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After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust, Eva Hoffman (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 320 pp., $25 cloth.
The Holocaust has become the paradigmatic case for discussions of ethical approaches to memory, justice, apology, reparations, representations, and reconciliation in the aftermath of atrocities and genocides. But as After Such Knowledge shows, the passage of time between the original events and the present leads to the development of informative, and sometimes alternative, perspectives on these issues by succeeding generations.
For Eva Huffman, the child of Holocaust survivors, "the Holocaust past, aside from being a profound personal legacy, is also a task. It demands . . . an understanding that is larger than just ourselves. . . .The second generation after every calamity is the hinge generation, in which the meanings of awful events can remain . . . fixed at the point of trauma; or in which they can be transformed into new sets of relations with the world and new understanding" (p. 103). Hoffman's meditation on this distinct historical moment illuminates many of the processes of long-term reconciliation. It has weaknesses, but, tellingly, some of these derive from the very complexity of the issues and the immensity of the task she has set herself: defining the contemporary meaning of a crime which, in Hannah Arendt's words, was too radical to punish or forgive, and charting how individuals, communities, and relationships recover from it.
After Such Knowledge contributes to our understanding of reconciliation, whose long-term nature is still too often overlooked by those demanding that a trial or truth commission "achieve reconciliation" right away. It also deepens our knowledge of reconciliation's complexity: though reconciliation is generally framed as a bilateral process, it is rarely just a matter of perpetrator-victim relations or those between their descendants, and certainly not as years and decades pass. Bystanders, rescuers, collaborators, the fellow-persecuted slated for lessswift annihilation-the descendants of these groups, too, are important actors in reconciliation, as Hoffman demonstrates through her...