Introduction

Abstract

The twentieth century has witnessed genocides, ethnic cleansing, forced population expulsions, shifting national borders, and other massive disruptions on an unprecedented scale. Cities and landscapes still bear the visible or hidden scars of past massacres and destruction, as do groups and populations that have been victims of repression. How do societies confront a past marked by violence and exclusion? What happens to people so steeped in oppression that personal and social traumas pervade their community relations even after the violence has ended? Are there models of reconciliation that can overcome the asymmetry of perpetrators and victims? How can such experiences be conveyed and represented by those who suffered the consequences to those who come after? This volume explores the work of memory and the ethics of healing in societies that have experienced sociopolitical rupture and histories of state violence. Combining a global and transnational approach with case-oriented analysis, it seeks to highlight the political, ethical, and aesthetic challenges posed by the commemoration of traumatic violence. The models and transformations of memory work analyzed in this book illustrate how the past is remembered or forgotten, confronted or repressed, and how it keeps haunting the present in the aftermath of violent historical events: the Second World War, the Holocaust and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Stalinism in post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe, the Civil War and Francoism in Spain, the Vichy collaboration in France, and the apartheid regime in South Africa.

These cracked grounds, shattered by history, these grounds that make you want to scream.

—Georges Didi-Huberman¹