Agonistic Memory and the Legacy of 20th Century Wars in Europe

272 Pages·2022·3.14 MB·English

by  Stefan Berger, Wulf Kansteiner

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN MEMORY STUDIES
Agonistic Memory and
the Legacy of 20th Century
Wars in Europe
Edited by
Stefan Berger · Wulf Kansteiner
Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies
Series Editors
Andrew Hoskins
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK
John Sutton
Department of Cognitive Science
Macquarie University
Macquarie, Australia
The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends
that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to
that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes
in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory;
panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination
with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of
trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to
an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years.
Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect
what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This
groundbreaking series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’ under
these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its
interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual,
theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and
illumination?
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14682
Stefan Berger • Wulf Kansteiner
Editors
Agonistic Memory
and the Legacy of
20th Century Wars in
Europe
Editors
Stefan Berger Wulf Kansteiner
Ruhr University Bochum Aarhus University
Bochum, Germany Aarhus, Denmark
ISSN 2634-6257 ISSN 2634-6265 (electronic)
Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies
ISBN 978-3-030-86054-7 ISBN 978-3-030-86055-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86055-4
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C
ontents
1 Agonistic Perspectives on the Memory of War: An
Introduction 1
Stefan Berger and Wulf Kansteiner
2 Agonistic Memory Revisited 13
Anna Cento Bull, Hans Lauge Hansen, and Francisco
Colom-González
3 The Production of Memory Modes During Mass Grave
Exhumations in Contemporary Europe 39
Francisco Ferrándiz and Marije Hristova
4 Memory Cultures of War in European War Museums 69
Stefan Berger, Anna Cento Bull, Cristian Cercel, David Clarke,
Nina Parish, Eleanor Rowley, and Zofia Wóycicka
5 “Krieg. Macht. Sinn.” An Agonistic Exhibition
at the Ruhr Museum Essen 115
Daniela De Angeli, Wulf Kansteiner, Cristian Cercel, and
Eamonn O’Neill
v
vi CONTENTS
6 ‘To Understand Doesn’t Mean that You Will Approve’:
Transnational Audience Research on a Theatre
Representation of Evil 149
Diana González Martín and Hans Lauge Hansen
7 Taking Agonism Online: Creating a Mass Open Online
Course to Disseminate the Findings of the UNREST
Project 179
David Clarke, Nina Parish, and Ayshka Sené
8 Agonism and Memory 203
Wulf Kansteiner and Stefan Berger
Index 247
n C
otes on ontributors
Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute
for Social Movements at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany. He is also
executive chair of the Foundation History of the Ruhr and honorary pro-
fessor at Cardiff University in the UK. He has published widely on the
history of memory, the history of deindustrialization, industrial heritage,
the history of social movements and labour movements, the history of
historiography, historical theory and the history of nationalism and
national identity. Among his most recent publications are A Cultural
History of Memory, co-edited with Jeffrey C.  Olick, 6 vols, 2020;
Constructing Industrial Pasts, 2020; (De)Industrial History, co-edited
with Steven High, special issue of Labor: Journal of Working-Class History
16:1 (2019).
Anna Cento Bull is Emeritus Professor of Italian History and Politics at
the University of Bath, UK. Her research interests include the legacy of
political terrorism, political identities and agonistic memory in theory and
practice. She has published widely on this last topic, including ‘On Agonistic
Memory’ (with H. L. Hansen, Memory Studies, 2016, 9(4): 390–404);
‘Agonistic Interventions into Public Commemorative Art: An Innovative
Form of Counter-Memorial Practice?’ (with D. Clarke, Constellations, 2020,
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-8675.12484);
‘Emotions and Critical Thinking at a Dark Heritage Site: Investigating
Visitors’ Reactions to a First World War Museum in Slovenia’ (with D. De
Angeli, Journal of Heritage Tourism, 2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/
doi/full/10.1080/1743873X.2020.1804918).
vii
viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Cristian Cercel is researcher at the Institute for Social Movements at
Ruhr-University Bochum. His areas of interest are memory studies, minor-
ity studies, nationalism studies, transnationalism and European history.
He has recently published Romania and the Quest for European Identity:
Philo-Germanism Without Germans (2019).
David  Clarke is Professor of Modern German Studies at Cardiff
University. He has published on various aspects of the politics and culture
of memory, on representations of war in museums and on cultural diplo-
macy. His recent book, Constructions of Victimhood: Remembering the
Victims of State Socialism in Germany, was published by Palgrave in 2019.
Francisco Colom-González is Professor of Research of the Centre for
Humanities and Social Sciences at the Spanish National Research Council
(CSIC) in Madrid. Previously he was Associate Professor of Political
Sociology at the Public University of Navarre (Pamplona, Spain). He
holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Universidad Complutense and a
Diploma in Political Science and Constitutional Law from the Centre for
Political and Constitutional Studies, Madrid. His work has mainly dealt
with the normative relations between culture, political identity and social
change. More recently, his research interests have turned towards the
study of political spaces and urban theory. He has recently directed a proj-
ect on The Political Philosophy of the City and is preparing a new one on The
Just City. Among his recent publications is (ed.) Narrar las ciudades. El
espacio urbano a través de los textos (2021).
Daniela De Angeli has more than nine years of experience designing and
evaluating interactive experiences and digital content for museums. She is
co-director of the Community Interest Company Echo Games (echo-
games.co.uk) and a visiting researcher in Human-Computer Interaction
(HCI) at the University of Bath in the UK. Her research is interdisciplin-
ary, ranging from HCI and games to cultural heritage and memory studies.
Francisco Ferrándiz is senior researcher at the Spanish National Research
Council (CSIC). He holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology
from UC Berkeley (1996). His research focuses on the anthropology of
the body, violence and social memory. Since 2002, he has conducted
research on the politics of memory in contemporary Spain, analysing the
exhumations of mass graves from the Civil War (1936–1939). He is
Principal Investigator (PI) of the research project The Politics of Memory
Exhumations in Contemporary Spain, funded by the Spanish Ministry of
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix
Science and Innovation. His main books on this topic are El pasado bajo
tierra: Exhumaciones contemporáneas de la Guerra Civil (Anthropos 2014)
and, as edited volumes, Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the
Age of Human Rights (2015, with A. C.G.M Robben) and ‘Memory
Worlds: Reframing Time and the Past’ (special issue Memory Studies,
2020, with M. Hristova and J. Vollmeyer). He is a senior advisor in the
State Secretariat for Democratic Memory, integrated in the Ministry of the
Presidency in Spain’s central government.
Diana González Martín is Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin
American and Spanish Culture, Media and Society at the Department of
German and Romance Languages, School of Communication and Culture,
Aarhus University (AU), Denmark. She is specialized in performing arts,
aesthetics and cultural memory studies. Her interests focus on social
movements and the relationship between activism and institutions in Latin
American and European societies, on the one hand, and, on the other
hand, methodologies for the societal transformation through the arts.
Among her most relevant publications are the monograph Emancipación,
plenitud y memoria. Modos de percepción y acción a través del arte
(Iberoamericana Editorial Vervuert, 2015) and the articles ‘Going to the
Theatre and Feeling Agonistic: Exploring Modes of Remembrance in
Spanish Audiences’ (Hispanic Research Journal, 21:2, 2020) and
‘Informantes, Escogidos, Ejércitos, Ene Enes, Testimonios: Múltiples
actores de la memoria en la literatura colombiana reciente’ (Iberoamericana,
Nordic Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 48:1, 2019).
Marije Hristova is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Culture and Literature
at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Previously she
was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Cofund fellow at the University of Warwick
and a postdoctoral researcher at the Spanish National Research Council.
She is a researcher in the project ‘Below Ground’, funded by the Spanish
Ministry of Science and Innovation. She is a member of the association
‘Memorias en Red’ and of the advisory board of the Memory Studies
Association. Her research focuses on the remembrance of mass grave
exhumations in art and literature. She has published widely on transna-
tional memory discourses and the production of cultural memories after
the forensic turn in Spain and in Europe. Her most recent publications
include the special issue ‘Memory Worlds: Reframing Time and the Past’,
Memory Studies 13(5) 2020, co-edited with Francisco Ferrándiz and
Johanna Vollmeyer.