Abstract
Affected by totalitarianism, genocide, ethnic cleansing and post-socialist transition, Eastern Europe has regularly been an object of memory studies research using theories and methods developed in Western academia. The 16 essays here, edited by Polish scholars Małgorzata Pakier and Joanna Wawrzyniak, were written primarily ‘by insiders, by multidisciplinary scholars from Eastern Europe’ (p. 4), who contributed to two sessions at the Warsaw-based multinational European Network of Remembrance and Solidarity in 2011/12. Jeffrey K. Olick provides the foreword, while Aleida Assmann contributes an essay on ‘The Transformative Power of Memory’. Contrasting with the global scope of Assmann and Shortt’s (2012) Memory and Political Change, Memory and Change in Europe considers the potential in regional-scale research. A central thread running through the volume involves testing the feasibility of the concept of ‘European memory’ once it is entangled in the space that Timothy Snyder (2010) memorably termed the ‘Bloodlands’. A key question emerges, namely, if Europe’s memory culture is dominated by a model shaped principally in Western Europe, which, following Assmann, expounds ‘a transnational concept of victimhood’ (p. 31), can justice be done to nationally bound memories of suffering?
Assmann’s contribution outlines her global vision of a ‘paradigmatic shift from forgetting to remembering’ (pp. 28–29) or the move from ‘modernist’ future-oriented forgetting towards the ‘moralistic or therapeutic perspective’ (p. 25). This shift should result in the formation of a transnational dialogic memory that takes the victims’ perspective, thus ultimately transforming the very nature of the nation-state. Embodying what the editors term the ‘postulative-normative’ mode of memory work (p. 6), Assmann’s contribution rejects heroic national memories, deeming them a barrier to the envisaged dialogic memory. What most contributors highlight, however, is the complex entanglement of such heroic memories and confrontations with shameful aspects of the past. Challenging Assmann’s ‘memorial correctness’ (p. 52), Polish historian Andrzej Nowak offers a direct riposte in broad strokes, suggesting Western European memory agents seek to impose ‘collective shame’ by building ‘a guilt culture of memory from above’ (p. 48). By effacing what for Nowak are collective, national traumas, the message of the normative ‘post-national’ model of remembering to Eastern Europe is that ‘[i]f you want to belong [to Europe], you must forget’ (p. 44).
The volume’s strengths lie beyond this illustrative though starkly confrontational opening section. Expositions of inherent epistemic inequalities in memory studies, such as Maciej Górny and Kornelia Kończal’s multinational exploration of the Eastern European (non-)translations of the concept of lieux de mémoire, are more rewarding. ‘Central and Eastern European scholars were interested in memory issues long before the memory boom was diagnosed in Western Europe and the USA’ (p. 74). Scholars had employed effective methods and conceptual frameworks, but, they argue, local and research traditions were forgotten and overwritten as Western epistemologies and theories became prevalent. In Assmann’s age of remembering, the transfer of a dominant epistemology actually generates forgetting. Still, Górny and Kończal’s essay depicts only briefly the significance of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School or Grabski and Czarnowski’s work on historical consciousness (pp. 68–69). Likewise, Yana Yancheva’s contribution here focuses on her insightful empirical findings on local and family memories of collectivization in Bulgaria, rather than her locally inspired biographical ethnography method.
Similarly, Kaja Kaźmierska skims over Polish sociology’s long-standing tradition of biographical approaches, including Józef Chałasiński and Nina Assorodobraj-Kula’s work (p. 96). Tensions with dismissals of ‘martyrdom and heroism’ (p. 103) become evident as Kaźmierska explores Polish memories of the eastern borderlands (‘Kresy’) annexed by the USSR in World War II. She echoes Nowak by arguing that ‘Europeanization means overcoming national sentiments rooted in tradition’ (p. 103) and consequently ignoring ‘the process of democratization and decolonization of memory when liberated from totalitarian ideologies’ (p. 106). However, in overlooking Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Jews and others who inhabit(ed) the territories, Kaźmierska nationalizes the space, demonstrating insufficient sensitivity towards multicultural, dialogic memory. However, Matthias Weber’s contribution on Polish–German memory work on relations shaped by ethnic cleansing does trace sensitively the move from a ‘monologic’ past (p. 273) towards encounters with others’ victimhood. Civil society rather than official measures constitute their most productive site, he argues, since ‘pluralistic societies do not require standardized historical viewpoints’ (p. 280).
More open towards official memory projects, Lidia Zessin-Jurek investigates the European Union (EU)-level lobbying for recognition of gulag memories. This is not forthcoming, she believes, since the dominant Western European narrative made national guilt, rather than victimhood, central. However, EU structures could engender a regional and thus transnational memory that might be looked upon more favourably and consequently gain entry to European memory. She is convinced that East European countries have earned an ‘entry ticket’ having sufficiently explored Holocaust memory (p. 141). Joanna Beata Michlic assesses post-Communist countries’ efforts to publicize Holocaust memory less optimistically. However, she declares Poland ‘a paradigm’, whose painful but cleansing ‘Jedwabne debates’ should provide a region-wide model. Her home country is ‘where the second phase of restored memory has reached a sophisticated and advanced level’. Transcending the ‘(ethno)nationalist’ memory restoration of the immediate aftermath of communism, this second phase is instead ‘progressive, pluralistic and civic’ (p. 119). The notion of phases is problematic given that her own evidence shows the two modes’ coexistence in Poland. However, Michlic’s differentiation of ‘remembering to remember’, ‘remembering to benefit’ and ‘remembering to forget’ (p. 126) demonstrates effectively that remembering is not inherently moral. ‘Remembering to benefit’ is entangled in commercialism, heritage tourism and grant applications to Western organizations. Meanwhile, Western Holocaust memory can flatten the past, creating ‘a free-floating myth’ that enables remembering to forget (p. 128). While querying normative models in East–West encounters, Michlic reproduces the ‘orientalising temporal othering’, critiqued here by Kapralski (p. 77), within the region. Paradigmatic Poland’s other is Ukraine, supposedly stuck in the ethnonationalist ‘first phase of restored memory’ (p. 122). This conclusion rests on a single quote from 2008 from the director of the Ukrainian Centre for Holocaust Research.
Offering some counter-balance to the volume’s overall Polonocentrism, the three essays on Ukraine suggest a diverse, competitive and self-reflective memory culture. Tatiana Zhurzhenko’s excellent comparative and historicizing exploration of memories of the Great Patriotic War, or World War II, in Russian Belgorod and Ukrainian Kharkiv, just 70 km apart, shows intersections of local, national, cross-border and international factors. In Kharkiv, mnemonic agents ranging from municipal projects through non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to private initiatives, including Holocaust memorials, have produced a diverse memorial landscape that especially following the 2004 Orange Revolution became increasingly ensnared by state-level memory politics. Georgiy Kasianov’s essay shares Zhurzhenko’s historicizing perspective on official memory, offering surprising views on the Yanukovych-era’s ‘pragmatism’ (p. 186) before noting growing instrumentalisation of the academic apparatus in post-Euromaidan Ukraine, which is disrupting the previous ‘shaky consensus’ (pp. 196–197). Judy Brown’s piece on ‘walking memory’ in Sevastopol, Crimea, with its readings of tour guides’ narratives, rectifies partly, like Zhurzhenko’s essay, one omission in Memory and Change, namely, Russia’s passive presence and objectification. The editors note that Russia provides ‘one of the major points of reference for discussions’ (p. 16). Yet with Russian voices lacking and the country framed predominantly as an externalised perpetrator, the value of further collaborative memory work that would include the region’s Other becomes evident. After all, if the gulag is central to a transregional memory aiming to alter dominant European memory, why exclude Russian victims?
As Weber states in one of this uneven volume’s better contributions, ‘there is nothing to indicate that the “nation” is likely to lose its meaning as a primary point of reference for the remembrance communities in Europe in the foreseeable future’ (p. 281). Chorabczyński and Trojański’s essay on Auschwitz and Katyń reproduces a competitive memory framework, illustrating the problematic nature of the ‘two totalitarianisms’ narrative. Taking Katyń as a symbol of perceived injustice of international failure to acknowledge East European nations’ suffering, solidarity with other victims is undermined. Still, as Weber suggests, the national can provide a starting point for cross-border dialogue, while in more ambivalent terms, Michlic illustrates national memory cultures’ potential to become inclusive of others’ suffering.
Poland’s dominant place among the volume’s ‘Eastern Perspectives’ means that it fails to contribute to broader, regional knowledge on memory cultures in Eastern Europe. Bernhard and Kubik’s (2014) Twenty Years after Communism offers a more systematic overview of official memory in over a dozen countries. Lebow et al.’s (2006) Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, meanwhile, situates selected Eastern European countries in a broader European context. Where Pakier and Wawrzyniak’s volume could have made a significant contribution is in rectifying memory studies’ epistemic inequalities. Yet methodological and theoretical innovations from Eastern Europe are illustrated frustratingly fleetingly. Readers in German can enjoy essays by Kaźmierska (2010) or Kończal and Wawrzyniak (2011 and 2012), and even a whole volume of the Polish–German sites of memory project (Deutsch-Polnische Erinnerungsorte, vol. 5 2015), all drawing on the archive of marginalized Polish epistemologies. In English, memory studies’ hegemonic language, these contributions, like those from the broader region, remain largely unknown.
What Memory and Change in Europe does show in essays written in neatly edited English, though, are the familiar questions and problems relating to tensions between national memory cultures and memory studies’ prevailing transnational turn. This reveals the need for more dialogue between memory scholars and practitioners across European divisions, and within Eastern Europe itself, rather than monologic assertions of national suffering or indeed moralistic demands to remember.