ABSTRACT
The chapter introduces the concept of recognition into a thematic environment with which it is not commonly associated. Recognition is understood against the backdrop of a particular vision of secularisation, with the prospect of shedding a new light on one of the foundational controversies of the European Union. The main premise of the approach is that this reworking of the concept of recognition could boost the debate over the fairest manner of proportioning the memories of the crimes against humanity perpetrated by right- and left-wing European totalitarianisms.
The Western and Eastern commemorative cultures directed at the victims of extermination policies are regarded as unacknowledged accretions of religious and secular attitudes. If Western European Holocaust memory is underpinned by a concept of uniqueness un-self-aware of its theological or mystical component, in the Eastern European rituals dedicated to the victims of Communist repression, we could read a self-centred and pragmatically-survivalist sense of collective ‘uniqueness’ coated in a religious discourse.
A recognition of otherworldly and this-worldly stakes implied in the commemoration of the victims of extermination policies could transgress (without eliminating) the difference between the ontological catastrophes caused by German Nazism and Soviet Communism, consolidating a basic moral consensus of the European Union.
