great analysis. it was not just the Eichmann trial, though: all of the death camp trials took place in the 1960s: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec etc. This is when the modern holocaust narrative was launched. During Nuremberg the jewish issue was still a minor one.
Still, the impact doesn't seem to be very durable. Just as there are a few other fiction and nonfiction treatments in the 60s, but everywhere you read an explanation for the revival of Jewish interest after 1967 the Six Day War and Black American angst are mentioned.
it's quite possible, but I guess by that time they could draw on the results and "witnesses" of the preceding trials. This material simply wasn't yet there in 1945 or even 1960.
The distinction in scope between Nuremberg and later trials is something I hadn't thought about, and does seem like an interesting thread to pull. I would have to grind through the details to really counter your point, but outside of that there are partially satisfactory arguments. First, there was enough of the narrative we recognize today, really all of it, included in the newspaper reports from 1945 beginning with April 29 stories about Buchenwald. You could have the cultural and media "Holocaust Industry" that emerges after 1978 in 1945 based on the lay reporting (plus modified emphasis to Jews vs. political prisoners) if the appetite were there. Second, as far as the academic angle, Jick and Littell and the unnamed student told that "No one is interested in Hitler" seem to go through that period with a will to learn and document, but thwarted by lack of publisher interest rather. And third, related, Hilberg's material is already in his thesis in 1955, but doesn't get published until privately funded.
"should not be understood with a “special kind of history” "
Wouldn't that be nice.
A German mainstream politician recently suggested that "climate denialism" should be criminalized similar to how "Holocaust denialism" already is. (e.g. you can go to prison for arguing it was really 5.7 million, not 6.0+)
The Climates is definitely one of the myths unseating or filling the absence of the Holocaust, maybe the main one for the under-20 - it's very much a buffet of narratives with no clear winner
A thought that came to mind is that history is not so much the writings of the victors, than a narrative formed by the elites. (and begs an explainer for the motivations of such choices...)
Having finished, I'm surprised it ends without looking for alternative ways the term has smuggled in a religious interpretation - effectively it limits the argument to what has already been said, demonstrates that this is false, and declares that Shoah could come to be the primary term without any difference in how people think of the thing. That seems facially implausible, and ignores altogether the amazing coincidence of interest exploding and "Holocaust" becoming fixed and exclusive at the same time. Of course, that could be confounding - the religious overtones of the word derive retroactively from its attachment to the Jewish catastrophe. But it's hard to imagine any other word having the same branding; it would be like replacing "crown" with "hat."
What's interesting is how it changed from the Jewish Holocaust to just The Holocaust, with less emphasis on the other groups involved .This may have been counter productive in the long run with today's geopolitics and identity politics.
Looking at Google Trends there is indeed declining interest in the term, though antisemitism is on the rise lately:
I wonder if I am being dense - I can't think of why there would be such a dramatic yearly spike and drop. (A funny note is that the term autism does the same around back to school time as opposed to just during Autism Month, though this is potentially just because of teachers noticing behavior etc.)
The push to co-emphasize non-Jewish deaths was meant to gain broader support / awareness in the late 70s, to infer from Freedman's 1978 quotes and as directly acknowledged by Wiesenthal, who just invented the 5 million number out of thin air (https://www.jta.org/2017/01/31/united-states/remember-the-11-million-why-an-inflated-victims-tally-irks-holocaust-historians). But I think besides not being necessary for interest to have exploded like it did, this was never a useful way to think of things, and I only include the treatment of Jews in my own definition.
I love the car crash description example. Narratives are a reality-distorting substance - see how everyone obsessed and fretted over "Original Antigenic Sin," it was always because of the name, when the actual "evidence" was always completely without valence.
'It seems paradoxical that the HSAM group showed vulnerability to memory distortion yet remember an abundant amount of autobiographical information accurately for years.'
2. Misinformation Effect and the Overcritical Juror
'Eyewitnesses are susceptible to recollecting that they experienced an event in a way
that is consistent with false information provided to them after the event. The effect
is commonly called the misinformation effect'
Explains a lot of the fearmongering in the covid narratives, media output with a few less relevant but scary looking facts together with a load of fear language; using language to imbue events with a chosen meaning.
Jul 4, 2023·edited Jul 4, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey
Great piece, Brian.
This chimes with my experience as a Celt settled in modern Germany. THE Holocaust has effectively assumed a sacred character in the contemporary canon of shared beliefs and collective cultural history, and almost any attempt to contextualise it is treated as heresy (see article I linked previously, "The German Catechism").
Relatedly, any criticism of the modern State of Israel is regarded very suspiciously and leaves one open to accusations of anti-semitism. This has been effectively weaponised by the establishment to denounce and cancel unwanted public figures (see Labour's Jeremy Corbyn in UK, Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, etc.)
For obvious reasons, many critics of the Covid hysteria and ensuing authoritarian measures here drew parallels with the 1930's of Nazi Germany (see CJ Hopkins' Substack and the charges he is currently facing from the Berlin state prosecutor). However, I have been repeately stunned and dismayed to be confronted with educated adults' inability to differentiate between drawing a parallel (ie. highlighting a similarity) and drawing an equivalence (ie stating the two were the same). As a result, even to compare emergency legislation of the pandemic with the that of the early 1930's, or the treatment of Jews in the initial years of Nazi rule with the treatment of the unvaccinated, was taboo and could even be illegal if perceived as belittling or trivialising the crimes of the period.
The German establisment's go to approach has been to tar any critics of its regime as right wing extremists (ie. Nazi-adjacent) and, in polite German society, this form of denunciation is equivalent to social excommunication which ends up functioning as subtle dissuasion or self-censorship of public criticism and protest.
Sorry, I am drifting from the main vein of your article which I took to be that THE Holocaust has been mythologised and serves a quasi-religious function (amongst others) of moral sense-making in a post-(nuclear)war secular western world.
DISCLAIMER: I neither deny the Holocaust nor have anything against Jewish people or Judaism.
Sorry for the late reply - thank you for the kind words at the top. It's very hard to have admiration for European nations at this point when they have so little admiration for themselves, and certainly the lockdowns didn't help. In a similar vein I had to quit learning German when Duolingo asked me to say "meine großvaters mann" or whatever the correct grammar is. Bridge too far. So I guess I can never move there and then go to prison for wrongspeak anyway, but I still find it appealing.
The yoking of guilt aspect is certainly important. But it also serves in the social infrastructure as a brace against the irreconcilable guilt of white superiority-status in most of the markets that matter (dating, job, housing, etc., everything except where being exceptional is highly weighted) - the center of the American caste system is insulated from attacks from below because 1, it's already guilty about the Holocaust, 2, at least it didn't actually do the Holocaust, 3, actually, it's not guilty at all, because it stopped the Holocaust. It's like a ground wire absorbing shocks, keeping the system from melting down. And that's what is lost.
great analysis. it was not just the Eichmann trial, though: all of the death camp trials took place in the 1960s: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec etc. This is when the modern holocaust narrative was launched. During Nuremberg the jewish issue was still a minor one.
Still, the impact doesn't seem to be very durable. Just as there are a few other fiction and nonfiction treatments in the 60s, but everywhere you read an explanation for the revival of Jewish interest after 1967 the Six Day War and Black American angst are mentioned.
it's quite possible, but I guess by that time they could draw on the results and "witnesses" of the preceding trials. This material simply wasn't yet there in 1945 or even 1960.
The distinction in scope between Nuremberg and later trials is something I hadn't thought about, and does seem like an interesting thread to pull. I would have to grind through the details to really counter your point, but outside of that there are partially satisfactory arguments. First, there was enough of the narrative we recognize today, really all of it, included in the newspaper reports from 1945 beginning with April 29 stories about Buchenwald. You could have the cultural and media "Holocaust Industry" that emerges after 1978 in 1945 based on the lay reporting (plus modified emphasis to Jews vs. political prisoners) if the appetite were there. Second, as far as the academic angle, Jick and Littell and the unnamed student told that "No one is interested in Hitler" seem to go through that period with a will to learn and document, but thwarted by lack of publisher interest rather. And third, related, Hilberg's material is already in his thesis in 1955, but doesn't get published until privately funded.
"should not be understood with a “special kind of history” "
Wouldn't that be nice.
A German mainstream politician recently suggested that "climate denialism" should be criminalized similar to how "Holocaust denialism" already is. (e.g. you can go to prison for arguing it was really 5.7 million, not 6.0+)
The Climates is definitely one of the myths unseating or filling the absence of the Holocaust, maybe the main one for the under-20 - it's very much a buffet of narratives with no clear winner
Great article as usual; while doing some google-fu I came across an essay that focuses on the changing meanings of the word:
'The secular word HOLOCAUST: scholarly myths, history, and 20th century meanings'
https://www.armenews.com/IMG/pdf/arc_petrie_the_secular_word_holocaust.pdf
A thought that came to mind is that history is not so much the writings of the victors, than a narrative formed by the elites. (and begs an explainer for the motivations of such choices...)
Having finished, I'm surprised it ends without looking for alternative ways the term has smuggled in a religious interpretation - effectively it limits the argument to what has already been said, demonstrates that this is false, and declares that Shoah could come to be the primary term without any difference in how people think of the thing. That seems facially implausible, and ignores altogether the amazing coincidence of interest exploding and "Holocaust" becoming fixed and exclusive at the same time. Of course, that could be confounding - the religious overtones of the word derive retroactively from its attachment to the Jewish catastrophe. But it's hard to imagine any other word having the same branding; it would be like replacing "crown" with "hat."
What's interesting is how it changed from the Jewish Holocaust to just The Holocaust, with less emphasis on the other groups involved .This may have been counter productive in the long run with today's geopolitics and identity politics.
Looking at Google Trends there is indeed declining interest in the term, though antisemitism is on the rise lately:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%22the%20holocaust%22,%22antisemitism%22
I wonder if I am being dense - I can't think of why there would be such a dramatic yearly spike and drop. (A funny note is that the term autism does the same around back to school time as opposed to just during Autism Month, though this is potentially just because of teachers noticing behavior etc.)
The push to co-emphasize non-Jewish deaths was meant to gain broader support / awareness in the late 70s, to infer from Freedman's 1978 quotes and as directly acknowledged by Wiesenthal, who just invented the 5 million number out of thin air (https://www.jta.org/2017/01/31/united-states/remember-the-11-million-why-an-inflated-victims-tally-irks-holocaust-historians). But I think besides not being necessary for interest to have exploded like it did, this was never a useful way to think of things, and I only include the treatment of Jews in my own definition.
That spike in October 22 was due to one man, KanYe West.
I ended up doing a date search on Google News for that month, would post the link but it's massively long for some reason.
I love the car crash description example. Narratives are a reality-distorting substance - see how everyone obsessed and fretted over "Original Antigenic Sin," it was always because of the name, when the actual "evidence" was always completely without valence.
It is a fascinating rabbit hole, a google on the names of the researchers turns up loads of related research, eg:
1. False memories in highly superior autobiographical memory individuals
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3876244/
'It seems paradoxical that the HSAM group showed vulnerability to memory distortion yet remember an abundant amount of autobiographical information accurately for years.'
2. Misinformation Effect and the Overcritical Juror
https://dro.dur.ac.uk/26586/2/26586.pdf
'Eyewitnesses are susceptible to recollecting that they experienced an event in a way
that is consistent with false information provided to them after the event. The effect
is commonly called the misinformation effect'
Explains a lot of the fearmongering in the covid narratives, media output with a few less relevant but scary looking facts together with a load of fear language; using language to imbue events with a chosen meaning.
Nice find! Complements Brian's piece well.
Great piece, Brian.
This chimes with my experience as a Celt settled in modern Germany. THE Holocaust has effectively assumed a sacred character in the contemporary canon of shared beliefs and collective cultural history, and almost any attempt to contextualise it is treated as heresy (see article I linked previously, "The German Catechism").
Relatedly, any criticism of the modern State of Israel is regarded very suspiciously and leaves one open to accusations of anti-semitism. This has been effectively weaponised by the establishment to denounce and cancel unwanted public figures (see Labour's Jeremy Corbyn in UK, Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, etc.)
For obvious reasons, many critics of the Covid hysteria and ensuing authoritarian measures here drew parallels with the 1930's of Nazi Germany (see CJ Hopkins' Substack and the charges he is currently facing from the Berlin state prosecutor). However, I have been repeately stunned and dismayed to be confronted with educated adults' inability to differentiate between drawing a parallel (ie. highlighting a similarity) and drawing an equivalence (ie stating the two were the same). As a result, even to compare emergency legislation of the pandemic with the that of the early 1930's, or the treatment of Jews in the initial years of Nazi rule with the treatment of the unvaccinated, was taboo and could even be illegal if perceived as belittling or trivialising the crimes of the period.
The German establisment's go to approach has been to tar any critics of its regime as right wing extremists (ie. Nazi-adjacent) and, in polite German society, this form of denunciation is equivalent to social excommunication which ends up functioning as subtle dissuasion or self-censorship of public criticism and protest.
Sorry, I am drifting from the main vein of your article which I took to be that THE Holocaust has been mythologised and serves a quasi-religious function (amongst others) of moral sense-making in a post-(nuclear)war secular western world.
DISCLAIMER: I neither deny the Holocaust nor have anything against Jewish people or Judaism.
Sorry for the late reply - thank you for the kind words at the top. It's very hard to have admiration for European nations at this point when they have so little admiration for themselves, and certainly the lockdowns didn't help. In a similar vein I had to quit learning German when Duolingo asked me to say "meine großvaters mann" or whatever the correct grammar is. Bridge too far. So I guess I can never move there and then go to prison for wrongspeak anyway, but I still find it appealing.
The yoking of guilt aspect is certainly important. But it also serves in the social infrastructure as a brace against the irreconcilable guilt of white superiority-status in most of the markets that matter (dating, job, housing, etc., everything except where being exceptional is highly weighted) - the center of the American caste system is insulated from attacks from below because 1, it's already guilty about the Holocaust, 2, at least it didn't actually do the Holocaust, 3, actually, it's not guilty at all, because it stopped the Holocaust. It's like a ground wire absorbing shocks, keeping the system from melting down. And that's what is lost.