Episode 4: Memories of the Holocaust in the Present Day

Welcome to Talking Memories, the podcast of the School of European Memories. This season, we explore historical revisionism and ask a [music] bold question: Who owns the past? Join us as we listen, question, [music] and rethink the stories we thought we knew. Let's get into it. Episode 4, Memories of the Holocaust in the present [music] day. >> I'm Roberta. >> I'm Varvara. >> I'm Carolina. >> I'm Christian. >> I'm Miguel. >> And I'm Bianca. >> In today's episode, we have a very special guest, Valentina Pisanti. >> Welcome and thank you for being here with us today. >> Thank you very much. >> Valentina Pisanti is a full professor of semiotics in the Department of Literature and Philosophy and Communication at the University of Bergamo. Can you tell us more about you and your work and in particular tell us more about one of your publications, The Guardians of Memory and The Return of the Xenophobic Right? >> I'm a scholar in semiotics, which means that I study language, signs, and representations, in particular historical representations, and I have specialized on the issues concerning Holocaust remembrance, beginning with the strategies of Holocaust denialism, which was my PhD dissertation, and then over the years, over the decades, I have also studied the various ways in which memory and in particular Holocaust memory has been instrumentalized politically and rhetorically. And the essay that you are asking me to talk about, The Guardians of Memory and The Return of the Xenophobic Right, was written about 10 years ago anyway, and I was beginning to feel that the rhetoric and politics of memory, the European and American politics of memory, were beginning to actually encourage, in a sort of paradoxical way, the rise of the ultra-right in ways that were totally unexpected, perhaps, because the xenophobic rights all over the Western world have learned to exploit the same circuits of Holocaust remembrance to their own uses. How? Well, it's pretty complicated to explain, but let's try to analyze it a bit a bit at a time. If you want to ask me questions, we can get into it in more detail. But basically, what has happened was that the victim-centered template narrative template, which has been emptied of its historical contents and its specificity through a strategy of cosmopolitan memory that holds good for everyone, is so de-territorialized that anyone can actually step in, identify with the role of the victim, and represent themselves as the victims of some injustice. And this includes the xenophobic rights themselves, who have learned to represent themselves exactly according to the same same template, which, as you can imagine, is pretty paradoxical. >> Yes, we are really curious to learn more about your personal interest and sense of sense of purpose in the field of memory studies. So, could you please explain what drew you to memory culture and memory work specifically? And do you have any end goal of the year of the of your research and maybe the major purpose that you look up to? >> So, my end goal, I don't know if I have an end goal. I can tell you what really gets to me, and that is the hypocrisy of a representation of the past that is supposed to end all conflict and overcome all intolerance and injustice. When you realize that the real purpose of many of these activities are not really related to the explicit purpose, but are functional to other political goals. So, my idea is that if semiotics, my discipline, is worthy of any, you know, effort, it is because it gives a few instruments that allow to deconstruct dominant narratives, especially when they are ideologically motivated. This is possibly my purpose. Thank you. >> And one of the central concepts in your work is the never again mantra. And could you unpack this for us from this semiotic perspective? >> Yes, from a semiotic and also from a historical perspective at the same time. Because we are so used to this formula, the never again formula, which is usually coupled with never forget. And in the past 30 years or so, we have listened to this mantra over and over again. Never forget, never again. As if never forgetting were in itself the best antidote against things like the Holocaust or extreme from occurring again in the world. And nobody ever really bothered to explain how the passage from never forget to never again was supposed to unfold. And the impression one gets, thinking in retrospect, is that this formula was pretty empty of specific content. And in fact, when you go when you analyze the history as well as the structure of the formula itself, you realize that the never again formula meant two things, two completely different things right from the very beginning. There was, of course, the universalist message of never again, which is what we all embraced, and rightly so, because I do feel that the universalist never again is one of those principles that are almost, I would say, worthy dying for. I mean, I do agree with the message of never again for anyone. And that was the way it was uh explained to us and presented to us in Europe and partly in the United States over last decades. And that is what we agree upon. But on the other hand, in parallel, there has been another way of interpreting this never again, which came about in the early 1970s at least. And I'm referring specifically to this pamphlet written by this controversial American rabbi called uh Meir Kahane, who in 1971 wrote a pamphlet whose title was Never Again, A Program for Survival. And the purpose of that pamphlet, Meir Kahane was exhorting American Jews who at the time, according to him, were more interested in defending the civil rights of other minorities than in safeguarding uh the rights and defense of their own people. And the whole purpose of that pamphlet was to invite Jews all over the world to focus on the only thing that they were supposed to be interested in, which was the survival of their people, of Jews, which for him were identified totally with Israel by any means necessary. So, even through the use of violence and force, uh because Kahane had this idea that Israeli territory and the whole territory around Israel uh was, you know, something that had to be defended, as I said, whatever it takes, by any means necessary. So, it was a very particularist reading of the same slogan, which uh has passed on to uh current Israeli politics. And today's the people who are in government today are actually the heirs of that message. They They explicitly say so. And what has happened, however, from our From the point of view of Europeans, is that this confusion between the two interpretations of Never Again has never been uh made clear. And we are uh are now witnessing a period in which the particularistic interpretation is being cloaked with the legitimization given by the universalist interpretation of the same message without anybody trying to really separate the two. So, what happens is that an ultra-particularistic claim is being pushed in international politics under the pretense of a universalist message. >> Uh how has it become entangled with these far-right movements we are seeing rise across Europe today? >> Okay, like I said, the the far-right in all across Europe, the various movements and parties that are now in many countries in power, talking about Italy for example, have learned to exploit these circuits of commemoration. How? Well, at a certain point, they realized that there was no point in persevering with explicitly anti-Semitic rhetoric and policies because for any political subject that aspired to governmental positions, it was essential to distance themselves from that rhetoric. Uh the difference now, if you compare these far-right movements with their the previous ones, I'm thinking about Le Pen father or Jobbik or Golden Dawn in Greece and many others, the difference now, however, is that these parties have learned to uh not just uh um distance themselves from explicit anti-Semitism, but they have learned to exchange, as it were, rhetorical and political favors with the Israeli far-right. How do they do that? They have understood that if they if they comply with the with the standard commemorative practices, if they go to the sites of trauma or they go to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and they also at the same time denounce Israel current Israeli adversaries, they adhere to the idea that current enemies of Israel are the equivalent of what Nazis were during the Second World War. In exchange for this, so in exchange for a total alignment with Israeli current policies, what do they get? They get sort of certificate of immunity from any accusation of anti-Semitism and racism. And they can actually go back to their countries, to their respective countries, and continue persecuting and discriminating whatever minority they have decided to persecute or discriminate and nobody can tell them that they are racist anymore because they have been given the license, the patent of, you know, total immunity. This is what is happening right now. I don't know if this game will continue, this exchange can continue for much longer because I feel that the majority of people in all European countries have understood what is going on and I don't and whereas for few decades now this has been possible, I think it will not be possible in the future. But this has worked so far for them. >> So this lets us to the central question we want to explore today with you is never again, but who is left behind in your opinion? Especially what do you think about that but in relation to the Palestinian situation and the ongoing violence? >> Well, it is obvious that in the particularistic interpretation of never again, the Palestinians are totally left out. And actually, what is happening is that according to that interpretation that I obviously reject, there is a continuation between all enemies or supposed enemies of the Jewish people from the pharaohs in Egypt across, you know, the Middle Ages, obviously including Nazism and the current adversaries of Israeli policies and politics. They're all grouped into one role as if it were always the same absolute enemy that wanted to persecute the Jews in any in any situation. So, this is obviously in that narration the Arabs and the Palestinians are considered to be like the avatars of Hitler and the Nazis and they are definitely excluded from the never again because it means never again for for the Jews and for the Israeli Jews and for those Israeli Jews who identify with Netanyahu's policies. Is there a way of including, of course, if you interpret it the other way, it is scandalous that people don't think of the Palestinians as the first group at the moment that the never again pledge should be applied to. But that means that you have to adopt a universalistic reading interpretation. So, what is happening now is that people who protest in the street, student movements and whatever, who are actually scandalized by rightly so about what is happening right now, they're they are being perfectly coherent and consistent with the message that they have received, the never again message. There is nothing contradictory. It's actually Yeah, it is what they were have been taught to believe, the inclusive never again. >> And for our last question, what can people like us, students, activists, young people in general, do to avoid falling into this trap and fueling far-right discourses? >> First of all, be aware of the mechanisms at play and be able to talk about them and not fall into the rhetorical traps first and foremost. And then, may I add, not fall in the opposite trap. The opposite trap is happening right now because I you can see it now, because people have been invited, even by the institutions themselves, to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. Some people are beginning to say, well, I mean, if they are the same thing, well, why not? Then I am an anti-Semite. And and this is actually what is happening straight which is not strange at all if you think about it. The risk is that anti-Semitism will be actually legitimized by this kind of operation. This is another trap that we must avoid. If you notice that people discussing the issue of Israel-Palestine are using, perhaps through pure inertia, some anti-Semitic tropes, you have to be the first to denounce it. >> Thank you so much, Valentina. Thank you. And what I think also it's super important from all of this is that this very era that built the most elaborate commemorative culture around the Holocaust has also been an era of rising racism, xenophobia, far-right politics. And at the same time that we have more memorials, more museums, more international remembrance days, we also have more exclusion at the same time. And that's not a coincidence and that's exactly what happens when a memory is gets instrumentalized, when some are left behind. Taking that as a hook, I want to bring us to somewhere that might feel a bit surprising, but that I think it illustrates this whole process with full force and that's Brazil. Many people don't know this, but Brazil lived under that military dictatorship from 1964 to '85. So, over 20 years of authoritarian rule with political repression, torture, and disappearances. And this year, 2026, marked the 62nd anniversary of the coup that then started a dictatorship. And on this anniversary, a journalist called Paulo Motoryn, he responded to a expose that had reached, I think, 2 million 2 million people. And this post specifically was arguing that the dictatorship was essentially a middle-class experience, which is very far from the truth. That, for example, if your family was poor, black, or lived in a rural area, uh they probably had nothing to do with the dictatorship. And here is where I think um Bizantist framework cuts through because that tweet is doing precisely what the particular reading of never again does. It looks at the memory that survived and mistakes it with being the full picture. Uh but the Brazilian dictatorship operated as a racial system. For example, over 1,600 rural workers were killed or disappeared and probably even more. Indigenous populations, including the Krenak, were sent to concentration camps. And uh black youth was also uh filed um criminally, but then not as political prisoners under other categories. Simply, for example, asserting that racism existed at the time was considered subversion. And this shows us that that memory is not neutral. The regime chooses its targets precisely because they would leave no organized record behind. And um when someone then uses that silence as evidence, so as they probably had nothing to do with it, they are not reading history, they are reading the violence itself. And then this erasure becomes the argument. So, like, again, never again for whom? In Brazil, the answer is still mapped onto race and class. >> This reminds me also to the Spain's case when they, despite Spain's having quite great memory policies about its own history on civil war, on other histories such as Holocaust, even Palestinian genocide, which is like really difficult to find in Western Europe, the same Spain's government, which claims to be progressive, does not recognize at all historical and legal obligations within the Western Sahara, which had been Spain's colony for decades. In 1976, with the transition from dictatorship to democracy, Spain abandoned the its colony, the Western Sahara, and 50 years ago, after this progressive government recognized Moroccan authority and sovereignty over Western Sahara, which is international law obligates Spain to assume its responsibilities to the Sahara, and it has not done anything. This famous regularization of so many migrants in Spain excludes absolutely Western Sahara Sahrawis, which has have the which are apartheid, and it's quite strange how Spain has so much memory with what happened in the Iberian Peninsula, which happened in the Holocaust, and what happened in Palestine, but nothing to do with its still current responsibilities. So, why do they not follow the same path of memory? >> Yeah, actually, I think that what you're describing about Spain connects to something that I keep thinking about and I encounter also living in Berlin around the topic of colonialism and responsibility, which is that the architecture of memory is never accidental in the sense that like someone decides what gets a plague, what enters the curriculum in the schools, what is more in publicly, and what is quietly then administered and like managed into silence. I think that nowhere is the contradiction more visible than in Berlin because the city has a lot of Holocaust memorials, has made, for example, memory culture, like the word in German, Erinnerungskultur, into something of like a civic identity. Still, the city is where the Berlin Conference happened in 80 1884 and 1885 on a street there called Wilhelm. The European powers, they sat down and covered carved up an entire continent to colonize. 14 countries, 19 delegates, but still there were no African delegates there, not one. But nowadays, there is a plague marking the building and telling the story what of what happened. Still, this plague that is awkwardly in front of a tree was not installed by the city itself, by the state. It was installed by an NGO, a non-profit trying to bring the part of memory alive onto the streets, into the architecture of the city. Yeah, a few hundred meters from the Holocaust Memorial. So, the contrast is not subtle. And this is not just about a plague because the German colonial record includes the massacre of the Herero and Nama people in what is today present in Namibia. And that is what many historians nowadays recognize as the first genocide of the 20th century. >> [snorts] >> So, decades before the Holocaust. And so, it's important to notice these dichotomies inside the the cities. Yes, so this genocide was carried out by the same German military apparatus that will later industrialize the mass killings in the Holocaust. Still, this whole part of the colonization German history is not part of the mass public consciousness. And this and with this plague, for example, is where activists are pushing for this colonial reckoning to to to bring more yeah into the public consciousness, I think, into the dominant framework, into institution institutionalization. >> That thing about this topic about monuments and plagues reminds me to another case in Spain, especially in Madrid in the headquarters of the regional government in Madrid has three plates on its facade. Which one are for the 2nd of May of 1808 when Spaniards rebelled against Napoleonic invasion. Third one remembers the victims of the huge terrorist attack on 11th March 2004. And the third one remembers the victims of the COVID pandemic. But this specific building has also many victims because during the Franco's dictatorship it was called the Dirección General de Seguridad, the Security's General Direction, which was a torture and jailment and a political repression center. And my own grandfather was jailed there just for demonstrating asking for liberty and amnesty. And the regional government in Madrid refuses and refuses and refuses to put a simple plate just as there are another three to remember this. So why there's no problem to remember the brave fighters for liberty in the 19th century and not to for them who fought for the same ideals in the 20th century and in the during the dictatorship because by some historians there was in Spain a political genocide against everyone who opposed fascism, who who fought for the republic and for the freedom. >> Yeah, I think that what ties all of this together, so Brazil, Spain, Germany, Palestine, Western Sahara, is that the question is never just do we remember? The question is who controls the memory? What does it obligate us to do when never again collapses into this from collapses from this universal meaning to the particular one, it stops being a moral commitment and starts being a gatekeeping mechanism. The people left out outside the circle of mourning are usually and almost without exception the same power the same people who are already excluded from power. I guess their work is to keep expanding this this this circle to ask not only who we commemorate but who we protect. And right now today with the political choices we make because never again only means something if it means for everyone. >> Talking Memories [music] is a production of the School of European Memories. Produced by Fernanda Zanussi, Moritz >> [music] >> and Natalia Papayorgiou. Original idea by Fernanda Zanussi and Cesc Mainz. [music] Recording and post-production Benjamin Samama. All episodes were recorded at the Jean Monnet House from [music] May 4th to 6th, 2016 during the 4th School of European Memories. This podcast was made possible with the support of the European Commission and [music] the European Parliament. However, the views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions.