Abstract
Jones investigates recent moves to network memorials, museums, and institutes of memory dedicated to human rights abuses committed under left-wing dictatorships in Central and Eastern Europe. Focusing on memorial museums in Germany and Romania, the chapter considers how non-state elite actors are using these networks to negotiate a European memory of communism founded on models of totalitarianism and acting as a potential challenge to the position of the Holocaust as the locus of post-1945 European identity. Drawing on Esref Aksu’s conceptualization of “institutional memory” to demonstrate how such elites operate across borders, Jones shows how groupings beyond and within the boundaries of individual states interact in complex ways to negotiate new narratives about the past. She develops the concept of “collaborative memory” to capture the impact of non-state elite actors in the European public sphere, in which memories are shared, but differently interpreted both within and across borders, and where each national collective is integrated not only culturally, but also politically, with supra- and transnational institutions, traditions, and concerns.
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- 1.
Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–1992), 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).
- 2.
Etienne François and Hagen Schulze, eds., Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001); Martin Sabrow, ed., Erinnerungsorte der DDR (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2009).
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See for example, Aleida Assmann, “Europe: A Community of Memory?,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 40, no. 1 (2007): 11–25; Aleida Assmann, Auf dem Weg zu einer europäischen Gedächtniskultur (Vienna: Picus, 2012); Claus Leggewie, Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung: Ein Schlachtfeld wird besichtigt (München: Beck, 2011); Sharon Macdonald, Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2013).
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Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth, “Introduction: A European Memory?,” in A European Memory?: Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (New York, NY; Oxford: Berghahn, 2010), 1–20. 12.
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Müller, “A European Memory?,” 26–7.
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Assmann, Auf dem Weg zu einer europäischen Gedächtniskultur, 32. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from German and Romanian are my own.
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Assmann, Auf dem Weg zu einer europäischen Gedächtniskultur, 35.
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Assmann, Auf dem Weg zu einer europäischen Gedächtniskultur, 41; Leggewie, Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung, 23.
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See also Annabelle Littoz-Monnet, “The EU Politics of Remembrance: Can Europeans Remember Together?,” West European Politics 35, no. 5 (2012): 1182–1202; Sebastian M. Büttner and Anna Delius, “World Culture in European Memory Politics? New European Memory Agents Between Epistemic Framing and Political Agenda Setting,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 23, no. 3 (2015): 391–404; Laure Neumayer, “Integrating the Central European Past into a Common Narrative: The Mobilizations Around the ‘Crimes of Communism’ in the European Parliament,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 23, no. 3 (2015): 344–63.
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Eşref Aksu, “Global Collective Memory: Conceptual Difficulties of an Appealing Idea,” Global Society 23, no. 3 (2009): 317–32. 323.
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Gabriela Cristea and Simina Radu-Bucurenci, “Raising the Cross: Exorcising Romania’s Communist Past in Museums, Memorials and Monuments,” in Past for the Eyes: East European Representations of Communism in Cinema and Museums after 1989, ed. Oksana Sarkisova and Peter Apor (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), 275–305; Tismăneanu, “Democracy and Memory.”
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See “‘Romanian Nuremberg’ Trial for Communist Labour Camp Commander,” The Guardian, September 22, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/22/romanian-nuremberg-trial-communist-labour-camp-commander-alexandru-visinescu.
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Ciobanu, “Criminalising the Past and Reconstructing Collective Memory”; Mark, The Unfinished Revolution; Stan, Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Romania.
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Cristea and Radu-Bucurenci, “Raising the Cross,” 303.
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Mark, The Unfinished Revolution, 70.
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Stiftung Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, ed., “6. Tätigkeitsbericht (2011–2012),” n.d.
- 43.
According to the first four activity reports: 2000–2002 saw no prominent international visits; 2003–2004 saw three; 2005–2006 saw six international visits; and in 2007–2008 this number fell to two. However, in the 2009–2010 report, the memorial records a total of nine prominent visits from outside Germany, including the first visit from a foreign president, Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, the head of the Jingmei museum in Taipei, the head of the Iraq National Archive and Institute for Genocide Studies and a group of six Cuban dissidents. The author of the report adds that this is in addition to numerous foreign researchers and journalists.
- 44.
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- 47.
The handbook was published in 2013. See Sven Felix Kellerhoff, Aus der Geschichte lernen: Ein Handbuch zur Aufarbeitung von Diktaturen (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2013).
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Beattie, “Learning from the Germans?”
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Welsh, “Beyond the National.”
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Andrea Nüsse, “Von Hohenschönhausen nach Tunis: Experten für die SED-Diktatur berichten vom Erfahrungsaustausch in Tunesien,” Der Tagesspiegel, May 20, 2011, http://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/von-hohenschoenhausen-nach-tunis/4196040.html.
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Jones, S. (2017). Memory Competition or Memory Collaboration? Politics, Networks, and Social Actors in Memories of Dictatorship. In: Kraenzle, C., Mayr, M. (eds) The Changing Place of Europe in Global Memory Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39152-6_4
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