Afterword

In his 1982 novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera starts by recounting a story. On the first official event since the coup d’état of February 1948, the leader of Communist Czechoslovakia, Klement Gottwald, gave a speech from a balcony, marking the beginning of a new regime order. Beside him stood his most faithful supporters, among them Clementis. It was cold, so Clementis gave the bare-headed Gottwald his fur hat. The photograph of this foundational event signaling a national rebirth was reproduced in the hundreds of thousands, as the beginning of Communist Bohemia. Most children would had seen this photograph in their school textbooks. A few years later, however, Clementis fell out of favour, and his image was erased from all subsequent reproductions of the photograph, replaced by a blank wall. All that remained of Clementis was his fur hat on Gottwald’s head. Though disappeared by the state, he was potentially remembered by a whole generation, among them Kundera, who was nearly twenty years old at the time. By turning his memory of this day and his memory of the photograph of the solicitous Clementis into a story, Kundera constructed a lieu de mémoire. State violence, deaths, and disappearances, and in turn memories, storytelling, cultural interventions, and lieux de mémoire are the themes running throughout the contributions to this special issue of Les Ateliers de l’Éthique/The Ethics Forum edited by Florence Larocque and Anne-Marie Reynaud, “Dealing with Difficult Pasts: Memory, History, and Ethics” (“Et après? Mémoire, histoire et éthique pour faire face au passé”). The unifying question they ask is how countries and citizens face their difficult national pasts. Implicitly and explicitly they see this “faire face” with the past as a moral prerogative and as a necessary step toward a more just future. This progression toward this hoped-for future structures many of the articles here: the authors present a range of country experiences at different stages of confronting their pasts, whether by members of civil society, initiatives undertaken by the state, or with the collaboration of an international community. In so doing, the authors add more examples to the many other case studies of how countries have chosen to silence or recount their pasts (most often a mixture of the two), in the interdisciplinary fields of memory studies, human rights, and transitional justice. Memory studies, human rights, and transitional justice are several decades old: the field of memory studies is often cited as beginning with Maurice Halbwachs, then taking root in response to the Holocaust, and booming in the 1990s just as truth commissions (as a key mechanism in the transitional-justice toolbox) were becoming more widespread. The field of human rights, from which transitional justice emerged, has a trajectory similar to that of memory studies, rooted in the aftermath of the Second World War and international declarations on human rights and genocide and the formation of an interconnected international system. Though the concept of “human rights” has a much longer history, civil society and victims of Cold War era dictatorships made crucial use of the term for their defence, and its use has expanded since the fall of the Berlin Wall. While Samuel Moyn (2010) has argued that human rights represent the most recent in a series of utopias, practitioners on the ground and academics doing fine-tuned analysis of specific regions have argued for the practical importance of human rights in combatting such abuse (Cmiel, 2012; Grandin, 2007; Robinson, 2014). These three fields—memory studies, human rights, and transitional justice—are now fully established, with their own journals, conferences, associations, and preferred interdisciplinary methodologies. With …