Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe

Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe
Author: Eric Langenbacher
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2013-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0857455818

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The collapse of the Iron Curtain, the renationalization of eastern Europe, and the simultaneous eastward expansion of the European Union have all impacted the way the past is remembered in today’s eastern Europe. At the same time, in recent years, the Europeanization of Holocaust memory and a growing sense of the need to stage a more “self-critical” memory has significantly changed the way in which western Europe commemorates and memorializes the past. The increasing dissatisfaction among scholars with the blanket, undifferentiated use of the term “collective memory” is evolving in new directions. This volume brings the tension into focus while addressing the state of memory theory itself.

Dissonant Heritages and Memories in Contemporary Europe

Dissonant Heritages and Memories in Contemporary Europe
Author: Tuuli Lähdesmäki
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2019-08-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030114643

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This open access book discusses political, economic, social, and humanitarian challenges that influence both how people deal with their past and how they build their identities in contemporary Europe. Ongoing debates on migration, on local, national, inter- and transnational levels, prove that it is a divisive issue with regards to understanding European integration and identity. At the same time, the European Union increasingly invests in projects related to European heritage, museums, and cultural memory networks, while having to take dissonant heritages into account. These processes in their combination offer an interesting dynamic and form the complex puzzle that poses challenging questions for anyone involved in academic research, heritage practices, and policy debates. With this puzzle at its core, this book explicitly focuses on slippery and transforming notions of Europe and critically discusses ongoing and transforming power structures of heritage and memory in today’s Europe. The book combines theoretical and methodological contributions to the debates on European heritage and memory studies and in-depth analyses of empirical case studies. Its main aim is to bring research fields concerning memory and heritage into a closer dialogue and thus explore the cultural and political dynamics of contemporary Europe.

Dissonant Heritages and Memories in Contemporary Europe

Dissonant Heritages and Memories in Contemporary Europe
Author: Iris van Huis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2020-10-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781013276583

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This open access book discusses political, economic, social, and humanitarian challenges that influence both how people deal with their past and how they build their identities in contemporary Europe. Ongoing debates on migration, on local, national, inter- and transnational levels, prove that it is a divisive issue with regards to understanding European integration and identity. At the same time, the European Union increasingly invests in projects related to European heritage, museums, and cultural memory networks, while having to take dissonant heritages into account. These processes in their combination offer an interesting dynamic and form the complex puzzle that poses challenging questions for anyone involved in academic research, heritage practices, and policy debates. With this puzzle at its core, this book explicitly focuses on slippery and transforming notions of Europe and critically discusses ongoing and transforming power structures of heritage and memory in today's Europe. The book combines theoretical and methodological contributions to the debates on European heritage and memory studies and in-depth analyses of empirical case studies. Its main aim is to bring research fields concerning memory and heritage into a closer dialogue and thus explore the cultural and political dynamics of contemporary Europe. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

The Essence and the Margin

The Essence and the Margin
Author: Laura Rorato
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2009
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9042025719

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With the expansion of the EU and calls for a European constitution, the question of a common European identity has become increasingly pressing in recent times. However, in the face of diverse national and regional traditions - and the absence of an obvious European cultural imaginary - the forging of a strong sense of European identity proves problematic. This volume brings together case studies of national and regional images from across Europe, which together suggest emerging patterns of identification within contemporary Europe - patterns which may not necessarily amount to a European 'identity', but rather to a European 'mode' of identification. The chronological structure of the volume demonstrates the increasingly problematic nature of national collective memories and past imaginaries in light of emergent marginal voices and images, and suggests that it is both from beyond and within the national paradigm that new challenges are now reshaping the cultural imaginary of European communities. Focusing on cultural images within film, literature, national narratives and myths, museum exhibitions and architecture, this volume is of interest to a wide variety of disciplines in the humanities, and presents an interdisciplinary approach to questions of cultural memory and identity formation.

Memory, Identity, and Nationalism in European Regions

Memory, Identity, and Nationalism in European Regions
Author: Apryshchenko, Victor
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2019-04-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1522583939

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Memory studies is a well-established academic discipline, but the revised issue of ethnicity poses a new set of research questions, particularly in relation to the problem of the operational character of memory and ethnicity in the context of traumatized identity. Contemporary political processes in Europe, populism, and nationalism, in addition to ethnic challenges in the form of demographic shifts have created a situation in which new national identities have been developed simultaneously with emerging competitive historical memories. Memory, Identity, and Nationalism in European Regions is an essential scholarly resource that investigates the interactions between politics and managed historical memory and the discourse of ethnicity in European regions. Featuring topics such as anthropology, memory politics, and national identity, this book is ideally designed for scholars, practitioners, specialists, and politicians.

Memory and Securitization in Contemporary Europe

Memory and Securitization in Contemporary Europe
Author: Vlad Strukov
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2018-01-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1349952699

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The volume is the first study to explore the intersection of memory and securitisation in the European context. By analysing a variety of practices ranging from film to art and new media, the book expands the existing theoretical framework of securitisation. The authors consider memory as a precondition for contemporary integration projects such as the European Union, and also showcase how memory is used to stage international conflicts. Following this memory-securitisation nexus, the European Union, and Europe more generally, emerges as an on-going cultural, political and social project. The book also examines developments outside the EU such as the conflict in Ukraine and the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union, which, the authors argues, have a profound impact on Europe. From a consideration of historical contexts such as national referenda the discussion proceeds to media and film analysis, artistic practice and more transient phenomena such as climate change.

Europe in Its Own Eyes, Europe in the Eyes of the Other

Europe in Its Own Eyes, Europe in the Eyes of the Other
Author: David B. MacDonald
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2014-04-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1554588669

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What is Europe? Who is European? What do Europe and European identity mean in the twenty-first century? This collection of sixteen essays seeks to answer these questions by focusing on Europe as it is seen through its own eyes and through the eyes of others across a variety of cultural texts, including sport, film, literature, dance, cartography, and fashion. These texts, as interpreted here by emerging researchers as well as well-established scholars, enable us to engage with European identities in the plural and to understand what these identities mean in larger cultural and political contexts. The interdisciplinary focus of this volume permits an exploration of European identity that reaches beyond the area of European studies to incorporate understandings of identity from the viewpoints of both insider and other. Contributors explore diverse understandings of what it means to be “other” to a country, a culture, a society, or a subgroup. This book offers a fresh perspective on the evolving concept of identity—in the context of Europe’s past, present, and future—and expands on the existing literature by considering the political tensions and social implications of the development of European identity, as well as its literary, artistic, and cultural manifestations.

Hi Hitler!

Hi Hitler!
Author: Gavriel D. Rosenfeld
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 477
Release: 2015
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1107073995

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Analyzes how the Nazi past has become increasingly normalized within western memory since the start of the new millennium.

Antigone's Ghosts

Antigone's Ghosts
Author: Mark Wolfgram
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 1684480051

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Sophocles' play Antigone is a starting point for understanding the problems of human societies, families, and individuals caught up in the aftermath of mass violence. Through comparison of Germany, Japan, Spain, Yugoslavia and Turkey, we begin to appreciate the different pathways that societies have taken when confronting their violent histories.

Fate Unknown

Fate Unknown
Author: Dan Stone
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 455
Release: 2023-06-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0192585800

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Dan Stone tells the story of the last great unknown archive of Nazism, the International Tracing Service. Set up by the Allies at the end of World War II, the ITS has worked until today to find missing persons and to aid survivors with restitution claims or to reunite them with loved ones. From retracing the steps of the 'death marches' with the aim of discovering the burial sites of those murdered across the towns and villages of Central Europe, to knocking on doors of German foster homes to find the children of forced labourers, Fate Unknown uncovers the history of this remarkable archive and its more than 30 million documents. Under the leadership of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the tracing service became one of the most secretive of postwar institutions, unknown even to historians of the period. Delving deeply into the archival material, Stone examines the little-known sub-camps and, after the war, survivors' experience of displaced persons' camps, bringing to life remarkable stories of tracing. Fate Unknown combs the archives to reveal the real horror of the Holocaust by following survivors' horrific journeys through the Nazi camp system and its aftermath. The postwar period was an age of shortage of resources, bitterness, and revenge. Yet the ITS tells a different story: of international collaboration, of commitment to justice, and of helping survivors and their relatives in the context of Cold War suspicion. These stories speak to a remarkable attempt by the ITS, before the Holocaust was a matter of worldwide interest, to carry out a programme of ethical repair and to counteract some of the worst effects of the Nazis' crimes.