ABSTRACT
By moving from event to discourse, the Holocaust has been incorporated into Western thought and culture. The large-scale reproduction and transfer of the Holocaust image – its discursive and ideological constructions and uses – together with the transfer of the Holocaust’s images has helped to create ‘the Holocaust’ and its role in Western culture. The most significant change in the image of the Holocaust, evident since the late 1990s but particularly since the year 2000, is that ‘the Holocaust’ is not really about the Holocaust any more. The story of the destruction of European Jewry more often than not has ceased to be the story of this particular destruction, and has gradually become the story of the destruction of life in general. Having discussed this shift, it is interesting to note that recent history writing increasingly qualifies the established image of the Holocaust. In Bloodlands, a history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s mass killings, Timothy Snyder (2010) criticises the image of the Holocaust – the crimes of the Nazi regime and the horror of the mass killing surrounding World War II – as too clean and simple. He says that the images in photographs and texts we have from German concentration camps are horrific, but do not represent the whole picture. They are the closest most people come to perceiving the mass killing, but the horror of the twentieth century thought to be located in concentration camps – with Auschwitz standing for the Holocaust, and the Holocaust for the evil of the twentieth century – is an incomplete story regarding the sites and methods of mass killing. And Snyder argues in detail how this too clean and too simple image of the Holocaust prevents us from understanding the history and horror of what happened. But it is this simple and clean image of the Holocaust that has determined today’s Holocaust discourse and is therefore part of the history that enabled the transfer I have described.
