Why Auschwitz has become the symbol of the century
The Holocaust is the icon of the new therapeutic history, argues Frank Furedi
Many people seem to want us to remember the modern era as the century of the Holocaust. The government has now endorsed the idea of an annual Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain. It seems that the further the Holocaust recedes into history, the bigger news it becomes - and the more removed we are from this terrible tragedy, the more we seem to talk about. As one whose family was virtually wiped out in Nazi concentration camps, I have mixed feelings about the Holocaust being transformed into a contemporary morality play. I still remember how my father exploded with outrage when he heard a group of scornful Hungarian anti-Semites claim that 'after the war, more Jews came back than went to the camps'. Remembering was important to him, as it is to me. However, today, remembering the Holocaust has been transformed into an official ritual that allows every sanctimonious politician to put their superior moral virtues on public display. Remembering the Holocaust as the defining moment of the twentieth century also involves a lot of forgetting. The century boasts a formidable record of human creativity. Millions struggled to overcome tyranny, improve their lives and change the world. Sometimes they failed and sometimes they made mistakes. But despite the Holocaust, humanity departs the old century with considerable achievements under its belt. Sadly, we seem to be attracted to the symbol of the Holocaust for the very bad reason that we have lost confidence in the humanist project. Society today has a very different conception of human behaviour than it did at the beginning of the twentieth century. Important cultural and intellectual voices now suggest that people are not nearly as self-sufficient, capable or resilient as was once believed. Vulnerability is now likely to be seen as the defining feature of the human condition. The victim is no longer simply somebody to be pitied. Instead, victimhood is a prestigious status that many aspire to. The victim has become an object of cultural empathy, serving to affirm the belief that life is subject to forces beyond our control. The newly privileged status of the victim testifies to a shift of emphasis in society's morality. Rather than being judged on one's achievements, one is likely to be defined by what one has suffered. The model of the individual as a rational actor is in danger of being displaced by a therapeutic framework which insists that human experience is best understood through the prism of emotion. Therapeutic terms like stress, self-esteem and emotional literacy have entered the language, continually highlighting the trauma of simply coping with everyday life. Emotion-based explanations are now used to make sense of problems that might once have been illuminated through socioeconomic or philosophical analysis. A major report on the crisis of the British education system focused on the emotional damage inflicted on poor children by problems in their families and communities, claiming that 'poverty does its worst damage with the emotions of those who live with it'. Academics applying for research grants are far more likely to gain funding for a project on 'unemployment and mental health' than for a proposed study on 'structural unemployment'. It seems that society is far more comfortable in dealing with poverty as a mental health problem than as a social issue. This approach is driven by a widely held assumption that adverse circumstances, even if relatively banal, cause stress, trauma and mental illness. The shift in emphasis from the social to the therapeutic is particularly striking in deliberations around old social problems such as racism. Whereas in the past critics of racism emphasised the salience of economic inequality, discrimination and violence, today there is a tendency to adopt the therapeutic language of victimisation. A recent study conducted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation self-consciously sought to win sympathy for victims of racism by playing the therapeutic card, focusing on the 'anger, stress, depression, sleepless nights' they suffered. Here, the idiom of therapy provides a new vocabulary to express an old problem. So what drives the culture of emotionalism and the consciousness of vulnerability? It appears that at a time of social fluidity and moral uncertainty, the question of belonging is acutely posed. Throughout the Western world, national identities have become problematic - see the tortuous debates about what it means to be British today, or about what constitute core American values. The rise of regional and ethnic movements suggests that traditional national identities no longer inspire people in the same way. These disorienting developments have been reinforced by the fragmentation of communities, and the continual transformation of family and gender relations. The net result is to create a powerful sense of uncertainty about the individual's place in the contemporary world, forcing more and more people to ask the question, 'where do I belong?'. The trouble is that there are no longer any obvious answers to that question, at either the collective or individual level. At a time of unprecedented individuation, the outlook of emotionalism allows people to make sense of their lives. The notion that we are all vulnerable helps provide a focus for shared experience. This community of suffering is the foundation for those rare instances of collective solidarity that can make an impact on people's lives today. Some of the biggest public mobilisations of the past decade have involved displays of mourning for individual victims like Princess Diana, or for those who lost their lives in bigger tragedies like the Dunblane massacre or the Oklahoma bombing. The community of feeling, where we can share in each other's pain, appears to provide a provisional solution to the question of belonging. The very normalcy of suffering allows everybody to share in each other's pain. That is why victim TV and confessional writing have become so pervasive in popular culture. As well as allowing people to feel together, emotionalism also endows those who have suffered with moral status and a sense of identity. Moreover, it is a form of identity that suits the individuated temper of our times. The consciousness of suffering allows people facing adversity to make sense of their circumstances by dwelling on what has happened to them in the past. A key factor here is the cultural manipulation of memory. There has been a major controversy in relation to what one side characterises as repressed memory syndrome, and the other as false memory syndrome. From the standpoint of sociology, the most interesting aspect of this debate is the very fact that memory itself has become so politicised through the ascendancy of victim culture. In one sense there is nothing new about the manipulation of memory. The rewriting of history has produced rich mythologies down the centuries. What is distinct about the contemporary politics of memory is that the stakes have been raised. The erosion of individual and collective identities has fostered an unusual interest in the past. Indeed, one of the principal features of victim consciousness today is the privileged status it assigns to the past, which is seen as exercising a decisive influence over the present. The way in which history is now rewritten through the language of emotionalism and therapy marks an important shift in the politics of memory. During the past two centuries, history has been rewritten primarily to demonstrate the greatness of a particular people or culture. Heroic national myths were used, not simply as sentimental celebrations of the past, but to construct a positive vision of the future. Thus the myth of the American frontier promised a manifest destiny for US society, while British, French and German national myths provided optimistic hopes for the future. Today, the rewriting of history is driven by a very different impulse. The manipulation of collective memory makes no grand claims on the future. On the contrary, memory serves as a monument to a people's historic suffering. In a perceptive contribution on this subject, Ian Buruma has drawn attention to the tendency of many minorities 'to define themselves as historic victims'. This reorientation towards an obsession with past suffering provides a form of collective therapy.