For societies that decide to memorialise victims of persecution (genocides, invasions, civil wars, military dictatorships, police states), notions like deterrence and aversion come quickly into play. But they are the poor cousins of 'memory', an almost mystical concept in these circumstances and crucial to any discussion as to why the world is caught up in a 'global rush to commemorate atrocities', as Paul Williams puts it in Memorial Museums (Berg, £19.99). There is no doubting the evidence. A non-exhaustive list at the beginning of the book includes 24 museums, sites or artefacts marking atrocities, disasters and 'crimes against humanity', of which only three existed before 1980: the Hiroshima museum, the old slave house on the island of Gorée in Senegal and the 1967 sculpture near Yerevan commemorating the Armenian genocide.

LRB 6 March 2008 | PDF Download