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Veterans, Victims, and Memory
In the vast literature on how the Second World War has been remembered in Europe, research into what happened in communist Poland, a country most affected by the war, is surprisingly scarce. The long gestation of Polish narratives of heroism and sacrifice, explored in this book, might help to understand why the country still finds itself in a -mnemonic standoff- with Western Europe, which tends to favour imagining the war in a civil, post-Holocaust, human rights-oriented way. The specific focus of this book is the organized movement of war veterans and former prisoners of Nazi camps from the 1940s until the end of the 1960s, when the core narratives of war became well established."
Theorizing Social Memories
Public debates over the last two decades about social memories, about how as societies we remember, make sense of, and even imagine and invent, our collective pasts suggest that grand narratives have been abandoned for numerous little stories that contest the unified visions of the past. But, while focusing on the diversity of social remembering, these fragmentary accounts have also revealed the fault-lines within the theoretical terrain of memory studies. This critical anthology seeks to bridge these rifts and breaks within the contemporary theoretical landscape by addressing the pressing issues of social differentiation and forgetting as also the relatively unexplored futuristic aspect of social memories. Arranged in four thematic sections which focus on the concepts, temporalities, functions and contexts of social memories, this book includes essays that range across disciplines and present a variety of theoretical approaches, from phenomenological sociology and systems theory to biography research and post-colonialism.
Memory and Change in Europe
In studies of a common European past, there is a significant lack of scholarship on the former Eastern Bloc countries. While understanding the importance of shifting the focus of European memory eastward, contributors to this volume avoid the trap of Eastern European exceptionalism, an assumption that this region’s experiences are too unique to render them comparable to the rest of Europe. They offer a reflection on memory from an Eastern European historical perspective, one that can be measured against, or applied to, historical experience in other parts of Europe. In this way, the authors situate studies on memory in Eastern Europe within the broader debate on European memory.
The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism
This Handbook is the first systematic effort to map the fast-growing phenomenon of memory activism and to delineate a new field of research that lies at the intersection of memory and social movement studies. From Charlottesville to Cape Town, from Santiago to Sydney, we have recently witnessed protesters demanding that symbols of racist or colonial pasts be dismantled and that we talk about histories that have long been silenced. But such events are only the most visible instances of grassroots efforts to influence the meaning of the past in the present. Made up of more than 80 chapters that encapsulate the rich diversity of scholarship and practice of memory activism by assembling differen...
Everyday Postsocialism in Eastern Europe
The collapse of state socialism ushered in dramatic political and economic change, producing new freedoms and opportunities, but also new challenges and disappointments. Focusing on laborers, professionals, youth, women, sexual minorities, foreign students, and emigrants, Everyday Postsocialism in Eastern Europe explores these multifaceted changes and people’s varied experiences of them. The featured narratives complicate hegemonic representations of transformation, revealing ruptures and continuities, progress and reversals. Highlighting the multi-directionality of change over the last thirty years, the book reappraises 1989 as an epochal event for all.
The Lives of Jewish Things
Tracing the paths of Jewish things across time, place, and culture, this collection reveals complex stories of individual and collective struggles to survive.
Peace at All Costs
Although it was characterized by simmering international tensions, the early Cold War also witnessed dramatic instances of reconciliation between states, as former antagonists rebuilt political, economic, and cultural ties in the wake of the Second World War. And such efforts were not confined to official diplomacy, as this study of postwar rapprochement between Poland and West Germany demonstrates. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Peace at All Costs follows Polish and German non-state activists who attempted to establish dialogue in the 1950s and 1960s, showing how they achieved modest successes and media attention at the cost of more nuanced approaches to their national histories and identities.
Neither Good Nor Bad
When confronted by a range of violent actions perpetrated by lone individuals, contemporary society exhibits a constant tendency to react in terms of helpless, even perplexed horror. Seeking explanations for the apparently inexplicable, commentators often hurry to declare the perpetrators as “evil”. This question is not restricted to individuals: history has repeatedly demonstrated how groups and even entire nations can embark on a criminal plan united by the conviction that they were fighting for a good and just cause. Which circumstances occasioned such actions? What was their motivation? Applying a number of historical, scientific and social-scientific approaches to this question, this study produces an integrative portrait of the reasons for human behavior and advances a number of different interpretations for their genesis. The book makes clear the extent to which we live in socially-constructed realities in which we cling for dear life to a range of conceptions and beliefs which can all too easily fall apart in situations of crisis.
The August Trials
The first account of the August Trials, in which postwar Poland confronted the betrayal of Jewish citizens under Nazi rule but ended up fashioning an alibi for the past. When six years of ferocious resistance to Nazi occupation came to an end in 1945, a devastated Poland could agree with its new Soviet rulers on little else beyond the need to punish German war criminals and their collaborators. Determined to root out the “many Cains among us,” as a Poznań newspaper editorial put it, Poland’s judicial reckoning spawned 32,000 trials and spanned more than a decade before being largely forgotten. Andrew Kornbluth reconstructs the story of the August Trials, long dismissed as a Stalinist ...
Trauma, Experience and Narrative in Europe after World War II
This book promotes a historically and culturally sensitive understanding of trauma during and after World War II. Focusing especially on Eastern and Central Europe, its contributors take a fresh look at the experiences of violence and loss in 1939–45 and their long-term effects in different cultures and societies. The chapters analyze traumatic experiences among soldiers and civilians alike and expand the study of traumatic violence beyond psychiatric discourses and treatments. While acknowledging the problems of applying a present-day medical concept to the past, this book makes a case for a cultural, social and historical study of trauma. Moving the focus of historical trauma studies fro...
