“This is a God-given signal! If this fire, as I believe, turns out to be the handiwork of Communists, then there is nothing that shall stop us now crushing out the murder pest with an iron fist.” So allegedly expressed Adolf Hitler to Sefton Delmer, British journalist and Berlin correspondent for the Daily Express, one day after arsonists razed the Reichstag, Germany’s federal parliament building, on 27 February 1933.

Though he had yet to complete his first full month as chancellor in the still functioning Weimar Republic, Hitler seized upon the crisis for his own political gain. The Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party’s official newspaper, propagated the false allegation that communists were planning to overthrow the legally-appointed government.

Historians have never discovered any credible evidence that supports this claim. Many German citizens at the time, however, believed the Nazis’ charge, including several news agencies in the United States. The New York Times reported on 13 September 1933, for instance, that a German commission discovered “a coup in the hands of a Russian Jew named Wollenberg … was prepared so that at a given signal the Red rising would break loose everywhere.” Germany did not release any specific information, however, “so as not to anticipate the court trial.”

As the Reichstag still smoldered, Nazi representatives, together with a sizable cadre of center-right politicians in the German National People’s Party (DNVP) and Center Party, passed the so-called “Reichstag Fire Decree” on 28 February 1933. Article 1 formally suspended “Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124, and 153 of the Constitution,” an action that enabled the government “to restrict the rights of personal freedom, freedom of expression, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, [and] the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications.”

Article 4, meanwhile, targeted anyone whom the Nazis deemed a potential enemy of the state. “Whoever provokes, or appeals for, or incites the disobedience of the orders given out by the supreme state authorities … or order given by the Reich Government,” decreed the new legislation, “is punishable—insofar as the deed is not covered by other decrees with more severe punishments—with imprisonment of not less than one month, or with a fine of 150 up to 15,000 Reichsmarks.”

The same Article continued that “Whoever endangers human life by violating Article 1 is to be punished by sentence to a penitentiary … with imprisonment of not less than six months. … In addition, the sentence may include [the] confiscation of property. Whoever provokes or incites an act contrary to public welfare is to be punished … with imprisonment of not less than three months.”

Hitler’s fire decree effectively served as his first step toward civil dictatorship. Less than one month later, the last political remnants of Germany’s republic passed the “Enabling Act,” which authorized the Nazis to declare laws outside of the traditional constitutional framework. The last remnants of democracy, in effect, voted themselves out of existence. Germany’s elected body, now under the leadership of Hermann Göring, Hitler’s future second-in-command, simply authorized legislation at his convivence. It was the beginning of a long and dark period in German history, a catastrophe that eventually enveloped all of Europe six years later.

Serious historians recognize the importance of historical context and the necessity for evaluating the past on its own terms. At a time when high-profile media personalities invoke a skewed or blatantly false historical narrative to justify policies on a seemingly daily basis, I am wary of arguments that clumsily rely on unnuanced comparisons. Professional responsibility, however, does not abjure scholars the right to call attention to contemporary affronts to liberal democracy, from the forced separation of families at the U.S. southern border to officially-sanctioned violence against peaceful protestors in Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C and Portland, Oregon.

One does not need a Ph.D. in German history to recognize the dangerous potentials of our present-day politics in the United States. We can no longer comfort ourselves in a false logic that regards discriminatory practices as a unique aspect of German history or the distant past. History does not repeat itself. But a critical evaluation of past events can at least provide us means to learn about the destructive capabilities of nationalism, racism, and centralized oppression of citizens peacefully exercising their constitutional rights.

As George Orwell reminds us, “Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish a dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism. But any systematic government reliance on secret police and fabricated revolutions will not have a happy ending.

Dr. Adam A. Blackler is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wyoming. His book manuscript, currently titled An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa, explores the transnational dimensions of German colonialism, race, and genocide in German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia). In September 2020, Peter Lang Press will publish his co-edited volume, entitled After the Imperialist Imagination: Two Decades of Research on Global Germany and Its Legacies, that analyzes the critical role of empire in modern German history between 1884 and the present-day. He will also publish a chapter, entitled “The Consequences of Genocide in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Bloomsbury Press’s forthcoming series, A Cultural History of Genocide, which is scheduled for release in October 2020.

Yes, you can. And you should. After all, America is the country that lets you return a used toaster when the shade of brown it puts on your bread doesn’t match the color of your kitchen wallpaper — no questions asked. I don’t think the Founding Fathers would mind if we returned some of the things that made sense 250 years ago but no longer do. They’d of course be surprised and probably a little flattered to see that their Constitution is still up and running while countries in the Old World have had multiple system changes, revolts, and constitutional do-overs in the meantime. But then, after a second glance, they’d be scratching their wigged heads over our attempts to base 21st-century gun laws on an amendment that uses 18th-century grammar and a fuzzy syntax that has led to wildly different interpretations. I am sure they’d take the 2^nd Amendment back and give us something brand new that’s a better fit. After all, they were bold innovators who resisted dogma, had a secular worldview and would shudder at the notion of calling a political document “sacred.” And besides, what’s the point of originalism if nobody wears wigs anymore?

The last time a group of framers went to work in my home country Germany was in 1948. They were more remodelers than founders — a democratic constitution had already been in place since the end of WWI, except it hadn’t worked. It had major flaws and loopholes wide enough for the entire Nazi party to march through and seize power legally. Interestingly and in contrast to their celebrated American counterparts, hardly anyone today remembers the Gründungsväter (founding fathers) of 1948. There is no shrine you can visit that displays a flashy piece of parchment, under glass and guarded by security, that starts with a German version of “We the People” and ends with an impressive list of signatures. It was their speed, not so much their names that made it into the history books. In just two weeks the group of legal experts put together a draft constitution with 149 articles while being secluded in a monastery on a Bavarian lake that was part of the American occupation zone. Chiemseeinsel Herrenwörth or short Herrenchiemsee provided a beautiful Alpine backdrop to the participants and a formidable pronunciation challenge to the US administrators. The Allies’ charge to the framers was simple. Come up with a tyrant-proof constitution and make sure there won’t be a Fourth Reich after the Third. It was done by taking back gifts that had been generously doled out during the previous round of democracy building. The Reichspräsident was stripped of the powers granted to him in the 1919 Weimar Constitution so that he could no longer act as “Ersatzkaiser” and overrule parliament by emergency decree or, for that matter, executive order. For Germany the real Hindenburg disaster wasn’t the Zeppelin exploding in 1937, it was President Hindenburg handing the chancellor position to Adolf Hitler four years earlier. The 1948 framers, many of them imprisoned, exiled or dismissed from office during the Nazi period, had seen their fellow Germans fall for strongmen’s promises and propaganda. Their solution? Take back the people’s right to directly vote for a leader (the German translation of which is “Führer”) and have parliament do it instead — parliamentarism instead of populism. So far, the system has worked and produced leaders that may be short on charisma but, luckily, on personality disorders as well.

Had the Herrenchiemsee framers taken more than two weeks to rummage through the dustbin of discarded constitutions they might have even stumbled upon the European “Electoral College,” a group of princes that had sold their votes for the Emperor of the First German Reich from 1356 until Napoleon and his Grande Armée put an end to it. Napoleon never made it to the US, only his sales order for Louisiana did. Therefore, the American Electoral College is still alive and if European history is any predictor of its longevity, it’ll be with us until 2237. Has it prevented demagogues and wannabe dictators from snatching the President’s office as the Founding Fathers hoped it would? I bet that with their hopes so badly dashed in 2016 they’d take that gift back too, definitely before November — no questions asked.

Henning Schroeder is a former vice provost and dean of graduate education at the University of Minnesota. His email address is schro601@umn.edu and his Twitter handle is @HenningSchroed1.

In 2015 I travelled to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.  As a U.S. citizen, I worried about how I would be received.  Born in 1968, I grew up hearing Walter Cronkite’s nightly reports of American casualties during what U.S. media accounts commonly called the Vietnam War (1955-1975).  I remember the famous 1972 picture of a Vietnamese girl running naked from a bombing campaign using napalm, a slick, sticky petroleum.  Napalm had seared the girl’s skin.  Her agonized distress while running on a road with other screaming Vietnamese children, followed by armed and seemingly nonchalant soldiers, confused and sickened me.  The black and white, Pulitzer-prize winning picture stood in contrast to full-color film clips I also remember of the war, clips shot from U.S. bombers whose payloads created massive, spectacular orange fireballs against the lush green jungle.

My interest in genocide studies surely grew from my childhood exposure to such images.  In On Photography, Susan Sontag (2001) said she was forever changed from seeing a picture from the Holocaust as a youth, a photograph that she said divided her life in half, from innocence to a new vision of vomitus human cruelty.  Now traveling as an adult in Ho Chi Minh City, I felt unease and shame.  I knew of the atrocities perpetrated by U.S. soldiers on unarmed women and children.  I had become aware of the massive and indiscriminate U.S. bombing campaigns against Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian citizens.  I had learned of the ongoing effects of the U.S. use of chemical weapons like napalm and Agent Orange.  Despite being a child during the war, as a now-adult citizen of the aggressor nation I felt complicit—that in my brazen appearance on Vietnamese soil, I could not escape judgment for my country’s policy decisions and atrocities.

Still, I found it unsettling to visit Ho Chi Minh City’s War Remnants Museum. Once named the Exhibition House for Crimes of War and Aggression, its name was changed following the normalization of Vietnamese and U.S. relations in 1995.  The museum, though, uses the phrase “the American War” throughout, as opposed to what U.S. citizens call “the Vietnam War.”  The museum’s exhibition of the material was frank and persuasive, without much commentary.  I found a statement from U.S. Senator Wayne Morse that the U.S. had flouted the rule of law during the war.  Quotes in the museum from the Geneva Convention can be contrasted against photographic evidence of the My Lai massacre, the shells of massive bombs, and charts outlining the tonnage of U.S. bombs dropped on Vietnam (tonnage estimated as perhaps double what was used in all of World War II).  Here was undisputed material.  Americans had fought the war in Vietnam. Vietnam never attacked U.S. soil.  It was a war of aggression carrying the hallmarks of genocide (Lemkin 1944).  In the American War, unarmed U.S. women and children did not suffer and die.  U.S. villages were not razed.  Chemical weapons were not deployed on American soil.

Perhaps the images and other material in the museum were especially upsetting for me as I was now surrounded by Vietnamese people and international visitors.  We viewed the images together.  A specific area of the museum devoted entirely to images of deformed fetuses and children, victims of Agent Orange, also left no doubt that Vietnamese people would long suffer the effects of this war.  A war resulting in genetic mutations arguably never ends.

I wish more Americans could see the War Remnants Museum.  While it can be perceived as promoting a form of Communist Party nationalism (Giller 2014), it might also give Americans pause to consider both America’s immense power on the world stage and the results of war.  The War Museum can be seen as propagandistic and one-sided, but perhaps American visitors could simply see that war is understood in many ways (Schwenkel 2009).  Gently phrased, the world outside of the U.S. at times views its actions unfavorably.  Shame is a powerful emotion and is perhaps the first step toward reconciliation—if shame is expressed by the citizens of the once-invading country, the victims and other observers can see that the event horrifies some citizens from the responsible country.  Carefully walking through such a museum can also disabuse visitors of simple ideas that history is a collection of events neutrally observed and recorded.  Public displays of war atrocities, seen by U.S. citizens, might promote U.S. accountability for and acknowledgment of U.S. war crimes.  Such public displays, upsetting as they are, might further reduce future support for wars that feature indiscriminate killing.  

Later that same trip, I wait in a line several blocks long to see the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Hanoi.  A little girl standing nearby with her classmates, in her school uniform, says hello to me in English.  She asks where I am from.  When I say the United States, she replies “welcome to Vietnam.”  I was humbled.  The girl was kind and magnanimous, like all the Vietnamese people I met that trip.  This child-welcoming me would know the prolonged effects of the American War.  She will learn about the history of her country.  She seemed younger than nine years old, the age of the girl in the photograph I cannot forget, the girl whose skin was burning.  She will see that picture.  U.S. citizens should also see it, particularly through Vietnamese eyes.

Kurt Borchard is Professor of Sociology at the University of Nebraska Kearney.  He was a participant in the 2019 CHGS summer workshop for teachers.  He teaches an undergraduate course on the Holocaust and has written extensively on cultural studies and homelessness.  

References:

Gillen, Jaime.  2014.  Tourism and Nation Building at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.  Annals of the Association of American Geographers.  DOI:10.1080/00045608.2014.944459.

Lemkin, Raphael.  1944.  Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.  Washington D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Schwenkel, Christina.  2009. The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Sontag, Susan.  2001.  On Photography.  New York: Picador.

At the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, we are both deeply saddened and profoundly angered by the brutal, horrific murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police. In the face of the continued murder of Black people in Minnesota, across the country, and in many places around the world, we reaffirm our commitments to racial justice and equity.

We recognize that the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and the State of Minnesota were established through the theft of Dakota and Anishinaabe land and the genocide of the Dakota and Anishinaabe peoples. Indeed, the first sins of Indigenous genocide and the enslavement of African Americans laid a foundation for a society built upon and maintained through violence and white supremacy. While it is rare in academia and education that the Transatlantic slave trade or the institutions and legacies of slavery and segregation in the United States are termed genocide, noted genocide scholar Adam Jones wrote that arguments against the label genocide have too often become a tool for denial, “serving to deflect responsibility for one of history’s greatest crimes.” Last week, civil rights attorney Ben Crump wrote in the Washington Post, “And then we hear that nagging thought that keeps coming back and demanding us to face it: How many more deaths have not been captured on video? How long has this been going on without witnesses or documentation? Is this an outlier or is this endemic? And it starts to feel like genocide.” We recommend Crump’s 2019 book, Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People.

Indeed, over the past few days, our email inboxes and social media accounts have been filled with statements regarding the vicious murder of George Floyd and commitments and resources for supporting one another, dismantling white supremacy, promoting social justice, and engaging in anti-racist teaching and learning. We are turning to our colleagues and amplifying their voices and critical work. Some additional resources we highly recommend:

General Resources:

1619 Project from the New York Times

A collaborative set of scaffolded anti-racism resources aimed at engendering white allies and accomplices in anti-racist work, a set of anti-racist resources complied by Victoria Alexander, and another very comprehensive list of resources compiled by Sarah Sophie Flicker and Alyssa Klein.

Rethinking Schools offers a number of resources for teaching about and for social justice, including a magazine and many excellent books. We highly recommend Teaching for Black Lives (edited by Dyan Watson, Jesse Hagopian, and Wayne Au), as well as Rethinking Schools’ yearly Planning to Change the World: Plan Book for Social Justice Educators (edited By Gretchen Brion-Meisels, Margaret Kavanagh, Thomas Nikundiwe, Carla Shalaby) – check back for the 2020-2021 edition

“‘We Charge Genocide’: The 1951 Black Lives Matter Campaign” from the University of Washington’s Mapping American Social Movements Project (by Susan Glenn)

Local Resources:

Articles on local history: “Dred and Harriet Scott in Minnesota” from MNopedia by Annette Atkins and “Duluth Lynchings” from the Minnesota Historical Society

East Side Freedom Library: The ESFL is a local community library and gathering space in East St. Paul dedicated to inspiring solidarity, advocating for justice, and working toward equity for all

Mapping Prejudice Project from the University of Minnesota, which includes an educator guide

MPD150: Working Towards a Police Free Minneapolis: MPD150 is a participatory, horizontally-organized effort by local organizers, researchers, artists, and activists dedicated to changing the story of policing in Minneapolis and working to ultimately dissolve the Minneapolis Police department. [Example lesson resource on policing reform]

We stand in solidarity with you and our Twin Cities communities.

It is almost impossible to put into words how heartbreaking and grim these past days have been, as we watched in horror and distress the footage of Minneapolis police officers murdering George Floyd. The outrage and pain that followed have shaken the foundations of our communities to their very core. The magnitude of this moment cannot be minimized, as protesters have taken to the streets. Young and old alike have cried out for justice.  

When I was a youngster back in high school in Madrid I was deeply moved by a drama I read called Biedermann and the Arsonists, by Max Frisch. It is about a citizen who invites two arsonists into his house, even though they signal from the start that they will set fire to it.  

Penned in the 1950s, Frisch’s play has been read as a parable about the complacency and cowardice of the common man that stood by during the rise of Nazism, ignored the crimes of Stalinism in Europe, or buried his head in the sand during the nuclear arms race. What has this to do with our current crisis? Biedermann is a stand-in for the German average citizen who indulges the good life, a contented member of the middle class detached from the reality that surrounds him. Most of us have a bit of Biedermann housed within us. Our beautiful Twin Cities is one of the most livable places in the country… for White citizens, but that wealth, prosperity, and acceptance have never been fully accessible to African American and indigenous neighbors.

My friend and colleague Joachim Savelsberg wrote these compelling lines in a letter to the New York Times last week:

“Expressions of disgust come easily in response to killings of unarmed black men by police. So does upset about lacking judicial responses. Yet, both are only possible in a context in which society and its political representatives tolerate and promote massive structural inequalities and segregation of the disadvantaged in neighborhoods and prisons, delegating to specialized forces the dirty work of keeping these populations in check. Such conditions generate high rates of killing in poverty neighborhoods, police brutality, and police impunity. We must fight these evils by eliminating the roots.”

In other words, the problem will not simply fizzle out because the fires are momentarily quelled. Max Frisch’s ominous subtitle for his play was also a warning: “A lesson without a lesson”. For us, unless we become more attentive to the needs of our communities and work actively in the fight against discrimination, each from our respective positions, dismantling the visible and invisible barriers that fan the flames of racial inequality, we will continue to be burned like Biedermann.

“Ever since the Holocaust, in which six million European Jews – among other victims – were deliberately targeted and destroyed, a moral hierarchy of suffering has seized the humanitarian imagination, one in which stories of victimhood are ranked based on the scale of human destruction. Genocide has become a numbers game. In this spectacle of suffering, the bodies of victims literally count” (Meierhenrich 2020, 4). 

The figure of 800,000 Rwandan deaths has long been associated with the Rwandan genocide. It has been widely cited in scholarly works, documentaries, museums, and memorials. This casualty figure, while widely cited, is also highly contested. In the most recent edition of the Journal of Genocide Research (2020), this figure is methodologically deconstructed and debated. While the figures modeled in the journal are also contested by scholars, the debates surrounding the politics of numbers raise important questions and concerns about how victimhood is constructed in the wake of genocide and mass atrocity.

As the above quote alludes to, the numbers debate is political in nature. While sociologists, political scientists, demographers, and economists attempt to arrive at casualty figures for the Rwandan genocide, Jens Meierhenrich argues that this debate is inherently imbued with morality and claims of victimhood. This is because, within violent conflicts such as war and genocide, there is a propensity to equate the group with the highest number of victims with true victimhood.

Calculating Casualty Figures

Before diving into the various numerical conclusions of the authors featured in the debate, it is crucial to recognize that these numbers are highly subjective and reflect the myriad of statistical modelling decisions that must be made when deriving these figures. 

All of the authors point to the problematic nature of trying to derive a precise estimate of casualty figures based on the existing data. One of the first hurdles for scholars is calculating a pre-genocide baseline, in which they determine the population of Rwanda as a whole, as well as its racial breakdown.

For example, McDoom (2020) argues that precise figures are impossible for a few reasons. First, the existing data scholars used to derive these numbers, such as census data and population growth models, are faulty. In the period leading up to the Rwandan genocide, censuses underreported the number of Tutsis in Rwanda, in an effort to justify the ethnic quotas that had been put in place by the Habyarimana regime. Tutsis may have also self-reported as Hutu in an effort to avoid discrimination. Furthermore, as Armstrong and his co-authors (2020) explain, many arbitrary decisions must be made in the process of modeling causality, and scholars must place a significant amount of credibility and faith in the aforementioned existing data.

The above chart summarizes the key authors in this debate who have modeled their own casualty figures. It is important to note, however, that several others have weighed into this debate providing feedback on the above numbers and the various methodological approaches. This chart also includes the highly contested numbers of Davenport & Stam (2009), the oft-cited Human Rights Watch Report, and the Rwandan Ministry of Local Affairs’ own numbers (found at memorial cites across the country).

There are a few points worth stressing in this table. First, the majority of estimates regarding Tutsi deaths during the 1994 genocide are around 500,000, with the Rwandan government’s own reporting being an outlier. Interestingly, however, is the vast array of casualty figures of Hutus, ranging from 60,000 to 700,000. It is also important to note that many of these casualty figures are derived from not only direct killings of Hutus, but also Hutu deaths as a result of disease and access to resources. This is a result of living in refugee camps in the immediate aftermath of the genocide.

Why does this debate matter, and should it? 

It is apparent that many of the scholars in this journal point to increased numbers of Hutu deaths. Thus, if the number of fatalities between Tutsi and Hutus is much closer than initially believed, the Rwandan government’s claims of exclusive Tutsi victimhood stand to be challenged. And, if these higher Hutu casualty figures are accurate than perhaps we need to focus on the structure of genocide, highlighting how it occurred within the context of a civil war.

This raises some important questions. For example, as McDoom asks: “Should the killing of Hutu be seen as morally less reprehensible or equivalent?” (2020, 84). And should Hutu victimhood be acknowledged? McDoom argues that recognizing Hutu casualty figures matters for three reasons: it shapes the categorization of violence, it raises questions of the experience of memory and justice following the genocide, and it has implications of reconciliation. As previous scholars have noted (Berry 2018), recognition of a group’s victim status often transfers into distinct political advantages and economic resources. Additionally, by acknowledging Hutu casualty figures, it complicates current perceptions of Hutus as the sole perpetrators and Tutsis as the sole victims of violence. It may go as far to imply that following (or during) the 1994 Genocide against Tutsi, a politicide against Hutus may have also occurred, in which Hutus were targeted for their political beliefs, rather than for their ethnic identity. At it’s very least, however, discrepancies in the numerical figures and identities of victims warrants question the validity of the oft-cited 800,000 casualty figure.

Ran Zwigenberg, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, History and Jewish Studies at Pennsylvania State University, was recently hosted by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Center for Jewish Studies. He gave a talk entitled: “Survivors: Psychological Trauma and Memory Politics in Hiroshima and Auschwitz.” I sat down with Dr. Zwigenberg for a wide-ranging conversation covering survivor politics, the gendered dimensions of social work, praxis of care, the notion of social trauma, and other topics related to the global politics of memory.*

Nikoleta Sremac: One thing I’m curious about which you mentioned in your talk is the application of the concept of trauma from psychiatry and psychology to sociology, or other fields where it’s used in a collective sense like this idea of cultural trauma. What is your take on that concept?

Ran Zwigenberg: I’m very ambivalent about that concept. I don’t reject it completely. I think there are a lot of good arguments made by very smart people for social trauma. However, I’m ambivalent about using psychological concepts that pertain to particular psychological events and individual bodies and expanding them to the body politic or the social body. This has too much resonance to organic ideas of community which I’m very hostile to. It also for me is a bit of a shortcut that I don’t want to take. There is an example in my book, where one scholar said that there is a lapse between the Holocaust and the 1960s when people start talking about the Holocaust and this corresponds to the lapse in PTSD where you only feel the symptoms later on. I don’t buy this. There are very good reasons for why people start talking or don’t start talking at particular moments. There was actually a particular point in time we can point out. It was a very conscious decision made by the government to make people start talking. They put people as witnesses on trial. I think we should use different kinds of narratives and different kinds of sociological explanations here.

What do you think scholars are not taking into account when transporting these concepts?

First and foremost, historically, it’s an anachronism. People of different eras did not experience trauma the way we experience it today. It doesn’t mean they didn’t suffer or have anxiety and other symptoms that we may now see as PTSD. But we have to be very aware of the fact that we are taking a category we have now and retroactively putting it onto different historical situations. They are also neglecting the cultural ethnocentricity of their concepts. The concept of PTSD was developed in 1980 in the U.S. in relation specifically to the Holocaust, Vietnam, Hiroshima, and other places. It’s essentially an American notion, and it’s still not used as much in other cultural situations. To apply it to various places like Israel in the 1950s, France, Europe, the Soviet Union, Serbia in your case—culturally it doesn’t work. It’s doubly problematic when we talk about Japan and other non-Western contexts. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but it has to be done very carefully, and you have to be careful about confusing individual experiences with social experience. The mechanism is different. 

Sure. But I think it’s trying to get at this part that you do mention about constructing a narrative of this experience. People do that collectively.

But why are you calling it a trauma? Why do you want to use this term? It’s easy. I don’t think the originators [of the term] meant for it to become a shortcut, but I think for a lot of people it has become one. A shorthand for a whole array of things that are put into one box and called trauma. Different people and communities have different narratives they construct to explain—let’s call them social wounds. One example is the Harkis who fought for the French during the Algerian War of Independence and were then resettled in internment camps in France. The Harkis talk about how they “keep the wound alive,” and pass it on. This might be again a problematic metaphor, but it’s still recognized as a metaphor. We don’t think about social trauma as a metaphor; we think of it as a real thing. 

Thank you; that’s very helpful. Could you please describe your book that’s coming out and your previous research?

My first book, which built on my dissertation, was about memory culture in Hiroshima and its connection and entanglement with the Holocaust. The main thrust of the book is the rise of the idea of survivorhood, as a trope and as a historical process of creating transnational figures of the survivor, the witness, and the like. What I wanted to do in this new book is to write both the pre-history from the Japanese point of view and also the post-history. What was the historical impact of the globalization of those categories? How does this happen and how do we end up with PTSD? What I’m aiming to do in this book is look, as much as possible, at the terms that survivors used at the time to understand their own experiences, and how they were understood by researchers. The book is meant to historicize PTSD in a trans-cultural context.

Could you talk a bit about the terms that survivors were using in Hiroshima at the time and about the development of PTSD as a concept?

Generally speaking, most people cannot discern, both the survivors themselves and doctors, what is somatic, for example, the physical impacts of radiation or starvation, versus the impact of mental shock, or what we now call mental trauma. For survivors, fatigue is the biggest category of symptoms: muscle issues, headaches, nightmares. They talk about their lack of ability to get up in the morning and continue with life. Sometimes people mention wounds of the heart. A lot of times and this is more from work about veterans, they try to rationalize what happened. They don’t really make the connection between their alcoholism and the war. They focus more on the connection between their alcoholism and their inability to find a job. Further, if you don’t believe your trauma is real, this has a mitigating effect. You think: “I shouldn’t be traumatized.” I mean, they did not even think in those terms because no one thought in those terms. If you don’t have the concept, you don’t interpret your experience that way.

They describe issues that we now might say are symptoms of PTSD, but as I said yesterday, you cannot discern causation. These people were also discriminated against because they were survivors and because a lot of them had physical disabilities. People didn’t want to marry them. How much of their anxiety and other symptoms were due to the fact that a lot of them were from very low socioeconomic backgrounds? Most of the bombs were dropped on the center of town and on low-income neighborhoods. People had less resources and ability to pull back from this, and their health was worse, to begin with. There are so many different things that impact this.

A lot of times, these processes leave the survivors in a situation where the real care is done primarily by social workers and nurses and communities. Mostly, women [and not] at the hospital. And this is my last chapter, which I hope I can write. I really want to give a whole chapter to care and praxis of care, because there is a pattern of denial, up until again there are a couple of male heroes that come in. Once the guys are done playing the research game, all the anxiety and social ills fall on women in society. I’m trying to capture this historically, but it’s very hard. People didn’t leave documents. Social workers didn’t write long treaties about how they did their work. 

Because they didn’t think anyone would care?

Or it was oral. Or it was just that the next worker came around and they were too busy. They were not paid enough to have time to sit down and write. They didn’t think it was important enough; they didn’t see the historical context. It might just be another book, but this is what I’m doing now. 

They probably would have the most accurate or insightful descriptions of what people were facing. 

Yes, because they had to deal with this! They had to deal with the husband who didn’t want to go to work, who couldn’t leave the house, who made them the breadwinner and also took out all his frustration on them. They were also carrying the burden of how society treated the guy. It’s tragically classic in a way. I started doing this because I went and looked. I really, really wanted to see how people dealt with this. I want to understand people’s experiences on the ground, and in those documents, I find social workers again and again. I find that they were the ones who would come and go to people’s houses. They were the ones who would collect the data. They were the ones who talked to people. I’m sure there’s some kind of corpus of knowledge that they developed; I just don’t know how to get there. It’s still a work in progress.

That’s great that you’re trying to document that, though, and trying to find that information to include it. I agree that’s really important.  

I’m interested in women who are picking up after all the mess that we [i.e. men] made. A lot of this is similar to my own experience. I was in the army, and when I went back after combat, who had to deal with my moods? It’s very mild compared to what these people went through, but my mom had to deal with this. My girlfriend had to deal with this. I didn’t go to a psychiatrist. I went to a care worker at City Hall. I know that similar things happen to survivors all over the world. And it’s not even institutionalized. It doesn’t even have to be social workers. It can be women in the household.

Could you talk about how some of this has changed in Japan, in terms of the construction of survivors as something that is more accepted now?

It almost went from something people were ashamed of to something people are proud of. Even though some people still don’t want to talk about it, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are highly regarded in Japan overall as a peace symbol. This is related to the way that the government is pushing the idea of Japan’s unique position as a non-nuclear country. At the same time, if you look at what happened to survivors of Fukushima, they are treated very similarly to how Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors were treated [i.e. discriminated against]. My good friend who works on nuclear production and accidents all over the world has said that radiation makes people invisible. It’s true—once people are contaminated, people don’t care about them. It’s amazing how immediate it is.

Does this sort of stigma continue in Japan even though survivors, in theory, are highly valued?

Yes, because there is a hierarchy of victimhood. Some victims have more status than others. If your event becomes a foundational event for the nation, or institutions, or global memory culture as a whole, you have much more of a voice and status—if you choose to use it. It’s a different situation when people don’t want to talk about it. Then they feel bad because they’re not a “good survivor.” Another example is that people like to talk about civilian victims but no one wants to talk about military victims, because it’s inconvenient. I know a PhD student working on memory maps. There is an app in Hiroshima now, which lets you walk with your phone and see exactly where people were hit by the bomb. It’s an amazing tool, but there are huge gaps. One thing I noticed is there was this enormous military compound in Hiroshima right in the middle of the city, not very far from where the bomb was dropped. And there were 40,000 soldiers there. About half of them became casualties, and the other half, no one really knows. If you walk through this area, there’s not a single memory that was recorded there. It’s totally erased. It’s not on purpose. It’s just a structural idea of whose memory is valid, whose trauma is valid, and whose message will be heard. 

I’m studying Serbia, which is considered a perpetrator country of the wars in ex-Yugoslavia. Nonetheless, when I talk to people there, they have a lot of pain and difficulty with the violence that was done to them, too.

Japan is a perfect example of this. When I went to the museum about the war there, the thing that really shocked me is that the first thing you hear is that on August 6^th, 1945, the bomb was dropped on Japan. What do you mean it was dropped? The use of passive voice is a strategy that divorces the war and Japan’s role as perpetrator and America’s role as the perpetrator, because it’s very convenient. You don’t have to talk about the past, you can just talk about the bomb. History starts August 6^th. To isolate little areas historically or geographically gives you a much purer idea of victimhood. I don’t know what happened in Serbia, but I guess if you go to a Serbian museum of the wars, you’ll see a very particular notion of Serbian victimhood.

Yes, the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia. That’s what is primarily focused on, which nobody talks about here.

It’s the same everywhere. It’s the nation-state. I’m very suspicious every time nation-states take it upon themselves to commemorate anything, even with the best of intentions like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial or Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Power, national narratives, all those things will come into the individual situation. Memories become the tool of nation-states.

What will your next book be about?

The next book will be on the military history of Hiroshima and what was erased by the whole narrative of Hiroshima as a peace city. It is a place that is supposed to commemorate something, yet they always look forward to healing. It’s supposed to leave a memory behind and keep it alive but it’s sort of a paradox. Institutional memories always have a greater goal: reconciliation, peace, democracy, stability, healing, economic recovery. All of those things need forgiveness and forgetting, yet memory institutions keep wounds alive, and those wounds also have a tendency to forget whatever came before them and to overshadow narratives of nationalism, perpetration, and the like.

Fascinating.

I hope so. It interests me, but, you know, it might just be my obsession. 

*Responses have been edited for clarity and length.

Nikoleta Sremac is a Ph.D. student in Sociology and a Research Assistant at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. She studies gendered power relations and collective memory, primarily in the former Yugoslavia and the United States.  

Before the trophy went to Adolf Hitler, German Emperor and King of Prussia Wilhelm II held the award for Most Hated Man on Earth. And while Hitler’s Third Reich has become the ultimate go-to place for much journalistic handwringing about the horrible times we are living in, in reality it feels like we are still stuck in Wilhelm’s Second Reich — it’s Kaiserzeit in America. Donald Trump and the last German Emperor have a lot in common, the vanity, insecurity, the penchant for bombast and persönliches Regiment (personal rule), to name just a few. In Wilhelm’s case the brakes on his impulsive and egotistical personality came off after he fired Bismarck, the experienced chancellor he inherited from his father, and surrounded himself with sycophantic generals and noble toadies who went along with his imperial fantasies and straight into World War I.

I am reminded of those spineless Wilhelmine characters every time I am watching a White House press briefing. It’s not so much the bumbling fool at the microphone who advertises Clorox for healing the nation. That’s to be expected from someone who has been in sales all his life. What’s truly troubling is the backdrop of supposedly educated advisors and cabinet members who gaze at the president nodding their heads like bobble toys every time he opens his mouth. Not much different from Wilhelm’s bootlicking court jesters. I often hear the argument that when people do that, they don’t mean to kowtow to Trump but are only paying respect to the office of POTUS. As if through some weird Hegelian twist the presidency has a spirit and will of its own, whether the job is filled or not. Or are people afraid that the Founding Fathers will be miffed if their genius isn’t appreciated and hurl lightning bolts from heaven at them?

Let’s face it, the President of the United States and Donald Trump are one and the same ugly thing right now. There is no need to get sentimental about the Founding Fathers’ wisdom. They handed—by today’s standards—a grotesque amount of powers to the presidency and hoped that checks, balances, and judicial review would somehow tame any officeholder with tyrannic ambitions. In hindsight, it is surprising that it took 44 presidents before somebody came along who ruthlessly abused the many constitutional loopholes to his personal advantage. But that Trump is in the White House can only partially be blamed on 18th-century baggage like the Electoral College. Constitutions are just as good as the people who interpret them, which is another way of quoting Joseph de Maistre’s, “Every nation has the government it deserves.” Hitler became Germany’s dictator without ever breaching the democratic Weimar Constitution; the Reichstag voted to give him absolute powers. So, whose fault was that? Wilhelm II wasn’t voted into office, but he still reflected the preference of most Germans at the time for authoritarian leadership. He was deserved as well, I guess. All these nodders and pseudo-patriots that don’t stand up to a mobster like Trump out of some warped respect for his office make me feel that, well, he is deserved too — a gigantic system failure of the people, by the people, and for the people. I can’t wait for a better system reboot in November.

Henning Schroeder is a former vice provost and dean of graduate education at the University of Minnesota. His email address is schro601@umn.edu and his Twitter handle is @HenningSchroed1.

Nora Krug is a German-American author and illustrator. Her 2018 visual memoir Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home about WWII and her own German family history, has won numerous awards and has been translated into several languages. Krug is an Associate Professor of Illustration at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. She spoke at the University of Minnesota in February 2020.

George Dalbo: You have said that it took leaving Germany for you to get to a place where you could conceive of writing your graphic memoir. Could you expand on this? Additionally, is there something about settling in the United States, your current personal or professional situation, or the present political or social climate that also influenced your decision to write the book?

Nora Krug: Many different factors contributed to my writing this book. One of the strongest was definitely that I left Germany. This is probably an experience that many people have had; when you leave your home, and you find yourself surrounded by people who are not from your cultural context, you suddenly begin to realize how deeply rooted you are in your own culture, and you are simultaneously confronted with your own culture in a much different way than if you had never left. Of course, growing up in Germany in my generation, we learned so much about the Second World War and the atrocities that were committed, but we learned about it collectively. When you remove yourself as an individual from that context, you are suddenly forced to confront the subjects on an individual rather than a collective level because you are approached about them as an individual by the people around you. This, at least, has been my experience. Also, settling in New York City, which traditionally had been the major port of entry for refugees from the war, I was much more aware of the effect that my cultural heritage could have on my neighbors and my friends, many of whom are Jewish. That certainly contributed to my thinking about the book, as well. Had I moved to Seattle or the Midwest, I probably would not have felt the same confrontations.

In the United States, one often hears that Germany has done such a good job confronting their own difficult past with World War Two and the Holocaust, especially. Do you think that this is the case? In your opinion, what have been some of the gaps in the way Germany has approached its difficult past?

I think Germany has done a very good job when it comes to remembering, memorializing, and collectively making public commitments to taking on responsibility so that such things will never happen again. You can see this, despite the recent far-right-wing extremism in Germany,  in everyday German life and in German politics, as well. People go to the barricades very quickly when such developments happen. Just this week, you saw an example of this; the public outcry when the Conservative party [Christian Democratic Union] basically collaborated with Alternative für Deutschland. It was very satisfying to see how quickly people reacted to that in a negative way, a critical way. Where we still have a lot of work to do is on an individual level. I think that a lot of the experiences that we had, as I mentioned before, were collective and institutional. This is tremendously important; if institutions do not recognize and acknowledge the mistakes that a country has made, that is a huge problem for the country. I’m not trying to diminish the collective aspect, but the individual effort is as important because if you only memorialize collectively, you avoid the personal confrontation, and this can lead to a sense of tiredness about having to address the subject as a group, a feeling of being burdened by that task, which, I think, many Germans feel. If you do not approach the subject on an individual level, you can not take agency, individual agency. That is what I tried to do with my book, to think about investigating my own family, because I perceived it as something freeing. It freed me from this paralysis of feeling guilty but not knowing what to do about it. I have not overcome my feelings of guilt, but I have addressed them on an individual level, which made me feel like I had some agency as an artist and as a writer to talk over these things. It made me feel that I had a more constructive way of dealing with the guilt.

For the graphic memoir, you rely on several sources to reconstruct your family history, such as local and national archives, family documents, flea market finds, and personal reflections. In many cases, such as with your grandparents, who had passed away, you were unable to have conversations with family members about their experiences during World War Two. How does this shape the narrative? In what ways does this make your work similar or dissimilar to other works in this genre of Vergangenheitsbewältigung [“working through the past”] memoirs?

I think it was similar for most Germans; the grandparent’s generation did not talk much about these things, and, because of that, our parent’s generation did not know much about their experiences. It was not so much that our parents did not want to talk about these things and deprive us of these stories; they themselves had no information because their parents did not talk about their experiences. Older generations also did not have access to all of the technological tools and the research documents available today. Actually, they could not have gone beyond conversations with their parents or grandparents. In other words, the internet did not exist, and certain documents were not made open to the public at that point, so, even if my parents had wanted to go further with trying to find out about the past, they could not have accessed the same materials that I was able to access. I think my generation has many more entry points into this kind of research, and with my book, I really tried to think of any way in which I could get information. The archival research was just one type of research. I did also have conversations with people who were still alive and who knew my family in person. I conducted interviews with people who took the place of my grandparents. Also, there are the flea market objects and items, which, to me, provided both a collective and personal entry point into that period because they represent objects that were used and collected by many Germans. Such research allowed me to represent a collective German point of view, not necessarily a family member’s point of view from my family. At the same time, it is also a highly individual view; I was able to connect to these objects on an individual level even though they belonged to people I did not know at all.

Who do you see as the audience for the book? Especially as the memoir is released in translation, how do you imagine non-German audiences are connecting with the work?

Every country has its own perspective, experience, and narrative surrounding World War Two. I think that we all construct narratives about traumas retroactively. These narratives say something about our culture, and, for Germans, that narrative is obviously and completely steeped in guilt, as well as neglecting to talk or writing about German loss during the war. The Germans are incapable of really considering what the trauma of the war and the Holocaust did to them; certainly, we brought this trauma on ourselves, but it is still a trauma that we are trying to deal with to this day. I think that it is difficult for some Germans to admit this because it would put us in a position of victimhood. In the United States, there is a very different narrative, which is one of the United States as the liberator, and there is sometimes very little nuance given to different narratives that existed on the American side as well. I have noticed that when I am traveling with the book in the countries where it has come out that the responses I receive and the questions I am asked are informed by these different cultural perspectives. In Germany, the book has probably found its biggest audience, which is because a lot of Germans can identify with this story and this viewpoint, and many Germans have not tried to write about their own personal narrative. They really have not been able to figure out how to do that. Again, maybe this is because talking about one’s own losses is considered inappropriate. To some Germans, my book seems like an entry point for conducting this kind of family research. Indeed, I’m often asked by German audiences how they can begin to do such research. For many people, both German and non-German, there is little consideration that there could be a German viewpoint that is not just the Nazi perspective. I think it is very important to consider these other views because we can learn so much from them. If we try to understand how people came to think this way, we can prevent these things from happening again in the future. I think it is very important to get inside the more intimate, nuanced German war experience. What has been really satisfying when traveling with the book has been that people in all the countries I’ve been to so far have been able to translate the idea of responsibility for a national past to their own country’s history, whether this was a Canadian audience talking about First Nations people and the lack of work that has been done around that or the history of slavery in the United States. In France, journalists talked to me about the importance of actually discussing the French collaboration with Germany which has been underemphasized there because of a focus on the resistance, The memoir has been understood on a universal level, which is the best thing that could have happened, because it is not really about my family or about Germany, but it is about something more universal than that.

In addition to illustration, you use many photographs, both personal and not, in the memoir. Could you speak a little bit about your choice to use photographs and some of the ethical considerations you weighed in using them?

I’m somebody who really believes that it is our responsibility not to look away. Of course, if there is an exploitative aspect to using the photographs, then that is wrong. I think that if you can use images sensitively, you have to show them because we owe it to the people who perished to not look away. I think we owe it to them to confront ourselves with their hardship. That is not only true for World War Two and the Holocaust, but it is also true for things that are going on right now. I Think about how little we know about the conflict in Yemen and how rarely we actually see photographs of injured children, though they are being attacked on a daily basis. I think that once we see these things, we feel much more compassionate. In the course of writing the book, I thought very carefully about how to use images. One of my biggest goals was not to create a sense of false sympathy for the Germans or a sense of sentimentality, which images can very quickly do if they are used in the wrong way. In several images in the book, you see dead bodies in the background, but I decided that I wanted to focus on the German facial expressions and the reactions. On one particular page [see image below], I eliminated the dead bodies entirely because I wanted to show the moment when the German guilt actually set in and what it looked like. I wanted to show how the guilt was visually manifested in their faces and gestures. For me, there was almost something reminiscent of Renaissance paintings about that. Here I really felt that you needed to see what the cause was that led her to look like this.

In the next photo [see below], you have an idyllic landscape that looks very innocent, but the photo shows the contrast of what was actually happening all this time underneath the surface, which we were completely unaware of. In the photo, you can see this; you can experience this ignorance in a way. I think that it is very important to show these images, but it is also equally important to think about how you show them. 

George Dalbo is the Educational Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a Ph.D. student in Social Studies Education at the University of Minnesota with research interests in Holocaust, genocide, and human rights education. Previously, he was a middle and high school social studies teacher, having taught every grade from 5th-12th in public, charter, and independent schools in Minnesota, as well as two years at an international school in Vienna, Austria.

This year’s Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is an especially important anniversary. In January, we marked 75 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Since then, through our programs on and off campus, and in collaboration with the Center for Jewish Studies, we were able to reflect on the scope of the destruction of European Jewry but also on the heroic resistance and the resiliency of the survivors. 

At the University of Minnesota, we strive to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. This year, the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies was honored to support the work of Kathryn Huether (Ph.D. candidate in Musicology) as an Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellow as she works to curate an audio guide for the Treblinka memorial site. Huether also received the Theresa and Nathan Bearman Graduate Fellowship in Jewish Studies in support of her research. Avraham Shaver, a recent graduate from the Center for Jewish Studies, earned a prestigious internship position with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In addition to the individual achievements of students, the University continues to offer a breadth of courses on Holocaust history, memory, and representation.

As we reflect back on the legacy of the Holocaust today, we encourage you to utilize some of the resources available digitally, including artist Felix de la Concha’s Portraying Memory project and the series of testimonies from the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies’ Survivors, Witnesses and Liberators collection. 

Find a selection of survivor testimonies below from the Portraying Memory project.