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This chapter presents the theoretical argument about state responses to various ontological insecurities they face in the aftermath of a great political transformation—the end of communism—and links this framework to the issue of political memory. Rethinking the concepts of cosmopolitan versus national memory, especially as they relate to Holocaust remembrance, the chapter introduces the notion of memory appropriation. It outlines the major historical junctures in the development of a “European” cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust and discusses ways in which this remembrance is in conflict with the postcommunist, Eastern European narrative of World War II, the Holocaust being far from the central element of this story. The chapter describes various strategies of political resistance postcommunist states engaged in during this narrative dialogue with the West. But it was not only Eastern European states that changed their remembrance to appear more “European.” The postcommunist states also successfully changed the European Union (EU) approach to memory by pushing the EU to adopt the Eastern European position on the twentieth century's “two totalitarianisms.”

Homi Bhabha provides snapshots of what he calls spectral sovereignty, vernacular cosmopolitanism, and cosmopolitan memory. The nation-state persists in spectral or compromised form, Bhabha argues, long after it has been declared dead. It remains an object of desire for those who don’t have it, like the Kashmiris, the Palestinians, and many indigenous peoples. It is not a holdover from the past but absolutely contemporary, part of any properly cosmopolitan aspiration in the digital era. Like migrants, they need to settle somewhere. But settlement is not the affirmation of an authentic, already-existing identity. The vernacular cosmopolitanism that accompanies the desire introduces into their identity a primordial indefiniteness—one might say, a refusal to be pinned down by the question, “Where are you from?” For Bhabha, this indefiniteness parallels the role of dignity in the discourse of human rights: it is the proper basis for a cosmopolitan ethics.

This chapter explores memories of violence, and asks to what extent we can uncover early modern trauma. Early modern Europeans did not have a psychological theory to account for the lasting mental damage caused by violence. We also find little trace of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in early modern sources, either because early modern people also struggled to articulate such pain in ways that we recognize, or because the widespread belief in providence made them more resilient, and enabled many to turn pain into something that could also be remembered as beneficial. At the same time, the early modern world was as fascinated by the pain and sufferings of others as is our own, and some of these memories became ‘cosmopolitan’. Memories of atrocity were powerful in shaping transnational and public opinion, and in the pre- and remediation of memories of victims.

This essay discusses how Riera's Dins el darrer blau (1994) revisits the past in order to create a “culture of memory,” a process whereby society confronts its traumatic past and the history of exile and repression. Riera's novel is based on historical events that occurred in the City of Mallorca from 1687 to 1691. I suggest that this work engages with ideas of collective memory relating to the Jewish historical experience. Much of Dins el darrer blau corresponds to the writing on diaspora, implicitly questioning the relation between collective memory and nation. Riera shows what happens when the process of memory transcends ethnic national boundaries—what Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider (2002) have referred to as “cosmopolitan memory”. From this perspective, the persecution of Jewish converts in Mallorca can be remembered beyond the personal or even the group identities of the Jewish victims and the Catholic perpetrators on the island.