Realms of Memory

Something novel happened after the Second World War.  Rather than just celebrating past victories or heroic defeats, nations began to memorialize their most shameful crimes and misdeeds.  From the Holocaust to the slave trade, memory studies expert Itay Lotem argues that West Germany and France pioneered this new form of auto-critical, perpetrator memory.  How auto-critical memory gained global resonance and why it ultimately failed to meet expectations is the subject of Itay Lotem’s most recent book, Dealing with Dark Pasts: A European History of Auto-Critical Memory in Global Perspectives.  A conversation with Itay Lotem about the rise and fall of auto-critical memory, next on the November 3rd episode of the Realms of Memory podcast.

The army in Peru has long been held in high regard as the defender of Peruvian independence and the standard bearer for its large indigenous population.  Yet in the investigations that followed the two-decade conflict with the Maoist Shining Path insurgency, Peru’s security forces were found responsible for 36% of the deaths.  Beyond the revelations of massacres, torture, gendered violence, corruption and support for Alberto Fujimori's 1992 coup, Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported that the overwhelming victims of human rights crimes committed by the security forces were indigenous peoples.  From facing criminal prosecution and imprisonment in the early 2000s, how have the security forces rehabilitated their image, won the support of the Peruvian people, and captured the highest offices in the land?  Find out from historian Cynthia Milton, author of Conflicted Memory: Military Cultural Interventions and the Human Rights Era in Peru.

The civil war in Peru is often lumped together indiscriminately with neighboring conflicts in Latin America.  University of Victoria historian Cynthia Milton argues that we need to take into account the very different nature of the violence in Peru as well as the centrality of the military in Peruvian society to fully grasp how the conflict has been remembered.  In Conflicted Memory: Military Cultural Interventions and the Human Rights Era in Peru, Milton reveals how the military has successfully deployed the language of human rights memorialization to reframe their role in the conflict.  A conversation with Cynthia Milton about memory politics in Peru on the October 6th episode of the Realms of Memory podcast.

The Holocaust is at the heart of German national memory culture.  From commemorative events organized on the floor of the parliament to mandatory instruction in public schools, «never again » is a much repeated refrain echoed throughout German society.  How then is it possible that Germans are unlearning the lessons of the Holocaust?  This is the contention of historian Juergen Zimmerer, renouned for his scholarship on the genocide in imperial German South West Africa.  Zimmerer argues that by making the defense of Israel, Staatsräson, or national policy based on the burden of the past, Holocaust memory is being used to stifle freedom of expression and to promote ethnonationalist thinking.  By reducing the causal factors of the Holocaust to antisemitism in the Nazi era, it becomes possible to bracket out an uncomfortable past as a problem resolved. Antisemitism can now be located either in the regressive thinking of unwanted Muslim minority communities or the horrors perpetrated by Hamas in the present.  Instead of embracing tolerance and respect for fundamental human rights, Germany is now unlearning the lessons of the Holocaust and moving towards a more intolerant, ethno-nationist future.  A conversation with Juergen Zimmerer about his book, Germany’s History Wars: Contesting Memory and Identity Today, in this episode of the Realms of Memory podcast.

How singular was the Holocaust?  Historian Juergen Zimmerer sparked a firestorm of controversy in Germany for suggesting continuity between the colonial past and the Holocaust.  Any suggestion that the Holocaust needs to be understood within a broader framework that goes beyond antisemitism and the Nazi era strikes at the heart of the German national memory culture.  Drawing from his recently published edited volume, Germany’s History Wars: Contesting Memory and Identity Today, I had the chance to talk with Juergen Zimmerer about how the singularity idea has contributed to the unlearning of the lessons of the Holocaust.  A conversation with Juergen Zimmerer, renowned scholar of the genocide in German South West Africa, next on the September 1st episode of the Realms of Memory podcast.