Justice and Memory - Confronting traumatic pasts : An international comparison

The present volume summarises the contributions of 18 prominent scholars of an international interdisciplinary conference at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue, Vienna, in June 2008. Commemorative events, issues of guilt, justice and legitimation as well as forms of restitution were compared, analysed and discussed in respect to their functions, objectives and effects, while focussing their specifically national contexts of origin and their respective impact. Thus, the many dimensions of "remembering and forgetting" were part and parcel of thetheoretical and methodological presentations, on the one hand, and of specific national case studies (in Europe, South-Africa, South America (Chile), Israel, and so forth), on the other. Salient social phenomena such as war crimes and tribunals, the functions of ideologies and images of the past (Geschichtsbilder) were deconstructed and critically debated, always related to specific national and transnational contexts. It became obvious that the past(s) can never be silenced; and that they always impinge onthe present and future of all societies - and our lives.