Memory and victims in the theses on the concept of history of Walter Benjamin: against the violence of forgetting

Abstract

The theses about the concept of history Uber dan Begriffder Geschhicte (1940) are the last philosophic and political papers edited by Walter Benjamin, written between 1939 and 1940 in the middle of the National Socialism rise in Europe.  This is the brief of a Jewish that tries to escape, a victim of the legal violence and its irrational dehumanization that finally obliges the philosopher of Berlin to commit suicide. The theses are a clear demand for justice and compensation for the Victims of violence, those who are socially excluded, against whom injustice was impelled, where a new interpretation of History is proposed, from the standpoint of the defeated, the victims of the historic facts that History takes out of its narrative.  This reading of history requires “a brush against the grain” through memory in order to disclose those details that escape the historian where the holes, invasions and discontinuities show the barbarism that is hidden in this supposed linearity of the historic time, important details for the victim`s justice.  The memory is from this conception of history the tool for the struggle against violence of oblivion and at the same time an ethic guarantee of Redemption and Justice.