Spicing up Memories and Serving Nostalgias: Thematic Restaurants and Transnationalisation of Memory in East-Central European Borderland Cities

The article is a result of field studies on the transformations of multicultural heritage in the East-Central European cities of Cracow, Wrocław, Lviv and Chernivtsi. In all these cities, a majority of the pre-war populations (and in Wrocław, practically all pre-war residents) disappeared as a result of WWII. After decades of silence imposed by the ruling communist elites, collective memories of the post-war populations are now surfacing in public discourse. Precisely how the contemporary populations living in the zones of ‘dismembered multiethnicity’ approach the past’s cultural diversity in the everyday life remains, however, an underinvestigated topic. Under these circumstances, ethnography proves to be an innovative methodological approach particularly suited to studying local expressions of transnational memory. Based on the methodological approach of multi-sited ethnography, the article examines thematic restaurants which allude to cultures of some perished ethnic groups (in particular, Jews, Poles, and Germans). The main conclusion of this study is that in Central and Eastern Europe transnational memory trends have been actively translated and localized in the public spaces intended primarily for leisure and recreation. Over the past two decades, commercial actors have created hybrid spaces where references to historical ethnic diversity serve to evoke embodied memories and nostalgias primarily among cultured middle-class audiences. The political-ideological quality of their suggested projects is not always clear-cut, but they nevertheless strive to achieve an uneasy balance between commercial success, incentives of local memory politics, and sensitivity to dimensions of European memory underscoring historical responsibility as well as celebration of difference.