'The Politics of Memory' in Europe

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. It's quite a time to be Masha Gessen. Just this month, Vladimir Putin put The New Yorker staff writer and author of 11 books on his wanted list, criminal charges against Masha Gessen, for allegedly spreading false information about the Russian military. Then in a bizarre irony, an award ceremony honoring Gessen for their political thought was canceled in Germany because of their political thought.

It was the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given out each year by a foundation in Germany associated with the Green Party there. Arendt having been a scholar of totalitarianism in her day, something Gessen is today in theirs. Both Jewish. Both have had victims of the Nazis in their families. Gessen's family also left the former Soviet Union in 1981, if I have my dates right, when Masha was 14.

Something Gessen wrote in The New Yorker critical of Germany's relationship to free speech about the war in Gaza and conditions in Gaza caused the ceremony to be canceled. The award was made nonetheless in a different setting, we should say. Gessen has been on this show many times over the last decade as some of you know usually to speak about their writings on Putin and Trump and totalitarianism. Today, to speak about Putin and Trump and totalitarianism, but also about Gaza and what Masha calls memory culture in Germany. Masha, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Masha Gessen: Great to be with you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Your New Yorker article actually begins with your description of visiting Germany often after the fall of the Berlin Wall and maybe even before in the '80s and you found it exhilarating to watch memory culture take shape. Can you start by defining what you mean by the term "memory culture" and why you first found it exhilarating?

Masha Gessen: Actually, the term "memory culture" is a German term. It's something that post-Berlin Wall Germany, the post-unification Germany, really put a lot of effort into cultivating. It's really the cornerstone of national identity in this post-1989 Germany. It has to do with reckoning with the Holocaust. The reason I found it exhilarating was because in the late 20th century, I think many of us hoped that these post-totalitarian countries would figure out ways to deal with the darkness in their past and to make never again not just a slogan but a political reality.

Certainly, some of the inventiveness and inspiration in Germany's memory culture remains just an incredible thing what Arendt, I'm sure, would have thought of as inventing something new, which, to her, was the essence of politics. In the last decade and a half, I feel and many people living in Germany feel that this memory culture has, as the philosopher Susan Neiman said, gone haywire. It's become this political tool of silencing people, especially people who are critical of Israel, and in many cases Jews and sometimes Israeli Jews living in Germany who are critical of Israel.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, I want to invite you in. I see some people are calling already. I know Masha was also on national Morning Edition this morning. Maybe some of you heard her there. We don't coordinate our bookings, so it's a coincidence. Anyone with a connection to Germany, Holocaust survivors or descendants, or anyone else want to join this conversation with a comment or a question with Masha Gessen from The New Yorker, 212-433-WNYC.

Maybe you read The New Yorker piece from just earlier this month that got her in the trouble there that she got in. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, on any side of it or with a question for Masha Gessen, 212-433-9692, and they'll take your calls. Now, you say the way memory culture has been constructed there, it feels static and somehow an attempt to establish that only this memory is remembered, the memory of the Holocaust, and only in this way. Are you arguing again seeing the Holocaust as a singularly evil event in Germany's history?

Masha Gessen: Well, I am in the footsteps of some great Jewish thinkers who survived the Holocaust, including Zygmunt Bauman, arguing for seeing it as both singular and not singular, but a function of its historical moment. I'll explain. Obviously, the Holocaust is a horrific event and, in some ways, stands completely apart from other things that humans have done to one another. It's not the largest genocide that ever happened, but it is the largest number of people killed over the shortest period of time.

It's the only time so far when people have built factories to kill other people. In that sense, it's a function of its age as the philosopher, Zygmunt Bauman, argued. My argument is that when you place the Holocaust outside of history specifically by forbidding any comparisons between the Holocaust and contemporary events, which is something that Germans call Holocaust leveling or Holocaust relativizing and some American Jews call Holocaust universalizing.

When you ban these kinds of comparisons, you turn never again from a political project into something akin to a magic spell. You just assume it's never going to happen again. When I think the point of never again is to keep comparing and to keep asking ourselves, "Are we seeing signs of something equally horrific or similarly horrific beginning to happen so that we can prevent it, so we can make good on the promise of never again?"

Brian Lehrer: People know exactly what got you in trouble here. The most offending reference was a comparison of Gaza to a Nazi-era Jewish ghetto. You've said you thought that might be a trigger for a backlash there from your New Yorker article. Would you explain the comparison that you were making?

Masha Gessen: Yes. I've noticed, obviously, that for a long time, human rights organizations and politicians and generally people speaking about Gaza have used this metaphor of an open-air prison. If you think about it, there's no such thing as an open-air prison, or at least I'm not aware of such a thing existing. What I would tell my writing students is that's not a great metaphor because it's not illuminating. It doesn't tell us what the phenomenon is.

When I thought about what might be a better analogy, I thought that a walled-in space, which is hyper-densely populated, which is imposed by an occupying power that doesn't have prison guards but does have a local force that rules it that, in some ways, is empowered by the occupying power, all of these things are actually most reminiscent of a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe. Even though or perhaps because that comparison is so shocking, I think it gives us language for understanding what's happening now.

My argument is that what's happening now is that the ghetto is being liquidated. If you think about the similarities, they're really chilling. The way that ghettos were liquidated in Nazi-occupied Europe, and I spent a lot of my writing life studying this, is that a lot of the time, ghettos would be compressed in space. Jews would be told to go from a larger space that they occupy to a smaller space. Defense would literally be moved.

Often troops shooting indiscriminately would be running through the streets of the ghetto shooting people on site to force them into this smaller space. Of course, another weapon of war that the Nazis used against Jews was starvation and disease. Of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, 1.3 million died of starvation and disease. That is also exactly what we're seeing in Gaza. Human Rights Watch has already come out saying unequivocally that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war. It is also using disease.

We're hearing and seeing a lot of reports of people unable to get care. Yesterday, I heard an absolutely chilling audio of a conversation with a woman whose entire family was sick who has been dislocated. 9 out of 10 people in Gaza have been displaced at this point and who couldn't get medical care because they were too weak to walk anywhere to seek medical care. If that doesn't make you think of Jews in ghettos of the Holocaust, then I don't know what will.

Brian Lehrer: Let me summarize some of the pushback and then we'll also take some phone calls. My guest, if you're just joining us, is Masha Gessen, New Yorker staff writer who had the ceremony for her Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought canceled because of what was in The New Yorker that they were just describing. 212-433-WNYC, as we continue on the show to get a variety of points of view about what's been going on in Israel and Gaza.

Yesterday, it was Jodi Rudoren, the editor of the Jewish news organization, The Forward. Today, it's Masha Gessen. One difference you acknowledge is that Israel's justification for walling in Gaza stems from actual and repeated acts of violence unlike the Nazis, who just ghettoized as pure acts of hate, the only aggressor in that equation. Some defenders of Israel will argue that that difference is more defining than the way you apparently see it.

They would say Israel tried to be done with Gaza more than 15 years ago, but Hamas, bent on the destruction of Israel, not just independence from it, kept drawing them in with rocket attacks that needed to be defended against, and culminating on October 7th with those atrocities, and then embedding themselves among civilians to force Israel into this position of killing civilians as not a goal of Israel unto itself like the Nazis liquidating the ghettos but a necessary evil in order to actually get to the Hamas fighters to kill or disarm them. That's such a different set of circumstances, the argument goes, than what the Nazis did to Jews and others as to make the comparisons you're trying to emphasize much less meaningful. How would you respond to that kind of critique?

Masha Gessen: There are obviously differences and there's no such thing as a one-to-one comparison. My argument is that the very real threat that emanates from Hamas does not justify or even begin to explain the collective immiseration that Israel has visited on people in Gaza. It also certainly does not explain why, over the course of 17 years, Israel prevented people from leaving Gaza.

The policy that gave rise to this very strange metaphor of an open-air prison was that Israel had a policy of not allowing travel in and out of Gaza and not issuing passports to people in Gaza and allowing them to go abroad. Locking people in behind a wall and creating this hyper-densely populated impoverished, the poverty rates and unemployment rates in Gaza are among the highest in the world, along with the population density, is not explained by this threat of violence. If you think about it, it's the exact opposite of a rational response to violence.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call with a connection to Germany. Nika in Chicago, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Nika: Hi, can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear you.

Nika: Okay, it's so great to be on the phone with you finally. I'm such a long-time listener from when I lived in Brooklyn for about eight years during college. Then afterwards, I'm also a long-time reader of Masha Gessen. I think we ran into each other at a party for SNOB magazine. I attended while I still lived there. I am a Moldovan immigrant to the United States. My parents brought me here when I was about three and three-quarters. It was 1991.

I had actually spent about six months in Israel during the Gulf War before being able to immigrate with my mom directly from Moldova. My father was already at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. I have been living with the trauma of that experience in Israel throughout my entire life in a way that was very, very hard to talk about. Recently, what I've come to understand is that we talk about the Holocaust as, like I think you said, Mr. Lehrer, like a singular violence in German history or in European enlightenment history.

The experience of Jews in Europe beyond the parameters of that kind of Western imperialism was not any better. My grandfather was functionally expelled from Moldova. I just think that one thing that's been missing from the conversation on Israel and Hamas has been the reality that Jews weren't the only people who were sterilized and killed by the Third Reich, so were queer people, Romas, and the psychiatric patients. About 75% to 100% of psychiatric patients were--

Brian Lehrer: Let me jump in just to say that that is in Masha's article. They were very explicit about the Holocaust being memorialized in Germany in various ways with what they call the stumbling stones on the streets in some places, remembering specific individuals who were Roma, were homosexual, were others who were persecuted.

Nika: I don't think we really know what a Roma is. Yes, but the status of psychiatric patients globally continues to be degraded, stigmatized.

Brian Lehrer: People with mental illness are also cited by Masha in that article, just saying.

Nika: In fact, even my rabbi is not open-armed in drawing lengths of solidarity locally with the community of psychiatric patients while he is very much actively in community with Brandon Johnson or in political allegiance to Brandon Johnson, the Chicago mayor.

Brian Lehrer: Do you want to finish your point? Feel free to finish your point, Nika, if you're critiquing Masha.

Nika: Oh, I've just been following this debate around what happened in Berlin. I got a graduate degree there. I went to the new school, which was a home base for Hannah Arendt when she immigrated to the United States. I just don't think the debate was out of line. Masha, I love your contribution, but I also think that these are really thorny issues. I don't know that Hannah Arendt's legacy hasn't been zombified in Germany and in the United States. I just want to say that probably--

Brian Lehrer: Nika, thank you. Masha?

Masha Gessen: Let me just respond on the Hannah Arendt point. She was a fervent comparer of Nazis and the Holocaust, specifically to Israel. In 1948, so the year that the state of Israel was formed, she wrote a letter to The New York Times that was ultimately signed by Albert Einstein, among others, objecting to a planned visit to the United States by Menachem Begin, then the head of the Freedom Party.

He eventually went on to become the Israeli Prime Minister. What Arendt wrote in her letter was that the tactics used by the paramilitary arm of that party and the ideology of the party reminded her of the Nazis and that this was a fascist ideology taking hold in Israel, which she found dangerous. The support for which in the United States, which she saw starting to take shape, she also found dangerous.

Specifically, what she used as an example of this danger was an attack that this paramilitary arm had staged on an Arab village that was outside the Theater of War at the time in 1948, during what Israelis called the War of Independence, where she felt that the population had been attacked and driven out of their homes simply for being Arab. She saw that as clearly reminiscent of what had happened to the Jews in Europe.

I would say that my comparison of Gaza to a Jewish ghetto falls squarely within the intellectual tradition of Hannah Arendt, which doesn't mean that I think it's unassailable. Comparisons are made so we can parse out the similarities and the differences and understand in what way this comparison is or isn't informative. What happened in Germany was that the sponsors of the Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought tried to shut down discussion, saying that this kind of comparison foreclosed it.

Brian Lehrer: Nika, thank you for your call. I'm going to take another call of pushback. Mike in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Masha Gessen. Hello, Mike.

Mike: Hi. I follow a lot of the logic of what you're saying. I think you're definitely being intellectually truthful and the logic makes sense. The one thing that keeps coming up though for me is even with the ability to criticize Israel, and I'm open to hearing any criticism because you don't want to give anyone carte blanche, Hamas' whole strategy is to say, "We're going to attack you, then we're going to be amongst the civilians' population. If you attack us back, you're now in the wrong."

Too many people will say, "Well, I'm not a military expert, so I don't have an answer to that question, but Israel shouldn't be doing what it's doing." If I were Hamas, I would be doing exactly what they're doing, which is to attack, re-embed amongst the civilian population, and then wait for Israel to say either they can't really attack back, or if they do, now they're the bad guy.

I just think we need a whole new way of thinking about how does the world and the UN respond to organizations like Hamas, which is basically playing our liberal democratic values against us because Israel is damned if they do and they're damned if they don't. When someone says, "Well, I'm not a military expert. I don't have an answer to that," well then my answer to them is, "Then Israel got to do whatever they think is best because what's the alternative?"

Brian Lehrer: Mike, thank you. Masha?

Masha Gessen: I agree with you on the point that we need a whole new way of thinking about this. I don't agree about Israel, "Damned if you do it, damned if you don't," because I think that there's something wrong with the argument that this kind of onslaught is the way to root out Hamas. There's clearly no game plan for actually getting Hamas.

Tens of thousands of civilians who have been killed, hundreds of thousands of civilians who have been displaced, who are starving, who are dying of disease, how is that going to help end terrorism? How is that going to lessen support for Hamas in Gaza? If anything, in addition to just being, at this point, plainly a crime against humanity because of the number of civilians killed and immiserated, it's also clearly a machine for manufacturing more support for Hamas.

Brian Lehrer: Mike, thank you very much for your call. I want to ask you another question about the Germany aspect of this. The German project of memorializing the Holocaust as a central aspect of contemporary German practice and education and even singularly so, which is part of your critique, is sometimes used as a model by progressives in this country who want the US to do something similar with respect to this country's original sins of slavery and genocide against the Native Americans. Instead, we get Ron DeSantis and a so-called parents' rights movement, China keep those histories watered down, and to move on without a real truth and reconciliation process in this country. The progressives say, "Look how Germany got it right." I'm curious to what extent you share that thinking.

Masha Gessen: I do share that thinking to a large extent because I still think that the variety and the intentionality rather of the memorialization and the creation of memory culture in Germany is something truly extraordinary. It really is something that I think no people had done before. Just train this very clear eye on the Duckers chapter of their past. The moment that something turns from a set of ideas and a process of political engagement into an ideology, that's when things go off the rails. I think that's what's happened in Germany. Let's just get into some specifics there, a little bit inside baseball.

I think that we need them to understand what's really happening there. One of the things that's happened, and it's also happening in this country, which is that an odd definition of antisemitism has been adopted and is being instrumentalized. It's a definition of antisemitism created by an organization called the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, which is used to interpret critique of Israel, particularly any statements that call Israeli policies racist and any statements that compare Israeli policies to Nazi policies. They're called a priori antisemitic.

Germany has created this vast bureaucracy of anti-antisemitism commissioners who take down and defund and otherwise silence people whom they see as being guilty of Holocaust trivialization, Holocaust leveling, and what they call Israel-related antisemitism. The reason that I say it's happening in this country too is because, actually, the State Department has also adopted the HRA definition of antisemitism. Congress, just last week, passed a non-binding resolution equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. These are all fronts to free speech and not great ways of fighting antisemitism, and also ways of taking this memory culture that was a really generative political process and turning it into a political culture.

Brian Lehrer: We're just about out of time. I want to get one thought from you on the other way you've been in the news this month. You're now not just a critic of Vladimir Putin. You're wanted by him also for an alleged crime of speech spreading what he claims are falsehoods about the Russian military. You've been a leading critic of Putin on the world stage for years. Why do you think he took this creepy step now?

Masha Gessen: I just got news from my lawyer that I'll be arrested in absentia on Monday.

Brian Lehrer: What? What does that mean? Where are you?

Masha Gessen: I'm in New York, but a Moscow court is going to issue an arrest order. Right now, there's an arrest warrant. Now, there's going to be an arrest order, and then they're going to try me in absentia. I'm one of about 250 journalists and activists, but I think primarily journalists who are accused of "knowingly" spreading false information about the Russian military.

This is a law that went into effect almost two years ago in the first week of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine when they instituted a set of laws aimed at silencing any potential protest, and also aimed at driving out what remained of Russian independent media basically forcing the entire independent media community into exile because, very clearly, they would be risking arrest because anything that doesn't come directly from the Russian defense ministry can potentially be interpreted as either discrediting the Russian armed forces, which is a lesser crime, or knowingly spreading false information about the Russian armed forces, which is the crime that I'm charged with, which carries a potential penalty of more than 10 years in prison.

People who are not tried in absentia like I'm going to be, and there are dozens of them, are imprisoned in Russia now. They've gotten terms of between seven and a half and 10 years. The reason they're doing it now is because the political crackdown there is intensifying. There's this machine that works to terrorize people who are both inside and outside the country. If you're wondering why they would go against somebody who is living in exile, it is partly to make our lives inconvenience because there are now a lot of countries in the world that I can't travel to because they have extradition treaties that they actually observe with Russia.

It's actually probably most of the world. The other thing is that because they also have teams of assassins roaming in the European Union. There have been a number of incidents of poisonings of Russian journalists, particularly women journalists living in exile in the last year. It's also putting people who are living in exile unnoticed basically saying, "We're going to get you somewhere." They're not going to arrest me, but they want me to be scared of them.

Brian Lehrer: Do you need to put security around yourself in a new way because of this?

Masha Gessen: I don't know how one protects oneself from being poisoned in one's own home, which is what's happened to these women in Europe. I'm hoping that I'm safer in New York. It's not something you can effectively protect yourself again, which is an old KGB tactic. They used to kill people abroad in the '60s and '70s and they continue to do it today.

Brian Lehrer: Well, we're not going to solve Vladimir Putin today and we're not going to solve Germany today and we're certainly not going to solve the Middle East today as we continue to present a variety of points of view and have, hopefully, open conversation, including your calls of pushback in this case as we listen also to Masha Gessen, their article in The New Yorker that started all this, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, in the December 9th edition. Thank you very much for joining us, Masha.

Masha Gessen: Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. More in a minute as we will end on a lighter note.

 

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