Remembering and Forgetting: Introduction

Abstract

In the past couple of decades, European societies have experienced a real memory boom, starting with a series of national and international commemorations in the 1980s and gaining momentum with the deepening effects of decolonization and with the growing awareness of the withering away of Holocaust and World War II witnesses. Pierre Nora, who perhaps set the stage for this boom with his seminal Lieux de mémoire (1984), recently announced ‘l’avènement mondial de la mémoire’ [the global advent of memory] (Nora, 2004), and rightly so, for the interest in memory has been rapidly developing since the 1990s in post-communist, post-genocide, post-authoritarian, post-war and post-apartheid settings, from Cambodia to Argentina and from Russia to South Africa. The proliferation of contemporary media, especially the internet, has ensured a truly global visibility to these processes.