Methods: Getting on the Public Memory Bandwagon

This is a bit jumbled right now, but here are some ideas I've been working on.

Methods

After trying to resist the siren call of the Public Memory bandwagon, I have determined that it will be the best critical perspective for what I am trying to capture with this project.  As Holocaust deniers tend to call themselves "revisionist historians," they tend to believe they are making positive contributions to public memory.  Through an analysis of publications from the Institute for Historical Review (Look, Ma!  We're trying to make ourselves look legitimate by giving ourselves a fancy official name!) and the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), I intend to explore limitations that might ensue from a uniquely optimistic view of public memory.  


When most people hear the words "revisionist historian," they probably think of people like Howard Zinn.  They probably do not expect a "revisionist historian" to say that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz or that testimony is not a legitimate form of evidence.  While it may be hard to imagine that anyone would take these people seriously, people do.  The irony here, of course, is that the idea of "revisionist history" came out of academia, yet most academic scholars, and, for that matter, most of the general educated public, recognize the work of Holocaust deniers as weak, ideologically-motivated pseudo-scholarship that's not worth the time of day to read.  Not only do they borrow academic theory, but, as they want to seem highly educated themselves, Holocaust deniers also borrow academic conventions: they write "peer-reviewed" publications, they hold conferences, they cite sources.  Yet they also distort and ignore evidence in order to promote a particular agenda.


What I am interested in with this project is how concepts like revisionist history and public memory can be perverted by extremist groups.  Perhaps I am wrong about this, but it seems that we generally assume that revisionist history and public memory studies will make positive contributions to our understanding of history and truth (writ small).  That is, by uncovering the stories of marginalized groups, we will know more about history, cultural forces, and the world at large.  Now, I do not intend to discredit the work of scholars who pursue this kind of work, but what happens when the challenge to dominant narrative is corrupt, arguably malicious, and capable of producing serious material consequences?


My goal with this project is to explore Holocaust denial as a possible limitation to the study of public memory studies.  I do not intend to dismiss or destroy public memory; I believe public memory studies are one of our discipline's great accomplishments.  On the contrary, I hope to better understand how our ways of thinking about public memory could be used against us by extremist groups and how learning about these groups might help us respond to them.  To this end, an analysis of Kendall Phillips's notions of the "memory of publics" and the "publicness of remembering" operate in the case of Holocaust denial will be useful.  


Questions


Some questions I have generated based on my understanding of these terms are the following: 


1) What happens when groups with a malicious agenda attempt to pass as legitimate "publics"?  Should all groups be given a fair hearing?  If not, how should we determine which groups should not?


2) What happens when circulated public questions of memory are inaccurate and, more importantly, offensive (for example, when David Irving asked a Holocaust survivor how much she paid for her tattoo)?


3) Are there some questions of history or memory that should eventually be taken as fact and not questioned?  If so, how should we determine them?  If not, how should we handle viewpoints like these?


Texts


The texts I have started to analyze (mostly from the IHR and CODOH) have been fascinating.  One question that I've had is how Holocaust deniers constitute themselves as a group and attract new members, how they constitute their opponents / mainstream society, and how they participate in the debate over free speech.  CODOH founder Bradley Smith's "Confessions of a Holocaust Denier," an autobiographical account of Smith's conversion to Holocaust denial and experiences as a denier has been very useful.  The websites for the IHR and CODOH have also been handy (for example, CODOH has a randomly generated free speech quote at the top of the page each time it loads).  


Context


I have already mentioned the context of the Irving v. Lipstadt trial and Holocaust denial laws.  One thing that I haven't spent too much time on, however, is the fact that there will soon be no more Holocaust survivors to give first-hand accounts of what they experienced.  What concerns me is that ten years after Irving v. Lipstadt, Holocaust denial is alive and, to some extent, well.  Of course, Holocaust deniers discount the testimony of survivors anyways, but I wonder if the absence of survivors will make it easier for them to spread their messages in the future. 


Next steps: 


1) Read Stephen Browne's essay on Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and Barry Schwartz and Horst-Alfred Heinrich's essay on German and American way of responding to "shameful events" in Framing Public Memory.  From the way Phillips describes these essays, they should be useful in my discussion about memory and forgetting.


2) Analyze some of the texts previously mentioned (Bradley Smith's "Confessions of a Holocaust Denier," The Institute for Historical Review's leaflets)


3) Make sense of how these questions all relate to each other and begin to answer them.


More to come!