Perseverance and Place: A Review of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. By Zina Precht-Rodriguez

By Zina Precht-Rodriguez Columbia University student and EUROM fellow (2017) Cover picture: A statue of Thomas Jefferson hovers over the illuminated phrase, while a black figure hovers in the background.   The arduous struggle throughout history between the legal recognition of equal rights for African Americans and the actual implementation of these rights ironically resembles the …

The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Monument in San Francisco. By Marina Garde

Marina Garde Political scientist and Executive Director of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) “What we have created here is an antidote to amnesia” Peter N. Carroll, historian Nine years ago, on March 30th, 2008, a national monument to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was unveiled in San Francisco. Forty feet long and eight feet high, …

Aljube Museum. Musealization of a «difficult heritage». By Luís Farinha

LuĂ­s Farinha Director of the Aljube Museum Resistance and Freedom   The Aljube Museum appeared four decades after the fall of the New State, as a result of an awakening from an apparent amnesia of an authoritarian regime that imposed censorship on the thought and creativity of millions of Portuguese people, that deported them and …

Re-Use of Nazi symbols in Germany after 1945. By Stefanie Endlich

Stefanie Endlich Honorary Professor of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Berlin University of the Arts (UniversitĂ€t der KĂŒnste Berlin) Cover picture: Imperial Eagle with Swastica at the “FĂŒhrer’s Building” in Munich; picture taken in the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism (picture: Stefanie Endlich   Right after the capitulation of Nazi Germany, …

Memory, a hinge between past and present. Elizabet Jelin is interviewed by Laura Mombello.

Senior Researcher of CONICET and Professor of the Postgraduate Program in Social Sciences UNGS-IDES, Elizabeth Jelin holds a PhD in Sociology and was awarded in the Houssay Prize for a Lifetime Achievement in Social Sciences in 2013.  She has been Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and member of the Academic Directory of that institution. …

History will liberate. By Pavel Tychtl

Pavel Tychtl Representative of the European Commission There are two stories that illustrate well the many complex issues connected with memory. Both of them are linked to one place with a very specific role in the memory of the 20th century. The place is the concentration camp of Buchenwald and the first story is from …

The Memorial’s Vernacular Arc Between Berlin’s Denkmal and New York City’s 9/11 Memorial. By James E. Young

James E. Young Ph.D., Emeritus Distinguished Professor of English and Judaic and Near Eastern Studies Founding Director, Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (UMass Amherst)   Adapted from The Stages of Memory:  Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016)   In April 2003, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation …

Time, Memory and History. At the crossroads of European Memory. By Henry Rousso

Henry Rousso Senior researcher at the Institut d’Histoire du Temps PrĂ©sent (CNRS, Paris) Version reviewed and corrected by the author For an extended reading check also: Rousso, Henry. Face au passĂ©. Essais sur la mĂ©moire contemporaine, Paris, Belin, 2016 The need to understand the past and provide a collective representation of history is anything but …