On the idea of cultural trauma see Jeffrey Alexander et al., eds., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2004). This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. In this case what I am suggesting is that what became known as the Holocaust was experienced as a cultural trauma by two different groups, first by those identifying as Jews, and second by those considering themselves to be members of the West, the heirs and beneficiaries of the moral and philosophical order of modernity. 1 As Ron Eyerman writes, “cultural trauma refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion.” 2 Based in the idea of collective memory, Eyerman goes on to explain that, “the trauma need not necessarily be felt by everyone in the community or experienced directly by any or all.” 3 It is a collective experience. Across the United States and England, and indeed across the whole of the West, punk expressed not only a local politics but also, ultimately, the existential affect of a nihilism born in the slow surfacing of the cultural trauma embodied in what, around 1978, was becoming named, becoming known as the Holocaust. Punk, I am arguing, was something special.
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