Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity Chapter 6

"On the Social Construction of Moral Universals"
Jeffrey C. Alexander

This is a long chapter. It is also my favorite chapter that I have read in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity thus far.

"On the Social Construction of Moral Universals" grapples with the constructions of the Holocaust among those directly, indirectly, and not involved in the event. This includes the perpetrators, the victims, contemporary Europeans and Americans, as well as the "heirs" to the event - later generations who, despite not living through World War II and the Holocaust, nevertheless have to encounter and construct meaning from the traumatic and confusing events.

The chapter deals primarily with the consumption of the myriad Holocaust narratives in the United States, although its scope is intended to be, and to a degree is, further reaching than simply the US.

Alexander's thesis in this chapter posits the Holocaust narrative as changing over time, from a "progressive narrative" to a tragedy. In other words, immediately following the Allied victory in WWII, the Nazis were accused of war crimes, and the collective focus was on the liberation of the concentration camps and on the heroic action of the Allied forces.

With this construction of the narrative, there was no specific focus on the murdered Jews. Rather, Nazi violence was coded, weighted, and narrated as a simply evil force, with less of a focus on the specifics. For example, when the news of Kristallnacht reached the US, public outrage was directed at the Hitler's obvious irrationality and violence, especially in the wake of the Munich Agreements, rather than at the treatment of the German Jews. The Jews, interestingly, are referred to as "defenseless people," rather than as a specifically targeted group.

At this point in the construction of the post-WWII narrative, Alexander writes, the Holocaust is not seen as a collective trauma, that is, as traumatic worldwide, even for those not directly affected. This can be attributed to a lack of psychological identification with the victims on the part of the American people, who, despite work to diminish antisemitism in US culture (what Alexander calls anti-antisemitism), continued to focus on broad Nazi atrocities, or Nazi "evil," as opposed to the real experiences of the victims.

With a break in the chapter, Alexander moves to how the "Holocaust" as a term to describe the killing of European Jews emerged, transforming what was a progressive narrative of moving beyond to the acceptance of real collective trauma, and the mass murder of the Jews as a symbol of incomprehensible tragedy, or a "sacred-evil," the term Alexander uses to describe the newly-constructed perception of the events.

Significantally, it was with this recasting of memory that the Holocaust became such a defining event of the twentieth century. In constructing the event as a tragedy, its inexplicable nature became an "archetype" for evil, cementing the process of identification that transformed the mass murders as a collective trauma.

Alexander attributes the myriad media representations of the events as facilitating identification with the victims, especially as the focus of films and television series shifted from military victory to the horrors of everyday life for the individuals involved. In recasting WWII as the mundane and horrifying survival of camp victims, rather than the heroics of the military, those not directly involve with the European war gained the ability to identify with its victims. Additionally, the release of testimonial works, such as Anne Frank's Diary, further personalized the events, especially for young people who had little memory of the war years themselves.

Significantly, Alexander also points out an increasing tendency to identify with the perpetrators of the events, calling it a "massive universalization of Nazi evil" (235). Together with the growing awareness of Allied appeasement of Hitler, failure to act despite knowledge of the camps, the fire bombings of Europe, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and later with American racism and the war in Vietnam, the evil of the Holocaust once so neatly assigned to the National Socialists seeped into the public imaginary as a collective trauma.

The combination of psychological identification with the both victims and the perpetrators led to guilt, hyper-awareness of the "evil" connotations of the political tensions of the Cold War, and a collective understanding of the Holocaust as a floating signifier of the greatest evil, used as a barometer for contemporary evils. Here Alexander identifies the "dilemma of uniqueness," or the tricky nature of comparing the Holocaust to modern events. Does comparing a modern event to the Holocaust always already diminish the experience of the victims of the Holocaust?