Dan Diner

“Globalizing WWII-Memory” sets out to examine the epistemic premises innate to universalizing historical experience, by scrutinizing the quest for historical understanding and moral judgment against the backdrop of an emerging global cultural environment, fraught with multiple recollections, while using memories of World War II as the empirical core of the study. The pivotal constellation of research emerges by interfacing a horizontal (West-East) alignment traditionally significant for continental European history with a vertically oriented alignment (North-South) that sheds a colonial and post-colonial perspective on World War II. This constellation tends to lead a posteriori to a realm of conflicting, morally permeated discourses of comparison and analogy, revealing the Holocaust to function as the central event of continental narration, on the one hand, while genocidal atrocities highlight the colonial or post-colonial comprehension, perception and narration, on the other. Methodologically, and in order to offer a fresh and innovative view of the emergence of the specifics of knowledge and meaning in the domain of historical understanding in a globalizing world, while placing the signifying event of the Nazis’ systematic annihilation of the Jews at the heart of the question of universal historical judgment, the project proceeds from the colonial periphery of events, however. Insofar it extends the sphere of events in time and space, letting WWII begin with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria 1931, the occupation of Iran 1941, the fall of fortress Singapore 1942, the battle of El-Alamein, the Bengali famine 1943 and other iconic events combining continental and colonial repercussions. This “peripheral” perspective will in a further seemingly paradoxical turn find itself extended into continental European affairs where it functions to help us comprehend the multiplicity of experiences and the diversity of attendant memories unfolding there, i.e. iconic events on the continents which represent a different “logic” of events and its inscription in memory, as the massacre of Katyn, the Finnish “war of continuity”, etc. Such a research perspective may epistemologically enable us to reconstruct a universally convincing and valid understanding of a foundational event in European and global history, namely the recollection of World War II, and thus render possible common judgment while re-determining the meaning of “History”.