World War Collective Memory In The Holocaust

Memory is an essential part of an individual’s identity, as it connects with the past and defines the present. However, memory is important on an individual level as well as on a level of a collective. According to many theorists such as Maurice Halbwach, individual memory is “fragmentary and incomplete”, and therefore is “guided by the script that collective memory provides” (Sturken 4). Thus, the term collective, cultural or social memory as Astrid Erll has mentioned refers to “the interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts” that may concern either “individual acts of remembering in a social context to group memory” (2) or national memories which are based on a specific narrative. Additionally, a cultural memory is rather

Moreover, the phrase “Never again!” (Levy, Sznaider 143) became a significant motto in the aftermath of the war, which emphasized the didactic aspect of the Holocaust that conveyed a propagative transnational historical message. Thus, the primary focus of this paper is the integration of the Second World War collective memory in the European-Dutch and American collective memory ,respectively, as it had been formulated by certain manifestations of dominant national narratives or founding ‘myths’, and gratitude memorials. The study case of Thus, a vast number of scholars have observed a common element in the Second World War ‘myths’ of both Dutch and American narratives, which is the heroization of the act of resistance to the ‘evil’

In general, the Netherlands has acclaimed a “heroic stance” as regards the World War II by projecting its opposition to the “Nazi persecution of the Jews [which] has become a founding myth for the Dutch nation” (Kronemeijer, Tashima). Not only that, but the story of the persecution of Anne Frank became an image of “youthful innocence and suffering” (Kronemeijer, Tashima), as well as an international political myth of the Dutch experience of the war. It was only after the 1980s that the Netherlands focused on the interpretation of the genocide, as prior to that “monuments, rituals and publications emphasized national resistance, not the annihilation of the Jews” (Kronemeijer,