mural depicting aboriginal leader and anti-Nazi protestor William Cooper, part ofGreater Shepparton Aboriginal Street Art Project.

Mnemonic Solidarity in the Global
Memory Space
Series | Mnemonic Solidarity
January 31, 2019 | Volume 12 | Issue 4
Jie-Hyun Lim
Arguably, “the focus in the globalization discourse has shifted from imagination tomemory” at the turn of the third millennium.1 The mnemoscape—the topography ofsocial memory—was one of the domains of the human imagination reconfigured
most dramatically by the spatial turn of globalization. Global memory space has
emerged to challenge the nation-state as the legitimate container of collectivememories. Freed from the nation, memories have become entangled, cohabitated,reconciled, contested, conflicted, and negotiated across borders. Due to the global
movement and transaction of memories, unconnected historical actors and memory
activists are linked mnemonically a posteriori in the global memory space, eventhough no de facto entangled history exists. It is not so much history that isentangled, but memory. In the emerging global memory space, memory activists
have become agents of transnational solidarity across political and cultural
boundaries. Whether mnemonic solidarity is possible and desirable or not remains
an open question. However, it would be plausibly a new form of solidarity in thetwenty-first century.
A meeting of Korean ‘comfort women’ victims and Holocaust survivors at theQueensborough Community College in New York City on 13 December 2011, coorganized by Korean American Civic Empowerment and the Kupferberg Holocaust
Center, represents an example of globally entangled memory. The mnemonic
confluence of Korean comfort women and European Jewish survivors was facilitatedby the transatlantic and transpacific migration of memories to the USA. Holocaust
and postcolonial memories have been entangled in the postwar era. The AustralianAboriginal League’s anti-Nazi protest action against the Kristallnacht of 1938,
reenacted on 6 December 2012, exemplifies a parallel confluence of postcolonialand Holocaust memory in Australia. A series of controversial exhibitions of ‘Nazismein Zuid-Afrika’ in the early 1970s, hosted by Anne Frank House in Amsterdam andorganized by the ‘Anti-Apartheids Beweging Nederlands’, indicates the interaction of
postcolonial and Holocaust memory, which was preceded by African-American
communists’ petition to the UN for the recognition of American slavery as agenocide in 1951. In the USA, Holocaust resonances are even traced back to thefifteenth century in an outspoken comparison between Christoph Columbus andHeinrich Himmler by an American Indigenous Rights activist.2
Entangled memories of the Holocaust and colonial genocide tend to produce theextraterritoriality of remembrance by exposing national experience to acrisscrossing global accountability. It is characterized by the cosmopolitanization of
the Holocaust, which transposes the memory of the Holocaust to contemporary
sensibilities of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and today’s
Burma. However, the global memory space does not necessarily guarantee the denationalization of collective memories. Instead, the transnational history ofvictimhood nationalism invokes the re-territorialization of cosmopolitan memory
within national boundaries; and as the Holocaust is used as a memory template ofhuman tragedy, victimhood contestations over who suffered the most become moredistasteful.3 Entangled memories globally intensify the contest over memory as wellas the mnemonic solidarity among nations, nationalities, ethnicities, or races. Thus,
global memory space fluctuates between de-territorialization and reterritorialization, mnemonic solidarity and contest.
The entangled memory of Auschwitz and Hiroshima/Nagasaki exemplifies theambivalence of the global memory space. In a memorial mass for the A-bomb
victims in Nagasaki on November 23, 1945, Takashi Nagai delivered a funeralmessage saying that the Urakami church, above which the bomb exploded, was"chosen not as a victim but as a pure lamb, to be slaughtered and burned on thealtar of sacrifice to expiate the sins committed by humanity in the Second WorldWar."4 It is interesting to note that Nagai picked out the word hansai (燔祭), theJapanese translation of ‘holocaust’ from chapter 22 of the Book of Genesis, toillustrate the sublime world-redemptive suffering of the Japanese hibakusha-A-bombvictims. Considering that the word ‘holocaust’ was not popular even in Israel and the‘West’ until the late 1950s, Nagai’s speech is one of the earliest recorded public usesof ‘Holocaust’ in the postwar world. Nagai’s address of hansai premonished theconnectivity of Auschwitz and Hiroshima/Nagasaki in postwar Japanese memory.

Auschwitz and Hiroshima have been frequently cited as terrible twin symbols ofhuman-made mass death and even singled out as two archetypical examples ofWhite racism.5 In this simplistic juxtaposition, Holocaust as the decontextualized
symbol of absolute evil served to territorialize memory by justifying national
victimhood metonymically.
Freed from the nation, memories have become entangled, cohabitated, reconciled,contested, conflicted, and negotiated across borders.
The ‘Hiroshima-Auschwitz Peace March’ in 1962-63 embodies the intriguinginterconnectedness of hibakusha victims and Holocaust victims by blaming
American imperialism in alignment with Nazism.6 It explains why the Polishcommunist regime greeted those Japanese peace activists warmly, in contrast to theJapanese governing authority’s reluctance to support the Peace March. From a transAsian perspective, transposing the Holocaust onto Hiroshima and Nagasaki easily
became a way of forgetting Nanjing, Bataan, comfort women, and other Japanesecolonial atrocities. The obsessive Japanese attention to Anne Frank is another markof nationalist appropriation of the Holocaust memory in the Pacific. As Alain
Lewkovitz explains, “the Anne Frank-Japan connection is based on a kinship ofvictims” in Auschwitz and Hiroshima/Nagasaki. But the Japanese don’t think of thecountless Anne Franks their troops perpetrated in Asia.7 Holocaust wasinstrumentalized to stress national victimhood metonymically in Eastern Europe too.
Polish nationalists used the term ‘forgotten Holocaust’ and defined Poles as “the firstpeople in Europe to experience the Holocaust.” German memories of the Alliedbombing, Central & East European Vertriebene, and Ukrainian Holodomyr referred
the Holocaust as the memory template.

Statue of Anne Frank at the Holocaust Education Center in Fukuyama City, southern
Japan.
Reflection on this manner of connecting Auschwitz and other genocidal atrocities
illuminates why any simple juxtaposition of genocidal tragedies cannot serve
cosmopolitan memory. Mnemonic solidarity would demand a critical and radical
juxtaposition of different, unrelated, yet entangled memories in the global memory
space. It aims at “a non-hierarchical act of comparison” in order to “illuminate bothcommensurabilities and incommensurability” of human tragedies in different partsof the world.8 Otherwise, cosmopolitan memory is subject to the nationalist
vulgarization and mnemonic solidarity is vulnerable to the struggle among
antagonistic mnemonic hegemons. It is not difficult to witness mnemonic hegemons
struggling behind the scene of the cosmopolitan memory. A capital letter‘Cosmopolitan’ memory may sharpen antagonistic competition among different
mnemonic hegemons. Mnemonic solidarity would be possible not by imposing thesingle capital letter ‘Cosmopolitan’ memory, but by attaining a conflictual consensus
of competing memories.
Entangled memories of the Holocaust and colonial genocide tend to produce theextraterritoriality of remembrance by exposing national experience to acrisscrossing global accountability.

One more point. Mnemonic solidarity is not always positive. Deniers globally havebeen in search of mnemonic solidarities of their own. For instance, Holocaust denial
has provided the referential idea for generic negationism, including the Jedwabne
massacre in Poland, stolen Aboriginal children in Australia, comfort women during
the Japanese empire, the Armenian genocide, and other colonial atrocities. The
emergence of the global memory space elevated Holocaust denial to a universal
negationism. The Holocaust denial conference in Teheran in December 2006 is agood example. David Duke’s keynote speech following Ahmadinejad’s opening
speech connotes a strange alliance of the Islamic theocracy with the KKK’s white
supremacism. Iranian efforts to delegitimize the state of Israel were connected with
the KKK’s new policy to escape from the racist stereotype by allying with the colored
Third World.9 Thus, looking awry at both the Holocaust and its denial as templatesof cosmopolitan memory remains a challenging task.
_____________
Editor’s note: This global-e special issue series on “Mnemonic Solidarity in theGlobal Memory Space” was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea
Grant funded by the Korean Government (2017S1A6A3A01079727).
Notes
1. Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, “Introduction,’ in Aleida Assmann andSebastian Conrad eds, Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices, andTrajectories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 1.
2. Shirli Gilbert. "Anne Frank in South Africa: Remembering the Holocaust During andAfter Apartheid." Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26, no. 3 (2012): 366-393.
https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed March 10, 2018), pp. 374-5; Ann Curthoys and John
Docker, “Defining Genocide," in Dan Stone, ed. The Historiography of Genocide(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp.16-21; Ward Churchill, “American
Holocaust: Structure of Denial,” Socialism and Democracy, vol. 17, no. 1 (2003), p.
26.
3. See Jie-Hyun Lim, “Victimhood Nationalism in Contested Memories-Mourning
Nations and Global Accountability” in Memory in a Global Age, pp. 138-162.
4. Konishi Tetsuro, “The Original Manuscript of Takashi Nagai’s Funeral Address at a

Mass for the Victims of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb,” The Journal of Nagasaki
University of Foreign Studies, No. 18 (December, 2014), pp. 58, 61.
5. Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan KoreanTranslation (Seoul: Hangyŏreh Shinmusa, 2002), pp. 119-26; John W. Dower, ‘An
Aptitude for Being Unloved: War and Memory in Japan’, in Omer Bartov et. al. eds.,
Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (New York: The New Press,2002), p. 226; James J. Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National
Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001).
6. See Ran Zwigenberg, "Never Again: Hiroshima, Auschwitz and the Politics ofCommemoration," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 3, No. 1, January 19, 2015.
7. https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/anne-frank-the-japanese-anime-1.5314070, lastaccessed on January 15, 2019.
8. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies,”
Modernism/Modernity, vol. 17, No. 3 (2010), p. 493.
9. George Michael, “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Sponsorship of Holocaust Denial,”
Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol. 8, (September–December, 2007),
pp. 667–671.

Tags
global dynamics
memoryhistory

Jie-Hyun Lim is Professor of History and Director, Critical Global Studies Institute at
Sogang University, Korea.
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