EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO.

EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES NO. 1 DECEMBER 2011

E ast European Memor y Studies CONTENTS

GHOSTS OF THE PAST
1 OP-ED: GHOSTS OF THE PAST Aleida Assmann 6 DIARY OF FORTHCOMING EVENTS 7 CALL FOR PAPERS: GULAG UNBOUND Cambridge 29-30 June

Aleida Assmann
Let me start with a rather simple distinction between spirits and ghosts. Spirits are conjured up, they are called up; ghosts intrude, they come without bidding, they haunt us. How spirits are conjured up is described in an ironic way in a dialogue in Shakespeares Henry IV (III, I, 52 55), where Owen Glendower, the magician, boasts: I can call spirits from the vastly deep. To which Hotspur dryly replies: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? Ghosts, on the other hand, represent something that returns from the past or the realm of the dead on its own will. This return is the symptom of a deep crisis; it is felt as a violent and threatening interruption of the present.
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8 RECENT EVENTS: GERMAN VICTIMHOOD IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE James Koranyi 10 STUDYING MEMORY IN THE POLISHRUSSIANUKRAINIAN TRIANGLE: SOME OBSERVATIONS Andrii Portnov

Something that had been deemed overcome and gone reappears to announce some unnished business that needs to be addressed. The paradigmatic case is of course the ghost of Hamlets father appearing on the battlements of Elsinore castle or Banquos ghost at the feast of King and Lady Macbeth. Shakespeare was clearly interested in both manifestations of invisible and uncanny beings, in spirits as well as ghosts. Spirits and ghosts show a close similarity to two for ms of remembering: conscious recall on the one hand and non-conscious, involuntary and even countervoluntary summons on the other. I will start from this hint and examine more closely the connection between spirits, ghosts and memory together

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with its contexts, media and mechanisms. In the second part of my paper I will focus on photography as a carrier of an unknown, uncanny, traumatic past that confronts the present with something that refuses to simply vanish or disappear. There is an obvious connection between violence, trauma and ghosting, a proof of which is the strong interest that arises in spirits and ghosts after wars and battles. Wherever there is a sudden and alarming rise in the population of the dead, the living try to establish some form of contact across the borderline between the world of the living and the dead. After the Great War, many individuals tested their own spiritual powers or relied on persons who acted as a medium to establish some form of communication with family members that had recently fallen in battle. The American poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) for instance took an active part in such spiritistic sessions; her poetry is tinged with this metaphysical quality of reaching out to former epochs. The art historian Aby Warburg believed in mnemic waves that emanate from a distant past and could be received by those who were endowed with a seismographic sensibility.

problem is aggravated by the fact that as a Jewish woman she is not entitled to the ritual outt with which male Jews are provided in the Jewish tradition. According to the patriarchal rules, the prayer for the dead, the Kaddish, is not to be recited by a female voice. Klger describes the memorial sites of the death camps as a kind of bargain that the living offer to the ghosts of the dead. However, she trusts words more than places. In the concentration camp Gro Rosen, she composed poems to shield herself from the ultimate terror with the help of words, sounds, rhymes and meter. As a child, she made use of regular patterns to create a counterpoint against chaos a poetical and therapeutic attempt to confront the abyss of destruction with rhyme and structure, which is perhaps the most archaic function of art. Klger meditates on this strong bond between aesthetics and magic, art and ritual in playful words: Remembering is a branch of witchcraft; its tool is incantation. To conjure up the dead you have to dangle the bait of the present before them, the esh of the living, to coax them out of their inertia. This passage blurs the difference between ghosts and spirits. The passive memory, the pain of being haunted is answered by an active effort, a self-made ritual.

Ruth Klger: Still Alive. Exorcising the Dead In her Holocaust memoir, Ruth Klger refers to two family members that haunt her memory.2 Her father and her brother were murdered in the Holocaust. Without a grave, the work of mourning cannot come to an end, she writes. Only many years later, in her research and reconstruction of the events, Klger nally found out some details about the last transport of her family members. What makes their memory so troubling is not only the uncertainty about the circumstances of their death but also the fact that they could not take leave from one another in peace. Memory for her is a trap and a prison of sorts, too: you cant shake or alter the images engraved there. (34) She is therefore compelled to keep up a long and painful dialogue with her father that revolves around the trivial events of their last hours together. She deploys the only real power that she has at her disposition which is the power of words. My father, she writes, has become an unredeemed ghost. I wish I could write ghost stories. (34) Her
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Bert Hellinger: Addressing the Dead in Psychotherapy In the 1990s a new form of therapy was invented that claimed to be able to externalize and change deeply concealed memories. Used all over the world, this therapy is called Aufstellung (this German word contains semantic elements of putting up, staging, summoning and mobilizing). The concept goes back to Bert Hellinger, a Catholic priest who worked in South Africa. In a room lled with other therapists who witness the process, the client is asked to stage his/her family by picking individual persons from the audience. The stage on which this is performed is an externalization of the psyche and mirrors a family constellation that includes both living and dead members.

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Hellinger thus transfor med therapy from a synchronous to a diachronic model, reckoning with pressures emanating from absent and dead family members which may or may not have been known to the client. Staging the constellation creates an imaginary space in which such forms of impact can be identied and answered by symbolic action. We may detect an interesting parallel in the change of a therapeutic model on the one hand and the new literary genre of German family novels on the other. Like the family novels, the family staging comprises a transindividual time span of three (and sometimes more) generations which are interlocked in an interactive eld. It is often what is transmitted only indirectly and unconsciously that shapes the intra-familial relations across the generations. The therapeutic model of family staging is thus based on a transindividual concept of identity that privileges long-term generational integration over separation and confrontation. Individuals do not give up their sense of distinction, but they accept family inuences as part of their identity. This change, from individual autonomy to a more integrated view on family and history, may have its source in the posttraumatic situation. It directs us not only to the future but also toward the past, and it teaches us to listen to the voices of ghosts. We cannot open ourselves to the future without having listened to

the voices of the past and having appeased the claims of the ghosts. Photographs and Ghosts A photograph makes two distinct statements: This was once there and this is no longer here. Though both messages are clearly related, they refer to two rather different functions. The rst one is the documentary function of providing accurate evidence of an otherwise inaccessible past. The second one is the memorial function of providing an affective material trace of something that is absent or lost. I am concerned here mainly with the second function in which a moment is r e s c u e d f r o m t i m e, t o b e transfor med into a lasting monument that remains the object of continued attention and meditation. In the theoretical writings on photography, its close relationship to death has been frequently emphasized. Roland Barthes wrote that the moment of shooting the photo is itself conceived as a shock that produces an effect of mortication: it mutes and xates vibrant and bustling life, freezing a moment and simulating a form of eternity. Marianne Hirsch has opened up a new approach to the memorial function of photography by investigating the context of traumatic family memory. In her book Family Frames, she has focused on photographs as stand-ins for dead family members, and in particular for those whose death is shrouded in trauma. Such memory icons assume the character of a fetish, which means that the object itself
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becomes the last piece of evidence that this person had ever existed. In these cases, the memorial function re-afrms the documentary function of the photo. These forms of transmission and tradition prolong an embodied memory beyond the limits of experiential memory, extending it to the second generation that has no empirical knowledge of the persons involved. To emphasize the importance of family photos as transitional objects or missing links that connect family members across generations, Hirsch has coined the term postmemory.3 In their primary memorial use, photos act as external props for an embodied memory; in their secondary use, as postmemory, the photo is not only an externalized memory but an object that is re-embodied through conscious and unconscious forms of transmission. It becomes therefore a m e d i u m o f m e m o r y, a memento, not only for those who maintain an embodied memory of the past but also for those who have acquired this memory via narratives or mute gestures in a shared living context. If the photo is the only relict of a family member who died a violent death, this material object gains the additional value of a sacred aura. In this case, the photo itself becomes the replacement of the missing person, and assumes a ghostly presence.

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H.-U. Treichel: Der Verlorene The novel by Hans Ulrich Treichel, Der Verlorene (The Lost One), deals with the life of a German refugee family after the Second World War in the 1950s.4 It is told from the point of view of a boy born after the war whose brother was lost when the family was eeing from Poland. The novel begins with the description of a photo-album which shows a picture of the lost elder brother. The younger brother is barely visible. The photo-album belongs to the material items that Anne Fuchs has classied as memory icons, rightly emphasizing their central importance in recent family novels.5 In Treichels novel, this memory icon inverts the order of the real: the absent son is highlighted in the center where he has an overwhelming presence, while the present son is (almost) absent from the photos. This inverted relationship accurately represents the way in which both brothers gure in the family consciousness and memory; the lost one holds a central place in the familial mourning, affection and longing, while the one who is actually there is disregarded, almost invisible. The photo assumes a presence in itself, it becomes an idol, a family fetish that deprives the younger brother of a life of his own, leaving him with a diminished or ghostly presence. The novel ends with a meeting in which the mother, who is stuck in the past, fails to recognize her former child in the grown-up boy.

The son, on the contrary, is struck by a shock of recognition; he is suddenly confronted with his doppelganger, his ghostly other. The melancholy search for the lost son is ended at the very moment when their paths have nally crossed. Memory and the present, ghosts of the past and reality, Treichel seems to suggest, cannot come together.

function of photography, on top of the documentary and memorial, which I call the memento mori function. Boltanski works primarily with photographs from the private or family sphere, whether amateur shots or studio prints. His obsessive interest focuses on human faces; each photo stands for an individual life. Within Western culture the photograph is celebrated as a cultural practice that is able to rescue the e p h em er a l i n d i v i d u a li ty o f humans from the clutches of death. It is this myth that Boltanski explodes. He often reworks and enlarges the original photos in such a way that their documentary value gets lost; the persons are less and less r e c o g n i z a b l e. N o t h i n g n e s s shimmers through the amorphous black and white grains; faces that can neither be identied nor recognized are transformed into ghostly apparitions. As we saw in the case of postmemory, the memorial dimension of photographs depends on their being embedded in a sociocommunicative frame. Without such a family frame, photos cease to be props of memory. When they turn up at ea markets after the dissolution of a household or an estate, they provide evidence for only one thing: that the family memory, which had once framed and supported these photographs, has been dissolved. In other words: the document of memory becomes a monument of forgetting. Boltanski shows that material perseverance in itself

image: www.museumsjournal.de

Christian Boltanski: Photographs as Memento Mori Christian Boltanski does not concern himself with the documentary status of photographs, nor does he engage in memorial projects. Instead, he makes us sharply aware of the futility of collective and cultural memorial practices and institutions. The acts of remembering, documenting and a rch i v i n g a re m e t i c u l o u s l y brought to the fore, but what they expose is less remembering than forgetting. Boltanski exposes photographs as ghostly remnants and revenants, devoid of a cultural or familial frame of remembering which are the necessary prerequisites of both memory and postmemory. In his art, Boltanski introduces a third
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cannot secure the memorial function of the photo.

image: www.terminartors.com

Boltanskis artistic use and recycling of family and portrait photographs emphasizes the erosion both of their documentary and memorial functions. What he highlights instead is their memento mori function. He describes himself very much like W. G. Sebald as a thoroughly melancholy artist. Like Treichels narrator, he sees those photographed as eaten away by time, as future dead. He collects and stages photographs which have irreversibly fallen out of the frames of family memory and are recurring as ghosts, ooding cultural memory. According to Zygmunt Bauman, until recently, the project of culture was to transform the transient into the permanent. However, the conditions for such transubstantiation seem to be in d e c l i n e, d e s p i t e t h e e ve rexpanding capacity for storage. Bauman speaks of the present as a liquid modernity, where the desire for stability and memory ows into nothingness. Boltanski has located his art on exactly this threshold. It is a matter for wonder: a

moment, now here and then gone, nothing before it came, again nothing after it has gone, returns as a ghost and disturbs the peace of a later moment. 6 Nietzsches motto sums up the various forms of ghosting. We have seen how images return from the past, from the dead, from the forgotten, from the unconscious, to assume a ghostly presence and haunt the quiet of a later moment. Ruth Klger developed verbal magic to exorcise her ghosts while a new form of family therapy mixes preand post-moder n rituals to address the ghosts. In the context of postmemory, photographs assume a ghostly presence, be they fetishised as in Treichels novel or thinned out as in Boltanskis installations.

Ruth Kluger, Still Alive. A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, New York: Feminist Press, 2001. 2 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames. Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1997, 22. 3 Hans-Ulrich Treichel, Der Verlorene, Frankfurt a M: Suhrkamp, 1998. 4Anne Fuchs, Fr eine Archotopik der Erinnerung: eine Relekre von Horst Bieneks Gleiwitz-Tetralogie im Kontext der Debatte um Flucht und Vertreibung, in D Lorenz & I Spoerk (eds), Konzept Osteuropa. Der Osten als Konstrukt der Fremd- und Eigenbestimmung in deutschsprachigen Texten des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts.Wuerzburg: Koenigshausen und Neumann, 225-240. 5 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, in Daniel Breazeale (ed), Untimely Meditations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 60. Werke in Drei Bnden, Bd,1, Mnchen: Hanser 1962, 211.

image: 2.bp.blogspot.com

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DIARY OF FORTHCOMING EVENTS

image: shutterstock.com

Events in Cambridge
EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES RESEARCH GROUP SEMINAR CRASSH, Cambridge. All seminars begin at 5:00pm. January: Peter Rodgers (University of Shefeld), How Many Ukraines? Understanding Regionalism and the Politics of National Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine February: Julie Fedor (University of Cambridge), The Tandems Anti-Soviet Turn: New Memory Projects in Contemporary Ru s s i a a n d Ta t i a n a Zhurzhenko (Univer sity of Vi e n n a ) , N at i o n a l i s i n g t h e C o m m o n Vi c t o r y i n t h e Ukrainian-Russian Borderlands: Political Uses of WWII Memory in Kharkiv and Belgorod Fe b r u a r y : G e r n o t Howanitz (University of Salzburg), Re-Playing the Stalinist Past and Galina NikiporetsTa k i g a w a ( U n i v e r s i t y o f Edinburgh/University of Cambridge), The Manezhka Affair and the First Steps of Russian Mnemonics
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February: Nelly Bekus (University of Warsaw), Memory and Forgetting in Two Post-Soviet Capitals: Minsk and Astana and Anna Krylova (Duke University), Neither Erased nor Re m e m b e r e d : A c a d e m i c M e t a p h o r s a n d I n t e r p re t i ve Challenges of Soviet Post-War Literature and Memoirs M a rc h : K atarzyna Z e c h e n t e r ( S S E E S, U C L ) , Memory and Postmemory in Polish Jewish Fiction and Andrei Zorin (University of Oxford), Lydia Ginsburg on the Lening rad Blockade: Mechanisms of Forgetting and Repression
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THE GULAG UNBOUND: Remembering Soviet Forced Labour 29 & 30 June 2012, Cambridge co-organised Reading with University of

For CFP, please see page 7.

Events at MAW Partner Institutions

Tartu
CONFERENCE: Hard Memory, Soft Security: Competing Securitisation of the Legacy of Communism in Eastern Europe 9 - 10 December 2011 For the programme, please see our website. This event will be broadcast live at http://uttv.ee/esileht

MAKING SENSE OF CATASTROPHE: Postcolonial Approaches to Postsocialist Experiences 2 4 & 2 5 Fe b r u a r y 2 0 1 2 , Cambridge co-organised with Passau University The programme is currently being nalised and will be available on our website soon.

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CALL FOR PAPERS

THE GULAG UNBOUND: REMEMBERING SOVIET FORCED LABOUR

Cambridge, 29-30 June 2012

Dan Healey Alexander Etkind

The history of the Gulag is conventionally understood as a story of enormous injustice and heroic endurance. This story is bound to the compelling narrative of suffering of the i n t e l l e c t u a l i n t h e G u l a g, exemplied by the classic accounts of its highly literate survivors or mourners of its victims. Until recently, these narratives had been the principal prisms through which we saw the Soviet forced labour. The narrative of intellectual martyrdom was powerful, and its g reat moral prestige fuelled opposition to the Soviet system. Since the 1990s, the state archives of the Gulag have gradually been made available to scholars and this ood of documents must be weighed against the memoirs of survivors. The enormous paper trail generated by the security apparatus and its massive penal bureaucracy now challenges historians to consider the Gulag through the eyes of the perpetrators, those who imagined, built, and maintained the forced labour camps. How can we evaluate the factual validity, bureaucratic rivalries, and ideological aims that underpin these documents? How far can we trust the archival documents of the managers of the Gulag? With the issue of trust coming to the forefront of empirical research, moral and philosophical problems o f i n ter p ret ati ve j u d g e m e n t become more pertinent than ever. The new bodies of source material compel us to reassess traditional narratives of Stalinist violence, and

we are confronted with almost unbearable choices. How far should historians attempt to reconcile the diverging picture of the Gulag found in survivor memoirs and in ofcial documents? How do we evaluate the economic consequences of Gulag activity? What moral and philosophical problems arise when we compare Soviet camps to those organized by the Nazi regime or Communist China? What is the place for the experience and testimony of Gulag employees and criminal prisoners? How far does the new material available to us challenge commemorative practices? What do the politics of memory in Russia and other post-Soviet states teach us about history of the Gulag, and history as a discipline? Is there anything to learn from comparison with other penal-colonial systems such as transportation to Australia? Is the paradigm of inter nal colonization and the broader context of postcolonial studies productive for understanding and remembering the Gulag? Means of the resistance, sabotage, and subversion in the Gulag and other Soviet corrective institutions need more research. While colonial anthropology has developed sophisticated means of identifying weapons of the weak, Gulag historiography is only beginning to apply such analysis to the archived documentation of the camps. Like any long-term system of life management, the Gulag developed its ways of healing, entertaining, and educating its population. Inmates responded to
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their particular condition by developing equally specic means of artistic creativity, religious ritual, and erotic behaviour. These aesthetic, medical, religious, and pedagogical aspects of the life in the Gulag need to be discussed in conjunction or counterpoint with its archival history. The purpose of this symposium is to reect on the challenges currently confronting history, cultural studies, anthropology, and other disciplines who work with these unbound documentary, memoiristic, and folklore archives of the Gulag. We invite papers examining these themes to be presented at a workshop to be held at Cambridge University, 29-30 June 2012. The workshop is org anized by Alexander Etkind of Cambridge University and Dan Healey of Reading University, with support from both institutions. Our conrmed keynote speaker is Professor Lynne Viola, University of Toronto, author of The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalins Special Settlements (Oxford & New Yo rk : O U P, 2 0 0 7 ) . L i m i t e d nancial assistance for participants may be available. Papers should be original unpublished work, and will be pre-circulated to workshop participants. To propose a paper, please send a 300-word abstract and 2-page CV to Jill Gather, M e m o r y a t Wa r P r o j e c t , info@memoryatwar.org, by Friday, 24 February 2012.

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RECENT EVENTS
James Koranyi and Bill Niven on GERMAN VICTIMHOOD IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE

James Koranyi

Bill Niven

At the Heimattag der Siebenbrger Sachsen (Homeland Day of Transylvanian Saxons) in 2005, the commissioner for the Federal Republic of Germany for Issues concerning German Resettlers and National Minorities (Beauftragter der Bundesregierung fr Aussiedlerfragen und nationale Minderheiten), Hans-Peter Kemper, explained his understanding of German victimhood in contemporary Europe. Referencing the motto of the Heimattag of Overcoming lows, building bridges (Tiefen berstehen, Brcken bauen), he viewed the construction of German memories as a challenging and arduous task in light of ight, expulsion, emigration and integration in the twentyrst century. As such, Transylvanian Saxons, Romanian Germans, and ethnic Germans from eastcentral Europe ought to regard their role in Europe as a living link between the two continents (ein lebendiges Bindeglied zwischen den Kontinenten).

Yet the difculties of placing German memories of victimhood have hardly been surmounted with such ease. On 2 November 2011, the Memory at War series opened up to the topic of German victimhood. Professor Bill Niven from Nottingham Trent University and Dr James Koranyi from the University of St Andrews presented their papers on contemporary memories of German victimhood in Germany and south-eastern Europe. James Koranyis paper entitled Romania, Serbia, and Contemporary Memories of German Victims compared the different legacies of ethnic Germans in Romania and Serbia. In it, he traced the development of Romanian German victim stories from parochial and marginal in both (West) Germany and Romania to a transnational success story. While Romanian German discourses during the late Cold War period were concerned with recognition in West Germany, the post-communist period ushered in attempts to transform the standing of these memories into one of the central issues for German and Romanian society. These attempts were highly successful. They allowed Romanian Germans to reafrm existing cultural hierarchies that marked out Romanian society as untrustworthy and in need of critically assessing its role in the disappearance of Germans from Romania. In the context of Romanias EU accession, this s e r ve d , t o o, a s a w a r n i n g o f Ro m a n i a s
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unpreparedness to join the West. In the meantime, however, German victim stories have become a valuable currency in Romanian society. The public engagement with the Saxon and Swabian heritage and the memories of German victimhood has provided a useful way for Romanian politicians and public gures to demonstrate their deserved inclusion into the West, i.e. in the EU and NATO. Furthermore, this public comingto-ter ms-with-past vis--vis German victims has been used as a way of ignoring other difcult pasts, such as the Holocaust in Ro m a n i a , t h e q u e s t i o n o f complicity during communism, or the pressing issue of Gypsies in Romanian society in past and present. In Serbia, by contrast, these processes have been rather different. The last three decades h ave b e e n m a rk e d by t h e disintegration of Yugoslavia, civil war, sanctions, international ostracisation and a NATO bombing campaign in 1999. It has made little sense to reassess the role of German victims in Yugoslavia/Serbia a society that has undergone a distinct inward turn since the 1980s. Instead, the anti-fascist narrative concerning World War Two has remained strong and still governs the way in which the 1930s and 1940s are remembered. The commemorative topography of cities such as Novi Sad bears witness to that. Yet, this may be a good thing: The absence of any real engagement with difcult victims such as Germans or Hungarians has also meant more commemorative space for the Yugoslav civil wars. In this way,

the open-air exhibition Missing Lives in Belgrade in 2010 can be seen as an opening for debates surrounding the end of Yugoslavia in Serbia. Bill Nivens talk was concerned with the complexity of museum exhibitions in portraying ight and expulsion and its relationship with the Holocaust. He presented a plethora of case studies searching for a good template for combining the two issues. Yet as his paper demonstrated, the politics of memory surrounding these two topics have made the public depiction of this in museums all the more ch a l l e n g i n g. D e p i c t i n g t h e Holocaust alongside stories of German victimhood has led to accusations of relativism. The absence of the Holocaust in exhibitions on German victimhood, on the other hand, has been regarded as a sleight of hand for ignoring the context of these expulsions. In its exhibition Flucht, Vertreibung, Integration (Flight, Expulsion, Integration), the German Historical Museum (Deutsches Historisches Museum) attempted to solve this dilemma by containing images of the Holocaust and World War Two (i.e. of German crimes) in a tunnel situated at the entrance to the exhibition. One can interpret this in several ways: It provides a context while refusing to establish a hard causality between the two issues (Holocaust and German expulsion). The Holocaust does not sit alongside the narrative of German victimhood, thereby avoiding accusations of relativism, but it is also not absent. Whether this is a meaningful way of addressing German victimhood in museum
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remains open. A noticeable difference in museum exhibitions exists between the expelled ethnic Germans from Poland, Lithuania, Russia and the Czech Republic on the one hand, and Danube Swabians from south-eastern Europe on the other. While the former groups museums tend to end their stories with ight and expulsion, the Danube Swabians depict life and society in their former homelands beyond the end of their community in those regions. It is this acknowledgment of continuity that may be a valuable way of embedding German memories in a transnational context. German victimhood has been back on the agenda in Germany since the late 1990s. More recent developments, however, point to a widening debate on where these memories can be placed in a European topography of memory. While German society has been confronted with the intricacy of these memories for a longer period of time (some might say since the inception of the Federal Republic of Germany), it is the very places where these contested periods occurred that are now encountering the impact of these legacies. In a web of expulsion, counter-expulsion, resettlement, migration, war and ideology, these memories are not merely fascinating case studies for scholars but challenging stories in European societies.

James Koranyi

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STUDYING MEMORY IN THE POLISH-RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN TRIANGLE: SOME OBSERVATIONS

Andrii V. Portnov

Andrii Portnov is a Research Fellow at the Ivan Krypiakevych Institute for Ukrainian Studies, and Editor-in-Chief of Historians.in.ua web site. In March 2011, he was a Memory at War visiting fellow in Cambridge. The eld of memory studies is not only fashionable and exciting, but also carries a high level of responsibility, given how closely and inevitably it is intertwined with politics. Sometimes it is claimed that memory studies should be a separate discipline with its own methodology, but I see it rather as an interdisciplinar y eld of research. In this article, I set out to identify and challenge some common misconceptions characteristic of East European memory studies, before going on to sketch out a future research agenda for the eld. There are numerous stereotypes and common places in thinking about the politics of memory in post-Soviet Ukraine, Russia and Belarus as well as post-communist Poland. The rst quite common misleading tendency is rationalization, whereby the state politics of history in these countries is presented as the result of a conscious strategic decision by the

elites. I would rather agree with Ilya Kalinin that to portray Putins authoritarianism as a re-mastering of the Soviet system and a return to Soviet symbols would be to attribute integrity to something that is in fact disjointed and f r a g m e n t a r y, a n d t o i nv e s t ideological meaning into something that is rather a political technology. The same could be said about Belarus and Ukraine. In the B e l a r u s i a n c a s e, d e s c r i b i n g President Lukashenkas policies as re-Sovietization explains very little, even if we keep in mind the shift in Lukashenkas ofcial speeches from the Victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War to the Victory of the Belarusian people. In the Ukrainian case we should be very c a u t i o u s i n a t t r i bu t i n g a ny conscious strategy to the history politics conducted by Kuchma, Yushchenko or Yanukovych. Quite often (if not on a regular basis) this politics has been highly spontaneous, internally contradictory, and situational. I would even argue that Kuchma tried to follow his intuition by avoiding any potentially dangerous issues and tended to accept different variations of
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memory among different parts of Ukrainian society. Yuschenkos politics, especially in the last years of his presidency, were highly determined by his deep personal involvement in the memory of certain historical events, rst and foremost, of the 1932-33 Holodomor. But personal feelings or deep emotional connections, on the one hand, and consistent and coherent strategies, on the other, are very different things. The second common trend is the essentialization of certain explanatory formulas, usually promoted and constantly supported by the mass media. The best example here is the notion of two Ukraines, suggesting a country that is deeply divided along not just linguistic, but civilizational lines. This image of two homogeneous conicting groups within Ukrainian society overshadows a wide range of g e n u i n e l y i n t e re s t i n g s o c i a l phenomena. The latter include the dynamics of identity formation and identity debate in post-Soviet Ukraine; the emerging civic (political) Ukrainian identity; the villagecity difference in terms of language practices; the rich diversity of political and cultural attitudes within the Russian-

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speaking group (quite often wrongly described simply as Russian); and the variety of local memories within the proposed general notions of East and West Ukraine. Last but not least, such an approach would enable serious analysis of the regional dimensions of memory in Ukraine, rather than the usual method of ascribing some features of Lviv to West Ukraine and of Donetsk to the East. The third tendency is what I will call here the decontextualization of description. As Timothy Snyder rightly stress in his Bloodlands, any account of events in inter-war or present-day Eastern Europe that is based solely on attention to one single group is bound to fail. Omer Bartovs book, Erased. Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, can serve as an illustration of this point.2 Bartov, an acknowledged specialist on the Holocaust, has written a book on a very important issue, in which he offers up a disturbing picture of the continuity in rejecting and destroying the traces of Jewish Galicia in Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine. Bartovs account is highly emotional, but it fails to identify any dynamics of memory; it proposes no comparison of Galicia with the rest of Ukraine; it shows no particular knowledge of local history, or attention to Polish places of memory. For the American or Israeli reader Bartovs book will be excellent proof of the stereotypes of Ukrainian anti-Semitism. When we decided to discuss Bartovs book in Ukraina Moderna it proved difcult indeed to criticize this publication without neglecting or relativizing the fundamental importance of the issues raised in his book.3 Thinking about the prospects for memory studies in the Polish-Russian-Ukrainian triangle, I would highlight a number of possible directions for future research. First, there is a crucial and urgent need for the collection of empirical data, the preparation of maps of memory sites, and continuation of the research started by German scholars who have collected information on Holodomor memorials in Ukraine.4 Next, we need serious research into attitudes and perceptions. Even when we know what monuments or what state holidays are in existence, we usually know very little how they are perceived by real people. The issue of invisible monuments is of crucial importance here, as are the analysis of public opinion, oral history projects, and analysis of the memory wars on the internet and in the printed media. Another task is the cataloguing of sites of forgetting: of the football stadiums built on top of cemeteries; sites of

atrocities and persecution now converted into parks; and even luxury hotels built at former Nazi concentration camps for Soviet prisoners-of-war (eg the case of Lviv Citadel).5

Lviv Citadel image: cambridgeculturalmemory. blogspot.com

We need a wide variety of comparative and interactive studies, or Bezieungsgeschichte, to use the German term. We need to ask: why does public debate comparable to the Polish controversy over Jan Tomasz Grosss Neighbours seem to be impossible in Belarus and Ukraine? Why is the Ukrainian Institute for National Memory so different from its Polish or Lithuanian counterparts? We should keep in mind the fact that the actors in such interactions are usually not equal, and that the interaction itself is usually assymetrical. Other potentially fascinating topics here might include a comparison of Polish and Russian policies towards Ukraine; a closer look at Polish and Ukrainian media discourse on the Volhynian events of 1943; or analysis of the ways in which Russian ofcials have adapted the Katyn story for internal and external use. Critical attention must be paid to the phenomena of Soviet politics and its long-lasting impact. We need to analyze the Soviet politics of history in order to understand, for example, why the city of Dnipropetrovsk has two very different memorials dedicated to the same historical event the mass shooting of the Jews; or why the deSovietization of East Galician urban landscapes has itself so often involved the revival or reconstitution of Soviet aesthetics (see eg the new Stepan Bandera monuments); or how the Soviet literary canon has inuenced the promotion of Ukrainian or Belarusian literature and culture after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Attempts at the re-construction or selective rewriting of Soviet symbols are of special interest here; consider, for example, the creation of the Stalin Line park near Minsk, or the reconceptualization of the 1918-21 Civil War in current Russian movies.

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Rituals of memory provide rich material for research, especially newly invented rituals like the wearing of the St. Georges Ribbon on Victory Day (inuenced by the Orange ribbon widely used during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine), or the lighting of candles on Holodomor Memorial Day. Additional topics for research include museums as a memory battleground. This topic is of special interest in postcommunist Poland where we can observe a real competition of museums, such as the controversy between the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising created by Warsaw-born Lech Kaczyski and the Museum of World War II soon to be opened in Gdask, the native city of current prime minister Donald Tusk. Finally, East European memory studies should also engage with language as a memory battleground. There are many potentially fascinating research topics here, such as: the Russian language outside Russia; the usage and images of Belarusian and Ukrainian in Belarus and Ukraine; the phenomenon of situational post-Soviet bilingualism; and the issue of the languages of Western discourses (the plural is always very helpful in memory studies!) about the East.

EAST EUROPEAN MEMORY STUDIES

To subscribe or to submit an item to East European Memory Studies, please email: info@memoryatwar.org MEMORY AT WAR CAMBRIDGE TEAM Alexander Etkind Project Leader and Principal Investigator Uilleam Blacker Julie Fedor Research Associates Rory Finnin Matilda Mroz Galina Nikiporets-Takigawa Harald Wydra Project Members Judy Brown Molly Flynn Rolf Fredheim Simon Lewis Tom Rowley Tanya Zaharchenko PhD candidates Jill Gather Administrator Memory at War Department of Slavonic Studies University of Cambridge Cambridge CB3 9DA UK www.memoryatwar.org The project Memory at War is nancially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme which is cofunded by AHRC, AKA, DASTI, ETF, FNR, FWF, HAZU, IRCHSS, MHEST, NWO, RANNIS, RCN,VR and The European Community FP7 2007-2013, under the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities programme.

Andrii Portnov
Ilia Kalinin, Nostalgicheskaia modernizatsiia: sovetskoe proshloe kak istoricheskii gorizont, Neprikosnovennyi zapas, 6 (2010). For an English translation of this and other memoryrelated articles from the leading Russian intellectual journal Neprikosnovennyi zapas visit: www.memoryatwar.org/resourcesnz/ 2 Andrii Portnov, Post-Soviet Ukraine and Belarus Dealing with The Great Patriotic War, 20 Years after the Collapse of Communism. Expectations, achievements and disillusions of 1989, Ed. by Nicolas Hayoz, Leszek Jesie, Daniela Koleva (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), 369-381. French version: Andrii Portnov, Mmoire et mmoriaux de la Grande Guerre pour la Patrie en Belarus, Moldova et Ukraine: quelques observations pour tablir des comparaisons, Le Pass au prsent. Gisements memoriels et actions historicisantes en Europe centrale et orientale, Dirs. Georges Mink, Pascal Bonnard (Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2010), 187202. 3 Omer Bartov, Erased. Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton University Press, 2007). 4 See Ukraijna Moderna, 4:15 (2009). Pamjat` jak pole zmahan`. And the continuation of the discussion in: Ab Imperio 1 (2010). 5 Anna Kaminsky, Hrsg. Erinnerungsorte an den Holodomor 1932/33 in der Ukraine (Berlin, 2008). 6On which see further: http:// cambridgeculturalmemory.blogspot.com/2011/03/ historian-andriy-portnov-on-sites-of.html
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