Memory and Representation in Contemporary Europe. The Persistence of the Past (original) (raw)
Related papers
H-Memory, 2013
Siobhan Kattago's most recent book discusses the issue of the presence of the past in contemporary Europe and the role it plays in different societies. Having published numerous works on the subjects of memory, history, and historical responsibility, focusing primarily on Estonia and Germany, she takes these two countries as representations of the two versions of the European historical narrative.[1] Kattago's previous work (Ambiguous Memory: The Nazi Past and German National Identity, 2003) has been praised for being an "informed and useful overview," but criticized for terminological chaos and not providing enough original analysis.[2] This book is not only a theoretical study of the persistence of the past but also an engaged text on the role and responsibility of public history and the tensions between history and politics.
This article examines European memory and memory politics. Taking as my starting point the deepening divisions between the “old” and “new” members of the European Union since the 2004 and 2007 enlargements, I investigate whether differences in official memory concerning World War II on the one hand and communism on the other should be regarded as permanent. Using examples from the development of West-European postwar memory-regimes and comparing them to the current state in postcommunist Europe I suggest that with respect to historical memory the two parts of Europe underwent similar developments, crises and debates, thus making eventual convergence and consensus possible. However, there are various factors that complicate progress in this area: postcommunist countries have to contend not only with their wartime history but also with the experience of communism, which latter colours the assessment of the former.
1989, Contested Memories and the Shifting Cognitive Maps of Europe
European Journal of Social Theory, 1989
Addressing attempts to define a common European memory on the theme of the Holocaust, and transformations of the Cold War discourses on totalitarianism and democracy. The article conceptualizes the persistent forms and new constellations of alterity that reproduce an East-West divide. The article shows that cognitive debates about Europe hint at constantly shifting relations between various parts of Europe and between Europe and its neighbors. A relational conceptual vocabulary is proposed to describe the debates on Europe following 1989. Cleavages and social distancing can be expressed in terms of different temporal locations (allochronism) which, when merged with a normative stance, can lead to a situation of heterochrony.
Agreeing to Disagree on the Legacies of Recent History: Memory, Pluralism and Europe after 1989
European Journal of Social Theory, 2009
Since 1989, social change in Europe has moved between two stories. The first being a politics of memory emphasising the specificity of culture in national narratives, and the other extolling the virtues of the Enlightenment heritage of reason and humanity. While the Holocaust forms a central part of West European collective memory, national victimhood of former Communist countries tends to occlude the centrality of the Holocaust. Highlighting examples from the Estonian experience, this article asks whether attempts to find one single European memory of trauma ignore the complexity of history and are thus potentially disrespectful to those who suffered both Communism and National Socialism. Pluralism in the sense of Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin is presented as a way in which to move beyond the settling of scores in the past towards a respectful recognition and acknowledgment of historical difference.
In this essay I track the challenge for today's European memory regime, focused upon the uniqueness of the Holocaust. I argue that the political elites of the new Eastern European member states have acted as primary drivers of change by urging the European Union to take a firmer stance towards the memory of communism in Europe by establishing communism as a similar evil than Nazism. In the context of the "Eastern challenge", the memory politics formula looks as follows: it is the communist memory that has shape the politics of Eastern Europe, but the politics of Eastern Europe that shape the memory of Europe as a whole.
Postnational Relations to the Past: A " European Ethics of Memory "
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2013
In nation-building processes, the construction of a common past and references to a shared founding moment have played a well-documented role in fostering notions of a collective political actor. While notions of unreflective national collective memories no longer hold in an age of a postheroic " politics of regret " , the preferred subject of collective memories nevertheless often remains the nation, both in academic literature and in public debates. In this paper, my aim is to establish the role of collective memory in self-proclaimed " postnational " approaches—specifically in the context of European integration—and to assess in how far these approaches can claim to go beyond notions of memory handed down to us from earlier accounts of nation-building processes. I start by laying out two different approaches to a postnational collective memory as they emerge from the literature. The first approach aims at overcoming national subjectivities by focusing on a specific content: a shared, albeit negative, legacy for all Europeans. The Holocaust plays a particularly prominent role in this discourse. The second approach sees and seeks commonalities not so much on the level of memory content but rather on the level of specific memory practices (a " European ethics of memory "). While it is not aimed at dismantling the nation as a political subject per se, it also creates a European self-understanding that makes the symbolic borders of Europe look more porous: potentially everyone can employ these memory practices. However, as I will show, this approach knows its own attempts to define a postnational " essence " , most notably by tying the ethics of memory to a specifically European cultural repertoire.
Changing memory regimes in a new Europe
European memory politics undeniably affects the prospects of a shared European identity. During the political transition of 1989/91 East European societies needed to redefine their collective identities through reinterpreting their recent past. Consequently the historical interpretations grown out of the specific East European war experience, that is the double legacy of Nazism and Stalinist communism, began to increasingly challenge and clash with commonly held western interpretations after 1989. Pointing to the fault lines of these colliding political memories in the new Europe, this paper provides a contextual analysis of these interpretive differences. The regional focus of this paper is on the Baltic Three and Poland (with some references also to Ukraine), as these four new member states are at the forefront of a new commemorative politics in Europe. It is on the ‘level’ of political memory that memory regimes are formulated and political myth constructed, but this paper also tackles the ‘level’ of social memory and puts forward a generational explanation for the character of the new East European form of commemorative politics.