Cosmopolitan Memory Research Articles

The making of Holocaust education in Britain, 1945–1991

ABSTRACT Despite the prevalence of research in Holocaust memory and Holocaust education, the historical development of British Holocaust education remains understudied. This paper reconstructs this history, presenting Anglo-Jewish efforts to teach about the Holocaust in the 1970s for the first time and using the concept of ‘cosmopolitan memory’ to explain its proliferation in the early 1980s. This article argues that the origins of contemporary Holocaust education should not be found in the increase of its teaching with the National Curriculum of 1991 but in the changing culture of memory and history teaching in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

2 The Stories that Make Us: European Holocaust Narratives and the Promise of Albanian Cosmopolitan Memory Practices

2 The Stories that Make Us: European Holocaust Narratives and the Promise of Albanian Cosmopolitan Memory Practices

Reconsidering the ethics of cosmopolitan memory: In the name of difference and memories to-come

Departing from what Levey and Sznaider (2002) in their seminal work ‘Memory Unbound’ refer to as ‘cosmopolitan memory’ that emerges as one of the fundamental forms ‘collective memories take in the age of globalization’, this article will consider the underlying ethical implications of global memory formation that have yet to be adequately theorized. Since global disseminations of local memory cultures and the implicit canonization of its traumas are intimately related to the concept of archive, I will first focus on what Derrida (1996) in Archive Fever calls ‘archival violence’ and will show its inherent relation to the formation of cosmopolitan memory. Another related concept that I will use and that will problematize the transformation of living, embodied memory into archival, cultural memory upon which the formation of cosmopolitan memory depends is the witness. Using Agamben’s writing (2002) in this context that in Remnants of Auschwitz focuses on the foundational (im)possibilities of bearing witness, I will show that this transformation that determines the very possibility of cosmopolitan memory is far from unproblematic and readily accessible as Levy and Sznaider seem to assume. What will emerge as the most distinctive concern of global memory formation is the ethical material of difference as that which both makes its imperatives historically and politically exigent and that which signifies the difficulties of its unified articulation. Solidarity with the suffering of the other that mobilizes the very formation of cosmopolitan memory is also what should solicit vigilance against the universalistic ritualizations of its prerogatives.

Memory laws, mnemonic weapons: The diffusion of a norm across Europe and beyond

The diffusion of memory laws across Europe maps onto global trends towards legal memory protection writ large. Through applications of cosmopolitan memory and norm diffusion, this article demonstrates that differences across laws – although they derive language and sentiment from a shared global norm – also adhere to the specific memory politics of the state. The author proposes that three categories of memory law have emerged since the 1980s, each resulting from isomorphic pressures exerted by an international community with expectations of shared sociolegal human rights norms. The article concludes with a case study of recent laws in Russia (2014) and Poland (2018): both illustrative of a new nationalistic paradigm of memory laws as mnemonic weapons in ongoing memory wars. By tracing isomorphic similarities across Europe, this article reveals a mirroring of language that has recently appeared in the United States. It is with an eye towards worldwide shifts in populism that the current research remains urgent. This study offers a theoretical contribution from which memory scholars might draw when considering globally relevant mnemonic trends.

Connected Memories: The International Politics of Partition, from Poland to India

Abstract This article theorizes connected memory, or in other words how people remember each other's memories, through the connected histories of territorial partition in different contexts. It claims that social memories can travel beyond their original context, pushing beyond efforts to understand supranational “mnemonic communities,” or to understand cosmopolitan memory as a thin memory community encompassing all humanity. It builds on the idea of “connected histories,” arguing that existing approaches to social memory in world politics either neglect connections across national and regional boundaries or scale up the national model to the global level. The article uses the history of territorial partitions as an illustration of three types of connected memory: sympathetic, vicarious, and modular. Partition has often been studied in comparative or aggregative ways, ruling out the possibility that partitions affect each other. But from the partitions of Poland to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, to Ireland, Palestine, and India, partitions have often been events remembered beyond the national context and in the plural. Such memories have, in turn, altered the imaginable possibilities of the future, for example, by providing precedents for or warnings about future partitions.

George Floyd and cosmopolitan memory formation in online networks: A report from Northern Europe

This work analyses the presence and management As personalized digital networks have increased in cultural and political relevance, there is a more urgent need to understand their role in democratic memory-formation. Moreover, scholars have suggested that, in a globalized digitalized age, collective memory could extend to transnational publics. This study aims to advance the understanding of memory on global social networks by investigating the way the death of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 was treated and understood by Twitter-users outside the United States. Using a combination of big data and contemporaneous qualitative interviews with users in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, the paper brings the concept of cosmopolitan memory into the social media era. The study finds that users fused the event and its aftermath with observations of injustice in their own countries. However, this process operated differently among users of different ideological outlooks. Another key finding is that users on the radical right resented the uptake of the event as a cosmopolitan memory, and employed techniques termed as “combative counter-memory”.

Agonistic homecomings: Holocaust postmemory, perspective and locality

This essay explores the relationship of trauma, memory and locality in works of autobiographical nonfiction by Daniel Mendelsohn, Rita Gabis and Julija Šukys. While the lineage of the first extends to historical victims of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe and the lineage of the latter extends (mainly) to historical perpetrators, their works are examined here as examples of third-generation Holocaust postmemory. Each reflects on the experience of war and displacement through the prism of the stories and silences that circulated in their families and émigré communities from Eastern Europe in North America. Each challenges the received family narrative, travels to the site of historical atrocity, and contemplates individual and collective implication in the Holocaust. These texts manifest an agonistic strategy of remembrance that reflects multiple, incommensurable subject-positions. As distinct from the nationalist utopia of antagonistic memory and the de-territorialized ethics of cosmopolitan memory, they highlight locality as the arena for an encounter with the other.

Cosmopolitan Memories under Pressure: The Case of Postcommunist Wroc?aw

Cosmopolitan Memories under Pressure: The Case of Postcommunist Wroc?aw

The Münster Rising, Memories of Violence, and Perceptions of Dissent in Restoration England

AbstractThis article examines the ways in which the violent Anabaptist rising at Münster in 1533–5 was reinterpreted in Restoration England. Historians have often recognized that the incident was used to attack English Baptists in the seventeenth century, but there has been little systematic exploration of the processes behind this. This article suggests that recollections of Münster in later seventeenth-century England were a species of ‘cosmopolitan memory’ – an internationally shared memory of trauma put to distinctive local uses. References to Münster served as ways for English writers to tie nonconformists to specific acts of religious violence in England, including the Civil Wars and Thomas Venner's 1661 rising in London, without directly recalling these events. Historical discussions of the Münster rising therefore often directly transformed German Anabaptists into Quakers or Fifth Monarchists. Condemnations of the violence in the German city were also used by Congregationalists and Presbyterians to differentiate themselves from Baptists and Quakers and to emphasize their orthodoxy. Some Baptist writers responded by disclaiming their links to continental Anabaptists, while others moved to question the established historiography around the Münster rising. This article demonstrates these points through a range of sources, including sermons, letters, commentaries, controversial literature, and almanacs.

When the Past Is Not Another Country: The Battlefields of History in Russia

ABSTRACT In this introduction to our special issue on the politics of memory in the post-Soviet space, we present a four-part analytical framework through which to evaluate recent developments in the region. Specifically, we focus on: 1) the circulation of memories across space and time; 2) the factors that condition the recall of the past; 3) the actors involved in these processes; and 4) the logics that guide how the past is represented and interpreted. This framework provides a means through which to conceptually order and discuss the individual contributions to this issue, as well as to evaluate the wider relevance of Russia’s 2020 Victory Day commemoration, which marked the 75th anniversary of World War II’s end. A central claim advanced in this article is that researchers need to distinguish not just between the nationalized remembering we increasingly see being manifest across the former communist states of East-Central Europe and the more universalistic appeals of the cosmopolitan memory regime that predominates in Western Europe, but also contemporary Russia’s attempts to promulgate an “empire memory” that represents a competing set of generalizable norms for how the past should be depicted. The latter is significant because it directly challenges the specificity and contextual embeddedness of national recall as well as key mnemonic precepts of the post-national–meaning largely spatially and temporally unbounded–attention that has been accorded to victimhood and suffering in recent decades.

Battleship Island and the transnational dynamics of cultural memory between South Korea and Japan

ABSTRACT This essay examines the transnational impact of mediated memory of Korean forced labour through a case study of the South Korean blockbuster Battleship Island (2017)—a historical action film about the mass escape of Korean coalminers from forced labour on Hashima Island. Rather than focusing on the content of the reconstructed past in the film and its historical (in)accuracies, we explore the film’s entanglement with a wider mnemonic landscape and political intent in and beyond South Korea. We argue that the film became an effective cultural memory through a dynamic network of media and social practices that developed around it. By thus treating the film as a material object in the broader media environment and examining its transnational social performance, we highlight Battleship Island’s role in turning Hashima into a new symbolic focal point of South Korea–Japan memory conflict and a transnationally available icon of Korean suffering. Further, we suggest that the film stimulated the production and circulation of alternative memory narratives of Hashima by Japanese rightist memory activists. While recent works on transnational memory in the European context tend to focus on cosmopolitan memory that promotes cross-border identification with victims, this study provides insight on how transnational memory dynamics can develop towards a different direction of reinforcing nationalism.

Sustainable emotions: the front and backstages of slavery in Gorée Island

More than merely symbolic, destinations of roots tourism such as Gorée Island (Senegal) are places where emotion about slavery is supposed to be experienced and displayed. UNESCO statements, political testimonies by distinguished visitors, performances of well-known African American artists and comments of tourists seem to testify this. I modestly argue that, by evoking feelings, presumably shared, about slavery in a setting that exacerbates emotions through touristic performances, the idea of international community is here re-enacted and sustained, under the principle of the universality of human rights. I believe that the global heritage regime promoted by UNESCO and other similar international platforms could be considered the strongest apparatuses to induce common belonging crosscutting national borders while spreading cosmopolitan liberal ethics and forms of cosmopolitan memory that are no longer primarily framed by the nation state. The question here, is that the very idea of international community is built with the same imagination, devices and displays and based on the same nationalist assumption of pan-cultural emotions that Anderson described for the rise of nations, but one that, paradoxically, is inter-national, made of nations: a metanation.

A work of death: martyrdom, myth and dead women in contemporary Spanish film

ABSTRACT In the same moment that the Spanish government passed the Ley de memoria histórica, recognizing the rights of those persecuted during the Civil War and dictatorship, the Spanish Church escalated its own project of remembering, more than doubling between 2007 and 2013 the number of beatifications of clergy killed during the war. This discordant combination of circumstances has been reflected in cultural production where cinematic representations of the Civil War dead have often reanimated tropes of the Catholic popular imagination. While these films mark a broader cultural move away from the Church rhetoric of sacrifice and martyrdom and towards human rights frameworks as a way to deal with past traumas, their reliance on the culturally charged motifs of traditional hagiography has meant that contemporary martyr narratives remain entangled in older national myths. Taking examples from Emilio Martínez Lázaro's 2007 film Las 13 rosas, Mikel Rueda's Izarren Argia (2010) and Benito Zambrano's La voz dormida (2011), this article will demonstrate how the interpenetration of opposing discourses both undermines the films’ contribution to the project of historical memory while also offering powerful moments of reflection and empathy at the intersection of traditional martyrology and cosmopolitan memory practices.

Social Framework of Collective Memory and Cognitive Problems of Historical Knowledge

The article demonstrates that the cognitive possibilities of historical memory and “living history”, which generates the agenda, questionnaires and source strategies of historians, are closely connected with the social framework of historical memory and, accordingly, with the self-identification of historians. They form cognitive maps that regulate the cognitive activity of a historian. It is shown that the social framework of historical memory within the crisis of globalization is changing rapidly, creating unusual, contradictory and sometimes absurd constellations. This topic is studied in the context of the history of discursive hegemony in historical memory by analyzing the ideas of A. Assmann, J. Laroche, A. Cento Bull and H. L. Hansen, who criticize the current state of historical memory and suggest new versions of it, based on the change of social frameworks and forms of discourse. The project of cosmopolitan memory created by the latter, its advantages and disadvantages are evaluated. The tools of analysis are N. Elias's theory of “civilization process”, G. Bateson's theory of schismogenesis, E. Erikson's theory of self-identification, E. N. Shulga's concept of pre-understanding. It is shown that cosmopolitan memory, while remaining within the framework of hegemonic discourse, reproduces antagonistic forms of memory. The most productive are the approaches of A. Assmann and S. Conrad, who carefully criticize the situation of cosmopolitan memory, seem to be the most productive. Cultural and historiographical processes in Germany, the British Empire and Southeast Asia served as the main material for the study. The works of N. Ferguson, close to the imperial historical school and the neo-Asianism (reorientalism) of Lee Kuan Yew, in which the values of empire, colonialism and traditionalism are defended in opposition to the ideal of human rights, have been analyzed. It is noted that historians strive to distinguish between the universalism of the idea of humanity and cultural pluralism in dialogue about human rights, which prevents criticism of alien or seemingly alien values outside a situation of cooperation and consensus. The ideal of cross historical memory as the historian's optimal cognitive tool is put forward.

Mass grave exhumations as patriotic retreat

Between 2012 and 2017, at the Ł-section of Warsaw’s Powązki Military Cemetery, or ‘Łączka’, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance exhumed a mass grave containing the remains of post-war anti-communist resistance fighters. Being referred to as the ‘cursed soldiers’, these fighters have become key figures in post-2015 Polish memory politics. In this article we focus on the role of the volunteers at these exhumations in the production of the ‘cursed soldiers’ memory. Following the idea of community archaeology as a civil society-building practice, the observed processes of sacralisation and militarisation show how the exhumations create a community of memory that promotes the core values of the currently governing national-conservative PiS party. We found that tropes related to forensic research and typically identified with cosmopolitan memory paradigms are used within a generally nationalist and antagonistic memory framework.

The Appropriation of Holocaust Memory in Post-Communist Eastern Europe

This short essay explores the ways in which the visual and symbolic repertoire of cosmopolitan Holocaust memory has become appropriated to represent other types of historical crimes. Specifically, I examine to what extent has this instrumentalization of Holocaust memory fed into a crisis in cosmopolitan memory and the rise of its nationalized, particularized and populist variants. Focusing on post-communist Eastern Europe, I demonstrate how the familiar narratives and images of the Holocaust have been repurposed for two main goals: firstly, to normatively elevate the suffering of non-Jewish national majorities and equate it with the Holocaust; and secondly, to reposition the crimes of communism as the dominant criminal legacy of the twentieth century on a par with, and sometimes overtaking, the legacy of the Holocaust. I illustrate these arguments with brief examples of revisionist museum and commemorative practices in Poland, Hungary, Lithuania and Serbia. I conclude by thinking through some methodological and ethical dimensions of this research.

Towards a Disentanglement of the Links between the Memory Boom and the Neoliberal Turn

The memory boom and the related emergence of cosmopolitan victimhood-centred memories, increasingly criticized for depoliticizing the past and thus contributing to the depoliticization of the present, have been simultaneous with the curtailment of the welfare state, the abandonment of the politics of redistribution, the erosion of social and economic rights, and the growth in social and economic inequalities. Yet if the latter are often being considered to be among the reasons leading to the current right-wing populist wave in Europe and elsewhere or at least are seen as entangled therewith, the relevance of the memory boom for these developments has not been properly interrogated.
 Against this background, this contribution makes a plea for a critical appreciation of the linkages between the memory boom and the global ascension of neoliberalism. It acknowledges the contemporaneity of the two phenomena, which have been fundamentally informing our present age, roughly since the end of the 1970s, and calls for a critical engagement with their interwoven character. In doing this, it argues that scholarship should pay particular attention to the relationship between past, present, and future that the neoliberal turn in its various shapes and guises implies, as well as to the regimes of temporality that underlie various instantiations of the memory boom. It ends by taking heed of recent theorizations in memory studies and by asking to what extent can they be used in order to have a better grasp of the critical juncture we are currently lying at and to contribute to a radical change of the political status quo. Thus, the article makes some preliminary steps towards disentangling the interconnections between the memory boom and the neoliberal turn, and aims to provide a blueprint for a substantial future research project that should look in depth at these entanglements.

Introduction: Museums and Monuments: Memorials of Violent Pasts in Urban Spaces

IntroductionMuseums and Monuments: Memorials of Violent Pasts in Urban Spaces Ulrike Capdepón, Aline Sierp, and Jill Strauss Over the last thirty years, there have been ever increasing numbers of memorial projects worldwide that address the histories of mass violence, genocides, recent wars, dictatorships and systematic human rights abuses. Along with the growing numbers of memory initiatives, the theoretical field of memory studies has developed concurrently. Writing on the influence of symbolism and ritual on remembrance in the early 1990s, historian John Bodnar noted the dearth of literature on collective memory in urban spaces.1 Over the next three decades this strand has grown exponentially. In the introduction to their special issue from 2008, “Collective Memory and the Politics of Urban Space,” Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman and Maoz Azaryahu argued that the choices individuals and groups make to remember or forget are “embedded within and constrained by particular socio-spatial conditions.”2 Meanwhile, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider had already coined the term “cosmopolitan memory” to describe how cultural memory is not limited to localities but, in fact, goes beyond borders. They reasoned that just as individual and collective memories are interconnected processes, so too, local and global memory making are symbiotic.3 Drawing on developments in the field, from local framings of memory to transnational perspectives, this special issue focuses on the role of various memory practices in urban space. When places hold multiple and often opposing memories, the question of whose histories are remembered and publicly shared, or marginalized and excluded, becomes crucial for understanding social dynamics and political change. Coming from the fields of anthropology, communication, history and political science, this interdisciplinary group of scholars presents various case studies of public representation of contested history in cities located in Europe and the Americas to discuss theoretical and [End Page 5] methodological approaches in memory studies. Toward that end, the articles address the following questions: To what extent is there a common thread in the motivation to portray contested history in spaces of public memory display? And related to this, in what ways are memorialization practices informed by transnational perspectives? Finally, how do political forces and civil society activists shape public debates regarding the representation of a contested past in urban space? This collection examines how museums and memory sites construct historical narratives through processes of preservation, education and public exhibition. Aline Sierp’s article on the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism considers how and why Munich, the birthplace of Nazism, was able to avoid for seventy years publicly acknowledging and documenting its role in Hitler’s rise to power. Sierp refers to the influence of transnational memory processes when analyzing the museum that was ultimately constructed and shows how they shaped the museum’s decision to design exhibitions to educate and engage visitors on taking responsibility. Cosmopolitan memory and glocalization—a concept also used to describe how ideas and practices are adopted globally and then adapted to suit the local situation—are employed by Jan Gryta in his article on the history of the creation of the museum in Oskar Schindler’s Factory in Kraków, Poland. In this case, given Schindler’s role in saving the lives of more than one-thousand Jewish internees, memorializing the factory itself was not in question. Influenced by international best practices of museum exhibition design, the museum director and curators envisioned portrayals of the daily lives of all residents of Kraków, but this met with resistance from city officials. The conflict centered on how best to represent the Poles who were both victims and perpetrators in a country unwilling to acknowledge its culpability even five decades later. Whether or not monuments, museums and symbolic acts like street or place names are physically tied to “authentic” places of memory, they often function as powerful political tools. In Buenos Aires, the former clandestine torture and extermination center ESMA, originally the school of the Argentine navy, today houses a memorial museum in the building that was the headquarters of repression and disappearance during the Argentine dictatorship (1976–83). In her article on the Ex-ESMA, Susana Kaiser compares visitor and museum staff experiences of the site...

Creating a Cosmopolitan Past: Local and Transnational Influences on Memory Work in Schindler's Factory, Kraków

This article tests the limits of cosmopolitan memory. It spotlights a unique case study, the permanent exhibition in Schindler’s Factory in Kraków, shaped by a group of local curators and politicians, as well as representatives of foreign memorial institutions and supranational NGOs. The thrust to create a cosmopolitan narrative came from Polish curators, but their vision was curbed by both a local politician and the head of a global NGO. The version of cosmopolitanism offered in Kraków engaged with contemporary Polish problems. However, it ignored Polish anti-Semitism and perpetration. The article reveals how in practice the cosmopolitan message is shaped, what propels it forward and what limits its horizons.

The political economy of global memory: Shared memory of global conflict in Captain America: The First Avenger

Recent scholarship explores the possibility of a global collective memory in which networked individuals transiting national, class, and ethnic boundaries create commonality from shared difference. Yet, the public past’s representation remains influenced by powerful entities such as governments and corporations, and resources made available, particularly by the popular culture industry, will likely shape globally shared memories. This study documents an instance of commercially mediated global memory, showing how Captain America: The First Avenger revised the original comic’s World War II backdrop to appeal to global audiences who would have been dire enemies during the period the film depicts. Scholars positing cosmopolitan memory might agree there is value in representing the world coming together to defeat a common enemy. Yet the film also relativizes historical depravities by claiming that real historical actors are not as bad as they seem and by suggesting that such acts are not truly ours but rather visited upon us by non-human strangers.