Memory and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust Era by Alejandro Baer Natan Sznaider

Author:Alejandro Baer, Natan Sznaider [Alejandro Baer, Natan Sznaider]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317033752
Google: 2s2VDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-11-25T03:24:27+00:00

Between No Pasarán and Nunca Más

In the article “Icons of Memory Juxtaposed,” historian Dan Diner (2010) points out that anti-fascist memory of the Civil War (embodied in the watchword No Pasarán, the slogan of the heroic defense of Madrid) has gone from being a European icon to being a purely national issue. The global memory of Spanish Civil War as an icon of anti-fascism, which was predominant in the post-war years in western Europe, has been substituted by another global icon: the Holocaust (Never Again). The irony about Diner’s argument is that it also applies to present-day Spain, where, as we have seen, representations of memoria histórica are being modeled after the ethics of Never Again. However, anti-fascist memory has not entirely vanished from Spanish memory politics.20

The conflict and negotiation between these two memory paradigms is most clearly played out in the struggle over the meaning of exhumation work between the ARMH and the communist Foro por la Memoria. The two groups share the imperative of judicializing exhumations and investigating the crimes, but they are not aligned in their political approaches to exhumations. They disagree with regard to the overall significance of recovering the memory of the defeated. ARMH represents an ethics of Never Again. It embraces the category of “victim,” emphasizes the humanity of the dead and the rights of the family (see also Bevernage and Colaert 2014; Ferrándiz 2014). The Foro invokes the revived, politicized memory of the Spanish Civil War as a struggle between the Left and the Right and criticizes ARMH for treating exhumations as a family affair. Indeed, if it can be claimed that current memory politics has made the Holocaust the dominant time frame of memory, subordinating the political memory of the Civil War to its new paradigm, then the Foro wants to re-establish a pre-Holocaust memory frame: the ever-present struggle between fascism and socialism, which was first played out on a global scale in the Spanish Civil War, fought between 1936 and 1939.21 As we argue, much of the human rights frame of the ARMH is, in contrast, driven by Holocaust memory. Part of this frame is mediated by family concerns, the notion of trauma and the search for therapeutic closure. The active agents of mourning and memory work are thus the relatives of the victims (Ferrándiz 2014). The Foro, however, views this as a treasonous “privatization of memory” and argues that recovery of historical memory actually means the re-installing of a straightforward anti-fascist metanarrative and the explicit politicization of the exhumations. Recovery of the bodies also means recuperating their political identities and thus the ideals and the political project for which they were killed (Ferrándiz 2014; Rubin 2014). This plays out at the exhumation sites and in ceremonies and tributes, where symbols are displayed, and anthems such as the communist International or the republican Riego hymn are sung. Volunteers and activists also take pictures of themselves in front of the exhumed mass graves with flags of the Communist Party, symbols of the Republic, and raised fists.

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