On Forgetting and Rediscovering the Holocaust in Scandinavia: introduction to the special issue on the histories and memories of the Holocaust in ScandinaviaFootnote
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Abstract
The interest in the Holocaust – Nazi Germany's concentrated attempt to exterminate European Jewry – has become increasingly noticeable in the Scandinavian countries during the last decades, with a growing number not only of dissertations, monographs and other publications, but also public debates and controversies relating to this event. This new upsurge of interest in the Holocaust reflects the dynamics and the contested nature of collective memories of wartime Scandinavia more broadly. This article highlights, broadly speaking, the development of Holocaust historiography in Scandinavia; the changing perspectives, interpretations, debates and focus from the immediate post-war years to the present day. It argues that, despite the fact that the Holocaust was truly a European-wide phenomenon transcending national borders, Holocaust studies have mainly been produced as nation-centred histories. Only with the end of the Cold War and with a paradigmatic shift from ‘the event’ to ‘the memory’ has a new form of Holocaust remembrance begun, ‘the cosmopolitanization of Holocaust remembrance’, which transcends borders and makes memory cultures coincide. In Scandinavian historical cultures and historiography, then, the 1990s marks the starting point of a process by which Holocaust remembrance has become officially embedded into European memory.
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Volume/Issue
36(5)
Page Number / Article Number
520-535
Related
‘A Record of Infamy’: the use and abuse of the image of the Swedish Jewish response to the Holocaust (Part of same special issue)
Between History and Politics: the Swedish Living History project as discursive formation (Part of same special issue)
The Holocaust and Collective Memory in Scandinavia: the Danish case (Part of same special issue)
The Norwegian Holocaust: changing views and representations (Part of same special issue)
The Holocaust Historiography in Finland (Part of same special issue)
On Forgetting and Rediscovering the Holocaust in Scandinavia: introduction to the special issue on the histories and memories of the Holocaust in ScandinaviaFootnote (Part of same special issue)
Between History and Politics: the Swedish Living History project as discursive formation (Part of same special issue)
The Holocaust and Collective Memory in Scandinavia: the Danish case (Part of same special issue)
The Norwegian Holocaust: changing views and representations (Part of same special issue)
The Holocaust Historiography in Finland (Part of same special issue)
On Forgetting and Rediscovering the Holocaust in Scandinavia: introduction to the special issue on the histories and memories of the Holocaust in ScandinaviaFootnote (Part of same special issue)
DOI
Link
Link to article (paywalled), On Forgetting and Rediscovering the Holocaust in Scandinavia: introduction to the special issue on the histories and memories of the Holocaust in ScandinaviaFootnote
Bibliographic Information
On Forgetting and Rediscovering the Holocaust in Scandinavia: introduction to the special issue on the histories and memories of the Holocaust in ScandinaviaFootnote. 2011: 520-535. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1080/03468755.2011.629359
