Memory and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust Era ─ The Ethics of Never Again

The study of memory is too often pervaded with a spatially-fixed understanding of culture. The idea of culture as ‘rooted’ was an attempt to provide a solution to the uprooting of local cultures caused by the formation of nation-states. Conversely, Sznaider and Baer contend that there exist travelling/cosmopolitan or multi-directional memories, based on experiences originating in a specific place, but which move and travel from there to other ones. Using the Holocaust as an example, the authors show how memories of it are disseminated and how they become part of a larger global framework. There are four ways the Holocaust can be universalized: was it the Jews, or many different peoples that suffered? Is the lesson 'never again', for the Jews, or for everyone? Were the Nazis uniquely evil, or only different in quantity from other mass murderers? Who remembers and who has the right to pronounce the truth of the Holocaust? Taking Argentina and Spain as test cases and looking at public media, scholarly discourse, NGOs dealing with human rights and memory, museums and memorial sites, this book follows these four ways of universalization to illustrate the transformation from the national to the cosmopolitan ethics of overcoming the past. Both case-studies show that this ethics is not only pertinent to Europe and the places that are directly related to the Holocaust, but proves that that memory does indeed travel.

Natan Sznaider is a Full Professor of Sociology at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo in Israel. His research interests over the past few years have centered on giving a sociological account of processes of trauma and victimhood as well as on the Jewish political theory of Hannah Arendt. His publications include Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order (2011) and The Compassionate Temperament: Care and Cruelty in Modern Society (2000). He co-authored with Daniel Levy Human Rights and Memory (2009) and Erinnerung im Globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust (2001), which was expanded and translated into English as The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (2006). Alejandro Baer is Associate Professor of Sociology, Stephen Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. He currently conducts research on the representation of present and past mass violence in a global arena of interconnected memory cultures as well as on theory and research methods for the study of contemporary antisemitism. His publications include Holocausto. Recuerdo y RepresentaciA3n (2006) and El testimonio audiovisual. Imagen y memoria del Holocausto (2005).