Reflective Paper 2: Seit die Juden weg sind

Observation:

Omer Bartov’s essay Seit der Juden weg sind discusses how the absence of a Jewry in German post-war culture was not discussed and how the empathy, and the remorse, that the Germans should have felt about the war and the Holocaust was instead directed towards themselves to create themselves as victims of the Nazi regime. To most German, it is “a mere statement of fact” (211) that there are no Jews in German and that the Jews that are there are not connected to the Jews that died in the Holocaust. This “absence of representation” was soon filled by literature, film, and historians who wrote stories in this “skewed universe of competing victimhood” (216) about innocent Germans who are swept up in the conformist society and forced to perform as soldiers for some evil “other”. These German protagonists are posed as victims of circumstance and their actions against the victims of the Holocaust are only seen as afterthoughts. Bartov poses these stories and their victimized protagonists as the “representation of absence” of the Jews. The absent Jews are “known to have been the perfect victim[s], the true, innocent, ideal victim, the victim with whom one precisely should empathize, had one not already chosen oneself as the preferred object of empathy” (216).

Reflection:

When I initially read Bartov, I was annoyed by this focus on very specific examples of literature, film, and history as it appeared to be cherry picking examples. However, on further examination, Bartov is using the most prominent examples of people in the given fields. This ubiquitous, unconscious creation of an alternative narrative was compelling, not only because almost all cultural figures had taken some stake in it, but it was also because it was a narrative about true events, as opposed to fictional ones, like what the Japanese created in post-war Nippon. I found the use of German rural life, from Edgar Reitz’s film Heimat, and the unwitting soldier, from Boll’s Der Zug war punktlich, to be analogous to the South’s use of the Antebellum Period in turn of the century America. These recreations of true events with a change of victims seem to be a common occurrence by the perpetrators of atrocities who then lost their wars.

Contextualization:

In the 1980s, members of the German intelligentsia were involved in what was soon called die Historikerstreit, a debate about how to properly view Germany, WWII, and the Holocaust. The right-wing position was that “there was a need to reintroduce the notion of empathy to the study of Nazism and to eliminate the distancing techniques and rhetoric employed in such writing” (221). This led to many of those historians disgracing their reputations, as some had argued further saying that historians “must identify with the fate of the Wehrmacht’s soldiers on the eastern provinces of the Reich” and that the atrocities committed there were only as bad as the Allied Power’s (read Soviet) policies towards Germany. Bartov writes his essay about these events and the wider cultural phenomenon of rationalizing war and attempts to create a unified national history.

Conclusion:

Bartov’s essay Seit der Juden weg sind is an interesting look at how the atrocities that one’s own people commit are rationalized and normalized. The three areas that Bartov looks at give very good insight into the unconscious thoughts of a culture and how that culture perceives itself and its place in the world. For the post-war Germans who were born during WWII, the guilt that is given to them by the world at large they feel is largely unjustified as they were mere teenagers who were swept along into the tide of Nazism. This innocence and victimhood they portrayed does not necessarily negate the empathy that should be felt for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Indeed, Bartov, falls for his own skewed logic in the “skewed universe of competing victimhood” (216).