Historical Trauma between Event and Ethics: Aleida Assmann’s Theory in the Context of Trauma Studies

The paper focuses on the way the notion of trauma functions and is justified in the contemporary discourse on history. The author refers to the works of Aleida Assmann and examines the critique brought forward against memorial culture. Deconstructing Assmann’s argument, the author concludes that there are two levels of discourse that support and justify each other: the level of fact and the level of value. The first one deals with the problem of traumatic events and expanding memory about them, which is explained as a change of time regime. The second one deals with the ethical turn that made the change of the time regime possible. To analyse historical trauma, the article suggests breaking the connection between these two levels and examining their foundations separately.