Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe

Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind, J. Fedor, J. Fedor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137322067
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea

It is the aim of this volume to investigate how academic practices of Memory Studies are being applied, adapted, and transformed in the countries of East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. It affords a new, startlingly different perspective for scholars of both Eastern European history and Memory Studies.

Part I

Divided Memory

1

Europe’s Divided Memory

Aleida Assmann

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, European politicians developed the idea of a European Museum in Brussels. A group of professional experts was commissioned to plan a site that would tell the transnational citizens of the European Union (EU) who they are, where they come from, and what connects them. A team of experts, with the Polish-French historian Krzysztof Pomian as the head, started to work on the design of a European Museum in the 1990s. The opening of the museum, however, had to be postponed several times. The emblematic date 2005—60 years after the end of the Second World War and 55 years after Robert Schuman’s declaration on May 9, passed without a symbolic event. In 2007, an exhibition with the title “C’est notre histoire” was opened in Brussels, featuring the visitor of the exhibition as a prominent actor. In 2008, a fresh start for the museum was made by appointing a new team and choosing a new name for the project. The central focus is to be the history of European unification after 1945 up to the present. Rather than looking back into divisive national pasts it was now decided to tell the story of new alliances and the shared resolve to look forward to a common future. The current team is working under a definite deadline; the museum in Brussels, now named “House of European History” after its model, the German “Haus der Geschichte” in Bonn, is to open in 2014.

A glance at this complicated history of creating a European museum already conveys a sense of the problems and complications that arise when the 28 member states of the EU have to agree upon a shared version of their histories. It was Marcel Proust who created the neat distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory. Following this distinction, one might have supposed that the top-down European Museum at Brussels is voluntary memory in the process of being constructed. As we have seen, however, such a plan proved unfeasible. Given the massive and extended periods of violence in the history of Europe, this past is far from being agreed upon and mastered; on the contrary, it continues to haunt the present with periodical eruptions and controversies, scandals and taboos. Despite the scrupulous ongoing work of historians, there is as yet no end in sight to occasions for renewed collisions and contestations along national borders when it comes to interpreting, representing, and commemorating the European past. The long shadow of Europe’s violent past is continued in a number of fault lines, subsumed under the heading of Europe’s “memory wars.” Given this troubled legacy, it makes much more sense to start in 1945 and to focus on the consolidation of Europe rather than descending into the deep and troubled well of Europe’s past. Even today, 68 years after the Second World War, we have ample evidence that the traumatic events related to that war have not vanished into the past and sunk into oblivion but continue to engage and enrage European citizens in various ways. Fortunately, it is also true that there are many dimensions in which Europe has already irreversibly grown together and is becoming an unquestioned reality for its citizens who enjoy the normality of unrestricted traveling, of business transactions, of university collaborations, of study programs, tourism, and the media hype of popular song contests. The memory of the Second World War, however, is still very much present as an involuntary one and a subliminal but firm reference point for many Europeans, not for those of the older generation alone.

To illustrate the mental and emotional divisions in European memory, let me insert here a piece of everyday evidence. It is a conversation that I recently had with a Polish mathematician over breakfast in a student’s residence at Madrid. He was attending a conference on mathematics, while I was involved in a conference on memory. “Memory, what is that?” he asked curiously, “Psychology? Medicine?” I explained to him that not only individuals remember but that a whole field of studies has recently evolved around dealing with the impact of (violent) pasts and the use of memories by groups and even nations. He found this difficult to believe, telling me that for his generation (born around 1970), history had completely lost its interest. In our further conversation, however, he proved to be very well informed about current Polish memory debates, from Katyn to Jedwabne, adding details about Jan Tomasz Gross’ recent revelations about the “golden harvest,” that is, diggings for valuables that formerly belonged to victims of the Holocaust carried out by the Polish population in the killing fields of Treblinka and other former concentration camps after the war. He added that, in contrast to himself, his father (born shortly after the Second World War) had a worldview that was completely imbued with historical memory. This is the reason why his father would never think of traveling to Germany and is a staunch opponent of the European Union, which he perceives as just another variation of German imperialism.

The conversation related above illustrates the problem on which this chapter will focus, namely, the way in which European memory is still divided. The chapter will focus on the two core events of the twentieth century that lie at the heart of this divide, the Holocaust and the Gulag. While the memory of the Nazi genocide has been transformed into a transgenerational and transnational memory, providing the EU with a “foundation myth” and a moral yardstick for new member states since 2005, the memory of Stalin’s terror has had a much more contested and fragmented history, fuelling the national narratives of victimhood of some post-Soviet states on the one hand and disappearing from Russian political memory almost entirely on the other. After sketching the different memorial histories of these core events, this chapter will discuss the status and possible future of both events as part of European memory.

The Holocaust as a foundation myth for the European Union

Given that modern Europe rose from the ashes of the old Europe, it is small wonder that the Second World War still looms large in the consciousness and memory of Europeans. The European Union was devised as a defense mechanism against internal European warfare, with the main strategic aim of neutralizing and containing the danger of German aggression. That this mission was effectively achieved is something that the members of the EU were about to forget in the broils of financial crises, nationalistic movements, and mutual stereotyping. In 2012 the Norwegian Nobel Committee, therefore, reminded the Europeans of their history, focusing on what it saw as “the EU’s most important result: the successful struggle for peace and reconciliation and for democracy and human rights. The stabilizing part played by the EU has helped to transform most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace.”¹

Directly after the war, the common efforts toward an economic rebuilding of Europe served not only as a preventive measure against a new war but also as an anaesthesia of traumatic memories that had no place in the new Europe. In retrospect, we may even say that the Cold War, with its strong orientation toward modernization and the future, was an ice age of memory. In 1950s Germany, for instance, the political and social frame was dominated by a spirit of relief and renewal that was combined with a determination to let bygones be bygones. This spirit was prominently embodied by the first German chancellor Adenauer.² As the architect of material restitutions for Jewish victims he was invited to Tel Aviv by Israeli president Levi Eshkol, who thanked him for his initiative. As an active member of the resistance himself, Adenauer also felt entitled to a policy of forgive and forget. At a dinner party in the home of Eshkol, he shocked his host when he said: “The Nazi regime has killed as many Germans as it has killed Jews. We should now let this time sink into oblivion.”³

Today, it has been agreed upon that the Holocaust is the founding myth of Europe; the genocide of European Jewry that was invented and started in Nazi Germany was carried into and supported in various degrees by almost all European states. From the point of view of Germany, it took 20 years for these events to resurface in the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt, 1965; another 20 years to enter German memory through acts of public commemorations in the speech of president Weizsäcker in 1985, 40 years after the liberation on May 8, 1945; and another 20 years to be established in museums and monuments as a national and transnational lieu de mémoire, marked by the opening of the central Holocaust memorial in Berlin in 2005. In the same year, the European Parliament in Brussels declared January 27 the day of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945, a European day of annual commemoration in all member states and passed a resolution against anti-Semitism in Europe.⁴ Since this resolution of 2005, participation in the Holocaust community of memory has become part of the entry ticket to the EU.

The infrastructure of this memory community was provided by the so-called Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research (ITF), which had been promoted by Swedish president Göran Persson in January 2000 in Stockholm.⁵ Two years earlier, a “Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust” had come up with the following “Stockholm Declaration”: “The Holocaust (the Shoah) fundamentally challenged the foundations of civilization. The unprecedented character of the Holocaust will always hold universal meaning.”⁶ Working on the premises of this statement, the task force was founded with a twofold aim:

(1) to carry the memory of the Holocaust across a temporal border, in this case, across the threshold of the new millennium, at the moment when the communicative memory of survivor-witnesses was dwindling, thus transforming it into a long-term cultural memory;

(2) to carry it across spatial borders, spreading the memory of the Holocaust across Europe by creating a supranational memory community with an extended infrastructure of social institutions, finances, and cooperative networks.

Before the activities of the ITF, Holocaust memory had already resurfaced in various ways after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The opening of numerous archives considerably enlarged the scope and complexity of Holocaust memory, challenging some firmly established national self-images. New documents about Vichy and the history of anti-Semitism in East Germany put an end to the self-image of France or the GDR as pure resistors; after the scandals about the NS-past of Austrian president Waldheim and information about a Polish pogrom in Jedwabne, Austria, and Poland were no longer able to claim the status of victim exclusively, and even the seemingly neutral Swiss were confronted with their own “sites of memory” in the form of their banks and borders. While this new archival evidence documenting collaboration or indifference toward this crime against humanity challenged dominant national narratives in the West, some sections of East European societies took a different approach. After having liberated themselves from their forced alliance with the Soviet Union, these countries often embraced new national narratives that revolved around the experience of suffering and victimhood. For some, the cultivation of victim status deepened the national spirit and created a distance from European identity, and this shift has raised questions about attitudes in these societies toward minorities past and present.

The East European memory of Stalinist terror

While the memory of the Holocaust returned in West European nations after a long state of latency of four–six decades, and has been reconstructed as a new foundational European memory, it was the memory of Stalinism and Soviet occupation that formed the center of the national narratives of the new states that claimed political independence after the collapse of communism. These memories had also been well preserved in a state of latency through longer periods of political repression. From the point of view of Western intellectuals, this rise of the memory of Stalinism was observed with considerable anxiety and irritation, because it was seen as a challenge to the recovery and expansion of Holocaust memory. Debates about the respective status of these crimes, which confirm their incompatibility and often seek to lay a taboo on comparing them, continue to this day.⁷

Only very recently, however, have there been signs that these concerns are reopened to negotiation. My evidence for this is an invitation from a European commission at Brussels that met in May 2011 to discuss the status of the European memory of the Gulag. Participants included organizations such as Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, Yad Vashem, the Terezin Memorial, Anne Frank House, Holocaust Educational Trust Ireland, Living History Forum Sweden, the European Shoah Legacy...