Genocide and Memory

Abstract

We live in a memory-obsessed age. Western culture is suffused with autobiographies, especially with traumatic life narratives about the legacies of abusive childhoods. Tourism consists to a large extent of the consumption of ‘heritage’ such as castles and stately homes; memorials and museums increasingly dot the landscape, and commemorative events seem to occur with increasing frequency. The history of genocide is also affected by these broad cultural trends; indeed, in some respects it exemplifies them. The perpetration of genocide requires the mobilisation of collective memories, as does the commemoration of it. For the individual victims of genocide, traumatic memories cannot be escaped; for societies, genocide has profound effects that are immediately felt and that people are exhorted (and willingly choose) never to forget. ‘Dark tourism’ — visits to death camps or other sites of mass murder — is fully integrated into the tourist trail.1 Although thinkers as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernest Renan, Paul Ricoeur and Marc Augé might be right to suggest that forgetting is essential for the health of society, genocide is less amenable to willed oblivion than most events because of the deep wounds it creates; thus, in the memory politics that surround it, genocide can scar societies long before and long after its actual occurrence. This chapter shows how genocide is bound up with memory, on an individual level of trauma and on a collective level, in terms of the creation of stereotypes, prejudice and post-genocide politics.