Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Being Contemporary, Then and Now
- I Conceptualizing the Contemporary
- II Contemporary Politics and French Thought
- III The Second World War and Vichy: Present Perspectives
- 8 What Does ‘Vichy’ Mean Now?
- 9 Forces of Solidarity and Logics of Exclusion: The Role of Literary Institutions in Times of Crisis
- 10 Narrative, Testimony, Fiction: The Challenge of Not Forgetting the Holocaust
- 11 ‘Moral Witnessing?’ An Israeli Perspective on Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes
- 12 From ‘Never Forgetting’ to ‘Post-Remembering’ and ‘Co-Witnessing’: Memory Work for the Twenty-First Century
- IV Writing the Contemporary Self
- V Novel Rereadings
- VI Memory: Past and Future
- Contributors
- Index
12 - From ‘Never Forgetting’ to ‘Post-Remembering’ and ‘Co-Witnessing’: Memory Work for the Twenty-First Century
from III - The Second World War and Vichy: Present Perspectives
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Being Contemporary, Then and Now
- I Conceptualizing the Contemporary
- II Contemporary Politics and French Thought
- III The Second World War and Vichy: Present Perspectives
- 8 What Does ‘Vichy’ Mean Now?
- 9 Forces of Solidarity and Logics of Exclusion: The Role of Literary Institutions in Times of Crisis
- 10 Narrative, Testimony, Fiction: The Challenge of Not Forgetting the Holocaust
- 11 ‘Moral Witnessing?’ An Israeli Perspective on Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes
- 12 From ‘Never Forgetting’ to ‘Post-Remembering’ and ‘Co-Witnessing’: Memory Work for the Twenty-First Century
- IV Writing the Contemporary Self
- V Novel Rereadings
- VI Memory: Past and Future
- Contributors
- Index
Summary
‘Never Again’ and ‘Never Forgetting’
With the commemoration of various anniversaries related to the catastrophes of the mid-twentieth century, we are admonished at least every five years that we must ensure those crimes never happen again. We are told too that the world must never forget the horrors of the Holocaust even after the last survivors have died, an event that many remind us will occur very soon.
On the one hand, it is perfectly persuasive when survivors tell us that they will never forget the loved ones they watched being beaten, starved, marched to their deaths, or murdered directly, as it is completely believable that they will never forget what they themselves suffered at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. As a scholar of contemporary Germany, I think it is also correct to say that most Germans feel a special responsibility for somehow ensuring that such things never happen again. Witness the now decades-old German pacifist movement and the continued public reluctance to send German troops outside the borders of Germany, even as official policy concerning such deployments has changed.
On the other hand, we run into problems when we who were born after the war are commanded: never forget. Most obviously, there's a logical issue: ‘never forget’ implies that one currently remembers something, whereas, in point of fact, the majority of people alive in the world today do not have actual memories of the events we have come to refer to as the Holocaust or the Shoah, and therefore cannot ‘not forget’ them. Of course, thousands of people involved in Holocaust education, like myself, could rush to clarify that ‘never forget’ actually means: never forget that I have told you that these things happened and that they must never happen again.
Even with such provisos and interpretations, flaws with these dicta remain. They are not optimally efficacious rhetorically since negatives engender attraction to the forbidden. The neo-Nazi movement in Germany and the rise of rightist extremism in many other places in Europe and around the world provide one type of indication that prohibitions do not work with at least a certain percentage of the targeted audience.
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- Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2016