Perpetrator memory and memories about perpetrators

Abstract

Contemporary memory debates on representations of conflict and, in particular, crimes against humanity have undoubtedly been informed by the fairly recent emergence of perpetrator voices. As survivors of the Second World War reach the end of their lives, and as the event and related atrocities become increasingly distant in time, perpetrators are equally as aware as victims of a final opportunity to be heard directly. Paradoxically, too, war crimes trials since the 1990s, whilst intended to bring perpetrators to justice, have often provided them with a platform from which to 'talk back' to their victims, many of whom are no longer alive to defend themselves. Moreover, when groups of people associated with past oppression chose to remain silent (or were silenced), it is often the descendents of those implicated who publicly defend their cause today. Recent acts of genocide, notably in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, the increasingly vocal demands for reparation from victims of genocide and massacres committed during the Second World War, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the USA have also played their part in defining the study of perpetrators and their misdeeds, and in shaping public and political debates.Academic scholars have lately sought to develop interpretative models for understanding and defining different kinds of 'extreme' violence, attempted to give meaning to specific acts of violence and questioned the ethical responsibilities involved in researching what is often a harrowing subject matter (see, for example, Sémelin et al., 2002). Whilst academic studies begin to stress the complexities surrounding perpetrator-hood and the ability of most human beings to become perpetrators under particular circumstances (see Bloxham and Kushner, 2005: 157-9), public reconstructions of the past according to victim-perpetrator/good-evil absolutes often fail to take account of the rather more blurred dynamics behind oppressive state rule and acts of atrocity.The construction and diffusion of memories of perpetrators and their crimes feed directly into, and are conditioned by, public debates relating to national/group identities, cultures and histories. Re-visitations of the past are inevitably conditioned by the imperative of national or group cohesion in the present. In the current international context of truth commissions, and restitution and compensation laws, in an age of commemorations and legislative deliberations relating to national histories, the apparent willingness of states to admit and make amends for past crimes against humanity has on occasion been contradicted by revisionist or 'normalizing' stances. In Germany,

Ecologies of violence: Cultural memory (studies) and the genocide–ecocide nexus

“…Scholarship in memory studies has begun to pay critical attention to the cultural construction and difficult memory of this figure in various media and in national and comparative contexts (e.g. Adams and Vice, 2012;Canet, 2020;Dunnage, 2010;Knittel and Benzaquen-Gautier, 2019), to questions of perpetrator trauma (Mohamed, 2015;Morag, 2013) and to the ethical and aesthetic conundrums that accompany the engagement with the perpetrators' perspective (e.g. Eaglestone, 2017;Knittel, 2019a;McGlothlin, 2021;Morag, 2020).…”

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“…Levy and Sznaider welcome this focus on the individual victim. Yet this tends to result in an obscuring of the different contexts in which "a human being" died and thus promotes the problematic tendency to place everyone killed in World War II on the same level as equally innocent victims, which they address as a slight problem only in relation to the German victims of bombing and expulsion (Dunnage 2010). This universalization dehistorizes the events of World War II in order to make them applicable as a moral lesson (Knigge 2008: 151): since "we Europeans" have learned from the Holocaust so successfully, it seems necessary to understand victims of today's conflicts, "the Muslims," the "Bosnians" or "the Kosovars," as the "new Jews" (Miller 2010).…”

Introductory Reflections on Perpetrators of Crimes Against Humanity and their Representation in Documentary Film

“…' (2018). This volume and a number of other publications constitute valuable steps towards answering this question, as they address different historical and geographical contexts (Dunnage 2010;Schlund-Vials and Martínez 2015;Bielby and Murer 2018;Knittel and Goldberg 2020). Efforts in this line are necessary in order to develop general theories and conceptual models on perpetrators that move beyond the particularities of any specific context.…”

“…The originality of these narratives lies in the shift in point of view they propose: their protagonists, rather than being the victims of the atrocities, are instead their perpetrators. According to several scholars, there has been a considerable increase in the number of narratives exploring memory from the perpetrator's perspective in recent decades (Crownshaw 2011;Dunnage 2010), even to the point of constituting a genre of their own, as Pettitt suggests (2017), which has been labelled 'perpetrator fiction' (Crownshaw 2011, 75;Eaglestone 2011, 13;Pettitt 2016Pettitt , 1301. Bernhard Schlink's The Reader (Der Vorleser, 1995) 14 and especially Jonathan Littell's novel The Kindly Ones (Les Beinveillantes, 2006; translated into English in 2009) 15 are probably the best-known examples of this trend and the most frequently studied cases.…”