Memory, cultural heritage, and legacies of wars

Rosoux, Valérie [UCL]

The Israeli and Palestinian understandings of the 1948 war and the origins of the Palestinian refugee question illustrate the gap between narratives. Beside the notions of memory and cultural heritage, discussions about the weight and the uses of the past are often presented in terms of legacies of war. In France, for instance, President Emmanuel Macron recently acknowledged that the French Army had tortured and killed a youthful anti-war intellectual in 1957. The death in custody of Maurice Audin, a 25-year-old mathematician, has for decades been a symbol of the French Army’s brutality during the Algerian War. In the aftermath of wars, emotions such as grief, anger, resentment, shame and/or guilt are widely shared and passed on in family circles. The way in which Jean Améry insists upon his right to resentment shows the need to go beyond the traditional vision of resentment as a backward-looking emotion or as a sign of a moral failure.