Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Politics in Turkey and Spain

• In Event: 234 - Regular Session. Collective Memory: Contesting the Meanings of the Past

Abstract

Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies on January 27th (anniversary of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp) in diverse national contexts provide a comparative venue to assess how supra-national memory discourses are incorporated, rejected or reinterpreted within the nation-state framework. By examining the official remembrance ceremonies in the U.S., Germany, Argentina, Spain and Turkey, this ongoing study engages with the debate between critical genocide scholars and theorists of cosmopolitan memory regarding the presence of the Holocaust in a global context. Does Holocaust remembrance enhance a process by which societies increasingly adopt universal ethical criteria and challenge their historical self-perception or does it rather conceal other forms of traumatic violence and local genocides? The case studies selected fall into two distinct groups: those who are historically connected to the Holocaust (Germany and the U.S.), and those who are more marginal to Holocaust history (Argentina, Spain and Turkey). In this paper we focus on the findings from Spain, a country with its own past of dictatorship and grave human rights violations and Turkey, with a long history of denial of the Armenian genocide.

Authors

• Alejandro Baer, University of Minnesota

• Yagmur Karakaya, University of Minnesota