Preliminary Programme

The opening of secret police archives is an indispensable – albeit not sufficient – condition to a sound societal debate on a past dictatorial regime where secret played a crucial role. But the timing of this opening and the conditions in which it takes place are equally important : the « when » and the « how » the former Czechoslovak secret police (Státní bezpečnost or StB) files were made available to the wider Czech public have interfered with a conflictual memory of the communist period in this country. They have shown the difficulty in streamlining a social atmosphere which has been poisoned for two decades by a chaotic collective reflection which has mostly disregarded individuals and their feelings, has often been malicious and petty and has been marked by repeated mediatical scandals. This presentation will reflect on these issues on the basis of the recently revealed « scandal » concerning the Czech-French writer Milan Kundera. (Show less)

The Hungarian political culture has been deeply historicizing for centuries. After 1989 the clashes were inevitable. How could one handle the anti-Trianon discourse on the borders drawn in 1920 by the peace treaty and participate to the European integration process, which meant a policy of cooperation with all neighbors (apart from Serbia at certain times) ? How could one face the memory of the Holocaust in Hungary – long kept in a half silence – and the Hungarian official participation to the German war?
The ideological fights were also fueled by the contradictory memories of communism and opposition to communism, for example about 1956. The specifics of Hungarian debates in this case are many: no IPN (Polish) style institute of national remembrance, but a solid archive limited to the secret services of the communist time with no judiciary in it, and limited communication and research functions, a private institution called House of Terror-Museum very much politicized working in close contact with a political party of the right, out of government three months after the opening in 2002, a historical corporation with a specific stand (Academy, Universities, several private research institutions) and internal debates on the focus of the research needed to understand communism. But the lack of a generation gap and the specific institutional setting seem to be unique in the region.
Highly fragile, the present balance is not to be seen as stable. And the changes in 2009-2010 could be many. Informational compensation – the right to access to the names and files of the actors of communist or Nazi repression – has been reshaped several times and largely used as a short term political instrument. But time passes and Kádár has a good public image while Arrow-Cross memory is repeatedly activated. So informational compensation seems to face its own limits and coming to term with the past takes also other forms in young post-communist Central European democracies. (Show less)

The last two decades have seen, in Germany as elsewhere in Europe, the establishment of a new field of public policy of the central state: Geschichtspolitik or history of politics. History politics as a specific form of governmentality responds to the emergence of memory discourses working their way up from the bottom of civil society and their inherent potential of conflictuality. This process has been underway already since the late seventies, but in the German case, it was with the breakdown of the communist dictatorship, that the federal state of unified Germany had to stand up to the task to manage the co-presence of different and partly opposed, if not mutually exclusive memory cultures within in the own nation integrated in an emerging European public sphere.
Governing the civic coexistence of these subcultures within the framework of the West-German raison d’état as laid down in the Grundgesetz requires specific principles and rituals of public deliberation, to be executed by a community of experts, lobbyists of interest groups, and policy makers, and assisted by the mass media, who have their own stakes and agendas in nurturing memory cultures. At the same it needs politicians able to perform this governmentality in acts of public representation which symbolically affirm the peaceful coexistence of conflicted memory subcultures within society. The ultimate purpose of governing memory can thus be seen in preventing disruptive effects of the memory cultures which seem unavoidable given the violent and conflict-ridden nature of the collective experience of the 20th century. (Show less)