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word about privation and injustice in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Here again, the legal proceedings that did occur regarding the privations and injustices of the former GDR were due to the outside impetus of the old West Germany. In any case, the Germans are not a people who revel in legal redress to settle accounts. The First and Second World Wars and the economic and political collapse of the GDR were experienced more as ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ to be commonly borne, rather than as something that a minority of the Germans did to the majority and for which they now had to pay a price.
    How recent or remote an event is is not its only measure of relevance. An event can be recent and yet feel very distant because then it was war and now there is peace; because it happened in a place far away and now one is home again; or because it happened under an old regime or during a revolution and now one is living under the new system. Two experiential worlds can, within short periods of time, be so strikingly different that it becomes arduous to map the past using the coordinates of the present. Because the world is constituted more along the lines of the collective rather than the individual, a collective need to forget will tend to overcome an individual desire to remember, and a collective need to remember will overcome an individual wish to forget.
    Furthermore, if there is an ‘other’ who remembers and insists on remembrance, redress, restitution, criminal proceedings and verdicts, then that can become decisive for whether remembrance is pursued and done on account of the law. One individual has a difficult time forgetting if there is another who steadfastly connects him or her to an occurrence, a conduct or a crime. This is also true for a community that others identify as connected with specific happenings, conduct, and crimes; it cannot free itself by simply forgetting and repressing. Think of Germany, or more recently Serbia, Rwanda, and Cambodia on the one hand, and on the other of Russia and Spain – in the latter cases, forgetting and repressing work because there is no ‘other’, just Russians who had inflicted harm on other Russians under Stalin and Spaniards who fought other Spaniards in the civil war. The more numerous and strong those insisting on remembrance are, the less feasible forgetting becomes. Should they also be victims and should they be sufficiently numerous and influential then they can imprint their mark on the culture of the community and define it as a victim culture. Conversely, a victor culture could disregard a few, weak victims.
    It is also, of course, harder for a community to be freed from identification with past injustices and crimes when a sufficient number of its members are implicated. Entanglement in the past arises not only through having been a perpetrator, an accessory, inciter or supporter. Common knowledge, observing and turning away, the omission of lending aid to the victims, not expelling, prosecuting, and punishing the perpetrators afterward, but seeing them instead tolerated or even respected – these all contribute. Solidarity with the perpetrator leads to entanglement in his or her crime and guilt – we discussed this as the centre of the idea of collective guilt.
    Even given these considerations, the question still remains: does law, an instrument that can facilitate both remembering and forgetting, have an intrinsic proximity to either agenda? I will cite three often-used arguments for remembering as opposed to forgetting or repressing, be it in regards to the national socialist, communist, or any other horror-filled, criminal, and guilt-laden past. Then I will try to evaluate these arguments as to their claims on the law. According to the first argument, remembering is the secret of redemption. A second argument posits remembering and the work on guilt and grief as prerequisites for a strong individual identity, trust and