Theological Innocence and Family History in the Land of Perpetrators: German Theologians after the Shoah

Krondorfer, Björn

doi:10.1017/s0017816004000574

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Readers familiar with the postwar German discourse on the past will easily recall the many publicly and privately rehearsed desires to forget, and scholars familiar with post-genocidal situations can just as easily point to the general desire among perpetrators to keep a lid on the past. I am, however, not arguing for a wish to forget that is based on escaping justice or on eluding complicity and culpability on the part of a perpetrator society (see Krondorfer 1995Krondorfer , 2004Krondorfer et al 2006). question" (Suleiman 2006, 216)-is heeded by differentiating between victims, perpetrators, and their respective discursive environments.…”

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IS FORGETTING REPREHENSIBLE? Holocaust Remembrance and the Task of Oblivion

Krondorfer¹

2008

Journal of Religious Ethics

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Forgetting" plays an important role in the lives of individuals and communities. Although a few Holocaust scholars have begun to take forgetting more seriously in relation to the task of remembering-in popular parlance as well as in academic discourse on the Holocaustforgetting is usually perceived as a negative force. In the decades following 1945, the terms remembering and forgetting have often been used antithetically, with the communities of victims insisting on the duty to remember and a society of perpetrators desiring to forget. Thus, the discourse on Holocaust memory has become entrenched on this issue. This essay counters the swift rejection of forgetting and its labeling as a reprehensible act. It calls attention to two issues: first, it offers a critical argument for different forms of forgetting; second, it concludes with suggestions of how deliberate performative practices of forgetting might benefit communities affected by a genocidal past. Is it possible to conceive of forgetting not as the ugly twin of remembering but as its necessary companion?

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confidence: 99%