Difficult Pasts, Vicarious Trauma: The Concept of ‘Secondary Witnessing’

Abstract

Since the 1980s and 1990s, a remarkable change in the global landscape of remembrance has meant that nations and their citizens are encouraged to remember not only times of glory or martyrdom but also less assimilable pasts of violence and trauma, persecution and guilt. Traditional forms of public commemoration conveniently ignore any collective responsibility for acts of violence while collective victimhood is framed in a narrative of heroic martyrdom, a form of suffering which — not only in a Christian worldview — can also be configured as an empowering nationalistic discourse. While this dynamic of remembering and forgetting was recognized as potentially helping former enemies to overcome their violent conflicts, there is a global trend in which the acknowledgement of suffering is required to allow both sides to ‘move on’. Questions of culpability and victimhood have moved to centre-stage, symbolic apologies, moral and legal accountability and increasingly also material compensation are demanded from those who have been established as perpetrators.