Triumph and Trauma 9781594510380, 9781594510397

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TRIUMPH AND TRAUMA

THE YALE CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY SERIES Edited by Jeffrey Alexander and Ronald Eyerman Triumph and Trauma, by Bernhard Giesen (2004) FORTHCOMING Contemporary Societies: Self, Meaning, and Social Structure by Jeffrey Alexander and Kenneth Thompson (Spring 2005) American Societal Community by Talcott Parsons (Fall 2005)

TRIUMPH AND TRAUMA

Bernhard Giesen

First published 2004 by Paradigm Publishers Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2004 , Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for. Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.

ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-038-0 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-039-7 (pbk)

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Foreword by S. N. Eisenstadt

ix

Introduction

1

1 Triumphant Heroes: Between Gods and Humans The social construction of heroes Heroes as triumphant subjectivity The sacrificial core of heroism Rituals of remembrance Relics: The places of heroes Monuments: The face of the hero Classics: the voice of the hero The Hero’s Dress for Everybody: Historicism Places without heroes: The evanescence of the sacred Notes

15 15 17 22 25 28 31 34 36 40 42

2 Victims: Neither subjects nor objects The social construction of victims Victims, perpetrators and the public perspective At the fringe of moral communities Remembering victims Before guilt and innocence: Victims as sacred objects Personal compassion: The victim as the inferior subject Impartial justice: The construction of perpetrators The discourse of civil society: The construction of victimhood Claims and recognitions in a strong public sphere Concluding remarks Notes

45 45 46 48 54 58 60 61 64 66 71 72

3 The Tragic Hero: The Decapitation of the King: Triumph and Trauma in the Transfer of Political Charisma Introduction Reversing the perspective on the center: The master narrative of modern society Personal charisma: Linking the king’s two bodies

v

75 75 77 80

vi

Contents

The rule of the law: Accusing the king The public sphere of civil society: Scandal at the center The public space of the people: Scapegoating the center The publicity of the media: Dissolving the center Concluding remarks Notes

85 91 98 101 105 107

4 The Trauma of Perpetrators: The Holocaust as the Traumatic Reference of German National Identity Introduction Lost paradises: Germany as Naturnation Failed revolutions: Democracy without a triumphant myth The denial of the trauma Changing sides: Public conflicts and rituals of confession The objectification of the trauma: Scholarly debates and museums The mythologization of the trauma: The Holocaust as an icon of evil The globalization of the trauma: A new mode of universalist identity Notes

109 109 112 115 120 129 135 141 144 153

5 Postscript: Modernity and Ambivalence

155

References

165

Index

187

About the Author

196

Acknowledgments Writing this book was made possible by fortunate institutional contexts, stimulating intellectual environments and, above all, by the encouragement and criticism that I received from friends and colleagues. The idea of the book was triggered off during a one year stay at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto. A group of scholars at the center chaired by Jeffrey Alexander and Neil Smelser discovered their common interest in exploring the concept of “cultural trauma,” debated this extensively during several conferences and developed plans for a joint publication (Alexander et al. 2004 forthcoming). At the Center I received many stimulating comments from Neil Smelser and Norman Naimark, both of whom read first versions of the main chapters, and from Ron Eyerman, Björn Wittrock, Eduardo Cadova, Arie Kruglansky, Jochen Brandtstetter, Nancy Cott and Gabi Salomon. Returning from California to a new position at the University of Konstanz, Germany, I had the opportunity to continue the historical research in the newly founded DFG Special Research Center “Norm and Symbol.” Its chairman, Rudolf Schlögl, not only granted generous funding but also generated a quite uncommon intellectual exchange between history and sociology. Conferences on “The Trauma of Perpetrators” (2001) and “Collective Guilt” (2002), organized and funded by the University of Konstanz, allowed me to present the main thesis of the book to a range of international scholars. All main ideas, many detailed arguments and finally the entire manuscript have been intensely debated by my wonderful research team at Konstanz University. I owe many thanks to Valentin Rauer, Christoph Schneider, Daniel Šuber and above all to the excellent Kay Junge. My colleagues in Konstanz, Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, Wolfgang Seibel and Jürgen Osterhammel; former colleagues such as Helmut Berding, Helmut Dubiel, Wolfgang Schneider, Günther Lottes and Günther Oesterle; and friends like Klaus Eder, Dan Diner, Johannes Weiss and Karl Otto Hondrich discussed the main ideas of the book and provided intellectual stimulation many times and at many occasions. Many thanks to Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, who has read the entire manuscript, given critical comments and supported its completion. Most of all, however, I am deeply indebted to my friend Jeffrey Alexander who has accompanied the manuscript from its beginnings by reading, commenting and supporting it through the different stages of its evolution. Finally I would like to thank Yonca Bozkurt, Dorit Laßlop, Andreas Brehmer and the other student assistants who helped to check the final version of the manuscript. It goes without saying that it is only the author who is responsible for the remaining mistakes and inaccuracies of the book. vii

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Foreword S. N. Eisenstadt

Bernhard Giesen’s Triumph and Trauma constitutes a very important contribution to comparative macrosocietal and institutional studies. It brings back to such studies an anthropological dimension as well as important components of phenomenology of religion. These dimensions constituted an important component of such studies in the earlier, classical studies, be it those of scholars like Taylor, Frazer, Gilbert Murray or Jane Harrison, Lord Raglan, and later Durkheim and Max Weber—but which on the whole disappeared, as it were, from comparative macrosociological analysis in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the more recent comparative studies—perhaps above all in the classical studies of modernization of the fifties and sixties of the twentieth century—these dimensions of human life and creativity were either neglected or subsumed under more general structural aspects of social order, such as degrees of structural differentiation or power relations. In Triumph and Trauma, Giesen succeeds in bringing back these dimensions to macrosociological and comparative historical analysis in a highly innovative and constructive way. Of special importance is the way in which Giesen addresses the place of the sacred in the constitution and dynamics and tribulations of the social order; the place of the sacred in the constitution of authority and ambivalence to it as well as in the destructive potentialities of the contact with the sacred. In this he follows in many ways Max Weber’s classical work on charisma and its routinization, but goes beyond it by incorporating into his discourse not only comparative studies, but also the specific phenomenological analyses of religion as developed in the more recent studies such as, among others, those of Roger Caillois, René Girard and Walter Burkert. Of special interest here is the way in which Giesen, in his analysis of the place of the triumphant hero and of the victim in the constitution of collective identity—themes which were to some extent implicit in some of the classical anthropology analyses, but which have disappeared since then. Also of special interest is the way in which he combines the analysis of royal sanctification and royal decapitation as a central component of the entire problematique of ambivalence to authority. Another highly important aspect of his innovative approach is the connection between the relation to the sacred and the constitution of collective identity and collective memory, aswell as the changes in such constitution and struggles around it, a topic which was on the whole neglected since the classic works of ix

x

Foreword

Durkheim and Halbwachs and the historians influenced by Durkheim—be it Granet on China, Brehier on Byzantium, and above all, of course, Marc Bloch. He brings together these themes in an incisive discussion of the German case from the nineteenth century up to the Holocaust, of the vicissitudes of the constitution of “different” German identities throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with special emphasis on the confrontation of the post-Second World War generation with the Nazi heritage, thus attesting to the fact that such analysis need not be conferred only on “static” comparative studies but also on that of historical dynamics. In all these ways, Triumph and Trauma provides very important indications for the enrichment and reorientation of comparative macrohistorical studies.

Introduction This is a book about collective memory.1 It deals with triumphant and tragic heroes, with victims and perpetrators as cultural imaginations of identity. They mark the boundaries between regular and ordinary social life and the realm of the extraordinary beyond it. Heroes, victims and perpetrators are liminal figures that can be imagined only from this side of the boundary, from the point of view of regular social life, from the point of view of a community. We have to refer to their position in the outlands if we want to understand our situation inside the boundary, our social order, our community and history. Changing social ties and crossing social boundaries affect the imagination of the land beyond the horizon—the contour begins to waver, heroes appear as perpetrators, victims as heroes. What is demonic terrorism for one community is revered as heroic martyrdom by another. In order to unfold a phenomenology of these liminal figures the book refers to a broad range of cultural history, but its central historical focus is the collective memory of Germany after the Holocaust. It attempts to present the national identity of postwar Germany as a collective trauma—as the cultural trauma of perpetrators. In contrast to the trauma of victims, which has been dealt with extensively by historical research and clinical psychology, up till now few publications have addressed the collective trauma of perpetrators. This is hardly surprising since the perpetrators’ role is seen in the context of guilt and moral discourse rather than in the frame of a collective trauma.2 Suggesting a change of perspectives has to be rendered plausible.3 Therefore, the presentation of the German trauma will be embedded into a general theoretical model of identity construction that refers to the traumatic origins of collective identity as well as to its opposite—the triumph of the hero. Though following a broad line of intellectual heritage, this book will not present a reconstruction of its pedigree. In dealing with collective memory, neither its own ancestors from Kant and Nietzsche, Freud, Weber and Durkheim to Heidegger and Campbell, nor its inspirations from contemporary classics like Koselleck, Shils and Eisenstadt will be remembered extensively. Instead, the general questions of why we refer to classics, why we imagine the heroism of the past and why we construct the charisma of the present will be addressed. This book 1

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will also not discover and explore a forgotten intellectual predecessor, but it will deal with the more general question of why we rediscover the forgotten subjectivity of outsiders who had been banned from the margin of human society and treated as objects. In addressing these issues the book will not follow the beaten path of reducing cultural phenomena to power relations or to the economic interests of actors. Yet it will reverse the perspective: The focus will be on identity instead of interests, on the symbolic representation of the sacred instead of on the exchange of commodities.4 Thus, it will try to contribute to the exploration of something that can hardly be represented in an easy and straightforward way— the national identity of Germany after the Holocaust. The chapters of the book will approach the subject in a sequence of increasing historical specificity—starting with some brief conceptual remarks presented in this introduction and ending with an analysis of several stages of German postwar history with respect to the Holocaust. Although partly based on our own historical research, the book does not aim at the discovery of new historical facts or the challenging of a particular sociological thesis based on its main empirical case. Referring to historical detail and sociological data the book follows the paradigm that was set by Weber and Durkheim and continued by Eisenstadt and Shils—a broad comparative perspective that aims more at a structural typology or a historical phenomenology than at a detailed and exhaustive reconstruction of a particular case. Historians may profit from the typological suggestions rather than from the interpretations of documents contained. In the following short chapter, I will outline the main theoretical presuppositions of the thesis. Those readers who are reluctant to indulge in abstract metatheoretical reasoning can, of course, rush to the main part of the book without lacking major prerequisites of understanding. The main part of the book consists of four large chapters. The first deals with the memory of the hero as the triumphant representation of subjectivity and collective identity. The charismatic hero is presented as a mediator between the realm of the sacred and the mundane field of human action; he is imagined as a personal embodiment of the sacred, but he is also exempted from the constraints of regular rules. Instead, his sovereign action creates new rules and lays the ground for a new order. However, the sovereign hero can survive only in the memory of past triumphs—any living hero would risk being questioned by the challenges of everyday life and by the inevitable blurring of the boundaries between the sacred and the profane. The second chapter addresses the opposite boundary of human societies, the fringe where human beings who have been treated as objects before are remembered as subjects. Victims are the counterpart to triumphant heroes—both are located beyond the limits of the regular social life, but at opposite directions. Whereas the collective memory of triumphant heroism refers to birth as the ultimate limit of the conditio humana, the remembrance of the victims’ trauma puts death and mortality at the center. In spite of their juxtaposition there is, however, a profound ambivalence in the relationship between victims and heroes, triumph and trauma. Both can change places if the perspective shifts.

Introduction

3

The third chapter deals with transfers of political charisma or with the inescapable tragic defeat of the hero. In contrast to the memory of triumphant heroes and traumatized victims, charisma refers to the present. It considers a living hero as an embodiment of the sacred—a quality that we have associated before with the hero of the past. Because charisma sacralizes the present and the living hero, the opposition between the sacred and the mundane is no longer supported by the tension between the present and the past. In the experience of charisma we can try to have a close look at the sacred and to participate in it, but the charismatic moment also risks blurring the boundaries between the sacred and the mundane. As Max Weber previously noted, the attempt to establish charisma as an enduring element of everyday life (Veralltäglichung) and the pressure to prove charisma under mundane conditions (Bewährung) risk the collapse of the constitutive tension between the sacred and the mundane. In order to restore the tension, charisma has to be volatile and fragile, prone to instability and change, to decay and reconstruction, to transfers and translations. Therefore, in the end, the living hero cannot escape his tragic defeat. In the chapter “The tragic hero: the decapitation of the king” we will try to outline this instability of charisma and the wavering between triumph and trauma that is caused by the defeat of the hero. Following our typological distinction between triumphant heroes and traumatized victims, tragic heroes and perpetrators, we will, in the last long chapter, investigate a historical case of the trauma of perpetrators—the construction of German national identity after the Holocaust. Nazi Germany is a paradigm case of a society whose members imagined themselves as triumphant heroes but— after the collapse of its rule—had to realize that they had been perpetrators. In this last chapter we will describe different stages of coping with the moral trauma of the perpetrators as well as different social carriers and institutional arenas that patterned the public response to the trauma. But the public confession of guilt for the victims of the past is no longer a special German phenomenon. Today it can be found in many Western societies (Barkan 2000). It may be regarded as a new turn toward a collective identity that not only refers to remembrance and reinclusion of those who have been treated as objects before, but that is also able to gain recognition beyond the boundaries (Sa´adah 1992). After the collapse of the great utopias that were at the core of the old missionary universalism of modernity, a new universalism of mourning patterns the public rituals of national identity—the victims assume the position that, before, was the place of heroes.5

The Construction of Boundaries When the human mind perceives the world, it distinguishes the similar from the dissimilar; it treats certain phenomena as alike and others as different from each other. We arrive at this distinction between alikes and non-alikes by considering a phenomenon as an exemplar of a certain type, as a case of a certain conceptual

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category, and by constructing a boundary between those phenomena that are cases of this category and those that are not.6 These distinctions and boundaries are connected and combined to form a grid that transforms the original chaos into order. Boundaries function like watersheds: water that is located on one side is moved to the main stream in the valley, merges with that main stream and becomes indistinguishable from it—even if it originally was closer to the spring on the other side of the watershed. In a similar way, the phenomena of the world are separated by boundaries and assimilated to different mainstream types. Thus, their original diversity is blurred and they merge into phenomena of one kind similar to each other but different from phenomena beyond the boundary. This construction of boundaries is, of course, questionable, fragile and even arbitrary. It is easier for us to ignore the fragility of boundaries if we see others who demarcate them in the same way, and thereby confirm our separation of inside and outside. Boundaries persist only if they become a shared social construction. But, just as old maps, which are, in fact, highly selective and arbitrary representations of a landscape, have to be taken for true descriptions in order to function as a guide for travelers, the social construction of boundaries has to hide the fact that it is socially constructed and that its demarcation might be different if perspectives change. Therefore, social constructions of boundaries require continuous reaffirmation by those who direct their actions according to the grid of boundaries and distinctions. The constructedness of the social order has to be kept latent, the ambivalence of boundaries has to be ignored and the original chaos has to be turned into a rational structure.7 However, the other possibilities that are excluded from this shared social reality persist in a hidden way.8 Even if they are banned from the public sphere, even if they are silenced and denied— they are still there, and this latent existence needs to be coped with.9 If normal communication hints at them, they are usually located in a different world, a private world of dreams and fantasies, in the hinterlands beyond the margin of civilization, in forbidden paradises imagined by artists and poets, in the private world of those who are considered to be insane and unreasonable.

Subject and Object If we perceive the world among us, act with respect to others, deal with the things at hand, we have to presuppose our acting self as being separate from the outside world. In contrast to the ever-changing phenomena of the world outside, we see ourselves as stable and unchanging, as the persisting source of our actions, as the realm of identity. Although our identities seem to be given to us instantly, it is difficult for us to imagine and to describe them. For the very reason that the self is the immediate subject of its own actions, it has to ignore, for the time of action, the puzzling problem of defining its identity. There is a pervasive certainty about our identity, about the origin of our actions, but this identity—as opposed to our actions—does not occur to us, or is not performed by us. Yet, it is given beyond

Introduction

5

and before our contingent experiences, it constitutes the order of experiences instead of being derived from them. Early modern philosophy from the “cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”) of Descartes to Kant’s transcendental idealism and Fichte’s “sich selbst setzendem Ich” (the ego positioning itself ) referred to this certainty and regarded it as the foundation of ontology and epistemology. In contrast, late modern philosophy ranging from the neopositivism of the Vienna Circle to deconstructivism questioned this certainty and tried to neutralize or dissolve it (Kraft 1950). Neopositivism considered any subjective perspective impinging on knowledge as a distortion that had to be banned from the realm of true—i.e., objective—knowledge. Deconstructivism, though, reduced subject and object to mere grammatical functions of language that are mistaken for ontological entities (Derrida 1997). Different as they are, neopositivism and deconstructivism both disregard the inescapability of the reference to subject and object. The symbolic representation of the subject, its embeddedness in social relations and its mode of reflecting on itself may vary according to culture, language and historical situation, but no language or culture can entirely dispense with the reference to a speaker or the world that is spoken about. Whether ultimate foundation or contingent construction, the subject appears to the actor as an absolute certainty, and it is this perspective of the actor that matters for the following argumentation. Opposed to the absolute certainty of the existence of the self as the a priori of action stands the intransparency of this self. Although we try ever and ever again to represent this self to us and to others, although we try to narrate our story and to describe our personality, all these attempts to describe our own identity will inevitably fail. They are incomplete and distorted accounts that are dependent on the situation, on the other we are talking to and on the preceding communication, and they will change depending on the situational context.10 In contrast to subjects, the objects of the world appear to be easier to describe; they are the given matters of perception and distinction. They relate to our action as changeable and contingent conditions, but we do not impute agency to them.11 Still, even if we think of the objects of the world as naturally given matter, we know—after Kant at the latest—that our perceptions and observations should not be taken for the objects as such, but that they are patterned by our conceptual a priori.12 Neopositivist epistemology that strictly required the reduction of theories to their observational meaning or their empirical content was nevertheless quite aware of the difference between the natural objects and the observational sentences that reported an experience of the senses. The former—the objects “as such”—were considered to be inaccessible whereas the linguistic descriptions of experiences were taken as the empirical rock-bottom of scientific knowledge. If even the objects of the world cannot be grasped by a complete, accurate and exhaustive description, this certainly holds true also for the opposite pole: the knowing subject. Both subjects as well as objects serve as ultimate reference points for the classification of reality, the perspective on human agents and the things that surround them, and both subjects as well as objects escape any attempt at an

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accurate description. 13 We presuppose these reference points as being absolutely certain, but all symbolic representations of them have to be treated as approximations that are only partially true and irretrievably dependent on a particular perspective and a particular language. Our accounts of actual actors and real things are described in relation to these reference points, but we are tacitly aware that these representations of objects and subjects can be revised and varied. We impute subjectivity to us and our fellow humans, but this assumption of subjectivity is always a limited one. We, as well as the others, have bodies, and those can be seen and treated as objects; they are dependent on the restrictions of physical existence in space and time. Therefore, all real human beings are located only in between the poles of perfect subjectivity and perfect objectivity.14 This ambiguity of real humans between subjects and objects impinges on the boundary between both realms and renders it fragile and volatile, ambivalent and questionable.15 In spite of, and—in a certain way—also because of their inaccessibility, the poles of subjectivity and objectivity have to be imagined and symbolized, they have to be embodied and represented, and these embodiments and representations of their existence have to be locally affirmed and reconstructed by rituals and practices of communication. Let us first consider the basic codes or the archetypes whereby these embodiments are represented in symbols, texts or images. If we conceive of human existence as a realm between perfect subjectivity and perfect objectivity, it is, above all, these two boundaries that have to be represented in symbolic archetypes. The boundary toward perfect subjectivity is represented in the figure of the hero, and the opposite boundary, the conversion of human beings into objects, is represented in the figure of the victim. These two archetypical figures take central stage in the first two chapters of the book. Both the hero as well as the victim are presented as ultimate reference points for the human constitution and both are located beyond the profane and mundane everyday activities of the regular social reality. In this respect, the distinction between subjects and objects is closely associated with the distinction between the sacred and the profane (Durkheim 1991). Both the symbolic representation of heroes and the symbolic representation of victims are reaching out across the confines of the everyday world and hinting at a realm beyond it—the sacred, invisible and evanescent, eternal and frightening. Yet between the perfect and sovereign subjectivity of the hero who creates a new order and the dehumanized victim who is treated as an object, there is a range of positions denoting a subjectivity that is limited and restricted by the adversity of the world or by its own perversion. Using the distinction between the subject and the world as analytical dimensions, we can set up the following matrix: Subjectivity preserved: Subjectivity damaged:

Mastering the world:

Adversity of the world:

Triumphant Hero Perpetrator

Tragic Hero Victim

Introduction

7

The matrix points to the distinction between tragic and triumphant heroes and relates victims to their counterpart—the perpetrators. The tragic hero tries courageously to live up to his sacred self but fails to turn this self-reference into profane reality. Instead of conquering the world and successfully fighting his enemies, he is defeated himself and turned down by the adversity of this world. The lack of fortune in profane affairs, however, does not affect the sacredness of his subjectivity. To the contrary, the contrast between the sacred subjectivity and the profane misfortune prevents the subjectivity from being polluted and profaned. Outside observers, and sometimes even the heroes’ enemies, recognize and admire this special subjectivity of tragic heroes.16 Distinct from the tragic hero, who, despite his failure, is able to keep his sacred and sovereign subjectivity without a stain, is the perpetrator, who dehumanizes other subjects, extending his control over the world into a realm that should be exempted from such treatment—the subjectivity of others. Deciding about the life and death of others, he assumes a god-like position. The perpetrator has to face a damaged subjectivity not only on the part of the victims but also with respect to his own self. When the perpetrator treats subjects as objects he erodes the basic premises of his own sacredness and voluntarily violates the fundamental reciprocity of subjects: we have to respect the subjectivity of others, because they are the only source of recognition for our own subjectivity. Our subjectivity “exists” only insofar as it is recognized by a community of other subjects.17 Whereas the tragic hero’s sacred subjectivity is admired by third parties, the perpetrator is denied this recognition. Therefore, the perpetrator who turns subjects into objects also challenges his own sacredness. Instead of being regarded as a sovereign hero who infuses sacred subjectivity into the world, or as a tragic hero who has increased his subjectivity by his failure, he is considered by outside observers as the one who has desacralized the subjectivity of others. These outside observers differ from the bystanders who did not participate actively in the action but watched it being done without intervening or preventing it. The lack of protest and this omission of action put the bystanders in a special position in between the perpetrators who are undoubtedly guilty and the outside observers who had no opportunity to prevent the suffering or rescue the victims. The distinction between the archetypes of victorious heroes and tragic heroes, perpetrators and victims, can be considered as an ideal typological field. The positions of historical persons within this field are not fixed and immutable— triumphant heroes can become tragic ones, heroes can be turned into perpetrators, and victims can, later on, get the sacral aura that before was the mark of heroes. Thus, the firefighters who were victims of the attack on the World Trade Center were turned into heroes afterward. The basic typological distinction between triumphant heroes, tragic heroes, victims and perpetrators patterns the structure of the following chapters. It results not only from the fundamental tension between sacred subjectivity and profane objectivity, but it also presupposes the reference to the past as triumphant or traumatic. We will outline this perspective in the following section.

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Triumph and Trauma

Triumph and Trauma When, at particular moments, we reflect on our identities, on the unity that embraces our life, we inevitably have to refer to the liminal horizons of our existence, to birth and death. The fundamental certainty about our being born and our being destined to die contrasts strikingly with the inaccessibility of these events for ourselves. We are unable to report about our own death and our own birth, but we know about and can even observe the death and the birth of other human beings. Only by reference to the death and birth of others are we are able to imagine our own death. In this respect the categorical assumption of a collective identity of humankind precedes the awareness of an individual person’s identity.18 The fundamental certainty of being born and being destined to die interferes with the self-assured attitude of mundane everyday acting. In our mundane activities, we tend to ignore the horizon of birth and death: if we would constantly be aware of the ultimate limitations of our subjectivity, we would not be able to construct it as the stable reference point for changing actions and events. Birth and death represent ultimate ruptures and breaks in the web of meaning that catches the objects of the world. They are like black holes we are unable to experience directly and to speak about—the unspeakable origin of our human existence. Sometimes, however, external forces invade violently and unexpectedly the personal realm of our existence and remind us suddenly of our mortality. Later on, after a period of latency, we remember this shocking intrusion again and again, we revive it in our dreams, we talk about it, etc. We call this ruminating memory a “trauma.”19 Remembering a trauma refers to our mortality not merely as a potentiality but as an event that could have happened to us, that was almost real. In contrast, those moments when we, against all odds, could overcome and master surprisingly the adversity of the world are remembered as triumphs. Triumphs represent the feeling of sovereign life, of crisis and transition, of a new beginning, and thereby they represent the moment of birth. Similar to death, birth is also a central reference point for identity—unalienable and very personal, but nonrepresentational and almost impossible to communicate. Only if we translate the general existential condition of being born and being mortal into a personal event can we conceive of our own identities. Therefore, trauma and triumph are the ways we, as living subjects, refer to our own births and deaths, although we are not able to experience those individually and to report this experience to others.20 The origin and termination of our existence do not occur to us as distinct experiences that can be caught by the web of mundane meaning—they are like blanks that we are unable to speak about, like ruptures that, as such, have no meaning for those who have to endure them. Instead, they provide the frame of reference for the constitution of meaning and the narration of history. Because triumph and trauma represent ultimate breaks and ruptures in the construction of meaning, the sudden events they refer to frequently escape our attention at the moment when they occur—we ignore the risk of death and act as if nothing had

Introduction

9

happened. It is not perception, but memory, that provides the core arena for trauma and triumph, for the imagination of heroes and victims. “History can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence” (Caruth 1996, p. 17). Memory is the most important mode of creating a distance without which we are not able to reflect upon and conceive of our identity. The extension of the temporal horizon by memory is at the core, not only of subjectivity and identity, but also of the objectivity of the world. Here, the incessantly changing phenomena have to be typified by assuming a natural order.21 When the human mind constructs the grid of natural classification, it has to assume, in principle, that the pattern of classification remains the same in past, present and future—or to phrase this in a different way: the mind objectifies its present construction of boundaries by looking at it from an assumed position in the past or in the future. The objectivity of boundaries in the present is affirmed only by this decentering of our perspective—whether we see the present as the future of the past or as the past of the future.22 This extension of the mind’s temporal range engenders several problems. They result from the occasional observation that the assumed continuity between past, present and future is, in itself, fragile and questionable, that not only the phenomena, but also the order of things itself is changing and prone to variation. The inconsistency between the assumed order of the past and the order of the present—or the inconsistency between the order of the future and the order of the present—can be overcome by considering the past or the future to be the reference of the ideal and perfect order, whereas the present state of affairs is devaluated as imperfect and contradictory.

The Turn toward Memory The tension between the imperfection of the present and the ideal order located in the future or in the past—or in other words: the sacralization of the future or the past—can be turned into a strong collective thrust to change the present situation by historical action. Accelerating the present into a utopian future or restoring an ideal past are commonly considered as the prime motives for historical action that transcends the limitations of an individual’s life. The modern mind had devalued the experiences of the past and focused on the future as the open horizon of history, as the emancipation of the self and as the field of an ideal social order.23 At the turn of the millennium, however, the perspective on the future is a far more ambivalent one than it ever was before. Some neomodernists continue the straightforward technological progressivism of early modernity and can even revive it with reference to new technological breakthroughs that promise to overcome what previously was considered as inescapable fate. The Human Genome Project, the advances of artificial intelligence, etc., seem to enlarge the prospect of technological progress—they promise to turn what was previously considered as beyond human disposition into a field of human interven-

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tion and manipulation. Rarely, however, are these new technologies undisputedly accepted in the Western world. Instead, broad and intense public debates result from a deep ambivalence toward these new technologies and they engender new cultural cleavages in Western societies. For many Western intellectuals, as well as for their audience, the promise of future progress has lost its attractive lure that once forged the collective singulars (Koselleck 1985; Oesterle 1985) of modernity—history, progress, reason, individuality. Instead of disregarding the side effects of progress, the advanced Western discourse in the fin de siècle emphasizes risks and unanticipated consequences; instead of representing the field of hope and progress, the future is increasingly regarded as the field of threatening catastrophes and terror. This is not to say that the tragic or even catastrophic perspective on technological progress will prevail forever or that there will be no more carriers of utopian expectations—new generations may turn the tide and nonWestern civilizations may still follow the promise of old and new utopias. The ambivalent attitude toward technological progress is not entirely new. But it has, in various forms and with changing salience, always been an element of the discourse of modernity. Still, today more than ever before, the future as a grand collective singular has become worn out as the source of a grand transcendence that keeps the present under tension. For centuries, the modern mind was able to consider the present condition to be a barrier impeding progress—that is, the realization of new ideas. Today the time lag between having an idea and its realization is constantly decreasing. Imagination is immediately translated into virtual reality. The future has ceased to be a distant horizon people long for; moreover, it has been turned into a part of our mundane reality. Attempts to reconstruct the inevitable tension between the sacred and the profane turn, therefore, to the past again. Memory and remembering seem to replace progress and revolution as the master metaphors of history—at least for large parts of the Western public sphere. This extends also to the imagination of the sacred: it is collective memory that constructs heroes and victims, and it is collective memory that remembers them as the triumphant or traumatic embodiments of collective identity. Today, collective trauma is one of the major driving forces of international politics. The terrorist attack on the Twin Towers was such a traumatic event that it transformed collective identities, reshuffled international relations and inspired wars. After the triumphant celebration of the millennium, America and the West had to face the sudden and shocking experience of their vulnerability and even mortality. As many commentators stated: nothing was like it was before, the world had changed.24

Ritual Practices and Institutional Arenas Symbolic representations of the sacred are not just free-floating ideas, texts, semantic structures, myths, narratives and images—elements of a platonic world. These symbolic structures have to be enacted, instead, in particular social prac-

Introduction

11

tices; they have to be communicated between actors, the stories have to be narrated, the myths have to be mimetically reproduced by rituals, the images have to be shown to others, the cultural script has to be performed in particular institutional arenas. The same myth of heroism can be represented by different practices and rituals; it can be presented as oral narration, as a monument, as a novel, as a memorial day, as a movie, as an anthem, as a display in a museum. In participation in local rituals and practices the feeling of alikeness and the strong mutual attachment are constructed that we call collective identity.25 Rituals exist because they exist—whoever asks for explanation, presents criticism, or suggests improvement reveals himself as an outsider. If the presence of outsiders cannot be prevented or ignored, it risks being treated as an offense. The construction of a boundary between those who participate and those who do not is at the core of local ritual practices. The construction of translocal communities, however, challenges this boundary. The presence of outsiders, of strangers, of those who are not familiar with the local practices, but watch their performance, can hardly be avoided here. Hence rituals increasingly have to stand the view from outside and communities have to claim external recognition for symbolic representations and ritual performances of their collective identity. Ego needs Alter’s recognition for his self-representation and this recognition can be denied and debated.26 Particular institutional arenas are required in order to cope with the presence of outsiders and the claim for recognition. Most of these institutional arenas establish a public perspective on the boundaries between inside and outside. This public perspective becomes increasingly salient for the—always fragile—construction of boundaries, because it can claim to represent the third-party perspective that is involved neither in feuds and conflicts between opposing groups nor in the personal charismatic bond between the heroes and their followers.27 Therefore, the construction of boundaries and the reference to the past is in most cases linked to institutional arenas that represent the public perspective—the charismatic rule of the king and the public administration of the law, professional services and the public discourse of civil society, public rituals of remembrance and modern media of broadcasting. We will, therefore, not only focus on the ritual practices whereby the symbolic representation of a boundary is performed among insiders, but we will also present a typology of different institutional arenas in which the boundaries are represented and debated in public. Thus we hope to connect a phenomenology of symbolic representations that is at the core of the book to a focus on ritual practices,28 to social structural29 and to more recent neoinstitutionalist models of explanation.30 But we do not only have to account for the difference between symbolic representations as narratives, myths or texts on the one hand and the local practices, ritual performances and public institutions on the other. Local practices and rituals are, in turn, embedded in particular social situations, in particular histories and in particular social relationships; these situational conditions impinge on the meaning of the ritual and the symbolic representation. It matters, for example, whether those who sing an anthem in public are in a minority or in a majority

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situation, whether they have known each other for a long time or not, whether they are observed by powerful outsiders or not, etc. A reference to this embeddedness in a particular historical situation certainly requires a detailed and accurate account of the case in question—and we will hardly be able to provide this for most of the historical illustrations that are mentioned in the next chapters. However, as we proceed from general conceptual considerations—as presented above—via a phenomenology of heroes and victims to the historical case study in the last chapter, the references to historical material become richer and the embeddedness of rituals in particular social relationships becomes more clearly visible. In this last chapter, we focus especially on the change of generations as an important structural cleavage associated with collective memory. Marxist as well as Weberian sociology tried to relate symbolic representations to particular social carriers, and such carriers were mainly identified with, and investigated as, social classes or political camps. However, the turn toward memory, as well as the turn toward utopia, brings about a certain temporalization of the perspective on social carriers—“avant-garde” and “generation” tend to replace “class” as the key concept for social carrier and collective agency.31 Generations may even be defined by the experience of a particular triumph or a trauma that devaluates the experiences of the preceding generation.32 All three levels of analysis—symbolic representations, rituals and institutional practices, social relations and historical situations—are structured by their own principles and any attempt to conflate and reduce them to one level risks the fallacy of simplification. Like language, speech act and the indexical world to which they refer, myth, ritual and social relations are also connected to each other. But these relationships of presupposition, intention and reference cannot be grasped by a straightforward attempt to identify cause and effect. Myth, ritual and social situation are the semantic, the performative and the referential dimension of collective identity rather than causally linked events.

Notes 1. For the most complete single authored accounts, seemingly covering all the relevant historical and contemporary literature, see especially Jan Assmann (1988, 1999b), Aleida Assmann (1999), and Harald Weinrich (1997). For a short overview by a sociologist see Connerton (1989). For their innovative conception, cp. the essays of Koselleck (1977, 1999, 2000) and Ricoeur (1995). 2. Although a huge number of articles and books have been and still continue to be written on this issue, Karl Jaspers’ famous lecture “Die Schuldfrage” (“The Question of Guilt”), already published in 1946, can be seen as having set the analytical frame of the public debates that were to follow it many years later. For a new general theoretical perspective on collective guilt—linking arguments developed within the Durkheimian tradition to arguments from the heritage of analytic philosophy—see Gilbert (1996). 3. Among those who have been inspiring for our own endeavor we should mention Rene Girard’s conception of the transformation of the scapegoat into a sacrifice (1977), Joseph Amato’s (1990) and Wolfgang Lipp’s (1977) essays on the different uses of suffering, but above all the many discussions of Jeffrey Alexander and Neil Smelser on the issue of cultural trauma. See Alexander et al. 2004.

Introduction

13

4. Here we will basically follow the still too much neglected theoretical proposals made by Alessandro Pizzorno (1986, 1991). 5. Thus Habermas’s sophisticated philosophical endeavor to save universalist reasoning from deconstruction (Habermas 1985) could possibly be sociologically substantiated by an analysis of this new universalism of public mourning. By an irony of history, the lament on the crisis of representation and the repeatedly announced dissolution of all metanarratives (Lyotard 1984) has become one of our most fascinating master narratives. 6. The construction of a system of differences is the classical issue of the structuralist tradition ranging from Durkheim and Mauss (1963) to Lévi-Strauss (1962) and Derrida (1967). A distinct approach to differences is presented by the radical constructivism of Niklas Luhmann (1995) and by the logician Spencer-Brown (1969). The classic reference for typification is Alfred Schütz (1932). 7. According to the terminology of phenomenological sociology this is the core of the “natural attitude of every day acting” (Schütz 1932). We will defer the detailed analysis of the possible correlations between the cognitive and the social order to later chapters (for some classic sociological accounts in the structuralist vein arguing for a particularly strong correlation see: Durkheim and Mauss (1963), Sahlins (1976), Douglas (1970, 1986). For the time being we rely on the phenomenological account of every day life as outlined especially by Alfred Schütz (1932, 1962, 1964) and Thomas Luckmann (Schütz and Luckmann 1974). For a once vanguard and still unsurpassed introduction to the broader field of interpretative sociology see Berger and Luckmann (1967). 8. The exclusion of the Other was the classical theme of M. Foucault; see, for instance, Foucault (1965, 1981). In a certain respect, deconstructivism and poststructuralist analysis address this issue just as psychoanalysis does. 9. In his famous “breaching experiments,” Harold Garfinkel showed that there is a specific morality in cognition, i.e., that cognition is not simply a cognitive problem, but is dealt with socially as a normative problem (Garfinkel 1963, 1967); see also Heritage (1984, pp. 78ff.). Luchmann tried to deal with moral discourse as a special “species” of communication in his “Moral im Alltag” (1998). 10. See Strauss (1959), Goffman (1959), and Hahn (2000). 11. This might be changing right now, as has been argued by Latour (1993) and KnorrCetina (1999). 12. This does not necessarily imply that these concepts have to be attributed to human nature. Following the neo-Kantian movement, several domain-specific and culture-dependent a priori have been discovered by the humanities and social sciences and this multiplication of different a priori schemes by now seems to run the risk of becoming inflationary. Facing the Scylla of radical cultural relativism and the Charybdis of what might account for a universal human nature, the work of Ernst Cassirer still seems a good guide. For a short American introduction, written by himself, see Cassirer (1944). For a more recent and much more provocative critique of hermeneutic relativism— taking its stance with Heidegger, rather than with Kant—see Koselleck (1987). 13. We may question the universality of the distinction between subject and object and regard both concepts as particular products of Occidental or Western philosophy. The specific meaning of both concepts varies certainly according to its cultural context, but it is hard to imagine any account of the world that can entirely dispense with the distinction between the source of action and the objects of action—whatever its linguistic phrasing might be. 14. Here the reference to Nietzsche’s idea of the human existence as “Seil zwischen Tier und Übermensch” (“the rope between animal and superhuman”) can hardly be avoided (Nietzsche 1977b, p. 281). William James pointed already to the partial “blindness” involved here (James 1962, pp. 113ff ). This puzzle of the entanglement between the visible and the invisible became also the central concern of the late Maurice Merleau-Ponty. See especially his “The Visible and the Invisible” (1969). What we are aiming at is a shift in focus from the human individual to the social collectivity, where collective identity can be characterized by a precise structural analogy to what has been pointed out within the different paradigms of the philosophy of mind. 15. With a quite different empirical problem in mind, but from a similar theoretical perspective, this problem has recently been put to the fore again by Latour; see especially Latour (1993).

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16. Existentialist philosophers like Sartre, Camus or Jaspers regarded this failure as the central avenue for the individual’s reflection on himself or herself. Glimpses of this perspective can already be found in Weber; cp. Henrich (1987). 17. In the last few years Charles Taylor has most convincingly elaborated on this specific source of the self (Taylor 1992). While Taylor took his inspiration from Hegel, Jürgen Habermas has in recent years put much more emphasis on the American pragmatist tradition, especially on George Herbert Mead; see especially Habermas (1992). The more recent reception of Mead in Germany started with Hans Joas (1985). Butler (1997) charts the entangled trajectory of desire and the struggle for recognition from the Hegelian and post-Hegelian traditions of dominating French philosophy from Kojève (1947) onwards. Detailed analysis of the post-Kantian idealist concept of intersubjectivity closely sticking to the primary texts of Hegel and Fichte can be found in Williams (1992, 1997). For those who prefer a less philosophically headed, not explicitly post-conventional or post-metaphysical account, see Julian Pitt-Rivers’ entry on “honor” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Pitt-Rivers 1968). For a sympathetic and stimulating discussion of the “struggle for recognition,” ranging from Hegel via Marx and Sorel, Mead and Sartre to Habermas and Taylor, see Honneth (1995). 18. Kant refers to this connection in his “Anthropologie” as well as Heidegger does in “Sein und Zeit” (1986, pp. 237 ff.). Christiaan L. Hart-Nibbrig charted this terrain as far as philosophy and literature dealt with the issue (Hart-Nibbrig 1995b). 19. The career of the concept of “trauma” in the social sciences started with Freud’s and Breuer’s analysis of Hysteria. Before, it was used mainly in medical contexts for the neurological responses to bodily injury. In psychology, it became prominent in the debate about posttraumatic disorders. Today it is decoupled from its original reference to bodily experiences and transferred into the domain of cultural history and collective memory; see Neil Smelser (2003); Bronfen et al. (1999); Caruth (1995, 1996); Felman and Laub (1992); Antze (1996); Robben (2000); Farrell (1998); Neal (1998); and Alexander et al. (2004). 20. We will address this Heideggerian turn again at the beginning of the last chapter. 21. See Berger and Luckmann (1967); Garfinkel (1967); Schütz (1962, 1964). 22. While deconstructivists, e.g., Derrida (1982), get entirely absorbed by this seemingly paradoxical endeavor, mundane reasoning usually finds an easy, though sometimes brutal way out, by institutionalizing one specific account; see Melvin Pollner (1974), John Heritage (1984, pp. 212ff.). 23. See Koselleck’s essays on the semantics of historical time (1985). 24. There is a vast literature on collective memory ranging from classics like Maurice Halbwachs (1967) to more recent publications like Connerton (1989) or the useful overview of literature in LeGoff (1986); see also Nora (1992), Jan Assmann (1988, 1999b) and Aleida Assmann (1999). 25. See Turner (1969), Giesen (1998) and Soeffner (1997, 2000). 26. See Giesen (1999a), Taylor (1992), Pizzorno (1986, 1991), Williams (1997) and Honneth (1995). 27. The focus on thirdness as a constitutive perspective for social order ranges from Kant’s categorical imperative via Peirce’s pragmatism (1991) and Simmel’s sociology (1922) to Jürgen Habermas’s ethics of discourse (1983). For the third perspective in the settlement of feuds, see Gluckmann (1955) and Eckhoff (1966). 28. See Van Gennep (1960), Turner (1967, 1969) and Goffman (1967). 29. See Merton (1968), Blau (1977) and Blau and Merton (1981). 30. See Zukin and DiMaggio (1990), North (1988), March and Olsen (1989) and Drobak and Nye (1997). 31. See Mannheim (1970), Eisenstadt (1956) and Platt and Dabag (1995). 32. See Koselleck (2000) and Davis (1984).

Chapter 1

Triumphant Heroes Between Gods and Humans The Social Construction of Heroes “No More Heroes” was the title of a famous song of the seventies.1 Indeed, after the war in Indochina the ideal of the hero was widely questioned because of its association with military bravery and virtue. As is not uncommon in the aftermath of war and defeat, those who had been praised as heroes before, were afterwards considered as victims whose self-sacrifice was devoid of any meaning, or they were regarded as perpetrators, as icons of evil, as embodiments of demonic madness. In death and defeat, heroism exhibits its ambivalences, the fragility of its foundations, the tension between trauma and triumph. The idea of the “hero” as it originated in ancient Greek or Oriental literature,2 was, indeed, associated with the extraordinary deed of the warrior who followed the call of adventure, ventured out into the unknown, withstood tests and temptations and returned full of glory to his people (Campbell 1991, p. 151).3 War represented the fringe of the social order, the challenge of crisis, the frontier against the uncommon and superhuman that could not be dealt with by ordinary means. The heroes Achilles, Hercules and Theseus in ancient Greek mythology were, therefore, imagined as warriors of superhuman force, liminal figures who could cross the boundary between everyday life and the realm of Gods and demons. They were depicted as half-divine, as descendants of a minor Goddess, as tempted by a Goddess in disguise or even as married to a half Goddess. The idea of the hero, although originally couched in the myth of the warrior, extends, of course, far beyond the battlefields. It is at the core of many charismatic constructions of collective identities. Among the various transformations of the hero described by Joseph Campbell (1971, 1974, 1988), at least one other stands out: the hero as the founder of religion, who retreats from everyday life to meet God in solitude and to bring the new message of salvation back to his people. The Buddha and Moses, Christ and Mohammed are exemplars of these redeeming heroes. 15

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But the idea of the hero has not been confined to warriors or to the founders of religions—the hero has, indeed, “a thousand faces” (Campbell 1974), and the face reflects and expresses a particular cultural foundation of a community. Intellectual heroes like Confucius (Kung fu tse), Plato, Newton and Hegel coined a classical tradition for a community of scholars. Since the eighteenth century, aesthetic heroes like Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Mozart and Goethe have been revered as geniuses whose pathbreaking exceptionalism transcends the level that can be achieved by regular education and common effort—and this cult of the genius responded to the spread of education and enlightenment in the civil society of the eighteenth century. In communities that value compassion and charity, exceptionally altruistic persons like the medieval noblewoman Elizabeth of Thuringia and the contemporary Mother Theresa are considered as saints or angels. Political communities focus on popular leaders or on heroes of resistance like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, who were explicitly opposed against military violence, whereas others like the French maiden Jeanne d’Arc, George Washington and Che Guevara, have led military movements against the reigning authorities. Youth movements that oppose mainstream culture heroify stars like James Dean or John Lennon, sport fans remember legendary performers like DiMaggio, Muhammad Ali and Jesse Owens—indeed, to repeat again Campbell’s felicitous phrasing, the hero has a thousand faces.4 Heroes embody charisma, they fuse the sacred into the profane world, they establish a mediating level between the humans and the Gods. The myth of the hero ended the original myth in which Gods and humans could meet each other without mediation. In this way, it is a transitory stage located halfway between the direct communication between Gods and humans as represented in magical thinking on the one hand, and the fully developed axial age civilizations on the other. In between the realm of Gods and the realm of humans, affected by the earthly problems and overcoming them with supernatural powers, heroes are doublefaced subjects. This position between Gods and humans is reflected in the mythical account of the birth of the hero (Rank 1910). The mythical hero is of divine or royal descent but, as a child, is cast off by his parents into swamps or forests and raised by fishermen, herdsmen or even animals, i.e., by people or creatures of low descent. Moses and Christ, Romulus and Perseus, Cyrus and even Sargon of Akkad, the first Sumerian king, are only the most famous examples of this mythical move of the hero from high to low, from Gods to humans (Rank 1910, p. 12). Here heroes represent still the personal embodiment of the sacred, but the gap between both poles is already widening, the tension between the evanescence of the sacred and its local embodiment is already unfolding. It requires constant mediation and remembering. This mode of mediation is deeply affected by the transition to axial age civilizations: axial age civilizations are based on the tension between an impersonal principled transcendental order and a mundane sphere of acting persons and contingent worldly reasoning, of power and money (Schwartz 1975; Eisenstadt 1982, 1986). In axial age civilizations, the sacred center of society is disembodied and finally even depersonalized and conceived of by abstract principles. Hence

Triumphant Heroes

17

the post-axial age hero can no longer be related by kinship and direct encounter to personal Gods; instead, he or she is considered to be the pure embodiment of transcendental principles, of virtue and reason, morality and valor. Societies that emphasize impersonal principles and virtues are, therefore, less fertile grounds for the creation of heroes than societies that put a high premium on a distinctive personal aura of public appearance. Heroes are public figures; they represent the collective identity of a community. In the nineteenth century, when the separation between the public and the private realm was increasingly marked, heroism withdrew from the private virtues and was limited to the public realm or to exceptional situations in which the boundary between the private and the public sphere was blurred (Todorov 1996, p. 52). We will return to this issue at the end of this chapter. The classical hero (before the axial age tension) has a face, a voice and a place in the center of a social community that reveres him, commemorates him and imagines him. His or her presence marks the charismatic center of society. As Max Weber’s famous definition notes, charisma is constituted by the belief of followers in the extraordinary qualities of an individual.5 The extent and the mode of this embeddedness in a community of followers may vary and change, but no charismatic hero can exist without it. Therefore, many sociological studies on charisma focused more on the charismatic movement than on the figure of the hero himself.6 In the following chapter, we will outline this relationship between the hero and his or her community, but we will center less on the internal structure of the charismatic community than on the different modes and rituals of representing and remembering the charisma of the hero. We will not, however, regard charisma as a simple reflection of institutional practices of memory, but instead treat the cultural core of charisma as an independent reference.7 Neither can the symbolic structure of the myth be reduced to a mere reflection of rituals, nor can the ritual be reduced to the simple performance of the cultural script of a myth. Relics and rituals, monuments and memorials construe not only close links, but also distance8 between the community and the hero. Heroism dissolves if looked at from a close range. Hence the reconstruction of this blending of distance and proximity is at the core of many shifts in the cult of the charismatic hero. If it fails and the hero is continuously entangled in ordinary life he will end up in tragic failure—as will be shown in chapter four.

Heroes as Triumphant Subjectivity Heroes are the triumphant embodiments of collective identity. As individual figures, they symbolize the community’s ties to the sacred, the possibility of human beings to rise above ordinary and mundane affairs and to partake in divine perfection and immortality (Otto 1917; Durkheim 1991). In between the realm of Gods and the realm of humans, affected by earthly problems and overcoming

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them by supernatural powers, heroes are double-faced subjects.9 Beyond the narrow rules of ordinary life, disdaining routines and breaking conventions, heroes represent the extraordinary and charismatic; they do not perform according to the rules, instead they constitute them. Like the rule that needs the exception to become visible as a rule (Wittgenstein 1980), the social order of mundane life also cannot be constituted without referring to its opposite—the sacred (Durkheim 1991)—and the society cannot construct its collective identity without any form of imagining subjectivity. The charismatic hero embodies this subjectivity in a triumphant way. He stands above the law, he “breaks the crust of a mechanism grown rigid through repetition” (Agamben 1995), he represents the ultimate sovereign who decides about the state of exception. In this respect, the hero lives, indeed, in a constant state of war, in a preconstitutional situation before the regular norms apply, before the social standards of comparison become valid, before the political game among humans begins. The hero is incomparable; his uniqueness as a subject corresponds to the exceptionalism of his situation Although they are of divine descent, heroes have a place within a mundane community: they embody the sacred in this world.10 Yet, because they act in a realm where neither personal advice from others nor self-interested strategies can pattern and support their decisions, heroes are rightly depicted as lonely. Beyond or before the bonds of humaneness, he is crazy, cruel (Nietzsche 1977b) and commands a “divine violence” (Benjamin 1978, p. 59). Heroes can and must disregard strategic advantages and scarcity of resources, and because of this ignorance for mundane contingencies, they can—like the medieval knight Perceval—even appear as the sacred fool or as fallen into temporal madness, like Achilles and Hercules in ancient Greek myths. In contrast to them, ordinary humans are moved by the fear for a mortal body (Arendt 1978, p. 134). This madness of the hero becomes fully visible only from an outside perspective. Crossing the boundary between the inside and outside shows the deep ambivalence of heroism. What insiders revere as the embodiment of the sacred is considered by outsiders as ridiculous, crazy, mad or even horrible and demonic. Viewed from outside, the heroic revolutionary, the martyr, the suicide bomber is a terrorist, a madman, a criminal. As the Weberian conceptualization of charisma already noted, real persons are not heroes by themselves. Heroes are, in fact, social constructions of particular communities, cultural imaginations of supreme individuality, collective projections of sovereign subjectivity, of the sacred on particular persons and their lives. In constructing the hero, a community overcomes not only profane constraints and mundane contingencies, but also, most importantly, the threat of death. Thus the construction of heroes creates a social bond that transcends the confines of individual life and the limits of strategic reasoning. For the community of followers, the hero who defies pain and disregards death achieves immortality that was the mark of Gods before. Like Gods, heroes do the unprecedented and create a new perspective on the world. By this unique and creative act they constitute themselves as supreme subjects (Fichte 1961) and provoke awe and admiration

Triumphant Heroes

19

among ordinary men and women. Many attempt to follow their example, but nobody will ever be able to reach it; many travel the path they have broken, but nobody will be able to be the pathbreaker again. The very novelty and uniqueness of the heroic act impedes its repetition. However, heroes are fragile constructions. If there is or has been a real person whose life is heroified, it is often easy to erode—if not to shatter—the monumentality of the hero by presenting the profane and humane details of his or her life. This total dependence on the admiration of the community makes also for the hero’s partial independence from nonfollowers, from outsiders, from the public perspective. The community can, and frequently does, just ignore the evidence presented in order to deconstruct the hero. In contrast to the victim, the hero can be constructed by the community of followers alone. But this independence from the approval of outsiders engenders also volatility and ambivalence; if the charismatic appeal to followers cannot stand the test of time, if it collapses suddenly or fades away in the routines of ordinary life (Weber’s famous notion of Veralltäglichung), the hero is dethroned and sometimes turned into a perpetrator not just by outsiders but also by what was his own community before. What was considered as a charismatic exceptionalism and divine violence before is discovered afterward as demonic cruelty, as madness and ruthlessness. One way of preventing the routinization of charisma consists of killing the mortal hero in order to keep the sacred charisma alive. The semidivine kings of ancient African kingdoms had to undergo ritual death or self-sacrifice if they became old or if their charisma was evidently wearing out (Eliade 1959). Dying young is even today regarded as a prime path for being remembered as a hero. The most important way to save the charisma of the living hero is based on social distance. Successful heroification of living persons is fostered if the members of the community that reveres them are not intimately familiar with the personal life of the heroified person. Whoever knows about the human weaknesses, the petty interests and the miserable moments of a person can no longer consider him or her to be a hero. The hero is turned into a common, everyday human being, into one of us. But there is also another reason to keep the hero at a distance. It results from the risks of disturbing routines and institutions if a living hero actually enters the arenas of everyday life. The hero’s charismatic presence does not fit into the regular pattern; heroes will by their sovereign subjectivity not observe the rules, they will divert followers from their obligations, they will call for radical changes and even destroy institutions. Therefore, the heroic leaders of a revolutionary uprising are rarely converted into successful administrators of the new established regime— even the peaceful revolutionary Gandhi seemed not to fit into the new government of India after striving and fighting for its independence for decades. Viewed from the perspective of a rule-governed community, the hero has to be regarded as a deviant individual.11 If the sacred as embodied in the hero comes too close, it becomes frightening and dangerous, it will burn the mundane rules to ashes. There-

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fore, it has to be socially encapsulated in particular positions, encountered only in special rituals and kept at a distance. Although the passing of time does not preserve the charisma of the living hero, it does construct distance and prevents a close look at the mundane weaknesses of the hero.12 Hence, many heroes exist only as icons of the past, imagined in myth, art and literature, removed to times immemorial. We do not know whether the English King Arthur and Romulus, the mythical founder of ancient Rome, Buddha and Moses, the Spartan king Leonidas and the Gothic chief Teja ever existed as real persons and—if they did—what their lives were like. Others, like the Oriental hero Gilgamesh and the ancient Greeks Achilles, Prometheus, Odysseus and Aeneas, or the medieval heroes Siegfried, Lancelot and Perceval, are purely mythical figures, crucial for collective identity, but unquestionably cultural fictions. Sometimes newly constructed nations deliberately—and even desperately—look for a mythical individual that can be presented as a founding hero. The debate among German writers in the eighteenth century about Arminius, the Germanic chief, as the founding hero of the Germanic nation pitted against Roman domination (Wiedemann 1988), and the staging of Charles Le Temeraire, the famous Duke of Burgundy ruling in the fifteenth century, as the founder of Belgium (Lope 1991), are cases in point, but so also are the current attempts to present legendary Cossack leaders as the founding heroes of the Ukrainian nation (Sevcenko 1996); to imagine the defenders of Masada, the Jewish uprising against Roman domination, as the founding heroes of Israel; to celebrate the ancient Persian ruler Cyrus as the founder of modern Iran; or to stage Shaka Zulu, the leader of the black African armies against colonial rule, as the father of South Africa. In all these cases, founding heroes are construed who had been forgotten for a long time and could not be connected to the present day by an uninterrupted tradition. And it is exactly the shortlivedness of the present state and the distance of a mythical past that fosters the social construction of heroes. Historical persons like Washington and Napoleon, de Gaulle and Gandhi, Bismarck and Lenin, fare less well after their death and the collapse of their rule than the mythical heroes. Although their genius as leaders is beyond doubt and their charismatic appeal to their followers is unquestionable, they are discovered as ordinary men or despotic rulers after their death or after the end of their regime; when the archives are opened and documents are read with critical scrutiny, the icon of the superhuman hero, who had fascinated his followers yesterday, is soon dismantled and destroyed. Only from a distance that blurs all traces of humaneness and disregards all entanglement in mundane affairs, does the hero appear as a hero. In the case of Napoleon, this distance was reconstructed after his defeat and exile. The charismatic hero ended his political career as a despotic oppressor, but became again a living legend in his exile on Saint Helena. This distance is, however, not only a matter of time and space. For those, who do not know the details and are captivated by the legend, even living persons can appear as heroes. Hitler and Stalin, Mao and Mussolini had certainly an extraordinary charismatic appeal to their followers; they were celebrated as redeem-

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ers and triumphant leaders of their nations (Bach 1990). After the collapse of their power, when the monstrous results of their rule were presented to their followers, they became icons of evil. This rupture and—mostly enforced—axial shift prevented remembering and counteracted a charisma that was still hauntingly close to the present time (Mitscherlich 1994). The cases of Hitler and Stalin show not only the hero’s dependence on his followers but also the fundamental ambivalence of heroism. Deprived of his community of followers and banned from the public realm, the formerly charismatic hero is turned into a demonic perpetrator. What before has been his exemption from the rules is afterward seen as a criminal act of violating them. If this turn occurs suddenly and unexpectedly, the exceptionalism of the hero, his despise for rules and his ruthless cruelty becomes the trauma of those who had been his followers before. Hitler and his German followers are a paradigm case for this ambivalence of triumph and trauma. We will return to this case in the last chapter of this book. But even an abundance of knowledge about details does not in every case prevent the construction of heroes: historians who describe the life and times of historical leaders rarely escape their hidden inclination to heroify their main figures. They do so not only because the heroification emphasizes the importance of their subject and justifies the amount of research work devoted to it, but also because it is the very structure of historical narration which leads to the identification of heroes. Narrating a story requires main actors who are endowed with the power to determine the events and to propel the action. This empowerment of the main actor can result from divine intervention or—in modern contexts— from the representation of an encompassing collectivity. The hero stands for the community in an exemplary way, he or she is imagined as the formative force of the historical environment, he or she founded a new collective identity or transformed an existing one in a fundamental way.13 But the collective identity that is founded or symbolized by the hero reaches out beyond the actors presented in the story; it includes also the storyteller who identifies with the hero’s perspective, and, most importantly, it includes the audience—the readers, listeners and spectators who feel sympathetic with the hero. Thus the narrative construction of the hero’s triumph merges three positions: the hero, the storyteller and the audience. The bond of identification that embraces the three positions is based on the triumph of the hero over mundane regards and earthly matters. It appeals to a particular imagination of the sacred. The sacred as embodied by the hero’s triumph has a transempirical validity and is not affected by contingent experiences and opportunities. It claims an unconditional certainty. This ultimate certainty is the certainty of being born—an existential certainty that is at the core of the collective identity of all human beings (Heidegger 1986, p. 235; Hart-Nibbrig 1995a). No single human being can remember his or her individual birth. Being born is ultimately certain for any human being, but this certainty cannot be derived from personal experience. It is only by observing the birth of others, and by assuming that these others are alike, that the certainty of being born can be connected to personal experience. The

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triumph of the hero translates this common certainty of being born into a collective representation. Similar to the birth of an individual person, it stands for a fundamental passage, a moment of crisis and blood, and a new beginning; it opens up rejoicingly a new horizon of possibilities and experiences; it symbolizes the rise of a community above the toils of everyday life.14 Thus the triumph of the hero represents a double reference—it hints at the self-constitution of the subject mastering his fate, but it also marks the birth of a community. Rituals that reenact the birth of individuals as purification and conversion are well known; they range from rituals of passage like marriage, examination and inauguration to religious rituals like baptism and confession (Van Gennep 1960). Frequently, the person undergoing the ritual also changes his or her name, or receives a special title or an addition to his or her regular name. In the celebration of a hero’s triumph, this is reflected in renaming the hero according to his triumph (“the conqueror,” “the victor of . . . ”) or by adding a simple “the Great” instead of marking his or her position in a dynastic sequence. The supreme individuality of the hero is emphasized by disconnecting him or her from the common kinship ties in which ordinary human beings are embedded. In Native American societies this renaming practice extends also to many warriors who are called by mentioning their heroic deeds: Sitting Bull, Seven Bears, Crazy Horse and even Dances with Wolves. But more important than the ritual reenactment of birth as a practice of individualization is its function for the construction of collective identity (Giesen 1999a). There is no reason for commemorating the triumph of the hero if no collective identity embraces the hero and those who celebrate and remember him or her. No strategic reasoning justifies the expenses for those who gladly spend money, time and emotions to celebrate the past triumphs of a dead hero. It is not only just the joyful reenactment of the community’s birth, but also the affirmation of an open space for future collective actions. Certainly the commemoration of the hero’s triumph is not the only way to construct collective identity by rituals. Scapegoating or missionary inclusion and assimilation of outsiders, legal citizenship and local knowledge, kinship and education are other important institutional practices to construct a boundary between inside and outside. In this range of different modes of boundary construction, triumphant heroism occupies a special position: it connects the community to its sacred center by a person who is distant and close at the same time—distant because the hero is superhuman in his triumphant creativity and far out of reach for ordinary human beings, close because the hero results from the projection of the ideal self that is in the mind of the individual persons who admire the hero.

The Sacrificial Core of Heroism The triumph of the hero is an ambivalent one.15 Just as existential reflections on birth can never ignore its opposite, death, the triumph of the hero can never

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escape the risk of its pale and traumatic counterpart. But the hero is a hero because he or she defies the risk of death.16 His or her triumph is based on this very risk and often even requires the sacrifice of the hero’s life for the birth of the community. In order to understand the social meaning of heroism and its ambivalent nature, we have to turn to its sacrificial core. Since prehistoric times, the construction of collective identity has been closely associated with rituals of sacrifice.17 Offering something precious to the deity strengthened and tightened the ties between the mundane community and the realm of the sacred. Such sacrifices get their sacral and identity-inspiring power from their very violence and their lack of intrinsic meaning—if the sacrificed item were cheap and the sacrifice useful and even profitable for those who offer it, it would not touch the otherworldly realm. Transcending the boundaries of the ordinary and common suspends the ban on violence and bloodshed and even asks for it; it is by the very violence of the sacrifice that the crossing of boundaries is marked (Burkert 1983). In the violent act of sacrifice, the traumatic and triumphant elements of collective identity are not yet separated. The trauma of killing a member of the community merges with the triumphant construction of a bond between community and deity. The fundamental innocence of the victims is not an issue that could challenge and undermine this practice in archaic cultures—there is no conception of justice beyond the idea of revenge, reciprocity and retaliation between groups. Ancient myth had no problem ignoring or disguising the innocence of the victim.18 Yet there is already a feeling for the ambivalence of the sacred character of the victim. In ancient Roman texts, the sacred represents totem as well as taboo: the sacred victim is regarded as polluted and located outside of the community; killing such a victim is not regarded as homicide (Agamben 1995). It is only in the Judeo-Christian heritage that this concealment of the barbaric violence is reversed (Girard 1977).19 Here, the sacrifice can no longer be regarded as just punishment. Instead, the innocence of the victim is fully revealed and the violence is sacrificially reversed by the intervention of God. Revealing the innocence of the victim not only shifts the location of the victim from the periphery to the center and sacralizes the victim up to the point of deification. In discovering his or her sacral character, the victim is lifted to a superhuman position. Beyond the bonds of reciprocity and retaliation, he or she becomes a hero. The hero appears as the ultimate subject, merging individuality and collectivity when he voluntarily offers himself as a sacrifice for the community. The myth of Christ as the divinely innocent victim, who by his self-sacrifice saves not only his own followers but humankind, completes this deconstruction of the ancient conception of victims.20 In the resurrection of Christ from the dead the trauma of self-sacrifice is turned into the ultimate triumph: after three days, the crucified and humiliated victim reemerges as the triumphant hero and savior of the world.

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The oriental myth of Christ’s resurrection can be traced back to the Mesopotamian cult of Tammuz, the God of fertility whose death was lamented and whose resurrection was celebrated in springtime, as well as to Egyptian and Assyrian myths of the king sacrificing himself (J. Assmann 1999a). From late antiquity onward, it has set the path for the Occidental model of heroism that converts death into life, trauma into triumph. According to Roman ethics, the hero had to sacrifice his own life to save the community, and in doing so he or she achieved unsurpassed individuality and immortality. Later on, the Christian cult of martyrdom reconstructed the model of the heroic self-sacrifice to save the community: the martyrs were seen as deifying themselves through their voluntary decision for death.21 The Judeo-Christian mythology of heroic self-sacrifice not only shows a path to increasing individualization, but it is also based on a strong sense of representation of the sacred. In Christ, God is represented as a human being; the faithful Christian partakes in the glory of God; the priest and, later on, the king is the representative of God, etc. (Frazer 1947, p. 96). In early modernity, this merging of the sacred and the mundane on the one hand, and of the individual and the community on the other was secularized in the cult of the founding hero who gives birth to a nation or defends it against a threat from outside. It repeats the pattern of Christomimesis with respect to the newly emerging territorial states.22 The hero is not only seen as the pater patriae, as the demiurgical creator of the kingdom or as the ultimate sovereign who constitutes the law, but also as the sacral individual risking his or her life for the defense of the nation. The heroic self-sacrifice became the central mode of ascending to fame and acquiring a monumental individuality. Its core icon was, of course, the warrior who is ignoring the challenge of death. Originally imagined as the prince or the general leading his troops, the myth of warriors’ heroism was democratized in the cult of the unknown soldier as celebrated in the twentieth century (Koselleck 1988). The heroic individual who sacrifices his life by voluntary decision and whose name has ascended to immortality is replaced by the many nameless men who lost their lives by order or by evil incident. In sacrificing their lives, they hope to step forward from the ranks of the ordinary and boring and acquire an individuality denied to them in everyday life. Rising to fight an oppressor, to liberate one’s nation or to rebel against an unjust authority was the nineteenth century’s call for the heroism of commoners who, by responding to this call, believed they were giving birth or rebirth to their nation. The myth of the people on the barricades as it emerged in the revolutions of 1830 and in particular of 1848 condensed this collective heroism to an icon of emancipation and self-empowerment. Indeed, the revolution established a new state of exception, a state of nature where the old rules were suspended forever and where violence was sacralized (Sorel 1981). But the voices of common German soldiers heralding the outbreak of the war in 1914 also show this seductive attraction of heroism in a striking way. The admiration of war as the arena of the extraordinary, the enthusiasm of young

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British and German students running into their almost certain death at the battle of Langemarck, the postwar cult of the heroism in the trenches are not only the results of fatal ideological blindfoldedness—they were also responses to a widespread thrust to experience the extraordinary, to live through moments of utmost intensity, to encounter the sacred in the danger of death and thereby to achieve immortality.23 Stauffenberg, the leader of the failed rebellion against Hitler in 1944, facing the execution squad, shouted in the moment of death: “Es lebe das heilige Deutschland!”24 Even modern societies, as secularized as they pretend to be, cannot entirely dispense with the heroic sacrifices of individuals in order to construct a sacred bond of collective identity.25 Self sacrificial heroism is, of course, not an exclusive tradition of Western culture. The Muslim tradition of martyrdom is today invoked by Islamist suicide bombers who appear as heroes in their respective communities, whereas to the West they are demonic and criminal terrorists. From an outside point of view, heroes become perpetrators, martyrs are turned into criminals. The sacrificial core of heroism shows also a deep ambivalence with respect to the other counterpart of the hero, the victim (Smelser 1993, 1998a, p. 111). The hero as well as the victim emerges from the liminal horizons of human society, and the perspective on this horizon can barely hide its fundamental instability. It could also be looked at in another way: as perpetrators can be converted into heroes, victims can be turned into heroes and heroes into victims, the trauma of death can be revealed as the path to triumphant immortality; the sacrifice of the individual hero can be celebrated as the birth of a new community (Smith 1894). This ambivalent shifting between heroes and victims, between the abyss of meaninglessness and the glory of sacredness is increased by the anonymity of modern warfare. In contrast to the military heroes before, the innumerable dead of modern warfare have no names; they are buried under the masses of other unknown soldiers, their immortality is a blunder. This anonymity results in a symbolic barrier against heroism—the heroes become victims again.26

Rituals of Remembrance There are no private heroes. As lonely as they might be in the moment of heroism, they are carried by a community that defines them, tries to follow their example and commemorates their lives. Even if not all heroes are dead, their heroism lives only in the community’s acts to represent and remember them. The immortality of the hero as construed by collective rituals is brought out even more clearly if there is no living person anymore whose entanglements in mundane affairs could call into question the purity of the hero. Not only because of the sacrificial core of heroism—only dead heroes are immortal and their immortality is assured even if they die young; indeed, nothing jeopardizes the fame of the hero so much as aging—the hero represents the promise of immortality and the triumphant feeling of birth. Dying young combines this promise with the tragic intrusion of mortality and hints at the hero’s position between Gods and humans.27

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Rituals of remembering the hero can emphasize three elements: they can mark his place in the community, they can recall his voice and his story, and they can represent his face to insiders and outsiders.28 The hero’s place in the community is marked by the veneration of his or her remains, his or her burial site, his or her relics. Every community that is centered on a hero attempts to mourn the dead hero in places where he or she lived and where he or she performed the extraordinary deed, where he or she was born and where he or she died. If still existing, the remains of his or her dead body will attract followers and his or her grave will become the local center of a particular cult. It stands for the mortal and human part of the hero and links it to his or her sacred and immortal existence.29 The hero’s voice in the community is, in its basic form, recalled by narrating his or her story to the community. Of course, the community knows about the importance of the hero as part of the community’s mythology. Therefore, the narration does not simply transport information about the hero’s life; most of the basic elements are well known to all but the novices in the community. Instead, it brings the myth again to the attention of the public, it modifies and reinterprets it according to the situation of the day, it adds color and refinements to the basic story, it embodies new elements representing the contemporary challenges to the community, it invents new stories linked to the surroundings of the hero. Although the members of the community vary in their ability to present the story colorfully and convincingly, the myth itself, in its most elementary form, is common and public knowledge available for every member of the community.30 The face of the hero is represented in its most elementary form by heraldic signs. These heraldic signs range from the totems of the clan to the colors of the nation, from the coat of arms—the eagle, the lion, the lily or the cross—on the shields of knights to the banners and emblems shown on national celebrations, from the heraldic pattern of the seal to the symbols of religious fraternities, from the caps of famous sports clubs to the faces of pop heroes on the shirts of their fans. All these heraldic signs symbolize the collective identity of followers who partake in the charisma of a hero—of warriors and princes, saints and sports heroes. In distinction to the narration of myth that remembers the hero for the members of the community (Campbell 1971, p. 382), the presentation of heraldic signs indicates membership mainly outside of the community, in the public space or in direct confrontation with outsiders when the boundary between insiders and outsiders, between friend and foe has to be demarcated quickly. Here the pride of followers and the awareness of identity has to be signaled by clearly visible symbols that are even to deter hostile outsiders—like the horrible head of the medusa on the shield of the ancient hero. Thus, heraldic signs represent the face of the hero in its most simple form.31 In its most elementary forms—as narration of the myth, as veneration of the mortal remainders and as presentation of the icon—the memory of the hero is accessible for every member of the community. Elaborated rituals that reenact

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triumphant heroism, however, have to be limited to special occasions; they must not overwhelm and suffocate the mundane affairs of everyday life.32 Therefore, differentiation takes over. The ritual remembrance of the heroes is concentrated on special places and times, when the myth is reenacted on stage in dances and plays, when the traditional masks and costumes are put on, when the community celebrates by taking special food and beverages, when the community rallies and presents its statues, heraldic signs, banners and colors—in short, the totems of its heroes—to the outside world (Nora 1992). But it is not only the effort to open up spaces that are discharged from the burden of memory that fosters the separation between places and times of remembrance on the one hand and everyday life on the other.33 A common date of remembrance also allows for the construction of a supralocal community: all members—wherever they are—are united in a simultaneous celebration of memory, but return to their everyday businesses when the day of remembrance has passed. It even gives way to a complex integration of different locally separated communities of remembrance by one embracing principle.34 Thus the calendar of saints that emerged in the late Middle Ages connected different parishes and fraternities, monasteries and religious orders; each of them was devoted to a particular saint and celebrated his or her day in a special way, but all of them knew about the all-embracing calendar, the times of memory for the others (Cronin 1963). This spread of a common calendar of saints and heroes indicates a new pattern of societal integration: the unconnected diversity of local saints is replaced by an encompassing temporal order that travelers can account for if they move from one local community to the other. Indeed, the rise of the calendar of saints in the eleventh century coincides with an increasing activity of traveling in medieval Europe—pilgrimages and crusades, trade and the exchange between monasteries grew considerably. Of course, these constructions of collective identity by common days of remembrance are not limited to premodern societies. They are part of the ritual backbone of many contemporary communities. Christmas and Easter customs in Orthodox, Protestant and Catholic communities, the annual celebration of the respective saints in Catholic fraternities and parishes, the celebration of Chanukah and Yom Kippur in Jewish communities and of Ramadan in Muslim societies are central for the construction of the respective religious identities, as are the establishment and observance of national holidays for the national identities (Bell 1997, p. 102). Here, not only are the independence day or the birthday of the ruler or founder celebrated but also the heroes of minorities and movements: Martin Luther King day is a case in point. In modern democratic communities, these rituals of remembering frequently shift the focus from individual heroes to the heroification of entire groups that, by rising against repressive rulers, give birth to the national demos. It is the heroism of collective action that is remembered in the U.S. Fourth of July, in the Quatorze Juillet of the French Republic, in the celebration of the German unity after 1990, in the celebration of the Polish uprising against the Nazi occupation in 1944, etc.

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Here, too, in the myth of the revolutionary uprising that broke the continuity of an authoritarian rule, it is a heroic action that opened up a new space of collective action, where the unprecedented could happen and the demos could constitute itself in violent action devoid of the chains and shields of law (Eisenstadt 1978; Koselleck 1984; Sorel 1981). At least it is remembered that way, as banal as the revolutionary action might have been to the eyes of its contemporaries. When it happened, the Boston Tea Party was not reported as the birth of a new powerful nation, but as a minor act of insubordination in the colonies—not uncommon at the wild margin of large empires. Similarly, the seizure of the Bastille on 14th July 1789 was hardly noticed as the heroic rise of a new republican nation. It was a part of the usual urban riots of the eighteenth century: an agitated mass of people liberated a dozen nonpolitical prisoners and killed their guards, in case they did not join the ranks of the mob (Tilly 1986). Later on, the seizure of the Bastille was remembered as the core event of the French Revolution and as the democratic constitution of the French nation. The storming of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in 1917, too, did not attract much attention in the contemporary situation of war and unrest. Only later on, mediated by Eisenstein’s famous movie, was it regarded as the start of the Russian Revolution, as the rise of the people against the brutal monarchic rule. If the ritual of remembering constructs the heroes, they can also be deconstructed by a ban on their remembrance. A change in political regime usually also affects the calendar. The founding heroes of the old order vanish and new days of remembrance are institutionalized, sometimes turning the victims of the ancien régime into the heroes of the new one. The collapses of the German Nazi regime in 1945 and of the Communist rule in East Germany show these axial reversals of heroes and victims in an exemplary way. The “Führer’s” birthday and the celebration of the October Revolution were replaced by memorial days for the victims of Nazism and the uprising of the people against the Communist regime.

Relics: The Places of Heroes In contrast to calendars, the local specification of collective memory allows for a quite different mode of integration by collective memory; it replaces the idea of a simultaneous and superlocal moment of remembrance with the temporal continuity of memory concentrated on special places where the relics of the dead hero are preserved. In the veneration of relics and remainders the community marks its sacred center as the place of the hero (Nora 1992; François 1996). The presence of relics commands piety. Whoever enters the tomb or approaches the relics is expected to abstain from mundane affairs; outsiders are requested to be silent and to respect the rituals of remembrance performed by the members of the community. This obligation to piety results, not merely from the awe inspiring presence of the hero’s remainders, but also from the awareness that the hero is presented as mortal, as a dead corpse, as decaying bones. His mortal

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body is still with us, the mortals. But this obvious mortality of the human part of the hero renders his or her spiritual presence ever more palpable; the true hero is invisible, but powerful. Miracles are attributed to his influence, the members of the community experience a strong sense of collective identity, the pilgrims speak about the encounter with the extraordinary when they return to their homes.35 The extension of this community of memory varies. Clans worshiping their ancestors place their relics in a special shrine and take it with them if they change places. For nomadic tribes in particular, the relics of their ancestors mark the sacred center that represents the kinship bond and its continuity wherever they are. The material presence of the dead ancestors cannot be replaced by just the knowledge that they are buried somewhere else. In local communities the sacred has to be locally represented; there is still no strong pattern of social order connecting these different communities whether sedentary or nomadic, and there is no need to represent an embodiment of the sacred on a supralocal level. Life in the early Middle Ages came close to this situation. Before the turn of the millennium, Western Europe consisted mainly of local communities gathered around a monastery or the castle of the local ruler. Cities were very small and an embracing social order, as represented by the Holy Roman Empire, was extremely weak. Therefore the remembrance of the heroic past focused on the local presence of relics. The diversity of the local saints reflected the scattered map of early medieval society, the wide empty spaces between the local communities and the lack of central powers, whether cultural or political. In the Carolingian reign of the ninth century, the rapidly spreading cult of the saints’ relics was debated as the issue of translatio, that is, the transfer of the relics from their original place—mostly in the Mediterranean areas—to new Christian communities in the north of the empire.36 This transfer of the sacred relics reflected, in turn, the famous translatio imperii, the takeover of the ancient Roman Empire by the Frankish chiefs after the crowning of Charlemagne (Karolus Magnus) by the Roman patriarch in 800. It was not before the central Middle Ages that a hierarchy of universal saints and their relics, most important among them the euchrist himself, emerged, reflecting the increasing power of the pope in Rome. With the rise of superlocal saints and the spread of relics brought by the crusaders to northern Europe, the movement of pilgrimage to the places of famous relics gained additional salience. Crusades that conquered relics, and pilgrimages that revered them, set the Christian community of the central Middle Ages in motion.37 Collecting relics became a passion for kings like the collection of art five centuries later on, but it reflected also the increasing power of princes over more and more local communities. By collecting the relics of saints, the prince could expand and extend his power, deprive the local communities of their spiritual center and justify his position as a representative of the sacred.38 But also the new monastic movements needed material centers of devotion to attract pilgrims and to justify their spiritual claims. After the twelfth century, the cult of the saints’ relics lost importance as the structural backbone of Christian society; it was increasingly regarded as a laic

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mode of religious devotion, but it never faded away (Reader 1993). Even today, Christian pilgrims travel to Assisi, Torino, Rome, Lourdes or Tschenstochau as they did in medieval times to Santiago de Compostella, Cologne or Canterbury. And, of course, the pilgrims’ movement is not a special Occidental phenomenon, but is central for most translocal religious communities that believe in the embodiment of the sacred: Muslim pilgrims follow their religious duty in the Hadj to Mecca, Buddhists make pilgrimages to the places where the Buddha was born, had his enlightenment, gave his first teaching or died. Furthermore, the veneration of relics is not limited to religious communities, but can be found in the early modern princely state as well as in the construction of modern nations. The monumental tombs of the rulers in the crypta of churches they sponsored connect the two bodies of the king—his hidden dead corpse and the artful image of the immortal hero (Kantorowicz 1957). Later on, with the rise of the modern nation-state, the rulers and their dynasties are succeeded by the great men of a nation, by the founding fathers, political leaders and cultural heroes. Their relics, too, are sacred places frequently located in churches, temples or mosques like Westminster Cathedral in London or Santa Croce in Florence or the Dome des Invalides in Paris. After adolescents learn at school about the heroism of their founding fathers, they are, as part of their education as citizens, officially escorted and supported to visit the memorial sites of the nation in the capital city, in Paris, London, Washington, Moscow, Bejing, or Tokyo. Global communication networks provide no substitute for the local presence of the sacred as embodied in the remainders of the hero. The visit to the Dome des Invalides in Paris, to the temple wall in Jerusalem and to the Kaaba in Mecca cannot be replaced by their representations on the Internet. The concentration of memory on particular places and its embodiment in particular objects is, of course, a social construction of the present. As such, it not only represents the social order and collective identity of its carriers, but it is also open to debate and doubts, to contested claims and bloody conflict. This tendency toward conflict and controversy increases if heroism is represented in material relics or places. It is easier to claim the property of an object and a place than to do this with respect to time, and ownership claims are prone to be challenged, objects can be stolen, land can be occupied. Whoever owns the places of memory has the key to collective identity and, if it is not his own, but rather the collective identity of others, he can humiliate them by preventing access to the sacred places or even by abusing the sacred places for mundane purposes. Destroying the temple of the enemies, erasing their cemeteries, stealing and mocking the relics of the other community are the ultimate ways to defy their collective identity. Debates and feuds between medieval monasteries or cities about the possession of the bones of saints were, therefore, not insane aberrations, but desperate cultural wars about collective identity and the access to the sacred core. The Venetian theft of the relics of Saint Marc from Alexandria in 827 (Geary 1978, p. 107), or the transfer of the relics of Saint Nicholas from Myra to Bari in 1087 are stories of armed robbery and paid treason, of faked documents and distorted justifications (Geary 1978, p. 88).

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Of course, there were economic interests at stake. Traders of relics (the most famous one was Deusdona in the ninth century) could make a fortune, organizations of relic merchants emerged, and the theft of relics became a major problem; scholarly expertise could be called upon, soldiers and sailors could offer their services, and, above all, the guardians of the relics, the local traders and innkeepers could profit from the many pilgrims attracted by the sensation and hoping for salvation. More than monuments and public rituals of remembrance, the embodiment of the sacred in relics fosters its commercial and professional exploitation. Profit margins in the business of rarities exceed those in the trade of replica—like, later on, the aura of the original piece of art justified its price in distinction to the reproduction. But all these commercial and professional interests depended on the fact that the relics of the heroes and their local presence were imputed with spiritual power. It was the emanation of the sacred that justified the expenses, toils and inconveniences of the pilgrimage. In a similar way, we cannot regard the crusaders invading and conquering Palestine just as greedy adventurers in search of new colonies. Certainly, many of them were crude warriors attracted by the lure of conquest, but in venturing out into the unknown, they also tried the path of heroism, driven by the mission to bring the sacred center of their community under their control. This reference to the spiritual power of relics and remainders is not the mark of an exotic past; it is very much alive. The Jewish claim to Jerusalem and the remains of the Temple Wall on the one side, and the Muslim claim to the same city and the Dome of Rocks on the other are not carried by strategic reasoning, by the calculation of monetary profit and military advantage. They cannot be compensated or negotiated—it is the sacred core of collective identity, it is the place of David and Muhammad, that is at stake. Reconquering the land of the ancestors and bringing the heroes’ bones back to their homeland is, therefore, the ultimate ritual of remembering the heroes— regardless if it were Napoleon to Paris, the Prussian kings to Berlin after the unification of Germany or the Russian czar to the Kremlin after the collapse of the Soviet empire. Even the relics of former heroes who have been turned to icons of evil do not cease to fascinate contemporary societies. After Hitler’s suicide at the end of the Second World War, his corpse was burned by his bodyguards, but the search for his bones and remainders kept the attention of a global audience for decades. The same holds true for the debate about the skull of Bormann, one of the highest Nazi leaders, who was said to have escaped Berlin in 1945 and to have lived in South America for many years. Once cheered as charismatic heroes, the Nazi leaders were publicly turned into the opposite after 1945. As monstrous demons, they continued to haunt the collective memory of Germany. We will return to this issue in chapter five.

Monuments: The Face of the Hero Even if they have been frequently faked, relics are, by their very nature, rare. Their power is local and fades away if distance increases. The members of the community

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have to travel to approach the sacred. With the rise of larger territorial orders and sedentary citizenship, new forms of collective representations of the sacred are required (Hardtwig 1990, p. 13, p. 224). The representation of the dead hero has to be decoupled from material relics that are considered to be a part of him or her and brought to the centers of public life. This is achieved by monuments erected by the living in memory of the dead.39 Monuments represent the face of the dead hero. In contrast to relics, they are less demanding on piety and not particularly sensitive to the presence of outsiders. Like their predecessor, the heraldic sign, they are constructed by the members of the community, but presented also to outsiders; they can penetrate everyday life, but they can also represent the sacred core of the hero if no mortal remainders are available. Some of the monuments that have been constructed by the rulers themselves during their lifetimes, like the pyramids of ancient Egypt, Hadrian’s mausoleum in Rome or Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe in Paris, mark the transition between remainders and true monuments.40 They hint at remainders and relics, but these are hidden or entirely vanished behind the monumental architecture. Pure monuments cannot claim anymore a special connection between the symbolic content and the particular place where they were erected. These monuments dispense with the mortal relics of the hero and represent the absent hero by sculptures and images, by architecture and space. By cutting the ties to the mortal remainders, these pure monuments hint directly at the sacred core of collective identity. Yet, the turn toward pure representation engenders new risks: The ties of the sacred to the mortal community are weakened, the hero tends to be entirely out of this world, he can vanish into abstraction. In order to counteract this evanescence of the sacred, the hero has to be presented as a human being; he has to get a face again. The representation of the hero’s face is, therefore, at the core of the monument. Most important in the Western transition from relics to monuments is certainly the spread of the image of the crucified Christ. In early medieval art, Christ was presented commonly as the supreme ruler of the world, and even if he was shown on the cross, he was the triumphant hero and king of kings (Kantorowicz 1957). In contrast, late medieval art depicted God as a tortured being, thus emphasizing mortality as symbolized in the relic, but dispensing with the relic itself. This transition was repeated by statues of the universal saints— above all, Mary—which could be found in many churches although they did not dispose of the respective relics (Carroll 1986; Beissel 1972, 1976). These saints linked local patronage and religious fraternities to the universal church. In a similar way, sculptures showing the prince on a horse in the central place of a city represented the princely power integrating the early modern territorial state even if the prince and his court were far away. The relics of the rulers were still special places, but usually removed from the large cathedrals and located in private chapels. Monuments representing the victorious liberator of the nation—Washington, Bolivar, Napoleon, Garibaldi, Lenin, Marcus Garvey, Kim il Sung—imagine the nation rising against the ancient regime, even if the everyday business of the citizen is well established in legal routines and commercial prac-

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tices. Monuments of cultural heroes like Goethe and Dante, Shakespeare and Rembrandt, Mycziewicz and Pushkin, represent the rising bourgeoisie that defined itself by reference to culture instead of capital and acquired education instead of inherited titles. In all these cases, an embracing invisible social order, the territorial state or the nation, has to be visualized and represented. Because of the very invisibility of the order, it has to be imagined as a face and a name—as the hero who mediates between the invisible sacred order and the visible mundane locality and creates thus the supralocal community. This representation of the sacred core is challenged to a certain degree by the impersonal identity of the modern democratic nation. The democratic nation has by its very constitution no personal center anymore. The nation is in all its citizens and the commonality of all its citizens is the nation. Hence the hero has, in a literal sense, thousands of faces. This crisis of representation, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century and fully developed after the First World War, led to the monuments for the anonymous fallen soldiers (Koselleck and Jeismann 1994; Koselleck 1997). Here, the representation of the heroic core of the community still has a face, but it has lost its individual name. The nameless heroes are surrounded by a tragic aura, their death is less triumphant than traumatic; finally, the heroes are victims again. A different, even opposite reaction to this crisis of representation can be found in monuments that have given up any symbolic connection to historical persons—monuments of Germania and Britannia, for example, symbolize the triumphant and victorious nation as an ahistorical Goddess. Here, the ideal and immortal hero still has a name and a face, but is entirely decoupled, not only from the remainders, but also from the memory of a mortal historical person. Only when the impersonal identity of the nation gets a face can it be imagined as heroic. But because every citizen knows that this face is fiction, it is no longer considered truly sacred. Therefore, the awe, inspired by the presence of the sacred relics or the vivid memory of the hero’s life, has to be replaced by the awe provoked by the sheer size of the monument—the figures of the heroes are blown up to gigantic proportions. Finally, in the attempt to recreate the awe of the sacred, even the human face of the hero is lost (Mosse 1993). Because of its otherworldly nature the sacred itself is regarded as impossible to represent, and this crisis of representation extends also to the image of the hero who was, originally, a mediator between the Gods and the humans. Repeating inadvertently the Protestant critique of figurative art in the churches, the image of the hero is banned from his temple, the monument. What is left are empty spaces, towering columns and huge scales. The national monuments of Vittorio Emmanuele in Rome still have figurative decoration, the Völkerschlachtsdenkmal in Leipzig is already devoid of it, and the planned Nazi monument of Großdeutschland in Berlin was sheer megalomania of empty space, scales and columns. In the attempt to represent and visualize the sacredness of the hero, the face of the hero is lost—the empty space of the monument is ready to be converted into a monument of the victims.

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Monuments can be erected at any place where the community of memory wants to mark its center. Because this is usually also the center of urban everyday life, the awe and piety with respect to the sacred is difficult to sustain. Even if they are of gigantic size, monuments are easier to blend into ordinary life than dead corpses. Below the monument the mundane life can continue to flourish. This blending of the hero’s monument into the everyday life of citizens is put one step further if the city streets and places are named after the heroes of the community. Here, the hero’s name has entirely replaced his face and the citizens’ everyday lives can continue without remembering the sacred core of heroism. Thus the monumentalization of the hero also discharges the individuals from the obligation to remember the hero constantly. Monuments are the depositories of collective memory. Monuments may be difficult to construct, but they are easy to destroy. Changes of political regimes and religious authorities not only affect the calendar but also result in the destruction of monuments (Koselleck and Jeismann 1994). The Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten ordered the statues of the old Gods to be destroyed, Christian missionaries engaged in a destructive war against the pagan statues of devotion, radical Protestantism banned the statues of saints from the churches, the French revolutionaries converted churches into stores for grains and guns, the monuments of Hitler were crushed and blown up in the German cities after 1945, as were the Lenin monuments after 1990. Because these monuments represented the triumphant and sacred core of the past community, the new community could not just reduce them to mere aesthetic objects or pieces of historical interest. If the triumphant hero is turned into a haunting demon, his symbolic representation is destroyed in a collective act of purification. Even the history of street names tells about the destruction of old heroes and the construction of new ones. Monuments are, obviously, not just decorative architecture; they reflect and construct collective identity and their destruction hints at the ambivalence of heroes between triumph and trauma.

Classics: The Voice of the Hero But the imagination of the hero in the monument is not the only way to decouple the remembrance from the material remainders of the hero. A refined and less obvious, but not less powerful, ritual of remembering the heroic core of communities can be found in the citation of the classics.41 It recalls the name and the voice of the hero—his message, his words, his works—and decouples them from his face and his material remains. If we consider an author as a classic, if we quote his or her work in order to achieve the consent of others, if we repeat or reinterpret a classical pattern because we regard the aesthetics to be unsurpassed, if we regard a poet, a composer, a painter, a sculptor to be a supremely creative individual, that is, a genius, we are constructing a hero. The Greek sculptors Pheidias and Praxiteles, the Renaissance

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painters Michelangelo and Raphael, the Chinese poets Li Tai-po and Lao-tse, the writers Shakespeare, Dante and Ariosto, Corneille and Racine, Goethe and Schiller, the musicians Bach and Handel, Mozart and Beethoven, the thinkers Confucius and Ibn Kaldun, Plato and Augustine, Newton and Voltaire, Kant and Hegel are classical classics. All of these cultural heroes were not only influential for their contemporaries, but, later on, were seen as original lonely geniuses who, beyond the confines of tradition, created a new cultural universe in a Godlike manner. Instead of continuing a tradition, they are seen as the founders of a new one. This demiurgical act creates a new tradition that is, later on, called classic. Even those who deliberately rebelled against any classicism—as did the German romantic poet Novalis or the French Baudelaire, the painters Monet and Picasso, and the philosophers Marx and Nietzsche, Freud and Benjamin—can, later on, be lifted up to the ranks of the immortal genius who blazed the path for a new tradition. To declare a period to be classic culture and to relate it to a towering genius means not only to exempt it from criticism and any attempt to surpass it, but also to ignore its predecessors. In declaring a period to be classic, we establish a boundary against the infinite track into the past. We do not have to think about what was before the classic, what influenced it and what it depended upon. The classic is not contingent, but sacred. And it is exactly this sacredness of the classic that justifies its being taught to the current generations, its entering textbooks and school curricula, and its being quoted by people who want to emphasize their closeness to the sacred core of cultural communities. What is true for the political hero holds also for the cultural one. There are neither natural geniuses nor timeless classics. Both are social constructions of the present time, carried by cultural communities that create their collective identity by declaring an artist and his or her period to be classic, unsurpassed, paradigmatic. In the construction of a classic, the sacred core of a cultural community, of a scholarly field or an aesthetic style—as abstract as its symbolic products might be—gets a name and is imagined as an individual person, as inimitable and unique. Thus the classic as a sovereign subject mediates between the transcendental realm of eternal beauty and truth on the one hand and the profane business of normal science and decorative craftsmanship on the other. Of course, the works that are regarded as classic vary and change. The heroes of today may only rarely be mentioned tomorrow. Apart from the devaluation of the classics of the past, the number of classics in a particular field also varies. Narrowing the range of those authors or works that are listed as classics may hint at a consolidation of an intellectual discipline, an increasing consensus within a community and a normalization of a field, whereas a large variety of contested claims to enthrone a classic indicates a lack of consensus and coherence of the genre. The construction of a classic continues the line of appeasement of conflicts about heroes. Bloody conflicts about holy lands and sacred relics are quite common, monuments may cause public debates, but rarely bloody feuds, reverence for a classic may not be shared by everyone, but it is rarely contested or put to

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revenge.42 Outsiders can just ignore the devotion to a genius or the quotation of a classic by his or her followers, whereas it is difficult to disregard the obligation to silence and piety in sacred places or in the presence of the hero’s relics—the community will take offense. Tourists visiting sacred places without showing the obligatory respect are frequently seen committing such an offense, but readers who question the author’s enthusiasm for a classic will only in exceptional cases be publicly noticed. In the construction of a classic, the community of memory is even more decoupled from the mortal existence of the hero than it is in the building of a monument. It is not the entanglement in mundane affairs and mistakes, but his or her works, words and ideas that count and will be remembered and their reinterpretation and adaptation to the present day situation can dispense with the contemporary context. That Aristotle was the ideologue of slavery, Marx an anti-Semite and misogynist, Kant a neurotic pedant, Baudelaire a drug addict, Voltaire a corrupt spy for the French King—all this is easily disregarded and has to be, if we consider them as cultural heroes. Bringing the cultural hero back into his original context risks deconstructing him as a classic. But if the refinements of historical research may erode the pedestal of the classics, the heroes will survive in popular culture, in novels and schoolbooks. From the nineteenth century, the teaching of the community’s past was focused on the great men and, later on, even the great women, the heroes of the mythical tales of The Iliad and The Odyssey, of the Nibelungenlied and of Perceval, the legends of martyrs and saints, the stories about Luther and Washington, Napoleon and Barbarossa, Frederic the Great, Alexander and Caesar. Teaching the collective identity was mainly a presentation of founding heroes, mostly triumphant, sometimes tragic, always programmatic (Giesen 1998a). If the reference to the classics is shifted down to the level of basic education, some advanced intellectual fields have largely left the reference to the classics behind their vanguard of discourse. They have passed the threshold to normal science and present themselves no longer as a tradition founded in a classical heritage, but as timeless objective knowledge—like the natural sciences that confine the reference to the classic to a small chapter at the beginning of their textbooks; others thrust boldly to crush the tradition in order to create the unprecedented and new on the shambles of yesterday’s classics. But even the boldest modernism has its secret heroes whose revolutionary achievement is remembered—modern art and its celebration of Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol or Josef Beuys is just one example, the current veneration for Jacques Derrida as the master of deconstructivism is another one. If it is just intertextuality that matters, why are the audiences paying to experience the bodily presence of their intellectual hero?

The Hero’ s Dress for Everybody: Historicism All cultural production—literature, sculpture, painting, music, philosophy, science—is influenced by the already existing patterns, forms and examples, whether

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inadvertently or deliberately, whether as repetition or as revolution. But classicism or historicism differs from simple lines of influence. It turns the repetition of the past patterns into an aesthetic program. In contrast to modernism, here the past is sacralized and raised to a level that the present efforts always have to strive for, but will never be able to achieve (Giesen 1999a). The incarnation of this sacralized past is the aesthetic hero, the genius who coined the period he lived in. But the historicist’s reference to the past ceases to present the face of the hero. The hero is represented only by his or her traces in history, by imitating his creations, by citing symbols, forms, images and icons. The genius himself is sacralized to a degree that forbids any depiction and representation. Historicism continues the line of increasing depersonalization that started with the cult of monuments in the nineteenth century. The sacredness of the hero is turned into a disposable decoration, into a dress that everybody can put on and exchange for another in the next moment. Attempts to revive the aesthetics of the past and to teach the classical heritage are frequently associated with the nineteenth century. Indeed, the aesthetics of the nineteenth century showed the marks of historicism and classicism in a striking way: there were neo-Gothic, neo-Romanesque, neobaroque, even neoclassical styles in architecture; the program of the Pre-Raphaelites proclaimed a return to Renaissance art even before Raphael; painters like Makart copied the style of Rubens and Titian (Fillitz 1996); Brahms defended the classical heritage of music against the innovations by Richard Wagner; princes like Ludwig von Bayern constructed new castles in an exaggerated Gothic or neobaroque style; churches and stock exchanges (Kreisel 1954), train stations (Krings 1985) and even public lavatories were built in the style of the past centuries; cathedrals that never had towers before were completed with perfect towers in the style of the past (Cologne); the home of the educated bourgeois boasted furniture in Gothic or Renaissance style (Brönner 1982, 1987); telephones were disguised as little Gothic cathedrals; historical associations tried to restore ruins and to reconstruct the buildings of the past better than they ever had existed before; history ascended to a core position among the scholarly disciplines—in short, the nineteenth century was at least as fascinated with the past as it was attracted by progress into the future (Giesen 1999a). Of course, the historicism of the nineteenth century was trapped by its fascination with the classics of the past. It widely ignored that the classics themselves, behind their seemingly autonomous creativity, referred to remote predecessors, that they reinterpreted their own classics. The architecture of classicism in the second half of the eighteenth century revived the model of the Renaissance and Roman patterns; Renaissance art, in turn, was deeply influenced by the rediscovery of Roman antiquity and changed its aesthetics of the male nude profoundly after the discovery of the monumental statue of the Hercules Farnese; and—most importantly perhaps—Roman art itself copied the great masters of Greek sculpture and proclaimed the so-called Hadrianic renaissance. In periods of historicism and classicism, copies and reinterpretations were not seen as a sin against the requirement of authenticity—to the contrary, they allowed the spiritual core, the “Gestalt,” the ideal form of classical beauty, to be

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brought out in an even purer way than in the original. Thus the classicists of the early nineteenth century, following Winckelmann’s aesthetics, could consider the plaster copy of an antique statue to be the purer and more valuable representation of beauty than the antique original that was hidden under a layer of patina— dirty, truncated and broken. In historicism, the present community is linked to the past, not by the material continuity of relics and remainders, but by style and form. This insistence on the construction of the past by symbolic patterns and ideas, instead of material embodiments, reflects the shift from the nobility to the bourgeoisie as the main carriers of collective memory (Möckl 1996). Nobility refers to bodily lineage that cannot be copied and imitated—you have it or you do not have it, and any attempt to acquire it by education is doomed to failure. In contrast, the bourgeoisie is based on property and profession, on education and office—in short, on attributes that can be achieved and exchanged. The very mode of constructing the past reflects this shift in the recruitment and constitution of class. But the nobility with all its pretensions against the rising bourgeoisie has not always been able to look back to an impressive descent. This is not only because many lines of noble descent had been faked and invented, bought and rewritten afterwards, but also because they, too, had their own beginnings. The Medici of Florence started as a family of wealthy merchants who rose to be the city’s rulers by impressing their co-citizens with princely splendor; they organized spectacular public ceremonies, commissioned art and public buildings and thus turned down their rivals like the Pazzi and Strozzi families (Burckhardt 1988). But historicism does not only hide the novelty of a group in the center of power, it can also disguise the decay of power. Ludwig II von Bayern, the fabled and crazy king, dressed—according to the occasion—in different historical styles; he appeared as a Germanic warrior or a Baroque prince, he staged parties and theatrical rituals that revived a glorious past in contrast to his actual political powerlessness. In putting on the princely clothes, the ruler can conceal his simple and nude humanity and rise up to the pedestal of the hero. Historicism is, indeed, based on the attempt to hide the newness, insecurity and symbolic nudity of individuals and groups entering the center of society behind the traditional dress of greatness—commoners dressing up as heroes. Historicism is an aesthetics of the theatre, separating between the mask and the face, between facade and interior, between public appearance and private existence. In this separation, the private is concealed from the public eye, the traditional facade has to conceal the questionable, mundane and even weird mechanism behind it—like the Gothic facade of the train station covers the modern technology that is considered ugly and intimidating for the public eye. The aesthetics of the theatre succeeds, however, only if the public forgets, for a moment at least, that it is just a play, a facade, a mask. It has to be taken for real, it has to ignore the split between the mortal nudity of the individual and the splendid dress of the immortal hero, it has to hail and applaud the hero and to approve his enthronement in public rituals.

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Occasionally, the tension between both sides is supremely overridden by special gestures of the hero. When Napoleon was crowned as l’empereur, he used the traditional dress of the French kings, but changed the embroidered heraldic signs from the Bourbon lily to the bee; instead of being crowned by the representative of the church, as all French kings were before, he, in a sudden and unexpected gesture, took the crown from the archbishop and crowned himself. The hero could not dispense with the traditional dress, but he insisted on his selfconstitution in the ritual. But it would be misleading to see the historicism of the nineteenth century as a special dress for the ruler whose legitimacy was questionable. To the contrary: historicism fluidified the splendor of the past and made it accessible for every citizen (Pieske 1988; Plumpe 1997). The style of the past could be copied and transferred, even exaggerated and improved—the number of columns, pedestals, ornaments and towers decorating the facade increased, regardless of the function hidden behind the facade. In the end, the reference to the classical form of the past loses all its distinctive value—it runs into a crisis of inflation. Beyond the barriers of privilege and scarcity, everyone could adapt the heraldic signs of the glorious past to his or her own leisure and pleasures. What was once the aweinspiring embodiment of the sacred was now watered down to an omnipresent and banal commodity. The hero did not have a thousand faces anymore; instead, his dress was copied a million times and sold as a souvenir. Against this historicist banalization of the past and the neoclassicist trivialization of the hero, Nietzsche pointed his thunderous criticism. Disgusted with the pious repetition of the classical heritage and mocking the naive optimism of those who still believed in progress and utopias, he praised the intensity of life, the triumphant awareness of the present moment, its vitality and ineffability (Nietzsche 1977d). Only in discharging the burden of the past as well as in tearing down the illusions of the future happiness, in destroying the conventions of the present society and in rejecting the guilt of the past, could a triumphant subjectivity be set free and give way to the creative act (Nietzsche 1977c). Only beyond guilt and punishment, after an acid deconstruction of fake morality and hypocrisy, on the shambles of the old statues of heroes who had enslaved humanity, could the pure will and the pure creativity of the triumphant subject emerge— a titanic hero constituting himself and for himself, dependent on nobody’s appreciation, without followers and admirers.43 The Nietzschean attempt to reconstruct the hero as the Übermensch (Nietzsche 1977a), who does not represent the sacred, but is the sacred himself, is, in itself, an exemplar of groundbreaking intellectual heroism that—finally—required the sacrifice of his own mundane existence as an intellectual. It reestablishes the distance between the hero and the ordinary human being; it overcomes its banalization by radical and frightening determination; it shows that—even if banalization can kill the mundane face of the hero— the idea of heroism itself is immortal. It is a categorical presupposition of culture, a mediation between the sacred center and mundane society—as technology is an indispensable mediation between society and its other frontier, nature.

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But the Nietzschean attempt to deconstruct the chains of conventions that had turned humans into intellectual slaves does not pursue its endeavor to the very end and look from the summit of triumphant subjectivity into the abyss without which the summit would not exist. In its powerful attempt to break the chains that tied not only Hegel’s servant to his master (Hegel 1980, p. 113), but also the master to the servant in the act of recognition, it replaced Hegel’s fundamental insight about distinction and dialectics as the essence of serfdom and domination by the free-floating, bottomless creative moment. Blowing up this elusive moment to the focus of triumphant subjectivity, it disregards that every society has not only a center but also a fringe, that it not only cannot dispense with heroes, but that it also produces victims. Both are the extremes between which collective identity unfolds—as birth and death, triumph and trauma, demarcate the categorical reference points for individual identity and life.

Places without Heroes: The Evanescence of the Sacred As important as the hero might be for the triumphant construction of collective identity, there are, of course, places and times which are, by their very structure, devoid of heroism and the personal embodiment of the sacred. First of all, social relations can fail to provide the fundamental distance that is indispensable for the construction of heroism. Close friends and relatives rarely regard the respective other as heroes—even if they admire special qualities of the other or love each other. A wife calling her husband “my hero” can hardly mean it. The complex picture of the other which results from intimate personal knowledge impedes the imagination of the sacred as embodied in heroes. Charisma fades away in the attempt to turn it into an everyday practice. Close and continuous interaction cannot avoid establishing informal rules and routines that are inconsistent with the sovereignty and exceptionalism of the hero—he is beyond routines as he is above the law. At the opposite end of this dimension of intimacy and personal knowledge ranges the object, the embodiment of the profane. Objects are seen as elements of the outside world that are impossible to communicate with, to argue with and to agree with. In contrast to the sacred and its immediate, irrefutable and even frightening calling, in distinction also to the contingencies of personal relationships with other humans, the objects are silent and do not challenge us.44 They are devoid of any sovereignty. In demarcating ourselves against objects, we can increase our own awareness of being sovereign and autonomous subjects. Cultures which emphasize the subjectivity of individuals tend, therefore, also to objectify the world and to treat even human relationships as if they were objects. Max Weber’s account of rationalization as disenchantment, objectification (Versachlichung) and routinization (Veralltäglichung) provides a paradigm for this symbolic transformation from the personal into the impersonal, from subjectivity into objectivity, from the sacred to the profane.45 Reformatory Protestantism con-

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sidered—according to Weber—the objects of the world as devoid of any sacral meaning. The profane realm of worldly action was sharply contrasted with the transcendental realm of salvation that alone was the resort of the sacred. Representation of the sacred in objects was considered pagan idolatry. This expulsion of the sacred turned the mundane world into a realm of pure objects. If thus mundane activities become the “objects” of trade and bureaucracy, mediated by money and the impersonal law, there is no place for the personal charisma of heroes anymore. The pioneers who opened up a new market may be invested with a touch of heroism, but, once established, the market has no heroes anymore. Revolutionaries who fought for citizenship rights may be considered as heroes, but the citizen enjoying these rights is no hero anymore. The same holds true for other arenas of routinized objectification—if the charisma of the ruler is turned into bureaucratic administration, if the genius of the classics gives way to normal science, if the wisdom of the judge or shaman is replaced by professional services, if war is turned into work.46 Mediation in modern institutional systems has a voice, but no face and no place anymore. The faces of professionals disappear behind their products and services. Law, money, science, and values claim validity beyond the confines of localities, they abstract from the individuality of subjects and allow us to measure and to compare in an “objective” way (Simmel 1987). Heroes are not from this world of objectivity—they are incomparable and extraordinary; they have faces and voices to be remembered; they embody collective identity as triumphant subjects. But the objectification of the world (Weber’s Versachlichung), the turn toward impersonal representations of the sacred, and the routinization of charisma (Weber’s Veralltäglichung) also engender a strong thrust to stress one’s subjectivity and personality. The constant pressure toward individualization (Elias 1991), to show a sovereign distance to the rules and to present oneself as unique and inimitable became a key feature of the modern way of life. Sovereign subjectivity ceases to be the exclusive attribute of a few representative individuals in contrast to the many who remain normal and exchangeable. Instead, it is turned into a permanent challenge for everybody. We know the most obvious results of this modern cult of the individual: In the desperate competition for uniqueness, the style and fashion of yesterday are constantly devaluated, distinction is cherished, and the culture of the “masses” is despised. But the thrust for individualization can also lead to the sacralization of deviance and trespassing; the artist who violates the conventional norms of good taste or the criminal who defies the norms of the law, the perpetrator, the eccentric and even crazy person who acts beyond the rules of reason and commonsense, are turned into icons of sovereign subjectivity. In doing the unexpected, in creating ugliness and committing crimes, the Nietzschean defiance of the normal and regular is translated into a modern cult of individualization. Again, the perspective toward the boundaries reveals just flickering instability and ambivalence. The attempt to go beyond the horizon risks shifting perspectives.

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In addition, the construction of distance that is constitutive for heroism engenders a special dialectics of evanescence. Heroes are located beyond the realm of the ordinary profane order, but they also attract followers who try to come close to them and to study their lives in detail, and who thereby inevitably bridge the gap that separates the embodiment of the sacred from the social community. The sacred burns down the mundane world if it enters it without mediation, but it, in turn, will disappear if the mundane followers come too close, if imitation takes over, if cheap copies are sold, if the exceptional becomes teachable (Callois 1939), or if the hero’s dress is taken over by everybody. In order to reconstruct the constitutive distance to the sacred, it has to be rephrased in ever more inaccessible ways— located in times immemorial, in a transcendental world, finally embodied only in abstract principles and devoid of any subjectivity (Weber 1921; Eisenstadt 1986; Schluchter 1989). Thus, the faces and voices of heroes are widely replaced by impersonal values; the personal calling of past heroism recedes from the obligation to respect the timeless values of a universal community. Although—as we have stressed above—heroism itself is immortal, the places for heroes are fading away with the expansion of money, law and science. If rationalization drives the modern world, the sacred becomes, indeed, an impersonal order which is less embodied in persons than in principles that have no special place anymore but are everywhere. And the modern conception of individuality embodies the sacred only in a faceless and anonymous way; at the end we all become heroes, but only for ourselves. Thus the triumphant awareness of birth projected to the hero is returning to each single member of the community—as the unalienable rights of human beings by birth, as the citizenship rights by being born in a territory, as the sacredness of the human body. But in this transformation of the sacred that once had a face, a voice and a place into an anonymous and impersonal, invisible and omnipresent principle, the order of modernity also engenders a hidden elective affinity to the symbolic opposite of the hero: the anonymous victim who has no face, no voice, no place anymore. Thus, it is not blunt euphemism that the victims of September 11 were, later on, referred to as heroes although they did not opt sovereignly for their fate, although they can hardly be regarded as extraordinary personalities, although they pursued their regular professional activities.

Notes 1. “No More Heroes” was recorded in 1979 by an English punk group called “The Stranglers.” 2. The classical and most influential text here is Carlyle (1967). From a sociological point of view, see Goode (1978), Burkert (1983) and Vernant (1983). 3. Interestingly Weber’s original account on charisma refers strongly to the warrior figure. See Weber (1978: vol. 2, chapter 5. 1). 4. However, only the political and the religious hero caught the attention of sociologists under the heading of charismatic leadership. The main inspiration of this literature is of course Max Weber. See Eisenstadt (1992).

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5. Although among sociologists Max Weber is commonly regarded as the main reference of the concept he, in fact, never claimed to be its original author. When introducing the concept in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (“Economy and Society”), Weber referred to Rudolph Sohm (1892) and Karl Holl (1898). The renaissance of the Weberian concept in sociology was mainly mediated by Shils (1965, 1975), Eisenstadt (1968), Bendix and Roth (1971) and Schluchter (1989), whose systematic reconstructions and elaborations of the concept prepared the ground for contemporary debates. See also the different contributions in Gebhardt et al. (1993). 6. See, among others, Camic (1980), Wallis (1982), Lindholm (1990) and Tiryakian (1995). 7. The autonomy of this cultural perspective is powerfully advanced by Philip Smith (2000). 8. J. Assmann (1988, p. 12) uses the words Alltagsferne or Alltagstranszendenz in order to refer to this character of cultural memory. 9. Weber mentions the institutionalized madness of berserkers in Byzantium. See Weber (1978, vol. 2, chapter 5. 1). 10. For the territorial and local arrangements and the opposition of the sacred and the profane, see Eliade (1959). Comments on the tensions and affinities of order and placement (Ordnung und Ortung) can be found in Carl Schmitt (1988). 11. Within Robert Merton’s classical categorization of types of deviance, the hero can be conceptualized as an innovator. For an interesting analysis taking some of its arguments from labeling theory, see Lipp (1977). 12. The connections between tradition, myth and the construction of heroes have been introductorily discussed by Lord Raglan (1975). 13. This phenomenon is even recognized by rational-choice theorists. See, for instance, Coleman (1990, p. 278). However, it is obvious that it doesn’t fit their theoretical framework. 14. Otto Rank (1910) has focused the structural similarity between the birth and heroism in a strong and convincing way: Every individual is a hero in the moment of his or her birth. 15. For ambivalence as a sociological category, see: Smelser (1993, 1998a, 1998b), Merton (1976), Callois (1939), Durkheim (1991), Mauss and Hubert (1968), Smith (1894) and Wundt (1913). The classical reference here is Freud (1991). 16. Here, one can object an obvious parallel to Hegel’s famous analysis of the dialectic relationship between master and slave (1980). 17. From an anthropological point of view on this aspect, see, among others, Douglas (1978), Eliade (1991) and Van Baal and Van Beek (1985). 18. This theory of scapegoating as the transfer of evil dates back to Frazer (1947); see also Girard (1986) and Weiss (1998). 19. The anthropological presuppositions to Girard’s theory of sacrifice have been illuminated by Greisch (1995). For an interdisciplinary outlook on this matter, see Schenk (1995) and Neuhaus (1998). 20. For a comparison of the ancient and Christian notion of sacrifice, see Auffahrth (1998) and Rendtorff (1998). 21. This sacrificial conversion of death into life, of trauma into triumph, of victims into heroes, is not only repeated in the Catholic and Orthodox liturgy, but also in the ritual of confession and repentance. In the ritual of confession, the repenting individuals sacrifice their old lives, their old pride and self-esteem in face of the community. But it is by this very self-humiliation that they are reborn and reaccepted as purified and redeemed members of the sacred community. Thus, by rituals of repenting, individuals are not degraded and do not lose the respect of others; instead they achieve a superior individuality as they get rid of their old human egos—they turn their trauma into a triumph. 22. For the idea of Christomimesis in late antiquity, see Feichtinger (1999). 23. For a very sensitive analysis of the pre-World War I atmosphere, see Zweig (1947). 24. “Long live the sacred Germany!” 25. For a recent psychoanalytic explanation of this thesis, see Weatherill (1994, p. 83). 26. As Paul Fussell (1975) has brilliantly shown, this transformative warfare has left a decisive mark on modern memory of warriors and the heroic.

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27. Could Evita Perón or James Dean be imagined as old persons? Weber knew that continuity was the Achilles’ heel of charisma (Weber 1980, p. 122, p. 541). 28. The relationship between rituals and myth are discussed by Raglan (1975, p. 141), Connerton (1989, p. 53) and Bell (1997, pp. 3–23). 29. We will deal with this cult of the dead hero in greater detail in the chapter on relics. 30. More advanced patterns of recalling the voice of the hero will be examined in the chapter on classics. 31. We will consider more elaborate forms of representing the face of the hero in the chapter on monuments. 32. In Connerton’s (1989, p. 64) phrasing: “Under the conditions of modernity the celebration of recurrence can never be anything more than a compensatory strategy, because the very principle of modernity itself denies the idea of life as a structure of celebrated recurrence.” 33. See especially the introduction of Pierre Nora (1992). 34. See the too-long-neglected study by Halbwachs (1941). 35. The existence of miracles is still one of the basic presuppositions for sanctification in the Catholic Church. According to the London Times (July 26th, 1998, pp. 42–50) the Pope considered seriously the sanctification of Princess Diana in order to provide Great Britain with a contemporary saint who surely would attract masses of devotees. But, unfortunately, there are up until now no miracles—because the British Catholics do not pray powerfully enough, the Pope said. 36. On this topic, there have been explorations by, among others, Herrmann-Mascard (1975), Fichtenau (1952), Geary (1978, p. 31), Le Blant (1887), Hotzelt (1935) and Kötting (1965, 1966). 37. See Webb (1999), Davidson/Dunn-Wood (1993), Geary (1978) and Töpfer (1956). 38. The history of the idea of the king or prince figuring as a “typus Christi” has been traced by Kantorowicz (1957). 39. The significance of monuments for the construction of collective memory is explored by von Beyme (forthcoming). 40. For a general perspective on the religious and social role of sacred places, see McLuhan (1996). 41. For the history and development of what is and has been called classical, see Scholtz (1987) and Pieper (1987). 42. If, however, the classic was regarded as a dogma in a political community, it may be banned after its collapse. Hitler’s Mein Kampf is a case in point. Its publication is outlawed in Germany. 43. Nietzsche himself soon became the center of a cult (Tönnies 1897). See also Nicholls (1958/59). 44. Objectivation of the social world was a major theme in Marx (1990). See also Lukàcs (1968). 45. For the Weberian concept of objectification of charisma, see Schluchter (1989). 46. Here, the handling of the issues requires an impersonal attitude, a comparison between different objects or efforts, a mundane perspective that treats everything as ordinary and regular.

Chapter 2

Victims Neither Subjects nor Objects

The Social Construction of Victims Living heroes, in their attempt to rise above the ordinary, disregard mundane reasoning and disdain the voices of caution. Cruel and merciless, their deeds demand sacrifices also from their followers and can even entail the death of those who are not members of the charismatic community. The concentration of the sacred in the person of the triumphant hero comes at the price of desacralizating others. Thus heroes, in the moment of triumph, can, and frequently do, produce victims. To regard somebody as a victim seems to be a spontaneous self-evident classification that does not need further justification. Indeed, the suffering and the death of victims are obvious facts beyond doubt and question—ultimate certainties about our cohumans, if there are any at all. Death is, like birth, a categorical presupposition of our human existence—ultimately certain and exempted from the contingencies of individual experience (Heidegger 1986, pp. 231–267). In reflecting on our mortality, we are constructing our collective identity as humans. Because mortality is a common certainty linking all members of the human species, it also brings the question of boundaries to the fore and acquires a particular salience if entire groups are concerned. Therefore, the Nazi genocide of the European Jews, Stalin’s ethnic cleansing and waves of purge, the killing fields of Cambodia, the death marches of the Armenian people in 1915, the extinction of large numbers of Native Americans under the Spanish and North American conquest, the enslavement of the African black population, as well as the massacres of 800,000 in Rwanda in 1994, the ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia, and the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers are commonly acknowledged as paradigms of collective victimization, as icons of innocent suffering. Yet, even this seemingly obvious reaction to the suffering and death of others is based on symbolic codings, presup45

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posing the social construction of boundaries and resting on cultural foundations.1 I will try to outline these tacitly assumed cultural foundations of victimhood in the following chapter. Although not entirely limited to the above mentioned cases of genocide and collective suffering, my perspective is mainly focused on them.

Victims, Perpetrators and the Public Perspective There are no natural victims. The very notion of victims presupposes agencies that intervene and change human lives, that define and recognize victimization. To define someone as a victim is to assume that his or her condition is the result of human action and that it could have been avoided if human decisions would have been different (Shklar 1990). If somebody dies at the age of eighty, nobody calls him or her a victim of old age. Even if an unforeseeable earthquake kills people, the dead are not immediate victims of the earthquake in the strict sense of the term. Only if at least vague information about the risk of catastrophe were available, if precautions could have been taken, if the presence in the area of risk and danger could have been avoided, is the term “victim” justified. Victimhood presupposes—at least partly—voluntary action, intervention in natural processes, uncertainty and risk, even accountability and responsibility—although in many cases the responsible perpetrators are not easy to spot. Victims are produced by human action that could have been expected to have taken a different direction. If the result of a human action is in accordance with the usual expectations, we do not consider the person concerned to be a victim—even if his or her suffering is caused by the action of others. The loser in a fair competition is not a victim of the winner, the convicted criminal is not a victim of the judge, latecomers who get no parking spot are not victims of those who came earlier. To call somebody a victim does not only assume that his or her condition is caused by voluntary action under uncertainty. It also implies that the result of this action is considered wrong, even that the decision to act in this way is considered as an avoidable error on the part of the acting individual. Evaluating an action as wrong or mistaken is, of course, first and foremost done from the perspective of outside observers who assume certain rules to be unquestionably valid and certain information to be available for the actor in question. In most cases, these assumptions result in a moral judgment which holds that the observers’ perspective should also be the perspective of the actor and even be the perspective of the victim. Thus the discourse about victimization becomes a social construction and is carried by a moral community defining an evil. Of course, the notion of evil varies according to the core principles of the respective culture (Ricoeur 1967). The evil can, for example, refer to demons invading and polluting the community from the outside, it can be seen as an upheaval against a divine and transcendental order, it can be defined as a violation of the law and its

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constitutional principles, it can be phrased as a scandal with respect to a public moral, it can be constructed as a scapegoat by the yellow press, etc. These cultural narratives of evil are embedded in institutional arenas that impinge on them, support them or obstruct them—in law courts, in religious ceremonies, in literary discourses, in parliamentary debates, in informal encounters among neighbors, in news-media, in professional services. We will try to outline why particular institutional arenas impede the cultural coding of evil as “victims,” whereas others give way to the cultural construction of victimhood (Neal 1998, pp. 21–37). Before we turn to these institutional arenas, we should, however, analytically separate three structural positions or agencies presupposed in the construction of victimhood: The agent who, by voluntary decision, risks producing the condition of the victim has to be distinguished from the victim, and both have to be distinguished from the position of the outside observer or the third party who evaluates the action and recognizes the condition of the victims, even if the victims should not be aware of it. This analytical separation between three positions might—like all structural idealtypes—be blurred in historical cases of victimization, but it cannot entirely be dispensed with (Giesen 1999a, p. 69). If, for example, an individual is held entirely responsible for his or her deplorable condition, outside observers will not consider him or her to be a victim. Whoever dies in a car accident while driving 120 miles an hour on a narrow winding road, drinking a bottle of whiskey, will not be acknowledged as a victim of the road authority; whoever invests in high risk stock and loses money will not be recognized as a victim of the stock exchange; whoever refuses to take medical advice seriously and continues a risky lifestyle will not be regarded as a victim. The social construction of victimhood presupposes an outside actor who is at least partly responsible for the misfortune of the victim—the driver must be seen as involuntarily intoxicated by others and warning signs about the winding road must be missing; the investor must be trapped by an investment consultant, the terminally ill man must be forced to continue a risky lifestyle by his boss; etc. Victimization presupposes the—at least partial—attribution of responsibility to outside agencies—it assumes the innocence of the victim and can increase the awareness of victimhood by focusing on members of the community whose innocence is beyond doubt, e.g., children. Of course, societies differ vastly in this attribution of responsibility. What is attributed in the United States to the individual’s success and failure in a market is, in Sweden or East Germany, charged to the responsibility of big corporations or the state; what is seen in India as the inescapable karma of each individual is attributed by Westerners to the reckless management of the chemical industry, etc. But we do not recognize individuals as victims merely because their suffering can be attributed to an actor or agency. If a group or an individual accuses another group or agent of being responsible for its miserable condition and if it is not supported in this claim by a third impartial perspective, there can be a conflict

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between the accused agent and the accusing party, but no assessment of victimhood.2 The very idea of victimhood presupposes a kind of universalist moral discourse that aims at impartiality and justice (Barry 1995), it is embedded in special institutional arenas where this impartial perspective is routinized, and it is carried by special groups or actors who are at a certain distance from the victims, as well as from the perpetrators. Clans can engage in bloody feuds and revenges, but they cannot claim the status of victims because they do not conceive their conflict in terms of impartial justice (W. I. Miller 1990). Their conflict is purely reciprocal, it goes back and forth, each threat asking for a counterthreat, each attack requiring retaliation (Nisbett and Cohen 1996). In contrast, the model of victimhood presupposes the intervention of a seemingly impartial third party who is able to assess the damage and to transform the retaliation into a public definition of evil, thus ending the feud. Like the attribution of responsibility (Gluckman 1972), the institutional arenas—where the victimization is recognized—and the social carriers of the public perspective also vary vastly.3 The public perspective can be based on the authority of priests, kings, intellectuals, or judges, or it can just refer to the majority of impartial spectators. It can be constructed in the discourse of civil society, articulated in literature and art, or brought forward by the response of the common people on the streets. Before we consider several institutional arenas that foster or impede the construction of victimhood, we will outline the general structural position of the victim at the fringe of moral communities.

At the Fringe of Moral Communities Victims take a special position in a community. If they are still alive, their subjectivity is damaged; they have been, temporarily at least, excluded from the usual rights attributed to every member of the community; they are displaced and uprooted persons, assembled in camps, submitted to violence, torture, rape. Similar to heroes, but at the opposite end of the social order, they have been put into a state of exception in a space beyond laws, rules and rights. In recognizing this damaged subjectivity, a society tries to include them again in the community of human beings who are not only endowed with rights, but also tied to each other by some bond of solidarity in distinction to outsiders. Yet the obligations that are derived from this bond of solidarity vary: respect for basic human rights, limited economic support, far-reaching use of personal resources, obligation to listen extensively to the presentation of psychic problems—all these ties extend to different circles of solidarity and the claims to this solidarity differ vastly between societies or groups.4 The bond of collective identity may even be extended beyond the boundaries of humankind, and this, too, may be debated and defined in culturally varying ways. We—at least, non-vegetarians—do not regard the cattle, the meat of which we eat, as victims of our dietary habits, but ethical vegetarians do. Most people in Western societies would

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refuse to eat the meat of apes and dogs, because they are considered to be related to humans or even regarded as members of the family, but Chinese gourmets do not share this reluctance.5 Chaining dogs or torturing apes for medical research purposes is seen as unethical by many members of Western societies even if there might be good technical reasons to do this. Although to a lesser degree than human beings, dogs and apes are included in a moral community that invests them with certain basic rights and excludes any possibility to sacrifice their lives for instrumental reasons (Singer 1986). Human beings are, on the other hand, under certain conditions deprived of their sovereign subjectivity, declared to be insane, unconscious and bound to death, treated as dead corpses exploitable for medical research and the survival of others, or considered as animals that could be traded like cattle. The construction of boundaries between those who are endowed with subjectivity similar to us and those who are not, and who are therefore excluded from common solidarity, is far from being clear and unquestionable. After the conquest of the Americas, intellectuals like Las Casas and Sepulveda engaged in serious debates about whether the natives in the New World had to be treated as tradable goods or as savable souls, and the conclusion of the debate was not easy to arrive at for the contemporaries.6 To regard somebody as a subject endowed with consciousness and a sovereign self does not result from simple empirical observation; instead, it is categorically assumed and presupposed,7 socially attributed and intentionally imputed to others if we communicate with them. Even if this imputation of consciousness and subjectivity is shared in a community, it can never escape completely from its shifting foundations in collective decisions. This fragility of boundaries and shifts in solidarity affect the social construction of victimhood directly. Although unquestionably included into the community, the position of victims is at a certain distance from the persons who recognize their suffering. The victim is, of course, closer to us than the objects that we can eat, use and trade. There is no normative obligation with respect to the fish or the salad we have for dinner; the car we drive has—at least under regular conditions—no moral claims that we have to respect; the property we buy and sell is not a subject we can communicate with. These are commonly seen as objects and treated by technological action, instead of being included in a common collective identity, however weak it might be. In particular historical settings, human beings, too, have been considered objects of trade and consumption beyond any moral obligation and claims of solidarity. The raids of the Assyrian kings in ancient Mesopotamia, the slavery in the Roman Empire or certain forms of cannibalism are examples of this “objectification” of human beings.8 If a culture does not classify outsiders as subjects who are included in a common identity, but sees them as mere objects, there is no way to claim the status of a victim on moral grounds. What we consider genocide or exploitation is seen as normal or natural behavior on the part of the “perpetrators” and as a kind of natural catastrophe on the part of the “victims.” At the other end of the scale of distance is the close proximity of kinship and sympathy. If a close friend or a member of the family gets into a miserable

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situation, we offer our more or less unrestricted personal support without calling him or her a victim. Here, the ties of communality and solidarity are so strong that we feel personally harmed by the calamity affecting our parents, children, or friends. There is only one distinction which matters in these situations: us and them—those who are held responsible for the harm that affects one of us. These strong ties of solidarity do not need a moral justification—right or wrong, it is my family, my friend, my people who need support and have to be defended against the evil from outside. Here, the collective identity of insiders is unquestionably given—they have to see each other exclusively as subjects, as carriers of an identity, as the Alter who will undoubtedly understand because he or she is alike in a primordial way. If we assume the other to be a subject in the full sense of the term, we assume him or her to be like us, to be endowed with competence to act like us, but we also assume him or her to be a unique and individual person. He or she has a face we know and a voice that talks to us, objects don’t. In between the ultimate distance of objects and the ultimate proximity of primordial collective identity, the construction of victimhood unfolds. As clear as the categorical reference to proximity and distance is for the endpoint, so is the construction of boundaries in between ambiguous and questionable. Many cultures try to cope with this ambiguity by imagining a realm in between subjects and objects, populated by strange creatures like demons who are half humans and half animals, or crazy and insane persons who are human by bodily nature, but animals by the lack of reason and morality.9 Primitive art, as well as the sculptures of medieval cathedrals and fictitious reports about demons living on the wild margin of the world, show these blendings of humans and animals; they are halfhuman and half-horse or fish, they have hairy bodies and wings, a human body, but the head of a lion or a bird, etc. In every society there is a fringe, a place for those who do not fit into the dominant classificatory grid. In early modern territorial states that wanted their populations to be sedentary, accountable and productive, these “misfits” were people without a home and a master, migrants and beggars, vagabonds and other “useless” individuals who could not be turned into sedentary citizens with a clear position in the newly emerging society of production and labor. The Age of Reason responded to this awareness of uncertain boundaries and shifting foundations by separating those who are human by nature, but deprived of reason, from the reasonable citizens, by enclosing them in mental asylums (Goffman 1961; Foucault 1965). But the clear-cut social separation between the reasonable and the insane members of the community could not remove the suspicion that we all are both, that reason may be only the superficial cover for our mad desires, which occasionally erupt in every human being. The assumedly insane persons, in turn, may be discovered as truly humane and reasonable beings in their own world. Today, it is the debate about the ethics of vegetarianism and the rights of animals that hints at a moving frontier between human beings and other mammals. When humans and other primates share 99 percent of their genes, there is, indeed, a haunting suspicion that the frontier between them and us is arbitrary,

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questionable and gradual. What were once considered objects of consumption that are controlled by taboos of purity, but exempted from any ethical rules, are now discovered to have hidden subjectivity and are reinvested with rights. Instead of excluding an animal from the range of eatable food because it is regarded as alien and impure, ethical vegetarianism excludes animals from human diet because they are seen as too similar to us. One of the most important responses of modern cultures to the uncertainty of boundaries consists of including the outside in the inside. This move is at the core of any construction of victimhood. To refer to a person or a group as “victim” not only presupposes a certain detachment from direct involvement and identification, but also an inclusion of the suffering persons into a community of subjects. The subjectivity of victims, however, is restricted, damaged and anonymous: Victims have no faces, no voices, no places of their own—at least in the moments when they are victimized. They cannot raise their voices in the public discourse of civil society; they are dead, mutilated, traumatized, or overwhelmed with grief. Frequently, the surviving victims are enclosed in special camps, in an outland exempted from property claims to the land and citizenship rights, separated from normal life within the state (Agamben 1995, p. 166). It is in the universalistic moral communication between members of the noninvolved third party that persons or groups are seen and labeled as “victims.” In this construction of victimhood, the noninvolved third party, the public perspective of citizens, merges communality and distance. On the one hand, the victims are reincluded in the community and hence supported in their claim for solidarity; on the other hand, the victims’ misery is kept at some distance from the social carriers who represent the public center of society. Their place is the camp of refugees, the nonlocal locality of special spaces in airports and harbors, the realm in between the outlands of violence and the civil life of the community. The transitory nature of these camps is a permanent one—most of the surviving victims remain here for a longer time of their life, and the authorities of the surrounding state seem to make much more of an effort to keep the victims within the fences of the camps than to integrate them into the citizenry. Only later on, when the passing of time has provided the inevitable distance, are the voices of survivors heard, their reports collected and their faces become well known public icons. In order to find an answer to the question of why modern societies construct victims, we have to turn to the moral basis of modern communities. In the definition of victimhood, the center of a moral community not only distinguishes itself from the periphery, it also reveals the tension between the moral ideal and the imperfect realization of this ideal. The moral community evidently needs the difference between the normative ideal and the factual behavior in order to construct its basic motive of integration; the moral community needs deviance (H. Becker 1973) and perpetrators in order to construct the boundary between the good and the evil because the community of reason and enlightenment requires the tension between truth and reason on the one hand and error and insanity on

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the other. In moral communities, there is an unavoidable tendency to define and to detect transgression, to identify and to condemn perpetrators, and even to scapegoat others if the evil cannot be located in a different way. The intimate ties between collective identity and scapegoating, between the construction of a normative order and the sanctioning of deviance, between virtue and sin, have been outlined before.10 But the construction of a moral community does not only require reference to actors who are held guilty for deviance, crime and evil, and whose position as outsiders can be attributed to their own decisions and responsibilities. It also needs reference to actors who do not correspond to the moral ideal of membership, without being guilty. These individuals are outsiders not because of their deliberate decision to violate the common norms, but because of their basic dispositions, or because they simply fail to dispose of the necessary means to correspond to the ideal of membership. In this way, homosexuals and handicapped persons, people who are mentally deprived or extraordinarily poor, gypsies and vagabonds are frequently labeled as despised outsiders who have to be kept at a distance without being directly the target of criminal persecution. Moral communities regard these outsiders as persons with restricted sovereignty and treat them—depending on the institutional arena—with contempt and disgust, with compassion and paternalistic care, or with educational efforts and medical therapy. They are kept at a distance, removed from regular interaction and encapsulated in special institutions. Even more exempted from the charge of guilt, however, are those individuals who are considered as victims. Victims are neither guilty nor despised—they are innocent individuals who could have enjoyed a normal human life within the moral community, but have been treated as non-humans. They clearly represent the fringe of moral communities, but on the opposite end to the position of the perpetrators. This reference to victims becomes increasingly salient when societies emphasize the distinction between morality within the community and means outside of the community, between solidarity on the one hand and power on the other hand, between the range of personal responsibility and the determination of action by biological or social conditions. If these realms are not clearly separated by institutional patterns—and they rarely are—the boundaries between perpetrators, deviant outsiders and victims tend to be blurred; hence perpetrators can be considered as deviant outsiders, and deviant outsiders can be treated as victims. In the process of scapegoating, all three positions are merged. Viewed from the center, the fringe of moral communities appears as an area of twilight and ambivalence where the opposites are sometimes in close vicinity. If the moral community succeeds in establishing a clear definition of victimhood, it relates the imperfection of society to differences in power on the one hand and to differences in moral justification on the other; victims are recognized as possible subjects and invested with moral dignity, but they lack the power to act as responsible members of the community or simply to survive; perpetrators, in contrast, have the power to act as responsible members of the community,

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but fail to act in accordance with the moral principles and thus pollute the sacred core of the community. Hence, their membership status is a morally degraded one and the society can violently restrict their sovereignty as subjects. In between victims and perpetrators is the position of the despised outsiders who, due to their origin, their personal predisposition and their social condition, cannot live up to the expectation of normal and regular citizens and sometimes do not want to do so. But because of their unclear position between voluntarily accepting the outside and being doomed to stay outside by external conditions, they do not fit well into a moral construction of society. Therefore, the moral community constitutes its basic tension and its fringe of restricted membership mainly by pointing to victims and perpetrators—and considers the despised outsiders frequently either as victims or as perpetrators. Full membership is ascribed to those who not only satisfy the moral expectations but also dispose of the necessary means and power to act accordingly. Excluded are those who are seen as devoid of any moral standards shared with the community. If these excluded ones are considered as powerful agents, they are demonized; if they are seen as nonpowerful and lacking agency, they appear as objects of technical manipulation. In distinction to this, victims and perpetrators are located at the margin of moral communities, in between full membership and the outside—the victims because they are unable to act as full members of the community or restricted in their means to do so, the perpetrators because they violated the moral principles of the community. Victims are impersonal subjects, they have no face, no voice and no place. Even if they are still alive, they are numbed and muted, displaced and uprooted. They embody the dark fringe of human societies, where doubts about the seemingly clear boundaries arise, where subjects are suddenly turned into objects and objects are endowed with a voice—a realm of haunting ghosts, monsters and nightmares in between common subjectivity and plain objectivity, a realm ruled by demons and deprived of humanity. In the construction of victimhood, a culture encapsulates the latent suspicion that boundaries between inside and outside could also be constructed otherwise, that the exclusion of an outside can never be perfectly justified, that there is a latent subjectivity even in the excluded outside of objects, that the recognition of subjects as alike and the definition of objects as different rests on fragile foundations, that culture is based on the latency and even on the repression of claims of subjectivity. But when the moral community unfolds the tension between moral and factual behavior and recognizes the damaged subjectivity of victims, it also emphasizes its own sovereign subjectivity. The construction of subjectivity and the construction of objectivity are mutually dependent classificatory operations, separated by a fragile boundary and always susceptible to ambivalence and sudden changes of places. Finally, there is a deeply rooted elective affinity between the impersonal order of modern society and the construction of victims. If the basic principles that pattern law and public discourse, exchange of commodities and science

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disregard personal background and privilege in favor of an objective, standardized and accountable treatment of an issue, then the public embodiment of power and charisma in the figure of the hero risks being considered immoral, scandalous, or unjust. Heightened agency and sovereign trespassing of rules is under strong suspicion of being evil if it cannot be encapsulated in special arenas like art. Therefore, what was regarded as a hero before is converted into a perpetrator. In contrast, the figure of the victim who has no voice, no face, no place anymore is much more compatible with the impersonal and anonymous order of modern society. The victim is a case of a general category, an object devoid of a personal story, and as such the victim can be treated by the objectifying and impersonal institutions of modern society (Bauman 1989). In a compensatory move, however, modern society keeps a haunting awareness of the loss of personal subjectivity that is engendered by its impersonal institutions—therefore, perceiving others as victims is not only an attempt to remember their forgotten sovereign subjectivity but hints also at one’s own personal subjectivity that is disregarded and excluded by impersonal modern institutions (Bauman 1989).

Remembering Victims The tension between the center of collective identity and the voiceless and faceless victims at the fringe of society does not have to be based on spatial distance. It does not need camps. It can also be, and most frequently is, based on the passing of time. Most human beings do not consider themselves to be victims in the moment when they are victimized. Slaves and servants in ancient societies saw their condition as a misfortune if they had been living free before, or as a fate that was very hard to change but had to be accepted, like age, gender and body height. Of course, if there were chances to escape serfdom and slavery without taking deadly risks, they chose liberty—they fled, rioted or killed their masters. But this reversal of their fate was not encouraged by a third party or justified by appealing to an impartial justice, a universal morality or public definition of the evil. Instead, they just took advantage of an unexpected chance to improve their situation, and they rarely would have hesitated to turn their former masters into slaves if possible. In a similar way, the genocidal practices of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses, the Assyrian king Assuranibal II, or the Mongolian rulers Ghengis Khan and Timur who occasionally killed the entire population of a city, including children, even if it surrendered unconditionally, were hardly seen as victimization. It was immense terror and horror, but no common moral ties connected the conqueror and the defeated people, no third party monitored the horror and condemned it as evil. Like carnage in the relation between predator and prey, the killing of others was beyond moral grounds. It was not an issue of justice and innocence, but of subject and object. The others were not human beings endowed with rights to be respected, they were treated as objects that can be damaged but cannot suffer.

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Only later on, when those who have been treated as objects of carnage, repression and rape are recognized as subjects again, were the dead of the raids and conquests retrospectively defined as innocent victims. Remembering the victims bridges the temporal as well as the social distance; it crosses the twilight zone between inside and outside and turns what was previously treated merely as an object into a subject again. Remembering includes the dead in the moral community of humanity.11 In remembering the victims of the past, we construct their postmortal life—hoping for a future when no subject will ever be treated as an object. The end of victimization would provide a warrant for the divine subjectivity of all humans and thus replace the hope for the resurrection of the dead—a modern version of apotheosis. The time lag between the moment when human beings are killed, mutilated, tortured or enslaved by others, and the moment when these actions are considered as avoidable and evil by a third party establishes the distance and detachment that are inevitable for the adoption of an impartial, disengaged and public perspective. Furthermore, it supports the sharp axiological break between past and present that is at the core of the paradigm of progress: the past is evil and should not be repeated.12 If there is some cultural continuity between the occurrence of evil and its recognition, the time lag also can be considered as the time of latency that is constitutive for a cultural trauma (Felman and Laub 1991). Like in the case of an individual trauma, most victims are not aware of the traumatizing event in the moment when it occurs. And just as the individual mind is incapable of perceiving the threat to its life immediately or of grasping its full importance, cultures tend to normalize the present situation of its carriers and to ignore the possible breakdown of meaning and self-respect in moments of crisis. Only later on, after the time of latency, can the culture of a community perceive the victimization in the past, talk it out and work it through. This is exactly what happened in some great historical paradigm cases of victimization—the slavery of African Americans, the colonization of African and Oriental societies, the early modern genocide of Native Americans, the Great Irish Famine and the Holocaust of the European Jews. With a few exceptions that rise to fame and public recognition, the victims have no voice to be heard. The victims are dead. Unlike the relics of dead heroes who are venerated by the community of remembrance, the bones and remains of the dead victims are turned to ashes, dispersed in unknown soils, left to decay in the desert, or blown in the wind like the smoke of the gas chambers. In most cases, the perpetrators try to destroy the remains of the victims and the traces of their own deeds when leaving the place. No future generation should be reminded of the victims. They should remain dehumanized objects, without a face, a voice, a place. Like the traumatized individual, who sometimes needs therapeutic assistance and special modes of recalling the trauma, social communities need special institutions for remembering the victims, rituals to mourn their suffering and to represent the forgotten subjectivity of the dead (Felman and Laub 1991). They

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try to find the place where the victims have suffered, they search for their remains and rebury them solemnly, they construct memorials and, above all, collect and narrate their stories—the victims are remembered as subjects with a place, a face and a voice within the community (Neal 1998, pp. 201–215). Before we turn to different institutional arenas of representation, let us consider—on a general level— the relationship between the victims and the agents who remember and represent them. The victims of the past might be mourned by others who feel compassion for their past sufferings, but who cannot claim a particular common collective identity with the victims beyond the general bond of humankind. Britons can thus remember the victims of the Khmer Rouge terror or of the Rwanda genocide, Americans can remember the victims of Stalinism in Russia, Spaniards can remember the victims of the Shoah, etc. The temporal and social distance between the mourning community and the dead victims is unquestionable and strong, but it is bridged by the abstract and impersonal empathy of humanism. Here, the encompassing construction of a universal community of humankind embraces the remembering agent and the victims and includes both in the categorical construction of moral responsibility. This universal community is mainly constructed on the level of discourse itself— by citing the examples of victimization, repeating the story of the victims, warning of repetitions, etc. Only in rare cases will this act of universal inclusion lead to monuments representing the victims in images and sculptures, architecture and memorial sites. There is no special link between the mourning community and the remembered victims. The remembering does not mark a boundary within humanity and it does not justify particular claims presented by the mourning group to outsiders. In a second case, the mourning community does indeed claim a particular collective identity with the victims of the past—as their offspring, as their compatriots, as their coethnics, or as their brothers and sisters in a common religious faith. In the most obvious case, the trauma of victimization is transferred to the next generation who—although not directly concerned—sometimes suffers from a secondary trauma resulting from the loss of parents or from their parents’ psychic disorders (Kogan 1998).13 But even if there are no close kinship ties anymore, the descendants might remember the suffering of their ancestors, renarrate their story and adopt the trauma of genocide and slavery, of occupation and repression as a part of their collective identity in distinction to other human beings. This thrust to identify with the victims of the past can be so strong that some individuals even claim to have suffered the fate of the victims in a forgotten and repressed period of their own life—although there is little evidence for this beyond a recovered memory that may well be an artifact of therapeutic discourse. Occasionally this claim may be put forward for strategic reasons—to demand compensation and privileges. But in many cases the identification with the victims’ fate is a genuine one—the person is truly convinced that he or she is a victim who has repressed his or her memories. Here, the figure of the victim seems to replace the

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figure of the hero as the paradigm of heightened subjectivity. In the most private dreams, the dark outlands of victimization take, in a perverted turn, the position of sovereign subjectivity that once was associated with the victorious hero. In public life, this core position of the victim in collective identity leads frequently to monuments, museums and memorial sites that keep the memory of the dead victims alive, even if their faces are forgotten and their relics are dispersed. In particular, when the last survivors of the horror and their personal memories fade away, there must be material embodiments and special places that reinvest the dead victims with a face and a voice and thus keep the collective memory alive. 14 Sometimes the descendants of the victims suffer from a transgenerational trauma, a rupture in a genealogical sequence, an “archaic heritage” (Freud 1982, p. 546) that marks and masks their collective history (Bronfen et al. 1999, pp. 64ff.). Sometimes the descendants of the victims have even forgotten the fate of their ancestors and rediscover it because they are taught so by outsiders. The black child in an American school has no primordial knowledge about the slavery of his or her ancestors, the Jewish adolescent in New York has no personal memories of the Shoah, the native Australian does not remember the genocide committed on the Aborigines, the Armenian girl in Paris was born decades after some of her relatives were killed by Turkish soldiers in the death marches, etc. They all have to be taught about the historical trauma that is at the core of their group’s identity; they have to adopt the heritage of the victims and to claim public recognition for this collective identity. This taking over the archaic heritage of the victims can result in an obsessive imagination of the ancestors’ trauma that is converted into a feeling of primordial purity and even moral superiority on the part of the descendents. If their parents or other members of their primordial group tell children a story about their roots, nobody will question the parents’ right to do so. If, however, the teaching of a victim’s identity is not carried by the group itself, but performed by total outsiders, if the ancestors’ fate becomes a phantom for the descendents that is not supported by family experiences, questions of imposition and seduction, of legitimate representation and paternalism may be raised. Occasionally, the dead victims’ suffering can be turned into a claim for reparation for the living generation, even if they did not suffer from the original trauma as individuals. This claim presupposes an undeniable bond of collective identity between the dead victims and their living heirs that has to be recognized by the general public, that is, by the impartial third party. Recognition of this claim by the general public is fostered if the heirs of the victims can convincingly argue that their present life chances are severely hampered because of their ancestors’ fate and if the heirs of the perpetrators are still enjoying benefits that can be traced back to their ancestors’ deeds. If, for example, the descendants of the black slaves in America would be clearly better off than the descendants of the white slaveowners, their claims for reparation would be largely pointless—although the bond of collective identity linking the present to the past might be strong in both groups. This bond of collective identity can be ritually reconstructed and transferred from

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generation to generation—as a collective memory of a traumatic history. Here, too, the dead victims have to be remembered by representatives or advocates, whose mandate is unquestionable. We will return to the question of representation at the end of this chapter. The difference between the past victims and those who remember them is, however, not the only way to construct a temporal distance between the center of a community and the fringe of repressed subjectivity. We cannot only mourn the victims of the past, but also warn of the victims of the future.15 Present action has undeniable risks and can lead to future catastrophes, to devastating pollution and illnesses, to famines and violence, war and carnage. Our unborn descendants can— in principle—become possible victims of our own actions. They, too, have no voice or face, and they, too, need representation. And, of course, they are represented in the public discourse of modern society. Referring to the fate of our children is even becoming a strategic resource in the debate of civil society. But there is a fundamental difference between mourning the victims of the past and warning of the possible victims of the future: The death of past victims is certain, the suffering of the future is hypothetical. And certainty matters in the twilight zone between subjects and objects.

Before Guilt and Innocence: Victims as Sacred Objects The modes of constructing the realm in between subjects and objects vary. I will outline different paradigms of coping with the twilight zone of restricted membership at the fringe of human societies. Let us consider, at first, the original meaning of the term “victim.” It is usually traced back to the Sanskrit vinakti meaning “to set apart.” Here, the special position of the victim between the inside and the outside of the community is already hinted at. In the Roman and in other ancient empires the victima were the human beings and animals who were destined to be sacrificed to the deity (Henninger 1987). In the sacrifice, the victima were not considered as subjects endowed with full membership rights and moral claims. They were precious objects offered to the deity in order to construct and confirm a strong bond between the community and the gods.16 But they were also animals or humans whose bloodshed and death were essential for the sacrificial act. It is the very abstention from mundane use that sets the victima apart from mere objects. Because the victima ensured the bond to the sacred, they were considered as partaking in the sacred core of the community (Loisy 1920, p. 16; Spaemann 1995, p. 14). Even in its original meaning, the victima were double-faced creatures in between subjects and objects—ambivalence has been at the core of the construction of victims from the very beginning. The community itself is the victimizing agency; it consecrates the victima, and by doing so, it creates its own superior subjectivity as the one who decides about life and death—not for reasons of necessity and survival, but for partaking in the sacred.

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We have mentioned Girard’s (1986) deconstruction of ancient myths of sacrifice before. In the attempt to structure their desires and drives, human beings tend to imitate each other and to construct a basic homogeneity of the community. Yet the mimetic construction of similarity and homogeneity within the community engenders also the exclusion of others as fundamentally different. Excluding others does not inevitably require submitting them into violence. Archaic societies are—according to Girard—threatened by a universal tendency toward violence and violent revenge. Kinship is the only barrier against violence and bloody retaliation in simple societies. The threat of violence inside the community is overcome by directing it toward a scapegoat, an innocent victim. The scapegoating of innocent victims combines the inevitable exclusion of outsiders with the transformation of lingering violence between different clans inside the community. This victim is usually found at the periphery of the society or among persons who do not fit easily into the classificatory grid of the society—in strangers who pass by, in vagabonds, in homosexuals, in unmarried older women, in handicapped or “insane” persons, etc. Because the presence of these persons challenges society’s basic boundaries, removing them reinforces the basic mode of social integration. Killing them does not engender bloody revenge and retaliation. Ancient myth had no difficulties in ignoring or disguising the innocence of the victim. The victim is presented as evil, as pollution, as scandalon. Sometimes the victima were also victi, defeated enemies who were shown in the triumph, the parade of the victorious war hero after his return from war and conquest. The honor of the triumph was based on the degradation of enemies who were once free, and even leaders of their people, but were now turned into slaves and doomed to be sacrificed to the Gods. Even in the more advanced discourse of the ancient empires, this conversion of status was not seen as morally questionable. The bond of collective identity did not transcend the boundaries of political units or common cultures. Enslaving the barbaroi was not a moral issue for philosophers like Aristotle. It was not until the Stoic philosophy of late antiquity focused on the suffering in the world that knowing about the high rank of the defeated victus conveyed a tragic feeling about the volatility of fame and fate (Geyer 1983). Yet, because the victima were seen as sacralized beings at the periphery of society, in between subjects and objects, they were not considered as guilty or innocent. Although unquestionably related to the distinction between the sacred and the evil, the evil was not yet tied to human agency. If the innocence of the victima was not yet recognized in the original sacrifice, there could also be no search for perpetrators who had caused the harm. Furthermore, lacking a focus on guilt and innocence, the original sacrifice did not separate the position of the perpetrator from the position of the general public. It was all about the self-constitution of community by constructing boundaries. The Judeo-Christian heritage, in contrast, revealed the innocence of the victim, and the violence of the sacrifice is reversed by the intervention of God. Abel, as well as Jacob; Isaac, as well as Job; and, of course, Christ, are innocent and

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their suffering shows the way to redemption by God; both Judaism and Christianity even raised a ban on the sacrifice of human victims or turned it into a paradox by the self-sacrifice of Christ who turned his death into the ultimate triumph (Ebertz 1987; Girard 1987; Amato 1990, pp. 44–48). A new symbolism for the ambivalence of triumph and trauma, of life and death, of heroes and victims, was set.

Personal Compassion: The Victim as the Inferior Subject The compassion for the beggar or the obligation to support the poor and defenseless is radically different from this situation of the human victima. The Christian agape or misericordia, the Buddhist dana or the Moslem obligation to give something to the poor assume a communal bond between full members and those who by coincidence, fate and the will of God are in a miserable situation. This bond transcends the boundaries of kinship and personal relationship and includes, in principle, all other members of the community of faithful. It is, however, enacted and performed only in a local context. In contrast to the public construction of victims, charity is a local act. It occurs originally only in the local confrontation of rich and poor, of powerful and defenseless. Here, it reduces the tension when local proximity overcomes social distance, when those commonly located at a far distance suddenly step forward from their anonymity and appear as persons with a face and a voice. Compassion copes with the proximity of the distant; it bridges the gap for a moment just to open it up again in the next. Beggars can make use of this inconsistency of local proximity and social distance when, in public places, they approach closely the well-off who then have to give alms in order to get rid of this embarrassing proximity that seems, for a moment, to blur the inequality between social ranks.17 Actually, however, the obligation to give does not at all blur the distinction between those who do the charitable act and those who receive it. It is always limited to an inexpensive transfer, and it never aims at overcoming the differences in status and lifting the poor up to the level of the rich. Instead, it reinforces the internal boundary between social ranks and reconstructs social distance even in a literal sense. The donors reconstruct and stress their sovereign subjectivity because they decide voluntarily to do the charitable act.18 After receiving alms, the beggar has to withdraw and stay at a distance. The obligation to support the needy is complemented by their obligation to respect the distance and to take their place at the periphery of the good society, excluded from power and wealth. Rituals of charity to the victims— although they may be motivated by compassion—actually reaffirm the structural backbone of inequality (Derrida 1992). At the same time, however, the poor can claim moral dignity if they accept their fate and position in this world—they can even aspire to reverse their fate after death and, because of their sufferings, to ascend to heaven, whereas the rich and powerful face the risk of being punished for their sins, their ambition and

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their lack of humility. Here again, the relationship between the sovereign subject and the needy and miserable is a highly ambivalent one. Both can change places— if not in this life, then in the eternal life to come. Because of the risk of reversing the situation in the transcendental world, the religious virtuosi tend to accept voluntarily the misery and the poverty in this world—the obligation to renounce personal property and to live in personal poverty marks most monastic orders not only in the Christian tradition. Although the position of the poor and needy in the rituals of charity combines lack of power and moral dignity, it does not constitute victimhood in its complete sense. Charity does not care about possible agencies who are held responsible for the miserable position of the victim. Although the innocence of the poor is acknowledged in the act of charity, here, too, the distinction between perpetrators and victims is still disregarded and still has to be disregarded. Because the misery of the poor is seen as a part of a great chain of beings, of a grand order of the world that is based on the contrast between high and low and founded in the will of God, any questioning of fate—as rose in the issue of theodicy (Weber 1925, p. 314)—has to be turned down before it can affect the divine source of order itself. Personal compassion with the inferior subject is thus the perfect response of stratified societies to the challenge of boundaries—the sacredness of the center as embodied in the nobility or its substitutes is never questioned, but the fragility and uncertainties of boundary construction is taken into account. The subjectivity of those at the margin of society is recognized, but it can never challenge the embodiment of the center itself. Both the nobleman and the beggar constitute themselves in their mutual act of recognition—to rephrase Hegel’s famous distinction. In modern societies that have replaced the divine chain of beings by the equality of citizens, the voice and face of misery triggers off strong pressures on public charity. The illusion of a fairly equal condition of all citizens breaks down if the suffering of cohumans comes to the fore of public attention. Public, as well as private compassion copes with this breakdown by considering it as an exceptional and individual case that can be repaired by the personal sympathetic encounter with the suffering individual. Therefore, every construction of public compassion requires the misery to be presented as an individual story, requires the misery to have a face and a voice. The anonymous suffering of the many has to be transformed and condensed into a face and fate, which, in contrast to mere numbers, can evoke empathic identification. Thus the public advocates of victims have to stage an icon of misery, even to invent a story of individual suffering, if they want to raise compassion and charity—the emotional shortcut in the discourse about victimhood.

Impartial Justice: The Construction of Perpetrators If, in distinction to charity, the attention turns to the human agents who have caused the misery, we can, in principle, distinguish between perpetrators and

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victims. The actor who has intentionally and knowingly caused harm to members of the community is held responsible for this. If these actors have a face and a name, if they can be depicted and identified, then they can be presented as perpetrators, accused of wrongdoing, convicted and perhaps forced to restore the original situation, to repair the damage, to compensate for the harm, misery and evil inflicted on the victims.19 Originally, the assessment of damage and its reparation did not require and involve a third party. If, in simple stateless societies, a member of one family is killed or harmed by a member of another family, this can engender a bloody chain of revenge and retaliation and lead even to the breakdown of society; but it can also lead to negotiations between the two groups in order to find ways to repair the damage by paying material compensations (Gluckman 1972). Here, on the level of purely reciprocal relationships between groups, the question of guilt and punishment is not yet raised. It is just a matter of harm, damage and retaliation, of us and them, of friends and foes.20 The question of guilt and the concept of the criminal perpetrator do not come to the fore until the third impartial party is engaged and involved to mediate between groups in conflict. This third party assesses the damage and tries to find a solution on the basis of personal authority or by reference to a set of common norms to be respected by the conflicting groups. The agent who has caused harm is now seen not only as an inimical outsider but also as a member of an encompassing group defined by common norms (Braithwaite 1989). The conflict between groups and the rituals of revenge are replaced by the violation of the law and the ritual of constructing justice—the enemy is turned into a perpetrator. In this fundamental change from intergroup hostility to the punishment of crimes, the institutionalization of the third party is absolutely crucial. In the institutional arena of jurisdiction, the three parties—the victim, the perpetrator and the enforcement of justice—are clearly separated. All of them are present, but their communication is highly ritualized in an almost liturgical manner—thus ensuring the indispensable distance between the perspective of the impartial public and the victim or the perpetrator. Any suspicion of secret ties between the representation of the public and one of the opponents in court would question and disrupt the entire procedure. If the moral order is reconstructed mainly by rituals of jurisdiction, the third party has to disregard personal interests and involvement. Once established, the rule of the law turns the sacred center of society into an impersonal sphere. This impersonality and objectivity of modern law does not go well with personal embodiments of the sacred: the rule of the law expels heroes from the sacred center of society. Heroes are extraordinary; they do not respect the common rules; they are sovereign and stand above the law. Yet expelling the heroes from the center of society does not dispense with the question of agency as the moving force of society. Looking for agency, the perspective turns, therefore, from the center to the periphery, from the sacred to the demonic, from heroes to villains. The ritual of jurisdiction allows, not only the reconstruction of the moral order, but also the combination of an impersonal

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conception of the sacred center with a personal conception of the periphery. It purges the center from Gods and heroes, but still believes in devils and demons at the periphery. The rule of the law does not provide positive sanctions; it does not reward those who respect the rules. Instead, it relies on negative sanctions—it expels the perpetrators to enclosures of violence within the boundaries of the community. The prison becomes the symbol of suspended citizenship and legitimate violence (Foucault 1981). This violence indicates not only the sovereignty of the law but also the marginal situation of the imprisoned. In most cases, the perpetrator is not immediately discovered or identified; he is amidst us, but we do not know his face and his whereabouts—he does not raise his voice and admit publicly to his deeds. In the search for the embodiment of evil, the moral community has to discover the perpetrator. Thus the perpetrator becomes a public construction of the moral community. Once discovered and convicted, the perpetrator has a face, but he has no voice and no place in the community anymore. He or she is expelled from the community, moved beyond the margin of full citizenship—at least for a certain time. The expulsion of perpetrators will, however, restore the social order only if the number of perpetrators is relatively small. Sentencing the majority of the population to prison risks turning the perpetrators into defeated victims of an unjust order. But even if this is not the case, the ritual of jurisdiction presupposes also the awareness that the fringe of the community is uncertain and that boundaries are unclear. Thrusting for an embodiment of the evil, a moral community can accuse innocent persons and the actual culprit can escape punishment. The ritual of jurisdiction centers the detached perspective of the impartial observer, but the reference to a common set of impersonal norms does, of course, not warrant unanimity with respect to their interpretation. The question of guilt and innocence is subject to debates and arguments because the accused party has, in principle at least, a voice in the judiciary discourse—accusations can be questioned and turned down, the claim of guilt and responsibility can be countered by the assertion and proof of innocence, etc. (Scott and Lyman 1990; Luhmann 1993). Such debates become salient if the alleged perpetrator is, indeed, present and his or her punishment is at stake. If the perpetrators are dead or far away, and thus not participating in the discourse about victimization, the public usually arrives quickly at a consensus about guilt and responsibility. Today, there will be hardly a serious voice in defense of the witch hunters of the fifteenth century, the slave traders of the eighteenth century or the Holocaust perpetrators of the twentieth century. The moral verdict is unanimous and clear, but their punishment is out of reach. In spite of this apparently obvious condemnation, the position of the perpetrator too is a highly ambivalent one. The boundary between just and unjust, good and evil, good citizens and perpetrators, is fragile and shifting. Similar to the rich and the poor in the charitable act, the perpetrator and the good citizen can change places—this time, however, not mediated by the separation between the mundane life and the transcendental world. Instead, those who claim to be good citizens in their public life can imagine themselves to be violent and ruthless

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criminals, rapists and bad boys in their most private moments, that is, in their dreams (H. Becker 1973). The boundary that separates both realms and prevents the excluded side of the ambivalence from being exposed is the divide between public and private life, between consciousness and unconsciousness, dream and everyday life. Like the police inspector tries to discover the hidden and unknown criminal, the therapist and the poet try to cross the thin line between the moral citizen and the hidden amoral individual in all of us. Even the figure of the perpetrator cannot escape the ambivalence that is at the core of any boundary construction.

The Discourse of Civil Society: The Construction of Victimhood In spite of debates about proofs and refutations, accusations and defenses, confessions and denials, the discourse of justice is based on the assumption that individual human agents can be identified and held responsible for the suffering of others. Although recognizing the status of victims, the ritual of judiciary trials focuses clearly on the person of the perpetrator and tries to repair the imperfect society by punishing the guilty perpetrator—even if the victims are dead and the harm afflicted to them cannot be repaired anymore. Sometimes, however, moral imperfection and evil cannot be traced back to a clearly identifiable perpetrator who can be held responsible for it (Shklar 1990). There is no doubt that human suffering, misery and evil exist even in complex and so-called advanced societies, but it is increasingly difficult to attribute responsibilities to a clearly demarcated individual or group. Instead, the misery is attributed to complex concatenations or side effects of human agency, involving a multitude of actors, acting under uncertainty and risk, shifting possible side effects to the periphery of their attention, some of them known, most of them unknown, none of them entirely innocent, but most of them responsible only to a limited degree. As our knowledge about the complex ramifications of action effects increases, as our awareness about contextual embeddedness of action is heightened, the verdict about guilt or innocence, crucial to the discourse of justice, amounts sometimes to an arbitrary decision and disregard of knowledge, to an abstraction from the complexity of entanglement, to a reduction of a field of grayish nuances to a clear cut line between black and white. Even if the misery of the victim can be clearly related to a perpetrator, these perpetrators can sometimes not be held accountable for their deeds because they may be unable to compensate for the immense harm they caused or because they may be dead or simply out of reach. Sometimes in the aftermath of a bloody civil war, the punishment of the perpetrators would risk severing the fragile bonds between the two parties and refueling the hatred and hostility between them. If the perpetrators include large parts of the population and cannot be limited to a small group—as in the case of the genocides of Rwanda or Cambodia—jurisdiction fails to restore the moral order of society. Here, muteness and the taboo of talking about personal involvement in atrocities ensure a fragile and endangered peace.21

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This situation of complex entanglement and difficult accountability fosters a shifting of attention from the responsibility of perpetrators to the innocence of the victims. Even if the question of guilt is difficult to answer, we can arrive at a consensus about the innocence of the victims because no participant in the debate is targeted as the one who has to face the risk of punishment. If the victims are considered innocent, they are seen as devoid of control about their own fate, entangled in a web of outside powers and influences. Furthermore, the shift from perpetrators to victims is supported by the impersonal order of modern societies. Heroes, as well as perpetrators, have faces and voices; they are personal embodiments of good and evil, the sacred and the demonic, triumph and trauma. The impersonal order of markets and bureaucracies, sciences and technologies, cannot dispense with agency, but these agencies are conceived as objects that can be compared, evaluated and measured. In a strange way, the systems of modern society show an elective affinity to the faceless deindividualized victim who is treated as an object, but could claim to be a subject again. The institutional arena of this construction of victimhood is the public discourse of civil society. Here, the victims are remembered and represented by the citizens who by their very self-understanding have to take responsibility for those who have no voice in politics—for their children and servants, for passing visitors and guests, as well as for the victims of the past. The core of civil society is based on a discourse of representation and responsibility—every citizen participating in it has to take the perspective of others, assume their subjectivity and construct tentatively a general will based on a common moral order. Even in the pursuit of particular interests, participants in the public discourse have to couch these interests in terms of commonly acceptable arguments. This drift toward universalism fosters also the representation of excluded others. Because every civil society actually has to exclude some outsiders from having a voice, it also cannot dispense with representing their reasonable interests and assuming subjectivity beyond the narrow confines of citizenship rights and presence. It can merge the unavoidable particularity and restrictions of citizenship with the idea of a universal justification only if excluded subjectivity is represented by citizens. Therefore, recognizing the innocence of victims in the discourse of civil society has a similar function for the reconstruction of moral order as has the assertion of responsibility and guilt in the judiciary discourse. If, instead of the guilt of the perpetrators, the focus is on the innocence of the victims, civil society strengthens its consensus and integration, not only because it is the public that decides about the imperfection of social reality and suggests its repair. It is also assumed that, not individual perpetrators, but the civil society and the state itself have to compensate for the sufferings of the victims. Suffering requires soothing, compensation and healing, and suffering that is caused by human agency asks for social repairs. If individual persons cannot be held responsible, because they are dead or unknown or because, like in most cases, the harm and suffering of the victims outweighs by far the perpetrators’ means to

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compensate for it, then the community has to take over the task of healing (Kaufmann 1992). Thus, the discourse about victims changes its core focus: It is no longer about individuals and their responsibilities, crime and punishment, but, instead, it is about public responsibility and public solidarity, about risks of life and collective support. The public not only defines the imperfection of the social order but takes responsibility also for its repair; it not only assesses the harm inflicted to the victims but also carries the burden of its healing; it not only commands solidarity among the citizens but also practices this solidarity itself. It would be too simple to explain this shift toward public responsibility by the distribution of costs among a multitude of citizens who, as individual persons, can disregard the resulting setback because it is so small. Instead, the turn toward public responsibility for the victims may rather result from a feeling of collective guilt on the part of those who did not intervene to prevent the suffering or ignored it when it occurred. In a global public sphere, everybody can be seen as a bystander. The turn toward public responsibility may, however, also reflect a latent identification with victims, as well as with perpetrators—it is only by chance that some escaped the fate of victims, it is only by coincidence and not by moral merit that most did not end up in a situation where they might have become perpetrators. Thus the public construction of victims not only transcends the single actor model (as it underlies rational choice explanations), which holds individuals accountable and responsible for their own actions, and assumes a second actor who, because of his power, harms the situation of the victim. In addition to the power relationship between perpetrator and victim that underlies the judiciary discourse, the public construction of victimhood is based on a strong collective identity of humankind united by moral principles, the power to define its violations and the obligation to repair it by solidarity. The rise of this collective identity of humankind engenders this turn from retaliatory justice to public responses to suffering. Decoupling the solidarity with the victims from the individual responsibility for their sufferings becomes a crucial feature of this strong conception of the public sphere and marks its difference to the judiciary discourse.

Claims and Recognitions in a Strong Public Sphere A strong public sphere that not only carries and embodies moral principles but also replaces the punishment of perpetrators with the solidarity with the victims cannot, however, entirely prevent debates and conflicts. It is the very generosity and solidarity of the strong public sphere that can invite exploitation and attract misuse. In the strong public sphere, the surviving victim is entitled to receive financial assistance, legal privileges and social empathy. Claims to be the victims of unforeseeable risks or traumatizing events are, therefore, put forward in the name of many groups. To present the claim as one of a group adds superindividual weight to it and removes any suspicion of individual responsibility. Ac-

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cording to the model of victimhood outlined above, however, the victims themselves have no voices and no faces. They are dead, muted in their misery, numbed in their trauma. Certainly, after some time, the voices of the very few survivors who are able to talk about their trauma move a wide audience, their testimonies and memories are globally read and broadcasted. Survivors like Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel are regarded as embodiments of authenticity, as paradigms of the restitutions of damaged subjectivity. The moral authority and the fame of the surviving victim can even inspire dubious testimonies like the memories of Bruno Doesseker who pretended to have escaped the camp of Majdanek as a child, but who, in fact was neither Jewish, nor a surviving victim. His autobiography was celebrated as one of the most touching and authentic reports of Holocaust survivors, translated into thirteen languages (Wilkomirski 1995; Mächler 2000). Here, the public audience’s readiness to believe and its longing for authenticity had constructed the victim. The authority of the surviving victim is so overwhelming that under normal circumstances nobody dares to challenge it. Even if the memories of Wilkomirski, alias Doesseker, are not an intended fake, but an artifact of therapeutically induced imagination, they provide a vivid illustration of the secular shift from juvenile dreams imagining the self as a hero, via dreams that envision the subject as a bad boy, as a transgressor of norms, to imagining the victim as the icon of damaged subjectivity. Equally important are the changes in public resonance. Like the figures of the hero and the perpetrator, the figure of the victim, too, is not a natural result of an individual’s actions but is constructed by the public audience, i.e., the citizens who take generalized responsibility. In early modern Europe, it was noble descent that conveyed privileges and superior status. Many presented faked documents in order to prove their pretended nobility. The issues and claims raised required legal regulation; special princely courts investigated them and licensed titles and entitlements. Later, the figure of the marriage impostor and swindler who pretended to be wealthy and of respected origin fascinated and frightened bourgeois society. Today, the focus of superior identity has shifted from the center to the periphery—it is the claim of being a victim that has to be publicly debated and approved in order to prevent fraud and abuse. The public representation and recognition of the victims is not only carried by the general moral responsibility of every citizen. It can also be put forward by individuals who claim a special mandate as their advocates, their representatives, or their heirs. This special claim of representation opens up a new field of selection and exclusion. Because some victims are impressively represented by professionals, others inevitably remain in the shadow. There has always been, there is and there always will be, suffering without representation and recognition, misery that fails to receive public attention; there will always be the silence of unnoticed “victims” (Lyotard 1988). Those victims who are represented in the public discourse are not invariably and unanimously granted public support.22 Various advocates can advance claims and compete for representing the group that has suffered most and deserves support first. Does the history of black slavery justify stronger claims than the extermination

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wars against Native Americans, does the suffering of the Jewish community in the Shoah outweigh the victimization of Poland and Russia by Nazi Germany, does the colonial repression of African people justify more compensation than the suffering of women through male chauvinism? Of course suffering is as incomparable as identity is, but scarce resources are at stake. On the level of welfare budgets, the incomparable has to be compared and assessed; compensations have to be paid if claims have been accepted in court and in the public sphere. Thus the strong public sphere can be turned into an arena for public fights for recognition. Like other presentations of collective identity, the claim to be a victim also has to be recognized by others—it is a public construction, a collective classification that has to be consented to and recognized by outsiders as well as insiders. Identity can never dispense with this precarious balance between inside and outside, between self-presentation and social recognition (Trilling 1972). This social recognition can, of course, be granted or refused. Some claims are recognized, others are not. Most representatives of the victims can present their stories as cases of innocent suffering, risk and misfortune; they can appeal to solidarity and refer to common moral principles. But it is not the obvious difference in moral gravity or the sheer amount of suffering that makes some claims successful and causes others to be dropped. Defining innocence and guilt, demarcating the boundaries of the social order and declaring its imperfections, labeling actions as deviant and situations as miserable are not self-evident deductive operations; they result instead from debates and conflicts, routines and traditions, professional interests and political power. Indeed, there are no natural victims. It is not only the situation of the victims that is produced by human action, but also their recognition as being miserable and in need of solidarity. Obviously, the conditions for this recognition vary. At first there are the long-term changes of the moral order, of sensitivities and empathy. What we today unanimously regard as brutal violence against children and women was, a century ago, seen as appropriate education and an adequate display of manly authority. But, although public fights for recognition frequently refer to traumas of the past, it is not history itself that decides success or failure. Certainly, the passing of time does matter—nobody would today consider the claim of the descendents of South American victims of the Spanish colonial rule, or support Indonesian claims with respect to Dutch colonialism. But why should American slavery substantiate claims for restitution, whereas the Arabic slave trade in the eighteenth century hardly engenders similar claims?23 Some historical traumas are forgotten, others are very much alive, appealed to and reconstructed in public fights. What decides the social construction of victims is their successful representation in the public sphere. In its most elementary form, representation is achieved by visible presence in public places. But visible presence also has its special risks for the indispensable distance between the third party and the victims. First of all, the distinction between the minority of miserable victims and the majority of regular passersby must be clearly marked. Mutilated soldiers in rags can eventu-

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ally claim to be victims, jobless ex-managers in impeccable suits cannot. But even if the misery and suffering is undeniable and distinctive, the individual beggar asking for alms will not be treated as a victim in the strict sense. He himself is advancing the claim for support, he has a face and a voice, he addresses individual persons, he is in close proximity—the reaction will be compassion and individual charity or civil inattention. Victims cannot advance their claim directly, individually and personally. Instead, as outlined above, the social construction of victimhood presupposes distance and a certain noncommunication between the public center and the victims.24 For similar reasons, victims cannot be represented by formal organization with voluntary membership. The classical model of organizational representation and lobbying works for workers, farmers, Catholics, storekeepers, gun collectors, etc., but it runs counter to the basic structure of victimhood: by their very definition, victims are seen as powerless and unable to fight for their own rights. When unions become powerful collective actors, workers cannot claim the position of victims anymore. Victims are subjects devoid of faces and voices; they cannot be imagined as powerful actors pitted in conflicts with other collective actors on the same footing. Because of their damaged subjectivity, their muteness and anonymity, they need mediating third parties who articulate their suffering and advocate their claims—they need civic or professional representation. Even the few who have survived the horror and raise their voice to present their memories rarely do so without assistance from publishing houses and broadcasting agencies, therapists and humanitarian associations. Like other forms of authenticity, the authenticity of the victims’ testimony is also mediated and constructed—even if the survivors are intellectuals who are able to speak on their own. The preciousness of the victim’s authentic voice results from its very rarity. Victims need advocates and representatives. If laic people advocate the cause of victims in a strong public sphere, they are mostly moved by compassion and conviction, they identify strongly with the cause of the victims—hence their impartiality might sometimes be questioned by outsiders. In contrast, professional specialists like lawyers, social workers, medical doctors, and even journalists, can claim to be impartial experts and thus to represent the public interest, but they can also claim to represent the justified interests of the victims and bringing them to the fore of public attention. They act as mediators between the victims and the public sphere. But in this mediation they also construct the distance that is constitutive for victimhood. Without this distance to the center, the victim would be considered either as a challenge to immediate personal compassion or as an actor struggling for resources. Professional advocacy not only constructs the indispensable distance between the public center and the victims, but also affects the struggle for recognition: efficiency is increased, conflicts become less passionate, compromises more likely. The professional representation may end up in a new field of politics, where the claims of victims are recognized or rejected; legal institutions define the rights

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and entitlements of victims, norms of political correctness demarcate the range of prudence in public expression and the occasions for publicly recognized offenses. This public regulation of recognition and offense certainly restricts the original freedom of speech and also occasionally engenders ridiculous exaggeration, but this holds true also for other patterns of civilization, for the control of eating behavior by dietary norms, for the control of driving by traffic regulations, etc. Of course, the advocacy of professional experts is not without risks. Experts not only offer their services to an eagerly demanding clientele of suffering victims, they can also convince a possible clientele of their victimization and thus create the demand that their professional services are ready to satisfy. In this respect, the professional advocacy for victims does not differ from other professional services, however.25 Medical doctors define health and disease, provide the cure and control the efficiency of their services by themselves; lawyers convince possible clients to sue some other party and then represent their clients in court; professional politicians try to mobilize the voters; etc. In principle, professional groups aim at a monopoly of defining the need, providing the therapy and supervising its success by themselves. Society and victims cannot completely avoid the risk of being misused by these quasi monopolies—even when therapists and advocates are tempered by the obligation to serve the common good (H. Becker 1973; Giesen 1983). Obviously, suffering and misery at the fringe of society can fail to get public attention, because the professionals have strategic reasons not to represent it—because strategic interests of their old clientele are at risk, because of costs, or simply because of ignorance. But the opposite might also be true. People who have no connection to each other and live their lives in quite diverse ways might be declared victims and represented by professional advocates without a mandate. A market for the representation of victims can emerge; identity entrepreneurs compete in the public sphere; misery is staged in the media; and finally those who considered themselves to be happy citizens before come to see themselves as humiliated victims. The descendants of Tasmanian aborigines, who previously tried to hide their origin and lived well-integrated among their cocitizens, now proudly claim their once despised descent, regard themselves as the heirs of victims and demand compensation. Thus professional representation not only may leave authentic suffering unnoticed but also may construct victims where there is no suffering (Rutschky 1992). More than other professional services, the professional representation of victims has to defend itself against the charge of paternalism.26 In contrast to a therapeutic discourse that leaves the task of defining problems and needs to the patient, the professional representatives of the victims can rarely refer to an explicit mandate—the victims are dead, muted and overwhelmed by their suffering. The fact that the suffering has muted the victims can, however, be turned into a strong justification of the victims’ cause: Every member of the community will agree on the severity of the trauma and its need to be represented. The death and the suffering of the victims serve as a foundation for a general impersonal man-

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date, which doesn’t need further justification. It is not strategic reasoning of a particular group, but the moral foundation of community itself that requires representation and advocacy. This universal mandate can be strengthened by an explicit mandate of the victims’ heirs and relatives who—even if they should not be victims themselves—could claim a strong primordial identity with the victims and turn their mourning about the loss into a public cause. The professional advocates can, furthermore, reinforce this mandate by pointing to the fact that they themselves, although certainly not suffering and miserable, belong also to the group to which the victims belonged. Thus the trauma of the victims is transferred and dispersed to those who share a primordial collective identity with them. Because the victims have no voice, the professional advocate has to construct his or her mandate in a counterfactual way. The victims would have trusted him or her because he or she has the same primordial identity which suffered from victimization and which is now to be represented: Thus women are represented by women, African Americans by African Americans, Latin Americans by Latin Americans. Trust is the basic bond that connects the muted victims to the professional representatives—as expertise is the key that opens the doors to the public arena for the professional advocates. Both are indispensable in the process of mediation and representation that constructs the constitutive distance between the voiceless and faceless victims on the one hand and the public center of society on the other. If the advocates can claim a primordial connection to the community of victims, they are better protected against the suspicion of seducing or imposing identity from outside—similar to the case of the parents telling their offspring a story about their roots. In both cases, the primordial collective identity between parents and children or between the surviving victims and their professional advocates—provides the basis of trust and justifies the advocacy. Certainly, this primordial collective identity is also socially constructed and needs continuous reaffirmation. But it is constructed in a way that allows for little objections: by his or her “nature,” the other has the same competence as a subject partaking in a community of remembrance.27

Concluding Remarks The social construction of victims has, indeed, a core function for the distinction between center and periphery, between inside and outside, between subjects and objects. Victims—whether dead or surviving—demarcate the fringe of human societies, the frontier where the neat cultural classification gets stuck into semantic swamps and moral twilight, where the fragility and imperfection of social order becomes obvious. This perspective on the fringe presupposes a strong public sphere as the center of society and institutional arenas where the outlands of damaged subjectivity can be ritually embraced and coped with. Although religious sacrifices and charity are institutions that define and deal with victims, they do so in a truncated way. The sacrifice treats victims as sacrificial objects that are turned

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from life to death in order to reinforce the precarious ties to the sacred. The rituals of charity cope with the misery of the living and present cohumans, but address it within the frame of direct encounters between individual persons. Here, the victims have a face and a voice, but their suffering is not recognized as a problem of the social order. In contrast, the arenas of jurisdiction and the public discourse of civil society focus on perpetrators and victims and regard both of them as embodiments of an imperfect social order. Jurisdiction, as well as the discourse of civil society, give way to a strong public perspective and connect this to the punishment of perpetrators and the construction of guilt—as far as jurisdiction is concerned—and to the representation of voiceless and faceless victims and their innocence—as far as the strong public sphere is concerned. Because they are at the fringe of the social community, victims need advocates to represent them whether they are dead or survivors. Although not without risks—like other forms of representation, too—these modes of advocacy by insiders and outsiders, by professional services and laic movements, are as indispensable for the construction of victims as are memorials, museums and monuments for the construction of collective memory. In the public debate about victimhood, society not only tries to construct and to reconstruct its boundaries, but it also accounts for the imperfection of social order and tries to repair it by cultural redefinition and social recognition. The public discourse about victimhood responds to the haunting awareness that there is a land in between inside and outside of the boundaries, a ghostly land of demons and victims, a land where Ockham’s Razor fails.

Notes 1. When J. F. Lyotard (1983) published Le Différend, he was heavily attacked for taking such a seemingly relativistic perspective. However, from a sociological point of view, this seems to be inevitable. For the cultural and public character of social problems in general, see, for instance, Gusfield (1981). 2. E.g., Japan’s reluctance to acknowledge war guilt vis-à-vis China during Jiang Zemin’s state visit to Japan in 1998. 3. Especially within the more strictly codified context of law, comparative rational studies have pointed this out again and again. For an illuminating comparative analysis of the political— culture-specific—power of apologies in this context, see Tavuchis (1991). 4. The unconditional support that African people often owe to even distant relatives contrasts strikingly with the Occidental modern tendency to shift medical care and support for the elderly to centralized public institutions. On the public level, modern Western societies allow for the inclusion of outsiders and people at the fringe of the community, but they also tend to minimize the range of personal obligations to solidarity. 5. For the cultural interpretation of food habits, see Eder (1988, pp. 103–219). 6. For a closer examination of these debates, see Giesen (1998a, pp. 53–55). The almost classical account of the cultural clash in the conquest of the Americas is Todorov (1992). 7. On the self as a locus of linguistic causality, see the important book of E. Becker (1972) on the birth and death of meaning. 8. The term “objectification” means here that human beings are treated as objects in the literal sense. Lukàcs (1968) and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer/Adorno 1997) use

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this term (Verdinglichung) in a different way, referring to the transformation of social relations and not to persons as such. 9. See, for instance, Turner’s (1967) analysis of liminality. 10. See Girard (1986), Lipp (1990) and Burkert (1983). 11. More generally, see Connerton (1989, pp. 41–45). 12. See also Eder (1991), Giesen (1999a, p. 60), Koselleck (1980) and M. Miller (1986). 13. A similar phenomenon has been observed in the second generation of the collectivity of the perpetrators (Eckstaedt 1989). 14. On memorial sites, see Nipperdey (1976), Nora (1992) and Speitkamp (1996); for a special focus on war memorials, see Koselleck (1977), Koselleck and Jeismann (1994) and Koselleck (1997). 15. For Alfred Schütz’s analytical distinction between predecessors, contemporaries, consociates, and successors, see Natanson (1962, pp. XXXIII-XXXIV). 16. On the varying schemes according to the functions of the sacrifice, see Mauss and Hubert (1968). 17. For an unusual perspective on this phenomenon, see Saint-Exupéry (1956). 18. On the moral implications of charity, presents and gifts, see Mauss (1967). 19. An interesting study on this point is presented by Scully and Marolla (1990). 20. For a more general view on law and reciprocity in savage societies, see Malinowski (1985). 21. For case studies on this matter, see Henke (1991) and Avishai and Smith (1997). 22. On victim language, official victims and interest groups, see Amato (1990). 23. Recently a group of Herero chiefs has presented an official quest asking half a billion German marks in compensation for the genocide of the Hereros during the German colonial rule a century ago. The German president, when visiting Namibia, expressed his concern but declined the claim. 24. The public arenas of the government, the court and the discourse of civil society are superlocal institutions—they do not notice local events without mediating mechanisms; instead, the claim to be recognized as victims has to be presented to them in ways they can respond to. 25. Polemical, but still worth reading, is Illich (1977). For a less polemical account—taking Illich’s accusations seriously—see Collins (1979) and Abbott (1988). 26. Debates in cultural anthropology about the ethnographic representation of “victims of colonialism” are an example of this; see for instance Clifford and Marcus (1986). 27. For primordial codings of collective identity, see Giesen (1998a, pp. 25–29).

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Chapter 3

The Tragic Hero: The Decapitation of the King Triumph and Trauma in the Transfer of Political Charisma Introduction “Society does have a center,” wrote Edward Shils (1975), and, indeed, the tension between center and periphery can well be regarded as one of the main axes for the construction of social reality. It constitutes boundaries and imagines a common orientation beyond the limitations of shifting encounters and direct communication. But the meaning of the center varies vastly. It can be understood in the literal sense as the market square of a village, as a sacred locality, as a central public place in a city, as a capital or as the palace of the king. It can be embodied in persons, in kings and princes, in presidents and priests. It can be associated with institutions and social arenas like constitutions and parliaments, academies and councils, legal courts and even stock exchanges; and it can be attributed to symbolic patterns, to values, icons and narratives that create a sense of collective identity and a social bond in distinction to outsiders. All these constructions of the center result from ideas of the sacred, but they also rely on particular rituals, reflect common practices and refer to special perspectives on the periphery, i.e., on the boundary separating insiders from outsiders, the realm of good community from the banned outlands of demons, the reasonable from the irrational. Before this background, the following remarks will consider transformations in the perspective on center and periphery as a transfer of charisma.1 Its dynamics result from a particular tension between the otherworldly character of charisma and innerworldly reality. Both are basically incompatible. Charisma is by definition extraordinary, infused with sacrality and opposed to mundane routine and everyday life, but it has to be embodied and represented in this 75

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world if it is to provide the social bond of a community. Max Weber’s famous presentation of the notion of charisma in Economy and Society centers on this problem of routinization (Veralltäglichung).2 Routinization occurs if the charismatic moment that establishes the bond between the hero and his followers is turned into a stable personal authority that extends not only to followers but also to a broader community. But even if we disregard this transformation of charisma into institutionalized authority and focus only on the relationship between the hero and his followers, charisma is bound to the dialectic of failure and reconstruction. The personal embodiment of the sacred in the prince or the leader, the living hero, can hardly stand the test of time and routine—the fusion of the sacred and the profane in everyday life will finally and inevitably entangle the hero in mundane matters and challenge his charisma, if the radical and mad aspects of heroism have not yet burned down mundane reality and engendered ruins and ashes, victims and wastelands. The living hero is created in a charismatic moment—any attempt to turn this extraordinary moment into an ordinary and stable routine will finally result in the decay of genuine charisma. No hero can continuously work miracles. If the hero lives long enough, he is inevitably bound to fail and to be defeated by the adversity of the world. In the real world, the hero therefore cannot escape a tragic ending. Recognizing this inescapability of a tragic ending, some living heroes, in a dramatic turn, may even prefer to choose the moment of death by themselves and, thus, keep their sovereignty even in the defeat (Morris 1975). And some of them may even try to convince their followers to join them into the abyss—leaving behind them a devastated world that resisted their thrust for the new order. Cultures of martyrdom center on this ultimate sovereignty of the voluntary death: let reality perish, but never give up the sacred cause. But the tragic fate of the living hero does not entail the end of the charismatic core of society. It can be transferred to a new living hero whose charisma will undergo the same inevitable dynamics of decay and defeat. But it can also be replaced by abstract conceptions of the sacred center—by principles and rules that have no face and no place anymore (cp. Eisenstadt 1982, 1986), by an order carried by anonymous individuals and open to anonymous individuals. Because it is disembodied, invisible and impersonal, the sacred can finally no longer be located in a special place and associated with a special face—any attempt to tie it to a particular person risks the suspicion of profane misuse. Therefore the sacred tends to be removed from the mundane center and shifted to the anonymous periphery, to those who are considered innocent because they have no mundane power. Yet, as soon as the new carriers of the sacred, in turn, acquire mundane power, their sacredness risks being routinized, wearing out and failing tragically— the sacred is, again, transferred to new arenas and translated to new “innocent” carriers in order to reconstruct the basic tension. This disembodiment and depersonalization of the sacred goes along with a growing separation between the private and the public sphere. What originally was the personal, exclusive and magical bond between the hero and his followers—without distinguishing between private and public relations—now becomes the impersonal anonymous and in-

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clusive perspective of those who, before, were excluded from the charismatic center. In the following chapter, we assume that each of these translations of the sacred is connected with a particular public arena in which the charismatic center of society is triumphantly reconstructed as the birth of a new body politic. These public arenas differ with respect to their rituals of discourse and with respect to their logic of communication. I will distinguish five models of such public arenas: (1) the charisma of the king appearing in public, (2) the public rule of law as transmitted by professional specialists, (3) the civil society and its moral discourse, (4) the public space of the people in collective action, and (5) the publicity of the mass media. All these arenas of the public sphere coexist and interact in contemporary societies. Therefore the common assumption that there is only one encompassing public sphere fails to account for the differences and even the mutual inconsistency of their institutional logic, the diversity of their social carriers and the heterogeneity of their cultural codes. As the following remarks question the assumption of an all-encompassing public sphere, they also do not assume a straight sequence of evolutionary stages with respect to the various arenas of the public sphere. In fact, these different arenas—king and bureaucracy, civil associations and urban crowds—frequently coexisted in historical societies, but not all of them claimed—or were recognized—to represent the center of society at all times. The shift of the charismatic center between different arenas of society is at the core of the following chapter. Although in no way limited to the Occidental path to the modern state, these stages in the transition to an impersonal order will be presented—for reasons of brevity—with a particular focus on Western history.

Reversing the Perspective on the Center: The Master Narrative of Modern Society Most accounts of the idea of modernity agree that the cultural program of modernity is based on a fundamental reversal of the relationship between center and periphery. This master account of modernity assumes that premodern (i.e., traditional) political cultures centered on the person of the prince and took his court as the focal orientation for the surrounding society. The prince was seen as the source of sovereignty and rights, collective identity and peace, innovation and enlightenment. His rule was commemorated as triumphing over internal and external enemies who challenge the peace. From the center, the perspective extended to the periphery of society, which was regarded as uncivilized and untamed, in need of education and direction. “The people” were treated as children devoid of an authentic will and a true identity that demanded respect. The court’s attitude toward the people was mainly a pedagogical one: policing unrest and violence, teaching the law and preaching

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obedience. Only if the people became similar to the prince—that is, if they imitated the language, the manners, the fashion of the princely court—were they allowed to approach the center of society and to participate in its activities. The modern idea of revolution destroyed this identity-inspiring position of the princely court and reversed the relationship between center and periphery. Now the center as embodied in the person of the prince was considered as inauthentic and artificial, as sinful and perverse, as a private abuse of public power. The prince was discovered to be an ordinary, even mediocre, human being devoid of any charisma. In contrast, the people at the periphery were seen as the embodiment of natural reason, unspoiled manners and innocent violence. They were the source of authenticity, identity and innovation; the moving force of history; and the origin of sovereignty. What had been the triumphant center of society before was now converted into a traumatic repression, and the previously despised periphery overcame this trauma in a triumphant uprising. Even the members of the ancient center occasionally accepted this axial shift and turned to the periphery in their own search for authenticity. Seeking ascetic distance from the old center and getting rid of the vices and illusions of society was treated as the supreme path toward individuality and identity. “Do not imitate others, but discover yourself and determine your own fate!” became the modern path to salvation. Individual subjectivity was invested with the power of an ultimate, triumphant and insurmountable stance and source, but it could maintain this position only as long as it could present itself as closely connected to the periphery. The individual power of political leaders, in contrast, is seen as a derivative. The government receives its power only as a temporal and limited representation of the periphery; it is inauthentic and should only reflect truthfully the moving forces of the periphery, that is, in political phrasing, of the people. Consequently, according to this paradigm of modernity, any attempt by the governing individuals to act on their own behalf, to pursue their own interests and to appear as individual persons in the center, must provoke strong reactions by the periphery. They may be accused of abusing public office for private interest. The very attempt to embody the center in the person of a hero who is exempted from the law but, instead, constitutes it, is, therefore, opposed to the core idea of an autonomous periphery. Hence the heteronymous regimes of Hitler and Stalin, Mao and Kim il sung—despite their claims to represent the true will of the people—stand out as ultimate crimes against the modern political order. The authentic center of modern society is conceived as devoid of any personal and private elements. In contrast to the personal rule of the prince and the arcane origin of politics, here the center is disembodied and impersonal, public and porous. The modern public sphere is defined by open boundaries, excluding outsiders only on their own contingent decisions or by their incidental absence. Access to this public sphere is granted to everybody who observes certain procedural rules of discourse or appeals to certain moral principles, who refers to a common triumphant or traumatic past or believes in a common utopia.

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Following the centripetal movement of modernity, the public sphere turns outsiders into insiders, observers into participants, and yesterday’s periphery into today’s center, thus extending the horizon of inclusion. Including ever-new individuals in the center, however, also results in pressure to expel others who were already there. The public sphere of modern societies copes with this pressure by several institutions that will be outlined in the following chapters. The dynamics of expulsion and reconstruction of the center engender conflicts. Even if these conflicts are based on a common culture, they cannot avoid debates about its interpretation. Establishing orthodox interpretation inevitably provokes objections and gives rise to heterodoxies, which in turn claim to represent the true unspoiled and undiluted cultural program. Great traditions are contrasted to little traditions, moderates and radicals struggle for power, camps and parties crystallize around vested interests, and the forum of these debates is the public sphere. Even in modern societies, the public sphere can never entirely escape from the impact of individual and collective interests. The ambivalent nature of these transformations impinges even on the modes of remembering the changes of the charismatic center. What is remembered as the triumphant self-constitution of a new center by its social carriers can be regarded by others as the traumatic humiliation of the charismatic center. The decapitation of the king is the classical issue for the ambivalent unfolding of memories that waver between trauma and triumph. The stabbing of Caesar and the decapitation of Konrad, the last of the Hohenstaufen imperial lineage; the execution of Charles I of England and of Louis XVI of France; and the killing of the Russian Czar Nicolas Romanov—to name just the most famous cases— engendered sharply opposed memories. The republican conspiracy of Brutus and Cassius saw the assassination of Caesar to be a triumphant victory over tyranny, whereas Caesar’s followers mourned the death of the greatest Roman. The decapitation of Konrad, the last Hohenstaufen in Italy, was—even centuries later—deplored as the traumatic end of the glorious imperial reign over medieval Europe. The execution of Charles I was remembered as the Puritans’ triumph and the Cavaliers’ trauma. The death of Louis XVI under the guillotine resulted in a deep cleavage of political traditions between republicans and légitimistes that patterned French politics in the nineteenth century, and even today French monarchists refuse to accept July 14th as a national memorial day.3 The murder of Czar Nicolas Romanov and his family was disregarded in the triumphant annual celebrations of the Russian Revolution. But it fueled a bloody civil war between the white and red armies and was remembered as the traumatic end of holy ancient Russia by the emigrants who fled their native country after the revolution.4 We can see that sudden transfers of charisma are always ambivalent and never exclusively triumphant or traumatic (cp. Smelser 1998a, 1998b). Even when the triumph of a revolution silences the voices of its adversaries for a long time, cultural memory preserves ambivalent perspectives. Triumphant memories can be converted into traumatic ones, and the death of the king can give birth to a monarchist movement that aims at the restoration of the monarchy. But the triumph of the

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counterrevolution is regarded by the defeated revolutionaries not only as a violent oppression of their cause but as a trauma that, after some time of latency, must be overcome by a reenactment of the revolution. Thus the destruction of the old charismatic center and the construction of a new one, defeat and victory, triumph and trauma, are inseparably linked. If one perspective prevails, it is only because the other has been kept silent. The tides of history can, however, give new salience to a latent perspective and foster a Gestalt switch of memories.

Personal Charisma: Linking the King’s Two Bodies Louis XIV’s famous dictum “L’état c’est moi” marks the final point of an institutional development that started many centuries before, when various Franco-Germanic tribes chose a chief and this chief was solemnly crowned by the representative of the church—the pope for the Carolingian emperors and the bishops of Sens or Reims for the Capetian kings of France. No matter how powerful the ruler might have been, he could not claim the crown unless the holy church agreed and invested him according to a prescribed liturgy. This embodiment of the center in the person of the king links two different realms: the sacred, timeless, and invisible realm of the crown on the one hand, and the mundane, mortal, and visible realm of the ruler on the other (Eisenstadt 1982). The king has two bodies, as Kantorowicz (1957) has shown in his masterful account of medieval political theology: his mortal, visible, and private body is distinguished from his sacred and public office, which never dies, but is passed from one ruler to another. The occidental dichotomy between the sacred and the mundane, the public and the private, reflects the double nature of Christ as God and human being, as a mediator between the sacred transcendental realm and the profane affairs of this world. Saint Augustine in late classical antiquity and the Calabresian monk Joachim of Fiore in late medieval times elaborated the theological frame for this conception of the two realms or “two swords.” Consequently, the early medieval image of the link between the king’s two bodies was based on Christomimesis, the liturgical imitation of Christ by the king (Feichtinger 1999). The king was depicted as a giant uniting and ruling the world triumphantly; like the Roman emperors, his person marked the center of the universe and he could claim “ubi imperatore ibi Roma” (where the emperor is, Rome is). His presence sacralized the place and his entourage—in late medieval France, “les rois thaumaturges” (Bloch 1998) were reported to heal scrofula (a skin disease) by simply touching people who had the disease. Christomimesis and the permeating and diffuse character of the king’s sacredness created a moment of intensive apparition and aura—the individual and mortal body of the ruler merged with the supernatural mysterious realm. But the sacral radiation of the crown also engendered a profound bond between the king’s followers. The fundamental risk of violence and bloody vengeance between families and clans is overcome by the sacred rule of the king. The king is—above all—the source of internal peace.5 He bans violence and warrants

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peace among his followers, his triumphant rule transcends family ties and his authority binds his followers in a nonviolent way. They could even see themselves as an extension of the king’s sacred body—just as the community of faithful could claim to represent the corpus christi mysticum, the spiritual body of Christ. Thus the embodiment of the center not only bridged the gap between the sacred and the mundane, but also forged a strong bond between people. In the sociological tradition, this primordial form of authority is commonly called charismatic. No construction of political authority can entirely dispense with a charismatic core. The charismatic self-empowerment constitutes the ultimate source of political agency. It is represented as the triumphant self-constitution of a political authority that can claim obedience without enslavement and repression. But the location of this charisma varies, as does its mode of construction. Because charisma does not allow for questions or objections, but commands a diffuse and almost unrestricted obedience without falling back on terror and open violence, it is the most precious and versatile basis of power. Many actors try to lay claim to it and to deny this claim to others. Hence conflicts and contestations about the location and transfer of the sacred center are hard to avoid. The charismatic character of the king’s authority is revealed by his appearance in public. Without the distinction between the arcane and the public fields of politics, no charismatic bond between ruler and followers can persist beyond the elusive and transitional moment. As the living hero, the king has to stay at a distance from regular and mundane affairs. Because no mortal person is able to present himself constantly in a charismatic way, the charisma of the king requires that he can escape and retreat to the arcanum, where only his confidants, his personal servants and his close family members notice his human weaknesses, respond to his need for advice and communicate with him on an equal footing. Both poles, the arcanum and the publicum, are necessarily connected, and the charisma of the king presupposes a delicate balance between them. If the king’s rule remains permanently in the arcanum, rumors about his death can spread and his charisma will fade away—a risk depicted in the classical drama El Cid or Kurosawa’s film Kagemusha. If, on the other hand, the king never retreats backstage, he risks appearing as just another ordinary human being—mortal and weak, dependent and commonplace. This mortality and weakness have to be concealed from the public eye; those who witness it—his servants and advisors—are obliged to be mute with respect to outsiders. In the prince’s rare appearances in public, his charisma is staged by an elaborate liturgy, assisted by servants and minstrels, patterned by solemn rituals of procession, adorned with the signs of sacredness. The public presentation of charisma recalls not only the triumph of the hero over his adversaries and rivals but also the triumphant construction of authority with respect to his followers. Enslaved princes of conquered nations adorn his triumphant rituals and his honorific titles recall past victories. The staging of his charisma focuses on distance and awe. Even when the prince crosses the boundary between arcanum and publicum and meets

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the people outside of his palace, the distance between them is ritually marked. The close physical proximity between the prince and the people has to be counteracted by ritual restrictions of communication. Courtiers and guards maintain a distance between the king and the people; the king is silent or restricts his speech to ritual benedictions and blessings; he sits on an elevated throne or rides a special animal; his dress and insignia indicate his triumphant sacredness, so that he is separated from the mortal beings in many ways. Staging the charisma of the prince is to construct alterity and visibility, distance and proximity, at the same time. As beneficial as the king’s presence might be, it is also frightening, overwhelming or even terrifying. When the charismatic hero appears in public, the people are captivated by his presence; they allow the sacred to permeate them and to dissolve their mortal individualities. The triumphant moment of charisma is also the moment of effervescence. Whoever wants to prevent the charismatic osmosis between the prince and the people has to establish strong barriers of communication between the prince and his followers. Thus the English Puritans had to forbid any attempt of Charles I to address his people directly before his execution; the execution was public, but performed behind a screen that prevented the bloody act from being watched by the people. The Puritans were well aware of the diffuse, permeating and expansive nature of charisma, the crossing of boundaries and the sacred radiation of the crown. Charisma is, of course, not limited to the monarchic rule of kings. Even in modern political systems that have removed all charismatic underpinnings from their administrations and have decoupled it from the dried-out shell of bureaucratic legal rationality, there are still the charismatic expectations on the top representatives of the nation. The solemn ritual of the presidential inauguration in the United States and even the appearance of the president in Congress for the State of the Union Address indicate these charismatic expectations toward the highest representative of the nation in an impressive way. The State of the Union Address is being broadcasted nationwide, and the appearance of the president is announced solemnly. Everybody rises and cheers the president by applause; the president praises the achievements of his rule and directs attention to new challenges; he introduces eminent citizens and their achievements for the community in a way that comes close to public nobilitations. The inauguration of the president shows the sacredness of his rule in an even more explicit way. The leaders of the political parties and the representatives of the various states of the union, as well as many citizens, attend it. Anthem and flag, oath and address to the people, colorful pageantry and glimmering arms—all the classical elements of a king’s coronation ritual are there. But the act of sacralization is no longer performed by a representative of the church: Religion, although powerful and pervasive in the United States, is a matter of private confession and communal association. Instead, the representative of the Constitution administers the oath of office. The Constitution and the law have replaced the church as the source of the sacred. Although I have so far outlined the charismatic link between the king’s two bodies—following Kantorowicz—with European history in mind, the charisma

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of princely rule is, of course, not an exclusively Occidental phenomenon. Indeed, no construction of monarchic authority can entirely dispense with charisma. In the West African kingdoms (most prominently in the figures of the Ashante Hene or the Ibo Onitsha) in the Cuban monarchy or the Cameroon principalities, the Swazi kingdoms, etc. (Girard 1977, p. 111; Beidelmann 1966), the ruler’s position had a clearly sacred character; he was not a simple mediator but a being detached from ordinary men and similar to the gods. The king was not allowed to eat ordinary food in public, he should not touch the ordinary ground with his feet; he was even exempted from the incest taboo in order to indicate his extraordinary and superhuman nature. In some important cases—in the empires of China and Japan, in ancient Egypt (J. Assmann 1999a), in the state of the Inca, and, of course, also in the Roman Empire—the deification of the ruler went far beyond the Occidental model. The Chinese Ming emperor, for example, claimed not only to be under the mandate of heaven but also to be the son of heaven himself; the Pharaoh was divine; and the Incan ruler could not marry outside his own family because his divinity set him apart from ordinary human beings. This kind of deification of the ruler refers to a construction of charisma before the threshold of axial age civilizations. The king is personally related to the gods, and the sacred is imagined in analogy to the mundane, as a realm of acting persons similar to humans, but equipped with superhuman powers. In contrast to these fundamental structural cleavages that restricted the communication between the divine ruler and the people, modern populist leaders construct charisma in direct communication with the people. Gone are the intermediaries between the ruler and the people, though a fundamental boundary between them is still assumed. This boundary is imprinted with the marks of axial age civilizations that separate the mundane world of acting people from impersonal transcendental principles. Here, charisma is imputed to those human beings who, despite their ordinary appearance, embody the invisible transcendental principles in a purer form then ordinary people. The charismatic moment of populist authority occurs when the leader, although he or she is the incarnation of the sacred, presents himself or herself to the people as one of them. He is dressed like them, talks like them, behaves like them, addresses them on a seemingly equal footing and, thus, allows them to participate in his presence. Because the leader presents himself in an utterly mundane way, he shows his disdain for profane and visible marks of charisma and stresses the invisibility of the transcendental principles which he embodies. It is his word and his radiation, and not his dress or his decoration that indicate the transcendental roots of populist charisma. Pressure toward populist constructions of charisma can even result in a strange reversal of the private and public modes of communication. French conservative presidents who addressed their wives by “Madame” in privacy and insisted on being addressed by their children as “Monsieur” are called by their first names in public assemblies during electoral campaigns (e.g., Valery Giscard d’Estaing). The people are expected to respond to this blending of alterity and likeness by loving the leader and cheering him or her in moments of public ecstasy. Yet, even in populist

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constructions of charisma, there is the insurmountable barrier between the charismatized hero, who has the word, and the audience that listens to him or her. In contrast to the hero, the audience can only cheer, confirm and shout—it cannot argue and suggest, tell stories and command actions. Even modern societies thatsee themselves as moral communities gathered around a moral core—in distinction to communities of descent—cannot entirely dispense with personal charisma. Here, the public staging of leadership reflects this moral core and stresses the moral integrity of the leader: The leader is seen as trustworthy, because he or she is presented as immune to the temptations of sin, corruption and private interest. Moral charisma is based on abstention from privacy, on impeccability, on the public individuality of the leader who embodies the moral perfection the community strives for (Soboul 1988, p. 363). Robespierre’s “l’incorruptible” is a paradigm case of this moral perfection, which may rightly be regarded as merciless. Of course, even in modern societies, political charisma is not limited to virtue and moral excellence. In Italy or France, the charisma of political leaders will be gravely eroded by sloppy or ridiculous appearances in public, whereas the people in the United States or Norway would interpret such an event as funny or even as popular relaxed behavior proving that the leader is “one of us.”6 Presenting famous stars and political leaders in humiliating snapshots is a major issue of the yellow press in Italy—few U.S. journals would care to publish them. In Italy and France, the charisma of political leadership is obviously not purely moral, but it is also connected to ideals of a distinguished public appearance, which hint at deeply rooted aristocratic beliefs. Charisma, however, is vulnerable and risks being worn out regardless of whether it is based on heroism, aristocratic ideals, moralism or populism. Any construction of charisma is highly ambivalent and risks being converted into its opposite if it can be presented as mundane interests in sacral disguise. Because of its diffuse way of merging and blending the public and the private, the sacred and the mundane, the individual and the collective, charisma not only sacralizes the mortal body of the prince but also risks contaminating the public office if the ruler is entangled in mundane affairs, petty conflicts, sins and stains. This fragility of charisma has held true even for occidental Caesaropapism and for truly theocratic empires, in which the ruler was not only of divine descent, but God himself. Deification did not shield the ruler entirely from doubts and criticisms. Floods and catastrophic misfortunes, as well as military defeats, could raise serious questions. For example, was the Chinese emperor really the son of heaven, or should he have been replaced by someone else who could claim and “prove” to be really divine? (Fairbank 1992). Evidently the charismatic link between the sacred and the profane needs continuous confirmation. A radical way of coping with the challenge of decay and volatility consists of disconnecting the sacred core of the political community from its personal embodiments.7 In the following chapters, I will present three successful attempts to

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separate the sacred nature of the political authority from its embodiment in the mortal king. All these moves to decharismatize the personal rule of the prince are connected to transformations of the public sphere. In these transformations, new conceptions of political agency constitute themselves as a triumph over the personal rule of the king—a triumph that at the same time is also a trauma for the king and his followers. Before considering these major transformations of the public sphere in the following chapters, an institutional differentiation should be mentioned that preserves personal embodiment of the sacred, but disconnects it from the function of government: the separation of collective identity from instrumental leadership. If the representation of national identity and the function of government are separated—as in most European democracies—the government seems to demand less political charisma and to be less vulnerable to challenge from the private behavior of political leaders. The conflicts between government and opposition, the rivalries and fights between factions of the elite, are institutionally decoupled from the representation of collective identity.8 Consequently, moral objections matter less in debates about government and leadership, and the rage of political fights will be kept at a distance from the representative of the nation. If, in contrast, the charismatic representation of collective identity and the performance of governmental functions are combined in one single position, as in the U.S. presidency, the risk of political crisis rises (Alexander 1988; Schudson 1992). Here, the fundamental ambivalence of charisma is brought out fully and without the safeguards of structural differentiation—the risk of a tragic defeat of the political hero rises. But decharismatization is not an exclusive phenomenon of political systems that do not separate institutionally between identity and strategy, political charisma and executive performance. Italy’s mani pulite scandals, Germany’s Guillaume scandal that led to the fall of the chancellor Willy Brandt (Hafner et al. 1990; Hafner et al. 1994) and Britain’s Profumo affair in the 1960s occurred in political systems that provided for institutional differentiation. No institution of political leadership can entirely dispense with charismatic expectations or reserve them solely for the politically powerless representatives of the nation. Although frequently generated by the sacred character of the office, these expectations cannot be confined to the office itself; they will also affect the individual holding the office.

The Rule of the Law: Accusing the King When the Staufian emperor Frederic II9 extended his rule over Italy in the twelfth century, he staged his charisma, not only by referring to the sacredness of the imperial crown and his succession to the Roman Emperors, but also by presenting himself as the pater iustitiae, as the source of justice in his realm (Stürner 1996). In doing so, he—like other princes of the period—appointed a large number of

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clerics as counselors and missi dominici, who were to administer justice and to justify the emperor’s decisions. These clerics were experts in Roman law as codified under Justinian in the sixth century, trained at the centers of medieval scholarship and were involved deeply in a new rational discourse about legal principles. They exalted rationality and justice and considered themselves to be sacerdotes iustitiae (priests of justice).10 Their jurisdiction and legal discourse were performed in a liturgical manner that strongly resembled the religious rituals of the church—the adopted solemn postures, special robes set over their ordinary dress, readings of sacred texts and lectures on their interpretation, clearly defined roles, and the moment of epiphany when the judgment is solemnly declared. Even if the king was absent and invisible, his sacred rule was reenacted in a liturgical celebration of justice. Individuals and their substantial interests did not matter in these highly ritualized forms of communication. As in the religious ceremonies of the church, ordinary people were, of course, largely excluded from participation in the rituals. They were considered to be just the objects of administration or the audience whose approval was irrelevant for the service of justice and rationality. Since the central Middle Ages, there was an increasing separation between the lay community and the inner circle of the religious virtuosi who celebrated the Eucharist. Inside the church, a decorated wall protected the holy ceremony from the view of commoners, who, instead of participating in the communion by eating the body of Christ, could only look at the holy wafer for a short moment when the priest presented the result of the sacrament to them. God became increasingly invisible and inaccessible to commoners. The liturgy of jurisdiction reflects this growing independence and autonomy of the ritual. The process of justification and arriving at a decision was shielded from the eye of a particular public—it was only the result of the jurisdiction that was proclaimed to them. The approval of the particular audience could be disregarded because it could be erroneous in its very particularity. Instead, the service of justice aimed at a more general and disembodied public, whose impartiality and rationality it tried to represent. The medium for communicating with this general public was the written text. Writing transcends the boundaries of locality and presence, reaches out to future generations and distant readers, stabilizes meaning and facilitates comment and criticism. Replacing the presence of the charismatic ruler and his spoken word with his written law and the divination of the classical scripture removed the center from visibility and accessibility to the ordinary people. It allowed the decoupling of the authority of the center from the public appearance of the king and gave way to a fundamental transformation of political systems. The radiation of personal charisma was limited by visibility and presence, but the rule of the invisible written law was omnipresent and allowed for the emergence of territorial states. Therefore, legalist rule was by no means limited to the Occidental case. From Hammurabi’s Babylon to the Chinese empires, the written law and its administration by a professional class were a central institutional prerequisite for the political integration of large territories.

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But this invisibility and omnipresence of the charismatic center also engendered its own special risks. It undermined the communication between the carrier of public charisma and the common people. Only those who had endured the hardships and toils of scholarly education could enjoy the pleasures of reading the sacred texts.11 Although in principle addressing a public audience that extended far beyond the confines of family and locality, the new mode of scholarly communication in fact established a professional monopoly of politics and administration, decoupled from the approval of ordinary people and impenetrable by common sense. This institutional monopoly not only was based on the exigencies of training and teaching, on the elaboration of a special language and a special liturgy, but furthermore and above all, it was reinforced by the institution of office.12 Originally derived from, and dependent on, the king’s authority, the office of administering justice gradually became an autonomous source of power. In their efforts to disempower unruly vassals and to fight rivals, the medieval kings and emperors promoted the extension of legalist scholarship and bureaucratic administration. The impersonal rule of the law could disguise personal strategic interests, and the administration of the laws by appointed officials prevented the hereditary appropriation of delegated power that had eroded the king’s power in the feudal system (Reuter 1982; Fleckenstein 1966). In contrast to vassals, the clerical administrators could not pass their power to their offspring. The German emperor Otto I used clerics for his imperial administration in the tenth century,13 and the late medieval French kings—in particular Philip Augustus, Philippe LeBel, and Louis IX—followed Frederick of Sicily in replacing or superseding feudal authority by the institution of bailiffs and senechaux who were directly responsible to the king. This creation of a special group of administrators and magistrates, who got their positions by intellectual training, education and princely appointment, represents a breakthrough of political institutions that moved the rule of the king toward the contours of a state—even if territorial demarcations were still vague and shifting.14 The public nature of legalist rule is based on an institutionalized and sometimes even embodied disregard of family ties.15 If an official has a family to care for, this care will usually prevail over the exigencies of his mandate—in particular, if the control is loose and the ultimate authority far away. Hence conflicts between the obligation of filial piety on the one hand and the duty to follow the king’s orders on the other became a core issue of classical literature in ancient Rome, as well as in early modern France and China. In particular, if the person of the ruler is absent and tight controls are lacking, then the institutionalized disregard of family ties takes on crucial importance for the rule of the king. Thus it is not by coincidence that the main carriers of medieval legalism were monks. The great monastic reform movements of Citeaux and Cluny renewed the requirement of asceticism and chastity for the religious “virtuosi”; in contrast to the unregulated religious charisma of radical prophets and hermits, they focused on liturgical celebration and devoted most of their time to the scholarly study of scriptures. The crusading orders of the German Knights, the Hospital of Saint

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John (the Maltese knights) and the Templars merged the monastic ideal of chastity and the feudal institution of military fraternity in the pursuit of honor and virtue. This combination of military power and monastic ideals became, however, a dangerous institutional alternative to the emerging princely rule. Later, the newly founded orders of the Dominicans and the Jesuits perfected the methodical conduct of monastic asceticism, as well as rational organization based on written law and the techniques of interrogation in courts both secular and religious. Even the Inquisition was a methodically conducted and rationally controlled procedure to find proof of heresy—and it was mostly performed by traveling monks who were specially appointed to the office and had no personal ties to the accused individual or the community that raised the accusation of heretical activities. In contrast to its common image, the Inquisition was not a frantic scapegoating driven by personal hatred but a highly formal interrogation that led to far fewer executions than commonly assumed.16 The path to the modern legalist state was prepared not only by the monastic deification of justice and rationality but also by the strict decoupling of justice from the private realm of the family. Legalist administrators institutionally relieved of family ties were, of course, not an exclusively Western invention. The most impressive case is certainly that of the Chinese mandarins (Marsh 1961; Loewe 1966). Since the Song dynasty at the latest, they replaced the old hereditary aristocracy as the core carrier group of the Chinese Empire (Anderson 1990, p. 182). The mandarins were scholar-officials, who reached their positions in the imperial bureaucracy and in civil service only by passing a highly competitive examination after a long and arduous study of the classical scriptures, in particular the writings of Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi, but also those of so-called legalists like Li Si and Han Fei. Family support and recommendation were helpful17—most of the Chinese bureaucracy was of gentry origin—but could never replace the examination itself as the central institution of recruitment (Ch’ü 1957; Franke 1972; Chang 1974). In order to detach the mandarin’s office from family interests, most officeholders could not be appointed to a position in the region where their families lived. Holding an office was often limited to a couple of years, and performance in office was externally controlled and rated according to a nine-rank scale. Under the Ming emperors, the external control was increased to the degree that the officeholders had to face the risk of being punished or removed from their positions for misbehavior. In the inner circle of the imperial palace, the insistence on decoupling the administrators from family ties was even more radical. It relied on not only institutional but also bodily detachments—hundreds of eunuchs had influential positions at the court of the Song, Ming and Qing emperors. Distrusting the ministers and generals who had to care for their own families, the Chinese emperors sometimes reserved the inner court and its politics exclusively for the eunuchs (Gellner 1983; Hopkins 1978). Most of them engaged strongly in partisan politics at the inner palace; some of them even became powerful generals or acquired— like Wei Zhongxian (1528–1628)—almost dictatorial positions (Anderson 1990, p. 246; Tsai 1996).

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The imperial mandarins promoted a rule of law and a strong state, carried by scholar-officials who were to be proud “to be the first to become anxious about the world’s troubles and the last to enjoy its happiness” (Fan Zhongyan, 989– 1052). They embodied the guan, the public office, in distinction to the person of the ruler (who occasionally could even be a foreigner) and the gong, the public sphere that is open to every citizen (Wakeman 1997). Clearly the mandarins saw themselves to be Confucian “virtuosi” in charge of not only the empire but also the order of the world. Even if the West and China are the most striking examples of the systematic decoupling from family ties, it was not limited to these cases. The Muslim caliphate was based on the law of Shari’a as administered and taught by a class of priestscholars, the Mullahs, who—although married—could not use their position to support of family interests. The empire of Ashoka on the Indian subcontinent was greatly assisted by Buddhist monks (Dutt and Noble 1982). Occasionally the cutting of family ties and interests was reinforced by using marginalized ethnic groups like the Janissaries, i.e., Christian slaves in the Ottoman Empire, as military elites, or foreigners as modernizing elites like the Jesuits in early modern Japan and China. Vast parts of the bureaucracy in the ancient empires were, however, controlled by social classes that did have family ties and that were closely associated with social corporations and their particular interests. In these cases, the administration of justice was less likely to take a turn toward universalism than in Western history. Even if the rule of law was impersonal and its administration divorced from personal interests, it could also change sides and be used by aristocratic opponents of the king or give rise to the establishment of an autonomous political authority. The Christian orders of the Hospitalers and the Templars established their own political rule, which rivaled the traditional princely authority, because of their highly rationalized organization, their supralocal networks and their detachment from family ties. Monastic orders like the Templars were targeted as heretics (Barber 1978; Demurger 1991), banned, and persecuted by Philippe LeBel (Strayer 1980), the French king. Two centuries later, Henry VIII of England banned the monastic orders entirely from the English territory. The rise of monasticism and legal scholarship was indeed an ambivalent transformation of the king’s authority. On the one hand, it extended princely rule by superseding feudal ties, on the other it could challenge the personal rule of the king and question the embodiment of the sacred law in the special person. Viewed from the legalists’ perspective, the king was considered king not because of his own personal sacredness, but because he incorporated the law and granted justice. As soon as he, as a mortal person, violated the law and pursued private interests, he challenged his own sacred rule of law. In this case, the professional legalists could, by their very office, turn the law, that is, the invisible and eternal rule of the king, against the mortal body of the king, against his erroneous opinions and private interests. In order to cope with this situation, Frederick II of Sicily adopted

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the formula pater et filius iusticiae, “father and son of justice,” for his rule. But this precarious balance between the king’s two bodies could stand the legalists’ challenge only as long as the king was indeed in full control over his realm. If he was devoid of reason and unable to rule rationally, the charismatic link between the king’s two bodies was broken. Murdering the king became a definite possibility.18 Instead of being lèse majesté, the ultimate crime, regicide, could also be considered a restoration of the maiestas legis (“majesty of the law”)—an act that gives way to a new embodiment of the law. In the debates about regicide at the end of the fifteenth century, the monarchomaques took this direction. Even in China, the mandarins could occasionally turn against the emperor. Eunuchs led military revolts, installed new emperors, and even assassinated emperors such as Xianzong (805–820) and Jingzong (824–826). In contrast to the legalism of medieval monks, however, the Chinese law had no strong transcendental foundation that could be turned against the ruler. Instead, it was based on human virtue and utilitarian principles. The axial tension between political and religious power was weaker than in Europe (Eisenstadt 1982). In distinction to the monastic orders of the West, the power of the mandarins was dependent on the imperial office and the eunuchs had no organizational basis outside of the palace itself. But the classical scriptures contained sufficient legitimization to turn against bad rulers. The emperor could be suspected of being the embodiment of selfish shi, or he could be controlled by an insurmountable amount of paperwork and restricted by a complex system of security rules that kept some documents from the emperor’s own eyes. Failure to fulfill the emperor’s duties and evident incompetence could even raise the question of replacement. The mandate of heaven was debatable and the mandarins had the power of interpreting it. If the construction of charisma was to link the king’s two bodies, the sacralization of the law took the opposite direction: shifting the center to an impersonal and abstract level took away the king’s sacred dress and risked revealing him merely as a human person. This revelation of mundane human nature, in distinction to the abstract divinity of ratio (reason), is also indicated in the depiction of Christ in late medieval art. Whereas Romanesque art presents Christ as the giant ruler of the world uniting heaven and earth, Gothic art shows God as a suffering human being—crucified, tortured and mortal. If the law is deified and separated from the mundane politics of the king, the state gradually replaces the person of the king and modern bureaucratic authority starts its ascent. The legalists exhibited a strong sense of autonomy and independence in their own arenas of discourse—at least as long as the princes could not directly control them. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the deputies of the German Reichstage, which occasionally continued for years, developed this autonomy with respect to their body politics to an amazing degree (Moraw 1977). For some time, the king could still claim to be legibus assolutus (but ratione alligatus)—independent of the laws, but bound by reason. Despite Louis XIV’s proud dictum “L’état, c’est moi,” the carriers of the state had been for a long time

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the legalist scholars and administrators. Their cult of rational consistency and principled reasoning, of written evidence and formal accuracy, transformed the charismatic rule of the prince into the modern territorial state. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the parliaments in England and France took a clearly antimonarchic turn.19 Supported by the tides of aristocratic resistance, the king became the target of legalist opposition. This opposition was based, not on military power or popular movements, but on the rule of the law, on the command of legal procedures, on the complicated divisions of courts. Removing the monarch was staged as a legal trial in court, using the independence and complexity of the law, turning documents of previous royal decisions against the king’s actual politics and requiring consistency, rationality, and respect for the law.20 Of course, there was no constitution guaranteeing the independence of the parliaments, and, when threatened by military intervention, the legalists had to take risks or to step backward. But they could also try to form a coalition with other public arenas. They could take advantage of the decaying charisma of the king and the eroding loyalty of his troops, they could be supported by the scandalous discourse of civil society,21 or they could try to mobilize urban crowds and direct their scapegoating energies toward the king. In successful rebellions against the king, the legalists were usually able to connect several of the public arenas in a joint effort to overthrow the king’s rule. Thus the French parliaments could not just insist on their refusal to agree to the budget of the king; instead, they needed, not only the support of the civil society’s discourse, but also the timely assistance of popular riots during la grande peur of 1788, in order to challenge the authority of the king. In the summer of 1789, the Estates General would have been stuck in the Salle de Jeu de Paume, surrounded by royal guards, if popular unrest in Paris and the provinces had not come to their support (Hunt 1984; Furet, Bergeron, and Koselleck 1969). To take a contemporary example: when the independent counsel of the American Congress, Kenneth Starr, accused President Clinton in 1998 of perjury, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power, he assumed that disclosing the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky would provoke popular outrage in civil society’s discourse. But the legalists’ accusations lost their power as soon as the elections and the polls testified to the unexpected popular support for the president and rising disgust with the investigations of the independent counsel. The Grand Inquisitor can only accuse the king of heresy if he is supported by civil society’s discourse and by the mobilization of the people. The triumph of the law over the personal rule of the king presupposes that the periphery beyond the legalists will join their zeal.

The Public Sphere of Civil Society: Scandal at the Center In his account of civil society, Habermas (1962) centers the public discourse of deliberating individuals who consider themselves to be equal and who, by the communicative logic of public discourse, aim at universally acceptable reasoning.

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Habermas’s model of the public sphere (Calhoun 1992) marks the latest and most refined summit of an intellectual movement that is commonly seen as rooted in the European Enlightenment, in the ideas of Kant and Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau, Ferguson and Condorcet. Its conception of the public sphere presupposes the rule of the law and its embodiment in the state, but it cannot be reduced to this. Instead, it refers to a social class defined, not by its formal authority and social privilege, but by its self-appointed task as an audience monitoring the political process. Civil society acts as an interface between the privacy of the individual citizens, their family life and their pursuit of economic interests on the one side, and the state and the sphere of law on the other. Civil society emerges only if neither the personal charisma of the king nor the impersonal sphere of the law is considered to incorporate the sacred in a convincing way. The sacred character of the law and its embodiment in the state are challenged by the coexistence of different territorial states and corresponding variations of the law, by its professional administration and mundane omnipresence. Disenchantment with the bureaucratic state engenders the search for a new source of sacredness and collective identity. The king’s two bodies are now transformed into the collective identity of society and the individual identities of citizens, into the volonté générale and the volonté de tous (Rousseau 1966), into universal morality and contingent interests. The charismatized arena linking both poles is the public sphere of civil society. Here, individual interests and private passions can be articulated only if they are couched in terms of a possible general will. A universal morality has to be accepted by the individual citizens; the political decisions of the government have to be legitimized by the political class of citizens. According to the Hegelian ideal, the field of civil society should give way to a harmonious merging of the individual and the general, the interests of the citizens and ethics of the state, without repressing either side of the opposition. This conception of merging the individual and the general can also be found in the British idea of a balance between the king’s government and the people’s representation by the parliament. The German, English and French versions of this tension between the private and the public may differ, but they converge in a common focus on civil society as the main arena where the common good is mediated and constructed (Giesen 1998b). Although its social forms are by no means limited to Europe, the associational life and the public communication of eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe are commonly treated as the historical paradigm case for this public sphere. Its general institutional preconditions—cities and relatively large literate classes that did not treat literacy as a professional monopoly—can also be found in nonEuropean civilizations like China, Japan, or the Muslim empires. There, too, voluntary associations provided a public space for educated citizens to debate matters of common interest. They crystallized around professional interests or local politics, matters of general concern, and leisure activities. Access was limited to respected adult members of the community, occasionally even depending on ceremonies of introduction, recommendation and adoption. In the ancient empires

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of China, Japan, India, and the Muslim world, as well as in the European case, civil society and its manifold clubs and associations, public houses and secret societies, emerged as an interface between the formal authority of the king and his bureaucracy on the one hand, and the family, the locality, and private economic interests as organized in corporations on the other. Because of its position outside of work and family, communication in this public sphere has a leisurely character, and because of its position outside of the political organization of the state, participation in it is voluntary. Nevertheless, it presupposes education and nonutilitarian knowledge from its participants. In Ming China, the Confucian literati formed cultural movements organized around academies like the Donglin in the seventeenth century or intellectual networks like the Fushe, the restoration movement, which were clearly opposed to the imperial bureaucracy and sometimes even persecuted by the imperial secret police. It gave way to a new conception of the public sphere, the gong, in distinction to the guan, the public office (Wakeman 1997). The increase of bureaucratic and centralized control during the long reign of Qianlong in the eighteenth century, however, repressed these beginnings of a Chinese civil society. It was not before the nineteenth century that a public sphere carried by networks of Chinese literati—like the Xuannan Poetry club, the movement of qingyi (pure thought), or early parts of the powerful reform movement—could be restored again. Structural predecessors of civil society’s discourse can even be found in archaic societies: the palaver of men in the longhouses of New Guinea, the jamboree of the warriors in African herding societies or the meeting of the wise men in American Indian tribes. All these basic forms of civil society, however, differ from the European Enlightenment in one important aspect: their participants rarely claimed to speak as advocates or representatives of humankind in general. Their turn toward universalism was, if not entirely missing, less pronounced. And it is this abstention from a triumphant universalism that also prevented the charismatization of the civil society that is essential to its claim to be the center of society. This charismatization is the mark of the European Enlightenment. Even today, it is triumphantly remembered as the seedbed of civil society. Newspapers and associations, British clubs, French salons and German Vereine22—to name just a few organizational patterns—established a space of communication where citizens could debate, deliberate and comment on political matters, constructing a general will by discourse. The rituals of discourse in this public sphere were based on the individual variation of a common thematic issue, whether controversial, in the form of a debate, or supportive, in the form of successive appeals to morality, virtue and reason. Again, the communication was based on the knowledge of written texts. In distinction to the scholarly texts of the professional legalists, however, these texts were not hermetically closed to outsiders but addressed to a general public of educated readers (Giesen 1998a). Everybody present in a public arena was entitled to participate on an equal footing, but the private interests

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of the speakers ought not to be mentioned. Only if the private realm of the citizen is respected by other citizens and protected from the intervention of the state, can individual subjectivity unfold and become the moving force of discourse. The public nature of this discourse is not ensured by institutions that disconnect the individual from his or her family—as in the case of monasticism—but by presenting the communication in a way that could be accepted by any reasonable person regardless of family background. Disagreement and dissent were by no means excluded, but they had to be articulated by referring to a common horizon of morality, reason and virtue. Critical detachment from conventions and contingencies, privileges and powers, was fostered and favored, but it had to be phrased in terms of universal reason and morality. Kant’s famous “categorical imperative” catches this core conception of public discourse superbly. This reference to the universalistic conceptions of a general will, human reason and natural morality engenders an imagination of the public sphere in opposition to the private sphere as the realm of particular group interests. “Private” refers here less to family ties or to the arcanum of politics than to the corporate order of society (Gay 1995; Koselleck and Santos 2000). This traditional order of corporations, of status groups and religious confessions, of local clans and ethnic communities, of guilds and professional monopolies, provided the structural backbone, not only of late medieval and early modern society, but also of most ancient empires. It was considered as the ultimate reference for collective identities in the mundane sphere of society. Premodern civil society could flourish only within the confines of these corporations, which were based on locality, birth and traditional class. The boundaries of the corporate communities were closed, membership was given on a primordial basis and immutable by the dynamics of education and learning. Public discourse and social solidarity were limited by the confines of ascribed communities. The new civil society of the Enlightenment turned the separated public sphere of the diverse corporate groups into its opposite: They were redefined as private, as barriers to reason, and contrasted with the triumph of a new inclusive public discourse that transcended locality and class, religion and privilege. Instead of depending on membership in particular corporations, participation in this new public discourse of civil society was to be based on individual choice and decision. This voluntariness of participation is at the core of modern civil society—it reconciles public discourse with respect for privacy and individual freedom. Access to the arenas of civil society’s discourse, although not restricted by descent or by local origin, was, in fact, by no means open to everyone. It was granted only to those who possessed education, manners and morality and who were, to a certain degree, detached from the tiresome business of economic survival. La vile populace, das einfache Volk, hoi polloi, common people, were, of course excluded from participating in the discourse of civil society—they lacked morals, manners, and means (Eder and Giesen 2001). This exclusion was achieved more discreetly than demonstratively, less formally proclaimed than tacitly assumed. It is not by coincidence that the public

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institutions of civil society were only partially open; the clubs, salons, and associational halls were shielded against external disturbances, notwithstanding whether they resulted from princely intervention, from legal supervision, or from popular intrusion (Darnton 1982). No one could insist on access to the arenas of civil society. Salons were based on invitations (Giesen 1999a), clubs and Vereine required personal recommendations for would-be members. But again, this exclusive character of civil society’s discourse is not a particular occidental phenomenon. The Chinese literati, with their bibliomania and their discourse about public matters, were similarly based on the exclusivity not of descent, but of education. In China, as well as in Enlightenment Europe, education was considered to be the insurmountable barrier and defense against intruders from above and below. Occasionally, however, the attempt to shield the discourse of civil society from external influence turned the principle of public reasoning into its very opposite—the associations of Freemasonry or the radical order of the Illuminati were certainly strongholds of the Enlightenment discourse, but at the same time they were secret societies. In fact, on the institutional level, the civil society of the eighteenth century was very exclusive, and it had to be that way in order to protect the fragile rule of reason. Even in today’s civil discourse, this exclusivity can still be found—although in a much attenuated form. Access to the forums of ambitious media discourse presupposes not only education (which is fairly widespread), but also some intellectual reputation. The new social movements that have replaced the associational life of the eighteenth century as the organizational form of civil society expect their members to display a certain way of behaving and talking, and even have certain dress codes. They repel outsiders with silent moral contempt. This boundary between participants in civil discourse and outsiders is no longer seen as the demarcation of an elite, but as the difference between a moral avant-garde and the unenlightened masses. But in spite of its obvious social exclusivity, civil society could, and can, claim to represent the encompassing society and also to speak for those who were actually excluded and had no voice. The discourse of the Enlightenment abounds with sometimes condescending, but mostly compassionate references to the poor people who were excluded and—if they actually came too close—even treated with disgust. This seemingly paradoxical merging of compassion and contempt was the civil society’s way of separating the king’s two bodies—the categorical presupposition of humankind and the actual limitation of voicing it by an educated audience and its particular rituals of discourse. At the core of this paradoxical linkage of categorical inclusion and factual exclusion is the idea of moral education (Gay 1995; Wuthnow 1989; Koselleck and Santos 2000). The categorical presupposition of a universal moral reference transcending the limitations of space and time, as well as of class and race, gave way to the conception of humankind as an inclusive moral community. History was imagined as a progression of education and learning—the more advanced

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had to advocate the interests of the backward groups even if the latter seemed to oppose it. Moral discourse presupposes the tension between the moral, the universal and the public on the one side and the strategic, the particular and the private on the other.23 Constructing and relinking these oppositions in moral communities is imprinted with temporal metaphors. The charismatized center, the public sphere and the morality are triumphantly associated with the future, progress and the avant-garde, whereas the private, the particular and the periphery are considered to be backward, limited and linked to the past. These basic distinctions, which are the constitutive core of moral discourse, are not to be jeopardized. Hence moral discourse is extremely sensitive to any blurring or crossing of the boundaries; for example, it engenders an increased suspicion of individual immorality in the center. Because the moral discourse of civil society respects privacy and disregards individual strategic interests, it is particularly vulnerable to hypocrisy. The intrusion of private motives into the public sphere is considered a transgression, and this transgression turns into abuse if the private interests appear in moral disguise. Because there are no safeguards against a hypocritical pretense of moral commitment, suspicion is the inevitable companion of morality. Traumatic memories of previous cases of hypocrisy and abuse of morality increase sensitivity and alertness. In order to be secure, the protected realm of privacy has to be disclosed under special institutional conditions, occasionally even by special agents operating secretly and authorized by special laws. Thus, discovering private interests that invade and secretly undermine the public sphere becomes the core strategy of moral purification. The scandal is a vital source of public morality, and its staging is as indispensable for the modern public sphere as gossip is for private communication (Käsler 1991). Without a relatively liberal public sphere of civil society, no scandal can ever arise and get an audience, but without a minimum of hierarchy and personal authority, scandal will never find a target. Scandal outflanks the regular institutional procedures of delegitimizing the government, as gossip can dispense with truth and fairness in direct communication. Both are similar in strengthening the social bond at the cost of third actors who are excluded and stigmatized, but they differ greatly in their logic of communication. Gossip can refer to absent actors in a degrading way and without proving the truth of the information, because the absent actors cannot object and the content of the communication is protected by privacy. Gossip does not claim moral motives and risks exposure to public communication and moral scrutiny. Scandals result from the reverse move: they bring private behavior to the fore of public attention because it is considered morally wrong or disgusting. In distinction to gossip, communication about scandals claims moral motives for the disclosure of privacy. Furthermore, the claim that the scandalous action really occurred is usually subjected to critical investigation, and the moral relevance of the action may be questioned and doubted. In spite of this critical assessment of the moral gravity, however, it is not the event itself that leads inevitably to the scandalized response, but the inherent dynamics

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of moral discourse. There is no natural proportion between private stimulus and public response. Minor failures of individuals can be blown up to enormous and outrageous crimes if the structural conditions are conducive to scandals. Like gossip, scandals, too, refer to significant individuals of a community, even if they are triggered by marginal and obscure individuals. Scandals shift the focus of attention from the crimes of ordinary men to the responsibility of wellknown people hidden in the background. Hence scandal always points to the carriers of charisma—but contrasts this charisma to their lives and entanglement in mundane affairs. The hero is disclosed as just another human being. Scandal can result in a moral destruction of charisma, but—if connected to scapegoating and legal accusations—it can also oust leaders and even lead to their decapitation. In the French Revolution, the king was beheaded not primarily because he could be accused of illegal activities (which was the indispensable pretext). His very existence as the former incarnation of personal rule was a scandal to the moral core of revolutionary republicanism. His two bodies, the immortal representation of the sacred center and the mortal body of the individual, were reduced to one. The French Republic triumphantly took over the sacred core, dissipated it to the individual citizens and reconcentrated it in the committee du salut publique headed by Robespierre, the “incorruptible.” Left was the mortal body of the king, who, however, still had the marks of his previous sacredness, and who hence, in order to demonstrate his mortality, had to be killed in public. Civil societies consider their moral core to be categorically valid, but of course they differ vastly in their definition of this core and consequently in their sensitivity to alleged violations of it. A comparative analysis of scandals could provide striking evidence. Even today in Italy or France the erotic adventures of political leaders hardly create a scandal. Instead of being moralized in the public sphere, they are handled as popular gossip if communicated at all. President Mitterrand’s various extramarital relationships were well known to his political opponent, but were never treated as a matter of public interest. And the German chancellor Willy Brandt’s numerous affairs were never publicly debated. The various visits of the Italian secretary of state to expensive brothels did not become an issue in the mani pulite scandals of the early nineties because of his sexual conduct, but because he had used public money for his private pleasures (Boschetti 1996). In Great Britain, erotic behavior of politicians is scandalous only if it leaves the mainstream of sexual orthodoxy—that is, if it is homoerotic, sadomasochistic, or otherwise “abnormal”—or if it is connected with espionage. In the United States, however, the erotic behavior of the president can cause a public scandal even if his extramarital affairs neither affect his office nor constitute a legal offense. Even political institutions that seem to rely on a firm and strict separation between the private and the public cannot completely prevent scandal. German postwar governments, for example, may have been immune against any attempt to scandalize the erotic affairs of leading politicians, but any disclosure of a Nazi past would have seriously affected their leadership—even if their current way of

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conducting the nation’s affairs were beyond reproach. In a similar way, Italian politicians can easily withstand hints at extramarital affairs but are extremely sensitive to the disclosure of connections to secret societies—above all to the Mafia, but also to Freemasonry, as the so-called “P2 scandal” during the 1980s showed. Societies that ground their collective identity on a particular economic morality or on economic success react to minor tax illegalities of their leaders as scandals. The United States and Germany do, Italy and France do not. In order to be successful, scandals have to present the politician involved as a challenge to the moral integration of civil society. They have to relate the behavior of the politician to the triumphant or traumatic core of collective identity, and, obviously, nations differ with respect to this core of collective identity.

The Public Space of the People: Scapegoating the Center The public discourse of an educated civil society represents the eighteenth century’s conception of the sovereign source of politics. Already in the great revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but at least in the course of the nineteenth, a new collective subject entered the political arena and claimed sovereignty: “the people.” The people are, by definition, at the periphery of the traditional political system. Even if they are solemnly defined as the source of the political will—as modern democratic constitutions define them—their direct influence on political decisions and their participation in the political process is limited by the political institutions themselves and by the burden of conducting private everyday lives. For most of the population, the toils of everyday life take all the attention and prevent an enduring and persisting mobilization in political matters. But sometimes the people give up these isolated private lives, leave their protected private spaces, step forward and enter the public space, join others and raise their voices. Outraged, concerned, or triumphant, they construct their own collective will beyond the confines of institutional representation and individual entitlements. The arena where this collective will is constructed is the public space in its most elementary and literal form: the streets, open places and public halls where access is granted to everybody according to the space available.24 Nobody can be excluded, no membership rules apply, nobody is obliged to stay or to leave. Communication extends to everyone who is present. The boundaries are porous and constantly changing, time and scarcity can be disregarded. The primordial anarchy of informal communication in public spaces conveys the impression of spontaneity and voluntariness to the participants, but it has risks of its own. If there is no impediment to access and departure, the public crowd constantly pulsates between growth and dissolution. It will shrink rapidly if the communication itself cannot fascinate the bystanders (Hunt 1984). A strong pressure to forge unity arises, and the voices of moderation have to be silenced. Instead, a collective effervescence has to be staged and the urgency of acting here and now has to be affirmed again and again. Gossip is transformed into rumors,

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scapegoats are named, heroes are hailed, and finally the crowd is set into motion to protect its heroes and to punish its scapegoats. Although unquestionably public, the communication within the crowd is far from being deliberative; instead the rituals—marching, singing, shouting—construct unanimity by bodily coordination. Whoever disagrees leaves the place or keeps his or her mouth shut— dissent is removed from this form of the public sphere. If doubts and dissent cannot be confined to the private realm, but appear in public, they are the marks of the outsider. The anarchy of this public sphere should not lead to the assumption that it is devoid of any structure: communication in crowds, too, requires a turn-taking order. It establishes rapidly a dichotomy of speaker and audience—the speakers addressing the crowd by messages that presumably will be confirmed by cheers or other signs of support. If the speaker fails to mobilize the audience, he or she has to give way to a better agitator, or the crowd will dissolve. Because of this risk of failure, most people are reluctant to take the role of the speaker, and the competing candidates are fewer than expected, considering the communicative anarchy of crowds. Experience matters here; it instills confidence and trust, creates reputation and fame, and fosters the separation between the agitator and the audience. Crowds can attack the center successfully only if they are led by agitators and spokesmen who give form and direction to the unspecified emotions, define the targets, and coin and repeat the slogans. In their addresses to the crowd, the outrage is also moralized and justified in accordance with common narratives. Crowds spring up only if there are people around who can disregard—at least for the moment—their private affairs and leave their homes to enter the public space. These conditions are present mainly in cities,25 where people can meet and communicate with strangers and where large numbers of people are disconnected from their kinship ties and family obligations.26 Thus, crowds are fueled by uprooted people who can engage in public activities because their private family lives, their neighborhoods, their workplaces or their homes do not matter much for them. Sometimes they have lost these ties entirely and live in the public space in a literal sense; sometimes they are in a transitional situation between one settlement and another. Migrants and vagabonds are such people, but also students or followers of a religious leader, as well as jobless, poor and homeless people living in the public spaces of the cities (Rudé 1966). Because of the contagious density of oral communication in these settings, urban crowds are particularly receptive to rumors and panics. They tend to accept any dramatic definition of their cause and turn it immediately into action. Smelser (1998a) has described this pattern as the “communicative shortcut of hysteria.” Not always, but frequently, the hysteria results in scapegoating, thus constructing a boundary and defining a target for a hostile outburst. The scapegoats can be marginal groups like the Jews, the Lombards, the Blacks, the Catholics, or foreigners. They can be secret and invisible outsiders like witches, heretics or freemasons, but they can also be located in the center of society

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that is accused of indulgence in worldly luxury, decadence and frivolity. Here, guided by the rhetoric of new leaders, envy and revenge are blended with a heightened sense of moral values and purification. The reform movements of monastic orders from Saint Francis to Savonarola and Luther attacked the luxury and sins of the center and produced ascetic mass movements. Savonarola and his ascetic republic in Florence at the end of the fifteenth century has become the paradigm case of appealing to urban crowds and turning them successfully against a scandalous center in early modern Western societies, but it was by no means the only one. Most cities of medieval and early modern Europe had to cope with popular unrest, vagabonds and jobless or homeless people ready to join an emerging crowd in the search for bread, entertainment and salvation (Moraw 1989; Mollat 1978; McCall 1979). More than a third of the entire population of medieval Cologne belonged to this group (Militzer 1980; Irsigler 1975). The core and the cause of these crowds varied. Sometimes it consisted of students gathering around centers of intellectual activities like the socalled Goliards in thirteenth century Paris, sometimes of mendicant monks preaching a radical asceticism, as in Italian and German cities of the fifteenth century, sometimes of unemployed craftsmen and unskilled construction workers, as in the London riots of the eighteenth century.27 These crowds could occasionally even take over political power, if only for a limited time. In early modern Italy, a century before Savonarola, Cola de Rienzi in Rome and the Ciompi in Florence mobilized urban crowds, rebelled against the city governments and established republican regimes. Etienne Marcel, the leader of the merchants de l’eau (boat merchants) in late medieval Paris, took over the city government with the support of urban mass movements, etc. Crowds of uprooted people and their outrage affected most city-states and the capitals of the territorial states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; no party or camp in the confessional wars in England, France and Germany could ignore them. Like other popular religious movements before, the Levelers and Diggers in early modern England or the Anabaptists in northern German cities like Münster during the sixteenth century, turned urban crowds into zealot movements against the established center (Rammstedt 1975; Stayer 1991). Often the sheer existence of the crowds alone challenged the authority of the center and led to increasing police control in the cities.28 During the Gordon riots in 1765 London, the Geneva rebellion of the 1770s (which had been inspired by Rousseau), and in particular the reign of the sans-culottes in Paris (1793–94),29 the crowds again took over the control of the center. The events in Paris even gave rise to the myth of the revolutionary people reversing the relationship between center and periphery. Even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, crowds expressed outrage about the immorality of the center—the Hessian burghers rallied in 1820 against the Duke of Darmstadt because of his mistress and forced him to leave the capital city. Urban crowds do not exert pressure on behalf of formal competence or critical deliberations. Instead, their power consists of their sheer presence, their tendency to turn rage into violence and the threat of internal war. The center can,

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of course, respond by military means, but crowds are difficult to fight. In most cases, they outnumber the soldiers, they dissolve quickly and reemerge in other places, and if there is bloodshed, it fuels the myth of resistance and repression. Therefore, the center tries to cope with outraged crowds by symbolic gestures that divert attention from the center itself and focus on particular people as scapegoats in order to calm the crowd—publicly staged tortures and executions of witches and heretics responded to this exigency, as did forcing a minister to leave office or a general to quit military service, or the public accusation of a counselor, the removal of a mistress from court, or the announcement of an independent committee to investigate the scandal, etc. Sometimes, however, substitutive humiliation does not appease the crowd and its demand for a triumph. They ask for more: The main representative of the center has to show up in front of the crowd and humiliate himself or herself by identifying with the cause of public unrest. Louis XVI was caught when he tried to escape from unruly Paris to Varennes, brought back to Paris and forced to declare that he was happy to be back among his people. In March 1848, the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm was forced to pay his respect to the corpses of citizens who had been shot by his soldiers while rallying for constitutional reforms (Siemann 1985). Even in the television address that Queen Elizabeth II gave to the British nation after the death of Princess Diana, we find this pattern of public humiliation. The queen was forced to mourn for the deceased princess, who had become a hero of the people because she had been rejected by the royal family (Wieland 1998). In these acts of public humiliation, one of the king’s two bodies is sacrificed for the sake of the other: the personal honor of the officeholder is degraded in order to defend the institution; the hero is tragically defeated. Sometimes, however, even personal humiliation cannot prevent the gradual erosion of the center’s authority. The charisma of the prince extends to the institution as well as to the person, and the decay of one of them also affects the other. Crowds do not distinguish between the king’s two bodies. For them, the center still has the liturgical unity that the king’s charisma originally aimed at. Therefore, the king finally becomes the victim of this unity. The people rise on the barricades, sacralize their own violence and triumphantly take over the center. In spite of its special prominence and power in the movements of popular unrest in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the public sphere of the crowds is by no means an exclusive element of modern societies. In the capital cities of ancient empires, in Rome and Alexandria, Byzantium and Baghdad, Kaifang and Hangzhou, Damascus and Cordoba, the urban crowd was always a source of unrest which had to be calmed down and could also be manipulated by able politicians.

The Publicity of the Media: Dissolving the Center Transferring the center from the charisma of the king to the rule of the law and to the discourse of civil society not only dissolved its tangibility and visibility but

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also referred increasingly to written texts as modes of communication and abstract construction of the center. The sacred scriptures of legalist scholarship were originally handwritten and accessible only to a devoted professional elite. Civil society’s public sphere, in contrast, presupposed printed texts that could be reproduced and spread at relatively low cost. Though the audience of newspapers and journals at the end of the eighteenth and during the nineteenth century was still limited by education and national language, the major works of the Enlightenment were translated and internationally spread at a surprising speed (Darnton 1982; Clark and Clark 1977). Writers and readers were not separated by professional institutions—few authors of the eighteenth century could make a living from the sales of their books (Haferkorn 1974), and many readers responded to the newspapers by writing their own comments and public letters.30 With the expansion of literacy and the corresponding growth of the number of possible readers, publishing newspapers became a profitable business and created a field of professional journalists. But for some time most journalists got their position in the media just by personal ability and special relationships to political parties, religious communities, and even governments that supported the newspapers financially—not in a purely maecenatic way, but in exchange for public voicing of their cause. It was only in the last decades of the twentieth century that the mass media were turned into a commercially profitable big business, attracting investors and depending on consumer demand. Journalism became entirely professionalized, with special academic education and degrees, professional associations, and an independence of character to ensure the quality of the product and monitor professional ethics. The very existence of these monitoring institutions indicates, not only the expansion of journalistic activities, but also the fact that journalism is no longer a matter of morally motivated citizens, but a field of strategic behavior and career-oriented professionals. The decline of the original public sphere of civil society has been much regretted and its perversion by economic interests and political power has been vividly criticized (Habermas 1962; Calhoun 1992). It is true that the logic of entrepreneurial activities seems to be utterly inconsistent with the construction of a public sphere. Making a profit under market conditions is usually considered to be a legitimate private activity, far from the construction of a general will. But as soon as the big media corporations grow to dimensions that surpass the size of minor states and reach out to international audiences, the seemingly clear-cut distinction between the moral construction of civil society and the utilitarian pursuit of private interests becomes blurred. New social movements that have traditionally been regarded as the legitimate successors of civil associations are increasingly transformed into giant media enterprises organized by professionals using advanced technologies and marketing strategies and competing with other global players in the field. They are promoting a moral public cause, but they do so in selling morality to a global audience. But this loss of innocence to commercialization, this intrusion of economic motives into the seemingly pure sphere of moral discourse, finds its striking coun-

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terpart in the aim of moralizing economic activities. International corporations present themselves as moral movements to their global audience, even if they are not media enterprises in the strict sense of the term. Benetton sells fashion through commercials that depict moving scenes of human suffering, the American tobacco industry supports human rights campaigns, McDonald’s emphasizes its devotion to ecological issues, etc. The traditional distinction between private and public, as well as that between morality and profit, becomes even more blurred if we turn to global media enterprises. Since the concert for relief of Bangladesh, pop music sells most successfully if it is couched as a global campaign of solidarity for suffering fellow human beings or endangered nature. In TV broadcasts in the United States, the consensus between the anchormen or reporters on screen and their audience is constructed by appealing to a common morality, by being scandalized at vicious behavior, by showing human suffering, and by staging human compassion. Morality and profit are indistinguishably merging, and the tension between center and periphery seems to collapse: the media are omnipresent and translocal, a volatile center accessible to every reader, listener, or viewer. Staging a moral consensus by mass-media broadcasting represents a new transformation of the public sphere that has its particular rituals and risks of communication. The professional logic underlying this media construction of a moral public sphere is very similar to the one of professional preachers convincing their audience to join a campaign of salvation and—above all—to contribute to the costs of the campaign. Like preachers, the professional journalists act in competition with other vendors of morality, and, like preachers, they do not have to be personally convinced of their cause in order to sell it to their audience. The ritual construction of a moral campaign in the television media has no elaborated liturgy; turn-taking rules are missing—in distinction to the gospel service of preachers in churches, the TV audience has only an extremely restricted mode of responding: they can switch to another channel. If turn-taking rules are suspended, there is also no opportunity for deliberation, argument or critical evaluation between the people on the screen and their audience. In spite of all the conflicts and arguments on stage or on screen, the audience is largely doomed to silence. But it is exactly this muteness of the audience that engenders the core problem of mass-media communication. Therefore the presentation on stage has to simulate a direct communication with its addressed public. It not only has to catch and bind the attention of the audience (“stay with us”) by announcing evernew surprising and amazing news, disclosures, and sensations, but it also has to act as if the audience could respond directly and intervene. The best way to prevent the breakdown of this fragile illusion is to assume a widespread consensus of as large an audience as possible. Thus, like markets, contemporary broadcasting is bound to include more and more people. Even national political boundaries gradually lose their importance for the news—CNN is omnipresent—and are replaced by linguistic or civilizational ones. Popular music and movies address broad cultural communities, such as India, China, or the Western world, and occasionally they

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reach out to include a truly global audience. Even if the audience does not transcend linguistic boundaries, mass-media broadcasting is based on pictures more than on the reading of texts or oral presentation—presenting the eyewitness becomes more important than listening to his or her report. Repeating the pictures in short succession turns them into icons for an audience that reaches global dimensions. Thus the public sphere that was once the firmly located center of society is turned into a dislocated omnipresent image that tries to catch the attention of a global audience. This attention is, however, limited to a moment. The global extension of the center is compensated by its volatility and short life. Global media broadcasting produces an intense sense of the moment—we are all united in our focus on an image, but the common focus dissolves and decays soon. Spatial structures are turned into temporal ones; the moment replaces the center. The extreme volatility of public attention is one of the distinctive features of the public sphere as constructed by the mass media. It changes the distinction between the public and the private in a fundamental way. There is no longer any separation of moral discourse and private interests. Traditionally, the divide between the public and private spheres ran within individual citizens, who were participants in public discourse, as well as private persons. Today, there are private persons without access to active participation in public debates and public persons without a private life. The mass of anonymous entertainment consumers is separated from the few public figures whose private lives are broadcasted and whose lifestyles are copied by the consuming masses. The separation between media stars and their anonymous audience has become one of the central structural boundaries in modern societies. To be on TV, attended by a nationwide or even international audience, rivals, or has even replaced, the classical dream of entering the charismatic arenas of wealth and power. The media stage itself has become a sacred place, and access to it has been turned into a new path of salvation. It defines reality and truth in contrast to the banalities of everyday life; it constitutes a communal bond in contrast to isolated and individualized careers; it offers a strong mythology without demanding asceticism (Dayan and Katz 1994). But the radical divide between the many who are doomed to remain in their anonymous privacy and the few who enjoy the fame of being public figures has its special price. The charisma of media attention is all-encompassing: Unlike the traditional princes or even the celebrities of the world of art in early modern times, today’s media stars cannot retreat into an arcanum—there is no backstage left for them. Every aspect of their private lives is by their very status an issue of public attention and by the advances of supervision technology becomes an object of persistent monitoring. The limelight of the mass media melts away any shield of an intimate private realm. Whoever has risen to stardom cannot save his or her privacy from the merciless magnifying glass of media attention—Princess Diana and the former President Clinton are only the most recent victims of this contemporary condition.

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Every citizen’s fundamental right to protect his or her intimate and private life from outside attention is denied to these public figures. The efforts and expenditures made to disclose the privacy of the star seem to be justified by his or her fame and charisma. But in fact, this relation has to be turned around: It is mostly not their intrinsic excellence, but only the media attention itself that turns common people into stars. Instead of attracting the attention of the media, the star is first of all created by them. The publicity of the media converts the trivial details of the star’s everyday life into a spectacle the audience is lusting for. This totalitarian publicity has killed the private body of the stars in order to expose them permanently in public. On the other side of the divide, many anonymous people dream of ascending to media fame. For the one elusive moment when they leave the dark anonymity of their normal life and enter the focused light of media attention, many people are indeed willing to sacrifice self-respect and privacy. Television shows in which ordinary people frankly expose their most intimate forms of behavior or do not hesitate to act out their most private conflicts are getting increasingly popular. Here, too, the sacrifice of privacy is the harsh price of admission to the arena of media attention. The traditional conception of the public sphere as excluding private affairs, and thereby protecting a realm of individuality, is perverted into its opposite. By exposing the intimate and private to the eyes of an anonymous audience, the people on stage attempt not only to heighten their sense of personality and individuality but even to charismatize themselves—if everybody is watching me, I must be unique. But, of course, this perverted fame is volatile in the extreme—after one hour, even their names are forgotten. To a lesser degree, the fame of media stars, too, cannot escape from this volatility of media attention. Few faces survive several seasons; the cycles of rise and decay become shorter for the charisma of stars, too. Only “superstars” survive this rapid decay of public attention, but they have to sacrifice their private life entirely—up to the threshold of death. Public immortality of their charisma is achieved only by the sacrifice of their bodily existence. Here, the triumph of the public body merges with the trauma of the private body.

Concluding Remarks This chapter has presented five different types of public arenas, their institutional logic of communication, their rituals and their social carriers. Most of them coexist in contemporary and historical societies. There is charismatic leadership, as well as the public rule of the law as administered by a professional class of legalists and bureaucrats, there is the discourse of civil society and its moral construction of community, there are popular movements and riots and there is—at least in contemporary societies—the media staging of fame in front of an invisible audience. All of these public arenas have their own particular way of challenging the personal embodiment of the center and constructing the tension between center

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and periphery—between the public and the private—by preventing the charismatic infection of the people, by accusing the king, by spreading a scandal, by scapegoating or by the disclosure of privacy in mass media. And all of these attempts to erode the charisma of the hero and to achieve his tragic defeat are linked to the personal implicit claim to represent the new, the true, and the authentic center of society; in short, they claim charisma—this time an impersonal one. In this respect, the master-narrative of modern society, as outlined at the beginning of this chapter, points correctly to the tension between the public and the private, but fails to account for the complexity of its solutions. The conversion from the embodiment of the sacred center in the person of the king to the impersonal public sphere is not a sudden conversion that invalidates the previous conceptions of the sacred once and forever. Furthermore, in axial age civilizations the sacred does not cease to be volatile and evanescent once it has been translated into the discourse of civil society but can be claimed by the people on the barricade, and even their triumphant seizure of the sacred is not a final and ultimate one. The myth of a revolutionary uprising of the people has lost much of its appeal and fascination—at least in advanced Western societies. Behind the decaying barricades, a new periphery emerges and a new embodiment of the sacred appears— the victims of genocide and violence. They stand for the utmost periphery of human society, for the twilight zone between subjects and objects. They are remembered and represented by a new type of public discourse, which gives their voices and faces back to them. Yet, even this blending of trauma and triumph in the public remembrance of victims will not remain, once and forever, the ultimate representation of the sacred. In fact, the different public arenas—once existing and institutionalized— are structurally bound to compete with each other for the claim to be the sacred center of society that constructs the communal bond and mediates between the particularity of interests. Some of these institutional arenas have established their claim relatively late in history, and the conflict and competition does not always include all of the arenas outlined; instead the focus shifts and the major contenders change. But no public arena and its potential claims on the center are forever gone, and no established and recognized claim to represent the charismatic center is immune against future challenges and attacks. Victors can become victims and the triumphant heroes of today can tomorrow be turned into the tragic objects of shame, pity and disgust. Instead of being a safe haven of personal power, the charismatic center of society is today an arena of high stakes and dangers, sometimes causing trauma and tragedy for those who have been triumphant before. Thus the ambivalence of triumph and tragedy will never be decided once and for all. The opposition between the public and the private will never be ultimately settled. The tension between the center and the periphery will never be solved, and the distinction between the sacred and the profane will never be finally dissolved and alleviated, but a broad field for a continuous process of deconstruction and reconstruction of

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charisma opens up. It is staged by society and it imagines a universal community. And at the same time, hinting at a realm beyond, and moved by particular interest, what has begun as the charisma of the triumphant hero is, in the course of time, inevitably turned into tragic decay.

Notes 1. Cp. Weber (1992), Otto (1917), Eisenstadt (1968), Gebhardt (1993) and Breuer (1994). I follow Shils and Eisenstadt in assuming that every institution has a charismatic core. 2. Cp. Schluchter (1988, p. 535). 3. “Since 1793, the death of Louis XVI has been a potent vehicle for political and moral reflection, a catalyst for exploring the relationship between violence and progress, pity and justice, amnesty and vengeance, the inviolability of the individual and the longing for national communion. [. . . ] Commentaries on the regicide produced ideas, themes, and myths that became essential features of nineteenth and twentieth-century historical, humanitarian, and nationalist doctrines.” (Dunn 1994, p. 165) 4. In some cases of charismatic rule the sacralization of the king and its symbolic decapitation are even connected by a special ritual of inauguration. The Incwala ritual of the African kingdom of Swazi stages the attack of the warriors on the king who—being endowed with superhuman powers— is able to defeat all his warriors (Girard 1977, p. 110). 5. The literature about this peace-making function of rulership ranges from Shakespeare’s dramas to Service’s anthropology about the origins of the state (Service 1975) and Girard’s impressive suggestion about the ban of internal violence by the sacrificial reign of the king (Girard 1977). See also Gluckman (1955) and Eckhoff (1966). 6. There are exceptions: Umberto Bossi, the leader of the separatist Lega Norte in Italy dressed deliberately in a sloppy way in order to show his distance from the traditional political class and to present himself as a hard-working lower middle class man. 7. Schluchter, following Bendix, suggests the separation of charismatic leadership from charismatic authority (Schluchter 1988b, p. 539, referring to Bendix 1964, especially chapter 9). 8. This is similar to the separation of charismatic leadership from charismatic authority; see Schluchter (1988b, p. 539). 9. See Chapter IV, Law-centered Kingship, in Kantorowicz (1957, pp. 87–192). 10. “It fell in with the intellectual climate of the century of legalism in general, and in particular with that of Frederick’s Magna Curia where the judges and lawyers were expected to administer justice like priests; the High Court sessions, staged with a punctilio comparable to Church ceremonial, were called a most holy ministry (mystery) of Justice (Iustitiae sacratissimum ministerium [mysterium]); the jurists and courtiers interpreted the ‘Cult of Justice’ in terms of a religio iuris or of an ecclesia imperialis representing both a complement to and an antitype of the ecclesiastical order; the robe of the law clerk was set over against the robe of the ordained cleric; the emperor himself, whom the Great Artificer’s hand created man, was spoken of as Sol Iustitiae, the ‘Sun of Justice,’ which was the prophetic title of Christ” (Kantorowicz 1957, p. 101; Kantorowicz 1931, p. 88). For more details about the magna curia, see Cuozzo (1996). 11. Weber emphasizes discipline as a prerequisite of administration; see Weber (1978, vol. II, chapter 5.3). 12. See Weber (1978, vol. II, chapter 5.1) for the concept of “Amtscharisma,” i.e., charisma of office. 13. For example, his brother Brun, who was the archbishop of Cologne and became even the archduke of Lothringen (Fichtenau 1973). 14. Thus Ranke could describe the reign of Philippe LeBel as showing den kalten Lufthauch der modernen Geschichte (“the chilly breeze of modern history”).

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15. Max Weber was probably the first to have pointed to this institutional logic of modern administration, see especially Weber (1978, vol. II, chapter 9). 16. Cp. Katz (1994, vol. I, chapter 11). 17. Marsh (1961) uses a lot of historical data to investigate the effects of family position and other factors on elite mobility in China during the Qing dynasty. See table 4, p. 80, and table 5, p. 82. 18. The doctrine of tyrannicide has a long history in Europe. It grew out of the medieval notion of a “contract” between the ruler and subject and the idea of a system of preexisting legal rights. However, it was John of Salisbury who articulated a doctrine of tyrannicide: The ruler who broke the law could no longer claim to be a legitimate sovereign, and thus could be deposed and executed (Gough 1961). 19. For the “Glorious Revolution” and the parliament see Gralher (1973). 20. The trial and execution of Charles Stuart in 1649 stands out in Western history. Charles I was the first European monarch to be put on trial for his life in public by his own subjects (Mayfield 1988). But Charles’s execution has not left the same traces in the English national memory as the execution of Louis XVI in the French collective memory. The English saw themselves as getting rid of one wicked prince. For the French, monarchy itself was “an eternal crime” (Dunn 1994). 21. See for example the scandal about the famous Diamond Necklace affair in prerevolutionary France (Maza 1993). 22. Although the Enlightenment was a discourse all over Europe, there were differences in the social position of the supporters and their communication (Darnton 1982; Wuthnow 1989; Albrecht 1995). 23. For the increasing differentiation between the public and the private, see Giesen (1998b, pp. 228) and Brewer et al. (1996). 24. See, for example, the French Revolution (Lottes 1991). 25. Marxists and non-Marxist scholars agree that there is a close alignment between revolutionary culture and cities. See the essay of Ragan (1999) who reviews the studies of Malcom Crook (1991) and Ted W. Margadant (1992). See also Sutherland (1986) who extends Tilly’s (1976) perspective to view the Revolution as a process brought about by conflict between the revolution, located primarily in urban France, and the counterrevolution, mostly based in rural areas. 26. But in the later Middle Ages the pressure on the rural population sometimes got so high that it resulted in several peasants’ revolts, which culminated in the German Peasants’ War of 1525. Thereby the peasants’ movement developed an altogether revolutionary potential. The connection of rural and urban unrest in 1525 was very close; often the rebellious peasants outside the town gave the final impulse for urban unrest. See, e.g., Blickle (1993). However, Rammstedt (1975) denies a very close connection between the Peasants’ War and urban unrest. 27. Such movements tended to become more frequent with the Industrial Revolution in England in the century’s closing years. In the course of such riots, attacks on industrial property and machinery outweighed assaults on persons (Rudé 1966: p. 47; Hobsbawm 1952). 28. See Rudé (1966, p. 47): “[…] the policing of large cities, though grossly inadequate by nineteenth-century standards, was taken far more seriously than that of country towns. This was particularly true of Paris; so much that a chronicler of the early 1780’s wrote that, while London might be wracked by serious civil commotion, in Paris this was almost impossible to contemplate.” 29. Rudé (1966, p. 84), in his masterly account of the masses in the French Revolution, estimates that 80 percent of the total population of Paris belonged to groups that formed the sansculottes. See also Soboul (1962) and Tilly (1976). 30. Schiller and many other German authors distinguished strictly between writing for a market and the true poetic work (Giesen 1998a).

Chapter 4

The Trauma of Perpetrators The Holocaust as the Traumatic Reference of German National Identity Introduction No construction of collective identity can entirely dispense with memory. Memory supports or even creates the assumption of stability that demarcates identity in distinction to the incessant change of the phenomenal world. Triumphant or traumatic, memory marks the center of identity and sets up a horizon that delineates the space of possible pasts. Identity is constituted by the very conception of the past as traumatic or triumphant; trauma and triumph are liminal experiences of individual, as well as collective, subjects. There is no way to imagine a land beyond the liminal horizons, but memory strives to reach out for it, to cope with it and to relate and to adapt the movement of history to it. It can be spoken out or silenced; it is always there, enabling us to represent and present the past as our history. In the preceding chapters, we have outlined three basic references to the past: the triumphant memory as embodied in the figure of the hero, the traumatic memory as embodied in the figure of the victim and the ambivalent reference as embodied in the figure of the tragic hero who was defeated by the adversity of this world. In the following chapter, we will deal with the traumatic memory of the perpetrators. Freud’s and Breuer’s original treatment of the trauma issue focused on the trauma of perpetrators (J. Assmann 1999c), but today—in contrast to a vast range of studies investigating the individual and collective trauma of victims—there are relatively few scholarly treatments of the trauma of perpetrators who, by their own decision, dehumanized other subjects and, in doing so, not only perverted the sovereign subjectivity of the victims, but also challenged their own sacredness. If a community has to recognize that, instead of being heroes, they have been perpetrators who violated the cultural premises of their own iden109

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tity, the reference to the past is indeed traumatic. This holds true not only for those who were involved in the killing of others, but also for the bystanders who knew about the crime or watched it being done without intervening or preventing it. The active perpetrators rarely speak out their guilt. They remain mostly mute and try to hide their identity. In contrast, the bystanders’ ambivalent position between guilt by non-action, voluntary inattention and lack of courage is especially prone to a collective trauma. The historical paradigm case the following chapter deals with is the construction of German national identity after the Holocaust. Since the turn of the century, German national identity has been treated as the result of a Sonderweg to modernity, and this German exceptionalism, originally coined by German historians such as Meinecke, has been reaffirmed by recent publications pointing, although in a quite different way, to a primordial German national character that is seen as bound to the death camps (Goldhagen 1996; Greenfeld 1992). Like other constructions of national identity too, the thesis of German exceptionalism stresses Germany’s uniqueness and inimitability in distinction to other nations. The Holocaust represents this uniqueness in an exemplary way and has to be regarded as the traumatic reference for German national identity after 1945. The thesis of this chapter, however, is to elaborate how it also gave way to a new pattern of a universalistic identity.* We will present this new paradigm of universalistic identity as one of several modes of coping with the trauma of postwar Germany. In order to understand the case of postwar Germany, however, we have to briefly address the historical context of German national identity as it emerged in the nineteenth century. The following outline of different historical codings of the German nation will be patterned by the typological distinction between primordial, traditional, and universalistic constructions of collective identity.1 Primordial identities refer to sharp and exclusive boundaries based on natural distinctions; they imagine the outsider as a superior demon that cannot cross the boundary and never should. Traditional identities insist on continuity between past and present and are based on the routines and practices of local life worlds. Their boundaries are gradual transitions between inside and outside; in principle they can be crossed, but it takes time and a certain cautiousness to approach the traditional community. The outsider is treated as a stranger who is neither superior nor inferior, but difficult to communicate with. In contrast to primordial and traditional communities, universalistic constructions open their boundaries for the inclusion of outsiders. Universalistic identities are based on the tension between the sacred and the profane. They claim a special link between the community and the realm of the sacred and transcendental. They try to establish a radical discontinuity between the past and the future. Social constructions of national identity are never unanimous, nor are its modes of remembering the past. Instead, they are prone to conflicts and subject to public debates; they vary according to the life world of the social carrier group and *A shorter version of this chapter is published in Alexander et al. (2004)

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are transformed by the turnover of generations. Rituals can bridge the cleavages of political conflicts and public debates, but they also sometimes cause public controversies. Although the perspectives may shift and the evaluation may differ, the institutional arenas may vary and the rituals may change, constructions of national identity cannot escape from an orientation toward the past, which does not pass away, whether traumatic or triumphant. Traumas and triumphs constitute the “mythomoteurs” of national identity (Barthes 1996). They represent liminal experiences and ultimate horizons for the self-constitution of a collective subject—like birth and death providing the ultimate horizon for the existential experience of the individual person. Only by reference to the undeniable fact of birth and the inescapable prospect of death is the individual person able to construct an encompassing identity beyond shifting encounters and experiences.2 In a similar way, by referring to a past as a collective triumph or a collective trauma, contingent relationships between individual persons are transcended and forged into a collective identity. Triumphs are moments of “effervescence” in Durkheim’s phrasing, or of “Charisma” and “Verzauberung” (“enchantment”) in Weber’s. Even if an event that is recalled as a triumph was not experienced as an extraordinary moment at the time it occurred, the collective memory glorifies it and imagines it in retrospect as a moment of utmost intensity, and it is this lack of awareness and consciousness that has to be coped with by ritually re-enacting the triumph, by annual celebrations, by mythologization and narration. The trauma is constructed according to a similar logic. Traumas remember a moment of violent intrusion or of the collapse of meaning that the collective consciousness was not able to perceive or to grasp in its full importance when it happened (Caruth 1995). They represent the rupture of the web of meaning, the break of order and continuity— a dark and inconceivable boundary that provides the frame for the construction of meaningful histories, but has no meaning by itself. Only later on, after a period of latency, can it be remembered, worked through and spoken out. Both imaginations of a collective origin, triumph as well as trauma, refer mostly to an act of violence that breaks down and reconstructs the social bond. Thus triumph and trauma refer to a source that constitutes the social order but that has its own origin beyond and before this order. Collective identity is never exclusively triumphant or traumatic; it is never based only on an imagined homogeneity of insiders or only on the excluded otherness of outsiders; it is never driven only by Eros or only by Thanatos—it is always both, but the balance may be disturbed and the levels may differ (Smelser 1998a). The following remarks will outline a repertoire of German identities that respond to three—predominantly traumatic—marks of German history: the belated origin of the German nation state, the lack of a successful revolution in Germany and—most importantly—the Holocaust. We will address the first two German identities only briefly and focus on the modes of coping with the Holocaust in postwar Germany.

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Lost Paradises: Germany as Naturnation Nations that cannot look back to a long political history as states, or that cannot ignore the discontinuities in their history, face special problems in constructing memories to support their identity. The emptiness or the evil of their recent history fosters an escape to a timeless mythical past in which culture and nature are merged and blended in harmony. This primordial unity of culture, nature and community is usually considered to be lost in the course of history—culture and community were alienated from their natural base, but the people kept a memory of their origins embedded in nature. Looking back to the primordial paradise fuels energies to overcome decadence and disease, artificiality and pollution in present societies, or it provides a claim on a homeland, thus bringing the community back to its natural roots. From this perspective, the continuity between the present and the remembered past is seen as interrupted by a long history of alienation and opposition. Here, national identity is not constructed by reference to a recent historical past that is available in the form of witnesses or written reports, but is formed by imagining a timeless past that is seen as the origin and source of identity, as the horizon of history, and as the ultimate goal of collective action. Even more than other forms of memory, the representation of a lost paradise is a social construction of the present. It comes as no surprise that primordial conceptions of an ethnic identity resonated well with the new nations that emerged in middle and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The old nation-states in Western Europe, too, were not entirely immune to these primordial constructions of ethnic origins, even if they could look back to a firmly established republican tradition. Indeed, France as well as England and the Netherlands had their own myths of ethnic origins, their own racism and anti-Semitism. Their political traditions dating back to prenineteenth-century roots prevented, however, these primordial ideas from becoming more than influential intellectual heterodoxies (Sternhell 1996). In contrast to its western neighbors, the national identity of Germany is frequently seen as founded in natural or primordial structures.3 Indeed, Germany may be considered the paradigm case of a latecomer in political modernization and nation-state building (Plessner 1992; Bendix 1978; Hobsbawm 1990). It was only in 1871 that—after centuries of fragmentation and division—the scattered political map of two large princely states and many small ones was replaced by the unified nation-state of imperial Germany. For centuries, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been a major player in European politics, and Prussia had ascended in the eighteenth century to the status of a military superpower and a focal arena of European enlightenment, but the German nation was imagined, not as a political community, but as a cultural one. When the German nation-state was finally realized in 1871, it lacked political traditions. This situation fostered the imagining and invention of primordial paradises. These primordial constructions of a German identity are not immutable or invariably connected to the essence of the Germans; instead they result from a

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repertoire of societies’ ideas about their relationship to nature as provided by history. Even nature, which is usually considered as objectively given, does not exist in a self-evident and socially unmediated way. Instead it is a cultural construction reflecting the particular setting of a society. Imagining the outside as a demonic threat that has to be fought or fled from, as a wilderness that requires taming and civilizing, as a resource or a property that can be used and traded, as an object that can be investigated by the methods of science, as a bodily existence that is at risk of disease and finally as a precious garden that has to be protected against pollution and destruction—all these conceptions hint at particular patterns of social interaction and community. Our idea of nature reflects our own situation and our longing for a lost paradise—which attempts to reconnect culture to nature—and is no exception from the embeddedness of our images of nature in society (R. Groh and D. Groh 1996). The constructions of German national identity have been influenced by four different models relating nature to the social community. All of them emerged in situations of crisis and rapid change and focus on an alienation from nature. Nature is perceived here rather as an issue of identity than as a field of resources to be used and exploited. A discourse about purity and pollution supports these constructions of a lost paradise, but the level of discourse has varied from ambitious philosophical reasoning to trivial novels. The German Romantics conceived of national identity in an ambitious philosophical way. It was considered as an inalienable natural individuality exempted from ordinary communication and the varying tides of history. Responding to the trauma of the French occupation, the Romantic intellectuals discovered a sublime essence, that is, a national identity of the Germans concealed and hidden by layers of foreign influences; this identity could be disclosed and approached only from an aesthetic point of view—for example, by looking at medieval ruins, which in their very decomposition reunited and merged culture and nature. Only art or infinite longing that conveyed a radical distance from the realm of the ordinary and above all from the world of power and money could provide access to the sublime primordial identity of the Volk. Particular rituals of discourse, like Romantic irony and the exaltation of sentimental life (love, madness), reflected and reinforced the detachment from idle business and ordinary society and the orientation toward the sublime. This ambitious conception of national identity as the sublime ineffable essence set the stage for the subsequent imagining of German primordial identity reducing demos to ethnos and politics to aesthetics. The Völkische Bewegung4 in the second half of the nineteenth century revived these Romantic ideas in a trivialized way. Again, the movement was propelled by heterodox intellectuals who marked their distance from the center of imperial Germany. Like the Romantics, the völkische intellectuals, such as Dahn, Freitag, Lagarde and Langbehn, and their petit-bourgeois audience opposed the world of art to the world of money. Instead of focusing on sublime essences, however, they had more tangible and earthly matters in mind. Between 1880 and 1910, Germany underwent a process of accelerated modernization and

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mobilization. Every third German changed residence, mostly from the rural areas to the emerging large cities. Germany became the leading military and industrial power on the continent, challenging even Great Britain. The intellectuals of the Völkische Bewegung reacted to the rapid social changes by depicting the idyllic life of free Germanic peasants and warriors, who were seen as sane, vigorous, and bound to the natural soil.5 The lost ethnic paradise was contrasted to the decadent, unhealthy, and alienating world of the large cities (Bergmann 1970; Lees 1979). Criticism of modern decadence and disintegration was combined with a longing for a primordial, but lost, unity between body and land, blood and soil. Outside of intellectual circles, the attempt to get rid of the decadence of modernity and the disruptive forces of industrialism led to particular forms of retreat and special patterns of ritual purification. New rural communities revived seemingly ancient Germanic forms of economy without money, and worshipped the sun or other Germanic or natural deities. Reform movements promoted vegetarian diets and so-called natural clothing; nudism gained followers and was practiced with almost religious devotion; youth movements like the Wandervogel sought to flee the cities and to live in close contact with nature.6 Public discourse was preoccupied with sexual diseases and decadence; the ambitious reform movements in music (Richard Wagner) and art (Jugendstil) found widespread attention. All this was patterned by a discourse about purity and pollution and aimed at reconstructing indisputable boundaries in a society where traditional structures were blurred and dissolved. In the third model, merging culture, community, and nature was also based on a discourse about purity and pollution, but it was not moved by nostalgia for a bygone folklore. Instead of pursuing the sublime, it was couched in the objectivist language of scientism. At its core was a quasi-scientific conception of racial differences. Distinctions between races had been quite common in intellectual discourse since the eighteenth century, but now they were based on biology instead of culture and were thoroughly medicalized. At the end of the century, this new racism merged with anti-Semitism and the eugenics movement.7 It attempted to organize societies around the order of nature as revealed by science. The recalling of lost paradises consists here mainly of the statement of the primordial purity of the Germanic or Aryan race, which was endangered by migration and lost in the increasing mixture of races. The Nazi ideology blended this racism with elements of the völkische movement8—in particular with the cult of the heroic warrior whose superiority and dominance over others was considered as natural, original, and unalienated. Again, the everyday life of liberal capitalist democracies was seen as decadent and artificial and contrasted to the natural harmony between the people and the land, the primordial violence of the Germanic hero, and invested the triumphant beast with sacred qualities. A fourth model of a primordial harmony between nature and culture can be seen in the ideas of ecological fundamentalism, which has an extraordinary strong

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resonance in Germany (comparable to the wildlife protection movement in the U.S. or the animal rights movements in Britain). Although the political orientation of its social carriers shifted from the right to the left, ecological fundamentalism clearly uses, not only elements of Romanticism, but also motifs of anti-industrialism and radical “retreatism” that could also be found in the heritage of the Völkische Bewegung (Knaut 1993; Linse 1986). Evidently and understandably, any reference to this heritage is taboo in Germany. When Rudolph Bahro, one of the most popular fundamentalist intellectuals of the German Greens, mentioned this heritage in an affirmative way, he provoked a public scandal and was immediately excluded from the Green Party. German ecological fundamentalism pushed the contrast between past and present even further than the Völkische Bewegung; it is not only the primordial purity of a particular nation that is at stake but the fate of humankind in its entirety, and it is not only the primordial paradise of preindustrial life but nature itself that is endangered and jeopardized by industrial society. As in preceding imaginings of a lost paradise, nature is here considered as the nonmalleable fundament of identity. It will decay when subjected to exploitation and instrumental use. Again, these fundamentals of identity are approached mainly from an aesthetic point of view—but in a trivialized form. The Romantic wilderness is intentionally produced and carefully preserved in the suburban gardens of the ecologically minded Bildungsbürgertum, the most important supporters of the German Greens. Nevertheless, the striking continuities between nineteenth-century and contemporary imaginations of a lost paradise should not blur a very important difference: Although local, regional and occasionally even national boundaries show up in the discourse of ecological fundamentalism—when, for instance, foreign plants and animals are banned from the territory as polluting the original ecosystem— the national coding of the lost paradise is here clearly replaced by a global horizon. Ecological fundamentalism is a global movement and aims at a global scenario; national boundaries appear only as differences of sensitivity with respect to ecological issues. The strength of the ecological movement in Germany and the Netherlands can thus be contrasted to its relative weakness in Italy and France, for example.

Failed Revolutions: Democracy without a Triumphant Myth More striking than these memories of a primordial paradise, however, are social rituals that try explicitly to revive the memory of a particular event of the historical past: days of remembrance and monuments, dates and places of memory visited and venerated by members of a community, pictures and narrations presenting the past for the following generations and the presentation of its relics in museums for the educated public. Even rituals that construct and continue a tradition emerge not as effortless and evident remembrance of an unquestionably

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given past but as a social construction that may be in principle objected to, debated, and questioned. Outsiders do not have to share these conceptions of the past, and their presence in rituals of remembrance is often seen as disturbing or even offensive—it is our own past and we consider ourselves sovereign with respect to our common memories. This is especially true with respect to the triumphant memory of past victories and acts of liberation, by which a political community construes its own origin. Liberation from foreign domination, the birthday of the ruler, or the enactment of a national constitution are ritually remembered and celebrated; monuments recall the victories of the nation over its enemies; poems and anthems praise the great deeds of the sovereign or the liberation of the country; public marches and rallies revive the triumphs of the past. Even the seemingly unprecedented rituals of modern revolutionary movements that attempt to establish an entirely new society and intend not to repeat the past but to accelerate into an open and undetermined future—even these rituals are founded in memories, consciously or unconsciously. The rhetoric of the great French Revolution recalled the republicanism of Roman antiquity,9 the European revolutions of the nineteenth century took over the symbols of the French Revolution, as well as the national traditions of citizenship and bourgeois self-consciousness, the Russian Revolution referred to the patterns of the preceding revolutions in the nineteenth century, and so on. After defeating the ancien régime, the revolutionaries strongly traditionalized their own historical success; the French, as well as the American and Russian, revolution quickly spawned annual memorial celebrations. Such highly elaborated rituals of remembering the revolution are not mere folklore and remainders. Instead, the triumphant memory of the revolution must be considered indispensable for the construction of a modern demos (Eisenstadt 1976). Only if the people can imagine themselves as rebelling and rising up against the personal regime of the prince, is a nation constituted as a sovereign political subject. Hence, remembering the revolution provides a ritual basis for a democratic identity. In order to create such a triumphant collective memory of revolutions, even relatively harmless insurrections and upheavals are hailed as heroic actions—the famous seizure of the Bastille by a large street crowd liberated only a dozen apolitical prisoners. Consequently, the French king could write in his diary on the evening of the Quatorze Juillet: “Aujourd’hui rien.” Indeed, it is not the factual political success but the collective memory that constitutes the triumphant origin of a nation. Only in exceptional cases like the American, the Russian, or the Chinese revolution can the uprising of the people really establish a relatively continuous and uninterrupted new government. The French revolutions of 1830 and 1871 failed in this respect, and—strictly speaking—even the great French Revolution of 1791 cannot be regarded as successful. But their factual success and uninterrupted continuity are less important than their perception in cultural memory. The collective memory of the French Revo-

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lution is marked by a deep divide between trauma and triumph that was at the core of French politics in the nineteenth century. The gens de robe and the upper bourgeoisie perceived the reign of the sansculottes between 1792 and 1793 as a trauma, whereas the petite bourgeoisie and the emerging working class remembered the revolution as the triumphant beginning of a republican tradition. This class coalition was the major carrier of the long-lasting Third Republic and could hence treat the return of the ancien régime as an interruption of its own successful tradition. In contrast, the German revolutionary uprisings not only failed to establish a lasting regime but also to engender a memory of a triumphant constitution of the nation. The short-lived Weimar Republic and the enduring Bonn Federal Republic were both the result of defeats after devastating wars that had caused millions of victims. Hence, the beginnings of democracy were remembered as trauma rather than triumphs. In this respect, they continued a tradition of traumatic origins that started with the Thirty Years War that had devastated Germany three and a half centuries ago. A third of the German population died in the confessional war, and the always fragile unity of the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations was dissected into a multitude of princely states, most important among them, Austria and Prussia. While England and France emerged out of their bloody confessional wars as powerful nation-states based on the dominance of one confession, the same turn toward monoconfessionalism decided by the ruler, the same expulsion or repression of religious minorities, and the same legalist modernization of the state occurred in Germany on the level of small princely states. Therefore, the revolutionary constitution of a national demos in 1848 was not framed by an already existing nation that just had to decapitate its ruler, but, to the contrary, it had to create the nation state by itself. In its desperate attempt to catch up with the Western lead, the German revolution in 1848 even considered establishing a national monarchy—not the decapitation of a king, but the very creation of one was one of the solutions debated in the German parliament in Frankfurt. The radical left opposed this turn backward toward monarchy. Instead, it suggested replacing the traditional rivalry between Prussia and Austria with embedding the German nation in a European conflict between the culture of the West (which included Poland and Hungary) and the “barbarism of the East,” which means Russia. A century later on, new national mythologies could refer to this opposition again. Overly burdened with the task of establishing the state and forging the identity of the nation at the same time, the revolution of 1848 collapsed; its radical continuation in the southwest was soon crushed by Prussian troops. More important than its factual breakdown, however, was its failure to give rise to triumphant memories. Disappointed and traumatized by their political failure, the carriers of the revolution, the German Bildungsbürgertum, left the country or converted their former enthusiasm into cultural oblivion and even into contempt for the idea of revolution.

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In contrast to 1848 and 1918, the wars of liberation against the Napoleonic occupation could well be regarded as a successful revolt of the people and could have become a powerful founding myth for the German national movement. Although its initial impact was limited, it nevertheless preluded the military defeat of the French emperor some years later. The democratic potential of this movement faded away, however, in the course of the nineteenth century, and the final realization of the German nation state by Bismarck would dispense with any kind of democratic legitimization. In imperial Germany, the myth of the wars of liberation fuelled hostility against the archenemy Frankreich rather than supporting democratic constructions of identity, and this hostility was reinforced by the defeat in the First World War. Thus a connection between the first German democracy in 1918 and the revolution that had failed seventy years before was hard to establish. When the Arbeiter und Soldatenbewegung entered the stage in 1919 as a new carrier of the revolutionary project, the educated bourgeoisie refused to join the ranks of the revolutionaries—the class that had achieved 1848 felt that it had lost control over the project of revolution and even adopted a hostile attitude to it. The democratic uprising of les classes dangereuses did not give birth to a triumphant founding myth; instead, it was held responsible for a military defeat (“Im Felde unbesiegt. . .”). In addition to this shift of the carrier group, the frightening example of the Russian Revolution, its turmoil and chaos, deterred even Social Democrats from supporting a radical revolutionary course. Finally, the level of economic, social and even political modernization to which Germany had advanced by the turn of the century alleviated the fundamental tension that is at the core of successful revolutions. Whereas in 1848 the lack of the nation-state prevented the revolutionary constitution of the demos, in 1918 it was the existence of a relatively modern state that weakened its thrust. The revolutionaries could only extend the already existing institutions by establishing the women’s right to vote or they could radicalize the revolutionary project according to the Russian project and opt for a global revolution—a turn that not only affected their support but also failed to support a specifically German demos. The revolution collapsed and was remembered as a failed local rebellion instead of a triumphant uprising of the German people against the reactionary imperial rule. There was only one German “revolution” that can claim to have established a new regime which endured for some years: National Socialism. The Nazis—like the Italian Fascists before them—presented and remembered their seizure of power as a völkische revolution. They considered their regime to be the reconstruction of the free German nation, constituting itself by violence and heroism, triumphantly rising over the forces of decadence, of money and of foreign repression. The Nazi “revolution” claimed to reverse the defeat of World War I and to abolish “the shame of Versailles.” Consequently, their rituals of remembrance focused on the triumphant rebirth of the nation out of the sacrificial death of the heroes of the past (Mosse 1991; Connerton 1989).

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But the rituals of the Nazi revolution not only remembered the fallen soldiers of the First World War and the casualties of their own early years, but reached also— especially at the end of their rule—back to the wars of liberation against the Napoleonic occupation (e.g., the movie Kolberg). Because of its tight connection to the Nazi cults, the memory of the wars of liberation disappeared with the collapse of the Third Reich. The very fact that the Nazis could claim their regime to be a revolutionary rise of the people contaminated the idea of a triumphant self-constitution of the nation—in particular after the defeat of 1945, when a new democratic government was founded. This new German democracy did not result from a revolutionary upheaval of the people but was decreed by the Allied forces. It ran counter to the conception of a people determining its own fate, empowering its own government and defining its own identity. Indeed, only a small part of the German population considered their military defeat to be a liberation from repressive rulers. In this embarrassing situation, the various resistance movements against the Nazi tyranny (the Munich students around the Scholls, the Kreisauer Circle and, most prominently, the coup d’état of July 1944) were used as a substitute for a people’s revolt. Thus the German nation that—at least in the western Federal Republic—tried to enter the political arena as a sovereign democratic subject could uphold an image of innocence: Not all of them had been collaborating with or tacitly accepting the criminal regime, but quite the contrary—the good German people were forced to keep their mouths shut by the Nazi tyrants.10 In this construction of a substitute resistance, it was widely ignored that many members of the German resistance against Hitler (e.g., Stauffenberg and Moltke) did not have democratic ideas in mind when they planned for the new Germany to come after the successful overthrow of Nazi rule. Also ignored was the brutal fact that the good German people had voted Hitler into power by democratic elections and that a majority of them supported the Führer “in Treue fest,” even when the prospect of military defeat could hardly be ignored. In the following sections, we will outline a repertoire of responses to the German trauma of 1945. They are presented in a sequential order, and, indeed, there is a certain inherent logic of succession in these responses to a cultural trauma. It is difficult—if not impossible—to arrive at the subsequent stage without passing through the preceding ones. Some stages may be passed so quickly that it will hardly be noticed in the historical record later on, and there is no guarantee that a society will proceed to all stages of the sequence or do so in a coordinated and simultaneous manner. Instead, different forms of response may coexist in the same society—“early” patterns of response may remain dominant in certain social groups while others proceed to a subsequent pattern. For the sake of clarity, however, we will disregard these coexistences and present the responses in a sequential order. Passing from one stage to the other is frequently, but not always, related to a generational turnover and a change in the mode of memory—from direct personal memory to public reconstructions or historical research. These connections between modes of coping with a trauma, generational turnover and shifts in the mode of collective memory are at the core of the following chapters.

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The Denial of the Trauma The defeat of 1945 and the disclosure of the Holocaust resulted in the ultimate trauma of recent German history. First were the obvious and catastrophic German losses—more than ten million Germans lost their lives as soldiers on the battlefield and in prison camps, as casualties of the Allied bombing raids or as refugees on the trek westward to escape the Red Army. In the bombings of Dresden and Hamburg, tens of thousands died in a single night. More than two million Germans were killed as victims of ethnic cleansing in the lost eastern provinces after the war (Naimark 1997); hundreds of thousands of women and girls were raped; twelve million refugees were displaced in the wake of Russian invasion or expelled from their homes in the eastern provinces; most German cities were turned to ruins. At the end of the war, the Großdeutsche Reich was in shambles and most survivors had to face atrocities just to save their bare lives. All these experiences were traumatic in their own right, but amazingly they did not engender a broad public movement of mourning or public rituals of collective memory. Hannah Arendt (1950) noted early the remarkable absence of mourning about the devastations of the war in Germany. As horrible as defeat and death in war may be, their atrocity would have been alleviated by the moral triumph of a collective project that could have persisted even after a defeat and could even have earned the tacit respect of the victors—a heroic war of liberation and independence, for example. But moral justification of the war was entirely and radically denied for the Germans. The aim, the form and the circumstances of war were criminal and were so-labeled by the victors. The shame connected with the German name from then on was a matter of collective identity. The trauma of 1945 resulted, not only from ruin and rape, death and defeat, but also from the sudden loss of self-respect and moral integrity. The utmost barbarism had happened in the nation that had previously grounded its identity on Kultur and that, at the beginning of the century, could claim to have furthered and supported Jewish emancipation more than its European neighbors (Diner 1988). The triumphant notion of a German Kulturnation was replaced by the traumatizing disclosure of the Holocaust; the nation that gave birth to a prodigious Weltliteratur had procreated also the unspeakable and inconceivable horror of the extermination camps. Faced with Auschwitz, there was no place left for poems, Adorno (1992) wrote.

The coalition of silence Traumas result from a sudden unmediated conversion of inside and outside, good and evil, security and destruction. In the Freudian tradition, they are defined as violent events that were ignored or disregarded at the time when they occurred— the individual mind cannot perceive the possibility of its own death (Caruth 1996, p. 60). In a similar way, collective consciousness tends to reject perceiving the actions of its own community as barbaric in the moment when the barbaric vio-

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lence occurs. Therefore collective traumas, too, require a time of latency before they can be acted out, spoken about and worked through. Postwar Germany responded to the disclosure of the Holocaust by an “inability to mourn” (Mitscherlich 1994) or “communicative silence” (Lübbe 1981) about the unspeakable or inconceivable horror, the dark abyss into which the German nation had been precipitating. There was no way of telling a story as to how it could have happened. Nobody could bear to look at the victims. All those who had devoted years of their lives to a movement whose members had to consider themselves as collaborators in a mass murder could not repair their ruined moral identity, even if they had been ready to confess their guilt: There would be no second chance, life is spoilt. The trauma is insurmountable. As a moral subject the person is dead. He or she can only remain mute, look away, turn to other issues and hope that nobody will ask the wrong questions. A tacitly assumed coalition of silence provided the first national identity after the war. Everyone assumed that the others, too, had supported the Nazi regime and would therefore agree to be silent about their common shame. No one mentioned his or her relationship to the Holocaust in informal communication—even if their involvement was only that of bystanders of history who never knew exactly what was happening. This muteness and silence contrasted to vivid informal communication about the personal involvement of the war. Even experiences like the escapes from the eastern Heimat, the nights in the bomb shelters and the struggle at the Ostfront during the last month of the Third Reich could be addressed by those who did not suffer personally from traumatic shocks. But only very few spoke even of their responsibility as bystanders, collaborators and party members with respect to the Holocaust; those who had directly participated in the genocide, obviously, kept their silence in order to avoid imprisonment. Neither the individual trauma of rape, death and dehumanization, nor the collective trauma of guilt and defeat could yet be turned into the theme of conversation. There was a moral numbness with respect to the horror. The postwar coalition of silence extended to two subsequent generations, both of them entangled in the Nazi regime, but with different perspectives on it. The first generation consisted of those who were born between the turn of the century and the First World War. They had experienced the economic crisis of 1929 in their most formative years, some of them had memories of the First World War, they had voted Hitler and his party (NSDAP) into power and they provided the backbone of the NSDAP before its seizure of power, but also during the war. Most younger leaders of the party and most of the SS leaders were members of this generation. For them, Hitler was the political redeemer who miraculously solved Germany’s economic malaise and wiped out the “shame of Versailles.” Their family backgrounds, however, were not yet patterned by Nazi ideas and, hence, they had memories of a different social and cultural world, not yet dominated by Nazism. But many also despised this world of their parents who were related to the assumed decadence of the Weimar republic. Some had turned at the end of the twenties to radical racism and anti-Semitism and regarded themselves as a radical

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avant-garde devoted to a mission of saving the world from the “Jewish disease.” In contrast to this generation that grew up in a Germany of deeply divided camps, the generation born between 1920 and 1933 were raised in a world that provided few alternatives to National Socialism. In a certain way, they had few choices to oppose Nazi power. This generation of Hitlerjungen, Flakhelfer and young soldiers was shaped by the war experience, educated in a radical militaristic system and considered themselves frequently to be the charismatic carriers of a future Nazi Germany. For them, the defeat of 1945 resulted in a sudden and radical breakdown of a taken-for-granted worldview. For the first time, they were faced with a world that was not totally dominated by the Nazi ideology. As differently as these generations may be related to the regime and ideology of National Socialism, they responded to the disclosure of the Holocaust in a very similar way: The generation of 1933 remained muted because they had backed the Nazi regime although they could have known better, the Hitlerjungen generation, in contrast, remained silent for the very opposite reason—they could not have known better; their world had collapsed, many of them felt betrayed and abused. If the unspeakable issue could not be avoided in informal conversations among Germans, those who had been enthusiastic followers of National Socialism could sometimes cope with the trauma of total defeat and the dismantling of the horror only by simply denying obvious facts—they considered the documentary evidence to be faked by the Allied forces. Others tried to separate the program of National Socialism from its realization or insisted that “der Führer” did not know about the Holocaust. At the beginning of the fifties, a shocking figure of almost forty percent believed that the merits of National Socialism outweighed the damage it had done to the German people (Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach 1950). The vast majority maintained that they had not known anything about the mass murders or that they had been too preoccupied by mere survival to care about the monstrous rumors. “Wir wussten von nichts. . .” Most of the horrors certainly were concealed from the German public.11 But even if the “final solution” was declared to be “Geheime Reichssache,” thousands of Germans participated directly in the genocide, the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the Nazi press continuously increased its fervor, rumors were spread, and questions could have been asked even by those who were not directly involved in the deportation and killing (Mommsen and Obst 1988). Few knew all the horrible facts, but almost everybody knew something. Most Germans deliberately or inadvertently avoided focusing their attention on the disappearance of the Jews from public life. They did not want to get involved in piercing moral questions, for fear, negligence or resentment. Thus, what, later on, became the crucial challenge for the German self-consciousness was removed to the diffuse and dim periphery of awareness and perception. In some respects, the silencing of the past after 1945 continued the ignorance and disregard that existed before 1945. And, to a certain degree at least, this coalition of silence included even the victorious allies (Laqueur 1980). Neither in

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the Soviet Union nor in the United States was the Holocaust centered in public debates during the fifties. An increasing awareness of the immensity of the genocide did not start before the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. The coalition of silence was not limited to informal communication in intimate spheres shielded from public control but left its traces also in the political rhetoric of Germany’s public discourse (Dubiel 1999; Herf 1997). The German chancellor Adenauer, a sober and pragmatic politician, mentioned the Holocaust only rarely in official speeches. On the few occasions when he addressed the Holocaust, he referred to it in the passive mode as “the immense suffering of the Jewish people” and did not mention the perpetrators. The Judeocide was, of course, not denied, but it ranged among other victims like fallen soldiers and refugees (Vertriebenen) who had lost their eastern Heimat. Instead of mentioning the crimes directly, the political rhetoric referred to the past as the “dark times of the recent past,” as the “time of unfathomable barbarism,” as the “catastrophe of German history” (Dubiel 1999). And even the German movies and TV series in the fifties and early sixties focused much more on the fate of prisoners of war in Siberian camps than on the Holocaust. One of the most popular series was Soweit die Füße tragen (“as far as the feet will carry you”), which presented the story of a German soldier escaping from a Russian prisoner camp and trying to return to Germany. Thus, the crimes and their perpetrators were removed to a realm of unreal nightmares beyond conception and description. Similar to the period of latency in the case of individual traumata, here, too, the traumatizing event—the Holocaust—is removed from collective consciousness and shifted to the level of haunting dreams which occasionally found their way into cultural representations—the popular movies about Doctor Mabuse, who uses men like string puppets to commit horrible crimes, hinted at the collective nightmare, but never spoke out its direct reference.

Blaming the outside: The demonization of Nazism Not everyone, however, consented to the coalition of silence. Some intellectuals raised their voices and asked the inconvenient question, “Where have you been, Adam?” (Böll 1972). Some situations required an explanation to outside observers, to schoolchildren, foreigners and those Germans who never supported the Nazi regime. Faced with these outside observers who could not be co-opted into the coalition of silence, Germans required a new exculpatory narrative. Postwar Germany constructed this narrative by primordializing the opposition between oppressors and the people: The Nazi rulers, Hitler in particular, were depicted as insane barbarians, as wild beasts, as satanic seducers who had approached the good and innocent German people from outside and deprived them of their common sense like a drug, a disease or a diabolic possession. The criminal domination was represented as pathological, inescapable and fatal, whereas the people were imagined as seduced into blindness, as unsuspicious and completely ignorant of the atrocities of genocide. Demonization of Nazi rule removed the nation from

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the realm of moral responsibility and culpability. This reference to intoxication, seduction, and blindness allowed Germans even to regard the German nation as the true victim of Nazism. This narrative of victimization was not only limited to the first postwar years. In 2000, a documentary series on German television had the title The Refugees: Hitler’s Last Victims (this demonization of the Nazi rule was, of course, not supported by the approximately fifteen percent of the German population that, even in the early fifties, considered Hitler to be one of the greatest German politicians of the century [Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach 1950]). In this new exculpatory narrative, primordialization was again used to exclude the outsider, but its direction was radically reversed: Before 1945, antiSemitism considered Jews to be poisonous demons secretly invading and seducing the German nation; now the same primordial exclusion and its rituals of purification and decoupling (Abspaltung) turned on the Nazis themselves. Hitler, once the charismatic redeemer and savior of Germany, was converted into a devil, a crazy epileptic, a monster, the immense misfortune of German history, an alien demon seducing the innocent German people. In a way, the demonization of Hitler continued his previous position as a fascinating superhuman individual beyond the ordinary rules, powerful and dangerous, mad and seductive—but the hero was converted into a demon, a sorcerer, a devilish monster. The charismatic hero of Nazi Germany had turned his followers into victims who, awakening from a dream, had to recognize that his crusade had left nothing but ashes and ruins. Demonization is reversed heroification; it keeps the superhuman individual as a reference of historical meaning, but it demands radical conversion on the part of his or her previous followers—what has been the embodiment of the sacred before is now turned into the embodiment of the demonic. The pattern of radical conversion was put to the extreme by Nazis who tried to change their personal identity, assumed new names, and after several years reemerged into public life as faithful and respected democrats, supporting social democracy and taking over important public offices before their former identities as SS officers were disclosed (Leggewie 1998).

Decoupling: Expelling the perpetrators The Nazi demons were usually regarded as figures of the past, but some of them had undoubtedly survived undercover or even under their proper names as respected persons of postwar society. If their Nazi past was publicly disclosed, the German nation could not simply fall back to the narrative of demonization. They had to be expelled from civil society in order to reaffirm the boundary between the majority of decent Germans on the one side and the few surviving monsters on the other. A new narrative was needed. It was provided by the model of individual criminal guilt. The Nazi consociates could not be considered as alien monsters—instead they appeared as individual perpetrators who had committed horrible capital crimes and had to be treated as criminals and sentenced to prison according to the rules of law that were proclaimed in the name of the German

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people “Im Namen des deutschen Volkes.” In the narrative of individual criminal guilt, the German people were no longer in the position of the victim, as they were in the narrative of demonization. Instead, they took the position of the third party, defining the relationship between perpetrators and victims with respect to impartial rules of justice. In this narrative, the collective trauma was moralized, but there was no acceptance of collective guilt yet. To the contrary, the public discourse of the fifties insisted on a strict rejection of any idea of collective guilt and a strict boundary between the few unquestionably criminal perpetrators and the majority of seduced citizens and soldiers. Of course, the position of the boundary was debatable. The oppositional Social Democrats were willing to include a larger group of higher officials in the circle of perpetrators—targeting especially Globke, the previous commentator of the “Rassengesetze,” now a member of the government. In contrast, chancellor Adenauer—unquestionably an anti-Nazi himself—and his conservative coalition insisted that, although the criminal perpetrators should be punished, there should be no distinction between two large classes of Germans—those with blemishes and those without (Dubiel 1999). Sometimes, even the leading generals of the Wehrmacht who had been sentenced to prison and the young soldiers who did their military service in the Waffen-SS were included in the community of abused people.12 Despite dissents and debate, most politicians of the new democracy agreed in the denial of any collective guilt of all Germans and supported the new narrative of individual criminal guilt. The parliamentary debates about de-Nazification, about wearing military decorations in public, about paroles for mass murderers and the end of prosecution of Nazi crimes, and even about the Auschwitz trial in the early sixties, aimed at demarcating a clear boundary between the majority of normal and “decent” Germans on the one side and the few criminal perpetrators on the other (Dubiel 1999).13 This demarcation not only allowed for a new construction of national identity but also stressed, by expulsion and oblivion, the radical newness of the political system and the departure from totalitarian rule. Expelling the condemned perpetrators from civil society and ending the prosecution of newly discovered Nazi crimes represented just different sides of the same thrust to get rid of the past. The law court was the institutional arena where the demarcation of individual criminal guilt was staged, ritually constructed and reaffirmed. Although in the early fifties the imprisonment of Nazi criminals at Landsberg and the related trials was still much criticized by the conservative right, there was no way to avoid the trial if discontinuity between past and present was to be constructed. Here, the roles of the accused perpetrators and the accusing public represented by the prosecutor were strictly separated, just as the rules of law on the one hand and the criminal action on the other were clearly distinguished. Both oppositions supported the demarcation between an innocent nation and treacherous criminals. Denying any collective responsibility, the ritual of trials confined the question of guilt strictly to individual acts, in particular, as testified by formal decisions within organizations. But even if crimes were committed beyond any doubt,

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the perpetrators tried to relativize their guilt by referring to the inescapability of military orders: Befehlsnotstand. Even the commanders of Auschwitz and Treblinka presented themselves as performing strictly within their formal competences; they emphasized that they never participated in personal cruelties (which was a lie)— these, they argued, were committed by subordinate Kapos from Ukraine, Lithuania and Poland (in passing the blame, they adapted their contempt for the Slavic Untermenschen to the new situation) (Langbein 1965). Demarcating the perpetrators and denying one’s own involvement and guilt was not only the Federal Republic’s way of coping with the past. It was also used in the new socialist republic of East Germany. Here, the founding myth of the new state focused on the idea that the repressed German people had—assisted by the glorious Red Army—succeeded in overthrowing the fascist regime. The boundary between the past and the present was declared to be radical and insurmountable, “der neue sozialistische Mensch” (the new socialist human being) had nothing in common with “Hitlerism” and “fascism.” The socialist rhetoric carefully avoided speaking of “National Socialism.” Any traces of continuity between past and present were shifted across the border to the “revanchist and fascist” Federal Republic of West Germany. The Federal Republic, indeed, could not deny that it was the legal successor of the Nazi state, because it had to provide a legal basis for the citizenship of refugees and for its claim to represent the entire Germany. The new German Democratic Republic (GDR) considered the Federal Republic to be a fascist society in bourgeois disguise. This demarcation between good, antifascist and socialist east and the fascist and capitalist west was also used to deny any responsibility for the survivors of the Holocaust—hence no restitutions and reparations were paid (Lepsius 1989). The public rituals of the GDR focused on the fascist barbarism of the past and the heroism of antifascist resistance, but the Judeocide was rarely mentioned. Based on the antifascist ideology and the constitutional rupture between past and present, the politics of the GDR did occasionally even take an anti-Semitic turn. In socialist East Germany, the Stalinist waves of purging in the early fifties targeted Jewish communists like Paul Merker and Leo Zuckermann who, after returning from a Western exile, had tried to merge antifascism and socialism in the new Germany. Like leading Jewish members of the communist parties in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, they, too, were accused of “cosmopolitanism” and secret espionage with imperialist and bourgeois forces (Herf 1997). In a similar and even more self assured way, Austria tried to get rid of its Nazi past. Austria’s founding myth turned the Anschluß of 1938 into a military occupation by foreign forces and tried to position Austria among the liberated nations like Czechoslovakia, Holland and Denmark as “Hitler’s first victim.” Here too, responsibility and guilt for the Holocaust was simply pushed across the border and the perpetrators were defined as non-Austrian outsiders, and its own people were seen as “innocent perpetrators” (Wodak 1990). And here, too, decoupling the new nation from the history of guilty perpetrators weakened its alertness with respect to new anti-Semitism.

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But the thrust to shift the guilt across the border and to turn collaboration into victimization was not limited to German-speaking nations. Italy rapidly forgot its own fascist past and its complicity with Nazi Germany and presented itself as a nation of resistance heroism; the Flemish, the Slovakian and the Croatian participation in the Shoah was blurred because they were parts of new nationstates that emerged out of anti-Nazism resistance movements. And even within Germany, the process of coping with the past by expelling the perpetrators was repeated half a century after the Holocaust: The “destasification,” which took place in East Germany after the German unification in the early nineties, shows a striking similarity with the de-Nazification of the late forties. Again, the issue was to demarcate the line between the perpetrators and the majority of the decent Germans who had suffered from repressive rule, but this time it was even more difficult to turn the filthy grayish web of collaboration into a clear-cut black-and-white picture of guilt and innocence: Almost a third of the entire population had been involved in Stasi activities, and the system of surveillance and control had expanded during four decades to reach a perfection the Gestapo never achieved. However, the Communist system in East Germany did not produce genocidal practices comparable to the Shoah or to the Stalinist mass murders. The pattern established in the postwar period was to be repeated; the disclosure of previous Stasi collaboration and the public debate about it were in many respects similar to the earlier de-Nazification. It ousted many rising political stars from office but kept some of the former collaborators (such as Stolpe) in prominent positions. A successor party of the old regime, the PDS (like the Deutsche Reichs-Partei in the fifties) could profit from the resentment of the old elite now deprived of their old power and privilege. Rumors about clandestine networks of the old secret police spread. And even the militant members of the 1968 revolt—who had tried to disclose the hidden “fascist” heritage of postwar Germany—could not entirely escape this pattern of decoupling and expulsion with respect to the evil of the past. In 2000, they, too, became the target of public debates and some of them—now in their fifties—had to show up in court. After coming of age, many of them had become members of the Green Party and some of them even succeeded in taking important public offices, like the popular German foreign minister Joseph Fischer or his colleague Jürgen Trittin. The public disclosure of photos showing the young Fischer as a street fighter battering a policeman triggered off a public debate about the violence of the militants twenty years before. This time it was the generation of ’68 that had to publicly denounce and outdistance its past. Leading members of the militant movements pointed to the spirit of the time and recalled the best intentions of the “revolutionaries,” and those in public office stressed again and again in public that they had never consented to violence against human beings. Again, a strong demarcation was publicly staged between those who remembered their past as democratic revolutionaries and those who engaged in terrorism and criminal activities. Thus the attempt of the generation of ’68 to cope with the Nazi past became itself a paradoxical issue of contested memory.

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Withdrawal: The timeless German virtues Excluding the perpetrators by legal trials continued the de-Nazification—originally decreed by the Allied forces—as an autonomous act of the German nation, but it did not provide a positive, let alone triumphant, construction of identity. Still, the collective trauma could not be addressed directly. Any prospect of a unified German nation state seemed to be barred by the stable partition of Germany. Like traumatized individuals withdraw from active engagements that presuppose a basic trust in the environment, traumatized communities, too, can withdraw from risky and threatening engagements to a secure realm of identity. Thus, postwar Germany turned from its recent past to timeless German virtues as the core of a new sober national identity that blended traditional and primordial elements. These virtues varied depending on social carrier and context. The generation of Hitlerjungen who were raised in a militaristic life world and who were returning from the prison camps in Siberia stressed the discipline and the spirit of sacrifice of the German soldiers and disregarded entirely the ideological context in which these virtues were used. They felt betrayed and abused and remained deeply suspicious toward the lure of ideologies. But they kept the practical virtues that provided the backbone of their wartime experience. The petite bourgeoisie focused on honesty, reliability, and industriousness, virtues that fit the functioning of modern organizations but do not ask for a legitimization of their aims (Bauman 1989). In a weird way, the shift to discipline and work as the core of national reconstruction inadvertently continued the Nazi cult of the Volk as the merging of “Arbeiter der Faust und der Stirn,” and hinted even at the infamous slogan “Arbeit macht frei” (Hamacher 1996). The culture of the “economic miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder) was predominantly of petite bourgeois origin, carried by craftsmen and clerks, holders of minor public offices and skilled workers. These German virtues seemed to be exempted from the changing tides of history, the decay of the German nation state and the shame of Nazism. They were strictly decoupled from the historical context that could question and discredit them and separated from the level of state and politics. Thus the new narrative of national virtues fostered the creation of a German nation that lived below the level of politics and the state in associations, enterprises and neighborhoods.14 The German mark became the cultural symbol for this prepolitical identity of the Wirtschaftswunder. In a certain way, this turn toward the sober virtues of working citizens could even be regarded as a belated Westernization of Germany—no highflung political Romanticism any more, no nostalgic look backward, just practical reasoning about rebuilding the cities and integrating the refugees. Based on and backed by this new self-consciousness, the Germans could even—albeit indirectly— face the survivors of the Holocaust. The Adenauer government decided relatively early to pay large sums to Israel (till 1995, almost 100 billion German marks) as restitution for Jewish property and reparations for the crimes. But retreatism from politics was not only a matter of the petite bourgeoisie, of ordinary people. It extended also to the traditional Bildungsbürgertum. The

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educated classes emphasized Bildung (education), Innerlichkeit (sensitivity) and Unbestechlichkeit (impartiality and devotion to public office) and cultivated a new Biedermeier, which did not challenge the political rule. Retreatism also marked the attitude of those intellectuals who—in the case of Nazism, as well as under the Communist regime—frequently sought refuge in so-called “inner emigration.” This inner emigration was essentially apolitical, and many of the prominent emigrants who returned from their American exile after 1945 detached themselves explicitly from politics. Thomas Mann is one of the best known examples of this detachment from and despise of politics.15 Their melancholic abstention from politics continued a tradition of the German Bildungsbürgertum, which during its formative century was excluded from official politics and confined to the realm of culture and reason. Its intellectual leaders converted abstention into a virtue. From Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt, German intellectuals rarely accepted regular politics, which they found a tiresome, mundane chore. The educated and cultivated person had to detach himself from the superficial exaltations of politics, as well as from the banal calculations of money and markets. Politics could attract attention only if it appeared as an extraordinary charismatic event challenging the heroic individual. In revolutions and wars, the Bildungsbürgertum discovered situations in which the sublime and the sacred invaded and overwhelmed the mundane and profane field of everyday business. As soon as political decisions lost their extraordinary charismatic character and gave way to routinized craftsmanship and professional skills, they were treated as dirty business—character and identity are spoilt by politics and compromise. In the fifties, the concept of a subpolitical, associational German identity responded to the exigencies of the day as well as to the trauma of the past. Because the nation was seen as based on kinship and neighborhood, and not as a territorial state, it was able to integrate millions of refugees from the lost eastern provinces and even an increasing stream of migrants from the second German state. Because the people considered themselves to be innocent victims betrayed and abused by the Nazi rulers, the new German identity between Goethevereinen and Wirtschaftswunder had to keep its distance from politics. Nobody wanted to repeat the fatal mistake of a strong ideological commitment in the political arena. The same coping strategy applied to the situation after 1989, but with different results. This time, the retreat to personal networks gave way to a cleavage between East and West Germans and the construction of a particular eastern identity of common memories and lifestyles beyond politics and public discourse (Engler 1999).16

Changing Sides: Public Conflicts and Rituals of Confession Generational conflict and collective guilt The fragile combination of a new political start and the enduring identity of decent Germans, who considered themselves to be the true victims of the catastrophe

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and just wanted to be proud of their economic miracle, persisted until the sixties, when a new generation entered the political stage. This generation was born after the war. The young men and women of this generation did not have personal memories of the Nazi past; they broke the coalition of silence and faced their parents with inconvenient questions that until then had been the mark of outsiders. In their zeal to find out about the guilt of their parents, they constructed the boundary between insiders and outsiders in the midst of their own families. The trauma was now considered from an outside perspective. It became the stigma of the entire German nation. The new generation did not want to be a part of this nation that bore the stigma of perpetrators—they shifted sides and identified with the victims; it became fashionable to give children Jewish names. Thus, the repressed otherness of the victims not only had a voice again but was represented by personal names within the German nation. This advocacy for previously excluded otherness extended to political opposition. In contrast to the Hitlerjungengeneration who, returning from the Russian prison camps, could effortlessly continue their hostility by focusing on Soviet totalitarianism, the new generation turned enthusiastically to socialist ideas—they not only attacked their fathers’ fragile constructions of national identity but also became the declared ally of the enemy. Partly because the young Germans felt the stigma of collective shame and guilt, they did not want to belong to their fathers’ nation; they favored everything foreign and were afraid to be treated as typical Germans abroad. The students’ rebellion of 1968, however, was not only a generational revolt or protest. Its anger and rage addressed the traumatic origin of German national identity and it tried to reconstruct this identity. Suspicious of remainders of the old fascism and hidden signs of a new fascism in the Federal Republic, the new außerparlamentarische opposition responded to the trauma by repeating furious hallucinations of the event that had caused the collective trauma and the collective fright. But it also spoke out the trauma and crushed the carefully constructed boundaries surrounding the postwar identity of Germany. The angry young men and women attacked the myth of a democratic start, brought the issue of guilt to the fore of public debates and replaced the narratives that had presented the Germans as the victims of Nazi tyranny with a charge of tacit and overt collaboration. It was, of course, not their own guilt that required reassuring illusions, but the guilt of their fathers, from whom a moral distance must be constructed. The new narrative turned the trauma into the stigma of an entire generation. Beyond the narrow limits of individual criminal guilt, the preceding but still present generations, the voters of 1933 as well as the Hitlerjungen, were considered collectively responsible for the national trauma—voters, party members, bystanders, collaborators, fanatic supporters, as well as all those contemporaries who had not prevented the horrible crime that was committed in the German name. In stigmatizing the generation of their fathers, the young Germans were not entirely impartial—they represented the victims and in doing so they could cut the links to the nation of perpetrators that was identified with the preceding generation.

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The tension between the generations produced a merciless public investigation and, for the first time, a clear public statement of a collective German guilt. More than ever before, the Holocaust entered the institutional arena of public debates in which every citizen could partake, in which secrecy and silence hinted at hidden crimes and in which the privilege of personal experience did not count anymore. From now on, the crime of the past was directly referred to, the silencing and ignoring, the covering and disguising of the crimes, were replaced by a dismantling of collaboration. The circle of perpetrators was widened to include the entire generation of fathers and mothers and the boundaries of the nation were changing. Like other major changes of boundary construction also, this shift resulted in strong political conflicts and produced deeply entrenched political camps opposing each other in public (Dubiel 1999). Whereas the conservative camp insisted on an unmasked pride of the economic miracle and tended to render the past to oblivion, the New Left (that carefully avoided referring to the past as “National Socialism”) used the term “fascist” sometimes as a rude club to crush the civil reputation of its opponents. Even some of the most ardent followers of the ’68 rebellion got lost in the outland of violence and capital crime: in the end, the Baader-Meinhof group and the so-called Red Army Fraction (RAF) constituted their sovereign subjectivity no longer in pursuing an enlightenment vision of society but in trespassing the law. Their aim was to be persecuted as enemies of the state. Although it was unquestionably the New Left that established the Holocaust as an issue of public discourse in Germany, its radical zeal was not without ambivalence with respect to the Nazi heritage. Habermas and Marcuse, themselves intellectual leaders of the New Left, accused the radical left of “Linksfaschismus” (leftist fascism) and, later on, the political center insisted that the totalitarian character of the militant left was strikingly reminiscent of Nazi politics. Moreover, the strong antifascist move of the new left did not prevent the leftist movement from opposing the state of Israel, which was accused of Zionist imperialism with respect to the Palestinians.17 In response to this anti-Israeli turn of the New Left, some liberal Jewish intellectuals in Germany could not deny being afraid of a new anti-Semitism—this time from the left. Twenty years later on, some of the leading actors of the militant left even changed sides and became right-wing radicals. Horst Mahler, a former member of the RAF, declared on German television: “The young people of the Waffen-SS and the RAF have a lot in common” (ARD Panorama, Sept. 2, 1999); Reinhold Oberlercher, once a leader of the ´68 Hamburg student movement, advocated in 1999 the Fourth Reich that bans foreigners and excludes them from the labor market;18 Rainer Langhans, previously a member of the Berliner Kommune, now warns against “be-devilishing” Hitler, whom he regards as a spiritual person, etc. The shift to a public discourse about the Holocaust was closely associated with a change in the construction of memories. The first postwar generation still had immediate experiences and strong personal memories, which persisted and

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were sometimes traumatic. They did not need an explicit discourse to revive and reconstruct the Nazi past. Tiny hints in the informal conversations between them were sufficient to recall the past and to signal the side they had been on with respect to Nazism. Recalling the past was not their problem—it was always lingering, haunting their memories. These personal memories were missing in the new generation; they had to rely on an elaborate public discourse to cope with the Nazi past. Hence, it was not only the conflict between generations, but also a shift from personal memories, silenced or reconstructed in microconversations, to the remembrance of the past by public discourse carried by those who did not take part and could not refer to personal memories.

Accepting the guilt of the nation: Rituals of confession The new narrative of the collective guilt of an entire generation changed the notion of guilt. It was no longer limited to the voluntary acts of individuals who decided deliberately to violate the basic moral rules of a community. Instead, it now extended also to those members of a political community who, although not actively engaged in crimes, did not prevent these crimes that were committed in the name of the community. Because the new narrative decoupled the collective guilt of a political community from the active involvement of each individual member, it allowed for a ritual admittance of guilt by representatives who were innocent as individual persons. Rituals reconcile and reunite oppositions and ruptures and provide ways to overcome traumas and losses (Soeffner 1992). Public rituals of confessing guilt for the Holocaust were performed rarely in the fifties and early sixties—and they addressed mostly a limited audience. The only exception was the German president Heuss’s speech at the memorial site in Bergen Belsen in November 1952. This ceremony was broadcasted, reported in the national press and attended by several representatives of Western nations. Here, Heuss spoke the famous phrase “Diese Schande nimmt uns niemand ab” (“None will lift this shame from us”). But Heuss remained—in spite of all his reputation—in the position of a respected critic, rather than being carried by a majority movement (Herf 1997, p. 327). Other gestures, like the visit of ambassador Allaert to Auschwitz in March 1963, were barely noticed by the media.19 More important in this respect was certainly the famous kneeling of the German chancellor Willy Brandt in Warsaw in 1970. In a spontaneous gesture, the head of the German government visiting the monument for the victims of the Ghetto uprising against German occupation knelt down in silence and remained so for some minutes. This representative confession of collective guilt was no longer relativized by reference to the sufferings of the Germans or to a fatal blindness and seduction. Neither could it be seen as a youngster’s untamed revolt against his or her parents’ generation. In distinction to the generational revolt that established a cleavage between the carriers of collective guilt and the accusing generation, Brandt took the burden of the collective guilt of the nation although he was innocent as a person (he was persecuted by the Nazis and joined the Norwegian

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resistance army). Thus he enacted a new narrative that confessed the collective guilt of the German nation with respect to the Jewish victims facing an international public that acted as a third party. This narrative of national guilt was not presented in a public speech but as a spontaneous and mute gesture that did not require further explication and did not allow for objections and criticism. There was no public announcement or plan to perform this gesture; even the personal staff of the chancellor did not expect it, and no large Polish audience attended it. But by its very unexpectedness it was globally noticed and immediately reported on the front pages of the major Western newspapers: The New York Times as well as the Corriere della Sera or the Daily Telegraph and other foreign newspapers showed on their front pages the picture of the German chancellor kneeling at the Ghetto memorial. Their comments stressed unanimously the importance of the gesture: This “touching incident” overshadowed the signing of the German-Polish treaty on the same day (New York Times); it was “il momento culminante” (“the peak moment”) of Brandt’s visit, “un nuovo rituale” (“a new ritual”) that marked a turning point in German postwar history (Corriere della Sera).20 Although the issue of the Holocaust had been addressed already in public by some political representatives of the Federal Republic (for example, by President Heuss, Mayor Reuter of Berlin, and Schumacher, the leader of the Social Democrats), it was the kneeling of Brandt in Warsaw that became an icon of recent German history—like the mass rallies of the Nuremberg Parteitage, the Soviet soldiers erecting the red flag on the Brandenburger Tor in 1945 or, later on, the fall of the Berlin Wall. This global resonance was not only due to the context of an official visit abroad. More important was the fact that it added an innovative element to a well-known ritual. Visiting the monuments of unknown soldiers who sacrificed their lives for a nation was nothing new. Originally it was performed only by the representatives of the nation to which the dead belonged. Later, it became part of the rituals performed by heads of state visiting another state and paying respect to the dead of the host nation. In this ritual, the fallen soldiers who were revered as heroes before are regarded as victims and the hostility of the past is blurred in a common act of mourning. Brandt’s kneeling transformed this ritual in a profound way. It added a gesture of repentance with respect to victims killed by the chancellor’s own nation. Unlike the famous gestures of reconciliation performed by the French president Mitterand and the German chancellor Kohl at the cemeteries of Verdun later on, Brandt’s gesture did not ignore the difference between perpetrators and victims. Although the monument of the Ghetto upheaval in Warsaw depicts a heroic act of failed resistance, it was not the death of soldiers who were casualties of a war, but the death of innocent victims that he was mourning.21 But it clearly differed also from a simple Canossa ritual or a voluntary personal humiliation of a repenting individual who is personally guilty. When guilty people repent in public they can never avoid the suspicion of hypocrisy. Brandt’s Warsaw kneeling separated the individual guilt of the ritual actor from the collective guilt of the German

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nation. It could be performed and was beyond suspicion of hypocrisy for the very reason that Brandt was innocent as an individual person. He was believable as the representative of the German nation because he had no personal interests or past involvements to be disguised and masked by this gesture. The decision to humiliate oneself and take on the burden of collective guilt gained immense respect for the individual person of the German chancellor and gave way to a reconciliation between Germany—the nation of the perpetrators—and the nations of the victims. It ended the postwar period. This gesture, not the many announcements of German politicians, ended the status of moral occupation for the Federal Republic and opened the path to a new political identity recognized by its neighbors. It substituted the missing revolution and prepared the ground for a new German identity, one not imposed from outside but emerging from representative acts of the nation defining itself and accepting its guilt. Thus it is no coincidence that the chancellorship of Willy Brandt also gave way to a normalization of relations between Germany and its eastern neighbor states and that the new Ostpolitik supported Germany’s entry onto the stage of global politics. The public confession of the guilt of perpetrators even opened up a path to a rebirth of the nation. Three decades later, remembering the thirtieth anniversary of Brandt’s kneeling in Warsaw, the commentaries in the German media almost unanimously proclaim this rebirth of Germany as a consequence of the Brandt gesture: Instead of questioning it as a moment of public humiliation like thirty years before when it was referred to as a “Canossa ritual,” it was celebrated as Germany’s reentry into European politics. The trauma of perpetrators who confess their guilt was turned into a triumph that could even be regarded as a new model for public politics.22 The extraordinary media resonance of the Brandt kneeling was not only due to the particular historical setting in which it was performed. It was also related to a deeply rooted cultural pattern of self-humiliation and self-sacrifice in the Christian tradition. In this tradition, an innocent person can, in an extraordinary public act, humiliate himself in order to relieve the burden of collective guilt from his people. Although this mythical pattern can be found also in Mesopotamian cultures, the most famous elements of this tradition are the idea of the original guilt as elaborated by Augustine, the sacrifice of Isaac and the self-sacrifice of Christ. Christ is the ultimate innocent individual, the king of divine descent, the hero who is killed in order to save his people. Christian liturgical rituals remember or even repeat (cp. the Catholic ritual of transsubstantiation) this sacrifice of the innocent: Jewish and Christian symbolism represent it by the figure of the innocent lamb that replaces the human sacrificial object; early Christian martyrs and, later on, religious virtuosi accepted suffering and death in order to do penance for the sins of others and to repeat the model set by Christ. This cultural pattern of Christomimesis underlies also the confession of collective guilt by political leaders, although they might be raised in a largely secularized environment like Willy Brandt. Myth and ritual form and guide our actions in liminal situations, even if we are not aware of the original version of the mythological or ritual pattern—like a rule of grammar that structures and directs speech acts also for

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those who are unable to name the rule. This holds true not only for the performing actors, but also for the audience. It may be revealing to compare Brandt’s gesture in Warsaw with the famous ritual of remembrance performed by Reagan and Kohl in 1985 at the German war cemetery in Bitburg, where soldiers of the German Waffen-SS were also buried. This ritual of remembrance was staged to support the postwar demarcation between the few Nazi perpetrators and the innocent German people—this time, however, not only the regular soldiers of the German Wehrmacht, but also members of the Waffen-SS, were to be included in the immense group of victims. Even if not all of its members had joined voluntarily the Waffen-SS, the sign of the SS was rightly seen as the epitome of Nazism—it marked a monstrous elite corps of mostly cold-blooded murderers. Consequently, the international community was outraged by the ritual at Bitburg. Beyond a vivid sensitivity toward the symbols of Nazism, this response also indicates the clash between two general tendencies. On the one hand, the construction of victims is bound to inclusion. More and more new groups are included in the mass of victims. On the other hand, this construction of victims cannot dispense with perpetrators; it is ritually staged by public acts of repentance and accepting collective guilt. The Bitburg ritual was incomplete in this respect: A repenting actor representing the group of perpetrators was missing. Noting that both representatives, Kohl as well as Reagan, were personally innocent missed the point. In contrast to the Brandt gesture in 1970, Kohl did not take on collective guilt but tried to disperse it in the untraceable space of history, or to charge it to demons, thereby reviving the postwar narrative of the seduced nation. But remembrance and repentance cannot be separated if the collective identity of perpetrators is involved. Representing the nation in a ritual of repentance in a believable way is fostered by the innocence of the representative as a person. Kohl failed to see the opportunity in what he presented as an excuse. But the heritage of the Brandt ritual of atonement and repentance prevailed. Shortly after the visit to Bitburg, the German president Weizäcker gave one of his most impressive memorial addresses on the occasion of the fortieth commemoration of May 1945; solemnly, he recalled the different groups of victims, most prominently among them the Jewish citizens. Ten years later, at the fiftieth commemoration, thousands of Germans attended observances at the memorial sites of the concentration camps, and the 27th of January, the day when the camp of Auschwitz/Birkenau was liberated, was officially instituted as a German memorial day for the victims of Nazism.23

The Objectification of the Trauma: Scholarly Debates and Museums In the first postwar period, the trauma was embodied in haunting personal memories. (see, for example, Mitscherlich’s book Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern, 1994). The

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“inability to mourn” resulted in public silence and the social expulsion of the perpetrators. The institutional arena where the Holocaust was spoken out was the law court. In contrast, the second period was patterned by political conflicts and public debates carried by a generation who had no personal memories anymore, and by public confessions of guilt. Its arena was the political space of civil society. Every citizen could participate, engage in ardent debates, be a passionate partisan on the public issue, and join political camps. It was national identity that was at stake and—even if the participants try to surpass each other in laying claims on the issue—there are no a priori privileges in defining collective identity in public discourse. But claims to be close to the moral core of collective identity will be raised and contested, stigmas are attached to those who are regarded as the outsiders of the moral order and who, in turn, are trying to defend themselves against the stigma of perpetrators. The trauma, unspeakable in the years after 1945, had been turned into the stigma of collective guilt, publicly contested and debated between generations. In the next stage, the stigma will become the theme of stories and histories that can be narrated and represented to an audience that is no longer haunted by personal memories or stigmatized by collective guilt.

The professional historians take over During the eighties, the memory of the Holocaust was increasingly transferred to a new institutional arena: scholarly debate and historical research. When the number of eyewitnesses is shrinking and personal memories are fading, when new generations can no longer listen and respond to their fathers’ stories, then historians and other professional custodians of the past have to preserve relics, reports and remainders. Scholarly reconstructions extend the range of memory and submit it to seemingly impersonal methods of investigation and evaluation. Historians can investigate their objects even if they are not studying the history of their own group. In principle at least, the memory produced by historical research is disembodied, abstract and detached from the identity of the scholar. If the past is rendered to the professional experts, it becomes an object of comparisons, it is explained by particular conditions and understood by imagining a special context. In distinction to the narrative of national guilt, the past is turned into a field of objective causes and conditions that move history and result in historical events. Questions of guilt and responsibility are shifted into the background and moral commitments are to be separated from the professional investigation of the case and the impartial assessment of truth. The professional expert acts on behalf of the general community, and this community extends to include all reasonable subjects in the case of the scientist and scholar. As soon as the experts take over the reconstruction of the past, debates about these reconstructions tend not only to be decoupled from issues of personal identity but also to be institutionalized and tempered by the sober rituals of scholarly methods. Therefore the shift from general public debate to the field of professional specialists who replace or supplement the judges and politicians as repre-

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sentatives of the nation and as the impartial third party is commonly expected to produce a more detached and less passionate perspective. However, this expectation holds true only if the debate about the Holocaust is confined within the shielded fields of scholarly debates. But the general interest in the national trauma could not be banned from the exclusive halls of historical science. The historians (many of them members of the Hitlerjungen generation, but also leading liberal intellectuals of postwar Germany) were eager to present their findings to a larger public audience, and the national audience showed a strong and sensitive resonance. As soon as the issue was turned again into a matter of general concern, the very attempt to deal with the Holocaust as a matter of normal historical research provoked violent public objections and triggered off intense debates. The first important controversy about the Holocaust, however, still remained largely within the scholarly community. It was the debate between so-called functionalist and intentionalist explanations of the Judeocide. Intentionalists focused on the original anti-Semitism of Hitler and the Nazi leaders.24 They explained the Nazi organizations and even the entire war at the Ostfront as a deliberate and controlled attempt to exterminate the Jewish people. According to them, all parts of the Nazi’s mythology could be suspended, revoked or mocked at in internal communication among the Nazi leaders—but not anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was the mythomoteur of Nazism. In contrast, functionalists like Mommsen analyzed the Holocaust as a result of a highly developed differentiation of tasks on the one hand and a complex field of internal rivalries and tensions between different offices and Nazi organizations on the other (Mommsen 1983). Far from being a centrally planned and meticulously executed campaign, the Holocaust appears here as the result of an organizational chaos where even the high ranking participants did not exactly know about the genocidal activities of other parts. Nobody— not even Hitler himself—was in full control and nobody had exhaustive and reliable information about the complete reality of the genocide. If the Holocaust is explained as the—at least partly—unintended consequence of internal rivalries and conflicts between Nazis or as a function of an organizational system, then, indeed, the question of guilt and responsibility is suspended and the ties that link the Holocaust to the national identity are weakened. As hefty as the controversy between intentionalists and functionalists has been, it was too complex to enter the general public sphere, and it never questioned the monstrosity of the Holocaust itself—whatever its core conditions may have been. In contrast, the famous German Historikerstreit of the eighties got tremendous public attention because it addressed directly the question of German national identity and brought out the lingering ambivalence with respect to the trauma. The Historikerstreit confronted the protagonists of German exceptionalism who insisted on the uniqueness of the Holocaust and its absolute importance for German identity on the one side with a new right-wing revisionism on the other (Nolte 1987; Hillgruber 1987; Diner 1987; Habermas 1987a, 1987b; Lacapra 1994; Maier 1997). Pointing to some new historical evidence, the

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conservative revisionists tried to normalize the German war crimes and to position them in the context of a European civil war in which Stalin, not Hitler, had set the model of exterminatory crusades. This strategy obviously lightened the burden of moral responsibility and questioned the uniqueness of the Holocaust; it did not exonerate the Germans, and it did not shift the guilt across the border, but it dissolved and suspended the question of guilt in a broad display of genocidal practices of the “European civil war” triggered off by Soviet communism. It blurred the boundaries. Not surprisingly, the reaction of the liberal public audience led by Habermas was strong. Historicizing the Holocaust and embedding it into a historical context was considered an act of alienation and misappropriation of the very idea of German identity that the new generation had adopted.25 In a different way, but with comparable results, the issue was again brought to the fore of public attention by Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Goldhagen 1996). Goldhagen attributed the Holocaust to a deep rooted exterminatory anti-Semitism in German culture. The debate revived the generational revolt of the sixties and, again, expanded the group of perpetrators to include almost all Germans in the Nazi Reich. The public debate was fierce. Even the professional historians who questioned the scholarly merits of the book were accused of masking the past and hence of ex post facto collaboration. But both camps in this debate contributed—certainly without intending it—to a blurring of boundaries that constitute a moral discourse. The historians around Mommsen did so in insisting on the impartial treatment of a national trauma in the public sphere and on scholarly investigation even if it deals with matters of identity. Goldhagen’s supporters did so because Goldhagen primordialized German anti-Semitism and thus removed it from the range of moral decisions. Furthermore, including everyone in the group of perpetrators risks eroding the distinction between guilt and innocence that is at the core of moral discourse.26 To a lesser degree, this erosion of the moral distinction by widening the group of perpetrators could be found in the debate about the exhibition Wehrmachtsausstellung of the nineties (Heer 1995). The exhibition presented almost a thousand documents to prove the many connections between the regular German army at the Ostfront and the Judeocide, the readiness of officers and common soldiers to cooperate with the Einsatzgruppen, and, in particular, the undeniable fact that many of them did know about the Holocaust. Again, the circle of perpetrators was widened and one of the seemingly safe havens of “inner emigration,” the Wehrmacht, was discovered to be deeply entangled in the crimes. And again, the large public resonance and clamor that the exhibition received resulted not from scholarly debates but from its impact on the new German identity as the nation of perpetrators. Germany’s response was divided—a clear majority was deeply moved and concerned by the documented atrocities, prominent politicians and public intellectuals gave the introductory speeches for the exhibitions, etc. A strong minority of conservatives, however, refused to admit to the guilt and the entanglement of the German Wehrmacht. Finally, even the German parliament dealt with the issue in a memorable and impressive debate. Again the

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fundamental demarcation between the majority of decent Germans on the one side and the minority of criminal Nazi monsters on the other was at stake. In the case of the Wehrmachtsausstellung, this new German identity was supported by a scholarly attempt to revise the traditional master-narratives of the decent German soldier, and, at first, it was only the defenders of this traditional identity who rallied against it. But scholarly discourse was by no means unanimously supporting the revisionist cause—at the end of nineties, an increasing number of historians challenged the scholarly basis of the exhibition. They pointed to a small number of the photo documents that were mistaken as proofs for the Wehrmacht’s murderous actions, but, in fact, showed the victims of the Russian NKWD or the German SS.27 Finally, the organizers closed the exhibition in response to scholarly criticism. Obviously the trauma was still ruminating and dividing the German public—the diagnosis of the experts was accepted only if it could soothe the pain or acerbate the trauma; most Germans resisted turning their national identity into just another object of impartial scholarly investigation. Of course, this was not a general ban on historical research about the Holocaust and not all attempts to submit the Holocaust to historical research provoked passionate public controversy. To the contrary, with the number of witnesses fading away, there was an increasing demand for the collection of memories and remainders. The turn toward oral history, autobiographical narration and history of mentalités responded to this demand (Niethammer 1983). It extended the perspective to include everyday life and seemingly banal details that reflected the penetration of Nazism into the life of ordinary Germans. But here again, the once clearly demarcated boundary between the few criminal perpetrators and the majority of innocent and abused Germans was blurred. It dissolved in a history of complex contexts and entanglement; finally, it depicted the manifold ways of ignoring and tacit consenting, of cowardice and fascination. It described the subtle ramifications on the way to the Holocaust, but—in contrast to the trials of the postwar period—it refused to proclaim a final verdict of guilty or not guilty: Indissoluble and entangled, all Germans had been guilty and not guilty at the same time. The historians’ narrative of the national trauma established a strong perspective of a third party, but it merged the positions of perpetrators and victims. Finally, there were even German victims and Jewish collaborators. Half a century after the end of the Nazi rule, the Germans discovered their own victims—the victims of the bombing raids, the victims among the refugees in 1945, the victims of rape under Russian occupation. It was mainly the Günther Grass novella Im Krebsgang that turned the suffering of Germans after 1945 into an issue of public debate. Because Grass is a liberal and, as such, beyond suspicion of revisionist intentions, his advocacy for the forgotten German victims was believable. In 2003, plans for a center for refugees and expulsion in Berlin were set up by a German committee and caused an international debate. The possible involvement of a Jewish partisan unit in a massacre committed on a Lithuanian village in January 1944 was publicly debated (FAZ 8-12-2003). The once clearcut distinction between victims and perpetrators was gradually blurred.

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Museums and memorial sites: From laic associations to official committees Professional administration and scholarly investigation of the past is not an invention of the late twentieth century; instead, it dates back to the establishment of history as an academic discipline and the institutional conservation of past objects in the nineteenth century (Nora 1992; Giesen 1999a). The general civil concern with the past as organized in historical associations and the idea that the past can be appropriated by every citizen according to his or her own taste receded in the second half of the nineteenth century and was gradually replaced by an exclusive professional handling of historical matters that turned the non-professionals into a laic audience consuming the past for curiosity and education. This transformation of voluntary movements that want to preserve the remainders of the past as a matter of general civic concern into a professional organization was repeated in the case of the Holocaust. Although most of the concentration camps—in particular, Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergenbelsen and Ravensbrück—had been turned into memorial sites shortly after the war, it was in the eighties that the Holocaust was focused on by local movements of citizens who tried to collect local knowledge and to discover the traces of the national trauma within their own local community. Frequently organized by teachers of the ’68 generation, these laic associations dug out the remainders, established local memorial sites and reconstructed the maps of the cities with respect to a past that their parents had shifted to a distant demon in Berlin. But the traces of the Gestapo and of pogrom, of vanished Jewish citizens and Nazi rituals, could be found in every city—the persecution of the Jewish cocitizens was not just a matter of Hitler and Auschwitz, it happened everywhere in Germany. Thus the laic memorial movements and associations appropriated the national trauma on a local level. In the nineties, however, these laic movements were increasingly superseded and replaced by professional musealization and by official national policies to construct memorial monuments (Schafft and Zeidler 1996; Puvogel 1989). This turn toward professional musealization is not limited to the German collective memory. Holocaust museums were founded in Washington, Los Angeles and more than a hundred other cities; Holocaust archives were sponsored by American movie directors. In Germany, the professional care for the national trauma reached its peak in the planning of a large Holocaust memorial in the center of Berlin as the national monument of the new united Germany. A huge committee was assembled to decide about the different suggestions provided by internationally known artists and architects, and each of these suggestions had its ardent followers and opponents in the committee, as well as in the public debate about the issue. On the German, as well on the Jewish side, this shift toward musealization and monumentalization hints at the thrust to preserve and to appropriate a memory that is endangered by the passing away of witnesses. This longing for roots can lead to individual investigation of the fate of ancestors, but it results mostly in a

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collective construction of a past, first by voluntary associations of citizens, then by official organizations and committees chaired by experts who act on behalf of the nation. In the end, the differentiation between past and present is no longer an achievement of the individual consciousness but a spatial distinction between les lieux de memoire that are exclusively devoted to memory and the regular and mundane spheres of action that are discharged from the burden of the past; but it is also turned into a social distinction between the professional specialists of the past and the laic audience that faces the past only on special occasions and otherwise indulges in oblivion. They know: the past is stored and in good hands.

The Mythologization of the Trauma: The Holocaust as an Icon of Evil As a reference for identity, the Holocaust could not be contained within the confines of museums and archives. From the seventies onward, it increasingly entered a new institutional arena: the media. Most important in this respect is certainly the television series Holocaust, which attracted unusual attention in the German public sphere. Presenting the Holocaust and the Nazi heritage in the context of a nondocumentary movie was not entirely new: Wolfgang Staudte’s movie Rosen für den Staatsanwalt had addressed the issue of Nazism as early as the fifties, but this, as well as most other movies dealing with the dark legacy of Nazism, did not dare to present the Judeocide directly. In contrast, the most popular TV-serials dealt with the fate of German POWs in Russian camps and their attempts to come back home (Soweit die Füße tragen). In distinction to the many attempts to describe the horrors of the war or the persistence of secret Nazi networks, the TV series Holocaust told the story of two German families, one Jewish, the other Nazi, in a convincing, detailed and moving way. Mediated through the movie, the process of remembering was shifted again to the German families, to children who refused to accept the narrative of the seduced nation and to parents who still defended themselves occasionally by maintaining that only the participants could understand, but mostly felt estranged by their own almost forgotten past. Far from resuscitating the political debates of the sixties or exacerbating the scholarly debates, the presentation of the past in German movies like Heimat or Die Blechtrommel or U.S. movies like Schindler’s List (Loshitzky 1997) or Holocaust, transferred the issue to a new institutional arena that tends to overcome opposition and conflicts by the ritual construction of communality. Nobody in the audience could disagree with the fundamental evaluation of the Holocaust because the movies presented a story and not an argument. In contrast to scholarly research, reconstructions of the past in the mass media have to abstain from referring to abstract figures and arguments; instead, they must narrate a story about good and bad people, they have to create suspense and emotions, and to offer clear-cut anchors for identification (Rosenthal 1995). Entanglement and indifference, gradual shifts and uncertainties of evaluation can

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be presented only at the beginning of the story and only to a very limited degree; sheer coincidence and structural constraints are hardly accepted as moving forces of a story; instead, there must be action and responsibility, heroes and villains, suspense and—at the end of the story—an absolutely clear decision between perpetrators and victims, guilt and innocence. In doing so, the media staging of the Holocaust succeeds also in the representation of the victims as subjects with a face, a name and a voice. Those who have been reduced to mere objects are remembered as “cohumans,” as suffering subjects, as members of the national community. Thus the media staging of the Holocaust not only creates unanimity and the unification of oppositions but can also construct an identification with the past even if personal memories are no longer at hand, and it fosters this identification because it is based on voluntary decision instead of on traumatic intrusion. It creates a collective memory that would not have existed without it. In this respect, it represents the past in the way museums do, as the utmost alterity and without personal memories. The vividness and liveliness of the narrated story blurs the fact that it is not their own personal story that they tell or listen to. They can produce and consume this disconnected past as exotic alterity and even as sentimental entertainment. In the extreme, the Holocaust is converted into “funny” entertainment and presented as a souvenir in the shops of museums: In St. Petersburg, Florida, a visit to the local Holocaust museum rates among the “40 fun things to do” in a flyer for tourists; the museum shop offers, for $39.95, a scale relic of a Polish box car used to transport Jews to the death camps. In Los Angeles, the famous Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance is promoted like a Disney World of horror: “Make the Museum of Tolerance part of an exciting and informative itinerary for your group. Check us out for group discounts, special bonuses.” The show itself is praised as “high tech, hands-on experiential unique interactive exhibits” (New York Times, March 18, 1999). The utmost horror is abused for selling kitsch (Young 1994). Today, the Holocaust has acquired the position of a free-floating myth or a cultural icon of horror and inhumanity—similar to Ghengis Khan’s raids, witch hunting or the slave trade. It is not a particular German problem anymore—every person can refer to it, regardless of his or her origin, history and descent; it is understood by every member of a worldwide audience. Independent of individual memories and recollections, of collective trauma and personal guilt, the Holocaust has ascended to the status of an undisputed master narrative. In a strange turn, the hell has been sanctified.28 This mythological use of the Holocaust contrasts markedly to the traumatic postwar period when the ultimate horror was beyond explanation and description—an abyss of total inconceivability. Today, the mythological use of the Holocaust has turned what once was inconceivable and traumatic into an almost trivial and well known background knowledge in which new stories are embedded and which is evoked in order to explain, to interpret and to evaluate. It is not only staged in the media, but also referred to by various political camps and used to raise money for various campaigns and move-

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ments; it disguises strategic action in moral terms, and it ends by creating conflicts about the right to claim it as one’s own cause.29 It was this instrumentalization of the Holocaust for daily purposes and its trivialization in the media against which the German writer Martin Walser raised his voice in his provocative public confession that he switched off the TV if it was showing a movie about the Holocaust. But he also attempted to reindividualize German guilt by stating that everybody has to face his own bad conscience privately, thus criticizing “the incessant presentation of our disgrace” (“Dauerpräsentation unserer Schande”30). Ignaz Bubis, the head of the German Jewish community, responded strongly to this by calling this statement “mental arson.” In 1999, the controversy between Walser and Bubis divided Germany again into two moral camps—more than half a century after it happened, the Holocaust is at the core of the serious public discourse about Germany’s national identity. Therefore, focusing on the dissolution of collective trauma into global entertainment does not tell the complete story. Certainly, the transformation of the repressed trauma into a national discursive universe is a story of disembodiment and externalization, of decoupling collective memory and identity from personal memory and individual responsibility, of turning internal ambivalence into external presentations of common values staged by professional specialists and appealed to by almost every political actor in the pursuit of a democratic majority. It may even be described as the transformation of a collective nightmare into a myth of commercial entertainment. But the extraordinary resonance of these media events in Germany cannot be explained by the sheer weirdness and awe-inspiring alterity of their content. It rather hints at a collective memory that exists, is reproduced, and can be appealed to—even if personal memories fade away. Beyond the manifold ways to exploit the trauma of the past for present-day interests remains a deep rooted collective sensitivity to racism and xenophobia. In response to xenophobic outbursts in the midnineties, more than two million Germans rallied in the “Lichterkettenbewegung.” This cannot be reduced to individual interests or to the shifting tides of mass entertainment. It is a matter of collective memory and identity. It transferred the spontaneous gesture of Brandt into the ritual of a huge popular movement. Any attempt to construct a new Germany after 1989 has to take this into account. The soil in Berlin on which the new center of German government has been erected is soaked with memories of persecution and Nazi rule. Again and again the construction workers in Berlin discovered new remainders and relics buried by a thin layer of sand and shambles. Attempts to get rid of the past and attempts to remember it coalesced in the debate about the Holocaust memorial— appeals to respect the past and to leave the ruins untouched collided with the urge to turn them into a new construction manifesting the new democratic identity after the Holocaust. In all these debates, the reference to the Holocaust itself is never challenged; instead they are moved and twisted by the quest for the right, the most authentic, the most adequate and the most dignified way to refer to the trauma of the nation.

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The Globalization of the Trauma: A New Mode of Universalistic Identity In Karl Jaspers’ famous distinction between different notions of guilt with respect to the Holocaust ranges the so-called metaphysical guilt. Metaphysical guilt refers neither to the personal guilt of individual perpetrators nor to the collective guilt of a political community, but extends to all human beings. After the Holocaust, humankind has had to give up its original trust in the irresistible progress of civilization and in its own victorious endeavor to overcome barbarism. Faced with the Holocaust, we have to consider the optimistic anthropology of the Enlightenment as a—possibly fatal—illusion. If this could happen in one of the heartlands of modern European culture, then there is no safe haven where a relapse into barbarism can be excluded. Instead, the human condition has to be rewritten to include a deeply rooted and original tendency toward barbaric violence. Viewed from this perspective the Holocaust is turned from a particular German trauma into a global trauma of humankind. This negative anthropology of the Holocaust hints at religious roots in the narrative of the original sin and the hope for salvation and redemption. It was Germany that committed the original sin of modern history, that had to give up the paradise of the Enlightenment’s modernism and that had to respond to the question “where have you been Adam?” but the consequences of this exodus extend to all members of the human species—it could also have happened elsewhere. But this extension of the trauma beyond the national identity of Germany to humankind is not only the subject of secular theological debates among intellectuals. It can be found also on the level of rituals constructing national identity. The public confession of German guilt shows a new pattern of constructing national identity. It is no longer a ritual remembrance of past triumphs or a remembrance of its own victims as represented by the columns of victory and the monuments of fallen soldiers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is no longer recalling the paradise of a mythical past set up as an ideal for the present. And certainly, it is no longer a revival of an endangered tradition or an appeal to national virtues that resist the changing tides of history. To the contrary, memory aims here at an axiological reversal of history, at a radical rupture in the stream of events: We recall the past to prevent it from ever being repeated. In this insistence on a radical discontinuity between past and future, the new pattern of national identity relates to modernism and universalism. Modernity commonly sees the attractiveness of the future as the main motive of historical action and as the Archimedeal point of temporal order. In contrast to classical modernity and the universalistic patterns of identity associated with it, however, the new pattern of identity is based not on the attraction of the future, but on the horror of the past. Progress has lost its powerful appeal as the prime motive of acceleration in historical action, and the moral discourse of Western societies is much more focused on the demarcation of evil than on the definition of the common good. The

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one great Progress of History has been dissolved again into many little progresses, the side effects and risks of which can be deliberated and debated. The small steps of progress in technology and medicine, in social reform and ecology, can hardly be tightened and condensed into a great project of identity that sets history in global motion and inspires everyone to aspire to the emancipation of humankind. Progressive politics is especially impeded by everyday problems; it has lost its charismatic appeal and complains that the voters are bored and even disgusted by politics. The temporal horizon of history has been reversed. Today, the horror of the past and the remembrance of the victims replace the attraction of utopias that once produced the victims. It is only remembrance, and not the utopia, that is able to provide the unquestionable basis of a universalistic collective identity (Habermas 1985, 1987c). The new pattern of constructing collective identity by public confessions of guilt got its first and most impressive contour in the German remembrance of the Holocaust, but later on it was not limited to the German case. In many Western nations, political representatives have solemnly admitted the guilt of the past. The French president has deplored the extensive voluntary French collaboration in the deportation of French Jews during the war; the former Norwegian president Bruntland has noted that—contrary to the national master narrative of resistance— more Norwegians died in the ranks of the Waffen-SS than as victims of the German occupation; the Pope apologized solemnly for the Catholic Church’s failure to intervene in the persecution of the European Jews; in the debate about Jedwabne, Poland—itself a nation of victims—debates its own genocidal crimes committed on Polish Jews under the German occupation (Jan Gross 2001); and the Italian postfascist leader Fini laid flowers in a cemetery of the victims of the German occupation (the “fosse adreatine” executions), even though his own party is considered to be a successor to the fascist collaborators in Italy. The new pattern of public confessions of guilt extends even beyond the case of the Holocaust of the European Jews. The American president Clinton intended to confess the guilt of white Americans for racism and slavery, as well as for the genocide committed on Native Americans; the Dutch government asked for apologies from the victims of colonial exploitation; the Australian government did the same for the genocide of the Australian aborigines; and French public debate—in spite of the pompous celebrations of its centenary—paid increasing attention to the victims of la terreur in the great French Revolution. The French president apologized to the descendants of Alfred Dreyfus; the Pope apologized solemnly for the Inquisition, the Crusades and the persecution of the Jews; the queen of England apologized for the wrongs done to the aborigines of New Zealand. Sometimes these apologies are reluctantly given in response to public pressure and sometimes the act of confessing guilt or asking for apologies is still lacking, but a strong public movement is pressing for it—the massacre of Amritsar in 1919 or the Irish famine in the 1840s are cases in point for the British public debate. The Pope’s plea for apology extended even to the victims of the Crusades and of the persecution of heretics in the Middle Ages.

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The global spread of these rituals of confessing guilt results even in amazing and questionable acts of taking responsibility: When the American president Clinton visited Africa in 1998, he asked the African people to forgive the American guilt with respect to the Rwanda genocide, because the American government disregarded some reports, it did not prevent the genocide by military intervention. In a similar way, the military intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo by European and American troops was justified by the moral obligation to prevent a genocide—we would have been guilty if we had not invaded the territory of a foreign nation. This “politics of apology” (Cunningham 1999), the widespread readiness to see responsibility and to ask for apologies, does not presuppose a direct and personal involvement into the crime—it occurs not in spite of a lack of involvement, but because of it. The political representatives can take responsibility and admit a collective guilt for the very reason that they are not responsible as persons. It is not individual moral or criminal guilt that is at stake, but a ritual confession of a collective guilt, and the presuppositions of this representative confession differ from those of a confession of a personal wrongdoing. Again, Willy Brandt is the paradigm: He who was a political refugee from the Nazi terror and never a citizen of the Third Reich confessed the guilt of his fellow Germans, whom he represented as a politician (Weiss 1998). This representation of a moral community— and in this ritual, the nation is imagined as a moral community—presupposes that the representative is beyond any suspicion of masking his personal interests or the history behind his public office. Otherwise the—always fragile and precarious—claim to represent the nation is eroded by one of the most critical risks of moral communities: the suspicion of hypocrisy. Contrary to common assumptions about authenticity, the representation of the nation succeeds here not because the representative is presented as “one of us,” sharing the same memories with the other members of the community. Instead, individual identity and memory on the one hand, and collective identity and memory on the other, are no longer tightly coupled. As in other universalistic constructions of identity, the particular identity of the individuals, their biographies and their life worlds are set apart from the public constructions of identity. It is because of this very separation that individuality can aspire to autonomy and public discourse can focus on its own dynamics, on the common good in distinction to the sum of individual happiness. The separation of individual crime and collective guilt shows some striking parallels to the post-axial age distinction between the impersonal conception of the sacred and the embodiment of the sacred in the person of the hero. The charismatic center of society has to be separated clearly from its representation in particular individuals—and the triumphant hero who merges the public and the private is bound to tragic defeat. In a similar way, but with reversed perspective, the public memory of victims has to be separated from the private guilt of individual perpetrators. As in the German case, rituals revoking the old national myth are frequently prepared and supported by intellectual debates and scholarly revisions of tradi-

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tional narratives. The new historiography of the French Revolution attacked the sacralizing view of the Annales school and disclosed the totalitarian character of the Jacobin rule and the exterminatory goals of the revolutionary crusades against royalist resistance in the Vendée and other provinces (Furet 1989; Eisenstadt 1998). New French historians scrutinized the history of communism and exposed the mass murders resulting from the attempt to establish a radically new society (Courteois 1997). The widespread support of the Germans by collaborators in France, in the Netherlands and in Belgium is no longer ignored and hidden behind a triumphant history of resistance movements; the refusal to accept and rescue Jewish refugees by Swiss authorities, as well as the almost complete disregard of reports about the extermination camps in the British and American press during the Second World War are no longer denied. The new pattern of collective identity is adopted by ever-more contemporary societies. It is no longer limited to official declarations of political representatives or leaders, but extends also to the level of individual citizens or organizations: church organizations apologize for abuse of children, South Africans apologize to fellow citizens for apartheid, Australians apologize to Aborigines for the assimilative policy of separating aboriginal children from their parents, etc. Although spreading rapidly in Western democracies, these revisions are rarely accepted unanimously by all participants in public discourse. Revisions of national narratives cannot avoid objections, and the wide public acceptance of a new ritual of remembrance may even provoke a counteracting revisionist attack on the new orthodoxy. The carrier groups of the old master narrative cannot deny the event that resulted in the trauma of collective identity, but they mostly try to remove it from the core of national identity and to normalize it as a deplorable side effect of historical turmoil. The piercing challenge to the traditional triumphant constructions of national identity is reflected in accusations of shamelessness, dishonesty and scholarly incorrectness. In the debates about revisionism or antirevisionism, the new or the classical historiography of the nation, the rise of the state or the story of its victims, criticism of the dominant narrative is no longer a privileged domain of left-wing intellectuals. The French debate about resistance and collaboration, or the French origins of fascism, and even some publicly presented denials of the Holocaust, show that the general public as well as intellectuals, liberals as well as conservatives, are involved in it. Slowly, deconstructivist criticism has invaded the camp of even its most ardent opponents. As widespread as the revisionism of national master narratives may be, it is also hard to deny that cultures and political communities differ strongly in their acceptance of rituals of repentance and mourning for past victims. The public confessions of guilt have by no means superseded or replaced the ritual celebrations of heroism everywhere—triumph has not entirely been replaced by trauma. The readiness of the German public to accept the Holocaust legacy contrasts strikingly with the long-lasting refusal of the Austrian public to admit collaboration and to expel the perpetrators. Evidently, the national identity of Austria was mainly

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based on its demarcation from Germany, to which all the guilt of the Holocaust was shifted. Austria did not consider itself to be the legal and moral successor of the Third Reich (Lepsius 1993). Occasionally, the official refusal to admit guilt and entanglement is backed by a public conflict about claims for victimhood, by a national master narrative of heroic and tragic resistance. The public conflicts between the international Jewish community on one side and the Polish government and the Catholic Church on the other are a case in point. Should the victims of Auschwitz be labeled as Jewish or Polish, what matters more: being like Edith Stein Jewish by descent or Catholic by confession? Both the Jews and the Poles can claim the status of victims, but the Jews have suffered from anti-Semitic pogroms in Poland before and after the German occupation, and not vice versa. The debate about Jedwabne has, however, increased the awareness of the Polish entanglement in the Holocaust. Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia have up till now denied involvement in war crimes, but each has accused its adversary of mass murder by displaying the naked bodies of unidentifiable victims to the international press. The evidence of Srebenica cannot be disregarded, but the involvement of the Serbian nation and its government is still an issue for public debate and revision. For different reasons, but also in a striking way, the political representatives of postwar Japan tried for a long time to avoid mentioning the issue of Japanese war crimes in China or Korea during the Second World War. The Nanking massacres were among the most horrible and brutal episodes of genocide in the past century, but were never included in official speeches by political representatives of postwar Japan. Only recently, as a result of long negotiations, has the Japanese government conceded to war crimes committed by individual Japanese soldiers and signed a document that contained an official excuse for the war crimes in Korea. The Turkish government has never admitted even the existence of the Armenian genocide of 1915 and declared itself to be offended by an official French statement about it. This refusal to admit the guilt of the past is even more remarkable as the contemporary Turkish nation-state was founded after the event. The repercussions of today’s Kurdish separatism and the threat of possible Armenian claims on Turkish territory may support this refusal, but only uncompromising strategic thinking would accept this as a satisfying explanation. The Turkish government does not deny the death of Armenian victims, but it refuses to accept this as the collective guilt or responsibility of the Turkish nation. Instead, the death of the Armenian victims is attributed to individual perpetrators and considered as an accidental collateral damage of war. We may ask now whether there are structural conditions fostering or impeding the acceptance of collective guilt. One important condition is certainly the passing of time and the phase of latency. In many cases, the politically responsible individuals are still in power and the murderers are still alive, sometimes hidden, sometimes publicly known. But they are out of reach for criminal prosecution. As long as the perpetrators are at large, or at least as long as their dead

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booodies are not discovered, their followers can continue to admire them as heroes and engage in underground warfare such as terrorism or guerilla warfare. This is one of the important differences between the collapse of the Nazi rule in Germany and the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan or of the Saddam regime in Iraq. After Hitler’s death, there was neither organized resistance nor underground activities against the allied troops in Germany. The Führer could be publicly converted from a triumphant hero into a criminal perpetrator. Osama bin Laden, in contrast, remains a living hero for his followers. The global search for him forced him into secrecy and disguise, but this distance even enhanced his mythical status as charismatic leader. As long as he is still alive, he will inspire terrorism. A different case of latency occurred in both Cambodia and Rwanda, where half of the population participated in slaughtering the other half. Here, the mass murder was certainly not a terrible secret planned by a government and executed by specialized military units, but, indeed, the voluntary and passionate deed of ordinary men, women and youngsters. Nobody can deny the evidence of genocide. Although the perpetrators were defeated and driven across the borders for a time, the trauma is omnipresent and its public remembrance risks disrupting the fragile coexistence of the opposing camps or ethnic groups. Almost every family is concerned and was involved in the killing as perpetrators or victims, and sometimes as both. There is no way yet to separate individual and collective guilt or to discuss the horror without accusing all. But the passing of time and the period of latency cannot account for the resistance to admit to the collective guilt in Turkey and Japan. The Nanking massacres and the death marches of the Armenians occurred more than half a century ago. In order to explain this difference, we have to account for cultural differences. Public confessions of collective guilt by political leaders are fostered in cultures that rely on the Judeo-Christian mythology of sacrifice, repentance and redemption. This cultural pattern dates back to the Augustinian conception of the original sin, to the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham and in particular to the selfsacrifice of Christ, the ultimately innocent hero who, by his death, saved his people from a collective guilt. Western politicians confessing the guilt of the nation are, hence, relying—mostly without being aware of it—on a pattern of Christomimesis that is deeply rooted in Occidental mythology. In contrast to this occidental connection between collective guilt and individual innocence, the Confucian tradition can hardly conceive of a collective guilt or responsibility. In a Confucian perspective, the attribution of guilt to individual and community is reversed: while war crimes committed by individual Japanese perpetrators can be easily admitted to, the nation has to remain without blemishes. This cultural difference accounts for the reluctance or even refusal of the Japanese government to admit to a national responsibility for the Nanking massacres. In a similar way—although for different reasons—the Turkish government rejects any international pressure to apologize for, or even to recognize a national

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responsibility for, the Armenian genocide. While not denying the massacre, the official Turkish response is blaming individual perpetrators. The reasons motivating the perpetrators, however, are closely related to the beginnings of Kemalist Turkey and might stain the official founding myth of modern Turkey: it was not for religious hatred, but for reasons of ethnic cleansing in the pursuit of a modern nation-state that the so-called Young Turks—now revered as the founding fathers of modern Turkey—sent millions of Armenians on death marches. However, as convincing as they might be, cultural patterns like the common culture of sacrifice are not the only conditions supporting the rise of the new pattern of collective identity in some societies. The Judeo-Christian heritage is a very ancient one and cannot—taken alone—explain the new phenomenon. Therefore, we have to look for an additional condition fostering the acceptance of the new rituals of confession in contemporary societies and we may find this in the conditions of international communication and global observation. A triumphant celebration of past victories or a ritual construction of ethnic purity not only excludes outsiders, but also offends them if they are present and have to attend the rituals as observers. This situation could be neglected in premodern societies: the excluded others had neither voice to object to the offense nor eyes to observe it. They were slaves, exotic visitors or simply absent. Up to the nineteenth century, the presence of outsiders could be widely disregarded given the state of media communication. The elaborate rituals of the Sedantag in Germany, celebrating the victory over France, were hardly reported in the French press. International public attention was focused on political decisions and economic tendencies; letters and written reports arrived with some delay, and telegraphic messages had to be condensed to the bare essentials. Symbolic politics was not limited to gestures of military threat or the movements of warships and armies; in order to reach the international level, it had to be directly addressed to the head of state. Popular feelings and triumphant celebrations were matters of internal affairs. The demos was not yet an international actor. Given the omnipresence of today’s international media reporting, however, the presence of third parties and excluded communities can no longer be ignored— they are part of the audience that the performance of a national ritual has to account for. The potential inclusion of outsiders as bystanders is indispensable for the construction of national identity in a tight network of international cooperation. Even if the international audience is not directly offended, as in the case of the famous processions of Northern Irish Protestants through Catholic neighborhoods, the celebration of a past victory has to account for its response. Rituals of collective identity are no longer a matter of just two parties, the insiders and the excluded outsiders; instead, they are constantly monitored and morally evaluated by large international audiences that are in the situation of an impartial third party. Faced with a global audience, the celebration of victorious traditions can survive only if it is shifted from the level of serious and solemn national ritual to

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the level of harmless folklore, which does not offend outsiders, but even attracts the attention of tourists. Insisting on a positive construction of collective identity is accepted by outsiders—and that means by the vast majority of others in a globalized world—only if the alleged identity is constructed as a nonpolitical one, which can be aesteticized by outside observers, or as the identity of a victimized group. The power of the global public opinion depends, however, on its unanimous voice. If the third party is itself divided in supporting one side or the other, then the two camps are turned into allies with opposing perspectives on perpetrators and victims. This was not the case in the defeat of Nazi Germany. In 1945, there was hardly a foreign voice backing the Nazi cause, and those Germans who were still devoted to it preferred to keep their mouths shut. In contrast to the largely unanimous global public opinion in 1945, in 2003, the world was divided into different camps with respect to the postwar situation in Iraq. There was no consensus about victory and defeat, about heroes, victims and perpetrators. Those who continued to admire bin Laden as a charismatic hero could be sure that a large public audience in the Muslim world would back them. The sons of the bourgeoisie in Pakistan wore T-shirts with bin Laden’s portrait in the same way as the 1968 generation used the figure of Che Guevara as an icon of anti-imperialism. The most wanted terrorist of the West was admired as a mythical hero in large parts of the Muslim world and both perspectives were incompatible only on a superficial level. There are victims and perpetrators, triumphant heroes and tragically failing heroes, but the global public opinion is not unanimous on the definition of who is who. The war is not yet over. This seems to question our general thesis about the secular turn from the celebration of heroism toward public confessions of guilt. Certainly, zealots and prophets have always attracted followers and were able to mobilize them even to the level of sacrificing their lives. But today, their frantic attacks are no longer downplayed as accidents that are deplorable but will not shatter the embracing social order. Today, preventing the accident is turned into a core concern of international politics. The madmen are able to set the global agenda. This sudden shift is not just a natural reaction to the trauma of September 11 or the rise of fundamentalism in the Muslim world. Undoubtedly, religion has returned to the fore of politics not only in the Muslim world. The famous clashes of civilizations are phrased as religious divides. But it is not only the increasing violence for religious reasons that seems to question the shift to the public confession of collective guilt. It is also the hegemonial claims of the American government in response to the trauma of September 11 that seem to revive the figure of triumphant heroism. The media reports about the war in Iraq referred abundantly to “our heroes”—operating along the lines of wartime routine was sufficient to be called a hero—the many victims on the Iraqi side were rarely mentioned. And it was this very self-assured triumphalism of the American administration that provoked resentment on the part of other nations. Triumphant heroism is an alien element in the new culture of mourning.

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Anyway, the inflationary rhetoric of heroism in the media reports about the war in Iraq converted the meaning of heroism into its opposite: “Hero” did not refer to the unique, mad and rule-breaking lonely individual defying death, but to the many rule-guided, cautious, and calculating professional soldiers whose risk of dying on the battlefield was lower than in any other war. It referred to the routine of war instead of the exceptional deed. In this respect, the inflationary rhetoric of heroism continued the democratic symbolism of warrior memorials in the nineteenth century—every soldier is a hero. The American reports on the war in Iraq extended even the range of heroism; they heroified not only the actual victims of war but also those who could become victims—even if the chance was rather low. The trauma of September 11 could finally be soothed only by a rigorous reenactment of a collective triumph over the alleged enemy. This conversion of trauma into triumph resonates in the inflationary use of the rhetoric of heroism. As the rhetoric of heroism compensates for the—compared to previous wars— relatively low risks for the soldiers, so does the focus on victims with respect to the relatively low number of civil casualties. But taking revenge and retaliation risks engendering a vicious circle of violence that cannot be stopped by sheer military might. Even the most dominant superpower cannot prevent thoroughly the fanatic heroism of terrorists. Therefore, the vicious circle of violence and revenge has to be interrupted by special institutions instead of waiting for its end to result just from mutual exhaustion. The public confession of collective guilt is such an institution. We cannot expect that other countries like Iraq will repeat the postwar history of Germany. The situation of global public opinion and the cultural traditions differ, and the passing of time is essential in order to overcome muteness and rage. But the German case and the spread of the new rituals of public confessions of guilt have provided an institutional exemplar for the ritual reconciliation. Certainly, even these new rituals of reconciliation by confessing a collective guilt cannot escape entirely from dark unintended side effects. If the memory of genocide is passed over to institutionalized public rituals of remembering and accepted as a national cultural code, it risks also being turned into a decanted and light-hearted routine that discharges the individual members of the community from the burden of the past. Sensitive observers may be concerned if haunting and traumatic memories are transformed into cheap public gestures of routinized respect, if the immensity of horror is replaced by the omnipresent reference to a past that never passes away, but has lost its traumatic impact. Thus, for example, the construction of official memorials of the Holocaust and the firm establishment of a pedagogic of the Holocaust may even produce the tragic opposite of their original moral intention: dissolving the trauma on the individual level by externalizing it in official memorials and museums. But the risk of these paradoxical effects cannot seriously challenge the future of new modes of reconciliation. These new modes focus on victims instead of victors, on the past instead of the future, on the similar fate of the outsiders instead of the homogeneity of the insiders, on the discontinuity between past and

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present instead of its continuity, on common history instead of a sum of individual identities. A reconciliation between the descendants of perpetrators and those of victims results not from the simple fact that the generation of the direct and indirect perpetrators is fading away and that their offspring can point to their individual innocence. Collective identity is at stake, and only collective rituals can mark the opposition between past and future and heal the fundamental breakdown of commonality between perpetrators and victims. Just as traditions that attempt to continue the past require rituals of commemoration, ruptures between past and present, too, require rituals of repentance and cultures of memory. Neither can persist if we recall them only occasionally, incidentally, and individually. Cultivating memories by rituals and memorials creates a collective identity that is protected against doubts and objections. Therefore, rituals of confession of guilt are not a harassing duty of political rhetoric in postutopian democracies. Quite the contrary, they provide the only way of getting the recognition of national identity beyond reclaiming artificial primordialities and questionable utopias.

Notes 1. Shils (1975b), Eisenstadt and Giesen (1995), Giesen (1998a, p. 62) and Giesen (1999a, p. 24). 2. These basic limits of human experience have been philosophically analyzed by Heidegger (1986, p. 235). According to him, it is impossible for subjects to know about or comprehend the transition from life to death. 3. Brubaker (1994), Giesen and Junge (1991), Giesen (1999a) and Greenfeld (1992). 4. About the Völkische Bewegung, see the extensive work of Puschner, Schmitz and Ulbricht (1996) and Giesen (1999a, p. 255). 5. Giesen (1999a), Berding (1996), Mosse (1991) and Stern (1974). 6. The reform movements (Lebensreform) were characterized by an ambivalence of regressive and utopic-revolutionary ideas. The term “Conservative Revolution” shows this ambivalence. See, for example, Stern (1974). About the Lebensreform, see Frecot (1976), Krabbe (1974), and Kerbs and Reulecke (1998). 7. P. E. Becker (1990), Mosse (1964), Stern (1974), Weindling (1989) and Weingart (1996). 8. Mosse (1964) emphasizes the continuity of the völkische movement toward the Nazi ideology. 9. See, for example, Rousseau’s “contrat social ” where he refers to various Roman institutions (1966). 10. The representatives of the new German Democratic Republic tried to establish a founding myth of the people by concentrating on the actions of the communist German resistance against Nazi domination (e.g., the upheaval by the communist inmates in the concentration camp Buchenwald). 11. Himmler’s famous Posen address to the SS leaders shows his attempt to hide the genocide from the German public. The members of the Sondereinheiten had strict orders to keep “the terrible secret,” the foreign governments did not respond to the secret reports about the Holocaust because they did not believe it, and even the people in the Ghetto of Lodz did not know their fate several weeks before their deportation to the death camps (Laqueur 1980; Diner 1987). 12. See H. J. Merkatz in the parliamentary debate of November 8, 1950, “Männer wie Manstein und Kesselring und andere, die in Landsberg und Werl einsitzen, diese Männer und wir, wir sind doch eines. Wir haben doch das mitzutragen, was man stellvertretend für uns auferlegt” (Men like Manstein

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and Kesselring, who are imprisoned in Landsberg and Werl, these men and we are of one kind. We have to carry the burden that has been put on them as representatives of us). (Frei 1996: p. 202). 13. This demarcation was even shared by some Jews, such as Victor Klemperer (1995), who in his diaries considered the Germans to be the chosen people and the Nazis to be un-German. 14. This particular form of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, by retreating to a subpolitical level, has a corollary on the level of historiography: The focus in Alltagsgeschichte (life world history) on the ways ordinary people experienced Nazism and narrated their biographical connections with it reflects this turn to the life world as the core of identity and history. 15. Christa Wolff is another famous example. 16. Even the modes of coping with the Stasi past after the German unification in the nineties repeated this retreatism from ambitious moral discourse to the level of informal personal ties, to kinship and neighborhood, in distinction to the allegedly few real perpetrators of the Stasi system. 17. The “kufia” scarf became a common dress of the generation. 18. The former SDS-members (Socialist German Students Federation) Horst Mahler, Günter Maschke and Reinhold Oberlercher published a “Canonical Declaration on the 1968 Movement” on the Internet. By framing the RAF as “Waffen-SDS,” they relate the 1968 revolt to the NS-revolution and the Waffen-SS. See http://www.deutsches-reich.de/oberlercher/texte-zur-zeit/1990–1999/ kanonische_erklaeung.html. 19. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 8, 1963. 20. In contrast to the foreign newspapers, however, the German newspapers did not immediately notice the importance of the event. Instead, they focused mainly on the legal and political implications of the treaty. Only later on did the picture of the kneeling Brandt advance to a front page issue in Germany. The influential weekly Der Spiegel was one of the first to publish it on its front page. 21. For an analysis of veteran ceremonies at Verdun, see Soeffner (1997). 22. Already a significant phrasing by Lev Kopelev from the year 1977 pointed at this direction: “Er kniete nieder und erhöhte sein Volk” (He knelt down and elevated his people) (DIE ZEIT, Febuary 4, 1977, p. 46). 23. The central position of the Holocaust memory for German postwar identity is also reflected in the fact that denying the Holocaust in public is treated by law as an offense that is severely punished, whereas the usual national symbols like the flag are not protected by German law. 24. Bauman (1989), Feingold (1983), Friedländer (1997) and Fest (1977). 25. This holds true in spite of Steven Katz’s (1994) impressive scholarly attempt to prove the uniqueness of the Shoah. 26. Goldhagen (1996) only casually refers to the accurate research of Christopher Browning (1993) on the Polizeibattaillon 101. Many German intellectuals participated in the debate about Goldhagen. See, e.g., Heil (1998) and Schoeps (1997). 27. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 21, 1999. 28. This sanctification has provoked critical responses (Mayer 1994; Ophir 1987). 29. This holds true even for political conflicts within Israel where the Askenasin were accused by oriental Jews for discriminating them in the way of a Holocaust (Zuckermann 1999). See also the debate about Finkelstein (2000), who criticized strongly the instrumentalization of the Holocaust for economic interests but presented not much more than a generalized and largely unwarranted suspicion. 30. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 12, 1998.

Chapter 5

Postscript Modernity and Ambivalence The social construction of boundaries is an ambivalent endeavour. Separating an inside from an outside, marking a threshold, drawing a line, maintaining a distinction, usually goes along with positioning an object or the observer on one side of the boundary. Both positions are, in principle, possible, but we have to opt for one and to keep the other alternative latent, excluded, even without a name. The boundary is not a naturally given thing, but a product of our mind. In order to map and to represent the world, the mind has to reduce its complexity and to regard a range of phenomena as alike in spite of their manifold differences and in distinction to others that are treated as different. In ordering our perceptions, we have to abstract from the manifold differences; in describing the things of the world, we have to subsume them under categories—we have to treat single and unique phenomena as cases of a certain type. But the ambivalence of boundaries results not only from the descriptive distinctions that could have been drawn in a different way. It is brought out by the human mind’s capability to question and to negate a representation of the world— at least in our reflexive mode, we know that a representation of the world is not, by its sheer existence, already true, and we can argue about its truth. Usually these alternative ways of mapping the world are kept latent, and everyday communication reinforces this latency. But even if the boundary between normality and deviance, reason and insanity, truth and falsity is taken for granted, we know that it is not insurmountable and, above all, we know that there is another side. It is simply impossible to think of a boundary without an outside. In order to respect the boundary, we have to—at least tacitly—imagine the outside and, occasionally, our imagination invites us to change sides, to pass the threshold, to cross the line. Usually we resist and repress our secret longing to switch sides and to go beyond the horizon. Sometimes, however, the temptation becomes too strong. This is the moment when ambivalence is turned into movement (Smelser 1998b). 155

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(1) The cultural program of modernity centers this transformation of ambivalence into movement. The first movement of modernity responded to the ambivalence of social and local boundaries marked by the princely state that, extending its control over its subjects, wanted them to be sedentary and accountable, respecting the boundaries of tradition, locality and class. Ambivalence is fostered and increased if social relations are diffuse and stable and if individuals consider their position to be inescapable and dependent (Smelser 1998b). Modernity enters the stage if these individuals can imagine themselves in a different position, beyond the boundaries, and if they attempt to escape from personal dependence. Resulting from this thrust to cross the boundaries, modernity accelerates the pace of change, fluidizes social relations and dissolves the strong ties between words and things, individuals and localities, communities and institutions. The old mappings of the world are no longer taken for granted, but questioned, devaluated and replaced by new ones; the access to institutions is no longer the privilege of particular persons or communities, but opened up for the general public; ascribed and stable social relations are turned into contracts with exit solutions, the range of options for individual choices is widened, chances for participation in common affairs are increased, the inescapable authority of the princely ruler is submitted to the rule of the impersonal law. Traditional society, which had been tightly structured by the cleavages between classes and the distances between regions, is put into motion by migration and mobility, by the revolutionary abolition of political privileges, by the breakdown of class barriers, by the acceleration of communication and the stream of innovations. The first movement of modernity aimed at a society of autonomous individuals who could move freely across local and social boundaries and change institutions on a consensual basis. This society itself had open and inclusive boundaries; moved by a missionary zeal, it tried to turn outsiders into insiders, disalikes into alikes, to abstract from manifold differences and to merge them into the equality of citizens. The early modern adventurers who sailed into the unknown to discover, conquer and exploit the treasures of a new world were succeeded by monks and scholars who assimilated the strange creatures of the New World by education, baptism and classification. But this transformation of ambivalence into movement comes at a price; the chances to migrate to a more promising place or to leave an inconvenient social relationship, the mobility of modern citizens, and the universal access to institutions erode the taken-for-granted local lifeworlds and dissolve the personal ties on which institutions have previously been based. The encounter with strangers and the dissolution of routines becomes a common situation; individuals have to decide and choose beyond the boundaries of local knowledge and personal trust; the floor is open for almost every citizen, the perspective widens and the horizon expands—and the shadow of the war of all against all rises. In the society of individuals who, beyond the ties of personal authority, are on their own, the

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quest is for a new limitation of the horizon, a new boundary that clearly transcends the local and personal ties but can also substitute the integrative function of locality and hierocratic power. The Enlightenment, the first project of modernity, produced two different branches of this translocal and impersonal culture. One branch referred to universal and impersonal moral principles and unalienable human rights and centered the idea of the ethically good as a common integrative bond for all members of the society. The other, in contrast, focused the idea of the functionally adequate and brought forward universal principles of rational individual action that allowed people to compare options and to justify individual choices. The first branch of the Enlightenment was carried by the public discourse about the good society and its moral foundations, and it was embodied in the public intellectual. The second one was carried by the process of rationalization and functional differentiation. Its charismatic embodiment is the scientist representing the vanguard of progress. Both branches of the Enlightenment referred to impersonal principles as the new encompassing fundament—but they differed sharply in their construction of this fundament. The project of a moral integration and reasonable identity decoupled the ethically good from the personal will of God and related it to the universal presuppositions of human subjectivity. These universal presuppositions defined the common identity of all humans and engendered equal basic rights for all of them. Because they are universal and equal for all humans, these basic rights do not result from contingent contracts between the citizens but are categorically presupposed by civil society and its laws. In a similar way, the common good, the volonté générale (Rousseau) or the state (Hegel) cannot simply be reduced to the sum of the individual interests. Instead, they set a common frame of reference for the reasonable pursuit of individual interests. Public discourse and education provide the interface between the individual subjects and this common frame of reference. Only if, and insofar as, individual action is in accordance with the categorically presupposed common moral, can it be considered as a realization of reasonable identity. The universalism of modern rationality, on the other hand, referred to the world in a different way—it separated the individual subject radically from the world of objects that were comparable, measurable and usable. Here, rationality of action is disconnected from, and even opposed to, the identity of the individual—an action can claim to be rational only if it is in accordance with the given world of objects. From this perspective, the world is conceived as nature, as the sum of comparable and measurable objects. Science as well as the arts aimed at the most accurate descriptive representation of nature, and sociology was, from its very beginning, a part of this branch of modernity: social reality is considered as a domain of scientific investigation, the individual actors themselves are turned into measurable and comparable objects, and the methodology of scientific research is applied to the social sciences as well as to other sciences. Approaching the structure of nature by symbolic representations was the core episteme of modernity; it became the dominant paradigm of progress and

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provided the first reference for rationalization. All institutional arenas of rationalization—bureaucracy as well as markets, science as well as technology, democratic government as well as professional services—presuppose that the original manifolds can be ignored, that one dominant functional reference has been established and cannot be questioned anymore, that comparisons between objects with respect to this functional reference can be performed and—most importantly— that the world is firmly at hand as a sum of discernable and describable objects. Faced with this clearly established order of nature, the individuals could not only move beyond the confines of locality and class and venture out to new horizons, but they could also reach out to construct a rational society. In contrast to the good society based on moral principles, the rational society should not exist above and even in distinction to its individual members—it was nothing but a contingent contract of its citizens and was to provide for a maximum of their liberties. Both branches of the Enlightenment, the project of a universal categorical moral as well as the project of rationalization, responded to the ambivalences of boundaries set by locality and class, personal authority and traditional dogma. In a heroic turn, the first movement of modernity challenged, weakened and dissolved boundaries, but it pointed also to new and clearly demarcated horizons: the perfectibility of the world based on the discovery of the nature on the one hand, and the perfectibility of the human individual based on a common moral identity on the other. Later on, the project of rationalization and moralization, firmly established in different institutional domains, lost its missionary zeal and heroic appeal. Today, bureaucracy and democracy, science and public moral discourse, markets and civil associations, are probably more powerful than ever, but they have been turned into routinized institutions that fail to inspire the vanguard of cultural discourse.

(2) But because of its very inescapability and its presuppositional nature, this world of objectivity, unified reason and morality provoked a new kind of ambivalence, a new temptation to trespass the boundaries and reach out beyond the horizon. This horizon was, however, no longer limited by local and territorial ties or by the bonds of tradition and class. Instead of institutional barriers, it was the new cultural boundaries set by universal principles that tempted trespassing and crossing. Starting with Romanticism, a second cultural movement of modernity turned now against the cultural foundations of the first one—it debunked the dogmatic fundaments of rationality and enlightenment in order to set free an unrestrained and incomparable sovereign subjectivity. The objectivity of the natural order and the universality of reason and morality were regarded as narrow-minded and superficial, as boring and hypocritical, as failing to grasp the essence of the human subjectivity. The sovereign and autonomous individual should escape the bounds of reason and morality and define his or her incomparable and unique identity.

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The heroic narrative of emancipation by reason and morality was converted into the tragic story of the new chains, the new iron cage, and the new enslavement by universalistic principles. In its thrust to turn the objects of science, the victims of rationality, into sovereign subjects again, the second movement of modernity challenged even the most basic cultural presuppositions—in principle, everything can be looked at from the opposite point of view. There is no uniform and eternal nature anymore that can be universally used as a firm basis for the scientific assessment of truth, for the representation of the world in art and literature or for the construction of a good society. The idea of scientific truth is presented as a tragic illusion or as a consolation for the narrow-minded specialist (Feyerabend), representative art is devaluated as academic and boring, morality is accused of repression (Freud) or considered to be just a rescue for the fainthearted (Nietzsche), authenticity is presented as a simulation (Baudrillard), etc. Instead, the new intellectual criticism ventures out to attack cherished truisms and common certainties, the new modern art reveals the dark abyss of a different and invisible world inside the human subjects, dissonance substitutes for harmony as an aesthetic ideal, the joyful endeavor of self-realization and hedonism replaces the morality of decency, the criminal and the perverse is depicted as the true moralist, the thrust of transgression wipes out the standards of good taste, etc. This deconstructivist modernism is no longer embedded in political society and carried by its citizens who are asking for institutional changes. Instead it remains a radical cultural discourse embodied in the figure of the ingenious artist who, despising conventions, creates his sovereign subjectivity, not in accordance with, but in contrast to, civil society. Of course, like the Enlightenment, the second movement of modernity, too, could not escape the trivialization of its original charismatic appeal. A diversity of subcultural movements tried to follow the track of creative individualization—in various degrees of trivialization, from the bohemians of the nineteenth century to today’s circles of self-realization. The basic pattern of these movements is not institutional reform but abstention from institutional activities, not missionary activism but individualization by cultural distinction. Sociology, too, takes part in this second movement of modernity—it debunks a hidden barbarism behind the surface of modern society, it deconstructs the taken for granted and criticizes the pretensions of the rational order, it reveals the backstage of social reality, it discovers the besilenced victims, and it presents the exotic and deviant as understandable and reasonable in its own right. In the end, the second movement of modernity turned its free-floating deconstructivist zeal even against its last anchor—the concept of subjectivity itself is dissolved as an illusion, as a side effect of communication, of grammar or of text. Again, ambivalence is turned into a movement of transgressing boundaries. But the nature of this movement differed from the one that was at the core of the first modernity. Instead of directing the ship of society in a linear and progressive movement guided by the lighthouses of objectivity, rationality and morality, the second project of modernity turned innovations and reinventions into the planks

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of a ship that is continuously changing its direction and exchanging its parts. The early modern venture for the New World is replaced by Gericault’s “helmless raft of the Medusa,” where there are no heroes anymore, but only victims. This antifundamentalism of the second modernity is, of course, not without costs. The price of the bold venture out to crush the bonds of universal moral and functional rationality is anxiety and anomy. The anchorless movement of disenchantment provokes a new longing for roots and certainties that cannot be questioned, debated and deconstructed. Those who cannot or will not follow the fast pace of deconstructivist twists anymore retreat to fundaments that many considered as being dissolved long ago, to lost paradises and primordial boundaries that should counteract the seemingly pathological effects of industrialization and urbanization and were to give rise to an original, pure and unpolluted community. In response to a world that has been turned into a stormy ocean, the imagination reaches out again to find a calm land of truth and trust, authenticity and virtue. Today, this response has been unfolded into a multifaceted movement. It includes not only a reconstruction of primordial communities, of ethnicity and locality, but also the ecological conservation of nature and the attempt to restore a culturally defined ideal of natural harmony and equilibrium. It embraces, not only a revival of civil attention and a rigorous and robust response to deviance and crime, but also a new emphasis on communal obligations and civil responsibilities. It engenders not only the strong sensitivity for public virtue and morality, but also the growing attraction of fundamentalist religious movements—in Christianity as well as in Islam, in Hinduism as well as in Judaism. All these among themselves very different strands of the response to modernity are inspired by a heightened sense of crisis for social communities, institutional boundaries and natural foundations that are either endangered by technological progress and rationalization or melting away by the fire of a radical cultural discourse.

(3) The construction of primordial boundaries and the insistence on authenticity and virtue make sense on the level of direct interaction among private individuals—we have to limit our horizon and we can appeal to moral standards if communication runs into a crisis. It may even be a reasonable endeavor on the level of institutional reform and civil activities, when, and if, we want to sustain local differences, to revive ethnic traditions and to conserve natural diversity. However, it risks being blamed for naïveté or dogmatism if it is transferred to the level of ambitious cultural discourse. Institutional activities have to respect boundaries that ambitious cultural discourse can deconstruct, and cultural discourse, in turn, can pursue radical ideas that institutions have to disregard. Decoupling cultural discourse from institutional activism has been a major achievement of modernism and the attempt to tighten again the connection between

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cultural discourse and institutional boundaries, between radical ideas and political decisions, can rightly be accused of fundamentalism or dogmatism. Both realms are autonomous and differ as profoundly in their internal logic as, e.g., personal networks and modern institutions like markets and bureaucracies do. On the level of critical reflection, we cannot simply turn to the simple and straightforward faith in morality and reason, in natural ties and trust, in objectivity and progress. We cannot ignore and forget that primordial ties are cultural imaginations, that authenticity and trust are social constructions, that the charisma of heroes and the suffering of victims are projections of our own societal conditions, that triumphs are bound to fade away and that even traumata can be soothed. But we also know that practical acting has to disregard subtle doubts and refinements of discourse, that it has to stop the never-ending twists of questions and doubts. And we know that we cannot dispense entirely with categorical presuppositions if we engage in communication of any kind. We have to regard them as indispensable illusions that—like a good drama on stage—should, for the moment, be taken for reality, although the audience basically knows that its only reality is the performance of a play. Thus, beyond the modernist deconstruction and the primordialist reconstruction of boundaries, we have to stand a new kind of ambivalence. This ambivalence is not inspired by the boundaries of locality and privilege, or by those set by morality and rationality. Instead, it results from the boundary that separates fundamental modes of referring to the world: subjectivity and objectivity, contingent decisions and categorical presuppositions, illusion and disillusion, cultural deconstruction and institutional construction, local embodiments and global principles. This new ambivalence is based on the recognition that neither side of the opposition is the true and real one, that any attempt to dissolve the contradiction in a synthesis is in vain or fatal, that, instead, there is a permanent move back and forth across the boundary. Of course, others have been aware of this ambivalence before. But they could cope with it by differentiation—most prominently between the autonomy of individuals to set their values and the natural objectivity of means, between the original decisionism and, after the decision has been set, the inescapable obligation of rationality to execute ruthlessly and strictly its consequences. Max Weber could still praise this obligation as the core of modern virtue. Today, after the rational perfection of the death camps, after Auschwitz, Gulag and Kampuchea (Cambodia), we are reluctant to regard the strict pursuit of rational perfection of means in contrast to the arbitrariness of aims as the royal path to overcome this ambivalence. In order to avoid the slip of perfect rationality into barbarism and the deconstructivist retreat from reality, as well as fundamentalist regression to fake certainties, we have to extend our perspective to the ultimate horizon of our existence—we have to start with the one ultimate certainty of our existence: ambivalence itself. Thus a third conception of cultural modernity could embrace the reference to natural objectivity that was at the core of rationalization, and the

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reference to sovereign subjectivity that was at the core of deconstructivism, and turn the irredeemable ambivalence between both into its one basic certainty. In reflecting on ambivalence, in being aware of it and in turning it into the issue of public debates, modernity could come to terms with its Janus-faced nature, give up its pursuit of final solutions and perfection, temper its violent thrust for purification and the conquest of alterity. In replacing rationality with ambivalence as its idée directrice, this third modernity will give up the dangerous zeal of previous movements; instead of turning ambivalence into change, it will cope with it by reflecting on its inevitability. This broken, but mature, modernity could face the great oppositions of modernity without the pressure to overcome them by action, movement and violence. In contrast to Hegelian dialectics, this mature modernity would demand no merging of oppositions into a new rigorous synthesis of history, no new triumphant march, and no new certainties—the tension would remain and there would be no hope of finding a final relief. And, in contrast to a so-called “reflexive modernization” (Beck) that centers the risks of modernity in order to prevent them (and thus tacitly continues the old race for perfection), mature modernity would not aim at perfecting the world anymore. But mature modernity would also not result in a cynical despising of moral principles—morality will matter, but it will have lost its unconditional zeal and, like rationality, will be bounded by the logic of the situation. Irony and skepticism are the core attitudes of this mature modernity—we know about the fragile and questionable presuppositions of our action, but we continue to act; we are aware of the ambivalence of boundaries, but we respect them in our local actions, for the moment and without any zeal, not always and not at all costs. We, as participants in a global cultural discourse, cannot just retreat to the local and personal basis of trust and the taken for granted, but we, as practical actors, can think in terms of locality and situation and account for the incomparable and unique. We, as practical actors, cannot return to the great utopias and the merciless thrust for a perfect society, but we can reflect on the principles that might justify and question our actions. We, as practical actors, cannot abstain from decisions and just mock reality, but we can try to be aware that our reality is not the only possible one. We, as intellectual subjects, cannot continue to impose our principles straightly and strictly on institutions and communities, but we can act as interpreters, bridging boundaries and translating principles. We, as intellectual subjects, cannot close the gap between moral and practical exigencies, but we can replace the heroic activism of the first movement of modernity and the tragic nihilism of the second one with cautiousness and irony. This demise of heroism also questions the embodiment of cultural charisma in the intellectual, the scientist and the artist. Postheroic ambivalence is located in the sober ethics of the professional who knows about the fragile foundations of his knowledge, but acts as if he were in superior command of the situation—in order to inspire confidence in his laic clientele. By not talking about his doubts and the questionable basis of his advice, the professional shields his clien-

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tele from realizing the ambivalence. Only because the laic people do not know the risks can they trust in the advice and the decisions of the professional expert. Professional experts are professionals not because they possess a secret technical knowledge but because they take from laic people the burden of facing ambivalence. It is not by sheer coincidence that, today, scientists as well as intellectuals are increasingly adopting this sober ethics of professionals. The ironic handling of ambivalence could embrace the new polytheism that Weber mentioned in his famous “Zwischenbetrachtung” and cope with the paradoxical conversions of the great modern oppositions: progress that can become a boring tradition and traditions that can have the lure of surprising inventions; old social boundaries that are destroyed to give rise to a society of individuals and individualism that, in turn, engenders a new quest for communal bonds; enlightenment that defeats superstition and devaluates traditions, but its rapid turnover of information fosters a longing for esoteric roots and unquestionable certainties, etc. Viewed as a basic ambivalence, antifundamentalism and fundamentalism, individualism and collective identity, tradition and progress, rationalism and Romanticism, simulation and authenticity are inseparable kin, two faces of the same cultural epoch, integral parts of the same mature modernity that, beyond utopias and missionary activism, could rest in itself and become a tradition.

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Index Adenauer, Konrad, 123, 128 aesthetic programs, 37, 38 agency, 5, 13nn11–15, 14nn16–17 Alexander, Jeffrey, 12n3 Alltagsgeschichte, 154n14 altruistic heroes, 16 Amato, Joseph, 12n3 ambivalence, 22–23, 43n15, 64, 155; and boundaries, 158, 159–60, 161–62; and modernity, 156, 161–62; and professionals, 162–63; relationship to the sacred, 23; toward victims, 25 ancien régime, 116, 117 animal rights, 49, 50–51 “Anthropologie,” 14n18 antifascism, 126 antirevisionism, 147 anti-Semitism, 114, 124, 126, 131, 138 apologies, 72n3, 146 arcanum, 81–82, 104 Arendt, Hannah, 120 Armenian genocide, 148, 149–50 art, 32, 37, 54, 113–14 asceticism, 87–88 audiences, 99; muteness of, 103–4; of national rituals, 150; of newspapers, 102 authenticity, of victims testimony, 67, 69 Baader-Meinhof group, 131 Bahro, Rudolph, 115 barbarism, 161 Befehlsnotstand, 126 Bendix, Reinhard, 107n7

Bildungsbürgertum, 115, 117 bin Laden, Osama, 149, 151 birth, 111, 153n2; and heroism, 21–22, 43n14; relationship to triumph and trauma, 8–9; rituals that reenact, 22 Blickle, Peter, 108n26 Bossi, Umberto, 107n6 boundaries, and ambivalence, 158, 159–60, 161–62; and communal bonds, 60; construction of, 3–4, 13nn6–9; fragility of, 49; between inside and outside, 18, 22; movement across, 156–57; and ritual practices, 11; social construction of, 155 Brandt, Willy, 97, 132–35, 143, 146 breaching experiments, 13n9 Breuer, Josef, 109 Browning, Christopher, 154n26 Bubis, Ignaz, 143 bureaucracies, and civil society, 92–93 Butler, Judith, 14n17 calendar of saints, 27 Cambodia, 149 Campbell, Joseph, 15, 16, 42n4 “Canossa ritual,” 134 Carlyle, Thomas, 42n2 Cassirer, Ernst, 13n12 Catholic Church, 44n35 the center, dissolving of, 101–5; global extension of, 104; meaning of, 75; perspectives on, 77–80, 107nn3–4; scandal at, 91–98, 108n22; scapegoating of, 98–101, 108nn25–29

187

188

Index

charisma, fragility of, 84; heroes embodiment of, 16, 17, 43n7; of kings, 81–82; location of, 81; perspectives on, 75–76, 107n1; and political systems, 82, 83–85, 107nn7–8; routinization of, 19, 41; and scandal, 97; Weber’s views of, 17, 42n3, 42n4, 43n5, 76 charismatic authority, 107n7 charismatic heroes, 2, 16–17, 18, 42n4 charismatic leadership, 107nn7–8 charity, 60–61 chastity, 87–88 China, 88–89, 90, 93, 95 Chinese Empire, 88–89, 90, 108n17 Chinese literati, 93, 95 Christ, 23–24, 59–60, 134 Christomimesis, 24, 43n22, 80–81, 134 cities. See urban areas civil society, Chinese, 93; discourse of, 64– 66, 73n24; and moral discourse, 91–98, 108n22; support of for rebellions against kings, 91; and voluntariness of participation in, 94 claims, 57–58, 66–71, 73nn23–26 classicism, 37 classics, 34–36, 37, 44nn41–42 clerics, as justice administrators, 86, 107n10 Clinton, Bill, 91, 104, 145, 146 clothing and dress, of leaders, 84, 107n6; of rulers, 38, 39 cognition, 4, 13n9 Coleman, James, 43n13 collective guilt, acceptance of, 148–49; and Confucian tradition, 149; and generational conflict, 129–32, 154nn17–18; and genocide, 149; Germany, 132, 134; and humiliation, 134; perspectives on, 12n2; and politics of apology, 146; public confession of, 152; stigma of, 136 collective identity, 1, 18, 31, 45, 50; adopted by contemporary societies, 147; bond of, 48–49; and bureaucratic state, 92; character of, 13n14, 111; and conflicts of government and leadership, 85; construction of, 145; and heroes, 17, 21, 43n13; and memories, 109, 152–53; and monuments, 32–34; and mythical figures, 20; and professional advocates,

71; and relics, 28–31, 44n35; and remembering, 56–57, See also identity collective memory, 1, 10, 14n24; and the Holocaust, 142; monuments as depositories of, 34; and origins of nations, 116 collective trauma, 1, 10, 12n2, 143 colonialism, 73n26 commercialization, 102–3 common people, exclusion from discourse, 94–95 communication, 6; charismatic nature of, 93–94; and civil society, 92–93; and gossip, 96; in public spaces, 98–99; between the rulers and the people, 83; and urban settings, 99 community, construction of, 52; corporate, 94; and heroes, 18–19; position of victims in, 48–50; relationship with deity, 23; and victimhood, 51–53 compassion, 60–61 confessions, public apologies of guilt, 145– 46, 147, 162; rituals of, 43n21, 132–35, 154n20, 154nn22–23 conflicts, generational, 129–32, 154n17–18 Confucian traditions, and collective guilt, 149 Connerton, Paul, 14n24, 44n32 “Conservative Revolution,” 153n6 construction workers, 100, 108n27 corpus christi mysticum, 81 craftsmen, 100, 108n27 crime and criminals, German perpetrators, 124–27, 153–54nn12–13 Crook, Malcolm, 108n25 cultural discourse, and institutional reform, 160–61 cultural heroes, 33, 35–36 culture, and admission of guilt, 149; and confessions of collective guilt, 152; cultural memory, 79; and sacrifice, 150 dead, subjectivity of, 55–56 Dean, James, 44n27 death, 111, 153n2; dying young, 25, 44n27; and historical figures, 20; relationship to triumph and trauma, 8–9; risk of, 23; of victims, 45–46 decapitation of the king, 79, 107nn3–4

Index decharismatization, 85 deconstructivism, 5 deconstructivist criticism, 147 deconstructivist modernism, 159–60 democracy, Germany, 117–19 demos, 27–28, 117–18 Derrida, Jacques, 13n6 Der Spiegel, 154n20 “Die Schuldfrage” (lecture), 12n2 differences, 3–4, 13n6 discourse, and the construction of victimhood, 64–66, 73n24; exclusive character of, 94–95; and politics, 98; structural predecessors of, 93, See also moral discourse divine violence, 18, 19 Doesseker, Bruno, 67 Durkheim, Emile, 13n6, 111 ecological fundamentalism, 114–15 economics, and traders of relics, 31 Economy and Society, 76 education, 157; and the classics, 36; and detachment from politics, 129; and newspaper and journal reading, 102; and sacred texts, 87 emigration, 129 Enlightenment, 93–94, 95, 102, 108n22, 157–58 ethnic identity, 112 Eucharist, 86 eugenics movements, 114 eunuchs, 88, 90 evil, 20–21, 54, 59; accountability for, 64; Holocaust as an icon of, 141–43, 154nn28–29; and scapegoating, 43n18; and time lag between occurrence and recognition of, 55; and victimization, 46– 47 exceptionalism, 18, 19, 21, 110, 137 executions, 108n20 faces of heroes, 26, 31–34, 44n39 facism, 126–27 family and family ties, 87, 88–90, 99, 108n17 fascism, 130, 131 First World War, 121

189

Fischer, Joseph, 127 Foucault, M., 13n8 founding heroes, 20, 24 Frankfurt School, 72–73n8 Frazer, James, 43n18 Frederic II, Emperor of Italy, 85–86 Frederick II, King of Sicily, 89–90 French Revolution, 108n29, 116–17 Freud, Sigmund, 43n15, 109 Fussell, Paul, 43n26 Gandhi, Mahatma, 19, 20 Garfinkel, Harold, 13n9 generational conflict, and collective guilt, 129–32, 154nn17–18 genocide, apologies for, 145, 146; Armenian, 148, 149–50; as collective victimization, 45–46; during German colonial rule, 73n23; practices of, 54; and public rituals, 152, See also collective guilt; Holocaust German Democratic Republic, 126, 153n10 German Peasants’ War of 1525, 108n26 German-Polish treaty, 133, 154n20 German unification, 154n16 Germany, coalition of silence about Holocaust, 120–23, 153n11; creation of nation-state, 112, 117–18; failed revolutions in, 115–19, 153n10; as Naturnation, 112–15, 153n6, 153n8; and rituals of confession, 132–35, 154n20, 154nn22–23; virtues of, 128–29, 143nn14–16; World War II, 25–26, 43n23, 120, See also Holocaust Girard, René, 12n3, 43n19, 59, 107n5 globalization of Holocaust, 144–53 gods and goddesses, 15, 16–17 Goethevereinen, 129 Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, 138, 154n26 Goliards, 100 gossip, 96–97, 98–99 government, and national identity, 85 Grass, Günther, 139 groups, heroification, 27–28 guilt, 1, 12n2, 133, 144; admission of, 145– 46; German people, 125–27; global nature of public confession, 3; Japan’s reluctance to acknowledge, 72n2; and

190

Index

perpetrators, 62, 65; refusal to admit, 148; and rituals of confession, 132–35, 147, 154n20, 154nn22–23, See also collective guilt Habermas, Jürgen, 13n5, 131, 138 Halbwachs, Maurice, 14n24 Hart-Nibbrig, Christiaan L., 14n18 Hegel, Georg, 43n16, 92 Heidegger, Martin, 14n18, 153n2 heraldic signs, 26, 39 hermeneutic relativism, 13n12 heroes, 2, 3, 6; crisis in representation of, 33; as founders of religion, 15, 16; social construction of, 15–17, 18–19, 42nn1–4, 43n5, 43nn7–8; as triumphant subjectivity, 17–22, 43nn9–14; warriors as, 15, 42n3, See also specific type of hero, i.e., intellectual heroes heroism, 19, 22–25, 43nn15–26, 152 historians, and the Holocaust, 136–39, 154n25–26 historical associations, 140 historical figures, 20, 21 historical phenomenology, 2 historicism, 36–40, 44n43 Historikerstreit, 137 history, 95–96 Hitler, Adolf, 20, 21, 119; converted into a devil, 124; Mein Kampf, 44n42; suicide of, 31 Hitlerjungen, 128, 130 Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 138 Holl, Karl, 43n5 Holocaust, 67; accepting guilt for, 132–35, 154n20, 154nn22–23; and coalition of silence about, 120–23, 153n11; and the demonization of Nazism, 123–24; denial of, 154n23; expelling the perpetrators, 124–27, 153–54nn12–13; generational conflict and collective guilt, 129–32, 154nn17–18; and German virtues, 128– 29, 143nn14–16; globalization of, 144–53; as an icon of evil, 141–43, 154nn28–29; museums and memorial sites, 140–41; and professional historians, 136–39, 154n25– 26; sanctification of, 142, 154n28 honor, 14n17

human constitution, 6 Human Genome Project, 9 humanism, 56 human subjectivity, 157 humiliation, 101, 134 hypocrisy, 96, 146 hysteria, 14n19, 99 ideal typological field, 7 identity, 2; Germany, 129; and heraldic signs, 26; preceded by collective identity, 8, 14n18; primordial, 110; relationship to memory, 9; and self, 4–5, See also collective identity Illich, Ivan, 73n25 Im Krebsgang, 139 immortal hero, 33 immortality, 18, 25 individualization, 22, 41, 159 individual subjectivity, 78 industrialism, 114 Industrial Revolution, 100, 108n27 innocence, victims, 65 institutional arenas, barriers in, 158; madness in, 43n9; monopolies, 87; and ritual practices, 10–12, 14n27; and victimhood, 47–48, 64 institutional reform, 159–61 instrumentalization, of the Holocaust, 143, 154n29 intellectual criticism, 159 intellectual heroes, 16 intentionalists, 137 international corporations, 103 international politics, collective trauma as force of, 10 intersubjectivity, 14n17 Iraq, postwar situation, 151–52 James, William, 13n14 Jaspers, Karl, 12n2, 144 Jews, 154n13; Jewish intellectuals in Germany, 131; Jewish names, 130, See also Holocaust Jiang Zemin, 72n2 Joas, Hans, 14n17 John of Salisbury, 108n18 journalism, 102

Index Judeo-Christian heritage, 59, 149, 150 Judeocide, 126, 137, 138 jurisdiction, and civil society, 64; ritual of, 62–63 justice, administration of, 86, 87, 107n10; and the construction of perpetrators, 61– 64; enforcement of, 62; impartial, 48 Kant, Immanuel, 14n18, 94 Kantorowicz, Ernst H., 44n38, 80 Karr, Steven, 154n25 kings, decapitation of, 79, 107nn3–4; and family, 87; and the law, 85–91, 107n10– 11, 107–8nn13–15, 108nn17–18; linking the two bodies of, 80–85, 107n5– 8; as representatives of the sacred, 29, 44n38 kinship, 56, 59; close proximity of, 49–50; Germany, 129; and unrest, 99 Klemperer, Victor, 154n13 Knorr-Cetina, Karin, 13n11 Kohl, Helmut, 135 Kopelev, Lev, 154n22 “kufia” scarf, 154n17 Kulturnation, 120 laic associations, 140–41 Langhans, Rainer, 131 Latour, Bruno, 13n11, 13n15 law, and administration of justice, 86, 87, 107n10; China, 88–89, 90; and denial of Holocaust, 154n23; and heroes, 18; and justice, 62–63; and kings, 85–91, 107n10–11, 107–8nn13–15, 108nn17– 18; sacred character of, 90, 92; and victimhood, 48, 72n3 lay community, 86 LeGoff, Jacques, 14n24 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 13n6 Lewinsky, Monica, 91 liberation, 116, 118 Lipp, Wolfgang, 12n3 living heroes, 2, 3, 19, 76 lost paradise, Germany, 112–15, 153n6, 153n8 Louis XIV, King of France, 80, 90–91 Louis XVI, King of France, 79, 101, 107n3, 108n20 Luckermann, Thomas, 13n7

191

Luhmann, Niklas, 13n6, 13n9 Lukàcs, Georg, 72–73n8 Lyotard, J. F., 72n1 madness of heroes, 18 Mahler, Horst, 131, 154n18 mandarins, 88–89, 90 Mann, Thomas, 129 Margadant, Ted W., 108n25 Marsh, Robert M., 108n17 martyrdom, 24, 76 Marx, Karl, 44n44 Maschke, Günter, 154n18 master and slave, 43n16 Mauss, Marcel, 13n6 Mead, George Herbert, 14n17 media, commentaries about Brandt’s kneeling in Warsaw, 134; and Holocaust, 141–43; media stars, 104–5; publicity of, 101–5 mediation, 16, 69 Meinecke, Friedrich, 110 Mein Kampf, 44n42 memorial days, 27–28 memorial sites, Holocaust, 140–41 memories, 9; as a reversal of history, 144; and classics, 36; and collective identity, 109, 152–53; cultural, 79; of the hero, 26–27; and historical research, 136; triumphant, 79; turn toward, 9–10; use of rituals to revive, 115–16, See also remembrances Merkatz, H. J., 153–54n12 Merker, Paul, 126 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 13n14 Merton, Robert, 43n11 metaphysical guilt, 144 militant movements, 127 military interventions, 101 miracles, 29, 44n35 modernism, achievement of, 160–61; contrasted with classicism, 37; and heroes, 36 modernity, and ambivalence, 156, 161–62; attitudes of, 162; and Enlightenment, 157–58; Germany, 114; and movement across boundaries, 156–57; and national identity, 144; and perspectives on the

192

Index

center, 77–79; and rituals, 26–27, 44n32; and sovereign subjectivity, 158–59 monarchy, 91, 108n20 monastic ideals, 87–88 monasticism, 89, 94 monastic orders, 89, 90, 100 monuments, 56; as depositories of collective memory, 34; as the face of the hero, 31– 34, 44n39; tombs, 30, 31; of unknown soldiers, 133 moral community, and victimhood, 52–53 moral discourse, 13n9; and civil society, 91– 92, 108n22, See also discourse morality, 46; in communities, 51–52; and education, 95; moral charisma of leaders, 84; selling of, 102; universal morality, 92; vs. profits, 103 moralization, 158 moral movements, by international corporations, 103 moral order, reconstruction of, 62–63 mortality, as link to members of human species, 45; and relics, 32 Mosse, George I., 153n8 mourning, 147–48; about devastation of WWII in Germany, 120; and Holocaust, 136; universalism of, 3, 13n5 movies, about Holocaust, 141 mundane, 6, 18; merging with the sacred, 24; and objectification, 41, 44n46; vs. sacred, 3 mundane reasoning, 14n22 museums, Holocaust, 140–41 mythology, 15, 26 myths and mythical figures, 16, 20, 43n12; and the Holocaust, 142–43; and rituals, 146–47; and sacrifice, 24 nameless heroes, 33 Nanking massacres, 148 Napoleon, use of heraldic signs, 39 national identity, 110–11; construction of, 112, 144; and the Holocaust, 137–39; inclusion of outsiders in construction of, 150; models that influenced construction of, 113–15; and modernity, 144; rebellion against, 130 National Socialism, 118, 122, 126 nation-states, 112

nature, 157–58, 159 Naturnation, 112–15, 153n6, 153n8 Nazi revolution, 118–19, 153n10 Nazism, 114, 153n8; demonization of, 123– 24; expelling demons of, 124–27, 153– 54nn12–13; and German virtues, 128–29, 154nn14–16; leaders viewed as demons, 31; memorial day for victims of, 135 neopositivism, 5 New Left, Germany, 131 newspapers, audience of, 102 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 13n14, 39–40, 44n43 “No More Heroes,” 15, 52n1 Oberlercher, Reinhold, 131, 154n18 objectification, 40–41, 44n44, 44n46; of human beings, 49, 72–73n8 objects, contrasted with subjects, 4–7 Occidental model, 83, 86 ontology, 5 order and placement, 43n10 organizational representation for victims, 69 Oriental literature, 15 Ostpolitik, 134 the Other, 4, 13n8 ownership claims, and relics, 30 Paris, France, 100, 108n29 parliaments, 91, 92, 125, 154n13 participation, voluntariness of, 94 the past, construction and destruction of, 37–39 paternalism, 70, 73n26 peasants’ movements, 108n26 Perón, Evita, 44n27 perpetrators, 49, 59, 123; accountability of, 64; construction of, 61–64; expelling of in Germany, 124–27, 153–54nn12–13; guilt and punishment of, 62, 65; and the moral community, 51–52; and public perspective, 46–48, 72nn2–3; and rituals of confession, 132–35, 154n20, 154nn22–23; second generation of collectivity of, 73n13; and subjectivity, 7; trauma of, 3, 109–10 phenomenological sociology, 4, 13n7 Pieper, Annemarie, 44n41 piety, 28–29, 87 pilgrimages, 30, 31

Index Pitt-Rivers, Julian, 14n17 Pizzorno, Alessandro, 13n4 places of heroes, 26; and relic, 28–31, 44n35, 44n38; vs. places without heroes, 40–42, 44n44, 44n46 Poland, 133, 148, 154n20 police, in cities, 100, 108n28 political identity, Germany, 134 political institutions, and administration, 87, 108n15 political leaders and heroes, 16, 35–36, 44n42; behavior of, 97–98; and confessions of guilt, 149; power of, 78 politics and political systems, and charisma, 3, 82, 83–85, 107nn7–8; detachment from, 128–29, 154n15; and public discourse, 98; and religion, 151 poor and needy, 60–61 the Pope, 44n35 the prince, political culture of, 77–78; proximity to people, 82 the princess, as representative of the sacred, 29, 44n38 Princess Diana, 44n35, 101, 104 principles and virtues, 17 privacy, and the media, 105; protected realm of, 96 private guilt, vs. public memory, 146 private interests, 102 private spheres, 94 professionals, and ambivalence, 162–63; representation by, 69–70, 73n25 profits, 102, 103 Protestantism, 40–41 public discourse, 157; Germany, 114, 131; and victims, 66–67, 73nn23–26 public figures, and privacy rights of, 105 publicity, and dissolving the center, 101–5 public memory, vs. private guilt, 146 public opinion, power of, 151 public perspectives, 51; and time lag, 55; on victims and perpetrators, 46–48, 72nn2–3 public responsibility, 66 public space, of the people in collective action, 98–101, 108n25–29 public sphere, decline of, 102; and morality by mass media, 103; and victims, 66–71, 73nn23–26; and volatility of public attention, 104

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publicum, 81–82 punishment, 62; and the criminal perpetrator, 62; German perpetrators of Holocaust, 125, 153–54n12 racial differences, 114 Ragan, Bryant R., 108n25 Raglan, Fitzroy, 32n12 Rammstedt, Otthein, 108n26 Rank, Otto, 43n14 rationalization, 40–41, 158–59, 161–62 Reagan, Ronald, 135 reality, classification of, 5–6 recognition, of victims, 66–71, 73nn23–26 reconciliation, 152–53 Red Army Fraction, 131 redeeming heroes, 15, 16 reflexive modernization, 162 reform movements, 87–88, 100, 114, 153n6 The Refugees: Hitler’s Last Victims, 124 regicide, 90, 107nn3–4, 108n18 relics, 28–31, 32, 44n35, 44n38 religion, 100; ceremonies, 86; founders of, 15, 16; and politics, 151; religious community and relics, 29–30 remembrances, 147; dates of, 27–28; rituals of, 25–28, 44n27, 44n32, 133, 135; of unknown soldiers, 133, 135; of victims, 54–58, 73n13, See also memories renaming practices, 22 reparation, 57–58, 128 repentance, 43n21; acceptances of, 147–48; and Brandt ritual, 135 responsibility, attribution of, 47–48, 72n2 retreatism, 128–29 revisionism and revisionists, 138, 139, 147– 48 revolutions, 27–28, 78; culture of, 108n25; Germany, 117–19, 153n10; overview, 115–16 rituals, 111; and administration of justice, 86; “Canossa ritual,” 134; of collective identity, 150; of confession, 132–35, 154n20, 154nn22–23; and decapitation of kings, 107n4; of German Romantics, 113; and institutional arenas, 10–12, 14n27; of jurisdiction, 62–63; and modernity, 26–27, 44n32; of Nazi

194

Index

rituals (continued) revolution, 118–19; and old national myths, 146–47; and reenactment of birth, 22; of remembrances, 25–28, 44n27, 44n32, 133, 135; to revive memories of revolutions, 115–16; of sacrifice, 23–24, 43n17, 43n19; Sedantag, 150 Robespierre, Maximilien, 97 Romanticism, 158 Rosen für den Staatsanwalt, 141 routinization, 19, 41, 76 Rudé, George, 108n29 rulers, dress for, 38, 39; peace-making functions of, 107n5 rules, and heroes, 18 rural areas, Germany, 114; unrest in, 99, 108nn25–26 Rwanda, 149 the sacred, 3, 6, 41; heroes embodiment of, 18, 19, 43n10; and hero’s triumph, 21; merging with mundane, 24; movement from center to periphery, 76; and places without heroes, 40–42, 44n44, 44n46; relationship to ambivalence, 23; relationship to kings, 29, 44n38, 80–81; representation in monuments, 32–33; sacred center of society, 16–17; symbolic representation of, 2, 13n4; and U.S. political system, 82; victims as, 58–60 sacrifices, 59–60; Christ, 134; and culture, 150; rituals of, 23–24, 43n17, 43n19; and violence, 23, 24 saints, 28, 29–30, 32 sanctification, 44n35, 142, 154n28 Sandereinheiten, 153n11 sans-culottes, 100, 108n29 Savonarola, Girolamo, 100 scandals, 96–98, 115 scapegoating, 23, 43n18, 59; and public space of the people, 98–101, 108nn25–29 Schiller, Friedrich von, 108n30 Schluchter, Wolfgang, 107nn7–8 Schmitt, Carl, 43n10 scholarly methods, 136–37 Scholtz, Gunter, 44n41 Schütz, Alfred, 13nn6–7 scientism, 114 sculptures, 32–33

secondary trauma, 56 secret societies, 95 Sedantag, 150 “Sein und Zeit,” 14n18 self, and identity, 4–5; and subjectivity, 7 self-sacrifice, 23–24, 25, 43n21 September 11, 42, 151, 152 Shils, Edward, 75 Shoah, 154n25 silence, and Holocaust, 136 slavery, restitution for, 68, 73n23 slaves and servants, 54 Smelser, Neil J., 12n2, 99 Smith, Philip, 43n7 social classes, definition, 92; and family ties, 89; and victims, 60–61 Social Democrats, 125 social distance, 19–20 socialism, 126 social movements, 95 social order, restoration of, 63 Sohm, Rudolph, 43n5 soldiers, 24, 33, 133, 151–52 solidarity, 48, 72n4; and kinship, 50; and the public, 66; shifts in, 49 Sonderweg, 110 sovereign hero, 2, 7 sovereign subjectivity, 158–59 speakers and audiences, 99 Spencer-Brown, George, 13n6n spiritual power, of relics, 31 sports heroes, 16 Stalin, Joseph, 21 Starr, Kenneth, 91 Stasi activities, 127, 154n16 state, and the law, 92 Staudte, Wolfgang, 141 structural typology, 2 Stuart, Charles, 108n20 students’ gatherings, 100 students’ rebellions, 130–31 subject, contrasted with objects, 4–7; symbolic representation of, 4–5 subjectivity, 6; construction of, 53; of the dead, 55–56; heroes as embodiment of, 17–22, 43nn9–14; and position of victims in communities, 48–49; sacredness of, 7, 14n16; of victims, 51, 69; vs. objectivity, 6–7

Index suffering, compensation for, 65–66; and remembering, 56; and victims, 45–46, 47–48 superlocal institutions, 69, 73n24 survivors, voice of, 67 symbolic representations, 10–12 sympathy, close proximity of, 49–50 Taliban, 149 Taylor, Charles, 14n17 technology, 9–10 television, 103, 105 theodicy, 61 third parties, and construction of boundaries, 11, 14n27; German people, 125– 27; and national rituals, 150, 151; noninvolved, 51 time of latency, 55 tragic hero, and sacred subjectivity, 7, 14n16 transgenerational trauma, 56–57 translatio, 29 Trittin, Jürgen, 127 triumphalism, 151 triumphant memories, 79 Turkish government, and Armenian genocide, 148, 149–50 “typus Christi,” 44n38 tyrannicide, 90, 108n18 universalism, 65, 89, 93, 144–53 universalistic identity, 110 universal morality, 92 unknown soldiers, 24, 133 urban areas, policing of, 100, 108n28; power of crowds in, 100–101; and public space, 99, 108nn25–26; and unrest, 99, 100, 101, 108nn25–26 vagabonds, 99, 100 vegetarianism, 50–51 Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 154n14 victimhood, 46–48; and amoral community, 51–53; construction of, 51; and discourse of civil society, 64–66, 73n24; and the law, 48, 72n3 victimization, 55, 56, 124 victims, 2, 67; ambivalence toward, 25; claims and recognition of, 66–71, 72nn23–26; descendants of, 56–57; heritage of, 57; as inferior subjects, 60–

195

61; innocence of, 23, 65; overview of term, 58–60; position in communities, 48–50, 52–53; and public perspective, 46–48, 72nn2–3; remembering of, 54– 58, 73n13; as sacred objects, 58–60; of September 11, 42; social construction of, 45–46, 47, 72n1; subjectivity of, 53; symbolic representation of, 6; vs. heroes, 19 violence, king’s role in, 80–81, 107n5; and rituals of confession, 152; and sacrifices, 23, 24 voices of heroes, 26, 34–36, 44nn41–42 Volk, 113, 128 Völkerschlachtsdenkmal, 33 Völkische Bewegung, 113–14, 115 völkische movement, 113, 114, 118, 153n8 voluntary actions, and victimhood, 46, 47 voluntary associations, 92 voluntary movements, 140 von Bayern, Ludwig, 38 Waffen-SS, 131, 145, 154n18 Walser, Martin, 143 Wandervogel, 114 war crimes, 148 warfare, and heroism, 24–25, 43n26 warriors, as heroes, 15, 24, 42n3 Weber, Max, 108n15, 161; account of rationalization, 40–41; and charisma, 3, 17, 18, 42n4, 43n5, 76; on continuity, 44n27; on discipline, 107n11; and institutional madness, 43n9; views of triumphs, 111; and “Zwischenbetrachtung,” 163 Wehrmacht, 138–39 Wehrmachtsausstellung, 138, 139 Weimer republic, 121 Weltliteratur, 120 Wirtschaftswunder, 128, 129 Wolff, Christa, 154n15 World War II, 24–25, 43n23, 43n24, 120 written texts, 93 xenophobia, 143 youth movements, 16, 114 Zuckermann, Leo, 126 Zweig, Stefan, 43n23 “Zwischenbetrachtung,” 163

About the Author Bernhard Giesen, professor of sociology at the University of Konstanz, Germany, is the author most recently of Intellecdtuals and the Nation: Collective Identity in a German Axial Age (Cambridge, 1998) and The Micro-Macro Link (University of California Press).

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