How can a description of an encounter between traumatic memories of different collective events assist in reaching a more profound processing (“working through”) of each of them, and an assumption of responsibility for the past as well as for the present? In the early 1950’s, philosopher Hannah Arendt and poet and author Aimé Césaire already wrote about the connections between the European colonialism and World War II. The return of European violence into the continent and its expression in the Nazi genocide was called by Arendt the “boomerang effect.” However, only recently have a few of the Holocaust scholars begun to bring together these two extreme events to the same space without attempting to create hierarchies, in order to reveal their mutual constructive relationships as well as the mutual influence in cultural representations and in the conceptualization of responsibility. The course will focus on literary and cinematic works that bring together historical traumas from different places or periods without creating competition between them, and which enable therefore a common space for their processing, “multidirectional memory,” to use Michael Rothberg’s words. We will explore various texts, including The Fall of Camus, Hiroshima mon Amour, the film of Alain Resnais, Dora Bruder of Patrick Modiano, and Aurélia Steiner (three texts and two films carrying the same name) by Marguerite Duras. The course will draw both on the discourse of Holocaust testimony and its ethical dilemmas, through the writings of Saul Friedlander, Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, Georges Didi-Huberman, Annette Wieviorka, Dominick LaCapra, and Giorgio Agamben, among others; and on the discourse of Post-Colonialism, through Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak among others. The course will primarily draw on the links between the two discourses through the writings of Hannah Arendt, Aimé Cesaire, Michael Rothberg, and Eric Jennings. We will try to find out: How can one present culture’s “others” without appropriating their voices? How can one provide a space for different kinds of “otherness” in the same work?  How can one create alternative representations of otherness which include acknowledgment of the author’s privileged position and an acceptance of responsibility? We will explore how giving up the “competition” between the traumas and the exclusivity of suffering, as well as the “translation” of personal and collective pains from one culture to another, might enable new ways of thinking about  memory and testimony, which in turn can create an ethics of responsibility.