Michael CramerMember of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2004 until 2019 Recently we commemorated the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the Iron Curtain in Europe. The wall around West Berlin was 3.60 m high and 160 km long. Its appearance and location changed over the course of time: the …
Los Angeles, located in a region founded on the exploitation of Native Californians by Spanish missionaries and a destination for the Black community during the Second Great Migration, is home to two memorials depicting this great disparity in visibility and historical dialogue — the controversial defaced statue of Spanish missionary Junipero Serra and the memorial park of formerly enslaved and philanthropist Biddy Mason.
In this novel, the author analyses, criticizes and denounces a key feature of his own social reality: the trivialization of the Holocaust through its spaces of memory, and through the various mechanisms of memorial transmission, both in his homeland, Israel, and abroad. This trivialization takes the form of a memory monster.
El-Masri, Samar; Tammy Lambert; Joanna Quinn (Eds.). (2020) Palgrave By Luis Ángel Gasca Triviño, Undergraduate Student, Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University Fellowship student at EUROM (2020) Transitional Justice in Comparative Perspective: Preconditions for Success, edited by Samar El-Masri, Tammy Lambert and Joanna Quinn, is a volume of individual country case studies …
The construction of memorials and museums all over the globe seems significant in the sheer vastness and magnitude of their number, as well as in the significance that these sites of memory may have in, and for, affected communities.
During the Croatian War of Independence, the Croatian Army and military police had occupied the barracks, which were then handed over to the city of Rijeka and finally transformed into the university campus that opened in 2011. Since then I have heard rumours that a monument to the Spanish Civil War had once been located on the site of the former barracks, but the building of the campus had completely changed the landscape and all my efforts to track down information on the possible existence of a monument were fruitless.
Since 2010, the public memory of the working class has become more conflicted. The notion that ‘they’ are reactionary bigots has been strengthened by the result of the Brexit referendum of 2016. Most journalists overlook that many affluent residents of southern, rural England, voted to leave the European Union. They focus their ire on the deindustrialised areas of northern England – constituencies which also helped give Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party a landslide win in the 2019 General Election.
Each remembrance process has its own unique characteristics, and it is essential not to confuse or mix concepts; however, the globalization of memory can be used as a tool for truth, justice and reparation to establish parallels and affinities and thus enrich our analysis of each process.
Recent events are a powerful example of the memorial paradigm that has been established over the last twenty years both at the European level and internationally.
Géraldine Schwarz
French-German writer, journalist and filmmaker, author of the bestseller “Those Who Forget: My Family’s Story in Nazi Europe – A Memoir, a History, a Warning“