In search of lost time: Memory politics in Estonia, 1991-2011

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 651-674 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marek Tamm
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Memory Politics ◽  
General Characterization ◽  
Internal Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
Lost Time ◽  
Political Unions

This article analyzes memory politics during the first 20 years (1991-2011) of the newly independent Estonia. Memory politics is understood as a politics endeavoring to shape the society's collective memory and establish notions of what is and is not to be remembered of the past, employing to this end both legislative means and practical measures. The paper presents one possible scheme for analyzing Estonian memory politics and limits its treatment in two important ways. Firstly, the focus is on national memory politics, that is the decisions of the parliament, government, and president oriented toward shaping collective memory. And second, only internal memory politics is discussed; that is, bi- or multilateral memory-political relations with other states or political unions are not examined separately. The analysis is built on four interrelated dimensions of memory politics, which have played the most important roles in Estonia: the legal, institutional, commemorative, and monumental dimensions. Also, a general characterization and temporal articulation of memory politics in newly independent Estonia is proposed.

Collective Memory

Sociology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Simko
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Emile Durkheim ◽  
State Legitimacy ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Memory ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Borders ◽  
Monuments And Memorials ◽  
The Relationship

Collective memory encompasses both the shared frameworks that shape and filter ostensibly “individual” or “personal” memories and representations of the past sui generis, including official texts, commemorative ceremonies, and physical symbols such as monuments and memorials. Sociological work on collective memory traces its origins to Émile Durkheim and his student, Maurice Halbwachs. In the United States, the contemporary sociology of memory coalesced in the 1980s and 1990s, after Barry Schwartz brought renewed attention to Durkheim’s focus on commemoration as well as Halbwachs’s interest in how the past is reconstructed in the present, in the service of present needs, interests, and desires. Though this line of research initially emphasized heroic pasts—particularly national commemorations that bolstered state legitimacy with reference to triumphant episodes—scholars quickly began to address the ways that collectivities grapple with “difficult pasts,” or episodes that evoke shame, regret, and/or dissensus, and that threaten to “spoil” national identity. What is the relationship between memory and forgetting, and related concepts such as silence and denial? Can the increasingly pervasive language of “trauma” help us understand the current preoccupation with difficult pasts in both scholarly literature and public culture? More recently, scholars have critiqued the field’s overwhelming focus on national memory from two angles. First, studies of micro-level memories have revived Halbwachs’s initial interest in the social frameworks that structure (seemingly) individual memories. Second, globalization facilitates connectedness and identification beyond and/or outside of national frames of reference, and thus scholars have pointed to the emergence of “cosmopolitan” memories that create community and solidarity beyond and outside formal political borders.

The transnational mythscape of the Second World War

2019 ◽  
pp. 175069801986315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoav Galai
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Memory Politics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Multi Level ◽  
Second World ◽  
Made In

Since the early 2000s, the study of European Memory politics has proliferated, but has come to mean different things. It focuses either on the emergence of Holocaust remembrance as a shared cultural memory, disputes within European Union institutions over what the European collective memory should be, or diplomatic standoffs between Russia and its former satellites. I argue that while such complex multi-level memory politics defy an overarching theoretical categorisation, they can be understood through a comprehensive approach, which is achieved by considering the different narratives of the past to be interpretations of a common historical occurrence. This article argues that European Memory Politics as a whole occurs within a transnational mythscape of the Second World War, in which international actors promote their interpretations as simplified myths while warding off competing myths that negatively depict their mythical selves. An emergent narrative alliance between Russia and Israel, made in response to European memory politics, is used to illustrate the utility of the transnational mythscape framework for understanding memory politics beyond the national sphere.

scholarly journals AVALA: FROM A SYMBOLIC TOPOS OF SERBIA TO THE MONUMENT OF YUGOSLAVIA

2018 ◽  
pp. 073
Author(s):  
Tijana Borić
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Symbolic Meaning ◽  
Cultural Model ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Monument ◽  
Current Period ◽  
National Tradition ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Ideological Identity ◽  
Natural Characteristics

The purpose of this paper is to reveal how, over the time, Avala was put on the map, and became an influential symbolic topos of Serbian national memory. Furthermore, having fostered the evocation of national tradition related to this place, using the natural characteristics of this particular area and by the means of updating its exceptional historical and memorial capacity, Avala gained a highly committed and symbolic meaning in the mental geography of our nation. Later on, this potential was recognized as a tempting opportunity to create a monument with an overwhelming capacity for imposing a newly created Yugoslav cultural model by means of a highly needed transforming and re-designing the ideological identity of Avala. Raising a prominent national monument, the memorial complex to the Unknown Hero on Avala, near Belgrade, is a paradigm of obliteration, redefinition and alteration of tradition and collective memory. In the case of Avala we can clearly follow the process of exploitation and revision of the strategically selected image of the past and its adaptation to the needs of the current period.

scholarly journals National Trauma on a Foreign Stage

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 26-39
Author(s):  
Pirkko Koski
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Trauma ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Traumatic History ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Cold War

This article surveys the performance of the play Departure (Lähtö in Finnish, Minek in Estonian) by Estonian Rein Saluri at the Finnish National Theatre in 1988 during the last few years of the Cold War. The play depicts the deportation of an Estonian family to Siberia in the fall of 1946. The Finnish National Theatre invited Estonian Mati Unt to act as the director. The actors were Finnish, as were the audience, apart from a few individual spectators and during a short visit when Departure was performed in Estonia. The aim is to analyze how a theatre performance connected with an aspect of Estonian traumatic history and national memory was understood and felt by a country with a different historical and contemporary background. The performances of Departure show the ways in which repetition, memory, and re-appearance work and function in the theatre. Departure as theatre had power over history in its ability to reshape the image of the past through physical presence and affection. It increased in Finland the knowledge of and empathy toward Estonia and the presence of Estonian culture before the great political upheavals. However, the Finnish audience constructed the meanings of the play without the interaction between the collective memory, that is, the Finnish “memory” was historical and theatrical. Concerning national collective memory, it was not possible to cross the border.

scholarly journals Different Memories, Different Worlds

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
James V. Wertsch
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Narrative Approach ◽  
World War ◽  
National Community ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Strong Disagreement ◽  
American Memory

The chapter begins with an illustration of a “mnemonic standoff” between the author and Vitya, a Soviet friend from the 1970s, over the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The two are stunned that they had such different accounts of “what really happened,” and this leads to three general questions: 1. How is it that there can be such strong disagreement between entire national communities about the past? 2. Why were Vitya and I so certain that our accounts of the events in 1945 were true? 3. What deeper, more general commitments of a national community led to the tenacity with which we held our views? The remaining sections of the chapter address why national memory, as opposed to other forms of collective memory, deserves special attention, what a “narrative approach” to national memory is, and how disciplinary collaboration is required to deal with such questions. It then turns to three illustrations that help clarify the conceptual claims. The first involves American and Russian national memory of World War II, the second focuses on differences between Chinese and American memory of the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, and the third examines how Russian national memory is used as a lens for interpreting contemporary events in Russia and Georgia. Final sections of the chapter introduce the notion of narratives as “equipment for living” in national memory.

scholarly journals Las memorias nacionales: conflictos y límites / National Memories: Conflicts and Limitations

2017 ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Francisco Erice Sebares
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Identidad Nacional ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Memory

This article examines the relevance of the concept of national memory and its limits, defending the convenience of using an idea of collective memory which includes nations, these understood as specific communities of memory. It also analyses some key mechanisms in the diffusion by the States of a narrative on the past that is linked to the construction of national identity and legitimation of politics in the present. This diffusion is regarded as in a usually conflictive interaction with memories of groups or smaller collectives, as well as with other national communities.Key WordsCollective memory, communities of memory, national memory, teaching of history, commemorations, national identityResumenEste artículo se interroga sobre la pertinencia del concepto de memoria nacional y los límites de su aplicación, y defiende la utilidad de una noción de memoria colectiva extensible a las naciones entendidas como especificas comunidades de memoria. También analiza a algunos mecanismos claves en la difusión, desde los Estados, de un relato sobre el pasado ligado a la construcción de la identidad nacional y la legitimación de las políticas del presente. La difusión de la memoria nacional se entiende en interacción, generalmente conflictiva, con las memorias de grupos y entidades menores, o con las de otras comunidades nacionales.Palabras claveMemoria colectiva, comunidades de memoria, memoria nacional, enseñanza de la historia, conmemoraciones, identidad nacional. 

Memory Wars in the ‘New Europe’

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Stone
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Social Group ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
World War ◽  
Memory Politics ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Cold War

Seventy years after the start of World War II, revisionists across Europe are arguing that Joseph Stalin was as much to blame for starting the war as was Adolf Hitler. As Adam Krzeminski rightly says, World War II is still being fought. This article sees ‘collective memory’ as a set of representations of the past that are constructed by a given social group (be it a nation, a family, a religious community, or other) through a process of invention, appropriation, and selection, and which have bearings on relationships of power within society. ‘Memory’ here refers not only to the academic study of memory but primarily to the various manifestations of ‘memory politics’ that have characterised Europe since the end of the Cold War. It is worth situating these European memory wars in a broader context, since they occur worldwide, especially in societies scarred by civil war, genocide, and authoritarianism, such as post-apartheid South Africa, Rwanda, Guatemala, and Argentina.

Irish Republican Memory as Counter-Memory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Hearty
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Memory Function ◽  
Memory Politics ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Theoretical Literature ◽  
The North ◽  
Post Conflict

This chapter critically examines the inter-communal contestation over policing memory. It contextualises this dimension to memory contestation in contemporary Northern Ireland by drawing on theoretical literature on the use of memory in deeply divided societies and on memory politics in transitioning societies. In doing so it establishes how the collective memory of violence, suffering and victimhood can become ‘war by other means’ in post-conflict societies trying to ‘deal with the past’. This chapter uses the Irish republican policing narrative to critique Unionist, state and RUC narratives of policing that have little resonance with the lived on the ground reality in republican communities, thus developing a fuller understanding of the counter-memory function that Irish republican policing memory performs in current debates on the policing legacy in the North of Ireland.

Memory politics in the future tense: Exceptionalism, race, and insurrection in America

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 1272-1284
Author(s):  
Piotr M Szpunar
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Future Tense ◽  
Memory Politics ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
To Come

The grounding myth of American collective memory is built on the idea of America as a promise, what it shall be. Crises place futures in doubt. Against these two considerations, this article examines how the future can be used to shape the past. In the American context, the future as a general promise is invoked in times of crisis to reassure a nation by way of laundering difficult pasts so as to fit a narrative of progress in spite of the continued presence and recursive nature of these pasts. In the immediate wake of the 2021 Capitol Insurrection, another crisis (itself a harbinger of crises to come), the 2000 Bush v Gore decision, was rewritten as an exemplar of American exceptionalism rather than a stain on it. Beyond displaying the intricate relationship between future and past in collective memory, the case highlights how this operation only works to further neglect the racism and unresolved pasts entrenched in the myth of exceptionalism that motivated the Capitol Riot.

Family, Memory, and Identity: An Introduction

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-12
Author(s):  
Katie Barclay ◽  
Nina Javette Koefoed
Keyword(s):  
Family History ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
National Memory ◽  
A Site

This article introduces a special issue on “family, memory, and identity.” Beginning with a survey of previous research in this area, especially exploring family as a site for collective memory, and the ways that family memory work shapes national histories, it introduces the contribution made by this special issue to our understanding of how family memory and national memory intertwine in the production of individual identity. Highlighting the key findings of the special issue, it particularly notes how family history research has the potential to challenge and reform national memory, and in doing so allows for rich and complex rethinkings of the past for both historians and members of the public.

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