Larissa Allwork

Holocaust Trauma Between the National and the Transnational: Reflections on History’s “Broken Mirror”

Based on the research underpinning my book, Holocaust Remembrance Between the National and the Transnational (London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), which explores and analyses the significance of the politics and symbolism of the commemoration of the Holocaust and Nazi-era crimes in the late 1990s and 2000s at the European, international and transnational levels, I will reflect on the influence of contemporary trauma theory on my practice of researching, writing and teaching the histories and memories of the Holocaust. Section one of my article will outline the intellectual horizon with regard to interdisciplinary trauma theory and what I understood as its increasing globalisation and critique by thinkers such as Andreas Huyssen and Stef Craps during my research on the Stockholm International Forum on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (SIF 2000) and the first decade of the Task Force for International Co-operation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (ITF, renamed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance or IHRA in December 2012). Sections two and three will offer my response as a cultural historian to this pre-existing use of trauma theory and how it has contributed to my practice of writing, teaching and presenting the histories of the cultural memory of the Holocaust. Critically reflecting on key thinkers such as Dominick LaCapra, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub and Wulf Kansteiner, sections two and three will address not only the limitations of trauma theory for my research but will also discuss how a revised trauma theory remains important for archival, creative and pedagogical use in studies of the histories and memories of the Holocaust in singular and comparative terms.

Marking evil: Holocaust memory in the global age

through formal education can be very different from the stories transmitted from one generation to the next, leaving cognitive and emotional understanding at odds. The book is part of Bloomsbury’s Perspectives on the Holocaust series, “designed to help students further their understanding of key topics within the field of Holocaust Studies.” Students will particularly appreciate the extensive and thematically arranged bibliography of largely English-language literature. The chapters dealing with the Nuremberg trial and trials in West German courts are especially compelling. Post-unification and indeed more recent developments, such as the ongoing wave of Nazi trials, are not covered in the same depth as the period up to 1990. The book could have further benefitted from including work on the extent to which Germans were aware of National Socialist crimes prior to 1945, or on the future of Holocaust education and memory in the context of immigration to Germany. This aside, in synthesizing a vast amount of important scholarship on the subject, Sharples provides a concise and captivating account of Germany’s long history of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Her book will be key reading for students and postgraduates of German history, Holocaust Studies, and Cold War history, and will also be of value to teachers and lecturers.

Holocaust remembrance as 'civil religion': the case of the Stockholm Declaration (2000)

The Stockholm Declaration was the statement which summarized the main aims of the Stockholm International Forum, which was organized to promote Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research globally (hereafter, the SIF 2000; the forum was held on 26–28 January 2000). And despite the presence of non-European states such as America, Israel, Russia and Argentina, political scientist Jens Kroh (2008) has rightly stated that one of the most significant symbolic elements of the liberal representation of the Holocaust at this event was the idea that, ‘coming to terms with such a negative past has almost turned into an informal criterion for accession to the European Union’ (Kroh, 2010). Hence, the Stockholm Declaration demonstrates that the recollection of Nazi-era crimes with a central emphasis on the Holocaust has become a principal part of civic moral education in liberal Western and Westernizing nation states, particularly in Europe since 2000. These views are also echoed in sociologist Helmut Dubiel’s opinion that the SIF 2000’s representation of the Holocaust as a ‘European foundation myth’ is an attempt to ‘release the moral potential of its remembrance’ (Dubiel, 2004: 216–17), as well as in Alon Confino’s view, following and taking to extremes the ideas of Dan Diner, that the symbolism of contemporary Holocaust remembrance as moral and historical rupture has replaced the significance of the French Revolution as the ‘foundational past’ of human values in the West (Diner, 2007: 9; Confino, 2012: 5–6).

Intercultural legacies of the International Task Force: Lithuania and the British at the turn of the millennium

In the first 15 years following the collapse of Communism, and among pre-existing national and local efforts, there were also a number of international collaborative attempts to draw renewed attention to the memory of the genocide of the Jews in Lithuania during the Second World War. These efforts included the establishment of an ITF British/Lithuanian ‘Liaison Project’ (2000–03) as part of the work of the Task Force for International Co-operation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (ITF, which has been renamed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance [IHRA] in 2013). It will be argued that the British/Lithuanian ‘Liaison Project’ offers an example of intercultural memory work which enriches and nuances the research of scholars such as Tony Judt, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider. This is because the British/Lithuanian ‘Liaison Project’ can be interpreted in terms of British and Lithuanian political, cultural and foreign policies in relation to Europe and the memorialisation of genocides in the global arena at the turn of the millennium.