Violence, Memory and the Sacred: The Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust

This talk focuses on a contrast between the continuing presence today of the sacred language of martyrdom in some parts of Europe (and elsewhere), and the fading away or disappearance of the language of martyrdom in other parts of Europe by looking at the two contrasting cases of the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. While martyrdom is at the heart of how Armenians today remember the catastrophe of 1915, there has emerged since the 1940s a very different linguistic register in Jewish responses to the Holocaust, one by and large free of the language of martyrology.The implications of this distinction are far-reaching. How we think about catastrophe matters in contemporary Europe. We must commemorate the victims of violence, but we must also seek a way out of the spiral of continuing conflict which the language of martyrdom perpetuates