Abstract
At the start of the twenty-first century, globalization represents a challenge to the integration of the temporal and spatial durability of what it means to be human and social in the modern age. At the same time, as a result, the basic institutions of nation-state sovereignty (like national memory) move into the foreground and with them the question of whether the developments of the past decade constitute an epochal break within modernity. History and borders may no longer be the only form of social and symbolic integration. This begs the question: do territorial, geographical, and political distinction, such as Western or Eastern Europe, or even “The West” or “The East,” make any sense in our day and age? And, crucially, what does this mean for the study of memory?
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Notes
Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider, “Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences: A Research Agenda,” British Journal of Sociology, 57.1 (2006), 1–23; Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider, “Self-Limitation of Modernity? The Theory of Reflexive Taboos,” Theory & Society, 40.4 (2011), 417–36; Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Human Rights and Memory (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010).
For the concept of traveling memory see Astrid Erll, “Travelling Memory,” Parallax, 17.4 (2011), 4–18.
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
Andreas Huyssen, “International Memory and Human Rights,” Criticism, 53.4 (2011), 607–24.
Aleida Assmann, “Europe’s Divided Memory,” in Clashes in European Memory, ed. by Muriel Blaive, Christian Gerbel, and Thomas Lindenberger (Vienna: Studienverlag, 2006), pp. 259–69; Dan Diner, Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005); Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age.
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
For the comparison between East and South, see Oxana Shevel, “The Politics of Memory in a Divided Society: A Comparison between Post-Franco Spain and Post-Soviet Ukraine,” Slavic Review, 70.1 (2011), 137–64, and Stefan Troebst, Diktaturerinnerung und Geschichtsbilder im östlichen und südlichen Europa. Ein Vergleich der Vergleiche (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2010).
Natan Sznaider, Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).
See Levy and Sznaider, Human Rights and Memory; for a different narrative see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
Bryan Turner, Vulnerability and Human Rights (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2006), p. 1. 21. René Cassin, “From the Ten Commandments to the Rights of Man,” in Of Law and Man: Essays in Honor of Haim H. Cohn, ed. by Shlomo Shoham (New York: Sabra Books, 1971), pp. 13–25.
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Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
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Dirk Moses, “Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide,” in Oxford Handbook on Genocide Studies, ed. by Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 19–41; Anson Rabinbach, “The Challenge of the Unprecedented: Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide,” Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook, 4 (2005), pp. 397–420.
Michael Marrus, “The Holocaust at Nuremberg,” Yad Vashem Studies, 26 (1998), 4–45; Michael Marrus, “A Jewish Lobby at Nuremberg: Jacob Robinson and the Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1945–1946,” Cardozo Law Review, 27 (2005), 1651–65.
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See http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ for the wording of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
For the full declaration, see the website of the Israeli government, at http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Peace+Process/Guide+to+the+Peace+Process /Declaration+of+Establishment+of+State+of+Israel.htm.
A striking example is how the memory of the Holocaust has traveled to Argentina and its dealings with the dictatorship and its aftermath. The report on the so-called Desapercidos is called “Nunca Mas” (Never Again), directly borrowing the use of this term from the Dachau monument. Argentinian artists (like Julio Flores) use silhouettes to memorialize the victims of Argentinian dictatorship by consciously copying posters he encountered in Auschwitz; See Vikki Bell, “On Fernando’s Photograph: The Biopolitics of Aparacion in Contemporary Argentina,” Theory, Culture & Society, 27 (2010), 69–89. Through the use of Spanish, Argentinian memory of the Civil War is traveling back to Spain in its own dealing of the past of the Civil War. These processes of traveling/ multidirectional/cosmopolitan memories challenge the notions of divided European memories and provide a new point of view transcending the traditional gaze of divided national memories.
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© 2013 Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind, and Julie Fedor
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Sznaider, N. (2013). European Memory: Between Jewish and Cosmopolitan. In: Blacker, U., Etkind, A., Fedor, J. (eds) Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137322067_4
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