After Memory: World War II in Contemporary Eastern European Literatures
Edited by Matthias Schwartz, Nina Weller and Heike Winkel
Even seventy-five years after the end of World War II, the commemorative cultures surrounding the War and the Holocaust in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe are anything but fixed. The fierce debates on how to deal with the past among the newly constituted nation states in these regions have already received much attention by scholars in cultural and memory studies. The present volume posits that literature as a medium can help us understand the shifting attitudes towards World War II and the Holocaust in post-Communist Europe in recent years. These shifts point to new commemorative cultures shaping up ‘after memory’. Contemporary literary representations of World War II and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe do not merely extend or replace older practices of remembrance and testimony, but reflect on these now defunct or superseded narratives. New narratives of remembrance are conditioned by a fundamentally new social and political context, one that emerged from the devaluation of socialist commemorative rituals and as a response to the loss of private and family memory narratives. The volume offers insights into the diverse literatures of Eastern Europe and their ways of depicting the area’s contested heritage.
Author information
Matthias Schwartz, Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin; Nina Weller, Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder); Heike Winkel, Berlin.
Contents
After Memory: Introduction
Matthias Schwartz, Nina Weller and Heike Winkel
Growing in the Cracks: On Ecologies of the Margins
bellu& bellu
I IMAGINARY ADOPTIONS: FAMILY HISTORIES AND PERSONAL LEGACIES
Bodies of Evidence: Memory, the Forensic Imagination and Family Histories about former Yugoslavia
Stephenie Young
Transnational Aspects of Postmemory in Third-Generation Fiction: The ‘Contrapuntal’ Cases of Piotr Paziński and Erwin Mortier
Kris Van Heuckelom
Ghost-Writing World War II Memories: Romanian Holocaust Survivors’ Life Stories in Post-Cold War Western Societies
Dana Mihăilescu
Legacies of Stalinism and the Gulag: Manifestations of Trauma and Post Memory
Ernst van Alphen
II REVISIONIST APPROPRIATIONS: NATIONAL BELONGINGS AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES
Is the Past a Secret Language? The Jewish Other and the Holocaust in Iurii Vynnychuk’s Novel Tango of Death
Roman Dubasevych
Post-Imperial Resentments: Alternative Histories of World War II in Popular Post-Soviet Speculative Fiction
Maria Galina
Chetniks and Partisans: Conflicting Narratives in Contemporary Serbian Literature
Davor Beganović
Delectatio Morosa: Reflections on Affective Compensation, Conflation, and Fantasy in Polish Memory Culture
Joanna Niżyńska
III FICTIONAL INTERVENTIONS: ALTERNATE NARRATIVES AND SUBVERTED MYTHOLOGIES
‘Spectral Stories’: Fictional Re-Inventions of the Holocaust in Contemporary Polish Literature
Aleksandra Ubertowska
Counterfactuals and (Counter)memory: Im/possible Modes of ‘Undoing’ the Great Patriotic War
Brigitte Obermayr
The ‘Gift of Memory’ and the ‘Gift of Oblivion’: Holocaust and World War II in Contemporary Hungarian Literature
Stephan Krause
De-Mythologising History: On the Fictional and Phantasmatic Dismantling of the Leningrad Blockade Narrative
Nina Weller
IV IMAGINATIVE RECONFIGURATIONS: AVERAGE HEROES AND AMBIVALENT SUBJECTIVITIES
Digging up Skulls, Fighting with Words: On Radka Denemarková’s Novel Money from Hitler
Heike Winkel
Layers of the Crypt: Baltic Women’s Postmemory of World War II in Life Stories and Fiction
Tiina Kirss and Rutt Hinrikus
Bridging the Gaps: The Poetics of Postmemory in the Czech Graphic Novel Alois Nebel
Madlene Hagemann and Gernot Howanitz
Obsessed with the Past: On the Topicality of the Historical Novel in Eastern Europe Today
Matthias Schwartz
Appendix
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Index
Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter
Copyright year: 2021
Pages: 479
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110713831/html?lang=en