Publications

This book discusses how societies, groups and individuals remember and make sense of global neoliberal change in Eastern Europe. Such an investigation is all the more timely as the 1990s are increasingly looked to for answers explaining the populist and nationalist turn across the globe.
The volume shows how the key processes that impacted many lives across the social spectrum in Eastern Europe, such as deindustrialization, privatization, restitution and abrupt social reorganization, are collectively remembered across society today and how memory narratives of the 1990s contribute to current identities and political climate. This volume establishes the memory of economic transformation as a research focus in its own right. It investigates different levels of memory, from the national through the local to the cultural, analysing key myths of the transformation, giving special recognition to the social space and vernacular memories of the transformation period and reflecting on how the changes of the 1990s are mediated in cultural representations.

Given the book’s interdisciplinary scope that covers several fields, it will prove to be of interest to those working in memory studies, contemporary history, sociology, East European area studies and literary and film studies. It will also serve as a significant point of reference for those researching the interdisciplinary and rapidly expanding field of transformation studies and thus is an invaluable source across different fields.

Editors:

Joanna Wawrzyniak is associate professor in sociology and director of the Center for Research on Social Memory at the University of Warsaw. She is vice chair of the EU COST Action Slow Memory: Transformative Practices for Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change.

The book argues that religion is a system of significant meanings that have an impact on other systems and spheres of social life, including cultural memory.
The editors call for a postsecular turn in memory studies which would provide a more reflective and meaningful approach to the constant interplay between the religious and the secular. This opens up new perspectives on the intersection of memory and religion and helps memory scholars become more aware of the religious roots of the language they are using in their studies of memory. By drawing on examples from different parts of the world, the contributors to this volume explain how the interactions between the religious and the secular produce new memory forms and content in the heterogenous societies of the present-day world. These analyzed cases demonstrate that religion has a significant impact on cultural memory, family memory and the contemporary politics of history in secularized societies. At the same time, politics, grassroots movements and different secular agents and processes have so much influence on the formation of memory by religious actors that even religious, ecclesiastic and confessional memories are affected by the secular.

This volume is ideal for students and scholars of memory studies, religious studies and history.

Editors:
Zuzanna Bogumił, PhD, works at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her published works include Gulag Memories: The Rediscovery and Commemoration of Russia's Repressive Past (2018) and a co-authored study titled Milieux de mémoire in Late Modernity: Local Communities, Religion, and Historical Politics (2019).

Yuliya Yurchuk, PhD, teaches history at Umeå University, Sweden. She specializes in memory, the history of religion and Eastern Europe. She is the author of the book Reordering of Meaningful Worlds: Memory of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Post-Soviet Ukraine (2014).

This book discusses the active relationship among the mechanics of memory, visual practices, and historical narratives.
Reflection on memory and its ties with historical narratives cannot be separated from reflection on the visual and the image as its points of reference which function in time. This volume addresses precisely that temporal aspect of the image, without reducing it to a neutral trace of the past, a mnemotechnical support of memory. As a commemorative device, the image fixes, structures, and crystalizes memory, turning the view of the past into myth. It may, however, also stimulate, transform, and update memory, functioning as a matrix of interpretation and understanding the past. The book questions whether the functioning of the visual matrices of memory can be related to a particular historical and geographical scope, that is, to Central and Eastern Europe, and whether it is possible to find their origin and decide if they are just local and regional or perhaps also Western European and universal. It focuses on the artistic reflection on time and history, in the reconstructions of memory due to change of frontiers and political regimes, as well as endeavours to impose some specific political structure on territories which were complex and mixed in terms of national identity, religion and social composition.

The volume is ideal for students and scholars of memory studies, history and visual studies.

Editors:
Michał Haake is Professor and art historian at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. His research interests focus on history of European painting from medieval to contemporary art and art history methodology. His publications include Figuralizm Aleksandra Gierymskiego (Aleksander Gierymski’s Figuralism) (2015) and Obraz jako obiektteoretyczny (Image as the Theoretical Object) (as co-editor, 2020).

Piotr Juszkiewicz is an art historian and a professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. His publications include From the Bliss of Historiography to the "Game of Nothing". Polish Art Criticism of the of the Post-Stalinist "Thaw" (2005) and The Shadow of Modernism (2013).

This set of essays introduces readers to new historical research on the creation of the new order in East-Central Europe in the period immediately following 1918.

The book offers insights into the political, diplomatic, military, economic and cultural conditions out of which the New Europe was born. Experts from various countries take into account three perspectives. They give equal attention to both the Western and Eastern fronts; they recognise that on 11 November 1918, the War ended only on the Western front and violence continued in multiple forms over the next five years; and they show how state-building after 1918 in Central and Eastern Europe was marked by a mixture of innovation and instability. Thus, the volume focuses on three kinds of narratives: those related to conflicts and violence, those related to the recasting of civil life in new structures and institutions, and those related to remembrance and representations of these years in the public sphere.

Taking a step towards writing a fully European history of the Great War and its aftermath, the volume offers an original approach to this decisive period in 20th-century European history.

Editors:
Bartosz Dziewanowski-Stefańczyk is Deputy Head of the Academic Department at the Institute of European Network Remembrance and Solidarity and Researcher at the History Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. His fields of research include Polish-German relations, Polish foreign politics of memory and cultural diplomacy. He is currently writing a book on history as a tool of Polish diplomacy towards Germany, 1918‒1939.

Jay Winter is Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and Honorary Professor at the Australian National University. His fields of research include the First World War in history and memory, and the Armenian Genocide of 1915. He is currently writing a history of the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 and a book on the cultural history of modern war.

In creating the first issue of Remembrance and Solidarity: Studies in 20th Century European History, we elected not to give it a theme any more precise than what the title seems to suggest. Nonetheless, the scholars we invited to contribute, no matter whether they were experienced or young, submitted texts in which two relatively clear tendencies are evident. The first is the theme of remembering the history of the 20th century in terms of political and societal issues. The authors describe debates and decision-making processes leading to the establishment of days commemorating certain events or situations in which new political rituals come into being that are meant to change our perception of the past. They compare the reigning principles in historical memory in Eastern and Western Europe, and consider the roles of the great historical caesurae in forming a sense of community within a generation. The subject of memory and its political function and potential has evidently lost none of its relevance, and continues to attract researchers, although it has been widely discussed and addressed in Europe for at least twenty years. Another aspect that unites the majority of texts is reference to communist history. This surely results from the history of the communist system and regimes having been ‘delved into’ to a much lesser degree than that of Hitlerism and its affiliated ideologies, and the sinister mark they have left on the history of 20th-century Europe. Although it is not the intention of the publishers of Studies to oppose this sort of compensatory work in the fields of history and memory, we hope that the coming issues of our annual magazine will be devoted to the memory of crises (2013), which were plentiful in 20th-century Europe, and the memory of World War One and its far-reaching effects (2014).

Since there are a number of relevant periodicals dealing with Holocaust research, the ‘Call for Articles’ for this current issue, published in February 2015, requested a focus on issues that are particularly relevant to the work of the ENRS. The objective was to obtain current research contributions from different European countries and to address authors with regional and methodologically different approaches. The response to this call has been overwhelming. The fifteen contributions ultimately selected for publication in this issue were written by an international group of authors either in English or in their native language and then translated into English. They deal with Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Romania, Ukraine, Slovakia and Hungary, or Central and Eastern Europe as a whole. The issue is divided into two main parts: I. Articles, which include academic research, and II. Miscellanea, which present both project reports and professional reflections. The Articles are subdivided into two further sections: ‘History – Studies on the Period’ focuses on the history of oppression and dispossession of Jews as well as the history and course of the murders in different local, regional and national contexts; and ‘Memory – Studies on Remembrance’ centres on post-1945 memory and remembrance, in which a variety of forms of public and private remembrance and memory preservation are considered, including literature, exhibitions, films and memorials. Special emphasis is placed here on the ways in which the subject was handled during the communist era and the question of comparability of the Holocaust / Shoah with the crimes of Stalinism.

The issue is devoted to the diverse aspects of violence in 20th-century European history. It features two distinct contribution categories: studies and essays. The research papers showcase the complexity and multiple perspectives from which the phenomenon of violence can be studied. The second category is the synthesis of the most important lectures presented at the European Remembrance Symposium, 'Violence in 20th-century European history: commemorating, documenting, educating', Brussels, 2017.

The 4th issue – entitled “The memory of economic crisis” – focuses on depressions, recessions, shortages, and hyperinflation. These topics are not often a subject of memory studies, however memories of war and revolution often center on the economic experience of these events. Therefore, scholars look among others into Living in Warsaw under Hyperinflation in 1923 (by Izabela Mrzygłód), Parallels of Economic Business Cycles in Slovakia (by Ľudovít Hallon), Public Transportation in Budapest in 1945-46 (by Zsuzsa Frisnyák) and discuss The Possibility of Remembering Economic Crisis (by Łukasz Mańczyk).

This issue of Remembrance and Solidarity Studies is entirely dedicated to the European memory of the First World War. The authors, among others Andrzej Chwalba, Christian Wevelsiep, Jenny Wustenberg, and Mark W. Clark, take on new questions concerning the significance and long-term impact of one of the greatest conflicts in 20th-century Europe.

This third issue is devoted to the “second” anniversary being celebrated in this “extraordinary year” of European remembrance, which is the 25th anniversary of the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. The careful observer can see that the anniversary referred to above, at least in Western Europe, has been pushed into the background by the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. However, the year of 1989, while symbolizing events less dramatic, bloody and harrowing as those of 1914, would seem to be of similar significance in terms of periodization of European history. In fact, a number of historians subscribe to the belief articulated by Eric Hobsbawm that 1914 marked the beginning of “the short 20th century”, which symbolically ended in 1989. In light of recent events in the eastern part of Europe, I would like to express my wish that Hobsbawm be proven correct in his belief that “the age of extremes” has come to a close.