Preliminary Programme

Memory cultures have an effect on history teaching. This becomes specifically obvious in the case of the Cold War. Everybody was involved in this manichean conflict and each society and each nation has different memories. Memory cultures about the Cold War are characterized by a broad societal emotionalization. In this contribution we show how history teachers with their memories about the Cold War teach the epoch in the class room. We shed light on the question how individual memory influences the teaching of the topic and how it refers to the aspect of national identity. In the Swiss case the Cold War is an important time marker and closely linked with a conception of foreign policy, a bunker mentality, a strong ideological anti-communism, narrowness and social conservatism, but also welfare state and economic development and spiritual defense. Therefore, reorientation by the end of the Cold War was difficult for Swiss society. From the position of the present, one looks back to the Cold War in a twofold way. On the one hand, the question arises as to what effect its end had for the following period. A second perspective can deal with the “heritage” of the Cold War and ask the question as to what structures and initial positions being shaped in the Cold War have an impact on the present. (Show less)

On 14 September 2011 the imaginary about the Dutch colonial past changed, to being rather a colonial present, a present that still needs to be dealt with: When the Dutch government, for the first time, was obliged by a decision of the Civil Court in The Hague to apologize and to pay compensation to victims of its colonial policy in Indonesia; to the widows of summarily executed man in the village Rawagede in West-Java. Although the decision has been called a “milestone”, legally and historically speaking, critics have noted a lack of human rights discourse, interpreting this as a significant element of silencing. I will argue, however, that those assumptions are based upon a too narrow interpretation of human rights. Departing from a definition of human rights that describes alongside its legal nature also its utopian character – thereby following up on ideas of Charles Taylor and Samuel Moyn – this lecture analyses how human rights function as a social imaginary on the individual level and its impact in the political but also broader social and cultural realm.
This lecture explores what the concept social imaginaries (Taylor 2002) has to offer for a critical, bottom-up approach in the Transitional Justice field, when examining the impact of human rights as a social imaginary. Thereby this lecture aims to reflect upon the increasing critique in Memory Studies as in the Transitional Justice field on the absence of utopias and future in those dealings with historical injustice. (Show less)

I would like to present thepublic sphere as a field in which the mediation between two genealogies of memory occurs. The first of these genealogies is a bottom-up process of sedimentation of individual remembrance that leads to the establishment of cultural frames of memory. The second one is a top-down process of ‘information control’ in which cultural institutions select individual remembrance and influence its content. The mediation between these genealogies contributes to the emergence of social memory (as different from individual and cultural). From a point of view of Memory Studies, public sphere can be thus understood as field in which people communicate their memories. I will illustrate this approach with the case of Roma memories of their genocide during the Second World War and comment on the specific features of social memory that results from the transformation of the public sphere as described by Habermas and others. In particular, I will focus on various forms of distorted communication of memory. (Show less)

Developments in border regions can be used in order to analyse public controversies. The consequences of World War II were changes of borders, battles in border regions and movements of people across the borders. For this reason, we can assert that border regions played a special role in relation with World War II. Furthermore, this historical event produced a lot of myths in relation to battles, border changes, people’s movements and a new life in border regions. This is of course different in case of border regions where border changes didn’t affect the life of their inhabitants so much, where people were allowed to stay in their territories although they became part of another country. Such was the case of the Danish-German border after World War II, where Danish and German people continued their lives in Schleswig under the changed rule. In the German-Polish border region, where German inhabitants were expelled from the new Polish territories or in the Polish-Soviet border region, where Poles lost their homes and had to move either to Central or to Northern and Western Poland, World War II is present in narratives and collective memory of the inhabitants of these regions. In the presentation, the question will be analysed whether inhabitants of border regions have been successful in the development of a common discourse about divisions and separations they experienced in the past. (Show less)