Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe
Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe

Author: Eric Langenbacher

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2013-03-01

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0857455818

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The collapse of the Iron Curtain, the renationalization of eastern Europe, and the simultaneous eastward expansion of the European Union have all impacted the way the past is remembered in today’s eastern Europe. At the same time, in recent years, the Europeanization of Holocaust memory and a growing sense of the need to stage a more “self-critical” memory has significantly changed the way in which western Europe commemorates and memorializes the past. The increasing dissatisfaction among scholars with the blanket, undifferentiated use of the term “collective memory” is evolving in new directions. This volume brings the tension into focus while addressing the state of memory theory itself.

Dissonant Heritages and Memories in Contemporary Europe
Dissonant Heritages and Memories in Contemporary Europe

Author: Tuuli Lähdesmäki

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-08-13

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 3030114643

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This open access book discusses political, economic, social, and humanitarian challenges that influence both how people deal with their past and how they build their identities in contemporary Europe. Ongoing debates on migration, on local, national, inter- and transnational levels, prove that it is a divisive issue with regards to understanding European integration and identity. At the same time, the European Union increasingly invests in projects related to European heritage, museums, and cultural memory networks, while having to take dissonant heritages into account. These processes in their combination offer an interesting dynamic and form the complex puzzle that poses challenging questions for anyone involved in academic research, heritage practices, and policy debates. With this puzzle at its core, this book explicitly focuses on slippery and transforming notions of Europe and critically discusses ongoing and transforming power structures of heritage and memory in today’s Europe. The book combines theoretical and methodological contributions to the debates on European heritage and memory studies and in-depth analyses of empirical case studies. Its main aim is to bring research fields concerning memory and heritage into a closer dialogue and thus explore the cultural and political dynamics of contemporary Europe.

Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe
Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe

Author: Eric Langenbacher

Publisher:

Published: 2015-04

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9781782389170

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The collapse of the Iron Curtain, the renationalization of eastern Europe, and the simultaneous eastward expansion of the European Union have all impacted the way the past is remembered in today's eastern Europe. At the same time, in recent years, the Europeanization of Holocaust memory and a growing sense of the need to stage a more "self-critical" memory has significantly changed the way in which western Europe commemorates and memorializes the past. The increasing dissatisfaction among scholars with the blanket, undifferentiated use of the term "collective memory" is evolving in new directions. This volume brings the tension into focus while addressing the state of memory theory itself.

Europe in Its Own Eyes, Europe in the Eyes of the Other
Europe in Its Own Eyes, Europe in the Eyes of the Other

Author: David B. MacDonald

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

Published: 2014-04-23

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1554588669

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What is Europe? Who is European? What do Europe and European identity mean in the twenty-first century? This collection of sixteen essays seeks to answer these questions by focusing on Europe as it is seen through its own eyes and through the eyes of others across a variety of cultural texts, including sport, film, literature, dance, cartography, and fashion. These texts, as interpreted here by emerging researchers as well as well-established scholars, enable us to engage with European identities in the plural and to understand what these identities mean in larger cultural and political contexts. The interdisciplinary focus of this volume permits an exploration of European identity that reaches beyond the area of European studies to incorporate understandings of identity from the viewpoints of both insider and other. Contributors explore diverse understandings of what it means to be “other” to a country, a culture, a society, or a subgroup. This book offers a fresh perspective on the evolving concept of identity—in the context of Europe’s past, present, and future—and expands on the existing literature by considering the political tensions and social implications of the development of European identity, as well as its literary, artistic, and cultural manifestations.

Hi Hitler!
Hi Hitler!

Author: Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 477

ISBN-13: 1107073995

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Analyzes how the Nazi past has become increasingly normalized within western memory since the start of the new millennium.

Writing Russian Lives
Writing Russian Lives

Author: Polly Jones

Publisher: MHRA

Published: 2018-09-14

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 1781889104

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Like many genres, biography came belatedly to Russia. As with other such late arrivals, biography underwent intensive growth in quantity, sophistication, cultural significance and popularity from the era of Nicholas I onwards. It stands today as a dominant force in post-Soviet publishing. Yet studies of Russian biography’s poetics and its role as a literary and cultural institution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remain thin on the ground, a fact often lamented, yet not fully addressed, in the scattered writings on the subject. The present volume examines modern Russian biography as a literary form, a publishing phenomenon and a cultural force that reveals and contests hegemonic ideas of the role of the individual in society, and of the make-up of the human personality itself.

Antigone's Ghosts
Antigone's Ghosts

Author: Mark Wolfgram

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1684480051

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Sophocles' play Antigone is a starting point for understanding the problems of human societies, families, and individuals caught up in the aftermath of mass violence. Through comparison of Germany, Japan, Spain, Yugoslavia and Turkey, we begin to appreciate the different pathways that societies have taken when confronting their violent histories.

Fate Unknown
Fate Unknown

Author: Dan Stone

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-06-06

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 0192585800

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Dan Stone tells the story of the last great unknown archive of Nazism, the International Tracing Service. Set up by the Allies at the end of World War II, the ITS has worked until today to find missing persons and to aid survivors with restitution claims or to reunite them with loved ones. From retracing the steps of the 'death marches' with the aim of discovering the burial sites of those murdered across the towns and villages of Central Europe, to knocking on doors of German foster homes to find the children of forced labourers, Fate Unknown uncovers the history of this remarkable archive and its more than 30 million documents. Under the leadership of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the tracing service became one of the most secretive of postwar institutions, unknown even to historians of the period. Delving deeply into the archival material, Stone examines the little-known sub-camps and, after the war, survivors' experience of displaced persons' camps, bringing to life remarkable stories of tracing. Fate Unknown combs the archives to reveal the real horror of the Holocaust by following survivors' horrific journeys through the Nazi camp system and its aftermath. The postwar period was an age of shortage of resources, bitterness, and revenge. Yet the ITS tells a different story: of international collaboration, of commitment to justice, and of helping survivors and their relatives in the context of Cold War suspicion. These stories speak to a remarkable attempt by the ITS, before the Holocaust was a matter of worldwide interest, to carry out a programme of ethical repair and to counteract some of the worst effects of the Nazis' crimes.

Agency in Transnational Memory Politics
Agency in Transnational Memory Politics

Author: Jenny Wüstenberg

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2020-07-01

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 1789206952

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The dynamics of transnational memory play a central role in modern politics, from postsocialist efforts at transitional justice to the global legacies of colonialism. Yet, the relatively young subfield of transnational memory studies remains underdeveloped and fractured across numerous disciplines, even as nascent, boundary-crossing theories on topics such as multi-vocal, traveling, or entangled remembrance suggest new ways of negotiating difficult political questions. This volume brings together theoretical and practical considerations to provide transnational memory scholars with an interdisciplinary investigation into agency—the “who” and the “how” of cross-border commemoration that motivates activists and fascinates observers.

Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage
Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage

Author: Veysel Apaydin i

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2020-02-18

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1787354849

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Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage focuses on the importance of memory and heritage for individual and group identity, and for their sense of belonging. It aims to expose the motives and discourses related to the destruction of memory and heritage during times of war, terror, sectarian conflict and through capitalist policies. It is within these affected spheres of cultural heritage where groups and communities ascribe values, develop memories, and shape their collective identity.