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| You are here: 2000 / Workshops, Panels and Seminars / Workshops on Remembrance and Representation / Workshop 4 on Remembrance, "Remembering the Holocaust: The Public Perception of Remembrance" / Presentation by Mr. Arne Ruth | |||||||||
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Participants Countries and organizations Conference documentation Conference programme 
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Report from Workshop 4 on Remembrance: "Remembering the Holocaust: the Public Perception of Remembrance" Presentation by Mr. Ralph Grunewald Presentation by Mr. Arne Ruth Presentation by Dr. irena Veisaite Presentation by Mr. Arne Ruth Ruth, Arne Presentation by Mr. Arne Ruth David S. Wyman's and Charles S. Rosenzveig's "The World Reacts To The Holocaust", a broad-based comparative history of national reactions to the issue, describes two prevalent post-war European escape routes. In Germany, attempts have been made to play down the uniqueness of the slaughter of the Jews by stressing similarities with other crimes against humanity. The international focus on German guilt, however, has generated a tendency to assume that countries occupied by Hitler were without guilt. In Wyman's and Rosenzveig's view, occupied countries have attempted to universalize the victims, making no real distinction between the different forms of victimization. Besides all its other dimensions, the extermination of the Jews was robbery on the grandest scale in history, with a network of fences and profiteers extending across a continent. Singling out Switzerland as the main culprit in relation to Jewish property has drawn attention from the fact that the moral conumdrums posed by the extermination project affected occupied countries as well. Homes, businesses and valuables owned by Jews changed hands during the war. A number of governments discouraged survivors from confronting the new owners. In Eastern Europe, communism gave state authorities the option of treating Nazi confiscation of Jewish assets as an instituted element in the abandonment of private property. The Norwegian case shows that guilt cannot easily be fitted into categories of obedience, neutrality and resistance.Slightly more than one third of the 2100 Norwegian Jews were killed in 1942 within three months of their assets being seized. Returning Jews trying to reclaim their assets could be facing officials who, three years earlier, had handled the authorized theft of their property. Only officials who were members of the Quisling party were prosecuted after the war. The controversy in relation to this that erupted in Norway in the mid-nineties illustrates a wider problem. Postwar nationhood in most occupied countries was built on myths of general resistance. Norway has only now been forced to confront the fact that its definition of wartime resistance largely excluded the Jews and that this exclusion continued in subtle ways even after the war. In France, where the complicity of the Vichy government had much wider ramifications, this conflict between a heroic mythology and the actual facts is even more evident. It took the effort of an American, Robert Paxton, to force French historians to start dealing with the issues. In other occupied countries, sensitive issues, such as complicity and collaboration, the failure of non-Jews to attempt to save their Jewish compatriots, and the fact that the outside world offered very little in the way of rescue efforts, were largely avoided until the seventies and eighties. The crucial change came when these matters emerged as national issues in The United States, eventually influencing the European perception. The Nazi Gold controversy is a prime case in point in this transatlantic interaction.Hopefully, we are now seeing the beginning of a European meltdown of the national mythologies in relation to the Holocaust. Facts kept out of sight until recently are now widely avaliable. The Holocaust experience, truly unique, yet universal in its significance, has to be integrated into the various national projects constituting Europe. Emancipatory provocation across borders is necessary to build an element of real universality into the European project. The reflection made by the Swiss author Adolf Muschg in relation to the gold controversy catches the core of the matter. It is very relevant to the Swedish situation: "It was long ago: now we are paying for the sleepless nights that we didn´t have because of Auschwitz; now we are overtaken by all the concerns which never affected us in relation to the building of Europe, drowsing in the sleep of the selfrighteous, a state of mind where tears turned dry." >> Back to top |
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Introduction Opening Session: Messages and speeches Plenary Sessions: Messages and speeches Workshops, Panels and Seminars
Other Activities |
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| For information about this production and the Stockholm International Forum Conference Series please go to www.humanrights.gov.se or contact Information Rosenbad, SE-103 33 Stockholm, Sweden | |||||||||