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Remembering the 20th Century

Remembering the key political events of the 20th century has arguably to be thought of as a highly reflexive task. The more extreme political projects of the period saw erasures of memory, negations of the past, of an unprecedented sort and, in turn, the lapse of any criteria transmitted from the past that might impose limits upon the ways in which human beings are treated. Remembering events of this kind is likely to be an undertaking permanently mediated by questions concerning the nature, and the point, of historical memory itself. One need only think here of the problems that continue to surround the Nazi Holocaust as a historical event, with its astonishing susceptibility to emasculation or denial, and also the sustained controversies around attempts at public memorialization of the event, with attendant criticisms of ‘forgetful monuments which erase as much history from memory as they inscribe in it’.1 Such problems might be taken as evidence that the more breathtakingly brutal aspects of the 20th-century experience may at best be objects of what Lawrence Langer has described as ‘anguished memory’ which, far from being redemptive, collapses into uncertainty, and so forms an impoverished basis upon which to make historical judgments.2 In view of this, we are challenged to reconsider how we relate to the past through historical memory and also, in the light of the kind of crimes of which an amnesiac society appears capable, to consider how we reassert the connection between the possibility of memory and the possibility of humanism. These questions have a central place in recent volumes by Hannah Arendt and Tzvetan Todorov. Responsibility and Judgment collects together a number of shorter pieces by Arendt, previously unpublished or uncollected and written mostly during the last decade of her life, which contain reflections upon key moral questions thrown up by the experience of totalitarianism, questions that resonate through subsequent controversies and which frame critical assessments of more contemporary political events. In Hope and Memory, Todorov looks back at the 20th century from the vantage point of its close and poses the