ABSTRACT
The form of reflective learning through empathy can be understood as a commemorative practice that goes beyond learning historical facts and acquiring topographical understanding of a site. Visits to memorial sites are frequently conducted with the objective of establishing empathy. Volkhard Knigge stated that: Remembrance requires knowledge. There can be a misplaced sense of shock, one that precludes the process of learning. At the sites, visitors may expect to have a particular physical or emotion experience in contrast to what would otherwise be, primarily, the transmission of historical knowledge through cognition. A seeming compromise between two opposites – cognition and emotion – the practice of establishing empathy remains for the most part undefined and is utilised with various intended meanings. Benjamin’s Eingedenken does not coincide with memory understood as an archive summing up all the traces of the past, nor does it coincide with memory as a way of translating the past into present-day understanding and usage.
