Holocaust Memory and the Silences of the Human Rights Revolution

Marco Duranti

2013, Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann (Eds.), Schweigen: Archaologie der literarischen Kommunikation XI (Silence: Archeology of literary communication, vol. 11), (pp. 89-100). Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.

This chapter investigates whether the Holocaust was the catalyst for the adoption of a number of seminal texts in the postwar 'human rights revolution', including the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). An examination of published and archival source material reveals that the negotiations over the drafting of these documents were marked by a total or near-total silence on the mass murder of Jews. The article concludes with an analysis of why during the drafting process the framers of these texts, including Jewish delegates whose family members had been killed in the Holocaust, refrained from invoking the slaughter of European Jewry at the same time as they called attention to other Nazi crimes. [For a more in-depth analysis of the Holocaust origins of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, see my 2012 article in the Journal of Genocide Research]