Memories of Things
Last week was the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and the yearly commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day, something I did not realize but for Facebook.
Timed with this anniversary, BBC Films' Woman in Gold premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. The movie is about Maria Altmann's 2004 court case against the Austrian government and its significance for restituting art looted by Germans from wealthy Jews.
When some friends showed me the preview for this movie, I had an instinctive repulsion. It seemed to extend the schmaltzy sentimentalism and triumphal moralizing of the Anglophone Holocaust film to a part of that destruction that is personal to me.
My family's participation in art-restitution issues is detailed in the 2004 book Was einmal war among other sources, and The Hare with Amber Eyes popularized the story of family-self discovery through the art scene in Vienna before the war for English readers.
Stories like these frame my connection to the genocide, which is a material one. I am connected by things to this lost world of Jewish Vienna. That is to say, I have never felt connected by something more human, in the sense of a standing and distinct community.
There are a few reasons for this. For one, I am descended on the "wrong" side for purposes of Jewish law to be a person of that tradition.
More personally, the ancestors with the most stuff I know about were disenchanted folk who were intellectually part of the world of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Leopold Weiss, whose secularism he repudiated when he became Muhammad Asad.
The material and historical evidence suggests they did not maintain strict borders of the Jewish community, and so they would likely be liable to be called "assimilationist". This term became polemical in Hannah Arendt's famous rebuke to humanism that a Jew must only respond to anti-Semitism as a Jew.
This definition of Jew-as-pariah she adapts from Marx is essential to the claim of difference vital to the modern Zionist state, but is embraced by critics of Israel as thoroughgoing as Judith Butler.
Once, I was exchanging family stories with an older Israeli academic, a cosmopolitan and a true leftist, and I remember her remark that after the Holocaust there was one choice for Jews: Jerusalem or New York.
Rather than questioning the "Jewishness" of those who chose the latter as my people did, she was making a point about the rhetoric of that concept as it was understood at Israel's foundation.
Seen that way, the choice of destinations is between hardship and ease, defiance and assimilation, capitulation and authenticity. It is not hard to see which has been rhetorically the "right" choice.
That was reflected in my scrolling Facebook last week. Most all commemorations of the Shoah, if they did not explicitly mention Israel, stressed that this would never happen to us again; we are a vibrant nation; the Nazis failed.
As much as I try to understand this perspective, that of people living their connections to that terrible time, I was made aware that that just wasn't me.
Thinking of the material world, my orientation to reconstruct through stuff and the assimilationist privilege that generated it, I think of the lost context of sophistication and transgressions that's just not conceivable now in one particular sense. What the foundation of the state of Israel, as much as the war itself, accomplished was a foreclosure of a senses of belonging that are not national.
In that sense, the Nazis, and the national project that generated the Jewish question and Jewishness in the modern sense, have achieved success.