The new grammar of Otherness: Europe, the Shoah, and the Jews

Abstract

The essay discusses the passage from an ideological, patriotic and anti-fascist memory of the deportations and the extermination to what the author describes as the “ethnic” memory of the Shoah, which has played, and continues to play, a central role in constructing the European historical narrative as that narrative depicts the Jews as Europe’s “other”. Theoretical reflection on memory is intertwined with historical analysis of the period between 1945 until the end of the twentieth century. Two, binary perspectives are featured, one, which examines memory from a cognitive point of view and the other, which examines memory from a cultural, ideological, moral and political perspective. These perspectives come to the fore in memoire-literature, movies, plays, historiographic and philosophical debates, which illustrate the two perspectives and their articulation, as well as they justify the essay’s periodization.