On Forgetting and Rediscovering the Holocaust in Scandinavia: introduction to the special issue on the histories and memories of the Holocaust in Scandinavia 2
The interest in the Holocaust – Nazi Germany's concentrated attempt to exterminate European Jewry – has become increasingly noticeable in the Scandinavian countries during the last decades, with a growing number not only of dissertations, monographs and other publications, but also public debates and controversies relating to this event. This new upsurge of interest in the Holocaust reflects the dynamics and the contested nature of collective memories of wartime Scandinavia more broadly. This article highlights, broadly speaking, the development of Holocaust historiography in Scandinavia; the changing perspectives, interpretations, debates and focus from the immediate post-war years to the present day. It argues that, despite the fact that the Holocaust was truly a European-wide phenomenon transcending national borders, Holocaust studies have mainly been produced as nation-centred histories. Only with the end of the Cold War and with a paradigmatic shift from ‘the event’ to ‘the memory’ has a new form of ...