The historian Enzo Traverso, a professor at the
Cornell University (USA), is one of the most
distinguished specialists in memory studies. In the
following pages he answers a series of questions
focusing on the memory of the perpetrators and
their legacies, the current rise of new far-right
movements and the situation of the European
policies of memory. He also refers to his latest books,
Left-wing melancholia. Marxism, History, and Memory
(Columbia University Press, 2017) and Les nouveaux
visages du fascisme (Editions Textuel, 2017).
Why are there so few studies about the memory of perpetrators?
There are numerous and sometimes extremely important studies on
perpetrators if you think of the works of Christopher Browning and
Harald Welzer. The memory of perpetrators has been the object of
literary fiction — for instance, Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) by
Jonathan Littell — but the available corpus of testimonies and memoirs
is limited. Perpetrators do not like to exhibit or recall their crimes and
prefer to conceal them. Instances of “coming out” are rare (for instance,
the memoirs of the general Aussaresses on torture during the Algerian
war). This is not surprising. The scarcity of memories of perpetrators
(and therefore studies concerning them) is the dialectical reversal of
the increasing role that the remembrance of victims has taken in our
societies and in collective memory.
Do you believe that a policy of memory focused exclusively on
the victim and not the perpetrator can provoke a certain blindness
towards crimes that are currently committed?
Frankly, I believe that it is necessary to extricate ourselves from this
game of mirrors and from a historical consciousness based on mass
victims. We should try to accommodate the complexity of the past,
which is not reduced to a binary confrontation between perpetrators
Expert’s view
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