Berthold Molden - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Berthold Molden

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Jun 1, 2014

Böhlau Verlag eBooks, Apr 11, 2021

Journal of Austrian Studies, 2015

Routledge eBooks, Dec 7, 2018

Guatemala's reconciliation debate is as much about the present and the future as it is about hist... more Guatemala's reconciliation debate is as much about the present and the future as it is about history. In order to highlight its political dimension, I propose to read this controversy through the lens of hegemony theory. It is precisely because of the entwinement of specific political economic interests, centuries-old ethnic conflict and structural racism in Guatemala that charging genocide constitutes a key moment in a fight over power-a fight in which controversies about the politics of history are also expressions of struggle over economic resources and political hegemony. In this light, reconciliation does not appear to be a solution but a trap, set by those who defend their interests against the changes that the Peace Accords and the recommendations of the Historical Clarification Commission demanded. In the first section, I show that one crucial motive for these elites to deny the Guatemalan genocide, besides obvious reasons of historical shame and responsibility, is economic issues, among them the century-old land question. In the following sections I present two seemingly contrary arguments from the political and academic left. One takes apart, from a poststructural perspective, simplifying binary logics of class and ethnic conflict and thus delegitimizes the indigenous and peasant struggle for economic reform in the process. The other proposes a form of universal guilt that also ends up depoliticizing the history of the civil war. Reconciliation as a model of rule and the recalcitrance of genocide memory Given their ubiquitous coupling in academic and political discourse, genocide and reconciliation would appear to be a tricky but inseparable conceptual pair in many transitional justice scenarios. And yet, as the controversial nature of the Ríos Montt trial and its aftermath illustrates, the political memory of genocide was unlikely to provide fertile ground for reconciliation in Guatemala. To inscribe, or not, the term of genocide permanently into Guatemala's twentieth-century history has been one of the highest stakes in the postwar negotiations about the representation of the past. And it is non-negotiable to many of the actors in this process. Therefore, if offers of reconciliation are based upon excluding this issue, then reconciliation is little more than a simplistic equation to solve antagonistic relations of power and eventually become a 'conflict in itself'. 1 This article explores how the controversies about genocide in Guatemala expose the hollowness of

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2010

The years 1945 and 1989 were crucial for the genesis of the social-scientific conceptualization o... more The years 1945 and 1989 were crucial for the genesis of the social-scientific conceptualization of memory as we know it today. During these two periods of upheaval, the content and political meaning of ‘memory’ was shaped by specific social phenomena, particularly the experience of repression. In 1945, the victorious Allies began to understand the full extent of the Holocaust in the liberated concentration and extermination camps: the most systematic genocide in world history had been carried out in the very region that presented itself as the centre of civilization, progress and enlightenment. In the late 1940s, the first conclusions drawn from this experience, in the form of the statutes and judgements of the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, became the basis for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention. Those agreements subsequently formed an ethical reference point for a new system of international relations.

Corona und die Welt von gestern, 2021

Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Das Werk und seine Teile sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertun... more Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Das Werk und seine Teile sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung in anderen als den gesetzlich zugelassenen Fällen bedarf der vorherigen schriftlichen Einwilligung des Verlages.

Slavonica, 2017

Those who have visited the Riga-based Museum of the Occupation of Latvia before its recent renova... more Those who have visited the Riga-based Museum of the Occupation of Latvia before its recent renovation will recall the message that this central organ of the Latvian grand narrative of national victimhood communicated in a clear, if old-fashioned, way: that both the Nazis and the Soviets (and especially the latter, given their 46-year-long presence on Latvian soil), had gotten the better of the Latvians in an interplay of totalitarian repression. Not unlike the House of Terror in Budapest, this museum externalizes agency and responsibility, telling a story of collective endurance. The intellectual origins of this narrative lay in the Latvian exile community in the United States, especially in the person of the University of Wisconsin history professor, Paulis Lazda. Born in Latvia before the German invasion, Lazda fled with his parents from the Red Army and lived in refugee camps in Germany before reaching the U.S.A. in 1950. He became one of many politically active expats who eventually co-determined the cultural, social, and political transitions in Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism in 1989. The history of the political role that these exiles played in the cultural Cold War waged by the United States against its Soviet foe is complex and ambivalent. Around the time when the Lazdas began their perilous journey westwards, the Research and Analysis Branch of the US WW2 intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Security (OSS, predecessor of the CIA), and the exiled intellectuals and academics working in it, expressed suspicion of anti-communist groups, such as, for example, the Latvian Freedom Committee, the composition of which appeared at the time to have been drawn from former Waffen-SS formations. This, however, was before the Cold War had turned the global constellations of alliances and antagonisms upside down. Less than a decade later, the CIA financed and mentored an organization with exactly the same name. This new Latvian Freedom Committee (LFC), renamed from the Latvian Consultative Panel, was one of many organizations of Eastern European refugees, coordinated by a CIA front named the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE), and from 1954 the Free Europe Committee (FEC), which strived to pool the anti-communist energy of several hundred-thousand new Americans from Eastern Europe. The composition of the two namesakes was, in fact, not wholly dissimilar. Indeed, one of the leaders of the American LFC (who took over in 1964, after the death of its president, the anti-Nazi, Vilis Masens) was a former Latvian officer, major Vilis Hāzners, who had been recruited by the CIA in the early 1950s, but was then, in the late 1970s, charged with having selected Jews for execution in the Dwinsk ghetto in Riga as an SS-Sturmbannführer in 1941. Although Hāzners was in the end acquitted and thus escaped deportation, his case represented a startling exposure of a former Nazi henchman working for the CIA's anti-communist agenda (as discussed in more detail by Ieva Zake, in American Latvians: Politics of a Refugee Community, Transaction, 2010, as well as in Anti-Communist Minorities in the U.S.: Political Activism of Ethnic Refugees, Macmillan, 2009). It is this kind of contextual information that is largely missing from the otherwise very interesting volume on NCFE/FEC organizations, edited by the Hungarian-American scholar Katalin Kádár Lynn, known especially as the biographer of the ambiguous Hungarian politician Tibor Eckhart. It is above all in the editor's introduction that one also notes a somewhat combative Cold War tonethe use of phrases such as 'dangers of communism' (38), 'communist tyranny' (55), and 'keep[ing] the hope of democratic change alive behind the Iron Curtain' (60)which

Bananen, Cola, Zeitgeschichte: Oliver Rathkolb und das lange 20. Jahrhundert, 2015

Memory Studies, 2015

The politics of history and memory in any society are determined by the relations of forces betwe... more The politics of history and memory in any society are determined by the relations of forces between hegemonic master narratives, defiant counter-memories, and silent majorities whose historical experience is rarely articulated in public. Based on Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau, as well as postcolonial critique, this article explains historico-political processes through a specified reading of hegemony theory. Two common, though by no means unambiguous, terms are reloaded with specific definitions: politics of history as the political agency directed at the establishment of specific representations of the past, and memory cultures as the structural frameworks for these politics. This approach sheds light on the relationship between official and group-specific politics of history within defined memory cultures: the possibly conflictual interaction between those who interpret certain events, inscribe them into a historical canon and thus make them points of historical...

rrz.uni-hamburg.de

... Nachdem Ende der 70er Jahre und Anfang der 80er Jahre, unter den Präsidenten GeneralRomero Lu... more ... Nachdem Ende der 70er Jahre und Anfang der 80er Jahre, unter den Präsidenten GeneralRomero Lucas García, General Efraín ... CEH) zu ergeben, wonach Armee, Polizei, Zivilpatrouillen und Paramilitärs für 93% der Kriegsverbrechen verantwortlich sind, die Gue-rilla nur für 3 ...

Memory Studies, Jul 29, 2015