Memory and morality

It has long been recognized that the Holocaust poses special challenges. On the one hand, historical research has accumulated a detailed and penetrating account of the events. On the other hand, efforts at understanding and commemorating these events transcend professional history and take shape in the public sphere. In the public sphere, however, memory of the Holocaust is shaped just as much by art and by fiction as by history. The influence of films on the Holocaust is especially important in this context to the extent that audiences take them to be, if not true, ultimately realistic depictions of past experience. This article challenges the notion that the memory of the Holocaust is best served by the effort to recreate experience, and argues that there are deeply moral implications of how the present uses its past.