Encountering the Past within

the Present

Encountering the Past within the Present: Modern Experiences of Time

examines different encounters with the past from within the present – whether
as commemoration, nostalgia, silence, ghostly haunting or combinations thereof.
Taking its cue from Hannah Arendt’s definition of the present as a time span lying
between past and future, the author reflects on the old philosophical question
of how to live the good life – not only with others who are physically with us
but also with those whose presence is ghostly and liminal. While tradition may
no longer command the same authority as it did in antiquity or the middle ages,
individuals are by no means severed from the past. Rather, nostalgic longing
for bygone times and traumatic preoccupation with painful historical events
demonstrate the vitality of the past within the present. Divided into three parts,
chapters examine ways in which the legacies of World War II, the Holocaust and
communism have been remembered after 1945 and 1989. Maintaining a sustained
reflection on the nexus of memory, modernity and time in tandem with ancient
questions of responsibility for one another and the world, the volume contributes
to the growing field of memory studies from a philosophical perspective. As such,
it will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory and philosophy with interests
in collective memory and heritage.

Siobhan Kattago is Senior Research Fellow in Practical Philosophy at the

University of Tartu, Estonia. Her research interests include collective memory,
political thought and the philosophy of history. She is the editor of The Ashgate
Research Companion to Memory Studies and the author of Memory and
Representation in Contemporary Europe as well as Ambiguous Memory: The
Nazi Past and German National Identity.
Memory Studies: Global Constellations
Series editor: Henri Lustiger-Thaler
Ramapo College of New Jersey, USA
and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France

The ‘past in the present’ has returned in the early twenty-first century with a ven-
geance, and with it the expansion of categories of experience. These experiences
have largely been lost in the advance of rationalist and constructivist understand-
ings of subjectivity and their collective representations. The cultural stakes around
forgetting, ‘useful forgetting’ and remembering, locally, regionally, nationally and
globally have risen exponentially. It is therefore not unusual that ‘migrant memo-
ries’; micro-histories; personal and individual memories in their interwoven rela-
tion to cultural, political and social narratives; the mnemonic past and present of
emotions, embodiment and ritual; and finally, the mnemonic spatiality of geogra-
phy and territories are receiving more pronounced hearings.
This transpires as the social sciences themselves are consciously globalizing
their knowledge bases. In addition to the above, the reconstructive logic of mem-
ory in the juggernaut of galloping informationalization is rendering it more and
more publicly accessible, and therefore part of a new global public constellation
around the coding of meaning and experience. Memory studies as an academic
field of social and cultural inquiry emerges at a time when global public debate –
buttressed by the fragmentation of national narratives – has accelerated. Soci-
eties today, in late globalized conditions, are pregnant with newly unmediated
and unfrozen memories once sequestered in wide collective representations. We
welcome manuscripts that examine and analyze these profound cultural traces.

Titles in this series

Postnational Memory
Peace, War; Making Pasts Beyond Borders
Nigel Young

Encountering the Past within the Present

Modern Experiences of Time
Siobhan Kattago

For a complete list of titles in this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

sociology/series/ASHSER1411
Encountering the Past within
the Present
Modern Experiences of Time

Siobhan Kattago
First published 2020
by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kattago, Siobhan, 1966- author.
Title: Encountering the past within the present : modern experiences of
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Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge,
2020. | Series: Memory studies: global constellations | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019043327 (print) | LCCN 2019043328 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367110994 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367111007 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780429024825 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Memory—Sociological aspects. | Collective memory. |
Time—Sociological aspects. | History—Philosophy
Classification: LCC BF378.S65 K38 2020 (print) | LCC BF378.S65 (ebook) |
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ISBN: 978-0-429-02482-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Apex CoVantage, LLC
To Johanna,
in friendship
Contents

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction 1

Part I
Gaps, glitches and ghosts 17

1 Wandering in obscurity: modern experiences of time 19

2 The ghost of Patrocles: humanity and respect for the dead 35
3 The ghosts of Cain and Abel: am I my brother’s keeper? 48

Part II
Looking back after 1945 61

4 Walls and windows of silence 63

5 Why silence was not possible: Arendt on the Holocaust
and totalitarianism 77
6 The lost and haunted world of Austerlitz 94

Part III
Looking back after 1989 109

7 Being and not being there: Holocaust memorials, selfies

and social media 111
8 Lenin’s haunted house: ghosts and political theology 127
9 Nostalgia for phantom homelands: nowhere versus
somewhere145
Epilogue 159

Index 163
Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the lively debates and creative
insights of students from the University of Tartu. I am very grateful to colleagues
in the philosophy department for their intellectual support and patience during
the writing of this book. I especially wish to thank Ruth Jürjo for her meticulous
administrative assistance. Research for Encountering the Past within the Present:
Modern Experiences of Time was supported by the Estonian Ministry of Educa-
tion and Research (IUT 20–5, Disagreements: Philosophical Analysis) and the
European Regional Development Fund (TK 145, Centre of Excellence in Esto-
nian Studies).
Neil Jordan at Routledge has been a very helpful editor from the early book
proposal stage until submission for the series, Memory Studies: Global Constella-
tions. Likewise, I wish to thank Alice Salt for her editorial assistance. My sincere
gratitude to the anonymous reviewer of the book proposal for critical suggestions
for improving the direction of the manuscript.
I thank Routledge, Palgrave and Wiley Publishers for permission to reprint
revised versions of earlier work. Chapter 4 was originally published as ‘The Many
Sounds of Heidegger’s Silence’ in Beyond Memory: Silence and the Aesthetics
of Remembrance, edited by Alexandre Dessingué and Jay Winter (Routledge
Publishers, 2016). Chapter 6, ‘The Lost and Haunted World of Austerlitz,’ was
originally published as a chapter in The Afterlife of Events: Perspectives on Mne-
mohistory, edited by Marek Tamm (Palgrave Publishers, 2015). Chapter 8 was
originally published as ‘Haunted House: Memory, Ghosts and Political Theology
in Lenin’s Mausoleum’ in Constellations: A Journal of Critical and Democratic
Theory in December 2017.
I am grateful to the editors of Public Seminar for permission to expand some
ideas from a post, ‘Nowhere Is Somewhere: Solidarity and the Space between
Nations,’ published 15 January 2018, into Chapter 9. The paper also benefited
from helpful comments at the Third Russian and East European Studies confer-
ence held at Tartu University in June 2018.
Chapter 2 was first presented at the University of Södertörn’s Higher Seminar
in October 2018 as ‘The Legacy of Patrocles: Sediments of Time and the Tem-
porality of the Ghost’. My sincere thanks to Maria Sá Cavalcante-Schuback and
the participants of the philosophy department for a lively discussion on ghosts
 Acknowledgements  ix
and time. I am grateful to Hans Ruin for not only organising the seminar but also
for posing difficult questions on temporality, historical consciousness and burial.
An earlier version of Chapter 8 was presented as part of the Nordic Summer
University research study circle, Narrative and Memory: Ethics, Aesthetics at the
University of Tallinn in March 2017. The paper was also presented as part of the
UPTAKE seminar series at the University of Uppsala in November 2017. I am
especially grateful to Julie Hansen at the Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian
Studies for her thoughtful comments and warm hospitality.
My sincere thanks to Jordi Guixé i Coromines at the European Observatory
on Memories for his interesting work on memory and memorials in Europe. I
am grateful to Pavel Tychtl at the European Commission for lively debates on
European memory and changing understandings of twentieth century history. I
have learned much from participating in the study circle, Narrative and Memory:
Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics at the Nordic Summer University. My heartfelt thanks
to Eneken Laanes and Hanna Meretoja for organising our innovative and rigorous
symposia, 2017–2019.
I am very grateful to Emily Selvin for our conversations about memory and
time that resulted in her evocative cover for this book. Johanna Söderholm is
a wonderful friend who has supported the project from beginning to end with
multiple readings of drafts, a careful editorial eye and a marvellous sense of
humour. I thank my family, especially Alice and Paul, for their support while
writing Encountering the Past within the Present. For the reading of earlier ver-
sions and critical comments at various stages of writing, I am grateful to Andrew
Arato, Jean Cohen, Alex Davies, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Julie Hansen, Patrick Hutton,
Roomet Jakabi, Emma Juslin, Alena Kamenschikowa, Tiina Kirss, Daniel Levy,
Alvin Lim, Francisco Martínez, Deirdre Murphy, Francesco Orsi, Heiko Pääbo,
Elise Rohtmets, Hans Ruin, Merily Salura, Kadri Simm, Jaanus Sooväli, Tatiana
Stomakhina, Margit Sutrop, Pablo Veyrat and Michael Weinman.
Introduction

With the advent of mass media, internet and smart phones, our lives are increas-
ingly accompanied by ghostly images and unprecedented access to vast archives
of information. In today’s world of breaking news, the latest event renders the
previous one further down the list of headlines. Between our phones, computers
and televisions, we are bombarded with stories taking place both near and far.
If previous generations experienced a time lag due to the writing and posting
of letters, the printing of newspapers, typing of telegrams and limited radio and
television programmes, the internet and digital media collapse time and space into
an uncanny feeling of simultaneity, a sense that we are immediately connected to
events and the lives of others around the globe. But just as soon as we learn of one
event, another takes its place, and we risk forgetting those of yesterday and the
day before, of the previous week, not to mention of the previous month.
Reflecting on what he called ‘the Short Twentieth Century,’ Eric Hobsbawm
characterised it as an ‘age of extremes.’ Oscillating between progress and apoca-
lypse, the speed of technological and social change was not only rapid but accom-
panied by unprecedented state violence. ‘The Short Twentieth Century had been
one of world wars, hot and cold, conducted by great powers and their allies with
increasingly apocalyptic scenarios of mass destruction, culminating in the, fortu-
nately avoided, nuclear holocaust of the superpowers’ (Hobsbawm 1994: 559).
Rather than engaging with the trope of progress and decline, Hobsbawm, similar
to Freud in his Civilization and its Discontents (1930), depicted the twentieth
century as one pulled between the instincts of life and death, community and
destruction, Eros and Thanatos. What does it mean to live in a world where the
apocalypse is derived not from an all-powerful God but from our own ability to
rationalise violence and kill more efficiently? The realisation that human beings
can destroy the entire world caused Robert Oppenheimer, one of the physicists
who created the atom bomb, to recall the words of the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Now I
am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’ (Oppenheimer quoted in Temperton
2017). Standing at the precipice of enormous change, he recognised that it was not
only people who would be killed but worlds of people, with their unique civilisa-
tions, cultures, religions, art and science.
Much has been written about modernity, its cultural contradictions and pathol-
ogies. My interest in modern experiences of time focus on how the twentieth
2 Introduction
century, as an age of extremes, coupled with the increasingly fast pace of change
in the twenty-first century, affects our understanding of time, historical events and
our ability to respond to them. How might the fast pace of modern life influence
what and how we remember? Do we have a different understanding of time and
history than previous generations?
The late twentieth century was defined, by Zygmunt Bauman, less as a tract
of time that comes after modernity – as postmodern or posthistoire – and more
by the way in which social, economic and political relations have become fluid
and shapeless. To be modern is to be aware of ourselves as historical and tem-
poral beings. ‘The history of time began with modernity. Indeed, modernity is,
apart from anything else, perhaps even more than anything else, the history of
time: modernity is the time when time has a history’ (Bauman 2000: 110). While
modern experiences of time are faster and more intense than during that of antiq-
uity and the middle ages, questions of our responsibility to one another have not
gone away. Rather, given the increased capacity for the destruction of life and
the world, they have only become more pressing. In thinking about modernity as
a time of extremes and acceleration, old philosophical questions emerge within
a contemporary context: What is the good life? Am I my brother’s keeper? Do I
bear responsibility for the deeds of previous generations?
After World War II, an international legal and political order developed to pre-
vent future war, genocide and statelessness. The creation of the United Nations
(1945), NATO (1949), the foundation of the European Coal and Steel Commu-
nity (1951), along with the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crimes of Genocide (1948), prosecution of crimes against humanity at the Inter-
national Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (1945–1946), the Universal Declaration
on Human Rights (1948) and the Geneva Convention on Refugees (1951) were
institutional attempts to prevent state-sponsored violence by interlocking nation-
states into new forms of solidarity and multilateral cooperation. Although the
post-war institutions of the UN, the EU and NATO have very different aims, they
are, nonetheless, responses to the failures of individual governments in the first
half of the twentieth century to prevent war and genocide. Likewise, the Geneva
Convention and Universal Declaration on Human Rights affirm the dignity of the
human being and rights of the refugee to claim asylum. However, with the rise
of far-right populism in the twenty-first century, such post-war international trea-
ties and conventions seem to be increasingly disregarded in the name of national
sovereignty.

Encountering the past within the present

How we think about the past influences our attitude towards the present and how
we might imagine a shared future. One can either listen and respond to historical
events or evade, ignore, deny and repress them. To encounter someone or some-
thing is to meet them unexpectedly, to come face to face. This encounter may be
pleasant or disagreeable, a confrontation or a chance meeting. What, though, does
 Introduction  3
it mean to encounter the past, to stop for a moment and reflect on historical events
or individuals who are no longer with us but whose traces nonetheless remain?
The past is not encountered in a vacuum but experienced within a longer time-
frame. In Warped Mourning, Alexander Etkind links Derrida’s hauntology with
Benjamin’s secret agreement between generations and Edmund Burke’s great pri-
meval contract. All three share the conviction that generations are bound together
in a chain of responsibility (Etkind 2013: 206–207). Although writing in different
time periods, Burke, Benjamin and Derrida responded to revolutionary changes
and political crises in their lifetimes. Edmund Burke reacted to the violence of
1789 in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) by arguing for the
necessity to conserve tradition and for incremental change rather than rupture. For
Burke, generations participate in a partnership between the dead, the living and
the unborn. The ‘great primeval contract’ means that individuals cannot escape
their continuity with one another.

As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it

becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, those who are
dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is
but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society.
(Burke 1986: 194–195)

Walter Benjamin, like Burke, stresses the hidden links between generations. His
‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1942) were written and published during
World War II and after the Russian Revolution, and yet, he did not advocate a new
order severing the present from the past. On the contrary, past and present genera-
tions are linked into one of expectation and even redemption.

There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one.
Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us,
we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the
past has a claim.
(Benjamin 1968: 254)

Writing after the fall of communism and the break-up of the Soviet Union,
Derrida’s Specters of Marx focusses on justice and responsibility between genera-
tions. ‘No justice – let us not say no law and once again we are not speaking here
of laws – seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility,
beyond all living present’ (Derrida 1994: xix). As Etkind notes, Derrida’s justice
between generations is closely related to Burke’s great primeval contract between
the dead, the living and the unborn. Justice implies participating in a generational
continuum between past, present and future.

Without this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without

that with secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect for
4 Introduction
justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or
who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask the ques-
tion ‘where?’ and ‘where tomorrow?’ ‘whither?’
(Ibid: xix)

Derrida’s reflections on how the past haunts the present are raised within the
context of one of the oldest philosophical questions; namely, what does it mean
to live the good life? The answer, he suggests, lies not only in living with oth-
ers who are alive but also in living with ancestors from the past. Stressing the
importance of inheritance and tradition, Derrida provides a tentative roadmap
for understanding the past from the point of view of the present. His hauntology
demands the ability to listen to voices from the past and the moral capacity to
respond to them fairly. Only when we are open to the liminal presence of ghosts
can one begin to grasp the contours of what it means to live a good life. Although
Derrida addresses past events that seep into the present, it does not follow that
one is fixated traumatically on the past. On the contrary, he points to the necessity
to recognise spectres in order to fully live in the present. Of upmost importance
are two interwoven themes: the responsibility of the present generation to their
ancestors and the sense that ‘the time is out of joint’ due to ghosts who disrupt the
chronological flow of time.
Burke’s great primeval contract envisions time in a long duration – as a lengthy
continuum between generations. Likewise, Benjamin’s secret agreement between
generations and Derrida’s recognition of ghosts from the past emphasise how
individuals are embedded in longer temporal processes that precede and fol-
low them. With respect to long durations of time, it was Fernand Braudel who
called attention to the different layers of time, each with its own particular dura-
tion of temporality: long durations, medium durations and that of events. A long
duration (longue durée) is that of ‘man and his relationship to the environment’
(Braudel 1995: 20). It is that of ‘geographical time,’ which is one of slow change
and cyclical repetition. Medium time (moyenne durée), on the other hand, is that
of social history and the ‘history of groups and groupings’ (Ibid). Medium time
comprises decades and even centuries of economic and social time. The third
structure of time is the short duration of events (courte durée), comprised of ‘sur-
face disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong
backs’ (Ibid: 21). The time of events comprises days or weeks of political time
and change. Braudel’s three temporal durations elucidate how individuals experi-
ence time in different ways as long-term geographical time, medium social time
and that of short-term events. What is missing, however, is reflection on the gap
between experience and narrative, as well as the spectral presence of the past that
moves between the different structures of time in unexpected ways.

The gap between experience and narrative

The question of how to capture and represent historical experience is an enduring
paradox. How can one write a history of historical events and actions after the
 Introduction  5
fact? In his Philosophy of History, Hegel famously reflected on the dual nature of
the word ‘history.’

In our language, the term History unites the objective with the subjective side,
and denotes quite as much the historia rerum gestarum, as the res gestae
themselves; on the other hand it comprehends not less what has happened,
than the narration of what has happened. This union of the two meanings we
must regard as of a higher order than mere outward accident; we must sup-
pose historical narrations to have appeared contemporaneously with histori-
cal deeds and events.
(Hegel 1900: 60)

History, understood as the narrative of past events, contains two different mean-
ings: historia rerum gestarum and res gestae. If historia rerum gestarum is the
narrative telling of past experience, res gestae denotes what actually happened.
The task for historians, artists, writers, architects and museum curators is how to
bridge the gap between the things that happened and their subsequent representa-
tion. Since one cannot entirely capture past experience, there is a gap between the
lived experience of historical events and the meaning ascribed to them afterwards.
The gap between experience and its subsequent meaning, between the messi-
ness of what will later be named and designated as an ‘event’ with an exacting
chronology or pristine representation in a memorial or museum, is one that pre-
occupied Reinhart Koselleck and Hannah Arendt. Although historians chronicle
the complexity of the past and artists inscribe historical experience into monu-
ments and memorials, there is, nonetheless, a lingering inability to bridge the
gap between what happened and how it might be most faithfully represented. As
Koselleck writes: ‘The discrepancy between past reality and its linguistic process-
ing will never be closed. What is it that Epictetus said? “It is not what has been
done that shocks people, but what is said about it”’ (Enchiridion, cap V, quoted in
Koselleck 2018: 157). This is not to say that lived experience is authentic while
stories about the past are false but rather that a gap persists between historical
actions and the narrative of them. What Koselleck and Arendt insist upon is the
awareness that this space between an event and its aftermath, between experience
and storytelling, is impossible to close.
When thinking about the differences between the ancient and modern concep-
tions of history, Arendt focused on one particular scene in Homer’s Odyssey. For
her, the origin of history, ‘not historically but poetically speaking,’ occurs at the
precise moment when Odysseus, at the court of the Phaeacians, ‘listened to the
story of his own deeds and sufferings, to the story of his life, now a thing out-
side himself, an “object” for all to see and to hear’ (Arendt 1977: 45). The moment
when Odysseus recognises himself in the words of another marks the (poetic)
beginning of history. Such a recounting of deeds, in which Odysseus is reconciled
to his own actions through the words of another, indicates the tragic moment of
catharsis and reconciliation, which occurs ‘through the tears of remembrance’ dough
(Arendt 19 77: 45). When Odysseus listens to the bard, the story of his life becomes
6 Introduction
‘a thing outside himself.’ Odysseus entered the court of the Phaeacians anony-
mously, as an unnamed man, and through the course of the evening, he reclaimed
his identity when he recognised himself in the stories of the bard. The narration
of his participation in the Trojan War existed parallel to how he remembers what
he himself did.
In Arendt eyes, modern historians look for the truth of historical events. While
Plato sought truth outside ‘the realm of human affairs,’ modern historians seek it
within the actions of human beings. ‘To think, with Hegel, that truth resides and
reveals itself in the time-process itself is characteristic of all modern historical
consciousness, however it expresses itself, in specifically Hegelian terms or not’
(Arendt 1977: 68).
Living through an historical event is qualitatively different from the narration
of that same time period. For Koselleck, the historian retroactively represents the
fragmented actions of the past into an event different from other possible histo-
ries. ‘Every historical representation is a selection from a potentially unlimited
realm of past, endured and enacted histories’ (Koselleck 2018: 151). In trying to
understand historical experience in the twentieth century, Koselleck, like Arendt,
begins with Heidegger’s conceptual framework of individuals as beings in the
world who move towards their own death. However, both expand Heidegger’s
work by including the world, other people and a fuller conception of pre-linguistic
structures of action. Koselleck emphasises how the lived experience of war is
completely different from individual memories of that same war. Each person
experiences an event in a unique way. The experience of World War II differed
depending upon whether one was a soldier, civilian, man, woman, concentration
camp survivor or prisoner of war. In spite of the uniqueness of each experience,
Koselleck looked for conditions that not only shaped how individuals understood
historical events but also how they are recounted. In Sediments of Time, he anal-
yses the synchronic and diachronic factors that shape social consciousness. If
synchronic factors occur at a specific point in time, diachronic changes occur
over longer tracts of time. Each person experiences important changes in their
lifetime, which, upon retrospection, appear as pivotal turning points. Likewise,
certain historical and social experiences irrevocably alter the lives of those who
lived through them. Koselleck asks whether the historical consciousness of the
war generation can be shared and transmitted to the next generation. Experiences
of war are filtered and conditioned by what he terms ‘structured events’ or ‘event
structures’ that shape historical consciousness (Ibid 2: 208).
Although each person may have their own private experiences of war, Koselleck
maintains, they are still structured by pre-war conditions. Pre-war religious beliefs,
world views and ideology may transcend the war experience, hence defining who
is to be determined as an enemy or a friend. Pre-war political parties and nation-
ality are powerful filters for understanding the day-to-day experiences of war,
particularly in the case of soldiers from different parts of empires, be they Austro-
Hungarian, Ottoman, British or Russian. Koselleck underscores the importance
of generational differences for how one comprehends war. The war experience
differs between the old and young, between the generation of World War II who
had already lived through World War I and those who did not. Gender differences
 Introduction  7
structure the experience of war dramatically because it matters whether one lived
through the war at the front or at home. Likewise, class structures ways in which
the war is experienced, depending on whether one was an officer or in the infan-
try, rich or poor (Ibid: 208–213).
While social structures condition how individuals lived and experienced two
world wars, the momentous shift, for Koselleck, occurs after the ceasefire has
been declared. Once the war is over, experience changes to memory. ‘Experience
of war becomes memory of war’ (Ibid: 213–214). Memory changes, is unreli-
able, embellishes some parts and forgets others. Memory occurs after an experi-
ence or formative event. There is, he argues, a retroactive transformation in the
space of experience as certain events are brought forward and called to mind in
the present. Recollection is an afterthought, a way of reflecting on something after
it has happened. Hence, after the official cease-fire, the meaning of war is differ-
ent depending upon whether one was defined as a winner or a loser. As he himself
experienced, the kind of victory or loss is critical to how the war is remembered.
It makes an enormous difference whether individuals died for a ‘lost cause or for
victory’ (Ibid: 215). Koselleck is clear that the experiences of war cannot be ren-
dered fully into a written text. ‘However, memory of the war is not a stable entity
that has a continuous, unchanging effect’ (Ibid: 214). Some aspects are forgotten,
others are glorified. Of utmost importance is where one stands at the moment of
ceasefire – with the victorious or the vanquished.
The most visible transformation from experience to memory occurs with the
veneration of the war dead. Honouring those who died during the war is a common
response in the attempt to find meaning, if possible, in mass death. As Koselleck
writes, although each person dies alone, death due to war leads to a common desire
to understand and give meaning to this loss. ‘Every dying person dies alone. But
organized mass killing leads to commonalities and to differences in how survivors
work through the experience and remember the war’ (Ibid: 216). In reflecting on
the distinction between events and their narration, he underscores the gap between
experience and representation. The generational difference between those who
experienced war and the next generation is a chasm that Koselleck finds impos-
sible to bridge. Although he was a German soldier in World War II and a prisoner
of war in a Soviet camp, as well as a historian, Koselleck is very clear about the
limits of what can be said about the past in general and about the experience of
war in particular. In reflecting on commemorations and memorials to the Second
World War, he is acutely aware of this unbridgeable gap.

None of these experiences can be transmitted. They fill the memory of those
affected by them, they form their memories, flow into their bodies like a
mass of lava, immovable and inscribed. In comparison, all experiences of
contemporaries who were not in the camps as well as those who were born
later are secondary.
(Ibid: 240–241)

While mindful of how certain events stand out in the long duration of historical
time, Koselleck’s metaphor of history as layers of time allows for the prominence
8 Introduction
of certain events, their aftermaths and different durations. Building on Braudel’s
insights, Koselleck’s sediments of time, like geological layers, display cracks,
erosion and fissures. The metaphor of sedimentation allows one to trace varying
rates of acceleration and deceleration. Moreover, the intensity of the present as a
gap between past and future shifts within these layered sediments. Political events
may leave long-lasting traces in the fabric of society – whether inscribed into
law, art, religion, government, education, science or the writing of history. While
an event such as World War II might be demarcated by the years 1939–1945, or
referred to as the Great Patriotic War with the dates 1941–1945, its long aftermath
is unpredictable and leaves legacies of varying duration.

Ways of thinking about the past

Encountering the Past within the Present examines how the pivotal events of
World War II, the Holocaust and the fall of communism in Europe have been
remembered after 1945 and after 1989. The modern experience of time is char-
acterised by acute awareness that time itself is accelerating in manifold ways
that change how we think about past, present and future. Indeed, the continuum
of time may be experienced as one of gaps between different temporalities. Time
may glitch or freeze on particular moments – be they heroic and glorious or
traumatic and painful. In addition, aspects of the past may haunt individuals by
appearing as ghosts or spectres in the present.
In thinking about how an age of extremes and accelerated sense of time influ-
ence how we encounter and relate to the past, four patterns are prevalent through-
out this volume: commemoration, nostalgia, silence and ghosts. Although by no
means exhaustive, they exemplify ways that individuals experience time and deal
with dramatic social and political change from the standpoint of their lived pres-
ent. They also demonstrate that modern experiences of time are not only ones of
linear progress but subject to gaps, glitches and the episodic presence of ghosts.

Commemoration: memorials and museums

Commemoration, as a way of remembering together at a memorial or museum,
distils the complexity of the past into symbols and narrative, thus creating a
slower sacred time that is open to reflection. Commemoration may also serve as a
warning for the future. Although a monument may be built to represent a particu-
lar story about the past, its reception by the public is unpredictable. In visiting a
memorial or monument, we encounter and come face to face with a representation
of the past. A memorial may serve as a place of memory or become an invisible
part of the national landscape. It may also become a tourist attraction and an
iconic site for the taking of photographs and selfies. Memorials and museums are
deliberately designed to slow the passage of time to enable visitors to find points
of reflection between past and present. Such slowing down of ordinary time offers
a space for thinking about past events, the dead and the link between generations.
Commemoration is the activity of remembering together. As Hans Ruin (2019)
 Introduction  9
reminds us, the earliest and most primal place of commemoration is the grave,
whether as an individual tomb, mausoleum of a political leader, military cem-
etery, tomb of the unknown soldier, former battlefield or concentration camp.
The grave links the living with the dead and joins the present generation with
its ancestors. Likewise, commemorative days and holidays remind individuals of
events of national and religious significance. Memorials and memorial museums
are imbued with sacred time, and are, as Jay Winter (2012) suggests, ‘modern
cathedrals’ that reconfigure the sacred in a modern secular age. Commemorative
occasions deliberately interrupt ordinary and profane time with reflections on mor-
tality, loss and identity.

Nostalgia for a lost time and place

Nostalgia is the desire to return to a lost time and place that is elsewhere. Given
the rapid and uneven changes since the twentieth century, the desire for slower
and more traditional ways of life has become increasingly pronounced. Indeed, as
Svetlana Boym argues, nostalgia is ‘coeval with modernity itself’ (2001: xvi). It is
not that nostalgia completely rejects modern change, rather that nostalgic longing
is symptomatic of the dramatic upheaval and uprootedness caused by modernity.
Nostalgia is ‘a symptom of our age, a historical emotion’ (Ibid). As a senti-
ment, nostalgia is a longing for a past way of life. As the aching for past comfort
and rootedness, nostalgia imagines and often romanticises not only another place
but another time – youth or childhood, town or country that one has left but which
remains unchanged for the one who is remembering. ‘Nostalgia is a sentiment
of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy’ (Ibid:
xiii). Although nostalgia may be a sentiment familiar to many people, the longing
for home or nostos is historically and culturally specific. The imagined home that
one longs for is not an empty house anywhere but one associated with particular
family members and people who speak a familiar language and who belong in that
specific domicile. Nostalgia engages feelings of attachment, smells, tastes and
details associated with a lost home.

Silence and worldlessness

While silence may express the limit of being able to represent the complexity of
past events, silent retreat into the private realm may lead to disengagement from
past events, other people and the world in general. Silence may indicate mod-
esty, respect and piety. Especially within the context of religion and art, silence
acknowledges the limitation of language to express beauty and the divine. The
issue, however, shifts if individuals retreat into silence when confronted with
injustice and political violence. When silence is accompanied by a retreat from
the world, it may even lead to the evasion of individual responsibility, passive
acquiesce and the refusal to question or engage with others. Silent retreat into
one’s inner sanctuary indicates the desire not to become involved in public affairs.
For Arendt, retreat from the public realm indicated worldlessness and a desire to
10 Introduction
disengage from what we share in common. ‘Remoteness from reality’ is indica-
tive of modern detachment and alienation from what we share in common (Arendt
1969: 20). Mass society and globalisation expand the private realm and transform
the shared space of the common world. By receding to the private realm, albeit
one that is increasingly mediated by digital screens and online platforms, we risk
disengaging from public affairs and a shared common world.

Ghostly hauntings and glitches in time

Unlike commemoration, nostalgia and silence, whose roots are located in the pres-
ent, ghosts emerge unexpectedly from the past and demand recognition. While
ghosts may appear without warning, they can also be conjured up by individuals
in the present. As Derrida writes, ghosts often appear in ‘the name of justice’
(Derrida 1994: xix). While nostalgia is the longing for a lost home and another
time, ghosts emerge from the past and interrupt the present. Since photography,
film and social media supplement or even, at times, supplant traditional traces of
the past written onto paper, sculpted into monuments and built into museums, a
virtual world of ghostly images accompanies us with their flickering presence.
Like silence, traumatic fixation on a haunted past may lead to withdrawal into the
private realm and disengagement from others and the world. Since media tech-
nology is a pervasive part of our world, how we understand and come to terms
with ghosts from the past influences how we live in the present and move towards
the future. Ghosts and spectral pasts may even create glitches in our perception
of linear time. Similar to commemorative occasions after World War II, ghostly
hauntings tend to focus on negative and traumatic events. Although commemora-
tion, nostalgia, silence and ghosts may overlap, each encounter with the past has
its own temporality and understanding of historical time.

Outline of the book

Encountering the Past within the Present: Modern Experiences of Time examines
different encounters with the past from within the present – whether as commem-
oration, nostalgia, silence, ghostly haunting or combinations thereof. Divided into
three parts, the chapters examine ways in which the legacies of World War II, the
Holocaust and communism in Europe are encountered and remembered in the
present. What unites the volume is a sustained reflection on the nexus of memory,
time and modernity in tandem with ancient questions of responsibility for one
another and the world. Like Patrocles’ plea for a proper burial, Cain’s question
of ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ addresses human dignity and the fragility of life.
Each generation encounters these questions in unique ways and under different
historical circumstances. Linked to these questions is what kind of responsibility
we owe to one another. If the first layer of responsibility lies with people who
exist with us in the present, the second addresses those who are no longer alive but
whose legacy and afterlife continues to influence the present generation. The third
 Introduction  11
layer lies with our responsibility to those who come after us and to the continuity
of the world.
The first three chapters in Part I: Gaps, glitches and ghosts address gaps in
time and the effects of an accelerated pace of life. Derrida’s hauntology plays an
important role in outlining episodic ruptures and zig-zags in time. The ghost of
Patrocles, begging his friend Achilles to complete his funeral rites, reminds us
of the imperative to respect and bury the dead. Like Antigone, Patrocles dem-
onstrates that without burial and respect for those who came before us, we lose
our humanity. Cain, when asked by God about his brother, Abel, poses one of the
most powerful questions in ethics and politics: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ How
we choose to answer Cain’s question effects how we define solidarity and our
responsibility to one another.
‘Wandering in obscurity: modern experiences of time’ (Chapter 1) examines
different conceptions of time in the work of Arendt, Koselleck, Hartog and Der-
rida. Arendt’s depiction of the gap between past and future and Koselleck’s accel-
eration of time emphasise how the past influences, disrupts or even haunts the
present. While tradition may no longer command the same authority as it did in
antiquity or the middle ages, individuals are not severed from the past. Rather,
nostalgic longing for bygone times and traumatic preoccupation with painful his-
torical events demonstrate the vitality of the past in the present. As historical
beings, we live, as Koselleck suggests, within sediments of time that are layered
fossil-like in different temporal durations. The chapter supplements Hartog’s pre-
sentism, positing the omnipotence of the present over the past and future with
Derrida’s hauntology. Past injustices demonstrate that the past is not simply past;
rather, aspects of it continue to haunt the present and may be even more tangible
than the current moment.
Drawing on the Greek tradition, ‘The ghost of Patrocles’ (Chapter 2) reflects on
the legacy of Patrocles’ ghost from Homer’s Iliad. Arguing that burial is necessary
to our humanity, the chapter examines the temporality of Patrocles’ ghost as he
appears to Achilles in a dream asking for burial. The metaphor of the ghost demon-
strates how traces of the past can appear unexpectedly in the present. In everyday
language, we speak of a ghostly presence or spectre that haunts us, or one that is
suddenly evoked and conjured up. Patrocles’ ghost, his visitation during a dream
and in-between status of being stranded between different temporalities is helpful
for understanding the peculiar way that ghosts interrupt ordinary time.
If the Greek tradition reminds subsequent generations of the imperative to bury
the dead so that they might pass into the next temporal realm of eternity, ‘The
ghosts of Cain and Abel’ (Chapter 3) juxtaposes Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levi-
nas’s interpretation of the Hebrew story of Cain and Abel. For Schmitt, fratricide
haunts the origin of politics. While highlighting Cain’s murder of his brother and
the founding of the first biblical city, Schmitt avoids discussing Cain’s question of
whether kinship entails responsibility to the other person. For Levinas, however,
Cain’s question to God asking whether he bears any responsibility whatso-
ever to his brother demonstrates his utter isolation from society, God and the
12 Introduction
world. Schmitt was haunted by Cain and Abel when he was imprisoned by the
Allies for his support of National Socialism. Levinas, in contrast, spent five years
in a German prisoner of war camp, and the story of Cain and Abel appears many
times in his writing within the framework of Cain’s haunting question, which calls
us into infinite responsibility for the other.
Part II: Looking back after 1945 focuses on modern conceptions of time after
World War II and the Holocaust, with chapters on Heidegger, Blanchot, Arendt
and Sebald. What unites the chapters is a concern with the break in tradition in
the twentieth century. Looking back after 1945, questions about how to represent
the Holocaust and war preoccupy all four thinkers. Some, like Heidegger, chose
silence and monologue, others, like Blanchot, Arendt and Sebald, tried not only to
understand how such inhumanity might have been possible but how to honour the
dead and foster responsibility towards others and the world.
‘Walls and windows of silence’ (Chapter 4) examines the question of silence
with respect to Heidegger’s philosophical writings and political involvement with
the Nazi party. Although silence has often been associated with religious piety
and the ineffable, what happens when silence moves from religion to that of poli-
tics and history? Does silence indicate a denial of reality or a decision not to
respond to others? According to George Steiner, silence can either be a window to
the divine or a wall hindering dialogue and discussion. While Plato and Maurice
Blanchot’s writings employ silence as windows for understanding, Heidegger’s
poetic understanding of silence might be construed as a window; however, his
decision to remain silent about the Holocaust remains a wall of troubling evasions
that continues to haunt the history of philosophy.
Arendt’s writings on the Holocaust within the framework of totalitarianism
and the trial of Eichmann are the subject of ‘Why silence was not possible’
(Chapter 5). Unlike Heidegger, she was not silent about the Holocaust, the per-
petrators or individual bureaucrats within the regime. Rather, her reflections on
totalitarianism became the focal point for coming to terms with the relationship
between understanding and politics in the twentieth century. Totalitarianism, as
a new political phenomenon, was linked with anti-Semitism and imperialism in
the nineteenth century, which, in turn, crystallised in modern worldlessness and
remoteness from reality in the twentieth century. Thinking with and against Hei-
degger, she addressed the dangers of privileging philosophical contemplation
over judgment and the prevalence of bureaucratic efficiency and thoughtlessness.
‘The lost and haunted world of Austerlitz’ (Chapter 6) argues that W G Sebald’s
character, Austerlitz is haunted by his childhood gaps of memory. While acknowl-
edging that Austerlitz can be understood as an example of postmemory and trauma,
Sebald’s book is also a reflection on the origins of writing and representation, first
raised by Plato in the Phaedrus and later by Freud and Derrida. If Plato argues
that the activity of writing fosters forgetting, Austerlitz shows how the fixation
on memory can suppress not only speech but also writing. Nostalgia for his lost
childhood is accompanied by an inability to write about the past that he is trying
to come to terms with. Similar to Plato and Freud, Sebald underscores the central
role of dialogue to enable individuals to deal with the past and live in the present.
 Introduction  13
In addition to portraying the complexity of generational memories of the Holo-
caust, Austerlitz is also part of an older discussion on the difficulty of representing
historical experience.
The chapters in Part III: Looking back after 1989 shift to questions of tem-
porality after the fall of communism with the expansion of liberal democracy,
neoliberalism and capitalism to arguments for the end of history and exhaustion of
utopian ideas. Looking back after 1989, the present seems to be one of an endless
now with conflicting views towards the past and future. The chapters highlight
difficulties in commemorating Holocaust memorials in a digital age, commemo-
rating the Soviet past with the continued existence of Lenin’s Mausoleum and
rising populist nostalgia for phantom homelands in the twenty-first century.
‘Being and not being there’ (Chapter 7) reflects on the new commemorative
culture of selfies and photographs when visiting Holocaust memorials. Positing
that respect for the dead is a central component of what it means to be human,
it takes issue with selfies taken at an iconic place of suffering. Visiting an actual
gravesite or a memorial commemorating the dead is a markedly different expe-
rience than other tourist sites and places of memory. Holocaust memorials are
intended to slow ordinary time, in order to allow for reflection. However, the
spontaneous playfulness of selfies may unwittingly rupture memorial spaces that
are intended for commemorative reflection. The art project Yolocaust and film
Austerlitz underscore how selfies and social media may distance viewers from
memorials commemorating the Holocaust. In looking for the desired photograph
or perfect selfie, we may inadvertently remove ourselves from the present by
projecting ourselves forward into a near future, thereby becoming absent from the
very place we came to visit.
Lenin’s Mausoleum in Moscow is the subject of ‘Lenin’s haunted house’
(Chapter 8). Because Lenin’s physical body represents the continuity of state
sovereignty, the mausoleum exemplifies uneven patterns of commemorating the
Soviet past in contemporary Russia. Scientific advances prevent Lenin’s physical
body from the natural process of decay and also attempt to slow down or even
stop time. Although it was possible to bury Stalin’s embalmed remains in 1961,
burying Lenin is more complex because his removal from the necropolis of Red
Square requires rethinking the continuities between the history of the October
Revolution of 1917, the doctrine of Leninism, the role of the communist party
and the creation of the Soviet Union. As Lenin’s Mausoleum demonstrates, the
communist past continues to persist in contemporary Russia in unpredictable and
warped ways.
‘Nostalgia for phantom homelands’ (Chapter 9) examines how the nation-state
was the coveted ‘somewhere’ of 1918, while the post-war order of 1945 imagined
a different ‘somewhere’ that was neither a cosmopolitan ‘nowhere,’ nor a national
‘somewhere.’ The post-war liberal order was an attempt to create spaces between
nations after two world wars and during the Cold War. The fragility of peace dur-
ing the interwar years (1918–1939) was partially due to the lack of international
organisations and treaties that could challenge the tribal ‘somewhere’ of nation-
states. As the generation who experienced war and its immediate aftermath die
14 Introduction
out, memories of why a liberal international order was created in the first place
are fading. Nostalgia accompanies the modern acceleration of time and dovetails
with a longing for a golden age of the nation unrestrained by international organ-
isations and treaties. Nostalgia for a lost time and place is partially the fantasy of
a phantom homeland. Populism and calls for illiberal democracy not only chal-
lenge the post-war liberal order but are also part of what Samuel Huntington calls
the receding third wave of democratisation.
The presence of the past is a central theme in philosophy, history, politics, litera-
ture, religion and law. Past experiences are narrated by witnesses, written into texts,
carved into memorials and displayed in museums. Voices of the past reverberate in
the stories and actions of the next generation. One may experience gaps between
past, present and future, and time may glitch and or even seem to freeze. In some
cases, fixation on painful events may eclipse one’s awareness of the present and
anticipation of the future. Memories of pivotal events or particular individuals
may even appear as spectres or ghosts, that emerge in the present. Commemora-
tions briefly freeze slices of complex historical events into a memorial, museum
or mummified leader. Nostalgia longs for a lost time and place that is partially
a fantasy. Silent retreat from the world may just as well indicate reverence as
worldlessness or denial, while ghosts from the past episodically interrupt the flow
of accelerated time.
Emily Selvin’s cover photograph, The Dance of Time, captures pivotal aspects
of the past as they are encountered within the present. While old watches without
hands can no longer tell time, the hands of other watches are frozen in a fixed
present. Selvin’s overlapping images of time express the ghostly blurring of tem-
porality endemic to modernity – as simultaneous moments of acceleration and
deceleration.
While the retrospective gaze dominates Encountering the Past within the Pres-
ent, the past is connected with how we imagine the future by caring for this world
and for one another. Patrocles’ ghost, who appears to Achilles in a dream, demands
burial. Cain poses the pivotal question of social justice that continues to resonate
with contemporary issues of war, migration, statelessness and the destruction of
the planet. Hence, the imperative to find ways in which we might respond fairly to
historical injustices in order to honour the dead within an ever-accelerating pres-
ent and live together in a shared future world.

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Thought. (New York: Penguin).
Arendt, Hannah. 1969. Crises of the Republic. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Benjamin, Walter. 1968. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Hannah Arendt, ed.,
Illuminations. (New York: Schocken Books).
Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. (New York: Basic Books).
Braudel, Fernand. 1995. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World. Vol. 1. Siân
Reynolds, trans. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).
 Introduction  15
Burke, Edmund. 1986 [1790]. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Conor Cruise
O’Brien, ed. (London: Penguin Books).
Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning,
and the New International. Peggy Kamuf, trans. (London and New York: Verso).
Etkind, Alexander. 2013. Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the
Unburied. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).
Hegel, G. W. F. 1900. The Philosophy of History. J Sibree, trans. (New York: Wiley Book
Co).
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1994. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991. (New
York: Vintage Books).
Koselleck, Reinhart. 2018. Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories. Sean Franzel and
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ed. and trans. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).
Ruin, Hans. 2019. Being with the Dead: Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of His-
torical Consciousness. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).
Temperton, James. 2017. ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds: The story of
Oppenheimer’s infamous quote’, Wired. 9 August. www.wired.co.uk/article/manhattan-
project-robert-oppenheimer (Accessed 17 May 2019).
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Copyright © 2020. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or
applicable copyright law.
Part I

Gaps, glitches and ghosts

1 Wandering in obscurity
Modern experiences of time

Hannah Arendt, Reinhart Koselleck and François Hartog perceived dislocation

and rupture as characteristics or even symptoms of the modern experience of
time. All three reflected on historical events that occurred during their lifetimes
with their corresponding shifts in temporality. Koselleck, like Arendt, lived through
the age of extremes in the twentieth century. Both argued that the past no longer
illuminates the present in the same way as it did in previous centuries. Instead, it
is the future that structures the modern understanding of time. Hartog, in contrast,
argues that neither the past nor the future illuminate the present in the same way
as before. Instead, the present has become an extended tract of time disengaged
from both the past and the future.
In 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville concluded Democracy in America by reflecting
on the dramatic changes that he had experienced in France and the United States.
In examining how a democratic form of government was shaping the manners
and habits of Americans, Tocqueville foresaw the future of Europe and the old
world. After the French Revolution, the past no longer illuminated a way out of
the present towards the future. ‘Since the past has ceased to throw its light upon
the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity’ (Tocqueville quoted in Arendt
1977: 7).1 Tocqueville’s disorientation in the present and disenchantment with
the authority of the past resonate with Arendt, Koselleck and Hartog. And yet, if
the past is no longer a source of authoritative tradition, how might one account
for its traces that linger, influence, burden, and even haunt the present? Particu-
larly with mass-mediated images, moments from the past seem to have a ghostly
presence and extended afterlife. Moreover, the compression of time and space in
the twenty-first century blurs traditional boundaries of past, present and future.
For some, the ‘time is out of joint,’ while others may sense glitches or that they
are ‘stuck in time’ and ‘stranded in the present.’2 In response to this impasse, I
suggest Derrida’s hauntology as a way in which to acknowledge the spectral and
episodic presence of the past within a changing present. His attention to ruptures
in linearity and the disjointed sense of time responds to the lacunae in Arendt,
Koselleck and Hartog’s writings. Moreover, ghosts demonstrate that temporal
boundaries may be more porous than the past as ‘no longer’ and the future as
‘not yet.’
20  Gaps, glitches and ghosts
Looking back after 1945: the gap between past and future
In trying to make sense of the magnitude of historical change in the first half of
the twentieth century, Arendt described the present as a gap between past and
future. In simplest terms, the present is a temporal space in between two different
understandings of time. If the past is ‘no longer’ and the future is ‘not yet,’ the
present lies somewhere in between the two. However, Arendt emphasised how
the meaning of the ‘present’ as a contemporary period of time transformed after
the war to denote a break in continuity that had occurred during her lifetime.
Totalitarian regimes, statelessness, genocide and the mass murder of Jews consti-
tuted a fundamental break in the continuity of tradition. The post-war ‘present,’
for her, was without precedent. Indeed, she characterised the experience of trying
to understand the first half of the twentieth century as akin to ‘thinking without a
banister. ‘In German, “Denken ohne Geländer.” That is, as you go up and down
the stairs you can always hold on to the banister so that you won’t fall down. But
we have lost this banister’ (Arendt 2018: 473). The past as a rich repository of tra-
dition and heritage, filled with ideas and cultural ways of life handed down from
one generation to the next, had been irrevocably broken. In her preface to Between
Past and Future, Arendt reflected on what René Char, a French poet and member
of the resistance, wrote: ‘Notre heritage n’est précédé d’aucun testament – our
inheritance was left to us by no testament’ (Char, quoted in Arendt 1977: 3). The
lack of a written will or testament left Char and his generation at a loss for how to
live in the present and how to make sense of the past in order to go forward into
a shared future.

Without testament or, to resolve the metaphor, without tradition – which

selects and names, which hands down and preserves, which indicates where
the treasures are and what their worth is – there seems to be no willed
continuity in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither past nor future,
only semipaternal change of the world and the biological cycle of living
creatures in it.
(Arendt 1977: 5)

The present, understood for Arendt and many of her generation as the years after
World War II, was overshadowed by learning how to find new ways to think
about a broken past. She wrote that Char’s sense of loss ‘sounds like a variation’
on Tocqueville’s diagnosis that the past had lost its ability to illuminate the future
(Ibid: 7). For her, 1945 meant zero hour or Stunde Null – the end of catastrophic
world wars demanding renewal and change.3 If continuity had previously been
taken for granted, after the Second World War, links to a traditional past were
fragmented. Given what Arendt calls ‘the modern break in tradition,’ the present,
as a tract of time between past and future, became increasingly uncertain and frag-
ile (Ibid: 15). On the one hand, as she writes, the present, as a gap in between two
temporalities, is nothing new. ‘The gap, I suspect, is not a modern phenomenon, it
is perhaps not even a historical datum but is coeval with the existence of man on
 Wandering in obscurity  21
earth’ (Ibid: 13). Once tradition loses its authority and solidity, the past no longer
serves as a guidepost to the present and the future.
In her essay on Walter Benjamin, Arendt reflected on the role of tradition and
authority.

Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses author-

ity; insofar as authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition.
Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of author-
ity which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that
he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past.
(1968: 38)

As tradition and authority fragment, the links between generations weaken. Both
Benjamin and Arendt tried to find new points of continuity with a broken past, as
well as ways of dealing with its traces in the present. In Life of the Mind, Arendt
again reflected on the relationship between religion, authority and tradition.

What has been lost is the continuity of the past as it seemed to be handed
down from generation to generation, developing in the process its own con-
sistency. The dismantling process has its own technique. . . . What you then
are left with is still the past, but a fragmented past, which has lost its certainty
of evaluation.
(1978: 212)

The authority of tradition was challenged by two world wars, genocide and state-
sponsored terror.

We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply
call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load
which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of West-
ern history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our
tradition.
(1973: ix)

Like Benjamin, Arendt looked for new ways to retrieve fragments from the past
in order to understand how they relate to the present. The loss of tradition in the
twentieth century did not mean that all links with the past were severed. Nor
did it mean that traditional concepts such as freedom, politics or authority were
meaningless – rather, that they had undergone a ‘sea-change.’ In the late twenti-
eth century, Hobsbawm echoed Benjamin and Arendt’s argument for the loss of
tradition by suggesting that fading links between generations are indicative of
twentieth-century social life. ‘The destruction of the past, or rather of the social
mechanisms that link one’s contemporary experience to that of earlier genera-
tions, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth
century’ (Hobsbawm 1994: 3).
22  Gaps, glitches and ghosts
Benjamin’s ‘Theses for a Philosophy of History’ outlined historical change as
one propelled from one catastrophe to the next. The Angelus Novus is haunted
by catastrophes that are continually piled at his feet. While the angel is propelled
forward, his gaze looks back to the past. ‘But a storm is blowing from Paradise;
it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer
close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back
is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward’ (Benjamin 1968:
257–258). Living in the present includes dealing with remains of the past, as ruins
and unpredictable aftermaths of upheaval. ‘Where we perceive a chain of events,
he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and
hurls it in front of his feet’ (Ibid: 258). Time is viewed less as a linear line of
progress and more as a destructive storm. The past understood as ‘no longer’ and
the future as ‘not yet’ do not capture the fragility of historical time that Benjamin
wished to convey. ‘To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it
“the way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashed
up at a moment of danger’ (Ibid: 255). The present as nunc stans or ‘standing still’
invokes a moment of danger within the passage of time.

Futures past and accelerated time

Arendt and Koselleck were both influenced by the work of Martin Heidegger, for
whom time is the horizon of human understanding. There is neither an objective
view from nowhere nor a point of eternity; rather, we approach the world from
a particular temporal and historical standpoint. ‘Time must be brought to light
and genuinely grasped as the horizon of every understanding and interpretation
of Being’ (Heidegger 1978: 60). As human beings, we are aware of our finitude
and that we exist ‘in time.’ Moreover, we live in a world full of artefacts from the
past. ‘Remains, monuments, and records that are still present-at-hand, are pos-
sible “material” for the concrete disclosure of the Dasein which has-been-there’
(Heidegger 1962: 446). Key to Heidegger’s understanding of time is that although
events may have occurred in the past, their effects continue in the present. ‘Here,
by “history,” we have in view that which is past, but which nevertheless is still
having effects’ (Ibid: 430). Our temporality is rooted in the future of our own
impending death. We are not confined to the present but rather pulled towards the
future with projects, plans and concerns. ‘Understanding is grounded primarily in
the future; one’s state-of-mind, however, temporalizes itself primarily in hav-
ing been’ (Ibid: 390).
Like Arendt, Koselleck argued for a shift in the how we understand ourselves
in historical time. What she described as a ‘break in tradition,’ was, for him, more
the fading of history as the source of an exemplary past. From Cicero onwards,
historia magistra vitae meant that the orator and historian granted immortality to
glorious examples from the past. The study of the past meant that history was a
teacher for life. Koselleck examined how the modern experience of time changes
how we think about historical events and their narration. The past and future
started to become unmoored and detached from one another during the Sattelzeit
 Wandering in obscurity  23
or threshold of modernity in the 1800s. The Enlightenment heralded a different
consciousness of time from the medieval religious world. Rather than moving
towards the certainty of the Last Judgment, modern progress is open-ended and
accelerates towards an unknown future. ‘The future of this progress is character-
ized by two main features: first, the increasing speed with which it approaches us,
and second, its unknown quality’ (Koselleck 1985: 17).
The French Revolution changed how time was understood. If, previously, revo-
lution marked the cyclical direction of the planets, afterwards, it meant irrevers-
ible change. The future became an unknown horizon of political upheaval and
expectation of something better. If the medieval sense of temporality posited a
Final Judgment and end of the world, this changed after 1789, as the future was
slowly detached from a religious, eschatological sense of time. Progress gradually
replaced prognosis or the certainty that the world will end one day with the Final
Judgment. ‘Progress opened up a future that transcended the hitherto predictable,
natural space of time and experience, and thence – propelled by its own dynamic –
provoked new, transnatural, and long-term prognoses’ (Ibid).
‘Futures past’ refers to different ways that people in the past imagined and fore-
saw the future. Once the future was perceived as uncertain, it was not only open
to progress and change but also to the unknown. For Koselleck, like Arendt, Toc-
queville captured the disorientation accompanying the loosening of traditional
ties between past and future. In reflecting on Tocqueville’s quotation that ‘the past
has ceased to throw light upon the future,’ he found his writing to be ‘heavy with
the suspense of the modern breaking free of the continuity of an earlier mode of
time’ (Ibid: 31).
Different rates of acceleration and deceleration co-exist simultaneously. There is
not one universal historical time but rather many ‘histories in the plural’ which are
multi-layered, comprised of different durations and speeds. Possible histories are
comprised of the sediments of time, which, like the geological metaphor, may be
open to cracks and erosion. Although Koselleck refers to modernity in the singular,
he stressed histories in the plural and the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous.
Koselleck’s histories in the plural share much in common with Eisenstadt,
Chakrabarty and Fabian. Similar to Koselleck, S. N. Eisenstadt suggests not one
but ‘multiple modernities,’ each with different experiences of modernisation and
technical progress. Multiple modernities underscore that ‘modernity and West-
ernization are not identical’ (Eisenstadt 2000: 2–3). The European experience is
not the only path for modernisation. Rather, each encounter with modern forms
of government, technological innovation and cultural ways of life is unique. For
Eisenstadt, modernity is a complex process of adaptation, appropriation, innova-
tion and redefinition. Of central importance to his argument for multiple moderni-
ties is the ongoing and unresolved tension between the universal and particular
claims of the Enlightenment. Modernity indicates a new time distinguished from
the previous one, structured by myth and religion.
Similar to Eisenstadt, Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests that the many different
experiences of modernity point towards what he calls ‘the provincialization of
Europe.’ ‘The Europe I seek to provincialize or decenter is an imaginary figure
24  Gaps, glitches and ghosts
that remains deeply embedded in clichéd and shorthand forms in some every-
day habits of thought’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 3–4). Likewise, for Johannes Fabian,
the emphasis on European and even Western modernity denies not only different
modernities but the coevalness of time in different cultures. If Europe is under-
stood as the centre for the counting and measuring of time, other cultures are
deemed to be slower, backwards or even to exist in a different temporal realm
(Fabian 2002). What unites Koselleck with Eisenstadt, Chakrabarty and Fabian
is an understanding of modernity that avoids positing a universal conception
of historical time. Instead, the modern experience of time is plural, coeval and
overlapping.
While natural time is based on the cycles of birth and death and the changing
of the seasons, linear time is structured by clocks and calendars. Koselleck’s dis-
tinction between the past as a ‘space of experience’ and the future as a ‘horizon
of expectation’ visualises how the temporalities of past, present and future differ
from one another. Time is comprised of three existential moments with different
structural attitudes. The space of experience (Erfahrungsraum) maps past action
onto a kind of topography. Because we often identify past experience with
concrete physical places, the past is understood as a ‘space of experience.’ The
future, understood as the horizon of expectation (Erwartungshorizont), is open
and includes dreams, hopes, fears and nightmares. ‘Evidently, the categories of
“experience” and “expectation” claim a higher, or perhaps the highest, degree of
generality, but they also claim an indispensable application. Here they resemble,
as historical categories, those of time and space’ (Koselleck 1985: 269). It is dif-
ficult to think about the past without associating experience with physical places,
symbols, texts, frameworks and people. The future, however, remains unknown
because it has not yet been experienced.

Experiences overlap and mutually impregnate one another. In addition, new

hopes or disappointments, or new expectations, enter then with retrospec-
tive effect. Thus, experiences alter themselves as well, despite, once having
occurred, remaining the same. This is the temporal structure of experience
and without retroactive expectation it cannot be accumulated.
(Ibid: 275)

Expectation of the future may have a ‘retrospective effect’ on how past experience
is remembered. The past, as a space of experience, is full of layered sediments
whose meanings change over time. And yet past and future are qualitatively dif-
ferent from one another. Of utmost importance to Koselleck is the way in which
experience and expectation are ‘the conditions of possible histories’ rather than of
a universal history (Ibid: 271). Moreover, the temporality of the past is markedly
different from that of the future. ‘Past and future never coincide, or just as little as
an expectation in its entirety can be deduced from experience’ (Ibid: 272).
The future as a horizon of expectation has shifted with modern ideas of prog-
ress, technological innovation, exploration, industry and capitalism. The finality
of the Last Judgment has been gradually replaced by an ‘open future’ (Ibid: 278).
 Wandering in obscurity  25
‘Acceleration, initially perceived in terms of an apocalyptic expectation of tem-
poral abbreviation heralding the Last Judgment, transformed itself – also from the
mid-eighteenth century – into a concept of historical hope’ (Ibid: 36–37). As long
as the Christian expectation of a Last Judgment was in place, past and future had
a clear relationship to one another. Expectations focused on the afterlife in heaven
or hell, on the Apocalypse and the end of the world. However, by the late eigh-
teenth century, awareness of living in a new time altered the relationship between
past and future. The way in which past and future appear to us is not the same: ‘the
presence of the past is distinct to the presence of the future.’ The space of experi-
ence has many layers of times that are ‘simultaneously present,’ while the future
remains an unknown horizon of possibility (Ibid: 273).
Central to Koselleck’s distinction between the past as a space of experience and
the future as a horizon of expectation is the distancing of the future as a result of
the modern acceleration of time. ‘As long as the Christian doctrine of the Final
Days set an immovable limit to the horizon of expectation (roughly speaking, until
the mid-seventeenth century), the future remained bound to the past’ (Ibid: 277).
Modernity, however, entails the consciousness that our time period is transitional
and transitory. We are not ‘bound to the past.’ Rather, echoing Arendt’s ideas, the
relationship between past and future is fragmented and detached: ‘characteristic
of the new epochal consciousness emergent in the late eighteenth century was that
one’s own time was not only experienced as a beginning or an end, but also as a
period of transition’ (Ibid: 251).

Looking back after 1989: presentism and the endless now

François Hartog goes one step further than Arendt and Koselleck by arguing that
the widening gap between past and future results in ‘the sense that only the pres-
ent exists’ (Hartog 2015: xv). Presentism as a diagnosis of the contemporary
perception of time posits that neither the past nor the future offer guidance to the
present. Rather, presentism hesitates between the space of experience and horizon
of expectation by focusing on an all-pervading now. If the past formerly served as
a source of tradition and authority, with the Enlightenment, the future became the
goal towards which historical time moved.

Today, enlightenment has its source in the present, and the present alone. To
this extent – and this extent only – there is neither past nor future nor histori-
cal time, if one accepts that modern historical time was set in motion by the
tension between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation.
(Ibid: 203)

Rather than refer to historical periods or epochs, Hartog introduces the concept
of a ‘regime of historicity’ (régime d’historicité) to serve as a heuristic tool for
classifying and comparing different understandings of time. Similar to Aristotle’s
typology of government (politeia) and Max Weber’s ideal types, regimes of histo-
ricity distinguish between different classifications of historical time. From Hegel
26  Gaps, glitches and ghosts
to Heidegger, historicity or Geschichtlichkeit indicates the awareness of oneself
in historical time.

Whatever the emphasis given – on the human being’s self-awareness as a

historical being, on his finitude, or on his openness toward the future (in Hei-
degger’s ‘being-for-death’) – the term essentially refers to how individuals
or groups situate themselves and develop in time, that is, the forms taken by
their historical condition.
(Ibid: xv)

While temporality is linked to the measurement of clocks and calendars, historic-

ity has a closer relationship to stories and narrative.
According to Hartog, there are three regimes of historicity: ancient, modern
and presentist. If the ancient regime of historicity revered the past as a teacher
of life or historia magistra vitae, after the French Revolution, the modern time
regime looked instead to the future for illumination. While ancient and medieval
reverence towards tradition privileged the past over the future, after 1789, it was
the open future that increasingly gained importance. Like Arendt and Koselleck,
Hartog drew inspiration from Tocqueville’s sense that the past no longer offers
guidance. Instead, it is the future of a New World that offers orientation to minds
wandering in obscurity (Ibid: 95). However, after the fall of communism, the
future as a point of illumination has been eclipsed by ‘presentism.’ Individu-
als perceive the present as a tract of time characterised by ‘the tyranny of the
instant and by the treadmill of the unending now’ (Ibid: xv). And yet, if pre-
sentism means that one lives only in the present, how can we account for issues
of responsibility towards the past and future? Interest in history after 1989 dem-
onstrates a complex relationship between past, present and future. Within the
‘treadmill of the unending now,’ or ‘omnipresent present’ (Ibid: 8), the expansion
of tourism, heritage sites, history museums and memorials attest to growing pub-
lic interest in how the past is remembered. Likewise, concern for global warming
and environmental destruction attest to the dangers of neglecting the future for
the sake of the present.
Agreeing with Pierre Nora’s assessment of the ‘era of commemoration’ since
the 1980s (Nora 1998: 609–637), Hartog sees patrimonial places of memory as
tangible footholds against an accelerating pace of time. Presentism has a para-
doxical relationship to the past because the more the past seems to slip away, the
greater the interest in memory. Patrick Hutton maintains that interest in collective
memory is intimately linked with understanding the present as an endless now.
‘Memory has in the presentist regime of historicity become a preoccupation, even
an obsession’ (2016: 174). Although Hartog primarily focuses on commemora-
tion, heritage, the archive and museums, he underscores that remembrance is a
debt owed to the victims. Witnesses and victims of state-sponsored violence bring
their past experience into the present with a sense of immediacy and urgency.
This ‘doubly indebted present’ looks to the past and the future. In arguing for
presentism as a regime of historicity, Hartog asks whether public and academic
 Wandering in obscurity  27
interest in memory indicates ‘nostalgia for the old model of historia magistra?’
(Hartog 2015: 99).
Henry Rousso, influenced by Hartog’s presentism, points out how violent his-
torical events such as the Vichy occupation, National Socialism and the Holocaust
haunt French society. In particular, he calls attention to the importance of histori-
cal trials and memory laws that, with their use of witnesses and testimony, bring
the past into the present.4 Rousso’s analysis of the aftermath of state-sponsored
violence in the twentieth century, understood as ‘the latest catastrophe,’ suggests
a tragic and catastrophic sense of history.

Interest in the near past thus seems ineluctably connected to a sudden erup-
tion of violence and even more to its aftereffects, to a time following the
explosive event, a time necessary for understanding it, becoming cognizant
of it, but a time marked as well by trauma and by strong tensions between the
need to remember and the temptation to forget.
(Rousso 2016: 9)

The moral imperative to critically work through a recent past and atone for past
grievances invokes sombre warnings for the future. Benjamin’s angel of history
serves as a profound warning because contemporary time, understood as ‘the lat-
est catastrophe,’ looks backward to war, violence and the dead.

History no longer unfolds in the first place as traditions to be respected, lega-

cies to be transmitted, knowledge to be elaborated, or deaths to be commem-
orated, but rather as problems to be ‘managed,’ a constant ‘work’ of mourning
or a memory to be undertaken.
(Ibid: 13)

Technological advances in photography and film open up the immediacy of the

past, as well as its lingering aftermath on contemporary society. What we are left
with, in Rousso’s eyes, is ‘a form of rootless historicity’ in which we are embed-
ded in the present and, at the same time, haunted by a fragmented past (Ibid: 83).

No future and the end of history?

When the present is considered solely as the immediate time period stretched
between past and future, the future is open to possible scenarios of continuity,
progress, fulfilment, and even apocalypse. Either the end means that the highest
stage of the consciousness of freedom has been reached or that the present, as an
endpoint of history, is one of limbo. The end of history, for Francis Fukuyama,
meant not only the triumph of liberal democracy but also nostalgia for a lost past
of heroic conflict. ‘The end of history will be a very sad time. . . . In the post-
historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual care-
taking of the museum of human history’ (1989: 17–18; my emphasis). Without the
division of the Cold War, Fukuyama suggests, we are left with antiquarian longing
28  Gaps, glitches and ghosts
to commemorate the past in museums and monuments. ‘I can feel in myself, and
see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed’
(Ibid: 18). Accompanying his nostalgia for the international order of the Cold War
is the premonition that the end of history entails the inability to strive for collec-
tive ideals beyond the immediate concerns of the present. Fukuyama’s nostalgia
for grand narratives, like Hartog’s presentism highlighting the importance of heri-
tage and memory, is linked with disorientation accompanying the acceleration of
time and dissolution of utopian ideals after 1989.
Thinking with Arendt, Koselleck and Hartog, Enzo Traverso argues that the
increased interest in the past after the fall of communism is linked to the exhaus-
tion of utopian projects and shift in attention from the future to the past. Without
the promise of utopia, one is left with a ‘historical impasse’ and hesitancy towards the
future (Traverso 2016: 8). Echoing Hartog’s presentism, Traverso writes about the
disenchantment of not being able to imagine alternatives or a better future. Look-
ing back after 1989, remembrance of the victims of political violence seems to
have overtaken utopian hopes for the future. Indeed, Traverso suggests that Ben-
jamin’s ‘melancholic vision of history as remembrance’ has become a template
for thinking about historical time as one haunted by the ruins of the past.

The tension between past and future becomes a kind of ‘negative,’ mutilated
dialectic. In such a context, we rediscover a melancholic vision of history as
remembrance (Eingedanken) of the vanquished – Walter Benjamin was its
most significant interpreter – that belongs to a hidden Marxist tradition.
(Ibid: xiv)

The fall of communism entailed a shift in understanding the twentieth century

not only as the age of extremes between progress and catastrophe but also as one
suspended between utopia and memory. ‘The obsession with the past that is shap-
ing our time results from this eclipse of utopias: a world without utopias inevita-
bly looks back’ (Ibid: 9). Traverso sees a correlation between the exhaustion of
utopian hopes for a better world and fixation on traumatic historical events. The
growing interest in silenced history after 1989 is accompanied by the acceleration
of time in everyday life and structural changes in the public sphere and media
technologies. ‘The ghosts haunting Europe today are not the revolutions of the
future but the defeated revolutions of the past’ (Ibid: 20). What seems different
in the experience of time after 1989 is the desire to approach the past not simply
as the repository of continuous tradition or with nostalgic longing for a lost time
but as one burdened by war, violence and trauma. Although the past may no lon-
ger serve as a teacher for life, historical events nonetheless leave traces that may
manifest themselves in unpredictable ways.

‘Enter ghost’
Ghosts, phantoms and spectres are liminal beings who are neither permanently
here nor there. The ghost is the paradoxical presence of absence. The publication
 Wandering in obscurity  29
of Derrida’s Specters of Marx sparked interest not only in the afterlife of Marx-
ism after the fall of communism but, even more so, in the older philosophical
question of how to live a good life. For Derrida, one cannot learn how to live a
good life solely in the present. One needs to learn how to live with individuals
and ideas from the past. Whether understood as inheritance, heritage, legacy or
burden, the past has a different modality of existence than the present moment in
which we live our day-to-day lives.

The time of the ‘learning to live,’ a time without tutelary present, would amount
to this, to which the exordium is leading us: to learn to live with ghosts, in the
upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the com-
merce without commerce of ghosts. To live otherwise, and better. No, not
better, but more justly. But with them.
(Derrida 1994: xviii)

Just as graves and cemeteries are part of the social world, so ghosts with their
spectral presence participate in a peculiar type of temporality. As Derrida and,
subsequently, Avery Gordon argue, when ghosts appear, they demand our atten-
tion. ‘Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the
way we separate the past, the present, and the future’ (Gordon 2008: xvi). How
might the appearance of a ghost shift temporal boundaries? After all, ‘the experi-
ence of being in time’ is integral to how we orient ourselves in the world, how
we respond to others, recall the past and make plans for the future. Recent work
by Hans Ruin expands Heidegger’s sense of Mitsein or ‘being with’ to include
reflection on what it means to live ‘with the dead’ while existing in the present
(Ruin 2019).
Mass media and the digital world increasingly seep into the folds of our social
lives. In glancing at the photograph of a deceased family member or friend, we
may be pulled for a moment back into the past. Memorial museums, designed to
re-create the vicarious experience of history through film, photography, audio
sound and speaking holograms, alter how we experience time. Gordon under-
scores how ghosts are part of social life. ‘The ghost is not simply a dead or missing
person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where
history and subjectivity make social life’ (Gordon 2008: 8). Indeed, Gordon, like
Derrida, emphasises that we should pay attention to how the time is out of joint
and listen to ghosts when they call for justice and recompense. Exemplified in
literature and theatre, ghosts demand recognition and reconciliation for actions
done by oneself in the past or by one’s ancestors. ‘Being haunted draws us affec-
tively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of
feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a trans-
formative recognition’ (Ibid). Acknowledgement of standing in the presence of
a ghost opens up a different way of perceiving time, the link between generations
and our responsibility towards one another.
Hauntology foregrounds how the past breaks through the present in unpredict-
able and powerful ways. Indeed, the spectral presence of the past goes against
30  Gaps, glitches and ghosts
the grain of the linear concept of time. If one perceives time as a succession of
nows moving forward from the past through the present into the future, one is
unable to recognise the ghostly presence of the past after an event. For Derrida,
spectres demonstrate that ‘the time is out of joint.’ When traces of the past are
experienced in the present, temporality seems to fold in upon itself. Influenced
by Freud’s ideas of afterwardness or delayed reactions (Nachträglichkeit), Berber
Bevernage suggests that past events do not abruptly end but rather continue in
waves. ‘The present is “out of joint” because it fuses and incorporates elements of
the past and future, because it is always haunted by ghosts or revenants’ (Bever-
nage 2011: 142). Moreover, he underscores Derrida’s link between ghosts and an
ethics of responsibility. ‘Ethics cannot restrict itself to the present and the living
generations’ (Ibid: 144). Ghosts are delayed appearances of historical wounds that
have been silenced or repressed. Hence, Derrida’s hauntology is open to the social
space between the past and present, the dead and living.
Nostalgia tries to reverse time by returning to an imaginary place or phantom
homeland. Ghosts, however, appear from the past unexpectedly or may even be
conjured from the present. Ghosts bring aspects of the past into the present in a
disjointed way. With their appearance, ghosts can create glitches whereby time
seems to freeze or malfunction. With Derrida’s reflections on hauntology, ethical
questions of what kind of responsibility we owe to the dead converge with reflec-
tions on the temporality of the past. As Colin Davis writes: ‘Hauntology supplants
its near-homonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the
figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor
alive’ (2013: 53). Like Freud, Derrida argues against remaining in a traumatic
past. The point is to recognise the unexpected ways that the past leaves its traces
on the present. Derrida’s attention to ghosts and the spectral presence of the past
points towards a fusing of time whereby the past invades the present. By address-
ing past injustices, possibilities emerge for reparations and reconciliation, as well
as for new beginnings in the future.
Historical wounds interrupt the linear flow of time in a similar way that ghosts
haunt a person or a place. Chakrabarty underlines the importance of recognis-
ing the existence of ‘historical wounds’ that have been ignored and silenced. In
demanding that individuals recognise injustices that were committed in the past,
historical wounds are brought into the present. ‘Historical wounds are not the
same as historical truths but the latter constitute a condition of possibility for the
former’ (Chakrabarty 2007: 77; emphasis in original). Indeed, it is precisely when
historical wounds are not recognised, but instead silenced, that they haunt the
present. Spectres blur or fuse past and present. While appealing to lived experi-
ence, the role of the historian is supplemented or even displaced by that of the
witness, who, in retelling his or her historical experience, demands recognition
of injustice. Chakrabarty points out that public attention to historical wounds of
the past is strongly linked to larger processes of democratisation, globalisation,
the politics of identity, post-colonialism, human rights and changes in the public
sphere.
 Wandering in obscurity  31
Influenced by Chakrabarty, Chris Lorenz addresses some of the lacunae in Har-
tog’s presentism:

Not the past itself, but the diverse and conflicting ways in which the past has
been experienced and represented by specific groups has moved to the centre
of the stage, manifesting itself also in permanent public attention for contro-
versies over monuments, museums, trials, truth commissions, and reparations
payments over the world.
(Lorenz 2010: 83)

The experience of the witness and survivor takes on a privileged role in the per-
ception of historical time. Of utmost importance are the temporal moments when
historical wounds are ignored or silenced. Much has been written about trauma
and the inability to work through the past. While ghostly hauntings are not the
same as trauma, the two are closely linked. Traumatic experience possesses a
‘different time conception’ because the past is strikingly present and does not go
away (Ibid). Instead, time may seem to glitch or freeze. Likewise, individuals
suffering from unrecognised historical wounds remain stuck or feel that they are
reliving traumatic past experience.
Building of the insights of Hartog, Chakrabarty and Lorenz, Aleida Assmann
suggests a ‘continental shift’ in the contemporary understanding of time. ‘While
the future has lost much of its luminosity, the past has more and more invaded
our consciousness’ (Assmann 2013: 41). However, such an invasion of the past
into the present does not only emphasise the authority of tradition and nostalgia
but includes traumatic experience breaking through the temporal boundaries
of past and present, so that ‘past, present and future are fused in various ways’
(Ibid: 53).

Concluding thoughts
Two world wars, genocide and statelessness in the first half of the twentieth
century caused Arendt to argue that the long line of continuity associated with tradi-
tion had not only faded but was broken. The past was no longer an authoritative
guidepost for the present and future. Koselleck, however, traced the gap between
past and future to the distancing of experience and expectation that occurred dur-
ing the late eighteenth century. The modern acceleration of time causes profound
dislocation in our understanding of history. Moreover, with the emphasis on sci-
ence, progress and reason during the Enlightenment, it was the open future that
offered direction more than the authority of the past. Hartog, however, suggests
that we live in a completely different ‘regime of historicity’ than previous genera-
tions. The fundamental break in our understanding of time occurred neither in
1789 nor in 1945 but rather after the fall of communism in 1989. This contempo-
rary shift in temporality results in a presentist regime of historicity – or an endless
now and extended time of the present.
32  Gaps, glitches and ghosts
While Arendt and Koselleck depict a gap between past and future, they do not
go so far as to suggest a regime of historicity that is presentist. Rather they, like
Tocqueville, argue for the fading authority of tradition in the face of an uncertain
and open future. Both sought ways to deal with and make sense of a fragmented
past in the present. The gap between past and future that Arendt described after
World War II was symptomatic of the age of extremes in the twentieth century and
the acceleration of time that began in the late eighteenth century. However, the fall
of the Berlin Wall, which Hartog underscores as the pivotal rupture heralding a
new regime of historicity, is the complex aftermath of political changes that began
in the first half of the twentieth century. The end of communism would not have
been possible without the Russian Revolution, creation of the Soviet Union, two
worlds wars and the post-war division of Europe.
Moving from Koselleck’s conception of futures past to Derrida’s haunted present,
the past continues to illuminate the future by reminding us not only of the positive
aspects of tradition but also of violence and war. Given the extremes of the twenti-
eth century and the acceleration of time in the twenty-first century, the present may
appear endless and the future deeply uncertain. Nonetheless, responsibility to one
another across generations has not disappeared. On the contrary, historical events and
their ghostly afterlives demonstrate how it has become even more urgent.

Notes
1 ‘Quand le passé n’éclair plus l’avenir, l’esprit marche dans les ténèbres. For the original
sentence in a different translation, see Tocqueville’s chapter 8, ‘General Survey of the
Subject’:
The world which is arising is still half buried in the ruins of the world falling into
decay, and in the vast confusion of all human affairs at present, no one can know
which of the old institutions and former mores will continue to hold up their heads
and which will in the end go under. . . . The past throws no light on the future, and
the spirit of man walks through the night.
(Tocqueville 1969: 703)
2 Most importantly, see Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present,
Past and Future, edited by Chris Lorenz and Berber Bevernage, 2013; Peter Fritzsche’s
Stranded in the Present, 2010.
3 Anson Rabinbach, in his book, In the Shadow of Catastrophe (1997) examines the leg-
acy of the war and its aftermath on historians and philosophers, ranging from Jaspers
Questions of German Guilt and Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism to Adorno and Hork-
heimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno’s essay, ‘What does coming to terms with
the past mean?’ and Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’.
4 For Rousso’s earlier work, see The Vichy Syndrome, Arthur Goldhammer, trans. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994 and The Haunting Past: History, Memory
and Justice in Contemporary France, R. Schoolcraft, trans. Philadelphia: The Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

References
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and Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations. (New York: Schocken Books).
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Arendt, Hannah. 1973 [1951]. The Origins of Totalitarianism. (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich).
Arendt, Hannah. 1977 [1968]. Between Past and Future. Eight Exercises in Political Thought.
(New York and London: Penguin Books).
Arendt, Hannah. 1978. The Life of the Mind. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).
Arendt, Hannah. 2018. ‘Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt’, in Jerome Kohn, ed., Thinking
without a Banister: Essays in Understanding. (New York: Schocken Books).
Assmann, Aleida. 2013. ‘Transformations of the Modern Time Regime’, in Chris Lorenz
and Berber Bevernage, eds., Breaking Up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Pres-
ent, Past and Future. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht).
Benjamin, Walter. 1968. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Hannah Arendt, ed. and
Harry Zohn, trans., Illuminations: Walter Benjamin: Essays and Reflections. (New York:
Schocken Books), pp. 253–264.
Bevernage, Berber. 2011. History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and Jus-
tice. (New York and London: Routledge).
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Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2007. ‘History and the Politics of Recognition’, in Keith Jenkins, Sue
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Davis, Colin. 2013. ‘État présent: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms’, in María de Pilar
Blanco and Esther Peeren, eds., The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Con-
temporary Cultural Theory. (London: Bloomsbury), pp. 53–60.
Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning,
and the New International. Peggy Kamuf, trans. (London and New York: Verso).
Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah. 2000. ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedelus, 129: 1, 1–29.
Fabian, Johannes. 2002. Time and the Other. (New York: Columbia University Press).
Fritzsche, Peter. 2010. Stranded in Time: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest (Summer), 1–18.
Gordon, Avery F. 2008. Ghostly Matters: Hauntology and the Sociological Imagination.
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press).
Hartog, François. 2015. Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time.
Saksia Brown, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press).
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans.
(Oxford: Blackwell).
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Writings. (Abingdon: Routledge), pp. 37–87.
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Koselleck, Reinhart. 1985. Future’s Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Keith
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Lorenz, Chris F. 2010. ‘Unstuck in Time: Or, the Sudden Presence of the Past’, in Karin
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34  Gaps, glitches and ghosts
Rousso, Henry. 2016. The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary.
Jane Marie Todd, trans. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press).
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Columbia University Press).
2 The ghost of Patrocles
Humanity and respect for the dead

The appearance of a ghost demonstrates how traces of the past can appear unex-
pectedly in the present. In everyday language, we speak of a ghostly presence that
haunts us or one that is suddenly evoked and conjured up. Given their unpredict-
able and ephemeral status, what kind of temporality do ghosts have? What kind
of time is implied with the ghostly presence of the past? What does it mean to say
that someone is haunted by the past or that ghosts haunt a particular place? From
ancient Greece, there are three different understandings of time: Chronos, Kairos
and Aion corresponding to chronology, rupture and eternity. And yet, past experi-
ence may haunt us in ways that are not necessarily chronological, transformational
or eternal. Where, if at all, do ghosts fit into the Greek tripartite understanding of
time? After examining ancient Greek conceptions of time, with particular empha-
sis on Kairos as a time of crisis and change, I suggest that Reinhart Koselleck’s
sedimented layers of time and atemporality of dreams in tandem with Derrida’s
hauntology illuminate how the episodic presence of Patrocles’ ghost in The Iliad
is linked to unresolved events in the past.

Chronos and Kairos

In ancient Greece, there are three conceptions of time: Aion, as eternity, indi-
cates unbounded and timeless time. Chronos, as linear time, represents sequential
and measured time. From chronicles to chronology, time as Chronos designates
the categorisation of historical time into periods, ages and epochs. Chronologi-
cal time is ordinary, while Kairos represents an extraordinary rupture or break.
From the Sophists, Kairos denotes the right or opportune moment that breaks into
an ordinary speech. Kairos is the moment in which to make one’s point during an
argument. From Judaism and Christianity, Kairos is understood as a moment of
judgment and time of action. Kairos is a turning point, epiphany and miracle. It
is, most importantly, the time of the Messiah and moment of existential decision.
If Chronos denotes ‘the quantity of duration’ and the age of a person or an object,
Kairos indicates the ‘qualitative character of time.’ Chronos answers the question
of how fast and how often something can be measured, while Kairos asks the
question of when and at what opportune time an event occurred (Smith 1969: 1).
36  Gaps, glitches and ghosts
When Kairos is defined primarily as crisis rather than as religious epiphany
or opportune moment of a speech, the focus is on the suspension of ordinary
affairs and acceleration of time during the crisis. From medicine, theology, poli-
tics and law, crisis indicates acute attention to the present condition that demands
a rethinking of past and future. While chronological time continues to move for-
ward, Kairos symbolises the right moment, akin to medieval nunc stans or stand-
ing still, and what Walter Benjamin describes as Jetztzeit or ‘now time.’ It is an
opening, rupture, political revolution and period of regime change. ‘History is
the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time
filled by the presence of the now (Jetztzeit)’ (Benjamin 1968: 261). The critical
moment breaking through ordinary time is the time of revolution that changes and
restructures how we understand the time preceding and following it. ‘The aware-
ness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic
of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action’ (Ibid). Benjamin refers
to such revolutionary moments in which time stands still not as periods of transi-
tion but of ‘Messianic cessation,’ whereby an era is blasted or exploded out of
chronological time (Ibid: 263).
Like Benjamin, Arendt is attentive to ruptures and breaks in time. She empha-
sises that a crisis is an interruption of ordinary affairs which compels us to make
a judgment on future action. ‘A crisis forces us back to the questions themselves
and requires from us either new or old answers, but in any case direct judgments’
(Arendt 1977: 174). For Arendt, the revolutionary spirit is a kind of treasure and
ephemeral fata morgana that appears briefly, only to retreat into ordinary time.
Revolution, as the highest political moment, is temporary and charged with pos-
sibility. If a crisis challenges the established political order, revolutions go even
further because they, like Kairos, promise a new beginning to the status quo. ‘Cru-
cial, then, to any understanding of revolutions in the modern age is that the idea
of freedom and the experience of a new beginning should coincide’ (Arendt 1963:
29). Revolution is an interruption with unpredictable consequences. Unlike Ben-
jamin, for whom nunc stans or Jetztzeit is filled with Messianic time, revolutions
are rooted in the world of human affairs, not in theology. They are political events
of extraordinary possibility with the promise of a new beginning.
In a similar vein, Koselleck argues that crisis and revolution are periods of
exception which reconfigure ordinary time. Moreover, one cannot predict how
or when a crisis ends. Whether in medicine, theology, politics or law, crisis
‘always posited a temporal dimension, which parsed in modern terms, actually
implied a theory of time’ (Koselleck 2002: 237). Koselleck analyses the ways in
which the concept of crisis has been defined in different historical time periods.
Derived from the Greek krino, crisis means ‘to cut, to select, to decide, to judge’
(Ibid). In the writings of Thucydides, crisis is connected with ‘decisive battles.’
For Aristotle, crisis is linked with law and decisions requiring legal judgment.
In theology, however, crisis entails ‘the judgment before God’ (Ibid), or the Last
Judgment and second coming of Christ. Since the eighteenth century, however,
crisis has become synonymous with the diagnosis of modernity. ‘Since then, it
is always one’s own particular time that is experienced as crisis. And reflection
 The ghost of Patrocles  37
upon the particular temporal situation disposes one to both a knowledge of the
entire past and a prognosis of the future’ (Ibid: 239).

Sedimentation of historical experience and

the anachronistic time of dreams
Where does the episodic appearance of a ghost fit into the Greek tripartite distinc-
tion of time into Chronos, Kairos and Aion? Although ghosts are an integral part
of the ancient Greek world, as recounted by Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey,
in order to understand the peculiar temporality of the ghost, a conception of time
is needed that allows for overlapping temporalities and the anachronistic time of
dreams. Envisioning the experience of time as porous layers of sedimentation
allows one ‘to parse historical findings and circumvent the linear-cyclical dichot-
omy’ (Koselleck 2018: 4). Sediments or Zeitschichten are layers of time with
different durations that co-exist simultaneously. The metaphor of sedimentation
represents the accretion, erosion and acceleration of historical experience. Using
the geological metaphor, sediments of compressed time leave visible cracks, fault
lines, tensions and surface changes. ‘The advantage of a theory of sedimenta-
tion of time lies in its ability to measure different velocities – accelerations or
decelerations – and to thereby reveal different modes of historical change that
indicate great temporal complexity’ (Ibid: 6). If the past is understood as the space
of experience, the future is a horizon of expectation. Both modalities of time,
however, co-exist as layers of different times. Most importantly, Koselleck’s
theory of the sediments of time is open to possible histories that might have taken
place. ‘To propose the existence of different sediments of time makes it possible
to grasp different speeds of change and transformation without falling prey to the
false alternative between linear or cyclical temporal processes’ (Ibid: 9).
While acknowledging the importance of language for articulating lived experi-
ence, Koselleck looked for pre-linguistic structures that made different histories
possible. In an essay titled ‘Historik and Hermeneutics,’ he begins from the exis-
tential structure of Dasein, stretched between birth and death. However, according
to Koselleck, Heidegger’s phenomenology cannot account for possible histories.
‘As “Dasein” human beings are not yet open to their fellow humans’ (Ibid: 44).
Hence, although he begins with Heidegger’s fundamental understanding that we
are beings towards death, Koselleck articulates a richer phenomenology of how
individuals interact with one another in the world. ‘From the beginning, the times
of history are constituted interpersonally, and they always deal with the simulta-
neity of the nonsimultaneous, with determinations of difference that contain their
own finitude and are not traceable back to an [individual human] “existence”’
(Ibid: 44–45).
Koselleck augments Heidegger’s categories of Dasein, finitude, thrownness,
anticipation of death, care, anxiety and destiny by suggesting five pre-linguistic
conceptual pairs that thematise ‘the basic temporal structure of possible histories’
(Ibid: 45). In the first conceptual pairing, Koselleck supplements the awareness
of our impending death with the potential ability that each person has to kill one
38  Gaps, glitches and ghosts
another. Like Hobbes’ fear of violent death, it is not simply recognition of our
own death that terrifies us but the possibility that we may kill another person or
be killed by someone. ‘In order to make histories possible, we must supplement
Heidegger’s central determination of running towards death with the category
of being able to kill’ (Ibid). Hence, Koselleck’s first conceptual pair is death and
the ability to kill. The second pre-linguistic conceptual pair is the friend/enemy
distinction. Influenced by Carl Schmitt, Koselleck argues for the importance of
the friend/enemy grouping throughout history. The distinction underscores the
existential threat that an enemy may pose to one’s way of life and demarcates
how individuals act in times of crisis and war. The third conceptual pair is that
of inside and outside. Boundaries and borders define who belongs to families,
communities, cities, nations and empires. For Koselleck, the writing of history
depends on the distinction of inside and outside and often works in tandem with
the conceptual pairing of the friend and enemy. Where he distinguishes himself
most strongly from Heidegger is with the fourth pre-linguistical conceptual pair-
ing of birth and death. Influenced by Arendt’s idea of natality and new begin-
nings, Koselleck links birth with what he calls generativity (Generativität) as the
creation of the family and generations. ‘Contained with generativity is the very
finitude that belongs to the temporal preconditions for the generation of ever-
new possible histories’ (Ibid: 50). Youth and new generations create possibilities
for different understanding of the past. Moreover, how different generations deal
with conflict leaves open unpredictable and different outcomes for the future.
Like Arendt, Koselleck stressed plurality, spontaneity and unpredictable chance
in human affairs. The last and fifth conceptual pair is that of master and slave.
While similar to that of the friend/enemy, the master/slave distinction stresses rec-
ognition of hierarchical structures that can either be affirmed or overthrown. The
five conceptual pairings are ‘existential determinations’ (Ibid: 53) that augment
Heidegger’s initial insight of Dasein and being-towards-death, thereby allowing
for possible histories and history in the plural to develop.
In addition to his theory of the sedimentation of time, Koselleck also wrote
about the temporality of dreams during the Third Reich and argued that recorded
dreams offer historians a unique glimpse into historical experience.

In their seeming atemporality, dreams tied together all the temporal dimen-
sions. They were considered as nocturnal doublings of a particular day’s
activities, as the processing of the past that is left behind, and, even more
than this, they were regarded as beacons to the future.
(2002: 329)

Dreams combine elements of fact and fiction. Moreover, they express uncon-
scious fears and desires occurring during a particular historical time period.
For Koselleck, dreams are ‘a realm which is part of the daily and nightly world
of acting and suffering mankind’. Even more importantly, dreams ‘possess a par-
ticular relation to the future’ (Koselleck 1985: 217). In his Afterword to Charlotte
 The ghost of Patrocles  39
Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams (Das dritte Reich des Traums, 1966), Koselleck
underlines how Beradt’s documentation of the dreams of people who lived in Nazi
Germany are a unique source of historical experience. These documented dreams
during the years 1933–1939 provide a glimpse into the past that is distinct from
other recorded testimonials.

For a historian working on the history of the Third Reich, Beradt’s documen-
tation of dreams represents a first-rate source. It opens up layers not even
reached by diary entries. The narrated dreams have the character of events
that precede the writing of them, despite the fact that they were written down
ex post facto.
(2002: 328)

It was Sigmund Freud who linked dreams with the unconscious desires of the
mind, soul or psyche. The study of dreams leads to the discovery of repressed and
forgotten memories of past waking experience. ‘The interpretation of dreams is
the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind’ (Freud
1955: 604). In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud provides an archaeology of the
hidden world of dreams in our waking life. ‘Every dream reveals itself as a psy-
chical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable
point in the mental activities of waking life’ (Ibid: 35). Koselleck acknowledges
Freud’s contribution to the study of dreams as historical sources for understanding
a particular time period. ‘Precisely where we appear to be completely alone, by
oneself asleep, we are ambushed. Thus we have developed coping mechanisms
to rationalize most of the visions experienced as threats’ (Koselleck 2002: 329).
Before Freud’s influential work on the interpretation of dreams, Aristotle reflected
on the connection between dreams, sleep and waking. A ‘dream is one form of
mental image, which occurs in sleep’ (Aristotle 2000: 369). Without dwelling on
a traumatic experience in waking life which manifests during a dream while we
sleep, Aristotle reflects on the perception of experiences when we are asleep and
awake. One could argue that the temporality of the dream is that images occur
when we sleep. Moreover, we are aware of having dreamt when we wake up and
try to remember pieces of dreams that often disappear at the moment of active
reflection. For Aristotle, dreams provide mental images of experiences linked to
sensory impressions in our waking existence. In a sense, ‘a dream is one form of
mental image, which occurs in sleep’ (Ibid).
In her reflections on the hermeneutics of sleep, Marcia Sá Cavalcante-Schuback
points out how sleep, dreams and waking are connected to a larger understanding
of life for Aristotle. ‘The starting point for Aristotle’s discussion on sleep is the
intimate relationship between sleep and life’ (Cavalcante-Schuback 2014: 130).
Agreeing with him, she suggests that ‘Sleep is nearly as self-contained as death;
for those who are asleep, like the dead, withdraw into themselves, apparently
breaking all bonds with the common world of the living’ (Ibid: 129). The close-
ness of sleep and death is found in Greek mythology, where sleep or Hypnos is a
40  Gaps, glitches and ghosts
brother to Thanatos as death. In their self-contained withdrawal from the world,
sleep and death demarcate the differences between past and present because when
we wake up in the present, we are keenly aware of having slept in the past. In a
similar way, the dead in Greek mythology are aware of having lived in the past
and of their present loss of life and participation in chronological time.
Although dreams combine elements of fact and fiction, Koselleck insists on
their relevance as historical sources because they ‘throw a particularly glaring
light on the very reality from which they come’ (Koselleck 2002: 333). Just
because time is distorted in dreams, it does not follow that their content is without
sense or meaning. On the contrary, the skewed passage of time is indicative of the
unconscious thoughts of the person dreaming. ‘All temporal modalities flash up
in them: the Wilhelminian and Weimar past, the presence of an ever more densely
organized daily life, and the prognostic potential laid bare by dreams’ (Ibid: 337).
The ghostly presence of the past, like dreams, interrupts ordinary time briefly and
disturbs the boundaries of past, present and future. Even though Koselleck does
not write about ghosts as a metaphor, he does write about ways in which different
times overlap. Moreover, he calls attention not only to the distortion of time in
dreams but also to their validity as historical sources. Given his theory that time
is compressed into sediments of different durations existing simultaneously, the
temporality of the ghost seems closest to the refracted and skewed temporality
of the dream world. In The Iliad, the ghost of Patrocles appears to Achilles in a
dream, during which he is acutely aware of seeing his friend’s ghost, not Patrocles
himself. Since The Iliad is one of the oldest epic poems in ancient Greece, it is
worth considering how Patrocles’ ghost appeared to Achilles during a dream.

Ghosts and disjointed time

Koselleck’s understanding of history as the simultaneous sedimentation of layers
of time, combined with the anachronistic time of dreams, makes it possible to
think about the temporality of ghosts that haunt the present. If crisis is a Kairos
that breaks into ordinary time, haunting occurs in an unpredictable and anach-
ronistic time frame. The ghostly presence is not isolated but linked as a kind of
aftermath to events in the past. The metaphor of the ghost embodies the pres-
ence of that which is absent. Whether frightening or comforting, ghosts remind
one that the past seeps into the present. The appearance of a ghost indicates an
unconscious discrepancy in our experience of past and present. Ghostly haunt-
ings blur the boundaries between a past that one has not come to terms with and
a present still affected by past events. Because of their episodic and unpredict-
able visitation, ghosts reconfigure the boundaries between past and present. As a
metaphor for times past, the figure of the ghost may be comforting or frightening.
In between life and the finality of death, not quite dead but life-like, the presence
of ghosts reminds us of that which is absent from the present. Moreover, their
liminal and transitory existence is linked with activities in the past that have been
repressed, forgotten or simply dismissed as irrelevant.
 The ghost of Patrocles  41
In Specters of Marx, Derrida reflects on the temporality of spectres in Marx
and Shakespeare.

What is the time and what is the history of a specter? Is there a present of the
specter? Are its comings and goings ordered according to the linear succes-
sion of a before and an after, between a present-past, a present-present, and a
present-future, between a ‘real time’ and a ‘deferred time’?
(Derrida 1994: 39)

Spectres ghosts and phantoms are able to pass between past, present and future.
Ghosts, like Patrocles, undo the comfortable delineations of chronological time.
Their ‘comings and goings’ in the present bring residues from the past and may
portend omens in the future. Since the ghost has a kind of liminal presence but is
not itself alive, the oppositions between life and death, presence and absence are
askew. ‘[O]ne must perhaps ask oneself whether the spectrality effect does not
consist in undoing this opposition, or even this dialectic, between actual, effective
presence and its other’ (Ibid: 40).
Although ghosts may emerge in haunted houses and landscapes, their most
familiar place of appearance is the grave. As Hans Ruin, reminds us, the most
primal place of memory is the grave. ‘The most charged and contested “places”
or “sites” of memory are graves and burial grounds’ (Ruin 2015: 132). Graves
symbolise the profound intersection of life and death, place of remembrance, fini-
tude and human dignity. Moreover, honouring the dead is integral to our human-
ity. Indeed, as he argues: ‘The grave marks the passage between the living and
the dead, and as such also the first known form for articulating an experience of
pastness’ (Ibid: 138). It is at this point that Derrida’s hauntology helps us to under-
stand what Ruin describes as the ‘experience of pastness.’ The grave is a material
place of memory, but a ghost is ephemeral, liminal and non-material. In order
for a ghost to find peace in the afterlife, it needs to be properly buried. Only then
can it move temporally and spatially to the afterlife. Stressing the importance of
inheritance and tradition, Derrida provides a roadmap for understanding the past
from the point of view of the present. By shifting the emphasis from ontology to
hauntology, from a philosophy of presence to one of absence, Derrida highlights
the generational link between past and present. Attentiveness to the spectral traces
of the past entails the ability to listen and the openness to respond fairly to their
demands.
Derrida is interested in the ghostly traces that haunt the present. As a metaphor,
the ghost or spectre, while disrupting linear time, embodies traces of the past.
In his analysis of Marx and Shakespeare, Derrida calls attention to the ghostly
moment of visitation that haunts the person in the present. ‘The specter appears to
present itself during a visitation. One represents it to oneself, but it is not present,
itself, in flesh and blood’ (Derrida 1994: 101). The ghost of his father appears to
Hamlet demanding justice for his murder by his own brother. A disjointed present
indicates that the scales of justice are out of balance and need to be restored by
42  Gaps, glitches and ghosts
the next generation. The ghost of Hamlet’s father appears to him demanding jus-
tice. Derrida argues that the sense of responsibility and need for justice may span
generations. ‘To whom, finally, would an obligation of justice ever entail a com-
mitment, one will say, and even be it beyond law and beyond the norm, to whom
and to what if not to the life of a living being?’ (Ibid: xx).
The Specters of Marx underscores two interwoven themes: the responsibility
that the present generation has to their ancestors and the sense that ‘the time is out
of joint’ due to the ghosts who disrupt the ordinary flow of time. In reflecting on
Hamlet’s remark that the ‘time is out of joint,’ Derrida outlines different transla-
tions that provide nuanced interpretations of time.

In ‘The time is out of joint,’ time is either le temps itself, the temporality of
time, or else what temporality makes possible (time as histoire, the ways
things are at a certain time, the time that we are living, nowadays, the period),
or else, consequently the monde, the world as it turns, our world today, our
today, currentness itself, current affairs.
(Ibid: 18)

If time is understood to mean today or the present moment, then our under-
standing of time has a very short, even immediate, duration. If time, however,
is perceived as history, it contains the long duration of time from its origins in
mythology, cosmology and physics until the culmination of this long process
into the present moment. Since time is coeval with the existence of the world,
Derrida unpacks the three central meanings as time, history and world. ‘Time: it
is le temps, but also l’histoire, and it is le monde, time, history, world’ (Ibid: 19).
Given the three interwoven meanings of time, when we say that ‘the time is out
of joint,’ does this entail that the world and history are unhinged and also out
of balance? The very notion that time itself might be out of joint evokes spaces
in between experiences of time, glitches in temporality and a lack of temporal
balance.
Derrida highlights how four different translations from English to French reveal
nuances of unbalance: ‘Le temps est hors de ses gonds’ suggests that time is ‘off
its hinges.’ ‘Le temps est détraqué’ means that time is ‘broken down, unhinged,
out of sorts.’ ‘Le monde est à l’envers’ points to the fact ‘the world is upside
down.’ ‘Cette époche est déshonorée’ shifts the attention to the age that is ‘dis-
honored’ (Ibid). The German translation underscores disjointed, dislocated time:
‘aus den Fugen, aus den Fugen gehen’ (Ibid: 23). In reflecting on the temporality
of Patrocles’ ghost as being out of joint, his ghostly time is between different tem-
poralities. Patrocles’ ghosts can only be in tune or in harmony with time after his
body has been buried. In this sense, to be in tune with time restores balance to the
worldly affairs of Achilles as he recognises the finality of Patrocles’ death and the
ethical injunction to return Hector’s body to his father, King Priam.
Derrida’s hauntology emphasises that the figure of the ghost is ‘that which
haunts like a ghost and, by way of this haunting, demands justice, or at least a
response’ (Blanco and Peeren 2013: 9). While a haunted past is often connected
 The ghost of Patrocles  43
with painful trauma, Derrida argues that it is the present generation who must
learn how to live with ghosts from the past. Like Freud, the goal is not to remain
fixated on trauma but to work through a difficult past in order to live fully in
the present. Although ghosts interrupt ordinary time, haunting has a peculiar and
unique temporality. ‘Haunting is historical, to be sure, but it is not dated, it is
never docilely given a date in the chain of presents, day after day, according to the
instituted order of a calendar’ (Derrida quoted in Blanco and Peeren 2013: 14).

Humanity and respect for the dead

Hence, if we combine Koselleck’s sedimented layers of time and atemporality of
dreams with Derrida’s hauntology, the ghost of Patrocles represents the afterlife
of unresolved events in the Trojan War that can only be resolved with his burial
and, subsequently, with Hector’s burial. The last books of The Iliad depict the
importance of burial for both victors and vanquished. Patrocles death is a highly
charged event because it is only after he has been killed that Achilles agrees to
enter the war. Having previously watched the battle from the sidelines, aware that
his fellow Greeks are being killed with each day of his absence from the battle-
field, Patrocles’ death marks the moment when the Trojan war shifts. Patrocles’
death is a Kairos that transforms Achilles’ resentment towards Agamemnon and
grief for Patrocles into vengeful rage against Hector and the Trojans.
Of particular importance is the timing of when Patrocles’ ghost appears to
Achilles. Although Patrocles’ body has been cleaned and prepared for burial,
Achilles refuses to bury him until he has killed Hector. It is only when Patrocles’
ghost visits Achilles during a dream, begging to be buried, that he acquiesces.

Then came there unto him the spirit of hapless Patrokles, in all things like his
living self, in stature, and fair eyes, and voice, and the raiment of his body
was the same; and he stood above Achilles’ head and spake to him.
(Homer 1950: 418)

Looking like himself but ghostlike, Patrocles pleads with Achilles to let him move
on to the afterlife. ‘“Thou sleepest, and has forgotten me, O Achilles. Not in my
life wast thou ever unmindful of me, but in my death. Bury me with all speed, that
I pass the gates of Hades”’ (Ibid). Out of love for Patroclus, Achilles listens to his
ghost, acknowledges his need for burial and lights his funeral pyre the next day,
vowing to kill Hector without proper burial.
Patrocles ghost appears only once – and only to Achilles. He does not conjure
up his ghost from his corpse; rather, Achilles is visited by the ghost of Patrocles.
Although asleep and dreaming, Achilles is fully aware that he is seeing his ghost.
Patrocles request is clear: without proper burial and recognition of his death, his
spirit cannot pass to the afterlife of Hades. Moving from life to death requires the
burial of his body. Patrocles’ ghost is linked to the Kairos of his own death and
to the unfinished process of his burial. It is also connected to the long chain of
events leading up to his death. By appearing to Achilles, Patrocles’ ghost reminds
44  Gaps, glitches and ghosts
him of their long friendship, Achilles’ refusal to fight in the Trojan war in defi-
ance of Agamemnon, Patrocles’ request to wear Achilles armour into battle, his
own miscalculation and death at the hands of Hector. Achilles’ refusal to bury
Patrocles is bound up with his own remorse for allowing his best friend to fight
and die on his behalf.
Achilles anger and grief merge when he kills Hector in revenge for Patrocles
death. The Iliad foregrounds the taboo that Achilles breaks with his protracted
defilement of Hector’s corpse. In his vengeful rage, he ties Hector’s feet to his
chariot and drags him around Troy and Patrocles tomb. As a sign of the depth of
Achilles’ transgression, the gods keep Hector’s body from defilement and harm.
As Hector is protected by Aphrodite and Apollo when he is dragged behind Achil-
les’s chariot, the Olympian gods become increasingly horrified by Achilles’ dis-
respect for human burial. When Achilles is told by his mother, Thetis, that Zeus
demands the return of Hector’s body to King Priam, Achilles listens. The Iliad
emphasises the sanctity of the human body and the need for dignified burial –
even for the remains of an enemy. In perhaps one of the most memorable scenes,
King Priam goes alone to Achilles asking him to return the body of his son. He
approaches the enemy warrior not as a king but as a father mourning for his dead
son. Priam breaks through Achilles’ pride, and they regard one another as fel-
low human beings united in grief for their loss. Achilles does not kill Priam but
makes an exception. The men respect one another, mourn their dead, and Achilles
acquiesces, so that King Priam can take Hector home for burial. In the preparation
of his body to be returned from killer to father, from enemy to enemy, Achilles
recognises his transgression and asks women to wash and prepare Hector’s body
for burial. Then he himself places Hector’s wrapped corpse onto Priam’s cart.
A cease-fire is declared for the family funeral for twelve days. After Hector has
been buried, the war continues. The long Trojan War takes place over ten years
in chronological time; it is only suspended to permit an extraordinary event: the
Trojan burial of Hector.
Patrocles ghost represents two different understandings of time. In the first, his
ghost evokes the traumatic present of his unburied self. The longer that Achilles
mourns his loss, the farther Patrocles is from entering Hades. As horrible as the
experience of his death at the hands of Hector might have been, his ghost is tor-
mented by his inability to find peace in the afterlife. In the ancient Greek world,
the final process of death is burial in the earth. By fixating on the trauma of Patro-
cles’ death and returning to the scene of allowing Patrocles to fight on his behalf,
Achilles and Patrocles remain in an extended state of trauma. The painful state of
loss indicates a protracted time of the present unhinged from past or future. In the
second understanding of time, Patrocles ghost is caught between Chronos, Kairos
and his desired Aion. Patrocles’ participation in chronological time ended with the
Kairos of his own death. However, as long as he remains unburied, Patrocles is
suspended in an unhinged time of waiting to enter eternal life. As a ghost in The
Iliad, Patrocles time is ‘out of joint’ as he waits for Achilles to accept his death
with a proper burial.
 The ghost of Patrocles  45
Although the ghost of Patrocles interrupts the flow of ordinary time, it is not a
Kairos because it is connected to his own death. If anything, Patrocles’ ghost is
the unintended consequences of waiting for burial. His ghost does not fit neatly
into the Greek tripartite conception of time. Linked to the Kairos of his own
death, Patrocles has a liminal status as an unburied ghost waiting in limbo for
the eternal afterlife of Hades. Only after his body has been buried can Patrocles
move in the ancient Greek understanding from chronological time to eternity.
Without the closure of burial, he waits in between different structures of time.
As a ghost awaiting burial, his liminal presence lasts until he is buried and enters
into eternal life.
Koselleck’s existential structures of friend and enemy, death and the potential
to kill, birth and death, inside and outside, master and slave are clearly visible in
Homer’s story of the Trojan war. Achilles and Patrocles are friends, Priam and
Hector are their stated enemies. However, when Priam approaches Achilles, the
pairing of friend/enemy disappears as they share the common bond of those in
mourning – even if only briefly. Achilles could have regarded Priam as an enemy
and killed him but chose not to. How Achilles responds to the deaths of Patrocles
and Hector is a Kairos in The Iliad. In the first instance, Achilles responds to the
ghost of Patrocles; in the second, he responds to King Priam’s plea to have his
son’s body returned for burial. It is the ghostly presence of Patrocles, demanding
his own burial, that awakens Achilles from his protracted mourning. Likewise, it
is the living presence of Priam begging for his son’s body that stops Achilles from
defiling Hector. In both instances, proper burial is required in order for the dead
to pass into the afterlife. Priam reminds Achilles of his grief for his own father
but this grief is short-lived, for once Hector has been properly buried, ordinary
time resumes and the war continues. Moreover, Achilles knows that he will soon
be killed and can join Patrocles in the afterlife. Like Sophocles’ Antigone, who
feels compelled to bury her brother by defying King Creon, Homer underscores
the tenet that respect for the dead is central to our humanity.
Derrida suggests that learning how to live includes learning how to accept our
mortality and learning how to live with our ancestors. ‘It is ethics itself: to learn to
live, – alone, from oneself, by oneself. . . . It has no sense and cannot be just unless
it comes to terms with death’ (Derrida 1994: xviii). Learning how to live means
learning how to live in the space, in the time between life and death. Hence, if we
wish to live a full and good life, we need to come to terms with ghosts, spectres
and spirits of all kinds. One needs to live ‘with ghosts.’ ‘No being-with the other,
no socius without this with that makes being-with in general more enigmatic than
ever for us’ (Ibid: xviii–xix). In Derrida’s reflections on the multiple spectres of
Marx, he repeatedly returns to the question of what we owe to the dead. What is
the nature of our debt and our inheritance? Attentiveness and responsiveness to
the ghostly presence of the past is made ‘in the name of justice’ (Ibid: xix). Justice
entails responsibility for one’s actions, and for the actions of those who precede
us. In this sense, Derrida comes remarkably close to Edmund Burke’s great pri-
meval contract between the dead, the living and the unborn.
46  Gaps, glitches and ghosts
For Homer, in the ancient world, and, by extension for Derrida, in the twenti-
eth century, ghosts may make demands upon the living. Likewise, their haunting
presence is linked to ruptures in the past that could be reconciled in the present.
How we respond to the ghostly presence of an absent past is connected with how
we live in the present. In order to fight in the Trojan war, Achilles has to fully
accept Patrocles’ death. Furthermore, he needs to bury his friend, so that he can
move from a state of limbo to one of eternal life. After seeing Patrocles’ ghost in
a dream, and after King Priam asks for his son’s body, Achilles understands that
the physical passage from life to death is one that cannot be transgressed – even
during the most violent experiences of war. Achilles recognises his own mortality
when he acknowledges his profound transgression against Hector.
Ghostly traces and ciphers interrupt chronological time and blur boundaries
between past and present. As the ghost of Patrocles demonstrates, ghosts do not
appear without reason but are connected to events in the recent past. Patrocles’
ghostly appearance to Achilles during a dream reminds him of his responsibility
to honour the dead with a proper burial. While Patrocles’ ghost may be eternal,
his apparition is neither Kairos nor Chronos but akin to the disjointed time of
a dream. Patrocles’ visitation to Achilles is part of his unresolved death. When
Achilles agrees to bury his friend and, later, to bury Hector, the chronological
sequence of war is suspended until after the Kairos of their burials. As Homer
demonstrates in The Iliad, although the ghost may appear at an unpredictable
moment and demand a response, or even an attempt at reconciliation, the open-
ness to listen and the decision to act remain solely with those living in the present.

References
Arendt, Hannah. 1977 [1968]. Between Past and Future. (New York: Penguin).
Arendt, Hannah. 1963. On Revolution. (New York: Penguin).
Aristotle. 2000. [1936]. On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath. W. S. Hett, trans. Loeb
Classical Library 288. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Benjamin, Walter. 1968. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations. (New
York: Schocken), pp. 253–264.
Blanco, Maria del Blanco and Peeren, Esther. 2013. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and
Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. (London: Bloomsbury).
Cavalcante-Schuback, Marcia Sá. 2014. ‘The Hermeneutic Slumber: Aristotle’s Reflec-
tions on Sleep’, in David Payne, trans. and Claudia Baracchi, ed., The Bloomsbury Com-
panion to Aristotle. (London: Bloomsbury), pp. 128–143.
Derrida, Jacques, 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning,
and the New International. Peggy Kamuf, trans. (New York and London: Verso).
Freud, Sigmund. 1955. The Interpretation of Dreams. James Strachey, trans & ed. (New
York: Perseus).
Homer, 1950. The Iliad. A. Lang, W. Leaf and E. Myers, trans. (New York: Modern
Library).
Koselleck, Reinhart. 1985. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Keith Tribe,
trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Koselleck, Reinhart. 2002. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing
Concepts. Todd Samuel Presner et al., trans. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).
 The ghost of Patrocles  47
Koselleck, Reinhart. 2018. Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories. Sean Franzel and
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, trans. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).
Ruin, Hans. 2015. ‘Housing Spirits: The Grave as an Exemplary Site of Memory’, in Anna
Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen, eds., Routledge International Handbook of Memory Stud-
ies. (New York and London: Routledge), pp. 131–141.
Smith, John E. 1969. ‘Time, Times, and the “Right Time”: Chronos and Kairos’, The
Monist, 53:1 (January), 1–13.
3 The ghosts of Cain and Abel
Am I my brother’s keeper?

In an age of extremes where time seems to accelerate at a dizzying pace, ques-

tions of how to define fraternity and solidarity have not disappeared. On the con-
trary, the refugee crisis, economic inequality and global warming challenge what
it means to be responsible to one another. The Hebrew tradition of tikkun olam
and the mitzvah, along with Christian tenets of forgiveness, love of one’s neigh-
bour and the Good Samaritan, teach responsibility towards one another and the
need to repair the world. One of the earliest accounts of responsibility occurs in
the book of Genesis, with Cain’s murder of his brother, Abel. Over time, the story
has moved from the religious realm to that of politics and law because it not only
recounts the first murder after creation but, even more tellingly, poses the funda-
mental question of social justice: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Abel’s murder by
his brother calls into question definitions of community, responsibility, fraternity
and solidarity. Although definitions of brotherhood are often narrowed to that of
kinship within one’s tribe, nation or religion, the story of Cain and Abel demon-
strates how the most primal of blood ties, that of family, resulted in fratricide and
the founding of the first city, Nod.
How one answers Cain’s question involves thinking about the self in relation
to others and the world. Biblical teachings have a long afterlife based on his-
torical interpretation that bridges the original revealed text with its reception in
contemporary times. ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ was originally addressed to
God; however, since then, responses have been interpreted as if his question were
addressed to each new generation. Like the ghost of Patrocles, who asks Achilles
to bury him, Cain’s question of whether he bears any responsibility whatsoever
for his brother has not gone away but continues to haunt subsequent generations.
This chapter examines ways in which the story of Cain and Abel, as one of
primordial fratricide and fraternity, has haunted the writings of Carl Schmitt and
Emmanuel Levinas. Beginning with Schmitt’s meditation on Cain and Abel while
he was imprisoned by the Allies in 1947, we move to Jacques Derrida’s interpreta-
tion of Schmitt’s conception of politics and fratricide. If Schmitt was haunted by
Europe’s fraternal war, Levinas’ reflections on Cain and Abel were written within
the context of the Holocaust and World War II. Unlike Schmitt’s privileging of
politics, Levinas argued that it is ethics that precedes politics and metaphysics.
Moreover, it is the face of the other, who calls us into a condition of infinitely
 The ghosts of Cain and Abel  49
demanding responsibility. Indeed, Cain’s question to God demands that we reflect
on what it means to be human and to live in the world with other people.

The other as brother and enemy

As a law professor, jurist and member of the Nazi party, Schmitt’s legal work
was important in justifying Nazi rule. Arrested in 1945 by the Allies, Schmitt’s
library was confiscated; he was stripped of his professorship in Berlin and placed
in civilian detention camps from 1945 to 1946. In March 1947, he was held
and interrogated in the prison of the Nuremberg International Tribunal as both
a witness and a ‘possible defendant’ (Kalyvas and Finchelstein 2017: 3). Sitting
in his prison cell in 1947, waiting for interrogation for his role as a jurist dur-
ing the Third Reich, Schmitt wrote Ex Captivitate Salus or ‘deliverance from
captivity.’ As the ‘crown jurist of the Third Reich’ and member of the Nazi party
since 1933, his self-defence provides ‘an explanation for the role he played in
the Third Reich’ (Ibid: 5). Unlike Karl Jaspers’ The Question of German Guilt
(1947), Schmitt was unapologetic. Neither coming to terms with the past nor
recognition of complicity were necessary conditions for the future of Germany
after the war (Ibid: 10).
Confined to his prison cell, Schmitt remained defiant about his interpretation
of the law to justify the Nazi regime. Resentful of imprisonment, he reflected
on his life’s work and legal ideas on the political. ‘Self-delusion is inherent
to loneliness. . . . At the deepest core of the cell lies the internal dialogue and
the self-delusion’ (Schmitt 2017: 69). During his captivity, Schmitt returned to
his central idea of the friend–enemy relationship and the theological origins
of political concepts. Ex Captivitate Salus begins with a questionnaire that he
was asked to respond to in prison. ‘Who are you? Tu quis es? This is an unfath-
omable question’ (Ibid: 13). Upon reflection, Schmitt looks at his interrogator,
Eduard Spranger, ‘the famous philosopher and teacher’ and thinks to himself,
‘Who are you, in fact, to question me? Whence your superiority?’ (Ibid: 14).
In the end, Schmitt’s response to Spranger is that he was an ‘authentic case of
a Christian Epimetheus’ (Ibid: 15). Twin brother to Prometheus, Epimetheus
accepted the gift of Pandora from the gods. Moreover, both Titan brothers dis-
obeyed the gods. As a Christian Epimetheus, Schmitt, like Adam, awaited his
Final Judgment (Meier 2011).
From the question of ‘Who are you?’ Ex Captivitate Salus moves to its pen-
ultimate chapter, ‘Wisdom of the Cell,’ in which Schmitt conjures up Cain and
Abel in order to reflect on the existential dimension of political conflict. Alone in
prison, Schmitt speaks with himself about politics, conflict, humanity and world
history. ‘On whom must the definition of the human be modeled, on the naked
or on the dressed person? On the disarmed or on the armed?’ (Schmitt 2017: 63)
Only after Adam and Eve had eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil could they recognise their nakedness. For Levinas, the moment of recognition
occurs with the face of the other, whereas, for Schmitt, it is the enemy who calls
him into existence.
50  Gaps, glitches and ghosts
Upon further reflection, Schmitt cannot answer the question of what it means to
be human without recourse to an enemy. ‘Who is my enemy, then? Is my enemy
the person who feeds me here, in the cell?’ (Ibid: 70). The enemy is the victorious
prison guard and interrogator. ‘He even clothes and shelters me. The cell is the
clothing he donates. I ask myself, then: Who can my enemy be?’ (Schmitt 2017:
70). Reflecting on his captivity, he asks himself whether those interrogating him
could be considered his enemy or his friend. Both sides need to acknowledge the
other as their enemy. ‘In this mutual acknowledgment of acknowledgement lies
the greatness of the concept’ (Ibid: 70–71). The only person whom Schmitt could
acknowledge as his enemy was the one who calls him into question. ‘Who in the
world can I acknowledge as my enemy? Clearly only him who can call me into
question. By recognizing him as enemy I acknowledge that he can call me into ques-
tion’ (Ibid: 71). It is not simply an enemy who can call Schmitt into question –
rather only he, himself or his brother can do this. ‘And who can really call me
into question? Only I myself. Or my brother.’ And yet, what if the brother is also
an enemy? ‘The other proves to be my brother, and the brother proves to be my
enemy’ (Ibid). Hence, the one who can truly call Schmitt into question is the one
he should love and regard as a brother.

War, fratricide and the origin of politics

Convinced that politics is about the conflict between friend and enemy, Cain and
Abel emerge in Schmitt’s prison cell as archetypes not only of fraternal conflict
but also of the beginning of history.

Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. Thus begins the history of
humankind. This is what the father of all things looks like. This is the dia-
lectical tension that keeps world history moving, and world history has not
yet ended.
(Ibid)

Like Heraclitus, Schmitt viewed war and conflict as the ‘father of all things.’
Murder is the inescapable origin of history. Schmitt focuses on the moment when
the primordial ties between the brothers shift to that of the friend/enemy grouping.
‘One categorizes oneself through one’s enemy. One grades oneself through what
one recognizes as hostility’ (Ibid).

Now Abel kept the flocks, and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time,
Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the LORD. But
Abel brought fat portions from some of his firstborn flock. The LORD looked
with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not
look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.
Then the LORD said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry? Why is your face
downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do
 The ghosts of Cain and Abel  51
not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but
you must master it.’
Now Can said to his brother Abel, ‘Let’s go out into the field.’ And while
they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.
(Genesis 4:2–8, The Holy Bible: 1984)

As Jean-Claude Monod argues, when history begins with Adam’s disobedience

and banishment from the Garden of Eden, humanity turns away from God with-
out the intention of harming another person. The emphasis is on human weak-
ness and frailty in the face of temptation. If, however, history begins, as Schmitt
argues, with Cain’s murder of Abel, the view of history is ‘radically pessimistic’
(Monod 2012: 98). History begins not from paradise lost as the fall from grace
or passive weakness but from Cain’s calculated decision to kill his own brother.
‘Schmitt’s vision of politics describes a possible face of politics: politics as a prin-
ciple of anti-fraternity in which anybody can become one’s enemy – even one’s
brother’ (Ibid: 101).
St Augustine traced the earthly city of sin back to Cain in the City of God. ‘Cain
was the firstborn, and he belonged to the city of men; after him was born Abel,
who belonged to the city of God’ (Augustine 2009: 431). Augustine’s two cities,
the city of man and the city of God, directly correspond to Cain and Abel, to a
life of sin and a life of grace. Schmitt, like Augustine and Hannah Arendt, links
fratricide to the founding of new political communities.

That such a beginning must be intimately connected with violence seems to

be vouched for by the legendary beginnings of our history as both biblical
and classical antiquity report it: Cain slew Abel, and Romulus slew Remus;
violence was the beginning and, by the same token, no beginning could be
made without using violence, without violating. . . . The tale spoke clearly:
whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of frat-
ricide, whatever political organization men may have achieved has its origin
in crime.
(Arendt 1963: 20)

While Augustine and Arendt connect the biblical and mythical foundation of cit-
ies with fratricide, the story of Cain and Abel is unique among the ancient legends
of fratricide and political origins. Cain had to be exiled by God in order to found a
city, while Romulus did not receive any punishment from the gods for the murder
of his brother, Remus. If the story of Romulus and Remus is solely one of frat-
ricide and political foundation, it does not include the relationship between the
brothers and the gods, nor does it include Cain’s question to God as to whether he
bears any responsibility for his brother.
When thinking of Cain and Abel, Schmitt focuses on the murder of enemies,
not on Cain’s question. In his meditation on fratricide, he leaves open the issue
of whether the origin of politics must always be accompanied by murder. Central
52  Gaps, glitches and ghosts
to Schmitt’s definition of the political is the very real possibility of death. As he
underscores in The Concept of the Political, politics begins with the possibility of
conflict between friend and enemy. ‘The distinction of friend and enemy denotes
the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or disso-
ciation’ (Schmitt 2007: 26). But who is the political enemy? What happens when
one’s brother becomes the enemy? ‘But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger;
and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially
something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are
possible’ (Ibid: 27). The fact that Schmitt is haunted by Cain and Abel while under
arrest for his support of the Nazi regime confirms his own conviction that political
concepts have their origins in theology.

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized
theological concepts not only because of their historical development – in
which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby,
for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver – but also
because of their systematic structure. . . . The exception in jurisprudence is
analogous to the miracle in theology.
(Ibid: 36)

In recognising Cain’s murder, it is ‘the omnipotent God’ as ‘the omnipotent law-

giver’ who calls attention to how Abel’s blood cries out from the earth. Cain will
be cursed as an exile and outcast, but he cannot be killed by anyone else. In mark-
ing Cain, God prevents the bloody cycle of revenge that is depicted in Aesychlus’
Oresteia trilogy. Instead, Cain is a kind of homo sacer figure, who cannot be
killed but is exiled to found the first city in the Bible.

Then the LORD said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’
The LORD said, ‘What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries
out to me from the ground. Now you are under a curse and driven from the
ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your
hand. When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you.
You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.’
Cain said to the LORD, ‘My punishment is more than I can bear. Today
you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I
will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.’
But the LORD said to him, ‘Not so! If anyone kills Cain, he will suffer
vengeance seven times over.’ Then the LORD put a mark on Cain so that no
one who found him would kill him. So Cain went out from the LORD’s pres-
ence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.
(Genesis 4:9–16, The Holy Bible: 1984)

Although Schmitt dwells on the exceptionalism of the sovereign and the origins
of political concepts in theology, he avoids the teachings of the New Testament
 The ghosts of Cain and Abel  53
demanding love of one’s enemies. ‘You have heard it said, Love your neighbour
and hate your enemy. But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who
persecute you’ (Matthew 5:43–44, The Holy Bible: 1984). Schmitt emphasises
Abel as the brother turned enemy or the ‘enemy-brother’ murdered by Cain,
thereby beginning human history as one of endless conflict.
In his book, The Politics of Friendship, Derrida examines different ideas of
community, fraternity and brotherhood by asking what role friendship plays in
politics. In a chapter on Schmitt’s prison writings, he argues that the ghosts of
Cain, the murderer, and Abel, the slain brother, haunt Schmitt after the war in his
prison cell. ‘We have become attuned to a certain effect of haunting. Where it
seems inaccessible to intuition and concept, the purely concrete starts to resemble
the ghost, just when you start to believe that you can tell them apart’ (Derrida
2005: 138). For Schmitt, it is the moment when a possible enemy becomes an
actual enemy that lies at the core of politics. Or, as Derrida writes with respect to
his concept of the political:

We are constantly reminded that only a concrete, concretely determined

enemy can awaken the political; only a real enemy can shake the political
out of its slumber and, as we recall, out of the abstract ‘specularity’ of its
concept; only the concrete can awaken it to its actual/effective life (as ‘the
living fool that I am,’ when it bemoans the fact that here is no longer, or not
yet, an enemy). But there is the spectre, lodged within the political itself; the
antithesis of the political dwells within, and politicizes, the political.
(Ibid)

How and why must a brother become an enemy to be killed? Fratricide can be
found in Greek, Roman and Hebrew traditions. However, unlike Eteocles and
Polynices or Romulus and Remus, it was only Cain who posed the question to
God as to whether he bore any responsibility to his murdered brother. Romu-
lus killed Remus and founded Rome. Eteocles and Polynices killed one another
in a battle to rule Thebes. If the Greek and Roman traditions include fratricide
with the founding of a new political community, it is the Hebrew tradition that
poses one of the most enduring questions of social justice. Why indeed should we
feel a sense of responsibility towards one another? What happens when a brother
becomes a perceived enemy? ‘And if the brother is also the figure of the absolute
enemy, what does fraternization mean?’ (Ibid: 149). In other words, must frat-
ricide be the original sin for the foundation of a new political community? ‘We
could look for examples in the Bible, which in sum speaks of nothing else, start-
ing with Cain and Abel, whose ghosts we will see haunting Schmitt in his prison
cell’ (Ibid: 151).
Where does Cain’s hostility and resentment towards Abel originate from – in
Cain’s isolated sense of self or in God’s favouring of Abel’s sacrifices over those
of Cain’s? Was God encouraging or even tempting Cain to kill his brother? Why
would God even need to test Cain? After all, God only addresses Cain rather than
both Cain and Abel. ‘Cain, in fact, is called into question in the whole narrative,
54  Gaps, glitches and ghosts
he is the only one to whom God speaks, he is the one who is challenged, he is the
one who will be protected by God even after he has killed his brother’ (Monod
2012: 101). God’s favouring of Abel’s sacrifices over those of Cain foreshadows
his testing of Abraham and Job later in the Old Testament to prove their love and
obedience to him. However, Cain’s murder of Abel takes place prior to the Ten
Commandments, which were given to Moses in the book of Exodus. Even though
the commandment not to kill had not yet been written or made explicit, for Levi-
nas, the primordial relation between human beings forbids murder. It is the face of
the other that calls us into responsibility, not the written law. With the murder of
Abel and the marking of Cain, the natural order of human relations was destroyed,
necessitating God’s commandment against murder. Schmitt, however, does not
view Abel’s murder as the destruction of a natural order. Instead, the ghosts of
Cain and Abel, of brother killing brother, embody the beginning of politics as
fraternal civil war.

Fraternity and the ethical relation with the other

If Schmitt was imprisoned for his active support and legal participation in the
Nazi regime, Levinas was incarcerated in German prisoner of war camps from
1940–1945 as a member of the French army. Born in Lithuania to a Russian-
speaking Jewish family in 1906, he studied philosophy in Strasbourg, then later
in Freiburg with Husserl and Heidegger. In 1930, he became a naturalised French
citizen. Drafted into the French army in 1939 as an interpreter of Russian and
German, Levinas was taken prisoner in 1940. His friend, Maurice Blanchot,
helped to hide his wife and daughter under the protection of Catholic nuns, the
Sisters of Vincent de Paul. It was only after the war that he learned that his par-
ents, two brothers and other family members in Lithuania had been killed (Der-
rida 2001: 198).
In his prison notebooks, Carnets de captivité et autres inédits, Levinas recounts
how he was placed in the Jewish part of the prisoner of war camp (Levinas 2009).
Indeed, as Sarah Hammerschlag and Howard Caygill emphasise, it was the
Geneva Convention that protected him from deportation to a concentration camp
(Hammerschlag 2019; Caygill 2010). It was his French prisoner of war status that
protected him from his Jewishness. ‘“That mere piece of paper,” as Levinas put
it in an essay written soon after the war, was that all that stood between them and
Auschwitz. It was the most contingent of existences’ (Hammerschlag 2019: 22).
Although Levinas’s prison notebooks were published posthumously in 2009, he
also wrote about his time in captivity in Difficult Freedom, originally published in
1963. The essays ‘bear witness to a Judaism that has been passed down by a liv-
ing sense of tradition, one nourished by its reflections on stern texts that are more
alive than life itself’ (Levinas 1997: xiii). While Schmitt was haunted by Cain’s
murder of Abel with its link between fratricide and politics, Levinas focuses on
how Cain’s question reveals the demands of responsibility and social justice. His
reflections on Cain and Abel appear in various places, most notably in Difficult
 The ghosts of Cain and Abel  55
Freedom, Totality and Infinity, Otherwise than Being, Entre Nous and Of God
who comes to Mind.
By juxtaposing Levinas and Schmitt’s reflections on the same biblical passage
in the book of Genesis, one gleans vastly different understandings of the rela-
tionship between self, one another and world. If Schmitt concentrates on murder
and the hostility implicit within each political relationship, Levinas focuses on
Cain’s question that is directed to God. Schmitt struggles with and even rebels
against answering Cain’s question. Moreover, Schmitt does not even address
Cain’s question when he recalls the biblical story in his prison cell. For Levinas,
however, the mere fact that Cain asked whether he should be responsible for his
brother reveals a broken social order. ‘“You shall not kill” is therefore not just a
simple rule of conduct; it appears as the principle of discourse itself and of spiri-
tual life’ (Levinas 1997: 9).
In Difficult Freedom, Levinas suggests that Cain’s question, ‘Am I My Broth-
er’s Keeper?’ is not one of rudeness or ‘simple insolence’ (Ibid: 20). Rather,
Cain’s question reveals his lack of social and moral relation to others. Cain thinks
of himself and himself alone, disconnected from fraternal, familial or human ties.
‘Instead, it comes from someone who has not yet experienced human solidarity
and who thinks (like many modern philosophers) that each exists for oneself and
that everything is permitted’ (Ibid). Echoing Arendt’s depiction that in totalitari-
anism ‘everything is possible,’ Levinas calls attention to Cain’s disengaged, cold
indifference towards his brother. If Schmitt argues that political concepts origi-
nate in theology, Levinas underscores the primordial origins of ethics in religion.
‘The ethical relation is anterior to the opposition of freedoms, the war which, in
Hegel’s view, inaugurates History. My neighbour’s face has an alterity which is
not allergic, but opens up the beyond’ (Ibid: 18).
Because God marked Cain, future revenge through the generations was pre-
vented. Indeed, the story of Cain and Abel opens up questions of responsibil-
ity to the living, the dead and the unborn. For Levinas, the natural order is one
of responsibility towards one another. ‘But God reveals to the murderer that his
crime has disturbed the natural order’ (Ibid: 20). It is Cain’s question, God’s
punishment of him and Cain’s response that Levinas calls the reader’s attention
to. God had to ‘reveal’ to Cain that he had disturbed the natural order of respon-
sibility that preceded God presenting the written Ten Commandments to Moses.
When God addressed Cain asking about his brother, he responds to him rhetori-
cally with a question.

Then the LORD said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’
(Genesis 4: 9, The Holy Bible: 1984)

Levinas contrasts Cain’s response to God with that of Abraham when he was
addressed by God to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Abraham did not answer with a ques-
tion but responded: ‘Here I am’ (Genesis 22:1, The Holy Bible: 1984). When
56  Gaps, glitches and ghosts
individuals address one another, they should respond not like Cain, who questions
our responsibility to one another, but like Abraham, who is open to God. For Levi-
nas, one should respond to the other as Abraham responded to God, with ‘Here
I am.’ ‘I am for the other in a relationship of deaconship: I am in service to the
other’ (Levinas 2000: 161). If Cain’s attitude to others was one of calculated self-
interest and cold egoism, for Levinas, Abraham’s attitude was one of openness,
deaconship, even of passivity.
Hence, when we are addressed by someone else, we should respond with ‘Here
I am,’ not with ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ For Levinas, when we address some-
one, the other person is ‘not only named, but also invoked’ (Levinas 1997: 7). ‘To
put it in grammatical terms, the Other does not appear in the nominative, but in
the vocative. I not only think of what he is for me, but also and simultaneously,
and even before, I am for him’ (Ibid).
Throughout his writing, Levinas was fond of quoting Dostoyevsky’s The
Brothers Karamazov. ‘Each of us is guilty before everyone for everyone, and I
more than the others’ (Dostoyevsky, quoted in Levinas 2002: 146); ‘“Chacun de
nous est coupable devant tous pour tous et moi plus que les autres” écrit Dos-
toïevsky dans les Frères Karamazov’ (Levinas 1974: 186). As Alain Toumayan
argues, this quotation of being guilty or responsible before the other demon-
strates the asymmetry of ethical relations that Levinas sought to articulate most
strongly in Otherwise than Being. Not only do Dostoyevsky’s characters in The
Brothers Karamazov represent nihilism, existentialism and religion, their discus-
sions recall the conflict between Cain and Abel. For Toumayan, Ivan the nihilist,
like Cain, does not feel any responsibility or guilt for others (Toumayan 2004).
Levinas underscores Cain’s ‘sober coldness’ and isolation from other people
(Levinas 2002: 10). Indeed, for him, Cain is sincere in his answer to God asking
about his brother Abel. What he utterly lacks is a sense of responsibility to others.

We must not take Cain’s answer as if he were mocking God or as if he were

answering as a little boy: ‘It isn’t me, it’s the other one.’ Cain’s answer is
sincere. Ethics is the only thing lacking in his answer; there is only ontology:
I am I and he is he. We are ontologically separate beings.
(Levinas 1998a: 110)

It is precisely Cain’s attitude of calculated coldness and indifference that Levinas

himself experienced during the war. By arguing for a primordial sense of respon-
sibility that precedes any social contract, the Ten Commandments and written law,
Levinas revisited the story of Cain and Abel many times. Cain’s question, ‘Am I
my brother’s keeper?’ was raised by a person who was completely disconnected
from his brother. ‘Biological human fraternity, considered with the sober cold-
ness of Cain, is not a sufficient reason that I be responsible for a separated being.
The sober, Cain-like coldness consists in reflecting on responsibility from the
standpoint of freedom or according to a contract. Yet responsibility for the other
comes from what is prior to my freedom’ (Levinas 1998b: 71). Levinas argues
that responsibility for the other emerges from the face of the other, not from a
 The ghosts of Cain and Abel  57
social contract, reason or the categorical imperative. ‘I cannot slip away from the
face of the neighbour without avoidance, or without fault, or without complexes;
here I am pledged to the other without any possibility of abdication’ (Ibid).
While thinking about his years as a prisoner of war, Levinas remembered how
it was a dog who treated him with the highest respect and dignity, not the prison
guards or people who passed by the camp. As Levinas was working among sev-
enty men in a forestry commando for Jewish prisoners of war, it was the French
uniform that saved them from the concentration camps. Camp orderlies and
individuals passing by regarded them with indifference. ‘We were subhuman, a
gang of apes. A small inner murmur, the strength and wretchedness of persecuted
people, reminded us of our essence as thinking creatures, but we were no longer
part of the world’ (Levinas 1997: 153). Isolated from society in a camp, Levinas
felt excluded from the world and regarded as less than human. In his essay, ‘The
Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,’ he underscored the dignity of a dog who came
to their prisoner of war camp halfway through his captivity. Named by the prison-
ers as ‘Bobby,’ he would wait and greet them when they returned from the for-
est. ‘For him, there was no doubt that we were men’ (Ibid). Only Bobby treated
the prisoners with dignity rather than cold indifference. ‘This dog was the last
Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain needed to universalize maxims and
drives’ (Ibid).
Difficult Freedom closes with Levinas’s ‘Signature.’ As an autobiographical
sketch, he outlines moments of profound importance in his life: the Hebrew
Bible, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Blondel, Halbwachs, friendship with Maurice Blanchot,
Freiburg and phenomenology, friendship with Jean Wahl, ‘long captivity in
Germany,’ Talmudic texts, doctoral degree, professorships at the University
of Poitiers, Paris-Nanterre and the Sorbonne. ‘This disparate inventory is a
biography. It is dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi
horror’ (Ibid: 291). Husserl and Heidegger occupied a special place in Levi-
nas’s work. However, for him, it was not Being or ontology but the face of the
other that was most fundamental for human relations. ‘The face of the Other
puts into question the happy spontaneity of the self, this joyous force which
moves’ (Ibid: 293). In writing an inventory of his life and signing his name, he
emphasises that it is the face of the other that structures human relations. ‘The
epiphany of that which can present itself so directly, outwardly and eminently is
face’ (Ibid: 294).

A question that continues to haunt

From Schmitt’s prison cell to Levinas’s prisoner of war camp, the ghosts of Cain
and Abel raise fundamental questions about justice, solidarity and our responsi-
bility towards one another. In most haunted tales, the ghostly figure appears to
someone who is alive, just as Patrocles appeared to Achilles asking to be bur-
ied. Oftentimes the ghost demands justice, as is the case with the ghost of Ham-
let’s father. With the story of Cain and Abel, however, there are various stages
of haunting beginning with the conversation between the two brothers, the act
58  Gaps, glitches and ghosts
of murder and Cain’s conversation with God. When the story reaches the ques-
tion, ‘Am I my Brother’s Keeper?’ it is raised by Cain after he has murdered his
brother. It is precisely this difficult question that continues to haunt subsequent
generations. But how can a question haunt? Cain’s question haunts because of the
event that it follows. The question is not posed in a vacuum or hypothetically but
is addressed to God after fratricide. Cain’s question is forever tied to the murder
of his own brother.
Patrocles was killed in a time of war, while Abel was murdered out of jealousy
in a time of peace. Patrocles appeared in a dream to his best friend, Achilles. Cain
and Abel appear less as spectral ghosts and more with the question of what consti-
tutes fraternity and solidarity. Cain’s question, as well as God’s response, makes
up the very foundation of social justice and pacts of solidarity. Cain’s question
haunts in two ways: first, with the finality of murder, and second, with the social
isolation accompanied by his question. ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ is raised most
often in times of crisis when a decision has to be made – whether to assist a
stranger, respond to an estranged family member, offer hospitality to refugees or
close the borders, intervene in war in order to help civilians or look away. The
question is addressed most strongly during times of inhumanity and inhospitality
and assumes the innocent helplessness of the brother or sister whom we are called
upon to respond to. Levinas underscores Cain’s alienation from others and cold
calculated orientation to the world. Indeed, as he writes in Otherwise than Being:

Why does the other concern me? What is Hecuba to me? Am I my brother’s
keeper? These questions have meaning only if one has already supposed that
the ego is concerned only with itself, is only a concern for itself.
(Levinas 2002: 117)

Although individuals do not appear as liminal ghosts in the Bible but as human
beings within a sacred text, Abel’s murder and Cain’s question to God nonethe-
less continue to haunt each successive generation. Cain’s question opens up a
space demanding that we understand our relationship to one another as either one
of responsibility or one of fraternal enemies. The ghostly quality of Cain’s ques-
tion opens up a space between the Biblical past and the present in which we find
ourselves. As Colin Davis writes, an encounter with a ghost includes the ‘ethical
injunction’ to listen and respond to its spectral demands.

Attending to the ghost is an ethical injunction insofar as it occupies the place

of the Levinasian Other: a wholly irrecuperable intrusion in our world, which
is not comprehensible within our available intellectual frameworks, but
whose otherness we are responsible for preserving.
(2013: 53)

Indeed, the appearance of a ghost opens up a space between past and present that
is directed towards the future. Furthermore, Davis links Derrida’s reflections on
ghosts with Levinas’ responsibility towards the other. ‘For Derrida, the ghost’s
 The ghosts of Cain and Abel  59
secret is not a puzzle to be solved; it is the structural openness or address directed
towards the living by the voices of the past or the not yet formulated possibility
of the future’ (Ibid: 58).
While both Levinas and Schmitt spent considerable time in confinement – one
in prison, the other in a prisoner of war camp – their experiences of the Third Reich
were vastly different. If war, for Schmitt, is the existential moment of the friend
facing a perceived enemy, war, for Levinas, is the critical span of time where ethics
is most challenged. The juxtaposition of Schmitt and Levinas’ reflections on Cain
and Abel reveal contrasting interpretations of the same story. Schmitt focuses on
the primordial relationship between fratricide, politics and death, while ignoring
Cain’s question of whether fraternity entails responsibility towards one another.
Levinas, however, takes Cain’s question as the starting point for ethics as first phi-
losophy. The face of the other should compel us not towards violence but towards
infinitely demanding responsibility. For Levinas, Dostoyevsky answers Cain’s
question most profoundly when he writes: ‘Each of us is guilty before everyone
for everyone, and I more than the others’ (Dostoyevsky quoted in Levinas 2002:
146). Questions of whether politics is primarily concerned with fratricide or fra-
ternity have not gone away. Rather, the story of Cain and Abel lies at the centre
of political problems that demand global responses from war to statelessness and
the environmental destruction of the very world in which we live.

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Augustine. 2009. The City of God. Marcus Dods, trans. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson
Publishers).
Caygill, Howard. 2010. ‘Levinas’s Prison Notebooks’, Radical Philosophy, 160 (March/
April). www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/levinass-prison-notebooks (Accessed 27 May
2019).
Davis, Colin. 2013. ‘État présent: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms’, in María de Pilar
Blanco and Esther Peeren, eds., The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Con-
temporary Cultural Theory. (London: Bloomsbury), pp. 53–60.
Derrida, Jacques. 2001. ‘Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95): Adieu’, in Pascale-Anne Brault
and Michael Naas, eds., The Work of Mourning. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chi-
cago Press), pp. 197–209.
Derrida, Jacques. 2005. The Politics of Friendship. George Collins, trans. (London: Verso
Books).
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. 2005. The Brothers Karamazov. Constance Garrett, trans. (New York:
Dover Publications).
Hammerschlag, Sarah. 2019. ‘Levinas’s Prison Notebooks’, in Michael L. Morgan, ed., The
Oxford Handbook of Levinas. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 21–34.
The Holy Bible. 1984. New International Version. (Colorado Springs, CO: International
Bible Society).
Kalyvas, Andreas and Finchelstein, Federico. 2017. ‘Introduction: Carl Schmitt’s Prison
Writings’, in Carl Schmitt, Andreas Kalyvas and Federico Finchelstein, eds. and Mat-
thew Hannah, trans., Ex Captivitate Salus: Experiences 1945–47. (London: Polity Press),
pp. 1–12.
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Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969 [1961]. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Alphonso
Lingis, trans. (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press).
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1974. Autrément qu’être ou au-delà de l‘essence. (The Hague: Mar-
tinus Nijhoff).
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1997 [1963]. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Seán Hand,
trans. (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press).
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998a [1991]. Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. Michael B.
Smith and Barbara Harshav, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press).
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998b [1986]. Of God Who Comes to Mind. Bettina Bergo, trans.
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).
Levinas, Emmanuel. 2000 [1993]. God, Death and Time. Bettina Bergo, trans. (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press).
Levinas, Emmanuel. 2002 [1974]. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Alphonso
Lingis, ed. (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press).
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Calin and Catherine Calier, eds. (Paris: Grasset & Fasquerelle).
Meier, Heinrich. 2011. The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction
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Studies: 104, Encounters with Levinas, 55–66.
Part II

Looking back after 1945

4 Walls and windows of silence

Martin Heidegger’s work was a watershed for his philosophical reflections on

time, language and existence. In posing an old question anew – Why is there some-
thing and not nothing? – he attracted readers not only from the field of philoso-
phy but also from theology, poetry and literature. The publication of Heidegger’s
Schwarze Hefte 1931–1941 (2014), however, has rekindled controversy surround-
ing his Nazi involvement and silence about the Holocaust.1 For decades, scholars
have wondered what Heidegger’s silence might have meant – denial, indifference,
inability to speak, shock or simply anti-Semitism.2 After all these years, one might
ask whether the question is relevant anymore. Why should one expect harmony
between a philosopher’s writing and his life? Heidegger was certainly not the first,
nor the last, philosopher with dubious political alliances (Rorty 1999).
When associated with liturgical reverence and piety, silence is often the most
appropriate response to the divine and the ineffable. What happens, though, when
religious and aesthetic silence enters into the political realm? Is silence suitable,
or might it signify denial? Is silence tantamount to forgetfulness? As Jay Winter
argues, how one interprets silence or the absence of speech often depends on the
social and political context: ‘Silences are spaces either beyond words or con-
ventionally delimited as left out of what we talk about’ (Winter 2010: 4). The
decision to remain silent can just as easily denote self-censorship and denial as
well as modesty or humility. Hesitancy to speak may also imply the inability of
language to express thought and communicate with others. As Winter suggests,
silence is a third dimension and ‘socially constructed space,’ lying somewhere
between memory and forgetting (Ibid).
In 1988, in the midst of the controversy surrounding the publication of Hei-
degger and the Nazis by Victor Farias (1987), Jacques Derrida reflected on Hei-
degger’s silence at a colloquium held in Heidelberg. ‘What would have happened
if Heidegger had said something, and what could he have said?’ (Derrida 1988: 2).
Would he have been pardoned or absolved from his Nazi party membership?
Would the affair have been closed? Given his steadfast silence, Derrida argued
that philosophy after Heidegger has to examine his philosophical insights within
the context of his individual and political choices.

For we have this work to do, I mean this legacy, Heidegger’s horrible perhaps
inexcusable silence. There are very few statements we can make today about
64  Looking back after 1945
Heidegger’s relation to National Socialism; this lack of statements leaves us
with a legacy. It leaves us the commandment to think what he himself did
not think.
(Ibid: 2)

Given the fact that Heidegger was asked to respond to both National Socialism
and the Holocaust by those whom he most admired, philosophers and poets, his
silence speaks volumes. Philosophers afterwards are left to respond to the ethical
questions that were absent from his writings. In addition to Derrida, reflection
on Heidegger’s philosophy can be seen in the work of Levinas, Arendt, Löwith,
Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas, Lyotard and Blanchot. It is difficult
to reconcile that the same person who argued for the limits of language, truth as
unconcealment (aletheia) and the necessity to remain open to the call of being
(Dasein) remained silent. Moreover, it is puzzling that the person who first wrote
about the significant of the event (Ereignis), essence of truth, call of conscience
and care as the fundamental human mode of existence remained silent. When
reflecting on Heidegger’s silence, Richard Rorty is very clear about the noise that
followed. ‘Many eminent twentieth-century writers have mistrusted democracy,
but he was the only one to have remained unmoved by the Holocaust’ (Rorty
1999: 193). The problem is less his inaugural address as Rector of Freiburg Uni-
versity in 19333 than the fact that he refused to speak, even when approached by
colleagues such as Karl Jaspers, former students such as Herbert Marcuse and
Karl Löwith and the poet whom he greatly admired, Paul Celan. It is this seemly
impenetrable wall of silence in the face of the brilliance of his insights into lan-
guage that so many thinkers afterwards feel compelled to reflect on.
In his book, Language and Silence, George Steiner suggests that silence can
be understood in two ways: as a wall blocking communication or as a window
leading to a deeper appreciation of the limit of knowledge and philosophical truth.
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings provide such a window of understanding. ‘With
Wittgenstein, as with certain poets, we look out of language not into darkness but
light’ (Steiner 2010: 31). The final sentence of the Tractatus famously elevates
silence to a modest acceptance of the limitation of language to express experi-
ence: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’4 In the spirit of
Steiner, Heidegger’s silence is both a window into the nature of language and an
impenetrable wall that borders on disinterest and evasion of the Holocaust.
Although language became a major concern for twentieth-century philosophy,
one can trace earlier discussions about language and silence back to the Middle
Ages and Antiquity. Before nominalism raised the question of the reality cor-
responding to a name, discussions of silence, language, memory and truth were
important themes in many of Plato’s dialogues. Indeed, the very form of a Pla-
tonic dialogue mirrors speech and silence. Conveyed through conversation, one
character speaks, while the other listens. Plato’s dialogues represent philosophical
reflection as conversation rather than monologue. Moreover, many of his writ-
ings are named after the person with whom Socrates speaks (Cratylus, Geor-
gias, Meno, Parmenides, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Protagorus and Theaetetus). Thus,
 Walls and windows of silence  65
Socrates spends a great deal of time questioning others and listening silently to
their answers. In the Phaedo, as he is preparing to die, Socrates looks forward to
silent mediation on the eternal forms in the afterlife. In the Phaedrus, Socrates
expresses his distrust of writing because it encourages forgetfulness. Silence is a
sign not only of a retreat from the world, but as Steiner notes, it is ‘the retreat from
the word’ (Ibid: 16). Meditation and philosophical contemplation leave language
behind in favour of silence. ‘The ineffable lies beyond the frontiers of the word’
(Ibid). The Buddhist monk, the mystic and the priest retreat from the everyday
world of speech into a higher realm of silence. Likewise, Plato’s Republic advo-
cates philosophical exit from the cave of worldly affairs in order to contemplate
the eternal forms.

Heidegger’s walls and windows of silence

Three aspects of Heidegger’s work are particularly relevant to questions of silence
and language: the primacy of being, call of conscience and language as the house
of being. In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger described care or Sorge as the fun-
damental human mode of being. As temporal creatures, we can choose whether
to be indifferent or to care – not about another person – but about being. ‘Con-
science summons Dasein’s Self from its lostness in the “they.” The Self to which
the appeal is made remains indefinite and empty in its “what”’ (Heidegger 1962:
319). Summoned by being, we can choose to respond. Heidegger, however, seems
to be fixed on the subject rather than on other people. Unlike the philosophy of
Emmanuel Levinas, where one is compelled to respond to the face of the other,
Heidegger’s care and the call of conscience remain solipsistic and focused on the
self. Other people seem to be more of an impediment than companions. They are
‘the they,’ the masses, the crowds, the ones who are inauthentic.
Heidegger’s new style of writing was mindful of the ways in which language
shapes thought and action. His attention to the etymological origin of words in
ancient Greek and German, in conjunction with close reading of individual phi-
losophers and attention to the phenomenology of everyday life, continues to have
an enormous influence. It is, however, in his post-war publications, namely, ‘Let-
ter on Humanism’ (1947), On the Way to Language (1959) and Language, Truth
and Poetry (1971), that he reflects most directly on language, silence and rep-
resentation. Written in response to questions posed by Jean Beaufret, ‘Letter on
Humanism’ is also a reflection on Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism (1946).
In Heidegger’s eyes, humanism grants too much primacy to man and not enough
to Being. ‘Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who
think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home’ (Heidegger
1978: 217). Recalling Plato’s Republic, man is a guardian not of the polis but
of Being. Thinking is more than techné, poesis or praxis. In response to Beau-
fret’s question, ‘Comment redonner un sens au mot “Humanisme”? (How can
we restore meaning to the word “humanism”?)’ (Ibid: 219), Heidegger does not
answer this question directly within the political context of his time but within the
essence of language: ‘But if the truth of Being has become thought-provoking for
66  Looking back after 1945
thinking, then reflection on the essence of language must also attain a different
rank. It can no longer be a mere philosophy of language’ (Ibid: 222).
In one of his more enigmatic passages, Heidegger reflects on the denigration
and instrumentalisation of language in the public sphere. ‘But if man is to find his
way once again into the nearness of Being he must first learn to exist in the name-
less’ (Ibid: 223). Returning to the metaphor of the guardian, Heidegger reaches
back to religious imagery. ‘Man is the shepherd of Being’ (Ibid: 234). Man is
called by Being; hence, he must be open to hear this call. ‘Man is not the lord of
beings, Man is the shepherd of Being. . . . Man is the neighbor of Being’ (Ibid:
245). In perhaps one of the most important parts of the letter, Heidegger poses a
question related to his own actions and to his time: ‘Soon after Being and Time
appeared a young friend asked me, “When are you going to write an ethics?”’
(Ibid: 255). Where can one find a ‘preemptory directive’ – and ‘rules that say
how man, experienced from ek-sistence toward Being, ought to live in a fitting
manner’ (Ibid). In thinking about what ethics means, he reflects on a fragment by
Heraclitus: “‘A man’s character is his daimon”’ (Ibid: 256). Moreover, he sug-
gests that an original definition of ethos is abode or dwelling place that is open to
the world. In one of the very few places where Heidegger reflects on the problem
of evil, he writes: ‘The essence of evil does not consist in the mere baseness of
human action, but rather in the malice of rage’ (Ibid: 260). The ‘Letter on Human-
ism’ closes with a modest plea not to overestimate what philosophy can do and,
instead, to be mindful of the process of thinking.
Anson Rabinbach analyses Heidegger’s evasions in the ‘Letter on Humanism’
and interprets the letter within the context of two other texts that were also pub-
lished immediately after the war: Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer
and Theodor Adorno (1991 [1944]) and The Question of German Guilt by Karl
Jaspers (2010 [1947]). The Letter is particularly important because it was Hei-
degger’s first post-war publication and written when he was considered as poten-
tially unsuitable to teach. Rabinbach argues that the letter ‘represents Heidegger’s
first utterances on the defeat of Germany and – indirectly – on Heidegger’s own
fall from grace’ (1997: 98). Influenced by Löwith and Marcuse, he suggests that
the ‘Letter on Humanism’

must be considered not merely as a philosophical meditation on the hubris

of subjectivity in the blinding light of Being, but as a careful reformulation
and restructuring of a narrative on the event with which Heidegger is most
profoundly concerned: the collapse of Germany, whose chief victim Hei-
degger considered to be himself.
(Ibid: 104)

Under scrutiny for his ability to teach as a former member of the Nazi party, criti-
cised by Karl Jaspers and Karl Löwith, Heidegger seems to abstract the political
context of war and genocide to one of existential homelessness, decline of the
West and technological bureaucracy. As Rabinbach remarks, ‘The “Letter” is a
gesture of defiance in the cloak of humility’ (Ibid: 115). What seems to be missing
 Walls and windows of silence  67
from Heidegger’s writing is a sense of care (Sorge) for the victims – in particular,
care for the Jewish victims.5
Shortly after the publication of the ‘Letter on Humanism,’ Herbert Marcuse
wrote to Heidegger, asking him to comment on his membership in the Nazi party.
‘You have never publicly retracted them – not even after 1945’ (Marcuse 1993a:
160). In the letter, Marcuse sought an answer, much like Löwith before him in
1936 and Celan after him in 1966. All three asked for a response from the phi-
losopher whom they most admired. In this personal letter, Marcuse, Heidegger’s
student from 1928–1932 and a Jew, who had emigrated to the United States, con-
fronted Heidegger as a professor and as a German.

Many of us have long awaited a statement from you, a statement that would
clearly and finally free you from such identification, a statement that honestly
expresses your current attitude about the events that have occurred. But you
have never uttered such a statement – at least it has never emerged from the
private sphere. I – and very many others – have admired you as a philoso-
pher; from you we have learned an infinite amount. But we cannot make the
separation between Heidegger the philosopher and Heidegger the man, for it
contradicts your own philosophy. A philosopher can be deceived regarding
political matters; in which case he will openly acknowledge his error. But he
cannot be deceived about a regime that has killed millions of Jews – merely
because they were Jews – that made terror into an everyday phenomenon, and
that turned everything that pertains to the ideas of spirit, freedom, and truth
into its bloody opposite.
(Ibid: 161)

Marcuse tried to understand and help Heidegger overcome his silence. ‘Once
again: you (and we) can only combat the identification of your person and
your work with Nazism (and thereby the dissolution of your philosophy) if you
make a public avowal of your changed views’ (Ibid). In his reply, Heidegger
rebuts Marcuse by arguing that he cannot understand his actions because he left
Germany.

If I may infer from your letter that you are seriously concerned with [reach-
ing] a correct judgment about my works and person, then your letter shows
me precisely how difficult it is to converse with persons who have not been
living in Germany since 1933 and who judge the beginning of the National
Socialist movement from its end.
(Heidegger 1993a: 162)

In effect, he argues that Marcuse does not have the right to speak or to judge
because Heidegger remained in Germany, whereas Marcuse emigrated. More-
over, Heidegger admits that he expected ‘a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety’
from the Nazi movement. He refers to his resignation from his position as rector
in 1934 as his recognition of ‘political error’ (Ibid). The closest that Heidegger
68  Looking back after 1945
comes to an apology is when he writes: ‘You are entirely correct that I failed to
provide a public, readily comprehensible counter-declaration; it would have been
the end of both me and my family. On this point, Jaspers said: that we remain
alive is our guilt’ (Ibid: 162–163). However, unlike Heidegger, Jaspers opposed
National Socialism and emigrated to Switzerland, along with his Jewish wife.
Heidegger remained in Germany and chose to be silent. His brief attempt at apol-
ogy to Marcuse was undercut by closing reflections on European Jews.

I can merely add that if instead of “Jews” you had written “East Germans”
[i.e., Germans of the eastern territories], then the same holds true for one of
the allies, with the difference that everything that has occurred since 1945 has
become public knowledge, while the bloody terror of the Nazis in point of
fact had been kept a secret from the German people.
(Ibid: 163)

Marcuse responded in a second letter to Heidegger and ended both their friend-
ship and correspondence in May 1948.

You are right: a conversation with persons who have not been in Germany
since 1933 is obviously very difficult. . . . The difficulty of the conversation
seems to me rather to be explained by the fact that people in Germany were
exposed to a total perversion of all concepts and feelings, something which
very many accepted only too readily.
(Marcuse 1993b: 163–164)

In addition, Marcuse focuses on the latter half of Heidegger’s letter, in which

he avoids any discussion of Jewish genocide. ‘You write that everything I say
about the extermination of the Jews applies just as much to the Allies, if instead
of “Jews” one were to insert “East Germans”’ (Ibid: 164). Appalled by such a
comparison and Heidegger’s dismissal of the topic as not even worthy of discus-
sion, Marcuse has the last word. ‘From a contemporary perspective, there seems
already to be a night and day difference in humanity and inhumanity in the differ-
ence between Nazi concentration camps and the deportations and internments of
the postwar years’ (Ibid).
In Being and Time, Heidegger argued that ‘keeping silent’ is necessary for dis-
course. ‘In talking with one another, the person who keeps silent can “make one
understand”’ (Heidegger 1962: 208). Language as communication requires listen-
ing, speaking and silence. Silence can also speak volumes. ‘To be able to keep
silent, Dasein must have something to say – that is, it must have at its disposal an
authentic and rich disclosedness of itself’ (Ibid).
He continues this line of thought in ‘The Way to Language’ by suggesting that
‘to correspond’ (entsprechen) is the very basis of language.

The unspoken is not merely what is deprived of sound; rather, it is the unsaid,
what is not yet shown, what has not yet appeared on the scene. Whatever has
 Walls and windows of silence  69
to remain unspoken will be held in reserve in the unsaid. It will linger in what
is concealed as something unshowable. It is mystery.
(Heidegger 1978: 409)

Moreover, in Poetry, Language, Thought, Heidegger writes: ‘Language speaks’

(Heidegger 1971: 188). It is not man who speaks but language. Speech is an
expressive response. ‘Language speaks. Man speaks in that he responds to lan-
guage. This responding is a hearing. It hears because it listens to the command
of stillness’ (Ibid: 207). Heidegger suggests that the history of philosophy has
forgotten not only Being but also the ability to listen. In this sense, silence is as
important as speaking because it is a precondition for listening and understanding.
Listening means responding – but to what or to whom?
Heidegger’s final public attempt to break his self-imposed silence about Nazism
occurred during an interview with Der Spiegel in 1966. At his request, the inter-
view was not published until after his death in 1976. Reflecting on his speech as
rector of the University of Freiburg, ‘The Self-Assertion of the German Univer-
sity’ and decision to resign in 1934, Heidegger argued that his lectures on Hölder-
lin and Nietzsche during the late 1930s and 1940s were an indirect confrontation
with National Socialism. ‘In 1936, I began the Nietzsche lectures. Anyone with
ears to hear heard in these lectures a confrontation with National Socialism’ (Hei-
degger 1993b: 101). When pressed for a public comment on his political engage-
ment with the Nazis and the future direction of philosophy, Heidegger retreated
into silence. In fact, he argued that silence is required as one waits for redemp-
tive salvation. ‘Only a god can save us’ has become one of his most infamous
statements on the entire affair (Ibid: 107). It is only when one reaches the end
of philosophy that thinking truly begins. ‘It may be that the path of thinking has
today reached the point where silence is required to preserve thinking from being
all jammed up just within a year’ (Ibid: 109–110). As Heidegger’s philosophical
writing on language and silence demonstrates, silence can be a window into the
limit of language to express the ineffable. However, his lack of public response to
the Holocaust also reveals silence as a wall of evasion.

Blanchot’s window on silence

Immediately after the war, Heidegger’s thought had a strong resonance in French
philosophy in the work of Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel
Levinas. Throughout his literary and philosophical writing, Blanchot was pre-
occupied with the ethical relationship between language, politics and commu-
nity. His reflections on silence are meditations on absence, responsibility and the
limitations of language to express what one wishes to say. Blanchot was deeply
aware of the power of language to destroy what it seeks to describe. In one of
his early books, The Work of Fire (1949), he reflects on how speech both creates
and destroys. ‘In authentic language, speech has a function that is not only rep-
resentative but also destructive. It causes to vanish, it renders the object absent,
it annihilates it’ (Blanchot 1995b: 30). Inspired by Heidegger’s writing on poetry
70  Looking back after 1945
and language, Blanchot wrote about the relationship between silence and poetry
in an essay on Heidegger’s interpretation of Friedrich Hölderlin.

‘Still’ is not the fullness of silence here, but the emptiness of the absence of
speech, the darkness and coldness of an existence in which silence no longer
makes itself a poem. That is because silence is marked by the same contra-
diction and the same tearing apart as language: if it is a way to approach the
unapproachable, to belong to what is not said, it is ‘sacred’ and only insofar
as it makes communication of the incommunicable possible and arrives at
language.
(Blanchot 1995b: 127)

While Heidegger was an early influence on Blanchot’s work, the latter’s lifelong
friendship with Levinas transformed how he viewed philosophy, writing and eth-
ics. Even before The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot engaged with the limit of
language to express the ineffable. For him, any attempt to represent the unspeak-
able is dangerous because speech might unwittingly destroy singularity. Language
might reduce an event into trivialities. For Blanchot, like Plato, language is a
double-edged sword that not only opens the possibility for dialogue but also to the
danger of destroying the other. As Ethan Kleinberg argues in Generation Existen-
tial: ‘Blanchot and Levinas deviated from Heidegger because they both sought to
confront the Shoah, which led them to rethink not only the relation of language to
being but also the place of the other in that relation’ (2005: 224). Kleinberg’s point
is an important one. Although both were influenced by Heidegger’s philosophy of
language, the Holocaust is an event that cannot be bracketed out of philosophical
reflection. Instead, it becomes the focal point of their philosophical writing on
language and humanity. Similar to Plato’s argument in the Phaedrus, Blanchot
and Levinas are wary of language’s narcotic power to lull one into indifference
or forgetfulness. Being is not something that can be recovered and remembered
through philosophical thought; rather, language is a potentially dangerous site
of meaning. Heidegger is deeply reverent towards language and being – perhaps
even too reverent. Blanchot, on the other hand, cautions against the power of lan-
guage to destroy the humanity of the other.
In an essay originally published in Le nouvel observateur in 1988 and trans-
lated into English for a special issue of Critical Inquiry (1989), Levinas reflected
on Heidegger’s silence on the Holocaust. In the 1930s, Levinas hoped that Hei-
degger’s involvement with National Socialism ‘expressed only the temporary
lapse of a great speculative mind into practical banality’ (Levinas 1989: 485).
However, as time went on, it was Heidegger’s refusal to respond to his former
students, colleagues and the poet Paul Celan that suggested a deeper philosophi-
cal problem.

But doesn’t this silence, in time of peace, on the gas chambers and death
camps lie beyond the realm of feeble excuses and reveal a soul completely
 Walls and windows of silence  71
cut off from any sensibility, in which can be perceived a kind of consent to
the horror?
(Ibid: 487)

It is this lack of response to the other, behind Heidegger’s wall of silence, that
is so different from aesthetic and liturgical silence toward the ineffable. If Hei-
degger places Being at the centre of his philosophical work, for Levinas, and
subsequently for Blanchot, it is the other person, not Being, who animates philo-
sophical inquiry and demands an ethical response.
Blanchot confronted the legacy of the Holocaust most directly in his book The
Writing of the Disaster. ‘The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving every-
thing intact’ (Blanchot 1995a [1980]: 1). Indeed, the disaster lies at the very limit
of writing. ‘It is what escapes the very possibility of experience – it is the limit of
writing’ (Ibid: 7). In this book, Blanchot reflects on Wittgenstein’s call to silence.
‘Wittgenstein’s “mysticism,” aside from his faith in unity, must come from his
believing that one can show when one cannot speak. But without language, noth-
ing can be shown. And to be silent is still to speak’ (Ibid: 10–11). Blanchot argues
that the Holocaust was the defining event of the twentieth century. From the
various metonynms – Shoah, Holocaust, genocide and extermination – Blanchot
chose to write about ‘the disaster.’ His reflections are part of a much larger debate
surrounding the limits of representation and the Holocaust. Originally published
in France in 1980 before Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film, Shoah (1985),
Blanchot struggled with the paradox of how to represent historical events while
acknowledging both the aporia of expression and the integrity of the victims.
Moreover, many of his questions echo fundamental themes in two of Saul Fried-
lander’s books on the representation of the Holocaust: Probing the Limits of Rep-
resentation (1992) and Reflections on Nazism (1982).

It is language that is ‘cryptic’: not only as a totality that is exceeded and

untheorizable, but inasmuch as it contains pockets, cavernous places where
words become things, where the inside is out and thus inaccessible to any
cryptanalysis whatever – for deciphering is required to keep the secret.
(Ibid: 136)

If Heidegger avoids direct or even oblique reflection on the Holocaust, it is at

the very centre of Blanchot’s later writing. In a public letter, ‘Thinking the Apoca-
lypse,’ also published in Critical Inquiry in 1989, he wrote about the legacy of
Heidegger’s silence:

Each time he was asked to express his ‘error,’ he kept a stony silence or
expressed himself in such a way that he aggravated his situation (for a Hei-
degger could not be mistaken: it was the Nazi movement that had changed by
abandoning its radicalism).
(Blanchot 1989: 476)
72  Looking back after 1945
Reflecting on both Heidegger’s contribution to the philosophy of language and his
personal decision to remain silent, Blanchot was also critical of his own youth-
ful political orientation, when as a young journalist, he was attracted to the far
right and French nationalism. However, at some point, during the war or immedi-
ately afterwards, his political views moved from far right to radical left (Blanchot
2010). In his letter, ‘Thinking the Apocalypse,’ Blanchot calls the reader’s atten-
tion to Heidegger’s words when he spoke most directly about the Holocaust. In
this passage, Heidegger argues that the essence of modern agriculture is similar to
that of concentration camps.

Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry. As for its essence, it is the

same thing as the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and the death
camps, the same thing as the blockades and the reduction of countries to fam-
ine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.
(Heidegger quoted in Levinas 1989: 487)

Blanchot took issue less with the equation of mechanised agriculture and con-
centration camps and more with the fact that this was Heidegger’s only public
statement on the Holocaust. ‘What was unthinkable and unforgiveable in the
event of Auschwitz, this utter void in our history, is met with Heidegger’s deter-
mined silence’ (Blanchot 1989: 478–479). Moreover, the only time that he spoke,
Heidegger engaged in revisionism and the equation of Jewish genocide with Ger-
man deportation. Heidegger’s silence seemed the loudest when Paul Celan came
to visit him at his mountain cottage in Todtnauberg in 1966. As Blanchot writes:

Allow me after what I have to say next to leave you, as a means to empha-
size that Heidegger’s irreparable fault lies in his silence concerning the Final
Solution. This silence, or his refusal, when confronted by Paul Celan, to ask
forgiveness for the unforgivable, was a denial that plunged Celan into despair
and made him ill, for Celan knew that the Shoah was the revelation of the
essence of the West. And he recognized that it was necessary to preserve this
memory in common, even if it entailed the loss of any sense of peace, in order
to safeguard the possibility for relationship with the other.
(Ibid: 479)

An important difference between Heidegger and Blanchot is whether language

is considered as a monologue or dialogue. In ‘The Way to Language,’ Heidegger
argued for ‘the monological character of the essence of language’ (Heidegger
1978: 423). Language is not understood as a dialogue between two people. ‘Yet
language is monologue’ (Ibid). Influenced by Georg Novalis, Heidegger is drawn
to the solitary silence of language rather than its potential for communication
with others. ‘“Precisely what is peculiar to language – that it concerns itself
purely with itself alone – no one knows”’ (Novalis quoted in Ibid: 422). In con-
trast, Blanchot’s hesitancy towards language is expressed in The Writing of
 Walls and windows of silence  73
the Disaster and The Infinite Conversation, both of which focus on dialogue and
the responsibility to respond to the other person. In the tradition of Plato, Martin
Buber’s I, Thou, Gadamer’s emphasis on dialogue and Levinas’ face of the other
emphasise conversation. Perhaps lack of care for the other person is key to
Heidegger’s silence – if language is indeed a monologue, the point of view of
the other is secondary to the one speaking. ‘This now says something twofold:
it is language alone that properly speaks; and it speaks in solitude’ (Ibid: 423).
Blanchot, however, sees another side to language. It is not the revelation of Being –
the clearing – but dialogue with another person that is the essence of language.
For Heidegger, language speaks and the listener listens. For Blanchot, in contrast,
language grants primacy to the other. Listening is listening to the other, not reverie
towards an abstract or absolute Being. Language is dialogue and an infinite
conversation. Blanchot argues that with Levinas’ thought,

[w]e are called upon to become responsible for what philosophy essentially
is, by entertaining precisely the idea of the Other in all its radiance and in the
infinite exigency that are proper to it, that is to say, the relation with autrui. It
is as though there were here a new departure in philosophy and a leap that it,
and we ourselves, were urged to accomplish.
(Blanchot 1993: 51–52)

Silence as wall or window, monologue or dialogue

Reflections on silence are visible in contemporary art, music, literature and phi-
losophy. Silence is not simply erasure or denial of historical events; it is, as Jay
Winter argues, a third dimension between memory and forgetting. As Heidegger
and Blanchot demonstrate, silence and the inadequacy of language to express
the ineffable may even resonate louder than speech. For Blanchot, language is
understood as a dialogue and conversation. In Heidegger’s philosophical writ-
ing, however, language is primarily a monologue in which language speaks while
the person serves as the guardian and shepherd of Being. As the Heidegger con-
troversy continues to demonstrate, silence can be morally neutral or deplorable,
depending upon the social context. Likewise, silence may just as well indicate
respectful piety as blatant disregard for the other.
Heidegger and Blanchot are two very different thinkers who wrote about the
inherent limitation of language to express experience. In his work, Heidegger
increasingly turned towards poetry and suggested that one listen silently to the
call of Being while Blanchot described the inadequacy of language to represent
political violence, most notably that of the Holocaust, during the twentieth cen-
tury. The controversy surrounding Heidegger’s refusal to respond publicly to
his Nazi past and the Holocaust is perhaps less about what he wrote than what
remained unwritten and unspoken. If Blanchot offers a window into the limit of
language to express the ineffable, Heidegger’s writing is both a window and a
wall. When he reflects on the poetic relation of silence and poetry, his work opens
74  Looking back after 1945
a window into how language frames and colours thought. However, his steadfast
silence about the Holocaust remains an impenetrable wall that continues to speak
volumes.

Notes
1 Martin Heidegger, Schwarze Hefte 1930–1941. Gesamtausgabe, ed. Peter Trawny.
Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014. Named after their black leather bind-
ing, the notebooks comprise the final eight volumes of Heidegger’s complete works.
Hence, the content of his private reflections on Nazism and world Jewry has sparked
renewed questions about his anti-Semitism. Since the notebooks, covering the period
1931–1941, do not address Heidegger’s post-war silence about the Holocaust, this
chapter concentrates on Heidegger’s philosophical texts about the relationship between
silence and language, as well as his responses to those who asked him to speak about
the Holocaust. For the English translation, see Ponderings II-VI Black Notebooks 1931–
1938, Martin Heidegger, Richard Rojewicz, trans., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016;
Ponderings VII-XI Black Notebooks 1938–1939, Martin Heidegger, Richard Rojewicz,
trans., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017; Ponderings XII-XV Black Notebooks 1930–
1941, Martin Heidegger, Richard Rojewicz, trans., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017.
Among the growing commentary on Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, see the editor, Peter
Trawny, ‘Eine neue Dimension’ die Zeit, 27 December 2013 and his book, Peter Trawny,
Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung. See also Richard Wolin
‘National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s Black Note-
books, Jewish Review of Books, Summer 2014, Peter E. Gordon, ‘Heidegger in Black’,
New York Review of Books, 9 October 2014. For an excellent anthology, see Reading
Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941, Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas, eds., Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2016.
2 Among the numerous books on the Heidegger controversy, see Victor Farias, Hei-
degger and Nazism, 1991, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics,
1990; Richard Wolin’s edited and translated collection of primary texts and interpreta-
tive essays is also very helpful, The Heidegger Controversy, 1993. See also Derrida, Of
Spirit, 1991 [1987]., Jürgen Habermas, ‘Work and Weltanschauung’ 1989, Jeffrey Olick,
‘In the Ashes of Disgrace: Guilt versus Shame Revisited’ 2010, George Steiner, Martin
Heidegger, 1991 and Richard Wolin, Politics of Being, 1992.
3 See Heidegger’s Address as Rector of Freiburg University, ‘The Self Assertion of the
German University’ (1933) in Richard Wolin, 1993.
4 The original German reads: ‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man
schweigen.’
5 See Berel Lang’s Heidegger’s Silence and Jean-François Lyotard’s Heidegger and “the
Jews,” both of which argue for the absence of the Jewish question from Heidegger’s
work. Levinas, however, frames it within the context of the face of the other. See his
Totality and Infinity, 1991.

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Olick, Jeffrey. K. 2010. ‘In the Ashes of Disgrace: Guilt versus Shame Revisited’, in Efrat
Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio and Jay Winter, eds. Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence
in the Twentieth Century. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 68–90.
Plato. 2005. Phaedrus. Christopher Rowe, trans. (London: Penguin).
Rabinbach, Anson. 1997. In the Shadow of Catastrophe. German Intellectuals between
Apocalypse and Enlightenment. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).
Rorty, Richard. 1999. ‘On Heidegger’s Nazism’, in Philosophy and Social Hope. (London:
Penguin Books), pp. 190–197.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2007. [1946]. Existentialism is a Humanism. Carol Macomber, trans.
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
Shoah. 1985. Directed by Claude Lanzmann. Distributed by New Yorker Films.
Steiner, George. 1991 [1978]. Martin Heidegger. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago
Press).
Steiner, George. 2010 [1958]. Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and
the Inhuman. (London: Faber & Faber).
Trawny, Peter. 2013. ‘Eine neue Dimension’, die Zeit online, 27 December. www.zeit.
de/2014/01/heidegger-schwarze-hefte-herausgeber-peter-trawny (Accessed 23 Septem-
ber 2015).
Trawny, Peter. 2014. Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung. (Frank-
furt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann).
Winter, Jay. 2010. ‘Thinking about Silence’, in Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio and Jay Win-
ter, eds., Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century. (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 1–31.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus. C. K. Ogden, trans. (London:
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co).
Wolin, Richard. 1992. The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger.
(New York: Columbia University Press).
Wolin, Richard. 1993. The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press).
Wolin, Richard. 2014. ‘National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s
Black Notebooks’, Jewish Review of Books (Summer). http://jewishreviewofbooks.
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black-notebooks/ (Accessed 23 September 2015).
5 Why silence was not possible
Arendt on the Holocaust
and totalitarianism

Understanding historical and political events mattered greatly to Hannah Arendt.

She consciously reflected on historical events in her lifetime and understood total-
itarianism and the Holocaust as ruptures in tradition.

Understanding begins with birth and ends with death. To the extent that the
rise of totalitarian movements is the central event of our world, to understand
totalitarianism is not to condone anything, but to reconcile ourselves to a
world in which such things are possible at all.
(Arendt 1994 [1954a]: 308)

Unlike Martin Heidegger, she was not silent about the Holocaust or National
Socialism. Nor did she, like Maurice Blanchot, suggest that the Holocaust was an
event beyond representation. Rather, as Robert Fine points out, Arendt recognised
the Holocaust as a ‘caesura’ that shifted how one encountered the past and the
authority of tradition.

Arendt was one of the first to argue that the attempted extermination of
Jews – only later to be called the Holocaust or the Shoah – was an event that
marked, or should mark, a caesura in modern social and political thought.
(Fine 2000: 19)

When asked in an interview with Günter Gaus on West German television in

1964 whether there was ‘a definitive event in your memory that dates your turn
to the political,’ Arendt responded that the burning of the Reichstag was precisely
such an event that precipitated her departure from philosophy to politics.1 ‘I would
say February 27, 1933, the burning of the Reichstag, and the illegal arrests that
followed during the same night’ (Arendt 2000a: 6). Arendt would spend much of
her academic life trying to understand the ‘definitive event’ (bestimmtes Vorkom-
mnis) of her generation, ranging from The Origins of Totalitarianism to The
Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Between Past and Future and indi-
vidual essays on understanding, politics and judgment.
Later in the same interview, Arendt refined the timing of that event and argued
that it was less 1933 and, more precisely, the year 1943. ‘You know, what was
78  Looking back after 1945
decisive was not the year 1933, at least not for me. What was decisive was the
day we learned about Auschwitz’ (Ibid: 13). The ‘real shock,’ the event of the
Third Reich that began with Hitler’s rise to power, National Socialism as a politi-
cal movement, the loss of German citizenship due to her Jewishness, emigration
to France, years of statelessness and naturalisation in the United States, was the
recognition that the concentration camps actually existed.

It was really as if an abyss had opened. Because we had the idea that amends
could somehow be made for everything else, as amends can be made for just
about everything at some point in politics. But not for this. This ought not to
have happened.
(Ibid: 13–14)

Instead of retreating into silence and philosophical contemplation, Arendt tried

to understand events in the world. In asking how the concentration camps could
have been possible, she perceived a gap between past and future, a caesura in
historical time that marked before and after. ‘Something happened there to which
we cannot reconcile ourselves’ (Ibid: 14). This chapter examines how Arendt
understood the camps within the context of totalitarianism as a new political
phenomenon, the trial of Adolf Eichmann as a study in the banality of evil, and
the relationship of philosophy and politics that is notable in her lifelong response
to Heidegger’s privileging of thinking over acting, the self over the world.

Understanding totalitarianism as a new political phenomenon

Arendt opens the Preface to the First Edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism
with an epigraph by Karl Jaspers that sets the tone for the entire book. ‘To suc-
cumb neither to the past nor to the future. What matters is to be entirely present’
(‘Weder dem Vergangen anheimfallen noch dem Zukünftigen. Es kommt darauf
an, ganz gegenwärtig zu sein’) (Jaspers quoted in Arendt 1973: vii). Being fully
present and paying attention to the world involves not only the ability to think but,
as Arendt would later argue, of being able to make a judgment.

Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprec-
edented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and
generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no
longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden
which our century has placed on us – neither denying its existence nor sub-
mitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremedi-
tated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality – whatever that may be.
(Arendt 1973: viii)

Elizabeth Young Bruehl captured the breadth of Arendt’s analysis of totali-

tarianism in the following way: ‘Reading The Origins of Totalitarianism is like
visiting a museum where there is a giant mural of the nineteenth and twentieth
 Why silence was not possible  79
centuries that you can never finish taking in – a vast historians’ Guernica’
(2006: 33). The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951, the same year
that Albert Camus published The Rebel. It was preceded by Karl Popper’s The
Open Society and Its Enemies in 1945 and followed by Czeslaw Milosz’s The
Captive Mind in 1953. Similar to Camus, Popper and Milosz, the Origins of
Totalitarianism was an intellectual response to the age of extremes of her lifetime.
However, unlike Adorno and Horkheimer’s The Dialectics of Enlightenment pub-
lished in 1944, Arendt did not trace the cause for totalitarianism within human
reason itself. Instead, she searched for elements and origins of total domination,
as the German translation of her book suggests (Elemente und Ursprünge totaler
Herrschaft), that crystallised into a new political form in Nazi Germany and the
Soviet Union.
The Origins of Totalitarianism is a formidable book linking together the exis-
tential loneliness of individuals living in mass society, decline of the nation-
state, state policies of racism and statelessness, bureaucratic lack of personal
accountability and rise of totalitarian political movements. Divided into three
parts – anti-Semitism, imperialism and totalitarianism – Arendt argued that totali-
tarianism was a new political phenomenon which exploded traditional categories
of understanding. As a type of political regime, totalitarianism was unprecedented
and did not fit into the traditional categories of tyranny, dictatorship, despotism
or authoritarianism. In addition to accounting for its novelty, she tried to under-
stand how the behaviour of individuals living in totalitarian regimes was related
to an old philosophical problem. As she wrote in her essay, ‘Nightmare and Flight’
(1945): ‘In other words, the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of
postwar intellectual life in Europe – as death became the fundamental problem
after the last war’ (Arendt 1994 [1945]: 134).
Arendt provided an existential reading of loneliness and homelessness in the
political realm. Moreover, she argued that totalitarianism as a form of political
rule would have been unthinkable without modern alienation, which made indi-
viduals receptive to totalitarian political movements.

But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not

content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on
loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is
among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.
(Arendt 1973: 475)

Loneliness is connected with uprootedness and the process of rendering people

inhuman and superfluous. Uprootedness is directly linked with the rise of mass
society, imperialism and mob rule. ‘To be uprooted means to have no place in
the world, recognized and guaranteed by others; to be superfluous means not to
belong to the world at all’ (Ibid). Influenced by Heidegger’s concept of Angst and
Kierkegaard’s despair, Arendt’s attention to individual loneliness expressed the
alienation of one who is not at home in the world, of one whose very existence
has nothing in common with others. Loneliness is not solitude but a feeling of not
80  Looking back after 1945
belonging with others, of not fitting into the world. The extremes of worldless-
ness, loneliness and superfluousness made individuals receptive to ideas of com-
munity promised by totalitarian movements.
If one only reads the third part of her book on totalitarianism, the crucial link
between anti-Semitism and imperialism is missed. In the preface to ‘Imperialism,’
Arendt calls the reader’s attention to how the colonial administration of violence
against the local population was applied to Europeans in the twentieth century
as ‘the feared boomerang effect of imperialism upon the homeland’ (Ibid: 155).
Michael Rothberg, Timothy Snyder and Alexander Etkind have argued for wider
readings of Arendt’s work, linking the importance of imperialism and anti-Sem-
itism to the modern phenomenon of totalitarianism. They each underscore how
the colonial administration of violence boomeranged back to imperial powers in
Europe. In Multidirectional Memory, Rothberg points out how post-war discus-
sions of Jewish genocide emerged in dialogue with the dynamic struggles of de-
colonialisation. Moreover, he supports Arendt’s comparative argument as a way
in which to avoid the pitfall of a ‘zero-sum struggle for preeminence’ or a hierar-
chy of victimhood (Rothberg 2009: 3). Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands (2010) pro-
vides a detailed and comparative analysis of state-sponsored, totalitarian violence
in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Likewise, Etkind’s Internal Colonization
applies colonial patterns of administrative violence to the Soviet empire. Indeed,
he argues that Arendt’s ‘boomerang imagery’ was vital for understanding the
bureaucratic nature of state violence in both the Soviet and Nazi regimes (Etkind
2011: 24).2
Comparison does not mean equation, because each historical event is unique.
While Arendt sought to understand totalitarianism, she did not depict a hierarchy
of victimhood. As she recognised in ‘The Eggs Speak Up,’ the danger of avoiding
comparison is the elevation of an event to myth and indifference to the suffering
of others.

The greatest danger of recognizing totalitarianism as the curse of the century

would be an obsession with it to the extent of becoming blind to the numer-
ous small and not so small evils with which the road to hell is paved.
(Arendt 1994 [1950a]: 271–272)

If anything, Arendt sought to understand the political reality of her time. As her
interview with Günter Gaus highlights, her emphasis on the necessity to under-
stand political events is an important leitmotif throughout her work.
Nazi and communist ideologies were totalitarian because they aimed at the
total domination of the individual. When writing about the systematic killing of
European Jews, Arendt referred to death, destruction, elimination and the Final
Solution. Moreover, she focused on the camps as laboratories common to both
regimes. ‘The concentration and extermination camps of totalitarian regimes
serve as the laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that
everything is possible is being verified’ (Arendt 1973: 437). Given that one of
the hallmarks of totalitarianism was the labelling of individuals as unwanted,
 Why silence was not possible  81
subhuman and unnecessary, the concentration camps tried to eliminate plural-
ity and spontaneity. ‘These camps are the true central institution of totalitarian
organizational power’ (Ibid: 438). Arendt focuses on the ‘nihilistic principle’ of
totalitarian camps in which ‘everything is possible’ (Ibid: 440).
The internal logic of totalitarianism in the camps occurred in three phases of
‘total domination.’ In the first phase, the destruction of the juridical person placed
certain individuals outside the protection of the law. The Nuremberg Racial Laws
of 1935 legalised the elimination of the Jew as a juridical entity and reversed the
Rights of Man and Citizen from the French Revolution. ‘The destruction of a
man’s rights, the killing of the juridical person in him, is a prerequisite for dom-
inating him entirely’ (Ibid: 451). The second phase aimed at the destruction
of the moral person. If the first phased removed one from the protection of the
law, the second emphasised how ideological terror affected the capacity of pris-
oners to choose between right and wrong. ‘The alternative is no longer between
good and evil, but between murder and murder’ (Ibid: 452). Total domination,
in effect, aimed at the corruption of ‘all human solidarity’ (Ibid: 451). The third
phase of total domination was the attempt to destroy the uniqueness and sponta-
neity of the person. From the humiliation of prisoners, tattooing of numbers on
their arms, physical and mental debasement, total domination crystallised in the
destruction of the person as a juridical, moral and unique being. ‘What totalitar-
ian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of the outside world
or the revolutionary transmutation of society, but the transformation of human
nature itself’ (Ibid: 458).
Indeed, concentration camps challenge the understanding of what is possible
in politics.

The extraordinary difficulty which we have in attempting to understand the

institution of the concentration camp and to fit it into the record of human
history is precisely the absence of such utilitarian criteria, an absence which
is more than anything else responsible for the curious air of unreality that
surrounds this institution and everything connected with it.
(Arendt 1994 [1950b]: 234)

From deportations to the administration of the camps, the emphasis was on a

bureaucratic and systematic destruction of the individual human being. This, for
Arendt, was unprecedented.
In ‘Understanding and Politics,’ originally published in 1954, Arendt distin-
guished understanding from scientific knowledge. ‘It is an unending activity by
which, in constant change and variation, we come to terms with and reconcile
ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at home in world’ (Arendt 1994 [1954a]:
307–308). One can only understand historical events retrospectively because the
event, as it were, ruptures ordinary time. ‘Only when something irrevocable has
happened can we try to trace its history backward. The event illuminates its own
past; it can never be deduced from it’ (Ibid: 319). The challenge of trying to under-
stand totalitarianism with the traditional tools of political and historical analysis
82  Looking back after 1945
assumed the existence of a common world. However, as Arendt argued, totalitari-
anism attempts to destroy traditional bonds in between people and to sever what
they hold in common.

The originality of totalitarianism is horrible, not because some new ‘idea’

came into the world, but because its very actions constitute a break with all
our traditions; they have clearly exploded our categories of political thought
and our standards for moral judgment.
(Arendt 1994 [1954a]: 309–310)

Robert Fine suggests that Arendt

offered a ‘worldly’ perspective on this rupture in civilisation which was rather

lost in the later reflections on the Holocaust which stressed the uniqueness,
singularity, non-representability and ineffability of the Holocaust and which
treated ‘Auschwitz’ as an emblem of the breakdown of human history and
limits of human understanding.
(Fine 2000: 19–20)

In her attempt to understand the camps as the central experience of totalitarian-

ism, she remained cautious about ‘dwelling on horrors’ or fixating on the camp
experience.
Although the Origins of Totalitarianism has more detailed analysis about Nazi
Germany than the Soviet Union, it nonetheless laid a foundation for comparative
research into the two regimes. As Tony Judt wrote:

The lasting importance of Arendt’s major work thus rests not upon the
originality of its contribution but on the quality of its central intuition. What
Arendt understood best, and what binds together her account of Nazism and
her otherwise unconnected and underdeveloped discussion of the Soviet
experience, were the psychological and moral features of what she called
totalitarianism.
(Judt 2008: 75)

It is precisely her attention to the ‘moral features’ of totalitarianism that has

had such lasting impact. When reflecting on its comparative structure, Arendt
cautions against the possible overuse of the concept of totalitarianism. In her
reply to Eric Voegelin, responding to his review of her book, she writes: ‘I there-
fore only talk of “elements,” which eventually crystallize into totalitarianism,
some of which are traceable to the eighteenth century, some perhaps even further
back’ (Arendt 1994 [1953]: 405). Hence, The Origins of Totalitarianism seeks
to understand ‘the subterranean stream of Western history’ whereby ‘nostalgia
for a still intact past’ and ‘the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are in vain’
(Arendt 1973: ix).
 Why silence was not possible  83
Understanding Eichmann, the banality of evil and judgment
The connection between totalitarianism, evil and thoughtlessness was the cen-
tral controversial theme of Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). When Arendt argued
that Adolf Eichmann did not have evil motives but banal ones, many accused
her of lessening the gravity of his deeds.3 However, she argued that his life
demonstrated how ordinary people within a totalitarian regime are capable of
committing evil deeds. ‘The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many
were like him, and that many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were,
and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal’ (Arendt 1963: 276). Arendt’s thesis
that evil actions may be the result of a lack of thought departs from the theologi-
cal arguments of temptation or malicious intent. As Richard Bernstein suggests,
Arendt changed how we think about evil. ‘Throughout Western thought, the very
“grammar” of evil has involved the idea of evil intentions’ (Bernstein 2002: 214).
Although evil has traditionally been associated with demonic and monstrous
individuals, Arendt discovered that one could commit evil deeds without mal-
ice or wicked intentions. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she shifted the ground from
demons to a non-demonic understanding of evil (Baer 2001).4
Arendt suggested that the monstrousness of Eichmann’s deeds did not con-
tradict his thoughtlessness. Demonising him downplayed the modern role of
bureaucracy, alienation and remoteness from reality. It was precisely Eichmann’s
insistence on his own administrative efficiency that Arendt linked with totalitari-
anism. Alienation from the humanity of the Jewish people who were led to ghettos
and transported to concentration camps underscored his apparent lack of mali-
cious intent as part of the dehumanising process of total domination. The banality
of evil was, for Arendt, as chilling, if not more so, than its traditional demonisa-
tion. By clinging to the juridical destruction of the Jews and his need to follow
orders, Eichmann demonstrated how the process of dehumanisation occurred
within a high-level bureaucrat in the Nazi party.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt described the growing superfluous-
ness of individuals in modern society and linked it with the appearance of ‘an
absolute evil’ (Arendt 1973: ix). Unlike Kant, who perceived self-love to be the
source of radical evil, Arendt used ‘radical’ to mean an extreme version of evil
that viewed human beings as superfluous or unnecessary (Kant 1998). ‘There
is only one thing that seems to be discernible: we may say that radical evil has
emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally super-
fluous’ (Arendt 1973: 459). The concentration camps and the Gulag attempted to
change human nature and became the hallmark of totalitarianism. Although she
initially argued that evil action was the result of evil intention, her analysis of
totalitarianism and modern society foregrounded an increasing lack of individual
thought. In a letter written to Karl Jaspers after the publication of The Origins of
Totalitarianism, she expressed the link between evil and superfluousness:

What radical evil really is I don’t know, but it seems to me it somehow has to
do with the following phenomenon: making human beings as human beings
84  Looking back after 1945
superfluous (not using them as means to an end, which leaves their essence as
humans untouched and impinges only on their human dignity; rather, making
them superfluous as human beings).
(Arendt’s letter to Jaspers 1992: 166)

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt returned to earlier questions about the nature

of totalitarianism and the existence of concentration camps. If she previously
analysed the regime and broad elements of totalitarianism, the trial of Eichmann
allowed her to see aspects of this larger problem with respect to one high-level
bureaucrat. Although she shifted from radical to banal evil, she did not break com-
pletely with her earlier work. In contrast, her study of Eichmann led her to focus
on moral questions of the conscience, judgment and its relationship to thinking
and willing. What immediately struck Arendt during the trial in Jerusalem was
Eichmann’s lack of malicious intention and anti-Semitism. ‘He merely, to put
the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing’ (Arendt 1963: 287).
During the trial, Arendt observed Eichmann’s deformation of language and inabil-
ity to express himself. By his own admission, he was unable to speak beyond
bureaucratic language and clichés. Instead, he used stock phrases and officialease
or Amtssprache. Eichmann’s remoteness from reality and existence in a paral-
lel universe was not only a function of the totalitarian state but linked to mass
society and its increasing bureacratisation. During his police examination, Eich-
mann spoke of ‘winged words’ (geflügelte Worte), famous quotes from the clas-
sics, stock phrases, slogans, ‘self-invented clichés’ (Ibid: 48–49). Recalling that
he suffered from aphasia at school, he justified his paltry sense of language with
the bureaucratisation of his everyday life. ‘Officialese (Amtssprache) is my only
language’ (Eichmann quoted in Ibid: 48). Arendt argued that Eichmann’s ‘empty
talk’ was more than a simple self-defence mechanism (Ibid: 49). Rather, the failed
or deformed link between language and conscience indicated the enormous con-
sequences of removing oneself from reality.
Accused on fifteen counts for crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against
humanity and war crimes during the period of the Nazi regime and World War
II, Eichmann pled ‘Not guilty in the sense of the indictment’ (Eichmann quoted
in Ibid: 21). Throughout the trial, Eichmann emphasised that he had no hatred of
Jews; rather, he was doing his job and following orders from above. ‘With the
killing of the Jews I had nothing to do. I never killed a Jew, or a non-Jew, for that
matter – I never killed any human being. I never gave an order to kill either a Jew
or a non-Jew; I just did not do it’ (Eichmann quoted in Ibid: 22).5 Having joined
the Nazi party, he entered the SS in 1932. Being part of a movement made him
part of something larger (Ibid: 33). In 1934, he applied for a position in the Secu-
rity Service or Sicherheitsdienst. By 1938, he was the head of the Centre for the
Immigration of Austrian Jews, which he described as an assembly line.

‘This is like an automatic factory, like a flour mill connected with some bak-
ery. At one end you put in a Jew who still has some property, a factory, or a
shop, or a bank account, and he goes through the building from counter to
 Why silence was not possible  85
counter, from office to office, and comes out at the other end without any
money, without any rights, and with only a passport on which it says: “You
will leave the country within a fortnight. Otherwise you will go to a concen-
tration camp.”’
(Eichmann quoted in Ibid: 46).

It was Eichmann’s inability to think from the perspective of the other person
that Arendt identified as the decisive characteristic of the banality of evil in the
modern world. When asked about his participation in the Wannsee Conference,
Eichmann answered that since he was not a key decision-maker, he was free from
guilt. He felt like Pontius Pilate because he was liberated from the necessity to
choose. Just as the crowds chose Barabbas, so the ‘Popes of the Third Reich’
chose the final solution. ‘At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feel-
ing, for I felt free of all guilt’ (Eichmann quoted in Ibid: 114). Eichmann’s Pontius
Pilate moment revealed not only the depth of his thoughtlessness but also his
inability to judge. ‘That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness
can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps,
are inherent in man – that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem’
(Arendt 1963: 288).
One of the most controversial parts of Eichmann in Jerusalem was Arendt’s
criticism of the Jewish councils who were forced to cooperate with Eichmann.

I have dwelt on this chapter of the story, which the Jerusalem trial failed to
put before the eyes of the world in its true dimensions, because it offers the
most striking insight into the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused
in respectable European society – not only in Germany but in almost all coun-
tries, not only among the persecutors but also among the victims.
(Ibid: 125–126)

It was particularly her criticism of the Jewish councils that received the strongest
rebuke by friends and colleagues. For her, the ‘moral collapse’ of Europe could
not be understood solely by arguing for a demonic depiction of evil. For many
people, though, Arendt had gone too far and was blind to the choices that individ-
uals working for the Jewish councils faced. Seyla Benhabib underscores Arendt’s
criticism towards the role of the prosecution and her harsh suggestion that some
members of the Jewish Councils may have cooperated with the Nazis.6 Despite
Arendt’s insensitivity towards the difficulties that individuals may have faced in
extreme situations, her central but bold claim throughout Eichmann in Jerusalem
was that ordinary people can be thoughtless, when put into extreme situations.7 In
response to criticism from Gershom Scholem that she no longer conceived evil to
be radical but banal, she wrote:

It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme,
and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can over-
grow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus
86  Looking back after 1945
on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to
reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with
evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.”
(Arendt’s letter to Gershom Scholem,
quoted in Arendt 2000b: 396)

Totalitarianism provided a new twist to the old problem of evil by moving from
the language of temptation and intentional wickedness to one of thoughtlessness,
worldlessness and obedience to authority. During his defence, Eichmann cited
a Kantian sense of duty as an important rationale for his actions. Arendt takes
issue with his claim that in implementing the Final Solution, he was acting from
obedience and had derived his moral precepts from Kant. ‘This was outrageous,
on the face of it, and also incomprehensible, since Kant’s moral philosophy is so
closely bound up with man’s faculty of judgment, which rules out blind obedi-
ence’ (Arendt 1963: 136). She makes the careful distinction between the source
of morality as practical reason and the will of the Führer.

In this household use, all that is left of Kant’s spirit is the demand that a man
do more than obey the law, that he go beyond the mere call of obedience and
identify his own will with the principle behind the law – the source from
which the law sprang. In Kant’s philosophy, that source was practical reason;
in Eichmann’s household use of him, it was the will of the Führer.
(Ibid: 136–137)

Whether one looks at her analysis of Eichmann as a man incapable of thinking

from the perspective from another person or her more philosophical essays on
questions of the conscience, thinking and judgment, Arendt connects thoughtless-
ness with the banality of evil in the modern age.

Politics and philosophy: thinking with and against Heidegger

Heidegger’s silence about the ‘decisive event’ of her lifetime remained in the
background of Arendt’s work on totalitarianism, worldlessness and the banality
of evil. She was not simply influenced by Heidegger’s philosophy but responded
to and developed his ideas about the worldliness of the world. As Dana Villa sug-
gests: ‘Arendt’s subversion of Heidegger’s thought is every bit as profound as
her philosophical debt’ (Villa 1999: 77). While much has been written on their
affair when she was a student at the University of Marburg (1924–1926) and
Arendt’s decision to rekindle their friendship after the war in 1950, the fact that
Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party and remained silent about the Holo-
caust influenced how she understood the relationship between philosophy and
politics.8 Throughout her work, she thinks both with and against Heidegger in her
arguments for plurality, new beginnings, critique of modern worldlessness and
imperative to connect thinking with judging.9
 Why silence was not possible  87
Arendt’s point in Eichmann in Jerusalem, ‘Martin Heidegger at Eighty’ and Life
of the Mind was that the process of thinking, when removed from the world, risks
becoming unmoored from the faculty of judgment. There is a parallel between
Eichmann’s inability to think about what he was doing and Heidegger’s inability
to think and judge in the world. As Dana Villa suggests,

Heidegger and Eichmann, it turns out, are linked: pure thought and thought-
lessness are two sides of the same phenomenon, the incapacity for judgment.
Heidegger’s ‘error’ was no error in judgment, his entanglement with National
Socialism no ‘mistake’; rather, what it testified to, in Arendt’s view, was the
absence of judgment.
(Ibid: 85)

Villa is not equating Heidegger and Eichmann but instead arguing for their similar
lack of judgment, one to ‘pure thought,’ the other to ‘thoughtlessness.’ What Villa
suggests is that both were ‘representative’ of how removal from the world influ-
enced the ability of individuals to think about what they were doing and to judge
how to act during the Third Reich (Ibid: 86).
During the 1940s and 1950s, Arendt’s articles on existentialism and understand-
ing reflect Heidegger’s influence on her early thought, as well as her distancing
from the privileging of bios theoretikos for bios politikos. As she writes in ‘What
is Existential Philosophy?’, ‘Heidegger’s is the first absolutely and uncompromis-
ingly this-world philosophy’ (Arendt 1994 [1948]: 179). If, for Arendt, the most
authentic form of existence is being with others in the world, for Heidegger, it is
being-towards-death and the awareness of our own finitude and mortality.

Existence itself is, by its very nature, never violated. It exists only in com-
munication and in awareness of others’ existence. Our fellowmen are not (as
in Heidegger) an element of existence that is structurally necessary but at the
same time an impediment to the Being of Self. Just the contrary: Existence
can develop only in the shared life of human beings inhabiting a given world
common to them all.
(Ibid: 186)

When writing to Jaspers in 1946, Arendt reflects on Heidegger’s letter as Rec-

tor of Freiburg University informing Husserl of his exclusion from the fac-
ulty because he was Jewish. Once Heidegger signed his name to this letter, he
became, in her eyes, responsible for his actions. ‘It always seemed to me at the
moment Heidegger was obliged to put his name to this document, he should
have resigned. However foolish he may have been, he was capable of under-
standing that’ (Arendt 1992: 47). Moreover, she acknowledges the severity of
Heidegger’s letter for Husserl. ‘And because I know that this letter and this sig-
nature almost killed him, I can’t but regard Heidegger as a potential murderer’
(Ibid: 48).
88  Looking back after 1945
In an early essay, ‘On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understand-
ing,’ Arendt writes about the blindness of philosophers towards politics. Indeed,
it can be read as a critique not only of philosophy in general but, more point-
edly, of Heidegger and his preference for language as a monologue in which
one listens silently to the call of being. Arendt cautions against the inability of
philosophers to be able to make political judgments. ‘As the inherent risk of soli-
tude, loneliness is, therefore a professional danger for philosophers, which, inci-
dentally, seems to be one of the reasons that philosophers cannot be trusted with
politics or a political philosophy’ (Arendt 1994: 360). Wanting to be alone in
order to think, philosophers, Arendt argues, may retreat from the world of human
affairs, leading them ‘to sympathize with tyrannies where action is not expected
of citizens’ (Ibid). While philosophers might have ‘extraordinary insight’ into
metaphysics and the contemplative life, they may also ‘forget the perhaps even
more primary relationships between men and the realm they constitute, springing
simply from the fact of human plurality’ (Ibid).
Although Arendt’s understanding of the centrality of the world stems from Hei-
degger, she takes his concepts of being-in-the-world, historicity and care further
by developing being-in-the-world with others as the starting point for politics. In
her lecture ‘Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought’
(1954), Arendt departs from Heidegger’s concept of das Man or ‘the they’ as
opposed to the authentic self that retreats from other people in the world (Arendt
1994 [1954b]: 432). Frustrated by the inclination of philosophical inquiry to
examine the human being in the singular as ‘man,’ she argued for their plurality
as unique human beings. To her, the question is not only ‘What is man?’ in the
abstract but rather how one answers the question of ‘Who are you?’
With the publication of The Human Condition in 1958, Arendt criticised world
alienation and worldlessness by arguing for the primary condition of natality
over mortality. Although Heidegger’s name does not appear in The Human
Condition, the book is a response and rebuttal to many of Heidegger’s cen-
tral ideas. As Jacques Taminiaux argues, Arendt’s phenomenological method is
influenced by Heidegger because she uncovers earlier Greek traditions in order
to support why one should not leave the world for the realm outside the Pla-
tonic cave (Taminiaux 1997). However, while her approach may be influenced
by Heidegger, she examines the vita activa rather than vita contemplativa. If, for
Heidegger, being had been forgotten, Arendt suggested that it was the world and
the polis that had been forgotten with the rise of the social and increasing world-
lessness. ‘It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us,
but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us’
(Arendt 1998: 55). The Human Condition proposed to do ‘nothing more than to
think what we are doing’ (Ibid: 5). Where Heidegger underscores the importance
of death, for Arendt, it is birth. ‘Moreover, since action is the political activity par
excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as
distinguished from metaphysical thought’ (Ibid: 9).
It is, however, in Arendt’s Festschrift or homage, ‘Martin Heidegger at Eighty’
(1969), that she compared his membership in the Nazi Party and inaugural speech
 Why silence was not possible  89
as Rector of Freiburg University to Plato’s sympathy for the tyrants of Sicily most
explicitly.10

We who wish to honor the thinkers, even if our own residence lies in the
midst of the world, can hardly help finding it striking and perhaps exasperat-
ing that Plato and Heidegger, when they entered into human affairs, turned to
tyrants and Führers.
(Arendt 1978: 303)

Arendt recounts the story of the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales and the Thra-
cian girl who laughed when he fell over while looking up at the sky. In her eyes,
Heidegger was similar to Thales because he was so focused on contemplation
and, hence, stumbled in the real world. ‘Now we all know that Heidegger too,
once succumbed to the temptation to change his “residence” and to get involved
in the world of human affairs’ (Ibid: 301–302). Heidegger is cast after the ancient
model of Thales, who was too removed from the world to see where he was going.
‘As to the world, he was served somewhat worse than Plato, because the tyrant
and his victims were not located beyond the sea, but in his own country’ (Ibid:
302). As Arendt recounts in a footnote, Heidegger, like many of his generation,
had removed himself from the reality of totalitarianism during the Third Reich.
While still praising Heidegger for his contribution to philosophy, Arendt is clear
about what, for her, was the source of his decision to join and support the Nazi
party – namely, his choice to reside in a realm of contemplation rather than in
one of world affairs. Heidegger’s ‘attraction to the tyrannical’ casts philosophical
contemplation on being as removal from the world.
In her essay, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations,’ (1971) Arendt asks whether
our ability to judge – to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly is dependent
upon thinking. Second, she asks whether the ability to think is connected with a
failure of conscience, and finally, she asks whether the activity of thinking might
condition people against evil doing. Thinking necessarily interrupts and suspends
action. As an abstract process, it is concerned with universals. Judgment, on the
other hand, is concrete and deals with particulars. Judgment is the most political
of human faculties because it is concerned with other people and concrete situ-
ations. By combining insights from Aristotle’s phronesis with Kant’s aesthetic
judgment, Arendt argues that thinking is not sufficient to avoid evil. Instead, one
needs to cultivate both thinking and judging.

The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge: it is the ability

to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this indeed may prevent
catastrophes, at least for myself, in the rare moments when the chips are down.
(Arendt 1971: 446)

Judgment is the realisation of thinking in a concrete situation. Moreover, judg-

ment requires that one think not only for oneself but also from the perspective of
the other person. It involves the possibility for an enlarged mentality, or what Kant
90  Looking back after 1945
calls a sensus communis. Likewise, thinking is not simply the removal of oneself
from the world in order to contemplate timeless and eternal truths.
For Arendt, Socrates provides the exemplary model of thinking as a dialogue
with oneself as two-in-one. By arguing that it is better to suffer injustice than to
commit it, Socrates strives to stay in harmony with himself – not to be against
himself or go against his conscience. The ability of a person to reflect and act in
accordance with a conscience while imagining the consequence on his actions on
another person might reduce evil-doing in the world. However, as Arendt under-
scored, the capacity for abstract thought is singularly unable to avoid evil-doing.
At the end of the day, judgment becomes the critical faculty of the mind. ‘It is the
faculty to judge particulars without subsuming them under those general rules
which can be taught and learned until they grow into habits that can be replaced
by other habits and rules’ (Ibid). For Heidegger, thinking is modelled on the bios
theoretikos and on wisdom as sophia. Moreover, he argues that one listens to the
call of Being and is silent. For Arendt, totalitarianism in the twentieth century
demonstrated the dangers of severing thinking from phronesis or practical wis-
dom. Theoretical knowledge is not the same as thinking. Removal of oneself as
a citizen and member of the world may lead to thoughtlessness, the inability to
think about others and complicity with state-sponsored violence. For Socrates
and, by extension, for Arendt, thinking is a dialogue with oneself and others in the
world. Thinking, in tandem with judging, takes place in the world.
Unlike Heidegger, Arendt did not respond to National Socialism and the Holo-
caust with silence. Instead, she tried to understand the complexity of historical
events in the twentieth century. For her, totalitarianism was a new political form
that shattered traditional categories of political understanding. Likewise, the con-
centration camps marked a caesura and rupture in historical time and traditional
definitions of evil. The past, understood as tradition that was handed down from
one generation to the next, no longer illuminated the present. In tracing the con-
flict between philosophy and politics, between the philosopher who wishes to
leave the world for contemplation and the citizen who judges and acts in the
world, Arendt thinks both with and against Heidegger. Although she compares
him to Plato and his attraction to the tyrants of Syracuse, it is in the model of
Socrates, with his emphasis on dialogue and maxim that it is better to suffer injus-
tice than commit wrongdoing, where she finds a model within the tradition of
philosophy for the thinker as a citizen of the polis and member of the world.

Notes
1 For the full transcript of the interview in German, see, ‘Zur Person: Hannah Arendt im
Gespräch mit Günter Gaus. Was bleibt? Es bleibt die Muttersprache,’ RBB Fernsehen,
28.10.1964. www.rbb-online.de/zurperson/interview_archiv/arendt_hannah.html
2 In Warped Mourning, Etkind calls attention to a central difference in comparative stud-
ies of Nazism and communism; namely, how the regimes ended and the subsequent
attitudes towards their dead. Military defeat, the Nuremberg Trials and subsequent
Auschwitz Trials and trial of Adolf Eichmann have associated National Socialism
with genocide and crimes against humanity. This did not happen after 1945 in Eastern
 Why silence was not possible  91
Europe, nor did it happen after 1991. Instead, uneven patterns of transformation and
democratisation have left very different legacies across the continent.
3 Although Kurt Blumenfeld, Gershom Scholem and Hans Jonas ended their friendships
with Arendt, Jonas renewed it two years later with the agreement not to speak about
Eichmann anymore. See Jonas’ homage to her, ‘Hannah Arendt: An Intimate Portrait,’
Brian Fox & Richard Wolin, trans. New England Review. 27: 2, 2006, 133–142.
4 Theodor Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950, and Stanley Mil-
gram’s Obedience to Authority, published in 1974, examining individuals in extreme
situations of power, demonstrated that ordinary people do not necessarily require a
wicked motive in order to commit evil actions.
5 Recent scholarship has demonstrated that Eichmann was more anti-Semitic than Arendt
realised. Once the interviews with Willem S. Sassen (1957) were made available, a
more complex picture of Eichmann emerged. See Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann before
Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer. Ruth Martin, trans., New York:
Vintage Books, 2014. See also Seyla Benhabib’s review of Stangneth: ‘Who’s on Trial,
Eichmann or Arendt?’ The New York Times, 21 September 2014. https://opinionator.
blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/whos-on-trial-eichmann-or-anrendt/
6 ‘What was unprecedented in the Eichmann affair was that for the first time a struggle
broke out among the Jewish community and the survivors of the Holocaust as to how
and in what terms one should appropriate the memory of the Holocaust and its victims’
(Benhabib 2000: 180–181).
7 For subsequent research on ordinary Germans and the Holocaust see, Christopher R.
Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in
Poland, New York: HarperCollins, 1993 and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing
Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, New York: Vintage Books, 1996.
8 For the book that sparked controversy over Arendt’s affair with Heidegger, see Elz-
bieta Ettinger, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger, New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1995. For a critical study of Heidegger’s students that also focuses on Arendt’s
affair with Heidegger, see Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl
Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Once Arendt left Germany in 1933, she did not have contact with Heidegger until 1950.
Their correspondence is available in Letters 1925–1975. Hannah Arendt and Martin
Heidegger, Ursula Ludz, ed., Andrew Shields, trans., New York: Harcourt, 2004.
9 For a longer discussion of the centrality of the world that discusses the influence of
Augustine and Heidegger on Arendt, see my article, ‘Why the World Matters: Hannah
Arendt’s Philosophy of New Beginnings,’ The European Legacy, 18: 2, 2013, 170–184.
10 ‘Martin Heidegger at Eighty’ was originally published in German in Merkur, 10 1969,
893–902. It was then published in the New York Review of Books, 21 October 1971,
pp. 50–54 and reprinted in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy in 1978.

References
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Arendt, Hannah. 1971. ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, Social Research, 38: 3 (Autumn),
417–446.
Arendt, Hannah. 1973 [1951]. The Origins of Totalitarianism. (New York: Harcourt Brace).
Arendt, Hannah. 1978 [1969]. ‘Martin Heidegger at Eighty’, in Albert Hofstadter, trans.
and Michael Murray, ed., Heidegger and Modern Philosophy. (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press).
Arendt, Hannah. 1994 [1945]. ‘Nightmare and Flight’, in Jerome Kohn, ed., Essays in
Understanding 1930–1954, Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. (New York: Schocken
Books), pp. 133–135.
92  Looking back after 1945
Arendt, Hannah. 1994 [1948]. ‘What Is Existential Philosophy?’, in Jerome Kohn, ed.,
Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. (New York:
Schocken Books), pp. 163–187.
Arendt, Hannah. 1994 [1950a]. ‘The Eggs Speak Up’, in Jerome Kohn, ed., Essays in Under-
standing 1930–1954, Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. (New York: Schocken Books),
pp. 270–284.
Arendt, Hannah. 1994 [1950b]. ‘Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration
Camps’, in Jerome Kohn, ed., Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, Formation, Exile,
and Totalitarianism. (New York: Schocken Books), pp. 232–247.
Arendt, Hannah. 1994. [1953]. ‘A Reply to Eric Voeglin’ in Jerome Kohn, ed., Essays in
Understanding 1930–1954, Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. (New York: Schocken
Books), pp. 401–408.
Arendt, Hannah. 1994 [1954a]. ‘Understanding and Politics’, in Jerome Kohn, ed., Essays
in Understanding 1930–1954, Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. (New York:
Schocken Books), pp. 307–327.
Arendt, Hannah. 1994 [1954b]. ‘Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical
Thought’, in Jerome Kohn, ed., Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, Formation, Exile,
and Totalitarianism. (New York: Schocken Books), pp. 428–447.
Arendt, Hannah. 1994. ‘On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding’, in
Jerome Kohn, ed., Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, Formation, Exile, and Totali-
tarianism. (New York: Schocken Books), pp. 328–360.
Arendt, Hannah. 1998 [1958]. The Human Condition. (Chicago, IL: The University of
Chicago Press).
Arendt, Hannah. 2000a. ‘What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with
Günter Gaus’, in Peter Baehr, ed., The Portable Hannah Arendt. (New York: Penguin
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table Hannah Arendt. (New York: Penguin Books), pp. 391–396.
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 Why silence was not possible  93
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6 The lost and haunted world
of Austerlitz

Like many writers, W. G. Sebald was fascinated with the ways in which the past
shapes the present. What distinguishes him is the sense that the past continues to
radiate and seep into the present. The travels of his characters are often mediated
via historical fragments from bygone times. Photographs, documents, passports,
landscapes, streets and architectural monoliths all exude an aura from a previous
life. Each object’s existence has an afterlife to be deciphered. More often than
not, their talismanic afterlife is part of the larger aftermath of twentieth-century
European history. Life, afterlife and aftermath are themes that permeate Sebald’s
work. While most of his stories illuminate the porous layers of recent history,
Austerlitz is an example of the relationship between writing and remembering,
traumatic event and its unpredictable afterlife. There is a paradoxical relationship
that unfolds between memory and storytelling, in which we, the readers, are car-
ried along in Jacques Austerlitz’s struggle with writing, talking and remembering.
If academic scholarship can outline the epistemological problem of memory and
writing, it is literature that represents the moral contours of this complex relation-
ship. As Sebald remarked in one of his last interviews:

The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. . . .

Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your
life. Without memories there wouldn’t be any writing: the specific weight an
image or phrase needs to get across to the reader can only come from things
remembered – not from yesterday but from a long time ago.
(Sebald 2001b)

Sebald’s work has been critically examined within the context of postwar Ger-
man literature, trauma, melancholy, modernity, narrative and history.1 Likewise,
his prose has sometimes been regarded as a complex example of how second-
generation authors write about the Holocaust and Allied bombing of German cit-
ies during the Second World War.2 Some critics, in particular, have focused on the
ethical implications of his identity as a second-generation, non-Jewish German
writing about Jewish characters.3 When Sebald was asked in an interview about
this difficulty, he emphasised that Austerlitz was not written as a historical novel
but as a piece of prose (Sebald 2001c). Likewise, in response to the images in his
 The lost and haunted world of Austerlitz  95
books that refer to the Holocaust, Sebald was very careful about his approach.
In a documentary made about his work, he remarked: ‘The reader needs to be
prompted that the narrator has a conscience and that he is, and has been, perhaps
for a long time, engaged with these questions. And this is why the main scenes of
horror are never directly addressed’ (Patience 2012). In today’s media age, such
images can ‘paralyse our moral capacity’; thus, Sebald chose to approach his sub-
jects ‘obliquely’ rather than directly.
His poetic juxtaposition of image and text has prompted discussion about how
memories of the past are mediated by photography and film. Indeed, it was Mari-
anne Hirsch (1997, 2012) who termed the concept of ‘postmemory’ as a specific
genre within the larger framework of collective memory. Postmemory refers to
the vicarious memories of those who were born after a traumatic event. Such
memories are part of the generation who did not live through the experience but
instead learned about it from others.

‘Postmemory’ describes the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the
personal, collective and cultural trauma of those who came before – to expe-
riences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors
among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them
so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.
(Hirsch 2012: 5)

Hirsch is interested in the imaginative internalisation of memories that are bor-

rowed from the previous generation. In particular, she concentrates on Holocaust
memories as they affect family members in the second generation. For her, the
Assmann’s theory of cultural memory is insufficient for discussing the mediated
memories of the second generation. Neither Jan Assmann’s distinction between
communicative and cultural memory (Assmann 1992, 1995) nor Aleida Ass-
mann’s distinction between individual, social, political and cultural memory
(Assmann 2006) can ‘specifically account for the ruptures introduced by collec-
tive historical trauma, by war, Holocaust, exile and refugehood’ (Hirsch 2012:
33). Postmemory, for Hirsch, is more than a delayed response or temporal marker.
In a similar vein, Alison Landsberg argues that modernity makes new forms of
memory possible, most notably that of prosthetic memory. ‘This new form of
memory, which I call prosthetic memory, emerges at the interface between a
person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a
movie theater or museum’ (Landsberg 2004: 2). Modern mass culture destroys the
original connection between event and experience by adding a fluid dimension
of a mass-mediated experience. ‘Prosthetic memories thus become part of one’s
personal archive of experience, informing one’s subjectivity as well as one’s rela-
tionship to the present and future tenses’ (Ibid: 26).
However, if one looks more closely at the Assmann’s theory of cultural memory,
it may actually be more complementary than contrary to Hirsch’s postmemory
and Landsberg’s prosthetic memory.4 If communicative memory lasts up to three
generations, cultural memory has a more elastic time span. ‘What communication
96  Looking back after 1945
is for communicative memory, tradition is for cultural memory’ (Assmann 2006
[2000]: 8). Jan Assmann’s cultural memory is attentive to the different temporali-
ties that co-exist with one another. Likewise, cultural memory encompasses the
manifold traditions that individuals are born into. His idea of mnemohistory or
Gedächtnisgeschichte is directly relevant to how members of the second genera-
tion internalise painful events in a mass-media age. Mnemohistory is less con-
cerned with the historical recording of what happened and rather with the way in
which history is understood.5 Thus, Assmann’s mnemohistory perhaps has more
in common with Hirsch’s and Landberg’s insights than is at first apparent. Mem-
ory re-presents something that occurred in the past. Whether that representation
occurs over one or many generations, via written text or mass media, memory
relies on a trace or image connected to the past. Assmann’s emphasis is less on
what happened and more on how a certain experience in the past is rendered mean-
ingful in the present. ‘The present is “haunted” by the past and the past is modeled,
invented, reinvented, and reconstructed by the present’ (Assmann 1997: 9).
While acknowledging the importance of reading of Sebald within the immedi-
ate framework of second-generation memory, trauma and Holocaust literature,
I wish to suggest that Austerlitz is also linked with an older question about the
origins of writing and representation, first raised by Plato in his dialogue Pha-
edrus and later interpreted by Freud and Derrida. If Plato hints at how writing
encourages forgetting, Austerlitz suggests that memory can stifle both speech and
writing. Like Plato, Sebald’s Austerlitz emphasises the importance of dialogue
between the narrator and the person after whom the book is named. Likewise,
Sebald’s poetic use of image and text resonates with Jan Assmann’s conception
of cultural memory, drawn from Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin. Although
postmemory and prosthetic memory call our attention to generational nuances of
memory in a mass-media age, cultural memory emphasises the longer duration of
tradition that Sebald is both haunted by and deeply part of.

Writing as remedy or poison

Plato’s Phaedrus provides one of the earliest reflections on the difficulties of
translating memories of the past into writing. Indeed, it is in the Phaedrus that
Plato reflects on what is lost during the process of writing. The desire to cap-
ture and represent the past is thwarted by the very inability to make past experi-
ence real. Representation as a re-presentation or re-presencing becomes a kind
of quest that we undertake with a sense of immanent failure. We cannot retrieve
the past because that experience is simply gone. Likewise, our identity and sense
of self are influenced by the past. There is a famous part in the dialogue where
Socrates chides Lysis for relying on his written speeches rather than speaking
from memory. It is at this point that Socrates tells Phaedrus about the mythical
origins of writing. In the story, Theuth comes to the Egyptian King, Thamus, and
presents him with a new invention of writing. When the king is sceptical, Theuth
convinces him that writing will improve the memory of the Egyptians. ‘But this
 The lost and haunted world of Austerlitz  97
study, King Thamus, will make the Egyptians wiser and improve their memory;
what I have discovered is an elixir of memory and wisdom’ (Plato 2005: 62). This
elixir or pharmakon is the invention of writing. The king, though, equates writing
with weakness and forgetfulness. If people do not use their memories, then they
will forget easily and rely on writing rather than on themselves.

For your invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have
learned it, through lack of practice at using their memory, as through reliance
on writing they are reminded from outside by alien marks, not from within,
themselves by themselves. So you have discovered an elixir not of memory
but of reminding.
(Ibid)

Socrates emphasises that writing is similar to painting because neither a text nor
a painting can say anything beyond what they represent. It is as if Socrates wants
writing to do more than is possible. Without writing or representation, memories
of past experience disappear, yet the way in which events are framed and narrated
inevitably shapes the content of what is remembered. Socrates prefers speech to
writing and even goes so far as to agree with Phaedrus that written speech is a
‘kind of phantom’ (Ibid: 64). Like a ghost, it is not alive but life-like. This idea
of writing being a kind of phantom fits with Socrates’ definition of memory as
recollection and rote memory. It was Derrida, in his essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’
who applied the pharmakon to the limits of writing and representation (Derrida
1983 [1972]). Writing is a peculiar kind of pharmaceutical remedy that can both
heal and poison. Derrida emphasises how the Egyptian god of writing (Thoth or
Theuth) is also the god of medicine. Translating pharmakon as ‘remedy’ signifies
scientific techne stripped of magic. And yet, Derrida shows how Plato is fully
aware of the mythical power inherent within writing. Writing has the magical
power to draw us into its metaphors. Indeed, it is one of the great ironies of West-
ern philosophy that Plato is unparalleled in his use of myth yet deeply critical of
its ideological power of deception.

One must indeed be aware of the fact that Plato is suspicious of the phar-
makon in general, even in the case of drugs used exclusively for therapeutic
ends, even when they are wielded with good intentions, and even when they
are as such effective. There is no such thing as a harmless remedy. The phar-
makon can never be simply beneficial.
(Ibid: 99)

Socrates longs for a kind of memory that does not require signs to remain alive.
‘It is this life of memory that the pharmakon of writing would come to hypnotize:
fascinating it, taking it out of itself by putting it to sleep in a monument’ (Ibid:
105). In other words, Plato cautions against the mythical power that words have
when they are inscribed into a story.
98  Looking back after 1945
Talking and walking through a haunted past
Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) reflects on how memory and forgetting affect the his-
torical self-understanding of two individuals: the narrator and Austerlitz. Through
the conversations between the two of them, the story meditates on various aspects
of memory, highlighting over and over again the damage that too much or too
little memory leaves. Austerlitz and the narrator talk and walk their way through
haunted places of Europe’s recent past. Although the title of the novel, Austerlitz,
can be associated with two places – a battlefield outside of Brno where Napo-
leon’s army defeated the Russo-Austrian army in 1805 and a major train station
in Paris commemorating this famous battle – Sebald’s original association came
from listening to a radio programme, where he learned that Fred Astaire’s origi-
nal name was Austerlitz (Sebald 2001c). The ambiguity of Sebald’s title already
suggests the layers of time haunting the present. At first glance, it is a strange
story about one man, Austerlitz, and his increasingly obsessive search for his past.
In the spirit of Proust, Sebald’s character is searching for ‘lost time’ (les temps
perdu), but, unlike for Proust, remembering is associated less with nostalgia and
the magical recovery of time and more with a sense of impending loss. Auster-
litz’s madeleine moment occurs in the ladies waiting room of the Liverpool Street
Station, when, after nights of sleepless walking through London, Austerlitz, as
an adult, stumbles into the very waiting room where he entered England as a
4-year old child. For the first time, he remembers meeting his foster parents and
remembers himself as a small child.
Much of Sebald’s work (Vertigo, The Emigrants, Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz)
explores the long-term effect and afterlife of the past on émigrés. As a master of
the uncanny, there is always a strange tale to be told if one only scratches the sur-
face of the émigré’s damaged life. There is a surreal blurring of novel and travel-
ogue, fact and fiction in the dream world that Sebald constructs. From the moment
Austerlitz arrived into his adopted Calvinist family in an isolated Welsh village,
he is lost. Unable to understand Welsh or English, never told about his Jewish and
Czech background, Austerlitz grows up in silent estrangement from those around
him. Having forgotten his native Czech language, his family and country, his past
only becomes a question for him as a teenager after his foster mother dies and
his foster father is institutionalised for a mental breakdown. From the time that
his boarding-school director tells him of his real name, ‘Jacques Austerlitz,’ he
becomes aware of having a past different from others. But after research by one
of his schoolteachers, nothing turns up. Austerlitz knows no more than that he
was adopted at an early age. After finishing boarding school, he went on to study
at Oxford and became an architectural historian, teaching for years in London.
As an architectural historian, Austerlitz is obsessed with the enigmas of man-
made spaces: fortresses, railway stations, waiting rooms, sanatoria, mental asy-
lums, courts, opera houses and libraries. He dreams of writing a book that would
chronicle the ‘compulsive sense of order and the tendency towards monumental-
ism’ (Sebald 2001a: 44). Architecture captures and freezes the mood of a genera-
tion. But there always seems to be a sense of decay and loss in the places that
 The lost and haunted world of Austerlitz  99
Austerlitz visits in his odyssey to find himself. As Susan Sontag notes, ‘Travels
under the sign of Saturn, emblems of melancholy are the subject of all three books
Sebald wrote in the first half of the 1990s. Destruction is his master theme’ (Son-
tag 2001: 44). It is more than a Homeric quest to find his roots and return home.
Rather, Austerlitz comes up against the great emptiness of himself.
Austerlitz is an uncanny alter ego for Sebald because while the narrator is a
German professor (like Sebald himself) living in England, Austerlitz is Jewish.
Given the fact that he was neither historian nor witness, his work is best judged
within his chosen genre of literature (Hutchinson 2006: 180). The strength of
Austerlitz lies in the moral questions that he, as an author, raises. Whether viewed
as melancholic or fixated, Austerlitz is a person about whom the narrator cares
deeply. From the moment when the narrator first meets Austerlitz in the 1960s, it
is always Austerlitz who chronicles strange tales and the narrator who listens and
writes the story for us to read. After a twenty-year lapse in seeing one another,
they meet again by accident in London during the early 1990s, and it is then that
Austerlitz reveals his recent knowledge of being a Jewish orphan from Prague.

Since my childhood and youth, he finally began, looking at me again, I have

never known who I really was. From where I stand now, of course, I can see
that my name alone, and the fact that it was kept from me until my fifteenth
year, ought to have put me on the track of my origins, but it has also become
clear to me of late why an agency greater than or superior to my own capac-
ity for thought, which circumspectly directs operations somewhere in my
brain, has always preserved me from own secret, systematically preventing
me from drawing the obvious conclusions and embarking on the inquiries
they would have suggested to me.
(Sebald 2001a: 60–61)

From their conversations in Belgium, England and France, we, the readers, learn
of Austerlitz’s failed affair with Marie, ending in his breakdown and recovery.
Later, after his retirement from teaching, he tells how he wanted to finally write
the book on architectural history but lost the ability to write and to speak.

It was as if an illness that had been latent in me for a long time were now
threatening to erupt. . . . I sensed that in truth I had neither memory nor the
power of thought, not even any existence, that all my life had been a constant
process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the world.
(Ibid: 173–174)

His alienation from language and contact with other people led Austerlitz to
throw away everything that he had written in the past forty years: papers, lecture
notes and outlines. He did, however, keep the photographs that he had taken over
the years and eventually gave the narrator the keys to his house, should he wish to
spend time there and look at them.
100  Looking back after 1945
After sleepless nights, Austerlitz began his nocturnal walks through the city
of London, culminating in the day when he accidentally walked into the waiting
room where he met his foster parents from Wales for the first time. This moment
triggers memories buried deep within of early childhood. With this knowledge
that he came from somewhere else by train, he continues walking at night but
cannot write. He has another nervous breakdown in 1992 and then, during his
recovery, overhears a radio interview with a woman who was a child from a
Prague Kindertransport to England. Convinced that he must have been on the
same train, Austerlitz goes to Prague, seeks his parentage and knocks on the door
of his former nanny, Vera. Through conversations told afterwards to the narrator,
we learn that Sebald’s father left for Paris, with the plan that his mother and Aus-
terlitz would soon join him. As the situation became worse for Jews in Prague,
Austerlitz’s mother sent him to England with the hopes that she could also escape
and that the family could be reunited in Paris. Shortly after Austerlitz left on the
children’s transport, his mother was deported to Theresienstadt. Austerlitz walks
with Vera in Prague, remembering his early childhood places. These walks are
filled with bittersweet nostalgia for a time of carefree innocence and childhood.
The impressions of happiness and security are strongly different from the other
parts of the book. In evoking his early childhood years, Austerlitz conjures up the
memory of childhood itself. Surrounded in warmth, he senses the idyllic past that
he has lost. Once Vera tells Austerlitz about his mother’s deportation, the novel
returns to its sense of trauma and fixation on the past. In taking the train to There-
sienstadt, Austerlitz confronts the history that he otherwise avoided. He retraces
both his mother’s final journey and his own childhood train journey from Prague
to London. He then moves to Paris in search of his father and of Marie, his lover
from three decades ago.
Even though it is always Austerlitz who seeks out the narrator, we, as the read-
ers, are following the voice of the narrator. From the very beginning of the novel,
the narrator remarks that Austerlitz is the first person that he has met that he can
listen to and learn something from. ‘I found Austerlitz the first teacher I could lis-
ten to since my time in primary school’ (Ibid: 43–44). Indeed, the narrator shares
many preoccupations with Austerlitz. When they met again after a lapse of two
decades, Austerlitz remarked that he knew that he ‘must find someone to whom
he could relate his own story’ (Ibid: 60). Talking to the narrator helps Austerlitz
work through the past that had damaged his life. Whether or not Austerlitz would
finally write the book about the history of architecture and civilisation remains
unclear. But Austerlitz only begins to come to terms with himself when he recog-
nises the source of his estrangement and can speak about it with the narrator. The
novel is a kind of talking cure of conversations and walks with Marie, Vera and
the anonymous German narrator. If Marie was unable to break through Auster-
litz’s distance as a young man, his former nanny, Vera, can speak to him clearly,
without fixation or repetition. But it is only with the narrator that Austerlitz can
speak about everything and begin to find a balance between his enormous loss in
the past and friendship in the present.
 The lost and haunted world of Austerlitz  101
Correspondences and the uncanny
Correspondences, elective affinities and family resemblances permeate Sebald’s
writing (Eshel 2003; Friedrichsmeyer 2006). Photography and metaphor can
express meanings often closed to the cumbersome language of academic scholar-
ship. Throughout his life, Austerlitz struggles with the limitation of language to
express what is most important for him. From the moment he learns that he was a
child from Prague, he grasps at fragments of memory so that he can finally reach
the secret part of his mind that he could always sense but had somehow blocked
out. ‘(I)n any case, the crucial point was hardly this speculation in itself, which
was really only a distraction, but the scraps of memory beginning to drift through
the outlying regions of my mind’ (Sebald 2001a: 191–192). Similar to Proust,
Sebald finds the correspondence of different, even unrelated, experiences to be
the richest. There is an element of chaos and stream of consciousness, like being
inside the mind of one who wanders aimlessly. In reflecting on Proust, Walter
Benjamin writes that Proust was the first to create a kind of dream world between
waking and sleeping, woven from memory and forgetting in search of a time that
had been lost.

We know that in his work Proust did not describe a life as it actually was,
but a life as it was remembered by the one who had lived it. . . . For an expe-
rienced event is finite – at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a
remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that hap-
pened before it and after it.
(Benjamin 1968a: 202)

What actually happened in Proust’s childhood is perhaps less important than

how it is remembered and interpreted by Proust, the author. It becomes ‘a key
to everything that happened before it and after it.’ Both Austerlitz and Proust are
in search of a magic key that will unlock the door to past experience. Many of
Benjamin’s suggestions about how to read Proust’s interweaving of memory and
forgetting, his use of involuntary memory (la mémoire involuntaire) and the role
of the correspondences of haphazard events can just as easily be applied to Sebald
as well. One thing leads to another as Proust lies on his bed and recalls his child-
hood. For Austerlitz, on the other hand, the correspondences of random events
have to be found in the process of traveling and walking through the physical
spaces of his past.
If Proust offers a dreamy nostalgia, Sebald leaves the reader with the impres-
sion of deep loss. One of the sentiments haunting Sebald’s writings is the for-
mative experience of the past influencing the present self. Sebald’s world is an
uncanny one, full of coincidences, secrets and strange occurrences. In his essay
on ‘The Uncanny,’ Freud writes about the odd feeling we have when we experi-
ence something that falls between real and imaginative. This feeling or sense
is the uncanny. As something that is both frightening and familiar, his essay
102  Looking back after 1945
examines various definitions of the word to uncover the central meaning of
uncanny: ‘uncomfortable, uneasy, gloomy, dismal, uncanny, ghastly (of a house):
haunted, (of a person): a repulsive fellow’ (Freud 2003 [1919]: 125). Uncanny is
linked with something that is off the mark, strange and yet somehow familiar. If
heimlich means homely and comfortable, unheimlich is the very opposite: it sug-
gests that something is ‘belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, dear
and intimate, homely etc.’ (Ibid: 126). Freud continues to unearth the etymology
of unheimlich by pointing out that the German word for uncanny (unheimlich)
bears a close resemblance with the German word for secret (Geheimnis). Thus,
the original meaning of ‘uncanny’ is a secret: ‘(t)he term “uncanny” (unheimlich)
applies to everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, has come
into the open’ (Ibid: 132). This sense of the uncanny is precisely what Austerlitz
feels about himself – that he carries a secret, or has a secret past that is com-
ing out in the present. If it was Freud who first wrote about the uncanny in the
psychic realm, Sebald is able to portray the uncanny in the damaged lives of his
characters.

I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the
shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper,
as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling
to them.
(Sebald 2001a: 109)

Unheimlich contains the word Heim or home, Heimat – the very place that Sebald
writes about in all of his books. What is the relationship between a person’s home
and himself?
Although memory, for Plato, is a rather simple affair embodied in the wax
tablet, for Freud memory is burdened with mechanisms of repression, uncon-
scious drives and secrets that haunt the present. What links Plato, Freud and
Sebald together is the image of the mind as an inscribed tablet. Knowledge and
self-understanding are stored within the mind and have to be awoken from deep
within. All three are writers who share a distrust of writing and a sense that
written words can just as easily hide rather than reveal past experience. In the
Theaetetus, Socrates introduces memory with the famous image of a wax tab-
let. ‘Whatever is so imprinted we remember and know so long as the image
remains; whatever is rubbed out or has not succeeded in leaving an impression
we have forgotten and do not know’ (Plato 2007: 25). Central to Plato is that
some kind of an image remain in our minds; otherwise we forget and no longer
have knowledge of the past. Many centuries later, Freud, fascinated by a novelty
in the market in the 1920s, returns to the image of the mind as a block of wax
with his conception of the mystic writing-pad. The mystic writing-pad promises
to perform better than a piece of paper or chalkboard. A piece of paper provides
a ‘permanent memory-trace’ (Freud 2007 [1925]: 114), while the chalkboard can
always be erased for new writing. Both paper and the chalkboard have the same
unattainable goal.
 The lost and haunted world of Austerlitz  103
Measured by this standard, devices to aid our memory seem particularly
imperfect, since our mental apparatus accomplishes precisely what they
cannot: it has an unlimited receptive capacity for new perceptions and never-
theless lays down permanent – even though not unalterable – memory traces
of them.
(Ibid: 115)

It is the ‘mystic writing-pad’ that comes closest to mimicking how the mind works.
The mystic writing-pad is a metaphor for the way in which repression and the
unconscious are manifest in everyday life.

The afterlife and aura of images

Sebald has a meandering, wandering, stream-of-consciousness style that is nei-
ther fully fiction nor memoir. Written as a single paragraph, Austerlitz is full
of black and white photographs and architectural drawings. The images have a
ghostly presence that can sometimes complement the story and at other times jar
the reader from the narrative. The grainy images are totems of lost time and of
the dead. They radiate energy and have an afterlife of their own. Writing almost
a decade earlier than Benjamin, Aby Warburg described the psychic afterlife of
pagan images. In his incomplete Atlas project, entitled Mnemosyne, Warburg tried
to capture symbolic images from the past that radiated energy or pathos formula.
Each of these images collected in his project contained an afterlife or Nachle-
ben. Warburg studied the uncanny survival and posthumous meaning of images
beyond the lifespan of the artist. Indeed, he conceived of ‘“Mnemosyne” as “a
ghost story for truly adult people”; (Warburg quoted in Agamben 1999 [1975]: 95).
The idea of an afterlife or posthumous meaning of an image fascinated Warburg
and was the basis for his method of art history.

‘Survival’ is the central concept, the Hauptproblem, of Aby Warburg and

the Warburgian school of art history. In Warburg’s work, the term Nachle-
ben refers to the survival (the continuity or afterlife and metamorphosis) of
images and motifs – as opposed to their renascence after extinction or, con-
versely, their replacement by innovations in image and motif.
(Didi-Huberman 2003: 273)

In many ways, Warburg’s afterlife or survival of images bears a strong similarity

to Benjamin’s aura of the artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction. Once an
artwork is reproduced, it becomes a mass object that is infinitely reproducible, be
it a postcard, stamp or advertisement.
Sebald’s juxtaposition of images exemplifies Benjamin’s aura and Warburg’s
afterlife of images. Concentration camp photographs within the text are an exam-
ple of the unpredictable and traumatic afterlife of Holocaust memory in contem-
porary literature (Crownshaw 2010). But to what extent might Sebald’s use of
imagery also serve as an example of prosthetic or postmemory? Hirsch compares
104  Looking back after 1945
Sebald’s importance to that of Art Spielgelman’s Maus in the late 1980s and
early 1990s. ‘The images Austerlitz finds, I want to argue, are what Warburg
calls “pre-established expressive forms,” that amount to no more than imper-
sonal building blocks of affiliative postmemory’ (Hirsch 2012: 42). And yet, the
images in Sebald’s books are far from impersonal; rather, they carry traces of the
very European tradition that Sebald calls into question. From railway stations,
libraries, fortresses and concentration camps, Sebald gathers together nineteenth
and twentieth-century architectural examples of monumentalism. If anything,
Sebald’s pictorial motif confirms Benjamin’s famous quotation about the violent
undercurrent to civilisation. ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at
the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of
barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one
owner to another’ (Benjamin 1968b: 256). Sebald reminds the reader that hidden
beneath every modern architectural structure is a corresponding story of violence
and inhumanity.
Thus, Austerlitz is more than an example of postmemory and prosthetic mem-
ory; it is also a meditation on the frustrating limit of language and communica-
tion to represent past experience. Dominick LaCapra captures this double bind
succinctly when he maintains that the paradox of trauma and language is central
to Sebald’s prose: ‘The traumatic experience is unspeakable yet calls for endless
speech’ (LaCapra 2013: 54). Austerlitz struggles with this paradox in his own
writing and obsessive need to talk with the narrator. Sebald’s fascination with
images of the past has particular resonance with Holocaust imagery. However,
it is also part of an old philosophical question about the limits of representation
that is part of European cultural memory. Sebald’s prose moves deftly between
multiple time periods. As Jan Assmann writes: ‘With cultural memory the depths
of time open up’ (Assmann 2006 [2000]: 24). Just before Austerlitz gives up his
idea to write a book on the history of architecture and civilisation, he questions
language as a tool for communicating with one another.

If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks
and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while oth-
ers have been torn down, cleaned up and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching
further and further into the surrounding country, then I was like a man who
has been abroad for a long time and cannot find his way through this urban
sprawl any more, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard
is, or a street junction, an avenue or a bridge.
(Sebald 2001a: 174–175)

In the spirit of Plato and Nietzsche, the writing of history is both a poison and a
remedy against the tide of forgetfulness. Fixation on monumental history dwarfs
the present, while too much preservation induces nostalgia. The strongest con-
nection between the Phaedrus and Austerlitz occurs when Austerlitz throws away
all his writing. Writing became a crutch or screen that blocked access to his
early childhood memories. ‘Moreover, I had constantly been preoccupied by that
 The lost and haunted world of Austerlitz  105
accumulation of knowledge which I had pursued for decades, and which served
as a substitute or compensatory memory’ (Ibid: 198). The initial destruction of his
writing does not result in liberation but leads to a complete mental breakdown.
Austerlitz’s recovery begins when he enters into the train station waiting room
and remembers who he is. Until that moment, he was an enigma and did not belong
anywhere. Similar to Plato’s Phaedrus, writing became for Austerlitz, ‘a kind of
phantom’ or a pharmakon that poisoned, rather than healed (Plato 2005: 64). It
is through his conversations with the narrator, who has, over the years, become
a friend, that Austerlitz is able to change. The solitary pursuits of reading and
writing were obsessive fixations on traumatic moments in the past. In order for
Austerlitz to move on, he cannot rely on the solitary process of writing.
Although Austerlitz can be read solely as an artistic work on the long-term
effects of the Holocaust on the second generation, Sebald draws on traditions
that reach back further than the Third Reich. Throughout the book, the Holocaust
takes on a changing afterlife of its own as Austerlitz and the narrator struggle to
come to terms with themselves. By reading Sebald’s meditation on the episodic
afterlife of the past in Austerlitz, we can gain new insights into the paradoxical
experience of memory. Through the conversations and observations of the narra-
tor, the novel reveals the haunted and lost world of Austerlitz. It traces the dam-
age that both silence and memory leave on the present. First of all, we read of
Austerlitz’s desire to confide in the narrator and the need to tell his story, and
second, we understand the narrator’s sympathetic fascination with Austerlitz and
his willingness to listen to him. Both need one another and embark on a friendship
ending in both confronting the afterlife of the Holocaust in their lives. If Austerlitz
has to deal with the legacy of victimhood and loss within his family, the narrator,
as an expatriate professor of German literature, works through his legacy as the
child of a generation of perpetrators. This process of digging through twentieth-
century European history takes on a life of its own when Sebald, as the author of
this strange tale, writes not only for himself but for an audience of readers. It is
particularly in the novel Austerlitz that Sebald raises moral questions of memory.
Do we have a debt to the past? Should we have a sense of responsibility for the
crimes committed to others in the name of religions or nations that we belong to?
Sebald’s message is clear: memory is not simply related to individual identity but
shapes the very contours of how we live together. Through the use of metaphor
and narrative, literature has a unique way of expressing the moral responsibil-
ity that individuals have towards the past – whether in the short or long-term.
In reflecting on the role of literature and injustices of the past, Sebald remarked
in one of his last speeches: ‘There are many forms of writing; only in literature,
however, can there be an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of
facts and over and above scholarship’ (Sebald 2005: 215).

Notes
1 Long’s introductory essay (2007a) in W. G. Sebald and the Writing of History (Fuchs
and Long 2007) offers a concise and thematic overview. The anthology, W. G. Sebald:
106  Looking back after 1945
History, Memory, Trauma (Denham and McCulloh 2006), is very helpful. Of particular
interest in that anthology, for a critical reading of Sebald’s melancholic view of his-
tory, see Peter Fritzsche (2006). For Sebald, history and ruins, see Pensky (2011). For
insightful criticism on Sebald’s use of narrative, see Garloff (2006) and Hutchinson
(2006). Likewise, see McCulloh (2003); Long (2007b). For a discussion of not only
trauma and narrative but also a comparison of the Holocaust and colonialism in the
work of Sebald and Coetzee, see LaCapra (2013: 54–94).
2 For interesting discussions of Sebald’s depiction of his Jewish characters with traumatic
memories of the Holocaust, see Richard Crownshaw (2010), especially chapters 2 and 3.
Prager (2005) presents a critical overview of how Sebald writes about the Holocaust.
Likewise, see Huyssen (2003: 138–157).
3 Santner (2006) argues that Sebald’s use of photography embedded within a text is an
example of postmemory and a way of bearing witness to the past. Likewise, Crownshaw
(2010) applies Hirsch’s postmemory and Warburg’s afterlife of images to an insightful
reading of Sebald.
4 For an excellent analysis of cultural memory see Erll (2011). See also her helpful anthol-
ogy co-edited with Nünning (2010).
5 For a helpful overview of Assmann’s mnemohistory and Warburg’s afterlife, see Marek
Tamm (2015), ‘Introduction: Afterlife of Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory’ After-
lives of Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory, Marek Tamm, ed., Basingstoke: Pal-
grave Macmillian, pp. 1–23.

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Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after
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Hutchinson, Ben. 2006. ‘“Egg Boxes Stacked in a Crate”: Narrative Status and Its Implica-
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(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).
LaCapra, Dominick. 2013. History, Literature, Critical Theory. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press), pp. 54–94.
Landsberg, Alison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remem-
brance in the Age of Mass Culture. (New York: Columbia University Press).
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Fuchs and Long (eds.), pp. 11–29.
Long, Jonathan J. 2007b. W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
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McCulloh, Mark R. 2003. Understanding Sebald. (Columbia, SC: University of South
Carolina Press).
Patience, (after Sebald). 2012. Directed by Grant Gee, produced by Sarah Caddy, Gareth
Evans and Di Robson, Soda Pictures, UK.
Pensky, Max. 2011. ‘Three Kinds of Ruin: Heidegger, Benjamin and Sebald’, Poligrafi,
12: 61/62, 65–90.
Plato. 2005. Phaedrus. Christopher Rowe, trans. (London: Penguin Classics).
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Memory: A Reader. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 25–27.
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Santner, Eric L. 2006. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. (Chicago, IL: The Uni-
versity of Chicago Press).
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108  Looking back after 1945
Sebald, W. G. 2005. Campo Santo. Anthea Bell, trans. (London: Penguin Books).
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Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 1–23.
Part III

Looking back after 1989

7 Being and not being there
Holocaust memorials,
selfies and social media

The desire to mirror and capture the world, to freeze and fix experience for eter-
nity, is as old as the first cave paintings. In today’s digital world, imitation as
mimesis has become a fluid and seamless part of everyday life. Photography and
film provide immediate access to the past, creating the sense that one can experi-
ence events vicariously and virtually. In a world of images, selfies, chats and texts,
the speed of technological innovation changes how we experience the world, our
perception of time and our relationship to the past. While time moves forward
into an open future of technological innovation, anniversaries and commemora-
tive occasions remind us of past events. Memorials and museums are designed to
slow the passage of time so that one might find points of reflection between past
and present. Such slowing down of everyday time accompanies the awareness of
our finitude and link to previous generations. And yet, although memorials open
space for reflection, the desire to instantly photograph our presence at an iconic
place may inadvertently distance us from what we see. In a world of selfies, where
each person is a photographer, experience is increasingly mediated by a camera
or smart phone. If a photograph is not deemed powerful enough on its own, we
include ourselves, as if confirming our on-site presence. While the photograph
documents a place or person, the selfie validates the authenticity or realness of our
presence at a particular time and place.
Recent art demonstrates how a new commemorative culture is emerging with
the advent of mass tourism and social media. In 2016, two art projects, Yolo-
caust by Shahak Shapira and Austerlitz by Sergei Loznitsa, examined how visi-
tors behaved at memorials commemorating the Holocaust. Using different media,
selfies taken at the Holocaust Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin
and filmed behaviour of visitors at the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentra-
tion camp memorials, the artists depicted how photography and new social media
influence ways that visitors interact with places commemorating mass murder.
Although Holocaust memorials and museums are constructed for reflection and
engagement with past, one cannot predict how visitors will respond. The taking
of photographs and sharing of selfies at memorials may just as well indicate the
desire to share one’s experience with others as absence from the place one vis-
its. Likewise, selfies and social media may inadvertently remove visitors from
encountering and reflecting on the very place they came to visit.
112  Looking back after 1989
Photographs, selfies and the experience of being there
Living in an image-driven society is, for Susan Sontag, a particularly modern
problem. The barrage of imagery simultaneously stimulates and dulls the senses.
Steady streams of images on smartphones encourage viewers to quickly click
onto a link for something more interesting. ‘Needing to have reality confirmed
and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which
everyone is now addicted’ (Sontag 1990: 24). Acknowledging that pictures of
suffering can either be responded to or ignored, Sontag emphasises that the act of
remembrance is an ethical act that connects us to previous generations. ‘Remem-
bering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly,
the only relation we can have with the dead’ (Sontag 2003: 115). Given that both
Holocaust memorials and former concentration camp sites commemorate death,
Sontag’s reminder is an important one. The most basic link between past and
present is not only between the living, but between the dead and the living. ‘All
photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another
person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability’ (Sontag 1990: 15).
Sontag’s own interest in photography began when she was 12 years old, after
seeing a book of documentary photographs on Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. In
this case, the photographs were not the portraits of early photography but pho-
tojournalism. ‘One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate
horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative
epiphany’ (Ibid: 19). She remained troubled by the power of photographs to both
attract and numb the viewer at the same time. Sontag’s concern is the reaction
of the viewer to photographs of horror. Looking at images of other people’s suf-
fering changes how we see the world and respond to others. As Sontag wrote,
photographs provide ‘an ethics of seeing’ (Ibid: 3). In response to images, we
may be moved and affected by photographs or disconnected and disengaged from
them. Either way, though, just by looking at photographs of war and suffering,
viewers have the sense of being part of someone else’s experience. ‘Photography
has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an
appearance of participation’ (Ibid: 10).
In a similar vein, Roland Barthes reflects on the ghostlike quality of photo-
graphs and the strangeness of posing for a photographer. ‘Now, once I feel myself
observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of
“posing.” I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in
advance into an image’ (Barthes 1981: 10) Just before the moment when Barthes
is photographed, he feels that he has become an object to be seen by someone else.
Looking at a photograph is qualitatively different from seeing someone or some-
place in real time. Indeed, for Barthes, seeing oneself in a photograph is spectral,
as we become the object of own gaze. ‘I then experience a micro-version of death
(of parenthesis). I am truly becoming a spectre’ (Ibid: 14).
Like Sontag, Barthes argues that photographs offer evidence and certainty. ‘Pho-
tography offers an immediate presence to the world – a co-presence; but this pres-
ence is not only of a political order (“to participate by the image in contemporary
 Being and not being there  113
events”), it is also a metaphysical order’ (Ibid: 84). This documentary aspect of
photography confirms the existence of what happened. The photograph exists in
a similar way as the person or place who has been photographed. The image,
person and place are all present in the world. Indeed, the photograph may outlive
the presence of a person or a place. ‘Every photograph is a certificate of presence’
(Ibid: 87). Looking at photographs of people and places who no longer exists,
the photo evokes the spectral presence of those who are absent. For Barthes, the
invention of photography, with its documented presence of what has been, marks
a paradigmatic shift in how the world is perceived.

Perhaps we have an invincible resistance to believing in the past, in History,

except in the form of myth. The Photograph, for the first time, puts an end to
this resistance: henceforth the past is as certain as the present, what we see on
paper is as certain as what we touch. It is the advent of the Photograph – and
not, as has been said, of the cinema – which divides the history of the world.
(Ibid: 87–88)

The photograph confirms the presence of something or someone in the past. ‘The
photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain
what has been’ (Ibid: 85). Indeed, for Barthes, photography is a kind of magical
process that freezes time and creates a new kind of trance-like presence.

The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucina-

tion: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal
hallucination, so to speak, a modest shared hallucination (on the one hand ‘it
is not there,’ on the other ‘but it has indeed been’) a mad image, chafed by
reality.
(Ibid: 115)

When looking at the photograph of his mother, Barthes is reminded of details of

her life, of his love for her and of her absence from his life. Seeing her as a 5-year
child reminds him of certain features that were unique to her. Although his mother
is no longer alive, she is somehow more present to him when photographed not as
his mother whom he knew in life but as a child before he was even born.
Selfies are a particular type of self-portrait. As a snapshot that can instantly be
shared on social media, it is more fluid than a painting or photograph. One needs
only a smart phone in order to take a selfie. As a flickering story and narrative
of oneself, the snapshot is a self-portrait taken at a particular time and place.
Less mirror image, the selfie is a momentary persona to be saved or shared. Like
Narcissus, we can gaze at ourselves afterwards. However, unlike Narcissus, a
selfie is an image that can be shared with others and commented on various social
platforms. The inward gaze of looking at oneself, whether viewed in water like
Narcissus or on a screen, share more than a trace of similarity. Narcissus is unable
to do anything other than look at himself in the pool of water. While the selfie
114  Looking back after 1989
might encourage the narcissism of looking at oneself, it is only one part of what
Guy Debord characterised as the society of the spectacle. ‘The spectacle is not
a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images’
(Debord 1983 [1967]: 4). The selfie and social media, like photography and film,
are part of a society that is ‘mediated by images.’ Similar to Sontag and Benjamin,
Debord reflects on how images affect our social relations with one another and
the world. Everyday life is increasingly mediated by the camera and smart phone,
which have become filters for perceiving what we see and for living in the world.
The reflex to take a photograph or selfie bears witness to our presence at a cer-
tain time and place. If the selfie is shared and accompanied by ironic comments,
its meaning shifts from that of witnessing and documenting our presence in a
certain place to one of playful disengagement. Sontag’s question of whether the
camera distances individuals is even more relevant given that photos and selfies
have an even briefer lifespan in today’s accelerated world than when she wrote
in the late twentieth century. ‘Images transfix. Images anesthetize’ (Sontag 1990:
20). Replaced by newer images on social media, the selfie becomes part of the
ritualised daily recording of one’s experience for others. At its most narcissistic,
the selfie confirms what Benjamin wrote in ‘The Work of Art in the Mechanical
Age of Reproduction.’

Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the

Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a
degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of
the first order.
(Benjamin 1968: 242)

By privileging the photograph and selfie, we risk distancing ourselves from

what we see. If the intention of the selfie is projected into anticipated feedback
from others, we may be less present in the moment and more concerned with the
future afterlife of our own image.

Commemorating the Holocaust

Memorials and memorial museums dedicated to war, atrocity and genocide are
connected not only with sacred time but also with prophetic warnings for the
future. In the twentieth century, the visual language of memorials and museums
has shifted from one of heroic valour and sacrifice to that of mourning and incom-
prehensible loss. Beginning with tombs to the unknown soldier after World War I,
memorials began to commemorate loss of ordinary life, thereby loosening the
ascribed meaning between past war, heroism of national leaders, future peace
and national identity. If tombs to the unknown soldier commemorate anonymous
death and national sacrifice, Holocaust memorials after World War II commemo-
rate mass death and serve as warnings of ‘never again.’ As Alejandro Baer and
Natan Sznaider suggest, the injunction of ‘never again’ has three parts: ‘remem-
ber atrocity, honor the victims, learn for the future’ (Baer and Sznaider 2017: 4).
Moreover, the injunction of ‘never again’ warns about the possibility that the past
 Being and not being there  115
may repeat itself in the future. ‘The ethics of Never Again introduces a particular
way of conceiving temporality. It relies on the representation of certain historical
occurrences, which reveal what happened and which should not happen “again”’
(Ibid: 5). After World War II, monuments and memorials face the task of repre-
senting the magnitude of loss without appeal to theodicy, national sacrifice or
redemption.
Memorials, museums and former concentration camps are material, even ghostly
traces of the first half of the twentieth century. Like war memorials, ‘memory
museums’ (Arnold-de Simine 2013) or ‘memorial museums’ (Sodaro 2018) address
violent national pasts with the stated aim to learn from history. However, unlike
national museums that predominantly represent positive aspects of national his-
tory, memorial museums depict traumatic events in the past. Created for present
and future generations, memorial museums are, as Amy Sodaro argues, ‘a new
“hybrid” cultural form of commemoration’ that combine the functions of memo-
rial, historical exhibition, pedagogy, research and forum for public debate
(2018: 4). In particular, memorial museums aspire to improve the future through
remembrance of tragic events. Although memorials and museums may inten­
tionally reconfigure and deliberately slow down time in order to allow for reflec-
tion, one cannot predict how individuals will interact with them. For those born
afterwards, the experience of visiting a memorial and memorial museum may be
full of reflection and even empathy with the victims. Indeed, as Arnold-de Simine
(2013) argues, memory museums use new media technology to foster empathy
and identification with the victims. With greater numbers of tourists visiting
monuments, they might also become sites of ironic detachment from the past. As
places of memory, monuments and museums are spaces that deliberately interrupt
ordinary time. If war memorials commemorate and venerate the dead, memorial
museums combine veneration with education and historical narrative. What links
them is the injunction to remember the dead and strengthen the link between
generations. What remains unpredictable, however, is the reaction of those who
visit these places of memory – varying from reflection and warning to ironic
disengagement.
Mass tourism at former concentration camp sites and the Holocaust Memorial
in Berlin indicate public interest in the history of World War II and the Holocaust.
Indeed, the Holocaust, as a historical event, has been institutionalised in muse-
ums, memorials, academic departments and research centres. It has become the
universal symbol of evil and a template for understanding genocide from Armenia
and Cambodia to the Gulag and Rwanda. If early scholarship on the Holocaust
accentuated its historical uniqueness, with a generational shift, creation of digital
archives and the emergence of comparative genocide studies, the Holocaust is
part of a larger framework rooted in remembrance of the victims in tandem with
the protection of human rights (Levy and Sznaider 2010; Rothberg 2009).1

Yolocaust: selfies and public shaming

In response to selfies taken at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Israeli-German
artist Shahak Shapira created a short-lived project entitled Yolocaust. Merging
116  Looking back after 1989
YOLO (you only live once) with the word ‘Holocaust,’ Shapira found public self-
ies online that people had posted of themselves at the memorial. He then juxta-
posed the images with photo-shopped bodies of concentration camp victims and
posted them on his online art project, Yolocaust. In Shapira’s new context, the
original selfie was rendered callous and disrespectful.2 In order for the selfie to
be removed from the project, the author or photographer had to send Shapira an
email at undouche.me@yolocaust.de. By juxtaposing documentary photographs
from concentration camp sites with selfies taken at the Holocaust Memorial, the
artist called attention to visitors at memorial sites as well as ways in which social
media and selfies influenced how visitors act at memorials commemorating
mass murder. Shapira’s motivation for Yolocaust was to emphasise the differ-
ence between the Holocaust Memorial and a conventional tourist site. The project
foregrounds how mass tourism and the posting of selfies with hashtags may indi-
cate indifference to the historical context of where tourists choose to visit.
‘You only live once.’ At first glance, the sentiment of YOLO seems to follow in
the footsteps of the Latin aphorism ‘carpe diem,’ or ‘seize the day’ and live for the
moment. However, YOLO also includes pranks, risk taking, crossing boundaries
and irony towards social norms. YOLO and selfies are part of an individualist
culture fixated on the sharing of experience that is instantly shared with ‘friends’
via social media. The experience of being somewhere or with someone is not
complete until the picture is taken, shared, liked and commented on. Yolocaust
powerfully captures ways in which selfie culture influences how individuals act
in commemorative places of memory. In his choice of selfies found in the pub-
lic domain, Shapira juxtaposed colour selfies at the Holocaust Memorial – with
some visitors jumping on the memorial pillars, others doing yoga poses, juggling,
smiling or adding hashtags – with documentary black and white photographs
of concentration camp bodies, in order to demonstrate the incongruity of their
behaviour. As he wrote on his Yolocaust page in English and German:

Dear Internet,
Last week I launched a project called YOLOCAUST that explored our com-
memorative culture by combining selfies from the Holocaust Memorial in
Berlin with footage from Nazi extermination camps. The selfies were found
on Facebook, Instagram, Tinder and Grindr. Comments, hashtags and “likes”
that we see posted with the selfies are also included.

Liebes Internet,
letzte Woche habe ich ein Projekt namens YOLOCAUST veröffentlicht,
welches unsere Erinnerungskultur durch die Kombination von Selfies am
Holocaust-Mahnmal in Berlin mit Bildmaterial aus Vernichtungslagern hin-
terfragte. Die Selfies wurden auf Facebook, Instagram, Tinder und Grindr
gefunden. Kommentare, Hashtags und „Likes“ aus den Selfies wurden eben-
falls übernommen.
(www.yolocaust.de)
 Being and not being there  117
According to Shapira’s site, approximately 2.5 million people visited Yolocaust.
de. All 12 people whose selfies were posted responded, and almost all apologised.
The most interesting feedback came from one of the selfie photographers with the
caption, ‘Jumping on dead Jews@Holocaust Memorial.’ As Shapira wrote on the
project’s website, the author’s email response to him was a fitting way in which to
conclude the Yolocaust project.

I am the guy that inspired you to make Yolocaust, so I’ve read at least. I
am the ‘jumping on de . . . ‘ I cant even write it, kind of sick of looking at
it. I didn’t mean to offend anyone. Now I just keep seeing my words in the
headlines.
I have seen what kind of impact those words have and it’s crazy and it’s
not what I wanted. . . .
The photo was meant for my friends as a joke. I am known to make out
of line jokes, stupid jokes, sarcastic jokes. And they get it. If you knew me
you would too. But when it gets shared, and comes to strangers who have no
idea who I am, they just see someone disrespecting something important to
someone else or them.
That was not my intention. And I am sorry. I truly am.
With that in mind, I would like to be undouched.
P.S. Oh, and if you could explain to BBC, Haaretz and aaaaallll the other
blogs, news stations etc. etc. that I fucked up, that’d be great. 😅
(www.yolocaust.de)

With this anonymous response remaining on the homepage of Yolocaust, the proj-
ect ended, and all selfies, with their corresponding commentary, were removed
from the site. Although some images remain online in the archival memory of the
Internet, they have taken on a life of their own and are no longer part of Shapira’s
project.
When asked about the motivation for his art project, Shapira responded: ‘I felt
like people needed to know what they were actually doing, or how others might
interpret what they were doing’ (Shapira quoted in Frank 2017). As an artist,
Shapira asks individuals to step back, reflect and be conscious of their actions.
In many ways, Yolocaust examines ‘the rituals of our social media generation’
(Frank 2017). In response to Shapira’s project, the architect of the Holocaust
Memorial, Peter Eisenman, took issue with the public shaming of Yolocaust.
Instead, he wanted for the memorial to be as open as possible to the interpretation
of viewers. ‘To be honest with you. I thought it was terrible . . . people have been
jumping around on those pillars forever’ (Eisenman quoted on Gunter 2017). For
Eisenman, since the Holocaust Memorial is neither a burial ground nor a former
concentration camp, one can be more open with how visitors behave there. ‘It’s
like a catholic church, it’s a meeting place, children run around, they sell trinkets.
A memorial is an everyday occurrence, it is not a sacred ground’ (Ibid).
The Holocaust Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe opened after long
debate in 2005 and is a popular commemorative site in Berlin. The abstract nature
118  Looking back after 1989
of its design lends itself to different interpretations as to how visitors should
interact with the memorial in the centre of Berlin, adjacent to the Reichstag and
Brandenburg Gate.3 According to Peter Eisenman: ‘For me . . . the memorial sym-
bolizes silence and emptiness. It does not say . . . what it is and what it means’
(Eisenman quoted in Rosenfeld 2016: 290). Acknowledging that architectural
openness engenders both reflection and disinterest, he preferred abstract to figu-
rative design. ‘The project deliberately eschewed signs, had no overt symbols,
which was to become part of its impact on the viewer’ (Eisenman 2016: 306). For
Shapira, however, the purpose of the memorial is to provide a space for viewers
to reflect and learn about the Holocaust. ‘I am worried that younger people fail
to understand the importance of these memorials. They’re not there for me – for
Jews – or for the victims, they are there for the people of today, for their moral
compass’ (Shapira quoted in Gunter 2017).
The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin not only exemplifies a monumental sense of
history with its heavy design and immense size, it also serves as a critical warn-
ing to future generations. Former concentration camp sites, on the other hand,
preserve the physical structures of the camp as evidence so that future generations
might learn about what happened during the Third Reich. The message of Holo-
caust memorials, former concentration camp sites and museums is one of ‘never
again.’ They are places not only of remembrance but, even more so, places of
warning to future generations.
Shapira’s project implies that the Holocaust Memorial is very much ‘a sacred
ground’ that is similar to a graveyard, particularly if one recalls Paul Celan’s
poem, ‘Deathsfugue’ (‘Todesfuge’) on Holocaust victims without a grave – who
had been cremated, buried in forests and fields and thrown into mass graves. ‘We
shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped.’ [wir schaufeln ein
Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng] (Celan 1992: 257–258).4 As Celan
writes, without a known place of burial, one is left with only a ‘grave in the air.’
The Holocaust Memorial to Europe’s Murdered Jews evokes the solemnity of a
cemetery for those with only a grave in the air. Although Eisenman intentionally
left the architectural space open to playfulness, Shapira emphasises its sacred-
ness as a place commemorating the dead.

Austerlitz: filming visitors at concentration camp memorials

Unlike Yolocaust’s intention to publicly shame the individuals with their selfies
at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the film Austerlitz examines ways in which
mass tourism and photography influence how individuals interact with former
concentration camp sites. The film documents visitors at Dachau and Sachsen-
hausen concentration camps as they look at the physical remains of the camp
and the museum exhibits. The camera follows them as they look, talk with one
another, stop for photographs or take selfies. During the filming of the documen-
tary, the filmmaker, Sergei Loznitsa, placed cameras at the eye level of visitors,
who were unaware that they were being filmed. Like Shapira, Loznitsa asks how
visitors should behave at a Holocaust memorial site. Unlike the Holocaust Memo-
rial in Berlin, concentration camp memorials are historical places where people
 Being and not being there  119
were actually tortured and killed. They are not artistic representations of death
but the ‘sacred grounds’ that architect Peter Eisenman referred to. On his website,
Loznitsa reflects on why he decided to make his unusual and disconcerting film.

What am I doing here? What are all these people doing here, moving in
groups from one object to another?
The reason that induces thousands of people to spend their summer
weekends in the former concentration camp is one of the mysteries of these
memorial sites. One can refer to the good will and the desire to sense com-
passion and mercy that Aristotle associated with tragedy. But this explana-
tion doesn’t solve the mystery. Why a love couple or a mother with her child
goes on a sunny summer day to look at the ovens in a crematorium?
To try to come to grips with this, I made this film.
(www.loznitsa.eu)

In Loznitsa’s black and white film, we, the viewers, watch visitors as they observe
the remains of the camp, listen to tour guides and visit exhibitions. In recent
years, mass tourism has combined with a growing interest in places of violent
history. Dark tourism is linked with the growing desire to travel, learn from state-
sponsored violence and discover something new. (Lennon and Foley 2000; Stone
2018). Loznitsa’s film is unsettling to watch because as viewers, we eavesdrop and
follow visitors touring the concentration camp site. Austerlitz does not document
the concentration camps from the perspective of survivors, curators or historians.
Instead, we follow tourists who visit concentration camp memorials in group tours
or as individuals. In an interview with The New York Times, Loznitsa remarked:

The people who came to these places 40 years ago came with a different
purpose than people now. . . . Now, people don’t remember, and some-
times I think they don’t even understand where they are and what the
places are about.

When reflecting on his earlier visit to Buchenwald, Loznitsa asks:

I realized, in front of the crematorium, that I was myself like a tourist. . . .

And at the same time, I thought, ‘how can I be? How can I stay there?’ It
was like in a Kafka novel. I can’t be in this place. . . . And my question is:
How can we keep memory? Is it possible in general to share this memory?
(Loznitsa quoted in Rapold 2016)

Austerlitz foregrounds the impossibility of understanding how concentration

camps could have been built and utlilised for mass death. For Loznitsa, it is
important to remember the complexity of the Holocaust and he wonders how
such experience can be shared by people who did not experience the Holocaust or
Second World War. While Marianne Hirsch argues that children of Holocaust vic-
tims may remember vicariously events from the war as ‘postmemory’ or that mass
media technologies may induce what Alison Landsberg refers to as ‘prosthetic
120  Looking back after 1989
memory’ in museum exhibitions and re-enactments of the past, Loznitsa is less
optimistic (Hirsch 2012; Landsberg 2004, 2015). In particular, he is wary of the
commodification of the past with the speed of everyday life, tourism and pho-
tography. His film Austerlitz asks whether the gap between generations may be
too great for visual media to bridge. Combining the function of memorial and
museum, concentration camp sites use film, photography and recorded testimony
to help visitors understand what happened. As Arnold-de Simine suggests, Holo-
caust museums not only represent factual information but instil empathy in visi-
tors, as well as identification with the victims of the concentration camps. ‘The
ethical imperative to remember is taken to its literal extreme: visitors are asked
to identify with other people’s pain, adopt their memories, empathize with their
suffering, reenact and work through their traumas’ (Arnold-de Simine 2013:1). By
appealing to affective sentiments and identification as well as facts and histori-
cal truth, concentration memorial museums attempt to bring the past to life for
younger generations.
Loznitsa’s film does not use voice-over or a narrator; rather, as the audience,
we observe how visitors look and act in concentration camp memorials. Whether
viewing families with teenage children, couples, friends or large groups, the film
depicts the constant movement of people, talking and posing for pictures. Listen-
ing to recorded information or simply walking and looking, waves of individuals
constantly move amidst the preserved camp site. As they stand in line waiting to
enter a building or see an exhibit, there is the overwhelming presence of other
people walking in a kind of trance-like state. Austerlitz captures the quotidian
habits of visitors as they look intently, drink, eat, talk, sit, wait and look around.
The mood alternates between introspection and distraction.
Austerlitz demonstrates that the most popular place for people to take photo-
graphs is at the camp gates. Selfies taken at the gate marked Arbeit macht frei are
indicative of the reflex to document that one has visited an iconic place. Over and
over again, the film pauses at the crowds entering and leaving the camp gates.
Selfies taken at the gates, photographs of loved ones before or behind the gates –
and always with the inclusion of the words, ‘Arbeit macht frei.’ As visitors stand
in line to see the crematoria, some take photographs, others walk on. One visitor
even posed in front of the crematoria for a photograph. The trance-like movement
of the crowd then resumes until the exit is reached for a final photogenic moment
at the gates of the camp. Like Roland Barthes, Loznitsa seeks to understand the
power of a particular photograph. For Barthes, photography vacillates between
two extremes: studium and punctum. If studium indicates the intention of the pho-
tographer as the study of a certain landscape, place or person, the punctum is what
emanates from the picture itself. The punctum pierces or cuts through the studied
arrangement of the photograph. It is the punctum that draws or repels us to look
at a photograph.
For Loznitsa, like Shapira, one should approach former concentration camp
sites with reverence and respect. One is expected to behave differently at a memo-
rial commemorating death than at a theme park or national building. ‘I think it
 Being and not being there  121
must be like a church’ (Loznitsa quoted in Rapold 2016). Indeed, the filmmaker’s
website raises the questions underlying the entire film:

There are places in Europe that have remained as painful memories of the
past – factories where humans were turned into ash. These places are now
memorial sites that are open to the public and receive thousands of tourists
every year. The film’s title refers to the eponymous novel written by W. G.
Sebald, dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust. This film is an observa-
tion of the visitors to a memorial site that has been founded on the territory
of a former concentration camp. Why do they go there? What are they look-
ing for?
(www.loznitsa.eu)

Loznitsa raises pertinent questions about how to understand the twentieth cen-
tury as an age of extremes and state-sponsored violence. What motivates people
to visit places of past violence and suffering? Can concentration camp memorials
serve as points of reflection and moral transformation? For some, the visit may
be personally connected to family history. For others, it might be an occasion to
learn about recent history.
As Yolocaust and Austerlitz demonstrate, the context of what individuals see
and remember matters. Memorials, museums and former concentration camps
are material and ghostly traces of twentieth-century European history. At both the
Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and former concentration camps in Dachau and
Sachsenhausen, the viewer reflects on past events that are represented in archi-
tecture, historical narrative and the physical remains of a camp. Moreover, the
viewer learns of the suffering and death of others – whether designed abstractly in
the Holocaust Memorial or displayed realistically in museum exhibits. Whether
portrayed abstractly, figuratively or realistically, the historical event that is rep-
resented remains the same – the mass murder of Jews in the twentieth century
on European soil. Both memorials and memorial museums share an aura of
sacredness because they commemorate the dead and reflect on the link between
generations.

Irony and detachment

In the nineteenth century, Nietzsche cautioned against the excess of history.
While monumental history glorifies and mythologises past events, antiquarian
history preserves their authenticity. Critical history, on the other hand, is an atti-
tude of judgment that makes a sharp distinction between past and present. When
taken to excess, the link between past and present is severed so that the present
generation disregards its connection to the previous one. Nietzsche underscored
that each historical sense distorts the past and damages the present in different
ways. In addition to Nietzsche’s three kinds of historical sense, his reflections on
ironic historical consciousness capture the distancing of individuals from the very
places they came to visit.
122  Looking back after 1989
It may appear surprising but should not be thought contradictory if despite
the age’s noisy, obtrusive and carefree rejoicing about its historical culture I
nevertheless ascribe a kind of ironical self-consciousness to it, a pervasive
inkling that there is no cause for rejoicing, a fear that perhaps all enjoyment
of historical knowledge will soon be gone.
(Nietzsche 1980: 43)

Nietzsche calls attention to the contradiction of historical progress and deca-

dence, of optimism for an enlightened future and recognition of its violent short-
comings. An ironic attitude towards the past take a step back from the present.
However, to what extent might irony move from playfulness or disengagement
from history? Might an excess of irony lead to cynicism and fatalism towards the
future?

Hard by the pride of modern man we find his irony about himself, his aware-
ness that he must live in a historicizing and, as it were, evening mood, his fear
of being unable to save for the future any of his youthful hopes and youthful
strength.
(Ibid: 49)

As Nietzsche points out, it is a short step from irony to cynicism. ‘He who cannot
endure irony flees into the comfort of cynicism of this kind’ (Ibid).
Some selfies and photographs taken at Holocaust memorials are examples of
ironic detachment from the very places that individuals visit. Moreover, as Yolo-
caust demonstrated, the playfulness of hashtags indicates not only the desire to
share an experience with others but the lightness of the moment. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, irony is: ‘A figure of speech in which the intended
meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used; usually taking the
form of sarcasm or ridicule in which laudatory expressions are used to imply
condemnation or contempt.’ As a rhetorical device, irony moves between two
meanings – that which is on the surface or visible and an underlying meaning. In
everyday language, irony is often used as a synonym for cynicism, dark humour
and detachment. Although the decision to visit a memorial commemorating the
Holocaust may indicate historical interest in the past, selfies and photographs may
suspend our presence in the moment into one of irony or detachment. The social
media of smart phones and selfies, in conjunction with mass tourism, alter one’s
presence at a memorial. In looking for the perfect snapshot and selfie, lived expe-
rience is rendered secondary to the photogenic moment. Yolocaust and Austerlitz
express different ways of encountering the past at memorial sites commemo-
rating the Holocaust ranging from ironic detachment to moral blindness and
obsession. Social media and mass tourism underscore the fleeting moment as a
photogenic one to be shared with others or archived in one’s digital photo album.
When reflecting on individual detachment from the world, Zygmunt Bauman
and Leonidis Donskis argue that the pace of modern life fosters indifference and
numbness. In Moral Blindness: The loss of sensitivity in liquid modernity, they
 Being and not being there  123
define moral blindness as adiaphoria or a kind of numb indifference close to anes-
thesia. ‘The liquid modern variety of adiaphorization is cut after the pattern of the
consumer-commodity relation, and its effectiveness relies on the transplantation
of that pattern to interhuman relations’ (Bauman and Donskis 2013: 15). Drawing
from Emmanuel Levinas, Bauman argues that ethics begins with the face of the
other. To be human means to live with others, not to remove oneself from them.
Indeed, adiaphoria is akin to Georg Simmel’s ‘blasé attitude’ that accompanies
people living in large cities. It is also a kind of ‘compassion fatigue’ (Ibid: 42).
‘The term “adiaphoria” does not mean “unimportant,” but “irrelevant” or better
still “indifferent” or “equanimous’” (Ibid: 40).
Obsession, on the other hand, is the opposite of adiaphoria. If moral blindness
denotes indifference to the plight of others, obsession is a fixation on particular
historical events. Saul Friedlander criticised the obsessive hold of Nazism on the
public imagination in his book, Reflections on Nazism, an Essay on Kitsch and
Death. It is particularly in mass culture that Nazi imagery, mythology and sym-
bolism retain an obsessive fixation in popular culture. Indeed, for him, part of this
obsession lies with the equation of Nazism with evil.

For the contemporary imagination, Nazism has become one of the supreme
metaphors, that of Evil. It is nourished by memory, by scientific inquiry, by
art. . . . One feels, here and there, the return of a fascination.
(Friedlander 1993: 119–120)

Concluding thoughts
Key to our humanity is respect for the dead – whether in an actual graveyard or
commemorative memorial that serves as a grave in the air for those denied proper
burial. The playfulness of selfies with their corresponding commentary breaks
into the reflective space intended by memorials. One need not remain for long in
the slow time of commemoration but linger long enough to reflect on what hap-
pened in the past. Yolocaust and Austerlitz encourage viewers to stop and think
about where they are, to be present rather than to view each experience from the
mediated perspective of a possible photograph. It is not simply that we should
put down our devices but rather be mindful of the power that the camera as a
mediating filter between the self and the memorials that we visit. We experience
and share the world differently through the mediation of a camera. In looking for
the desired photograph or perfect selfie, there is the tendency to project ourselves
forward into a near future that may inadvertently lead to our removal from the
very place we came to visit.
Although commemorative culture may change with technological advances,
memorials and museums recall the Holocaust so that the living generation can
learn about the past, honour the dead, and strive to prevent future violence. While
selfies and mass tourism raise the older question of the aesthetic and ethical limits
of representation from a new perspective, the particular context of visiting his-
torical sites continues to matter. When visiting a Holocaust memorial or former
124  Looking back after 1989
concentration camp, social habits of new media encourage that we document,
comment and share our experience. However, as Yolocaust and Austerlitz dem-
onstrate, because social media accentuates the present and immediate future, it
is tempting to disconnect and place ourselves in ironic juxtaposition to what
we see. Being conscious of history entails an awareness of being with the dead
and living with their spectral presence. Memorials and museums are built in order
to interrupt the ordinary flow of time. They are intended to provide occasion for
reflection on past historical events and people, who, although no longer alive,
continue to influence the present. Holocaust memorials and former concentration
camps are sacred spaces in which visitors can reflect on individuals who were
murdered in a not-so-distant past by people who were not so different from us and
whose absence continues to haunt the present.

Notes
1 In 1990, Saul Friedlander convened a conference to discuss the limits of representation
of the Holocaust across the disciplines. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism
and the ‘final solution’ (1992) raised the question of how to represent the historical expe-
rience of the Holocaust in fiction and non-fiction. Are there limits within the structure of
language itself when the subject matter defies aesthetic beauty? Can one really convey
the violent experience of historical events, or do they remain private? Stemming from
Adorno’s dictum that there could be no poetry written after Auschwitz, the conference
examined the ethical and aesthetic aspects of representation. If historian Martin Broszat
argued for the historisation of Nazi Germany, Friedlander emphasised the uniqueness of
the Holocaust as an historical event. During and after the conference, there were con-
troversial representations of the Holocaust that provoked various responses, most nota-
bly the American TV series, Holocaust (1978), Art Spiegelman’s graphic novels Maus
(1980–1991), Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) and Roberto Benigni’s film Life
is Beautiful (1997). However, the genres of a TV series, graphic novel and film did not
inspire indifference or moral blindness, but just the opposite: they raised historical inter-
est in the Holocaust for a younger generation. The ethical, aesthetic and philosophical
impasses of how to convey the Holocaust within the context of a digital mass-mediated
world in the twenty-first century are the subjects of The Ethics of Holocaust Culture
edited by Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner (2016), a book dedicated
to revisiting Friedlander’s original theme on the limits of representation. Although the
parameters may shift in a digital age, the question of how to reflect on, respond to and
understand the Holocaust remains as pertinent as ever.
2 Shahak Shapira is not the first person to call attention to selfies taken at Holocaust
memorials. In 2014, Breanna Mitchell tweeted a selfie on Twitter: ‘Selfie in the Aus-
chwitz Concentration Camp’ that was found on the Internet and retweeted, and Mitchell
became the subject of online shaming (Gunter 2017). In 2019, visitors to the Auschwitz
concentration camp memorial were asked to stop taking selfies and photographs of
themselves balancing on the railway lines into the camp. ‘Auschwitz Visitors Urged Not
to Balance on Railway Tracks for Photos.’ BBC News, 20 March 2019. www.bbc.com/
news/world-europe-47644553
3 For a nuanced discussion of visitors interacting with the Holocaust Memorial, see Irit
Dekel, Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (Palgrave 2013). Also see her
reaction to Shapira’s art project in an “Let Action in Holocaust Memorials open a Discus-
sion instead of Shaming on the Yolocaust Selfies Project” (2017). http://theconversation.
 Being and not being there  125
com/let-action-in-holocaust-memorials-open-a-discussion-instead-of-shaming-on-the-
yolocaust-selfies-project-71953.
4 See “‘The Grave in the Air”: Unbound Metaphors in Post-Holocaust Poetry’ by Sidra
DeKoven Erzahi in Probing the Limit of Representation for insightful reflections on the
importance of Celan’s poetry after Adorno’s dictum that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz
is barbaric.’

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Arnold-de Simine, Silke. 2013. Mediating Modernity in the Museum: Trauma, Empathy
and Nostalgia. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Baer, Alejandro and Natan Sznaider. 2017. Memory and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust
Era: The Ethics of Never Again. (Abingdon: Routledge).
Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Richard Howards,
trans. (New York: Hill and Wang).
Bauman, Zygmunt and Leonidas Donskis. 2013. Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity
in Liquid Modernity. (London: Polity Books).
Benjamin, Walter. 1968. ‘The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction’, in
Hannah Arendt, ed. and Harry Zohn, trans., Illuminations. (New York: Schocken Books),
pp. 217–250.
Celan, Paul. 1992. ‘DeathsFugue’, John Felstiner, trans. in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing
the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
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Debord, Guy. 1983 [1967]. The Society of the Spectacle. (Detroit, MI: Black and Red).
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holocaust-memorials-open-a-discussion-instead-of-shaming-on-the-yolocaust-selfies-
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als’, Huffington Post, 23 January. www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/yolocaust-holocaust-
memorial-selfie_us_588602a7e4b096b4a232e386 (Accessed 12 October 2017).
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Solution. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Friedlander, Saul. 1993 [1984]. Reflections on Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death.
Thomas Weyr, trans. (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press).
Gunter, Joel. 2017. ‘“Yolocaust”: How Should You Behave at a Holocaust Memorial?’, BBC
News, 20 January. www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38675835 (Accessed 16 October 2017).
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8 Lenin’s haunted house
Ghosts and political theology

Much has changed since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. An empire
has vanished from the maps, while economic and social changes have proceeded
quickly but unevenly. Yet in spite of such turbulence, one of the most iconic
places of Soviet memory still remains. Vladimir Lenin, the first leader of the
Soviet Union, died in 1924 and has been lying in an open coffin in the centre of
Moscow for over ninety years.1 If the grave marks the passage from life to death –
what could a body that is perpetually waiting for burial signify? Furthermore, if
the regime that the leader founded no longer exists, why is Lenin still revered as a
modern-day relic? After all, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was not just any leader but
the first leader of the Soviet Union and father of the October Revolution.
Before he died Lenin asked to be buried in a cemetery next to his mother in
Petrograd. Immediately after his death opinions were divided as to where and how
to bury him. Although Lenin’s widow was opposed to embalmment and public
viewing in Red Square, Stalin prevailed. Lenin’s body was embalmed and pre-
pared for his unusual afterlife in the mausoleum. The idea of a temporary mau-
soleum changed in an unprecedented way when the Funeral Commission was
renamed the Commission for the Immortalization of the Memory of Vladimir
Ulyanov Lenin. With this bureaucratic change in July 1924, Lenin’s body was
transformed from being prepared for burial to having his remains preserved for
immortality, remembrance and veneration. The Mausoleum, which was the focus
of disagreement about how to deal with Lenin’s body, assumed a life of its own
in the power vacuum that immediately followed his death.2 After Stalin’s death in
1953, his body was also embalmed and interred next to that of Lenin. However,
after Nikita Khrushchev’s speech in 1956 denouncing Stalin, his etched name
was removed from the marble façade of the Mausoleum, and he was buried at a
gravesite in front of the Kremlin wall in 1961. As the literal embodiment of state
sovereignty, the preservation of Lenin’s body demonstrates the uneven pattern
of commemorating and dealing with the Soviet past in contemporary Russia. As
a long-standing artefact on the necropolis of Red Square, the Mausoleum is an
iconic part of the memorial landscape of the capital city.
Remarkably durable, Lenin’s remains have survived the various permuta-
tions of the Soviet empire and its subsequent collapse. With the exception of his
removal for safekeeping during the Great Patriotic War and regular periods of
128  Looking back after 1989
re-embalming, Lenin’s preserved body has resided continuously in the Mauso-
leum since his death.3 Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first,
Lenin lives. The gravesite is more than a Soviet curiosity for the occasional tourist;
it signifies the difficulty of coming to terms with the past in contemporary Rus-
sia. Lenin’s Mausoleum exemplifies three interconnected patterns of post-Soviet
memory: (1) warped mourning for the victims of communism; (2) the grave as a
sacred and haunted place of memory; and (3) the political theology of the Soviet
and post-Soviet state. Although it was possible to bury Stalin’s embalmed remains
in 1961, burying Lenin proves to be more difficult because his removal from Red
Square entails a rethinking of the October Revolution of 1917, Leninism, the role
of the Communist Party and the creation of the Soviet Union.

Warped mourning for the victims of communism

Collective memory, as understood by Maurice Halbwachs, is linked to the com-
plex ways that people interact with a collective – be it family, religion or nation.
Moreover, collective memory is a social construction or sense of belonging to past
events linked to particular groups and generations. Without discussion of trauma,
Halbwachs appealed to the past as a repository of tradition, habits, customs and
mores that are passed from one generation to the next. In his writings on ‘Reli-
gious Collective Memory’ and ‘The Legendary Topography of the Gospels in the
Holy Land,’ he paid specific attention to the sacredness of certain places, totems,
churches and temples (1992: 84–119, 193–235). However, it was Pierre Nora who
underscored how specific sites possess a particular aura to draw individuals into
moments of collective reflection and commemoration. ‘Certain broad categories
of the genre stand out: anything having to do with the cult of the dead, the national
heritage, or the presence of the past can be considered a lieu de mémoire’ (Nora
1992: 16).
Alexander Etkind expands on key ideas of collective memory for the unique
and complex terrain of post-Soviet Russia.4 What distinguishes his scholarship is
his comparison of post-war German and post-Soviet patterns of remembrance. As
he outlines in his book, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of
the Unburied (2013), there are important differences in how victims are remem-
bered and mourned in the two countries. If Germany’s transition from fascism
to democracy entailed defeat, division, occupation and criminal trials, Russia’s
transition to democracy has taken different paths that include collapse, implosion,
popular uprising and reinvention of the sovereign state.5 As Etkind writes: ‘Unlike
the treatment of former Nazi officials in Germany, no professional ban was ever
instated for former leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, let alone
its rank-and-file members’ (2013: 10). While the Nazi Party is characterised as a
criminal organisation, the Communist Party is linked with a worker’s movement,
social justice and emancipation. Moreover, since part of the moral and political
legitimation of the Soviet Union was anchored in the Great Patriotic War and the
communist struggle against fascism, comparisons between the state-sponsored
violence of the USSR and Nazi Germany are often met with fierce resistance.
 Lenin’s haunted house  129
Taking his cue from Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich’s (1975) study of the inabil-
ity to mourn the Nazi past in post-war Germany, Etkind traces a post-Soviet
‘inability to mourn’ similar to that of West Germany during the 1960s. ‘It is not
historical knowledge that is at issue but its interpretation. Sociological surveys
reveal a complex picture of a people who retain a vivid memory of the Soviet ter-
ror but are divided in their interpretation of this memory’ (2013: 207). Hence, the
memory of Lenin as father of the Russian Revolution and founder of the Soviet
Union is distinguished from the memory of Stalin, associated with terror, the
Gulag, modernisation and the Great Patriotic War. ‘If the Nazi Holocaust was
ended and exposed by others, the Soviet terror was ended and exposed by its for-
mer perpetrators, who were also its potential victims’ (Ibid: 35–36).
Etkind argues that post-Soviet Russia is characterised by a particular type of
mourning that does not free the person but is instead distorted by lack of state rec-
ognition of the people who suffered under communism. State recognition of com-
munist crimes, while not entirely absent from post-Soviet Russia, is distorted and
expressed in mixed messages. For example, since 30 October 1991, the Day of
Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions commemorates those who
suffered during the Soviet Union. The Gulag History State Museum was founded
ten years later in 2001 and opened to the public in 2004 (Gulag History Museum).
The 30-metre long Wall of Grief, commemorating victims of Soviet repression
alongside Moscow’s central ring road, was dedicated on 30 October 2017. And
yet the first monument to Ivan the Terrible was inaugurated in October 2016 in the
town of Oryol, with the support of the Russian Orthodox Church, and in Novem-
ber 2016 President Putin unveiled the monument to Vladimir the Great at the
Kremlin, accompanied by the mayor of Moscow and Natalya Solzhenitsyna, the
widow of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Walker 2016; Agence France-Presse 2016).
Etkind’s concept of ‘warped mourning’ is derived from the Freudian distinction
between trauma and mourning.

As Sigmund Freud classically defined it, mourning is an active, realistic and

healthy process. . . . Trauma is a response to a condition that had been experi-
enced by the self; mourning is a response to a condition of the other.
(Etkind 2013: 14).

Central to both mourning and trauma is the repetition and return to past events
that haunt the present.

If the suffering is not remembered, it will be repeated. If the loss is not

recognized, it threatens to return in strange though not entirely new forms,
as the uncanny. When the dead are not properly mourned, they turn into the
undead and cause trouble for the living.
(Ibid: 16–17)

As Etkind emphasises, warped and distorted mourning includes a ‘magical histori-

cism’ of ghosts, spectres and the undead (2013: 220–248). In a similar vein, Sergei
130  Looking back after 1989
Alex Oushakine portrays post-Soviet society as one marked by the loss of empire,
habits of daily life and social orientation. The sense of belonging to the Soviet
Union has morphed into what he terms ‘the patriotism of despair’:

The abandoning of old institutions and the erasing of the most obvious trace
of Communist ideology did not automatically produce an alternative uni-
fying cultural, political, or social framework. As a result, the trope of loss
turned out to be the most effective symbolic device, one capable of translat-
ing people’s Soviet experience into the post-Soviet context.
(2009: 1–2)

While ‘the trope of loss’ may engender nostalgia and disorientation, the break-up
of the Soviet Union has also emboldened civil society, human rights groups and
protest movements (Gabowitsch 2016). For example, at the grassroots level, the
work of Memorial Society, an organisation and research centre for the remem-
brance of victims of communism, monitors human rights abuses and campaigns
for a legal accounting of the Soviet past. On the eve of the official Day of Remem-
brance (29 October), Memorial Society organises ‘The Reading of the Names’ at
the Solovetsky Stone to victims of the Gulag in front of the former KGB building
in Moscow. With readers taking turns, the reading of the names lasts for hours. The
chairman of Memorial, Arseny Roginsky, argued for the simple clarity of read-
ing of names of individual people. ‘It is about people. It is opposing the memory
of the state and its glory’ (Roginsky quoted in Litvinova 2016). Hence, although
there is a national day to commemorate the victims of political oppression on 30
October in contemporary Russia, official recognition of the criminal nature of the
Soviet regime remains distorted and twisted.
In 2012, a law was passed requiring all independent groups to register as ‘for-
eign agents’ if they receive any foreign funding or engage in any sort of political
activity in Russia. In October 2014, the Justice Ministry applied to the Supreme
Court to dissolve Memorial Society. It was only after pressure from international
human rights groups and intervention by the Council of Europe that the Justice
Ministry withdrew its application to dissolve the society (Denber 2016). In addi-
tion, the label of foreign agent has sharply curtailed the activities of Perm-36, a
memorial museum dedicated to victims of the Gulag (Ibid). The suppression of
citizen initiatives such as Memorial Society and Perm-36 Museum, dedicated to
the victims of communist oppression, in conjunction with the continued venera-
tion of Lenin’s grave indicate the warped complexity of coming to terms with the
Soviet past in contemporary Russia.
Mourning for the first leader of the Soviet Union functions as a screen memory
hiding his legitimation of state violence for the sake of revolution. Freud’s defini-
tion for the uncanny is one that is familiar and yet at the same time unfamiliar:

This is the fact that an uncanny effect often arises when the boundary between
fantasy and reality is blurred, when we are faced with the reality of something
 Lenin’s haunted house  131
that we have until now considered imaginary, when a symbol takes on the full
function and significance of what it symbolizes, and so forth.
(Freud 2003 [1919]: 150)

In venerating the sacred image of Lenin as a quasi-godlike sovereign, the criminal

nature of the Soviet regime is obscured.

Such a memory, whose value consists in the fact that it represents thoughts
and impressions from a later period and that its content is connected with
these by links of a symbolic or similar nature, is what I would call a screen
memory.
(Ibid: 15)

Instead, the ritual of a prolonged period of state mourning suspends Lenin’s body
in between revolutionary time and that of post-Soviet Russia. At present, Lenin
is waiting for burial yet is viewed as if buried in an open coffin. Lying in state,
in an extended wake of more than 90 years, Lenin’s body has a ghostly liminal
presence.

The grave as a sacred and haunted place of memory

Graves are one of the most primal places of memory, linking generations together
and re-enforcing the social need to commemorate the dead. From individual
gravesites to war cemeteries and tombs of the unknown soldier the grave contains
the remains of the dead. Although many statues to Lenin have been torn down,
Lenin’s Mausoleum is different. As a grave with human remains, it is not easy to
dismantle or relocate. Hans Ruin has written about the cultural meanings ascribed
to the grave as a place that connects the living and the dead in the philosophical
work of Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida. In particular, he links Hegel’s analysis of
spirit to rituals of burial, commemoration and memorials (Ruin 2019). Because
burial occurs at the crystallisation and intersection of the individual and the col-
lective, Hegel’s interpretation of Antigone is relevant for clarifying the responsi-
bility of the present generation to the dead (Ruin 2015: 133). For Hegel, Antigone
personifies the conflict between the needs of the state and those of family and
religion. As a sister, she feels obligated to bury the body of her brother. As a citi-
zen of Thebes, however, she is bound to follow the orders of the king. The grave
is the physical link between the individual and the collective, between ethical and
political obligations. Indeed, as Ruin argues: ‘Hegel’s account of the compulsion
to bury the dead provides the most elaborated attempt to forge what we would call
a speculative, secular-philosophical theory of the meaning of burial’ (Ibid: 132).
Antigone’s decision to bury her brother against the will of King Creon under-
scores the taboo against leaving a body without a respectful burial. Because Poly-
nices is cast as a traitor to the city of Thebes, Creon forbids his burial. ‘No, he
must be left unburied, his corpse / carrion for the birds and dogs to tear / an
132  Looking back after 1989
obscenity for the citizens to behold’ (Sophocles 1982: 229–231). Creon argues for
the primacy of the collective before the individual. ‘And whoever places a friend /
above the good of his own country, he is nothing: / I have no use for him’ (Ibid:
lines 203–205). Antigone, on the other hand, interprets Creon’s command as an
unjust one that dishonours the gods: ‘He’s to be left unwept, unburied, a lovely
treasure/for birds that scan the field and feast to their heart’s content’ (Ibid: lines
35–36).
The clash between the kinship of family and state is magnified by Antigone’s
plea for a higher sense of justice beyond that of the earthly sovereign. ‘Your wis-
dom appealed to one world – mine another’ (Ibid: line 626). Sophocles’ Antigone
demonstrates that burial is a kind of ethical command for justice. Hegel under-
stands the conflict in the tragedy as between human and divine law.

Neither of the two is alone self-complete. Human law as a living and active
principle proceeds from the divine, the law holding on earth from that of the
nether world, the conscious from the unconscious, mediation from immediacy;
and returns to whence it came. The power of the nether world, on the other
hand, finds its realization upon earth; it comes through consciousness to have
existence and efficacy.
(Hegel 2003: 264)

Lenin’s Mausoleum presents Antigone’s problem with a distinct twist, because,

unlike her brother’s body, Lenin is artificially prevented from decomposing. Part
of the tragedy lay in how to respond to the command to leave a body unburied and
open to desecration. Antigone demanded a dignified burial for her brother’s body.
But Lenin’s Mausoleum is shrouded in respect and piety, with scientists artifi-
cially arresting the natural process of decay on behalf of the state. Moreover, the
Mausoleum, with its artificial suspension of natural decay, goes against Lenin’s
private wish to be buried next to his mother. Lenin unburied body is an example of
what Etkind describes as ‘the undead,’ and it is linked to the incomplete transition
to democracy in contemporary Russia.

If the second and third generations live on the same territory where the
catastrophe happened; if the political regime on this territory, despite hav-
ing gone through multiple transformations since the catastrophe, remains
ambiguous in its treatment of the catastrophic past; if the perpetrators are not
condemned, the victims not compensated, the criminal institutions are not
banned, the monuments are not built – the postmemory of the catastrophe
acquires intense and peculiar forms.
(Etkind 2013: 42)

Derrida’s attention to the unintended ways that the past haunts the present is
relevant for understanding how the commemoration of Lenin’s role in the Soviet
Union is a complex mixture of restoration, borrowing, rupture and continu-
ity. Complementing the work of Etkind and Oushakine, Derrida reflects on the
 Lenin’s haunted house  133
spectral legacy of Karl Marx and the relationship between past and present gen-
erations. Of particular importance is Derrida’s argument that living in the present
means living with the inheritance of the past. ‘And this being-with-specters
would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of gen-
erations’ (1994: xviii–xix). In reflecting on the complex legacy of Marx, Derrida
suggests there is a different kind of relation to the past. If ontology is concerned
with presence and existence, hauntology focuses on the presence of that which
is absent.

All the questions on the subject of being or of what is to be (or not to be) are
questions of inheritance. . . . That we are heirs does not mean that we have
or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day
with this or that, but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance,
whether we like it or know it or not.
(Ibid: 54)

Since we are heirs to the past, the way in which the past is received is very much
open to interpretation. We do not choose when we are born. Our sense of self is
first of all an inheritance. Citing Marx as a rich example of hauntology, Derrida
calls attention to the ghostly presence of the past in Marx’s own writing, particu-
larly in the Communist Manifesto. ‘A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of
Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to
exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals
and German police-spies’ (Marx and Engels 1978: 473). Derrida’s hauntology
involves spectres, ghosts, revenants and spooks. While different, they all belong
to the family of beings who are not fully present among the living. Indeed, for
Derrida, Lenin’s body is just such a spectre.

As in the work of mourning, after a trauma, the conjuration has to make sure
that the dead will not come back: quick, do whatever is needed to keep the
cadaver localized, in a safe place, decomposing right where it was inhumed,
or even embalmed as they liked to do in Moscow.
(Derrida 1994: 97)

Lenin is the heir to Marx, while the spectre of Marxism can be juxtaposed
to that of Leninism. The spectre is a ‘paradoxical incorporation’ that is neither
wholly body nor spirit (Ibid: 6). It is a kind of apparition or conjuring. As Der-
rida notes: ‘One does not know if it is living or if it is dead’ (Ibid). And therein
lies the problematic nature of Lenin’s body, as it is suspended between life and
death. Traditionally, an open coffin is the last instance when mourners bid fare-
well before burial or cremation. However, visitors to Lenin’s Mausoleum have
been in a state of distorted and warped mourning for over decades. Instead of
burial, his artificially preserved body has become a life-like hybrid monument, a
pure sign and symbol.
134  Looking back after 1989
Marx himself was no stranger to the power of a haunted past. The Eighteenth
Brumaire is full of ruminations on a ghostly presence of the past and how the
French Revolution hovered over that of 1848.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they
do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circum-
stances directly encountered and inherited from the past. The tradition of all
the generations of the dead weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
(Marx 1978: 9)

Both the French and Russian revolutions restructured time with a revolutionary
calendar. Both changed the fabric of social life and ended in terror. If Robespierre
was beheaded, Lenin was embalmed and rendered immortal. As Marx continues
the passage, revolutionary change involves ‘borrowed language’ and conjuring of
‘spirits from the past’:

And just when they seem involved in revolutionizing themselves and things,
in creating something that has never before existed, it is precisely in such
periods of revolutionary crisis that they anxiously conjure up the spirits of
the past to their service and borrow names, battle cries and costumes from
them in order to act out the new scene of world history in this time-honoured
disguise and this borrowed language.
(Ibid: 9–10)

Derrida calls attention to how Marx understood historical time as the unpredict-
able afterlife and reinvention of ideas from the past (1994: 95–124). With respect
to Lenin, the very idea of a mausoleum is borrowed from Egypt, while sacred rel-
ics are Christian. Likewise, the cult of Leninism is a conjuring of spirits from the
past in order to shore up the continuity of the Soviet state. Not only does Lenin
haunt the mausoleum; Stalin’s presence looms large.
Lenin is not only venerated as the first leader of the Soviet Union but is sym-
bolically linked to the October Revolution of 1917 and the continuity of the Rus-
sian state with the Soviet Union. As Alexei Yurchak argues: ‘The political role
of Lenin’s preserved body goes far beyond that of propaganda’ (2015: 119). He
is associated with revolutionary time, a sacred rupture and new beginning. In
addition, Lenin is linked to the lineage of the state from Ivan the Terrible, to
Peter the Great, through Stalin and present-day Vladimir Putin. In its suspen-
sion of the natural process of decomposition, Lenin’s embalmed body partakes
of sacred time. His death is a Kairos or opportune moment interrupting ordinary
time. Moreover, the extraordinary circumstances of his afterlife link him with
religious relics and the immortal presence of the sovereign. Hindering the natural
process of decay and postponing the burial of the first leader of the Soviet Union
may even be the cause of paralysis in the public recognition of Lenin’s role in
communist repressions. Instead, his preserved body has become a state-sanctified
 Lenin’s haunted house  135
relic linked to the legitimation of the Soviet Union and its warped mourning for
communist repressions.

Political theology of the Soviet and post-Soviet state

The mythical cult of Lenin began in the 1920s, was briefly eclipsed by that of Sta-
lin and revived under Khrushchev. Although the Gulag camp system had earlier
precedents during tsarist Russia and reached unprecedented heights under Stalin,
members of the opposition were already imprisoned under Lenin. Indeed, Anne
Applebaum (2003) documents how the Soviet concentration camps of the Gulag
originated in the Russian revolution (2003: 3–4). By 1918, there were eighty-four
camps in forty-three provinces. Likewise, Richard Pipes argues that the myth of
Lenin as an intellectual ‘who resorted to cruelty only from necessity’ hid his role
in the foundation of the Gulag system in the Soviet Union (2014: 141).
Immediately after his death, Lenin’s Mausoleum functioned as a kind of ‘pil-
grimage site of the Lenin cult’ and was quickly associated with sovereignty
(Tumarkin 1997: 267). The Mausoleum was the iconic site for viewing parades,
especially those held to commemorate the October Revolution and Victory Day,
so that the spectral presence of Lenin accompanied Soviet leaders as they stood
at the tribune directly over his body. As Yurchak argues, Lenin’s embalmed body
‘literally transcended every individual body of party members, leaders, and even
Lenin himself; it was, in fact, the immortal body of the sovereign’ (2015: 147).
Russian Orthodox believers, like Catholics, venerate Jesus, Mary and many
saints. Relics, whether in the form of an intact body, parts of one, bones, teeth,
hair or clothing are considered immensely sacred. Often displayed in church reli-
quaries or embedded in altars, relics were a distinct aspect of European religion
during the middle ages. To be canonised, the person has to have performed a mir-
acle. In the spirit of Carl Schmitt’s political theology, Lenin’s exceptional deeds
were the October Revolution and the founding of the Communist Party in the
Soviet Union (Schmitt 1985 [1922]).
Tombs of unknown soldiers are gravesites remembering those whose remains
are unknown and serve as memorials to war and national identity.6 While the
modern secular state continues to sanctify relics with the internment of remains in
tombs of the unknown soldier, the cult of veneration surrounding Lenin’s Mauso-
leum is different. Nina Tumarkin traces the connection between the Russian ven-
eration of saints and the emerging cult of Lenin. As she pointed out, the cults of
Stalin, Mao Zhedong and Tito were ‘cults of a living leader’ (1997: 3). In contrast,
the cult of Lenin was anchored in his dead remains. The veneration of Lenin’s
embalmed body ‘was itself molded by precisely those elements of old Russian
culture that Lenin so desperately sought to destroy’ (Ibid). Not only did Russian
peasant culture venerate the remains of saints, it encompassed the rich Byzantine
tradition of icons. Moreover, in the Russian Orthodox religion, a person is con-
sidered a saint if their body does not decompose or putrefy. The fact that Lenin’s
body does not decompose but looks life-like has roots in cultural concepts of
136  Looking back after 1989
religion and death. Catherine Merridale emphasises the irony of Lenin’s public
embalmment.

Soviet power, which sought in so many ways to deny the power of death,
turned the heart of the capital, the ceremonial core of its government, into a
grave. . . . The empire was built upon the bones of a saint, and had used its
greatest mystery – technology – to ensure that the body would not corrupt.
(2000: 153)

Scientists at the Mausoleum Lab (Centre for Scientific Research and Teaching
Methods in Biochemical Technologies) preserve the physical remains of Lenin’s
body. While only his face, hands and dark suit are visible to the viewer, the Mau-
soleum group maintains the flexibility and life-like quality of Lenin’s body. Once
every 18 months, his body undergoes lengthy re-embalming procedures lasting
for up to two months – with treatments including attention to joints, hair and the
skeletal system. Throughout the decades, doctors have developed new techniques
for preserving his body, requiring regular re-embalming, baths and the substitu-
tion of organic material with artificial ones.
In his research, Yurchak unearths ‘the political role that Lenin’s body played
during the Soviet period, and, to some extent, continues to play today’ (Ibid: 119).
The scientific processes of embalmment and preservation by the special labora-
tory are linked to ideas of Soviet modernity and scientific ingenuity. Lenin has
‘a unique materiality’ (Ibid) which is different from other mummified political
leaders. If Egyptian mummies were deliberately enclosed as dry bodies into a
casket, the goal of the Lab is to preserve the life-like quality of Lenin’s body.
The artificial embalming and corporal adaptations have created a hybrid body
that is neither fully human nor artificial but something in between. Moreover,
the protracted period of state mourning has blossomed into a theatrical staging of
commemorative rituals.
During times of rapid political change, gravesites and statues of former leaders
become more prominent. In her research on post-communism, Katherine Verdery
studied the political significance of dead political leaders during times of transi-
tional change:

Statues are dead people cast in bronze or carved in stone. They symbolize a
specific famous person while in a sense also being the body of that person. By
arresting the process of that person’s bodily decay, a statue alters the tempo-
rality associated with the person, bringing him into the realm of the timeless
or the sacred, like an icon. For that reason, desecrating a statue partakes of the
larger history of iconoclasm.
(Verdery 1999: 5)

Removing a statue from the landscape disrupts the symbolic order of sacred and
profane. ‘Bodies have the advantage of concreteness that nonetheless transcends
time, making past immediately present’ (Ibid: 27). Scientists in the Mausoleum
 Lenin’s haunted house  137
Lab ‘activate’ some of Lenin’s joints and bathe his body in various liquids to the
degree that it has become neither fully organic nor artificial. It is something in-
between statue and body, as his ghostly presence has entered into the realm of a
relic and symbol. When speaking about their research, some doctors in the Mau-
soleum Lab referred to Lenin’s body as a kind of ‘anatomical image’ or ‘living
sculpture’ (quoted in Yurchak 2015: 128). As Yurchak notes: ‘This body both is
and is not a representation. The phrase “living sculpture” is meant to convey this
paradox, as if to say this is a sculpture of the body that is constructed out of the
body itself’ (Ibid). The attitude of those working on the preservation of Lenin’s
body bears a striking similarity to the aesthetic gaze of an artist towards a beauti-
ful artwork. And yet Lenin’s body is not art but the physical remains of a dead
political leader.
Lenin’s body exemplifies Ernst Kantorowicz (1997 [1957]) theory of the king’s
two bodies, according to which the sovereignty of West European monarchs was
linked to the physical body of the king. As the monarchy secularised, the legiti-
macy of the monarch was determined by family lineage and royal blood. In terms
of the divine right of kings, the body of a monarch consisted of the physical body
that existed in nature and the immortal one of the sovereign. When a king died,
his mortal body perished while the immortal one survived and passed to the next
person in line to the throne. The king’s spiritual body is a symbol of his office as
sovereign. Because kings have two bodies, their spiritual body transcends the suf-
fering and decay of the physical one. Kantorowicz’s theory of the sovereignty of
the state, as represented in the king’s two bodies during late medieval and early
Christian Europe, is central to Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben’s concep-
tion of biopolitics. The sovereign is the one who decides not only the exception
but on bare life. The sovereign has power over his two bodies, as well as over the
biological life of the population. Although in his later years Lenin was plagued
by illness, his sovereign spiritual body continues to defy physical destruction. He
does not putrefy. Moreover, the scientific preservation of Lenin’s body demon-
strates state control over life and death.
While agreeing with Kantorowicz Yurchak goes one step further, arguing that
‘a distinct political cosmology’ emerged, linking Lenin’s real body with ‘sover-
eign perpetuity’ (2015: 131–132). In this cosmology, ‘The Bolsheviks imagined
themselves heirs to the French Revolution who had created the ultimate modern
state, severing all links to Russia’s traditional past and opening itself completely
to the future’ (Ibid: 132). Lenin personified the break with the ancient regime, the
end to class oppression and the dawn of a revolutionary future. His embalmed
body is anchored in the eternal Communist Party and doctrine of Leninism as ‘the
locus of sovereign power’ (Ibid: 134).
The transformation of Lenin into a doctrine of Leninism coincided with his
embalming and spectral presence in the Mausoleum at Red Square. Leninism
meant the canonisation of Lenin’s writings and speeches, and their interpretation
in various contexts. Photographs, paintings, posters and statues of Lenin emerged
as secular icons linking the living person to the mythical foundation of the Soviet
Union. Lenin personified and embodied not only the Soviet Union – but even
138  Looking back after 1989
more importantly, the purity and orthodoxy of the Bolshevik Communist Party
that he founded. Indeed, Yurchak traces the progression from Lenin the leader
to the doctrine of Leninism. ‘In November 1923, Pravda wrote that Lenin was
not just “the name of a beloved leader” but something bigger – “a program,” “a
tactic,” “a philosophical world view” – in a word, Leninism’ (Ibid: 122). Politi-
cal sovereignty in the Soviet Union was legitimised by the Communist Party that
transcended individual heads of state. Moreover, the political foundation of the
Communist Party coincided with Leninism as a doctrine and foundational myth.
Immortalised in Mayakovsky’s poem ‘Lenin lives!’ the first Soviet leader had a
spectral presence in numerous aspects of Soviet life – from statues, busts, books,
commemorative holidays, pioneer groups, posters, parades, medals, cards and
calendars.
Comparing Stalin’s excess to Lenin’s devotion to the Communist Party, Khrush-
chev removed Stalin’s preserved remains from the Mausoleum. Khrushchev’s
decision to return to the purity of Lenin during the period of de-Stalinisation
conjured up Lenin’s spirit against Stalinist excess (Tumarkin 1997: 258–259).
Stalin had deviated from the foundational doctrine of Leninism and the spirit
of revolution. Lenin was higher than Stalin; hence his physical presence sug-
gested the continuity of state sovereignty and the Communist Party, regardless of
changes in political leadership. ‘The process of de-Stalinization that followed was
framed as a return to the true, undistorted Leninism, which allowed the party to be
disconnected from Stalin, survive the critique, and even re-emerge stronger than
before his rise to power’ (Yurchak 2015: 134).
The coup d’état in 1991, break-up of the Soviet Union and transition to democ-
racy left another power vacuum. After the city of Leningrad returned to its original
name of St Petersburg, Boris Yeltsin removed the honour guard from the Mauso-
leum and suggested Lenin’s burial in 1993. He tried again in 1997 to have Lenin
buried. Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, has not tried to remove or bury Lenin.
On the contrary, much of his presidency has been marked by self-conscious Rus-
sian exceptionalism, along with carefully crafted points of continuity with tsarist
Russia and the Soviet Union. In the year 2000, Putin restored the Soviet melody
to the Russian national anthem. In a speech to his political party, United Russia,
in 2006, he went so far as to define the Russian state as a ‘sovereign democracy.’
When Putin declared in 2005 that the break-up of the Soviet Union was ‘the great-
est geopolitical catastrophe’ of the twentieth century (Putin Deplores Collapse of
USSR, BBC 2005), Russia’s sovereign democracy was not only linked to tsarist
Russia and the Soviet Union as an empire but to Russian exceptionalism.
In 2001, Putin argued against the removal and burial of Lenin by suggesting
that because many people in the older generation continue to identify with Lenin
and Communism, his burial might dislodge their sense of stability. He noted that
burying Lenin would mean that they ‘had lived in vain’ (Putin quoted in Heintz
2005). In doing so, Putin effectively tapped into the loss of social and sym-
bolic orientation that Oushakine described as the ‘patriotism of despair.’ The
Mausoleum, like the Soviet melody to the Russian national anthem, maintains
 Lenin’s haunted house  139
national continuity and social stability during times of loss, difficult transition
and political change.
In contemporary Russia, legitimised by the Great Patriotic War and antifas-
cism, there is little political will to bury Lenin. In 2010, Putin again argued against
the removal of Lenin’s body from Red Square. During his presidential campaign
in 2012, he linked the preservation of Lenin’s body to traditions within the Ortho-
dox Church (Birnbaum 2013).

Many are saying that having Lenin’s Mausoleum runs counter to the tradi-
tion. But what runs counter to tradition? . . . Just go to Kiev Pechersk Lavra
or check out Pskov Monastery or Mount Athos. You’ll see the relics of
saints there.
(Putin quoted in Ponomareva 2012)

In his speech, Putin echoed the sentiment of the leader of Russia’s Communist
Party, Gennady Zyuganov, who argued that the preservation of Lenin’s body
‘complies with Orthodox canons and traditions.’ Appealing to the immense loss
of continuity after the fall of the Soviet Union, Putin called for a return ‘to our
historic roots.’ In a carefully scripted rhetorical question, Putin appealed to the
difficulty of post-Soviet life: ‘What happened after the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the dominant ideology? . . . We never got anything in its place.’ More-
over, he emphasised that the burial of Lenin was one of timing for the stability
of Russian society: ‘The time will come and the Russian people will decide what
to do’ (Ibid).
In 2011, a poll by the main Russian independent pollster, Levada Centre,
revealed that 40% of Russians were in favour of Lenin’s burial. In 2012, 56%
of respondents supported burying Lenin, while 28% wished for him to remain in
the Mausoleum. Vladimar Medinsky, the Cultural Minister of Putin’s own party,
United Russia, favoured burying Lenin in 2011: ‘Having him as a central figure
in a necropolis at the heart of our country is sheer nonsense’ (Medinsky quoted in
Ponomareva 2012). In 2011, Russian citizens were invited to vote on the Good-
bye Lenin website as to whether they wished for Lenin to remain or be removed.
(Kelly 2011; Goodbye Lenin 2011) The poll attracted votes from about 270,000
people, 70% of whom voted for his removal. Unsurprisingly, members of the
Communist Party oppose the movement to bury Lenin and wish to keep his body
embalmed on Red Square. As the second largest party in Russia, the Communist
Party of the Russian Federation, founded in 1993, is the successor to the Commu-
nist Party of the Soviet Union, which was banned by Boris Yeltsin in 1991.7 Given
the political support for the Communist Party and reverence towards Lenin as the
founder of the Soviet Union, Lenin’s Mausoleum straddles the different genera-
tions and political aspirations of the two main political parties in post-Soviet Rus-
sia: United Russia and the Communist Party.
At various occasions, Putin has underscored that he would not ‘take any steps
that would divide society’ (Associated Press 2016). The emphasis is on social and
140  Looking back after 1989
symbolic continuity rather than on rupture and dramatic change. The preserva-
tion of Lenin’s physical body is an example of the political sovereignty of tsarist
Russia and the Soviet Union. As Etkind argues, post-Soviet Russia ‘has turned
its tortured process of mastering the past into an important part of the political
present’ (2013: 244). Lenin’s venerated remains sustain the continuity of the Rus-
sian state throughout its various permutations as tsarist, Soviet and sovereign
democracy.
Since Lenin is not fully buried but awaiting burial, the arrested decay of his body
distorts and obfuscates coming to terms with the Soviet past. As Ruin writes: ‘In the
end, the grave is not a house for corpses, but a vehicle for spirits of the once liv-
ing’ (2015: 138). Unlike other post-communist countries that have removed most
of the street names and monuments commemorating communism, major Soviet
street names and monuments still remain in Russia.8 Streets named after Lenin
still serve as major points of orientation in the Russian landscape.9 Gagarin, Marx
and Engels continue to mark the contemporary Russian landscape in descending
order of frequency, but they are not nearly as popular as Lenin, October or Soviet
(Lichtfield 2015). Unique examples of warped memory in post-Soviet Russia are
visible in the chocolate heads of Lenin sold at the Chocolate Museum on Nevsky
Prospekt in St Petersburg. Prominently displayed in the gourmet shop windows
are expensive busts and heads of Lenin in various sizes ranging from dark to
white chocolate.10 As the street names, monuments, chocolate and Mausoleum
demonstrate, Lenin’s spectral presence continues to inscribe the physical space of
Russian everyday life.

Conclusion
Lenin’s Mausoleum is a haunting reminder of his political presence in the Russian
Revolution and founding of the Soviet Union. Given the acrimony surrounding
his unburied body, Derrida’s question strikes a fundamental chord in post-Soviet
Russia: What kind of responsibility does the present generation have to the past?
How should one care for the dead? Perhaps, after more than nine decades of state
veneration and mourning, it is time to heed the call of Antigone and bury Lenin.
Perhaps, the symbolic gesture of a quiet burial next to Stalin at the Kremlin wall
will open up the possibility of reckoning with Lenin’s long and complex legacy as
leader of the Communist Party and father of the Russian Revolution.
As a place of memory, Lenin’s Mausoleum is not only reminiscent of a haunted
house but is an example of warped mourning, political theology and deification of
the state. Lenin’s body is a venerated relic of the old regime and embodiment of
the continuity between the Soviet Union and the contemporary Russian state. In
light of the state suppression of citizen initiatives, Lenin’s Mausoleum exempli-
fies the distorted patterns of post-Soviet mourning and remembrance. The Mau-
soleum merges the functions of gravesite, place of memory and symbol of Soviet
state power. While there is indeed official recognition of repression during the
Soviet Union, as long as Lenin’s Mausoleum remains open, his role in this violent
repression is played down. His physical presence near the Kremlin highlights
 Lenin’s haunted house  141
veneration rather than critical reflection. Lenin’s Mausoleum is a haunting and
eerie reminder that the past is not at all past but has been rearranged according to
contemporary political interests. Moreover, the deification of Lenin as a revolu-
tionary relic prevents responses to the crimes committed during the Soviet Union.
If Soviet leaders could bury Stalin in 1961, they could not bury Lenin because
of his founding role in the 1917 Revolution and the canonisation of Leninism
as a doctrine. The first leader of the Soviet Union has an unusual afterlife. He is
undead.

Notes
1 Lenin is one of five leaders embalmed for visitors to view and mourn. Other mum-
mified leaders include: North Korean leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jon II, Chinese
nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen, Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong and Vietnam’s
communist leader, Ho Chi Ming. There are strange parallels with the cult surround-
ing the embalmment, burial and reburial of Eva Peron’s body in Argentina, Italy and
Spain. www.nytimes.com/1995/07/30/world/eva-peron-s-corpse-continues-to-haunt-
argentina.html. Accessed 3 November 2016.
2 Aleksei Viktorovich Shchusev, the architect of the Lenin Mausoleum, emphasised
immortality in his design.
Vladimir Ilich is eternal. . . . How shall we honor his memory? How will we mark
his grave? In architecture the cube is eternal. Everything proceeds from the cube,
the entire range of architectural creation. Let the mausoleum, which we will erect
as a monument to Vladimir Ilich, derive from a cube.
(Quoted in Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, p. 189)
3 In October 1941, Lenin’s body was secretly moved to Tyumen in Siberia and returned
to Moscow at the end of the war.
4 Complementing Alexei Yurchak’s book on the last Soviet generation, Everything Was
Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2005, Etkind reflects on the complexity of Russian and Soviet culture.
His work also supplements Svetlana Boym’s reflections on nostalgia (2001) with an
analysis of literature, art and monuments. See her The Future of Nostalgia. New York:
Basic Books, 2001.
5 Also see Alexander Etkind, ‘Post-Soviet Hauntology: Cultural Memory of the Soviet
Terror’ in Constellations, Vol 16, No 1, March 2009, pp. 182–200. For a compelling
account of how contemporary Russian democracy is damaged by not dealing with
its communist past, see David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet
Empire, New York: Vintage Books, 1994. More recently, see David Satter, It was a
Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway, New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2012 and The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep, New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2016.
6 For work on war memorials, memory and mourning, see Reinhart Koselleck’s ‘War
Memorials: Identity Formations of the Survivors’ in The Practice of Conceptual His-
tory. Trans. T.S. Preser, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Also, Der Poli-
tische Totenkult. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1994. George Mosse’s Fallen Soldiers,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990 and Jay Winter’s Remembering War, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2006 and his Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
7 Led by Gennady Zyuganov, the party has strong support in large cities, industrial areas,
and in eastern parts of Russia, Siberia and the Urals.
142  Looking back after 1989
8 Although in 1991 there were 7,000 monuments to Lenin, 6,000 busts and statues still
stand in town squares, schools, factories, cities and villages. For a website with pho-
tographs of individual monuments to Lenin and their location in Russia, see http://
leninstatues.ru. Accessed 31 October 2016.
9 According to Yandex.ru in 2015, there are 6,836 streets with the name ‘Soviet,’ 5,719
streets named ‘October’ and 5,167 streets named after ‘Lenin.’
10 For the Chocolate Museum website, see www.muzeyshokolada.ru. Also www.
inyourpocket.com/st-petersburg-en/Chocolate-Museum_9647v. Accessed 3 November
2016. One of the popular chocolate companies, Krupskaya, named after Lenin’s
widow, was redesigned by a British company to appeal to nostalgia and childhood; see
John Crace, “The Soviet Chocolate Named After Lenin’s Widow,” www.theguardian.
com/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/27/soviet-chocolate-lenin-russia. 27 January 2010.Accessed
3 November 2016.

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Etkind, Alexander. 2013. Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the
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Gabowitsch, Mischa. 2016. Protest in Putin’s Russia. (Oxford: Polity Press).
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Hegel, Georg Friedrich. 2003. The Phenomenology of Mind. J. B. Baillie, trans. (New York:
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 Lenin’s haunted house  143
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sia. (London and New York: Penguin Books).
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Nora, Pierre. ed. 1992. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Lawrence
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Representations, 129 (Winter), 116–157.
9 Nostalgia for phantom homelands
Nowhere versus somewhere

Since the Brexit referendum in June 2016 and the election of Donald Trump in
November 2016, there has been a distinct shift away from international institu-
tions and multilateralism towards the overwhelming primacy of the nation-state.
Indeed, trust in liberal democracy and the rule of law is challenged by anti-
pluralism, retreat to the national citadel and xenophobia. Moreover, feelings of
mistrust, fear and resentment are increasingly overwhelming ideals of community
and social justice.
From the founding of the United Nations in 1945 through that of NATO in
1949 and the European Economic Community in 1957, individual nation-states
have cooperated in supranational organisations and international agreements.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted in 1948, and the 1951
Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol enshrined binding mechanisms to help
refugees fleeing war and violence. Both documents were written in the aftermath
of two world wars and, like the creation of NATO, the UN and the EU, expressed
a burning desire to forge a liberal international order beyond the borders of the
nation-state. Populism and calls for illiberal democracy in the second decade of
the twenty-first century, however, seem to be eroding or even bypassing the lib-
eral international order created in the aftermath of World War II.
The normalisation of far-right populism and illiberalism are part of larger geo-
political shifts that began with the War on Terror after 9/11, neoliberal austerity
policies of 2008 and the refugee crisis of 2015. If the post-war liberal international
order attempted to harness the excesses of the nation, memories of two world wars
have faded sufficiently to allow for its bold return. The post-war urgency of social
justice and solidarity is hardening into one of isolationism and protectionism.
Addressing a pronounced ‘vacuum in the liberal international order,’ the Munich
Security Report of 2019 posed the question: ‘The great puzzle: who will pick up
the pieces?’1 Quoting Antonio Gramsci, the authors of the report portrayed the
period after the Brexit referendum in 2016 not only as a ‘vacuum,’ but also as
an interregnum and crisis. (Munich Security Report 2019: 16). Gramsci, writing
from prison in the 1930s, argued that a political crisis is indicative of an inter-
regnum between sovereign rule. As he wrote: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the
fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great
variety of morbid symptoms appear’ (Gramsci quoted in Munich Security Report
2019: 16). Populism, anti-pluralism, disdain for the rule of law, attacks on the free
146  Looking back after 1989
press, xenophobia and retreat to the national citadel may indeed be some of the
‘morbid symptoms’ of the current interregnum.2
If the nation-state was the definitive ‘somewhere’ of 1918, architects of the
post-war order of 1945 imagined a different ‘somewhere’ that was neither a cos-
mopolitan ‘nowhere’ nor a national ‘somewhere.’ After World War II, cooperation
between nations was a supplementary somewhere to that of the nation-state. The
fragility of peace during the interwar years (1918–1939) was due not only to
economic crisis, resentment, political extremism and nationalism but also to the
lack of liberal international organisations and treaties with the power and moral
authority to challenge the tribal ‘somewhere’ of the nation-state. The post-war
international order operated in the spaces between nations during that strongest
of realist conflicts – the Cold War. If 1918 demonstrated the fragility of peace
against the background of nationalism, 1945 signalled new ways in which to
interlock nation-states for the sake of peace and cooperation. Disdain for liberal
democratic institutions and multilateralism in the twenty-first century, coupled
with disregard for the legal claims of universal human rights and rights to asylum
are linked to three broad changes: (1) fading memories and mis-memories of 1918
and 1945; (2) nostalgia for phantom homelands before 1945, and (3) a reversal of
the third wave of democratisation.

Fading memories and mis-memories of 1918 and 1945

In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson drafted his Fourteen Points outlining the
right to national self-determination in conjunction with the creation of the League
of Nations. Designed to prevent war, the League would also protect the national
right to self-determination. As stated in Article 14: ‘A general association of
nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording
mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and
small states alike’ (Wilson 1918).
While the Baltic states, Finland and Czechoslovakia exercised their right to
national self-determination, the Versailles Treaty, ending World War I, was also
accompanied by the Minority Treaties of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.
Originally designed to protect religious and ethnic minority rights, the treaties
were later incorporated into the United Nations and international human rights
treaties. And yet, as Hannah Arendt argued in The Origins of Totalitarianism,
the Minority Treaties created a new class of people – ‘the stateless.’ Originally
founded to protect the rights of minorities, the Treaties did not protect individuals
from policies of exclusion during the twentieth century.

The Minority Treaties said in plain language what until then had only been
implied the working system of nation-states, namely, that only nationals
could be citizens, only people of the same national origin could enjoy the full
protection of legal institutions, that persons of different nationality needed
some law of exception until or unless they were completely assimilated and
divorced from their origin.
(Arendt 1973: 275)
 Nostalgia for phantom homelands  147
The post-war international order of 1945 was partially founded on the failure
of the League of Nations and the Minority Treaties to protect people against
statelessness, genocide and war. Although shaped by the Cold War’s division of
Europe and an age of extremes, the post-war international order aimed at coopera-
tion and solidarity between nations. As populists portray the European Union and
the United Nations as elites from ‘nowhere’ that infringe upon the sovereignty
of the nation-state, the sense of urgency accompanying the early post-war years,
which necessitated finding a new somewhere in between nations, is fading.
The United Nations and the European Union share the common ideal of bind-
ing the sovereign nation-state into organisations and treaties designed to rein in
the excesses of the nation as a mythical ‘somewhere.’ Rather than arguing from
a position of ‘nowhere,’ founders of the EU and the UN, along with the drafters
of the Declaration on Human Rights, created a new ‘somewhere’ as the fragile
space in between nations. The goal was not the end of the nation-state but rather
a rethinking of Wilsonian democratic peace and the Kantian project of perpetual
peace. The historical conditions of World War II and the immediate post-war
years were lived experience for the generation of political leaders who founded
the United Nations, drafted the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and cre-
ated the European Coal and Steel Community. For many people today, memories
of World War II and its aftermath have either faded or are increasingly recalled
through the prism of national suffering. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and
break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended the Cold War and precipitated a
large wave of democratisation in Eastern Europe. Terrorist attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001 resulted in a protracted War on Terror and
heightened measures of national security.
In his posthumous book, The Collective Memory (1950), Maurice Halbwachs
argued for a difference between history as that which is static and memory as a
living process. For him, the memory of historical events that are learned from oth-
ers is external to collective memories that one experiences. If history has a long
duration, collective memory is bound by three generations.

During my life, my national society has been theater for a number of events
that I say I ‘remember,’ events that I know about only from newspapers or the
testimony of those directly involved. . . . I carry a baggage load of historical
remembrances that I can increase through conversation and reading. But it
remains a borrowed memory, not my own.
(Halbwachs 1980: 51; my emphasis)

For those individuals who founded the post-war international order, Europe in
ashes was a lived experience, not a ‘borrowed memory.’ There was a strong desire
for peace in Europe and for the protection of the stateless and minorities. In con-
trast, contemporary appeals to illiberal democracy and populism appeal to a pre-
war international order unencumbered by post-war international institutions and
treaties. Memories of the aftermath of World War II are shifting towards a ‘bor-
rowed memory’ that is commemorated on ritual occasions and written into history
books. The stability and democratic peace that the post-war liberal order achieved
148  Looking back after 1989
is challenged by a nostalgic return to nationalist movements of the early twentieth
century. Likewise, the enormous displacement and uprooting of people during
both wars and immediately afterwards is fading or selectively remembered.
The immediate post-war years were accompanied by millions of displaced per-
sons, refugees, those expelled from their homes with the creation of new national
borders and those fleeing from communism in the East. If the Great War generated
4–5 million refugees, by May 1945, there were, according to Eric Hobsbawm,
‘40.5 million uprooted people in Europe’ (Hobsbawm 1994: 51). Outside of
Europe, the de-colonialisation of India produced 15 million refugees, the Korean
War displaced 5 million people, and the establishment of the state of Israel created
1.3 million Palestinian refugees. As Hobsbawm reminds his readers:

In short, the global human catastrophe unleashed by the Second World War
is almost certainly the largest in human history. Not the least tragic aspect of
this catastrophe is that humanity has learned to live in a world in which kill-
ing, torture and mass exile have become everyday experiences which we no
longer notice.
(Ibid: 52)

Tony Judt argues that post-war memories of World War II are partially based
on mis-memory and myth. A mis-memory is an intermediary concept between
memory and forgetting. It is neither amnesia nor complete forgetfulness but rather
closer to an embellished and politically charged interpretation of an historical
event. Like myth, a mis-memory contains a grain of truth and is easily represented
in a monument or narrated into a particular exhibit at a museum. Judt empha-
sises that 1945–1948 were years that signified much more than the division of
Europe into East and West. They were the years when the post-war reconstruction
of Europe began and the time when ideological divisions began to consolidate.
More importantly, these immediate years after the end of the war were ‘the period
during which Europe’s post-war memory was moulded’ (Judt 2002: 160). As he
writes in the West, ‘the idea of “Europe” was refurbished as a substitute for the
kinds of national identification which had caused such wounds in the recent past’
(Ibid: 169). Architects of the European community sought to learn from the past
and move beyond national identity towards solidarity, respect for plurality, toler-
ance and peace.
The European project that began in Western Europe was only realised in the
East after the fall of communism. The desire for independence and national sov-
ereignty after decades of communism included a rethinking of World War II and
its aftermath. For Judt, 1945–1948, as the years when the Cold War solidified,
were also the period most subject to mis-memory and mythology. After the fall
of communism, old myths and mis-memories about war, post-war years of expul-
sions, displacement and settling of scores began to unravel. While the fall of com-
munism brought about democratisation and the re-independence of states behind
the Iron Curtain, memories of two world wars and the subsequent displacement
of people on the continent have sufficiently faded, opening a space for nostalgia
 Nostalgia for phantom homelands  149
for the nation-state before it was interlocked in international organisations after
1945. If the post-war liberal order formed an international system of checks and
balances for the potential excesses of the nation-state, this pact is being chal-
lenged not only by newer democracies but also by older ones who long for the
authentic somewhere of the nation. As memories of war fade and members of the
war generation die, the living link between witnesses, survivors and the present
generation weakens. Indeed, as Chancellor Angela Merkel remarked on the hun-
dredth anniversary of the end of World War I: ‘We now live in a time in which the
eyewitnesses of this terrible period of German history are dying. In this phase, it
will be decided whether we have really learned from history’ (Merkel quoted in
Bennhold 2018).

Nostalgia and the longing for a phantom homeland

The nation is one of the most meaningful and enduring political communities that
individuals belong to. In addition to appealing to the authentic will of the people,
populism evokes powerful feelings of belonging to a chosen nation with a unique
culture, language and tradition. Nostalgia for the past greatness of a nation that
has been stifled by international organisations taps into sentiments of a lost time
and lost place. Nostalgia for a lost national past opposes an international order
of global elites and cosmopolitanism. Populist slogans appeal to a golden past
of missed opportunities that have been side-tracked or neglected. From Donald
Trump’s slogan: ‘Make American Great Again!’ to UKIP’s: ‘We want our Coun-
try Back!’ the emphasis is on returning to a national past that has been taken away
by global elites from a cosmopolitan nowhere. Nostalgia for a lost time and space
dovetails with the strong desire to belong to a particular somewhere.
Stemming from the Greek nostos, or home, and algia, or longing, the word
nostalgia denotes a profound longing for home. But this longing is not a simple
return to the past. Rather, it is the desire for what Svetlana Boym describes as a
‘phantom homeland’ or a flickering mixture of memories and dreams. In desiring
to return home, the actual home is often confused with an imaginary one. ‘The
danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home and the imaginary
one. In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one
is ready to die or kill’ (Boym 2001: xvi). While individuals experience feelings
of melancholy, nostalgia is not limited to a particular individual. Rather, nostal-
gia occurs between an individual and his or her phantom homeland. Nostalgia
is the longing for a lost home. ‘Unlike melancholia, which confines itself to the
planes of individual consciousness, nostalgia is about the relationship between
individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal
and collective memory’ (Ibid).
Although nostalgia is directed towards the past, it has ‘a utopian dimension’
because its temporal dimension zigzags. While desiring to return home, nostalgia
projects a backward glance into the future by trying to bring the past into the
present. ‘The nostalgic feels stifled within the conventional confines of time and
space’ (Ibid: xiv). Nostalgia longs for tradition, community and the warmth of
150  Looking back after 1989
home. It challenges modern ideas of progress and disruption by returning to a
golden age that has been lost. ‘Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mecha-
nism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheaval’ (Ibid). Central
to Boym’s argument is that nostalgia for a particular time in the past challenges
the forward march of modern globalisation and mass culture.
Nostalgia can be seen as a side-effect of the centrifugal spinning of progress,
shrinking of space and the acceleration of time. As she argues: ‘In my view, the
spread of nostalgia had to do not only with dislocation of space but also with the
changing conception of time’ (Ibid: 7). Hence, modern nostalgia is connected to
an inability to adapt to the speed of everyday life. If previous generations could
anticipate that traditional life would remain the same from generation to genera-
tion, modern individuals are painfully aware of the approaching obsolescence of
technology, patterns of work and, perhaps, even of themselves. ‘Thus nostalgia,
as a historical emotion, is a longing for that shrinking “space of experience” that
no longer fits the horizon of expectations’ (Ibid: 10). Nostalgia accompanies the
fracturing of social order. If the future means progress, nostalgia leans backwards
towards the familiar and longs for a lost time and place within the fast pace of
modern life.
The word ‘nostalgia,’ coined by Dr Johannes Hofer in 1688, was originally
a medical diagnosis for people who suffered from homesickness. Patients diag-
nosed with nostalgia often confused past and present, lost their appetite, claimed
to see ghosts and hear voices (Ibid: 3). Prevalent among soldiers, nostalgia was
associated with displacement and uprooting. By the twentieth century, nostalgia
was considered less as a medical condition curable by returning home and more of
a symptom of modern upheaval. Indeed, Patrick Hutton suggests that Fukuyama’s
end of history and Hartog’s presentism most broadly ‘reflect the nostalgic tenor
of our times.’ Nostalgia longs to return to the past in order to recover ‘missed
opportunities’ and bring them forward into the future (2016: 15).
Nostalgia can take conservative or critical forms. Conservative nostalgia attempts
to restore the bygone home in its pristine purity. Hence, Boym suggests that such
‘restorative nostalgia’ attempts to equate tradition with truthfulness. Restorative
nostalgia is linked to reactionary political movements and national revivals. In
its conservative manifestation, it can lead towards the tribal path of making a
country or a people who are the erstwhile losers of modern progress great again.
Restorative nostalgia emphasises the home or nostos that it brings from the past
and projects into the future. Reflective nostalgia stresses algia as the longing
for tradition and maintains a critical attitude towards the possibility and desire
to ever return home. ‘Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and pro-
poses to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps. Reflective nostal-
gia dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance’
(Boym 2001: 41).
The past, for restorative nostalgia, is like a ‘perfect snapshot’ that does not
age, change or decay (Ibid: 49). The phantom homeland stands as a place outside
of time. Restorative nostalgia strives to return and reconstruct a lost past. ‘Nos-
talgic manipulations are side effects of the teleology of progress’ (Ibid: 10).
 Nostalgia for phantom homelands  151
Like Boym, Zygmunt Bauman argues for the dangers of nostalgia as a reaction
not only to modern transformations in technology but, more importantly, to the
cultural changes that accompany modernity. Nostalgia is part of what he calls
‘retrotopia,’ or the desire to bring an imaginary past into the future. Nostalgia is
a symptom of the disorientation caused by modern life. For him, nostalgia is ‘(b)
ut one member of the rather extended family of affectionate relationship with an
“elsewhere”’ (Bauman 2017: 3). Elsewhere is a place where we would like to
belong, an ideal abode where we feel at home. Elsewhere is neither the place nor
the time where we currently live. Nostalgia, as part of the family of elsewhere,
is not only a spatial demarcation but deeply one of temporality. ‘Nostalgic time
is that time-out-of-time of daydreaming and longing that jeopardizes one’s time-
tables and work ethic’ (Boym 2001: xix).

The receding third wave: illiberal democracy and populism

In addition to fading borrowed memories of two world wars and nostalgia for
phantom homelands, the challenge to liberal democracy in the twenty-first cen-
tury might be understood as the recession of the third wave of democracy. As
Samuel Huntington underscored, each historical advance in global democratisa-
tion has been followed by a corresponding period of regression and readjustment.
In his book, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century
(1991), Huntington argues that although the first long wave of democratisation
(1828–1926) had its roots in the American and French Revolutions, it really
began in 1828, when 50 % of adult American males were eligible to vote and a
‘responsible executive’ was elected in popular elections. The first reverse wave
began in 1922 with Mussolini’s March on Rome and continued until 1942. The
reversal occurred largely in countries that had recently become democratic after
World War I. The second short wave of democratisation began in 1943 and ended
in 1962. This period included de-colonisation and Allied promotion of democra-
tisation in occupied countries. The second reverse wave (1958–1975) was char-
acterised by Huntington as a shift towards authoritarianism that began in Peru in
1962. The third wave of democratisation started with the coup d’état in Portugal
in 1974 and occurred in Southern Europe, Asia, Latin American, Eastern Europe
and South Africa. As Huntington emphasises: ‘In one sense, the democratization
waves and the reverse waves suggest a two-step-forward, one-step-backward pat-
tern’ (Huntington 1991: 25). Historically, as he argued, each wave of democratisa-
tion has been accompanied by a receding wave of reversal.
Huntington’s metaphor of forward and receding waves captures the com-
plexity and fragility of the democratic process. He outlines numerous factors that
contributed to the first and second reversals of democracy, among them, the weak-
ening of democratic values among political elites and the general public, eco-
nomic crisis and collapse and intensified social conflict leading voters towards
strong leaders, as well as social and political polarisation. When considering pos-
sible causes for a third reversal wave, Huntington underscores the power of fading
memories if people forget the difficulty of authoritarianism: ‘As the memories of
152  Looking back after 1989
authoritarian failures fade, irritation with democratic failures is likely to increase’
(Ibid: 292). Ivan Krastev applies Huntington’s reversal of the third wave of
democratisation to illiberal democracy in Eastern Europe: ‘illiberal democracy has
become the new form of authoritarianism that Huntington warned about more than
two decades ago’ (Krastev 2018). Nostalgia for a pre-war nation-state combined
with an understanding of national identity in terms of existential crisis dovetails
with fears of globalisation, liberal culture and refugees to support populist claims
for illiberal democracy. Nostalgia for a national past as an authentic somewhere
promises an antidote to the upheaval and fragmentation of modernity.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s arguments in favour of ‘illiberal
democracy’ challenge the central tenets of liberal democracy and solidarity between
nations. Moreover, illiberal democracy is a reactionary critique of open society,
multiculturalism and tolerance (Orban 2014). Within the context of illiberal
democracy, national sovereignty overrides moral claims to fraternity and human
dignity codified in Article 2 of the Treaty of the European Union.

Respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law
and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to
minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in
which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equal-
ity between women and men prevail.
(Consolidated Version)

Populist parties challenge liberal values of freedom, pluralism and tolerance in

the name of the will of the people. Nativist fear and resentment undermine post-
war ideals of solidarity and cooperation. What distinguishes the third reversal
of democratisation is the acceleration of time, globalisation, the rise of social
media and a backlash against a global elite. Populism and calls for illiberal
democracy have emerged at a particular historical juncture in which the reasons
for the creation of the EU and UN, along with human rights and the rights of
asylum, are fading from living memory. For some, they are not only a borrowed
memory but associated with the cosmopolitanism of a global elite. However,
such organisations and treaties were originally created as self-binding institu-
tions for cooperation in order to avoid repeating the violence and genocide of the
twentieth century.
If Tocqueville foresaw democracy as the future, Huntington understood democ-
ratisation in old and new democracies as a back and forth process with advances
and regressions. While the post-war international world order was rooted in the
recognition that the nation-state should be interlocked within a liberal interna-
tional framework, Huntington’s waves of democratisation remind us that the
future may be full of unpredictable regressions and reversals. Arguments for
populism and illiberal democracy share a rejection of the world as a place that
we share in common. Narrowing the world to one’s nation, tribe or people appeals
not only to nostalgia for a lost homeland but also to worldlessness and a concept
 Nostalgia for phantom homelands  153
of the political that eschews solidarity in favour of an existential antagonism
between friend and enemy.
In her speech to the conservative party conference in 2016, British Prime Min-
ister Theresa May emphasised the primacy of the nation over that of cosmopoli-
tan solidarity and cooperation:

But today, too many people in positions of power behave as though they
have more in common with international elites than with the people down
the road, the people they employ, the people they pass in the street. But if you
believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t
understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.
(May 2016)

And yet, although citizenship is defined as membership in a particular nation-

state, does it necessarily follow that the world is ‘nowhere’? After all, individu-
als belong both to the world at large and to a particular country. Indeed, some
individuals may even have dual citizenship in different countries. However, we
all share the world. The possibility of being both a citizen of a particular country
and of the world is dismissed in Theresa May’s construction of either/or: either
one is a citizen of a particular somewhere or one is a cosmopolitan who belongs
nowhere. Particularly when political issues such as climate change, health and
migration demand global responses, the narrowing of citizen of the world to that
of ‘citizen of nowhere’ challenges post-war ideals of multilateralism and coopera-
tion among sovereign nation-states.
David Goodhart argues that populism is a ‘counter balance’ to the global elite,
who travel, work and thrive anywhere. ‘The Anywhere world of geographical,
and often social, mobility, of higher education and professional careers was once
the preserve of a small elite; it has now become general, though not universal’
(Goodhart 2017: 6). If May juxtaposed cosmopolitans as people, who come from
nowhere and who are without a geographical place of attachment, citizens come
from a distinct somewhere – from a particular country, region, town and culture.
Nowhere is a negative non-place that does not exist, while somewhere is rooted
in concrete lived traditions, rootedness to a place and generational continuity.
However, rather than view somewhere and anywhere solely as opposites, we
might consider the nation and the world as complimentary places. In an essay,
‘The Importance of Elsewhere,’ Kwame Anthony Appiah argues for three places:
somewhere, nowhere and a cosmopolitan elsewhere. ‘The cosmopolitan task, in
fact, is to be able to focus on both far and near’ (Appiah 2019: 20). Moreover,
he suggests that we have many identities that act as ‘nesting memberships’ of
belonging to a particular family, neighbourhood, region, city and nation. Cosmo-
politanism as belonging to the world helps one to imagine different and chang-
ing nesting memberships. Rather than view somewhere and nowhere, nation and
cosmos as competitive, Appiah emphasises their complementarity. One can both
care for the world and one’s neighbourhood. Indeed, he warns that given today’s
154  Looking back after 1989
global challenges, we do not really have the luxury of ignoring the world in favour
of a local somewhere.
While nostalgia looks backwards towards a romanticised view of the past, world-
lessness gazes inward and resists public engagement with others, who express
different viewpoints. It is precisely the distancing of individuals from a shared
world that characterises modernity for Arendt. ‘World alienation, and not self-
alienation as Marx thought, has been the hallmark of the modern age’ (Arendt
1998: 254). When the world is held in common to be passed down to future gen-
erations, we participate in a shared sense of reality beyond the private boundaries
of a digital bubble, home, religion and nation-state. However, with the accelera-
tion of time, the sense of continuity between generations is weakened, fostering
retreat into the private realm and the inner citadel. ‘Worldlessness as a political
phenomenon is possible only on the assumption that the world will not last;
on this assumption, however, it is almost inevitable that worldlessness, in one
form or another, will begin to dominate the political scene’ (Ibid: 53). In the
twentieth century, Arendt argued that worldlessness is like a desert that dries up
the space in between people and lessens bonds of commonality. ‘The modern
growth of worldlessness, the withering away of everything between us, can also
be described as the spread of the desert’ (Arendt 2005: 201). The world is not
the same as the people who live in in it. Instead, the world is the space between
individuals.

The world lies between people, and this in-between – much more than (as is
often thought) men or even man – is today the object of the greatest concern
and the most obvious upheaval in almost all the countries of the globe.
(Arendt 1995: 4)

Such an in-between place is cultivated through our relations with one another.
For Arendt, belonging to the world is a given because we share the world.
Citizenship, however, is only granted to those individuals who fit the national
requirements for citizenship by jus sanguinis, jus solis or naturalisation. Citizen-
ship, as Arendt herself experienced, can also be taken away by the sovereign state.
Her point, unlike that of Theresa May, was to argue against world government on
the grounds that it would destroy the pluralism of different nations. As she writes
with respect to Karl Jaspers: ‘Nobody can be a citizen of the world as he is a citi-
zen of his country’ (Arendt 1968: 81). However, in arguing for the importance of
citizenship, it does not follow that international institutions such as the UN or EU
that interlock nation-states in binding agreements represent world government.
Membership in such organisations does not grant world citizenship. On the con-
trary, member states maintain national citizenship and state sovereignty. Given
new technologies of destruction, the point is rather that if we do not act together,
there will no longer be a world at all.

This negative solidarity, based on the fear of global destruction, has its cor-
respondence in a less articulate, but no less potent, apprehension that the
 Nostalgia for phantom homelands  155
solidarity of mankind can be meaningful in a positive sense only if it is cou-
pled with political responsibility.
(Ibid: 83)

New ways of thinking about how to protect the world from annihilation and to
protect one another from state-sponsored violence are needed. ‘Politically, the
new fragile unity brought about by technical mastery over the earth can be guar-
anteed only within a framework of universal mutual agreements, which eventu-
ally would lead into a world-wide federated structure’ (Ibid: 93). Whilst such a
federated structure may be close to the tenets of Kant’s perpetual peace, it does
not mean the end of national citizenship.
Those who argue for illiberal democracy and criticise the weakness of plural-
ism, the rule of law and parliamentary democracy share an understanding of the
political that Schmitt outlined during the 1920s and 1930s. For him, the concept
of the political is an existential and antagonistic relationship between friend and
enemy, pitting life against death. ‘The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the
utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissocia-
tion’ (Schmitt 2007: 26). At the very core of Schmitt’s concept of the political lies
the perceived threat of ‘enemies’ who threaten ‘our’ way of life. Schmitt under-
stood the power of resentment that voters feel towards elected officials who have
ignored their plight. Populism and illiberal democracy challenge the post-war lib-
eral international order by emphasising the nation-state over solidarity with other
nations and binding legal agreements. However, citizenship in a nation-state does
not contradict solidarity and cooperation with other nation-states within the legal
framework of international organisations.
The second decade of the twenty-first century shares certain features with the
second decade of the twentieth century: disdain for representative elites, weakened
parliaments, attraction to strong charismatic leaders who brazenly flout national
and international law, xenophobia and the normalisation of political extremism. If
the political is perceived as an existential antagonism between friend and enemy,
pluralism and solidarity among nation-states who share the world are rejected. If,
however, the concept of the political is understood as the space between people
and as freedom, as Arendt envisioned, there is room for difference and plurality.
Although politics is concerned with conflict, that is not all. Politics is also con-
cerned with freedom and dialogue. Moreover, as the word signifies, politics is
about the polis as a community. From the Greek polis to modern nation-state and
post-war international organisations, the meaning of community has shifted and
changed. Nonetheless, regardless of the size of the political community, respect
for the uniqueness of each person, freedom and a sense of solidarity were shared
political ideals for those individuals, who drafted human rights, the rights to asy-
lum, the EU and the UN as pillars of the post-war international order. As Arendt
argued: ‘Politics is based on the fact of human plurality. . . . Politics deals with
the coexistence and association of different men’ (Arendt 2005: 93). If the polis
is understood as a forum for discussion and antagonism of different individuals,
the concept of the political can include freedom and the space in between people.
156  Looking back after 1989
Schmitt’s concept of the political remains at the powerfully realist level of unre-
solvable conflict, while Arendt’s is open to new beginnings and spirited debate.
If Schmitt’s point of reference is the sovereign nation-state, Arendt’s includes
both the nation-state and the world. Although citizenship and rights can only be
derived from membership in a nation-state, we are also inhabitants and caretakers
of the world that we share.

Cultivating a space between nations

Halbwachs’ distinction between a borrowed memory that is distant from lived
experience and a collective memory that is generational and linked to specific
social frameworks highlights a paradigmatic shift from memory to history. The
passing of time has diminished the urgent historical context during which inter-
national organisations and declarations of human rights were created. The rise of
populism in the twenty-first century challenges the very foundation of the post-
war order with nostalgic appeals to return to a golden age of the nation-state.
Populism postulates phantom homelands unencumbered by international agree-
ments of cooperation, rights to asylum and human rights. Moreover, the historical
and political reasons that legitimated the foundation of the post-war liberal order
are fading, or even becoming a borrowed memory, thereby, conjuring a kind of
nationalism that bears a haunting similarity to those of the first half of the twen-
tieth century.
Given the world’s depleting natural resources and political capacity for global
destruction, we do not have the luxury of thinking within provincial or national
fortresses. To live in the world is to take care of it for the next generation. The
world is the one ‘somewhere’ to which we all belong. Caring for the world does
not mean that we are any less citizens of particular homelands or nation-states.
Although Theresa May categorised a cosmopolitan as a citizen of nowhere, the
worldly ‘nowhere’ that was re-articulated after World War II is an integral ‘some-
where’ or place in between nation-states for the cultivation of global peace and
solidarity. The worldly ‘nowhere’ of post-war international organisations and trea-
ties designed to protect human rights has been an important balance to the histori-
cally tribal ‘somewhere’ of the nation-state. Thinking about 1918 and 1945 makes
the cultivation and rethinking of the space between nations all the more important.
Somewhere may be rooted in particular homes, as well as in the space between
them, as supranational or international organisations between sovereign nation-
states. The reconsideration of spaces in between nations is worth reconsidering
in light of the state-sponsored violence of the twentieth century and the continued
exclusion of people who are displaced in the twenty-first century. Perhaps nowhere
is a kind of somewhere. The distinction is less between somewhere and nowhere
and more of finding ways in which nations can cooperate with one another while
still maintaining their sovereignty and caring for the continuity of the world.

Notes
1 In the Munich Security Report of 2017, the conference themes were post-truth, post-West
and post-order. The opening to the report underscored the consequences of abandoning
 Nostalgia for phantom homelands  157
the liberal international order: ‘The international security environment is arguably more
volatile today than at any point since World War II. Some of the most fundamental pil-
lars of the West and of the liberal international order are weakening. Adversaries of open
societies are on the offensive’ (Munich Security Report 2017). In 2018, the conference
theme was ‘To the Brink – and Back?’ Focusing on the unravelling of the post-war inter-
national order, it highlighted the reduced commitment to multilateralism, criticism of the
rule of law, a free press and an independent judiciary (Munich Security Report 2018).
2 Most notable from recent books on the crisis in liberal democracy, see How Democra-
cies Die by Steven Levtisky and Daniel Ziblatt, New York: Penguin, 2018; The Road to
Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder, London: Bodley Head, 2018; How Democracy Ends by
David Runciman, New York: Basic Books, 2018 and What is Populism? by Jan-Werner
Müller, New York: Penguin Books, 2017.

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April), 20–26.
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Arendt, Hannah. 1998 [1958]. The Human Condition. (Chicago, IL: The University of
Chicago Press).
Arendt, Hannah. 2005. The Promise of Politics. Jerome Kohn, ed. (New York: Schocken
Books).
Bauman, Zgymunt. 2017. Retrotopia. (Cambridge: Polity Books).
Bennhold, Katrin. 2018. ‘Can Europe’s Liberal Order Survive as the Memory of War
Fades?’, The New York Times, 10 November. www.nytimes.com/2018/11/10/world/europe/
europe-armistice-merkel-macron-peace-war.html (Accessed 16 April 2019).
Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. (New York: Basic Books).
‘Consolidated Version of the Treaty on European Union, Title I, Common Provisions,
Article 2’, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A12012M002
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Goodhart, David. 2017. The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of
Politics. (London: C Hurst & Co.).
Halbwachs, Maurice. 1980 [1959]. The Collective Memory. Francis J. Ditter and Vida
Yazdi Ditter, trans. (New York: Harper and Row).
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1994. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914–1991. (New
York: Vintage Books).
Huntington, Samuel P. 1991. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Cen-
tury. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press).
Hutton, Patrick H. 2016. The Memory Phenomenon in Contemporary Historical Writing.
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Judt, Tony. 2002. ‘Myth and Memory in Post-War Europe’, in Jan-Werner Müller, ed.,
Memory and Power in Post- War Europe. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Krastev, Ivan. 2018. ‘Eastern Europe’s Illiberal Revolution: The Long Road to Demo-
cratic Decline’, Foreign Affairs (May/June). www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/hungary/
2018-04-16/eastern-europes-illiberal-revolution (Accessed 26 April 2019).
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law.yale.edu/20th_century/wilson14.asp.
Epilogue

As this volume draws to a close, the lingering effects of World War II, the Holo-
caust and the end of communism in Europe have been considered in light of
changing conceptions of time. Each person encounters the past within the horizon
of the present and within their own generation. However, the relationship between
past, present and future is a not constant one but accelerating and decelerating at
different speeds. Living in an age of extreme progress and destruction influences
how one thinks about historical time. As scientific and technological progress
replace the religious certainty of a final judgment, what we are left with is, accord-
ing to Arendt and Koselleck, a gap between past and future. And yet, in spite of
the obscurity and uncertainty of the present, the future nonetheless continues to
offer hope for a new beginning. For Hartog, on the contrary, we are left with an
endless present that seems to be unmoored from both past and future. The danger
of presentism is that the past may become embellished or mythologised while the
future loses its luminosity. However, the greatest challenge of presentism is the
sense that one feels trapped in an endless now without alternatives or possibili-
ties for change. Both Arendt and Koselleck recognise that although the present
is precarious, it is nonetheless open to new beginnings and unexpected change.
Commemorative reflection, feelings of nostalgia, retreat into silence and ghostly
haunting exemplify how difficult it is to express, narrate and reify historical expe-
rience for posterity. Commemorative places such as Lenin’s Mausoleum, the
Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and former concentration camp sites were designed
to slow time in order to instil reflection on historical events and the dead. While
Lenin’s Mausoleum was built to revere the first leader of the Soviet Union, it has
become a controversial and anachronistic relic to a fallen empire. Moreover, it
represents warped mourning for the victims of communism and of the leader who
is physically preserved within the Mausoleum. The unintended consequences of
commemoration in an age of social media and selfies are brought into sharp relief
with the art project Yolocaust and the film Austerlitz. The reflective and sacred
purpose of the memorials is to remember the dead. However, how visitors interact
with such memorials is unpredictable.
Nostalgia for a lost time and place provides a balance to the upheaval and
disruption that occurs with the fast pace of modern life. While the character of
Austerlitz may have been nostalgic for his lost childhood, returning to his fam-
ily home was fraught with disappointment. Likewise, the continued existence of
160 Epilogue
Lenin’s Mausoleum may evoke nostalgia for a slower pace of life during the
Soviet Union and for the revolutionary ideals of communism. In the twenty-first
century, nostalgia is a powerful sentiment for populist leaders to tap into and use
for political purposes. Nostalgia for a pristine nation unencumbered by mem-
bership in international organisations and treaties risks creating the fantasy of a
phantom homeland.
One enduring way of encountering the past is to remain silent. As Blanchot
indicated, silence may denote respect and the limitation of language to represent
experience. And yet, Heidegger’s silence about the Holocaust continues to haunt
philosophical debates with his seeming indifference to Jewish suffering, if not out-
right anti-Semitism. Silence may just as easily signify evasion, indifference, denial
or even acquiescence. Unlike Heidegger, Arendt was unable to remain silent about
the Holocaust and National Socialism. Instead, she tried to understand its causes
and its aftermath, as well as the actions of perpetrators and bystanders.
The ghost of Patrocles hovers over many chapters in this book with his plea
for the sanctity of a dignified burial. Honouring and respecting the dead, whether
as the victorious or the vanquished, links generations into a great primeval con-
tract. Homer’s Iliad is a poignant reminder of the importance of burial, both so
that the living may find closure and that the dead may pass from ordinary chron-
ological time to eternity. However, it is, above all, the story of Cain and Abel
that permeates almost every chapter in Encountering the Past within the Present.
While Carl Schmitt focuses on the story of fratricide and the origin of politics, it is
Emmanuel Levinas who calls attention to Cain’s question to God. Cain’s difficult
question, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ is posed to every individual and to each
generation. Too often, the desire for fraternity seems to spring from the horror of
fratricide. It is Cain’s indifferent coldness, isolation from society and alienation
from himself that Levinas reflects on. Cain’s question provokes Levinas’ response
that it is the face of the other who calls us into existence. In spite of the accelera-
tion of time, the uncertainty of the future and the precarity of living in an age of
extremes, the ghosts of Patrocles, Cain and Abel have not gone away. On the con-
trary, they remind us of our responsibility to one another – whether as the dead,
the living or the unborn.
***
Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, far-right populism is gaining ground
in national parliaments and governments, as well as in the European parliament.
If 1989 signified the tearing down of physical and mental walls, 2019 portends
the opposite. Indeed, it is the building of walls in Europe and the United States
that seems to preoccupy many populist leaders and their electorate. Populism and
the rise of the far-right challenge the foundation of liberal democracy with a con-
certed attack on the rule of law, a free press, pluralism, tolerance and an indepen-
dent judiciary. In looking back thirty years after the momentous evening of the 9th
of November 1989, solidarity and open societies stand in stark contrast to calls for
illiberal democracy, isolationism and closed borders in 2019.
In reflecting on how historical time has been experienced and events have been
remembered after 1945 and after 1989, the fragility of our world has become
 Epilogue  161
increasingly apparent. Greta Thunberg’s powerful pleas to take action on global
warming and halt the destruction of the environment is a call from the future to the
present. As a young schoolgirl and activist, she pointedly asks what kind of future
she and her generation may hope for.

The bigger your carbon footprint is, the bigger your moral duty. The bigger
your platform the bigger your responsibility. Adults keep saying we owe it to
the young people to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope, I don’t want
you to be hopeful. I want you to panic, I want you to feel the fear I feel every
day. And then I want you to act, I want you to act as if you would in a crisis.
I want you to act as if the house was on fire, because it is.
(Thunberg 2019)

By solely living in the present and concentrating on short-term economic gains,

we ignore the burning planet and environmental changes occurring all around us.
The time of the Anthropocene, of human time and our destructive human footprint
harkens back to Braudel’s time of long duration. While the chapters in Encountering
the Past within the Present have focussed on the medium duration of social time
and the short duration of pivotal events, most notably World War II, the Holocaust
and the end of communism in Europe, the fundamental importance of long-term
structural time cannot be ignored. If there is to be a future world, technological
progress and the exploitation of natural resources cannot go unabated. The nuclear
accidents at Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 are reminders of the
destructive power that scientific advances may unleash, when something goes
horribly wrong and when governments are indifferent to the safety of their citizens.
While the explosion at Chernobyl was a pivotal short-term event, its long-term
aftermath damaged and continues to corrode the natural world in unprecedented
ways. As Svetlana Alexievich wrote in Chernobyl Prayer, the nuclear accident
changed the very ways in which we think about time. ‘But I see Chernobyl as
the beginning of a new history: it offers not only knowledge but also prescience,
because it challenges our old ideas about ourselves and the world’ (Alexievich
2013: 24). The modern understanding of time as linear progress and technological
perfection exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

When we talk about the past or the future, we read our ideas about time into
those words; but Chernobyl is, above all, a catastrophe of time. The radionu-
clides strewn across our earth will live for 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 years.
And longer. From the perspective of human life, they are eternal. What are
we capable of comprehending? Is it in our power to extract and decipher the
meaning of this still unfamiliar horror?
(Ibid)

What occurred was not simply a man-made accident or aberration but, as Alexiev-
ich emphasises, ‘a catastrophe of time.’ Familiar responses to war, political and
economic crisis, as well as to natural disaster, were incapable of dealing with the
magnitude of irreversible damage caused by the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl
162 Epilogue
and the lack of safety regulations during its clean-up. The unknown long-term
effects of radiation on people, animals and the environment challenge ordinary
conceptions of time.
How we understand our relationship to the past affects how we live in the
present and imagine the future. Responsibility between generations has widened
beyond that of political violence within and between nations to an urgent need to
preserve the very world that we inhabit. If the scale of destruction after World War
II prompted the creation of international organisations and new forms of multilat-
eralism as well as declarations of human rights and the rights of the refugee, such
creative solidarity needs to be rekindled in order to preserve our shared world for
future generations.

References
Alexievich, Svetlana. 2013. Chernobyl Prayer. Anna Gunin and Arch Tait, trans. (London
and New York: Penguin Books).
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Davos. www.fridaysforfuture.org/greta-speeches#greta_speech_apr16_2019 (Accessed
17 June 2019).
Index
acceleration of time 11, 22–25, 28, 31–32,
35, 36, 42, 160; and nostalgia 150, 152,
154; see also Koselleck, Reinhart
Achilles 11, 14, 40, 42, 48, 57, 58; and
Hector 43–46; and Patrocles 43–46
age of extremes 1, 2, 8, 28, 32, 48, 79, 121,
147, 160; see also Hobsbawm, Eric
Alexievich, Svetlana, on Chernobyl
161–162
Antigone: and the dead 11, 45, 131,
140; and Hegel 131–132; and Lenin’s
Mausoleum 132
Appiah, Kwame Anthony 153; see also
cosmopolitanism
Arendt, Hannah: on the break in tradition
12, 20–22; on Eichmann 78, 83–86,
87; on fratricide 51; on Heidegger
86–90; on minority treaties 146–147;
on René Char 20; on Socrates 90; on
statelessness 78, 79; on totalitarianism
77–82, 83; on worldlessness 9, 12, 14,
80, 86, 88, 152, 154
Aristotle 25, 36, 39, 89, 119; dreams and
sleep 39
Arnold-de Simine, Silke, on museums 115,
120
Assmann, Aleida: and cultural memory
with Jan Assmann 95; on time 31
Assmann, Jan: and cultural memory with
Aleida Assmann 95; on mnemohistory
96, 104
Austerlitz (book) see Sebald, W. G., on
Austerlitz; for film see Loznitsa, Sergei,
on Austerlitz film
Barthes, Roland, and photography 112–113,
120
Bauman, Zygmunt: and modernity 2; on
moral blindness with Leonidis Donskis
122–123; and retropia and nostalgia 151
Benjamin, Walter 3, 36, 101, 104; Angelus
Novus – angel of history 22, 27–28;
aura of images 103, 114; Enzo Traverso
on 27–28; tradition and authority 21
Beradt, Charlotte, and dreams 38–39;
see also Koselleck, Reinhart, dreams
and history
Berlin wall, fall of 32, 147, 160; see also
Hartog, François, on the Berlin wall,
fall of
Bevernage, Berber 30
Blanchot, Maurice: and Heidegger’s
silence 72; and Levinas 54, 57, 73; and
silence 69–73; Writing of the Disaster
70–71
Boym, Svetlana: on modernity and
nostalgia 9, 149; on nostalgia,
restorative versus reflective 150; on
phantom homelands 149–150
Braudel, Ferdinand 4, 8, 161
burial: Antigone and 131, 132; Hans Ruin
on 131; Hegel and 131; and Holocaust
memorials 111–125; Lenin and 127,
131, 133–134, 138–140
Burke, Edmund 3–4, 45
Cain and Abel 48–59; fratricide and
politics 1, 48, 50–54, 58–59, 160; my
brother’s keeper and social justice 2, 10,
11, 14, 48, 53–54, 58–59
Cavalcante-Schuback, Marcia Sá 39–40;
see also dreams and time
Celan, Paul: and grave in the air 118; and
Heidegger 64, 67, 70, 72
Chakrabarty, Dipesh 23–24, 30, 31
Char, René 20; see also Arendt, Hannah,
on the break in tradition
Chernobyl 161–162; see also Alexievich,
Svetlana, on Chernobyl
citizenship 78, 153, 154, 155, 156
164 Index
Cold War 13, 27, 28, 146–148
commemoration 7, 8–9, 14, 26, 115, 123,
132, 138, 141, 159
communism, fall of 3, 8, 13, 26, 28, 29,
31, 148
cosmopolitanism 13, 146, 149, 152, 153, 156
crisis 35–36, 38, 40, 48, 58, 134, 146, 151,
152, 161; and Gramsci 145; see also time,
ancient Greek kairos, chronos and aion
Davis, Colin, and hauntology 30, 58–59
democracy 13, 27, 128, 145; illiberal
14, 145, 147, 151–152; third wave of
democratization and Samuel Huntington
151–152; transition to democracy in
Russia 128, 132, 138, 140
Derrida, Jacques: on hauntology and
justice 3–4, 10, 11, 19, 29–30, 32,
35, 41, 45; and Heidegger 63, 69; on
Levinas 54; and pharmakon 96–97; on
Schmitt, Cain and Abel 48, 53; and time
42–43
Donskis, Leonidis, with Zygmunt Bauman,
on moral blindness 122–123
dreams and history see Beradt, Charlotte,
and dreams; Koselleck, Reinhart
dreams and time 37–40; Freud’s
interpretation of dreams 39; Marcia Sá
Cavalcante-Schuback on Aristotle’s
dreams and the hermeneutics of sleep
39–40
Eichmann, Adolf 83–86; see also Arendt,
Hannah, on the break in tradition
Eisenman, Peter 117, 118, 119; see also
Holocaust Memorial to Europe’s
Murdered Jews
Eisenstadt, S. N. 23–24; see also
modernity
end of history 27–28; see also Fukuyama,
Francis, and the end of history
Etkind, Alexander: on the great primeval
contract 3; on warped mourning 128–129,
132, 140
European Union: and human rights 152;
and nowhere 147; see also post-war
liberal order
evil 49, 66, 79, 80, 81, 89, 90, 115, 123;
banality of 78, 83, 85, 86; see also
Arendt, Hannah, on the break in
tradition; Eichmann, Adolf
Farias, Victor, on Heidegger 63, 74
Fine, Robert 77, 82; see also Arendt,
Hannah, on the break in tradition
fraternity 48, 51, 54–59, 152, 160; see also
my brother’s keeper and social justice
fratricide 11, 48–59, 60; Arendt on 51;
Carl Schmitt 49–54; Eteocles and
Polynices 53; Romulus and Remus 53;
St Augustine 51; see also Cain and Abel
Freud, Sigmund: on civilisation and its
discontents 1; interpretation of dreams
39; memory and wax tablet 102;
mourning and melancholia 129 (see also
Etkind, Alexander, on the great primeval
contract); screen memory 131; the
uncanny 101, 102, 130
Friedlander, Saul: on Nazism and evil 123;
on representation 71
Fukuyama, Francis: and the end of history
27, 28; nostalgia 150
gap between past and future 20–22;
see also Arendt, Hannah, on the break
in tradition
Gaus, Gunter, interview with Hannah
Arendt 77–78, 80
Geneva Convention 2, 54
ghosts 10, 40–43; and Avery Gordon 29;
and Berber Bevernage 30; Colin Davis
on 30, 58–59; Derrida and hauntology
3–4, 10, 11, 19, 29–30, 32, 35, 41, 45;
and the ghost of Patrocles 43–36; and
Karl Marx 133, 134
Goodhart, David 153
Gordon, Avery 29; see also ghosts
great primeval contract 3, 4, 45; see also
Burke, Edmund
Habermas, Jürgen, on Heidegger 64
Halbwachs, Maurice: and collective
memory 57, 128, 147, 156; history as a
borrowed memory 147
Hartog, François: on the Berlin wall, fall
of 32, 147, 160; presentism 25–27, 150,
159; regime of historicity 26
hauntology 3–4, 10, 11, 19, 29–30, 32, 35,
41, 45; see also Derrida, Jacques, on
hauntology and justice; ghosts
Hegel, G. W. F.: and burial 131–132; and
historical consciousness 5–6
Heidegger, Martin 6, 12, 22, 26, 29, 37,
38, 54, 57; black notebooks 63; and
Emmanuel Levinas 54, 70–72; and
Hannah Arendt 86–90; and Herbert
Marcuse 64, 66, 67; and Karl Löwith
64, 66, 67, 68; and Maurice Blanchot
63–74; and Paul Celan 64, 67, 70, 72;
silence and National Socialism 63–77

Hirsch, Marianne, and postmemory 95–96,
103–104, 119, 120
Hobsbawm, Eric 1, 21; and age of
extremes 1, 147, 160; refugees and
statelessness 148; short twentieth
century 1
Holocaust 8, 10, 12–13; and
commemoration 114–115; and
Emmanuel Levinas 57; and Hannah
Arendt 77–90; and Heidegger’s silence
63–74; and Maurice Blanchot 69–74;
memorials 111–125; see also Sebald,
W. G., on Austerlitz; Yolocaust
Holocaust Memorial to Europe’s Murdered
Jews 118, 121, 122; see also Eisenman,
Peter
human rights 145; and the European Union
151–152; and Russian civil society 130;
and the UNDHR 146, 147
Huntington, Samuel, and the third wave of
democratization 155, 156, 162
Hutton, Patrick, and nostalgia 150
Jaspers, Karl 49; and Arendt 78, 83, 84,
87, 154; and Heidegger 64, 66, 68
judgment and banality of evil 83–90;
see also Arendt, Hannah, on the break in
tradition; Eichmann, Adolf; phronesis
Judt, Tony: on Arendt 82; on mis-memory
148
Kant, Immanuel 83, 86, 89, 147, 155; last
Kantian in Europe 57; see also Levinas,
Emmanuel
Kantorowicz, Ernst 137
Koselleck, Reinhart 5–8, 11, 19, 22–26,
28, 31–32, 37; acceleration of time
22–25; dreams and history 37–40;
futures past 22–25, 32; historia magistra
vitae 22, 26; horizon of expectation 24,
25, 37, 150; Sattelzeit 22; sedimentation
of time 37–38; space of experience 7,
24–25, 37
Krastev, Ivan 152; see also democracy
Landsberg, Alison, and prosthetic memory
95, 119, 120
League of Nations 146, 147; see also
Wilson, Woodrow
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov 127–128,
129; Leninism 133–134, 137, 138; Lenin’s
Mausoleum 127–142; Mausoleum Lab
136–137
Levinas, Emmanuel 11, 12, 48, 54–59, 64,
65, 69, 70, 160; and Blanchot 54, 57,
Index  165
73; on Dostoyevsky 56, 59; face of the
other 48, 49, 54, 56–57, 59, 65, 73, 123,
160; and Heidegger 54, 70–72; see also
Cain and Abel
Lorenz, Chris 31
Loznitsa, Sergei, on Austerlitz film 111,
118–121
Löwith, Karl, and Heidegger 64, 66, 67, 68
Marcuse, Herbert, and Heidegger 64, 66, 67
Marx, Karl: and the Eighteenth Brumaire
134; and Marxism 29; and spectre of
communism 133; see also Derrida,
Jacques, on hauntology and justice;
Traverso, Enzo
May, Theresa, and citizen of nowhere 153,
156
Minority Treaties 146, 147; see also
Arendt, Hannah, on the break in
tradition
modernity 1, 2, 9, 10, 14, 19–32, 36,
94, 95, 122, 136, 151, 152, 164, 172;
multiple modernities 23; see also
Arendt, Hannah, on the break in
tradition; Bauman, Zygmunt, and
retropia and nostalgia; Eisenstadt, S. N.;
Koselleck, Reinhart
Monod, Jean-Claude, on Schmitt, Cain and
Abel 51, 54
museums and memorials 8–9, 10, 14, 26,
28, 29, 31, 111, 114, 115, 118, 120, 121,
123, 124; see also Arnold-de Simine,
Silke, on museums; Sodaro, Amy, and
memorial museums
my brother’s keeper and social justice 2, 10,
11, 14, 48, 53–54, 58–59, 160; see also
Cain and Abel; Levinas, Emmanuel
NATO 2, 145; see also post-war liberal
order
Nietzsche, Friedrich: and historical sense
104; and ironic historical consciousness
121–122
Nora, Pierre: and commemoration 26, 128;
lieu de mèmoire 26
nostalgia 1, 8–10, 12–14, 27–28, 30–31,
98, 100, 130, 159, 160; homesickness
150; and modernity 9; phantom
homelands 145–152; see also Boym,
Svetlana, on modernity and nostalgia
Odysseus and history 5, 6; see also Arendt,
Hannah, on the break in tradition
Oppenheimer, Robert 1
Oushakine, Sergei 129, 133, 138
166 Index
Patrocles and Achilles 43–46; ghost of 11,
35–47
phronesis 89, 90; see also Aristotle;
judgment and banality of evil
Plato 6, 12, 64–65, 70, 73, 88–90; on
memory as a wax tablet 102; Phaedrus
and pharmakon 96, 97, 104, 105;
see also Derrida, Jacques, on hauntology
and justice
political theology of Soviet state 135–140
populism and illiberal democracy 145,
147, 149, 151–156
post-war liberal order 13, 14, 147, 149, 156
presentism 25–27; see also Hartog,
François, on the Berlin wall, fall of;
Rousso, Henry; Traverso, Enzo
Rabinbach, Anson, and Heidegger 66
Refugee Convention 80, 145
Romulus and Remus 51, 53; see also
fratricide
Rorty, Richard 63, 64
Rothberg, Michael 80, 115
Rousso, Henry 27
Ruin, Hans, on burial 8, 29, 41, 131, 140
Schmitt, Carl: and fratricide 11, 12, 38,
48–54, 57–59; friend and enemy relation
155; political theology 135
screen memory 131; see also Freud,
Sigmund, on civilisation and its discontents
Sebald, W. G., on Austerlitz 94–105, 121
selfies 111, 115–118; at Holocaust
memorials 111–125
Shapira, Shahak, on Yolocaust 115–118
silence 63–74, 77, 78, 86, 90, 105, 118,
159, 160; see also Steiner, George, on
silence; worldlessness
Snyder, Timothy 80
Socrates 64, 65, 90, 96, 97, 102
Sodaro, Amy, and memorial museums 115
Sontag, Susan: on photography 99, 112,
114; on Sebald 99
Stalin, Josef 13, 127–129, 134, 135, 138,
140, 141
St Augustine 51
Steiner, George, on silence 12, 64, 65
Taminiaux, Jacques, on Arendt and
Heidegger 88–89
Thunberg, Greta 161
time: acceleration of 11, 22–25, 28, 31–32,
35–36, 42, 160; ancient Greek kairos,
chronos and aion 35–37; disjointed
40–43; see also Braudel, Ferdinand;
Koselleck, Reinhart
Tocqueville, Alexis de, and Democracy in
America 19, 20, 23, 26, 32, 152
totalitarianism 12, 77–90; see also Arendt,
Hannah, on the break in tradition
Toumayan, Alain 160
tourism 26, 111, 115–116, 118, 120, 122,
123; dark 119
Traverso, Enzo 28
uncanny 101, 102, 130; see also Freud,
Sigmund, on civilisation and its
discontents
United Nations 2, 145, 146, 147; see also
post-war liberal order
Villa, Dana, on Arendt and Heidegger
86–87
Warburg, Aby 96, 103, 104
Wilson, Woodrow 146, 147; see also
League of Nations
Winter, Jay, on silence 63, 73
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, on silence 64, 71
worldlessness 9, 12, 14, 80, 86, 88, 152,
154; see also Arendt, Hannah, on the
break in tradition; silence
World War II 1, 2, 6–8, 10, 12, 20, 32, 48,
84, 114–115, 145–147, 148, 156, 159,
161, 162
Yolocaust 115–118; see also Shapira,
Shahak, on Yolocaust
Yurchak, Alexei, on Lenin’s Mausoleum
134–138