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The Holes of Oblivion: Arendt and Benjamin on Storytelling in the Age of Totalitarian Destruction

After the unprecedented violence of WWI, the question of the demise of storytelling occupied Walter Benjamin and others who understood the urgency of communicating the horrors that had happened in order to prevent further atrocities from following. After the vast human destruction of WWII, Hannah Arendt returned to Benjamin's earlier theories, making important changes to them in order to develop her ideas about "the holes of oblivion" in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Then, interestingly, in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), she reversed her position on storytelling and the totalitarian construction of oblivion, thus removing this cornerstone of her theory of...