enewsletter december2011
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East European
Memor Studies -CONTENTS
1
OP-ED:
GHOSTS OF THEPAST
Aleida Assmann
6
DIARY OF
FORTHCOMING
EVENTS
7
CALL FOR PAPERS:
GULAG UNBOUND
Cambridge 29-30 June
8
RECENT EVENTS:
GERMAN
VICTIMHOOD IN
CONTEMPORARY
EUROPE
James Koranyi
10
STUDYING MEMORY
IN THE POLISH-
RUSSIAN-
UKRAINIAN
TRIANGLE: SOME
OBSERVATIONS
Andrii Portnov
EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 1EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 8 DECEMBER 2011
GHOSTS OF THE PAST
Aleida Assmann
Let me start with a rather simple
distinction between spirits and
ghosts. Spirits are conjured up,
they are called up; ghosts intrude,
they come without bidding, they
haunt us. How spirits are conjured
up is described in an ironic way in a
dialogue in Shakespeares Henry IV
(III, I, 52 55), where Owen
Glendower, the magician, boasts: I
can call spirits from the vastlydeep. To which Hotspur dryly
replies: Why, so can I, or so can
any man; But will they come when
you do call for them?
Ghosts, on the other hand,
represent something that returns
from the past or the realm of the
dead on its own will. This return is
the symptom of a deep crisis; it is
felt as a violent and threatening
interruption of the present.
Something that had been deemed
overcome and gone reappears to
announce some unfinished business
that needs to be addressed. The
paradigmatic case is of course the
ghost of Hamlets father appearing
on the battlements of Elsinore castle
or Banquos ghost at the feast of
K i n g a n d L a d y M a c b e t h .
Shakespeare was clearly interested in
both manifestations of invisible anduncanny beings, in spirits as well as
ghosts.
Spirits and ghosts show a close
s i m i l a r i t y t o t w o f o r m s o f
remembering: conscious recall on
the one hand and non-conscious,
involuntary and even counter-
voluntary summons on the other. I
will start from this hint and examine
more closely the connection between
spirits, ghosts and memory together
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with its contexts, media and mechanisms. In the
second part of my paper I will focus on photography
as a carrier of an unknown, uncanny, traumatic past
that confronts the present with something that refuses
to simply vanish or disappear.
There is an obvious connection between violence,
trauma and ghosting, a proof of which is the strong
interest that arises in spirits and ghosts after wars and
battles. Wherever there is a sudden and alarming rise
in the population of the dead, the living try to
establish some form of contact across the borderline
between the world of the living and the dead. After
the Great War, many individuals tested their own
spiritual powers or relied on persons who acted as a
medium to establish some form of communicationwith family members that had recently fallen in
battle. The American poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) for
instance took an active part in such spiritistic sessions;
her poetry is tinged with this metaphysical quality of
reaching out to former epochs. The art historian Aby
Warburg believed in mnemic waves that emanate
from a distant past and could be received by those
who were endowed with a seismographic sensibility.
Ruth Klger: Still Alive. Exorcising the Dead
In her Holocaust memoir, Ruth Klger refers to two
family members that haunt her memory.2 Her father
and her brother were murdered in the Holocaust.
Without a grave, the work of mourning cannot
come to an end, she writes. Only many years later, in
her research and reconstruction of the events, Klger
finally found out some details about the last transport
of her family members. What makes their memory sotroubling is not only the uncertainty about the
circumstances of their death but also the fact that
they could not take leave from one another in peace.
Memory for her is a trap and a prison of sorts, too:
you cant shake or alter the images engraved
there. (34) She is therefore compelled to keep up a
long and painful dialogue with her father that
revolves around the trivial events of their last hours
together. She deploys the only real power that she has
at her disposition which is the power of words. My
father, she writes, has become an unredeemed
ghost. I wish I could write ghost stories. (34) Her
problem is aggravated by the fact that as a Jewish
woman she is not entitled to the ritual outfit with
which male Jews are provided in the Jewish tradition.
According to the patriarchal rules, the prayer for the
dead, the Kaddish, is not to be recited by a female
voice. Klger describes the memorial sites of the
death camps as a kind of bargain that the living offer
to the ghosts of the dead. However, she trusts words
more than places. In the concentration camp Gro
Rosen, she composed poems to shield herself from
the ultimate terror with the help of words, sounds,
rhymes and meter. As a child, she made use of
regular patterns to create a counterpoint against
chaos a poetical and therapeutic attempt to
confront the abyss of destruction with rhyme and
structure, which is perhaps the most archaic functionof art.
Klger meditates on this strong bond between
aesthetics and magic, art and ritual in playful words:
Remembering is a branch of witchcraft; its tool is
incantation. To conjure up the dead you have to
dangle the bait of the present before them, the flesh
of the living, to coax them out of their inertia.
This passage blurs the difference between ghosts and
spirits. The passive memory, the pain of being
haunted is answered by an active effort, a self-made
ritual.
Bert Hellinger: Addressing the Dead in
Psychotherapy
In the 1990s a new form of therapy was invented that
claimed to be able to externalize and change deeply
concealed memories. Used all over the world, thistherapy is called Aufstellung (this German word
contains semantic elements of putting up,
staging, summoning and mobilizing). The
concept goes back to Bert Hellinger, a Catholic priest
who worked in South Africa. In a room filled with
other therapists who witness the process, the client is
asked to stage his/her family by picking individual
persons from the audience. The stage on which this is
performed is an externalization of the psyche and
mirrors a family constellation that includes both living
and dead members.
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Hellinger thus transformed
therapy from a synchronous to a
diachronic model, reckoning with
pressures emanating from absent
and dead family members which
may or may not have been known
to the client. Staging the
constellation creates an imaginary
space in which such forms of
impact can be identified and
answered by symbolic action.
We may detect an interesting
parallel in the change of a
therapeutic model on the onehand and the new literary genre
of German family novels on the
other. Like the family novels, the
family staging comprises a
transindividual time span of three
(and sometimes more) generations
which are interlocked in an
interactive field. It is often what
is transmitted only indirectly and
unconsciously that shapes the
intra-familial relations across the
generations.
The therapeutic model of family
staging is thus based on a trans-
individual concept of identity that
privileges long-term generational
integration over separation and
confrontation. Individuals do notgive up their sense of distinction,
but they accept family influences
as part of their identity. This
c h a n g e , f r o m i n d i v i d u a l
autonomy to a more integrated
view on family and history, may
have its source in the post-
traumatic situation. It directs us
not only to the future but also
toward the past, and it teaches us
to listen to the voices of ghosts.
We cannot open ourselves to the
future without having listened to
the voices of the past and having
appeased the claims of the ghosts.
Photographs and Ghosts
A photograph makes two distinct
statements: This was once there
and this is no longer here.
Though both messages are clearly
related, they refer to two rather
different functions. The first one
is the documentary function of
providing accurate evidence of an
otherwise inaccessible past. The
second one is the memorial
function of providing an affectivematerial trace of something that
is absent or lost. I am concerned
here mainly with the second
function in which a moment is
rescued from time, to be
transformed into a lasting
monument that remains the
object of continued attention and
meditation. In the theoretical
writings on photography, its close
relationship to death has been
frequently emphasized. Roland
Barthes wrote that the moment of
shooting the photo is itself
conceived as a shock that
p r o d u c e s a n e f f e c t o f
mortification: it mutes and fixates
vibrant and bustling life, freezing
a moment and simulating a formof eternity. Marianne Hirsch has
opened up a new approach to the
m e m o r i a l f u n c t i o n o f
photography by investigating the
context of traumatic family
memory. In her book Family
Frames, she has focused on
photographs as stand-ins for dead
family members, and in particular
for those whose death is shrouded
in trauma. Such memory icons
assume the character of a fetish,
which means that the object itself
becomes the last piece of
evidence that this person had ever
existed. In these cases, the
memorial function re-affirms the
documentary function of the
p h o t o . T h e s e f o r m s o f
transmission and tradition
prolong an embodied memory
beyond the limits of experiential
memory, extending it to the
second generation that has no
empirical knowledge of the
persons involved. To emphasize
the importance of family photos
as transitional objects ormissing links that connect
f a m i l y m e m b e r s a c r o s s
generations, Hirsch has coined
the term postmemory.3
In their primary memorial use,
photos act as external props for
an embodied memory; in their
secondary use, as postmemory,
the phot o is not onl y an
externalized memory but an
object that is re-embo died
t h r o u g h c o n s c i o u s a n d
u n c o n s c i o u s f o r m s o f
transmission. It becomes therefore
a medium of memory, a
memento, not only for those who
maintain an embodied memory
of the past but also for those whohave acquired this memory via
narratives or mute gestures in a
shared living context. If the photo
is the only relict of a family
member who died a violent death,
this material object gains the
additional value of a sacred aura.
In this case, the photo itself
becomes the replacement of the
missing person, and assumes a
ghostly presence.
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H.-U. Treichel:
Der Verlorene
The novel by Hans Ulrich
Treichel, Der Verlorene (The Lost
One), deals with the life of a
German refugee family after theSecond World War in the 1950s.4
It is told from the point of view of
a boy born after the war whose
brother was lost when the family
was fleeing from Poland. The
novel begins with the description
of a photo-album which shows a
picture of the lost elder brother.
The younger brother is barely
visible. The photo-album belongs
to the material items that Anne
Fuchs has classified as memory
icons, rightly emphasizing their
central importance in recent
family novels.5 In Treichels novel,
this memory icon inverts the
order of the real: the absent son is
highlighted in the center where he
has an overwhelming presence,while the present son is (almost)
absent from the photos. This
inverted relationship accurately
represents the way in which both
brothers figure in the family
consciousness and memory; the
lost one holds a central place in
the familial mourning, affection
and longing, while the one who is
actually there is disregarded,
almost invisible. The photo
assumes a presence in itself, it
becomes an idol, a family fetish
that deprives the younger brother
of a life of his own, leaving him
with a diminished or ghostly
presence.
The novel ends with a meeting inwhich the mother, who is stuck in
the past, fails to recognize her
former child in the grown-up boy.
The son, on the contrary, is struck
by a shock of recognition; he is
suddenly confronted with his
doppelganger, his ghostly other.
The melancholy search for the
lost son is ended at the verymoment when their paths have
finally crossed. Memory and the
present, ghosts of the past and
reality, Treichel seems to suggest,
cannot come together.
C h r i s t i a n B o l t a n s k i :
Photographs asMemento Mori
Christian Boltanski does not
concern h imse l f wi th the
d o c u m e n t a r y s t a t u s o f
photographs, nor does he engage
in memorial projects. Instead, he
makes us sharply aware of the
futility of collective and cultural
m e m o r i a l p r a c t i c e s a n d
i n s t i t u t i o n s . T h e a c t s o f
remembering, documenting and
archiving are meticulously
brought to the fore, but what they
expose is less remembering than
forgetting. Boltanski exposes
photographs as ghostly remnants
and revenants, devoid of a
cultural or familial frame of
remembering which are thenecessary prerequisites of both
memory and postmemory. In his
art, Boltanski introduces a third
function of photography, on top
o f the documentary and
memorial, which I call the
memento mori function.
Boltanski works primarily withphotographs from the private or
family sphere, whether amateur
shots or studio prints. His
obsessive interest focuses on
human faces; each photo stands
for an individual life. Within
Western culture the photograph is
celebrated as a cultural practice
that is able to rescue the
ephemeral indiv idual i ty of
humans from the clutches of
death. It is this myth that
Boltanski explodes. He often
reworks and enlarges the original
photos in such a way that their
documentary value gets lost; the
per sons are le s s and le s s
recognizab le . Noth ingness
shimmers through the amorphousblack and white grains; faces that
can neither be identified nor
recognized are transformed into
ghostly apparitions. As we saw in
the case of postmemory, the
memor ia l d imens ion o f
photographs depends on their
being embedded in a socio-
communicative frame. Without
such a family frame, photos cease
to be props of memory. When
they turn up at flea markets after
the dissolution of a household or
an estate, they provide evidence
for only one thing: that the family
memory, which had once framed
and supported these photographs,
has been dissolved. In other
words: the document of memorybecomes a monument o f
forgetting. Boltanski shows that
material perseverance in itself
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cannot secure the memorial
function of the photo.
Boltanskis artistic use and
recycling of family and portrait
photographs emphasizes the
e r o s i o n b o t h o f t h e i r
documentary and memorial
functions. What he highlights
instead is their memento mori
function. He describes himself
very much like W. G. Sebald as
a thoroughly melancholy artist.
Like Treichels narrator, he sees
those photographed as eaten
away by time, as future dead. Hecollects and stages photographs
which have irreversibly fallen out
of the frames of family memory
and are recurring as ghosts,
flooding cultural memory.
According to Zygmunt Bauman,
until recently, the project of
culture was to transform the
transient into the permanent.
However, the conditions for such
transubstantiation seem to be in
decl ine, despite the ever-
expanding capacity for storage.
Bauman speaks of the present as
a liquid modernity, where the
desire for stability and memory
flows into nothingness. Boltanski
has located his art on exactly thisthreshold.
It is a matter for wonder: a
moment, now here and then
gone, nothing before it came,
again nothing after it has gone,
returns as a ghost and disturbs the
peace of a later moment.6
Nietzsches motto sums up thevarious forms of ghosting. We
have seen how images return
from the past, from the dead,
from the forgotten, from the
unconscious, to assume a ghostly
presence and haunt the quiet of a
later moment. Ruth Klger
developed verbal magic to
exorcise her ghosts while a new
form of family therapy mixes pre-
and post-modern rituals to
address the ghosts. In the context
of postmemory, photographs
assume a ghostly presence, be
they fetishised as in Treichels
novel or thinned out as in
Boltanskis installations.
1Ruth Kluger, Still Alive. A Holocaust
Girlhood Remembered, New York:Feminist Press, 2001.2 Marianne Hirsch,Family Frames.
Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory,Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP,1997, 22.3 Hans-Ulrich Treichel,Der Verlorene,Frankfurt a M: Suhrkamp, 1998.4Anne Fuchs, Fr eine Archotopikder Erinnerung: eine Relekre vonHorst Bieneks Gleiwitz-Tetralogie imKontext der Debatte um Flucht undVertreibung, in D Lorenz & ISpoerk (eds),Konzept Osteuropa. Der
Osten als Konstrukt der Fremd- undEigenbestimmung in deutschsprachigenTexten des 19. und 20.
Jahrhunderts.Wuerzburg:Koenigshausen und Neumann,
225-240.5 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Usesand Disadvantages of History forLife, in Daniel Breazeale (ed),Untimely Meditations, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1997,60. Werke in Drei Bnden, Bd,1,Mnchen: Hanser 1962, 211.
INVESTOR NEWSLETTER ISSUE N3 FALL 2009EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 7 NOVEMBER 2011EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 8 DECEMBER 2011
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http://www.terminartors.com/http://www.terminartors.com/http://www.terminartors.com/https://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).htmlhttps://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).htmlhttps://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).htmlhttps://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).htmlhttps://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).htmlhttps://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).htmlhttps://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).htmlhttps://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).htmlhttps://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).htmlhttps://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).html -
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Events in Cambridge
EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY
STUDIES RESEARCH
GROUP SEMINAR
CRASSH, Cambridge. All seminars
begin at 5:00pm.
18 January: Peter Rodgers
(University of Sheffield), How
Many Ukraines? Understanding
Regionalism and the Politics of
National Identity in Post-Soviet
Ukraine
1 February: Julie Fedor
(University of Cambridge), The
Tandems Anti-Soviet Turn: New
Memory Projects in Contemporary
R u s s i a a n d T a t i a n a
Zhurzhenko (Univers ity of
Vienna) , Nat iona l i s ing the
Common Vic tory in theUkrainian-Russian Borderlands:
Political Uses of WWII Memory in
Kharkiv and Belgorod
15 February: Gernot
H o w a n i t z ( U n i v e r s i t y o f
Salzburg), Re-Playing the Stalinist
Past and Galina Nikiporets-
T a k i g a w a ( U n i v e r s i t y o f
E d i n b u r g h / U n i v e r s i t y o f Cambridge), The Manezhka Affair
and the First Steps of Russian
Mnemonics
29 February: Nelly Bekus
(University of Warsaw), Memory
and Forgetting in Two Post-Soviet
Capitals: Minsk and Astana and
Anna Krylova (Duke University),
N e i t h e r E r a s e d n o r
R e m e m b e r e d : A c a d e m i c
Metaphors and Interpretive
Challenges of Soviet Post-War
Literature and Memoirs
14 March: Katarzyna
Zechenter (SSEES, UCL),
Memory and Postmemory in Polish
Jewish Fiction and Andrei Zorin
(University of Oxford), Lydia
Ginsburg on the Leningrad
B l o c k a d e : M e c h a n i s m s o f
Forgetting and Repression
MAKING SENSE
OF CATASTROPHE:Postcolonial Approaches to
Postsocialist Experiences
24 & 25 February 2012,
Cambridge
co-organised with Passau University
The programme is currently being
finalised and will be available on our
website soon.
THE GULAG UNBOUND:
Remembering Soviet Forced
Labour
29 & 30 June 2012, Cambridge
co-organised with University of
Reading
For CFP, please seepage 7.
Even ts at MAW Par tner
Institutions
Tartu
CONFERENCE:
Hard Memory, Soft Security:
Competing Securitisation of
the Legacy of Communism in
Eastern Europe
9 - 10 December 2011
For the programme, please see our
website.
This event will be broadcast live at
http://uttv.ee/esileht
EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 7 NOVEMBER 2011
DIARY OF FORTHCOMING EVENTS
EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 8 DECEMBER 2011
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The history of the Gulag isconventionally understood as astory of enormous injustice andheroic endurance. This story isbound to the compell ingnarrative of suffering of the
i n t e l l e c t u a l i n t h e G u l a g ,exemplified by the classic accountsof its highly literate survivors ormourners of its victims. Untilrecently, these narratives had beenthe principal prisms through whichwe saw the Soviet forced labour.The narrative of intellectualmartyrdom was powerful, and itsgreat moral prestige fuelledopposition to the Soviet system.Since the 1990s, the state archives
of the Gulag have gradually beenmade available to scholars and thisflood of documents must beweighed against the memoirs ofsurvivors. The enormous papertrail generated by the securityapparatus and its massive penalbureaucracy now challengeshistorians to consider the Gulagt h r o u g h t h e e y e s o f t h eperpetrators, those who imagined,built, and maintained the forcedlabour camps. How can we
evaluate the factual validity,bureaucrat i c r i va l r i e s , andideological aims that underpinthese documents? How far can wetrust the archival documents of themanagers of the Gulag? With theissue of trust coming to theforefront of empirical research,moral and philosophical problemsof interpret ative judge mentbecome more pertinent than ever.
The new bodies of source materialcompel us to reassess traditionalnarratives of Stalinist violence, and
we are confronted with almostunbearable choices. How far shouldhistorians attempt to reconcilethe diverging picture of the Gulagfound in survivor memoirs and inofficial documents? How do we
e v a l u a t e t h e e c o n o m i cconsequences of Gulag activity?What moral and philosophicalproblems arise when we compareSoviet camps to those organized bythe Nazi regime or CommunistChina? What is the place for theexperience and testimony of Gulagemployees and criminal prisoners?How far does the new materiala v a i l a b l e t o u s c h a l l e n g ecommemorative practices? What
do the politics of memory in Russiaand other post-Soviet states teachus about history of the Gulag, andhistory as a discipline? Is thereanything to learn from comparisonwith other penal-colonial systemssuch as transportation to Australia?Is the paradigm of inter nalcolonization and the broadercontext of postcolonial studiesproductive for understanding andremembering the Gulag?
Means of the resistance, sabotage,and subversion in the Gulag ando t h e r S o v i e t c o r r e c t i v einstitutions need more research.While colonial anthropology hasdeveloped sophisticated means ofidentifying weapons of the weak,Gulag historiography is onlybeginning to apply such analysis tothe archived documentation of thecamps. Like any long-term system
of life management, the Gulagdeveloped its ways of healing,entertaining, and educating itspopulation. Inmates responded to
their particular condition bydeveloping equally specific meansof artistic creativity, religious ritual,and erotic behaviour. Theseaesthetic, medical, religious, andpedagogical aspects of the life in
the Gulag need to be discussed inconjunction or counterpoint with its archival history. Thepurpose of this symposium is toreflect on the challenges currentlyconfronting history, cultural studies,anthropology, and other disciplineswho work with these unbound documentary, memoiristic, andfolklore archives of the Gulag.
We invite papers examining thesethemes to be presented at aworkshop to be held at CambridgeUniversity, 29-30 June 2012. The
w o r k s ho p i s o r g an i ze d b yAlexander Etkind of CambridgeUniversity and Dan Healey ofReading University, with supportfrom both insti tutions. Ourconfirmed keynote speaker isProfessor Lynne Viola, Universityof Toronto, author of The UnknownGulag: The Lost World of Stalins
Special Settlements (Oxford & NewYork: OUP, 2007). Limitedfinancial assistance for participantsmay be available. Papers should beoriginal unpublished work, and willbe pre-circulated to workshopparticipants. To propose a paper,please send a 300-word abstractand 2-page CV to Jill Gather,M e m o r y a t W a r P r o j e c t ,[email protected], by Friday,24 February 2012.
CALL FOR PAPERSTHE GULAG UNBOUND:
REMEMBERING SOVIET FORCED LABOUR
Cambridge, 29-30 June 2012
INVESTOR NEWSLETTER ISSUE N3 FALL 2009EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 8 DECEMBER 2011
Dan Healey Alexander Etkind
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At the Heimattag der Siebenbrger Sachsen (Homeland
Day of Transylvanian Saxons) in 2005, the
commissioner for the Federal Republic of Germany
for Issues concerning German Resettlers and
National Minorities (Beauftragter der Bundesregierung fr
Aussiedlerfragen und nationale Minderheiten), Hans-Peter
Kemper, explained his understanding of Germanvictimhood in contemporary Europe. Referencing the
motto of the Heimattag of Overcoming lows,
building bridges (Tiefen berstehen, Brcken bauen), he
viewed the construction of German memories as a
challenging and arduous task in light of flight,
expulsion, emigration and integration in the twenty-
first century. As such, Transylvanian Saxons,
Romanian Germans, and ethnic Germans from east-
central Europe ought to regard their role in Europe
as a living link between the two continents (ein
lebendiges Bindeglied zwischen den Kontinenten).
Yet the difficulties of placing German memories of
victimhood have hardly been surmounted with such
ease. On 2 November 2011, the Memory at War
series opened up to the topic of German victimhood.
Professor Bill Niven from Nottingham Trent
University and Dr James Koranyi from the
University of St Andrews presented their papers oncontemporary memories of German victimhood in
Germany and south-eastern Europe.
James Koranyis paper entitled Romania, Serbia,
and Contemporary Memories of German Victims
compared the different legacies of ethnic Germans in
Romania and Serbia. In it, he traced the
development of Romanian German victim stories
from parochial and marginal in both (West) Germany
and Romania to a transnational success story. While
Romanian German discourses during the late ColdWar period were concerned with recognition in West
Germany, the post-communist period ushered in
attempts to transform the standing of these memories
into one of the central issues for German and
Romanian society. These attempts were highly
successful. They allowed Romanian Germans to
reaffirm existing cultural hierarchies that marked out
Romanian society as untrustworthy and in need of
critically assessing its role in the disappearance of
Germans from Romania.
In the context of Romanias EU accession, this
serve d, too, as a war ning of Roma nias
RECENT EVENTS
James Koranyi and Bill Niven on
GERMAN VICTIMHOOD IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE
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unpreparedness to join the West.
In the meantime, however,
German victim stories have
become a valuable currency in
Romanian society. The public
engagement with the Saxon and
Swabian heritage and the
memories of German victimhood
has provided a useful way for
Romanian politicians and public
figures to demonstrate their
deserved inclusion into the West,
i.e. in the EU and NATO.
Furthermore, this public coming-
to-terms-with-past v is--v is
German victims has been used as
a way of ignoring other difficultpasts, such as the Holocaust in
Romania, the quest ion of
complicity during communism, or
the pressing issue of Gypsies in
Romanian society in past and
present.
In Serbia, by contrast, these
processes have been rather
different. The last three decades
have been marked by thedisintegration of Yugoslavia, civil
war, sanctions, international
ostracisation and a NATO
bombing campaign in 1999. It
has made little sense to reassess
the role of German victims in
Yugoslavia/Serbia a society that
has undergone a distinct inward
turn since the 1980s. Instead, the
anti-fascist narrative concerningWorld War Two has remained
strong and still governs the way in
which the 1930s and 1940s are
remembered.
The commemorative topography
of cities such as Novi Sad bears
witness to that. Yet, this may be a
good thing: The absence of any
real engagement with difficult
victims such as Germans orHungarians has also meant more
commemorative space for the
Yugoslav civil wars. In this way,
the open-air exhibition Missing
Lives in Belgrade in 2010 can be
seen as an opening for debates
s u r r o u n d i n g t h e e n d o f
Yugoslavia in Serbia.
Bill Nivens talk was concernedwith the complexity of museum
exhibitions in portraying flight
and expulsion and its relationship
with the Holocaust. He presented
a plethora of case studies
searching for a good template for
combining the two issues. Yet as
his paper demonstrated, the
politics of memory surrounding
these two topics have made thepublic depiction of this in
m u s e u m s a l l t h e m o r e
challenging. Depicting the
Holocaust alongside stories of
German victimhood has led to
accusations of relativism. The
absence of the Holocaust in
e x h i b i t i o n s o n G e r m a n
victimhood, on the other hand,
has been regarded as a sleight of
hand for ignoring the context ofthese expulsions. In its exhibition
Flucht, Vertreibung, Integration (Flight,
Expulsion, Integration), the German
Historical Museum (Deut sche s
Historisches Museum) attempted to
solve this dilemma by containing
images of the Holocaust and
World War Two (i.e. of German
crimes) in a tunnel situated at the
entrance to the exhibition.
One can interpret this in several
ways: It provides a context while
refusing to establish a hard
causality between the two issues
( H o l o c a u s t a n d G e r m a n
expulsion). The Holocaust does
not sit alongside the narrative of
German victimhood, thereby
a v o i d i n g a c c u s a t i o n s o f
relativism, but it is also notabsent. Whether this i s a
meaningful way of addressing
German victimhood in museum
remains open. A noticeable
difference in museum exhibitions
exists between the expelled ethnic
Germans from Poland, Lithuania,
Russia and the Czech Republic
on the one hand, and Danube
Swabians from south-eastern
Europe on the other. While the
former groups museums tend to
end their stories with flight and
expulsion, the Danube Swabians
depict life and society in their
former homelands beyond the
end of their community in those
regions. It is this acknowledgment
of continuity that may be a
va luable way of embeddingG e r m a n m e m o r i e s i n a
transnational context.
German victimhood has been
back on the agenda in Germany
since the late 1990s. More recent
developments, however, point to a
widening debate on where these
memories can be placed in a
European topography of memory.
While German society has beenconfronted with the intricacy of
these memories for a longer
period of time (some might say
since the inception of the Federal
Republic of Germany), it is the
very places where these contested
periods occurred that are now
encountering the impact of these
legacies. In a web of expulsion,
counter-expulsion, resettlement,migration, war and ideology,
these memories are not merely
fascinating case studies for
scholars but challenging stories in
European societies.
James Koranyi
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Andrii Portnov is a Research Fellow
at the Ivan Krypiakevych Institute for
Ukrainian Studies, and Editor-in-Chief
of Historians.in.ua web site. In March
2011, he was a Memory at War visiting
fellow in Cambridge.
The field of memory studies is not
only fashionable and exciting, but
also carries a high level ofresponsibility, given how closely and
inevitably it is intertwined with
politics. Sometimes it is claimed
that memory studies should be a
separate discipline with its own
methodology, but I see it rather as
an interdiscipl inary field of
research. In this article, I set out to
identify and challenge some
c o m m o n m i s c o n c e p t i o n s
characteristic of East European
memory studies, before going on to
sketch out a future research agenda
for the field.
There are numerous stereotypes
and common places in thinking
about the politics of memory in
post-Soviet Ukraine, Russia and
Belarus as well as post-communist
Poland. The first quite common
m i s l e a d i n g t e n d e n c y i s
rationalization, whereby the state
politics of history in these countries
is presented as the result of a
conscious strategic decision by the
elites. I would rather agree with
Ilya Kalinin that to portray Putins
authoritarianism as a re-mastering
of the Soviet system and a return
to Soviet symbols would be to
attribute integrity to something that
i s i n f a c t d i s j o i n t e d a n d
fragmentary , and to inves t
ideological meaning into something
that is rather a political technology.
The same could be said about
Belarus and Ukraine. In the
Be larus ian case , de scr ib ing
President Lukashenkas policies as
re-Sovietization explains very
little, even if we keep in mind the
shift in Lukashenkas official
speeches from the Victory of the
Soviet people in the Great Patriotic
War to the Victory of the
B e l a r u s i an p e o p l e . In the
Ukrainian case we should be very
caut ious in at tr ibut ing any
conscious strategy to the history
politics conducted by Kuchma,
Yushchenko or Yanukovych. Quite
often (if not on a regular basis) this
p o l i t i c s h a s b e e n h i g h l y
s p o n t a n e o u s , i n t e r n a l l y
contradictory, and situational. I
would even argue that Kuchma
tried to follow his intuition by
a v o i d i n g a n y p o t e n t i a l l y
dangerous issues and tended to
accept different variations of
memory among different parts of
Ukrainian society. Yuschenkos
politics, especially in the last years
of his presidency, were highly
determined by his deep personal
involvement in the memory of
certain historical events, first and
f o r e m o s t , o f t h e 1 9 3 2 - 3 3
Holodomor. But personal feelings
or deep emotional connections, onthe one hand, and consistent and
coherent strategies, on the other,
are very different things.
The second common trend is the
essentialization of certain explanatory
formulas, usually promoted and
constantly supported by the mass
media. The best example here is
the notion of two Ukraines,
suggesting a country that is deeply
divided along not just linguistic, but
civilizational lines. This image of
two homogeneous conflicting
groups within Ukrainian society
overshadows a wide range of
genuinely interes t ing social
phenomena. The latter include the
dynamics of identity formation and
identity debate in post-Soviet
Ukraine; the emerging civic
(political) Ukrainian identity; the
villagecity difference in terms of
language practices ; the rich
diversity of political and cultural
attitudes within the Russian-
INVESTOR NEWSLETTER ISSUE N3 FALL 2009
STUDYING MEMORY
IN THE POLISH-RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN TRIANGLE:
SOME OBSERVATIONS
Andrii V. Portnov
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speaking group (quite often wrongly described simply
as Russian); and the variety of local memories within
the proposed general notions of East and West
Ukraine. Last but not least, such an approach would
enable serious analysis of the regional dimensions of
memory in Ukraine, rather than the usual method of
ascribing some features of Lviv to West Ukraine andof Donetsk to the East.
The third tendency is what I will call here the de-
contextualization of description. As Timothy Snyder
rightly stress in his Bloodlands, any account of events in
inter-war or present-day Eastern Europe that is based
solely on attention to one single group is bound to fail.
Omer Bartovs book, Erased. Vanishing Traces of Jewish
Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, can serve as an illustration
of this point.2 Bartov, an acknowledged specialist on the
Holocaust, has written a book on a very important issue,
in which he offers up a disturbing picture of the
continuity in rejecting and destroying the traces of
Jewish Galicia in Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine.
Bartovs account is highly emotional, but it fails to
identify any dynamics of memory; it proposes no
comparison of Galicia with the rest of Ukraine; it shows
no particular knowledge of local history, or attention to
Polish places of memory. For the American or Israeli
reader Bartovs book will be excellent proof of the
stereotypes of Ukrainian anti-Semitism. When we
decided to discuss Bartovs book in Ukraina Moderna it
proved difficult indeed to criticize this publicationwithout neglecting or relativizing the fundamental
importance of the issues raised in his book.3
Thinking about the prospects for memory studies in the
Polish-Russian-Ukrainian triangle, I would highlight a
number of possible directions for future research.
First, there is a crucial and urgent need for the collection
of empirical data, the preparation of maps of memory sites,
and continuation of the research started by German
scholars who have collected information on Holodomormemorials in Ukraine.4
Next, we need serious research into attitudes and perceptions.
Even when we know what monuments or what state
holidays are in existence, we usually know very little how
they are perceived by real people. The issue of
invisible monuments is of crucial importance here, as
are the analysis of public opinion, oral history projects,
and analysis of the memory wars on the internet and in
the printed media.
Another task is the cataloguing of sites of forgetting: of the
football stadiums built on top of cemeteries; sites of
atrocities and persecution now converted into parks; and
even luxury hotels built at former Nazi concentration
camps for Soviet prisoners-of-war (eg the case of Lviv
Citadel).5
We need a wide variety of comparative and interactive studies,
or Bezieungsgeschichte, to use the German term. We need
to ask: why does public debate comparable to the Polish
controversy over Jan Tomasz Grosss Neighbours seem to
be impossible in Belarus and Ukraine? Why is the
Ukrainian Institute for National Memory so different
from its Polish or Lithuanian counterparts? We should
keep in mind the fact that the actors in such interactions
are usually not equal, and that the interaction itself is
usually assymetrical. Other potentially fascinating topicshere might include a comparison of Polish and Russian
policies towards Ukraine; a closer look at Polish and
Ukrainian media discourse on the Volhynian events of
1943; or analysis of the ways in which Russian officials
have adapted the Katyn story for internal and external
use.
Critical attention must be paid to the phenomena of
Soviet politics and its long-lasting impact. We need to analyze
the Soviet politics of history in order to understand, for
example, why the city of Dnipropetrovsk has two verydifferent memorials dedicated to the same historical
event the mass shooting of the Jews; or why the de-
Sovietization of East Galician urban landscapes has
itself so often involved the revival or reconstitution of
Soviet aesthetics (see eg the new Stepan Bandera
monuments); or how the Soviet literary canon has
influenced the promotion of Ukrainian or Belarusian
literature and culture after the collapse of the Soviet
Union. Attempts at the re-construction or selective re-
writing of Soviet symbols are of special interest here;
consider, for example, the creation of the Stalin Linepark near Minsk, or the reconceptualization of the
1918-21 Civil War in current Russian movies.
INVESTOR NEWSLETTER ISSUE N3 FALL 2009EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 7 NOVEMBER 2011EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 8 DECEMBER 2011
Lviv Citadelimage: cambridgeculturalmemory.blogspot.com
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EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 7 NOVEMBER 2011
Rituals of memory provide rich material for research,
especially newly invented rituals like the wearing of the St.
Georges Ribbon on Victory Day (influenced by the Orange
ribbon widely used during the Orange Revolution in
Ukraine), or the lighting of candles on Holodomor
Memorial Day.
Additional topics for research include museums as a memory
battleground. This topic is of special interest in post-
communist Poland where we can observe a real competition
of museums, such as the controversy between the Museum
of the Warsaw Uprising created by Warsaw-born Lech
Kaczyski and the Museum of World War II soon to be
opened in Gdask, the native city of current prime minister
Donald Tusk.
Finally, East European memory studies should also engagewith language as a memory battleground. There are many
potentially fascinating research topics here, such as: the
Russian language outside Russia; the usage and images of
Belarusian and Ukrainian in Belarus and Ukraine; the
phenomenon of situational post-Soviet bilingualism; and the
issue of the languages of Western discourses (the plural is
always very helpful in memory studies!) about the East.
Andrii Portnov
1
Ilia Kalinin, Nostalgicheskaia modernizatsiia: sovetskoeproshloe kak istoricheskii gorizont, Neprikosnovennyi zapas, 6
(2010). For an English translation of this and other memory-
related articles from the leading Russian intellectual journal
Neprikosnovennyi zapasvisit: www.memoryatwar.org/resources-
nz/2 Andrii Portnov, Post-Soviet Ukraine and Belarus Dealing
with The Great Patriotic War, 20 Years after the Collapse of
Communism. Expectations, achievements and disillusions of 1989,
Ed. by Nicolas Hayoz, Leszek Jesie, Daniela Koleva (Bern:
Peter Lang, 2011), 369-381. French version: Andrii Portnov,
Mmoire et mmoriaux de la Grande Guerre pour laPatrie en Belarus, Moldova et Ukraine: quelques
observations pour tablir des comparaisons, Le Pass au
prsent. Gisements memoriels et actions historicisantes en Europe
centrale et orientale, Dirs. Georges Mink, Pascal Bonnard (Paris:
Michel Houdiard, 2010), 187202.3 Omer Bartov, Erased. Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in
Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton University Press, 2007).4 See Ukraijna Moderna, 4:15 (2009). Pamjat` jak pole
zmahan`. And the continuation of the discussion in: Ab
Imperio 1 (2010).5 Anna Kaminsky, Hrsg. Erinnerungsorte an den Holodomor
1932/33 in der Ukraine (Berlin, 2008).6On which see further: http://
cambridgeculturalmemory.blogspot.com/2011/03/
historian-andriy-portnov-on-sites-of.html
EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 8 DECEMBER 2011
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