Abstract
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.
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Notes
“The Nobel Peace Prize 2012—Press Release,” Nobelprize.org, October 15, 2012, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2012/press .html (accessed January 2, 2013).
Adenauer had lived in hiding until he was arrested, together with his wife, in the crackdown raids that followed July 20, 1944. He was interned in Brauweiler near Cologne, one of the first concentration camps and later in a secret police (Gestapo) prison. Having suffered himself, Adenauer did not have much empathy for victims and felt entitled to a policy of forgetting and forgiving; Hermann Daners and Josef Wißkirchen, Was in Brauweiler geschah. Die NS-Zeit und ihre Folgen in der Rheinischen Provinzial-- Arbeitsanstalt (Pulheim: Verein für Geschichte, 2006), pp. 93–95.
Rainer Blasius, “Der gute Wille muss auch anerkannt werden,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 11, 2009, 60, p. L21 (my translations).
Official Journal of the European Union, January 27, 2005, http://www.eurlex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C:2005:253E:0037:0039:DE: PDF (accessed January 2, 2013). In the same year, Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, joined the initiative and declared January 27 an annual commemoration day for the victims of the Holocaust.
Jens Kroh, Transnationale Erinnerung. Der Holocaust im Fokus geschichtspoli-tischer Initiativen (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2008). In 2012 the ITF was renamed the “International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance” (IHRA) and the websites were changed accordingly. The new logo was devised by Daniel Liebeskind.
“Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust,” Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research, http://www.holocausttaskforce.org/about-the-itf/stockholm -declaration.html (accessed January 15, 2013).
Dan Diner, for instance, has opposed most emphatically such a comparison and has disqualified any such attempt as a priori ideologically warped. He suspects that such a comparison is not immune to the hidden agenda of proving that “Stalin’s crimes are more reprehensible than those of the Nazis”; Dan Diner, Kreisläufe. Nationalsozialismus und Gedächtnis (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1995), p. 53. See also Heidemarie Uhl, who still sees these two memories as incompatible: “Konkurrierende Erinnerungskulturen in Europa: Neue Grenzen zwischen ‘Ost’ und ‘West’?” in Kulturen der Differenz — Transformationsprozesse in Zentraleuropa nach 1989. Transdisziplinäre Perspektiven, ed. by Heinz Fassmann, Wolfgang Müller-Funk, and Heidemarie Uhl (Göttingen: Vienna University Press, 2009), pp. 165–77; and Stefan Troebst, “Jalta versus Stalingrad, GULag versus Holocaust. Konfligierende Erinnerungskulturen im größeren Europa,” Berliner Journal für Soziologie, 15.3 (2005), 381–400.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Declaration_on_European_Con-science_and_Communism (accessed February 14, 2012).
Uhl, “Konkurrierende Erinnerungskulturen in Europa,” p. 172–73; and Meike Wulf, “Changing Memory Regimes in a New Europe,” East European Memory Studies, 7 (November 2011), 15–20. Wulf focuses on the interaction of political and social memory in the Baltic States and Poland after 1989/91. She describes these East European memories as a combination of a martyrological “narrative of collective suffering” and a heroic “narrative of collective resistance.” These highly ideologized narratives make it difficult to acknowledge acts of collaboration and to include also the victims of these collaborations into the national memory.
Jie-Hyun Lim introduced in this context the term “victimhood nationalism”; see his essay “Victimhood Nationalism in Contested Memories: National Mourning and Global Accountability,” in Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, ed. by Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 138–62.
Zuzanna Bogumił, “Cross or Stone? Gulag Commemoration Practices on the Territory of the former Soviet Camps” (unpublished manuscript, 2011). See also Zuzanna Bogumił, “Crosses and Stones: Symbols of Solovki in the Construction of Memory of the GULAG,” trans. Simon Lewis, http://www.memoryatwar.org/pdf/Bogumil-NZ-71-eng.pdf (accessed January 15, 2013); Russian original published in Neprikosnovennyi zapas 3 (2010) and available at http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2010/3/zu3.html. The most important monument of this memory is the Solovetsky stone that was transferred from the site of an infamous camp on the Solovetsky Islands in northern Russia to Moscow to commemorate the inmates of the forced labor camps; see Ekaterina Makhotina, “Vergangenheitsdiskurse zur Sowjetzeit in Russland und Litauen nach 1989,” in Erinnerung und Gesellschaft. Formen der Aufarbeitung von Diktaturen in Europa, ed. by Wolfgang R. Assmann and Abrecht Graf von Kalnein (Berlin: Metropol, 2011), pp. 195–222 (p. 208). While there are over one thousand monuments and memorial plaques to the Gulag and terror victims across the former Soviet Union, the vast majority of these were erected at the initiative of individuals or civil society groups, or local and (more rarely) regional authorities; the Katyn memorial is exceptional in holding federal status; see further Alexander Etkind, Rory Finnin, Uilleam Blacker, Julie Fedor, Simon Lewis, Maria Mälksoo, and Matilda Mroz, Remembering Katyn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), p. 115. Russia still lacks a national memorial to victims of Soviet repressions.
Janusz Reiter, “Geteilte Erinnerung in vereinten Europa,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 7, 2005.
Tony Judt, Geschichte Europas von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2006), p. 962.
Bernd Faulenbach, “Probleme des Umgangs mit der Vergangenheit im vereinten Deutschland. Zur Gegenwartsbedeutung der jüngsten Geschichte,” in Deutschland. Eine Nation — doppelte Geschichte. Materialien zum deutschen Selbstverständnis, ed. by Werner Weidenfeld (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1993), p. 190.
Heike Karge, “Practices and Politics of Second World War Remembrance. (Trans-)National Perspectives from Eastern and South-Eastern Europe,” in A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance, ed. by Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Strath (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2010), pp. 137–46 (p. 139).
Kevin M. F. Platt has interpreted the dropping of Stalin’s crimes from the Russian public agenda not as an act of “forced forgetfulness” but as “a disavowal of trauma.” He further describes the compliance of Russians in averting “their eyes from the known violence and injustice of Russian his-tory” as “a mass ritual.” According to Platt, the Russian population shares a “chosen trauma” “that helps to cement together a community of sufferers, victims, and witnesses of that violence.” Mass disavowal thus deepens a sense of national selfhood through collective suffering “in a ritual act of self-subjugation to the collectivity”; Kevin M. F. Platt, “Trauma and Social Discipline: Text, Subject, Memory and Forgetting” (unpublished manuscript, 2011). The frame of this interpretation is a collectivism that has no place for individual suffering, mourning and a sense of retrospective justice.
Till Spanke and Cornelius Schwärzler, “The Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center,” East European Memory Studies 5 (May 2011), 14, http://www.memoryatwar.org/enewsletter-may-2011.pdf (accessed January 31, 2013).
“Russia to Build Holocaust Museum; Israel to Erect Memorial to Soviet Army,” World Jewish Congress, February 17, 2010, http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/8985/russia_to_build_holocaust_museum_israel _to_erect_memorial_to_soviet_army (accessed February 20, 2012).
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© 2013 Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind, and Julie Fedor
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Assmann, A. (2013). Europe’s Divided Memory. In: Blacker, U., Etkind, A., Fedor, J. (eds) Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137322067_2
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