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    East European

    Memor Studies -CONTENTS

    1

    OP-ED:

    GHOSTS OF THEPAST

    Aleida Assmann

    6

    DIARY OF

    FORTHCOMING

    EVENTS

    7

    CALL FOR PAPERS:

    GULAG UNBOUND

    Cambridge 29-30 June

    8

    RECENT EVENTS:

    GERMAN

    VICTIMHOOD IN

    CONTEMPORARY

    EUROPE

    James Koranyi

    10

    STUDYING MEMORY

    IN THE POLISH-

    RUSSIAN-

    UKRAINIAN

    TRIANGLE: SOME

    OBSERVATIONS

    Andrii Portnov

    EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 1EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 8 DECEMBER 2011

    GHOSTS OF THE PAST

    Aleida Assmann

    Let me start with a rather simple

    distinction between spirits and

    ghosts. Spirits are conjured up,

    they are called up; ghosts intrude,

    they come without bidding, they

    haunt us. How spirits are conjured

    up is described in an ironic way in a

    dialogue in Shakespeares Henry IV

    (III, I, 52 55), where Owen

    Glendower, the magician, boasts: I

    can call spirits from the vastlydeep. To which Hotspur dryly

    replies: Why, so can I, or so can

    any man; But will they come when

    you do call for them?

    Ghosts, on the other hand,

    represent something that returns

    from the past or the realm of the

    dead on its own will. This return is

    the symptom of a deep crisis; it is

    felt as a violent and threatening

    interruption of the present.

    Something that had been deemed

    overcome and gone reappears to

    announce some unfinished business

    that needs to be addressed. The

    paradigmatic case is of course the

    ghost of Hamlets father appearing

    on the battlements of Elsinore castle

    or Banquos ghost at the feast of

    K i n g a n d L a d y M a c b e t h .

    Shakespeare was clearly interested in

    both manifestations of invisible anduncanny beings, in spirits as well as

    ghosts.

    Spirits and ghosts show a close

    s i m i l a r i t y t o t w o f o r m s o f

    remembering: conscious recall on

    the one hand and non-conscious,

    involuntary and even counter-

    voluntary summons on the other. I

    will start from this hint and examine

    more closely the connection between

    spirits, ghosts and memory together

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    with its contexts, media and mechanisms. In the

    second part of my paper I will focus on photography

    as a carrier of an unknown, uncanny, traumatic past

    that confronts the present with something that refuses

    to simply vanish or disappear.

    There is an obvious connection between violence,

    trauma and ghosting, a proof of which is the strong

    interest that arises in spirits and ghosts after wars and

    battles. Wherever there is a sudden and alarming rise

    in the population of the dead, the living try to

    establish some form of contact across the borderline

    between the world of the living and the dead. After

    the Great War, many individuals tested their own

    spiritual powers or relied on persons who acted as a

    medium to establish some form of communicationwith family members that had recently fallen in

    battle. The American poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) for

    instance took an active part in such spiritistic sessions;

    her poetry is tinged with this metaphysical quality of

    reaching out to former epochs. The art historian Aby

    Warburg believed in mnemic waves that emanate

    from a distant past and could be received by those

    who were endowed with a seismographic sensibility.

    Ruth Klger: Still Alive. Exorcising the Dead

    In her Holocaust memoir, Ruth Klger refers to two

    family members that haunt her memory.2 Her father

    and her brother were murdered in the Holocaust.

    Without a grave, the work of mourning cannot

    come to an end, she writes. Only many years later, in

    her research and reconstruction of the events, Klger

    finally found out some details about the last transport

    of her family members. What makes their memory sotroubling is not only the uncertainty about the

    circumstances of their death but also the fact that

    they could not take leave from one another in peace.

    Memory for her is a trap and a prison of sorts, too:

    you cant shake or alter the images engraved

    there. (34) She is therefore compelled to keep up a

    long and painful dialogue with her father that

    revolves around the trivial events of their last hours

    together. She deploys the only real power that she has

    at her disposition which is the power of words. My

    father, she writes, has become an unredeemed

    ghost. I wish I could write ghost stories. (34) Her

    problem is aggravated by the fact that as a Jewish

    woman she is not entitled to the ritual outfit with

    which male Jews are provided in the Jewish tradition.

    According to the patriarchal rules, the prayer for the

    dead, the Kaddish, is not to be recited by a female

    voice. Klger describes the memorial sites of the

    death camps as a kind of bargain that the living offer

    to the ghosts of the dead. However, she trusts words

    more than places. In the concentration camp Gro

    Rosen, she composed poems to shield herself from

    the ultimate terror with the help of words, sounds,

    rhymes and meter. As a child, she made use of

    regular patterns to create a counterpoint against

    chaos a poetical and therapeutic attempt to

    confront the abyss of destruction with rhyme and

    structure, which is perhaps the most archaic functionof art.

    Klger meditates on this strong bond between

    aesthetics and magic, art and ritual in playful words:

    Remembering is a branch of witchcraft; its tool is

    incantation. To conjure up the dead you have to

    dangle the bait of the present before them, the flesh

    of the living, to coax them out of their inertia.

    This passage blurs the difference between ghosts and

    spirits. The passive memory, the pain of being

    haunted is answered by an active effort, a self-made

    ritual.

    Bert Hellinger: Addressing the Dead in

    Psychotherapy

    In the 1990s a new form of therapy was invented that

    claimed to be able to externalize and change deeply

    concealed memories. Used all over the world, thistherapy is called Aufstellung (this German word

    contains semantic elements of putting up,

    staging, summoning and mobilizing). The

    concept goes back to Bert Hellinger, a Catholic priest

    who worked in South Africa. In a room filled with

    other therapists who witness the process, the client is

    asked to stage his/her family by picking individual

    persons from the audience. The stage on which this is

    performed is an externalization of the psyche and

    mirrors a family constellation that includes both living

    and dead members.

    EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 8 DECEMBER 2011

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    Hellinger thus transformed

    therapy from a synchronous to a

    diachronic model, reckoning with

    pressures emanating from absent

    and dead family members which

    may or may not have been known

    to the client. Staging the

    constellation creates an imaginary

    space in which such forms of

    impact can be identified and

    answered by symbolic action.

    We may detect an interesting

    parallel in the change of a

    therapeutic model on the onehand and the new literary genre

    of German family novels on the

    other. Like the family novels, the

    family staging comprises a

    transindividual time span of three

    (and sometimes more) generations

    which are interlocked in an

    interactive field. It is often what

    is transmitted only indirectly and

    unconsciously that shapes the

    intra-familial relations across the

    generations.

    The therapeutic model of family

    staging is thus based on a trans-

    individual concept of identity that

    privileges long-term generational

    integration over separation and

    confrontation. Individuals do notgive up their sense of distinction,

    but they accept family influences

    as part of their identity. This

    c h a n g e , f r o m i n d i v i d u a l

    autonomy to a more integrated

    view on family and history, may

    have its source in the post-

    traumatic situation. It directs us

    not only to the future but also

    toward the past, and it teaches us

    to listen to the voices of ghosts.

    We cannot open ourselves to the

    future without having listened to

    the voices of the past and having

    appeased the claims of the ghosts.

    Photographs and Ghosts

    A photograph makes two distinct

    statements: This was once there

    and this is no longer here.

    Though both messages are clearly

    related, they refer to two rather

    different functions. The first one

    is the documentary function of

    providing accurate evidence of an

    otherwise inaccessible past. The

    second one is the memorial

    function of providing an affectivematerial trace of something that

    is absent or lost. I am concerned

    here mainly with the second

    function in which a moment is

    rescued from time, to be

    transformed into a lasting

    monument that remains the

    object of continued attention and

    meditation. In the theoretical

    writings on photography, its close

    relationship to death has been

    frequently emphasized. Roland

    Barthes wrote that the moment of

    shooting the photo is itself

    conceived as a shock that

    p r o d u c e s a n e f f e c t o f

    mortification: it mutes and fixates

    vibrant and bustling life, freezing

    a moment and simulating a formof eternity. Marianne Hirsch has

    opened up a new approach to the

    m e m o r i a l f u n c t i o n o f

    photography by investigating the

    context of traumatic family

    memory. In her book Family

    Frames, she has focused on

    photographs as stand-ins for dead

    family members, and in particular

    for those whose death is shrouded

    in trauma. Such memory icons

    assume the character of a fetish,

    which means that the object itself

    becomes the last piece of

    evidence that this person had ever

    existed. In these cases, the

    memorial function re-affirms the

    documentary function of the

    p h o t o . T h e s e f o r m s o f

    transmission and tradition

    prolong an embodied memory

    beyond the limits of experiential

    memory, extending it to the

    second generation that has no

    empirical knowledge of the

    persons involved. To emphasize

    the importance of family photos

    as transitional objects ormissing links that connect

    f a m i l y m e m b e r s a c r o s s

    generations, Hirsch has coined

    the term postmemory.3

    In their primary memorial use,

    photos act as external props for

    an embodied memory; in their

    secondary use, as postmemory,

    the phot o is not onl y an

    externalized memory but an

    object that is re-embo died

    t h r o u g h c o n s c i o u s a n d

    u n c o n s c i o u s f o r m s o f

    transmission. It becomes therefore

    a medium of memory, a

    memento, not only for those who

    maintain an embodied memory

    of the past but also for those whohave acquired this memory via

    narratives or mute gestures in a

    shared living context. If the photo

    is the only relict of a family

    member who died a violent death,

    this material object gains the

    additional value of a sacred aura.

    In this case, the photo itself

    becomes the replacement of the

    missing person, and assumes a

    ghostly presence.

    EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 7 NOVEMBER 2011EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 8 DECEMBER 2011

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    H.-U. Treichel:

    Der Verlorene

    The novel by Hans Ulrich

    Treichel, Der Verlorene (The Lost

    One), deals with the life of a

    German refugee family after theSecond World War in the 1950s.4

    It is told from the point of view of

    a boy born after the war whose

    brother was lost when the family

    was fleeing from Poland. The

    novel begins with the description

    of a photo-album which shows a

    picture of the lost elder brother.

    The younger brother is barely

    visible. The photo-album belongs

    to the material items that Anne

    Fuchs has classified as memory

    icons, rightly emphasizing their

    central importance in recent

    family novels.5 In Treichels novel,

    this memory icon inverts the

    order of the real: the absent son is

    highlighted in the center where he

    has an overwhelming presence,while the present son is (almost)

    absent from the photos. This

    inverted relationship accurately

    represents the way in which both

    brothers figure in the family

    consciousness and memory; the

    lost one holds a central place in

    the familial mourning, affection

    and longing, while the one who is

    actually there is disregarded,

    almost invisible. The photo

    assumes a presence in itself, it

    becomes an idol, a family fetish

    that deprives the younger brother

    of a life of his own, leaving him

    with a diminished or ghostly

    presence.

    The novel ends with a meeting inwhich the mother, who is stuck in

    the past, fails to recognize her

    former child in the grown-up boy.

    The son, on the contrary, is struck

    by a shock of recognition; he is

    suddenly confronted with his

    doppelganger, his ghostly other.

    The melancholy search for the

    lost son is ended at the verymoment when their paths have

    finally crossed. Memory and the

    present, ghosts of the past and

    reality, Treichel seems to suggest,

    cannot come together.

    C h r i s t i a n B o l t a n s k i :

    Photographs asMemento Mori

    Christian Boltanski does not

    concern h imse l f wi th the

    d o c u m e n t a r y s t a t u s o f

    photographs, nor does he engage

    in memorial projects. Instead, he

    makes us sharply aware of the

    futility of collective and cultural

    m e m o r i a l p r a c t i c e s a n d

    i n s t i t u t i o n s . T h e a c t s o f

    remembering, documenting and

    archiving are meticulously

    brought to the fore, but what they

    expose is less remembering than

    forgetting. Boltanski exposes

    photographs as ghostly remnants

    and revenants, devoid of a

    cultural or familial frame of

    remembering which are thenecessary prerequisites of both

    memory and postmemory. In his

    art, Boltanski introduces a third

    function of photography, on top

    o f the documentary and

    memorial, which I call the

    memento mori function.

    Boltanski works primarily withphotographs from the private or

    family sphere, whether amateur

    shots or studio prints. His

    obsessive interest focuses on

    human faces; each photo stands

    for an individual life. Within

    Western culture the photograph is

    celebrated as a cultural practice

    that is able to rescue the

    ephemeral indiv idual i ty of

    humans from the clutches of

    death. It is this myth that

    Boltanski explodes. He often

    reworks and enlarges the original

    photos in such a way that their

    documentary value gets lost; the

    per sons are le s s and le s s

    recognizab le . Noth ingness

    shimmers through the amorphousblack and white grains; faces that

    can neither be identified nor

    recognized are transformed into

    ghostly apparitions. As we saw in

    the case of postmemory, the

    memor ia l d imens ion o f

    photographs depends on their

    being embedded in a socio-

    communicative frame. Without

    such a family frame, photos cease

    to be props of memory. When

    they turn up at flea markets after

    the dissolution of a household or

    an estate, they provide evidence

    for only one thing: that the family

    memory, which had once framed

    and supported these photographs,

    has been dissolved. In other

    words: the document of memorybecomes a monument o f

    forgetting. Boltanski shows that

    material perseverance in itself

    EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 7 NOVEMBER 2011EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 8 DECEMBER 2011

    image: www.museumsjournal.de

    http://www.museumsjournal.de/http://www.museumsjournal.de/http://www.museumsjournal.de/
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    cannot secure the memorial

    function of the photo.

    Boltanskis artistic use and

    recycling of family and portrait

    photographs emphasizes the

    e r o s i o n b o t h o f t h e i r

    documentary and memorial

    functions. What he highlights

    instead is their memento mori

    function. He describes himself

    very much like W. G. Sebald as

    a thoroughly melancholy artist.

    Like Treichels narrator, he sees

    those photographed as eaten

    away by time, as future dead. Hecollects and stages photographs

    which have irreversibly fallen out

    of the frames of family memory

    and are recurring as ghosts,

    flooding cultural memory.

    According to Zygmunt Bauman,

    until recently, the project of

    culture was to transform the

    transient into the permanent.

    However, the conditions for such

    transubstantiation seem to be in

    decl ine, despite the ever-

    expanding capacity for storage.

    Bauman speaks of the present as

    a liquid modernity, where the

    desire for stability and memory

    flows into nothingness. Boltanski

    has located his art on exactly thisthreshold.

    It is a matter for wonder: a

    moment, now here and then

    gone, nothing before it came,

    again nothing after it has gone,

    returns as a ghost and disturbs the

    peace of a later moment.6

    Nietzsches motto sums up thevarious forms of ghosting. We

    have seen how images return

    from the past, from the dead,

    from the forgotten, from the

    unconscious, to assume a ghostly

    presence and haunt the quiet of a

    later moment. Ruth Klger

    developed verbal magic to

    exorcise her ghosts while a new

    form of family therapy mixes pre-

    and post-modern rituals to

    address the ghosts. In the context

    of postmemory, photographs

    assume a ghostly presence, be

    they fetishised as in Treichels

    novel or thinned out as in

    Boltanskis installations.

    1Ruth Kluger, Still Alive. A Holocaust

    Girlhood Remembered, New York:Feminist Press, 2001.2 Marianne Hirsch,Family Frames.

    Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory,Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP,1997, 22.3 Hans-Ulrich Treichel,Der Verlorene,Frankfurt a M: Suhrkamp, 1998.4Anne Fuchs, Fr eine Archotopikder Erinnerung: eine Relekre vonHorst Bieneks Gleiwitz-Tetralogie imKontext der Debatte um Flucht undVertreibung, in D Lorenz & ISpoerk (eds),Konzept Osteuropa. Der

    Osten als Konstrukt der Fremd- undEigenbestimmung in deutschsprachigenTexten des 19. und 20.

    Jahrhunderts.Wuerzburg:Koenigshausen und Neumann,

    225-240.5 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Usesand Disadvantages of History forLife, in Daniel Breazeale (ed),Untimely Meditations, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1997,60. Werke in Drei Bnden, Bd,1,Mnchen: Hanser 1962, 211.

    INVESTOR NEWSLETTER ISSUE N3 FALL 2009EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 7 NOVEMBER 2011EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 8 DECEMBER 2011

    image: 2.bp.blogspot.com

    image: www.terminartors.com

    http://www.terminartors.com/http://www.terminartors.com/http://www.terminartors.com/https://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).htmlhttps://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).htmlhttps://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).htmlhttps://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).htmlhttps://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).htmlhttps://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).htmlhttps://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).htmlhttps://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).htmlhttps://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).htmlhttps://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/researchoutput/fur-eine-archaotopik-der-erinnerung(8c0f27bf-f35d-4227-a731-5d78719684cd).html
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    Events in Cambridge

    EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY

    STUDIES RESEARCH

    GROUP SEMINAR

    CRASSH, Cambridge. All seminars

    begin at 5:00pm.

    18 January: Peter Rodgers

    (University of Sheffield), How

    Many Ukraines? Understanding

    Regionalism and the Politics of

    National Identity in Post-Soviet

    Ukraine

    1 February: Julie Fedor

    (University of Cambridge), The

    Tandems Anti-Soviet Turn: New

    Memory Projects in Contemporary

    R u s s i a a n d T a t i a n a

    Zhurzhenko (Univers ity of

    Vienna) , Nat iona l i s ing the

    Common Vic tory in theUkrainian-Russian Borderlands:

    Political Uses of WWII Memory in

    Kharkiv and Belgorod

    15 February: Gernot

    H o w a n i t z ( U n i v e r s i t y o f

    Salzburg), Re-Playing the Stalinist

    Past and Galina Nikiporets-

    T a k i g a w a ( U n i v e r s i t y o f

    E d i n b u r g h / U n i v e r s i t y o f Cambridge), The Manezhka Affair

    and the First Steps of Russian

    Mnemonics

    29 February: Nelly Bekus

    (University of Warsaw), Memory

    and Forgetting in Two Post-Soviet

    Capitals: Minsk and Astana and

    Anna Krylova (Duke University),

    N e i t h e r E r a s e d n o r

    R e m e m b e r e d : A c a d e m i c

    Metaphors and Interpretive

    Challenges of Soviet Post-War

    Literature and Memoirs

    14 March: Katarzyna

    Zechenter (SSEES, UCL),

    Memory and Postmemory in Polish

    Jewish Fiction and Andrei Zorin

    (University of Oxford), Lydia

    Ginsburg on the Leningrad

    B l o c k a d e : M e c h a n i s m s o f

    Forgetting and Repression

    MAKING SENSE

    OF CATASTROPHE:Postcolonial Approaches to

    Postsocialist Experiences

    24 & 25 February 2012,

    Cambridge

    co-organised with Passau University

    The programme is currently being

    finalised and will be available on our

    website soon.

    THE GULAG UNBOUND:

    Remembering Soviet Forced

    Labour

    29 & 30 June 2012, Cambridge

    co-organised with University of

    Reading

    For CFP, please seepage 7.

    Even ts at MAW Par tner

    Institutions

    Tartu

    CONFERENCE:

    Hard Memory, Soft Security:

    Competing Securitisation of

    the Legacy of Communism in

    Eastern Europe

    9 - 10 December 2011

    For the programme, please see our

    website.

    This event will be broadcast live at

    http://uttv.ee/esileht

    EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 7 NOVEMBER 2011

    DIARY OF FORTHCOMING EVENTS

    EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 8 DECEMBER 2011

    image: shutterstock.com

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    The history of the Gulag isconventionally understood as astory of enormous injustice andheroic endurance. This story isbound to the compell ingnarrative of suffering of the

    i n t e l l e c t u a l i n t h e G u l a g ,exemplified by the classic accountsof its highly literate survivors ormourners of its victims. Untilrecently, these narratives had beenthe principal prisms through whichwe saw the Soviet forced labour.The narrative of intellectualmartyrdom was powerful, and itsgreat moral prestige fuelledopposition to the Soviet system.Since the 1990s, the state archives

    of the Gulag have gradually beenmade available to scholars and thisflood of documents must beweighed against the memoirs ofsurvivors. The enormous papertrail generated by the securityapparatus and its massive penalbureaucracy now challengeshistorians to consider the Gulagt h r o u g h t h e e y e s o f t h eperpetrators, those who imagined,built, and maintained the forcedlabour camps. How can we

    evaluate the factual validity,bureaucrat i c r i va l r i e s , andideological aims that underpinthese documents? How far can wetrust the archival documents of themanagers of the Gulag? With theissue of trust coming to theforefront of empirical research,moral and philosophical problemsof interpret ative judge mentbecome more pertinent than ever.

    The new bodies of source materialcompel us to reassess traditionalnarratives of Stalinist violence, and

    we are confronted with almostunbearable choices. How far shouldhistorians attempt to reconcilethe diverging picture of the Gulagfound in survivor memoirs and inofficial documents? How do we

    e v a l u a t e t h e e c o n o m i cconsequences of Gulag activity?What moral and philosophicalproblems arise when we compareSoviet camps to those organized bythe Nazi regime or CommunistChina? What is the place for theexperience and testimony of Gulagemployees and criminal prisoners?How far does the new materiala v a i l a b l e t o u s c h a l l e n g ecommemorative practices? What

    do the politics of memory in Russiaand other post-Soviet states teachus about history of the Gulag, andhistory as a discipline? Is thereanything to learn from comparisonwith other penal-colonial systemssuch as transportation to Australia?Is the paradigm of inter nalcolonization and the broadercontext of postcolonial studiesproductive for understanding andremembering the Gulag?

    Means of the resistance, sabotage,and subversion in the Gulag ando t h e r S o v i e t c o r r e c t i v einstitutions need more research.While colonial anthropology hasdeveloped sophisticated means ofidentifying weapons of the weak,Gulag historiography is onlybeginning to apply such analysis tothe archived documentation of thecamps. Like any long-term system

    of life management, the Gulagdeveloped its ways of healing,entertaining, and educating itspopulation. Inmates responded to

    their particular condition bydeveloping equally specific meansof artistic creativity, religious ritual,and erotic behaviour. Theseaesthetic, medical, religious, andpedagogical aspects of the life in

    the Gulag need to be discussed inconjunction or counterpoint with its archival history. Thepurpose of this symposium is toreflect on the challenges currentlyconfronting history, cultural studies,anthropology, and other disciplineswho work with these unbound documentary, memoiristic, andfolklore archives of the Gulag.

    We invite papers examining thesethemes to be presented at aworkshop to be held at CambridgeUniversity, 29-30 June 2012. The

    w o r k s ho p i s o r g an i ze d b yAlexander Etkind of CambridgeUniversity and Dan Healey ofReading University, with supportfrom both insti tutions. Ourconfirmed keynote speaker isProfessor Lynne Viola, Universityof Toronto, author of The UnknownGulag: The Lost World of Stalins

    Special Settlements (Oxford & NewYork: OUP, 2007). Limitedfinancial assistance for participantsmay be available. Papers should beoriginal unpublished work, and willbe pre-circulated to workshopparticipants. To propose a paper,please send a 300-word abstractand 2-page CV to Jill Gather,M e m o r y a t W a r P r o j e c t ,[email protected], by Friday,24 February 2012.

    CALL FOR PAPERSTHE GULAG UNBOUND:

    REMEMBERING SOVIET FORCED LABOUR

    Cambridge, 29-30 June 2012

    INVESTOR NEWSLETTER ISSUE N3 FALL 2009EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 8 DECEMBER 2011

    Dan Healey Alexander Etkind

    mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]
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    At the Heimattag der Siebenbrger Sachsen (Homeland

    Day of Transylvanian Saxons) in 2005, the

    commissioner for the Federal Republic of Germany

    for Issues concerning German Resettlers and

    National Minorities (Beauftragter der Bundesregierung fr

    Aussiedlerfragen und nationale Minderheiten), Hans-Peter

    Kemper, explained his understanding of Germanvictimhood in contemporary Europe. Referencing the

    motto of the Heimattag of Overcoming lows,

    building bridges (Tiefen berstehen, Brcken bauen), he

    viewed the construction of German memories as a

    challenging and arduous task in light of flight,

    expulsion, emigration and integration in the twenty-

    first century. As such, Transylvanian Saxons,

    Romanian Germans, and ethnic Germans from east-

    central Europe ought to regard their role in Europe

    as a living link between the two continents (ein

    lebendiges Bindeglied zwischen den Kontinenten).

    Yet the difficulties of placing German memories of

    victimhood have hardly been surmounted with such

    ease. On 2 November 2011, the Memory at War

    series opened up to the topic of German victimhood.

    Professor Bill Niven from Nottingham Trent

    University and Dr James Koranyi from the

    University of St Andrews presented their papers oncontemporary memories of German victimhood in

    Germany and south-eastern Europe.

    James Koranyis paper entitled Romania, Serbia,

    and Contemporary Memories of German Victims

    compared the different legacies of ethnic Germans in

    Romania and Serbia. In it, he traced the

    development of Romanian German victim stories

    from parochial and marginal in both (West) Germany

    and Romania to a transnational success story. While

    Romanian German discourses during the late ColdWar period were concerned with recognition in West

    Germany, the post-communist period ushered in

    attempts to transform the standing of these memories

    into one of the central issues for German and

    Romanian society. These attempts were highly

    successful. They allowed Romanian Germans to

    reaffirm existing cultural hierarchies that marked out

    Romanian society as untrustworthy and in need of

    critically assessing its role in the disappearance of

    Germans from Romania.

    In the context of Romanias EU accession, this

    serve d, too, as a war ning of Roma nias

    RECENT EVENTS

    James Koranyi and Bill Niven on

    GERMAN VICTIMHOOD IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE

    EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 7 NOVEMBER 2011EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 8 DECEMBER 2011

    James Koranyi Bill Niven

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    unpreparedness to join the West.

    In the meantime, however,

    German victim stories have

    become a valuable currency in

    Romanian society. The public

    engagement with the Saxon and

    Swabian heritage and the

    memories of German victimhood

    has provided a useful way for

    Romanian politicians and public

    figures to demonstrate their

    deserved inclusion into the West,

    i.e. in the EU and NATO.

    Furthermore, this public coming-

    to-terms-with-past v is--v is

    German victims has been used as

    a way of ignoring other difficultpasts, such as the Holocaust in

    Romania, the quest ion of

    complicity during communism, or

    the pressing issue of Gypsies in

    Romanian society in past and

    present.

    In Serbia, by contrast, these

    processes have been rather

    different. The last three decades

    have been marked by thedisintegration of Yugoslavia, civil

    war, sanctions, international

    ostracisation and a NATO

    bombing campaign in 1999. It

    has made little sense to reassess

    the role of German victims in

    Yugoslavia/Serbia a society that

    has undergone a distinct inward

    turn since the 1980s. Instead, the

    anti-fascist narrative concerningWorld War Two has remained

    strong and still governs the way in

    which the 1930s and 1940s are

    remembered.

    The commemorative topography

    of cities such as Novi Sad bears

    witness to that. Yet, this may be a

    good thing: The absence of any

    real engagement with difficult

    victims such as Germans orHungarians has also meant more

    commemorative space for the

    Yugoslav civil wars. In this way,

    the open-air exhibition Missing

    Lives in Belgrade in 2010 can be

    seen as an opening for debates

    s u r r o u n d i n g t h e e n d o f

    Yugoslavia in Serbia.

    Bill Nivens talk was concernedwith the complexity of museum

    exhibitions in portraying flight

    and expulsion and its relationship

    with the Holocaust. He presented

    a plethora of case studies

    searching for a good template for

    combining the two issues. Yet as

    his paper demonstrated, the

    politics of memory surrounding

    these two topics have made thepublic depiction of this in

    m u s e u m s a l l t h e m o r e

    challenging. Depicting the

    Holocaust alongside stories of

    German victimhood has led to

    accusations of relativism. The

    absence of the Holocaust in

    e x h i b i t i o n s o n G e r m a n

    victimhood, on the other hand,

    has been regarded as a sleight of

    hand for ignoring the context ofthese expulsions. In its exhibition

    Flucht, Vertreibung, Integration (Flight,

    Expulsion, Integration), the German

    Historical Museum (Deut sche s

    Historisches Museum) attempted to

    solve this dilemma by containing

    images of the Holocaust and

    World War Two (i.e. of German

    crimes) in a tunnel situated at the

    entrance to the exhibition.

    One can interpret this in several

    ways: It provides a context while

    refusing to establish a hard

    causality between the two issues

    ( H o l o c a u s t a n d G e r m a n

    expulsion). The Holocaust does

    not sit alongside the narrative of

    German victimhood, thereby

    a v o i d i n g a c c u s a t i o n s o f

    relativism, but it is also notabsent. Whether this i s a

    meaningful way of addressing

    German victimhood in museum

    remains open. A noticeable

    difference in museum exhibitions

    exists between the expelled ethnic

    Germans from Poland, Lithuania,

    Russia and the Czech Republic

    on the one hand, and Danube

    Swabians from south-eastern

    Europe on the other. While the

    former groups museums tend to

    end their stories with flight and

    expulsion, the Danube Swabians

    depict life and society in their

    former homelands beyond the

    end of their community in those

    regions. It is this acknowledgment

    of continuity that may be a

    va luable way of embeddingG e r m a n m e m o r i e s i n a

    transnational context.

    German victimhood has been

    back on the agenda in Germany

    since the late 1990s. More recent

    developments, however, point to a

    widening debate on where these

    memories can be placed in a

    European topography of memory.

    While German society has beenconfronted with the intricacy of

    these memories for a longer

    period of time (some might say

    since the inception of the Federal

    Republic of Germany), it is the

    very places where these contested

    periods occurred that are now

    encountering the impact of these

    legacies. In a web of expulsion,

    counter-expulsion, resettlement,migration, war and ideology,

    these memories are not merely

    fascinating case studies for

    scholars but challenging stories in

    European societies.

    James Koranyi

    INVESTOR NEWSLETTER ISSUE N3 FALL 2009EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 7 NOVEMBER 2011EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 8 DECEMBER 2011

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    Andrii Portnov is a Research Fellow

    at the Ivan Krypiakevych Institute for

    Ukrainian Studies, and Editor-in-Chief

    of Historians.in.ua web site. In March

    2011, he was a Memory at War visiting

    fellow in Cambridge.

    The field of memory studies is not

    only fashionable and exciting, but

    also carries a high level ofresponsibility, given how closely and

    inevitably it is intertwined with

    politics. Sometimes it is claimed

    that memory studies should be a

    separate discipline with its own

    methodology, but I see it rather as

    an interdiscipl inary field of

    research. In this article, I set out to

    identify and challenge some

    c o m m o n m i s c o n c e p t i o n s

    characteristic of East European

    memory studies, before going on to

    sketch out a future research agenda

    for the field.

    There are numerous stereotypes

    and common places in thinking

    about the politics of memory in

    post-Soviet Ukraine, Russia and

    Belarus as well as post-communist

    Poland. The first quite common

    m i s l e a d i n g t e n d e n c y i s

    rationalization, whereby the state

    politics of history in these countries

    is presented as the result of a

    conscious strategic decision by the

    elites. I would rather agree with

    Ilya Kalinin that to portray Putins

    authoritarianism as a re-mastering

    of the Soviet system and a return

    to Soviet symbols would be to

    attribute integrity to something that

    i s i n f a c t d i s j o i n t e d a n d

    fragmentary , and to inves t

    ideological meaning into something

    that is rather a political technology.

    The same could be said about

    Belarus and Ukraine. In the

    Be larus ian case , de scr ib ing

    President Lukashenkas policies as

    re-Sovietization explains very

    little, even if we keep in mind the

    shift in Lukashenkas official

    speeches from the Victory of the

    Soviet people in the Great Patriotic

    War to the Victory of the

    B e l a r u s i an p e o p l e . In the

    Ukrainian case we should be very

    caut ious in at tr ibut ing any

    conscious strategy to the history

    politics conducted by Kuchma,

    Yushchenko or Yanukovych. Quite

    often (if not on a regular basis) this

    p o l i t i c s h a s b e e n h i g h l y

    s p o n t a n e o u s , i n t e r n a l l y

    contradictory, and situational. I

    would even argue that Kuchma

    tried to follow his intuition by

    a v o i d i n g a n y p o t e n t i a l l y

    dangerous issues and tended to

    accept different variations of

    memory among different parts of

    Ukrainian society. Yuschenkos

    politics, especially in the last years

    of his presidency, were highly

    determined by his deep personal

    involvement in the memory of

    certain historical events, first and

    f o r e m o s t , o f t h e 1 9 3 2 - 3 3

    Holodomor. But personal feelings

    or deep emotional connections, onthe one hand, and consistent and

    coherent strategies, on the other,

    are very different things.

    The second common trend is the

    essentialization of certain explanatory

    formulas, usually promoted and

    constantly supported by the mass

    media. The best example here is

    the notion of two Ukraines,

    suggesting a country that is deeply

    divided along not just linguistic, but

    civilizational lines. This image of

    two homogeneous conflicting

    groups within Ukrainian society

    overshadows a wide range of

    genuinely interes t ing social

    phenomena. The latter include the

    dynamics of identity formation and

    identity debate in post-Soviet

    Ukraine; the emerging civic

    (political) Ukrainian identity; the

    villagecity difference in terms of

    language practices ; the rich

    diversity of political and cultural

    attitudes within the Russian-

    INVESTOR NEWSLETTER ISSUE N3 FALL 2009

    STUDYING MEMORY

    IN THE POLISH-RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN TRIANGLE:

    SOME OBSERVATIONS

    Andrii V. Portnov

    EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 7 NOVEMBER 2011EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 8 DECEMBER 2011

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    speaking group (quite often wrongly described simply

    as Russian); and the variety of local memories within

    the proposed general notions of East and West

    Ukraine. Last but not least, such an approach would

    enable serious analysis of the regional dimensions of

    memory in Ukraine, rather than the usual method of

    ascribing some features of Lviv to West Ukraine andof Donetsk to the East.

    The third tendency is what I will call here the de-

    contextualization of description. As Timothy Snyder

    rightly stress in his Bloodlands, any account of events in

    inter-war or present-day Eastern Europe that is based

    solely on attention to one single group is bound to fail.

    Omer Bartovs book, Erased. Vanishing Traces of Jewish

    Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, can serve as an illustration

    of this point.2 Bartov, an acknowledged specialist on the

    Holocaust, has written a book on a very important issue,

    in which he offers up a disturbing picture of the

    continuity in rejecting and destroying the traces of

    Jewish Galicia in Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine.

    Bartovs account is highly emotional, but it fails to

    identify any dynamics of memory; it proposes no

    comparison of Galicia with the rest of Ukraine; it shows

    no particular knowledge of local history, or attention to

    Polish places of memory. For the American or Israeli

    reader Bartovs book will be excellent proof of the

    stereotypes of Ukrainian anti-Semitism. When we

    decided to discuss Bartovs book in Ukraina Moderna it

    proved difficult indeed to criticize this publicationwithout neglecting or relativizing the fundamental

    importance of the issues raised in his book.3

    Thinking about the prospects for memory studies in the

    Polish-Russian-Ukrainian triangle, I would highlight a

    number of possible directions for future research.

    First, there is a crucial and urgent need for the collection

    of empirical data, the preparation of maps of memory sites,

    and continuation of the research started by German

    scholars who have collected information on Holodomormemorials in Ukraine.4

    Next, we need serious research into attitudes and perceptions.

    Even when we know what monuments or what state

    holidays are in existence, we usually know very little how

    they are perceived by real people. The issue of

    invisible monuments is of crucial importance here, as

    are the analysis of public opinion, oral history projects,

    and analysis of the memory wars on the internet and in

    the printed media.

    Another task is the cataloguing of sites of forgetting: of the

    football stadiums built on top of cemeteries; sites of

    atrocities and persecution now converted into parks; and

    even luxury hotels built at former Nazi concentration

    camps for Soviet prisoners-of-war (eg the case of Lviv

    Citadel).5

    We need a wide variety of comparative and interactive studies,

    or Bezieungsgeschichte, to use the German term. We need

    to ask: why does public debate comparable to the Polish

    controversy over Jan Tomasz Grosss Neighbours seem to

    be impossible in Belarus and Ukraine? Why is the

    Ukrainian Institute for National Memory so different

    from its Polish or Lithuanian counterparts? We should

    keep in mind the fact that the actors in such interactions

    are usually not equal, and that the interaction itself is

    usually assymetrical. Other potentially fascinating topicshere might include a comparison of Polish and Russian

    policies towards Ukraine; a closer look at Polish and

    Ukrainian media discourse on the Volhynian events of

    1943; or analysis of the ways in which Russian officials

    have adapted the Katyn story for internal and external

    use.

    Critical attention must be paid to the phenomena of

    Soviet politics and its long-lasting impact. We need to analyze

    the Soviet politics of history in order to understand, for

    example, why the city of Dnipropetrovsk has two verydifferent memorials dedicated to the same historical

    event the mass shooting of the Jews; or why the de-

    Sovietization of East Galician urban landscapes has

    itself so often involved the revival or reconstitution of

    Soviet aesthetics (see eg the new Stepan Bandera

    monuments); or how the Soviet literary canon has

    influenced the promotion of Ukrainian or Belarusian

    literature and culture after the collapse of the Soviet

    Union. Attempts at the re-construction or selective re-

    writing of Soviet symbols are of special interest here;

    consider, for example, the creation of the Stalin Linepark near Minsk, or the reconceptualization of the

    1918-21 Civil War in current Russian movies.

    INVESTOR NEWSLETTER ISSUE N3 FALL 2009EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 7 NOVEMBER 2011EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 8 DECEMBER 2011

    Lviv Citadelimage: cambridgeculturalmemory.blogspot.com

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    EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 7 NOVEMBER 2011

    Rituals of memory provide rich material for research,

    especially newly invented rituals like the wearing of the St.

    Georges Ribbon on Victory Day (influenced by the Orange

    ribbon widely used during the Orange Revolution in

    Ukraine), or the lighting of candles on Holodomor

    Memorial Day.

    Additional topics for research include museums as a memory

    battleground. This topic is of special interest in post-

    communist Poland where we can observe a real competition

    of museums, such as the controversy between the Museum

    of the Warsaw Uprising created by Warsaw-born Lech

    Kaczyski and the Museum of World War II soon to be

    opened in Gdask, the native city of current prime minister

    Donald Tusk.

    Finally, East European memory studies should also engagewith language as a memory battleground. There are many

    potentially fascinating research topics here, such as: the

    Russian language outside Russia; the usage and images of

    Belarusian and Ukrainian in Belarus and Ukraine; the

    phenomenon of situational post-Soviet bilingualism; and the

    issue of the languages of Western discourses (the plural is

    always very helpful in memory studies!) about the East.

    Andrii Portnov

    1

    Ilia Kalinin, Nostalgicheskaia modernizatsiia: sovetskoeproshloe kak istoricheskii gorizont, Neprikosnovennyi zapas, 6

    (2010). For an English translation of this and other memory-

    related articles from the leading Russian intellectual journal

    Neprikosnovennyi zapasvisit: www.memoryatwar.org/resources-

    nz/2 Andrii Portnov, Post-Soviet Ukraine and Belarus Dealing

    with The Great Patriotic War, 20 Years after the Collapse of

    Communism. Expectations, achievements and disillusions of 1989,

    Ed. by Nicolas Hayoz, Leszek Jesie, Daniela Koleva (Bern:

    Peter Lang, 2011), 369-381. French version: Andrii Portnov,

    Mmoire et mmoriaux de la Grande Guerre pour laPatrie en Belarus, Moldova et Ukraine: quelques

    observations pour tablir des comparaisons, Le Pass au

    prsent. Gisements memoriels et actions historicisantes en Europe

    centrale et orientale, Dirs. Georges Mink, Pascal Bonnard (Paris:

    Michel Houdiard, 2010), 187202.3 Omer Bartov, Erased. Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in

    Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton University Press, 2007).4 See Ukraijna Moderna, 4:15 (2009). Pamjat` jak pole

    zmahan`. And the continuation of the discussion in: Ab

    Imperio 1 (2010).5 Anna Kaminsky, Hrsg. Erinnerungsorte an den Holodomor

    1932/33 in der Ukraine (Berlin, 2008).6On which see further: http://

    cambridgeculturalmemory.blogspot.com/2011/03/

    historian-andriy-portnov-on-sites-of.html

    EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 8 DECEMBER 2011

    http://cambridgeculturalmemory.blogspot.com/2011/03/historian-andriy-portnov-on-sites-of.htmlhttp://cambridgeculturalmemory.blogspot.com/2011/03/historian-andriy-portnov-on-sites-of.htmlhttp://cambridgeculturalmemory.blogspot.com/2011/03/historian-andriy-portnov-on-sites-of.htmlhttp://www.memoryatwar.org/resources-nz/http://cambridgeculturalmemory.blogspot.com/2011/03/historian-andriy-portnov-on-sites-of.htmlhttp://cambridgeculturalmemory.blogspot.com/2011/03/historian-andriy-portnov-on-sites-of.htmlhttp://cambridgeculturalmemory.blogspot.com/2011/03/historian-andriy-portnov-on-sites-of.htmlhttp://cambridgeculturalmemory.blogspot.com/2011/03/historian-andriy-portnov-on-sites-of.htmlhttp://cambridgeculturalmemory.blogspot.com/2011/03/historian-andriy-portnov-on-sites-of.htmlhttp://cambridgeculturalmemory.blogspot.com/2011/03/historian-andriy-portnov-on-sites-of.htmlhttp://www.memoryatwar.org/resources-nz/http://www.memoryatwar.org/resources-nz/http://www.memoryatwar.org/resources-nz/http://www.memoryatwar.org/resources-nz/http://www.heranet.info/http://www.heranet.info/http://www.memoryatwar.org/http://www.memoryatwar.org/mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]