Remembering to Forget: Memory, History, National Identity in Postwar East-Central Europe

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Remembering to Forget: Memory, History, National Identity in Postwar East-Central Europe Author(s): Richard S. Esbenshade Source: Representations, No. 49, Special Issue: Identifying Histories: Eastern Europe Before and After 1989 (Winter, 1995), pp. 72-96 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928750 . Accessed: 21/06/2014 08:39 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Representations. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928750?origin=JSTOR-pdf http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp RICHARD S. ESBENSHADE Remembering to Forget: Memory, History, National Identity in Postwar East-Central Europe Memory is never shaped in a vacuum; the motives of memory are never pure. -James Young' In a land without history whoever supplies memory, shapes concepts, and interprets the past will win the future. -Michael Stuirmer2 THE FALL OF STATE socialism in Hungary left hundreds of monu- ments and statues of idols from the Communist lexicon on streets and squares across Budapest, not to mention in the country's towns and villages. Monuments command us not merely to remember, but to remember a triumph, in this case one that was now meant to be seen as tragedy. In the debate that raged over the fate of the monuments, some called for them to be "wiped off the face of the earth"; others argued that they had become part of the city's landscape, part of an undeniable lived past, and as such should be allowed to stand.3 Popular sen- timent tended to resent the huge expense that either destroying or moving such masses of granite and bronze involved, all the more so in a time of economic crisis and hardship. The government finally decided on a "sculpture park" on the out- skirts of the city, which opened in 1993 with fifty-eight towering figures of Marx and Lenin, generic worker-heroes, Soviet soldiers, and obscure Hungarian com- munists. But the former sites of the sculptures are often still marked by empty pedestals, and by their absence looming in the memories of people who had grown used to them. Another past-to-be-erased was the Communist-era street name: Lenin Ring Road in Budapest reverted to its old name of Theresa Ring Road (after Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa), People's Republic Avenue became Andrassy Avenue, Red Army Road became Ulli Road, and November 7 Square became the Octagon, to name just a few of the most prominent and striking examples in Budapest.4 But instead of being removed, the old signs were left standing above the new, marked merely by a red diagonal slash. They remain "under erasure" in 72 REPRESENTATIONS 49 * Winter 1995 ? THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp the Derridean sense, neither truly there nor fully absent, the presence of an absence, memory markers of a most ambiguous, yet eerily appropriate, kind. The conundrums of East-Central European memory seem twisted, even in the global context of the struggle over memories of World War II, the Holocaust, colonialism, and the cold war. In the West there is a temptation to view history and memory in Eastern Europe as "out of control," with tribal passions, blood feuds, and "primitive" ethnic strife "threatening stability in Europe." But this view denies the West's own struggles and privileges a particular Western version of stability.5 Eastern European explanations of the same phenomena, ranging from victimization through amnesia to nostalgia, can be just as distorting. What these opposing positions have in common is their failure to recognize the full com- plexity of the phenomenon of collective memory and of the region's history of struggles over concepts of nation, political power, economic entitlement, and the contradictory lessons of the past. My purpose here is to examine the role of memory in national narratives constructed in East-Central Europe, particularly in the alternatives to official state socialist versions of the past. Such "counter-narratives," based on "counter- memory," proliferated both before and after the "revolutions of '89." Dissident intellectuals of the '68 generation anchored their opposition to the Communist state in the "true" past rescued by memory from state forgetting. Subsequent memory-work addressed the liabilities of individual conduct and collaboration with the oppressive system. This has been superseded by new nationalist projects to reinvent the national past. Thus, the reburial in 1989 of Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy, a reform Communist executed in 1956, was followed by that of interwar authoritarian leader Miklos Horthy; Alexander Dubcek and the Prague Spring were supplanted as objects of adulation by Tomas Masaryk, the president of the first Czechoslovak republic, or, in Slovakia, by Nazi collaborator Monsignor Jozef Tiso.6 The nationalist narrative presents a form of historical continuity running counter to the Communists' narrative of class struggle and the triumph of Soviet power, while both building on and manipulating the earlier efforts of the dissidents. In what follows I will first examine models for East- Central European collective and national memory offered by two prominent dissident writers, Milan Kundera and Gyorgy Konrad, and then turn to post- Communist revisions of memory, some of the pitfalls of transition politics, and the situation as it stands today. Displaced monuments and changed street signs may seem uniquely contem- porary, but for Milan Kundera these phenomena were by the late '70s already historical: There are all kinds of ghosts prowling these confused streets. They are the ghosts of mon- uments demolished-demolished by the Czech Reformation, demolished by the Austrian Counterreformation, demolished by the Czechoslovak Republic, demolished by the Com- munists. Even statues of Stalin have been torn down. All over the country, wherever statues Remembering to Forget 73 This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp were thus destroyed, Lenin statues have sprouted up by the thousands. They grow like weeds on the ruins, like melancholy flowers of forgetting.7 Kundera goes on to cite the five different names in this century-before 1989- of a single street in Prague: "They just kept changing its name, trying to lobot- omize it."8 The unconsciously ironic precedent to the Budapest Sculpture Park was Lenin's plan for a similar collection in Moscow, as part of the campaign of "de-Romanovization." The "mother" of all projects in the service of casting a new history was, of course, revolutionary France. Yet the Musme des Monuments Franqais ultimately outlasted the clear ideological intentions of its founders and spawned unforeseeable counter-trends of national historicization.9 Hungarian and other East-Central European successors, invisibly informed by ghosts of the past, are bound to do the same. The connections between national identity, national narrative, and individual memory have been much explored of late, for a wide range of national settings and historical periods.'0 In the totalitarian experience of postwar East-Central Europe, the imperative of presenting national memory as biography or autobiog- raphy was all the stronger, since the "traditional" means of preservation-history books, journals, textbooks, national holidays, museums-were so obviously ma- nipulated. Hence the central role of the writer as keeper of the records, custodian of memory, and truth-teller for the nation in the postwar period. Fiction and poetry rather than documentary history as such came to be seen as the guardians of the national heritage.1' Writers became popular heroes while official historians were reduced to the role of small-minded propagandists. 12 In the face of official manipulation and distortion of history (forced forgetting), the writer's individual memory became the source for, and representation of, national history, its advan- tages and pitfalls. In postwar East-Central European literature the well-known opening of Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting has become paradigmatic for the ideal of resistance through memory: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." 13 The dynamic of state-managed forget- ting begins for Kundera with the airbrushing of the 1948 Slovak leader Vladimir Clementis out of official photographs after his show trial and execution. But of course it is the nonmemory of the 1968 Soviet invasion which led to Kundera's exile (and that of thousands of other intellectuals) that drives his work: And just to be sure not even the shadow of an unpleasant memory could come to disturb the newly revived idyll [the post- 1968 "normalized" state], both the Prague Spring and the Russian tanks, that stain on the nation's fair history, had to be nullified. As a result, no one in Czechoslovakia commemorates the 21st of August, and the names of the people who rose up against their own youth are carefully erased from the nation's memory, like a mistake from a homework assignment. 14 74 REPRESENTATIONS This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp The invasion and its consequences define the lives of most of Kundera's charac- ters, inevitably sending them into exile, whether professional, internal, or, like Kundera's, physical. Although Kundera is himself skeptical and even disdainful of demonstrations and campaigns, he is clearly committed to preserving the memory of events and names (like his own) that were "erased." With apologies to a writer whose presentation of memory is ultimately much more complex and ambiguous, I will call this characterization of the relationship in Eastern Europe between the state that erases and the memory that resists the "Kundera paradigm." This principle, admittedly predating Kundera's formula- tion, became a guiding one in the dissident movements of the late '70s and throughout the '80s and in the national self-awareness of Central European intel- lectuals more generally (as well as becoming a leitmotif of East European studies in the West). Thus the commemoration of "airbrushed" people and events became a focal task for these movements and their support groups in the West.15 The year 1989 brought the seeming triumph of memory-as-resistance, the long struggle vindicated by official reburials; impromptu shrines; and the resuscitation of banned works, taboo issues, and blacklisted individuals. But if anything, the widespread acceptance of the Manichaean opposition of state forgetting and individual remembering promoted a kind of amnesia in its own right. There were, after all, alternative counter-memorial positions. Kon- rad's novel The Loser is a memory tale, spilling out a stream of images, events, and visions from the past and strewn with whirlpools, sinkholes, and reversing cur- rents. T., the narrator and protagonist, exhibits the unreliability of memory for the task of resistance. His memory is unpredictable, impossible to control, and often incoherent; it lurches backward and forward; it tends to dwell on the painful and embarrassing, even the humiliating; it immobilizes rather than empowers. During T.'s post-1956 prison stint, his walks take him past the site of a former prison camp from the early '50s, where peasants who were insufficiently zealous in fulfilling the requisition quotas were sent to carry out forced, useless, killing labor at the behest of the new order that T. himself had helped so zealously to construct. "History is the forcible illumination of darkened memories," T. con- cludes.16 Thus it is not only state-sponsored forgetting but individual remem- bering itself that can reconcile citizens with the system and foil their resistance. In contrast to the image of vindication-through-resistance offered by Kun- dera, Konrad's novel is a veritable exercise in self-accusation. It wallows in guilt, from the initial musings-"I cannot fool myself; each station of my life was an error"-to the final scene: "I am looking for my precious brother, who, inciden- tally, is a murderer-as am I, incidentally, only he is a more recent one, his hand is still warm from choking that girl, whereas from my heroic deeds the blood and gore of the moment have vanished, and my victims stand motionless in the museum of my mind." 17 In his propaganda work at the microphones in a liber- ating Red Army tank at the end of the war, he sees soldiers' corpses with "names Remembering to Forget 75 This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp familiar from childhood" that will be buried anonymously in a common grave: "It's my doing, too, that they are irretrievably lost." 18 And it is not only T. who is guilty. Those around him are guilty as well, from his father and brother to his fellow wartime underground activists, exiles he befriends in the Soviet Union who later turn up as his jailers, or those he trains "to become revolutionaries just like me; on some I did such a good job that they became my surliest interrogators at state security headquarters.'" The Kundera paradigm disintegrates into Kon- rad's morass of shared responsibility. Memory betrays T. not only by its ruthless honesty but also by its mendacity. Late in the book he realizes that his life, refracted through memory, has been built on falsehood. "Around me, in me, all I saw were towers of lies; everyone who spoke lied. I always thought at least I was telling the truth, but in fact I was lying, too."20 As the midwife of speech, memory also lies, at least as long as it offers a picture of heroism in the face of oppression. T. "sentenced [him]self to silence," and slipped from there into the alternately serene and tortured world of the insane asylum where he has ended up. Voluntary silence cooperates with the state's forgetting, or at least suppression, of memory. East European silence, often celebrated as resistance, has another, darker side. Kundera himself also admits the foibles of memory. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting he counterposes the axis of state-imposed forgetting / personal and collective remembering with another axis, which might be paraphrased: "the struggle of man against his (personal) past is the struggle of forgetting against memory." His character Mirek assiduously preserves his notes, letters, and rec- ollections of his political activities as a defiant statement of his rights and freedom but simultaneously dedicates himself to retrieving and getting rid of his twenty- year-old love letters to his now-despised one-time lover Zdena, in order to erase unpleasant memories from his life narrative. Mirek is "just as much rewriting history as the Communist Party."921 So manipulation, distortion, and forced for- getting (or at least attempts to do so-Mirek, for example, is unable to erase the memory of his animal passion in making love to Zdena) are just as characteristic of individual memory left to itself as of collective memory under the impact of the state. The story of the young widow Tamina (who, like Kundera, is living in exile in France) demonstrates the unreliability of either memory or forgetting to consistently shape and harness personal (and by extension political) projects. Tamina struggles unsuccessfully to reconstruct the memory of her life with her dead husband-focusing on the details of their lovemaking-but finally sees even the fragments of the memory of him she has retained replaced by repulsive images of the student to whose repeated advances she finally accedes. Kundera shows himself profoundly ambivalent toward his own maxim. This is the crux of the memory problem in the postwar East-Central Euro- pean context. The state falsified history and manipulated collective memory. But 76 REPRESENTATIONS This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp the response of individuals, rejection of the state narrative and assertion of an untainted, "primal," and collectively remembered past, falters when confronted with personal memory, which is alternately unreliable and all too reliable in dredging up a highly compromised past. The sheer power and persistence of the totalitarian project of forgetting was bound to leave its mark, impressive and even fabulous acts of preservation/ resistance notwithstanding. The resisting compo- nent of the Kundera paradigm-memory in struggle-is, or has become, a myth, and this source of opposition to state-imposed forgetting has become highly problematic. The celebration of counter-memory or counter-history begs the question of who is doing the remembering and the rewriting of history.22 The answer, espe- cially in the East-Central European context, is invariably the intelligentsia. The intellectual class has carried the mantle of national cultural development, and with it the responsibility for political leadership, since before the last century.23 This "special role" continued through both the construction of and opposition to state socialism. At the time of writing The Loser in the late '70s, Konrad found himself, like the Hungarian intelligentsia as a whole, in an acutely ambiguous position. Intellectuals were able to live quite well in the late Ka'da'rist order; they held a monopoly on (visible) protest and resistance to the regime but without ever being quite able to escape their favored position of isolation from the toiling classes or the fact of their responsibility for the construction and maintenance of the system. Intellectuals were thus both privileged and guilty. Yet, particularly then, in the pre-Solidarity era, they were still the only imaginable (especially to themselves) resistance to the system, and were thus the saviors of national integrity. In this light, Konrad's "biography" or "autobiography" looks at the same time like a national narrative for Hungary in this century. The action recalled covers all the traumatic and crucial events, from underground organizing against a repressive right-wing regime to war prosecuted on distant steppes, forced labor battalions, and deportations to concentration camps; from defeat and ruin to socialist construction, show trials, revolution, Soviet invasion, the Ka'da'rist com- promise, and life under the "goulash Communism" of the '60s and '70s. Konrad himself comes close to making the connection explicit: "Here people take their cues from us, intellectual noblemen; they refer to us, our grievances are the nation's grievances."24 T. is clearly meant to represent Konrad and the course of his life in some essential way.25 And as the relationship between creator and pro- tagonist or between autobiography and biography creates or replicates the rela- tionship between personal narrative and the national narrative it constructs, the Hungarian, the Central-European intellectual, in his or her own mind, takes on the roles of savior of the nation in times of struggle and preserver of national culture and memory in times of unstemmable repression-that is, he or she rep- Remembering to Forget 77 This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp resents the nation. T. represents the intelligentsia representing the nation while also, or perhaps through, representing Konrad (a real actor in the Hungarian drama). A "Konrad paradigm" might run thus: there is no pure, pristine memory beneath the state's manipulation, for its subjects are caught up in the process and themselves become guilty of mis-remembering; of manipulation of others' memory; in fact, of all the crimes of the totalitarian state. A national narrative for Hungary along these lines, neither dismissing nor idealizing memory, would be an antidote to both the Communist and, prospectively, the nationalist rewriting of history, perhaps leading to a more sensitive, responsible view of national his- tory (one in fact offered by the public persona of Konraid and others like him).26 In the strength of this kind of narrative, however, there is also a weakness. Accep- tance of guilt-national as well as personal-and repentance for it is character- istic of intelligentsia narratives; other social strata are unlikely to be represented in such confessional narratives.27 Ultimately, and for all his literary virtuosity and pretensions to individuality, the author presenting his biography-as-autobiography-as-national-narrative can- not avoid the discourses that speak through him. The East European intellectual ethos, valorizing the power of the truth-telling individual (even if, as in The Loser, these "truths" are of collaboration, lies, and guilt), ultimately imprisons itself: the historically produced tale submerges the teller. Thus does Konrad's character T. seem so much the model actor, escaping none of the flashpoints of the national story, nor any of the much-agonized contradictions of the intellectual's role within it.28 The discourses of the nation, resistance, and even the Kadairist compromise together construct the intellectual as authoritative spokesperson for and repre- sentative of the nation. In offering a version of the Czech national narrative linked to biography, Kundera locates the intersection of individual and nation in characteristics such as litost (an untranslatable and incomparably Czech malady of the soul). "The history of the Czechs-a history of never-ending revolts against stronger enemies, a history of glorious defeats setting the course of world history in motion but causing the downfall of its own people-is the history of litost."29 Despite their implicit and explicit claims of universality, both Konrad and Kun- dera are products of their distinct political environments. While Konrad's am- biguous position reflects the Kadarist compromise, Kundera's more resolute stance can be seen as a reflection of the harsh cultural dictatorship of post- 1968 Czechoslovakia.30 The dissident intellectual narrative of memory, then, offered a mnemonics of ambiguity and danger as well as of resistance and responsibility. Post-1989 nationalist leaders needed most of all to offer the nation a direct route out of the swamp of the past forty years. In Hungary, this was attempted by harking back 78 REPRESENTATIONS This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp to national history before 19 March 1944 (when German forces invaded Hun- gary). The intervening years became the responsibility of German and then Soviet occupiers and hence not part of the national story. Events such as the 1993 reburial of Miklos Horthy were used to paint the nationalists grouped in the then- ruling Hungarian Democratic Forum as guardians of the pre-1944 "authentic" national memory-thus using the dissidents' strategy of memory-as-resistance to oppose those intellectuals' liberal vision. The nationalists' strategy of memory-through-forgetting also forgets its own historical precedent: the massive project of forgetting that swept across Europe- from West to East-at the end of World War II. Tony Judt and Istvan Rev have identified the identical phenomenon on both sides of the cold war divide-to-be.31 Inexplicable tragedies, widespread collaboration with Nazi occupiers, and the combined interests of all major parties (the Soviets' desire to avoid examination of their conduct; political parties' thirst for the votes of ex-Nazis; mobilization for an anti-communist crusade) caused unconscionable laxity in the provision ofjus- tice, the comfortable settling of the blanket "myth of resistance," and the general disabling of the memory of the war. No one, including the victors, could claim a clean conscience. In the East, the Communists, with their stance of active resis- tance to fascism, seemed to be in a unique position to offer the necessary for- getting, a "new past" as the means to the new future (while keeping alive the stigma of national guilt, the memory of this forgetting).32 The natural scapegoat was "the Germans," just as now "the Soviets" are blamed for the pains of the Communist era. Similarly, the irony of the liberal dissidents paving the way for the strategy of their later nationalist opponents finds a perhaps even more ironic parallel at a previous moment of transformation. The direct predecessors of this generation of intellectuals (or in some cases the very same individuals) also paved the way for their eventual oppressors; many originally trumpeted the coming of the com- munist utopia, which in due course came back to haunt them. "Those young, intelligent radicals had the strange feeling of having sent something into the world, a deed of their own making, which had taken on a life of its own, lost all resemblance to the original idea, and totally ignored the originators of the idea."33 The intellectuals were continually amazed when their words produced real con- sequences, usually unintended ones. But public discourses, it turns out, are not just empty intellectual exercises. In neighboring lands, different histories, transition experiences, and political situations have yielded a variety of outcomes. A common feature, however, is the conflictual nature of the attempts to negotiate issues of memory and, perhaps less clearly, a trend away from the heroization of the memory of socialist wrongs (memory as resistance) toward forgetting and denial of the recent past. The post- Solidarity conflict between Adam Michnik and Lech Watksa in Poland, the con- troversy over the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, the political eclipse of the Remembering to Forget 79 This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp former dissidents in Czechoslovakia and the subsequent "velvet divorce," and the myriad memory tremors emanating from German unification-all show a varying but undeniable mix of rehabilitated traditions and historical figures and the repression of problematic wartime and postwar memories. The Polish experience since 1989 has been marked by the astonishing eclipse of Solidarity (the idea and the organization) as a means to intellectual or political ends and the stubborn persistence of the much messier unresolved issues of World War II. Poland's key figure, Lech Walksa, Solidarity leader and now pres- ident, is unique in not being of the intelligentsia. Before 1989 he imposingly embodied the heritage of Gdansk shipyard strikes and their repression in a Polish tradition of "place memory" (the coalescence of social identities around particular sites of events and their subsequent commemorations).34 Once he attained a posi- tion of authority, Waksa chose rather to style himself after interwar strongman Marshall Jozef Pilsudski, even going so far as to imitate his model's disgust with parliamentary politics and formation of a "non-Party bloc."35 Waksa's playing of the national card over workers' interests, democracy, and social justice caused his former ally Adam Michnik, a more familiar intellectual type, publicly to break with him, and to prophesy an opening chasm between "Polonophiles" and "Euro- philes."36 This dispute clearly revolved around differing conceptions of the Polish nation, with barely hidden charges of Polish chauvinism and anti-Semitism on the one hand and of incomplete loyalty to "Polish interests" on the other. But where the post-1989 nation-building project obscured growing inequality in an idealizing national populism, Solidarity had itself posited an uncritical unity, "social conflict reduced to a simple dichotomy between the undifferentiated peo- ple and the state."37 Both identities rested on a totalizing view of the national narrative. The open sore of Polish-Jewish relations still refuses to heal. Competing senses of victimhood and martyrdom collide in the conflicting Polish and Jewish memory of wartime events.38 This clash is aptly represented by the controversy over the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, established to commemorate "the sins committed there . .. but also 'as a spiritual fortress,"' a Catholic and Polish strong- hold in the primary Jewish lieu de me'moire.39 The controversy exploded into open conflict with an attempted occupation of the site by Jewish activists who were repelled by anti-Semitic epithets and physical force. Warsaw too asserts its "place memory," as the site of the parallel but tragically separated uprisings of 1943 and 1944. James Young has teased out the multiple meanings taken on by the memorialization of the Ghetto Uprising;40 the Warsaw Uprising, just celebrated in fiftieth anniversary ceremonies, has its own multitude of meanings. The anni- versary ceremonies opened with the reburial of the commander who led the uprising and whose remains had just been repatriated from London. The occa- sion was marked by disputes and suspicion; veterans' and right-wing groups held their own ceremony to protest the presence of German and Russian officials at 80 REPRESENTATIONS This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp the official one.4' Atonement for the Katyn massacre notwithstanding, Russian leaders "seem reluctant to abandon the myth that the Red Army's advance into Poland signified 'liberation,"' while Poles refuse to forget the inaction of nearby Soviet units that doomed the uprising (not to mention the postwar Communist persecution of the Polish wartime underground).42 Waksa praised his German counterpart for his contrition while the Russians were criticized for their lack of it; when neighboring national identities clash, memory becomes the coin of dip- lomatic maneuvering as well.43 In the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel has suffered a particularly visible, if not unequivocal, assault on his principled stance on remembering. Havel's essays, most pointedly the classic "Power of the Powerless," unsparingly exposed the compromises of everyday life ("living the lie") and proposed a way out through "living in truth," refusing the co-optations of the system.44 This was a rather Kundera-like strategy of absolute resistance together with a Konrad-like under- standing of the reality of collaboration. He continued to confront uncomfortable memories, whether of participation in the Communist system or of Czech treat- ment of Sudeten Germans after 1945. But with the complete failure at the polls in 1992 of his former dissident intellectual colleagues, he was left a lonely voice in the wilderness, plaintively repeating his call for "morality in politics."45 The nationalist hue of memory has been much less in evidence in the Czech lands than, for example, in Hungary, though work on the narrative of the founding of the nation has been proceeding, albeit in a less public fashion.46 Meanwhile, the dissident narrative focused on 1968, and the Soviet suppression no longer seems to evoke the slightest public interest.47 In Eastern Germany, the former GDR, the Stasi secret police files are the lightning rod for post-unification national identity formation and memory trou- ble. The Stasi files may, perversely, represent the most complete fulfillment of the "dream of total recording," the intellectual drive to master memory and record everything:48 records of activity that "infiltrated every organization, every school, every office, and virtually every family in East Germany."49 The conflict over the fate of these records, bringing up issues of justice and revenge, privacy, public access, and possible use by the Federal Republic's security services, qualifies as Eastern Germany's most acute memory struggle in the transition to a unified Germany. In terms of former GDR citizens' own Vergangenheitsbewdltigung, or mastering of the past, the "daily discoveries of betrayal and small-minded ambi- tion" that the files produce are proving paralyzing, "wreaking havoc with people's ideals and breeding a need for revenge accompanied by bitter cynicism."50 This most brutal preservation of the memory of collaboration is countered by the simultaneous and complete erasure of memory in all other spheres, accom- plished in the swift and total absorption of all vestiges-political, legal, economic, and cultural-of the former East German state by the "real existing capitalism" of the Federal Republic, which "effortlessly swallowed up forty years of East Remembering to Forget 81 This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp German history."''5 Like other East-Central Europeans, but more acutely, former citizens of the GDR "stood perplexed before the discovery that their lifetime of social experiences had suddenly lost all usable context": their memories were rendered useless, or worse, as dangerous baggage.52 The writer Christa Wolf expresses the disgust at the evolution of their own Kunderan "lost deed" felt by many of the intellectual dissidents and human rights, peace, and environmental activists who had prepared the ground for the 1989 upheaval: "In all of my life I have never seen an atmosphere so foul. You don't throw forty years of existence onto the rubbish heap.... What we are going through now is a surrender, a disastrous collapse. We are losing many things that are worth crying over."53 Wolf herself became notoriously entangled in the thickets of memory politics after the 1990 publication of a hitherto unpublished story from the late '70s, "What Remains," about her experience of Stasi surveillance. She was immediately attacked by commentators in the West German press-and by some former dis- sidents who had been subjected to more serious harassment, arrest, and expul- sion from the country-for her ambiguous relationship to the GDR state. (A member of the Socialist Unity Party until 1990, Wolf had almost all of her works published officially in East Germany and republished there in honor of her six- tieth birthday in March 1989. In late 1989 she signed an appeal for a "socialist alternative" endorsed by party leader Egon Krenz, and during her career she generally supported the system while criticizing the state.54) Here we have the perils of memory delayed, or perceived as delayed: Wolf's critics argued that if she had been a true resister, she would have published the story at the time it was written, thus exposing herself to the same kind of harassment others experienced. German unification itself became a vehicle for re-remembering and forget- ting perhaps best symbolized by its characterization as "reunification." In the euphoria of the shift from "We are the people!" to "We are one people!" the long- standing ambiguity felt on all sides toward unification (and the memory thereof) disappeared without a trace, replaced by the "myth . .. that [it] was a long bottled up dream come true for East and West Germans alike."56 The Federal Republic's constitutional generosity to all Germans, including the "Volksdeutsche," of the lands beyond the former GDR was forgotten socially, if not legally, as descendants of German settlers-often speaking little or no German-streamed in to take the new Germany up on its promise of automatic citizenship.57 From such prospective immigrants bureaucratic procedure demands documentary proof of German roots, often only to be found in evidence of the immigrants' parents' or grand- parents' wartime loyalty to the Nazis, thus resurrecting painful memories.58 Meanwhile, those Germans who are already "in" can use unification as a means of forgetting the collective role in the Nazi past. The fast sale, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, of T-shirts proclaiming "Nov. 9-I was there" exemplifies such for- 82 REPRESENTATIONS This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp getting; the fortuitous date has eclipsed any memory of the Kristallnacht fifty-one years earlier.59 Before unification was even on the horizon, the '80s had already seen an intensification of memory and identity struggles in West Germany, best exempli- fied in the much-analyzed Historikerstreit (historians' debate). The obsession with Auschwitz and Nazism as the keystone of modern German history met the growing desire for "normalization" of German national consciousness and the search for a view of history that would return at least West Germany to the com- munity of "normal" nations.60 (This desire for "normalcy" is also central to the efforts of the other East-Central European nations to "return to Europe," spur- ring in these nations too an unwillingness to confront the painful legacy of an "abnormal" social system.) Attempts to de-link the Federal Republic's historical narrative from the regime that preceded it crystallized in the planning of a new national museum, bitterly opposed by those who saw the project as an example of conservative triumphalism and evasion of historical responsibility. Finally opened in June 1994, the Museum of Contemporary History, now attempting to incorporate the postwar history of the new eastern fellow-citizens into the essen- tially West German story, was criticized both as "history from a Kohl's-eye view" (with too dominant a national narrative) and as a "trash heap of historical kitsch" (lacking narrative).61 Leaders of the German Democratic Republic had constructed a separate national identity, that of the "workers' and peasants' state," officially divorced from the legacy of Nazism. The ideologically approved and enforced version of events saw National Socialism as a creature of imperialism, thus an ancestor only to the capitalist West German state. The officialdom of the GDR and eventually the East German public as well, rejected the common Western concept of one German nation divided into two states: the two Germanys, and their respective citizens, had nothing in common.62 With the limited relaxation of ideological strictness in certain areas of intellectual and scholarly activity, spurred by antici- pation of the 750th anniversary of the founding of Berlin in 1987, there was, beginning in the late '70s, a cautious reintegration of classic German historical figures and themes into GDR historiography. But of course denying any connec- tion to National Socialism by the state ostensibly founded solely by anti-Nazi resisters could no more exorcise the horrible memories of wartime complicity than the too-earnest claims in the West to have superseded them. The alleged uprising at the Buchenwald concentration camp has been called "in effect the founding myth of the German Democratic Republic."63 Post-1989 revelations that the Soviet occupation forces kept the camp in operation until 1950 "to punish former Nazis, class enemies, and counterrevolutionaries" begged the question of comparability of Nazi and Soviet atrocities-the heart of the Historikerstreit.64 Indeed, a view has gained currency since the collapse of the GDR that the Com- Remembering to Forget 83 This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp munist state was in effect a continuation of the totalitarianism of Nazi rule, and was in fact worse, since it lasted for forty years instead of twelve.65 In this sense the nature of the GDR state and its distorted view of the Holocaust and the Second World War are central to German identity-memory struggles. German writer Gunter Grass has argued that, after forty years of separation, the only thing the citizen heirs of the two Germanys have in common is "the burden of a guilty past."66 To the stumbling process of German integration has now been added a growing hostility toward immigrants and asylum-seekers in both East and West. Hans Magnus Enzensberger has noted the amnesia involved in the rejection by any German resident of the right of newcomers to settle, since all are themselves descended from migrants.67 More pointedly, Gunter Grass has called attention to the kind of disabled memory that can ignore the fact that Romany and Sinti people (who, along with the Jews, suffered attempted genocide at the hands of the Nazis) are "once again subjected to violence in Germany" and are being des- patched across the borders by state agreement with the Romanian government.68 These seemingly disparate historical phenomena can be seen as a continuum: Auschwitz-Historikerstreit-unification-alienation / shock / nostalgia-neo-Nazi revival and the call for "Foreigners Out!" As with the glorification of November 9, "Unification Day," distinct and often opposite perspectives on memory, rather than stimulating introspection and exploration, seem instead to create new vari- ations of ever more powerful forgetting. The Polish, Czech, and German cases reflect the common demise of the intel- lectuals' critical memory model, in favor of a more nationalist version of history. The story of postwar East-Central European collective memory, in this telling, is one of repression of memory by the Communist state and opposition by a dissi- dent strategy of resistance (the "Kundera paradigm"), which was itself super- seded by a more nuanced but intelligentsia-biased vision of co-optation and guilt (the "Konrad paradigm"). Ultimately a "re-repression" of memory has been accomplished in the name of its preservation, by a nationalist project of sup- pressing all memories of life under socialism. Various totalizing claims on the construction and determination of the national narrative have called forth equally totalizing counterclaims. In what Richard Terdiman calls a "dialectics of memory," memory thus proceeds in a constant process of negation and reinven- tion, without necessarily leaving behind the previous paradigms.69 Recent developments point to a new set of dangers for a sensitive and thor- ough working through of memory and the past. The New York Times in November 1993 reported the announcement of plans by an Eastern German entrepreneur, with funds from a Western investment concern, for the construction of a "Com- munist theme park" at Prenden, near Berlin.70 The park will give tourists an 84 REPRESENTATIONS This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp opportunity to experience "real life" as it was in the state socialist GDR. The visitor, upon arrival, changes a quota of deutsche marks into facsimiles of the old GDR currency, trades the Mercedes or Volkswagen in for a vintage Trabant or Wartburg, and enters. Having eaten in a shabby but cheap restaurant where the service is unfriendly and disheartened, she or he may be turned in for careless "anti-state" comments by Stasi informants, arrested and interrogated, and even 'jailed" for a few hours. Or the visitor can use excess hard currency to shop in special luxury stores. Outfitting plans for the park include vintage uniforms, flags, and propaganda banners; period television programs and Soviet films on closed-circuit television; May Day parades; and, of course, barbed wire and sin- ister guard towers. Is this, then, the next step: the shift from political to economic manipulation, the total commodification of memory? "East-nostalgia" now has "hard-West" cur- rency value.71 Instead of being integrated, memory as in the Budapest sculp- ture park-is uprooted, detached from life, packaged and "sold," whether for hard cash or political points. Tony Judt characterizes as the "most telling crisis" of memory now the issue of restoration of, and compensation for, property confiscated by the Communist 72 regimes. The unacknowledged subtext of the debate over restoration is that many have benefited materially from the suffering of others. Thus personal his- tory is potentially a direct source of wealth (or of privation), just as it was a source of dispossession after 1948, when anyone alleged to have a noble or "kulak" back- ground was stripped of possessions and deprived of a role in building the socialist society (and, in extreme instances, imprisoned or sent to a camp). In a current case, a popular pizzeria in an industrial Budapest neighborhood is under threat of closure for violating a 1993 law prohibiting display of "totalitarian" symbols (in particular the swastika, hammer and sickle, or red star).73 The eatery/bar, named Marxim's (a play simultaneously on the Paris restaurant, the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, and of course Karl Marx), features a decor of barbed wire and Communist slogans.74 Is this example an incidence of state repression of memory, or repres- sion of the right to manipulate memory freely? Or is it commodification of memory "from below"? Or all of these? Is there in fact a future in sight for a just collective memory in East-Central Europe, for national narratives without scapegoats or exclusion? James Young proposes the term "collected memory" instead of "collective memory" as a way to express memory's more variegated than unifying nature.75 "National memory comprises many, often competing, reflections."76 But is "collected memory" a rather exclusively Western possibility, unrealistic for the nations-in-formation east of Europe's historic divide? Tony Judt, in cataloging the current European problem of "mis-memory," draws a sharp distinction in the attitude toward memory between West and East: "If the problem in Western Europe has been a shortage of memory, in the continent's other half the problem is reversed. Here Remembering to Forget 85 This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp there is too much memory, too many pasts on which people can draw, usually as a weapon against the past of someone else."77 He continues by asking whether there is not "something to be said, socially-speaking, for taboos," for the "single beautiful lie" that the Communists imposed to oppose the "many unpleasant truths about that part of the world" (fascism, anti-Semitism, and "hypercollabor- ationist regimes").78 Is remembering itself, even "true" remembering, always a good thing? Cannot something be said in some cases for "strategic forgetting," for allowing the individual and the nation to go on? In Benedict Anderson's words, "All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical cir- cumstances, spring narratives."79 Or Istvan Rev: "History writing is never born of only remembering; the forgetting, the discarding of elements that can't be fit into the new history are just as much a part of the reconstruction of history as remembering."80 This was certainly Friedrich Nietzsche's position: "Without forgetting, it is utterly impossible to live at all.... There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of historical awareness, which injures and finally destroys a living thing, whether a man, a people, or a culture. "81 These observations look remarkably prescient when applied to present-day East-Central Europe, with its history let out of the bottle and its prominent citizenry in fear that 'justice" of some destructive kind may at any time swoop down: When the uncontrolled historical sense prevails and reveals all its implications, it uproots the future by destroying illusions and depriving existing things of the only atmosphere in which they can live. Historical justice, even when applied in a true and pure-hearted way, is therefore a frightening virtue because it always undermines and destroys living things.82 It has been argued that Nietzsche's "rhetoric of forgetting" has turned for- getting into a positive and productive postmodernist activity.83 Indeed, with so many competing and conflicting memories and histories, is it not better to banish all metanarrative, to let memory bloom in all its manifestations, true, false, or otherwise? Alternatively, why should memory necessarily be anchored to any "truth," any reality?84 Charles Maier points out both the temptations (freedom from excessive historicism) and dangers (relativization of the Holocaust) of a "postmodern historiography";85 such a historiography might also be seen to rob the national narrative of its "natural" order and transcendent meaning. History is invoked, if at all, "less as a record than as a problematic constituent of identity." Memory too becomes available for any desired ad hoc construction of identity; a coherent national narrative is no longer essential, or even desirable. There are surely more productive possibilities, for both theory and practice. Michel Foucault's concept of the "discursive regime" looks at the changes not in knowledge itself but in how it is governed.86 Rather than drawing a line between "ideology" and "truth," we should be "seeing historically how effects of truth are 86 REPRESENTATIONS This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false."87 Truth is not outside power; rather, Each society has its regime of truth, its "general politics" of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.88 Substituting "truth in memory" for "truth" in Foucault's conception can help to illuminate our problem. Party ideologues (the state), dissident writers, intellec- tuals, nationalist politicians, all claim to portray or shape a "truer" collective memory, or one more in line with the "true" collective past. In fact they are involved in creating and developing discourses-state socialist discourse, resis- tance discourse, discourse of intellectual responsibility, nationalist discourse- that compete to shape or take over the "regime of (memory-) truth." Similarly, we can begin to break down the absolute opposition between memory and forget- ting; forgetting is not the negation of memory, something necessarily false and deceptive, but "remembering otherwise," another revision in a stream of constant revision and evolution.89 Are the Stasi archives a depository of memories or a place where the past is stored in order to get rid of it? Is Christa Wolf's past a vehicle for remembering or a dead end, leading nowhere? In these and other cases memory repositories inevitably have a double valence. The story is not, as in the "Kundera paradigm," one of memory against forgetting, but of different -more or less exclusive, denying, or offensive-versions of remembering otherwise. Foucault's notion of "genealogy" also offers a counter to totalizing national narratives produced within the discourses on memory. Explicating Nietzsche's understanding of the term, he finds that "its duty is not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present, that it continues secretly to animate the present ... [but] to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion."90 Nietzsche's idea of heritage is not "an acquisition, a possession that grows and solidifies; rather, it is an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within or from underneath."91 Thus a proper investigation of the past becomes destabilizing rather than stabilizing; the national narrative as a means of control can be subverted and splintered into multiple and ever-changing narratives. The use of memory itself can and should be subject to such examination, thus mixing the call for a "social history of memory"92 with (as proposed once in the pages of this journal) "the working principle that whenever memory is invoked we should be asking ourselves: by whom, where, in which context, against what?"93 In May 1994, in a stunning defeat for both the ruling nationalist center-right coalition and the dissidents-turned-liberals, Hungarian voters brought to power Remembering to Forget 87 This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp the Hungarian Socialist Party, heir to the ruling party of Jalnos Kaidair's three decades of "goulash Communism," a party composed of the same reform Com- munists who tried to make that system work and who finally, grudgingly, negoti- ated its demise. Hungary thus joined Poland and Lithuania (and subsequently Bulgaria) in returning to power "post-Communists," those who are politically implicated in the events of the four decades that nationalists have been trying to erase from memory. How can this development be squared with our "dialectic" of postwar memory? At first glance it may seem to be a case of either amnesia- taking to heart the nationalists' exhortations and tossing out responsibility along with memory-or nostalgia, a beautifying of unpleasant memories of suffering and guilt. But Istvaln Rev argues that, at least in Hungary, rather than being a prolongation or new stage in memory distortion, this development may in fact indicate a de-emphasis on memory and its openness to contention. The national- ists' history project fell victim not to a more convincing national narrative, but to its inability to solve the everyday problems of inflation, unemployment, crime, and insecurity that are most Hungarians' primary concerns. The mixture of lies, inconsistency (the nationalists' easy commerce with nomenklatura industrial man- agers and Communist-era secret police and show trial judges), and bald-faced self-interest have led to a sense of "weightlessness": if the past and memory are so easily manipulable, why pay attention anymore, once life-and-death issues are no longer involved? For Rev this "weightlessness" is also a rejection of the national narrative that blanks out historical periods, experiences, and memories and is thus a potentially positive development. By losing weight the nationalists' narra- tive also loses exclusivity, leaving room for other, competing versions.94 The regime of truth will not disintegrate, but it may open up and become more democratic. In Tony Judt's characterization, East-Central Europe is pre- vented from achieving "normalcy" by "the double crisis of history": On the one hand, cynicism and mistrust pervade all social, cultural, and even personal exchanges, so that the construction of civil society, much less civil memory, is very very difficult. On the other hand, there are multiple memories and historical myths, each of which has learned to think of itself as legitimate simply by virtue of being private and unofficial. Where these private or tribal [sic] versions come together, they form powerful counterhistories of a mutually antagonistic and divisive nature.95 But to draw too sharp a distinction between East and West would be to ignore the turbulence of "Western" discourses on memory, history, and nation. The enticing admonition to East-Central Europeans just to "forget a little" in order to be ''normal" props up a myth of the West that exists only in the stifling model forced on the "East" (whether in the context of memory/history, capitalism, democracy, or any of the other absolutes proffered to the nations-in-transition). If East and East-Central Europeans indeed "tire of memory," Pierre Nora's truism that "there are as many memories as there are groups, that memory is by 88 REPRESENTATIONS This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural, and yet individual" may yet have a chance to become operative.96 An alternative example is provided by efforts such as that of an artist and Green Party politician to save a guard tower near the Reichstag in Berlin as a "vital part of (East) German heritage which should not get plastered over with a Mercedes sign but should be restored and used as a meeting place, arts center, and macabre tourist attraction [alas!]"; the proposal also envisions a farmers' market at the tower's base, featuring local pro- duce at below-normal prices.97 Another example is the East Side Gallery, a five- hundred-meter stretch of Wall left intact and opened to artists and their responses to the changes in the East Bloc.... Where not long ago the Wall was a closely guarded white barrier against capitalism, it has here become a monument to creative energy.... Whereas the murals on the Western side of the Wall have been sold to private collectors and museums or been broken down into thousands of tiny souvenirs, the East Side Gallery preserves some of the flavor of political wall painting-a mixed phenomenon of nostalgia and memory.98 One hopes that submerged memories, and submerged versions of collective memories, will be able to rise to the surface, to enter the public discourse. Where personal histories and memories represent sources of both power and wealth- as in the 1948 dispossessions, the current struggles over compensation for them, or nationalists' efforts to cleanse personal pasts-continuing social inequality may well stifle these hopes. Intellectuals and writers, despite their pretensions, are far from immune; they have profited and will continue to profit from their uses of memory. But political developments may help at least to open national narratives to multiple stories, including some of those stifled by the various memory para- digms of the last half-century. Between starry-eyed idealism and the black future of the "tribal" view, the region's own dynamics and history will determine the patterns in the fabric of future memories. Notes My thanks to all of the participants in the graduate seminar "Pasts in the Present: Institutionalizations of Memory" at the University of California, Berkeley, in Spring 1993, where this article got its impetus. I am deeply indebted to Istwin Rev and Ran- dolph Starn for their extensive input and patient attention throughout the process. I also thank Stephen Greenblatt, Konstanty Gebert, Peter Kenez, Martha Lampland, Anna Szemere, and especially Zsuzsa Gille for their comments and encouragement. An earlier, shortened version of the article was presented at the conference "Revi- sioning Culture" at the University of California, Santa Cruz, on 9 April 1994. 1. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, Conn., 1993), 2. 2. Michael StUrmer, "Geschichte in geschichtslosem Land," Frankfurter allgemeine Zeitung, Remembering to Forget 89 This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp 25 April 1986; quoted in Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 44. 3. Sylvia Plachy, "Graveyard of the Statues: Communist Heroes in Perspective," New York Times Magazine, 2 May 1993. See also Peter Maass, "Lenin Returns to Eastern Europe's First Communist Theme Park," Washington Post, 9 July 1993. 4. The changing of street names, a bloc-wide phenomenon after 1989, has not been carried out without some resistance. Polish intellectual and former dissident Kon- stanty Gebert points out that post-'89 changes in street names and other symbols in smaller towns and villages, in Poland as elsewhere, were by and large pushed through by former Communists still holding local power, anxious to legitimate themselves in the new order. The same goes for the "witch hunts" searching out former secret- police collaborators in 1989-90. Personal conversation with Konstanty Gebert, Jan- uary 1995. 5. For examples of Western views of history and memory out of control, see David Rieff, "Original Virtue, Original Sin: Letter from Bosnia," New Yorker, 23 November 1992; Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New York, 1993). For an expose of this variety of "othering," taking in particular the Balkans (so often the linchpin of the case for Eastern European "abnormality"), see Maria Todorova, "The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention," Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994). 6. See Henry Kumm, "Few Slovaks Protest Honor Accorded Nazi Collaborator," New York Times, 3 December 1991; John Tagliabue, "Prague Turns on Those Who Brought the 'Spring,"' New York Times, 24 February 1992. For parallel attempts to rehabilitate Romania's Marshall Ion Antonescu, see David Binder, "Romanians Look Anew at a Dictator," New York Times, 8 August 1990, and Andrei Codrescu, "Fascism on a Ped- estal," New York Times, 7 December 1993. The new Croatian leadership rehabilitated certain symbols of the wartime Nazi-created Ustaga state; see Stephen Kinzer, "Pro- Nazi Legacy Lingers for Croatia," New York Times, 31 October 1993. 7. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York, 1981), 158. 8. Ibid. 9. See the chapter on the Musee in Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, Conn., 1993), 236-52. 10. The anchor for this discussion has of course been Benedict Anderson, Imagined Com- munities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991). See also Patrick H. Hutton, "The Art of Memory Reconceived: From Rhetoric to Psychoanal- ysis," Journal of the History of Ideas 48, no. 3 (1987), especially 383-85; John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, N.J., 1994). 11. I would note in particular Aleksander Wat's My Century as a quite explicit presentation of the national significance of personal history. Aleksander Wat, My Century: The Od- yssey of a Polish Intellectual, trans. Richard Lourie (New York, 1988). 12. This is not to belittle the very impressive roles-both scholarly and political-played by certain individual historians; the Poles Adam Michnik and Bronislaw Geremek leap immediately to mind. But even among the recently prominent, the ambiguous posi- tion played by the late Hungarian Prime Minister J6zsef Antall (a competent but not particularly brilliant historian of British constitutional history, never active in oppo- sition before his political career began in 1989) may be more instructive. 13. Kundera, Laughter and Forgetting, 3. 14. Ibid., 14. 15. For the text of, and information about, the petition circulated throughout Eastern 90 REPRESENTATIONS This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp Europe on the thirtieth anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, see Across Fron- tiers 3, no. 3 (Spring 1987): 1; for commemorations of other events, such as the war- time Katyn massacre of Polish officers, numerous violently repressed workers' strikes and uprisings in communist Poland, and the Prague Spring and the 1968 Soviet inva- sion of Czechoslovakia, see various issues of Across Frontiers and East European Reporter (London) from the mid- to late-1980s, for example, in 1988 for a commemoration of the 1968 events. 16. Gy6rgy Konrid, The Loser, trans. Ivan Sanders (New York, 1982), 202. 17. Ibid., 8 and 303, respectively. 18. Ibid., 155. 19. Ibid., 8. 20. Ibid., 262. 21. Kundera, Laughter and Forgetting, 22. 22. According to Amos Funkenstein, "counterhistories" are historical treatises whose "function is polemical. Their method consists of the systematic exploitation of the adversary's most trusted sources against their grain.... Their aim is the distortion of the adversary's self-image, of his identity, through the deconstruction of his memory"; Amos Funkenstein, "History, Counterhistory, and Narrative," in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution," ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 69. 23. See Zygmunt Bauman, "Intellectuals in East-Central Europe: Continuity and Change," Eastern European Politics and Societies 1, no. 2 (1987): 162-86. 24. Konrdd, The Loser, 232. 25. Konrdd, in a note at the beginning of the late-appearing "official" (that is, not samiz- dat) text (but absent from the previously published English version), denies that the work is autobiographical: "This book is not an autobiography, but rather a work of imagination." Konrid Gy6rgy, A Cinkos (Budapest, 1989), 5 (translation mine). But the obvious resemblance of his protagonist T. to himself, especially in T.'s later years- and the fact that Konrdd felt it necessary to include such a denial-indicate that the identity is more than mere conjecture. 26. It may be objected that Konrdd never intended his novel as more than a personal narrative, a work of fiction; he certainly does not explicitly present it as a narrative of Hungary. I would agree up to a point-KonrAd, like most of the liberal intelligentsia, sincerely attempts to avoid self-aggrandizement and constantly defers to the universal good. But I would argue that, in grand old intelligentsia tradition, this stance belies its manifest intentions in the context of the assumed leading social role and the latent function of intellectuals. Konrdd himself, in his pathbreaking treatise on intellectuals in state socialism (with sociologist Ivan Szelenyi), nicely captured this type of dual role with the idea of the "generic" (fundamental teleological mission) versus "genetic" (functions served and interests articulated in specific social contexts) concepts of the intelligentsia. Gy6rgy Konrdd and Ivan Szelenyi, Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (New York, 1979), 12. Foucault also recognizes both the "universal" and the "specific intellectual." Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Inter- views and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York, 1980), 130-33. For me, Konrdd's text thus cries out to be read as a national narrative. 27. The intelligentsia as a whole undeniably profited in the state socialist order, at the expense of workers and peasants (who bore the brunt of punishment for social resis- tance as well, while getting little recognition for their actions). See Michael D. Ken- nedy, "The Intelligentsia in the Constitution of Civil Societies and Post-Communist Regimes in Hungary and Poland," Theory and Society 21, no. 1 (February 1992): 29-76. There is a strong case to be made that the collaborator motif applied to all is unjust, since intellectuals bear the lion's share of any blame to be apportioned. Outside the Remembering to Forget 91 This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp intelligentsia, the question of guilt is much more problematic. Accommodation and resistance in the countryside, for example, are inextricably bound together. See Istvdn Rev, "The Advantages of Being Atomized: How Hungarian Peasants Coped with Col- lectivization," Dissent (Summer 1987): 336. 28. For another exposition of the contradictions of the intellectual in Ka'dairist Hungary, see Miklos Haraszti, The VelvetPrison: Artists Under State Socialism, trans. Katalin Landes- mann and Stephen Landesmann with Steve Wasserman (New York, 1989). For a broader East European and more seminal example, see Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (New York, 1955). 29. Kundera, Laughter and Forgetting, 150. In another work he is even more blunt: "History is similar to individual lives in this respect. There is only one history of the Czechs. One day it will come to an end as surely as Tomas's life, never to be repeated." Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York, 1984), 223. 30. This contextualization can also be extended to VAclav Havel (discussed later in the text); Havel's use of "myth" has been related to his generational (post-'68) position, and contrasted with the "self-repudiation" of former communists such as Kundera. Jadwiga Staniszkis, The Ontology of Socialism, ed. and trans. Peggy Watson (Oxford, 1992), 133. 31. Istvdn Rev, "A kommunizmus szdIldscsindl ja?" (Communism's Trailblazer?), Nip- szabadsag, 2 September 1993 (a revised English-language version of this article is incor- porated into Istvin Rev, "Amnesia: The Revised Framework of Hungarian History," Budapest Review of Books 4, no. 1 [Spring 1994]), and Tony Judt, "The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe," Daedalus 21, no.4 (Fall 1992): 83-118. 32. Rev, "A kommunizmus szAlhAscinAl6ja?" 33. Kundera, Laughter and Forgetting, 9. 34. Staniszkis, Ontology of Socialism, 131. 35. On Lech Waksa's modeling of J6zef Pitsudski, see Carole Nagengast, Reluctant So- cialists, Rural Entrepreneurs: Class, Culture, and the Polish State (Boulder, Col., 1991), 23- 24. Pitsudski's political legacy in Poland is in fact more complex than, say, Mikl6s Horthy's. Adam Michnik, ironically, himself declared his allegiance to "the 'early,' independence-minded, socialist Pilsudski," who before coming to power was a staunch opponent of the anti-Semitism characteristic of his nemesis, the National Democrats. See Michnik's essay "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors," in Adam Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays, trans. Maya Latynski (Berkeley, 1985), 220. Walqsa, however, clearly identified himself with the later, vehemently anti-parliamentary, Pitsudski in power. I owe this point and reference to Konstanty Gebert. 36. See Adam Michnik, "My Vote Against Waksa," New York Review of Books 37, no. 20 (20 December 1990). 37. Nagengast, Reluctant Socialists, 202 i. 38. Young, Texture of Memory, 115 i. 39. Ibid., 146. The Carmelite controversy is discussed thoroughly in ibid., 144-50. 40. See James E. Young, "The Biography of a Memorial Icon: Nathan Rapoport's Warsaw Ghetto Monument," in ibid., 155-84. 41. Louisa Vinton, "Waksa Urges Reconciliation as Uprising Ceremonies Begin," Radio Free Europe lRadio Liberty Daily Report no. 144, 1 August 1994. 42. Louisa Vinton, "Russia Sidesteps the Issue of Guilt," Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty Daily Report no. 145, 2 August 1994; see also other items in that report and in no. 146, 3 August 1994. 92 REPRESENTATIONS This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp 43. Less prominent but perhaps even more illuminating contact points for Polish-Jewish memory conflict are Czeslaw Milosz's famous poems, "A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto" and "Campo del Fiori" (both 1943, first published 1945), describing the powerlessness bordering on indifference of life continuing outside the Warsaw ghetto walls while inside them the ghetto burns. Translated and reprinted in Czeslaw Milosz, The Collected Poems, 1931-1987 (New York, 1988). The first poem was the hook for a 1986 article published in Poland, "A Poor Pole Looks at Anti-Semitism," which spawned a ferocious and unprecedented debate about anti-Semitism and Western insensitivity to Polish suffering. [Various contributions are collected and translated in Antony Polonsky, ed., "My Brother's Keeper?" Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust (London, 1990).] Echoes of Milosz's poem reverberate in Jolanta Dylewska, Chronicle of the Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto According to Marek Edelman, 70 min., Documentary and Features Polish Films, Poland, 1993, a documentary film presenting interview segments with the sole surviving commander of the Ghetto Uprising against a back- drop of footage taken by the Nazis, in which the image of the carnival outside the ghetto walls, the single most memorable image in the second poem (and perhaps of all poetry of wartime Warsaw), recurs. This image (referred to twice by Edelman's only fellow-interviewee and recapitulated several times in the film score) can be read as a harsh reminder to Poles, and to Milosz himself, also a symbolic figure for the nation and its suffering. Current debate in Poland over wartime memories tends more and more to divide over what was "true" resistance during the war, leading into the question of respon- sibility for the communist takeover. This conflict is symbolized by the choice of two sets of buried crimes to be uncovered: Polish complicity in the destruction of its Jewry and the postwar pogrom against surviving Jews in Kielce; or the Katyn atrocities and (expressed crudely, as it is in the right-wing press) the "Jewish-Communist conspiracy." The conspiracy charge is then drawn through to cover the student protests of '68 that launched the intellectual dissident movement (the protesting students-cum-dissidents were children of the apparatchiks, who were "playing both sides of the fence," setting themselves up in a future free Poland) and the founding of Solidarity (the "true Pole" Walesa was almost hoodwinked by his devious, secretly "Jewish-Communist" advisors, who wanted to restrain the union and thus suppress Polish freedom). The real aim, of course, here as elsewhere, is to delegitimize the non-Communist Left in Polish pol- itics. Konstanty Gebert, personal conversation, January 1995. 44. VWclav Havel, "Power of the Powerless," trans. Paul Wilson, in Vdclav Havel, Open Letters, ed. Paul Wilson (New York, 1991), 127-214. 45. VAclav Havel, Summer Meditations, trans. Paul Wilson (New York, 1993); see especially the section "Politics, Morality, and Civility." The issue of the Czech parliament's "lus- tration" law has been a particularly difficult and telling one for Havel. Ostensibly passed to cleanse the new parliament and civil service of former collaborators with the Communist-era secret police, the law's wide net of accusation caught up, among others, Havel's old associate Jan Kavan. See Lawrence Weschler, "A Reporter at Large; The Velvet Purge: The Trials of Jan Kavan," New Yorker, 19 October 1992, and "From Kafka to Dreyfus: Department of Amplification," New Yorker, 2 November 1992. 46. See Ernest Gellner, "Reborn from Below: The Forgotten Beginnings of the Czech National Revival," Times Literary Supplement, 14 May 1993, a review of the recently published book by the late Czech philosopher Jan Patocka, Co Jsou C'ehi? Was Sind Die Tschechen? (Prague, 1993), originally written in the early 1970s. Gellner gives a flavor of the fascinating exploration of both the founding Czech national story of the six- Remembering to Forget 93 This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp teenth and seventeenth centuries and its (repeated) re-creation in the nineteenth and twentieth. Patocka's idiosyncratic vision is antagonistic to all of the "standard" counter- histories-as well as tightly bound with the Hungarian story of the struggle for influ- ence within the Habsburg Empire. See also Timothy Garton Ash, "Journey to the Post- Communist East," New York Review of Books 41, no. 12 (23 June 1994): 16. 47. Garton Ash, "Journey to the Post-Communist East," 16; Istvdn Rev, personal conver- sation, June 1994. 48. Kundera identified a kindred phenomenon as "graphomania." Laughter and Forgetting, 91-92. See also Danilo Kis, "The Encyclopedia of the Dead," in The Encyclopedia of the Dead, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York, 1989), 39-65. A real-life parallel is the Mormon libri memorialis in Salt Lake City, which endeavors to collect vital information on every soul (and potential post-mortem convert) that has graced the planet. 49. Luise von Flotow, "Shocks and Nostalgia in East Berlin," Cross Currents 11 (1992), 7. 50. Ibid. 51. Dirk Philipsen, "Revolutionary Autumn: Traditions That Weigh Like Nightmares on the Brains of the Living, or: The Difficult Quest for Democratic Forms in East-Central Europe" (paper presented at the annual conference of the American Historical Asso- ciation, San Francisco, January 1994), 2. 52. Ibid., 1. 53. Lili Braniste, "Crying Wolf," reprinted in World Press Review (February 1991): 62; from Lire (Paris). 54. The case is summarized and analyzed in Catherine Hutchison, "The Case of Christa Wolf," Cross Currents 11 (1992), 9-22. 55. What's more, "Those engaged in the debate were counting on the short memory of their readers. Hadn't they just been praising the author in the same publications?" Peter Schneider, The German Comedy: Scenes of Life After the Wall, trans. Philip Boehm and Leigh Hafrey (New York, 1991), 87. 56. Philipsen, "Revolutionary Autumn," 1. 57. See Schneider, German Comedy, especially the chapter "Sentimental Germany," 42-65. 58. See ibid., 9, 45. 59. Ibid., 32-33. James Young also discusses the peculiar weight of memory and history on this date, in the context of united Germany's search for a new national day; Young, Texture of Memory, 23-25. 60. Maier, Unmasterable Past, 16ff. 61. Craig R. Whitney, "If It's a Museum, Why Does It Look Like an Attic?" New York Times, 26 June 1994; see also Steve Vogel, "Telling Germany's History the German Way," Washington Post, 12 July 1994. On the earlier debates surrounding the museum project, see Maier, Unmasterable Past, 121-39. 62. Maier, Unmasterable Past, 148. 63. Ian Buruma, "Buchenwald," Granta 42 (Winter 1992): 69. 64. Ibid., 71. Signs of the camp were first "discovered" in 1983 but quickly hushed up by the East German government. 65. Ibid., 75. 66. Gunter Grass, "Losses," Granta 42 (Winter 1992): 101. 67. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "The Great Migration," Granta 42 (Winter 1992). 68. Grass, "Losses," 102. 69. Richard Terdiman, "Deconstructing Memory: Representing the Past and Theorizing Culture in France Since the Revolution," Diacritics 15 (Winter 1985). 94 REPRESENTATIONS This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp 70. Stephen Kinzer, "For East German Theme Park: The Bad Old Days," New York Times, 9 November 1993. 71. Also capitalizing on "East-nostalgia" is the recent appearance (first opening in, ironi- cally enough, the Kreuzberg neighborhood of former West Berlin!) of "the East German Deli, [a] shop that sells exclusively East German food products," allowing people to "buy back a certain amount of lost culture that was swamped by waves of West German Maggi and Knorr products"; von Flotow, "Shocks and Nostalgia," 5. James Young discusses the commodification of memory in the context of the "memory entrepreneurs" who descended with picks and hammers on the Berlin Wall from the very day after its opening; Young, Texture of Memory, vii. 72. Judt, "The Past Is Another Country," 104. 73. Passage of the law is reported in "Hungary Bans Swastikas, etc.," New York Times, 15 April 1993. 74. The establishment's name is also a play on a longtime Budapest striptease club named Maxim's located across town opposite the Gorky cinema, which used to show only "correct" Soviet films. 75. Young, Texture of Memory, xi. 76. Ibid. 77. Judt, "The Past Is Another Country," 99. 78. Ibid., 108. A somewhat unexpected admission, since Judt is hardly known (any longer) as a friend of the Left. 79. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 204. 80. Rev, "A kommunizmus szdlldscsindl "a?" 81. Friedrich Nietzsche, "History in the Service and Disservice of Life," in Unmodern Obser- vations, ed. William Arrowsmith, trans. Gary Brown (New Haven, 1990), 90. 82. Ibid., 119. A recent article on the deteriorating relics (victims' hair in particular) in the display cases at Auschwitz points up the painful nature of this issue when applied to the Holocaust. Some (including survivors) argue that common decency dictates that, as human remains, the samples should be allowed to decay naturally. Also noted is the high cost and dubious outcome of technological attempts to preserve such relics. Timothy W. Ryback, "Evidence of Evil," New Yorker, 15 November 1993. Susan Gal shows how, in the context of the reburial of Imre Nagy and the consequent welling up of problematic personal memories of 1956, a certain amount of (individual) forgetting is indeed a requisite for (collective) remembering. Susan Gal, "Ritual and Public Dis- course in Socialist Hungary: Nagy Imre's Funeral" (paper presented at the 89th annual meeting of the American Association of Anthropologists, Washington, D.C., November 1989), 10. 83. Helga Geyer-Ryan and Helmut Lethen, "The Rhetoric of Forgetting: Brecht and the Historical Avant-Garde," in Theo D'haen, Rainer Grubel, and Helmut Lethen, eds., Convention and Innovation in Literature (Amsterdam, 1989), 305-6. 84. For a radical presentation of this question, see Steven Knapp, "Collective Memory and the Actual Past," Representations 26 (Spring 1989). 85. Maier, Unmasterable Past, 168-72. 86. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 112-13. 87. Ibid., 118. 88. Ibid., 130. 89. Rev, "A kommunizmus szdlldscsindl "a?" 90. Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Prac- tice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), 146. Remembering to Forget 95 This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp 91. Ibid. 92. Peter Burke, "History as Social Memory," in Memory: History, Culture, and the Mind, ed. Thomas Butler, 100. 93. Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn, introduction to Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 2. 94. Istvain Rev, "A megesett t6rtenelem" (The history that happened), Magyar Narancs, 26 May 1994. Konstanty Gebert presents an alternate explanation: The failure of the new post-1989 parties, and their displacement in power by the "post-Communists," is in part a reflection of the desire on the part of most of the population that their mem- ories, memories of "ordinary lives" lived under Communism with neither heroism nor dramatic betrayal, be validated. Konstanty Gebert, personal conversation, January 1995. 95. Judt, "The Past Is Another Country," 101. 96. Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les lieux de memoire," Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 9. 97. von Flotow, "Shocks and Nostalgia," 5. 98. Ibid., 5-6. 96 REPRESENTATIONS This content downloaded from 130.225.94.35 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 08:39:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp Article Contents p. 72 p. 73 p. 74 p. 75 p. 76 p. 77 p. 78 p. 79 p. 80 p. 81 p. 82 p. 83 p. 84 p. 85 p. 86 p. 87 p. 88 p. 89 p. 90 p. 91 p. 92 p. 93 p. 94 p. 95 p. 96 Issue Table of Contents Representations, No. 49, Special Issue: Identifying Histories: Eastern Europe Before and After 1989 (Winter, 1995), pp. 1-166 Front Matter Introduction [pp. 1-14] Parallel Autopsies [pp. 15-39] Censorship, a Comparative View: France, 1789-East Germany, 1989 [pp. 40-60] Intellectual Life Under Dictatorship [pp. 61-71] Remembering to Forget: Memory, History, National Identity in Postwar East-Central Europe [pp. 72-96] Symbols that Face Two Ways: Commemorating the Victims of Nazism and Stalinism at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen [pp. 97-119] Communist Camps and their Aftermath [pp. 120-132] From the Russian Soul to Post-Communist Nostalgia [pp. 133-166] Back Matter


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