'To remember everything is madness, but to forget is a betrayal.' These are the words of Abba Kovner one of the leaders of the anti-Nazi resistance in the ghetto to which the Nazis had banished all the Jews of Vilna (Vilnius) in Lithuania. In 1947, only two years after the end of the Second World War, Kovner was contributing to a discussion about how the soon-to-be-established State of Israel should commemorate those complex and terrible events that we now call the Holocaust.

'At around the same time the Organisation of Polish Jews in America proposed setting up a Holocaust memorial in New York City. They ran into strong opposition from the leaders of the American Jewish establishment. After nearly three years of deliberations, a representative of one of these institutions summarised the case against the project, saying it 'would be detrimental to the best interest of Jewry since it would stand as a perpetual reminder … that the Jews are a helpless minority whose safety and very lives depend upon the whim of the people among whom they live or the governments who control their destinies.' The site was dedicated on 19 October 1947 but the memorial was never built.

In 1946, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who later caused great controversy with her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, was certain that 'no conceivable chronicle of any kind could succeed in turning six million dead people into a political argument.' She was wrong. Even in the optimistic postwar macho age, in which there was hardly any room for remembering the Jewish victims, the Holocaust was already being used under the reductionist code of the 'six million', to endorse Zionism in Israel and liberalism and democracy in America.

Tourist trade

But in America, the Western Mecca of consumerism, the instrumental usage of the Holocaust soon started to be played out in the market place. As soon as the Holocaust's commercial potential as a tourist attraction and a quality leisure activity was discovered, the 'joy of victimhood', as author and journalist Ian Buruma has called it, entered the popular culture. Television shows and films about the Holocaust attracted a broad and mixed audience. So did other forms of business ventures.

In St Petersburg, Florida, 'Remember the Holocaust' is number 11 on a list of '40 Fun Things to Do' in the city. For just $39.95, visitors can purchase a scale-model replica of a Polish box car once used by the Nazis to transport Jews to the camps. For a donation of $5,000 one can leave with a genuine railway spike from Treblinka. A few years ago, the Embassy Suites hotels named as winner of their 'First Annual Well-Travelled Luggage Contest', a small, tattered pre-World War II suitcase that survived the Holocaust … through the ghetto, forced labor camp, displaced persons' camp in Germany, and to the family's new home in America'. Another prizewinner in this contest was a 25-year-old American briefcase that had travelled to 49 states of the union.

Even the highly acclaimed US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington is marketed as an exclusive tourist attraction. The Carlton Hotel in Washington DC has advertised 'a special package' in conjunction with the popular museum. Since 'only a limited number of tickets are available each day to experience this haunting and moving museum', the Carlton 'offers its premier package, featuring these exclusive and sought-after tickets'. Other components of the Weekend Museum package include 'deluxe accommodations at our newly renovated hotel, a late checkout, and a lavish Sunday brunch, including a sumptuous buffet. The brunch ambience is enhanced by piano accompaniment.'

Seeing is not understanding

In the course of its natural move from living memory into history, the Holocaust as a historical event has been transformed into a universal cultural icon. This is evident in the glut of Holocaust memorials of many shapes and forms that have dotted many landscapes like mushrooms after rain. Accompanying this phenomenon is a changed emphasis on successful representation rather than on meaningful understanding.

It is worthwhile recalling the observation of the Austrian writer, Robert Musil, who said: 'There is nothing in this world as invisible as monuments. They are no doubt erected to be seen — indeed, to attract attention. But at the same time they are impregnated with something that repels attention. … Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression. Anything that constitutes the walls of our life, the backdrop of our consciousness, so to speak, forfeits its capacity to play a role in the consciousness.'

There is something bogus about the fact that the theorised, politicised and consumerists' version of the Holocaust has become the moral litmus in an immoral age, when so little has been done to prevent genocide in our own times. Indeed, what is astonishing about the Holocaust is not that some people have forgotten that it happened, but that so many people who seemingly remember, have learned so little from it.

Indeed, the shift in modes of representations — from history to story-telling; from the concrete to the abstract; from the factual to the fictional; from knowledge to entertainment — has resulted in the experiential dimension of the Holocaust being distanced from human consciousness. Moreover, as history has demonstrated, memory and vengeance have often gone hand in hand. More recently, this is what inflamed the Serbs, who never forgot their defeat some 600 years ago at the hands of the Muslim Turks in the Battle of Kosovo. It is also what continues to hinder the attainment of peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

A core of truth

But these observations should not be read as a plea for forgetting the Holocaust. Rather, they are a plea for an ethics of remembering: for differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate usage of the past.

Let me make my position clear: education is paramount if we are ever to win our struggle against injustice and against social pathologies of whatever kind. Yet I seriously doubt that the Holocaust can serve as a moral benchmark or teach us to be humane. This is precisely because, as Saul Friedländer has said, these events were at 'the limit' of human experience. It is not only that some, however few, may learn how to repeat it, but that we rarely learn from extreme situations.

An ethics of remembering must assure a permanent core of truth that functions alternatively as a formal frame of reference and as a source of legitimisation. This does not mean that remembrance traditions can be static or unchanging, nor that it is feasible or appropriate to determine one 'authentic' memory or 'correct' interpretation of the past. Rather, parameters such as authenticity, truth, and correctness ought to be approached as range concepts that can accommodate changes, but still aim to define the right to be included, and thereby make manifest that which does not belong.

This is all the more necessary since the Holocaust has become a major element in identity politics and an icon in the dubious culture of victimhood, in which various groups plead to redress injustices and social pathologies of very different historical experiences. I do not wish to imply that there were no other victims before or after the Holocaust, nor that its victims were unique. Neither is it my aim to expunge suffering from the collective memory, as some right-wing groups would wish.

Rather, my critique echoes two universal concerns. The first, and more immediate concern is that in the present inflation of claims, recognition and recompense will be awarded to the most powerful and not to the most deserving. For it must be acknowledged that collective memory is both an instrument and an objective of power, so care must be taken to prevent the misuse of memory to determine relationships of power over others. The second, and perhaps more consequential concern in the long term, is the impact that a collective identity based on sentimental solidarity of remembered victimhood has on a community that subscribes to such a self-definition.

It is deeply offensive when the memories of powerless and innocent victims are appropriated by the powerful for multifarious purposes. Modern politicians, whose chief concerns are about coalitions, majorities and winning over interest groups, can hardly be expected to do justice to the past. Spiritual leaders who are in charge of great religious bureaucracies suffer from similar institutional constraints.

In recent times, when ubiquitous apologies for sins and omissions of the past have become essential to political survival, we must be all the more careful not to forget that denouncing evil after the fact is a far cry from doing good. We should heed the late Irving Howe who said: 'The more public tumult about the Holocaust, the less likelihood that the memory of its terribleness will become a serious part of human consciousness.'

The deluge of memories in which our contemporary sensibilities have been immersed attests, perhaps, to what the author Frances Yates thought of us when she wrote in The Art of Memory: 'We moderns have no memories at all.'

If that is indeed the lamentable human condition, we are all the more obliged to challenge the rhetorical, political and religious misuses to which this catastrophe has been put; to ensure that what we remember is the victims' truth. As Primo Levi revealed so powerfully, those who suffered were not afraid that future generations would fail to share their pain. Rather, they were afraid that we would fail to recognise the truth.

Dr Gulie Ne'eman Arad teaches European and American history in Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and is the author of America, its Jews, and the Rise of Nazism.

Concentration camp survivor at liberation