Tuija Parvikko, Ph.D
Political Science / Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy
Political Thought and Conceptual History (PolTCH), research team vice-leader
E-mail: tuijaparvikko@gmail.com
Postal address:
P.O. Box 35 (MaB)
FI-40014 University of Jyväskylä
FINLAND
The Holocaust and the Politics of Memory
The aim of the research project is to carry out a political reading of the politics of memory concerning the Holocaust. It examines how history and memory are politically used and abused in order to produce a desired interpretation of past events and their political significance. The guiding principle of the research is the conviction that controversies and debates over the Holocaust provide a politically sensible and sensitive context in which to study the problem of how memory and remembering can be used and abused in steering the political understanding and judgment of a certain event in a desired direction.
Secondly, the research is based on a view according to which, in its present mode, the politics of memory has taken the form of the ‘partisanship of memory’, which often turns into a moralist fight over who is considered to have remembered in a morally correct way and who has the right to judge events related to the Holocaust in the first place. In this perspective, all historiography becomes the politics of memory.
Hence, the second guiding principle of the study is the notion according to which the recent debates over the Holocaust can be read as expressions of the politics of history, which constitute a kind of meta-discourse of various politics of memory.