Life Writing and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe

This volume addresses the issues of remembering and performing the past in Eastern European ex-communist states in the context of multiplication of the voices of the past. The book analyzes the various ways in which memory and remembrance operate; it does so by using different methods of recollecting the past, from oral history to cultural and historical institutions, and by drawing on various political and cultural theories and concepts. Through well-documented case studies the volume showcases the plurality of approaches available for analyzing the relationship between memory and narrative from an interdisciplinary and international perspective.

Simona Mitroiu is Senior Researcher at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Romania. Her research focuses on the European culture, memory and life writing. She is the author of two books and several papers in international journals. Her most recent publications include Identity Narration and Trauma: Sebald's Memory Landscape, and Diagrams: Walter Benjamin's Urban Landscape.

1.Introduction; Simona Mitroiu
PART I
2.Memories of Displacement and Unhomely Spaces: History, Trauma, and the Politics of Spatial Imagination in Ukraine and Poland; Irene Sywenky
3.Forgotten Memory? Vicissitudes of the Gulag Remembrance in Poland; Lidia Zessin-Jurek
4.When Memory Is Not Enough: Roaming and Writing the Spaces of the Other Europe; Katarzyna Kwapisz Williams
5.Re-Reading the Monuments of the Past; Andrea Pruchová
PART II
6.Dignity and Defiance: The Resilience to Repair and Rebuild in Response to Despair; Hannah Kliger and Sheryl Perlmutter Bowen
7.Individual and Official Narratives of Conflict in Croatia: Schools as Sites of Memory Production; Borislava Manojlovic
8.Bordering on Tears and Laughter: Changes of Tonality in the Life Histories of Estonian Deportees; Aigi Rahi-Tamm
9.Memory of Lost Local Homelands. Social Transmission of Memory of the Former Polish Eastern Borderlands in Contemporary Poland; Malgorzata Glowacka-Grajper
PART III
10.Caught Between Historical Responsibility and the New Politics of History. On Patterns of Hungarian Holocaust Remembrance; Ferenc Laczó
11.From Skull Tower to Mall: Competing Victim Narratives and the Politics of Memory in the Former Yugoslavia; Michele Frucht Levy
12.Post-communist Romanians Facing the Mirror of Securitate Files; Raluca Ursachi
13.Divided memory in Hungary: the House of Terror and the lack of a left-wing narrative; Csilla Kiss