In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
—Bertolt Brecht
I would not be surprised if one or another of you read the document below and thought: “History is written by the victors…”
The special observances to be eliminated by fiat of the new administration include Black history month, Holocaust Days of Remembrance, Women’s History Month, and so on.
Memorial Site of Concentration Camp Buchenwald.
Once you discard the public remembering and teaching of history, you can fill in the blanks with anything you like, likely falsehoods that will stay with the next generations who have no access to the actual records, if it is done thoroughly enough. The current attacks on the contents of teaching materials, and even independent sources like Wikipedia (reported in Newsweek,) clearly speak to the issue. As journalist Adam Server from The Atlantic commented: “They want to ban the teaching of the unpleasant facts of American history because people might conclude injustices in the past that contribute to inequalities in the present should be rectified, instead of their belief, which is that some groups of people are inherently superior to others.”
The quote about victors shaping the narrative in their preferred fashion was attributed to Winston Churchill for the longest time. Falsely, as it turns out. People then pointed to words uttered by Reichsmarschall and war criminal Hermann Göring, a coward who did not even face his Nürnberg Trial sentence of death by hanging, resorting to suicide by poison the night before. “Der Sieger wird immer der Richter und der Besiegte stets der Angeklagte sein,” “the victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished the accused.”
Apparently, the sentiment had been around for a much longer time, in various European nations, France in 1842, Italy in 1852 and Great Britain in 1889. It arrived at our own shores a few years later:
“In 1891, Missouri Sen. George Graham Vest, a former congressman for the Confederacy who was still at that late date an advocate for the rights of states to secede, used the phrase in a speech: “In all revolutions the vanquished are the ones who are guilty of treason, even by the historians,” Vest said, “for history is written by the victors and framed according to the prejudices and bias existing on their side.” (Ref.)
Well, if you have (and abuse) the power to erase history when it is at odds with your ideology, you sound more like a loser than a victor to me. Might as well go golfing on Holocaust Remembrance Day…. (yes, he did.)
The real question is, of course, what can be done when the powers that be try to eliminate our remembering of acts of horror as well as acts of heroism, acts of oppression met by acts of resistance, of an evolution of rights for those who had been denied them since times immemorial. The prohibitions of public remembrances, the choice of names for institutions, the restriction of text book contents might not be easy to stop, particularly when appeals to “forgetting” are voiced by some of the largest communication platform owners in the world. (e.g. Musk’s contribution to the neo-Nazi party AfD rally last week in Germany.)
But this can be counterbalanced by art (although admittedly much harder to distribute to large enough audiences.) Films that try to document the past as it unfolded can be useful and convey content pretty directly. Poetry can be a teacher. One of the best collections I can think of is Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting (1993). The classic anthology contains hundreds of poems centered around events that changed history. No other than Nelson Mandela introduced the book at the time:
“Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality—thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard. Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting is itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice. It bears witness to the evil we would prefer to forget, but never can—and never should.”
Primroses and bush anemones under the beeches of KZ Buchenwald (Beechwood) near Weimar.
A more recent one is Poetry of the Holocaust (2019), edited and translated by Jean Boase-Beier and Marian de Vooght. This volumes contains work by many lesser known poets, intended, with the help of 35 translators from languages as varied as Yiddish, Norwegian, Japanese and Hungarian, to present the poems in original and translation, with a contextual note for each. It is a remarkable book.
A particularly timely read, too. I am writing this on the day of the signing of an Executive Order to prepare a 30,000 capacity migrant detention camp in Guantanamo Bay. The site of previous human right abuses (including torture) identified by the UN, Amnesty International and Red Cross. A site three times the size of Auschwitz, outside of U.S jurisdiction (leased from Cuba,) so that many of our legal protections don’t apply and access of observers and journalists can be restricted or altogether prohibited. The justification, at this point, is that it will house undocumented immigrants, to be deported. When will the first US citizen be shipped off shore as well? According to NBC news, the President himself “suggested Monday that the United States could pay a “small fee” to foreign countries to imprison Americans (bolded by me) who are repeat criminal offenders, floating a kind of modern-day penal colony. Trump billed the idea as a cost-saving measure in remarks at a conference for House Republicans in Miami.” Gitmo next?
Crematorium at Buchenwald
Photographs today from my visits to memorial sites of German concentration camps.
Music today is unfortunately just a snippet of a piece we should have access to in its entirety. Click on the blue arrow in the lower left corner to listen to the excerpt of Jüdische Chronik, organized by Paul Dessau.
KZ Ravensbrück
The Vanished
For Nelly Sachs
It wasn’t the earth that swallowed them. Was it the air?
Numerous as the sand, they did not become
sand, but came to naught instead. They’ve been forgotten
in droves. Often, and hand in hand,
like minutes. More than us,
but without memorials. Not registered,
not cipherable from dust, but vanished—
their names, spoons, and footsoles.
They don’t make us sorry. Nobody
can remember them: Were they born,
did they flee, have they died? They were
not missed. The world is airtight
yet held together
by what it does not house,
by the vanished. They are everywhere.
Without the absent ones, there would be nothing.
Without the fugitives, nothing is firm.
Without the forgotten, nothing for certain.
The vanished are just.
That’s how we’ll fade, too.
TRANSLATED BY RITA DOVE
Nelly Sachs, to whom the poem is dedicated, was one of the foremost Holocaust poets who escaped to Sweden. The German original can be read here. It references themes of one of her famous poems, Flight and Metamorphosis.
