By RENAKE DAVID*
The insufficiency of the concept of collective guilt is useful to those who want to forget the past and move forward because they can combat it.
“He cries play the music of death more sweetly death is a master from Germany / he cries take a darker sound from the violins and you will rise like smoke into the air / so you will have a grave in the clouds there no one lies huddled together” (Paul Celan, Funeral escape[I])
“Who is this woman / Who always sings this refrain / She just wanted to rock my son / Who lives in the darkness of the sea” (Chico Buarque, Angelica)
“Her pride was greater than her forgetfulness. She would never feel sorry for herself. Nor did she want us to feel sorry for her. She never asked for help. Recently, a new saying full of meaning entered her repertoire, especially when a whirlwind of emotions hits her, like seeing a daughter who lives in Europe again or holding my son in her arms, which shows happiness and a warning, in case anyone hadn’t noticed: I’m still here. I’m still here” (Marcelo Rubens Paiva, I'm still here).
January 27, 2025 marks 80 years since the liberation by Soviet troops of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camps, an industrial complex of slave labor exploitation, torture and murder organized by the Nazi regime.
Forty-eight hours before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Elon Musk, the world’s richest and most miserable man, virtually attended a rally for the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) party, where he lamented that Germany has been wasting “too much focus on the guilt of the Nazi past” and urged Germans to leave that history behind.
And this happened six days after the businessman had Heil-Hitlerized in his speech at the inauguration for Donald Trump's second term as US president, following the ironic fascism manual to the letter – make a typically Nazi gesture or comment, and then say that it was misinterpreted or that he was just joking.[ii]
Nothing new on the front. The attempts of the contemporary European far right to reconfigure the current memory of the fascist past are becoming increasingly strident, as we can see in the account given by Géraldine Schwarz at the end of The amnesiacs, a book that deals with the long and tortuous path of the work of memory of Nazism in German and French societies: “A smell of revisionism haunts this congress [Kongress der Verteidiger Europas / Congress of Defenders of Europe, Austria, 2018]. It is the same perfume that reeks when Marine Le Pen claims that Vichy “is not France”, when FPÖ MPs refuse to applaud the Kristallnacht speech or when Matteo Salvini quotes Mussolini on the anniversary of the Duce; when Viktor Orbán’s Hungary pays tribute to Admiral Horthy and fascist writers; when PiS’s Poland passes a law that prohibits attributing responsibility “to the Polish nation or state” for Nazi crimes […]. The smell is the same as when AfD chairman Alexander Gauland claims “the right to be proud of the performance of German soldiers in the Second World War” or insists that “Hitler and the Nazis are just chicken shit in more than a thousand years of glorious German history”. And what about when party leaders describe German remembrance work as “propaganda and re-education directed against us” and demand “a 180-degree turn” to end the “culture of shame”?[iii]
In Germany, a country that is today considered a model in preserving the memory of the victims of Nazism and in building mechanisms aimed at preventing this history from repeating itself, even in the most enlightened moments of elaboration of this past, the followers of amnesia have never stopped trying to hide or minimize the “looting”, the “extermination”, the “brutal denial of the conquests of thousands of years, a fanatical regression to bestiality”[iv] practiced by the regime led by Adolf Hitler.
If we look at interventions carried out between the 1960s and 1980s by intellectuals such as Theodor W. Adorno, Jean Améry and Günther Anders on the issues of memory and responsibility for Nazism and its crimes, we will see the tortuous historical path of this work of memory.
In “What does it mean to elaborate the past?”[v], from 1959, Theodor Adorno criticized the movement in German society to end the discussion about the Nazi past, which placed the gesture of forgetting and forgiveness, morally reserved for those who suffered injustice, in the hands of supporters of those who committed the injustice.
What predominated was the willingness to deny or minimize Nazi crimes, with absurd arguments such as that six million Jews had not been murdered, but “only” five million, or that resorted to macabre mathematics of equalizing suffering, as if the deaths caused by the Allied bombings in Germany could compensate for the deaths in Auschwitz, that center of administrative murders of millions of innocent people.
Jean Améry, in Resentments,[vi] expressed his fear, during the mid-1960s, that the Third Reich would be understood as a historical accident and would ultimately be considered neither better nor worse than other dramatic historical periods: “The portrait of my great-grandfather in SS uniform will hang on the living room wall and children in schools will have much more information about the drop in unemployment at that time than about how those who went to the gas chamber were selected. Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, Kaltenbrunner will be just names, like Napoleon, Fouche, Robespierre and Saint-Just. Even today I can read in a book called About Germany, and which contains imaginary conversations between a German father and his young son, for whom there is no difference between Bolshevism and Nazism. […] In the end, the fact that some of us survived will be considered only a failure of the system.”[vii].
In the late 1980s, GüntherA nders[viii] warned of the “radical” regression of the political-moral mentality in Germany and Austria, also showing himself dismayed by this stance – very present among those who “impatiently demand and claim their right that our ‘furious gaze at the past’ finally come to an end” – which, despite not denying the Nazi extermination, dilutes its specificities, and even naturalizes mass murders by identifying them as “part of the history of humanity”.
Within the battlefield for memory, another dangerous trend that Günther Anders denounced is closely related to Musk’s intervention at the AfD rally: the movement of old and new Nazis to convince others and themselves that the demand that Nazi crimes not be forgotten is an indirect accusation of “collective guilt”. Behind this discourse lies the tactic – so widespread among anti-Semites – of inventing that they are accused of something completely nonsensical and, by establishing their illegitimacy, proving their innocence.
The expression “collective guilt” was used at the end of World War II, mainly in the United States, when the Nazi extermination policy was revealed to the world, but by the 1950s no serious person or institution was using it anymore. Günther Anders shows that it is not through the victims and the defenders of the victims of Shoah that the concept of collective guilt survives: “we, who were spared by chance, avoid this dubious expression on principle. This term survives, and obstinately and zealously, only in your hands […]”[ix].
The inadequacy of the concept of collective guilt is useful to those who want to forget the past and move forward because they can combat it. These “professional minimizers of horror”, by rejecting the unsustainable thesis of collective guilt, which only they use – in fact, as Karl Jaspers pointed out, who had enough of the idea of collective guilt, “in the most evil way possible, hammered into people’s heads by means of propaganda”[X], were the Nazis –, intend to transform the absurd and non-existent statement “all Germans are guilty” into the negative thesis “no German is guilty”, using a false universalization to universalize innocence. From this spurious inversion to the total denial of the Shoah is a short step.
It is clear, therefore, that since the military defeat of the Thousand-Year Reich – which lasted twelve years –, fascist sympathizers have never given up on preventing any historical reflection that could establish responsibility for the crimes committed. Many of the tactics remain the same, while many others are being invented or readapted to face new times, which seem to them quite propitious for bolder attacks.
Attacks on the elaboration of the past from the perspective of the oppressed are not exclusive to Europe. On this side of the Atlantic, the far right also relies on them as one of the pillars of its agitation. Spreading false information about fascism, especially its Nazi variant, is a strategy carried out on an international scale. Jair Bolsonaro had the nerve to state that Nazism is a left-wing movement during a presidential visit to Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial center.[xi].
Regarding more specific issues concerning the history of the Americas, indigenous genocide, slavery and military dictatorships in the Southern Cone are often the spearhead of the fascist movement of denial and manipulation of facts. In the United States, for example, they try to establish the grotesque thesis that slavery was also beneficial to the enslaved and their descendants.[xii].
In Brazil, they lie that the Portuguese never set foot in Africa and blame the Africans themselves for the slave trade.[xiii]. The tantrum of Regina Duarte's former secretary of culture – who, by the way, replaced the secretary who was fired due to the reaction of Brazilian society to his portrayal as Joseph Goebbels in a state speech – during an interview with CNN Brazil It brings back several of the tactics used by the “let’s leave the past behind” crowd over the decades: “enough talking about it”, “it’s always happened”, “everyone suffers”, “move forward”…
This time, they were applied to the period of the military dictatorship of 1964-1985 in Brazil. Regina Duarte praised her boss and criticized those who kept “accusing him of things that happened in the 60s, 70s, 80s”. When the journalist who interviewed her, Daniel Adjuto, mentioned the deaths and torture perpetrated by the regime, Regina Duarte came out with generalizations and cowardly equalizations: “Man, sorry, I'm going to say something like this: in humanity, there's no end of death. If you say 'life', next to it is 'death'. Why do people go 'oh, oh, oh!'? Why?”; “There has always been torture. My God in heaven… Stalin, how many deaths? Hitler, how many deaths? If we're going to keep dragging these deaths, bringing this cemetery… I don't want to drag a cemetery of dead people on my back and I don't wish that on anyone. I'm light, you know, I'm alive, we're alive, we're going to stay alive. Why look back? Those who drag coffins around can't live. I think there's a morbidity at the moment. Covid is bringing an unbearable morbidity, it's not good!”[xiv].
The far-right’s historical revisionism, from the most discreet to the most shameless, seeks to stifle any discussion of accountability and is a weapon for the concentration of wealth and power. In reality, it is not a broad, general and unrestricted amnesia, but rather one directed at the horrors suffered by the oppressed. Michela Murgia masterfully distinguished the sequence of fascist actions in the field of reappropriation of the past: “first, contaminate the memory of others, then deconstruct it and, finally, at the right time, rewrite it.”[xv]
The fight for the active preservation of memory is the basis for the imperative reparation to victims (and their descendants, when necessary) of crimes against humanity in various historical periods and regimes, but it is not limited to that (and that would already be legitimate and important enough). It also has the purpose of triggering a process of reflection on how so many people perpetrated – through enthusiasm or opportunism – or allowed – through apathy – so much ignominy against humanity, and of preventing dehumanizing and murderous mechanisms from being set in motion again. It is a condition sine qua non to stop the growth of adherence to anti-democratic ideals (although not enough, since sometimes we may be aware of the facts but not have the capacity to work with them in a categorical way).
The world of Elon Musk, Jair Bolsonaro et caterva there is no space or time for this. It is the world of the ephemeral, of “I can’t help it”, of every man for himself, of digitalized binary thinking, of ultra-accelerated time, of the culture of toil, of arbeit macht frei, in which we must be fully adapted to what Günther Anders called the “law of discrepancy”[xvi] – the greater the pace of technical progress, the greater the effects of production and the more intricate the mediation of work processes, the more degraded tend to become our imagination, our perception of the effects of our work or our action, and our capacity to feel, especially the capacity to feel responsibility.
Thus, we will all be children of Eichmann – we will carry out the tasks ordered by those in power with obedience, adherence to order and obsession with perfect execution, without the content of the task mattering, without any reflection or hesitation about our actions, totally integrated into the great machine of the world (composed of interconnected sets of political, administrative, industrial or commercial machines) and its blind imperative of maximum performance. And the worst crimes against humanity will be able to be carried out as if they were just any job.
But we are still here, and against the graves dug in the earth, in the air, in the clouds and in the darkness of the sea, we will fight so that the memory of the victims plays the violin, day and night, on the roofs of their houses and does not let them sleep the sleep of the just. A memory that seeks not revenge, but accountability and reflection on these crimes, so that they are not repeated.
No amnesty!
*Renake David She holds a PhD in social history from the Fluminense Federal University (UFF).
References
ADORNO, Theodor W. Education and Emancipation. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2021.
AMERY, Jean. Beyond crime and punishment: attempts to overcome. Rio de Janeiro: Counterpoint, 2013.
ANDERS, Gunther. We, Children of Eichmann: Open Letter to Klaus Eichmann. São Paulo: Elephant, 2023.
FEINBERG, Ashley.This Is The Daily Stormer's Playbook", HuffPost, 13 / 12 / 2017.
GOLDSTEIN, Joseph.Alt-Right Gathering Exults in Trump Election With Nazi-Era Salute", The New York Times, 21/11/2016.
GONÇALVES, Géssica Brandino. “Portuguese never set foot in Africa, says Bolsonaro about slavery", Folha de S. Paul, 31 / 07 / 2018
GUNDRY, Saida.Why Ron DeSantis's Florida slavery curriculum is so dangerous", The Guardian, 30/07/2023.
JASPERS, Karl. The Question of Guilt: Germany and Nazism. São Paulo: However, 2018.
KLEMPERER, Victor. LTI: the language of the Third Reich. Rio de Janeiro: Counterpoint, 2009.
MANN, Thomas. German listeners!: speeches against Hitler (1940-1945). Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2009.
MARWICK, Alice & LEWIS, Rebecca. Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online, 2017.
MURGIA, Michela. Instructions for Becoming a Fascist. Belo Horizonte: Âyiné, 2021.
"At the Holocaust Memorial, Bolsonaro says Nazism was left-wing", National Journal, 02/04/2019.
"Regina Duarte downplays dictatorship and interrupts interview with CNN; see full interview", CNN Brazil, 07/07/2020.
SCHWARZ, Geraldine. The Amnesiacs: The Story of a European Family. Belo Horizonte: Âyiné, 2021.
Notes
[I] Translation of “Todesfuge” by Karin Bakke de Araújo in: Literature in Translation Notebooks, n. 11. “Er ruft spielt süsser den Tod der Tod is ein Meister aus Deutschland / er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft / dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng”.
[ii] On ironic fascism, see Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online, 2017 and the article about the editorial manual of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, published in HuffPost. Speaking of Heil-Hitlerizing, in 2016, after Trump's first victory for the US presidency, Richard Spencer, a leader of the alt-right, gave a speech in which he attacked Jews, cited Nazi propaganda in German, argued that Americans are part of the white people, a race of conquering creators, and made the Nazi salute gesture, complete with “Hail Trump”; when questioned, he said it was ironic (see here). Nothing very different from what fascists did a hundred years ago, as Victor Klemperer demonstrates: “The National Socialists, in turn, with sarcasm and shamelessness, claimed that they only did what the Constitution allowed, while attacking the institutions and guidelines of the State and furiously launching themselves against books and newspapers, satirizing everything, giving heated sermons.” (LTI: the language of the Third Reich, Rio de Janeiro: Counterpoint, 2009, p. 62).
[iii] Geraldine Schwarz, The Amnesiacs: The Story of a European Family, Belo Horizonte: Âyiné Publishing, 2021, pp. 383-384.
[iv] Thomas Mann's words to describe the supposed revolution of National Socialism. German listeners!: speeches against Hitler (1940-1945), Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2009, p. 100.
[v] Theodor W. Adorno, “What Does It Mean to Elaborate the Past?” in: Education and Emancipation, São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2021.
[vi] Jean Améry, “Resentments” in: Beyond crime and punishment: attempts to overcome, Rio de Janeiro: Counterpoint, 2013.
[vii] Jean Amery, op. cit., pp. 129-130.
[viii] Gunther Anders, We, Children of Eichmann: Open Letter to Klaus Eichmann, New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
[ix] Gunther Anders, on. cit., p. 82, emphasis in the original.
[X] Karl Jaspers, The Question of Guilt: Germany and Nazism, New York: Routledge, 2018, epub.
[xi] "At the Holocaust Memorial, Bolsonaro says Nazism was left-wing”, Jornal Nacional, 02/04/2019. Last accessed: 28/01/2025. Fernando Haddad rightly reminded us in a tweet: if he were really left-wing, Bolsonaro would never have said that Nazi crimes against humanity could be forgiven.
[xii] See Saida Grundy, “Why Ron DeSantis's Florida slavery curriculum is so dangerous", The Guardian, 30/07/2023. Last access: 28/01/2025.
[xiii] See Géssica Brandino Gonçalves, “Portuguese never set foot in Africa, says Bolsonaro about slavery", Folha de São Paulo, 31/07/2018. Last access: 28/01/2025.
[xiv] "Regina Duarte downplays dictatorship and interrupts interview with CNN; see full interview", CNN Brazil, 07/07/2020. Last access: 28/01/2025.
[xv] Michela Murgia, Instructions for Becoming a Fascist, Belo Horizonte: Âyiné, 2021, p. 77.
[xvi] See Günther Anders, op. cit..
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