"Tell Ye Your Children..." : The Twisted Swedish Road to Holocaust Recognition

From a historical perspective, this article analyzesthe dramatic politicalprocess in the 1990s when modern Sweden left its traditional dissociationfrom historical orientations by entering into a European context in which theSecond World War and the Holocaust were crucial historical landmarks.The political campaign Living History must be understood in terms of recent processes of both nationalization and Europeanization of history. As a conclusion, three problems of the politics of history are discussed: a competingEuropean historical focus on communist crimes against humanity, a simplisticand reductionist political use of Holocaust history, and a difficult but necessarydiscussion of the potential lessons of history in general, and of Holocausthistory in particula