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This paper analyses the memory crisis resulting from conflicting perceptions of the Shoah in Western and Central Europe. To clarify this memory crisis, crucial aspects of these divergent perceptions will be discussed. From the Western perspective, there is a strong tendency to underline the universal meaning and importance of the Shoah, and to institutionalize this in UN and EU resolutions and declarations. From an Eastern perspective, this process of globalizing Shoah discourse is often considered to be a Western preoccupation and as just another mechanism to promulgate further Western cultural domination. In Central Europe the supposed singularity of the Shoah is not only often doubted, but the focus is shifted far more on to processing communism and identity-based policies. To clarify and illustrate how the Shoah is reflected on in historical debates and the public domain, recent Polish and Hungarian monuments, museums, literature and films are discussed.

Starting with the late 1980ʹs and early 1990ʹs, the field of Western historiography was pervaded by studies on the history of memory against the background of mentalities, the birth of the history of present time and the struggle of oral history to promote itself (time of roots, genealogies, commemorations); it was also the time for a growing interest in an alternative history of Africa built upon memories. Museums felt empowered to interrogate current histories, while the older ones revisited the very concepts upon which they had been previously built. Memories felt compelled to question history – and to rectify it. Certain researchers felt obliged to bring forth the memorial constructions. While in Europe memories were invited to permanently defy history, in Africa their task was, from the beginning, that of investing history with truth. Very scarce were here the invitations to relativism. Memories in Africa brought with them a familiar past that was allegedly colonized and suppressed Furthermore, waking up dormant memories from before the recent, Western colonial past was part of the identity building process in Africa: such narratives justified the individual via his/her ancestors, ethnic group peers and generations. On top of that, local intellectuals built on the national and continental identity. Based on the common roots, the emerging African discourse blamed recent history for the rupture with the long durée. Celebration and commemoration are still the barometers of existing, different types of memories (individual, communities, official). The controversial heritage of juxtaposed memories requires a separate interpretation. The Kermel Square in downtown Dakar, Senegal, is such an example. The walls of the main building and the surrounding building of colonial French architecture are overlapped with imprints of the more recent national memory, and the latter is the sworn enemy of the former. Each nation-state has its own heroes and places of memory, while few remember when the stories associated with them were born. We are now left with just their compulsory, ceremonial re-visitations.

This article outlines the "discursive node" as an approach to a cultural
analysis of how memory is being done in history classrooms. Teaching is a practice
embodied in the interactions between teachers and their audiences, between
texts, imagery and institutional formations, and between material and immaterial
participants in an activity that entails not only knowledge but also emotions,
experience and values (Henry Giroux). Discursive nodes are useful metaphors that
enable research of a phenomenon that is ontologically and empirically fluxional,
heterogeneous, unstable, situative and fuzzy—memory.