CRASSH

East European Memory Studies: An Emerging Sub-Discipline

Rationale

Memory studies have become a major topic of interest in the humanities and social sciences but their empirical focus has been largely, if not exclusively, on 'western' societies. This course has a double objective. First, the seminars will map how historical and psychological vectors of memory have shaped cultures, societies, and politics in post-communist Eastern Europe. Second, they will develop a conceptually innovative methodological focus with a view to defining a theoretical blueprint of this emerging sub-discipline. This pilot course is open to graduate students and academics across the humanities and social sciences, in particular to students enrolled in Mphil courses across PPSIS and the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages (European Literature and Culture; Russian Studies; Screen and Media Studies).

 

Course Outline

The seminar series will take place at CRASSH during Lent Term 2011
on Thursdays from 2.30pm to 4.30m, starting on Thursday 20 January 2011.

The concept of cultural memory is different from the concept of collective memory. Cultural memory presumes a remembering “collective” only in the broadest and loosest sense; the cultural communities of those who subscribe to a certain journal or take part in an online chat, play the role of such a collective. Culture allows people to share their experiences without requiring physical encounter. Various media and genres of culture transmit and distort memory, which moves between individuals, communities, and generations. Cultural forms structure virtual collectives of their fans and connoisseurs or, in some cases, their active antagonists. However, the turn from “collective memory” to “cultural memory” deemphasizes the remembering collective and focuses on the materials which memory is made of. It is a turn from the sociology of memory in the tradition of Maurice Halbwachs, to cultural studies of memory in the tradition of Walter Benjamin. “Multimedia collages” of cultural memory integrate multiple types of signifiers: from memoirs to memorials; from historical studies to historical novels; from family albums to museums and archives; from folk songs to films to internet.

Human beings build their identities on the capacity of forgetting. Modern states, in particular, have used strategies of forgetting in order to forge civic and national identity. Examining the complex relations between remembering and forgetting in Eastern European cultural memory this seminar enquires into Eastern European paradoxes, where incapacity to forget meets the impossibility to remember. The scale of crimes against humanity by Nazism and communism required revealing the truth against the strategies of state-led forgetting. Under communism, the keeping alive of subversive social memory (e.g. of Stalin’s crimes, the legacy of the revolutions in 1956 in Hungary or 1980 in Poland) could have a liberalizing or ‘democratising’ character. After 1989/91 selective memory regimes have tried to construct a historical identity around national heroism or national martyrdom. Other countries, such as Russia, are in need of accommodating rival narratives, often legitimating regimes that fed on the systematic destruction of their citizens.

3. Memory of Nazism and Communism

Comparing and contrasting the Russian and German situations of memory, several major factors should be taken into account. First, the socialist regime in Russia lasted much longer than the Nazi regime in Germany. Repairing the damage probably also requires more time, but Russia is less distant from the collapse of its Soviet state than Germany is from the collapse of its Nazi state. Second, the Soviet victims were significantly more diverse than theNazi victims; their descendants are dispersed and in some cases (e.g. Russian and Ukrainian political elites), have competing interests. Third, Germany’s post-war transformation was forced upon it by military defeat and occupation, while Russia’s post-Soviet transformation was a political choice. Fourth, the memory of the Nazi period has developed in different ways in Germany’s Western and Eastern parts; it may happen that the situation in East Germany is more similar to the Russian case. Finally, among the victims of both regimes and their descendants, the subjective experience of victimization and mourning was significantly different.

While in many ways beneficial to these countries, the negotiated regimes changes in Eastern Europe after 1989 lacked a cathartic effect comparable to the Nuremberg tribunal against main Nazi perpetrators or the épurations in France (and to some degree in Italy) after 1945. Elite continuity and the absence of trials afforded little, if any, possibility for either reconciliation of former perpetrators and victims or for screening, retribution, or disqualification of former collaborators of communist regimes. This seminar examines the political uses and abuses of the search for collective guilt and the attempts of ‘cleansing the house’. In particular, it pays attention to as processes of lustration and de-communisation, on the one hand, and the rehabilitation and popularity of former perpetrators in the name of national glory, on the other hand.

Three elements of cultural memory, its software (texts), hardware (monuments), and ghostware, are intimately connected. Usually, ghosts live in texts; sometimes, they inhabit cemeteries and emerge from monuments. Mostoften, ghosts appear before the living whose dead were not properly buried. Ghosts feature interesting differences from texts and monuments. Texts are symbolic, while ghosts are iconic in the semiotic sense of these terms (as signs, ghosts possess a visual resemblance to the signified); in contrast to monuments, texts and ghosts are ephemeral; and in contrast to texts and monuments, ghosts are uncanny.

The construction of collective political memory has traditionally focused on codes of honour and national pride. In the last decades, however, there has been a change in the grammar turning towards recognition of victims, reconciliation, and ethical responsibility for suffering. Pioneered by Germany’s coming to terms with the past and international pressures, the transition from memories of victims towards the self-reflexive dimension of memories of perpetrators have raised questions of official apologies, restitution, and compensation of victims. This seminar examines the chances and limits of such a politics of regret within Eastern Europe by looking at some crucial controversies about the collective guilt or shame of one’s own nation in committing crimes against humanity, mass murder, or collaboration in genocide.

New concept of the memory event builds upon two conceptual sources, Alain Badiou’s ‘event’ and Pierre Nora’s ‘site of memory.’  In contrast to Nora’s sites of memory (e.g. edifices, memorials, and cemeteries), memory events are defined temporally, as points of entrance into the dynamics of the public sphere, rather than spatially, as fixed locations on national territory.  While sites of memory simulate eternity, memory events produce volatile effects that reverberate with time, generate secondary waves and aftershocks, and eventually fester and crystallise in common cultural symbols.  In Badiou’s philosophy, events are juxtaposed with situations.  Arising sporadically from situations, events are explosive; they transform situations and shape new ones.

 

This seminar examines the impact of memories of victimhood on the stability of states. The idea here is to examine comparatively the consequences of memories of foreign invasions, (civil) wars and ethnic cleaning for the region and Europe as a whole. How have narratives of victimhood in the Baltic countries influenced political decisions about secession from the Soviet Union? Why did divided memories about the civil war between Croats and Serbs lead to war in former Yugoslavia? Will memory regimes in Eastern Europe remain a backward-looking force, aimed at a bricolage of recovering national identity and sense of pride through a victim-based narrative? Or will the ‘forward-looking’ urge to acknowledge historical responsibility for committed crimes weaken civic identity and civil society even more? This liminal situation between self-victimisation and search for national identity reflects the paradoxes of political legacies in Eastern Europe, which often cannot be accommodated in claims for a ‘duty to remember’ or a ‘need for forgetting’.

 

How to register

Deadline 5 January 2011.

The format of each session will vary, but will include presentations by both convenors; presentations from graduate participants, and general discussion.  All participants must be prepared to read the set materials and to contribute.

We welcome applications to take part in the course from graduate students in a wide range of relevant disciplines, not limited to those listed in the course description above, and would ask you to submit an application via email, to Harald Wydra  or Alexander Etkind addressing the following points (maximum 250 words)

    *     a brief statement of your research, including the title of your PhD or Masters dissertation, or the name of the Masters course you are taking, and the name of your supervisor
    *     a brief statement of what you hope to get out of the seminar, including an indication of what the likely benefits to your research may be
    *     a brief statement of what you hope to be able to contribute to the seminar

Numbers will be limited, and unsuccessful applicants will be placed on a waiting list. The deadline for applications is 5 January 2011.  A preliminary reading list will be made available via email to participants by mid December.