Unsettling Empathy. Bjorn Krondorfer

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       London • New York

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      Support for this publication was provided by the Martin-Springer Institute, Northern Arizona University

      Copyright © 2020 by Björn Krondorfer

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

       British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      ISBN: HB 978-1-78661-581-7

      ISBN: PB 978-1-78661-582-4

       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2020931533

      ISBN: 978-1-78661-581-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

      ISBN: 978-1-78661-582-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

      ISBN: 978-1-78661-583-1 (electronic)

      Acknowledgments

      Though the bulk of this book was written during my 2019 spring sabbatical, Unsettling Empathy has been in the making for a long time. I have published smaller pieces on reconciliatory processes and unsettling empathy over the years, but I always found it daunting to write a more comprehensive account of my work with groups in conflict. People familiar with or curious about my work kept asking about such a book because they wanted to learn more about how trust-building intergroup processes unfold in conflict settings. They wanted to understand the dynamics that make or break a process in which people explore adversarial relations due to past and present injuries and injustices. I hope that Unsettling Empathy meets their expectations.

      Twenty-five years ago I published my first monograph, Remembrance and Reconciliation: Encounters Between Young Jews and Germans (1995). In that book I tried to make sense of how the Holocaust affected relationships between non-Jewish Germans and Jewish Americans born after 1945. I reported on various encounters between these two groups, relying on examples from the then-available literature as well as on my own experience as active participant and facilitator. I situated and contextualized these encounters within the intellectual and public debates of the 1980s and 1990s on Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). The book emphasized the vital role of memory in dialogue and reconciliation settings. Without fully acknowledging the past, I argued, trust would be impossible to establish, thus thwarting the restoring of relationships between the Jewish community and German society.

      I still consider the acknowledgment of an unjust and traumatic past essential for reconciliatory processes, but I have since realized that memories can be as much a stumbling block as a building block when working with groups in conflict. Memories tied to large-group identifications, iterated in national narratives, embraced as chosen cultural traumas, and recounted in personal storytelling have the power to fixate our gaze on the past in such a way that we are no longer capable of imagining a different future. Since the 1995 publication, I have arrived at a more nuanced and complex understanding of the (psycho)social and (psycho)political dynamics that obstruct or advance our efforts of seeking alternative pathways in protracted conflicts.

      In this light, Unsettling Empathy can be seen as a companion volume to Remembrance and Reconciliation. Each book has been written in a different moment in time. Remembrance and Reconciliation was completed in the optimistic spirit and enlightened certitude of the 1990s when coming to terms with the past coincided with real signs of political progress: the fall of the Berlin Wall, glasnost, and the expansion of liberal democracies. Unsettling Empathy has come into being during a period of increasing cultural pessimism, where we are witnessing the spread of populism and the rise of illiberal democracies that hark back to nationalist and ethnocentric narratives of the past. Because of this changed landscape, Unsettling Empathy, I believe, is more important today than it would have been twenty-five years ago.

      I could not have СКАЧАТЬ