Abstract
In this introductory chapter, the editors position the volume in the field of memory studies and transnational European memory discourses by surveying and assessing the current state of scholarship in both fields. They discuss the main theoretical concepts examined in the collected chapters, including methodological nationalism, transnationalism, and multidirectional, travelling, and cosmopolitan memory. Through a summary of each chapter’s contribution to transnational European memory discourses, the editors also highlight the main themes emerging from these case studies and the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of transnational European memory that incorporates the analysis of a variety of commemorative media.
The co-authors are listed alphabetically.
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Notes
- 1.
Klas-Göran Karlsson, “The Uses of History and the Third Wave of Europeanization,” in A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance, ed. Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth, Studies in Contemporary European History (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2010), 38–52. 38–9.
- 2.
Veronika Settele, for instance, observes tensions between a political mandate of unity and integration given by the Museum’s initial conception by politicians and funded by the European Parliament on the one hand, and the academic museum curators’ aim to also draw attention to uneven power relations and the experience of exclusion on the other. Veronika Settele, “Including Exclusion in European Memory? Politics of Remembrance at the House of European History,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 10 (2015): 405–16. 413.
- 3.
European Parliament, “European Conscience and Totalitarianism,” April 2, 2009, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+TA+P6-TA-2009-0213+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN.
- 4.
Following Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning’s inclusive definition, by cultural memory we mean “the interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts,” which includes “a broad spectrum of phenomena as possible objects of cultural memory studies—ranging from individual acts of remembering in a social context to group memory (of family, friends, veterans, etc.) to national memory with its ‘invented traditions’, and finally to the host of transnational lieux de mémoire such as the Holocaust and 9/11.” Astrid Erll, “Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction,” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin; New York, NY: De Gruyter, 2010), 1–15. 2.
- 5.
For example, the following are titles of works that have been published over the last 15 years: Jan-Werner Müller’s Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (2002), Klaus Eder and Willfried Spohn’s Collective Memory and European Identity: The Effects of Integration and Enlargement (2005), Konrad Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger’s Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories (2007), Natan Sznaider’s Gedächtnisraum Europa: die Visionen des europäischen Kosmopolitismus: eine jüdische Perspektive (2008), Helena Gonçalves da Silva et al.’s Conflict, Memory Transfers and the Reshaping of Europe (2010), Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth’s A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (2010), Claus Leggewie and Anne Lang’s Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung: Ein Schlachtfeld wird besichtigt (2011), Siobhan Kattago’s Memory and Representation in Contemporary Europe (2011), Eric Langenbacher et al.’s Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe (2012), Mithander et al.’s European Cultural Memory Post-89 (2013), Sharon Macdonald’s Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today (2013), and Aline Sierp’s History, Memory, and Trans-European Identity: Unifying Divisions (2014).
- 6.
As Michael Rothberg argues: “Our relationship to the past does partially determine who we are in the present, but never straightforwardly and directly, and never without unexpected or even unwanted consequences that bind us to those whom we consider other.” Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 5.
- 7.
Claus Leggewie and Anne Lang, Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung: Ein Schlachtfeld wird besichtigt (Munich: Beck, 2011), 7.
- 8.
Joanna Wawrzyniak and Małgorzata Pakier, “Memory Studies in Eastern Europe: Key Issues and Future Perspectives,” Polish Sociological Review, no. 183 (2013): 257–79. 258.
- 9.
Mälksoo further asserts that as “the debates held in these multiple political fora demonstrate, efforts to influence the normative and institutional formation of a pan-European remembrance of communist regimes have hardly gone unchallenged. The meaning of the communist legacy for ‘European memory’ has emerged as a political issue of substantial controversy and significance.” Maria Mälksoo, “Criminalizing Communism: Transnational Mnemopolitics in Europe,” International Political Sociology 8, no. 1 (2014): 82–99. 97, 83.
- 10.
Wawrzyniak and Pakier, “Memory Studies in Eastern Europe,” 266.
- 11.
Maria Mälksoo, “The Memory Politics of Becoming European: The East European Subalterns and the Collective Memory of Europe,” European Journal of International Relations 15, no. 4 (2009): 653–80. 656.
- 12.
Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories (Basingstoke; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 2.
- 13.
As De Cesari and Rigney argue: “[T]he time is ripe to move memory studies itself beyond methodological nationalism. Globalized communication and time-space compression, post-coloniality, transnational capitalism, large-scale migration, and regional integration: all of these mean that national frames are no longer the self-evident ones they used to be in daily life and identity formation. As a result, the national has also ceased to be the inevitable or preeminent scale for the study of collective remembrance. By now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, it has become a matter of urgency for scholars in the field of memory studies to develop new theoretical frameworks, invent new methodological tools, and identify new sites and archival resources for studying collective remembrance beyond the nation-state.” Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney, Transnational Memory, Circulation, Articulation, Scales, Media and Cultural Memory (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 2014), 2.
- 14.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London; New York: Verso, 2006); Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–1992), 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).
- 15.
Ann Rigney, “Ongoing: Changing Memory and the European Project,” in Transnational Memory, Circulation, Articulation, Scales, ed. Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 339–59. 356.
- 16.
Aline Sierp and Jenny Wüstenberg, “Linking the Local and the Transnational: Rethinking Memory Politics in Europe,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 23, no. 3 (2015): 321–29. 323. Sierp and Wüstenberg note three exceptions: Jens Kroh, Transnationale Erinnerung: Der Holocaust im Fokus geschichtspolitischer Initiativen (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2008); Elisabeth Kübler, Europäische Erinnerungspolitik: Der Europarat und die Erinnerung an den Holocaust (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2012); Aline Sierp, History, Memory, and Trans-European Identity: Unifying Divisions (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014).
- 17.
For Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande’s use of the term “methodological nationalism,” please see Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, “Jenseits des methodologischen Nationalismus,” Soziale Welt 61 (2010): 187–216.
- 18.
Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, trans. Sara B. Young, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 66.
- 19.
Erll, Memory in Culture, 66.
- 20.
Erll, Memory in Culture, 2011, 66.
- 21.
Astrid Erll, “Travelling Memory,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 4–18. 12.
- 22.
Erll, Memory in Culture, 2011, 66.
- 23.
Sebastian Conrad, “Entangled Memories: Versions of the Past in Germany and Japan, 1945–2001,” Journal of Contemporary History 38, no. 1 (2003): 85–99. 86.
- 24.
Conrad, “Entangled Memories,” 86. As Konrad Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger point out, the notion of “histoire croisée has emerged primary in relation to histories of intra-European relations.” Konrad Hugo Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger, Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories, ed. Annelie Ramsbrock, Studies in Contemporary European History (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2007), 10.
- 25.
Michael Rothberg, “Introduction: Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de Mémoire to Noeuds de Mémoire,” Yale French Studies, no. 118/119 (2010): 3–12. 7.
- 26.
Michael Rothberg, “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory,” Criticism 53, no. 4 (2011): 523–48. 524. As Rothberg also observes, the politics of memory continue to necessitate differentiation between what he calls “politically productive” forms of memory from those that lead to “attempts at territorialization (whether at the local or national level) and identitarian reduction.” Rothberg, “Introduction: Between Memory and Memory,” 7.
- 27.
Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 6.
- 28.
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, “Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory,” European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 1 (2002): 87–106. 88.
- 29.
Levy and Sznaider, “Memory Unbound,” 102.
- 30.
Jeffrey K. Olick, “From Useable Pasts to the Return of the Repressed,” The Hedgehog Review 9, no. 2 (2007): 19–31. 20.
- 31.
Assmann and Conrad, Memory in a Global Age, 1.
- 32.
Alexander Etkind et al., Remembering Katyn (Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity, 2012), 10–11. Given this processual and active nature of collective memory, Chiara Bottici opts to replace the term collective memory by Winter and Sivan’s notion of collective remembrance. They “focus on remembrance precisely to avoid the shortcomings of the concept of collective memory and to emphasize activity and agency in its place. They consider collective remembrance as the product of individuals and groups who come together not necessarily at the behest of the state or any of its subsidiary organizations, but because they have to speak out. In other words, whilst memory may be understood as denoting an object, remembrance always designated a process.” Chiara Bottici, “European Identity and the Politics of Remembrance,” in Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, ed. Karin Tilmans, Frank Van Vree, and Jay Winter (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 335–60. 342.
- 33.
Yifat Gutman, Amy Sadoro, and Adam D. Brown, “Introduction: Memory and the Future: Why a Change in Focus Is Necessary,” in Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society, ed. Yifat Gutman, Amy Sadoro, and Adam D. Brown, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies (Basingstoke; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1–11. 1.
- 34.
Amir Eshel, Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 4–5.
- 35.
Ann Rigney, “Transforming Memory and the European Project,” New Literary History 43, no. 4 (2012): 607–28.
- 36.
Ann Rigney, “Transforming Memory,” 621.
- 37.
Kroh, Transnationale Erinnerung, 38.
- 38.
Joan DeBardeleben and Achim Hurrelmann, eds., Transnational Europe: Promise, Paradox, Limits, Palgrave Studies in European Union Politics (Basingstoke; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 12.
- 39.
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, trans. Assenke Oksiloff (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006), 3.
- 40.
David Inglis, “Globalization and/of Memory: On the Complexification and Contestation of Memory Cultures and Practices,” in Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies, ed. Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 143–57. 144, 147.
- 41.
Cognizant of the contested and constructed nature of Europe, Europe here is broadly defined not only by its shifting political borders but also as an imagined community of shared traditions.
- 42.
Michael Rothberg, “Multidirectional Memory in Migratory Settings: The Case of Post-Holocaust Germany,” in Transnational Memory, Circulation, Articulation, Scales, ed. Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 123–45. 139.
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Kraenzle, C., Mayr, M. (2017). Introduction: The Usable Pasts and Futures of Transnational European Memories. In: Kraenzle, C., Mayr, M. (eds) The Changing Place of Europe in Global Memory Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39152-6_1
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