Triple Victimhood: On the Mnemonic Confluence of the Holocaust, Stalinist Crime, and Colonial Genocide

This reflection article scrutinizes the mnemonic confluence and entanglements of the triple victimhood- the Holocaust, the crimes of colonialism, and Stalinist terror- on a global scale. The thaw of frozen memories in the post-Cold War era released the oppressed memories of Stalinist terror and Nazi collaboration in Eastern Europe. In the tri-continent of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the fall of communism also signalled the release of suppressed memories of the atrocities perpetrated by colonial powers. The mnemonic confluence of the triple victimhood, often with the Holocaust as a memory template, merged the divided memory space of the bipolar Cold War system into a single global memory formation. This essay will place the temporal focus on the post-Cold War era with its spatial dimension of the global memory space. Against the model of the cosmopolitanization of the Holocaust, Jie-Hyun Lim argues for the non-hierarchical comparability of the triple vicimhood, exploring global memory formation from the postcolonial perspective. He concludes this essay by suggesting the “critical relativization” and “radical juxtaposition” as ways of both de-hegemonizing and de-territorializing historical memories.