Simon Wiesenthal Research Articles

On the occasion of the centennial of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1923: Nicolae C. Paulescu-between scientific creativity and political fanatism.

On the occasion of the centennial of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1923: Nicolae C. Paulescu-between scientific creativity and political fanatism.

A Supporter in Vienna: Simon Wiesenthal and the War in Bosnia

Abstract The author gives an inventory of Simon Wiesenthal’s advocacy for Bosnia during the 1992–1995 war. Though Wiesenthal played an active role in speaking up for Bosnia, his activism has been largely neglected in the existing literature. Based on primary sources at the Simon Wiesenthal Archive in Vienna, this article pieces together the story of how the famed Nazi hunter supported Bosnia-Herzegovina. Wiesenthal acted by speaking up about the atrocities in Bosnia, writing letters to influential decision-makers, and keeping Bosnia on the agenda. He supported a greater and more assertive American involvement to end the war and was a strong advocate of a UN war crimes tribunal, which materialized as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). By lending his voice and moral stature, Wiesenthal helped shape public opinion in favour of a more assertive international reaction to the war.

Response

Response Pamela S. Nadell (bio) I thank Doron S. Ben-Atar, Jonathan Judaken, Sharon Musher, Shari Rabin, and Kenneth Stern for thoughtfully reflecting on my congressional testimony on the proposed Anti-Semitism Awareness Act. I certainly never anticipated that what Doron Ben-Atar has called my "fifteen minutes of fame" would extend into the pages of this historic journal, where, for a decade, I edited the book reviews. One day, when a future historian updates Jeffrey Gurock's terrific history of this journal, my words and those of these respondents will be taken into account, whereas my testimony has already faded into obscurity in the millions of pages of the Congressional Record.1 Four of the respondents join me in opposing the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act; one abstains. This small sample of colleagues adds their names to the long list of those sharing my opposition to the bill whom I consulted before agreeing to testify. I wrote my testimony early in November 2017. As Sharon Musher has pointed out, and I agree, antisemitism, as well as "other forms of hate, including racism and Islamophobia, [have] been growing both on our campuses and in our broader society." Were I to testify today after Pittsburgh and Poway—the cities already metonyms in the Jewish world for the murders at the Tree of Life Synagogue (October 27, 2018) and Chabad of Poway (April 27, 2019)—I would have noted the tragedies and emphasized the dangers of online proliferation of white supremacy spreading communities of hate.2 Shari Rabin's historical lens deepens our understanding of the phenomenon of "anti-semitism awareness acts." A recent book substantiates her speculation that far more rabbis than Jewish studies scholars have ever appeared before Congress.3 She reminds us of the legal bases of discrimination against Jews, African Americans, and other minorities. [End Page 231] Quoting Ibram X. Kendi, who succeeded Elie Wiesel as Boston University's Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, she reiterates that education cannot obliterate racist ideas because what has driven them are racist policies. This leads to Jonathan Judaken's brilliant assessment of the politics of anti-antisemitism at the core of the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act. I appreciate Judaken's critique of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism, whose lead author was Kenneth Stern. Since testifying, I have joined colleagues around the country, including Michael Brenner, Paola Tartakoff, and Britt Tevis, in developing new courses on antisemitism. When we teach, we scrutinize multiple definitions of the term, and I include Judaken's scholarship.4 Nevertheless, I presumed that the busy members of Congress, who flitted in and out of that three-hour long hearing, are little interested in semantics and scholarly debates. But Judaken has raised a very important issue, which I did not address, about the shifting conceptions of the term "racism" and how they have led to "the exclusion of Jews from the struggle against racism." Just this academic year (2020–2021) while in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, my American University colleagues Michael Brenner, Lauren Strauss, and I organized the virtual lecture series, "Antisemitism since the Holocaust: America, Israel, and Europe."5 When I asked our campus Antiracist and Research Policy Center to co-sponsor the series, my request was politely declined. Disturbingly, educating about antisemitism, even if such education cannot eradicate it, is not seen as anti-racist work. I appreciate Kenneth Stern's bringing me into this conversation, even if Doron Ben-Atar suggests that I was a puppet doing "his bidding." Stern's recent book, The Conflict over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate, provides the fullest account I have seen of this history.6 Jewish advocacy groups sitting at the Judiciary Committee's hearing table, like the Simon Wiesenthal Center, would learn much by reading it. But mostly I am grateful because we never know what conversation, event, or chance encounter will spark an idea. While I had long taught [End Page 232] about antisemitism, it was primarily through the lens of the Holocaust. Now, looking back, I see that entering into the fray over the AntiSemitism Awareness Act at the same time that I was finishing...

A Losing Game

A Losing Game Kenneth S. Stern (bio) As Pamela Nadell notes, she wasn't my first choice for a scholar to testify at the House Committee on the Judiciary's hearing on campus antisemitism. But that's only because I did not know her. The Judiciary committee staff had asked me to suggest academics who opposed the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (ASAA) and would make compelling witnesses. The scholars I had worked with over the years, including fellow members of the Alliance for Academic Freedom, all had other commitments that could not be changed. "Who else would be good?" I asked the half dozen people who weren't available. One suggested Nadell. Another said Nadell would be an excellent choice, and that she was "strong and would not fold under pressure." That's how, a few weeks before the hearing, Nadell and I had a conversation. She had many questions, and asked for reading material, which I sent. She then reached out to her Jewish studies colleagues and many others for their thoughts, and came to the same conclusion as I—that the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act was ill-advised, and would damage academic freedom and the interests of those involved with Jewish studies. The committee staff, no surprise, approved Nadell, and we met, as she notes, on that November day at the House Judiciary Committee. The hearing was a study in contrasts. We're very used to seeing a partisan divide in the US today, some of it playing out before that same committee in that same hearing room. But on the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, it was obvious that there were members of both parties who supported it, and others who opposed it. It was also clear that those who opposed it did so with less bravado and more caution, aware of the potential political costs. All the Democrats and Republicans, I believe, were supporters of Israel. The issue that divided them was how strongly they valued academic freedom and free speech. Those who testified were also divided. As Nadell writes, the witnesses supporting the legislation included my friend and former AJC colleague Rabbi Andy Baker, Simon Wiesenthal Center's Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL, a representative of Christians United for Israel, and a lawyer tasked with promoting the bill, Paul Clement, a former US Solicitor General. [End Page 201] These were all people from outside the academy, each of whom had their own institutional or political interests to articulate. I'm not questioning their sincerity or good faith, only noting that none of the pro-ASAA groups at the hearing, despite their concern with the campus, were campus-based, or to any significant degree campus-linked. Those opposing the legislation, on the other hand, were stakeholders in the campus. Barry Trachtenberg, a professor of Jewish studies at Wake Forest University, Suzanne Nossel of PEN America (which includes many academic writers among its members), I, and most especially Nadell, either work on campus or directly with campus stakeholders. Those opposed to the legislation all argued that while there are indeed instances of antisemitism at some campuses, the problem was drastically overblown, that Jewish students were for the most part not victimized by antisemitism, and that the effect of the legislation would be to make matters worse. As Nadell noted, citing a recent Stanford study, when Jewish students "experience discomfort as Jews, they trace it to the stridency of both sides of the Israel-Palestine debate on campus." In other words, to address the problem, educators should work to reduce the effect of stridency, not buy into the binary of one side or the other, which the legislation does. As I pointed out in my testimony, there is debate inside the Jewish community about whether Jews who are anti-Zionist are "inside the tent" or "outside the tent." This isn't an easy question. Most Jews would likely count Satmar Jews, who are anti-Zionist, as part of the community. Why then exclude young Jews who have an ideological or theological objection to Zionism based on their understandings of Jewish values and social justice? I'm not sure this debate can be decided, but the legislation...

Brief Amicus Curiae of B'Nai B'Rith International, Raoul Wallenberg Ctr. for Human Rights, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Amb. Stuart E. Eizenstat, et al. filed in Zuckerman/Leffman v. The Met, Petitition for a Writ of Certiorari, Supreme Court of the United States No. 19-942

Amicus Brief for a petition for a Writ of Certiorari in Support of Petitioner Zuckerman, as Ancillary Administratrix of the Estate of Alice Leffman v. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Monsters and Monstrosity in Jewish History: From the Middle Ages to Modernity ed. by Iris Idelson-Shein and Christian Wiese

Reviewed by: Monsters and Monstrosity in Jewish History: From the Middle Ages to Modernity ed. by Iris Idelson-Shein and Christian Wiese David B. Levy (bio) Monsters and Monstrosity in Jewish History: From the Middle Ages to Modernity Edited by Iris Idelson-Shein and Christian Wiese. Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. xiv + 269 pp. The past two decades have witnessed a surge of interest in monsters and the monstrous, but none from the perspective of Jewish studies except for some of the work of David Ruderman, who in a number of pioneering articles in the 1970s and 1980s analyzed early modern Jewish representations of conjoined twins, unicorns, and child prodigies, shedding light on the relationship of monsters and omens, teratology, and anthropology, science, religion, and magic. In addition, Jay Geller's Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews (2018) investigates the productive relationship between the animalization of Jews in Christian works, up to the depiction of animals in works by Kafka and Freud. Thus this timely, well-written, erudite, well-researched book imports the increasing interest in monstrosity into the field of Jewish studies. The book gathers the scholarship of fourteen distinguished international academics, shows how, as Joshua Trachtenberg did, the mechanism by which Jews as the feared "outsider and other" have been demonized negatively into monsters by medieval Christians. Robert Chazan, Miri Rubin, and Sara Lipton have shown it was during the Middle Ages that the Jewish otherness coupled with Christian theology led to accusations of host desecrations, well poisonings, and ritual murder. Its scope is from the medieval times to the modernity from the interdisciplinary methodologies of the perspectives of history, literature, anthropology, folklore, and history of science, art history, and religion, across geographical boundaries. Yet the book goes beyond Trachtenberg's seminal studies and is not susceptible to what Baron calls [End Page 303] "the lachrymose conception of Jewish history"; that is, the history of persecution in the diaspora, by demonstrating how Jews have sometimes subversively polemically flipped the image of monstrosity, a kind of Freudian sublimation and projection, onto their enemies—be they Christian Jew haters or secular Nazis as internally ethically bankrupt. For example, Kabalek's chapter 7 in part analyzes the representations of Simon Wiesenthal's representations of Nazis as monsters. The book is in two parts. The first explores the predominance of images of monsters in Jewish Christian interreligious and intercultural encounter. In chapter 1 Krummel and Mittman examine Beowulf alongside the Old English Exodus, demonstrating how pursuing monsters sheds light on cultural intersections. In chapter 2 Strickland exposes images of medieval monstrous Jews in the painter Hieronymous Bosch, who uses Jewish racial stereotypes of physical features such as long noses, beards, and dark skin to represent Jews as well as Jews' associations with toads, owls, asses, pigs, and scorpions. In chapter 3 Epstein considers the Duke of Sussex Pentateuch from the fourteenth century in southern Germany, whereby four monstrous figures are depicted representing different types of gentiles juxtaposed with four images of anti-Jewish tropes of Jews. In chapter 4 Guesnet examines matted hair assumed to be the work of demons called Plica Polomica [Polish plait] or Judenzopf [Jewish braid] as a marker of contamination and transgression. In chapter 5 Jacobs offers a close reading of Oskar Panizza's The Operated Goy (1922) and Salomo Friedlaender's The Operated Jew (1893) to reveal how science can create monstrosity. In chapter 6 Gelbin looks at Weimar cinematic expressionism. Her examples are Paul Wegener's Der Golem (1920), Friedrich Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), and Richard Oswald's Anders als die Anderen (1919) to reveal anti-Jewish stereotypes and iconographies of horror. In chapter 6, drawing creatively on Lyotard and other postmodern philosophers, Kabalek analyses Holocaust testimonies that represent the Nazi persecutors and their collaborators as moral monsters, and also addresses the image of the Muselmänner as an image of degraded monstrosity created by the Nazis who worked the Muselmänner to death. [End Page 304] Part 2 looks at "the Jewish monsters" within the European Jewish communities' self-perception and intracommunal meanings of monstrosity. In chapter 8 Shyovitz considers the monstrous inhabitants on the realm of Tevel from the seventh- to eighth-century cosmological...

Love, Guilt, and Forgiveness

AbstractIn Simon Wiesenthal's book The Sunflower: On the Possibility and Limits of Forgiveness, Wiesenthal tells the story of a dying German soldier who was guilty of horrendous evil against Jewish men, women, and children, but who desperately wanted forgiveness from and reconciliation with at least one Jew before his death. Wiesenthal, then a prisoner in a camp, was brought to hear the German soldier's story and his pleas for forgiveness. As Wiesenthal understands his own reaction to the German soldier, he did not grant the dying soldier the forgiveness the man longed for. In The Sunflower, Wiesenthal presents reflections on this story by numerous thinkers. Their responses are noteworthy for the highly divergent intuitions they express. In this paper, I consider the conflicting views about forgiveness on the part of the respondents in The Sunflower.I argue that those respondents who are convinced that forgiveness should be denied the dying German soldier are mistaken. Nonetheless, I also argue in support of the attitude that rejects reconciliation with the dying German soldier. I try to show that, in some cases of grave evil, repentance and making amends are not sufficient for the removal of guilt, and that reconciliation may be morally impermissible, whatever the case as regards forgiveness.

Derrida, the Gift and John Barclay’s Paul and the Gift

Simon Wiesenthal encapsulates the impossibility of forgiveness in the face of Holocaust evil. Deconstructionist, Jacques Derrida articulates what he describes as the aporia of forgiveness—that once given it degenerates into an economy of exchange and thus negates the ‘purity’ of forgiveness. In Paul and the Gift John Barclay offers a New Testament response to contemporary voices. He argues that whilst the gift of the gospel is unconditional, it does not come unconditioned and identifies six ‘perfections’ of the gift of grace we receive in response to the Gospel. The free gift does indeed come with conditions. Anselm and McLeod Campbell are offered as examples of atonement that incorporate various aspects of Barclay’s presentation of gift.

The problem of romanticising Israel–Taiwan relations

Israeli academic literature on Taiwan depicts the relations between the two states in the most favourable terms, assuming a mutually beneficial partnership between the Jewish state and the East Asian country, seen as free of any anti-Semitism. The Israeli literature understands Taiwan solely as a small democratic, modern high-tech country surrounded by enemies. This projection of the own country image onto Taiwan leads to a romanticised and false idea of it. In fact, Taiwan is a highly anti-Semitic country with a poor human rights record and fascist tendencies. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is right to say that ‘it is obvious that Taiwan has a problem’. So, too, have many Israeli writings on the country which ignore the rather unsettling reality.

The Forgiveness to Come: The Holocaust and the Hyper-ethical by Peter Banki

Reviewed by: The Forgiveness to Come: The Holocaust and the Hyper-ethical by Peter Banki Karl S. Sen Gupta (bio) The Forgiveness to Come: The Holocaust and the Hyper-ethical By Peter Banki. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. 208 pp. Given its topic, Peter Banki's The Forgiveness to Come: The Holocaust and the Hyper-ethical is a remarkably compact text, comprising 134 pages (not including 45 pages of notes). This fact alone marks Banki's text as exemplary. As it was, it took me more time than I'd expected to read it. This was not because of opaqueness or any such deficiency in the text, which is superbly written; rather, it took longer because of my need to continually pause to reflect on what I'd read. Not unlike the midrash, Banki's text makes one consider older issues anew, from fresh, even disconcerting perspectives. No doubt this is due in part to his reliance on Jacques Derrida, the gadfly par excellence, to say nothing of the topic itself, which will likely (one hopes) inspire intense debate for centuries to come. The relative brevity of Banki's text, then, is ideal, making an admirably efficient exercise of what might easily have degenerated into a slog. Banki's The Forgiveness to Come might be described, at the risk of oversimplification, as a reading of Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower through a Derridean lens. As related in the aptly named first chapter, "The Survival of the Question," Wiesenthal was deeply concerned lest the issue of forgiveness be silenced and the attendant discourse curtailed. In this light, Banki's choice of Derrida as a lens through which to read The Sunflower is brilliant. The resulting questions, here and elsewhere, are many—and barbed, so to speak—exactly in keeping with Wiesenthal's concerns. Banki provides a nuanced reading as he teases out a crucial aspect of Wiesenthal's wrestling with forgiveness—namely, his calling into question of his own position—leading Banki to label Wiesenthal's effort "'hyper-ethical' . . . because it affirms itself in giving unconditioned hospitality, or rather 'hostipitality,' to the other" (45). [End Page 216] In the second chapter, "Reading Forgiveness in a Marrano Idiom," Banki draws attention to Derrida's concerns that the globalization of Christianity has resulted in a cheapening of the violence and degradation accomplished in the Holocaust due to Christianity's insistence on the possibility—indeed, the necessity—that victims forgive. In this manner, forgiveness becomes a sort of business transaction (that is to say, limited and calculated, however sincere the initial motivation), which in turn greatly increases the possibility of future violence. Other considerations—such as the reduction of the Other to the Same—are also addressed. The following chapter, "Crimes against Humanity or the Phantasm of 'We, Men,'" is a logical outgrowth of the preceding chapter's talk of the "worldwidization" of Christianity. Christianity's emphasis on man as the imago dei, and therefore on universal brotherhood, has resulted in an abstraction (i.e., a reductionism) of the violence committed against individuals. Violence and degradation like that witnessed in the Holocaust is thereby thematized as a "crime against humanity." Surely, Banki observes, the Holocaust is more than an assault on the "'we' or 'we, men' of modern European philosophy" (82). In "A Hyper-ethics of Irreconcilable Contradictions," Banki draws on Derrida's metaphorical dialogue with Vladimir Jankélévitch, who counseled forgiveness after the Holocaust based on a universal human brotherhood. Noting the difficulties Jankélévitch experienced in attempting to live out this idea, Derrida concludes that we must seek out a new, radically "other" understanding of forgiveness. In this light, Banki counsels that we must look for a forgiveness understood "as truly impossible, as a radical experience of powerlessness" (99). In the final chapter, "Forgiveness as a Jewish Joke," Banki continues to problematize our simplistic understanding(s) of forgiveness by drawing attention to the contradictions and complexities inherent to the process, which must transcend the calculated, the totalizing, the formulaic. He does so, however, while eschewing pessimism or despair. Both like and unlike Derrida's "theology," our search for a new understanding of forgiveness, he stresses, is tantamount to awaiting...

What Does It Mean to Be Human in the Aftermath of Mass Trauma and Violence?: Toward the Horizon of an Ethics of Care

What does it mean to be human in the aftermath of mass trauma and violence? When victims and perpetrators of gross human rights violations live in the same country, and sometimes as neighbors, what strategies can help individuals and communities deal with trauma in a way that restores dignity to victims and enables perpetrators to be accountable for their crimes? This essay explores these questions and discusses examples that illustrate attempts to create sites for listening, for moral reflection, and for initiating the difficult process of dialogue at community and individual levels after mass trauma and violence. It is argued that in the aftermath of historical trauma, restoring human bonds requires a new vocabulary of rehumanization. This new mode of being human calls for a “reparative humanism” that opens toward a horizon of an ethics of care for the sake of a transformed society. Examples drawn from two sources are discussed to explore the idea of an “ethics of care.” First, insights from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa are discussed to show how the work of the TRC enabled dialogic spaces in which new subjectivities emerged in the encounter between victims/survivors and perpetrators. Second, the essay engages in a reinterpretation of Simon Wiesenthal’s book The Sunflower as a story that continues to pose a challenge about how to reclaim a sense of being human in the aftermath of unspeakable crimes against humanity. The essay concludes with a critical reflection on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of responsibility and suggests that it is a compelling vision in societies facing a violent and traumatic past.

Necronationalism: managing race, death and the nation's skeletons

This paper examines the construction of the Simon Wiesenthal Center ‘Museum of Tolerance (Jerusalem)’ over Mamilla Cemetery, one of the largest Muslim burial grounds in the region. Tracing the politics of death as exercised through the excavation of the cemetery, I consider how access to settler colonial memory is managed and renewed through the purging of Indigenous corporeality. Inspired by Achille Mbembe's sobering account of necropower, this paper conceptualizes power as a system of domination inscribed through the colonial management of deceased racial subjects and asks how we might understand systems of settler colonial power arranged through dehumanization of the already dead. I contend that the capacity to govern life after death is still firmly rooted in the reach of colonial power, and that by attending to the excavation and erasure of Mamilla Cemetery's deceased Palestinian subjects, we see a particular configuration of sovereignty defined through a calculus of absence. Identifying this practice of settler colonial nation building as ‘necronationalism’, I consider how power over life after death becomes the very terrain through which a nation is imagined.

Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe by Laura Jockusch (review)

Reviewed by: Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe by Laura Jockusch Richard E. Frankel Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe. By Laura Jockusch. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xv + 320. Cloth $78.00. ISBN 978-0199764556. In this important new book, Laura Jockusch effectively puts to rest the “myth of silence”—the idea that Jews did not discuss the Holocaust in the war’s immediate aftermath—and sheds light on the fascinating origins of Holocaust scholarship. She does so through the story of survivors across Europe, including both professionally trained historians and many more with no academic credentials. They were all imbued with a powerful sense of duty, seeking to document the experiences of as many survivors as possible. Far from silence, their response to the Holocaust was to engage and study it; to seek justice and to warn; and to make aware those who truly were silent—namely the wider, non-Jewish public. The book fits within a growing body of work on the post-Holocaust, post-WWII period: from focused studies like that of Atina Grossman’s Jews, Germans, and Allies (2007) to continental or global perspectives offered by Tony Judt’s Postwar (2005) and Ian Buruma’s Year Zero (2013). Jockusch uses a comparative approach to explain how some Jews sought to make sense of their recent experiences and move forward in the wake of such devastation. She also gives credit to the people—both men and women—whose approach to studying the Holocaust was well ahead of their time. Jockusch begins by showing how 1945 was no Stunde Null for these Holocaust survivors. Instead, she places their work within a longer tradition of khurbn-forshung (destruction research) that originated in efforts to document the pogroms in early twentieth-century Russia. Pioneered by the likes of Simon Dubnow and Chaim Bialik, khurbn-forshung departed from traditional Jewish accounts of historical traumas in its factual and documentary approach, its secular nature, and its purpose in seeking justice. Within this framework, Jockusch examines five national cases: France, Poland, Germany, Austria, and Italy. Her approach highlights the importance of context for understanding the particularities of each project. Austrian scholars focused on collecting evidence against war criminals. With Simon Wiesenthal among the key figures, they presented a badge to all who testified, which read, “I exposed a murderer.” In France and Poland, the emphasis was on gathering materials for use in published accounts of the Jewish experience. In these studies, participants sought to depict the Holocaust as more than simply a Jewish event. While those at the French Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDJC) understood the Holocaust to be unique, they also sought to universalize its significance. They depicted the Nazi program to murder all Jews as an attack on the values of liberalism and democracy, and thus an attack on all. In Poland, the survivors at the Central Jewish Historical Commission (CZKH) faced a more hostile environment; but they also sought to link the Jewish experience to that of the country [End Page 216] as a whole. They noted that Jews may have been the first targets for annihilation but Poles were the next. Those in France, Poland, and Italy also worked to place the Holocaust within the war’s larger national context. This strategy meant a stress on Jewish resistance: both within the ghettos and camps, and in the broader fight against the Nazis. One is struck by the extent to which these early scholars focused on resistance. In Italy, for example, they sought to produce a “partisan almanac” which they expected would “silence all our enemies who are trying to say that the Jews did not defend themselves against the German occupier and were not represented among the resistance” (157). More than a decade before Hannah Arendt wrote of Jews having gone “like sheep to the slaughter,” the survivors in Jockusch’s study had already demonstrated the absurdity of such a notion. In many other respects, too, the survivors’ work was pioneering. Much of it involved the collection of materials, including documents from the perpetrators. Still, they focused primarily on the victims. In particular, they sought the memories...

Perpetrator Parables: Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Perpetrator Parables:Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness Adam M. Wassel (bio) In King Leopold’s Ghost, a 1999 historical account of the mass violence perpetrated in the Congo Free State, Adam Hochschild suggests that “European and American readers, not comfortable acknowledging the genocidal scale of the killing in Africa at the turn of the century, have cast Heart of Darkness loose from its moorings” (143). Hochschild remarks specifically about the manner in which Heart of Darkness is taught, critiquing the array of theoretical lenses with which scholars and professors tend to approach the text. As a result, “We read [Heart of Darkness] as a parable for all times and places, not as a book about one time and place” (143). Several critics have noted, though, that Hochschild himself exhibits a similar tendency throughout King Leopold’s Ghost with regard not to a literary text but to events in European history: namely, the systematic annihilation of Europe’s Jews by the German Nazi regime. Hochschild presents quotations from Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, as well as from Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl, as a means to offer insight into the minds and motivations of King Leopold’s murderous emissaries to Africa. As Sarah De Mul points out, “Although these two political catastrophes are set in different moments in history and dissimilar geographic locations, King Leopold’s Ghost brings them together and, in so doing, separates them considerably from their historically specific circumstances” (590–91). Thus, Holocaust history in King Leopold’s Ghost is, at least to some degree, cast loose from its moorings. I do not raise these points to fault Hochschild’s study (which is excellent) but to call attention to the complexities of approaching literary texts as historical documents and, conversely, treating history itself as we would treat a literary text. Just as Hochschild critiques literary approaches to Heart of Darkness that, in his view, evade a confrontation with the history that informs it, some of Hochschild’s critics hold that his comparison of the Congo Free State to Nazi extermination facilities manifest “an insult to the truth” (qtd. in De Mul 591). The comparison itself, however, does not originate with Hochschild; political theorist Hannah Arendt elucidated the analogues between imperial and totalitarian violence as early as 1951, in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Assessing the structure of imperial rule, which substitutes race for nation and bureaucracy for government, Arendt writes, “Lying under anybody’s nose were many of the elements which gathered together could create a totalitarian government on the basis of [End Page 232] racism” (221). Though she takes care not to suggest a direct causal relationship, Arendt argues that imperialist ideologies of racial supremacy and limitless expansion would eventually crystallize on the European continent in an unprecedented political manifestation: totalitarianism, of which the German Nazi regime was an exemplar. To be sure, numerous commentators have highlighted the problems intrinsic not only to Arendt’s analysis of imperialism but to her reliance on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness throughout that analysis. Arendt’s treatment of the novella as an unadulterated representation of imperialism imbues the second book of Origins with an air of cultural chauvinism, depicting native Africans as “human beings … living without the future of a purpose and the past of an accomplishment” (Arendt 190). Thus, we locate in Arendt some of the same problematic, Eurocentric tendencies Chinua Achebe famously located in Conrad: “the desire—one might say the need—in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest” (251–52). When Arendt writes about the trauma engendered by imperial encounters, she locates it exclusively in the minds of European imperialist perpetrators, whose humanity she can identify, rather than the native inhabitants of the areas they occupy, whose humanity she cannot. Recently, though, Michael Rothberg has returned to Arendt’s analysis of imperialism to help formulate his concept of “multidirectional memory,” a paradigm for considering the commonalities shared by disparate violent histories that resists placing those histories in competition with one another. Fully acknowledging...

Beyond Law and Justice: Revenge in Jean Améry

How can we conceive of justice after Auschwitz? This question informs all of Jean Améry's writings. While Améry is famous for his defense of ressentiments and for problematizing the demand of forgiveness put on survivors after the war, I argue that a consideration of his reflections on revenge are indispensible for reaching a fuller understanding of his complex engagement with individual and collective notions of justice after Auschwitz. In his essay collection Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (1966), Améry is quick to dismiss the idea of revenge. However, the protagonist of Lefeu oder der Abbruch (1974), a Holocaust survivor, indulges in a fantasy of vengeance, followed by the fantasy of being brought to trial for his quest for justice. Relegating both revenge and the court to the realm of the imaginary, Améry depicts them in their failure to bring about justice and foregrounds the survivor's struggle to be heard by his or her community. I demonstrate that Améry—in dialogue with Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, and Simon Wiesenthal—is not primarily interested in the contours of justice as a juridical concept as much as he is renegotiating the terms of justice, community, and remembrance after the war.

Nazis on the Run: How Hitler's Henchmen Fled Justice, Gerald Steinacher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), xxvii + 382 pp., illus., hardcover $34.95, paperback $19.95 electronic version available

Scholarship on the postwar escape of thousands of former Nazis and fascist collaborators long lagged behind popular fascination with the subject. Like many others, I found books such as Ladislas Farago's Aftermath and Frederick Forsyth's The Odessa File captivating thrillers, all the more so since they were fact-based. Even those with a serious and consequential stake in tracking former Nazis could not always resist sensationalism. On flimsy evidence, Simon Wiesenthal promoted the myth of “ODESSA” as a clandestine organization of former SS officers, a myth that would not only provide the title and subject of Forsyth's best-seller, but, as Gerald Steinacher points out in his important new study, offered the public a “serviceable symbol to keep alive public anxiety and outrage about conniving former SS-men and the impunity of their actions” (p. xvii). This situation has changed in recent years. While sensationalism endures, European, American, and South American historians and journalists have scoured archives around the world—energized by the declassification or opening of numerous collections—and are providing a more detailed narrative cartography elucidating how so many criminals escaped Europe after the war. What have we learned from this outpouring of research? For one thing, there was no “ODESSA,” as Heinz Schneppen and Uki Goñi demonstrated conclusively—though without question former SS-men aided and protected their own very effectively. As Steinacher argues, five interrelated factors—rather than any shadowy conspiracy—intersected to ensure the escape of so many Nazis and their collaborators.

Przebaczenie jako kategoria współczesnego dyskursu pamięci na przykładzie Kinderszenen Jarosława Marka Rymkiewicza i Słonecznika Szymona Wiesenthala

Przebaczenie jako kategoria współczesnego dyskursu pamięci na przykładzie Kinderszenen Jarosława Marka Rymkiewicza i Słonecznika Szymona Wiesenthala Forgiveness as a Category of Modern Memory Discourse as Seen in Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz’s Kinderszenen and Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower:On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness The text attempts to describe forgiveness as one of the key categories of modern memory discourse. To this end the authors analyzed two texts: Kinderszenen by Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz and Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. Even though the two texts talk explicitly about forgiveness, the unexpressed discourse rules they are based on turn out to be equally interesting. Among them, following Jacques Derrida’s suggestion, it is possible to attribute the biggest importance to the definition of the “unforgivable,” towards which the question about the act of forgiveness occurs to be secondary. Paralleled reading of the two texts allows us then to see that it is not an act of forgiveness or lack of forgiveness, but a call for forgiveness (or for no forgiveness) which constitutes the basic practice of memory today. The attitude toward this call is the basis on which memory communities constitute themselves.

Encyclopedia of war crimes and genocide

This A-to-Z encyclopaedia examines the entire history of crimes against humanity, during both wartime and peacetime. With more than 450 entries, the encyclopaedia covers a wide range of relevant topics: human rights, war criminals, trials of war crimes, examples of genocide, international organizations and international law concerning war crimes, and many more. Also included is a primary resources section with documents that are vital to understanding this subject. The coverage includes: Amnesty International; Klaus Barbie; Geneva Conventions; Saddam Hussein; Kosovo; North Korea; Pol Pot; Rwanda; Shining Path; Taliban; Desmond Tutu; and Simon Wiesenthal.

Odessa und das „Nazigold“ in Südamerika: Mythen und ihre Bedeutungen

Stories about an organization of former SS members and the transfer of Nazi assets dominated our common wisdom of the Nazi’s escape routes to South America after the World War II for a long time. As soon as historians began to tackle this subject, they realized that most of these narratives lacked any factual foundation and belong to the realm of myth-making. But why did these narratives nevertheless become so influential to the broader public? This article asks which groups and individuals were responsible for the creation and promotion of these myths and what their motives were. It demonstrates that the creation of the myths was a result of the interaction between the economic interests and security needs of the United States with the interests of the Argentine opposition movement. Some years later, however, activists like Simon Wiesenthal and Beate Klarsfeld took up the myths, adapted and instrumentalized them in order to promote the prosecution of the nazi criminals. During the 1990s, the SS organization and its money became an important argument in the debate about the restitution of Nazi-looted assets.

The Architecture of Erasure

It was a glorious afternoon in May 2004, and the advocates, fundraisers, and backers of the newly launched Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem (MOT-J) could not have asked for a more auspicious groundbreaking ceremony. Dozens of important guests were in attendance to mark the realization of the project by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center (which had for some years already been running the original Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles), including the building’s world-renowned architect, Frank Gehry; the dean of the Wiesenthal Center, Rabbi Marvin Hier; the Israeli president, Moshe Katsav; and the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. “In the darkness that pervades the Middle East,” proclaimed the governor in the ceremony’s keynote address, “this building will be a candle to guide us.”1 Schwarzenegger’s words spoke to the museum’s lofty proclamations about itself. The complex aims to offer, according to Rabbi Hier, “a great landmark promoting the principles of mutual respect and social responsibility.”2 The museum’s marketing literature says that, in the face of a “‘rising crescendo of ethnic tensions, civilizational clashes