Postwar

of an earlier generation of lapidary commemorations. The Berlin memorial, occupying a conspicuous 19,000- square metre site adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate, is the most explicit of them all: far from commemorating ecumenically the ‘victims of Nazism’ it is, quite avowedly, a ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’.[430] In Austria, young conscientious objectorscould now choose to replace military service with a period in the state-financed Gedenkdienst (‘Commemorative Service’, established in 1991), working at major Holocaust institutions as interns and guides. There can be little doubt that Western Europeans—Germans above all—now have ample opportunity to confront the full horror of their recent past. As the German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder reminded his audience on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, ‘the memory of the war and the genocide are part of our life. Nothing will change that: these memories are part of our identity’.

Elsewhere, however, shadows remain. In Poland, where a newly established Institute of National Memory has striven hard to encourage serious scholarly investigation into controversial historical subjects, official contrition for Poland’s own treatment of its Jewish minority has aroused vociferous objections. These are depressingly exemplified in the reaction of Nobel Peace Prize winner and Solidarity hero Lech Walesa to the publication in 2000 of Jan Tomasz Gross’s book Neighbours , an influential study by an American historian of a wartime massacre of Jews by their Polish neighbours: ‘Gross’, Walesa complained in a radio interview, was out to sow discord between Poles and Jews. He was a ‘mediocre writer… a Jew who tries to make money’.

The difficulty of incorporating the destruction of the Jews into contemporary memory in post-Communist Europe is tellingly illustrated by the experience of Hungary. In 2001 the government of Viktor Orban inaugurated a Holocaust Memorial Day, to be commemorated annually on April 16th (the anniversary of the establishment in 1944 of a ghetto in wartime Budapest). Three years later Orban’s successor as prime minister, Peter Medgyessy, opened a Holocaust Memorial Centre in a Budapest house once used to intern Jews. But much of the time this Holocaust Centre stands nearly empty, its exhibits and fact sheets seen by a thin trickle of visitors—many of them foreign. Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Hungarians have flocked to the Terrorhaza.

The Terrorhaza (‘House of Terror’), as its name suggests, is a museum of horrors. It tells the story of state violence, torture, repression and dictatorship in Hungary from 1944 to 1989. The dates are significant. As presented to the thousands of schoolchildren and others who pass through its gloomy, Tussaud-like reproduction of the police cells, torture equipment and interrogation chambers that were once housed there (the House of Terror is in the headquarters of the former Security Police), the Terrorhaza’s version of Hungarian history draws no distinction between the thugs of Ferenc Szalasi’s Arrow Cross party, who held power there from October 1944 to April 1945, and the Communist regime that was installed after the war. However, the Arrow Cross men—and the extermination of 600,000 Hungarian Jews to which they actively contributed—are represented by just three rooms. The rest of the very large building is devoted to a copiously illustrated and decidedly partisan catalogue of the crimes of Communism.

The not particularly subliminal message here is that Communism and Fascism are equivalent. Except that they are not: the presentation and content of the Budapest Terrorhaza makes it quite clear that, in the eyes of the museum’s curators, Communism not only lasted longer but did far more harm than its Nazi predecessor. For many Hungarians of an older generation, this is all the more plausible for conforming to their own experience. And the message has been confirmed by post-Communist Hungarian legislation banning public display of all representations of the country’s undemocratic past: not just the swastika or the Arrow Cross symbol but also the hitherto ubiquitous red star and its accompanying hammer and sickle. Rather than evaluate the distinctions between the regimes represented by these symbols, Hungary—in the words of Prime Minister Orban at the opening of the Budapest House of Terror on February 24th 2002—has simply ‘slammed the door on the sick twentieth century’.

But that door is not so easy to close. Hungary, like the rest of central and eastern Europe, is still caught in the backdraft.[431] The same Baltic states which have urged upon Moscow the duty to acknowledge its mistreatment of them have been decidedly slow to interrogate their own responsibilities: since winning their independence neither Estonia nor Latvia nor Lithuania has prosecuted a single case against the surviving war criminals in their midst. In Romania—despite former President Iliescu’s acknowledgement of his country’s participation in the Holocaust—the ‘Memorial of the Victims of Communism and anticommunist Resistance’ inaugurated at Sighet in 1997 (and supported by the Council of Europe) commemorated assorted inter-war and wartime Iron Guard activists and other Romanian fascists and anti-semites now recycled as martyrs to Communist persecution.

In support of their insistence upon ‘equivalence’, commentators in eastern Europe can point to the cult of the ‘victim’ in contemporary Western political culture. We are moving from winners’ history to victims’ history, they observe. Very well, then let us be consistent. Even if Nazism and Communism were utterly different in intent—even if, in Raymond Aron’s formulation, ‘there is a difference between a philosophy whose logic is monstrous, and one which can be given a monstrous interpretation’—that was scant consolation to their victims. Human suffering should not be calibrated according to the goals of the perpetrators. In this way of reasoning, for those being punished or killed there, a Communist camp is no better or worse than a Nazi camp.

Similarly, the emphasis upon ‘rights’ (and restitution for their abuse) in modern international jurisprudence and political rhetoric has furnished an argument for those who feel that their sufferings and losses have passed unrecognized—and uncompensated. Some conservatives in Germany, taking their cue from international condemnation of ‘ethnic cleansing’, have re-opened the claims of German communities expelled from their lands at the end of the Second World War. Why, they ask, was theirs a lesser form of victimhood? Surely what Stalin did to the Poles—or, more recently, what Milosevic did to the Albanians—was no different in kind from what Czechoslovakia’s President Benes did to the Sudeten Germans after World War Two? By the early years of the new century there was talk in respectable circles of establishing in Berlin yet another memorial: a ‘Center Against Expulsions’, a museum devoted to all victims of ethnic cleansing.

This latest twist, with its suggestion that all forms of collective victimhood are essentially comparable, even interchangeable, and should thus be accorded equal remembrance, aroused a spirited rebuttal from Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, when he signed a petition in 2003 opposing the proposed Center. ‘What sort of remembrance! Did they suffer that much? Because they lost their houses? Of course it is sad when you are being forced to leave your house and abandon your land. But the Jews lost their houses and all of their relatives. Expulsions are about suffering, but there is so much suffering in this world. Sick people suffer, and nobody builds monuments to honour them’ ( Tygodnik Powszechny, August 17th 2003).

Edelman’s reaction is a timely reminder of the risks we run by indulging to excess the cult of commemoration—and of displacing perpetrators with victims as the focus of attention. On the one hand there is no limit in principle to the memories and experiences worthy of recall. On the other hand, to memorialize the past in edifices and museums is also a way to contain and even neglect it—leaving the responsibility of memory to others. So long as there were men and women around who really did remember, from personal experience, this did not perhaps matter. But now, as the 81-year-old Jorge Semprun reminded his fellow survivors at the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald on April 10th 2005, ‘the cycle of active memory is closing’.

Even if Europe could somehow cling indefinitely to a living memory of past crimes—which is what the memorials and museums are designed, however inadequately, to achieve—there would be little point. Memory is inherently contentious and partisan: one man’s acknowledgement is another’s omission. And it is a poor guide to the past. The first post-war Europe was built upon deliberate mis-memory—upon forgetting as a way of life. Since 1989, Europe has been constructed instead upon a compensatory surplus of memory: institutionalised public remembering as the very foundation of collective identity. The first could not endure—but nor will the second. Some measure of neglect and even forgetting is the necessary condition for civic health.

To say this is not to advocate amnesia. A nation has first to have remembered something before it can begin to forget it. Until the French understood Vichy as it was—and not as they had chosen to misremember it— they could not put it aside and move on. The same is true of Poles in their convoluted recollection of the Jews who once lived in their midst. The same will be true of Spain, too, which for twenty years following its transition to democracy drew a tacit veil across the painful memory of the civil war. Public discussion of that war and its outcome is only now getting under way.[432] Only after Germans had