Accusation and Therapy: The Gedenkstätten in Austria and Germany and the sitios de memoria in Argentina

Abstract

The sitios de memoria established on sites of former Clandestine Centers of Detention, Torture and Annihilation during the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983) and the Gedenkstätten on sites of former nazi concentration camps in Germany and Austria are places in which a traumatic past for the victims and a past burdened with guilt of the perpetrators are remembered. They both carry an inherent duality within them: they can be places of (self)therapy or places of accusation; places to commemorate the victims or places of Mahnung, i. e. of appeal and monition, which focus on the perpetrators and their deeds. But the question is: under which circumstances does one aspect gain dominance over the other? The text tries to show that, while the Argentine sitios de memoria emphasize the (self)therapy of the affected society, the Gedenkstätten are dominated by a discourse that focusses on the accusation of the perpetrators. For this purpose, it outlines the different sociopolitical constellations under which the discourses about the past were established in post National Socialist societies and in post dictatorial Argentina, respectively. Finally, the text wants to show how these foundational moments influence in the subsequent unfolding and development of memory discourses and how all that is symbolically inscribed in the sites dealing with the commemoration of the past.