Misremembering the Holocaust: Universal Symbol, Nationalist Icon or Moral Kitsch?

Abstract

In recent years, a number of theorists — I will focus on Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2006), but see also Jeffrey C. Alexander (2002) and Helmut Dubiel (2003)1 — have argued for what I will call the ‘universalization scenario’ about the memory of the Holocaust. This scenario has two aspects. The first is that the Holocaust has come to function not merely as a name for a specific historical crime, but as a universal signifier for the systematic violation of human rights in general. It has been ‘transformed into a generalized symbol of human suffering and moral evil’ (Alexander 2002, p. 6), denoting ‘moral evil itself’ (Dubiel 2003, p. 59). At the same time, and this is the second aspect of the scenario, the memory of the Holocaust has ceased to be the particular possession of the members of those states and groups which were directly involved in the Holocaust, but has become universalized in the sense that it has become the common property of everyone (or at least of everyone in what the authors call ‘Second Modernity’). As Levy and Sznaider occasionally recognize, there are two concepts of universality at work here. The first is the conceptual and normative universality of a concept that applies to a potentially infinite number of instances; the second is geographical, or perhaps political: it refers to the spread of a cultural symbol across state boundaries.