By ODILON BOILER NETO*
The way of creating and transforming the world — especially in genocidal transformation — is not an act of barbarity absolutely removed from us by time, space or moral values.
On September 16, 1992, Yitzhak Rabin visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in greater Berlin. It was the first time an Israeli prime minister had visited the memorial. Ten days after the visit, three neo-Nazis broke into the camp and set fire to one of the few remaining structures of the camp where some 200.000 people were imprisoned, half of whom lost their lives.
They were Jews, communists, homosexuals, people with disabilities, in short, a wide variety of “undesirables” to National Socialism. The reconstruction of the space, completed in 1997, became a striking aspect, as can be seen in the images below.
It was (or rather, it is) a long rhythm and process, from genocide to denialism. From burning books to burning people in crematoriums, from denialism to paper Eichmanns, to the destruction of records and memory spaces, genocide is linked to denialism and its diverse mechanisms. The experience of visiting a concentration camp was profound, as anyone can imagine.
Perhaps this explains why it took me so long to organize a visit, even though I have been researching and writing about Holocaust denial for decades. And at every step I thought about the absurd denial arguments, from the most puerile to the supposedly articulate ones that dare to sound historiographical, with a rationality and technique so typical not of historiography, but precisely of the architects and enablers of the genocide. Logic and techniques present from the entrance to the camp, in the opulent surveillance of the so-called “tower A” and its cursed motto “Work sets you free”, to “station Z”, where there were crematoria and a gas chamber that rationalized solutions to problems, those that were accused of being problems.
Leaving the camp complex and looking to the left, today there is a building of the Brandenburg University, dedicated to the field of Applied Police Sciences. The poster states the educational purpose of this police academy next to a site of human rights violations, reminding (or trying to convince) that no human dignity should be violated. But beyond this potentially paradoxical condition, the camp surroundings provide a disturbing experience, beyond the houses where SS officers and other genocide professionals lived.
The road from Oranienburg station to Sachsenhausen is lined with propaganda from the Alternative for Germany, a radical right-wing party that invests in rhetoric against minorities, foreigners and, in particular, Islamophobic rhetoric. In these discourses, these others are presented as both undesirable and potentially exterminable, even if only hypothetically. As if the AfD’s propaganda were not enough, it was accompanied by “Der III Weg”, a group that presents itself as a third-way, national-revolutionary, socialist/nationalist group, as a big show of not revealing its neo-Nazi credentials.
For me, the experience of visiting is disturbing, rather than “transformative”. If we look at the concentration camp simply as a remnant of a traumatic past (or an unspeakable one, as Tony Judt suggested in ‘Post-War’), it becomes a reference to a past that is receding day by day. But if we consider this past as present, we need to pay attention to the daily violations against immigrants and minorities in central Europe and in the Gaza Strip, as well as the daily normalization of far-right discourses and entities.
The challenge of interpretation, which is also a challenge of representation, as a great author once suggested, is not only to interpret the Holocaust in light of its own event, but to understand how that/this form of creating and transforming the world — especially in the genocidal transformation — is not an act of barbarity absolutely displaced from us by time, space or moral values. Today's genocides make this premise clear. Just as neo-Nazi propaganda in the vicinity of a concentration camp shows that the Holocaust is part of our present time.
*Odilon Caldeira Neto is a professor in the History Department of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF).
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