The first argument for the failure of generational consciousness to emerge in Central and Eastern Europe was that in the absence of a sense of historical continuity there can be no generations. But the historical consciousness of the Jewry of the region is not identical with the consciousness of the majority, because no Jew could say that they had lost or won the Second World War. “Its only now I understand, “ writes Maxim Biller, a child of Russian parents raised in Prague and currently living as a Jewish writer in Germany, “that a German writer has no need of history or historical sense, and finds it unnecessary to identify himself with or even understand himself as a kind of individuality or personality whose existence is directed by the entire current of history. When a man knows that in all probability he will be buried one fine day in the same ground on which he has spent his whole life roaming, that he has a permanent home, that’s more than enough to put his soul to rest. (…) But for a Jew who is sure, at the end of the day, that he is not bound to any single place on earth (…) the history of his own people is the only permanent dwelling place.” Apart from its uncharacteristic pathos, this assertion of Biller’s could probably be extended over all the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe.
The School of Identity
The memory of the shared experience of the Shoah is kept alive involuntarily in the continuity of history, but above and beyond that, through the kind of attitude described by Korniss. And that is the second reason why generations existed within the Jewish diaspora. Whereas for a long time an independent discourse, which one or another generation could regard as their own, failed to appear around the events following the war, the Shoah did not allow for competing discourses. Nor could any self-respecting state apparatus allow itself to alter the holocaust story to the extent they did the histories of the ‘56 and ‘68 revolutions for example. The accounts, in Thalassa 1994 1-2, of the psychoanalysts who examined and treated the offspring of holocaust survivors in the region testify that what is at issue here is a continuously sustained discourse, and not some kind of mystified “national spirit”. In one of her papers Judith Kestenberg distinguished three generations: the survivors, their children and the third generation. She concludes that the children of survivors tend to treat the Shoah secret as their own, and feel they have to hide it from their own children, yet they unwittingly bequeath it to the third generation. The transmission takes place through slips and silences and spontaneous outbursts (what psychologists term “acting out”) – with the aid of the entire artillery of meta-communication.
From inadvertent fragments such as these the identity of the third generation came into being: from an event which they can remember without ever having experienced it; the unconscious behaviour of one generation generating a conscious identity in the next. Emi Baruh of Sofia devotes a large section of her essay to what she terms the “will” of memory – that is, the “selective memory” of the Jews – in which, for example, every Passover repeats the story of the exodus from Egypt, while a deep silence surrounds the lived experience of the holocaust. The creative artist wishes to remember everything, leaving no part of the past uncovered, and it is from this will that she draws her identity of otherness. Maxim Biller, who writes exclusively about Jews asserts that for him it’s not so much the holocaust itself that supplies his theme, but what it did to the survivors and their offspring, or rather exactly those shifts in conscious and unconscious behaviour which made his own identity just so. He replaces actual memory with aestheticized renderings of “acted out” moments and the other phenomena of meta-communication.
Milosziak, in whose family Jewishness was never mentioned, was Christened by each of his grandmothers separately, because “if another Hitler comes along and the authorities don’t let you into one village, well, you can go to the other”. The twice-Christened Milosziak then lived through the “holocaust-like” Czechoslovakian assimilation policy – the exaggeration illustrates the extent of his identification, as though he himself had become a participant in the story of his ancestors. This is even clearer in the case of David Albahari who performs the same identification as a certain kind of “ars poetica”: the memory of the holocaust, according to him, obliges the writer to stand against every kind of horror. Albahari’s reference here is to the Yugoslavian war; Elma Softic -Kaunitz from Sarajevo puts it more directly – in Sarajevo they survived a second holocaust, which goes to show that humankind has not improved in the least since the Shoah. Victor Neumann, Konstaty Gebert and Milosziak don’t put a name to it, but they write about communism as an unmistakably similar “small age of fear”, which further broadens the already wide shared experience of the Jews of the region with yet another oppressive experience.
Traditional Choices
When it comes to the Jews, my earlier treatise on the absence of the dynamics of modernity is only moderately true. No amount of state propaganda could have convinced all these people, who carry within themselves the memory of a shared experience, that their sense of belonging together was mere deviance. The propaganda could not counter the fact that everyone knew that “Jewish consciousness” had provided the dynamic that modernised an internationally recognised Jewish state. It is a separate issue that the image of Israel in the popular imagination of the time was so obviously idealised – a sort of vision of Canaan, since whatever was actually happening over there could only be guessed at from the vague rumours that reached us.
The third generation came to consciousness in the mid-‘80s, in the era of the “revival of history”, and immediately began searching for a tradition for its own peculiar, fragmented Jewishness, a Jewishness which was patched together from the haberdashery of meta-communication. The return to tradition has always proved a secure “modernisation strategy” in periods overburdened with history, or, as Mircea Eliade puts it in his Myth of Eternal Return, the return to tradition is elicited by an instinctive opposition to history (Eliade, 1993, 212-222). This generation freely chose the possibility (or rather the obligation) of a “revival of history” as their identity, but on the other hand they undoubtedly moved to replace their “instinctive” Judaism with “conscious” Judaism as quickly as possible, because they blanched at the uncertainty that accompanied the changes. The most obvious solution seemed to be the “importation of tradition” and in this too Israel stepped in immediately with the “nationalist innovation” – to use Eric Hobsbawn`s term – of tradition (Hobsbawm, 1983, 13-14). In 1989, Israel had several hundred young people – myself among them – flown out to the Jewish state, for a taster of the promised land as guests of the nation, to witness both the ancient and the four-decade-old traditions, the ideology, the kibbutzim etc. This was the first time most of the young Central and Eastern Europeans had ever seen Jews doing physical labour – but then this was the first time any of the Israelis had ever met Jews who were not fanatical about the ideology of the nation-state. The missionary fervour of the Jewish Agency has subsided significantly since then, although I once met an orthodox guy in Cernovic who was leading kids in a dance to fake Israeli folk songs, and in Prague I saw young people in kipot booing the newly elected Netanyahu with all the zeal of the neophyte, when in the course of his speech he alluded to a pursuit of the peace process.