Victimhood Nationalism in Transnational Memories
Jie-Hyun Lim (RICH, HYU)
1. genealogy
• Jan Błoński, „ biedni polacy patrzą na getto” (1987), Giordano Bruno in
‘Campo di Fiori’ by Czesław Miłosz: sins/shame vs. culpability, moral guilt, metaphysical guilt, Mitbetroffenheit, Mitschuld
• Jan Gross, “Neighbors” (2000), Jedwabne controversy
• Zygmunt Bauman, “hereditary victimhood”/ Intifada+ postcolonial historiography in Korea-2002/12 interview
• Yoko Kawashima Watkins, So Far from the Bamboo Grove (2005)/ 2007.
January 18
2. Sublime
• Opfer/Ofiara: sacrifice, victim, casualty.
• sacrificium vs. victima/ sacrifice vs. victim
• 희생자 vs 피해자 / giseisha vs. higaisha/ 犧 (sheep, severed legs) + 牲 (perfect cow/bull)/ sacred sacrifice.
• Victimhood Nationalism/ 犧牲者意識 民族主義 : sublime victimhood
• ‘pro domino mori’ -> ‘pro patria mori’: sacrifical offering
• 浦上燔祭説（うらかみはんさいせつ） Nagai Takashi’s ‘Bell of Nagasaki’
(1949), Maksymilian Kolbe as a missionary in 1930s, Urakami Tenshudo =>Holocaust/holos- kaustos. Genesis 22, Olah; 燔祭 (hansai): 깨끗한 양
을 통째로 태워 공양…
• Victimhood nationalism as a political religion/ secular religion
3. Global Memory
3.1 deterritorializing national memories in the Post ‘Cold War’ era
• Multidirectional memory: postcolonial + post-zionist-> 식민주의 폭력과 홀로코스트의 기억의 만남, aborigins on Holocaust, African-Americans, Turkish-Germans, memory activists of comfort women in Jewish cultural center,
• cosmopolitanization of holocaust memory=> from heroic martyrdom/war
memories to innocent victimhood/disaster memory (as if victims are guaranteed to be morally superior to their victimizers).
• Former Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Rwanda , Sudan: transposition of holocaust memory onto the contemporary sensibilities to genocide cf) nation-state, national
sovereignty, majoritarian democracy,
• Stockholm declaration (2000); International Holocaust Remembrance Day (Jan. 27, 2005; United Nations General Assembly Resolution 60/7 on 1 November ), East European membership of EU.
3.2 re-territorializing global memories
• Hiroshima and Auschwitz: Japanese and Jews as archetypical victims of the White racism. cf) 2005. March 15. Holocaust history museum in Israel. No invitation issued to the Japanese (FAZ). http://www.urban.ne.jp/home/hecjpn/button.html. Cf)
‘Marco Polo’-> Holocaust Denial
• Americanization of Holocaust/liberal democracy, multicultural Britain, Zionist Israel as a model for the Korean developmental dictatorship (Ganaan farm and new village movement, Six days war, New Right) … cf) between politicizing and
instrumentalizing
• Occupation by twin totalitarian regimes: Forgotten Holocaust, Poland’s Holocaust, Baltic countries & Ukraine
• Koreans as Jews in Asia, Albanians as Jews, Palestinians as Albanians in Middle East=> ambivalence:
4. Transnationality
• ‘Histoire croisée’ rather than historical
parallels/comparisons: entangled pasts of the victimized and victimizers in collective terms, transnational history with a focus on interaction rather than on transfer
• Antagonistic complicity of nationalism-anti- Hinomaru/Kimigayo website, New History Textbook/Korean Textbook,
• East European anti-Communist history and revisionist historiography in Historikerstreit
(European Civil War, Nazi’s Orientalism and the neo- liberal anti-Russianism), Mufti, Erika Steinbach:
Vertreibung-Umsiedlung-Wy(prze-)siedlenie, Bogdan Musiał/Richard Pipes.
4. Transnationality
• Long distance nationalism/diaspora nationalism: PAAHE-Korean Americans on the hikiage, Iris Chang-Chinese diaspora on Nanjing massacre, Japanese Internment camp, Polish American Congress (anti ‘Hate Poland’ campaign, Jedwabne report), American Jewish Organizations
• ‘a distasteful competition over who suffered most’: 1) politics of numbering-> Polish war victims (6 or 5 millions), Nanjing vs.
Hiroshima+Nagasaki (three hundred thousands) , six million vs. eleven million at Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. 2) ‘hierarchization of victims’: obozy koncentracyjne vs. obozy zagłady/Szpilman’s Pianist, atomic bomb-comfort women 3)‘nationalization of victims’: six million Polish citizens as victims, 27 million Russian victims (include all victims in annexed territories in 1941), Korean victims in Hiroshima (1998),
5. (de-)sacralization
• Historical uniqueness/exceptionalism discourse: national experience incommensurable with others, untransferrable memory: individual or collective?-> blocking any approach from the outside of the
national/ethnic community
• Sacralization of memories: every individual experience is irreducibly unique and cannot be transferrable. But ‘untransferrable collective memory’ is an Oxymoron-> nationalist appropriation of human tragedy
• positivism and the construction of nonsense: comfort women, Jan Gross’s fiction, Yoko Kawashima Watkins’s fiction; ‘one hundred lies’, ‘distortion’,
‘historical truth’…
5. (de-)sacralization
• victim’s witness/voices: democratization of the narrative, transmission of memory: emphatic listening, mediatization: “not to prove factually, but to transmit affectively” cf) 굴뚝 세 개 ,
… 굴뚝 한 개
“it is only a story, but it really happened”
• “It amazes me that this book is placed in the nonfiction category of books. The reader should not be misled, as this is not a historical documentary. The official state investigation in Poland is not completed…. All of the relevant evidence indicates that it was a German, not Polish, crime.”
• “This is a bad fiction based entirely on fabricated history. The book is so biased and inundated with historical inaccuracies that even the publishers in Japan refuse to publish this book in Japanese...
• Author needs to explain many strange historical facts. My guess is that she probably can't. This makes this book a great fiction that duped so many in dumb westerners.”
6. Collective Guilt
• Categorical thinking in terms of nation: not for their doing, but for their belonging: perpetrator collective <-> victim collective : “trans-generational historical guilt”.
• Negation of collective guilt in Japanese and German memory discourses in 1950s: Die Schuldfrage (1949, Jaspers): ‘mitbetroffen (co-affected)’, ‘Mitschuld (joint guilt)’, moral guilt/metaphysical guilt
• Responsibility for the memory in the making: memory community/mnemohistory (Aleida Assman)
• Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s ‘implication’
(Japanese Saibatsu, German Konzerns, Korean Chaebol)
• Homo Jedwabnecus (48% against the apology, 34% for Germans’ own responsibility, 80% for no moral responsibility); Collective guilt and abstract victimhood: legal positivism versus
ontological ethics, “not about the culpability for what they did, but of sin for what they did not” Poles’ fury against Jan Błoński/ Jan Gross and Jews’ anger against Hannah Arendt
7. De-contextualization
• Post-war Germany and Japan in 1950s: negation of the collective guilt.
Innocent Germans and Japanese victimized domestically by the vicious Nazis and bad military leaders and internationally by the Soviet barbarism, communist brutality, Allied Powers, Occupation, Victors’ legal court/
Vertriebene and Kriegsgefangene in Siberia, Allied bombing versus Japan as the ‘yuiitsuno hibakukoku , Hikiage, POWs in Siberia (Equation of
German/Japanese sufferings with the Suffering of Jews-Einsatzgruppe, Crematoria, Vernichtungskrieg, Genozid, Konzentraionslager, Neo-Nazi)
• Yoko Kawshima Watkins’s “So Far…” versus Günther Grass’s Im Krebsgang/
victimhood within the national collective excluding memory of Jewish suffering versus Pacific War with a focus on American-Japanese conflict excluding Asian neighbors’ suffering/ German Orientalism versus Japanese Orientalism/ Analogy of the September 11 and Kamikaze-> Japanese fury/
• 9/11 memorial-Hiroshima paper cranes… , Genzo Tange,
8. Over-contextualization
• Magical metamorphosis of the individual victimizers into the victimhood collective/ Laudański Brothers: “like the whole nation we suffered from under the Germans, the Soviets and People’s Poland”/ Korean Presidential Committee of ‘Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung’: Korean war criminals
executed by the Allied Power’s legal court “innocent victims by the Japanese colonial rule”
• Żydokomuna/ Japanese petty colonialisms versus Western imperialism
• Israeli identity as Holocaust survivors in the 1992 survey (80% of
respondents), Begin: “after the Holocaust, the international community had lost its right to demand that Israel answer for its actions (in Lebanon)”
• North Korea’s kidnapping of Japanese civilians in 1970-80s
9. Agency
• Mass Dictatorship
• Współwinni i ofiary
• Japanese Prewar Feminists
• Japanese as slaves of feudal habits of subservience to authority and false indoctrination versus ordinary Germans as Hitler’s first and last victims
• SCAP’s Oreintalism: ordinary Japanese exempted from war culpability and guilt, Japanese as slaves of feudal habits of subservience to authority and false indoctrination versus ordinary Germans as Hitler’s first and last
victims
• Hibakusha poet
原口喜久也
(Oe)10. Epilogue
• Responsibility-answerability: Verantwortung, Odpowiedzialność, responsibilite
• Cf)
責任
• Answerability to whom? Listening to Others “the other is my justice”
