Alejandro Baer (University of Minnesota): "Healing Wounds or Perpetuating Divisions? Remembering Extreme Violence in the Post-Holocaust Era"

Department: Jewish Studies

Date and Time: February 9, 2017 | 5:00 PM-6:30 PM

Event Location: Humanities Instructional Building (HIB) 135

Event Details


Alejandro Baer (University of Minnesota)

Healing Wounds or Perpetuating Divisions?
Remembering Extreme Violence in the Post-Holocaust Era

February 9, 2017 at 5pm
Humanities Instructional Building (HIB) 135


Over the last decades, memorialization of large scale political violence across the globe has become highly conditioned by the standards of the Holocaust. How have images, language and interpretative frames related to the Holocaust and the definition of events as “genocide” affected the ways in which groups and societies at large understand their respective histories of extreme violence? Do such “global memories” facilitate or hamper the task of coming to terms with and overcoming divisive pasts? In this lecture, I will present the main findings of a recently published book titled Memory and Forgetting in the post-Holocaust Era. The Ethics of Never Again (Routledge, 2017), co-authored with Israeli sociologist Natan Sznaider. Special attention will be given to the contemporary memorialization of the crimes of the Civil War and ensuing Franco dictatorship (1936-1975) in Spain and of State Terror (1976-1982) in Argentina.
Alejandro Baer is the Stephen Feinstein Chair and director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Baer earned his Ph.D. at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid and held faculty positions at universities in Madrid, Bayreuth and Munich. He has authored numerous books and articles addressing issues of genocide, collective memory, and antisemitism. He is currently engaged in research on the representations of present and past mass violence in a transnational arena of interconnected memory cultures (particularly the cases of Spain, Argentina and Germany). In April 2014, Alejandro Baer was honored with the 2014 Public Sociology Award at the University of Minnesota.