ABSTRACT
During the last two decades there has been a proliferation of public interest and concern throughout the world in the various cultural and political dimensions and phenomena of war memory, and in the forms and practices of war commemoration. While this complex general development has yet to be adequately explained, a number of its key features can be clearly discerned. First, its most powerful, transnational manifestation has been the emergence into public visibility of the Shoah, through a variety of projects ranging from the establishment of new museums and the production of documentary and fictional films, to the campaigns to trace and bring to justice Nazi war criminals, and to restore the so-called ‘Nazi gold’ and other stolen property to the Jewish victims and their families. The debates surrounding the necessary remembrance, commemoration and reparation of Nazi genocide have had the most intense impact in the USA, Israel and Germany, but their resonance has been felt to varying degrees in all those parts of Europe where Jews were exterminated, and in countries throughout the world in which Jewish refugees made their homes, or to which their persecutors sought to flee. 1
