Once a primarily Jewish trauma, the Holocaust is now a universal symbol that plays a significant role in contemporary politics and to questions concerning justice and human rights. However, each European country has its own relation to this genocide and in the post-war era Sweden has primarily identified as a rescue-nation. Although the question has been debated, the memory of the Holocaust did in general not play an important role in Swedish politics and culture during the first post-war decades and it was not until the 1990s that a significant discussion began concerning questions of guilt in regards to the Jewish trauma. Positive aspects of the past were given more importance and in Sweden the positive aspects of neutrality during the war became a part of a post-war national identity.
In the presentation I want to hold at your conference I will focus on describing the Swedish-Jewish collective memory of the Holocaust in relation to questions concerning justice. The time period in focus will be the 1950s and 1960s. I will explain how a discussion on the Holocaust developed among Jews in Sweden, at the time when Sweden's glorification of its politics of neutrality became an important narrative, which compared to contemporary discussions on Nazism and the Second World War left little room for the particular experience of the Jews in historiography and public debate.
My main sources are the journals Judisk Krönika and Judisk Tidskrift. These journals were well-known within the Jewish community in Sweden and they are useful sources to identify the collective memory of the Jews in Sweden as the journals were the main public arenas where Jews were invited to discuss issues relating to Judaism, and more specifically their ideas concerning the Holocaust and justice. I have also looked at archive material that concerns questions of justice from the administration of the Jewish community in Stockholm and other places.
