| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The Context Antiquarianism is certainly not the first term that comes to one's mind when considering the relationship towards the contemporary past. Collecting and displaying strange and alien objects regularly recalls the image of archeological exhibitions dedicated to demonstrate the richness and fascinating nature of radically distant and different pasts like the ancient or medieval periods of human history. Nonetheless, if one recollects the weird, but characteristic obsession towards obscure relics of the recent past like communist medals, images of the 'great leaders' as well as the frenzy of demolishing old statues and erect new monuments or the mushrooming of peculiar museums dedicated to the terror of the dictatorship, the conclusion, that physical objects play a significant role in the relationship to the recent past, becomes obvious. The relationship of the present - the contemporaneity after 1989 - to its recent past -or pasts, since the comprehension of the past before 1989 is inseparably connected to the past before 1945 - is fabricated through a peculiar practical activity concerned with the construction and destruction of things. The fate of themes in the public discussion of contemporary history seems to be bound to the assignment of objects. The subject of the proposed research is precisely this public discussion of the recent past in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. What is the connection of the emergence and fading away of various issues in contemporary history to the appearance and disappearance of those objects that seem to signify their place in the public representations of the past? The object of the collective venture is the often complicated framework and web in which occurs the discussion of the recent past, that is of fascism and communism in Central and Eastern Europe or as it is commonly classified in the former communist countries. Since 2004, when the unification of the European political and cultural sphere took a decisive turn with the entrance of eight countries from the Eastern side of the previous Iron Curtain to the European Union, the state and conditions of coming to terms with the legacies of their dictatorial pasts have become a crucial problematic question and come to the fore of public interest. In 2004 Central and Eastern Europe has left communist dictatorships behind and begun the complicated process of constructing democratic regimes for 15 years. Since then Central and Eastern European societies have started to build their relationships with their recent past. It is all the more important since all these knowledge, patterns and attitudes towards the recent past shape to a considerable extent the vision of the political elite of the region on policy making and politics in general. Apart from that this particular conception of contemporary history has become an integral part of the common shared European memory of the traumatic 20th century. The particular East European experiences of fascism and communism and especially the peculiar ways of conceiving them have entered the sphere of public discourse in Europe and will soon have their effects on its shape. The West which seemed to get rid of the haunting memory of fascism and was lucky to avoid dealing with that of communism cannot neglect to re-assess these in the perspective of the newly joint countries and those that are about to join in the near future. It is also a priority for the East to constantly discuss the recent past and form various ways of recollections in the perspective of the enlargement. The Problem `Zeigen ist schweigen` (To reveal is to conceal) as Reinhart Koselleck once remarked on the complicated nature of public representations of the past. To demonstrate certain aspects of the past is regularly a moral, political or scholarly commitment that at the same time, however, frequently hides its other segments. One of the most striking - often also shocking - feature of these societies emerged after the fall of the Berlin wall is a deep and weird disorientation, confusion - sometimes hitting the frontiers of derangement - that prevails in their broadly conceived public manifestations on matters of history. There is virtually no public consensus concerning the most traumatic events of the past of these nations. There is no broad social agreement on the judging and denial of fascist and communist dictatorships, the terror these regimes executed, the Holocaust and the institutionalized state violence. This condition opened the space for all types of weird para-historiographies, political justifications and arbitrarily self-appointed prophets to offer points of orientation that further increased the state of confusion in Central and Eastern Europe. This horrific disorientation of matters of history entails the lack of basic moral-political norms that may help these societies to construct responsible democratic citizenship. The prevailing myths on national heroes, the stressing of the history of national conflicts and the traditional narratives of victimization are among the main obstacles that prevent and prolong the development of a genuine democratic politics in Central and Eastern Europe based on the mutual understanding of similar patterns and problems. The professional reaction was generally the attempt to bring coherence and a systematic order into this state of disorder. Most of these investigations tend to be interested in how narratives that originate from political-ideological sources and offered for collectivities manage to substitute the collective frameworks for memory and tend to explain the troubles with the harmful and destructive penetration of politics or history into the sphere of collective memory. The conceptual framework for making order derives from the intellectual and political attempt to understand the phenomenon as an Eastern version of the German process of coming to terms with Nazism, or as it is ordinarily called the Vergangenheitsbewältigung. As a generally highly appreciated model of successful incorporation of a traumatic historical experience into current social memory, the German way gained a powerful image of a pattern to follow. Its superficial reminiscence to the Eastern European situation of the necessity to re-assess a dictatorial past or pasts has persuaded most of the critics that contemporary Eastern European attempts to re-construct those pasts can be interpreted according to the (West)German model. The concept of collective memory as an appropriate way of studying public form of evoking the past was derived from the Western European experience of coming to terms with Nazism and World War II. The German and Western European process of critically rethinking the traumatic past has been originated in a considerable social pressure from the part of various collectivities that managed to open up channels for public communication and gain political support. Holocaust survivors, local communities, victims of rape and ex-servicemen all claimed a voice for them in the on-going debate on the historical representation of the past. The discussion occurred in a non-restricted public sphere that circumvented and communicated with proper historical interpretations according to well-established professional standards. One of the major transformations that occurred concerning the nature of the public assessment of the past in the Western hemisphere is that professional history has tore away from its preceding role of providing confirmation for gloriously imagined collective national histories. Instead of the establishment and signification of items worth being remembered, it has begun to warn political communities not to forget and started to remind them to those frequently uncomfortable memories they would like to cover. This modification led to a conspicuous fragmentation and division of public modes of remembrance in the Western world. This current culminated in the most recent wave of resurrected Western interest in re-thinking the memory of the European wars and the Shoah and the attempt to capture and record their fading remembrance with the generation of witnesses dying out. Simultaneously, a common shared consciousness of Europeannes has begun to be based upon the re-assessment of the legacy of the continent`s war-torn past in the twentieth century. British, French, German, Italian and Spanish scholars accompanied by several US based investigations made tremendous efforts to re-allocate the memory of the two world wars, the genocide and mass death as well as public mourning, grief and celebrations of heroes and victory as the common experience of Europeans. Recent monographs and collections of case studies edited by experts like Jay Winter, Reinhart Koselleck, Paloma Aguilar, Luisa Paserini, Jörn Rüsen, Henry Rousso, Pieter Lagrou, Jan-Werner Müller, Jeffrey Olick, Alon Confino, Peter Fritzsche, T. G. Ashplant, Gerald Sider, Emmanuel Sivan or Luigi Portelli among many others investigated the structural and formal similarities in the formation of history and memory as well as the substantial correspondence in terms of meaning of these modes of representations. This process led to an approach that is legitimately embedded in the Western experience of community claims for manifesting own representations of the past in public discourse. Accordingly, studies on the East-Central European way of coming to terms with the past ordinarily try to endow the process with meaning by the conceptual clarification of the terrain of history, memory and symbolic politics and the definition of their own individual logic. From a methodological point of view, the process of evoking the past is systematically divided into various topics of representation like professional historiography, individual memory, social and political anniversaries, ceremonies and rituals. This traditional approach regularly tends to conceal the relationships and effects of the consecutive events - like establishing a historical museum, publishing a historical monograph, staging a commemorative festival or constructing a monument - to each other in the creation of significance and consciousness of issues in contemporary history. This condition resulted in a peculiar conceptual isolation of the succeeding steps and occurrences in the understanding of the emergence and fading away of certain issues in the awareness of the recent past. Topics of the recent past are regularly described as distinct genres of the representation of the past and their interpretation generally means providing the contexts of power and discourses of legitimacy capitalizing on historical reasoning. In this way, however, the described topics and genres appear the manifestation of something hidden and different entity, which usually contributes to the confinement of the analysis to reveal those concealed meanings. In this context the purpose of the interpretation is to consider the forms of historical representation as signs and to decipher its relationship to the signified it signifies. The objects of research become the expressions of a peculiar state of consciousness developed somewhere else. The 'sites of memory' - objects and issues of the public discussion on the past - appear the embodiments and crystallization of something being somewhere else, the sites of something else. Consequently, the logical metaphors of description derive from psychology and cultural anthropology. Historians, as well as other students of contemporary European public re-collections aspire to grab the subject of their investigations as a result of collective mental practices and processes. Scholars of remembering ordinarily aim at learning about the community frames of memory and identify collective mental shapes that carry them. This is usually coined as collective memory, social memory or historical consciousness and is believed to be possessed and dominated by the state or civil society and attempted to define by capitalizing on insights from psychology, sociology or anthropology. In addition, it would testify the observer's, and especially the historian's, naivety and conceit to set his or her target the clearly ordered and arranged depiction of the process. The attempt to put the issue in order would increase disorder, paradoxically. Representing a purified 'order of things' suggests that the analysts can be isolated and seceded from this collective procedure. The investigator him or herself, however, is far from being in the position of a critical analyst who is able to provide judgment independently. Instead of being able to resolve the problem, he or she is the essential part of the problem itself. Apart from being embedded in the contemporary cultural and political contexts, the scholarly production is one of the inherent and crucial contributor to the complicated, and often obscure, affair of coming to terms with the recent past. The uncertainty that surrounds the public recollections of the recent past has been caused also by the profession to a considerable extent. The Purpose Consequently, the systematic conceptual separation of the process into various genres of manifestation does not help too much to understand the genesis of the patterns of evoking the recent past in Central and Eastern Europe. The task, therefore, is not to construct an image of a systematic order of the public evocation of the past, but rather to provide an account on the confusion and disorder. The aim is to detect the practical activity that connects the creation and destruction of objects to the emergence and sinking of issues and, in turn, the consequences of the happenings to issues on the fate of things. The source base of this research would be interpreted as a serial practice, a sequence of actions and events that mutually affect the destiny of each other. The basic methodological principle of the proposed research is the concentration on well-defined individual case studies that can render it possible to meticulously analyse and carefully read the thick context that surrounds the particular events. This is the appropriate method to call under scrutiny a large corpus of available sources from archival material and newspaper articles to visual representations and recorded media broadcasts. The subject of this proposed research is not the description of a theoretically conceivable abstractum, but the strikingly tangible corpus of the public discussion on the recent past and the intelligibly comprehensible relationship among its various aspects. The duty is to analyze and demonstrate the state of the public discussion on recent history in contemporary Central and Eastern Europe. What are the themes we talk about as history comes to the fore? How do these topics enter and exit the public sphere? Which are the points - objects- in connection to we dispute the recent past? How could the appearance of these objects influence the relevance of certain issues? What happens with the objects related to issues? What is the agency behind the process? Who and how can direct or intervene into the practical activity of producing meanings? The research would focus on the history of issues like extraordinary events - e. g. interwar authoritarianisms and dictatorships, World War Two and the Holocaust, the Gulag and its satellites, the Cold War and Stalinism, the "thaw" and 'socialism with a human face', 'goulash communism' and 'national communism', resistances to and collaboration with party-states, the enigmas and traumas of 1989, a frequently protracted 'Transition' - and significant personalities and their relationship with various objects like monuments, exhibitions and historical museums, archives and libraries, historical festivals and anniversaries, trials, burials, television and radio programs or the publication of historical monographs. Conceiving the process of evoking the recent past a practice, a sequence of practical actions would cease the separation of the investigator and the occurrences and would situate the analyst inside the procedure by presenting him or her the momentarily last one of a series of events. The Organization Since the aim is to provide a uniquely comparative perspective on Central and Eastern Europe, will be conducted by an international team consisted of mostly young historians, social scientists and scholars of art who are familiar both with the methodological and theoretical literature in the field and the local sources and native contexts. A basic pre-condition of reaching a truly comparative aspect of the research is the constant communication of the individual members of the team, which can provide the necessary feedback, criticism, questions and suggestions helping the authors to learn the similar experiences in various national cultures, thus, transgressing the national boundaries of interpretation. Since many of them have already known each other as members of the truly international CEU community, thus, having experienced a genuine trans-cultural way of thinking, the group has good hopes to successfully fulfil this mission. The organizational framework is designed to foster the continuous communication in the various phases of the research. Three institutions, Collegium Budapest, Central European University and the Open Society Archives have agreed in a mutual collaboration to implement the project providing their individual institutional infrastructure, while at the same time gaining the maximum benefits. The programme is planned to begin with an international conference on the topic in November 2006 in Budapest. The aim of this event is, first of all, to visibly signal the start of the programme gaining initial publicity for the activity. It will be used to clarify the themes as well as the ultimate methodological and theoretical focus of the research and to finalize the list of contributors. Subsequent to the setting of the individual themes, researchers will return to their home institutions and field of research to conduct the profound archival and other work necessary for producing an adequate corpus for analysis. During the intensive research period participants will be asked to work together in setting up a virtual archives based upon a corpus of their own individual source material. The collection will be hosted by OSA and will be used as the basis of a virtual forum accessible by the participants and several other interested parties. This peculiar web archive will enable the individual researchers to work on a common corpus of records, consider similar matters of interest and documentation and communicate collaboratively well in advance the actual beginning of their common stay in Budapest. In order to allow an intensive period of communication vital for the comparative interpretation, a period of 6 months fellowships is planned for a group of the participants to spend together in Budapest as fellows of the Collegium Budapest and Pasts Inc. starting from September 2007. Immediately following their arrival to Budapest, a workshop will be organized to share and discuss the findings of the research period and establishing the context and perspective for an intensive period of writing the actual case studies. Participants are expected to finish a substantial draft of their contributions by the end of the fellowship term, which will be helped by an informal but constant personal communication in Budapest. In order to foster creative practical understanding of the problems under scrutiny, participants will be involved in the activity of the partner institutions. Apart from building a common archive of source materials, they will have the opportunity to capitalize on OSA as an object of historical representation, thus, experimenting on the crucial questions of the research like the relationships of the institution-object to the discussion of the past or that of the object to the story. A collaborative exhibition will result from this activity. During the fellowship period, fellows will conduct a common research seminar at the History Department on the modes of representing the recent past. The phase will end with a closing conference, which will be devoted to make the achievements and conclusions public, but also to obtain important insights and suggestions before entering the preparation of the publication. This conference will be open to the general public and intended to attract broad media attention. Following the conference, contributors will have three months to revise and finalize their studies. The collective volume, that will be the first comparative work devoted especially to the peculiarities and specificities of the Central and Eastern European ways of evoking the recent past, will be published by CEU Press in its series Pasts Incorporated: CEU Studies in the Humanities edited by Sorin Antohi and László Kontler. The research will contribute to the agenda of the largest all-European network of contemporary history, EURHIST XX. EURHIST XX was established in Budapest in May 2003 and took further developments in Potsdam in May 2004, in order to identify common bases for the wider European discussion in the major problems of recent history. Its broader aim is to lead historical discourse in the continent further to an Europeanization of historical research concerning the 20th Century. During the period of the project participants will have the opportunity to get involved into the activities of the network, whereas the research will gain broader publicity through EURHISTXX. This research project will be incorporated into the framework of the CEU Seminar in Recent History, originally co-sponsored by the Open Society Institute's Higher Education Support Program and hosted by Pasts Inc., CEU`s Institute for Historical Studies.
|  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Print Version
Mail this contribution