Memory and Political Change

Over the last 25 years we have been able to witness how countries that maintained brutal dictatorships and bred bloody genocides chose to set an end to oppression, violence or exploitation in order to build up a new relationship between victors and losers, perpetrators and victims, on the way towards an integrated society. The transnational advance of the norm of human rights and the emergence of a watchful global community have provided the larger framing condition for such changes. The new credo is that countries noted for injustice and violence may be transformed, or rather that they may transition from autocratic regimes to democracies. The contemporary political landscape is continuously undergoing decisive changes which are propelled, instigated and reinforced by a whole new set of instruments and institutions that are employed to overcome totalitarian and violent pasts. These changes have been bolstered by a new search for justice, which has been implemented by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), truth commissions and the International Criminal Court. The historical truth about the political crimes of the past — uncovered from archival sources or oral testimonies of victims — is today considered to have great ethical and transformative power. Memory has become a central issue in our discussions about transition, as this truth is directly related to the memory of the victims, and it is the medium of a new shared narrative of the past that integrates formerly divided perspectives. In these cases, as Andreas Huyssen has emphasized, memory forges a new powerful link between past atrocities and a peaceful future:

As particular nations struggle to create democratic polities in the wake of histories of mass exterminations, apartheids, military dictatorships, and totalitarianism, they are faced, as Germany has been and still is since World War II, with the unprecedented task of securing the legitimacy and future of their emergent polity by finding ways to commemorate and adjucate past wrongs.¹

One of the best-known replacement children born after the Shoah to Jewish parents is perhaps political cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who grew up with the sense that he was competing with his ‘ghost-brother’ Richieu.¹ We learn about this ghost-brother in Maus, an experimental memoir written as a cartoon that features the Jewish people as mice and the Nazis as cats or pigs. Dedicated to Richieu and his mother Nadja, Maus opens with a photograph of Richieu. In the following exchange with Art’s wife Françoise, we learn that this photograph served as the single most tangible object of Art’s rivalry with his ghost-brother.

In West Germany, the systemic transition from the National Socialist dictatorship into a modern European democracy was accomplished within a period of four years. The transformation of society, however, took much longer. Examining the emotional legacy of the National Socialist past in West and post-unification Germany,¹ this chapter focuses on its transformations over a period of 65 years and across three to four generations.² Divided into two different sections, it firstly offers an overview of three distinct phases in which the memory of the Nazi past has been framed differently through modes of externalization, moralization and institutionalization. The second part presents the results of an interview study which was conducted on the topic of ‘Holocaust education’. It investigates the ways in which teachers and pupils engage with the National Socialist legacy in the classroom, exploring the emotional undercurrents in this process of transgenerational transmission. This analysis shows that, in spite of general transformations, some aspects of this complex emotional legacy seem to persist that are not fully integrated into the social and political framework.

During the 1990s, the innovative term ‘culture of remembrance’ was coined, providing a cultural framework within which we automatically assume that remembering is a beneficial obligation that we must fulfil. Remembering thus appears to be a significant social and cultural resource. This picture has been recently thoroughly upset by Christian Meier, whose latest book Das Gebot zu vergessen und die Unabweisbarkeit des Erinnerns (The Imperative to Forget and the Inescapability of Remembering, 2010) posits the theory that it is the ability to forget which should be considered the cultural achievement; remembering is only to be recommended under absolutely exceptional circumstances such as Auschwitz.¹ Using Meier’s study on the importance of forgetting after civil wars as its point of departure, this chapter opens up a more general discussion on ways of possibly overcoming a shared history of violence.

This contribution focuses on the way the state and the international community deal with the legacy of a violent past after repressive dictatorships or civil wars. During the 1980s and the early 1990s, attempts to institutionalize memory and to come to terms with the past in the transitional period after the collapse of repressive authoritarian regimes were usually undertaken within a domestic framework. Since the 1990s, there have been increasing numbers of external initiatives to promote democracy and, in light of increased international interventions to enforce and keep the peace, the mechanisms of truth, reconciliation and justice have also become internationalized. Institutional procedures and the politics of memory now increasingly involve international actors; the duty of lifting the lid of silence off painful periods of history has almost become an international norm.

Twenty years after the fall of the Wall, 2009 has provided critics and commentators with a perfect platform for observing the successes and failings of the process of German unification. From the vantage point of the present, we can see that although the systemic transition from state socialism to liberal democratic capitalism was officially sealed by the Unification Treaty of 3 October 1990 which formally erased the former territory of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the transference of East German emotional and identificatory allegiances to the new German state have proven more difficult to negotiate.¹ This ‘affective transition’ has been impeded by two main factors. Firstly, the circumstances of ‘transition through unification’ meant that former East Germany was simply absorbed into former West Germany. Unification was effected at rapid speed using Article 23 which simply extended the constitution’s area of jurisdiction. This meant that East Germans were expected to reorientate themselves towards former West Germany’s cultural norms and values. Rather than a fusion of equals, unification appeared to be a victory for the West, whose superiority was confirmed by the very collapse of the East. Secondly, the social and economic circumstances of post-unification Germany resulted in dissatisfaction with unified Germany; despite the financial investment from the West, modernization of the East resulted in deindustrialization and a rise in unemployment. The combined effects of disorientation in, and dissatisfaction with, the unified present, led to the development of a reactive ‘eastern identity’ during the 1990s which seemed to impede the drive towards ‘inner unity’ because of its backward-looking nostalgia.

This chapter explores the relationship between cultural products and historical change, examining how contemporary South African writers engage with South Africa’s past and present, writing ‘Transition’ into the literary imagination. ‘Transition’ is one of the terms which is used to describe the period between 1990 and 1994 — that is, between Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and his election as President; it is also referred to as ‘dismantling apartheid’ and ‘the creation of the Rainbow Nation’. In the public sphere, this process of dismantling was carried out in newspapers, political speeches and texts. This chapter examines the cultural importance of literary texts which hold up a mirror to transitional processes, offering a space where fears and misgivings which may not have a place in official discourse can be thematized. Acting as a container and giving a ‘name to what has no name, especially to what the language of politics excludes’, literature acts as ‘one of a society‘s instruments of self-awareness … because its origins are connected with the origins of various types of knowledge, various codes, various forms of critical thought’.¹

On 15 February 2010, exactly two years after Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered the Apology to Australia’s Indigenous People as the first act of the reconvened parliament, Australian author Kate Grenville was invited to contribute an opinion piece to the Guardian. In her article, Grenville looked back on the progress that the project of reconciliation had since made and conceded that, while there had been some movement, ‘the Rudd government can’t point to any spectacular policy changes or huge improvement in outcomes’. Rejecting the notion, however, that the Apology had been just ‘hot air, a cynical exercise in spin’, Grenville discussed the difficulties faced by the government’s housing programme for Indigenous communities as one example of ‘just how tangled the problems are’. While symbolic acts were never enough, she concluded, the Apology remained an ‘overdue and necessary first step’.¹

Over the past few years, public intellectuals in the United States have begun speaking of the collective dioxyribonucleic acid (DNA) of nations. In analysing ‘the myth of American innocence’, for example, Robert Kagan asserts that a predilection to interfere in the affairs of other nations is ‘embedded in the American DNA’.¹ Meanwhile, Fareed Zakaria has written about the ‘cultural DNA’ of India as it shapes the ‘post-American world’, and David Brooks has argued that US involvement in Afghanistan reflects ‘America’s DNA’.²

This chapter examines the emotionally charged debates in Georgia which have been unleashed by recent attempts to change how history is being written and taught. In December 2008, Simon Janashia, director of the National Curriculum and Assessment Centre at the Georgian Ministry of Education, gave a talk on the new history books at the Centre for the Study of the Caucasus and Black Sea Region (CBSR).¹ This presentation generated intense discussion and passionate responses. One historian teaching at the University of Georgia exclaimed; ‘This is some kind of experiment that they are trying to conduct on Georgia … you are trying to raise global citizens and uproot patriotism in this country … that’s what it is!’ This type of impassioned response is typical for the debate on the new history textbooks. Critics are dissatisfied that someone else has a monopoly on the nature of collective memories which will be instilled.

Recent evidence suggests that culture can operate as a lens, bringing distinct aspects of one’s environment into focus based on cultural priorities, values and experiences. Individuals from Western cultures tend to focus on that which is object-based, categorically related or self-relevant whereas people from Eastern cultures tend to focus more on contextual details, similarities and group-relevant information. For example, when asked to describe animated vignettes of underwater scenes, American descriptions focus on the prominent fish in the scene, Japanese participants, on the other hand, incorporate many more contextual details, such as the colour of the seaweed and water and the relationship of the fish to the other elements in the scene.¹ These different ways of perceiving the world suggest that culture shapes the ways in which individuals attend to and remember aspects of complex environments.