Remembering Yesterday to Protect Tomorrow: The Internationalization of a New Commemorative Paradigm

Abstract

Even before the end of World War II and the liberation of all of the Nazi concentration camps, the camp at Majdanek, Poland, was turned into something of a ‘museum,’ intended to document what had happened there, honor the victims who had perished and stand as a grim reminder to the world of the atrocities that human beings are capable of (Young 1993). Though the Holocaust did not yet have a name, its memory was already invoked in the name of what would become the Holocaust’s greatest mantra: ‘never again.’ In another world region, the city government of Hiroshima, Japan, decided to create a set of memorials to victims of the atomic bomb that was dropped on 6 August 1945. These memorials would serve as ‘reminders of the past and contributions to a future of lasting peace.’1