Editorial

The past, as historians constitute it, is the result of negotiation and debate. Final as it may seem once written down, however, the past frequently turns out not to be settled. In fact, some pasts never achieve a final historical form, but may be subjects for constantly renewed arguments (Zolberg, 1998, p. 565).

This special issue honours the memory of Vera Zolberg, Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York, who died on 15 November 2016. Her work on the entwinement of memory and the arts broke ground in its theoretical and historical depth, and has been a source of inspiration for scholars working in the sociology of culture. In this issue, we, her colleagues, students, and friends, study the relations between artistic representation and political articulation, with the aim of adding new dimensions, especially with respect to the question of reaching historical truth and reconciliation. The tradition of critical interpretive analysis that considers structural and cultural aspects of institutions, memory and the arts, for which Zolberg’s is an influential voice, is the shared intellectual and theoretical basis of the articles that make up this special issue.

Zolberg’s study of the Enola Gay Affair (1995, 1998) is among the most decisive in the field of understanding the intersection of the arts, historical representation, and public memories of a difficult past. She argues that the past frequently turns out not to be settled. In fact, some pasts never achieve a final historical form, but remain subjects for constantly renewed arguments (1998, p. 565). This, we shall see, is the core finding that inspires and unites the articles collected in this guest-edited section, diverse as the cases they study and the tools with which they are studied may be. Zolberg’s writing documented the controversy surrounding the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with regard to the exhibition, at the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Foundation in Washington DC, of the Enola Gay bomber which carried the bomb to Hiroshima. She wrote:

I analyze the role of the museum as an institution involved in the construction of national narratives in two countries, the political controversies unveiled, and the lost opportunities for innovation in the museum’s relationship to its public as politicians intrude upon professions (Zolberg, 1995, p. 69).

That exhibition represented, according to Zolberg, a lost opportunity to recall the ‘truth’ of violent warfare at the end of the Second World War between Japan and the US. Moreover, she developed a sociology of collective memory that moved away from the boundaries of a single society. Zolberg highlighted the museum as a privileged political and aesthetic arena for the mise-en-scène of one of the darkest events in modern history. Her bold claim about a missed opportunity for the museum’s relations to its public is paramount in understanding what art and its institutions can achieve in representing and deliberating on the past in an open society.

The contributors to this special issue study the social construction and mediation of authenticity and its relations to historical truth in sites, in events, and within groups that are marked by an unresolved or difficult past. Authenticity is defined here first as the believed quality of the real, and is a necessary but insufficient condition for deliberation on historical truth. It is also necessary for deliberation on other forms of acquiring knowledge that could bring about the recognition of wrongdoing in their truthful resonance of collected memories and representations of the past, and of those groups carrying them. As in the case of the Enola Gay controversy, and in others discussed in this special issue, understanding the voices which attempt to silence diversity and reconciliation through their recourse to other, arguably more pressing, fundamental issues are also crucial to the sociological understanding of power relations and structures that bring them about. In all cases, rather than suggesting that authenticity is a mimetic representation of the past, or some replication of it, the authors in this volume study the modes through which relationships to certain eras are constituted as meaningful to people’s national (or cosmopolitan) identity (Gable & Handler, 2007).

Literature on the unspoken, and on silence in social memory, has stressed the importance of cultural forms of art and literature in addressing that which one cannot otherwise directly address (i.e. Erll, 2011; Passerini, 1986; Tota & Hagen, 2016; Vinitzky-Seroussi & Teeger, 2010; Winter, 2010; Zerubavel, 2007). While we are not claiming that authentic depiction of the past is entirely possible and that it is ‘real’ (this would entail an ontological conflict with regard to the possibility of comprehending an event), we do stress the epistemological as well as the deliberative possibilities of studying the intricate relations between aesthetic and artistic paths to justice, which provide modes of obtaining knowledge of the past that has not, or could not be, accessible otherwise, as Jeffrey Goldfarb suggests in his contribution to this issue.

The authors examine cases in which tangible aesthetic codes represent the past, not merely through the theoretical lens of remembrance versus silence or forgetting, but rather through that of deliberate, artistic, and curated claims to truth in the forms of their creation, reception, or political outcomes. We foreground cases in which access to certain worldviews is made possible, and in this sense, creates an authentic path to understanding, as well as possibly to empowering minority voices marginal to grand national narratives. Sometimes reconciliation and authentic relationships are impossible because social memory, in both hegemonic and critical expressions, silences marginal voices, leaving essential elements of a difficult past unspoken. On such occasions, the cultural shapes of the past do offer an additional opportunity to respect the processual nature of how ‘truth’ emerges. If a social memory has become silent, there are also structural and political reasons that must be considered, together with the modes with which they were coded and can be presented and experienced (Macdonald, 2013). In this sense, the arts seem to offer an autonomous sphere, a suspended space, where the fragments of memories can be recomposed in a new form, where ambiguities can be exposed without offering one decisive solution. Sometimes arriving at some form of truth in itself is not possible, not just because of the ontological problem of its existence or the diversity of perspectives and stakeholders, but also owing to the political and social implications of the emergence of a certain public knowledge of a controversial past, as was explored and theorised by Zolberg (1998) around the Enola Gay exhibition, as well as in studies by Vinitzky-Seroussi (2002) and Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz (1991).

Authenticity as a concept and as a condition pertaining to a fantasy of the experience of the backstage reality has been illuminated in anthropological writing on tourism (MacCannell, 1973, 2008; Wang, 1999). As a performed condition, it can play various interchangeable roles in different historical contexts and is intersubjectively created and shared (or not) within specific institutional and discursive settings and time-periods. This is crucial to understanding mega-investments in reconstructing old buildings which stand for older times in major European cities, as Rebecca Dolgoy explores in this issue through the case of the newly reconstructed Stadtschloss in the centre of Berlin. Leaving aside the discussion on essentialism and true reality, which we earlier suggested is irrelevant to our theoretical approach, we address authenticity as a possible access-point to a difficult past, and recognise the need for ambiguous ways in which cultural artefacts are transformed, as well as ways in which they are used to obtain justice or represent a difficult past. Ambiguity and ambivalence will not be seen, in this approach, as blurring or standing on the way to truth, but rather in terms of some of the effective mechanisms that can make them possible. Ambivalence mixes and converges between different aesthetic codes. Moreover, the ways in which the past has been represented is part and parcel of the conversation carried out in and between the articles in this special section. Finally, we ask who is in a position of access or entitlement to speak in a voice that is rendered authentic. The authors then enquire which institutions, subjectivities, subjects and intersubjectivities are created and maintained through those paths. What are the roles of victims, moral entrepreneurship of memory work and representation, contingency, and change over time?

Bernhard Forchtner and Christoffer Kølvraa analyse the symbolic claims to authenticity made by today’s German extreme right in their guise as ‘true national socialists’, using their lifestyle demonstration banners and aesthetics, presented and shared via social media. By focusing on the visual aesthetics of extreme-right social-media presence, the authors show how a bricolage of symbols has been created by adopting left-wing aesthetics and claiming authenticity through them. This allows them to ask how such images negotiate and communicate the connection between contemporary youth cultures and National Socialist ideology, and how the potential tensions between these are handled through the medium of images. Thus, Forchtner and Kølvraa explore the themes of history, nature, and gender. Their analysis reveals that the negotiation between classical National Socialism and contemporary youth culture is achieved by the extreme right through the production of images belonging to two very different and distinctive imaginaries; one of ‘authority’ and one of ‘intimacy’. Forchtner and Kølvraa demonstrate how internal contradictions between these themes and their representation do not lead to a weakening of the subjectivities and ideological positions of these groups. Rather, they bring into their discussion the treatment by the extreme right of environmentalism and climate change, veganism, and animal rights. By examining the cultural artefacts used and created by these groups, the authors allow us to better understand the existential imaginary that drew and continues to draw people to extremism and authoritarianism, looking beyond the latter’s organisational forms, institutional structures, or concrete aims and policies.

Jeffrey Goldfarb’s main argument is that dilemmas and ambiguities in remembering and forgetting are somehow ‘natural consequences’ of the human condition. In the social condition, they cannot be solved once and forever; in art, dilemmas that confront highly contested pasts, even if they cannot yet be solved, can be reverberated in a new light and through a new perspective. Goldfarb goes further to claim that it is precisely in art that the challenges of memory become important instances of the social condition. Moreover, without the arts in contemporary societies it would be almost impossible to successfully ‘work through’ traumatic and controversial pasts. To support his argument, Goldfarb studies three exemplary cases: slavery and racism in America as seen in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the murderous actions of Poles against their Jewish neighbours in Paweł Pawlikowski’s film Ida, and the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington DC, designed by Maya Lin. In each case, remembering was made possible through an aesthetic lens and a space opened by the arts to use new methods of inquiry. In addition, art engaged new modes of intervention and commemoration in conjunction with addressing the impossibility of reaching some decisive historical truth on which all parties could agree and unite around. The crucial lesson of Goldfarb’s article is that while art may not solve any dilemmas, it certainly articulates them. This articulation, or making clear the structure of the dilemma, offers new possible ways of understanding historical ambiguities and silence. This is exactly the reason, we claim with Goldfarb, why the contribution of the arts to the process of remembering and forgetting is crucial both for the social condition and for understanding it.

Rebecca Dolgoy explores the newly constructed Humboldtforum in Berlin as a diorama, an invented scene and approximation of the ‘authentic’. A diorama’s claim to truth usually rests on its ability to convey a particular worldview – that of the time period in which it was assembled, together with that of the time of the visitors’ gaze. But, as Dolgoy shows, in the case of the Humboldtforum the whole museum becomes a diorama. The glass frame disappears and the visitor becomes complicit in the simulacrum, an exact copy with no origin, or a falseness that is closer to the truth in the reactions it produces in the viewer. The reconstructed Stadtschloss, and to some extent, the mandate of the Humboldtforum, Dolgoy argues, revive certain nineteenth-century tropes, including universalism, unification, and cosmopolitanism. This reconstruction functions both literally and metaphorically as a contemporary expression of a nineteenth-century means of structuring perception, specifically the diorama. In watching the diorama, the unmoved visitor shifts from being a spectator to becoming a witness, and thus becomes complicit in the illusion and the worldview frozen in it, albeit tacitly. However, and this is the novelty of Dolgoy’s analysis, the Stadtschloss differs from dioramas in that it takes away the ability to see through this image and obliges the viewer to perceive something as if it were objective and spontaneous. Here, the artificial becomes the real: spectators move from being complicit witnesses to being implicit in the illusion. Berlin can be heavy with elements of imperial history, and the Stadtschloss works hard to get the order of the story ‘right’.

Dolgoy shows that, paradoxically, casting the reconstruction of the Stadtschloss in terms of healing a wounded city erases the city’s past and renders it less relevant to the city today. The newly reconstructed Schloss, in other words, bases its legitimacy on a claim to truth that in effect erases a difficult historical truth. This, Dolgoy makes clear, does not result from an attempt to manipulate history but rather to make the Stadtschloss seem ‘natural’ or more relatable than other national pasts. This claim helps us, in this special issue, to advance our understanding of claims to truth as lying within a tension between authenticity as original and authenticity as enabling a true experience.

Irit Dekel and Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi write precisely on this question of how contemporary actors engage with curated spaces in order to ‘reconstruct’ history, through the example of visits to home museums in Israel and Germany. They offer a sociology of atmosphere in order to study how homes are presented as authentic and therefore as telling true stories about famous persons who lived in them, as well as about their time. Dekel and Vinitzky-Seroussi ask how those seemingly mundane domestic scenes are made to appear authentic through the mediation of objects and stories which make them real and relatable to visitors. In observing the organisation of space in homes, they offer a typology of home museum objects and the way they work in creating and sustaining the home atmosphere. Atmosphere, the authors claim, is built around the condensation of time around specific home stories and the special situatedness of visitors in relation to them. In this way, the home presents a historical moment, which may or may not include the time that the protagonist occupied in the space where they are currently exhibited. Finally, they show how and under what circumstances the familiarity of home becomes unknown uncanny and how this determines the particular construction of authenticity in these museums.

The articles in this volume expand the scope of research about elite and secondary elites who shape collective memory narratives. In developing analysis of the central role played by the state, private, and public institutions in shaping and transmitting shared narratives, we also contribute to a discussion that studies intentionally harmful discourses, as in the case of the extreme right in Forchtner and Kølvraa’s article, in which one can see that the claim to authenticity and authority originates in an era of dramatic geo-political transformation in Europe, as well as in the US anti-elitist and anti-internationalist movements of 2016. We thus see a return to and an expansion of certain historical moods in relation to nature, gender, and history. These are not searching for the ‘true truth’ but for a return to a mode of commonality that enables the extreme right to flourish, involving additional forms of association that are informed by today’s consideration of environmental protection and gender roles. Museums, as cultural institutions, respond to this crisis (we leave aside the question of how much influence on social discourse they may have). Whereas in tourism and museum studies authenticity derives its authority from the meticulousness of its attention to detail and its potential to facilitate pedagogy (Gable and Handler, 1996), memorial, historical, and advocacy museums today (Arnold-de Simine, 2013; Dekel & Katriel, 2015; Lehrer, 2016; Sodaro, 2013) follow the tradition of critical museology and devote themselves to a mission that is inherently critical: directed at practising democracy in response to humanitarian breakdowns.

The book reviews in this issue highlight the close relationship among memory, culture, and the arts. Beginning with Julia Rothenberg’s Sociology looks at the arts, Volker Kirchberg underscores how we understand art through the sociological imagination. Amy Sodaro reviews The Routledge handbook of memory studies, edited by Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen and commends the volume’s thematic breadth and depth. Lyudmila Nurse reflects on Collective memory in war with examples from Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine. Lastly, Hamza Preljević calls the reader’s attention to the political importance of cultural monuments and heritage in his review of Bosnia and the destruction of cultural heritage.

For many of us, Vera Zolberg was a mentor, a source of inspiration, an extremely generous and brilliant colleague, a wonderful person, and a rare friend. From her work, we know that the past is a complicated matter. Indeed, as we stressed at the beginning of this editorial, sometimes it is not possible to arrive at a common and shared understanding of what has happened and its consequences. This holds equally even in cases where the past does not seem difficult to those who aim to revise it, as in the article by Forchtner and Kølvraa in which extreme right groups celebrate a horrendous past as justified (or altogether deny its violent elements and celebrate its outcomes). Dolgoy, Dekel, and Vinitzky-Seroussi write about pasts that are acknowledged to be difficult and that are represented through many, often incompatible and competing forms of mediations. Goldfarb shows that actual mediations in film can bring the public closer to the truth of the matter when dealing with loss and injustice in their complexity. In writing about the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, Rouhana (2012, p. 141) suggests that one model for achieving truth in processes of reconciliation is ‘forensic truth’, referring to hard facts about human rights violations; a truth that journalism strives for today, more than perhaps ever before, in order to maintain fairness and justice. ‘Emotional’ truth refers to the impact of violations on victims; and ‘general’ truth refers to plausible interpretations, or how claims to truth reflect relations between truth, authenticity, and justice. The three models of truth help achieve historical truth together with its manifestations for the present. We hope that the articles in this guest-edited issue help us to move closer both to a sociological understanding of the work of art and of cultural institutions in achieving a general, sharable truth with regard to unresolved pasts and present conflicts, and to supporting those who create spaces for paths to justice and reconciliation.