United through Evil

Historical trauma, recognition and collective identity.

Diana van Vugt, M.A., LL.M.

'The aim of judgment in historical or literary critical discourse, a forensic rather than juridical sort of inquiry, is not that of determining guilt or innocence. It is to change history into memory; to make a case for what should be remembered. This responsibility converts every judgment into a judgment on the person who makes it.' (Geoffrey Hartman 1991)

Introduction.

This essay consists of a critical theoretical thought experiment drawing on the question how the shared experience of injustice by social groups could lead to collective identification. Mostly the analysis will draw on Axel Honneth's social theory of recognition. The theory emphasizes the driving force of collective experiences of repression and injustice behind social struggle and societal development. Furthermore, historiographical notions of Dominick LaCapra and Hayden White will play a role. They refer to the relativity of historical narratives and the dialogical relation with the past, helping in accounting for the cultural and political relevance, functions and dangers of the phenomenon of strong collective identification with past traumas.

During the decades that follow the Second World War there seems to be an increasing trend to guide transformative phases after social crises by highly formalized and authoritative means, like trials, official excuses and investigation commissions. Ever since the examples of the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, the growing international community has played an important stimulant and increasingly guiding role in initiating formal mechanisms of transformative justice. The United Nations ad hoc criminal tribunals for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR), as well as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission dealing with the apartheid regime in South Africa, are prime examples of this trend. The crown on this development, till so far, has been the installation of the International Criminal Court in The Hague in 2002.

The rapid evolvement of international criminal law after the Second World War is closely related to the 'never again' atmosphere that dominated international politics and law, as the magnitude of the neatly planned program for the extermination of Jews became acknowledged and turned into a symbol of absolute evil. Not only international criminal law, but also the post war human rights discourse reflects a need for universal moral and legal normativity. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the UN General Assembly almost at the same moment as the Genocide Convention. Meanwhile, they both signify the evolving of an universalizing political and moral tradition which is for an important part rooted in negative collective identification with the holocaust.

The essay will concentrate on one of the most famous cases setting this trend; the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem. Besides the Israeli Supreme Court judgment in the Eichmann case, Hannah Arendt's famous investigation of this case, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem; a report on the banality of evil, will be a first point of reference. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt ingeniously pioneers in relating formal justice to the collective identification of a victim group after a recent history of persecution and war. The prosecution of the war criminal Eichmann before the courts of Jerusalem has been an influential event in the symbolic affirmation of Jewish collective identity through 'doing justice' by the strongest formal means possible; retribution and punishment through criminal law.

This study should mainly be seen in the light of a theoretical experiment, drawn on a case study as a mere example. Of course, no empirically founded statements could be made on one case study. Nor do I pretend to have filled up all theoretical and methodological gaps left open by my analysis, which in important respects diverts from its main inspirator, Honneth's theory of recognition. Led by the hypothesis that the concept of struggle for recognition could fulfill a highly relevant role in social scientific and historical analysis of collective identification, it is my main aim to stimulate a debate on the content and operationalization of this concept.

First, the Eichmann case as well as Hannah Arendt's account of the trial will be introduced. Next, Honneth's negative mechanism for social recognition will be analyzed as a starting point for critical analysis of the Eichmann case. Subsequently, the theoretical framework will be worked out and applied to the Eichmann case. Meanwhile, some modifications to Honneth's model will be proposed, mostly based on historiographical studies of LaCapra and White.

Eichmann in Jerusalem.

It was on May 23rd 1960 that the Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion announced to the Knesset that Eichmann had been found by the Israeli Secret Service. Actually, he had been kidnapped by Israeli agents or, as Hanna Arendt puts it, only been picked up, for it seemed that Eichmann had almost been awaiting his arrest. Shortly after that, Eichmann would be brought to Israel to stand trial with a highly predictable outcome: his execution on May 31st 1962. Although only a middle ranked SS bureaucrat in the organization of the final solution, Eichmann became the face of evil as a mind behind the holocaust.

Before the District Court in Jerusalem Eichmann stood accused of fifteen counts, mainly consisting of crimes against the Jewish people, which also classified as war crimes and crimes against humanity. The wording crimes against the Jewish people is telling, for it was merely the acting out of the disaster of the holocaust that was the central theme of the trial. Therefore, the Israeli District and Supreme Court came away easily with their legally dubious judgments. Under the standards of national as well as international law it is at least highly doubtful whether one could be retroactively prosecuted for acts of state, after being kidnapped from another's state territory. It is also doubtful whether a state - Israel - could claim jurisdiction over acts that preceded its existence and, moreover, were neither committed on its territory (which did not exist as such yet) or by one of its nationals (which did not exist yet either).

The Court mainly claimed jurisdiction on two other dubious grounds, namely the passive nationality principle (but again, how to do that when there are no nationals yet?) and the universality principle. The latter one was conceived to be implied in the severity of the atrocities of the holocaust, which at the same time - analogical to crimes against humanity - legitimizes retroactive prosecution, as well as prosecution for acts of state. Here the post war paradigm shift from sheer legal positivism to the desire of justice through pre-emptive norms clearly comes to light. The Israeli Supreme Court hailed the judgment of the District Court with enthusiastic approval. But what could it have done otherwise?

The same question goes for the merits of the case. Eichmann was convicted on all fifteen grounds, although he categorically denied that he had been actively and deliberately involved in killing Jews. Plainly considered, there seems to be much truth in this; Eichmann had - as he emphasized - never killed a Jew himself and , allegedly, never deliberately intended to do so as well. Ironically, it is precisely the intent to destroy that makes the crime of genocide, or to a lesser extent the crimes against humanity of persecution and extermination. Crimes against the Jewish people should, by analogy, be counted to the latter category. The evidence for Eichmann's criminal intent - mens rea - turned out to be quite meager. Though, for practical purposes he was considered a categorical liar. Eichmann was hanged and entered history as the cold blooded engineer of the holocaust.

The banality of Evil

In her famous critique of the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt damasks the cold blooded engineer of the holocaust, as a middle ranked, career zealous bureaucrat. In fact, Eichmann had not known the party program, nor read Mein Kampf when he became a member of the Nazi party in April 1932. He merely seemed to consider party membership as a glaring career perspective, for he was an ambitious man that till so far had failed to succeed in life. When Kaltenbrunner had asked him to join the party, he had simply replied: Why not? Completely in line with this background, Eichmann would later defend his cooperation with the final solution as an act of a proper citizen and employee, being faithful to the law and state, loyal to its superiors, without second thought. But on trial, he was considered a categorical liar and so his criminal intent was constructed without proper evidence. The simple fact that Eichmann's acts in itself, nor his set of mind were exceptional in the context of Third Reich, burdened the Israeli judges with an insolvable dilemma. They were confronted with the banality of Eichmann's evil and could not do anything else with it than making a cold blooded monster of him.

Banal evil is ignorant evil, not even abnormal behavior, given its historical context. Evil, nonetheless, and maybe even more dangerous, because it is not recognized at the time being. Moreover, it does not fit within the criterion of mens rea required for crimes against humanity or genocide. Even worse, it does not fit the urge to do justice to the Jewish trauma, which requires clear binary oppositions between good and evil in order to make sense. For that purpose, evil must be absolute evil, evil which could not be justified, nor explained in terms of normal human behavior or consciousness. The classification as evil construes an absolute other, the dehumanized enemy. Eichmann had to become the face of the Nazi evil, because the Nuremberg trials had not paid particular attention to the Jewish trauma, but instead defined the atrocities of the Nazi regime in general terms of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The Eichmann trial offered an unique chance to prosecute the Nazi evil before an Israeli court for crimes against the Jewish people, while the young state of Israel was the heart of post war Jewish nation building. The way David Ben Gurion explained the captivation of Eichmann is telling; 'We (...) want to establish before the nations of the world how millions of people, because they happened to be Jews, and one million of babies, because they happened to be Jewish babies, were murdered by the Nazis' And: 'We want the nations of the world to know... and they should be ashamed' Directing himself towards the Jewish people, Ben Gurion emphasized the Jewish unity through its evil fate, by calling into remembrance how Judaism 'four thousand years old, with its spiritual creations and its ethical strivings, its Messianic aspirations' had always faced 'a hostile world'. So it was not primarily Eichmann who stood on trial, but history, more specifically the history of anti-Semitism which came to a climax in the Holocaust.

At the same time, the professional spirit of the judges must have been calling upon the law's standards according to which plainly and exclusively Eichmann's allegedly criminal acts should be examined.'Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann... On trial are his deeds, not the suffering of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.' However, Hannah Arendt observes: ... this case was built on what the Jews had suffered, not on what Eichmann had done.' Clearly, the judges yielded doing justice to the Jewish trauma to judging Eichmann's acts, which means that they rather acted like co-authors of the grand narrative of Jewish collective identity, than judges in a criminal case.

The importance of evil in collective identification

Honneth and the struggle for recognition.

With his negative ethics of recognition, the German philosopher Axel Honneth deliberately aimes to criticize what he calls utilitarian approaches to social struggle. This refers to the paradigmatic emphasize of social theory on the struggle for political power and economical resources.15 Though valid analyses in themselves, they leave, according to Honneth, the moral dimension and driving force of social struggle underestimated. Honneth sturdily grounds his philosophy on the early writings of Hegel, who developed a model of social theory based on the dynamics of social struggle. Hegel already employed the concept of recognition as an analytical tool to describe the intersubjective character of individual flourishing and societal change.

Hegel mainly aimed to criticize the atomism in which Machiavelli and Hobbes grounded their political theories. In those theories social struggle merely served the goal of self preservation instead of recognition. Honneth also owes his negative methodology to Hegel, which is merely reflected in the axiom that the negative experience of injustice - a lack or denial of recognition - forms the driving force behind individual as well as social development. Explaining Honneth´s negativist concept of recognition, Deranty puts it as follows:´The normative order appears as the absent or the damaged structures to which suffering subjects appeal in their protest against social injuries, or even more primarily in their intimate experiences of social domination.´Negative methodology thus hinges upon the emancipatory notion that experiences of oppression are translated into positive morality, through negative identification with the collective experience of oppression.

This happens, as Honneth makes clear, if victims of oppression find common semantics to assert collectively the injustice done to them and turn this into a positive claim for recognition. The language of human rights is a prime contemporary example of such a common vocabulary. Honneth, as well as Hegel, assumes that social struggle and recognition leads to moral progress, individually as well as collectively. Although I am highly skeptical of the linear concept of moral development that Honneth ties to the process of recognition, his concept of struggle for recognition in itself provides a suitable analytical tool to explain the crucial importance of evil for the construction of collective identity. Though, Honneth's distinction between three aspects of recognition will be left out of the scope of this essay. The same counts for the Meadian social psychological framework he develops to ground those aspects as empirical parameters, rather than metaphysical claims, as in Hegel. Although these aspects are quite essential to Honneth's theory, for the purposes and limited scope of this study, only the abstract concept of struggle for recognition will be employed.

In Honneth's view, the first step towards full social recognition, outside the limited circle of loved ones, is the acquisition of equal (human) rights. Honneth acknowledges that this conception of social struggle is closely tied to modern thought about state and society. Honneth, as Habermas, clearly considers the principle of liberal democracy the neutral - value free - and universal optimum for societal development. In that sense, Honneth is trapped in liberal objectivism and universalism, which limits the critical potential of his theory significantly, since he excludes critical reflection upon the paradigmatic and relative character of his own liberal moral convictions.

Nevertheless, the central notion of legal recognition connects Honneth's theoretical model for recognition on a vital point with the topic and case study at hand. Honneth rather envisioned a struggle for equal rights than transitional justice through trial, though the mechanism works, hypothetically, the same; a former victim group seeks recognition preferably through criminal conviction of perpetrators. Characteristically, the principle of the rule of law connotes the highest form of 'justice' achievable (at least in this earthly life). Presumably, Honneth would not problematize the ideological assumptions on which this concept of justice founded, since he considers the liberal principle of the rule of law a value free and universal norm.

However, I aim to modify Honneth's model to point out that struggles for recognition and related collective identity building could never be value free and are always exclusive in nature. In other words, I consider liberalism as value system amongst others. However diverse and even conflicting the values called 'liberal' could be, the values of freedom and equality occur as the foundational values or 'common dominators', to put it in Rawlsian terms.

I also want to emphasize that I do not agree with Honneth´s idea that the collective experiences of injustice and suffering inherently give the oppressed a neutral perspective that enables them to criticize the existing power relations. Of course, social critique often originates in oppression and injustice, but to assume that the oppressed would have a neutral view that helps them to see through the veil of ideology, goes too far in my eyes.

Contrary to Honneth's assumption, social groups that are in the process of emancipation from oppression tend to employ similar essentialist rhetoric as their former suppressors. That is done to legitimate their collective identity as, at least apart from, but often also opposed to the (former) dominant group. Often, the latter is even defined as the absolute (significant) other; the enemy or evil. Once struggled towards effective power, if it succeeds to do so, the emancipated group will seek recourse to similar oppressive means to sustain and expand its dominance. In my eyes therefore, social dynamics is driven by the struggle for effective power of groups with competitive interests and related normative conceptions of 'good life', justifying those interests. Thus, moral, cultural, political and formal institutional aspects appear as interrelated factors in the struggle for recognition.

Accordingly, social change is characterized by an endless sequence of power struggles, resulting in changing power configurations, rather then an emancipatory development towards a moral liberal optimum, as Honneth assumes. Applying Hegelian negative methodology to the phenomenon of collective identification leads to the conclusion that the definition of collective identity ultimately resides in the negative identification with significant others and is thus essentially exclusive in character. In that light, Honneth's Habermasian belief in a tendency of moral progress sounds almost as an apology for the radical implications of the idea of negative identification. Besides the exclusive character of negative identification, the moral justification a negative concept of recognition gives to social struggle, seems to imply a moral justification for violence.22 Unfortunately, Honneth circumvents dealing with the radical implications of his theory.

The Eichmann case as part of Jewish collective identification.

As discussed above, Honneth aims to explain with his negative theory of recognition how shared experiences of suffering and injustice leads to the potential for collective action. Thus, in his view the shared negative experience of no access to justice leads to the quest and strife for justice. This implies that the experience of injustice is also at the heart of the collective identification of social groups emancipating from domination. Collective identification forms the basis for the 'common semantics', that is, a common definition of the situation in a common vocabulary, which is necessary for the assertion of a claim for recognition.

Especially the form of trial gives rise to complications in this context; the formalized standards of the rule of law seem often to contradict the quest for moral justice. In case of a trial only one party could 'win', whereas more interests and claims might be morally and even legally valid. This occurs in the case of the Eichmann trial as well, where the quest for justice of Jews was yielded to the norms of public international and criminal law. At the same time, the inherent binary opposition in the vocabulary of law lends itself excellently for the goal of politics of identity by creating a seemingly clear black and white image of the past, along the division between right and wrong. Therefore, especially trial, as a form of dealing with past injustices, seems to be especially attractive to (former) victim groups.

Besides gaining formal legal recognition for the holocaust trauma and doing symbolically justice to it, the Eichmann trial gave the evil of the holocaust a face; a reconstruction of Eichmann as a cold blooded engineer of the holocaust. This personalization of a collective experience of trauma forms an important means for collective identity politics. By associating a collective memory of trauma with a concrete evil person, the trauma could be put on trial; be symbolically judged and executed. This creates a very powerful claim for recognition. Moreover, through identification with their past trauma, a former victim group creates an identity of moral and political superiority, to sustain its claim for recognition. Trial thus convicts the traumatic past, closes it symbolically off and paves the way for social respect, peace and harmony. Put cynically, it almost looks like an eschatological process in which criminal justice has a messianistic role.

Consequently, the construction of a meaningful narrative through putting a past trauma on trial could be considered as a struggle for recognition through negative affirmation in the sense of Honneth's theory. The idea of doing justice to past traumas also accords with Honneth's idea of a positive affirmation and transition through the struggle for recognition. Transitional justice triggers formal and social rehabilitation, thereby symbolically creating a clean slate for the future, especially in relation to former perpetrators. However, at the same time, transitional justice evokes an essentialist, 'black and white' image of winners, victims, criminals and losers; good guys and bad guys. Especially through trial such a binary opposition between good and evil is forged in a highly formalized and authoritative way. After all, it is said that justice will have its course through enforcement of the law, which means that especially the conviction by a criminal court generally connotes that justice is done.

Past evil and present judgment in context

We have seen that the struggle for recognition through transitional justice generates an essentialist worldview, which excludes alternative historical narratives as well as insecurities about past events. Every essentialism is inherently exclusive in its nature, which makes it potentially totalitarian. If there should be lessons to be learned from the holocaust and the Jewish trauma, I think this should be this one. Drawing on this lesson, writing critically about the dynamics of social struggle should first and foremost engage with the analysis of essentialist narratives, keeping in mind the relativity of historical events, as well as their remembrance. Applied to the Eichmann case, such an exploration would focus on questioning the process of historization of the holocaust trauma and the functions it fulfills within specific contexts.

Dominick LaCapra employs a contextualizing and dialogical approach to the past for analyzing the process of historization of the Holocaust. With this approach he emphasizes the phenomena of particularity and relativity in a two fold way: first, in relation to history, by taking into account the particular discursive framework of past events, and second, in relation to the historian, by stressing his dialogical relationship with the past. LaCapra thus opposes the traditional historiographical idea of objectifying the past through a scientific way of historical research, in which the historian takes the role of a neutral medium. LaCapra's idea of contextualization and dialogue concurs with White's statement that history is as much invented as it is found. To White's idea, meaning is primarily attributed to historical events through history writing. This means that a narrator should mainly qualify himself by acknowledging the relativity of historical narratives and their dependency on the narrator's standpoint, thus releasing himself from essentialism and objectivism.

Analyzing the historization of the holocaust then primarily means examining the ways in which the holocaust is reconstructed in suitably altered forms to meet with present needs. White emphasizes that the value of historical narrative lies precisely in its metaphorical associatedness with the present and, more directly, its author(s). LaCapra employs the concept of transference to analyze how past events are redefined to fit into a particular historical narrative. Transference implies displacement of historical events; they are decontextualized to be recontextualized, that is: narrated in a meaningful way. The process of recontextualization involves purposeful selection, silencing, distortion and exaggeration of historical events.

In case of historical narratives concerning the collective identification with past traumas by (former) victim groups, the quest for representation is steered by a need for social recognition through rehabilitation. As we saw above, the reconstruction of a traumatic past in the light of this desire for transitional justice, resulted in a black and white picture of past events; morally colored binary oppositions that starkly divide between good and evil. Rather than 'serving the law', the Israeli courts contributed to the writing of a holocaust history that served the struggle, the need for recognition of the holocaust's main victim group, with Eichmann as a figurehead of evil in the leading role. As Hannah Arendt already indicated, without a constructed moral and historical meaning, evil would just be banal and from banality no sense could be extracted, nor a meaningful narrative construed.

Thus Eichmann's trial should mainly be seen within the morale it aimed to impose to history, so well worded in the lesson Ben Gurion wanted to teach the world, namely that Jews have earned their position as a respected nation, with a state of its own, by the mere virtue of the traumatic history they had suffered.32 In other words, Eichmann's trial should be seen in its context; as a part of the struggle for recognition of the holocausts' main victim group through transitional justice. Although serving an obvious and relevant rehabilitating goal as a claim for recognition; reconstruction of the past injustice implies the danger to close off critical engagement with traumatic past events. Whereas doubt, conscious acknowledgment of alternative narratives and the notion of the banality of evil are essential indegredients of a critical dialogical relation with the past, which exactly aims to prevent to produce the kind of essentialisms that usually lies at the ideological root of atrocities like the holocaust.

Concluding remarks.

In the preceding it was analyzed how the Eichmann trial became a mere metaphor for the anti Semitist evil in Jewish collective identity. The crucial role of a negative identification with shared experiences of historical trauma in the process of collective identification was explained through the concept of the negative recognition by Axel Honneth. Through his theory it was conceptualized how collective identity becomes ultimately articulated through oppression and suffering, leading to a dynamics of social struggle for recognition. Due to its association with Justice, its authoritative formalism and ritualism, trial is an excellent form to symbolically judge and convict a past trauma in the concrete form of a crime and criminal. Therewith, evil is provided with a face, a figurehead on which - otherwise untouchable and incomprehensible - collective mourn, grief and anger could be reflected.

Moreover, the way the vocabulary of law naturally classifies events and persons in clear binary terminology fits the goals of collective identification and recognition excellently. By being judged a criminal, the accused is symbolically placed outside the order of the humane and good. This is exactly how collective identification works; its roots lie in the negative identification with those we oppose and exclude. That is where the struggle for effective power starts and finds its symbolic justification. We need a they to really become we.

The Eichmann trial became an important stimulant for the collective remembrance and rethinking of the Holocaust in general. So it seems that Ben Gurion and the prosecutor got what they asked for; recognition for the Jewish trauma and the status of a moral example. But is this really the essential lesson to be learned from the atrocities of the holocaust, and with them so many others throughout history and contemporary times? Shouldn't we rather go beyond the division of history in good and evil guys and acknowledge that every (collective) identity is inherently exclusive and essentialist, so potentially totalitarian? In my opinion, it is exactly at that point that a lesson from a history of trauma, aggression and injustice could be learned...

Cited literature.

Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem. A report on the banality of evil. Harmondsworth 1976 (revised and enlarged edition).
Carroll, Noël, Interpretation, history and narrative. In: Brian Fay, Philip Pomper & Richard T. Vann (eds.), History and theory. Contemporary readings Oxford 1998.
Deranty, Philip, Injustice, violence and social struggle. The critical potential of Axel Honneth's theory of recognition. In: Critical horizons, 2004 volume 5. Issue 1.
Honneth, Axel, The struggle for recognition. The moral grammar of social conflicts. Cambridge (MA) 1995.
LaCapra, Dominick, Representing the holocaust. History, theory, trauma. Ithaca and London 1994.
Kellner, Hans, Never again is now. In: Brian Fay, Philip Pomper & Richard T. Vann (eds.), History and theory. Contemporary readings Oxford 1998.
Supreme Court of Israel, Judgement May 29 1962 (Eichmann case).
White, Hayden, The historical text as literary artefact. In: Brian Fay, Philip Pomper & Richard T. Vann (eds.), History and theory. Contemporary readings Oxford 1998.