Palimpsests: National, International, and Transnational Sites of Memory

Abstract

In this essay I claim that all sites of memory have both local and national meanings, since they say that something happened here or to the people who live here, in this country, which is worth remembering in public. Only some sites of memory are international, in that they are constructed not solely by locals or residents of a particular region or state, but by groups of people in different countries drawing attention to events they think significant. However, transnational sites are those which were constructed or designated as significant by people from different places or different states, who worked together to represent the past from a transnational perspective. Therefore, the central question of my research is what did memory agents, that is, the people who built or used these sites of memory, want to achieve through them? What were they for? The answers I present are based on war memorials and museums. Reflecting on these sites underscores the ways in which war memorials are palimpsests, in the sense that they have multiple levels of meaning attached to them, corresponding to the collective memory of local, regional, national, international and transnational communities about our violent age.