The Americanization Of The Holocaust

The Holocaust happened in another continent which is far away from America,and this event had little direct links with the Americans.Although the Holocaust had less "American background" during World War II,it did not disappear from the stage of American society and the Americans’ memory.On the contrary,during the Post-Holocaust Era,it has gradually moved on to the stage of American public discourse,and eventually became part of the national memory.The American society uses its own cultural prism to interpret the Holocaust,and the latter has become one of the main reference points of the American politics and popular culture.In addition to the Introduction and Conclusion,this study is divided into five chapters to explore the Americanization of the Holocaust.In the first chapter I scrutinize the attitudes of the American society towards the Holocaust during World War II.When the Nazis started the murder-machine to extinguish the European Jews,the Roosevelt government failed to rescue the Jews actively and effectively;the American media and non-Jewish people were indifferent to the fate of the Jewish people;the Jewish community’ s cowardice and self-centered attitudes made them fail to respond in an effective way.After the war,those reaction and attitudes have been criticized,and the American government was called the conspiracy of the Holocaust crime,all of which become the blasting fuse of the reflection on the Holocaust in the future.In the second chapter I mainly research the American society’s concern about the Holocaust in the early postwar period.For a long time,there was a "consensus" for the academia--there was no Holocaust discourse in the American society until Eichmann Trial in the 1960s.However,in 1945-1960,the popular culture which was represented by The Diary of Anne Frank played an indispensable role in attracting the American people’s attention to the Holocaust.These works of popular culture interpreted the Holocaust from the perspectives which helped the ordinary people for the better understanding of the event.Some works conveyed the creeds and ideas the American people were happy to hear,and some of them reflect racial discrimination and injustice in American society.Besides,in the process of raising fund for the Jewish survivors,the American Jewish charity organizations spread the information of the Holocaust to thousands of families in an more efficient and faster way through fund-raising materials,posters,announcements,radio programs and short films.In the academic field,historians represented by Philip Friedman and Raul Hilberg began to build the Holocaust study in the United States,and some of their research ideas and methods are still important guidelines in the Holocaust study.In the third chapter I explore the rise of the Holocaust discourse in the United States.The Eichmann Trial in 1961 became an important watershed of attracting the attention of the American people to the Holocaust,and it played a key role in the rise of the Holocaust discourse in the United States,and the authoritative position of the Holocaust survivor’s testimony was established since then.The Arendt Controversy triggered by Eichmann in Jerusalem lighted the the American academy’s interest of the Holocaust.At the same time,with the continuous development of the American civil rights movement,in order to express their interests more effectively,some ethnic minorities and groups which had endured social injustice and discrimination for a long time began to use the Holocaust discourse as a tool to reveal American social problems.In this process,the American civil rights movement made the wider middle and lower classes to know the Holocaust.With the deepening of the study of the civil rights movement in American academia,more and more scholars began to use the Holocaust discourse as a means of understanding the turmoils of American society and politics,which in turn promoted the study of the Holocaust in America.It is particularly worth mentioning that,in recent years,the international Holocaust study no longer regarded the Afro-American civil rights movement just as part of American history,but rather classified it as a category of global history to explore how the Afro-American civil rights movement promoted the Holocaust discourse to become a model of global collective memory.The Second Vatican Council not only opened the prelude to the Christian world’s reflection on the Holocaust,but also became the catalyst of Christian-Jewish dialogue.In this process,it pushed the American society to think about their own responsibility during the Holocaust.Meanwhile,some Christian scholars felt guilt and remorse and began to study the Holocaust,some of whom also set up courses of the Holocaust study in colleges and universities.Therefore,the Holocaust gradually occupied an important position in the United States.In the fourth chapter I study the Americanization of the Holocaust memory.The establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum(USHMM)in the core memorial area of Washington,DC,is a hub for the Americanization of the Holocaust,which officially marked the Holocaust memory becoming part of national memory.The Human Rights Diplomacy of the United States and the tension between the White House and the American Jewish community were the inseparable political reasons to establish the USHMM.It also branded a strong political imprint in the museum from the beginning,and the politics influenced the entire construction process of the USHMM.There were a series of controversies surrounding the definition and the number of the Holocaust victims,the Jewish uniqueness of the Holocaust,the Americanization of the museum,the location of the USHMM and so on.These debates eventually evolved into the tensions between Carter and Elie Wiesel,between the White House and the American Jewish community,and between the American Jewish community and other ethnic minorities.The final completion of the USHMM showed strong Americanization features.Visitors can strongly feed the Holocaust is closely related with the United States when they were visiting the museum.It also made the United States as a witness-county of the Holocaust,and made the American people become the direct witnesses.Although the museum exhibited the America’s attitudes and policies towards the Jewish refugees during World War II,but it highlighted more on the America’s heroic image in defeat of the fascist countries and the liberation of Nazi concentration camps.Today,the USHMM has become an important Holocaust Education base,an archive of Holocaust evidence,a site of Holocaust memory and an official institution of Holocaust Study in the world.In the last chapter I discuss the internationalization of the Holocaust discourse.The internationalization of the Holocaust discourse has undergone a process in which the United States has played an important role.The NBC Mini-Series Holocaust had an indispensable impact on the Holocaust memory of the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany.For one thing,it was an important watershed in the development of the American Holocaust discourse;for another,it also was a catalyst for the Federal Republic of Germany to explore the history of the Nazis,which opened the prelude to the German society’s intense discussion of the Third Reich.At the level of intergovernmental exchanges,London Conference in 1997,the Washington Conference in 1998 and the International Holocaust Forum of Stockholm in 2000 performed an essential function in the internationalization of the Holocaust.The United States has played an important role in convening these three vital international conferences,and encouraged the European countries to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and brought the Holocaust education to the center of the international community.Under the influence of the above-mentioned meetings,the Holocaust education programs and memorial activities of European countries and organizations have sprung up.In this context,the United Nations also participated in this process in 2005,and the 60th session of the United Nations General Assembly unanimously passed Resolution A/RES/60/7 to designate 27 January as the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust,and requested member states to preserve Holocaust memory and sites,promote Holocaust education and combat "Holocaust Denial",which became an important milestone in the internationalization of the Holocaust discourse.With the participation,support and promotion of the United Nations,the Holocaust discourse has become a touchstone for the possibility to exposing social problems,supervising human rights and detecting cultural tolerance.It also has been a core factor of cultural cognition and educational cognition in the world.The main conclusions are as follows:Firstly,to the large extent,the Americanization of the Holocaust reflects the development and vicissitude of American culture,society and politics.Weakening the Jewishness and strengthening the American characteristics are the important features of this process.Secondly,the Americanization of the Holocaust fully demonstrates that cultural memory has the ability to reconstruct the cognition of history.American society extended,interpreted and reconstructed the Holocaust memory.The Americanization of the Holocaust is a typical case for studying historical fact and memory construction.Thirdly,from some certain perspective,the reason that the American society focused on the Holocaust is not due to the fact that the main victims were Jews,but because of the connection between the event and America and American experience.The Americanization of the Holocaust helps America to highlight and convey its image.Fourthly,in the process of the Americanization of the Holocaust,there has been a phenomenon of abusing the Holocaust discourse,and it will continue in the foreseeable future.Finally,the Americanization of the Holocaust is inseparable from the macro historical background in which the whole world has been reflecting the war responsibility,racism,morality,humanity and peace,and the process of the Americanization of the Holocaust is also the process of preserving human-catastrophe memory and realizing the disastrous influence of racism.This process of reflection is an important thrust of the development of the Holocaust discourse.Today,racism still has its own market,so we should take the Holocaust as a prism to reflect on the human-made disasters,remember the history,and alert the descendants.