Museums, emotion and memory culture: the politics of the past in Turkey

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Demet Gülçiçek
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
Emotion And Memory

Pragmatism and Memorialization

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-139
Author(s):  
Helen J. Whatmore-Thomson
Keyword(s):  
Local Identity ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
The Past ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
New Institutions

After the internment camps closed, the KZs were used in further pragmatic capacities. Chapter 3 reviews how the refunctionalization of the KZs at Vught and Neuengamme displaced the connotations of Nazi history by inscribing new narratives onto the local landscape, and how the new institutions gave the sites more prevalent associations with the present than with the past. The chapter also assesses the ways in which memory culture began to develop at the three sites, with or without the presence of an official (national) KZ monument. It evaluates local contributions to rites and rituals, the occasions when the KZ site was used as the stage for alternative forms of commemoration, and the practical and administrative implications of hosting a KZ monument on local territory. It closes by analysing how KZ memory was not limited to the KZ site (in former occupied Europe) and assesses other contexts in which KZ memory affected local identity and self-understanding.

scholarly journals The Place of Past Events in International Information Wars

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-163
Author(s):  
Alvydas Nikžentaitis
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
Economic Potential ◽  
The Past ◽  
Policy Tool ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
Grand Duchy Of Lithuania ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Global Identities ◽  
Global Systems ◽  
Grand Duchy

This article presents an analysis of the role memory culture plays in information wars. Based on the examples of Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Belarus, it finds that the phenomenon of using the past in information wars can be explained as a fighting measure to entrench the authority of a given country in the eyes of the global community. This requirement emerged among countries in this region following the collapse of the old global systems and with the creation of new political blocs. Associations have been noticed between information wars that exploit the past and the growth of a country’s economic potential. For this reason, this foreign policy tool has not been used to the same degree in different countries in the region, nor did it start being used at the same time. Almost all the countries in the region started to massively exploit the past as a means of soft power only in the 21st century. This tool is especially significant in Poland and Russia, being used less often in Lithuania and Ukraine, and hardly at all in Belarus. The storylines of the past being used in information wars can be divided into two categories: Global identities, whose symbols have become Holocaust and Gulag figures; and symbols associated with the memory cultures and identities of separate societies, such as the idea of Slavic unity (in Russian-Ukrainian relations) or the past of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (in Lithuanian-Belarusian relations). The author predicts that the use of the past in information wars is set to intensify in the future, and as such, the teaching of expert skills is necessary to address this; at present, these skills are lacking in countries in the region.

American Memory, Culture Wars, and the Challenge of Presenting Science and Technology in a National Museum

2007 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROGER D. LAUNIUS
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Smithsonian Institution ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Historic Sites ◽  
The Past ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Memory

Abstract There is no question that the American public has an unabashed appetite for history. This is demonstrated in numerous ways from bestsellers by popular historians to tourism at historic sites and museums to the popularity of films and other media depicting versions of the past. Although historians might think that the discourse presented in most of these forums is simplistic and stilted, little doubt exists that it is passionate. This discussion explores a few of the issues affecting the public's deep fascination with the past, especially in the context of the history of science and technology, and the presentation of these issues in the Smithsonian Institution. These thoughts are tentative and speculative, but, I hope, stimulating and worthy of further consideration.

scholarly journals Can Counter Histories Disturb the Present? Repohistory’s Street Signs Projects, 1992–1999

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-61
Author(s):  
Mark Donnelly
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
The Public ◽  
Ernesto Laclau ◽  
The Past ◽  
Street Sign ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Historical Past

SummaryThis paper argues that where appropriations or invocations of the past have contributed to projects of social and political change, they have usually done so with little or no recourse to the historical past. Instead, activists and campaigners have used various forms of vernacular past-talk to unsettle those temporary fixings of ‘common sense’ that limit thinking about current political and social problems. The example of such past-talk discussed here is the work of the art-activist collective REPOhistory, which sought between 1989 and 2000 to disrupt the symbolic patterning of New York’s official and homogenized public memory culture by making visible (‘repossessing’) overlooked and repressed episodes from the city’s past. In effect, they challenged the ways in which history’s dominance of past-talk within the public sphere was constituted by exclusions of subjects on grounds of gender, ethnicity and socio-economic status. REPOhistory fused politically-engaged art practices with Walter Benjamin’s belief in the redemptive potential of dialectical encounters between past and present. To assess the value of their art-as-activism projects (“artivism”), this article will situate REPOhistory’s practices within a frame of ideas provided by Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe. In a series of street sign installations that mixed visual art, urban activism, social history, and radical pedagogy, REPOhistory exemplified why the past is too important to be trusted to professional historians.

scholarly journals Monuments for deserters: A particularity of German memory culture

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 85-92
Author(s):  
Marco Dräger ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Armed Forces ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Retrospective Evaluation ◽  
German Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Visual Presence ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
Long Time

This paper examines the changing face of deserters in Germany and the gradual entry of monuments dedicated to them into German memorial culture. The multiple changes in the perception of the Wehrmacht (united armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935-1945) deserters during the last 70 years from cowards and traitors to (anti-)heroes to victims is the result of generational shifts and changed political contexts. Deserters from the Wehrmacht were a taboo subject for a long time. Over the course of the past thirty years, their story has been reappraised. It now has a visual presence in the form of counter monuments which challenge notions of traditional heroic military virtues and the place of resistance in modern political German culture. Counter-monuments, which had their origins in Germany in the 1980s, were always intended to be provocative, for they sought to disrupt a discourse that had become anachronistic, even unbearable in the eyes of many. Whether they will continue to have a presence, whether further deserter monuments will be built, or whether a future retrospective evaluation will show these monuments to have been an ephemeral and singular phenomenon, is still uncertain.

Memory Culture and Memory Policy in Germany – Prerequisites and Critique

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-191
Author(s):  
Daniela Decheva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
The Political ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
The Past ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Political Consensus ◽  
Protection Of Human Rights ◽  
Basic Prerequisite

The paper analyses the contemporary debate about memory culture and memory policy in Germany which are highly valid for Europe as well. They base on the political consensus that the memory of collective crimes committed in the past, especially of the Holocaust, and the honour to the victims, are a basic prerequisite for the protection of human rights. In the second part of the paper different critical views on the conception and practice of memory culture and memory policy in Germany are discussed.

Germany's Meta-narrative Memory Culture: Skeptical Narratives and Minotaurs

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 99-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Gudehus
Keyword(s):  
Age Groups ◽  
Group Discussions ◽  
National History ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
National Pride ◽  
The Past ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
Historical Truth ◽  
Country Specific

This article is based on the findings of an empirical study that is being conducted in Austria, Poland, and Germany. The material consists of a total of sixty group discussions with families, people of different age groups, as well as individuals dealing professionally with history and memory, including historians, teachers, politicians, journalists, displaced persons, and Jewish communities. Even if there are differences within every country, one clearly can observe dominant country-specific ways of speaking about the past. The German discourse could be described as a meta-narrative. Germans do not speak mainly about the past itself, but rather about how it should or should not be represented. The narrations are highly skeptical and unheroic. By contrast, the Polish discourse is almost devoid of skeptical narratives. Notions such as “historical truth,” “national pride” and “national history” were dominant in the discussions. The article concludes by noting that even though the modes of narrating the past are different in Germany and Poland, its function remains untouched: the past is always a resource for the construction of coherence and meaning.

Tid for anerkjennelse: Andre verdenskrig 75 år etter frigjøringen1

2021 ◽  
pp. 13-38
Author(s):  
Thomas V. H. Hagen
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
Typical Form ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
Professional History

In this article, the author argues that the need for recognition is a defining feature of the ways WW2 is commemorated and represented today, both in terms of professional history and popular narratives. WW2 as a source of recognition for groups and individuals is described as a process with three constitutive elements: diversity of narratives, a “moral turn”, and the personal acquisition of history. While representations of Norway and WW2 previously fit into an ideal-typical form based on how different stories related to the established – or later expanded and nuanced – basic narrative, the memory culture has turned and gained a more horizontally arranged structure from the 2000s. The characteristic of the 2020 anniversary seems to be a battle for attention and recognition. This is described as an agonistic memory culture. Also, WW2 as a source of recognition means that sensitive dimensions are activated. This has led to a change regarding the role of historians in society. Historians and other professional history-workers must not only master “real history”, but they must also be able to handle and contribute to meaningful processing of conflicts related to how the past is being understood, articulated, and negotiated.

scholarly journals On the Significance of the Concept of Memory Culture in Urban Studies (A Case Study of Vilnius)

2021 ◽  
pp. 460-475
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Kasner
Keyword(s):  
Urban Studies ◽  
Human Memory ◽  
Spatial Representations ◽  
Research Model ◽  
The Past ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
Generic Term ◽  
Urban Discourse ◽  
Alternative Discourses

This article aims to present the possibilities offered to urban studies by the concept of memory culture. The case study discussed is that of Vilnius in the 1990–2018 period. The definition put forward by C. Cornelißen, for whom memory culture is “the formal generic term for all possible forms of conscious human memory of historical events, personages and processes”, inspired the creation of a research model encompassing: the multilingual urban discourse of Vilnius (analysis of texts), interviews with representatives of the official and alternative discourses of Vilnius’ memory (analysis of oral histories), and spatial representations of the past (analysis of carriers of memory). This diversified corpus of sources will allow for as comprehensive as possible a description of the phenomenon that is present-day Vilnius’ memory culture; it will also extend the boundaries of research towards true interdisciplinarity.

scholarly journals A történelem politikai felhasználásáról

2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (3-4) ◽  
Author(s):  
László Levente Balogh
Keyword(s):  
Political Engagement ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Past Event ◽  
The Past ◽  
Academic Level ◽  
Public Representation ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Decisions

Within memory culture the relationship between politics and history has always been full of tension which is usually distinguished with the concept of history politics. The concept has become a standard point of orientation nearly everywhere, which, on its own, does not have outstanding political importance, however, as a dominant element it determines what we accept and reject from the past, thus history can never be completely politically neutral. In present political decisions we can always find direct or indirect references to or motivations for the past, which defy our political engagement and necessities. Therefore, in general, history politics explains the interaction through which past events gain meaning and significance in politics. History politics is the discursive space in which the interpretation of history is based upon the primer political usage of the present public representation of a communally relevant past event by different agents. Hence, it is not a coherent subject but a way of approaching or a perspective of questioning, which wishes to grasp the interactions between history and politics on a public and academic level.

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