Alejandro Baer

Consuming history and memory through mass media products

The representation of the past through products of the ‘culture industry’ bears the history of a long debate between detractors and optimists. This controversy becomes especially significant in a time where commercial audiovisual media affect in unprecedented ways the content and the form in which massive audiences relate to the events of the past. Even more so in a so-called postmodern moment in which public confidence in the real is overall in decline. In this context, the debate on the representation of the history and memory of the Holocaust – the paradigmatic example of limitations and imperatives to representational practice – has become a contemporary battlefield regarding the legitimacy and propriety of mass media products. By examining contemporary Holocaust representations that are at the intersection between the world of commercial mass media and the conventional nonfiction culture and documentary tradition (such as high-tech museums and Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation), this article will reflect upon the diverse implications of the mass media–history relation.

THE VOIDS OF SEPHARAD: THE MEMORY OF THE HOLOCAUST IN SPAIN

Spain is a country with no immediate historical connection to the Holocaust. However, in recent years discussions about the Holocaust have gained a more significant presence in Spains public life. This irruption of the Holocaust in the spheres of politics, education and culture can be explained as a consequence of

Ghosts of the Holocaust in Franco’s mass graves: Cosmopolitan memories and the politics of “never again”:

This essay presents a sociological analysis of what is known in Spain as the “recovery of historical memory” and the politics deriving from this recovery. This process was catalyzed by the exhumations of the remains of victims of Francoism that have been under way since the beginning of the twenty-first century. In order to do this, we will use the literature on cosmopolitan sociology and provide a dialogue between this sociology and recent developments in the study of social and cultural memory using concepts like postmemory, multidirectional, and cosmopolitan memory. The article moves beyond the national context and looks at Spanish memory politics through the theory and praxis of Holocaust memory on the one hand and the memory of the Argentinean victims of the military dictatorship on the other hand. This will enable us to identify the components and problems of a culture and politics of globalized memory.

THE BLIND SPOTS OF SECULARIZATION

ABSTRACT According to several international surveys Spain is among the western countries with the most negative views of Jews. While quantitative data on the topic accumulates, there is a significant lack of interpretative approaches that might explain the particular Spanish case. This paper presents the background, methodology and major results of a discussion group-based study on antisemitism, which was conducted in Spain in the autumn of 2009. The study identifies and locates in different socio-economic and ideological milieus the range of stereotypical discourses on Jews, Judaism and the Arab–Israeli conflict in Spain. Analysis of the group meetings shows that, despite growing secularization in Spanish society, the central explanatory variable for persisting and resurging antisemitism in this country is still religion in a broad cultural sense.

Holocaust-Erinnerungskultur als Wissensnetzwerk : Zwischen globaler Wertegemeinschaft und universaler Symbolkultur

Die Frage nach einer ‚gemeinsamen‘ transnationalen europaischen oder sogar globalen Erinnerungskultur ist derzeit ein bevorzugter Gegenstand breiter Forschungen in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften. Wahrend zuvor uber Jahrzehnte hinweg primar nationalstaatsgebundene Erinnerungspraxen und Vergangenheitsdiskurse dominierten, die jeweils spezifische nationale Deutungen und Identitatsbegrundungen in den Vordergrund ruckten, initiierte der weltpolitische Umbruch 1989/91 die Voraussetzungen fur einen Prozess, der vielfach als ‚Europaisierung des Erinnerns‘ oder als ‚Entstehung eines europaischen Gedachtnisses‘ beschrieben wird. Das nationalsozialistische Vernichtungsprojekt des Holocausts bildet darin einen zentralen, wenngleich ‚negativen‘ Bezugspunkt fur ‚gemeinsame‘, von Nation und unmittelbaren Opfergruppen abgeloste Erinnerungskonstruktionen.

The Holocaust across Generations. Trauma and Its Inheritance among Descendants of SurvivorsThe Holocaust across Generations. Trauma and Its Inheritance among Descendants of Survivors, by JacobsJanet. New York: New York University Press, 2016. 179 pp.

colleagues have painstakingly built the evidence base for this book. Sociologists, economists, demographers, political scientists, policy scientists, health scientists, policymakers, and students across a range of disciplines will benefit by reading it. As House remarks in the Preface, none of the evidence he presents throughout the book is particularly new. But what is new is the way that he organizes it and brings it all together so that we now have a roadmap for population health policy-making that makes sense, given the population health mess that the country is in. Unfortunately, at least right now, there is no chance that any of his policy ideas will gain political traction at the national level. Even with a different political landscape, though, the idea that health care is health policy is so firmly entrenched in U.S. society that it will be very difficult to change in meaningful ways. Indeed, the medical establishment, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies, universities, and government bureaucracies (e.g., CDC, FDA, NIH) are in part built on, and profit from, the idea that health policy consists of health care and health care only. But in early 2021, I sincerely hope the new Secretary of Health and Human Services will have House’s book prominently on her or his desk and, as a result, will recognize the paradoxical crisis we are in and help lead us down a bold new demand-oriented health policy pathway.

24.00 paper. ISBN: 9781479839292.

Am Beispiel der Gedachtnisleistungen von Zeitzeugen zeigen Bernt Schnettler und Alejandro Baer , dass die Erinnerung eines Subjekts stets ein Akt der retentionalen Erfahrungsbildung, ein „ruckwartsgewandtes Fantasieren“ entlang der subjektiven Relevanzen darstellt. Zur Aufrechterhaltung eines kollektiven Gedachtnisses sei es erforderlich, dass diese subjektiven Gedachtnisleistungen uber kommunikative Handlungsprozesse gesellschaftlich zuganglich gemacht werden. Adressaten fanden diese Erinnerungen aber nur, wenn sie an ein etabliertes kollektives Gedachtnis anschliesen konnen. Diese kommunikative Kopplung sei fur das Subjekt immer mit Verlusten verbunden. Der Versuch, sein Solitarsein in der Preisgabe einer Erinnerung kommunikativ zu uberwinden, konne nur zu ‚Teilerfolgen‘ fuhren. Am Beispiel von Zeitzeugen wird illustriert, wie das Erinnerungssubjekt die materiale Basis fur die Aufrechterhaltung einer Erinnerungskultur darstellt und wie es sich zugleich in dieser Erinnerungskultur nicht adaquat wiederfindet. Umgekehrt werde die subjektive Erinnerung immer schon durch kommunikativ eingespeiste Erinnerung gesellschaftlich uberformt.

Zur Soziologie des Zeitzeugen : Erinnerung zwischen Subjektivität, Sozialität und kommunikativer Konstruktion

El desarrollo de las tecnologias audiovisuales – especialmente la precision, miniaturizacion y asequibilidad de camaras de fotografia y video – esta teniendo efectos en un amplio abanico de nuevas practicas sociales y culturales, que son ahora objeto de estudio en las ciencias sociales. Desde los pioneros analisis de Bourdieu sobre fotografias familiares (Bourdieu 1965) encontramos hoy investigaciones sobre videos domesticos de boda y vacaciones, sobre videos personales en youtube, sobre la comunicacion en videoconferencias o bromas de camara oculta, que no son sino el corolario investigador de una »cultura visual«, marcada por la expansion vertiginosa de las tecnologias de registro y reproduccion de imagenes. Mientras que el interes academico por estos nuevos fenomenos crece gradualmente, todavia son escasas las reflexiones metodologicas especificas sobre el empleo del video como herramienta en la investigacion social cualitativa. Contamos con contribuciones metodologicas relevantes en el ambito del uso e interpretacion de fotografias, pero las echamos en falta para la imagen en movimiento, y en particular para el registro y analisis de datos »naturales«, es decir no editados o provenientes de los medios de comunicacion. Este capitulo se concibe como un intento de suplir este hueco que existe en la literatura metodologica. Comenzaremos con un esquematico recorrido por la historia del audiovisual como herramienta de investigacion cientifica, y en particular de investigacion socio-antropologica, para a continuacion responder a la pregunta sobre que es, o que puede ser una metodologia cualitativa con video con dos propuestas que surgen de la praxis investigadora de ambos autores: la metodologia biografica audiovisual y la videografia (etnografia focalizada+videoanalisis).