Abstract
In his 2010 keynote lecture at the inaugural event of Cambridge University’s “Memory at War” research project, historian Jay Winter provided a succinct motto for a new direction in Memory Studies. Referencing discussions at “European Union meetings on the question of creating a European history,” Winter remarked that “it’s been evident that the turn toward the east is the key move in scholarly work. If you shift the centre of gravity of Europe from Paris to Warsaw, it looks different. And it has to be done.”1 Shifting the center of gravity of Memory Studies from Paris to Warsaw, Winter continued, would “allo[w] for a reconfiguration of European space’ and would ‘deal with the notion of a common European past” in an original and valuable way. I am sympathetic to Winter’s proposal to reconfigure European space and impressed by the Memory at War project’s efforts to develop, in their words, a “memory paradigm” in order to understand “cultural and political transformations in Eastern Europe”— especially in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia—as “differential responses to legacies and traumas of the imperial, Soviet, and national pasts.”2 Although Warsaw as a site of memory plays a large role in my chapter, my contribution to rethinking memory and theory in Eastern Europe entails approaching Warsaw from diverse, non-Polish perspectives.
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Notes
Jay Winter, “Reflections on Silence,” lecture given at the inaugural workshop of Memory at War, Cambridge University, June 2010. Partial video available at http://www.memoryatwar.org/resources (accessed January 22, 2012). All quotations from this lecture are based on my transcription. My emphasis of the key sentence.
I am quoting here from Memory at War’s homepage: http://www.memoryatwar.org/projects (accessed January 22, 2012).
Winter’s talk, “Human Rights and European Remembrance” is available on the Memory at War website and is dated July 4, 2011. There he writes: “The future of the European experiment is how well it handles the shift in its center of gravity to the east, towards Warsaw, and some day, inevitably, towards Istanbul.”
See Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 263–64 (p. 262); and Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 78.
Noeuds de Mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture. Special double issue of Yale French Studies, 118–19 (2010), ed. by Michael Rothberg, Debarati Sanyal, and Max Silverman.
See Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. by Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
For a more extensive version of this argument, see Michael Rothberg, “Remembering Back: Cultural Memory, Colonial Legacies, and Postcolonial Studies,” The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. by Graham Huggan (Oxford University Press, Forthcoming).
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. by Lewis Cosner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
See Les Lieux de Mémoire, ed. by Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92).
Aleida Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 97–107 (p. 106). See also Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und Politische Identität in Frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1992). In recent work, Aleida Assmann has, however, begun to turn to the question of colonialism; see “How History Takes Place,” in Memory, History, and Colonialism: Engaging with Pierre Nora in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts, ed. by Indra Sengupta (London: German Historical Institute, 2009), pp. 151–65.
The proximate field of trauma studies has, unlike the dominant tradition of Memory Studies, foregrounded dislocation in the relation between past and present. But it too has had more difficulty thinking structural (or systemic) forms of violence, as scholars engaged with Postcolonial Studies have argued in attempting to broaden the scope of trauma studies; see, especially, Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
See Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
Addressing this problem means reflecting on how acts of public memory encode different imaginaries of political subjectivity and justice. Building on work by Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, and Iris Marion Young, I suggest that at stake in articulations of multidirectional memory are conceptions of solidarity and justice that turn on matters of framing, commensurability, and affect—that is, on questions of political representation and jurisdiction as well as the epistemological grounds and emotional tonalities of recognition. See Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009); Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); and Iris Marion Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Public Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). I develop the argument in this section further in “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory,” Criticism, 53.4 (2011), 523–48.
Marguerite Duras, “Les deux ghettos,” France-Observateur, November 9, 1961, pp. 8–10.
Scholars are rapidly and definitively changing our understanding of the early years of Holocaust memory. This is one of the stakes of Multidirectional Memory, but for a full account of the US context, see Hasia Diner, We Remember With Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto,” Jewish Life (May 1952), pp. 14–5 (p. 15). Emphasis added.
Ibid., p. 14, emphasis added.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa Has Played in World History (New York: Viking, 1947), p. 23. This passage is often used as evidence for the argument that the Nazi genocide simply repeated colonial violence on a new set of European victims, but Du Bois came to a more nuanced view in “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto.”
For an extended discussion of the case of the American sociology professor, see my “From Gaza to Warsaw.”
Although the photo essay is not signed by Finkelstein, it can be found on his website: http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/deutschland-uber-alles/ (accessed December 10, 2012).
On the Warsaw Ghetto boy, see Richard Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of Photo (Aarhus University Press, 2004); Frédéric Rousseau, L’enfant juif de Varsovie: Histoire d’une photographie (Paris: Seuil, 2009); and Marianne Hirsch, “Nazi Photographs in Post-Holocaust Art” and “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy,” in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), pp. 3–23.
The Solidarity protests are mentioned in the important “biography” of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument in James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 156.
Alexander Etkind, “Post-Soviet Hauntology: Cultural Memory of the Soviet Terror,” Constellations, 16.1 (2009), 182–200 (p. 195).
Valentin Rauer, “Symbols in Action: Willy Brandt’s Kneefall at the Warsaw Memorial,” in Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed. by Jeffrey Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason Mast (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 257–82 (pp. 257–58).
In an interesting twist, Brandt’s gesture in front of the monument has itself been turned into a monument, a nice illustration of the circular relationship between memory’s hardware and software.
See http://www.jmberlin.de/heimatkunde/kuenstler/en/oeztuerk.php (accessed December 10, 2012).
The focus on childhood memories mediated by popular culture is a persistent theme in the Öztürks’ work; for instance, Rear Window (Story No. 6), a 2005 piece for the “Projekt Migration” exhibit in Cologne, reconstructs the living room of their great aunt in Istanbul where they used to spend a week each summer when visiting Turkey. With a title that references Hitchcock, the installation—according to the exhibition website—“does not reconstruct a room, but a childhood memory of Turkey, mediated by an American film”; see http://www.projektmigration.de/english/content /kuenstlerliste/oeztuerk.html (accessed December 10, 2012) as well as the artists’ MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/anny_und_sibel/blog (accessed December 10, 2012).
See Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall, “Opa war kein Nazi”: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2002).
Kien Nghi Ha, Ethnizität und Migration (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1999), p. 20. Cited from Astrid Messerschmidt, Weltbilder und Selbstbilder: Bildungsprozesse im Umgang mit Globalisierung, Migration und Zeitgeschichte (Frankfurt: Brandes & Apsel, 2009), p. 188. The key phrase reads: “Mit dieser geschichtlichen Singularität im Rücken zu leben.”
The Hitler figures in the various Madame Tussaud’s have been the source of ongoing controversy. In 2011, the London Madame Tussaud’s attracted negative publicity for allowing visitors to pose with the Hitler statue while making the Nazi salute; see Vanessa Allen and Kirsty Walker, “Madame Tussaud’s in Hitler Row as it Refuses to Stop Customers Doing Nazi Salute,” Daily Mail Online, August 19, 2011, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2028015/Madame-Tussauds-Hitler-row-refuses-stop -customers-doing-Nazi-salute.html (accessed October 24, 2011).
This is also an example of what Etkind would call “ghostware.”
A museum press release explains: “In addition to the research and communication of the history and culture of German speaking Jewry, the museum is planning a new area of focus—migration, integration, and cultural diversity in a multiethnic society”; available on the homepage of Studio Daniel Libeskind: http://daniel-libeskind.com/news/jewish -museum-berlin-celebrates-its-10th-anniversary (accessed May 8, 2012). In fact, the museum sought to address such themes even before the tenth-anniversary commemoration, as, for instance, with the recruiting of Turkish-German tour guides who, among other things, lead visits especially designed for groups of students with predominantly “Muslim” backgrounds. See also the interview with the museum’s Program Director, “Deutsche Geschichte aus der Minderheiten perspective: das Jüdische Museum in Berlin: Cilly Kugelmann im Gespräch mit Katja Sussner,” Multikultur 2.0: Wilkommen in Einwanderungsland Deutschland, ed. Susanne Stemmler (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2011), 285–91.
See, for instance, Nevim Çil’s study Topographie des Außenseiters: Türkische Generationen und der deutsch-deutsche Wiedervereinigungsprozess (Berlin and Tübingen: Verlag Hans Schiler, 2007); Can Candan’s film Duvarlar-Mauern--Walls (2000); Yadé Kara’s novel Selam Berlin (Zurich: Diogenes, 2003); and Hakan Savaş Mican’s play Die Schwäne vom Schlachthof (2009).
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© 2013 Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind, and Julie Fedor
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Rothberg, M. (2013). Between Paris and Warsaw: Multidirectional Memory, Ethics, and Historical Responsibility. 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_5
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