Introduction: Remembering and Reviving in States of Flux

Abstract

‘We will remember’ is the exclamatory pledge given by those who are moving on from troubled times. It is intoned, for example, in Laurence Binyon’s Ode of Remembrance, which honours the British war dead of World War I. In its Hebrew version it gives the name to Nizkor, a web- based project that counters Holocaust denial. It is casted in plaques and chiselled into memorials meant to last forever. Moreover, the solemn promise never to forget collective experiences of trauma and pain in times to come dictates many other forms and rituals of commemoration. There, the words are uttered in order to bring together the past, the present and the future, and thus to repeatedly connect the bygone time that is to be recalled, the current time in which the pledge is given and the forthcoming time when the promise will avowedly be kept. The call and the assertion to remember are, therefore, not only backwards-looking undertakings: rather, they carry the agents, objects and circumstances of remembering along the temporal continuum between yesterday, today and tomorrow.