| Abstract | In reading Santner's analysis, one is reminded of [Theodor W. Adorno]'s statement that "for countless people it wasn't all that bad under fascism. Terror's sharp edge was directed only against a few relatively well-defined groups." Adorno made this point to caution against the role of a "diminished faculty of memory" that abets repression and denial, thereby inhibiting the ability to work through problems posed by the Nazi regime.(10) A diminished faculty of memory corresponds to the role of more or less open secrets in a nation's practice and its history, for the Shoah was a relatively open secret at the time of its occurrence and it has often maintained that status in the postwar period. A diminished faculty of memory would also increase chances that the secreted or "encrypted" aspects of the Nazi past would be passed on to those "born later" as a disorienting and destabilizing "phantom" or unworked-through heritage that would, at times mysteriously, haunt descendants and possibly create the basis for a renewed fascination with fascism.(11) (Such an encrypted and phantomlike past could easily be misinterpreted as a secular analogue of "original sin.")
Transference of course involves personal relations among people in social contexts such as the family, the school and the nation. A close investigation of these relations would be crucial for any more complete analysis of the problems I discuss. What I shall focus on, however, is the dimension of transference in which there is the tendency to repeat, in one's own analysis (or other behavior), forces that are active in one's object of investigation. With reference to the Holocaust or Shoah, this tendency arises even on the basic level of terminology, for no terms are innocent and there is the danger of using dubious terms in one's own voice. Thus there is an ineluctable difficulty in naming the events in question. Indeed, each name creates a somewhat different site for memory and mourning. "Holocaust" connotes a burnt sacrificial offering and threatens to sacralize events, although this possibility is counteracted at present by the prevalent use of the term in ordinary contexts. "Shoah" seemingly places events in one religious and ethnic tradition and has, at least for those not within that tradition, an exoticizing potential. (It also brings out the cultural and even linguistic power of film in the recent past. In France and even more generally, the term "Shoah" became prevalent after the appearance of Claude Lanzmann's film in 1985.) Other terms such as "final solution" or "annihilation" repeat Nazi terminology, often of course with the use of scare quotes as a distancing frame or alienation effect. Neologisms such as "Judeocide" (Arno Mayer's term without quotes) recall neutralizing bureaucratic jargon favored by the Nazis.(12) "Genocide" may have a leveling effect, but "Nazi genocide" may be one of the better terminological compromises. Still, the best option may be to use various terms with an awareness of their problematic nature and not to become riveted on one or another of them. In any case it is significant that, particularly with respect to extremely traumatic events, the transferential problem arises on the elementary discursive level of naming.
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