The Use And Abuse Of Memory

Decades after the previously unimaginable horrors of the Nazi extermination camps and the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their memories remain part of our lives. In academic and human terms, preserving awareness of this past is an ethical imperative. This volume concerns narratives about—and allusions to—World War II across contemporary Europe, and explains why contemporary Europeans continue to be drawn to it as a template of comparison, interpretation, even prediction. This volume adds a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to the trajectories of recent academic inquiries. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, political scientists, and area study specialists contribute wide-ranging theoretical paradigms, disciplinary frameworks, and methodological approaches. The volume focuses on how, where, and to what effect World War II has been remembered. The editors discuss how World War II in particular continues to be a point of reference across the political spectrum and not only in Europe. It will be of interest for those interested in popular culture, World War II history, and national identity studies.

Decades after the previously unimaginable horrors of the Nazi extermination camps and the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their memories remain part of our lives. In academic and human terms, preserving awareness of this past is an ethical imperative. This volume concerns narratives about--and allusions to--World War II across contemporary Europe, and explains why contemporary Europeans continue to be drawn to it as a template of comparison, interpretation, even prediction. This volume adds a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to the trajectories of recent academic inquiries. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, political scientists, and area study specialists contribute wide-ranging theoretical paradigms, disciplinary frameworks, and methodological approaches. The volume focuses on how, where, and to what effect World War II has been remembered. The editors discuss how World War II in particular continues to be a point of reference across the political spectrum and not only in Europe. It will be of interest for those interested in popular culture, World War II history, and national identity studies.

In this volume, the editors make use of current memory scholarship to explore ethical, moral and cultural issues that continue to shape the ways in which memory is conceived in a range of scientific, therapeutic and legal settings.

Maintains that there is no controlled scientific evidence that memories of trauma may be "recovered" years later.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Introduction: Memories and Analogies of World War II -- 1 Genocide Memorialization and the Europeanization of Europe -- 2 Appeasement Analogies in British Parliamentary Debates Preceding the 2003 Invasion of Iraq -- 3 How Deeply Rooted Is the Commitment to "Never Again"? Dick Bengtsson's Swastikas and European Memory Culture -- 4 Cultural Memories of German Suffering during the Second World War: An Inability Not to Mourn? -- 5 From Perpetrators to Victims and Back Again: The Long Shadow of the Second World War in Belgium -- 6 L'Histoire bling-bling Nicolas Sarkozy and the Historians -- 7 The Pasts of the Present: World War II Memories and the Construction of Political Legitimacy in Post-Cold War Italy -- 8 "The Nazis Strike Again": The Concept of "The German Enemy," Party Strategies, and Mass Perceptions through the Prism of the Gre -- 9 Who Were the Anti-Fascists? Divergent Interpretations of WWII in Contemporary Post-Yugoslav History Textbooks -- 10 Multiple Dimensions and Discursive Contests in Austria's Mythscape -- 11 World War II in Discourses of National Identification in Poland: An Intergenerational Perspective -- 12 From the "Reunification of the Ukrainian Lands" to "Soviet Occupation": The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in the Ukrainian Political Memory -- 13 "Often Very Harmful Things Start Out with Things That Are Very Harmless": European Reflections on Guilt and Innocence Inspired by Art about the Holocaust in the 1990s -- 14 Epilogue -- List of Contributors -- Index

In an effort to bring scientific understanding to this complex and highly emotional controversy, psychologist Robert A. Baker has collected important essays by noted experts on child sexual abuse.

The nature of memory for everyday events, and the contexts that can affect it, are controversial topics being investigated by researchers in cognitive, social, clinical, and developmental/lifespan psychology today. This book brings many of these researchers together in an attempt to unpack the contextual and processing variables that play a part in everyday memory, particularly for emotion-laden events. They discuss the mental structures and processes that operate in the formation of memory representations and their later retrieval and interpretation.