Introduction: Remembering Urban Terror in Europe—Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Memorialisation, Narratives, and the Politics of Memory

Abstract

Taking the 2004 bombings in Madrid’s Atocha Station as a case study, this chapter introduces and explores the central themes of the work that follows: the narrating, remembering, and forgetting of terror attacks across Europe between 2004 and 2019. The aim of this volume is to offer ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz, 1973) of the material, cultural, and political impact of this violence. As such, this introduction offers an initial contextualisation of the debate surrounding political violence in Europe—including state violence, mass atrocities, epistemic violence, and urban attacks—and proposes that the ways in which we remember such violence is a question not only of Europe’s past, but also one of re-imagining its potential futures. In particular, considering questions of politics and power, this chapter explores the definitions of ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism’ as concepts, and aims to show that these labels should be studied as both political and cultural phenomena. Finally, this introduction also contextualises the use of art throughout the volume, suggesting that works of art may be understood as a new means through which terror and violence can be remembered, imagined, and commemorated across Europe.

Remembering Urban Terror in Europe

The year 2024 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Madrid train bombings (11M). What has been described as the largest terrorist attack on European soil (Reinares, 2014) and as ‘Europe’s 9/11’ (Truc, 2018: 44) is widely seen as the beginning of a new era of political violence in Europe. Other major attacks in this era include the London 7/7 bombings in 2005, the 2011 Norway attacks, the Paris attacks in November 2015, the Nice and Berlin truck attacks in 2016, the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, the 2017 Barcelona attacks, and three racist shootings in Germany in Munich (2016), Halle (2019), and Hanau (2020). While there are important ideological and political differences between these attacks, they have one important thing in common: the perpetrators sought to spread fear and terror by targeting social events and busy urban spaces.

The targets of the Madrid bombings were not government decision makers, members of the armed forces, police officers, or public figures. They were ordinary people using public transport. At 7:37 am on 11 March 2004, thousands of them were on their way to work or school when ten explosive devices detonated on four trains on the Madrid rail network. 191 people lost their lives at Atocha, El Pozo and Santa Eugenia stations as well as in Calle Téllez in Madrid. 1,841 people were injured (Audiencia Nacional, 2007: 174–175). On 3 April 2004, seven members of the group responsible for the attack, facing imminent arrest in Leganés (Madrid), committed suicide by detonating several charges of dynamite. The explosion also killed a policeman and injured another 34 people (Audiencia Nacional, 2007: 172 and 710–711).

The public nature of the Madrid bombings and other acts of terrorism in Europe since has profound implications on their memory. As this volume illustrates, the attack sites are shaped by both rituals of remembrance (e.g. makeshift memorials and commemorative events) and practices of forgetting (e.g. the quickest possible removal of physical traces of the attacks and the subsequent return to business as usual). Soon, it was possible to travel from and to Atocha station without being forced to think about the deadly attack in 2004. On the platforms, the only physical reminders of the attack are temporary: flower bouquets that visitors leave in honour of the victims (Image 1.1).

Image 1.1

(Photograph by Gérôme Truc)

Madrid, 11 March 2010: flowers laid on one of the platforms at Atocha train station, struck by terrorists on 11 March 2004

On the first anniversary of the attacks, a first memorial for the 193 victims in the form of a ‘Forest of Remembrance’ (Bosque del Recuerdo) located in a local park was inaugurated by King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia. On the third anniversary of the bombings, a second memorial followed. The memorial, which was accessible through an entrance at Atocha station, contained a large plastic bubble with messages of condolence in various languages left by anonymous visitors at the sites of the attacks (Image 1.2).¹ Far from creating a sense of unity and solidarity, the Atocha memorial became a contested symbol of Spain’s deeply polarised and fragmented memory landscape. Over the years, the delicate construction collapsed multiple times, prompting some to demand that it is removed altogether. In 2023, local officials decided to get rid of the memorial. They argued that the deconstruction was necessary to enable works on a new metro network. They promised to replace it with a new memorial.

Image 1.2

(Photograph by Mireya Toribio Medina)

Messages on the plastic bubble at the Atocha memorial

The controversies surrounding the Madrid bombings did not begin with the disputes over the Atocha memorial. From the first moment on, the attacks were the subject of ‘mnemonic battles’ (DeGloma & Liebman Jacobs, 2023; Irwin-Zareka, 1994). They took place three days before the general elections were due to be held. Despite a lack of evidence, the conservative Popular Party (PP) blamed the Basque separatist group ‘Euskadi Ta Askatasuna’ (ETA) for the bombings. Meanwhile, part of society saw the attack as a direct consequence of conservative government’s decision to send Spanish troops to Iraq and thus join the US-led ‘war on terror’. This sparked protests in front of PP headquarters on the day before the elections. Despite conservatives being the favourite in the polls, the Socialist Party won the elections.

As the example of Madrid train bombings in 2004 illustrates, terrorist attacks in Europe in the twenty-first century are the subject of intense mnemonic conflicts (Saryusz-Wolska et al., 2022). The narratives surrounding these violent events are shaped by multiple coexisting and intersecting memories of political violence in the past and present. In the case of the Madrid train bombings, narratives were not only shaped by memories of ETA violence but also by repressed memories of colonial expansion and of the Francoist dictatorship as well as global discourses about the 9/11 attacks and the global ‘war’ on terror. Analysing the complex interplay between such memory narratives and conflicts requires a range of methods and explanatory strategies (Irwin-Zarecka, 1994: 72). The aim of this volume is to offer ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz, 1973) of the material, cultural, and political impact of European terror attacks since 2004. It includes chapters by scholars from a range of disciplines and countries as well as critical insights from survivors of terrorist violence and artists. The book shows that the memory of the Madrid train bombings and other terrorist attacks in Europe in the twenty-first century is multi-directional (Rothberg, 2009), transcultural (Erll, 2011), and ‘entangled’ (Fareld, 2021) with the memory of other violent histories including acknowledged and unacknowledged forms of state violence.

Terrorism as a Threat to the European Project

While the Madrid train bombings and other attacks explored in this volume need to be situated in a particular cultural and political context, terrorism in twenty-first-century Europe is also a transnational phenomenon and must be analysed as such. A key part of the European project is the creation of a shared view of the past (Jones, 2017; Rigney, 2012) and a collective narrative of progress leading from a lawless and violent past towards a peaceful and democratic future. The end of the Second World War—in Germany sometimes referred to as Stunde Null or Zero hour—marks the beginning of this process, and the ‘peaceful revolution’ of 1989 is widely regarded as an important milestone. On the 30th anniversary of the protests on 9 November 1989, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (2019) argued that the people who took to the streets in autumn 1989, ‘healed a European continent divided by war, and reconciled Europe’s history with its geography’.

In recent years, the narrative of a reconciled and peaceful Europe has become the subject of growing criticism. In a controversial speech in October 2022, the European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell compared Europe to a peaceful garden surrounded by a wild jungle. By portraying Europe as a beacon of ‘peaceful coexistence, cooperation, integration and development’ (Borrell, 2022a) in a world characterised by violence, disorder, and ‘the law of the jungle’ (Borrell, 2022b), Borrell reinforced a ‘sanitized version of European history that ignores both the experience of the East and the South of Europe, as well as the West’s colonial and imperial history’ (Boatcã, 2021: 390; see also Chakrabarty, 2000).

This sanitised version of European history is problematic because it fails to account for historical and ongoing patterns of violence, exclusion, and marginalisation. Indeed, even ‘as Europe progressed to its more internally peaceful later twentieth century, its war-making techniques in its colonies and outposts would have gained prosecutions for their implementers at the Nuremberg trials’ (Bloxham et al., 2011: 14). The ‘strategic cruelty’ at the European borders (Sajjad, 2022; see also Stierl, 2023) and the hidden and open forms of racism in Europe today are a direct result of these violent histories.

The history of racism in Europe is far from over, and there are plenty of examples illustrating this. While we were working on this introduction, thousands of people were protesting against police violence in France. The current protests were triggered by the brutal killing of a 17-year-old boy of Algerian and Moroccan origin during a police control. Like in many other European countries, racialised communities in France face a significantly higher risk of police violence. In a joint statement, France’s leading police unions declared that they are in a war against ‘savage hordes’ and ‘vermin’ (Henley & Chrisafis, 2023). After three nights of riots in cities across the country, the UN urged France to ‘seriously address the deep issues of racism and discrimination in law enforcement’ (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2023).

Europe is no idyllic garden. As this volume shows, violence is not just an important part of Europe’s past but also of its present. Violence here is understood in the broadest sense ranging from genocides and mass atrocities to ‘epistemic violence’ (Brunner, 2021; Spivak, 1988) and ‘imperialist amnesia’ (Fletcher, 2012). The particular focus of this volume is on urban violence. As Andrea Pavoni and Simone Tulumello (2023) argue, urban violence is the subject of a quickly growing body research but remains under-theorised. According to them, urban violence is shaped by three interlocking trajectories: ‘the process of (capitalist) urbanisation, which ontologically structures the realm in which urban violence emerges; the spatio-political project of the urban, which […] constitutes the epistemological realm against which urban violence is made visible; and the concrete urban atmospheres in and through which the process and the project materialise, often violently so, in the urban’ (Pavoni & Tulumello, 2023: 4). From this perspective, urban violence has material, political, affective, and imaginary dimensions that are deeply entangled. It follows that urban terrorism in contemporary Europe is a complex phenomenon that is about much more than spectacular attacks and official commemorations. A key aim of this book is to show that there are many other—and often less visible—forms of violence that contribute to the social, cultural, and political impact of terrorism in contemporary Europe.

The essays in this book, with a focus on memory discourses of and creative responses to terrorist violence in the twenty-first century, illustrate that violence in the past and in the present and within and outside Europe intersect in complex ways. The volume shows that the way in which we remember recent acts of political violence is not just a question of (re)interpreting Europe’s past but also one of (re)imagining Europe’s future. As Andreas Huyssen (2003: 6) notes, we ‘need both past and future to articulate our political, social, and cultural dissatisfactions with the present state of the world’.

While the Madrid bombings in 2004 can be seen as the beginning of a wave of terrorist attacks targeting public events and spaces in Europe, it is important to stress that they were not the first attacks of this kind on European soil. The year 1980 alone saw two major bombings in Italy and Germany; one targeted a busy train station in Bologna and the other a popular folk festival in Munich, Germany. However, in the early twenty-first century, terrorism against ‘soft targets’ in European cities has undoubtedly reached a new intensity. And there is something else that is ‘new’ about this wave of terror attacks: unlike in the twentieth century, political authorities in many European countries depict terrorism today as a threat to a ‘European’ way of life.

In his State of the Union Address 2016, the then President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker highlighted that terrorist attacks in the EU since 2004 had claimed more than 600 lives and promised further policy actions to protect ‘the European way of life’ in the face of heightened internal and external threats (Juncker, 2016). The EU has made the prevention of further acts of urban terrorism a key priority. Yet, less than three months after Juncker’s speech, Anis Amri deliberately drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people and injuring dozens, and the following years saw several other attacks against soft targets in European cities. In 2017, EU officials openly admitted that despite all security measures ‘there can never be “zero risk”’, because an almost infinite number of public spaces could be targeted in a range of ways (European Commission, 2017). How does this constant threat of violence affect the memorialisation of such violent events?

The immediate aftermath of recent terror attacks in Europe has been characterised by public declarations of unity and collective gestures of solidarity with victims. A famous example for this is the use of the famous ‘je suis Charlie’ hashtag after the 2015 attacks on the editorial office of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris. In the days after the 13 November Paris attacks, thousands of people left flowers and messages at the attack sites (Image 1.3). However, such public displays of solidarity and love should not obscure the fact that collective memories of urban terror in contemporary Europe are far from consensual (Faucher-King & Truc, 2022), and that different people and institutions are implicated in different ways in Europe’s violent histories. According to Michael Rothberg, implication ‘emerges from the ongoing, uneven, and destabilising intrusion of irrevocable pasts into an unredeemed present’ (2019: 9). Moving beyond the perpetrator/victim dichotomy, Rothberg’s implicated subject participates in injustice in ways that are not necessarily visible or obvious. He rightly insists that commemoration that fails to acknowledge positionality and implication ‘tends toward empty rhetoric and platitude’ (Rothberg, 2019: 20). While the chapters in this book focus on different countries and cultural contexts, they share an interest in questions of positionality and implication as well as in the ethics and politics of memory.

Image 1.3

(Photograph by Gérôme Truc)

Paris, 17 November 2015: an ephemeral memorial in front of the restaurant Le Petit Cambodge 4 days after the 13th November Paris attacks

As Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt (2012: 5) note, memory can be both a catalyst for and an impediment to social and political change. This is because memory narratives ‘commonly imply multiple collective references, nonlinearities, ambivalences, manipulations and blindspots’ (Capdepón & Dornhof, 2022: 6). Even if there are strong official narratives about terrorist attacks and about who and what should be seen as a terrorist threat to European citizens and their way(s) of life, such narratives rarely remain uncontested. The case studies explored in this book illustrate that power is relational, dynamic and ‘exercised from innumerable points’ (Foucault, 1990: 38). The book does not seek to offer an in-depth analysis of every terror attack on European soil in the twenty-first century (and could not possibly do so). Rather it offers empirical, theoretical, and creative perspectives on particular events that offer critical insights into local, national, and transnational memory discourses. The contributions show that these discourses erupt and evolve in complex and often contradictory ways.

This volume focuses on attacks that are widely regarded as acts of terrorism. However, this should not obscure the politically charged and contested nature of this terminology. Multiple definitions on a national and supranational level shape how ‘terrorism’ is conceptualised in contemporary Europe. The prevailing definitions have several common features, but there are also some interesting differences. Most definitions emphasise the collective affective impact of terrorist violence. Namely, its capacity to create terror in a society or in part of it. This terror is created through an instrumentalization of violence for political ends. Terrorism is widely understood as a political form of violence—even if discussions abound on the question of what exactly should be seen as political in this context (e.g. in relation to religious motivations or perpetrators with unclear or mixed ideologies).

There are also some key assumptions surrounding the victims and perpetrators of terrorist violence—even if both issues are heavily disputed. Some definitions specify that perpetrators of terrorist violence must be sub-national groups and clandestine actors. Unlike the US, the EU has no official register of state sponsors of terrorism and has no legal tools to address state terrorism. As we have shown elsewhere (Geerts et al., 2023; Karcher & Geerts, 2024), the inclusion and exclusion of potential perpetrator groups is deeply political and has been the subject of important work in the field of Critical Terrorism Studies. While some definitions of terrorism specify that the victims must be civilians, others maintain that members of the armed forces can also be targets of terrorism. Overall, definitions tend to agree that a defining element is that victims are targeted randomly and not individually. This aspect is closely linked to the communicative function and affective power of terrorist violence. If a substantial part of the population identifies with the victims to the degree that they feel that they themselves could have been the target, this can create a general sense of terror.

Definitions of terrorism in Europe have evolved with and against the perceived threat of political violence. Since 2004, the EU has adopted a range of new measures to stop terrorism. They include new rules on the online dissemination of terrorist content, measures to improve information exchange between EU countries and with non-EU partners, anti-money laundering rules, measures to stop foreign terrorist fighters, stricter rules on the acquisition and possession of weapons and explosive precursors, and measures to improve the safety of public spaces and infrastructures. Although it is still too early to assess the long-term effects of these counter-terrorism measures, it has become clear that they, too, can have harmful and divisive consequences. For that reason, it is vital that research on terrorism in contemporary Europe also critically examines counter-terrorism measures at a local, national, and supranational level.

An EU directive from 2017 lists a number of offences, including causing significant damage to transport and information systems, which can be classified as terrorist acts if they aim to seriously intimidate a population, to destabilise the fundamental structures of a country or international institution, or to manipulate decisions and actions on a national or supranational level. Human rights organisations have warned that the broad language adopted in this directive makes it possible for states to ‘criminalise, as terrorism, public protests or other peaceful acts’ that they see as destabilising for their social, political, or economic order (European Network Against Racism, 2016). This criticism is nothing new. Studies have repeatedly shown the politically charged nature of the term terrorism (see e.g. Cronin, 2006; Jackson et al., 2020; Tilly, 2003).

As we hope to show in this volume, terrorism is not only a political but also a cultural phenomenon and needs to be analysed as such. In a special issue of the journal Memory Studies focusing on the 2005 London bombings, Matthew Allen and Annie Bryan (2011) highlight the mediated nature of commemorations of terrorist violence in the twenty-first century. Indeed, to analyse the memories of terrorism in Europe today, researchers must explore ‘a complex memoryscape that encompasses multiple media, modalities and temporalities’ (Allen & Bryan, 2011: 264). It is important to note that this memoryscape is shaped by a broad range of plurivocal meaning-making practices. As research in memory studies has shown, a range of memory actors including state authorities, victims, local residents, journalists, and transnational communities engage in a variety of practices and rituals to build, maintain, and transmit specific memories (Hirsch, 2015). It is through their power and their limitations that commemorative practices are shaped and reshaped (Vinitzky-Seroussi, 2002: 33).

While the Spanish police made the controversial decision to release graphic video footage of the Madrid bombings and a video of three men claiming responsibility for the attacks, police authorities in other countries tried to share as little evidence as possible with the public. For example, after a racist terror attack in Hanau, Germany, in February 2020, police refused to discuss critical details of the incident—as the chapter by Karin Yesilada in this volume illustrates. The families of the nine victims of the racist shooting commissioned the research agencies Forensic Architecture and Forensis to investigate the attack. The findings of the investigation were presented as part of the exhibition ‘Three Doors’ at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, a public space for contemporary art and culture in Frankfurt am Main (see Image 1.4). As the contributions to this volume illustrate, art has been used by victims and survivors to process their traumatic experiences and to reclaim their lives. The book shows that art is used to offer critical perspectives on collective practices or remembering and forgetting in relation to violence in the past and the complex effects of counter-terrorism measures in the present.

Image 1.4

(Photograph by Norbert Miguletz, ©Frankfurter Kunstverein)

“Forensic Architecture/Forensis, Installation view Frankfurter Kunstverein 2022 with the investigation “Racist Terror Attack in Hanau: The Arena Bar” and the timeline “Incidents and Unknown”

Memory, Art, Aesthetics: Representations of and Responses to Terror

The work of art, writes John Dewey, serves to ‘concentrate and enlarge an immediate experience’, directly expressing ‘meanings imaginatively summoned, assembled, and integrated’ (2009: 273). It is vital that we acknowledge and explore the multiple, multi-directional, transcultural, and entangled nature of memories of twenty-first century terror in Europe. Such an exploration, we believe, would be incomplete without a consideration of the role of art, as the representation of these immediate experiences, in the creation and proliferation of memory. Indeed, art has played a crucial role in our research, offering new and transformative perspectives in our understanding of terror, memory, and the memory of terror. As Marsha Meskimmon writes, art functions as ‘an active constituent element’ within the conditions of the world and of memory, allowing us to ‘encounter difference, imagine change that has yet to come, and make possible the new’ (2010: 8). The various artworks that make up this volume, as well as the contributing chapters that discuss the art and literature of memory, thus enable us as researchers to expand the field of imagination in ways that go beyond the forms of narrating, planning, and playing that characterise catastrophe scenarios, exercises, and the academic literature on this subject.

Our understanding of art in this volume, then, is as a form of testimony. Generally difficult to define in absolute terms, we use the term ‘testimony’ here to refer to memory narratives of past traumatic events, or what Verónica Tozzi refers to as ‘limit events’, which she defines as ‘events of victimisation on a massive scale and intensity’ (2012: 3). For Tozzi, whose work builds on Hayden White’s studies of ‘witness literature’ (2024: 114), testimony is a vital means of interpreting history, as it not only recounts this limit event in the past but effectively re-constitutes it in the present (2012: 4). Andreas Huyssen, too, writes that artists have ‘used these confusions of temporality to create […] aesthetic work, weaving a web of memories in the present with an opening to alternative futures’ (2022: 11). The notions of temporality and linear memorialisation are again disrupted here, as memory is ‘actively constructed and re-constructed over time’ and memory and imagination come together to create ‘various lines of synthesis between past, present, and future’ (Keightley & Pickering, 2017: 167). In such an approach to testimony, then, memory narratives of these ‘limit events’ (Tozzi, 2012: 3) stand not only as an affirmation that these events took place, or a recounting of the facts of the event, but also as a reconstitution or ‘enactment […] of what it felt like to have had to endure such “facts”’ (White, 2004: 123, emphasis in original). Aleida Assmann similarly proposes that the purpose of testimonial narratives ‘is less to tell us what happened than what it felt like to be in the centre of those events; [to] provide very personal views from within’ (2006: 263).

A majority of the work on testimony refers generally to written narratives, to ‘art’ in the form of literature—such as, for example, in the poems that appear in Folkvord and Lassègue’s chapter, or the reflective writing contributed by Harry Man and David Fritz Goeppinger. Sara Jones, for example, defines testimony as ‘a form of knowledge’ existing within culture, where culture includes ‘the creation of artefacts such as books, film, and the theatre’ (2019: 259). To these, we would add visual arts: indeed, there are a number of studies considering the role of visual arts in the creation of testimonial knowledge. For example, Jill Bennet proposes that art offers ‘unique capacities to contribute actively’ to what she refers to as ‘the politics of testimony’ (2005: 3). The work of Halilovich and Fejzić asserts that history and testimony have long been ‘“preserved” in collective memory’ through ‘creative “inscribing” through different media such as paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, and films’ (2018: 91). Similarly, Andreas Huyssen theorises the work of art as one that ‘embodies memory in its media and materiality’ and ‘produces memory in the social present’ (2022: 18). Understood as a form of testimony, artworks thus allow for the ‘deepening of knowledge and a better understanding of the facts that we might already know’, offering us these so-called inside views as a ‘distinctive way of offering us facts that is more vivid and involving than the usual mere providing of facts, or by expression of attitudes of the artist which can challenge or enlighten our own worldview’ (Vidmar & Baccarini, 2010: 334).

In their work on Bosnian memory, Halilovich and Fejzić also examine how art might become implicated in the creation, preservation, and proliferation of memory narratives, as well as how it might stand as a form of counter-memory in the face of sanitised historical discourses, such as those versions of European history mentioned above. The example they give is that of Picasso’s painting Guernica: despite the Franco regime’s multiple attempts ‘to create and impose an alternative memory of what “really” happened in Guernica on that fatal April 26, 1937’, they write, Picasso’s famous painting stands as a counter-narrative to this denial of atrocity, and one that has now ‘become the shared memory of millions of people across the globe’ (2018: 21). Today, the painting is seen as an enduring symbol of Francoist repression in Spain, and it has been re-interpreted, re-contextualised, and re-purposed by groups across the political spectrum. Now installed in the Reina Sofia Museum in democratic Spain, Guernica is thus implicated in the practice of memory-making, standing as an artistic record of the experience of state terror. Mihaela Mihai, in her recent work on political memory, defines the creation of such art as ‘mnemonic care’, or memory care work. For Mihai, art may be defined as an act of memory care when it ‘chips at dominant mystifications by uncovering their blind spots’ (2022: 47), making visible collective and alternative narratives of history and memory. As in the case of Picasso’s famous painting, this art challenges dominant or hegemonic memory narratives, allowing artists to refuse and counter ‘the erasure of certain inconvenient, shameful, or not-so-glorious episodes from political memory’ (Mihai, 2022: 61).

We suggest that the artistic contributions included in this volume, as well as a range of other art works, engage in such refusal, providing valuable forms of artistic testimony and memory. Art, then, is a fundamental part of our project and our methodology. We believe that art can provide new ways of looking at terror, and at how terror is remembered in the twenty-first century. Our volume points towards new ways of understanding memory-making, with its particular focus on art as a means of ‘materialising concepts and meanings beyond the limits of a narrow individualism’ (Meskimmon, 2010: 8), allowing us to emphasise the plurivocality and multidirectionality of memory and of memories of violence. We hope that this volume, and the multiple artworks included within as well as the scholarly considerations of art and its contributions to memory, will point to new ways in which to understand the role of art in the memorialisation and commemoration of terror in Europe.

About the Book

This book does not follow a linear structure. Each contribution offers a unique perspective on the memory of terrorist violence in Europe in the twenty-first century and can be read as a stand-alone piece. But there are also important synergies and connections. The volume is structured around five common themes, and there are shared cultural contexts and methodological approaches connecting chapters in different parts. Some authors have contributed personal reflections in the form of photographs, paintings, and autobiographical accounts. Others offer comparative analyses of individual and collective memorialisation processes in different countries and contexts. As survivors, local residents, critical observers, artists, and academics, the contributors are implicated differently in Europe’s violent histories. The ‘view from within’ that distinguishes many of the volume’s contributions from existing scholarly writings on terrorism eloquently demonstrates how political violence touches us, shapes how we perceive events, and how they fold into our personal stories throughout time and then suddenly re-emerge as a violent rupture when a terrorist attack occurs close to us. The volume offers perspectives on the transformative potential of accounting for the researcher’s positionality in relation to the object of study, the spatial context, and affective layers which have rarely been brought to the surface in the field of political violence research.

If terrorist attacks are studied as isolated incidents, it is possible to create a linear memorialisation timeline. Each time a terrorist attack strikes across an emblematic urban location in Europe, citizens would gather in solidarity with the victims and create grassroot memorials as tokens of remembrance of the victims. The memorialisation process is thus often perceived as originating in the immediate aftermath of an attack with spontaneous expressions of grief and solidarity materialising in improvised memorial assemblages, and it reaches a ‘mature’ stage when attacks become part of official memory discourse on a national and/or transnational level. However, in line with other recent work in the field of memory studies, the contributions in this book complicate and challenge the linear model of conceptualising both memorialisation and coming to terms with trauma.²

Gérôme Truc’s opening chapter in the section on time and temporality draws on extensive ethnographic and archival fieldwork to analyse social responses to terror attacks in Europe in the post-9/11 era. The chapter challenges the dominant view that it is possible to distinguish clearly between a short-term period of ‘social responses’ to the attacks and the memorialistion of these attacks. Instead, it argues that the phenomenon of memorialisation begins from the very first moments after a terrorist attack as evidenced by the posting of messages on social networks, taking to the streets, and placing objects and messages in tribute to the victims at the sites of the attacks, and that those responses eventually form a continuum with other memorial practices. By proposing three different levels of memorialisation—official public memory, group memories, and individual memories—not as distinct entities, but ones that constantly influence each other over time, the chapter demonstrates the need to reconsider the usual distinction between ‘individual’ and ‘collective’ memory when we think of the social responses to terrorism.

Through a walk along the main memorials of the 11M attacks in the Spanish capital, Mireya Toribio Medina explores the dynamic interplay of remembering and forgetting in Madrid. She provides a visual overview of commemorative sites for the 11M victims, exploring their most significant features. This contribution addresses the complexities related to individual and group responses to terrorist attacks, private and collective commemoration as well as their evolution across time.

The chapter by Charlotte Heath-Kelly and Tom Pettinger shows how commemoration and ‘the past’ have become implicated within national security practices in the United Kingdom which anticipate and act upon future insecurity. The authors demonstrate how the imagination of ‘the next’ attack is reliant upon knowledge of previous cases of terrorist violence and how governmental bodies purposefully attempt to anticipate and curate ‘spontaneous’ expressions of grief after terrorist attacks. As a result, counter-terrorism measures that try to prevent future attacks are often based on historical attacks and can act as deliberate or inadvertent reminders of past attacks.

Faisal Hussain’s contribution to the volume offers a powerful response to recent counter-terrorism and extremism measures in the UK through an artistic lens. Illuminated anti-vehicle bollards emblazoned with the words ‘insecurity proves itself’ and ‘it might be nothing, but it could be something’ represent the reordering of cities as counter-terrorism response, a process that re-positions and re-conceptualises the purpose and the function of urban space. The chosen text—which is taken from academic articles that analyse the PREVENT strategy—and font allow Hussain to ‘question the terminology and often racialized nature of the legislation’ (EP, 2021: 3). Similarly, the image of the PREVENT cupcakes playfully calls into question the legitimacy and efficacy of the UK’s PREVENT legislation: as Hussain writes, the cakes are symbolic of the strategy’s ‘positive façade but harmful core […] a seemingly generous offer as luring promotional materials often are, but whose presentation disguises an inedible acrid taste’ (Suspect Objects, 2017). These works then constitute a rejection of official state discourses surrounding both terror and counter-terrorism legislation, providing a counter-narrative to strategies such as PREVENT, which is still in effect today, despite ‘racialized understandings of radicalization and extremism’ (Ali, 2020: 579).

The second part of the edited volume shows how individual memories and the embodied engagement of the researcher with sites of memories and commemoration can play an important role in addressing and contesting silences and purposefully obscured memories in terrorism discourses. Drawing on her multisensorial experience of the Memorial Centre for the Victims of Terrorism in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, which opened to the public in 2021, Itoiz Rodrigo-Jusué analyses the exhibition panels of the museum in the goal of examining the role of public institutions in processes of memorialisation. By acknowledging her own experiences with regard to the past in the Basque Country, this chapter highlights the potential of embodied writing and autoethnography to ‘hear’ some of the silences and detect some of the absences in relation to public truths and collective memories enacted through the commemorative space.

Karin Yeșilada’s chapter demonstrates how childhood memories of racism and historical taboos can become violently intertwined with far-right extremism. Zooming in on the 19th February 2020 right-wing terrorist attack that has put in her hometown Hanau on the map of a series of racially motivated attacks in Germany, Karin Yeșilada makes a compelling argument why we should think of Hanau as a ‘lieu de mémoire’. Her essayist recollections and scholarly reflections on the role of literary works and activism in disturbing dominant political discourses exemplify the notion of the researcher as an archivist.

The third part of the edited volume shows that absence and presence are not mutually exclusive categories. Rather, they co-exist and intersect in individual and collective memory practices, as Katharina Karcher’s contribution shows. She reflects on a field trip to Berlin, a city ‘scarred by the twentieth century’ (Ward, 2016: 11). While the Breitscheidplatz square in central Berlin still bears some of the traces of aerial raids during the Second World War, almost all physical traces of the 2016 terror attack at the same location have disappeared.

Kostas Arvanitis and Robert Simpson’s chapter views spontaneous memorials as places of communion with the bereaved in the goal of demonstrating how spontaneous memorials construct and communicate presences by and for the living too. By viewing them as an expression of the individual’s and community’s need to create, participate in, share, and experience presence through their own bodies and actions, they argue that these memorials are sites where different forms of presence co-exist and interact with one another. Furthermore, they claim that the presences of the individuals involved in the making of the spontaneous memorials and their participation in the sociality of those memorials shape the rationale, value, and use of those memorials when collected by museums and related cultural organisations. They show that curational and preservatory practices in the museum space have extended the embodied presences created by the grassroots memorial(s) that have emerged in the city of Manchester in the aftermath of the Arena bombing in 2017.

Based on observations from a multidisciplinary research program on the spatial effects of the attack on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice on France’s National Day in 2016, Frédéric Vinot’s chapter explores the intricate ways in which traumatic grief can become a catalysator for the transformation of the urban space that has sustained an attack and conversely, how those spatial renovation works eventually turn into markers and resources for the work of mourning. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory as well as interviews with bereaved parents and staff involved in reconstruction works, the chapter demonstrates how the post-attack life confronts the bereaved with two types of loss: firstly, a traumatic loss of a loved one and secondly, a symboligenic loss following urban renovation and security work. This psychoanalytical approach to the post-attack transformation of the urban space and the redoubling of the loss it triggers proposes an alternative to the thought of resilience by bringing forward the creative effects of construction upon dealing with violent loss and mourning.

The fourth section demonstrates how the temporality of memory and memorialisation is further challenged when we attend to the difference between victims’ needs and political and cultural expectations of closure. The three chapters in this part draw on distinct experiences of victimhood and trauma with the goal of demonstrating how incorporating victims’ experiences are key sources to learn from when thinking about temporality, memory, and remembrance. Alejandro Acín’s photographs address individual memories of terror and grief, working with Darryn Frost, a survivor of the attack at Fishmongers’ Hall on London Bridge in 2019: as in the previous discussion of testimony as a ‘view from within’ (Assmann, 2006: 236), these photos constitute an intimate form of memorialisation, produced through collaboration between artist and survivor.

Drawing on interviews with victims and prolonged involvement with victim communities that have emerged following different terrorist attacks in Europe’s recent past, Ana Milošević's chapter highlights the temporal dimensions of victimhood and the ways victims’ needs and demands across time might clash with those of society as a whole. The chapter advocates for a shift away from the linear conceptualisation of victimhood and post-attack recovery and instead demonstrates eloquently through victims’ testimonies that the passing of time and the experience of victimhood interact in a spiral way—at times they overlap, or alternatively collide. By drawing our attention to how temporal conflicts are multiple—between victims and society, within victim associations themselves, and in the distinct way each victim comes to terms with the trauma of their experience, Milosevic’s study challenges the assumption that time alone can eventually resolve trauma, heal and lead to closure.

The temporal misalignment between the political and societal wish to ‘wrap up’ trauma through the inauguration of permanent memorials, on one hand, and the victims, especially those who have lost loved ones in the attacks, is also explored in Yordanka Dimcheva’s chapter on the phenomenology of grief in the aftermath of terrorist violence in France. Based on in-depth phenomenological interviews with two bereaved parents, the chapter explores the role of memory-making activities and sustained acts of care for the deceased in defying societal forgetting and resisting closure. The qualitative study of affect-laden practices of remembrance the bereaved parents have committed themselves to in the aftermath of violent loss thus aims at expanding upon the lived experience of grieving and explore how ‘living’ forms of memorialisation in the goal of challenging what is commonly understood as commemoration.

The transformative role of artistic expression in coming to terms with experiences of victimhood and trauma is reflected upon in David Fritz Goeppinger’s essayist writing and photographic capture of the historical trial against the perpetrators of the deadliest terrorist attacks in 21st century France. Survivor of the Paris attacks on 13th November 2015, David’s photography and writing traces the psychic transition he underwent over the eight months of judicial hearings in the Court of Justice in Paris. The habits and routines he established through sharing in writing his reflections of each day in Court and photographing victims from the intimate proximity of a shared experience gave back meaning and substance to his post-attack life. In addition, the trial did not only push the creative limits of his writing and photography, but also allowed him to grasp the contours of his traumatic experience and the enigma of his survival. David’s painful transition occurred both ways—through the restorative potential of judicial justice and the disruptive power of writing and photography in rethinking his perception of the terrorist event. The act of capturing the unfolding of the trial allowed him to claim ownership of his experience, rewrite the narrative of what he has been through, and eventually take a leave from victimhood.

The final section of this volume focusses on literature, creative responses to terror, and the anticipation of justice. The contributions, both academic and artistic, explore the role of art, and narration in the creation of memory after traumatic experiences. Harry Man’s piece reflects on the process of writing about tragic events of enormous significance for society and the responsibility towards victims and survivors. The terrorist attacks on 22nd July 2011 have been deeply felt in communities across Norway and their impact continues to reverberate in every corner of Norwegian society even 12 years later. Both authors of the series of elegies in Deretter (‘Thereafter’)—Harry Man and Endre Ruset found themselves compelled to address what has happened through literature. They have created a collage of lived experiences in a collection of poems, several of which appear throughout this volume. The literary reflection traces the struggle of writing about others’ loss and pain when one is an outsider to their experience, the risks of secondary trauma for the writer, the ethics of representation and the need to reach out to others and offer consolation to those who need it and privacy to those who continue living with the embodied knowledge of the events. It also evokes the ultimate wish to recentre the lives of the victims in a way which will engage the imagination and spark a contemplation and maybe even an inspiration for change. The poetic collages also become a tool to honour those whose lives have been lost by connecting their life to our memory and thus offering them a symbolic afterlife.

Ingvild Folkvord and Jean Lassègue’s chapter draws our attention to the inexhaustible potential of literature to ‘re-work’ judicial material and deepen the concepts of justice and injustice in the goal of broadening the borders of how we think about and imagine life after experiences of crisis and rupture. By stressing the role of literature as an integral part of the communal process of coming to terms with extreme experiences, the authors reject the conventional perception of art and literature as ‘supplements to the soul’ and instead argue that they have a key role in restoring the relationality, a sense of community and the ability to envision anew living together. The chapter’s exploration of three literary texts focusing on three different national contexts—Norway, France, and Germany, shows how judicial trials are not always a sufficient condition for justice and thus encourages us to broaden our understanding of the notion of justice—not as a mere judicial fact, but an experience where multiple voices can be heard.

The book concludes with Jose Ibarrola’s umbrella paintings, which offer an intimate memory of terror. As part of the series Memory and Umbrellas, these paintings allow Ibarrola to address his own memories of ETA terrorism. In Jose Ibarrola’s work, the umbrella functions as a metaphor through which he is able to speak about objects, images, remembrance, absence, emotions, metaphors, and tribute.