1 Introduction

Commemorations are ongoing dynamic processes, through which narratives about the past, about ‘us’ and ‘them’ as well as beliefs and values contained in these stories, are produced and reproduced. Remembrance and commemoration entail communication processes wherein people, events and stories of the past are recalled, retold and recontextualised in the present, frequently with a view to ensuring a just and moral society in the future (Gutman et al. 2010). The processes by which certain narratives of the past come to prominence over others, how we are to understand them and how to understand ourselves in relation to these pasts, are matters of deep social significance (Edgerton and Rollins 2001; Kansteiner 2006; Stone 2013). Commemorative events play a subtle role in the garnering of public consensus, working to consolidate myths about social in-groups and out-groups (particularly nations) and hence contributing to processes of group inclusion and exclusion. This facilitates room for the creation of unity but also the collision of opposing political interests and interpretations of the past, as well as the potential for conflict with the collective myths/narratives of other national, ethnic or religious groups (Heer et al. 2008; Wodak and Auer-Borea 2009). Consequently, processes of collective memorialising are not neutral, but rather always tied to collective identity, politics and power in complex and mutually informed ways (Billig and Marinho 2017; Wodak and De Cillia 2007). This article examines one such case: the televisation of the British national commemorative ceremony, as part of Holocaust Memorial Day.

2 Televising Commemoration

Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) is now relatively well-established in the British national calendar, with over 7700 local and regional events organised in 2017 to commemorate the day.Footnote 1 The 27th January—chosen to mark the liberation of the concentration and extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Soviet Red Army—provides an opportunity “for everyone to pause to remember the millions of people who have been murdered or whose lives have been changed beyond recognition during the Holocaust, Nazi Persecution and in subsequent genocides” (UK HMD Trust).

As Berger (2008: 7) argues, “History writing has never been the sole guardian of national narratives […] A range of other media and genres play a much more important role in shaping national discourses”. The mass media—and perhaps especially television broadcastersFootnote 2—“provide a public arena for various agents […] who want to influence the ways in which collective pasts are narrated and understood” (Meyers et al. 2014: 5). And, although questions regarding the (in)ability of the mass media to do ‘proper history’ remain a perennial feature (cf Kershaw 2004), Bell and Gray (2007) suggest that an “increasing number of historians do recognise the value of this form of public communication in disseminating historical knowledge” (p. 144).

Public awareness and understanding of the Holocaust—what Pearce (2014) calls Holocaust consciousness—has developed hand in hand with its mass mediation, whether through fictional or actuality genres (Kansteiner 2006, 2008; Meyers et al. 2014; Shandler 1999). British television and radio broadcast a variety of programmes to mark HMD, though the form and frequency of this mass mediation commemoration has been uneven. The contents and staging of the first national HMD ceremony have been written about in detail (Macdonald 2005; Pearce 2013, 2014; Sauer 2012) but, in contrast, there is a surprising lack of analysis of HMD commemoration since 2002 (though see Richardson 2017, forthcoming a, b; Eadson et al. 2015). Academic analysis of the mass mediation of Holocaust commemoration is even thinner, aside from a series of ground-breaking studies by Meyers, Neiger and Zandberg (Neiger et al. 2011a, b; Meyers et al. 2009, 2014; see also Gray and Bell 2013).

The first British HMD ceremony, in 2001, was held in Westminster Central Hall and televised live on the BBC to around 1.5 million viewers. A capacity audience of 2000 were present in the Hall, including leaders of the three main political parties, cultural figures, 200 Holocaust survivors and representatives of the wider Jewish communities; Prime Minister Tony Blair gave the keynote speech. Since then, the national ceremony has been broadcast four further times: an edited version in 2002 on Regional Independent Television, and on BBC2 in 2005, 2015 and 2016. When planning this first ceremony in 2001, Gaby Koppel—the BBC Event Producer, responsible for its staging and television direction—was “very clear about one thing. Holocaust Memorial Day wasn’t to be an event just for Jews. It was a national occasion, relevant to all British citizens” (2001: 7). Such a televisual agenda resonated with the governmental aims for HMD. For example, after receiving 512 responses to an initial Consultation Paper on HMD, the Blair government announced some amendments: “in light of ‘criticism that the event appeared to be excessively Holocaust- and Jewish-centered’, the ‘element devoted to education and awareness of genocide and human rights abuses since 1945 was accentuated’” (Pearce 2014: 146). How anyone could conceive of a Holocaust Memorial Day that wasn’t “Holocaust- and Jewish-centered” remains to be seen. But regardless, as Pearce (2014) argues, the staging of HMD as a national event was instrumental in sedimenting a shift from commemorating the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish tragedy to an event that could be functionalised in service of broader political concerns: opposing prejudice, the protection of human rights and strengthening civic society.

Gray and Bell (2013) argue that “anniversaries of key events are particularly sensitive in terms of national identity maintenance and this may be seen in UK television” (p. 20) just as much as with other countries. Indeed, in their chapter on commemorative television, they argue that nowhere is the representation of the nation (and its relation to gender, social class, ethnicity and race) “more significant than in commemorative programming, which seeks to represent a historical national identity, but in so doing, to create a sense of community within a culturally disparate nation” (p. 100). Whilst Chapman (2007) highlights the subversive potential of some commemorative programming there is, as Young (1999: 86) points out, a danger “of turning Holocaust memory into a kind of self-congratulatory spectacle”, and ignoring controversial periods of British Holocaust history.

3 Method and Data

This article is drawn from a wider project aimed at analysing linguistic and semiotic processes employed in the commemoration of HMD, their potential for shaping the understanding of mass audiences and the ways that the commemoration of HMD has changed since 2002. My research triangulates data and methods in order to make sense of both the field of remembrance and its genres (e.g. ceremonies, speeches, stories, testimony, music and minutes of silence) and the ways that they reflect the complex interplay between historiography, popular understandings of history, and social and historic contexts (Richardson 2017, forthcoming a).

This article offers a rhetorical analysis of four British Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) ceremonies (2002, 2005, 2015 and 2016), as broadcast on British television. These televised national ceremonies should be approached as an example of multi-genre epideictic rhetoric, working up meanings through a hybrid combination of genres (speeches, poems, readings), author/animators and modes (speech, music, light, movement and silence) (Richardson, forthcoming b). Epideictic oratory is directed towards proving someone or something worthy of admiration or disapproval, and is one of three species of rhetoric identified by Aristotle. In more detail, Aristotle’s Rhetoric codified epideictic rhetoric “primarily as a written genre (3.12) delivered before an audience of spectators (1.3), which praises or blames a subject (1.3), relates this topic to the present time (1.9), and achieves its rhetorical force (dynamis) through ethos (1.9), amplification (3.17), and narrative (3.16)” (Lauer 2015: 5). Such arguments can be advanced through what Aristotle termed non-artistic means of persuasion, which amount to other texts (laws, photographs, film, etc.) that the speaker calls upon and uses; and artistic means of persuasion, which the speaker needs to invent.

I argue that these commemorative programmes aim to communicate four metafunctions: to Communicate History; to Communicate Values; to Communicate Solemnity; and to Communicate Hope. In order to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides, some work is done detailing historical events—and this is achieved through both non-artistic means of persuasion as well as artistic means. Communicating solemnity is not separate to, but rather is integral to, the first two metafunctions—so, the history of genocide and our values need to be presented in such a way that emphasises their gravity. The aim to communicate hope clearly stands in a degree of tension with certainly the aim to communicate Holocaust history. But it is an integral aspect of the ceremony, as I aim to demonstrate below.

4 Communicating History

In epideictic oratory, it is not enough to simply praise or blame someone for a particular action or accomplishment—“sometimes it is necessary to prove that they really took place” (Pernot 2015: 90). Thus, examples and narratives are utilised to demonstrate ‘This happened’. This rhetorical aim, of establishing facticity, is particularly well suited to the use of non-artistic proofs, though artistic persuasion also plays a central role.

4.1 Non-artistic Historicisation

Each broadcast programme of the HMD ceremony includes examples of texts that could be, and have been, used in other contexts. Prior existing texts, such as photographs and archival film taken during and at the end of the war, are used to demonstrate the facticity of the Holocaust. As Bathrick (2008: 1) put it: media visualisations serve “for some as virtual access to knowledge of the horror; in a few cases, they even provided preeminent verification that it actually happened […] pictorial icons by which many have sought to capture the seemingly unimaginable”. That is, they are used to document the past—or, as an introduction during the 2016 ceremony put it, to remind us of “the scenes that so shocked the world at the end of the Second World War, and are still shocking us all today” (2016: 2.41–2.48).

Such images feature in a variety of ways during these broadcasts: they are typically used in the programme opening credits, projected as a backdrop to a speaker on stage, or are intercut with footage of survivor testimony as exemplars of the barbarity they experienced and are describing. These photographs and archival film clips tend to repeat a number of well-established visual metonyms of the Holocaust: inter alia, striped ‘pyjama-style’ suits, piles of naked corpses, railway lines particularly those leading to the Auschwitz gatehouse, the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ signs that adorned several concentration and extermination camps, and images of emaciated survivors behind barbed wire fences.

Although these official ceremonies never offer any direct comparison, the similarities between some of these images of the Holocaust and those of subsequent genocides—particularly the images of the Omarska death camp, run by Bosnian Serb forces in the mining town of Omarska, near Prijedor in northern Bosnia—facilitates a migration and transference of meanings between these discrete events. Zelizer (1998) has also commented on this, showing how “atrocity photographs” have become the basis of our memory of the Holocaust, and arguing that these photographs subsequently “provided the template for all later photo-reportage of mass murder, leading to the blurring of temporal boundaries” (Cesarani 2000: 10).

The provenance of the photographs and film clips, used to demonstrate the veracity of the historic events being commemorated, is rarely detailed; texts produced by perpetrators, bystanders and victims are all used in the same way as each other: to provide a visual non-artistic demonstration of the narrative spoken by survivors and others. For example, the image in the top left of Fig. 1 (see below) was featured in the 2015 ceremony immediately after Holocaust survivor Iby Knill stated: “We could smell, the incinerators. The smell [pause] of burning flesh” (29.03).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Visual documentation of genocide

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Very few images are extant of the extermination camps in full operation; the Nazis demolished the death camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka before the end of the war to conceal what they had done; after the Belzec camp was dismantled, Nazi soldiers built a manor house on the site, including planting trees and crops, to disguise the area as a farm. It is because of these conditions of concealment and denial that the photograph on the top left has such importance. “Among the millions of photographs that are related to Nazi death camps, only four depict the actual process of mass killing perpetrated at the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau” (Reiniger nd), and one of these is included in Fig. 1. This image was one of four taken by the Jewish Sonderkommando at Auschwitz—the Jewish prisoners whose job (until they were periodically murdered and replaced) was to work the gas chambers and burn corpses of victims (Chare and Williams 2013; see also Stone 2013). As Reiniger (nd) states “taking these photographs was a collective act of resistance, taken by the person smuggling the camera into the camp, the one taking the pictures, the ones guarding him and the ones smuggling them outside”, and so “in comparison to other Auschwitz photographs, these actually show the danger and the resistance in the act of taking a photograph”.

4.2 Artistic Historicisation

Lauer (2015) maintains that narratives form an integral part of epideictic oratory, and in HMD commemoration they take one of two forms: third-person historic narratives which provide the grand, over-arching accounts of the principal actors and events in a chronological order; and the testimony of survivors, who recount their first-hand individual historical experience of living through the events outlined in the collective narrative. Both these types of narrative can be delivered by an individual standing on the stage, speaking to the audience, or as an audio-visual package, filmed on location and edited together into a coherent whole.

The broadcast of the national ceremony always opens with a summary narrative, in which the audience is reminded of what ‘the Holocaust’ refers to. In 2015, this was delivered by the journalist David Dimbleby (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
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Opening of the 2015 broadcast

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Such openings always provide only the bare essential ‘what’ of the programme, distilled down into references to perpetrators (“Nazis”) and the numbers and types of victims. The ceremony itself then takes up this history, providing additional details of the ‘when’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the genocides commemorated on HMD. Thus, this particular programme from 2015 featured items providing narrative accounts of non-Jewish victims of Nazism (24.35–26.48), of the shift from ghettoisation of Jews to their mass murder (27.12–30.47) and a narrative account of the genocide in Bosnia (39.36–45.28). There were also narratives read out that had been written by unnamed victims during the war, which survived and now document their suffering: a letter written to a Kindertransportee from their parents was read out (22.02–24.04), as was a portion of the ‘Auschwitz scroll’ written by Salman Gradovsky, detailing his work as a Sonderkommando (45.29–46.51).

Dimbleby provided the voice over throughout the remainder of the 2015 broadcast ceremony. This meant that, at one point, he would have heard the voice of his father, the journalist Richard Dimbleby, in an archive radio broadcast of the British liberation of the Belsen-Bergen concentration camp. Richard Dimbleby was the first British correspondent to reach the camp in 1945; an extract of his report played during the ceremony:

One woman, distraught to the point of madness, flung herself at a British soldier. She begged him to give her some milk, for the tiny baby she held in her arms, because there was no milk in her breast. And when the soldier opened the bundle of rags to look at the child, he found that it had been dead for days. I have never seen British soldiers moved to cold fury, as the men who opened the Belsen camp this week.

Throughout his report, Richard Dimbleby emphasises his shock and disbelief at what he was witnessing. The report also implicitly works up a representation of British soldiers as typically phlegmatic and reasonable—and yet “moved to cold fury” because of the extreme depravity of what they witnessed. Seaton (1987: 56) recounts that Dimbleby “broke down five times while he was recording the broadcast. But when the recording was received at the BBC […] it was queried. The broadcast was delayed for over a day”, whilst its authenticity could be established, so concerned were the BBC that the report may amount to ‘atrocity propaganda’. Dimbleby remained profoundly affected by what he saw at Bergen-Belsen for the rest of his life. As Seaton (1987: 76) writes, all those who witnessed the camps were “irrevocably changed by the experience—when they said that they had not ‘known’ or ‘believed’ what they were to see, what they meant was in terms of its emotional and moral impact. What had been happening in the camps was, as many have pointed out, unimaginable, and so beyond normal experience that it was unassimilable”.

Coinciding with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust taking over responsibility of the ceremony from the government, from 2005 onwards, any survivors included in the broadcast ceremonies have always been identified through the use of on-screen captions. The broadcast of the 2005 ceremony featured a film of survivor Susan Pollack telling the story of her life before, during and after the Holocaust. Split into four film clips—successively labelled ‘Susan’s Return: Departure’, ‘Arrival’, ‘Liberation’ and ‘Remembrance’—the films follow Susan on a journey back to the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, where she was held at the end of the war and was found close to death by the British soldiers when they liberated the camp. Though the story she tells is hers and hers alone, the programme positions her experience as a metonym for collective experiences—indeed, the first film is introduced by the speaker Lord Winston stating that her experience “could be that of any Jewish girl in Eastern Europe during the war”.

4.3 Potential Derailment

Claims to represent, and so communicate, history can derail. Looking first to the images and archival films, which feature in HMD commemoration as non-artistic proof of Holocaust history, these have a production history that is frequently elided by the ways that they are used without comment. Simply put, images and film of various visual icons of the Holocaust will, almost universally, have been taken by either Allied or Axis forces.Footnote 3 On this basis, they are frequently termed ‘liberator’ or ‘perpetrator’ images. With perpetrator images, we cannot assume even a basic “indexical link of the analogue image with the pro-filmic world” (Böser 2012: 38). The subjects depicted usually had no autonomy to act otherwise; they were manipulated, scenes staged and frequently reshot to create precise filmic tableaus that reflected Nazi ideological preoccupations. Therefore, what we see in such photographs and film cannot be taken as an unproblematic historic record, other than to suggest that its existence acts to index systematic power abuse. For liberator images, and indeed all images taken of the camps after liberation, the critical issues are less their indexical function, and more the ways that they have taken on iconic or symbolic meanings. The Western camps liberated by Allies forces were concentration camps, not death camps (which were all located further east).Footnote 4 Further, whilst unquestionably shocking in its portrayal of deprivation and death, liberator footage records these camps at the end of the war, not how they functioned during the war. Without sufficient clarification and contextualisation, which can direct the audience how we are to understand the standpoint of the non-artistic proof, they could be used (fallaciously) to symptomatically ‘represent Belsen’, or even ‘the Holocaust’ as a whole, rather than the particular pro-filmic scene.

Artistic narratives can also derail, particularly in the ways that they are mass-mediated. For example, the first segment of the 2002 ceremony involves two unnamed Holocaust survivors recounting fragments of personal narratives of oppression; their collective narrative is added to later in the broadcast, by three further unnamed survivors. The ways that these sections are edited suggests that the testimonies, as spoken by these five individuals, were longer, but that they were cropped and edited together as two packages. On my first watch of the programme I understood the testimony as episodes in the lives of these five Holocaust survivors, where they each testify to an experience of living through, and being subject to, the iniquity and violence of Nazism. It was only when I transcribed these narrative fragments that I realised they in fact fitted together: they were not simply five narrative fragments, but rather were episodes in a common place chronicle of Jewish persecution under Nazism and during the Holocaust. I say that they’re a chronicle, rather than a narrative, because they don’t communicate any sense of the transition between the five episodes—in historical terms, they lack any sense of causal explanation between one state of affairs to the next (Table 1).

Table 1 Mediating Holocaust survivor testimonies
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The five extracts, in turn, can be viewed as symptomatic illustrations of successive periods in (German) history, from the early-to-mid 1930 s, through to the years of extermination. The five fragments also follow the classical narrative structure identified by Aristotle: the exposition of people, time and place; introduction of complication or narrative obstacle; rising action; resolution producing falling action; and then the coda and return to the present.

Using the testimonies of the five survivors in this way can be viewed as a solution to a problem typically experienced by television broadcasters when covering the Holocaust in general, and survivors in particular—Meyers et al. (2014) show that survivor testimony tends to be repetitive and formulaic in many ways. However, this particular choice, to splice together extracts from five survivors, is not without its problems. Presenting the five extracts, as five episodes in a single chronical, backgrounds the differences between the five individuals—it doesn’t deny their specific experiences as much as ignore them; each fragment is extricated, or decontextualised, from the life story of the narrator and recontextualised as part of a standardised survivor narrative. And, of course, it should go without saying that the Holocaust is not conventionally considered to be a history of survival.

5 Communicating Values

Aristotle suggested that epideictic speeches “take up actions that are agreed upon, so that what remains is to clothe the actions in greatness and beauty” (Rhetoric, 1.1368a26). Likewise, Pernot (2015: 87) argues that epideictic speech tends to start from “acknowledged facts, which need only to be qualified”. That said, with epideictic rhetoric, the “orator’s task is not just to strengthen listeners in their affinities and aspirations, but also to explain and justify the latter. The orator enlightens the community about its own sentiments [and] provides a rational foundation for its traditional practices” (Pernot 2015: 99). In the case of HMD, these foundations are grouped into three types of speech act: Assertives, Expressives and Directives.

5.1 Assertive: It was a Catastrophe

The most important organising speech acts, at the centre of commemorative ceremonies, assert that the Holocaust and subsequent genocides were catastrophes. The normative assertion that the Holocaust was a catastrophe is invoked in speech during these ceremonies, and evoked in other modes of communication—principally in music. The most straightforward example of this is the first line of the speech Tony Blair gave in 2001:

The Holocaust was the most hideous act of collective evil in our history.

Whilst seemingly banal, it is these normative speech acts that change a historic narrative to a commemoration: that is, they provide a moral position vis a vis the past. Indeed, we do well to remember that it is possible for neo-Nazi historic narratives to be based on the same artistic and non-artistic historicisation that I examined in the first section of this analysis; the difference is that neo-Nazi narratives would subsequently celebrate this mass murder, whilst HMD commemorations lament it.

5.2 Expressive: We Grieve

Following on from the last point in the previous section, the second group of speech acts, upon which HMD commemoration is founded, are Expressives. Speakers repeatedly express emotions and/or states of mind, and various lamentations are invoked in speeches and readings and evoked through song and music. Such Expressives tend to be pluralised, such that a speaker will claim to vocalise the collective feelings of the commemorating norm circle (Elder-Vass 2010, 2012). As Chief Rabbi Sacks stated, in his 2005 speech, “we remember the victims of the greatest crime of man against man, and weep, for a murdered generation” (emphases added). Every televised ceremony features a Jewish Mourners’ prayer, sung by a Cantor, and frequently melancholic klezmer music which, in combination with the speech always given by the British Chief Rabbi, act to index the specifically Jewish tragedy of the Holocaust.

Grief, and its ritualised defeat, is also symbolised in the ceremony through lighting candles. Such a ritual, like all rituals, is rich in meaning. As Rothenbuhler (1998: 53–54) reminds us, “Rituals are always symbolic behaviour in social situations […] The movements of ritual are signs of something else, and whatever they accomplish as rituals is accomplished by those signs and not by the movements qua movements”. Thus, candles are not lit in rituals for the sake of setting something on fire, nor simply to produce light. Candles lit in times of death and commemoration can signify a host of meanings, from the beauty, fragility and transience of life, through to the light of ‘the next world’. The candle can symbolise light in the darkness of life; the illumination it provides can symbolise the holy illumination of the spirit of truth. In the Jewish tradition, candlelight is often thought of as a reminder of God’s divine presence, and an eternal flame, or Ner Tamid, is located in most synagogues above the Ark where the Torah scrolls are kept. Memorial candles are lit by Jewish families on the anniversary of a death of close loved ones every year (the yahrzeit), they are lit every week to mark Shabbat, and during holidays where they serve to signify that the occasion is holy and distinct from our day-to-day life. In the Christian tradition, candlelight can also represent Christ (c.f. “I am the light of the world”, John 8:12).

The rich—and polysemic—meanings of the ritual of lighting a candle only add to its power and significance in HMD commemoration, given that the breadth of meanings help ensure the act, and the symbolism, are comprehensible and meaningful to a wide variety of social groups.

5.3 Directive: We (Must) Remember…

Clearly, a principle function of the HMD ceremony is remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides. However, when combined with the moral and emotional imperatives of the previous two groups of speech acts—it was a catastrophe; we lament—the expressive speech act typical of funereal discourse (‘we remember’) takes on a more Directive inflexion: that is, the rhetorical force of the commemoration interpellates listeners (Richardson 2017, forthcoming a), calling upon them to join the norm circle of those committed to commemorating HMD and, as a consequence, directs that we/you are now obligated to remember.

The directive ‘we must remember’ is supported by a combination of symbolic, performative and consequentialist rationales. Most straightforwardly, ‘we must remember’ in order to honour the victims. Such a conception of remembrance accords exactly with funereal encomia, where “orators often declare that they want to bestow honour and immortal fame on the deceased through their speech”. (Pernot 2015: 92). For example, in the final section of the 2005 ceremony before the audience processed out, the actor Christopher Eccleston read the following, from a letter written by David Berger in the Vilna ghetto:

‘I should like someone to remember that there once lived a person named David Berger.’ Today David, you are remembered. You, and the millions of others who perished.

Thus, through the act of reading his name, reading his words and recounting the appalling circumstances in which he wrote them, the speaker and the ceremony ritually honour David Berger and the millions of other victims.

More specifically, we are directed to remember to acknowledge/celebrate heroism and specific acts of laudable conduct, including active resistance, passive resistance, and examples/narratives which affirm the victims of genocide were not as if ‘lambs to the slaughter’. Accordingly, “epideictic affirms values, and by this affirmation, its aim is to create a conviction and suggest a conduct. The encomium offers listeners models of virtue and encourages their imitation. The subject being praised inspires admiration and emulation” (Pernot 2015: 95).

Finally, and most importantly, we are directed to remember in order to revivify our values and so help ensure that ‘this doesn’t happen again’. This is a key ‘lesson’ of the British HMD, which both the HMD Trust and organisers of small scale remembrance events frequently orientate to, and articulate, when explaining their personal motivation to commemorate (Richardson, forthcoming a). As the Chief Rabbi Mirvis stated, in his 2015 keynote speech:

[as] we recall the horrors of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides, the survivors are calling out to us from the depths of their hearts, please keep the memory alive. And we must respond, emphatically and adequately to their call, through action. The action of education, in order that we all can recall the horrors of the past, so that together we can create a destiny of peace for our future.

Similarly, Chief Rabbi Sacks dedicated the second half of his 2002 keynote speech to this argument:

And as we think of those who didn’t escape. What would they want of us now? Those who managed to leave a final message, asked just one thing: that we remember. That we remember what happens when hate takes hold; when evil is done, and no one protests

Here, Sacks links processes of remembering/forgetting to moral action in a causal way—that is, we should remember past injustices to ensure an advantageous, worthy and just future. To take the first clause in the final sentence, this simultaneously communicates: a grammatical entailment that we know something (and must remember rather than forget); more specific presuppositions that are inferable from the immediate context of the speech situation (a HMD speech, given by the Chief Rabbi, inferring that this is knowledge related to the Holocaust); a moral presupposition about our values, structured as an ‘if/then’ conditional; and a consequent application of this to support an entailed moral action. The argumentation of the clause can be reconstructed as follows:

That we remember what happens when hate takes hold

[entailment] we have knowledge of what happens when hate takes hold;

[context-invoked implication] the Holocaust is what happens when hate takes hold;

[conditional] if we are to avoid another Holocaust then we need to ensure hate doesn’t take hold

[corollary: deliberative case for moral action] we should ensure hate doesn’t take hold

In this clause, and two others in this section of his speech, Sacks argues that politically advantageous social conditions will be brought about—caused—by remembering.

5.4 Potential Derailment

Speech acts regarding ‘Our values’ can derail in a variety of ways, though the most common are shifts (or, arguably, equivocation) between the specific and universal status of the value claim in question. Such derailments are therefore founded on fallacious applications of part-for-whole and whole-for-part synecdoche. That is, a value may be claimed as a specific property or characteristic of the in-group commemorating norm circle, and implicitly held to be absent in the out-group. For example, in his 2015 speech, the Prime Minister David Cameron declared “We will teach every generation the British values of respect and tolerance that we hold dear” (emphasis added). The sense is that a principal aim of Cameron’s speech was national self-praise, and that the Holocaust, and the survivors who rebuilt their lives in Britain after the War, are instrumentalised as part of that rhetorical agenda. We do well to remember that the British ‘proud tradition of taking in refugees’, ritually invoked by politicians like Cameron, is in fact “a myth. And one of the cornerstones of the myth is the remarkably persistent claim that this country did all it could to aid Jews trying to escape from Nazi persecution” (London 2000: 18). The result is something akin to the “self-contradictory experience” predicted by Stone (2000: 57), prior to the first HMD ceremony: flagging the moral superiority of ‘Our Nation’ and yet, simultaneously, warning of the dangers of chauvinistic nationalism.

On the other hand, particular norms, narratives, individuals and ‘lessons’ from the Holocaust can be presented as universal. In the case of Holocaust survivors, for example, “the choice of narrating survivors has always been guided by political and cultural considerations […] by and large, the protagonists who dominate the broadcasts are Holocaust survivors who can emblem the ‘right’ story bearing the ‘right’ lessons; in most cases, this requirement is translated into the accounting of redemptive narratives of survivors who have overcome the trauma” (Meyers et al. 2014: 156–57). Holocaust survivors who either do not (or cannot) speak of the trauma they endured, or are still crippled by their ordeal, or who express only hate and contempt for their persecutors and/or bystander countries (like the USA and UK) who did little-to-nothing to help—responses to suffering which are just as valid as those of more magnanimous survivors—tend not to be invited to give testimony at commemorative events.

More broadly, a great deal of epideictic rhetoric at HMD commemoration belies its national context-specific nature. The metanarrative account—that the Holocaust is an example of prejudice in extremis, and that we can guard against future atrocities by keeping the prejudice of others in check—are ‘lessons’ which liberal multi-ethnic bystander countries take from the Holocaust; they are the ‘lessons’ that pervade British and American commemoration, in particular, because to argue that the Holocaust took place because of the prejudice of others is in no way threatening to the national self-image (Cesarani and Levine 2002; Lawson 2010). However, they are absent from the commemoration of perpetrator countries like Germany, which has historically tended towards a more functionalist explanation of the Holocaust. Similarly, they are absent from Israeli commemorative discourse, where historically the Holocaust has been viewed as the ultimate proof of both Europe’s indefatigable antisemitism and the corresponding need of a solution, in the form of Israel (Marrus 2015).

I point this out not to suggest that I think one or other of these lessons is correct. But rather to note that the moral lessons taken from Holocaust relate to time and place. They tend to present themselves as universal—in the case of Chief Rabbi Sack’s speech in 2002, as our presupposed knowledge that we simply need to remember—however, they are particular, and particular in ways that index the norm circle that produces, consumes and shares them.

6 Communicating Hope

It might appear strange, even absurd, to claim that the national HMD ceremony aims to communicate hope. However, hope and faith in humanity are integral aspects of commemoration. The closest analogous social ritual is, of course, the funeral. And, whilst funerals rarely lose sight of the fact that a loved one has died, equally it is rare for the rhetorical emphasis to be located squarely on tragedy and loss. Funeral orators will also tell stories of good times enjoyed with the deceased; they will ‘celebrate their life’, as well as mourning their death.

With HMD commemoration, moments of hope tend to take one of three forms. First, speakers express their hope that humanity will ‘learn the lessons’ of the Holocaust and, should genocide threaten again, that such murderous practices will be opposed and so halted. Examples of these Expressive speech acts, from the 2015 and 2016 ceremonies, are discussed below.

Second, some speakers reference aspects of the Holocaust that (for them) give them hope in the enduring strength of the human spirit. The actor Christopher Eccleston has spoken at three of the televised ceremonies (2002, 2005 and 2015), reading poems and extracts of works by W. H. Auden, Primo Levi, Elie Weisel and David Berger, who was shot dead in Vilna, Lithuania in 1941. Eccleston explained his motivation to contribute to so many HMD ceremonies as follows: “I work in the arts, I’m continually astonished and buoyed by the fact that in the most inhumane of circumstances we resort to self-expression, art as a means of survival”.Footnote 5 Holocaust survivors are also frequently presented as ideal examples of courage and perseverance in the face of desperate persecution. For example, in his 2015 keynote speech, the Prime Minister David Cameron referred to “Britain’s many inspirational Holocaust survivors”, “an extraordinary resistance” and “our incredible Holocaust survivors”.

Third, and more specifically, speakers refer to exemplars of heroism and self-sacrifice. In his 2005 speech, the Prime Minister Tony Blair brought together these second and third categories of hopefulness, stating:

today lets us, with humility, remember some of the extraordinary acts of courage by Jewish people and others, during the Holocaust. Some we know, and have read about, but how many others will we never know? The thousands of acts of kindness, sacrifice, fellowship, exemplary bravery, that kept the spirit of human progress alive, even in the uttermost darkness. And helps, even now, to give us the faith to go forward.

Blair’s reference to “faith” in this extract should not be understood in a simple idiomatic sense. Indeed, his speech at the first HMD in 2001 was criticised on the grounds that his call to “let not one life sacrificed in the Holocaust be in vain” evinced a peculiarly Christian interpretation of the Holocaust, wherein martyrdom is linked with redemption (cf Dreyfus and Stoetzler 2011).

6.1 End on an ‘up-beat’

Hope has been deliberately inscribed into the national ceremony from the first year, both in the commissioning and selection of material to feature, and in the order of items over the programme of the ceremony. The song ‘I believe in the Sun’, written by Howard Goodall, was commissioned to provide “something moving and inspiring” at the close of the 2001 ceremony (Koppel 2001: 6). The event organiser for the BBC stated at the time “I didn’t want the audience to leave the auditorium feeling overwhelmingly depressed by the solemn subject matter. I needed a gleam of hope to finish with” (Ibid.). Across the four broadcast ceremonies it is the final musical items that place greatest emphasis on communicating hope—though, as I show below, in more recent ceremonies this aim was weighed against the brutal realities of Holocaust history, thus managing this balance between history and hope more effectively.

The 2015 and 2016 televised broadcasts both reused songs written by Howard Goodall, commissioned for earlier ceremonies. The 2015 ceremony ended with ‘I believe in the sun’ (commissioned for HMD 2001) and the 2016 ceremony ended with ‘A song of hope’ (commissioned for HMD 2010). Goodall has stated that, through his music, he aims “to harness the extraordinary power of music to heal and comfort […] The sound of a young person singing is the sound of inextinguishable hope”.Footnote 6 In the 2015 ceremony, the final song was sung by the Aldeburgh Young Musicians choir; and in the 2016 ceremony it was sung by the slightly older Choir of Clare College, Cambridge. As the extract below shows, both songs end with an uplifting vocal refrain, before the programmes are brought to a close with a final voice over from the presenters (Table 2).

Table 2 Closing remarks, 2015 and 2016
Full size table

In contrast to the uplifting sentiment of the songs, in both of the closing monologues hope remains very tentative—a future conditional on our actions. Both assume that in the Holocaust there are lessons for humanity, for us, but that we have not learnt these lessons yet; and until we do, we will continue to inflict “horrendous cruelties on each other”. The first-person plural “we” is used by Dimbleby, directly including himself and the listening television audience within the transgressing group; Hussain refers instead to the broader “humanity”, which still includes both herself and us but in a more detached way. The sense of hope, then, is not something that the presenters (and, by default, the programme) direct us to take from the songs (i.e. that they give us hope; that they give us inspiration), but something more provisional. The uncertainty of the desired social and political advancement is implied in the way Dimbleby stresses doubt when he repeats “we may one day, one day, learn”. They both offer hope that there may be positive change—but this social change will emanate from us first changing ourselves; it requires us to work, and that these positive changes may only be noticeable at some distant time in the future.

6.2 Potential Derailment

Just like other communicative metafunctions, the aim to communicate hope can derail—and, in so doing, it can also undermine the achievement of other metafunctions, particularly that the ceremony remains fittingly solemn. This tension, I feel, lies at the heart of some criticism levelled at HMD commemoration, when writers judge the balance to have tipped too heavily towards a redemptive tone (see MacDonald 2005; Pearce 2014).

For example, the 2002 HMD ceremony ended with the song sung by the Manchester Community Choir. First, the government press release, promoting the event, stated that the ceremony actually ended with a reading of the Statement of Commitment for Holocaust Memorial Day, so the televised ceremony was markedly changed from how the event was experienced by those in the attending audience. Second, there is the matter of the particular song chosen to end the programme that year: ‘Something inside so strong’, written and recorded by British singer-songwriter Labi Siffre. The quick transition from the poem by Pastor Niemoller, to a song that asks us to take inspiration from suffering is quite jarring. The famous poem, read by four celebrities, which ends with the lines

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out

– Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me

– and there was no one left to speak for me

is then immediately followed by the rousing voices of an acapella choir singing:

The higher you build your barriers

The taller I become

The farther you take my rights away

The faster I will run

The song is widely believed to have been inspired by Siffre watching film footage from South Africa, of young Black men and women being shot at by white policemen.Footnote 7 Given the theme of the 2002 commemoration—Britain and the Holocaust—the song seems a peculiar choice, since Britain’s political and economic record towards South Africa during the apartheid period is mixed, at best. More significantly, the song is a song of survival—the lyrics speak of personal strength in the face of persecution, of resilience and of pride; the chorus, repeated several times through the song, declares “I know that I can make it, though you’re doing me wrong, so wrong”.

The decision to end on such an upbeat song seems particularly ill-judged. After all, the dominant story of the Holocaust isn’t one of survival, nor of Jewish victims ‘making it’ despite the Nazis doing people wrong, nor of victims (metaphorically) running faster when their rights are taken away; it is a kaleidoscopic story of mass murder, a story of catastrophe. Other portions of the ceremony, as broadcast, did stress the cataclysmic scale of the Holocaust, wiping out Jewish communities and cultures across Europe—the homily by the Chief Rabbi, the Mourner’s prayer, even the famous (arguably cliché) poem by Pastor Niemoller, all in their own way fix our attention on loss, devastation and inhumanity. However, the staunch optimism of the song pulls focus from this, derailing the solemnity of the occasion.

7 Conclusion

This article explored the rhetoric and mass mediation of the national Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) commemoration ceremony, as broadcast on British television. I approached these broadcast ceremonies as an example of epideictic rhetoric—a species of rhetoric that always aims to affirm values, strengthen convictions, and inspire “admiration and emulation” (Pernot 2015: 95). In addition, I made the specific claim that such commemoration aims to achieve four communicative metafunctions: to communicate history; to communicate values; to communicate solemnity; and to communicate hope. As an epideictic discourse genre, the primary function of the ceremony (and so the broadcast) is to communicate and constitute shared values. These values include the belief that the Holocaust was a catastrophe, to grieve the loss of innocent life, and that we must remember these victims (to honour them; to celebrate specific acts of laudable conduct; and to revivify our commitment to the shared values of the norm circle). However, in order to praise or blame someone for a particular action or accomplishment, it is also necessary to establish facticity, hence the need to communicate Holocaust history: that this happened. Communicating solemnity is integral to these first two metafunctions—the history of genocide and our values need to be presented in such a way that emphasises their gravity.

Each of the four metafunctions can be advanced through a combination of non-artistic means of persuasion (that is, prior texts), which the ceremony calls upon and uses, and artistic means of persuasion, which speakers need to invent and present themselves. Fulfilling these metafunctions is a rhetorical accomplishment. Accordingly, such rhetoric can also derail in a variety of ways: the claim to symptomatically represent the past can be judged misrepresentative; a claim to embody or vocalise values may equivocate the specific and universal status of the value claim in question; or, with too great an emphasis on redemptive hope, the solemnity of the whole occasion can be undermined. Other television programming, exploring Holocaust history, may aim to achieve one or more of these metafunctions, but the difficult balancing act of accomplishing all four is only walked by the national commemorative ceremony.