Arnon Grunberg

Dead

The past

'“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” William Faulkner famously wrote. And in the case of the Holocaust, the past is today’s geopolitics. Poland has once again lost out and Israel has been forced to take Russia’s side,' Anshel Pfeffer writes in Haaretz in an article on the Holocaust and today's geopolitics.

Read it here.

As if to remind us that memory, remembering the past and history are rarely or maybe even never neutral.

Governments and their willing executioners slaughtered millions, now the dead are being used in smaller and lager power plays and the question remains whether remembering the dead is possible without falling into the trap of geopolitical and perhaps also more personal fights.
Who is allowed to speak on behalf of the dead? How do we know that our are attempts at "restoration" serve the dead and the victims of injustice? Can we be sure that these attempts are more than tools in contemporary power struggles? We can be sure that when remembering becomes the extension of politics the victims are being reduced to means to an end, once again.

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