Paper short abstract:

This presentation will take the form of a walk through Berlin that examines a handful of memorials to the Holocaust and World War II. Observing, analyzing, and contextualizing these spaces demonstrates a marked shift in practices of memorialization from the mid-20th century until today.

Paper long abstract:

Memory scholar Andreas Huyssen writes, "Berlin as text remains first and foremost historical text, marked as much, if not more, by absences as by the visible presence of its past…" (2003, 52). Some of the most present absences with which Berlin is concerned are the voids that were created by the death and destruction of World War II, most especially through the Nazi plot to annihilate European Jewry. This presentation will take the form of a walk through Berlin that examines a handful of memorials to the events of World War II. By observing, analyzing, and contextualizing each of these physical memorial spaces, each of which was created in a different period after WWII, this presentation will demonstrate a marked shift in practices of memorialization from the mid-20th century until today—a shift characterized by an increasing distrust of traditional monumentality and permanence, a move away from literal representation towards abstraction, and an amplified focus on the subjective, emotional experience of the individual visitor. This increased focus on the visitor's emotional life and the facilitation of embodied practice to engage with the past highlight an increasing recognition that the resonant violence of genocide is an affective force felt within and through the body. Through creating spaces that recall the past affectively in the present, new memorial spaces seek to transform the present effects of past violence into an entity that can be experienced and productively manipulated by and for the contemporary subject.

Paper short abstract:

The contribution focuses on the representation of Nazi-perpetration in several permanent exhibitions in Austria and Germany. Two aspects are mainly regarded: general approaches to interpreting “the aggressor” and potential gender-specific connotations of female and male perpetrators and their crimes.

Paper long abstract:

Exhibitions enjoy credibility to a great extend (Thiemeyer 2010: 17) and are important parts of cultural memory (Pieper 2010: 195). They can also influence cultural memory (Beier de Haan 2005: 147). Because of that, it is extremely relevant, how the Nazi-crimes and Nazi-perpetrators are shown nowadays in museums. There are certain things to reflect on, like ethical aspects concerning the victims or concerns of survivors (Lutz 2009: 205). Often, the responsible institutions reflect carefully on it, sometimes it seems as if they don't. Consistently, curators and historians intend to represent the perpetrators carefully, but still there can be unintended messages in the exhibitions, for instance due to a specific combination of photographs, lighting and exhibition room. Seven permanent exhibitions of memorial sites and documentation centres in Austria and Germany were analyzed regarding the representation of male and female Nazi-perpetrators - per photographs, documents, three-dimensional objects, orchestration on the whole. The analyzed exhibitions respectively museums in Germany are Mittelbau-Dora Memorial, Grafeneck Memorial, Documentation Centre Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nürnberg, Wewelsburg 1933-1945 Memorial Museum and Documentation Obersalzberg. In Austria, Mauthausen Memorial as well as Hartheim Memorial were analyzed.

Paper short abstract:

My paper will based on materials collected among the non-Jewish population of Latgale. The memory of the Holocaust is one of the main parts of the local history and place memory in old-timers of Latgale. I will analyze narratives of the Holocaust and I will focus on folklore types of narratives.

Paper long abstract:

My paper is based on materials collected among the non-Jewish population of Latgale, a south-eastern region of Latvia. The main subject of our fieldwork conducted in 2011-2013 has been the image of Jews from the point of view of their non-Jewish neighbors. The non-Jewish population of Latgale before WWII was composed of several groups: Catholic Latvians, Catholic Poles, Catholic Byelorussians, Russian Orthodox Old Believers and Jews. A large number of interviews were conducted with the older representatives of the local population, who remember Jews and were witnesses of Holocaust.

Holocaust was one of central themes of the fieldworks too. We collected nearly 130 interviews with people who live in Latgale. They include a lot of stories of the Holocaust. The memory of Holocaust is one of the main parts of the local history and place memory in old-timers of Latgale.

I can be divided into some types of stories of the Holocaust: (1) Stories about Jewish life after Nazi's occupation; (2) Stories about a mass murders of the Jews in the town; (3) Stories of rescues of Jews; (4) stories of life murderers after the war and "God's punishment" for murderers; (5) Stories about "Jewish gold" and buried treasures; and so on.

And these narratives are based on own traumatic memories from childhood or stories of parents and others elder relatives. Some stories have elements of folklorisation (for example stories about "God's punishment" for murderers, stories about "Jewish gold").

Paper short abstract:

Using the case study of Derry~Londonderry and its designation as ‘UK City of Culture’ in 2013, this paper analyses the challenges associated with the production of a year-long cultural heritage programme in a culturally and politically divided place.

Paper long abstract:

Using the case study of Derry~Londonderry and its designation as 'UK City of Culture' in 2013, this paper will analyse the challenges associated with the production of a year-long cultural heritage programme in a culturally and politically divided place. Given that the Northern Ireland's second largest city has largely been understood in terms of a bloody conflict between 'two traditions', Irish/Catholic and British/Protestant, the paper critically reviews the dialogue and negotiations with reference to public places as well as the representation of collective memory and traditional music during the year-long festivities. Extensive fieldwork in the city over a number of years has enabled us to investigate how culture and identity politics were played out in the context of city that is still in a process of reconciliation. Placing our case-study in a strongly comparative context, this paper argues that cultural and heritage can be pivotal points of (re-)negotiation in any society transitioning from conflict to 'peace'.

Paper short abstract:

Any 13th of July, associations of victims and relatives of the Srebrenica massacre commemorate their losses, visiting the sites where their loved ones had been detained, executed and then buried into mass graves by the Republika Srpska Army after the fall of the muslim enclave, the 11th of July, 1995.

Paper long abstract:

As it is known, the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, declared in 1993 UN safe-area by General Philippe Morillon, fell after less than a week of battle in the hands of the Bosnian-Serb General, Ratko Mladić. During the days that followed, more then 8.000 Bosniak men and young boys had been captured and then murdered around the Drina valley by the bosnian-serb forces.

The one-day journey organized by the "Mothers of Srebrenica and Zepa", through the locations where their relatives had been detained and executed, constitutes the commemorative event where they find the opportunity to deal publicly with their dramatic past, mourning and remembering their husbands and sons. Seeking different levels of recognition, the Mothers challenge the policy of denial carried out by Bosnian-serb institutions in post-war Bosnian context, creating a performative complex where they can keep alive the memory of the victims, claiming their identities as mothers and survivors. Taking the Tour on the sites and crime scenes as ethnographic example, this paper, inspired by an ethnographic experience carried on in summer 2012 and 2013, aims to explore the different ways relatives and survivors display their agency as witnesses as much as social actors involved into the remembering process of the Srebrenica massacre. In other words, assuming that memory is a performative process where individual experiences are affected and mixed with political claims and social institutions, what are the socio-cultural meanings and the symbolic edges of the commemorations of the Bosniak genocide, once it has become heritage?

Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with relation between representations of memory and politics of forgetting in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina. The practices of creation, representation and usage of a monument and a heritage site are in focus: who owns a monument and how is it used, by whom and why?

Paper long abstract:

Experiences of War of the 1990s, the political transition and the establishment of a new social framework of ethno-national identification has caused the internal dynamics of a group memory and forgetting in Bosnia and Herzegovina (B-H). This paper deals with relation between representations of memory and politics of forgetting in Bosnia and Herzegovina in general and in town of Visegrad in particular. The world cultural heritage site "Bridge over Drina" and nearby "Monument over a fallen soldier" in Višegrads city centre, carries a physical and mental presence that is influenced by, and influence everyday life in this locality. The practices of creation, representation and usage of a monument and a heritage site by a wide range of events and actors are in focus. The paper generally addresses both historical and present relevance of the monumental heritage: who owns a monument and how is it used, by whom and why?

Methodologically, this phenomenological investigation focuses on how experiences are set out in action and what the consequences of these actions are. Ethnography highlights the dynamics between four different levels that are part of the production of meaning: the local, the national, the transnational (in the post-Yugoslav context) and the international

Keywords: post-war society, (ab) use of world heritage sites, strategies and tactics of silence, cultural remembering and forgetting, commemoration, lieux de mémoire, space of appereance, state of denial.