2017 Book TheChangingPlaceOfEuropeInGlob

The Changing Place of Europe
in Global Memory Cultures

Usable Pasts and Futures
Edited by
Christina Kraenzle and Maria Mayr
palgrave macmillan memory studies

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies
Series Editors
Andrew Hoskins
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK
John Sutton
Department of Cognitive Science
Macquarie University
Macquarie, Australia
The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends
that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to
that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes
in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory;
panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination
with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of
trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed
to an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty
years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts
affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This
groundbreaking new series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’
under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for
its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theo-
retical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination?
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14682
Christina Kraenzle • Maria Mayr
Editors
The Changing Place

of Europe in Global
Memory Cultures
Usable Pasts and Futures
Editors
Christina Kraenzle Maria Mayr
Canadian Centre for German Department of German and Russian
and European Studies Memorial University of Newfoundland
York University St. John’s, Canada
Toronto, Canada
Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

ISBN 978-3-319-39151-9 ISBN 978-3-319-39152-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39152-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959492
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

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Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge several institutions and individuals with-

out whom this volume would not have been possible. First, we would
like to thank the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) as well
as our respective universities, Memorial University and York University,
for their support of this project. In addition, we would like to thank all
the participants of the workshop “Post-Wall (Trans)national Memory:
Germany and the European Context” (Memorial 2013) and the con-
ference “Usable Pasts and Futurities: The Changing Place of Europe in
Global Memory Cultures” (Canadian Centre for German and European
Studies, York 2014), whose papers and insights have helped shape this
volume. We would also like to thank Robyn Clost for her diligent dedica-
tion to all things related to the citations and bibliography, and Yvan Rose
for his tireless tech-support.
We are especially grateful to the contributors to this book whose
patience and collaboration in the editing process have made this volume
possible. Finally, we thank the external reviewers for their constructive
comments and Felicity Plester, Sophie Auld, and other staff at Palgrave
Macmillan for their guidance in the production of this volume.
v
Contents
1 Introduction: The Usable Pasts and Futures of

Transnational European Memories1
Christina Kraenzle, Maria Mayr
2 Between the National and the Transnational: European

Memories of World War II in the Twenty-First-Century
Museum in Germany and Poland23
Stephan Jaeger
3 Contemporary Memory Politics in Catalonia:

Europeanizing and Mobilizing the History of the
Spanish Civil War49
David A. Messenger
4 Memory Competition or Memory Collaboration?

Politics, Networks, and Social Actors in Memories of
Dictatorship63
Sara Jones
5 Towards a Transnational Ethics for Europe: Memory

and Vulnerability as Gateways to Europe’s Future in Koen
Peeters’s Grote Europese roman87
Jan Lensen
vii
viii CONTENTS
6 Transnational Memory in Michael Haneke’s The

White Ribbon and Cate Shortland’s Lore103
John O. Buffinga
7 Visions of Europe in Fatih Akin’s The Evil Old Songs:

Divided Past, Transnational Future?119
Eva Maria Esseling
8 Beyond Foundational Myths: Images from the

Margins of the European Memory Map137
Christian Sieg
9 A Place in the Sun: Colonial Entanglements in Lukas

Bärfuss’s Hundert Tage and Daniel Goetsch’s Herz
Aus Sand159
Charlotte Schallié
10 Compelled to Share: Exploring Holocaust and

Residential School Survivors’ Stories179
Willow J. Anderson
11 From Europe’s Early Iron Age to a New Urbanist

Shanzhai Village: Themed Environments, Global
Property Markets, and the Role of Hallstatt’s
Cultural Lineage201
Markus Reisenleitner
Bibliography221
Index243
Notes on Contributors
Willow J. Anderson is a communication scholar who works as a partner-

ship broker, trainer, and researcher in St John’s, NL, Canada. Her scholar-
ship focuses on intercultural communication and reconciliation processes
with a particular interest in the experiences of immigrants and indigenous
peoples. Her recent publications include a co-authored chapter in the Sage
Handbook of Conflict Communication and an article in the International
Communication Gazette.
John O. Buffinga is Associate Professor of German at Memorial
University. His research and teaching focus on twentieth century German
and Dutch culture, film, and literature. His most recent articles are
“Heterolingualism in Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book” (Canadian Journal of
Netherlandic Studies 35.1 (2014): 23–37), and “Alex van Warmerdam’s
Borgman as a study in Visual contrasts” (Canadian Journal of Netherlandic
Studies, forthcoming).
Eva Maria Esseling is a doctoral student in the DFG project “Where
does Europe Exist? Contemporary Literary Topographies,” the Europa-
Kolleg and the Graduate School Practices of Literature (GS PoL) at the
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. Her research focuses on con-
cepts of transculturality and the spatial turn as well as evolving representa-
tions of Europe in contemporary Germanophone literature.
Stephan Jaeger is Professor of German at the University of Manitoba.
His recent publications include an edited special issue of Seminar called
Representations of War Experiences in and on Germany (2014); the edited
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
volume Fighting Words and Images: Representing War across the Discipline
(University of Toronto Press, 2012); and Performative Geschichtsschreibung:
Forster, Herder, Schiller, Archenholz und die Brüder Schlegel (de Gruyter,
2011). He is currently working on a monograph about twenty-first-
century museum representations of World War II in North America and
Europe (Germany, Poland, the UK, Belgium, Canada, the USA).
Sara Jones is a Senior Birmingham Fellow working across the Colleges of
Social Science and Arts and Law at Birmingham University. Her current
research analyzes the political, social, and cultural processes of remember-
ing state socialist dictatorship. She recently published the monograph The
Media of Testimony: Remembering the East German Stasi in the Berlin
Republic (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, 2014).
Christina Kraenzle is Associate Professor of German Studies at York
University, Canada. Her research focuses on modern German-language
cultural studies, with an emphasis on issues of transnational cultural pro-
duction, migration, travel, globalization, and memory. Her recent publi-
cations include the co-edited volume Mapping Channels Between Ganges
and Rhein: German-Indian Cross-Cultural Relations (CSP, 2008), articles
in The German Quarterly, German Life and Letters, Transit: A Journal of
Travel, and Migration and Multiculturalism in the German-Speaking
World, and chapters in the volumes Transnationalism in Contemporary
German-language Literature and Searching for Sebald: Photography after
W.G. Sebald.
Jan Lensen is a postdoctoral research fellow (DFG) at the Institut für
Deutsche und Niederländische Philologie of the Freie Universität Berlin
and a Visiting Scholar at York University in Toronto, Canada. He is the
author of De foute oorlog: Schuld en nederlaag in het Vlaamse proza over de
Tweede Wereldoorlog (Garant, 2014) and has been widely published on
contemporary Dutch and German literature and cultural memory in inter-
national peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Dutch Literature,
Comparative Literature, and Modern Language Review. He currently
investigates the poetic and ethical dimensions of contemporary fictions
about World War II in Germany, Flanders, and the Netherlands.
Maria Mayr is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Memorial
University. Her current research focuses on transnational European mem-
ory discourses in German-language literature primarily written by writers
with a background from former East European countries. Her most recent
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
publications include: “Berlin’s Futurity in Zafer Şenocak’s Gefährliche

Verwandtschaft (1998) and Marica Bodrožić’s Kirschholz und alte Gefühle
(Seminar 2015),” “B. as in Balkan: Terézia Mora’s Post-Yugoslav Berlin
Republic” (German Life and Letters 2014), “Europe’s Invisible Ghettos:
Transnationalism and Neoliberal Capitalism in Julya Rabinowich’s Die
Erdfresserin” (in Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language
Literature 2015), and “‘Überwältigende Vergangenheit’: Questioning
European Identity in Contemporary German-language Literature About
the Former Yugoslavia” (in Re-Forming the Nation in Literature and Film
2013).
David A. Messenger is Professor of History and Global and Area Studies
at the University of Wyoming. He is the author of two monographs,
Hunting Nazis in Franco’s Spain (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 2014) and L’Espagne Républicaine: French Policy and Spanish
Republicanism in Liberated France (Brighton, UK and Portland, OR:
Sussex Academic Press, 2008) and co-editor, with Katrin Paehler, of A
Nazi Past: Recasting German Identity in Postwar Europe (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 2015). He is the Director of the Global and
Area Studies Program at Wyoming.
Markus Reisenleitner is Professor of Humanities and European Studies
at York University. His research is situated at the intersections of Cultural
History and Cultural Studies and focuses on the imaginaries of mobility,
community, fashion, and style in the global digital city. He has also worked
and published on urban imaginaries of modernity, digital humanities,
e-learning, and memory and nostalgia in popular and digital culture. His
most recent publications include the co-authored monograph Wiener
Chic: A Locational History of Vienna Fashion (Intellect, 2013) and the
edited volume Historical Textures of Translation: Traditions, Traumas,
Transgressions (Mille Tre 2012).
Charlotte Schallié is Associate Professor of German at the University of
Victoria. Her teaching and research interests include post-1945 diasporic
and transcultural writing and filmmaking, theories of spatiality, Jewish
identity in contemporary cultural discourse, and Holocaust education.
Her recent publications include the monograph Heimdurchsuchungen:
Deutschschweizer Literatur, Geschichtspolitik und Erinnerungskultur seit
1965 (Chronos, 2008), and the co-edited volume Globale Heimat.ch:
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Grenzüberschreitende Begegnungen in der zeitgenössischen Literatur (8th

edition 2012).
Christian Sieg holds a research position at the Cluster of Excellence
“Religion and Politics” and teaches in the Department of German Studies
at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. His research focuses on
modern and contemporary German literature and literary theory. His
recent publications include the monograph The Ordinary in the Novel of
German Modernism (Aisthesis 2011) and the edited volume Autorschaften
im Spannungsfeld von Religion und Politik (Ergon 2014).
List of Figures
Photo 2.1 Cube on German war planning. Permanent exhibition.

German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, 2014
(Photo by author) 34
Photo 2.2 Cabinet “The Invasion of Poland.” Permanent exhibition.
Military History Museum, Dresden, 2012 (Photo by author) 37
Photo 2.3 Introductory panel section 5. Special exhibition
Warsaw Rising of 1944, Warsaw Rising Museum,
hosted by the Topography of Terror, Berlin, 2014
(Photo by author) 43
Fig. 7.1 Superimposition of Üner and F.M. Einheit (The Evil
Old Songs, dir. Fatih Akin) 123
Fig. 7.2 Spinning room (The Evil Old Songs, dir. Fatih Akin) 127
Fig. 7.3 Üner sings “Ağla Sevdam” in color sequence (The Evil
Old Songs, dir. Fatih Akin) 134
Fig. 8.1 Barbed wire (Trojanow and Muhrbeck 116–7) 146
Fig. 8.2 High-rises and shepherd (Trojanow and Muhrbeck 14–5) 147
Fig. 8.3 Donkey and old airplane (Trojanow and Muhrbeck 98
and back cover) 149
Fig. 8.4 Shumen Monument (Trojanow and Muhrbeck 102–3) 152
Fig. 10.1 Politics of memory coding map 191
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Usable Pasts and Futures

of Transnational European Memories
Christina Kraenzle and Maria Mayr
Towards a Transnational European Memory

Over the past decade, the European Union (EU) has been no stranger to
crisis. For instance, the Eurozone debt crisis came to a critical point with
the threat of Greece’s exit from the Eurozone in 2015. In 2016, the EU
was further destabilized when the UK voted in favour of leaving the EU,
the political and economic consequences of which have yet to emerge.
In addition, the growing refugee crisis, which reached new heights in
the wake of the war in Syria, has led to further disagreement among EU
member states whose leaders and citizens have at times incommensurable
ideas on how to address the massive influx of immigrants and refugees to
Europe. Since 2004, citizens across Europe have also faced several acts
The co-authors are listed alphabetically.
C. Kraenzle (*)
Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, York University,
Toronto, ON, Canada
e-mail: Kraenzle@yorku.ca
M. Mayr
Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Memorial
University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NL, Canada
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 1

C. Kraenzle, M. Mayr (eds.), The Changing Place of Europe in
Global Memory Cultures, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39152-6_1
2 C. KRAENZLE AND M. MAYR
of terror, which have both united them in solidarity and divided them
in their responses to questions such as the role of Islam in Europe or the
legitimacy of a military response to terrorism. Unsurprisingly, doomsday
reports about the potential collapse of the European Union are prolif-
erating in popular discourses, with various tensions emerging between
member states and regions regarding questions pertaining to economic
recovery, immigration, multiculturalism, the role of religion in secular
society, and socialism, to name but a few.
Negative prognoses aside, what these discussions bring to the fore is
that since its inception as the European Coal and Steel Community in
1951, the EU has come a long way, gradually shifting its focus from mere
economic and political integration to address questions about broader
cultural integration. As Klas-Göran Karlsson shows, there were three
waves or phases of European integration: an initial economic wave, a sec-
ond—in his assessment less successful—wave of political unification, and
a third wave of cultural Europeanization, which began in the 1990s due
to the end of the Cold War.1 A cornerstone of the process of this third
wave of cultural integration has focused on memory and commemora-
tive practice in the attempt to foster a greater sense of shared European
identity amongst citizens of the various member states. As evidenced by
numerous EU funded projects such as the contested House of European
History in Brussels, initiated by the European Parliament and presumably
opening in late 2016, the EU takes the goal of creating a common mem-
ory very seriously.2 Indeed, in its Resolution on European Conscience
and Totalitarianism from 2009, the European Parliament asserts that
“Europe will not be united unless it is able to form a common view of its
history, recognizes Nazism, Stalinism and fascist and Communist regimes
as a common legacy and brings about an honest and thorough debate
on their crimes in the past century”; it also underlines “the importance
1
Klas-Göran Karlsson, “The Uses of History and the Third Wave of Europeanization,” in
A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance, ed. Małgorzata Pakier
and Bo Stråth, Studies in Contemporary European History (New York, NY: Berghahn
Books, 2010), 38–52. 38–9.
2
Veronika Settele, for instance, observes tensions between a political mandate of unity and
integration given by the Museum’s initial conception by politicians and funded by the
European Parliament on the one hand, and the academic museum curators’ aim to also draw
attention to uneven power relations and the experience of exclusion on the other. Veronika
Settele, “Including Exclusion in European Memory? Politics of Remembrance at the House
of European History,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 10 (2015): 405–16. 413.
INTRODUCTION: THE USABLE PASTS AND FUTURES OF TRANSNATIONAL... 3
of keeping the memories of the past alive, because there can be no

reconciliation without truth and remembrance”; and it “[b]elieves that
appropriate preservation of historical memory, a comprehensive reassess-
ment of European history and Europe-wide recognition of all historical
aspects of modern Europe will strengthen European integration.”3 These
constitutional calls for a common European memory, accompanied by
significant EU investments in commemorative projects and in the form of
research grants in cultural memory studies, have made European cultural
memory a fascinating case study.4 As the titles of some of the academic
monographs and collections published in the past decade-and-a-half illus-
trate, case studies of European memory attest to the ways in which issues
such as wars, genocide, colonialism, communism, migration, or expulsion
have been cast as central to, or divisive of, the notion of a European iden-
tity at the present moment.5
But even though most scholars agree that collective identity is closely
linked to cultural or collective memory, any straightforward relation that
3
European Parliament, “European Conscience and Totalitarianism,” April 2, 2009, http://
www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+TA+P6-TA-
2009-0213+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN.
4
Following Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning’s inclusive definition, by cultural memory we
mean “the interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts,” which includes “a broad
spectrum of phenomena as possible objects of cultural memory studies—ranging from indi-
vidual acts of remembering in a social context to group memory (of family, friends, veterans,
etc.) to national memory with its ‘invented traditions’, and finally to the host of transnational
lieux de mémoire such as the Holocaust and 9/11.” Astrid Erll, “Cultural Memory Studies:
An Introduction,” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar
Nünning (Berlin; New York, NY: De Gruyter, 2010), 1–15. 2.
5
For example, the following are titles of works that have been published over the last 15
years: Jan-Werner Müller’s Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of
the Past (2002), Klaus Eder and Willfried Spohn’s Collective Memory and European Identity:
The Effects of Integration and Enlargement (2005), Konrad Jarausch and Thomas
Lindenberger’s Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories (2007), Natan
Sznaider’s Gedächtnisraum Europa: die Visionen des europäischen Kosmopolitismus: eine
jüdische Perspektive (2008), Helena Gonçalves da Silva et al.’s Conflict, Memory Transfers and
the Reshaping of Europe (2010), Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth’s A European Memory?
Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (2010), Claus Leggewie and Anne Lang’s
Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung: Ein Schlachtfeld wird besichtigt (2011), Siobhan
Kattago’s Memory and Representation in Contemporary Europe (2011), Eric Langenbacher
et al.’s Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe (2012), Mithander et al.’s
European Cultural Memory Post-89 (2013), Sharon Macdonald’s Memorylands: Heritage
and Identity in Europe Today (2013), and Aline Sierp’s History, Memory, and Trans-European
Identity: Unifying Divisions (2014).
is drawn between the European past and a collective European identity is

problematic.6 As the question mark in the title of Małgorzata Pakier and
Bo Stråth’s edited volume A European Memory? highlights, there are ques-
tions as to the legitimacy and plausibility of the very call for a common
European memory. As Stephan Jaeger notes in this volume, the challenge
in negotiating memories of pan-European events is to avoid homogenized
or competitive forms of supranational European memory that erase differ-
ence and alterity for the sake of identity and homogeneity. This point also
forms the focus of Jan Lensen’s chapter in the present volume, in which
he argues that European memory should not erase but rather accommo-
date the diverse ways in which different communities actually experienced
and remember the past. Indeed, as Anne Lang and Claus Leggewie argue,
a sustainable political European identity must be built on a view of its
history that gives equal due to both shared and disputed memories as
well as memories of disputes. As Eva Maria Esseling’s contribution further
details, playing with the German word “geteilt,” meaning both shared and
divided, Lang and Leggewie argue that the “common” part of European
memory can grow from acknowledging and working on and through,
rather than erasing, that which divides it.7
The need to accommodate potentially divisive European memories
perhaps becomes most apparent in view of memories of the Gulag and
oppression under totalitarian communist regimes in the former socialist
East European countries. In this volume, we employ the term “Eastern
European” as used by Joanna Wawrzyniak and Małgorzata Pakier “to refer
to the half of the continent that in the twentieth century experienced dou-
ble totalitarianism, wars, and decades of communism (or real socialism) and
Soviet dependency.”8 Since the end of the Cold War and particularly since
the 2004 Eastern enlargement of the European Union, which entailed the
integration of post-socialist countries, Europeans in both East and West
have been confronted with working through a past previously ignored
6
As Michael Rothberg argues: “Our relationship to the past does partially determine who
we are in the present, but never straightforwardly and directly, and never without unexpected
or even unwanted consequences that bind us to those whom we consider other.” Michael
Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 5.
7
Claus Leggewie and Anne Lang, Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung: Ein
Schlachtfeld wird besichtigt (Munich: Beck, 2011), 7.
8
Joanna Wawrzyniak and Małgorzata Pakier, “Memory Studies in Eastern Europe: Key
Issues and Future Perspectives,” Polish Sociological Review, no. 183 (2013): 257–79. 258.
as well as obscured as part of socialist totalitarian and Cold War politics.

As Maria Mälksoo argues in her work, there continues to be an “ongo-
ing argument over the place that the communist legacy should occupy
in Europeans’ collective sense of themselves,” which is “reflective of the
wider politics of recognition for making East European experiences part of
a shared mnemonic inventory of the enlarged European community.”9 An
often cited example for potential divisions of European memory is May 8,
1945, which is marked as the date of the end of World War II and the “lib-
eration” of Europe but simultaneously represents the beginning of totali-
tarian oppression for many Eastern European countries. Stephan Jaeger’s
and Sara Jones’ chapters in this volume engage with Russian, East German,
and Romanian memories, highlighting the need to incorporate what have
previously been considered to be squarely East European memories into
European memory. However, there is not only an imbalance regarding
the visibility accorded to memories concerning Eastern European coun-
tries, but also a potentially problematic Western imposition of the ways in
which memories are to be dealt with in the East. As Christian Sieg points
out in this volume, commemorative practices deemed too exclusive may
not foster European integration, but rather further divide Europe. Voicing
the discontent of other memory studies scholars from Eastern Europe,
Wawrzyniak and Pakier forcefully criticize much scholarship on European
memory to date, arguing that “the Western processes of self-critical con-
frontation with the dark past, underway since the late 1960s, are seen as
establishing direction for post-communist Eastern Europe, a model which
then simplistically views that region as governed by reviving nationalist sen-
timents or uncritical patriotic narratives.”10 Thus, our volume attempts to
help answer Mälksoo’s call to “pluralize the ways of being European.”11
The danger of exclusive and hegemonic Western accounts of European
memories that obscure East European perspectives highlights the need for
9
Mälksoo further asserts that as “the debates held in these multiple political fora demon-
strate, efforts to influence the normative and institutional formation of a pan-European
remembrance of communist regimes have hardly gone unchallenged. The meaning of the
communist legacy for ‘European memory’ has emerged as a political issue of substantial
controversy and significance.” Maria Mälksoo, “Criminalizing Communism: Transnational
Mnemopolitics in Europe,” International Political Sociology 8, no. 1 (2014): 82–99. 97, 83.
10
Wawrzyniak and Pakier, “Memory Studies in Eastern Europe,” 266.
11
Maria Mälksoo, “The Memory Politics of Becoming European: The East European
Subalterns and the Collective Memory of Europe,” European Journal of International
Relations 15, no. 4 (2009): 653–80. 656.
analyzing the ways in which European memories are transnationally nego-

tiated, which is one of the central concerns of this volume. As the various
chapters collected here show, European memories exceed the boundar-
ies of the various European nation states and their individually conceived
histories, and also those of Europe itself. This transnational dimension
of European memory is to date still a nascent field of study. As rich and
proliferative as work on European memory has been to date, the majority
of scholarship has taken the nation as its primary object of study. Echoing
others, Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad have pointed to the insuf-
ficiency of national models in memory studies, where it was previously
held that “the dynamics of memory production unfolded primarily within
the bounds of the nation state” and that “coming to terms with the past
was largely a national project.”12 They attribute the need for transnational-
izing memory mainly to globalization and its mechanisms—global capital-
ism, migration, multiculturalism, tourism, international academic circuits,
transnational non-governmental organizations, and bodies such as the
European Union or the various organs of the United Nations—as well as
to global communication channels such as mass media and the internet.
In their introduction to Transnational Memory, Circulation, Articulation,
Scales (2014), Chiara de Cesari and Ann Rigney also argue that national
frameworks no longer adequately account for the formation of memory and
identity today13 in the way in which previous nationally based models such
as those described in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983)
or Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–1992) had functioned.14
As Rigney argues in the same volume, which is otherwise primarily con-
12
Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and
Trajectories (Basingstoke; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 2.
13
As De Cesari and Rigney argue: “[T]he time is ripe to move memory studies itself
beyond methodological nationalism. Globalized communication and time-space compres-
sion, post-coloniality, transnational capitalism, large-scale migration, and regional integra-
tion: all of these mean that national frames are no longer the self-evident ones they used to
be in daily life and identity formation. As a result, the national has also ceased to be the inevi-
table or preeminent scale for the study of collective remembrance. By now, in the second
decade of the twenty-first century, it has become a matter of urgency for scholars in the field
of memory studies to develop new theoretical frameworks, invent new methodological tools,
and identify new sites and archival resources for studying collective remembrance beyond the
nation-state.” Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney, Transnational Memory, Circulation,
Articulation, Scales, Media and Cultural Memory (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 2014), 2.
14
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London; New York: Verso, 2006); Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire
(1984–1992), 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).
cerned with transnational memory as such rather than with transnational

European memory, Europe provides “a very good illustration of the issues
and complexities at hand in the study of transnational memory … [and of]
its multi-layered, multi-sided, and multi-scalar dynamic.”15 Aline Sierp and
Jenny Wüstenberg’s special journal issue Transnational Memory Politics in
Europe (2015) focuses specifically on European memory, making a strong
case for the need to pay attention to its understudied transnational nature:
While there is much empirical work to build on in terms of single case stud-
ies, research on transnational memory politics is nevertheless as yet in its
infancy. What is lacking is a systematic understanding of the transnational
structures, agents, and practices that shape local, national, or transnational
‘realms of memory’ (Nora and Kritzman 1996)…. A genuine investigation
of transnational memory linkages on the European level, comprising the
analysis of cross-border social relationships of non-state and other actors, is
still largely missing.16
Our collection of chapters has been conceived specifically in order to add

to the growing body of scholarship and case studies on such transnational
European memory practices and events.
While memory studies scholars have only recently begun to empha-
size the need to conceptualize memory on a transnational scale beyond
the nation, it is important to keep in mind that transnational memory
is of course not a new phenomenon. In her critique of methodological
nationalism operative in previous memory studies projects,17 Astrid Erll
emphasizes that memory in fact has always been “fundamentally a trans-
15
Ann Rigney, “Ongoing: Changing Memory and the European Project,” in Transnational
Memory, Circulation, Articulation, Scales, ed. Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 2014), 339–59. 356.
16
Aline Sierp and Jenny Wüstenberg, “Linking the Local and the Transnational: Rethinking
Memory Politics in Europe,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 23, no. 3 (2015):
321–29. 323. Sierp and Wüstenberg note three exceptions: Jens Kroh, Transnationale
Erinnerung: Der Holocaust im Fokus geschichtspolitischer Initiativen (Frankfurt am Main:
Campus, 2008); Elisabeth Kübler, Europäische Erinnerungspolitik: Der Europarat und die
Erinnerung an den Holocaust (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2012); Aline Sierp, History,
Memory, and Trans-European Identity: Unifying Divisions (New York, NY: Routledge,
2014).
17
For Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande’s use of the term “methodological nationalism,”
please see Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, “Jenseits des methodologischen Nationalismus,”
Soziale Welt 61 (2010): 187–216.
cultural phenomenon,” and that it “is actually since ancient times that
contents, forms and technologies of memory have crossed the boundar-
ies of time, space, and social groups, and been filled in different local
contexts with new life and new meaning.”18 As a pertinent example, Erll
for instance points to Islam’s influence on the European Renaissance or
the Persian influence on the Old Testament.19 Rather than assuming that
transcultural memories are an extraordinary case of memory formation,
Erll convincingly suggests that:
Transcultural memory is … therefore not simply a special case of cultural

memory. It is a certain research perspective, a specific curiosity or focus of
attention, which is directed towards mnemonic processes unfolding across
time and space, between and beyond cultural formations…. It is based on
the insight that memory—individual as well as social—is fundamentally a
transcultural phenomenon.20
Any study of European memory, as proposed here, therefore necessitates

thinking beyond the nation as well as beyond Europe as a supranational
entity. That is, an assessment of European memory can neither merely
consist of comparing various nationally based memories in an additive
fashion, nor can it approach Europe itself as some kind of unified and
homogenous entity mimicking traits previously attributed to the nation.
Rather, it seems to be more fruitful to approach European memory as
intrinsically transnational on an intra- and extra-European level.
Tracing the itineraries of European memories beyond and between
nations as well as beyond Europe, the majority of the case studies collected
in this volume uncover memory formations that are most adequately
conceptualized by Astrid Erll’s notion of travelling memory, Michael
Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, and Levy and Sznaider’s
cosmopolitan memory. As is further discussed in several chapters, Astrid
Erll invokes James Clifford’s metaphor of “travelling culture” to coin the
notion of a “travelling memory.” Given the centrality of the term to many
of the chapters in this volume, it is worth quoting Erll at length:
18
Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, trans. Sara B. Young, Palgrave Macmillan Memory
Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 66.
19
Erll, Memory in Culture, 66.
20
Erll, Memory in Culture, 2011, 66.
The term “travelling memory” is a metaphorical shorthand, an abbreviation

for the fact that in the production of cultural memory, people, media, mne-
monic forms, contents, and practices are in constant, unceasing motion…. I
claim that all cultural memory must “travel”, be kept in motion, in order to
“stay alive”, to have an impact both on individual minds and social forma-
tions. Such travel consists only partly in movement across and beyond terri-
torial and social boundaries. On a more fundamental level, it is the ongoing
exchange of information between individuals and the motion between
minds and media which first of all generates what Halbwachs termed col-
lective memory. “Travel” is therefore an expression of the principal logic of
memory: its genesis and existence through movement.21
The term thus captures her insistence that “memory seems to be con-
stituted in the first place through the movement of people, objects and
media” [emphasis added] in contexts such as “everyday interaction among
different social groups to transnational media reception and from trade
and travel to migration and diaspora, to war and colonialism.”22 Sebastian
Conrad also observes the a priori interconnected nature of all memory and
engages the concept of histoires croisées:
The term “entangled memories” does not refer so much to the fact that the
past which is remembered—the object of memory—must itself be placed in
a transnational context and be seen as a product of processes of exchange
and influence. Instead, it focuses on the moment of memory production
which is seen not only as an attempt to connect to the individual or collec-
tive past, but also as the effect of a multitude of complex impulses in the
present.23
For Conrad, this notion differs from the idea of shared history, which
evokes the idea of a consensual interpretation of the past. The concept of
entangled memory instead “stresses the asymmetrical relations and inter-
actions that produce different and conflicting accounts of the past.”24
21
Astrid Erll, “Travelling Memory,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 4–18. 12.
22
Erll, Memory in Culture, 2011, 66.
23
Sebastian Conrad, “Entangled Memories: Versions of the Past in Germany and Japan,
1945–2001,” Journal of Contemporary History 38, no. 1 (2003): 85–99. 86.
24
Conrad, “Entangled Memories,” 86. As Konrad Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger
point out, the notion of “histoire croisée has emerged primary in relation to histories of intra-
European relations.” Konrad Hugo Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger, Conflicted
Similarly invoking a network metaphor, Rothberg suggests that we look

at memory in terms of “‘noueds de mémoire’—knots of memory” to con-
ceptualize a collective memory shaped outside of the confines of the nation
state, suggesting that memories are knotted by “rhizomatic networks of
temporality and cultural reference that exceed attempts at territorializa-
tion (whether at the local or national level) and identitarian reduction.”25
What emerges from this and other conceptualizations of memory is that
memory evolves and transforms based on exchange and interaction. In
order to combat the notion that this transformation is inherently conflic-
tual, Rothberg has proposed the notion of multidirectional memory. In his
widely received 2009 book, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the
Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Rothberg convincingly argues that
seemingly separate public memories of different groups and events are not
inherently competitive but rather mutually productive and intrinsically co-
influential. Since “public memory is structurally multidirectional—that is,
always marked by transcultural borrowing, exchange, and adaptation”,26
a particular memory discourse, such as that of the Holocaust, “far from
blocking other historical memories from view in a competitive strug-
gle for recognition,” is able to contribute to the “articulation of other
histories.”27 Many of the case studies collected here illustrate this mul-
tidirectional nature of memory on an intra-European level. In addition,
our volume also includes cases of transnational multidirectional European
memories operating on an extra-European level. Willow Anderson’s chap-
ter, for example, traces the ways in which memories of Holocaust survi-
vors interact with memories of residential school survivors from Canada’s
Aboriginal community, showing how European memories travel to other
parts of the globe, and Charlotte Schallié’s chapter traces memory itinerar-
ies between Switzerland, Rwanda, and Western Sahara. Similarly, Markus
Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories, ed. Annelie Ramsbrock, Studies in

Contemporary European History (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2007), 10.
25
Michael Rothberg, “Introduction: Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de
Mémoire to Noeuds de Mémoire,” Yale French Studies, no. 118/119 (2010): 3–12. 7.
26
Michael Rothberg, “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory,”
Criticism 53, no. 4 (2011): 523–48. 524. As Rothberg also observes, the politics of memory
continue to necessitate differentiation between what he calls “politically productive” forms
of memory from those that lead to “attempts at territorialization (whether at the local or
national level) and identitarian reduction.” Rothberg, “Introduction: Between Memory and
Memory,” 7.
27
Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 6.
Reisenleitner’s chapter traces the ways in which a replica of an Austrian vil-

lage evokes European memories in China, reflecting global phenomena of
memory projects ready-made for global consumption and appropriation.
The extra-European scale of some of the commemorative practices and
itineraries presented in this volume also engage with the ways in which
transnational European memory acquires universal and global dimensions.
Therefore, it is not surprising that many of the chapters reference Daniel
Levy and Natan Sznaider’s notion of cosmopolitan memory. Levy and
Sznaider argue that Holocaust memory today represents a cosmopolitan
memory in so far as it exceeds the confines of both time and space and
now serves as a moral yardstick by which human rights issues are addressed
around the globe. Here, it is important to point out that this cosmopoli-
tan memory is nevertheless rooted in local processes. This “glocal” nature
arises because “issues of global concern are able to become part and parcel
of everyday local experiences and moral life worlds of an increasing num-
ber of people.”28 Moreover, Levy and Sznaider point out that contempo-
rary formations of cosmopolitan memory are decidedly oriented towards
the future. As they argue:
In a newly European “cosmopolitan” memory, the Holocaust future (and

not the past) is now considered in absolutely universal terms: it can happen
to anyone, at anytime, and everyone is responsible. This future-oriented
dimension is a defining feature of cosmopolitan memory. It is not a memory
that is solely looking toward the past to produce a new formative myth.
Discussions about post-national collectivities are mostly focused on the
future.29
There are several case studies in our volume that also engage with memo-
ries of the Holocaust and they all do so with this future orientation in
mind. Looking at how Holocaust memory operates in contemporary
contexts such as discussions surrounding European literature, Truth and
Reconciliation initiatives in Canada, or renegotiations of Catalan identity,
these case studies make apparent that the past is used for present and
future purposes and thereby point to the anachronistic nature of memory.
As Jeffry Olick points out, “memory is made wholly neither in the past
28
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, “Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation
of Cosmopolitan Memory,” European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 1 (2002): 87–106. 88.
29
Levy and Sznaider, “Memory Unbound,” 102.
nor in the present but in the continual struggle between them,”30 or as

Assmann and Conrad put it, “memory rethinks the future in alliance with
recasting the past.”31 The case studies collected in this volume are there-
fore not about memories that are statically perceived or unchangeable but
rather are what Alexander Etkind and others call memory events. Memory
events constitute “deterritorialized and temporal phenomena that …
‘start time’ by endowing the past with new life in the future” and “reboot
cultural memory by keeping this hardware [monuments, plaques, street
signs] and software [novels, films, marches] in dialogue while refreshing
and updating the code that facilitates their exchange.”32 As Yifat Gutman,
Amy Sodaro, and Adam Brown argue, an awareness of this Janus-face
of memory is essential for addressing the relationship between collective
memory and issues such as “democratic politics; human rights and tran-
sitional justice; revenge, imposture and forgery; social movements and
utopian moments.”33
In the context of such future-oriented uses of the past, Amir Eshel
privileges the imaginative arts and literature about atrocity in particu-
lar with what he calls “futurity,” that is, the ability to create “the ‘open,
future, possible’ by expanding our vocabularies, by probing the human
ability to act, and by prompting reflection and debate.”34 Ann Rigney
30
Jeffrey K. Olick, “From Useable Pasts to the Return of the Repressed,” The Hedgehog
Review 9, no. 2 (2007): 19–31. 20.
31
Assmann and Conrad, Memory in a Global Age, 1.
32
Alexander Etkind et al., Remembering Katyn (Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity, 2012),
10–11. Given this processual and active nature of collective memory, Chiara Bottici opts to
replace the term collective memory by Winter and Sivan’s notion of collective remembrance.
They “focus on remembrance precisely to avoid the shortcomings of the concept of collec-
tive memory and to emphasize activity and agency in its place. They consider collective
remembrance as the product of individuals and groups who come together not necessarily at
the behest of the state or any of its subsidiary organizations, but because they have to speak
out. In other words, whilst memory may be understood as denoting an object, remembrance
always designated a process.” Chiara Bottici, “European Identity and the Politics of
Remembrance,” in Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, ed.
Karin Tilmans, Frank Van Vree, and Jay Winter (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2010), 335–60. 342.
33
Yifat Gutman, Amy Sadoro, and Adam D. Brown, “Introduction: Memory and the Future:
Why a Change in Focus Is Necessary,” in Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics
and Society, ed. Yifat Gutman, Amy Sadoro, and Adam D. Brown, Palgrave Macmillan Memory
Studies (Basingstoke; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1–11. 1.
34
Amir Eshel, Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (Chicago, IL:
The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 4–5.
similarly argues that the imaginative arts continue to play an essential role
in creating future-oriented collective memories for Europe.35 The aes-
thetic surplus and identificatory potential of fiction and the arts provide
privileged access to geographically and temporally different memories, and
thus help to generate “subtitled” shared memories. In addition, because
of “their unscripted and imaginative character … the arts have the poten-
tial to generate new narratives that break away from inherited models, by
providing a conduit for bringing into play new perspectives and unfamil-
iar voices that fall outside dominant discourses.”36 While this volume in
part follows Aline Sierp and Jenny Wüstenberg’s call to study concrete
practices of state and non-state actors in transnational memory formation
in Europe, it combines this tracing of memory agents and institutions
with an investigation of those itineraries outlined by the imaginative arts.
Because of the understudied importance of the role of cultural products in
constituting a transnational European memory, several of the chapters in
this volume engage with film, literature, and photography.
While travelling across and beyond national and continental borders,
the case studies collected in this volume show that the transnational is by
no means leaving the concept of the nation behind or necessarily implying
the non-national. As Jens Kroh outlines, the transnational is differenti-
ated from both the international and supranational. International denotes
relationships between nations that leave the national as such intact and
supranational denotes a level that exists above the nation state, such as the
political organization of the European Union. Transnational, on the other
hand, focuses on processes, flows, and networks that exist beneath the level
of the nation state and lead to formations of community and commonality
outside or beyond, rather than merely between, national frameworks.37
What many case studies in this volume foreground is that the transna-
tional therefore does not entail the end or obsolescence of the nation
state. Just as the word itself retains reference to the national, contexts such
as the national, as well as the ethnic, regional, or local, are integral to some
of the transnational European memories highlighted by our contributions.
This is perhaps best exemplified in David Messenger’s contribution to this
volume, where he shows how Catalan efforts at solidifying their collective
35
Ann Rigney, “Transforming Memory and the European Project,” New Literary History
43, no. 4 (2012): 607–28.
36
Ann Rigney, “Transforming Memory,” 621.
37
Kroh, Transnationale Erinnerung, 38.
identity vis-à-vis Spain takes the route of identifying with Europe. That
is, in order to assert Catalan national identity, the Catalan memory proj-
ects in question tap into these memories’ transnational European lineage
and connections. Similarly, Markus Reisenleitner’s chapter reveals how
European memories of an Austrian village have been integrated into, and
drive national aspirations in Austria and China. These case studies there-
fore affirm Joan DeBardeleben and Achim Hurrelmann’s observation that
one of the “most striking insights produced by transnational approaches in
history” is that “transnational relations within civil society can play a key
role in constructing and perpetuating discourses of nationhood.”38 Levy
and Sznaider point to a similar phenomenon. They borrow Ulrich Beck’s
notion of rooted cosmopolitanism to clarify that the idea of a cosmopoli-
tan memory “provides an analytical prism that captures a key dynamic in
the global age—namely, the relationship between the global and the local
(or, for our purposes, the national). Accordingly, we suggest that national
and ethnic memories are transformed in the age of globalization rather
than erased.”39 This point has recently been emphasized by David Inglis,
who exhorts memory studies scholars to pay attention to the continued
relevance of the nation in memory studies, suggesting that there is “a
need to recast analytic frameworks of memory studies so that they can
adequately encompass the trans-national level, while not relinquishing the
national level that they have hitherto been primarily oriented towards”
because “it is a simplification to think that some unitary ‘globalization’
simply has the power to sweep away before it older forms of belonging
and memorizing [sic].”40 While Inglis refers to the global arena, several of
the case studies collected here also affirm the continued relevance of the
local, regional, and national elements in transnational memory formation
on the European level.
38
Joan DeBardeleben and Achim Hurrelmann, eds., Transnational Europe: Promise,
Paradox, Limits, Palgrave Studies in European Union Politics (Basingstoke; New York, NY:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 12.
39
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, trans.
Assenke Oksiloff (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006), 3.
40
David Inglis, “Globalization and/of Memory: On the Complexification and Contestation
of Memory Cultures and Practices,” in Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies,
ed. Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 143–57.
144, 147.
Transnational European Memories: Case Studies

from around the Globe
The chapters assembled here share in common a focus on the ways in

which various European memories travel beyond the confines of the
nation state. Drawing on concepts from memory studies and putting
them in conversation with concepts and methodologies drawn from disci-
plines such as communication studies, European studies, film studies, his-
tory, literary studies, museum studies, and urban studies, they analyze the
transnational and European dimensions of memory practices and events
from Austria, Catalonia, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and Turkey, some
of them in dialogue with those in China, Canada, Rwanda, the USA, and
Western Sahara. More specifically, the chapters critically examine how and
to what effect various artists and artistic works, institutions, and museums
are mobilizing future-oriented memories of “Europe.”41 Taken together,
these chapters also move beyond individual case studies to provide valu-
able insights into the theoretical dimensions of the emerging field of trans-
national memory studies.
The first three chapters in the collection focus on the complex interac-
tions of national and transnational levels of remembrance in contemporary
museums and memorial sites in Germany, Poland, Spain, and Romania.
Stephan Jaeger poses fundamental questions about what constitutes trans-
national memory in his analysis of twenty-first-century museum represen-
tations of World War II. Examining four exhibitions, Jaeger highlights
the central caveat regarding the very notion of a common European
memory, namely that it should not entail new hegemonic and suprana-
tional forms of remembrance that synthesize multifaceted experiences and
multiple voices, effectively subsuming those that do not fit into autho-
rized commemorative narratives. Jaeger reminds us that at its most pro-
ductive, a transnational approach to memory does not aspire to erase the
tensions between national perspectives; rather, the transnational lies pre-
cisely in the exploration of these tensions. Given the very embeddedness
of nationalism and the nation state in World War II memory, as well as
the divergent discourses of World War II memory in Western and Eastern
Europe, World War II serves as a particularly fruitful realm of memory
41
Cognizant of the contested and constructed nature of Europe, Europe here is broadly
defined not only by its shifting political borders but also as an imagined community of shared
traditions.
for thinking through the dynamics of memory strategies that negotiate

between national, transnational, and universal levels of remembrance to
balance multiple perspectives with historical specificity. Jaeger’s case stud-
ies of German and Polish museum exhibits on World War II at the Eastern
front provide an ideal opportunity to assess by what means, and to what
extent, contemporary museums represent World War II as a unifying, but
nonetheless multiperspectival, European memory.
The relationship between the national and transnational also informs
David Messenger’s investigation of the prominent and complex role that
the memories of Catalonia’s experience in the Spanish Civil War play in
negotiations of Catalan identity. Focusing on how contemporary Catalan
memory sites construct narratives that link experiences of the Spanish
Civil War and the fight for democracy with the broader European strug-
gle against Nazism in World War II, Messenger demonstrates how these
narratives not only connect Catalonia’s past to Europe’s, but also posit
Catalonia as an essential part of contemporary efforts to further democ-
racy in Europe. Messenger traces how Catalan memory discourses that link
the memory of Franco’s victims to victims of Nazism and the Holocaust
are renationalized in ways that allow Catalan identity to be cast not in
ethnic or linguistic terms, but in relation to a sense of civic nationalism
based on European memories of historical injustices and democratic activ-
ism. Messenger’s assessment of the Europeanization of memories of the
Spanish Civil war in Catalonia thus serves as a reminder that the separa-
tion of national and transnational memory cultures is not straightforward.
In the Catalan example, memories circulate transnationally, but are nev-
ertheless reterritorialized in a national context, exemplifying Rothberg’s
contention that “national” memory cultures are “in fact assemblages of
inter- and transnational exchange.”42
In the final chapter concerned with museums and memorial sites, Sara
Jones investigates the dynamic interactions between national and trans-
national memory cultures that occur when institutions collaborate across
national borders. Jones considers the inter- and extra-European collabora-
tions of two influential memorial sites commemorating crimes committed
by former communist regimes, namely the Hohenschönhausen Memorial
Site in Germany and the Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of
42
Michael Rothberg, “Multidirectional Memory in Migratory Settings: The Case of Post-
Holocaust Germany,” in Transnational Memory, Circulation, Articulation, Scales, ed. Chiara
De Cesari and Ann Rigney (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 123–45. 139.
the Resistance in Romania. Her chapter explores how these cross-border

interactions influence institutional narratives regarding the perceived
successes and failures of transitional justice as well as national and pan-
European attempts to address the communist past. Here Jones makes
an important theoretical intervention, taking into account processes that
can only partially be accounted for by existing concepts in memory stud-
ies. Developing the term “collaborative memory,” she expands the theo-
retical toolkit of memory studies to describe the memory narratives that
result from transnational institutional collaboration as influential memory
entrepreneurs borrow and transform narratives of similar pasts from other
national contexts. Unlike processes of cosmopolitan memory, in which
universalized narratives are localized, collaborative memory denotes pro-
cesses in which narratives are borrowed precisely in their national specific-
ity in order to sanction or critique dominant memory narratives at home.
While these collaborative memory projects transnationalize memory dis-
courses, they nevertheless remain rooted in memory-political debates at
the local and national level.
The following five chapters all deal with reflections on European mem-
ory in artistic media such as film, photography, and literature. Like several
other chapters in the volume, Jan Lensen’s contribution attests to the
fact that even though there are strong calls to integrate commemoration
of the crimes committed by Communist regimes into a shared European
memory, the Holocaust undoubtedly continues to occupy a central place,
particularly in Western European memory narratives. Taking the novel
Grote Europese roman [Great European Novel] (2007) by Belgian author
Koen Peeters as a case study, Lensen argues that the novel formulates an
outspoken plea for the acknowledgement of the Holocaust as a funda-
mental component of a transnational European identity, and as a prereq-
uisite for developing an ethical and political attitude that allows for mutual
understanding and a common future European community. Lensen fur-
ther argues that while Grote Europese roman exemplifies a clear appeal for
a joint European memory and identity, on an aesthetic level the novel
simultaneously rejects the idea of homogenous memory and identity by
adopting a poetics that reflects a resistance to any kind of prescriptive
master narrative.
While the events of the Holocaust are not directly depicted in either
Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon or Cate Shortland’s Lore, John
O. Buffinga shows how the Holocaust nevertheless informs both films.
Their German settings and treatment of German history might at first
glance seem to offer visualizations of a specifically German past, restrict-

ing their focus on memory to a national level. But as Buffinga argues, the
films also highlight shared European memories, such as the collapse of the
European monarchy or mass migration and displacement at the end of
World War II. Buffinga moreover shows how both films, although on the
surface quite different in terms of their subject matter, similarly engage
national, transnational, and universal levels of European memory to
encourage viewer identification, challenging audiences to reflect on con-
temporary forms of brutality and violence in locations beyond Germany
and Europe. Despite their different visual aesthetics, Buffinga argues that
both films incorporate elements of the Heimat film, exporting one of the
hitherto most “German” of film genres to global film markets. This detail
underscores the transnational dimensions of cinematic production, recep-
tion, and distribution. The relative ease with which film crosses national
boundaries and its potential to reach mass audiences makes cinema an
especially powerful purveyor of transnational memory.
Cinematic memories of a traumatic European past also form the basis
of Eva Maria Esseling’s investigation of Fatih Akin’s contribution to Lars
von Trier’s Visions of Europe, an omnibus film project commissioned by
the EU to mark the occasion of EU expansion in 2004. Employing liter-
ary references and an eclectic musical repertoire—ranging from Schubert,
German military songs, avant-garde industrial music, and popular Turkish
and German film scores—Akin’s The Evil Old Songs evokes collective
memories of war and violence. But Akin’s vision is not limited to this past-
oriented perspective. Rather, it ultimately makes a plea for overcoming the
nationalisms that led to the catastrophes of the twentieth century in order
to foster a peaceful, transnational European community for the future.
With its focus on a wide range of artists and realms of art—including
cinema, theatre, music, and poetry—Akin, like Eshel and Rigney, draws
attention to the prominent role of the creative arts in shaping future-
oriented collective memories.
An orientation towards the future may, however, also lead to skepticism
about the efficacy of a common European memory. With this in mind,
Christian Sieg reads Ilija Trojanow and Christian Muhrbeck’s collection
of stories and photographs, Wo Orpheus begraben liegt [Where Orpheus Lies
Buried] (2013) as a direct response to discourses on European identity
and to the question whether European memory discourses can be integra-
tive—that is constitutive of a transnational European identity—while still
allowing for a plurality of European voices. The ironic title of the book
alludes to Bulgaria’s part in Europe’s rich cultural history, and critiques

attempts to locate the foundations of European identity in Greek antiq-
uity. While the texts and images all allude to Bulgaria’s past, they offer no
definitive historical narrative that might serve as a new, unifying myth for
either Bulgaria or Europe. The complex juxtaposition of texts and images
instead raises questions about how we remember and construct the past.
Placing emphasis on the politics of remembrance, particularly in Eastern
Europe, Trojanow and Muhrbeck’s book casts doubt on the very idea of
foundational European myths, arguing instead for a memorial culture that
embraces the plurality of European memory as a pathway to the future.
In the first of three chapters that consider how European memory circu-
lates beyond the territorial confines of Europe, Charlotte Schallié engages
Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory to investigate how mem-
ories of colonialism and the Holocaust mutually inform one another and
challenge long-established discourses of Swiss national memory. Set in the
transnational space of the international aid community, Lukas Bärfuss’
Hundert Tage [One Hundred Days] and Daniel Goetsch’s Herz aus Sand
[Heart of Sand] reveal that Switzerland’s humanitarian engagement and
aid work in Rwanda and Western Sahara was inextricably interwoven with
the tarnished legacies of European colonialism. Intertwining disparate
violent histories and human rights violations in Europe as well as Africa,
the novels highlight how the memory of the Holocaust and the legacy
of European colonialism influence and cross-reference one another over
time. The novels thereby challenge Switzerland’s post-war memory cul-
ture and question the established canonical narratives of Swiss neutrality
during World War II and of Switzerland—and, by extension, Europe—as
a defender of international human rights and democratic values. Schallié’s
case study shows how Switzerland, a non-EU nation that historically has
distanced itself from the pan-European atrocities of genocide and colo-
nialism, nevertheless experiences the transnationalization of its memory
discourses within the contemporary European and global context.
The multidirectionality of memory is also explored in Willow Anderson’s
investigation of the ways in which Holocaust memory has operated in the
post-colonial Canadian context. Anderson’s chapter explores the ongo-
ing dialogue between Holocaust survivors and former Aboriginal students
forced to participate in the Canadian residential school system, mapping
the ways in which memories of colonialism and the Holocaust have “trav-
elled” together and mutually informed one another in the larger context
of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Focusing on a
unique memory event co-organized by the TRC and the Centre for Israel
and Jewish Affairs, Anderson’s discursive analysis shows how participants
identified parallels and differences between the various experiences of his-
torical trauma, injustice, and recovery. Participants noted how, given the
general lack of public knowledge and discussion of the crimes committed
in the residential school system, Holocaust memory has provided them
with a framework for articulating traumatic memories not yet part of a
broader Canadian collective consciousness. Anderson’s case study thus
offers an example of non-competitive forms of remembrance in which
memories of the Holocaust are invoked not only to draw attention to past
injustices, but also to establish the necessity of the collective commemora-
tion of these crimes for any future reconciliation.
Finally, Markus Reisenleitner explores particularly circuitous routes of
European memory in his investigation of the curious replication of the
Austrian village of Hallstatt in Guangdong, China. His chapter explores
how the Chinese real estate development taps into selective memory dis-
courses in Hallstatt that have connected memories of industrialization in
the region to the small-town appeal of a centuries-old community in a
picturesque, sustainable environment. Detailing the ways in which memo-
ries of Europe and idealized and nostalgic notions of small-town com-
munities have similarly inspired the principles of New Urbanism and real
estate development in the USA, Reisenleitner convincingly shows how
this particular instance of shanzhai (piracy/imitation) entails far more than
simple emulation or a gradual homogenization of global urban planning.
The carefully selected imaginary instead fits perfectly into China’s project
of modernization and nation building, providing a surprising example of
national uses of transnational European memory.
Engaging with a wide range of commemorative media and practices,
the case studies collected here raise similar issues. Beginning from the
basic premise that memory exceeds the confines of national borders, the
individual contributions nevertheless highlight the continued relevance of
the nation. The collection thereby reveals complex and dynamic interac-
tions of national and transnational scales of European memory, showing
how transnational memories have been deployed at the intra- and extra-
European level not only to offer alternatives to dominant national nar-
ratives, but also, in certain instances, to reinforce them. Nevertheless, as
several chapters show, transnational approaches to commemorative prac-
tice have the potential to create a sense of a shared past or novel forms
of solidarity, while also paying attention to multiple voices, perspectives,
and cultures of remembrance. The patterns that are made visible through
the case studies furthermore underscore how expanding the field of mem-
ory studies to include topics such as the creative arts or urban planning
can help to capture more fully the myriad ways in which memories of
“Europe” are being shaped and mobilized.
CHAPTER 2
Between the National and the Transnational:

European Memories of World War II
in the Twenty-First-Century Museum
in Germany and Poland
Stephan Jaeger
Europe, the Transnational, and World War II

As Stefan Berger observes, “[t]he way that the war has been memorialised
with striking similarity in Western European nations raises the question of
a common European memory of the Second World War.”1 By analyzing
different strands of collective memory of World War II through Western
and Central Europe and the increasingly top-down politicization of the
war by the European Union since the 1980s, Berger and others have
1
Stefan Berger, “Remembering the Second World War in Western Europe, 1945–2005,”
in A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance, ed. Małgorzata
Pakier and Bo Stråth (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2010), 119–36. 133.
S. Jaeger (*)
Department of German and Slavic Studies, University of Manitoba,
Winnipeg, MB, Canada
e-mail: stephan.jaeger@umanitoba.ca

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39152-6_2
24 S. JAEGER
emonstrated how Western European countries established a “minimum

d
consensus” of European culture and history.2 Berger argues that:
The Second World War and the Holocaust became crucial elements in
a strategy to construct a sense of Europeanness. Included was the long-
established use of the Second World War in bilateral national relations to
further processes of reconciliation, most prominently between France and
Germany starting in the 1950s and between Poland and Germany from the
1970s onwards.3
However, Berger ultimately doubts whether this level of concentration

on a specific European realm of memory (lieu de mémoire) even works.
He highlights the nationalistic danger of simply replacing the idea of the
nation with that of Europe, points out the global dimensions of World
War II, and argues that the Holocaust “has arguably become the paradig-
matic case for all genocides and mass crimes worldwide.”4
Claus Leggewie presents another attempt to discuss common memory
through his “seven circles of European memory,”5 which span from the
Holocaust, Soviet communism, expulsion and resettlement, the general
experience of war and wartime as a possible “motor of Europe,” to colo-
nialism, immigration, and Europe’s political success story after 1945. The
Holocaust is Leggewie’s inner circle and functions as the negative found-
ing myth of Europe. Leggewie cautiously marks his circles as mere sugges-
tions and his detailed analysis focuses on cases that he sees as being on the
“periphery” of Europe, whether he is analyzing the “Aljoscha”-memorial
in Tallinn (marking the tensions between Estonians and Russians in the
post-Soviet era) or the Holodomor traveling exhibition in Cologne in
2
Berger, “Remembering the Second World War in Western Europe, 1945–2005,” 135;
Monika Flacke, ed., Mythen der Nationen: 1945 – Arena der Erinnerungen. Eine Ausstellung
des Deutschen Historischen Museums. Begleitbände zur Ausstellung 2. Oktober 2004 bis 27.
Februar 2005. Ausstellungshalle von I. M. Pei, 2 vols. (Mainz, Germany: Zabern, 2004);
Aleida Assmann, Geschichte im Gedächtnis: Von der individuellen Erfahrung zur öffentlichen
Inszenierung (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2007); Jörg Echternkamp and Stefan Martens, Experience
and Memory: The Second World War in Europe (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2010).
3
Berger, “Remembering the Second World War,” 134.
4
Berger, “Remembering the Second World War,” 135.
5
Claus Leggewie, “Seven Circles of European Memory,” trans. Simon Garnett, Eurozine,
December 20, 2010; Claus Leggewie and Anne Lang, Der Kampf um die europäische
Erinnerung: ein Schlachtfeld wird besichtigt, Beck’sche Reihe 1835 (Munich: Beck, 2011),
14–48.
BETWEEN THE NATIONAL AND THE TRANSNATIONAL... 25
1998. Leggewie’s case studies show the dynamics of the overlap between
different circles, such as World War II and Communism. He consistently
notes that a European memory can only exist in the way the crimes, such as
the Holocaust, are collectively remembered and in “the way that the most
cautious of lessons are drawn for contemporary European democracy.”6
Leggewie highlights the danger that, on the one hand the historicization
and singularization of the Holocaust would be too dogmatic, and its uni-
versalization on the other would lack historical depth.7 The insight into
this tension between historicization and universalization highlights the
importance for museum representations of World War II, as analyzed in
this chapter, to express tensions between the national, the transnational,
and the universal.
The transnational has been especially discussed in the disciplinary con-
text of transnational history. Although it is a fairly vague term, it allows
historians and memory theorists to go beyond the national without aban-
doning the idea of the importance of the national: “Nation is therefore
constitutive to the definition, not as its center, but as something that has
to be overcome, implying that transnational is a category, covering every-
thing that is not contained primarily within the nation state.”8 This inher-
ent tension differentiates the transnational from the idea of the global
that implies a progressive narrative from the national to the global. As Ian
Tyrell argues, “transnational history refers to a broad range of phenomena
cutting across national boundaries; it is both less than global history and
yet more, in the sense that not all history across national boundaries is
global or the product of globalization, but all—at least for modern his-
tory—is transnational.”9 Unlike the transnational in its binding relation to
the national, the concept of the universal shows the attempt to overcome
categories of history, culture, the national, and other group identifiers.
Numerous recent dynamic memory concepts could offer ways to avoid
the dangers alluded to by Berger and Leggewie, who both caution against
transforming a future Europe into a new hegemonic and consequently
restrictive, supranational identity. These include Michael Rothberg’s
6
Leggewie, “Seven Circles,” 5.
7
Leggewie, “Seven Circles,” 6.
8
Konrad Hugo Jarausch, “Reflections on Transnational History,” H-German Discussion
Logs, January 20, 2006, http://www.h-net.org/_german/discuss/Trans/forum_trans_
index.htm.
9
Ian Tyrell, “Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and
Practice,” Journal of Global History 4, no. 3 (2009): 453–74. 454.
26 S. JAEGER
“multidirectional memory,”10 Astrid Erll’s “travelling memory,”11 and

Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider’s “globalized memory.”12 In these
approaches the transnational, however, quickly transforms into the trans-
cultural, highlighting that the nation is only one of the possible “contain-
ers of true history,” as is also, for instance, religious belief.13 Depending
on the approach, memory becomes either globalized,14 or else it resists
globalization.15 Levy and Sznaider, for instance, argue for the “decoupling
of collective memory and national history” so that “national and ethnic
memories are transformed rather than erased” towards a new global nar-
rative that can be “reconciled with the old national narratives.”16 For Levy
and Sznaider the Holocaust is more central to European memory than
other events of World War II. However, an analysis of recent World War II
representations including the Holocaust shows that the war as such must
be recognized in its various dimensions in order to understand European
memory patterns.
Twenty-first-century museum representation of World War II provides
an ideal case study to examine the current dynamics of memory between
national, transnational, European, and universal memories, because by
definition these memories cannot easily escape the notion of the nation
state.17 Simon Knell argues that “[o]ne of the contributions of national
10
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of
Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
11
Astrid Erll, “Travelling Memory,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 4–18.
12
of Cosmopolitan Memory,” European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 1 (2002): 87–106;
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Erinnerung im Globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007).
13
14
Levy and Sznaider, Erinnerung im Globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust; See also Aleida
Assmann, “The Holocaust – a Global Memory? Extensions and Limits of a New Memory
Community,” in Memory in a Global Age, ed. Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad,
Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 97–117.
15
Jan Assmann, “Globalization, Universalism, and the Erosion of Cultural Memory,” in
Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, ed. Aleida Assmann and
Sebastian Conrad (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 121–37. 134.
16
17
For museums and national identities in twenty-first century Europe, see also Robin
Ostow, ed., (Re)visualizing National History: Museums and National Identities in Europe in
the New Millennium (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).
museums to national imagining is to define and transcend geographical

boundaries in complex and subtle ways.”18 Many museums representing
World War II walk a similarly fine line between the national and the trans-
national. In this chapter, I first present a number of museum concepts that
attempt to overcome the national through an emphasis on transnational
or universal ideas. Secondly, I will briefly discuss narrative cores that go
beyond specific national narratives and (possibly) allow for a transnational
representation of the past. Thirdly, in the main section of the chapter, I
will analyze three recent German and Polish World War II exhibitions to
provide an example of different nationalistic-transnational and historical-
universal memory strategies in their aesthetic, cognitive, and political
dimensions. The focus on German and Polish exhibitions and their rep-
resentation of the Eastern Front (in Poland and the Soviet Union) allows
for an analysis of the crossroads at which a Western European trend of
universalizing the war, which is particularly pronounced in the perpetrator
nation Germany, and an Eastern European trend of using the war for the
creation of national memories intersect.
Museums and World War II

Any museum exhibition about World War II that tries to break up the dom-
inant perspective of a nation state must find other ways of structuring the
history and memory of warfare to highlight transnational, European, and
universal tendencies. Yet such a representation remains in constant tension
with the national identities of participants, including victims, and with
other group identities. This is also true for representations of World War
I, about which there has been considerably more discussion of a European
or universal memory—at least for the fighting at the Western front. The
prime World War I museum example utilizing a comparative approach,
the permanent exhibition of the Museum of the Great War [Historial de
la Grande Guerre] in Péronne, which was opened in the 1990s,19 is still
heavily shaped by the representation of the history of different nations.
18
Simon Knell, “National Museums and the National Imagination,” in National Museums:
New Studies around the World, ed. Simon J. Knell et al. (London: Routledge, 2011), 3–28.
23.
19
Compare Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in
the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 222–237.
28 S. JAEGER
Most recent exhibitions in the wake of the centennial of the outbreak

of World War I show similar tensions between the national and transna-
tional. The national perspective is, for example, strongly reduced in the
In-Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres (a new permanent exhibition from
2012), which highlights transnational experiences of the war. However,
other exhibitions strive for a specific understanding of national experi-
ences while integrating some universal representational strategies, such as
the special exhibition Expo 14–18: It’s our History in the Royal Army and
Military History Museum in Brussels in 2014–15.
Unlike World War I, the European memory of World War II is more
closely bound to concepts of the nation state. This is more often the case
in countries that see themselves as either victors or victims of the war,
which—with the special history of German civilian suffering—could be
any nation involved in the war, provided that they are portrayed in differ-
ent role patterns.20 Berger notes that unlike for World War I, “to this day,
there exists no Second World War [museum] … which is truly comparative
and international.”21 At first glance, a war, army, military forces, or mili-
tary history museum would seem likely to either convey a nationalistic or
heroic message, or to retreat into exhibiting an expert culture of objects
and knowledge related to weapons, technology, uniforms, heraldry, or
other memorabilia and scenes from war in order to document the past
for the visitor or to let her or him empathize with the military perspective
of war. There is nothing transnational or pan-European about this, since
such exhibits repeat the divisive structure of war, representing different
parties of war that are most often divided into good or evil, self or others.
Yet especially because Western European memory of World War II indi-
cates transnational memory patterns and emphasizes reconciliation, while
Central and Eastern European memory is often still concerned with devel-
oping a national post-1990 memory of the war, the memory of World War
II displays a particularly dynamic potential for a European memory.
In this chapter I analyze how recent European museum exhibitions
demonstrate a representational reorientation from merely documenting
a national, often heroic past to developing new forms of remembrance
that simulate the tensions between regional, national, and transnational
20
For the most comprehensive collection and comparison of national memory patterns of
World War II since 1945, see Flacke, Mythen der Nationen.
21
Berger, “Remembering the Second World War in Western Europe, 1945–2005,” 135.
emory. Because the museum reacts to societal trends (be they in aca-
m
demic history, popular memory, or memory politics), it provides an ideal
case-study genre for Memory Studies. The museum can function as a
showcase for competing tendencies that seem to replace the national with
the European or the global; to reveal hierarchies for different forms of
co-present local, regional, and national memories; to demonstrate trans-
national forms of memory; and to trace universalized war memories whose
national origins are submerged or counter-balanced.
Concepts and Narrative Cores

Almost all World War II museums start with the historical, usually with
some national focus, and move towards universal or at least generalized
concepts and ideas from there. The function of exhibitions in war or mili-
tary history museums varies. To a certain extent, they function as attrac-
tions for military and military history enthusiasts who want to see military
equipment, technology, medals, and other material traces of conflict.
Yet in most recent exhibitions in Europe, there is also a tension between
documenting the past, narrating the past, and experiencing the past, to
use slightly alternative terminology to Aleida Assmann’s differentiation of
Erzählen (to narrate), Ausstellen (to exhibit) and Inszenieren (to stage).22
If military history museums attempt to create simulated experiences for
the visitor, one must ask whether it is a simulation of specific historical
experiences that can be traced to a concrete event or of more abstract
structural experiences that let the visitor experience a secondary level of
history, such as experiencing the mechanisms of how civil society interacts
with the reality of war.23 For transnational memory, it seems almost man-
datory to create structural simulations of experience in order to avoid a
competition amongst atrocities. One could, for instance, witness such a
competition in the lobbying about which genocides or atrocities should be
represented, and to what extent, as in the Canadian Museum for Human
22
Assmann, Geschichte im Gedächtnis, 149–153.
23
Stephan Jaeger, “Historical Museum Meets Docu-Drama: The Recipient’s Experiential
Involvement in the Second World War,” in Exhibiting the German Past: Museums, Film, and
Musealization, ed. Peter M. McIsaac and Gabriele Mueller (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2015), 138–57; Stephan Jaeger, “Temporalizing History toward the Future:
Representing Violence and Human Rights Violations in the Military History Museum in
Dresden,” in The Idea of a Human Rights Museum, ed. Karen Busby, Adam Muller, and
Andrew Woolford (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2015), 229–46.
30 S. JAEGER
Rights in Winnipeg (which opened in September 2014), a process that

was mockingly referred to as the “Olympics of atrocities.”24 If a military
history museum commemorates the past by following the traditional path
of glorifying individual war heroes, collectives (especially nation states),
and the plight and suffering of soldiers, such as the permanent exhibition
of the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa (which opened in 2005), it moves
in a direction opposite to a transnational European-focused museum.
Yet the museum as an applied historiographical medium in the public
sphere provides not only an ideal case study for memory studies in order
to explore the tension between historical knowledge and historical experi-
ence, but it can also demonstrate the dynamics of transnational memo-
ries. To connect to transnational memory processes, museums must turn
the historically specific into more abstract or structural experiences, which
give historical representations relevance for the future, since for example,
violence or perpetration are seen as principles that can occur in the present
and reoccur in the future. Consequently, they do not exclusively depend
on the historical division between nation states at war, but maintain the
tension between nation states and more universal principles. Unlike Aleida
Assmann who sees “memory as a form of closure in order to open a way
to the future,”25 I argue that the temporalization of past, present, and
future, instead of isolating their mutual relationship, allows museums to
help shape a memory that can move towards the future by simultaneously
overcoming and maintaining historical specificity, so that past, present,
and future, or geographically speaking the regional, national, and transna-
tional memory work together.26
24
A. Dirk Moses, “The Canadian Museum for Human Rights: The ‘Uniqueness of the
Holocaust’ and the Question of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 14, no. 2 (2012):
215–38.
25
Aleida Assmann, “Europe: A Community of Memory? Twentieth Annual Lecture of the
GHI,” in GHI Bulletin, vol. 40 (Washington, D.C., 2006), 22, http://www.ghi-dc.org/
index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=483:twentieth-annual-
lecture&catid=82:lectures-2006&Itemid=334.
26
In this chapter, this is mostly demonstrated in my analysis of the Military History
Museum in Dresden. Compare also Stephan Jaeger, “Temporalizing History.” For a dynamic
concept of European memories, see Sharon MacDonald, who sees the co-presence of and
continuous switching between different temporalities as characteristic of contemporary
Europe. Sharon Macdonald, Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today (London:
Routledge, 2013), 221.
To understand the various tensions between the national and transna-

tional, the European and the global, and Western and Eastern European
memory, I will first examine the conceptualization and mission statement
of a museum that is still in the conceptual phase: the Museum of the
Second World War (Muzeum II Wojny Światowej) in Gdansk, which will
presumably open in early 2017. Its mission statement proposes that the
museum will fill the void of a comparative World War II museum:
The mission of the Museum of the Second World War is to create a modern
institution that will present the history of the war as the greatest cataclysm
of the 20th century. Despite the fact that over 70 years have passed since the
outbreak of the Second World War, no museum in Europe treats its course
and nature comprehensively. This makes our initiative timely.27
The museum’s name does not contain the words “national” or “Polish.”
This is significant especially for a country with an extremely complex
museum and memory landscape that is situated between the establish-
ment of national memory based on World War II and the search for rec-
onciliation and stronger Europeanization (see section “National Heroics
Guarantee European Future” for further details).
Despite its comprehensive approach, the Museum of the Second World
War emphasizes its objective to represent “the wartime experiences of
Poland and the other countries of East-Central Europe.” Thus, it raises
the question of whether there is a distinctively Eastern European memory
of the war, or many national ones, and whether the museum mainly high-
lights a national and regional component and the collective perspective of
the Polish people (and other actors in Eastern Europe), and is thus similar
to most World War II museums in, for example, Germany, Belgium, the
Netherlands, France, or the UK. The third component of the Museum
of the Second World War’s mission statement is significant, since it indi-
cates a new trend in World War II representation (and World War and war
representation in general) by distancing itself from military and political
events, and by focusing on collective experiences from civilians and sol-
diers as well as visitors’ affective responses to the war:
27
Museum of the Second World War, “Mission and Purpose,” accessed October 27, 2015,
http://www.muzeum1939.pl/en/museum/programmatic_premises/mission_and_purpose.
32 S. JAEGER
This museum will focus on the stories of individuals, societies and nations;
military events will serve as mere background to the narrative about the
everyday lives of civilians and soldiers, the terror of the occupation and
genocide, resistance to the occupying forces, diplomacy and great-power
politics. This approach will convey the uniqueness of the Second World War,
in which it was the civilian populations that suffered the most.28
One can sense the tensions between the national and the transnational,
as well as between Western and Eastern European memory. Whether and
how the museum implements these tensions remains to be seen.
The decisive question for the development of a European memory of
World War II is whether it only works in a closed perspectival structure
(that is, there is a distant bird’s-eye European perspective that synthesizes
different voices), whether the medium of the museum could allow for
tensions to co-exist, or whether a constant tension between the transna-
tional and the European on the one side and the national on the other
is structurally simulated in its representations. The House of European
History, which will open in Brussels presumably in late 2016, indicates in
its promotional material that it “aims to convey a transnational overview
of European history, taking into account its diverse nature and its many
interpretations and perceptions,”29 which appears to be less like an effort
to retain tensions and closer to an approach that synthesizes multiple
voices, without understanding that the transnational relies on its tension
with the national or in this case on the tension between multiple national
perspectives.
A more productive analytical strategy than looking at conceptual defi-
nitions of comparative and transnational European museums’ approaches
to World War II is to analyze the actual narratives of current World War
II exhibitions. By doing so, one can readily observe that there is certain
agreement on the main segments of the story of World War II, which
then are put into specific national, regional, or thematic perspectives. The
28
The museum is also the Polish alternative to the German Documentation Centre against
Expulsions (Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen) in Berlin, which is currently under construction,
whose concept also emphasizes an understanding of European expulsion beyond the national
perspective. Compare Louis Charbonneau, “Germany’s Merkel, Poland’s Tusk Aim to
Repair Ties,” The Washington Post, December 10, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/10/AR2007121000363_pf.html.
29
European Parliament, “The House of European History,” accessed October 27, 2015,
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/visiting/en/visits/historyhouse.html.
survey panels and master narratives are comparable: the major events and
stages of the war and a certain core of the images are identical in many
newer World War II exhibitions, whether they are in the Imperial War
Museum North in Manchester, the German Historical Museum in Berlin,
the chronological part of the Military History Museum in Dresden, or in
the recently redesigned Halle Bourdiau in the Military History Museum
in Brussels. For example, events such as the rise to power of fascism or the
Battle of Stalingrad have roughly the same function, at least in Western
European museums. In addition, British museums add a stronger empha-
sis on the war in Asia-Pacific. All museums integrate the local national
theater, but in general the majority of European museums stress a certain
documentary approach, which means that the survey text panels and the
text-image interaction are surprisingly similar. To a certain extent, there
seems to be a common memory. The more the focus shifts East and deals
with Stalinism and the legacy of Communism during the Cold War, the
more this narrative core collapses.
Simulating the Repercussions of War
The next step in the analysis is to test how European museums actively
create transnational memory and how they balance the tensions between
the national and transnational as well as the historical and universal. The
new permanent exhibition of the German-Russian Museum in Berlin-
Karlshorst (a historical villa where the “Eastern front” World War II sur-
render was officially signed), which opened in May 2013, shows a shift
from a national to a global conceptual idea of war. The exhibition uses
the national in a historical sense—the contrastive focus on Germany and
the Soviet Union, comprising Russia, Ukraine, and Belorussia—to express
an abstract simulated experience of the impact of war. The museum does
not attempt to create the illusion that the past can be “experienced” as
such.30 Instead, it constructs and simulates structural experiences that rely
on the constructed collective perspectives of specific groups. For example,
the museum focuses on Soviet prisoners of war, the interactions between
Germans and civilians in the Soviet Union during the occupation, or the
experience at the Soviet and German home fronts. These perspectives fol-
low historical time: the Soviet soil-based perspective comprises Rooms
30
Such an assumption has also been heavily criticized in the recent collection edited by
Wolfgang Muchitsch: Does War Belong in Museums? The Representation of Violence in
Exhibitions (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013).
34 S. JAEGER
Three to Five and the German soil-based perspective, based on when the
Soviet army entered German territory, is found in Rooms Eight and Nine.
Specific events of the war only play a minor role.
The key question is whether the museum creates a transnational per-
spective that merges different national perspectives, or whether it simply
narrates the perspectives of two different states and their sub-groups. At
the end of the room housing a pre-war introduction, the visitor enters a
black cube with dimmed lights, which focuses on German war planning
(see Photo 2.1).
This cube combines quotations from Nazi and SS leaders as well as
leading Wehrmacht officers, which comment on the planned politics in
the East, and 11 résumés of German leaders, from Hitler to Rosenberg
to Jodl, who were involved in the planning of the invasion of the East.
It also contains facsimiles of German policies and directives, propaganda
flyers, as well as a map of grain and livestock supplies to be used to feed
the advancing German army. The cube leaves no doubt about German
Photo 2.1 Cube on German war planning. Permanent exhibition. German-

Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, 2014 (Photo by author)
e xtermination policies and the involvement of the Wehrmacht in their exe-

cution. It creates a structural experience by simulating the visitor’s entry
into the collective mind of the planning of a campaign to destroy the
Soviet people. One quotation, a memorandum from a meeting of state
secretaries from May 2, 1941, reads: “The war can only be continued if
the whole German army is fed with Russian food in the third year of the
war. Without doubt millions will famish once we have retrieved everything
that is necessary for us from this country.”31 This quotation resonates in
a different room that focuses on the fate of Soviet civilians. Room Four
is introduced by a leitmotif art installation of an enlarged picture of a
Soviet woman ordered by the Germans to wade through a river to search
for mines. It metaphorically represents the millions of civil victims of the
German occupation. A nearby quotation from a German prisoner of war
talking to a comrade reads as follows: “They were doing road construc-
tion, great looking girls—we drove past and simply pulled them into the
car, laid them, and then tossed them out. Man, did they swear!” The
room merges the perpetrators’ voice and gaze in many photos, charts,
documentary material, and other material objects, with the voices of the
victims. The latter are given voice, for instance, in four audio stations that
represent the victims’ biographies, supplemented by a slideshow of histori-
cal photographs. Here, the historical details are less important than the
structural experiences. The visitor seems to travel through the horrors of
German occupation and crimes against Soviet civilians, from exploitation,
rape, murder, and mass killings to concentration camps. The rooms on the
perspective of German civilians and the final advance of the Soviet Army
also target war crimes and collective experiences. Although the Karlshorst
museum represents a historically specific world, it moves beyond this
specificity by creating a universal experience of different collective gazes
focussing on many horrors and crimes.32 The museum simulates total war
and here it can supersede any national interests in displaying the repercus-
sions of war, despite being based on the display of two opposing states.
In other words, it operates truly transnationally, going beyond the nation
state while displaying its continuous relevance.
31
Translated by the author.
32
Other rooms, such as the one about Soviet resistance, are slightly more uplifting because
of their expression of the collective will to survive.
36 S. JAEGER
Between History and Anthropological

Universalization
My second example is the Military History Museum in Dresden (MHM),
which reopened on October 15, 2011 with an entirely new exhibition,
designed by HG Merz and Holzer Kobler, in a re-designed building. A
wedge by the architect Daniel Libeskind cuts into the classicist Arsenal
Building in the nineteenth-century military quarters of Albertstadt, in
order to fragment and complicate the memory of the past. The museum
aims to interweave war and military history with political, social, and cul-
tural history, as well as with the history of mentalities. To fulfill its goal of
simultaneously representing the history and the anthropology of violence,
the museum uses a two-fold approach. First, the museum presents the tra-
ditional chronological story of mostly German warfare in the old arsenal
building from 1300 to the present. Secondly, the thematic tour in Daniel
Libeskind’s wedge confronts the visitor with the violent effects of war in
a more abstract way.33 The exhibits have a German focus, but their impact
is clearly concept-based. To the visitor, war becomes a transhistorical and
transnational category in constant tension with the nation-based narrative
in the chronological section. As a museum of the Bundeswehr, the unified
armed forces of Germany, the museum also aims to present the history,
traditions, deeds, and atrocities of German armed forces.
To understand the tension between a cultural history of violence and
a cultural history of German warfare, I will briefly analyze the museum’s
representation of World War II in its chronological tour that focuses on
the attack on Poland as a catalyst for the start of the war. The chrono-
logical tour narrating the course of World War II seems to move tem-
porally forward in conventional historiographic phases, highlighting the
perspective of the Germans with a considerable emphasis on the victims
of German atrocities. At first glance, the display cabinet (see Photo 2.2)
about the campaign against Poland seems comprised of an almost chaotic
ensemble of objects, photographs, and documents.
A closer look reveals a careful presentation of the events of the war and
its aftermath in a spatial arrangement that makes the “attack on Poland”
33
Compare Gorch Pieken, “Contents Space: New Concept and New Building of the
Militärhistorisches Museum of the Bundeswehr,” in Does War Belong in Museums? The
Representation of Violence in Exhibitions, ed. Wolfgang Muchitsch (Bielefeld: Transcript,
2013), 64–82.
Photo 2.2 Cabinet “The Invasion of Poland.” Permanent exhibition. Military

History Museum, Dresden, 2012 (Photo by author)
almost a living scene. The spatial arrangement works in seven segments:

the text panel at the bottom left summarizes the essence of the war—as
with all survey text panels throughout the museum, from an unlocatable,
zero-focalized perspective. Its ending erases any doubt that the museum
wants to sugar coat the involvement of the Wehrmacht in the Holocaust
and crimes against civilians: “From the very beginning, members of
Einsatzgruppen (special operations groups) of the SS and Wehrmacht units
committed crimes against civilians: Jewish people, political opponents,
intellectuals, and the handicapped. These murders of civilians were above
all an expression of National Socialist racial theories.” The beginning of
the war and the effect of the war on everyone is represented through
three photographs depicting the air attack on the Polish city of Wielun
on the very first day of the war, a stone fragment from the Catholic parish
church in Wielun, the burnt Torah from Wielun’s Synagogue, Nazi propa-
ganda from the war, and artifacts (a machine gun and a radio) marking the
38 S. JAEGER
t echnological superiority of the German army. The focus on the bombing

of Wielun links to the museum’s air-war section, entitled “Dresden View.”
This section is found at the top of the wedge in the thematic tour, in
which the museum displays material related to the air attacks on Wielun,
Rotterdam, and Dresden, marking the effect of the bombing war, which
was started by the Germans, on civilians. The abstract effects of the war
are also symbolized in the center of the cabinet through a souvenir mug
commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Polish constitution in 1892,
and the aftermath of the war against Poland through various sets of pho-
tographs that show acts of discrimination, humiliation, and the killing of
Polish civilians and Jews in particular. The visitor can discern phases and
perspectives of a historical event, which leads to encountering the attack
on Poland as a dynamic scene. Here, documenting historical knowledge
and providing arguments (such as those found in the introductory panel),
transfers to the experientiality of narrative, since the visitor encounters an
ensemble of perspectives in the text, images, and objects, without being
provided with simply one clear interpretation or a linear narrative leading
towards an argumentative goal. War destroys Jewish and Catholic life, and
technological advancement cannot be seen without invoking the humili-
ation and killing of Jews. The museum in this display case—as through-
out the entire exhibition following the representational principle of
presentism—does not provide answers to questions such as why German
soldiers so easily participated in humiliations and killings.34 Besides expe-
riencing a spatial narrative as a “living scene” the visitor is drawn into a
number of other connections in the rest of the museum. The most appar-
ent ones are the connection to the air-war Dresden section at the top level
of the wedge, to a narrative of the advancement and effect of military
technology in the cultural history of violence, and to an experience station
that directly follows the Polish cabinet. This station allows the viewer to
observe the metaphorical use of flowers in Nazi race and expansion policy.
These connections extend to documents and photos of discrimination and
war atrocities that reappear throughout the exhibition. The visitor seems
34
To achieve a more precise collective experience of the German soldier or officers, the
museum could have mounted an installation of their letters, diaries, and objects simultaneous
to the one on German military resistance, which is set up in horizontal display cases with
drawers and ego documents at the side of the World War II exhibition.
to be a participant in the mobile warfare depicted by being drawn from

one scene to the next in the World War II section.35
The chronology itself certainly creates a multiperspectival panorama,
but the shift from a national cultural history museum to a museum that is
also transnational and universal, relies on the networking technique of a
museum36 and on its simultaneous staging of two models of progressing
time: the time of evolution, in which violence is always part of change,
and the time of cultural change, in which violence depends on cultural,
historical, and social surroundings. The Holocaust and other genocidal
activities during World War II are examples that can be found not only
in the d isplay cases representing the war of extermination in the East,
especially in the cabinet entitled “Shoah” with displayed shoes and the
poem “Shoes of the dead” from Majdanek, but also in the cabinets on the
armament industry, the mass murders in Greece in the “Homeland and
Hinterland” cabinet, in the sections of the thematic tour (e.g., on silent
heroes in the “Memory” section, on the pogroms in Lviv in the suffering
section, or by marking the parallel between the KZ Mittelbau-Dora, the
V2 rocket, and its devastation in London in the technology and games
sections), and in various commissioned art works.37 The Holocaust is
clearly not represented in a memorializing mode, nor is it used to express
a national identity narrative. The museum’s approach of presentism38
allows for an open, progressive future39 even though the visitor is eventu-
ally thrown back to the continuities in the German and human history of
violence. Despite the presence of the national, the museum succeeds in
35
For a detailed analysis of the chronological tour’s representation of the war of annihila-
tion against the Soviet Union and of the way in which the museum creates a structural expe-
rience of the interconnectivity of war effort, forced labor, the Holocaust, and the German
economy, see Jaeger, “Temporalizing History,” 235–240.
36
Jaeger, “Temporalizing History.”
37
These commissioned art works supersede any historical or nation-based representation
of war by triggering aesthetic and self-reflexive experiences about violence and aesthetic
pleasure. See Jaeger, “Temporalizing History,” 238–240; and Pieken, “Contents Space: New
Concept and New Building of the Militärhistorisches Museum of the Bundeswehr,” 67.
38
Presentism indicates that the museum avoids steering the visitor didactically to one spe-
cific interpretation. Instead the visitor is challenged to form her or his own interpretation
when perceiving objects and especially when finding relations between different objects and
installations in the museum.
39
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe
(New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004), 258–263.
40 S. JAEGER
transcending the German perspective to the transnational and universal,

challenging the visitor to understand violence as a present concept that
is relevant for the future. As I have argued elsewhere, the “combination
of thematic/abstract concepts and historicity in a temporalized setting
offers a way of representing ideas with implications for the future while
maintaining their historical specificity.”40 The concrete national history of
war is opened up to transnational relevance. Because the museum does
not focus on the nation state, but on the cultural history of warfare, it
avoids the trap of simply reproducing the national on a higher level, and
makes its presentation transnational. The museum’s interest in anthro-
pological constants of violence allows for the expression of the universal,
while simultaneously relativizing the universal through the concrete and
historical. By staging the tensions between the national and the transna-
tional, and between anthropological universalization and historical docu-
mentation, the Military History Museum creates a dynamic relationship
between past, present, and future.
National Heroics Guarantee European Future

To understand the dynamics of the memory of World War II in the
twenty-first-century museum, it is necessary to take a comparative
approach in understanding European complexities, and it is important
to add an Eastern European perspective so that World War II cannot be
remembered without considering the impact of communism.41 Poland is
a country that works as an ideal case study for various trends in museum
representation and memory formation of World War II. On the one hand,
Polish museums in the past decade have been pre-occupied with finding a
new national memory or master narrative overcoming the suppression of
national Polish identity during the Communist era, showing that transna-
tional memory in a mass historiographical medium such as the museum is
more achievable in countries that have worked through their national war
40
Jaeger, “Temporalizing History,” 242.
41
For Poland, see: Beate Kosmala, “Polen: Lange Schatten der Erinnerung – Der Zweite
Weltkrieg im kollektiven Gedächtnis,” in Flacke, Mythen der Nationen, 509–40; Piotr
Madajczyk, “Experience and Memory: The Second World War in Poland,” in Experience and
Memory: The Second World War in Europe, ed. Jörg Echternkamp and Stefan Martens (New
York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2010), 70–85; Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg, Eugeniusz Cezary
Krol, and Michael Thomae, Der Warschauer Aufstand 1944: Ereignis und Wahrnehmung in
Polen und Deutschland (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2011).
traumas. This applies to the Warsaw Rising Museum (Muzeum Powstania

Warszawskiego), which opened in 2005, as well as to the Armia Krajowa
Museum (Muzeum Armii Krajowej w Krakowie) in Kraków, which opened
in 2000 and was greatly expanded in 2012. On the other hand, other
museums, such as the previously mentioned Museum of Second World
War in Gdansk, intend to engage in European memory politics, highlight
comparative aspects of World War II representation, and contextualize or
functionalize Polish war history in a broader picture of the war.
Another example of Polish-European memory politics is the special
exhibition Warsaw Rising of 1944, an exhibition of the Warsaw Rising
Museum under the patronage of Bronisław Komorowski, president of
the Republic of Poland, and Joachim Gauck, president of the Federal
Republic of Germany, which was open in the grounds of the Topography
of Terror (Topographie des Terrors) in Berlin from July 30 to October
26, 2014. The exhibition is a shining example of the universalization of
the national, built on the same black-and-white patterns of warfare as tra-
ditional national war museums. Yet it also shows the tension produced
by the remembrance of World War II and why a universalized European
memory of World War II might be popular in national memory politics
but can hardly capture the diversity and multiple voices in European col-
lective memory.
The exhibition was situated in the moat of the Topography of Terror
where the exhibition “Berlin 1933–1945: Between Propaganda and
Terror” was usually displayed. Behind the glass panels the excavated
ruins of the Gestapo and Reich Security headquarters could be seen.
Unlike its very experiential home museum in Warsaw, the exhibition—
partly due to the limitations of the moat—uses a predominantly doc-
umentary style. Information texts introduced by leitmotif quotations
lead into the different chapters and sub-chapters. Photos and a limited
number of objects, films, and audio stations support the content that
is introduced through headers, text panels, and quotations. Unlike the
permanent exhibition inside the Topography of Terror building, the
photography in the Warsaw Rising exhibition never develops any aes-
thetic autonomy. It illustrates history without gaps since the representa-
tion of terror in the photographs always corresponds to the text of the
actual panel. The exhibition highlighted the Nazi will to exterminate
Polish civilization in such a way that the city of Warsaw in particu-
lar and the Polish people in general become the unquestioned victims.
42 S. JAEGER
They were the victims first of the Germans, then of the Soviets during
and after the war, and also of the Allies who sacrificed Poland for politi-
cal reasons during the war.
German Federal President Joachim Gauck notes in his opening
speech of the exhibition how miraculous it is to him “that Poles and
Germans should today be not only neighbours who get on all right but
even friends who actually like each other.” He continues: “Poles were
able to show forgiveness when Germans showed regret. Poles were able
to overcome hatred, anger and distrust when Germans acknowledged
their guilt and their shame. Nowadays, our peoples are linked by shared
political and military alliances. Nowadays, we seek to protect peace
and democracy together.” Here, Gauck marks the futurity of German–
Polish reconciliation that should lead to democracy and peace, asserting
that “our shared European house is built on respect for human dignity
and respect for others.”42 The exhibition itself follows a similar narra-
tive pattern. It starts off with a quotation from a speech by Heinrich
Himmler to military district commanders in September 1943 in which
he demands the total destruction of Warsaw. The second panel features
an empty beige circle with the inscription: “You are in a place where
it was intended to annihilate a large city, the capital of a big European
country ….” Symbolically, the circle could either represent an eradi-
cated Warsaw or the grounds of the Topography of Terror in Berlin
where the visitor is physically standing. The total destruction of a city
and its inhabitants as well as the destruction of the Polish people in
general form the central message of the exhibition whose official main
purpose is to make the Warsaw Rising more familiar to Germans.43 This
message corresponds to the three-dimensional film The City of Ruins
that provides simulated aerial views of the completely destroyed Warsaw
(supported by dramatic instrumental music) that ends the exhibition in
a small viewing cubicle.44 By choosing the total destruction of Warsaw
as a focal point, the exhibition develops a master narrative from the
42
Joachim Gauck, “Exhibition: The Warsaw Uprising of 1944” (Speech, Berlin, July
29, 2014), http://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Reden/EN/JoachimGauck/
Reden/2014/140729-Ausstellung-Warschau-Aufstand.html.
43
Compare Christiane Habermalz, “Ausstellung in der Gedenkstätte ‘Topographie des
Terrors’: Polen zeigen ihre Sicht auf den Warschauer Aufstand,” Rundfunk Berlin-
Brandenburg, July 29, 2013, http://www.rbb-online.de/kultur/beitrag/2014/07/
Ausstellung-Warschauer-Aufstand-Berlin-Topographie-des-Terrors.html.
44
The same film is shown in the Warsaw Rising Museum in Warsaw.
Photo 2.3 Introductory panel section 5. Special exhibition Warsaw Rising of

1944, Warsaw Rising Museum, hosted by the Topography of Terror, Berlin, 2014
(Photo by author)
destruction of a flourishing metropolis in the 1930s to its re-emergence

after the war in the final section “Phoenix from the Ashes.” It concludes
with a colored photo of the skyscrapers of today’s Warsaw, with the
caption: “Today Warsaw looks quite differently [sic] from what it used
to be before WW II … Still, thanks to preserving the memory of the
Warsaw Rising, the capital retains its old spirit—the love for freedom.”
The exhibition makes “freedom” the crucial idea of the Polish success
story. This then turns into a European success story capable of bring-
ing nations together. The exhibition’s fifth section is introduced by the
quotation “We wanted to be free and owe this freedom to nobody” by
Polish government Deputy Prime Minister Jan Stanislaw Jankowski on
September 1, 1944 (see Photo 2.3).
In the exhibition’s interpretation, the Warsaw Rising becomes a national
need and force which, despite its failure, guarantees the moral and spiritual
44 S. JAEGER
freedom of Poland in particular and Europe in general. The exhibition

narrates one clear version of the past without room for any other pos-
sible perspectives and voices.45 In other words, the visitor is supposed to
understand the general information about the Rising and to believe in its
heroic necessity. The later parts of the exhibition confirm this through
political statements, such as an excerpt from Ronald Reagan’s speech on
the 40th anniversary of the Warsaw Rising: “All of us who share their pas-
sion for freedom owe the heroic people of Warsaw and all of the valiant
people of Poland a profound debt.” The exhibition makes no effort to
problematize such statements; they merge effortlessly with historical facts.
One panel of the Phoenix from the Ashes section shows the history of
the solidarity movement. Although neither the survey text nor the three
photographs make a direct connection to the Warsaw Rising, its subtext is
clear: the legacy of the Warsaw Rising was instrumental in ending the Cold
War.46 The Solidarity movement panel, embedded in the other panels of
the Phoenix section, was introduced by a leitmotif quotation by the Polish
writer Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz: “The Rising has won. A proof of it,
easy to see, totally sufficient is right here … It is independent Poland.”
The exhibition establishes the idea that the spirit of the Rising persevered
and transferred to all of Europe. The second to last panel celebrates the
commemoration of the Polish Warsaw Rising, including the foundation of
the Warsaw Rising Museum itself. One photo depicts German Chancellor
Gerhard Schröder at the 60th anniversary of the Warsaw Rising, marking
the museum as a place for Polish and German peoples to find reconcilia-
tion and peace.
45
For example, the exhibition does not mention the controversy in Poland about whether
the Rising was really necessary and useful or whether it was a senseless sacrifice. It avoids any
meta-reflection on how the memory or myth of the Rising’s impact came into being. For
details, see Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg, Eugeniusz Cezary Król, and Michael Thomae, Der
Warschauer Aufstand 1944: Ereignis und Wahrnehmung in Polen und Deutschland, especially
Eugeniusz Cezary Król, “Perzeptionen des Aufstands in Polen,” 171–91.
46
German Bundespräsident Joachim Gauck follows this form of memory politics in his
opening speech in an utterly naïve way: “The Solidarność trade union was also inspired by
the Warsaw Uprising. It too fought for a free and independent Poland, for the right of each
nation to make its own way.” He then transfers this to the East German revolution in 1989;
thus the whole post-1989 European order characterized by “peace and liberation” is based
on the Warsaw Rising.
Conclusion: Simulating Tensions as Pan-European

Second World War Memory
Michael Rothberg defines multidirectional memory as follows:
“Against the framework that understands collective memory as competi-
tive memory—a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources—I suggest that
we consider memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotia-
tion, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative.”47
Following this idea of multidirectional memory, World War II remains a
discourse of memory that will inevitably return to competitive memory,
group identities, and national claims. The project of the Museum of the
Second World War in Gdansk, however, shows that Polish memory can
be represented within a transnational framework that highlights Polish
experiences, establishes threads of a Central or Eastern European war
memory, and creates comparisons with, and contrasts to, the more clearly
developed Western European memory (that is less complicated because it
does not directly overlap with the memory of Communist rule). Similarly,
the German-Russian Museum in Berlin-Karlshorst displays networks of
human suffering and perpetratorship in World War II and bridges the
Russian-German dichotomy without resolving it. The Military History
Museum in Dresden simulates the manifold violence and impact of war as
a presentist structural experience. In contrast, the Warsaw Rising exhibi-
tion in Berlin fails to express such structural experiences since it forecloses
history by isolating only a single narrative strand that represents traditional
ideas about heroic suffering and its positive effect on the greater European
good. Though it is important to hear this story, as an isolated memory
that employs a linear cause-and-effect model about the future of Europe,
it fails to contribute to the European memory landscape of World War II
and to be relevant to Europe’s present and future.
The dynamic museum representations analyzed in this article are his-
torically concrete enough to express perspectives on national wartime
history while also highlighting the human impact of war that transcends
national or cultural boundaries. Performing a circulating memory of dif-
ferent cultural signs, including the ones that claim national or group iden-
tity status, allows for simulated structural experiences of the particular
tensions in European World War II memory. Here, Astrid Erll’s concept of

47
46 S. JAEGER
travelling memory, which tries to capture the “traffic between individual

and collective levels of remembering, circulation among social, medial,
and semantic dimensions,”48 and Rothberg’s anti-competitive idea of a
multidirectional memory work on a micro-scale within actual museum
exhibitions and in the circulating dialogue between different exhibitions.
Rothberg argues: “The political thrust of my argument has been to reject
the reductionism of the nation-centered, real-estate development model
in favour of a more open-ended sense of the possibilities of memory and
countermemory that might allow the ‘revisiting’ and rewriting of hege-
monic sites of memory.”49 The dynamic rewriting of European World
War II memory will not eradicate the nation-centered perspectives, but
its temporalized model in European museums in the twenty-first cen-
tury increasingly simulates a multidirectional memory that can display
dynamic tensions between the national and the transnational, between the
historical and the universal. The museums move their focus from actual
events towards the impact of war and the affective response of all people,
especially civilians, impacted by war and violence. This might include the
suffering of soldiers but only as part of the overall memory. Museums per-
form such memories as structural experiences, not as mimetic representa-
tions of real experiences. European World War II museums have started
to abandon the moral “us versus them” paradigm, so that visitors can
have different structural experiences of the war’s impact on past, pres-
ent, and future. Here the European memory differs strongly from, for
example, North American memory, which generally frames World War II
through specific battles and events, collective heroic suffering, and indi-
vidual heroic stories, as the permanent exhibitions of the Canadian War
Museum in Ottawa and the American National World War II Museum
in New Orleans demonstrate. Nations east of the former Iron Curtain or
the nations impacted by the Balkan Wars in the 1990s will certainly need
more time to develop their national version of a European World War II
memory, but the Polish example shows that there is a path to European
integration and a multiperspectival European memory of World War II. It
is too early to determine if nations constantly challenged in their concept
of national identity in the present such as Ukraine can join such a dynamic
48
Erll, “Travelling Memory,” 15.
49
Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 209–310.
path of European memory in their museum representations. However, the

efforts of the German-Russian Museum show that to an extent even with
Russia—at least on German soil—such a dynamic dialogue is possible.
Such a memory can never be totalizing, but through the understanding
of the war’s impact on many segments of the European population and
through the integration of concrete historical experiences and national
perspectives, museums can represent World War II as one unifying, but
multiperspectival and dynamic connector of European memory between
the past, present, and future.
CHAPTER 3
Contemporary Memory Politics

in Catalonia: Europeanizing and Mobilizing
the History of the Spanish Civil War
David A. Messenger
Introduction
In Barcelona, the field in the Montjuic cemetery known as Fossar de la
Pedrera [Mass Grave of the Quarry] is a place where many of the 1,717
people executed in Barcelona from 1939 to 1952 were buried en masse,
in an area of the cemetery not accessible to the public. They were victims
of the round of repression that followed the victory of the Nationalist side
led by General Francisco Franco at the conclusion of the Spanish Civil
War in 1939. Franco’s dictatorship replaced a democratic Republic that
had been dominated by the parties of the political left. The repression that
came with the dictatorship was meant to eliminate political opponents,
or those deemed potential opponents of the regime. What occurred in
Catalonia in 1939 and the years after was replicated across Spain, in what
historian Paul Preston recently termed the “Spanish Holocaust.”1
1
Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth Century
Spain (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2012).
D.A. Messenger (*)

Department of Global and Area Studies, University of Wyoming,
Laramie, WY, USA
e-mail: dmesseng@uwyo.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39152-6_3
50 D.A. MESSENGER
Finding memory spaces in contemporary Catalonia is a search for real

estate imbued with the spirit of justice. One of the key questions to ask in
memory studies is what form justice takes and who gets to count as a sub-
ject of justice.2 In Catalonia, there is a great deal of representation similar
to elsewhere in Spain, where the recovery of historical memory and a
revival in public memorial sites has occurred since the return to democ-
racy in 1978 and especially since the excavations of mass graves, which
has been a focus in much memory work since 2000. The most divisive
period prior to the dictatorship came after the election of February 1936
put in place a leftist, Popular Front coalition government of socialists and
leftist republicans, supported by the Communist Party and various anar-
chist groups even though these were not part of the government itself.
The Popular Front government led by Manuel Azaña was opposed by the
monarchist right wing (including leading members of the military), the
political right wing of elected parliamentarians, and the fascist-inspired
Falange movement. To many, this tension-filled political situation sug-
gested an impending civil war. Instances of physical violence perpetrated
by one side against the other increased through the first half of 1936, and
war broke out when the Spanish military in Morocco launched its attack
against the state, led by its commander, General Francisco Franco. He
was joined by other generals around Spain who used their garrisons to
take control of various regions. The division of the country in July and
August 1936 replicated the voting results of the February election: the
center, north-west, and southern parts of the country fell to the army
rebels, now called the Nationalists; the Republican government held the
cities, especially Barcelona and Madrid, due to the voluntary rallying of
citizens in those places against the coup and their taking up arms to assist
those soldiers and commanders who stayed loyal to the Republic.
At the most basic level, the conflict was a military and political one. Two
military forces emerged, the rebellious Nationalists, who had support from
most of the Spanish Army, and the legitimate Republican government, sup-
ported by some of the military and especially by various civilian and political
militias created in the summer of 1936 to defend the state. The latter were
eventually assisted by thousands of foreigners in the International Brigades
who came to see the Republic’s cause as their own. The conflict was also a
political one: various right-wingers who wanted Spain to be a monarchy, a
2
Nancy Fraser, “Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World,” New Left Review 36 (2005):
69–88.
CONTEMPORARY MEMORY POLITICS IN CATALONIA: EUROPEANIZING... 51
Catholic society, an authoritarian state, or even a fascistic modern empire

supported the Nationalists. While divided over what form a future govern-
ment might take, the various parties nonetheless were in agreement that
the authority of the Catholic Church, centralized government in opposi-
tion to minority rights of Basques and Catalans, and the end of democracy
were important goals. Similarly, the Republicans seemed quite divided:
some wanted liberal democracy, some Communism or socialism and land
reform; some anarchism and social revolution. Yet all these groups believed
in the fight against the Nationalists as a fight that replicated the interna-
tional situation as a choice between democracy and fascism. Beyond this,
the war was also a class struggle between landowners and those with other
economic interests supporting Franco, against workers, peasants, and other
forces of the center left. Finally, it was also a religious war to decide whether
Spain should be a Catholic or anti-clerical state.
The civil war was a conflict of steady attrition from July 1936 through
the end of March 1939. In the fighting, over 60 percent of Spain’s rail-
way network was destroyed; half a million buildings were destroyed or
severely damaged; in combat, about 125,000 Spaniards lost their lives,
as did 25,000 foreigners. Yet the real cost of the war came in civilian
deaths and the manner in which civilians on both sides were targeted and
murdered because of their real or perceived loyalties. Each side embraced
a desire to completely destroy the enemy. From 1936 to 1939, a total
of some 500,000–600,000 Spaniards died as a result of combat, disease,
and political murder, out of a 1930 population of some 23.6 million.3 In
terms of civilian deaths as a result of repression behind the front lines,
130,000 civilians died at the hands of Franco’s forces and his support-
ers, and the number was probably at least 20,000 more, but we do not
have complete information on civilian murders. Finally, almost 86,000
other civilians were killed by the Republican side.4 The political repression
of opponents and perceived opponents of the regime continued to be a
dominant feature of the period of “first Francoism” following the war,
not just in the 1940s, but throughout the 1950s. The Law on Political
Responsibility, decreed by the regime on February 9, 1939, even before
the end of the conflict, ordered the continuation of the “liquidation” of
3
Conxita Mir, “The Francoist Repression in the Catalan Countries,” Catalan Historical
Review 1 (2008): 133–47. 138.
4
Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, xviii–xix.
52 D.A. MESSENGER
those who fomented the “red subversion.” The Law created special politi-
cal tribunals to try those suspected of being opponents of the new regime.
As a result, more than 270,000 political prisoners were held in the year
1940 alone.5 Political executions ordered by military tribunals in the first
years following the war numbered 50,000.6
Catalonia’s experience of the Civil War mirrored the trends in the rest
of Spain, although it did not became a battlefield until near the end of the
conflict, in April 1938, when it was the last stronghold of the Republican
Government. Catalonia had been a part of the Republic under an auton-
omous statute that gave co-official status to the Catalan language and
decentralized civil law and local administration to the Catalans themselves.
Once the city of Tarragona fell on January 15, a mass movement of people
from Catalonia over the Pyrenees Mountains to France occurred. The
exiles were mostly civilian; many had already been refugees, as some 1
million non-Catalans had settled in Barcelona from 1936 to 1939, fleeing
the fighting in other parts of Spain. Others were Catalan. In all, some half-
a-million people left Barcelona and other parts of Catalonia in January
and February 1939. This massive migration continued until Franco had
control of all border crossings by February 13, 1939. Shortly after, Franco
won his final victory in April 1939, and established an authoritarian, cen-
tralized dictatorship that lasted until his death in 1975.
Francoist repression was as severe in Catalonia as elsewhere; from
May to July 1939, immediately following the end of the war, about ten
Catalans were executed every day in the countryside and nearly 150 per
day in the city of Barcelona in the month of July.7 Current estimates sug-
gest some 8,500 Catalans were killed in rearguard actions during the war
and some 4,000 in the aftermath of war.8 Undoubtedly these numbers
will increase as some 9,000 unidentified bodies have been found in the
excavations of mass graves funded by the Catalan government from 2003
to 2008.9 Following the war, a “cultural genocide” led by the new Franco
Government ensued, as the Catalan flag, public use of the Catalan lan-
guage, and Catalan publishing were banned.
5
Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, 507–9.
6
Mir, “The Francoist Repression,” 138.
7
8
9
Memory of the Civil War

While the transition to democracy that occurred in Spain following
Franco’s death in November 1975 acknowledged some of the crimes of
Francoism—for instance, granting Republican military veterans pensions
for the first time—the general mood that prevailed was one characterized
by the 1977 Amnesty Law. This legislation prohibited the pursuit of any
legal cases emerging from the civil war or after that could be considered to
have involved human rights violations and war crimes. In general the transi-
tion was thought to be accompanied by a “pacto de olvido,” a pact of forget-
ting or, perhaps better phrased, a “pact of silence.”10 Catalonia—due to the
restoration of its autonomous statue, policies to promote the use of Catalan
language, and other changes that came with democracy—embraced public
memory more than most parts of Spain. As early as 1975, Catalan citizens
tore down street signs named by the dictator and replaced them with their
own, handmade signs. In small towns and villages, mass graves of Francoist
victims were identified and publicly marked. This was not comprehensive,
but it was obvious and not hidden. In Barcelona, the field in the Montjuic
cemetery known as Fossar de la Pedrera was first opened to the family
members of victims in 1976. From the late 1970s, the Asssociacío Pro-
memòria als Immolats per la Libertat a Cataluyna [Association for the
Memory of those who sacrificed for the Liberty of Catalonia] spearheaded
efforts to open up the field; it negotiated an end to all burials there by
1979 and pushed for the creation of the first public monument on the
site by the government in 1985. Nonetheless, it was cultural policy and
not historical memory that occupied the Catalan government in the first
decades after democratization. From 1980 to 2003, the Catalan govern-
ment, the Generalitat de Catalunya, led by Jordi Pujol and his nationalist
party Convergència y Unió (CiU), sought to take advantage of the new
political environment to rebuild Catalan identity and Catalanism after
decades of repression. Language usage and promotion was the top priority,
followed by support for folk and traditional culture, more broadly defined.
The Catalan language, however, was never linked to ethnicity. Language in
Catalonia helped foster national identity, as it was the basis for creating a
common bond between individuals from diverse backgrounds.11 This drew
10
W. L. Bernecker and S. Brinkmann, Memorias divididas: Guerra Civil y franquismo en la
sociedad y la política españolas, 1936–2008, trans. M. Muñoz-Aunión (Madrid: Abada
Editores, 2009), 220.
11
E. Roller, “When Does Language Become Exclusivist? Linguistic Policies in Catalonia,”
National Identities 4, no. 3 (2002): 273–89.
54 D.A. MESSENGER
on a longstanding tradition of Catalan nationalism that linked language to

cultural consciousness and social cohesion rather than ethnicity.
Across all of Spain, the silence associated with the pact of forgetting had
changed by the 1990s and early 2000s. Novels and films concerned with
the Civil War entered the realm of popular culture, more public commem-
orations of the civil war emerged, and debates over how best to recover
memory, or what to remember, developed throughout Spain. In 2000,
the most notable group to emerge was the one led by Emilio Silva, that is,
the Asociacíon para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica [Association
for the Recuperation of Historical Memory] (ARMH). The ARMH made
its primary goal the excavation of mass graves and the identification of
victims killed by Francoist forces during and after the Civil War. By 2006,
the ARMH had exhumed graves in some 40 locations across Spain that
contained a total of 520 bodies. It encouraged local communities to host
“memory forums” where there would be discussions of how to proceed,
since most communities knew of the existence of mass graves in their midst,
but did not have the means to exhume them. ARMH offered support ser-
vices and then employed forensic anthropologists and other professionals,
often from other countries, to carry out the work on the ground.
The next stage in the development of the movement to recover the
memory of the Civil War and Francoist repression came in March 2004,
with the election of the Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez
Zapatero. Zapatero took the lead in what he and others called Spain’s
“second transition.” The major result of this promise was the passage of
the ground-breaking Law on Historical Memory in October 2007. This
law condemned Franco’s military uprising as “illegitimate” and the judg-
ments of military tribunals that sentenced Franco’s opponents to death
or prison camps as “unjust.” It set aside money to be used as reparations
for family members of those found to have been victims of war crimes.
Those stripped of Spanish citizenship by Franco because of their exile were
allowed to reclaim it. Monuments, plaques, and statues that exalt one side
over the other or were directly associated with the Franco regime were
supposed to be removed. In this instance, the role of educating the pub-
lic was emphasized so as not to ensure one interpretation over another,
although on balance the Law clearly associated the Government with the
anti-Francoist side. A Documentation Centre of Historical Memory was
created. Finally, following the lead of ARHM, the government itself began
the funding of mass grave exhumations.
While debates about the broader memory of the Civil War were occur-
ring across Spain, a parallel process was underway in Catalonia, attuned
to both the specifics of the experience of war there and to contempo-
rary Catalan politics. Many of the initial policies focused on mass graves
and the documentation of Francoist repression, as in the rest of Spain.
The Generalitat instituted a program to compensate victims of Franco in
2000. In 2003 the Parliament therefore asked the government to create
a census of persons missing as a result of the Civil War and dictatorship
era and a map of known mass graves.12 Other significant issues included
the Generalitat’s demand for the national government to apologize for
the execution of Civil War-era Catalan President Lluis Companys in 1940
(made in 2004) and opposition to moving civil war documents from the
Catalan archive to a national archive on the civil war in Salamanca. The
Generalitat passed a separate law governing missing persons and mass
graves in 2009. This Law gives the Generalitat the financial and moral
obligation to govern the process of mass grave excavations, unlike the
Spanish law that simply allows the government to subsidize initiatives that
must emanate from the local community.13
Yet in Catalonia developments also reflected different agendas, and
here both the link to contemporary politics and the connection to other
memory trends across Europe become apparent. It was in Catalonia that
the first broad legal directive on historical memory was given, in the
updated and revised 2006 Statute on Autonomy negotiated between the
central government and the Generalitat of Catalonia. The statute includes
Article 54, in which Catalonia’s role during and after the Civil War is
described as “its resistance and struggle for rights and democratic free-
doms.” Moreover, Article 54 seeks to mobilize historical memory for the
promotion of democracy, ordering the Generalitat to “strive to make its
historical memory a permanent symbol of tolerance, of the dignity of dem-
ocratic values, of the rejection of totalitarianism, and of recognition for all
individuals who have suffered persecution as a consequence of personal,
ideological or conscientious choices.”14 The statute’s focus on the issue
12
R. D. Martín, “Legal Framework for Democratic Memory Policies and Mass Graves in
Catalonia and Spain and Services for People Who Suffered Retaliation,” in Historical
Memory: Policy and Practice (London School of Economics and Political Science, Catalan
Observatory, 2010), 5, http://www.lse.ac.uk/europeanInstitute/research/catalanObserva-
tory/PDF/HistMem1/Raul%20Rigon%20.pdf.
13
Martín, “Legal Framework for Democratic Memory,” 6.
14
Memorial Democràtic, “Article 54 and Llei Del Memorial Democràtic,” accessed
October 18, 2014, http://memorialdemocratic.gencat.cat/ca/memorial_democratic/
qui_som/.
56 D.A. MESSENGER
of “historical memory” marks a significant moment, for it clearly charges

the Generalitat to use memory as a tool in the creation of a viable political
community today. The most comprehensive legislation in Catalonia came
in the 2007 Law that created a new government institution, the Memorial
Democràtic, which has sponsored dissemination of new research, public
signage and markings of historical spaces, and the creation of and support
to museums and other public spaces meant to commemorate the Civil War
and dictatorship. One of the efforts has been to connect various spaces to
one another through the use of common symbols and text, and to encour-
age visitors to make a journey between different sites. The new institution
also sponsors travelling exhibitions on the Civil War and post-Civil War
periods of history, such as “Catalonia Bombarded.” It holds conferences
and meetings in various communities that explore local histories of the
Civil War and repression, and provides support for institutions like local
museums developing exhibits and commemorations concerning the Civil
War. In 2013 alone, Memorial Democràtic held 75 events across the prov-
ince, reaching some 5,000 people.15
One of the ways in which Article 54 and the efforts of Memorial
Democràtic manifest themselves is to link Catalonia’s struggle for democ-
racy and tolerance with Europe’s struggle against Nazism in World War
II. This appears in public memory spaces in many different ways. One
example is at the Fossar de la Pedrera. While the main foci of the site are
the mass graves and the individual grave of former Catalan President Lluis
Companys, at the edge of the space there are also seven black tombstone-
like rock outcroppings. Each one has the name of a Nazi concentration
camp that operated during World War II. One of these is Mauthausen in
Austria, a brutal work camp that held over 23,000 Spanish Republicans
rounded up in occupied France, 16,310 of whom died.16 This linkage to
memorial sites outside Spain continues the memorialization of the Spanish
15
Some examples of these public events include an academic conference on the centenary
of the birth of Joaquim Amat-Piniella, a writer who died at Mauthausen under the Nazis, a
local commemoration of the Civil War bombing of cities and towns in Tarragona, La Garriga,
Figueres and Flix, amongst others, a memorial service for the anniversary of the execution by
Francoist courts of Manuel Carrasco I Formiguera, a Catalan political leader, and the launch,
with an academic conference, of the travelling exhibition “Catalonia in Transition
1971–1980.” Memorial Democràtic, “Memòria d’actuaciones del Memorial Democràtic”
(Generalitat de Catalunya, 2013).
16
David Wingeate Pike, Spaniards in the Holocaust: Mauthausen, Horror on the Danube
(London: Routledge, 2000).
Civil War by following the fates of those who fought, lost, and continued
to be persecuted even outside Franco’s Spain. Of the Spaniards sent to
camps outside France by the Nazis 90 percent were sent to Mauthausen.17
The other six markers however, commemorate the six Nazi death camps
that operated in Poland during World War II. On the top of each are
stones, placed as on a tomb in the Jewish tradition. Certainly there were
Spaniards at these camps—in addition to Mauthausen and its subsidiary
camps, Spaniards were held inside Germany at Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen,
Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and the women’s camp at Ravensbrück, where
101 Spanish women were held as members of the French resistance. There
were also Spaniards in the Polish death camps Auschwitz and Treblinka.18
However, the placing of markers at Montjuic that not only remind visitors
of Mauthausen, but make references to other Nazi camps, most of which
did not hold very many Spaniards. This suggests a broader memorializa-
tion of the Holocaust in general and establishes connections between the
Spanish Civil War, Franco’s repression, World War II, and the Holocaust.
The placing of these memorial stones in Barcelona raises the question
of moving beyond regional or national memory settings to consider mem-
ory on a larger scale. Jim Hyun-Lim and Peter Lambert have argued that
a social framework for memory can be global, particularly due to the rise
of linking past political violence to human rights and the ways in which
memorialization and human rights often intersect.19 In Catalonia, the
connecting of the memory of the repression of the civil war to the larger
European memory of the Holocaust and World War II, which did not
occur on Catalan soil, is changing the representation of the past and sug-
gests links between Catalonia’s experiences and broader European experi-
ences. Another example of this is the Memorial Museum of Exile in La
Jonquera, Catalonia—a space that remembers the exile of some 450,000
people who fled across the border into France in January and February
1939 as the Civil War ended. The museum’s historian, Miguel Serrano,
stated that there is an element of victimhood in the way the museum pres-
ents the story of the exiles, but he asserted that what is more significant is
to recover the memory of these people not as victims but as part of a his-
torical process of repression of democracy and republicanism that defined
Pike, Spaniards in the Holocaust.

17
Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, 516.

18
19
Jie-Hyun Lim and Peter Lambert, “Introduction: Coming to Terms with the Past of
Mass Dictatorship,” in Mass Dictatorship and Memory as Ever Present Past, ed. Jie-Hyun Lim,
Walker, and Lambert (London; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1–13.
58 D.A. MESSENGER
not just the Civil War, but also World War II, not just Spain or Catalonia,
but Europe generally.20
Rather than emphasizing the physical difficulty of this particular exilic
experience taking place in winter over a treacherous mountain range, the
exhibit space in the Museum of Exile stresses the reception of the exiles
in France, where the exiles were interned, and then follows their path
throughout World War II, either in the camps of Hitler or in the French
Resistance.21 There is also a great deal of material that examines the pro-
liferation of Catalan democratic groups in France after World War II, after
a time that included significant Catalan and Spanish participation in the
French Resistance. Margaret Townsend, a member of the museum staff,
argues that by focusing on different time periods beyond the Civil War,
rather than the trauma of exile itself, emphasis is put on the fact that
the exiles found themselves in a labyrinth of war, underground resistance,
and migration that defined the rest of their lives.22 They were victimized
repeatedly, and they struggled, but the ultimate triumph of democracy
now justified that struggle and that victimization. In constructing a nar-
rative that emphasizes the Catalan struggle for democracy and against
fascism, the museum not only connects Catalonia’s past to Europe’s,
but makes Catalonia an essential part of contemporary efforts to further
democracy in Europe and thus mobilizes the past for future uses.
In addition to victimhood nationalism, then, there is also a desire to link
the experiences of the Civil War, World War II, and Holocaust, and also
to encourage reflection on what those Catalan, Spanish, and European
experiences have to tell us today. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider have
argued that references to the Holocaust and, by extension, World War
II, have become so widespread in Europe that in addition to national
and ethnic memories of these events, we now also have a “cosmopoli-
tan” memory of the war whereby national and ethnic memories share a
“common patterning.”23 In this way, the struggle and story of victimhood
in Catalonia is connected to what happened in Europe shortly thereafter.
The fact that many Spanish and Catalan exiles participated in both struggles
reinforces Catalonia’s European dimension, its shared democratic values,
20
Miquel Serrano, Personal Interview, November 13, 2012.
21
Serrano, Personal Interview.
22
Margaret Townsend, Personal Interview, November 13, 2012.
23
and common cultural and historical ties to the continent. The mobiliza-
tion of memory in Catalonia thus also fits what Sharon Macdonald has
argued is a common impetus to use the Holocaust for educational pur-
poses with reference to the present and the future.24
Jordi Font, the Director of the Memorial Museum of Exile in La
Jonquera, reinforces this point. Noting that the majority of visitors to
the Museum are 13- to 15-year-old children encouraged to visit by the
Catalan Government and Memorial Democratic as part of their history
courses, Font emphasizes that the goal was to get students to make a
connection between exile, war, the denial of rights, and contemporary
democracy. Students are encouraged to understand that the process of
democratization in Catalonia was a lengthy struggle, an ongoing struggle,
and a struggle that owes much to the exiles.25 In this sense, there is not a
great deal of emphasis on the political leanings of different exile groups,
but rather on their experience as republicans and anti-fascist democrats;
the details of political divisions and conflicts amongst the exiles is not
the main point because the visitors are mostly high school aged children.
Memorial Democràtic’s participation in the United Nations sanctioned
Holocaust Remembrance day at the end of January reinforces these con-
nections. In 2013, the day was commemorated by a discussion for 280
students in Barcelona comparing those who saved Jews in the World War
II and those who saved Republican exiles in France and Spain.26
In addition to the sites linked to Francoist repression and exile, there is
an additional site in Portbou that makes connections between Catalonia
and the rest of Europe. This is the Walter Benjamin site, where Benjamin,
the intellectual who fled Hitler’s Germany in 1940, committed suicide
just after crossing the Pyrenees in the fear that he would be sent back to
Hitler’s Europe. The effort here is certainly to honor Benjamin, but it also
links Spain’s experience with the anti-Nazi and anti-fascist elements of
World War II. This is a significant theme that also occurs in the Memorial
Museum. Although the exile experience of crossing the border and then
internment in France was most definitely traumatic, what these sites and
their connection to the Benjamin site mark, is more than that. The over-
all effect is to link the exile to broader political ideas, to move beyond
24
Sharon Macdonald, Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today (London;
New York, NY: Routledge, 2013).
25
Jordi Font, Personal Interview, November 13, 2012.
26
Memorial Democràtic, “Memòria d’actuaciones.”
60 D.A. MESSENGER
trauma, or, better put, to mobilize the experience of trauma of this forced
migration toward a broader commitment to democracy and anti-fascism.
The Benjamin site, then, complements the Museum in depicting trauma,
in this case the death of a great thinker, but seeks to mobilize trauma
and remind the visitor of the political actions Benjamin took. The shared
trauma of exiles from Nazi Germany and Spanish exiles, and its mobiliza-
tion to act in favor of a democratic path instead of dictatorship, marks
both groups of exiles as victims of mass dictatorship. To make these con-
nections even more explicit, the Memorial Museum of La Jonquera is cur-
rently overseeing the development of a Benjamin memorial foundation,
conference, and prize.
A final physical location where one can find the development of a trans-
national European memory—or what Levy and Sznaider would call a cos-
mopolitan memory—of Catalans and their connection to World War II is
in southern France. The French Government interned the nearly 500,000
Spanish exiles who crossed the border in January and February 1939 via
Catalonia. One of the largest centers was at Rivesaltes, north of Perpignan
on a direct route from Catalonia. Here some 15,000 were held from
1939 to 1940, before it became a transit camp for political prisoners and
Jews during World War II. The camp was subsequently used for various
political groups in France through 1970, including for Algerians during
the Algerian war for independence against France in the early 1960s. A
memorial to Spanish internees was erected in 1999 and the camp opened
to the public in 2005; as of summer 2015, a museum is now open.27
Within France, various associations linked to Spanish Republican
memory exist. One of these groups, Sons and Daughters of the Spanish
Republicans and Children of the Exodus (FFREEE) actively promotes
memorial space at places like Rivesaltes and the camp site nearby at Argelès.
It also organizes commemorative ceremonies and programs in schools and
communities across the region. Here too, links between the experiences
of Catalan exiles and the Jewish prisoners who followed them into the
camps of southern France are present.28 Moreover, there are cross-border
activities such as a march over the border from Spain to France, recreat-
ing the 1939 routes of the exile, the Retirada. A transnational emphasis
27
Conseil General des Pyrenées Orientales, “Le Mémorial de Rivesaltes,” accessed October
18, 2014, http://www.ledepartement66.fr/52-le-memorial-de-rivesaltes.htm.
28
Scott Soo, The Routes of Exile: France and the Spanish Civil War Refugees, 1939–2009
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).
in the commemorations within France and amongst groups dedicated to

the memory of the Spanish Civil War underline, in the words of Scott
Soo, that “the links between identity and memory cannot be reduced to
a single national framework.”29 Most significantly, Memorial Democràtic
in Catalonia is engaged with the process of memorialization at Rivesaltes,
supporting it as a site that will link the Spanish exiles, the prisoners of
World War II, the Holocaust, and those Algerians held there in the
1960s. According to Memorial Democràtic, the site will provide visitors
with testimony about “three great conflicts of the twentieth century.”30
Beyond that, the Catalan institution increasingly stresses its links to other
European memorializations of World War II and the fight against fascism.
As Soo’s analysis suggests, the future of memory is increasingly transna-
tional. Memory sites in Catalonia thus demonstrate the power of cosmo-
politan memory and the use of the Holocaust and World War II, as well as
the Spanish Civil War, to create a collective remembrance of victimhood at
the hands of dictatorship. Alejandro Baer and Natan Sznaider argue that
in Spain, as elsewhere, the Holocaust serves as a frame for interpreting
the present and the past when political violence of any kind is involved.31
Contemporary fusion of moral, legal, and political identities leads us to
focus on the victims of political violence and to assert the need to memori-
alize and commemorate these victims in the same manner in which we have
dealt with the victims of the Holocaust at sites and museums in Europe
and elsewhere—and not to forget them as Spain attempted to do earlier.32
The linking of two pasts and the making memory of Franco’s vic-
tims more cosmopolitan are not all that is happening at such sites, for, as
argued above, memory is also mobilized to link the past to contemporary
ideas of democracy and democratic spirit. Here one might see the linkage
of Lim’s concept of victimhood nationalism with what others have called
a sense of civic nationalism in Catalonia.33 Civic nationalism here entails
29
Soo, The Routes of Exile, 237.
30
Memorial Democràtic, “El Memorial del Camp Rivesaltes,” accessed October 18, 2014,
http://memorialdemocratic.gencat.cat/ca/publicacions/Rivesaltes.
31
Alejandro Baer and Natan Sznaider, “Ghosts of the Holocaust in Franco’s Mass Graves:
Cosmopolitan Memories and the Politics of ‘Never Again,’” Memory Studies 8, no. 3
(February 5, 2015): 328–44. 333.
32
Baer and Sznaider, “Ghosts of the Holocaust,” 336.
33
Jie-Hyun Lim, “Victimhood Nationalism in the Memory of Mass Dictatorship,” in Mass
Dictatorship and Memory as Ever Present Past, ed. Jie-Hyun Lim, Walker, and Lambert
(London; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 36–61.
62 D.A. MESSENGER
that the nation as a community is drawn together first, in Anthony Smith’s

definition, by a common body of law, and secondarily by a kind of shared
public culture.34 This is quite different from a nationalism grounded in
ethnicity. Previously, some have applied the concept to Catalan national-
ism by emphasizing that the Catalan language was the shared public cul-
ture that mattered most, regardless of ethnic or linguistic background.35
The conception of civic nationalism used here draws from Anderson’s
“constructivist” approach to nationalism, which stresses the changing
nature of national identity and its adaptability to diverse political contexts
in different times and places.36 Yet the concept can also be applied trans-
nationally and, in Catalonia, such nationalism is taking advantage of the
cosmopolitan memory of the victims of Francoism seen at sites around the
region and articulated by Memorial Democràtic.
What is apparent in Catalonia is that the memory of historical injustices
can be used to create a new public culture where historical memory, con-
temporary nationalism, and democratic activism become part of national,
European, and global identity. In this way, historical memory not only
connects Catalonia to Europe, but can also be used for future mobilization
around a variety of issues linked to the development of democratic cul-
ture. The national is not forgotten in this use of Holocaust cosmopolitan
memory—indeed, one might argue that Catalonia is, in a way, renational-
izing cosmopolitan memory. Given current debates in Catalonia about
separation from Spain, one can easily assume that historical memory of
Catalonia’s democratic tradition might be one area where these references
become activated for political purposes. However, it remains clear that the
interpretation of sites linked to the Civil War and representing Catalonia
as a naturally democratic place that fell victim to the forces of dictator-
ship, makes Catalonia and the Spanish Civil War not just s omething that
occurred on the periphery of Europe, but something that was centrally
European and very much relevant today.
34
Anthony Smith, “Tres conceptos de nación,” Revista de Occidente 161 (1994): 7–22.
35
A. Villarroya, “Cultural Policies and National Identity in Catalonia,” International
Journal of Cultural Policy 18, no. 1 (2012): 31–45.
36
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London; New York, NY: Verso, 2006).
CHAPTER 4
Memory Competition or Memory

Collaboration? Politics, Networks,
and Social Actors in Memories
of Dictatorship
Sara Jones
The study of political memory and its relation to political and cultural
identity has frequently focused on the nation state as its unit of analy-
sis. This is seen perhaps most explicitly in Pierre Nora’s concept of the
lieux de mémoire and the associated project, in which he endeavored to
map the places to which the memory of the French nation had been con-
signed—be it in language, canonic texts, commemorative dates, or monu-
ments.1 Scholars have subsequently made efforts to replicate Nora’s work
in other national contexts, including François and Schulze’s Deutsche
Erinnerungsorte and Martin Sabrow’s Erinnerungsorte der DDR—the
1
Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–1992), 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).
S. Jones (*)
Department of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham,
Birmingham, West Midlands, UK
e-mail: s.jones.1@bham.ac.uk

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39152-6_4
64 S. JONES
latter suggesting that the nation need not continue to exist for its sites of
memory to remain significant for the construction of identity.2
Despite this focus on the national, there have also been recent attempts
to chart the realms of memory beyond and between nation states. A num-
ber of writers have turned their attention in particular to the question of
European memory and its links to European identity.3 Małgorzata Pakier
and Bo Stråth include a tentative question mark in the title of their 2010
publication A European Memory? They argue that the attempt “to make
ex post the commemoration of the Holocaust a foundation myth of the
European Union has remained an illusion,” as discussion of the meaning
of past events has shifted from historical analysis “to [national] memory
politics with a strong degree of instrumentalisation.”4 In the same volume,
Jan-Werner Müller questions whether “from a normative point of view”
there is not in fact “something deeply troubling about the vision of a
European memory or even a Europeanisation of memories,” as this might
imply the “exercise of power in the suppression of memories … that just
do not fit.”5 Müller argues that a singular European understanding of the
past might not be desirable; however, a “self-critical European memory,”
that is, a “Europeanisation of moral-political attitudes and practices in
dealing with profoundly different pasts” could promote European unity.6
One of the central issues for European memory is that of the place
of communism and the relationship between remembering the crimes
of the Holocaust and the crimes of the gulag. Aleida Assmann describes
2
Etienne François and Hagen Schulze, eds., Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (Munich:
C.H. Beck, 2001); Martin Sabrow, ed., Erinnerungsorte der DDR (Munich: C.H. Beck,
2009).
3
See for example, Aleida Assmann, “Europe: A Community of Memory?,” Bulletin of the
German Historical Institute 40, no. 1 (2007): 11–25; Aleida Assmann, Auf dem Weg zu einer
europäischen Gedächtniskultur (Vienna: Picus, 2012); Claus Leggewie, Der Kampf um die
europäische Erinnerung: Ein Schlachtfeld wird besichtigt (München: Beck, 2011); Sharon
Macdonald, Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today (London; New York, NY:
Routledge, 2013).
4
Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth, “Introduction: A European Memory?,” in A European
Memory?: Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (New York, NY; Oxford:
Berghahn, 2010), 1–20. 12.
5
Jan-Werner Müller, “On ‘European Memory’: Some Conceptual and Normative
Remarks,” in A European Memory?: Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance, ed.
Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth (New York, NY; Oxford: Berghahn, 2010), 25–37. 25–6.
6
Müller, “A European Memory?,” 26–7.
MEMORY COMPETITION OR MEMORY COLLABORATION? POLITICS... 65
the Holocaust as the “memory centre of Europe.”7 She notes that EU

accession is now dependent upon entrance into the “Holocaust mem-
ory community.”8 However, the understanding of the genocide of the
European Jews as a unique human catastrophe is not universally shared,
particularly within Eastern European states. In combination with the fail-
ure of the Russian Federation to recognize the crimes of Stalinism, the
result has been a form of competitive remembering between victims of
Nazi and Soviet oppression.9 In a similar vein, Claus Leggewie argues that
it is one of the major challenges for European memory culture to establish
the singularity of the annihilation of the European Jews without eclips-
ing the systematic murder of “class enemies” or “enemies of the people”
under Stalinist regimes.10
In recent years, some European institutions have taken steps towards
putting forward guidelines for exactly this kind of negotiated memory.
In 2006, the Parliamentary Assembly published Resolution 1481, which
states the “need for international condemnation of crimes of totalitarian
communist regimes.”11 Despite the strong language of censure against the
authoritarian states of Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth cen-
tury, the Resolution does not propose specific measures beyond encour-
aging successor parties “to reassess the history of communism and their
own past, [and to] clearly distance themselves from the crimes committed
by totalitarian communist regimes and condemn them without any ambi-
guity.” In contrast, the “Prague Declaration on European Conscience
and Communism,” initiated by the Czech government and signed by
several European politicians, historians, journalists, and former political
prisoners in June 2008, firmly states that “consciousness of the crimes
against humanity committed by the Communist regimes throughout
the continent must inform all European minds to the same extent as the
7
Assmann, Auf dem Weg zu einer europäischen Gedächtniskultur, 32. Unless otherwise
indicated, all translations from German and Romanian are my own.
8
Assmann, Auf dem Weg zu einer europäischen Gedächtniskultur, 35.
9
Assmann, Auf dem Weg zu einer europäischen Gedächtniskultur, 41; Leggewie, Der
Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung, 23.
10
Leggewie, Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung, 24; Claus Leggewie, “Seven
Circles of European Memory,” trans. Simon Garnett, Eurozine, December 20, 2010.
11
Parliamentary Assembly, “Resolution 1481: Need for International Condemnation of
Crimes of Totalitarian Communist Regimes” (Council of Europe, n.d.), http://assembly.
coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-en.asp?fileid=17403&lang=EN.
66 S. JONES
Nazi regime’s crimes did.”12 Nonetheless, the response of the European

Parliament in the form of the resolution on “European Conscience and
Totalitarianism” in April 2009 was measured.13 While it recognized the
need to promote understanding of the “double legacy of dictatorship” for
the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, it emphasized the “unique-
ness of the Holocaust” and the central role of World War I and World
War II as the motor for European integration. The focus—which in the
Prague Declaration was clearly on communism—becomes in this docu-
ment a broader condemnation of all “totalitarian,” “undemocratic,” and
“authoritarian” regimes and the assertion of a European identity based on
“respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law
and respect for human rights.”14
Nonetheless, the European Parliament resolution did make a further
contribution towards the development of a European way of approaching
the past by calling for: “[T]he establishment of a Platform of European
Memory and Conscience to provide support for the networking and
cooperation among national research institutes specialising in the subject
of totalitarian history.” On August 23, 2011, this Platform was called
into being by representatives of public history institutes, museums, and
memorials from across Europe. The agreement signed by the founding
members notes the “exceptionality and uniqueness of the Holocaust,” yet
considers that younger generations in post-communist states “need to be
confronted with [Communism], informed and educated about it in the
same manner as they are educated about National Socialism.”15 The key
12
“Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism,” 2008, http://www.
praguedeclaration.eu/.
13
European Parliament, “European Conscience and Totalitarianism,” April 2, 2009,
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+
TA+P6-TA-2009-0213+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN.
14
See also Annabelle Littoz-Monnet, “The EU Politics of Remembrance: Can Europeans
Remember Together?,” West European Politics 35, no. 5 (2012): 1182–1202; Sebastian
M. Büttner and Anna Delius, “World Culture in European Memory Politics? New European
Memory Agents Between Epistemic Framing and Political Agenda Setting,” Journal of
Contemporary European Studies 23, no. 3 (2015): 391–404; Laure Neumayer, “Integrating
the Central European Past into a Common Narrative: The Mobilizations Around the ‘Crimes
of Communism’ in the European Parliament,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies
23, no. 3 (2015): 344–63.
15
Platform of European Memory and Conscience, “Agreement Establishing the Platform
of European Memory and Conscience,” 2011, http://www.bstu.bund.de/SharedDocs/
Downloads/DE/Statut_Platform_of_European_Memory_and_Conscience.pdf?__blob=
publicationFile.
purpose of the Platform is to promote networking and coordination of

institutions that deal with the legacy of dictatorship and authoritarianism
“on a pan-European level.”
In this chapter, I look in more detail at the ways in which this network-
ing of memories is taking place in two member institutions in two dif-
ferent European nations: Gedenkstätte Hohenschönhausen in Berlin and
Memorialul Victimelor Comunismului şi al Rezistenţei in the Romanian
town of Sighetu Marmaţei. In this way, I respond to Aline Sierp and
Jenny Wüstenberg’s recent call to move the study of European memory
beyond the focus on single national case studies or abstract or norma-
tive approaches to investigate empirically “the mechanisms by which
memories are (trans)formed, displayed, shared, and negotiated through
transnational channels, while maintaining their local rootedness.”16 My
particular interest is in the meanings and narratives attached to transna-
tional collaboration at these sites within the context of national, inter-
national, and European memory discourses. That is, I focus not (or not
solely) on the activities in which these organizations and their represen-
tatives engage, but on how these activities are interpreted by “memory
entrepreneurs”17 and how this relates to particular memory agendas. In
this way, I seek to demonstrate how Esref Aksu’s concept of “institu-
tional memory”18—that is, efforts by elite actors (here, principally, man-
agers of national memorials) to construct and propagate meanings of the
past—functions in a cross-border context. The identification of multiple
narratives that shift according to the specific context of the collabora-
tion and audience for which an action is being interpreted, indicates that
these collaborative activities are being used to promote transnational
memory-political projects that are nonetheless deeply rooted in national
memory debates. In a concluding section, I consider how we might thus
conceptualize these interactions in terms of the theoretical toolbox of
memory studies.
16
Aline Sierp and Jenny Wüstenberg, “Linking the Local and the Transnational: Rethinking
Memory Politics in Europe,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 23, no. 3 (2015):
321–29. 324.
17
Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and the Labors of Memory (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 2003).
18
Eşref Aksu, “Global Collective Memory: Conceptual Difficulties of an Appealing Idea,”
Global Society 23, no. 3 (2009): 317–32. 323.
68 S. JONES
The Case Studies

The method of detailed narrative discourse analysis used in this chapter
necessarily restricts the corpus of texts that can be studied. I have therefore
selected two organizations that are members of the Platform of European
Memory and Conscience, which have a significant voice in the memory-
political debates in their respective countries.
With reference to the memory of state socialism, Germany and Romania
have had significantly different approaches towards what is known in
Germany as “Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit” [working through the
past] and in Romania as “asumarea trecutului” [taking on/assuming the
past]. Romania saw a continuation in positions of power of leading com-
munists in the first decade following the revolution, and an, in part, resul-
tant reluctance to enact wide-ranging transitional justice.19 In contrast, the
incorporation of East Germany into Western democratic structures meant
that Germany was able financially and politically to respond swiftly with
legal proceedings, lustration, file access, reparations, and state-mandated
memorialization. Nonetheless, many of those who suffered state repres-
sion in the GDR argue that these measures did not go far enough and it
was often the democratic structures themselves—notably the prohibition
on retroactive justice—that were seen as preventing punishment of those
responsible for human rights abuses.20 Moreover, the Federal Republic
has a very particular relationship to memories of the Holocaust and World
War II. As Eric Langenbacher notes, although other pasts, including
the memory of state socialism, “vie for influence … the dominance of
19
See for example Carmen González-Enríquez, “De-Communization and Political Justice
in Central and Eastern Europe,” in The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in
Democratizing Societies, ed. Alexandra Barahona de Brito, Carmen González-Enríquez, and
Paloma Aguilar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 219–47; James Mark, The
Unfinished Revolution: Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe (New
Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2010); Lavinia Stan, Transitional Justice in Post-
Communist Romania: The Politics of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013).
20
See for example A. James McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001); Gary Bruce, “East Germany,” in Transitional Justice in
Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, ed. Lavinia Stan (London; New York, NY:
Routledge, 2009), 15–36; Jan-Werner Müller, “East Germany: Incorporation, Tainted
Truth, and the Double Division,” in The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in
Democratizing Societies, ed. Alexandra Barahona de Brito, Carmen González-Enríquez, and
Paloma Aguilar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 248–74.
Holocaust-centre memory was never in doubt and it remains the ethical

imperative for German political culture.”21 In contrast, Holocaust educa-
tion in Romania is relatively new and according to Misco, as late as 2003,
the official narrative in Romania did not accept that the Holocaust had
also occurred on Romanian soil.22
Importantly, both states have also seen recent shifts in government
policy towards remembering state socialism that are likely to have sig-
nificant consequences for the work of memorial museums, such as those
considered here. In December 2006, the Presidential Commission for the
Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania published its final
report condemning the state socialist regime and calling for a suite of
transitional justice measures. The report was highly politicized and fiercely
contested and its impact on other forms of transitional justice has been
limited.23 Nonetheless, the condemnation of communism by the President
signaled an important step in terms of official recognition of past injus-
tices.24 The recent charges of crimes against humanity brought against
former prison head Alexandru Vişinescu and labor camp commander Ion
Ficior—problematically dubbed the “Romanian Nuremberg”25—might
also be read in this vein. In Germany, debates in the mid-2000s and, in
particular, the report of the Expert Commission for the Creation of a
21
Eric Langenbacher, “Still the Unmasterable Past? The Impact of History and Memory
in the Federal Republic of Germany,” German Politics 19, no. 1 (2010): 24–40. 35.
22
Thomas Misco, “‘Nobody Told Us about What Happened’: The Current State of
Holocaust Education in Romania,” International Education 38, no. 1 (2008): 6–20. 7.
23
See for example Monica Ciobanu, “Criminalising the Past and Reconstructing Collective
Memory: The Romanian Truth Commission,” Europe-Asia Studies 61, no. 2 (2009):
313–36; Mark, The Unfinished Revolution; John Gledhill, “Integrating the Past: Regional
Integration and Historical Reckoning in Central and Eastern Europe,” Nationalities Papers
39, no. 4 (2011): 481–506; Cristian Tileagă, “Communism in Retrospect: The Rhetoric of
Historical Representation and Writing the Collective Memory of Recent Past,” Memory
Studies 5, no. 4 (2012): 462–78; Vladimir Tismăneanu, “Democracy and Memory: Romania
Confronts Its Communist Past,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 617 (2008): 166–80.
24
Gabriela Cristea and Simina Radu-Bucurenci, “Raising the Cross: Exorcising Romania’s
Communist Past in Museums, Memorials and Monuments,” in Past for the Eyes: East
European Representations of Communism in Cinema and Museums after 1989, ed. Oksana
Sarkisova and Peter Apor (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), 275–305;
Tismăneanu, “Democracy and Memory.”
25
See “‘Romanian Nuremberg’ Trial for Communist Labour Camp Commander,” The
Guardian, September 22, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/22/
romanian-nuremberg-trial-communist-labour-camp-commander-alexandru-visinescu.
70 S. JONES
Historical Network for Working through the GDR Past26 led to devel-
opments in memorialization policy and increasing representation of the
GDR in the state-mandated heritage landscape.27
The Memorial Museums

Turning to the sites themselves, Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen
is situated in the former remand prison of the State Security Service (Stasi)
in Berlin. The memorial, and particularly its director Hubertus Knabe,
have played a prominent role in debates surrounding the GDR since uni-
fication. Viewed by many as an attempt to impose a particular version of
the GDR, the memorial has been criticized for, amongst other things, an
over-emotionalized presentation of the past, over emphasis on the brutal-
ity of the 1950s, conflating Nazi and Soviet oppression, and engaging in
political propaganda directed against the far left.28 Knabe has, from the
start, been a controversial figure in this context. In press interviews given
at the beginning of his tenure in 2000, he compared the remand prison
with a National Socialist concentration camp—the “Dachau of commu-
nism”—described National Socialism and SED socialism as two sides of
the same totalitarian coin, and failed to distinguish between Stalinism,
Soviet-style communism, and GDR socialism.29 This equation of extreme
left- and extreme right-wing dictatorships would seem to fit better with
the perspective of the Prague Declaration than with the European Union’s
(EU) emphasis on the uniqueness of the National Socialist genocide—a
position that is also often considered as the consensus within German
public memory at least since the 1990s.30
26
Martin Sabrow et al., eds., Wohin treibt die DDR-Erinnerung? Dokumentation einer
Debatte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007).
27
David Clarke and Ute Wölfel, “Remembering the German Democratic Republic in a
United Germany,” in Remembering the German Democratic Republic: Divided Memory in a
United Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3–22.
28
See for example Jürgen Hofmann, “Zur Auseinandersetzung mit der Hohenschönhausener
Gedenkstätte für die Opfer des Stalinismus,” Utopie Kreativ 81/82 (1997): 158–63; Florian
Kappeler and Christoph Schaub, “Mauer durchs Herz: Inszenierungen von Zeitzeug/innen-
Wissen im erinnerungspolitischen Diskurs der Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen,” in
NachBilder der Wende, ed. Stephan Inge and Alexandra Tacke (Cologne: Böhlau, 2008),
319–29.
29
Carola S. Rudnick, Die andere Hälfte der Erinnerung: Die DDR in der deutschen
Geschichtspolitik nach 1989 (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011), 292.
30
Andrew H. Beattie, “Learning from the Germans? History and Memory in German and
European Projects of Integration,” PORTAL: Journal of Multidisciplinary International
Studies 4, no. 2 (2007): 14.
Memorialul Victimelor Comunismului şi al Rezistenţei is a memorial

and museum housed on the site of a former political prison in Sighet.
The memorial site was opened in 1993 and, since 1994, has been
run by the Fundaţia Academia Civică [Civic Academy Foundation].
Its motto—“When justice is unable to act as a form of memory,
memory alone can be a form of justice”—makes clear the memori-
al’s self-positioning as a response to the failure of the state to address
the past. Nonetheless, the site has been institutionalized to a certain
extent through the patronage of the Council of Europe in 1995 and
its establishment as a national historical site in 1997.31 In May 2013,
the Sighet Memorial opened a permanent exhibition space—under the
title “Memory as a Form of Justice”—in the capital, Bucharest. The
memorial’s founders, writers Ana Blandiana and Romulus Rusan, are
prominent figures in Romanian memorial politics: Rusan was a mem-
ber of the Presidential Commission of 2006 and both Blandiana and
Rusan have spoken on a number of occasions on Romanian television
and radio, as well as published articles in the local and national press.
Like Hohenschönhausen, the site has been criticized for its tendency to
universalize the experience of those interned here in the 1950s by con-
structing—in the words of Cristea and Radu-Bucurenci32—“a single
victimizing version of the past: suffering and death on the altar of the
Nation,” as well as for the absence of any reference to the site’s links to
the history of the Holocaust, that is, as a transportation center for Jews
being deported to Auschwitz.33
The Method of Narrative Analysis

The approach taken in this chapter is informed by narrative research.34
That is, through a discursive analysis of the media texts produced by and
for the memorials, I will identify the stories being constructed by these
sites not only about the state socialist past, but also about the processes
31
Ciobanu, “Criminalising the Past and Reconstructing Collective Memory”; Mark, The
Unfinished Revolution; Stan, Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Romania.
32
Cristea and Radu-Bucurenci, “Raising the Cross,” 303.
33
Mark, The Unfinished Revolution, 70.
34
See for example Barbara Czarniawska, Narratives in Social Science Research (London:
Sage, 2004); Gabriela Spector-Mersel, “Narrative Research: Time for a Paradigm,” Narrative
Inquiry 20, no. 1 (2010): 204–24; Corinne Squire, Molly Andrews, and Maria Tamboukou,
eds., Doing Narrative Research (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2008).
72 S. JONES
of coming to terms with this part of European history in these different

national contexts.
Narrative can be defined as “a mode of knowing,” which consists of
an “organizing experience with the help of a scheme assuming the inten-
tionality of human action.”35 Otherwise fragmented events are brought
“into one meaningful whole” through integration into a “plot,” that is,
(temporal) connections are suggested between the different elements.36
Crucially, “the same set of events can be organized around differ-
ent plots,”37 which is what makes public narratives intrinsically politi-
cal. We can draw links here to recent work in international relations on
“strategic narratives,” defined by Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle
as “a tool for political actors to change the discursive environment in
which they operate, manage expectations, and extend their influence.”38
In this context, narrative is understood as a method by which “politi-
cal actors—usually elites—attempt to give determined meaning to past,
present and future in order to achieve political objectives.”39 Miskimmon,
O’Loughlin, and Roselle are thinking here particularly about state identi-
ties in the international system; however, we can observe that memory
activists will also use narrative “strategically,” that is to suggest a certain
meaning for their actions. Thus, in this approach, it is not about the
“truth or falsity of story elements that determines the power of the narra-
tive as a story,”40 but rather about the plot’s ability to create causal links
and to interpret events in a way that suggests the need for a specific politi-
cal response. The method I will use in my exploration of these narratives
is thus one of discourse analysis; I aim to identify causal connections and
how, in turn, these position national or European regimes of memorial-
ization and transitional justice in terms of success and failure.
The text corpus is formed of material published by or about the memori-
als since they joined the Platform for European Memory and Conscience
(October 2011 and June 2012 respectively) until January 1, 2014. This start
35
Czarniawska, Narratives in Social Science Research, 7.
36
37
38
Alister Miskimmon, Ben O’Loughlin, and Laura Roselle, “Forging the World: Strategic
Narratives and International Relations” (Royal Holloway/Elon University Working Paper,
2012), 3, http://newpolcom.rhul.ac.uk/storage/Forging%20the%20World%20
Working%20Paper%202012.pdf.
39
Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle, “Forging the World,” 4.
40
date is selected for convenience, rather than being a suggestion that it is only
at this point that international collaboration began—as Helga Welsh notes,
civil society actors have been co-operating across national borders since the
1990s.41 The material was gathered from the press and events sections of
the memorial websites, as well as newspaper archiving sites (Nexis and Ziare.
com) and, in the case of Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, the activ-
ity reports that are produced by the memorial every two years. Only material
that referenced in its title international co-operation (broadly understood as
working in some format with institutions outside the given national context)
was included in the corpus. This selection process resulted in 28 articles for
Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, the sixth activity report, and 53
articles for the Sighet Memorial.
Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen
The sixth activity report of Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen,
which covers the years 2011–2012, includes for the first time a section
devoted to “international cooperations.” The authors state as an intro-
duction to this section that “the international significance of Gedenkstätte
Berlin-Hohenschönhausen has increased significantly in recent years.”42
We might dismiss this as self-promotion and—while analysis of trends
in the previous activity reports does suggest an increase in visits by
prominent international visitors43—we should be careful about making
definitive claims regarding the quantity of collaboration based only on
reported activity. Nonetheless, the increased reporting of this kind of
event in the memorial’s promotional material can be seen as indicative of
41
Helga Welsh, “Beyond the National: Pathways of Diffusion,” in Post-Communist
Transitional Justice: Lessons from Twenty-Five Years of Experience, ed. Lavinia Stan and Nadya
Nedelsky (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 167–187.
42
Stiftung Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, ed., “6. Tätigkeitsbericht (2011–2012),”
n.d.
43
According to the first four activity reports: 2000–2002 saw no prominent international
visits; 2003–2004 saw three; 2005–2006 saw six international visits; and in 2007–2008 this
number fell to two. However, in the 2009–2010 report, the memorial records a total of nine
prominent visits from outside Germany, including the first visit from a foreign president,
Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, the head of the Jingmei museum in Taipei, the head of
the Iraq National Archive and Institute for Genocide Studies and a group of six Cuban dis-
sidents. The author of the report adds that this is in addition to numerous foreign researchers
and journalists.
74 S. JONES
the importance placed on transnational co-operation on the part of the

memorial’s management.
Activities in the period under consideration include: the loan of a
piece of the Berlin Wall to the Budapest House of Terror in November
2011; the joint organization with the Czech embassy of a reading from
Grit Poppe’s Abgehauen in October 2012; Knabe’s visit to Czech sites
of memory in the same month; the fifth Hohenschönhausen Forum
in November 2012 with the title “Working through the Communist
Past as a European Task”; the first Annual Meeting of the Platform
of European Memory and Conscience at Hohenschönhausen also in
November 2012; the visit of Liechtenstein’s Prime Minister in January
2013; and the attendance in March 2013 of János Áder, State President
of Hungary and co-founder of the House of Terror in Budapest. In the
same period, there were also a number of meetings with representa-
tives of non-EU countries with experience of authoritarian rule: dip-
lomats from 37 different countries attended the site in January 2013
and the Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez visited in May 2013. A particu-
lar link with Tunisia following the Arab Spring saw collaborations in
May 2011, September 2012, December 2012, and May, June, July,
September, and December 2013. At the end of 2011, in co-operation
with the Organization for the Promotion of Democracy in Tunisia and
the company beier+wellach, and at the request of the Foreign Ministry,
the Memorial developed the project “Contre l’oubli,” which aims to
promote the processes of coming to terms with the past in Tunisia.44
Several of the exhibitions referenced in the sixth activity report are
also international in terms of subject matter: “Revolution in Tunisia—
The Red Thread” shown from October to December 2011; “‘Black
Whitsun’—The Deportations to the Romanian Bărăgan Plain”—a
collaboration with the Sighet Memorial; and “Human Rights and Civil
Society in Belarus.”
So how are these numerous activities framed by the memorial manage-
ment in their promotional material? I would like to argue that there are
three principal answers to this question that correspond to three differ-
ent narratives about Germany’s approach to working through its state
socialist past.
44
Stiftung Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, “6. Tätigkeitsbericht (2011–2012),”
81.
Learning from the Germans
Drawing on the work of Andrew Beattie,45 I will term the first narrative
pattern “Learning from the Germans.” In a press release of October 13,
2011, announcing the formation of the Platform for European Memory
and Conscience, Knabe is cited as describing the “education about the
past” as a “European task” that requires “European standards.” However,
the framing of several international events at Hohenschönhausen suggests
that “European standards” might in fact be “German standards,” par-
ticularly when it comes to sharing experiences with post-conflict societies
outside the EU.
The sixth activity report states that the changes in Tunisia and Egypt
in the wake of the Arab Spring resulted in an increased desire to work
through the past in this region and that “in the search for experience
and models in this regard, Germany was a sought-after example.”46
In the press releases published by the memorial with reference to visits
by Tunisian representatives, the visitors are described as “impressed” by
the German example—Knabe in turn is presented as keen to assist the
Tunisians in building a similar site of conscience in their own country. A
statement on September 13, 2012 asserts that “since 2011 Gedenkstätte
Berlin-Hohenschönhausen has been promoting the efforts of Tunisia to
work through its dictatorial past.” The sixth activity report notes that, in
collaboration with memory activists in Tunisia, the memorial is working
on a “Handbook for Working through the Past,” which aims to “sketch
Germany’s experience with coping with both its dictatorships and espe-
cially to describe successful examples of working through the past.”47
Similarly, in November 2013, the Memorial reports that, following
Knabe’s suggestion to this effect at a conference on human rights edu-
cation in Taipei, citizen’s rights activists in Taiwan have demanded “file
access like that in Germany.” In a speech given on the occasion of the visit
of diplomats from 37 countries, Knabe notes that Hohenschönhausen is
“interesting for other countries,” because “a lot of them are looking for
possibilities to honour the victims and to educate people to democrats.”
He adds that in terms of transitional justice, “in Germany we have a lot
of experiences in these issues, which we offer to share with you,” and
45
Beattie, “Learning from the Germans?”
46
Stiftung Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, “6. Tätigkeitsbericht (2011–2012).”
47
The handbook was published in 2013. See Sven Felix Kellerhoff, Aus der Geschichte
lernen: Ein Handbuch zur Aufarbeitung von Diktaturen (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2013).
76 S. JONES
suggests that Hohenschönhausen might become “a centre of strengthen-

ing democracy all over the world.” In Beattie’s use of the term, “learn-
ing from the Germans” refers to the potential application of the German
experience of Vergangenheitsbewältigung to the pan-European context.48
With regard to the international collaborations of the memorial, how-
ever, “learning from the Germans” comes to mean the exporting of an
apparently successful German memory culture to promote democracy on
a global level. Here the story is one of a German success, to which other
post-conflict societies are turning in their efforts to overcome their dicta-
torial pasts. Germany, the Hohenschönhausen Memorial, and its director
are—in this account—willingly providing this help, resulting in transna-
tional collaboration.
Beyond the National
However, a different narrative pattern emerges when we look more

closely at the framing of collaborations on an intra-European level: a
pattern that—borrowing from Helga Welsh49—I will term “beyond the
national.” Here, the specificity of German memory culture is subsumed
into the need to work through the state socialist past at a European level.
On the founding of the Platform for European Memory and Conscience,
Knabe is cited as viewing this as an opportunity for an “Europeanisation
of working through the past.” A year later, in November 2012, the
Hohenschönhausen Forum was held under the title “Working through
the Communist Past as a European Task.” The announcement of the pro-
gram asked whether “Europe failed in working through the communist
past” [emphasis added] and cited once again the need for a pan-European
memory culture. Notable here is the statement that this should “focus
on the crimes of communism and National Socialism equally” [emphasis
added]. If in the extra-European co-operations the specificity and apparent
success of the German model of dealing with dictatorship was emphasized,
here the focus is on shared experience and shared failure. In this version
of the story, Germany and Europe have failed to deal adequately with the
legacy of state socialist dictatorship and it is this that drives transnational
co-operation for, in this account, it is only at a European level that the
project of “Aufarbeitung” (working through) can succeed.
48
Beattie, “Learning from the Germans?”
49
Welsh, “Beyond the National.”
We can link these forms of networking back to efforts to shape mem-

ory cultures at a European and national level. Those involved with the
conference, Forum and Platform—historians, archivists, artists, and other
memory entrepreneurs—come together to emphasize a shared history of
“communist dictatorship” that must, in this narrative, be part of European
understandings of the past on an equal footing to memories of National
Socialism. That this has a political or even lobbying function is further
seen in the organization of panels at the 2012 Hohenschönhausen Forum.
Panel II—“The Renewal of Personnel after the End of Communism”—
included a paper by the President of the Platform for European Conscience
and Memory with the title “How can the EU Promote the Change of
Elites in East and Central Europe?” Panel III—“The Development of a
Pan-European Memory Culture”—incorporated a presentation by Knabe
himself with the title “What Can the EU do for a Better Appreciation of
the Victims of Communism?” At the annual meeting of the Platform, held
in Hohenschönhausen during the conference, the members demanded
“more support from the European Union,” including the securing of the
archives of dictatorial regimes. The particular view of state socialism that
is emphasized within the network can be seen in the focus in panel titles
on “crimes,” “justice,” and “victims.”
Learning from Others
However, it is not only within a European framework that the story

of German success becomes one of failure. The third type of narrative
attached to the memorial’s international collaborations is what I would
like to term “learning from others.” As we have seen, in the co-operation
with Tunisia, the representatives of Hohenschönhausen are principally
portrayed as offering advice and direction to their less experienced col-
leagues. However, in the Tagesspiegel article reporting Knabe’s visit to
Tunisia in May 2011, Knabe is cited as stating: “In contrast to what hap-
pened in Germany, the Tunisians continued their revolution beyond the
collapse of the ruling elite and banned the former ruling party.”50 The sug-
gestion of a “completed” revolution in Tunisia resonates with the concept
50
Andrea Nüsse, “Von Hohenschönhausen nach Tunis: Experten für die SED-Diktatur
berichten vom Erfahrungsaustausch in Tunesien,” Der Tagesspiegel, May 20, 2011, http://
www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/von-hohenschoenhausen-nach-tunis/4196040.html.
78 S. JONES
of an “unfinished revolution” in Central and Eastern Europe51 and clearly

implies a need to ban the SED successor parties in order to achieve full
social renewal. Moreover, it is not just in the extra-European context that
improvements on the German approach are sought. In the visit to Czech
sites of memory in December 2012, Knabe is reported in a memorial
press release as noting: “In contrast to what often happens in Germany,
in the Czech Republic, National Socialism and communism are not seen
as opposites, but as two sides of the same coin…. In this respect, the
Czech Republic, which was a victim of both regimes, is a model for other
European states.” In this framing, a shared history is suggested not—or
not only—in order to promote a particular understanding of the past at
a European level, but to criticize a national memory culture that is found
wanting. In this narrative, we are told a story of Germany failing, where
others have succeeded—transnational cooperation serves to highlight
those failures.
Sighet Memorial
So how do these three German narratives compare to the presentation of
transnational collaborations in the Sighet Memorial? In the period from
June 2012 to January 2014, the Sighet Memorial was involved in numer-
ous transnational collaborations, principally with other European memory
entrepreneurs, and especially with Germany. The German version of the
exhibition “‘Black Whitsun’: The Deportation to the Bărăgan Plain” was
shown in a number of German cities in 2012 and 2013, including Berlin,
Sindelfingen, Munich, Augsburg, and Tübingen, as well as in Budapest.
The exhibition was initiated and curated by Rusan and Blandiana under
the auspices of the International Centre for the Study of Communism
[Centrul Internaţional de Studii asupra Comunismului], a component of
the Civic Academy Foundation (and thus of the Sighet Memorial com-
plex). The German version was created with the support of the Romanian
Cultural Institute in Berlin.
Moreover, the Sighet Memorial sent a representative to Berlin in 2012
and to the Hague in 2013 for the annual meetings of the Platform for
European Memory and Conscience, and in October 2013 to the inter-
national conference, “Totalitarian Regimes’ Heritage in Hate Crimes,”
hosted by the Lithuanian Ministry for Justice in collaboration with the
51
Mark, The Unfinished Revolution.
Centre for Research on Genocide and Resistance in Lithuania. In June

2013, Blandiana took part in a debate comparing the approach to the com-
munist past in Germany and Romania to mark the launch of the Romanian
translation of German Federal President (and former Commissioner for
the Files of the GDR State Security Service) Joachim Gauck’s mem-
oirs: Iarnă-n vară, primăvară-n toamnă [Winter in Summer, Spring in
Autumn] (2009). In June 2013, the Memorial displayed an exhibition
under the title “The Revolt in Berlin and Thuringia (1953),” which had
been developed in collaboration with the Ettersberg Foundation and the
Jena Institute of History.
The 20th anniversary of the inauguration of the Memorial in 2013 also
saw visits by memory entrepreneurs and academic experts from diverse
national contexts, including the head of the Platform Goran Lindbald, the
historian Stéphane Courtois, former director of the Cultural Heritage divi-
sion of the Council of Europe José Maria Ballester, British historian Dennis
Deletant, former Czech political prisoner Petruška Šustrová and Sven-
Joachim Irmer, representing the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Indeed,
the Konrad Adenauer Foundation supported each of the annual Sighet
Summer Schools between 2000 and 2014. The 20th anniversary also
saw the launch of the edited volume Geist hinter Gittern: Die rumänische
Gedenkstätte Memorial Sighet [Spirit Behind Bars: The Romanian Memorial
in Sighet], edited by Katharina Kilzer and Helmut Müller-Engbergs, pub-
lished in Germany (in German) and containing contributions from indi-
viduals associated with the Memorial from diverse national contexts.52
This raises the question of what meaning is given to these collabora-
tive activities by the representatives of the Sighet Memorial? I would
like to argue that the networking activities in Sighet are presented using
two different, but interrelated narratives: I will term these, once again,
“learning from others” and “beyond the national” although they can
be seen to serve slightly different goals to the narratives constructed by
Hohenschönhausen.
Learning from Others
Common to several of the texts promoting or reporting these collabora-

tions is the lament that Romania has done little to address its communist
past and that the Romanian political elite is not interested in addressing
52
Katharina Kilzer and Helmut Müller-Enbergs, eds., Geist hinter Gittern: Die rumänische
Gedenkstätte Memorial Sighet (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2013).
80 S. JONES
the crimes against human rights committed between 1945 and 1989. In
this account, it is this unwillingness to remember the past in Romania that
leads the founders of the Memorial to seek the expertise and assistance
of others, particularly of the Council of Europe and of German memory
entrepreneurs. For example, in an interview on August 8, 2012 with the
Allgemeine Deutsche Zeitung für Rumänien (a German-language news-
paper whose target audience is the ethnic German minority in Romania)
Rusan states in reference to the annual Sighet summer school that “in the
beginning it was not without risk, the communist era was still taboo.” We
then learn that the Civic Academy Foundation and the Memorial found
support and inspiration not only from the Council of Europe, but also the
Hanns-Seidel and Konrad Adenauer Foundations. In the same interview,
Blandiana recalls the support of Gauck in their efforts to replicate the Stasi
Records Authority in Romania. She states that they consulted with their
German counterparts in 1992, “in the naive, and ultimately false, hope
that we might through this means alone sort out the political landscape”
at home. This is the counter-view to that of Hohenschönhausen’s narra-
tive of “learning from the Germans.” Here, the Romanian activists fail to
find support in their own national context, thus they seek this in appar-
ently successful initiatives abroad—the result is transnational co-operation.
That these reported efforts to adopt a “German” approach to lustration
were ultimately unsuccessful in the Romanian political context of the early
1990s points towards the limits and national constraints of such transna-
tional initiatives, especially where they are initiated by memory entrepre-
neurs acting outside the state apparatus.
A similar way of making meaning from the institution’s early years
can be seen in a text produced to mark the twentieth anniversary of the
Memorial’s foundation—“20 years ago, 29 January 1993.” The text situ-
ates the origins of the site in Blandiana’s intervention at an international
conference dedicated to human rights, in which she argued that “the
defense of these rights must also be projected onto the totalitarian past”
and at which she presented the Memorial project to the Secretary General
of the Council of Europe. The author of the text notes that “although the
authorities in Bucharest vehemently rejected the idea, the proposal was
received favorably in Strasbourg.” In this way, “Europe”—and European
memory culture—is counter-posed to, and seen as the salvation for,
the amnesic memory culture of the Romanian state. Indeed, this is an
example of Gledhill’s observation that “where there have previously been
constraints on historical reckoning, activists have drawn ‘Europe’ behind
efforts to promote national-level confrontations with particularly national

experiences of communist rule.”53
This narrative of learning from others, or perhaps gaining the support
of others for one’s own efforts, continues in discussions of present day
collaborations. In her message sent to the Consulate General of Romania
in Munich, on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition “Black
Whitsun” in that city, for example, Blandiana describes “our [Romania’s]
weak democracy, in which projects of a European scope have on many
occasions faltered on route,” stating that in this regard “it is a distin-
guished performance” by the Sighet Memorial to have survived for two
decades. Here criticism of the Romanian political context goes hand in
hand with valorization of the Memorial’s own efforts to promote mem-
ory of the crimes of communism. In these accounts then, in contrast to
that produced in Hohenschönhausen’s “beyond the national” narrative,
European memory is the story of success that counters national failure.
Beyond the National: Or Learning from Sighet
In this way, this narrative of learning from others links to the second
way of presenting and interpreting the collaborative actions of the
Memorial in Sighet. While Romanian national memory culture has—in
this account—failed, the Memorial in Sighet is seen to be a success. This
is perhaps not particularly surprising given the status of these documents
as largely promotional. However, what is interesting is that the Memorial
is positioned not only as a success in terms of countering the culture of
forgetting at home, but as a site of European or even global memory, that
is, as having a significance that goes beyond the national. A central part of
this is the account of the origins of the memorial, which, as seen above, is
located in the Council of Europe’s decision to take the site under its aegis.
In the text of January 29, 2013, for example, the site is described as “the
first memorial to the victims of communism in the world”—a phrase that
is repeated across publications marking the 20th anniversary. The open-
ing of the new exhibition in Bucharest on May 9, 2013 that is, Europe
Day, can also be seen as significant in this regard and is pointed out in the
English-language press release for this event. Blandiana’s speech at a com-
memorative concert at the Romanian Athenaeum on May 15, 2013 gives
further shape to this narrative and is worth citing at some length:
Gledhill, “Integrating the Past,” 481.

53
82 S. JONES
At the moment when, in 1993, the Council of Europe—one of Europe’s

defining institutions—took the project under its aegis, it accepted institu-
tional responsibility for the historical viewpoint of the victims of commu-
nism…. In the atmosphere of those times, the gesture of the Council of
Europe was almost revolutionary, triggering a process whereby mentalities
were transformed, a process that would gain momentum in the years that
followed. This is the deeper theme of today’s jubilee; this is the moment we
are celebrating, the moment when the history of the last century, and even of
the present, began to be understood from the viewpoint of the victims too.
She notes that Sighet was, in 1997, positioned alongside the Auschwitz
Memorial and the Peace Memorial in France “as one of the three foremost
sites of European memory.” This narrative has in common with that of
“learning from the Germans” the assertion that one’s own efforts have
promoted democratic learning on a global scale; however, here it is not
the national memory culture that has achieved this, rather the institutional
and personal efforts that transcend this national culture and are located
instead within “Europe.”
In part this location in “Europe” is within Eastern Europe, that is, the
Memorial is presented as representative of the experience of citizens liv-
ing “in the former Communist bloc,”54 “under totalitarian Communist
regimes from the end of the Second World War,”55 or “in countries like
Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.”56 Nonetheless, it is
also a narrative of uniting East and West in a common memory culture, in
which Auschwitz might be placed alongside Sighet—memory of National
Socialism alongside that of communism. Blandiana is explicit about this
in an article published on July 16 by Agerpress and reporting on a debate
that took place at the European Commission’s representation in Romania.
In this piece, she is reported as stating that “we won’t achieve a united
Europe if we unite politics and economics alone … We must also unify the
54
“Europe’s first communism memorial marks 20th anniversary,” Global Post, July 14,
2013, http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/130714/europes-first-communism-
memorial-marks-20th-anniversary.
55
“Former Jail Keeps Raw Memory of Communist Repression in Romania,” Global Post,
July 21, 2013, http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/130721/former-jail-keeps-
raw-memory-communist-repression-romania.
56
“Primul memorial dedicate victimelor comunismului în Europa de Est marchează 20 ani
de existenţa,̆ ” International, July 14, 2013, http://www.agerpres.ro/externe/2013/07/14/
afp-primul-memorial-dedicat-victimelor-comunismului-in-europa-de-est-marcheaza-20-de-
ani-de-existenta-12-52-39.
obsessions, and our obsession in the countries of the East was and will be
for a long time from now the history of communism.”57
Towards a Collaborative Memory

In his analysis of public controversies surrounding memory of commu-
nism at a European level, Clarke concludes that “ultimately … any EU
memory politics, however inclusively formulated, will remain the vehicle
of national interests.”58 However, the different narrative patterns identi-
fied in the framing of international collaborations at Hohenschönhausen
and Sighet, or by their representatives, demonstrate that the separation of
national and transnational memory cultures is not straightforward. The
national and international interact in dynamic ways, as social and political
actors identify shared experiences and goals that are then refracted through
their particular context. This entanglement perhaps reflects the fact that,
as Müller notes, “so much of national histories and memories are already
inextricably bound up with each other.”59 The histories of the states of
Europe are indeed “histoires croisées,” and, accordingly, the memory
projects associated with them are “not only in a state of interrelationship
but also modify one another reciprocally as a result of their relationship.”60
National narratives relating to the past and its interpretation are located
in a transnational context in a way that means our analysis of the activities
of these individuals and institutions must take into account the different
scales (local, regional, national and transnational) as they exist in interac-
tion with one another.61
Indeed, the enmeshed nature of different scales of memory has been
noted by a number of theorists in their efforts to conceptualize what
has been termed variously “transcultural,”62 “transnational,”63 or even
57
“Ana Blandiana: Europă Unită, prin unirea obsesiilor legate de communism,” Agerpress,
July 16, 2013, http://www.ziare.com/politica/stiri-politice/ana-blandiana-europa-unita-
prin-unirea-obsesiilor-legate-de-comunism-1246546.
58
David Clarke, “Communism and Memory Politics in the European Union,” Central
Europe 12, no. 1 (2014): 99–114.
59
Müller, “A European Memory?,” 29.
60
Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée
and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 30–50. 35.
61
Werner and Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison,” 43.
62
Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson, eds., The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory
Between and Beyond Borders (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014).
63
Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney, Transnational Memory, Circulation, Articulation,
Scales (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014).
84 S. JONES
“global”64 memory culture. Feindt et al., for example, describe the
“entangledness” of memory, by which they mean the interactions and
interrelationships of different synchronic and diachronic interpretations of
the same “mnemonic signifier.”65 They recommend a focus on an “actor’s
struggle to establish the dominant interpretation by marking other inter-
pretations as inappropriate, illegitimate, or simply wrong.”66 Combined
with Werner and Zimmermann’s concept of “histoires croisées,”67 Feindt
et al.’s methodological reflections offer a useful starting point for the anal-
ysis of strategies, interpretations, and narratives, such as those discussed in
the present chapter, that is, “to go beyond a continuous inventory of lieux
de mémoire.”68 However, with their focus on conflict, they do not offer
a way of conceptualizing the co-operation, borrowing, and transfer of
experience seen in the interactions of memory entrepreneurs in different
contexts. A similar point can be made regarding Aksu’s critique of the
concept of “global collective memory.”69 While his theoretical innovation
points us towards the need to conceptualize transnational memory, or
rather the “complex network(ing) of selective remembrances” in terms of
its “institutional nature,” he offers little insight into what the impact of
such networking might be with regard to the formation and transforma-
tion of narratives about the past and its meaning for the present.70
So how might we understand both the activities and results of these net-
works in theoretical terms? Also focusing on the relationship between the
national and transnational, Levy and Sznaider elaborate the term “cosmo-
politan memory.” They argue that—when it comes to memory—the “con-
tainer of the nation-state … is in the process of slowly being cracked,” and
that as a result of a process of “‘internal globalization’ … global concerns
become part of local experiences of an increasing number of people.”71
In many respects, the narratives explored in this chapter can be seen to
64
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age
(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006); Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad,
Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010).
65
Gregor Feindt et al., “Entangled Memory: Toward a Third Wave in Memory Studies,”
History and Theory 53, no. 1 (2014): 24–44.
66
Feindt et al., “Entangled Memory,” 38.
67
Werner and Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison.”
68
69
Aksu, “Global Collective Memory.”
70
Aksu, “Global Collective Memory,” 319.
71
Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, 2.
incorporate this kind of “cosmopolitan memory,” as universal concepts of

human rights and justice are invoked to narrate memory-political interests
at the local level. Nonetheless, in other respects, the narratives constructed
by the memory entrepreneurs considered here do not, in fact, go through
what Levy and Sznaider term “de-territorialization.”72 Rather, they are
embraced as territorial narratives of one national context, which can be
used in an effort to transform the dominant memory narratives of another.
In this sense, this process is also qualitatively different to that described
by Erll in her concept of “travelling memory”73—these narratives do not
“move,” as such, instead they communicate across borders, whilst remain-
ing situated in their original context. Thus, the narrative that, accord-
ing to Knabe, equates National Socialism and Communism in the Czech
Republic is not universalized and then localized, instead it is presented as
a Czech narrative that can be used to critique what this particular memory
entrepreneur perceives as the deficits in German memory culture.
Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory” similarly aims to
go beyond debates about “collective memory as competitive memory”
[emphasis in original] and to show that memory is instead “subject to
ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing.”74 This model
highlights the interweaving of memory narratives and demonstrates how
“groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come
into being through their dialogical interactions with others.”75 Rothberg’s
approach would, therefore, seem particularly useful in explaining how
different groups and actors within the European public sphere draw on
each other’s accounts of the past and of the methods of dealing with it
and, in the process, refract and critique the national memory culture in
which they are located. However, Rothberg has in mind multidirectional
exchange between different pasts, located in diverse contexts: notably
memories of the Holocaust and of colonialism. In European memory
of state socialism, we are dealing instead with memories that are con-
structed as being of similar historical experience, despite acknowledged
differences in the nature of authoritarian rule in these different national
contexts. These memory entrepreneurs and groups do not appear to be
72
Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, 10.
73
74
Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 3.
75
86 S. JONES
in a state of potential conflict, but rather to be working towards a particu-

lar European understanding of state socialism, which in turn is refracted
through national memory culture.
I would thus suggest that we also think of the development of mem-
ory narratives by (European) elites—in Aksu’s terms “institutional
memory”76—as “collaborative memory.” The concept of “collaboration”
attempts to encompass what is happening when memories are shared, but
differently interpreted both within and across borders, in which memory
entrepreneurs co-operate transnationally, and in which they “borrow”
narratives about similar pasts from their neighbors and transform them
to match or critique the dominant accounts of the past in their national
context. In this way, they both transnationalize the national context and,
yet, remain very much located within it. This is particularly relevant for
contemporary Europe, in which each national collective is integrated not
only culturally, but also politically, with supranational and transnational
institutions, traditions, and concerns. Indeed, it is clear that transnational
collaborations between memory entrepreneurs are not new, nor are they
restricted exclusively to those involved in cultural co-operations of the
kinds investigated here. Cross-border collaborations are also seen, for
example, in political and civil society projects that have the aim of promot-
ing a particular understanding of the past.77 Development of our memory
studies conceptual toolbox towards a “collaborative memory” might thus
allow us to more fully understand these interactions at a granular level and
to explain their impact on broader memory cultures.
76
Aksu, “Global Collective Memory.”
77
See Welsh, “Beyond the National.”
CHAPTER 5
Towards a Transnational Ethics for Europe:

Memory and Vulnerability as Gateways
to Europe’s Future in Koen Peeters’s Grote
Europese roman
Jan Lensen
In order to foster a legitimate demos that recognizes itself as a transna-

tional “people” and that is able to identify with the transnational institu-
tions that claim to represent it, official EU discourse has often called for
the imagining of a European cultural memory—one in which Europe’s
rich and diverse political and cultural heritage functions as the key to
a shared sense of belonging.1 This idea, which presumes the intricate
intertwining of memory and identity, fits within a significant philosophi-
cal and historiographical tradition;2 however, it is hampered by various
1
See for example Deborah Parsons, “Nationalism or Continentalism: Representing
Heritage Culture for a New Europe,” in Beyond Boundaries: Textual Representations of
European Identity, ed. Andy Hollis (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 1–23.
2
See for example Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2005), 18.
J. Lensen (*)
Institut für Deutsche und Niederländische Philologie, Freie Universität Berlin,
Berlin, Germany
e-mail: janlensen@zedat.fu-berlin.de

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39152-6_5
88 J. LENSEN
problems. First, from a conceptual and ethical point of view, the axiom
that a straight line runs from memory to identity has been the subject of
intense debate in memory studies over the past decade, since it implies
that “the only kinds of memories and identities that are therefore possible
are ones that exclude elements of alterity and forms of commonality with
others.”3 Cultural memory, by contrast, is now increasingly understood
as defined by semantic connectivity, multidirectionality, and spatial de-
territorialization. Worth noting here is, for example, Marianne Hirsch’s
concept of “connective memory,”4 which engages with the internal func-
tionalities of cultural memory, similar to Gabrielle Schwab’s notion of
“haunting legacies,” in which memories are conceived of as “always already
composites of dynamically interrelated and conflicted histories.”5 Other
examples are Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory”
or Georg Feindt et al.’s notion of “entangled memory.”6 Each of those
also conceives cultural memory as transgressing the borders of national
memory, an element made even more explicit in Andreas Huyssen’s con-
cept of “memory without borders,” “cosmopolitan memory” by Daniel
Levy and Natan Sznaider, or Astrid Erll’s “travelling memory.”7 The idea
of confining it on a European, transnational level seems therefore nothing
more than a reproduction of long-lost nationalist dreams and ideals.
Second, if—from a political point of view—we are to consider Europe’s
heritage as a unifying principle in spite of this conceptual objection, other
problems arise. European history is haunted by a long list of historical
struggles and traumas that have been endured, but also perpetuated, by
its member states and which might stand in the way of a shared vision of
the past. It is unclear how the multitude of established national cultural
memories in Europe can be integrated properly into a larger narrative
without evoking a zero-sum struggle for commemorative dominance. Yet,
3
Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 4–5.
4
Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the
Holocaust (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012), 21.
5
Quoted in Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 21.
6
Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 4; Gregor Feindt et al., “Entangled Memory:
Toward a Third Wave in Memory Studies,” History and Theory 53, no. 1 (2014): 24–44. 24.
7
Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 4; Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, “Memory
Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory,” European Journal
of Social Theory 5, no. 1 (2002): 87–106. 87; Astrid Erll, “Travelling Memory,” Parallax 17,
no. 4 (2011): 4–18. 4.
TOWARDS A TRANSNATIONAL ETHICS FOR EUROPE: MEMORY... 89
it is exactly the engagement with this divisive past that is considered to

be crucial to writing such a narrative.8 In their 2011 study Der Kampf
um die europäische Erinnerung [The Battle for European Memory], Claus
Leggewie and Anne Lang present this claim as their central thesis: “In
this book, we claim that a supranational Europe can only attain a durable
political identity when the public debate and reciprocal recognition of
opposed memories are valued as much as agreements, internal markets,
and open borders.”9
Leggewie and Lang go on to discuss how within this range of negative
memories, the Holocaust remains firmly located at the center, although this
position has recently been challenged by a strong emancipatory upsurge
of various national and supranational traumatic memories striving for inte-
gration in the current European memory narrative. Leggewie and Lang
mention those of the gulag, the ethnic cleansing of minorities, the abun-
dance of other national and supranational wars in European history, the
heritage of colonialism, as well as those traumatic memories that enter(ed)
Europe through immigration as pan-European traumas. Leggewie and
Lang visualize the structural relations between these traumatic memories
in a diagram of seven concentric circles of European memory, and put
the Holocaust at its center.10 As Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider similarly
argue, the Holocaust stands as a universal “moral touchstone,” sensitiz-
ing a large public “to the evils of genocide and the moral responsibil-
ity not to stand by and witness the murder of innocent civilians.”11 It is
8
Aleida Assmann, Auf dem Weg zu einer europäischen Gedächtniskultur (Vienna: Picus,
2012); Claus Leggewie and Anne Lang, Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung: Ein
Schlachtfeld wird besichtigt (Munich: Beck, 2011); Klaus Eder, “Remembering National
Memories Together. The Formation of a Transnational Identity in Europe,” in Collective
Memory and European Identity. The Effects of Integration and Enlargement, ed. Klaus Eder
and Willfried Spohn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 197–220.
9
As Leggewie and Lang state: “In this book, we argue that a supranational Europe can
only obtain a politically viable identity if the public discussion and reciprocal recognition of
contested memories are as highly priced as treaties, the European single market and open
borders.” Leggewie and Lang, Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung, 7. All translations
from the original German are my own.
10
Leggewie and Lang, Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung, 14. While positioning
the Holocaust at the center of Europe’s collective memory structure, Leggewie at the same
time points at the necessity of integrating as many traumatic memories as possible into that
structure.
11
Levy and Sznaider, “Memory Unbound,” 93; Jeffrey Alexander, “On the Social
Construction of Moral Universals. The ‘Holocaust’ from War Crime to Trauma Drama,”
European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 1 (2002): 5–85.
90 J. LENSEN
also exactly this event—along with the encompassing World War II—that
forms the very basis of Europe as a political and economic union. Hence,
as Leggewie claims, it functions as its negative foundational myth.12
A Great European Novel…

The emphasis on the decisive importance of Holocaust memory for the
construction process of a European identity is not only central to aca-
demic debates; it has often been expressed in literary artifacts. The works
of Albert Camus, Jorge Semprún, Primo Levi, or Eraldo Affinati are cases
in point. A very explicit example of this emphasis in recent literature is
the 2007 novel Grote Europese roman [Great European Novel] by the
Belgian author Koen Peeters.13 The novel formulates an outspoken plea
for an ethics of transnational conduct, which entails an approach to the
Other (individual, nation, culture) that is marked by circumspection and
the continuous awareness of the interdependence between that Other and
the Self. Crucial to that awareness is the recognition of a shared past—that
of the Holocaust—which functions as a moral basis for a mutual transna-
tional understanding and European community building. In this chap-
ter, I analyze this plea, arguing that Grote Europese roman exemplifies an
explicit, almost propagandistic case for a joint European identity. At the
same time, the novel thwarts its very ambitions, both by denying the idea
of a homogenous identity built on a shared history as well as by adopt-
ing a poetics that reflects a resistance to any kind of master narrative that
prescribes such an identity.
Koen Peeters, born in 1959, is the author of a small but diverse oeuvre,
marked by a skillful interweaving of classic storytelling and post-modern
poetics. His novels—whose topics mostly engage with forgotten or pecu-
liar histories—are highly accessible but at the same time intricate and self-
reflexive texts. They engage with our modern society and how it focuses
on functionality and purpose at the expense of what is deemed trivial and
unusable. Out of this, a mild form of arte povera is born: Peeters’s works
engage with the art of the everyday, foregrounding what passes by with-
out being noticed. Out of these elements emerge small and often highly
12
“This shared recourse to the murder of millions of European Jews as an overall singular
crime against humanity offers a negative foundational myth for Europe.” Leggewie and
Lang, Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung, 15.
13
Koen Peeters, Grote Europese roman (Amsterdam; Antwerpen: Meulenhoff; Manteau,
2007).
a musing anecdotes, but also stories that challenge canonized historiogra-

phy. While critical of ideology, Peeters’s writings never become pedantic
or dogmatic. His style persistently balances nostalgia and playful irony and
his stories resist narrative closure. Peeters has gained wide critical acclaim
within the Dutch language arena, but little beyond, which may be due to
the local setting of his stories and his strict focus on Belgian themes, such
as Belgian royal history or the traumatic history of Belgian colonialism in
Congo, which have stood in the way of transnational interest. No doubt,
this limited interest might in itself be an apt illustration of the problems
national memories face in light of a supranational or post-national mem-
ory narrative.14
In writing Grote Europese roman, Peeters steps outside Belgium. The
title alludes to the Great American Novel, as the narrator openly confirms
in the novel’s introduction: “I wish to write a book like a Great American
Novel, masked as a Great European Novel. I googled it, it does not yet
exist. In a majestic and epic way, it has to capture the history of European
mankind.”15 This ambition to narrate a European history mirrors the aims
of the “Great American Novel.” Used “more as an epithet than as a con-
cept defined with any precision,”16 the Great American Novel allegedly
captures the unique American experience and identity at a given historical
moment, and it is for this reason often regarded as the American response
to the national epic in Europe: literary works that sought or are believed
to have recorded and expressed the essence or spirit of a particular nation.
Examples of novels that have received the label of Great American Novel
are Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby (1925), and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973).
There are, however, some crucial distinctions between the Great
American Novel and Peeters’s Grote Europese roman. First, while the label
“Great American Novel” is typically retroactively attributed to a novel by
someone other than its author, Peeters provocatively proclaims that his
own novel possesses the epic scope and visionary qualities that a Great
American Novel is supposed to have. Second, and more importantly, the
14
Hugo Bousset and Sofie Gielis, “Koen Peeters,” in Kritisch lexicon van de (moderne)
Nederlandstalige literatuur (na 1945), ed. Ad Zuiderent, Hugo Brems, and Tom Van Deel
(Houten: Wolters, 2009), 1–12, A1, B1–3.
15
Peeters, Grote Europese roman, 4. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the
original Dutch are my own.
16
Lawrence Buell, “The Unkillable Dream of the Great American Novel: Moby-Dick as
Test Case,” American Literary History 20, no. 1–2 (2008): 132–55. 135.
92 J. LENSEN
attribution of the label “Great American Novel” can be applied only on

the assumption that a pre-discursive (American) identity exists—one that
is believed to be reconstructed or represented in that novel. Peeters’s self-
conscious labeling of his novel as “Grote Europese roman,” in contrast,
suggests a constructive act, implying exactly the conviction that such an
identity is absent in the case of Europe and the belief that literature can
play a significant role in the construction of collective identities. In order
to remedy this lack, Grote Europese roman tells a story of what such an
identity could look like and how it might be constructed. It therefore
starts with a critique of a capitalist logic according to which Europe is
primarily a market place where people exchange goods and money rather
than personal or collective experiences, showing how this hampers a trans-
national mutual understanding. To that end, the novel sketches a trajec-
tory of what is needed to break this logic, namely an engagement with the
Other and with what lies beyond the immediately recognizable.
Grote Europese roman tells the story of a marketing specialist, Robin,
who travels throughout Europe to acquire new marketing strategies for
his company, Marchand NV. His employer, the elderly Theo Marchand,
has become increasingly aware that the market has changed radically. As
an intelligent, loyal, discrete, and—above all—single employee, Robin
is assigned to ascertain how colleagues and competitors all over Europe
organize their business and, on the basis of his findings, to devise new
marketing strategies to be presented in an elaborate business report. On
the level of the narrative, the quest is initially economic in nature, but
over the course of the story, it becomes profoundly personal. It evolves
into a quest for Robin’s own identity as well as for that of the people he
meets during his trip. The novel presents an often ironic description of the
world of globalization, replete with conferences and incidental meetings
in hotels and airports. This world is analyzed and conquered in terms of
personality marketing, customer value, competitive intelligence, perfor-
mance dashboards, management tools, activity based costing, preferred
suppliers, assessments, and so on. People start each sentence with “I,”
but each “I” also looks like the others: young, intelligent, successful,
wealthy, but devoid of any sense of a coherent social structure of family
and friends. As Robin contends: “We are all so even-tempered, so similar,
we are empty and generic.”17 They all share a sense of optimism about
progress and collaboration, but their narcissism and ambition cause their
17
Koen Peeters, Grote Europese roman, 109. (Translation Sven Vitse).
interpersonal relationships to lack any depth and make each of them essen-
tially interchangeable.
Via Robin, the novel depicts this superficial contact as a formula for dis-
content. He considers his personal life empty and dissatisfying, governed
by the motto: “Something should happen now.”18 But nothing does and
Robin shows no interest in changing that impasse. He has no interest in
knowing either himself or other people better, claiming “I don’t like the
histories of strangers, and neither that of myself,”19 and his view on his
working environment is marked by skepticism and ironic reserve. This
situation not only concerns the personal, but can also be read as an ethical
and political critique of the insufficiency of constructing a transnational
understanding and a concomitant shared European self-consciousness
merely on the basis of market communication principles.
We find this critique not only in Robin’s personal observations, but
also in the psychological changes he undergoes. Theo Marchand plays a
crucial role in this process. Theo is a businessman whose original goal in
life was to become successful. Now, at an old age, he perceives a “white
background noise, a past that cannot be considered as finished,”20 a past
that steadily resurfaces in visions and nightmares. This past is that of the
Holocaust. Theo, so we gradually learn, is a Lithuanian Jew, formerly
named Markmann, who was saved from the Holocaust by business part-
ners of his father, after the latter had committed suicide. Similar to the
character Austerlitz in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), Theo was sent on
a trip through Europe, recalling the trope of the wandering Jew, moving
from one location to the next in order to escape Nazi persecution.
This past determines Theo’s visions of Europe, which are marked by
a negative view of its history and by the widely held conviction that the
awareness of this past is necessary to prevent its repetition. Invoking iconic
Holocaust imagery, Europe’s past is depicted as a long series of ongoing
wars, of “mountains of hair, heaps of glasses, piles of shoes.”21 “Europe,”
so Theo claims, stands for “the names of the dead in our joint cemeter-
ies.” Robin calls this remark “a bit gloomy,” but Theo responds by con-
sidering it “very useful … It is the best warning against a new war among
neighbors, or against a new world war, if you so wish.”22 Theo, moreover,
18
Peeters, Grote Europese roman, 29.
19
20
21
22
94 J. LENSEN
has a clear idea of how Europe’s member states should behave in this
regard: “Countries should always meet each other very carefully, like two
mourning old people in a cemetery. That is the only appropriate tone.”23
The code of behavior between nations, as formulated here by Theo
Marchand, resonates with Judith Butler’s concept of an ethics of vulner-
ability in Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War (2009).24 Inspired
by the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Butler calls for an approach towards
the Other that is marked by care, circumspection, and an awareness of
the interdependence between Self and Other. This awareness implies an
understanding of how lives are produced “according to norms that qualify
it as a life or, indeed, as part of life.”25 Engaging with the Other therefore
requires a framing or the adaptation of a set of norms that allow us not
only to apprehend the lives of others, but to recognize them as lives that
are precarious, “lose-able or injurable.”26
The meeting of the two elderly people at the cemetery is a fitting par-
able of the complexity of this ethics. On an anecdotal level, the scene
implies not only that both elderly are mourning, but also that they are
confronted with the other’s grief. The confrontation encompasses, in
other words, the act of mourning as well as the witnessing of a mourning
outside the Self. Marchand’s reference to them as “old people” is cru-
cial in understanding the ethical implications of this witnessing, as their
age suggests that they have experienced loss in the past—a condition that
might enable them to fathom the gravity of suffering. These experiences,
so Marchand’s parable suggests, have led to a frame in which the Other’s
sufferings become “recognizable” as such. This recognizability, so Butler
identifies, constitutes “the more general conditions that prepare or shape
a subject for recognition.”27 The perception through which the Other is
constructed is no longer determined by a narcissistic preoccupation with
melancholia, but becomes endowed with a consideration for the vulner-
ability of that Other.
Allegorically, the meeting stages the confrontation between two
European nations at the cemetery of Europe’s cultural memory, which

23
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London; New York,
24
NY: Verso, 2004); Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London; New York,
NY: Verso, 2009).
25
Butler, Frames of War, 2.
26
27
embodies a large burial site (“joint cemeteries”) in which the dead, stem-
ming from all countries, lie randomly scattered. That this meeting should
take place within the context of that painful memory (which first and fore-
most is that of the Holocaust), so Theo Marchand implies, suggests not
only the need for a reciprocal apprehension of grief and precarity, but also
for the awareness of the dire consequences of failed confrontations in which
the Self is or has been implicated. This notion of “implicatedness,” derived
from Michael Rothberg’s concept of the “implicated subject,”28 entails the
extension of accountability of present subjects in traumatic histories and
opens up “a broad and murky terrain in which we can locate many dilem-
mas of remembrance, responsibility, and reparation.”29 This awareness, so
the parable teaches us, is necessary for developing a mutual framing in
which perspectives of reparation and a shared future become possible.
During the course of the story, Theo Marchand exerts a strong influ-
ence on Robin’s views on life, work, and politics. Initially, this influence
is sporadic, for example, when he criticizes Robin’s folkloristic view of
Europe, as “a thing of flags, hats, and ribbons. The language of the people
mixed with the language of the authorities, and all that nourished by local
dishes and baptized with water from Manneken Pis.”30 Theo responds
condescendingly: “You call that Europe? … That romantic hassle of
nations? Is there nothing more to Europe than folk dancing?”31 These
questions do not evoke an explicit response from Robin, who seems at
first quite insensitive to his new experiences. He displays a startling lack of
historical knowledge and an indifference and ironic haughtiness towards
the people he meets and the places he visits. At the same time, during the
transit moments from one meeting to another, the conversations with the
people he meets trigger his awareness for the subjectivity of the Other,
who appears not to be so generic and interchangeable after all. These
experiences gradually rupture his narcissistic attitude, and his immanent
dissatisfaction with his life course is reversed into a longing for the “elec-
trical conversation”32 with the strangers he meets, an exchange that
28
Michael Rothberg, “Multidirectional Memory and the Implicated Subject: On Sebald
and Kentridge,” in Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, ed. Liedeke Plate and
Anneke Smelik (New York, NY; London: Routledge, 2013), 39–58.
29
Michael Rothberg, “Memory Bound: The Implicated Subject and the Legacies of
Slavery” (Reading, Memory Unbound, Mnemonics Summer School, 2013).
30
31
32
96 J. LENSEN
“scratches us softly”33 and is reciprocally “challenging, sometimes eroti-

cizing, always personal.”34 Robin’s desires extend onto a political level as
he increasingly links them with Europe’s collective dimensions. Europe,
so he observes, should be more than a world of superficial acquaintances;
its people should not just “Coexist”35 as asserted by the Irish rock band
U2, whose concert Robin attends in Brussels.
His growing concern with communication and mutual understanding
in a world of superficial acquaintances is paralleled by an increased inter-
est for what lies beyond the visible. Here, the ability to “see” becomes of
crucial importance. When he tells Theo about his visit to the Eiffel tower
in Paris, he describes how he overheard someone talking “about a cer-
tain Paul—I cannot understand his last name—who committed suicide by
jumping in the Seine.” Here, his vision is clearly limited: “I can continue
looking at it without seeing anything.”36 Theo’s explanation that “Paul”
refers to Paul Celan, a concentration camp survivor, constitutes the first
of a number of initiations by means of which he instructs Robin about the
inextricable link between Europe’s identity and the past of World War II
and the Holocaust. Upon learning of Theo’s Jewish identity, Robin devel-
ops a strong interest in the history of World War II. In Warsaw, he visits
the Jewish ghetto and in Berlin he is highly sensitive to the traces of the
war past. By observing these historical echoes, he feels increasingly differ-
ent from his business environment. Walking through Berlin with Diana,
one of his business contacts, he remarks: “We have to commemorate the
names of the dead in Europe, because they are the essence of Europe.”
Diana replies indifferently: “You do that … But in this city probably every-
where something has happened. The phantoms are there for those that
want to see them. And I have better things to do.”37
Diana’s remark is intriguing, as it stresses the importance of true
sight: the perception of the traces of the past is not just dependent upon
their historical presence or immanence, but on the willingness to adopt
a frame through which they can actually be “seen” and made recogniz-
able. Here, so the story makes clear, Robin has developed that frame by
abandoning his initial self-centered focus on the present and it embodies
33
34
35
36
37
a move towards Theo’s ethical insights about transnational communi-

cation. Moreover, by sharing his insights with Diana in words that are
very similar to Theo’s, Robin not only spreads the latter’s point of view,
but also increasingly assumes his employer’s perspective. This identifica-
tion does not constitute a form of idolatry. On the contrary, it shows
how Robin—voluntarily or not—assumes a position in which he tries
to understand the trauma that has led to Theo’s current identity. This
transformation is enhanced as Robin reads the works of Holocaust survi-
vors Primo Levi and Imre Kertesz, which causes him to have nightmares:
“In the morning I wake up shivering, as a Jew. A star-Jew, a star-bearing
Jew.”38 This imaginary transformation is not without ethical limits and
problems. By undergoing these psychological changes, Robin seems to
subsume Jewish identity without actually having suffered the Holocaust,
seemingly replacing the victimized Other by putting himself in his or her
place. At the same time, this identificatory reflex is not an end in itself.
Rather, it is presented in the novel as a perturbing, cathartic experience
(“shivering”), through which Robin’s ego is displaced and which opens
the perspective of approaching and being able to recognize that which
is entirely Other.
This change in Robin’s character is the means by which Grote Europese
roman constructs an allegory for the ideal European citizen, and it is
embodied by a dislocation process on four levels: (1) geographically, by
means of his travels through Europe; (2) temporally, by allowing the past
into his experience of the present; (3) psychologically, as Robin is able to
rupture his superficial narcissism, and (4) professionally, as he eventually is
able to quit his job, unwilling to be identified through its logic of deper-
sonalization. Finally, so it seems, something has happened. This evolution
allows him to engage again in a romantic relationship and it equally has
consequences for his identity as a (European) citizen. Engaging in this
process of opening up towards the Other, recognizing the fundamental
interdependency with that Other, as well as performing the role of the
vulnerable, so the novel suggests, allows for transcending the antagonisms
that compromise the construction of one’s own identity and that of a
shared, communal one—in this case a European one. In the “Envoi” of
the novel, this twofold evolution is expressed by Robin’s wish “to converse
with birds in a civilized manner. Birds, those fragile souls.”39 This wish

38

39
98 J. LENSEN
shows his change in identity from “being a Robin”—referring to the soli-

tary little bird—to him becoming a social creature, part of a community.
Robin’s wish also evokes the figure of Saint Francis of Assisi who, so the
legend goes, spoke with birds and preached values of peace, equality, and
humility. By adopting an identity of vulnerability, Robin envisions being
a messenger of the transnational ethics articulated in the novel—one that
can secure the future of a European community.
…But Also a Small Booklet

No doubt, the transnational ethics put forward in the novel as a means of
stimulating a future for Europe’s identity and community sounds idealistic
and naïve. Its premises, formulated via Theo Marchand and reflected in
Robin’s personal development, remain highly theoretical in nature and
their practical implications remain unarticulated, as the focus throughout
the story increasingly shifts to Robin’s personal experiences. At the same
time, the poetics at work in Grote Europese roman signal a resistance against
normative bravado by defying a number of interconnected concepts that
are associated with exclusion and with the market place, such as certainty,
authority, unity, totalization, system, universalization, center, homogene-
ity, and hierarchy. Most striking in this regard is the novel’s structure,
which consists of 36 chapters that all carry the names of mostly European
capitals. Here, the novel explicitly mimics Primo Levi’s Il sistema periodico
from 1975, which presents Levi’s experiences as a Jewish-Italian doctoral
student in chemistry under the Fascist regime and afterwards. Levi’s book
is structured along 21 autobiographical episodes named after chemical
elements from Mendeleev’s periodic table, but the link between chapter
title and content is loose and associative, resisting easy categorization and
the assumed transparency of propaganda.40 In Grote Europese roman, the
relation between chapter title and chapter content is similar to that of
Il sistema periodico. Although, in many cases, Robin effectively visits the
cities mentioned in the title of the respective chapters, in other chapters
the titles refer to encounters with people from those places or to Theo’s
life story. In more extreme cases, the capital’s name is almost unrelated
to the story, as for example in the chapter “Podgorica,” where the link is
40
Hugo Bousset, “The Periodic Table of Europe: On Koen Peeters and Primo Levi,” in
Dutch Studies in a Globalized World, ed. Margriet Bruijn Lacy (Münster: Nodus Publikationen,
2009), 155–63.
only present in the mentioning of the “Montenegrostraat” (Montenegro

Street) in Brussels, where Robin goes shopping. We find another example
of this in the chapter “Sofia,” which does not refer to Bulgaria’s capital,
but to the name of a prostitute.
On a political level, this formal unpredictability—somewhat vaguely—
indicates how each national space within Europe is already pervaded by
elements from other nations, thereby implying that Europe’s political
dimension is not just an artificial wish, but an answer to the needs of a
social space that is already profoundly post-national in nature. On the level
of form, it serves as a critical comment on the acclaimed transparency and
the unimaginative uniformity that governs the financial market.
A significant metaphor for this poetics is Robin’s Moleskine book-
let, a gift from Theo initially meant for notes for his report. During his
travels, however, it gradually becomes a notebook for “the sudden depth
popping up in superficial conversations with people you hardly know.”41
Subsequently, it is converted into a collection of linguistic souvenirs,
words, and phrases in the various national languages Robin encounters on
his travels. Its apparent triviality stands in sharp contrast to his work and
it becomes, as Sven Vitse notes, “a fragmented and scrappy monument to
Europe’s (linguistic and cultural) unity in diversity, which is threatened
by global monolingualism and the general tendency towards leveling of
differences.”42 But it is also more than that. Near the end of his assign-
ment, Robin supplements his various notes with Theo’s life story and with
quotes from his readings of Primo Levi and Imre Kertesz. His booklet
becomes a narrative that not only reflects Europe’s rich and diverse cultural
and linguistic heritage, but also integrates the history of the Holocaust.
However, it does not just do this with an eye to its victims. After his
trip is finished, Robin visits the former concentration camp in the Flemish
town of Breendonk. Fort Breendonk is a fortification built in 1906 as
part of the second ring of defenses around the city of Antwerp, Belgium.
During World War II, the Germans used it as a prison camp and, with the
help of Belgian collaborationists, detained political dissidents, as well as
captured resistance members and Jews.43 Here the war history is no longer
41
Peeters, Grote Europese roman, 135
42
Sven Vitse, “Images of Europe: The (De)construction of European Identity in
Contemporary Fiction,” Journal of Dutch Literature 2, no. 1 (2011): 99–127.
43
“National Memorial Fort Breendonk,” accessed July 7, 2014, http://www.breendonk.
be/EN/.
100 J. LENSEN
just the story of others, but it also becomes his own: he is physically present
at the site of perpetration and—more importantly—visits exactly that place
which exemplifies the role of his own nation as perpetrator. This implies
that his relation to war history is no longer that of an aloof bystander, but
one in which he acknowledges that his own national identity is implicated
in the crimes committed. I consider this move an ultimate example of how
Robin incorporates an ethics of vulnerability, as he accepts the fundamen-
tal interdependency between Self and Other and lays his identity bare to
questions of guilt and responsibility.
During this visit, Robin fills up the first blank page of his “Groot
Europees Schriftje” [“Great European Booklet”], naming it his “Grote
Europese roman” [Great European Novel]. This speech act is significant,
as it consolidates the various evolutions that Robin has undergone. The
booklet, initially meant to serve his European business report, demand-
ing systematic organization, unambiguous efficiency, and practical results,
has become a document marked by imagination, playfulness, and self-
reflexivity. The post-modern rupturing of the line between the story and
the extra-textual level, for example, in the novel’s naming, confirms this.
Hence, through its form, the booklet embodies a critique of capitalism as
a basis for a transnational identity, while at the same time functioning as an
icon for a non-violent communication praxis that refrains from a unilateral
first-person narrative.
From that perspective, Koen Peeters’s novel can be read as an effort to
ground a European literature in the manner that Goethe envisioned his
concept of Weltliteratur. Grote Europese roman clearly reflects the latter’s
ambition at creating a discursive space in which different collective identi-
ties might be able to acknowledge and understand each other, tolerate
each other, even if they do not necessarily learn to love each other.44 It
envisions a Europe that is more personal in nature, foregrounding the
union’s potential for intercultural synergies and pointing at the morale
behind its historical origins and its shared cultural and philosophical
heritage. At the same time, it hints at the unavoidable and also neces-
sary diversity at the core of its identity and at its intrinsic connection to
Europe’s modern, economic dimension, and the threats its success might
entail for that identity.
44
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Letzte Jahre 1827–1832,” in Goethe, Johann Wolfgang:
Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, ed. Karl Richter, Münchner Ausgabe, vol.
XVIII/i: Letzte Jahre, 1827–32 (Munich: Hanser, 1996), 131.
The explicit nature of the novel reflects a clear political purpose. Against
the background of Europe’s jeopardized credentials, it pushes forward an
instructive example of how the European demos should understand itself
and how a transnational, mutual understanding can be formed. Hence,
Grote Europese roman wants to partake very actively in the European
identity construction. The explicitness of the novel’s ambitions, however,
stands in contrast to its humble, nuanced form and its continued attention
for Europe’s intrinsic diversity. A great novel, yes—with capitals—but also
a small booklet: a small history about awareness, empathy, and vulnerabil-
ity; about looking and listening carefully; about learning—as the narrator
states at the end in a fit of wishful thinking—“in a European way.”45

45
CHAPTER 6
Transnational Memory in Michael Haneke’s

The White Ribbon and Cate Shortland’s Lore
John O. Buffinga
On the surface Michael Haneke and Cate Shortland are as different as chalk
and cheese: while Haneke is Austrian, Shortland is Australian; Haneke is
a man born in 1942 in Munich but raised in Vienna, and Shortland is a
woman born in 1968 in New South Wales; Haneke is known for mak-
ing both German- and French-language films, while Shortland, a native
speaker of English, directs Lore as a German-language film that features
an entirely German cast; finally, Haneke’s work is so multifaceted and
multilingual that it extends beyond national boundaries, so that we think
of him less as a German or an Austrian than as a European filmmaker,
while Shortland, although a winner of multiple awards, has only begun to
establish her scope and international reach. Interesting parallels emerge,
however, when we look at two of their films—Haneke’s The White Ribbon
(2010) and Shortland’s Lore (2012)—as visualizations of a traumatic
German past. While The White Ribbon is set in 1913, the year leading up to
the outbreak of World War I, Lore takes place in the traumatic days follow-
ing the end of World War II. Both films focus on children; Haneke’s film
is ironically (and surreptitiously) subtitled “a German children’s story”
J.O. Buffinga (*)

Department Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Memorial University,
St. John’s, NL, Canada
e-mail: johnb@mun.ca

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39152-6_6
104 J.O. BUFFINGA
[“Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte”] as it is about children who may well

grow up to be Nazi adults, while Shortland’s film features children of Nazi
adults who are facing an uncertain future in 1945. As well, the actors who
play the baroness (Ursina Lardi) and one of the farmer’s sons (Kai Malina)
in The White Ribbon reappear in Lore as the mother and the young man
named Thomas. The subject matter in the two films is bleak and neither
provides a pleasurable viewing experience, which is intensified by the fact
that both filmmakers like to play in the field of ambiguity, constantly leav-
ing the viewer starved for information that is withheld from them.
The White Ribbon and Lore are examples of a post-Wall “memory
boom,” to use Andreas Huyssen’s term, which reaches beyond or tran-
scends national boundaries.1 This boom is ongoing, and the film industry
is fully participating in it. In fact, in the twenty-first century the produc-
tion and distribution of films are being shaped and mobilized more and
more along transnational lines that can no longer be identified with a sin-
gle nation.2 Haneke’s and Shortland’s films are a case in point. Although
written and directed by Haneke, The White Ribbon is a German/Austrian/
French/Italian co-production, while Lore is a German/Australian/UK
co-production based on an Anglo-German source novel (Rachel Seiffert’s
2001 The Dark Room), adapted by a British-Bengali screenwriter and an
Australian director. However, the transnational is not limited to the direc-
tors who worked and sought funding in a range of national contexts, but
also to the films themselves, which, at the point of distribution in the
global market, become “physical embodiments of cultural exchange.”3
Shortland views her film along these lines as a transnational cultural
product. It appears that her fascination with history and the national image
of Germany made her very conscious about neither wanting to make an
apologist film nor the kind of redemptive film that shuts down dialogue.
Instead, she wants her film to foster discussion about totalitarianism or
the meaning of 1945 in the present and for the future.4 As an Australian,
1
Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York,
NY; London; Routledge, 2012), 5.
2
Deborah Shaw, “Deconstructing and Reconstructing ‘Transnational Cinema,’” in
Contemporary Hispanic Cinema: Interrogating the Transnational in Spanish and Latin
American Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison (Woodbridge: Tamesis Books, 2013), 47–66.
47–48; Randall Halle, “German Film, Aufgehoben: Ensembles of Transnational Cinema.,”
New German Critique 87 (2002): 7–46.
3
Shaw, “Deconstructing and Reconstructing,” 60–61.
4
Sheila Roberts, “Cate Shortland Talks Lore, Filmmaking Challenges and Gray Areas, the
Film’s Inspiration, Researching the Historical Era and Her Personal Reaction to the Film,”
Collider, February 8, 2013, 1, http://collider.com/cate-shortland-lore-interview/.
TRANSNATIONAL MEMORY IN MICHAEL HANEKE’S... 105
Shortland has stated in multiple interviews that she sees immediate paral-
lels between the Holocaust and the racist policies of Apartheid in South
Africa or the atrocities committed against indigenous people in her own
country and elsewhere,5 pointing to the transcultural nature of memory
as it travels across time, space, and cultures. As Astrid Erll argues, “[m]
emories do not hold still,” and her concept of “‘travelling memory’ is
a metaphorical shorthand, an abbreviation for the fact that in the pro-
duction of cultural memory, people, media, mnemonic forms, contents,
and practices are in constant, unceasing motion.”6 It may be argued that
screen memories are particularly effective in creating such transnational
memories since in an age of global production and circulation, movies are
screened simultaneously in different parts of the globe, and worldwide TV
audiences can have mass mediated experiences in real time wherever they
are in the world.7 However, despite Shortland’s own assessment of her
film and the transnational production and distribution of both Haneke’s
and Shortland’s films, it remains to be seen if transnational impulses are
reflected in the films’ content as well.
The cultural memories evoked in both films are part of what Claus
Leggewie calls the “Fourth Circle” of the “Seven Circles of European
Memory” that concern war and wartime memory as motor of Europe.8
Although neither The White Ribbon nor Lore is technically set in wartime,
but just before and after a world war, both are focused on pan-European
traumas and are therefore European sites of memory. In the following, I
argue that Haneke provides us with a brief glimpse into another time and
another place: the authoritarian political system of monarchy leading up to
1914. Focusing attention on the social conditions that led to the collapse
of the monarchy, the consequent collapse of the old European order, and
5
Michael Choi, “Director Cate Shortland Dissects the Traumatic History of World War
II’s Nazi Children in Lore Interview (Exclusive),” Screen Slam, February 6, 2013, http://
www.screenslam.com/lore-interview-director-cate-shortland/; Roberts, “Cate Shortland
Talks Lore”; Patrick Ryan, “A Conversation with Lore Director Cate Shortland,” April 26,
2013, http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/get_out/movies/article_365d5af6-adca-11e2-
88e8-001a4bcf887a.html; Melissa Silverstein, “TIFF: Interview with Cate Shortland -
Director and Co-Writer of Lore,” Indie Wire Women and Hollywood, September 25, 2012,
http://blogs.indiewir e.com/womenandhollywood/tif f-inter view-with-cate-
shortland-director-and-co-writer-of-lore.
6
Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (Basingstoke; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1.
7
Erll, Memory in Culture, 11.
8
December 20, 2010.
106 J.O. BUFFINGA
the rise of fascism, the film imbues pre-1914 German national reality with a
larger, transnational European significance. Shortland’s Lore also highlights
an important aspect of a transnational European memory by focusing on
the experience of displacement and migration that characterized the lives
of millions of Europeans, including more than 12 million German refugees
and up to 12 million displaced persons in the aftermath of World War II.9
While both movies therefore transnationalize German memories, they also
participate in universalizing these memories. By means of his unreliable
narrator and by creating a shadow narrative, Haneke puts the onus on the
reader to reflect on his or her own participation in contemporary forms
of social brutality and conspiracies of silence, therefore universalizing the
memories of a pre-1914 German village. Similarly, Shortland’s film uni-
versalizes the experience of post-war German displacement by means of
embedding her film in the framework of a coming-of-age story and by
employing fairy tale tropes. Participating in the memory boom, both direc-
tors thus trade on one of the most exportable of German memories, that
is, Nazism and the Holocaust. In the process, both transform elements of
one of the hitherto most provincial and “German” of genres, that is, the
Heimat or homeland film, into a universally exportable product.
What, then is being remembered in the two films? A brief synopsis is
in order. The White Ribbon presents the ruminations of an old man who
looks back at a period of his life when he was a 31-year-old teacher in a
seemingly idyllic but fictional North German town named Eichwald in the
year leading up to World War I. The tranquil façade, however, cannot hide
a series of imploding households and mysterious and seemingly random
events that are never fully explained. Accidents, abuse, and dysfunctional-
ity of every kind are at the heart of the film, usually perpetrated by the
adults against the children, but also by the adults against each other, and,
in some cases, by children against each other. Doing the math, we know
that these children in 1913, some of whom are forced to wear the white
armband of the title to remind them of the purity that they supposedly do
not have, will grow up to be adults in the Third Reich. The outbreak of
World War I almost comes as a relief for the viewer and functions as a kind
of deus ex machina for the villagers, putting an end to a culture that is truly
asphyxiating. Haneke exposes the rot beneath this bastion of family values.
9
Jochen Oltmer, “Zwangszuwanderung nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg,” Bundeszentrale
für politische Bildung, accessed October 29, 2015, http://www.bpb.de/themen/
CNSEUC,0,0,Zwangswanderungen_nach_dem_Zweiten_Weltkrieg.html?
Lore is set in the weeks immediately following the end of the war in
1945. There is no voice-over narrator here, and the lead characters are
children who, by virtue of their young age, have fewer memories to draw
on. In fact, they have to unlearn everything they know, while gaining
understanding through experience. As children of high-ranking Nazi per-
petrators, they are sent off by their parents to fend for themselves on a
cross-country trek of 900 kilometers from the Black Forest to their grand-
mother’s house on the North Sea coast. The 14-year-old titular Lore is in
charge of her four younger siblings, including a set of twins and an infant.
While nature remains largely indifferent to their plight, Germany itself has
ceased to exist, society has collapsed, and the people they meet along the
way have become lawless and uncivilized. As the film is a World War II
romantic thriller, a survivalist film, a fairy tale, and an archetypal journey
in equal parts, the children meet hinderers and helpers along the way. One
of the helpers is a young man named Thomas who may or may not be
Jewish. Torn between feelings of repulsion and sexual attraction for him,
the teenager Lore has to find her own humanity, while being confronted
with the Holocaust and the full extent of the war crimes committed by
her parents and her country. At the end of the film, Lore and the three
surviving siblings reach the grandmother’s house, only to realize that the
grandmother is still an unrepentant Nazi who insists on their submissive
compliance and reminds them that their parents did nothing wrong. In a
final act of rebellion, through which she displays some atavistic traits her-
self, Lore rejects this world and leaves it behind.
Individual memory is foregrounded only in The White Ribbon, which
is told from the perspective of the voice-over narration of an elderly man
reflecting on his past. As his first words are “I don’t know,” he acknowl-
edges from the start that his memory is flawed and may or may not be an
accurate representation of things. He vaguely suggests that the disturb-
ing and never fully explained events in the main narrative “could perhaps
clarify some things that happened in this country,” as he states, but leaves
it to the viewer to surmise what that connection might be. He only alludes
indirectly to the two world wars. It appears to be Haneke’s way of creating
a kind of shadow narrative that the audience can inhabit, allowing them
to think and to make their own connections. The off-camera commentary
has the structural function of aiding continuity in order for the audience
to gain a better understanding of what has gone on between scenes. It is
also clear, however, that the narrator could not possibly have witnessed
many of the dramatized scenes, which he therefore must have imagined
108 J.O. BUFFINGA
or invented to suit his grand narrative. In some sequences his imagina-

tion even appears to go into “speculative overdrive,” as one critic writes.10
Although voice-overs often create the illusion of omniscience, this is clearly
not the case in The White Ribbon; nothing is ever fully explained and much
of the narrative seems to be the product of a free-flowing imagination.
Under Haneke’s direction, the voice-over also becomes a self-conscious
device of playing with the viewer’s mind.
The small fictional Protestant North-German town of Eichwald in
which the narrator was a teacher in 1913 is feudal in every sense of the
word. It is a pre-industrial society structured around relationships derived
from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor. Unlike the
children who have names, the adults are known only by their occupation.
At the apex of this society is the baron, followed by the steward, the pas-
tor, the doctor, and the police, with the housekeeper, the midwife, and
the small tenant farmers ranking somewhere at the bottom. The entire
town essentially works for the baron. The teacher occupies a somewhat
privileged place in the sense that he has access to all levels of society,
and, moreover, serves as an intermediary between the adults and the chil-
dren. However, such access does not give him any power: the children
are always one step ahead of the teacher; the teacher does nothing to
stop the bullying tactics of the detectives in their interrogation of the
steward’s daughter who claims to be clairvoyant; he meekly acquiesces in
the courtship terms imposed by his future father-in-law; and he is bullied
into silence by the pastor in whom he confides that the latter’s children
might have something to do with the disturbing events that are plaguing
the village. Admittedly, the innocent love between the young couple is
a ray of sunshine in an otherwise bleak environment, but both are also
naïve in the extreme and easily forced into compliance. At the end of the
film the teacher offers no further insight into his experiences in Eichwald,
merely re-iterating the rumors surrounding the village’s secrets. The
viewer learns that the teacher was drafted in 1917, and that he moved to
his father’s village with his now wife where he opened a tailor’s shop after
the death of his father. After moving away, he never saw any of the villag-
ers of Eichwald again. Considering the gaps and elisions in his narrative,
10
James S. Williams, “Aberrations of Beauty: Violence and Cinematic Resistance in
Haneke’s the White Ribbon,” Film Quarterly 63, no. 4 (Summer 2010): 48–55. 52; Garrett
Stewart, “Pre-War Trauma: Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon,” Film Quarterly 63, no. 4
(Summer 2010): 40–47. 43.
the viewer may well wonder how the teacher lived out the rest of his long
life. How did he get through the interwar years, for example, and what
did he do during World War II? Haneke can only encourage us to look for
answers in the shadow narrative that he creates for his viewer, but every-
thing points to the narrator having offered little resistance.
The retrospective look at his own past, along with the static view of
life and the moral absolutism of the society he describes, are rendered
cinematographically in images that are black and white, and always beauti-
fully balanced, composed, or framed, like a tableau. While the black and
white images remind the viewer of sepia photographs of the past, their
digitally enhanced and crisp execution is a fitting corollary for the essen-
tialist Protestant worldview of the villagers from which all lifeblood has
been sucked.11 The static images of the pristine village and the surround-
ing countryside somehow contain or restrain the imploding households
and the violent undercurrent of society. The interiors are what one would
expect from a period piece, but more so: starchy, musealized, and life-
less. They do not seem to be inhabited or lived in, and the characters
move within these interiors as if they were part of the décor. The interiors
are also dark, as these are the places where most of the violence of the
adults against the children takes place. By contrast, the exterior or land-
scape shots are bright and sunny, with fields of wheat gently moving in the
wind, well-tended and fenced in vegetable plots, farmers harvesting their
crops in harmony with nature and with each other. As several critics have
pointed out, the nature shots reveal an aesthetic that we have come to
associate both with Nazi notions of blood and soil and with the “nostalgic
Heimat films popular in post-war Germany and Austria with their simple
narratives of family life,”12 which also served to make the thousands of
refugees feel at home after the war. The editing, at times, is languorously
paced, reflective of the slow pace of village life. At other times, it is excru-
ciatingly slow, particularly in the scenes showing physical or psychological
abuse. All in all, the cinematography in The White Ribbon reflects in visual
terms the memory of the narrator with all its flaws, its missing links, and
false leads. Much conscious thought went into the careful composition,
the visual ordering, and the formal structure of his narrative, which leads
one to suspect that the teacher/narrator only remembers what he wants
to remember and that he frames, arranges, or adjusts things not to shed
Williams, “Aberrations of Beauty,” 50.

11
Williams, “Aberrations of Beauty,” 50.

12
110 J.O. BUFFINGA
light on them but to mislead or obfuscate. It is difficult to say exactly what

is being deliberately forgotten or hidden in the teacher’s recollections, but
it is clear that he knows more than he lets on.
Comparing the cinematography in The White Ribbon and Lore is a study
in contrasts. First of all, there is no voice-over narrator in Lore and the
spotlight is not on memory as such, that is, on the process in which infor-
mation is encoded, stored, and recalled, but rather on undoing, depro-
gramming, and unlearning everything that had previously been learned.
The focus is not on an old man looking back on his life, but on children,
the oldest of whom is the 14-year-old eponymous lead. She is in every
scene, and the camera is almost entirely aligned with her perspective. At
the beginning of the film, Lore thinks she knows everything, but at the
end she realizes that she knows nothing. The end of the war also coincides
with Lore’s coming of age and her sexual awakening. Director Shortland
has said in interviews that she is fascinated by the moment of adolescence
at which childhood ends and a deeper, sexual understanding manifests
itself.13 Having had little perspective on anything outside her immediate
world, Lore gains understanding through experience, and this is reflected
in the film by the brilliant camera work of Adam Arkapaw. The camera is
handheld, which allows for greater freedom of motion during filming, and
always stays close to Lore, so that we get her point of view. The camera
becomes part of the story, recording how the world has become an alien-
ating and threatening place and the familiar is suddenly unfamiliar. Lore
is frequently seen picking up material objects and looking at them closely,
and the camera is at times so close that it becomes difficult for the viewer
to figure out what is being shown. Shallow focus shots in these extreme
close-ups often give way to shots that are super-saturated, focusing on
the texture of mosses, grasses, and insects, of misty light coming through
windows or distant hills made dreamlike in the soft light of a misty dawn,
rendering the movie otherworldly and lyrical, like a fairy-tale. Nature is
everywhere. As in The White Ribbon, some of the nature scenes appear to
show a kind of Nazi aesthetic, particularly near the beginning of the film
as we see Lore and her younger sister frolicking through the fields, while
in their clothes, hairstyles and blondness conforming to the Nazi concept
of Aryan. Conversely, Shortland may also be playing to a post-war German
collective cultural memory here, evoking an aesthetic of the Heimat or
13
Shane Danielsen, “A Formidable Piece of Storytelling,” SBS Movies, June 12, 2012, 1,
http://www.sbs.com.au/movies/movie/lore.
homeland films of the late 1940s and 1950s and their focus on a whole
and innocent world untouched by the hazards of real life. However, lush
and verdant green at the beginning of the film, nature in Lore also hides a
lot of ugliness in the form of decomposing corpses, burned out buildings
and abandoned villages. This would not be found in a typical Heimat film.
Cinders and bits of burned paper, which Lore is trying to read, are floating
through the dappled light in the woods. As they head further north the
richness of nature is gradually replaced by a landscape that is becoming
more and more desolate, almost apocalyptic, ultimately giving way to the
mud flats of the North Sea coast. This elemental landscape consisting of
land, water, and sky is in many ways a metaphorical representation of Lore
herself; by leaving her grandmother and her siblings, she can start again
with a clean slate, ignore the past, and learn how to feel. Considering,
though, that she is now escaping from a horrible grandmother suggests
that she will still face a difficult road ahead.
While the violent undercurrent of the plot resists Haneke’s stark and
tableau-like images, Shortland’s images are more tentative, more provi-
sional, and less permanent. The difference may be attributed to the way
a somewhat disingenuous elderly man remembers his past and the way a
teenager on the cusp of becoming an adult discovers life. This brings me
back to my point of departure and the place of these two films in memory
discourse, beginning with Haneke’s film.
Like Shortland, who wants her film to foster discussion about the mean-
ing of 1945 in the present and for the future, as well as across cultures,
thereby creating a shadow narrative, Haneke also creates a kind of second-
ary narrative in his film. Here the viewer is given a space to engage with the
material on a more personal level, without being told what to think, but
thinking a thought through to its logical conclusion. Although the viewer
is encouraged to associate what happens in this film with the destructive
effects of the authoritarian system of the German monarchy, our response
to the film is mixed; while most viewers enjoy the film on a purely aesthetic
level, there is no end to our frustrations on a narrative level. This is after
all a Haneke film, and one of its primary aims surely seems to be the inflic-
tion of pain, something which Moira Weigel calls “sadomodernism.”14
While the brilliant cinematography somewhat tempers or at least contains
the more disturbing and sinister events taking place behind the scenes in
14
Moira Weigel, “Sadomodernism,” N+1 Magazine, March 6, 2013, http://npluso-
nemag.com/sadomodernism.
112 J.O. BUFFINGA
a village that outwardly appears so idyllic, the film’s narrator appears to

the viewer as disingenuous at best and deceitful at worst. As his retrospec-
tive look is marked by suppression, omission, and elision, the viewer’s
frustrations are therefore with him. His memory is communicative in the
sense that it communicates autobiographical memory as defined by Jan
Assmann.15 It appears to be a private interpretation of his own past and
that of the society and the times in which he lived. This interpretation may
appear to be individual and unstructured, but the film also makes it clear
that this narrator represents not just himself but an entire social group and
an entire generation. He becomes their spokesman, as it were. His memo-
ries are shared by his generation through the means of verbal communica-
tion over a time span of 60–80 years. Therefore, it is implied that what the
teacher/narrator chooses to remember or to suppress with reference to
his memories of the days leading up to World War I are the elisions in the
memories of his generation. By extension, therefore, the frustrations expe-
rienced by the viewer with regard to the selective memory of the teacher/
narrator are the same ones the viewer experiences with reference to the
memory of the generation that he represents. It is these irritations that
prompt the viewer into action in terms of questioning everything the nar-
rator and his generation represent. As such the film makes us think about
the transparency with which this particular German culture deals with a
very difficult part of its history, specifically the patriarchy as it evolved
around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, and the auto-
cratic social and family structures that essentially encompass all members
of society into a feudal system of lords, vassals, and fiefs. This is a society
ready for war, and, although the film is so much more than just a caution-
ary tale about the seeds of Nazism, there is also more than a suggestion
that the young children who are treated so badly by their parents and
caregivers in the film will grow up to be Nazi adults in the years leading
up to World War II.
Born in 1942, Michael Haneke is too young to have experienced the
events portrayed in The White Ribbon himself. His memory is therefore
cultural in the sense that it is institutionally shaped and sustained or medi-
ated by films and books or schools, rather than personal experience. In
other words, the cultural memory of the director is presented in the film
15
Jan Assmann, “Globalization, Universalization, and the Erosion of Cultural Memory,”
in Memory in a Global Age, ed. Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, Palgrave Macmillan
Memory Studies (Basingstoke; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 121–37. 122.
as the communicative memory of the voice-over narrator. However, nei-

ther the director nor the narrator offers any answers to the questions that
are raised, but only clues, and these clues may or may not be relevant
to solving the mysterious crimes that are afflicting the village. Similarly,
Haneke does not pretend to offer us a full picture of the past. The White
Ribbon ends as it begins—fading into a black screen—having provided the
viewer with a brief glimpse into another time and another place. On the
one hand, this fade-to-black or glimpse of the past could suggest a distant
reality, one with no connection to the present, an aberration in history
that leads perhaps to Hitler and World War II, but ends at the so-called
“Stunde Null” or Zero-Hour of 1945. On the other hand, the narrator
of the film begins by saying, however timidly, that the “strange events”
to be reported might “perhaps clarify some things that happened in this
country.” Although it would be simplistic to view the film exclusively as
an etiology of Nazism, this suggests that the particular national context of
The White Ribbon is hard to deny.
Michael Haneke is widely considered to be one of the most influential
filmmakers of the contemporary era. He achieved this stature due in no
small part to the recognition that his work transcends national borders; his
work is multilingual, European (in the sense that he was born in Germany,
raised in Austria, and works in German and French), international, and
even global. His work is laced with themes that generate wide-ranging
appeal, such as alienation, anxiety, fear, and violence of every kind. Kate
Ince captures the transnational nature of Haneke’s work in general in
a phrase she uses to characterize his fascination with “space rather than
place,”16 with place defined in physical terms as a particular location and
space defined in existential terms. In The White Ribbon, the place, a rather
generic small Protestant farming village in northern Germany, is trumped
by the space that is created by the people that live there, and that becomes
a breeding ground for the imploding households and the community
and society of which they are an integral part. In other words, Haneke
shows us the conditions in the village that breed hatred and violence for
future detonation. The movie delineates the firm grip that the men in
charge have on everyone in the village, be it through rigid hierarchical
structures defined by moral absolutism, sternness, or heartlessness, and
16
Kate Ince, “Glocal Gloom: Existential Space in Haneke’s French Language Films,” in
The Cinema of Michael Haneke: Europe Utopia, ed. Ben McCann and David Sorfa (New
York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011), 85–93. 85.
114 J.O. BUFFINGA
how this tears apart an already fragile social fabric. An entire social order
comes to a head. Although it is the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in
Sarajevo that will ultimately end the barony and bring down the Kaiser, we
know that this sick and stultifying society has to come to an end. We are
watching a town and a culture implode, which has consequences for the
world beyond. In other words, while the film focuses on a specific national
context of Germany and makes suggestions about possible social condi-
tions contributing to the rise of Nazism, the emphasis on the impending
collapse of the monarchy adds a transnational layer that should not be
overlooked. The fact that all of this is told from the less than reliable
point of view of an elderly man looking back at his own life also brings
up the question of personal responsibility. Although the narrator’s secret
is the blind spot of an entire generation, what Haneke appears to be inti-
mating is that while the teacher/narrator and members of his generation
may be pleading innocence, contemporary spectators of The White Ribbon
anywhere in the world cannot make this claim in the face of the cinema
before them. Having watched a village implode under these conditions
puts all viewers in a position of accountability and culpability. Moreover,
the “unpleasure” that Haneke’s films elicit, to loosely summarize the
findings of Caroline Wheatley, forces the viewer to become a rationally
aware spectator who takes up some responsibility for viewing.17 In other
words, the self-awareness that the narrator/teacher lacks is forced upon
the contemporary viewer. Haneke thereby makes a film that creates a space
in which not just Germans but people anywhere in the world may deal
with the more difficult parts of their history as well as their own personal
responsibility for it. This allows a transnational reading of the film that
reaches beyond or transcends national boundaries and interests.
While the national context in The White Ribbon ultimately allows the
viewer to see the film in a transnational context, Cate Shortland univer-
salizes the World War II experience to the point where it is a very un-
German, de-nationalized film. Although the film is set in Germany in the
immediate aftermath of World War II, and the characters are German and
speak German, there is an otherworldly quality to the film that sets it apart
and de-territorializes it at the same time. This is achieved in part by the
fact that the lead characters are children who are shedding their particular
Germanness in the course of the film, along with the countryside through
17
Caroline Wheatley, Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image (New York, NY;
London: Berghahn Books, 2009).
which they travel on their trek to the North Sea coast. At that moment,
Germany does not exist anymore but is governed by sectoral administra-
tions. It has become a place of uncertainty and the children are uprooted,
displaced, and lost in a world they no longer understand. Their journey is
a physical one, of course, but also an emotional and moral one. The edu-
cation that they gain along the way consists of unlearning everything they
know, but culminates not in a re-integration into society but in its rejec-
tion altogether. By portraying the children as refugees, Shortland clearly
taps into a post-war European memory of displacement and migration
that is truly transnational and that resonates very much in our own con-
temporary world.
A certain amount of de-territorialization of the specifically German is
also achieved by the fairy tale elements of the narrative. As the hungry
and frightened children leave the familiar behind on their way to visit
their grandmother’s house, meeting helpers and ogres along the way, they
travel through a devastated, otherworldly countryside, entering an alien
environment, a different world in which scary things happen, and for-
ests are haunted and filled with demons. Post-war Germany becomes a
Grimm’s fairy tale,18 thereby rendering in a universally understood lan-
guage the experiences of these otherwise uniquely German children.
Moreover, theirs is an archetypal journey representing a quest for identity
that taps into “the shared heritage of the human race.”19 This seems to
bring in an element of cosmopolitanism in the sense in which Levy and
Sznaider define it as collective memories that transcend national and eth-
nic boundaries.20 According to Levy and Sznaider, cosmopolitanism is “a
process of ‘internal globalization’ through which global concerns become
part of local experiences of an increasing number of people.”21 Strong
identification with distant events, facilitated by new global communica-
tions, can happen especially when these events resonate on a local level as
18
Robert Zaller, “Postwar Germany as a Grimm’s Fairy Tale,” Broad Street Review, April 13,
2013, 1, http://broadstreetreview.com/books-movies/cate_shortlands_lore_germany_year_
zero.
19
Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, ed. Herbert Read, Michael
Fordham, and Gerhard Adler, trans. R. F. C. Hull, vol. 9i, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung
(London: Routledge, 1959).
20
21
116 J.O. BUFFINGA
well.22 Providing a coming-of-age story with fairy tale and archetypal ele-
ments creates such a cosmopolitan memory, to which viewers all over the
globe can relate based on their own experiences. It is along these lines that
traumatic memories from one place can be opened up to a global audi-
ence, crossing space and time to become repositories of meaning for those
to whom this past would otherwise not be accessible.
Of the contemporary media that are facilitating this shift from the
national to the transnational and the global, cinema arguably stands out
as the primary purveyor of images and memories. One can also argue
that the movie industry is most susceptible to this transnationalization
and globalization as it is an ensemble industry with a multitude of work-
ers spread around the world in various production and post-production
locations.23 The international provenance of The White Ribbon and Lore
and their transnational directors are a case in point. As international co-
productions, they clearly stretch the terms according to which a film can
be designated as “German” on the level of production, distribution, and
reception. The White Ribbon as a cultural product itself only appears to be
firmly anchored in a specifically national problematic and national com-
munity, both from the point of story and history. However, the film’s
themes are transnational, and its focus on space rather than place suggests
that the film concentrates on the conditions that give rise to the brutal
crimes committed in a village just before the outbreak of World War I. The
White Ribbon therefore oscillates between a national and a transnational,
and a universal level. The fact that this is a German village is less signifi-
cant than the conditions under which the deplorable behavior of human
beings towards each other inevitably occurs,24 and this is a message that
transcends national borders. Lore goes a step further. From the point of
view of direction, production, dissemination, and global appeal, the film is
transnational in every sense of the word. In terms of content or a narrative
point of view, however, the film universalizes the World War II experi-
ence by focusing first of all on children, who are only learning to under-
stand through personal experience, and by framing the arc of their story
in terms of a fairy tale or archetypal journey. This leads to a certain loss
of (German) national particularity, but opens up the film to a much wider
22
Levy and Sznaider, “Memory Unbound,” 91–92.
23
Halle, “German Film, Aufgehoben,” 7–46.
24
Justin Vicari, “Films of Michael Haneke: The Utopia of Fear,” Jump Cut, no. 48 (Winter
2006): 1–13. 1.
audience that sees itself and its respective traumatic events reflected in the
story line as well, aligning it with cosmopolitan and a universal memory.
To conclude, considering the transnational production forces behind
them, one can assume that the narratives in The White Ribbon and Lore do
not limit themselves to a single national orientation; both emphasize the
transnational European significance of the national memories they invoke,
and, in addition, both universalize these memories. In other words, we
have the national German, the transnational European, as well as the
universal in both films. Moreover, the target audience for both films is a
transnational community. The fact that many countries participate in the
production as well as the reception of these films changes the character
not only of what is German but also what is European. By extension, it
changes the character of what constitutes the national and transnational
dimensions of European memory. It also changes the uses to which these
memories are put. Individual memory in The White Ribbon is flawed, and
director Haneke offers us no more than a momentary or partial view of
the past before he lets the screen fade back into black. We are invited only
briefly into this silence. This is enough, however, to produce a medita-
tive moment and generate in the audience a level of anger and frustra-
tion that can effect change. As one critic writes, “Haneke’s nihilism has
an essentially moral component.”25 It is a way of getting at the truth of
social brutality, indifference, social, religious, and political conformism,
and the conspiracy of silence. We experience the past as comprehensi-
ble in the sense that we do not want it to be repeated in the present.
Lore is less about looking back than about looking forward. The viewer
is invited to enter the memory landscape through which the children of
the perpetrators travel, and eventually learns to understand that the child
of a murderer is not a murderer. The movie reveals the crippling degrees
of prejudice to which the teenage lead has been subjected, as well as the
much longer journey that she will have to face in order to overcome these.
The children are displaced and have become refugees in a country that
no longer exists. Their unravelling mirrors the unravelling of the country
itself. This is not a Holocaust film in a strict sense. It is also a different
take on World War II. It does not even feel like a particularly German
movie. Shortland’s direction of the film was always informed by her per-
sonal interest in how nations deal with their past. In other words, the
Holocaust memory in Lore is in constant dialogue with memories of other
Vicari, “Films of Michael Haneke,” 1.

25
118 J.O. BUFFINGA
repressive regimes, suggesting that the film is indeed a site for transethnic
solidarity. It is on this level that the film resonates around the globe. From
this perspective as well, the screen memories of both The White Ribbon
and Lore have a future-oriented dimension that points to a new Europe
defined less by national borders than by memories and realities of dis-
placement and migration. Finally, my placement of both movies in the
“Fourth Circle” of Claus Leggewie’s “Seven Circle” model of European
memory, which includes war or wartime memory as a negative founda-
tion for a united Europe, needs to be fine-tuned somewhat. While Lore,
with its emphasis on children unlearning the past, appears to conform to
the negative foundational memories that Leggewie includes for a united
Europe, my analysis of The White Ribbon, with its even stronger focus on
the destructive effects of the authoritarian political system of monarchy,
suggests an additional transnational “Circle” distinct from those described
by Leggewie. However, this does not take away from the fact that both
films are nuanced variations in terms of their movement between national
histories, transnational European memories, and universal themes.
CHAPTER 7
Visions of Europe in Fatih Akin’s The Evil

Old Songs: Divided Past, Transnational
Future?
Eva Maria Esseling
In varietate concordia: Visions of Europe

and the Promotion of European Unification
Visions of Europe is the title of a compilation of 25 short films released by
the Danish film production company Zentropa1 in co-operation with the
German and German-French television channels ZDF and ARTE. It was
first aired in 2004, the year the European Union (EU) expanded from 15
to 25 official members. Twenty-five directors, representing each of the 25
nations that constituted the newly enlarged continental community, were
invited to present their “personal visions of current and future life in this
‘impending cultural melting pot.’”2 The only guidelines given were of a
1
The production company Zentropa was founded in 1992 by Lars von Trier and Peter
Aalbæck Jensen, as a result of their cooperation on Europa (1991), the third in von Trier’s
Europe Trilogy.
2
“Concept,” Visions of Europe, accessed December 9, 2014, hhtp://visionsofeurope.dk/
voe.htm.
E.M. Esseling (*)

Europa-Kolleg, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Münster, Germany
e-mail: Eva_Esseling@gmx.de

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39152-6_7
120 E.M. ESSELING
technical nature: each director received €34,000 in funding, they all had
to employ a 16:9-shooting-format compatible with television and were
not to exceed the designated five-minute length. In terms of content,
though, the organizers refrained from offering any guidelines in order
to grant “absolute freedom of expression as this should be a key value of
the European community.”3 In accordance with the credo in varietate
concordia, the project’s objective was “to assemble and present a power-
ful manifestation of the cultural diversity of Europe.”4 The mix of tech-
nical standardization and thematic heterogeneity can thus be read as an
attempt to put into practice the European constitutional values of unity
and diversity.
Taking into account the project’s premiere on May 1, 2004, the exact
day of the EU’s expansion, it becomes obvious that the creative project
was intended as a means of artistic communication between new mem-
ber states that was to accompany political developments. In this context,
participants in the project were confronted with the contested notion of a
European identity—often proclaimed a necessary foundation for the rap-
idly expanding EU—as well as with the tensions between national and
transnational concerns. Accordingly, the compiled artistic short films dif-
fer in terms of content, approach, and message. While some contributions
portray optimistic fantasies about the continent, many of them express cri-
tiques of, or concerns about, Europe’s further development. Thematically
they deal with current sociopolitical topics or discourses that might be
clustered into the following categories: immigration and the question
of “Fortress Europe,” borders and the question of national division or
supranational unity, as well as cultural hybridity and questions of identity.
Of course, critical and satirical reflections on European bureaucracy also
come into view.5
3
“Concept.”
4
Nadja Stamselberg, “Visions of Europe: The Ethics Behind the Aesthetics,” in Breaching
Borders. Art, Migrants and the Metaphor of Waste, ed. Juliet Steyn and Nadja Stamselberg
(New York, NY: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 73–96. 76.
5
Diffrient holds up Visions of Europe as the primary example of supranational cinema—a
term denoting “that which transcends, rather than merely traverses, national borders and
cultural boundaries, thus extending above and beyond the sphere of economic influence
and/or governmental authority held by individual states and regional organizations.” For
him, “like the European Union itself, a supranational cinema strives not only to promote
dialogue among its various participants but also to consolidate and manage, at the institu-
tional level, a multiplicity of potentially contentious ‘voices’ and conflicting ‘visions’ while
ensuring the uninhibited movement of services, good, and capital so central to the concept
VISIONS OF EUROPE IN FATIH AKIN’S THE EVIL OLD SONGS: DIVIDED... 121
Several filmic contributions draw on Europe’s past to shape their vision

of Europe’s future.6 In many films, the project of envisioning Europe as
both a present and future entity is based on a complex memory practice,
in which national memories are evoked, but also take on more transna-
tional dimensions when considered in the context of the larger project.
Fatih Akin’s contribution for Germany is a case in point, operating both
on a national and transnational level in its focus on memories of past
nationalisms, and the possibility of a future that transcends nationalist
discourses. David Scott Diffrient argues that Akin’s film “revolves around
contemporaneous attempts to grapple with the past, to dismantle the
difficult and trauma-filled legacies of national history in hopes of moving
forward into a multicultural future.”7 The following analysis of the short
film aims to scrutinize how this memory is realized cinematically and
also how this coming to terms with nationalism relates to future-oriented
visions of Europe.
The Evil Old Songs: An Acoustic Memory

of Nationalism
The German contribution to Visions of Europe was directed by Fatih Akin,

whose oeuvre includes music videos, documentaries, and feature films,
including the internationally acclaimed trilogy Liebe, Tod und Teufel [Love,
Death and Devil], consisting of the three films Gegen die Wand [Head-On]
(2004), Auf der anderen Seite [The Edge of Heaven] (2007), and The Cut
(2014). As a German director of Turkish descent who throughout his
career has set and shot his films in both Germany and Turkey, employ-
ing international casts, multilingual scripts, and themes of migration and
mobility, Akin is representative of transnational impulses in post-Wall
German film. Given his international success, it is no surprise that the
organizers8 of Visions of Europe chose Akin as the German contributor to
the film compilation.
of the common market.” David Scott Diffrient, Omnibus Films: Theorizing Transauthorial
Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 184–185.
6
The very concept of Europe is of course a contested one, which becomes apparent in the
Danish contribution, entitled Europe is everything, Europe does not exist.
7
Diffrient, Omnibus Films, 192. The negative undertone perceived in Diffrient’s formula-
tion may arise from the fact that the question of coming to terms with the past is a frequent
discourse in the discussion about Europe and its unification.
8
The committee consisted of the founders of Zentropa and the commissioning editor
from the German TV channel ZDF and the French-German cultural channel ARTE.
122 E.M. ESSELING
Akin executes his personal vision of Europe in a complex intertextual

and intermedial arrangement in a format reminiscent of both a music
video and a silent movie from the early-twentieth century. The short film
is almost completely recorded in black and white, which together with the
film’s discordant musical score generally creates a sinister and frightening
atmosphere. As in much of Akin’s work, music plays an important role:
indeed this film, which is devoid of any dialogue or narrative, is comprised
entirely of musical performances, challenging viewers to decode the signif-
icance of Akin’s juxtaposition of songs ranging from avant-garde industrial
music to German military songs and popular Turkish film music.
In order to analyze the significance of the music in Akin’s film, a brief
synopsis of the film is in order. The film begins with the jarring sounds
of military trumpet fanfare, as the opening credits are projected onto
what appears to be a theatre curtain. The curtains open to reveal the
interior of Hamburg’s resplendent neo-baroque theater, the Deutsches
Schauspielhaus, whose auditorium is mostly empty apart from a few
female cellists sitting in the loges. On the center of the main stage, a set
resembling a small construction site has been erected: the German musi-
cian F.M. Einheit from the band Einstürzende Neubauten is performing
on the set, producing jarring industrial sounds with tools such as a ham-
mer and an electric drill, which are used to hit industrial springs hanging
from the ceiling. The film cuts to a medium shot of the cellists as they start
playing their instruments.
With this unusual sampling of completely different musical styles in
the background—the antagonistic sound effects of a harmonic quartet
of cellists and an individual performance of industrial music—the camera
pans over and begins to focus on the protagonist, played by Idil Üner,
an actress who regularly appears in Akin’s films. Throughout the film,
the camera follows the actress on her way from the peripheral balconies
through the empty tiers below until she finally arrives at the central stage.
It is a path that leads from the margins of the theatre to its center, from the
position of the spectator to that of the performing actors.9 The actress’s
steady gaze is often directed at the camera, so that she seems to address
the viewer while she moves through the theatre and performs the last
song in Robert Schumann’s song-cycle Dichterliebe [A Poet’s Love]. The
song, composed by Schumann in 1840, is a musical setting of German
9
This could be considered an allusion to the importance of cultural participation and
artistic performances to be further discussed below.
poet Heinrich Heine’s 1827 poem “The Evil Old Songs.” About halfway
through this performance, however, the film abruptly cuts from black and
white to color, and shows Üner on center stage, bathed in red light as she
performs a brief excerpt of the Turkish song “Ağla Sevdam.” The film
then cuts back to black and white as Üner continues her performance of
“The Evil Old Songs.” After finishing this song, Üner moves to an old-
fashioned gramophone that is standing alone on the stage, its turntable
already spinning. Üner drops the gramophone’s needle to play a recording
of military songs similar to those in the film’s opening sequence. Üner’s
body writhes and she clutches her head, as if pained by the sounds of the
military marches, while the theatre appears to spin around her, suggest-
ing a mood of disorientation and distress. Akin overlays images of Üner’s
pained expressions with shots of F.M. Einheit, while the overlaying of the
military recordings and the industrial music create a disturbing cacophony.
In the final moments of the film, a crane shot shows Üner as she turns
away from the gramophone and leaves the stage (see Fig. 7.1).
What can we make of Akin’s film and its catalogue of seemingly dis-
parate music? The obvious starting point is the poem that lends Akin’s
contribution its title, that is, Heinrich Heine’s “The Evil Old Songs.” As
the longest song performed in the film, and the only one performed in its
entirety, it constitutes the nucleus of Akin’s vision. The film does not pro-
vide any translation or subtitles of the lyrics, so that non-German speak-
ers unfamiliar with Heine’s poem will be unable to decipher its possible
Fig. 7.1 Superimposition

of Üner and F.M. Einheit
(The Evil Old Songs, dir.
Fatih Akin)
124 E.M. ESSELING
meaning.10 The intertextual reference to Heine’s poem suggests that

Akin’s vision of a future Europe is linked closely with history and memory.
The six stanzas of the poem deal with “evil old songs.” The adjectives
“old” and “evil” suggest that the songs signify memories of traumatic past
experiences from which the lyrical I is suffering: “The evil old songs, / the
terrible dreams, / let us bury them: / so, a great coffin bring!” In an act
of burial they will all be placed in a large coffin and lowered to the bottom
of the sea as a distant archive of grief and pain, which historian Bea Lundt
describes as a symbolic act of coming to terms with memories.11 The strik-
ing significance and power of those memories is illustrated by the compari-
sons made with the coffin, which steadily increase in number: they lead
from the Great Heidelberg Tun to the Cologne Cathedral and the Holy
Christopher, a figure that, according to a Christian legend, is carrying the
burden of all mankind. Given these proportions and the negative coding
of the songs as “evil,” it is at first glance curious that, in addition to the
pain and grief, love is also banished into the coffin: “I also laid my love /
and my pain inside.” Yet, some historical context explains this seeming
contradiction: Lundt attributes it to the fact that for the Romantics, “love”
was perceived as an enduring connection and promoted as a new ideal of
the rising bourgeoisie. For Heine, love therefore often served to legitimize
false continuities and traditions. Burying love therefore represents giving
up the belief in an inescapable connection with one’s ancestors and their
misdeeds.12 Following Lundt, Heine’s poem can also be read as an act of
liberation from negative traditions and memories passed down through
the generations. Consequently, the poem neither opts for adopting estab-
lished memories nor does it advocate for a culture of forgetting.
In his filmic adaptation Akin takes up this ambivalent constellation
expressed in the poem, but adjusts it to fit within the project’s overarch-
ing European horizon. With his short film, Akin concretizes the horrors of
the poem, which in the text remain temporally, spatially, and ideologically
10
Every contribution to Visions of Europe exists in at least two versions: one in its original
form and one in English translation. However, Heine’s poem is not translated for viewers
and only appears in the German original in both versions. The English translations of the
lyrics sung in Akin’s film are the author’s own.
11
Bea Lundt, “Die alten bösen Lieder und die neuen Emotionen: Transkulturelles histo-
risches Lernen,” in Emotionen, Geschichte und historisches Lernen: Geschichtsdidaktische und
geschichtskulturelle Perspektiven, ed. Juliane Brauer and Martin Lücke (Göttingen: V & R
University Press, 2013), 277–302. 280.
12
Lundt, “Die alten bösen Lieder und die neuen Emotionen,” 282–3.
unspecific. Although the Heidelberger Tun, the Cologne Cathedral, and

the figure of the saint are connotatively linked to the German nation or
the Christian religion, there is no explicit indication of a specific historical,
cultural, or national community in Heine’s poem. In contrast, Akin’s ver-
sion makes very specific socio-historical references, relating the “evil old
songs” to Europe’s violent past and the threats posed by nationalist ideol-
ogy. By framing Schumann’s arrangement of Heine’s lyrics with excerpts
of German war music, the short film underscores a particular reading of the
poem, in which the “evil old songs” are equated with acoustic documents
of war and nationalism. Some of the musical snippets from the compila-
tion can be identified as war-songs composed originally in the nineteenth
century, including a song popular at that time, “The Watch on the Rhine”
[“Die Wacht am Rhein”]. Composed by Max Schneckenburger in 1840,
this song is a musical document of the so-called Rhine crisis [Rheinkrise],
a time in which conflicts between France and Germany fueled nationalist
tendencies. Taking this socio-historical context into account, the song rep-
resents a musical expression of nationalist tendencies, and, by extension,
opposition to the idea of a cosmopolitan Europe. Consequently, although
Heine neither inserted vocabulary such as “war,” “hostility,” or “violence”
nor other explicit references to the historical context in his poem, Akin’s
musical framing of the poem connects the concept of evil to the growing
nationalist tendencies in the nineteenth century that strengthened separa-
tion and hostilities between Germany and France.
The juxtaposition of war songs and poetic text, however, constitute
more than merely a critique of the nationalist tendencies of the nineteenth
century. Rather, by implementing these particular songs Akin hints at the
continuity of the nationalist threat that culminated in the twentieth cen-
tury. “The Watch on the Rhine,” for example, was not only a popular
song in the nineteenth century but was also frequently adapted during the
world wars. For example, during World War II the Wehrmacht (German
armed forces during the Nazi-era) used its melody as an official warning
signal. Moreover, “Die Wacht am Rhein” also served as the codename for
a military attack conducted by the Nazi regime, that is, the offensive mili-
tary campaign in the Ardennes in 1944 known as The Battle of the Bulge.
Thus, the songs originally composed in the nineteenth century do not
only evoke memories of the historic epoch in which they were created, but
also of the nationalistically motivated catastrophes of the twentieth cen-
tury. As a result, the symbols and metaphors in the original poem obtain
different connotations when shifted to the context of the fascist era of the
126 E.M. ESSELING
twentieth century. The poem’s mention of a voluminous and heavy coffin,

a sea-grave, and a death bier that is longer than the bridge of Mainz, all
evoke the enormous scope of the atrocities of the twentieth century and,
especially, of the millions of people killed during the war.
However, these references to nationalism do not only gesture towards
the history of World War II. Although the music underscores this par-
ticular allusion, Akin’s film does not only consider the historical conse-
quences of nationalist ideologies. In the opening sequences the military
songs emanate from an unknown source beyond the view of the camera
and accompany the opening credits, which in their font and framing have
been stylized to recall the silent film era, encouraging the viewer to place
the music in the distant past. However, as the film progresses and the pro-
tagonist moves towards the front of the theatre, we see the gramophone
installed on the center stage. Once Üner places the gramophone needle
on the record, a thunderous sampling of those military marches re-starts
and once again creates a threatening atmosphere. Amid this jarring musi-
cal mix, the protagonist’s pained expression suggests that the torment
she suffers is not only a thing of the past. In this setting of cacophonic
noise, the “evil old songs” coming from the gramophone and the mod-
ern industrial music produced on stage by F.M. Einheit co-mingle. The
re-interpretation of the old military marches through the experimental
industrial music turn the “old songs” into an intense and visceral contem-
porary experience. In this sequence, the military music does not only serve
to evoke memories of the past, but to refer to the protagonist’s current
reality and a possible threatening future; the ideologies and consequences
of the nineteenth and twentieth century continue to re-verberate in the
on-stage performance. On a cinematic level, this film thus reflects the min-
imalist definition of memory provided by Richard Terdiman: “Memory is
the past made present.”13
Such simultaneity of past and present is not only realized on an acous-
tic level but also on a visual one. Akin does not arrange the scenic images
successively. Instead, letting the room spin around Üner (see Fig. 7.2)
and by visually and auditorily superimposing the different kinds of music,
he instead circularly interweaves one with the other and thereby practi-
cally puts into view what is metaphorically often referred to as a “spiral
13
Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 3.
Fig. 7.2 Spinning room

(The Evil Old Songs, dir.
Fatih Akin)
of violence.” Playing with this metaphor, Akin’s editing technique gives a

visual and auditory impression of the continuity of violence.14
Employing these particular technical devices, Akin reminds the viewer
that the “evil” tendencies of nationalism and intolerance embrace centu-
ries. Therefore, they pose a persistent threat to the democratic and peace-
ful community of Europe, a threat that must be opposed. Akin draws
attention to the persistent threat of militaristic and national zeal to the
entire continent represented by these songs. He also hints at the fact
that the destructive experiences of nationalism should not be regarded
as simply belonging to the past. On the contrary, memory practice and
future vision in The Evil Old Songs constitute a kind of double helix. They
are closely connected, not in a one-dimensional and linear way, but in a
manner that stands out for its multiple perspectives and references. This
filmic constellation resonates with what Ann Rigney theoretically calls
“the bringing together of the legacies of the past and the complexities
of the present.”15 As she argues, the function of a mnemonic dealing
with the past is “to provide an imaginative and cognitive resource for
14
The composition of visual and auditory effects in the initial shot of the film foreshadows
this recurring threat: while the first information boards illustrate the film’s title Die alten
bösen Lieder [The Evil Old Songs] background music of military choirs singing “Wir kommen
wieder” [We’ll be back] from the military song of the same name is played. Consequently,
the first seconds of the film already include the semantic nucleus of what Akin develops artis-
tically throughout the short film.
15
128 E.M. ESSELING
understanding contemporary realities.”16 Accordingly, past and present

must not be conceived of as monolithically enclosed mnemonic entities
but instead as existing in a cross-referencing relationship.
In Akin’s cinematic future vision of Europe, the past—or, more pre-
cisely, the question of how to come to terms with the past—is eminently
important. Given its references to German literary and musical traditions,
and the allusions to the history of German military aggression, Akin’s film
seems at first glance to deal primarily with national memory discourses and
the specific German task of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms
with the past). However, in the following section of this chapter, I con-
sider how Akin’s short film about Europe’s future transcends such national
frameworks and also ask how, and by whom, such transnational memory
processes can be realized. Akin’s film thus touches upon the question of
memory agency and thereby broadens what might be regarded as a par-
ticularly national, German memory scape to the transnational, European
level of the overall project.
Memory Agency: Transnational Dynamics

and the Role of Art
Discourses surrounding European integration and the construction of

a unified European community are closely connected to the question of
memory. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that Akin takes up this par-
ticular concern in his contribution to Visions of Europe, a project explic-
itly intended to accompany the process of European expansion. In the
context of European unification this memory is often conceptualized as a
“common memory,” one that serves as the mnemonic base of all identity
challenges confronting the new community. This notion of “common
memory,” however, is not as one-dimensional as it may appear at first sight.
The ambivalence inherent in the idea of a so-called “common memory”
is perfectly expressed in a German neologism: in their monograph Der
Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung Anne Lang und Claus Leggewie
coined the concept of “geteilte Erinnerung.”17 The adjective geteilt means
both “shared” and “divided” and thus refers simultaneously to both a
16
Ann Rigney, “Transforming Memory and the European Project,” New Literary History
43, no. 4 (2012): 607–28. 624.
17
Schlachtfeld wird besichtigt (Munich: Beck, 2011).
shared and a divided memory. Or as the Swiss writer Adolf Muschg puts it,
using the plural: “What holds Europe together and divides it are at heart
the same thing: common memories.”18 This ambiguous implication hints
at the challenge confronting European memory processes. Rigney out-
lines these difficulties and transfers them to the European context, asking:
“[H]ow can one generate a sense of connectedness between groups who
have not traditionally figured prominently in each other’s identity narra-
tives or have been excluded from them, but who now belong together
for better or for worse as ‘intimate others’ and fellow citizens within the
EU?”19
As Rigney suggests, the answer to the challenges of negotiating shared,
but nevertheless heterogeneous, European memories is to be found in
the “particular agency of the arts.”20 In view of the complex relationship
between memory and identity, Rigney calls for looking “at memory prac-
tices in productive, performative, and dynamic terms as a cultural activ-
ity that has the potential to forge new connections between people and
to cross borders.” Rigney asserts the arts “have a singularly important
role to play in the production of new forms of connectedness across the
boundaries of imagined communities.”21 She concretizes this further by
contending that the arts play “a role as mediators or ‘connectors’ between
different mnemonic communities, be these defined nationally, ethnically or
in other terms.”22 Correspondingly, the arts are regarded as independent
from established and restrictive memory narratives. It is their imaginative
and creative character that enables them to generate other memories than
those along inherited lines by providing “an experimental space bring-
ing into play new actors and unfamiliar voices that fall outside dominant
discourses.”23 Accordingly, arts are to be conceptualized as dynamic vehi-
cles uniting the old and new nations of the expanding EU and as fostering
common identity narratives.
18
Adolf Muschg, “‘Core Europe’: Thoughts About the European Identity,” in Old Europe,
New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations After the Iraq War, ed. Daniel Levy, Max
Pensky, and John Torpey (London; New York: Verso, 2005), 21–27. 26.
19
Rigney, “Transforming Memory and the European Project,” 620.
20
21
Ann Rigney, “Ongoing: Changing Memory and the European Project,” in Transnational
Memory, Circulation, Articulation, Scales, ed. Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney (Berlin; New
York, NY: De Gruyter, 2014), 339–59. 353.
22
Rigney, “Ongoing,” 353.
23
Rigney, “Ongoing,” 353.
130 E.M. ESSELING
This optimistic demand placed on art as a tool for unification seems

to have been taken on board by the Visions of Europe project, which was
initiated to support the European integrative process in 2004. The initial
theatrical release of the omnibus film was planned to coincide with the
official day of EU enlargement, as the film’s producers relied on the quali-
ties of art to facilitate communication throughout the recently expanded
continental community and to potentially foster a common narrative.
It is perhaps not surprising that it was specifically a filmic project that
was charged with such a task. In terms of production, reception, and dis-
tribution, cinema has always been a transnational medium. Both Astrid
Erll and Ann Rigney assert the centrality of cinema as a powerful vehicle
for memory culture.24 As Rigney notes, “[Film] arguably travel[s] more
easily than historiography does.”25 Writing specifically on the European
context, she considers how films have contributed to a dynamic circula-
tion and exchange of (mnemonic) narratives beyond national borders.26 In
The Europeanization of Cinema: Interzones and Imaginative Communities
Randall Halle investigates the trajectories of such mnemonic exchanges,
asserting “that transnationalism in Europe is not leading to a cultural
space unified along the same model of nation-state”27 but rather to what
he calls the “interzone.” Notably, the term “interzone” does not refer
to stable areas between separate national entities. In Halle’s concept the
interzone instead describes flexible and traversable spheres of time and
space. It is “a material and a psychical terrain and it designates a space
in which divergent communities of people actually come into contact.”28
The interzone is a metaphorical space: it “is not a perfect union; it is
not a union at all. It is a tentative communication that can double space
and shift time, bind distant places, and give separated individuals a sense
of possible community.”29 For Halle, cinema is one of the predominant
24
Astrid Erll and Stephanie Wodianka, “Einleitung: Phänomenologie und Methodologie
des Erinnerungsfilms,” in Film und kulturelle Erinnerung. Plurimediale Konstellationen, ed.
Astrid Erll and Stephanie Wodianka (Berlin; New York, NY: De Gruyter, 2008), 1–20. 1. Erll
herself mentions the significance of film art for memory processes stating that film can be
considered as the “Leitmedium” of cultures of remembrance.
25
26
Rigney, “Ongoing,” 353. Here, Rigney considers the distribution of movies as a knit-
pattern in the circulation and exchange of narratives within the European cultural space.
27
Randall Halle, The Europeanization of Cinema: Interzones and Imaginative Communities
(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 5.
28
Halle, The Europeanization of Cinema, 9.
29
artistic modes of communication in such interzones, it is the “privileged

medium for the imagining of communities.”30 Considering such observa-
tions it is hardly surprising that a project intended to foster community in
times of European expansion draws on the cinematic medium. With the
mandatory shooting-format of 16:9, which is compatible with television,
the films can reach many citizens in all European member-states, television
being a widely available and easily accessible medium. These preconditions
supported the desire to bring into contact different visions of Europe and
to thereby transcend national boundaries.
To some extent, this approach practically implements what the cur-
rent president of Germany, Joachim Gauck, argued for in his “Speech
on the Prospects for the European Idea.” There he states that it is espe-
cially through such transnational communication that European identity
processes could be supported. With a view to providing practical sugges-
tions for a forum for this endeavor, he calls for an extended and updated
model of the traditional agora. In ancient Greek city-states the agora was
the central meeting-place where both cultural festivities and public dis-
cussions about shared sociopolitical conditions took place. Gauck takes
up this ancient idea of a place that offers the possibility for both cultural
practice and political dialogue. However, by adjusting it to the structures
of a transnational alliance, he transfers it from the sociopolitical reality
of an ancient city-state to that of current Europe. As a forum for discus-
sion and negotiation it would contribute to transcending national bor-
ders or restrictions connecting the particular members: “[W]e need an
agora. It would disseminate knowledge, help to develop a European civic
spirit and also act as a corrective when national media adopt a nationalistic
approach and report on neighbouring countries without sensitivity or real
knowledge, thus encouraging prejudices.”31 Interestingly, in his vision, it
is a European television channel that could serve as a twenty-first-century
agora: “Today we need an extended model. Perhaps our media could pro-
duce an innovation to foster more Europe, perhaps like an ARTE channel
for everyone.”32 By shifting the concept of the ancient stabile agora to the
dynamic and medial sphere of film it undergoes a process of mobilization
30
31
Joachim Gauck, “Europe: Renewing Confidence—Strengthening Commit-ment” (Speech,
Schloss Bellevue, February 22, 2014), 11, http://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/
Reden/EN/JoachimGauck/Reden/2013/132222-Europe.html;jsessionid=965D0227129C
1EE02B821EC54B3DB369.2_cid379?nn=1891680.
32
Gauck, “Europe: Renewing Confidence – Strengthening Commitment,” 11.
132 E.M. ESSELING
and pluralization, thus adjusting it to the sociopolitical condition of the

enlarging EU. By pointing to ARTE, a transnational TV-channel focusing
on culture and the arts in Europe, he emphasizes the relevance of arts and
culture for the unifying process.
Gauck’s notion of art as a transnational agora for the promotion of
European integration and identity is undoubtedly optimistic. His call for
an “ARTE for everyone,” that is, for an open and wide-ranging artistic
forum, reveals that the virtual agora is meant to be a participative model
in which many people can communicate. This concept mirrors the fun-
damental premise of the Visions of Europe project that accompanied the
enlargement of the EU in May 2004. In several respects it also informs
Fatih Akin’s film, which reflects on the importance of art both theoreti-
cally and on a meta-level. As previously noted, the film’s textual basis is
a poem, performed with the musical accompaniment of a quartet of cel-
lists and an industrial musician in Hamburg’s Deutsches Schauspielhaus,
Germany’s largest theater. The intersection of various artistic media—film,
music, literature, and theater—makes art and artistic performance central
themes of the film. In this way, director Akin presents a very personal
vision of a European future informed by artistic production and reflec-
tion. Correspondingly, the film not only links Akin’s vision of Europe with
historical events, but also suggests ways in which this past can be remem-
bered. The active contribution of art—and artists—and their participative-
performative potential is presented as vital. In this way, the short film
considers not only questions of memory but also of memory agency. In
this context it is significant that the individuals appearing in Akin’s contri-
bution and named in the opening credits are all artists, a notable contrast
to many of the other films in Visions of Europe that feature politicians
or bureaucrats. The protagonists in Akin’s short film—actress Idil Üner,
musician F.M. Einheit, and the anonymous cellists—all perform live on
the theater’s stage. The author Heinrich Heine and musician Robert
Schumann also play an implicit role in the film by providing the corre-
sponding textual and tonal material. In this context, the director Akin
himself must also be mentioned, although he does not appear in the initial
credits but only in the official intro-credit of the short film. However, the
composers and performers of the military songs are not mentioned in the
opening credits and, therefore, do not seem to be part of the sphere of arts
as Akin understands it. For Akin, they do not belong to the artistic ensem-
ble that in his vision of the future continent appear visibly and actively on
stage. The anonymous soldiers who chant the military songs and evoke
the many associated memories appear merely as an invisible, albeit threat-

ening, collective. In contrast, the other singers and artists are presented
as clearly identified individuals who challenge this display of nationalist
ideology with their artistic production or performance and interrupt the
continuity of the “evil old songs.”
Another striking aspect of the artists showcased in this short film is that,
along with Akin himself, they all position themselves between, or even
transcend, various national and cultural affiliations. It is significant that
Akin chooses Heinrich Heine as a literary source. The German author and
journalist Heinrich Heine, who spent 25 years as an expatriate in Paris,
is famous for strictly refusing nationalist concepts and instead voicing his
desire to overcome nationalist and exclusionary interests through his art.
With his transnational cinematic production and reception, Akin positions
himself in the poet’s tradition. The artists coincide in not identifying them-
selves primarily with a single, specific affiliation. While for Heine the oscil-
lation between Germany and France33 influenced his b iography and his
oeuvre, for Akin the twofold affiliation to Germany and Turkey, its culture
and language, characterizes his art.34 This multiplicity of cultural influ-
ence is expressed in the striking central scene in which the film abruptly
transitions from black and white to color. While blue, red, and green lights
illuminate the large stage, Idil Üner performs a Turkish dance and sings
passages from the Turkish song “Ağla Sevdam” [“Cry, My Darling”] (see
Fig. 7.3).35 Visually, acoustically, and linguistically the sequence contrasts
sharply with the rest of the film.
With the actress’s more tranquil expression, the color sequence mark-
edly differs from the sinister black-and-white images, and the accompany-
ing harmonious rhythms contrast with the militaristic and staccato-like
marches. There also is a close connection between the texts of “Ağla
Sevdam” and Heine’s poem since both deal with the same topics of love
and pain. This parallelism in terms of content is striking, especially because
it is not evident at first sight; on the contrary, on the visual level the per-
formances of the Turkish song and German poem are constructed with
33
At least until the end of World War II, Germany and France constituted a pair of nations
often referred to as archenemies due to the hostile bilateral relations that were based on the
upcoming German nationalist attitude and self-perception as nation.
34
It is only at first glance that there seems to be a twofold dimension. By connecting
Heine’s French-German affiliation with Akin’s Turkish-German one, this dimension acquires
a European range and meaning.
35
Like the German poem, the Turkish song is also not translated.
134 E.M. ESSELING
Fig. 7.3 Üner sings “Ağla Sevdam” in color sequence (The Evil Old Songs, dir.
Fatih Akin)
noticeable differences. For instance, Üner’s performance of the Turkish

song appears in color and she remains in one position on the stage, sways
to the music, and does not look directly into the camera. In contrast, her
performance of the poem appears in black and white as Üner is shown
moving through the theater gazing intensely into the camera.36 With its
combination of visual difference and thematic parallel, the film plays with
images of a European “Other,” ultimately refusing notions of antagonistic
difference. Instead, the Turkish song and the German poem both appear
as a positive artistic contrast to the sinister military music.
By subtly underlining commonalities without erasing difference, this
color scene mirrors arguments such as those made by Rigney and Gauck
that the arts can serve as an arena for intercultural exchange. Such a read-
ing is strengthened if one considers the source of the Turkish music in
Akin’s film. Viewers familiar with Fatih Akin’s oeuvre will recognize the
36
The black-and-white setting in this context is a European rather than a merely German
context. This becomes apparent considering that no specific nations are mentioned explicitly
in the film itself. The snippets of nationalist music, which Akin arranges as a frame for the
poem at the beginning, only mention the unspecific fatherland (“Vaterland”) and culminate
in the choric repetition of the word “Europa.” Therefore, it is “Europe” that constitutes the
film’s horizon and which can be seen as the filmic vision’s vanishing point.
song “Ağla Sevdam” from a key scene in Akin’s Head-On [Gegen die
Wand] (2004), in which the female protagonist, Sibel, attempts suicide.
The connection between Head-On and The Evil Old Songs is made even
stronger by the fact that actress Idil Üner also appeared in Head-On,
where she performs Turkish songs that function as a sort of chorus, remi-
niscent of classical drama, that interrupt the narrative and divide it into
five acts. Turkish cinema buffs, however, will know that “Ağla Sevdam,”
written by Yusuf Takşim, did not first appear in Akin’s film, but rather
in director Mustafa Altioklar’s 1997 film Ağir Roman [Cholera Street].
Deniz Göktürk argues that Ağir Roman served as an inspiration for
Akin’s celebrated film,37 which went on to win the Silver Bear at the
Berlinale. As the first German-directed film to claim the award in 18
years, Head-On cemented Akin’s status as auteur, but also established the
artistic significance of Turkish-German cinema and, by extension, more
self-consciously transnational cinema in the German canon. The choice
of this particular piece of music, which has travelled from popular Turkish
to German cinema, only underscores the theme of the performing arts as
a transnational sphere for the exchange of ideas and the forging of new
identities and ways of belonging.
Finally, one can also read the insertion of the Turkish song on a more
concrete political level. The performance of the Turkish song could also
have been a reference to ongoing debates about Turkey’s accession to
the EU. Akin himself suggests such a reading in the press release for the
film in which he states: “[The film] wants to remind the community that
there are even more countries knocking on the door, including Turkey.”38
Akin’s film not only focuses on the question of integration, as its historical
context in May 2004 might suggest. Instead, the German contribution
also reminds how the process of enlargement is always accompanied with
the discourse of exclusion.
In sum, Akin’s The Evil Old Songs interweaves memories of the past
with visions for the future. While at first glance Akin seems to trade on
37
Deniz Göktürk, “Sound Bridges: Transnational Mobility as Ironic Melodrama,” in
European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe, ed.
Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg (Basingstoke, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010), 215–34. 224.
38
Since December 1999 Turkey has been an officially recognized candidate for full mem-
bership in the EU. In May 2004, the date of the film’s release, the EU was about to decide
whether or not to take up negotiations with Turkey. Negotiations began in October 2005
and are still ongoing.
136 E.M. ESSELING
what Claus Leggewie has called Europe’s “negative foundational myth,”39

namely collective memories of war and totalitarianism, his vision is not
limited to this past-oriented perspective, but also includes a more future-
oriented dimension. The film emphasizes the necessity of overcoming
the nationalist, racist, or xenophobic attitudes that led to the catastro-
phes of the twentieth century in order to foster a transnational, tolerant,
and peaceful European community. The film suggests that art significantly
contributes to this process by facilitating the transnational perspectives
that are necessary for a collective European memory process.
39
Leggewie and Lang, Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung, 15.
CHAPTER 8
Beyond Foundational Myths: Images

from the Margins of the European Memory
Map
Christian Sieg
Over the past decades the European memory map has been re-drawn
several times to accommodate numerous additional European lieux
de mémoire, including not only actual geographical sites like Istanbul,
Versailles, Rome, Srebrenica, Algeria, or the Berlin Wall, but also non-
spatial elements such as myths, religions, ideas, literature, and values. Due
to their diversity and quantity, these various inscriptions of the European
memory map have become a topic for scholars of the memory boom
who consider collective remembrance as a way to unify Europe. Claus
Leggewie and Anne Lang, for example, are convinced that a European
identity requires a shared European memory.1 Like many other scholars,
they point out the obstacles that would have to be overcome in order to
achieve a shared European memory. One of the most pressing issues in this
1
Schlachtfeld wird besichtigt (Munich: Beck, 2011).
C. Sieg (*)
Germanistisches Institut, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster,
Münster, Germany
e-mail: christian.sieg@wwu.de

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39152-6_8
138 C. SIEG
regard is the lasting impact of the historical East-West divide in Europe,

which entails that European memory has to reflect that Eastern Europe
has not only experienced the Holocaust, but also the gulag. Timothy
Snyder, for instance, argues that the “absence of a common European
narrative, embracing both east and west, leads to failures of understanding
and solidarity.”2 Against this backdrop, this chapter turns to Ilija Trojanow
and Christian Muhrbeck’s Wo Orpheus begraben liegt [Where Orpheus Lies
Buried] (2013),3 which combines text and photography in order to reflect
on memory and the act of remembering. First, I argue that Trojanow and
Muhrbeck scrutinize the use of foundational myths to build a European
identity. Pointing to the history of heroic commemoration in Bulgaria and
its inherent power relations, they challenge the use of memory for identity
politics, thereby questioning the very idea that a common memory should
foster European unification. Second, I show how the book deconstructs
binary oppositions like center/margin by emphasizing that the periph-
ery should not be overlooked in the process of European integration.
Trojanow and Muhrbeck answer the call for a unified European memory
culture by warning us not to take recourse to the old, national recipes in
order to found a transnational European memory culture. Rather than
searching for a shared European essence on the basis of cultural traditions
reaching back to Greek antiquity and, consequently, conceiving Bulgaria
as the place where Orpheus lies buried, transnational practices of remem-
brance should valorize differences. Depicting multiple pasts and trouble-
some memory politics, Wo Orpheus begraben liegt engages with its readers
in a dialogic fashion—thereby exemplifying a transnational way of remem-
bering that acknowledges diversity in its very aesthetic practice.
The Diversity of European Memory

Memory studies have stressed the political dimension of their object of
study from the very beginning. Therefore remembrance on both the
national and the transnational level4 has been scrutinized for its political
2
Timothy Snyder, “Balancing the Books,” Eurozine, 2005, http://www.eurozine.com/
articles/2005-05-03-snyder-en.html.
3
Ilija Trojanow and Christian Muhrbeck, Wo Orpheus begraben liegt (Munich: Hanser,
2013). At present, there is no English translation available. All translations are the author’s.
4
For some crucial discussion of transnational memory, see: Chiara De Cesari and Ann
Rigney, Transnational Memory, Circulation, Articulation, Scales (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014);
BEYOND FOUNDATIONAL MYTHS: IMAGES FROM THE MARGINS... 139
significance. On the one hand, many studies have drawn attention to the
various ways in which remembrance paved the way for the nation state.
As Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger pointed out three decades ago,
some national traditions such as the tradition of the German empire were
actually invented, as the memorial politics of William II illustrate.5 On the
other hand, scholars observe that transnational actors like the European
Union (EU) are challenged by a wealth and plurality of memories, which
raises political issues. As Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth succinctly
state, “memories about Europe are contested: there is not one history
but many.”6 The political dimension of this memory contest results from
the attempt to create a “usable past,” for example, when remembrance is
employed to serve processes of national or transnational identification.7 As
Jeffrey Olick defines it, a “‘usable past’ is thus an invention or at least a
retrospective reconstruction to serve the needs of the present.”8 Scholarly
contributions to the discourse on European memory are often part and
parcel of attempts to render the past usable. Since European identity
is still weak,9 many scholars emphasize the normative, political dimen-
sion of their undertaking—some even in their very title, like Leggewie
History and Theory 53, no. 1 (2014): 24–44; Jan Assmann, “Globalization, Universalism,
and the Erosion of Cultural Memory,” in Memory in a Global Age, ed. Aleida Assmann and
Sebastian Conrad, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies (Basingstoke; New York, NY:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 121–37.
5
See: Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge;
New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
6
Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth, “Introduction: A European Memory?” in A European
Memory?: Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (New York, NY; Oxford:
Berghahn, 2010), 1–20. 2.
7
The term “usable past” was also used by the US literary critic Van Wyck Brooks in his
1918 essay “On Creating a Usable Past.” See: Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable
Past,” in The Early Years: A Selection from His Works, 1908–1921, ed. Claire Sprague (New
York, NY: Harper & Row, 1968), 219–26.
8
Jeffrey K. Olick, “From Usable Pasts to the Return of the Repressed,” The Hedgehog
Review 9, no. 2 (2007): 19–31. 19.
9
The search for identity responds to a situation that is experienced as crisis. According to
Stråth, this holds true on a European level as well: “The concept of a European identity was
launched in 1973, at the European Community summit in Copenhagen. This concept was
advanced and elaborated in a context marked by an experience lack of identity and the ero-
sion of interpretative frameworks and orientation. If there had been a sense of identity, there
would have been no need to invent the concept as a means by which to induce a new com-
munity in the Community.” Bo Stråth, “Methodological and Substantive Remarks on Myth,
Memory and History in the Construction of a European Community,” German Law Journal
6 (2005): 255–71. 261.
140 C. SIEG
and Lang with their book Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung:
Ein Schlachtfeld wird besichtigt [The Fight for European Remembrance:
Inspecting a Battlefield]. The militant language of the title already hints
at the political agenda that Leggewie and Lang follow with their book,
which is to strengthen the European unification process by formulating a
shared memory. For them, the Holocaust is central to this shared memory
and can serve as a “negative foundational myth.”10 Leggewie and Lang’s
position is far from unique. In fact, there is no shortage of normative utter-
ances in the discourse on European memory. Jan Werner Müller notes that
“European memory culture … is an integral component of a postnational
(or better, even though not eloquently phrased: postnationalistic) process,
which does not abolish nation states and national differences, but rather
transforms political cultures from the outside or within in liberal ways.”11
Many commentators have claimed that the divided European memory
map hinders the quest for a post-national and united Europe. Leggewie
also points to this division, which is illustrated by how important the
recent past under Soviet occupation is for Eastern Europeans—and how
irrelevant it is to Western Europe.12 Benoît Challand and Chiara Bottici
draw an accordingly divided European memory map:
If the Holocaust is a fundamental point for a collective Western European

memory, other themes occupy the forefront of collective debates in Central
and Eastern European countries. Such themes include the trauma of for-
eign occupations and dismemberment of certain countries by Nazi and then
Soviet troops (e.g., Poland, the Baltic States), the gulag experience, and the
terrible recollection of Holodomor, the 1932–3 famine that struck large
parts of the Ukraine as well as other regions of the Soviet Union.13
Challand and Bottici do not foreground the suffering in Eastern Europe in

order to equate one trauma with the other. Rather, they point to a prob-
lem that is at the very heart of the notion of “foundational myths.” The
concept implies homogeneity in so far as only one major event can serve
10
Leggewie and Lang, Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung, 15.
11
Jan-Werner Müller, “Europäische Erinnerungspolitik Revisited,” Eurozine, 2007,
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/article_2007-10-18-jwmuller-de.html.
12
Claus Leggewie, “Battlefield Europe: Transnational Memory and European Identity,”
Eurozine, 2009, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-04-28-leggewie-en.html.
13
Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand, Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory, and Identity
(New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 74–75.
as foundational myth. But which one: the Holocaust, the gulag, or one
of the many others atrocities of the past?14 Challand and Bottici warn that
if Europe privileges the memory of the Holocaust, the “resulting identity
may not be so easily accepted by Central and Eastern Europeans.”15
In fact, the division of European memory is reflected in the way in which
European countries commemorate the victims of the atrocities mentioned
above. While many member states participate in the International Day of
Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust on January
27, others choose to commemorate the European Day of Remembrance
for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism on August 23. While there is noth-
ing wrong in commemorating different catastrophes of the twentieth cen-
tury, problems arise when “there is a diffuse impression [in Central and
Eastern Europe] that a certain past, as well as a certain way of dealing
with it, is being imposed on the region.”16 To be sure, these tensions
result from present EU politics, but they are fueled by the search for an
exclusive foundational myth. Instead of fostering European unification,
memory might therefore in fact divide Europe. This unintended political
impact of remembrance should alert us to the problematic aspects of the
memory boom. In the context of competing and dividing commemora-
tion practices, Aleida Assmann suggests that we differentiate between the
diverse memories of the European past and the comparable lessons to
be learned from them: “To neutralize the malignant potential of memo-
ries, a line must be drawn between what has been experienced and what
follows from the experience in terms of interpretation, evaluation, claim,
and consequence.”17 Politics, in other words, should not directly follow
from memories but from the arguments that build on them. After all,
interpretations can be more easily shared than memories.
14
As a result, scholars have also de-emphasized the importance of memory and are point-
ing to the ways in which Europe should deal with historical differences and differences in
historiography: “Since pluralism is a value in itself within Europe—East and West Europeans
can agree to disagree on whether the crimes of Communism can be compared with the
crimes of National Socialism or not.” Siobhan Kattago, “Agreeing to Disagree on the
Legacies of Recent History: Memory, Pluralism and Europe after 1989,” European Journal
of Social Theory 12 (2009): 375–95. 390.
15
Bottici and Challand, Imagining Europe, 76.
16
Bottici and Challand, Imagining Europe, 81.
17
Aleida Assmann, “Europe: A Community of Memory?,” Bulletin of the German
Historical Institute 40, no. 1 (2007): 11–25. 20.
142 C. SIEG
Text and Image in the Act of Remembering
Memory plays a major role in Trojanow and Muhrbeck’s Wo Orpheus

begraben liegt. On its back cover the book informs its readers in bold red
letters that it deals with “myth and everyday life at the outer frontiers of
Europe.” In the text, the authors make references to Soviet occupation,
World War II, communist rule in Bulgaria, different religious traditions
of the country, and to Bulgaria’s inheritance from what we usually refer
to as “Greek” antiquity. Even more important than these allusions to the
past are the aesthetic ways in which the book evokes the past. Wo Orpheus
begraben liegt is composed of photographs by Muhrbeck and fictional sto-
ries by Trojanow, himself born in Bulgaria. Both the text and images refer
to the past, with the images depicting the traces of the past in contempo-
rary Bulgaria. Recent scholarship on photography emphasizes the politics
of the photographic image and analyzes the ways in which photographs
impact and alter remembrance. As Gerhard Paul concisely summarizes,
“to start with, images are capable of intervening in the historical process
and of making history; next, they are able to shape the ways in which we
remember precisely this historical process, that is, they write history in the
literal sense; and finally, images possess a history of their own, a history
of images.”18 In the following, I analyze Wo Orpheus begraben liegt with
regard to the interrelation of image and text in order to show how the
book reflects on remembrance as a social practice.
In the “third phase” of memory studies, the risk of reifying memory has
been addressed from several angles. As Olick states: “Not only do we treat
memory as a thing, but we also treat memories as clearly bounded enti-
ties representing or embodying a distant historical past.”19 Olick’s critique
takes into account that in the processes of constituting collective memory,
narratives do not simply represent a given past but actually construct the
object of representation in the first place. While individual recollections of
subjective past experiences may in some cases function without language,
18

My translation. Gerhard Paul, ed., Bilder, die Geschichte schrieben (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011). See also: Dagmar Barnouw, Germany 1945: Views of War
and Violence (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009); Cornelia Brink, Ikonen der
Vernichtung: Öffentlicher Gebrauch von Fotografien aus nationalsozialistischen
Konzentrationslagern nach 1945 (Berlin: Akademie, 1998); Jeffrey K. Olick, The Politics of
Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (New York, NY; London:
Routledge, 2007), 104.
19
Olick, The Politics of Regret, 104.
collective remembering takes place in social frames. As social acts, they

are impacted by other discourses, narratives, and practices. In their pro-
grammatic essay “Entangled Memory: Toward a Third Wave in Memory
Studies,” Gregor Feindt et al. argue along similar lines. For example, they
argue that lieux de mémoire such as Versailles should not be understood
as physical entities but rather as signs. Their meaning is in no way fixed
but rather unfolds in discourses that are always socio-historically embed-
ded. By suggesting the term “mnemonic signifier”20 [emphasis in original],
Feindt et al. draw attention to the linguistic nature of the objectification
inherent in acts of remembering. In memorial discourse “Versailles,” they
argue, functions in symbolic ways. As a sign, its meaning does not rely
on the referent but is produced by a play of differences within discourses,
which themselves are influenced by their socio-historical context. The
same signifier, thus, may have different signifieds.
These reflections on the constructed nature of collective memory serve
as a starting point for my analysis of Wo Orpheus begraben liegt because
they sharpen our understanding of the use of photographs in acts of
remembrance. In addition, criticism of the specific ways in which pho-
tographs are used for representation also needs to be taken into account.
Susan Sontag, for example, criticizes the “image-world” in which photog-
raphy serves as a means of control over objects: “In its simplest form, we
have in a photograph surrogate possession of a cherished person or thing,
a possession which gives photographs some of the character of unique
objects…. [T]hrough image-making and image-duplicating-machines, we
can acquire something as information (rather than experience).”21 Sontag’s
description of the reification process meets precisely the unease that the
third phase of memory studies expresses with reified memories. Therefore,
we should analyze the photographs in Wo Orpheus begraben liegt with cau-
tion. Do they treat memory as a piece of information like Sontag suggests?
Do they produce the illusion that we possess the past? Sontag bases her
argument on the specific modes of photographic representation. In con-
trast to paintings, photographs reproduce their object in continuous ways.
In the terminology of Charles Sanders Peirce, they are indexical signs that
are not arbitrary but rather stand in a causal relationship to the object
they represent. As an example for such an indexical sign, Peirce refers to
20
21
Susan Sontag, “The Image World,” in Visual Culture: The Reader, ed. Jessica Evans and
Stuart Hall (London; Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1999), 80–94. 81.
144 C. SIEG
the footprint.22 Roland Barthes likewise emphasizes this characteristic of

photographs: “Of all structures of information, the photograph appears as
the only one that is exclusively constituted and occupied by a ‘denoted’
message, a message that totally exhausts its mode of existence.”23 Barthes
understands the photograph as a message that focuses solely on the refer-
ent without using a code. Yet, at the same time, Barthes claims that it is
precisely by means of this “objectivity” that the photograph “has every
chance of being mythical.”24 For Barthes, myth has to be understood as
a semiotic system in which “the connoted (or coded) message develops
on the basis of a message without a code” [emphasis in original].25 The
connotation procedures Barthes has in mind do not necessarily involve
language but range from modifying the quasi-natural object by stereo-
typical arrangements—for example, a pose—to the aesthetics of picture
taking. Yet, language can be part of these coding mechanisms, as is the
case with press photographs that are supplemented by captions, headings,
and articles. The “historical reversal” that Barthes highlights in this regard
helps to explain the way in which photographs refer to the past. Barthes
claims that “the image no longer illustrates the words; it is now the words
which, structurally, are parasitic on the image” [emphasis in the original].26
If texts are understood to merely “illustrate” the images of the past, we
may very well speak of reification, since in this perspective the past becomes
an object whose meaning seems to be self-contained and independent of
our point of view. How do text and image then interact in Wo Orpheus
begraben liegt?
First of all, there are no captions in Muhrbeck and Trojanow’s book.
The book starts and ends with double-sided photographs that are neither
thematically ordered nor presented in ways that make them part of a nar-
rative structure. They simply stand on their own. In contrast, the images
between the title page and acknowledgements are grouped in chapters
that bear headings like “Clanship,” “Danubian fishers,” “Homecoming,”
and “Waiting.” These images are thematically arranged and sometimes
depict a social milieu. However, the stories do not illustrate these images,
22
Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Cambridge, MA: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974), 414.
23
Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image, Music, Text (New York, NY:
Hill and Wang, 1978), 15–31. 18.
24
Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” 19.
25
26
as a sentence at the very beginning of the book emphasizes: “The photo-

graphs from Bulgaria do not depict the persons described in the stories.”27
In other words, the referents of the photographs remain unknown to the
reader. This is not to say—as the back cover puts it—that the photographs
reveal an unknown, “unfamiliar,” and “astonishing world.” Muhrbeck’s
photographs certainly show scenes of Bulgarian everyday life that most
readers have not seen so far. They take account of the cultural and social
diversity in Bulgaria by depicting the social differences between urban
and rural Bulgaria or by pointing to religious practices both by Christians
and by the large Muslim minority of Bulgaria. At the same time, the
photographs avoid sensational revelations of a foreign culture. On the
contrary, many images share their themes and aesthetics with those pho-
tographs of (former) Eastern Europe that have been widely distributed
over the past two decades and are therefore not entirely unfamiliar to
the reader. These photographs show the ruins of socialist architecture,
abandoned and disassembled monuments of Communist heroes, derelict
houses, old television sets, harvesting people, and so on. While the shots
are fascinating due to the particular moments they capture, they nev-
ertheless follow familiar themes—and this familiarity is especially pres-
ent when the images deal with topics from the past. The following two
images illustrate how the book on the one hand presents photographs
that refer to the past in familiar ways, while on the other hand it refrains
from coding these photographs:
The image shown in Fig. 8.1 evokes the violent European past. On
the one hand, it reminds of the detention camps that the Soviet Army
used after the end of World War II, which brings the horror of the gulag
to mind.28 On the other hand, it might also capture one of the various
concentration camps the Nazis erected all over Europe.29 The picture does
27
Trojanow and Muhrbeck, Wo Orpheus begraben liegt, 22.
28
According to Tzvetan Todorov, there were nearly 100 camps in Bulgaria under
Communist rule. Tzvetan Todorov, Voices from the Gulag: Life and Death in Communist
Bulgaria (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 2.
29
While Bulgaria managed to save many Bulgarian Jews from extinction, concentration
camps were built in Dupnitsa and Gorna-Dzhumaia. Non-Bulgarian Jews from South-East
Europe were deported from there to Treblinka and other camps, where nearly all of them
died. For the role of these camps in the genocide of Greek Jews, see: Steven B. Bowman, The
Agony of Greek Jews, 1940-1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 80–94. For
a short summary of the events through which the majority of Bulgarian Jews could be saved,
see the entry “Bulgaria” in: Walter Laqueur and Judith T. Baumel-Schwartz, The Holocaust
Encyclopedia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
146 C. SIEG
Fig. 8.1 Barbed wire (Trojanow and Muhrbeck 116–7)
not allow the viewer to determine its referent. It commemorates the atroc-
ities of the past without giving information about the site that it actually
shows. For the reader/viewer, the many other pictures of concentration
and detention camps come to mind. The photographs that precede and
follow this image support this connotation procedure. The photograph on
the preceding page shows an embroidery work depicting Lenin and the
photograph on the following page displays the disassembled head of a mas-
sive communist statue. While the pictures evoke the communist past, they
refrain from providing clear messages. The embroidery and the remains of
a statue that is left alone in the vicinity of a bus stop are as much traces of
the past as they attest to the process of forgetting this past. The bus, and
not the statue, occupies the center of the photograph. Together with the
image reproduced above, the two photographs open the chapter entitled
“Homecoming.” The text accompanying the chapter avoids signifying the
past as well. Neither does it comment directly on the pictures nor does it
provide a story that could exemplify the past to which the pictures refer.
Rather the story focuses on a man who is released from prison and returns
home. Yet, we do not learn why he was imprisoned and what exactly hap-
pened in the past that might explain the unpleasant welcome he receives
from his sister-in-law. The images and text are all concerned with traces of
the past, but neither of the two media supplies a code by means of which
the meaning of the past could be determined.
By combining rural and urban themes, the image in Fig. 8.2 asserts
the presence of the past as well. The photographed buildings show the
typical traits of socialist architecture. They remind—not only the German
reader—of the so-called Plattenbauten, that is, the standardized high-rises
that were built in many socialist countries and symbolized the promise
of a socialist modernity. The houses in this picture are abandoned and
merely form the background of a rural scene in which a shepherd traverses
the ruins with his sheep. This post-industrial theme is taken up by other
shots as well. For instance, the photographs of the chapter “Danubian
Fishers” contrast industrial landscapes with rather primitive fishing prac-
tices. Considering the rural landscape of many photographs, the question
may be raised whether we are dealing here with the creation of a ste-
reotypical other. “As in the case of the Orient,” Maria Todorova claims,
Fig. 8.2 High-rises and shepherd (Trojanow and Muhrbeck 14–5)
“the Balkans have served as a repository of negative characteristics against

which a positive and self-congratulatory image of the ‘European’ and the
148 C. SIEG
‘West’ has been constructed.”30 In her important contribution, Todorova

is mainly concerned with texts. Yet, without doubt photographs can oper-
ate in similar ways. In Camera Lucida Barthes demonstrates how a photo-
graph from Nicaragua is regarded in such a way as to confirm the viewer’s
prior and stereotypical knowledge: “[R]ebellion, Nicaragua, and all the
signs of both: wretched un-uniformed soldiers, ruined streets, corpses,
grief, the sun, and the heavy-lidded Indian eyes.”31 In order to confirm
stereotypes, a (photographic) message needs to be coded. However, in
Wo Orpheus begraben liegt texts and images irritate this form of auto-
matic reception. By depicting various traces of the past and manifold acts
of remembrance the photographs draw attention to the production of
meaning as such. Instead of capturing the past or conveying it with coded
messages, the photographs focus on mnemonic signifiers that need to be
interpreted.
Wo Orpheus begraben liegt differs from the genre of travel guides or
illustrated books as it evokes and plays with the discourses that inform
our understanding of photographs. Thus, the book does not capture the
past in objectifying and reifying ways, as Sontag’s critique of photogra-
phy suggests. Rather than focusing on the referent, the book anticipates
the hermeneutic horizon of the reader. It addresses our relation to the
past and, thereby, highlights remembrance as a practice that impacts our
understanding of the past. By linking the region to a famous mythological
character, the work’s title—Wo Orpheus begraben liegt —suggests that the
book is not primarily about “Bulgaria.” Rather, it addresses the ways in
which the German readership constructs—or fails to construct—Eastern
Europe. This dialogic dimension of the book becomes most obvious when
we take a look at the programmatically phrased and consumer-oriented
back cover copy: “Myth and everyday life on the outer frontiers of Europe
where archaic culture meets the post-socialist present.” This line stresses
the importance of memory and time for the contained pictures and sto-
ries—and what is more, it attests to the spatialization of time. The “outer
frontiers of Europe” are more than geographical co-ordinates. The cover
tells us that at Europe’s margin, local time is not in sync with the European
present and that different times are simultaneously present. If the picture
of the back cover (Fig. 8.3), which shows a donkey in front of an old
30
Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford; New York, NY: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 188.
31
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York, NY: Hill and
Wang, 1981), 26.
Fig. 8.3 Donkey and old airplane (Trojanow and Muhrbeck 98 and back cover)
airplane, is taken into account as well, this advertising strategy comes full
circle. It depicts how the memory of the Great War against Nazi-Germany
fades away, acquires a ghostly quality, and is displaced by a rural scene
which itself is reminiscent of older times—as the title stresses, these are
pictures of the region where Orpheus lies buried.
Muhrbeck’s photographs assemble mnemonic signifiers without
homogenizing them. They allude to various pasts without rendering them
into a historical narrative. As I will show in more detail below, in com-
bination with the text they ask questions about the ways in which we
remember and construct the past. Hence, what on first sight might be
seen as expressions of nostalgic longings for a place in which the past is still
present, actually deconstructs such wishes. Similar to the above captured
airplane memorial, the rural scene becomes legible as a mnemonic signifier
itself. It does not express something present but relies on absence like any
other sign. Thus, the book’s images and texts do not simply represent the
past but make us understand that we construct it.
150 C. SIEG
Politics of Remembrance
The past is present in several of Muhrbeck’s photographs throughout Wo

Orpheus begraben liegt. Yet, it is in particular in one chapter that the past
and questions concerning remembrance dominate. The very title of this
chapter—“Denkmalvordenker”—refers to the act of remembering. The
German compound noun is a complex play with words that can be divided
into two parts: “monument” (“Denkmal”) and “intellectual pioneer”
(“Vordenker”). Thus a “Denkmalvordenker” is a person who is at the
vanguard of thinking about monuments.32 The photographs of this chap-
ter address the past in several ways. Mostly, they contrast the present with
the past or refer to two different pasts. They all have in common that they
cannot be transformed into an evolutionary narrative. Rather than show-
ing a present that evolves from the past, they highlight the hiatus between
past and present. The image in Fig. 8.3, which shows a donkey grazing in
front of a warplane monument, exemplifies this representational strategy.
Other photographs juxtapose the war with folkloristic items, contrast a
casino with statues of Roman legionaries, or show how profane youth
culture occupies the once sacred space of national monuments. In contrast
to the other stories of the book, in this chapter Trojanow does not use the
depicted persons as personnel in his fictive stories but invents a narrator,
the aforementioned intellectual pioneer in thinking about monuments,
who takes part in the discourse that the photographs evoke.
Here, the narrator comments on Bulgaria’s memorial discourse that
aroused much political attention in the 1990s—in particular the contro-
versy about a memorial to the Soviet army in Plovtiv. This local dispute
about memorials, which gained national significance in 1997, refers to the
fight over the Alyosha Monument in Plovtiv between two youth groups.
As Nikolai Vukov explains, “[o]ver a period of several weeks, representa-
tives of two groups, Satanists and skinheads, waged battles, beating and
throwing stones at each other. Ordinary citizens who climbed the hill
were also in danger of being wounded and police intervention appeared
inevitable.”33 Trojanow alludes to the same events in a slightly different
32
You may also divide it into four parts: “Denk mal vor, Denker” which can be translated
into “Plan ahead, thinker.”
33
Nikolai Vukov, “Refigured Memories, Unchanged Representations: Post-Socialist
Monumental Discourse in Bulgaria,” in Zwischen Amnesie und Nostalgie: Die Erinnerung an
den Kommunismus in Südosteuropa, ed. Ulf Brunnbauer and Stefan Troebst (Cologne:
Böhlau, 2007), 71–86. 71.
context. Both groups, his narrator claims, aimed at reclaiming the memo-
rial site. Whereas the Satanists believed that they were seizing a place
where evil energy resided, the skinheads aimed to desecrate the memory
of their enemy, the Soviet army.
While the particulars of this controversy are not important for Wo
Orpheus begraben liegt, it is crucial to recognize that in the chapter
“Denkmalvordenker,” Muhrbeck and Trojanow comment on the politics
of remembrance. The photographic images, and the ways in which the
narrator comments on them, bring to the fore how we make use of the
past for present purposes. Thereby, they implicitly address the discourse
on memory that characterized the socialist epoch—both in Bulgaria and
in East Germany. As Vukov puts it for the Bulgarian context: “Undertaken
as early as the late 1940s as a systematic policy of sacralizing the special
dead, this discourse rigidly expanded over the following decades, over-
populating towns, villages, and mountain locations with monuments,
memorial sites, plaques, and commemorative signs.”34 Reminding their
German readers of socialist memorial politics through the photographs
and narrative of “Denkmalvordenker,” Muhrbeck and Trojanow empha-
size the political dimension of all the other pictures in the book that
depict traces of the past. Wo Orpheus begraben liegt does not simply depict
the past, but prompts us to question its significance today and the uses to
which the past is being put.
It is also in “Denkmalvordenker” that it becomes most obvious how
Wo Orpheus begraben liegt relates to foundational myths. As mentioned
above, Trojanow’s narrator engages in the discourse on the politics of
remembrance. Significantly, he does so in an ironic tone:
This country, you should know that, owes its foundation to the gout, yes,
the gout of a king, we want to be precise: gout in its late-stage. This calls
for an explanation? How right you are. King Constantine IV—you won’t
know him—the Bearded, as those who do not know about his gout call him,
otherwise he would certainly be known to History as the Gouted. In the
year 681, King Constantine IV from Constantinople set himself up to drive
back the invading hordes of Kahn Asparukh, to subjugate the barbarians at
the northwestern border.35
34
Vukov, “Refigured Memories, Unchanged Representations,” 71.
35
152 C. SIEG
The story goes on and finally concludes with the note that the campaign to
subjugate Kahn Asparukh’s troops had to be terminated due to the King’s
gout. As a result, the first Bulgarian Empire under the rule of Asparukh
was born. The narrator’s anecdote aims at a proposal: he intends to initiate
a campaign for the construction of a monument to the gout. Trojanow’s
story highlights the contingent nature of the so-called founding acts and
satirizes the pathos inherent in foundational myths. Notwithstanding its
ironic tone, the story points to a crucial strand of Trojanow’s narrative,
that is, the narrator’s critical stance towards monuments. As the narrator
reports, he grew up in a city over which a monument towered and in which
monuments were to be found at every corner. This over-saturation with
memory explains the narrator’s disgust with this form of remembrance.
Besides this story of the narrator, the accompanying photographs also
reveal the power structures inherent in the politics of remembrance. While
the story imagines the narrator as a child who is impressed by the sheer
magnitude of the monuments, the image in Fig. 8.4 depicts a contempo-
rary scene.
Fig. 8.4 Shumen Monument (Trojanow and Muhrbeck 102–3)

The photograph shows a woman taking pictures of a monument.

Since the photograph is taken from a great distance, it captures the dif-
ferences in size between the woman and the monument. The monu-
mental stone characters in particular stand in sharp contrast to the tiny
living person. In the context of the story, the viewer cannot help but to
discern a power relation. The past dominates the picture. Muhrbeck’s
photograph refers to the same founding act as the story by Trojanow.
It shows a monument in Shumen that commemorates the 1300th anni-
versary of Bulgaria, built in 1981.36 It is also known as “Monument to
the Founder of the Bulgarian State” and does not celebrate communist
heroes, as do many other monuments depicted in the book, but rather
national history. However, the ways in which the past is remembered is
strikingly similar. The sheer size of the monument alone and its location
on a hilltop render the past a sublime object. By including the photo-
graph of the Shumen monument in the book and by placing it along the
memorial of communist heroes, Muhrbeck and Trojanow draw atten-
tion to a phenomenon that exemplifies the social and historical frames in
which remembering takes place.
Here, it is instructive to return to Olick’s work on memory, which
highlights that acts of remembrance are neither solely determined by their
referents nor by the conscious needs of the present. Olick emphasizes the
history of memorial practices and draws attention to the ways in which
they influence our contemporary forms of remembering. With reference
to Mikhail Bakhtin, Olick conceives of remembering as an utterance that
always belongs to a certain genre and therefore follows a certain logic.
Genres are “the residue of past behavior, an accretion that shapes, guides,
and constrains future behavior.”37 Bakhtin’s notion of genre is important
for Olick because it helps to clarify that remembering is “fundamentally
36
Richard Watkins and Christopher Deliso, Bulgaria (Oakland, CA: Lonely Planet
Publications, 2008), 165.
37
Gary S. Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 290. Bakhtin’s notion of genre also helps to empha-
size the transnational and transcultural dimension of remembrance, since it explains how the
forms that we use to remember can travel from one nation or culture to the other. Hence,
genre can be used as a tool to analyze transcultural memory, which Astrid Erll conceives “as
the incessant wandering of carriers, media, contents, forms, and practices of memory, their
continual ‘travels’ and ongoing transformations through time and space, across social, lin-
guistic and political borders.” Astrid Erll, “Travelling Memory,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011):
4–18. 11.
154 C. SIEG
relational.”38 If remembering as a social practice possesses a habitual

dimension and follows a specific logic, political importance pertains not
only to what is remembered but also to how we remember.
A Monument to Orpheus?
The photographs discussed so far draw attention to Bulgaria’s past by
depicting monuments and other historical traces, such as the ruins of
socialist high rises. Almost all photographs in the book emphasize the
discrepancy between the past and present. In these photographs, the past
is not of any use for the present and fails to foster present identities. Two
other pictures further underline this problematic status of the past. Both
show abandoned places: a dilapidated office space or former school room
on the walls of which we recognize portraits of once esteemed persons,
and a dreary pedestrian underpass without any sign of life. The graffiti on
the wall of the underpass adds to this dark prospect. With bold letters, it
declares in English: “Forget your past.” While the programmatic mes-
sage is written in clearly visible letters, a Cyrillic engraving right next to
it—maybe the site of another memorial—is fading away. It is against this
backdrop of a receding past,39 that Trojanow’s text addresses the reader.
In the above discussion of the chapter “Denkmalvordenker,” which
refers to the founding of the Bulgarian state, I only referred to the plot.
Yet, the chapter’s literary form is no less important. Here, it is notewor-
thy that the narrator addresses the reader directly: “This country, you
should know that, owes its foundation to the gout.”40 Trojanow’s narrator
engages in a playful dialogue with the reader. Thereby, he anticipates what
the German reader should know about Bulgaria and what information
she or he might require. The transnational, European dimension of this
dialogue becomes most apparent in the following passage:
The monument to the patriotic gout was by no means my only foible. Not
far from my city of birth flows the Maritsa—our Nile, our Amazon— …
38
Olick, The Politics of Regret, 106.
39
Contrasting these references to the past, two pictures show icons of a capitalist present
and may be read as critique of a shallow globalization. In one picture we encounter a person
dressed up as Kermit from The Muppet Show in order to entertain tourists on Bulgarian
beaches; the other picture shows the advertisement of another US product: Coca Cola. See:
Trojanow and Muhrbeck, Wo Orpheus begraben liegt, 104–105, 110–111.
40
flows since the day Orpheus was murdered here, at our place, yes, that might
shock you, we are dealing here with an important crime scene … What
would be more natural than to build a monument to Orpheus?41
In his function as “Denkmalvordenker,” the narrator cannot help but pro-

pose a monument to Orpheus. This is a satirical move, which becomes
even more obvious in the ensuing passage. Because seven villages claim
that Orpheus was born in their vicinity, one could potentially build seven
monuments, which would increase the chances to “get it right for a
change.”42 Even more important than the narrator’s actual proposal is
the fact that he again addresses the reader. He anticipates that the reader
might not know that Orpheus lies buried in Bulgaria. That he speaks of
“our place” supports the process of othering that this passage performs.
The narrator constructs a “foreign” reader in his speech and emphasizes
his pride about being part of a transnational European legacy that the
reader might mistakenly ascribe to “Greek” culture. Along these lines,
he hints at the importance of his own country in the European context.
Thus, the memory of Orpheus is taken up in a dialogic way. It signals that
Bulgaria takes pride in being part of the European heritage. At the same
time, it pokes fun at the idea of starting a new round of memorialization—
this time on a European level. The ironic proposal to build a monument
to Orpheus casts doubt on the legitimacy of calls for a unified European
memory on the basis of classical culture or similar foundational myths.
Pointing to the history of heroic commemoration in Bulgaria under com-
munist rule, it challenges a genre of memory that serves identity politics.
Thereby, Muhrbeck and Trojanow’s book also questions the idea that
memory might help to unify Europe.
Beyond Foundational Myths

Wo Orpheus begraben liegt presents images and stories of Bulgaria in a
dialogic fashion. Placing emphasis on the various traces of the past and the
politics of remembrance, the book casts doubt on the very idea of foun-
dational European myths. In particular, photography is used as a medium
that allows for a different perspective on the past—a perspective that con-
ceives the past not as usable for the present and breaks with notions of
41
Trojanow and Muhrbeck, Wo Orpheus begraben liegt, 99–100.
42
156 C. SIEG
historical progress. Instead of evolutionary narratives or myths, the pho-

tographs juxtapose different epochs with each other. Walter Benjamin’s
famous line that “[h]istory decays into images, not into stories,”43 which
criticizes the domination of narratives in our conceptualization of the past,
helps to grasp this temporal poetics of Trojanow and Muhrbeck’s book.
The photographic image breaks with the temporal continuum of histori-
cal time because “time is no longer to be understood as continuous and
linear, but rather as spatial.”44 In Muhrbeck’s photographs, different times
enter in a spatial relationship with each other. The past thereby acquires a
presence in its own right and, doing so, effectively hampers any attempt to
subjugate it for purposes of the present. Articulating itself in Muhrbeck’s
pictures, the past asks to be recognized.
In the discourse on European identity, the term “myth” refers to a
narrative “about the past that symbolizes the values of a group and legiti-
mizes their positions or claims.”45 The search for a foundational myth is,
consequently, part and parcel of identity politics. As elements in processes
of inclusion and exclusion, memories cannot be acknowledged in their
diversity but need to be homogenized. To make use of memory along
the lines of identity politics contradicts attempts to preserve the richness
and multifariousness of a collective memory that Wo Orpheus begraben
liegt expresses. One could conclude with Pakier and Stråth and suggest
“to work not towards a European collective memory in the singular, in
a homogenizing and essentializing sense, but towards a construction of
European collective memory in the plural, which strives for a growing
understanding of diversity.”46 Trojanow and Muhrbeck’s book is a case in
point. Yet, there is more to its transnational poetics. The book does not
only add a voice to the emerging transnational European public sphere as
an arena in which different voices can be heard. In its dialogic fashion, it
actually constitutes such a public sphere. Thus, the work exemplifies how
voices interact and that the call for foundational myths may remain unheard
43
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2002), 476.
44
Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Princeton
Paperbacks (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 60.
45
Bo Stråth, “The Baltic as Image and Illusion: The Construction of a Region between
Europe and the Nation,” in Myth and Memory in the Construction of Community: Historical
Patterns in Europe and Beyond, ed. Bo Stråth (Brussels; New York, NY: P.I.E.-Peter Lang,
2000), 199–214. 204.
46
Pakier and Stråth, “Introduction: A European Memory?,” 13.
in a society that suffered from the memory boom of the communist area.
Tzvetan Todorov puts this as follows: “[T]he unity of European culture
resides in the way it manages the different regional, national, religious
and cultural identities that constitute it, granting them new status and
benefiting from this very plurality.”47 From this vantage point of another
Bulgarian-born intellectual, cultural unity may be achieved not by seeking
a European identity through foundational myths but by a certain kind of
practice that acknowledges, accepts, or even embraces diversity and differ-
ences when it comes to memory. Rather than pointing to a shared essence
or past, this culture points to a shared attitude. Depicting multiple pasts
and troublesome ways of remembering, Trojanow and Muhrbeck’s book
not only requests but also exemplifies such a culture by the dialogic fash-
ion in which the book engages with its readers. In this sense, it is a truly
European book. Presenting images from what is perceived as Europe’s
periphery, it reminds us that Eastern Europe did not only suffer from
Soviet occupation after World War II but also experienced a different cul-
ture of remembrance. Against the backdrop of this political dimension of
memorial practices, the book focuses on the pitfalls of foundational myths.
Rather than focusing on the referent of remembrance as the common
ground for a European identity, it calls for a memorial culture that refrains
from privileging specific aspects of Europe’s past and embraces its plural-
ity. The divide of the European memory map causes political tensions as
long as we treat the past along the lines of identity politics. However, a
dialogic memorial practice allows us to understand historical differences
not as divisions but as diversity and, thus, to appreciate the richness of
European memory.
47
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations (Chicago:
University Of Chicago Press, 2010), 174.
CHAPTER 9
A Place in the Sun: Colonial Entanglements

in Lukas Bärfuss’s Hundert Tage and Daniel
Goetsch’s Herz Aus Sand
Charlotte Schallié
This chapter focuses on two recent Swiss-German novels that embed liter-
ary representations of Switzerland within a larger transnational European
context. What makes these two narratives particularly salient for a broader
discussion of European memory is that they entangle Switzerland’s post-
war history with Europe’s contentious colonial past in Africa. By read-
ing the texts through a transcultural lens, I contend that Daniel Bärfuss’s
Hundert Tage [One Hundred Days] (2008)1 and Daniel Goetsch’s Herz
aus Sand [Heart of Sand] (2009)2 represent the African continent as a
negative, culturally sublimated image of Europe. Both texts unpack mis-
construed conceptions of Swiss neutrality during World War II and reveal
1
Lukas Bärfuss, Hundert Tage (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2008); Lukas Bärfuss, One
Hundred Days, trans. Tess Lewis (London: Granta Books, 2012). All translations from the
original German are my own.
2
Daniel Goetsch, Herz aus Sand (Zurich: Bilgerverlag, 2009). All translations from the
original German are my own.
C. Schallié (*)
Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies, University of Victoria,
Victoria, BC, Canada
e-mail: schallie@uvic.ca

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39152-6_9
160 C. SCHALLIÉ
that even Switzerland’s humanitarian engagement and aid work in Africa

was inextricably interwoven with the tarnished legacies of European colo-
nialism. The idea of geographically and historically separated “single mem-
ory cultures” is thus rigorously contested.3 Through the transnational lens
of African development aid work, Bärfuss and Goetsch demonstrate that
Switzerland’s refugee and foreign aid policies were entwined with vio-
lent conflicts that unfolded and erupted beyond its national boundaries.
Hundert Tage and Herz aus Sand also question the established canoni-
cal narrative of Switzerland—and, by extension, Europe—as a defender
of international human rights and democratic values. Many scholars and
European Union (EU) policy makers—for example, the European Union
Agency for Fundamental Rights—have argued that the Holocaust became
a negative benchmark, which generated a post-war need for Europe to
promote and protect human rights throughout the world—indeed even
positioned Europe as a particularly effective force in this endeavor because
of difficult lessons learned.4 These novels demonstrate, however, how
memories of more recent humanitarian failures complicate the assertion
that “human rights are at the foundation of the EU.”5 Hundert Tage
argues that Switzerland’s myth of neutrality only blinds the protagonist
and others to their troubling role in the Rwandan genocide; Herz aus
Sand contends that the humanitarian aid mission in the Western Sahara
was mainly intended to shield “Fortress Europe” from an influx of refu-
gees and asylum seekers. Both texts negotiate a multidirectional memory6
3
4
As Ann Rigney argues, the “Holocaust as a negative benchmark for European identity has
also generated variations on a neo-Enlightenment narrative identifying Europe as a global
defender of democratic values whose present and future investment in universal human rights
is, and should continue to be, all the greater precisely because of the extent to which it had
violated them in the past.” Ann Rigney, “Ongoing: Changing Memory and the European
Project,” in Transnational Memory, Circulation, Articulation, Scales, ed. Chiara De Cesari
and Ann Rigney (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 339–59. 344.
5
European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, “Human Rights Education at
Holocaust Memorial Sites across the European Union: An Overview of Practices”
(Publications Office of the European Union, 2011), http://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/
files/fra_uploads/1790-FRA-2011-Holocaust-education-overview-practices_EN.pdf.
European Union, ‘Human Rights’, Human Rights, accessed 20 December 2015, http://
europa.eu/pol/rights/index_en.htm.
6
I am borrowing this term from Michael Rothberg, who argues that the “model of multi-
directional memory posits collective memory as partially disengaged from exclusive versions
of cultural identity and acknowledges how remembrance both cuts across and binds together
diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites.” Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory:
A PLACE IN THE SUN: COLONIAL ENTANGLEMENTS IN LUKAS BÄRFUSS’S... 161
perspective interlinking disparate violent histories and human rights viola-

tions in Europe as well as Africa; they highlight how the memory of the
Holocaust and the legacy of European colonialism influence and cross-
reference one another over time. To this end, Hundert Tage and Herz
aus Sand also recall Andreas Huyssen’s suggestion that “memory politics
and human rights are already more intimately connected than ever.”7 In a
larger pan-European context, the two novels use “Holocaust conscious-
ness as a platform” to re-visit the transnational catastrophes of European
history.8 More precisely, however, they discuss the transnational space
of the international aid community in Africa as a catalyst for re-thinking
Switzerland’s nationally constructed myth of neutrality and the country’s
post-war memory culture.
In Bärfuss’s Hundert Tage the protagonist, David Hohl, is posted as
a representative for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation
in Kigali. Hundert Tage re-tells the horrific massacres, which claimed
the lives of over 800,000 Tutsis and several thousand moderate Hutu,9
through the eyes of David. The novel also examines to what extent Swiss
foreign aid—through its support of the ruling Hutu dictatorship—helped
set the stage for the genocide to unfold.
Frank, the laconic Swiss narrator in Goetsch’s Herz aus Sand reflects
on his futile peacekeeping mission as a Swiss UN observer in the Western
Sahara. His posting for the United Nations Mission for the Referendum
in Western Sahara (MINURSO), which includes human rights monitoring
on the fringes of a refugee camp, also entails identifying and registering
voters for a referendum designed to finally end a 40-year territorial dispute
between Morocco and the Polisario Front. It is only after Frank decides to
illegally enter the camp that he comes to realize the full extent of violence
and human suffering, which his UN mission has willfully ignored.
Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2009), 11. Similarly, Andreas Huyssen has argued that Holocaust memory and colo-
nialism discourse should be examined within a shared theoretical framework. Andreas
Huyssen, “Transnationale Verwertungen von Holocaust und Kolonialismus,” in VerWertungen
von Vergangenheit, ed. Elisabeth Wagner and Wolf Burkhardt (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2009),
30–51.
7
Andreas Huyssen, “International Human Rights and the Politics of Memory: Limits and
Challenges,” Criticism 53, no. 4 (2011): 607–24. 621.
8
9
“Genocide in Rwanda,” United Human Rights Council, accessed December 20, 2015,
http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/genocide/genocide_in_rwanda.htm.
162 C. SCHALLIÉ
As the violent narratives in Hundert Tage and Herz aus Sand unfold,
the two displaced Swiss narrators remember their past, and thereby re-
examine the extent to which their own biographies have been shaped by
Switzerland’s reluctance to acknowledge its humanitarian failures in public
and political discourse.
While the genocidal war erupts in Rwanda, Bärfuss’s protagonist wit-
nesses the dark side of Swiss development aid as it serves a colonial agenda
fueling a global war economy. Through the transnational space of a for-
eign aid mission, Bärfuss challenges Switzerland’s alleged bystander role
in the genocidal conflict in Rwanda, exposing the public memory of Swiss
wartime neutrality as a post-1945 humanitarian myth. Goetsch’s protago-
nist debunks the humanitarian and diplomatic failures of a European-led
UN mission and juxtaposes it with anti-immigrant rhetoric that tries to
keep foreign elements out of Europe.
Both Bärfuss’s and Goetsch’s protagonists are confronted with the rav-
ages of war and genocide as well as their inability to provide adequate
humanitarian relief. As a result, they find themselves in a constant state
of emergency. Throughout these violent conflicts, which expose a deeply
conflicted interdependence between Switzerland, Europe, and Africa, the
protagonists fathom the moral and ethical implications of their role as
modern-day colonizers, individual field workers, and as representatives of
Swiss(-based) organizations.
Although Switzerland has no imperial history of its own and did not
pursue overseas expansions under the Swiss flag, Hundert Tage and Herz
aus Sand bring to light that Switzerland’s colonial fantasies have been a
driving force behind Swiss business ventures in Africa. Recently, historians
have provided further evidence demonstrating that Swiss nationals have
had contact with Africa since the seventeenth century, for instance, as mer-
cenaries, missionaries, and adventure seekers. Moreover, Swiss business
people worked for both Swiss- and European-based companies, traded
in cocoa, cotton and gold, and were even involved in the African slave
trade.10 In the context of these two novels it is important to stress that
10
“During the nineteenth century while European States were building colonial empires
the Swiss Confederation abstained from taking part in this territorial expansion. However,
the Swiss positioned themselves in the wake of the colonial powers. Traders, industrialists,
bankers and farmers participated in the colonization process.” Marc Perrenoud, “Switzerland’s
Relationship with Africa During Decolonisation and the Beginnings of Development
Cooperation,” trans. Sarah Jordan, International Development Policy 1 (2010): 77–93. See
also: Harald Fischer-Tiné, “Auch die Schweiz profitierte von den Kolonien,” Neue Zürcher
Zeitung, December 23, 2014, http://www.nzz.ch/meinung/debatte/auch-die-schweiz-
profitierte-von-den-kolonien-1.18449650.
Switzerland’s form of colonialism—for which historians have coined the

terms “secondary imperialism,” “secret dominion,” and “hidden or soft
colonialism”11—was not just limited to expansionist business ventures
abroad. Partaking in Europe’s imperialist activities, Swiss professionals,
tradespeople, and missionaries subscribed to a dominant Eurocentric
mindset that “was trapped within Western constructs and categories
which tended to present indigenous people and cultures as distinct and
inferior.”12 They participated in colonial discourses and espoused assump-
tions that legitimized their enterprises abroad juxtaposing “underdevel-
oped” African countries vis-à-vis the enlightened Occident. Moreover,
Swiss entrepreneurs invested in countries with abysmal human rights
records—such as the apartheid regime of South Africa. Even after the
United Nations had issued a series of economic sanctions against South
Africa,13 the Swiss government argued that these business ventures did
not comprise Switzerland’s doctrine of neutrality.14 It is through the lens
of Switzerland’s self-serving policy of neutrality in the face of new African-
based wars that both authors expose the moral ethics of bystanding.15
In Hundert Tage, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Rwandan-based Swiss aid workers inadvertently abetted the “perfectly
organized hell”16 as they financially supported the totalitarian regime of
Hutu elites prior to the outbreak of the state-organized genocide. Bärfuss
based his own research on eyewitness interviews and publications that
suggested that “[i]t was actually development aid that financed the most
comprehensive genocide since the Holocaust.”17 In the early 1900s,
11
Thomas David and Bouda Etemad, “Gibt es einen schweizerischen Imperialismus?,”
trans. Beatrice Schumacher, Traverse: Zeitschrift für Geschichte - Revue d’histoire 14, no. 2
(1998).
12
Ricardo Roque and Kim A. Wagner, eds., Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading
European Archives in World History (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 7.
13
Regula Ludi, “What Is so Special about Switzerland? Wartime Memory as a National
Ideology in the Cold War Era,” in The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, ed. Richard Ned
Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006),
210–248. 237.
14
Georg Kreis, Switzerland and South Africa: Final Report of the Nfp 42+ Commissioned by
the Swiss Federal Council (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 254.
15
I am using Mary Kaldor’s theoretical term “new war,” which she defines, among other
criteria, as wars that “take place in the context of failing states.” Mary Kaldor, “The ‘New’
War in Iraq,” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 109 (2006): 1–27. 1.
16
Bärfuss, Hundert Tage, 8.
17
Christian P. Scherrer, Genocide and Crisis in Central Africa: Conflict Roots, Mass
Violence, and Regional War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 73.
164 C. SCHALLIÉ
and with support of both the German and the Belgian colonial admin-
istration, Swiss missionaries established Catholicism as a state religion in
Rwanda. Recently, historians confirmed that the Swiss largely contrib-
uted to the “acceleration of the ongoing polarization process” as they
bought into the European colonial discourse favoring the indigenous
“Hutu race” over the Tutsi ethnicity.18 Moreover, Monsignor André
Perraudin, a Swiss national who strongly supported Hutu nationalism,
became archbishop of Kabgayi and Kigali in 1956. Grégoire Kayibanda,
leader of the Hutu Emancipation Movement and Rwanda’s first elected
president following the country’s independence, was widely known as
being one of Perraudin’s protégés.19 For these early Swiss immigrants
at the beginning of the twentieth century, Rwanda was considered the
“Switzerland of Africa,” and they strongly empathized with the coloniz-
ers’ discrimination of the Hutu vis-à-vis the colonial favorites, the Tutsi.
Drawing historical analogies, the Rwandan situation reminded them
of the Swiss Confederacy’s uprising against the Habsburg monarchy.20
Switzerland’s foreign involvement in Rwanda became much more sub-
stantial and influential from 1963 onward. During the following 30 years,
the Swiss Directorate of Development Cooperation and Humanitarian
Aid (DCA)21 provided development money to Rwanda’s leaders even
when confronted with highly visible human rights abuses that took place
leading up to the genocide.22 Together with other international aid agen-
cies, ground workers for the Swiss mission turned a blind eye and thus
18
Lukas Zürcher, Die Schweiz in Ruanda: Mission, Entwicklungshilfe und nationale
Selbstbestätigung (1900–1975) (Zurich: Chronos, 2014), 89.
19
Wehrli, “Ein Musterpartner, der zum Genozid-Staat wurde,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung,
April 5, 2014, http://www.nzz.ch/schweiz/ein-musterpartner-der-zum-genozid-staat-
wurde-1.18278011; Linda Melvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s
Genocide (London: Zed Books, 2000).
20
Philip Rosin, “Wilhem Tell in Afrika?,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 1,
2014, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/politische-buecher/die-schweiz-in-ruanda-wil-
helm-tell-in-afrika-13283762.html.
21
Direktion für Entwicklungszusammenarbeit und humanitäre Hilfe (DEH). It was renamed
Direktion für Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit (DEZA) in 1996. DEZA, “Geschichte der
DEZA,” Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft: Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit, December 20,
2015, https://www.eda.admin.ch/deza/de/home/deza/portraet/geschichte.html.
22
According to historian Lukas Zürcher, Switzerland invested 290 million dollars in
Rwandan-based projects between 1963 and 1993.
became complicit in the ongoing “structural violence”23 that escalated in

1994 when the Tutsi ethnic minority and Hutu who refused to partake
in the genocide were murdered on a mass scale. David Hohl, the pro-
tagonist in Hundert Tage, explains the Swiss involvement as a need to
compensate for the colonial exploitations of European powers: “We felt
responsible for the misery that the whites have brought to the continent,
and we worked hard to make up for part of this guilt.”24 Yet, as a result of
their refusal to acknowledge the extent to which Switzerland’s foreign aid
payments propped up a corrupt leadership, Swiss aid workers unwittingly
ended up “in the turmoil caused by one of this century’s worst crimes.”25
Bärfuss’s Hundert Tage was, after Christoph Buch’s Cain and Abel in
Africa (2001), the second Germanophone novel addressing the Rwandan
genocide.26 Unlike previous non-fiction works on Switzerland’s involve-
ment in Rwanda, such as Peter Uvin’s Aiding Violence: The Development
Enterprise in Rwanda (1998), and Christian P. Scherrer’s Genocide and
Crisis in Central Africa (2002), Bärfuss’s widely-read novel, which was
immediately considered “highly political,”27 launched a broad and often
heated debate in the Swiss media while the author himself became a vocal
critic of foreign aid. He was adamant about the fact that, on the ground
in Rwanda, the Swiss turned a blind eye to the human rights abuses while
steadfastly supporting the totalitarian system:
What I wanted to show in my novel is how people who worked in foreign aid
had a very selective awareness. On the one hand, they were highly inspired
by compassion, solidarity and altruism, on the other hand, they simply tuned
out an essential part of reality. They collaborated with a totalitarian regime,
solely based on the fact that the latter provided law and order.28
23
Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda (West Hartford,
CT: Kumarian Press, 1998).
24
25
Lukas Bärfuss, qtd. in Stefan von Bergen, “Zwischen Not und Gutgläubigkeit,” Berner
Zeitung 1 March 2008: 6.
26
Carlotta von Maltzan, “Development Aid and the Genocide in Rwanda: Lukas Bärfuss’
Novel Hundert Tage,” in Hospitality and Hostility in the Multilingual Global Village, ed.
Kathleen Thorpe (Stellenbosch: Sun Media, 2014), 225–42.
27
Katharina Arni-Howald, “Von hundert schlimmen Tagen,” Berner Rundschau, April 14,
2009.
28
Qtd. in Markus Mathis, “Bilder vom Paradies und der Hölle stimmen nicht,” Neue
Luzerner Zeitung, September 24, 2008, 3.
166 C. SCHALLIÉ
In his commentaries, Bärfuss never went as far as blaming Switzerland for

the genocide arguing that a direct causality could not be established. He
was careful to state that several countries and international aid organiza-
tions shared responsibilities in the lead-up to the outbreak of large-scale
violence. Yet, he also maintained that the Swiss Directorate of Development
Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid needed to acknowledge that as one
of the largest foreign financiers in Rwanda, it co-created conditions that
paved the way for the violent conflict.29 In his interviews, Bärfuss refused
to clearly demarcate the boundaries between good intentions and horrific
consequences, guilt, and innocence.
The law of unintended consequences is also the central tenet in Hundert
Tage. In order to create this unsettling moral grey zone, Bärfuss employs
shifting temporal and physical landscapes that almost seamlessly blur into
one another. In the opening chapter, the first-person narrator visits David
Hohl, a former classmate and ex-aid worker in Rwanda. Following his
return to Switzerland, David moves to a remote mountain valley in the
canton Jura. The winter climate is inhospitable and David is portrayed as
a recluse, an emotionally broken trauma survivor who ran away as far as
he could from everything that reminded him of Rwanda. The narrator
observes that David still refuses to speak much about his experiences in
Africa and gently encourages David to reminisce about his experiences
in Kigali. Why did David refuse to leave the mission’s compound at the
onset of the violent outbreak? In response to this question, the narra-
tive’s perspective shifts within a single paragraph; for the remainder of
the text, David, the new first-person narrator, tells his eyewitness account
directly to the reader who finds him/herself in the position of a confi-
dant and accomplice. Moving from a snowy winter scene back in time to
the heart of Africa creates a bewildering and destabilizing spatial effect.
29
Coming under fire, several representatives of the current Swiss Agency for Development
and Cooperation (SDC) explained the agency’s rationale for supporting the corrupt
Rwandan leadership. Martin Fässler, vice president of SDC, contended that Switzerland only
supported moderate forces during 1991 and 1994. He failed to acknowledge that prior to
the 1990s Switzerland had been pouring aid funds into Rwanda for almost a quarter of a
century. Other SDC representatives were upfront about the fact that “mistakes have been
made” and that the agency had learned its lessons. To date, Swiss aid continues to send aid
money to Rwanda, although it stresses that it only supports local communities and organiza-
tions bypassing the government. See von Bergen, “Zwischen Not und Gutgläubigkeit”;
Barbara Basting and Christof Münger, “Das Engagement war von Beginn an falsch,” Tages-
Anzeiger, April 8, 2008; Fabian Urech, “Fortschritt mit eiserner Faust,” Neue Zürcher
Zeitung, June 13, 2013, http://www.nzz.ch/fortschritt-mit-eiserner-faust-1.18097935.
The perspectival shift not only conflates the physical and temporal land-
scapes but it also erases any arbitrary separation between the private and
the public spheres. David’s recollections of his harrowing experiences
prior to and during the Rwandan genocide make no distinction between
his personal and his professional integrity and responsibility, neither does
he distinguish between personal and collective guilt, individual and cul-
tural trauma. The human condition, which per se cannot be apolitical, is
fluidly situated within both realms. David sees his former role in Rwanda
both as henchman and victim erratically oscillating in an ill-defined moral
grey zone: “Because I wanted to be righteous, I pleaded guilty, and when
I found myself guilty, I saw myself as righteous.”30 Given the nature of
this symbiotic relationship between seemingly opposing forces, David’s
eyewitness testimony also brings an inherent contradiction to the fore.
Inevitably, all acts of goodness have the potential to cause harm. We can
thus never rest assured that our good intentions lead to a desirable out-
come, or, as David argues, that we will even be able to distinguish between
desirable and undesirable outcomes.
In his eyewitness testimony, David meticulously recollects a long
string of events that led to his own breakdown and to the collapse of
“the Directorate’s”31 ill-fated mission during the spring months in 1994.
Switzerland’s fascination with Rwanda, he contends, stems from a deep
sense of familiarity and attraction as well as a belief in a shared sense of
purpose: “Beginning in the sixties, when the Directorate was founded, we
looked around for a country that resembled our own. Small, mountain-
ous, populated by taciturn, mistrustful and hardworking farmers. And by
elegant longhorn cattle. Jokingly we referred to this country as our crown
colony.”32 According to David’s recollections, the people in Rwanda were
exotic and distinctly different; however, at least on the surface, they were
also similar to the Swiss: “African Prussians” who were “punctual, orderly,
and exquisitely polite.”33
Early on in David’s recollections, he remembers an incident en route to
Kigali that challenges his still firmly entrenched colonial mindset. His verve
and idealism are put to the test at the Brussels airport when he witnesses

30
“The directorate” is a placeholder name for the Swiss Directorate of Development

31
Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid.

32
33
168 C. SCHALLIÉ
how an “African woman” is being racially profiled.34 Seeing another colo-

nial scenario repeating itself, David comes to her aid and is forcefully
apprehended by Belgian officials. To his surprise, the woman considers his
intervention misguided and treats him with contempt. The young woman
rejects David’s need to be perceived as the Good Samaritan based on his
ready-made assumption that she is in need of his help. Unaware of his
own need to project his displaced guilt onto her, David’s veneer of the
do-gooder crumbles instantly and he responds with hostility. He cannot
comprehend why she would withhold her gratitude for his courageous act.
As a result, he feels degraded and reverts back to his stereotypical belief
system: “[I]n my thoughts I badmouthed her a negress, bashfully at first
then more clearly, until my lips formed the word and without breath, until
I finally dared to give voice to this sound. Negress. Negress. Negress.”35
The colonial configuration of roles is seemingly still intact.
Once on the ground in Rwanda, David witnesses that the Swiss aid
agency was knee-deep in projects that required a close co-operation with
the government. In order to secure an ongoing good rapport with the
president, Switzerland launched more and more initiatives that benefitted
the political elite. One of these initiatives was the expansion of the local
radio infrastructure with the idea of encouraging freedom of expression.
Yet, as it turned out, the Hutu used Radio Rwanda to stir up hatred
against the Tutsi,36 turning the broadcasting station into a powerful
weapon of propaganda. Many of David’s memories re-create a world that
is steeped in absurd colonial practices displaying a Swiss naïveté that bor-
ders on self-delusion. For David, Switzerland’s development aid agency in
Rwanda was only able to pursue its agenda because it firmly believed that
the natives were unable to run their own affairs without Western guidance.
According to the Swiss, the Rwandan people were incapable of sustaining
democracy. As a result, the dictatorship deserved to be wholeheartedly
supported, at least for the time being: “We were the experts and knew
that this was not the best of all worlds, but it was also not the worst; at
the utmost it was the fourth or the fifth worst, and that was sufficient
for us.”37 The fact that the Hutu were in a position of power and openly
discriminated the Tutsi was an unfortunate development that had to be
34
Bärfuss, Hundert Tage, 15, 6.
35
Bärfuss, Hundert Tage, 19–20.
36
37
accepted under the banner of law and order. The Swiss development aid
office tried everything to remain apolitical, David recalls, which became a
farce given that it threw all its weight behind the ruling power. However,
David is careful to point out that the Swiss were not alone:
The development aid agencies went crazy for this country, stepping on
each others’ toes, and there hardly was a hill without a development project
… Poverty and backwardness set no boundaries to all the ideas, slaughter
houses, spring-fed water supplies, granaries, textile workshops, maternity
wards, telephone lines, school toilets, youth farms, model dairies, supply
silos—there was nothing that this country did not need, and the two hun-
dred and forty-eight different development aid organisations competed with
one another with newer and newer development projects.38
This falsely constructed model of explanation underpins the magnitude of

the Swiss involvement in Rwanda. Human rights issues have been mostly
disregarded for the purpose of maintaining the status quo, which guaran-
teed that the local interests of the aid agency were protected.
It is not until much later in David’s narrative when he recollects his
relationship with Agathe, the young woman from Brussels whom he meets
again in Rwanda. When he discovers that Agathe is a Hutu extremist and
militia leader, his desire for her grows even stronger. Their consensual
sexual relationship is in many ways emblematic for the symbiotic relation-
ship between the Swiss aid workers and the indigenous Hutu population
that David describes throughout his narrative. It is a perverted symbiosis
“between our virtue and their crimes” that is manifested in both Agathe’s
sadism and David’s masochism and sexual dependence on her.39 Whereas
the sadist derives his/her pleasure from inflicting pain and from feelings
of power, the masochist seeks out subjugation and humiliation.40 Here,
too, the boundaries between the two sexual partners are challenged. On
another deeper level, Agathe and David reverse the status quo of their de
facto relationship. In that Agathe, the Hutu, condemns and ultimately
objectifies David, the colonizer, she devalues his humanity. However,
this is exactly what David desires, because for “the masochist, taking on
a role of subjugation and helplessness can offer a release from stress or
38
39
40
Franco de Masi, The Sadomasochistic Perversion: The Entity and the Theories (London:
Karnac Books, 2003), xii.
170 C. SCHALLIÉ
the burden of responsibility or guilt.”41 Although David seems to be at

Agathe’s mercy, he derives satisfaction from her domination and seeks it
out whenever he can because it releases him from any sense of responsibil-
ity for his own actions. In that Agathe sexually exploits David, she avoids
having her body “colonized” by him.42 The more hate-filled tirades she
unleashes, the stronger his desire and lust for her grow and the more
release he feels.
During the hundred days of mass slaughter from April to June 1994,
David refuses to join the embassy convoy, which would have transported
him to a safe place. Not knowing the whereabouts of Agathe and because
he does not want to be seen as an opportunist and a “coward,”43 he stays
at his mission compound in Kigali until it is too late to leave. His only
means of surviving the ensuing bloodbath is by putting himself under the
protection of a Hutu militia. In the final scene, he again meets Agathe,
who is dying of cholera. For the first time David comes to fully under-
stand the nature of their relationship while gaining deeper insight into
his personal and professional failures as an aid worker in Rwanda. He is
horrified to realize that he, too, caused Agathe’s death. All she ever meant
to him was to be a mirror in which he could find himself. His vanity, his
self-indulgence, and his lack of introspection exposed a complete disre-
gard for his lover’s wellbeing. David is a narcissist who only engages with
his self-reflection and gazes at the world for the purpose of seeing himself
in everything. This Lacanian gaze is a “vision that is satisfied with itself
in imagining itself as consciousness.”44 Only in her final dying moments
does David come to recognize and understand Agathe as a separate iden-
tity, as “a soul, a human being, a life.”45 This realization comes too late,
and David’s testimony ends with a harrowing conclusion that emphasizes
the conflated nature of his personal identity and his public involvement
in Rwanda.
In this context, he also alludes to Switzerland’s role in World War II,
which was marred by economic, financial, and ideological entanglements
41
Neel Burton, “The Psychology of Sadomasochism,” Psychology Today, August 17, 2014,
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hide-and-seek/201408/the-psychology-
sadomasochism.
42
43
44
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York, NY: Norton, 1978), 74.
45
with Nazi Germany: “It was our fortune that with each crime Switzerland
was involved in, an even greater villain had a finger in the pie … No,
we are not among those who perpetuate bloodbaths. These are caused
by others. We only swim in them.”46 Forced to accept his own culpa-
bility, David c oncludes that any form of humanitarian aid—regardless of
how compassionate and well intentioned—can potentially lead to cata-
strophic outcomes for both sides. Given that David retreats into his own
secluded world back in Switzerland, it remains doubtful whether the les-
sons learned in Rwanda could be in any way transformative for his future
life and identity.
In an interview, Bärfuss raised the rhetorical question if “inaction”
[“Nichtstun”] or the refusal to get involved, could be ethically and
morally justifiable.47 Although Bärfuss referred to Switzerland’s role in
Rwanda, he also implicitly evoked Switzerland’s “inaction” during the
Holocaust. Ever since Switzerland’s reparation scandal over Holocaust-
era assets, which dominated Swiss public discourse in the mid-1990s,
Switzerland’s glorified image of wartime heroism and resistance and its
alleged political neutrality have been exposed as wartime myths. The find-
ings of the Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland—Second World
War (ICE) revealed that Swiss “inaction” in the face of the Holocaust was
synonymous with an official anti-semitic asylum policy that discriminated
against Jewish refugees while helping “the Nazi regime achieve its geno-
cidal goals.”48 These findings were framed within a broader human rights
context asserting that the wartime government of Switzerland did not
fulfill its duty “to protect human rights and dignity.”49 Thus, when Bärfuss
refers to “inaction,” he references Switzerland’s Holocaust bystander
mentality suggesting that it continues to re-verberate in public discourses
on human rights policies. Regula Ludi convincingly argues that “the Swiss
had cultivated a belief in their humanitarian achievements and were con-
vinced of the neutral’s special mission as the guardian of humanitarian
law.”50 Both Lukas Bärfuss and Daniel Goetsch deconstruct and challenge
Switzerland’s memory construction and humanitarian failures emphasiz-
ing that the country was, and continues to be, globally interconnected
46
47
Qtd. in von Bergen, “Zwischen Not und Gutgläubigkeit,” 41.
48
Ludi, “What Is so Special about Switzerland?,” 237.
49
50
172 C. SCHALLIÉ
and entwined with violent conflicts that unravel and escalate beyond its
national boundaries.
In Daniel Goetsch’s Herz aus Sand, an extended state of “inaction”
denotes the modus operandi or the actual raison d’être for the Swiss nar-
rator, an international UN observer in the Western Sahara.51 Yet, it is not
the protagonist himself who can be blamed for inertia or apathy on the
ground, but his mission’s headquarter, which he, in shorthand, refers to as
“Geneva.” The city becomes the equivalent of a benevolent, yet faceless,
institution that is indifferent to the plight of the local UN field workers
and the humanitarian refugee disaster in the Western Sahara.
Beginning in the late-nineteenth century, Switzerland, especially the
city of Geneva, became the preferred location for many international inter-
governmental bodies and institutions such as the International Committee
of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 1863, the headquarters of the League of
Nations (1919), and the headquarters for the United Nations’ European
office (1946) and, two years later, the World Health Organization
(WHO). Geneva was also chosen as the site for the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees in 1951.52 Geneva’s international image and
prestige was synonymous with a place that represented and defended inter-
national human rights; it was a global image that was largely reinforced
by the fact that the Swiss government purported to be politically neutral
throughout the twentieth century. It is precisely this notion of Swiss neu-
trality that is most rigorously challenged and contested in Bärfuss’s and
Goetsch’s Africa novels as Swiss-based aid agencies (the thinly disguised
and parodied Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the
UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara) show a blatant disre-
gard for the plight of the local population and field workers. Foreign aid
policies are exposed as misguided, ultimately serving a Eurocentric agenda
that continues to operate in the footsteps of Western imperialism.
In Goetsch’s narrative, the Swiss narrator comes to realize that his
observer role on the ground is not much more than an exercise in futility
and self-deception given that he produces endless piles of weekly reports,
“only for them to rot away in the basement of a palace in Geneva” (25).53
51
Some of the colonial tropes in Heart Made Out Of Sand emerged in Goetsch’s second
novel Ben Kader (2006) in which he juxtaposes the assaults of freedom fighters in colonial
Algeria with the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
52
John Merriman and Jay Winter, “Geneva,” in Europe Since 1914: Encyclopedia of the Age
of War and Reconstruction (Detroit, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2006), 1192–93.
53
Goetsch, Herz aus Sand, 25.
Whereas David Hohl reminisces about his experiences in Rwanda from

the vantage point of his remote domicile in Switzerland, Goetsch’s main
character, Frank, remembers his story while he is based as a UN observer
outside a refugee camp in the Western Sahara, a space that is emerging in
his detailed description as a territorial no-man’s-land, where all actions
and decisions are put on hold. Frank is part of a mission that has been
formed to collect voter lists so that a referendum can take place in the
near future. Although Frank does not discuss the specifics of his mission,
it is clearly suggested in the text that he is referring to the United Nations
Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), which was
established in 1991 with the goal of holding a referendum in the vola-
tile region. The UN Mission was tasked with organizing a referendum in
which the local population of the Western Sahara, Africa’s last colony, had
to choose between independence and integration into Morocco.
Western Sahara (formerly Spanish Sahara) in northwest Africa was col-
onized by Spain until 1975. After the Spanish had left, a post-colonial
dispute erupted between the local nationalist group, Polisario Front,
Morocco, and Mauritania, as all three stakeholders laid claim to the ter-
ritory. Whereas Mauritania signed a peace deal with Polisario, Morocco
claimed sovereignty over the region of Western Sahara. An ensuing guer-
rilla war between Polisario and Morocco lasted until 1991 when the United
Nations intervened and brokered a ceasefire. The originally proposed tran-
sition period was established to organize and hold a referendum. Since a
consensus on voter eligibility was not reached between Morocco and the
Polisario Front, the referendum never took place.54 Over 20 years later,
the Western Sahara is still considered a Non-Self-Governing-Territory,
and the local Sahrawis (inhabitants of the Sahara) continue to live in an
unstable transition period. Even though the narrator in Herz aus Sand
never localizes the refugee camp he is asked to observe—as per UN direc-
tives from the outside only—it can be inferred from the geopolitical con-
text that it is closely modelled on the Sahrawi refugee camp in Tindouf,
in southern Algeria.
Frank, the Swiss first-person narrator in Herz aus Sand, is based in
a United Nations Mission compound nearby a large IDP (Internally
Displaced Persons) camp and in close proximity to a UN peacekeeping
operation. The physical co-ordinates of his whereabouts remain vague
54
“Western Sahara Profile,” BBC News Africa, January 7, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/
news/world-africa-14115273.
174 C. SCHALLIÉ
and blurry; it is a stiflingly hot, barren, and desolate wasteland, situated

between the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara desert. All the development
aid workers, military personnel, UN observers, and the IDPs are in an
extended holding pattern waiting for the referendum to finally take place.
Given that the election has already been postponed six times for the previ-
ous 15 years, skepticism prevailed. Life in the UN mission was governed
by an inherent contradiction: the transitional period, which is required to
pave the way for a future referendum, leaves everybody in limbo, creating
an environment of instability and potential violence. Consequently, the
whole area is engulfed in a perpetual state of emergency while the stake-
holders lack the commitment to reach a political solution. Frank, who is
an international UN observer, cynically accepts the fact that his mission
fails to provide direction and purpose and that nothing will ever change.
Since it is too dangerous for Frank to enter the IDP camp and because
he cannot afford to lose his official neutrality, his weekly reports to the
UN headquarter in Switzerland amount to nothing more than a pretence.
As the weeks become interchangeable, he recycles old reports and cut-
and-pastes them together at will. The growing paperwork provides a sem-
blance of normalcy and routine without having to acknowledge that the
UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara has failed a long time
ago. Frank despises the fact that he is drowning in a bureaucratic system
regurgitating paragraphs from UN manuals without truly understanding
the humanitarian impact of his own presence at the mission compound.
Although he constantly mocks his employer, Frank is also aware of the fact
that these patchwork reports, which he files obsessively, are his sole raison
d’être. Without them, there would be no need for him to stay any longer.
Being an international observer dispatched by “Geneva,” Frank is
expected to be impartial and neutral in his execution of the UN man-
date. As in Hundert Tage, the concept of neutrality—a term that literally
means ‘neither-nor’ (Latin ne-uter)55—is revealed to be a vacuous signi-
fier behind which the protagonist is hiding. In his assessment, the actual
peacekeeping operation is nothing but self-defeating: “Never, not even for
a second, did they [the soldiers] raise the suspicion that their service could
be futile.”56 To avoid the monotony of their daily rituals and eschew being
affected by human hardship all around them, many of his male colleagues,
55
Laurent Goetschel, “Neutrality,” in International Encyclopedia of Political Science, ed.
Bertrand Badie, Dirk Berg-Schlosser, and Leonardo Morlino (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2011).
56
“custodians of misery”57 get drunk, carry out drug deals, consume opi-
ates, and frequent prostitutes. The latter are former female backpackers
who arrived at the camp, when it used to be a good place,58 Frank recol-
lects, a magnet for physicians, psychologists, anthropologists, journalists,
and adventurers. In the meantime, and in light of political inertia, every-
thing has degenerated even further. Now, disillusionment and apathy are
widespread, so are opportunism and corruption. For Frank, the mission
compound is not only devoid of idealism and compassion, it is entirely
bereft of memory and humanity. It is a place filled with historical amnesia
with regard to Europe’s colonial legacy, a site that is at a standstill as if it
were in an ongoing state of rigor mortis.
This image of a no-man’s-land that is completely drained of memories
is an apt metaphor for a failed decolonizing process such as the one in the
Western Sahara. Through the lens of Frank’s narrative perspective, we can
observe a pronounced Western bias toward sustaining a prolonged decol-
onization process that leaves everything in limbo. The decision to support
the status quo also fails to challenge the existing power imbalance of the
global North/South Divide. Moreover, as the private and public worlds
at the mission compound are deeply intertwined, it becomes apparent that
Frank himself perpetuates this conflicted colonial legacy.
Frank’s complicity is challenged with the arrival of German architect
Duncker who has no affiliations with any aid agencies, and is eager to
improve the conditions in the displaced persons’ camp.59 It is through
Frank’s relationship with Duncker that Goetsch explores how various sup-
pressed memories re-emerge in this post-colonial setting. The character of
Duncker—a re-incarnation of Joseph Conrad’s infamous Kurtz figure in
Heart of Darkness—is an idealist who is obsessively driven to build the per-
fect refugee camp. When Duncker’s lofty endeavor falls apart, his passion
turns into self-destructive compulsion and, ultimately, into an apparent
suicide. Duncker’s hubris is at the core of Goetsch’s narrative. As an inter-
textual reference, it allows the author to evoke the inherent destructive-
ness in Western colonialism. The arrival and self-annihilation of Duncker is
also an impetus for Frank to reminisce about his former life and reasons for
leaving Switzerland. Duncker’s fatal biography inevitably reminds Frank
of his former girlfriend and fellow law student, Alma, who was eager to
57
58
59
176 C. SCHALLIÉ
defy the established political system. Her compassion soon turned into
an obsession when she began her legal work and became the lead advisor
and campaign manager for Stettler, an up-and-coming Swiss right-wing
politician who gained considerable political momentum as a result of his
vitriolic anti-refugee platform.60 Horrified to see that his girlfriend would
fall for such a demagogue and betray their shared ideals, Frank decided to
leave Switzerland and work for the UN relief mission in Africa, but even-
tually loses his own idealism and faith in the efficacy of the UN mission.
Through the figures of Frank, Stettler, and Duncker, Goetsch connects
rising xenophobia in Europe and the humanitarian and diplomatic failures
of the UN mission in the Western Sahara.
Duncker is laconically referred to as “the brave Nazi” for his steadfast and
almost fanatical attempts to imprint his own utopian vision of a European
refugee village onto the existing internally displaced persons’ camp. The
sole purpose of this neocolonial camp is to physically prevent the refugees
from fleeing to Europe. It is, as Frank notes, a vision of a prison or con-
centration camp that holds its inmates hostage breaking both their spirit
and their physical ability to ever leave. Duncker’s ambitious Eurocentric
agenda comes to a temporary standstill when he discovers that Mendes,
one of Frank’s colleagues, is running an underground school. As part of
the curriculum, Mendes teaches all the required skills to forge official doc-
uments and invitation letters in order to skillfully navigate the pitfalls of
the European refugee and asylum system. Although Frank considers this
subversive educational project to be morally bankrupt, threatening every-
thing for which the UN mission stands, he does not prevent Mendes from
going ahead. Neither does Frank confront Duncker, who is about to blow
Mendes’s cover, in any meaningful way. The decisive meeting between
Frank and Duncker occurs incidentally when Frank stumbles across a dis-
placed person carving a swastika into a wooden table. Symbolically inter-
relating European aid, fascism, and neocolonialism, this scene is about to
catapult Frank into action, or rather true to form, into another episode of
“inaction.” Frank encounters Duncker nearby, and asks the architect, who
has become severely ill, to withdraw his extensive construction project.
Frank evokes the Holocaust when he mentions one of his reading mate-
rials, a volume documenting concentration camp memorial sites across
Brandenburg, Germany. He rather naïvely hopes that this historical refer-
ence will bring Duncker to his senses. Duncker, who is either too ill or

60
too deeply invested in his project, disengages from the conversation after
Frank has left some medication for him. Shortly after, Duncker commits
suicide; at least this is the official version circulated by the UN mission.
Throughout the course of the novel, various people accuse Frank of hav-
ing murdered Duncker, which in light of the fact that he fails to help the
German architect, might indeed be construed as the cause of death. Yet,
it is this scene that symbolically sums up the insidious nature of Frank’s
neutral position: while he does not kill Duncker, he does not provide ade-
quate medical care either. By proxy, paralyzed by his state of inertia, Frank
becomes an agent of the relief agency’s neocolonial, and ultimately fascist,
agenda. It is only after Duncker’s death that Frank begins to recollect the
story of his life and lost love and the various entangled memories slowly
emerge and position themselves at odds with one another. Finally able
to understand that the European legacy of colonialism shapes the relief
mission on the ground in Africa, Frank quits his mission and returns to
Zurich. The novel provides satirical relief in its final chapter when Frank
opens the doors of his apartment to Mendes and a group of refugees who
escaped from the IDP camp (presumably well-trained in the art of suc-
cessfully deceiving European immigration officers). Quite ironically, the
narrative comes full circle as Frank and Mendes now must set up their own
kinder and gentler African refugee camp in the heart of Europe. The novel
ends with Frank watching a TV segment, which features a news confer-
ence with Stettler. The politician is surrounded by bodyguards who look
notably old and haggard. Frank notes with a deep sense of satisfaction and
Schadenfreude that Stettler’s eyes are full of fear.
Even though Goetsch was unable to create a broader public awareness
of the political and humanitarian failures of the UN mission in the Western
Sahara, Herz aus Sand has been recognized as an important literary con-
tribution to the highly charged political issue of the efficacy of foreign
aid.61 Together with Hundert Tage, Goetsch’s post-colonial text sheds a
critical light on the new wars and on violent conflict zones while demon-
strating that literature can be an important vehicle that challenges homog-
enized national narratives and public memory discourses. Both novels
also reveal that Switzerland’s post-war memory culture was born out of
a reluctance to face the country’s complex and morally tarnished role in
World War II. Although the narratives discuss humanitarian aid missions
61
Christian Walther, “Herz aus Sand: Daniel Goetschs Roman über ohnmächtige UNO-
Helfer in der West-Sahara,” Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen, July 22, 2009.
178 C. SCHALLIÉ
in Africa, they also deploy memories that encompass Europe’s colonial

legacies, World War II memories, and the Holocaust. As such, these texts
show us the deep entanglement between competing memory cultures—
most notably those that position Switzerland as guardian of humanitarian
law—based on the country’s longstanding asylum policy dating back to the
sixteenth century62—in contrast to those that reveal it to be a Holocaust
bystander. It is through the various mnemonic perspectives in Hundert
Tage and in Herz aus Sand that misconstrued conceptions of Swiss neu-
trality and foreign aid work are most forcefully contested.
62
Historians have pointed out that Switzerland’s long-established tradition of asylum pol-
icy was largely mythified. The Swiss policy favored “an elite and privileged class” and contin-
ued to remain restrictive after the founding of the Swiss national state in 1848. Independent
Commission of Experts Switzerland–Second World War, “Switzerland and Refugees in the
Nazi Era” (BBL/EDMZ, 1999), 43, https://www.uek.ch/en/publikationen1997-2000/
fb-e.pdf.
CHAPTER 10
Compelled to Share: Exploring Holocaust

and Residential School Survivors’ Stories
Willow J. Anderson
On November 4, 2012, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of

Canada and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs co-sponsored an
important memory event in Toronto. Compelled to Remember brought
together survivors, and what Marianne Hirsch calls the post-generation,
of both the Holocaust and Canada’s residential schools in order for them
to discuss “their experiences of historical trauma and injustice, healing and
recovery” and “parallels and differences between Jewish and Aboriginal
legacies.”1 To the casual observer the discussion may have appeared as a
unique coming together of these two groups; in reality it was the latest
occurrence in a decade-long discussion between Aboriginal and Jewish
groups in Canada. This chapter will explore the development of this inter-
1
Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the
Holocaust (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012); Truth and Reconciliation
Commission of Canada, “‘Compelled to Remember’: Program Explores Jewish and
Aboriginal Legacies [Press Release],” November 1, 2012, 1, http://www.myrobust.com/
websites/trcinstitution/File/pdfs/TRC%20NEWS%20RELEASE%20Compelled%20to%20
Remember.pdf.
W.J. Anderson (*)

St. John’s, NL, Canada
e-mail: willow@mindthegapconsulting.ca

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39152-6_10
180 W.J. ANDERSON
cultural mnemonic dialogue. It is an exploration of how memory, and the

means to survive it, travels between these two groups. The first half of the
chapter is an attempt to concretize this mnemonic itinerary,2 extending
back into the recent past to draw lines between seemingly disparate events
and individuals that have led to, among other things, a conversation and
significant allegiance worthy of attention. The second half of the chap-
ter explores that specific 2012 event—entitled Compelled to Remember—
within this mnemonic itinerary. Both are explored through the lens of
Michael Rothberg’s multidirectional memory3 and Astrid Erll’s travelling
memory4 with the aim of exploring how the dialogue reflects Rothberg’s
“politics of memory” map, highlighting how European memory can oper-
ate in an extra-European context, and understanding to what uses these
memories are being put.
This chapter starts with a brief introduction to the history of residen-
tial schools in Canada and then outlines the two theoretical frameworks
that help inform this chapter: Rothberg’s multidirectional memory and
Erll’s travelling memory. I then move on to describe the development of
the mnemonic dialogue between Aboriginal and Jewish Canadians pay-
ing particular attention to a 2012 Truth and Reconciliation Commission
event in Toronto.
Historical Context
Residential schools are a dark and disturbing part of Canada’s history. The
first boarding schools began in the early 1600s,5 but between the years of
1867–1983 these schools were run by various churches and funded by
the Canadian government.6 Over this period approximately 100,000—or
2
3
Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Michael Rothberg, “From
Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory,” Criticism 53, no. 4 (2011): 523–48.
4
Erll, “Travelling Memory.”
5
Rhonda Claes and Deborah Clifton, “Needs and Expectations for Redress of Victims of
Abuse at Residential Schools” (Law Commission of Canada, 1998), http://epe.lac-bac.gc.
ca/100/200/301/lcc-cdc/needs_expectations_redres-e/html/claes.html.
6
Peter A. Chow-White and R. McMahon, “Examining the ‘Dark Past’ and ‘Hopeful
Future’ in Representations of Race and Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” in
Expanding Peace Journalism: Comparative and Critical Approaches, ed. Ibrahim Seaga Shaw,
Jake Lynch, and Robert A. Hackett (Sydney, Australia: University of Sydney Press, 2012),
345–73. 345.
COMPELLED TO SHARE: EXPLORING HOLOCAUST AND RESIDENTIAL... 181
one-third of all Aboriginal children—were taken from their families and

brought to these schools so that they might be educated in “civilized ways”7
and weaned “from the habits and feelings of their ancestors”—habits and
feelings which those in power believed were inferior to those of European
Canadians.8 In their paper for the Law Commission of Canada on institu-
tional child abuse, Rhonda Claes and Deborah Clifton indicate that “brutal
and arbitrary punishment was a daily feature of school life; public beatings
and humiliations, head-shaving, and being kept in locked closets on bread
and water for days are described.”9 Tragically, about one-fifth of the chil-
dren who attended these schools also suffered sexual abuse.10
In the early 1990s, after all the residential schools had closed, there
was a Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) that led
to—among other things—an unearthing of some of these disturbing
residential school accounts. In 1998 the federal government, led by the
Liberal Party, responded to the RCAP’s final report by announcing an
Aboriginal action plan and by reading a Statement of Reconciliation,11
but many did not feel that this response was adequate. The year 2008,
however, saw a more substantial response to the history of residential
schools when Conservative Prime Minister Harper announced the Indian
Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, which included a total of
$1.9 billion in payments to former students and the promise of a five-year
Truth and Reconciliation Commission.12 At the time that the Compelled
to Remember event took place in Toronto, the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission was travelling across Canada hearing the stories of survivors.
The event was one of many events across Canada to tell Canadians about
the 150-year legacy of the residential schools and to “inspire a process of
reconciliation and renewed relationships based on mutual understanding
and respect.”13
7
Matt James, “Wrestling with the Past: Apologies, Quasi-Apologies, and Non-Apologies
in Canada,” in The Age of Apology: Facing up to the Past, ed. Mark Gibney et al. (Philadelphia,
PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 137–53. 141.
8
Claes and Clifton, “Needs and Expectations for Redress.”
9
Claes and Clifton, “Needs and Expectations for Redress.”
10
Tim Naumetz, “One in Five Students Suffered Sexual Abuse at Residential Schools,
Figures Indicate,” The Globe and Mail, January 17, 2009, http://www.theglobeandmail.
com/news/national/one-in-five-students-suffered-sexual-abuse-at-residential-schools-fig-
ures-indicate/article20440061/.
11
Melissa Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2008), 74.
12
“Official Court Notice: Residential School Settlement,” 2008, http://www.residen-
tialschoolsettlement.ca/summary_notice.pdf.
13
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, “‘Compelled to Remember,’” 2.
182 W.J. ANDERSON
Theoretical Framework
During the years that Canadians were learning more about the allega-
tions of the abuses that residential school students had experienced, schol-
ars were debating how or if one might be able to compare the tragedies
experienced by Aboriginal people in North America to the Holocaust.
Some Holocaust scholars (such as Steven Katz, Deborah Lipstadt, and
Daniel Goldhagen) “have underscored the Jewish character of the event
and have strongly asserted its fundamental singularity.”14 On the other
side of the debate scholars such as Lilian Friedberg, Ward Churchill, and
David Stannard have used the Holocaust “as a rhetorical device … to
highlight indigenous suffering.”15 This debate has led to arguments about
the intentionality of the decimation of native populations,16 about the
exact number of people who died in both tragedies, as well as about the
definition of genocide and which atrocity might be considered “lesser” or
more.17 The debate has been punctuated by extreme comparisons such as
comparing the damage of the creation of Mount Rushmore with “burning
synagogues.”18
Luckily a handful of scholars have stepped in to question the productiv-
ity of the debate.19 Rothberg, in fact, developed his idea of multidirectional
memory in direct response to assumptions that he saw emerging from
these and similar debates. As he explains: “Against the framework that
14
Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, “The Politics of Uniqueness: Reflections on the Recent Polemical
Turn in Holocaust and Genocide Scholarship,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 13, no. 1
(1999): 28–61. 29.
15
Lilian Friedberg, “Dare to Compare: Americanizing the Holocaust,” The American Indian
Quarterly 24, no. 3 (2000): 353–80; Ward Churchill, “Forbidding the ‘G-Word’: Holocaust
Denial as Judicial Doctrine in Canada,” Other Voices 2, no. 1 (February 2000), http://www.
othervoices.org/2.1/churchill/ denial.php; David Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest
of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); David MacDonald, “First Nations,
Residential Schools, and the Americanization of the Holocaust: Rewriting Indigenous History
in the United States and Canada,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 40, no. 4 (2007):
995–1015. 1009.
16
Stannard, American Holocaust.
17
Friedberg, “Dare to Compare.”
18
Stannard, American Holocaust.
19
MacDonald, “First Nations, Residential Schools, and the Americanization of the
Holocaust”; A. Dirk Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the
‘Racial Century’: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust,” Patterns of Prejudice
36, no. 4 (2002): 7–36; Rosenfeld, “The Politics of Uniqueness.”
understands collective memory as competitive memory—as a zero-sum

struggle over scarce resources—I suggest that we consider memory as
multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and
borrowing; as productive and not privative.”20 Multidirectional memory,
for Rothberg, is the “productive, intercultural dynamic” that can result
from the “interaction of different historical memories.”21
Astrid Erll’s notion of travelling memory also theorizes memories as
evolving and in motion. In her 2011 article, she argues that “the pro-
duction of cultural memory, people, media, mnemonic forms, contents,
and practices are in constant, unceasing motion.”22 For Erll, “all cultural
memory must ‘travel’, be kept in motion, in order to ‘stay alive’, to have
an impact both on individual minds and social formations.”23 She suggests
that memory studies should note these “mnemonic itineraries,” propos-
ing that scholars should explore the paths that memories take, the “non-
isomorphic trajectories of media, contents, and carriers, the paths, and
path-dependencies, of remembering and forgetting.”24
This chapter seeks to explore one such mnemonic itinerary and how a
“productive, intercultural dynamic” might take shape in a specific memory-
driven dialogue between two cultural groups.25 To date, Rothberg has
largely explored multidirectional memory through eminent cultural works
and mediated messages.26 By applying his theory to “more mundane situ-
ations” there is an opportunity to explore the specific elements that dif-
ferentiate more productive uses of multidirectional memory from those
that are less productive—something Rothberg himself has advocated.27
Secondly, exploring the trajectory and dialogue that form part of the
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory; Rothberg, “From Gaza to Warsaw.”
27
Michael Rothberg, Fransiska Louwagie, and Pieter Vermeulen, “The Holocaust and the
Comparative Imagination: Interview with Michael Rothberg,” March 2010, http://
michaelrothberg.weebly.com/uploads/5/4/6/8/5468139/interview_holocaust_and_
comparative_imagination.pdf. This document is a translation of an interview of Michael
Rothberg by Fransiska Louwagie and Pieter Vermeulen. Fransiska Louwagie and Pieter
Vermeulen, “L’holocauste et l’imagination comparative: entretien avec Michael Rothberg,”
Témoigner: Entre Histoire et Mémoire 106 (2010): 151–67.
184 W.J. ANDERSON
growing relationship between Holocaust and residential school survivors

and their post-generation allows us to learn how those who “live within,”
if you like, the first and fifth circles of European memory, that is, the
Holocaust and colonialism respectively,28 see their individual and collec-
tive worlds.
Mnemonic Itinerary and Dialogic Development

Strangely, this dialogic, multidirectional, and intercultural mnemonic itin-
erary begins with fairly brutal and very public anti-Semitic comments. In
2002 a respected First Nations leader in Canada, David Ahenakew, spoke
at a First Nations leaders’ meeting about health care.29 During his speech
Ahenakew made many anti-Semitic remarks, allegedly in an attempt to
encourage the group to become incensed by the state of the health and
treaty rights of Aboriginal Canadians.30 Following the speech a reporter
asked him to explain his remarks further and he was quoted to have said
that “Hitler was ‘trying to clean up the world’ when he ‘fried’ six million
Jews” and that Hitler had to do it “to make damn sure that the Jews didn’t
take over Germany or Europe.”31
The strong response to Ahenakew’s comments was both swift and
prolonged. In addition to being the recipient of the public’s immedi-
ate outrage, in the months that followed he was stripped of the honor
of being a member of the Order of Canada and he was charged with
promoting hatred.32 These charges led to many years of court proceed-
ings. During his trial Ahenakew said that he had developed his beliefs
about Jews during his peace-keeping years with the military in the Gaza
Strip in the 1960s. The peace keepers he was working with were trying
28
December 20, 2010.
29
CBC News, “Controversial Native Leader Ahenakew Dies,” CBC News, March 13,
2010, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/controversial-native-leader-ahenakew-
dies-1.885292.
30
Chris Purdy, “Doesn’t Hate Jews, Only What They Do, Ahenakew Testifies,” The Globe
and Mail, November 28, 2008, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/
doesnt-hate-jews-only-what-they-do-ahenakew-testifies/article1365672.
31
Betty Ann Adam, “‘Hitler Had His Reasons,’ Ahenakew Tells Court,” The StarPhoenix,
November 28, 2008, http://www.thestarphoenix.com/Hitler+reasons+Ahenakew+tells+co
urt/1006940/story.html.
32
CBC News, “Controversial Native Leader Ahenakew Dies.”
to maintain fences to keep children away from land mines. He believed

that Israelis were removing them. This perceived behavior, he remarked,
was “unjust” and “cruel” and “reminded him of his own people living
on reservations”33 because they “were absolutely captive people in [their]
own country.”34 Initially Ahenakew was convicted, but an appeal led to his
eventual acquittal. Despite this acquittal, however, Ahenakew remained
disgraced, perhaps in part because some six years after his original com-
ments he affirmed that he still believed them.35
Ahenakew’s original 2002 comments prompted several Aboriginal
leaders to call the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) to ask how they
might make amends for his comments. A member of the CJC, Holocaust
survivor Robbie Waisman, recalled that “[t]he CJC said, ‘By contacting
us, you’ve done a lot already.’”36 Those phone calls sparked a dialogue
between Aboriginal and Jewish leaders in Canada that extends to the pres-
ent day. Interestingly, an integral piece of this dialogue has been an explo-
ration of the experiences of two memory communities housed within their
larger cultural groups: Holocaust and residential school survivors.
This exploration has taken many forms in the years following Ahenakew’s
comments. In January 2003, for example, Robbie Waisman, who was the
president of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre at that time, and
residential school survivor Willie Abrahams spoke to 800 students and
community members from Terrace and Stewart, British Columbia about
their stories of trauma and resilience.37 In 2006, Worldview Strategies,
also in British Columbia, brought together a group of people to talk
about Jewish–First Nations relationships.38 This teleconference featured
Mark Weintraub, Chair of the CJC Pacific Region, and Robert Joseph,
Hereditary Chief of the Gwa wa enuk First Nation, and Special Advisor
33
Purdy, “Doesn’t Hate Jews, Only What They Do, Ahenakew Testifies.”
34
Adam, “‘Hitler Had His Reasons.’”
35
Purdy, “Doesn’t Hate Jews, Only What They Do, Ahenakew Testifies.”
36
Marites N. Sison, “Holocaust Survivor Offers Message of Hope,” Anglican Journal,
September 19, 2013, http://www.anglicanjournal.com/articles/holocaust-survivor-offers-
message-of-hope.
37
Naomi Rozenberg, “Stories about Survival,” Jewish Independent, January 31, 2003,
http://www.jewishindependent.ca/oldsite/archives/jan03/archives03jan31-03.html.
38
Worldview Strategies, “Jewish-First Nations Relations. [Transcript from the Weaving
Webs of Communities Teleconference Series Moderated by J. Sutherland, Featuring Chief
Robert Joseph and Mark Weintraub],” Worldview Strategies, January 26, 2006, http://
www.worldviewstrategies.com/jewish-first-nations-joint-initiatives/.
186 W.J. ANDERSON
of Indian Residential Resolution Canada as guest speakers. The former

described the conversation as part of what he envisioned would be a bring-
ing together of “Aboriginal people and members of the Jewish community
in some kind of larger conversation … to communicate to our respective
communities how deep these connections are and the kind of work that
can be done.”39 Later that same year, Assembly of First Nations (AFN)
chiefs (including Chief Robert Joseph) and CJC leaders travelled to Israel
to talk about issues of “cultural retention, of modernization, [and] lan-
guage retention.”40 On his return to Canada, one of the chiefs who had
been on the good-will tour asked the CJC whether any Holocaust survi-
vors lived in Canada. Two years later, at the invitation of the chief, Robbie
Waisman went to Fort Providence in the North West Territories.41 When
Waisman arrived to speak at a residential school conference he was greeted
by many local people—several of them residential school survivors—who
“formed a circle around him and for the first time, spoke about their own
horrors at the schools.”42 Yet another connection came in the form of a
small Canadian delegation travelling from the Northwest Territories to
Germany to meet with a small group of people from around the world
engaged in reconciliation work. The aim of the meeting was to talk and
learn about healing, genocide, and the intergenerational transmission of
trauma.43 So from 2002 through 2008 the mnemonic discussions between
these groups continued, crossing political, social, and cultural boundaries.
Interestingly, all of the above dialogues preceded the creation of the
five-year Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as promised by
then Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in his apology to resi-
dential school survivors on June 11, 2008.44 Since the advent of the
Commission, there have been several more events bringing together rep-
resentatives from the Jewish and Aboriginal Canadian communities to talk
about the Holocaust and the residential school system. In the summer
of 2012 Chief Robert Joseph met with representatives of the Centre for
Israel and Jewish Affairs, the Jewish Federation, the Vancouver Holocaust
39
Worldview Strategies, “Jewish-First Nations Relations,” 3.
40
41
Sison, “Holocaust Survivor Offers Message of Hope.”
42
43
Worldview Strategies, “Jewish-First Nations Relations.”
44
“Official Court Notice.”
Education Centre, and the Jewish Museum “to share his vision of fur-
ther dialogue between the two communities.”45 Robbie Waisman contin-
ued his work speaking about his experience at Buchenwald concentration
camp with residential school survivors throughout Western and Northern
Canada in particular—many of those speaking engagements as part of the
TRC’s work.46 Waisman explained to the Anglican Journal “that he feels
a ‘sacred duty and responsibility’ to bring healing to residential school
survivors.”47 Recognizing his efforts, in 2011 Waisman was inducted as
an honorary witness by the TRC48 and in 2014 he received the Governor
General’s Caring Canadian Award.49
In 2012 there were two TRC sponsored events that brought together
Aboriginal and Jewish Canadians.50 The first was an event called Voices of
Survival. It was held in a synagogue in Winnipeg. Robbie Waisman spoke
as did Justice Murray Sinclair— the chair of the TRC. Justice Sinclair
admitted that the experience of Holocaust and residential school survivors
were different, but pointed out that the sharing of stories of resilience and
recovery can be helpful. Sinclair expressed hope that this was the first of
many events between these two groups.51 Compelled to Remember, which
we will return to shortly, followed some eight months later in Toronto
and was co-sponsored by the TRC and the Centre for Israel and Jewish
Affairs.52 In speaking to a conference in Sudbury that same month Justice
45
Centre for Israel & Jewish Affairs, “Jewish and Aboriginal Communities Continue to
Strengthen Relationship” (Centre for Israel & Jewish Affairs, April 25, 2013), http://www.
cija.ca/judaism/jewish-and-aboriginal-communities-continue-to-strengthen-relationship/.
46
Meagan Fiddler, “‘Death Was a Constant Companion’: Residential School and Holocaust
Survivors Share Their Stories” (Winnipeg: Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, March
22, 2012), http://aptn.ca/news/2012/03/22/death-was-a-constant-companion-residen-
tial-school-and-holocaust-survivors-share-their-stories/; Myron Love, “Etz Chayim
Residential School Panel,” Jewish Post and News, n.d.; Sison, “Holocaust Survivor Offers
Message of Hope.”
47
48
49
Pat Johnson, “Holocaust Survivor Robbie Waisman Receives Caring Canadian Award,”
Jewish Independent, February 28, 2014, sec. Local, http://www.jewishindependent.ca/
holocaust-survivor-robbie-waisman-receives-national-honor/.
50
Fiddler, “‘Death Was a Constant Companion’”; Truth and Reconciliation Commission
of Canada, “‘Compelled to Remember.’”
51
Fiddler, “‘Death Was a Constant Companion’”; Love, “Etz Chayim Residential School
Panel.”
52
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, “‘Compelled to Remember.’”
188 W.J. ANDERSON
Murray Sinclair spoke about a bond that existed between residential school
and Holocaust survivors.53 Proof of this bond continued to grow in the
year that followed with the creation of a day-and-a-half long workshop
between Holocaust and residential school survivors in Vancouver—Chief
Robert Joseph, who had been part of meetings with Holocaust survivors,
had envisioned this project—and with the Jewish Federation and the
Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs’ assistance in organizing a Walk for
Reconciliation in Vancouver on September 22, 2013.54
Compelled to Remember as a Multidirectional

Memory Case Study
The above discussion outlines the development of a relationship and
a dialogue between two different memory communities. In order to
understand better the complexities and nuances within these conversa-
tions, however, it is helpful to tease out one example of this on-going
conversation. As an event co-sponsored by the TRC and the Centre for
Israel and Jewish Affairs during Holocaust Education Week, Compelled
to Remember is a meaningful example of the discussions that have hap-
pened between these two communities. The event was held in Toronto
on November 4, 2012 and featured a panel that brought together six
individuals with direct links to the tragedies of the Holocaust and the
residential school system in Canada: a Holocaust survivor (Alma55), a
residential school survivor (George), two descendants of Holocaust
survivors (Paula and David), and two descendants of residential school
survivors (Kimberley and Dean). The event was broadcast live over the
Internet through the TRC website56 and explored the “parallels and dif-
ferences between the Jewish and Aboriginal legacies.”57 This exploration
highlights well how memory might travel across cultural and temporal
53
Carol Mulligan, “Residential School, Holocaust Survivors Have Bond: Judge,” The
Sudbury Star, November 28, 2012, http://www.thesudburystar.com/2012/11/27/
residential-school-holocaust-survivors-have-bond-judge.
54
Centre for Israel & Jewish Affairs, “Jewish and Aboriginal Communities Continue to
Strengthen Relationship.”
55
Please note that the names used here for the panellists are pseudonyms.
56
Compelled to Remember Panel Discussion, Compelled to Remember, 2012, http://www.
livestream.com/trc_cvr/video?clipId=pla_7cbfa08f-c198-4d8b-8cda-fbc0d294517f.
57
boundaries and involves “dynamic transfers that take place between

diverse places and times during the act of remembrance.”58
Michael Rothberg’s theory of multidirectional memory offers a useful
lens through which to explore the intercultural dialogue of November 4,
2012. It allows us to look at how Holocaust and residential school survi-
vors and their post-generation might navigate discussions about their his-
tories of trauma and resilience in ways that can be creative and productive.
In the next section, I explore how the dialogue from that event reflects
Rothberg’s “politics of memory” map.
As mentioned earlier, Rothberg developed his idea of multidirectional
memory in direct response to what he calls the “logic of competitive
memory,”59 a logic he found emerging from research he was conducting
on the histories of slavery and the Holocaust.60 He found problematic
the assumptions that “different forms of memory are strictly separate and
autonomous forms of remembrance”61 and in response he suggests the
concept of a multidirectional memory, which takes account of how mem-
ory is influenced across borders, cultures, and times. In his 2011 article
entitled “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory,”
Rothberg further elaborates on multidirectional memory by conceptual-
izing memory discourse as falling along two axes. The first axis is the
“axis of comparison” and the second the “axis of political affect” [empha-
sis in original].62 The intersecting axes are continuums along which all
memory discourse might be plotted. At one end of the axis of comparison
is “equation” and at the other “differentiation.” To Rothberg differentia-
tion requires a speaker to move past his or her experience as a “separate
and unique thing” and to bring histories of different groups “into rela-
tion without erasing their differences or fetishizing their uniqueness.”63
The axis of political affect runs from “solidarity” to “competition.” This
continuum describes the intentional (or perhaps sometimes uninten-
tional) rhetorical frame or spirit that is adopted. That is, in talking about
two different groups’ traumatic pasts a speaker can choose to engage a
58
59
Rothberg, “From Gaza to Warsaw,” 523.
60
Rothberg, Louwagie, and Vermeulen, “The Holocaust and the Comparative
Imagination.”
61
Imagination.”
62
63
190 W.J. ANDERSON
competitive tonality” that essentially pits one group’s experience against

“
the other or, rather, choose to engage in an approach more empathetic to
the experience of the other.64
In talking about the comparison of histories and memories, Rothberg
knows he is treading on dangerous ground, but as he points out:
Too often comparison is understood as “equation” … The logic of com-

parison explored here does not stand or fall on connections that can be
empirically validated for historical accuracy; nor can we ensure that all such
connections will be politically palatable to all concerned parties. Rather, a
certain bracketing of empirical history and an openness to the possibility of
strange political bedfellows are necessary in order for the imaginative links
between different histories and social groups to come into view.65
Given that part of the stated purpose66 of Compelled to Remember was to

explore possible similarities between two different histories—in this case
that of Aboriginal and Jewish Canadians—multidirectional memory is
a useful resource in understanding this commemorative event. It is also
worth mentioning that Rothberg sees multidirectional memory as particu-
larly important to the recognition of an “unexpected resonance between
the Holocaust and colonialism,”67 making it a useful lens through which
to understand better the dialogue between Holocaust and residential
school survivors and those of their post-generations.
Methods
The purpose of this chapter is to discover how memory travels between
two different cultural groups, how European memory functions in an
extra-European context, and to find out how these memories are being
deployed. The lens of Rothberg’s multidirectional memory allows for an
exploration of where dialogue falls on a “politics of memory” map68 so
that we might better understand the mnemonic dialogue. In this process
the 1-hour-and-37-minute discussion that transpired during Compelled to
64
65
66
67
68
Remember becomes data. My initial step in exploring this event was to

watch and listen carefully to the whole discussion, noting possible areas of
thematic importance by attending to re-occurrence, repetition, and force-
fulness.69 Since I was particularly interested in the interactive components
of the event, I then went back and transcribed only the one-hour-and-
six-minutes of panel discussion and assigned pseudonyms to the panelists.
This resulted in 13 pages of data.
Before coding the data I completed the interesting task of shaping
Rothberg’s multidirectional memory theory, his “politics of memory”
map, into a coding map (see Fig. 10.1).70 I took Rothberg’s description of
the intersecting axis of comparison and political affect and created a cod-
ing map from the resulting four categories. I then named the four catego-
ries based on his description of their characteristics. The four categories
are: competitive equation, competitive differentiation, equation solidarity,
and differentiated solidarity.71
Competitive equation denotes communication which sees no difference
in the nature of the histories being discussed (“what we went through
is essentially the same”) and whose political affect is one of competition
Fig. 10.1 Politics of memory coding map
69
William Foster Owen, “Interpretive Themes in Relational Communication,” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 70, no. 3 (1984): 274–87.
70
71
The term “differentiated solidarity” is Rothberg’s. The remaining three position names
were developed based on Rothberg’s description of multidirectional memory.
192 W.J. ANDERSON
(“there is only room for one of us”). Competitive differentiation is com-

munication that recognizes the uniqueness of the histories being discussed
and whose affect is one of competition (“I recognize our experiences were
different” and “there is only room for one of us”). Equation solidarity,
however, is the opposite of competitive differentiation in that it sees the
histories in question as equitable (“what we went through is essentially
the same”) and that the political affect is one of solidarity (“we are in
this struggle together”). Finally, differentiated solidarity recognizes that
the histories being discussed are diverse from each other and the political
affect is one of solidarity (“I recognize our experiences were different, but
we are in this together”).
Once the four multidirectional memory categories were clear, I returned
to the data and coded all the instances when panelists referred specifi-
cally to something said by another panelist as well as those instances when
panelists were engaging with specific events or language that originated
from the other culture (such as a Holocaust survivor using the Aboriginal
Canadian term “Elder” to describe her own experience). This coding was
very selective as I had a particular interest in the dialogic nature of the
event. I took the coded data and plotted it on the multidirectional mem-
ory map.
Results
As referenced earlier, multidirectional memory’s intersecting axes of com-
parison and political affect resulted in four categories, that is: competitive
equation, competitive differentiation, equation solidarity, and differenti-
ated solidarity. Rothberg does not believe that there should be “a mora-
torium on analogies and comparisons” between various historic traumas,
however he does admit that there are “distinguishing elements that dif-
ferentiate ‘better’ uses of multidirectional memory, uses in the interest of
solidarity, from uses that are more disturbing.”72 In this section I explore
where the dialogue at the Compelled to Remember event might be plotted
on Rothberg’s “politics of memory” map, highlighting how and to what
ends European memory is operating in an extra-European context.
The discourse from this event did not include any examples that fit
comfortably within the competitive end of the political affect axis. That is,
no one took the “there is only room for one of us” approach. There were
Rothberg, Louwagie, and Vermeulen, “The Holocaust and the Comparative Imagination.”
72
a couple of instances, however, when the residential school experience was

equated with the Holocaust, but the political affect (competition or soli-
darity) was not quite clear, thereby putting these instances on the cusp of
equation solidarity and competition equation. The most striking example
was from George who said that being in residential school “was like a
concentration camp.” Explaining this further he said: “[L]ike my number
for ten years up there was [89] … I was brainwashed with that number.
I actually got it tattooed on my hand. It’s number [89]. It says Mohawk
Residential School survivor.” George so identified with the experience of
the Holocaust that he chose to tattoo his number on his wrist, presumably
as a direct reference to how concentration camp prisoners were forced to
have their numbers tattooed on their arms. There is no doubt that this
is an appropriation that many would consider problematic (which is why
this comment sits firmly within equation) and that this is not a “‘good’
version of multidirectional memory.”73 It is a good example, however,
of Assmann’s assertion that the Holocaust “is used as a universal lever to
draw attention to other marginalized collective memories.”74 She suggests
that these invocations of the Holocaust may not need to be made “in a
spirit of competitive victimhood, but rather with the aim to establish a
claim for moral authority, recognition and restitution for historical trau-
mas that have as yet received no or little attention.”75 In the void of recog-
nition of his trauma, George used Holocaust memories to create a physical
manifestation of his painful residential school experience.
Moving from the competition end of the political affect axis to the
equation end, there was a fair bit of dialogue within the category of equa-
tion solidarity. As referenced earlier, equation solidarity describes discourse
that sees the histories in question as equitable (“what we went through
is essentially the same”) and in which the political affect is one of solidar-
ity (“were are in this struggle together”). Dean’s discourse in particular
reflected equation solidarity. For example, at one point he explained that
when he was young, he watched a lot of movies about World War II and
73
Imagination,” 201.
74
Aleida Assmann, “The Holocaust – A Global Memory? Extensions and Limits of a New
Memory Community,” in Memory in a Global Age, ed. Aleida Assmann and Sebastian
Conrad, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010),
97–117. 111.
75
Assmann, “The Holocaust- a Global Memory?,” 111.
194 W.J. ANDERSON
as he watched these movies he realized: “I could identify with the Jewish

resistance more and I rooted for them and I cheered them on and I wanted
to go out and shoot Nazis, right, I was a little boy.” Hollywood portrayals
of native people were horrible, he explained, they were presented as “hea-
thens, savages, just barbaric, sub-human beings … as a little boy, I couldn’t
identify with that. I didn’t want to identify with that … I could identify
with fighting the Nazis.” So in the vacuum of realistic portrayals of his
own people and their struggles, Dean grew up identifying with the experi-
ence of the Jewish resistance. Here we see what Daniel Levy and Natan
Sznaider would argue is the cosmopolitan nature of Holocaust memory.
In the struggles of World War II, Dean recognized his people’s own suf-
fering. In this identification, Levy and Sznaider argue, “the local context”
is central.76 Without this context, an identification with the Holocaust
experience would not result, because “[s]trong identifications are only
produced when distant events have a local resonance.”77
And Dean’s identification with the Jewish resistance movement runs
deep. In a second example of equation solidarity, Dean talks about a
realization he came to after years of watching World War II movies. He
recounts that he “started seeing the similarities, the parallels here, the con-
nections. ‘How did the Nazis come up with this madness of killing human
beings?’ … and I started seeing the similarities that … one of the models
was how they treated the Indians, right, [Canada], the United States.”
In this quote Dean once more parallels the experience of Native North
Americans with Jews in the Holocaust. In this case he points to what he
feels is the historical interconnectedness of the two experiences, which is
reminiscent of the competitive memory work of scholars such as Stannard
and Churchill.78 Dean himself talks of this experience in solidarity with the
Jewish experience, but he is suggesting that Aboriginal Canadians were
put on a “parallel” track.
Rothberg points out that the equation and solidarity combination is “a
frequent permutation” in the political memory map that he has created.79
76
77
78
Stannard, American Holocaust; Churchill, “Forbidding the ‘G-Word’”; Ward Churchill,
Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools
(San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2004).
79
Although he admits that equation solidarity is “preferable to competitive

discourses, this vision would also risk downplaying historical heterogene-
ity, with uncertain effects for political mobilization and moral vision.”80
Equation solidarity then is a category that leads to less productive dis-
course than that of differentiated solidarity.
The final category in the multidirectional memory map is differenti-
ated solidarity. Discourse within this category recognizes that the histories
being discussed are different from each other and the political affect is
one of solidarity (that is, “I recognize that our experiences were differ-
ent, but we are in this together”). Both Kimberley and Alma engage dif-
ferentiated solidarity. In responding to a question about how the media’s
depiction of the Holocaust might provide “lessons that could be learned
and maybe applied to the Aboriginal experience in Canada,” Kimberley
talks about how the movie Schindler’s List had been her first exposure to
the Holocaust. She acknowledges an earlier comment from a daughter
of Holocaust survivors who said that she really appreciated media repre-
sentations of the Holocaust even though she feels they were often not a
“true accounting,” but Kimberley noted that when she saw Schindler’s
List she had thought it was an important movie because the Holocaust
“wasn’t hidden anymore.” This exposure of the Holocaust, she points
out, is in stark contrast to the public’s lack of knowledge about residential
schools. “There are so many more people that don’t know that it hap-
pened and they think that it’s something that is remote like the beginning
of Canada—when the last school closed in 1996.” Kimberley laments that
her experience of her family’s trauma was different because of the lack of
media representation: “I don’t think people can understand without some
kind of media discussion.” She recalls that the Holocaust prompted her to
learn more and “make some connections with the experience my family
had had.”
Holocaust survivor Alma also engages with differentiated solidarity
discourse. In talking about George’s experience with residential schools,
Alma expressed how moved she was by his story. She told him: “I can
identify with you and your suffering—both as a child and as a parent. I
think it’s a terrible stain on Canada’s honour and face. Our country can
be, should be better and should hurry up to make amends to you and
your people. You deserve it. You deserve better. We all do, but you’ve
80
196 W.J. ANDERSON
been on the short end.” Alma gives recognition to the fact that both she
and George have been wronged, but she does not equate her experience
to his. She acknowledges that he has been wronged by his country and
she stands in solidarity with him in his call for further support for residen-
tial school survivors. In her discourse Alma is able to explore “historical
relatedness”81 but does so “without erasing their differences.”82
Limitations
Not unlike other studies, this one is not without its limitations. Firstly,
I was constrained by the medium through which I accessed the data.
Although the audio component of the taped broadcast was clear, various
camera foci meant that in some instances the camera focus was so broad
that it was not close enough to see specific facial expressions. In other
scenes, the focus was so close on one panelist that you could not always
see to whom the panelists were gesturing and/or how the other panelists
reacted to a given comment. Given that I was looking for specific instances
of dialogue, the blurring of the non-verbal components was somewhat
of a hindrance. Secondly, the nature of the event means that panelists
were selected, if even just partially, based on their appropriateness for this
kind of event. As a result, their dialogue did not include any competitive
rhetoric, which meant that this study was unable to unpack that particular
aspect of discourse.
Conclusion
This chapter sought to explore the development of an intercultural mne-
monic dialogue. It outlined the itinerary of how the memories of two
communities in Canada—Holocaust and residential school survivors and
their post-generations—have travelled together since 2002, partly in
response to anti-Semitic comments made by an Aboriginal leader. One
of the stops on this itinerary was the Compelled to Remember event in
Toronto in 2012. The question this raises is what this event, and those
that preceded it, tell us about how European memory works in an extra-
European context.

81

82
It is clear that in some situations and contexts, the Holocaust is being

used as a framework for the articulation of this Canadian-based atrocity.83
Panelists involved with Compelled to Remember and similar events, do ref-
erence where they saw their residential school story within a Holocaust
frame.84 However, with the exception of Ahenakew’s comments, they do
not seem to be within a competitive framework. It is worth mention-
ing here that despite Assmann’s assertion that Canada lives “outside the
historic constellation of the Holocaust,”85 Aboriginal children in Canada
were far more likely to grow up with media representations of the struggles
and traumas of those living through the Holocaust than of their people’s
own struggles. Before the advent of the TRC, Canada as a whole had not
in any meaningful or broad-reaching way commemorated the struggles
of its Aboriginal peoples and the residential school system. That is, even
though Canadians are the “inheritors of their own historic traumas and
burdens,”86 these are only recently being explored and it is therefore not
surprising that the story of the Holocaust has had, to borrow Levy and
Sznaider’s term, “local resonance” in Aboriginal communities.87
There are two other important characteristics of this dialogue worth
highlighting. Interestingly, a great amount of the dialogue between
Holocaust and residential school survivors does not focus on the “event”
of the Holocaust. Instead the dialogue is about the sharing of survival and
resilience stories and strategies; it is about learning from each other. In
the context of the traumas that both groups experienced, Holocaust sur-
vivors are veterans; they are successful survivors and resilient mnemonic
advocates.88 As Chief Robert Joseph said “we need to … demonstrate the
same kind of perseverance the Jewish people exercised and we need to
find out what those ideas and ideals [are] and how those things sustain
us in difficult times so we can move forward.”89 European memory, then,
is something to be shared and learned from. From this perspective, the
Holocaust is not seen merely as a template to understand the experience
83
Assmann, “The Holocaust- a Global Memory?”
84
85
86
87
88
89
198 W.J. ANDERSON
of other traumas. Rather, its survivors are the keepers of the knowledge
of resilience.90
In addition, an exploration of the development of the on-going dia-
logue between these two groups unearths where the residential school
survivors’ struggles may fit within the understanding of Jewish Canadians.
As Jewish leader Mark Weintraub pointed out, the Jewish experience is
one of a keen awareness of human rights abuses. In talking about this
understanding, Weintraub added that he feels “Aboriginal justice is para-
mount … and that we need to put it in the centre piece of our human
rights agenda” so that it is passed down “into the hearts and minds of the
next generation.”91 The recent discussion of Canadian residential schools
might thereby provide a framework for continuing the conversation about
the Holocaust. It allows European memory to travel and thus keeps those
memories alive, serving a new purpose in the current day in a very differ-
ent context “maintained precisely through the fiery interaction between
the local and the global”92 and the human compulsion to share.
Finally, the intercultural mnemonic event that was Compelled to
Remember offers important insights into the process of sharing memories
more generally. First of all, it serves as a reminder of the importance of
being both intentional and careful in the language one uses in describing
our own memories, particularly when working in intercultural contexts.
A couple of the panelists, for example, engaged language that originated
from the other’s experience in ways that bordered on appropriation
(for example, an Aboriginal panelist talking about trying to forgive the
unforgivable, a Jewish panelist hoping she might refer to herself as an
Elder rather than a survivor). Although the intent of these invocations of
each other’s experience may not be competitive in this specific context—
and a multidirectional memory lens suggests this might be symptomatic
of our world’s porous cultural boundaries93—in some contexts the effect
may counter endeavors towards solidarity and support in memory sharing
processes.
Secondly, Compelled to Remember highlights the power of sharing
memories in unmediated forms. Several panelists remarked on being very
90
Compelled to Remember Panel Discussion; Love, “Etz Chayim Residential School Panel”;
91
92
93
moved by each other’s accounts of their experiences. Even Dean, the

Aboriginal panelist who had explained that growing up he had greatly
identified with the Jewish resistance in the movies he watched confessed
after hearing Alma’s Holocaust recollections first hand: “[Hollywood] can
just barely put their finger on it and touch that madness and that pain and
that suffering. I learned more about the Holocaust today hearing you talk
because it’s coming from your heart.” This important intercultural mne-
monic event, therefore, serves as an illustration of both the importance of
the intentionality of language use and the potential power of unmediated
formats in memory sharing processes.
CHAPTER 11
From Europe’s Early Iron Age to a New

Urbanist Shanzhai Village: Themed
Environments, Global Property Markets,
and the Role of Hallstatt’s Cultural Lineage
Markus Reisenleitner
Episode 13 of the seventh season of the popular German-Austrian cop

show SOKO Donau,1 titled “Verschollen/Lost,” is uncharacteristically set
in Hallstatt. Hallstatt, with its fewer than 1,000 inhabitants, lies in the
Austrian tourist region known as the Salzkammergut, which is famous for
1
I am referring to the show by the title used in Austrian television. In Germany, the show
is titled SOKO Wien. For a more detailed discussion of the show, see Susan Ingram and
Markus Reisenleitner, Wiener Chic: A Locational History of Vienna Fashion (Bristol: Intellect,
2013), 55–75.
I am grateful to Cornelius Holtorf for comments on an earlier version of this

chapter. For his archeological analysis of Hallstatt’s memory sites, see Cornelius
Holtorf and Anders Högberg, “Zukunftsbilder in Erhaltungsstrategien,” in
Diachrone Zugänglichkeit als Prozess: Kulturelle Überlieferung in systematischer
Sicht, ed. Michael Holmann and André Schüller-Zwierlein (Berlin; Boston, MA:
De Gruyter, 2014), 197–214.
M. Reisenleitner (*)
Department of Humanities, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
e-mail: m_r1@mac.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39152-6_11
202 M. REISENLEITNER
its pristine alpine scenery, lakes, mountains, and church steeples towering
over villages and small towns. While SOKO Donau shows are typically,
and in keeping with genre conventions, urban in their setting, this spe-
cific episode was shot entirely on location in Hallstatt in August 2011.2
The plot revolves around the murder of an archeologist. Solving the case
involves digging into personal histories that lead back to the Third Reich,
which necessitates breaking through walls of silence that the inhabitants
of Hallstatt have erected around the region’s past during World War II. In
this context, detection emerges as memory work against the deliberate
obliteration of a sometimes painful and traumatic, and often unsavoury,
past. Referencing the mythical Alpine Fortress [Alpenfestung], where
looted Nazi gold treasures are supposedly still buried, a veritable treasure
hunt reveals in the end that everybody has a dark secret, either person-
ally or through their family connections. These secrets are camouflaged
in a twofold manner: in the first instance by what one of the detectives
describes in Austrianese as “vü Gegend do” [a lot of scenery here] and
secondly, by the tiny city’s über-cute architecture, which reminds one of
the other detectives in the team of Disneyland. Indeed, in the background
of one scene, tourists from all over the world admire the fountain in the
village square, and among those tourists, one notices a group of Chinese
who look more like engineers and real-estate agents, measuring and taking
pictures of the locations.
Despite the prescient Disneyland reference, the film crew would likely
not have been aware of what the Chinese who stumbled onto their set
were up to. A year later, however, the reasons for the Chinese presence
became clear. In 2012, Hallstatt made international headlines when it
became publicly known that a more or less faithful replica of the pretty
little place had been created in China’s Guangdong province3—one of the
most extreme instances yet of the Chinese practice of shanzhai (piracy/
copying/counterfeiting) that continues to baffle Western observers.4
2
“SOKO Donau-Stars im Salzkammergut,” Nachrichten.at, March 11, 2015, http://
www.nachrichten.at/oberoesterreich/SOKO-Donau-Stars-im-Salzkammergut;art4,696987.
3
“Hallstatt-Kopie: China eröffnet Nachbau eines österreichischen Dorfs,” Spiegel Online,
February 6, 2012, http://www.spiegel.de/reise/aktuell/hallstatt-kopie-china-eroeffnet-
nachbau-eines-oesterreichischen-dorfs-a-836618.html; Tafline Laylin, “World’s First Clone
Village in China Is Now Open to Visitors,” Inhabitat, June 22, 2012, http://inhabitat.
com/worlds-first-cloned-village-in-china-is-now-open-to-visitors/.
4
Bianca Bosker, Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China
(Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013); Tony Paterson, “Alpine Villagers
FROM EUROPE’S EARLY IRON AGE TO A NEW URBANIST SHANZHAI... 203
According to newspaper reports, the not-so-creative alignment of luxury

living and theme park in China initially caused some concern and out-
rage among the Alpine villagers,5 apparently mostly because the process
of replicating the tiny village had been carried out “in secret”: architects
secretly set their sights on the picturesque town in recent months. “The
people are not very amused that this has happened behind their backs,”
Mayor Alexander Scheutz told German news agency DPA. As a news
magazine reported at the time, the “leader of the lakeside town in the
picturesque Salzkammergut region heard about the plans coincidentally
in May through an Austrian economic delegation in Hong Kong where
the Chinese real estate company responsible inquired about arranging a
partnership between the two cities.”6
However, the dust settled quickly, and the inhabitants of Hallstatt have
not only accepted, but also embraced the global reach of their village. To
show their appreciation, they sent a delegation to China to promote tour-
ism, a trip that resulted in headlines such as: “An Austrian delegation tours
Guangdong province, where the World Heritage Site, replete with a lake,
has been recreated––Upper Austrian local capo: ‘Like a trade fair.’”7 Since
then, the number of Chinese visitors to the Salzkammergut has skyrock-
eted. It did not take long for slightly ironic comments to appear:
The mayor of Hallstatt, Alexander Scheutz, signed an agreement on cul-

tural exchange and said that he was “very proud” that his village had been
recreated in China. “One recognizes immediately that it’s Hallstatt,” said
the mayor of the original [village]. However, Austrian media amused itself
by pointing to the inaccurate dimensions, typos and palm trees in the copy.8
Bewildered as China Clones Their Home,” October 22, 2011, http://www.independent.

co.uk/news/world/europe/alpine-villagers-bewildered-as-china-clones-their-
home-2299946.html; Bethany Bell, “Austrian Village ‘Cloned’ in China,” BBC News (BBC,
June 5, 2012), http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-18327751.
5
“Hallstatt Kopie sorgt weiter für Aufregung,” Vorarlberg Online, June 15, 2011, http://
www.vol.at/hallstatt-kopie-sorgt-weiter-fuer-aufregung/news-20110615-12125078.
6
“Xeroxed Village: Chinese Secretly Copy Austrian UNESCO Town,” Spiegel Online,
June 16, 2011, http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/xeroxed-village-chinese-
secretly-copy-austrian-unesco-town-a-768754.html.
7
“Hallstatt liegt in China,” Der Standard, June 1, 2012, http://derstandard.
at/1336698514206/Kopie-vor-Eroeffnung-Hallstatt-liegt-in-China?_slide=1. “Eine öster-
reichische Delegation tourt durch die Provinz Guangdong, wo der Welterbe-Ort samt See
nachgebaut wurde—Oberösterreichischer Ortschef: ‘Wie eine Verkaufsveranstaltung.’”
8
“Hallstatt Liegt in China.” All translations from the original German are the authors.
While still making the news on occasion, it seems to have been accepted
that Hallstatt’s cloning into a much larger site, conceived by a mining
company and part of the economic boom in the Pearl River Delta,9 is yet
another example of a by now well-known tendency of Asian culture to
replicate what they see as desirable in “the West” (which grabbed world-
wide attention in the Samsung vs. Apple lawsuit). Hallstatt proudly claims
its aura as the original on its website: “Millionfold photographed—once
copied—never reached.”10 The village’s clone in Southern China is placed
in the context of other Chinese developments that replicate architectural
signifiers of “western civilization” such as the Egyptian sphinx, the Eiffel
tower, the Roman colosseum, the Sydney opera house and the White
House.11 Clearly, imaginaries of “the West,” for which Europe signifies
metonymically and prominently, matter for the cachet these theme parks
cum property developments have acquired in a part of China that prides
itself on “catching up”:
Disney-themed photo spots are scattered around the village’s main plaza,
which is modeled after Hallstatt’s marketplace. “The moment I stepped in
here, I felt I was in Europe”, said 22-year-old Zhu Bin, a Huizhou resi-
dent. “The security guards wear nice costumes. All the houses are built in
European style.”12
How did a small village in a popular tourist area of Austria come to sig-
nify “European-ness” in China and evoke memories of Europe’s past on
a par with the Roman Colosseum and the Egyptian sphinx? While part of
it might be explained by the serendipity of partnership and trade agree-
ments, it seems to me that we have to take a closer look at how institution-
alized and promoted local as well as European historical imaginaries have
generated and perpetuated memory projects around the village that lend
themselves to global appropriation while camouflaging the darker side of
personal and collective pasts that are not likely to sell real estate.
9
“Made in China: An Austrian Village,” Reuters, June 5, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/
article/2012/06/05/china-austria-idUSL3E8H42VJ20120605#P3Y5XcQVqtfI
wHZ2.97.
10
“Hallstatt.net,” Hallstatt.net, accessed November 6, 2014, http://www.hallstatt.net/.
“Hallstatt: Millionenfach fotografiert – einmal kopiert – nie erreicht.”
11
“China baut sich die Welt nach,” Der Standard, May 15, 2014, http://derstandard.
at/1399507604318/China-baut-sich-die-Welt-nach.
12
“Made in China: An Austrian Village.”
What I would like to explore in this contribution is how Hallstatt

sutures and articulates memories of industrialization and the exploita-
tion of land through mining as the basis of material affluence to the
small-town appeal of a tightly knit community existing over centuries in
a beautiful, tranquil, and sustainable environment. As I outline below,
these strategies are not unique to China or Southeast Asia. Rather,
American towns planned or re-structured according to concepts and
tenets of New Urbanism reveal a similar proclivity towards fake histo-
ries (Rosemary Beach) and proximity with theme parks (Celebration)
inspired by idealized and nostalgic imaginaries of such small, tightly knit
communities. Hallstatt’s “Disneyfication” fits extremely well into New
Urbanist tenets and thus provides a basis for the nostalgic refractions of
the global memories of a prelapsarian Europe that never existed, a foil
for bourgeois desires spread over the market machinery of contemporary
real-estate capitalism. In the following, I aim to unravel the entangled
memories13 that constitute the basis of this imaginary and show how
they “travelled”14 to China via the USA. Gregor Feindt et al.’s conceptu-
alization of memory correctly emphasizes memories’ “(inter-) relational
character.”15 Feindt draws our attention to processes of meaning-making
based on memory that are grounded in “polyphony,”16 dissolving the
frame of the nation state and exploding the homogeneous notions of
cultural lineages derived from the national frameworks to which earlier
forms of (European) memory studies (such as Nora’s) are still indebted.
In the contemporary context, there cannot even be a doubt that memo-
ries travel, and that the nation cannot be “the key arbiter of cultural
memory.”17 A site like Hallstatt can draw, I hope, our attention to the
complex mechanisms through which memories of Europe are mobilized
in specific contexts, both inside and outside Europe, and always in mul-
tiple, polyphonic acts of transference, (mis-)translation and commodi-
fication, with material traces of multiple histories providing both the
raw material and stubborn sources of resistance to the appropriations of
global and local markets and their meaning-making machines.
13
14
15
16
17
Creating Memories of “Olde Europe”

Through Self-Promotion and Forgetting
Arguably, Chinese property developers did not just stumble over a ran-
dom little village in Upper Austria, and Hallstatt is not just another inter-
changeable tourist spot available to be transplanted as an image of “Olde
Europe.” With its scenic location, population of 795, and area of 60 km2,18
it is one of the few Austrian sites on UNESCO’s world heritage list, a
list of “981 properties forming part of the cultural and natural heritage
which the World Heritage Committee considers as having outstanding
universal value.”19 This “universal value” was assigned to the picturesque
village in 1997 because “it bears a unique or at least exceptional testimony
to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or which has
disappeared”20 and because it provides “an outstanding example of a tra-
ditional human settlement, land-use, or sea-use which is representative of
a culture (or cultures), or human interaction with the environment ….”21
Due to UNESCO, Hallstatt had been put on the global map 15 years
before it was reproduced in China.
What was recognized by UNESCO was that the origins of the his-
tory of the village can be traced back to pre-Roman times. While settle-
ment of the area dates back to the Stone Age, it was salt mining that
established the name Hallstatt in European memory. Predating written
records, the early iron-age Hallstatt culture, c. 800–400 bce,22 became a
formative part of narrating Europe’s past after a prehistoric cemetery was
discovered by the mining manager and hobby archaeologist Johann Georg
Ramsauer in 1846. What he found turned out to be a minor necropo-
lis; over 1,000 burial sites were excavated during the second half of the
18
“Hallstatt,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, May 12, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.
org/w/index.php?title=Hallstatt&oldid=601698741.
19
UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “World Heritage List,” accessed May 19, 2019,
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/.
20
UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “World Heritage List.” Criterion iii.
21
UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “World Heritage List.” Criterion iv.
22
Thomas Werner, Hallstattkultur (Göttingen, 1984); Naturhistorisches Museum Vienna
et al., Krieger und Salzherren: Hallstattkultur im Ostalpenraum. Ausstellung des naturhisto-
rischen Museums Wien in der neuen Galerie der Stadt Linz vom 7. September bis 24. Oktober
1971 (Vienna: Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, 1971); Anton Kern, Kingdom of
Salt: 7000 Years of Hallstatt (Vienna: Natural History Museum, 2009); Timonthy Champion,
Settlement and Society: Aspects of West European Prehistory in the First Millenium B.C.
(Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1985).
nineteenth century. The archaeological site is still active, and more burials
keep being discovered—to date, more than 5,000.23 Distinctive artifacts
proved that the salt mining village was connected to the rest of Illyrian
and Celtic Europe and established it as a major prehistoric settlement.24
Sustained archaeological interest in the area since then has revealed that
mining activities actually date back to 1500 bce, but there is little evi-
dence for a major settlement at the lake before the Middle Ages, when salt
mining was taken up again after a hiatus during the Roman era and the
post-Roman migrations.25 In the twelfth century, Hallstatt was fortified to
protect a princely salt privilege, which resulted in a distinctive landmark
fortification (Rudolfsturm), and the village was awarded the status of a
market town in 1311.
Nestled into the steep inclines of the Alps, the village was only acces-
sible by boat until 1890, when a road was built and the idyllic location
became part of what was by then an established summer resort region
(Sommerfrische) for both the nobility and the second society in the wan-
ing days of the Habsburg empire, exploiting a byproduct of its loca-
tion and resources—the spas. Franz Joseph spent his summers in nearby
Bad Ischl, while other nearby villages were popular with writers, paint-
ers, and intellectuals of the Vienna 1900 ilk: Hugo von Hofmannsthal,
Jakob Wassermann, Theodor Herzl, and Friedrich Torberg preferred
Altaussee,26 while Klimt and Emilie Flöge summered at the Attersee. One
of the main, and somewhat morbid, attractions of Hallstatt was provided
by an ossuary, a collection of decorated skulls and bones that resulted
from the local custom: from the early modern era on, buried corpses were
routinely exhumed and put on display in the parish church after a certain
length of time because of the spatial constraints of the community. The
village’s acumen to make the most out of its sparse historical remains and
the area’s archaeological claim to fame to attract tourists is also evidenced
by the museum, which opened in 1888.27
23
Hannes Hintermeier, “Hallstatt und die Kelten: Taranis wohnt hier nicht mehr,”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 20, 2007, sec. Reise, http://www.faz.net/aktu-
ell/reise/nah/hallstatt-und-die-kelten-taranis-wohnt-hier-nicht-mehr-1488042.html.
24
“Hallstatt Culture,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, May 12, 2014, https://en.wikipe-
dia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_culture.
25
“Hallstatt (Archäologie),” Wikipedia, April 29, 2014, http://de.wikipedia.org/w/
index.php?title=Hallstatt_(Arch%C3%A4ologie)&oldid=129933796.
26
“Altaussee,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, accessed March 11, 2015, http://en.wiki-
pedia.org/w/index.php?title=Altaussee&oldid=623892390.
27
“Museum Hallstatt,” 2014, http://www.museum-hallstatt.at/.
What is clear is that when the village made it to the list of UNESCO
heritage sites (a year after Austria celebrated its official “millennium”—the
name Ostarrichi had first been mentioned in a document in 996—in a
series of events that had boosted Austria’s PR activities and budgets for
local, provincial, and federal institutions and organizations) it was not a
coincidence. Rather, it resulted from over a century of self-promotion that
made the most of Hallstatt’s local history. The claim to being simultane-
ously a natural and a cultural heritage site certainly helped. The sheer age
of Hallstatt’s past, its pristine scenery and the quaint but likeable rhetoric
of the region’s tourism promoters—a bit rustic but savvy enough to hone
in on important buzzwords such as the pristine environment, historical
buildings, and so on—obscured its mining past as an early form of indus-
trial production. Mining’s associations of penetration and robbery, which
have probably become one of the most affective images of environmental
damage, brought to the screens in 3D in James Cameron’s Avatar, are
avoided studiously in official material. Mining is aligned with the imagi-
nary of Hallstatt as a cultural and trade center connected to the rest of
Europe rather than with providing a basis for proto-industrialization:
“Underground mining for salt began at the end of the late Bronze Age
and resumed in the 8th century BC when archaeological evidence shows
a flourishing, stratified and highly organised Iron Age society with wide
trade links across Europe.”28 What is germane here is that the village actu-
ally constituted a traffic hub rather than a remote but culturally important
outpost in the pre-Roman period, during a time when waterways were
more relevant for transport and trade than roads.29 Such memories of a
Europe defined by the legacies of pre-Roman and Roman trade routes
and forms of economic exchange have been mobilized repeatedly in the
village’s self-representation, most remarkably in the prestigious form of a
provincial exhibition (Landesausstellung) in 1980, long before Austria was
even considering joining the European Union, which was tellingly titled
“Hallstatt Culture: An Early Form of European Unity.”30
While the metaphor of “excavation” seems to be the overarching trope
of the village’s strategies of memorializing particular pasts, r epresentations
28
“Hallstatt-Dachstein/Salzkammergut Cultural Landscape,” UNESCO World Heritage
Centre, accessed March 11, 2015, http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/806.
29
“Hallstatt und die Kelten.”
30
Dietmar Straub, ed., Die Hallstattkultur: Frühform europäischer Einheit; Internationale
Ausstellung des Landes Oberösterreich, 25. April - 26. Oktober 1980, Schloss Lamberg, Steyr
(Linz: Oö./Landesverlag, 1980).
of Hallstatt are equally characterized by a deliberate forgetting of other

pasts that have emerged. The Salzkammergut is a region that was notorious
during the final years of the war as mythical alpine fortress (Alpenfestung,
a propaganda term used by both sides), a place of refuge for Nazi lead-
ers such as Eichmann,31 and the hiding place of loot in the mines of
Altaussee32 and the depth of its lakes, particularly the Toplitzsee.33 These
local instances of local collaboration with the Nazi regime were followed
by silence and denial after 1945.
Tapping into the mythologies of pan-European, vaguely new-agey
Celtic mythologies has strongly contributed to the region’s appeal and
helped bury or erase these less appealing imaginaries. The Celts—if there
ever was a homogeneous ethnicity by that name—have the distinct advan-
tage of not having left any written records, and are thus very useful for
creating somewhat malleable imaginaries of a distant pan-European past.34
The Celtic heritage is also conveniently distant from both Roman and
Germanic appropriations of ethnic histories that damaged desires for
European “unity” (and trade relations) in the past in conflicts whose evo-
cation is ambivalent at best, while the Celts have very few of these conno-
tations, at least in Continental Europe. A Celtic “Erlebnisdorf” [adventure
village] and Celtic re-enactment groups in the vicinity of genuine archaeo-
logical digs bear testimony to the continuing popularity of this imaginary,
easily mobilized for shared “European” legacies from the dawn of time
that connect Hallstatt to Glastonbury and the mists of Avalon.
If at this point the impression emerges that the “original” Hallstatt is
an ideologically somewhat questionable theme park that has been in the
making for over a century, this impression would not be entirely mistaken.
But of course so are many other tourist spots in Europe—Venice springs
to mind—for which mythologies, theming, and remnants of historical
material environments are hard to disentangle. UNESCO’s preservation
31
Simon Wiesenthal, “Doch die Mörder leben: Auf der Jagd nach flüchtigen
NS-Verbrechern,” Der Spiegel Online, August 21, 1967, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/
print/d-46211734.html.
32
“Altaussee.”
33
Gerhard Zauner, Verschollene Schätze im Salzkammergut: Die Suche nach dem geheim-
nisumwitterten Nazi-Gold (Graz: Stocker, 2003); Christian Topf, Auf den Spuren der
Partisanen: Zeitgeschichtliche Wanderungen im Salzkammergut (Grünbach: Ed. Geschichte
der Heimat, 1996).
34
Bernhard Maier, The Celts: A History from Earliest Times to the Present (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2003).
efforts are doubtless both based on and simultaneously perpetuate a care-

fully crafted, distinctive imaginary that seamlessly connects some strands
of history that are appealing (original Celtic settlers living in harmony
with the pristine and sublime environment while building connections all
across Europe through trade) while obliterating the more inconvenient
ones. Lineages of memory have in this context produced heritage sites and
collective assumptions about shared histories that have become export-
able commodities—in highly mediated form, mobilized and transformed
in global marketization efforts.
A similar analysis could probably be conducted for many European her-
itage sites; so why did the Chinese mining company pick Hallstatt? Is there
something specific about the place that makes it particularly attractive for
the current Chinese context? Some of it is no doubt due to a generic
“European-ness.” What little information we have about the Hallstatt rep-
lica in China seems to bear this out:
Besides the buildings, which have been rebuilt very exactly and with great
attention to detail, horses and pigeons apparently have also been imported.
Even trees were flown in and the bamboo and other subtropical fauna
removed. Advertising leaflets promise that in the future there will be alpine
flowers that blossom all year, a Viennese pastry shop, a kind of Hofbräuhaus
and a romantic village square. High-class European restaurants and an inter-
national school have also been promised, as well as a swimming pool on
the peak of a nearby hill. The exclusive accommodation in Asian-Hallstatt
should be ready in May.
Despite these efforts, there are some discrepancies in the copy according
to Parry. The church in China may look almost exactly like the original, but
it will hardly be used as a church due to the circumscribed religious freedom
in China. According to the Chinese real estate agent it will rather be turned
into a restaurant, a sports facility or a concert hall. Additionally, the Chinese
Hallstatt will contain an imitation of the Getreidegasse, where Mozart was
born. However, the original is not in Hallstatt but rather Salzburg.35
On a more specific level, there are some remarkable parallels between

the original’s history and the replica’s context and aspirations. After all,
Hallstatt redux, Chinese style, was built by a mining tycoon, and the
35
Markus Roman, “Kopiertes Österreich-Alpendorf: Niemand will in Chinas Hallstatt
wohnen,” T Online, February 1, 2012, http://www.t-online.de/reisen/china/
id_53670068/kopiertes-oesterreich-alpendorf-niemand-will-in-chinas-hallstatt-wohnen.
html. Translated by the author.
s ettlement’s location in the Pearl River delta places it at the center of one
of the busiest trade regions of the world—on a somewhat larger scale than
the Celtic salt mining settlement.
I have indicated how Hallstatt sutures and articulates histories of indus-
trialization and the exploitation of land through mining as the basis of
material affluence to the small town-appeal of a tightly knit community
existing over centuries in a beautiful, tranquil, and sustainable environ-
ment. My final section explores how the desirability of this particular
form of living has emerged during the past two decades as a hegemonic
response to processes of massive and rapid urbanization—conveniently,
and somewhat misleadingly, labelled New Urbanism. Probing this phe-
nomenon will require an exploration of the circuitous routes on which a
nostalgic memory of Europe’s past has travelled, via Disney’s theme parks
and Florida’s Gulf Coast, through the USA over the course of its capital-
ist development of a specific version of modernity, to influence property
development in Southern China.
It’s a Small World After All: Prosthetic

Childhood Memories Made in America36
Unlike modern Europe or contemporary China, the USA is not an urban
society. Rather, its entry into modernity as well as its national imaginary
have been profoundly dominated by the small town, which “has been,
since the mid-nineteenth century, a part of the fictional imagination,”
traced meticulously by Miles Orvell in The Death and Life of Main Street:
Small Towns in American Memory, Space and Community and described as
a “story of the effort, and the failure, to define community.”37 Main Street,
the heart of the small town, is a trope invented in the nineteenth cen-
tury that found its apotheosis in Disneyland, bringing together notions of
community, family values, and commerce. While actual small towns were
often pretty dismal and socially oppressive places that young people in par-
ticular tried to escape, Main Street, according to Orvell, provided a nostal-
gic trope of an always already lost golden age and, in the US imaginary, a
36
An earlier version of this section appeared as Markus Reisenleitner, “Resetting the Clock:
Theme Parks, New Urbanism, and Smart Cities,” in A Reader in Themed and Immersive
Spaces, ed. Scott Lucas (Pittsburgh, PA: ECT-Press Carnegie Mellon University, 2016).
37
Miles Orvell, The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space
and Community (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
powerful home-grown antithesis to the international style that permeated

the modern city, metonymically represented by New York and Chicago.
This imaginary is precisely what Disneyland’s entryway into the theme
park tries to recuperate as a form of prosthetic childhood memory.
The Main Street imaginary also provided a fulcrum for the attacks on
modernism that resulted from its failure to socially engineer and aestheti-
cally plan the more equitable, liveable, and functional cities imagined by
Le Corbusier. While the attacks on modernism, which resulted in the
post-modern rallying cry to learn from Las Vegas, targeted the housing
projects and rational layouts of the inner cities that had become all but
uninhabitable in the USA and had produced the racialized blight of an
urban underclass, the neo-traditional approach that takes its cues from
Disney—and the nostalgia it builds on—targeted modern city planning’s
failure to accommodate the middle-class by militating against suburban
sprawl, bedroom communities, and car culture, and their devastating con-
sequences on family and street life.
Branded as “New Urbanism,” the neo-traditional approach to tack-
ling urban issues literally codifies the nostalgia that inspired Disneyland
into a few simple principles that profess to stem directly from an appre-
ciation of historical models indicative of universal—or universalizable—
human values:
New urban approaches affirm the appeal of compact, mixed use, walkable,
and relatively self-contained communities. Instead of car-oriented develop-
ment practices, new urbanism argues for traditional architecture and build-
ing patterns that facilitate walking and that create strong urban identities.
In sum, in an era when modernism has profoundly affected the shape of the
city, new urbanism presents a new image of the good community.38
One of the first and probably best known developments of New Urbanism
is the resort town of Seaside, Florida, a planned town on Florida’s Gulf
Coast (a.k.a. “the Redneck Riviera”). Masterminded by architects Andrés
Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and their firm DPZ, Seaside, with a
population of 2,000—supposedly the size of a typical town of the 1920s
and 1930s—, takes its stylistic cues from the Old South and sets out to
build a community through a:
38
Jill Grant, Planning the Good Community: New Urbanism in Theory and Practice, Ebook
(London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2006).
rediscovery of planning and architectural traditions that have shaped some

of the most livable, memorable communities in America—urban precincts
like Boston’s Back Bay and downtown Charleston, South Carolina; neigh-
borhoods like Seattle’s Capitol Hill and Philadelphia’s Germantown; and
traditional small towns where life centers around a courthouse square, com-
mon, plaza, train station or main street.39
With strict building codes inspired by historical models, Seaside was the
first example of the “Traditional Neighbourhood Approach” that DPZ
would develop into the codified tenets of New Urbanism with the foun-
dation of the Congress of New Urbanism (CNU, 1993) and their book
Suburban Nation,40 an urban planning bestseller that has been seen as the
twenty-first-century response to, and continuation of, Jane Jacobs’ 1961
bestseller, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.41
[C]odes dictate the proportion of building heights to street width, ensuring

that each type of street has a distinct spatial character …. The basic building
block of DPZ’s community plans is the neighborhood, which is sized (from
40 to 200 acres) and configured (a radius of no more than one-quarter mile)
so that most of its homes are within a three-minute walk of neighborhood
parks and a five-minute walk of a central square or common.42
The result is a town that mobilizes eclectic stylistic references to architec-

tural history to implement a particular vision of community, imagined as a
form of sociability that needs to be resurrected from the past:
Seaside, Florida, is a town designed as an ‘ideal’ community, where houses

have front porches and verandas, picket fences and sleeping porches; here,
streets are carved and paved with brick, and sidewalks are made of peb-
bles and seashells. It is the kind of place where you might imagine your
grandparents grew up.43
39
Peter Katz, Vincent Scully, and Todd W. Bressi, The New Urbanism: Toward an
Architecture of Community, Ebook (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1994).
40
Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of
Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York, NY: North Point Press, 2000).
41
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of the Great American Cities (New York, NY: Vintage
Books, 1992).
42
Katz, Scully, and Bressi, The New Urbanism.
43
Andres Duany and Seaside Institute, eds., Views of Seaside: Commentaries and
Observations on a City of Idea (New York, NY; Santa Rosa Beach, FL: Rizzoli; Seaside
Institute, 2008). Cover text.
Of course, chances are high that even middle-class Americans’ grandpar-

ents would have grown up in an entirely different, less Rockwellian and
more Orwellian place. It would be easy to debunk a resort town with
faux historical styles as yet another example of post-modern architecture’s
eclectic and apolitical appropriation of past models, a “fantasy theme
park village”44 built to provide a refuge for well-heeled, white-bread
Midwesterners from the hardships of winter that lets them experience the
utopia of small-town communities during a spring break. But Seaside, and
the New Urbanism movement in general, struck a chord with city planners
and communities because they promised to address, at a very fundamental
level, the problematic of urban modernity while also speaking to the desire
that planning decisions and aesthetic choices can address and improve this
problematic. The language of “improvement,” accompanied by buzz-
words such as “smart growth,” played well in an economic environment
in which property value was on everybody’s minds.45 Mission statements
seemed to summarize neatly what was wrong with American cities:
[N]ew towns and master-planned communities, these basic Modernist con-

cepts have compromised, if not completely destroyed, their ability to evolve
into vital communities. The task of the New Urbanism is to learn from these
failures, avoiding their sterile and suburban character while defining a form
of growth which can help mend the metropolis.46
They promised solutions inspired by (imagined) histories—learning from

small-town pasts—that had the potential to re-build communities and
neighborhoods. The CNU provided an organizational framework for
New Urbanists, who also slowly started to make inroads into an Ivory
Tower still dominated by modernists. The relatively small scale of New
Urbanism planning—for example, its being centered around the con-
cept of the “neighborhood”—made it relatively easy to put theory into
practice, while the populist and eclectic rhetoric, modelled after what had
worked for theme parks, helped communicate the message to officials and
stakeholders, often mobilizing innovative forms of communication, such
as DPZ’s “charrettes”—seven-day meetings with community stakeholders
who were asked to contribute their own ideas that were translated, on-site,
44
Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs
Happened (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000), 251.
45
46
into planning and hand-drawn visualizations. The CNU has met regularly
since 1993, has established chapters, produced publications, television
programs, and a YouTube channel, and has thus successfully established
itself as a “movement” with a streamlined, uncomplicated, seemingly apo-
litical, and capital-friendly message that is strongly rooted in an optimistic
belief in spatial determinism and social engineering47 through architecture
and planning at the local, community level. CNU proved adept at getting
out the basic message about their “principles,” and it is precisely in those
principles that a nostalgic memory of Europe, as the origin of suppos-
edly best past practices, both aesthetically and structurally, is mobilized.
New Urbanists routinely reference “historic European towns”48 and quote
nineteenth-century city planners such as Camillo Sitte in their defense of
family-friendly “neighborhoods,” the basic building block of “commu-
nity,” which is imagined as having existed unproblematically in a simpler
(pre-automobile) past, facilitated by walkability and safe streets, obliter-
ated in late modernity and now in need of being re-engineered through
deliberate historical references.49
It would be easy to debunk the historical gumbo of European and
colonial pseudo-references that provide the basis of New Urbanism’s re-
imagining of a small-town past in Europe, but what interests me more is
how this imaginary is related to theming and themed environments. The
affects produced by pseudo-historical references to an imaginary past, only
vaguely specified but widely appealing, play up long-established anxieties
over urban alienation, lack of community, and fear of diversity, all of which
the fantasies created by theme parks promise to suspend temporarily. The
Walt Disney Company demonstrated the intimate connection between
theme parks and utopian desires for a different kind of urbanity when it
developed the town of Celebration in the 1990s on Disney property close
to Orlando.
Celebration is a very different realization of Walt Disney’s ini-
tial concept for EPCOT, the “Experimental Prototype Community of
Tomorrow” that he had planned as a utopian city of commerce and tech-
nology, inspired by the World Fairs of 1893 (the Chicago Columbian)
47
Grant, Planning the Good Community.
48
49
Andres Duany: The Urban Design View of the Neighborhood (Chicago, IL: The University
of Chicago Urban Network, 2014), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne0MqFZIoCw&
feature=youtube_gdata_player.
and 1939 (the New York City of Tomorrow), but with a strong dosage
of social control, “as influenced by urban planner Victor Gruen,”50 who
is credited with the invention of the shopping mall. Disney’s approach
to town planning foreshadows some of New Urbanism’s tenets with its
emphasis on “mixed-use development to revitalize dying city centers”51
and reduce traffic. While “Ur-Epcot was the last gasp of the paternalist
company town,”52 Celebration maintains Walt’s utopian spirit but mar-
ries it to the Main Street USA nostalgia that had already been successfully
translated into community utopianism by the neo-traditionalists in their
attempt to revive and re-interpret a supposedly lost sense of place and
community not reliant on cars.53 Disney’s imagineers originally intended
to go far beyond design, style manuals, and floor plans by inventing a “his-
tory” for the town:
[A] key part of the Imagineering process is developing what is called a ‘back-
story’ for the product, the mythological history that provides a focus as the
development proceeds. Concocting a backstory for a town did not seem
too different from concocting one for a new ride. But some of the ideas
were ripe. At some point, the Imagineers suggested the tale of a city rising
from the ashes of General Sherman’s march across the South, though that
fact that he never set foot in Florida did not seem to matter. In the end, the
more pragmatic development people recognized that the town would not
be a ride or a movie, but a real place.54
Despite abandoning the idea of a fictitious history for Celebration, mas-

ter planners Robert Stern and Jacquelin Robertson designed Celebration
to look as though it had “grown up organically over time”55 even if the
results are somewhat contrived, as Andrew Ross, who spent his sab-
batical there in 1997, observes in his aptly titled book The Celebration
Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Values in Disney’s New
Town: “In Celebration … everything, even if it is ‘slightly aged’ …, looks
50
Cher Kraus Knight, Power and Paradise in Walt Disney’s World (Gainesville, FL:
University of Florida, 2014), 112.
51
Knight, Power and Paradise in Walt Disney’s World, 112.
52
Andrew Ross, The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Values
in Disney’s New Town (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1999).
53
Douglas Frantz, Celebration, U.S.A.: Living in Disney’s Brave New Town (New York,
NY: Henry Holt & Co, 1999), 43.
54
Frantz, Celebration, U.S.A., 52.
55
Ross, The Celebration Chronicles, 10.
freshly minted. The preference for porches and gingerbread detail made
of polymerized materials instead of wood (highly rottable in this climate)
means that the real aging process will have a struggle on its hands.”56
While architectural critics were largely dismissive of Celebration’s “inau-
thenticity” and themed origins, Ross troubles the false dichotomy that
underwrites the town’s aesthetic dismissal:
For some time now, it has been considered a feat of publicly minded hero-
ism to save and restore old buildings. By contrast, constructing old build-
ings from scratch is considered a morally corrupt act of forgery [if he wrote
the text now, he would no doubt make a remark about the Chinese]. One
enterprise is true and noble, the other is false and vulgar. According to this
double standard, gentrifying urbanites are serving an admirable cause by
restoring Federal townhouses, while well-heeled suburbanites who move
into brand-new neotraditionalist communities are fodder for the heritage
machine that merchandizes a counterfeit past. This is no small irony in a
country whose most cherished public buildings are often ardent copies of
ancient European originals.57
Ross reminds us of earlier movements that have informed at least part of

New Urbanism’s agenda, especially Jane Jacobs’ spearheading of a pres-
ervationist movement that “convinced an entire generation of the envi-
ronmental sanity of preserving the high-density urban neighbourhoods
that planners were itching to condemn as slums.”58 Well intended, they
were also fodder for the gentrification onslaught of the 1980s that freely
mixed downtown revitalization with Disney-like theming in places such
as Boston’s Quincy Market, New York’s Times Square, and a number of
waterfront revitalization projects reminiscent of New Urbanism.59 Ross
draws our attention to the fact that “old,” in the US context often implies
copying of European styles, whether in historicist nineteenth-century
endeavors or post-modern theming.
The hyper-real European legacy of New Urbanist imaginaries is par-
ticularly manifest in Rosemary Beach, down the road from Seaside.
Also designed in 1995 by Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk,
Rosemary Beach is characterized by its “incorporation of the European
56
57
58
59
Ross, The Celebration Chronicles, 6, 68.
Colonial architecture of the West Indies, New Orleans, and St. Augustine
as the prototypical house design.”60 Rosemary Beach’s imitation of colo-
nial architecture—itself imitating the architecture of the imperial center—
substantiates what Celebration had already intimated: that at least in the
US utopian imaginary, there is a close connection between the desires
for sustainable, walkable, equitable, and mixed-use urban environments
that are vaguely remembered as pre-modern—for example, prelapsarian
“European”—and the kind of social and aesthetic control that theme
parks’ “imagineers” impose on anyone who enters their spaces. And while
new developments such as Celebration and Rosemary Beach re-work tra-
ditional architecture from cities such as St Augustine and New Orleans in a
complex layering of historical imaginaries, New Urbanism’s principles have
in turn had an effect on the restoration, commodification, and gentrifica-
tion of historical town centers, and the intricate layering of imaginaries.61
Conclusion
Hallstatt’s architecture is mostly Baroque. The town was re-built after a
fire in 1750. However, its “universal value,” recognized by UNESCO,62
clearly makes it look like a prime model for the desires for new modalities
of living together that New Urbanism has promoted and that have made
their way to China, losing some of the complexities and subtleties charac-
teristic of such translations in well-established shanzhai practices. What the
recreation of Hallstatt in China demonstrates is the appeal of a particular
form of memory: not the prosthetic childhood memory of an individual
but one of humanity. Humanity’s shared history serves as a substitute for
the small-town US imaginary in driving a similar capitalist dynamic of
theming while maintaining some of the themed dreamland that resonates
with mirror images of New Urbanist thought.
This particular mobilization of European memory is very apposite for
promoting a vision of global flows of capital that historically originated in
60
Richard Sexton, Rosemary Beach (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 2007).
Cover text.
61
This became manifest when DPZ, whose projects had been so strongly influenced by the
architecture of New Orleans, were retained in the re-building process of that city after Katrina.
Doug MacCash, “Urban Planner Andres Duany Shows off His Bywater House Prototypes,”
NOLA.com, January 31, 2009, http://blog.nola.com/dougmaccash/2009/01/post_14.
html.
62
“Hallstatt-Dachstein/Salzkammergut Cultural Landscape.”
Europe and are re-imagined as not only an inevitable, but also as a sup-
posedly benign model of organizing community. The spectacularization of
Hallstatt as a New Urbanist theme park all but obliterates the dark sides of
a historical trajectory in which capitalism was built, among other things,
on environmental damage (still somewhat visible in the mines) and on the
social control of an absolutist Baroque theocracy and its fear-mongering
mobilization of religious orthodoxy (still manifest in the ossuaries and
frescoes of Hallstatt’s churches), a violent trajectory that escalated during
the past century in a fascist state whose memories are now buried in a deep
lake and are only occasionally resurrected in popular culture. It also artic-
ulates European memory to a historical perspective that screens out an
alternative model of social order on which European memories could be
based, namely the anti-capitalist alternative models that existed between
1945 and 1989 in Europe’s east and that have a close, albeit precarious,
relationship to China’s own history.
Suturing selective memories of Europe to New Urbanist visions of live-
able environments, ideological as it may be, fits very well into contem-
porary China’s national project of modernization and nation-building,
which has taken a toll on the environment on an unprecedented scale and
is of course no stranger to targeted forgetting of a recent past. Evoking
memories of a Europe that can be presented, through its memes, as hav-
ing successfully negotiated the contradictions of capitalism in a way that
makes it possible to live like the Hallstätter do, surrounded by glorious
and pleasing reminders of the past, cannot but be attractive for the emerg-
ing Chinese middle class, even though this imaginary can only exist in the
form of a theme park. From this perspective, the “cloning” of European
sites becomes less slavish emulation than carefully selected, historically
rooted ideological markers of imaginaries that make it possible to exist in
advanced capitalist regimes of a massive scale.
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Haneke’s the White Ribbon.” Film Quarterly 63, no. 4 (Summer 2010):
48–55.
Winter, Jay. Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the
Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.
Worldview Strategies. “Jewish-First Nations Relations. [Transcript from the
Weaving Webs of Communities Teleconference Series Moderated by J.
Sutherland, Featuring Chief Robert Joseph and Mark Weintraub].” Worldview
Strategies, January 26, 2006. http://www.worldviewstrategies.com/
jewish-first-nations-joint-initiatives/.
“Xeroxed Village: Chinese Secretly Copy Austrian UNESCO Town.” Spiegel
Online, June 16, 2011. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/
xeroxed-village-chinese-secretly-copy-austrian-unesco-town-a-768754.html.
Zaller, Robert. “Postwar Germany as a Grimm’s Fairy Tale.” Broad Street
Review, April 13, 2013. http://broadstreetreview.com/books-movies/cate_
shortlands_lore_germany_year_zero.
Zauner, Gerhard. Verschollene Schätze im Salzkammergut: Die Suche nach dem
geheimnisumwitterten Nazi-Gold. Graz: Stocker, 2003.
Zürcher, Lukas. Die Schweiz in Ruanda: Mission, Entwicklungshilfe und nationale
Selbstbestätigung (1900–1975). Zurich: Chronos, 2014.
Index1
A 177n30, 177n32–9, 177n42,

Akin, Fatih, 14, 121–7, 130–3, 177n43, 177n45, 177n46
135n14, 136n36 Barthes, Roland, 142, 145, 156n23–6,
Aksu, Eşref, 83n18, 86n69, 86n70, 156n31
86n76 Beattie, Andrew, 71, 84n30, 85n45,
Algeria, 137, 170, 178n50 85n48
Anderson, Benedict, 19n14, 62n36, Beck, Ulrich, 18n7, 19n17, 43n2,
101n45 43n5, 81n2, 81n3, 99n8,
Assmann, Aleida, 4, 9, 18n12, 20n51, 135n17, 136n39, 154n1
28, 43n2, 44n14, 44n15, 45n25, Belgium, 29, 90, 97
64, 81n3, 86n64, 99n8, 117n15, Benjamin, Walter, 58, 157n43
140, 155n17, 199n74 Blandiana, Ana, 68, 74–8, 86n57
Assmann, Jan, 26n15, 112, 112n15, Bottici, Chiara, 20n32, 139, 140,
139n4 155n13, 155n15, 155n16
Austria, 10, 11, 55, 108, 112, 203, Brown, Adam D., 9, 20n33, 21n33
205–7 Brussels, 2, 26, 30, 94, 97, 157n45,
165, 166
Bulgaria, 15, 138, 140, 141, 143,
B 146, 148, 150–2, 156n28,
Bakhtin, Mikhael, 150, 156n37 156n29, 156n33, 156n36
Bärfuss, Lukas, 15, 160–2, 164, 168, Butler, Judith, 92, 93, 100n24–7
174n1, 176n16, 176n24–26, ethics of vulnerability, 92
Note: Page numbers with “n” denote notes.

1

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39152-6
244 INDEX
C Eshel, Amir, 9, 14, 21n34

Canada, 9, 11, 179–85, 190–3 Etkind, Alexander, 9, 20n32
capitalism, 5, 19n13, 91, 98, 204, European Parliament Resolution on
215–6 European Conscience and
and precarity, 216 Totalitarianism, 65
Catalonia, 11, 12, 49–62 European Union
Celebration, USA, 204, 213 cultural vs. political and economic
Challand, Benoît, 139, 140, 155n13, integration, 2, 92
155n15, 155n16 diversity, 138, 120
China, 8, 10, 11, 16, 202–5, 208, expansion, 14, 120
209, 215 Europe, foundational myths of, 64,
Clifford, James, 6 137–57
colonialism, 3, 7, 15, 16, 24, 80, 88,
90, 159, 160–2, 172, 173,
175n6, 182, 187, 215 F
communism fascism, 30, 51, 57–9, 105, 112, 173,
crimes of, 65–8, 73, 77, 155n14 216
end of, 73 Feindt, Gregor, 79, 86n65, 86n66,
Conrad, Sebastian, 4, 7, 9, 18n12, 86n68, 88, 99n6, 141, 154n4,
19n23, 20n24, 20n31, 44n14, 155n20, 204, 217n13, 217n15,
44n15, 86n64, 117n15, 154n4, 217n16
199n74 film
cosmopolitan memory, 6, 8, 10, 13, Heimat film, 14, 105, 108, 110
57–60, 80, 88, 114 and transnationalism, 104, 112,
creative arts 114–5, 128
as public sphere, 129–30, 133 First World War, 26, 27, 65, 103, 106,
role in European memory 111, 115
discourses, 15, 98, 128–9, 133 Font, Jordi, 57, 62n25, 125
forgetting the past, 52–3, 60, 77, 144,
146, 151, 205, 207–8, 215–6
D France, 24, 29, 52, 56–9, 78, 124,
de Cesari, Chiara, 5, 19n13, 19n15, 131, 136n33
21n42, 86n63, 135n21, 154n4, Franco, Francisco, 49–52, 54
174n4
G
E genocide, 28, 52, 75, 162–3, 181
Eder, Klaus, 17n5, 99n8 (see also Holocaust)
entangled memories, 7, 173, 204 German Democratic Republic, 84n27
Erll, Astrid, 5, 6, 17n4, 19n18–22, Germany, 11, 13, 14, 23–47, 56, 58,
43n11, 47n48, 80, 86n73, 99n7, 66, 67, 71–5, 85n43, 104, 106,
104, 117n6, 117n7, 128, 135n24, 108, 112–14, 120, 121, 124,
157n37, 174n3, 182, 195n2, 195n4, 129, 131, 136n33, 146, 148,
196n22–4, 217n14, 217n17 168, 173, 183, 184
INDEX 245
globalized memory, 25 K
Goetsch, Daniel, 160, 168, 172, 174, Karlsson, Klas-Göran, 2, 17n1
174n2, 178n53, 178n56–60 Kattago, Siobhan, 155n14
Greece, 36, 152 Knabe, Hubertus, 68, 71–4, 80
gulag, 3, 64, 88, 137, 139, 140, 143 Kroh, Jens, 10, 19n16, 21n37
Gutman, Yifat, 9, 20n33
L
H Lambert, Peter, 56, 62n19, 62n33
Halbwachs, Maurice, 7 Lang, Anne, 3, 18n7, 43n5, 88, 89,
Halle, Randall, 30, 116n2, 118n23, 99n8–99n10, 100n12, 127,
128, 129, 135n27–30 135n17, 137, 139, 154n1,
Hallstatt, 16, 201–9, 215 155n10
Haneke, Michael, 103–6, 108, 110–13, Langenbacher, Eric, 18n5, 67,
115, 117n16, 118n24, 118n25 83n21
Heine, Heinrich, 123, 124, 130, 131 Leggewie, Claus, 3, 18n5, 18n7, 24,
Hirsch, Marianne, 99n4, 99n5, 25, 43n5–7, 64, 81n3, 82n9,
179, 195n1 82n10, 88, 89, 99n8–10,
histoires croisées, 7, 79 100n12, 105, 116, 117n8, 127,
Holocaust, 7, 23, 49, 64, 88, 104, 133, 135n17, 136n39, 137,
137, 160, 168, 179–99 139, 154n1, 155n10, 155n12,
Holodomor, 24, 139 196n28
human rights, 8, 9, 15, 28, 52, 56, 65, Levi, Primo, 90, 97, 98, 98n40
67, 71, 72, 76, 80, 160–3, 166, Levy, Daniel, 6, 8, 10, 20n28, 20n29,
168, 169, 174n4, 193 21n39, 25, 43n12, 44n12–14,
Huyssen, Andreas, 99n7, 166n1, 44n16, 57, 58, 62n23, 80,
175n6, 175n7 86n64, 86n71, 86n72, 88, 89,
99n7, 100n11, 114, 118n20–2,
135n18, 190, 193, 199n76,
I 199n77, 199n87, 199n92
Indigenous Peoples of Canada Lim, Jie-Hyun, 56, 62n19, 62n33
and Canadian Residential School
System, 179–94, 196n19
and Canadian Truth and M
Reconciliation Commission, Macdonald, Sharon, 45n26, 57,
16, 179–81, 184–5, 193 62n24, 81n3
of African countries, 162 Mälksoo, Maria, 3, 18n9, 18n11
Inglis, David, 11, 21n40 memory
international aid, 15, 160, 163, 164 common European, calls for, 2, 3,
11, 14, 23, 78, 87, 138
common European, concerns
J regarding, 2, 4, 11, 13, 24–5,
Jarausch, Konrad, 18n5, 20n24, 43n8 64, 70, 79, 87, 138, 152
246 INDEX
memory (cont.) universal memory, 8, 10–12,

divided, 2, 3, 27, 50, 119–36, 139 26, 33, 68, 115, 189
Eastern vs. Western European migration, 57–9, 105, 113, 116, 160
discourses, 13, 26, 27, 30, 41, (See also refugees and asylum
64–5, 67, 78, 137–40 seekers)
entrepreneurs, 13, 66, 73–6, 79–81 Miskimmon, Alister, 69, 84n38,
future-oriented, 8, 9, 11, 14, 36, 84n39
38, 57, 60, 116, 120, 133 Muhrbeck, Christian, 14–5, 138–57
and photography, 10 Müller, Jan-Werner, 17n5, 44n23, 64,
and place marketing, 91 75, 79, 82n5, 82n6, 83n20,
selective, 16, 79, 111, 189, 216 85n52, 86n59, 139, 155n11
strategic narratives of, 69 museums and memorial sites
and urban planning, 16, 17 European House of History,
memory studies, concepts of Brussels, 11, 12, 30
collaborative memory, 13, 78–81 Fossar de la Pedrera, Barcelona, 55
communicative memory, 111 Gedenkstätte Hohenschönhausen,
competitive memory, 3, 7, 16, 41, 65
64, 80, 181, 186, 188, 190 German-Russian Museum, Berlin,
connective memory, 88 31, 42
cosmopolitan memory, 6, 8, 10, 13, Memorial Democràtic, 55, 60
57–60, 80, 88, 114, 190 (see Memorial Museum of Exile, La
also globalized memory) Jonquera, 56, 57
cultural memory, 17n4, 87–8, Memorialul Victimelor
110–1, 182 Comunismului şi al Rezistenţei,
divided memory, 3, 127 Sighet, 68
entangled memories, 7, 88, 141, 173, Military History Museum, Dresden,
204 (see also histoires croisées) 33, 41
globalized memory, 8, 10, 11, 15, Museum of the Second World War,
25, 27, 31, 56, 77, Gdansk, 29, 41
79–80, 114, 194, 208 (see also Rivesaltes Memorial Museum, 59
cosmopolitan memory) Walter Benjamin Memorial,
haunting legacies, 88 Portbou, 58
histoires croisées, 7, 79 (see also Warsaw Rising of 1944 exhibition,
entangled memories) 37–40, 47n42
institutional memory, 81
lieux de mémoire, 5, 24, 63, 79,
137, 141 N
multidirectional memory, nationalism
7–8, 15–6, 25, 41–2, 80, 88, civic, 12, 60
175n6, 180–94 methodological, 5, 19n13, 36, 63
noeuds de mémoire, 20n25 victimhood, 57, 60
prosthetic memory, 209, 215 National Socialism, 55–8, 64–5, 68,
travelling memory, 6–7, 25, 41, 80, 73, 74, 78, 80, 112, 155n14,
88, 104, 182, 209 202, 207
INDEX 247
New Urbanism, 16, 204, 209–12, Rusan, Romulus, 68, 74, 76

214, 215 Rwanda
Nora, Pierre, 5, 19n14, 81n1 genocide in, 176n26
O S
Olick, Jeffrey K., 9, 20n30, 139, 141, Sadoro, Amy, 20n33, 21n33
150, 151, 154n8, 155n18, Schwab, Gabrielle, 88
155n19, 157n38 Second World War, 4, 11, 12, 14,
15, 23–47, 55–9, 65, 67, 78,
89, 94, 95, 97, 103, 105,
P 106, 108, 111–13, 115,
Pakier, Małgorzata, 3, 4, 17n1, 18n5, 116, 124, 125, 136n33,
18n8, 18n10, 43n1, 64, 82n4, 140, 143, 153, 159, 168,
82n5, 138, 153, 154n6, 157n46 174, 178n62, 190, 202
Peeters, Koen, 13, 89, 90, Shortland, Cate, 103, 104, 109, 110,
100n13–15, 100n17–23, 113, 117n4, 117n5
101n34–41, 101n46, 10030–33 Sierp, Aline, 5, 19n16, 66, 82n16
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 142, 156n22 Smith, Anthony, 62n34
Platform of European Memory and Snyder, Timothy, 138, 154n2
Conscience, 65, 66, 70 socialism, 2–3, 51, 65–8, 74, 78,
Poland, 11, 23–47, 56, 78, 139 80–1
Prague Declaration on European Sontag, Susan, 142, 156n21
Conscience and Communism, 65 Soo, Scott, 59, 62n28, 62n29
Spain, 10, 11, 49–54, 56, 58–60, 170
Spanish Civil War, 12, 49–62
R Stalinism, 2, 31, 64, 68, 140
refugees and asylum seekers, 105, 113, Stråth, Bo, 17n1, 43n1, 64, 82n4,
116, 160, 172 (See also migration) 82n5, 138, 153, 154n6, 155n9,
Rigney, Ann, 5, 9, 14, 19n13, 19n15, 157n45, 157n46
21n35, 21n36, 21n42, 86n63, Switzerland
126–8, 132, 135n16, and myths of neutrality, 160, 169
135n19–26, 154n4 Sznaider, Natan, 8, 10, 20n28, 20n29,
Romania, 11, 13, 66, 67, 75–8 21n39, 25, 43n12, 44n12–14,
Rosemary Beach, USA, 204, 214, 215 44n16, 57–9, 61n31, 62n23,
Rothberg, Michael, 7, 18n6, 19n21, 62n32, 80, 86n64, 86n71,
19n25–7, 20n25–7, 21n42, 41, 86n72, 88, 89, 99n7, 100n11,
42, 43n10, 47n47, 47n49, 80, 114, 118n20–2, 190, 199n76,
86n74, 86n75, 99n3, 99n6, 199n77, 199n87, 199n92
100n28, 100n29, 134n13,
135n15, 175n6, 175n8, 181,
182, 186, 187, 189, 191, 195n3, T
196n20, 198n58–70, 199n72, Todorova, Maria, 145, 156n30
199n73, 199n79–82, 199n93 Todorov, Tzvetan, 153, 156n28, 157n47
248 INDEX
transnational U
and cinema, 104, 112, 114–5, 128 USA, 11, 16, 204, 209, 210, 213
vs international, 5, 10, 15, 27, 66, usable past, 139, 148
70, 72–4, 76, 79, 103, 112,
114, 121, 160
relationship to national, 9, 10, 12, W
25, 28, 30, 33, 37, 42, 57, 60, Wawrzyniak, Joanna, 3, 4, 18n8,
66, 71–4, 76–9, 79, 80, 95, 18n10
113–6, 126, 128, 153, 216 Welsch, Helga, 69, 72, 85n41
vs. supranational, 3, 6, 10, 12, 25, Western Sahara, 8, 11, 15, 160, 161,
81, 88, 90, 120 169–72, 174
Trojanow, Ilija, 14, 15, 138–157 Wüstenberg, Jenny, 19n16, 82n16

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The Changing Place of Europe

in Global Memory Cultures

Christina Kraenzle and Maria Mayr

palgrave macmillan memory studies

More information about this series at

The Changing Place

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959492

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover image © NASA Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

We would like to acknowledge several institutions and individuals with-

1 Introduction: The Usable Pasts and Futures of

2 Between the National and the Transnational: European

3 Contemporary Memory Politics in Catalonia:

4 Memory Competition or Memory Collaboration?

5 Towards a Transnational Ethics for Europe: Memory

6 Transnational Memory in Michael Haneke’s The

7 Visions of Europe in Fatih Akin’s The Evil Old Songs:

8 Beyond Foundational Myths: Images from the

9 A Place in the Sun: Colonial Entanglements in Lukas

10 Compelled to Share: Exploring Holocaust and

11 From Europe’s Early Iron Age to a New Urbanist

Willow J. Anderson is a communication scholar who works as a partner-

publications include: “Berlin’s Futurity in Zafer Şenocak’s Gefährliche

Grenzüberschreitende Begegnungen in der zeitgenössischen Literatur (8th

Photo 2.1 Cube on German war planning. Permanent exhibition.

Introduction: The Usable Pasts and Futures

Towards a Transnational European Memory

The co-authors are listed alphabetically.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 1

of keeping the memories of the past alive, because there can be no

is drawn between the European past and a collective European identity is

as well as obscured as part of socialist totalitarian and Cold War politics.

analyzing the ways in which European memories are transnationally nego-

cerned with transnational memory as such rather than with transnational

Our collection of chapters has been conceived specifically in order to add

Transcultural memory is … therefore not simply a special case of cultural

Any study of European memory, as proposed here, therefore necessitates

The term “travelling memory” is a metaphorical shorthand, an abbreviation

Similarly invoking a network metaphor, Rothberg suggests that we look

Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories, ed. Annelie Ramsbrock, Studies in

Reisenleitner’s chapter traces the ways in which a replica of an Austrian vil-

In a newly European “cosmopolitan” memory, the Holocaust future (and

nor in the present but in the continual struggle between them,”30 or as

Transnational European Memories: Case Studies

The chapters assembled here share in common a focus on the ways in

for ­thinking through the dynamics of memory strategies that negotiate

the Resistance in Romania. Her chapter explores how these cross-­border

glance seem to offer visualizations of a specifically German past, restrict-

alludes to Bulgaria’s part in Europe’s rich cultural history, and critiques

Between the National and the Transnational:

Europe, the Transnational, and World War II

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 23

­ emonstrated how Western European countries established a “minimum

However, Berger ultimately doubts whether this level of concentration

“multidirectional memory,”10 Astrid Erll’s “travelling memory,”11 and

museums to national imagining is to define and transcend geographical

Museums and World War II

Most recent exhibitions in the wake of the centennial of the outbreak

Concepts and Narrative Cores

Rights in Winnipeg (which opened in September 2014), a process that

9 A Place in the Sun: Colonial Entanglements in Lukas

10 Compelled to Share: Exploring Holocaust and

11 From Europe’s Early Iron Age to a New Urbanist

Photo 2.1 Cube on German war planning. Permanent exhibition.

for thinking through the dynamics of memory strategies that negotiate

the Resistance in Romania. Her chapter explores how these cross-border

emonstrated how Western European countries established a “minimum

Photo 2.1 Cube on German war planning. Permanent exhibition. German-

e xtermination policies and the involvement of the Wehrmacht in their exe-

t echnological superiority of the German army. The focus on the bombing

destruction of a flourishing metropolis in the 1930s to its re-emergence

Conclusion: Simulating Tensions as Pan-European

the importance placed on transnational co-operation on the part of the

in a state of potential conflict, but rather to be working towards a particu-

a musing anecdotes, but also stories that challenge canonized historiogra-