While preparing a lecture on entangled memory cultures across Germany, Eastern Europe, and Russia back in 2010 at LMU Munich, I first came across the term ‘memory wars.’ Deeply rooted in the German culture of reconciliation and sharing histories as a means of understanding and rapprochement, I was irritated by that term. Professor of History and Culture of Eastern Europe at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn, Germany What is really troubling is that the real prize one gets for winning the Victimhood Olympics is the privilege to act as a villain. Now we are back to the Victimhood Olympics.Įuropean nations feverishly compete to prove that they are the biggest victim of historical injustice. Russians were forced to answer for Stalin’s crimes. Bulgarians were forced to recognize the crimes committed by the communist government against Bulgarian Turks in the 1980s. Poles and Romanians were forced to face the truth about the rise of anti-Semitism in their countries in the pre-war and war periods. “We, the nation” meant “we, the victims.” The European Union’s post-1989 ambition was to radically change this, and “we, the nation” began to mean “we, the perpetrators.” In the post-1989 world memory politics was the politics of forgiveness. In the days of the classical nation-state, identity-building was very much centered on building the sense of common victimhood. The Post-Cold War European attempt at pan-European reconciliation has failed. The logical consequence of our nostalgic mood is that the most critical question is not who will own the future but who was right in the past. The majority of Europeans believe that life was better before, with “before” remaining unclear. Today in Europe we live in the Age of Nostalgia. Russia with its Great Victory in World War II is an anachronism for some, a well-timed threat (to the future, the present and the past) for others, and a structural antipode for most others.Ĭhairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, Bulgaria, and Permanent Fellow at the IWM, Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria Meanwhile new members of the community are actively furthering the Old Testament tradition of Babylonian-Egyptian capture, thus undermining the long-standing monopoly of the Holocaust. Traditional military-political, financial, and intellectual centers are rapidly advancing the culture of collective repentance for the sins of privileged groups, successful states and the entire Christian/civilized/free world, a culture originally devised in Germany and quite unprecedented in memory politics. The promotion of democracy and the struggle for human rights did not last long.
The place that was occupied by “the Christian world” and its successors-“the civilized world,” “the free world,” and “the Western civilization”-is temporarily empty after their decline. And it is building several of them at once. In the search for the meaning of its post-Soviet existence, the reformed West (also known as the “international community”) needs a new genealogy. Regime change requires pantheons to be reinvented. Professor of History, Director of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, USAĪll human communities mythologize their past. So, since the topic triggered such a powerful response, we decided to take it further by asking members of the academic community in different countries how they assess the current state of affairs in “memory politics.” They came up with a very broad range of opinions, which we gladly share with our readers. In general, the willingness to see behind everything a conspiracy of dark forces and the belief that everything happens for a reason, well-known to us from our own history, have now spectacularly become commonplace. Our modest publication was immediately dubbed as nearly a forge of Kremlin ideas regarding “memory wars,” which, of course, is flattering, but, alas, is not true. To our amazement, the discussion caused a very keen reaction, especially in Europe. In January 2020, the Russian-language bimonthly “Russia in Global Affairs” published an article on “memory politics” and related conflicts, following a roundtable hosted by the magazine (Rossiya, 2020).