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“and the war was over”
“Are you sure?”
In the literature on trauma, testimony, and witnessing that has arisen from the Holocaust and other sources, an issue sometimes surfaces without often being discussed. This is the question of what it might mean to remember an event of which one was not part, to memorialize an experience that happened to others with whom one might not be linked through ties of family or friendship—or not linked in any objective way, but simply through an act of imaginative identification. There are various forms this question might take. For example, there is the negative form in the sense of a felt culpability for something that was not in fact one's responsibility, yet in which one is implicated simply by virtue of one's position in a particular place or time. This is, for instance, the culpability that might be felt and acknowledged by those who come after, as in the responsibility some British people feel for colonialism and slavery, or some Germans for the actions of their Nazi forbears—even if their actual forbears were not Nazis. Alternatively, there is the kind of traumatized identification that can be made with those who have suffered, even if one has not suffered in the same way oneself. The horrified, albeit sometimes phobic, identification that people can have with parents who have lost children is an example of this, and it might be the case that certain “empathic” identifications leading to charitable giving and social action depend upon the capacity of people to identify with and take responsibility for a suffering of which they themselves may have had no direct experience (Seu, 2013).