Friday, March 14, 2014
Empire (Omni Shoreham)
In explorations of how hegemonic memory narratives are constructed and maintained, the nation state and elite actors have tended to be considered the principal players. However, in recent years, the European Parliament and Commission have published a number of resolutions that promote memory of dictatorship as a pan-European responsibility, which must be pursued in the name of ‘European’ values (e.g., 2006, 2009, 2010). Part of this movement has been the networking of national sites of remembrance through initiatives such as the ‘Platform of European Memory and Conscience’ (2011). This drive towards transnational memory has been followed by greater pan-European collaboration. Moreover, particularly in the wake of the Arab Spring, co-operation between German sites of memory increasingly takes place with locations outside of the EU. How are these collaborations understood and valued? What meanings are attached to this use of the past? This paper addresses these questions through considering how memorial sites in Germany – particularly the former Stasi prison Gedenkstätte Hohenschönhausen – construct the importance of such international co-operations in terms of their impact on national narratives about coming to terms with dictatorship. Through close examination of media texts and deploying a method of narrative analysis, I argue that the representation of German approaches to Vergangenheitsbewältigung shifts between accounts of success, pan-European failure and national disappointment. In this way, entangled pasts are resurrected and transformed in multiple ways to achieve different political goals in shifting national, international and regional contexts.
