From the ITF to the IHRA: future trends and challenges [and book launch for Holocaust Remembrance between the National and the Transnational]

At the 2015 British Association of Holocaust Studies conference, I presented a book launch for my monograph, 'Holocaust Remembrance between the National and the Transnational'. I also gave a paper entitled 'From the ITF to IHRA', which summarised the main findings of my monograph. The abstract for my paper was as follows: My book, 'Holocaust Remembrance between the National and the Transnational' (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) has analysed the causes and consequences of the SIF 2000 on the Holocaust and the founding of the ITF/IHRA. By specifically focusing on the ITF/IHRA and the conference at Stockholm, broader themes have been unpacked relating to the political, social and cultural dynamics of Holocaust memory politics between the national and the transnational at the dawn of the twenty-first century. These themes have included the relationships of power between Western Europe and ‘New’ Europe and how Holocaust-era issues fit into NATO and EU enlargement processes as well as the relationship between the focus on the Jewish Catastrophe, broader Nazi atrocity crimes and the ‘universalist’ political objectives in Bauer’s rhetoric of Holocaust ‘unprecedentedness’. This rhetoric was particularly significant because it formed a central element of the discursive construction of SIF 2000 manifesto and guiding document of the ITF/IHRA, the Stockholm Declaration on the Holocaust. This paper will draw on material from oral history interviews with, among others, Yehuda Bauer, Kathrin Meyer and Karel Fracapane in order to delineate some of the current strengths of the ITF/IHRA and the challenges that it faces. In the process this paper will reveal the legacies of Persson’s Holocaust research, remembrance and education projects in all of their complexity, while simultaneously suggesting that the challenges that the ITF/IHRA face remain pressing questions for today.