What kind of shared practices of remembering can be born out of Europe’s seemingly dark history? To what extent might such practices even contribute to the formation of a European identity? Memory activists and scholars have advocated for the last two decades that Holocaust memory has indeed brought forward a model of reflexive and impartial remembrance. And with the reference to Europe such a position of impartiality might become consensual. Europe seems well placed to overcome the triumphant mode of remembering, when violence and war were primarily national memory’s core, in favour of transnational practices of remembering that focus on the suffering of victims.
Our presentation takes up the commonplace of the Holocaust as a pacifying founding myth, and explores its problematic features from the perspective of memory’s entangled character. We embed the rhetoric of impartial remembering in its broader pragmatic contexts, to argue that references to Europe in contemporary memory discourse actually produce effects contrary to the promise of an impartial arbitration through memory. Furthermore, we suggest that the discourse on European memory eventually reproduces expectations that are derived from the national framework of memory and its culturally homogenising effects. We draw our analysis on a recent book project and will develop two examples of European memory struggles: the massacre of Srebrenica and the Warsaw Uprising. The first case illustrates that the diffusion of the “European” in the sense of “impartial remembrance” and “remembrance of victims” has not merely pacifying effects. The second case forces us to think about the extent to which “impartial remembering” may serve as a founding myth for Europe with a capacity to generate visibility for those experiences of violence that have hitherto been less prominent.
