Sharing the Same Space: How the Memory of the Holocaust Travels in Political Speech

ABSTRACT

In this research I examine how collective memory travels in political speech. I qualitatively analyze how the memory of the Holocaust is deployed in non-commemorative settings across three national contexts: Israel, Germany, and the US. Findings demonstrate how the memory of the Holocaust is selectively presented and rearranged to support a domestic agenda. Ever-expanding transnationalization has thus heightened interconnectivity, enabling the memory of the Holocaust to travel over and beyond traditional settings. It has also admitted memories from beyond the border into the national context of public sense-making through speech. Discussing implications for theory and scholarship, I argue that the social construction of memories as transnationalized entities, and their importation via political speech holds within it a socially-charged question, namely, to whom does this memory belong?

KEYWORDS:

• Collective memory
• Holocaust
• political speech
• globalization
• national identity

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this research I refer to the memory of the Holocaust, as opposed to memories of the Holocaust. While the Holocaust as a memory is obviously comprised of many events and occurrences, I follow Olick’s (1999) distinction between collective and collected memory, the first referring to a collective process of remembering and the latter to the “aggregated individual memories of members of a group” (338). In so doing, I wish to focus the attention of the readers to the collectivist approach to social memory wherein the memory of the Holocaust is presented in political speech in each of the three countries.

2. It should be mentioned that there is a considerable Jewish community in the US such that, after Israel, it hosts the largest Jewish population.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tracy Adams

Tracy Adams, PhD, the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her PhD research focuses on 'traveling’ collective memory and the many ways in which memory is mobilized in political rhetoric. Her research interests include the intersection of memory, conflict and politics, and how meaning is constructed through interactive processes of negotiation. She has been published in Memory Studies and Review of International Studies.