Introduction: Memories of Conflict in Eastern Europe

In recent years many nations within Western Europe have undergone a period of intense public and private scrutiny of memories related to past conflicts. Well-established and widely accepted state narratives of war and national identity have come under pressure from without, as subaltern memories have challenged the monolithic nature of ‘official’ history. Spain's pacto del olvido (pact of forgetfulness) and what writer and former Culture Minister Jorge Semprun referred to as an example of ‘voluntary collective amnesia’ (quoted in Wesselingh & Vaulerin, 2005, p. 209) has been ripped apart: between 2000 and 2002 the exhumation and scientific examination of non-combatant corpses began a period in which the ‘right to memory’ was actively reclaimed in Spain. In Germany reunification necessitated a rethinking of established memories of conflict and dictatorship, and as the controversies of the late 1990s receded (the Goldhagen controversy in 1996 and the Wehrmacht exhibition in 1997) (see Kattago, 2001), newer discourses of German victimhood and suffering emerged to challenge the dominant narratives of guilt and repentance and the previously widespread acceptance of the role of a nation of perpetrators. While some argued that a debate about these memories of wartime suffering was overdue, others saw them as ‘ethically problematic, self-serving and sentimental’ (Zehfuss, 2005). Further, commentators have viewed the fracturing of established narratives as heralding a dynamic period of ‘memory contests’ (Fuchs et al., 2006) which moves debate in Germany beyond the comparative statis and constraints of the interpretative framework of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with/putting aside the National Socialist past). In Italy the sixtieth anniversary of the Second World War revealed the persistence of sharply defined divisions over the legacies of fascism, resistance, liberation and the civil war. Whilst the significance of fascism to the Italian state and its identity continue to be hotly debated, memories of conflict remain polarised along political lines, with an unapologetic Right often displaying openly revisionist views, as well as a marked reticence towards any acknowledgment of the role of the Italian resistance, as evidenced by Berlusconi's refusal in 2005 to join the traditional march commemorating the partisan uprising which became the catalyst for the end of the war. In France the post-war Gaullist myth of heroic universal resistance has been comprehensively shattered in the light of the renewed focus on collaboration and French fascism in the 1970s, followed by the role played by the French police and the Vichy state in the implementation of the Holocaust, which came under intense public scrutiny in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Rousso, 1987; Conan & Rousso, 1996). Since then, France has been beset by resurgent and related debates over the memory of its colonial wars which have, at times, spilled over into the courts. Not that this reclaiming and broadening of memory should be viewed as a means of ‘pacifying memory’ (Schalk, 2002, pp. 248–249): on the contrary, many now suggest that France is participating in a series of ‘memory wars’, some of which are as bitterly fought as the conflicts they seek to remember (see Stora, 2007: Blanchard et al., 2005; Blanchard & Bancel 2005). These memory wars revolve around conflicts over hierarchies of victimhood and martyrdom, issues of recognition and reparation and, above all, around that crucial intersection between history, memory and identity.

Much of the memory work undertaken in Western Europe has necessarily focused on the two World Wars and, as a number of commentators have noted, the extraordinary visibility, particularly of the Second World War, has meant that successive conflicts have been framed, analysed, debated and represented within the framework of the analogies and references which emerged from the study of that war (Finney, 2002). As Eva Hoffman stated, in the opening lines to After such Knowledge: ‘In the beginning there was the war’ (Hoffman, 2005, p. ix). Indeed, for many commentators the Second World War and the Holocaust have replaced the First World War as a foundational event, one which has provided a ‘common, unifying European memory’ (Diner, quoted in Faulenbach & Jelich, 2006, p. 17). The continuing prevalence of the imagery and vocabulary of World War II has meant that chronologically closer conflicts have inevitably been read through the prism of the catastrophes of the Second World War.

It is against this backdrop of Western European memory work, framed as it has been by Western experiences of World War II, that the present articles might usefully be considered. This issue focuses on the presence of a parallel set of memory debates emerging from states which formed part of the former Eastern bloc. The narratives, experiences and memories of the past which have newly found expression in the post-Communist era have necessitated both a recasting of Western experiences of world war and brought to the fore previously suppressed or marginalised memories which now problematise and complicate established narratives and memories of the past. Though, as Faulenbach noted, the memories of the victims of Stalinism and Communism are still far less prevalent than those of the Second World War (Faulenbach & Jelich, 2006, p. 20), it remains that evolving and often competing Eastern memory complexes have begun to disrupt established Western discourses of world conflict. Indeed, it might be argued that the interstition of Eastern memories into the ‘canonical’ Western model perhaps points to a wider evolution or shift in dominant ‘memory landscapes’. Whereas previously ‘the Other Europe’ (Pittaway, 2004, p. 1) had been largely absent from the series of collected volumes on European memories of the Second World War timed to coincide with its fiftieth anniversary (Peitsch et al. 1999, and Bartram et al. 1996) (which tended to focus almost exclusively on France, Germany and Italy), the sixtieth anniversary perhaps heralded the beginnings of a more nuanced memory landscape which started to acknowledge the transmission and mediation between East and West and between Eastern and Western narratives and memories of world conflict. However, as Claudia Kraft has asserted, although there may now, after two world wars and two dictatorships, exist a consensus of ‘never again’, it is precisely the ways and means of remembering these events which have led to friction within Europe (quoted in Faulenbach & Jelich, 2006, p. 16).

Indeed, the often bewildering transformations undergone in the last few decades by Eastern European states—the speed of those transformations, the rapidity of the tumultuous political and economic changes which occurred, the violence and scale of more recent conflicts and the attendant problems of displacement, migration, reintegration and identity (re)formulation—have combined to produce an unprecedented outpouring of memories which compete and vie with one another to establish some sort of ‘truth’ and stability amidst the tumult. The articles in this issue bear witness to the multiplicity of memories emerging both from this more immediate period of conflict and also from the accumulative weight of past conflicts: as a number of articles in this issue attest, the impact and import of one conflict on the next is nowhere more clear than in the former Yugoslavia. Equally, while these articles recall the divisions between East and West, they also point to the interrelatedness of memories of conflict and to the increasingly fluid boundaries between formerly more firmly separated or divided narratives of the past. The evolving narratives related in these articles begin to breach boundaries and barriers of memory and start, perhaps, to constitute what might be viewed as a more cumulative and plural memory of past European conflicts.

The articles in this issue focus in different ways and through different means on issues arising from memorialisation and commemoration, recognition and acknowledgement. They also, however, point to the diverse range of contrasting mediators and agents of memory: from artists and curators, musicians and journalists to historians and politicians. In turn, this diversity highlights the variety of roles undertaken in the mediation of memory and the different approaches to the transmission of memory. The crucial questions which frame memory debates as they move eastwards are posed immediately by Anna Saunders's article, which opens this issue: what should be remembered; who is engaging in remembrance; where should remembrance be located; how should we best remember? Saunders's article locates us at that quintessential crossroads, and most prominent symbol of division, between East and West Europe—Berlin—and thus her analysis of the memorialisation of the Berlin Wall and border crossings provides a timely reminder of the necessity of commemorative conversations: a continuing dialogue about the past as a form of commemoration in itself (see Fulbrook, 1999, pp. 144 & 146). Although the Wall had largely disappeared as early as 1990, its symbolic presence as the most prominent metonym for the ideological conflict of the Cold War carries with it a legacy which is very much present. The emergence in the last few years of a vast number of competing Wall remembrance projects demonstrates the variety of actors engaged in that continuing conversation and the many and diverse forms and practices of memory at work in society: visual and material memory, contemporary memorial landscapes, memorial installation projects and literal sites of memory.

Karoline von Oppen's article focuses specifically on journalistic responses to war reporting and argues that the journalist is a secondary, rather than primary, witness to conflict and as such a mediator of testimony and memory. Using the writings of Maria Achenbach, von Oppen asserts that reflexive journalism can open up possibilities of challenging established narratives of distant places. Indeed, Achenbach's methods and writings, in privileging and extending the ‘contact zone’, provide an effective counter-narrative to the predominantly ‘Balkanist’ accounts of conflict in Bosnia produced in the Western European media.

Catherine Baker's article is illustrative of the expansion of the field of memory studies, focusing as it does on post-war reconstruction and re-membering of Croatian identities through a discussion of the uses and functions of popular and traditional music. The article shows that musicians and songwriters, like journalists, are key agents in the formulation and transmission of memories of conflict. Baker suggests that contemporary music—pop, hip-hop and folk music—has played an important role in the conceptualisation and memorialisation of Croatia's Homeland War (1991–1995): music has shaped the narrative of war through the privileging of certain highly symbolic locations and events; it has been used as a vehicle for the promotion of different forms of nationalism; it has provided a forum for commentary on the aftermaths of conflict, in particular the international post-war contexts of justice and memory and recovery or reconstitution of identity.

Tea Sindbaek evokes yet further forms through which memory is mediated in an article which brings together historiography and ‘official’ memory, alongside sporting, educational and media uses of particular vectors of memory. The article focuses on the conflicting interpretations and representations of Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović from the Second World War to the present. Sindbaek shows how the evolution of official narratives of the past, evolving in relation to the successive political ideologies of Yugoslavia and then Serbia, required and produced correspondingly different interpretations of this iconic figure from a former conflict. The article points very clearly to the instability and mutability of memories of historical figures and narratives and charts some of the many stages through which memory paradigms are subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, shifted.

In the final article of this issue Jelena Obradovic outlines some of the longer term processes of interpretation and instrumentalisation already evoked above. The article deals with the contentious memory of the Srebrenica massacre, focusing particularly on post-Milošević Serbian responses to what has come to be known as one of the worst atrocities since the Holocaust. Obradovic posits a series of contrasting dynamics at work both within Serbia and Western Europe: denial and belief, the co-presence of patriot/traitor narratives and the tensions between knowledge of and acknowledgment of war crimes. The article exposes a variety of responses to Srebrenica, all of which contain strategies or mechanisms of denial or which broadly attempt to explain or justify the massacre without engaging critically with the atrocity itself, but concludes that these should not be viewed (in Adorno's words) as a failure to come to terms with the past. Whilst Obradovic suggests that the existence of denial strategies in politics is predominantly pragmatic, she concludes that in the media and in private these narratives present a starting point in a larger, more long-term process of re-examining the past.

The editors of the Journal of Contemporary European Studies are very grateful to Nicola Cooper and Kathryn Jones for this latest in a series of guest edited issues. The processing of memory has been a significant theme in the pages of the journal since its original launching as the Journal of Area Studies in 1980, be it in relation to German unification (1993), to the fragmentation of Yugoslavia (1994), to central and eastern Europe in transition (1994) or to Turkey (2006) and Italy (2006), be it in relation to nation and identity (1997), to the specific legacy of 1945 (1995) or colonialism (2003) or be it in the shape of interdisciplinary approaches to the epistemology of the social ‘sciences’. This current issue provides further evidence of the selectivity and perspectivism which pre-programmes and filters many of the cognitive processes which inform social existence and the identities of the different members of ‘society’.

It could be argued that the two non-thematic articles in this issue—by Polona Petek and Joanna Rydzewska—illuminate some of the territory covered by the five authors in the thematic section, even if they were chosen independently. The contribution by Rydzewska examines the work of Pawel Pawlikowski, the Polish born British film director, using the example of his film Last Resort. This film, released in 2000, uses the story of a Russian mail order bride to illuminate features of changing East–West relationships in the post-Cold War period. The author shows how Pawlikowski travels freely between European cultures to engage in questions of identity, belonging and the notion of ‘home’. Petek examines the very different work of the Czech surrealist film-maker Jan Švankmajer, in particular the reception of his seemingly alien approach to film in the West before and after the transition. Petek seeks to provide a very real geopolitical context to the cultural products of this surreal artist and, therefore, to identify a ‘space where a politicised, rather than utterly commodified, surrealist practice is still possible.’

The issue is completed by 18 reviews of books covering aspects of contemporary Europe.