ABSTRACT
Wulf Kansteiner has stated that: ‘The belated construction of the Holocaust as the central event of the twentieth century is inextricably linked to the rise of trauma as one of the key interpretive categories of contemporary politics and culture’ (Kansteiner 2004: 193). In drawing out these links, Kansteiner wishes to draw attention to two complex issues reflected in the contemporary use of trauma as a cultural concept: the inaccurate conflation of the different meanings trauma implies, and the associated elision of the moral differences between victims, perpetrators and bystanders. To these problematiques it is possible to add a third, observed by Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman (2009): the moral economy of trauma. Fassin and Rechtman (2009: 284) posit that:
Trauma today is more a feature of the moral landscape serving to identify legitimate victims than it is a diagnostic category which at most reinforces that legitimacy. It speaks of the painful link that connects the present to the past. It identifies complaints as justified and the causes as just.
