Postnational memory: Narrating the Holocaust and the Nakba

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-110
Author(s):  
Nadim Khoury
Keyword(s):  
Three Dimensions ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Way

At the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rages a struggle between two foundational tragedies: the Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba. The contending ways in which both events are commemorated is a known feature of the conflict. Less known are marginal attempts to jointly deliberate on them. This article draws on such attempts to theorize a postnational conception of memory. Deliberating on the Holocaust and the Nakba, it argues, challenges the way nationalism structures ‘our’ and ‘their’ relationship to the past. While nationalism seeks the congruence of memory and territory, postnationalism challenges this congruence. Doing so entails (i) extending the communicative bounds of memory beyond national members, (ii) disrupting the territorialization of memory along national lines, and (iii) critically revising national narratives in light of a cosmopolitan memory. The article explores these three dimensions and offers a typology that differentiates the way nationalism and postnationalism mediate our relationship to the past.

Populism and Memory: Legislation of the Past in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia

2021 ◽  
pp. 088832542095080
Author(s):  
Nikolay Koposov
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Democratic Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Initial Stage ◽  
The Holocaust

This article belongs to the special cluster “Here to Stay: The Politics of History in Eastern Europe”, guest-edited by Félix Krawatzek & George Soroka. The rise of historical memory, which began in the 1970s and 1980s, has made the past an increasingly important soft-power resource. At its initial stage, the rise of memory contributed to the decay of self-congratulatory national narratives and to the formation of a “cosmopolitan” memory centered on the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity and informed by the notion of state repentance for the wrongdoings of the past. Laws criminalizing the denial of these crimes, which were adopted in “old” continental democracies in the 1980s and 1990s, were a characteristic expression of this democratic culture of memory. However, with the rise of national populism and the formation of the authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and Poland in the 2000s and 2010s, the politics of memory has taken a significantly different turn. National populists are remarkably persistent in whitewashing their countries’ history and using it to promote nationalist mobilization. This process has manifested itself in the formation of new types of memory laws, which shift the blame for historical injustices to other countries (the 1998 Polish, the 2000 Czech, the 2010 Lithuanian, the June 2010 Hungarian, and the 2014 Latvian statutes) and, in some cases, openly protect the memory of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity (the 2005 Turkish, the 2014 Russian, the 2015 Ukrainian, the 2006 and the 2018 Polish enactments). The article examines Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian legislation regarding the past that demonstrates the current linkage between populism and memory.

Agreeing to Disagree on the Legacies of Recent History

2009 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siobhan Kattago
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Agreeing To Disagree ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Communist Countries ◽  
Historical Difference

Since 1989, social change in Europe has moved between two stories. The first being a politics of memory emphasizing the specificity of culture in national narratives, and the other extolling the virtues of the Enlightenment heritage of reason and humanity. While the Holocaust forms a central part of West European collective memory, national victimhood of former Communist countries tends to occlude the centrality of the Holocaust. Highlighting examples from the Estonian experience, this article asks whether attempts to find one single European memory of trauma ignore the complexity of history and are thus potentially disrespectful to those who suffered under both Communism and National Socialism. Pluralism in the sense of Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin is presented as a way in which to move beyond the settling of scores in the past and towards a respectful recognition and acknowledgement of historical difference.

The Public Secret

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Eaglestone
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Way

The knowledge of the murder of the European Jews was a public secret in the Third Reich. What is a ‘public secret’? How does it shape or reshape a society? The answers to these questions are key to understanding the Holocaust and other genocides. However, the public secret is elusive because of its nature: when it is at its most powerful, it cannot be explicitly discussed; when it no longer holds such power, people deny their knowledge of it and complicity in its concealment. Both the ‘subjective experience’ of the public secret and its wider meaning are beyond the limits of the discipline of history and are better elucidated obliquely through a work of fiction: in this case Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a novel which reflects on the past in the way historians cannot. Significantly, the public secret and the consequences of complicity are important concepts for understanding the post-Holocaust world.

Memory between Locality and Mobility: Diaspora, Holocaust and Exile as Reflected in Contemporary German-Jewish Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
Jessica Ortner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Migratory Movements

Memory is not only a biological capability but also a social practice of constructing the past, which is carried out by social communities (e.g., the nation state, the family, and the church). Since the 1980s, memory studies has intertwined the concept of cultural memory with national narratives of the past that are to legitimize the connection between state, territory, and people. In the present time of growing migratory movements, memory studies has abandoned this “methodological nationalism” and turned its attention towards dynamic constructions of cultural memory. Indeed, memories cross national and cultural borderlines in various ways. The cultural memory of the Jewish people, ever since its beginning, has been defined by mobility. As the exile and forty years of wandering in the wilderness preceded the Conquest of Canaan and the building of the temple, the cultural memory of the Jewish people has always been based on the principle of extraterritoriality. The caesura of the Holocaust altered this ancient form of mobility into a superimposed rediasporization of the assimilated Jews that turned the eternal longing for Jerusalem into a secularized longing for the fatherland. This article presents examples of German-Jewish literature that is concerned with the intersection between the original diaspora memory, rediasporization and longing for a return to the fatherland. I will analyze literary writings by Barbara Honigmann and Vladimir Verlib that in a paradigmatic manner navigate between memory of the Holocaust, exile and the mythological past of Judaism, and negotiate the question of belonging to diverse territorial and mobile mnemonic communities.

The Memory of Europe’s Age of Catastrophe, 1914–2014

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Mercer
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Cultural Struggle ◽  
Nazi Past ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

The enormous death toll of the twentieth-century world wars created a cultural struggle over their meaning. States, institutions, and individuals developed conflicting memories, which shifted with the political trends of the post-war eras. After the First World War nationalist narratives promoted by states did not automatically win unanimous adherence, but the apparently apolitical language of loss and mourning was most successful where the war was least controversial or where national narratives were unavailable. While memory of the Second World War and the Holocaust has often been discussed in terms of forgetting, there was no amnesia but rather a selective appropriation of the past. Myths of victimhood and resistance proved popular across Europe and persisted despite periodic engagements with the past. Germany’s acknowledgement of the Nazi past is the most thorough, while most Europeans states now more easily remember the Second World War than their colonial heritage.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Hannah Pollin-Galay
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Cultural Translation ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Legacy ◽  
Geographic Context ◽  
Empirical Information ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Way

The Introduction opens two interlocking debates: The first relates to the purpose and study of Holocaust testimony. Scholars have debated whether we should seek psychic, expressive truths from victim testimony or reconstructive, historical ones. Both of these approaches have overlooked the global, cultural translation aspects of recent testimony projects. The specific language, political, and geographic context of the witness (her ecology, or oikos) shapes the way she sees her own psyche as well as how she pieces together empirical information about the past. A comparative reading of recent testimonies, all narrating similar events, can bring the significance of language and place into view. Staging this comparison, investigating points of contrast between testimonies from three different ecologies, leads us time and again to question the effect of the Holocaust on Jewish culture—the second debate in which the book intervenes. Each contemporary ecology gives witnesses different tools for thinking about what makes the Holocaust a catastrophe—in the sense of an event that not only annihilated human life but also destroyed paradigms of knowledge, values, and identifications. The introduction also outlines why Lithuanian Jewry and its Yiddish cultural legacy make especially rich grounds for this explanation.

Between Globalization and Particularization of Memories: Screen Images of the Holocaust in Germany and Poland

2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 83-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna K. Stimmel
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
World War ◽  
Visual Material ◽  
Personal Connection ◽  
The Past ◽  
Film Directors ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Way

With the increasing medialization of cultural memory regardingWorld War II and the Holocaust, cinematic texts become significantcomponents of our remembrance. Not only videotaped witness testimoniesbut also documentaries and fictional films make up the growingbody of visual material that tells of the wartime past and the waywe remember it. Today, the great majority of the filmmakers depictingthe Holocaust on screen—as well as their audiences—belong tothe so-called second and third generations. Born too late to have witnessedthe murder of Europe’s Jews, these film directors nonethelessdeclare a very strong personal connection to the past they neverknew. Their renditions of this past is, as Marianne Hirsch argues,driven by the “postmemory,” a type of memory in which the connectionto its object or source is mediated not through recollectionbut rather through imagination and creation.

Methodological and Substantive Remarks on Myth, Memory and History in the Construction of a European Community

2005 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bo Stråth
Keyword(s):  
Critical Approach ◽  
The Past ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
One Step ◽  
Critical Scrutiny ◽  
Hayden White ◽  
Narrative Framework ◽  
The Way

Over the last decades, a shift has occurred in the methodology of academic historiography, from an earlier focus on the quality of the sources towards the narrative framework of the history. The point in the new approach is that the sources are interpreted and put together into a narration. In the earlier approach, there was a kind of myopic source criticism, which stopped at the sources and never really questioned the way in which they were put together into a narration. The way in which this composition is made is as biased as the sources on which the narration is based. For this reason, critical scrutiny must move one step forward, instead of halting at the sources. The path-breaking Metahistory by Hayden White in 1973 demonstrated, in a provocative way, the bias in narrative structures. He moved the focus from the sources as such, towards the manner in which they were employed. When the book was published, it was generally rejected and marginalized by the historians’ craft. Today, it is no exaggeration to say that, even if it is not generally recognized, at least it is widely accepted. Metahistory alluded, of course, to metaphysics. White's conclusion was that history is basically ideology. History is not the past per se, nor, as Ranke argued, is it wie es eigentlich gewesen, but a reflection on the past from the present. This methodological shift does not deny the continued importance of a critical approach to the sources and does not reject the existence of events and facts. Methodological rules of how to evaluate sources critically are still valid. The events and the facts based on the events can be documented. No serious historian founding his or her work on sources would deny the fact that, for instance, the Holocaust really did occur.

scholarly journals Padres no Brasil: Ontem, hoje, amanhã

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (286) ◽  
pp. 308
Author(s):  
Antonio Alves de Melo
Keyword(s):  
Decisive Role ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Epochal Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
New Phase ◽  
Pastoral Practice ◽  
The Way

A história da Igreja no Brasil conhece três fases: o catolicismo luso-brasileiro, o catolicismo romanizado e o catolicismo renovado. Atualmente, se delineia uma quarta fase ainda não claramente designada. Em cada uma dessas fases, os padres tiveram uma atuação determinante segundo um modo característico no estilo de vida e na atuação pastoral. A fase em que agora nos encontramos, na medida em que vai se configurando, abre caminho para um estilo de presbítero em consonância com ela. Um estilo que engloba a forma de vida, a prática pastoral e a espiritualidade entendidas como três dimensões de uma única realidade. Essa busca de novos caminhos se dá não somente na abertura ao novo, no interior de um movimento de mudança epocal, mas também à luz do testemunho de presbíteros que, no passado, exerceram o ministério segundo o mais autêntico espírito apostólico, embora limitados por condicionamentos pessoais, sociais, culturais e eclesiais.Abstract: The history of the Church in Brazil can be said to have three phases: Luso-Brazilian Catholicism, Romanized Catholicism and Renewed Catholicism. At present there are discussions about a possible fourth phase, but its characteristics are yet to be established. In each of these phases, the priests had a decisive role in terms of a characteristic lifestyle and pastoral activity. The phase in which we now find ourselves, as it gradually takes shape paves the way for a new style of priests more suited to this new phase. A style that embodies the way of life, the pastoral practice and the spirituality, all understood as three dimensions of one reality. This search for new paths occurs not only as an opening towards the new, within a movement of epochal change, but also in the light of the testimony of elders who in the past exercised the Ministry according to the most authentic apostolic spirit, even if limited by personal, social, cultural and ecclesial constraints.

scholarly journals A Portrait of the Rabbi as a Young Man: Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung’s Memoir of His Escape from Europe to Canada

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Holocaust Survivor ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Way

In November 1944, Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung published a memoir of his escape from Nazi-held Europe entitled Fun Natsishen Yomertol: Zikhroynes fun a Polit [From the Nazi Vale of Tears: Memoirs of a Refugee]. This book is remarkable from several important perspectives. It is one of the earliest examples of Holocaust survivor memoirs, written and published while the systematic destruction of European Jewry was ongoing. It thus enables us to see the way the Holocaust was approached before the pattern of survivor memoirs was fully developed. It is also one of the rare examples of a twentieth-century Orthodox rabbinical autobiography. From an examination of his memoir, Rabbi Hirschprung obviously saw his narrative as a continuation of the chronicles of massacres and other disasters befalling Jewish communities in the past. This book enables us to perceive the ways in which a young Orthodox rabbi reacted to some of the most important moral, intellectual, and political challenges facing Jews in the twentieth century and how he attempted to relate them to previous trials and persecutions of the Jewish people.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document