ABSTRACT
This chapter exemplifies the content of an ethical-existential logic of responsibility when responding to perpetrators and victims of evil deeds in the past in my role as posterity. In this respect, the chapter is centered on a critical examination of Christopher Browning’s studies of Holocaust perpetrators. Typical ideas under scrutiny are empathy, the psychology of identification, and a metaphysical susceptibility to evil. The central transgenerational thread of the discussion is what it means ethically to belong to a generation responding to the afterlife of these events. I argue that we need to recognize the dead victims in the circumstances of death in order to continue living a life after them that is not oblivious to what has happened.
