Carrying Responsibility Through Remembrance

Looking back at the course this semester, I am interested in the question: The war is over- What now? How do you deal with the question of responsibility and not only responsibility by certain individuals but also the responsibility of the German people as a whole? The Nuremberg trials punished those directly responsible but there still remained the question of collective guilt. Is it not true that every German was aware of the genocide- at least to some extent? The Germans had to face the truth of their utopian visions of an Aryan society- the mass killings of their own people, their neighbors, and their responsibility in this betrayal. What is the most righteous way to address this? But also consider, the feelings of survivor’s guilt. W.B. Sebald, a Jewish German writer who left Germany before the war, is just one example of this identity crisis felt across the world- being Jewish, the victim, but also German, the perpetrator. Theodor Adorno offers a method to addressing this internal conflict, and dealing with the past. He stresses that the Germans cannot swipe away the realities of what happened. The German people carry their guilt through a responsibility to remembering- through art, through literature.

In his essay “Ethics and Metaphysics After Auschwitz” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/), Adorno suggests, that rather than coming to terms with what has happened by stratifying, dissecting and thereby overcoming and forgetting the past, constant remembrance is key. Adorno suggest that the terrors of the Holocaust are not unrepresentable (one clearly understands why this could be thought) demanding a commitment to the past by the German people. The Holocaust demands new forms of expressions- the classical forms of poetry etc. are not capable of expressing what happened. Art has the right to exist as long as WWII and the Holocaust act as examples of the regression of society- art must resist this verdict, and portray the abundance of real suffering. The motto “Never again Auschwitz”- to teach future generations of the truths of genocide. He suggest that it is important not to forget but also not to claim that by not forgetting it will not happen again. It has happened again- the Armenian genocide, the genocide Rwanda, Serbian genocide etc.- What Adorno means is that there is a lack of reflection despite the continuous dissection and insight into the particularities of what happened. But then again, this raises the question and paradox-the holocaust forgetting versus the overbearing presence, which is another way of forgetting. The Holocaust transforming into a culture industry, which trivializes what really occurred. So the question still remains: What is the next step- How can the German people come to terms with what has happened and yet still pay an appropriate amount of moral retribution. Should the future generations still carry the guilt and responsibility of the actions of their parents and grandparents?