Urban commemoration and literature in post-Soviet L’viv: a comparative analysis with the Polish experience (original) (raw)
Related papers
A comparative analysis is made of the evocation of urban memory in the work of the Polish author of detective fiction Marek Krajewski and the leading Ukrainian writer of postmodernist fiction and popular historical publications Iurii Vynnchyuk. The cities that form the focus of the work of these writers, Wroc/law for Krajewski and L␣viv for Vynnychuk, both experi- enced massive population shifts after World War II, meaning that the post- war populations had little or no memory of the pre-war cities. The legacy of this disjunction can be felt to this day. This study demonstrates how both writers re-create a sense of memory through a number of similar memory strategies and concludes that the recreation of memory in these writers’ work can be understood as what Marianne Hirsch calls postmemory, yet that this is postmemory removed from the traumatic context of Hirsch’s original concept. It is also argued that these writers demonstrate that an effective ‘cultural memory’ can be produced in a situation when ‘communi- cative memory’ is lacking, through an imaginative and accessible representa- tion of the ostensibly inaccessible past. This is achieved through the utilization of mass cultural forms, which some theorists of urban memory see as conducive only to forgetting.
East/West Journal of Ukrainian Studies (ewjus.com), 2014
Despite geographical proximity and some comparable features of historical development since the fall of the Soviet system, Lviv and Chernivtsi betray quite different patterns of commemoration and practices in approaching the past. Different commemorative practices and attitudes to the recent past in the two cities might point out the existence of different cultures of memory that sustain a basic narrative about acceptance or denial of ethnic diversity. Aside from references to, by and large, the same historical periods and types of political regimes, the cultures of memory in the two cities have another common characteristic, namely, the mode in which memory works among contemporary urbanites. The attitudes to the past among the great majority of present-day urban populations are formed not through personal experience and family transmission of past-memories, but rather through prosthetic memory, relying on hearsay, media, literature, popular culture and the arts. As the deliberate choice of the past comes to the fore, the work of stitching together contradictory historical representations within various identity projects is guided not so much by path-dependent logic of collective memory, but rather by present-day expediency and power games of different mnemonic actors. Therefore, we argue, the most observable trend in cultures of memory in present-day Lviv and Chernivtsi is pillarization, i.e., the basic agreement of both external and internal memory entrepreneurs and marketeers that every population group is a custodian of its “own” heritage. However, the condition of heritage envisioned in the two cities seems to be rather an assimilationist “incorporation-to-the-core” model, where the core consists of various versions of Ukrainian national heritage.
Lviv and Chernivtsi: Two Memory Cultures at the Western Ukrainian Borderland
East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies Vol 1 No 1 2014 pp. 59-84
Despite geographical proximity and comparable historical development since the fall of the Soviet Union, Lviv and Chernivtsi betray different approaches to commemorating the past.This might point to the existence of different cultures of memory that sustain anarrative about acceptance or rejection of ethnic diversity. But the cultures of memory in the cities also have common characteristic, namely, contemporary urbanites form the attitudes towards the past not through personal experience and family transmission of past memories but through prosthetic memory, which relies on hearsay,media, literature, popular culture and the arts. When deliberate choice comes to the fore in building various identity projects, the work of stitching together contradictory historical representations is guided not so much by path-dependent logic of collective memory as by present-day expediency and power games of different mnemonic actors. Therefore, this paper argues that the most observable trend in the cultures of memory in Lviv and Chernivtsi is pillarization, i.e., an agreement among external and internal memory entrepreneurs and marketeers that each population group is the custodian of its “own” heritage. Nevertheless, ultimately the condition of heritage envisioned in the two cities seems to be an assimilationist “incorporation-to-the-core” model, where the core consists of various versions of the Ukrainian national heritage.
2015
The article focuses on (re)constructing the local memorial landscape in a post-Soviet military base in Poland and the process of forging the local identity of its new inhabitants in the years 1993–2015. These processes, which occurred after the withdrawal of Russian Federation forces from the base and the establishment of a civilian town, find their reflection in the urban space of Borne Sulinowo and are written into a broader context of state policies and national debates about the past. The aim of the article is to present how the initiative in these processes has gradually shifted from the national level to the local, causing fragmentation and pluralisation of the collective memory. In this context certain significance can be attributed to the need to comply with EU standards, and to the progress of com-mercialisation of the past related to the development of tourism. KEYWORDS: collective memory • memorial landscape • post-Soviet base • post-communist Poland • urban space I N T R O D U C T I O N A contemporary flâneur strolling about the town of Borne Sulinowo encounters signs and symbols which at almost every turn testify to the town's complicated past. The efforts undertaken by the Poles since the early 1990s to 'domesticate' the urban space, together with the development of new social and cultural practices and gradual transformation and reinterpretation of the cultural landscape of Borne Sulinowo, bear testimony to an attempt to put down roots and construct a local identity, 1 combined with the need for locals to create their own place within the world, as " no one lives in the world in general " (Geertz 1996: 262). People construct, cultivate and preserve both their personal and collective identities as they remember and forget (Connerton 1989; 2009; Wertsch 2004), commemorate and repress the past and present narratives. In the process of constructing a local identity, what matters greatly is the history of urban landscape and the configurations of the 'things' that fill places and change over time. The space of this post-Soviet base contains multiple material traces of the past presence of Soviets and Germans in the area. The presence of these traces is not indifferent to the shaping of the identity of the local community and its attitude to the past. The foreign material and symbolic legacy, to the same.
Lviv (Lwów, Lemberg, Lvov)—an East European city, located in the Polish-Ukrainian border zone, recently attracted the attention of many scholars. Its history and cultural heritage is an interesting source for studying cross-cultural influences and identity contests, politics of memory, processes of nationalization of urban space, as well as its symbolic marking.[2] During the medieval period Lviv developed as a poly-cultural, poly-religious and poly-ethnic space inhabited by Armenians, Germans, Jews, Poles, Ruthenians (Ukrainians), and others. All of them left their imprints on the city's landscape creating many places of memory. At the same time, their co-habitation entailed a constant struggle through symbolic representations and markers of urban space. Coming into the era of modern nationalism, their contest became stronger and evolved into an attempt to turn the whole city into a national symbol. From its beginning, Lviv experienced several shifts of borders and changes of political regimes. The most numerous and rapid transformations of political regimes happened in the 20th century when the city subsequently belonged to the Habsburg Empire, West Ukrainian People's Republic, Polish Republic, Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, and finally the Ukrainian State. Two World Wars profoundly changed its physical landscape and ethnic composition. Many turbulent events caused continual attempts to " rewrite " the city's social space by destroying some places of memory and imposing others. These manipulations and distortions of the past resulted in the marginalization of some voices and domination of others. This article examines changes that happened to the politics of memory in Lviv, as reflected in its symbolic landscape after the Second World War. The first part of the article provides a comparative overview of the politics of memory under the Soviet and new Ukrainian political regimes. It also touches upon some theoretical aspects of studying the politics of memory within an urban space as well as its symbolic structure. The majority of scholars who studied manifestations of memory politics in Lviv focused on the macro-level— describing institutions that produce memory and/or its structure. They did not take into consideration whether symbolic representations of the city's past were shared by inhabitants of Lviv and to what degree. Similarly, discussion about the processes through which the personal experiences of Lviv dwellers become part of the collective memory was often omitted in their research. Consequently, I will introduce a new conceptual scheme, which allows us to incorporate both levels— analysis of the symbolic structure of a city's politics of memory and its impact on the collective identities of the inhabitants. Using this scheme in the second part of the article I will perform a diachronic analysis of changes of the politics of memory in Lviv after the Second World War, focusing on monuments, memorial plaques and street names as the most important markers of urban landscape. For this purpose I will perform a content-analysis of monuments and memorial plaques,[3] which helps to identify major tendencies and shifts in the symbolic structure of city
Cities, 2010
Before WWII Jews constituted one third of the Warsaw population. Muranów is the heart of the former Jewish district, the central area of the Warsaw Ghetto, installed by the Nazis in 1940. This district was totally destroyed during the war and its present urban shape not in the least reminds of its pre-war past. In this study, we investigated the collective memory of the district and representations of the Polish-Jewish history shared by contemporary inhabitants of Muranów. Ninety four residents were interviewed at their homes. The results show that ''people living on the ashes" perceive the Jewish history of their place of residence as important and meaningful even though almost no visible remnants of the Jewish pre-war district have survived. The present attitudes and memories of the contemporary inhabitants seem to be shaped by the public ceremonies and educational tours which take place in the district, by presence of commemorating monuments and by the street names. These findings emphasize the crucial role of urban reminders such as museums, monuments and street names in the dynamics of collective memory.
JOURNAL OF SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET POLITICS AND SOCIETY , 2019
The Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław offers a unique perspective on the changing tectonics of memory construction in a Central European city. In this article, we trace the little known history of the cemetery and the ways in which its position in the urban imaginary changed in the context of large‐scale geopolitical transformations. Through the cemetery’s history, we can follow the fate of one of the most prominent Jewish communities in pre‐World War II Germany, starting with its emergence following the emancipation of German Jews in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to its demise under Nazi rule. After the city’s transfer to Poland following the Potsdam Conference (1945), the cemetery became an increasingly isolated relic of the Jewish past of the city until its grassroots‐led revitalization commencing during the 1980s Solidarity era. After this important period of civic‐led renaissance tied to the city’s Jewish heritage, today, the cemetery has been pushed again to the periphery, an outcome of a process we refer to as the policy of memory containment.
Nationalities Papers, 2010
This article proposes to look afresh at the legacies of communism in urban spaces in post-1989 Poland. Specifically, it investigates the fate of Red Army monuments and explores how these public spaces have been used in the multifaceted and multileveled process of post-communist identity formation. The article suggests that Red Army monuments constitute sites for the articulation of new narratives about the country’s past and future which are no longer grounded in the fundamental division between “us” (the nation) and “them” (the supporters of communism) and which are far from being fixed in the binary opposition of the banished and the embraced past. The reorganization of public memory space does not only involve contesting the Soviet past or affirming independence traditions but is rather the outcome of multilayered processes rooted in particularities of time and space. Moreover, the article argues that the dichotomy “liberator versus occupier,” often employed as a viable analytical tool by scholars investigating the post-communist memorial landscape, impedes our understanding of the role played by Soviet war memorials in the process of re-imagining national and local communities in post-1989 Eastern Europe.
Collective Remembrance in Jedwabne: Unsettled Memory of World War II in Postcommunist Poland
History & Memory, 2006
This article focuses on problems of remembering a painful and still contentious historical past and examines the interaction between remembrance and reconciliation initiatives undertaken by local communities, on the one hand, and state-sanctioned national commemorations on the other. Using the sixtieth anniversary of the massacre of Jewish inhabitants of Jedwabne in northeast Poland during World War II as a case study, the article argues that interference from the"outside"—in this case by groups holding political power, the media and intellectual elites— is detrimental to local remembering.