Language:
English
Year of publication:
2003
Titel der Quelle:
Australian Journal of Politics and History
Angaben zur Quelle:
49,2 (2003) 164-181
Keywords:
Eichmann, Adolf,
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Psychological aspects
;
War crime trials
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Abstract:
A "limit event" is an event or practice of such magnitude and violence that its effects rupture the otherwise normative foundations of legitimacy that underlie the constitution of a political and moral community. Victims' accounts play a key role in the construction of such events. Illustrates this with two examples: the Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961, and the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families held in Australia in the mid-1990s. The representational logic of the Eichmann trial was testimonial, oral, and memory-based, distinguishing it from the Nuremberg Trials. Like the document "Bringing Them Home" that was published following the Australian inquiry in 1997, the Eichmann trial occasioned a passage of the traumatic event from collective unspeakability to collective speakability. In Israel, the survivor testimonies at the Eichmann trial served not so much to verify historical data but to construct a tense narrative of the Holocaust and transform the negative perception of Holocaust survivor immigrants into a non-objectified presence, as well as to include the memory of the Holocaust in Israeli culture and integrate it into post-genocidal identities.
DOI:
10.1111/1467-8497.00302/full
URL:
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