ABSTRACT
Historians cannot ‘make whole what has been smashed’ (Benjamin 1968, 257). Yet, how many of us studying murderous regimes, genocides or colonial atrocities secretly wish we could? And how many others despair because they know that they cannot? Elsewhere I observed that historians writing about historic wrongs and the search for historical justice are ‘almost willing [their] protagonists [ . . . ] to right the wrong’ (Neumann 2012, 128). It seems to me that the initial problem here is not so much the arousal of emotions such as anger or compassion, but an unwillingness to admit to the possibility of such arousal.
