Agonistic memory as a relational concept: Remembering socialism in Lithuania

Agonistic memory

Most conceptual approaches determine the main features of agonistic memory by juxtaposing it with cosmopolitan as well as antagonistic memory (Bull and Clarke, 2020; Bull and Hansen, 2016). As a result of this exercise in drawing boundaries on two sides, authors have compiled a list of supposedly stable features. Agonistic memory is expected to render visible the political inherent in contested versions of the past as well as to focus on the role of perpetrators and bystanders in specific historical situations as compared to cosmopolitan memory, which is perceived to aim at the moralization of history by both abstracting from concrete historical contexts and privileging the perspectives of victims. And, unlike antagonistic memory, which is seen as propagating Manichean views of self and other as well as making absolute truth claims, agonistic memory is further said to shed light on the ambivalence inherent in historical realities and to reflect on the contingency of its own articulations.

Cercel (2018) takes a slightly different approach. Arguing from a functionalist point of view and asking what this specific mode of remembering actually does, he has described agonistic memory as destabilizing hegemonic discourses by giving voice to all that is usually silenced and as unsettling even its own narratives by offering, for example, intentionally ambivalent stories that incite sharply opposite interpretations. He has thus identified disruptiveness and reflexivity as the two main features of agonistic memory.

I suggest to push Cercel’s idea one step further. Once we place the aim to bring about destabilization at the center of the concept, we cannot but recognize that the polemical interventions launched by agonistic memory depend to a large extent on the hegemonic discourses it is intervening in. Once we take seriously its situated nature, any attempt at defining it with reference to a list of supposedly fixed properties loses its meaning. Agonistic memory is conceived as a relational concept instead. This small step has far-reaching consequences. As destabilizing cosmopolitan memory requires a different repertoire of interventionist moves than destabilizing antagonistic discourses, agonistic memory will take on different shapes in different contexts. Before I illustrate this point by analyzing Adele’s agonistic account against the background of the Lithuanian memory culture with which she is engaging, I will briefly reflect on oral history as a means to gain insight into agonistic practices of remembering the past.

Oral history and memory studies

Once oral history had abandoned the objective to tell the whole true story by giving voice to the marginalized, an objective unmistakably rooted in a positivist epistemology, it became widely used in the essentially constructivist effort to reconstruct social processes of remembering the past (Thomson, 2007). Numerous studies have analyzed how oral history both reflects and shapes memory. However, the insights gained in the course of this endeavor differ significantly with regard to the power and pervasiveness that is attributed to hegemonic discourses. Upon closer examination, variation seems to correlate to some extent to the issues of the past the memory of which is analyzed, as well as to the context in which the remembering takes place. While authors dealing with the highly regulated memory of the Holocaust or the Second World War in the established nation states of the West have often revealed how individuals tend to trim their own experiences to fit them into culturally informed shapes (Portelli, 2003; Welzer, 2010), scholars analyzing processes of remembering much less-settled issues of the past in much more divided societies have frequently come to the opposite conclusion. Describing how oral history accounts on the civil war in mnemonically deeply divided Finland can both resist and challenge official versions of the past, Heimo and Peltonen (2003) remind us that every act of remembering is eminently political. Focusing on the socially highly contested memory of Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, Cornejo et al. (2020) have argued that recalling the past in a situation of mnemonic struggle inevitably compels people to take actives stances. Analyzing the life stories of Indigenous people who were forcibly adopted as children in Australia, Hamilton (2003b) shows how the counter-memories offered by members of the stolen generations “subvert the traditional assumption of an unproblematic national history” (p. 146).

Drawing attention to the political and interventionist character of oral history accounts, these studies—without using the concept—thus single out features which play a prominent role in academic discourses on agonistic memory as well. However, due to the fact that many authors have devoted their primary interest to other aspects by exploring, for example, variation among the perspectives voiced by different people at different times (Cornejo et al., 2020; Heimo and Peltonen, 2003; Mihelj, 2013), investigating narrative patterns evoked in the effort to deal with trauma (Blackburn, 2009; High, 2015; Ricatti, 2019; Skultans, 2014; Thomson, 2015) or reconstructing the articulation of gendered identities (Hamilton, 2003a; Stephens, 2010; Summerfield, 2004), these features have not been of pivotal concern so far. Looking at moments in which interviewees critically reflect on or even polemically intervene in public debates on issues of the past through the lens of the concept of agonistic memory can put them into the center of attention.

Methodology: the policy of discursive positioning as enacted in a life story

In part, the rather marginal interest in policies of positioning as articulated in interviews seems to result from the methodological design dominating in oral history research. In marked contrast to studies which explore the memory practices of cultural elites (Jõesalu and Nugin, 2012; Maslen, 2013) or political activists (Hamilton 2003a), authors who deal with the historical accounts produced by ordinary men and women usually scan multiple life stories for recurring patterns and cultural schemes.

Subjecting a single account to a close reading, I have chosen a different approach. To start with, I have decided to conduct a biographical narrative interview (Rosenthal, 2004) with Adele. This type of interview, which is not very often used in oral history research, requires the interviewer to abstain as much as possible from intervening with questions. It thus gives the interviewees maximum freedom to shape their stories according to their own criteria of relevance. Analyzing Adele’s life story, I furthermore follow a two-step procedure developed by Rosenthal (2004). I first reconstruct the sequencing of stories offered in the uninterrupted main narrative and then look for recurrent patterns in the three longest and thus particularly insightful narratives. However, different from Rosenthal, I do not focus on how Adele engages in developing a narrative identity by making sense of her life. Inspired by the concept of agonistic memory and drawing on Mihelj (2013) suggestion to focus on the interaction between vernacular and official memory by analyzing how participants engage in a conversation with “different historically and socially situated ways of talking” (p. 68) about the past, I rather pay close attention to the positions she articulates vis-à-vis the different discursive strands that form the Lithuanian memory culture she is entangled with.

For several reasons, the interview with Adele, which was conducted, recorded, and transcribed in 2009, ¹ is particularly well suited for such an inquiry. It lasted 238 minutes. This fact alone testifies to the wealth of stories and ideas she was eager to share. At 79 minutes, her main narrative (Rosenthal, 2004) is particularly long. Its rather peculiar structure based on a series of carefully selected and even more carefully assembled stories furthermore speaks to the delight she takes in polemically intervening in public debates, not so much by forwarding explicit arguments but rather by developing complex narratives that constantly interrupt or correct each other. While these stories do not reveal much about Adele herself as they are mainly based on the memories her parents and relatives shared with her, they comment and reflect critically on a number of highly politicized issues, all of which figure prominently in Lithuanian memory culture and most of which took place in a time before she was born or while she was still a young girl. Even if she refers to her own personal experiences, she makes sure that these relate to publicly contested issues of the past. Most interestingly, she herself explains—between the lines—how she became a politically astute observer by describing her parents as well as the neighbors she grew up with on a Lithuanian collective farm as politically interested people who not only followed events around them closely but most of the time also expressed dissenting views about them.

Memory culture in Lithuania

As I have already emphasized, Adele develops her account in conversation with an insider of Lithuanian memory culture, in whose ability to understand the subtleties of her discursive moves she obviously trusts. I will now give a brief introduction to the main dynamics in public discussions on issues of the past in post-Soviet Lithuania, relying primarily on Šafronovas (2011) who distinguishes between two phases in the politics of memory.

The first phase, which lasted roughly from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, was characterized by a tremendously high degree of unity. Founded in 1988, Sajudis, a typical post-socialist umbrella movement, succeeded in mobilizing the vast majority of the ethnically rather homogeneous Lithuanian population to rally behind the demand for withdrawal from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The rediscovery of Lithuanian history played a central role in this. With the exception of a tiny group of communists loyal to Moscow, all political actors including the majority of the reform-friendly members of the Communist Party condemned both the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, which had paved the way for the forcible incorporation of Lithuania into the USSR, and the mass deportations that took place during the first decade of Soviet rule. The creation and maintenance of this unity was a crucial factor that first contributed to the delegitimization of the USSR, irreversible to this day, and then to the almost bloodless restoration of Lithuanian statehood in 1990. It was mainly the result of a certain restraint shown by all political forces. For quite some time, public debates on the past remained exclusively centered on historical events that upheld the idea of the Lithuanian nation as a unified community of victims (Christophe, 1997; Šafronovas, 2011).

It was only from the middle of the 1990s that this restraint was gradually abandoned in the course of increasingly polarized debates on four contested issues of the past. The first dispute revolves around the evaluation of the independent Lithuanian state of the interwar period in general and the assessment of the dictatorial rule of President Smetona between 1926 and 1939 in particular. While conservatives mainly glorify these pre-Soviet years arguing, for example, that Lithuania would resemble Switzerland if it had not been forcibly subjected to the inefficient Soviet system (Christophe, 1997), liberal and left-wing intellectuals raise the question to what extent the dictatorship, rejected by many as a regime based on political repression and social exclusion, was partly responsible for the Lithuanian population’s failure to resist the Soviet invasion in 1940 (Truska, 1996). The second controversy is ignited by the public handling of the memory of the partisans who fought Soviet power harder than in any other Soviet republic until well into the 1950s. Again, we observe a pronounced contrast between the conservative right which revers them as heroic freedom fighters and the post-communist left which rejects them as unscrupulous brutes who had often collaborated with the Nazis and furthermore indiscriminately killed everyone who was suspected of having collaborated with Soviet structures (Budrytė, 2016). The third historical argument is concerned with the question of how to make sense of post-Stalinism which saw undeniable achievements in terms of social modernization on one hand (Davoliute, 2013) and repression of dissidents on the other hand (Vardys, 1978). One bone of contention is longtime party leader Sniečkus: While the post-communists celebrate him as a politician who stood up for national Lithuanian interests against the Soviet overlords by, for example, preventing an influx of Russian-speaking workers, the conservatives condemned him as a traitor who signed thousands of deportation orders (Čepaitiene, 2007). The dissidents who often closely cooperated with the Catholic Church and by Soviet standards enjoyed high support among the predominantly Catholic population are no less controversial. While the right sees them as moral exemplars whose memory every Lithuanian should honor, the left charges them with having thoughtlessly risked the lives of thousands of people in a hopeless struggle (Christophe, 1997). The fourth issue concerns the anti-Soviet uprising, organized by openly anti-Semitic right-wingers in June 1941 in the shadow of the German invasion of the USSR. While conservatives have proposed, among other things, recognizing legal acts of the government that emerged from this uprising as legally binding, leftists who regularly blame the participants of the uprising for having collaborated with the Nazis have routinely brought down such initiatives (Šafronovas, 2011).

The mnemonic stand-off I have described so far can be expected to have a deep impact on practices of remembering the past enacted by ordinary citizens like Adele. However, the mnemonic contest lays bare the political inherent in all processes of remembering the past and prevents a hegemonic closure of debate. Accordingly, a heightened sense of contingency is involuntarily kept alive (Christophe, 2021). At the same time, ritualized mnemonic conflict ensures a sharpening of edges and a passionate dramatization of difference that invites people to take a stance.

“Think with your own little head!” The main narration

As we can learn from the shape she gives to her life story, this invitation is well received by Adele. The one characteristic that distinguishes her main narrative is the almost complete absence of glimpses into her personal life. What she shares with us is for the most part an artfully composed symphony of stories, charged with political significance, about relatives and neighbors. While at first glance she only seems to be “ranting” about the personal affairs of people from her home village, a second glance reveals that with all these little episodes from the everyday lives of ordinary people she is permanently positioning herself on publicly contested issues of the past. She moreover does so in a highly idiosyncratic and provocative way. The political position she is taking is articulated not so much in the single stories she is telling, but rather in the space that opens up between them.

This is already evident in the very first set of carefully selected and intertwined family stories about the interwar period she begins the interview with. Recalling how her paternal grandfather was banished from his parents’ house because he refused to marry the daughter of the rich neighbors, and how her maternal grandfather was robbed of the chance to live a better life in the United States by his own father who tore his ship ticket to pieces, Adele seems to make a clear point: life back then was far from idyllic; families were not the cradle of a happy nation, but rather a space where people made each other’s lives miserable. Between the lines, she thus seems to take issue with the popular right-wing myth according to which everything was better until the Soviets came. However, the next story she presents already destabilizes this very conclusion. Her mother, she explains, had always told her how her life as a handmaid in capitalist Lithuania, despite all hardship, had been so much better than all she had to cope with in Soviet times. This reminiscence not only relativizes the criticism she had just leveled at the nostalgic glorification of the interwar period, but also debunks the rosier pictures of Soviet times generally painted by the political left.

The same principle of deconstructing the narratives of both the political left and right also shapes her stories about the Soviet era. Again, she starts from a clear position. Very much in line with anti-Soviet narratives of the right, she recalls how her parents from the very beginning responded with fear to collectivization campaigns. The misery of the war refugees from Soviet Belarus, she claims, had reliably immunized them against false Soviet promises. Her father, she continues, remained skeptical of the Soviet system throughout his entire life. He never gave up the dream of an independent Lithuania, constantly listened to the Voice of America and instructed his daughter “to think with her own little head.” Thanks to him, Adele resonates, she herself was able to dismiss Soviet propaganda lies from an early age.

However, right after this she initiates a radical narrative turn by focussing on the bitter experiences her father suffered in pre-Soviet times. Already in his early youth, she recounts in accordance with left-wing criticism of the interwar period, he had to earn a living as a farmhand for a rich peasant. Criticizing the critics of the Soviet system, she then recalls how cruelly a 14-year-old boy had been bullied in her village just because he had joined the Komsomol. Her next story about the chairman of the local soviet in her native village takes her support of left-wing positions a step further. Whereas—maybe even because—adherents of right-wing positions would probably openly attack this Soviet official for having served a criminal regime, Adele praises the courage and generosity he showed when he shared the manor house with the former bourgeois owners on their return from their place of deportation in Siberia. However, as if to interrupt herself, the next anecdote she comes up with features a Soviet functionary who could not be further from the image of a noble hero that left-wing accounts love to portray and that she herself had invoked just a moment previously: It is the memory of how the head of the collective farm she grew up in tried to fill his own pockets with the money she earned as a student tending the sheep that occasions her last turnaround.

Upon closer inspection of the entire panorama of stories she presents in her main biographical narrative, we can see that Adele is consistently placing herself between the chairs of the political right and left. In a pattern too systematic to be the result of mere coincidence or helpless inconsistency, her memories follow a zig-zag course full of unexpected but carefully staged twists during which each new story seems to undermine and relativize the previous one.

Disrupting, destabilizing, dismantling: the hidden agenda behind Adele’s stories

Albeit in a much more condensed form, the same pattern shimmers through the three most complex stories scattered across the entire interview that form the core of her account. As I will show now, all of them pursue the same hidden agenda. All of them aim at disrupting, destabilizing, and dismantling publicly circulating frames of remembrance. The first story takes us back into the year 1941:

Near D. there is this forest, and in this forest 10 party members have been shot. And one of them is our neighbor. . . . But he is also one of the richest in our village. . . . He was somehow interesting. . . . For example, he organized the wedding for my mother. Well, because my mom served with him . . . He hosted the wedding and was the best man. . . . So somehow people used to live very closely together in the village. Well, now what happened then. In 1941, there was the uprising, there were activists in our village, they all called them the white bandages. . . . They came to power. And what did they do then? These activists shot 10 of their neighbors—whoever was angry with someone. That’s what my parents said. . . . They said that they were Soviet activists. . . . All the time my parents were saying, what kind of Soviet activists are these? What kind of activists. . . . They were settling scores. And they were turned into Soviet activists. Well, this is the thing. In Soviet times an article was written, . . . that the priest . . . and the chairman of the rifle union, . . . that they rounded them up like murderers and shot them. . . . My parents read the newspaper and commented that all this was not so. . . . I can tell you another story. Because my dad was a wage laborer, in 1940 . . . the Soviet power came. Then the village headman came . . . and said to him, you will now be village headman. . . . You are a former farmhand; they won’t touch you. But then in 1941, they locked them up first, the prison was in the D. dairy. . . . He sat there and got a beating and everything. But these three people, who were so harshly criticized, a former teacher, the chairman of the rifle union and the priest. So that’s what Dad says, . . . so the teacher came and stood up for him, then the priest came and ordered him to be released.

Apparently, the main aim of this multilayered narrative is to bring into view the many contradictory repercussions that the anti-Soviet uprising organized by Lithuanian nationalists in 1941 with the support of Nazi Germany had on ordinary people in her village of origin. With her first round of observations, Adele purposefully casts a negative light on the nationalist insurgents who, she reports, killed 10 villagers. However, as she knows from her parents, none of them was concerned with politics or the defense of the Lithuanian nation against the Soviets. Rather, they were all driven by selfish motives and used the favor of the hour to settle personal scores. With a brief sideways glance at the victims, Adele backs up her interpretation of the events. Even though they were all communists, she explains, they were all very special. One of them, she recalls, was not only the richest man in the village, he also distinguished himself by generosity. Among other things, he hosted Adele’s parents’ wedding. With this hint, Adele is obviously pursuing a double goal: First, she dismantles right-wing historical narratives that falsely declare murderers like these to be freedom fighters. Second, she also disrupts Soviet propaganda tales which would later on falsely portray the murdered villagers as Soviet activists. The next and final episode, with which she concludes this long story, is no less charged with an ultimately political meaning. What begins with the description of a dramatic situation that almost turned into a family tragedy, leads in the last consequence to the skillful destabilization of an overly undifferentiated left-wing critique of the insurgents and the social classes that had supported them. In the midst of the uprising, Adele confides to us, her own father was arrested. In 1940, she adds in an obvious attempt to provide background information, he had served as chairman of the local soviet, that is, the local council. A year later, she continues, this office, which he, as a politically unsuspicious representative of the lower classes, had taken only to represent the interests of the village in the face of the unpredictable Soviets, made him a collaborator and a traitor. In that desperate situation, Adele emphasizes, it was the teacher, the priest, and the chairman of the local rifle union, in short, all the members of the traditional elite which the Soviets later on identified as the driving force behind the uprising, who successfully lobbied for his release and thus saved him from certain death.

Summing up, we see the same mechanism at work here that had already shaped Adele’s main narration. Only this time, she is not primarily concerned with working out the good and bad features of the pre-Soviet and Soviet order. Rather, she focuses on showing us that there were good and bad people on both sides, among the opponents and supporters of the Soviet system. At first glance, this may seem trivial and unspectacular. At second glance, however, her systematic shuttling back and forth between points of view that are generally considered irreconcilable amounts to nothing less that the questioning of the binary oppositions that inform almost all mnemonic debates in Lithuania.

The next story conveys exactly the same message, albeit in a much clearer way, perhaps thanks to the unspoken references she draws from established cultural models. Looking back at “the war after the war” between anti-Soviet partisans and the Soviet security forces in the late 1940s, Adele now talks about the rough and risky times people from her region experienced back then:

After the war . . . Somehow it was the case that only someone who had been nominated by the partisans could become a village elder. . . . If they said that he would get the job, then he got it. And if they said no, then he didn’t. And if you did get it, you didn’t do it for long. . . . That was . . . Petrauskas, Arvydas. His brother later told me that the state security was after him. . . . This Petrauskas . . . later married my mother’s sister. He was chairman of D. . . . all through this partisan period. . . . He says: “First the Skrebai (extermination battalions) come and take me with them for a week; they drive around with me; then I go home. Then the partisans come. . . . They also take me with them and off we go. With them I drink again for a week.” You see, that’s how he was, that’s how he maneuvered all the time.

The main protagonist is her uncle who, like her father, became the chairman of the village soviet. However, apparently in a preemptive attempt to defend herself against the accusation that she was related to a collaborator, she emphasizes right at the beginning how this man could have been nominated only after the resistant fighters approved of him. This is actually a rather ambiguous argument. Whereas the idea that someone who worked for the Soviet power structures needs to be justified resonates well with right-wing views, according to which Soviet credentials are worth nothing at all, her storyline about the partisans who were not helpless victims but the secret masters of the country, radically challenges the David-versus-Goliath narrative generally upheld by conservatives. With her next step, Adele adds yet another layer of complexity. Recalling how her uncle was persecuted by the state security despite his position in the village soviet, she also reminds us that people who feared the Soviets and therefore gave in to ideological pressure did so with good reason. With a combination of narrative tactics that first support and then target right-wing memory policies, Adele thus skillfully messes up conventional distinctions between the Soviet power structures and the resisting partisans.

And yet, if we look at the finale of this excerpt, all this seems to be a mere prelude to the story that really matters to her, as we can see from the repeated inclusion of dramatizing verbatim speech. Remembering him talking, she describes how her uncle first had to spend a week drinking heavily with the so-called extermination battalions that the Soviets had set up to fight the partisans, only to do exactly the same thing the next week with the partisans. Here, if not before, the average Lithuanian will notice that Adele is actually fitting her anecdote into the plot structure of the well-known Lithuanian film Nobody Wanted to Die. Released in 1966 at the peak of the thaw-period, this film tells the story of the four sons of Lokys, head of a village soviet. After their father has been killed by partisans, the young men plot bloody revenge. In the end, they set in motion a ferocious dynamic that generates even more senseless death. The main character of the film, Vaitkus, agrees to become the new village chief only under great pressure. He alone tries to avoid any more bloodshed by moving back and forth between partisans and Soviets, eating and drinking with them in efforts to de-escalate the situation.

Considering the parallels between the film and Adele’s story we can better understand her objective. By having her uncle play the part of the tragic movie hero, she is silently restructuring the field of historical actors. The decisive line of conflict she is drawing is not between partisans and Soviets but between those who impose themselves on others and those who have to maneuver a way out of the imposition. Or, in the film’s terms, between armed gangs waging a bloody war on the backs of innocent people and the vast majority of civilians who found themselves embroiled in a deadly confrontation that none of them had invited.

The next quotation, which is not about a single episode but about a couple of stories nested within each other like Russian matryoshka dolls, varies this very motif once again. Dealing with relations between the Soviet state and the Catholic Church, Adele displays ultimate mastership in weaving together three different narratives that complement and correct each other in a peculiar way:

You know, this colleague, we studied together. . . . she married in the church of P.-town. And then somebody complained and she was fired as a history teacher. [. . .] Well, you see . . . all those denunciations. They really took place. But in our neighbourhood, thank God, here people were really good. . . . both of my children were baptized and me and my husband, we married in the church. You cannot do this without somebody taking notice of it. The neighbours really knew what we were doing. And the priest, you know, I mean he was very tolerant too. I filled in a piece of paper, he did not put it into the book, well he said, “this is not important,” he said, “maybe someone will come to check the book (parish register).” So I just got that piece of paper, . . . written by hand. Maybe this is not a real document, but in our neighbourhood it was valid. [. . .] You know, everybody was afraid, of course they were. There was this headmaster of our school. . . . once his mother died. Of course, his mother was a believer and his father was a believer too. . . . And then all the colleagues went to the funeral. I was on maternity leave, so I did not go with them. But they told me everything later, how they brought the flowers into the church, you know and then they turned and they left the church. But there were these three, the headmaster and his sisters. His sisters are teachers too. They stood near the coffin. They did not leave the church. But then there was this priest, Jesus. Well, I don’t know. Jesus, when the teachers returned to school afterwards, they were all shaking with fear. I was afraid too. Jesus, what this priest told them. During his prayer he said, this poor woman, she gave birth to three murderers.

In the first story, a female colleague of Adele falls victim to the anti-church policies of a state which fires her because she had a religious ceremony for her wedding. In the second story, Adele herself escapes the same fate because a priest abstained from officially registering her church marriage as well as the baptism of her children, anticipating that this could cause her trouble in times when teachers were expected to spy on churchgoers among their own students. The third story introduces a priest who accuses the headmaster of the school where Adele is employed of “murdering” the souls of Lithuanian children by exposing them to atheist propaganda. The attack takes place at a highly inappropriate moment, during the funeral of the headmaster’s mother, the attendance of which was itself an act of courage given the possible consequences for his career. In all three stories, teachers are the protagonists. There is, however, great variation in their experiences. Whereas the first teacher is a victim of a fanatic state, the third is a victim of a no less fanatic church. At the same time, Adele’s example shows that, if only more people had been as reasonable as her local parish priest, nobody would have had to fall victim to anybody.

From a more abstract angle, Adele essentially accomplishes two objectives with the selection and telling of these stories. First, she clearly communicates whom we should hold in high regard and whom not. Those who are able to keep at bay the social roles they assume, she tells us between the lines, deserve our respect. Those who are only too ready to sacrifice real people for the sake of rigid ideologies do not. But beyond this moral lesson, she once again engages in the very political activity of disrupting the two frames that dominate Lithuanian memory culture.

Whereas right-wing and left-wing narratives, despite all the differences in the assignment of concrete roles, usually construct a binary opposition between those who served and those who betrayed the Lithuanian nation, Adele blurs this very distinction. She shows us that state and church, which are usually seen as fiercely opposing each other, actually have a lot in common. Both have become perpetrators; both have mercilessly subordinated the needs of concrete people to abstract ideas. What really distinguishes people in her account is thus not fixed political commitments but personal ethics. In her universe, “us versus them” refers to empathetic people open to the needs of others like her local parish priest on one hand and overtly rigid people blinded by narrow ideologies or greed on the other hand, such as the yelling priest of her headmaster and the boss who fired her colleague. By making this distinction, she introduces a new binary. Accordingly, her at first glance somewhat unpolitical move of saying “in the end it is all about either preserving or losing one’s humanity” actually amounts to the inherently political act of re-articulating an established way of framing the world and the people operating in it.

Discussion

As the examples vividly show, Adele’s account fulfills the three most important requirements of agonistic memory discussed in the literature. First, and consistent with what Cercel (2018) as well as Bull and Clarke (2020) in particular have emphasized as a central feature of agonistic memory, Adele’s account is undoubtedly interventionist in character. The choices she makes with the selection, composition, and assemblage of her stories regularly lead to destabilizing the two partisan narratives circulating in the public space. Along the way, she also makes clear how selective and manipulative these competing versions of Soviet history actually are. In a sense, she exposes them as products of antagonistic memory by repeatedly focusing on all the ambivalences and complexities that do not quite fit into the framework of politically opportune narratives.

Second, and very much along the lines of what Bull and Hansen (2016), in particular, have described as a key moment of agonistic memory, she stresses the importance of bearing in mind the specific historical context in which the actors in question were operating. She is more than skeptical of any attempts to tie a person’s merits or demerits to his or her political identity. No one, she emphasizes, is off the hook once and for all just because he or she has taken what is supposed to be the “right” side. The reverse is also true, of course; no one deserves our contempt just because they joined, say, the Communist Party, which now happens to be out of favor. Adele seems to be emphasizing the importance of looking closely at each individual case and considering the humanity inherent in a person’s actions. Or, conversely, she is at least implicitly criticizing hegemonic discourses for reproducing the misleading opposition between the categories of “communist” and “anti-communist.” She knows better. Showing that the differences between people who are commonly assigned to one category are sometimes greater than the differences between the two categories themselves, her stories expose the dubiousness of the whole classification scheme.

Third, in accordance with what all authors mention as the single most important quality of agonistic memory, the narratives she offers are to some extent political. Her implicit suggestion to re-map the field of relevant historical actors, no longer distinguishing between supporters and opponents of the Soviet powers but between people with and without decency, amounts to a re-articulation of dominant binary opposites. Only at first glance does her argument that it is ultimately not so much political attitudes or identities that matter, but rather the character traits of people, display distinct moral undertones. However, if we take into account the structure of memory culture in Lithuania, we can conclude that she is relying with good agonistic reason on moralization rather than on politicization. After all, she is not intervening in the typically cosmopolitan culture of memory in which the orientation toward values that are as abstract as they are capable of consensus has led to a depoliticization of public discourses. It is the antagonistic structure of the Lithuanian memory culture she is opposing that dictates her agenda; she adds nuance and complexity where there has been too much rigidity and she sows uncertainty where the illusion of being in the possession of truth has created too much certainty. Her moralizing move is thus deliberately challenging and destabilizing the politicized views on the past circulating in public discourses.

Looking at the insights we can draw from Adele’s case for oral history debates, I make three points.

First, her way of turning the everyday into a battlefield for the politics of memory by making sure that all the episodes she shares with us sooner or later take a rather idiosyncratic position on larger issues of the past, clearly challenges those studies on remembering the socialist past which claim that people tend to adhere to the allegedly unpolitical memory of the everyday in order to avoid an open clash with official narratives (Jõesalu, 2016; Petrović, 2010). Adele does not avoid politics and she does not play safe. Quite the reverse. She persistently selects stories, which revolve around particularly controversial historical topics from the assessment of pre-Soviet times and the 1941 uprising to the historical roles played by partisans, party members, dissidents, and the church in the Soviet Union. All these stories furthermore regularly stage surprising tipping moments. They are organized in such a way that they switch back and forth between rival political frames and thus in the end render visible the weak spots inherent in both of them. In what is ultimately a very political move, Adele’s plea to shift the focus from which side someone was on to what someone did, finally proposes an alternative mode of categorizing social actors.

Second, Adele’s agonistic mode of remembering confirms and at the same time radicalizes insights presented in a recent study on Estonian family memories. While Nugin (2019) describes how some of her informants creatively negotiate memory by either ignoring or adapting institutionalized frames of remembering to their family stories, I claim that Adele has moved from negotiating to challenging. In an almost playful manner, especially her main narration repeatedly offers one episode that entices the audience to believe that she supports one of the publicly circulating rival narratives of remembering, only to refute that very impression with the next one. As a result of these narrative moves, all official frames are disrupted and discredited in the end.

Third, Adele’s way of navigating the terrain of a divided memory culture not by taking sides with one of the rival camps but by exposing how both of them are silencing important aspects of the past, is apparently not unique. In a study on the personal memories of female members of the Basque ETA, Hamilton (2003a) has thus for example shown how her interviewees’ accounts render visible both, the silences in official narratives of the Spanish state and in the narratives of fellow male militants who in line with traditional storylines tend to conceal the role of women. While it remains a task for future research to explore empirically how often this phenomenon occurs, the concept of agonistic memory can function as a sensitizing concept which alerts us to the theoretical significance of these occurrences.

Conclusion

In this article, I have pursued a twofold agenda: On a theoretical level, I have proposed redefining agonistic memory as a relational concept, the concrete outlook of which morphs in synchrony with the dynamics of the established mnemonic discourses it aims to dismantle, disrupt, and destabilize. The gain that comes with such a change in perspective, I have argued, lies in an increase in flexibility that finally allows us to discover agonistic features not only in carefully crafted artistic representations of the past but also in the stories told spontaneously by ordinary people. On an empirical level, I have described the life story of Adele as an instantiation of agonistic memory from below. To support this claim, I have pointed to the following three crucial features: (1) The almost exclusive focus on publicly contested issues of the past, (2) the consistent sequencing of stories, all of which constantly interrupt each other by oscillating between left-wing as well as right-wing frames, and (3) the skillful organization of tipping points which undermine the publicly still dominant distinction between foes and friends of the Soviet system. As a result of all these moves, I have argued, a narrative structure emerges which destabilizes politically opposed frames of interpreting the past that vie for attention in the public sphere by revealing the blind spots inherent in them and by undermining the schemes of categorizing social actors they are based upon.

With regard to the more general insights provided by this case study, I have introduced agonistic memory as a sensitizing concept by means of which we can identify the more subversive undercurrents in oral history accounts often overlooked under the influence of strong beliefs in the formative power of discourse. And I have turned Adele’s example into a showcase that reminds us how political supposedly small shifts in the framing of everyday-life experiences can be. I would like to close with a last thought on the social relevance of Adele’s way of practicing agonistic remembering: Her case does not only show us that ordinary men and women, who are at times denied the ability to produce more than a “a conventionalized gloss over reality” (Crapanzano, 1984: 955), can indeed be very reflective and critical of the discourses that surround them. It also suggests, at the very least, that the development of these capacities benefits from a discursive environment in which persistent controversies continually thwart the fixation of ideological certainties.