IN January of 2017, Björn Höcke, often regarded as the ideological leader of Germany’s far-right political party, AfD (Alternative für Deutchland) called for a ‘180-degree reversal on the politics of remembrance’ that places atonement for the collective sins of the holocaust at the centre of national politics, and notions of German responsibility. The unspoken, if obvious, target of Höcke’s speech was, of course, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision, one and half years before, to open Germany’s borders to refugees fleeing primarily, though not exclusively, from civil war in Syria, resulting in the country taking in over a million people in 2015 alone. Referring to the holocaust memorial in Berlin as a ‘monument of shame’, Höcke went on to suggest that Germans had become a psychologically beaten down people that ‘to date… are unable to mourn [their] own victims’ of the Second World War.¹

Despite the public uproar generated by this, the AfD continues to surge in electoral popularity, particularly in the former East, where post-unification experiences of state-abandonment and social stigma have provided the party’s rhetoric alarmingly fertile ground, with one BBC observer concluding that, ‘For the AfD, its status as victim is the key to future success.’²

To observers of the new wave of right wing populism/nationalism around the world, this is an eerily familiar double movement – one that appropriates a politics of victimhood, while simultaneously rejecting culpability for the past. Indeed, such developments in the West seem to be mirrored in the Indian context with the emergence of a discourse that attempts to recast dominant, upper caste Hindus as the ‘real’ victims of a politics of ‘minority appeasement’.

 

Two things, then, seem necessary to come to terms with these developments. The first is a reflection on what about today’s politics of victimhood allows for these kinds of appropriations. The second is a need to reimagine what it means to take responsibility for the past, and to find a vocabulary that can respond to the rejection of guilt and shame without erasing collective histories of oppression. The German context might turn out to be particularly fruitful for such an investigation. First, because the holocaust marks one of the quintessential ways in which collective trauma and victimhood are understood today, and second, because no other country has so extensively integrated the crimes of its past³ into its national history in search of a politics of remembrance – the crimes of Nazi Germany form a significant part of education both in schools and through public memorializations of its victims.

This essay brings together two works that place these questions of political subjectivity at their core. The first is Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman’s The Empire of Trauma, and the second is Michael Rothberg’s most recent book, The Implicated Subject. Both books diverge, quite crucially, in the kinds of projects they are. While the former follows a deconstructive approach to how trauma, ever more intimately entangled with victimhood, became essential to the way we came to view our own political subjectivity at the turn of the century, Rothberg’s book follows a normative approach; it is, in other words, an attempt to make a case for what kind of political subjects we should be if we are to contend with the way we are implicated in the various structures of inequality, violence and hierarchy that surround us.

Fassin and Rechtman are not interested in the validity of trauma as such, but instead look to denaturalize it. In doing so they examine the shifting social role played by the category of trauma in producing a particular way of thinking about suffering, legitimacy and victimhood.

 

To open, Fassin and Rechtman ask how, ‘[f]or a century this human being suffering from trauma was seen as… weak, dishonest, perhaps a phoney or a profiteer. Then a few decades ago she or he became the very embodiment of our common humanity.’⁴ Tracing the origins of trauma to the victims of railway accidents that suffered from what was called ‘railway spine syndrome’, to Edouard Brissaud’s introduction of the term ‘sinistrosis’ to describe workers who demanded financial compensation, and finally to ‘trauma insanity’ which caused soldiers to abandon their convictions during war, the book shows us how, in a matter of twenty-five years, ‘trauma’, from being a clinical-psychological concept that socially marked victims with stigma, disbelief and suspicion, became so central to claims against injustice that victims groups actively campaigned to be recognized as traumatized.

They contend that a coming together of, on the one hand, theoretical debates within psychiatry and psychology, and the political mobilizations of victims groups, on the other, produced a fundamental shift in the political articulation of suffering. Perhaps most vitally, they observe a shift in the etiology, or the mechanism of trauma, and consequently in the very language of the event. In Freud and Janet’s pioneering work, for instance, ‘the traumatic… is already present even before an event causes it to manifest itself’⁵ – this is why, it was reasoned, only some soldiers manifested traumatic symptoms after exposure to war. By the 1970s, however, the discipline of psychiatry found itself burdened with its image as a tool of social control, viewed as a ‘hazy amalgamation of moral judgments, received ideas, and outmoded theories.’⁶

 

The clinical category of trauma seemed to be just another example of the pathologization of non-conforming behaviour that sought to find what was already always wrong with patients presented with traumatic symptoms. Under attack from feminist and gay rights groups for its pathologization of the experience of victims, and in a bid to reinvent the image of the discipline, a new consensus resulted in a paradigmatic reversal: ‘the event was [now] the sole etiological factor.’ Thus, trauma completed its transformation from being a pathological reaction to a normal situation to ‘a normal response to an abnormal situation’,⁷ such that it ‘revealed the unbearable character of the event in general.’⁸

 

The final political valence of this new category of trauma was cemented in what it offered to the moral conundrum posed by soldiers returning from the war in Vietnam. The American populace, vociferous in its protests of what many saw as an unjust war, now faced the question: ‘What should be done about the suffering of soldiers who were guilty of war crimes?’⁹ The invention of PTSD provided a solution through which ‘the perpetrators and the victims of atrocities could be combined in a single category’, such that denouncing the war no longer had to mean denouncing those who fought in it. Here, trauma came to stand in as the very proof of the humanity of the perpetrators. It is this – ‘the attractive idea that something of the human resists all forms of moral destruction’¹⁰ that Fassin and Rechtman argue, became its most compelling universal value. And yet, it is also precisely this ‘universalization of trauma [that] results in its trivialization… Not only do scales of violence disappear, but also their history is erased.’¹¹

Victimhood, in other words, is a comparative category, while trauma is not. Where the question ‘who are the victims of a disaster?’ requires us to ask to what extent different groups were differentially affected by the disaster, the question ‘who was traumatized by the disaster’ requires only a determination of who was exposed to it. Where victimhood is socially and unequally distributed, a question of degree would be non-meaningful from the perspective of trauma.

What is at stake then is the way collapsing the former into the latter erases the moral and historical distance between, and among, perpetrators and victims. If exposure to the violent event becomes the necessary and sufficient condition for victimhood, then the legitimacy of the suffering of a people is determined less through evaluating structures of injustice than by ‘the extent to which politicians, aid workers, and mental health specialists are able to identify with the victims, in counter point to the distance engendered by the otherness of the victims.’¹²

 

Much like The Empire of Trauma, Rothberg’s earlier (2009) book, Multidirectional Memory, published in the same year, is similarly concerned with how to deal with completing claims of victimhood. Like Fassin and Rechtman, he too rejects a reading of victimhood that collapses it into trauma, arguing further that ‘the concept of trauma emerges from a diagnostic realm that lies beyond guilt and innocence or good and evil. Precisely because it has the potential to cloud ethical and political judgments, trauma should not be a category that confirms moral value.’¹³

Published about a decade later, The Implicated Subject marks a certain shift, both in Rothberg’s work, and in the rhetoric of western politics, more generally. Where his earlier work was an intervention in conceptualizing victimhood, The Implicated Subject is an attempt to contend with how we might take responsibility for the occasionally unwitting roles we play in furthering structures of oppression. More broadly, if the first decade of the 2000s cemented the role of traumatic victimhood in western politics, the discourse of self-reflexivity, in acknowledging one’s own privilege, has marked much of progressive politics in the second.

 

More precisely, however, The Implicated Subject is an attempt to theorize a space beyond, and in-between, the traditional dualism of victim and perpetrator. A vocabulary that allows us to make sense of how, in Morris-Suzuki’s terms, even while not causing structures of suffering, ‘we are "implicated" in them, in the sense that they cause us.’¹⁴ To do this, Rothberg expertly brings together the work of political theorists like Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt with the work of artists like William Kentridge and contemporary political movements like those that emerged in the United States after the murder of Trayvon Martin,¹⁵ all while folding spatial distance in order to mark the complex webs of implication that entangle, for instance, Palestinians in occupied Gaza with the ruins and victims of Warsaw.

Rothberg makes two things clear at the outset. The first is that to speak of this subject is by no means meant to suggest that perpetrators do not exist. Instead, guilt and culpability simply define a different realm of legal and political questions. The second is that the implicated subject not be thought of as ‘an ontological identity that freezes us forever in proximity to power and privilege.’¹⁶ Indeed much of what seems to motivate both this work and The Empire of Trauma is a discomfort with the ‘absolute innocence’ afforded to the position of the victim in popular political discourse. Instead of defining the ‘essence’ of an identity, Rothberg argues that these are positions that we move in and out of, depending on context. Thus, he contends, ‘to be an implicated subject is to occupy a particular type of subject position in a history of injustice or structure of inequality – a history or structure one may enter, like an immigrant, long after the injustice at issue has been initiated or, like a beneficiary of global capitalism, far from its epicentre of exploitation.’¹⁷

 

Rothberg here makes particularly interesting use of the figure of the immigrant in this analysis of implication. He asks: what do we do with the ‘contemporary subjects facing the legacies of the past [that] have no genealogical connection to the events?’¹⁸ In other words, how should immigrants relate to the historical legacies of their new homes? So, on the one hand, what kinds of responsibility should new, white immigrants to the United States take on for the legacies of American slavery? Or perhaps more contentiously, how is a Syrian refugee in Germany meant to integrate herself into the history of the holocaust?¹⁹

There is a delicate tension here – on the one hand, such ‘integration’ seems to reproduce a certain kind of methodological nationalism (history as the history of a nation state).²⁰ On the other hand, there is the potential for something uniquely radical here. For in order for such implication to function, it must maintain the importance of collective memory, while simultaneously unmooring it from its genealogical, ancestral, or even ethnic links to a population understood to be ‘inside’ the nation.

 

From this perspective, what is inherited or more precisely, what the nation state bequeaths, are not so much the deeds and culpabilities of its ancestors, but the political and economic structures those actions made possible. It is in this sense that Rothberg argues for an implicated subjectivity that engenders a ‘future-oriented responsibility’,²¹ as opposed to one that seeks to settle the accounts of the past. This does two things, it ‘draws attention to responsibilities for violence and injustice greater than most of us want to embrace and shifts questions of accountability from a discourse of guilt to a less legally and emotionally charged terrain of historical and political responsibility. If the former action seems to increase our ethical burden, the latter loosens the terms of that burden and detaches it from the ambiguous discourse of guilt, which often fosters denial and defensiveness in proximity to ongoing conflicts and the unearned benefits that accrue from injustice.’²²

Indeed, one thing is clear, the popular claim that immigrants in Germany have nothing to do with the holocaust is simply untrue. This couldn’t be more evident in the AfD’s rhetoric that is defined precisely by the coming together of the denial of holocaust guilt, and an acidic anti-immigrant ideology.²³ That the desire to forget the past seems to accompany the desire to expel those who couldn’t possibly remember it, does not seem to be a mere coincidence. That is to say, it might be precisely by denying immigrants access to the violent legacies of the nation’s past that (ethnic) genealogy becomes the only grounds through which the nation can be understood.

 

What is of particular importance is that this denial seems to occur across the political spectrum in Germany, such that it seems incorporated into common sense. Framed another way, the opening up of the wounds of the past, to those that have no genealogical or ancestral relationship to it, might then turn out to be a crucial way in which to reclaim the legacy of the nation in terms that do no require those living in its present to feel overdetermined by it.

Thus, the implicated subject refers to a responsibility that emerges from the fundamental act of sharing this world and its diffused economic and political systems. Where traditional models of guilt and perpetration that attempt to differentiate between witnesses, accomplices, bystanders, beneficiaries etc. through an evaluation of the extent of our relationship to the crime, Rothberg does away with this anchor, suggesting that proximity to the event need not define our ethical orientation towards it. By doing away with proximity, we acknowledge that we are all always witnesses, and that we are therefore always implicated, even from afar, in injustice.

Both these books address sensitive issues. Much like Fassin and Recthman who find themselves having to reject the mocking of ‘victimization’ as ‘simply a sophisticated but classic way of denying injustice, inequality, and violence’,²⁴ Rothberg too cautions that ‘implication is not evenly distributed’, lying ‘disproportionately with certain populations who live in certain locations.’²⁵ Nonetheless, the question of comparison seems to haunt much of these and other discussions about victimhood. This essay has tried to tease out two possible approaches these works provide in the context of recent, global political developments.

The Empire of Trauma describes the way the popular coming together of discourses of trauma and victimhood allow questions of legitimacy to mirror, instead of undo, existing power structures. They speak powerfully to the precise elements of the contemporary politics of victimhood that seems to allow seemingly impossible inversions that so effortlessly deny the legitimacy of the suffering of minorities and refugees fleeing war-torn countries, all the while appropriating the politics of victimhood for use by traditionally dominant communities. The Implicated Subject seeks to provoke a contemporary re-imagination of our orientation to the legacies of the past – one that abandons guilt in favour of responsibility. Read together these works shed light on emergent forms of contemporary political subjectivity that require our urgent attention.

 

Footnotes:

1. Careen Becker, ‘The AfD and the Commemoration of the Holocaust: The Power of the Past to Shape the Present’, RUB Europdialog, July 2019. Accessed September 2019. Url: https://rub-europadialog.eu/the-afd-and-the-commemoration-of-the-holocaust-the-power-of-the-past-to-shape-the-present

2. Damien McGuinness, ‘Germany’s Far-Right AfD: Victim or Victor?’ BBC News, Berlin, September 2019. Accessed: September 2019. Url: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49549670

3. It should be noted here that, to a large extent, this reckoning is limited to the crimes of the holocaust. Indeed Germany’s colonial history, including that of genocidal violence in Namibia, is often shrouded in silence as far as general awareness and education of this part of its history is concerned.

4. Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry Into the Condition of Victimhood. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2009, p. 23.

5. Fassin & Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma, p. 33.

6. Fassin & Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma, p. 84.

7. Fassin & Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma, p. 87.

8. Fassin & Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma. p. 95.

9. Fassin & Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma, p. 89.

10. Fassin & Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma, p. 77.

11. Fassin & Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma, p. 18.

12. Fassin & Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma, p. 282.

13. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2009, p. 90.

14. Morris-Suzuki quoted in Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2019, chapter 2, para 49.

15. Trayvon Martin was a 17-year-old, African American high school student who was shot and killed on 26 February 2012 by George Zimmerman. Martin was unarmed, and Zimmerman, a private citizen unrelated to the police, reportedly believed that Martin looked ‘suspicious’. He subsequently followed Martin and fatally shot him in what he claimed was self-defence. The event and the widely publicized trial that followed became the focal point for a series of mass protests that wished to address racial politics and gun laws in the United States. Zimmerman was eventually acquitted, though the case continues to be central to protests against racial inequality and violence in the United States.

16. Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, chapter 1, para 9.

17. Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, chapter 3, para 36.

18. Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, chapter 4, para 10.

19. Here he cites Turkish-German writer, Zafer Azenocak, when she asks: ‘Doesn’t immigrating to Germany also mean immigrating into Germany’s recent past?’

20. Despite acknowledging that the two are intertwined, this tension between the ‘synchronic implication’ as global, and ‘diachronic implication’ as national goes under-explored through the book.

21. Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, chapter 5, para 54.

22. Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, chapter 1, para 45.

23. Indeed, in Germany, there is a certain way in which the denial of accessibility to holocaust memory seems to work, paradoxically, to limit claims of belonging to the nation state.

24. Fassin & Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma, p. 278.

25. Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, chapter 11, para 7.