scholarly journals What Remains: The Post-Holocaust Archive in German Memory Culture by Dora Osborne

2022 ◽  
Vol 117 (1) ◽  
pp. 138-140
Author(s):  
Helen Finch
Keyword(s):  
Memory Culture

They Lived Under That Rule as Do Those Who Have Succeeded Them: Simultaneity and Conflict in the Foundation Narratives of a French Women’s Convent (10th–18th Centuries)

2021 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-97
Author(s):  
Steven Vanderputten
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Women Religious ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Eastern Region ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Memory Culture

While foundation accounts of medieval religious institutions have been the focus of intense scholarly interest for decades, so far there has been comparatively little interest in how successive versions related to each other in the perception of medieval and early modern observers. This essay considers that question via a case study of three such narratives about the 930s creation of Bouxières Abbey, a convent of women religious in France’s eastern region of Lorraine. At the heart of its argument stands the hypothesis that these conflicting narratives of origins were allowed to coexist in the memory culture of this small convent because they related to different arguments in its identity narrative. As such, it hopes to contribute to an ill-understood aspect of foundation narratives as a literary genre and a memorial practice in religious communities, with particular attention to long-term developments.

Urban commemoration and literature in post-Soviet L'viv: a comparative analysis with the Polish experience

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 637-654 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uilleam Blacker
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
Polish Experience ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World

This article analyzes how the Poles and Jews who disappeared from the western Ukrainian city of L'viv as a result of the Second World War are remembered in the city today. It examines a range of commemorative practices, from monuments and museums to themed cafes and literature, and analyzes how these practices interact to produce competing mnemonic narratives. In this respect, the article argues for an understanding of the city as a complex text consisting of a diverse range of mutually interdependent mnemonic media produced by a range of actors. The article focuses in particular on the ways in which Ukrainian nationalist narratives interact with the memory of the city's “lost others.” The article also seeks to understand L'viv‘s memory culture through comparison with a range of Polish cities that have faced similar problems with commemorating vanished communities, but have witnessed a deeper recognition of these communities than has been the case in L'viv. The article proposes reasons for the divergences between the memory cultures of L'viv and that found in Polish cities, and attempts to outline the gradual processes by which L'viv‘s Polish and Jewish pasts might become more widely integrated into the city's memory culture.

Jan Hardy versus Likwidator. Comics als Medien der gesellschaftlichen Spaltung Polens

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Agnieska Balcerzak
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Culture War ◽  
Current State ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Projection Surface ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
The One ◽  
Second World

This article at the intersection of cultural studies of popular and memory culture deals with the genre of comics as an identity-forming (protest) medium and projection surface for the ideologised “culture war” between traditionalists and modernists in contemporary Poland. The analysis focuses on two historical comics that combine facts and imaginary and refer back to the Second World War, the communist period and the recent history of the Republic of Poland after 1989. The article juxtaposes two title heroes and their comic worlds, which represent opposite ends of the political spectrum and reveal the problem areas of Poland’s dividedness along the underlying canon of values and symbolic worlds: Jan Hardy, the national-conservative “cursed soldier”, and Likwidator, the relentless “anarcho-terrorist”. The characters and their adventures exemplify fundamental memory cultural, religious, nationalist and emancipatory discourses in Poland today. The focus of the analysis lies on the creation context and the (visual) language with its narrative-aesthetic intensifications, which illuminate Poland’s current state of conflict between national egoism and traditional “cultural patriotism” on the one hand and liberal value relativism with its progressive-emancipatory rhetoric on the other.

scholarly journals And up she went – The moral vertical in Wings

Nordlit ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Åsne Ø. Høgetveit
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Interesting Case ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
World War ◽  
Memory Hierarchies ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
Spatial Understanding ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
World War Ii Veteran

This article is dedicated to the film Wings (1966) directed by the Soviet director Larisa Shepitko. With its story of a World War II veteran, Nadezhda Stepanovna Petrukhina, Wings makes for an interesting case when looking at women’s and veteran’s status in the Soviet society of the 1960’s, and morality and memory culture more generally speaking. But as Nadezhda Stepanovna is a former fighter pilot who continuously return to the sky in her daydreams, Wings is also an excellent case for a critical discussion of the meaning of the airspace. Aviation and the airspace hold certain connotations is Russian culture (not necessarily excluding other cultures) that open up for a different kind of reading of this film, in particular because of the intersections between gender, space and memory. Hierarchies are often presented trough a metaphor of verticality in Russian culture. By examining the different notions of verticality, both physical and metaphorical, in Wings, I not only argue that this film can be read in a new way, but also bring new perspectives on the established theory of women’s position in Russian culture as morally superior to men. This again can be linked back to the spatial understanding of Russia, as the term Motherland in Russia particularly strongly makes a connection between femininity, the mother, and space, the land.

scholarly journals Ceremonial events at non-sites of memory: Seven framings of a difficult past

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 55-61
Author(s):  
Maria Kobielska
Keyword(s):  
Memory Devices ◽  
Burial Site ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Social Responses ◽  
Local Memory ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
The Holocaust

Abstract: The author discusses uncommemorated and under-remembered sites of past violence in terms of the conditions of their transformation into memory sites. Commemorative ceremonies, which may be staged at non-sites of memory, are presented as affective media of memory and identity, demonstrating social responses to the sites, as well as placing the local past in the context of supra-local memory forms. The argument is grounded in the material gathered from fieldwork during the research project on uncommemorated sites of genocide in Poland and, predominantly, in a detailed case study of a ceremony witnessed by the author in 2016 in Radecznica (Lublin Voivodship) at a burial site of victims of the “Holocaust by bullets”. In the article the discourse of speeches delivered during the ceremony is analyzed, on the assumption that they can reveal rules of national Polish memory culture dictating what may be commemorated and how cultural mechanisms have a power to hinder commemoration. As a result, seven distinctive framings of past events that kept returning in subsequent speeches were identified and interpreted as “memory devices” that enable and facilitate recollection, but also mark out the limits of what can be remembered and passed on.

Undoing the Myth of Childhood Innocence in Gisela Elsner’s Fliegeralarm

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-55
Author(s):  
Susanne Baackmann
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
Dialectical Tension

This article examines Gisela Elsner’s 1989 novel Fliegeralarm in light of Helmut Kohl’s politics of “normalization” and the Kriegskinder victimology that has recently gained traction. Fliegeralarm presents children as Hitler’s willing executioners and categorically refutes the notion of “liberation” (from fascism) as justification for normalizing German national identity. The text questions the entire edifice upon which West and now united Germany’s official memory culture is built. I argue that Elsner not only contests the concept of “historical innocence” but fundamentally refutes the possibility of an innocent historical subject position. Fliegeralarm provocatively casts remembering and childhood innocence as calculated performances that mirror the generational complicity of those born into a legacy of perpetration. It offers a prescient intervention in post-Wende discourses and rethinks childhood innocence along the lines of historical implication, that is, in dialectical tension with knowledge and denial, marked by the traffic between knowing and not knowing.

Dreams of Freedom, Temptations of Power

2019 ◽  
pp. 243-280
Author(s):  
Melvyn P. Leffler
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
September 11 ◽  
World War ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
September 11 Attacks ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter considers the end of the Cold War as well as its implications for the September 11 attacks in 2001, roughly a decade after the Cold War ended. While studying the Cold War, the chapter illustrates how memory and values as well as fear and power shaped the behavior of human agents. Throughout that struggle, the divergent lessons of World War II pulsated through policymaking circles in Moscow and Washington. Now, in the aftermath of 9/11, governments around the world drew upon the lessons they had learned from their divergent national experiences as those experiences had become embedded in their respective national memories. For policymakers in Washington, memories of the Cold War and dreams of human freedom tempted the use of excessive power with tragic consequences. Memory, culture, and values played a key role in shaping the evolution of U.S. national security policy.

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