Violence and Domesticity. Nazi Perpetrators’ Houses between Preservation and Resemantization

Over the last decades, academic interest in perpetrators has increased considerably . As well as providing important analyses of victims and their post-conflict commemorations, the fields of Memory and Trauma Studies have begun to investigate more intensely the memory, legacy and cultural reception of those who contributed actively to a genocide through their actions. The aim of this new line of inquiry is certainly not to ennoble deplorable violent practices or to give them visibility, but to offer a more comprehensive theoretical reflection on the cultural transmission of trauma and to come to terms with thorny issues such as accountability and culpability . This perspective can help to eschew the simplistic semantic binary opposition of “bad vs good”, which has long informed memory narrativity at a public level. It also enables us to stratify the numerous actorial positions in memory narratives, precluding false justifications and avoiding the risk of reducing the perpetrator to a prototypical, non-human evil with which we have nothing in common. Of course, such a misinterpretation can serve to crystallise actions in the contexts in which they occurred, creating “fixed” characters that therefore cannot be replicable in other times or places, instead of asking more pressing questions about where, how and why similar practices are replicated today in the world we inhabit. Studying perpetrators therefore productively foregrounds an ethics of memory and education and the formation of national-cultural identity. The rhetorical choices made in conveying responsibilities for crimes, for the violent actions perpetrated by one’s own countrymen and countrywomen, can unveil more about (i) how different nations ideologically reshape their past, deciding which parts to emphasise or narcotise, and (ii) how they thematise – if at all – their own moral implication .