ABSTRACT
When remembering the Holocaust—the name for the persecution and deportation of Europe’s Jewish populations, their internment, forced labor, humiliation and extermination during the years of Nazi rule—what is it that we are trying to recall and are called upon to commemorate? Do we want to bring to mind the all-too-real, but in their innumerable acts of inhumanity still unimaginable crimes? Is remembering the necessary if inadequate attempt to bear witness to and document the millions of singular individual lives? Is it a warning addressed to the future (“never again”), or a retrospective admission that the most ambitious project of modernity—to live by reason and rational planning—has proved a license for barbarity (the “failure” of the Enlightenment)? Is remembering the Holocaust answering the demand to accept collective guilt and individual responsibility, as a way of restoring the moral universe we need to believe in, after being so grievously violated? Or is it part of fostering solidarity in defense of universal human rights, for everyone on this planet, in and for the future?
