Historical Responsibility: Corporate Forms of Remembrance of National Socialist Forced Labour at the Volkswagen Plant

Abstract

The call to take historical responsibility is mostly found in connection with the consequences that arise from the National Socialist mass crimes.(Baer 2000)) The warning “Never again” was last linked with calls for an appropriate memorial and extensive compensation for the victims.(Spoerer 2002, Thompson 2002) But there are considerable complications with the term: theologians see a comprehensive, “historical responsibility through the eyes of the present day” (Virt 1993) while educationalists prefer “education as historical responsibility”. (Mogge 1988) The dictum is used for political instrumentalisation, rather as the long-serving president of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, Joseph Broz Tito, assigned a historical responsibility vis-à-vis world development to his movement of non-aligned countries. Tito 1979)