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Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China

According to these authors, the Nazi regime may have fallen and the death camps may have been liberated in 1945. But, they argue, the Geist, residue, presence, collective consciousness, or something else about the events has endured to the present and is likely to do so for generations to come. Their task in The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age is to examine why and how the social construction that we call “the Holocaust” (which, they argue forcefully, remains under construction) was created and is sustained. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age was first published in 2001 in German as Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust, and was translated into English by Assenka Oskiloff. Thus, only in the English edition was it possible for the authors to cite and discuss Jeffrey Alexander’s closely related article “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The Holocaust from War Crime to Trauma Drama.” Like Alexander, Levy and Sznaider analyze the issues at hand with what Alexander refers to as the “strong program” in the sociology of culture. This approach, which shares much with semiotics, seeks to avoid any quest for an ultimate reality or the essential facts. From this perspective, what “actually” happened is not only inaccessible, it is inconsequential. The important thing is what the world has made of it. In comparing the memorializing process in three nations: the U.S., Israel, and Germany, the authors give new meaning to the global/local dialectic. Through the act of bracketing the events of 1938–45, the world has impinged on the nation in ways that negate both. The collective construction and reconstruction of the Shoah, and only these collective acts, can have consequences so profound because the Shoah (however we choose to label and characterize it) altered forever the human equation. Levy and Sznaider identify the year 1989 as the turning point in this crisis; that is, the date of the collapse of Communism in Europe. But one can complete the chain of causation from the camps to the Nuremberg tribunal to the fall of the Communist regimes by noting the role of two intervening critical episodes. These are the ending of European colonial rule in the third world (and the founding of the State of Israel) as a response, in part, to the inhumanities revealed at Nuremberg; and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, 1954–68, as a response, in part, to the third world liberation struggles. When one considers this sequence as a sequence, the enormity and urgency associated with the creation of official memories of the episode that initiated it become self-evident. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age is densely written. Its ideas and its heavy use of the technical terminology of the strong program assault the reader relentlessly. Some books are difficult to put down. This one needs to be put down on occasion, if only to reflect on all that is being claimed. During one interval of putting it down, I happened to come across an article by Arthur Krystal, entitled “My Holocaust Problem,” which provided a refreshing contrast. Krystal touches on may of the same themes as Levy and Sznaider, but from a first-person perspective that differs sharply from their de-personified style. Krystal speaks as the child of survivors, a veritable genre in the vast and multi-genre literature on the subject. He wonders aloud if it is a mistake or a mitzvah to make a public spectacle of all of that suffering. In the end, Krystal concludes that it really doesn’t matter what he thinks about it; the spectacle—in all of its best and worst senses—has taken on an undeniable and unstoppable life of its own. This, in a phrase and notwithstanding the book’s many texts and subtexts, is precisely the thesis of The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age.