Home / English / Topics of the I... / Peace Education / Dealing with the Past
There is no future without past. What does the past tell us, and why does democracy needs a culture of memory and a dialogical reconstruction of history? In the past, story telling, the memory of historical events through myths, the oral history of social movements have always contributed to the perception of history from below. Many representatives of the official history or the scientific historical research have neglected or even destroyed the sources of ‘the other’ history. What makes history that dangerous?
Modernity with its foundation in the Enlightment and its positivistic scientific standards came up with the declaration of universal human rights in the 20th century and a value system which is based on the recognition of the individual, its dignity and his or her unalienable rights. These standards of rights were defined by the parliamentarian system in which people were elected to define the constitution and the laws, so that the different interests could be represented.
These standards of individual rights have been abolished among totalitarianists since the beginning of the 1930s, because the political actions/proceedings weren’t legitimized anymore by anybody. No clear delimitation of borders existed any more. Since the rise of the Nation State the governing forces had striven for the clear determination of belonging, of within or without the frontier, of who was a friend or enemy. As the friend and the enemy both belong to the same system of values and to the same system of order, the true threat of modernity was the foreigner, those who did not belong to the one or the other side, whose status was not clearly defined, like the Jew for example. He/she had to be incorporated or to be extinguished.
With the rise of totalitarianism, this sytem of order and delimitation was abolished, in Auschwitz there was no clear distinction any more between life or death (represented in the “Muselmen” in the concentrations camps, as far as Giorgio Agamben), the indiscriminate terror in the “night and fog-actions” of the Nazi created fear and trauma within the society, the “bodies in pain” (Ellaine Scarry) were not able to act anymore as autonomous subjects, but became objects of bio-politics (Foucault) of those exercising power. Indiscriminate terror inscribed in the bodies of people is not only a pattern within the everyday life behaviour of individuals, but defines the relationship between people. A person tortured or traumatized by whatever violence is restricted in its behaviour. The fear overwhelms and dominates the emotional system of a person, so that she or he is fully absorbed by preventing the suffering from happening again.
The making of a victim is the aim of a totalitarian system:
- it can be the process of dehumanization of an individual: a neighbour who becomes a Jew, than becomes a piece of cargo sent to the concentration camp, where he or she becomes a number.
- it can be the dehumanization of those who still had to work in the forced labour camps, by losing their names, their cultural or personal identity by not having any more an individual haircut, personal belongings or a name;
- it can be those, losing their labour force becoming “muselman”, those grey humble beings, not yet being dead and having any social relations or emotional expressions;
- it can be the “body in pain”, the tortured person who returns into the society as an altered person, he or she is still alive and by their reappearance into the society it is proven to the rest of the world that a ‘power beyond’ exists, beyond the legal system, beyond human relationships, beyond the logic of self-determination. The torturer or victimizer acting out with the victim, even violating her or him, is not being in relation, but only proving his power to humiliate and destroy the personality of the victim.
With the destruction of the self-esteem and identity of a person within the torture comes the creation of the omnipotence of the victimizer. While he/she is the dominating, acting person the victim loses his voice screaming, loses his identity, and being a person in social relationships, the victim becomes passive and can only react. As pain is not transferable, only describable by metaphors, it can only be signified by relating it to the activity of the victimizer...destroying the social existence of the victim in this way. It becomes a being without the world, without a past, without relations. As it can be described as the depersonalized representation of pain, it constitutes the omnipotence of the victimizer. His way of acting structures the reality, and that is the reason why a structural interdependency exists: the impotency of the victim becomes the source of the omnipotence of the victimizer. Representing violence unconsciously from the perspective of the victimizer, we are reproducing violence.
In the background of this analysis, it is very complex to rewrite the history of totalitarian violence and overcome it. Dealing with the past cannot just be an oral history approach of story telling, it can neither be just the analysis of historical facts, it has to take into account the destruction of the social world of the victim to be able to reintegrate it. The silence around Auschwitz, the European countries not wanting to recognize what was happening, their collaboration with the Nazi regime, they are all necessary relationships to reestablish the world of the victim. His/her pain can only be heeled if the world creates voices in the silence of him/her dehumanized world. It is the responsibility of the whole society to develop a discourse in which the world is not defined in black and white categories, but as a dual, ambiguous system. 'Ambiguity is the challenge for the new millennium,' says Zygmunt Bauman.
School can play an important role in this process. It is a public space in which the community can meet and create a dialogue to overcome fear and silence. The school as a public place has to ensure that memory and the critical approach towards history can take place. The teachers as representatives of different sectors of society can foster an open exchange of different points of view. Dialogical pedagogy and participatory methods of exchanging experiences and project-oriented learning can help the students to express their fears and traumas. There should be a specific capacity building for the teachers about how to include human rights and the local history in the programme. This capacity building has to include the person of the teacher as a social agent as well. Only a person who has elaborated his/her own fears can be open to confront the fears of others.
Pedagogy of memory (memorial = Gedenkstätte) has been taught in Germany since the 1970s. There are today more than 1000 memorials all over Germany where the violation of human rights have occurred. Local initiatives of survivors, families of the victims and humanistic associations have organized a movement of “history workshops from below” since the 1960s so that the local memory of these places of terror would be retained. Pedagogy of memory is an approach learning from the local history and connecting it with different subjects like exclusion, discrimination, anti-semitism, racism and human rights since the 1990s. School pupils and adults with special interests can get special courses, interactive trainings, study in the library, watch the videos and visit the exhibition.
Ilse Schimpf-Herken, Berlin 29th January, 2004