The Holocaust was in the headlines at the end of the second world war, and genocide as well and then they disappeared. Of course, in Israel people were concerned with it. Yad Vashem was established but in Western consciousness the Holocaust played a minimal role in historiography, commemoration and cultural discourse. Today, we forget that until the 1980s, you could write a book about the Second World War and the Holocaust would not even appear in the index. You could write a book about 20th century Europe without mentioning the Holocaust. You can take a course in German history and there would be nothing about the Holocaust. That is to say that it came back to life, you might say during the 1980s. Beforehand, it was something else. Now, this may partly be attributed to trauma and it can be explained with all sorts of psychological explanations. The reason Europe today a culture of remembrance and commemoration. The Holocaust of course appears nowadays as one of the major events of the 20th century. It did not appear that way 30 years ago but today it does. But what does that mean? What conclusions may one draw from this? Not to always the same conclusions. One might conclude that Europe today is completely different. It is a post-Holocaust world. It is a society, a civilization which is no longer able to think about such events. I mean, to think about it from a distance, to think of it as something which took place in the past, the Holocaust may also be perceived as something which brings people together. That is one of the things I find more troubling. You can come to a research center in Birkenau and groups come near from Germany and Poland and they meet and they have seminars about bringing the poles and Germans closer together. Why do the poles and Germans need to be brought closer over the graves of more than a million Jews is not entirely clear. There is a kind of feeling that through this trauma the Holocaust without going into what the trauma is exactly, an understanding can be reached. I heard the same thing in Strasbourg about two years ago when I was there at a conference. In Europe today, as part of the legislation of the European Union, it is compulsory to teach the Holocaust. This subject is thought of as something essential for Europe in order to understand itself as Europe as one civilization. So there was this event in Strasbourg, and it was talked about there that's Strasbourg which was a bone of contention between France and Germany was the best place in which to hold a meeting about the holocaust in order to bring Germans and Frenchmen closer together. Albeit with good intentions. Their intention is definitely that people should know and remember but these use is sometimes strange. I think that the Western culture, the Western world, Europe has not finished dealing with the Holocaust. The Holocaust is stuck within its body, its consciousness, it's culture. Neither is swallowed nor vomited. Europe, I would say is still sick because of the Holocaust because of what the Nazis did to the Jews because of the collaboration of European nations, the French, other nations, the poles. It sticks in their throats and their confrontation with it has only just begun. We see that 60 years "celebrations," celebrations in quotation marks of course, the 60 years celebrations that took place this year on the 27th of January commemorating the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. This need of theirs to confront memory only grows their need to process this atrocity. To overcome this "unheimlich," this threatening, threatened. Freudian thing which exists within them which for years they attempted to suppress but which bursts out and rises up again. This suppressed thing comes back and terrifies and haunts them. It exists within their conscious world. Europe has not finished its episode with the Holocaust. In my opinion, this episode will become more powerful as the years go by though I can't say for how long, we are also seeing a huge body of literature which has been written about the Holocaust not so much by survivors as by researchers, by thinkers in various fields, by philosophers and sociologists and so on, and also of course by historians. It just keeps growing. Every time we speak about the Holocaust, the world has to undergo trauma. Trauma in the sense that such talk reminds that humanity lost itself in this place. So it is a blessing drama. If it reminds me not only what could happen but it reminds me that I am a human being, that I can, that I have the ability to be once again. Not only within the trauma of the Jewish Holocaust but also in others. I think about that, the shock we take from the Holocaust must be constantly in the thoughts of the world. I think the West doesn't view things today as they should. Today, there is an idea that you should allow people to visit Auschwitz and these places. They do it in 24 hours. They go in the morning and return in the evening. That is the shock that people undergo. The people lost their lives by the hand of their fellow human beings. I am not looking to blame or to judge. We have moved beyond blaming a nation, but it could have happened to any nation, to all of humanity. All nations carry the possibility that it could happen again. Not only against Jews, but rather against the whole of humanity. So I think that this is a human universal trauma. The use of the word trauma here is questionable. One may borrow the term but of course trauma is something that happens to a single person. Trauma is a psychological event which happens to a person as an individual. Trauma does not happen to humanity. In the case of humanity, when you speak about trauma with a nation, you are simply speaking of a cultural, political situation which creates a very difficult dilemma that is very difficult to overcome. That being said, the nations of Europe still find themselves within the dilemma of what happened. They have not overcome this dilemma, just as we have not overcome it. Not England, even to this day. I spent a year in England, and I heard many broadcasts on their radio and television. They are still probing almost obsessively into the Second World War. What they did in the Second World War, and what was done to them in the Second World War, because post-war England has not rehabilitated itself. The paradox, which borders on the absurd, is that in fact, when you examine the outcome of the war today, it emerges that Germany won the war and not England. I mean, look where the Germans are today and where the English are. Germany is thriving, whereas England is in decline. She lost her empire, means of existence and still has not managed to rehabilitate itself. All their national systems were disrupted. Their social and cultural networks were utterly shaken up, and there was massive destruction. But the truth is that you cannot say that the Germans have wiped out what happened to them. Because Hitler happened to the German people not just to Jews. This period has shocking significance for them. In many respects, they have not recovered from what happened then. That is definitely true of Poland and Russia as well. What happened there was so horrific and dreadful in this respect. This open wound still has not healed or recovered. So you see that the Holocaust and the way they regard the Holocaust is part of this syndrome. In my opinion, the world experienced nothing. It just learned how to witness an extreme occurrence of atrocity or of killing, or of a production line of death, but it has changed nothing. For those who talk about the Holocaust, it was not a school or university, they have learned nothing from it. One cannot learn anything from it. They always used to say, you have learned nothing from the Holocaust. What's that supposed to mean? The Holocaust was a school of behavior? A school for teaching social etiquette? The Holocaust is almost impossible to grasp from a human point of view, and I don't think the world has learned anything from it. Perhaps it has invented some laws which may protect it from other holocausts but they won't prevent one. Perhaps the establishment of the United Nations came as a result of what happened then or the establishment of the State of Israel. I don't think it would've been established without the Holocaust. Because it suddenly became clear then that the Jews have nowhere to go. So we have a homeland, but I don't know how long it will last. Most of the world thinks we have no right to be here. So what the world learns or doesn't learn from this, I don't know. We live in a generation in which many people go around with numbers on their arms. The minute they no longer exist, there will be no more numbers and their children will no longer be around, and that day is not so far off. It will become just another historical event like the Hundred Years' War, or the Thirty Years' War. What do you know about the Hundred Years' War? Do you know details? You know there was a war, millions of people were killed. I think many people have an honest desire to be sorry, to atone in one way or another, but it is not a universal behavior. Neither can it be universal. The Americans have not yet come to terms with the problem of the Native Americans and everyone has enough baggage full of atrocities in their unresolved past. The crux of the Holocaust is for us, for Jews, unique. For others, it is just another thing.
