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Saturday 15 April 2023 11.00 - 13.00
W-14 CUL06 Heritages of Hunger: Legacies of European Famines in Education, Art and Musealization
Västra Hamngatan 25 AK2 135
Network: Culture Chair: Peter Gray
Organizer: Marguerite Corporaal Discussants: -
Anne-Lise Bobeldijk, Charley Boerman : Teaching the Holodomor: a Comparative Analysis of a Changing Victim/perpetrator Narrative in the Memory of the Holodomor in Post-Soviet Ukraine
On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. The war was legitimized by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin’s use of history and memory: Putin both denied the (historical) existence of a Ukrainian state, as well as expressed a wish for a renewed Russian Empire, including both Ukraine and Belarus. In the weeks ... (Show more)
On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. The war was legitimized by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin’s use of history and memory: Putin both denied the (historical) existence of a Ukrainian state, as well as expressed a wish for a renewed Russian Empire, including both Ukraine and Belarus. In the weeks that followed, many aspects of the contested history of the region were invoked to make sense of the war. Analogies were drawn between the arrest of one of the best known survivors of the Leningrad Siege in Moscow, and the bombing of the site where the massacre of Babyn Yar took place led to the recalling the horrors of the Holocaust.
However, the man-made famine, displacement and violence inflicted by Moscow upon Soviet Ukraine in 1932–33, known as the Holodomor, is perhaps the most recalled and widely referenced analogy.

During the Soviet period, existence of this man-made famine was denied, while the heroic history of the Great Patriotic War prevailed over all other historical narratives. As a result, there was no space to engage with the famine, nor was it taught in schools (Kasianov 2014). This changed significantly after Ukrainian independence in 1991. Since then, the famine has become a central aspect in the national narrative of an independent Ukraine: featuring in films, the Ukrainian curriculum, and since 2006 officially recognized as a genocide by the Ukrainian state (Vsetecka 2021: 249).
This paper seeks to analyse different ways of teaching the Holodomor since the fall of the Soviet Union, with a particular focus on how a victim-perpetrator narratives and identities have developed. This paper will draw a comparison between ‘classic’ teaching material–school books–and ‘popular’ and informal teaching material (Lloyd Yero 2020), such as films and museum exhibitions. The school books can be viewed as a direct portrayal of both the Russian and Ukrainian state’s view on this particular history, and showcase how this narrative is taught in their schools. Films and museum exhibits, increasingly relied on in educational settings, will illuminate how interpretations of victimhood and perpetratorship are bolstered as well as nuanced in the cultural memory of the Holodomor. (Show less)

Lotte Jensen : Famine and ‘Hongersnood’: Literary Legacies of the 1845-47 Food Crises in Ireland and the Netherlands.
The wide-scale famine caused by potato blight in Ireland during 1845-49 has been well researched and documented (Ó Gradá 1993; Kinealy 1994; Gray 1999; Donnelly 2003; O’ Murchadha 2011). The dire effects of the phytophthora infestans in the Netherlands in 1845-46 have been investigated less extensively, and primarily through ... (Show more)
The wide-scale famine caused by potato blight in Ireland during 1845-49 has been well researched and documented (Ó Gradá 1993; Kinealy 1994; Gray 1999; Donnelly 2003; O’ Murchadha 2011). The dire effects of the phytophthora infestans in the Netherlands in 1845-46 have been investigated less extensively, and primarily through a socioeconomical lens (Paping & Tassenaar 2006; Curtis et al. 2017). While these studies have significantly changed our understanding of the sociohistorical contexts of Great Irish Famine and the Dutch ‘aardappelhonger’, they have not engaged with the cultural practices that have shaped and transmitted these famine pasts, and that have thereby contributed to “socializing populations into a common culture” (Ashplant et al. 2000: 8).

What has often been overlooked and what this paper addresses are therefore the cultural legacies of these concurrent famines during their immediate aftermath and in the more recent past. This paper will focus on literary texts as carriers of famine memory (Erll and Rigney 2006; Rigney 2006; Rigney 2004), by looking at two media of transmission in which these famine legacies mainly circulated in the distant and more recent past: poems and songs printed in periodicals in the wake of both famines, as well as recent children’s fiction by, amongst others, Marita Conlon McKenna, Elizabeth Lutzeier and Dutch writer Simone van der Vlugt.

This paper will furthermore do so by analysing the texts from hitherto underexplored comparative, transnational perspectives. The transnational is often defined as “sustained, cross-border relationships spanning nation-states” (Vertovec 2009: 5) or “interactions and cross-currents” that transcend national borders” (De Cesari & Rigney 2014: 7). We will identify another form of transnationalism in these Irish and Dutch literary famine legacies, in their use of recurrent tropes and “narrative templates” (Wertsch 2002: 25) of family disintegration, travel and dismal weather to remember famine atrocities. (Show less)

Deborah Madden, Miguel Ángel Del Arco Blanco : The Spanish Years of Hunger (1939-52): the Lack of Musealisation of a Traumatic Past
During the Spanish Years of Hunger (“Los Años del Hambre”, 1939-52) the country suffered a long postwar. Mainly due to the autarkic policies of the Francoist Dictatorship, the economy stagnated, the country suffered a general shortage of food supplies and the living conditions worsened dramatically (Del Arco Blanco 2007). The ... (Show more)
During the Spanish Years of Hunger (“Los Años del Hambre”, 1939-52) the country suffered a long postwar. Mainly due to the autarkic policies of the Francoist Dictatorship, the economy stagnated, the country suffered a general shortage of food supplies and the living conditions worsened dramatically (Del Arco Blanco 2007). The situation aggravated so much that even a famine took place in 1939-42 and 1946. Due to the long duration of the Franco’s regime (1939-1975) both the famine and the years of hunger were silenced. During the Spanish Transition (1975-82) the “Pact of Oblivion” left the past aside and no policies of memory were taken by the new democratic governments.

Until the emergence of the movement for the recovery of the historical memory (2000) and the first relevant measures of the Government (2007) there were not active policies of memory about the Spanish traumatic Francoist past. This might be the main reason to explain the relative lack of institutions that musealise or commemorate both the hunger years and the Spanish Famine (Hernández Burgos & Román Ruiz 2021).

This paper will explain historically the reasons for this almost absence of monuments or places of memory about the hunger years. It will also deal with some examples that show a progressive effort to acknowledge, explain and disseminate the post-war years. We will use a comparative approach, reflecting about the lessons that we can learn from the musealisation of other European famines. (Show less)

Anne van Mourik : Germans as Victims of WWII: the Representation of Hunger Legacies in German Textbooks (1950-2000)
Since the mid-1980s many (West-)German publicists argued that, within German cultural memory, narratives about German war crimes pushed narratives on German suffering of WWII to the background (Lübbe 1983; Sebald 1999; Brand 2002; Grass 2002). They claimed that experiences of the aerial bombings of German cities, the expulsion of Germans ... (Show more)
Since the mid-1980s many (West-)German publicists argued that, within German cultural memory, narratives about German war crimes pushed narratives on German suffering of WWII to the background (Lübbe 1983; Sebald 1999; Brand 2002; Grass 2002). They claimed that experiences of the aerial bombings of German cities, the expulsion of Germans from areas in Eastern Europe and experiences of German soldiers at Stalingrad and in Soviet camps, had been ‘silenced’ or ‘tabooed’. And yet, scholarship has revealed the ubiquity of narratives of German suffering in German cultural memory since the 1950’s (Moeller 2005; Niven 2006).

A significant topic that remained absent from the discussion on German victimhood is German hunger (1945-49). However, Germany is an exceptionally relevant case for studying hunger memory, as it deals with conflicting legacies of hunger in relation to WWII: Germany was simultaneously a central driver to famine experiences in other countries as well as a victim of severe deprivation itself.
This paper investigates victim/perpetratorship discourses in the context of hunger narratives in a selection of German secondary school textbooks from various regions. Acknowledging the complex position of German perpetratorship and victimhood, it offers a discourse analysis of textbooks over time, focusing on the representation of German hunger. To what extent were memories of German hunger used to redress present political affairs? For example, to what extent was it recalled to mitigate German guilt? To what extent did memories of suffering caused by Germans overshadow memories of hunger endured by Germans? Furthermore, why was German hunger not a topic in the debates on the assumed silencing of memories of German suffering? (Show less)



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