National Socialism, especially the atrocities systematically perpetrated
under the guise of its ideology, stands out as one of the crucial events
of modern history. Its implications for present society are momentous:
The fact that such horrors were both organized by a modern state apparatus,
and willingly carried out by many of its citizens, implies that barbarous
behavior can be (and is) easily evoked in modern states. Max Horkheimer
and Theodor Adorno attempted to explain this phenomenon in their 1944
treatise Dialectic of Enlightenment. They argued that enlightenment
(or at least its positivist variant) was very close to myth, and thus
could easily oscillate between producing civil or barbaric behaviors.
The converse, they argued, was also true: myth, or non-rational belief,
could also promote the civilizing process.
This insight casts doubt on the very idea of progress toward more civil
states of social interaction. If one accepts that one of main purposes
of remembering and reexamining the past is to preserve attained levels
of civility in society, then Nazism represents perhaps the most utter
failure of this recollective process in the history of Western civilization.
I think it is important to keep this dialectic of enlightenment in mind
when one examines what are commonly distinguished as "history"
and "memory." History is often defined as the rationally established,
objectively reproducible, "true" representation of the past,
while memory is used to connote an emotionally influenced, subjective,
"distorted" version of the past held by individuals or what
I call memory groups. Mythic memory may, in certain circumstances for
certain groups, be more effective in advancing enlightenment than enlightened
history itself. It has been argued, for instance, that in postwar Germany
a period of forgetting and distorted recollection was necessary before
a more unsparing program of historical education could begin.
My current work, a study of the history of "Dachau" since
1945, can be conceived of as an investigation into how memory, at all
of its levels from individual remembering to group recollection to academic
historiography, has attempted to come to terms with this failure. I write
"Dachau" in quotation marks because I mean both the concrete
site of the concentration camp and the mental images of that site held
by individuals as individuals and members of specific groups and organizations;
those embraced by organizations, agencies and political bodies; and those
whose existence is postulated theoretically by individuals and groups
who see themselves as the vanguard of the civilizing process. In practice
my sources range from individual interviews, letters and memoirs to newspaper
reports and organizational documents, to programmatic statements and historiographical
representations and reconstructions. The most interesting and illuminating
material concerns the transitions in the use of the Dachau concentration
camp site. It went from a penal site run by the US Army in 1945, to a
refugee camp run by the Bavarian government in 1948, to a memorial site
run by the Bavarian government under the auspices of a consortium of organizations
of concentration camp survivors in 1965. Since the 1980s a younger generation
of (primarily) Germans has begun to assume responsibility for the future
of the memorial site, which has evolved substantially from several short-lived
museums prior to 1965 to an increasingly complex educational establishment
since then.
My own interest in the subject began when I visited the Dachau memorial
site in the mid-1970s. Subsequent experiences living in West Germany led
me to reflect on how that site had come to the unexpected form in which
I had encountered it. I began studying the concrete shapes given to Dachau
and other former concentrations camps. In 1985 this research culminated
in a large collaborative project comparing memorials for fallen soldiers,
civilian casualties, and victims of government-organized genocidal persecution
in four countries: East and West Germany (as successors of the perpetrator
nation), and France and Poland (as countries that had been victimized).
The next step was to examine the historical process out of which these
concrete shapes had emerged, as well as the evolution of the mental images
(or meanings) of the historical events for various groups over time. Once
I was able to reconstruct the historical process in fair detail, the next
logical step was to study the effects that the modified sites had had
on the individuals who had visited them and on the societies in which
they existed. The Dachau concentration camp was an obvious choice for
a case study because it had been the largest and best-known concentration
camp in what was to become West Germany, and because it had also consistently
had the highest local, regional, national and even international public
profile since 1945 (internationally it was eclipsed by Auschwitz some
time in the 1970s or early 80s).
Since little had been published about the post-war history of the camp,
my basic reconstruction of its history was based first on newspaper articles
archived in various clippings collections in Germany, as well as passing
references in the published literature about the Dachau camp. Based on
that information I was able to identify state agencies, private organizations,
and prominent individuals who had taken an active role in determining
the uses and shape of the site. The archival material I found enabled
me to reconstruct some of the dialogues about the camp, and ultimately
to infer the various meanings it had held for different groups at different
times.
Current research interest
The evolution of those meanings over time implies that the moral or political
culture of German society was indeed changing, but one cannot infer that
knowledge about the camps played a causal role in that transformation.
It is possible that the changing conceptions of the camp merely reflected,
rather than effected, changes in the underlying moral norms of German
society. Nonetheless, aside from past and present experience, few things
are likely to have effected such a learning process. Indeed, one finds
that at crucial junctures when present events raised moral concerns, the
Nazi past was (and is) often invoked, albeit in different ways by the
different parties. I recently completed a study of the invocations of
the Nazi past during the 1968 student movement. I found that radicals,
liberals and conservatives all brandished images from the arsenal of Nazi
history in their battles to establish or protect the legitimacy of their
respective stances.
At this point, I think it is acceptable to leave open the question of
causality, for it is also interesting to have a gauge of the predominant
moral culture of a society. In the title of this presentation I used
the more familiar term "political culture" because it overlaps
in many respects with what I mean by moral culture. However, political
culture is usually conceived more narrowly as the actual electoral and
social behavior of a population, as opposed to the legitimizing values
and principles underlying that behavior. Jürgen Habermas, who has
studied and theorized about this phenomenon, uses the term "moral
consciousness" to describe the same phenomenon. Whatever one calls
it, it remains a rather nebulous phenomenon. For one thing, societies
do not, and probably cannot have a single, monolithic consciousness (or
culture, unless it is understood in its most comprehensive sense). Thus
I prefer to speak of a predominant consciousness (i.e. one that
is hegemonic in the public sphere of politics), in which the heterogeneity
of a large number of relatively homogeneous group consciousnesses is subsumed
under a norm or accepted standard. That standard not only guides state
policies, but also determines the range of acceptable deviance in public
discourse, and perhaps also influences the parameters within which most
private discourses unfold.
Habermas has developed a taxonomy of this predominant moral consciousness
of society. He derived the taxonomy primarily from Harvard psychologist
Leo Kohlberg's empirical work on the moral development of children. Accordingly
Habermas outlines six basic stages of social moral consciousness within
three broad categories: pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional
morality. Preconventional morality is characterized by egocentricity and
immediate physical rewards or punishment; good is defined by the immediate
effect of an action on the subject. Conventional morality is oriented
along the lines of expectations, customs, norms, rules and regulations;
group loyalty becomes an important value, and intention may supersede
actual physical consequence as a criterion of judgment. Finally, postconventional
morality attempts to define good and bad according to principles whose
validity transcends the groups which hold the principles. Within each
of these categories there are two stages, one more passively accepting
of the moral order, the other more actively participating in the definition
of that order.
While this taxonomy does offer a developmental scale upon which the
moral consciousness of a society can be gauged, it is very rigid and contains
strong normative assumptions. It presumes that the horizon of the subject
group's identity is congruent with the frame of reference of its moral
principles. Thus individuals in groups bound by concrete physical characteristics
are oriented according to immediate, physical rewards and sanctions; more
arbitrary, voluntarily formed collectivities can codify their rules and
establish scales of equivalence; and universal collectivities apply universally
reciprocal principles. In practical application I found that groups often
acted inconsistently with their moral frames of reference, and that individual
identification with a group is not stable, but can move from one category
to another depending on circumstance.
For example, when the US Army liberated Dachau, in an unsupervised moment
before complete order had been established, a small group of US soldiers
massacred a large number of camp guards. On the one hand the soldiers
were men fighting in the name of humanity to liberate Europe from tyranny,
but at the same time they were inflicting physical retribution instead
of applying logically consistent principles of justice. Thus they combined
a postconventional group identity with preconventional behavior. Habermas'
taxonomy can be used to explain what happened if the group of soldiers
perpetrating the massacre is conceived as a tightly bonded group of soldiers
who had been fighting for their lives and identified themselves strongly
with as victims of German brutality, including the literally thousands
of starved and tortured corpses strewn throughout the camp. Their preconventional
eye-for-an-eye vengeance without due process was quite in accord with
this powerful, exclusive identity.
In an attempt to account for incongruities between identity and consciousness,
and for the changing frameworks of identity, I have expanded Habermas's
three-stage model to a grid, with the type of group along one axis, and
the motivation/rationale along the other. Habermas's three moral stages
fall on the diagonal ascending from left to right, which one can conceive
of as a line of stability (congruence of group identification and moral
consciousness). This axis is indicated by the italicized boxes 1, 5, and
9 in the table below. The inherent logical inconsistency of the non-diagonal
gives them, I think, an inherent instability, and they should tend over
time to move towards the categories of the stable diagonal. This is a
fairly complex model, and I will spend the rest of my time during my presentation
giving examples of the various categories and showing how the model helps
to explain the changing meanings of Dachau since 1945.
To give you my conclusion now in a nutshell:
I think that there was a development from an essentially preconventional
stage at war's end, in which the Germans were to be punished for their
transgressions, to a long conventional period ranging from bureaucratic
denazification, materialist reorientation and normalization during the
"economic miracle" of the 1950s. The 1968 era may have initiated
a transition to a postconventional situation, in which (West) Germans
of later generations not involved in the Nazi era feel responsibility
for the crimes committed by their parents and grandparents. I think Green
party politics show many postconventional traits. Still, societies are
diverse, and it is difficult to claim that the entirety of German society
is postconventional. |