On Memory, Vienna, and the Responsibility to Remember

 Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

It is a day of memory — but also a day of responsibility. Not only to remember what happened, but to reflect on how it became possible. Because history does not repeat itself in identical form. It returns in patterns: in language, in indifference, in the slow normalisation of what once would have been unthinkable.

In recent days, I have found myself returning to voices from the past that understood something essential about the fragility of civilisation — not as historians writing in hindsight, but as witnesses writing as the world was coming apart.

In The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig describes a Europe that believed itself immune to barbarism. A cultured, educated, interconnected world — convinced that progress was irreversible, and that the worst belonged to the past. Zweig’s tragedy was not naïveté, but trust: a belief that culture and education alone would be enough to protect civilisation.

That question has stayed with me, not least because I once lived in Vienna. A city that was once among the most cosmopolitan and intellectually vibrant places on earth — the home of Freud, Mozart, Wittgenstein, Mahler, Popper, Strauss, von Hayek, Klimt - and Zweig. How could a world so steeped in culture, reason, and modern thought descend into tyranny and barbarism?

Zweig understood that this was precisely the point: civilisation does not collapse from ignorance alone, but from complacency — from the belief that “it cannot happen here.”

Victor Klemperer, in his diaries, documented something equally unsettling: how language itself becomes a tool of transformation. Not always through sudden propaganda, but through gradual corrosion — words losing meaning, repetition dulling resistance, cruelty becoming administrative and banal. Authoritarianism, he shows, rarely arrives fully formed. It seeps in through habits, through euphemisms, through the quiet adaptation of everyday life.

This is where the warnings of Orwell and Huxley meet historical reality.

One feared the brute denial of truth — the demand that citizens reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. The other feared something more silent: a future where truth would not need to be banned, because it would be drowned in distraction, fatigue, and an endless stream of triviality.

Today, we recognise both dangers.

We live in a time where facts are not always forbidden — but often overwhelmed. Where lies are not hidden — but repeated until exhaustion replaces outrage. Where the public sphere becomes noisy enough that attention itself is fractured, and where democratic erosion can proceed not through dramatic rupture, but through the slow draining of civic vigilance.

Holocaust Remembrance Day is therefore not only about remembering victims. It is about recognising the mechanisms that made the catastrophe possible — and the human tendencies that allow societies to slide, step by step, into moral darkness.

Memory, without responsibility, is hollow.

Responsibility, without memory, is blind.

Today, we remember. And we recommit: to attention over indifference, to truth over convenience, and to the quiet courage of caring — even when it would be easier not to. 

Mathias Knutsson