A few days or weeks before leaving for Europe I watched The History Boys (2006, imdb.com) a couple of times, a movie about a group of teenage boys in Yorkshire, England, in 1983, who are trying to pass their A-levels (I think) in order to get into Cambridge or Oxford. Because the school is mostly working class, the headmaster hires a temporary teacher, Mr. Irwin, to help prepare the boys for the exams for Harvard and Yale. He acts as a foil to Mr. Hector, the general studies and literature teacher who has taught the boys to pursue knowledge for its own sake, for it will make them more human.
What sticks out to me, among many other things, about this film is a conversation had during a class period that Irwin and Hector are co-teaching. Irwin throughout the movie urges the boys to make “new” arguments, rather than re-hashing what they have been told; Hector is a bit more of a traditionalist. When the two are in the same class, the Holocaust comes up, and Hector argues that it is an “unprecedented” event, but then there is the argument from Irwin that we can put it into context and explain it. If I remember correctly, Hector brings up the Holocaust because tourists are now going to the concentration camp. Posner, one of the students who acts as the central character and is Jewish and gay, wonders if explaining it might also explain it away.
This all comes to mind because after visiting Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp in the northern suburbs of Berlin, a few weeks ago, I’m left wondering about all of this as well. The camp sits butted up against residential areas, as it did during the 1930s and 40s. It seems unbelievable that people could live right next to this monstrosity. But also, it seems unbelievable that here I was standing where so many had died. How do we commemorate the dead? The persecuted? It seems on one side that we mythologize it and call it an anomaly — this is an unprecedented event. On the other extreme, we can explain it away and erase it from our memory, and continue living and not commemorate it. Somewhere in the middle, we both remember and move on.
A placard at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, reading: “It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say” — Primo Levi
A placard at Sachsenhausen, reading: “And I know one thing more — that the Europe of the future cannot exist without commemorating all those, regardless of their nationality, who were killed at that time with complete contempt and hate, who were tortured to death, starved, gassed, incinerated and hanged” — Andrzej Sczcypiorski
Actually, the Holocaust was not unprecedented, most especially in numbers of deaths. In fact, Hitler and his cronies took the ideas of the concentration camps from the United States Calvary and the genocide of Native American peoples. This fact was made known to me, thanks to Ward Churchill. It was such an outrageous claim that I actually went to the library and followed the citations to the point where it was confirmed, in fact. The Holocaust was certainly horrible but not unprecedented. This is another way for European settlers and descendents to avoid acknowledging the genocide that occurred on the North American continent.
Thanks. I’d agree that it’s not unprecedented. I think the desire to think of the Holocaust as unprecedented also comes from a fear that people could do that to each other, so may have in the past (as they did with Native Americans and various others) and may do so again. If we decontextualize it and think of it as unprecedented, we remove the possibility, which we fear, that it could happen again, or that we could partake in such activities.