By: Aiso van Leeuwe

Introduction

The national remembrance day in the Netherlands, on the fourth of May, is surrounded every year by discussions about who ought to be remembered at this specific moment and who ought not. The tradition began as a remembrance of the victims of the Second World War on the day prior to the national liberation day that marked the end of the war for the Netherlands. In 1964, the victims of the Dutch colonial war in Indonesia were added to the list. Nowadays, all victims of war and peace operations wherein the Netherlands have been involved since the Second World War are part of the official memorandum However, victims of conflict in which the Netherlands played no active role, like those from Ukraine and Gaza, are not part of the official remembrance.^[1]

While the discussion about the official phrasing of who is remembered is never-ending, the specific discussion about victims in, especially, Gaza has been more intense than usual. As the call for attention for Gaza during the remembrance grows louder, so do the opposing voices. However, politicising the remembrance or protesting during the ceremony, is still generally opposed, as a majority of the Dutch people indicated prior to the national remembrance day of 2024 that ‘no purpose at all’ can justify disturbing the two minutes of silence. Prior to last year’s national memorial day Mayor of Amsterdam Femke Halsema announced, in response to the request by Dutch mosques, that she would not mention Gaza in her speech. Moreover, rightwing journalists stated that the 250,000 Dutch victims of the Second World War ‘deserve better’ than their memory being linked to victims in Gaza.^[2] And this year the same arguments can be heard in preparation for next month.^[3]

This discussion is not limited to national remembrance in the Netherlands, nor the memories of the Second World War and the Holocaust. It touches upon a fundamental understanding of what collective memory is, and what it should be. And as such, it cannot be understood within the confines of a national debate. A wider historical and philosophical perspective is necessary. To that end, this article will first consider the way collective memory must be understood, before analysing the collective memory of the Holocaust. Here, the unavoidable analysis of Hannah Arendt must be considered, as one of the most influential figures in the shaping of that memory, before ultimately returning to the question at hand and the case of the Dutch national remembrance day.

Collective memory

To understand the way collective memory is generally considered, the case of Khalid Muhammed offers a clear example. In 1994, the notoriously antisemitic activist Khalid Muhammed visited the Holocaust Museum on the Mall in Washington, where he spoke to an audience and stated that “the black holocaust was 100 times worse than the so-called Jew Holocaust.”^[4] This was a powerful statement according to literary critic Walter Benn Michaels, not because of its antisemitic Holocaust denial, but because the ‘commemoration of the Nazi murder of the Jews on the Mall was in fact another kind of Holocaust denial’, namely of the Black Holocaust.^[5] Michaels pointed out that although Muhammad may have had antisemitic motivations to question the importance of the Holocaust, the question that he posed was relevant in light of clashing histories. In doing so, he framed the question in the terms of a zero-sum game. For if a Holocaust memorial stands in Washington D.C., a slavery memorial cannot also stand in that place. That position in Washington, and in the collective memory, has been filled.

The term ‘collective memory’ comes from the French philosopher Maurice Halbwachs, who suggested that human memory is not only an individual capacity but relies on our social lives. Halbwachs was a French philosopher who died in Buchenwald concentration camp in Nazi Germany in 1945, after protesting the arrest of his Jewish father-in-law.^[6] Halbwachs stated that ‘our recollections depend on those of all our fellows and on the great frameworks of the memory of society’. According to Halbwachs, society obligates people to interact with their memories, to share them and thereby maintain them.^[7]

As collective memory deals with a relation between individuals and society, it has a duality at its core, as Halbwachs already pointed out. Collective memory is both the personal memory of an individual within a framework of society and collective representations embodied in society, public education and rituals such as remembrance.^[8] This duality has often posed a problem for people engaged with the topic and attempting to define and conceptualize collective memory.^[9]

For memory studies scholar Michael Rothberg, this problem is overcome by offering a new notion of collective memory that is a multidirectional memory. In his theory, collective memory is a network of interlinked memories that support one another. According to Rothberg, collective memory is a process of exchanging memories, between individuals and between collectives. The duality of collective memory is not a problem for multidirectional memory, but the key aspect, because, as an ongoing process of exchange, it cannot be singular for Rothberg.^[10] Multidirectional memory shows that, rather than Holocaust memory blocking memory of slavery, it is through Holocaust memory and the Holocaust memorial in Washington, that Muhammad can voice his concern about slavery and the mass killings of black people. Holocaust memory and its place within society through memorials and remembrance days, offer a platform to memory of slave trade, enabling its presence in collective memory. Viewing memory as a multidirectional dialogue allows us to view the public sphere and collective memory as a malleable space wherein groups and identities do not clash, but cooperate and shape themselves and each other in their interactions with each other. And this is then done without the competitive element that underlies the notions of memory of Muhammad and Michaels.

The Historikerstreit

Rothberg builds his theory upon a large historiography of the Holocaust, and in particular on the chapter of the Historikerstreit, which occurred in Germany in the 1980s. As an event with an unmeasurable impact on a worldwide scale, the Holocaust is part of the collective memory of the entire western world and therefore one of the most important pillars for any theory of collective memory.

On June 6th, 1986, German historian Ernst Nolte published ‘The Past That Will Not Pass: A Speech That Could Be Written but Not Delivered’, wherein he linked the history of the Holocaust to that of the Soviet Gulags and claimed that the latter was a cause for the former.^[11] Shortly thereafter came a response from Jurgen Habermas, who condemned Nolte and the broader conservative ambitions to revive German nationalism and to reconnect Germany to its supposed glorious past. To succeed in this endeavor, so Habermas argued, then-leading historians, such as Nolte, had aimed to explain away the Nazi-era and relativize the Holocaust.  If Nolte was right in making this comparison, Hitler, Nazism and the Holocaust could not be absolute evil or unique, which for Habermas meant a relativization of that history and a possible justification for the Holocaust.^[12]

This attack by Habermas started a heated debate among German historians and philosophers about the place of the Holocaust within history and its comparability to other atrocities that became known as the Historikerstreit. The conservative side, led by Nolte, considered the Holocaust not unique and therefore not morally different from mass murders committed by the Soviet Union. The other side, led by Habermas and followed by, among others, Steven Katz, argued that this view would lead to a normalization of the Holocaust and that Nolte’s arguments echoed Nazi propaganda.^[13] According to this school of thought, the Holocaust is incomparable, unlike anything else in history and in a sense transcended history. For proponents of this theory, there was an unbreachable discrepancy between its possible causes and the event itself, which must therefore be placed outside the chain of events that make up our history.^[14]

Habermas and his supporters have some claim to victory in the Historikerstreit, as the uniqueness of the Holocaust became widely accepted after the 1980s.^[15] But in more recent years, the debate about the uniqueness of the Holocaust has resurfaced in a new context. Rather than the focus on German responsibility and the relation to the Soviet crimes, the recent debate revolves about colonialism or imperialism and the Holocaust, and about racism and antisemitism.^[16] 

In the so called Historikerstreit 2.0, which started off in 2020 in anticipation of the 35^th anniversary of the first, anticolonial thinkers argue that granting the Holocaust a status of uniqueness is at the cost of other historical and often colonial atrocities, while their opponents still fear the relativization of the Holocaust. Remarkable is that while Habermas as a defender of the Holocaust’s uniqueness in the 1980s was associated with a progressive and leftist position, in the modern debate, this has shifted, and nowadays progressives and leftists align with the anti-colonial standpoint.^[17] 

While the so-called second Historikerstreit is only a few years old, the debate about the uniqueness of the Holocaust and its place within collective memory in relation to colonialism is not new. It has its roots in anticolonial thought going all the way back to early years after the Second World War. In 1950, Aimé Césaire published Discourse on Colonialism, wherein he coined the notion of the Imperial Boomerang. With the boomerang, Césaire argues that violence and repression used to dominate Europe’s colonial empires will eventually be used back home as well, with the Holocaust being a clear example of colonial violence used against European citizens.^[18]

For a proper understanding of the legacy of the Holocaust and its place in history, we must look to Hannah Arendt. She was both among the first to link Nazism to Europe’s imperialism and to stress the incomparability of the Holocaust to other cases of mass murder or genocides. She was also one of the most influential figures in shaping the collective memory of the Holocaust. Literary research has shown that it was through Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem that the American public first was able to conceptualize the mass murder of six million Jews during the war.^[19]

And even earlier than her Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, and the historical factors that produced it, has since the publication of Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 been the centre of discussion and is considered one of the most influential works on totalitarianism, the fascist and bolshevist regimes, Nazism and the Holocaust. While the Historikerstreit and the wider discussion about the place of the Holocaust in history only started after her death in 1975, Arendt had a firm conviction that the Holocaust was unique.

Yet despite her clearly positioning herself as a proponent of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, her work has often been used in argumentation of the opposite conclusion. Rothberg, too, reads Arendt’s work in order to criticize the uniqueness of the Holocaust. By criticizing Arendt’s perspective, Rothberg rejects Arendt’s conclusion and thereby implicitly argues for the Holocaust as not unique and possibly comparable to events in Europe’s imperial history.

Hannah Arendt

In 1946, in the aftermath of the Second World War, Hannah Arendt wrote in a letter to her close friend Karl Jaspers that a future German republic would have to renounce antisemitism constitutionally. This would entail that any Jew, regardless of place of birth, must be allowed to become a German citizen solely on the basis of being a Jew, without forfeiting their Jewish identity. Arendt believed that with the Holocaust, Germany had committed a crime that was beyond what the law or human politics could grasp. According to Arendt, the Holocaust was an unprecedented crime that rendered the Germans with a guilt that is beyond crime and the Jews with an innocence that is beyond goodness or virtue.^[20]

Because of this, Arendt argued that understanding the Holocaust should not mean understanding it in its own context and paradigms, for she feared that using the terms and reasons of the perpetrators also meant embracing their reasons. She believed that with the terminology of the perpetrator would also come the perspective of the perpetrator, and that understanding from this perspective would lead to a view that the Holocaust had been inevitable or even justified. All historiography is necessarily salvation and frequently justification, she writes in a response to a review of her Totalitarianism by Eric Voegelin.^[21] For Arendt, the worst possible outcome of an attempt to understand the Holocaust was a theodicy of the Holocaust.^[22] This argument would three decades later be repeated by Jurgen Habermas in the Historikerstreit.

This claim of the Holocaust as unprecedented, resulted from what she considered the Holocaust to be. Rather than simply the killing of millions of people, the victims were first robbed of their humanity, their relations to other people and ability to participate in a community. And simultaneously, the Nazis intent and purpose were unprecedented in their nature as crime against humanity. While mass killings and genocides are plenty in history, Arendt believed that the creation of the Holocaust by the nature of the regime was a new occurrence. According to Arendt, the bureaucratic system, wherein an ordinary man as Adolf Eichmann, the so called architect of the Holocaust, who during his trial in Jerusalem famously claimed to have no hate towards Jewish people but simply did his job, was able to operate without an own judgment of right or wrong, was unlike anything else in history.^[23]

The big difference between the Holocaust and other genocides in history, according to Arendt, is that it happened within a legal frame that not only allowed the mass murder, but enabled and commanded it. Rather than safeguarding human rights and freedom, ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shalt kill’.^[24]

For Hannah Arendt, the crime at the core of Nazism was robbing a person of their humanity. In order to do so, the victims of the Nazi’s were stripped of all that makes one human, their social relations, agency in their acting and their spontaneity. What was left was the ‘human being as such’. This attempt to kill the notion of a human being was a new one in history and had not played a part in the earlier genocides and historical atrocities. What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim for, according to Arendt, is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself. And what made totalitarianism unique in history was not so much the drive to do so, but the success it had in doing so.^[25]

It is therefore not the case that the Holocaust was unrelated to history up to that point. As Arendt describes in Origins of totalitarianism, the elements of totalitarianism were embedded in European imperialist history, the bureaucratic rule, radicalized behavior and violence already existed. But that these phenomena together crystalized into totalitarianism is not the same as totalitarianism being the inevitable outcome of these practices.

Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism as crystalized from Europe’s imperial history, also incorporated the incomparability of the Holocaust. While the ingredients of Nazism existed in the past and in Europe’s imperialism, it had not yet come together in totalitarianism, meaning that totalitarianism is by default a different phenomenon.^[26]

In her account, totalitarianism distinguishes itself by demanding not loyalty or enthusiasm for the regime like previous dictators or despots had, but rather transforming all subjects into active and unfailing tools of the perceived natural laws of, in the case of Nazism, the social Darwinism. It was therefore crucial that human expressions such as loyalty became superfluous. The goal of totalitarianism according to Arendt was that each and every person can be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions, so that each of these bundles of reactions can be exchanged at random for any other.^[27] Or, as Italian author Primo Levi wrote about his fellow prisoners in Auschwitz:

Their life is short but their number is endless; they, the Musselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death.^[28]

Although Arendt believed this to be the goal for all subjects of a totalitarian regime such as the Nazi’s, this total domination of the regime over its subjects, the complete annihilation of a person’s freedom and the superfluity of humanity, was only achieved in the Nazi camps during the Second World War.^[29] As she puts it, the camps were the true central institution of totalitarian organizational power.^[30] And it was this superfluity of humanity that existed in the camps that she considered unprecedented.

The banality of prejudice

Despite Arendt’s clear conviction that the Holocaust was unique, her legacy is also heavily present in the opposing argument. In part due to her own ambiguity, in part due to her prejudiced analysis of Europe’s imperial history, Arendt is echoed by both sides of the Historikerstreit.

The first aspect stems from Arendt’s second famous work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, wherein she observes the famous trial of the so-called Architect of the Holocaust, and offers an important argument against the uniqueness of the Holocaust. According to Arendt, Eichmann was not a particularly convinced antisemite, nor had he passionately wanted to exterminate the Jews in Europe.^[31]

The very notion of the banality of evil, as Arendt titled the book, seems to imply the very opposite of uniqueness. If an everyday man could play such a vital role in the Holocaust, it is impossible to say that it could never happen again. This concept of the banality of evil places the Holocaust firmly within humanity and thereby within history. By doing so, Arendt maintains what she already wrote to Jaspers some fifteen years earlier, that she would not mystify or mythologize the Holocaust.^[32]

The second problem with Arendt’s conclusion that the Holocaust is unique lies in her analysis of Europe’s imperialist history and the way she compares it with the Holocaust. For Arendt, the event of the concentration camps was what was unlike anything else in history, but while she studied and analysed this event closely, she did not do the same for the other side of the comparison. While she argues that the totalitarian regime produced the ‘human being as such’, a non-political being without social relations, she assumes that this did not happen similarly in Europe’s imperialist occupation of Africa. Rather than humans as such being produced, she states that Europeans found the African peoples as such. According to Arendt, African people, ‘behaved like a part of nature, that they treated nature as their undisputed master, that they had not created a human world, a human reality, and that therefore nature had remained, in all its majesty, the only overwhelming reality’.^[33] In reality, Rothberg, as well as historian Dirk Moses, argue that the human reality in Africa was destroyed by colonial oppression.

In order to categorize the Holocaust as a phenomenon beyond human comprehension, Arendt needs a reality beyond human reality. Therefore, she places this reality in the colonial encounter, where she believes that racism was a European invention, used to explain this division between the European human reality and the African natural reality. But in order to explain this origin of racism, she requires that the racial divide does already exist. By doing so, she draws the very line between the African and European humans that she describes as produced in the concentration camps. Rothberg states that Arendt ‘cannot fully recognize that that encounter [between Europeans and Africans] produces the very distinction she takes for granted there’.^[34]

In her efforts to simultaneously prevent a mystification of the Holocaust, as well as preventing a justification through historiography, Arendt leaves ammunition for both sides of the Historikerstreits. As her authority on totalitarianism and the origins thereof remains prevailing, her convictions of the Holocaust as a unique event in history still weigh heavily in the debate, but the racist notion whereupon she builds her argument supplies the anti-colonial side of the second Historikerstreit with ammunition.

Beyond analysis: an imperative

To see the lasting impact of Hannah Arendt’s work, it must be placed within the context of Rothberg’s theory of multidirectional memory. Her vital analysis of the Nazi camps as well as her racist analysis of Europe’s imperial history have a lasting effect, which proves both the truth and the necessity of multidirectional memory.

Michael Rothberg’s theory of multidirectional memory is in part an analysis of how collective memory works. In his book, he points out that the Holocaust has been compared to anti-colonial struggles since the early post-war years and that people who assume a competitive notion of collective memory unknowingly contribute to multidirectional memory, as he points out in the case of Khalid Muhammed. But beyond the analysis, multidirectional memory is not only an ontological theory, but also an active approach. While multidirectional memory works despite a competitive approach, it works even better if collective memory is actively maintained as multidirectional.

Rather than depending on antisemitic remarks to bridge the memories of the Holocaust and slavery, memorials, museums and other educational institutions can actively link them themselves. And by doing so, they can improve the understanding of both, and other, histories. This is shown by the research of Sina Arnold and Sebastian Bischoff (2023), who looked into the practices of multidirectional memory. By looking at 124 different practices of connecting two different memories in museums, educational institutions, memorials and digital media, they tested the use of multidirectional memory. Arnold and Bischoff concluded that the application of multidirectionality in collective memory indeed attributes to the understanding of history and memory and does so without the need for competition between the discussed memories.^[35]

Not only are such relations between the Holocaust and other events important for understanding the past better, but also for understanding the present. Maintaining the idea that the Holocaust is unique, will also lead to repetition of dangerous notions that have led to that idea in the first place. This idea was largely based upon Arendt’s racist notions of pre-colonial Africa, and if maintained, it can work the other way around. As anti-colonial thinkers have pointed out, defending that there is a difference between the Holocaust and other historical atrocities outside Europe, leads back to the idea that there is a difference between white Europeans and non-white people. This idea was explicit in Arendt’s analysis of imperialism and is still present in the second Historikerstreit. And it is also present in Mayor Halsema’s refusal to mention Gaza in her memorial speech, whereas she had mentioned Ukraine another year.^[36] It is in order to stop spreading such racist notions that we must be able to relate European suffering to that of other, non-white people in history and relate the Holocaust to atrocities outside Europe or western cultures.

The Holocaust has often been referred to as Europe’s moral authority.^[37]  In a secularized society, the memory of Auschwitz was a common notion of evil and a legitimation of human rights and international law. As historian Davis Wertheim summarized, the Holocaust filled the moral vacuum that was left by the death of God, as Nietzsche had proclaimed.^[38] It was this moral vacuum that had enabled fascists to rise to power and commit the Holocaust in the first place. But after the Second World War, Europe finally had an answer to Nietzsche’s question ‘What sacred games shall we need to invent?’.^[39] Remembering the Holocaust became the sacred game upon which liberal democracies relied, Auschwitz became the beacon of evil and the survivors became the moral authority that had once been religious leaders. And when Habermas argued for the uniqueness of the Holocaust, he argued for the foundation of liberal democracy as well.

And within this context, multidirectional memory does more than improve and expand the understanding of past and present, it also sustains the moral authority. If the Holocaust would be unique, as is still often claimed by scholars such as Steven Katz, Yehuda Bauer and widely believed in public opinion, there is no lesson to be learned from it. ^[40] If the Holocaust is ‘outside history’,  it cannot happen again as long as we live in history.^[41] If there is an unbreachable discrepancy between the events leading up to it, and the event itself, there is no lesson to be taken from the events leading up to it. Never Again would be not a warning, an imperative, to prevent it happening again, but an assurance that it cannot. So if we do not connect the memory of the Holocaust to other atrocities, in the past and in the present, it will lose meaning.

And so, as Arendt had feared, the Holocaust becomes mystified, a mythological event.^[42] And as such, an incomparable myth, detached from history, the memory of the Holocaust did indeed grow stale. As the moral authority of the Holocaust became more important than its history, religiously remembering became a ritual. Detached from current developments such as rising facism, rising antisemitism, war crimes in Ukraine and Gaza, the role of Holocaust memory as fundament for liberal democracy seems to have run its course. As Nietzsche declared the death of God, so Wertheim last year, announced the death of Auschwitz.^[43]

In order to sustain the memory of the Holocaust, to learn from it, we must be able to relate it to other memories and to current events. If the Holocaust is not part of a multidirectional network of memories, its lessons will be lost, its causes forgotten and its perpetrators mythologized. Eventually, Wertheim concludes, we find ourselves in a situation that is spookily similar to the pre-war crisis of liberalism. By dubbing every attempt to compare the Holocaust and colonialism, slavery or Gaza as Holocaust denial, its moral authority becomes, as the event itself, myth and then meaningless.

According to Rothberg, comparisons between the Holocaust and other historical events, in Palestine and elsewhere, can offer ethical frameworks and principles that can help to confront political situations. Including the Holocaust in the historical reality of other genocides is a step towards understanding past and present genocides and to learn from them and hopefully stop and prevent them. But to do so, we need ‘open-minded scholarship that is not afraid to take strong stances. We also need visions of differentiated solidarity that recognize all civilian victims and speak forthrightly about the conditions that produce continuing cycles of violence’.^[44] And to do so, we need to accept that the Holocaust is part of those cycles of violence and not above or beyond history and historical events.

So in order to maintain the importance of memory, the national remembrance moment on May 4th must connect the memory of the Second World War actively to other histories. Refusing to mention Gaza in a moment wherein another genocide is remembered, is a refusal to take lessons from memory and from history, and sets society up to repeat the same mistakes that have led to the Holocaust. Protecting the carefully selected victims from the Second World War, Dutch colonial wars and other Dutch involvements in war and peace missions, from a broader context of history, is to ultimately rob them of meaning and purpose.

Bibliography

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• Arendt, Hannah. “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship.” In Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn.
• Arendt, Hannah. “Eichmann in Jerusalem: Exchange of Letters between Gershom Scholem and Arendt.” In The Jew as Pariah, edited by Ron H. Feldman, 240–251. New York: Grove Press, 1978.
• Arendt, Hannah, Karl Jaspers, Lotte Köhler, Hans Saner, and Robert Kimber. Correspondence 1926–1969. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.
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• Ayodeji, Adewuyi. “Holocaust Studies and Postcolonial Trauma: Reading through Rothberg’s Trauma Model.” Academia Letters, 2021. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4050.
• Benn Michaels, Walter. “Plots Against America: Neoliberalism and Antiracism.” American Literary History 18, no. 2 (2006).
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• Césaire, Aimé, and Joan Pinkham. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: NYU Press, 2000.
• Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven. By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• Garagozov, Rauf. Collective Memory: How Collective Representations About the Past Are Created, Preserved and Reproduced. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015.
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• Katz, Steven T. “The Uniqueness of the Holocaust: The Historical Dimension.” In Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, 2nd ed., edited by Alan S. Rosenbaum, 49–50. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001.
• Levi, Primo, and Philip Roth. Survival in Auschwitz. London: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
• Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. “The Institutionalization of Cosmopolitan Morality: The Holocaust and Human Rights.” Journal of Human Rights 3, no. 2 (2004).
• Macumber, Lindsay Shirley. “Understanding, Reconciliation, and Prevention – Rethinking Hannah Arendt’s Representation of the Holocaust.” PhD diss., University of Toronto (Canada), 2016.
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• Rothberg, Michael. “Lived Multidirectionality: ‘Historikerstreit 2.0’ and the Politics of Holocaust Memory.” Memory Studies 15, no. 6 (2022).
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^[1] Nationaal Comité 4 en 5 mei Memorandum

^[2] De Kanttekening, ‘Burgemeester Halsema wil op 4 mei niet over Gaza spreken maar deed dit wel over Oekraïne’, 15-2024 https://dekanttekening.nl/nieuws/burgemeester-halsema-wil-op-4-mei-niet-over-gaza-spreken-maar-deed-dit-wel-over-oekraine/ 

Bouwman, R., ‘Dodenherdenking: 120 seconden per jaar géén Gaza en géén jodenhaat, is dat nou te veel gevraagd?’, Wynia’s Week, 1-5-2024

Dodenherdenking: 120 seconden per jaar géén Gaza en géén jodenhaat, is dat nou te veel gevraagd?

^[3] BNNVARA, ‘Bij inclusieve dodenherdenking in Den Haag aandacht voor genocide in Gaza’, 12-04-2025 https://www.bnnvara.nl/joop/artikelen/bij-inclusieve-dodenherdenking-in-den-haag-aandacht-voor-genocide-in-gaza

Vergeer, F., ‘Opinie: Herdenken van Tweede Wereldoorlog niet gebaat bij focus op oorlog in Gaza’, De Volkskrant, 9-3-2025

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/opinie-herdenken-van-tweede-wereldoorlog-niet-gebaat-bij-focus-op-oorlog-in-gaza~b6c82f0b/&ved=2ahUKEwi4pqug39mMAxWf2wIHHe6pGUUQxfQBKAB6BAgREAE&usg=AOvVaw3ETDqA9hmOo7uOMBpA_85l

^[4] Walter Benn Michaels, “Plots Against America: Neoliberalism and Antiracism,” American Literary History (summer 2006): 288-302;

^[5] Ibidem

^[6] O’Mara, Shane. Collective Memory, 2022. Progress in Brain Research, Elsevier, Volume 274, Issue 1, 2022, p.xiii-xiv

^[7] Halbwachs, M., 1992. The reconstruction of the past (L.A. Coser, Trans.). In: Coser, L.A. (Ed.), On Collective Memory. University of Chicago Press, pp. 42. (original work published 1950)

^[8] Garagozov, Rauf. Collective Memory : How Collective Representations About the Past Are Created, Preserved and Reproduced, 2015 1-11

^[9] Ibidem

^[10] Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. 1-30

^[11] Nolte, Ernst. “The Past That Will Not Pass: A Speech That Could Be Written but Not Delivered,” in Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust. Translated by James Knowlton & Truett Cates. Atlantic Heights, NJ, 1993, pp. 18-23

^[12] Bosworth, Richard J. B. “The Historikerstreit and the Relativisation of Auschwitz.” In Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima, 89–109. Routledge, 1993

^[13] Ibidem

^[14] Rothberg. Multidirectional Memory Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. 1-30

^[15] While during the Historikerstreit in the 1980s, Nolte and Habermas discussed the singularity of the Holocaust, this term has been little used since. In the years after, the term ‘singularity’ has widely been replaced by the term ‘uniqueness’. This term was already used by other philosophers during and before the Historikerstreit and is interchangeable with the term ‘singularity’ in this context. Since the term ‘uniqueness’ is the most commonly used in the past decades, this article will also use it in relation to the discussion about the Holocaust.

^[16] Rothberg, Michael. “Lived Multidirectionality: “Historikerstreit 2.0” and the Politics of Holocaust Memory.” Memory Studies 15, no. 6 (2022): 1316–29

^[17] Ibidem

^[18] Césaire, Aimé, and Joan Pinkham. Discourse on Colonialism. NYU Press, 2000.

^[19] Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven. By Words Alone : the Holocaust in Literature. Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, 1980

^[20] Ibidem

Pendas, Devin O. “Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt in Frankfurt: The Eichmann Trial, the Auschwitz Trial, and the Banality of Justice.” New German Critique 34, no. 1 (2007): 77–109

^[21] Arendt, Hannah. “Eichmann in Jerusalem: Exchange of Letters between Gershom Scholem and Arendt,” in

The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York, 1978), 240–251

^[22] King, Richard H. and Stone, Dan. Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007. 250-260

^[23] Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem : a Report on the Banality of Evil. Rev. and enlarged ed. Harmondsworth [etc.]: Penguin, (1994)

^[24] Arendt, Hannah. “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” in Kohn, Responsibility and Judgment, 42

^[25] Macumber, Lindsay Shirley. “Understanding, Reconciliation, and Prevention – Rethinking Hannah Arendt’s Representation of the Holocaust.” Order No. 10139218, University of Toronto (Canada), 2016. 40-49

^[26] Arendt to Voegelin, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” 80

^[27] Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism, rev. ed. (San Diego, 1979), 438

^[28] Levi, Primo., Roth, Philip. Survival in Auschwitz. Verenigd Koninkrijk: Simon & Schuster, 1996, 88

^[29] Macumber, “Understanding, Reconciliation, and Prevention – Rethinking Hannah Arendt’s Representation of the Holocaust.” 40-49

^[30] Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 438

^[31] Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

^[32] Arendt, Jaspers, Köhler, Saner, Kimber, Jaspers, Karl, Köhler, Lotte, Saner, Hans, and Kimber, Robert. Correspondence 1926-1969. New York [etc.]: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. Letter 43, 17-8-1946

^[33] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism 192

^[34] Rothberg. Multidirectional Memory Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. 60-61

^[35] Arnold, Sina, and Sebastian Bischoff. “Marginal(ized) Plurality: An Empirical Conceptualization of Michael Rothberg’s “multidirectional Memory” in German Educational Settings.” Memory Studies, 2023

^[36] De Kanttekening, ‘Burgemeeaster Halsema wil op 4 mei niet over Gaza spreken maar deed dit wel over Oekraïne’, 15-2024 https://dekanttekening.nl/nieuws/burgemeester-halsema-wil-op-4-mei-niet-over-gaza-spreken-maar-deed-dit-wel-over-oekraine/  

^[37] Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. “The institutionalization of cosmopolitan morality: The Holocaust and human rights.” Journal of Human Rights 3.2 (2004): 143-157.

^[38] Wertheim, David. ‘Auschwitz’ is dood. De groene Amsterdammer, 2024-20, 15-5-2024

^[39] Nietzsche, Friedrich. De vrolijke wetenschap, p.125. Nederland: Singel Uitgeverijen, 2012.

^[40] Ayodeji, Adewuyi. “Holocaust Studies and Postcolonial Trauma: Reading through Rothberg’s Trauma Model.” Academia Letters, 2021. doi:10.20935/AL4050.

^[41] Katz, Steven T.  “The Uniqueness of the Holocaust: The Historical Dimension,” Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, 2d ed., ed. Alan S. Rosenbaum (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 49–50

^[42]  Arendt, Jaspers, Köhler, Saner, Kimber, Jaspers, Karl, Köhler, Lotte, Saner, Hans, and Kimber, Robert. Correspondence 1926-1969.

^[43] Wertheim, D., ‘Auschwitz’ is dood. De groene Amsterdammer, 2024-20, 15-5-2024

^[44] Rothberg, M., ‘Holocaust Remembrance and the Ethics of Comparison’, The Massachusetts Review, 26-1-2024

https://massreview.org/node/11743