Abstract
The introduction outlines the relation between intergenerational transmission of memory, women’s narratives, and the active listener. Remembering the past is not an isolated, individual process, as it includes postmemory, which is formed during and based on interactions with others, and the process of listening and becoming witnesses to their narratives. The lines that both unite and separate these strata of memory offer valuable clues about how one remembers the past. No narrative of the past is ‘written’ in isolation, not the personal, public, nor the gender-determined narratives; all are interrelated and influenced by past and present historical frames. Presenting the core concepts of the volume as being the multi-layered memory/postmemory and women’s narratives of displacement, the introduction underlines that the narratives of the past are the result of the extremely elaborated process in which memories are correlated and permanently negotiated between different agents of memory. The introduction points out the volume focus on the complex and fascinating relationship between the testimony and the act of listening, as it sustains the act of witnessing the past and determines its remembrance.
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Notes
- 1.
The editors of the volume Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory develop further this question: ‘The attempt to resolve meaning in the present is thus often a matter of conflicts over representations: where a memorial should be sited, what artefacts a museum should include, whose views should be sought in television interviews.’ (Hodgkin and Radstone 2003, p. 1).
- 2.
For example, Richard Crownshaw and Selma Leydesdorff observe that the ‘collective memory is the screen onto which different subjectivities project their discrepant versions of the past for different (political) reason’ (2009, p. XVI).
- 3.
Hodgkin and Radstone resume in their introduction of the volume Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory some of the memory traits—as individual, cultural, and political—determined: ‘memory is not only individual, but cultural: memory, though we may experience it as private and internal, draws on countless scraps and bits of knowledge and information from the surrounding culture, and is inserted into larger cultural narratives’ (p. 5) and ‘memory is political: it remains a site of struggle over meaning (…) in both private and public manifestations, makes claims about the past, which will not be acceptable to everybody’ (p. 5).
- 4.
Jay Winter writes: ‘The overlap between history and memory is much greater than purists will have us believe’ (2010, p. 12). More about the relation history–memory and the discussions related to this topic on: Halbwachs 1925/1992; Lowenthal 1985; Nora 1989; Novick 1999; Wertsch 2002; Hodgkin and Radstone 2003; Assmann 2008; Winter 2010. The overlap between history and memory becomes essential in relation with testimony, see, for example, Dominick LaCapra arguments about the relation testimony—history: ‘Testimony is a crucial source for history. And it is more than a source. It poses specially challenges to history. For it raises the issue of the way in which the historian or other analyst becomes a secondary witness, undergoes a transferential relation, and must work out an acceptable subject-position with respect to the witness and his or her testimony.’ (1998, p. 11).
- 5.
As Assmann observes: ‘Totalitarianism can therefore be described as an attempt to restore the premodern state monopoly over history under modern circumstances and with modern means.’ (2008, p. 64).
- 6.
Günter Grass (1992, p. 27) names the twentieth century the ‘century of expulsions’.
- 7.
Andrew Bell-Fialkoff identifies the first instances of ethnic cleansing occurring as early as the eighth century B.C. The first Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III moved almost half of the population of a conquered region and replaced it with settlers from a different region. The purpose of the practice was to make the conquered territories more docile and easier to rule. The practice was used in the centuries to come by the Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans (p. 12). During the medieval period, the term took on a religious dimension, through the removal of the unfaithful and religious minorities by means of expulsions and massacres. A century later, the first ethnic cleansing based solely on ethnic discrimination took place in England (Bell-Fialkoff 1993, p. 113). With the secularization of the modern age, Bell-Fialkoff argued, the term ethnic cleansing started to become a political ideology.
- 8.
For more references about the space of Eastern Europe see Uilleam Blacker, Alexandr Etkind, and Julie Fedor edited volume, Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), especially pp. 1–2.
- 9.
See, for example, Archie Brown (2009) The Rise and Fall of Communism (New York: Harper Collins), also Ben Fowkes (1993) The Rise and Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press).
- 10.
Jan Gross (1997) estimates a total of 50 million people were moved as the result of political and social clashes between 1939 and 1948, during the war and after it.
- 11.
- 12.
See also Judt (2000).
- 13.
For a detailed account, please see Demsluk (2012), who presents a comprehensive analysis of the process of coming to terms with the loss of one’s homeland. According to Demsluk, approximately 12 million ethnic Germans fled or were expelled from Central and Eastern Europe. Ther and Siljak (2001) and Judt (2005) put this number at around 15 million, while Béla Várdt and Tolly (2003) put it as high as 16.5 million, stating ‘16.5 million Germans may have fallen victim to this officially sponsored policy of ethnic cleansing during and after World War II’ (p. 10).
- 14.
The German expulsion was a very accelerated process. For example, between December 1944 and January 1945, more than 22,000 Germans were removed from Yugoslavia, and in January 1945, around 70,000 Germans were expelled from Romania (Stark 2008, p. 77). In the spring of 1946, Czechoslovakia started the deportation of the German population. The Hungarians were also considered an alien group. A population transfer between Czechoslovakia and Hungary resulted in 73,000 Slovakians leaving Hungary and 120,000 Hungarians leaving Czechoslovakia (Stark 2008, p. 82). In addition, 44,000 Hungarians were expelled in the abandoned areas of the Sudetenland. They were permitted to return one year later. In Yugoslavia, ethnic Germans were rounded into camps, and 130,000 people lost their civil rights and properties and almost half died in internment camps (Stark 2008, p. 78). Between January and July 1946, more than 110,000 Germans were deported from Hungary; the last part of the deportations started in August 1947 (Ahonen and Schulze 2008, p. 86). During the 1950s, the number of Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia continued to drop because of the programme ‘Operation Link’ unfolded by the Red Cross, which had as its sole purpose the reunion of families separated during deportations. In total, 60,000 Germans from Poland and 20,000 from Czechoslovakia were moved to Germany between 1950 and 1951 (Kochanowski 2008, p. 96).
- 15.
For more information on this topic, please see Shepard (2011).
- 16.
Ben Shepard describes the situation after 1947, when the problem of prisoners of war and displaced persons received another interpretation, and many displaced persons were integrated into the workforce to fill the void created by the war. Three years after the war ended, over 1 million German prisoners of war were still being used as manpower, with more than half remaining in the Soviet Union. Many other countries chose to keep their prisoners: the Americans only repatriated 2.5 million of a total of 8 million, and by the end of 1947, France still had 300,000 prisoners. In Great Britain, there were around 20,000 Polish soldiers who refused to return to Poland, so the government employed them in mining and agriculture. In April 1946, the lack of workers forced the British government to adopt The Baltic Cygnet, a plan to hire 1000 Baltic women to work as domestics and in TB sanatoria (p. 317). To enforce this new perspective over the prisoners of war, the term ‘displaced person’ was replaced with the term ‘European volunteer workers’ (p. 317). Belgium also agreed to accept 50,000 displaced persons hired to work as miners and promised legal employment conditions, social security benefits, and even Belgian citizenship after a certain number of years. France accepted 30,000 people, while Morocco, Tunisia, and French Guiana accepted more than 50,000 people. Turkey agreed to take 3000 Muslims (Albanians and Yugoslavians), even though they were not able to work, and even offered them citizenship when they entered the country. In late 1945, the allied powers created the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), an entity charged with dealing with displaced persons. Later, this organization became the International Refugee Organization (IRO). The IRO quickly realized that the number of displaced persons was still high and a decision was made that the only solution would be found overseas in North and South America and in the British Commonwealth (p. 320).
- 17.
See also Bucur (2016).
- 18.
See Mitroiu (2016).
- 19.
For example, Remembering the Darkness: Women in Soviet Prisons edited and translated by Veronica Shapovalov (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield) in 2001, and Till My Tale is Told: Women’s Memoirs of the Gulag, edited by Simeon Vilensky (Bloomington) in 1999. A detailed account of the oral history in Post-Socialist Europe is presented in the volume edited by Natalia Khanenko-Friesen and Gelinda Grinchenko (2015) Reclaiming the Personal: Oral History in Post-Socialist Europe (Toronto, Buffalo, London: Toronto University Press).
- 20.
About the situation of women’s history and gender studies in Eastern Europe see also the paper written by Andreea Pető (2004) dedicated to the future of women’s history; she summarizes very well the social and political context from Eastern Europe.
- 21.
See, for example, the issue dedicated to the women’s narratives of deportation in Siberia by Journal of Baltic Studies (36, 1, special issue: Baltic Life Stories, Spring 2005). The journal is a fruitful space for memory discourse and analyses of the communist past in the Baltic states.
- 22.
See, for example, Rippl et al. (2013). This volume includes a chapter written by Leena Kurvet-Käosaar about the deportation narratives of Baltic women.
- 23.
- 24.
Only in 1941 the NKVD deported around 10,000 Estonian in Siberia.
- 25.
In the field of autobiographical studies, Leigh Gilmore (2001) argued against the tendency to find ‘thematic, formal and even broadly epistemological coherence among all women’s autobiography’ and points out that ‘The names of “women” and “autobiography” (…) come to represent diversity as a natural and stable identity.’ (p. XIII) See also Leigh Gilmore (2001) The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
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Mitroiu, S. (2018). Women’s Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe: Introduction. In: Mitroiu, S. (eds) Women’s Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96833-9_1
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