This essay attempts to examine the relationship between history and memory, and the appropriate role of historians with regard to collective memory by reviewing some recent historical studies on the collective memory of the Holocaust in the United States, France, and Germany. To illuminate the current obsession with the Holocaust in the United States, this essay focuses on the studies of the American historians, Arno Mayor and Peter Novick, and the political scientist, Norman Finkelstein. Mayor criticizes an ‘exaggerated sectarianism’ of the Holocaust memory in America which removes the Judeocide from the historical and profane circumstances in which it was generated. While Novick regards the memory of the Holocaust in America as a deliberately constructed strategy for showing up American Jewish Identity and a kind of civil religion with its own dogmas, for Finkelstein, the Holocaust ideology is the product of an alliance between US imperialism and the state of Israel with the support of American Jewish elites. The French historian, Henry Rousso assumes also a critical attitude toward the obsessive character of Holocaust memory, especially toward the Papon Trial at the end of 1990s which, as a form of belated reparation, was imagined as a catharsis on a national scale, a means of proclaiming to the world that France is capable of facing up to its past.Intellectually challenging and stimulating is his more through critique of the counter-productive duty to remember which has taken the reflective and transparent remembrances of survivors of the Holocaust and woven them into a collective prescriptive memory unconducive to critical and contextual thinking about the Jewish calamity. In Germany, the topic Holocaust is not a pure academic question but touches on fundamental moral and political values, because the Nazi Germany was responsible for the tragedy of Auschwitz. On the one hand, the Holocaust memory of the Germans has contributed to the development of democratic and humanistic ideas and values in German society. On the other hand, the memory of the Holocaust has done nothing towards increasing the historical knowledge of the extermination of European Jews during the Second World War. Typical of the climate in Germany since the late 1960s were: a strong moralizing approach to the Third Reich, guilty conscience, and a distinct polarization between two irreconcilable factions of conservative relativists and valiant guardians of burdensome historical legacy concerning the way in which the Nazi past should be assimilated. As the three cases of the Holocaust memory in the United States, France, and Germany show, there is hardly any balanced understanding of the Holocaust itself. The topic of the Holocaust is laden with the burden of value judgments
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