Remembering the 20th Century
| Date | 01 October 2006 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885106067290 |
| Published date | 01 October 2006 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Remembering the 20th Century
Steve Buckler University of Birmingham, UK
Hannah Arendt Responsibility and Judgment, ed. J. Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2003.
Tzvetan Todorov Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003.
Remembering the key political events of the 20th century has arguably to be thought of as
a highly reflexive task. The more extreme political projects of the period saw erasures of
memory, negations of the past, of an unprecedented sort and, in turn, the lapse of any
criteria transmitted from the past that might impose limits upon the ways in which human
beings are treated. Remembering events of this kind is likely to be an undertaking perma-
nently mediated by questions concerning the nature, and the point, of historical memory
itself. One need only think here of the problems that continue to surround the Nazi
Holocaust as a historical event, with its astonishing susceptibility to emasculation or denial,
and also the sustained controversies around attempts at public memorialization of the
event, with attendant criticisms of ‘forgetful monuments which erase as much history from
memory as they inscribe in it’.1Such problems might be taken as evidence that the more
breathtakingly brutal aspects of the 20th-century experience may at best be objects of what
Lawrence Langer has described as ‘anguished memory’ which, far from being redemptive,
collapses into uncertainty, and so forms an impoverished basis upon which to make
historical judgments.2In view of this, we are challenged to reconsider how we relate to the
past through historical memory and also, in the light of the kind of crimes of which an
amnesiac society appears capable, to consider how we reassert the connection between the
possibility of memory and the possibility of humanism.
These questions have a central place in recent volumes by Hannah Arendt and Tzvetan
Todorov. Responsibility and Judgment collects together a number of shorter pieces by
Arendt, previously unpublished or uncollected and written mostly during the last decade of
her life, which contain reflections upon key moral questions thrown up by the experience
of totalitarianism, questions that resonate through subsequent controversies and which
frame critical assessments of more contemporary political events. In Hope and Memory,
Todorov looks back at the 20th century from the vantage point of its close and poses the
495
review article
Contact address: Dr Steve Buckler, University of Birmingham, Department of
Political Science and International Studies, ERI Building, Edgbaston,
Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK.
Email: n.e.buckler@bham.ac.uk
EJPT
European Journal
of Political Theory
© SAGE Publications Ltd,
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi
issn 1474-8851, 5(4)495–503
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885106067290]
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