An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War

Revisiting Past, Reimagining Futures: Memories of Post-Socialist Childhood and Schooling

The article explores how people born in Estonia in the 1970s contextualize their memories about their Soviet childhood in the context of school. Focusing on small group of people who grew up in the Soviet Estonia, we argue that in biographical narratives, school is treated as the representative of the Soviet regime. Nostalgic reminiscences from childhood embrace both commitment and resistance to the regime. The hegemonic framework of repression discourse is often flexibly stretched, embracing sometimes ironic stories of disobedience as resistance or commitment as play. Rather than opposing the official discourse, they create playful side-meanings about the era.

2022

This seminar will scrutinise anthropological perspectives on memory in Eastern Europe. Through a range of regional case studies, it will discuss ethnographic approaches to analysing individual, vernacular, family, social, and cultural memory. We will explore how people embody, perform, feel about, and struggle over different pasts, with a focus on how these practices and affects are instrumentalised by political actors and how such instrumentalisations are resisted. Thematically the seminar will concentrate on (post)socialist, (post)colonial, and (post)national pasts and presents, and geographically on Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. Participants will discuss how people in these three-as well as a few other-Eastern European countries engage in 'past presencing' (Macdonald 2013), that is, making fragments of the past part of the present. At the centre of the discussion will be the role of various pasts in the current Russia-Ukraine war, which gives the seminar an acute urgency. Topics covered will include borderland identities, Holodomor, Joseph Stalin and the Gulag, World War Two, nostalgia for the Soviet Union, the 1990s, the Belarusian protests of 2020, as well as the 'Leninopad' (the demolition of monuments to Vladimir Lenin in 2013-2014) and 'decommunisation' in Ukraine. Participants of the seminar will examine manifestations of these pasts and presents in people's everyday lives, artistic practices, and political resistance efforts. The seminar will comprise inputs by the instructors and as well as students, joint engagement with an artwork, a film or a literary work, guest speakers, and meaningful discussions in various formats. Sprache/Language: Beiträge in deutscher oder englischer Sprache sind willkommen. Contributions in English or German are welcome. Special needs: Please feel free to raise with us anything that can help your participation in the seminar. № Date Topics, Readings, Tasks 1 21.10. Introduction: All Things Memory Syllabus & organisational matters Expectations from the seminar Mind maps: types & concepts of memory; disciplinary perspectives on (group) memory; media of memory; memory cultures & memory regimes Questions for reflection What is 'collective'/group memory? What disciplines study memory? What are official memories & vernacular memories, marginalised & silenced memories? What is the role of forgetting? 2 28.10.

Palgrave Macmillan memory studies, 2022

The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of memory, from 'what we know' to 'how we remember it'; changes in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory; panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This groundbreaking series tackles questions such as: What is 'memory' under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination? More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14682

2024

Even before World War II had ended, survivors, historians, writers, and artists tried to make sense of the Holocaust. To do so, they relied on belief systems and narratives that, as the bloc confrontation intensified, were increasingly shaped by Cold War thinking. Foregrounding the Cold War’s role in shaping Holocaust memory, this book highlights how the global conflict between East and West influenced research, legal proceedings, and collective as well as individual memories of the murder of European Jews. Contributions focusing on different parts of the world reveal commonalities, differences, and entanglements between Eastern and Western memories of the Holocaust. Examining Holocaust memory from various disciplinary perspectives, the authors highlight the many ways in which scholars, writers, artists, and survivors both countered and contributed to dominant narratives shaped by oppositional ideological stances. While such distinct ideological positions often mattered greatly, at other times a shared interest in bringing perpetrators to justice, commemorating victims, and providing testimony to the atrocities committed against Europe’s Jews led to cooperation and exchange across the Iron Curtain.

Children's Geographies, 2019

In the history of modernity, childhood represents societies' hopes and desires for the future. An offspring of modernity, the socialist project had a unique preoccupation with children and childhood for the social (re)making of societies. However, research on both sides of the Iron Curtain has explored children's lives in socialist societies by focusing on the organised efforts of state socialisation, largely overlooking how childhoods were actually experienced. In this article, first, we delve into the utility of memory stories for exploring childhoods and children's everyday lives in a variety of socialist spaces. Second, we explicate how memory stories about everyday life can serve as data for cultural-political analysis. We aim to show how 'thinking through' memory stories enables us to learn about childhood and children's lives and to gain access to historical socio-political discourses and practices. We conclude with the relevance of our discussion for engagements with current global problems. ARTICLE HISTORY

Voicing Memories, Unearthing Identities, Studies in the Twenty-First-Century Literatures of Eastern and East-Central Europe, 2023

In the region known as Eastern and East-Central Europe, the framework provided by memory studies became highly valuable for understanding the overload of interpretations and conflicting perspectives on events during the twentieth century. The trauma of two world wars, the development of collective consciousness according to national and ethnic categories, stories of the trampled lands and lives of people, and resistance to the rule of authoritarian and totalitarian terrors—these trajectories left complex layers of identities to unfold. The following volume addresses the issue of identity as a pivot in studies of memory and literature. In this context, it addresses the question of cultural negotiation as it took shape between memory and literature, history and literature, and memory and history, with the help of contemporary authors and their works. The authors take the literature of countries such as Estonia, Poland, Serbia, Ukraine, and Russia as the point of departure, and explain its significance in terms of geographical, theoretical, and thematic perspectives.

2007

This book sheds light on several totalitarian and post-totalitarian regions, such as Russia, Poland, Latvia, Serbia, Romania, China and South Africa. Taking the various genres and media of film, literature, art, autobiographies, testimonies, history textbooks, newspapers and websites as their point of departure, an international group of researchers examine the collective and individual memory in these regions, investigating its relation to poetics, identity, myth, history writing and, not least... its relation to the Truth.

Picturing the Family Media, Narrative, Memory. Edited BySilke Arnold-de Simine, Joanne Leal, 2018

In this chapter, the authors take Igor’s family as a revealing case of generational conflicts of interpretation that arise over family photographs. They focuses on Assmann’s distinction between social, political and cultural memory, as well as Hayden White’s notion of ‘emplotment’ to understand the variety of ways in which generational accounts of family history function at the intersection of visual evidence, memory formats and genres of historical narration. His narration of the family archive was refracted through the prism of what Aleida Assmann would term the political, or national memory culture around the Second World War – or, rather, the Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Russia. The ambivalence surrounding Jewish identity among secular urban Soviet Jews has been extensively described by Slezkine as well as others, and it is quite clear here that Igor did not treat this aspect of his father’s identity as one that deserved extensive commentary or a central place in the narrative.