Historical Memory in Post-Cold War Europe

Abstract

This article examines European memory and memory politics. Taking as my starting point the deepening divisions between the “old” and “new” members of the European Union since the 2004 and 2007 enlargements, I investigate whether differences in official memory concerning World War II on the one hand and communism on the other should be regarded as permanent. Using examples from the development of West-European postwar memory-regimes and comparing them to the current state in postcommunist Europe I suggest that with respect to historical memory the two parts of Europe underwent similar developments, crises and debates, thus making eventual convergence and consensus possible. However, there are various factors that complicate progress in this area: postcommunist countries have to contend not only with their wartime history but also with the experience of communism, which latter colours the assessment of the former.

Notes

1. Thomas Ferenczi, “Une mémoire à deux vitesses,” Le Monde, 20 July 2007.

2. Matt Killingsworth, Gosia Klatt, and Stephan Auer, “Where Does Poland Fit in Europe? How Political Memory Influences Polish MEPs’ Perceptions of Poland’s Place in Europe,” Perspectives on European Politics and Society 11.4 (2010): 367.

3. On these issues, see Eva-Clarita Onken, “The Baltic States and Moscow’s 9 May Commemoration: Analysing Memory Politics in Europe,” Europe-Asia Studies 59.1 (2007): 29, 24.

4. Siobhan Kattago, “Memory, Pluralism and the Agony of Politics,” Journal of Baltic Studies 41.3 (2010): 383–94.

5. Jan-Werner Müller, “Introduction: The Power of Memory, the Memory of Power and the Power Over Memory,” in Memory and Power in Post-War Europe, ed. Jan-Werner Müller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3.

6. Kattago, “Memory, Pluralism and the Agony of Politics,” 390.

7. Stéphane Courtois, “Introduction: The Crimes of Communism,” in The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, ed. Stéphane Courtois, et al., trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1–33. See also Richard Shorten, “Europe’s Twentieth Century in Retrospect? A Cautious Note on the Furet/Nolte Debate,” The European Legacy 9.3 (2004): 291.

8. Shorten, “Europe’s Twentieth Century in Retrospect?” 291.

9. Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,” Daedalus 121.4 (1992): 87.

10. John Hellman, “Wounding Memories: Mitterrand, Moulin, Touvier, and the Divine Half-Lie of Resistance,” French Historical Studies 19.2 (1995): 461–81.

11. On this, see Éric Conan and Henry Rousso, “Le Vél’ d’Hiv ou la commemoration introuvable,” in Eric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy, un passé qui ne passé pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 47–96.

12. Conan and Rousso, “Le Vél’ d’Hiv ou la commemoration introuvable,” 91.

13. Quoted by Jenny Wüstenberg and David Art, “Using the Past in the Nazi Successor States from 1945 to the Present,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2008): 78.

14. Lutz Musner, “Memory and Globalization: Austria’s Recycling of the Nazi Past and Its European Echoes,” New German Critique (Spring-Summer 2000): 86.

15. Wüstenberg and Art, “Using the Past in the Nazi Successor States from 1945 to the Present,” 80. See also Musner, “Memory and Globalization,” and Günter Bischof, “Founding Myths and Compartmentalized Past: New Literature on the Construction, Hibernation, and Deconstruction of World War II Memory in Postwar Austria,” in Austrian Historical Memory and National Identity, ed. Gunter Bischof and Anton Pelinka (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997), 302–41.

16. Current suggestions by the right-wing government to change the permanent exhibition of the Holocaust Museum in Budapest in order to lessen the responsibility of the wartime government for the Holocaust could also be mentioned.

17. Jan Tomasz Gross, Neighbours: The History of the Extermination of a Small Jewish Town (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

18. It most likely did not help that the book received many reviews that took it as an affirmation of their long-standing conviction about Polish anti-Semitism. Cf. Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (London: Heinemann, 2012), 268–69.

19. See, for example, Ewa Wolentarska-Ochman, “Jedwabne and the Power Struggle in Poland (Remembering the Polish-Jewish Past a Decade after the Collapse of Communism),” Perspectives on European Politics and Society 4.2 (2003): 171–89.

20. Frank Fox, “A Skeleton in Poland’s Closet: The Jedwabne Massacre,” East European Jewish Affairs 31.1 (2001): 87.

21. Hungarian aesthete Péter György illustrates this through the history of his father and goes as far as claiming that the 1 May 1957 speech of communist leader János Kádár, only six months after the brutal oppression of the 1956 uprising, implied a tacit deal between the Communist Party and Hungarian society—for accepting the communists’ rule and renouncing the goals of the uprising, they can also receive a pass for the crimes of 1944. See Péter György, Apám helyett [Instead of my father] (Budapest: Magvető, 2011).

22. Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality,” The New York Review of Books, 16 July 2009. A telling example is Nobel Prize winning Hungarian writer Imre Kertész’s autobiographical Holocaust novel Sorstalanság [Fateless], which was published only in limited numbers without any significant publicity in communist Hungary.

23. Kattago, “Memory, Pluralism and the Agony of Politics,” 383.

24. http://www.parlament.hu/naplo34/030/0300006.html.

25. Charles S. Maier, “Hot Memory... Cold Memory: On the Political Half-Life of Fascist and Communist Memory,” Tr@nsit online, Nr. 22/2002. At the same time, it is worth noting that East European (e.g., Polish) extreme right efforts which would like to portray Franco as a commendable politician who “saved Spain from communism” usually meet strong Western condemnation. At the same time, a recent debate in the EP about holding a minute’s silence in memory of Manuel Fraga and comparing (almost equating) him to Vaclav Havel is also telling: a fierce debate took place and the EP was criticized, but the silence was also held: this would not have been possible in case of German Nazis. See “European Parliament Under Fire for Equating Václav Havel with Franco Ally,” Guardian, 17 January 2012; http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/wintour-and-watt/2012/jan/17/eu-francisco-franco)

26. Siobhan Kattago, “Commemorating Liberation and Occupation: War Memorials along the Road to Narva,” Journal of Baltic Studies 39.4 (2008): 443.

27. Other existing resistance movements, such as the Hungarian “democratic opposition” or the Czech Charter ’77, are problematic for other reasons: apart from political competition, the small number of participants causes a certain embarrassment in their respective societies. Polish Solidarity is somewhat different in this respect, although it was also not exempt from political struggles.

28. Just to mention one example: official memory often refuses to distinguish between different stages of communist rule, such as the Stalinist era, the consequent thaw, and the various harder or softer phases, which varied from country to country, but usually attaches the much contested “totalitarian” adjective to the whole period.