6533b854fe1ef96bd12af249

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Forgetting to Remember: The Press Discourse, the Cold War and Conjunctures of Remembrance

subject

description

The first ‘memory wave’ of the Holocaust, largely based on the depictions of the liberation of the camps and the Nuremberg Trial, was coming to an end in the late 1940s.1 This period, sometimes called the ‘Nuremberg interregnum’,2 was also shaped by discussion relating to the Jewish DPs, the creation of Israel and its aftermath, as this this book has shown. As the Palestine issue became less acute and faded from daily news, talk of the Holocaust also vanished from the public domain. Consequently, the disappearance of the Holocaust from the public eye marked the beginning of a cultural amnesia that lasted, as the dominant historical wisdom now has it, until the 1960s.3 On the other hand, it should be pointed out that more recent work on survivors takes a different view.4 This is especially true in Israeli, Hebrew and Yiddish contexts where the tradition of chronicling the events in the ghettos continued in the DP camps and, a little later, in Israel and elsewhere among survivor circles. But how did the silence take root in the public domain?