Abstract
Since the last decades of the twentieth century, Western Europe and North America have been living through a “memory boom.”1 It is an open question whether this boom—or is it a bubble?—has spread to other parts of the globe. This volume focuses on cultural memory in Eastern Europe and its adjacent subcontinent, Northern Eurasia. To define this space, however, is notoriously difficult.2 In the obsolete terms of the Cold War and postcolonial emancipatory movement, this was the core of what was called the Second World, which marked its difference from both the rich First World and the developing Third World.3 Such a vision incorporates the former socialist states, from what used to be Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany all the way to Siberia (with its rich and much-ignored memory of the Gulag) and the eastern edge of the former Soviet Union. Yet the very act of stretching some kind of cultural entity from Prague to Vladivostok causes dissonance for many. The Czech writer Milan Kundera, author of the famous maxim “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,”4 wrote vociferous attacks on the “kidnapping” of part of Europe that really belonged to the West by a culture that belonged firmly in the Asiatic East.5
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Notes
Jay Winter introduced the idea of the “memory boom” in his Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (London: Canto, 1998); see also Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. by Meike Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1999); Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship between Past and Present, ed. by Duncan Bell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, ed. by Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); José van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); The Collective Memory Reader, ed. by Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
See Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Czesław Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self Definition, trans. Catherine S. Leach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988); Roman Szporluk, “Defining Central Europe: Power, Politics and Culture,” Cross Currents, 1 (1982), 30–38; In Search of Central Europe, ed. by George Schöpflin and Nancy Wood (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989); Mykola Riabchuk, “The Fence of Metternich’s Garden,” “ï”, 1.13 (1998), http://www.ji.lviv.ua/n13texts/riab chuk-en.htm (accessed January 15, 2013).
For the history of these concepts, see Ignacy Sachs, The Discovery of the Third World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976); Carl E. Pletsch, “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23.4 (1981), 565–90; David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet?” PMLA, 116/1 (2001), 111–28; Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), pp. 25–29.
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 3.
Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe: A Kidnapped West,” New York Review of Books, April 26, 1984, pp. 33–38.
See Richard Esbenshade, “Remembering to Forget: Memory, History and National Identity in Postwar East-Central Europe,” Representations, 49 (1995), 72–96; Czesław Miłosz, “Looking for the Center: On the Poetry of Central Europe,” Cross Currents, 1 (1982), 1–11; “The Lisbon Conference on Literature: A Roundtable of Central European Writers,” Cross Currents, 9 (1990), 75–124.
Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine was a pan- European research project at Cambridge and several other European universities, which was supported by the HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) Joint Research Programme in 2010–13; see www.memory atwar.org (accessed January 15, 2013).
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); Levy and Sznaider, Human Rights and Memory (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010); and Sznaider, Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).
On some of these issues, see James Mark, The Unfinished Revolution: Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Timothy Garton Ash, “Trials, Purges and History Lessons: Treating a Difficult Past in Post-communist Europe,” in Memory and Power in Post-war Europe, ed. by Jan-Werner Müller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 265–82; and Stanislaw Tyszka, “Restitution as a Means of Remembrance: Evocations of the Recent Past in the Czech Republic and in Poland after 1989,” in Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, ed. by Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree, and Jay Winter (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), pp. 305–34.
In this novel, a son finds evidence in the archives that his beloved father was a secret agent who denounced his friends and even his wife; see Peter Esterházy, Javított kiadás. Melléklet a Harmonia cælestishez (Budapest: Magveto, 2002).
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Vintage, 2010), pp. 773, 826.
See, for example, on Poland: Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic, eds., The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Ewa Wolentarska-Ochman, “Collective Remembrance in Jedwabne: Unsettled Memory of World War II in Postcommunist Poland,” History and Memory, 18/1 (Spring/Summer 2006), 152–78; Andrzej Paczkowski, “Nazism and Communism in Polish Experience and Memory,” in Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared, ed. by Henri Rousso (Nebraska: University of Nebraska, 2006), pp. 242–61; Piotr Madajczyk, “Experience and Memory: The Second World War in Poland,” in Experience and Memory: The Second World War in Europe, ed. by Jörg Echternkamp and Stefan Martens (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010); Robert Traba, Przeszło ść w tera ź niejszo ś ci: polskie spory o histori ę na pocz ą tku XXI wieku (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2009); Paweł Machcewicz, Spory o histori ę 2000–2011 (Kraków: Znak, 2012); Antoni Dudek, Instytut. Osobista historia IPN (Warsaw: Czerwone i Czarne, 2011). On Ukraine, see Catherine Wanner, Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); Serhii Plokhy, Ukraine and Russia: Representations of the Past (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); David R. Marples, Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2007); Andriy Portnov, Uprazhneniia s istoriei po-ukrainski (Moscow: OGI, 2010); Tarik Cyril Amar, “Different but the Same or the Same but Different? Public Memory of the Second World War in Post-Soviet L’viv,” Journal of Modern European History, 9.3 (2011), 373–96. On the Baltic states, see Memory and Pluralism in the Baltic States, ed. by Eva-Clarita Pettai (London and New York: Routledge, 2011); Maria Mälksoo, “Liminality and Contested Europeanness: Conflicting Memory Politics in the Baltic Space,” in Identity and Foreign Policy: Baltic--Russian Relations in the Context of European Integration, ed. by E. Berg and P. Ehin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 65–83; Maria Mälksoo, The Politics of Becoming European: A Study of Polish and Baltic Post-Cold War Security Imaginaries (London and New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2009); A. Astrov, “Liturgiia po Bronzovomu soldatu: pamiat’ i istoriia v formirovanii krizisa,” Ab Imperio, 3 (2007), pp. 427–447.
See Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Tom Segev, Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994); Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Dacia Viejo Rose, Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Heritage and Memory after Civil War (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2011).
See Alexander Etkind, Rory Finnin, Uilleam Blacker, Julie Fedor, Simon Lewis, Maria Mälksoo, and Matilda Mroz, Remembering Katyn (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).
Alexander Etkind, “Hard and Soft in Cultural Memory: Political Mourning in Russia and Germany,” Grey Room, Special Issue: Memory/History/Democracy, 16 (Summer 2004), 36–59; Alexander Etkind, “Post-Soviet Hauntology: Cultural Memory of the Soviet Terror,” Constellations, 16.1 (2009), 182–200.
Alexander Etkind, “Mapping Memory Events in East European Space,” East European Memory Studies, 1 (2010), 4–5; Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. by Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: Polity, 1984–87).
See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
See Grzegorz Motyka, Od rzezi woły ń skiej do akcji “Wisła.” Konflikt polskoukrai ń ski 1943–1947 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011); Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven and London: Yale Univerity Press, 2003).
See further Jan Tomasz Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), and his Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York: Random House, 2006), and (with Irena Grudzińska-Gross) Golden Harvest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also Polonsky and Michlic, The Neighbors Respond; Thou Shalt Not Kill: Poles on Jedwabne, ed. by William Brand (Warsaw: Więź, 2001); Wokół Jedwabnego, ed. by Paweł Machcewicz and Krzysztof Persak, 2 vols. (Warsaw: IPN, 2002).
See Dovile Budryte, Taming Nationalism? Political Community Building in the Post-Soviet Baltic States. (London: Ashgate, 2005); Baltic Postcolonialism, ed. by Violeta Kelertas (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006); Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Pavel Polian, Ne po svoei vole … Istoriia i geografiia prinuditel’nykh migratsii v SSSR (Moscow: OGI, Memorial, 2001), http://www.memo.ru/history/deport/ (accessed February 4, 2013).
See further Georgiy Kasianov, Danse macabre. Holod 1932–1933 rokiv u politytsi, masovii svidomosti ta istoriohrafii (1980-ti-pochatok 2000-kh) (Kyiv: Nash chas, 2010); Tatiana Zhurzhenko, “‘Capital of Despair’: Holodomor Memory and Political Conflicts in Kharkiv after the Orange Revolution,” East European Politics and Societies, 25.3 (2011), 597–639; and Andriy Portnov’s chapter in this volume.
See Etkind, Finnin, Blacker, Fedor, Lewis, Mälksoo, and Mroz, Remembering Katyn; Katyn: A Crime without Punishment, ed. by Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007); and George Sanford, Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940: Truth, Justice and Memory (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).
On some of these debates, see, for example, Polonsky and Michlic, The Neighbors Respond (on Jedwabne); Tatiana Zhurzhenko, “The Geopolitics of Memory”, Eurozine, May 10, 2007; David Marples, “Stepan Bandera: The Resurrection of a Ukrainian National Hero”, Europe-Asia Studies, 58.4 (2006), 555–66; Oxana Shevel, “The Politics of Memory in a Divided Society: A Comparison of Post-Franco Spain and Post-Soviet Ukraine”, Slavic Review, 70.1 (Spring 2011), 137–64; V. Kulyk, “The Media, History, and Identity: Competing Narratives of the Past in the Ukrainian Popular Press”, National Identities, 13 (2011), 287–303; Frank Golczewski, “Poland’s and Ukraine’s Incompatible Pasts,” and Wilfried Jilge, “The Politics of History and the Second World War in Post-Communist Ukraine (1986/1991–2004/2005)”, both in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 54.1 (2006), 37–49 and 50–81; Serhii Plokhy, “The Ghosts of Pereyaslav: Russo-Ukrainian Historical Debates in the Post-Soviet Era”, Europe-Asia Studies, 53.3 (May 2001), 489–505.
See America and the Armenian Genocide, ed. by Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Aida Alayarian, Consequences of Denial: The Armenian Genocide (London: Karnac 2008); The Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies, ed. by Richard G. Hovannisian (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction 2008).
See further Maria Mälksoo, “The Memory Politics of Becoming European: The East European Subalterns and the Collective Memory of Europe”, European Journal of International Relations, 15.4 (2009), 653–80; Claus Leggewie, “Equally Criminal? Totalitarian Experience and European Memory”, Eurozine, June 1, 2006; Eva-Clarita Onken, “The Baltic States and Moscow’s 9 May Commemoration: Analysing Memory Politics in Europe”, Europe-Asia Studies 59.1 (2007), 23–46.
See further John-Paul Himka, “Debates in Ukraine over Nationalist Involvement in the Holocaust, 2004–2008”, Nationalities Papers, 39 (2011), 353–70, and his Ukrainians, Jews and the Holocaust: Divergent Memories (Saskatoon: Heritage Press, 2009); Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths”, Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, 2107 (2011); Omer Bartov, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), and “Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide”, Journal of Modern History, 80.3 (September 2008), 557–593; Geneviève Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-communist Poland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Michael Stenlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997); Piotr Wróbel, “Double Memory: Poles and Jews after the Holocaust”, East European Politics and Societies, 11.3 (1997), 560–74.
For the idea of “traveling theory”, see Edward W. Said, “Traveling Theory”, in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 226–47.
See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York and London: Routledge, 1992); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, ed. by Paul Antze and Michael Lambek (London: Routledge, 1996); Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005); Karyn Ball, Traumatizing Theory: The Cultural Politics of Affect in and beyond Psychoanalysis (New York: Other Press, 2007); and Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
On the problems with applying the concept of trauma to Russian memory of Stalinism, see Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia (London: Granta, 2000); Etkind, Warped Mourning. On mourning in various political and historical contexts, see Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004); Symbolic Loss: The Ambiguity of Mourning and Memory at Century’s End, ed. by Peter Homans (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000); Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning.
Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today, 29.1 (Spring 2008), 103–28 and The Generation of Postmemory: Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
In her research on the “postmemory” of the Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch emphasizes the relevance of personal artifacts, such as photographs and family albums, for the experience of the generation that did not experience the catastrophe; Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
On cosmopolitan memory, see Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Holocaust Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006) and Natan Sznaider, Jewish Memory and Cosmopolitan Order (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). On generations in the twentieth century, see Generations in Conflict, ed. by Mark Roseman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. by Stephen Lovell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007); Mary Fulbrook, Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
An important example is the concept of genocide, which was introduced by Raphael Lemkin, a Jew from Belarus who studied in L’viv in the 1920s, worked in Warsaw as a lawyer, and served in the Polish army during the Second World War. Lemkin developed his ideas before the Nazi Holocaust. Among many possible sources for his ideas were the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33 and the Soviet extermination of 85,000 Poles in 1937–38, which Timothy Snyder describes as “in some respects the bloodiest chapter of the Great Terror”; Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (London: Vintage, 2011), p. 103. The influence of these events on Lemkin’s thinking in the 1930s has not been adequately studied, and it is not known how much Lemkin and his circle of Warsaw intellectuals and officials knew about the Soviet murders of the late 1930s. For several studies of Lemkin’s thought, including his Cold War involvement, see Anton Weiss-Wendt, “Hostage of Politics: Raphael Lemkin on ‘Soviet Genocide,’” Journal of GenocideResearch, 7.4 (2005), 551–59; Anson Rabinbach, “The Challenge of the Unprecedented—Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook, 4 (2005), 397–420; A. Dirk Moses, “Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide,” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. by Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
See, for example, Jan Plamper, “Foucault’s Gulag,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 3.2 (2002), 255–80 and Robert Horvath, “‘The Solzhenitsyn Effect’: East European Dissidents and the Demise of the Revolutionary Privilege,” Human Rights Quarterly, 29.4 (2007), 879–907. For the effect of Jacques Derrida’s brief incarceration in Prague in 1981 on his thought, see Benois Peeters, Derrida: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), pp. 332–41.
For reflections on these issues, see A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance, ed. by Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010); Timothy Snyder, “Balancing the Books,” Eurozine, May 3, 2005, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2005–05–03-snyder-en.html (accessed February 4, 2013); Chiara Bottici, “European Identity and the Politics of Remembrance,” in Performing the Past, ed. by Tilmans, van Vree, and Winter, pp. 335–59.
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Blacker, U., Etkind, A. (2013). Introduction. In: Blacker, U., Etkind, A., Fedor, J. (eds) Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137322067_1
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