Holocaust Monuments in Kamianets-Podilskyi as a Resource for Tourism Development

The Holocaust peculiarities of the Jewish population in Ukraine during the Second World War are revealed. Ten sites of the largest mass executions of Jews in Ukraine by the German occupation authorities during the Second World War have been identified and characterized. The largest number of victims are crimes in Kyiv (Babyn Yar – almost 34 thousand people) and Odesa (25 thousand people). The third-largest death toll was in the Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre (23,000 people), but it was the first chronological case of the Nazi massacre of Jews in Ukraine. The peculiarities of the mass extermination of the Jewish population in Kamianets Podilskyi, where a ghetto was created not only for the local Jewish population but also for Jews deported from Hungary, are highlighted. Three memorialization ‘waves’ of Holocaust memorial sites in Kamianets-Podilskyi have been identified. The main monuments of the Holocaust have been characterized, and directions for its further memorialization as a resource for the development of memorial tourism have been proposed.

Demokratie organisieren

Organizing Democracy. Role and Function of NS-Memorial-Sites as Agents of Social Transformation Today, NS-memorial sites in Germany are conceived, addressed, and perceived as state funded places of learning. Discussions about transnationalization, about the death of the last survivors, and a growing presence of right wing (memory-)politics is challenging their work. In order to trace the NS-memorial sites as pedagogical organizations, we focus on their role in processes of ›Organizing Democracy‹ in the context of an ›Education after Auschwitz‹.

Visiting The Past: A Case Study of Experiential Learning with Young People at Historic Sites

Learning about the past is becoming a complex issue due to the increasing need to ensure the approaches consider not only the facts, but also the implications for increasingly diverse future societies. This paper studies how experiential visits to memorial sites contribute to young people’s understanding of history from a wider and more inclusive perspective. The article presents a case study of two educational activities carried out at two memory sites related to the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) involving various qualitative techniques such as participant- and non-participant observation, expert interviews and focus groups with young people. The results show that an experiential approach to the past that works with emotions, empathy and dialogue with secondary students (17 years old) and older young people (15–25 years old) is a very effective means of offering a touching interpretation of the past and learning opportunity for youth, regardless of level of previous knowledge. Other findings show that the content needs to be reconsidered so new generations can interact with it. Young people’s worlds are shaped by cultural diversity, globalisation and the need to connect knowledge with the social environment, which enables them to engage in a critical re-appropriation of the past. This may be a new perspective that could be incorporated into the school curricula, and these types of visits could prove very useful for teachers and historical institutions such as museums or memorial sites interested in including young people’s experiences when planning their activities.

Keeping the Memories of the Malvinas/Falklands War Alive: Exploring Memorial Sites in the UK, Argentina and the Falkland Islands

The remembrance of war and commemoration practices shape the collective memories of society and, as such, war has been one of the most productive topics in memory studies. Commemorating past wars is one of the ways of constructing a commonly shared memory that would enhance group cohesion and shape collective identity. This paper will provide three examples of sites of memory in reference to the Malvinas/Falklands War, one from each side of the dispute— United Kingdom, Argentina and a third example from the actual territory of the Falkland Islands to illustrate how war memorials are an expression of patriotism, built to frame the deaths in terms of a national narrative of glorious sacrifice for cause and nation. Therefore, war commemoration recalls past experiences of suffering, but at the same time, of resistance.

Visitor Books and Memory – Evaluating the Bautzner Straße Dresden Memorial Site's Significance for Former Stasi Prisoners’ Individual Memories

Memorial sites document aspects of history. Thus, they represent a historical past deemed relevant by the initiators in the public sphere. The former Stasi detention center and district administration in Dresden Bautzner Straße is a memorial site that is dedicated to a critical representation of the communist dictatorship in East Germany. This does, however, not tell much about the historical site's meaning to the visitors. In order to get an impression of the visitors’ spontaneous reactions and thoughts, I systematically examine and categorize the memorial site's visitor books. Through these books, memorial sites offer visitors the opportunity to write down their thoughts thereby enabling an open channel of communication. My focus is on entries by persons who explicitly identify as former inmates of the very detention center they visited. They make up roughly 10 percent of all entries. I examine which thoughts former Stasi prisoners wrote down having visited their place of ordeal. What feelings and thoughts emerge after the visit? My aim is to shed light on the memorial site's significance and importance for the prisoner's individual memory by analyzing the entries’ type and content. The visitor books offer an authentic and intriguing access to former political prisoners’ mental world and their individual memory. This contribution connects the media representation of the communist dictatorship and its meaning for the former prisoners’ individual memory.

Lenin’s Memorization as a Hierotopic Project

This article traces the implementation of the concept of ‘temple consciousness’ in hierotopic processes, including the construction of monuments and the organization of memorial sites. The memorials were designed to stand as an eternal reminder of an event that was experienced as a common heroic story in its symbolic representation. The study shows the transit and transformation of memorial discourse in the Soviet and post-Soviet symbolic spaces, which manifested itself in the redefinition of memorial sites in the direction of either actualization or levelling of the cultural and historical memory, given the dominant ideological paradigm. The sources of research, in addition to architectural and artistic monuments, include the mythopoetics of the mass culture, which also acts as a projection of ideology and contains archetypal patterns of the collective unconscious.Lenin’s memorialization as ‘the leader of the world proletariat’ became useful. The memorial policy of the Bolshevik Party was influenced by the ideas and events that took place back in history, including the discovery of the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in Luxor (1922) and the teachings of Russian cosmologist Nikolai Fedorov in the work Philosophy of Common Cause published in full in 1913. The use of religion should point to key preconditions that have ensured the development of Soviet ideology which should be codified through the dominance of religion, in particular as ‘political religion’ or ‘secular religion’. The peculiarity of this phenomenon is the merging of two forms of thinking: political and religious.In addition, the Bolshevik atheists allowed the bodily resurrection of Lenin considering their unconditional belief in the “science of the future”; incidentally, they were not mistaken, because the leader’s body, engaged in the research work, survived until the invention of the cloning procedure. The secularized religious energy was mobilized to achieve political goals, which made possible the implementation of a totalitarian system, revealing the imitative essence of totalitarianism, which parasitized on religious thinking. Lenin’s Mausoleum is seen as a reliquary temple in the view of the communist cult of Eternity, which became the basis of Lenin’s cult.The levelling of the cult of Lenin began in the 1970s, which was facilitated by the pompous celebration of his 100th anniversary, which gave rise to political anecdotes as a symptom of the destruction of Lenin’s myth. The Revolution of Dignity (2013–2014) in Ukraine contributed to the dismantling of monuments to Lenin which were seen as personifications of Soviet-style ‘Leninism’ and symbols of imperial-Russian oppression.The purpose of this article is to substantiate the legitimacy of the author’s proposed concept of ‘political hierotopy’.