Forgetting and Remembering the Socialist Past

In the early 1990s, the cultural landscape of Croatia went through radical changes, one of them being the destruction of the monuments built under socialism. Drawing on the author’s research on the monuments in the capital city of Zagreb, and on the existing research on the politics of memory in the broader post-Yugoslav region, this article asks about the disappearance of the monuments to partisan women in contemporary Zagreb. The main research question regards the gender dimension of the under-representation of women in public space. The hypothesis is that egalitarian gender relations, analyzed here through memorial representation, are important for the democratization of post-socialist societies. Additional focus is on ethnic belonging as an influential explanatory category in accounting for the disappearance of monuments to minority women in contemporary Croatia. The article adds a new empirical vantage point to help better understand the comparative framework of how the socialist past is remembered through monuments.

Highgate Cemetery Heterotopia: A Creative Counterpublic Space

Highgate Cemetery is nominally presented as a heterotopia, constructed, and theorized through the articulation of three “spaces.” First, it is configured as a public space which organizes the individual and the social, where the management of death creates a relationship between external space and its internal conceptualization. This reveals, enables, and disturbs the sociocultural and political imagination which helps order and disrupt thinking. Second, it is conceived as a creative space where cemetery texts emplace and materialize memory that mirrors the cultural capital of those interred, part of an urban aesthetic which articulates the distinction of the metropolitan elite. Last, it is a celebritized counterpublic space that expresses dissent, testimony to those who have actively imagined a better world, which is epitomized by the Marx Memorial. Representation of the cemetery is ambiguous as it is recuperated and framed by the living with the three different “spaces” offering heterotopic alliances.

The Politics of Memorial Representation: The Controversy Over the German Resistance Museum in 1994

The study of historical memory in its various forms is a burgeoningarea of inquiry among historians. The debate over public, official,government-supported memory and private individual memoriesreveals a complex dynamic among myth, memory, and history,which as Michel Foucault and others have argued, is simply the dominantform of memory in a society at a given time.1 Some of the mostrevealing instances of the intersection between public and privatememory are commemorations and memorial sites where personalmemories are created and sustained within the context of the officialrepresentation of the event and those involved. The constant need tolocate memories within a larger social frame of reference ensuresthat supporters of different memories of the same event will directlyand forcefully link images from the present with their memories ofthe past, no matter how incongruous these images may appear.

A Note on Feedback in Discourse Processing

Feedback strategies designed to assist discourse processing seem differentially effective with respect to levels of memorial representation.

Marcel Proust and the Problem of Time and Self

Proust conceived the true or permanent self to be a sensitiveness to the essence of things. Across this substratum moves a succession of temporary selves responsive to the accidental and evanescent. Continuity of being is traced to the memory. The true self is activated involuntarily and participates in experiences outside time. We eliminate the dimension of time when in remembering we introduce the past unchanged into the present. It is in the resonance of a former sensation, freshly occurring by chance, and the memorial representation of its prior existence, that we realize the most profound of life's truths. Through examining the past we can better know the true self and so redirect our temporal being.