This essay presents a sociological analysis of what is known in Spain as the "recovery of historical memory" and the politics deriving from this recovery. This process was catalyzed by the exhumations of the remains of victims of Francoism that have been under way since the beginning of the twenty-first century. In order to do this, we will use the literature on cosmopolitan sociology and provide a dialogue between this sociology and recent developments in the study of social and cultural memory using concepts like postmemory, multidirectional, and cosmopolitan memory. The article moves beyond the national context and looks at Spanish memory politics through the theory and praxis of Holocaust memory on the one hand and the memory of the Argentinean victims of the military dictatorship on the other hand. This will enable us to identify the components and problems of a culture and politics of globalized memory.He cavado la fosa de mis muertos en el aire, donde sus huesos ligeros

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In this article, we analyze local Holocaust Remembrance Day (HRD) ceremonies promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in Spain and Turkey. We investigate whether these memory practices have the potential to lead to a cosmopolitan engagement with the host countries’ own pasts. Focused on the same memorial events in highly contrasting and diverse national contexts, this article examines how supranational memory discourses are adopted and reinterpreted within the nation‐state framework. Our ethnographic observation of the commemorations and analysis of the speeches between 2011 and 2018 in Turkey and 2005 and 2018 in Spain show that the Spanish ceremony can be defined as porous and to a certain degree open to multivocality—given the participation of different mnemonic communities—while the Turkish one is sealed and does not allow for the possibility of disrupting its self‐congratulatory national memory narrative. Paradoxically, in both cases, especially in Turkey, the national legitimation profiles are bolstered by the universal frameworks that Holocaust memory provides. Even though memory travels transnationally, the nation‐state still is the most powerful translator of this past. This results in the rendition of pre‐Holocaust nostalgic pasts as a multicultural heaven where different groups, including the Jewish community, lived in harmony.

The representation of the past through products of the ‘culture industry’ bears the history of a long debate between detractors and optimists. This controversy becomes especially significant in a time where commercial audiovisual media affect in unprecedented ways the content and the form in which massive audiences relate to the events of the past. Even more so in a so-called postmodern moment in which public confidence in the real is overall in decline. In this context, the debate on the representation of the history and memory of the Holocaust – the paradigmatic example of limitations and imperatives to representational practice – has become a contemporary battlefield regarding the legitimacy and propriety of mass media products. By examining contemporary Holocaust representations that are at the intersection between the world of commercial mass media and the conventional nonfiction culture and documentary tradition (such as high-tech museums and Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation), this article will reflect upon the diverse implications of the mass media–history relation.