There is a huge literature on the Third Reich and the explosion of state violence it provoked, first in Germany and then across Europe. The destruction of tens of millions of people culled from ethnic groups, above all European Jewry but also Slavs, Roma and Sinti and gay men and women, as well as members of political organisations considered enemies of the Nazi state, has come to define the historical narrative of the Second World War.
Just as pervasively, the collective memory of this paroxysm of state-sponsored mass murder shapes the moral universe of modern Europeans. Above all, the destruction of more than five and a half million Jews by the political agents of a modern European state has evolved into an ethical pivot that is consecrated in numerous state-sponsored and grassroots memorials, as well as by scores of new ‘Holocaust Museums'. To what end and why?
The many different acts of remembering and memorialising the Holocaust, inspired by the moral axiom of ‘Never Again', have not prevented genocides unfolding in the Balkans, Africa and South-east Asia. To remember and memorialise seems tantamount to acting and thinking without effect or impact. Mary Fulbrook's monumental book Reckonings makes a case for challenging the modern cult of memory and situates the rituals of memorialising in the context of the catastrophic failure of the postwar quest for justice in the successor states of the Third Reich.
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