Through case studies from Europe and Russia, this volume analyses memorials as a means for the present to make claims on the past in the aftermath of armed conflict. The central contention is that memorials are not backward-looking, inert reminders of past events, but instead active triggers of personal and shared emotion, that are inescapably political, bound up with how societies reconstruct their present and future as they negotiate their way out of (and sometimes back into) conflict. A central aim of the book is to highlight and illustrate the cultural and ethical complexity of memorials, as focal points for a tension between the notion of memory as truth, and the practice of memory as negotiable. By adopting a relatively bounded temporal and spatial scope, the volume seeks to move beyond the established focus on national traditions, to reveal cultural commonalities and shared influences in the memorial forms and practices of individual regions and of particular conflicts.
Author(s): Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, Dacia Viejo-Rose, Paola Filippucci
Series: Palgrave Studies In Cultural Heritage And Conflict
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 326
Tags: Cultural Heritage
Front Matter ....Pages i-xix
Memorials and Memorialisation: History, Forms, and Affects (Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, Dacia Viejo-Rose, Paola Filippucci)....Pages 1-32
Polarised Topography of Rival Memories: The Commemorations of the 11th March 2004 Train Bombings in Madrid (Gérôme Truc, Cristina Sánchez-Carretero)....Pages 33-60
From Salvation to Struggle: Commemoration, Affect, and Agency in Cyprus (Rebecca Bryant, Mete Hatay)....Pages 61-93
Heritagization of the Gulag: A Case Study from the Solovetsky Islands (Margaret Comer)....Pages 95-125
Potočari Memorial Center and Commemorations of the Srebrenica Genocide (Dzenan Sahovic)....Pages 127-158
Conflicted Memorials and the Need to Look Forward. The Interplay Between Remembering and Forgetting in Mostar and on the Kosovo Field (Gustav Wollentz)....Pages 159-182
The Dudik Memorial Complex: Commemoration and Changing Regimes in the Contested City of Vukovar (Britt Baillie)....Pages 183-227
From Socialist ‘Memorialkombinat’ to a Place of Learning. The Heidefriedhof Cemetery in Dresden as an Arena for Competing Cultures of Memory (Matthias Neutzner)....Pages 229-277
The Isted Lion: From Memorial of War to Monument of Friendship (Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, Inge Adriansen)....Pages 279-303
Back Matter ....Pages 305-312
