Misao posle užasa: problemi znanja i pamćenja
Thought after horror: problems of knowledge and memory

Author(s): Lazar Atanasković
Subject(s): Philosophy, History of the Holocaust, History of Antisemitism
Published by: Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju
Keywords: Holocaust; horror; memory
Summary/Abstract: Everything that happened between 1933 and 1945 on European streets, in concentration camps, in ghettoized Jewish quarters, in the open fields of Eastern Europe - had as its most ephemeral consequence the fact that the much-appreciated Western thought about history found itself before the finished act. After 1945, horror became the most obvious fact of history, a fact that, on the one hand, seems to fall into the continuity of human history, while on the other hand, breaks or cuts that continuity. Any understanding of Auschwitz as just one more event, in continuity with everything else, becomes problematic the moment that one more is spoken out loud. The impossibility of answering the question - in relation to what the experience of Auschwitz would be meant as another experience, necessarily already refers to the thought of concentration camps as a razor blade that asymmetrically cuts the previous history, to an incomprehensibly vast before and almost punctually after.

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