Abstract
According to Marianne Hirsch, the “postmemory” of experiences that were not ours can be passed down to us across generations in family narratives and artifacts. This includes memories of places.1 Hirsch applies her idea to the children of survivors of the Holocaust, and their postmemories of distant places that are important in family memory, but which they have never visited. This chapter takes Hirsch’s idea and applies it to another group who have a stake in this complex intersection of place and memory—the present inhabitants of those distant places. These people can also be said to be the subjects of postmemory. They may often have no direct familial or community link to the pasts of the places they inhabit; yet they do have access to these pasts through a variety of postmemory media, from poetry and memorials to guided tours and kitsch restaurants. While such forms are employed in the production and consumption of nostalgia in cities all over the world, they have a particular significance in Eastern Europe, where urban spaces often contain memories that are either uncomfortable for or alien to their inhabitants. The following analysis will focus on a number of such urban spaces, mainly in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, and attempt to interrogate ideas about memory, forgetting, and place that originate in Western memory paradigms through the prism of the East European context.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 244.
Ibid., p. 246.
Ibid., p. 243.
Ibid., p. 243.
Omer Bartov, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present Day Ukraine (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 9.
Hirsch, Family Frames, p. 244.
Bartov, Erased, p. ix.
Hirsch, Family Frames, p. 267.
Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010), p. xviii.
See Gregor Thum, Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011); 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). In the Polish context, more attention has been paid to the lost territories and cities of the “kresy,” or eastern borderlands, than to the experience of inhabiting the “new” postwar territories; see Robert Traba, “The Kresy as a Realm of Memory: The Long History of Persistence,” Herito, 8 (2012), 58–91. The situation is similar in most of the cases discussed here—the experience of the loss of places has been studied more than that of the gaining of new ones.
Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies, trans. by Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 7–8.
Ibid., p. 25.
Ibid., pp. 24–25.
Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today, 29.1 (Spring 2008), 103–28 (p. 107).
Ibid., p. 114.
Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique, 65 (1995), 125–33 (p. 130).
Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” in Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB/Verso, 1979), pp. 293–346; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 106.
On these cases and the general culture of urban commemoration in these cities see Thum, Uprooted; Gregor Thum, “Wrocław’s Search for a New Historical Narrative: From Polonicentrism to Postmodernism,” and Liliana Hentosh and Bohdan Tscherkes, “L’viv in Search of Its Identity: Transformations of the City’s Public Space,” both in Cities after the Fall of Communism: Reshaping Cultural Landscapes and European Identity, ed. by John Czaplicka, Nida Gelazis, and Blair A. Ruble (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), pp. 75–101 and 255–77 respectively; and Yaroslav Hrytsak and Viktor Susak, “Constructing a National City: The Case of L’viv,” in Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities, ed. by John J. Czaplicka and Blair A. Ruble (Washington and Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Centre Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 140–64. See also Andriy Portnov’s chapter in this volume.
Rebecca Gould, “Leaving the House of Memory: Post-Soviet Traces of Deportation Memory,” Mosaic, 45.2 (2012), 149–64 (p. 154).
Jewish and non-Jewish Polish writers, such as Czesław Miłosz, Tadeusz Konwicki, and Henryk Grynberg, have sporadically raised the topic since the 1960s, but it became a major theme only after the late 1980s. Some of the most important literary interventions come from the same authors who trace the German past, such as Huelle, Chwin, and Tokarczuk. Other important texts include Piotr Szewc’s novel Zagłada (Annihilation, 1987), the documentary literature of Hanna Krall and recent novels by Andrzej Bart and Piotr Paziński, the latter of which has been hailed as the first voice of the “third post-Holocaust generation.” See Piotr Szewc, Zagłada (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1987); Piotr Paziński, Pensjonat (Warsaw: Nisza, 2010 [the quotation above, by Justyna Sobolewska, is given on the cover]; Andrzej Bart, Fabryka muchołapek (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo AB, 2008). Among Hanna Krall’s works see Dowody na istnienie (Poznań: a5, 1995).
The Bu-Ba-Bu poets, and particularly Andrukhovych, drew on the multiethnic past of L’viv in their poetry and performances. Andrukhovych’s later novels and essays return more fully to this topic. The evocation and celebration of the Polish, Jewish, and Austrian pasts of L’viv broke with both Soviet and Ukrainian nationalist discourses, which, although in diametric opposition to one another, both preferred a monocultural vision of the city. Iurii Vynnychuk has engaged in a similar way with L’viv’s past, producing both postmodern prose and popular historical publications that revive the multiethnic past. The interest in the urban palimpsest of L’viv was paralleled by the works of a group of writers based in Ivano-Frankivs’k, including Andrukhovych again, Taras Prokhas’ko, Iurii Izdryk, and Halyna Petrosaniak, who became known as the “Stanislav phenomenon.” The label referred to the city’s Ukrainian name during the Polish and Austro-Hungarian periods, Stanislav (Polish Stanisławów, German Stanislau, after the seventeenth-century Polish nobleman Stanisław Potocki). The city’s pre-Soviet past was a chief concern of the group, though this was most explicit in the writings of Andrukhovych. See the Bu-Ba-Bu’s anthology of poems and essays: Iurii Andrukhovych, Viktor Neborak, and Olesandr Irvanets’, Bu-Ba-Bu: vybrani tvory, ed. by Vasyl’ Gabor (L’viv: Piramida, 2007), or Andrukhovych’s long essay “Tsentral’no-skhidna reviziia’ in Iurii Andrukhovych and Andzhei Stasiuk [Andrzej Stasiuk],” Moia Ievropa (L’viv: VNTL Klasyka, 2005), pp. 69–127, or his recent collection of essays on cities, Leksykon intimnykh mist (Kyiv: Maister knyh, 2011).
On memory of the deportation of the Chechens and the Hunzib see Gould, “Leaving the House of Memory”; on memory of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars see Rory Finnin, “Forgetting Nothing, Forgetting No One: Boris Chichibabin, Viktor Nekipelov, and the Deportation of the Crimean Tatars,” Modern Language Review, 106.4 (September 2011), 1091–1124.
Buida’s collection of short stories Prusskaia nevesta (Prussian Bride, 1998) and his novel Königsberg (2003) carefully map German traces in Znamensk and Kaliningrad. Another prominent contemporary writer and journalist, Zinovii Zinik, has also tackled the subject of memory of Königsberg in Kaliningrad in his novella Noga moego otsa (My Father’s Leg, 2005). Worth mentioning in this respect also is the Moscow-based writer Igor Klekh, a one-time resident of L’viv, whose stories and essays have brought that city and others in the region, together with the memory of their vanished communities, into Russian literature; Iurii Buida, Prusskaia nevesta (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998) and Königsberg, Novyi mir, 7 (2003); Zinovii Zinik, Noga moego otsa, Ural, 7 (2005); Igor’ Klekh, Migratsii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009), and Intsident s klassikom (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998).
Jurij Andruchowycz [Iurii Andrukhovych], “Tu i tylko tu,” in Ostatnie terytorium. Eseje o Ukrainie (Wołowiec: Czarne, 2002), pp. 13–20 (14). This essay is published only in Polish translation.
Paweł Huelle, Opowiadania na czas przeprowadzki (London: Puls, 1991), p. 29.
Taras Prokhasko, Neprosti (Ivano-Frankivs’k: Lileia NV, 2002), pp. 31–32.
Iurii Andrukhovych, “Letiuchi znaky” in his Dezorientatsii na mistsevosti (Ivano-Frankivs’k: Lileia NV, 2006), pp. 63–64 (p. 64).
Olga Tokarczuk, Dom dzienny, dom nocny (Walbrzych: Ruta, 1998), p. 90. 32. See “Zbieramy pamiątki,” Muzeum II Wojny Ś wiatowej website, http://www.muzeum1939.pl/pl/ekspozycja/zbiory_muzeum/zbieramy_pamiatki (accessed January 30, 2013].
On Ukraine, see Iaroslav Hrytsak, Strasti za natsionalizmom: istorychni esei (Kyiv: Krytyka, 2004); David Marples, Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007). See also Andriy Portnov’s chapter in this volume. On Poland, see Traba, Przeszło ść w tera ź niejszo ś ci; see also Richard S. Esbenshade, “Remembering to Forget: Memory, History and National Identity in Postwar East-Central Europe,” Representations, 49 (1995), 72–96; James Mark, The Unfinished Revolution: Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
Elżbieta Janicka, Festung Warschau (Warsaw: Krytyka Polityczna, 2011).
Olga Sezneva, “Locating Kaliningrad/Königsberg on the Map of Europe: ‘A Russia in Europe’ or ‘a Europe in Russia’?” Cities after the Fall of Communism, pp. 195–215; James Mark, “What Remains? Anti-communism, Forensic Archaeology, and the Retelling of the National Past in Lithuania and Romania,” Past and Present, 206 (2010), 276–300.
In 2007 L’viv saw the opening of a large monument to the wartime nationalist underground leader Stepan Bandera. Bandera is a controversial figure because of the extreme nationalist ideology of his organization, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, and the violence committed against Poles and Jews by its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). See Andriy Portnov in this volume. Symptomatic also is the Prison on Lonts’kyi Street museum, established in 2009 in a former prison that had been used by Austrian, Polish, Nazi, and Soviet authorities. The museum emphasizes the persecution of Ukrainians under the Poles, Nazis and Soviets, but makes almost no mention of Jewish or Polish suffering that took place on the same site. See Uilleam Blacker, “The Prison on Lonts’kyi Street: Memory Dialogue or MemoryMonologue,” Current Politics in Ukraine, January 4, 2013, http://ukraineanalysis.wordpress.com/2013/01/04the -prison-on-lontskyi-street-memory-dialogue-or-memory-monologue (accessed January 14, 2013); Tarik Cyril Amar, “Lonts’koho: pamiat’ pro tiurmu chy uviaznena pamiat?” Zaxid.net, August 3, 2009, http://zaxid.net/home/showSingleNews.do?lontskogo_pamyat_pro_tyurmu_chi _uvyaznena_pamiat&objectId=1083037 (accessed January 23, 2013), and Tarik Cyril Amar, “Different but the Same, or the Same but Different? Public Memory of the Second World War in Post-Soviet Lviv,” Journal of Modern European History, 9 (2011), 373–96.
On Szczecin, see Artur D. Liskowacki, “Szczecin—City with Seaview Potential,” Herito, 5 (2012), 92–109.
See Erica Lehrer, “Bearing False Witness? ‘Vicarious’ Jewish Identity and the Politics of Affinity,” in Imaginary Neighbours: Mediating Polish Jewish Relations after the Holcaust, ed. by Dorota Glowacka and Joanna Zylinska (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), pp. 84–109.
See Żydowski Instytut Historyczny website, http://www.jhi.pl(accessed January 14, 2013).
See Brama Grodzka/Teatr NN website: http://teatrnn.pl (accessed January 23, 2013); Pogranicze Foundation: http://pogranicze.sejny.pl (accessed January 23, 2013).
Joanna B. Michlic, “‘Remembering to Remember,’ ‘Remembering to Benefit,’ ‘Remembering to Forget’: The Variety of Memories of Jews and the Holocaust in Postcommunist Poland,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 113 (January 3, 2012), http://jcpa.org/article/remembering-to-remember -remembering-to-benefit-remembering-to-forget-the-variety-of-memories -of-jews-and-the-holocaust-in-postcommunist-poland (accessed January 14, 2013).
See also Andriy Portnov, “Dnipropetrovs’k. Iak opovisty istoriiu mista bez istorii,” polit.ua, January 30, 2012, http://polit.ua/lectures/2012/01/30 /portnov.html (accessed December 12, 2012).
See Alexander Etkind, “Hard and Soft in Cultural Memory: Political Mourning in Russia and Germany,” Grey Room, 16 (2004), 36–59.
Vasyl’ Rasevych, “Ale lakhn makhn fun mir shpas … ,” Novosti Hadashot, October 10, 2008, http://www.vaadua.org/Hadasot/2008–10/Had11–10-2008 .html (accessed June 28, 2013); (accessed January 23, 2013); Daniel Estrin, “Cheap Eats,” Tablet, February 6, 2012, http://www.tabletmag.com/tag/under-the-golden-rose/ (accessed December 12, 2012).
For more on the commemoration of Schulz from a Polish perspective see Jerzy Jarzębski, Prowincja Centrum: Przypisy do Schulza (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2005). From a Ukrainian perspective see Taras Vozniak, Bruno Shul’ts: Povernennia (L’viv: Ї, 2012).
Marek Krajewski, Śmierć w Breslau (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie, 1999). Krajewski’s more recent novels have turned to prewar Polish Lwów. He consulted Iurii Vynnychuk during his research. For a comparison of postmemory in Vynnychuk and Krajewski see my article “Popular Literature, the City and the Memory of Vanished Others in Poland and Ukraine: The Cases of Marek Krajewski and Iurii Vynnychuk,” Slavonica, 18.1 (April 2012), 37–50.
See www.mo-productions.com/index.html (accessed January 25, 2013).
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, trans. by Assenka Oksiloff (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), p. 194.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2013 Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind, and Julie Fedor
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Blacker, U. (2013). Living among the Ghosts of Others: Urban Postmemory in Eastern Europe. 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_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137322067_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45826-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-32206-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)