The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders 9783110337617, 9783110337525

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The Transcultural Turn

Media and Cultural Memory/ Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung

Edited by Astrid Erll · Ansgar Nünning Editorial Board Aleida Assmann · Mieke Bal · Vita Fortunati · Richard Grusin · Udo Hebel Andrew Hoskins · Wulf Kansteiner · Alison Landsberg · Claus Leggewie Jeffrey Olick · Susannah Radstone · Ann Rigney · Michael Rothberg Werner Sollors · Frederik Tygstrup · Harald Welzer

Volume 15

The Transcultural Turn

Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders

Edited by Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson

ISBN 978-3-11-033752-5 e-ISBN 978-3-11-033761-7 ISSN 1613-8961 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: Alex Masi/Corbis Typesetting: PTP-Berlin Protago-TEX-Production GmbH, Berlin Printing and binding: CPI buch bücher.de GmbH, Birkach ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

For Rick, who told us it would all be fine.

Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank series editors Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning for their enthusiasm for this project, and their crucial guidance throughout the publication process. We are also grateful to Manuela Gerlof, Christina Riesenweber and Angelika Hermann, and the technical team at De Gruyter, for their tireless work on the production of this book. This collection of essays originated from a conference on “Transcultural Memory”, which was organized to inaugurate the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory at the Institute for Germanic and Romance Studies (IGRS), now the Institute for Modern Language Research (IMLR), University of London, in 2010. Grateful thanks go to our co-organizers, Rick Crownshaw, Katia Pizzi and Ricarda Vidal, as well as to the many speakers who made this event so productive and exciting. In particular, our humble gratitude goes to Michael Rothberg, A. Dirk Moses, Astrid Erll and Andrew Hoskins, for their memorable keynote speeches. We would also like to acknowledge the support of the following people, without whom this volume would not have been possible: Christopher Lloyd and Helen Palmer for their friendship and keen-eyed proof-reading; Gill Rye for her continual guidance and encouragement; Anna Phillips, Simon Bacon, Susan Samata, and Manu Fruteau for their companionship down the winding road of memory; Henry Lane for being wise and wonderful. The Departments of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at Westminster, and all the staff who inspired us on the much-missed MA in Cultural Memory at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies. Our parents, Nick and Caroline Rapson, Susan Bond, and Stephen Bond for their loving patience and support. Last, but not least, enormous gratitude, love, and rewards are due to Simon Brzezicki and Arthur McVey for enduring endless days and nights of us talking ‘SHOP!’, and keeping us laughing all the way. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Content Acknowledgements | vii Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson Introduction | 1 Part One: Theorising Transcultural Memory A. Dirk Moses and Michael Rothberg A Dialogue on the Ethics and Politics of Transcultural Memory | 29 Peter Carrier and Kobi Kabalek Cultural Memory and Transcultural Memory – a Conceptual Analysis | 39 Lucy Bond Types of Transculturality: Narrative Frameworks and the Commemoration of 9/11 | 61 Part Two: Problematising Transcultural Memory Lars Breuer Europeanized Vernacular Memory: A Case Study from Germany and Poland | 83 Aline Sierp Integrating Europe, Integrating Memories: The EU’s Politics of Memory since 1945 | 103 Andy Pearce Britain and the Formation of Contemporary Holocaust Consciousness: A Product of Europeanization, or Exercise in Triangulation? | 119 Jessica Rapson Babi Yar: Transcultural Memories of Atrocity From Kiev to Denver | 139

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Part Three: The Possibilities of Transcultural Memory Wendy Koenig Motion and Sound: Investigating the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Centre | 165 Terri Tomsky Collective Loss and Commemoration after the Yugoslav Wars: Dubravka Ugresić’s Museumizing Gaze | 191 Franziska Meyer German writers remember 9/11: Katharina Hacker’s The Have-Nots | 209 Dirk Göttsche Cross-cultural Memoryscapes: Memory of Colonialism and its Shifting Contexts in Contemporary German Literature | 225 Marguérite Corporaal Black Patches and Rotting Weeds: The Great Famine as a Transcultural Figure of Memory in Irish (Diaspora) Fiction, 1855–1885 | 247 Contributors | 267 Index of Names | 271 Index of Terms | 273

Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson

Introduction In the months following 9/11, most of the debris that filled Ground Zero was removed to the Fresh Kills landsite on Staten Island, where it was catalogued and sorted. Coated in the toxic dust that covered the site in the aftermath of the attacks, much of this rubble was unidentifiable – an incinerated mass of building materials, office equipment, commercial goods, and personal effects, bearing traces of more precious human remains.¹ Most of the larger debris has since been shipped abroad – sent to recycling sites in India and China to be “reclaimed” and transformed into new items. However, from the 1.8 million tons of matter cleared from Ground Zero (less than two-tenths of one per cent of the solid material at the World Trade Center site prior to the collapse of the Twin Towers, most of which was simply pulverised) around 1,500 of the more recognisable, symbolicallycharged, artefacts have spent much of the last decade archived in Hangar 17 at Kennedy International Airport in New York City. These items have become objects of memory. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, when Ground Zero was still a burning pit, a small team of dedicated professionals began scouring the wreckage for items that might be salvaged for posterity. The immediacy of their actions testifies to the extent to which memory has become an instant and instinctive concern in the aftermath of contemporary atrocity. Stored in the secure environment of Hangar 17 since 2002, the diversity of the remnants recovered from Ground Zero is remarkable. At the peak of its usage, this 80,000 square-foot space contained items from fire engines to mangled steel, the radio antennae of the North Tower to cartoon figures and stuffed toys. For the past ten years, the Hangar has served as a “museum of unnatural history”, to quote the site’s official photographer, Fransesc Torres (2011, 11). Since 2008, the Hangar has been slowly emptying, as artefacts have been dispersed to serve as memorials to the devastation of 9/11. In disparate and often difficult ways, these objects reveal the complex processes by which memories are affected and inflected by the (physical and figurative) paths via which they travel. Around two hundred of the items released from Hangar 17 have found a permanent home at the National September 11 Museum, located between the former Trade Center’s “footprints” at Ground Zero (which now comprise the centrepiece

1 Concerns over the fact that the objects taken to Fresh Kills have resulted to a protracted – and often bitter – debate over the treatment of these artefacts between the families of certain victims and authorities overseeing the clearance effort.

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of Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s memorial, Reflecting Absence). These include the iconic “Last Column”, the final piece of the Twin Towers removed from Ground Zero during the clearance effort. More than any other item, perhaps, this piece of steel symbolises the site’s transformation from a place of atrocity to a space of memory. Even prior to its removal, the Column had become an unofficial memorial, covered with pictures of, and messages to, the victims who died in the Twin Towers, from rescue workers and family members. Thus, the Column might be seen as a transitional object: a commemorative text even before it left Ground Zero, it has since been returned to the site as the first exhibit in the Museum which is literally being built around it. However, alongside the numerous items that are being “rehomed” at the Trade Center site, nearly 2,000 others have travelled further afield – to towns and cities across the United States, and to nations as far afield as Afghanistan and New Zealand. Each of the fifty states of America now has at least one memorial made from recovered debris, and several other countries across the world have also claimed a piece of Twin Towers history. The process of reterritorialization has not only involved the physical transportation of the objects, but a corresponding remediation of their meaning. Their changing significance can be attributed to several ancillary factors relating to their relocation in time and space. Over the past decade, the items have been subject to a number of procedures that have had a corresponding effect on their commemorative impact. Firstly, their initial selection for salvage depended on their recognisability as objects, the pathos they engendered (their ability to reflect a poignant image of atrocity), and their pre-existing significance as cultural artefacts.² Secondly, before being deployed to their new environments, representatives from the organisations claiming the artefacts were invited to come to Hangar 17 to select their material from the hundreds of objects in storage  – a choice informed by a wide range of aesthetic and symbolic considerations. Thirdly, the steel will be shaped more literally in its transformation from remnant to memorial (from historical artefact to cultural object), as it is melted down, carved up, assimilated into another structure, or reconstituted in any number of ways. Finally, once installed at their eventual destinations, these objects do not exist in a vacuum, but in dialogue with their surroundings, charged with particular political and social agendas, and moulded by the constantly changing complexion of the present. To transport a piece of the World Trade Center, whether across

2 Most of the objects archived at the Hangar are burnt, scarred, or twisted in some way – symbolizing the destruction and devastation engendered by the attacks. Objects such as fire engines or police cars were also readily connectable to the prevailing iconography of 9/11, and the widespread elevation of rescue workers as heroes who sacrificed their lives for the nation.

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a country or over continents, is not simply to insert a piece of New York history in a new locale, it is to mediate that memory as it moves from one place to another. In their final surroundings, the remnants of the World Trade Center are required to serve diverse purposes, and even to remember disparate events.³ Many of the World Trade Center artefacts are intended to stand as symbols of international solidarity. Some of these memorials engender an inclusive vision of universal harmony, such as the International Peace Garden in Canada, which encourages its visitors to “Recall, Reflect, and Remember” 9/11 in the interests of securing future global peace. Others implicitly reflect a more hegemonic historical dynamic, as can be seen at the Caen Memorial for Peace in France, which places 9/11 in a commemorative nexus remembering events from the D-Day landings (the memorial is just fifteen miles from the Normandy beaches where these took place) to the fall of the Berlin Wall, invoking a particularly Western perspective on the recent past. More common are memorials that transcend national borders only to reinscribe new cultural boundaries, creating shared forums of remembrance between specific communities. For example, the German-American Firefighters and Friends responsible for transporting six-feet of Trade Center steel to Bavaria define their memorial as symbolic of the “international camaraderie” of firefighters (Kehrer 2011), and the same is true of New Zealand’s “Tribute to Firefighters”. Yet memory is not always so easy to contain. Whilst Daniel Libeskind’s Memoria e Luce in Padua is designed as a gesture of solidarity between Italy and the US, it also generates associative connections to Libeksind’s other constructions (for instance, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Imperial War Museum North, in Manchester, England, and of course the masterplan for Ground Zero) with complex transhistorical resonances. Such relations are drawn more explicitly at the Babi Yar Park in Denver, where the steel will stand alongside a memorial to the Nazi massacre at Babi Yar in the Ukraine, in which 100,000 people (mostly Jewish) were murdered between 1941 and 1943.⁴ Here, the material recovered from the Trade Center will form part of a new Memorial to the Victims of World Terrorism. The Denver Park has revealed a complex conjunction of local, national, and international concerns since the time of its conception. The original rationale for the location of the Park revolved around two key claims: firstly, the presence of a substantial expatriate Ukrainian community in Denver; secondly, the alleged similarity of the landscapes of Colorado and the Babi Yar ravine. However, at the time of its construction, the Park was deeply 3 The only requisites of the Port Authority, the agency to whom applications for artefacts were made, was that the beneficiary must use the object for a memorial purpose and arrange transportation themselves. 4 See Rapson’s chapter in the collection for a more detailed analysis of this site and its genesis.

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marked by the geopolitics of the Cold War, catalysed not only by the desire for a local tribute to victims of Nazi atrocity, but also as a protest against ongoing Soviet violence  – complicating its symbolic significance. The location of the World Trade Center steel at the Park only adds to this memorial melee: creating empathic links between one local community (Denver) and another (New York); drawing implicit connections between the suffering of distinct national groups in its commemoration of Ukrainian and American atrocity; and claiming to generate a sense of international solidarity. As Ellen Premack, one of the stewards of the Park explains, the material recovered from the Trade Center will help visitors “feel the sacred space. […] Sacred in the sense that it will associate different people’s stories and times in history. It will be very American and global in its sense of sacredness” (O’Connor 2011). Premack’s potentially problematic conflation of the “American” and the “global” draws attention to the persistent fluidity between the particular and the universal that has characterised the reterritorialization of the Trade Center steel. Expected to simultaneously stand as a tribute to a specific historical atrocity and a symbol of broader “human values”, many of these memorials blur the specificity of memory as they at once inscribe and transcend temporal and spatial boundaries. Such dynamics work in different ways in both intra- and inter-national forums. In Tucson, Arizona, one particularly unusual memorial, comprising Trade Center steel moulded into the shape of an angel, marks a tribute to nineyear-old Christina-Taylor Green, who was killed in the shootings of January 2011. This statue is not intended to commemorate 9/11 itself, but premised upon the fact that Green was born on September 11th, 2001, drawing implicit connections between two tragedies of immensely differing causes, scales, and effects. Entitled “Freedom’s Steadfast Angel of Love”, the statue was designed by Lei HennesseyOwen, who aims to place similar angel-shaped memorials across the United States to commemorate various acts of heroism and bravery. Owen has previously made statues for Ground Zero, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, producing other angels in honour of Jessica Lynch, the prisoner-of-war rescued in Iraq in 2003, a Pittsburgh mayor who died in office in 2006, and the 2004 re-election of President George W. Bush (Ruelas 2011). Whilst none of the other statues remain where Owens originally placed them, having been taken into storage or moved to new locations (the original World Trade Center Angel was moved to Hangar 17, after being deemed inappropriate to remain at Ground Zero), the memorial to Green stands as a permanent tribute to the “Tucson angel”. By connecting the personal tragedy of Green to the national narrative of 9/11, Owens appears to be implicitly elevating the significance of this private loss through its intersection with a seismic public event. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this memorial is the apparent lack of reflexivity to the political dimen-

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sions of such an endeavour. As many critics have noted, commemorative discourses surrounding September 11th remain entangled with complex hierarchies of life that have been made particularly explicit in the post-9/11 era.⁵ References to 9/11 have a tendency to encode a sense of American exceptionalism that has been uncomfortably linked to a lack of regard for other peoples and cultures. Despite its recurrent use as a symbol for international peace, the Trade Center steel has not escaped entanglement with such distasteful sentiments. In the aftermath of 9/11, then Governor of New York, George E. Pataki, petitioned the Secretary of the Navy, Gordon England, to name their fifth amphibious transport dock ship the USS New York in tribute to the victims of 9/11. In a letter to England, Pataki insisted that the new vessel should “bring the fight to our nation’s enemies well into the future”, playing “an important role in the War on Terror” in memory of those who died on in the attacks (USSNY 2011). The USS New York incorporates 7.5 tonnes of Trade Center steel into its bow stem. As Commander Quentin King, Navy representative for its construction, remarks: The significance of where the WTC steel is located on the 684-foot-long ship symbolizes the strength and resiliency of the citizens of New York as it sails forward around the world. […] It sends a message of America becoming stronger as a result, coming together as a country and ready to move forward as we make our way through the world (USSNY 2011).

Alongside the memorial currently installed at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan (a centre for US troops), the USS New York represents an explicit militarization of the memory of 9/11. According to England, the ship “will project American power to the far corners of the Earth and support the cause of freedom well into the 21st century” (USSNY). The USS New York thus demonstrates the complex imbrication of local, national, and international discourses relating to 9/11, and the immense political, emotional, and cultural capital invested in the World Trade Center steel. This brief survey of just a few of the memorials constructed from the nearly 1,200 remnants dispersed by the Port Authority reveals the diversity of the agendas that inform commemoration. Together, these objects demonstrate the mutability of memory as it is transplanted across time and space. Whether travelling within national borders or across continental divides (or, indeed, both), these artefacts demonstrate the different ways in which memories may be mobilised to create new communities between and beyond the cultural boundaries that have traditionally separated different national, ethnic, religious, or social groups. However, as we have seen, memorials can also be used to reinscribe such divisions as they travel (physically and figuratively) across the world  – drawing attention to the 5 See Butler (2004) and Bond (2012).

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manner in which commemorative practices continue to be imbricated with (and indeed implicated in maintaining) power differentials between individuals and collectives. To examine the dispersal of the World Trade Center steel, then, is to reflect upon the diverse ways in which processes of remembrance may simultaneously resist, reinforce, and reconfigure the relations between personal, local, national, and global discourses, revealing the centrifugal properties of memory and underscoring its often uncontainable qualities. This process raises several questions about the difficulties intrinsic to postulating any international culture of memory: can commemorative practices really help to facilitate a continuum that transcends (political, ethnic, religious, linguistic) borders, or does the very notion of border-crossing merely serve to reinscribe the differences that it aims to overcome? What becomes of culture in a putatively “post-national” age: can we still talk about distinct cultural groupings in the era of globalization, and how do we move past such ideas without collapsing any notion of identity into an indistinct homogeny? In drawing attention to the ethical potential of acts of solidarity consolidated by the construction of empathic communities of remembrance, do we risk obscuring the very real power differentials that continue to define contemporary life? This collection aims to move some way towards addressing these difficult issues. We begin with a brief genealogy of the related concepts of “culture” and “memory” as they have been theorized in recent scholarship, before turning our attention to the contested notion of transcultural memory.

1 Cultural studies and the transcultural turn Frequently defined and redefined, the concept of “culture”, and the corresponding notion of what is “cultural”, is slippery. In their extensive study of 1952, A.L Kroeber and Clyde Cluckhohn demonstrated the disciplinary diversity of approaches to this term. The generality of their summative conclusion testifies to the expansive nature the concept: Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, and on the other as conditioning elements of further action (Kroeber and Cluckhohn 1952, 181).

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By this reading, culture can be seen as both a process (constantly evolving through diverse forms of artistic, theological, social, and political practice) and an entity belonging to a distinct set (or sets) of people. As Krober and Cluckhohn assert, its essential core is not only historically derived but also selected, and cultural systems are conditioning elements of action as well as simply what is produced through action. In this sense, they should be regarded as deeply imbricated with a range of power relationships and hegemonic structures. Indeed, as articulated in the work of Matthew Arnold (1925), the very concept of culture constitutes an elitist ideal. Postulating the cultured being as one who has immersed themselves in “the best which has been thought and said” (Arnold, in Baldwin, Faulkner and Hecht 2006, 6), Arnold perceived the attainment of culture as a path towards perfection, through which an individual may rise above the class to which he or she belongs. Whilst Arnold constructed a rather objectified and exclusive model of culture, as something one either has or has not, in 1948, T.S. Eliot took issue with this definition. Eliot argued that culture should be seen as the relation of an individual to a larger social background, contending that “the culture of an individual cannot be isolated from that of the group and that the culture of the group cannot be abstracted from that of the whole society” (Eliot 1948, 24). Whilst Eliot maintains that the best of cultural production belongs to – and is produced by – an elite intelligentsia, his model of culture is somewhat more heterogeneous than Arnold’s homogenized vision. Eliot argued for a society made of hierarchically graded levels of local or regional culture. According to Eliot, “A people should be neither too united nor too divided, if its culture should flourish”, for social diversity creates cultural unity. For Eliot, the dominant, centralised culture gives rise to other satellite cultures, which complement, rather than challenge, the whole – as “a true satellite culture is one which, for geographical and other reasons, has a permanent relation to a stronger one” (1948, 54). Eliot’s model diversifies and develops the older notion of container culture, which can be traced to the eighteenth-century German scholar, Johann Gottfried Herder. Conceptualising cultures as discrete entities with impermeable boundaries, generally defined by the borders of the nation-state, Herder argued that “each nation has its centre of happiness within itself, just as every sphere has its centre of gravity” (1969[1774], 186). Concepts of Volkscharakter (national character) and Volksseele (national soul) are central to this ideology, as is the preservation of cultural traditions, folklore and song, religion and literature (Werner Ustorf 2004, 119). Perceiving cultural artefacts as by their very nature nationally defined, Herder’s ideas are very much grounded in the ideals of the Enlightenment. However, as Homi Bhabha has since argued, whilst “the advent of Western modernity, located as it generally is in the 18th and 19th centuries, was the moment

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when certain master narratives of the state, the citizen, cultural value […] came to define the ‘Enlightenment’ of Western society”, at the same time “the West was producing another history of itself through its colonial possessions and relations” (Bhabha, in Rutherford 1990, 218). In “Culture’s In Between”, Bhabha mobilises Eliot’s comments on movement between settler colonial societies to describe third world migration patterns. Yet, whilst Eliot might postulate colonial society as a satellite culture of the imperial centre, Bhabha identifies “part” or “partial” cultures created by the colonial experience, pointing to “the contaminated yet connective tissue between cultures – at once the possibility of culture’s connectedness and the border between them”. This, then, is what constitutes “culture’s in between”  – “part” cultures, which may be “bafflingly alike and different”, and which may result in both “culture sympathy and culture-clash” (1996, 54). Bhabha argues, after Bahktin, for the existence of a cultural doubleness which, neither binary nor dualistic, is instead a “collision […] pregnant with the potential for new world visions” (Bahktin, in Bhabha 1996, 58). Pointing to the “hybridizing potential” of dialogic engagement within the colonial relationship, Bhabha seeks to: open up of a space of negotiation where power is unequal but its articulation may be equivocal. Such negotiation is neither assimilation nor collaboration. It makes possible the emergence of an ‘interstitial’ agency that refuses the binary representation of social antagonism. Hybrid agencies find their voice in a dialectic that does not seek cultural supremacy or sovereignty. They deploy the partial culture from which they emerge to construct visions of community, and versions of historic memory, that give narrative form to the minority positions they occupy; the outside of the inside: the part in the whole (1996, 58).

Bhabha’s work on hybridity decentralises the nation-state as a cultural container, offering a heterogeneous model of culture that allows for fluid relations both within and between nations that exceed originary structures of power and identity. In dialogic form, hybridizing discourses and strategies may ideally allow both minority and majority cultural groups to narrativize visions of community; to become part of a whole rather than a part elided, over-written or normalized by that whole. Such conceptions, and the postcolonial discourses to which they belong, have played an important role laying the groundwork for the broader critical movement that we may loosely describe as the transcultural turn.

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2 The transcultural turn Throughout literary, cultural, historical, geographical and philosophical discourse, the late twentieth-century transcultural turn is manifest in a rejection of the formerly pervasive model of container culture in favour of a more fluid and transient paradigm of relations between societies. As academics have sought to formulate a fitting vocabulary for the global age over the past twenty years, transcultural perspectives have increasingly come to inform much work across the humanities and social sciences. In cultural geography, for example, practitioners have widely come to reject the bordered, “fixed” understanding of cultures that had formerly been prevalent in the work of seminal practitioners,⁶ occasioning a resultant shift in the way both place and human behaviour are conceived and interpreted within the discipline. Whilst the idea of the nation arguably no longer provides a stable framework for analysis, it is not jettisoned but contextualised between the local and the global.⁷ An increasing awareness of global issues is recognized as having considerable impact on local concerns, as demonstrated in ecocritical approaches to space, place and identity.⁸ However, much criticism also emphasises the necessity of maintaining contextual specificity, for “[w]hile there are issues requiring a global perspective, and there are phenomena truly global in scope, the local and the particular can never be forgotten or ignored” (Murphy 2010, 1). In historical discourses  – by their very nature concerned with looking back  – the idea of the nation state remains central to mapping cycles of progress and destruction. Yet comparative frameworks, “the classical way of transcending the narrow boundaries of national history” (Haupt and Kocka 2009, vii) are nevertheless (controversially) becoming broader in scope.⁹ As Michael Rothberg and Stef Craps have pointed out in their recent discussion of transcultural approaches to the Holocaust, some of the most influential work on

6 P. Jackson (1989) and Don Mitchell (1998), for example, both reject the notion of “the effectivity and salience of human culture vis-a-vis their inhabitation and transformation of physical environments” inherent to nineteenth century German Romanticism (see John Wylie’s (2007, 22) summary of this shift). 7 Implicit, for example, in Don Mitchell’s argument that to understand how nationalism itself is made, it is necessary to “set our sights on scales both larger and smaller than the nation state” (2000, 273). 8 Notable as early as Ti Fu Tuan’s Topophilia: a Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (1974). 9 See, for example, criticism of Timothy Snyder’s (2010) study of Europe under Stalin and Hitler, and the related discussion of ‘double genocide’ in academia and in the media (Efraim Zuroff, 2010; Jonathan Freedland, 2010; Bastov 2011).

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the genocide has drawn attention to the fact that the histories of “the Holocaust, slavery, and colonial domination are in fact interconnected, and by refusing to think them together (except in a competitive manner) we deprive ourselves of an opportunity to gain greater insight into each of these different strands of history and to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the dark underside of modernity” (Craps and Rothberg 2011, 518).¹⁰ Such studies reject the antiquated notion that belonging to a particular nation necessarily transcends other forms of cultural identity, or that national agendas alone are central co-ordinates in historical progress and conflict.¹¹ In the study of human rights, scholars are concerned with ways in which transnational empathy may be achieved and mobilized (Fuyuki Kurasawa 2007, Ronald Commers, Wim Vandekerckhove, An Verlinden, 2008). As Judith Butler has argued persuasively (2004 and 2009), it is increasingly apparent that we must pay more attention to, and become more active in opposing, the hegemonic structures that render some lives grievable and others barely human. Resisting collapse into such fallacious ways of thinking, Butler (via a reading of Emmanuel Levinas) argues that we should seek to envision an empathic mode of solidarity premised upon recognition of the precariousness of all life, moving beyond essentialising categorisations of nationality or ethnicity. Butler’s work is emblematic of recent attempts in political philosophy to imagine a mode of justice able to transcend the normative dynamics of hegemonic global relations. As Nancy Fraser contends, a growing critical consensus suggests that the time has come for a move beyond the conventional Westphalian mapping of political space, which envisions the world as divided into discrete political communities, “geographically bounded units, demarcated by sharply drawn borders and arrayed side by side” (Fraser 2008, 4). Noting the increasing influence of “intermestic” political actors (such as NGOs, intergovernmental organizations, and other “trans-territorial, nonstate actors” (2008, 5)), Fraser advocates “transnationalizing the public sphere” (2008, 76–99), in ways that facilitate “transnational solidarity, democratic framesetting, and emancipatory projects of social transformation” (2008, 10). Informed by her engagement with Habermassian discursive ethics, Fraser’s analysis resonates productively with Jürgen Habermas’s own work on the need for a reclamation of cosmopolitanism in the post-9/11 world (2003 and 2006). Habermas argues for a transnational politics that moves beyond the model of the nation-state, contending that the state remains too coercive an actor, and too reified an institution, to be a productive participant in an exemplary global 10 Rothberg and Craps are particularly referring to the work of Hannah Arendt (1951), Aimé Césaire (1972), Paul Gilroy (2000), and A. Dirk Moses (2002). 11 See for example Georgiy Kasianov, Philipp Ther (2009).

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society. Instead, Habermas calls for a constitutional order premised upon an ongoing dialogical examination of the laws and statutes to which the international community is held accountable, insisting that democracy should be recognised as a process of continual exegesis in which relations between political powers can be integrated into “a cosmopolitan order that ensures an equal and reciprocal hearing for the voices of all those affected” (Habermas 2006, 36).¹² Habermas outlines a contemporary “cosmopolitcs” (Robbins and Cheah 1998) that complements other attempts to reformulate the notion of cosmopolitanism for the global age.¹³ In his invaluable analysis of “cosmopolitical realism”, Ulrich Beck identifies an “epistemological turn” (Beck 2004, 131) in the social sciences as a result of which “a whole set of concepts associated with the ‘national perspective’ become disenchanted: that is deontologized, historicized and stripped of their inner necessity” (2004, 132). In contrast to the homogenizing model of globalization, which has long been seen as erasing distinct (national, cultural, and social) identities through the increasing internationalization of commerce, Beck’s understanding of cosmpolitanization suggests that “the distinctions and boundaries between internal and external, national and international, local and global, ourselves and others [have grown] more confused or hybridized” (2004, 132) as a result of the diffuse cultural, economic, ecological and political developments that have characterized late modernity. This (re)turn to cosmopolitanism challenges the rubric of globalization by seeking to find a place for the local inside the global, the particular inside the universal. Whilst each of these studies draws from disparate philosophical antecedents, and emphasises divergent characteristics of cosmopolitanism (always a contested term, as Kwame Anthony Appiah argues), what these perspectives tend to have in common is: on the one hand, attention to “the idea that we have obligations to others that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kin, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship”; on the other, the understanding that “we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance” (Appiah 2006, xiii). However, conceding that the dialectic of separation and togetherness that characterises these interests will not always be harmonious, Appiah warns that

12 Habermas aims to move beyond a Western-dominated hegemony in which “universal” principles are reflective of particular historical, cultural, economic, and political biases, arguing that “non-Western cultures must appropriate the universalistic content of human rights with their own resources and in their own interpretation, one that establishes a convincing connection to local experiences and interests” (Habermas 2006, 35). 13 See also Robbins and Cheah (1998), Benhabib (2004) and Appiah (2006).

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there is “a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge” (2006, xiii). In so doing, he begins to point the way towards the “critical cosmopolitanism” outlined by Rebecca Walkowitz. Drawing upon the legacies of Immanuel Kant and Max Horkheimer, Walkowitz asserts that critical cosmopolitianism is intended to designate “a type of international engagement that can be distinguished from ‘planetary humanism’ by two principle characteristics: an aversion to heroic tones of appropriation and progress, and a suspicion of epistemological privilege, views from above or from the center that assume a consistent distinction between who is seeing and what is seen” (Walkowitz 2006, 2). Walkowitz’s work forms part of a growing canon of literary criticism that has sought to critique relations between individuals, cultures, and nations as they are played out in fiction. Over the past two decades, this work has tended to focus upon the relationship between literature and globalization¹⁴ and the task of reconstituting more equitable global power dynamics in a post-colonial world.¹⁵ Such discussions have wrestled with the difficult matter of defining the place of the nation-state and its citizens in a rapidly changing international context. Mirroring concerns in political philosophy,¹⁶ attention has turned increasingly towards a consideration of the place (and indeed, imaginative space) of stateless individuals – the refugee, the dispossessed – deprived of political, social, or legal belonging: a form of “creaturely life” (Santner 2006) afforded protection by neither national nor international bodies.¹⁷ Commensurate with the perceived transcendence of geographical boundaries has been an exploration of the opening of the self, not only to the world around it but also to the others that inhabit it. In studies of social behaviour, communication and experience, we see a correspondingly increased interest in people’s experiences away from their ‘own’ environments, whether their movements are forced or elected.¹⁸ Formerly relegated and dismissed as complicit with imperialism and

14 See, for example, Suman Gupta’s (2009) Literature and Globalization, which traces the hermeneutic fluidity of “globalization” (and its attendant ideological biases), alongside the changing ways the complex processes of globalization have found reflection in literature, and affected the institutional practices of literary studies. 15 See Davis et al (2005), Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Society in a ‘Post’-Colonial World 16 See Agamben (1998 and 2005); Butler (2004); Stonebridge (2011). 17 This work considers exile in diverse geographic, historical and literary contexts, from the sixth-century BC, to contemporary Israel, seventeenth- century England, to post-Holocaust Eastern Europe. For broader studies, see David Bevan (1990) Literature and Exile, and Hong Zeng (2010) The Semiotics of Exile in Literature 18 In geography see work on the ‘global’ nature of spaces such as modern cities (Doreen Massey 2007); the notion that “the essence of tourism is the way in which the local interacts with the

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colonization (Clark 1999, 1–28) and haunted by Cartesian dualism (Blanton 2002, 16), the potential of travel, tourism and the associated practice of travel writing to facilitate a better understanding of the other is increasingly apparent in contemporary scholarship.¹⁹ The many ways in which we can now communicate with others from distant geographical locations, and the ever-developing technology which allows us to encounter these others and their cultural products (which soon become naturalised and part of our familiar cultural schema), also places transcultural concerns directly in the arena of media studies. James Curran and David Morley argue that, for too long, media studies has been “locked” in national frameworks in resistance to global homogeneity, but note that emerging studies show “reassuring evidence of multidirectional flows of global communication” and “the power and resilience of local audiences and the rich resources they draw upon in making diverse sense of globally distributed media products” (Curran and Morley 2006, 4). Whilst such a brief outline is unable to do justice to the complexity of the critical movements we have detailed, as even this short survey has shown, the search for new modes of interrogating contemporary cultural experience (of theorising cosmpolitanism, globalization, diaspora, exile, etc) has both an interdisciplinary and a global reach. Although each of these terms has specific characteristics and nuances that it is important not to lose sight of, all of them may be loosely defined as intersecting with the notion of transculturalism. A relatively broad (and somewhat under-conceptualised) idea, Wolfgang Welsch describes transculturality as “the most adequate concept of culture today – for both political and normative reasons” (Welsch 1999, 194). Rejecting any notion of culture as territorially bound, Welsch contends (in terms reminiscent of both Eliot and Bhabha) that “[c]ultures today are in general characterized by hybrization. For every culture, all other cultures have tendencially come to be inner-content or satellites” (1999, 198). Transculturality thus differs from either interculturality (which “seeks ways in which [different] cultures could nevertheless get on with, understand and recognize one another” (1999, 195)) or multiculturality (which “takes up the problems which difglobal” (Williams and Shaw 1998, 59); in literature itself, Patrick Murphy identifies a strain of literature that casts aside the nation-state, “as authors turn to transnational, bioregional, localist, new agrarian and futurists sites and locations for the settings, contexts, and political placement of the ethical conflicts they narrate” (2012, 33). 19 As Susan Sontag (2007, 228) suggests: “To be a traveller […] is to be constantly reminded of the simultaneity of what is going on in the world, your world and the very different world you have visited […] It’s a question […] of the limits of the human imagination.” The cultural historian Rudy Koshar echoes this perspective on tourism in general as “a cultural practice that requires and, to varying extents, instantiates, a hermeneutics […] based on the interpretation of a multiplicity of texts and markers, all oriented to producing knowledge of Self and Other” (2000, 103).

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ferent cultures have living together within one society” (1999, 196)), by refusing to subscribe to any separatist notion of cultures as discrete and impermeable entities. Resisting the idea that either values or lifestyles can be contained within any form of border (be it national, economic, ethnic or religious), Welsch argues “for a multimeshed and inclusive, not separatist and exclusive understanding of culture […] whose pragmatic features exist not in delimitation, but in the ability to link and undergo transition” (1999, 200). He thus neatly outlines a realignment of experience “away from the concentration on the polarity of the own and the foreign to an attentiveness for what might be common and connective” (1999, 200). Unlike Beck’s normative cosmopolitanization (outlined above), Welsch’s transculturality should be understood as a diffuse process arising from both institutionalized policies and organic, non-centralized, social changes. For Beck, cosmopolitanization: involves the formation of multiple loyalties, the spread of various transnational lifestyles, the rise of non-state political actors (from Amnesty International to the World Trade Organization), and the development of global protest movements against (neo-liberal) globalism and for a different (cosmopolitan) globalization involving the worldwide recognition of human rights, workers’ rights, global protection of the environment, an end to poverty, and so on. (Beck 2004, 36).

He concedes that such changes may also take place on an involuntary basis, seeing “normative” cosmopolitanism, structured and overseen by institutional bodies (the UN, the World Bank, the International Criminal Court, for example), shadowed by “passive” processes “which shape reality as a side effect of world trade or global dangers (climate disaster, terrorism, financial crisis)”, to ensure that “[w]ithout my knowing or explicitly willing it, my existence, my body, my ‘own life’ become part of another world, of foreign cultures, regions and histories, and global interdependence risks” (2004, 132–134). He also argues that “forced” cosmopolitanism may take place “beneath the surfaces” of the “persisting facades of national spaces and sovereignties”, undermining traditional models of hermetic identity from within even while “the main signifiers on display continue to proclaim national mentalities, identities and forms of consciousness” (2004, 134). However, whereas, for Beck, “the cosmopolitanization of reality” is something that occurs separately from, and even in resistance to, political and economic movements, for Welsch, the process of transculturality covers a remit of both conscious and unconscious social changes (to use Beck’s terms) from the grassroots to the institutionalised, the local to the global. Sharing the view that each of these developments occurs in dialogue (whether in solidarity or in tension) with the others, making it implausible to accurately

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separate out the hegemonic from the counter-hegemonic, the cultural from the political, or the “normative” from the “passive”, we choose to adopt the more fluid and encompassing notion of transculturality as a conceptual framework for this book. The designation “transcultural” may be applied to both the social, economic and political changes occurring in the “real-world” and the epistemological frameworks through which they are analysed in the academy – conceptualising both cultural practice and critical theory. Bearing this in mind, we turn now to growing field of transcultural memory and its associated theoretical approaches.

3 Memory studies and the transcultural turn As has been widely documented,²⁰ the past 30 years have seen an increasing preoccupation with the concept of memory, as a cultural “memory boom” (Huyssen 1995 and 2003) closely followed the emergence of the discipline of “memory studies” in the (predominantly western) academy. The rise of memory studies as a body of academic interest can be loosely traced back to a series of events that coalesced around the fall of Soviet Communism.²¹ These include the infamous historians’ debate over the Holocaust in Germany and a related national commitment to Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the past; increasing concerns about the “amnesiac” dimensions of both globalizing capitalism and cultural postmodernism; the heightened importance of identity politics in the late 1980s and 1990s; confrontations with the legacies of colonialism, fascism, and Apartheid; and an apparent decline in national affiliations and ideologies as a grounding for identity. As Susannah Radstone contends, these very disparate influences cumulatively suggest that “what is at stake in studies of memory is the elaboration of the relationship between lived experience and the broader field of history […] including within its purview questions of broad social forces and power relations that exceed those of relations between individuals” (Radstone 2005, 139). Radstone’s comments indicate that studies of memory negotiate the terms of the relationship between the individual and the collective. However, James Young points to the dangers of homogenising cultures of remembrance by assuming that it is possible for individuals to assume each other’s memories. He argues that 20 See Olick and Robbins (1998); Erll and Nunning (2010); Olick, Vinitzsky and Levy (2011); and Erll (2011) for a more detailed genealogy of memory studies and the related cultural memory boom. 21 See Olick and Robbins (1998); Klein (2000); Kansteiner (2002); Erll and Nünning (2008); Crownshaw (2010); Erll (2011).

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“even though groups share socially constructed assumptions and values that organize memory into roughly similar patterns, individuals cannot share another’s memory any more than they can share another’s cortex. They share instead the forms of memory, even the meanings in memory generated by those forms, but an individual’s memory remains hers alone” (Young 1993, xi). Whilst Young allows that social groups share – and construct – common sentiments about the past, he refuses to define memory as other than the property of the individual, mediated by and subject to, the customs, beliefs, and traditions of the collective. As Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney argue, memories do not simply inhere in cultures, but “can only become collective as part of a continuous process whereby memories are shared with the help of symbolic artefacts that mediate between individuals and, in the process, create communality across both space and time” (Erll and Rigney 2009, 1). It is not only specific places (such as Auschwitz, Gettysburg, or Ground Zero) that may constitute what Pierre Nora describes as lieux de mémoire (sites of memory), but the constantly evolving constellation of (tangible and intangible) media relating to a specific event. Erll and Rigney contend that cultural memory is comprised of “‘media’ of all sorts  – spoken language, letters, books, photos, films” – each of which provides “frameworks for shaping both experience and memory […] in two, interconnected ways: as instruments for sense-making, they mediate between the individual and the world; as agents of networking, they mediate between individuals and groups” (2009, 1). One of the central issues facing theorists of memory, then, has been to define relationships between cultures of memory, the individuals and institutions that precipitate their production, and the cultural artefacts that constitute them.²² An understanding of such dynamics is crucial to identifying the diverse ways in which memories circulate in the global age. As Andreas Huyssen has argued, at the beginning of the twenty-first-century: The form in which we think of the past is increasingly memory without borders rather than national history within borders. Modernity has brought with it a very real compression of time and space. But in the register of imaginaries, it has also expanded our horizons of time and space beyond the local, the national and even the international. (Huyssen 2003, 4)

The global movement of memory poses a web of ethical, political, and social questions about the stakes involved in our identification with and representation of the past. Following the work of Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2006), Michael Rothberg (2009), Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (2009), and Richard Crownshaw (2011) among others, this movement sees attention shift from lieux de mémoire 22 See Young (1993); J. Assmann (2008); and Erll (2011).

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(Nora 2001) – memory’s location in static objects and locations – towards a focus on the dynamics by which it is articulated. Positioning the Holocaust as the foundation for an international culture of “cosmopolitan memory” that encourages the articulation of other histories of injustice, Levy and Sznaider argue that “national and ethnic memories are transformed in the age of globalization rather than erased. […] They begin to develop in accordance with common rhythms and periodizations. But in each case, the common elements combine with pre-existing elements to form something new” (Levy and Sznaider 2006, 3). Rothberg’s work also draws on the Holocaust as a cornerstone of comparative memory, tracing the way in which memories of the Black Atlantic and (post-)colonial French Algeria have not only been articulated through the prism of the Holocaust over the past sixty years, but emerged alongside and with an influence upon early Holocaust memory. Rothberg issues a welcome challenge to both attempts to underscore the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the opposing over-emphasis upon the unprecedented nature of other atrocities, arguing that: the conceptual framework through which commentators and ordinary citizens have addressed the relationship between memory, identity, and violence is flawed. Against the framework that understands collective memory as competitive memory  – as a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources – I suggest that we consider memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative (Rothberg 2009, 3).

This resistance to “zero-sum” approaches to the past also grounds Erll’s work on travelling memory, a term which provides a “metaphorical shorthand, an abbreviation for the fact that in the production of cultural memory, people, media, mnemonic forms, contents, and practices are in constant, unceasing motion” (Erll 2011b, 12). Travelling memory essentially describes “the incessant wandering of carriers, media, contents, forms, and practices of memory, their continual ‘travels’ and ongoing transformations through time and space, across social, linguistic and political borders” (2011b, 11). Technological advancements have been pivotal in facilitating the travelling of memory, as demonstrated by Andrew Hoskins, Joanne Garde-Hansen, and Anna Reading (2009). Examining the impact of global media on memory practices, Hoskins identifies a “connective turn […] shaping an ongoing re-calibration of time, space (and place) and memory by people and machines as they inhabit and connect with both dense and diffused social networks” (Hoskins 2011, 29). Alongside her important work on “globital” memories (highlighting the impact of digital technologies in the global age) Reading’s recent work examines the cross-cultural notion of the “right to memory” – “the human right to have the otherness of the past acknowledged through the creation

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of symbolic and cultural acts, utterances and expressions” (Reading 2011, 379) – analysing the extent to which international debates have shaped national and cultural discourses over this issue. Without losing sight of their important individualities, it is possible to argue that each of these disparate methodologies posits remembrance as a fluid process in which commemorative tropes work to inform the representation of diverse events and traumas beyond national or cultural boundaries, bridging – but not negating – spatial, temporal and ideational differences. However, as Wulf Kansteiner contends, despite the recent tendency to see the displacement of national memories and identities by “a dialectical, conflicted interplay between global and local memories and identities” as a “very positive development” (Kansteiner 2006, 331), such ‘transnational’ memories have arguably yet to be truly embraced beyond the level of critical and political rhetoric. Attention must still necessarily paid to the dynamics of what Terri Tomsky describes as the “trauma economy”. Noting trauma’s use “as transcultural capital and commodity” (Tomsky 2011, 53), Tomsky describes the trauma economy as “a circuit of movement and exchange where traumatic memories ‘travel’ and are valued and revalued along the way” (2011, 49), mediated by “economic, cultural, discursive and political structures that guide, enable and ultimately institutionalize the representation, travel and attention to certain traumas” (2011, 53). As Dirk Moses argues, we should be wary of comparative methodologies that encourage a competitive rhetorical framework by subscribing to a “phallic logic” that shouts “‘my trauma is bigger than yours’ in order to defend or attack the theodicy that the brutal extermination and disappearance of peoples is redeemed by human progress in the form of the Western dominated global system of nation-states” (Moses 2010, 6). Although Erll, following Welsch, argues that transculturalism should manifest a turn towards the other, Moses’s comments suggest that in some instances, this apparent outwardness can in fact mask a turn against the other (or at least, a resurgent solipsism attendant upon a turn away from the other). Conversely, Radstone (2011) worries that the turn towards transculturalism will take attention away from the local dynamics of memory. These issues raise the spectre of whether we are right to increasingly think about the past as “memory without borders” without rigorously questioning whether the most idealistic aspects of memory theory actually reflect the complexity of how commemoration works in practice. Thus, whilst celebrating the ethical and political potential of projects that aim towards a dialogic understanding of the past able to account for both local and global interests, this book also aims towards an interrogation of the relationship between commemorative theory and practice.

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4 Transcultural memory: the aims of this collection Each of the theories outlined above has contributed to the movement we describe as the transcultural turn in memory studies. The essays in this collection aim to conceptualise the diverse ways in which memorial practices negotiate relationships between local, national, and international communities in the age of globalization. Drawing upon the interdisciplinary movements outlined above, we suggest that cultures of memory are more porous and interrelated than previously acknowledged. Whilst distinct national and local renderings of the past remain visible, the concept of cultures as discrete and hermetic entities tends to arise from a rather reductive and nostalgic institutionalisation of national, ethnic, or religious identity, often informed by deeply ideological agendas. Although diverse individuals or groups may, at different times, identify with particular histories, the way in which events are represented and remembered is strongly influenced by the memorialisation of other pasts – as commemorative tropes and techniques are transferred between events often distanced in time and/or space. Thus, while it would be misleading to suggest that particular communities do not possess important specificities in their approach to, and articulation of, the past, it is important to recognize that memories exist in an essentially dialogic relation to each other. One might therefore argue that even the most seemingly nationalistic examples of memory are implicit reactions to (or rather, against) the global culture in which contemporary commemorative practice takes place. Building upon Welsch’s definition of transculturality, we suggest that transcultural memory might best be regarded as describing two separate dynamics in contemporary commemorative practice: firstly, the travelling of memory within and between national, ethnic, and religious collectives; secondly, forums of remembrance that aim to move beyond the idea of political, ethnic, linguistic, or religious borders as containers for our understanding of the past. Covering a broad spectrum of memory sites, texts and media, this collection questions how the notion of “transculturality” informs both the practice of memory and the associated critical thinking that accompanies such activities. Viewed most optimistically, transcultural approaches to the theory and practice of memory demonstrate how shared co-ordinates (be they historical, cultural, political, or economic) may ease competitive claims to history, focusing on the commonality of ideas about remembrance that stretch across communities, reinforced by recurring themes or modes of expression. Yet, as Radstone and Tomsky have argued, the very notion of transculturalism can also be seen as a threat to distinct forms of identity, catalysing a reassertion of bounded notions of past histories and identities.

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Thinking critically about such issues, our collection emerges from three, closely related, ambitions. Firstly, to advance and interrogate the concept of transcultural memory, considering the problems and potentials of visualising intertwined pasts and processes of remembrance. Secondly, to map the topography of transcultural memory in contemporary theory and practice, looking at a variety of case studies representing the articulation of diverse histories in different media and across a range of cultures. Thirdly, to emphasise the openness of transculturalism as it affects processes of memory today. As the following essays demonstrate, transcultural practices are not homogeneous in approach, agenda, or outcome. It is therefore both difficult and undesirable to propose a reified model of “transcultural memory”. This book does not dictate a single narrative, or indeed produce a standardised paradigm of transcultural memory. Instead, readers are encouraged to explore the benefits and complexities of remembering transculturally, to question whether it is ever truly possible to escape localised cultures of memory, and to consider the implications of conserving national visions of the past in an increasingly globalised age. Transculturalism is in its infancy as a both a theory and practice of memory, and it is not our intention to close down its potential manifestations. Rather, we propose this collection as a moment for reflection: a chance to appraise past and present projects in both positive and negative lights, and begin to imagine an ethical dimension for the future theory and practice of memory.

5 Layout of the collection The collection is organized by three mutually informative sections. Contributions address the key issues faced in the study of memory today, considering the possibilities and problems posed by cultures of memory that attempt, often simultaneously, to operate on local, national, continental and even global scales. Chapters draw upon disparate theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, studying commemorative practice through texts, sites, landscapes, political initiatives, museums, memorial traces and moments of silence.

5.1 Part One: Theorising transcultural memory This section examines the diverse ways in which comparative approaches to the past might be conceptualised, articulated and mobilised, and addresses calls for a more nuanced understanding of the concept of transcultural memory. We open

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the collection with a dialogue between A. Dirk Moses and Michael Rothberg, two of the critics at the forefront of the transcultural turn in memory studies. Moses and Rothberg discuss the ethics and politics of this evolution from their respective positions within historical and literary and cultural criticism, foregrounding key issues relating to its associated problems and possibilities. The next contribution, by Peter Carrier and Kobi Kabalek, interrogates German and English scholarship on memory culture, exposing crucial terminological and methodological tensions. This analysis foregrounds an examination of the precedents of transculturalism in history and the social sciences. Ultimately, the chapter argues for the integration of associated methodologies, in order to better enable cultural memory scholarship to operate effectively above and beyond the parameters of the nation state. Continuing the critique of terminological ambiguity, Lucy Bond’s contribution draws attention to the complex forms that transcultural readings of memory may assume, contending that a clearer understanding of the political ramifications of particular commemorative practices is necessary to resist the assumption that comparative forms of remembrance can be considered inherently ethical by dint of their conceptual currency. Exemplifying this discussion with an analysis of diverse case studies from the American memorial culture of 9/11, this chapter warns against analogical practices that may forge an overidentification between events, and argues for allegorical forms of memory able to trace tentative and non-deterministic connections across cultures and histories.

5.2 Part Two: Problematising transcultural memory Secondly, we turn to address the problems that might arise from transcultural practices, considering the ways in which such processes of remembrance may be appropriated to shore up hegemonic memorial cultures, or reinforce certain ideological discourses, and examining the tensions that exist between local, national, and international approaches to commemorating the past. As Rothberg argues, memorialisation should not be a zero-sum process, but where memory is viewed as competitive, transcultural analyses allow us to see more clearly why certain possessive approaches to the past have developed, and furthermore to understand the forces and stakes behind these developments. Lars Breuer’s article draws upon linguistic studies of Holocaust memory in regional areas of Germany and Poland, demonstrating how the genocide is framed in distinctly divergent terminology across communities. This suggests that despite attempts to inaugurate a Europeanisation of memory, cultures of remembrance still tend towards distinctly vernacular forms. Building upon these ideas, Aline Sierp’s article focuses on the attempted creation of a universal version of the European

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past drawn from EU initiatives that attempt to standardize a continental reading of Holocaust memory. In its most positive manifestations, such Europeanized forms of memory are intended to transcend national cultures of remembrance, theoretically easing the tensions resulting from historical schisms between different ethnic groups. However, if the continuing focus on the Holocaust above other atrocities shapes the structure of European memory, how does this define or limit European memory, both in its nascent continental form and in its relation to commemorative cultures elsewhere in the world? Integrating the analysis of government policy with examples of cultural production and discussion of educational curricula, Andy Pearce’s contribution to this volume demonstrates how Britain’s Holocaust consciousness constantly evolves in dialogue with European and American memory cultures, effecting a triangulation of memory in which transcultural and national processes co-exist. Jessica Rapson’s chapter addresses the difficulties inherent in displacing memories from one context to another, questioning how dislocated pasts can travel across cultures to find resonances in places from which they are geographically and culturally distinct. In a discussion of the Holocaust mass grave site Babi Yar, Kiev, and the corresponding Babi Yar Park, Denver, Rapson examines the possibility that thinking transculturally should not lead to an erasure of distinct identities, but draw parallels between moments of the past and their representation in the present, revealing shared values as well as distinct ways of being from which we can learn.

5.3 Part Three: The possibilities of transcultural memory We end our collection with a more optimistic analysis of the possibilities that transcultural forms of commemoration may have for moving towards ethical processes of memory. Authors propose new discourses and modes of practice that might help to open up cultures of memory, resisting reification or appropriation. Their essays explore the emergence of rich counter-narratives that potentially transcend memory’s apparently predetermined borders, be they national, cultural, or emotional. Wendy Koenig’s paper explores the use of absence as a transcultural memorial trope. Koenig considers the connection between sound and cultural tradition in displacing aural traditions of commemoration. In so doing, she draws attention to the importance of extra-linguistic communication, and of the memories that can emerge in the lacunae between words. Expanding this investigation of absence as a mode of transculturality, Terri Tomsky’s discussion of the lost memory cultures of the former Yugoslavia sees the Yugoslavian diaspora now emerging (among many fragmented pasts) in Berlin, which seems to offer a haven for lost stories and haunted memories. Tomsky offers a Benjamin-

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ian approach to history, evidencing an interest in fragmentary pasts, haunting and spectral materialism. This perspective is echoed in Franziska Meyer’s paper, which also draws upon Berlin as a city of transcultural connections. Meyer’s chapter illustrates the ways in which recontextualising 9/11 within the context of the violent history of modern Europe refutes the culture of exceptionalism that has grown up around the attacks and allows for the traces of other hidden pasts to emerge. Tomsky and Meyer suggest that in its most successful manifestations, transcultural remembrance is not about homogenisation, but the creation of constellations of memory that reveal momentary connections across time and space whose shared qualities may previously have elided us. The next two chapters, by Dirk Göttsche and Marguerite Corporaal, examine how a dialogical relationship between histories shapes diasporic memories within the realm of literary representation. Corporaal’s discussion of memories of the great Irish famine (1845–50) in Irish and American fiction concentrates on the potentially transcultural nature of response to landscape, yet recognizes the way in which geographic dislocation may render distinct, and often contradictory, memories of suffering and loss. Göttsche’s focus on the memory of colonialism in contemporary German fiction reveals a trajectory of postcolonial memory cutting across both national and cultural boundaries to intersect, in the German context particularly, with memory discourses surrounding National Socialism, the Wende, and Black German literature.

References Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. London: Penguin Books, 2006. Assmann, Aleida. “Cannon and Archive.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. 97–108. Baldwin, John R., Sandra L. Faulkner, and Michael L. Hecht. “A Moving Target: The Elusive Definition of Culture.” Redefining Culture: Perspectives Across the Disciplines. Eds. John R. Baldwin, Sandra L. Faulkner, Michael L. Hecht and Sheryl L. Lindsley. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006. 3–27. Bartov, Omar. “Review.” Slavic Review : Interdisciplinary Quarterly of Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies 70.2 (2011): 424–428. Beck, Ulrich. What is Globalization? Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. Benhabib, Seyla. The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Bevan, David ed. Literature and Exile: Perspectives on Modern Literature. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi B.V, 1990.

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Bhabha, Homi K. “Culture’s In Between.” Questions of Cultural Identity. Eds. Paul de Gay and Stuart Hall. London: Sage, 1996. 53–60. Blanton, Casey. Travel Writing: the Self and the World. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso, 2004. Cheah, Pheng and Bruce Robbins eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Clark, Stephen H. Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit. London and New York: Zed Books, 1999. Cluckhohn, C. and A. L. Kroeber. Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. (Harvard University Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology Papers, 47). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952. Commers, Ronald, Wim Vandekerckhove, and An Verlinden. Ethics in an Era of Globalization. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. Copland, James. Tragic Solutions: The 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, Historical Antecedents, and Lessons for Tort Reform. New York: Manhattan Institute, 2005. Craps, Stef and Michael Rothberg. “Introduction: Transcultural Negotiations of Holocaust Memory.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 53.4 (2011): 517–21. Crownshaw, Richard. The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Crownshaw, Richard. “Introduction.” Transcultural Memory. Parallax 17.4 (2011): 1–3. Curran, James and David Morley. Media and Cultural Theory. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006. Dallmayr, Fred. Alternative Visions: Paths in the Global Village. Lanham and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. Davis et al. Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Society in a ‘Post’-Colonial World. 2005. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005. Erll, Astrid. “Travelling Memory.” Parallax vol. 17.4 (2011): 4–18. Erll, Astrid and Ann Rigney. Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. Erll, Astrid and Ansgar Nünning eds. Cultural Memory Studies: an International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. Feinberg, Kenneth. Closing Statement from the Special Master, Mr Kenneth R. Feinberg, on the shutdown of the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund. http://www.justice.gov/ archive/victimcompensation/closingstatement.pdf) U.S. Department of Justice, 2004. (3 March 2010). Fraser, Nancy. Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008. Freedland, Jonathan. “I see why ‘double genocide’ is a term Lithuanians want. But it appals me.” The Guardian, 14th September 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/14/double-genocide-lithuania holocaust-communism (13 September 2011). Garde-Hansen, Joanne, Andrew Hoskins, and Anna Reading, eds. Save as: Digital Memories. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Gupta, Suman. Globalization and Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009.

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Habermas, Jürgen. The Divided West, Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard and Jürgen Kocka. Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2009. Hayes, Casey. “Johann Gottfried Herder’s View of Culture and the Concept of Transculturality.” Transcultural German Studies: Building Bridges. Eds. Steven D. Martinson and Renate A. Schulz. Bern: Peter Lang AG, 1990. 317–326. Hoskins, Andrew. “Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn.” Parallax 17.4 (2011): 19–31. Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Jackson, P. Maps of Meaning: an Introduction to Cultural Geography. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Kansteiner, Wulf. “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies.” History and Theory, 41.2 (2002): 179–197. Kansteiner, Wulf. In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Kasianov, Georgiy and Phillipp Ther. A laboratory of transnational history: Ukraine and recent Ukrainian historiography. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009. Kehrer, Marcel. “Bavarian Firefighters Erect World Trade Center Memorial.”Deutsche Welle, September 10, 2011. Klein, Kerwin Lee. “On The Emergence of ‘Memory’ in Historical Discourse.” Representations 69.4 (2000), 127–150. Kurasawa, Fuyuki. The Work of Global Justice: Human Rights As Practices. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Levy, Daniel and Natan Sznaider. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Trans. A. Oksiloff. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. Lützeler, Paul Michael. ‘Goethe and Europe.’ South Atlantic Review 65.2 (2000): 95–113. Massey, Doreen. World City. Cambridge and Maldon: Polity Press, 2007. Mitchell, Don. Cultural Geography: a Critical Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998. Moses, A. Dirk. “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century’: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust.” Patterns of Prejudice 36, 4 (2002): 7–36. Moses, A. Dirk. Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2010. Murphy, Patrick. Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies: Fences, Boundaries, and Fields. Lanham: Lexington, 2010. Nora, Pierre. Rethinking France: Les Lieux de Mémoire, Volume 1: The State. Trans. M Trouille. London and Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001. O’Connor, Colleen. “Steel from World Trade Center being used in two 9/11 memorials in Denver.” Denver Post, 8th July 2011.

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Olick, Jeffrey K. and Joyce Robbins. “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices.” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105–140. Radstone, Susannah. “Reconceiving Binaries: the Limits of Memory.” History Workshop Journal, 59.1 (2005): 134–150. Radstone, Susannah. “What Place is This? Transcultural Memory and the Locations of Memory Studies.” Parallax, 17.4 (2011): 109–123. Reading, Anna. “Identity, Memory and Cosmopolitanism: The Otherness of the Past and the Right to Memory.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 14.4 (2011): 379–394. Rosenfeld, Gavriel D. “A Looming Crash or a Soft Landing? Forecasting the Future of the Memory ‘Industry’.” Journal of Modern History 81.1 (2009): 122–158. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Rutherford, Jonathan. “The Third Space.” Interview with Homi Bhabha. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, 207–221. Santner, Eric. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2006. Sikka, Sonia. Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe between Stalin and Hitler. London: The Bodley Head, 2010. Sontag, Susan. At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches. Eds. Paolo Dilonardo and Ann Jump. New York: Farrar, Strauss, 2007. Stammelman, Richard. “Between Memory and History.” Trauma at Home After 9/11. Ed. Judith Greenberg. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. 11–20. Tomsky, Terri. “From Sarajevo to 9/11: Travelling Memory and the Trauma Economy.” Parallax 17.4 (2011): 49–60. Torres, Fransesc. Memory Remains: 9/11 Artifacts at Hangar 17. Washington D.C.: National Geographic, 2011. Tuan, Ti Fu. Topophilia: a Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality – the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World. Eds. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash. London: Sage, 1999. 194–213. Williams, Allan, and Gareth Shaw. “Tourism Policies in a Changing Economic Environment.” Tourism and Economic Development: European Experiences. Eds. Allan Williams and Gareth Shaw. Chichester: Wiley, 1998. Wylie, John. Landscape. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2007. Young, James. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meanings. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993. Zeng, Hong. The Semiotics of Exile in Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Zuroff, Efraim. “A Dangerous Nazi-Soviet Equivalence.” The Guardian, 29th September 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/sep/29/secondworldw r-holocaust. (3 April 2012).

Part One: Theorising Transcultural Memory

A. Dirk Moses and Michael Rothberg

A Dialogue on the Ethics and Politics of Transcultural Memory Dirk Moses: This is a timely book. Memory studies, so long focused on “the nation” as the master unit of analysis, has joined the trend in the humanities and social sciences to study its chosen phenomena in a globalised and transnational  – or, rather, transcultural – mode. We are not talking about intercultural encounters between distinct traditions that otherwise bear no relation to one another. This book goes further, making “transculturality” its object of inquiry rather than solely discrete ideas or memories whose circulation can be traced or boundary crossing analysed. That is, the very constitution of local memories, especially those pertaining to war and occupation, are shot through with references to other cultures and nations, and not only of oppressive ones. Traumatic memory is necessarily analogical: we did not just suffer; we suffered like this or that, or we suffered more than or differently from them. Even claims to unique suffering are implicitly comparative, that is, transcultural. Without analogues, it is difficult to successfully bid for recognition, because the common sense of a public sphere will ascribe significance to certain types of suffering and not to others. As a number of chapters here note, the Holocaust has been held up as representing the West’s common sense standard of suffering. How and why it has come been constructed as the “gold standard” in the Western memory regime is being investigated by scholars, Michael Rothberg among them. His notion of “multidirectionality” brilliantly captures the spatial quality of memory. Transculturality gestures to the temporal dimension of memory’s analogical aspect. Contemporary memories are not only interpolated by other cultures but incorporate within them an archive about their relations in the past, whether stories of victory and exultation, defeat and humiliation, or relative coexistence, if with an emphatic sense of hierarchy. The editors and some authors here plead for an ethics of transcultural memory; consciousness of implication in others’ mnemonic archive makes subjects “acknowledge our implication in each other’s suffering and loss, and to begin to imagine a more equitable future in which such violence might be minimized through an acknowledgement of our common humanity, grounded by the awareness of our mutual experience of histories of destruction”. Just as I applaud this cosmopolitan ethic, I ponder its challenges. Consider the ugly debate transpiring today about the “double genocide” thesis in Eastern Europe and particularly in Lithuania. Since the independence of the former Soviet Baltic republic,

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which chafed under Soviet rule for generations, ultra-nationalist political forces have insisted on describing the Lithuanian experience as genocide, and indeed the country’s parliament has passed a law broadening the United Nations definition to include deportations and attacks on cultural (“spiritual”) genocide. Not for nothing is the institution dedicated to the Soviet occupation called the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania. By contrast, the Holocaust is marginalized in Lithuanian official memory, not least, say critics, because heroes of the resistance – nationalists – were co-perpetrators of the Holocaust of Lithuanian Jewry, of whom only 5% survived. The same memory constellation is apparent across east-central and northern Europe, that is, where relatively smaller countries were occupied by the Soviets: “the Russians”. The “double genocide” thesis, which posits that Baltic and Slavic peoples were subject to Soviet genocide just as Jews were victims of the Nazi genocide, is of course a species of totalitarianism theory. Its point is to replace the hierarchy of genocide apparent in the West’s memory regime – with the Holocaust at its apex, as in the Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust in 2000 – with an equalized memory field. That is why the new states of east-central and northern Europe prodded the European Union to pass the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism in 2008, and establish the Platform of European Memory and Conscience in 2011; they are dedicated to researching and memorializing the crimes of totalitarianism. As in Lithuania, Poland’s bearers of this memory project are also those dedicated to national(ist) memory and resistance against Russian imperialism, in this case, the Institute of National Remembrance and the Warsaw Rising Museum. These developments represent a full frontal assault on the Western memory regime. It is certainly transcultural, but hardly cosmopolitan. Regrettably, the canard that Jews in this region – called the “bloodlands” by Timothy Snyder in his recent book on Stalinist and Nazi crimes in the 1930s and 1940s – supported the Soviet Union and were therefore attacked by their Christian neighbours when the Nazis passed through, is apparent in this debate. Also unfortunate is the zerosum game structure of these rival memories; to isolate the Holocaust – or more concretely, say, the Jews of Vilnius – as an object of memory is experienced by Lithuanian nationalists as an unbearable effacement of their nation’s travails under communism. It is “Jewish memory” rather than Baltic memory, indeed a form of Western domination. Likewise, for many others, the double genocide thesis, while not denying the actual killings, though soft-pedalling local collaboration, is an unbearable flattening out of distinct forms and intensities of violence (see http://defendinghistory.com/). What are the ethics of transculturality in this situation?

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Michael Rothberg: The Transcultural Turn is dedicated to exploring new tendencies in memory studies from a tri-focal perspective that suggests the need for attention to theoretical definitions of actually existing transcultural and transnational connections; the ethical and political problems that attend the circulation of memories; and the possibilities for counter-narratives and new forms of solidarity that sometimes emerge when practices of remembrance are recognized as implicated in each other. The rich essays collected here offer just that mix of interventions: they trace diasporic networks, delve into dispiriting conflicts about the past, and chart constellations of unexpected relationality. Such a multi-levelled approach to collective memory is necessary in our dynamic, globalizing world. Yet, as Dirk Moses argues pointedly in his remarks above, the actually existing realm of transcultural memory often seems primarily to be a place of bitter contestation, competitive claims, and righteous victims. How, he asks, can we actualize truly cosmopolitan attitudes and transcultural ethics in such treacherous terrain? Before returning to this critical question, let me step back for a moment and consider the framing of this book in terms of transcultural memory. The category “transcultural” operates in the vicinity of other adjectival qualifiers that have recently emerged in the rapidly growing field of memory studies – most prominently “transnational” and “global”, as the editors of this volume suggest. Within that constellation of terms, the term transcultural does a particular kind of conceptual work. It points us toward the fact that the founding texts of collective memory studies are not simply or uniquely embedded in the assumption that remembrance can only be understood in national and local frameworks  – an assumption thus in need of transnational and global methodological innovations. At an even deeper conceptual level, these theories have reproduced assumptions about what constitutes a culture that are no longer tenable; they have assumed that only discrete and homogenous cultures and social groups can become bearers of memory. Astrid Erll has usefully traced this assumption back to a conception of ‘container-culture’ inherited from the eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (among other sources), a conception that persists in much recent work on collective memory. In the foundational theories in the field, “cultures […] remain relatively clear-cut social formations, usually coinciding with the contours of regions, kingdoms and nation-states”; there is, in other words, “an isomorphy between territory, social formation, mentalities, and memories” that blocks recognition of transcultural dynamics (Erll 2011a, 7). Even as we have begun to acquire a usable history of memory studies – for example, through Erll’s own work (2011b) as well as the creation of valuable new source books such as The Collective Memory Reader (Olick et al. 2011) – we need to turn a critical eye on the background assumptions of the field.

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Thinking of memory as transcultural means seeking to break through the isomorphic imagination that underpins – still valuable – models such as Maurice Halbwachs’s “collective memory”, Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire, Jan and Aleida Assmann’s “cultural memory”, and Avishai Margalit’s “ethics of memory”. In contrast to these models, which risk inadvertently instituting ‘ethnified’ notions of memory, the wager of a theory of transcultural memory is that other collective agents of memory exist who are not indebted to the Herderian notion of discrete cultures. Transcultural memory also offers a vision that cuts across the different scales evoked by the frameworks of transnational or global memory. That is, there is nothing inherently transcultural about transnational or global dynamics and nothing inherently monocultural about the local. A transnational formation such as Europe may be tendentially monocutural in its ideology or effects – note the attempted construction of a common “Judeo-Christian” culture in contemporary Europe that excludes Islam  – and globalization has long been recognized as having homogenizing effects as well as being a force for heterogeneity. Meanwhile, most locales are deeply transcultural – not only cities (like the Berlin discussed in the essays of Tomsky and Meyer) but also the villages whose assumed homogeneity served as Nora’s nostalgic model for the idealized milieu de mémoire that preexisted the intrusion of modernity. The transcultural turn offers a necessary intervention into the study of memory at all these levels: it draws attention to the palimpsestic overlays, the hybrid assemblages, the non-linear interactions, and the fuzzy edges of group belonging. But if the focus on the transcultural is a valuable methodological intervention  – directing us toward heteromorphic constellations instead of isomorphic territories of memory – how does it help us to evaluate the plateaus, problems, and possibilities offered by the disparate practices of memory discussed by the contributors to this book? What, indeed, are the ethics and politics of such an approach? Dirk Moses draws our attention to one of the “hottest” zones of memory conflict: that unfolding in the territories of the former Soviet bloc where multiple legacies of extreme violence coexist in explosive constellations. In describing the current conflict over the “double genocide” thesis, he already suggests some important parameters for the ethics of memory. When transcultural analogies and comparisons emerge, they often fall into two extremes: an “isolation” of histories from each other and a “flattening out” of differences between histories. These extremes represent the far ends of a continuum that runs between what we could call equation and differentiation and that constitutes one of the important axes of a transcultural ethics of memory. At the extremes of this axis of comparison we find attitudes represented in the current double genocide debate and much of the worldwide discourse about the Holocaust: relativization, on the one hand, and sacralization, on the other.

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This distinction is recognized by many scholars¹ but I now believe we need a more nuanced approach. In formulating an ethics of memory, we need to supplement the axis of comparison with an axis of political affect. The affective axis asks to what ends the comparison is being made; here a continuum runs from competition to solidarity. Thus, for instance, the discourse of double genocide often represents more than a thesis about historical comparison: it represents a competitive assertion that seeks to seize the ground of recognition from people with other experiences of suffering. So, for that matter, do sacralizing discourses of the Holocaust’s uniqueness. Mapping practices of memory across these two axes of comparison and affect establishes four larger categories with distinct political valences and opens up the possibility of degrees, gradations, and tendencies within those categories (competitive equation, competitive differentiation, and so on). An ethics of transcultural memory, in other words, would ask both how and why histories are imagined in relation to each other. Whether we equate or differentiate histories and whether we do so for reasons of solidarity or competitive antagonism matters. That doesn’t mean such an ethics can always give us the ‘right’ answers to the kinds of dilemmas Dirk Moses describes, however. My personal predilection is for visions of history that opt for a differentiated solidarity – that is, that allow us to distinguish different histories of violence while still understanding them as implicated in each other and as making moral demands for recognition that deserve consideration. But the notion that we as scholars can ‘choose’ how collective memory should be articulated is false. Here we need to move, I think, from the ethics of memory to the politics of memory. We need to ask: what are the material conditions – social, economic, political – that lead to memory conflict and what are the material conditions in which ethical approaches to the past become possible? Dirk Moses: Michael Rothberg’s points are so well made that I don’t need to elaborate further on them. What I would like to explore is the relationship between a politics of memory that leads to differentiated solidarity – the attractive ethical vision also advocated by Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson – and an investigation of the remembering subjects’ material conditions. The latter is a socio-anthropological exercise, a scholarly undertaking animated by an analytical rather than activist or political ethos. It is a precondition to a politics of memory with ethical poten-

1 See for example Tzvetan Todorov (2003, 159–64).

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tial. At the same time, it is also a transcultural praxis, because ideally it engages empathetically with all “sides” of memory conflicts. Transcultural scholarship, as exemplified in this volume manifests a choice to analyse memory conflicts for the sake of understanding them rather than participating in them in a partisan manner. Investigating the material conditions of memory in a transcultural spirit, as Michael Rothberg suggests, then, is in itself an engagement in the politics of memory with ethical effect. If successfully executed, actors in memory conflicts could gain some critical distance to their memory commitments after confrontation with scholarly accounts of their activism; they would understand better what they are doing when advancing specific arguments and making certain claims. It allows the scholar to challenge the politician’s manipulation of memory, whether in the “bloodlands” or the Middle East. It is no accident that universities – as institutionalized sites of rationality – and academics are routinely attacked by nationalists for selling out the country’s narcissistic narrative – whether apologetic or self-congratulatory – by empirically challenging its claims and by exhibiting the transcultural ethics implicit in its praxis. As an example of contestable partisan memory, take the entreaty, in 2009, of Asaf Shariv, Israel’s consul general in New York, that Holocaust education in Gaza would solve the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. Condemning Hamas’s refusal to allow the Holocaust to be included in an UN-sponsored human rights eighth-grade module, he declared that “To deny history and the humanity of victims of genocide is to prepare for future atrocities”. Without mentioning the blockade of Gaza that oppresses its population, or the civilian casualties that Israeli forces inflicted there, let alone the fact that most Gazans are refugees from Zionist forces’ ethnic cleansing campaigns in 1948, he noted that, in contrast to the Palestinian indoctrination of hate, “The first word that every Israeli child is taught in school is shalom, peace. I know that when peace is a word that is taught to every child in Gaza and the West Bank, then peace will be around the corner” (Shariv 2009). What the consul was asking his readers to believe was that Holocaust education would end the regional conflict, though he did not provide details, nor give any indication of agreeing with the proposition that ending the occupation would be part of a just peace. A transcultural analysis that attends to the material conditions of the conflict might observe that the consul was in fact arguing, or hoping, that Palestinians renounce their national claims, consent to the annexation of the West Bank and subservience within Israel, or even leave Palestine, once they understand the Jewish Holocaust experience, and that the consequent claim of Jews, as the universal victim, trump those of the aggressor, the Palestinian. This is memory invoked to deny the history and humanity of Palestinian victims in Gaza and else-

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where. Given this agenda, who could be surprised that Palestinians are wary of Holocaust education? Not that I think that learning about the Holocaust is a bad idea for Palestinians – or indeed anyone. I don’t. But in this mode, it represents the far end of the banalization-sacred spectrum mentioned by Michael Rothberg, perhaps even joining both ends. The transcultural analysis would continue by challenging the consul’s lazy culturalist assumption that hasbara – simply changing narratives – will resolve major geopolitical and national conflicts. Instead, one might study the production of memory in the subject’s body and how this body is affected by its material conditions, whether those of war, occupation, exile, rape or incarceration. Powerful affects are experienced in all these cases, and the psychological literature tells us how they are literally inscribed into the brains and mental processes of its victims.² Resistance and revenge narratives are the ineluctable cultural responses to these experiences, constructed to invest the exiled or occupied subject with the dignity that his and her humiliating material conditions have stripped from them.³ It is hard to see realization of transcultural memory’s ethical potential while those conditions obtain. Just as hard is it to see the transformation of those conditions when its masters feel terrorized by history, a legacy of previous trauma whose effects are transmitted through the generations in stories of suffering that convince them that they are actually victims, or potential victims, vulnerable to the same fate as their ancestors. Analysing paranoia and the cultural sources of its self-automatization belongs to a material analysis as well. Michael Rothberg: Dirk Moses has advanced this dialogue on transcultural memory in important ways. On the one hand, he has deepened our reflections on the ethics, politics, and analysis of acts of memory. On the other hand, he has supplemented our discussion of one geo-political hotspot – the Eastern European “bloodlands” – with another unavoidable and even more tension-filled site: the Middle East. As his contribution demonstrates, a theory of transcultural memory has the greatest chance of developing when dialogue is established between methodological questions and case studies of cultural exchange and conflict. Let me start with the methodological question of the relation between analysis, activism and the politics of memory. Dirk Moses usefully distinguishes different social arenas in which struggles over the past play out – from educational institutions such as the university and the school to the more properly political 2 I briefly discuss the literature in “Genocide and the Terror of History” (2011, 90–108). 3 Exemplary is Ghassan Hage, “‘Comes a Time We Are All Enthusiasm’: Understanding Palestinian Suicide Bombers in Times of Exighophobia” (2003, 65–89).

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realm of diplomacy and on to the trauma-marked bodies of victims of extreme violence. Such distinctions are necessary both for understanding the dynamics of memory and for preserving a space of critique outside immediate ideological demands. Yet I would also emphasize the permeability of these different realms to each other: conflicts over the ethics and politics of memory often take place in the interstices of various public and private spaces. In particular, I would point to the intertwined production of knowledge and memory about the past by activists and scholars. Academics can also be activists, while activists outside the academy often contribute insight into events that have remained taboo among more institutionally bound scholars. The most powerful example of the former type would be the late Edward Said, not only a paradigm-changing literary and cultural historian, but someone who worked tirelessly to reshape the public narratives about the Palestinian past and present and who had a distinctly transcultural approach to the intersecting memories of all the players in the Middle East conflict. The French activist-scholar Jean-Luc Einaudi would provide an example of the second type; his basic research on the 17 October 1961 massacre of peacefully demonstrating Algerians in Paris not only preceded academic scholarship on this “forgotten” event, but has also helped stimulate the public, transnational and transcultural memory work around October 17.⁴ This transcultural and “transdisciplinary” bleeding into each other of different realms was especially dramatic during Einaudi’s powerful testimony about the 1961 massacre of Algerians at Maurice Papon’s trial for crimes against humanity pertaining to the Nazi genocide of European Jews. I am certain that Dirk Moses would agree with me about the transit between different realms of memory work, but there still may be a slight difference in emphasis here between the two of us because of disciplinary assumptions about the relation between memory and history. That is, as a historian, he emphasizes the power of empirical historical research to interrupt nationalist narratives and check the memory manipulation of overt ideologues, although in a recent article he has speculated on the reasons for resistance to this mode of reality checking in the Middle Eastern case (Moses 2011, 106–108). Coming from literary and cultural studies, where there is a greater skepticism about the status of empiricist claims, I am less likely to see a clean break between memory and history, and I am rather less sanguine that humanist scholars are always quite so objective and distanced as he implies. We all know about the university positions held, for instance, by perpetrators of recent atrocities in the Balkans. But even beyond such dramatic cases, ideology – say, neoliberal ideology – shapes scholarship in

4 See, among other works, Jean-Luc Einaudi, La bataille de Paris: 17 octobre 1961 (1991).

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more banal ways every day as well. Even here, however, I suspect we are largely in agreement. I would readily admit, for instance, that an important part of Einaudi’s intervention with respect to the October 17 massacre was his uncovering of hard facts about the past, while Dirk Moses ends his last remarks with the very astute suggestion – which is indeed central to his own work – that psychological states and cultural contexts shape actions in the present as well as practices of remembrance. Discussion of the subjective and objective conditions of memory brings us back around to the question of conflict and the possibilities of transcultural memory. On the topic of Holocaust memory and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I think we have another case of a large degree of overlap and a divergence of emphasis. Dirk Moses’s example of the consul general’s offensive attempt to instrumentalize memory of the Shoah is a powerful one, and I can only concur with his analysis of its implications. At the same time, and despite the existence of many more such outrages (really, on all sides), I maintain a degree of optimism about the possibilities that transcultural memory practices can offer, even for seemingly unresolvable conflicts such as the one in the Middle East. I think of Edward Said’s writings about the “bases of coexistence” in overlapping narratives of remembrance by Jews and Palestinians, or the photography/video work of the Israeli-British artist Alan Schechner that establishes solidarity between iconic victims of the Holocaust and Israeli occupation.⁵ My point could also be put in slightly less rosy terms, though, closer to those of Dirk Moses: I don’t see how we can have any optimism about the situation in the Middle East at all without a belief that some form of transcultural exchange – including, but not limited to exchange about the past – can evolve between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians living under occupation as well as in Israel and the diaspora. To be sure, such an evolution has to be accompanied – or, more likely, preceded – by radical change in the basic political conditions of Palestinian life, by an end to the occupation and blockade. Ultimate reconciliation will only be possible, however, when cultural change joins political transformation – and cultural change will have to include a painful, but unavoidable transcultural memory work. This is true for other hotspots of remembrance, too, such as Turkey, where

5 On Schechner and Said, see my attempt to work out a transcultural ethics of memory in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory” (2011, 523–48). A comparison between this essay and Dirk Moses’s “Genocide and the Terror of History” (2011) provides an illuminating picture of the commonalities and differences of emphasis in our approaches to transcultural memory. Both of these essays were presented as lectures at the ‘Transcultural Memory’ conference organized by Lucy Bond, Rick Crownshaw and Jessica Rapson in London in February 2010.

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rabid genocide denial continues, while, simultaneously, tens of thousands of citizens march in memory of an assassinated Armenian-Turkish journalist and carry signs that read “We are all Hrant Dink. We are all Armenians”.⁶ Such a dynamic of denial, conflict and solidarity represents the current dialectic of transcultural memory. This volume helps us make our way through the contradictions, constraints, and possibilities of the transcultural turn.

References Arsu, Sebnem. “Thousands in Turkey Protest Verdict in Journalist’s Murder.” New York Times, 19 January 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/world/europe/in turkeythousands-protest-verdict-in-journalists-murder.html. Einaudi, Jean-Luc. La Bataille de Paris: 17 Octobre 1961. Paris: Seuil, 1991. Erll, Astrid. “Travelling Memory.” Parallax 17.4 (2011a): 4–18. Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011b. Hage, Ghassan. “‘Comes a Time We Are All Enthusiasm’: Understanding Palestinian Suicide Bombers in Times of Exighophobia.” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 65–89. Moses, A. Dirk. “Genocide and the Terror of History.” Parallax 17.4 (2011): 90–108. Olick, Jeffrey, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy. The Collective Memory Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Rothberg, Michael. “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory.” Criticism 53.4 (2011): 523–48. Shariv, Asaf. “Education, Not Settlements, is the Key to Peace.” The Jewish Week 21 October 2009. http://www.israelpolitik.org/2009/10/22/the-key-to-peace-education. Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe between Stalin and Hitler. London: The Bodley Head, 2010. Todorov, Tzvetan. Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

6 See Sebnem Arsu, “Thousands in Turkey Protest Verdict in Journalist’s Murder” (2012).

Peter Carrier and Kobi Kabalek

Cultural Memory and Transcultural Memory – a Conceptual Analysis In light of the essentially contested character not only of the concepts of “memory” and “culture,” but also of “cultural memory” and “memory culture,” this chapter explores current uses of these terms as the foundation of, and in order to respond to the additional challenge of understanding, what we mean by “transcultural memory.” The meaning of this tripartite concept does not lie in the term itself, of course. We adopt a pragmatic approach to the actual language of memory in use, not an ontological enquiry into what memory actually is or should be. The first two parts of this chapter illustrate the conceptual tensions and inconsistencies within and between studies referring to “memory,” “culture” and “cultural memory” or “memory culture” which have emerged in English and German-speaking scholarship. The final part of the chapter explores terminology of transculturation currently in use in the fields of heritage studies, political science, history and sociology, and suggests that the burgeoning field of transcultural memory studies stands to benefit by acknowledging some of the methods and terms used in these fields. The chapter concludes by defending a phenomenological approach to transcultural memory studies by placing emphasis on subjectivity and transformation rather than on memory as a tool of state politics. As such, this chapter should be read as a plea for the conceptual fortification of transcultural memory studies as a field of study in its own right. The proliferation of works about memory since the 1970s, the multiple disciplines of those working in this field, their different languages and variant vocabularies, as well as conceptual combinations, may confuse those who approach this field, and even hinder communication between established memory specialists. Is it possible to agree upon a common analytical language of memory? This essay proposes a theoretical stocktaking, a contribution to an intellectual history of “memory,” “cultural memory” and its more recent variant “transcultural memory.” Since the plural and ambiguous character of both “memory” and “culture” is compounded when these terms are lumped together, each section will summarise the meanings ascribed to these terms on the basis of the actual usage of each concept in specific cases.

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1 Memory The meanings of “memory” currently in circulation are based on four assumptions regarding the relation of memory to reality, location, essence and to other concepts. 1. The first assumption, which occurs both in academic and non-academic contexts, refers to the way in which memory relates to the past and to reality in general. One approach sees memory as a general reference to “the capacity for conserving certain information,” (Le Goff 1992, 51) which evokes the possibility of accurately storing and perpetuating (a more or less “objective”) reality. This first meaning often draws on techniques and technologies of storing information (from the writing block to the computer) as metaphors for human recollections (see Assmann 1999 and Draaisma 2000). A second meaning approaches memory entirely differently, as a highly subjective, elusive, and (intentionally or unintentionally) distorted description of lost times. According to this second interpretation, memory often refers more to people’s needs at a specific moment in the present rather than to the past itself.¹ 2. An additional and perhaps more significant distinction is that of the location of memory and who (or what) remembers. One approach focuses on the human brain (or the body in general) as the only thing capable of remembering. Another approach emphasises the dependence of human memory on interpersonal exchanges and on cultural artefacts that are external to humans, and located in their environment (these include memorials, films and commemorative rituals).² Students of memory from a variety of disciplines tend, in general, to follow the second interactive, or social, path elaborated by Maurice Halbwachs in his studies on collective memory. According to Halbwachs, “It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society they recall, recognise, and localise their memories” (Halbwachs 1992, 38). The sociologist Jeffrey Olick makes a further, yet related, distinction regarding the starting point of the individual’s interaction with his or her environment, and thus distinguishes between studies that focus on the individual (where he talks of “collected memory studies”), and those that explore mnemonic technologies located outside of the human brain (where he refers to “collective memory studies”), which include monuments, memoirs, films and rituals (Olick 1999 (b)). 3. An increasing number of scholars who lay claim to the social and interactive characteristics of “memory” speak about it as a process. As a result, James

1 For a critique of a purely “presentist” approach see Olick 1999 (a) and Schwartz 2000. 2 Kerwin Klein refers to this phenomenon as “structural memory” (Klein 2000).

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Wertsch recommends that we use the word “remembering,” which implies an activity, instead of “memory,” which suggests speaking of an entity. Wertsch defines “remembering” as “a form of mediated action, which entails the involvement of active agents and cultural tools. It is not something done by an isolated agent, but it is also not something that is somehow carried out solely by a cultural tool. Both must be involved in an irreducible tension” (Wertsch 2002, 13). Nevertheless, the focus on “collective memory” (in Olick’s terminology) or on what Wertsch calls “cultural tools” sometimes causes scholars to treat literary texts, monuments, or rituals as “memories” instead of seeing them as articulations of a mediation between humans and “cultural tools.” Susannah Radstone thus writes that, Personal memory may be silently experienced, or it may be articulated through speech as well as through any number of written forms, including diary, memoir, autobiography or poetry. Personal memory may prompt the making of films, videos, or multimedia productions. It may inspire paintings, sculptures or music. It perhaps needs saying that none of these forms and genres are, in any simple or straightforward way, “memory.” An autobiographical narrative is not, that is, “memory” (Radstone 2005, 135–136).

Olick also criticises studies which speak about the collective frame itself as an entity or a “thing.” “Collective memory is something – or rather many things – we do, not something – or many things – we have.”³ In particular, many studies tend to treat “memory” as a big brain or other type of storage site, as in the case of Michael Schudson’s Watergate in American Memory, which presents “American memory” as a kind of box or container in which the memories of the Watergate Affair are merely a few among many other “items” (Schudson 1992). And, indeed, it is not unusual to hear in conferences about memory remarks about “how big” a specific “memory” is supposed to be. The third assumption deals with the so-called “essence” of memory and whether it refers to mediation, to a single object or entity, or even to a collective “thing” or container. The different approaches to and uses of “memory” that we have surveyed so far illustrate multiple understandings of the concept and the problems that may occur when employing it without clearly defining what one means. 4. The fourth use of the term “memory” is made by authors concerned that this field is a popular fad that will eventually be abandoned.⁴ Some critical 3 In this sense Olick speaks of “mnemonic practices and products” rather than of “memories” (Olick 2010, 159). 4 Gavriel Rosenfeld has recently argued that “memory” emerged from specific historical circumstances and might therefore disappear once these have come to an end. See Rosenfeld 2009.

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authors argue that memory needlessly replaces older analytical concepts rather than providing new interpretative insights (see Gedi and Elam 1996). Indeed, in many cases, “memory” – (qualified with the adjectives “national,” “historical,” “popular,” and “public”) leads, in the words of Wulf Kansteiner, to a “terminological diversity [which] obscures the fact that the majority of contributions to the field of memory studies continues research agendas that used to sail under separate colours” (Kantsteiner 2002, 182). Referring to the use of the memory term in recent anthropological research, David Berliner similarly warns against applying the concept too broadly, arguing that, nowadays, every little trace of the “past in the present” is designated as memory. […] Memory is not seen as a set of representations of events and experiences that are shared, but as the way lasting traces of the past persist within us, of the transmission and persistence of cultural elements through the generations. Memory is not these series of recalled mental images, but a synonym for cultural storage of the past: it is the reproduction of the past in the present, this accumulated past which acts on us and makes us act (Berliner 2005, 201).

Instead of understanding memory as culture, Berliner focuses on memory as an individual capacity. Whether or not we accept Berliner’s understanding of memory, which focuses on human “memory” as the only valid remembering agent (an approach discussed in the second point, above), he convincingly claims that “memory gradually becomes everything which is transmitted across generations, everything stored in culture,” such that memory is indistinguishable from the concept of culture itself (Berliner 2005, 202f). A similar idea is implied by Heidemarie Uhl, who talks of “memory as culture” (2008, 60). While there is no doubt that mnemonic processes play a significant role in the creation of cultural artefacts and patterns, there seems to be little analytical benefit in equating the two.

2 Culture The concept of “culture” has not only become a central concept in the humanities and social sciences, but has also undergone many transitions in its long history. Its current usage contains and expresses a great deal of contradicting notions and interpretations.⁵ “Culture” can be both evaluative and descriptive, designate

5 For the changing and often contradicting meanings of “culture” as a concept and idea see Eagleton 2000 and Vaughan 2011.

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either an activity or an identity, and address different “portions” of human life, referring either to “a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development,” “a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general,” or “the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity” (Williams 1983, 90). We would like to focus here on how “culture” has been employed in scholarly works over the last few decades, following the useful analysis of the historian William Sewell. According to Sewell, there are two basic definitions of “culture.” “In one meaning, culture […] is always contrasted to some other equally abstract aspect or category of social life that is not culture – for example, to economics, politics, or biology” (Sewell 2005, 156). According to the second meaning identified by Sewell, culture encompasses all aspects of human life, and “stands for a concrete and bounded world of beliefs and practices. Culture in this sense is assumed to belong to or be isomorphic with a ‘society’ or with some clearly identifiable subsocietal group. […] The contrast in this usage is not between culture and not-culture but between one culture and another” (Sewell 2005, 156). Sewell’s distinction raises questions regarding the relation between “culture” and other analytical categories, the most important of which is undoubtedly “society.” Thus, while Sewell’s first definition of “culture” may be used to distinguish it from “society” and “the social,” his second definition suggests that “culture” can be treated as something which is indistinguishable from “society.”⁶ Scholars thus use the term “social memory” to refer to something which is either different from or identical with “cultural memory,” depending on their understanding of the concept of “culture.” This understanding becomes even more elusive when one considers that scholars make use of both meanings of “culture” or “cultural,” according to what situation and issue they address. Thus one can speak of “other cultures” or societies and emphasise the differences (or similarities) between, for example, Hungary and Saudi Arabia, then in the next sentence refer to cultural elements within one of these countries and contrast them to social phenomena. Keeping this unstable potential of “culture” in mind, let us now focus on the relation between “memory” and “culture.” 6 Furthermore, as Gavin Walker shows, the relation between “culture” and “society” also depends on one’s disciplinary orientation: “A typical conception within cultural anthropology divides culture into three sectors, here termed ‘material culture,‘ ‘ideal culture’ and ‘social culture’ […]. The first two roughly correspond in social sciences terms to technology and ideology respectively. ‘Social culture’ corresponds to society; in practice, ‘society’ is commonly preferred. In the social sciences, however, ‘culture’ is roughly synonymous with ‘ideology.’ Thus there arises a confusing situation, whereby society lies within and is subordinate to culture in the cultural sciences, while culture lies within and is subordinate to society in the social sciences” (Walker 2001, 32). Walker also points to the existence of “national traditions” in the use of these concepts.

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3 Cultural Memory How can we combine the concepts “memory” and “culture” meaningfully? If they are so similar, what do they mean when we use them together? Or are they interchangeable? This much quoted term reflects the academic craft of apposition, of finding meaningful grammatical structures combining two concepts upon which the academic community of specialists of memory studies can more or less agree. At present, they seem not to agree. For some, such as Marea Teski and Jacob Climo, “memory” is the way in which culture is preserved; for others, such as Jeannette Mageo, “memory is a site of transit between cultures” (Teski and Climo 1995; Mageo 2001a, 3). In this section we would like to examine uses of the terms “cultural memory” and “memory culture,” and ask whether their meanings depend on the language and country of origin of the texts. By and large, memory study specialists understand their work as both interdisciplinary and transnational, especially since the flow of ideas is facilitated (more or less) by academic English as a lingua franca, by translations, and by the movement of people between different academic environments. However, while national borders do not hinder transcultural interaction between disciplines and languages, there seems to be, in at least one context, a particular national culture of cultural memory. In Germany, Jan and Aleida Assmann’s writings on memory have become canonised texts to which many memory study specialists turn. While their work owes much to nonGerman scholars such as Maurice Halbwachs and Jan Vansina, and their theory gradually extends its influence beyond Germany, its impact on German language scholarship is unprecedented. But is it really so different from non-German theories? Let us first summarise the Assmanns’ assumptions regarding “culture” and “memory.” In an article originally published in 1988, which appeared in English in 1995 (Assmann 1988; Assmann 1995), Jan Assmann speaks of “cultural memory” (kulturelles Gedächtnis) as “a collective concept for all knowledge that directs behaviour and experience in the interactive framework of a society and one that is obtained through generations in repeated societal practice and initiation” (Assmann 1995, 126; our italics, translation modified). The shortcoming of this definition, as Berliner has pointed out, is that “cultural memory” is considered to be synonymous with “tradition” or “culture” (in Sewell’s second meaning of the latter), and functions as if it were the “brain” of a society (as if, like the human brain, it directs behaviour and relates to a learning process). Jan Assmann gives a further definition of “cultural memory,” however, one that defines it by negation. He says that “cultural memory” is, by definition, not science and not what he and Aleida Assmann call “communicative memory.” They define “communi-

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cative memory” as something which lacks “cultural characteristics” and which is “based exclusively on everyday communications,” and characterised by relative “formlessness” and flexibility, as well as temporal proximity to the events remembered. They speak here of three generations (a period of about eighty years, that is, the lifespan of “witnesses” who share their experiences with others) as the carriers of this short-term memory. Unlike communicative memory, “cultural memory is characterised by its distance from the everyday.” It has fixed points that establish its endurance over time, and is “maintained through cultural formation (texts, rites, monuments) and institutional commemoration (recitation, practice, observance)” (Assmann 1995, 129). As one can see, one of the pillars of the Assmanns’ theory is the distinction between different “carriers of memory,” that is, the media and communication forms through which images of the past are transferred.⁷ Yet for them, “cultural memory” does not apply to “cultural tools” as referred to by Wertsch (the elements and objects external to the human body that participate in forming personal recollections), but to the collective level alone. Their aim is to relate “memory (the contemporised past), culture, and the group (society) – to each other” (Assmann 1995, 129). This basic point about the mutual configuration of identities and memories of groups is not new or unique to the Assmanns’ theory, of course (see Gillis 1994). But what seems to be unique is the insistence that “cultural memory” is relevant only when it serves the needs of the group. For the Assmanns, the claim to belong is what marks the boundaries of “cultural memory.” “Cultural memory reaches back into the past, only so far as the past can be reclaimed as ‘ours’” (Assmann 2010, 113). Here, therefore, cultural memory does not refer to “all knowledge that directs behaviour and experience,” as initially argued by Jan Assmann.⁸ Rather, as Ulrike Jureit has recently argued, the Assmanns’ theory sees in culture a kind of “identity system of the group” that may change with time but which is, in itself, a homogenous and almost biological entity (Jureit 2010). Therefore, whereas their initial distinction between communicative and cultural memory defines the former as something that lacks “cultural characteristics” (and thus refers to Sewell’s first definition of culture, which contrasts it to other aspects of social life) their theory emphasises “culture” and “the cultural” as identity and thus as something that is different from other cultures (which in

7 The media focus is apparent in an early joint article by the Assmanns. See Assmann and Assmann 1988. 8 Compare Jan Assmann’s initial statement to this one, from the same article: “Cultural memory preserves the store of knowledge from which a group derives an awareness of its unity and peculiarity” (Assmann 1995, 130).

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fact comes close to the second meaning ascribed by Sewell to culture).⁹ It is this focus on the second definition of culture and on “cultural identity” that makes “cultural memory” lose some of the “cultural characteristics” initially defined by the Assmanns. The Assmanns’ preference for identity over “cultural characteristics” in their theory of memory is also expressed in their definition of “memory culture” (Erinnerungskultur), another influential concept which is associated with their work.¹⁰ Jan Assmann defines a memory culture as “compliance with a social commitment. It refers to the group [and] to the question ‘what mustn’t we forget?’ In a more or less explicit way, and a more or less central way, each group has such a question” (Assmann 1997, 30). The focus here lies on the commitment to memory and what people, as a group and/or culture, assume to be its central elements. This focus is also apparent when we turn to the use of the concept in various studies and public media. In his survey of its usage, Christoph Cornelißen offers a very broad definition of memory culture, which he understands to be a “superordinate concept (Oberbegriff) for all thinkable forms of conscious memory of historical events, people and processes, whether they are aesthetic, political, or cognitive in nature” (Cornelißen 2003, 555).¹¹ This very broad definition adheres to Sewell’s second definition of culture, and appears to derive from Cornelißen’s attempt to find a concept which encompasses all sources and phenomena concerning memory on a national level.¹² It is somewhat remarkable that the Assmanns’ use of concepts is inconsistent. In their first articles and books on the topic, Aleida and Jan Assmann use Halbwachs’ concept of “collective memory” as a starting point, but then break it down into two modes or ways of remembering, defined as “communicative memory” 9 This model emphasises the stability and endurance of “cultural memory” (locating it far from the ever changing flow of everyday interactions) and thus enables one to assume the existence of a stable identity and “culture.” This interpretation was no doubt influenced by Jan Assmann’s work on the sources of ancient societies such as Egypt and early Judaism, as well as on Aleida Assmann’s work with canonised literary texts (in all of which the endurance of written texts is remarkable). See Assmann 1997 and Assmann 2006. Such a view, however, which provides a rather simple model to work with, restricts the attention to the contestation and negotiation that take place between various actors and depictions of the past, which have become commonly held assumptions among students of “memory” in examining modern societies. 10 On the linguistic assumptions behind the Assmanns’ choice of the German concepts of either Gedächtnis or Erinnerung, see Harth 2010. 11 For a critique of such a broad and vague concept, see Leonhard 2007. 12 Cornelißen has used the term in this way in several publications dedicated to the comparison of different national memory cultures. Aleida Assmann’s writings about “German memory” similarly indicate that “cultural memory” and “memory culture” refer to a national group. See Cornelißen et al. 2003; Cornelißen et al. 2005, and Assmann 2006.

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and “cultural memory” (Assmann 1997; Assmann 1995). In later works, however, both scholars add “collective memory” as a third, mediating category between the communicative and the cultural, and define it as something that refers to the “functional” and “bonding” contribution of the past towards the creation of collective identities (see Assmann and Frevert 1999; Assmann 2006). In a more recent publication, Jan Assmann breaks down Halbwachs’ original terminology into “communicative” and “cultural” components, while describing the former as something that expresses the social “level of memory,” while at the same time saying that “what Halbwachs called collective memory […] we propose to rename communicative memory” (Assmann 1995, 111). The reader is presented not only with a series of contradictions, but especially confusion. How is cultural memory defined and used outside of the German-speaking academic environment? Are its non-German meanings and usages any different? And is there a specifically German conceptualisation? These questions are open to debate. Many current English-language publications which deal with cultural memory are indebted to the work of the Assmanns, either explicitly or implicitly, while some German authors differ from them considerably. For example, a recent handbook of “cultural memory studies,” which is edited by two scholars from Germany, applies “cultural memory” as an umbrella concept that may include everything, everywhere. Astrid Erll, one of the editors, writes that, This handbook is based on a broad understanding of cultural memory, suggesting as a provisional definition “the interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts.” Such an understanding of the term allows for an inclusion of a broad spectrum of phenomena as possible objects of cultural memory studies – ranging from individual acts of remembering in a social context to group memory (of family, friends, veterans, etc.) to national memory with its “invented traditions,” and finally to the host of transnational lieux de mémoire such as the Holocaust and 9/11“ (Erll 2010, 2).

The editors then add, in what may be a gesture designed to demonstrate detachment from the Assmanns’ conceptualisation, that “cultural memory studies is not restricted to those ways of making sense of the past which are intentional and performed through narrative, and which go hand in hand with the construction of identities” (Erll 2010, 2). While the editors stress that what makes this new field distinct is its conceptual approach rather than its topics, such a definition throws doubt on the effectiveness of a very broad concept and of marking the boundaries of one’s investigation. It is not surprising, therefore, that the contributors to the volume (Jan and Aleida Assmann, for example) do not necessarily share the same broad definition. Moreover, in another book about “cultural memory studies,” Erll and Ann Rigney provide a more restricted depiction of “cultural memory.” They empha-

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sise that it facilitates interpersonal mediation via cultural artefacts (in a similar way as the “cultural tools” presented by Wertsch, and in line with Sewell’s first understanding of “culture”), and associate it more directly with the creation of communities (see Erll and Rigney 2009). Again, the term “cultural memory” is used inconsistently, as its meaning changes from one situation to another. Additional different understandings of “cultural memory” in English language publications thwart effective collaboration in the field. The literary scholar Mieke Bal, for instance, writes that, Cultural memory has become an important topic in the emergent field of cultural studies, where it has displaced and subsumed the discourses of individual (psychological) memory and of social memory. In other words, the term cultural memory signifies that memory can be understood as a cultural phenomenon as well as an individual or social one (Bal 1999, vii).¹³

Bal follows Sewell’s first definition of “culture.” Rather than ascribing to “cultural memory” an umbrella quality, she employs it to emphasise a certain aspect of people’s lives. Her use of the adjective “cultural” serves to expand the study of “memory” in a way that may not have been as widely acceptable thirteen years ago when she wrote the text.¹⁴ Before addressing the question of transcultural memory, we can draw some preliminary conclusions. First, almost all German-language definitions of “cultural memory” refer to two authors, Aleida and Jan Assmann, and defer to an “original” (in the sense of first and authoritative) definition. By contrast, Englishlanguage definitions are more diverse, and lack the reference to original authorship, unless they were referring to the Assmanns. Nevertheless, the Assmanns’ theory is not adopted uncritically, even in German publications, which also integrate the insights of other (often non-German) scholars. Furthermore, the understanding of “culture” in German publications did not invariably draw on a German tradition of Kultur, but combined it with insights derived from the socalled “cultural turn” which arose at around the same time as (or slightly before) the “memory turn.”¹⁵ This could also explain the tendency to link “memory” and 13 Bal has also edited a series with Stanford University Press called “cultural memory in the present.” In this series, devoted to “understanding the past as part of the present,” she gives a broader definition of the concept and the ethical, sociological, aesthetic and other topics dealt with in the series cannot be said to focus on mnemonic processes as such. 14 In the words of Susannah Radstone, “An emphasis on the cultural, public and social realms militates against the consignment of memory-related issues to the domains only of the private and the personal, emphasising, at the same time, that where memory is concerned, the personal is political.” See Radstone 2008, 33. 15 See Bachmann-Medick 2009. For such a combination of interpretation in the case of historical writing in German see Tschopp 2009.

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“culture” (both of which involve the study of symbols), and the general migration of scholars from disciplines whose work was mostly associated with “the social” to cultural analysis.¹⁶ Second, there exists what one could call a jargon of cultural memory, insofar as jargon involves “talking shop,” that is, using “technical terms, abbreviations and allusions rather than spelling everything out” (Burke 1995a, 13). New jargons are symptomatic products of new institutions (just as the conference at which this paper was delivered served to inaugurate the Centre for Cultural Memory in 2010) (see Burke 1995b, 25f), which, in order to avoid the stigmatisation of jargon, may provide expertise in and about terminology by acknowledging it and understanding its mechanisms. Third, both “memory” and “culture” are polysemous and essentially contested concepts and, when combined (as “memory culture” or “cultural memory”), multiply the complexity of these concepts fourfold; they systematically give rise to circumlocution, that is, scholars often have recourse to other (often metaphorical) words in order to explain what we mean by memory, culture, cultural memory and memory culture. Common examples of such circumlocution are the use of the metaphor of the “weight” of the past and of memory.¹⁷ Moreover, almost all authors conceive of cultural memory spatially and in terms of location. Pierre Nora talks of “sites” or “places” of memory. According to Aleida Assmann, cultural memory is to be “placed above communicative and collective memory” on a “higher level” (Assmann and Frevert 49; our italics). Furthermore, both in academic and non-academic contexts, scholars generally speak about “memory” rather than “remembering,” “often associating with it a place, in either the brain or in society, or locating it in and as an object rather than seeing it as a process, occurring through a variety of practices” (Olick 2007, 90–91). 16 On the connection of cultural analysis and the study of memory see Confino 1997. Confino, who views “memory” as the central category of cultural investigation nowadays, at least among historians, even argued recently that there has been a shift from “society” to “memory” over the last two decades. “The notion of society, broadly speaking, was based on a linear concept of history progressing along one temporal timeline and privileged social and economic topics interpreted in terms of their function and structure. The notion of memory, in contrast, is based on a multitemporal concept of history where past and present commingle and coalesce, capturing simultaneously different and opposing narratives and privileging topics of representation interpreted in terms of experience, negotiation, agency, and shifting relationship. ‘Memory’ now governs questions of historical interpretation, explanation, and method in such a way that it seems appropriate to speak of a paradigm shift in historical studies from ‘society’ to ‘memory’” (Confino 2005, 7). 17 Mageo, Epstein and Marie-Claire Lavabre say that the “past” has “weight,” while Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone say that memory itself has “weight.” See Lavabre 1994 and Hodgkin and Radstone 2003, 5.

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Fourth, users of the “cultural memory” concept generally proceed from the general to the particular, and therefore show deference, either to other people’s definitions, or to their own definition. It seems that we have two choices – either to take a ready-made concept off the shelf, or to redefine the concept anew for each new context in which we use it.

4 Transcultural Memory Gérard Bouchard has pointed out that works about transculturality traditionally address law and linguistics, but rarely the equally significant cultural sphere of memory (Bouchard 2011, 440). In light of the lack of explicit references to transcultural memory in existing literature about memory, this final section will explore how scholars working on the periphery of memory studies address transculturality. It will therefore suggest how scholars of memory, cultural memory, memory cultures and transcultural memory may benefit by drawing on research undertaken in the fields of living history, national identities, globalisation, and migration studies. After outlining existing definitions of transcultural memory, it will explore the understandings of transcultural memory implied in these neighbouring fields of study. For even works in those fields which do not directly address remembering may have a palpable influence on our understanding of transcultural memory formation. The thrust of our concluding argument will be to show that, in transcultural contexts, the study of memory brings into doubt the assumption that remembering and power are intrinsically connected, as often argued by political scientists and historians. It is precisely the semantic juxtaposition of memory and culture, where the latter is understood to be a closed and often homogeneous unity, which has led to the misapprehension of memory as an inherently useful thing. The “trans” in transcultural memory is therefore potentially subversive – both of cultures understood as containers or “bounded world[s]” (Sewell), and of the trend towards homogenisation often implied by the term “globalisation” (Mageo 2001, 11b).¹⁸ The most pressing question raised by the study of transcultural memory derives from the meanings ascribed to the prefix “trans.” Across, through and beyond whose remembrance does transcultural memory operate? In her study of inter- and intra-group memory, Jeannette Marie Mageo defines a series of pos-

18 In what follows we will use “remembering” or “remembrance” when referring to mnemonic processes, and “memory” when referring to cultural or transcultural approaches to studying these processes, or to the field of memory studies in general.

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sible groups, from “whole cultural groups,” “ethnic groups within a culture,” to “smaller collectivities” such as families (Mageo 2001, 11b). In most cases, however, theories of cultural memory omit any mention of the group doing the remembering. These studies assume that the group is clearly demarcated and that their readers know to which group the authors refer, or that the readers themselves belong to it. One can often deduce the nature of the group implied in these texts. A classical case is Pierre Nora’s “sites of memory,” in which clearly French (national) sites are treated, the choice of which goes back to a seminar held by Nora in Paris from the late 1970s, such that the choice of sites may be ascribed to this specific social gathering of academically educated students. The Assmanns, similarly, seem to be referring to readers generally, to knowers (Assmann and Assmann 1988, 26, 27) and to people who collectively recognise symbols of a given (unnamed) shared culture, which is generally assumed to correspond to a national socially constructed identity or “memory culture.”¹⁹ Most of these definitions of cultural memory are essentialistic. They define what cultural memory is per se, and assume that remembering both bonds people (as members of groups sharing common memories) and divides people (who belong to groups whose shared memories differ), depending on whether one belongs to the in-group or out-group. Founding myths, linear narratives and longevity (the sense that one has greater rights for having existed as a group longer than another group), for example, are the stock memorial foundation of an imbalance of power between “established” and stigmatised or “outsider” groups.²⁰ By contrast, a growing number of studies address processes in which internal cohesion coupled with external dissociation, brought about by groups’ usage of remembering, is undermined. These studies address transcultural memory in terms of intergroup negotiations about the past, but also people’s natural reluctance to face up to the ambiguities inherent in acts of remembrance which cannot be reduced to any single collective subject (see Mageo 2001b, 18ff). Several works discuss transcultural memory in general, in largely metaphorical and spatial terms. Patrick Crowley, for example, studies “intermediary spaces,” which he situates between high culture and everyday remembering (Crowley 2003, 161). Aleida Assmann refers to links between different historical units or “genealo-

19 Jan Assmann also refers to “ancient cultures” and religions as the frames of “cultural memory.” 20 In this case, the estrangement of the two groups cannot be explained in terms of differences between types of social belonging, such as ethnicity, gender, religion or class, or in terms of differences between levels of education or income, but only in terms of differences between repertoires of episodic and semantic memories characteristic of each community. See Carrier 2008.

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gies,” whereby cultural memory makes “historical genealogies” “permeable and open to experiences of strangeness” (Assmann and Frevert 1999, 51). Ric Knowles focuses on links between lived and non-lived memory, where cultural memory “bridges difference” and provides a “suture” between people and their representations of the past (Knowles 2008, 50f). However, the significance of transcultural memory does not lie in the definitions of its terminology, but in the practical studies of memory formation between, across and even beyond the boundaries of closed groups. We therefore conclude this essay with a summary of recent innovative understandings of transcultural memory recorded in scholarship about living history museums, national and supranational identities, and migration. The purpose of the first of these fields, “living history,” is to give people the opportunity to learn about the past on the basis of popular exhibitions in which living people generally dress up in period costume, and in which visitors can, if they wish, become involved by touching or working with exhibits. As such, their transcultural dimension is one between the past and the present as well as between different places. Huis Ten Bosch, a theme park recreating the Netherlands in Japan, for example, is not an authentic reproduction of a Dutch town, but a representation of an imagined Dutch town designed for local visitors, an “amalgamation” (Schlehe and Uike-Borman 2010, 71) of architecture and styles from both countries. The underlying principle of such exhibitions is to facilitate experiential understanding of past cultures on the basis of tactile and affective involvement. Although visitors’ activities, whether making objects or joining in make-believe battles, are play-acting, they nonetheless arouse a genuine sense of fear and threat, or else embarrassment among those who do not wish to enter into the staged, playful encounters with museum actors (see Schlehe 2010, 251 and 201). In such encounters, where the “trans” links the present and the past in time, and the here and there in space, it is assumed that visitors more easily retain information about the past as a result of sensual and experiential stimulation. Work in the fields of nationhood, national identities and globalisation place less emphasis on the transmission of knowledge about the past in the present day than on the uses to which the language and symbols of the past may be put in the interest of politically motivated groups’ attempts to assure authority. Classical works in this field are (in English-speaking scholarship) Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition, or (in French-speaking scholarship) Raoul Girardet’s Myths and Political Mythologies. The object of many studies of memory has likewise been the utility of the past to reinforce group cohesion on the basis of shared memorial symbols and language, and to lend legitimacy to state leadership both domestically and as a bargaining tool in international relations and between particular parties. By reproducing the political logic underlying the appeal to remembering as a legitimising factor of states and groups, this branch of memory studies

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largely belies transcultural memory. However, recent studies about the process of globalisation have accounted for a shift in models of power distribution from inequalities between the “core” and the “periphery” to a multipolar, temporary, and negotiable “network” which, moreover, is subject to constant change. In short, stable defined “places” are said to be giving way to evolving undefined “flows” of social formation (Saxena and Omoniyi 2010, 220), in which collective remembering may be less easily evoked as a useful tool for (usually national) groups which compete for legitimacy on the basis of either heroic or tragic past events. A number of recent studies have shown how public memorial symbols and commemorations, though they occupy physical places, in fact symbolise hybrid narratives about past events in which people’s ideas about and attachments to the past coalesce rather than diverge. Two studies in particular are worth quoting here, for they both conceive of transcultural memory in terms of a reconciliation of groups once (if not still, by some) considered to be distinct and even at odds. The first example of transcultural memory in symbolic practice concerns Mexican national folklore. Mary Lee Mulholland explains how the traditional mariachi, an ensemble of eight to twelve mestizio male performers, has come to embody an apparently authentic national myth in Mexico by means of a process of metonymy, whereby the mariachi are – though merely one aspect of Mexican folklore – perceived to symbolise Mexican national identity as a whole. So powerful is this symbol that it not only evokes the mestizio origins of the nation as a union of colonial European conquerors and indigenous conquered, but succeeds in employing this ambivalent myth itself as a unifying myth (Mulholland 2007, 252). The utility of mixedness or hybridity as a binding myth derives from the way in which it is effectively symbolised in the music and images of the mariachi and in the performance itself, in which performers and audience alike remember by reenacting if not reliving the sentiments of “pain and suffering” (Mulholland 2007, 256) ascribed to humble rural mestizio males. The second example of transcultural memory in practice is that of Polish Tatars who, claim Anna Cieslik and Maykel Verkuyten, sustain their hybrid heritage on the basis of parallel narrative modes. Polish Tatars pursue “discursive strategies” in order to “manage” religious, ethnic and national identities in the public sphere by emphasising “religious similarities rather than difference,” or “the contribution that Islamic religion and culture has made to Polish culture” (Cieslik and Verkuyten 2006, 81 & 88). Cieslik and Verkuyten explain the transcultural memory of Polish Tatars in terms of their capacity to accommodate inconsistent narrative strains, whereby factual narratives are sustained alongside mythical narratives without entailing contradiction. “In general, the Oriental story has a mythical and symbolic form, whereas the Polish story is historical and factual” (2006, 85–86). In practice, narratives referring to Poland are descriptive,

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contain a precise temporal and spatial dimension, and refer to precise sources, whereas narratives referring to Tatars or Islam contain poetic images and metaphors which are void of temporal and spatial precision. Hence the Tatars’ perceptions of themselves as simultaneously Tatar, Muslim and Polish are not inconsistent because “they are presented at different levels of reality” (2006, 87). The examples of both the mariachi and the Polish Tatars demonstrate the wealth of transcultural memory fostered by migration for both migrants themselves and members of the majority society to which they migrate. Both groups create out of the combination of two memorial cultures a third framework of memory or “intercultural inbetween-world” (Gemende 2002). In contrast to most studies in the fields of history and political science, therefore, studies about migration address subjectivities, that is, experiences of the past on the individual “micro level” (Welsch 1999) which occur within or are shared by small and/or large groups, the reflexivity of remembering subjects, the influence of different countries on people’s personal remembering, as well as the responses of majority societies towards large minorities of migrants, otherwise publicly subsumed under the banner of “integration.” Such subjectivities can be experienced in terms of dual allegiance, which Kwame Anthony Appiah calls “cosmopolitan patriotism” (Appiah 1997) and which are often coupled with alienation, as experienced by Turkish migrants in Germany who are named in public as “Germans” when in Turkey, and “Turks” when in Germany, or of “Harkis,” Algerian citizens who fought on the side of the French army during the Algerian war of independence and whose experiences of the war are given no or scant recognition in Algeria or in France, or of Jewish survivors after 1945, whose accounts of personal experiences were initially met with disbelief, both in Europe and in Israel. This individual approach to transcultural memory complements, and therefore defies categorisation merely in terms of groups or cultures. Examples of migration provide rich illustrations of what, in terms of transcultural memory, is a process of sharing knowledge of and experiences from the past via symbolic and narrative channels of communication. In her study of significant “memorable moments,” Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper demonstrates how shared experiences or stories may give rise to transcultural memory. However, since “memory-sharing” is not retroactive, but only prospective (2011, 146), DolffBonekämper claims that it is not possible for newcomers (in particular migrants) to join an existing “memory reference group” at will, for membership of the group requires the approval of existing members (2011, 143). However, new memorial reference groups may be formed in the present as stories and symbols are actively shared. She gives a personal example of the dissolution of the East German state in 1990, whose citizens were reluctant to accept the advice or even the support of sympathetic West Germans in favour of the preservation of memorial relics of

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the East German regime. In 1990, citizens of the German Democratic Republic (regardless of their personal wishes, which were not consulted by referendum) involuntarily became citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany. Likewise, citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany involuntarily became citizens of a territory which incorporated all former East Germans as fellow citizens. A similar situation arose in states which emerged in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and when new Soviet Socialist Republics such as Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgystan were created under Stalin’s nationalities policy from the 1920s onwards, when literacy programmes were introduced in order to foster particular national identities. It is for this reason that people migrated from central Asia in the 1920s in order not to become citizens of new nations while remaining in their home towns. According to Andrew Phillips and Paul James, mass migrations by those people who were unwilling to become subjects of constructed nations in central Asia of the 1930s “involved large numbers of people translocating themselves physically over large distances in order that they might remain psychologically in the same place” (Phillips and James 2001, 30). These examples of the dissolution of old and the creation of new states, or the redrawing of state boundaries, suggest that transcultural memory is subject to the willingness of the members of both groups to share memories. Boundary shifting and the dissolution and creation of states certainly reinforce the resolve to defend the privileges of established members and to sustain a familiar set of memorial references into the future (which may lead to the hardening and closing of the majority group). But are these not exceptional circumstances? Are established memorial frameworks or “memory cultures” really so exclusive, and is dual consent a condition for transcultural memory? As long as migration takes place either within or between nation-states, different people bearing different memorial references will interact and communicate each other’s memories, creating circumstances which are not only conducive to “intercultural in-between worlds,” but also to transculturation  – a process by which small or subordinate groups adopt memories of dominant groups and, in turn, whose memories impinge upon and transform those of the dominant group. In what way do these examples of intermediary worlds and transculturality or transculturation help us to understand and define transcultural memory? Although the pioneering work of Maurice Halbwachs has often been considered somewhat polemically as one which places excessive focus on individual remembering within groups, without considering the long term consistencies and inconsistencies of group remembrance over several generations²¹, it is pre21 This is the implication of Marc Bloch’s much quoted book review of Halbwachs’ The Social Frameworks of Memory (1925). See Bloch 1995.

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cisely the individual “micro level” approach of Halbwachs’ early work which provides a theoretical model for the assessment of the process by which transcultural memory arises. For Halbwachs’ main consideration is the temporal and spatial relativity of social reference groups within which, and the symbolic means by which, knowledge and experience is transmitted. He illustrates this with the example of a journey spent in the company of others in a train compartment. I have just returned from a journey and can recall very precisely the faces and the conversation of the people who were with me in the train, as well as all that happened during the journey. […] If they [the memories] remain fresh for a short period, this is because my companions and I formed a little society which survived beyond the moment of our separation until the moment when each of us were absorbed by other groups […] (Halbwachs 1994, 130f).

According to Halbwachs, such frameworks of memory formation are only partially stable, which individuals enter and leave, interacting with each other for a limited duration; they facilitate a symbolic exchange defined in terms of language, space and time; and they are subsequently subjected to a process of “updating” (in which the past is rendered present via a conscious act) and “reiteration” (in which successive recollections and commemorations give rise to memories not of an event, but “the memory of memory of sites and rituals”) (Namer 1987, 203f), and even “osmosis” (in which the memory of first-hand experiences merge with readings about the event) (Namer 1987, 144). Halbwachs thus provides us with a synchronic and diachronic model for the appraisal of transcultural memory via symbolic means of communication with identifiable social frameworks. The role of people’s approval or will in the transmission of knowledge and experience of the past is subordinate, for even if the travellers in Halbwachs’ train compartment – like the East and West German citizens who found themselves in the same state in 1990 – disagree in principle, even in disagreement some sort of transfer and mutual acknowledgement if not sharing of memories almost invariably takes place. The purpose of this study of recent developments in theory and terminology of “culture” and “memory” formation has been to clarify, on the basis of current scholarly writings, misunderstandings which often plague the three complex and contested notions of memory, culture and the intermediation implied by the “trans” in transcultural memory. By recognising that memory is not a thing but a process, and that culture is not a closed entity or container, but a “collection of reference points” (Namer 1994, 321), composed of “aspects” (Berg 2011, 8), and that social groups in different places and times may share “different constellations of the same elements” (Rüsen 2002, 342), one may hope that transcultural memory studies, given a firm theoretical basis and precise terminology, will be

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confirmed as a branch of memory studies which will enable us to better understand the mechanisms of memory formation beyond closed groups.

References Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” Critical Inquiry 23.3 (1997): 617–639. Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999. Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory. A History of Ideas about the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Assmann, Aleida. Der Lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006. Assmann, Aledia and Ute Frevert. Geschichtsvergessenheit, Geschichtsversessenheit. Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1999. Assmann, Jan. “Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität.” Kultur und Gedächtnis. Eds. Jan Assmann and Tonio Hölscher. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988. 9–19. Assmann, Jan. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65 (1995): 125–133. Assmann, Jan. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1997. Assmann, Jan. Religion and Cultural Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Assmann, Jan. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010. 109–118. Assmann, Aleida and Jan Assmann. “Schrift, Tradition und Kultur.“ Zwischen Festtag und Alltag. Zehn Beiträge zum Thema ‚Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit.“ Ed. Wolfgang Raible. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1988. 25–47. Bachmann-Medick, Doris. Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 2009. Bal, Mieke. “Introduction.” Acts of Memory. Cultural Recall in the Present. Ed. Mieke Bal. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999. vii-xviii. Berg, Wolfgang. “Transculturality.” Transcultural Areas. Wolfgang Berg. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011. 7–15. Berliner, David. “The Abuses of Memory. Reflections on the Memory Boom in Anthropology.” Anthropological Quarterly 78.1 (2005): 197–211. Bloch, Marc. “Mémoire collective, tradition et coutume.” (1925) Histoire et historiens. Ed. Etienne Bloch. Paris: Armand Colin, 1995. 191–199. Bouchard, Gérard. “Qu’est ce que l’interculturalisme?” Revue de droit de McGill 56.2 (2011): 395–468. Burke, Peter. “Introduction.” Languages and Jargons: Contributions to a Social History of Language. Ed. Peter Burke. Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995a. 1–21. Burke, Peter. “The Jargon of the Schools.” Languages and Jargons: Contributions to a Social History of Language. Ed. Peter Burke. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995b. 22–41.

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Jureit, Ulrike. “Opferidentifikation und Erlösungshoffnung. Beobachtungen im erinnerungspolitischen Rampenlicht.“ Gefühlte Opfer: Illusionen der Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Eds. Ulrike Jureit and Christian Schneider. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2010. 63–71. Kansteiner, Wulf. “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies.” History and Theory 41 (2002): 179–197. Klein, Kerwin Lee. “On the Emergence of ‘Memory’ in Historical Discourse.” Representations 69 (2000): 127–150. Knowles, Ric. “Performing Intercultural Memory in the Diasporic Present: The Case of Toronto.” Signatures of the Past: Cultural Memory in Contemporary Anglophone North American Drama. Eds. Marc Maufort and Caroline de Wagter. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008, 49–67. Lavabre, Marie-Claire. “Usages du Passé, Usages de la Mémoire.” Revue Française de Science Politique 3 (1994): 480–93. Leonhard, Nina. “Gedächtnis und Kultur – Anmerkungen zum Konzept der Erinnerungskulturen.” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung 8.3 (2007). http://www. qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/303 (4 July 2012). Le Goff, Jacques. History and Memory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Mageo, Jeannette Marie. “Introduction.” Cultural Memory. Reconfiguring History and Identity in the Postcolonial Pacific. Ed. Jeannette Marie Mageo. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001a. 1–10. Mageo, Jeannette Marie. “On Memory Genres: Tendencies in Cultural Remembering.” Cultural Memory. Reconfiguring History and Identity in the Postcolonial Pacific. Ed. Jeannette Marie Mageo. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001b. 11–33. Mulholland, Mary-Lee. “Mariachi, Myths and Mestizaje. Popular Culture and Mexican National Identity.” National Identities 9.3 (2007): 247–264. Namer, Gérard. Mémoire et société. Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1987. Namer, Gérard. “Postface.” Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925). Maurice Halbwachs. Paris: Albin Michel, 1994. 297–367. Olick, Jeffrey. “Genre Memories and Memory Genres. A Dialogical Analysis of May 8, 1945 Commemorations in the Federal Republic of Germany.” American Sociological Review 64.3 (1999a): 381–402. Olick, Jeffrey. “Collective Memory. The Two Cultures.” Sociological Theory 17.3 (1999b): 333–348. Olick, Jeffrey. “Figurations of Memory. A Process-Relational Methodology, Illustrated on the German Case.” The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility. New York: Routledge, 2007. 85–118. Olick, Jeffrey. “From Collective Memory to the Sociology of Mnemonic Practices and Products.” A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010. 151–161. Phillips, Andrew, and Paul James. “National Identity between Tradition and Reflexive Modernisation: The Contradictions of Central Asia.” National Identities 3.1 (2001): 23–35. Radstone, Susannah. “Reconceiving Binaries: The Limits of Memory.” History Workshop Journal 59 (2005): 134 150. Radstone, Susannah. “Memory Studies: For and Against.” Memory Studies 1.1 (2008): 31–39. Rosenfeld, Gavriel. “A Looming Crash or a Soft Landing? Forecasting the Future of the Memory ‘Industry’.” The Journal of Modern History 81 (2009): 122–158.

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Lucy Bond

Types of Transculturality: Narrative Frameworks and the Commemoration of 9/11 1 Introduction Building upon the work of James Young (1993), Paul Ricoeur (2004), and Astrid Erll (2009) among others, this chapter argues for an understanding of memory as an inherently narrative form. Erll suggests that narrative frameworks manifest a means of emplotting historical events, drawing upon “traditional and strongly conventionalized genres […] to provide familiar and meaningful patterns for experiences that would otherwise be hard to interpret” (Erll 2009, 148–9). However, it is my contention that these “genres” of memory may implicitly encode particular social or political values that become naturalized through repetition, highlighting the importance of remaining reflexive about the various frameworks through which memories are articulated. This chapter will argue that more attention needs to be paid to memory’s mediation by the narrative structures in which different versions of the past find expression. This is particularly the case in relation to commemorative practices that attempt to draw connections between events separated in time and/or space. Despite the undoubtedly ethical potential of many of the constellations of memory explored throughout this collection, I suggest that not all transcultural discourses are necessarily as “multidirectional” (Rothberg 2009) or “cosmopolitan” (Levy and Sznaider 2006) as they first appear.¹ Responding to such concerns, I consider the divergent ethical and political implications of three particular narrative modes, seeking to differentiate between analogical, typological, and allegorical forms of comparative memory. My case studies case studies are drawn from divergent discursive realms (literature, museal culture, political rhetoric), underlining the diversity of the discourses that contribute to the work of the memory in the public sphere. My discussion focuses upon trends relating to the commemoration of 11 September 2001 in American memorial culture over the past ten years. Whilst memories of 9/11 have taken disparate forms and served divergent agendas since 2001, the commemoration of the attacks has been dominated by certain narrative frameworks with established prominence in the American public sphere; these frames emplot the events of September 11 within a particular series of tropes and

1 See the Introduction for a detailed definition of these seminal concepts.

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cultural conventions.² Erll contends that memory is often premediated in this fashion, arguing that, as “existent media which circulate in a given society provide schemata for new experience and its representation”, what is known about an event “seems to refer not so much to what one might cautiously call the ‘actual event’, but instead to a canon of existent medial constructions, to the narratives, images and myths circulating in a memory culture” (Erll 2009, 111). It is my contention that, articulated within transdiscursive (one might argue, transcendental) representational paradigms, the differences between memory texts can be easily disguised, producing what appear to be memorial master-narratives. Thus, whilst individual representations of the events may not necessarily be hegemonic (or at least, not produced with hegemonic intentions), the frameworks by which they are shaped often are. Without sufficient reflexivity, certain commemorative paradigms become self-referential through their apparent recourse to other times and places, transforming multidirectionality into unidirectionality, difference into sameness, and empathy into solipsism, as a superficial transculturality is conscripted as a foil for resurgent nationalism.

2 Analogical memory after 9/11 This first section considers the particular attributes of analogical memory.³ In his dialogue with Michael Rothberg (in the “Foreword” to this collection), A. Dirk Moses argues that, for better or for worse “[t]raumatic memory is necessarily analogical: we did not just suffer; we suffered like this or that, or we suffered more than or differently from them. Even claims to unique suffering are implicitly comparative, that is, transcultural […w]ithout analogues, it is difficult to successfully bid for recognition, because the common sense of a public sphere will ascribe significance to certain types of suffering and not to others” (Moses 2014, 39). Moses highlights the more problematic dimensions of comparative memory in both theory and practice: firstly pointing towards the persistence of the competitive zero-sum logic that Rothberg’s concept of multidirectionality aims to oppose; secondly, identifying the implicit power dynamics at work even (or perhaps, especially) within comparative approaches to memory.

2 In its attention to such matters, this project is undoubtedly indebted to Hayden White’s (1975 and 1987) seminal discussion of historiography. White’s analysis of history as the “content” of a particular “form” informs my interest in the mediating effects of narrative frameworks. 3 This section reworks material previously published in a longer article in a special edition of the journal Culture, Theory and Critique entitled “Crossroads of Memory”. See Bond (2012).

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In his analysis of the (mis)use of historical analogy in Stalinist Russia, Jay Bergman comments: the misuse of historical analogy, at least in the West, may be an unfortunate consequence of the tendency of Western Civilization, traceable ultimately to its origins in Judaism and Christianity, to consider history a linear and meaningful process in which historical events are thought to be appropriate for analogies with others by virtue of their all being part of a larger and unifying development or design (Bergman 1987, 98).

Bergman suggests that through its articulation in analogical frameworks, memory is oriented in a teleological direction that assumes a futural and eternalizing aspect. In this sense, the temporality adopted by analogy may be read as peculiarly ahistorical, angled towards equating rather than differentiating discrete occurrences. Furthermore, Bergman contends, “historical analogies, especially inappropriate ones, can often obscure more than they clarify, particularly when the object of one’s analysis […] proves to be far more rooted in a nation’s history and culture than any transnational comparison or analogy might suggest” (Bergman 1987, 73). Bergman’s comments imply that analogy’s apparent multidirectionality may in fact conceal a unidirectional bent, which transforms attention to the Other to a consideration (most often, an affirmation) of the self. More worryingly, the deployment of such narratives in American memorial culture after 9/11 suggests that, in particular contexts, articulation in analogical frameworks may serve to translate comparative memory to competitive memory. Moses critiques such discourses for assuming a “phallic” relation to traumatic loss, arguing: [i]n the wake of the so-called “war on terror” after 11  September 2001 in particular, the debate about empire, colony, and genocide is marked by a phallic logic. Commentators shout, “my trauma is bigger than yours” in order to defend or attack the theodicy that the brutal extermination and disappearance of peoples is redeemed by human progress in the form of the Western dominated global system of nation-states (Moses 2008, 6).

Such claims form an integral part of the phenomenon Terri Tomsky describes as the “trauma economy”. Noting trauma’s use “as [a] transcultural capital and commodity” (Tomsky 2011, 53), Tomsky defines the trauma economy as “a circuit of movement and exchange where traumatic memories ‘travel’ and are valued and revalued along the way” (Tomsky 2011, 49), mediated by “economic, cultural, discursive and political structures that guide, enable and ultimately institutionalize the representation, travel and attention to certain traumas” (Tomsky 2011, 53). Established as “the primary archetypal topic in memory studies” (Rothberg and Craps 2011, 517), the Holocaust has long occupied a dominant position in the

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Western trauma economy, as exemplified by the analogies deployed by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.⁴ In an address to Congress on September 20th, 2001, George W. Bush declared al Qaeda to be “the heirs […] of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism” (Bush 2001c). Such comparisons would repeatedly be used to frame the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the following years. Bush’s analogy was recycled by then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, in a 2002 interview given to Fox News in justification of the government’s policy of pre-emptive warfare. Rumsfeld remarked: Think of the prelude to World War II. Think of all the countries that said, well, we don’t have enough evidence. I mean, ‘Mein Kampf’ had been written. Hitler had indicated what he intended to do. Maybe he won’t attack us. Maybe he won’t do this or that. Well, there were millions of people dead because of the miscalculations. (Borger and Norton-Taylor 2002).

Other members of the administration advanced this discourse in more personal terms. Highlighting the loss of his extended family under the Nazis, Paul Wolfowitz, commented, “the failure to confront Hitler was largely from fear of what the consequences would be, and that lead to greater consequences” (in Ricks 2003). Discussing the US’s rejection of a second UN resolution on military action in Iraq, Under Secretary of Defense, Douglas Feith asserted: I took all these nice sounding ideas and compared it to my own little personal ‘cogito, ergo sum,’ which was that my family got wiped out by Hitler, and all this stuff about working things out – well, talking to Hitler to resolve the problem didn’t make any sense to me. The kind of people who put bumper stickers on their car that declare that ‘war is not the answer,’ are they making a serious comment? […] What’s the answer to the Holocaust? The surprising thing is not that there are so many Jews who are neocons but that there are so many who are not (in Goldberg 2005).

Such comparisons focus attention upon American innocence by analogising the nation with the image of exceptional victimhood (the Holocaust victim), relatedly depicting America’s political enemies in the guise of history’s most exemplary evil (Hitler and the Nazi regime). Thus, rather than seeking empathic affinities across time and space in the manner outlined by Rothberg et al, such analogies work to reaffirm the image of the United States as a historically exceptional nation, naturalising military action as a moral imperative.

4 The use of the Holocaust as an analogy for current events in American foreign policy has a long history of cultural antecedents. See Desch (2010) and Bond (2012).

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Whilst the above comments represent a particularly politicised mobilisation of analogical memory, equations between 9/11 and the Holocaust have recurred throughout American memorial culture over the last ten years, albeit motivated by less overtly ideologized concerns. Memorial museums tend to draw heavily upon practices of analogy, illustrating the current relevance of their subject through reference to other atrocities.⁵ Although many institutions deploy such techniques to ethical and informative effect, some practitioners have perhaps been less responsible in their mobilization of historical analogy. Formerly the photographic studio of curator, Gary Suson,⁶ the Ground Zero Museum Workshop (GZMW) in New York creates parallels with the Anne Frank Museum (AFM) in Amsterdam. The GZMW claims specific (although tenuous) associations with the AFM.⁷ Firstly, Suson makes comparisons based on the intimate scale of both museums, however, unlike the AFM, Suson’s Workshop possesses no site-specific properties and thus no claims to authenticity, being linked to 9/11 only by Suson’s ownership of the space. Secondly, the recorded interpretation that accompanies the tour of the GZMW attempts to equate a fragment of American Airlines flight 11 (which hit the North Tower and is now part of the museum’s display) with Anne Frank’s diary on the grounds that both are objects of trauma,⁸ although there can be little significant similarity between the testimony of a Holocaust victim and a piece of twenty-first-century technology brutally transformed into a horrific weapon. Thirdly, Suson contends that both museums aim to facilitate healing, despite the fact that the AFM asserts no such remit. In a 2005 interview with Associated Press reporter, Veronica Dobnik, he asserted, “I felt, if I could create something that would have an effect on people similar to the one the Anne Frank museum had on me, it could help people connect more to 9/11. If you can’t connect, you can’t heal,” (Dobnik 2005). Discounting the rather spurious connections drawn by Suson himself, perhaps the most genuine similarity between the two spaces is their mutual emphasis on the benefits of personally “experiencing” histories of atrocity (problematic in the unquestioning assumption that it is possible  – or indeed, desirable – to vicariously appropriate the experience of another). The AFM contends that touring the annex in which the Frank family were concealed for two years 5 See Feldman (2003) and Williams (2007) for more on such practices. 6 See Suson (2002) for a record of the photographs taken by Suson at Ground Zero when working with the FDNY. 7 This analogization is made more distasteful by its deployment as a marketing technique in flyers and newspaper articles (Dobnik 2005). 8 In the voiceover, Suson remarks, “the impact that Anne Frank’s diary had on me is equal to the impact that this plane had on me. Both artifacts made everything very real for me in only a matter of seconds” (transcribed on visit to GZMW, April 2011).

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gives visitors the “opportunity to feel personally involved in what occurred at this location” (AFM 2012). Suson echoes these claims, asserting that, having visited the Museum, “I felt as if I had come to know this little girl and when I left, I wept. A sense of loss embodied me and all-of-a-sudden, the Holocaust was now personal” (GZMW 2011). This highly emotive account gives further background to Suson’s decision to establish a “corresponding” institution in New York. He contends, “Anne and her story put a face on all the Holocaust victims within a very short period of time. I suddenly realized that […] I had a moral duty to erect a similar museum in New York City that would help people remember the fallen of September 11” (GZMW 2011). Suson’s belief that Anne Frank “put a face on all the Holocaust victims” reveals a confluence of identity that is an unfortunate trait of certain practices of analogization. Such frameworks at once depersonalize and overpersonalize memory, taking the specifics of one story as a blueprint for a universal experience of suffering. As Richard Cohen has argued, a regrettable aspect of the “false analogy contests” surrounding 9/11 has been their tendency to produce “specious” comparisons that “go from the particular to the general” (Cohen 2010). Cohen’s remarks raise an important concern about the despecifying properties of analogy. As a form oriented towards generating “abstract categories and relationships” able to provide “a ready-made conceptual organization for something unfamiliar or problematic” (Zashin and Chapman 1974, 299), analogy aims towards the occlusion of difference. As Zashin and Chapman argue in their exploration of the use of analogy in political language, “[e]xamination of differences would only weaken or limit the analogy, not produce meaning” (Zashin and Chapman 1974, 311). Analogy is thus dedicated to the production (or at least pretence) of sameness, a rhetorical construction in which “[o]ne subject or domain is used to organize our understanding of another subject or domain” (Zashin and Chapman 1974, 311). Uncritically (or cynically) deployed, analogy represents a narrative framework in which events are transformed by a synchronic, homotopic, relation so that the image of one overlays (one might argue, masks) the form of the other. Given the Holocaust’s prominence in Western memory culture, it may have seemed logical for memorial practitioners to turn to the most available point of analogy for historical trauma in the wake of the attacks. However, as Efram Sicher contends, both practitioners and theorists of memory need to remain attentive to the fact that “interpretative analogies of a repeated past might be ineffective or counterproductive in their subordination to metanarratives and ideologies” (Sicher 2000, 79). The mobilization of the Holocaust in aftermath of 9/11 leads to the convergence of two separate discourses in the American public sphere: in political narratives, the events of the War on Terror were framed in the image of World War II, justifying the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan on the pretext of

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preventing a second Shoah; particular cultural (literary and museal) narratives framed the two events in a series of undifferentiated tropes, reclaiming the Holocaust as an American event even as 9/11 assumed the form of the earlier genocide. In so doing, such representations reinforced pre-existing tendencies to universalise Jewish suffering, encouraging an uncritical overidentification with Holocaust victims. Whilst there are absolutely no grounds to suggest that Suson (or any of the numerous institutions and individuals evoking the Holocaust in the aftermath of 9/11)⁹ aimed of the to mobilise the memory of the genocide in the ideological manner of the Bush administration, the pre-existing deployment of the genocide in American memorial culture suggests that practitioners and theorists of memory need to be more self-reflexive about the implications of the analogous relations they construct. An established critical literature has drawn attention to the so-called “Americanization” of the Holocaust over the past twenty years. Against Levy and Sznaider’s interpretation of the Holocaust as a “decontextualised event oriented toward nation-transcending symbols and meaning systems” (Levy and Sznaider 2006, 5), Peter Novick argues that its commemoration has become a form of “national self-congratulation” (Novick 1999, 13). Novick asserts that “[i]ndividuals from every point on the political compass can find the lessons they wish in the Holocaust; it has become a moral and ideological Rorschach test” (Novick 1999, 12). Thus, as Hilene Flanzbaum contends, “the pervasive presence of representations of the Holocaust in our culture demands responsible evaluation and interpretation” (Flanzbaum 1999, 8).

3 Typological Memory After 9/11 In contrast to the analogical approaches considered above, typological memory does not aim at a comparison of discrete historical events, but a colonization of the past in the service of the present. Whilst analogical memory negates the specificity of earlier events in order to render them directly equivalent to the present, in typological modes of remembrance it is the texture of the present that is effaced in order that it might assume the image of the glorious past. In the context of 9/11, examples of typological memory see the attacks framed, not by the Holocaust, but through the founding myths of the United States. The resulting discourses aim to transform 9/11 into an affirmative event that (re)inscribes America as the bastion of liberty and freedom through myths of heroic sacrifice. 9 For examples see Bond (2012).

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Charting the use of typology throughout American cultural history, Debra Madsen argues that typological frameworks are intended to draw “all signs into a strict pattern of promise and fulfilment” (Madsen 1996, 3) to present the United States as a “redeemer nation” (Madsen 1996, 9) shaped by a providential historical covenant with God. Accordingly, “[t]ypology is the discursive mode which has come to characterize the rhetoric of New World exceptionalism” (Madsen 1996, 38). The mode of typology most widely mobilised in the “revitalization and rededication” (Bercovitch 1978, 18) of American exceptionalism can be identified as “America’s first distinctive literary genre” (Bercovitch 1978, 7): the jeremiad. Dedicated to generating an “apocalyptic history for America” (Bercovitch 1978, 68), Sacvan Bercovitch describes the American jeremiad as the quintessential form in which disaster was “qualified […] in a way that turned threat into celebration” (Bercovitch 1978, 8). Bercovitch argues that the jeremiad possesses an “extraordinary cultural hegemony” (Bercovitch 1978, 155); “nourished by an imagination at once defiant of history and profoundly attuned to the historical forces that were shaping the community” (Bercovitch 1978, 62), it is at once timeless and time-full, emplotted in, and respondent to, the present, but denied any form of critical historicity. It seeks to cultivate consensus in its audience by translating history into myth, individuals into collectives, and politics into natural law, functioning as a “vehicle of cultural continuity” (Bercovitch 1978, 61) that represents the United States as “an errand in sacred history” (Bercovitch 1978, 69). Since its origins as a political sermon in the seventeenth-century the American jeremiad has straddled the sacred and the profane, conferring a “quasidivine legitimacy” (Madsen 1996, 38) upon transient ideological doctrines. This conjoining of providence and politics has formed a recurrent rhetorical tradition in presidential addresses, as crisis and covenant have been evoked and invoked by successive leaders. Assuming the office of president of the newly independent America in 1789, George Washington affirmed the nation’s covenant with God as an assurance of its exceptional historical destiny and guarantee of recovery from calamity, commenting: No People can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the Affairs of men more than the People of the United States. Every step, by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency (Washington 1789).

Over time, such forms of address have themselves become sacred texts invoked in times of crisis. Departing for the capital as President-elect in 1861, with America on the brink of Civil War, Abraham Lincoln likened his situation to Washington’s own. Calling upon God’s assured allegiance with America’s great presidents, he declared: “I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a

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task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail” (Lincoln 1861). Eighty years later, facing not a civil but a world war, Franklin Delano Roosevelt recalled the speeches of his predecessors as proof of America’s inevitable victory over fascism. In his unprecedented third inaugural address on January 20, 1941, Roosevelt espoused: In Washington’s day the task of the people was to create and weld together a nation. In Lincoln’s day the task of the people was to preserve that Nation from disruption from within. In this day the task of the people is to save that Nation and its institutions from disruption from without. […] The destiny of America was proclaimed in words of prophecy spoken by our first President in his first inaugural in 1789 […]. If we lose that sacred fire – if we let it be smothered with doubt and fear  – then we shall reject the destiny which Washington strove so valiantly and so triumphantly to establish. […] As Americans, we go forward, in the service of our country, by the will of God (Roosevelt 1941).

It is perhaps, then, of little surprise that it was to these precedents that Bush returned in the aftermath of 9/11. On the evening of September 11th, Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Office to declare, “America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world” (Bush 2001a). He defined the crisis facing the United States as arising from its historically exceptional nature, asserting that “[t]errorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America” (Bush 2001a). In so doing, he underlined America’s union with “a Power greater than any of us”, affirming (as he declared three days later in a speech given during the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance) that “neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities, nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth can separate us from God’s love” (Bush 2001b). Amidst the chaos and carnage of the immediate aftermath, America remained “one Nation under God” (Bush 2001c), blessed with a new “responsibility to history” (Bush 2001b). Bush characterized the coming months and years as a “monumental struggle of good versus evil” (Bush 2001d), a battle of Biblical proportions in which America’s sacred destiny would ensure that “good will prevail” (Bush 2001d), as proven by the fact that “history has an author who fills time and eternity with his purpose” (Bush 2001e). Most importantly, however, Bush cast this Errand as a task of memory, firmly intertwining the duty of remembrance with his political and military vision. He asserted: Each of us will remember what happened that day and to whom it happened. We will remember the moment the news came, where we were and what we were doing. Some will remember an image of a fire or story or rescue. Some will carry memories of a face and a voice gone forever.

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And I will carry this. It is a police shield of a man named George Howard who died at the World Trade Center trying to save others. It was given to me by his mom, Arlene, as a proud memorial to her son. It is my reminder of lives that ended and a task that does not end (Bush 2001g).

In the aftermath of 9/11, the eternalising sentiments of the jeremiad have resonated throughout popular culture, emphasising the transdiscursive nature of such frames of memory. of memory. In Heroes (2001), many of Marvel Comics’ most famous illustrators pay homage to the rescue workers at Ground Zero.¹⁰ Collectively, they construct an exemplary jeremiad, tracing 9/11’s culture of calamity from its early, traumatized manifestations to the redemptive reinscription of American exceptionalism. Early in the collection, a panel by Alan Davis, Robin Riggs, and Pat Prentice pictures the Silver Surfer watching over Manhattan to witness “its teeming population […] unite in tragedy” (Quesada et al. 2001). Jim Shooter’s contribution connects these universalizing sentiments to the glorious American past, revealing a series of policemen and firefighters drawn around the American flag above the inscription, “let us all thank our choice of deities – guaranteed by the founding principles of this great nation – that there are heroes among us. God bless America” (Quesada et al. 2001). Robert Weinberg completes the jeremiad by mobilizing these images of heroism past and present in service of America’s new Errand, presenting the valour of servicemen and women as the catalyst for collective action. Below an image of a couple in mourning, he writes: Now, we must join with the heroes of that day – ordinary men and women who met that attack with extraordinary courage  – to demonstrate we can’t be beaten, that we can’t be intimidated. ‘That’, as Lincoln once proclaimed, ‘from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth’ (Quesada et al, 2001).

Lee’s commentary recalls the simplistic moral binary of Bush’s rhetoric of good and evil. Against the subversive culture conventionally identified with the graphic novel, Marvel’s Heroes provides an excellent example of the way in which an uncritical subscription to nationalist symbols presented cultural narratives as inseparable from the more general “apocalyptic theology” (Rozario 2007, 200) that dominated the public sphere in the aftermath of the attacks. Kevin Rozario argues that apocalyptic theology deflects critique by presenting both “politics

10 For an excellent analysis of the broader dynamics of the post-9/11 graphic novel, see Jenkins (2006).

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and morality in black-and-white terms, treating the world as a place where ‘innocence’ is always imperilled and where retribution is demanded against violators of virtue”, advocating a culture that “privilege[s] the sentimental […] over political knowledge to such an extent that complexity can begin to seem like the last refuge of fools and the corrupt” (Rozario 2007, 200). David Simpson suggests that through such endeavours, the dead are deindividualized, abstracted to become “heroes, sacrificial victims, icons of patriotic life, above all saturated with meaning. They connect the present to the past and the future, and enumerating and accounting for their deaths is a national commitment” (Simpson 2006, 50). Whilst this overly associative process appears directed towards empathic connection with the victims, Dominick LaCapra has argued that “[e]mpathy is too often conflated with identification, especially with the victim, and this conflation leads to an idealization or even sacrialization of the victim as well as an often histrionic self-image as surrogate victim undergoing vicarious experience” (LaCapra 2004, 65). Carolyn J. Dean suggests that this process engenders a form of solipsism that requires the victim to assume the identity of the witness. She designates this “narcissistic blotting out of the other as a sociocultural problem that impedes mutual recognition and thus precludes empathy” (Dean 2003, 98). This fetishization of victimhood can clearly be seen in E.L. Doctorow’s tribute to 9/11. Published in 2002, Lamentation 9/11 is one of many photobooks collated in the wake of the attacks. The book combines photographs of New York taken by David Finn in the aftermath of 9/11 with a highly emotive text by Doctorow. Doctorow positions himself as a twenty-first-century Walt Whitman, depicting an essential unity among New York’s disparate residents. He extends the muchvaunted community feeling after the attacks into an attempt to identify with the victims themselves. He writes, “I didn’t know them, the people who died there, […] But I counted on them”. “The rhythms of their speech were my rhythms, the figures of speech, the attitudes, the postures, the moods, were my rhythms and phrases, my attitudes and postures and moods” (Doctorow 2002). Doctorow transforms a communality of time and space into a partnership of shared values and experience, asserting, “[w]e naturally understood one another though we had never met…I would have been comfortable having a coffee or a drink with any one of them” (Doctorow 2002). In so doing, he negates the difference between himself and the victims, enacting a process of transference that allows him to presume unproblematic unity with the dead by casting them in his own likeness. Doctorow’s presumptive narrative technique cancels the diversity of the victims, assuming a unity derived from the shared “American” covenant; a “fervent love” of freedom, guaranteed by the “necessary humanity of the secular

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state”; enshrined in the certainty that “[t]his country and its institutions are a work in progress…Our story has just begun…Our raucous and corruptible political system lumbers on toward a true and universal justice” (Doctorow 2002). Doctorow underscores this national affirmation by appropriating the victims as symbols of (and for) the nation, declaring (in a direct address to the “killer”), “our thousands of dead were transfigured, and in their names and numbers they stand now for our Democracy. So that even as we mourn them, we know that they are our endowment” (Doctorow 2002). Each of the texts analysed above attempts to absorb 9/11 into the national symbolic by transforming the victims of the attacks into emblems of “American values”. LaCapra contends that such forms of over-identification are integral to the ideologization of culture, facilitating the establishment of an acritical discourse able to deflect critique. He argues, “certain forms of identification may approach a quasi-religious experience that resists ethical and political judgement” (LaCapra 2004, 130). In so doing, they bear all the hallmarks of the jeremiad, designed “to fuse the particular [the victim], the social [the nation], and the cosmic [values such as justice, freedom, and democracy]” (Bercovitch 1978, 42). Thus, in recognising the jeremiad’s predominance as a memorial framework in American culture, it is necessary to emphasise once again the convergence of political and cultural narratives after 9/11.

4 Allegorical Memory Each of the typological discourses analysed above appears to eschew any attempt to reckon critically with the aftermath of 9/11, evacuating the present of complexity in order to align it with a heroic and sanctified past. However, if the revisiting of the American jeremiad seems to present typological narratives as “the voice of orthodoxy”, Madsen argues that other incarnations of the form manifest “the rhetoric of dissent”, cautioning that “[a]llegory [can be] made to work against itself to expose the ideological manoeuvring that underlines orthodox typology” (Madsen 1996, 2–3). In order to fully understand its significance for the work of memory, the relationship between allegory and typology requires a little more exploration. As Madsen asserts, typology is essentially one mode of allegory among many; whilst “[a]ll typology is allegorical […] not all allegory is typological” (Madsen 1996, 3). Madsen charts a secularisation of allegory in American culture in the early nineteenth-century, arguing that, from this point, the heavily nationalistic typological forms favoured since the establishment of the first Puritan colonies

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in the 1600s were challenged by the more sceptical counter-narratives of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Whilst typology “draws all signs into a strict pattern of promise and fulfilment”, modern allegory “confronts us with the unknowability of transcendent categories of experience”, providing a “fundamental expression of dissidence” (Madsen 1996, 3), which prioritises the particular and the subjective above the eternal and the universal. For Madsen, modern allegory is fundamentally antithetical to the hegemonic discourses analysed above, with their presumption of national unity and their homogenization of the American nation and its citizenry. Rather than unifying the past and the present in heroic accord, Madsen suggests that allegory (understood here as distinct from typology) “presupposes a fracture within a once-Edenic referentiality. A singular, pure transparent referential structure becomes a dissonance of partial and obscure signifying terms” (Madsen 1996, 104). In this sense, unlike the unifying impulses of both analogy and typology, difference and otherness are built into the very structure of allegory. Paul de Man posits allegory as an inherently fragmentary form that thematicizes the radical figurality of language, highlighting the foundational chasm between sign and signified that lies at the heart of all communication. De Man suggests that “[t]he innumerable writings that dominate our lives are made intelligible by a preordained agreement as to their referential authority; this agreement however is merely contractual, never constitutive” (de Man 1979, 204). The inherent dislocation of the signifying process ensures that no referent can escape the semantic trap of false projection towards an authority with which it is nonidentical. Thus, de Man asserts, “all readings are in error because they assume their own readability” (de Man 1979, 202). However, in allegory this referential instability is supplemented by what de Man describes as a “figural superposition” (de Man 1979, 205). By acknowledging – through its “superposition” – the unreadability of all language, and the consequent impossibility of deriving any authoritative meaning from texts, allegory frustrates the attempt to unite word and world in a universalized fashion. In refusing totalizing explanation, allegory insists that any attempt at interpretation will inevitably leave a remainder – an excess – which denies incorporation into the prevailing order of signification. In this sense, allegory appears always to contain (or at least acknowledge the potential of) its own Other: it is inherently heterodoxical. Furthermore, De Man contends, “it remains necessary, if there is to be allegory, that the allegorical sign refer to another sign that precedes it […] with which it can never coincide, since it is of this essence of this previous sign to be pure anteriority” (de Man 1983, 207). Allegory reveals meaning to be contingent upon the shaky foundations constructed by cultural antecedents, each of which is implicated in an equally unstable process of signification. This

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chain of signifiers engenders a temporal fissure at the heart of allegory, born of “an unreachable anteriority” (de Man 1983, 222). Thus, as constituted by de Man, allegory is possessed of an inherently memorial temporality, but, unlike either analogy or typology, it maintains the distance between past and presence by refusing to collapse the sign into its historical antecedent. This attention to the splintered character of allegory is echoed in the work of Walter Benjamin, who argues that “[i]n the field of allegorical intuition the image is a fragment, a rune […]. The false appearance of totality is extinguished” (Benjamin 1977, 176). Otherness is intrinsic to allegory because “all of the things which are used to signify derive, from the very fact of their pointing to something else” (Benjamin 1977, 176). Benjamin’s theorization of allegory relates to a specific historical instance of the form  – the Trauerspiel (“mourning play”) of Baroque Germany. Revealing the ruins of memory as something incomplete and resistant to symbolization, Benjamin argues that allegory insists upon the mourning of unacknowledged losses, foregrounding the particular rather than the universal. In so doing, he translates the structural alterity that de Man identifies at the heart of allegorical narratives (the difference between signifier and signified) into an attention to historical otherness. I am interested in whether we might use this understanding to construe a mode of address suited to the representation of historical difference: that is, to consider how allegorical approaches to memory might help us to find a way to constitute our relation to actual Others to avoid the homogenizing, universalizing discourses considered in the previous sections. As Judith Butler argues, the Other has constituted a lack in American memorial culture following 9/11.¹¹ This elision does not exist apart from, but in parallel with, the commemorative frameworks analysed above. Such discourses reinforce global hierarchies in which “[c]ertain lives will be highly protected, and [as after 9/11] the abrogation of their claims to sanctity will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war. Other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as ‘grievable’” (Butler 2004, 32). Critiquing such practices, Butler suggests that global relations should be premised “upon an understanding of how easily human life is annulled” (Butler 2004, xviii), and attentive to “the ways in which our lives are profoundly implicated in the lives of others” (Butler 2004, 7). In so doing, she highlights the “dimension of political life that has to do with our exposure to violence and our complicity in it, with our vulnerability to loss

11 This is not entirely the case. Several texts from 9/11’s literary corpus have successfully attempted to address the issue of otherness or provide cultural forums for a more dialogic relationship with the Other. These include texts such as the poetry of Suheir Hammad (2001), Mohsin Hamid’s (2007) The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Amy Waldman’s (2011) recent novel, The Submission, among many other examples.

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and the truth of mourning that follows, and with finding a basis for community in these conditions” (Butler 2004, 19). In pursuing such ideas, my analysis finds resonance with both Benjamin’s conceptualisation of allegory and its afterlife in contemporary criticism. Revisiting Benjamin’s thought, Eric Santner proposes that “[a]llegory is the symbolic mode proper to the experience of irredeemable exposure to the violence of history” (Santner 2006, 20), suggesting it as a fitting form in which to conceptualise the events of 9/11 and their aftermath as understood by Butler. For both Santner and Benjamin, otherness is constituted by the persistence of historical loss: haunting elisions that testify to the erasure of experiences from the hegemonic historical record. The work of remembrance is to find a narrative form able to acknowledge and mourn this negated alterity. As we have already seen, in allegory, the Other is always missing – exiled, lost, or destroyed – yet it remains constantly in view as an absent presence, a spectre, haunting the text. As Kate Jenckes argues, allegorical narratives, “must be an ongoing endeavour, pointing to an “other” sphere that is always outside representation, and yet whose silences and exclusions can be traced in the cracks and crevices of history” (Jenckes 2007, xvii). For Benjamin, the “cracks and crevices of history” are the sites at which a “weak messianic power” is potentially operational. This weak messianic power does not aim towards a total redemption of historical experience, but an acknowledgement that “there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one”, “a power on which the past has a claim” that “cannot be settled cheaply” (Benjamin 2003, 390). Benjamin advocates a non-hierarchical reading of time, which understands that “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history” (Benjamin 2003, 390). He suggests that the past does not inhere in historical chronicles but “can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability” – “[a]rticulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was’. It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger” (Benjamin 2003 390–391). This connection to historical events cannot be reified; it will not prove enduring and stable, but will be dependent upon the form and context of the present for its recognition. It should not be premised upon imposing a fixed interpretation of the past as a paradigm for future experience; events cannot be forced into an analogous relation with each other, but are informed by a dialogic exchange that is attentive to their similarities and their differences. For Benjamin, by grasping “the constellation into which his own era has entered, along with a very specific earlier one”, the practitioner or theorist of memory “establishes a conception of the present as now-time shot through with the splinters of messianic time” (Benjamin 2003, 397). These splinters impel the work of memory, reclaiming hitherto repressed experiences and opening

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history up to a series of contesting interpretations. This is a truly multidirectional approach to memory. It does not attempt to prescribe certain events as standardized referents for historical experience, but allows for a fluid and negotiable relation between commemorative texts, producing cultural memory as a “map that, holding its constituent parts apart, also holds them together” (Jenckes 2007, 71). This is not to advocate a commemorative practice premised upon a literalization of allegory: I am not suggesting that memorialization should be based upon the fetishization of ruins; nor would I contend that memorial endeavours should necessarily approach their object of remembrance obliquely. Rather, I propose that by recognizing, and reading, memory’s intrinsic “allegorical impulse” (Owens 1992), we provide way of reconfiguring the problematic frameworks of representation analysed throughout this chapter. The ethical practice and theory of memory should point to the importance of recognizing the gaps that occur in historical knowledge, opening up connections across time and space that do not reify experience or produce events as concrete signifiers, but reveal all readings of the past as contingent, subjective, and ultimately incomplete. Reading memory allegorically positions every commemorative text as a part of a fragmentary constellation to which its own relationship should be interrogated. This self-consciousness brokers the potential for a reflexive approach to commemoration that would demand that practitioners and theorists remain aware of the particularity and partiality of any act of memory, as well as attentive to the broader (social, political, economic) factors that mediate its articulation. Ethically manifested, allegorical narratives offer a relation that Rothberg describes as one of “differentiated solidarity” (Rothberg 2011, 526), bringing together “victims of diverse injustices, and an ethics of comparison that coordinates the asymmetrical claims of those victims” (Rothberg 2011, 526). Such practices underscore the need for an acknowledgement of difference between forms of victimhood, as well as an attendant distinction between victims of historical atrocity and their witnesses in the present. As Dominick LaCapra argues, over-identifying with the experiences of another can lead to a form of “surrogate victimage” (LaCapra 2001, 40), which is both ethically and politically suspect in its occlusion of difference. Against such modes of relation, LaCapra argues for a form of “empathic unsettlement” that propagates “virtual” rather than “vicarious” experience, allowing one to put one’s self in the position of another without taking their place. The act of empathic unsettlement acknowledges that we are simultaneously inextricably bound to, and inescapably different from, the inhabitants of the world around us. Self-reflexive and attentive to alterity, allegorical memory eschews the allure of transcendence, “composing narratives that neither confuse one’s position with the victim’s nor seek facile uplift, harmonization, or closure” (LaCapra 2001, 78).

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5 Conclusion This chapter has briefly considered the ethical and political implications implicitly encoded within particular narrative frameworks, arguing that not all manifestations of comparative memory are as transcultural, multidirectional, or cosmopolitan as they first appear. In conclusion, I suggest that more attention needs to be paid to the temporality and spatiality of diverse narrative forms, in order that their suitability to memorial practice can be properly addressed. In the analogical narratives considered above, the specificity of both time and space appeared to be elided as events (9/11 and the Holocaust) were collapsed in a process of undifferentiated equation. In certain forms of political rhetoric, this process seemed to work as a means by which to exceptionalise both American victimhood and al Qaeda’s perpetration through equation with an extreme (and for many, unprecedented) example of genocide. In the GZMW’s comparison of Anne Frank and 9/11 victims, this association produced an alarming despecification of historical suffering that negated crucial differences between events and their victims. These discourses appear to represent the failure of the ideal cosmopolitan memory proposed by Levy and Sznaider: rather than opening memory up to negotiations between the local, national and the global that produce a new understanding of universal human rights, they prioritise certain examples of suffering above others, eclipsing important specificities in order to justify their claims to equation. If uncritical forms of analogy may thus be said to both dehistoricise and deterritorialise memory, the typological narratives analysed in the second section seemed to eternalise the narrative of 9/11 by reterroritorialising the events (from localised atrocities to national tragedies) through their inscription in the sacred chronicle of American history. In so doing, the specificities and complexities of the present were again occluded through their equation with a sanitised past, facilitating the construction of an undifferentiated, nationalised, culture of victimhood. Finally, I turned to a consideration of allegory as a possible framework for reading both the theory and practice of memory. Unlike the other two narrative forms analysed throughout this chapter, I argued that allegory attends to the specificities of time, place, and experience, holding different temporal and spatial coordinates in constellation rather than enfolding them in analogous collapse or eliding their differences in a process of typological sanctification. Ultimately, I suggested that reading memory allegorically proposes one possible way of attending to our relations to lost histories and distant presents. The continuing execution of this task is the promise inherent in the idealistic theoretical discourses that comprise the transcultural turn. But, as I have aimed to demonstrate

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over the course of this chapter, this potentiality will only be realised if theorists and practitioners of memory remain alert to the implications of the narrative forms in which they frame their commemorative endeavours.

References Anne Frank Museum. http://www.annefrank.org/ (6 January 6 2012). Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: NLB, 1977. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Jonathan Cape, 2003. 255–67 Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Wisconsin and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. Bergman, Jay. “The Perils of Historical Analogy: Leon Trotsky on the French Revolution.” Journal of the History of Ideas 48.1 (1987): 73–98. Bond, Lucy. “Intersections or Misdirections? Problematizing Crossroads of Memory in the Commemoration of 9/11.” Culture, Theory and Critique 53.2 (2012): 111–128. Borger, Julian and Richard Norton-Taylor. “Rumsfeld steps up Iraq war talk.” The Guardian, 21st August 2002. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/aug/21/iraq.richardnortontaylor (30 August 2011). Bush, George. W. “9/11 Address to the Nation,” 11th September 2001a. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/rhetoricofterrorism.html. (2 July 2011). Bush, George. W. “Remarks at National Day of Prayer and Remembrance,” 14th September 2001b. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/rhetoricofterrorism.html. (2 July 2011). Bush, George. W. “National Day of Prayer and Remembrance for the Victims of the Terrorist Attacks, A Proclamation,” 13th September 2001c. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/ rhetoricofterrorism.html. (2 July 2011). Bush, George. W. “President’s Address from Cabinet Room,” 12th September 2001d. http:// www.americanrhetoric.com/rhetoricofterrorism.html. (2 July 2011). Bush, George. W. First Address to United Nations General Assembly,” 10th November 2001e. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/rhetoricofterrorism.html. (2 July 2011). Bush, George. W. “Remarks at Barksdale Air Force Base,” 11th September 2001f. http://www. americanrhetoric.com/rhetoricofterrorism.html. (2 July 2011). Bush, George. W. “Address to Congress,” 20th September 2001g. http://www.washingtonpost. com/wpsrv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/ bushaddress_092001.html. (2 July 2011). Bush, George. W. “Remarks at Emma Brooker Elementary School,” 11th September 2001h. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/rhetoricofterrorism.html. (2 July 2011). Bush, George. W. “2002 State of the Union Address,” 29th January 29 2002. http://www. americanrhetoric.com/rhetoricofterrorism.html. (2 July 2011). Bush, George. W. “Full Text: Bush’s Speech.” The Guardian, 18th March 2003. http://www. guardian.co.uk/world/2003/mar/18/usa.iraq. (17 November 2011). Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. Cohen, Richard. “Obama Muddles His Mosque Message.” The Washington Post, 17th August 2010.

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Crownshaw, Richard. “The Limits of Transference: Theories of Memory and Photography in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. 67–90. de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979. de Man, Paul. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” Blindness and Insight. London: Routledge, 1983. 187–228. Desch, Michael C. “The Myth of Abandonment: The Use and Abuse of the Holocaust Analogy.” Security Studies 15.1 (2010): 106–145. Erll, Astrid. “Remembering Across Time, Space and Cultures: Premediation, Remediation and the Indian Mutiny.” Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. 109–138. Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture. Trans. Sara B. Young. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Erll, Astrid and Ann Rigney eds. Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. Feldman, Jeffrey D. “One Tragedy in Reference to Another: September 11 and the Obligations of Museum Commemoration.” American Anthropologist 105.4 (2003): 839–843. Goldberg, Jeffrey. “A Little Learning: What Douglas Feith Knew, and When He Knew It.” The New Yorker, 9th May 2005. Ground Zero Museum Workshop. http://www.groundzeromuseum.com/. (17 October 2011). Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. London: Penguin Books, 2007. Jenckes, Kate. Reading Borges After Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife and the Writing of History. New York: State University of New York Press, 2007. Jenkins, Henry. “Captain America Sheds His Mighty Tears: Comics and September 11.” Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11”. Eds. Daniel J. Sherman and Terry Nardin. Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2006. 69–102. Kelley, Theresa M. Reinventing Allegory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1997. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001. Levy, Daniel and Natan Sznaider. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Trans. Assenka Oksiloff. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. Lincoln, Abraham. “Farewell Speech.” http://www.historyplace.com/lincoln/farewell.html. 1861. (3 July 2011). Moses, A. Dirk ed. 2008. Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Moses, A. Dirk and Michael Rothberg. 2014. “A Dialogue on the Ethics and Politics of Transcultural Memory.” The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders. Eds. Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson. Berlin: De Gruyter. 29–38. Owens, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism.” Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. Pease, Donald E. The New American Exceptionalism. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Quesada, Joe et al. Heroes. New York: Marvel, 2001. Radstone, Susannah. “What Place is This? Transcultural Memory and the Locations of Memory Studies.” Parallax 17.4 (2011): 109–123.

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Roosevelt, F.D. 1941. “Third Inauguration.” http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/froos3. asp. 1941. (10 July 2011). Rose, Gillian. Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Santner, Eric L. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Sicher, Efraim. “The Future of the Past: Countermemory and Postmemory in Contemporary American Post-Holocaust Narratives.” History & Memory 12.2 (2000): 56–91. Stine, Catherine. Refugees. New York: Delacorte Press. 2005. Suson, Gary. Requiem: Images of Ground Zero. New York: Barnes and Noble. 2002. Tomsky, Terri. “From Sarajevo to 9/11: Travelling Memory and the Trauma Economy.” Parallax 17.4 (2011): 49–60. Waldman, Amy. The Submission. London: William Heinemann. 2011. Washington, George. “First Inaugural Address.” http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/documents/ inaugural/final.html. 1789. (11 July 2011). Zaskin, Elliott and Phillip C. Chapman. “The Uses of Metaphor and Analogy: Toward a Renewal of Political Language.” Journal of Politics 36.2 (1974): 290–326.

Part Two: Problematising Transcultural Memory

Lars Breuer

Europeanized Vernacular Memory: A Case Study from Germany and Poland 1 European memory Europe is at the core of current academic research about transcultural memory cultures. Drawing on the increasing political integration within the European Union, Europeanization often serves as a kind of role model for a transnationalization of societies, for new, transnational forms of belonging, and also for collective references to the past, which are thought to genuinely transcend national frameworks (Eder and Spohn 2005). In this light, the idea of a (shared or even common) European memory has become a significant, but yet indeterminate concept. There is far more discussion about the possibility and necessity of a European memory than actual attempts to define or conceptualise it (König, Sicking, and Schmidt 2008, Stråth and Pakier 2010). Most definitions either simply project the idea of a national memory on a supranational level or allege mere negation, namely the absence of the national. Both options are rather normative and deductive. In the case of the latter, European memory or identity is sometimes considered as overcoming the age of nationalism, or even the “antithesis of the ethnicised nation state” as Anton Pelinka (2001, 44) has put it. Problematic relations between academic research and political discourse are also widely observable. Despite all varieties of different approaches, most understandings of“European memory” are problematic in two senses: Firstly, they tend to treat the European and the national as competing, mutually exclusive categories, e.g. by assuming that emphasizing national interests would automatically impede further European integration and vice versa. Secondly, there is a certain bias in memory studies on institutional and official memory practices; for example, it is mostly the producers and agents of public discourses which are being examined while their reception is usually neglected. As an answer to these two tendencies, I will in this chapter outline what I call Europeanised vernacular memory. This concept has two implications: Firstly, the European and the national are regarded as rather mutually constitutive domains. Secondly, Instead of elaborating a theoretical concept, I will exemplify and illustrate my thoughts by presenting an empirical bottom-up approach focussing on group discussions in Germany and Poland.

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2 Vernacular memory In accordance with a vast number of scholars in memory studies who draw on the work of Maurice Halbwachs (1992), I conceive memory not as the mere recollection of past events, but rather as the past being made present for present purposes (Olick and Robbins 1998). As Jeffrey Olick maintains, memory has to be understood as an active, on-going process: “memory is a process and not a thing […] something […] we do, not something […] we have” (Olick 2008, 159). Moreover, memory is always collective and individual at the same time. As Olick in his reading of Halbwachs has put it: “social frameworks shape what individuals remember, but ultimately it is only individuals who do the remembering.” (Olick 1999, 338). Given the crucial role of individuals in memory processes, it seems almost surprising that empirical studies on memory practices often limit themselves to public forms of memory or commemoration. Most commonly, the production of memory discourses is being examined, while their reception is often overlooked. Analyses of memory cultures in different (European) countries also show a certain bias towards top-down memory practices, like mass media, parliamentary debates, official speeches, and monuments. The processes of mediation and appropriation of public memories by individuals, however, are often neglected. For a better understanding of the complexity of social memory (Burke 1989), I would like to suggest a delineation between three relational domains of memory:¹ Public memory could be defined as various forms of publicly available recollections of past events, which are mainly accessible and distributed through mass media, like TV shows, movies, newspapers, books, etc. Official memory would then refer to institutionalised manifestations of public memory narratives. This is a practice of commemoration by the state or similar agents, like memorials, commemoration days, speeches by state representatives. If official memory is the institutionalization of public memory, its appropriation and reproduction by ordinary people could be identified as vernacular memory, in the literature also referred to as private memory. In this domain, memories are often passed on in everyday practices such as conversational remembering (Middleton and Edwards 1990), sometimes even unintentionally. Vernacular forms of memory (Bodnar 1994) are closely linked to the collective self-understanding of particular smaller memory communities, like families or peer groups. As both vernacular and official memory are deeply informed by public memory, this relationship is neither

1 Of course, this division is purely analytical and without any claim of being an elaborated theoretical concept.

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one-way nor top-down only. Rather, all three domains are interdependent, as Bodnar and Burgoyne (Burgoyne 2006), have also pointed out.²

3 Data and methods This chapter seeks to explore the vernacular memory of Polish and German individuals on the basis of group discussions (see below). It draws upon existing studies of family memory on World War II in Germany (Welzer, Moller, and Tschugnall 2002) and other European countries (Welzer 2007), which have shown significant differences between public and vernacular memory not only regarding its contents, but also in terms of forms and media. To explore the dimensions of vernacular memory in Germany and Poland, group discussions have been chosen as a particularly well-suited method to investigate how people create meaning in social interaction. Since the communicative process and the themes addressed in its course are largely determined by the participants, group discussions facilitate an actual micro-analysis of how memories and meanings are negotiated in a social context (Lamnek 2005, Bohnsack, Przyborski, and Schäffer 2006). My analysis draws upon 40 group discussions with participants in Germany and Poland, conducted by the research project Europeanization of National Memory Spaces.³ Germany and Poland are well suited examples, since in both countries, memories of World War II, the Holocaust and its aftermath have shaped vigorous debates around national selfunderstanding (For Germany, see e.g. Fischer and Lorenz 2007 and Sabrow 2008; for Poland see Steinlauf 1996, Polonsky and Michlic 2003). Presupposing that these memory conflicts are still a crucial point of reference for collective memory and self-understanding also on a vernacular level, the two countries exemplify extremely different wartime experiences, and strikingly divergent ways of dealing with this past. Germany has, over the years, become a sort of benchmark in its efforts to successfully deal with its past. Poland, on the other hand, is paradigmatic for the dual memory of Stalinist and Nazi occupation.

2 Burgoyne’s analysis also considers “commercial” forms of memory that mediate between “vernacular” and “official” discourses in public memory culture 3 The group discussions (plus another 20 group discussions from Austria, which have not been taken into account by the author), were conducted between 2006–2009 by different interviewers on behalf of the research project Europeanization of National Memory Spaces, based at the University of Munich. The project’s aim was to investigate the cosmopolitanization of memories (Levy and Sznaider 2005) in the three countries.

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In order to cover a broad spectrum of memory actors, a non-probable purposive sampling was applied. Firstly, certain groups were defined by criteria like age, place of residence, profession, or affiliation with a particular institution or community. The groups ranged from age cohorts, like students or pensioners to people who in one way or another deal with memories in their daily lives, whether as history teachers, politicians, journalists, or staff of memorial sites (see table 2, Appendix, p.  101). Secondly, the recruitment of respondents matching these group criteria relied on a snowball method as well as on availability. Group sizes varied between three and eight people. The one-time, 60 minute discussions were conducted by different interviewers, all of them native speakers of the respective country. Given the broad spectrum of memory actors and the (comparably) low number of group discussions, the findings cannot claim to be representative with regards to the criteria mentioned above. Also, a certain degree of participant’s self-selection has to be taken into account. Thus, the exploratory character of the study needs to be underlined. At the beginning of each discussion, the group was presented with five unattributed photos depicting images related to World War II. Photographs were chosen in order to trigger memory narratives referring to a certain array of historical events without depicting single, actually recognisable events. The respondents were asked to share their associations departing from these photographs. The interviewer remained as passive as possible to allow group members to determine the relevance of themes and establish their own agenda. After 45 minutes, a sixth photograph with reference to the European Union was presented, accompanied by some questions about a common European memory. After transcription, the group discussions have been analysed⁴ according to a well-tested set of methods, following the precepts of grounded theory and qualitative content analysis (Mayring 2005, Jensen 2005). The entire material was coded with help of the qda-software MAXqda (Kuckartz, Grunenberg, and Dresing 2007, Lewins and Silver 2007). Finally, additional in-depth analyses of particular interview sequences were conducted.

4 Patterns of memory narratives Due to the open design of the group discussions, the material is quite heterogeneous. There are huge differences not only in terms of what people speak about,

4 This analysis was carried out by the author, in cooperation with staff members of the aforementioned project.

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but also how they do this. The participants were free to contribute personal stories, historical knowledge or more general reflections, on memory culture or even on the research project itself. For example, one group of historians would spend a lot of time describing the photographs in detail. Older people would often come up with their own personal experiences from the wartime, while students would rather tend to reflect on different memory cultures or political milieus. As opposed to the initial research intention, no clearly distinct memory communities could be identified with regard to criteria such as age, gender, or place of residence. Predictably, the largest differences in terms of memory narratives did not occur between groups within one country, but between the German and the Polish groups. However, there was a vast variety of topics and memory narratives even within national frameworks. Thus there can be no talk of homogenous national memories in the group discussions. Let me outline the patterns of memory narratives by presenting the historical events referred to in the group discussions. Given the photo stimuli, it was no big surprise that World War II, the Holocaust and forced migration were the three topics mentioned most frequently by the participants in both countries (see Table 1). Table 1. Historical events mentioned by the participants. All Percentages refer to the total of the respective column. Row

Historical Events

Polish groups

German groups Total

1 1.1 1.2

Forced migration, thereof: Referring to German migrants Referring to Polish migrants

283 113 74

33%

107 68 6

18%

390 181 80

27%

2 2.1 2.2 2.3

Persecution of Jews/Holocaust Auschwitz / concentration camps Jedwabne Warsaw Ghetto (1943 Uprising)

200 83 13 12

23%

146 66 0 5

25%

346 149 13 17

24%

3 3.1 3.1.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.4.1

World War II (w/o Holocaust) Mass killings Thereof: Katyn Warsaw Rising (1944) Forced and Slave Labor Bombings Thereof: 1945 Bombing of Dresden

213 62 26 29 4 26 10

25%

153 8 0 3 4 73 22

26%

366 70 26 32 8 99 32

25%

4

National Socialism (w/o WWII) (w/o 30 WWII or Holocaust)

3%

65

11%

95

7%

5

Other Events

140

16%

120

20%

260

18%

Total

866

100%

591

100%

1,457

100%

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World War II (row 3) as one of the key events was mentioned roughly equally often in both countries. In Germany, most references to World War II are somewhat abstract and often refer to “the war” as such, whereas the Polish participants rather refer to specific events. Of course, a lot of times, participants in both countries refer to events that took place in their respective home country. For example, Bombings (3.4) are a prominent topic in both countries. But as German participants, at least tacitly, mostly refer to Allied bombings of German cities, their Polish counterparts mainly point out German bombings of Polish cities. It is more revealing to scrutinize included memories of the “other”, for example German lieux de mémoire⁵ mentioned by Polish respondents and vice versa. The 1945 Dresden bombing (3.4.1) is the most frequently mentioned single war-time event in the German group discussions. It is also referred to in the Polish group discussions, albeit to a much lesser extent. In contrast, Polish war time events are virtually absent in the German material. There are three central lieux de mémoire in Polish public memory, which were also reflected in the group discussions: firstly the infamous 1941 pogrom in Jedwabne (Gross 2001), raising the issue of Polish collaboration in the Holocaust. Secondly, the 1940 Katyń massacre (Zaslavsky 2008), representing the mass killings of Poles by Soviet forces, and third, the 1944 Warsaw Rising (Davies 2004) as a symbol for the Polish nation’s fight for self-determination. While the latter was named three times (3.2), the other two of the three were not discussed a single time in all of the German conversations (2.2 and 3.1.1). The imbalance between Poles talking about German memories vis-à-vis Germans talking about Polish ones becomes even more obvious when looking at forced migration (row 1), the flight and forced resettlement of millions of Poles and Germans between 1944 and 1948. To this day, this is a highly controversial issue in collective memory as well as in current politics in both countries. In Germany, the “expulsion” of ethnic Germans from former German territories, is one of the most important lieux de mémoire since the 1950s. In Poland, both the “forced resettlement” of Poles and Germans has been a widely discussed topic since 1989. The Polish participants raised the issue twice as often as their German counterparts. Amazingly, even the expulsion of ethnic Germans after World War II (1.1) was actually mentioned more frequently by Polish respondents than by German ones. Again, this looks totally different the other way around. Poles as victims of forced migration (1.2) were only mentioned six times in all of the 20 German group discussions.

5 The term derives from Pierre Nora’s (Nora 1996) concept of Lieux de mémoire (realms of memory).

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This disproportion is a recurring pattern in the entire material: throughout all groups, and without significant differences with regard to age or education, the relationship to Germans (and Russians) is by far the most vividly discussed topic in the Polish group discussions, whereas the German participants hardly ever talked about Poles at all.⁶

5 Role Attributions My own analysis of the group discussions focuses on the various characteristics which participants ascribed to certain groups or individuals. People’s reflections about why things happened as they happened often lead to role attributions. These attributions, in which individuals’ recollections of the past are linked to their collective self-understanding, can be delimited in four dimensions: The first and most important aspect covers the content of the attribution, i.e., the roles that are most likely to be assigned. Throughout all groups and countries, the three most frequent types were: 1) perpetratorship, i.e., responsibility for wrongdoings is attributed to members of a particular group; 2) victimhood, i.e., suffering of individuals or certain groups and their members is acknowledged, and 3) ambivalent attributions, i.e., perpetratorship or victimhood is acknowledged, but at the same time questioned, legitimised or relativized. Second, it is helpful to distinguish between explicit and implicit attributions. An attribution is defined as implicit if a literal reference (to another group) is missing, but can be reconstructed from the context. For example, if a respondent speaks about expellees without mentioning any nationality, but the historical background clearly refers only to the expulsion of ethnic Germans. Third, national attributions can be defined as ascriptions of roles to people as members of a particular nation or ethnic group. Actually, this appears to be the largest category with about 60% of all identified attributions found in the material. Fourth, it is quite revealing to differentiate analytically between self-attributions, which are assigned to one’s own in-group (or nation), and hetero-attributions, which target other groups (or nations).

6 It has to be mentioned though, that this unequal concern about the respective “Other” is rather a general phenomenon in Polish-German relations and also prevalent in public memory.

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6 Uncertainties in national identity I argue that the affinity to the victim status that participants from both countries expressed is connected to uncertainties in their national self-understanding, which can be traced back to the memory of World War II and its consequences. Actually, most participants are not so much concerned about the historical events themselves, but about how they have been remembered and commemorated. In Germany, ever since the defeat of National Socialism, the very legitimacy of national identity was at the centre of fierce memory debates. After 1990, these disputes settled somewhat, and converged into a striving for a “normal” German nation. However, Vergangenheitsbewältigung⁷ remained an ambiguous process. On the one hand, the successful coming to terms with the “dark past” became a source of national identification and even pride. The German self-image as “inventor and world champion of Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (Frei 2005, 7) turned to a feeling of having commemorated Nazi crimes enough, as German writer Martin Walser expressed it in his famous 1998 speech (Rensmann 2004). In recent years, German public memory⁸ of WWII has significantly turned towards Germans as victims (Niven 2006, Schmitz 2007). The call for “normalisation” of the German nation, I argue, finds its expression in the Germans’ desire to be victims like (supposedly) everyone else. For most German participants in the group discussions, it goes without saying that today’s Germany has nothing to do with Nazi Germany at all. Above all, younger Germans present a self-image that is accorded as having nothing to do with Nazi crimes, which have become mere history. However, to many German participants, the National Socialist period still seems to be some kind of a burden. Yet, feelings of doubt and guilt were mostly dissociated and externalised.⁹ There were several cases of younger Germans who feel falsely blamed by foreigners for a

7 The German Vergangenheitsbewältigung means both “coming to terms with the past” and “mastering the past”. Even in English texts, the term is mostly quoted in the German original. Due to its shifting meanings in German memory debates, it is in my view actually untranslatable. See also (Kansteiner 2006). 8 As against the thesis of a “taboo” to speak about German victims – alleged e.g. by Friedrich (2006), German victims have been the focal point of vernacular memory (especially in families) all the time since 1945 and in public and official memory until the mid-1960s (see Frei 1999, Giordano 2000). 9 Here, a psychoanalytical interpretation seems appropriate. To me Jan Lohl’s concept of “emotional heritage” (Lohl 2010) looks like a promising approach for further research.

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past they feel they have nothing to do with. The East German high school student Maria (18)¹⁰ states: Yes, but what else are we supposed to do? I mean, we put up enough memorials and say: Okay, we were guilty. But what else can we do to show that this just isn’t happening anymore? (D12, 925, emphasis mine)¹¹

On the one hand, by using the collective “we”, Maria clearly identifies with the German nation, even with its guilt for Nazi crimes. On the other hand, these crimes, as well as the guilt for it, are matters of the past and have yet been atoned (by erecting “enough memorials”) – something that is obvious for Maria, but not for others, as she emphasises. In another group discussion, Saskia (23) a university student from West Germany asks herself: I’d be interested in knowing if this concerns especially us, because of our, […] historical emphasis […] from our, historical background, or if perhaps other European peoples really are dealing much more freely and easily with it. (D14, 122, emphasis mine)

What is revealed here is that something is puzzling Saskia. It is quite characteristic that both she and Maria use empty signifiers like “this” or “it” to refer to the Nazi past. We can only assume to what they actually refer. Curiously enough, in the subsequent discussions, their respective fellow participants seemed to know perfectly what Maria and Saskia were talking about. Actually, in many of the German group discussions such blurry and abstract phrasing helped foster an atmosphere of consensus among the group members. To a lesser extent, similar tendencies of indistinct wording can also be observed in German public and official memory. In Poland, after 1945, there was a huge gap between official and public memory, controlled by the Communist regime, and vernacular memory dealing with the “white stains”, like the Soviet occupation or the 1944 Warsaw Rising. After 1989 memory debates deeply challenged the Polish martyrological self-image of a deeply victimised nations (see Jasinska-Kania 2000), as for example Polish perpetratorship in the Holocaust was addressed (Gross 2001). Also, the relationship to its neighbours, namely Germany and Russia, needed to be redefined. Memory (of WWII) became a subject of political struggle, sometimes leading to clashes

10 All participants’ names have been anonymised. The age refers to the point of time when the respective interview was conducted (2006–2008). 11 The signature indicates the country (D=Germany, PL=Poland), number of the interview (see Appendix, p. 101) and, behind the colon, the paragraph quoted. Emphasis is the speaker’s if not noted otherwise.

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between rather national conservative and rather pro-European politicians (Kochanowicz 2007, Piskorski 2008). Hence, a generally acknowledged memory consensus has not been achieved yet in Polish public memory. However, like in other Central European countries, there is a broad anti-totalitarian consensus, roughly equalizing the occupations by Nazis and Soviets. This was also clearly reflected in the group discussions. There were much more open conflicts about different interpretations of the past within Polish groups than among their German counterparts. Additionally, Polish public debate is interested in and influenced by public debates in other countries, especially Germany. This is reflected by Patryk (32), a journalist who works with a large Polish daily: It’s irritating to me that there is this trend in Germany nowadays […] Of course, I look at it from a Polish perspective and it prompts a bad feeling. It is like they exclusively see and present their own victims. I’ve never realised that they would like to point out for example our victims. (PL20, 82).

Patryk feels disturbed by an alleged highlighting of German victims in German public memory. In his view this disregards the historical context of German perpetratorship. His criticism points at the one-sidedness of the German discourse, which he perceives as not caring about “the other”, while at the same time, Patryk marks his own perspective as partial. Krzysztof (20), a university student from Poznan, shares Patryk’s critique. But, whereas Patryk portrays two conflicting particularist memory narratives, Krzysztof considers the views coming from abroad as dominant misinterpretations that actually form a threat, to his image of Poland as a victim among the nations: There is currently a struggle about the shaping of the historical memory in the younger generation. If Poland doesn’t take a firm voice now and doesn’t take up the subject, who the actual victims were and who the executioners, these boundaries will vanish (PL02, 97)

Krzysztof, like many other Polish speakers, uses concepts like “the historical truth” or advised against an impeding “falsification of history“. His insistence on the categories of perpetrator and victim is also characteristic for the Polish group discussions. The crucial point here is the usage of (supposedly) universal categories to make particular claims. To sum up, in the German group discussions, there was a general tendency towards using abstract references and inferences, whereas in the Polish material, there was much more conflict between competing interpretations of the past.

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7 Europeanization of memory In both cases presented  – the difficulties of dealing with perpetratorship in Germany as well as the defence of the collective victim status in Poland  – the respective challenge seems to come from abroad, from a confrontation with “the other”. It is mostly in this challenging reconfiguration of the national that the various influences “from abroad” gain importance. What I have earlier called uncertainties in national self-understanding¹² can thus also be understood as a re-negotiation of the national, triggered by contestations from abroad. In general, those dynamics of transnational memories are not limited to Europe and can be studied worldwide. However, I would like to argue that there is a special quality to such processes in Europe, which can be called a Europeanization of memory. In the European case, as an effect of political integration within the European Union, Europe or rather Europeanness constitutes a common point of reference. Alongside different local, regional and national identities, many people in Europe actually express various forms of European belonging to Europe. For details on what this entails, see Bruter (2005) and Medrano (2003). Europeanization, as discussed, does not imply that the national is abandoned or overcome. Rather, Europeanization has to be understood as a dialectical process. To the participants, Europe represents both a normative aim and a potential threat for the national perspective. Let’s take a look at how Alexander (77) an academic pensioner from north-eastern Poland describes the two sides of this coin: Now we have to learn to think European. […] One should not forget, as a kind of lesson, that armed conflicts don’t solve any problems in international coexistence. […] The best way is the one of rapprochement and respect for otherness. On one hand, one should pay attention to the national differences, but on the other hand look for what we have in common. (PL06, 117)

For Alexander, Europe on the one hand symbolises transcultural understanding for the other’s experiences (Sontag 2003, Landsberg 2004) and the triumph over the age of warfare. Typical for participants from both countries, these positive connotations are depicted as a “lesson” to be learned from history. The atrocities of past wars become a moral obligation to do better in the future – a clearcut internalisation of a normative discourse descending from public and official memory.

12 From a constructionist standpoint, collective or national identity is of course always “uncertain“, as it requires constant reproduction (Anderson 1987, Hobsbawm 1989).

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On the other hand, towards the end of the quote, Alexander also expresses concern about national idiosyncrasies within Europe. Altogether, he is drawing a picture of Europe as some kind of unity in diversity. The claim for national autonomy, however, can also come off differently, as Helga (83), a retired physician from rural West Germany, states: The autonomy must not become some mishmash. It must remain different for each country. […] Our autonomy should not come at the expense of others, of course, but we must be allowed to preserve. What is typical and what is dear to our hearts, that we must be able to preserve and not to become some unitary mush altogether. (D06, 190–193).

Helga does not tell us what exactly constitutes the “mishmash” she repudiates. Presumably, there is an underlying notion of “naturally“ national or ethnic idiosyncrasies that need to be preserved. What becomes obvious though is the threat (by Europe) Helga perceives. It is important to stress that Helga’s rejection of an alleged homogenization is not anti-European. Her perspective is indeed particularistic, but in claiming to be allowed to maintain her own perspective, Helga is actually demonstrating her awareness of the existence of other (competing) perspectives. Here, the reference to the other promotes dissociation rather than understanding, yet this does not change its function for the reconfiguring of the national. In fact, statements in which the coexistence of different narratives and perspectives is explicitly welcomed are mostly made by memory actors who are in some way professional (often demonstrating an affinity with public and official memory). Karolina (49), a historian from Warsaw, comments on a European memory: The Germans will remember the war experience differently from the Poles – this is closely linked to their situation, with from what they suffered back then and what affected us. Probably, it is not about bringing uniformity to this. […] One needs to understand these different perspectives to be able to work jointly on themes that are suffused with conflict or with those which are borderline. That is even good and interesting, because one digs deeper and understands more. (PL13, 132–4).

Drawing on her experiences in international scholarly exchange and cooperation, Karolina acknowledges the differences in historical experiences of Germans and Poles and between the respectively different memory narratives. Here, the buzzword “learning a lesson from history” is actually elaborated upon on a professional level.

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8 Shared memory practices The participants‘ views on European integration can hardly be standardised as either pro- or anti-European. The very idea of a common European memory, addressed by the interviewers in every single group discussion, was for the most part met with scepticism by the participants. Additionally, as I have shown, there were not many memory narratives shared in the two countries. But there is another type of cross-country congruency that could be detected and which I would identify as shared memory practices. I will briefly illustrate what this means by depicting prominent narratives of victimhood in reference to the Holocaust. If, in a manner of speaking, victimhood or suffering are the currencies in which the value of memories are measured, then the Holocaust has become the “gold standard”; i.e., a universal container for crimes against humanity (Alexander 2002). Yet, analogies to the Holocaust are often drawn to legitimate or pursue particularistic interests (Levy and Sznaider 2005). For example, participants from both Germany and Poland use the category of “trauma” to claim a collective status of victimhood.¹³ It is a shared memory practice in the sense that the same pattern is used for different reasons, in different contexts, with different content and outcome. In Germany, one strategy to ease the perceived burden of the past is to dissolve all differences in historical experiences and to generalise Nazi crimes as generic wrongdoings, which are in no way special to Germans. As Marlene (69) the Grandmother of a West German family put it: If we want to become one Europe, we all have to shake hands, and every country has its Holocaust, its war, its crimes as well. There is no European country that says “I stayed clean”. (D08, 261).

Marlene’s statement is highly ambivalent: Indeed, she outspokenly supports European integration, but she only does so at the price of decontextualising, and dehistoricising all historical experiences altogether. The Holocaust is literally equated with war and other mass crimes and generalised in an anthropological, almost biblical metaphor. The effect of this generalisation is to ease the ‘burden of the past’, to lighten the weight of German guilt by scattering it.

13 Of course, traumas play a crucial role in individuals’ memories and they do have a certain influence on collective memory on a vernacular and public level. Yet the utilization of this psychoanalytical concept in a context of collective memory remains problematic, see (Kansteiner 2002, 2008).

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Curiously enough, in the Polish group discussions, quite similar analogical references to the Holocaust were used to justify Polish victimhood as equally significant with Jewish victimhood. Maciej (26), official of a Polish extreme right-wing party, when asked about how memory of the Holocaust should look, responds: Depends on how the term Holocaust is understood, because we can speak of a Holocaust of the Jewish people, or of all the nations, to which a holocaust was actually done to. […] Because quite often, this terminology is associated with the Jewish people. Or can we also refer it to other nations, for example to the Polish nation? Holocaust can be understood in different ways. (PL17, 106–114).

In both countries, such literal equations of the Holocaust with other events are exceptional cases. What is a recurring pattern, however, is the very thought of the analogy. As mentioned, these utilisations of Holocaust analogies can be comprehended as a reclamation of universal symbols for particular interests. In other words, one’s own identity and role is renegotiated via references to the other. Holocaust memory is just a paradigmatic example for this mechanism. A common pattern (or practice) is used in different contexts with different outcomes. In the Polish group discussions, even if parallels to the Holocaust were drawn to claim other events’ importance for today’s memory, the differences in historical experience remained acknowledged. In the German material, these differences were often neglected. Also, in Germany there is a tendency towards abstraction on a methodological level. The classifications of “perpetrator” or “victim” are increasingly thought to be too dichotomous and thus avoided. A possible explanation for these differences would be that the victim status offers a positive identification for Poles and is thus defended, while the perpetrator status is quite undesirable for Germans and yet sought to be overcome. While (self-)victimisation seems to evolve as a common memory pattern, the category of “victim” is far from being universal. The term can have entirely different meanings, thus, as I have tried to show, it is necessary to ask empirically, what this attribution actually stands for. Who is depicted as whose victim? Who is being made responsible for it? What is the relationship between different groups of victims? The concept of multidirectional memory outlined by Michael Rothberg in this volume, might be beneficial in this analysis. Rothberg identifies different types of “productive, not privative interaction of different historical memories” (Rothberg 2009). On an axes of comparison, the poles are equation and differentiation (e.g. relativization or sacralisation of the Holocaust), on an axis of political affect, the continuum reaches from competition to solidarity (cf. Moses and Rothberg, this volume, 33). These different modes can clearly be detected in the group discussions:

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Sometimes, even attributions that are usually considered emotionally affecting are used in a rather tranquil way to describe a historical context from the speaker’s point of view. Asked about the potential for a common European memory, the fire fighter Ryszard Gałczyński (46) from rural north-eastern Poland laconically states: We do have a shared past. Just that some were the oppressors and the others the oppressed. That’s a shared past. (PL03, 365).

The participant does not use the antithetical attributions to make a moral claim. Instead, he sees a commonality even in an experienced structured by such an extremely polarised power relation. In Rothberg’s terms, Ryszard expresses differentiated solidarity. In the Polish group discussions, this view is clearly challenged by participants who are reluctant to acknowledge conflicting memories e.g. of German victimhood. Here, competing memories are treated exactly as a “zero-sum game” as Rothberg has called it: If one groups wins (compassion or recognition), the other group loses. In Germany again, there is only little awareness of Polish memory at all. In official and public memory, there is a certain attention mainly due to political considerations. But at the German vernacular level, at least in the group discussions, a Polish perspective is virtually absent. As mentioned above, apart from expressions of Europeanness, dynamics similar to a Europeanization of memory are very likely to be found outside of Europe as well. As a more general phenomenon, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (Levy and Sznaider 2002, 2005) have described these processes as cosmopolitanization of memory, which should not be misunderstood as a straightforward universalization, but rather as a dialectical process of the “encounter of global interpretations and local sensibilities” that “involves the formation of nation-specific and nation-transcending commonalities” (Levy and Sznaider 2002, 92). This points to the entanglement between the global and the local, the universal and the particular, as it has been described by Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson in this volume:. Although […] individuals or groups may […]identify with particular histories, the way in which events are represented and remembered is strongly influenced by the memorialisation of other pasts – […] memories exist in an essentially dialogic relation to each other. One might therefore argue that even the most seemingly nationalistic examples of memory are implicit reactions to (or rather, against) the global culture in which contemporary commemorative practice takes place. (Bond and Rapson, this volume, 19)

As I have been trying to demonstrate, there is no contradiction between collective memories remaining to be deeply informed by national frameworks on the one hand and growing transnational or transcultultural influences on the other hand.

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Instead, it is the very understanding of the national itself that is being transformed. In reflexive particularism (Levy, Heinlein, and Breuer 2011), the nationstate is being revalued in an emerging transnational memory scape. Reflexive particularism refers to negotiations over ‘the national’ driven by the endogenization of transcultural norms and discourses and deliberative cognitive reflections that can be read as reactions to renegotiations of the national.

References Alexander, Jeffrey. C. “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The ‘Holocaust’ from War Crime to Trauma Drama.” European Journal of Social Theory 5.1 (2002): 5–85. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined communities. London: Verso, 1987. Bodnar, John. “Public Memory in an American City.” Commemorations. Ed. John R. Gillis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. 74–89. Bohnsack, Ralf, Agalja Przyborski, and Burkhard Schäffer, eds. Das Gruppendiskussionsverfahren in der Forschungspraxis. Opladen: Budrich, 2006. Bruter, Michael. Citizens of Europe? The emergence of a mass European identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Burgoyne, Robert. “From Contested to Consensual Memory: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.” Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts (Memory & Narrative). Eds. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone. New Brunswick (NJ): Transaction Publishers, 2005. 208–220. Burke, Peter. “History as Social Memory.” Memory: History, Culture and the Mind. Ed. Thomas Butler. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. 97–113. Davies, Norman. Rising‚ 44. The Battle for Warsaw. London: Pan Books, 2004. Eder, Klaus and Willfried Spohn. Collective memory and European Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Fischer, Torben and Matthias N. Lorenz, eds. Lexikon der “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” in Deutschland. Debatten- und Diskursgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus nach 1945. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007. Frei, Norbert. Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit. München: Beck, 1999. Frei, Norbert. 1945 und Wir: Das Dritte Reich im Bewusstsein der Deutschen. München: Beck, 2005. Friedrich, Jörg. The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Giordano, Ralf. Die Zweite Schuld oder Von der Last, Deutscher zu Sein. Hamburg: Rasch und Röhring, 2000. Gross, Jan Tomasz. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Hobsbawm, Eric J. and Terence Ranger. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

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Jasinska-Kania, Aleksandra. “Poland: The ‘Christ’ of nations.” European Nations and Nationalism – Theoretical and Historical Perspectives. Eds. Luke Hagendoorn, Gyorgy Csepeli, Henk Dekker and Russell Farnen, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. 281–306. Jensen, Olaf. “Induktive Kategorienbildung als Basis Qualitativer Inhaltsanalyse.” Die Praxis der qualitativen Inhaltsanalyse. Eds. Philipp Mayring and Michaela Gläser-Zikuda. Weinheim: Beltz, 2005. 255–275. Kansteiner, Wulf. “Finding Meaning in Memory.” History & Memory 41 (2002): 179–197. Kansteiner, Wulf. “Losing the War, Winning the Memory Battle: The Legacy of Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust in the Federal Republic of Germany.” The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe. Eds. Richard N. Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner and Claudio Fogu. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 102–146. Kansteiner, Wulf, and Harald Weilnböck. “Against the Concept of Cultural Trauma.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. 229–240. Kochanowicz, Jacek. “Rechtsruck.” Transit: Europäische Revue 33 (2007), 142–158. König, Helmut, Manfred Sicking, and Julia Schmidt. Europas Gedächtnis: Das Neue Europa Zwischen Nationalen Erinnerungen und Gemeinsamer Identität. Bielefeld: Transcript,2008. Kuckartz, Udo, Heiko Grunenberg, and Thorsten Dresing. Qualitative Datenanalyse: Computergestützt. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007. Lamnek, Siegfried. Gruppendiskussion: Theorie und Praxis. Basel: Beltz, 2005. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. “Memory Unbound.” European Journal of Social Theory 5.1 (2002): 87–106. Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. Levy, Daniel, Michael Heinlein, and Lars Breuer. “Reflexive Particularism and Cosmopolitanization: The Reconfiguration of the National.” Global Networks 11: 139–159. Lewins, Ann and Christina Silver. Using Software in Qualitative Research: A Step-by-step Guide. Los Angeles: Sage, 2007. Lohl, Jan. Gefühlserbschaft und Rechtsextremismus. Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2010. Middleton, David, and Derek Edwards. Collective Remembering. London: Sage, 1990. Niven, William J. ed. Germans as Victims. Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Mayring, Philipp. “Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse.” Qualitative Forschung. Eds. Uwe Flick, Ernst von Kardorff and Ines Steinke. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2005. 468–475. Medrano, Juan Díez. Framing Europe: Attitudes to European Integration in Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Middleton, D. and D. Edwards. 1990, Collective Remembering, Sage, London. Nora, Pierre. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Olick, Jeffrey K. “Collective Memory: The Two Cultures.” Sociological Theory 17.3 (1999): 333–348. Olick, Jeffrey K. “From Collective Memory to the Sociology of Mnemonic Practices and Products.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. 151–161.

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Olick, Jeffrey K., and Joyce Robbins. “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of of Mnemonic Practices.” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105–140. Pelinka, Anton. “Die Geänderte Funktionalität von Vergangenheit und Die Geänderte Funktionalität von Vergangenheit und Vergangenheitspolitik: Das Ende der Konkordanzdemokratie und die Verschiebung der Feindbilder.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaften 30.1 (2001): 35–48. Piskorski, Jan M. “Die vielen Gesichter der Geschichte: Erinnerung und Geschichtspolitik in Polen.” Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 1 (2008): 83–94. Rensmann, Lars. “Enthauptung der Medusa: Zur Diskurshistorischen Rekonstruktion der Walser-Debatte im Licht politischer Psychologie.” Umkämpftes Vergessen. WalserDebatte, Holocaust-Mahnmal und neuere deutsche Geschichtspolitik. Eds. Micha Brumlik, Hajo Funke and Lars Rensmann. Berlin: Schiler, 2000. 28–126. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Sabrow, Martin, ed. Der Streit um die Erinnerung. Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsanstalt, 2008. Schmitz, Helmut, ed. A Nation of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003. Steinlauf, Michael C. Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Stråth, Bo and Małgorzata Pakier. A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. Welzer, Harald, ed. Der Krieg der Erinnerung: Holocaust, Kollaboration und Widerstand im Europäischen Gedächtnis. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2007. Welzer, Harald, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall. “Opa war kein Nazi”: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002. Zaslavsky, Victor. Class Cleansing: The Katyn Massacre. New York: Telos Press, 2008.

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Appendix Table 2: List of groups interviewed

No.

Germany (20)

Poland (20)

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 25 26

15–25 y.o. East 15–25 y.o. West 40–50 y.o. East 40–50 y.o. West 65+ y.o. East 65+ y.o. West Family East Family West

15–25 y.o. countryside 15–25 y.o. city 40–50 y.o. countryside 40–50 y.o. city 65+ y.o. countryside 65+ y.o. city Family 1 (countryside) Family 2 (city)

Non-German minority Pupils Historians Students of history History teachers Politicians (MPs) Memorial Site Staff Jewish Community Journalists (Weekly) Expellees War Children Protestant Academy

Pupils Historians Students History teachers Politicians (MPs) Radical Party (LPR) Museum Staff Jewish Community Journalists (Daily) Expellees

Priests German Minority

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Aline Sierp

Integrating Europe, Integrating Memories: The EU’s Politics of Memory since 1945 1 Introduction World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it. The contribution which an organized and living Europe can bring to civilization is indispensable to the maintenance of peaceful relations. (Schuman, 1950)

Robert Schuman’s¹ words on 09 May 1950, proposing to place French and German coal and steel industries under a common High Authority – the forerunner of the European Commission – incorporate in an exemplary way the principles that have guided the initial integration process of the European Union. The determination to avoid another war among European nations has since then been central to the master narrative of European integration, being invoked particularly during celebrative commemorations of the founding instants of the European Union.² What role has this narrative played during the different phases of the integration process? Can the experience of war and repression, genocide and dictatorship during WWII be regarded as the EU’s founding myth? When did the goal of a shared understanding of this seminal event gain prominence? If we presuppose that this emerging form of collective memory transcends nationally bound types of remembering, could an emerging collective European memory become the base for the formation of an overarching political identity? By tracing the prominence of references made to the experiences of WWII in speeches by presidents of the High Authority and the European Commission between 1950 and 2009 on the one hand and in the different treaty-texts on the other, it will be possible to answer these questions and to establish the importance memories of WWII have had for the EU integration project and the emergence of a collective European memory framework. The analysis of the different EU policy instruments and discussions on their implementation will furthermore shed light on the nature of this framework: Is it a truly transcultural framework 1 French minister of Foreign Affairs. 2 As for example during celebrations of ”Europe Day” taking place each year on the 09 May in commemoration of the Schuman Declaration in 1950. ”Europe Day” became an official European celebrative day during the European Council meeting in Milan on 28/29 June 1985 but the recurrence of the Schuman Declaration had been celebrated with commemorative speeches by the European Institutions already before (Curti 2005).

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that cuts across different national memory regimes? Does it integrate existing, more specific, frames of remembrance or does it try to create something new, thus overwriting these existing frameworks? The terms “transnational” and “transcultural” are being used in reference to the subjects they substantiate. While transnational memory describes frameworks that cut across memories tied to the narrow boundaries of nation states, transcultural memory is a wider concept going beyond national frontiers cutting also across divisions present within national societies. It thus follows closely the definition given by Dirk Moses and Michael Rothberg in the opening chapter.

2 EU’s founding myths Founding acts and political myths are important tools for political communities because they provide sources of political identity and legitimacy that go beyond the mechanisms of institutional democracy. Founding myths tend to emphasize the interruption with the past, the break with old traditions and the reorganisation of a community around new values. Political legitimacy is drawn from this. As Hannah Arendt puts it: “Legitimacy bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future” (Arendt 1970). The historical correctness of the political myth in question is of limited importance in this context. What is important is its symbolic character that constitutes a powerful unifying force. It can create a WE-identity that gives meaning to the past and guidance for the future. “Political founding myths are narratives which bring about a collective identity beyond the social, cultural, and political fragmentation of a given community” (Probst 2003, 45). By appealing to common experiences in the past, a sense of belonging is being generated within a social group. It creates a special bond among all those who can refer in one way or another to the evoked experience or seminal event. This process is not only limited to those who might have experienced the past personally but might include also those who share a sense of relevance regarding its memory. Founding myths thus influence the way people relate to each other and to others and are an important element in the development of a common identity. “The emergence of a common political culture is more than the abstract acceptance of universal principles. It is also the adoption of a narrative which creates identity” (Dewandre and Lenoble 1994, 97). The creation of a shared narrative as the base of a founding myth necessarily implies processes of selection and simplification. This is certainly true at the national level, where particularistic social and individual memories tend to get homogenised into a coherent national narrative (see Assmann 2007). We can pre-

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suppose that the situation on the supranational level looks similar. Applied to the EU context this would mean that the emergence of a European memory might transcend national forms of memory by creating an additional level where memories are homogenised and simplified. The question to be posed is whether this necessarily implies the erasure of national and local forms of remembrance or if it means the creation of a further supranational arena where diverging memories can find their expression. Dewandre and Lenoble’s reference to universal principles might give an indication of the possible basis for such an arena. It resonates with Levy and Sznaider’s (2002) idea of the globalisation of Holocaust memory which situates the Holocaust as an event disconnected from its historical origins and more as a universal symbol for human rights violations triggering political actions and reactions. In the European context this would mean that the sense of a shared past might facilitate the development of a narrative of identity based on universal values detached from national elements of memory and identity. Following an analytical proposal by Giesen (1998), there are three modes of assimilating collective memories into a collective identity: the primordial, the traditional and the reflexive mode. The primordial mode bases identity on a mythical past. The traditional mode constructs collectives by transforming history into a story of glory and success. The reflexive mode presupposes a basic rupture with a glorious past and forces community members to take a reflexive view of themselves and others. While the primordial and the traditional modes are characteristic for the construction of national identities, the reflexive mode might best describe the process pursued by the EU of constructing a symbolic space in which all the different European memories can be contained. To be able to test this hypothesis, we have to have a closer look at the different founding myths that have characterised EU history from its very beginning. Europe has several foundation myths ranging from stories belonging to Greek mythology (“the rape of Europa”) to the first emergence of the idea of a European order during the Enlightenment. Considering the wealth of legends (true or false) it is not surprising that the question of the origins of Europe and the closely connected question of “what is European” has caused fierce debates during the European constitutional process. While ideas on the origin of Europe abound, the situation for the European Union as an economic and political entity, is much clearer. First proposals to found a European federation were made in the 1920s by Aristide Briand, French minister for Foreign Affairs. The idea of a united Europe was moreover repeatedly voiced by intellectuals³, politi-

3 See for example the speech by Léon Blum “L’Europe de Demain” on 14 October 1939, available from Centre d’action pour la federation européenne, Neuchâtel.

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cal associations⁴ and resistance movements⁵ before and during the two world wars. Concrete political action, however, was taken only after the end of WWII. After the foundation of the Council of Europe and the Organization for European Economic Cooperation in 1948, France took the initiative for further economic and political integration. The idea for the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was borne out of the necessity to find a solution to the eminent end of the Marshall Plan. The speech made by the French minister of Foreign Affairs Robert Schuman (quoted above) on 9 May 1950 is conventionally regarded as having inaugurated what later was to become the European Union. References to WWII and the importance of peaceful relations among countries (particularly France and Germany) abound in Schuman’s speech and were subsequently mentioned in the very first line of the Treaty establishing the ECSC in 1951: “Considering that world peace can be safeguarded only by creative efforts commensurate with the dangers that threaten it” (European Coal and Steel Community 1951). However, we might, as Probst (2003, 48) points out, overestimate the ideational motives of this founding story. One of the main reasons for France to propose to place French and German coal and steel industries under a common High Authority was its interest to limit Germany’s military and political power and to gain control over its steel industry.⁶ France’s ambitions were not met with opposition because they met in its turn the aims of the US and the Adenauer government to reintegrate Germany into the international community. Adenauer’s first comment about the Schumann plan was apparently: “That is our breakthrough” (Judt 1994, 28–31). And even Jean Monnet mentioned ‘peace’ as being only one of the goals of the ECSC among many others. If we take into account the often very idealistic ideas connected to transcultural memory models, seeing the commemoration of the same historical event as the necessary glue that has the power to unify people on the one hand and trigger political actions on the other (in this case in order to secure peace), the example of the origins of the EU provides a good counterexample of the sometimes very diverging political interests that can shape cosmopolitan projects of any kind. The often presented transcultural origin of the EU, the universal longing for peace and harmony, has certainly

4 For example the Swiss “Europa-Union”. 5 See for example the text ‘Declaration on a European Cooperation’ drawn up on 31 March 1944 in Paris by representatives of the Italian, French, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Yugoslav and Polish resistance movements, available from Centre d’action pour la federation européenne, Neuchâtel. 6 Before presenting the Schuman plan, the French government had tried to come to an agreement about the exploitation of the German raw material with the Soviet Union. Only after this attempt had failed, did France decide to change its strategy.

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not been the only rationale behind the creation of the ECSC, proving once more the mythical aspect of the founding of the EU. This becomes even clearer when analysing the role the EU’s origins have played during the Cold War.

3 The Cold War References to the experience of war and dictatorship that were still present in the “founding fathers’” speeches and in the Union’s first treaty, almost completely disappeared in speeches made by European Commission presidents during the Cold War. Already in the text of the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957, the aspiration to safeguard peace and liberty among its members is mentioned last among the many aims of the community (European Economic Community 1957). Speeches commemorating the Schuman Declaration make reference to the great achievements of the ECSC and the EEC and underline the importance of the existence of economic and political cooperation, but say very little about the experience of war and dictatorship being at the origin of this cooperation. This might be explained by the fact that memories of the seminal events that the founding myth of the EU was harking back to were far from being uniform across countries. The reconstruction of memories of WWII had been from the beginning a predominantly national affair, guided by the political need to protect the positive self-image of the nation. Memories were considered to be politically explosive and unusable during an era when Europe was both divided and bound together by a sharp ideological contest between East and West. Memories of the recent past were frozen and political images and interpretations adjusted to the political status quo of the Cold War (Judt 1992, 83–119). A form of collective amnesia was the result and any reference to Europe’s contested heritage was omitted from public speeches by political actors. If we analyse contemporary discourses on memory, we can still see traces of this tendency to avoid active confrontation, particularly with those memories that hark back to the division of the continent during the Cold War Years. The best examples of this are certainly the debates surrounding the installation of a remembrance day for all victims of totalitarian regimes on August 23rd. It could be argued that the mere attempt to create some kind of an overarching transcultural memory that has the power to overlay more localised commemorative discourses is a new attempt to express the wish for a form of amnesia through the conscious homogenisation of conflictual memories. However, whilst the Cold War might have impeded active confrontation with the past, its ideological confrontation with Communism may also have contrib-

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uted to further European integration. It has been suggested by several scholars that more than the memory of the traumatic experiences of WWII, it had been the division of Europe into East and West that has fostered European cooperation (Thum 2004). The opposition of the Soviet Union on the one hand and the European Community on the other had created a sense of community and directed major attention towards common interests that was able to cover many of the real existing differences (including divisions concerning memories of the past) between the Western European states. This is not to say that transcultural cohesion of any kind has an ideological basis. It only suggests that it is often the outcome of other needs and political requirements of that particular moment in history that might foster the development of a transcultural project.

4 After 1989 The fragility of this construct became obvious in 1989 when the breaking open of the bipolar political world resulted in an eruptive return of memory and a reawakening of history. After a period of strongly stylised and standardised ideas of the past, many countries started to slowly face conflicting, painful and embarrassing memories. It was particularly the opening up of archives, allowing for increased research activity into the circumstances of WWII and the Holocaust, that resulted in a more differentiated vision of victims and collaborators, often correcting the national memory constructs that had been built in the first 30 years after the end of WWII. The crumbling of national myths made a new confrontation with questions of guilt and responsibility for the WWII events necessary and allowed for the first attempts of talking about a “European memory”. Already in the 1980s, discussions of “European values” had frequently, but by no means exclusively, addressed the legacy of twentieth-century warfare and genocide in Europe (Speth, 1999). The institutional consolidation of the EU in the 1990s and in particular the forceful confrontation with the memory of Communism (often called the “second Totalitarianism of the 20th century”) led to the increased understanding of WWII as a European War and of Fascism/Nazism as a European phenomenon. This can be clearly seen when looking at public commemorative speeches in different European member states. Particularly in the past 20 years a clear shift away from a very nationally focused dealing with the legacy of WWII towards a more cosmopolitan way of addressing questions of guilt and responsibility can be discerned. A similar development can be seen on the European level. In light of the end of the Cold War, the original sources of inspiration that had led to the construction of the EU right after the Second World War came back to the fore.

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“We have to employ more than ever our intellectual power and our political will in order to build the European house whose foundations however have to remain the original ideas of Robert Schuman”, said Frans Andriessen (1990), the VicePresident of the European Commission, on 09 May 1990. He is echoing Jacques Delors’ words pronounced one day earlier during the commemorative celebrations of ‘Europe Day’, in which Delors had underlined the relevance Schuman’s original ideas still have for the European project: …I would like to quote a phrase of the speech Robert Schuman made in the Collège de Bruges in October 1953: “Our initial considerations were of a much less economic than political nature. Detoxify the relationship between France and Germany, secure peace, create a climate of cooperation across Europe. This was our main aim.” If we replaced the word “France” with a list of all the European countries, this declaration would be as relevant today as it was forty years ago. (Delors 1990)

Speeches in the 1990s are not only characterised by a reawakened interest in the original aims of European integration but also by a more open dealing with Europe’s painful heritage. On 09 May 1994 Sir Leon Brittan, Vice President of the European Commission, does not only underline today’s relevance of the principles evoked by Schuman in 1950 but connects the 9 May to two significant dates of WWII: the 9 May 1940, when Hitler ordered the invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium and France and the 9 May 1945, “the first full day of freedom” (Brittan 1994). He dedicates a large part of his speech to the recollection of “the darkest period of its [Europe’s] history for many centuries” (Brittan 1994), before emphasizing the importance of this era for the development of the guiding principles of today’s EU: “These foundations, these values, [democracy, liberty, equality, solidarity, justice] spring from our continent’s history and experiences. They have always continued to shine in Europe even, as in 1940, when it seemed that darkness had all but engulfed us” (Brittan 1994). The growing time period between the events of WWII and the present day, the arrival of new generations and their emotional distance to the recollections of their parents, and the slow disappearance of contemporary witnesses allowed for a more direct confrontation with the experience of war and dictatorship. Levy and Sznaider (2002, 96) identify three central changes in this context: (1) a generational transition from social to historical memories; (2) a growing historicization of WWII; (3) the identification of the Holocaust as unique with reference to the past and universal for the future. It was particularly the new focus on the Holocaust that started to dominate the public dealing with Europe’s recent past from the end of the 1990s onwards.

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5 The Holocaust In the immediate post-war years, the Holocaust did not permeate public discourse, nor was its commemoration in any form institutionalized. It had been originally conceived as part of a larger practice of war crimes in an almost endless list of Nazi cruelties (Levy and Sznaider 2002, 94). Taking into account Germany’s initial desire to forget about this aspect of the Third Reich and considering other countries’ attempts to cover up instances of anti-Semitism and collaboration in deportation, it is not surprising that, in contrast to the desire to prevent another war among European countries, the genocide was of no significance for early western integration. In the years between 1950 and 1989, when political and intellectual debates about the ongoing process of west European integration focused on the future of the European project, the Holocaust – as a central point of reference or even as a founding act – was never mentioned. Neither in public speeches, nor in the treaties, is reference made to the role the Holocaust might have played in defining the original values or the political goals of the European Union (Probst 2003, 54). Andrew Beattie might therefore be right when he says that “recent attempts to transform the Holocaust into the EU’s foundational myth […] rewrite and distort the historical record” (2007, 16). The interpretation of the Holocaust as founding act is, of course, only plausible from an ex-post perspective. It nevertheless has to be understood within a certain context, namely as an attempt to create an overarching political identity beyond the institutional framework of the EU. Dan Diner argues in this context that the commemoration of the Holocaust is increasingly becoming the core of a unifying European memory, giving constitution building in Europe the necessary symbolic foundation: “The ethical imperatives of this founding act constitute a catalogue of values which are of normative importance for a political Europe” (Diner 2000). That the commemoration of the Holocaust – as an event which gives meaning – is not only a source of symbolic legitimacy but also of political action and values, can be seen by the determination the EU demonstrates when it comes to the rejection of racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia. The joint Motion for a Resolution on remembrance of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and racism voted on by the European Parliament on 27 January 2005 reads: The sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Nazi Germany’s death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau […] is not only a major occasion for European citizens to remember and condemn the enormous horror and tragedy of the Holocaust, but also for addressing the disturbing rise in anti-Semitism and especially anti-Semitic incidents in Europe, and for learning anew the wider lessons about the dangers of victimising people on the basis of race, ethnic origin, religion, political or sexual orientation, or social classification (European Parliament 2005).

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It is striking that all previous resolutions on racism, xenophobia and antiSemitism by the European Parliament⁷ also make reference to the Holocaust. It has become the yardstick with which other political developments are being measured and evaluated. This became particularly evident during the Balkan crisis and the unsuccessful NATO intervention in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995, when military involvement in Kosovo was primarily framed as a moral obligation largely in response to previous failures to intervene on behalf of innocent civilians. Similar lines of argument could be perceived during disputes on military interventions in Rwanda, Iraq or Afghanistan. As Aleida Assmann puts it: “The Holocaust has not become a single universally shared memory, but it has become the paradigm or template through which other genocides and historical traumas are very often perceived and presented” (Assmann 2007, 14). The importance the Holocaust has acquired in the past years can also be seen by the number of initiatives that have been taken in the last decennial in order to anchor its memory firmly to the institutional setting. Already in 1995 the European Parliament passed a resolution on a day to commemorate the Holocaust (European Parliament 1995) but the first concrete step into this direction was taken in 2000 by the Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson, who invited representatives of sixteen nations (among them thirteen present and future members of the European Union) to a forum to discuss and define a common framework for commemorating and teaching the Holocaust. When in 2002 the Council of Europe decided to introduce a continent-wide Day of Remembrance, albeit with the flexibility for individual countries to select the most appropriate date, most countries did choose 27 January, confirming its transversal meaning and transforming it into a truly European memorial day. In addition to national initiatives, since 2000 the 27th of January is being officially commemorated by representatives of the European institutions as well, making it, together with “Europe-Day”, one of the few European commemoration dates that are being celebrated transnationally.⁸

7 27 October 1994, published in Official Journal C 323, 21.11.1994, p. 154; 27 April 1995, published in Official Journal C 126, 22.5.1995, p. 75; 26 October 1995, published in Official Journal C 308, 20.11.1995, p. 140; 30 January 1997, published in Official Journal C 55, 24.2.1997, p. 17 and 16 March 2000, published in Official Journal C 377, 29.12.2000, p. 366. 8 Even though Europe was the stage for the Holocaust, the memory of it is no longer specifically European but extends far beyond Europe’s boundaries. On 24 January 2005, the United Nations for the first time in its history commemorated the Holocaust in a special session and on 01 November 2005, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution designating 27 January as “International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust”.

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6 Memory and Identity The question that remains is: why has there been such a renewed interest in Europe’s past after statesmen had focused much more on the future throughout the Cold War? Aleida Assmann’s contention that the future has lost much of its power to integrate, while the past is becoming increasingly important for the formation of identity (Assmann 2007, 11) may explain this. Until the 1980s, the EU was mainly an economic, legal-political entity. It had few shared values and symbols, and could certainly not be called a community of memory (Beattie 2007, 1). When it became clear that economic prosperity and the images of a market community do not suffice to create a feeling of belonging, “the promotion of a shared historical consciousness became part of a larger attempt to imbue the dry bureaucratic and economic process of European integration with a common identity” (Speth 1999). Since the 1990s, historians have argued that very similar mechanisms are at work regarding the “memory work” of an individual nation and of the European community.⁹ Many political scientists are likewise convinced that the main device for generating a collective sense of identity in a complex society such as the European one lies in the mode of remembering the past and argue that Europe needs a memory in order to build a common identity, just as nations do.¹⁰ Going back to the proposal by Giesen (1998), the question emerges which model the development of the EU narrative followed. The above analysis suggests that particularly the first years of European integration followed a model closer to the traditional mode than to the reflexive one. The avoidance of conflictual memory discourses during the Cold War and the exclusive concentration on the integration success story hints at this. It could be argued that the commemoration of the Holocaust, seen as a transcultural symbol for human rights violations, could serve as an example for the emerging reflexive mode. However, if the reflexive mode according to Giesen implies a “rupture with a glorious past” and “forces community members to take a reflexive view of themselves and others”, the mere reference to the Holocaust as a counter-element to the values of the European Union is not enough. A true reflection on the elements that make up a narrative, including positive and negative memories, would be necessary in this instance. So far the analysis suggests that the construction of a European memory goes hand in hand with homogenisation and simplification rather than the manifestation of a diverse commemorative climate open to multiple interpretations of the past. First elements of the reflexive mode might only be discerned when looking 9 See for example Kaelble (1995). 10 See for example Eder (2005); Geremek (1998).

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at the debates that precede the drawing up of resolutions and recommendations. Those are the moments when the EU becomes an arena for debate and conflict, where different memory regimes oppose each other, can find their expression and are listened to. The emergence of a reflexive awareness of the coexistence of the dreadful past of perpetrators with the traumatic past of victims, in particular, might slowly create a feeling of collective responsibility, going beyond flags and coins and the sense of belonging created by the simple membership in the European community. “Europe, on the fast track to integration, seems more and more to be finding a common unifying memory in the events of World War II”, writes Dan Diner in the New German Critique (2003, 36). Is a collective European memory of WWII emerging?

7 A European memory? Collective memory can manifest itself in a variety of forms: as incorporated collective memory in the minds of people, as objectified memory in the form of museums and monuments (“lieux de mémoire”), and as institutionalized memory in curricula and rituals of remembering. Since the 1990s the European Union has made increasing efforts to frame the emergence of a European objectified and institutionalised memory. The installation of two official European remembrance days (Europe Day and Holocaust Memorial Day) and the frequent reference that is made in official speeches to the “bitter experiences common to all Europeans”, are but two examples of this. Impulses to commemorate the events of WWII within a transnational framework have particularly come from historians, who started to change the perspective in their research from a national to a European one. The project lieux de mémoire for example, launched for France by Pierre Nora and his colleagues in 1981 has been successfully imitated in other European countries in search for shared “European sites of memory”. On the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the European Community the Musée de l’Europe opened in Brussels and various European research teams – funded by the European Science Foundation – are engaged in investigating key historical events that make up the European imaginaire.¹¹

11 For example the research project on European historiography conducted by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for European History and Public Spheres, see http://ehp.lbg.ac.at or the project “United Europe-Divided Memory” carried out by the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences, see http://www.iwm.at.

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National initiatives are especially taken up by the European Commission, which is funding a series of remembrance projects as part of its Democracy campaign,¹² an initiative launched in 2005 to mark the 60th anniversary of the fall of Nazism. Its objective is to foster “action, debate and reflection related to European citizenship and democracy, shared values, common history and culture, and bringing Europe closer to its citizens by promoting Europe’s values and achievements, while preserving the memory of its past” (European Commission 2008). History is clearly seen as one unifying element, allowing for the reflection on the past and the definition of values for the present. The situation is, however, not as clear-cut as the European Commission likes to suggest. There is probably little disagreement about the values for the present and the future, but still a lot over those of the past. As Aleida Assmann puts it: “There are political norms and standards for a peaceful coexistence within the European Union, but there are as yet no norms and standards for the peaceful coexistence of European memories” (Assmann 2007, 19). Peter Esterházy expresses a similar opinion: “What was supposed to be united has been torn apart in self-hatred and self-pity […]. Besides the untruth of the exclusive perpetrator, there is the untruth of the exclusive victim, and the unspoken “we” of the national memory lies hidden beneath both […]. A common European knowledge about ourselves as both perpetrators and victims is not yet in view” (Esterházy 2004, 16). The extent to which simplistic memory constellations continue to divide more often than unite became evident in an exemplary way during the European constitutional debate, when the Polish head of state demanded that the number of Polish Nazi victims needed to be counted when assessing correctly Poland’s proportional votes in today’s Europe. Examples such as this illustrate the need to move beyond the optimistic view of memory constellations as put forward by scholars like Levy and Sznaider and take into account the potentially negative impact that simplistic memory constellations can have if they are used as a political tool. A shared European understanding of the past can certainly only develop if inherited, primarily national approaches to history are being overcome, opening the door towards a transcultural form of European memory that is open to discussion and debate and enhances dialogue between nations, rather than being smothered into a constructed transcendental narrative. The European Union is undoubtedly trying to frame this development through the initiatives mentioned above. Following the line of thought of Klaus Eder (2005), it is precisely the “self-organizing dynamics of remembering the process of coordinating particular memories in an institutionally bounded com12 In 2007 the ‘Democracy Campaign’ became part of the ‘Europe for Citizens Programme’. See http://ec.europa.eu/citizenship/programme-actions/doc48_en.htm

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municative space”, that might allow for the emergence of a transcultural memory that transgresses the confines of nationally determined memories. Eder assumes that if nationally bounded memories are reorganized on a higher level, a process of reflective abstraction takes place that generates higher ordered principles for remembering a collective past. While the EU is aspiring to reach this goal, it is exactly the weakness of the ‘institutionally bounded communicative space’ and the lack of symbolic power that is nevertheless still hampering this process.¹³ Any discussion of a European memory would furthermore have to include reflections on the division of Europe during the Cold War and the diverging memory frameworks that developed in East and West in consequence – a topic that the EU has not addressed sufficiently to date. How difficult the integration of different memory structures can be became evident after the reunification of Germany.¹⁴ A united Europe will have to face the same questions and problems with regards coming to terms with its own past if it wants to arrive at a common understanding of the EU’s “founding myth”.

8 Conclusions The above analysis shows clearly how the perception and reception of this myth has changed over the years. While the need to avoid any repetition of military conflict between European states guided the initial integration process of the European Union, it was mainly the pressure for internal unity that provided the main rationale during the Cold War, causing the disappearance of references made to Europe’s painful divisive past from most public memory discourses. The end of the Cold War did not only revive those conflicting, painful and embarrassing memories, allowing for a more differentiated view of them, but led at the same time to the increased understanding of WWII as a European war and of Fascism/Nazism as a European phenomenon. Since the 1990s, more than the aim of avoiding another war among Europeans, it is the memory of the common experience of repression, dictatorship and genocide that turned into the point of reference for the definition of the Union’s values and political goals. The existence of a catalogue of shared principles stemming from the experiences of a common past is furthermore seen as being the starting point for the creation of an overarching political identity going beyond

13 The same argument is usually applied to the European identity debate. 14 See for example Herf (1997).

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the institutional framework of the EU. The EU’s attempts to actively frame the development of a collective European memory can be understood in this context. Despite the positive signals coming from the EU’s initiatives, simplistic national memory constellations and the Union’s lack of legitimacy and symbolic power still hamper the development of a shared European understanding of the past. A clear conflict still seems to exist between the culture of memory developed over the past 20  years  – which shows early traces of a transcultural mode but failed to go much beyond the mere homogenization of already existing national forms of memory – on the one hand and a more self-reflexive “ideal” form that truly fosters dialogue among nations on the other. There are certainly still many steps to be taken on the Union’s road to integration before we can effectively speak about a collective European memory that allows citizens to reflect without feelings of guilt or anger about the events that were at the origins of the EU. Yet despite the fact that the idea of a common European memory still seems to be more of a vision than a reality, it is certainly the great potential the project of European unification inherently possesses. What remains to be questioned is the desirability of such a project and the implications it has for the integration of immigrants into European society. Particularly with respect to the latter point it might precisely be the emergence of a transcultural framework that can fulfil this aim better than a transnational framework tied to narrow national boundaries.

References Andriessen, F. (1990, May 09). Einführungsvortrag von Vizepräsident Andriessen: Der Weg Europas ins nächste Jahrtausend. SPEECH/90/38. Europa – Gateway to the European Union website: http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/90/3 8&format HTML&aged=1&language=DE&guiLanguage=en (29 January 2009). Arendt, H. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970. Assmann, A. “Europe: A Community of Memory.” GHI Bulletin 40 (2007, Spring): 11–25. Beattie, A. “Learning from the Germans? History and Memory in German and European Projects of Integration.” PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 4.2 (2007): 1–21. Brittan, L. (1994, May 09). Creating a New Europe – Schuman Lecture. SPEECH/94/47. Europa – Gateway to the European Union website: http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction. do?reference=SPEECH/94/47&format HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en (27 January 2009). Curti, G. I simboli dell’Unione Europea: Bandiera-Inno-Motto-Moneta-Giornata. Roma: Istituto Poligrafico e zecca dello Stato, 2005. Delors, J. (1990, May 08). Discours du président Delors lors de la séance commemorative de la Déclaration Schuman. SPEECH/90/39. Europa – Gateway to the European Union website:

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http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.o?reference=SPEECH/90/39&format= TML&aged=1&language=FR&guiLanguage=en (27 January 2009). Dewandre, N., and J. Lenoble. Projekt Europa. Postnationale Identität: Grundlage für eine europäische Demokratie. Berlin: Schelzky & Jeep, 1994. Diner, D. “Haider und der Schutzreflex Europas.“ Die Welt, 26 February 2000. Diner, D. “Restitution and Memory – The Holocaust in European Political Cultures.” New German Critique 90 (2003, Autumn): 36–44. Eder, K. “Remembering National Memories Together: the Formation of a Transnational Identity in Europe.” Collective Memory and European Identity: the Effects of Integration and Enlargement. Eds. K. Eder, and W. Spohn. London: Ashgate, 2005. Esterházy, P. “Alle Hände sind unsere Hände.” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 11 October 2004. European Coal and Steel Community. (1951). Treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community. Europa – Gateway to the European Union website: http://europa.eu.int/abc/ obj/treaties/en/entoc29.htm (19 January 2009). European Commission (2008). Active European Remembrance. European Commission website: http://ec.europa.eu/citizenship/programme-actions/doc48_en.htm (06 February 2009. European Economic Community. (1957). Treaty establishing the European Economic Community. EUR-Lex – Access to European Union Law website: http://eur-ex.europa.eu/en/treaties/ index.htm (19 January 2009). European Parliament (1995, July 03). Resolution on a day to commemorate the Holocaust. EUR-Lex – Access to European Union Law website: http://eur lex.europa.eu/Notice.do?val =311429:cs&lang=en&list=369890:cs,369673:cs,368561 cs,368562:cs,311429:cs,36873 3:cs,370640:cs,370601:cs,207413:cs,365686:cs,&pos 5&page=9&nbl=112&pgs=10&hwo rds=&checktexte=checkbox&visu=#texte (02 February 2009). European Parliament (2005, January 27). Joint Motion for a Resolution on the remembrance of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and racism. Europa – Gateway to the European Union website:http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=DN/05/52&for at=HTM&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en (02 February 2009). European Union (2004). Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe. Europa – Gateway to the European Union website: http://europa.eu/lisbon_treaty/full_text/index_en.htm (3 February 2009). Geremek, B. “Europa und sein Gedächtnis.” Erinnern, vergessen, verdrängen. Polnische und deutsche Erfahrungen. Eds. E. Kobylinska, and A. Lawaty, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998. 13–29. Giesen, B. The Intellectuals and the Nation. Collective Identity in German Axial Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Herf, J. Divided Memory. The Nazi Past in the Two Germanies. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Judt, T. “The Past is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe.” Daedalus 121 (1992): 83–118. Judt, T. Große Illusion Europa. München/Wien: Hanser, 1994. Kaelble, H. Kaelble, H. “Europabewußtsein, Gesellschaft und Geschichte.” Europa im Blick der Historiker. Ed. R. Hudemann. München: Oldenburg Verlag, 1995. Levy, D., and N. Sznaider. “Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory.” European Journal of Social Theory 5.1 (2002): 87–106. Nora, P. Les Lieux de Mémoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1981–1992.

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Probst, L. “Founding Myths in Europe and the Role of the Holocaust.” New German Critique 90.3 (2003): 45–58. Schuman, R. (1950, May 09). Declaration of 9 May 1950. Europa – Gateway to the European Union website: http://europa.eu/abc/symbols/9-may/decl_en.htm (1 February, 2009). Speth, R. “Europäische Geschichtsbilder Heute.” Umkämpfte Vergangenheit: Geschichtsbilder, Erinnerung und Vergangenheitspolitik in internationalen Vergleich. Eds. P. Bock and E. Wolfrum. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1999. 159–175. Thum, G. “Europa im Ostblock: Weiße Flecken in der Geschichte der europäischen Integration.” Zeithistorische Forschungen 1.3 (2004).

Andy Pearce

Britain and the Formation of Contemporary Holocaust Consciousness: A Product of Europeanization, or Exercise in Triangulation? As Europe enters into the second decade of the new millennium and a new cycle of commemorative anniversaries marking the Second World War, the omnipresence of the Holocaust in contemporary European culture shows no signs of abating. Instead the reverse is very much the case, with the past few years characterised by a spate of Holocaust-related events which testify to the continued potency, influence, and invocation of the Nazi genocide in continental politics and society. These occurrences have been myriad and multiple, ranging from renewed efforts to enshrine the Holocaust in European collective memory (as with the Terezin Declaration of June 2009) through landmark political addresses (like Shimon Peres’ speech to the Reichstag on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2010) to attempts to politically widen responsibility for the Holocaust (such as the lodging of a written declaration to the European Parliament). Cumulatively, these occurrences demonstrate that memory of the Nazi genocide has not just ‘become an official part of European memory’ but rather it is also a ‘new founding moment for the idea of a European civilization’ (Levy and Sznaider 2007, 167) and the central defining feature of ‘a Europe wrestling with identities, orientations and values’ (Karlsson and Zander 2003, 7). This so-called “Europeanization of the Holocaust” – the idea that while ‘individual countries have confronted their role in the Holocaust’ ‘Europe as a whole’ has ‘increasingly defined itself in relation to the Holocaust’ (Müller 2010, 655) – has acquired progressive currency in the opening years of the twenty-first century, as a means of explaining the profound shifts that have occurred since the cessation of the Cold War. In accounting for this phenomenon, Levy and Sznaider (2006, 4) have forwarded the utilitarian concept of the Holocaust as the archetypal ‘new cosmopolitan memory’ of the post-modern world. According to this interpretation, remembrance of the Holocaust has increasingly become such a transcultural entity that it functions today as a new form of global memory, capable of ‘transcending ethnic and national boundaries’ (Levy and Sznaider 2002, 88). So pervasive is this phenomenon that Levy and Sznaider invoke the notion of ‘glocalization’ to capture how the transnational Holocaust becomes ‘internalized’ (2006, 10) in our present age. In this chapter I intend to engage with both the continuing presence of the Holocaust in contemporary European society and the conceptual notions pro-

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mulgated by Levy and Sznaider. I will do so through an examination of how Holocaust consciousness has developed in Great Britain which, I will argue, can be understood as the case study par excellence of how the transnationalisation of Holocaust memory must still be approached first and foremost through the lens of the nation-state. Departing from the premise that British confrontation with contemporary Holocaust memory has followed a somewhat incongruous, even “twisted path” of development compared to events elsewhere, I will present a number of examples from the last thirty years which illustrate how British memories have been moulded and shaped not by any singular force or agency, but through a conflation of the internal and external over the course of the past generation. In this manner I argue that far from consciousness being merely imported from across the Atlantic or transposed by European agencies, British consciousness has evolved from an intersection between transnational forces which have “Americanized” and “Europeanized” Holocaust memory on the one hand, and more organic, “local” factors of its own on the other. In speaking to these developments this chapter thereby touches on much larger questions of Holocaust memory in today’s global age, and in this regard it is necessary to note that terms such as “Americanization” and “Europeanization” remain contested. Whilst the former has long served to provoke controversy over its meaning and consequences, the recent emergence of the latter is also proving no less divisive in its appropriation nor elusive in terms of definition. Equally, Jelena Subotic (2011, 313) raises a salient issue in her observation that ‘instead of asking how does Europeanization change state identities…ask how do state identities influence the Europeanization process itself?’ In this chapter I will seek to gesture to these matters by showing that the idea of “Europeanization” as shorthand for a centrifugal diffusion of memory effaces the complex ways in which Britain itself has been part and parcel of a continental “turn” to the Holocaust. In its very hybridity British Holocaust consciousness thus exemplifies the multifarious forces that shape collective memory in the new millennium and highlights the need for conceptual models which can adequately incorporate the nuances of transcultural memory work.

1 World at War, Escape from Sobibor, War Crimes Arguably the seminal event in Britain’s contemporary confrontation with the Holocaust came in 1974, when the commercial television network ITV transmitted episode 20 of the documentary series The World at War. Entitled “Genocide”, the programme appeared at a time when the Nazi destruction of European Jewry and

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its memory was very much on the margins of British society; put simply, the Holocaust had no place or relevance within a historical culture which had become progressively introverted in the wake of the post-war reversal in Britain’s imperial fortunes and international kudos. Instead, where representations or references gesturing to the events could be vaguely discerned or identified, they were commonly subsumed beneath a Second World War narrative characterised by its moralising tone and contrasting of assumed British probity against German National Socialism. Romanticised British war memories and latent anti-Germanism are still very much with us today, and have proved in recent decades to be potent and enduring filters through which Holocaust remembrance has had to pass. Indeed, what made “Genocide” all the more notable was its emplotment within ‘a largescale series commemorating a war fought and won well within living memory of British viewers…and traditionally freighted with the patriotic sentiment of a “good war”’ (Langford 2008, 68). According to its director Michael Darlow (2005, 142) this was very much a conscious juxtaposition, for the programme sought to press against the cultural tendency of using the fate of the Jews for British negative definitionalism and ‘de-mythologise events’ by setting down ‘what happened and above all, why’. With an approach which exemplified in the words of Haggith and Newman (2005, 124) the ‘commitment to the public service role of the broadcaster that underpins British television’, “Genocide” brought the subject of the Holocaust to a mass audience in Britain ‘for the first time’ (Cowie 2004, 185). The knowledge disseminated through this process was such that it undermined prevailing understandings of Nazi atrocities embedded within the dominant, self-congratulatory discourses of World War Two, but the episode could not rectify misconceptions and ignorance on its own; even if it did spark interest among the younger postwar generation who viewed it. In the longer term, “Genocide” also provided a formula for reconstructing the historical chronology of the Holocaust and documenting the human impact of its development without descending into “kitsch and death” (Friedländer, 1984). The success and application of this model was measurable by the international plaudits bestowed upon the programme and how other celebrated documentary-makers such Laurence Rees would later follow the “Genocide” blueprint. Given the sharp contrast between the peripheral status of “the Holocaust” in Britain at this time and its increasing prominence in other Western nations, it was still somewhat bizarre that “Genocide” became one of the first – and most celebrated – examples of transcultural memory exchange in recent decades. What made this development all the more remarkable was both its British origins and its predating of the NBC Holocaust mini-series commonly credited as an integral moment in the globalisation of memory.

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The differences between “Genocide” and Holocaust were numerous, and it can plausibly be suggested that the discursive and representational divergences between the two have done much to shape the attitudes and memories which have emerged in Britain and America. Indeed, the extent to which “Genocide” became something of a paragon in Britain was evidenced by how Holocaust was met not with wholesale acclaim but with public debate over its sensationalism and effectiveness – both among general public and media critics. While popular responses were generally more favourable than commentators, the fact that the series prompted discussion gestured to something of an emerging cultural sensitivity towards the events of the Holocaust within British society. “Genocide” had undoubtedly served to open up this dialogical and conceptual space, but had also provided a particular frame of remembrance which conflicted substantively with that offered by the NBC series. Furthermore, while engagement with Holocaust motioned to the interaction between the “local” and the “global”, this conjunction was one very much conducted within a British cultural framework in accordance with a prevalent ‘liberal imagination’ (Kushner, 1994), and was certainly not an example of what Levy and Sznaider identify as ‘cosmopolitanism’; that is the ‘process of “internal globalization” through which global concerns become part of local experiences’ (Levy and Sznaider 2006, 2). This isn’t to say that transnational forces weren’t influencing British memory formation, but rather that the “Genocide”/Holocaust conjunction was a good illustration of the terms on which the local-global relationship in Britain was founded, and the contextual framework in which transnational phenomena would be processed. In short, British parochialism and preoccupations would remain a pervasive influence over the formation of Holocaust consciousness for years to come. During the period of the late 1970s to the early 1980s, public discussions around Holocaust were part of a handful of notable events which tentatively suggested a growing willingness to approach the Holocaust. These included the belated appearance of historiography by Bernard Wasserstein and Martin Gilbert analysing British responses to the events, the dedication of the nation’s first official memorial in 1983, the appearance of a number of literary works and documentaries, the widening of the historical scope of exhibitions at the Imperial War Museum (IWM), and pioneering work in the field of Holocaust education by the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) (Russell 2008). Yet while this cultural activity was significant, it was still dwarfed by equivalent occurrences in the rest of the Western world, and could not disguise large swathes of indifference and ignorance towards the Holocaust in British society. One of the key reasons why the fate of European Jews remained far from the thoughts of many Britons was that Holocaust remembrance was not a priority for those within the corridors of power. Caution is required here for as scholarship

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has demonstrated political elites no longer hold a monopoly over the formation of collective memory – if indeed they ever have (Lebow 2006, 15), but it was nonetheless crucially important that at the level of government there was an uncertainty towards the efficacy of Holocaust remembrance for much of the 1980s. The long, protracted process by which Britain finally came to acquire its Holocaust Memorial Garden in Hyde Park was a case in point (as well as an illustration of the dominance of war memory), and this was furthered by the ambiguous form which the memorial garden eventually assumed. A lack of consensus over the meaning of the genocide for late twentieth century Britain even lead to political resistance, as was publicly demonstrated in the government’s condemnation of the ILEA teaching pack After Auschwitz. Put simply, the Holocaust served no clear purpose for those in government at this time, and in the absence of any extensive or embedded vernacular memory of the genocide the lack of political will had profound consequences for societal knowledge and understanding – not to mention the status accorded to the events in British collective memory. In the latter third of the 1980s, two separate occurrences helped to pique popular intrigue and further exemplify how the conjunction of the “local” and the “global” operated in the formation of British memory. The first of these came with transmission of the made-for-television film Escape from Sobibor in May 1987. An Anglo-American co-production headed by the British director Jack Gold, the film recounted ‘a chapter of Holocaust history that needed to be told’ (Insdorf 2003, 23) through an avowed commitment to ‘unadulterated realism’. For director Gold, this approach reflected the aim to ‘engage as large an audience as possible, not only to inform and educate…but also to enable the income from a mass audience to justify the great cost’. Such commercial pressures were notably at odds with Gold’s wish ‘to be as authentic as possible by emulating the documentary form’ (Gold 2005, 199–202), yet also revealed the power constellations behind the film’s production. As a collaborative project, the film threw cold water over any suggestion that British Holocaust consciousness was highly malleable, easily manipulated, or merely the consequence of “Americanization”. Instead, Britain was contributing for a second time to the creation of transcultural, global “product” which, according to Levy and Sznaider’s reading (2006, 5), would only serve to decontextualise the event further. There was also symbolism in Gold assuming directorial duties, since his natural inclination towards a “British” documentarian approach suggested an ingrained desire credibility and veracity which spoke to the influence that “domestic” forces had upon him and other filmmakers at this time. However, that the film ultimately compromised authenticity in pursuit of marketability indicated the greater control exerted by the American studios over the

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project; especially in financial terms. Britain was therefore very much the “junior partner”, but this should not render its participation as being meaningless. In the event this “global” co-production was a major commercial success with Escape from Sobibor seen by over 13  million in Britain alone, meaning that the awareness of a sizeable audience was increased. Unfortunately however this also meant that distorted understandings of the Holocaust were to some extent maintained – particularly, for example, with regard to comprehension of the camps in the East. Whilst the film did not shy away from depicting such shocking scenes as the filing of arrivals into the gas chambers and arbitrary acts of violence, the stylised images of swashbuckling Soviet soldiers and fresh-faced, clean-cut Jewish inmates did nonetheless eschew the stark realities of the fate of most Soviet POWs and the deadly conditions faced by those in the Reinhard camps. Of course, how far these could ever be represented is a different and altogether more enduring question, but for British audiences watching the film there was seemingly relatively little to distinguish Sobibor from other camps  – either those found elsewhere in the genre of Second World War films, or in terms of the visual horrors of Bergen-Belsen still ingrained in Britain’s cultural psyche. Nor did the film serve as a corrective to post-war misconceptions of the historical Holocaust or the particular fate of Polish Jewry  – instead these were only perpetuated through, for example, the narrator’s claim at the beginning of the film that Operation Reinhard was ‘Nazi Germany’s Final Solution to the Jewish Question’. In these ways whilst Escape from Sobibor may well have functioned as a form of “de-territorialization” of the kind identified by Levy and Sznaider (2006, 46), this was with one exception: what was being de-territorialized was not memory, but history. As a stage in the development of Holocaust consciousness Escape from Sobibor showed how influences beyond the UK have, on important occasions, been indispensible in bringing the genocide to the public’s attention and generating curiosity. In part, this is of course evidence of how the socio-cultural boundaries of nation-states have been made increasingly porous by the technological changes of post-modernity, and the expansion of Western interest in the Holocaust undoubtedly had a mutual interdependence with this. But what was notable in the tensions and contradictions within Escape from Sobibor was how Britain’s own domestic trends and approach were interacting with outside forces. A more visible demonstration of this “local” influence came with the war crimes affair of the late 1980s, which performed a massive role in popularising the Holocaust in Britain. Cesarani (2001, 190) has shown that by the mid-1980s Britain was ‘the only Anglo-Saxon country to absorb large numbers of East Europeans after the war that had not engaged in an exhaustive process of self-examination’, but the issue of Nazi perpetrators eluding justice had entered the popular imagination with the capture and trial of Klaus Barbie in the first half of the

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decade. Through media coverage and television documentaries the British public were informed of Barbie’s exploits and of a growing pan-European zeitgeist of retrospective retribution; a trend which by the mid-1980s had even implicated the former UN-General Secretary and Austrian Premier Kurt Waldheim. By early 1987 the exposure of war criminals residing in the UK brought the controversy home, and ensured in the process that long-standing assumptions of moral righteousness were directly challenged. During the course of the ensuing political imbroglio and eventual constitutional crisis both a ‘glacis of apathy’ and ‘sheer prejudice’ became clearly visible, while public debate over the issue laid bare ‘deeply running and frightening currents of racism within British society’ (Cesarani, 191). Although the war crimes affair was, in theory, not about the Holocaust but about the legal capacity for perpetrators of crimes in other countries to be prosecuted ex post facto under UK law, it was more abstractly concerned with the question of justice in relation to unprecedented mass murder, a willingness to pursue this and so in turn ‘brought forth conflict over the issue of Jewish particularism and the memory of Britain and World War II’ (Kushner 1994, 265). In this manner while the war crimes issue ‘never lost an international flavour’ (Cesarani, 191), it was an excellent example not of any internalized global trend but rather of the obstacles erected in the way of it – all of which were borne out of and deeply rooted within, British culture and society. While the occurrence of the war crimes affair was initiated by a foreign agency (namely, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre), its course and ultimate outcome were predominantly determined by specifically “local” concerns, priorities and pressures. This was evident both in the passage of the War Crimes Bill in 1991 (and the failure to successfully secure a conviction under it) and how the controversy had lead to concerted attempts by organisations like the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) to capitalise on ‘renewed interest in Nazi war crimes and the Second World War’ and ‘educate the public’ in the historical atrocities behind the affair (Russell, 71). The government’s decision to eventually incorporate the Holocaust into Britain’s first History National Curriculum in 1991 was in part a response to this lobbying, but noble and laudable intentions also commixed with the political calculation that the Holocaust could make a contribution to ‘anti-racist and citizenship education’ (Russell, 96). However, even on this issue of rationale there was a lack of consensus over the desired messages that Holocaust education was to promote, as could be seen through vague stipulations and a lack of pedagogical guidance. As sections of the teaching profession bemoaned being ‘left holding this unwanted and unplanned for baby’ (Klein 1992, 31), continuity in British ambivalence towards the Holocaust at an official level was preserved through opaque curriculum stipulations – a striking situation given the prescriptive nature of the National Curriculum, and one which had significant implications for the quality

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of teaching and learning. For all these shortcomings, the decision to implement mandatory teaching about the Holocaust nevertheless laid a keystone in the formation of memory. At a time when compulsory Holocaust education was virtually unheard of in Europe, it was also an indication that Britain was far from just a blank canvas onto which transnational contrails would be inscribed.

2 The “Schindler Effect”, Europeanization, HMD Through the examples of “Genocide”, Escape from Sobibor and the war crimes affair it has been shown that Holocaust consciousness in Britain emerged from the late 1970s onwards by way of a multitude of forces, and passed through a variety of peaks and troughs to emerge at the beginning of the 1990s as somewhat of a confused, contradictory and even paradoxical entity; immature and ‘relatively underdeveloped’ (Kushner 1990, 382) when compared to other parts of the Western world. We have seen that Britain’s island nature had not necessarily lead to any form of “splendid isolation” or rendered it impermeable to the Western world’s turn to the Holocaust in the last thirty years of the twentieth century, but at the same time the country’s unique experience of the war, its progressive decline in international standing after 1945 and its geographical detachment from a continent scarred by memories of occupation, collaboration and Cold War bifurcation were all strong curtailments to the development of memory. Finally, it has been highlighted that the relative disinterest of British politicians towards nurturing remembrance was also a decisive influence in the “thickness” of Holocaust consciousness. All of these trends remained in existence as Britain moved into a post-Cold War period which would be characterised by a continual intensification of Holocaust-related activities and what Alexander (2009) has described as ‘the social construction of moral universals’ around memory of the genocide. A key dynamo in this process has been recognised by a number of scholars as being the movement towards further European integration in the wake of the cessation of Cold War, for the perennial issues of legitimising EU institutions and cultivating a common continental identity became intrinsically entwined with what has been termed the “Europeanization” of the Holocaust. Given that much has been written in recent years of the “Europeanization” of the Holocaust, it is intriguing to note that in some ways the phrase lacks a degree of conceptual sophistication. On the one hand, the likes of Levy and Sznaider offer a definition which fits within their framework of cosmopolitan memory; that is Europeanization is regarded as a means by which the Holocaust has been

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universalized to become a ‘decontextualized event orientated toward nation-transcending symbols and meaning systems’ (Levy and Sznaider 2006, 5). According to this understanding, Europeanization is directly attributable to the ‘dual strategy’ pursued by Germany after reunification of at once ‘centring’ and ‘decentring’ the Holocaust as both a national and continental event (Levy and Sznaider 2002, 97). In effect, Europeanization stands in such a reading as the ‘diffusion of German memory to the European level’ (Wüstenberg and Art 2008, 82). A slightly different take has been offered by Claus Leggewie, for whom Europeanization can equally be understood as the recognition by European nation-states of their complicity in the events of the Holocaust. Leggewie (2008, 219) also highlights the role of German reunification in this process, but unlike Levy and Sznaider describes the consequence as being the ‘Europeanization of a German politics of history’; a subtle, yet not insignificant difference suggesting that while Vergangenheitsbewältigung may have become a pan-European phenomenon, this has not necessarily translated into a “Germanization” of continental remembrance or been wholly successful (Giesen 2009, 117). Despite the growing body of literature on Europeanization, its relation to (and the involvement of) Britain has not attracted scholarly attention. Although perhaps not surprising, given Britain’s own uncertainty of its relation to Europe, this is nonetheless regrettable since such examination has the potential to be highly illuminating. The difficulty in pinning down just what “Europeanization of the Holocaust” refers to is in no small part a reflection of how the ‘widespread application’ of Europeanization ‘makes it more difficult to specify what the term actually means and to use it in a way that makes sense’ (Geddes 2004, 54–5). As a response to the failure of previous theories to adequately capture the multiple ways that the accelerated European integration has impacted EU member states, Europeanization serves well the purpose of highlighting a profound shift in transnational interaction. However, there remains an extent to which certain long-standing understandings of Europeanization as a top-down, one-dimensional and one-way process of transmission fails to pay due attention to the complexities of transcultural exchange. Seen in this light there is much to commend Bach and Jordan’s (2006, 30) definition of Europeanization as constituting ‘the reorientation or reshaping of politics in the domestic arena in ways that reflect policies, practices and preferences advanced through the EU system of governance’; not least in its capacity to accommodate ‘the possibility that state preferences can be uploaded and transmitted’ at the same time that ideas and practices are “downloaded”. What this more nuanced conceptualisation also allows for is consideration of ‘the importance of the degree of “fit” between EU-level changes and exiting domestic structures, policies, and practices’  – where ‘poor fit implies strong pressure to adapt’ and ‘good fit implies weak pressure’ (Bach and Jordan 2006, 20).

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As we will come to see, the importance of refining Europeanization in this way bears relevance not just for any general discussion of the Europeanization of British politics, but also for specific consideration of Holocaust memory-work in a global age. As Geddes (2004, 6–7) has shown, the British political system is ‘nested within a series of interlocking relationships that extends “down” to the sub-national and “up” to the supranational’, and it is a point of debate as to whether the models put forward by Levy and Sznaider are flexible enough to allow for such particularity. Moreover, as scholarship by the likes of Snyder (2011) has shown – and recent public controversies in the former Soviet Baltic states has borne out – any discourse on “European memory” of the Holocaust can no longer ignore the effects that the dual experience of Nazi and Soviet occupation exerts on calibrating recollections of the genocide of European Jewry. What then of the process through which Europeanization as a means of mnemonic transmission? If there is tacit agreement that Europeanization of the Holocaust – and the growth of “cosmopolitan memory” – would not have been possible without the political transformations of 1989–1991 and the reunification of Germany, then another prerequisite was arguably the formation of the Council of Europe (CoE) in 1949. Established on the principle that cultural co-operation between European nation-states could increase unity and encourage peace through mutual understanding, the CoE became during the post-war period a forum for rooting out ‘historical misinformation and misunderstanding’ and a means of building ‘consensus’ on shared history (Davies 1997, 42). In turn this meant that the CoE held a keen interest in history and historical education, as was borne out by the variety of colloquia held during the 1950s, 60s and 70s. As a founding member of the Council, Britain was a regular participant in these meetings which progressively came to consider issues like human rights and the contribution of school history to ‘the social and civic purposes of education’ (LowBeer 1997, 16). After the Cold War the CoE prioritised the role of history to any further European integration, and this was mirrored at the political level in the passing of various resolutions related to the “European dimension of education” by European Ministers of Education in Vienna in 1991. In the aftermath of Maastricht and the creation of the European Union, member states were expected to increase their level of co-operation in cultural and educational intergovernmental initiatives. Henceforth in the realm of history education for example, a series of seminars and training programmes were held from 1991 to 1997 which explored issues like the relevance of nation states and the function of history in European unification. For our purposes, it is notable that an increasing number of these symposiums were convened and lead by British educators, for seemingly this demarcated a realisation of the then Prime Minister John Major’s commitment to take Britain to the “heart of Europe”; itself reveal-

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ing of what Deighton (2002, 100) calls a post-imperial ‘craving for a leadership role’. Yet even more significant than this was how British educators leading these events were increasingly referring to the Holocaust as a dark ‘side’ of European history which had the ‘potential to encourage moral reasoning’ and contribute didactically to the ‘idea of Europe’ (Stradling 1995, 19; Gallagher 1996, 28). Seen from this perspective, British representatives were in fact becoming active agents in the “Europeanization” of the Holocaust, promoting or “uploading” if not memory for memory’s sake, then at least the didactical purposes that the Nazi genocide could be put to. The increased activity of British educationists within the European sphere was precluded, and to some extent catalysed by, the “Schindler effect” following the UK release of Spielberg’s film in 1994. A measure of this domestic impact was how by the end of the year the film had been viewed by over a quarter of the population (Gold 2005, 196) – a quite remarkable commercial return given that the film did not necessarily endear itself to a mass audience. The effects of the film extended beyond the box office to also touch a range of other areas of British cultural life. At the IWM, the film’s release was a stimulus behind moves towards planning for some form of Holocaust gallery within its premises; a project which would finally lead to the creation of the permanent Holocaust Exhibition. Within education, the film ‘opened doors’ for survivors working with young people (Levi 2005, 244), and in 1995 directly entered history classrooms in the form of a school version produced by Film Education and the HET and distributed to all UK schools free of charge – mirroring a similar initiative introduced in the United States. As a result of this widespread distribution, Spielberg’s ‘master narrative’ (Loshitzky 1997, 2) of the Holocaust – complete with its valorisation of Schindler, idealised behavioural models, judgements on “bystanders” and survival, and combination of ‘concrete historical material with universal ethics’ (Levy and Sznaider 2006, 136) – was able to reach a very large audience indeed; so much so that Wall (2005, 207) notes that in Britain ‘it is tempting to say that for many people, the Holocaust is now viewed through Schindler’s List’. That Spielberg’s film had a major transnational impact is beyond dispute, for as Loshitzky (1997, 2) observes, Schindler’s List ‘penetrated historical consciousness on a global scale and…transformed the image of the Holocaust as perceived by millions of people all over the world’. However, as much as the film contributed to a general international decontextualisation of the Holocaust, its effects were not necessarily uniform. In Britain, the predilection to emphasise the universal aspects of the Holocaust over and above its unique specificities were long-standing cultural traditions, a product of a specific “liberal” mindset and evident in the reactions of contemporaries to the events themselves. In this sense, while Spielberg’s film undoubtedly ‘contributed to the universalization of the Holocaust’ by

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telling ‘a moral story of good against evil rather than the tale of Jewish victims’ (Levy and Sznaider 2002, 98), such a dilution was not new to a British audience and reinforced rather than challenged established cultural perceptions. This “local” or domestic predilection towards universalizing the events also gained expression through the revised terms of the National Curriculum in 1995, where the Holocaust was now depicted as one of the ‘main events… of the twentieth century’ that together with the World Wars and atomic bombs, had ‘shaped the modern world’ and was to be learnt from (DfE 1995, 13). Britain’s historical relation to this event was however neither explained nor explored. A powerful conditioning influence remained idealised memories of the Second World War, for although the Holocaust was ‘inserted’ into Britain’s VE Day commemorations of 1995, references to the genocide were more often than not used to ‘reinforce’ rather than disturb ‘the moral integrity of Britain’s war memory’ (Petersen 2001, 265). By the mid-1990s considerable changes had occurred to the position of the Holocaust in Britain’s historical consciousness; its events were attracting the interest of a widening non-Jewish portion of the population, and examples of engagement could be found in various guises across the nation’s cultural landscape. That said, there remained a real sense in which British war memory needed to be ‘recalibrated’ (Cesarani 1997, 36) to better take account of Britain’s actual historical relationship to the Holocaust and the ideal opportunity for this realignment presented itself in the form of the Nazi Gold controversy. A development which acted as a key driving force in ‘a new global Holocaust culture of remembrance’ (Bajohr 2005, 54) and intersected with the post-Cold War ‘mood of international morality’ (Evans 2006, 339) in the West, the Nazi Gold Affair was a major waypoint in Europeanization. Significantly the first movements towards concerted international action on the issues raised by the controversy came from Britain, leading to the convening of the London Conference on Nazi Gold in December 1997 as part of a pre-election pledge by the recently elected “New” Labour government. In the event, one commentator remarked that the symposium was in fact as ‘open and accessible as a gold bullion vault’ (Sweeney 1997, 12), yet while this laid bare a reluctance to truly confront the historical record the Conference nevertheless had telling outcomes. Beyond casting a light on the transnational issues of restitution and the involvement of so-called “neutral” countries in the darker recesses of the history, the hosting of a major international conference in Britain’s capital city implied that the Holocaust was now a prominent feature in British culture. To some extent this was true, but the presumed need to consider the legacies of the Holocaust was not necessarily apparent to the proverbial ‘man-on-the-street’ (Hartman 1994, 135); nor should it be overlooked that the Labour government stood to gain no small amount of capital by demonstrating leadership on an issue which was

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rapidly moving to the centre of European politics – particularly given the party’s aspiration for greater ties with the continent. In short, just as much as the convening of the London Conference was informed by good intentions so it was also then the product of political calculation and consideration of foreign policy and international relations. This is all the more striking when one considers the sense in which the event served to put Britain “on the map” of transnational Holocaust activity, for just a matter of months later in the Spring of 1998 the UK was invited by the Swedish government to join the International Task Force (ITF) as one of its founding members. As a member of this organisation, Britain was immediately accorded standing and figuratively held up for others to emulate, for it was felt that in the UK ‘we have the example of long-time public and private sector institutions cooperating in Holocaust education as well as the leadership the British government has provided in meeting head on Holocaust-asset issues’ (Eizenstat 1999a, 976–977). Britain’s new-found status as a paradigm of how to approach the Holocaust was extraordinary for a host of reasons, not least the rapidity with which previous marginalisation had seemingly been reversed. Since there was also no central Holocaust institution in British culture, the UK’s membership of the ITF was somewhat peculiar for it gave misleading impressions of the depth of Holocaust memory. Nonetheless, the nation’s seat at the high table of international Holocaust politics ensured an important role in the second major symposium of the late 1990s held in the United States. Prior to the opening of the Washington Conference in November 1998, the British delegation to the ITF approached its colleagues with the suggestion of creating a day which could ‘reinforce awareness’ of the Holocaust and demonstrate international ‘solidarity in the fight against anti-Semitism, racism, prejudice, and hatred’. The initiative was warmly received, and Britain was made responsible for working with ‘relevant NGOs and other participating governments’ in preparing a formal proposal for delegates at Washington (Eizenstat 1999b, 905; 1999a, 983). Formally submitted as the “Proposal for International Commemoration of the Holocaust”, the British presentation received widespread endorsement, and served to further enhance the UK’s new-found reputation as champion of Holocaust memory. More pragmatically, Britain was now obliged to take the lead in incorporating the day into its national commemorative calendar, especially as the government had agreed to assume the rotational chairmanship of the ITF. Seen in this way, the Washington proposal both literally cast and figuratively required Britain to become ‘one of the leading lights in encouraging the growth of Holocaust consciousness in Europe’ (Stone 2006, 184). The announcement of Britain’s HMD against the backcloth of the opening statements to the Stockholm Forum in 2000 reinforced a verifiable link between

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Britain and the “Europeanization” of Holocaust memory; a development which had previously been cited by the Labour government as a key justification for the creation of HMD (Straw 1999, 1). This symbolism was only further amplified by what actually transpired during the course of the symposium, for beyond the unforeseeable admissions of guilt lay the ‘essential message’ that ‘through the Holocaust, Europe could imagine itself as a community of shared values’ (Dietsch 2007, 113). The schema for realising this vision was the Stockholm Forum Declaration, a historical document of such a scale and scope that it heralded an unprecedented shift in the transnational dimensions of Holocaust memory. Yet the magnitude of these transformations at Stockholm did not merely provide the British announcement with an atmospheric “mood music”, for the pan-European endorsement of the declaration also invested HMD with international legitimation. Moreover the actual terms of the declaration  – which Levy and Sznaider (2006, 185) see as the very institutionalization of ‘de-territorialized, cosmopolitan memory’ – were ‘adopted and adapted into a “Statement of Commitment”’ which was to become ‘a benchmark for understanding the aims and objectives of the Day’ (Home Office 2001). From the outside, there was much about Britain’s HMD which appeared to render it the outcome of Europeanized memory. Closer analysis of the first memorial day however revealed a great deal of continuity with previous understandings and representations of the Holocaust. The best illustrations of this were two examples from the centrepiece national ceremony, an event which made manifest the Labour government’s ‘state validation’ of British Holocaust memory (Gray & Oliver 2001, 13). The first of these was the persistent emphasis on universality which was articulated in a variety of ways. One of these was the invocation of a ‘contemporary cultural icon’ (Rosenfeld 1997, 3) Anne Frank, another was references to other victims of Nazism like the homosexual community, together with the development of Holocaust mantras and maxims which were applied to post-1945 genocides. A final means of universalization was the repetition of the presumed “lessons” that people should remember. This was well illustrated by screening during the ceremony of HMD’s “Statements of Commitment”, in which one could not find in any of the statements the words “Jews”, “Jewry” or “Judaism”. The removal of the Jewish specificity of the Holocaust in this way was echoed in the address given by Prime Minister Blair who, in describing the Holocaust as ‘the most heinous act of collective evil in our history’ (Blair 2001, 5), used the word “Jew” only once. It thus became apparent that although the Jewish specificity of the Holocaust was not being entirely forgotten or effaced during the national ceremony, a clear and conscious strategy of accentuating the Holocaust’s universal features rather than is uniquity – of its contemporaneity over its historicity – was being pursued.

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Yet, rather than seeing this solely as an exercise in cosmopolitan “decontextualisation”, it should instead be regarded as evidence of established policies towards approaching the Holocaust in the UK being rehearsed and reinforced. This sifting of the Holocaust through the sieve of Britain’s history-cultural politics served only to “nationalise” memory, for it moulded and shaped the events into a comprehensible, serviceable cognitive framework. Moreover, in his omission of the term “Britain” from his speech Blair equally demonstrated the persistence of a second characteristic of British approaches to the Holocaust; namely, the marginalisation of Britain from the historical events. The result however, was not merely a dilution of Britain’s historical relationship to the Holocaust but also the effacement of the nation’s own history of imperialism, discrimination and persecution – both against Jews and other minorities (Kushner 2004, 118; Bloxham 2003, 42; Stone 2006, 174–190). In this way it was less a case of the Holocaust being “deterritorialised” than it being re-located into a continental landscape from which Britain was historically removed. In turn, sanitised Holocaust remembrance of this nature could be used for specifically instrumental, politically didactic ends, reinforce existing national identity and do so while enabling avoidance of reflexive self-examination – both of Britain during the period of the Holocaust and beyond (Stone 2009).

3 Summary It is beyond question that the Western world continues to “dwell in the shadow” (Postone and Santner 2003, 1) of the Holocaust and that its memory over the past twenty years has acquired even greater transcultural dynamics than before. In this respect, the many scholars who, like Levy and Sznaider, point to the events of 1989–1991 as marking a threshold in Holocaust remembrance are certainly correct, for it was the transformations in international politics which followed this juncture which had compelling consequences for the condition and position of the Nazi genocide in the contemporary world. Prior to this period, the primary driving forces behind Holocaust memorialisation came from North America and Israel, but following the unification of Europe a third power-bloc came into play. While Karlsson (2003, 28) is therefore quite right to ask the extent to which “European Holocaust consciousness [has] been mediated by a more predominant American Holocaust discourse”, it is also important to recognise that in the years after 1992 European confrontations with the legacies of continental genocide developed their own momentum in addition to the continued influence of “Americanized” narratives. Equally, as important as it is to recognise the affects

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of transnational forces in the contemporary age, it remains crucial to not overstate such structural trends. Stevenson (2007, 51) offers an important reminder of this in his observation that “even if the organization of our economy, politics and culture is increasingly global, for most of our citizens most of the time “the nation” nonetheless remains their dominant point of reference”. This chapter has argued that examination of the evolution of Holocaust consciousness in Britain presents an excellent example of Stevenson’s argument. As part of the Western community which has progressively “turned” to the Holocaust in recent decades, British memory cannot be separated from this broader, international context but nor is it possible to account for the emergence of Holocaust consciousness without reference to its domestic framework. Understanding this phenomenon thus demands appreciation of the interlocking and overlapping influences that have facilitated its evolution and shaped its form and content; something which speaks very much to “the transcultural turn” (Bond and Rapson 2014) in memory studies. The forces involved in the development of Holocaust consciousness in Britain were heterogeneous and ranged from those that were deeply historical to the highly contemporary, from cultural sensibilities and mentalities to matters of political concern and expediency, and from trends and events localised in the domestic sphere to other far more international currents. In this manner there is much evidence Britain has been part of a triangulation of escalating Western Holocaust remembrance in which its own collective memory has been conditioned according to its post-war history and present needs. What becomes particularly significant is that from the mid-1990s Britain became not only an increasing influence in the Europeanization of Holocaust memory, but also one of its most enthusiastic promoters. HMD 2001 was thus not just the apex of Britain’s “turn” to the Holocaust but also Europe’s, and the fact that there was a “good fit” between British and European contours of memory was attributable in no small part to Britain’s influence in the shaping of continental remembrance practices. That in the event Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day largely inculcated a specifically national and localised discourse, and in effect “nationalised” memory demands our attention; not only does it suggest that the “container of the nation-state” may not be as “cracked” (Levy and Sznaider 2006, 2) as some would have us believe, but it also should encourage us to consider further how Holocaust memories function and operate in an ever enlarging, and more diverse, European Union. Whilst terms such as “Europeanization”, “glocalization” and “cosmopolitan memory” undoubtedly motion us to the diverse ways in which people now interact and are impacted by transnational developments in the contemporary world, this chapter has shown that there remains ‘the danger of overgeneralizing’ (Delanty and Rumford 2007, 99) and effac-

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ing the particularities of Holocaust memory within separate nation-states. What the case of British Holocaust memory demonstrates therefore is not just an endurance of the nation-state as a frame of reference, but more generally the delicate tension which exists between “global” and the “local” in our own age.

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Kushner, Tony. “Too Little, Too Late? Reflections on Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day.” Journal of Israeli History 23:1 (2004): 116–129. Langford, Barry. “Mass Culture/Mass Media/Mass Death: Teaching Film, Television, and the Holocaust.” Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film. Eds. Robert Eaglestone and Barry Langford. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Lebow, Richard-Ned. “The Memory of Politics in Postwar Europe.” The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe. Eds. Richard-Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, Claudio Fogu. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006. Leggewie, Claus. “A Tour of the Battleground: The Seven Circles of Pan-European Memory.” Social Research 75:1, (2008): 217–234. Levy, Daniel and Sznaider, Natan. “Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory.” European Journal of Social Theory 5:1 (2002), 87–106. Levy, Daniel and Sznaider, Natan. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. Levy, Daniel and Natan Sznaider. “Memories of Europe: Cosmopolitanism and Its Others.” Cosmopolitanism and Europe. Ed. C. Rumford. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. Loshitzky, Yosefa. “Introduction.” Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List. Ed. Yosefa Loshitzky. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1997. Low-Beer, Ann. The Council of Europe and School History. Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1997. Müller, Jan-Werner. “Europe.” The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies. Eds. Peter Hayes and John K. Roth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Petersen, Judith. “How British Television Inserted the Holocaust into Britain’s War Memory in 1995.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 21:3 (2001): 255–272. Postone, Moishe and Eric Santner. “Introduction.” Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust andthe Twentieth Century. Eds. Moishe Postone and Eric Santner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Probst, Lothar. “Founding Myths in Europe and the Role of the Holocaust.” New German Critique 90 (2003): 45–58. Probst, Lothar. “‘Normalization’ Through Europeanization: The Role of the Holocaust.” German Culture, Politics and Literature into the Twenty-First Century. Eds. S. Taberner and P. Cooke. Leeds: Baydell & Brewer, 2006. Rosenfeld, Alvin cited in Kushner, Tony. “’I Want to go on Living after my Death’; The Memory of Anne Frank.” War & Memory in the Twentieth Century. Eds. Martin Evans and Ken Lunn. Oxford: Berg, 1997. Russell, Lucy. Teaching the Holocaust in School History: Teachers or Preachers? London: Continuum, 2008. Short, Geoffrey, Supple, Carrie and Katharine Klinger. The Holocaust in the School Curriculum: A European Perspective. Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1998. Smith, Stephen. “Proposal for International Commemoration of the Holocaust.” Proceedings of the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets. Ed. J.D. Bindenagel. Washington: State Department, 1999. Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. London: Vintage, 2011. Stradling, Robert. The European Content of the School Curriculum Report. Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1995. Stone, Dan. “Britannia Waives the Rules: British Imperialism and Holocaust Memory.” History, Memory and Mass Atrocity: Essays on the Holocaust and Genocide. Ed. Dan Stone. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006.

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Jessica Rapson

Babi Yar: Transcultural Memories of Atrocity From Kiev to Denver Stop! – for thy tread is on an Empire’s dust! An Earthquake’s spoil is sepulchred below! Is the spot mark’d with no colossal bust? Nor column trophied for triumphal show? None; but the moral’s truth tells simpler so, As the ground was before, thus let it be; – How that red rain hath made the harvest grow! George Byron (1841, III)

This chapter examines two landscapes 6000 miles apart, both of which serve as memorials to a Holocaust massacre committed at Babi Yar in Kiev, Ukraine. The landscapes discussed are the ravine itself and the corresponding Babi Yar Park, Denver, Colorado. Each of these transcontinental co-ordinates in contemporary Ukrainian Holocaust memory is the result of a dialogue between distinctive cultural groups. Accordingly, these places direct attention to the various transcultural affinities and tensions that have alternately driven or hindered their development as commemorative landscapes. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider’s thesis on Holocaust memory in the global age urges us to “uncover memoryscapes that correspond to emerging modes of identification” (2006, 2); the following chapter takes up this challenge, and in doing so attempts an evaluation of ethical and political implications of the identificatory modes these particular memoryscapes alternatively reveal and refuse. From September 1941–1943, Babi Yar was used by Nazi Einsatzgruppen squads as a place of slaughter and mass burial. In excess of one hundred thousand people, including Jews, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war were killed here, bodies burnt and ashes buried. 33,771 victims were shot during an initial massacre over two days in September 1941, in the largest isolated killing operation of World War II. The Holocaust in Ukraine was characterised by such mass shootings, many of which took place in fields, ravines, and forests. The full scale of these operations only began to emerge after the opening of Soviet archives in 1991. The spaces of killing in Ukraine “offer up none of the architectural design elements that shape the iconic imagery of Holocaust memorial sites worldwide” (Shapiro 2008, viii). As a result Holocaust memory in Ukrainian territory is not tied to barracks, crematoria, and barbed wire fences as is now the case in so many other European countries; in both rural and urban areas of Ukraine, the traces of the mass killings that took place between 1941 and 1943 are frequently invisible.

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Owing to many years of silence and marginalisation under Soviet rule, structures which do exist have generally not been preserved or dedicated as memorials.¹ The events of the Holocaust are now embedded primarily within Ukraine’s rich black soil and the distant memories of those who witnessed them.² Babi Yar marks a notable exception in this regard, as the scale of the related massacre has attracted a certain level of international attention to the site. Nonetheless commemorative activity at the ravine has been slow and plagued with bitter controversy. In the first years after the war […] the country “faced tasks more important than Babi Yar”, and it was ignored for the most part, except by “some suspicious characters who crawled along the ravine’s bottom in search of either diamonds or golden dental crowns.” Then it became “simply a rubbish heap. A small lopsided post with the laconic inscription “It is forbidden to pile rubbish here, fine – 300 roubles’ did not in the least prevent local residents from getting rid of no longer useful old beds, tin cans, and other rubbish” (Maria Tumarkin 2010, 280 with citations from Victor Nekrasov).

The Ukrianian writer Nekrasov was among the first to attempt to raise public awareness of Babi Yar’s neglect; he wrote against plans to build a sports stadium at the site in 1959 (Tumarkin 2010, 7). The stadium was never built, but the local authorities embarked on a comprehensive project to build a dam and fill the “goodfor-nothing ravine”; that it “could once and for all be wiped from the surface of the earth” (Tumarkin 2010, 281). The dam collapsed in 1961, and a wave of liquid mud flew from the ravine, killing hundreds (Tumarkin 2010, 281). As Tumarkin

1 This is commensurate with the broader academic climate, in which the concept of the “Holocaust in Ukraine” has existed only on the margins of scholarly perception for many years. Brandon and Lower’s (2008, 6) recent summary on the subject provides a historical explanation for this, based on the division of Ukrainian territory in 1941 and subsequent dilution of history into alternative narratives. Brandon and Lower also note that for a long time, and for understandable reasons, interest in the Holocaust was characterised by what they dub “Auschwitz Syndrome” – “many historians, philosophers, and political scientists as well as the general public focused on the killing centres and methods used to deport Jews” to the death camps; “country and regional studies had to wait.” Ukraine was very much in the latter category. The aforementioned lack of an architectural framework to anchor memories of the Holocaust doubtless contributed to this situation. 2 The most extensive research on this subject has been gathered by Father Patrick Desbois. His field work interviewing local people and discovering mass graves in and around Ukrainian villages and towns led him to state that the country had gradually transformed itself “into an ocean of extermination” (2008, 147). His narrative describes an apparently endless landscape of burnt bodies: “I imagine that if we could open all the mass graves we would have to take aerial photos of the whole of Ukraine. A mass cemetery of anonymous pits into which men, women, and children were thrown […] a country of graves.” (2008, 178).

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further remarks, the “idea of the curse or the revenge of Babi Yar became understandably widespread” in Kiev after the flood (2010, 282). Five years after the dam collapsed – twenty-five years after the massacre – thousands of people attended an event at the site in the first significant attempt by a large group to mark the events that took place at Babi Yar in 1941. In a grudging response, local authorities installed the first official marker at the site two weeks later, a granite rock which read “A monument will be erected at this site.” Over ten years passed. A memorial was finally inaugurated in 1977, but it elided the issue of “Jewish” persecution by simply “invoking the theme of slain Soviet citizens” (Tumarkin 2010, 282). Meanwhile, in the late 1960s, a group of American Jews in Denver, Colorado, observing the marginalisation of Holocaust memory in Ukrainian territory and perceiving a continued persecution of minority groups in the Soviet Union as a whole, decided to create a memorial space for the victims of Babi Yar on American soil. They aimed to give Ukrainian Holocaust memory the place it was being denied in Ukraine. As a result, the early 1980s saw the inauguration of the Babi Yar Memorial Park, Denver. The park bears a topological similarity to Babi Yar itself, and integrates elements which notably reinforce the idea that the Ukrainian Holocaust is embedded in the soil and landscape of Ukraine.³ It fell into relative disuse in the decade after its inauguration (Young 1994, 296). It is now being re-developed and re-orientated. The design proposed for this new landscape retains many elements from the original park layout but, as will be discussed, also notably engages with contemporary commemorative politics, focusing particularly on dialogical visitor engagement and the contextualization of the original Babi Yar massacre within an international history of genocide and terrorism. Rhetoric around the re-development is particularly rooted in forging links between the Holocaust and the war on terror, an agenda to be made manifest this year with the installation of a 9/11 memorial sculpture constructed from World Trade Centre steel. The park’s reorientation thus prompts an interrogation of comparative, transcultural models of remembering and commemoration. As the new project in Denver gets underway, the status of the original ravine site in Kiev remains controversial. Even after the demise of the Soviet regime, historian Stefan Rohdewald has argued that the Holocaust has become little more 3 The topological similarity includes the presence of a ravine in the Babi Yar Park and the range of flora natural to the Denver environment; the ravine echoes the larger one in Kiev, according to Babi Yar survivor Batya Barg, who visited the area allocated for the park in 1971, and a cursory analysis bears out Gass and Ginsberg’s argument that many of the same plants are native to both Denver and Kiev; Catherine Cooper (2006, 17) has noted that “[i]n many respects, Ukraine’s natural vegetation landscapes are very similar to those of North America’s interior.” The burial of a cylinder of soil from the original ravine in Kiev in the centre of the park in Denver serves to highlight the notion that the earth itself constitutes a carrier or vessel of memory.

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than a rhetorical frame of reference for the discussion and commemoration of the holodomor, or Great Famine, which struck the country in the early 1930s as a direct result of Stalin’s Five Year Plan.⁴ In 2009 tentative council plans to build a hotel on the Babi Yar site in Kiev to accommodate soccer fans for the 2012 European Championships were leaked to the press, prompting national and international outrage, particularly from Jewish groups (see for example Beaumont 2009). The plans were quietly withdrawn. The reinvigoration of interest in the site in Kiev, and throughout Jewish organisations worldwide, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the massacre has since resulted in a new announcement: that two Holocaust museums are to be built in Kiev, one at the Babi Yar site.⁵ This chapter thus examines two distinctive contemporary memoryscapes caught up in a unique transcultural relationship. In examining the place of Babi Yar in the context of two diverse societies’ “commemorative agendas” (Erll and Rigney 2010, 9), I evaluate the ethical and political potentiality and limitations inherent to the integration of the Holocaust into other memorial discourses. Considering the national context of the Ukraine, I argue that an increased recognition of the Holocaust within the Ukrainian agenda may not necessarily result in a zero-sum deterritorialisation of the holodomor as central to national memory; rather, in focusing on certain commonalities of Holocaust and holodomor experiences, it may be possible to neutralize the competitive nature of recent Ukrainian memorial activity, and replace it with something which is ultimately more productive and democratic. I will suggest that such a multidirectional approach may arguably be more appropriately employed in Ukraine than in Denver’s Babi Yar Park where the initiative to integrate the Ukrainian Holocaust with the context of the War on Terror raises troubling questions about the conflation of comparatively unrelated historical events. In both cases, I will be asking if it is possible for a form of genuinely “differentiated solidarity” (Rothberg, this volume, 33) to emerge from dialogical commemorative endeavours.

4 It is worth noting that the word holodomor is based on the Ukrainian words holod (starvation) and moryty (to kill or induce suffering) (Penuel, Statler and Golson 2010, 304). Thus the similarity of the terms holodomor and Holocaust is arbitrary. Estimates vary regarding the total number of deaths caused by the famine, but one of the most recent extensive histories on the period by Timothy Snyder (2010, 53) posits 3.3 million in Soviet Ukrainian territory during the famine years, of which approximately 3 million were Ukrainian. The remaining 300,000 were “Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews, and others.” A further 3  million Ukrainians died in other areas of the Soviet Union during the same period. 5 Ukrainian MP Oleksandr Feldman and Rabbi Moshe Azman, speaking at an anniversary conference on anti-Semitism, announced their aforementioned plan to build two new Jewish museums in Kiev, one at Babi Yar itself. (The Jewish Chronicle 2011).

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Before embarking on the central analyses, it is worth directing attention to the potential of landscape as memorial text, both in its more general perception as a vessel of memory and within the particular context of Ukrainian history. Following Young’s seminal argument that memorials exist in dialogue with the landscapes around them and those that visit them, we are increasingly aware of the ever-evolving nature of such spaces.⁶ John Dixon Hunt lists a plethora of “elements of landscape architecture that augment its commemorative functions beyond the opportunities of other arts” (2000, 20), not least the affective impact of the “transience of […] natural components”, their capacity for “decay and endless renewal” (22). Both landscape’s dialogic nature and its particular affective properties, I suggest, render it an appropriate medium for the representation of Ukrainian history, throughout which the connection between man and soil has been intimate. In stating as much I do not imply a replication of the logic of “blood and soil,” thus constructing a mythological, superorganic vision of Ukrainian identity; I am wary of assuming “naturalized affiliations between subject and object” (Campbell 2008, 3). Lawrence Buell’s argument that “National borders by no means regularly correspond with ‘natural’ borders” (2005, 81–2) should also be borne in mind. Yet Ukraine is an example of a nation whose borders are almost completely determined by natural elements and topographical forms. The term ukraïna, by which the land which now constitutes modern Ukraine was originally known, means “undefined borderland” The name Ukraine did not come into popular usage until the early 19th century (Magocsi 2010, 189–90). This land and the people who lived there have been historically defined according to their relationship with, and between, neighbouring states, rather than to any fixed conception of nationhood; indeed Ukraine did not become a nation in itself until the early 20th century. The connection between inhabitants and territory thus did not evolve strictly according to a national narrative. It was determined far more by the fertility of the rich black chernozem soil, which is ideal for growing wheat (Subtelny 1991, 3; Cooper 2006, 24–5). Thus the land of the Ukrainian steppe has for centuries been regarded as amongst the richest in the Europe, and as the continent’s “breadbasket” Ukraine has been “valued for its natural resources more than its diverse population” (Lower 2005, 2). Unlike their Russian neighbours to the North, who had to farm collectively to be effective, the fertility of

6 According to Erll and Rigney (2009, 3), the turn “from ‘sites’ to ‘dynamics’” within memory studies runs parallel to a larger shift of attention within cultural studies from products to processes, from a focus on discrete cultural artefacts to an interest in the way those artefacts circulate and interact with their environment.” Memory is never static, as the texts around which it circulates are continuously involved in processes of mediation and remediation (Erll and Rigney 2009, 3).

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Ukraine allowed inhabitants to farm independently, a natural circumstance that came to affect the “mentalit[y], cultur[e], and socio-economic organization” of the Ukraine and its people (Subtelny 1991, 5). Ukraine’s borderland position and fertile soil have lead to repeated colonizations; effectively, that is, attempts to deterritorialize and subsequently reterritorialize the land. Thus as much as geography has played a part in the creation of a secure Ukrainian national identity, it has led to frequent, violent attempts to destroy the fundamental basis on which this identity exists. Landscape, then, has what is arguably a unique capacity to communicate this complex history and render it affective, for its forms and components – not least its soil – have been repeatedly transformed according to the struggles enacted upon in. It is with this argument in mind that I proceed with a discussion of Babi Yar’s legacy in the landscapes of Kiev and Denver.

1 Babi Yar, Kiev Babi Yar lies on the outskirts of Kiev within a large public park. The exact position of the original ravine is no longer discernible; several ravines shape the landscape, which constitutes at least a kilometre square foot of woodland, lawns and paths. There are two distinct sections: one contains nearly all the officially inaugurated Babi Yar memorials including the aforementioned monument to slain Soviet citizens, a vast bronze sculpture group of oversized figures looming over this half of the park. Eight other memorials to various groups and individuals have since been added here.⁷ One might easily assume the broad, sweeping ravine at the centre of this space to be the original site of the Babi Yar massacre. The landscape aesthetic in this area is more formal and manicured in appearance than in the other half, which is more densely wooded, and to casual observation looks much as any other large city park. A simple stone Menorah is one of the few memorials to be found in this second half of the park, and this is rumoured to be much closer to the original ravine than the Soviet sculpture group (although there is no way one could know this without researching the subject in advance). The Menorah can be reached from the other half of the park by walking along a path 7 Others in this area include monuments to Soviet citizens, prisoners of war, and officers of the Soviet Army executed by German Fascists at Babi Yar, to a “Hero of Ukraine,” the Kyiv underground worker and revolutionary T. Markus, and a separate monument to executed children; and various monument crosses, for priests executed (shot) for praying for the protection of the Motherland from Fascists and Monument, to members of OUN (the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) and the Ukrainian poet O. Teliha.

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named “the road of grief.” As one landscape, the park is a somewhat incoherent space. Each memorial bears little stylistic resemblance to those around it, and there is scant evidence of any attempt to provide an overall view of the landscape’s history or of how, or exactly where, so many people of diverse cultural groups came to lose their lives here. The incoherence of Babi Yar’s landscape can be related in part to its slow and fractious development as a memoryscape. To date, as previously stated, commemoration at Babi Yar preceding the fall of communism in 1991 was notable mainly in its absence, reflecting the pervasive silence about the Holocaust in Ukrainian territory under the Soviet government. The complex and troubling history of Ukrainian anti-Semitism and complicity in Nazi atrocities, which for many years has been elided in national discourses, may be in part responsible for the long delays between the events of the Ukraine Holocaust and their commemoration in public space.⁸ Even when the stone Menorah did finally appear in 1991, historian Stefan Rohdewald argues that it served only to “[symbolise] the marginality of Jewish remembrance of the Shoah in Ukrainian society, rather than its incorporation into the national framework” (2008, 176). This observation is borne out by a superficial but striking comparison between the simplicity of the Menorah and the aforementioned ostentatious memorial to Soviet citizens. Rohdewald suggests that such marginalisation also characterises recent efforts to include Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Ukraine’s commemorative landscape as a whole, despite an evolution in research on the subject since 1991 and the mandatory inclusion of the Holocaust in school programmes laid down by the Ukrainian Ministry of Education in 2001.

8 Martin Dean, for example, records the significant role played by Ukrainian police in the implementation of Holocaust, particularly in rounding up local Jews. Widespread anti-Semitic propaganda in the local press encouraged Western Ukrainian nationalists towards Jewish persecution. Some orthodox priests preached against Jews (2000, 101–102). Ukrainian pogroms against Jews were frequent in 1941, in some cases even before German soldiers arrived in the area. These pogroms, which involved the humiliation, beating and murder of Ukrainian Jews, were often simply motivated by a desire to acquire Jewish property and wealth (Dean 2000, 20). It was a deliberate policy of the Einsatzgruppen to incite such pogroms (Dean 2000, 21). From September when the initial Babi Yar massacre took place, “numerous surviving Jews were reported and handed over to the Security Police by local inhabitants, the Wehrmacht, the civil administration and especially the local police posts in and around Kiev. Clear orders had been received that all Jews, including men, women and children, were to be shot” (Dean 2000, 61). Elie Wiesel (1987) has attributed both official and non-official silence on the subject of Jewish suffering after Babi Yar to Soviet complicity in Nazi crimes.

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[L]inking the murder of Ukraine’s Jews with Ukrainian national history remains a taboo in most public debates […] An analysis of Ukrainian history textbooks confirms this: the tragedy is linked to German anti-Semitism and extermination camps in Poland, and is “silent” about the death of Jews in the territory of today’s Ukraine. Hence, a strategy to externalise the Holocaust can be observed. (Rohdewald 2008, 17)

In 2008, director of the Ukrainian Centre for Holocaust Studies Anatoly Podol‘s‘kyi condemned the Ukrainian government for their lack of interest in “promoting a discussion of Jewish life and the Holocaust in Ukraine,” practically resulting in a failure to maintain the few memorials that have appeared or to provide any support – “moral, institutional, or financial” – for the few independent institutions now working to keep the memory of the Ukraine Holocaust alive (Podol‘s‘kyi 2008, 5). Reviewing the presence of the Holocaust in Ukrainian school and education programmes, Podol‘s‘kyi echoes Rohdewold in perceiving a peripheral focus at best due to “the subordination of academia to political interests” (2008, 4). Thus whilst the fall of communism in 1991 rendered the commemoration of Jewish suffering possible and even pragmatic in Ukraine (for the international community were looking on), the memorial landscape’s development was yet impacted by factors aside from direct prohibition.⁹ Whilst the memorial topography at Babi Yar now includes monuments to a number of victimised groups, the sports proposal of 2009 echoes that of 50 years before (Tumarkin 2010, 8), suggesting a continued desire to suppress Holocaust memory in Ukraine.¹⁰ Rohdewald also perceives a recently emerging competitive rhetorical framework of Ukrainian memory, generated by a refusal “to perceive […] national history” as one of “various cultures:” The “other” tends to be excluded and viewed as something alien. Apparently it is more comfortable to talk about “us” and “others,” for example about “our Great Famine” and about “the others’ Holocaust.” A certain narrative is taking shape, in which the Holocaust does not appear […] in recent times, the Great Famine in Ukraine is increasingly being called “the Ukrainian Holocaust” (2008, 4).

Andreas Kappeler has similarly suggested that the Great Famine became “the most important new element of Ukrainian collective memory” in post-Soviet his9 It has been, and remains, constantly subject to what Jennifer Jordan (2006, 10–11) refers to as the observable intersection of relevant factors including land use, land ownership, the resonance of a site’s meaning in broad contexts and the presence or absence of a ”memorial entrepreneur”. 10 Whilst further investigation, certainly into sources beyond those made available in the media, would be required to determine reliable details about the 2009 hotel proposal, it is at least suggestive in light of Rohdewald’s argument about continuing Ukrainian externalisation and marginalisation of the Holocaust.

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toriography (2009, 58–59), and that the designation of the famine as ‘the Ukrainian Holocaust’ implied a parallel between the two events, “a major element in Ukrainian national martyrology” and “a response to allegations of a so-called perennial Ukrainian anti-Semitism” and Nazi collaboration (Kappeler 2009, 59). A necessarily superficial survey of memorial activity instigated by official Ukrainian institutions in the recent past does perhaps suggest a similar tendency in public space. The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, in its first incarnation from 2005–2010, has been key in bringing the events of the holodomor to public attention and was instrumental in facilitating the legal recognition that they constituted a genocidal attack on the Ukrainian people.¹¹ There can be little doubt that in recapturing the memory of the Great Famine, the UINM amongst others has performed long overdue work of much value. 2008 was recognized by the Ukrainian government as “Holodomor Victims Remembrance Year” and at this date plans for a substantial memorial to commemorate the tragedy were announced. The UINM administered the competition for designs for the new space and oversaw the project to completion. The result is a monumental “Candle of Memory” perched on a steep slope overlooking the Dnieper river, in a central and much visited area of the city alongside the UNESCO world heritage site the Peshersk Lavra. The Candle itself, an impressive glass, concrete and metal structure, towers over the entrance to a comprehensive memorial museum, and is surrounded by a complex of walls, plaques, walkways and statues. The aims of the memorial, inherent in the designs of the monuments, museum, and UINM publications sold in the small museum shop, are twofold: the provision of an appropriate space in which people may remember and pay tribute to the suffering of holodomor victims; and the integration of the famine years as a central coordinate in the creation of contemporary Ukrainian national identity. The former commemorative agenda is visible in several elements within the museum in particular: a series of memorial books containing the names of victims from each region affected surrounds a pillar of corn kernels, into which visitors may place lighted candles. The associated museum publications also give a voice to the victims by reproducing their testimonies, which are featured in a film projected on the museum’s inner walls at timed intervals.

11 The holodomor was officially categorised as genocide against the Ukrainian people according to the national parliament [Verkovna Rada] in 2006. Current President Victor Yanukovych has controversially argued that “[t]he Holodomor was in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. It was the result of Stalin’s totalitarian regime. But it would be wrong and unfair to recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide against one nation,” (Kyiv Post 2010) – the implications of this statement will be considered at a later stage in this argument.

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The centrality of the holodomor to the construction of a new Ukrainian identity is manifest in the decisive casting of Stalin as a perpetrator of genocide, thus providing what the guidebook suggests to be a convincing argument for the elimination of “communism from the lives of all the world’s peoples once and for all” (Yukhnovskiy, then acting head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory 2008, 3); an emotive argument in the context of the holodomor, but one which fails to differentiate between different phases and forms of communism. Ukraine’s independence is partly defined, for the Institute at least, by this anticommunism. The museum catalogue also states that the principles that “every nation forms a natural union with its native land” and “Ukraine’s land has consistently and indivertibly given birth to Ukrainians” are central to the exhibit. This is borne out by the many reminders of the traditional Ukrainian relationship with soil and wheat in and around the museum; in the design of the outer complex (which features golden wheat behind black metal cages), film footage of Ukrainian farmers working the land in the aforementioned projection, and in an installation of related farm equipment, also within the museum. This overriding aesthetic implies that this traditionally productive union between man and soil, and its violent subversion under Stalin, remain central to contemporary Ukrainian national identity. The “Candle of Memory” and the other work done by the UINM warrant a more lengthy and nuanced analysis than I can provide in this context,¹² but the above summary at least gives some weight to the argument that the centrality of the holodomor for discourses of Ukrainian national memory is manifest in the landscape of the country’s capital city. Such cannot be said of the Holocaust; as the proposal for the “Candle of Memory” was being put into action, the Kiev city council was apparently discussing the practicalities of building a hotel at Babi Yar. In recapturing vital memories of the holodomor, those of the Holocaust have remained peripheral. According to Kappeler, the very notion of a Ukrainian “national history” raises questions: “What should be regarded as Ukrainian history? Is it represented only by the national Ukrainian narrative, focused on the Ukrainian people and their attempts to create a Ukrainian national state? Or does it embrace the territory of Ukraine, with its multiethnic population, from antiquity to the present time?” (2009, 56). Ukrainian historians, he goes on to suggest have to date adopted a national paradigm; from the brief survey above, it may be suggested that memorial activity has proceeded much along the same lines. 12 The museum further deserves attention as constituting a marked development in Kiev’s gradual move towards the provision of Westernized visitor spaces. It has left many of the “Soviet” museum features behind. Multilingual staff and the availability of museum publication in several European languages are particularly notable in this regard.

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2 The Babi Yar Memorial Park, Denver As previously noted, the creation of the Babi Yar Park in Denver was prompted by an awareness of the marginalisation of Holocaust memory in Ukraine alongside concerns about the persecution of minority groups in Soviet territory. Initially, then, its premise can be seen as both ethical and political. The nucleus of the idea came from the Colorado Committee of Concern for Soviet Jewry (CCCSJ), an organization formed to educate people about the plight of Soviet Jews, particularly those who wished to immigrate to Israel but who were prevented from doing so by the Soviet government (known as “refuseniks”). The first plans for a memorial were comparatively modest; organisers thought to name a street after Babi Yar. Whilst no streets were then nameless, an area of Denver parkland was available and subsequently earmarked for a memorial project in September 1969. Ginsburg recalled that renowned Ukrainian poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko and author Anatoli Kuznetsov wrote to support the endeavour during this period. Both had already written out against the marginalisation of the Holocaust and Babi Yar in particular within Ukraine itself. A separate committee, the Babi Yar Park Foundation, was formed in 1970 to run the project. A series of disagreements about the appropriate use of the space led to a rift between the CCCSJ and the newly formed Foundation,¹³ and from this date architect Alan Gass and local activist Helen Ginsburg became the key memorial entrepreneurs. It is again impossible in the context to do full justice to the work of the Park Foundation, or to examine the original park landscape in great detail. However, there are certain characteristics which must be outlined for the purposes of this essay, as they significantly illuminate its relationship with its Ukrainian counterpart. Firstly, the lack of commemoration in Kiev at the time was central to the park’s stated agenda. This is mentioned frequently in early speeches and press releases made by the Foundation, and further suggested by the choice of the following lines from Yevtushenko’s poem as a header on Foundation stationary: “There are no memorials over Babi Yar / Only an abrupt bank like a crude 13 The rift was twofold: the Ukrainian community in Denver wanted to be involved in the development of the park, because “the Jews killed at Babi Yar were Ukrainian Jews” (Brenda Morrison), but the CCCSJ argued that the collaboration of Ukrainian nationals with the Nazi perpetrators rendered their involvement inappropriate. Furthermore, the CCCSJ were concerned that their plan for a park which was “beautiful and meaningful in a simple and unadorned manner” was being replaced with a much more expensive project: “To think of the expenditure of dollars when our brothers in Israel and the Soviet Union are in such need is contrary to the very core of our Jewish religion” (in Morrison 1994, 6). From Gass’s later overview of the park’s history, it becomes clear that the Park Foundation themselves only agreed to input from the Ukrainian community after they had made a financial contribution to the park’s development.

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epitaph rears.” The early stated aim of the park was to “commemorate the tragic events which occurred in 1941 at Babi Yar” (Babi Yar Park Foundation, planning document, n.d.). Furthermore, from its earliest incarnation, certain resonances between the park landscape and that of Babi Yar in Ukraine have been central to its design. The park itself already contained a small ravine, and a “topographical and climatic comparison of Denver and Kiev, as well as typical flora are concerned, is astounding” (Ginsburg, n.d. speech draft). All planting was to reflect this similarity. A manually activated voice-over was installed to tell visitors the history of Babi Yar and the park, and informed visitors that the place they stand bears a “haunting resemblance to the original ravine in Kiev as it was during 1941” (transcript of narrative recorded 2011; this extract was also included in the earliest version of the transcript in the archives). Plans for landscaped features also included a “Forest that Remembers” and a “People Place,” an amphitheatre with a cylinder of earth from the original ravine in Kiev at its centre. The idea that the park’s landscape, in its resemblance to Babi Yar, could bring visitors somehow “closer” to the tragic history of the original ravine, was implicit in the Park Foundation’s rhetoric. Yet there has always been a transcultural slant to the Park’s remit: “The concept of Babi Yar reflects a spirit of humanitarianism that transcends all boundaries” (Ginsburg, n.d., ca. early 1970s). Because Judaism’s love of its own, and love for all mankind are inextricably interwoven, the Babi Yar Park concept has evolved beyond commemorating solely the tragic history of the Jew […] With the aid of people throughout our country, this park will grow in beauty and viability, thriving on its message of freedom and dignity for all men, regardless of religion, race, ethnicity or national citizenship. It will speak out against anti-humanism anywhere in this world of ours… for wherever a man is harmed, we are all hurt. (Ginsburg, 1974)

By this stage, then, it becomes clear that the specific political thrust of the CCCSJ had been replaced by a more general message about international solidarity beyond national or cultural boundaries. From 1971 to 1983 the park was developed in phases as a result of the Park Foundation’s persistent dedication to raising awareness and funds (see Gass 2010 and Park Foundation correspondence and minutes throughout this period). It must be deemed significant that most donations were made by non-Jews; “The support of the Jewish community was astonishingly meagre” (Gass 2010). For 23 years, the Park Foundation continued to develop the site. Although they do not corroborate Young’s description of a park fallen into disuse, Gass certainly acknowledges that both himself and Ginsberg, recognizing [their] own mortality” (2010), were aware that their ultimate goals for the park would require new collaborative partners to be fulfilled. With this in mind, after a series of discussions, the Park Foundation was eventu-

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ally disbanded in 2005 and the stewardship of the Park passed to Denver’s Mizel Museum, although members of the original Foundation continued to play a key role in its development in an advisory capacity. From 2005 the aims to “improve the public visibility of the park and adapt it to the museum’s program” became central to its development (Gass 2010). With regards the former point, conversation with Gass, Ginsburg and the Mizel’s Executive Director Ellen Premack, reveal that “visibility” was and continues to be both a local and a global issue: the way the park has been landscaped to date means that there is little view over it from the surrounding area, and as a result casual passers-by are unlikely to realise its presence and significance; they also believe that the park potentially has relevance to the national and international community and that its profile should be raised accordingly. In order to say a little more about the latter point that the park should ideally be able to enhance the Mizel Museum’s program, it is necessary to briefly foreground its main aims and remit as an institution, that is, to function as a “portal to the contemporary Jewish experience. Its exhibits, events and educational programs inspire people of all ages and backgrounds to celebrate diversity. Fine art, film, literature, drama, music, sculpture and technology offer interactive experiences that promote community, understanding and multiculturalism.” (Mizel Museum website 2012a). Its permanent exhibit is focused on a “Jewish journey across time and space from a contemporary perspective”, with an essential goal “for each visitor, in examining the experience of the Jewish people, to think about and feel proud of his or her own personal journey, and to feel inspired by the fact that journeys don’t end but rather continue to unfold” (Mizel Museum website 2012a). Thus whilst it centres on Jewish culture specifically, it is used as a platform for engagement across cultures; Premack sees the museum’s exhibits and education programmes as ways “to open minds, change attitudes, and discover paths that tie our world together through respect for our common humanity.” (Mizel Museum website 2012b). These are what we might call transcultural priorities. In 2006 the Mizel announced an international competition for a design to develop Babi Yar Park, and in 2009 confirmed that a design by the artist-architect team Julian Bonder and Krzysztof Wodiczko had been selected to take the project forward. The development, as previously, is currently taking place in stages by necessity, for substantial – and as yet to be found – finances are required to carry out the design as a whole. However, it is possible to assess the nature of what it is hoped will unfold via the publicity brochure produced by the Mizel Museum to showcase Wodiczko and Bonder’s design. Notably, elements such as the People Place and the Forest that Remembers are to be maintained (although the latter is referred to in the new design as the “Grove of Remembrance”), but integrated into what Wodiczko and Bonder describe as “an active site of memory” which

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will facilitate “three kinds of memories”: the first focused “on maintaining the memory of the Holocaust and of Babi Yar”, the second “on present and historic events and their immediate emotional aftermath”, and the third “on active emotional and thinking responses to new, unfolding world events that contain and bring back the memory of past terror and genocide which elicit a call for action towards a better future” (Wodiczko and Bonder 2009). In order to achieve this the team propose the addition of four new elements to the original design: an Empty Volume (an empty space surrounded by “monumental” walls with square holes running through them containing memorial flames; the empty space is to be a “forum for conversations, […] contemplation and solitude”); the transformation of the ravine into “reflective and active path” with a stream of “continuous running water” to “represent on going life”; and a Monitoring and Information centre where “the world situation indicating all points of emerging terror activities” will be displayed to visitors. Throughout, the new design functions in accordance with recently emerging scholarship in that it acknowledges and further encourages the dialogical nature of the memorial experience in landscape. Given that Bonder’s published work on commemoration has been part of this discourse, this is unsurprising. The team suggest that their Working Memorial “will significantly transform Babi Yar Park into a unique and new kind of public landscape: a participatory public place and an active agent for culture and dialogue” that “encourages visitors of all ages to be conscious and productive” (Wodiczko and Bonder 2009). The new park is to be as much about the visitor as the victim. It is thus obvious that the new design echoes the Mizel Museum’s transcultural priorities. However, a more specific narrative arguably emerges prominently in the brochure, in sections authored by both the design teams and the Museum respectively: the integration of Babi Yar within a discourse on acts of terror. In this respect, the new design can also be seen to complement the aims of the Mizel Museum’s partner museum, another Denver institution also founded by Larry Mizel, the Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab (CELL). Inevitably, this is another project that deserves a more thorough analysis than can be offered here. For the purposes of this argument, it is sufficient to note the main stated purposes of the CELL and its permanent exhibition, Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere: Understanding the Threat of Terrorism: “educate and empower citizens and organisations with the tools to become more informed, prepared and involved with their own communities in order to help combat the threat of terrorism”; the exhibit “provides visitors with an in-depth understanding of the history of terrorism, the methods terrorists employ and the extent to which terrorism impacts societies around the world” (CELL Visitors Guide leaflet 2011). The CELL, the Mizel Museum, and the Babi Yar Park now form a triangle of sites in Denver with intimately related concerns.

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In the first phase of Babi Yar Park’s redevelopment, a significant addition is being made to the site which is not referred to in the brochure but certainly fits its rubric; the aforementioned sculpture made from World Trade Centre steel. The steel, which arrived in Denver in July 2011, is being used to construct two sculptures, one for the CELL and one for the Babi Yar Park. The latter “will feature a so-called ‘earth sculpture’ […] a vertical surface with a marble and glass reflective wall leading to a plaza” containing the steel (Marcus 2011). Both Ginsburg and Premack reject firmly the notion that inauguration of the sculpture is in anyway intended as a political gesture. As far as Gass and Ginsburg are concerned, their aims have not changed since they became part of the Babi Yar Park Foundation in 1970–71; they see the new developments, including the inauguration of the steel, as commensurate with their original agenda to encourage “freedom and equality for all men.” The questions raised by the Park are thus: what are the real similarities and differences between two events such as 9/11 and the massacres at Babi Yar in 1941, and do their differences matter if by focusing on their similarities a genuine feeling of “differentiated solidarity” (see Rothberg, this volume, 33) can be produced? Furthermore, is it possible, as Ginsburg and Premack suggest, to leave out politics in a memorial endeavour?

3 The Holocaust, the holodomor and the War on Terror: shared ground? The dynamics of two memoryscapes have been uncovered so far. I have taken a necessarily brief glance at certain other museums and memorials within the larger landscapes inhabited by these sites (the holodomor “Memory Candle” in Kiev and the Mizel Museum and CELL in Denver), and whilst incomplete the results are suggestive. In the Babi Yar Park, Denver, designers and curators embrace a multidirectional, transcultural approach to Holocaust representation of the type that, to date, has been refused in Ukrainian memory discourses. The “Anyone, anytime, anywhere” narrative in Denver finds its opposite at the site of the original Babi Yar atrocity, where memorials to a number of cultural groups jostle for space in the shadow of the monumental Soviet sculpture group. The “memory competition” between the Holocaust and the holodomor as discussed serves to accentuate this lack of cohesion within Kiev as a whole. In this final section I evaluate some of the questions raised by these two memoryscapes. To take first the examples from Ukrainian territory, I would argue that the Holocaust and the holodomor share more ground than current memory discourse

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and landscapes suggest, and that any competitiveness that does exist could be productively neutralised by an official recognition of this ground. Both the Holocaust and the holodomor can be seen as the result of attempts to colonize Ukrainian land. Snyder’s research draws attention to the forces that shaped Ukraine under Stalin and Hitler, revealing many parallels – both political and experiential – in the process; furthermore, such parallels becomes even more pronounced when taken alongside the accounts given by Desbois of his field work across Ukraine and other available testimonial accounts from both periods. In both the holodomor and the Holocaust, people who occupied this territory were forced to fight against each other for survival, experienced or witnessed fatal starvation, were driven to murder and cannibalism.¹⁴ Victims of both regimes were buried chaotically, in mass graves full to overflowing which have comes to characterise Ukrainian memories of landscape in these periods. The traditional relationship between those who lived in Ukraine and the nation’s soil was also subverted by both regimes.¹⁵ This subversion was a reality for a number of cultural and ethnic groups; more Ukrainians may have died in the famine, and more Jews may have been killed in the Holocaust, but the two atrocities both affected each of these groups and a number of others besides. Only ten years apart, many people from all these groups suffered under both regimes, and the commonality of this suffering is explicit in their testimonies. Thus much of the imagery and symbolism employed at the Memory Candle resonates with histories and memories of both the Holocaust and the holodomor. Yet recognition of these similarities is frequently refused both within and beyond the Ukraine. The identification of the Holocaust with the Holodomor has […] been rejected by most nonUkrainian historians. It challenges the singular and exclusive place of the Holocaust and Auschwitz in the collective memory not only of Jews but also of most other Western Europeans and Americans. (Kappeler 2009, 59)

Within Ukraine itself, Kappeler suggests that whilst “the revived Ukrainian national history […] constituting above all a history of the Ukrainians, has its

14 See Snyder (2010, 49–52 and 386) on cannibalism in Ukraine during the holodomor, and as a later framework for Holocaust memory in the work of Vassily Grossman, also see Anatoly Kuznetsov (1972[1966], 347–8) on the use of human flesh by sausage-makers during the Holocaust in Kiev. 15 Snyder (2010, 52) on handling of corpses during the famine resonates with Desbois’ transcripts of witness accounts of mass graves during the Holocaust (2008, 66–7): the Nazis took away “the beauty from everything. The most luscious green landscapes became extermination fields […]” (Snyder 2010, 98).

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merits. It fulfils the important task of legitimizing and strengthening the new Ukrainian state and the fragile Ukrainian nation”, on the other hand, a “historical narrative that excludes non-Ukrainians” fails to articulate much that is central to the country’s development; it is on this basis that Kappeler pleads for “the opening up of the narrow mono-ethnonational approach and for a multiethnic history of Ukraine” (2009, 61). It is unclear in Kappeler’s argument exactly who is being excluded – whether “non-Ukrainians” is a reference to Jews, which confuses the issue as some Ukrainians are also Jewish – but his argument that instead of engaging in an ethnocentric competition centring on the questions “Who has suffered most?” and “Who had the greatest number of victims?” one should “tell what is known about all the atrocities of the past, their victims and perpetrators, regardless of ethnic origin” (Kappeler 2009, 62). is one which deserves to be taken forward. Based on the clear parallels to which Snyder draws attention, between victim and witness experiences of atrocity throughout the holodomor and the Holocaust in Ukraine, I would suggest that recognition of this commonality presents an opportunity to move beyond competitive memory and focus on what those who have lived on Ukrainian soil have shared. Whether the new museums to be built at Babi Yar and elsewhere in Kiev will take up this opportunity and engage with the longer history of atrocity, suffering, and perseverance that has characterised the experiences of all cultures on Ukrainian territory, remains to be seen. Based on activity up to 2010, it seems fair to suggest that the political concerns that have dominated the Kiev memoryscape have resulted in an evacuation of the original Babi Yar site as far as its potential to facilitate transcultural identification is concerned. Conversely, the connection between the Holocaust and the War on Terror which grounds the development of the Babi Yar Park is rather more obscure. That the park now links the events at Babi Yar to those at the World Trade Centre in 2001, a link made explicit with the installation of 9/11 steel, throws the abstract nature of such a comparison into relief. There is some shared ground, of course: in both cases lives were unjustly cut short by regimes which used terror as weapon against particular cultural or national groups. However, the disparities are more notable. The attack on the twin towers was a challenge to the hegemony of the United States, but it cannot be regarded as an attempt to erase that nation and its citizens from the face of the earth. Experientially there are few documented parallels between victim experiences. The Babi Yar massacre took place during the occupation of the Ukrainian capital by German troops, and it was one of many similar mass shootings then taking place throughout the country. The attack on the World Trade Centre was an isolated, unexpected event for those whose lives it took and for those who witnessed it. Some feel that such divergences are of little

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note: “[a]s the Holocaust has been for many Jews, 9/11 is now for many Americans; though of course radically different in scale, timing and circumstance, both events are emotionally devastating and morally clear cut since the murder of innocents is always, utterly wrong.” (Schweber and Findling, 2007, 1). Such arguments resonate with the approach adopted by the Babi Yar Park’s curators. They are not trying to say that the two events were the same; their concern is directing positive and active responses to the persecution of others, whoever they are. That both Babi Yar and 9/11 are “emotionally devastating” and “morally clear cut” is central to their integration of the two. Yet without attending to the specificity of the two events and their larger contexts – to their “radical difference” – sameness is implied. As Peter Novick has argued, “collective memory simplifies: sees events from a single, committed perspective”, and may be “in crucial senses ahistorical, even anti-historical” (2000, 3–4). Whilst curators of the park in Denver laudably integrate the Holocaust into an ethically productive multidirectional narrative, the collective memory they promote risks neglecting the historicity of the events it brings together. The co-ordinates upon which parallels between Holocaust and 9/11 have been based – whether in the museum environment, the media, or in academic discourse, both within and beyond America itself – are not always, I would argue, justified or desirable. Whilst the specific motivations that have prompted the curators of the Babi Yar Park should be given due attention in any attempt to evaluate the project overall, it must also be acknowledged that it takes place within, and is perhaps inspired by, a particular national context, one in which, as Novick argues, the Holocaust had “become a moral and ideological Rorschach test” (Novick 2000, 12) even before the attack on the World Trade Centre had taken place. In some instances since, for example at a Day of Reflection and Remembrance at the USHMM a year after 9/11 during which Holocaust survivors read out the names of those killed in the attack, this use of the Holocaust as a template effectively “emptied each [event] of their historical particularity” (Bernard-Donals 2005, 79). This is the existing national backdrop against which the re-orientation of the Babi Yar Park is taking place, and, regardless of the particular aims of those who conceived this reorientation, in contributing to this discourse a subscription to its main tenets is implied. Thus, I would argue, the potential of the site to develop a sense of differentiated transcultural solidarity may be somewhat undermined if the new design fails to adequately “distinguish” two very “different histories of violence” from one another.

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4 Conclusion By considering these two memorial environments alongside other co-ordinates in the respective surrounding cityscapes – the Memory Candle holodomor memorial and museum in Kiev, and the Mizel Museum and CELL in Denver  – I have drawn attention to the dialogical networks of memory discourse in which they exist. I have suggested that the landscape of Babi Yar, Kiev, and the surrounding cityscape, has been largely shaped by political and national concerns: initially those of the Soviet Union, and since 1991, those of Ukrainian nationalism. Conversely, the designers and curators of the Babi Yar Park in Denver, in spite of its political origins in the 1960 and 1970s, are primarily driven today by a desire to promote ethical engagement beyond national boundaries. Both landscapes are seen, to some extent, as a means to a particular end; as is always the case, memoryscapes reveal as much, if not more, about present concerns as they do about the particular pasts they commemorate. In comparing the two, I am left questioning whether both landscapes are rendered less productive by maintaining either an ethical or political agenda at the centre of their memorial practice. Would it be possible to create memorial space that combined the two approaches to memory; an ethical politics of memory, and a politically responsible ethics? The Holocaust in Ukraine, in both territorialised and deterritorialised spaces, is yet to find such expression. However, as recent scholarship so persuasively argues, memory and commemoration are constantly mediated and remediated, always evolving. It should be no surprise, then, that the Ukraine’s competitive memory terrain may be about to shift; indeed many would argue that that shift has already begun. On 10th December 2010 Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s website announced that the running of the UINM was to be transferred to Ministers in the Ukrainian cabinet. Effectively, the government will directly control the Institute’s budget. Whilst Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov insists that related museum will not be closed as a result, as various media sources have suggested,¹⁶ the transfer of the budget is suggestive. The former director of the UIMN has been replaced by Valery Soldatenko, a member of the Communist Party who outraged a number of Ukrainian historians and political opponents by arguing that the holodomor was the “the result of difficult circumstances”, and had not been artificially produced (Radio Free Liberty, 2010). This was a direct counter to the law of 2006 that pronounced the holodomor to be an act of genocide, and entirely opposed to the rhetoric employed in the Candle of Memory. Meanwhile, the 70th anniversary of 16 See for example Roman Kabachiy, “Ukraine’s stolen money” (2010), who highlights various ways the change has already begun to effect the activities of museums controlled by the UINM.

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events at Babi Yar drew seemed to prompt a resurgence of interest in the Holocaust in Ukraine in late 2011. Delegations to the site itself were frequent, a touring exhibition showcasing Desbois’ project visited Kiev for the first time to coincide with the anniversary, and in October the aforementioned plan to build two new Jewish museums in Kiev, one at Babi Yar itself, was announced. The memory of Babi Yar was also politicised anew in January 2012, when a new international Jewish organization, “The World Forum for Russian Jewry” was inaugurated at the United Nations Holocaust Memorial Day service and conference, with images of Babi Yar on screens in the background (Alperin 2012). Alexander L. Levin, president of the Greater Kiev Jewish Community, announced the forum’s purpose: “to bring together the Russian-speaking Jews of the world and save us and others from the next catastrophe and to protect our national land and the State of Israel. We stand ready to unite against the nuclear program of Iran […] We will not let another Holocaust engulf us” (in Alperin, 2012). The Holocaust is here mobilized in a way that conflates the historical and political specificity of both the Nazi genocide and the conflict between Israel and Palestine, much as Bernard-Donals argues has been the case in American memorial practices that take the Holocaust as a framework for the commemoration of 9/11. In the case of the World Forum for Russian Jewry, the mobilization is simply more transparent in using the Holocaust to justify continuing military conflict. Meanwhile in Denver, commenting on their inclusion of 9/11 steel in the park landscape, Premack and Larry Mizel argue that “[i]f you want a site to be relevant and meaningful and bring it to life, you have to go forward […] This is Babi Yar Park. We’re bringing additional elements to it, but we’re not taking anything away.” (In Jacobs 2012). Furthermore, with regards educating visitors about the War on Terror, Mizel argues that “Jews, who have a tie to Israel, had a better awareness of terrorism before the US woke up to it on 9/11 […] I felt we were uniquely situated to provide the proper background and support to educate the public on the nature of terrorism” (Jacobs 2012). Whether or not one agrees with the notion of a specifically Jewish appreciation of the threat of terrorism, it is clear that Mizel and Premack do not envision that the historical or political specificity of either the Holocaust or 9/11 will be elided in the new Babi Yar Park. It is not that these memory entrepreneurs necessarily encourage such an elision; however, there is no way of ensuring a confluence between their own ethical intentions and the collective memories produced, shaped, or mobilized as a result. As commentators, it lies with us to exercise vigilance about these memories as they unfold in the future. It is fairly certain that, as the political landscape of Ukraine continues to change, so too will its memoryscapes. The inauguration of two Holocaust museums would do much to redress an enduring imbalance; yet clearly this should not be

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at the expense of understanding the holodomor and its place in Ukrainian history. The danger is that one zero-sum competition will simply evolve into another. For this to be avoided, I would argue, memory culture concerning Ukraine – be it at the centre of the nation or 6000 miles away  – must aim to combine the ethics of remembering with a reflexive awareness of politics. If this can be achieved, between the diverse cultures of present day Ukraine and the US there exists a potential platform for ethically oriented transcultural memory work: the creation of a genuine “differentiated solidarity” (see Rothberg, this volume, 33). Whether such a platform can be achieved is a question for the future, but if the rapidity with which cultural memory discourse in Ukraine has evolved in recent years is anything to go by, that future may not be far off.

Acknowledgements Grateful thanks must go to a number of institutions and individuals who have made this analysis possible: the department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, and the Morris Leigh Foundation, whose generosity funded travel for this research; and to Alan Gass and Helen Ginsburg of the former Babi Yar Park Foundation, and Ellen Premack of the Mizel Museum, Denver, for their time and willingness to assist me and share their thoughts and memories of the Babi Yar Park. I am also indebted to Maria Tumarkin for sharing her rich work on Kiev with me at an early stage in the research process.

References Alperin, Michele. “With Iran in mind, Babi Yar remembered as ‘evil at its worst’.” Jewish Journal, January 30th 2012. BBC News. “Babi Yar hotel decision condemned.” 24th September 2009. http://news.bbc. co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8274043.stm (3 April 2012). Beaumont, Peter. “Anger as Kiev council plans to build hotel at biggest Holocaust shooting site.” The Guardian, 24th September 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/ sep/24/hotel-kiev-holocaust-germany-babi yar (3 April 2012). Bernard-Donals, Michael. “Conflations of Memory, or what they saw at the USHMM after 9/11.” New Centennial Review 5.2 (2005): 73–106. Bradley, K, Penuel, Matthew Statler and J. Geoffrey Golson. Encyclopedia of Disaster Relief. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2011. Brandon, Ray and Wendy Lower. Eds. and “Introduction.” Brandon, Ray and Wendy Lower. Eds. and “Introduction.” The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

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Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and the Literary Imagination. Maldon, Oxford and Carlton, AU: Blackwell, 2005. Byron, George and William Henry Bulwar. The complete works of Lord Byron: reprinted from the last London edition, 1841. Campbell, Neil. The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. CELL. Anyone Anytime Anywhere: Understanding the Threat of Terrorism – Visitors Guide. Denver: The Denver Post, 2011. Cooper, Catherine. Ukraine. 2nd Ed. New York: Infobase, 2006. Dean, Martin. Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–44. Houndmills, London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Desbois, Patrick. The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews. Trans. C. Spencer. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Dixon Hunt, John. “‘Come into the Garden, Maud’: Garden Art as a Privileged Mode of Commemoration and Identity.” Places of Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design. Ed. Joachim Wolschke-Bulman. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2000. Erll, Astrid. “Travelling Memory.” Parallax 17.4 (2011): 4–18. Erll, Astrid and Rigney, Ann. Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. Gass, Alan. “How Babi Yar Park Came to Be.” Mizel Tov: Good News from the Mizel Museum, Spring/Summer 2010 http://www.mizelmuseum.org/pdfs/MizelTovMarch2010.pdf (3 April 2012). Ginsburg, Helen. Speech draft (sign unveiling, 1974). Archives of the Mizel Museum, Denver. Speech draft, n.d., ca. early 1970s. Archives of the Mizel Museum, Denver. Holowinsky, Ivan. Psychology in Ukraine: a Historical Perspective. Lanham and Plymouth: University Press of America, 2008. Jacobs, Andrea. “A Jewish Museum for Everyone.” Intermountain Jewish News. 23rd February 2012. http://www.ijn.com/special-sections/lchaim-spring/3000-a-jewish-museum for-everybody (3 April 2012). Jordan, Jennifer. Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Kabachiy, Roman. “Ukraine’s stolen money.” OpenDemocracy.net, 5th May 2010. http://www. opendemocracy.net/od-russia/roman-kabachiy/stolen-memory (3 April 2012) Kappeler, Andreas. “From an Ethnonational to a Multiethnic to a Transnational Ukrainian History.” A laboratory of transnational history: Ukraine and recent Ukrainian historiography. Eds. Georgiy Kasianov and Phillipp Ther. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009. Kuznetsov, Anatoly. Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel. Trans. D. Floyd. London: Sphere, 1972 [1966]. Levy, Daniel and Sznaider, Natan. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Trans. A. Oksiloff. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. Lower, Wendy. Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine. Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press, 2005. Magocsi, Paul Robert. A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its People. 2nd ed. Toronto, Buffalo & London: Toronto University Press, 2010.

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Marcus, Peter. “WTC steel makes strong statement in Denver.” Colorado Statesman, 12th August 2011. http://coloradostatesman.com/content/992983-wtc-steel makes strong-statementdenver (3 April 2012). Mizel Museum Website. 2012a. “Contact Us.” http://mizelmuseum.org/about-3/ (3 March 2012). Mizel Museum Website. 2012b. “Welcome to the Mizel Museum.” http://mizelmuseum.org/ home-2/hours-and admission/welcome-to-the-mizel-museum-3/ (3 March 2012). Moses, A. Dirk and Michael Rothberg. 2014. “Foreword.” The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders. Eds. Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson. Berlin: De Gruyter. 29–38. Morrison, Brenda. “From Denver to Moscow: The Colorado Committee of Concern for Soviet Jewry, Part 2.” Rocky Mountain Jewish Historical Notes of the Rocky Mountain Jewish Historical Society. 12.3 (1994). Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Podol‘s‘kyi, Anatoly, “A Reluctant Look Back: Jews and the Holocaust in Ukraine.” Trans. Stephen Lang. Osteuropa 8.10 (2008). http:www.Eurozine.com/pdf/2008-11-28podolskyi-en.pdf (3 April 2012). Radio Free Liberty. “Communist Ukrainian Institute Head Denies Famine Was Deliberate.” 2010. http://www.rferl.org/content/Communist_Ukrainian_Institute_Head_Deni s_Famine_Was_ Deliberate/2112870.html. (3 April 2012). Rohdewald, Stefan. “Post-Soviet Remembrance of the Holocaust and National Memories of the Second World War in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 44.2 (2008): 173–184. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Shapiro, Paul. “Foreward.” The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews. Trans. C. Spencer. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, vii-xiii. Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe between Stalin and Hitler. London: The Bodley Head, 2010. Subtelny, Orest. Ukraine: A History. Toronto, Buffalo and London, Toronto University Press, 1988. Tumarkin, Maria. Otherland: A Journey with my Daughter. Sydney: Random House Australia, 2011. Wiesel, Elie. The Jews of Silence: a Personal Report on Soviet Jewry. London: Random House/ Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1987. Wodiczko, Krzysztof and Julian Bonder. “A Working Memorial at Babi Yar Park.” 2009. Babi Yar Memorial Park Brochure. http://www.mizelmuseum.org/pdfs/BabiYar.pdf. (6 February 2011). Young, James E. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meanings. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994.

Part Three: The Possibilities of Transcultural Memory

Wendy Koenig

Motion and Sound: Investigating the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Centre In the opening moments of Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoah, viewers are told the story of Simon Srebnik, one of only two survivors from the mass killings of Jews that took place in Chelmno, along the Narew River in Poland, between 1943 and 1945. Sent to Chelmno when he was 13 years old, Simon was placed in one of the “work details” and one of his duties was fetching alfalfa from fields along the river for rabbits kept in hutches by the SS. He and a guard would travel along the river in a flat-bottomed boat and he was forced to sing Polish folk songs and Prussian marches. He was known throughout the town for his “melodious voice”. After being shot and left for dead in the final executions that took place in January 1945, Srebnik managed to survive and escape, ending up in Israel. For one of the many interviews conducted for his film, Lanzmann asked him to return with him to the location in Chelmno where the killings took place. The film opens with footage of the two as they float down the river and the 47 year old Srebnik sings one of the Polish songs. One of the townspeople, interviewed at the time, commented that “When I heard him again, my heart beat faster, because what happened here … was a murder. I really re-lived what happened” (in Lanzmann, 1985). Such, it appears, is the power of sound. In the preliminary discussions surrounding the construction of a Holocaust museum, typically a great deal of attention is paid not only to the architectural design, in terms of the visual impact of the building itself and of the interior spaces, but also to the layout and historical parameters of the permanent exhibition. For example, during the extensive discussions surrounding the planning of the permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., committee members were asked to consider a number of difficult issues: How to locate a “European” event in American national memory; how to navigate the relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish victims; the significance of the state of Israel in the overall narrative; how to represent a variety of perpetrators while also acknowledging the category of “bystander”; the desirability of a “storytelling” approach rather than a display dependent upon artefacts; and the appropriateness of displaying human hair or images that reveal human genitalia in the exhibit.¹ Similarly, in his discussion of the Holocaust Exhi1 For a thorough discussion of the issues and personnel changes faced by the design committee for the permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, see Linenthal (2001, 109–250).

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bition at London’s Imperial War Museum, Andrew Hoskins illustrates a dilemma faced by designers dedicated to what he describes as a “purist,” artefact-driven approach with a story of how a collection of shoes, removed from victims before they entered the gas chambers, were “restored” to remove the dust and dirt that had accumulated on them since their last use (Hoskins 2005, 15).² Although the appeal of museums and monuments in the public sphere, according to Andreas Huyssen, is that they offer the “material quality of the object,” (in Hoskins 2003, 10) (something that television or video denies) for Hoskins the danger of the “purist” approach is that it works to exclude the “useable past of the post-event time of the Holocaust” and forges a “restricted perspective of the Holocaust as an historical event” (Hoskins 2003, 10, 14). Unlike the situation in a traditional art museum, in which the visitor is able to travel to and from different galleries and historical periods on a variety of paths, within most Holocaust museums the experience of the visitor is carefully scripted and it is anticipated that the encounter will be transformative, to some degree. Visitor experiences in memorial museums may be understood as having visual, auditory and spatial components, yet critical responses to non-art museums continue to rely heavily on the “object-focused” walk-through by a single critic (Williams 2007, 77). While Paul Williams has addressed aspects of this shortcoming by providing an analysis of location and spatiality in relation to memorial museums, this article focuses upon three different aspects of Holocaust museum design that deserve more attention: the first is acoustic design, including both the conscious use of sound within the museum exhibition (such as survivor testimonies and historical recordings) as well as the impact made on the visitor by the actual auditory experience within the museum. The second is the “processional” aspect of the museum visit, particularly sections within the layout that allow a visitor to bypass certain sound-based exhibits. The third is the purposeful use of “silence” and the effect of cultural biases, the geographical location of the structure, signage and other codes for behavior on the possible interpretations of such quiet spaces. In light of my own auditory experiences touring the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Centre (IHMEC) in Skokie, Illinois, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C., the Holocaust and Human Rights Centre of Maine (HHRC) and the “Holocaust Tower” at the Jewish Museum Berlin, I believe that decisions made regarding the acoustic dimensions 2 In this essay, Hoskins contrasts the “purist,” artefact-driven approach with one that accommodates “presentist” media (film, video and the electronification of memory that takes place through television). The latter approach would allow for consideration of the post-event time of the Holocaust and our mediated relationship to the past.

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and layout of exhibition displays in Holocaust museums, as well as other memorial and atrocity museums, may be examined, most productively, in relation to several larger issues: the prominent role of Holocaust consciousness in discussions about “transcultural memory”; the claim that a “visually based epistemology is both insufficient and often erroneous in its description, analysis and thus understanding of the social world” (Bull and Back 2003, 3); changes in the nature of historical research to include an expanded consideration of “aurality”;³ the debate surrounding “object-centered” versus “story-centered” museums (Hein 2000, 7); and the limitations placed upon exhibition strategies by the declared mission and underlying concerns of the specific institution. Throughout this analysis, I will be considering the potential for sound to act as a transcultural representative medium within the Holocaust museum environment, pointing to intersections between museum strategies that de-emphasize “memory” as something associated with specific objects or locations and the transcultural movement within memory studies that focuses upon the means by which memories of past events are articulated and transmitted across and, perhaps, beyond cultures.

1 The Holocaust and Transcultural Memory As the Holocaust remains, arguably, “the primary, archetypal topic in memory studies,” (Craps and Rothberg 2011, 517) discussions of transcultural memory typically include some reference to Holocaust discourse and its role in such developments. There is, however, no consensus on the impact of Holocaust research and commemoration on “memory” as a shared, collective or communal experience. For example, Peter Novick, Alan Mintz, and Tim Cole have written about the “Americanization” of the Holocaust, indicating how representations of the Holocaust, whether through popular culture expressions, requirements in educational curricula, or the founding of Holocaust museums throughout the land, have contributed to the establishment of the “Holocaust” as a “moral paradigm in this nation’s public culture” (Shandler 1999, 33). Some have raised critical questions about the circumstances and motives that led to an increased engagement with the Holocaust in the United States. Novick has suggested that the Holocaust has been “virtually the only common denominator of American Jewish identity in the late twentieth century” and, thus, “filled a need for a consensual symbol” (Shandler 1999, 33). In his book Selling the Holocaust, Tim Cole compares the representation of the Holocaust at the USHMM with that of Yad Vashem in Israel, 3 (Sound in all of its variety). See M. Smith (2004, ix).

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arguing that the former presents “American troops and the righteous gentiles” as the heroes and Jews as victims, while the latter emphasizes Jewish heroism, with greater emphasis on Jewish uprisings and resistance, as well as a message of “rebirth” in relation to Israel (Cole 2000, 156–7, 121–31). In his evaluation of cultural representations of the Holocaust, Alan Mintz has identified two approaches: the “exceptionalist” and the “constructivist”. The former is “rooted in a conviction of the Holocaust as a radical rupture in human history that goes well beyond notions of uniqueness,” while the latter “stresses the cultural lens through which the Holocaust is perceived” (Mintz 2001, 38–39). In the museum setting, Mintz suggests that an “exceptionalist” model makes primary the mission of “creating an unflinching encounter with the horror of the Holocaust,” while the “constructivist” premise underscores the “importance of the community, in the widest sense of the term, in which the museum is located” (Mintz 2001, 76–8). Mintz’s “constructivist” model would seem to encourage a heightened self-awareness within the process of memorialization, not only by accounting for geographic or demographic issues but also by employing an approach that does not ignore postHolocaust “mediations” of memory and considers “what happened and how it is passed down to us”(Young 2000, 11). On January 29, 2000, representatives from 48 countries signed the Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, thus making a commitment to promote education about the Holocaust in schools, universities, communities and other institutions, such as museums.⁴ In light of the transnational spread of Holocaust consciousness and discourse, other writers have presented arguments suggesting that the Holocaust “has escaped its spatial and temporal particularism to emerge as a common moral touchstone in the wake of the Cold War, and can thus provide the basis for an emergent universal human-rights regime” (Craps and Rothberg 2011, 517–8). For example, Jeffrey Alexander argues that the term “Holocaust” is a “new linguistic identity” that, along with many cultural transformations and social processes, “allowed the mass killing of the Jews to become what might be called a bridge metaphor […] the symbolic extension so necessary if the trauma of the Jewish people were to become a trauma for all humankind” (Alexander 2009, 49, 31). Alexander describes many of the same phenomena as the writers mentioned above, but reinterprets them as contributing to a “universalization” and “internationalization” of the “Holocaust” as a term used to define inhumanity and serve a function within a “post-Holocaust morality.” (Alexander 2009, 49–50, 86).⁵ In a similar vein, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider argue that 4 For a discussion of policies and potential problems related to Holocaust education as a global enterprise, see Neander (forthcoming). 5 Alexander explains: “According to the standards of post-Holocaust morality, one became nor-

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shared memories of the Holocaust “provide the foundations for a new cosmopolitan memory, a memory transcending ethnic and national boundaries” and that “in an age of ideological uncertainty these memories have become a measure for humanist and universalist identifications” (Levy and Sznaider 2002, 88). Meanwhile, Michael Rothberg has proposed a model of “multidirectional memory” that resists the “zero-sum logic” of a framework in which collective memory is understood as “competitive” (whereby remembering one traumatic historical phenomenon comes at the cost of forgetting or downplaying another). Rothberg explains that multidirectional memory “draws attention to the dynamic transfers that take place between diverse places and times during the act of remembrance” (Rothberg 2009, 3, 11) and emphasizes the “ethical significance of remembering traumatic histories across cultural boundaries” (Craps and Rothberg 2011, 518). Within my own research on Holocaust museums, the concept of “transcultural memory” has been helpful in providing an analytical perspective that questions the frameworks that may be superimposed upon acts of remembering, whether related to the notion of a “container culture,”⁶ the nation-state, ethnicity or other social formation. At the same time, however, aspects of my research underline Susannah Radstone’s assertion that, alongside the call for a transcultural turn, “memory research is producing rich and detailed analyses of the resonance, meaning and affectivity of highly specific and located processes, acts and events of memory and forgetting” (Radstone 2011, 114). For instance, one cannot make assumptions regarding the cultural or memorial significance of “silence” within the space of a museum without taking into consideration a variety of factors, including the architectural setting, the particular location of the museum, similarities with other memorial or commemorative spaces, the prior experience of the visitor, as well as the circumstances of the visit itself. Because Holocaust museums and memorials play a pivotal role in the ongoing discourse about the historical events of the Holocaust as well as the evolving perception of the significance of the “Holocaust” as a generalized symbol of suffering and moral evil, the decisions made by curators regarding the content and the strategies used to convey the information have ramifications well beyond the walls of the institution. Although I do not want to claim that particular uses of sound in Holocaust museums will, necessarily, contribute to a “cosmopolitanization” of Holocaust memory or provide access to a view of the Holocaust

matively required to make an effort to intervene against any holocaust, regardless of personal consequences and cost. For a crime against humanity, a ‘holocaust’ is taken to be a threat to the continuing existence of humanity itself” (50). 6 For a discussion of this concept, see Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson, “Introduction“ in this volume.

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as a “metaphorical bridge to the treatment of other ethnic, religious, and racial minorities,” (Alexander 2009, 64). I am suggesting that sound components offer a different path into the specificity of historical events while also, potentially, offering experiences that transcend such specificity. A parallel example from Michael Rothberg’s work on “multidirectional memory” may help to clarify this point. Within his discussion of W.E.B. DuBois’ visit to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1949, Rothberg notes that DuBois, following his encounter with the site itself as well as Nathan Rapoport’s figurative sculptural monument to the uprising, drew upon “the material traces of the Nazi genocide in order to rethink his understanding of the African American past and present” (Rothberg 2011, 526–7). DuBois’ powerful response to his physical encounter with the site and related work of art supports the idea that extra-linguistic experiences may inspire unexpected re-conceptualizations; that is to say, they may result in historical comparisons that do not rely upon a logic of equation but, rather, enact a type of transcultural negotiation. As with other types of public museums and commemorative spaces, designers of Holocaust exhibits must grapple with the relationship between content and audience as well as the sense that public memory is “invented, not in the large sense of a fabrication, but in the more limited sense that public memories are constructed of rhetorical resources” (Blair, Dickinson and Ott 2010, 13). Insofar as Holocaust and memorial museums have moved away from a strictly artefact-driven approach to adopt strategies designed to produce an emotive and socially-responsive experience for visitors from diverse cultural backgrounds, it would benefit designers to give more pronounced attention to affective aspects of the exhibit which may function on a transcultural level, such as sound, and to account for the increasing role of auditory consideration in historical research.

2 The Sonic Environment With his 1977 publication The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer outlined the possibilities for interdisciplinary work in a new subject that would be known as “acoustic design”; that is, a territory positioned “between science, society and the arts” (Schafer 1997, 4). Looking to Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus as an example, in terms of its collaborative approach to industrial design, Schafer envisioned a field of study involving musicians, acousticians, psychologists, sociologists and others who could study and analyze the world soundscape and make recommendations for its improvement (Schafer 1997, 4–5).

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In Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, first published in 1976, philosopher Don Ihde investigated the role of the auditory in all human life, from a perspective informed by the phenomenological writings of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, challenging philosophy’s longstanding focus upon the visual (Ihde 2007, xix, 6–7). Ihde’s descriptions of the “auditory field” and his explanation of the constantly shifting “focus-fringe ratio” (the ability to focus upon selected sounds in particular environments, such as the strains of the oboe instead of the louder trombones during a symphony) (Ihde 2007, 73-83). might help exhibition curators to better understand the aural experience offered by their museums as well as many of the pitfalls that result from poor auditory planning and engineering. Important work has been carried out by Jean-François Augoyard of CRESSONCNRS,⁷ where the concept of “sonic effect” emerged as part of the analysis of the experience of everyday sounds in architectural and urban spaces (Schafer 2005, xi-xiii). A “sonic effect” describes the “interaction between the physical sound environment, the sound milieu of a socio-cultural community, and the ‘internal soundscape’ of every individual” (Augoyard and Torgue 2005, 9). It is not surprising, given the new tools provided by these emerging fields of inquiry, that some historians have recognized the need for cultural and historical contextualization of auditory perception and would seek to take advantage of the information it could provide regarding human relationships and behaviors (Erlmann 2005, 3).

3 “Sound” Historical Research As historians have begun to overcome their deafness to past aural worlds, a number of projects have revealed the rich insights provided by careful considerations of the auditory. In the area of North American history, Richard Cullen Rath’s work on early American meetinghouses highlights the differences between the acoustics of European Catholic churches, in which Latin chants were spoken by a priest whose voice was reflected (and subject to reverberation) several times against chancel walls, the tympanum and the ceiling before ever reaching the congregants, and the crisp acoustics of Quaker hexagonal or octagonal meetinghouses of the 17th century, which, he argues, “acoustically instituted Quaker notions of egalitarianism” by featuring ceiling panels that equally amplified voices no matter where they originated in the room (Rath 2004, 216–7). In the Euro-

7 The Centre for Research on Sonic Space and the Urban Environment-National Scientific Research Centre at the National School of Architecture of Grenoble.

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pean context, James H. Johnson has argued that changes in audience etiquette at concerts in late 18th and early 19th century France, including the emergent code of silence and an understanding of “politeness” that prohibited humming along with music or beating a rhythm with one’s hand, was an important aspect of the self-conception of the bourgeoisie (Johnson 2004, 176–9).⁸ Bruce R. Smith’s 1999 book The Acoustic World of Early Modern England attempts an historical recovery of circa 1600 soundscapes of the “city” (London) and “country” (landscape around Kenilworth Castle) by not only cataloguing sounds but seeking a “syntax” by which they were understood. Smith is skeptical of the existence of a “universal syntax of sound” and argues that geography and social class are two factors that play a role in the perception and interpretation of sound, both verbal and non-verbal (B. Smith 2004, 85–111; 2003, 127–135).⁹ Such projects reveal that cross-cultural engagements with sound, while not necessarily claiming “universality”, nevertheless offer the potential for a transcultural approach to historical research. An example of research that points to possible insights into the acoustic environment of the early to mid-20th century is Jonathan Sterne’s 2003 book The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Sterne’s research provides an alternative to the long-accepted narrative that suggests that, “in becoming modern, Western culture moved away from a culture of hearing to a culture of seeing” (Sterne 2003, 2–3). Sterne argues that “sound reproduction technologies are shot through with the tensions, tendencies, and currents of the culture form which they emerged” and their history “offers a route into a field of conjunctures among material, economic, technical, ideational, practical and environmental changes”.¹⁰ Research into the history of sound, its reproduction and transmission, reveals how it has contributed to and developed from the “maelstrom” of modern life (capitalism, rise of industry, migration shifts, new forms of collective and corporate power, mass communication) and suggests that sound has become an object to be contemplated, constructed, manipulated, fragmented, bought and sold.¹¹ Although Sterne does not address the Holocaust explicitly, his conclusions may provide additional nuance to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s refutation of the understanding of the Holocaust as a “failure of civilization.” Bauman has stated: “Modern civilization was not the Holocaust’s sufficient condition; it was, however, most certainly its necessary condition. Without it, the Holocaust would be unthinkable” (Bauman 2000, 13). He follows this assertion with a quote from 8 For more information, see Johnson (2005). 9 For more information, see B. Smith (1999). 10 (Sterne 2003, 7–8). 11 (Sterne 2003, 9).

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historian Christopher Browning: “The Nazi mass murder of the European Jewry was not only the technological achievement of an industrial society, but also the organizational achievement of a bureaucratic society” (Bauman 2000, 13). Arguably, the intersection between emerging technologies related to sound reproduction and transmission and the incorporation of “scientific” and “medical” references into the, often spoken, rhetoric of anti-Semitism (labeling Jews “bacilli” or “decomposing germs” and attempting to normalize “sterilization” and “extermination” as necessary to isolating a “pathogenic and infectious” population) (Bauman 2000, 72–77), points to but one of many potential areas where “sound” historical research might enhance our understanding of methods of persuasion used during the Nazi era. Given these examples, one might expect that the soundscapes of early 20th century Europe and the acoustic strategies used during the Third Reich would figure prominently in Holocaust museums. In many instances, however, such auditory aspects are abbreviated, muffled or completely eliminated. In relation to the voices of survivors, often transmitted via video projections, the acoustic bleed from other nearby displays often interferes with attentive listening and discourages a group experience. Edward Linenthal has suggested that, within the USHMM, the permanent exhibition’s “design bespeaks the design team’s conscious intent to mute the allure of Nazi symbols” (Linenthal 2001, 200), and many of the sounds associated with Nazi propaganda have been equally muted. It is notable that Yitzchak Mais, former director of the Yad Vashem Historical Museum in Jerusalem, was bothered (at the USHMM) by his impression that “the Nazis appeared as a superhuman force that just took over, as if there was this metaphysical evil that mysteriously killed the Jews” (in Linenthal 2001, 201). For example, only by visiting one of the secondary exhibits at the USHMM (“State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda”) on the lower level does the visitor encounter the “People’s Radio” (Volksempfänger), the product of a government-subsidized program that put radios into many homes (thus, enabling the more efficient transmission of propaganda). While this display included a sound component, it was a short, repeating program that did not fully reveal how political messages were interwoven between “entertaining” broadcasts. Investigation into the techniques employed by the Nazi Party’s Reich Propaganda Directorate, headed by Joseph Goebbels, would be enriched by a consideration of sound and its impact. For example, several administrative institutions were designed to integrate German music and musicians into the Nazi regime’s national mission and many Germans during the Third Reich gravitated toward music “as a means to express and experience the new communal mood” (Trommler 2004, 67–68, 70). Along with propaganda campaigns such as the publication

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and distribution of posters known as “The Word of the Week: Official Party Wall Newspaper of the NSDAP”,¹² which appeared in March of 1936 and encouraged a shared public reading and viewing experience, Nazi propaganda was equally invested in meetings, speakers, film and radio broadcasts (Herf 2006, 29–31, 35). Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 film Triumph of the Will is well known for capturing the visual spectacle of a Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, but its auditory aspects should not be overlooked in the museum context. In terms of employing musical accompaniments for emotional effect, composer Herbert Windt, who collaborated with Riefenstahl, was called upon frequently to compose “fanfares”, short musical works broadcast before daily reports from the supreme command of the Wehrmacht (Trommler 2004, 71–72). Such musical prompts, along with the use of classical music (particularly that of Richard Wagner), Hitler Youth songs, folk music and the Horst-Wessel-Lied, created a powerful soundscape and acoustic “staging” of the war that exerted a psychological impact on the population that would last into the postwar period (Trommler 2004, 69).¹³ For example, recent scholarship on sound during the Nazi era suggest that “cinematic sound was seen as a viable means to disseminate the timbre of the German language and German musical traditions and, in doing so, to integrate diverse viewers into the national community” (Alter and Koepnick 2004, 11). Importantly, sonic material also, in some instances, contributed to the “foundation of authoritarian rule and the segregation of cultural identities in modern Germany” (Alter and Koepnick 2004, 11). Transcultural analysis that attends to such specific historical conditions and phenomena offers an opportunity for individuals to gain some understanding of how prejudice against certain groups is generated and how it functions in particular historical moments while, at the same time, indicating that some strategies, perhaps acoustic in nature, may travel across cultures and time periods. Although the USHMM does include some audio-visual projections of clips from Nazi speeches and rallies, the “Nazi Rise to Power” section at the IHMEC is dominated by the voice of Bill Kurtis (CBS news anchor in Chicago and recognizable narrative “voice” of crime and history programs on cable television), with few opportunities to encounter the actual sound and spectacle of Nazism. Granted, the presentation of such acoustic examples in the museum setting would require a great deal of contextualization, particularly in the United States. Typically, captions are used when presenting excerpts from speeches at Nazi rallies, which allows non-German speakers to consider the message as well as the aural 12 Die Parole der Woche: Parteiamtliche Wandzeitung der NSDAP 13 For further discussion of the politicization of music during the Third Reich, see Potter (1998).

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and visual impact of the speaker. In the case of music, it may also be necessary to provide some contextual information in order for twenty-first century visitors to appreciate the social and political associations attached to certain composers and specific works in early-mid twentieth century Europe. For example, it is likely that an American visitor who hears an excerpt from Wagner’s Die Walküre would associate the piece with the scene of helicopters dropping napalm on a Vietnamese village in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now!, rather than with a sense of high German culture and bourgeois respectability.¹⁴ Thus, the postHolocaust mediated understanding of Wagner as the composer of “Nazi” music, in the minds of many Americans, would need to be accounted for in museums in the United States in order for some listeners to grasp his place alongside Bach, Beethoven and Brahms in the pantheon of honored German composers of the time (Grieshaber 2009).¹⁵ The difficulties involved in presenting music that resists easy cultural “translation”, however, do not outweigh the value. An accounting of the post-Holocaust reception of music, newsreels, speeches and other spectacles associated with the Nazis would offer visitors an opportunity to consider not only a “documentary” reconstruction of aspects of Nazi Germany but also the idea that “collective memory is the site of mediation where professional history must ultimately share space with popular history” (Edgerton and Rollins quoted in Hoskins 2003, 10).

4 “Object centered” vs. “Story centered” Museums Although, historically, the mission of museums has been the “showing of objects,” recent changes in museological practice have signaled a shift, in many institutions, toward a more “story-centered” approach, resulting in a shift toward “reconstructions based upon oral histories and experiential recollection” (Hein 2000, 61). With respect to the USHMM, exhibition designer Ralph Applebaum has commented that his chosen approach represents “the act of controlling a few

14 Similarly, visitors familiar with film history may note that the “Ride of the Valkyries” was recognized for its cinematic potential, well before the Nazis, by American filmmaker D. W. Griffith. He used it in Birth of a Nation (1915) as the soundtrack for a scene of Klansmen riding on horseback to rescue a white woman from her mixed-race suitor. 15 Interestingly, it was Johann Sebastian Bach, rather than Wagner, who was dubbed “the most German of Germans” by the Nazis and his work was frequently performed by Hitler Youth and played almost daily on the radio.

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hours of someone’s time and setting them up to receive a certain experience” (in Hein 2000, 65). Some of the strategies and techniques employed may be chosen in response to the stated mission of the particular institution. For example, in its accompanying publication Memory and Legacy, the IHMEC directly states that it is a “storytelling museum, driven by the history of the Holocaust,” unlike “artifact-centered historical museums, which tell the stories of the artifacts they possess” (Berenbaum and Mais 2009, 8). In terms of its specific mission, the IHMEC is “dedicated to preserving the legacy of the Holocaust by honoring the memories of those who were lost and by teaching universal lessons that combat hatred, prejudice and indifference” (Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center website). Aesthetic decisions related to the building’s design and processional format – visitors move from a menacing black, windowless pavilion, through a dark, cylindrical room portraying the deportations, and emerge in the well-illuminated space of the white pavilion, the Room of Remembrance and the Hall of Reflection – reinforce the message of “the redemptive power of education” as one moves from “darkness” into “light” (Kamin 2009). The USHMM begins its mission statement with an institutional description and a definition of the “Holocaust” (the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945), followed by an outline of their overall mission: The Museum’s primary mission is to advance and disseminate knowledge about this unprecedented tragedy; to preserve the memory of those who suffered; and to encourage its visitors to reflect upon the moral and spiritual questions raised by the events of the Holocaust as well as their own responsibilities as citizens of a democracy (USHMM website, author’s emphasis).

Additionally, an unwritten but frequently acknowledged aspect of the mission of Holocaust museums is to stand against current and future attempts to deny the events of the Holocaust.¹⁶ The story-centered approach does lend itself to strategies that move beyond artifacts displayed in vitrines or on pedestals, but even in such venues, the exhibits that incorporate sound are often hampered by difficulties posed by exhibition spaces designed, primarily, with a visual experience in mind. With respect to other memorial or atrocity museums, there are general concerns that overlap with Holocaust exhibitions, such as employing display techniques that allow visitors to distinguish between separate auditory features within the gallery spaces, finding the appropriate volume for testimony or televi16 The aspect of combatting Holocaust denial through carefully crafted exhibits is discussed in Luke (2002, 37–38) and Cole (1999, 159–161).

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sion news footage, or deciding when and where to include sound without accompanying imagery. One issue, however, that raises questions about the particularity of the “commemorative” aspect of Holocaust museums is the use of “silence” (or quietude) in areas designated for remembrance or reflection.

5 Sounds and silence In Washington, D.C., the visitor’s “Holocaust” experience “begins and ends with the voices of Americans ringing in our ears,” (Cole 1999, 153) as the elevator ride to the beginning of the exhibit features a short video clip with an American soldier talking about his encounter with a concentration camp and the final exhibit features video testimony of survivors. These are two instances when visitors are physically directed toward the sound, and these exhibits serve to frame the Holocaust as “an un-American crime,” (Cole 1999, 153). while reinforcing Timothy Luke’s contention that the exhibit also “poses as a short course on the civic ideals of American democracy” (Luke 2002, 27). According to Greig Crysler and Abidin Kusno, the emphasis on “fundamental American values” throughout the exhibit creates two subject positions for visitors, that of “witness” (identified with U.S. soldiers or military personnel) or “victim” (represented as a universal figure of human suffering) (Crysler and Kunso 1997, 52–64), thus serving as further justification for the museum’s placement on the Washington mall (Patt 2003, 129). The IHMEC should not need to work nearly as hard to explain its chosen site in Skokie, Illinois, a village located 16 miles northwest of downtown Chicago. The $45  million museum, designed by Chicago-based architect Stanley Tigerman¹⁷ and opened in April of 2009, is the culmination of years of effort by a group of Chicago-area Holocaust survivors, who established the Holocaust Memorial Foundation in 1981 as part of the response to the threat of a march by American Neo-Nazis in the late 1970’s to be held in Skokie, then home to nearly 7000 Holocaust survivors (Berenbaum and Mais 2009, 9). The opening video of the permanent exhibition, including footage of contemporary Chicago and Skokie and still

17 Tigerman’s concept for the structure was tripartite: museum, memorial and education center. Featuring a dark rectangular building oriented toward Jerusalem, a light building oriented due east in anticipation of a Messianic age, and a book of remembrance situated at the intersection above the main level. As he explains, “the overall structure establishes a single directional progression through it, beginning with a descent into darkness and ending in an ascent into the light.” For more information, see Berenbaum and Mais (2009, 234–237). Tigerman’s emphasis on the visual transition from darkness to light may have played a role in the museum’s decisions regarding the importance of auditory aspects in relation to the visual experience.

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photographs overlaid with voices of local survivors, emphasizes that the Holocaust is not to be understood as a distant European event but, rather, part of the history of one’s neighbors. Unfortunately, perhaps due to an unnecessary commitment to a chronological narrative, the visitor is not introduced to the 1977–78 confrontation with the neo-Nazis until one of the final rooms and in the closing video. In the “Skokie 1977” section, there is a device dedicated to these events, a sliding display that allows visitors to choose topics and then view illuminated texts, photographs or videos on a small screen. Due to the size of the projection, the level of sound and the configuration of the viewing space, it is unlikely that more than one or two people at a time would be comfortable investigating the display. Also, as an “interactive” device, it is up to someone to make the decision about which topic button to press and other visitors may walk past without bothering to investigate. During one visit, two teenage boys commented, “That is the coolest thing ever,” but then walked away before engaging with the equipment and, consequently, with the Skokie events themselves. The secondary emphasis on the threatened neo-Nazi march is a missed opportunity for what could be a powerful examination of local and (fairly) recent events connecting Skokie to the Holocaust and its legacy. As an example of the possible integration of a local narrative into the Holocaust “global” narrative, this situation supports the contention that: “The Holocaust does not become one totalizing signifier containing the same meanings for everyone. Rather its meanings evolve from the encounter of global interpretations and local sensibilities” (Levy and Sznaider 2002, 92). The battle between the protesting citizens and the National Socialist Party of America¹⁸ was widely covered in American news, even resulting in a made-for-TV movie that aired in November of 1981. The ferocity on both sides of this confrontation is something best seen and heard through videos or recordings, rather than via an “interactive” device that itself distracts from the subject matter. As the impetus for many local residents to not only speak out but to organize a foundation, these events should be highlighted early on within the exhibit. In Washington, D.C. and Illinois, emphasis is placed upon the “voices” of the survivors, but opportunities for visitors to encounter these voices are often presented as “optional” and are frequently bypassed altogether. In some instances, the subdued voices speaking of personal trauma are overwhelmed by nearby auditory exhibits. At the USHMM, one of the few exhibits where imagery is absent is the “Voices from Auschwitz” area, positioned opposite the reconstructed concentration camp barrack and a cast of the “Arbeit Macht Frei” fence from Aus18 The National Socialist Party of America (NSPA) was a Chicago-based organization founded by Frank Collin in 1970.

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chwitz I in Poland.¹⁹ As they are given a choice, most visitors opt to head directly for the concentration camp section, which offers physical artifacts, photographs, film and video as opposed to disembodied voices played within a glass corridor. Alison Landsberg has argued that, while listening to the testimonies, “one does not take on the speaker’s memory wholesale; rather one constructs a memory triggered by the testimonial and yet intimately connected to one’s own archive of experience,” a process that allows visitors to create “prosthetic memories” (memories for things that they have never experienced). (Landsberg 1997, 63–86). On a different note, Andrea Liss suggests that the survivors’ voices: unwittingly ridicule the position of ownership and accessibility assumed by the museum in reconstructing the barracks. Their unequivocal witnessing are delivered from the remnants of survival, not from the perpetrator’s artifacts of destruction. (Liss 1998, 76)

There is a similar point within the “processional” layout of the IHMEC where visitors are given an option whether to enter a small room containing a model of the Belzec death camp in Poland, featuring a recording of the testimony of one of only two known survivors of Belzec, Rudolph Reder of Lublin. Although not read by Reder himself, the audio testimony provides a chilling description of how the killing process took place in the camp: the “noise of the sliding doors, moaning and screaming, desperate calls in Polish, Yiddish – blood curdling screams. All that lasted fifteen minutes. Screams of children, women and finally one common continuous horrible scream. All that lasted fifteen minutes. The machine ran for twenty minutes and after twenty minutes there was silence. The askars (guards) pulled open the doors on the opposite sides of the chambers, which led to the outdoors. We began our assignment. We dragged bodies of people who minutes ago were alive. We dragged them – using leather straps – to huge, prepared mass graves (Rudolph Reder in Berenbaum and Mais 2009, 89–90).

This circular space offers an emotionally powerful experience with the “voice” of a survivor and an opportunity for more lengthy engagement with the subject matter than in many other areas of the museum. Unfortunately, it is placed at the bottom of the ramp leading out of the cattle car exhibit, next to the model of Auschwitz and other related artifacts. If the visitor has already spent time in the dark

19 Although this fence, with its lettering “Arbeit Macht Frei,” has become a central image in the reconstructed “Holocaust,” Andrea Liss argues that it is a misappropriation of a sign, given that the fence did not have a central position in the history and architectural schema at Auschwitz and few of the Jews deported there ever saw the gate. See Liss (1998, 73–74).

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cattle car, chances are the Belzec room may be skipped in favor of what appear to be more “accessible” visual displays. On a crowded Saturday during March 2010, I was alone in this space for the duration of the audio broadcast. Another opportunity to encounter testimony via sound is offered by a display featuring the audio recordings made in 1946 by Dr. David P. Boder, a psychology professor at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology, of seventy interviews with “displaced persons” conducted in Europe. Using a “Model 50” Armour wire recording system and 200 spools of steel wire, Boder recorded over 90 hours of interviews in a variety of languages (Voices of the Holocaust website). At present, the recorder is in a glass vitrine accompanied by two sets of headphones to allow visitors to hear selected interviews. At this point in the exhibition, visitors are likely overwhelmed, having viewed “Death camp” and “Liberation” videos with narration from survivors and soldiers. The Boder interviews, as both a project with local connections and as the first oral history of the Holocaust, should be given much more fanfare and, I would suggest, should be required listening for visitors. Presently, the voices recorded by Dr. Boder are confined to two pairs of headphones, with no option for collective listening. The IHMEC leaves aside many of the filmed speeches, rallies, and musical recordings featured at the USHMM. Most of the areas dedicated to the Nazis and the activities that accompanied their expansion, including Kristallnacht, are almost shockingly quiet. In light of one survivor’s comments regarding how hard it was for Jewish children, given that they wanted to join in many of the festivities during the Nazi period, it would make sense to include some evidence that Nazi “culture” exuded an attraction that, in some instances, may have disguised its ultimate intentions.²⁰ Although the IHMEC has dedicated several rooms on the second floor to what is known as the “Legacy of Absence” galleries, featuring works of visual art that address the challenge of remembrance, no similar spaces or exhibits have been constructed for the consideration of artistic responses to the Holocaust in sound or music. These galleries serve as a welcoming space for contemplation, as the act of viewing works of art offers a type of privacy and spatial separation from others that is difficult to achieve in the designated Hall of Reflection. A similar section given over to sound-based or musical responses to the Holocaust, not to mention related contemporary works of the WWII-era, might encourage a different kind

20 One of the secondary exhibitions at the USHMM, entitled “State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda,” opens with a quote from Adolf Hitler: “All great, world-shaking events have been brought about … by the spoken word” (1924). This exhibit includes more examples of both visual and auditory Nazi propaganda, but recordings are all too often sidelined through the use of headphones or ignored altogether.

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of engagement with the period. For instance, R. Murray Schafer remarked that Gustav Mahler’s marches and German dances exhibit “such sarcasm as to give us a presentiment of the political danse macabre soon to follow” (Schafer 1997, 7). Too often, however, audio components are treated as supplementary and/ or optional and the transmission techniques may be limited and private, thus depriving the visitors of the valuable communal experience associated with a museum visit. As philosopher Hilda S. Hein has stated: “Experience becomes educationally meaningful only when it ceases to be private and acquires shareable form” (Hein 2000, 109). Audio and/or musical components within museum exhibitions, when presented in a form that allows for collective listening, could offer a “shareable” experience that may encourage cross-generational dialogue as well as transcultural exchange. The communal spaces for “remembrance” or “reflection,” located near the end of permanent exhibition, are typically free of audio-visual stimulation. Regarding the institutional intention for this type of space, the USHMM website states: Memory, above all, defines the Hall of Remembrance, the national memorial to victims of the Holocaust. […] the Hall is a solemn, simple space designed for public ceremonies and individual reflection. Epitaphs are set onto the limestone walls that encircle an eternal flame.

Diffused sunlight illuminates the Hall as it passes through the translucent glass of a high, center skylight. The floor is red granite, spattered and cracked by natural fissures. Visitors may light memorial candles in the niches of the outer walls – a universal symbol of renewed life and a sign of remembrance in many cultures (The USHMM website). At the IHMEC, two quiet areas are designated: The Room of Remembrance pays special homage to the 6  million Jews murdered during the Holocaust. Representative names of victims line the walls in a moving tribute to those who were lost. The inspirational Pritzker Hall of Reflection provides a forum for peaceful discussion and contemplation for groups and individuals (The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center website).

While the USHMM Hall of Remembrance is located near the bustling lobby, the IHMEC Pritzker Hall of Reflection, an almost-circular space with glass block windows and twelve individual square benches for seating, is on the second floor, away from much of the noise produced by visitors and displays. In such spaces, the conscious use of “silence,” however well or poorly achieved, requires analysis in relation to both the intended meanings and implied behavioral codes in comparison with actual visitor experiences. As “different languages have special onomatopoeic expressions for familiar animals, birds and insects,” suggesting

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“something about the manner in which the same sounds are heard variously by separate cultures,” (Schafer 1997, 153) the hearing or understanding of “silence” may be affected by cultural background.²¹ Thus, when attention is drawn to “silence” or the lack of sound, it is understood as “meaningful” across cultures, but specific interpretations regarding appropriate behavior or emotional response is, sometimes, culturally bound. In the memorial museum context, the meanings or activities associated with “silence” may range from feelings of grief, solemnity, and respect for the dead to a sense of absence, emptiness, muteness or even horror, depending upon the geographical location of the museum itself, the subject matter contained within the exhibition and the dominant cultural milieu. Additionally, the “experience” of silence in a museum setting may be quite different from the “concept” of silence in particular cultural or historical situations or geographical locations.²² At the Oklahoma City National Memorial, which commemorates the April 19, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, the major area for remembrance is a 318-foot long reflecting pool of black granite located between two large yellow bronze gates, one designating the moment before the bombing (9:01am) and the other designating the moment afterward (9:03am). The pool is adjacent to a field of 168 empty chairs, one for each person killed in the bombing. This contemplative area is located outdoors in a metropolitan area, so the ambient sounds of the city are unavoidable, but the placement of the empty chairs (on the footprint of the Murrah building) and the pool (on the former street where the truck filled with explosives was parked) indicates how the geographical significance overrides the convention of providing an indoor space for quiet reflection.²³ In the North American context, the quiet spaces in Holocaust museums function less as signifiers of “absence” and more as places for visitors to “decompress” and reflect upon what they have, presumably, learned from their visit. The

21 For a discussion of the role of silence in the auditory arts of certain African societies, see Philip M. Peek (1994, 474–494). 22 For example, Leslie Dwyer has explored a noticeable “silence” about the 1965–66 statesponsored massacres of one million Indonesians in history textbooks, Balinese media and pronouncements of public officials. Dwyer suggests that such silences are not simply “blank spots on a communicative landscape,” but are social products with particular genealogies and cultural and political signification. See Dwyer (2009, 113–146). 23 An example of differing “concepts” of silence in relation to commemoration is reflected in an audio display at the Oklahoma City National Memorial that allows playback of survivor recollections and several people commented upon the eerie “silence” just after the bombing: “What struck me was the silence – no voices, no cries for help, it was unbelieveable” and “I remember the silence of it all, how it was so surreal.

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expectation at the USHMM that the act of lighting candles will be understood as a “universal symbol of renewed life” and “sign of remembrance” may overlook the potential for a variety of responses and the design of the space itself opens up the possibility that Americans will understand the atmosphere as nearly identical to other spaces of “remembrance” in widely divergent types of museums.²⁴ During one visit, several young men were chastised repeatedly by a security guard for lighting too many of the memorial candles (apparently one is considered sufficient). Whether a misguided attempt to demonstrate heightened “remembrance,” the rambunctious behavior of youth or something in between, this incident suggests that such quiet spaces intend only a limited range of “appropriate” reactions but the spatial, auditory and behavioral codes are open to (mis)interpretation. In the context of continuing debates regarding the uniqueness of the Holocaust versus its emergence as, arguably, a free-floating, universal symbol of human suffering and moral evil (Alexander 2009, 3–102) or its status as a formative event that can provide the foundations for a new form of “cosmopolitan memory” (Levy and Sznaider 2002, 87–106), interpretations of “silence” within Holocaust-related museums in Germany and North America point to lingering particularities. For example, among the various spaces of “silence” within museums related to the Holocaust, none is more stark than the “Holocaust Tower” at Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin. Any analysis of this space, however, must acknowledge the geographical location of the structure, the manner in which the design of the structure was derived (in part, from the former addresses of composers, poets, artists and writers who “formed the link between Jewish tradition and German culture”) (Libeskind in Young 2000, 167) and the fact that the museum addresses not only the events of the Holocaust but also the Jewish religion, its customs and ritual objects, the long history of the Jewish community in Berlin and the lives and works of Jews who left their mark on the city over the centuries (Young 2000, 161). After passing through the underground entrance to the Jewish Museum Berlin, the visitor is faced with three paths: one leading to the Holocaust Tower (a 27-meter high concrete structure illuminated only through a narrow slit at the top); one leading to the E.T.A. Hoffman Garden of Exile and Emigration; and a third leading

24 For example, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Hall of Remembrance and the Rotunda at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tennessee exhibit a number of similar features: a circular space illuminated dramatically from above with natural light, the presence of an eternal flame, quotations inscribed in or adhered to the walls, and symbols honoring the dead (memorial candles in the former, bronze plaques in the latter). The benefits of universalization in the use of quiet rooms for memorialization exist alongside the risk that “losses” that are in no way commensurate will be unconsciously compared through the similarity of such culminating spaces.

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to the exhibition halls and central void. Before determining his design, Libeskind expressed his specific concerns regarding the site and the project: first, the impossibility of understanding the history of Berlin without understanding the enormous intellectual, economic and cultural contribution made by its Jewish citizens; second, the necessity to integrate the meaning of the Holocaust, both physically and spiritually, into the consciousness and memory of the city of Berlin; third, that only through acknowledging and incorporating this erasure and void of Berlin’s Jewish life can the history of Berlin and Europe have a human future (Libeskind 1999, 10).

Libeskind has described the Holocaust Tower as a “voided void” and “the space which somehow ends the old history of Berlin” (Libeskind 1999, 30). Positioned at the end of the Axis of the Holocaust, a museum guide opens and door and the visitor is plunged into the darkness of the raw concrete interior, accompanied by a resounding slam of the door. The space is not climate-controlled and, even after several minutes, vision is limited to only the barest perception of the gray walls and the outline of the door. There are no audio or visual displays, but visitors can perceive some sounds from nearby street, while simultaneously feeling completely cut off from outside life. Although the Holocaust Tower, arguably, provides a setting for contemplation, many of the cues employed in other quiet areas within Holocaust museums are undermined or avoided altogether. Given that the path of emigration and exile is represented by the outdoor Garden at the Jewish Museum Berlin, the Holocaust Tower does not provide any sense of hope or redemption and it is doubtful that anyone would find it a comfortable place to “decompress.” As a space of relative silence and limited vision that heightens bodily awareness and interrupts the expected flow of a museum visit, the Tower demands a different kind of acknowledgement of the fate of the Jews who did not escape the Holocaust and contains “that which can never be exhibited when it comes to the Jewish Berlin history, humanity reduced to ashes” (Libeskind 1991, 30). Its silence intimates a sense of absence, loss, destruction and muteness that is markedly different from the experience afforded by the quiet, culminating halls in many North American Holocaust museums, in part because they inevitably take on the aspect of emigration (given that the United States was a destination for many refugees), liberation (related to the emphasis placed on the role of American forces in World War II) and the potential for the establishment of a new community.

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6 Alternative strategies Although it may be tempting to suggest that smaller museums with limited budgets will be constrained in their ability to use sound effectively and creatively, the sound design for the Holocaust and Human Rights Center (HHRC) of Maine refutes such a claim. Housed at the University of Maine at Augusta, the HHRC is a non-profit organization that grew out of a seminar on “Teaching About the Nazi Holocaust in Maine Schools,” held at Bowdoin College in 1984. The stated mission of the organization is “to educate about the Holocaust, to advocate for human rights and dignity and to celebrate diversity” (Holocaust and HumaN Rights Center website). Operating under this general mission, the HHRC worked with Douglas H. Quin²⁵ and his firm “dqmedia,” during 2007 to develop the audio-visual installation Were the House Still Standing: Maine Survivors and Liberators Remember the Holocaust. Seeking an artistic vision that would integrate storytelling and documentary, the design team, including Quin, Professor of Art Robert Katz and documentary filmmaker Matt Dibble, created an installation that utilizes four synchronized video streams projected onto three wall-mounted screens and a sculptural ramp positioned at an inclined angle on the floor and sixteen channels of audio in order to integrate audio testimony with musical passages, soundscapes and sound effects. The exhibit also includes 15 large-format photographs of the Maine survivors, each of which is illuminated when corresponding testimony is played. Quin and Katz have emphasized that sound effects and music were considered central to the visitor experience from the outset of planning and the installation offers a variety of aural encounters, including survivor testimony, soundscapes composed from site-specific recordings in the United States, Poland, Holland and France, as well as archival audio recordings (Katz and Quin 2009). Music was used sparingly and consisted of themes and variations on niggunim (melodic instrumental compositions), excerpts from Johann Strauss’ overture in Die Fledermaus – chosen to represent both the “cultural vibrancy” before the war and due to its inclusion in a Berlin festival organized by Propaganda Minster Joseph Goebbels – and an archival recording of the Horst-Wessel Lied, a song that evolved into an anthem of the National Socialist Party (Quin 2007, 1).²⁶ The multi-media installation, over an hour in duration, is structured around a prologue, four acts and an epilogue, with five entreactes (“between acts”), 25 Douglas H. Quin holds a doctorate in Acoustic Ecology, teaches at Syracuse University and was the sound designer and mixer for Werner Herzog’s film about Antarctica entitled Encounters at the End of the World. 26 Correspondence between Douglas Quin and the author, 10 January 2010.

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which are sound recordings played with no accompanying visual imagery. The four “acts” address many of the themes covered in other Holocaust museums and include visual images and soundscapes that fluctuate between present-day Maine to locations in Europe related to the Holocaust. It is the entreactes, however, that demonstrate the potential for sounds, on their own, to impact visitors in a powerful manner that moves beyond the boundaries of historical narrative or the limits of a particular political message. For example, the entreacte transmitted between Act 3 (concentration camp experiences) and Act 4 (survival and emigration), focuses on “industrial killing on an unprecedented scale,” (Robert Bernheim in Quin 2007, 4) employing the sounds of trains recorded in Poland and elsewhere from various perspectives, which dissolve into recordings made of the screeching of gurneys and the tracks leading to the ovens of the crematoria of Auschwitz I.²⁷ Following this, the visitors hear the rusty oven doors as they creak and slam shut. Then, the striking of a match, the crackle of fire and a fade to wind. As Quin explains, “The single match, like the solo clarinet, the reading of individual names, the emphasis on each person’s story and later, the solitary cricket, are sonic gestures that serve as reminders of individual or singular identity and primacy of individual experience” (Quin 2007, 4). Other entreactes include sounds of breaking glass (Kristallnacht), Hitler addressing a youth rally in 1933, chants of Sieg Heil followed by sounds of a flamethrower and falling debris, and various recordings of bells (associated with one survivor’s comment that he remembered hearing bells ringing as the Allies liberated his area).²⁸ With an emphasis on the “sounds of modern warfare” and “industrial killing,” Quin’s soundscapes offer an auditory contextualization that is historical (and perhaps distant from visitors’ personal experiences) but simultaneously familiar (at certain points) and able to evoke known situations. The installation also engages in what has been described as the sonic effect of “intrusion”: the inopportune presence of a sound or group of sounds inside a protected territory, creating a feeling of violation of that space (Augoyard and Torgue 2005, 65). In the darkness of the HHRC installation, the specific sounds related to warfare and Nazi atrocities combine with

27 To access the sound clip described above, visit: http://www.dqmedia.com/holocaust/Entreacte_Trains&Ovens01.mp3. To access the sound clip of bells visit: http://www.dqmedia.com/holocaust/Entreacte_Bells02.mp3. To access a sound clip of interview snippets with survivors in Poland and the names and numbers of prisoners being read in Polish at one of the barracks in Auschwitz I, visit the following links: http://www.dqmedia.com/holocaust/Entreacte_Names02.mp3. http://www.dqmedia.com/holocaust/Entreacte_Names03.mp3. 28 See Quin (2007, 4).

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ordinary noises rendered unstable and disturbing by the juxtaposition. While not dispensing with the value of testimony and historical fact, the auditory aspects of Quin’s installation open up a phenomenological engagement with the events of the Holocaust that is necessarily shared but also varied according to personal, imaginative reactions.²⁹ It is in this way that sound reveals its transcultural potential, by facilitating a shared experience within which specific cultural variations are yet significant; an interaction of local and global. While such experiences in sound may not produce the “prosthetic memories” described by Alison Landsberg (as in memories of something one has not lived through), they might have the power to create, in relation to the museum visit itself, an effect of “anamnesis”; that is, a moment “in which a sound or a sonic effect revives a situation or an atmosphere of the past” (Augoyard and Torgue 2005, 21). If we accept R. Murray Schafer’s assertion that “hearing is the sentinel of the senses,” in that sounds cannot be “blinked away” or “shut out with eyelids” (M. Smith 2004, xi), then the auditory dimensions of the events surrounding the Holocaust, attention to the “sound” of testimony, and consideration of the implications of “silence,” should be understood as aspects that are crucial parts of this history, not merely its soundtrack.

29 Another example points to the potential for innovation in terms of audio testimony. In 2003, composers Cathy Lane and Nye Parry contributed a sound-based installation to the British Museum’s 250th anniversary exhibition, The Museum of the Mind: Art and Memory in World Cultures. Their piece, entitled “The Memory Machine,” asked visitors to leave a memory via a 1950’s-style telephone situated within the exhibition. The recordings made by visitors were combined with spoken word material, recorded in advance, from people who either worked at the Museum or were associated, in some way, with objects on display. All recordings were mixed and the selection was constantly changing, not only in terms of voices chosen but including the level of intelligibility and the degree of fragmentation and decomposition of the recordings themselves. The multi-channel playback was audible at the entrance and exit to the exhibition. According to Lane and Parry, listeners were stimulated to remember by listening to the mix of other peoples’ reminiscences and could then contribute their own memories. Although the presentation of survivor testimony in a straightforward manner (video and/or audio transmission without manipulation) in most Holocaust exhibitions attests to its treatment as material that is sacrosanct, it may become possible and desirable to allow interactions with and responses to testimony to become part of the Holocaust museum experience. For more information on “The Memory Machine,” see Lane and Parry (2003).

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References Alexander, Jeffrey C. “The Social Construction of Moral Universals.” Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate. Eds. Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Alter, Nora M. and Lutz Koepnick. “Introduction.” Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture. Eds. Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick. New York: Berghahn Books, 2004. 1–32. Augoyard, Jean-François and Henry Torgue, eds. Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, Trans. Andra McCartney and David Paquette. Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2005. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Berenbaum, Michael and Yitzchak Mais. “Introduction.” Memory and Legacy: The Shoah Narrative of the Illinois Holocaust Museum. Lincolnwood, Illinois: Publications International, Ltd., 2009. Blair, Carole, Greg Dickinson and Brian L. Ott. “Introduction: Rhetoric/Memory/Place.” Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials. Eds. Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair and Brian L. Ott. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2010. 1–54. Bull, Michael and Les Back. “Introduction: Into Sound.” The Auditory Culture Reader. Eds. Michael Bull and Les Back. New York: Berg, 2003. 1–18. Crysler, Greig and Abidin Kusno. “Angels in the Temple: The Aesthetic Construction of Citizenship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.” Art Journal 56:1 (1997): 52–64. Cole, Tim. Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold. New York: Routledge, 2000. Craps, Stef and Michael Rothberg, “Introduction: Transcultural Negotiations of Holocaust Memory.” Criticism 53: 4 (2011): 517–21. Dwyer, Leslie. “A Politics of Silences: Violence, Memory, and Treacherous Speech in Post 1965 Bali.” Genocide: Truth, Memory and Representation. Eds. Alexander Laban Hinton and Kevin Lewis O’Neill. Durham: Duke University Press. 2009. 113–146. Erlmann, Veit. “But What of the Ethnographic Ear? Anthropology, Sound and the Senses.” Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity. Ed. Veit Erlmann. New York: Berg, 2005. 1–20. Grieshaber, Kirsten. “German Exhibit Examines Nazi Influence on Music.” Windsor Jewish Federation website. http://www.jewishwindsor.org/page.aspx?id=203001. (9 July 2009). Hein, Hilde S. The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2000. Herf, Jeffrey. The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. Holocaust and Human Rights Center website. http://hhrc.org/hhrchome.html. (10 April 2010). Hoskins, Andrew. “Signs of the Holocaust: exhibiting memory in a mediated age.” Media Culture Society 25:1 (2003): 7–22. Ihde, Don. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 2nd edition. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. xix, 6–7. Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center website. “Mission Statement.” www.ilholocaustmuseum.org/pages/mission_statement/184.php. (15 August 2009).

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Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center website. “Exhibitions.” http://www.ilholocaustmuseum.org/pages/exhibitions/13.php. (10 September 2010). Johnson, James H. “Listening and Silence in France.” Hearing History: A Reader. Ed. Mark M. Smith. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2004. 176–179. Johnson, James H. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Kamin, Blair. “In Skokie, a new Holocaust Museum opens, at once moving and flawed.” The Skyline: Assessing the highs and lows of Chicago architecture. Chicago Tribune website. http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/theskyline/2009/04/in-skokie-a new-holocaustmuseum-opens-at-once-moving-and-flawed-.html. (19 April 2009). Katz, Robert and Douglas H. Quin. “Were the House Still Standing: Maine Survivors and Liberators Remember the Holocaust: Digital technology and new media as a means of storytelling in creating an imaginative template to preserve Holocaust testimony.” Paper presented at the Middle Tennessee State University International Holocaust Studies Conference, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 24 October 2009. An article based upon this presentation may be found in Nancy E. Rupprecht and Wendy Koenig, eds. The Holocaust and World War II: In History and In Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, forthcoming. Landsberg, Alison. “America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a Radical Politics of Empathy.” New German Critique 71 “Memories of Germany” (1997): 63–86. Lane, Cathy and Nye Parry. “The Memory Machine: Sound and Memory at the British Museum.” Paper from “Cultural institutions and digital technology” at the Ecole de Louvre, ICHIM Paris. 8–12 September 2003. Levy, Daniel and Natan Sznaider, “Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory.” European Journal of Social Theory 5:1 (2002): 87–106. Libeskind, Daniel. Jewish Museum Berlin. Ruksaldruck, Germany: G+B Arts International, 1999. Linenthal, Edward T. Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum. New York; Columbia University Press, 2001. Liss, Andrea. Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Luke, Timothy W. Museum Politics: Power Plays at the Exhibition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Mintz, Alan. Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001. Neander, Joachim. “Some Basic Problems In Implementing Holocaust Education.” The Holocaust and World War II: In History and In Memory. Eds. Nancy E. Rupprecht and Wendy Koenig. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. 215-235. Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999. Patt, Lisa Shinkle. That Which Stimulates and Numbs Us: The Museum in the Age of Trauma. Unpublished dissertation, City University of New York. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2003. Peek, Philip M. “The Sounds of Silence: Cross-World Communication and the Auditory Arts in African Societies.” American Ethnologist 21:3 (August 1994): 474–494. Potter, Pamela M. Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Quin, Douglas H. “Notes on sound design for Were the House Still Standing: Main Survivors and Liberators Remember the Holocaust (September 2007), 1. Correspondence between Douglas Quin and the author, 10 January 2010.

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Radstone, Susannah. “What Place is This? Transcultural Memory and the Locations of Memory Studies.” Parallax 17:4 (November 2011): 109–23. Rath, Richard Cullen. “Acoustics and Social Order in Early America.” Hearing History: A Reader. Ed. Mark M. Smith. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2004. 207–20. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Rothberg, Michael. “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory.” Criticism 53:4 (Fall 2011): 526–527. Schafer, R. Murray. “Foreword.” Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds. Eds. Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue. Trans. Andra McCartney and David Paquette. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005, xi-xiii. Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1997. Shandler, Jeffrey. “Aliens in the Wasteland: American Encounters with the Holocaust in 1960s Science Fiction Television.” The Americanization of the Holocaust. Ed. Hilene Flanzbaum. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1999. 33–44. Shoah. Dir. Claude Lanzmann. Originally released in 1985. New Yorker, 2003. Smith, Bruce R. “The Soundscapes of Early Modern England.” Hearing History: A Reader. Ed. Mark M. Smith. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2004. 85–111. Smith, Bruce R. “Tuning into London c.1600.” The Auditory Culture Reader. Michael Bull and Les Back. New York: Berg, 2003. 127–135. Smith, Bruce R. The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Smith. Mark M. “Introduction: Onward to Audible Pasts.” Hearing History: A Reader. Ed. Mark M. Smith. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2004. ix-xxii. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Trommler, Frank. “Conducting Music, Conducting War: Nazi Germany as an Acoustic Experience.” Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture. Eds. Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick New York: Berghahn Books, 2004. 65–76. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website.“Inside the Museum.” http://www. ushmm.org/museum/a_and_a/inside2/. (10 September 2010). “Voices of the Holocaust” website. voices.iit.edu. Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois. (19 September 2009). Williams, Paul. Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities. New York: Berg, 2007. Young, James E. At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Terri Tomsky

Collective Loss and Commemoration after the Yugoslav Wars: Dubravka Ugresić’s Museumizing Gaze In the wake of genocide and political violence, discourse – including especially witness accounts, speech acts, literature, films, and personal histories  – has a critical function in relating a collective memory of trauma. In his theory of cultural trauma, Jeffrey C. Alexander suggests that narratives form a significant part of the “trauma claim”, a social process that he sees as enabling a public, institutionalised traumatic consciousness (2004, 12).¹ Despite the problems involved in such a project – not least the challenge of representing extreme violence and the psychological, socio-cultural and economic conditions that structure its articulation – the creation of a public archive is both desirable and, above all, vital, since it holds the promise of a new future, with implications for political accountability, civic repair, and the reformation of fractured communities. But in the case of states that are quite literally fractured, where the collective identity of a people no longer exists, is such memory-work through a similar social process even possible? In the former Yugoslavia, recent efforts to reconstitute the multiethnic and supranational culture of Brodz Tito’s famously cosmopolitan East Slav federation have been denigrated (as well as celebrated) as an uncritical form of nostalgia, known as Yugonostalgia.² Nevertheless, the task to remember Yugoslavia in the face of a rapidly disappearing past remains urgent, since to avoid its commemoration means perpetuating the ethnic divides of its seceded states as well as disavowing the trauma inflicted by the Yugoslav wars. This chapter examines 1 Alexander’s theory rests on the case study of the Jewish Holocaust and the specific historical developments that came out of this event. Despite his reference to the social process of the “trauma claim” as a universal given, he concedes that it does not apply to many other (particularly non-Western) traumas. I have broached the unevenness and the problems of this social process elsewhere (see Tomsky 2011). 2 See Boym and Volčič for a discussion on the variants of Yugonostalgia. Yugonostalgia, with its longing for the past, resonates with Susan Stewart’s definition of nostalgia as “a sadness without an object” (23). Following Stewart’s understanding, I distinguish nostalgia from the related concept of mourning by its fixated attention to a past that “has never existed except as a narrative, and hence, [is] always absent, [a] past [that] continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack” (23). Yugonostalgia, in other words, focuses on Yugoslavia as an absence, an ideal that never existed in lived experience, rather than a loss for which a real solution or return could be possible.

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the literature of self-described Yugoslav writer and academic, Dubravka Ugresić, who thinks through these dilemmas as she steers a cautious path around ethnonationalist and communist ideologies. Ugresić is today well-known in Europe for her satirical essays on Tito’s Yugoslavia and her witnessing of its subsequent disintegration. Writing from the newly independent Croatia and in response to the escalation of ethno-nationalist patriotism, Ugresić became the target of a highly public campaign of harassment for her series of “Antipolitical” sketches, prompting her to leave in 1993. Now living in Amsterdam, Ugresić continues to write about Yugoslavia in response to massive traumatic social change and the question of identity in the face of collective dispossession. In this chapter, I consider her 1996 novel, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, which outlines ways in which one might resuscitate a Yugoslav subjectivity that no longer exists in the material world. Taking inspiration from the memorialisation of other traumatic histories, such as the Jewish Shoah and the Cold War, this novel engages with the trope of the museum to build an alternative legacy that affirms a Yugoslav collective memory and mourns the traumas of the Yugoslav wars, against the nationalist chauvinism of divided states. Such a memory exists not in a coherent form, but rather resides in what I call the “museumizing gaze”. By this, I mean Ugresić’s attempts to represent her subjective, affective relationship to her surroundings, her ability to gather together the fragments of heterogeneous histories, dispersed throughout the cultural, physical, and human landscape. My sense of the musemizing gaze builds on the work of Walter Benjamin, Eric Santner, and Michel Foucault in order to make an account of a collective memory that can only emerge outside of Yugoslavia, an account that takes shape within a transcultural, unsettling, and spectral frame of reference. When I talk of collective memory here, I refer to an already densely-theorized concept: collective memory is not only socially organised, part of what has been called “public”, “cultural”, “borrowed” memory, or the “common spaces of memory”, but it is also linked to individual subjectivity via everyday habits and objects; its collective nature partially emerges out of the sum of shared lifestyles and historical experiences.³ But, as cultural scholars have pointed out, such identity is neither natural nor essential; instead, like memory, it is heterogeneous, 3 Halbwachs uses the term “borrowed memory” to describe historical remembrance that comes out of culture, but that is not an individual’s memory (1992, 51). Young uses the phrase “common spaces of memory” (2006 69). As I demonstrate in this chapter, Ugresić finds traces of collective memory in some of the similar school experiences she shared with her peers. However, it is important to qualify any account of collective memory in some of the school experiences that she shared with her peers Scholars such as Marc Bloch have noted that collective memory is also shaped by generational legacies; we can also consider collective memory to be part of the complex social, intersubjective, and subconcious phenomenon that Pierre Bordieu called habitus.

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dynamic, and malleable. Whenever histories have been suppressed or selectively promoted by state institutions, identities are inevitably transformed. In Yugoslavia, for instance, the idea of a supranational Yugoslav identity was constructed and reinforced via the social institutions that were built following the postwar victory of Tito’s partisans. After the federation’s break-up, those “Yugoslav” institutions, including libraries, museums, and monuments, were targeted and destroyed by ethno-nationalist groups. In the place of this Yugoslav dispositif, the heterogeneous apparatus that constituted and conditioned that specific society, new institutions were set up to disseminate ethno-national histories and traditions.⁴ As suggested by the title, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (hereafter The Museum), places a special emphasis on the museum, its role as curator of collective memories, and, most significantly, its potential as an archive for a memory that is yet to come. As I intend to show, Ugresić’s preoccupation with the museum as an institution enables her critical engagement with the precarious past and possible future of Yugoslav collective memory. Broadly, museums can be understood as the institutions of shared memory; as the material archives that memorialise by preserving culture and social history. But, in their function as producers and preservers of (select) knowledge, museums are complicit in power structures. Benedict Anderson describes the museum as an institution “of power”, that enables the “concretisation” of national cultures (2006, 185). In the case of Yugoslavia, we can trace the active role of museums in producing subjectivity. For example, the multiethnic culture of Bosnia was significantly shaped by the Sarajevo provincial museum, an institute set up by the Austro-Hungarian authorities with the strategic aim of curbing competing nationalist movements (Donia and Fine 1994, 96–97). Museums, in other words, are political and cultural tools that compile objects of memory in tandem with the promotion of particular ideologies. It is therefore unsurprising that, as the sanctioned and official sites of collective memory, museums have traditionally been dominated by the elite, which makes it difficult to mount a sustained resistance from within their walls. In response, Ugresić explodes the notion of the museum as a bricks-andmortar edifice by re-imagining the museum’s central imperative (to organise and present an archive of collective history) with less fixed structures in mind. Consequently, it is the idea of the museum, rather than its physical incarnation, that enables Ugresić to formulate a strategy of anamnesis. The Museum is a text 4 Dispositif is Michel Foucault’s term and I understand it by way of Giorgio Agamben, who accounts for its complexity, describing it as a set of practices that determine and manage human subjects (2009, 2–13). A dispositif thus includes discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, and philosophical propositions, among others.

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that emulates a museum in collecting fragmentary knowledge, made up of the narrator’s memories, literary anecdotes, and observations on the unorthodox memorial productions in Berlin’s cultural landscape. To comprehend more fully the critical work of Ugresić’s museumizing memory-text, it is first necessary to review the political crisis of identity following Yugoslavia’s collapse. I examine the anxieties of remembering in a post-partition environment where the seceded post-Yugoslav states have suppressed memories of Tito’s Yugoslavia and have refashioned collective identity to reinforce particular ethno-nationalist agendas. In response, I consider the challenges faced by a writer like Ugresić when searching out a past principally recalled through personal memory and photographs. Only then can I elaborate the ethical significance of Ugresić’s museumizing gaze in Berlin’s exilic setting, a space of alterity and heterogeneity (in terms of communities, memories and histories) that following Foucault I identify as heterotopic. In her reconstitution of the Yugoslav past, Ugresić’s narrator practices what one might call – drawing upon Eric Santner (2006) – a spectral materialist historiography, that emphasises the productive figurations of affective and embodied experiences of loss as it relates to the traumas of Berlin’s disappeared Jewish community and the Cold War past. Here, Ugresić’s transcultural project is perhaps most animated by the subversive spirit of Walter Benjamin and, especially, his theoretical excavation of everyday spaces and sites in his quest to develop a practical form of memory and so rupture the continuum of historical forgetfulness.

1 The Confiscation of Memory and Witness Anxiety On opening Ugresić’s novel, one confronts, not a teleological and unified literary sequence, but a radical montage, a collection of intermittent discourses that offer us a portrait of the unnamed narrator’s life. The narrator is a “dislocated” and “weary human specimen”, an ex-Yugoslav in self-imposed exile (mostly) in Berlin (Ugresić 1996, 9). Feeling she has no “home” to return to, the narrator refuses to return to Croatia and, consequently, her narrative reflects a “state of searching” (Ugresić 1996, 7). Made up of a whimsical assortment of fragments and digressions, The Museum suggests the structure of dispersal and the fractured, disjointed process of memory recollection. It includes the excerpts of a diary (written by the narrator’s mother), descriptions of art exhibitions and museums, photographs, recipes, and anecdotes, some written in a magic-realist style. All these are interspersed with numbered, repetitive notes, postscripts, as well as pithy observations on memory, exile, and nostalgia, cited from writers like

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Rainer Maria Rilke, Milan Kundera, Vladimir Nabokov, and Victor Shklovsky. The Museum begins by urging its reader to be “patient” with its unconventional structure (Ugresić 1996, xi). These “fragments”, like “archaeological exhibits”, the narrator assures us, will eventually acquire “meaningful or firm connections […] of their own accord” (Ugresić 1996, xi). As such, the book is a creative response to what elsewhere Ugresić (1998a) calls the “confiscation of memory”, the process by which the newly independent states consolidated their power by effacing the collective memory of an entire people. In the case of Croatia, the confiscation of Yugoslav memory began with the newly independent republic undertaking a campaign of history-making, epitomized when Franjo Tudjman, Croatia’s first president, personally rewrote the history of the Ustaše, the Croatian civil administration put in power by the Nazi state. These efforts literally changed the topography by renaming city roads and buildings to those of Croatian historical figures and they were augmented by outright governmental intimidation in the process of creating an ethnically “pure” Croatian state. This alternative history could only be fully institutionalised after political opponents and undesirable minorities had been silenced or expelled. In The Museum, Ugresić’s narrator registers the repercussions of this history-making when she hears of the forced eviction of hundreds of people from their homes, of the arbitrary rule and police terror of the authorities, those that had finally made the “thousand-year” dream of their citizens come true, of mass sackings, of greed, insatiability, crime, and war profiteering. I learned of houses and villages burned and their inhabitants turned out by force. (Ugresić 1996 211)

The “‘thousand-year’ dream” is the narrator’s reference to Tudjman’s famous statement about the longevity of Croatia’s struggle for self-determination. Mythic nationalism is thus turned into historical fact. In one of her essays, Ugresić describes the way ethno-nationalists destroyed the “old truth” by the systematic targeting of societal institutions (1998b, 70). The collective memory of Yugoslavia, along with Yugoslav social practices and cultural norms were extirpated through the obliteration of “cities, ideological notions, bridges, criteria, libraries, norms, churches, marriages, monuments, lives, graves, friendships, homes” (Ugresić 1998b, 70). For the new states, to risk leaving old institutions intact is effectively to provide memorials, tangible and public objects to disappeared collectives. The political, historical, and cultural “cleansing” of the landscape of diverse peoples and their attitudes allowed for the construction of new collective memories. The eradication of collective history at an institutional level meant that the traumas incurred during the so-called “birth” of Croatia were disavowed.

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The disappearance of something as ephemeral as collective memory is difficult to understand, not least because the enormity of its consequences. In another essay called “The Confiscation of Memory,” Ugresić has argued that the enforced amnesia has made it impossible to understand “the true dimensions of other people’s loss” (1998a, 226). This fear is clearly expressed in The Museum, where the narrator notes the disappearance of “the memory of the everyday life that we lived” alongside the loss of the material “objects that […] surrounded us” (Ugresić 1996, 233). Because the “memory of the former country is tacitly forbidden”, the narrator worries that, “when the ban is one day lifted […] There’ll be nothing left to remember” (Ugresić 1996, 233). This is not to say that a Yugoslav collective memory is not a contested one, coming out of a diverse population and in tension with individual remembrance, nor that it is unmarked by ambiguity and contradiction. Instead, as Ugresić’s novel wagers, a Yugoslav collective did exist, albeit in a multivalent, uneven, and nebulous sense, disseminated via a governmental dispositif as well as emerging out of lived individual and familial experiences. Whereas all pasts can be (and have been) revised, selectively represented, or even eradicated, we should consider the loss of a Yugoslav collective memory as an event that has serious political ramifications for self-professed Yugoslavs and their future generations. The dissolution of Yugoslavia sharpened into focus coherent national groups structured along religion, ethnicity, and language. The destruction of memories of Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav identity left no recourse to a complex intersubjective self as each citizen’s identity had to be collapsed into a single ethnic category (e.g. Serb, Croat, Bosnian Muslim, etc.) The drive towards ethnically pure states activated cultural and political forms of alienation for many subjects. As The Museum testifies, an ethnically homogeneous national culture is openly hostile to hyphenated national citizens, those who are minorities or from mixed marriages. Of course, all who primarily saw themselves as Yugoslavs were instantly alienated. To be a Yugoslav meant embracing multi-communality as suggested by Yugoslavia’s supranational framework, its privileging of plural identities, and its tolerance of synthesis and integration. It is as one such alienated Yugoslav that The Museum’s narrator urgently seeks to procure evidence of a unified Yugoslav culture, proof that can additionally speak to the organised political violence that led to its destruction. She concedes that the Yugoslav wars are “verifiable” through “television film, newspapers and photographs from 1991 to 1995” (Ugresić 1996, 194); but she worries about the inadequacy of such testimonials as the collective experience of war is assailed by encroaching time; forgetting itself becomes inevitable when memory is not cultivated:

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Because soon the minefield will be covered in grass, new houses will spring up on top of the ruins, everything will be grown over, [the reality] will disappear and shift once again into dream, story, fortune-tellers’ prophecies. […] It is true that there will be people left, witnesses, who will not acknowledge those boundaries, evoking their nightmare experience as proof of what occurred, but few will listen to them, and then with time they too will be covered over with grass. (Ugresić 1996, 195)

Witnessing an alternative reality to that of the dominant narrative offers no guarantee of longevity nor of affirmation; instead these memories may die with the last generation of Yugoslavs. Testimony risks being subsumed by the forces of mass amnesia, a condition bolstered by the state’s monopoly over history. After the death of first-person witnesses, all remaining memories and, by extension histories, exist in textual forms, susceptible to erasure if they do not fit the dominant paradigms and pursuits of the time. For Ugresić’s narrator, the recollection of the Yugoslav past is a thorny enterprise. With so many state apparatuses focused on cultivating a new collective history, she turns to personal memory as one possible way to record a “vanished epoch” (Ugresić 1996, 38). One part of The Museum, entitled “Family Museum”, interweaves the narrator’s personal memories with the selective process of memory-making so emphasizing the indeterminacy of memory. The narrator’s memories of her childhood past are bound up with photography and her mother’s “storehouse of memories”, a brown pigskin bag bought after World War II that is used to store old photos and is itself a mnemonic device (Ugresić 1996, 13). A type of evidence, these photographs revive “an unwritten history of everyday life” in Yugoslavia that the narrator has forgotten (Ugresić 1996, 22). But the testimony offered by photographs and photo albums also introduces uncertainty, when the narrator realizes how easily memories, supposedly captured through photos and texts, can be modified, reordered, relabelled, and (mis)remembered. On the one hand, the narrator concedes that a “photograph is also a memory” as it relays the (family) history of a life lived (Ugresić 1996, 30); on the other hand, as she wryly notes, the compilation of a photo album is an activity “guided by the hand of the invisible angel of nostalgia […] [where] the scissors of censorship are most assiduous” (Ugresić 1996, 32). Photographs distil a particular version of events so that the narrator’s memory becomes “tenaciously fixed on the contents” (Ugresić 1996, 24). As with photos, personal memories can be easily “touched-up” and over time the “version” offered in the photograph hardens into a memory that is more “real” than its actual referent (Ugresić 1996, 19). Throughout The Museum, the narrator struggles to preserve her particular history in the face of the knowledge that the sites of personal memory are manipulatable. Denoting only a selective construction of an already elusive truth, they are always unverifiable and potentially self-defeating. From the photographs that

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“disclose the world of postwar shortages” to her mother’s constant rearranging of her photo albums; from the politically expedient temptation to erase the partisan “five-pointed star” on her father’s grave to the description of how “verbal memories” have ossified from childhood fantasy into adulthood fact, the narrator explores the shifting boundary between fiction and historical reality (Ugresić 1996, 22–23; 19). Grasping the unreliability of photographic documents, the narrator realizes that, life “is nothing other than a photograph album” and that, what “is not in the album, never happened” (Ugresić 1996, 25). This fear is, of course, resonant in the context of Yugoslavia’s dissolution where the lieux de mémoire became central to the wars between competing versions of history. In the aftermath of the Bosnian war, the narrator identifies two categories of refugees, “those who have photographs and those who have none” (Ugresić 1996, 5); one group possesses tangible if flimsy evidence that asserts their former lives, while the other group has been deprived of even such fragments. In the face of social upheaval and the construction of a new collective history, “when the language and the country and the flags and the symbols all changed; when the wrong side became right, and the right side became wrong,” such memories remain the only, if utterly untrustworthy, testaments to a vanished life (Ugresić 1996, 22). Aware of the instability of personal memory accounts, the narrator explores alternative ways to articulate a collective sense of loss. This is challenging, for the memory of Yugoslavia has not only been dismembered, destroyed, and denied by the seceded states, but it also continues to exist in scattered, anecdotal, and schizophrenic form, in the heterogeneous memories of “numerous fellow-refugees from [her] country” (Ugresić 1996, 141). The narrator suggests the difficulty of her project, citing a friend’s recollection of images “from a past life in a former country which […] will never again be possible to connect into a whole” (Ugresić 1996, 229). Additionally, while the narrator knows about the atrocities and genocidal practices of the Yugoslav wars, these experiences have been viewed from a safe distance; bearing witness to such traumas, through a reassembled collective memory, means she must account for the absence of extirpated communities, while foregrounding her own vicarious role in mourning. In keeping with her self-reflexive approach to the limitations of text and memory, the narrator draws upon her exilic experience in Berlin to assemble an anti-nostalgic archive that asserts a vanished Yugoslavia, yet simultaneously rejects the institutional and highly ideological memory of state dispositifs. As we have already seen, one way the narrator avoids these ethnonationalist “victor’s histories” is by problematising what is at stake in her quest to recuperate memory. Another method, which I outline next, involves her refusal of linear and totalist systems; instead, by being attentive to the interplay of multiple histories, and particularly the interconnections between past and present, the narrator grasps new ways to mourn as well as recollect a pluralistic Yugoslavia.

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2 The Museumizing Gaze Conventionally, the hope is that the traumatic past would be addressed in museums, those guarantors of collective history. The disavowed nation has no such recourse. This is because, while they claim to preserve a collective memory, museums are directly linked to governmentality. In the context of the very recent material and epistemic violence deployed by ethno-nationalists to establish hegemony over these institutions, Ugresić’s narrator eschews direct confrontation with state-controlled museums in favour of creating an alternative form in which a museum’s ritual activities might take place. Rather than a physical structure, the narrator develops a Yugoslav collective memory through what I would call a museumizing gaze, a narrative vision that gathers together and then organizes literary vignettes, memories, stories, and serendipitous encounters. The narrator refuses to spare the museum-as-institute and reconfigures it categorically by ontologizing it, identifying it as something that can be bodily and material, perceptible and ubiquitous. The narrator’s museum is embodied in memories, objects, in the random encounters the narrator writes of, and in the material text of The Museum itself; these create and, I would argue, legitimate new forms of collective memory. Rather than resembling the ordered collection of a museum, the narrator’s narrative emulates “the genre of collage”, mentioned earlier on in The Museum as an inherently subversive genre (Ugresić 1996, 25). Unlike the memorializing archives of the photo album, in collage there is a shift in emphasis from continuity and seeming transparency to the constituting of a history, its mediation and careful re-presentation. Unlike the coherent and unified historical narratives of hegemonic institutions, the polysemic fluidity and fragmentariness of the narrator’s archive evades hegemonic appropriation and affiliation. If it has not already become clear, Walter Benjamin’s writings (1999) seem to me to form a subtextal resource, from which The Museum draws inspiration. Though not explicit, there are resonant parallels within their methodologies and their attendance to the interruptive possibilities of those “discordant objects, experiences of discontinuity, and cultural zones of non-contemporaneity in everyday social practice” (Seremetakis 1994, 21). Reminiscent of the Parisian collector in Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, Ugresić’s narrator in Berlin sets out to gather narratives and memories. These objets trouvés serve her particular kind of historical recovery, a work aligned with Benjamin’s efforts to devise through accumulation and assemblage “a new expressly devised historical system […] a practical form of memory” (Benjamin 1999, 205). By collecting, as Benjamin noted, one “takes up the struggle against dispersion […] the scatter, in which things of the world are found” (1999, 211). In piecing together everyday objects, even those discarded items considered worthless, the fragments of a vanished past become

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anti-nostalgic codes with which to decipher the traumatic present in new ways. It is in the objects of the collection, that the “true collector” can attach and thus access “the entire past” of the now obsolete Yugoslavia (Benjamin 1999, 207).

3 Berlin’s Traumatic Past and Spectral Historiography I want to end my discussion of Ugresić’s novel by discussing the centrality of Berlin both to the narrator’s memorialization of Yugoslavia and to the possibility of its renewal. While Yugoslavia remains the focus of The Museum, the narrator’s recuperative project calls upon wider European experiences of partition and division. Thus, it is in Berlin, and not in the iconic Yugoslav city of multiculturalism, Sarajevo, where this remembering takes place. Historically, Berlin is significant because it symbolizes Europe’s constitutive partition experience during the Cold War. But, by resituating the Yugoslav crisis in 1990s Berlin, Ugresić does more than merely suggest their traumatic parallels of dislocation. The narrator’s geographical and cultural displacement enables her to avoid the ideological net of the postpartitioned state and its ethno-nationalist institutions. In other words, by expanding the stage of partition’s consequences beyond the geographical borders of the nation-state, the narrator undercuts the sovereignty that the postpartitioned state often claims over historical representations. By “internationalising” the partition event, she clears a space to speak. Berlin, more so than any other city, plays a significant role in the narrator’s strategy of internationalisation. As a setting crowded with museums and monuments, Berlin alerts us to traumatic pasts; and, it is here that the narrator becomes attuned to archives of memory and experience. With this information, she challenges the ethno-nationalist collective memory by utilizing other traumatic histories, specifically the Holocaust and the Cold War, to spur her inquiry into the eradication of Yugoslav culture. Already, her sense of dislocation and melancholia aligns her within the intellectual and political tradition of Berlin’s exilic and rootless communities: the visiting writers, artists, and critics; the city’s many migrant workers, dissidents, asylum-seekers, and refugees. The narrator’s cognizance of these estranged, marginalised figures is important because it is through affective dissonance and solitary wandering (her notable flânerie) that the narrator shapes her cultural activity of remembrance. Berlin is, of course, a city famously marked by historical traumas. In an interview, Ugresić (2008) characterises it as “a traumatised city of debris, graves, bullet holes”, making it an apt setting from which to reflect on the suffering of the not-so-remote past. Andreas

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Huyssen has poignantly described Berlin as a palimpsestic “memory space”, that recalls its “discontinuous, ruptured history, site of the collapse of four successive German states, command centre of the Holocaust, capital of German communism in the Cold War, and flash point of the East-West confrontation of the nuclear age” (2003, 77). Additionally, Berlin is scarred by the Battle of Berlin, the grisly conclusion to the Second World War and the defeat of Nazi forces to the Russians; this event is physically marked by Teufelsberg, a huge artificial hill, under which “pulsate[s] 26 million cubic metres of rubble from the ruins of Berlin, collected and dragged here after the […] War” (Ugresić 1996, 159–160). This wartime history is also embodied by the actual Museum of Unconditional Surrender, the location where German capitulation took place and the postwar institution (more commonly known as the German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst) from which the novel takes its name. Significantly, in the novel, this museum also serves as a meeting point where Yugoslav refugees congregate over Georgian džezvas coffee (Ugresić 1996, 221–224). Here, the narrator suggests how this institutional space of multiple memories might be utilized, redeployed by the dispossessed as they ingratiate themselves in new communities. From such scenes, Berlin can be seen as an instance of what Foucault (1967) calls a heterotopia in his lecture, “Of Other Spaces”. For Kevin Hetherington, heterotopias describe a space of “unsettling juxtapositions” and “limit experiences”, where old social orders are challenged and transgressed (1997, 42–46). Ugresić’s Berlin is a city awash with refugees, immigrants, and exiles, many of whom have fled from the Yugoslav wars. Within this environment, where heterogeneous populations, experiences, time, and histories intersect, the narrator locates opportunities to work through loss and reconstitute communities. In the post-Cold War era, Berlin represents the dissolution of ideological divides and its multicultural landscape points towards this communal recovery. One such model is suggested by the narrator’s story of her East German friend, Christa. Expelled from the East, Christa travels around the world “vainly seeking a substitute for her lost homeland” (Ugresić 1996, 136). She moves to West Berlin and, in the midst of her exile, finds that it is precisely in communities, among other outsiders, such as the “Turks, Greeks, and Yugoslavs” that she feels “closest to her true homeland” (Ugresić 1996, 136). In a heterotopic setting, it becomes possible to register new kinds of solidarities and participate in the exchange of critical ideas. Thus, in her exploration of the city, the narrator comes across multiple exhibitions by artists on the Cold War and the Holocaust, who explore histories of loss, and the notions of absence and commemoration. While she takes inspiration from their practices, the narrator also utilises them, incorporating them into the text. Mostly interested in modes of historical recovery and ideological critique, these artists bring to the surface the

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fleeting instances of lost lives and former communities, which would otherwise remain invisible. For the narrator, Berlin is the paradigmatic “museum-city”, not merely because it contains many museums, but also because it contains these physical and spectral traces of its history (Ugresić 1996, 221). Like the artists’, the narrator’s ability to comprehend these histories calls to mind Eric Santner’s notion of “spectral materialism” (2006). Spectral materialism is a critical practice derived from Walter Benjamin’s analyses on memory and history, where the city (namely, Paris) is shown to conceal the resources to the disappeared past. Only the attentive passer-by, attuned to the phenomena of his surroundings, can decipher and recover the history embodied in the urban landscape. Santner’s theory deals with accessing the hidden past; but, unlike Benjamin, Santner emphasizes the traumatic quality of this recreated past as well as the ethical possibilities opened up by the traumatic encounter with a vanished world. Santer’s spectral materialism involves an awareness of “the persistence of past suffering that has in some sense been absorbed into the substance of lived space” (2006, 57). As the term implies, a once existing material life is reanimated within the present. This traumatic “real” is made visible, albeit “paradoxically” as a spectral, momentary, and “virtual” archive, replete with the imaginative detail of lived history, the melancholic remainders of lives uprooted by political violence, and the pathos of their absence (Santner 2006, 52). Spectral materialism usefully explains not only the narrator’s critical engagement with different histories in her attempt to piece together a virtual archive commemorating Yugoslavia but also the fragmentary structure of the text itself. The process of reading The Museum cannot help but re-enact Rilke’s aphorism, cited approvingly by the narrator, that “the story of a shattered life can only be told in bits and pieces” (Ugresić 1996, 107). The “traumatised” structure of this text emulates the self-referential exhibitions of Berlin’s artists, whose political commentaries on the creation of cultural and historical discourses considerably shape the narrator’s own project. For instance, one point of reference is the artist Ilya Kabakov and his “museum of the extinct Soviet epoch” (Ugresić 1996, 37). Kabakov’s art pieces together the discarded objects from the everyday life of the ordinary Soviet citizen. Out of his collections Kabakov reveals “the complex permeation of the system, politics, ideology, media, culture, education, [into] the everyday and the personal life” (Ugresić 1996, 36). As the narrator notes, the life of the anonymous Soviet citizen is laid bare as a series of “‘facts,’ so terribly marked by the system” (Ugresić 1996, 37); but, this exhibition also resists full incorporation into the dissemination of Soviet ideology, “radically challeng[ing] official culture by the mere act of giving priority to ‘rubbish’ over the so-called great themes of art” (Ugresić 1996, 36). Similarly, the narrator’s museum that reproduces scenes, materials, and observations from the narrator’s Yugoslav

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and post-Yugoslav life provides an alternative strategy of remembrance, which demands a critical, rather than a nostalgic, evaluation of the object at hand, particularly if we consider how everyday objects, such as schoolbooks, are vessels that have been appropriated and politicized by hegemonic groups. Whereas Kabakov exposes the ideological workings of the state, other artistic sources provide the narrator with valuable insight into the way institutions can be reworked to fit or denigrate the shifting politics of the present. One artist, a collagist known as Sissel, suggests such possibilities in her reconstruction of geographical knowledge. “[O]bsessed with maps, measures, compasses”, Sissel explores the representation of space in the making of meaning (Ugresić 1996, 98). Using geographical maps of the world, Sissel “cuts seas out of the maps, cuts those seas up into little pieces, then sticks the pieces together again to form one surface”, following “her own inner sense of geography” (Ugresić 1996, 98). There is an echo of Sissel’s practices when the narrator comes across a community of Bosnian refugees in Berlin: Here refugees from Bosnia meet. They enquire after souls: who is from where, does anyone know what’s become of so and so, where is such and such now […] They exchange news. They gather according to their towns and villages. Along the way they buy some small thing which will help their little refugee room look like home. Here, in Gustav-Mayer Allee, on Saturdays and Sundays, the country that is no more, Bosnia, draws its map once again in the air, with its towns, villages, rivers and mountains. The map glimmers briefly and then disappears like a soap bubble. (Ugresić 1996, 230)

Like Sissel’s artwork, the narrator’s recreated map refuses to see identity as sutured to space alone. This conceptualisation is significant in the wake of Bosnia’s postwar transformation. Once considered the microcosm of the Yugoslav Federation, Bosnia’s territory now exists as a radically altered landscape because of its subjection to mass urban devastation (as suggested by the neologism, “urbicide”, invented during the Yugoslav wars in response to the disproportionate targeting of the urban environment as a symbol of shared, multicommunal space) as well as to ethnic reorganization, through population expulsions, ethnic cleansing, and political partition.⁵ In contrast, the narrator momentarily brings to life a multicultural Bosnia through living, moving bodies and the clamour of noisy exchange. Unlike museums filled with an archive of silent, extinct or inanimate objects, the narrator produces a living and aural institution, similar to what Dipesh Chakrabarty terms “a politics of experience” (2002, 9). In her emphasis

5 Bosnia now exists as one country with two constituent ethno-political units: the Croat-Muslim Federation and the Serb Republic; these enclaves share a revolving government.

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on the everyday and on the way the diaspora meets in renewed vocal solidarity, Ugresić’s narrator fulfils Chakrabarty’s call for a memorialising practice that is oriented towards “the realms of the senses and the embodied” over identity politics (2002, 9). What becomes evident is that human beings, exemplified by the refugees, immigrants, and exiles populating this novel, are themselves embodied historical and institutional artefacts, “walking museum exhibits”, resources from which a collective memory can be drawn (Ugresić 1996, 234). In Berlin, the provocative work of artists famous for their Holocaust “counter monuments”, such as Christian Boltanski, Shimon Attie, Jochen Gerz and others, provides the narrator with a key frame of reference in making material the spectral memories of a traumatic past (Young 2007, 70).⁶ Boltanski, the narrator tells us, is “one of the greatest archivists, biographers and reconstructors of anonymous human lives” (Ugresić 1996, 231). Using cardboard boxes, Boltanski fills each one with “the photographs and souvenirs of anonymous people, these endless archives of ordinary mortals”, so endowing them with “the right to a prolonged life” (Ugresić 1996, 232). In another installation called “The Missing House”, Boltanski located a space on Berlin’s Grosse Hamburgerstrasse, where a house had been destroyed in the Second World War. Using the walls of the neighbouring buildings, he put up “plates with the names and occupations of the former occupants. Most of the former occupants were Jews killed by the Nazis” (Ugresić 1996, 231). Boltanski’s memory work details the occupants’ lives, marking exactly where they lived, but further includes the information of the new occupants as the Jews were deported or left. In this, it contributes to the narrator’s project of building a museum as it reconstructs the traces of past traumas and individual lives into the present. Like the narrator’s museum, Boltanski’s work demarcates both a physical and virtual space, a memorialization which becomes pertinent in the work of mourning when we remember that, in the Holocaust, many victims’ bodies continue to be missing, incinerated or buried anonymously in mass graves. Santner’s study of creaturely life is particularly resonant in reading this interplay of the physical and the virtual because he utilises Boltanski’s “Missing House” installation in order to develop his theory of spectral materialism. But perhaps more valuable is Santner’s assertion that the affective melancholy of Boltanski’s work “becomes infused with the curiosity and rigor of historical research” (2006, 53). For Santner, it is this scholarly attention to historical specificity that leads an understanding of the conditions of political violence and opens up an ethical relation to its faceless victims, similar to what Judith Butler has termed “wak[ing] to the precarious6 Young’s term, “counter monuments” stresses the move away from tradition German monuments and their “fascist and authoritarian pedigree” (2006, 70).

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ness of the other’s lives”, thus allowing for a course of grief and mourning (2004, 139). Boltanski’s spectral museums of vanished communities offer an important practice of memorialisation for Ugresić, who frequently reminds us about how the annihilation of memory in Yugoslavia functioned in tandem with the destruction of people and social institutions (Ugresić 1996, 5). In an echo of Boltanski, the narrator lists the names, occupations, and physical description of friends. She details stories, anecdotes, chance meetings with Yugoslav migrants and refugees; she reproduces photographs, and childhood memories. Yet Ugresić’s methodology reverses Boltanski’s logic. Boltanski privileges space in order to create an archive that emphasises the absence of human beings. In contrast, if we think back to the Bosnia recreated momentarily in Berlin’s Gustav-Mayer Allee or in the city’s flea-markets, where the narrator can buy the “souvenirs of a vanished daily life…that rubbish heap of time”, the collective memory of Yugoslavia is reproduced in living bodies and discarded objects (Ugresić 1996, 231). The artistic narrative that records, organizes, and so “recyle[s]” these activities and the “human rubbish” of diasporic Yugoslavs in Berlin “achieves the right to prolonged life, to an ironic eternity” (Ugresić 1996, 232). The work of art exhibitions are public memorialisations then, creating symbolic sites of loss that call upon the viewer to participate as witness and vicarious mourner. As the narrator points out in relation to the work of the artist Jochen Gerz, the aim is to create “an unusual monument” by inscribing the memory of the dead onto the physical space of the city (Ugresić 1996, 224): Having discovered that 2146 Jewish graves in Germany had been destroyed, Gerz and [his] students stole paving stones from the main square [and]…inscribed the name and number of a vanished Jewish grave on the bottom of each square, and then put them back in their place. The main square in Saarbrücken acquired a new name: The Square of the Invisible Monument. (Ugresić 1996, 224)

The square, transformed into a public site of testimony, sanctions a form of remembering that mourns the city’s disappeared communities and its traumatic history. Like Boltanski and Gerz, Shimon Attie is another artist referenced in The Museum who takes the Holocaust as his subject; Attie also revisits the past but in order to scrutinize the relations between the lost past and present forms of commemoration. His installation, “Projected Restoring” superimposes photograph slides from the different times of Scheunenviertel, “the once famous Berlin Jewish quarter”, in the attempt to insert “fragments of past life into the visual field of the present” (Ugresić 1996, 164). Attie’s project calls attention to the amnesia of civic spaces; additionally, he also raises the uncomfortable notion that commemoration can be apolitical. Commemoration, in other words, can create a radical divide between past and present, victims and perpetrators, with little room for

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the ambivalent status of bystanders and today’s tourists of trauma. The narrator says of Attie’s exhibition: The visitor gradually noticed that he was turning from an observer into a voyeur, a witness in which in the blank windows of an abandoned building in Oraninenburgstrasse the past suddenly came to life. This hologram effect  – past life penetrating and eating away the surface of the present like a damp patch – filled the observer with painful disquiet. It suddenly seemed that forgetting was another form of remembering, just as remembering was another form of forgetting. (Ugresić 1996, 165)

If the scene above conveys a form of testimony, it also implies complicity – the transformation into a voyeur – as Attie’s viewers, born years after these historical events, either confront or become conscious of the loss of a Jewish community they may have never been aware of in the first place. If, in effect, they grasp the way society easily forgets and obliterates traces of the past, they also become aware how the artificial intrusion of the past into the present generates a sense of haunting, the feeling described by the narrator as “painful disquiet”. This affective unsettlement is an ethical response, one that reminds the viewer to check any uncritical compassion and reconsider her own position, her own fascination with extreme events. In connecting his visitors to Berlin’s traumatic absences, Attie suggests that the ghosts of the past should and do affect future communities. His work on remembrance and disquiet can be linked to the creation of a collective consciousness based on acknowledgement and working through. The issue here is not only one of commemoration, of bearing witness to what the narrator calls the “traces of former life” that would otherwise turn into “the sense of the absence of life”, such as to the Nazi’s mass extirpation of the Jewish community in Berlin, but also of staying vigilant to the recurrence of catastrophic histories (Ugresić 1996, 98). In the light of the Yugoslav wars whose atrocities targeted civilians – from the expulsion of undesired minorities, concentration camps, and mass rapes, to ethnic cleansing and genocidal practices carried out in Bosnia and Croatia – the memory of the Holocaust has a significant didactic role in The Museum, signalling the dangers of the drive towards an ethnically homogenous state. At the same time, the virtual archives produced by Berlin’s artists foreground the role of the spectator and the implicit dangers of voyeurism. Ugresić seems to suggest that we read with an eye to our implication, whether as bystanders, voyeurs, or confederates, in the recurrence of ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, and rape warfare in 1990s Europe. Through the connections that link together artistic endeavours and disparate traumatic histories, the narrator establishes an ethical and political vision that is, at once, a reassertion of a disavowed Yugoslav culture, and a contemplation upon the critical relevance of the institution to cultural life.

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To conclude, The Museum makes available a critical historical consciousness, by reminding us how the “living and the dead, the past and the present” can be fused together into “one, inseparable life” (Ugresić 1996, 160). In her activity of seeing and accumulating objects, the narrator’s virtual museums spring into being, monuments of material pasts that have long since vanished. What we see is the narrator’s ability to construct a legacy from the buried past, by creating a literary and historical archive. In its material form, The Museum constitutes a historical artifact, bearing evidence to a Yugoslav collective memory. In the context of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Ugresić’s literary project pertains to collective efforts towards justice not just because the novel responds to revisionist accounts, but in the way it provides a public record of Yugoslav culture and the traumas suffered. The project of The Museum, however, extends beyond preservation and memorialisation. For, if the narrator’s museum crystallises a memory of a collective Yugoslav culture through the productive dialogism of collective traumatic histories, it also offers her readers an imaginative site that revivifies the Yugoslav community within the present.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. “Towards a Theory of Cultural Trauma.” Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Ed. J. Alexander, et al. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 1–30. Agamben, Giorgio. What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. Trans. D. Kishik and S. Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard, 1999. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic, 2001. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Museums In Late Democracies.” Humanities Research ix.1 (2002): 5–12. Donia, Robert, and John Fine. Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978–79. Trans. G. Burchell. G. Burchell., 2004. London: Palgrave. 2008. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics, 16.1 (1986): 22–27. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Trans. L.A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Hetherington, Kevin. The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering. London: Routledge, 1997. Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

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Santner, Eric. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Seremetakis, C. Nadia. Intersection: Benjamin, Bloch, Braudel, Beyond. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Ed. C.N. Seremetakis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 19–22. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Tomsky, Terri. “From Sarajevo to 9/11: Travelling Memory and the Trauma Economy.” Parallax 17.4 (2011): 49–60. Ugresić, Dubravka. “Balkan Warrior.” The Guardian. 23 Feb. 2008: n. pag. “The Confiscation of Memory.” The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays. Trans. C. Hawkesworth. London: Phoenix, 1998a. 217–35. “The Culture of Lies.” The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays. Trans. C. Hawkesworth. London: Phoenix, 1998b. 66–85. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Trans. C. Hawkesworth. London: Phoenix, 1996. Volčič, Zala. “Yugo-Nostalgia: Cultural Memory and Media in the Former Yugoslavia.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.1 (2007): 21–38. Young, James E. An interview with James E. Young. Hedgehog Review 9.2 (2007): 68–73.

Franziska Meyer

German writers remember 9/11: Katharina Hacker’s The Have-Nots “We might in fact be better off forgetting September 11” Maja Zehfuss

If there is one recent event which was immediately articulated and interpreted within a transnational framework of remembrance then it is “9/11”. Looking at immediate reactions in the US and other Western countries we see the adoption of a limited number of storylines, by the media, writers and artists. In Germany public demands on authors’ ‘duty’ to become engaged¹ and to produce the definitive text about 9/11 resemble the call for the definitive novel about the fall of the wall in 1989 – a call which proved to be far from the literary concerns of most German-speaking authors. The extent to which writers responded to 9/11 with ready-made narratives is remarkable. Most common attempts to comprehend what happened emerge from First World War and Second World War terminology that invokes the assassination of Franz Ferdinand or Pearl Harbour (Dückers 2001). Jonathan Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), sought parallels between New York and the bombing of Dresden in 1944, while Martin Walser (2001) felt reminded of Hiroshima, which he called “the biggest possible historical atrocity”.² W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” was given new prominence when widely broadcast in the US. References to the Second World War were by no means a US phenomenon. “Do we want total war?” (Elfferding, 2001) a German left-wing weekly was entitled, others identified the public mood as being comparable to that of a “Zero Hour” (Schwerfel, 2002). Another popular plot structure was the Holocaust: The French author Frédéric Beigbeder understood the World Trade Center as a “luxury gas chamber” (2003, 334);³ a character in Art Spiegelman’s comic, In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), compared the smell in southern Manhattan with that in Auschwitz; Nikki Moustaki’s (2002) powerful lyrical reply “How to write a poem after September 11th” evoked Theodor W. Adorno’s notion about poetry after Auschwitz. Others turned to another apocalyptic symbol,

1 Michael Politicky (2001) insisted: “The events were a caesura, and it is a duty for anyone with a heart to get involved.” All translations, if not otherwise stated are mine. 2 See also Alison Kelly’s (2009, 56–57) reference to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. 3 For more comprehensive examples, see Ursula Hennigfeld (2009, 189–191).

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devoid of any historical and political context, but useful to define the “bigness” of the event: “one should recall the other defining catastrophe from the beginning of the 20th century”, claimed Slavoj Žižek, “that of Titanic” (2002, 15). Alexander Kluge (2004) also identified in this iceberg-accident “a metaphor, a writing on the wall […] that returned on 9/11”.⁴ And there were those like the Chilean exiled writer Ariel Dorfman (2001a) who warned against the virtual erasure of another 9/11 in public memory, trying to counterbalance a hegemonic media, when they remembered the Chilean military putsch and the US bombardment of Santiago de Chile on 9/11, 1973 – which marked the start of sixteen years of murder and torture of many thousands under a military dictatorship.⁵ A more far-fetched story line, however, to complete these examples, refers to the coincidence of Adorno’s birthday (Mergenthaler 2006). These few examples show that the “cosmopolisation of memory culture” (as Levy and Sznaider refer to it, 2006) and the new (and old) narratives it gives birth to are no less conflicted or contested than any national or local memory discourse.⁶ For his part, a month after the attack, Eliot Weinberger commented that, “One side believes this war began four weeks ago; the other that it is five hundred years old” (2003, 49). Each of these images, plot structures and story lines suggests a specific political perspective on the present. The concept of “multidirectional” memory, with its striving to move beyond memory competitions, opens up productive new routes into an intercultural understanding of other peoples’ suffering and transnational modes of remembering. It thus implies, as Michael Rothberg has argued, the “potential” for “new forms of solidarity” (2009a, 5); however, in light of the dominant narratives attached to the New York catastrophe it is of crucial importance to reflect on implicit hierarchies, established by competing memory discourses. Evocation of memories of the same historical event fulfil different functions and have varied effects in different geographical and political contexts. In the US and western Europe the revived commemoration of certain events during the Second World War – circulated by what Marc Redfield (2007, 61) rightly called a “vast representational and commemorative machine” – were now firmly embedded into 4 See also David Simpson’s critical assessment of the New York Times’ “patriotic monumentum” erected in its “Portraits of Grief”: “The event of 9/11 was, it seems, like the sinking of the Titanic” (2006, 23, 39–40). 5 On Chile and 9/11 as a complex, all-American lieu de mémoire see also Rinke (2008). Schmetterling’s (2006) analysis of filmic counter-narratives has provided me with important ideas for this article and complements in several ways my argument. 6 For an important overview on recent discussions of the problems of a media induced de-territorialization of the Holocaust and its merger with other catastrophies see Sundquist (2007), esp. his useful discussion of Eva Hoffman’s study (2004).

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the story of a nation that claimed victim status. As such it impeded other forms of solidarity with the pain of others, excluding a “common sensing of the vulnerable body”, a “compassion for all victims everywhere”, as David Simpson (2006, 8, 155–156) has requested, in line with Žižek, Judith Butler and several other critical writers While the dead civilians of the WTC offices soon had to take the place of war victims – see New York Archbishop Edward Egan’s notorious reference to ground zero: “but which I call Ground Hero” (quoted in Zehfuss 2003, 518) – the transnational remembrance of atrocities past helped an instant militarisation and nationalisation of discourse and, ideologically, functioned to pave the way to a “war on terror”. Not least the very name given to the site, borrowed from Hiroshima, successfully overwrote other historical stories (and other nations’ and civilians’ war memories, by delocalising and decontextualising them); it dispatched the horrific war crime of 1945 and replaced it with what happened in 2001.⁷ Simpson’s critical intervention that the “dead look different at different times and in different places” (2006, 32), cannot be underscored often enough; the historical limitations and the Euro-American nature of such a narrow repertoire of repeatedly borrowed atrocities from World War Two also prescribed a dangerously gendered politics of commemoration that took, as E. Ann Kaplan noted, a “largely masculine form” (quoted in Kauffman 2009, 651).⁸ And there was another powerful plot structure: the rhetoric of ‘nothing will ever be the same’. The devastating trope of a caesura or an originary creation instantly excluded and effaced other narratives; against the context of a frozen, iconic imagery of the falling (but not fallen) towers, discursive strategies of an “outrageous exceptionalism” (Simpson 2006, 44) functioned as the sine qua non to enforce the public forgetting of any historical and political contexts or pretexts.⁹ In an environment already accustomed to creationist thinking, writers also adopted a rhetorical figure of origin: Paul Auster (2002, 35) proclaimed, “And so the twenty-first century finally begins”; while in Germany, the poet Durs Grünbein announced the “official end of the cold war” (2001, 17).¹⁰

7 See Redfield (2007); on “Pearl Harbor” see also Simpson (2006, 43–44). 8 See also Susan Faludi’s (2008) feminist intervention and discussion of masculinities. 9 For the media production of “empty empathy” and an important consideration of other writers’ perspectives that rightly understood 9/11 as “a repetition of the terrorism that is routine nearly everywhere else” – albeit in the absence of TV cameras – see Kauffman (2009, 650, 657); see also Žižek (2002, 56): “America’s peace was bought by the catastrophes going on elsewhere”. On the “narrative dangers” of a photographic substitution and fixing of events through emptied imagery when producing collective memories of atrocities, see Michael Bernard-Donals (2004, 399). 10 For an analysis of US writers’ critical literary reactions to the event see Kelly (2009).

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To relate to and to remember historical events, concerns less the status of empiricist claims, as Michael Rothberg argues in dialogue with Dirk Moses in this volume, than the perception of simultaneous historical realities and the question who is accorded a voice to express them and, crucially, who is listened to. Whilst Siri Hustvedt (2002, 158–159) recalled other non-European atrocities, like the “Belgian Congo, Cambodia, My Lai, Sarajevo, Rwanda”, and Dorfman (2001b) appealed not to forget “multiple variations of the many September 11ths”, such voices had diminishing chances to be heard in an increasingly violent discursive environment whose commandment was, “you shall have no other September 11ths; should you mention others, they will be secondary to this absolute, toxic punctum: if you wish, say, to refer to Chile, you will have to speak of ‘the other September 11’” (Redfield 2007, 59).¹¹ However, writers’ actual literary replies were far more complex. Several German speaking authors, employing the most diverse aesthetic means, challenged what Susan Sontag (2001) called a “realityconcealing rhetoric”, and belied voices which perceived 9/11 as a terrorist attempt on literary fantasy.¹² To extend the dialogue this volume establishes between Dirk Moses, Michael Rothberg and Terri Tomsky, just as transcultural analysis can challenge what are often nationalised, narcissistic master narratives of remembrance, so the literary texts by Katharina Hacker or the Yugoslav author, Dubravka Ugresić, can reshape public narratives and intervene in hegemonic modes of perceiving and narrating the past. This article intends to show how Katharina Hacker’s award-winning Die Habenichtse intervenes in and offers a counter-memory to supposedly global versions and memories of 9/11. Published in 2006 it won the German Bookprize and immediately became a bestseller (Hacker 2006; The Have-Nots, 2008).¹³ The first part of my analysis will introduce the novel; the second part will suggest that Hacker’s engagement with certain aspects of Walter Benjamin’s understanding

11 So we should remember other post 1945 “name-dates” (Redfield), that implicate different local and national memories of massacre, and people’s unresolved fear, grief and conflict, for example: 12/3 1984 Bhopal; 5/8 1945 Sétif ; 10/2 1968 Tlatelolco; 10/17 1961 Paris. 12 Among others the Syrian exile Rafik Schami (Mit fremden Augen. Tagebuch über den 11. September, den Palästinakonflikt und die arabische Welt, 2002), the East German Kerstin Hensel (with Dagmar Leupold and Marica Bodrožić: 11.9. – 9 11. Bilder des neuen Jahrhunderts, 2002), the West German Ulrich Peltzer (Bryant Park, 2002), and the Austrian Kathrin Röggla (really ground zero. 11. september und folgendes, 2001). Thomas Lehr’s novel September. Fata Morgana (2010), was published after this article was written. Nearly 10  years after the event it confronts in a truly transnational perspective the sorrow of an American and Iraqi father whose daughters fell victim to 9/11 and American war terrorism. See also Reinhäckel (2009); Irsigler (2008); Lorenz (2004). 13 Henceforth all page references to the English version in the text.

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of remembrance helps to throw a different light on the perception of overbearing narratives of catastrophe. Set in Berlin and London, this 9/11 novel refuses to enter New York at all. It follows a heterosexual middle-class couple in their mid thirties to the UK, unfolding a palimpsest of individual stories which touch upon Europe’s fascist and post war history, on Germany after 1989 and the UK after September 2001, on the lives of London Arabs, and British and Hungarian Jews. The novel unfolds a broad social, political and historical horizon. On at least three different time levels Hacker’s text integrates: the mundane everyday life of the inhabitants of one London street; the past with its shattered biographies of those who were split from their former life through persecution, and the cold war; on a larger scale, the global impact of a country preparing for war and the ways that international policies infiltrate the life of the Londoners. The protagonists, Isabelle, a graphic designer, and Jakob, a lawyer, move from Berlin to London in 2003 shortly before the start of the Iraq war. Jakob, who escaped the New York catastrophe by one day and who profits personally from the death of his colleague Robert in the towers, is working for a lawyer’s office that deals with cases of restitution of former Jewish property. In its political references to the most prominent restitution cases which garnered international media attention in 2003 and 2006, the novel also challenges strategies of public forgetting.¹⁴ There is Jakob’s boss, Bentham, who arrived in London on a Kindertransport and who is mourning the untimely death of his boyfriend in an accident. There is Isabelle’s Jewish colleague Andras in Berlin, whose parents sent him from Budapest to West Berlin as a teenager in the early 1980s. Torn between Hungary and Germany, and secretly in love with Isabelle, Andras is puzzled by her “implacable aimlessness” (130). In contrasting the couple’s everyday life with their impoverished North London neighbourhood or London gay culture, Hacker slowly unwraps the listless attitudes of her prosperous protagonists. Class and class divisions are at the centre of this London world – in a milieu of violence, domestic and drug abuse, 25 year old Mae, dependent on narcotics and prescription drugs, vanishes after a brutal knife attack by her jealous boyfriend Jim, a drug dealer. Jim and Isabelle start a kind of affair, and Jakob feels sexually attracted to his boss, Bentham,

14 Such as the restitution of the Seehof plots (201); or of the former Wertheim land in Leipziger Straße/Potsdamer Platz, which is now the Beisheim Center, owned by and named after Otto Beisheim, the former SS man who is suspected of having been a member of Hitler’s Leibstandarte (203). See Köhler (2005) and Padtberg (2005); for the history of the Seehof plots, see “Jewish Family Wins Landmark Legal Battle” (2003).

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while also having an affair with another woman. The reader follows Jim’s desperate search through London for Mae, a woman he fears dead and whose face he had disfigured. Next door to Isabelle and Jakob lives an impoverished family, Dave and his little sister, Sara, who has stopped growing and is locked into the house; mentally disabled and abused, prevented from going to school, Sara is nearly starved by her parents. The stories of these drugdealers, graphic designers, burglars, neglected youngsters and lawyers and their respective entourages are intermingled in a complex way. The Have-Nots is a novel of psychological cruelty and violence, a city novel and a book of mourning. In its broader social perspectives Hacker’s novel is by no means a portrait of “a” generation – as it was labelled in the the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Meller 2006)  – nor does it contribute to the German literary memorial boom of the family novel or “turn toward the domestic” (Rothberg 2009b, 153–155), as was a tendency in US post 9/11 fiction. While Hacker’s Have-Nots are shown as not in command of their own “strangely lifeless” (54) biographies, the text never loses sight of the fact that there are other horizons beyond the world (views) of its main protagonists. Hacker’s narrative refuses to privilege one particular perspective; the text coerces its diverse characters into collision (even though they do not necessarily meet) via chance encounters or attacks on the streets: peeping on London’s cruising grounds, confronting neighbours, or eavesdropping on each other. While some characters move into focus to take centre stage, others, though present and looking on, retreat into the background (for which one critic compared the text to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio). These mutual perceptions of each other are often in sharp contrast, and can have a disturbing effect as the narrative ‘forces’ the reader into a constantly shifting point of view. Hacker’s cartographies of London and Berlin point to unremarkable corners of the cities Berlin Schöneberg, Kentish Town, and Kings Cross (the latter already associated with catastrophe, the tube fire in 1987, and London’s so-called 7/7 – where the bombers arrived). These mundane perspectives remain strictly at street level and offer no guidance or control to their city walkers. Hacker’s London streets are places of sudden encounters, where people lose their way; they are spaces of attack and the unexpected but also of boredom and uncanniness. The often empty streets produce lonely and faint figures, standing in the distance, waving towards somewhere, a waving that is only noticed but not responded to. 9/11 is at best tangible only at the narrative’s margins. Its horrific geopolitical consequences, on the other hand, provide a constant backdrop. Mae, lying crying at home, is haunted not by the infinite loop of fixed television imagery of 9/11, but by the aftermath of the planes’ impact. Hacker’s text is taking time and giving space to Mae’s own imagination of the actual people,

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she could still see the dead people and the live ones jumping from the windows into the abyss, she could hear their screams, she could hear what the people trapped in the lifts and the corridors were saying. […] how could we not have known that they hated us from the depths of their souls? (34)¹⁵

The Iraq war is imminent and state anti-terrorist measures complement the everyday racism against non-white Arabic-looking Londoners. The novel thus unites the falling people from the towers and the victims of American bombs  – like the “human sacrifices hobbling on the stumps of their legs around Baghdad or New York” (268). Hacker’s text oscillates between the everyday that is happening before Isabelle’s and Jakob’s eyes, and global politics; the Have-Nots only respond to the latter, expressing vague feelings of an amorphous lurking danger: How quiet it is on a Sunday, Isabelle said to Jakob, […] the whole city is so peaceful. Jakob nodded, but they were just passing one of the CCTV cameras: this was the new Europe, subject to surveillance, prepared and counting the days, Jakob thought […]. Were they safe? […] The threat was just another charade like Bush on his war ship. (226)

Not knowing what is going on, caught in an atmosphere of political hysteria, insecurity and disbelief, but above all caught in their mindsets of incessant indecision, of “maybes” and “perhapses”, Hacker’s protagonists stop short of exploration or engagement. The ongoing abuse of the neighbours’ daughter is only perceived by Isabelle as “something [that] was hurled against the wall”, while she stares in horror: Perhaps there was a thin voice making a humming sound, but perhaps it was some other sound. From outside, far away, an aircraft, a small aircraft on its approach to somewhere. No fire engine came around the corner, nothing happened. A door slammed. Isabelle switched on the radio. Desert Storm, you couldn’t see a yard in front of you, and so all traces were obliterated, “embedded journalism” was the buzzword, but you still didn’t get to know what was going on. (173–174)

The brutal, and only direct, encounter that the little girl Sara has with her German neighbour forms one of the key scenes, at the end of which the girl is forgotten and left to fend for herself all night in the garden. Sara’s single escape from the house, in search of her cat, exposes her to Isabelle’s gaze from a window into a garden that “was strewn with rubbish and old toys, the terrace cluttered with beer bottles and kitchen equipment […] Detritus, bags crammed with waste, and 15 On the perception and politics of time and counter-narratives, that aimed to pay tribute to the “realtime qualities of the deaths of those in the towers” in contrast to media versions of a “cartoonlike immediacy of the collapsing towers”, see also Simpson (2006, 102).

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the child was shamming dead, like an animal” (252). The scene unfolds the most mundane catastrophe of negligence and indifference: “This could be anywhere, [Isabelle] thought, Bosnia, Baghdad, it was always the obverse of her own life” (254). Her “eye rested without sympathy on the bare strip of childish flesh. […] What a farce, thought Isabelle, how stupid of me to get involved” (252, 255). Sara is left in “speechless horror” (252) and literally in a pile of debris, this encounter having belied her hopes when they moved into their new flat: “Everything will be different now” (11), she is told in the opening sentence of the novel by her brother Dave, in a clear comment on 9/11 discourse. A comment it is, but one which only undermines this very figure of speech, pointing 250 pages later at the permanence of Sara’s damaged life, which is governed by neglect and broken promises.¹⁶ Andras in Berlin refers dryly to other historical continuities: “Do you remember”, he writes to Isabelle in London, “what Bush said, that nothing is the way it was? Heerstrasse does not seem to have changed since the thirties, nor does the woodland cemetery. All unchanged” (217–218). In a wealth of intertextual references Hacker pays respect to a certain (humanist) tradition of engaged German post war writing, replying to Uwe Johnson (220) and Marie Luise Kaschnitz (213). There are references to Bertolucci and Shakespeare as well as Shaw’s Pygmalion and Günter Grass’s Tin Drum. However, Mae, the object of her boyfriend’s rage, who has taken to the streets of London to sell flowers, will not grow accustomed to her mutilated face. Here, in Hackers’ London streets, the romanticised character of the poor flower girl is giving way to a “gaunt” bearer of a marked face, who suddenly appears in Isabelle’s way: “fiery red, ugly […] branded by the viciousness that ruined human faces. But perhaps it was an accident, Isabelle thought” (198). Nor could Sara, the little girl who does not grow and who is used as a human drum by her father, ever qualify here, in Hacker’s arrangement, to take the narrative stage: forgotten and speechless as they are, these distorted figures are waiting to be seen and recognized. To be seen and recognized: it is in this constellation that Hacker’s novel enters into dialogue with Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s hunchback – das Bucklicht Männlein –, his “prototype of distortion” (Benjamin 2005, 811),¹⁷ populates Hacker’s text to remind these Have-Nots of things forgotten: “Whoever is looked at by this little man pays no attention”, says Benjamin: “Either to himself or to the little man. He stands dazed before a heap of fragments” (Benjamin 2006, 121). We find this uncanningly watching dwarf in Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood, in On the

16 But see Fromholzer (2008). 17 The literature on Benjamin is vast; my argument owes many stimuli to Fioretis (1995), Santner (2006), and Thielen (2005).

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Concept of History and in his essays on Kafka.¹⁸ Here, in the novel it is Sara, who takes the place of the un-recognised dwarf, while the Have-Nots are passing by, trying “to evade that insistent stare” (252). On Isabelle’s arrival in London Jakob “was relieved that outside […] the little girl had not appeared, hunchback-like, creepy”. And later he is only happy to “stop thinking about the neighbours’ little girl, whose pale face he found so disturbing: his route between home and the office was different now, no hunchback popping up, and his life was that of a married man” (trans. modified 134, 137). Little Sara is for Jim “an ugly little thing with stubborn eyes”, whom he “must get away from” (267), who serves as a messenger from the realm of oblivion – evoking uncanny reminders of “something mean”, like the “girl in the red coat” in “that film Don’t Look Now” (252). Isabelle’s exit from the theatre where she has seen King Lear is “intercepted […] by the Fool, a short, grim-faced man, […] muttering, muttering, standing close behind her, for she could not run away, she wanted to go ahead but did not dare” (192). And as the fool in Lear reminds the King of that which he should know but which he wilfully ignores, here the disturbing presence of Hacker’s distorted figures serve as a creepy and urgent reminder of a past that is not relieved – obstructing Isabelle’s and the other Have-Nots’ way into the future. “The little hunchback, too, is something that has been forgotten, something we once used to know; he was then at peace with himself, but now he blocks our way to the future”, writes Benjamin (2005, 499). To read Hacker’s novel against Benjamin proves productive in several ways (Fromholzer 2008; Apel 2006). The text zooms into the apathetic lives of her wealthy protagonists who refuse, in Benjamin’s sense, the attentiveness for the broken and violated biographies that surround them. In an article in honour of her friend Saul Friedländer (and his award of the Peace Price of the German book trade), Hacker referred to Benjamin’s “Angel of History” and stressed the importance of Benjamin for her work. Respect, caution, care and tenderness¹⁹ – these attitudes Hacker attributed to the work of Friedländer. Respect, caution, care and attentiveness – which Benjamin ascribes to Kafka (2005, 812) – are also at the center of Hacker’s poetics of remembering. At stake are forgetfulness, guilt and negligence. Hacker exposes her characters to an environment where their tiny deeds do not go unnoticed but are carefully registered. “But everything is recorded, whether anybody knows about it or not – and I saw you”, Jim, the drug dealer, confronts Isabelle, after she has disposed of Sara’s cat in a gesture of “fury and disgust”, and has “slammed the window shut and 18 The figure of the hunchback stems from a children’s poem, collected by the German romantics, Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano in Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1808); but there is of course a far older tradition. See Haider (2003). 19 “Achtung, Behutsamkeit, Sorge und Zärtlichkeit” (Hacker 2007).

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turned away” (278). The strength of Hacker’s text lies in its attention to minute detail, in her microanalysis of human encounters and fractures in the everyday. The emphasis on the quotidian may lead the reader to see similarities with Ian McEwan’s 9/11 London novel, Saturday. But The Have-Nots’ multidirectional perspectives and gender politics, and its exposure of everyday male violence against female bodies in contrast to Saturday’s sensationalist event that closes the novel (which is almost inevitably a rape scene) set the politics of the two novels apart. If it is elsewhere so extremely loud, the slow medium of literature can provide other portraits of grief, and a counter-narrative to the big storylines which govern hegemonic strategies of public remembering. Again, it is productive to borrow from Benjamin’s aesthetics of the concrete, which is first and foremost an aesthetics of recognition. In calling for attentiveness, and an aesthetics that strives for the recognizability of the pain of others, Hacker’s novel forms part of a broader transcultural tendency of an aesthetics of remembrance and commitment that suggests a decisive change in perspective. In taking longer, slower and closer views, these literary texts repudiate complicity with rhetorical constructions of “turning points in history” or universalising versions of catastrophes. In so doing, they provoke a different way of seeing that allows engagement and empathy, connecting the reader to an ethical dimension of transculturality that David Simpson outlined in his powerful plea for “Taking Time” (2006, 1–20).²⁰ This aesthetics of commitment takes the reader into a past which Benjamin called a construction site, a past which holds as yet undetected encounters with people who are looking at us and have not been seen yet. By inviting us to turn our gazes towards them this narrative strategy draws Hacker closer to claims for a transcultural, anti-national politics of remembrance and the interconnectedness of similar situations of suffering, made by authors and artists as geographically disparate as the Asian, Arundhati Roy, the Europeans, Christian Boltanski, José Saramago, Claudio Magris, or Dubravka Ugresić, or the Latin American, Ariel Dorfman. When receiving the Peace Price of the German book trade in 2009, the Italian author Claudio Magris referred to 9/11 as part of a linear tendency which connected the “bloodbath in Biafra” with the “disaster in Bhopal” and advocated the “greatest possible dialogue” with others. Referring to his government’s treatment of African refugees Magris spoke of the duty to remember violence and its victims, by calling on writers’ responsibility not to become complicit in killing victims a second time by forgetting them (Magris 2009a, 75; 2009b). For his part the Portug20 For the increasing impact of transcultural terminology on recent literary studies see SchulzeEngler’s insightful introduction (Schulze-Engler and Sissy Helff 2008, 10–17).

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ese writer José Saramago embedded the horror of the individual dying at the twin towers into a globalised, transcultural, but anti-national remembrance of horrific deaths inflicted on people by war and torture (Saramago 2001).²¹ This is reminiscient of Christian Boltanski’s projects of retrieval of the dead in which the French artist directs our gaze to tiny traces of things usually unnoticed and forgotten, but which point harrowingly at people being absent. “Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins”, says Benjamin (2003, 390). “And the dead people that we’ve forgotten”, replies Hacker’s Mae, “they’re calling us” (34). Hacker’s novel seeks another stark affiliation to Benjamin’s Angel and his concept of messianic time. Throughout the novel, we are shown how her HaveNots fail to seize hold of the things that matter, or in Benjamin’s words, to gain the “true picture of the past” (2003, 390). Indecisive as they are, the Have-Nots – whose sense of the future is as empty as their present  – find themselves confronted by an ever growing past, “like an unwelcome guest”: “like an old cat […] grown to an inordinate size […] sprawling gigantically on the table or the bed […] that would have driven one away if only one had known where to go” (220). However, in an instant that interrupts their empty present, there appears a hint of something that might be grasped, before it “threatens to disappear irretrievably” (Benjamin 2003, 390). Jim, Jakob and Isabelle are repeatedly overcome by sudden flashes of light, which “cut across the placid succession of things” (195): “Wasn’t there a tiny crack opening up there, a shift that provoked unease and curiosity […]?”, Isabelle is “thinking intently, as if she needed to discover what it was that had revealed itself for an instant” (195). And Jim’s “desperation […] was no more than a fine crack and then suddenly hurt, like a knife […] cutting out memory. […] In that crack there was always a light too, a dazzling brightness” (117). While Jim fails to “grab”, what is “only a hand’s breadth away from him” (269), Jakob “almost collided with somebody whose light-colored anorak came out of nowhere with the suddenness of a flash bulb going off, making Jakob blink, and the man hissed something with such venom that he was momentarily alarmed” (127). Momentarily, in the blink of an eye, Hacker’s characters are close to seeing – or making – a difference. In its attention to small things and what Benjamin once called the “tiny, fragile human body” (2002, 144), the text’s perspective focuses on cracks and gaps, which carry the potential to make all the difference: This ‘it should be otherwise’ – Benjamin’s “weak Messianic power” (Benjamin 2003, 390) lies dormant around the distorted lives the novel presents – if only “slight adjustments” were made. The hunchback, Benjamin writes, “[t]his little man is at home in distorted life; he will disappear with the coming of the Messiah, who (a 21 On the exchange of glances in solidarity cf also Saramago’s blog “Kissing Names”, 12 March 2009 (Saramago 2010, 196).

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great rabbi once said) will not wish to change the world by force but will merely make a slight adjustment in it” (Benjamin 2005, 811). In contrast to the caesura announced so portentously at the time of 9/11, Hacker’s text is at pains to show the slight and fleeting ways that the past can interrupt the present. Writing against the confiscation of memories, Hacker and the Yugoslav Dubravka Ugresić share many similarities. Their texts transcend notions of discrete cultures. In their perspectives on dislocation, their attentiveness to other histories, and their creation of other, often unnoticed, mnemonic spaces, both Ugresić and Hacker rupture – in a Benjaminian sense, and in the words of Tomsky – “the continuum of historical forgetfulness” (see p. 194 in this volume). In so doing they create a new, literary space of transcultural “differentiated solidarity” (Michael Rothberg in dialogue with Dirk Moses). Hacker’s novel redirects attention to the distorted ‘others’, insisting on the interconnectedness of simultaneous realities. In refusing totalising reflexes of a collective “We”, this literary response to 9/11 insists that we can remember differently.

References Apel, Friedmar. “Erinnerung und Vergessen bei Saul Friedländer und Katharina Hacker.” Das Gedächtnis der Literatur. Konstitutionsformen des Vergangenen in der Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Ed. Alo Allkemper and Norbert Otto Eke. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2006, 176–182. Auster, Paul. “Random Notes – September 11, 2001, 4.00 P.M.; Underground.” 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11. Ed. Ulrich Baer. New York: New York University Press, 2002. 34–36. Beigbeder, Frédéric. Windows on the World. Paris: Grasset, 2003. Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller”. Selected Writings III (1935–1938). Ed. M.W.Jennings, Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. 143–166. Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History”, Selected Writings IV (1938–1940). Ed. Howard Eiland, M.W. Jennings, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. 389–400. Benjamin, Walter. “Franz Kafka. On the tenth anniversary of his death.” Selected Writings II (1931–1934). Ed. M.W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. 794–818. Benjamin, Walter. “Franz Kafka: Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer.” Selected Writings II. 494–500. Benjamin, Walter. Berlin Childhood around 1900; tr. Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass., London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. Bernard-Donals, Michael. “Forgetful Memory and Images of the Holocaust.” College English 66.4 (2004): 380–402.

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Dorfman, Ariel. “America Suffers the World’s Pain: Unique No More.” counterpunch, 3rd October 2001a. Dorfman, Ariel. “America Looks at Itself through Humanity’s Mirror.” Los Angeles Times, 21st September 2001b; http://www.unc.edu/depts/pfn/17sep2001/dorfman.pdf (28 August 2009). Dückers, Tanja. “Die USA nach dem 11. September. Die Utopia sinkt.” Jungle World 52, 19th December 2001. Elfferding, Wieland. “Wollen wir den totalen Krieg? Über das Neue und das Alte nach dem 11. September 2001.” Freitag, 28th September 2001. Faludi, Susan, The Terror Dream: What 9/11 Revealed about America. London: Atlantic Books, 2008. Fioretis, Aris. “Contraction (Benjamin, Reading, History).” MLN 110.3 (1995): 540–564. Fromholzer, Franz. “Unerbittlich ziellos? Messianische Zeit in Katharina Hackers Die Habenichtse.” New German Review 23 (2008): 99–115. Grünbein, Durs. “Die ungeheuere Belästigung. Ein Gespäch mit den Schriftstellern Durs Grünbein und Thomas Meinecke.” Literaturen 12 (2001). 12–19. Hacker, Katharina. Die Habenichtse. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2006; Hacker, Katharina. The Have-Nots; tr. Helen Atkins. New York: Europa Editions, 2008. Hacker, Katharina. “Kein Engel hält inne. Für Saul, den Friedenspreisträger.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20th June 2007. Haider, Frithjof. Verkörperungen des Selbst: das bucklige Männlein als Übergangsphänomen bei Clemens Brentano, Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2003. Hennigfeld, Ursula. “9/11 als neuer Holocaust? Frédéric Beigbeders Roman Windows on the World.” 9/11 als kulturelle Zäsur: Repräsentationen des 11. September 2001 in kulturellen Diskursen, Literatur und visuellen Medien. Ed. Sandra Poppe, Thorsten Schüller and Sascha Seiler. Bielefeld: Transskript, 2009. 183–199. Hoffman, Eva. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. Hustved, Siri. “World Trade Center.” 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11. Ed. Ulrich Baer. New York: New York University Press, 2002. 158–159. Irsigler, Ingo. Ed. Nine Eleven: ästhetische Verarbeitungen des 11. September 2001. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. “Jewish Family Wins Landmark Legal Battle.” Deutsche Welle, 27th November 2003; http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,3367,1432_A_1043769_1_A,00.htm (3 September 2009). Johnson, Dennis Loy and Valerie Merians, eds. Poetry After 9/11. An Anthology of New York Poets. Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2002. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Kauffman, Linda S. “World Trauma Center.” American Literary History 21.3 (2009): 647–659. Kelly, Alison. “’Words Fail Me’: Literary Reactions to 9/11.” 21: A Journal of Contemporary and Innovative Fiction 1 (2009): 49–80; http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/documents/english/21/ issue1/Alison Kelly.pdf (29 April 2010). Kluge, Alexander. “Im Gespräch. Unterscheidungsvermögen ist das Metier der Autoren.” Freitag, 16th January 2004 (Interviewer: Mathias Heybrock). Köhler, Otto. “Die Wertheim-Geschichte.” Freitag, 11th March 2005.

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Levy, Daniel and Natan Sznaider. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Tr. Assenka Oksiloff. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. Lorenz, Matthias N. Ed. Narrative des Entsetzens. Künstlerische, mediale und intellektuelle Deutungen des 11. September 2001. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004. Magris, Claudio. Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels. Peace Prize of the German Book Trade 2009. Claudio Magris. Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung. Conferment Speeches. Frankfurt a.M.: MVB, 2009a. Magris, Claudio. “Friedenspreis Buchhandel: Claudio Magris in Conversation with Christina Weiss”. Deutschlandradio, 17th October 2009b. Meller, Marius. “Onkel Henry war einfach zu gut.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 28th December 2006. Mergenthaler, Volker. “Celan wieder(ge)holt. Zur poetischen Produktivmachung kultureller Tradition in Max Goldts ‘Tagebuch-Buch’ ‘Wenn man einen weißen Anzug anhat’.” Trans. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, 16th August 2006; http://www.inst.at/ trans/16Nr/02_1/mergenthaler16.html (7 August 2009). Moustaki, Nikki. “How to write a poem after September 11th”. Ed. Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians. Poetry After 9/11. An Anthology of New York Poets. Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2002. 95–96. Padtberg, Carola. “Bayerisches Gymnasium. Otto Beisheim lässt Millionenspende platzen.” Spiegel online, 11th November 2005;http://www.spiegel.de/ schulspiegel/0,1518,384419,00.htm (3 September2009). Politicky, Michael. “Simplifizierer und Schubladianer. Es schlägt die Stunde des erhobenen Zeigefingers: Brauchen wir nach dem 11. September wirklich eine andere deutsche Literatur?” die tageszeitung, 27th October 2001. Redfield, Marc. “Virtual Trauma: The Idiom of 9/11.” diacritics 37.1 (2007): 55–80. Reinhäckel, Heide. “Literarische Schauplätze deutscher 9/11-Romane.” 9/11 als kulturelle Zäsur: Repräsentationen des 11. September 2001 in kulturellen Diskursen, Literatur und visuellen Medien. Ed. Sandra Poppe, Thorsten Schüller, Sascha Seiler. Bielefeld: Transskript, 2009. 121–138. Rinke, Stefan. “Der 11. September als komplexer Erinnerungsort.” Lateinamerika Jahrbuch 32 (2008): 76–87. Rothberg, Michael R. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Rothberg, Michael R. “A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray.” American Literary History 21.1 (2009b): 152–158. Santner, Eric. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Saramago, José. “Im Namen Gottes ist das Schrecklichste erlaubt.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 21st September 2001. Saramago, José. Das Tagebuch. Mit einem Vorwort von Umberto Eco. Tr. Marianne Gareis and Karin von Schweder-Schreiner. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2010. Schmetterling, Astrid. “Encounters at the Site of Trauma. 11’09”01 – September 11: A Film by 11 Directors.” Third Text 20.5 (2006): 561–570. Schulze-Engler, Frank and Sissy Helff (eds). Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities. (Cross/Cultures, Vol.102). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Schwerfel, Heinz P. “Ground Zero und Stunde Null.“ Kunst nach Ground Zero. Ed. Heinz P. Schwerfel. Cologne: Dumont, 2002. 9–13.

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Simpson, David. 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Sontag, Susan. “Talk of the Town.” The New Yorker, 24th September 2001. Sundquist, Eric J. “Witness without End?” American Literary History 19.1 (2007): 65–85. Thielen, Helmut. Eingedenken und Erlösung. Walter Benjamin. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005. Walser, Martin. “Der 11. September erinnert mich an Hiroschima.” Spiegel Online, 12th October 2001; http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/0,1518,162062,00.html (14 August 2010). Weinberger, Eliot. 9/12. New York After. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Zehfuss, Maja. “Forget September 11.” Third World Quarterly 24.3 (2003): 513–528. Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London: Verso, 2002.

Dirk Göttsche

Cross-cultural Memoryscapes: Memory of Colonialism and its Shifting Contexts in Contemporary German Literature Postcolonial critique has established the transnational and cross-cultural dynamic of colonialism, which transformed both the “South” and the “North”, albeit in very different ways. Memory of colonialism (in both hemispheres) thus has a cross-cultural dimension and transcultural potential. In the contemporary world of global migration and multiple interaction across continuing asymmetries in power and wealth, collective memory is increasingly part of a complex matrix of often transnational memory discourses, as suggested by Michael Rothberg (2009) for post-war interaction between Holocaust memory and memory of colonialism. Postcolonial memory cuts across both national and cultural boundaries and, certainly in the German context, intersects with other memory discourses, such as those concerned with National Socialism or more recently the Wende, the demise of the German Democratic Republic. At the same time, postcolonial memory in the mainstream of contemporary German literature, hence from a European perspective, differs significantly from memory of colonialism in African migrants’ writing in German, which represents, in one way or another, the “postmemory” (Hirsch, 1997) of those whose societies were previously subjected to European colonial rule. Postcolonial memory in the literature of Africans who write in German for both German and African diasporic readers is transcultural by definition, while the rediscovery of colonialism in contemporary German mainstream literature is firmly rooted in Germany’s culture of memory and may or may not develop transcultural potential. A third strand of postcolonial memory discussed in this study can be seen in Black German literature, which, although linked in many ways to literature of African migration, has developed its own traditions and its own cross-cultural memoryscapes, which interact with German as well as transatlantic memory discourses.¹

1 The neutral term “cross-cultural” is used in this chapter as a general term for encounters and experiences of individuals from different cultural backgrounds as well as an umbrella term for relevant literary motifs. Not all cross-cultural experience produces a transcultural dynamic in terms of the transcultural theory outlined in the introduction to this volume; not all crosscultural themes in literature adhere to a transcultural poetics. Indeed, cross-cultural themes in contemporary German literature often continue to work along the lines of the intercultural discourse that dominated German cultural debate and research into the 1990s. For a discussion of the relationship between intercultural and postcolonial discourse in literary studies see Uerlings

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By considering engagement with the cross-cultural dimension of colonialism in historical novels about Africa since the 1990s as well as memory of colonialism and its legacies in African migrants’ writing in German and Black German literature since the 1980s, this chapter will explore how contemporary literature in German addresses the transcultural potential of postcolonial memory. Such engagement has seen significant development during the past thirty years. At the same time, interaction between postcolonial memory and other memory discourses, such as those concerned with National Socialism, the Wende, or traumatic experience of African civil war, illustrates the shifting politics of literary memory in the contemporary world of polycentric memorial cultures with transnational frames of reference.

1 Memory of Colonialism in Historical Novels about Africa While German colonial history was by no means forgotten in West German postwar literature and criticism (see Albrecht 2008), the dominant role of National Socialism in Germany’s memorial culture and the early end of her colonial empire in 1918 made it a less prominent theme (see Zantop 1997, 5), until left-wing writers and critics began to engage more consistently with anti-colonial theory and Third World politics during the mid-1960s, preparing the ground for postcolonial awareness in contemporary German literature. Despite earlier examples such as Ferdinand May’s East German novel Sturm über Südwest-Afrika: Eine Erzählung aus den Tagen des Hereroaufstandes (Storm over South-West Africa: A Story from the Days of the Herero Uprising; 1962), it was West German writer Uwe Timm’s Morenga (1978) about Germany’s subsequent colonial war against the Nama in South-West Africa that played a pioneering role for the literary rediscovery of German colonialism and for the integration of critical postcolonial memory in the matrix of German memory discourses. In ways which are typical of literary engagement with German colonial history during the post-war decades, Morenga cross-references the memory of Germany’s colonialism with memory of National Socialism and emerging memorialization of “1968” and the student rebellion against Western capitalism and imperialism (see Albrecht 2006; Göttsche 2010b). Although Timm’s Morenga is now considered a modern classic and a benchmark for critical memory of German colonialism, it took almost another twenty 2006; for a critical discussion of the terminological field and of Welsch’s theory of transculturalism see Göttsche 2013a, chapter 2.

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years before the colonial theme attracted wider attention. Literary engagement with colonialism remained rare until the 1990s, when perpetrators, victims and witnesses of German colonial rule had all but passed away and fuller development of the “postcolonial gaze” (Lützeler 1997) in conjunction with new popular interest in Africa (see Göttsche 2003a) set the scene for the emergence of wider literary memory of German involvement in European colonialism and of Germany’s own colonial history. Factors that help to explain both this delay and the rise of colonialism as a popular literary theme since the mid-1990s include the multicultural diversification of German society since the 1980s, the cultural changes effected by the Green and One World movements combined with the impacts of increasing global migration and mobility; the growing significance of transnational lives and transcultural families; the reassessment of German national history in the wake of unification; and the unprecedented prominence of colonial memory since 2004, when the centenary of Germany’s colonial war in Namibia and the genocide of the Herero in 1904 first placed German colonialism on the map of political commemoration and extensive cultural debate.² In this wider context a growing number of historical novels promote German postcolonial memory, which now goes well beyond selective critical awareness of Germany’s colonial history during the post-war period. Focussing largely on Africa, writers address a range of colonial themes from the European “exploration” of Africa and the history of the Christian missions, through Germany’s colonial wars and anti-colonial resistance, to German settlement and colonial life, the history of colonial culture and ideology, and domestic repercussions of colonial imperialism (see Göttsche 2003b, 2011, 2013a). Some novels, such as Alex Capus’s Munzinger Pascha (1997), Hans Christoph Buch’s Kain und Abel in Afrika (2001) and Christof Hamann’s Usambara (2007), alternate between two interlinking plots, set in the colonial period and in the present day respectively, to highlight the continuing relevance of the colonial past; others, such as Brigitte Beil’s Maskal oder das Ende der Regenzeit (Maskal or the End of the Rainy Season, 2003), Andrea Paluch’s and Robert Habeck’s Der Schrei der Hyänen (The Cry of the Hyaenas, 2004) or Stephan Wackwitz’s Ein unsichtbares Land (An Invisible Country, 2003), use family history to put colonial history back on the map of German cultural memory. Some novels, such as Hermann Schulz’s Auf dem Strom (On the River, 1998), Jens Johannes Kramer’s Die Stadt unter den Steinen (The City Under the Rocks, 2000) and Thomas Stangl’s Der einzige Ort (The One and Only Place, 2004), follow Timm’s Morenga in advancing specifically postcolonial politics of memory. They challenge European accounts of colonial history,

2 See for example Melber (2005); Hobuß/Lölke (2007); Conrad (2008, 119–124).

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represent Africans as individuals of equal value and history, and undercut – often ironically – the stereotypes of colonial perception and ideology. Often inspired by the authors’ own cross-cultural experiences, novels such as these thus also work towards transcultural memory of colonialism. Many other texts, however, cater for renewed popular fascination with the (now distant) colonial age, echoing the highly problematic re-enactment of colonial life and thought in popular television and film productions (see Struck 2010, 271–308). Gerhard Seyfried’s Herero (2003), for example, takes mimicry of colonial thought and language to the point where critical detachment is left to the reader, and novels such as Rolf Ackermann’s Die weiße Jägerin (The White Huntress, 2005), Ray Müller’s Ein Traum von Africa (A Dream of Africa, 2007), or Ilona Maria Hilliges’s Sterne über Afrika (Stars Above Africa, 2007), while all including explicit criticism of colonial rule and racism, return to casting Africa as the exotic space of European adventure and Europeans as mentors of African development. Despite cross-cultural motifs there is little evidence here of trancultural extensions and challenges to German colonial memory. Almost all writers focus on German or European experiences of colonial Africa; African characters are often little more than part of the exotic setting, tools of European cultural criticism or personifications of contemporary visions of cross-cultural partnership, projected back into the colonial past. Hilliges’s Sterne über Afrika, for example, envisages collaboration between traditional African and modern European medicine, represented by a traditional African healer and the protagonist, a young female German doctor, who share their very different medical knowledge for the benefit of East Africa’s population on both sides of the colonial divide – a vision of mutual respect and equal partnership which is clearly informed by contemporary rather than colonial concerns. Although stretching historical credibility, Sterne über Afrika is typical of the narrative foregrounding of German cross-cultural experience in colonial Africa as a literary device which reflects awareness of the transcultural dimension of colonialism and growing interest in the African experience of colonial history and legacy. Set against the backdrop of contemporary multiculturalism and facilitated by the lack of a German postcolonial literature of equal standing as anglophone, francophone or Spanish world literature, cross-cultural experience has therefore become very much a leitmotif in the literary memory of colonialism. In Timm’s Morenga, for example, the protagonist’s engagement with local African culture and language is part of a cross-cultural learning process, which is crucial to the novel’s critique of colonialism and helps to mediate between colonial thought and critical postcolonial awareness. Schulz’s Auf dem Strom takes its protagonist through a series of encounters with distinct East African cultures and instances of cultural hybridisation in colonial space, which unsettle the colonial sense of

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European cultural superiority along with European narratives of colonial control: British colonial rule in former German East Africa is shown to be patchy and vulnerable during the 1930s, while Africans are presented as agents of their own history rather than helpless victims of colonialism. Developing such literary interest in cross-cultural experience further, two significant recent historical novels about German colonialism  – Alex Capus’s Eine Frage der Zeit (A Matter of Time, 2007) and Hans Christoph Buch’s Sansibar Blues oder Wie ich Livingstone fand (Zanzibar Blues, or How I Found Livingstone, 2008) – illustrate very different ways of engaging with the African voice in the memory of colonialism. While Capus continues in Timm’s tradition of very limited and cautious representation of African experiences and perspectives  – not least for fear of appropriating and patronizing the other  – Buch’s attempt at multiperspective transcultural memory of colonialism marks a new departure in the history of recent historical novels about German colonialism. Only East German authors, such as Ferdinand May and Dietmar Beetz, writing on the basis of Marxist universalism, have previously remembered colonialism through African characters and their transcultural experiences; but this tradition came to an end with the demise of the German Democratic Republic (see Hermes 2009; Göttsche 2010b). The only other example that I am aware of is Die schweigenden Feuer: Roman der Herero (The Silent Fires: Novel of the Herero, 1994) by German-Namibian writer Giselher W. Hoffmann, published by the Peter Hammer Verlag, a renowned specialist publisher of Latin American and African literature in German translation. This novel chronicles Herero history from 1861 to 1905, from the arrival of the first European traders and missionaries to the aftermath of the Herero genocide in 1904, which the novel’s melancholy perspective marks as the end of Herero history rather than as a German colonial atrocity that has since become the central subject of Herero remembrance and part of Namibia’s memory of anti-colonial resistance (see Förster et  al. 2004; Melber 2005). This tragic construction of Herero history follows in the tradition of German post-war anti-colonialism, while the novel’s transcultural poetics of memory  – the protagonist and first-person narrator is a Herero symbolically called Himeezembi (“I will not forget”; Hoffmann 1994, 443)³ – alerts German readers to the African experience of colonialism and the complexities of African history. As a historical novel about African history, narrated from an African perspective, but written by a member of the German minority in contemporary Namibia for a readership in German-speaking Europe, Die schweigenen Feuer undercuts facile distinctions

3 All translations from the German are my own, except where translations are listed in the bibliography.

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between African and German memory of colonialism and illustrates the complexity and richness of contemporary postcolonial memoryscapes. By contrast, Capus’s second novel about colonial Africa, Eine Frage der Zeit, focuses almost entirely on the literary critique of European colonial thought and practice. This is a highly ironic critique of European colonial imperialism based on a marginal episode from World War I, “The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika”, as British author Giles Foden calls it in the subtitle of his novel on the same theme, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth (2004). The German strand of Capus’s novel tells the story of the steamer Graf Götzen, which the Wilhelmine Reich commissioned from the Papenburg shipyard in 1913 to secure military hegemony in central Africa. The disassembled steamer was shipped to East Africa and taken to Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika by train. However, reassembly could not be completed in time for full deployment at the onset of the war. Capus presents the anticlimax of this colonial adventure, the deliberate sinking of the ship to prevent it being used by the British, as highlighting “the absurdity of the colonial world” (Capus 2008). The point is reinforced by the parallel British story of preposterous marine officer Geoffrey Spicer Simson, who succeeds in transporting two small gun boats from London across South Africa and the Belgian Congo to the Eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika in order to reclaim military superiority for the British Empire – again without ultimate success. One aspect of the novel’s indictment of colonial adventure, violence and racism is a counter-strand to its imperial plot, which acknowledges African humanity, intelligence and resistance and exposes colonial rule as weak. This challenge to colonial narratives is represented symbolically by Masai prince Mkenge, who devises highly successful sabotage of the steamer’s reconstruction and defies colonial hierarchies by publicly confronting the German Lieutenant Commander as one of equal or indeed inferior rank: “I’m an equally high-ranking leader as you are. If not more” (Capus 2007, 273). At the same time, the novel deliberately portrays this Masai, who represents African resistance against German colonial rule, in the tradition of the “noble savage” of European colonial literature and mixes such self-reflexive exoticism with humorous reference to postcolonial tropes of cultural hybridisation, casting Mkenge as someone who is “youthfully handsome, heavenly slender” as well as being highly intelligent and speaking perfect German with a Rhenish accent as a result of German schooling (Capus 2007, 86–87, 89). The same detachment from established colonial and exoticist stereotypes can be seen in the novel’s only site of cross-cultural experience and (limited) cross-cultural dialogue, the small circle of Africans, including Mkenge, who join the four German shipyard workers in a network of mutual dependence and joint leisure, which, however, offers only partial and temporary respite from colonial violence and segregation. The novel’s politics of memory point to the

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need for African counter-narratives and intercultural memory dialogue, but its metareflexive narrative rules out any attempt to step outside the German cultural perspective to voice the African other. Critical memory of colonial imperialism in Eine Frage der Zeit thus goes along with acute awareness of the limitations of cross-cultural representation and deliberately stops short of imaginary extension into transcultural memory. Buch’s Sansibar Blues, on the other hand, addresses the colonial theme very much from a transcultural perspective, although Buch also uses humour and irony to put colonialism and neo-colonialism in critical perspective. Sansibar Blues alternates between four narrative strands, which combine to cover the history of Zanzibar and its African hinterland as well as German involvement there from the 1850s to the present day. The contemporary chapters and the author’s epilogue act as a metareflexive framework, which ties the three historical narratives together and links their themes to contemporary critique of colonial history and legacy. Moving backwards in time, the second strand gives a retrospective account of the life of an East German diplomat, who faces grotesque political turmoil in newly independent Zanzibar in 1964 only to find out later that he is the illegitimate son of Duke Adolf Friedrich zu Mecklenburg-Schwerin, a former governor of colonial Togo and his childhood mentor. Surprisingly, and in defiance of post-war East Germany’s professed anti-imperialism, GDR Third World politics thus appear as symbolic extensions of German colonialism. Such cross-mapping of the memories of colonialism and the GDR echoes the memoryscapes in African and Black German autobiographies by writers with East German backgrounds (see below). The colonial period itself is covered in two transcultural narratives, which blend, in an almost surreal way, colonial experience with present-day knowledge and language, often using the autobiographical mode of writing for thinly veiled historical essayism. Emily Ruete, born Princess Salme (1844–1924), the daughter of Sultan Said of Oman and Zanzibar, married Rudolf Heinrich Ruete, a merchant from Hamburg, in Aden in 1867, converted to Protestantism, and spent most of her subsequent life in Germany. In Sansibar Blues her narrative combines the account of her transcultural life with a summary of German colonial politics towards Zanzibar and her use as a pawn in the European “scramble for Africa”, when in 1885, fifteen years after her husband’s untimely death in a horse tram accident, she alligned her unsuccessful attempts to reclaim her Zanzibari inheritance with Bismarck’s diplomatic and military strategy of forcing Sultan Bargash to accept German rule in mainland East Africa. And legendary Zanzibari slave trader and ivory dealer Tippu Tipp takes the narrative back even further, into the pre-colonial period, in a lively account of his adventures in Eastern and Central Africa and his involvement with Henry Morton Stanley’s famous expeditions and the retrieval of Eduard Schnitzer alias Emin Pascha, the German governor of Egyptian Soudan.

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Buch’s narrative technique thus defies clear-cut distinctions between historical reconstruction, cross-cultural curiosity and exotic colonial adventure in historical terrain. This highly entertaining and multiperspectivist potpourri of voices warrants further analysis of the poetics of transcultural memory in Sansibar Blues. The novel’s two chapters on German colonialism in East Africa and its domestic contexts, as seen through the life and experiences of Sayyida Salme alias Emily Ruete, draw heavily on her memoirs, first published under the title Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin (Memoirs of an Arabian Princess) in 1886, at the height of Germany’s colonial expansion, on her letters (Briefe nach der Heimat, 1999), published posthumously, and other archival material. Already one of the most prominent cases of transcultural migration in the late nineteenth century, attracting sensationalist press coverage in 1871 and 1885 (see Ruete 1999, 149– 151, 172–173), Ruete has recently become the subject of postcolonial interest.⁴ Her memoirs focus on her youth in Zanzibar and conclude with only a very brief summary of her departure and subsequent life. In an attempt to rectify German Orientalist misconceptions, the memoirs give a detailed and often ethnographical account of life at the Sultan of Zanzibar’s court and of nineteenth-century Zanzibari history, as seen from the perspective of a female member of Sultan Said’s extended family. Frequently comparing Oriental and European conditions and criticizing elements of both societies, Ruete aims at objective representation while at the same time defending Oriental culture and Islam against German stereotypes and colonial thought. By contrast the letters, cast as letters to a female friend in Zanzibar and covering her journey to Germany and her life there into the 1880s, offer intimate and emotional insight into the hardship of her migration and of a life torn between cultures, exacerbated by the challenge of having to make a living for herself and her three children after her husband’s early death. Buch draws extensively on Ruete’s memoirs and to a lesser extent also on her letters, often integrating literal quotations from her text in the first-person narrative of Ruete’s fictionalised alter ego (see Göttsche 2012a). A typical example is a passage describing the hustle and bustle in a Zanzibari palace, which epitomizes the intensity, sensuousness and chaos of African-Oriental life and the multilingualism and multiculturalism of Zanzibar (Buch 2008, 46–48). The description combines elements of two equivalent passages from Ruete’s memoirs (Ruete 2000, 31–33, 35), which Ruete herself already presents as “genre pictures” tailored for the European imagination of the Orient (Ruete 2000, 35), while it also 4 See the new editions of her memoirs (Ruete 1989/2000) and the publication of her letters (Ruete 1999), anticipated by a more extensive English translation of her works (Ruete 1993). Also see Waldschmidt (2008) and Vosseler (2010), a biographical novel of Ruete’s life.

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illustrates the transformation of such source material in Buch’s novel. Buch condenses Ruete’s much more extensive and detailed descriptions into one emblematic scene and he fictionalises the memoirs’ biographical and ethnographical account by adding colour and drama, often at the expense of truth. Buch’s Emily, for example, claims to have done her homework in the midst of this “Babylonian chaos” (Buch 2008, 47), while Ruete comments critically on the rigorous German school system, insisting that her own schooling in the palace’s Koran classes had not included homework (Ruete 2000, 72). Where Ruete tells us that the palace’s chefs frequently boxed their assistants’ ears because they did not work fast enough, the kitchen boys and girls in Buch’s adaptation suffer the same penalty for pinching food or breaking plates (Ruete 2000, 32; Buch 2008, 48). And the end of the passage in Sansibar Blues suggests that Emily’s mother may have died early because she was poisoned; the memoirs state quite clearly that she died from cholera (Buch 2008, 48; Ruete 2000, 199). Condensation, fictionalisation and dramatisation equally affect the account of Ruete’s sensational relationship with her later husband and her involvement in a failed coup against her brother Madschid, the ruling Sultan at the time, where poetic licence leads to misrepresentation of potentially significant detail. There is thus tension throughout the Ruete strand of Sansibar Blues between the condensed literary retelling of her life story and the reworking of this biographical material for a highly dramatic and entertaining account of this transcultural biography, which at times resonates more with the pattern of Orientalist adventure stories (such as the tropes from Arabian Nights that informed the press coverage of her life at the time) than with historical and biographical truth. At the same time, Ruete’s alter ego in Sansibar Blues uses idioms and colloquialisms from today’s usage as well as an often ironic and even flippant tone, which is a world away from the ethnographic objectivism and restraint of Ruete’s memoirs and the intimate suffering and self-reflection of her letters. Buch’s poetics of transcultural memory are thus based on radical modernization of his transcultural source rather than historical reconstruction or literary mimicry. What could be seen as appropriation of an African-Oriental voice is balanced, however, by a metareflexive narrative technique that demonstrates full awareness of the free use made of historical material and defies expectations of naïve realism. The account given of Ruete’s life is put in perspective as no more than one potential version of her life (Buch 2008, 59, 176); the illusion of a consistent first-person narrative is broken at significant points, including fictional Emily’s account of her own death (Buch 2008, 175); the novel’s narrative style is marked by the postmodern techniques of intertextuality, metafiction and hybridisation of genres (see Neumann and Nünning 2007). One example for the blending of narrative and essayism is the opening “prologue” of the Ruete strand, which

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has Ruete herself comment on three photographs taken of her at three stages of her life in Germany (all printed in Ruete 1999), only the first of which is included in the picture gallery that frames the novel in the opening and closing pages of the book. When the first-person narrator (supposedly Ruete) takes these pictures as her introduction to the historical theme and comments, for example, on the location of her father’s portrait in today’s museum in Zanzibar (Buch 2008, 41–45), her voice becomes a rather transparent mask of the author who works his way into his colonial material. Sansibar Blues is clearly less interested in historical or cultural authenticity than in raising curiosity in colonial history and transcultural experience and providing intellectually informed entertainment. In this respect it echoes the fascination in contemporary television with documentary fictions (“Dokudrama”), except that Buch’s metareflexive style disrupts the deceptive realism of such cinematic reenactment of the past. In narratological terms (see Genette 1980, 27) the novel’s poetics of transcultural memory are restricted to the histoire level of the narrative and do not extend to the level of discours. In its use of transcultural voices Sansibar Blues illustrates growing interest in the African experience of colonialism, but by implication it also highlights the very limited presence and prominence of African postcolonial memory proper in German cultural debate.

2 Memory of Colonialism in Black German and African Migrants’ Writing in German African diasporic writing in German has seen significant development since its beginnings during the 1980s in the context of multicultural diversification of West German society and Black German self-assertion (see Göttsche 2007, 2009, 2010a; Kron 2009; Lennox 2012). Alerting Germany to her implication in the cross-cultural dynamic of colonialism and to continuing colonial legacies in both hemispheres, critical memory of colonialism is a central theme in such German postcolonial literature. This is particularly true of texts written before the later 1990s, when generational transitions combined with thematic shifts made the memory of colonialism part of more complex literary memoryscapes. Early works draw on anti-colonial theory and African-American discourses to place memory of colonialism and critique of German racism at the heart of diasporic selfassertion. More recent texts by younger African authors, however, recontextualize postmemory of colonialism in the light of transcultural experience in global migration, traumatizing violence in Africa, and diasporic achievement. Similar shifts can be seen in Black German writing of the past ten years, where narratives

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of self-assertion and achievement engage increasingly with established German memory discourses, in particular on the Wende, modifying or even replacing memory of colonial history at the very time when the colonial theme became popular in German mainstream literature. Critical exploration of German colonialism and Germany’s wider implication in the cultural history of European colonialism played a defining role in the emergence of Black German writing during the 1980s as a means of individual and political self-assertion in a society still in denial about its colonial history and its continuing racism, reflected in waves of xenophobic violence. The Afro-German feminist anthology Farbe bekennen (Showing Our Colors, 1986) and later work in this tradition played a crucial role in the rediscovery of German colonial history and exploration of the history of the African diaspora in the German-speaking area, including memory of colonial genocide and the persecution of individuals of African descent during National Socialism. Most notably, May Ayim’s critical studies and poetry (such as blues in schwarz weiss, 1995, and Grenzenlos und unverschämt, 1997) were instrumental in raising awareness of German colonial legacies, challenging naïve notions of multiculturalism, and developing the profile of Black German identity with reference to African-American feminism (Audre Lorde) and transatlantic cultural politics. Associations such as ISD (“Initiative Schwarze Deutsche”, later renamed more broadly “Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland”) and ADEFRA (“Afro-deutsche Frauen”) also played a crucial role in advancing Black self-empowerment and postcolonial memory. Today such postcolonial reassessment of German history and society has political support and features on governmental websites,⁵ but the autobiographical literature of Black Germans who lived through National Socialism or the post-war decades testifies to the traumatizing experience and arduous struggle involved in the shaping and articulation of such postcolonial memory. Ika HügelMarshall’s autobiography Daheim unterwegs (On the Move at Home, 1998) and Harald Gerunde’s biography Eine von uns: Als Schwarze in Deutschland geboren (One of Us: Born Black in Germany, 2000), about his Black German wife, Bärbel Kampmann, provide poignant evidence of the problems facing daughters of German mothers and African-American soldiers in post-war West Germany. Made to feel different through racist othering but lacking the support of more recent diasporic communities, they took well into their adult lives to assert themselves as Black Germans, and this self-assertion is inextricably linked to the exploration of African culture, the history of the African diaspora in the United States and 5 See the dossier Afrikanische Diaspora in Deutschland by the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (published 30 July 2004), http://www1.bpb.de/themen/626EGHG,0,0,Community.html (accessed 29 January 2010).

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Germany, and German colonialism. For this generation transcultural memory thus was a vital element of self-assertion and empowerment in the face of the difference imposed by German racism. For Hügel-Marshall personal development and achievement become synonymous with the fight for Black German recognition in a struggle that transcends national borders: “Black history is also my history and means Africa to me as much as America and Europe. I am proud of African, African-American history, I am proud to be part of this history – I am able to fall back on more than one culture” (Hügel-Marshall 2001, 106). In the broadest sense it is thus the transatlantic history of slavery and African migration which informs Black German identity and memory with transnational and transcultural frames of reference. In Eine von uns the link between Black German identity, transcultural memory of colonialism and slavery, and specifically German memory discourses (National Socialism) is even more conspicuous. Drawing on the complex patterns of “transitions, repetitions, parallelisms, deviations, and unexpected contrasts” in West African textiles (Gerunde 2000, 8), Kampmann’s biographer cross-stitches the rediscovery of her African-American family history with her “invention” of diasporic identity in the tradition of Alex Haley’s famous novel Roots and critical reassessment of her German grandfather’s involvement in colonial imperialism. Friendship with a Guinean in Germany, who introduces her to traditional West African life in his home village in Guinea, symbolically takes the place of a return to African origins (see Gerunde 2000, 165), and closer investigation of her African-American father’s ancestry reveals family connections to African and American-Indian resistance to colonialism and slavery. On the other hand, her German grandmother’s post-war room acts as a “museum” of her husband’s colonial involvement in China and South-West Africa, where he fought in Germany’s colonial wars (Gerunde 2000, 15, 39). The biography’s “construction” of postcolonial memory along with postcolonial identity therefore also includes memory of the Herero genocide and memory of Nazi persecution of Africans and the Holocaust, thus continuing the critique of historical connections between colonialism and National Socialism at a time when such cross-referencing has all but disappeared from mainstream historical novels about colonialism. Drawing on traditional African philosophy – “Read reality as a text, read your difference as a text” (Gerunde 2000, 9) – Gerunde’s biography of Kampmann develops a distinct poetics of transcultural memory, which extends beyond the level of histoire to the narrative discourse. Similar politics of memory can be found in other autobiographies, such as Thomas Usleber’s Die Farben unter meiner Haut (The Colours Under My Skin, 2002). Probably the most recent examples of this tradition are the volume of autobiographical chapters, essays and interviews entitled Die Farbe meiner Haut (The

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Colour of My Skin, 2009) by Black German anti-racism coach Manuela Ritz, born in the German Democractic Republic in 1969, and the political and didactic critique of German racism in Deutschland Schwarz Weiß: Der alltägliche Rassismus (Germany Black and White: Everyday Racism, 2008) by musician, journalist and radio producer Noah Sow of the same generation, born in Bavaria. Ritz’s account provides poignant evidence of residual racism in officially anti-colonial East Germany, thus linking postcolonial critique to critical memory of the GDR in the face of widespread Ostalgie, the popular nostalgia for life in the former GDR. The focus here, however, is firmly on racism rather than the history of colonialism, and despite the very different political and cultural context the record of Black German self-assertion, outlined in the first, autobiographical section of the book, follows a similar pattern to the one seen in Eine von uns for the previous generation of Black Germans in West Germany. This includes the retrospective working-through of traumatizing early experiences of racism (“Forgotten Memories or Recollected Forgetting”; Ritz 2009, 22), critical engagement with the extent of everyday racism and its history since the slave trade, colonial imperialism and National Socialism, but also with the history of Black resistance and Black culture, as well as travel to Kenya and West Africa, which provides emerging Black German identity with an African grounding. Such cross-mapping of postcolonial identity and memory now also includes memorialization of recent Black German history since the 1980s and the pioneering role of Farbe bekennen (Ritz 2009, 60). Die Farbe meiner Haut thus illustrates the emergence of a distinct Black German memory discourse within the matrix of contemporary German cultures of memory. Although Sow’s Deutschland Schwarz Weiß is even more explicitly focused on the critique of continuing racism in post-unification German society, her book contains more extensive coverage of Germany’s colonial history, since it aims to educate white readers about the unacknowledged racism in their culture, language and thought. This anti-racist therapy includes a dedicated section on German imperial colonialism, anti-colonial resistance, colonial genocide, the colonial origins of racism, the cultural history of colonialism (e.g. the culture shows), “colonial continuities” in the Weimar Republic and National Socialism, and the long history of the African diaspora in Europe since Roman times (Sow 2008, 82–102). Sow draws on relevant historiography and Critical Whiteness Studies to integrate such memory of Germany’s implication in European colonialism with detailed critique of othering in contemporary German media, thought and language. Like Die Farbe meiner Haut, Deutschland Schwarz Weiß clearly continues in the tradition established by Farbe bekennen, but its self-confident, humorous and often ironic or satirical style differs significantly from the tone of much early Black German writing, underlining the progress made in Black German cultural politics.

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The politics of memory in Ritz and Sow thus illustrate shifts in Black German literature since the late 1990s, when writing in search of Black German identity gave way to positions of confidence, authority and “normality” (Kelly 2009, 94; Göttsche 2012b). Paradoxically this sense of achievement and the performative assertion of normality in a modern, multi-ethnic Germany are also reflected in Black German autobiographies such as Abini Zöllner’s Schokoladenkind: Meine Familie und andere Wunder (Chocolate Child: My Family and Other Miracles, 2003) and Detlef Soost’s Heimkind Neger Pionier: Mein Leben (Institutional Child  – Negro  – Pioneer: My Life, 2005), both by minor celebrities from East Germany, whose narratives of crisis and achievement contribute to dominant memory discourses about the Wende and life in the GDR rather than memory of colonialism. While Zöllner claims not to have been affected by “latent discrimination” of Blacks in the GDR (Zöllner 2003, 102), Soost echoes Ritz in his criticism of East German racism and outlines the crucial role of African-American culture for his self-assertion, thus following established transatlantic patterns of Black identity politics. Criticism and critique of German racism and xenophobia is also a recurrent theme in African migrants’ writing in German, which is transcultural by definition but hardly ever includes the transatlantic dimension of Black German writing. Chima Oji’s poignant autobiographical essay Unter die Deutschen gefallen: Erfahrungen eines Afrikaners (Fallen Amongst the Germans: Experiences of an African, 1992) was particularly successful in sparking public debate about colonial legacies in German thought and culture. While his epilogue echoes Black German writing in tracing “everyday racism” back to the cultural history of colonialism, reflected in German language and thought, the first two chapters, devoted to his youth in Eastern Nigeria, illustrate characteristically ambivalent memory of British colonialism and post-independence neo-colonialism. On the one hand Oji deplores the “brainwashing” of colonial schooling, which deprived African youths of their cultural heritage (Oji 1992, 31–32); on the other hand he casts life in his home village during the 1950s as a world untouched by colonial rule and racism – despite his father’s European schooling and the “hierarchical race relations” in British-ruled Nigeria (Oji 1992, 21–22). Anti-colonial critique thus goes along with melancholy memory of supposedly pre-colonial Ibo culture, which has since been transformed beyond recognition by neo-colonialism, modernization and globalisation (Oji 1992, 208–212). A similar discourse of transcultural memory can be found in Aly Diallo’s novel Die Täuschung (The Deception, 1987) about a student from Mali in Hamburg and El Loko’s “autobiographical story” Der Blues in mir (The Blues Inside Myself, 1986) about his youth in Togo and his emergence as an artist in Togo and Germany. In both cases German diaspora becomes the site of a revalidation of African “roots” in the face of colonial and neo-colonial

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transformations which leave the African migrant stranded between two worlds and identities, struggling with tragic conflict between “authentic” African tradition and European modernity. In a context that is quite different from Black German self-assertion during the post-war decades, memory of colonialism again plays a vital role in postcolonial identity formation and is part of a distinctly transcultural discourse – not least because this African self-reflection is written in German.⁶ Der Blues in mir, in particular, engages extensively with the cross-cultural dynamic of colonialism and the challenges of postcolonial memory. The narrative opens with a nostalgic and idealized account of supposedly pre-colonial life in the author’s home village, a “paradise” of childhood memory (El Loko 1986, 13) that is later subjected to a postcolonial rereading, which reveals the extent of colonial transformation in the village during the period of German colonial rule as well as African complicity and agency in this process of colonial modernization (El Loko 1986, 33–34). This fairly rare instance of the German “Empire writing back” (Ashcroft/ Griffith/Tiffin 2002; see Göttsche, 2013b) illuminates the transcultural dimension of such African postcolonial memory by emphasising that the Germans remained part of Togolese history even after their departure and that the author’s own “dream” of personal and professional development in Germany was inspired by the very German values of “Fleiß und Geist” (diligence and intellectual culture) as well as engagement with German “art and literature” at the Goethe Institute in Lomé (El Loko 1986, 34). Authors from former German colonies seem to be a minority in the field of African migrants’ writing in German, and there do not appear to be any texts like Der Blues in mir by individuals from Namibia, Tanzania, Rwanda, or Burundi. There is, however, a sizable number of authors from Cameroon whose literature includes memory or postmemory of German colonialism. The Brechtian play Ach Kamerun! Unsere alte deutsche Kolonie… (Oh, Cameroon! Our old German colony, 1970/2005) by writer and political scientist Kum’a Ndumbe III signals its theme of alerting Germany to her forgotten colonialism in its very title (see Lennox 2006). Written in the context of 1960s anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, it draws on documentary sources to critique both the ruthlessness of the German colonizers and the divided response of the Douala, split between opportunist collaboration and emerging resistance. This play predates the emergence of a more consistent tradition of African diasporic writing in German by more than two decades and it seems to be the only text focusing entirely on German colonialism. In Jean Paul Lissock’s autobiography with the untypical title Mein Freund, der weiße Mann

6 Diallo’s novel was written in French, but published in German.

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(My Friend, the White Man, 1997) a narrative of diasporic achievement in West Germany casts the postmemory of German colonial rule in Cameroon as defining incentive for emigration to West Germany. Daniel Mepin’s autobiographical novel Die Weissagung der Ahnen (The Ancestors’ Prophecy, 1997) includes more detailed assessment of shifting African memory of German colonial rule in Cameroon throughout the periods of French occupation, decolonisation and subsequent civil war, enhanced by highly ambivalent memory of GDR anti-imperialism, since the protagonist is sent to East Germany for university study and eventually settles there. Postmemory of German colonialism again supports migration to Germany and one chapter is devoted entirely to an emblematic scene from German colonial rule, as remembered by the protagonist’s father Tafe (Mepin 1997, 77–82). His favourable assessment of German authoritarian rule and order, however, clearly reflects disenchantment with the violent upheaval of post-independence civil war and Tafe’s socio-political interests as a member of the traditional Bamileke elite in West Cameroun: “The Germans […] liked powerful people. Just as Tafe did” (Mepin 1997, 77). At the same time Cameroonian memory of German colonialism contrasts with German anti-imperialism, which supports Africans in fighting neo-colonial conditions, but fails to remember Germany’s own colonial history. Memory of colonialism in this novel is thus part of a postcolonial aesthetic, which highlights “the double-bind between European and African colonial and postcolonial history” (Gouaffo 2009, 60). Since the 1980s African memory of colonialism is typically part of cross-cultural self-reflection during university study and training in Germany, or, more recently, migration to Germany. Early examples (Oji, El Loko, Diallo) tend to operate with stark contrasts between African and European culture. Seeking to “decolonize the mind” (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1994) they re-cast the colonial period as an ambivalent space, marked both by colonial transformations of African societies and by continuing “authentic” traditions, which some of the authors try to reclaim. Since the late 1990s such anti-colonial discourse has given way to more sceptical and often marginal memory of increasingly distant colonialism, for example, in the autobiographies of Miriam Kwalanda, Nura Abdi, Fadumo Korn, or Senait Mehari, women who fled Africa after traumatizing experiences of prostitution, genital mutilation and civil war and embrace aspects of German culture, such as European feminism, to renegotiate their identity and rebuild their lives in German diaspora. Kwalanda, for example, notes colonial legacies in modern Kenya, such as the privileging of whiteness and white Europeans (Kwalana 1999, 25, 200, 232); Korn and Mehari remember aspects of Italian colonialism in Somalia and Eritrea. The transnational and transcultural frames of reference of postcolonial discourse in autobiographies such as these typically include commitment to international campaigns, such as those against female genital mutilation or the

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use of child soldiers, reflected in appendices with relevant contact details and bibliographies. The cross-referencing of memory discourses about colonialism and the GDR in Mepin’s Die Weissagung der Ahnen points to another tradition in African migrants’ writing since the late 1990s, which is more closely aligned with specifically German cultures of memory and echoes related patterns in Black German authors such as Ritz and Soost. This link between the memories of colonialism and the Wende is also found in other texts originating from East German support for Socialist liberation movements in Africa. The most recent examples here are Lucia Engombe’s Kind Nr. 95: Meine deutsch-afrikanische Odyssee (Child No. 95: My German-African Odyssey, 2004) and Stefanie-Lahya Aukongo’s Kalungas Kind: Wie die DDR mein Leben rettete (Kalunga’s Child: How the GDR Saved My Life, 2009), both concerned with the fate of Ovambo children raised in East Germany as part of the GDR’s support for Namibia’s SWAPO movement. Engombe was sent to East Germany in 1979 at the age of seven for training as part of the future “elite of the new Namibia” (Engombe 2004, 173), but struggled to find her place in newly independent Namibia, when these children were forced to return after the Wende in 1990 despite feeling quite at home in Germany. Aukongo was born in East Berlin in 1978, where her pregnant mother had been sent for medical treatment after serious injury in an attack on a SWAPO refugee camp. Adopted by Germans and overcoming physical impairment she becomes a German citizen, but returns to Namibia for a series of visits to reclaim the African side of her identity. Her history thus illustrates the increasing blurring between the previously distinct identities of Black Germans and African migrants. Both Engombe and Aukongo include appendices and bibliographies on German colonial involvement in Namibia and Namibian history. Both autobiographies also include ironic and unwittingly transcultural memory of colonialism, when the girls’ German mentors try to counter growing estrangement from “African roots” (Engombe 2004, 153) by presenting the children with stereotypically colonial images of African life: “People wore raffia skirts, lived in thatched huts, had a lot of fun, and there were little monkeys jumping around everywhere” (Aukongo 2009, 97–98). At the same time the negotiation of dual Namibian and German identity in Kalunga’s Kind echoes Black German memory discourses by including engagement with German colonialism, genocidal colonial war, and with “the African community in Berlin” (Aukongo 2009, 182). This overview of Black German and African migrants’ writing in German illustrates that memory and postmemory of colonialism in African diasporic writing in German is intrinsically transnational and transcultural, where authors write against the backdrop of postcolonial migration, but even where they do not, the transnational frames of reference of Afro-German diaspora and continued expe-

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riences with othering in a predominantly white society lead to foregrounding of the transcultural dimension in postcolonial memory. German postcolonial literature thus provides even more poignant evidence than the poetics of transcultural memory in historical novels such as Sansibar Blues for Michael Rothberg’s call to rethink “collective memory in multicultural and transnational contexts” (Rothberg 2009, 21). Significant intersections between memory of colonialism and other memory discourses, both in African diasporic writing in German and in German mainstream literature, also underline the “multidirectionality” of memory (Rothberg 2009, 5). They illustrate the rich history of cross-referencing between individual memory discourses in the contemporary world of polycentric remembrance cultures with transnational frames of reference.

References Primary Sources Abdi, Nura (with Leo G. Linder). Tränen im Sand. Bergisch-Gladbach: Ehrenwirth, 2003. Ackermann, Rolf. Die weiße Jägerin. Roman. Munich: Droemer, 2005. Aukongo, Stefanie-Lahya. Kalungas Kind: Wie die DDR mein Leben rettete. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2009. Ayim, May. blues in schwarz weiss. Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1995. Ayim, May. Grenzenlos und unverschämt. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 2002 [1997]. Beetz, Dietmar. Späher der Witbooi-Krieger. Roman. Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 1978. Beetz, Dietmar. Oberhäuptling der Herero. Roman. Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 1983. Beetz, Dietmar. Flucht vom Waterberg. Roman. Berlin: Verlag Das Neue Berlin, 1989. Beil, Brigitte. Maskal oder Das Ende der Regenzeit. Roman. Bergisch-Gladbach: Lübbe, 2003. Buch, Hans Christoph. Kain und Abel in Afrika. Roman. Berlin: Volk & Welt, 2001. Buch, Hans Christoph. Sansibar Blues oder Wie ich Livingstone fand. Roman. Frankfurt/Main: Eichborn, 2008. Capus, Alex. Munzinger Pascha. Roman. Zurich: Diogenes, 1997. Capus, Alex. Eine Frage der Zeit. Roman. Munich: Knaus. 2007. Capus, Alex. Interview with Beate Arabin, 14 June 2008. http://www.alexcapus.de/interview3. html (21 August 2008). Diallo, Aly. Die Täuschung. Trans. from the French by Gabriele Henschke. Frankfurt/M.: Nexus, 1987. El Loko. Der Blues in mir. Eine autobiographische Erzählung. Mit Holzschnitten des Autors. Nachwort von Al Imfeld. Oberhausen: Graphium press, 1986. Engombe, Lucia. Kind Nr. 95: Meine deutsch-afrikanische Odyssee. Aufgezeichnet von Peter Hilliges. Berlin: Ullstein, 2004. Foden, Giles. Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika. London: Penguin, 2005 [2004].

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Gerunde, Harald. Eine von uns. Als Schwarze in Deutschland geboren. Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 2000. Hamann, Christof. Usambara. Roman. Göttingen: Steidl, 2007. Hilliges, Ilona Maria. Sterne über Afrika. Roman. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Wunderlich, 2007. Hoffmann, Giselher W. Die schweigenden Feuer: Roman der Herero. Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag, 1994. Hügel-Marshall, Ika. Daheim unterwegs. Ein deutsches Leben. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 2001 [Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1998]. Korn, Fadumo (with Sabine Eichhorst). Geboren im Großen Regen: Mein Leben zwischen Afrika und Deutschland. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2004. English translation: Born in the Big Rains: A Memoir of Somalia and Survival. Trans. Tobe Levin. New York: The Feminist Press, 2006. Kramer, Jens Johannes. Die Stadt unter den Steinen. Roman. Munich: List, 2000. Kum’a Ndumbe III. Ach Kamerun! Unsere alte deutsche Kolonie …: Dokumentarstück in zehn Szenen. Douala: AfricAvenir, Berlin: Exchange & Dialogue, 2005. Kwalanda, Miriam (with Birgit Theresa Koch). Die Farbe meines Gesichts: Lebensreise einer kenianischen Frau. Frankfurt/M.: Eichborn, 1999. Lissock, Jean Paul. Mein Freund, der weiße Mann: Von Kamerun nach Deutschland. Berlin: Frieling, 1997. May, Ferdinand. Sturm über Südwest-Afrika: Eine Erzählung aus den Tagen des Hereroaufstandes. Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 1962. Mehari, Senait G. Feuerherz. Munich: Droemer, 2004. English translation: Heart of Fire: From Child Soldier to Soul Singer. Trans. Christine Lo. London: Profile Books, 2006. Mepin, Daniel. Die Weissagung der Ahnen. Roman. Kamerun. Unkel/Rhein, Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 1997. Müller, Ray. Ein Traum von Afrika. Roman. Munich: Langen Müller, 2007. Oguntoye, Katharina, May Opitz, Dagmar Schultz, eds. Farbe bekennen. Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1992 [Berlin: Orlanda FrauenVerlag, 1986]. English translation: Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Oji, Chima. Unter die Deutschen gefallen. Erfahrungen eines Afrikaners. Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 1992. Paluch, Andrea and Robert Habeck. Der Schrei der Hyänen. Roman. Munich: Piper, 2004. Ritz, Manuela. Die Farbe meiner Haut: Die Antirassismustrainerin erzählt. Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2009. Ruete, Emily (Sayyida Salme). An Arabian Princess Between Two Worlds: Memoirs, Letters Home, Sequels to the Memoirs, Syrian Customs and Usages. Ed. E. J. van Donzel. Leiden, New York, Cologne: Brill, 1993. Ruete, Emily (Sayyida Salme). Prinzessin Salme von Omar und Sansibar. Briefe nach der Heimat. Ed. Heinz Schneppen. Berlin, Bodenheim bei Mainz: Philo, 1999. Ruete, Emily (Sayyida Salme). Leben im Sultanspalast. Memoiren aus dem 19. Jahrhundert. Ed. Annegret Nippa. Berlin, Wien: Philo, 2000. Schulz, Hermann. Auf dem Strom. Roman. Hamburg: Carlsen, 1998. Seyfried, Gerhard. Herero. Roman. Berlin: Eichborn, 2003. Soost, Detlef D! (with Anne Ascher). Heimkind Neger Pionier: Mein Leben. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Wunderlich, 2005.

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Sow, Noah. Deutschland Schwarz Weiß. Der alltägliche Rassismus. Munich: Bertelsmann, 2008. Stangl, Thomas. Der einzige Ort. Roman. Vienna: Droschl, 2004. Timm, Uwe. Morenga. Roman. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1985 [1978]. Usleber, Thomas. Die Farben unter meiner Haut: Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen. Frankfurt/M.: Brandes & Apsel, 2002. Vosseler, Nicole C. Sterne über Sansibar. Roman. Cologne: Bastei Lübbe, 2010. Wackwitz, Stephan. Ein unsichtbares Land. Familienroman. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2003. English translation: An Invisible Country. Trans. Stephen Lehmann. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2005. Zöllner, Abini. Schokoladenkind: Meine Familie und andere Wunder. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2003.

Secondary Sources Albrecht, Monika. “Che Guevara in ‘Deutsch-Südwest’: Uwe Timms Anti-Kriegsroman Morenga aus interdisziplinärer Sicht.” Schreiben gegen Krieg und Gewalt: Ingeborg Bachmann und die deutschsprachige Literatur 1945–1980 / Writing Against War and Violence: Ingeborg Bachmann and Literature in German 1945–1980. Ed. Dirk Göttsche, Franziska Meyer, Claudia Glunz, Thomas F. Schneider. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2006. 187–202. Albrecht, Monika. “Europa ist nicht die Welt.” (Post) Kolonialismus in Literatur und Geschichte der westdeutschen Nachkriegszeit. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2008. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. 2nd ed. London, New York: Routledge, 2002. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, ed. Afrikanische Diaspora in Deutschland, published 2004, http://www1.bpb.de/themen/626EGHG,0,0,Community.html (29 January 2010). Conrad, Sebastian. Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte. Munich: Beck, 2008. Förster, Larissa, Dag Henrichsen, Michael Bollig, eds. Namibia – Deutschland: Eine geteilte Geschichte. Widerstand – Gewalt – Erinnerung (= Ethnologica, N.F. 24). Cologne and Wolfratshausen: Edition Minerva, 2004. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980. Göttsche, Dirk. “Zwischen Exotismus und Postkolonialismus: Der Afrika-Diskurs in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur.” Interkulturelle Texturen: Afrika und Deutschland im Reflexionsmedium der Literatur. Ed. M. Moustapha Diallo and Dirk Göttsche. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2003a. 161–244. Göttsche, Dirk. “Der neue historische Afrika-Roman: Kolonialismus aus postkolonialer Sicht.” German Life and Letters 56 (2003b): 261–280. Göttsche, Dirk. “Colonial Legacies and Cross-Cultural Experience: The African Voice in Contemporary German Literature.” Edinburgh German Yearbook 1 (2007): 159–175. Göttsche, Dirk. “‘Eine eigene Mischung aus Identität und Kultur’: Afrikanische Migrantenliteratur in deutscher Sprache zwischen Diaspora und Transkulturalität.” Mont Cameroun: Revue africaine d’études interculturelles sur l’espace germanophone 6 (2009): 29–51. Göttsche, Dirk. “Cross-Cultural Self-Assertion and Cultural Politics: African Migrants’ Writing in German Since the Late 1990s.” German Life and Letters 63 (2010a): 54–70.

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Göttsche, Dirk. “Colonialism and National Socialism: Intersecting Memory Discourses in Post-War and Contemporary German Literature.” Gegenwartsliteratur: A German Studies Yearbook 9 (2010b): 217–242. Göttsche, Dirk. “Rekonstruktion und Remythisierung der kolonialen Welt: Neue historische Romane über den deutschen Kolonialismus in Afrika.” Deutsch-Afrikanische Diskurse in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven. Ed. Michael Hofmann and Rita Morrien. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2011. 171–195. Göttsche, Dirk. “Hans Christoph Buch’s Sansibar Blues and the Fascination of Cross-Cultural Experience in Contemporary German Historical Novels about Colonialism.” German Life and Letters 65 (2012a): 127–146. Göttsche, Dirk. “Self-Assertion, Intervention and Achievement: Black German Writing from a Postcolonial Perspective.” Orbis Litterarum 67 (2012b): 83–135. Göttsche, Dirk. Remembering Africa: The Rediscovery of Colonialism in Contemporary German Literature. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013a. Göttsche, Dirk. “Recollection and Intervention: Memory of German Colonialism in Contemporary African Migrants’ Writing.” German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian and Oceanic Responses to German Colonialism. Ed. Nina Berman, Klaus Mühlhahn, Patrice Nganang. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013b (at press). Gouaffo, Albert. “Afrikanische Migrationsliteratur und Interkulturelles Lernen: Zu ihrem Stellenwert im Literatur- und Landeskundeunterricht des Deutschen als Fremdsprache im deutschsprachigen Kulturraum.” Mont Cameroun: Revue africaine d’études interculturelles sur l’espace germanophone 6 (2009): 53–67. Hermes, Stefan. “Fahrten nach Südwest”. Die Kolonialkriege gegen die Herero und Nama in der deutschen Literatur (1904–2004). Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames. Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Hobuß, Steffi and Ulrich Lölke, eds. Erinnern verhandeln. Kolonialismus im kollektiven Gedächtnis Afrikas und Europas. 2nd ed. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2007. Kelly, Natasha A. “‘Sie sind Afro-Deutsch? …Ah, ich verstehe’: Zur Entstehung eines neuen deutschen Literaturgenres.” Mont Cameroun: Revue africaine d’études interculturelles sur l’espace germanophone 6 (2009): 83–102. Kron, Stefanie. “Afrikanische Diaspora und Literatur Schwarzer Frauen in Deutschland.” Dossier Migrationsliteratur – eine neue deutsche Literatur?. Ed. Sibel Kara. Heinrich Böll-Stiftung, March 2009; http://www.migration-boell.de/web/integration/47_1900.asp (8 March 2009). Lennox, Sara. “Das afrikanische Gesicht, das in deinem Raum spricht: Postkoloniale Autoren in Deutschland: Kum’a Ndumbe III und Uche Nduka.” Literatur und Migration. Ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (= text + kritik special vol. IX/06): 167–176. Lennox, Sara. “Postcolonial Writing in Germany.” The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature. Ed. Ato Quayson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Vol. 1, 620–648. Lützeler, Paul Michael, ed. Der postkoloniale Blick. Deutsche Schriftsteller berichten aus der Dritten Welt. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1997. Melber, Henning, ed. Genozid und Gedenken. Namibisch-deutsche Geschichte und Gegenwart. Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel, 2005. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey, Nairobi: EAEP, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994.

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Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Struck, Wolfgang. Die Eroberung der Phantasie: Kolonialismus, Literatur und Film zwischen deutschem Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2010. Uerlings, Herbert. “Ich bin von niedriger Rasse”: (Post-) Kolonialismus und Geschlechterdifferenz in der deutschen Literatur. Cologne: Böhlau, 2006. Waldschmidt, Julius. “Salima bint Said & Emily Ruete: Ein Frauenleben zwischen Orient und Okzident.” Unbekannte Biographien. Afrikaner im deutschsprachigen Europa vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges. Ed. Ulrich van der Heyden. [no place:] Kai Homilius Verlag, 2008. 238–245. Zantop, Susanne. Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 1997.

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Black Patches and Rotting Weeds: The Great Famine as a Transcultural Figure of Memory in Irish (Diaspora) Fiction, 1855–1885 I know not whether the time has even yet arrived when that theme can be fairly treated, and when a calm and just apportionment of blame and merit may be attempted. To-day, full thirty years after the event, I tremble to contemplate it.

These comments by Alexander Sullivan in his memoirs New Ireland: Political Sketches and Personal Reminiscences of Thirty Years of Irish Public Life (1877, 58) are revealing in several respects. Sullivan’s use of the terms “blame” and “merit” indicates how the potato blight, which hit the nation for five consecutive years, led to severe political and social tensions. The native Irish reviled England’s colonial regime, accusing the English for not taking proper relief measures, and conflicts arose between the afflicted tenants who could no longer afford their rent, and Anglo-Irish landlords who subsequently had many of these farmers evicted from their lands and cottages.¹ Significantly, Sullivan emphasises the painfulness of remembering the trials of mass starvation, eviction and emigration that marked the years of the Great Hunger (1845–1850) in an era in which the threat of another severe potato Famine was looming on the horizon, and in which landlords and tenant farmers once again found themselves in conflict over rent interests, on the eve of the socalled Land War (1879–87).² Michael Rothberg argues that memories “emerge in the interplay between different pasts and a heterogeneous present” (2006, 162) and often “link current and past struggles and sufferings” (2006, 173). The reverberations of the Famine horrors to which Sullivan, then a nationalist Young Irelander,³ himself had been a witness, must have coloured his perspective on 1 For example, a strong critique on England’s policies concerned the inefficient resolution to the food crisis, as inedible Indian meal was imported while corn cultivated in Ireland was shipped off to the English markets. As Isaac Butt wrote: “Can we wonder if the Irish people believe – and believe it they do – that the lives of those who have perished, and who will perish, have been sacrificed by a deliberate compact to the gains of English merchants, and if this belief has created among all classes a feeling of deep dissatisfaction, not only with the ministry but with English rule?” (1847, 10). For further reading on this subject see, for instance, Daly (1986), Ó Gráda (1995) and Kinealy (1997). 2 For further reading on this period see, for instance, Turner (1996, 198–199), and Pelling (2003, 61–62). 3 See Curtis (2003).

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similar conditions of Ireland in the late 1870s, as his remarks suggest. Moreover, Sullivan’s suggestion that the traumatic memories of the Famine are too fresh to bear recollection implies a contradiction. His text simultaneously betrays a desire to repress the excruciating events while at the same time evoking them as a presence haunting current circumstances. As such, New Ireland illustrates that both the repression and recollection of the Great Hunger have been significant issues in Irish culture, marking the Famine out as what Jan Assmann calls a “figure of memory”, a “fateful” event of the past, whose memory is maintained through cultural formation” (1995, 129) in artefacts and social practices. Being what Ann Rigney calls a “portable monument” (2004, 386) that can be passed among different generations and circulate in various geographical contexts, literature can play a pivotal role in the transmission of an ethnic group’s shared past.⁴ Despite Terry Eagleton’s widely repeated claim that the Great Famine is glossed over to the point of neglect in the Irish canon, recent studies by Christopher Morash (1995), Margaret Kelleher (1997), Melissa Fegan (2002) and Marguérite Corporaal (2009) have revealed that the bleak Famine years have certainly been recollected in fiction by those who experienced the dark years as well as by descendants who never witnessed the event but nevertheless display a “deeply felt memory of a past event”, and whose memory is therefore, to borrow Alison Landsberg’s term, “prosthetic” (2004, 2). As Susannah Radstone has pointed out, the “remediation” of cultural recollections not only concerns its “diachronic aspects” (2011, 110), but also involves its movement through space, but hitherto the spatial relocation of memories of the Great Hunger has generally been overlooked. These spatial transmissions of Famine remembrance deserve further attention, however, for the catastrophies of starvation and wide-scale mortality were accompanied by a massive exodus: many Irish migrated to Britain, its colonies and the United States during the devastating mid 1840s and their immediate aftermath. As The Illustrated London News wrote on 6 July 1850, “the Irish emigration flows with full force upon the United States” where, according to rough estimations, between 1846 and 1855 1,442,000 Irish men and women alighted.⁵ In the same period, approximately 300,000 Irish set up new homes in the British and French Canadian territories,⁶ especially in New Brunswick, Upper Canada, Quebec City or Montreal,⁷ transfer-

4 As Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney state, “ ‘cultural memory’ has emerged as a useful umbrella term to describe the complex ways in which societies remember their past using a variety of media” (2006, 111). 5 See Fanning (1987, 6). 6 See Miller (1985, 104). 7 See MacKay (1991, 245).

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ring their recollections of the Great Hunger to future transatlantic generations. As a result, the Famine has become part of a transcultural memory in fiction written on both sides of the Atlantic. Recent discussions in migration studies in particular have greatly contributed to an awareness of the existence of transnational cultural spaces. The by now predominant notion that migrant identities occupy a liminal space between the former motherland and the host country, and are consequently “stretched across the multiple ruptures between here and there…” (Bammer 1994, xii), so that social groups are “no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded” (Appadurai 1991, 191), has sparked off an awareness of the existence of cultural communal spaces which cut across national borders. As migrants have “transnational affiliations” (Kalra, Kaur, Hutnyk 2005, 14) they participate in what Thomas Faist calls transnational spaces which may “result in the formation of a common culture, or a culture shared by both immigrants and natives” (2000, 240). This idea of transnational cultural communities, in addition to current debates about the transportability of recollections, has encouraged memory scholars to redirect their attention from national to transcultural remembrance. Andreas Huyssen has denouced the “tendency to hold the past hostage to a national and cultural power politics”, claiming that “the relationship between diasporic memory and the memory formations of the national culture within which a given diaspora may be embedded that remains seriously understudied” (2003, 151). Similarly, Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad have argued in favour of a transnational approach in examining memory dynamics, as “migrants carry their heritage, memories and traumas with them” which “are transferred and brought into new social constellations and political contexts” (2010, 2). While the work of these scholars has suggested important new directions for memory research, Michael Rothberg’s launch of the concept of “multidirectional memory” has opened up novel ways of exploring transcultural memories. Stating that “[m]emories are not owned by groups”, and therefore do not run parallel with group boundaries, Rothberg suggests a “malleable discursive space” in which different sets of cultural memory exist “in dynamic transfers” (2009, 5). As memories become inscribed with other cultural recollections, an infinite, interactive space of transcultural recollection can come into existence. In this article I will examine the mediation of the Great Hunger in fiction as a transcultural phenomenon in two manifestations that are central to the essays in this collection, namely transferences of memory to different sociocultural topographies as well as what Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson, after Astrid Erll, call the “travelling of memory” between “national, ethnic and religious collectives” thar result in the emergence of multidirectional “forums of remembrance” (this volume). Comparing and contrasting novels written in Ireland and by Irish-

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American immigrants during the late 1850s, 1860s, 1870s and early 1880s, I will illustrate that the cultural legacies of the Great Hunger can be viewed as transcultural because they form part of a transnational tradition of remembrance shared by the homeland and the American diaspora and because they dynamically interact with North American forms of cultural remembrance after transition to the New World. In so doing, I will focus on the recollections of landscape. As several scholars from memory studies have stressed, recollection involves “the narrative organization of memory” (Wertsch 2002, 57), as “conventional schematic formats … help us mentally string past events into coherent, culturally meaningful historical narratives” (Zerubavel 2003, 7). Images of wastelands are prominent mnemonic tropes in the narrative templates of fiction that remembers the trials of starvation, but the question remains whether the Famine-stricken landscape is recalled in similar terms among cultural communities in the homeland or in diaspora. When looking at the performance of the Famine past in Irish-American fiction, can we still speak of common ground with recollections of the Famine in literature written in the homeland from the same time frame? Or is this mediated remembrance informed by a specific diasporic consciousness, even if, according to Angelika Bammer, colonisation and diaspora can be compared as similar experiences of ethnic displacement?⁸ These are relevant questions for two reasons. First of all, while for many authors of the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s the Great Famine was a lived remembrance, there are some Irish diaspora writers for whom the Hunger was not what Maurice Halbswachs calls “mémoire vécue”, but prosthetic memory.⁹ For instance, a look at the preface of Famine novel Golden Hills (1865), republished as Kingston’s Revenge in 1917, suggests that the author Elizabeth Hely Walshe herself had no personal memories of the Famine years, and that the narrative is a mediated act of cultural recall rooted in other people’s remembrance, as the main sources of information for the writer were “the personal experiences of men who lived in the midst of the troubles of those years … Narratives of peril and deliverance far more exciting than anything written in the following pages, have been brought to the knowledge of the writer by those who were the chief actors in them” (1865, v-vii). Likewise, Mary Anne Sadlier had emigrated to Canada as a single woman in 1844, before blight and starvation affected the nation.¹⁰ Therefore, in writing about An Gorta Mór, she must have had no direct experiences with Famine Ireland, and must have relied on collective memories to reproduce the catastrophe in her novels. 8 See Bammer (1994, xi-xii). 9 Halbwachs (1992, 130). 10 See Fanning (2000, 150).

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Secondly, the situation of Irish immigrants to the United States was very specific. As Cormac O’Gráda has argued, “while not denying for a moment that emigrants were also famine casualties, it is also clear that they were more fortunate than the hundreds of thousands locked in by poverty” (2001, 124) who did not have the means to leave the nation. Moreover, doubly traumatised by Famine and displacement from motherland Erin, they often encountered hostility mainly because their Roman Catholicism was considered as a threat to the Anglo-American Protestant communities. Vehement mobbing of Irish emigrées was not uncommon. The Nativist or “Know-Nothing” party,  – notorious for its “undying and undiminished hatred of ‘Popery and Foreignism’” (2),¹¹ as The Irish American wrote on 22 August 1857 – displayed a strong enmity towards the Irish flood entering the United States, charging the predominantly Catholic immigrants with “disloyalty and un-Americanness” (Kenny 2000, 115–116), and using physical violence against the Irish. A well-known example mentioned by John Francis Maguire was the havoc wrought upon an Irish Catholic parish church by a crowd of Know-Nothings in Manchester, New Hampshire, in the early 1860s: “They had succeeded in destroying its windows of stained glass, when a party of Irish Catholics gallantly encountered and dispersed the mob, and saved from further injury the church which had cost them so much sacrifice” (Maguire, 1868, 530). As a result, the immigrants of the Famine generation often clung together in exclusively Irish-American communities promoting an essential Catholic IrishAmerican identity rooted in the homeland. This constructed Irish-Americanness was to a large extent disseminated by (popular) cultural products, such as fiction.¹² As I hope to demonstrate, while we can speak of a shared transcultural memory with regard to the Famine in Irish fiction written in the homeland and in diaspora, Irish-American literature is also distinct in that it looks back to an idealized, pastoral Irish pre-Famine past which represses the painful recollections of infertile land. As such, this fiction displays the prototypical nostalgia which, as Susannah Radstone contends, “substitutes for a lost sense of continuity with the past” (2007, 115).¹³ In these Irish-American narratives pastoral landscapes are what Pierre Nora would define as “lieux de mémoire” (1989, 7): they are symbolical spaces which presuppose a contrast with the hostile, assimiliationist urban

11 Timothy Sarbaugh writes that Lewis Levin, one of the Nativist leaders of the American Republican Party, introduced a bill which “would prohibit immigrants from becoming American citizens by extending the requirement of naturalization from several days to 21 years” (2003, 50–51). 12 See Ward (2002, 133–134). 13 Emilie Pine comes up with a similar definition of nostalgia as a “yearning for the stability which is absent from a present that is perceived to be fast-paced and hence unstable” (2011, 8).

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American culture in which the Irish immigrants find themselves, and which aim to crystallise a specific identity that is presumed to be rooted in an idealised, rural motherland. Although the promotion of ethnic solidarity and homogeneity in Irish-American fiction suggests a confirmation of Nora’s equation of memory with a specific area, this is far from the case. In fact, many novels contest the idea of static and territorially bound memory spaces: the pastoral landscapes that they evoke are represented as sites which can be transported to American soil, and which help the immigrants to establish transatlantic little Irelands. Such a transferability of a pastoral setting that is identified with Ireland illustrates that cultural memory transcends national boundaries, underlining the views currently expressed by memory scholars like Astrid Erll on the “‘default’ combination of territorial, ethnic and national collectivity” (2011, 8). Furthermore, in their depiction of imported Irish pastoral landscape, these Irish-American literary narratives frequently display intersections with the cultural legacy of the frontier myth, thereby underlining the transcultural dimensions of memory making.

1 “The odour of the charnel-house”: Blight-Stricken Landscape as Transcultural Remembrance Many scholars have acknowledged the temporal transference of cultural memory of the Great Famine in literature. Christopher Morash, for example, underlines the significance of the Great Hunger as transgenerational remembrance by speaking of “semiotic systems of representation” (1995, 54) that carry the memory of the event in literature and that enable writers who never witnessed the atrocities to reconstruct the Famine past. What many critics so far have failed to explore, however, is that the literary recollections of Great Famine are also transcultural in that one can speak of shared images of memory in fiction written in motherland Ireland as well as the American diaspora. One of these transcultural images of memory in literary recollections of the Great Famine is the blight-stricken landscape. This is by no means remarkable, as the dark years of blight undermined how for centuries Irish men and women had always relied on agriculture as a means of existence. Emily Lawless’s travel narrative “Famine Roads and and Famine Memories” from the collection Traits and Confidences (1897) shows how during the Famine the once populated landscape of Connemara transformed into a natural environment on which humanity could no longer depend for its sustenance, and which has consequently become uninhab-

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ited: “Fifty years back those projections were all villages, or groups, at any rate, of from three to ten cabins” (1897, 53). What remains is a wasteland which functions as a traumatic lieu de mémoire. The ruins of the deserted cottages constitute what Aleida Assmann would call “traces” (1996, 126) of a lost past in which humanity and nature co-existed in harmony – a nostalgic gesturing back to dwelling which resounds in contemporary recollections of landscape and therefore seems inherently transcultural.¹⁴ The once idyllic rural scene has become irretrievably lost both physically and mnemonically, for the bare hillsides conjure up recollections of “rotten abominations” of infected tubers which spread “a scent of decay…all over the country” (1897, 157). One can find many examples of literary texts written in Ireland which conjure up similar tropes of wasteland and pestilence. For example, Richard Baptist O’Brien’s novel Ailey Moore, A Tale of the Times (1856), speaks of a “perfectly appalling … condition and appearance of the country”, marked by empty cabbage fields with leaveless “reddish-yellow stumps”; a wasteland of “an occasional mound of withered grass, or some long yellow weeds” (264). The acres are affected by a disease which has “blackened” the “poor people’s food …in the bosom of the earth”, while rotting weeds send forth a terrible stench of decay, “the odour of the charnel-house” (1856, 261). Likewise, in Margaret Brew’s threedecker novel The Chronicles of Castle Cloyne (1885), also written in Ireland, we find the recollected experiences of rotting vegetation and stench: we can read that in a few days “the green stalks withered, and then blackened”, the tubers rotted, spreading “a most sickening and offensive odour” (II, 160–161). While these figures of barren, diseased land can be viewed as transgenerational, Irish-American fiction shows that these images of wastelands are also transcultural, for two Irish-American Famine novels by immigrant writers Mary Anne Sadlier and Peter McCorry similary “remember” barren fields and rotting crops. Sadlier’s Bessy Conway (1862), a novel that relates of the hardships of the Conway family in Famine-stricken Ireland as well as the adventures of the daughter, Bessy, as an immigrant servant girl in New York, touches upon the “dismal time in Denis Conway’s cottage, and in many a cottage through the length and breadth of Ireland” caused by “the failure of crops” during “the terrible year of the Famine”. Performing its recollections of Famine, the novel represents a barren land that is just a breeding place of weeds:

14 See, for example, David Matless (1998, 21) who discerns a contemporary culture of nostalgia and melancholy with respect to landscape in Britain. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion Books, 1998, p. 21.

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… tall ragweed nodded in the summer breeze, the dock weed spread its broad leaves on the arid soil, and the fiery nettle grew and flourished where a weed dared not rear its head before, to dispute possession with the careful grain stalk. (1862, 263–264)

McCorry’s The Lost Rosary (1870) also addresses the effects of the blight by recalling crops that “lay rotting in the earth”, and additionally exposes the negative impact of colonial rule on the Famine, showing that “wheat and corn were harvested, not to be eaten, but for sale in the English markets” (109). Furthermore, transcultural memory manifests itself in that Irish and IrishAmerican fiction both associate these blackened wastelands with displacement from the land. In Emily Bowles’ Irish Diamonds (1864), written in Ireland, the image of potato crops “badly tainted with disease” (160) is followed by one of the consequences of wasted land, eviction, as the novel describes how the landlord summons “old Michael Macnamara to quit his dwelling and give up the key” (164). Irish-American novels The Lost Rosary and John McElgun’s Annie Reilly (1873) equally connect the blight with eviction. In McCorry’s novel, while the blight transforms the land beyond recognition, Corny O’Donnell, father to main female protagonist Mary, is rackrented out of his ancestral family holding, losing “a portion of his land” (1870, 109) which he fails to retain. The acres that had been family possessions for years are no longer a site where he may dwell, and Corny dies of the mental affliction this has given him. Similarly, in Annie Reilly the family of the female protagonist is so much affected by the aftermath of the Famine and failed harvests that, unable to afford the rent, they are cast out of the old family cottage. Annie’s mother cannot cope with the blow of losing their cottage which is so close to her “father’s house, now untenanted” (1873, 623) that she could gaze on from their garden. While she struggles with having to move out of her childhood community, we learn that Farrell, Annie’s father, finds “great consolation” in coming to their old cottage from which he has become dispossessed, picturing how Annie used to walk “in the little garden or in the green fields around” (1873, 176). The novel thus suggests a displacement within Ireland from the rural cottages and land that characters used to live in. What ecocritic Greg Garrard would call “dwelling”, “the long-term imbrication of humans in a landscape of memory, ancestry and death, of ritual, life and work” (2004, 108), is brutally disturbed by the blight and policies of landlords. As a result, the people are uprooted from sites which contain their personal and cultural memories. The association of Famine wasteland with a physical displacement that involves lost connections to sites of remembance can therefore be found in Irish and Irish-American fiction alike. One can also speak of a transcultural memory of the Great Hunger in that a considerable number of literary texts written and read on both sides of the Atlantic nostalgically evoke a fruitful and sometimes even

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pastoral Irish landscape of the past that is in sharp contrast with Famine wastelands. As both Irish and Irish-American literature look back to a pre-Famine past that is prior to a Famine “present”, one can speak of explicit dynamics of remembrance that are operating within these narratives. David Power Conyngham’s Frank O’Donnell (1861), written in Ireland by an author who would later migrate to the United States to fight in the Civil War,¹⁵ evokes the image of a pre-Famine “Arcadia” where “the potato grew almost spontaneously…luxuriantly…placing abundance witin the reach of the poorest” (126), and juxtaposes it to “the potato blight and consequent famine” (194) blasting this rural paradise. Brew’s Chronicles of Castle Cloyne (1885) opens with an image of Ballycross Farm as an estate with “good meadows and arable land” (I, 1) that has fed many generations of the MacDermotts. The contrast with the pestilence-stricken barren lands one finds later in the novel suggests that the harmony of pre-Famine Ireland is only a happy memory clouded over by subsequent traumatic and haunting recollections of the bleak mid and late 1840s. This impression is underlined by the way in which the omnisicient narrator comments on the novel itself as a carrier of memory: Ah, heaven! Who that was old enough at “the time of the Famine” to remember it, can ever put its sorrowful, agonising memories out of his heart. (II, 161)

Similar contrasts can be found in the recollections of homeland scenery in IrishAmerican fiction, but here the ideal of pre-Famine pastoral Ireland is even more strongly pronounced. The Lost Rosary opens with representations of a pre-Famine pastoral Ireland where the rural population experiences a strong bond with nature. The omniscient narrator propounds the image of an idyllic, Edenic landscape decked out with spring flowers that is a pleasure to the beholder, and provides its inhabitants with a site of delightful labour as well as leisure, in the form of spring festivals: Happy May! When the bloom of the hawthorn offers its incense to nature, and gladdens every eye with its milk-white beauties. Happy May! When the light-hearted youths of Ireland, frolicsome and gleeful, go a-maying over moss and glen, to gather the golden flowers, whose magic spell around the cabin door preserves the humble home from all the spiteful influences and tricks of fairy-land… The whole “country-side was up.” Young and old were engaged in rambles and athletic sports … Everywhere there was racing and chasing, and harmless amusements. (1870, 9–10, 12)

15 Fegan (2002, 232).

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The scene voices the ideal of pastoral otium, further emphasised by the dance in a barn, with music by the blind fiddler Darby, which creates an image of bucolic happiness. This depiction of pre-Famine Ireland, which foregrounds the physical and spiritual connection of the people to the land, is in sharp contrast with the images of infertile land and hard toil that are used to recall the Famine: “the reapers’ song was hushed, and the dull workers in the field, from morn till eve, plodded out their lives in the hopeless task of saving their bits of land” (1870, 109). Moreover, the novel suggests that the pastoral loveliness of pre-Famine Ireland can only exist as a remembered image rather than a physical reality: May Eve, May Day. May, the Mother of the Months! What sweet recollections spring up in the mind at the thought of May! Recollections dear to every heart, recalling the May of youth, the happy hours of innocence, ere yet the shadow of sin had obscured. (1870, 9, emphasis mine)

Likewise, John McElgun’s Annie Reilly (1873) suggests a pre-famine Ireland that is pastoral, and that is a paradise lost that can only survive in the lived memories of the people. In a mode suggesting what Raymond Williams calls “pastoral elegy” (1975, 22), main protagonist and immigrant James O’Rourke reminisces over the “Green hills with tall chapel-spires peeping over their tops” (1873, 198), a pastoral image of his pre-Famine childhood through which he seeks to remember his motherland. At the same time this image of a pastoral nature in Ireland remains only an image that is recollected in diaspora as a figure of memory, and not a reality that James will ever return to, for he settles in America rather than in Ireland which has changed beyond recognition.

2 “The cottage beneath the sycamore, miles and miles away”: The Great Hunger and Diasporic Recollection Andreas Huyssen has pointed to the importance of examining diasporic memory (2003, 149), and a comparative analysis of Irish and Irish-American Famine fiction endorses the significance of such a project. While we can speak of a transatlantic cultural memory of the Great Hunger as manifested in images of wastelands and displacement, we may also discern aspects that are very specific to the cultural memory of American diaspora. The images of wasteland in fiction written in Ireland are explicitly linked to recollections of hunger and death. For instance, Ailey Moore directly addresses

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the horrendous realities following the blight, describing how people, young and old alike, are collapsing under the weight of starvation and disease: The poor became unable to assist one another. Gradually they seemed to suspend all intercourse. They grew pale, and haggard, and sinister in their looks. Children began to appear aged, and the old people sat down in a kind of stupor, from which few of them ever woke. (1856, 261)

Similarly, Frank O’Donnell evokes the remembrance of “half-starved, half-naked wretches”, “living skeletons, tottering with disease and weakness” (1861, 200), and Chronicles of Castle Cloyne includes a minute description of the painful starvation of Oonagh’s lover John Molloy. By contrast, in Irish-American fiction of the 1860s and 1870s we find hardly any images of death by hunger. While in The Lost Rosary Mary’s father passes away, his death is attributed to “paralysis or some disease of the heart” (1870, 100) which may have been brought on by his sorrows. Annie Reilly depicts the trauma of eviction, and it is even suggested that Annie’s mother might collapse to a fit, as they are removed from their cottage: “He was going to say more, but a scream from Annie startled him, and, turning round, he saw his wife reclining in her daughter’s arms, while a stream of blood poured from her nose and down over her face and breast” (1873, 66). However, nowhere in the novel do we come across any scenes of starvation. This remarkable phenomenon appears to suggest that the recollections of hunger and decease are repressed in much IrishAmerican literature of the so-called Famine generation – an impression which is confirmed when we look at Mary Anne Sadlier´s Bessy Conway. Intriguingly, Sadlier’s novel only briefly touches upon the blight and Famine, for it is only towards the end of the novel that the narrative shifts from America, the country to which Bessy migrated, back to the pestilence-stricken homeland and that readers learn about the “dismal time in Denis Conway’s cottage, and in many a cottage through the length and breadth of Ireland” caused by “the failure of crops” during “the terrible year of the Famine” (1862, 263). As Paul Ricoeur, amongst others, has argued, the performance of cultural memory involves the dynamics between selection, recollection and modalities of forgetting (2000, 43), and one can argue that literature actively shapes memory. Sadlier’s Bessy Conway makes observable both the desire to reiterate a traumatic past, for the experience of trauma is a repetitive process,¹⁶ as well as the urge to sidestep its painfulness. In Sadlier’s novel, the recollections of wasteland and starvation almost seem too traumatic to recall, for the novel immediately turns to Bessy who in the nick of 16 See, for example, Caruth (1996, 17).

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time returns to her motherland to save her family from eviction. Bessy pushes aside the bailiff who has started to remove furniture from the house, makes sure the arrears are paid so that her parents can continue to live in their cottage and the scene ends on a restoration of a comfortable home with plenty of food supplies: Before ‘the Lammas Foods’ rolled that year over the sunparched holms of Tipperary Denis Conway’s house had assumed more than its former appearance of comfort and neatness, and when the family sat down to their Hallow Eve supper on the last night of October the barn had grain, and the byer had cows, and a fine young colt was munching his hay through the rack of the well-covered stable, perhaps enjoying the sense of comfort as well as his owners. The big ark was packed full of new meal, and the flitches of bacon were again pendant from the snowwhite rafters. There was a fire blazing on the wellswept hearth that suggested the idea of a grand pyramidal turfstack somewhere in the immediate vicinity. (1862, 24)

This representation of recuperated dwelling extends to nature, for Bessy’s financial support appears to form the onset to a regeneration of the landscape which is symbolically revitalised by spring: The green fields of Erin were covered with their spring carpet dotted over with white daisies and yellow buttercups, the pale primrose – “dower of sweetest memories!” – was peeping forth on every sunny bank. (1862, 298)

This image of a regenerated, pastoral Irish landscape suggests that Bessy Conway evokes an image of Famine-stricken Ireland, only to repress it immediately afterwards, so that the illusion of Erin as a timeless Eden can persist. How can we explain that starving Famine victims do not figure in these three Irish-American Famine novels, while these atrocities are remembered in fiction written in Ireland? Is the repression of starvation in Irish-American fiction that we have noticed in any way linked to the experience of diaspora? As critics such as Susannah Radstone (2008) and Kerwin Lee Klein (2000) have claimed, issues of cultural recollection closely intersect with processes of ethnic identity formation. As a closer inspection reveals, there is reason to assume that strongly traumatic memories of the Famine are disturbing spectres that have to exorcised in the quest for an ethnic identity in diaspora that characterises this literature. Bessy Conway, The Lost Rosary and Annie Reilly display how the hostilities faced by Irish Catholic immigrants in America led to the construction of an exclusive Irish-American identity that separates itself from American society in many respects. The novels consciously suggest to their readers that it is important to stay true to the Catholic, rural traditions of the homeland and withstand integration in Protestant, urban American – which Mary Anne Sadlier in her preface to the

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reader even calls “These Great Babylons of the West” (1862, 3). All three novels not only promote Irish immigrants go to mass and observe Catholic doctrine, but also imply that the American city is a breeding place of temptations where immigrants lose their faith and morality. In Bessy Conway immigrant characters such as Ned Finigan and his spouse Ally who set up a pub are ensnared by the American Dream of wealth, lose their innate sense of morality, and all neglect the faith they were raised in. McElgun suggests that in New York City the streets “are literally filled with poverty and vice of the very worst kind” (1873, 108). McCorry implies that urban New York is full of the “allurements of the devil”, dens of moral degradation where young Irish women will discard their Catholic creed as well as their maidenly honour. As the narrator’s invocation to immigrant Irish girls suggests, the city will expose scenes to them that will shock their “virgin modesty”, “[v]ice will cunningly allure” them, with its deformities hidden beneath the garb of wealth” (1870, 102–103), and it is only by holding on to the moral and religious values of their Irish upbringing that girls can safeguard their purity. As Barbara Bender clarifies, landscape plays a crucial role in the “way in which identities are created and disputed, whether individual, group, or nationstate” (1993, 3), and this certainly applies to Irish–American fiction which identifies an imagined bucolic Irish landscape with Irish Catholicism. Representations of urban immorality and degradation are contrasted with images of a pastoral Erin which, in turn, symbolise Catholic morality. In Annie Reilly, for instance, James’ recollection of a pre-Famine green Ireland is marked by its religious devotion as well as its green, pure lands that express this Faith: “green hills with tall chapel-spires peeping over their tops – an emblem of its people’s devotion to God and the Catholic church” (1873, 198). The Irish rural landscape that James fondly recollects becomes invested with the religious traditions of Irish Catholicism and the people’s spirituality. As Oona Frawley contends, the Famine can be viewed as “the literal failure of the pastoral” (2005, 54). Painful memories of corpses and human beings reduced to skeletons by hunger would disturb the pastoral image of Irish landscape on which Irish-American identity grounds itself, and this may clarify the idealisation of an Edenic Ireland by these diaspora writers. That, indeed, the obliteration of dehumanising conditions of starvation in these Irish-American novels may be explained by the link between the pastoral mode and Irish-American identity construction, is revealed by the “pastoral endings” that we find in all three novels. As we have seen, Bessy returns to mother Ireland and her remigration marks a recuperation of an Irish pastoral landscape. Fellow immigrant Paul Brannigan does not settle back in Ireland, but he manages to find a home in the New World that closely resembles the pastoral motherland. We read that Paul likes to spend his free Sundays in the City Park

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which is called “the favorite haunt of all the dwellers ‘down town’ who loved the verdure and the shade” (1862, 106), thus offering a bower of pastoral retreat and leisure in busy New York. The narrator even evokes a comparison between Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” (1770) on pastoral Auburn and the city park by quoting the poem: “With seats beneath the shade”, which if not exactly “For talking age and whispering lovers made,”

like those immortalized in Goldsmith’s verse, were none the less most excellent resting places for the sons and daughters of toil when on “the Sabbath, the poor man’s day,” they could sit and listen to the plash of the fountain and think of things past, present, and future. (1862, 106)

While the City Hall Park thus resembles nature “at home” in Ireland, it is even hinted that the park is not only where nature may bloom, but where the Irish Catholic spirit may be cultivated as well. Here it is that Paul Brannigan meets Irish youngsters in order to teach them Catholic doctrine and morality: “Lord bless me!” said Paul, oblivious for the moment of the gross darkness that enveloped the minds of his hearers, “Lord bless me! don’t you know that? Why, sure, the Blessed Virgin is the Mother of Our Lord. I’ll tell you all about Him and her next Sunday, please God”. (1862, 113)

In this way, the City Park appears to be a replica of the pastoral scenery that is associated with the motherland, suggesting that the bucolic landscape functions as a translocatable memory space that can establish a specifc Irish Catholic ethnospace in diaspora. Similar instances of transposed homeland scenery feature in The Lost Rosary and Annie Reilly. In both novels the main characters do not return to Ireland, but settle successfully in the United States as Catholic Irish-Americans and this achievement of an authentic ethnic identity in diaspora is paralleled by the acquisition of homes in pastoral landscapes that are reminiscent of pre-Famine Ireland. In Annie Reilly the couple Annie and James, seem to find an alternative to the once pastoral Ireland in the New World city park which allows them to relish the beauties of nature: When they returned, James purchased a house in a beautiful part of New York City, from which himself and Mrs. O’Rourke, and quite a number of little O’Rourkes, may be seen driving through the Central Park every Sunday evening. (1873, 244)

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The Lost Rosary also presents a reconstruction of Irish pastoral dwelling in the New World where the same crops may be cultivated as in Ireland, but now without the threat of pestilence: There’s the river Delaware would do your heart good to see it. Grapes grow outside in the open air here You just put up five or six sticks in a row, and nail thin ones across them, and the grapes run up them, before they become garpes you know, just like kidney beans at home, an’sweet peas, ‘an I’m told they pay well. Turnips an’other things are much like as in Magheramore. (1870, 181)

At the conclusion of the novel the characters attain a real home in the American countryside, buying two neat little farms that adjoin one another. Although the recollection of Famine is traumatising, “in the shadowy outlines of a memory made treacherous by its conflicts with the world” (1870, 9–10), Tim, Barney, Mary and Alley will manage to reproduce their idealised image of rural Irish nature and a farming existence in America – an image moreover that is untainted by hunger and disease. This image of plenty that marks the narrative conclusion cannot only be interpreted as a response to the traumatic Famine past, but also as an engagement with discourses of the North-American frontier which often identified settlement in the West with opportunities for bountiful agircultural produce and food. For instance, in The Diary of Elisabeth Koren, 1853–1855, the memoir of a Norwegian woman’s settlement in Iowa, we can read about fellow immigrants to the western frontier like Lomen who live “high as far as food is concerned”, relishing dishes such as “apple charlotte”and “roast chicken” (1955, 156).¹⁷ Similarly, Edward and Rebecca Burlend’s A True Picture of Emigration; or Fourteen Years in the Interior of North America (1848) argues that in rural Illinois “everybody has plenty of plain good food” (60). These intersections between the depictions of frontier settlement in these Irish-American novels and recollections of pioneer life in the West, which suggest a transcultural blend of the cultural legacies of the former homeland and the heritage of the host nation, also becomes evident from the prominent role that the American ideal of the hardworking self-made man plays in these IrishAmerican Famine narratives. The ideal of the pioneer who, according to Major Strickland’s Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West is willing to endure “hard labour, and … all sorts of privations … dangers and hardships attending the settlement of a new country”(1853, 134) is embodied by the immigrant characters in these two novels. Their success in settling in landscapes that may remind them of their childhood abodes depends upon their ability to conform to the American ideals 17 See also Reginald Horsman’s observation that “most of the pioneers who settled the American continent were able to obtain a rough abundance of food” (2008, 1).

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of hard work and initiative. James can afford the Sunday outings to Central Park because he has risen on the social ladder through honest and steady labour, and it is through their willingness to toil hard in an area where civilization still needs to be laid out – without “hedges” or “roads of any consequence”(1870, 180) – that Tim and Barney can achieve the longed-for idyllic rural existence. The narrative evocation of a pastoral setting that reminds of Ireland is therefore bound up and overlaps with American forms of cultural memory, such as the American Dream and the frontier myth, and therefore becomes “multidirectional” (Rothberg 2009, 5). Furthermore, the role that the idyllic scenery associated with pre-Famine Ireland plays in these novels is transcultural in that similar patterns of identification with the homeland landscape can be found among another group of nineteenth-century European immigrants who fled to the United States to escape starvation. Between 1866 and 1868 Finland went through what they called suuret nälkävuodet, the great hunger years, which instigated massive immigration to America.¹⁸ Upon their arrival, the Finnish immigrants ”sought out the landscapes that echoed the lakes and forests of Finland in their new home” (Johnson 1996, 245) and that they connected with nostalgic memories of their motherland before the famine, while they also attempted to transfer the cultural legacy of their home country onto their new habitats, building saunas in the scenery of northern Michigan and Wisconsin.¹⁹ Ross Poole has argued that in cultural remembrance “we reach into the past, and make that past a presence in our current moral or political agenda” (2008, 160). An examination of Famine fiction written in homeland and diapora makes clear how valid this idea is. The fiction written in the homeland shares many memories with the texts written by Irish-American immirants, possibly because of shared “mémoires vécues”, because of the “imagined community” of IrishAmericans that sought to retain its connections with motherland Ireland and its past.²⁰ While we can thus speak of a transcultural recollection of the Famine which suggests a transatlantic ethnic identity, at the same time Irish-American fiction shows that cultural recollection changes in the process of relocation. The conditions of diaspora and particularly the problems of integrating in a new society provoke a crisis in identity which must be overcome by what Matthew Jacobsen has called, “extolling certain virtues, condemning certain vices, celebrating certain kinds of deeds, and advancing certain versions of the heroic, fabricated and enshrined … ‘national character’” (2002, 97). While the Famine 18 See Tanskanen (1994). 19 See Conzen (1994, 230). 20 For the idea of “imagined communities” see Anderson (1991).

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fiction produced in the homeland develops towards confrontational recollections when it comes to starvation, possibly as a way to redress the wrongs of British imperialism and the role of England in Famine atrocities, American Famine literature appears to move in the different direction of nostalgia and idealisation. This appears to endorse Doreen Massey’s observation that it is very common that diaspora cultures characterise the homeland from which they are distanced and displaced temporally and spatially “in terms uniquely of its past” and even “a static view” (1994, 113) of this past, in this case pre-Famine pastoral Ireland. As a result, the “accessible memory” (Connerton 1989, 14) of the Famine, what can be remembered because it is seen as acceptable by collective groups involved in the performance of recollection, is different for literary production in the motherland and among migrant communities. Furthermore, one may conclude that Irish-American writers took specific literary techniques at hand,²¹ in this case the pastoral mode, in the processes of digging up memory for identity formation. Figuratively rooting Irishness in a pastoral pre-Famine soil, Irish-American Famine fiction glosses over the fearful realities caused by blight-stricken wasteland and seeks to re-evoke a pastoral scenery as moveable lieu de mémoire that is either located in a regenerated homeland or transported to American soil.

Acknowledgements The author expresses her gratitude to the European Research Council for funding the research for this article.

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21 For a detailed discussion of literary techniques and cultural recollection, see Neumann (2008).

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Radstone, Susannah. “What Place Is This? Transcultural Memory and the Locations of Memory Studies.” Parallax 17. 4 (2011): 109–123. Ricoeur, Paul. La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil, 2000. Rigney, Ann. “Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans.” Poetics Today 25.2 (2004): 361–96. Rothberg, Michael. “Between Auschwitz and Algeria: Multidirectional Memory and the Counterpublic Witness.” Critical Inquiry 33.1 (2006): 158–84. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Sadlier, Mary Anne. Bessy Conway; or, the Irish Girl in America. New York: D & J. Sadlier and Co., 1862 Sarbaugh, Timothy. “The Spirit of Manifest Destiny: The American Government and Famine Ireland, 1845–1849.” Fleeing the Famine: North-America and Irish Refugees, 1845 1851. Ed. Margaret M. Mulrooney. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. 45–59. Strickland, Major. Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West; or the Experience of an Early Settler. Edmonton: M.G. Hurtig, 1953. Sullivan, Alexander M. New Ireland: Political Sketches and Personal Reminiscences of Thirty Years of Irish Public Life. Glasgow: Cameron & Ferguson, 1877 Tanskanen, Minna. “The Cultivated Mire Landscape as a Mirror of Finnish Society.” Landscapes, Identities and Development. Eds. R. Zoran et al. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. 195–207. The Irish American. 22 August 1857. Turner, Michael. After the Famine: Irish Agriculture, 1850–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Walshe, Elizabeth Hely. Golden Hills; a Tale of the Irish Famine. London: Religious Tracts Society, 1865. Ward, Patrick. Exile, Emigration, and Irish Writing. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002. Wertsch, James V. Voices of Collective Remembering. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Zerubavel, Eviatar. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Contributors Lars Breuer is research associate at the Institute for Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin, working in the research project “Collective Memory as a Basis for Identification with Europe”, funded by German Research Foundation (DFG). He studied Cultural Studies, Politics, and Sociology in Berlin, Copenhagen and Lüneburg and received his M.A. (Magister Artium) in Cultural Studies from Humboldt Universität in Berlin. From 2004-2006 he was Research Assistant in the project “International Traditions of Historical Consciousness” at the Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Studies (CMR), Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen. In 2007-2009 he was Ph.D. fellow at the CMR. In 2013 he finished his dissertation about German and Polish vernacular memory of World War II and received his PhD from Leibniz Universität Hannover. Lucy Bond is a teaching and research fellow in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. She was awarded her Ph.D., entitled Reframing Rupture: remembering 9/11 in theory and practice, by Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2012. She has taught and lectured widely on American and contemporary literature, and cultural memory and trauma. In 2010-2011 Lucy was course convener on the MA in Cultural Memory at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, and a fellow at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. She is the author of several published and forthcoming articles on American memorial culture after 9/11. Lucy has co-organized a number of national and international conferences on memory in the UK, Europe and the US, including: Transcultural Memory (2010); Memory and Education (2011); Memory and Restitution (2013); The Natural History of Memory (2014). Peter Carrier is a research fellow at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig. He studied German Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Leeds and the Université Paris VIII, and obtained his Ph.D. at the Free University of Berlin in 2000 with a study about  Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany (Berghahn, 2005). He has held posts lecturing in the fields of Philology, Cultural Studies and Political Science at the University of Tübingen, the University of Paris VII, the Free University of Berlin, the Central European University in Budapest and Queen’s University (Canada). He is an active editorial committee member of the journals Studies in Contemporary History and National Identities. His recent research has focused on the rhetoric of memory in political communication and on the historiography of the Holocaust, as demonstrated in the edited volume School and Nation. Identity Politics and Educational Media in an Age of Diversity (Peter Lang, 2013). Marguérite Corporaal is Assistant Professor of British Literature at Radboud University Nijmegen, and principal investigator of the research programme Relocated Remembrance: The Great Famine in Irish (Diaspora) Fiction, 1847-1921, for which she was awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council. Among her publications are Heroines of the Golden (St)Age: Women and Drama in Early Modern Spain and England (with Rina Walthaus, Reichenberger, 2008); and The Literary Utopias of Cultural Communities, 1790-1900 (with Evert Jan van Leeuwen, Rodopi, 2010) and various articles on the literary afterlife of the Great Hunger in such journals as Bréac, English Studies, Irish Studies Review, Atlantic Studies, and Irish Review. She is coeditor of Recollecting Hunger: An Anthology. Cultural Memories of the Great Famine in Irish and British Fiction, 1847-1920 (Irish Academic Press, 2012) and Global Legacies of the Great Irish Famine: Interdisciplinary and Transnational Perspectives (forthcoming, Peter Lang, 2014).

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Dirk Göttsche is Professor of German, University of Nottingham; Dr. phil. Münster 1986 (Die Produktivität der Sprachkrise in der modernen Prosa, 1987), Habilitation Münster 1999 (Zeit im Roman: Literarische Zeitreflexion und die Geschichte des Zeitromans im späten 18. und im 19. Jahrhundert, 2001). Further monographs on Zeitreflexion und Zeitkritik im Werk Wilhelm Raabes (2000), Kleine Prosa in Moderne und Gegenwart (2006), Remembering Africa: the Rediscovery of Colonialism in Contemporary German Literature (2013). Member of the Academia Europaea, co-editor of the Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft; co-editor of the critical editions of Ingeborg Bachmann’s “Todesarten”-Projekt (1995), Kritische Schriften (2005), and the Bachmann-Handbuch (2002). Co-editor of Metropole, Provinz und Welt: Raum und Mobilität in der Literatur des Realismus (2013), Realism and Romanticism in German Literature (2013) and (Post-) Colonialism Across Europe: Transcultural History and National Memory (at press, 2014). Research areas, reflected in various co-edited volumes, chapters and journal articles: German literature of the long nineteenth century; Austrian Modernism; modernist short prose; time, history and memory in German literature; literature and the politics of memory; postcolonial and cross-cultural literary studies, comparative postcolonial literary studies, German literary discourses about Africa, Black German writing, African migrants’ writing in German. Kobi Kabalek studied at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev and the Humboldt University in Berlin. He received his Ph.D. in 2013 from the University of Virginia. The title of the dissertation is The Rescue of Jews and the Memory of Nazism in Germany, from the Third Reich to the Present. His research focuses on cultural history, oral history, and memory in Germany and in Israel. He is currently editing a special issue of the journal Hagar – Studies in Culture, Polity, and Identities on Memory and Periphery (forthcoming June 2014) and his recent articles include: “What Is the Context of Memory?,” in Gerd Sebald and Jatin Wagle, eds, Theorizing Social Memories: Concepts and Contexts (forthcoming in Routledge) and “Das Scheitern und die Erinnerung: Über das Nicht-Retten von Juden in zwei deutschen Nachkriegsfilmen,” in Lisa Bolyos and Katharina Morawek, eds, Diktatorpuppe zerstört, Schaden gering: Kunst und Geschichtspolitik im Postnazismus (Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2012). Wendy Koenig is an Associate Professor at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois and teaches art history, urban and suburban studies, and the History of Ideas. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from Ohio State University in 2004. Recent publications include “The Holocaust and World War II: In History and In Memory” (2012) and “The Holocaust: Responses and Consequences” (2010), both co-edited with Nancy Rupprecht. She has written art criticism for Artpapers and the International Review of African American Art. A. Dirk Moses is Professor of Global and Colonial History at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (2007) and has written widely on genocide in colonial contexts. His edited books include Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (2004), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History (2008), and The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (co-edited with Donald Bloxham, 2010). He is finishing a book called Genocide and the Terror of History and his concurrent project is The Diplomacy of Genocide. He is senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Research.

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Franziska Meyer is Associate Professor at the Department of German Studies at the University of Nottingham. She studied German Literature, Philosophy, Politics and Media Studies at the Ludwig Maximilan University of Munich and the Free University of Berlin. She obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Cardiff and has taught at the Universities of Swansea, Cardiff, and Potsdam. She has published widely on women authors and gender politics of the late 18th, and 20th century; on postwar literature and the Cold War; Berlin literature, and the politics of memory in contemporary German literature; on exiled writers, and Holocaust literature and film. Her publications include Avantgarde im Hinterland: Caroline Schlegel-Schelling in der DDR-Literatur (1999), Writing against War and Violence Ingeborg Bachmann and Literature in German 19451980 (2006, ed., with Dirk Göttsche), German Life and Letters 64:1: Sex and Politics. In Honour of Elizabeth Boa (2011, ed. with Margaret Littler, Rachel Palfreyman). She is the editor of Peter Lang’s series on Exile Studies and has co-edited Argonautenschiff, Yearbook of the Anna Seghers Society (vol. 13, 18, 22). She is the vice chair of the International Anna Seghers Society (Berlin & Mainz). Andy Pearce is a Lecturer in Holocaust and History Education at the Centre for Holocaust Education, Institute of Education, University of London. His work involves delivering a national programme of research-informed CPD to teachers, designed to transform classroom practice. Andy also teaches on an MA module, oversees the development of the Centre’s resources and works with trainee teachers. He is involved with the Centre’s new landmark research into students’ knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust.  Prior to joining the IOE he worked at the Holocaust Educational Trust, and completed doctoral research at Royal Holloway University of London. He is a former teacher of History and Politics in London secondary schools. Andy is the Reviews Editor of the journal Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History. He has spoken at national and international colloquia, and had articles and chapters in various journals and edited volumes. His book Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain is published by Routledge in spring 2014. Andy is the author of the Wiener Library’s travelling exhibition Never Again? Thinking about the Holocaust, and has worked with the Imperial War Museum on their Moscati Collection. Jessica Rapson is a Teaching Fellow in the department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London. She is also an Associate Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she completed her doctorate in 2012. She was co-organizer of the international conference, Transcultural Memory at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, University of London, 2010, and has since co-run colloquia and seminars on Memory and Restitution and Memory and Education. She is the author of several existing and forthcoming peer-reviewed articles and chapters on memory and landscape, and her monograph, Topographies of Suffering: Buchenwald, Babi Yar, Lidice is scheduled for publication with Berghahn Books (Spring, 2015). Michael Rothberg is Professor of English and Head of the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is also Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies Initiative. His work has been published in such journals as American Literary History, Critical Inquiry, Cultural Critique, History and Memory, New German Critique, and PMLA, and has been translated into French, German, Hungarian, and Polish. His latest book is Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), published by

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Stanford University Press in their “Cultural Memory in the Present” series. He is also the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000), and has co-edited The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003), Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University: Poetry, Politics, and the Profession (2009), and special issues of the journals Criticism, Interventions, Occasion, and Yale French Studies. Together with Yasemin Yildiz and Andrés Nader he won a 2011-2012 ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship for a project on immigration and Holocaust memory in contemporary Germany. Aline Sierp is Lecturer in European Studies at Maastricht University (NL). She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative European Politics and History from the University of Siena (IT) and a joint Master’s degree awarded by the University of Bath (UK), the University of Siena (IT) and Sciences Po Paris (FR). Before joining the University of Maastricht, Aline worked as researcher at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site (DE). She has published several peer reviewed articles and book chapters on collective memory, questions of identity and European integration. A monograph on the nexus between national and European memory politics will be published with Routledge in 2014 and a Special Issue on the impact of the current crisis on different memory frameworks with Patterns of Prejudice in 2015. Terri Tomsky is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her research examines memory politics in postcolonial and post-socialist literatures. Her current  project theorizes the interplay of cosmopolitanism and abjection within the context of global terrorism, and focuses in particular on the figure of the enemy combatant. As well as working on the manuscript of  this book project, she  is also editing a volume of essays with Eddy Kent (University of Alberta). Negative Cosmopolitanism: Abjection, Power, Biopolitics investigates the relationship between cosmopolitanism, neoimperialism, and the unequal effects of a globalized political economy. It is forthcoming with McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2014.

Index of Names Adorno, Theodor W. 209–210 Alexander, Jeffrey 126, 168–170, 183, 191 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 11–12, 54 Arendt, Hannah 10, 104 Arnold, Matthew 7 Assman, Aleida and Sebastian Conrad 249 Assmann, Aleida 40, 49–51, 104, 111–112, 114, 253 Assmann, Aleida and Ute Frevert 49, 52 Assmann, Jan 44–48, 51, 248 Assmann, Jan and Aleida 16, 32, 44–48, 51 Bauman, Zygmunt 172–173 Beck, Ulrich 11, 14 Beigbeder, Frédéric 209 Beisheim, Otto 213 Benjamin, Walter 74–75, 192, 194, 199–200, 202, 212, 216–220 Berliner, David 42, 44 Bernard-Donals, Michael 156, 158, 211, Bhabha, Homi 7–8, 13 Bloch, Marc 55, 192 Bodnar, John 84–85 Boltanski, Christian 204–20, 218–219 Butler, Judith 5, 10, 12, 74–75, 204, 211 Craps, Stef and Michael Rothberg 9–10, 63, 64, 167, 168, 169 Diner, Dan 110, 113 Dorfman, Ariel 212, 218 DuBois, W.E.B. 170 Erll, Astrid 15–18, 47, 61–62, 252 Erll, Astrid and Ann Rigney 16, 31, 47, 48, 142–143, 248, 249 Foucault, Michel 192–194, 201 Frank, Anne 132, 77 – see also Anne Frank Museum Friedländer, Saul 121, 217 Gillis, John 45

Habermas, Jürgen 10–11 Hacker, Katharina 212–220 Halbwachs, Maurice 32, 40, 44, 47, 55–56, 84, 192 Hodgkin, Katherine and Susannah Radstone 49 Huyssen, Andreas 15, 16, 166, 201, 249, 256 Kafka, Franz 217 Kluge, Alexander 210 LaCapra, Dominic 71–72, 76 Landsberg, Alison 93, 179, 187, 248 Le Goff, Jacques 40 Levy, Daniel, and Sznaider, Natan 16–17, 61, 67, 77, 85, 95, 97, 105, 110, 114, 119–120, 122–124, 128–130, 133, 135, 139, 168–169, 178, 183, 210 Libeskind, Daniel 3, 183–184 Magris, Claudio 218 McEwan, Ian 218 Moses, A. Dirk 10, 18, 21, 29–38, 62–63 Moustaki, Nikki 209 Namer, Gérard 56 Nora, Pierre 16–17, 32, 49, 51, 88, 113, 251–252 Novick, Peter 67, 156, 167 Olick et al. 31 Olick, Jeffrey 40–41, 49, 84 Olick, Jeffrey and Joyce Robbins 15, 84 Radstone, Susannah 15, 18, 19, 41, 48, 49, 169, 248, 251, 258 Rigney, Ann 248 Rothberg, Michael 16, 17, 21, 29–38, 61, 62, 76, 96, 97, 142, 153, 159, 169, 170, 210, 212, 214, 242, 247, 249, 262 Roy, Arundhati 218 Santner, Eric 12, 75, 192, 194, 202, 204, 216 Saramago, José 218

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Simpson, David 71, 210–211, 215, 218 Snyder, Timothy 9, 30, 128, 142, 154–155 Sontag, Susan 13, 93, 212 Stalin, Joseph 9, 30, 55, 142, 147–148, 154

Walkowitz, Rebecca 12 Weinberger, Eliot 210 Welsch, Wolfgang 13–14, 18, 19, 54, 226 Žižek, Slajov 210–211

Ugresić, Dubravka 192–207, 212, 218, 220

Index of Terms 7/7 bombings 214 9/11 1–5, 47, 61–78, 209–220, 212, 218, – comparisons with 61–78, 141–142, 153–159 – see also Chile (9/11, 1973) Absence 202, 205–206 – and commemoration 22, 182, 184, 201 – “Legacy of Absence” galleries 180 – Yugoslavia as 191 – Reflecting Absence 2 al Qaeda 64, 77 Algerian War, 54 Angel of History 217 Anti-semitism 110, 131, 142, 145–147, 173 Attentiveness 14, 217–220 Auschwitz 16, 87, 154, 186, 209 – After Auschwitz 123 – Auschwitz-Birkenau 110 – “Auschwitz Syndrome” 140 – “Voices from Auschwitz” 168 African American memory 170 African literature 225–242 Anne Frank Museum 65–66 – see also Frank, Anne Babi Yar, Kiev 3, 22, 139–142, 144–148, 153–159 Babi Yar Park 3, 22, 139, 141–142, 149–159 Bagram Airbase, Afghanistan 5 Berlin Jewish Museum 3, 166, 183–184 Bhopal 212, 218 Bosnia 111, 193, 196–198, 203, 205, 216 –  and Croatia 206 CELL (Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab) 152–153, 157 Chile (9/11, 1973) 210–212 Cold War 4, 107–109, 112, 115–116, 119, 126–130, 168, 192, 194, 200–201, 211, 213 Colonialism (German, English) Colorado Committee of Concern for Soviet Jewry (CCCSJ) 149–150

Commitment to memory 34, 46, 132, 218 Communicative memory 44–47 Communism 107–108, 201 – anti- 148 – collapse of Soviet 15, 145–6 – Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism 30 Cosmopolitanism 10–12, 14, 54, 106, 108, 122, 133, 191 Council of Europe 106, 111, 128 Culture – homogeneous, homogenization of 15, 20–23, 31–32, 45, 50, 73–74, 94, 196, 206, 252 – national 193, 196, 249 – transcendence of national 3–6, 9–12, 22, 67, 83, 97, 103–105, 114, 119, 150, 169–170, 220, 236, 252 Diaspora 13, 203–204, 235–242, 247–263 Double genocide thesis 9, 29–33 Dresden (bombing) 87–88, 209 Ecocriticism 9, 254 Empathy 10, 62–64, 71, 211, 218 – communities of 6 – empathic unsettlement 76 – transnational 4, 10 Escape from Sobibor 123–126 Europe Day 103, 109, 113 European Commission 103, 107–109, 114 European Union 30, 84, 86, 93, 103–116, 128, 134 Exceptionalism, American 5, 23, 68–70, 211 Famine – Great Famine (Irish) 247–263 – Great Famine (Soviet) 142, 146–147, 153–159 First World War 209, 230 Forgetting/Amnesia 15, 107, 169, 196–197, 205–213, 218, 237, 257 French Algeria 17, 36

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Gaze – museumizing, 191–207 – postcolonial 227 Germany 15, 44, 47, 74, 83–98, 106, 109, 115, 127–128, 174, 183, 205, 209–213, 225–227, 231–232, 234–242 – Federal Republic of West 54–55, 91, 94, 235, 237, 239–240 – German Democratic Republic (GDR)/ East 55, 226–231, 237–238, 240–241 – Nazi 90, 110, 124, 175–176 Globalization 6, 11–14, 32 Ground Zero Museum Workshop 65–66, 77 Hiroshima 209–211 Holocaust – comparisons and uniqueness 9–10, 17, 32–33, 63–67, 77, 109, 141–142, 146–159 – consciousness 119–135, 167 – education 34–35, 125–126, 145–146, 168 – in literature 201–206, 209 – marginalization 30, 131, 140–149 – memory 37, 85, 87–95, 105, 108, 110–116, 119, 139–142, 145, 165–187, 225 – uniqueness and dominance 33, 63–64, 109 – universalization of 29, 168–169, 176–178 Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) 125, 129 Holocaust (NBC mini-series) 121–122 Holocaust Memorial Day – British 134 – European 113 – United Nations 159 holodomor (see famine, Ukraine) Human Rights Centre of Maine 166 Hunchback 216–217, 219 Hybridity 8, 53, 120 Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Centre 166–184 Imperial War Museum 122 – London 166 – North 3 Inner London Education Authority 122–123 International Task Force 131 Iraq War 4, 64–67, 111, 213–215

Israel 12, 34, 37, 54, 133, 149, 158, 165, 167–168 Jedwabne 87–88 Katyń massacre 87–88 lieux de mémoire 16, 32, 47, 88, 113, 198, 251 Lithuania 29–30 Memory – African American 234–238 collective 15–17, 31–33, 40–41, 44–49, 51–53, 68–70, 85, 88–97, 103–107, 112–116, 119–123, 134–135, 146–147, 154–159, 167–169, 175, 191–200, 204–207, 220, 225, 242, 250, 263 – competitive 10, 17–19, 21, 31–33, 142, 146, 154–159, 169 see also memory, zero-sum – cosmopolitan memory 17, 29–31, 85, 97, 119, 126–135, 183 – cultural 15–17, 39, 43–57, 159, 227, 248, 252, 256–257, 262 – ethics of 32–33, 37 – European 30, 35–36, 83–98, 103–116, 119–120, 125–135 – Irish American 251–263 – intergroup 51–52 – intragroup 50–51 – national 46–47, 83–85, 103–104, 108, 114–116, 142, 147–148, 165 – of colonialism 8–10, 12, 15, 53, 225–242, 254 – official 30, 83–84, 90–98, 113, 119, 125, 145–147, 154, 193, 202 – postcolonial 8, 225–242 – shared 3, 16, 51–55, 83, 95–98, 111–116, 155–156, 167–169, 187, 192–193, 248–252, 262 – transnational 10–14, 18, 29–32, 44, 47, 63, 83, 93, 97–98, 104, 111–113, 116, 119–122, 126–135, 168, 209–210, 225, 236, 240–242, 249–250 – travelling 17–19, 63, 249 – vernacular 21, 83–98, 123 – zero-sum 17, 21, 62, 97, 142, 159, 169

Index of Terms   

Migration 8, 54–55, 87–88, 172, 184, 225–227, 232–242 – migration studies 50, 52, 249 Mizel Museum 151–153, 157 Mnemonic forms 17, 29, 197 – processes 42 – space 220 – technology 40 – transmission 128 – tropes 250–253 Multidirectional memory 17, 29, 96, 169–170, 210, 242, 249, 262 Museumizing gaze 191–207 Museums 3, 52, 65–66, 147–148, 151–153, 157–159, 165–187, 204–205 Myth 53, 62, 143 – frontier 252, 262 – founding 51–53, 103–107, 110, 115–116 – national 67–68, 108, 195 National September 11 Museum 1–2 National Socialism, see also Nazism 87, 90, 121, 225–227 Nazism, see also National Socialism and Nazi Holocaust 36, 64, 108, 114, 132, 174 – neo-Nazism 177–178 – victims of 4, 30, 132, 139

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“Schindler effect” 126–129 Second World War 64–67, 85–90, 108–109, 113, 119–125, 130, 139, 184, 201–204, 209–210 Seehof plots 213 Slavery 10, 87, 231, 236–237 Soviet Union 30, 55, 108, 141, 149, 157 Stalinist Russia 63, 85 The World at War 120 Transculturation 39, 55–56 Trauma 18, 29, 35–36, 65–66, 70, 95, 108–113, 168–169, 178, 192–207, 234–237, 247–263 Trauma economy 18, 63–64 UK Labour government 130–132 Ukrainian Institute of National Memory 147–148, 157 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 165–167, 178–183 United States of America 2–4, 64, 67–69, 129–131, 155, 167, 174–175, 184, 235–236, 248, 251–262 USS New York 5 Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) 15, 90

Oklahoma City National Memorial 182 Palestine 34–38, 158 Pastoral 251–152, 255–263 Pearl Harbour 209 Poland 30, 53–54, 83–98, 114, 146, 165, 179, 185–186 Postmemory 225, 234, 239–241 Prosthetic Memory 179, 187, 248–250 Racism 110–111, 125, 131, 215, 228, 230, 234–238

War on Terror 5, 63–66, 141–142, 153–159, 211 Warsaw Rising Museum 30 Warsaw ghetto uprising 87–88, 91 Wende 225–226, 235, 238, 241 World Forum for Russian Jewry 158 World Trade Center 210, 155–156 – Steel from 1–6, 141, 153 Yugoslavia 191–207