Destruction of Memory and Memory of Destruction

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between violence, memory, and historical erasure in modernity, arguing that certain forms of political violence aim not merely to shape history but to obliterate its conditions of possibility. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and W.G. Sebald, the paper traces two distinct but converging strategies of silencing the past: the organized lie – a deliberate, state-engineered falsification of factual reality – and equanimity, a cultivated indifference that renders atrocity banal despite the continued visibility of its traces. These mechanisms neutralize the disruptive potential of memory, which otherwise resists the homogenizing force of official narratives. Arendt’s concept of the organized lie is compared to atomic annihilation, wherein falsification spreads through networks of interrelated facts, dissolving the fabric of historical intelligibility. Violence, in this context, is not a political instrument but an apolitical force that undoes the very structure of worldhood and temporality. The paper argues that historiography must move beyond the accumulation of empirical data and toward a reconstruction of the intentional destruction of history—influenced by what Sebald calls a “natural history of destruction.” By shifting focus from world-producing to world-dissolving violence, historiography must recognize that violence is not simply enacted within history but is directed at history itself: at its intelligibility, continuity, and transmissibility. The task is not to discern the annihilative force that renders the past incommunicable or meaningless, and to bear witness to what resists re-inscription into the historical record.