Mémoires en conflit

Taking as his starting point the controversy surrounding the Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe in Germany in 2020, Natan Sznaider puts into perspective, from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, two moral narratives that seem mutually exclusive. Which event, the Holocaust or colonialism, constitutes the archetype of the greatest crimes in human history? European and non-European memories seem irreconcilable on this point, with each side claiming to have learned the lessons of a cruel history, and therefore to be on the right side of history. So can the debate only be one-sided?

By looking back at the thinkers who have shaped thinking on this issue up to the present day, such as Claude Lanzmann, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt and Edward Said, the author sets out to highlight the possibility of a third way, beyond the dichotomy between universalism and particularism. A way in which universalising does not mean relativising particular experiences.

Natan Sznaider was born in Germany in 1954 to Polish parents who were stateless Holocaust survivors. He moved to Israel at the age of 20 and studied sociology, psychology and history at Tel Aviv University. He is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the Tel Aviv-Yaffo Academic College. Sznaider has also taught and conducted research at Columbia University in New York, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. In 2024, he was awarded the Geschwister Korn und Gerstenmann Foundation's Peace Prize for his literary work in favour of peace in Israel and throughout the world.

He is part of an international research team focusing on cultural memory in Israel, Europe and Latin America. His research focuses on cosmopolitanism, memory, anti-Semitism, the sociology of knowledge, Hannah Arendt, political theory and the Holocaust.