Potential City: Embodied Ephemeral Memory of World War II in Early Twentieth First Century Thessaloniki (original) (raw)
Related papers
Despite the progress of memory studies worldwide, the central role of memory has rarely been a topic of interest in Greek historiography. The aim of this article is to reconstitute the spatiality of the Holocaust in the micro perspective of the sites of memory of Second World War in Greece. The "biographies" of these sites of memory reveal the complicated historical, political, and aesthetic axes on which Jewish memory is being constructed, a point that I find very interesting to highlight, as sites of memory always seem to have changing lives and many dimensions.
More than 2 millennia of Jewish presence in Thessaloniki have shaped both the city and its Jews. The Jews of Thessaloniki, in most instances, were subject to the fortunes and misfortunes of their coreligionists in the realms of the Kingdom of Macedonia, the Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire – Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire. A new and current chapter in their history is the birth of the modern Hellenic state and its foundation on civil rights. In the second decade of the 20th century the Jews of Thessaloniki finally belong, on equal par with the overwhelming Christian majority, as Hellenes in Greece. The tumultuous events of the previous century, both worldwide and locally, had profound consequences for Jewish Thessaloniki. Still the community is in search of its current identity and of a vision for the future. Our presence here enhances my optimism.
Since the mid-2000s, site-specific interventions in public space by artist collectives have become a frequent phenomenon in Athens. Less known and discussed are the earliest examples of this phenomenon. Three such performative interventions took place in the so-called refugee houses on Alexandras Avenue (construction 1933–1935), two by the group Αστικό Κενό (Urban Void) and another by Λάθος Κίνηση (Wrong Movement). They took place in 2000 and 2003, in parallel with a citizen protest againstgentrification plans for the houses' demolition. Being site-specific meant that they were intervening in the physical, architectural site, as well as in a public debate mobilized by the protest and focused mainly on the site's significance as a monument. The article argues that through the form of their interventions, the groups approached the site through the experience of the past in the present. They foregrounded the experience of time and space in the instant of their actions, in which past and present come together and dynamically interact with one another, but without offering a coherent historical narrative. This approach deviated significantly from the dominant public discourses that saw the houses primarily as markers of national, political, and social history, often characterized by selectively constructed and ideologically laden narratives of historical continuity from the 1930s to the present.
The aesthetics and ethics of performative Holocaust memory in Poland
Nordisk judaistik/Scandinavian Jewish Studies, 2017
This article addresses the performative dimension of the post-1989 Polish memorial culture of the Holocaust, characterised by a collaborative and audience-participatory model of remembering the Jewish victims. In this model participants are invited to become creators and owners of public memory, rather than silent observers or witnesses to commemorations performed by others. The article offers a critical and theoretical understanding of performativity in Holocaust commemoration through the examples of educational memorial actions Listy do Henia (‘Letters to Henio’) and Kroniki sejneńskie (‘The Sejny Chronicles’) led by the Polish grassroots institutions Ośrodek Brama Grodzka (‘Grodzka Gate-NN Theatre Centre’) in Lublin and Ośrodek Pogranicze (‘Borderland Foundation’) in Sejny. Drawing mainly on Polish perspectives on memory, the article examines the aesthetic and ethical value of these actions. It further probes how a performative model of engagement can serve to expose the complex past of Polish– Jewish relations, to bring the historical past vividly into current consciousness, and to facilitate a sense of belonging to a moral community of memory among younger generations of Poles.
Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique Moderne et Contemporain, 2021
At different levels, times utilize one and the same building, which, while at first might have been a church, it then became a mosque, coffee shop, pharmacy, telephone centre, tobacco storage, restaurant, office, cabaret and cinema. This last phrase clearly refers to the building known as "Alkazar," in front of Caravan Serai, where need forced the dense coexistence of massive populations. 8 entanglements with the life trajectories of those who force-migrated to and from Turkey. These interactions and affiliations, we argue, are the proof of connected points and continuities with the building's past sensorial regime. We thus underscore the potential of a new materialist approach to social history and to the study of transitions, particularly those from empire to nation state.
The Holocaust in Thessaloniki: Reactions to the Anti-Jewish Persecution, 1942–1943
Routledge, 2020
The book narrates the last days of the once prominent Jewish community of Thessaloniki, the overwhelming majority of which was transported to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in 1943. Focusing on the Holocaust of the Jews of Thessaloniki, this book maps the reactions of the authorities, the Church and the civil society as events unfolded. In so doing, it seeks to answer the questions, did the Christian society of their hometown stand up to their defense and did they try to undermine or object to the Nazi orders? Utilizing new sources and interpretation schemes, this book will be a great contribution to the local efforts underway, seeking to reconcile Thessaloniki with its Jewish past and honour the victims of the Holocaust. The first study to examine why 95 percent of the Jews of Thessaloniki perished—one of the highest percentages in Europe—this book will appeal to students and scholars of the Holocaust, European History and Jewish Studies.