| Abstract | Through an experience of the fragmentation of memory through dementia I explore how personal experience can offer a way to consider connections and disassociations of cultural memory in relation to the Holocaust. I try to show how the disruption of "events" can bring the Holocaust back into current consciousness both within individual lives but also in the difficulties that Vienna as a city has in coming to terms with the dead bodies that were the result of the "euthanasia" programme. Disturbing memories come to the surface that cities have to confront even if they shatter the vision they prepared for themselves as the "first victim" of Nazism. Moving across the boundaries of generations and so of time and also across the boundaries of space that connect Vienna and London within both personal and cultural memory, I seek to explore different ways in which denial can produce the fragmentation of memory and a need to "come to terms" with the traumatic histories in different ways. I also explore how Holocaust memory has been shaped with different European societies and how questions of re/membering mass death have been marked so helping to shape future possibilities.
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