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Copyrighted material – 9781137343512 after the violence: memory / 9 disappeared. As recurrent and familiar “tropes” in memorial sites, objects are also ambiguous artifacts. Not legible in themselves, they can elicit a nostalgic and sentimental cult of the past prior to the catastrophe, a celebration of the heroism of survival, a fetishist glorification of violence, a voyeuristic and sensationalist spectacle of past horrors, or the artificiality of kitsch. Bones in particular have yielded the most debate, dialogue, and controversy. As recalcitrant and elusive “objects,” they lay bare the difficulty of representing violence and death. Part III, “Re-membering Memory,” hones in on the ethical dimension of memory politics as a process of constructing meaningful narratives about the past for the present. Literature is a privileged medium to reflect upon the longstanding impact of traumatic violence and to explore constructive responses and reparative modes of forgiveness and care. In “Toward a Critical Reparative Practice in Post-1989 German Literature: Chista Wolf’s City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (2010), Anke Pinkert probes how after historical rupture sustainable bonds can be imagined in a still divided present. She traces the systemic violence that has marked German unification since 1989, leading to chronic and ongoing unbalances and asymmetries between the two former Germanies. A critic of this aggressive takeover, Christa Wolf has been relegated to the margins of the public sphere, ridiculed as naive for her ethics-oriented writing, and subjected to a politics of shaming. Wolf’s last novel retraces how this symbolic exclusion from post-1989 society led to a personal crisis that the narrator seeks to resolve through an ethics of self-healing. Yet, beyond the individual cure Wolf reasserts a sense of collective solidarity and a hope for new collective bonds by reclaiming the utopian and elating moment of East German crowds demonstrating peacefully in 1989 for a future they were not yet able to imagine. Richard Golsan’s chapter “Paradoxes of Remembrance: Dissecting France’s ‘Duty to Memory’” takes up France’s often vexed efforts since the 1990s to come to terms with the Vichy past. Inspired by the imperative to fulfill a “duty to memory” (devoir de mémoire) toward the Holocaust’s victims, these efforts resulted in the trials and prosecutions on charges of crimes against humanity of former Vichy officials. Focusing on the trial of former collaborator Maurice Papon, which lasted from October 1997 to April 1998 and was the longest trial in modern French history, Golsan shows how in the name of political vigilance the “duty to memory” led to problematic comparisons between the Nazi regime and the Yugoslav wars or the massacre of Algerians in Paris on October 17, 1961. These comparisons distorted both the Vichy and Nazi past. On a more positive note Golsan draws on Tzvetan Todorov’s notion of “exemplary memory” to explore constructive ways of performing the “duty to memory” through recent literary fiction. In Boualem Sansal’s novel The German Mujahid and in Laurent Binet’s novel HHhH about the Copyrighted material – 9781137343512
Copyrighted material – 9781137343512 10 / florence vatan and marc silberman assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942, the confrontation with the past becomes a source of inspiration for personal and collective action in the present. In the volume’s closing chapter, “Afterwords: Lessons in Memory and Politics,” Marc Silberman reflects on the ethical and pedagogical challenges raised by the transmission of the past. If the multiplication of memorial sites, historical museums, and public spaces of mourning demonstrate the growing awareness of the relevance of the past for our own present, the remembrance of a difficult past raises significant challenges when it comes to decide what and how it should be transmitted to younger generations. The chapter highlights some of the stumbling blocks one encounters when teaching about memory, for example, the distinction between historiography and memory studies, issues of truth, evidence, and authenticity, and the status of “invented memory” and media spectacle in representations of the past. The essay argues that for teachers of memory the specific object of attention should be a transformation of values, encouraging students to recognize competing views of the past that produce not the stories we want to hear but those we need to hear. The evocation of bones haunts this entire volume like a specter of the past: Russian children playing in the woods and discovering bones from human bodies, bones excavated as vestiges of the Spanish Civil War, bones on display in Rwandan, Cambodian, and European memorial sites, women searching for the remains of their “disappeared” loved ones in the Chilean Atacama desert. These bones are fragments, mutilated remains of violently decimated lives. They are also signs of recognition, symbols of connection and interconnectedness, and pieces of a puzzle which cannot be fully reconstructed. The search and excavation process reinserts them into the community of the living as a shared legacy through the intergenerational process of transmission. Walking through the ruins of Birkenau, Didi-Huberman was reminded of Walter Benjamin’s brief 1932 text “Excavation and Memory”: “He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.” 11 Benjamin’s remarks, Didi-Huberman goes on, reveal two things: First, the art of memory cannot be reduced to an inventory of excavated visible objects. Second, archeology is “not only a technique to explore the past; it is also, and above all, an anamnesis to understand the present” (64–65). In many respects the commemorative projects analyzed in this volume perform an archeology of violence. Individuals, groups, and institutions dig again and again into a collective past in order to retrieve silenced truths and forgotten glimmers of hope. Their projects make visible what has been erased, buried, or left unnoticed. Some expose divisions and contradictions. Others generate new forms of solidarity. Terrorscapes—many Copyrighted material – 9781137343512
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