Contested and Shared Places of Memory

History and politics in North Eastern Europe

Jorg Hackmann, Marko Lehti, Jorg Hackmann, Marko Lehti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317989639
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Historic Preservation in Architecture

The Baltic–Russian debates on the past have become a hot spot of European memory politics. Violent protests and international tensions accompanying the removal of the "Bronze Soldier" monument, which commemorated the Soviet liberation of Tallinn in 1944, from the city centre in April 2007 have demonstrated the political impact that contested sites of memory may still reveal.

In this publication, collective memories that are related to major traits of the 20th century in North Eastern Europe – the Holocaust, Nazi and Soviet occupation and (re-)emerging nationalisms – are examined through a prism of different approaches. They comprise reflections on national templates of collective memory, the political use of history, cultural and political aspects of war memorials, and recent discourses on the Holocaust. Furthermore, places of memory in architecture and urbanism are addressed and lead to the question of which prospects common, trans-national forms of memory may unfold.

After decades of frozen forms of commemoration under Soviet hegemony, the Baltic case offers an interesting insight into collective memory and history politics and their linkage to current political and inter-ethnic relationships. The past seems to be remembered differently in the European peripheries than it is in its centre. Europe is diverse and so are its memories.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Baltic Studies.

COLLECTIVE MEMORIES IN THE BALTIC SEA REGION AND BEYOND: NATIONAL — TRANSNATIONAL — EUROPEAN?¹

Jörg Hackmann

Since the 1980s there has been a steadily increasing interest in issues of remembrance, memory and commemoration amongst the public and in the media, as well as from professional historians and scholars from neighboring fields: the journal History and Memory, founded in 1989, is only one indication of this trend. Dan Diner, director of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig, has even launched ‘memory’ as a new paradigm of historical research which is said to have pushed ‘society’ onto library shelves (Diner 2007). Such a thesis might, of course, be disputed and refuted, but there is no doubt about a boom in memory-related publications.

Looking at the Baltic Sea Region, it is not by accident that Estonia comes to the fore: the public debates and political disputes about monuments commemorating the dead of the Second World War have attracted the attention of many scholars since the removal of monuments in Lihula and Tallinn in 2004 and 2007, respectively.² Besides current debates, for many years memory has been a major issue in various disciplines of social studies in Estonia as, for instance, the various projects collecting post-Soviet Estonian life stories show.³ As the political dimensions of collective memory in north eastern Europe will be closely analysed in the contributions to this collection, these introductory remarks shall first of all highlight some scholarly aspects related to present interests in collective memory.

Key Issues of Collective Memory

Debates on the theory of collective, social and cultural memory, as well as on its manifestations, have very much broadened over the last three decades. However, scholarly discourses have a longer tradition which goes back to the first half of the twentieth century. Besides Maurice Halb wachs' introduction of the category of collective memory into social research in 1925,⁴ Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg — with his ‘Mnemosyne’ project, which focused on the recollection of the ancient world in images in European societies since the Renaissance — have been named as further ancestors of memory research.⁵ Recent research has spanned sociological and cultural approaches, first of all,⁶ and has recently been amended by neurobiological and psychological processes of recollection.⁷

Focusing on recent debates about collective memory in the Baltic Sea Region and Eastern Europe, the following issues may be highlighted: as a starting point in his research on collective memory, Halbwachs has stressed the distinction between memory and history.⁸ In that perspective, historians studying memory do not ask about scholarly knowledge, how events ‘really’ (to use Ranke's term) were, or about explorations of historical ‘truth’, but how historical events, developments or structures are reconstructed and represented in individual and collective consciousness, and how this representation changes. Social memory in that perspective is not an immutable entity, but dependent on social groups as well as on time (Halbwachs 1992, pp. 46–51). Thus, collective memory cannot be regarded as static or homogenous across an entire society. Today, one may connect this notion to constructivist approaches in history writing focusing on perceptions and narratives, which once again underline Diner's thesis of a new memory paradigm (2007).

Looking more closely at the forms of social memory, the distinction between communicative and cultural memory, which has been elaborated in particular by Jan and Aleida Assmann, has to be emphasized. Cultural memory, according to Jan Assmann (1995, p. 129) ‘has its fixed point; its horizon does not change with the passing of time. These fixed points are fateful events of the past, whose memory is maintained through cultural formation (texts, rites, monuments) and institutional communication’. Of particular importance for the formation of cultural memory is, as he has pointed out, the ‘floating gap’ between individual and communicative memory on the one hand and its cultural objectification on the other, which Assmann locates at a time of approximately 40 years post factum (Assmann 2002, p. 51).

Furthermore, there is the distinction between Erinnerung (remembrance) and Gedächtnis (memory) in German: while Gedächtnis may be associated with the social storage of individual (or communicated) memories, Erinnerung implies the process of remembering, the activations of elements from the storage of memories (Csáky 2004). Cultural and social memories are therefore objects of performances and negotiations, and they are, of course, related to power, as historical arguments and thus the shaping of memories provide a major source of legitimizing power. This leads to the broad field of past and history politics dealt with in the contributions to this collection.

Memory, however, does not exist without forgetting. Debates on forgetting range from neurobiological to social aspects and philosophical reflection.⁹ Niklas Luhmann has even argued that without forgetting, there is no evolution.¹⁰ In philosophical debates, Paul Ricœur (2004) has stressed the connection between passive and active forgetting, between amnesia and amnesty, or forgetting and forgiving. Most important in that context are the moral and political implications of forgetting. Ernest Renan famously underlined that the construction of modern nations is based on forgetting. In the aftermath of the Second World War the German debate has been shaped by Freud's notion of working through the past in writings by Theodor Adorno (1971, pp. 10–28) and Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich (1975).¹¹ In the context of the German Historikerstreit of the 1980s, Hermann Lübbe launched the thesis that active forgetting was a precondition of the political success of the Federal Republic. This provoked much criticism, yet it also received some consent.¹² With the focus on war crimes, and the Holocaust first of all, the imperative of ‘we must never forget’ — which comprises a much stronger normative element than ‘we will always remember’ (Weinrich 2004) — has become dominant in present-day political discourses in Europe and beyond.¹³

Memory, Monuments and Politics

It is not by accident that monuments commemorating the dead of the Second World War have become highly political issues in recent years, and have thus become ever more prominent within public awareness.¹⁴ Looking at the different forms of politics related to such monuments one sees first the erection of new monuments such as the Berlin ‘Memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe’ as a prominent example of international significance. Besides this, there is also iconoclasm and the translocation of monuments, as in the case of the monument to the ‘Soviet Liberators of Tallinn’, which reflect modes of memory politics obviously based on conflicting memories. Such ‘divided memories’, which are not restricted to the former Soviet hemisphere,¹⁵ may also result in the conscious or unconscious neglect of monuments. Even the official German policy of protecting and preserving Soviet war monuments cannot prevent such monuments from becoming invisible — as Robert Musil (1995, p. 87) has stated in his well-known dictum — if they do not attract practices of commemoration. Whereas Marx and Lenin may be transposed into theme parks or become the subject of ironic actions, war memorials are immune to such treatment, as the victims demand mourning. In that respect, the fate of the ‘Bronze Soldier’ — as the Soviet monument in Tallinn has been renamed in everyday speech — points at debates that will surely arise elsewhere, if they have not already started. The connection of mourning the dead with monumental forms of praising the victory of the Red Army will either become subject to political debates or will fall into oblivion.

Memory and Space

Besides the debates on memory politics and the revived interest in theoretical aspects of collective memory, there is one more important point related to the memory paradigm on which Dan Diner draws: the rise of the memory paradigm goes along with a turn towards rediscovered historic spaces (not least in eastern Europe). Observations that underline such a statement are for instance the widely read essays by the German historian Karl Schlögel (1986, 2003) and those by other authors, such as Robert Traba (2003) and Andrzej Stasiuk from Poland and Yurii Andrukhovyich from Ukraine (Andruchowytsch & Stasiuk 2004). Spatial explorations in Central and Eastern Europe discover ‘forgotten’ regions and places, which are now conceived as an integral part of (a new) Europe. The success of these essays may be explained by the fact that memories here are connected to specific places, cities, landscapes etc., and evoke a world of a pre-national ‘unity in diversity’ which is rarely found in the Europe of today after the destruction of the twentieth century. By the same token, these remembered places form a new mental map ...