González de Oleaga, Marisa N.2024-05-202024-05-202022https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14468/15602The politics of memory have become a sine qua non of the agendas of Western governments. Transitional justice, symbolic reparations, and memory transmission are some of the concepts that accompany these new trends in remembrance. In this process, the sites of traumatic events affecting the community—events necessary to remember—have gained particular prominence. Often referred to as places or sites of memory, they represent a novel combination of memory and space not seen in the past. Public policies have traditionally commemorated and emphasized sites associated with victory, not defeat. It was not until post–World War II that the places where atrocities took place began to emerge from the past as a way to take stock of the present. What can be done with an extermination camp after the fact? How can a battlefield be incorporated into a community’s historic landscape? This transformation can be achieved by resignifying these sites—for example, by turning them into spaces of memory, museums, study centers, cultural institutions, or social organizations where history can be reenacted, to list just a few examples. There appears to be a need, generally voiced by survivors and by the organizations that represent them, to not simply let bygones be bygones, to not allow these sites to be destroyed, and to preserve them as powerful documents but at the same time invalidate them as monuments. Those who promote this type of remembrance seem to suggest that, although we cannot change what happened at such sites, we can incorporate sites into our experiences and tell their stories to the generations to come in a different way.enAtribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 4.0 Internacionalcapítulo de libro