“Tell Ye Your Children…”: The Twisted Swedish Road to Holocaust Recognition

Abstract

ABSTRACT: From a historical perspective, this article analyzes the dramatic political process in the 1990s when modern Sweden left its traditional dissociation from historical orientations by entering into a European context in which the Second World War and the Holocaust were crucial historical landmarks. The political campaign Living History must be understood in terms of recent processes of both nationalization and Europeanization of history. As a conclusion, three problems of the politics of history are discussed: a competing European historical focus on communist crimes against humanity, a simplistic and reductionist political use of Holocaust history, and a difficult but necessary discussion of the potential lessons of history in general, and of Holocaust history in particular.