Harold Wolpe Memorial Forum Debate: 31 March 2004 Speaker Andre du Toit responds to Bernhard Schlink's lecture entitled Introduction: AnneMarie Wolpe opened the meeting by welcoming everyone into the new venue at the Iziko Natural History Museum, which was more spacious than their previous venue. The Schlink lecture had been hosted by the Holocaust Museum and the Goethe Institute of Cape Town which was represented here tonight. So tonight was a response to Schlink's lecture which was available to those on the mailing list. The Wolpe Trust, named after AnneMarie's late husband existed to promote intellectual debate throughout the country, and had just held a conference on the land question. She introduced Professor Andre du Toit of the Political Studies Department at UCT. Professor du Toit used to be at the University of Stellenbosch, had traveled widely and had a most impressive CV. He was a member of the South African group who met with the ANC in Dakar in 1987. Harold had said it was the most extraordinary meeting, and people's fears of one another were of course proved to be groundless. Professor du Toit's books include one on political violence, and another on struggles in South Africa. Professor Andre du Toit: I'm not talking about my own work but as a discussant on a paper given before. I understand the text was circulated so I'm assuming you are familiar with the text. I do not present my own views but raise issues from Schlink's paper. I must stress that I'm not authorized to speak on his behalf or that of his work. I wasn't here for his talk but I was intrigued by the text. Remembrance and the politics of memory: Bernhardt Schlink didn't spell out the special sense in which he was concerned with these terms as he assumed it was obvious. He didn't talk about the politics of memory in the normal or general sense of individual and collective memory and/or forgetting: he was concerned with special cases where something profoundly disruptive has occurred - such as apartheid, civil war, the holocaust - a major event, and how that is dealt with and how it should be remembered. Schlink made it clear he was speaking about the German experience and was interested in how it would apply to South Africa: the nazi past as central to German history and by analogy the atrocities of apartheid in South Africa. On the evening he spoke I don't know how much that analogy was explored but let's see what we come up with tonight. My task is to pick out some things from his text with some comments of mine, and to see what you think. There are four or five issues. When he talked about the German experience he adopted a generational perspective on dealing with the past and distinguished between four generations. He spoke only for his own generation that was born during the war, or at the end of the war or immediately afterwards: a generation which did not participate itself, but came to political consciousness in the 1950's and 60's. They were thus the second generation. The first generation were the perpetrators and victims, who by and large were reluctant to speak about the past. Post the Nuremberg trials there was silence. The second generation found this a problem: they rebelled against that silence and their identities and perspectives were formed by getting to grips with this past. That generation had specifically the problem of dealing with the past, partly through their fathers. So the first generation opted for silence, and the third and fourth have less problems with it because it is further removed, but the second generation is the one that had to deal with it. From a South African perspective, through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) which was how we did it, there are interesting differences. There is a generational difference: the South African case of the TRC was analogous to the first generation at a time when perpetrators and victims were still involved. It wasn't left for the next generation to deal with. So what are the implications? Is it that the next generation are relieved of guilt because the first generation took it on? Does it enable the next generation to normalize their history like the third or fourth post-war German generations? Or does it set up a new problem? What do the youth make of the TRC process? Does it matter? Are they relieved? Do they think about it, or do they have different problems about it? Secondly, in his lecture Schlink used 2 kinds of metaphors for this politics of memory. The first was the metaphor of redemption: remembrance as "the secret of redemption". The other metaphor was that of "mastering the past" as in the German term, "Vergangenheitsbewaltigung". These are two different kinds of metaphor: redemption is a religious metaphor and the mastering the past is a political metaphor, or perhaps a healing metaphor. So what is implied or assumed by them? I suggest that the metaphor of redemption assumes a fallen state and requires the project of salvation. The logic of the metaphor raises the question: what if you're not saved - then what? If remembrance is the secret of redemption, what about the cultures of forgetting? In his context Schlink gives two examples of cultures of remembrance, that of the Germans and of the Jews, in Diaspora but they can't be the same. Schlink says: "…everyday remembrance, cultural and literal remembrance, legal remembrance" is the secret of redemption particularly for Jewish people in the Diaspora. All they had was concrete cultures of remembrance. What does this mean? Germans need redemption from guilt but in the Jewish case of the Diaspora, if they they are in a "fallen" state, that is not a problem of guilt but of identity and survival. So these two cases are different and putting them together is a problem. But what of the cultures of forgetting? Schlink refers to post-fascist Spain, Russian and post-fascist Austria as relevant cases. Each of these had important and successful transitions to democracy through collective forgetting or amnesia. So if remembering is redemption, what is he implying about these cultures of forgetting? Schlink asks when and what develops the cultures of forgetting or remembering. His other metaphor is that of mastering the past: he says what drove us was our desire for freedom from the past, so the idea is that those who work hard at the task of remembering will be freed from the past. So what is it saying? It's a political metaphor that assumes a condition of traumatisation or unfreedom, but what then about those who do not master the past? Logic implies that they remain captive to the past This means that those who do not remember but forget the past thereby remain captives of the past -- which is a paradox. Schlink goes on to problematise the notion of mastering the past: he says attempts at mastering the past may amount to a fixation on the past in the mistaken belief that this means liberation from it. As against this conception he warns that there is no such thing as complete liberation from the past. People must be able to both remember and forget. If we compare it with the TRC here: it's sometimes been criticized as an attempt at mastering the past, of "dealing with the past" so we can move on and be rid of the past. To the extent that it didn't happen, this is then seen as a failing of the TRC, since it could not deliver a complete liberation from the past. As against this Schlink suggests that this is a misguided critique since ther can be no such thing as complete liberation from the past.. Thisrdly, two more points which I personally regard as Schlink's most profound insights: there is a large literature about this but these 2 points are novel and profound to me: the first concerns the role of the significant other in remembrance of this kind. What is decisive for remembering or forgetting is whether there is an other that demands remembering, prosecution and convictions. This provides an illuminating perspective on the politics of memory and forgetting: are we talking about what society has done to itself, or what society has done to some other. To what extent is the other a part of the political process of remembering or forgetting? Schlink suggests that in his forgetting cultures, these are things which societies have done to themselves; there is no other demanding restitution, which was different in Germany. So in the South African context, how would one characterize South Africa's dealing with the past? Is it basically an internal process - concerned withwhat we have done to ourselves, or is an other involved? I think the South African case is ambivalent and complex. On the one hand South Africa had an internal TRC process unlike other cases with international truth tribunals and/or international participation, so does this mean there is not an other in Schlink's terms? I don't think so, because there were major racial and ethnic components, so there both apply. Fourthly, another important insight is how he deals with the issue of collective complicity: he argues that in the German case there is a collective guilt and complicity, an "enmeshing", not just through committing the crime but also by knowing about it, through looking or looking away, through not helping, and through not ostracizing. The fact that the Third Reich perpetrators were not ostracized by the German community enmeshed not only the those directly involved but the entire community and even the next generation who had not been born yet. At the time of the Nuremberg trials the great German philosopher Karl Jaspers said there were four types of guilt: criminal, moral, political and metaphysical guilt. He said some of these guilts were individualized, e.g. criminal guilt as in Nuremberg. Similarly moral guilt was individual guilt. But political guilt was collective. There your membership of a group in society enmeshes you and makes you complicit. . To many the notion of such collective political guilt or complicity remains problematic: how can any individual who didn't engage directly or indirectly with the actual atrocities be complicit? Schlink says the key is not only what happened at the time, but also what transpired afterwards: were the perpetrators ostracized afterwards for their atrocities, or were they harbored by the community? If you freeze the camera at the moment of atrocity then bystanders have no part. But if you move on to the next generation, then they acquire complicity through the non-punishment of perpetrators. It seems to me an interesting question in the South African context where we have focused on the amnesty process for perpetrators of apartheid atrocities. Schlink, however, asks what happened to them in their communities. In Afrikaner rightwing circles, for example, were the perpetrators made to feel at home? And similarly with perpetrators on the liberation struggle side: if they were not ostracized or punished, their communities were enmeshed. Finally what Schlink calls the deeper, comparative question: the German experience was historically unique and disturbing because his country at the pinnacle of European civilization was capable of such horrors despite its cultural heritage. That is the question raised by the German experience. In South Africa how do we think about the atrocities of apartheid? Do we think they were committed despite the heritage - the high culture? But no, we tend to think these atrocities were due to apartheid not being at a high enough level of "civilization". So where does that leave us? Maybe we need to think again - maybe the horrors of apartheid were not due to its lack of high culture and "civilization" but came out of its best, like the Germans? DISCUSSION:
AnneMarie felt those present should engage with one another rather than directing all questions to Professor du Toit
AnneMarie: The youth are riven with class differences, it is not an homogeneous group.
AnneMarie said there were different types of memory…
AnneMarie thanked Professor du Toit and the audience and closed the meeting. |
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