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Copyrighted material – 9781137343512 after the violence: memory / 7 of German suffering—and Holocaust memory, which posits German responsibility. Drawing on Bourdieu’s analyses of field dynamics, Niven shows how the memory of flight and expulsion defined itself directly in reaction to the perceived hegemony of Holocaust memory and how it borrows its modes of representation from the latter in an attempt to counterbalance a presumed emphasis on German crime. To gain public resonance its proponents claim that the topic of flight and expulsion was taboo, while Niven demonstrates on the contrary the ongoing reactive dynamics between these antagonistic memories. Competing memory paradigms are also at the core of Rob van der Laarse’s reflections in “Beyond Auschwitz? Europe’s Terrorscapes in the Age of Postmemory.” Since the late 1980s the recognition of the Holocaust as a shared collective past of universal value has become part of the European Union’s politics of remembrance. However, with the expansion of the European Union and the inclusion of Eastern European countries the Holocaust paradigm and its universalizing claims have been challenged by the “occupation paradigm” according to which victims of communist crimes deserve equal recognition. Laarse raises questions about the appropriateness of Western mechanisms of “postmemory” in Eastern Europe. “Embodied identifications” with past victims through photo albums and memorabilia are not particularly successful in societies still marred by recent and potential conflicts. Furthermore, since Eastern European terrorscapes are sites of recurrent violence, memorial sites are faced with the conundrum of acknowledging the different and sometimes mutually exclusive demands of the heritage communities. Part II, “Staging Memory,” moves from larger narratives to practices of presenting memory as a self-reflexive process of construction and definition of new collective identities. In “Narrative Shock and Polish Memory Remaking in the Twenty-first Century” Geneviève Zubrzycki traces recent attempts to come to terms with the “narrative shock” produced by revelations about ethnic Poles’ active involvement in the persecution of their Jewish neighbors in the small town of Jedwabne. Not only did these revelations shatter the national martyrological narrative of Polish victimhood, they also generated debates and soul-searching about Polish–Jewish relations, the role of Poles in the Second World War, and Polish identity. Drawing on three memory-building projects—the postwar creation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and its post-1989 narrative revision, the Jedwabne memorial and counter memorial, and the artist/memory activist Rafał Betlejewski’s commemorative projects “I Miss You, Jew” and “Burning Barn”—Zubrzycki explores reactive and multidirectional forms of memory remaking as they relate to or challenge national mythology, suggesting that in the last case some forms become so controversial that they undermine the project of constructive engagement with the past. Copyrighted material – 9781137343512
Copyrighted material – 9781137343512 8 / florence vatan and marc silberman Ofelia Ferrán’s chapter “Grievability and the Politics of Visibility: The Photography of Francesc Torres and the Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War” focuses on two photographic memory projects by multimedia artist Francesc Torres: the 2007 photography exhibit and its accompanying catalogue, Oscura es la habitación donde dormimos (Dark Is the Room Where We Sleep). These projects document the 2004 exhumation in Villamayor de los Montes of a mass grave containing the bodies of 46 Republicans. After years of silence about Francoist repression the grassroots “movement for the recuperation of historical memory” has started to confront the legacy of the Civil War and dictatorship in Spain, leading to the exhumation of mass graves throughout the country. Torres’s photographic project commemorates the victims, acknowledging their right for a proper burial and the value of their life and ideals. The project invites viewers to engage with the victims. As such, it performs what Ariella Azoulay calls the “civil contract of photography.” 10 This intergenerational transfer initiates a sense of community and civic responsibility committed to keeping alive the victims’ heritage and to live up to the values they embody. Robyn Autry’s chapter on “Doing Memory in Public: Postapartheid Memorial Space as an Activist Project” explores how two South African memorial projects—Freedom Park, a state-directed national heritage project in Pretoria, and the District Six Museum, a community-based effort in Cape Town—give voice to dissident histories and memories silenced during apartheid. The chapter also examines the difficulties and contradictions involved in the attempts to accommodate conflicting memories in a society still deeply divided. A counter monument to the infamous apartheid-era Voortrekker Monument, Freedom Park with its postcolonial, Afrocentric monumentality reworks the understanding of South African national identity. Yet its own shortcomings elicited criticism and led to counter initiatives. In a different context the District Six Museum collected people’s stories and memorabilia in order to create a “memory culture from below” and to reclaim a neighborhood from which Coloured people had been expelled decades earlier. Yet the project was fraught with ambivalence and tensions in its effort to avoid racial language and imagery, in its strategies to reclaim the District Six physical space, and in its increased attention to the appeal of South Africa’s international tourist industry. Expanding the transcultural and transcontinental angle, Laurie Beth Clark’s contribution on “Mnemonic Objects: Forensic and Rhetorical Practices in Memorial Culture” considers how objects are staged as mnemonic devices and how they operate in heterogeneous and contested ways. With examples from Europe, Africa, Asia, North and South America, she considers the tension between a forensic impulse that uses objects as proof of crimes and a semiotic function in which objects stand in metonymically for the dead or Copyrighted material – 9781137343512
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