ISBN 978-3-11-043763-8
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-045353-9
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-045334-8
ISSN 1613-8961
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2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Cover illustration: Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Prague Tomas Sniegon
www.degruyter.com
Tea Sindbk Andersen and Barbara Trnquist-Plewa
Introduction: Disputed Memories in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe
In April 2007 the world media reported widely on violent riots that had broken out in Tallinn when thousands of people took to the streets in a clash over the decision to move the so-called Bronze soldier from its central location in the Estonian capital. For the Russian population of Estonia, the statue was a symbol of the heroic Soviet soldiers who died in Estonia fighting against Nazi Germany. However, for the majority of ethnic Estonians these Soviet soldiers were new occupiers representing the same Soviet power that had first crushed their independence in 1940 and again in 1945. The controversy over this war memorial as well the high emotions evoked by its removal illustrate well the complexity and specificity of memories in the part of Europe which until the end of the Cold War was generally called Eastern Europe and today is labelled, in more nuanced ways, Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.
The particularity of the experiences of this part of Europe is yet not generally recognized and understood, neither among EU-elites, who in the name of integration want to unify European memory, nor by the broad Western European public, whose understanding of Europes different war and ColdWar experiences are very limited. The German historian Karl Schlgel, one of the few Western historians realizing the dilemma caused by this asymmetry of memories in Europe, has described the complexity and specificity of Eastern European experiences in the following way:
Eastern and central Europe was the principal theatre of the epoch of world wars and revolutions, of the new thirty years war and of the violence linked to it, a degree of violence which was in many respects unprecedented. This region of the continent found itself between the main fronts of the European civil war, between nationalism and communism, between German National Socialism and Soviet communism. It was the principal theatre of the genocide of the European Jews, of systematic social and ethnic cleansing policies; the terrain of deployment of the greatest military machines, and of burnt earth; of forced population movements, of flight; and of a liberation that was to a great extent the replacement of one foreign occupation by another. There is no point on the map of this region, no family, no biography that is not marked by this double experience. This is the central zone of the century of extremes.
are also morally troubling. Categories such as victims, perpetrators, collaborators and bystanders, often used in the Western discourse about World War II, are very difficult to apply in discussing the memories of those from Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Both individuals and national and ethnic groups in this region often shifted their roles with the many, often violent, turns in the history of the century of extremes. The same people who were victims at one stage could become perpetrators at another, and vice versa. The same military formation could be seen as heroes and liberators by one group and as criminals or traitors by another (this is for example the case with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, UPA, see Yurchuk). Until today expressions of moral judgment regarding these kinds of events, such as for example the mass murder of Poles in Volhynia by the UPA in 1943, continue to evoke high emotions and heated debates.
Having to live with such a troubling past, transmitted not only through various media but also via family stories, leads to people becoming personally engaged in the memories, thus contributing to emotional intensity. As a consequence, the past is not a foreign country, memory of it is always there at hand to be used, to be referred to, leading sometimes to an excess of memory, that is, to situations where we can speak of too much memory, when a community is obsessed by the past. to be restored. The power of memory to exacerbate conflicts could be clearly observed during the Balkan wars in 1990s or the conflict between Russia and Ukraine that started 2014.
In order to better understand the developments in contemporary Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, we need to understand the content as well as the complexity of the memories in these societies. Research is needed into questions such as how regional memories are used (or manipulated) today, who the users are and what motivates them. An important contribution to the field was made by the research project Memory at War , Unfortunately, most publications dealing with these topics focus only on one or two countries in the region and there are still too few books that include a broader panorama of the regions memory disputes.
The present book aims to respond to the appeal by Blacker and Etkind for greater engagement by Western memory scholars in the memory landscapes of Eastern Europe.We want to give the readers a broad insight into memory disputes in several Eastern European countries as well as disputes on memories that transcend the borders of these countries. Having a regional focus, our book at the same time has as its ambition to contribute to the overall scholarship in memory studies by presenting cases that approach memory in innovative ways. We take seriously the remark by Blacker and Etkind that this region is a fascinating laboratory in which to study memory in action. Thus several authors of the chapters are keen to analyze memory mediation as a process, paying attention to issues of reception, that is, to reactions to the mediated memories. They also analyze carefully the social context in which the specific memories are mediated (see for example the contributions by Kotljarchuk, Yurchuk, Kaprans, Sindbk Andersen and Pietraszewski and Trnquist-Plewa).
In their studies the authors emphasize the role of emotions in the formation and transmission of memory, an aspect that has long been downplayed in memory studies and has just recently come to the fore. The case studies presented show the dynamics of affect in the interaction between individual and cultural memory (see for example Wylgaa in this book), deal with trauma as mediatized event (see Denti) and they show how culturally mediated, deeply rooted images of the past structure our feelings when we are faced with the need to reinterpret the past (see for example the chapter by Pietraszewski and Trnquist-Plewa).
