(A)symmetry of (Non-)memory

2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 766-784 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mateusz Magierowski
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Institutional Support ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Working Through ◽  
The Village ◽  
Second World ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
Local Leaders

During the Second World War, the village of Pawłokoma, nowadays located a dozen kilometres from the Polish–Ukrainian border, was an area of conflict between the two nations. It has been almost ten years since a ceremony was held commemorating the victims of the conflict. The ceremony was attended by the Polish and Ukrainian Presidents. Today, the village is a symbol of reconciliation between the two nations. This article analyzes the dynamics of local collective memory about the conflict, using the “working through” concept and works on social remembering as a theoretical framework. In my discussion of the causes and effects of the changes in dynamics, I use data from individual in-depth interviews with three categories of respondents: the inhabitants of Pawłokoma, local leaders, and experts. The aforementioned ceremony was an opportunity for working through the traumatic past in the local community of Pawłokoma. Although social consultations were held in Pawłokoma rather than a comprehensive working-through process, we should be talking about a symbolic substitute for this process. Despite the fact that material commemorations of the Polish and Ukrainian victims were erected, some factors essential to accomplishing the working-through process were missed, such as complex institutional support, the engagement of younger generations, and empathy towards the “Others” and their sufferings.

scholarly journals When All Could No Longer Be Equal in Death: A Local Community’s Struggle to Remember Its Fallen Soldiers in the Shadow of Serbia’s Civil War, 1955-1956

2010 ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Max Bergholz
Keyword(s):  
Local Community ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Local Practices ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
War Dead ◽  
Resistance Movement ◽  
The Village ◽  
Second World

In the spring of 1956, a plaque was hung in the Orthodox Church in the village of Brezna, located in western Serbia. On it were carved the names of local men who had been killed fighting during the Second World War. However, contrary to Communist policy, the list included not only those who had fought with the Communist-led Partisan resistance movement, but also those they had fought against, the Chetniks. Based on archival documents, the contemporary press, and interviews with local residents, this essay reconstructs the experience of the war years in this region, the factors that led to the hanging of the plaque, and the consequences faced by the village priest for its creation. The purpose is to examine how a local community, composed of combatants and their families from both sides of the wartime and postwar ideological divide, dealt with the mandate to simultaneously remember and forget the war dead. The main argument is that the incident in Brezna was a clash between traditional local practices of inclusive commemoration of the war dead and new exclusionary forms that emerged after the Second World War, due to the fratricidal nature of wartime violence, which were supported by Communist political elites as well as many local villagers.

scholarly journals Reassessing Japanese American Collective Memory Through Gene Oishi’s Internment Narratives

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolangelo Becce
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Model Minority ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
True Self ◽  
Direct Response ◽  
Model Minority Stereotype ◽  
Second World

Seven decades after Japanese Americans were interned during the Second World War, former journalist and internment survivor Gene Oishi published Fox Drum Bebop (2014). The protagonist, Hiroshi, had been introduced in Oishi’s previous memoir, In Search of Hiroshi (1988), as “quasi-fictional” and “neither American nor Japanese, but simply me”. Yet, in the same memoir, Oishi had also described his inability to write about ‘Hiroshi’, thus settling on ‘Gene’ as a main character and waiting 28 more years before publishing a book about his true self. A comparison between the two books highlights that In Search of Hiroshi was written as an attempt at telling a story that would implicitly support the ‘model minority’ myth by offering an account of the internment experience as a direct response to the sociopolitical constraints related to the request by Japanese Americans for redress from the U.S. government. On the other hand, the more recent Fox Drum Bebop represents a fictional retelling of Oishi’s memoir which reveals the limits of the collective memory of the internment as developed during the redress years by openly defying the ‘model minority’ stereotype while at the same time once more denouncing the injustices suffered by the Japanese American community during the war. This essay focuses on Oishi’s double narrative as a reassessment of the collective memory of the internment experience and of its lasting effects on Japanese Americans.

The Rise of the Middle Class in Iran before the Second World War

2019 ◽  
pp. 43-63
Author(s):  
H. E. Chehabi
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Consumption Patterns ◽  
World War ◽  
Village Level ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Modern Business ◽  
State Employment ◽  
The Village ◽  
Second World

This chapter traces the formation of a modern middle class that emerged as a result of Reza Shah's rigorous modernization policies in the 1920s and 1930s. The state expanded the educational system and bureaucracy, reaching down from the court to the village level. At the same time, it fostered lifestyles and consumption patterns modeled on those of Europe, which this new and increasingly secular middle class embraced, setting it apart from the rest of society. Given its reliance on state employment, this was not a bourgeoisie stricto sensu. This new middle class existed next to the traditional mercantile elite, which was centered on the bazaar and closely allied to the clergy. In the 1920s, however, many Iranian businessmen adopted a middle-class lifestyle, and, as a consequence, a modern business bourgeoisie gradually emerged that was to some extent a link between the traditional mercantile elite centered on the bazaar and the modern middle class.

Jedwabne and Wizna

2007 ◽  
pp. 244-270
Author(s):  
Marta Kurkowska
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
North Eastern ◽  
Second World

THE LOCALITIES explored herein, Jedwabne and Wizna, are both situated in the Łomża region of north-eastern Poland, close to each other. Only a few kilometres separate the two and yet what each can contribute and has contributed to local, regional, and national collective memory sets them oceans apart. The inspiration for this article was precisely this simple contrast. How is it that towns inhabited by persons of a similar culture evolve into symbols of radically different attitudes and actions taken by Poles during the Second World War?...

Evil

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Eaglestone
Keyword(s):  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Working Through ◽  
William Golding ◽  
Second World ◽  
Do So

Evil—the Nobel laureate William Golding wrote that anyone who lived through the years of the Second World War ‘without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head’. Why, then, do accounts by Holocaust perpetrators and fictions that focus on perpetrators and which appear to teach us about evil fail to do so, swerve from the issue, and seem shallow and unproductive? By working through Hannah Arendt’s changing view of evil, this chapter develops a way to answer this question and examine the significance of evil, first in relation to texts by perpetrators (often, like Speer with Sereny, by or with proxies) then in relation to fiction about perpetrators, concluding with the most significant work of Holocaust fiction in recent years, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.

The Neutral Zone at Pisarovina

2020 ◽  
pp. 196-306
Author(s):  
Gaj Trifković
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Neutral Zone ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
The Village ◽  
Second World

What transpired in Pisarovina, a small village located on the outskirts of Zagreb, is unique not only to Yugoslavia, but to the Second World War in general. Pisarovina was the location officially agreed by both the German occupation authorities and the Yugoslav Partisans to function as the center of the prisoner exchange cartel at the end of 1943. In order to facilitate this, the village and its immediate surroundings were declared a neutral zone, quite possibly the only such place in war-torn Europe. The system saved hundreds, if not thousands, of prisoners who faced an uncertain fate. Frequent contacts between the envoys provided both the Germans and the Partisans with a "back-channel" for talks on political issues and trade, as well as the opportunity to spy on each other.

Memory in Post-communist Europe: Controversies over Identity, Conflicts, and Nostalgia

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 924-935
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
The One ◽  
Communist Countries ◽  
Second World

This article is part of the special cluster titled Social practices of remembering and forgetting of the communist past in Central and Eastern Europe, guest edited by Malgorzata Glowacka-Grajper Controversies over social memory form an important aspect of reality in the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe. On the one hand, there are debates about coming to terms with the communist past and the Second World War that preceded it (because important parts of the memory of the war were “frozen” during the communist era), and, on the other hand, and intimately connected to that, are discussions about the constant influence of communism on the current situation. This article presents some of the main trends in research on collective memory in the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and reveals similarities and differences in the process of memorialization of communism in the countries of the region. Although there are works devoted to a comparative analysis of memory usage and its various interpretations in the political sphere in the countries of Eastern Europe, there are still many issues concerning daily practices (economic, religious, and cultural) associated with varying interpretations of the war and the communist past which needs further elaboration and analysis.

scholarly journals Between Grief and Pride: Visual Methods for the Study of Intergenerational Features of Emotional Experiences and Collective Memory of the War

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 127-143
Author(s):  
A.M. Rikel ◽  
N.V. Fedorova ◽  
I.B. Bovina
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Emotional Reaction ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Visual Methods ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Second World

The category of generation and emotional reactions within the framework of collective memory are considered as central categories within the framework of the research presented here. It is assumed that historical events are associated with certain emotional experiences, and the collective memory retains extremely positive or extremely negative ones. The study was conducted using visual methods, in which the subjects were asked to assess their feelings and emotions when looking at photographs of various wars of the XX century. Conclusions are drawn about the most pronounced feeling of fear among all generations of Russians when assessing various images of war; the absence of differences in the perception of the Second World War among four generations of Russians (N = 589 people) in all emotional reactions, except for the experience of pride in the results of the war. Separately, the so-called “Y” generation is described, experiencing the least vivid emotional reaction, including in terms of feelings of empathy.

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