Contemporary Identity and Memory in the Borderlands of Poland and Germany
Contemporary Identity and Memory in the Borderlands of Poland and Germany

Author: Aleksandra Binicewicz

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-09-30

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 1527516881

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The book analyses issues associated with the contemporary and memory in the Polish-German borderlands – a complex, multidimensional cultural and geographic area. The first section of the book, which focuses on contemporary issues, is divided into three parts: namely, a theoretical body, records of conversations with the inhabitants of the borderlands who are engaged in social activities, and records of workshops and conversations that brought together teenage inhabitants of the borderlands. Close cooperation with the inhabitants of two borderland towns resulted in several interesting perspectives on the borderlands, which are seen as a physical space, as well as a mental, intimate, close, and sometimes frustrating space subject to micro- and macro-scale transformations. In this book, the borderlands are viewed from these two perspectives. The micro-scale, is marked out by the individual experience of the inhabitants of the borderlands, and the macro-scale by the institutional framework established for the purpose of constructing an integrated community on the border.

Borders in East and West
Borders in East and West

Author: Stefan Berger

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2022-09-13

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 180073624X

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How we define border studies is transforming from focussing on “a line in the sand” to the more complex notions of how constituting a border is practiced, sustained and modified. In the expansion of borders studies, the areas explored across Europe and Asia have been numerous, but the specific themes that arise through comparative case studies are novel when approach Europe and Asian borderlands. Comparing the border experiences in East Asia and Europe in a number of thematic clusters ranging from economics, tourism, and food production to ethnicity, migration and conquest, Borders in East and West aims to decenter border studies from its current focus on the Americas and Europe.

Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe
Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe

Author: Uilleam Blacker

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-06-27

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1317428382

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After the Second World War, millions of people across Eastern Europe, displaced as a result of wartime destruction, deportations and redrawing of state boundaries, found themselves living in cities that were filled with the traces of the foreign cultures of the former inhabitants. In the immediate post-war period these traces were not acknowledged, the new inhabitants going along with official policies of oblivion, the national narratives of new post-war regimes, and the memorializing of the victors. In time, however, and increasingly over recent decades, the former "other pasts" have been embraced and taken on board as part of local cultural memory. This book explores this interesting and increasingly important phenomenon. It examines official ideologies, popular memory, literature, film, memorialization and tourism to show how other pasts are being incorporated into local cultural memory. It relates these developments to cultural theory and argues that the relationship between urban space, cultural memory and identity in Eastern Europe is increasingly becoming a question not only of cultural politics, but also of consumption and choice, alongside a tendency towards the cosmopolitanization of memory.

No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe
No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe

Author: Anna Wylegała

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-03-12

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 3031108574

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This book focuses on the social voids that were the result of occupation, genocide, mass killings, and population movements in Europe during and after the Second World War. Historians, sociologists, and anthropologists adopt comparative perspectives on those who now lived in ‘cleansed’ borderlands. Its contributors explore local subjectivities of social change through the concept of ‘No Neighbors’ Lands’: How does it feel to wear the dress of your murdered neighbor? How does one get used to friends, colleagues, and neighbors no longer being part of everyday life? How is moral, social, and legal order reinstated after one part of the community participated in the ethnic cleansing of another? How is order restored psychologically in the wake of neighbors watching others being slaughtered by external enemies? This book sheds light on how destroyed European communities, once multi-ethnic and multi-religious, experienced postwar reconstruction, attempted to come to terms with what had happened, and negotiated remembrance. Chapter 7 and 13 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Life Writing and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe
Life Writing and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe

Author: Simona Mitroiu

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-08-25

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 1137485523

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This volume addresses the issues of remembering and performing the past in Eastern European ex-communist states in the context of multiplication of the voices of the past. The book analyzes the various ways in which memory and remembrance operate; it does so by using different methods of recollecting the past, from oral history to cultural and historical institutions, and by drawing on various political and cultural theories and concepts. Through well-documented case studies the volume showcases the plurality of approaches available for analyzing the relationship between memory and narrative from an interdisciplinary and international perspective.

The Burden of the Past
The Burden of the Past

Author: Anna Wylegala

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2019-01-29

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0253046734

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Essays on how chaos, totalitarianism, and trauma have shaped Ukraine’s culture: “A milestone of the scholarship about Eastern European politics of memory.” —Wulf Kansteiner, Aarhus University In a century marked by totalitarian regimes, genocide, mass migrations, and shifting borders, the concept of memory in Eastern Europe is often synonymous with notions of trauma. In Ukraine, memory mechanisms were disrupted by political systems seeking to repress and control the past in order to form new national identities supportive of their own agendas. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, memory in Ukraine was released, creating alternate visions of the past, new national heroes, and new victims. This release of memories led to new conflicts and “memory wars.” How does the past exist in contemporary Ukraine? The works collected in The Burden of the Past focus on commemorative practices, the politics of history, and the way memory influences Ukrainian politics, identity, and culture. The works explore contemporary memory culture in Ukraine and the ways in which it is being researched and understood. Drawing on work from historians, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and political scientists, the collection represents a truly interdisciplinary approach. Taken together, the groundbreaking scholarship collected in The Burden of the Past provides insight into how memories can be warped and abused, and how this abuse can have lasting effects on a country seeking to create a hopeful future.

Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland
Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland

Author: Brendan Karch

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-10-04

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1108487106

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A century-long struggle to make a borderland population into loyal Germans or Poles drove nationalist activists to radical measures.

Echoes of the Holocaust
Echoes of the Holocaust

Author: Klas-Göran Karlsson

Publisher: Nordic Academic Press

Published: 2003-01-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9187121603

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The result of a research project conducted by Swedish scholars, this text examines interpretations and representations of the Holocaust in European societies, primarily focusing on the most recent decades. Using specific case studies, the articles in this anthology study how, when and why the collective memory of the Holocaust has been expressed and activated for cultural, economic, political and social reasons.

Borders in Post-Socialist Europe
Borders in Post-Socialist Europe

Author: Tassilo Herrschel

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1317173104

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'Borders' have attracted considerable attention in public and academic debates in light of the impact of globalisation and, in Europe, the end of the divisions of the Cold War era. Instead, being inside or outside of the EU has become a major paradigmatic divide between claimed 'spheres of influence' by 'Brussels' and 'Moscow' respectively. In the aftermath of the end of communism, established certainties no longer seemed to apply. And this included many of the borders within the former eastern Bloc, with some losing their relevance, while others re-assert themselves. As its particular contribution, this book adopts a symbiotic approach to the analysis of borders, drawing on a political-economy perspective, while also recognising the importance of the socio-cultural dimension as found in 'border studies'. This seeks to do greater justice to the complex, composite nature of borders as geo-political, state-legal and cultural-historic constructs in both theory and practice. In addition, the book's approach stretches across spatial scales to capture the multi-level nature of borders. The first part of the book presents the conceptual framework as it sets out to embrace this multi-faceted, multi-layered nature of borders. In the second part, case studies from north-central Europe, including the Baltic Sea Region, exemplify the complexity of borders in the context of post-socialist transformation and continuing EU-isation.