Cosmopolitanization of memory: The politics of forgiveness and restitution

This chapter addresses the issues using the example of the correlation between forgiveness and restitution in terms of legal practices and a corresponding dissolution of boundaries in national policies. The foundations for a cosmopolitan memory emerged out of the efforts to come to terms with the extermination of the Jews. The memory of the Holocaust creates and fosters an outlook on the world and on humankind that clearly distinguishes between victims and offenders, between good and evil. The cosmopolitan implication of Holocaust remembrance enables other groups of victims to recognize themselves in the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The Polish president understood that the globalization of this norm, which involves the cosmopolitanization of Holocaust remembrance, has become an integral part of European politics. At least in Europe, it is the memory of national chauvinisms that is laying the foundations for fundamental transnational institutions and a human-rights regime that is politically consequential and is co-determining national politics in many areas.