Recalling the Hunger Winter: Evoking famine memory beyond the national

Abstract

This article seeks to demonstrate how hunger legacies function as connecting vectors in later times. By investigating the comparative uses of memory in Dutch newspapers in the period 1945–1995, it reveals how recollections of the Dutch ‘Hunger Winter’ of 1944–1945 were evoked to make sense of current episodes of hunger, as well as to stimulate political and societal engagement among readers with famines across the world. In so doing, the article shows how memories of the Dutch famine were placed in larger transnational discourses of suffering, experienced by other oppressed and war-stricken communities, ultimately making the Hunger Winter a benchmark for understanding famine, deprivation and humanitarianism. Crucially, this article stresses the need to move beyond national paradigms in the study of famine memory, thereby allowing for a better understanding of the transnational workings of memory.