Human rights and European remembrance

Jay Winter

pp. 43-58

in: Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind, Julie Fedor (eds), Memory and theory in Eastern Europe, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

When the framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights met in Paris on December 10, 1948, and presented the document to the United Nations assembled there, they were engaged in an act of remembrance in a number of evident ways. There they were, in the Palais de Chaillot, a few meters from the spot where Hitler had stared out across the Seine at the Eiffel Tower, and surveyed his new dominions a brief eight years before. A few kilometers away was the Place de la Concorde, the geographical heart of the Revolution. Nearby, the deputies of 1789 and 1793 framed their call to arms in not one but two earlier Universal Declarations of the rights of man and the citi-zen. To announce a new Universal Declaration in Paris 150 years later was a performative act, an act of memory, and of transition, from the humiliations of Nazi occupation to a Republican future through the reassertion of the universal principles on which the French revolutionary tradition rested. One of the central acts of transitional justice after 1945 was the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.