ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a simple question: what do teachers and studentshope to accomplish when speaking, teaching, and writing about the Shoah? In the years since 1945 we’ve heard a lot of answers: so that we never forget; so that something like the Holocaust can never happen again; so we remember those who perished; so that we can heal or redeem the damage done to the world through anti-Semitism or racial hatred or any number of other causes of genocide. These answers, and others like them, focus our attention on the events of the Holocaust and the ethical consequences of it. And they’re compelling and useful answers. But they point to potentially impossible goals. First, we’ve seen in the chapters that precede this one that knowledge and learning often get in the way of and substitute for the event. By allowing us to believe that the event can be retrieved or adequately represented, the imperative to “remember” sometimes allows us to ignore a problematic fact: what we remember may not be closely related to the event at all, and the event may not be ours to remember. Second, the objects through which we do have access to the event-testimony, documentary evidence, museums and memorials, poetry and fiction-often resist our desire to have them “reflect” what happened. So regardless of what we think we know about the event-any event-the event itself will always be larger
and more unmanageable than what could be contained by history, other academic disciplines, or mimetic art. Put simply, conventional accounts of learning may fail, particularly when it comes to the Holocaust.
