This paper concentrates on Holocaust-remembrance within a Jewish-Norwegian context. It discusses how monuments and museums become sites for identity work for the third generation, Jewish grandchildren of Holocaust-survivors living in Norway. How do bonds to different, and yet entangled, mnemonic communities come to be expressed, shaped and negotiated in responses to public monuments, exhibitions and commemorative spaces? The discussion is based on my doctoral research on Jewish identity and memory in Norway. The project focuses on the third generation. Through ethnographic interviews and "walk-alongs" among memorials and in museums, I explore how informants from this cohort relate to the public memorialization of the Holocaust.
During our walks and visits, the participants in the study often allude to or tell stories about their grandparents` experience. They may for instance describe family photographs showing the larger family as it was before the deportations of Norwegian Jews from Norway. However, in our encounters with exhibitions and memorials it becomes clear how the informants` family history connect them to larger mnemonic communities. Some of these are rather close-knit, such as the Jewish communities in Norway; others are "imagined communities" (cf. Anderson 1983), such as Norway, Europe, European Jewry, world Jewry etc. The participants are involved in mnemonic processes that contextualizes the experience of the Holocaust in different ways. Sometimes this may put them in complicated or ambivalent positions.
This becomes clear in the informants` responses to memorials that clearly places the memory of the Holocaust in a local and national setting. In these cases, the informants often articulate narratives and reflections pointing to disturbances in their sense of emplaced belonging. They "work on" and negotiate their bonds to local communities in Norway, to the Jewish communities, and to Norway as an emplaced community.
This is perhaps unsurprising since monuments and exhibitions of the Holocaust in Norway usually bear a clear reference to the local context. Before the WW2 there were 2100 registered Jews living in Norway. Of these 773 were deported to German death camps; the rest mainly escaped to Sweden. The development of new memorial sites around the country has gone hand in hand with a growing public interest in "The Norwegian Holocaust". Academic studies and journalistic works have raised the awareness of how civilians and collaborators contributed to the genocidal politics of the German occupant regime. Thus, monuments and exhibitions of the Holocaust in Norway highlight a difficult moment in the history of the relationship between the majority-population and the Jewish minority.
Still, It is of interest how Jews living in Norway respond to memorials that so clearly places the memory of the Holocaust on Norwegian ground. In this paper, I discuss how monuments may challenge a sense of "being at home" in local communities in Norway and in Norway as a nation. It also shows how memorials may become important sites for individuals` work to confirm or connect to a local and national Jewish identity.
