The Nameless Heritage of the Résistance

Ko nc ep tu al ni iz az ov i p ro m iš lja nj u de m ok ra ci je I the pamphlet Indignez-vous (Cry out! – Hessel, 2010), the reason the author Stéphane Hessel gives for the necessity for public indignation makes us listen attentively: it is the “heritage of the Résistance” which obliges us to protest against contemporary grievances. The heritage of the Résistance – this is the emotion of indignation, but it is also the freedom of democracy, accompanied by social justice and the common good of the welfare state. And the contemporary grievances – these are the false promises of a neoliberal politics, the arbitrariness of the international financial markets, increasing state debts, the spectacles of populism, and the infamousness of xenophobic debates and movements. By his essay, Stéphane Hessel declares implicitly that the heritage of the democratic Europe is based not only on the horror of the Holocaust, as Dan Diner called for (Diner, 2001: 65) – to which, I think, we should also add the horrors of Stalinism. This heritage is not imaginable without the civil actors of the fight for freedom, without the Résistance. However, we are concerned here with a hidden tradition which does not have a slogan like “Auschwitz never again”. This hidden tradition is marked by its namelessness, by the absence of the right words. At the moment of the refoundation of freedom in Europe, the resistance movements were substituted for the rule of the parties which at best administered Wolfgang Heuer Otto-Suhr-Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin