Abstract
Sieg demonstrates how Ilija Trojanow and Christian Muhrbeck’s collection of stories and photographs, Wo Orpheus begraben liegt [Where Orpheus lies buried] (2013), can be read as a direct response to discourses on European identity and to the question of whether European memory discourses can be integrative, that is, constitutive of a transnational European identity, while still allowing for a plurality of European voices. The ironic title of the book alludes to Bulgaria’s part in Europe’s rich cultural history, and critiques attempts to locate the foundations of European identity in Greek antiquity. But while the texts and images all allude to Bulgaria’s past, they offer no definitive historical narrative that might serve as a new, unifying myth. The complex juxtaposition of texts and images instead raises questions about how we remember and construct the past. Placing emphasis on the politics of remembrance, particularly in Eastern Europe, Trojanow and Muhrbeck’s book casts doubt on the very idea of foundational European myths, arguing instead for a memorial culture that embraces the plurality of European memory.
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- 1.
Claus Leggewie and Anne Lang, Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung: Ein Schlachtfeld wird besichtigt (Munich: Beck, 2011).
- 2.
Timothy Snyder, “Balancing the Books,” Eurozine, 2005, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2005-05-03-snyder-en.html.
- 3.
Ilija Trojanow and Christian Muhrbeck, Wo Orpheus begraben liegt (Munich: Hanser, 2013). At present, there is no English translation available. All translations are the author’s.
- 4.
For some crucial discussion of transnational memory, see: Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney, Transnational Memory, Circulation, Articulation, Scales (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014); Gregor Feindt et al., “Entangled Memory: Toward a Third Wave in Memory Studies,” History and Theory 53, no. 1 (2014): 24–44; Jan Assmann, “Globalization, Universalism, and the Erosion of Cultural Memory,” in Memory in a Global Age, ed. Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies (Basingstoke; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 121–37.
- 5.
See: Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
- 6.
Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth, “Introduction: A European Memory?” in A European Memory?: Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (New York, NY; Oxford: Berghahn, 2010), 1–20. 2.
- 7.
The term “usable past” was also used by the US literary critic Van Wyck Brooks in his 1918 essay “On Creating a Usable Past.” See: Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” in The Early Years: A Selection from His Works, 1908–1921, ed. Claire Sprague (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1968), 219–26.
- 8.
Jeffrey K. Olick, “From Usable Pasts to the Return of the Repressed,” The Hedgehog Review 9, no. 2 (2007): 19–31. 19.
- 9.
The search for identity responds to a situation that is experienced as crisis. According to Stråth, this holds true on a European level as well: “The concept of a European identity was launched in 1973, at the European Community summit in Copenhagen. This concept was advanced and elaborated in a context marked by an experience lack of identity and the erosion of interpretative frameworks and orientation. If there had been a sense of identity, there would have been no need to invent the concept as a means by which to induce a new community in the Community.” Bo Stråth, “Methodological and Substantive Remarks on Myth, Memory and History in the Construction of a European Community,” German Law Journal 6 (2005): 255–71. 261.
- 10.
Leggewie and Lang, Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung, 15.
- 11.
Jan-Werner Müller, “Europäische Erinnerungspolitik Revisited,” Eurozine, 2007, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/article_2007-10-18-jwmuller-de.html.
- 12.
Claus Leggewie, “Battlefield Europe: Transnational Memory and European Identity,” Eurozine, 2009, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-04-28-leggewie-en.html.
- 13.
Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand, Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory, and Identity (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 74–75.
- 14.
As a result, scholars have also de-emphasized the importance of memory and are pointing to the ways in which Europe should deal with historical differences and differences in historiography: “Since pluralism is a value in itself within Europe—East and West Europeans can agree to disagree on whether the crimes of Communism can be compared with the crimes of National Socialism or not.” Siobhan Kattago, “Agreeing to Disagree on the Legacies of Recent History: Memory, Pluralism and Europe after 1989,” European Journal of Social Theory 12 (2009): 375–95. 390.
- 15.
Bottici and Challand, Imagining Europe, 76.
- 16.
Bottici and Challand, Imagining Europe, 81.
- 17.
Aleida Assmann, “Europe: A Community of Memory?,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 40, no. 1 (2007): 11–25. 20.
- 18.
My translation. Gerhard Paul, ed., Bilder, die Geschichte schrieben (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011). See also: Dagmar Barnouw, Germany 1945: Views of War and Violence (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009); Cornelia Brink, Ikonen der Vernichtung: Öffentlicher Gebrauch von Fotografien aus nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern nach 1945 (Berlin: Akademie, 1998); Jeffrey K. Olick, The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (New York, NY; London: Routledge, 2007), 104.
- 19.
Olick, The Politics of Regret, 104.
- 20.
Feindt et al., “Entangled Memory,” 31.
- 21.
Susan Sontag, “The Image World,” in Visual Culture: The Reader, ed. Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall (London; Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1999), 80–94. 81.
- 22.
Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974), 414.
- 23.
Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image, Music, Text (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1978), 15–31. 18.
- 24.
Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” 19.
- 25.
Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” 19.
- 26.
Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” 25.
- 27.
Trojanow and Muhrbeck, Wo Orpheus begraben liegt, 22.
- 28.
According to Tzvetan Todorov, there were nearly 100 camps in Bulgaria under Communist rule. Tzvetan Todorov, Voices from the Gulag: Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 2.
- 29.
While Bulgaria managed to save many Bulgarian Jews from extinction, concentration camps were built in Dupnitsa and Gorna-Dzhumaia. Non-Bulgarian Jews from South-East Europe were deported from there to Treblinka and other camps, where nearly all of them died. For the role of these camps in the genocide of Greek Jews, see: Steven B. Bowman, The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940-1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 80–94. For a short summary of the events through which the majority of Bulgarian Jews could be saved, see the entry “Bulgaria” in: Walter Laqueur and Judith T. Baumel-Schwartz, The Holocaust Encyclopedia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
- 30.
Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 188.
- 31.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1981), 26.
- 32.
You may also divide it into four parts: “Denk mal vor, Denker” which can be translated into “Plan ahead, thinker.”
- 33.
Nikolai Vukov, “Refigured Memories, Unchanged Representations: Post-Socialist Monumental Discourse in Bulgaria,” in Zwischen Amnesie und Nostalgie: Die Erinnerung an den Kommunismus in Südosteuropa, ed. Ulf Brunnbauer and Stefan Troebst (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007), 71–86. 71.
- 34.
Vukov, “Refigured Memories, Unchanged Representations,” 71.
- 35.
Trojanow and Muhrbeck, Wo Orpheus begraben liegt, 97.
- 36.
Richard Watkins and Christopher Deliso, Bulgaria (Oakland, CA: Lonely Planet Publications, 2008), 165.
- 37.
Gary S. Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 290. Bakhtin’s notion of genre also helps to emphasize the transnational and transcultural dimension of remembrance, since it explains how the forms that we use to remember can travel from one nation or culture to the other. Hence, genre can be used as a tool to analyze transcultural memory, which Astrid Erll conceives “as the incessant wandering of carriers, media, contents, forms, and practices of memory, their continual ‘travels’ and ongoing transformations through time and space, across social, linguistic and political borders.” Astrid Erll, “Travelling Memory,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 4–18. 11.
- 38.
Olick, The Politics of Regret, 106.
- 39.
Contrasting these references to the past, two pictures show icons of a capitalist present and may be read as critique of a shallow globalization. In one picture we encounter a person dressed up as Kermit from The Muppet Show in order to entertain tourists on Bulgarian beaches; the other picture shows the advertisement of another US product: Coca Cola. See: Trojanow and Muhrbeck, Wo Orpheus begraben liegt, 104–105, 110–111.
- 40.
Trojanow and Muhrbeck, Wo Orpheus begraben liegt, 97.
- 41.
Trojanow and Muhrbeck, Wo Orpheus begraben liegt, 99–100.
- 42.
Trojanow and Muhrbeck, Wo Orpheus begraben liegt, 101.
- 43.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 476.
- 44.
Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Princeton Paperbacks (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 60.
- 45.
Bo Stråth, “The Baltic as Image and Illusion: The Construction of a Region between Europe and the Nation,” in Myth and Memory in the Construction of Community: Historical Patterns in Europe and Beyond, ed. Bo Stråth (Brussels; New York, NY: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2000), 199–214. 204.
- 46.
Pakier and Stråth, “Introduction: A European Memory?,” 13.
- 47.
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2010), 174.
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Sieg, C. (2017). Beyond Foundational Myths: Images from the Margins of the European Memory Map. 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_8
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