Representations of German-Polish Border Regions in Contemporary Polish Fiction: Space, Memory, Identity

2013 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 59-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene Sywenky
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Spatial Memory ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Border Region ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
World War ◽  
Complex Dynamic ◽  
Border Regions ◽  
Border Narratives

This article examines post 1989 Polish literary production that addresses German-Polish history and border relations in the aftermath of World War II and participates in the German-Polish dialogue of reconciliation. I consider the methodological implications of border space and spatial memory for the analysis of mass displacements in the German-Polish border region with particular attention to spatiocultural interstitiality, deterritorialization, unhomeliness, and border identity. Focusing on two representative novels, Stefan Chwin's Death in Danzig and Olga Tokarczuk's House of Day, House of Night, I argue that these authors' attention to geospatiality, border space, and displacement forms a distinct characteristic of Polish border narratives. Chwin's and Tokarczuk's construction of interstitial border spaces reflects a complex dynamic between place, historical memory, and self-identification while disrupting and challenging the unitary mythologies of the nation. With their fictional re-imagining of wartime and postwar German-Polish border region, these writers participate in the politics of collective memory of the border region and the construction and articulation of the Polish perspective that shapes the discourse of memory east of the border.

scholarly journals MILITARY COMMEMORATIVE PRACTICES AS A COMPONENT OF THE HISTORICAL MEMORY OF THE UKRAINIAN PEOPLE ABOUT SECOND WORLD WAR

2020 ◽  
pp. 168-180
Author(s):  
І. Ковальська-Павелко
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Essential Feature ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
National Level ◽  
World War ◽  
Memory Space ◽  
Places Of Memory ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Post War

The analysis shows that military commemorative practices, as a component of the historical memory of the Ukrainian people of World War II, are sufficiently diverse and mainly aimed at uniting society around key issues of state formation. It is established that the essential feature of commemoration is the creation of shared memories through the elaboration of rituals of perpetuation (worship, celebration, etc.) of certain persons and events, the construction of “places of memory” (P. Nora). Commemoration, which is defined as the purposeful process of preserving the memory of events significant to the nation, is realized through commemorative practices – a set of ways that contribute to the consolidation, preservation and transfer in society of its historical past. The most common commemoration practices are the erection of monuments, the creation of museums and memorials, commemorations at national and local levels, commemoration of historical documents, and more.Accordingly, in the context of the formation and reproduction of the historical memory of the Ukrainian people, the militaristic commemorative practices of World War II are divided into three groups, depending on the level of memory and the peculiarities of historical development. In particular, the first group is represented by local forms of militaristic commemoration, initiated by family members, friends and veterans themselves, who collectively represent a group’ collective memory of a war that proclaimed the nation’s reconciliation with its heritage, military losses through the expression of grief, and mourning (accounts for the 40-50s of the twentieth century); the second group is a commemorative practice, the creation of which was initiated by the central authorities (president, parliament, government) and contained a collective memory of war at the national level, which was accompanied by the heroization and symbolization of the Great Victory (in the 1960-1970’s); the third group is represented by sources of personal origin, capable of actualizing the representations of war on specific examples, there is a combination of elements of the previous groups (periods) when, together with the ideological onset of the state on social (historical) memory, the expansion of memory space into everyday life, there is an attempt to return personal memory, inherent in the early (post-war) period, when the emphasis is on sacrifice, not just on the heroization of the events of World War II.

Metamorphoses of memory of the the Russian-Serbian Brotherhood of War in Modern Serbia

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 142-156
Author(s):  
A. Yu. Timofeev
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Party System ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Second World

The article considers the perception of World War II in modern Serbian society. Despite the stability of Serbian-Russian shared historical memory, the attitudes of both countries towards World wars differ. There is a huge contrast in the perception of the First and Second World War in Russian and Serbian societies. For the Serbs the events of World War II are obscured by the memories of the Civil War, which broke out in the country immediately after the occupation in 1941 and continued several years after 1945. Over 70% of Yugoslavs killed during the Second World War were slaughtered by the citizens of former Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The terror unleashed by Tito in the first postwar decade in 1944-1954 was proportionally bloodier than Stalin repressions in the postwar USSR. The number of emigrants from Yugoslavia after the establishment of the Tito's dictatorship was proportionally equal to the number of refugees from Russia after the Civil War (1,5-2% of prewar population). In the post-war years, open manipulations with the obvious facts of World War II took place in Tito's Yugoslavia. In the 1990s the memories repressed during the communist years were set free and publicly debated. After the fall of the one-party system the memory of World War II was devalued. The memory of the Russian-Serbian military fraternity forged during the World War II began to revive in Serbia due to the foreign policy changes in 2008. In October 2008 the President of Russia paid a visit to Serbia which began the process of (re) construction of World War II in Serbian historical memory. According to the public opinion surveys, a positive attitude towards Russia and Russians in Serbia strengthens the memories on general resistance to Nazism with memories of fratricide during the civil conflict events of 1941-1945 still dominating in Serbian society.

scholarly journals Narratives Transcending Borders: Sabrina Janesch’s "Katzenberge" as a German Response to Polish Migration Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-171
Author(s):  
Stephen Naumann
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
World War ◽  
Polish Spaces ◽  
Migration Literature ◽  
Polish Migration ◽  
Eastern Border ◽  
Border Narratives

The establishment of the Oder-Neisse border between Poland and Germany, as well as the westward shift of Poland’s eastern border resulted in migration for tens of millions in regions that had already been devastated by nearly a decade of forced evacuation, flight, war and genocide. In Poland, postwar authors such as Gdańsk’s own Stefan Chwin and Paweł Huelle have begun to establish a fascinating narrative connecting now-Polish spaces with what are at least in part non-Polish pasts. In Germany, meanwhile, coming to terms with a past that includes the Vertreibung, or forced migration, of millions of Germans during the mid-1940s has been limited at best, in no small part on account of its implication of Germans in the role of victim. In her 2010 debut novel Katzenberge, however, German author Sabrina Janesch employs a Polish migration story to connect with her German readers. Her narrator, like Janesch herself, is a young German who identifies with her Polish grandfather, whose death prompts her to trace the steps of his flight in 1945 from a Galician village to (then) German Silesia. This narrative, I argue, resonates with Janesch’s German audience because the expulsion experience is one with which they can identify. That it centers on Polish migration, however, not only avoids the context of guilt associated with German migration during World War II, but also creates an opportunity to better comprehend their Polish neighbors as well as the geographical spaces that connect them. Instead of allowing border narratives to be limited by the very border they attempt to define, engaging with multiple narratives of a given border provide enhanced meanings in local and national contexts and beyond. 

The Great Patriotic War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Collective Memory

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger D. Markwick
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
World War ◽  
The World ◽  
Great Patriotic War ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
The Hill ◽  
Personal Trauma

World War II has never ended for the citizens of the former Soviet Union. Nearly 27 million Soviet citizens died in the course of what Joseph Stalin declared to be the Great Patriotic War, half of the total 55 million victims of the world war. The enduring personal trauma and grief that engulfed those who survived, despite the Red Army's victory over fascism, was not matched by Stalin's state of mind, which preferred to forget the war. Not until the ousting of Nikita S. Khrushchev in October 1964 by Leonid Brezhnev was official memory of the war really resurrected. This article elaborates a thesis about the place of World War II in Soviet and post-Soviet collective memory by illuminating the sources of the myth of the Great Patriotic War and the mechanisms by which it has been sustained and even amplified. It discusses perestroika, patriotism without communism, the fate of the wartime Young Communist heroine Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the battle for Victory Day, the return of ‘trophy’ art, the Hill of Prostrations, and Sovietism without socialism.

scholarly journals Global Conflict of the Past in Contemporary Media Space: Historical Memory in a Discursive Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 17-50
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Y. Aleshina ◽  
Mark Y. Blokh ◽  
Tatiana A. Razuvaeva ◽  
Hedwig Wagner ◽  
Anton V. Kompleev
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
World War ◽  
Specific Data ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Media Space ◽  
Wide Circle ◽  
The Media

The article is devoted to an overview of studies on the discursive embodiment of historical memory, particularly, in the media. The research is aimed at the overview and systematization of, predominantly, international and Russian concepts of historical memory in academic literature. The scientific significance of research results is determined by the possibility of clarifying the definitions of historical memory in the process of systematizing the existing overseas and domestic studies. With that, the “starting point” of historical memory in this research are global political conflicts, particularly, World War I and World War II. The focus of research interest is the memory of the world wars which is discursively expressed in modern media space with various pragmatic tasks. Analysis of media materials allows for revealing the mechanisms of using historical memory as a tool for creating assessment and images while covering World War I and World War II. The research makes it possible to obtain a general discursive picture of the mass consciousness and, what is especially, important, to get specific data on the linguistic “content” of historical memory reflected in online media. The article is addressed to researchers in various fields of the Humanities, journalists and a wide circle of readers who are interested in the problem.

scholarly journals Memorialization of the "liberators" in Transcarpathia during the period of preventive Sovietization (1944 – 1946)

2021 ◽  
pp. 142-150
Author(s):  
Pavlo Leno
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
World War ◽  
The Carpathians ◽  
Great Patriotic War ◽  
Red Army ◽  
Regional Centers ◽  
Short Time

In 1944 – 1946, during the preventive Sovietization of Transcarpathian Ukraine, the local communist authorities initiated radical changes in its symbolic landscape in order to influence the collective memory of the population. The result of this policy was the appearance in the region in 1945 of monuments in honor of the Heroes of the Carpathians (soldiers of the Red Army), who died as a result of active hostilities in October 1944. Officially, the perpetuation of the memory of the fallen Red Army soldiers took place as a manifestation of the people's initiative of the local population in gratitude for the liberation from fascism, including from the “centuries-old Hungarian slavery”. However, archival materials and oral historical research prove that this process was an element of the traditional Soviet policy of memory, initiated by the command of the 4th Ukrainian Front. As a result, a number of memorial resolutions of the People's Council of Transcarpathian Ukraine were adopted in a short time. As a result, the graves of the Red Army were enlarged, fundraising was organized among the population, and the construction of monuments to the fallen liberators was started and successfully completed in all regional centers of the region. The peculiarity was that the installation of monuments in honor of the Heroes of the Carpathians took place long before the end of the Great Patriotic War / World War II, which was not observed in other territories of the Ukrainian SSR. One of the other paradoxes was that, so, the representatives of the Hungarian minority of the region demonstrated their appreciation for their "liberation from Hungarian domination".

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