Stephen Frosh. Those Who Come After: Postmemory, Acknowledgement and Forgiveness; London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; 246 pages, hardcover £64.99; ISBN 978-3-030-14852-2
By Roger Frie
How do we live with inherited traumatic memories of genocide and racial violence? Is it possible to ever atone for crimes against humanity, let alone forgive perpetrators of such crimes? What is the nature of historical responsibility and how does it relate to the silent complicity? Can we be implicated in injustices that we did not personally cause? These are the kinds of questions that reading Stephen Frosh’s deeply perceptive new book, Those Who Come After, evokes in the reader.
With his characteristic depth of analysis and breadth of knowledge, Frosh guides his readers through a complex ethical terrain while addressing the ever-present reality of historical trauma. Drawing variously on psychoanalysis, philosophy and social theory, Frosh invites us to struggle with him as he explores the history’s shadows and the afterlife of mass crimes that shape our current lives. At a time when the meaning of history is often questioned and governments seek to dictate how the past is remembered, Frosh emphasizes the effects of history’s traumas and considers why we are obligated to respond.
Those Who Come After is organized around interrelated themes and concepts: postmemory and the ghosts of traumatic history; silence and silencing; acknowledgement and responsibility; atonement and repair; and perhaps most difficult of all, reconciliation and forgiveness. Each theme is expanded in chapters on the politics of encounter, memorialising, the role of art and music in memorialisation, and German philosophy under National Socialism. Frosh doesn’t just engage in theoretical analysis but locates themes within a specific time and place drawing, for example, on the traumas unleased by the Holocaust and the challenge of post-Holocaust memory; the policies of apartheid South Africa and the role of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; and the history of slavery and its afterlife in the United States. He also analyses the political histories and current realities in regions as diverse as Brazil, Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and Germany.
Using an interdisciplinary approach, Frosh weaves together different levels of experience: spatial, interpersonal, perceptual and embodied. The point, of course, is that the afterlife of traumatic history is encountered in various ways and on multiple levels. Memory is always affectively charged. In this sense as well, Frosh is right to draw on thinkers from different disciplines ranging from Hirsch and LaCapra, Benjamin and Butler, Levinas, Heidegger and Arendt, to Derrida and Žižek. There are others, and I list these interrelated themes, experiential realms, disciplines and thinkers only to offer a glimpse of the sheer scope and richness of Frosh’s book, which can be read sequentially or in individual parts. What should be clear is that this book will reward the reader who, like me, chooses to return to it time and again.
How a reader responds to what Frosh says will depend in part on their own subject position, to where they are located at the intersection of culture and history. As a German descendant whose grandparents were members of the German generation of perpetrators and bystanders, many of the themes Frosh explores are familiar to me. Yet they are not easily addressed, whether in one’s personal life or in our social interaction with others. This became patently clear to me when, relatively late in life, I discovered that my maternal grandfather, whom I had known and loved as a child, was a card-carrying member of the Nazi party (Frie, 2017). It was an unspoken family history that had been covered over by a blanket of shame and silence and was revealed only by my chance discovery of a photograph of my young grandfather in uniform. Like many German descendants, I had been raised with an understanding of the importance of knowing about and remembering the Holocaust and Germany’s heinous crimes under National Socialism. After learning of my own family’s unspoken Nazi past, I struggled with memory its implications. What did it mean for me to inherit a dark past that took place before I was born, a history that I did not participate in, but to which I am inherently connected by way of family, language, and community? How do we understand the dynamics of German postwar memory which obligates descendants to engage in collective remembering but often enables private family memory of the Nazi past to be kept at bay? My family’s history, it turns out, is hardly unusual. There are many third-generation Germans who feel a sense of responsibility to remember, but know very little about the degree to which their own relatives supported the Nazis, enabled their hateful policies, or were directly involved in the crimes of the Holocaust. How, ultimately, do we respond to unwanted perpetrator legacies?
I am implicated in the community of silence in which I grew up and have an obligation to remember and to speak out. But as Frosh asks, what of the issues “to which I have had very limited exposure and of which I have no direct experience?” (xviii). Does my complacency in the face of past crimes and current societal injustices make me in some way complicit in them? What does it mean to be implicated? For example, as a white German-Canadian male I inevitably benefit from the history of colonialism that has shaped Canadian society. How do I address the legacy of suffering experienced by the First Nations in Canada, or by African-Canadians whose ancestors were enslaved and continue to experience injustice as a result of systemic racism? What is my role in this process and how do I respond to the discomfort I feel when I begin to acknowledge it? As Frosh points out, “This is what it means to be implicated; it is not comfortable and it is not always clear what one should do to turn a general ethical impulse into practical action that is not self-abnegating yet is open to the needs of the other, towards whom one has a responsibility” (p. 81).
At several points in his analysis, Frosh draws on Christina Sharpe’s important book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. The wake of the slave ships that forcibly carried some twelve million Africans to a life of enslavement in North and South America have continued to shape black lives despite the passage of time. The cruelty and suffering of the past have carried on into the present. In the United States, African Americans have been subjected to slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, and now mass incarceration. In a similar sense, we might say that the wake of those slave ships has ensnared members of the white majority, a great many of whom continue to engage in denial and silence even as the growth of white nationalism has come to pose a clear and present danger.
Frosh is sensitive to the challenges of considering the interconnections between victims and perpetrators and their descendants, the kind of relationship that the German-Jewish historian, Dan Diner once described as a negative-symbiosis. As Frosh states: “In claiming the right to engage with any experiences, even those that are not my own, I risk setting myself up as a translator of things that perhaps should not be translated, potentially taking them away from those who actually ‘own’ them and have the sole entitlement to articulate them” (pp. xiii-xiv). This is a very real concern, yet Frosh concludes, “being an ethical subject means knowing that you cannot avoid taking responsibility for another’s suffering by saying that they haven’t actually asked for help” (p. 30). In this sense, at least, he invokes Emmanuel Levinas’s well-known injunction that our responsibility for the other person is always primary.
On the difficult theme of forgiveness, Frosh turns to Heidegger’s engagement with National Socialism and the contrasting responses of Levinas and Arendt. As Frosh makes clear, the issue is highly complex. But in the briefest sense we might say that that Levinas was unable to forgive Heidegger for his embrace of the Nazis, while Arendt, who was romantically linked to the philosopher, was more equivocal. From there Frosh turns to the narrative of the black South African, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, who grew up under apartheid. Gobodo-Madikizela’s account of her relationship with the apartheid killer, Eugene de Kock, has become well-known and gives way to a nuanced discussion of culpability, atonement and the possibility of forgiveness in South Africa. Frosh carefully considers the different positions and their ramifications, while recognizing the need to find a route towards a shared experience that can move beyond the victim and perpetrator dyad. This is difficult terrain to be sure, and Frosh concludes that “murder in the service of apartheid; sadistic and cruel violence; abusing one’s position to explicitly advance Nazism? There is a limit, surely, and maybe these examples are where it has been breached” (p. 147). Finding a path forward is incredibly hard, yet vitally important. Acknowledgement, atonement and reparations cannot, in themselves, absolve anyone of the grievous wrongs committed, though they may at least open a space for dialogue and the possibility of future reconciliation.
Reconciliation between the victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust was quite impossible to imagine, but the circumstances for their descendants have proved different. Eva Hoffman, on whose work Frosh draws, makes a related observation when she acknowledges the way in which the children of Holocaust survivors like herself are paradoxically connected with the children of the German perpetrators and bystanders:
The Germans born after the war, I began gradually to realize, are my true historical counterpoint. We have to struggle from our antithetical positions with the very same past.…While the conflict for children of victims is between the imperative of compassion and the need for freedom. … How can you [the German second generation] ever come to terms with the knowledge that your parents, your relatives, the very people for whom you have felt a natural, a necessary affection, are actually worthy of moral disgust? That the relative who was fond of you, or a neighbor who treated you nicely, or indeed your mother or father, may have performed ghastly deeds? Or that the whole previous generation, which has served as your first model of adulthood, is tainted by complicity with such deeds? (pp. 118–119)
As Hoffman suggests, in the aftermath of genocide and racial violence the work of memory is laden with emotion, conflicted loyalties, fears, and fantasies. In a related sense, I believe the work of historical responsibility requires us to confront our emotional investments in long-cherished narratives and look for counter-narratives that can be difficult to discern. As long as the perpetrators and enablers remain abstract historical figures, questions of responsibility and implication are kept at bay. But what separates “us” from the perpetrators and enablers of past genocides may be little more than historical experience. As current rates of racial violence suggest, like them, we also have the capacity to dehumanize, mistreat and deeply injure others.
Those Who Come After is indispensable for anyone wishing to understand how the legacies of suffering that have resulted from the perpetration of mass crimes continue to shape us long after they are committed. The book’s interdisciplinary scope, like that of the Studies in the Psychosocial series in which it was published, forms a valuable addition to a field that is often dominated by narrow disciplinary accounts. Like Frosh’s earlier writings, Those Who Come After is filled with nuance and sophistication and asks to be revisited, rewarding the reader each time anew. Drawing on a rich and diverse body of knowledge, Frosh lays bare the human struggle with historical trauma, its lingering effects into the present, and the possibility of reconciliation and forgiveness in the future.
Roger Frie is a Professor and Clinical Psychologist at the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. He lectures and writes widely on historical trauma, cultural memory and human interaction and additionally is a practicing psychotherapist and psychoanalyst. He is author most recently of Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2017).
References:
Frie, R. (2017). Not in my family: German memory and responsibility after the Holocaust. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Hoffman, E. (2004). After such knowledge: Memory, history and the legacy of the Holocaust. New York, NY: Public Affairs.
Sharpe, C. (2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.