Twenty years after the end of communism, the history of Central and Eastern Europe still sparks intense discussions in the former Soviet bloc, as contested memories, primarily about communist repression and WWII, are relived. This volume goes beyond the state-centred approach that so often characterises the study of memory-issues in post-communist countries and highlights two interrelated factors that account for the recent proliferation of memory games in Central and Eastern Europe including, but not limited to, the growth in number of political and social actors who try to elaborate and impose new memory norms into society and the ‘internationalization’ of conflicted memories. In contrast to a narrow understanding of ‘transitional justice’, this collection of fourteen case studies situates conflicts around painful histories within the ‘ordinary’ operating of post-communist societies, concentrating on games played by political and administrative elites, activists and professional groups in various local, national and European venues.
List of Illustrations
General Editor’s Preface
Notes on Contributors
Introduction by Georges Mink and Laure Neumayer
Part I: Mobilizations around Memory: New Actors, New Issues
1. Cécile Jouhanneau: Would-be Guardians of Memory: An Association of Camp Inmates of the 1992–95 Bosnian War under Ethnographic Scrutiny
2. Kathy Rousselet: The Russian Orthodox Church and Reconciliation with the Soviet Past
3. Machteld Venken: ‘You Still Live Far from the Motherland, but You Are Her Son, Her Daughter.’ War Memory and Soviet Mental Space (1945–2011)
4. Eva Fisli and Jocelyn Parot: Pilgrimages to the Edge of the Fallen Empire – An Anthropological Study of Finnish and Hungarian Pilgrimages to Second World War Memorials in Post-Soviet Russia
5. Sarah Fainbergv: Memory at the Margins: The Shoah in Ukraine (1991–2011)
Part II: Memory Policies and Historical Narratives: How Do States Deal with Memories of the Past?
6. Irmina Matonyte: The Elites’ Games in the Field of Memory: Insights from Lithuania
7. Tatiana Kasperski: The Chernobyl Nuclear Accident and Identity Strategies in Belarus
8. Filipa Raimundo: Dealing with the Past in Central and Southern European Democracies: Comparing Spain and Poland
9. Georges Mink: Institutions of National Memory in Post-Communist Europe: From Transitional Justice to Political Uses of Biographies (1989–2010)
Part III: International Norms and ‘Geopolitics of Memory’
10. Tatiana Zhurzhenko: Memory Wars and Reconciliation in the Ukrainian–Polish Borderlands: Geopolitics of Memory from a Local Perspective
11. Pascal Bonnard: Memory of the Soviet Union and European Norms on Diversity as Rival Frameworks for Ethnic Boundary Making: A Case Study in Latvia’s Russian-speaking Schools
12. Laure Neumayer: Symbolic Policies versus European Reconciliation: The Hungarian ‘Status Law’
13. Guillaume Mouralis: The Rejection of International Criminal Law in West Germany after the Second World War
14. Philippe Perchoc: History as a Tool for Foreign Policy in the Baltic States after Independence
Conclusion by Georges Mink and Laure Neumayer
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