In the Wake of '89
| Autor: | Robin Okey |
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| Rok vydání: | 2012 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | History Workshop Journal. 73:324-330 |
| ISSN: | 1477-4569 1363-3554 |
| DOI: | 10.1093/hwj/dbr070 |
| Popis: | In 1990, in a striking but now largely forgotten prediction, the Anglo- German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf wrote that the political problem left by communism in the newly liberated states of Central-Eastern Europe could be resolved in six months, the economic problem in six years, but that the social problem would take sixty. Bearing in mind that by the political problem he meant constituting a multi-party system, he was remarkably prescient. West Europeans who have come to take for granted the integration of most of the region in the European Union have only recently been alerted by stances of leaders like the Polish Kaczynski twins and the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to the deeper stresses their societies have inherited from the communist experience. But communism in the region itself emerged from the Second World War, Nazi occupation and Holocaust. These traumatic, interlocking events and the questions they have raised about past criminality, the restitution of rights and in general the overcoming of a fraught past, have made post-communist Central-Eastern Europe fertile soil for the developing field of memory studies. While from the 1980s literary and cultural theorists influenced by post-modernism lent the field a dose of post-modernist scepticism about traditional historiog- raphy (reflected in this journal in Susannah Radstone's fear that it might not be able to 'assimilate' memory-studies insights), 1 Pierre Nora offered a specifically historical perspective. The decline of traditional peasant society and its unselfconscious ritualized memories, together with the retreat of the historian to the academic sphere, made modern collective memory, Nora argued, a matter of official orchestration. Nora's work led to a spate of studies on commemoration, monument building and musealization based round his notion of lieux de memoire (sites of memory). Historians of the late Habsburg monarchy have been to the fore in investigating memor- ialization, both by the regime and its nationalist opponents. The region's even more fraught history after 1918 helps to explain why a Cambridge University course prospectus speaks already of a 'sub-discipline' of 'East European memory studies'. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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