Today, our last day in Paris, we all met in the morning at the Mémorial de la Shoah—what Americans might call the Holocaust Museum. Senior Fellow Juliana Shnur, an intern at the Mémorial, welcomed us in front of the museum. She introduced the museum as the product of efforts in 1943 to gather documentation of war atrocities for later prosecution—efforts that, however somber, indicated a sense of optimism for a post-WWII world. With the context set by Juliana, we fellows then set out to explore the museum on our own. We stood in silent contemplation before the “The Crypt”—a tomb for the Jewish victims of concentration camps and ghettoes. We stood in the midst of countless police files of Jews who were victimized from 1940-1944, reading about the important role of Jewish resistance organizations and the collective amnesia that grasped France until 1995—the year that Jacques Chirac acknowledged the role of the Vichy government in the deportation of Jews. In the permanent exhibition, we read about the development of Jewish rescue networks in France, and learned about how the heterogeneity of the Jewish population in France posed a problem of collective action that complicated a united Jewish network.
After a couple hours of independent engagement with the museum exhibitions, we reconvened for a lecture by Georges Bensoussan, the editor-in-chief of Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah. Georges spoke about “The use and misuse of the Memory of the Holocaust,” and posited the idea that memory can be the enemy of history. He explained how collective memory has evolved over the years and has become a sort of “machine of forgetfulness.” As “all memory is utilitarian” in the sense that it reflects what is important to us today, it is also inevitably a selective memory that engenders collective amnesia in society. History is thus never objective, but rather constructed—a product, like memory, of contemporary context and societal expectations.
From these general ruminations about the nature of memory, Georges went on to warn that it is wrong to coopt Holocaust terms to easily explain other things—to project past events onto current ones. This appropriation of Holocaust terms to proclaim that “never again” shall such an event occur is a misuse of the memory of the Holocaust. Instead, Georges suggested that we remember the Holocaust as a watershed of human history; Shoah irreversibly destroyed the dignity of human beings and shattered the conception of human sanctity. This irretrievable destruction of humanity means that we cannot simply remember the Holocaust and assume such memory is sufficient to declare “Never Again”; we must understand that because the Holocaust marked an irreversible change in human history, it can indeed happen again.
In closing, Georges succinctly connected his lecture to the overarching ideals of Humanity In Action. Georges noted that former U.S. President Clinton inaugurated the Holocaust Memorial in Washington, D.C. shortly before the Rwandan genocide, and left us with a question and a call to action: what is the good of memorials and rhetoric if no action is taken?
Patrick Weil then ended our Paris opening program with closing remarks about “The Salience of Memory Issues in Contemporary France.” He explained that French law criminalized Holocaust denial, which brings up questions of freedom of speech and expression that we will discuss in more detail in Copenhagen in our discussion of the Muhammad Cartoon Crisis. Patrick contrasted the collective memory and social consensuses about the Holocaust and the slave trade with the collective memory and continued debate on colonization. Patrick’s remarks identified tensions in discourse and understanding that we shall take with us and explore as we now set out to our respective core programs for the next four weeks.
-Alexandra and Søren
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