sznaider

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.