Educating and transmitting for the world of tomorrow: The new witnesses on the changing field of memory
Educating and transmitting for the world of tomorrow: The new witnesses on the changing field of memory

Summary/Abstract: A collection of texts "Witnesses and Memory" published in 2003 in the USA under the direction of Ana Douglass and Thomas Vogler begins with this quotation from Maurice Blanchot in his "Last Man": even God needs witness. Today we are confronted with the accelerated disappearance of the last direct witnesses of the stone world, named by one of the Great Witnesses, Tadeusz Borowski, who, defeated in his relation to reality, committed suicide in 1951.Is it only this disappearance of the last witnesses of the atrocities of the second war that definitively confronts us with the forgetting against which Pierre Nora and many others warn us? Not without reason, Nora emphasizes that our concern for the memory of the past reflects the fact that the latter does not cease to be hidden. The memory arranged, fictitious, even false, is constantly making its appearance, it establishes, sometimes usurp, a link with the testimonies that bear on events that have nothing to do with the history of the holocaust, Shoah or other collective trauma. Arranged memory helps to create a climate of confusion. In the long run, reversals of meaning, even abuses, are no longer impossible!

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