Representations of violence surround us in everyday life – in news reports, films and novels – inviting interpretation and raising questions about the ethics of viewing or reading about harm done to others. How can we understand the processes of meaning-making involved in interpreting violent events and experiences? And can these acts of interpretation themselves be violent by reproducing the violence that they represent? This book examines the ethics of engaging with violent stories from a broad hermeneutic perspective. It offers multidisciplinary perspectives on the sense-making involved in interpreting violence in its various forms, from blatant physical violence to less visible forms that may inhere in words or in the social and political order of our societies. By focusing on different ways of narrating violence and on the cultural and paradigmatic forms that govern such narrations, Interpreting Violence explores the ethical potential of literature, art and philosophy to expose mechanisms of violence while also recognizing their implication in structures that contribute to or benefit from practices of violence.

In this article I discuss the entangled memories of the Holocaust and the anticolonial struggles in Western Europe in the 1960s by relating the writings of Jean Améry and Frantz Fanon. My aim is to show how Améry’s retrospective narrative of his lived experience in the Nazi camp was formed by his reading of Fanon’s experiences of colonialism, and how Fanon’s narrative of the colonial trauma was transposed and translated into Améry’s public testimony as a Holocaust survivor. The article argues that Améry’s individual memories found a certain mediated cultural form and narrative frame in the contemporaneous situation of decolonisation. The multilayered weave of fascist and colonial violence constituting Améry’s testimony highlights questions of memory’s multidirectionality and casts new light on how cultural memorial forms are shaped and shared.

This chapter discusses current changes in the conception of time in historical studies. Since Reinhart Koselleck, historical time has turned into an object of historicization by historians interested in how conceptions of time frame the writing of history. A common topic in current debate is a shared experience of crisis or profound changes in our present experience of time. Some historians view these changes as a threat to historical consciousness while others view them as offering an opportunity to scrutinize the chrono-normative underpinnings of academic historiography. This chapter gives an overview of (a) how the linear and homogenous conception of historical time is presently challenged by new ways of understanding temporality – notably by theories of presentism and of multi-layered temporalities – and (b) how traditional ways of periodization and scaling are challenged by theories of long-term history and the Anthropocene that integrate timescales of the human and nonhuman world.