Re-enacting the Past: Emotional Understanding of the Holocaust, Memory and Trauma
Re-enacting the Past: Emotional Understanding of the Holocaust, Memory and Trauma

Summary/Abstract: This study looks at the value of historical re-enactment, meant as a cognitive and emotional interaction with the past, especially with regard to Holocaust knowledge. Drawing on the theoretical insights of Robin G. Collingwood, Hannah Arendt, Dan Stone, Dominick LaCapra, and Elliot D. Cohen, this article investigates the reconstruction of historical thought and emotion. While maintaining the ability for compassion towards victims, Collingwood’s idea of re-enactment holds that historians can access not only the rational processes but also the salient emotions of historical agents, therefore allowing its critical differentiation from empathetic identification or moral alignment with perpetrators. This article creatively combines Cohen’s theory of emotional reasoning with Collingwood’s framework to offer a new approach for re-enacting past emotions. Central to this strategy is Cohen’s constructivist model, which stresses the cognitive accessibility of others’ emotions through rational analysis regardless of direct affective experience. The suggested framework reflects how the traumatic memory of the Holocaust disturbs temporal coherence, therefore requiring new representational forms that question historical norms and promote critical thinking. By allowing a cognitive reconstruction of agentic ideas and emotions, this work ultimately helps to clarify historical atrocities and provides an alternative to the aestheticization or oversimplification of suffering that preserves both conceptual integrity and compassionate involvement.

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