duty to remember (p. 144): The issue, however, is not to recall and reconstruct feelings but to give evidence to truth in order to preserve the moral order: ‘The moral order requires memory and memory in turn demands certain narrative forms’ (Kugelmass 1996: 195). Therefore, the enormity of the Holocaust cannot be forgotten and the forms in which it is given expression are important histor- ical phenomena in their own right. The dominant rhetoric of Primo Levi’s testimonial writing supports this argument. His phrase ‘the duty to remem- ber’ means that remembering the Holocaust is an ethico-political problem because it has to do with the construction of the future: ‘the duty to remem- ber consists not only in having a deep concern for the past but in transmit- ting the meaning of the past events to the next generation’ (Ricouer 1999: 9). The duty to remember is a duty to keep alive the memory of suffering by the persistent pursuit of an ethical response to the Holocaust experience.
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