Gideon Mailer's book compares and links public representations of the Holocaust and North American genocide. He approaches his topic with great sensitivity and compassion; he himself lost family members who were murdered during the Shoah.
Mailer's book is situated at the intersection of a number of distinct historical fields – including early American studies, American Indian studies, Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, Holocaust studies, and comparative genocide studies. His notes and select bibliography reflect a broad and deep engagement with the massive (and still growing) literature in these fields, as well as some of the many debates and controversies which the convergence of these histories has generated. In addition, it touches on the multidisciplinary fields of trauma and memory studies, public history, and museum studies. To be sure, it takes a well-rounded, multifaceted, and sophisticated scholar to undertake such an ambitious, broadly-conceived, and wide-ranging project. Gideon Mailer, in my view, is more than up to the task.
Mailer compares and links the traumatic histories of American Indians and Canadian First Nation peoples during the three-century Euro-American invasion and conquest with those of European Jews during the Holocaust. He also examines public representations of the settler genocide of North America's Indigenous peoples and the Nazi genocide of European Jews at public sites in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Finally, he analyzes the impact of those representations on the traumatic memory of American Indian, Canadian First Nation, and Jewish peoples – skillfully and carefully revealing the effects of those representations on internal group memory, external public memory, and cultural assimilation.
Mailer's book consists of six chapters and is organized into three parts (of two chapters each). In Part One, “Theory,” chapter 1 explores the debates, controversies, and tensions which have arisen from comparison of North American genocide and the Holocaust; chapter 2 examines the recent “imperial” or “colonial turn” in genocide studies, which situates both the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the attempted murder of European Jewry within imperial frameworks. In Part Two, “North America,” chapter 3 explores how North America's Indigenous peoples and Jews have dealt with the conflict between their own memories of ancestral trauma and how their traumatic memories are represented at public sites; chapter 4 compares how Indigenous peoples and Jews have grappled with the connections between historical representation, cultural renewal, and demographic assimilation. In Part Three, “Europe,” chapter 5 explores differences and similarities between the representation of the Holocaust and Indigenous genocide in European public memory; chapter 6 identifies and compares how Indigenous and Jewish group memory have been integrated in European public sites.
Mailer's new book is well researched, well written, and well argued. Rather than an explanation of the events themselves, he concerns himself with the meaning and effects of the traumatic histories of genocide on Indigenous peoples and Jews – showing, in the process, how these respective histories are not only comparable but connected. He concludes that these two traumatic histories have received “similar public treatment” from North American and European cultural institutions, with “comparable ideological agendas underlying [both] their representations” (5). At the same time, his study is forward-looking in suggesting how those engaged in public history “might do better” (11). The book is particularly effective at disrupting traditional narratives of the European civilizing mission and North American exceptionalism, as well as depictions of the Holocaust as an “aberration” in the otherwise linear story of Euro-American “progress.”
Much has been (and continues to be) written, of course, about the actual historical events themselves – both in isolation as well as in comparative frameworks. Mailer's book, however, breaks new ground in comparatively exploring how the events have been remembered in the traumatic memories of the respective survivor groups and how the events have been represented (or misrepresented) in public sites on both sides of the Atlantic. For scholars and students of Central European History, the book will be especially valuable in upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses dedicated – in whole or in part – to the study of genocide and the intergenerational aftereffects of genocide (particularly in a comparative framework). It will also be especially useful to those who teach courses or topics in public history and museum studies.
Mailer is critical of approaches (by this reviewer and other scholars) which directly compare the histories of North American genocide and the Holocaust. However, Mailer – I would respectfully suggest – may have misread the thrust of much of this comparative work. To compare, of course, is not to equate; rather, it is to identify similarities, differences, and possible links between two (or more) historical experiences. To point out these links and connections is not to argue for what Mailer calls “direct causal association” (30). It aims, instead, to provide fresh ways to read, compare, and connect these traumatic histories, to link histories previously thought of as totally unrelated.
Sometimes, of course, the findings are particularly disturbing and unsettling (but, at the same time, illuminating). On the occasion of his 50th birthday, April 20, 1939, Adolf Hitler told members of his personal entourage that his “Blood and Soil” ideology had been “confirmed in historical hindsight” by “land seizure” in the present-day areas of the United States, Canada, and Australia – accompanied by the brutal displacement or extermination of the “far inferior native inhabitants.” (Hermann Giesler, Ein Anderer Hitler [1982], 373–375). In Hitler's genocidal fantasies and in the Nazi colonial imagination, they were fighting “Indian wars” against “Russian Redskins” and “Jewish flat-footed Indians” in the “Wild East.” In acquiring new living space and building a race-based continental land empire in the eastern Lebensraum (Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia), Hitler thought he was merely doing in the twentieth century what the Americans had done in the nineteenth. In the autumn of 1941, as the German army was driving towards Moscow and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe was just beginning, Hitler told close associates: “Here in the [E]ast a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.” (Werner Koeppen cited in Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis [2000], 434–435).
