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The transition of the memory of twentieth-century conflicts from survivor to cultural memory has become inevitable with the passing of the survivor generation. This article examines the role of different generations in the retrieval and commemoration of the traumatic past in Germany and Spain by focusing on two main areas: firstly, it analyzes the debates surrounding the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and the ongoing review of form and function of existing memorial sites in the city, as well as ongoing vandalism and trivialization of these sites. Secondly, it examines recent debates and protests in Spain surrounding the 1977 Amnesty Law by prominent artists and the wider public. These range from protests against the indictment of Judge Baltasar Garzón in 2010 for opening an investigation into crimes against humanity committed by the Franco regime to demonstrations in November 2015 demanding an annulment of the 1977 Law, and to the recent Argentinean court case of Franco-era human rights crimes. Considering Pierre Nora’s notion that lieux de mémoire can be ‘material or non-material’, this article suggests that debates and demonstrations can act as a virtual space in which memory is viable. It analyzes the role of the ‘generations of postmemory’, in particular the third and fourth generations, in forestalling silence and forgetting and changing existing rigid discursive patterns.

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ABSTRACT∞ Transitional justice in Spain is still an ongoing process. This article examines the impact of memory laws and the rise of the radical right on transitional justice measures and the historical memory movement in Spain. It contends that the continued application of the 46/1977 Amnesty Law and the campaigning by radical right party Vox to repeal memory laws left a legal vacuum that precipitated interventions by memory activist groups. It is argued that these protest actions are a form of advocacy for participatory transitional justice. The article first focuses on Andalusia’s 2017 memory law and the rise of Vox in the region. Subsequently, it examines the effect of the state’s Democratic Memory Law (2022) on memory and justice measures and argues that both bottom-up approaches by civil society organizations and top-down measures by state actors are essential to transform Spain into a society anchored in the five pillars of transitional justice.

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