Realms of Memory: Recent Episodes
Realms of Memory
Alan Weisman is a journalist and non fiction writer whose focus over the past twenty five years has been on the crises that now imperil the planet. In The World Without Us (2007), which became a New York Times and International best seller, Alan tries to engage readers by helping them to imagine a world...
It was on a train to Siberia that Joy Neumeyer decided to write her story. Despite the distance between Russia and her history graduate program at Berkeley, she was still haunted by the memory of her abusive relationship with her boyfriend and classmate. In the early morning hours between Moscow and the Ural Mountains, she recalled...
Is it possible to understand the suppression of memory as an act of love? In Surviving the Survivor: A Brutally Honest Conversation about Life (& Death) with My Mom: A Holocaust Survivor, Therapist and My Podcast Co-Host, author Joel Waldman argues that his mother Karmela was determined to protect her family from the past. Karm,...
Objects recovered from sites of mass atrocities have a special significance today. This is because we live in what University College Dublin Professor Lea David labels as a human rights memorialization culture. Central to this culture is the conviction that we should face difficult histories, we should remember human rights abuses, and victims should be...
Sociocultural trauma experienced by nations isn’t just the result of unimaginable crimes and horrors. It is the repeated betrayals that make it impossible to mourn, to find meaning in the past, and to move forward. According to Tony Robben, Utrecht University professor emeritus of anthropology, this is what happened in Argentina. The military dictatorship that...
The duty to remember has become a moral imperative in today’s memory culture. But reporter and political analyst David Rieff argues that this belief is often misinformed and misplaced. In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and its Ironies, Rieff argues that sometimes forgetting is the better choice. This is especially true because conflicts often have...
Partition cast a shadow over the island of Ireland that stretched across the 20th century. Less well known, however, is the fallout caused by the division of the Protestant population in Northern Ireland, a region known as Ulster. Of the 9 historic Ulster counties, only 6 remained in the United Kingdom. What became known as...
The Great Patriotic War, shorthand for the war against Nazi Germany, has become the focal point of Russian nationalism under Vladimir Putin. Memories of the war bolster the legitimacy of Putin’s grip on power while offering Russians a feel good narrative about their national past. Rather than reducing the celebration of the Great Patriotic War...
From Spain to the Baltic States Europe is littered with sites connected to the personal lives of former dictators. Birthplaces, childhood homes, summer and winter residences, mausoleums and tombs these sites of dictators can be powerful poles of attraction for extremists, nostalgists, and dark tourists. They can also offer opportunities to bolster democratic systems by...
The National Rifle Association, known simply as the NRA, is commonly regarded as one of the most powerful lobbies in the United States. If much needed gun reform never sees the light of day, the power of the NRA to influence lawmakers and shape legislation is often held to blame. In On Target: Gun Culture,...
The greatest democracy in history, a beacon of freedom, a selfless force of good in the world, these are all elements of American exceptionalism. These are the ways Americans see their nation, its relationship to others, and its place in the world. But what happens when a sudden and unexpected catastrophe threatens this identity? This...
In June 2004 a thirty-member multiracial task force known as the Philadelphia Coalition stood on the stage of the Neshoba County Coliseum before a crowd of a thousand people. What was unique about the Philadelphia Coalition wasn’t that whites finally joined Neshoba County blacks in commemorating the lives and deaths of three young civil rights...
How can a wounded land become a source of healing, rejuvenation and renewal? How can a former death strip become a lifeline connecting a painful past to the promise of the future? Bate College Environmental Studies Professor Sonja Pieck explains how this is precisely what is happening with Germany’s Green Belt. The Green Belt is...
During the Great Depression the capitalist system in the United States neared the point of collapse. The stock market plunged to its lowest point in the century, the banking system was at risk of failing, and unemployment peaked at a quarter of the workforce. Just as the country reached its economic nadir, Franklin Roosevelt‘s New...
Historian Georgiy Kasianov has authored, co-authored, and co-edited over twenty books on his native country of Ukraine. I had the opportunity to speak with him in February 2024 about his book Memory Crash: The Politics of History in and around Ukraine 1980s-2010s. Georgiy’s interest in the memory politics of Ukraine grew out of his own...
How can we work toward a greater degree of freedom and justice for all if our memories of the past are fundamentally different? How can we pursue the general welfare and wellbeing of the people without common reference points? This is the dilemma raised by the Make America Great Again slogan. In Trump and the...
Under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. the 1960s civil rights movement achieved far reaching legal and political changes. University of Southern California sociologist Hajar Yazdiha points out that not surprisingly a myriad of other disenfranchised and marginalized groups looked to the example and framed themselves as an extension of the work of King...
Despite the removal of scores of prominent monuments to the Confederacy the vast majority remain firmly in place. For communities to make informed decisions about the future of these monuments they need to have a clear understanding of their past. It was with this objective in mind that University of North Carolina at Charlotte historian...
With the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the US-Mexico, Mexican Americans became the first non-white population to become US citizens. University of Texas at San Antonio historian Omar Valerio-Jiménez reminds us that most Mexican American never enjoyed full citizenship rights. In Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory and Citizenship, Valerio-Jiménez reveals how Mexican Americans...
Americans are living in an age of frenzied memorial making, argues University of Texas at Dallas art and cultural historian Erika Doss. We saturate the public landscape with memorials to every conceivable cause, aggrieved group, or unsung hero. What do memorials tell us about Americans and America today? In Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America,...
Staring down at the distorted and barely recognizable remains of her fourteen-year-old son is Mamie Till supported by her financé Gene Mobley who gazes directly at the camera. This September 1955 black and white photo of Emmett Till and his family was named by Time Magazine in 2016 as one of the 100 most influential...
Beginning in 1880s Africans Americans became the targets of a lynching craze that claimed thousands of lives. In Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lyching on Black Culture and Memory, University of Oklahoma historian Karlos K. Hill argues that narratives are key to understanding not just what drove the lynching craze but how African Americans...
Cambodia has often been cast as a broken, amnesiac nation, unable to confront the memory of the horrors it experienced during the Khmer Rouge era. How did these assumptions justify the establishment of transitional justice mechanisms such as the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)? In what ways were the therapeutic claims of...
The system of enforced prostitution by the Japanese military went unpunished and unexamined for decades after the Asia-Pacific War. International recognition only began in 1991 when Korean survivor Kim Hak-sun spoke out in graphic detail about her dark past. In Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia, University of Melbourne historian Kate McGregor...
In May 1980 the city of Gwangju in South Korea erupted in violence. Shocked by the brutal suppression of student protests against the threat of renewed dictatorship, the citizens of Gwangju, South Korea’s six largest city, seized weapons, formed their own army, and liberated the city from government control. The euphoria created by this victory...
In 1964 the military seized power in Brazil, overthrowing the democratically elected government of João Goulart. The military ruled Brazil for the next 21 years relying on increasingly repressive measures to retain its grip on power. The most infamous decree, Institutional Act Number 5, known simply as AI-5, empowered the government to imprison and torture...
The wars that led to the breakup of Yugoslavia stretched across the 1990s unleashing a level of destruction and human devastation not seen in Europe since World War II. The repercussions of the conflict were profound and can still be felt today. Over 130,000 died and another 4 million fled their homes. The predominantly Muslim...
The partition of British India was a two step process. First in 1947, Pakistan and India became independent nations. For over the next twenty years, however, a very uneasy relationship existed between the two culturally and linguistically very different wings of Pakistan—East and West Pakistan. In 1971 war broke out leading to the creation of Bangladesh and the end of what had previously been East Pakistan. Like countless others with roots in the region of Bengal, Ananya Kabir’s family ended up being split across the nations of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Trained as an expert in medieval literature and now a professor at King’s College London, it was the 50th anniversary of partition in 1997 that inspired Ananya to shift course and begin to look at the cultural entanglements that continue to bind the peoples of South Asia. Her first book on the region took up the contested territory of Kashmir—Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (2009). Her second book, Partition’s Post-Amnesia: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia (2013) is a study of the cultural connections between India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It is both a scholarly study of the making, unmaking, and remaking of national identities across two partitions as well as a personal account of her own family’s relationship to the region across this sweep of history.
When Ananya decided to turn her scholarly attention to South Asia it was a time of tremendous change for the emerging field of partition studies. It was through the pioneering work of Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, and Urvashi Butalia that the story of partition, once limited to male dominated, top-down, nationalist narratives featuring the great men of history, opened to include stories about how women and marginalized groups experienced the events of 1947. While references were made to Bangladesh, much of this new scholarship focused on the region of the Punjab on the western side of the subcontinent. Ananya was interested in bringing her skills of critical cultural analysis to the region where her family was from, Bengal, on the opposite, eastern side of the subcontinent.
As a scholar of English literature interested in using her training to understand partition, Ananya explains that the field of Holocaust Studies was especially useful. Methods used in Holocaust Studies, such as psychoanalysis, symptomatic and close reading, were familiar to her and ones she could use to study partition. She could use this tool kit to offer another perspective on the experience of partition. It was through this awareness of what she could bring to partition studies as a professor of literature that she began her work on South Asia in the 1990s.
As a literature expert, Ananya was also keenly aware of the limitations of novels as a narrative form of expression. Narratives inevitably convey a particular perspective. Narratives are trapped within a linear structure with a beginning, middle, and end. In trying to approach the memory of partition from a different perspective, Ananya was interested in looking at non-narrative forms of cultural expression. Songs, paintings, photos, maps, sculptures, for example, can evoke powerful memories of times, places, and people without being constrained by the limitations of narrative forms of cultural expression. Non-narrative cultural forms offer valuable means of reconciliation because they allow us to retain and assert our emotional attachments to places which may now be located in another country.
Indeed, the historian, the cultural producer, and the literary critic seeking to comment and analyse the work of her peers: we are all Partition’s grandchildren, whether Pakistani, Indian, or Bangladeshi. Although we displace our own curiosities and compulsions on to a range of ‘others’ – be it the characters of the novels we write, the lacuna of historiography we choose to fill, or the subjects for literary critical reading we privilege – we are unable to sever our personal connection to the material of memory. Ananya Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South AsiaIn novels such as A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam, set in post-independence Bangladesh, maps are a reminder of how the present is entangled in the past of East Pakistan. Anam includes a map in the opening pages of her novel to recall the peculiar relationship between East and West Pakistan between 1947-1971. Non-contiguous, separated by thousands of miles of Indian territory, the easiest way to bridge the divide was by plane. Maps are a means of remembering a past by writers whose grandparents lived through partition. Ananya Kabir refers to this cohort as the post-amnesia generation because of their desire and need to remember a forgotten or repressed past.
The Bengali singer Firoza Begam is an another example of how non-narrative forms of cultural expression have a special power to recall earlier times and attachments. Originally from the city of Fardipur, Begam began her career as a singer in Calcutta, which Ananya describes as the “cultural center of pre-Partition Bengal.” When questioned in an interview about how she ended up back in Fardipur, in what became East Pakistan after partition in 1947, Firoza’s recollections become hazy and imprecise. She only remembers being one of the artists who helped inaugurate Radio Pakistan’s broadcasts in Dhaka and how she had to abandon Bengali music to sing in Urdu. Pakistanis, however, have vivid recollections of Begum’s songs in Urdu which continue to circulate on the internet. While Begum’s own personal narrative draws a sharp line between pre and post-independence Bangladesh, her songs in Urdu continue to resonate for Pakistanis, despite the national borders and bitter memories of civil war that now separate the two countries. In short, non-narrative forms of cultural expression, such as music, have the power to transcend national divisions and promote reconciliation and healing by reminding all sides of shared cultural connections.
In the early years of Pakistan, archeology was a field of research which offered the possibility of unearthing a usable past to unite the disparate wings of the new nation. Figuring most prominently in this history was Ahmed Hasan Dani (1920-2009). Just a few years prior to partition Dani became the first Mulsim graduate of Benaras Hindu University but was barred from teaching there because of his region. He would go on to discover the ancient remains of a Stone Age culture in the caves of Sanghao in Northwestern Pakistan. Dani’s findings suggested that the roots of ancient South Asian civilizations like Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro might be in West Pakistan. At age 42 he was given the job of establishing the first department of archeology for Pakistan’s University of Peshawar. Dani used his new position and the financial support from the government of Pakistan to undertake a wealth of research on the Gandhara period in the Peshawar region. Flourishing between the 1st and 2nd millennium BCE, Gandhara Civilization was Buddhist with later Greek cultural influences rooted in Alexander the Great’s conquest of the region. Terracotta vases, reliefs, and sculptures were a core feature of Gandhara cultural expression. For the nascent state of Pakistan, Gandhara civilization and its terracotta culture held the promise of uniting the very different cultures of East and West Pakistan through an even older common Buddhist cultural heritage.
With the civil war that ended the union of East and West Pakistan, the countries of Bangladesh and Pakistan rewrote their national narratives. For Pakistan, hopes for union through a shared ancient Buddhist past and terra cotta culture were abandoned in favor of a newly crafted national identity rooted in an imagined Islamic past. Prominent national monuments erected in Pakistan after 1971, such as Teen Talwar (Three Swords) in Karachi, evoke the importance of this Islamic past through their emphasis on Arabic script. In the case of post-independence Bangladesh national monuments convey a desire to forget the period of union between East and West Pakistan through an emphasis on the events and people surrounding and leading to independence in 1971 or what Ananya labels as “the sealed moment.” The jaytio sriti (National Monument) at Savar, the Rayerbajar brick monument dedicated to Bengali intellectuals killed by the Pakistani army on 14 December 1971, and the shadhinota stombho (Independence Pillar) are all devoted to a singular moment in time divorced from a larger shared past.
One of the roles played by contemporary South Asian artists is to question and sometimes ridicule these imagined national histories. Pakistani visual artists, Bani Abidi, for example, took aim at one of the most prominent national icons in Pakistan, Muhammad-bin-Qasim. A military commander from the Umayyad Caliphate in the 7th century, Muhammad-bin-Qasim is credited with bringing Islam to Pakistan through the conquest of the Sindh region which contains the capital of Karachi. In the post-1971 era he became a central figure in the government’s effort to anchor the national history to an Islamic past. Abidi used a series of photos of a warrior on horseback dressed in Middle Eastern garb and photoshopped in front of prominent national monuments in the capital to poke fun at the distortion of the nation’s past.
Bani Abidi, like Ananya Kabir, is in her fifties and is a member of what Ananya describes as the post-amnesia generation. This is the third generation after partition. First generation cultural actors like the archeologist Ahmed Hasan Dani did the work of trying to build memories of a past that might connect and sustain the wings of East and West Pakistan. When this project failed the forgetting came as Pakistan and Bangladesh each tried to reinvent new national histories and narratives. While divorced by time and space from the lived experience of partition, this third generation of cultural actors retains powerful emotional ties to their ancestral homes. It is their desire to better understand the places and cultures experienced by their grandparents' generation that drives a new round of memory work. Often living outside of South Asia in the diaspora, with women playing a disproportionate role, these cultural actors are connected through social media and better able to communicate and collaborate across what are now hardened national borders. Their work may hold the promise of uncovering or rediscovering the shared culture that unites a now divided region.
Ananya Jahanara KabirAnanya Kabir is Professor of English Literature at Kings College London. She is the author of Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature (2001), Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (2009), and Partition's Post-Amnesias: 1948, 1971 and Modern South Asia (2013)
What made the Punjab particularly susceptible to violence at the time of partition was that it was one of the most militarized regions of British India. The Punjab had historically contributed a disportionate percentage of the soldiers of British India. Well over half of all recruits from British India during World War I and World War II came from the Punjab. There was a proliferation of firearms in the region as soldiers returning from World War II often hid their decommissioned weapons. Each of the three communities in the region—Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus—formed their own private armies. Within this volatile context we have a collapse of law and order with the fall of the Unionist government in the Punjab which had held sway in the region for the previous twenty years.
One of the reasons why memorializing partition is so difficult is the challenge of labeling or naming the violence that took place. In some cases the violence was planned and was tantamount to a form of ethnic cleansing. In other cases, the violence was improvised and spontaneous with groups or individuals seizing opportunities for score settling or personal enrichment. Targets of murder, rape, and abduction, women were especially victimized by the violence of partition. Attacking women or forcing women to take their own lives was a means of assaulting or safeguarding the honor of the community in question. The dividing line between victims and perpetrators was often blurred. The same individuals who were forced to flee their homes could in turn become the perpetrators of heinous crimes in their new communities.
It was precisely because the abduction of tens of thousands of women was regarded as an affront to the honor of each community that the governments of India and Pakistan devoted considerable resources to their recovery and return. For close to a decade after partition, both Pakistani and Indian authorities labored to locate and repatriate their abducted nationals. In many instances, these women had gone on to have new lives with new families, spouses, and children. They were given little say in their repatriation and were often placed in shelters upon their return, sometimes for the remainder of their lives when their birth families refused to welcome or assist them. The movie Pinjar, roughly translated as cage or skeleton, recounts the story of one such victim of abduction.
Much of the memory of partition centers on the violence, a tendency which perpetuates distrust and complicates the possibility of reconciliation between Pakistan and India. Much less is known about the absence of violence. The case of Malerkotla is a prominent example. Malerkotla, formerly a Muslim princely state, escaped the violence that tore apart the neighboring Sikh princely states and British controlled regions of East Punjab in 1947. Pippa Virdee argues that while distrust did exist between Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims, the authorities in Malerkotla were much more effective in intervening and preventing tensions from escalating into violence. While British authorities often failed to intervene, Pippa points out that in Sikh princely states violence was not only condoned but encouraged. In short, blaming the violence of partition on timeless communal hatreds fails to hold political leaders accountable. The case of Malerkotla, where Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs continue to coexist peacefully, raises important questions about whether the violence in 1947 and the fraught relations between India and Pakistan today could have been avoided.
One of the prominent trends in the memory of partition has been the creation of massive digital archives devoted to preserving the testimonies of the ever shrinking community of survivors of 1947. These archives are located at prestigious institutions outside of South Asia. For example, Harvard University’s 1947 Partition Project, collected over 2,300 narratives from survivors between 2017 and 2019. In 2011 UC-Berkeley physicist Guneeta Singh Bhalla, granddaughter of a partition survivor, founded the 1947 Partition Archive which contains over 9,000 interviews. While these archives are laudable for their efforts to preserve voices from the past, they raise fundamental questions about memory in the digital age. For example, what demands do these archives make on users to think critically and deeply about the past? Are testimonies surfed in a cursory and superficial fashion similar to Instagram posts? Do the contents of the archives favor English speakers or those with the cultural capital to articulate the past with greater clarity and authority? In short, do digital archives represent the democratization of memory or the narrowing of our understanding of the past?
Why, after seventy years of this bittersweet experience of partition and independence, should the people be talking about their memories? The answer partly lies in the lack of closure and understanding of why ordinary people paid such a high price. Pippa Virdee, From the Ashes of 1945: Reimagining Punjab. Have the lessons of 1947 gone unheeded? In the case of India, Pippa Virdee cautions against attempts to generalize. The local politics, economies, and languages vary dramatically from one region to another. Yet is it true that India is no longer the secular state imagined at the time of independence. Large scale communal violence claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 following the murder of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. In Gujarat in 2002 Hindu rioters murdered over 1000 Muslims as a reprisal for the deaths of 59 Hindus in a train fire (still under unresolved circumstance) after returning from a pilgrimage. Narendra Modi was Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time and accused of turning a blind eye to the violence. US authorities denied Modi a travel visa for nearly a decade because of “severe violations of religious freedom.” Yet in 2014 Modi’s Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), won the first parliamentary majority since 1984 and Modi became prime minister. Part of an international right wing populist wave, Pippa stresses that we need to question what makes these leaders so popular, are we to blame, and what can we do about it.
Pippa Virdee Pippa Virdee is Associate Professor/Reader in Modern South Asian History at De Montfort University. She is the author of Pakistan: A Very Short Introduction, From the Ashes of 1947: Reimagining Punjab, Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century (with P. Panayi) and Coming to Coventry: Stories from the South Asian Pioneers.
The partition of British India was one of the most traumatic events of the 20th century. The chaos that followed the creation of the nations of India and Pakistan in 1947 displaced over 14 million people and claimed the lives of another 1 million. Some of the worst violence occurred in the Punjab, one the most ethnically and religiously diverse regions of British India. Yet for decades historians neglected to tell the story of those who suffered most from partition—women, members of the lower castes, and refugees. Pippa Virdee, historian and South Asian specialist from De Montfort University in the UK, has devoted much of her career to giving voice to those who were previously left out of the story of partition. She is the author of books on Pakistan, South Asian immigrants in the UK and partition in the Punjab. My interview focused on her book From the Ashes of 1947: Reimagining Punjab.
For decades historians in South Asia told the story of partition from a top-down, traditional political perspective featuring the great men of history. The first to recount the experiences of women, Dalits or untouchables, and refugees were not historians, but novelists and movie producers. While these were fictional accounts they often drew from the life experiences of their creators. For example, Khrushwant Singh’s, Train to Pakistan, written in 1956, tells the story of the village of Mano Majra plunged into the chaos of religious hatred and communal violence. The peace and serenity of Mano Majra is shattered when the first ghost train arrives in the summer of 1947 filled with the bodies of refugees massacred en route from Pakistan. It is the fear of being killed by Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan that causes the Muslim residents of Mano Majra to flee to Pakistan.
When scholars finally turned their attention to the story of how partition was experienced by ordinary people, women and South Asian feminist scholars in particular, played a central role. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin’s Borders and Boundaries: How Women Experienced the Partition of India, published in 1998, was one of the first feminist and social histories that put women at the center of the story of partition. Drawing from first hand accounts, memoirs, and government documents, Menon and Bashin looked at the abduction, murder, and suicides of tens of thousands of women. Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, published in 2000, was based on ten years of oral history work among women, lower castes, and children separated from their families at the time of partition. Butalia focuses in particular on the “double dislocation” of women, abducted first from their families during partition then forcibly repatriated by their respective home government years later. Both books had a major influence on the career choices of future scholars and South Asian experts like Pippa Virdee who began her graduate work in the 2000s.
Trigger events recalling the trauma of 1947 were also important inspiring research on partition. For Urvashi Butalia it was the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi that motivated her to begin her oral history work on the survivors of partition. According to Pippa Virdee, many of those interviewed by Butalia commented that 1984 was like 1947 all over again. Pippa adds that anniversaries can also serve as memory triggers. Much of the more reflexive work on 1947 began in 1997, during the 50th anniversary of partition. The ethnic cleansing that took place in the 1990s during the wars in Yugoslavia as well as the genocide in Rwanda encouraged South Asians to think about similar events in own past. For traumatic events on the scale of partition, the passage of time, Pippa stressed, is often needed to begin to address difficult memories.
Many in the past have questioned why surprisingly there has not been a meaningful partition memorial of some sort to commemorate the lives lost, those that survived and also to promote peace between India and Pakistan…Furthermore, there has been nothing in the form of public hearings to allow for stories of mass rape and murder to be made public, to allow for truth and reconciliation which has been done elsewhere. There is no form of ‘putting history on trail’. These are cathartic processes which have been completely absent in South Asia. Pippa Virdee, From the Ashes of 1947: Reimagining Punjab. The case of the Punjab reveals the complexity of the unmixing of populations that happened during partition. Prior to partition, Muslims represented just over fifty percent of the population of the Punjab with Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs and other groups comprising the rest. But in the two towns (now cities) Pippa Virdee studied, Ludhiana (now in India) and Lyallpur (renamed Faisalabad and now in Pakistan), the populations were very different from the surrounding countryside. While in the predominantly Muslim western Punjab, Lyallpur had a majority non-Muslim population. Ludhiana, located in the mostly Hindu/Sikh region of eastern Punjab had a majority Muslim population. These once majority populations that played a central economic role in each town are now almost completely non-existent. Refugee populations from each side of the newly created border between India and Pakistan now represent the majority in each town. As the populations changed so did the cityscapes. Sikh gurdwaras or places of worship in Lyallpur were transformed into Muslim schools and mosques in Ludhiana were converted to gurdwaras.
Refugees who left their ancestral homes and businesses in the chaos of partition didn’t necessarily build their new lives on a foundation of amnesia. In her work on both sides of the border of the Punjab, Pippa Virdee finds that refugee entrepreneurs incorporated the names of their former hometowns into their new establishments. Visitors to Faisalabad (formerly Lyallpur), for example, can find stores named after Ludhiana and travelers to Ludhiana will see businesses named after Lyallpur. These place markers recall important remembered pasts and serve as familiar signposts that mitigate the trauma of beginning again in an otherwise new and foreign cityscape.
The Punjab today is a divided and communalized space. The Indian side of East Punjab is now predominantly Sikh and much smaller than in 1947 with Himachal Pradesh and Haryana split off and made into separate states. In East Punjab, Punjabi is the predominant language which is taught and preserved by schools. The history now taught in East Punjab caters to the majority population and is based largely on a Sikh narrative. In West Punjab, Punjabi doesn’t have the same cachet. This is because many of Pakistan’s elite originated in the Punjab and embraced Urdu as the national language. The majority of Punjabis in West Pakistan don’t speak Punjabi and are cut off from the history and culture associated with the language.
While the plural Punjab of the early 20th century has largely vanished, it is important not to overly romanticize this space. There were divisions in the Punjab long before partition. For instance, when Muslims would join non-Muslims for a festival or marriage, separate food would be reserved for Muslims. This was a form of othering, or thinking about Muslims as being impure. While communities of different beliefs may have coexisted peacefully, cultural elements such as food or marriage, represented prominent dividing lines which have only become more pronounced in recent times. Moreover, in such a vast area with so many diverse communities tensions inevitably flared. Even in exemplary regions such as Malerkotla, which escaped the violence of 1947, there were disturbances in the 1930s.
Given the preexistence of communal tensions, British authorities and their Indian and Pakistani counterparts, should have been better prepared for the violence of partition. However, what no-one anticipated, Pippa Virdee stresses, was the mass of people who would leave their homes for the other side of the newly created border. Most people had no idea what side of the border they would be on after independence. In the Punjab, the borders were not announced until three days after independence. While there were red flag events in the months prior to partition, it was the start of violence that triggered mass hysteria and the refugee crisis.
Pippa Virdee Pippa Virdee is Associate Professor/Reader in Modern South Asian History at De Montfort University. She is the author of Pakistan: A Very Short Introduction, From the Ashes of 1947: Reimagining Punjab, Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century (with P. Panayi) and Coming to Coventry: Stories from the South Asian Pioneers.
Nottingham Trent University historian Jenny Wüstenberg, author of Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany, argues that Berlin’s Topography of Terror Museum is emblematic of the dramatic transformation of Germany’s memoryscape beginning in the 1980s. It was in the course of the 1980s that Germany pivoted from commemorating the German victims of World War II to the victims of Nazi crimes and terror during the years from 1933 to 1945. Built over the once abandoned and forgotten ruins of the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, the Topography of Terror is one the most prominent examples of Germany’s new negative memory culture. By focusing on the role of Germans as perpetrators and the suffering experienced by the victims of the Nazi regime, this negative memory culture deepens democracy by reinforcing the importance of tolerance, respect for difference and equal rights in the present.
It was here that unknown thousands of perceived enemies of the Nazi regime were detained and tortured. It was here that participants in the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler were brought before their execution. It was here that parts of the Holocaust were planned. Yet as late as the 1980s the site of the future Topography of Terror Museum in Berlin remained a forgotten landscape of wartime rubble, an abandoned ground where locals practiced driving without a license. On May 5, 1985, a few days before the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, a small group of activists from a collective known as Active Museum—Fascism and Resistance in Berlin gathered with their shovels to symbolically excavate the site. Their goal was to publicly shame the authorities of West Berlin for their failure to preserve the site. They called for the transformation of the site into a museum where visitors would be confronted with the crimes of the Nazi past. It would be an active museum with an archive, library, and rooms for meetings and debate where visitors would have the resources to critically engage with the past. Every effort would be made to avoid monumental architecture and to preserve the original remains of the site.
It is a misconception that after the Second World War Germans wanted to forget the past, that the German economic miracle or wirtschaftswunder was the result of forgetting through work. It is true, however, that those groups who were most eager to remember were not inspired to look critically at the period of National Socialism or the suffering caused by Nazi Germany. The most vocal advocates of memory were Germans who wanted to recall their own experiences of suffering and victimization caused by the war. Most prominent among these groups were expellees forced from their ancestral homes in Eastern and Central Europe, former German soldiers who languished as prisoners in Soviet camps, and the residents of Germany’s cities leveled by Allied bombing aids. In West Germany, these were the groups that sent representatives to the Bundestag and had the ear of the influential postwar Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Most of the monuments, plaques, and memorials devoted to the recent past recalled the suffering experienced by these groups of Germans. Survivors of concentration and extermination camps struggled to preserve the sites of Nazi crimes, but usually with little or limited support from government authorities. Their voices were largely drowned out by the larger and more influential German victims groups who reflected the common sentiment that Germans were the greatest victims of the war.
The Democratic Republic of East Germany (GDR) was in many respects far out in front of the Federal Republic of West Germany (FRG) in preserving Nazi sites of memory. Years before West Germany, East German authorities devoted considerable human and material resources to converting large concentration camps such as Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück into memorials. But East German authorities had no interest in accommodating or working with victims groups who might constitute a rival pole of political authority—even if they shared similar views of the past. While stifling independent civic initiatives, the East German regime instrumentalized Nazi sites of memory to bolster the official narrative of the past. According to this narrative, East Germany was the inheritor of the communist history of resistance to fascism and Nazi Germany in particular. While memorializing former concentration camps, the memory of these camps was edited and narrowed to feature the sacrifices and struggles of the communist resistance while excluding a wide range of victims of both Nazi and Soviet authorities who used the camps after the war. Only in its twilight years, and for the most part after the collapse of the GDR, were Nazi sites of memory in East Germany broadened and made more representative of the diverse groups targeted during the National Socialist period. It is precisely the extent to which memories of minorities as well as of historical failures of the majority (the perpetration of crimes, racism, anti-Semitism, collaboration, profiteering, etc.) are represented publicly that characterizes a “deeply” democratic society. Jenny Wüstenberg, Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany The conditions that led to the willingness of West Germans to confront the Nazi past were multifaceted and unfolded over a period of decades. Immediately after the war victims groups did the invaluable work of documenting and preserving Nazi sites of terror from destruction. In the late 1950s, two former participants in the Church-based resistance to Nazi Germany formed the ASF (Action Reconciliation/Service for Peace). In the spirit of promoting greater understanding, cooperation, and reconciliation, ASF youth met Holocaust survivors in Israel and helped build nursing homes, churches, and synagogues. A significant percentage of memory activists in the 1980s were influenced by their involvement with the ASF. Jenny Wüstenberg argues that the 1968 student movement produced little in the way of concrete changes to the dominant memory narrative but it did encourage greater openness and criticism of the Nazi past. During the 1960s most West German states expanded the school curriculum to cover the period of Nazi rule. In the late 1970s television miniseries, entitled “Holocaust,” was viewed by millions of West Germans stimulating a greater interest in the Nazi past. A general climate of greater openness to and interest in the Nazi past was only strengthened when bureaucrats and political leaders from the Nazi era retired from active professional life.
It was beginning in the late 1970s, and especially during the 1980s, that West Germany underwent a dramatic transformation of its memory culture. Jenny Wüstenberg comments that “during the 1980s, more memorials and plaques commemorating those murdered between 1933 and 1945 were established in West Berlin than in the period of 1945 to 1980 combined.” In the course of a larger memory boom in West Germany marked by a dramatic increase in museum attendance, visitors demonstrated a particular interest in sites of memory associated with the Nazi past. The 1980s was the decade when West Germans went from seeing themselves as victims to perpetrators and embraced a new negative memory culture. This transformation occurred at the time when the long-ruling conservative government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl was looking for ways for Germans to have a more “normal” relationship with their past in which they could celebrate their heros and take pride in their larger history. Kohl’s decision to invite President Ronald Reagan to visit the German military cemetery in Bitburg to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the end of the war sparked international outrage when it was discovered that 49 former soldiers of the Waffen SS were buried at the site.
Jenny Wüstenberg identifies two separate but often interconnected movements that were most influential in reshaping Germany’s memory culture beginning in the 1980s—the Memorial Site Movement and the History Movement. The Memorial Site Movement was more exclusively focused on the Nazi past and targeted both large and infamous as well as small and forgotten sites with the goal of creating memorials or museums where visitors would be required to engage critically with the past. For the larger sites Wüstenberg includes Neuengamme, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, the Memorial to German Resistance, and the Plötzensee Memorial in Berlin. For the forgotten ones she lists “Judengasse in Frankfurt am Main, the EL-DE House in Cologne, the Gestapo headquarters at the former Hotel Silber in Stuttgart, the many sites of death marches and satellite camps, Nazi military tribunals, locations where Nazi euthanasia was practiced, and more come to mind.” The aim of these memorials and museums is to commemorate the victims and identify the perpetrators. Offering examples such as the Mirror Wall in Berlin Steglitz or the Aschrott Fountain in Kassel, these memorials were placed in central locations intended to provoke critical reflection. From the Sinti and Roma to the disabled, chronically ill, slave laborers, and deserters from the Wehrmacht, these memorials focused on a wide array of victims. Rather than simply intending to inspire empathy with the victims they were meant to raise questions about responsibility while encouraging citizens to reflect on contemporary prejudices and exclusionary thinking. By building a negative memory culture connecting the past and present the hope was to deepen the commitment to democratic values.
The history movement consisted of grassroots activists interested in local history. Although not limited to the period of National Socialism, they came to take a particular interest in this past. Their work was often triggered by construction projects that threatened to level significant sites of memory or local anniversaries and commemorations that made no mention of the Nazi past. Their motto was “dig where you stand” and they did the real work of confronting the past—carrying out oral history interviews, compiling archives and libraries, leading tours on foot or by boat, and organizing exhibits, festivals and debates. From changing bridge or street names from the Nazi era or establishing the historical record of crimes committed by a local military regiment, they focused on small, incremental changes. They put the history of Nazi forced labor on the map and they helped identify German companies that benefited from this practice. To challenge and unsettle unquestioned norms and values they used a variety of confrontational tactics. They disrupted military ceremonies by recalling the memory of the thousands of soldiers executed for desertion from the Wehrmacht. They sprayed graffiti on military memorials criticizing the glorification of war. They used public spaces and the media to draw attention to their causes—converting a bus into a mobile museum to bring the history of the Nazi euthanasia program to Berlin residents. It is when memory becomes protest, Jenny Wüstenberg argues, that it has the potential to change the existing norms.
The history movement also helped shape what Jenny Wüstenberg describes as a new memorial aesthetic in Germany. This new aesthetic grew out of a disenchantment with traditional, often large-scale monuments and memorials intended to convey the official narrative of the state and orchestrate an understanding of the past for participants or visitors. Discredited by the massive bloodletting of two world wars and the proclivity of Nazi leaders for monumental architecture, the history movement was influenced by a broader societal desire for alternative approaches to remembering the past. Jenny Wüstenberg identifies four characteristic features of the new memorial aesthetic, “a decentralized structure for the memory landscape; an emphasis on authenticity; the rejection of monumentality; and specificity and diversity in the content of commemoration.” Decentralized memorials reject the time honored practice of concentrating memorials in specially designated sites of public reverence. Artist Gunter Demnig’s Stolperstein or stumbling blocks, for instance, are pavers that recall the memory of the Holocaust but are placed on ordinary streets where residents will literally have to walk over them. The Stolperstein also demonstrate the desire for authenticity because they include the names and deportation dates of Holocaust victims and are located outside the places where these victims once lived and worked. As part of the rejection of monumentality and the desire for authenticity, the Topography of Terror Museum was designed to preserve and reveal the remaining ruins of the former Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Memorials to the Sinti, Roma, gays, slave laborers, and chronically ill victims of euthenasia represent the search for ways of remembering the diverse victims of the Nazi regime. Lastly, it is important to stress that this new memorial aesthetic often requires active participation and reflection on the meanings of the past and their connections to the present. The Stolperstein, for instance, are sponsored by specific groups who must research the history of those they seek to memorialize. This research is then published and presented at the inauguration ceremony for the pavers. It is this active, critical engagement with the past that has the potential to deepen democratic values.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, memory activists from the former East Germany benefited from a much more favorable context. West Germany had already been transformed by decades of memory work and now fully embraced a new negative memory culture that was much more in sync with democratic values of respect for difference and equal rights. Borrowing many of the same strategies used by History and Memorial Site Movements, memory activists from East Germany, and former dissidents in particular, played a crucial role in preserving sites of memory such as former Stasi offices, detention centers, remnants of the Berlin Wall, security and border checkpoints. But Jenny Wüstenberg points out that there were pronounced tensions between this new group of memory activists and their West German counterparts. West German memory activists have successfully integrated themselves into the decision making circles of the German memory establishment. They were determined that their years of hard work in establishing the primacy of the memory of the Holocaust and the crimes of the Nazi past would not be relevatized or diminished by memory work on repression in the East. Moreover, they took pride in their professionalism and were suspicious of the emotionally charged East German memory activists driven by personal, lived experiences of dictatorship and oppression. Links to conservatives and sometimes right-wing German elements, long supportive of the memory of the victims of communism, only added to these suspicions. While the Holocaust and Nazi past deserve to have a central place in the German memoryscape, Jenny Wüstenberg warns that other important memories, such as those from East Germany or the imperial past, deserve recognition as well. Only by continuing to confront and unsettle complacent understandings of the past with democratically inspired memory work can Germany continue to deepen its democracy.
Jenny Wüstenberg Jenny Wüstenberg is Professor of History & Memory Studies in the School of Arts and Humanities at Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom. She is the founding co-president of the Memory Studies Association. She is Director of the Center for Public History, Heritage and Memory at NTU, the co-editor of the World of Memory Series, Berghahn Books, and the chair of Cost Action, Slow Memory. She is the author of Agency in Transnational Memory Politics, Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany, and co-author of De-Commemoration: Removing Statues and Renaming Places (with Sarah Gensburger), and The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism (with Yifat Gutman).
The beginnings of many nations are marred by traumatic histories. This is certainly true for Turkey. The modern Republic of Turkey began with the dispossession and even eradication of many of the ethnic and religious minorities who had lived for centuries within the borders of the Ottoman Empire. The Armenian genocide is one of the most prominent examples. In Violence and Genocide in Kurdish Memory: Exploring the Remembrance of the Armenian Genocide through Life Stories, author Eren Yetkin argues that from the time of the genocide, which took place between 1915 and 1918, the government of Turkey has chosen to deny rather than confront the past.
Denialism, however, was never a static policy but rather one which evolved as international and national conditions changed over time. The term genocide did not gain international recognition until it was established as a crime by the United Nations in 1948. Until the 1950s, Turkish officials denied the violence not the genocide. It was not until the 1960s, when Armenians in the Soviet Republic of Armenia and Armenians living in the diaspora demonstrated for the recognition of the genocide that the focus of denialism shifted to the genocide.
In the 1990s Turkish denialism took on a more aggressive form with the construction of the Zeve Martyrdom Memorial Site. Located 25 kilometers outside the city of Van, the memorial was built by local authorities during a period of time when there was an enthusiastic search for Turkish victims of Armenian violence. Unearthing the bodies of mass graves was a means of substantiating the narrative of Turkish victimization. The plaque that adorns the obelisk commemorates the “2,500 heroic Turkish sons who were murdered by the Armenian militias bloodthirstily…in villages in May 1915.” While the plaque notes that the violence occurred in May, the governor of Van organizes an annual commemorative ceremony on April 24th—the international commemoration day of the Armenian genocide. Located in Kurdistan, the memorial also erases the ethnic identity of the Kurdish victims by labeling them as Turkish sons and renaming their villages with Turkish names.
By 1990s and 2000s we see another turning point in the memory of the Armenian Genocide in Turkey. On the one hand the government adopts more liberal policies—supporting labor rights, women’s rights, and ending the state monopoly over the media. It is during this period that we see the growing assertion of civil society with the creation of NGOs supporting the rights of minorities long targeted by the state. The weekly Turkish/Armenian bilingual publication Agos, was, according to its website, “founded in 1996 by Hrant Dink and a group of his friends, in order to report the problems of the Armenians of Turkey to the public.” Between 2010 and 2019 citizens laid claim to one of Istanbul’s most prominent public spaces, Taksim Square, to commemorate the Armenian Genocide.
While Turkey may have been liberalizing during the 1990s and 2000s this does not mean that the state abandoned its policy of denialism toward the Armenian Genocide. Instead, denialism became wrapped up in an ongoing nostalgia for a mythologized Ottoman past. This is best demonstrated by a 2014 article by former Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu which came to be known as “Just Memory.” In Just Memory Davutoğlu homogenized and simplified the various communities of the Ottoman Empire whom he cast as living in peace and harmony. It was the poison of nationalism that shattered this idealized state of coexistence. Just Memory was later adapted to exhibition form by Davutoğlu and titled Nar Niyetiyle, a reference to pomegranates that recalled nostalgia for a lost Armenian past. By reimagining the Ottoman past as a golden age of peaceful coexistence, both Just Memory and Nar Niyetiyle cast all sides as the victims of nationalism.
In the face of the persistence of official denialism, there were several civic initiatives to organize exhibitions to recognize the Armenian Genocide. Bizzat Hallediniz, loosely translated as Please Deal with it Personally, was an effort to demonstrate the irrefutable reality of the genocide and the responsibity of the state through the weight of archival evidence. A team of 20 historians and experts sifted through thousands of telegrams to feature some 400 that highlighted the orders given by Talaat Pasha to the regional governors and state agents on how to carry out what were then labeled as “the deportations.” Pasha was Grand Vizier (Prime Minister) and chairman of the Union and Progressive Party that governed the Ottoman Empire during World War I and the time of the genocide. The problem with the exhibition, Eren Yetkin points out, was the sheer volume of archival material presented on A4 paper, taped to the walls of the exhibition site. The exhibition organizers failed to frame, contextualize or explain the documents. Visitors were required to have both the patience and the ability to read through hundreds of pages of archival sources. Exhibitions aren’t books, Eren Yetkin argues, they need to find ways to personally move or resonate with visitors. Despite its success in compiling the evidence of the state’s orchestration of the genocide, the exhibition missed an important opportunity to connect with visitors.
Speaking about the Armenian Genocide makes the experiences of the Kurds discussable and describable. The Kurds remember the Armenian Genocide as the beginning of the state violence in the region. Eren Yetkin, Realms of Memory interview.
A few months after Bizzat Hallediniz, the same progressive Depo exhibition site in Istanbul hosted a second exhibition on the Armenian Genocide entitled Left Over. As the title suggest, Left Over, focused on the physical remains after the Armenian Genocide. While Bizzat Hellediniz used the denialist term “deportations” in quotations, Left Over framed the past in question as the Armenian Genocide. Whereas Bizzat Hellendiniz lacked aesthetic appeal and left visitors to fend for themselves amidst the archival evidence of the genocide, Left Over used an array of audio and visual supports to frame and make the past more accessible and engaging. Hand drawn maps showed visitors where Armenians lived prior to the genocide. Sketches of local topographies pointed to supposed Armenian treasures left behind. Family trees, church keys, photographs of properties, recordings of interviews with the grandchildren of survivors, together with music composed for the exhibition gave color and life to Left Over that Bizzat Hallediniz lacked. Yet while Left Over looked at how survivors had to deal with what remained after the genocide, it also failed to address how the genocide happened. By focusing on the remains of the genocide even the survivors became subjects who lacked agency. For Eren, violence on the scale of the Armenian Genocide could never have happened without a signficant degree of participation from the local population or “bystanders.” Bystanders, in German parlance, refers to “ordinary” Germans who claimed to know nothing about what happened during the Holocaust, that they were not involved, but rather simply bystanders.
It is precisely the role of bystanders that is the focus of Eren’s research. Introduced to the region of Van as a guide for European tourists in his late teens and early twenties, Eren became intrigued by the ruins of the Armenian churches and monasteries in the region. A center of Armenian intellectual and political life, the city and province of Van were unique in the Ottoman Empire in having a majority Armenian population. The providence is also in the heartland of Kurdistan and Kurds undoubtedly played a role in the genocide. Through interviews with Kurds both in Van and Istanbul Eren wanted to look at how Kurds remember the Armenian Genocide. While Kurdish mayors have been active in restoring Armenian religious sites and acknowledging the genocide, Eren found that the most common frame for this past is what he labels as the “instrumentalization thesis.” The instrumentation thesis posits that Kurds were manipulated by Turkish authorities and Kurdish elites into participating in the genocide. Moreover, betrayed by their supposed Turkish allies it was the Kurds who later suffered from both Turkish violence and the legacy of a region impoverished by the erasure of a once wealthy Armenian population. Rather than working through the difficult memories of the genocide, what Eren realized was that the Armenian Genocide offered a entry point and a means for Kurds to talk about their own experiences of victimization.
Eren’s original research plans to conduct interviews in the areas around Van were cut short by the failed July 2016 coup and the resumption of fighting in Kurdistan. When asked whether exhibitions like Bizzat Hallediniz or Left Over would be possible today he was somewhat ambivalent. On the one he noted that many of the Kurdish mayors who had taken progressive positions toward the remains and history of the Armenian past had been swept up in the post coup arrests and were now in jail. It was difficult for him to imagine how these kinds of exhibitions would be possible in the current political context. On the other hand, he asserted that the example and tools used by civil society to confront the past still remain in Turkey and it is still possible to take up the history of the country’s violence past.
Eren Yildirim YetkinEren Yetkin is a sociologist at Koblenz University in Germany. He is the author of Violence and Genocide in Kurdish Memory: Exploring the Remembrance of the Armenian Genocide through Life Stories
After fleecing billions of dollars from the Philippines, torturing and murdering thousands during the period of martial law, Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was removed from power through a popular uprising in 1986. How was it possible that his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., was elected as president in 2022? Dr. John Lee Candelaria, from Hiroshima University, argues that a long history of memorializing heroes and forgetting the victims of the nation’s past, has much to do with the reality of the Philippines present. From the influence exerted by American authorities during their half century of rule in the Philippines to the dependence on Japanese aid in the present, larger political forces have played a major role in shaping the parameters of official memory in the Philippines.The memory of three wars in particular offer important insights into the psyche of Filipino voters today. The first is the war against Spain or the Philippine Revolution at the end of the nineteenth century. The second is the Philippine-American War which began with American support for Filipinos in the fight against Spain and ended with a half century of American domination. The third is the war against Japan, or the Pacific War. Whereas more Filipinos died in the the Philippine-American War than in the war against Spain, and deaths in the war against Japan dwarfed the lives lost in both of the earlier conflicts, it is the memory of the Philippine Revolution that looms largest in the Philippines. Lee Candelaria explains that through the shaping of the education system and the crafting of the memorial culture during the first half of the twentieth century, American authorities played a major role in elevating the memory of the Philippine Revolution and suppressing the story of the Philippine-American War. Elevating the memory of José Rizal was one strategy employed by American authorities to celebrate the Philippines Revolution while discouraging resistance to American rule. Rizal was a Filipino writer whose work both inspired the war against Spain and led Spanish authorities to convict and execute him. Lee Candelaria argues that Rizal was the perfect poster boy for the Americans because while he was critical of the Spanish he was also a proponent of education as the means for peaceful change. American support for the memory of Rizal was most evident in the form of monuments and memorials. Lee describes the Rizal monument in Luneta, Manila as a cultural icon for the Philippines. Rizal is also celebrated in the national education system and through a national holiday every December 30th. While we now have a more nuanced understanding of Rizal, at the time of American rule he was thought to be a pacifist and opponent of the Philippine Revolution.
One of the ways of downplaying less desirable memories is to subsume them in larger memories. During the period of American control in the Philippines this was done with Memorial Day. Memorial Day began in the United States in the period after the Civil War to honor the fallen Union soldiers and eventually encompassed the lives of American soldiers lost in all past wars. Introduced in the Philippines, Memorial Day recognized the deaths of American soldiers in the Philippine-American War but not Filipino combatants. Another example is the Mausoleum of the Veterans of the Revolution. Built in 1915 in the Manila North Cemetery, the Mausoleum originally housed the bodies of many of the heroes of the Revolution—some of whom also fought in the Philippine-American War. Included on the facade of the Mausoleum are the dates 1896 and 1902. By including dates that marked the start of the war against Spain with the end of the Philippine-American War, the Mausoleum subsumed the memory of the later conflict within the story of the former.
I think the fact that national commemoration of historical events tend to shy away from recognizing victimization makes it easy for narratives such as the Marcos golden age. It’s so easy to popularize because at the end of the day the Philippines state has never really recognized points of weakness of the Philippines. John Lee Candelaria, Realms of Memory interview.There are monuments in the Philippines that recall heroic episodes in the Philippine-American War. Lee Candelaria points out that in Rodriguez, Rizal, near his hometown of San Mateo, there is a monument to Licerio Gerónimo, a Filipino Revolutionary general who was credited with the defeat and death of American Major General Henry Ware Lawton at the Battle of San Mateo on December 19, 1899. Lawton’s earlier claim to fame was the capture of Apache leader Geronimo. What is more striking to Lee, however, is that there has been very little done on the national level to recall the Philippine-American War.
Nearly a million Filipinos lost their lives in the war against Japan. While the vast majority of those who died were civilians, most Pacific War memorials are devoted to the memory of soldiers and the themes of military valor, sacrifice, and duty. Memorials at Corregidor and Bataan, where some of the fiercest fighting took place, are shaped not only by the past but also by the desire to recall the unified Filipino-American struggle against a common foe, an important imperative within the context of the Cold War fight against communism. For Filipino leaders, like Ferdinand Marcos Sr., fabricating heroic memories about personal valor during the Pacific War was a means of building political capital and justifying his long rule. Marcos became directly involved in the design and construction of one of most prominent memorials to the Pacific War in the Philippines, The Shrine of Valor on Mt. Samat in Bataan. Inspired by Francisco Franco’s Valley of the Fallen, built a decade earlier in Spain, the Shrine of Valor includes one of the largest memorial crosses in the world, visible on a clear day from Manila some 30 miles away. Planned soon after Marcos took office in 1965, the Shrine of Valor became the government’s main memorial to commemorate the war. Completed in 1969, when Marcos was running for his second presidential term, the Shrine includes references not only to the heroes of the Philippines past but to Marcos’ own imagined role as the greatest Filipino hero of the war and the leader of the Filipino resistance against the Japanese.
Broader memories of the Pacific War became possible after the People Power Revolution in February 1986 finally toppled the Marcos regime. Unthinkable in an earlier era marked by the celebration of the valor and heroism of Filipino combatants, we now see the commemoration of prisoners of war. Capas, Tarlac, the site selected to commemorate the victims of the Bataan Death March, was declared a National Memorial Shrine in 1989 and later the Capas Prisoners of War Memorial Shrine was erected under the presidencies of Corazon Acquino and Fidel Ramos and inaugurated by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2003. In 1995 the Memorare-Manila 1945 Memorial was completed. Located in the heart of Manila, the memorial commemorates the some one hundred thousand civilian lives lost in the Battle of Manila in 1945.
Despite the expansion of official memories of the Pacific War there are some subjects that continue to remain taboo. While most of the 80,000 to 200,000 sex slaves, also known as comfort women, who served the Japanese military during the Pacific War came from Korea, some 1000 Filipina women became comfort women during the war. In 2017 a memorial to Filipina comfort women was erected in Roxas Boulevard in Manila, near the Japanese Embassy. Supported by the Manila city government and the National Historical Commission of the Philippines, the monument nevertheless triggered a backlash from the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs and the Japanese Embassy. After only four months the Department of Public Works and Highways removed the statue because of supposed “drainage” issues in the area. In response to criticisms of the removal, then President Duterte commented that it wasn’t the policy of his government to “antagonize other nations.” Lee Candelaria argues that the politics of victimization may be available to stronger nations like South Korea, but is not possible for the Philippines which remains heavily dependent on Japanese aid.
The long history of remembering heroes, especially those of the Philippines Revolution, while neglecting stories of victimization from the Philippines-American War and the Pacific War, has direct repercussions for the Philippines political present. When Ferdinand Marco Jr. and his sister first began to cultivate nostalgia for their family, perhaps with funds Marcos Sr. stole from the state, they met with a highly receptive public ill-informed about the long history of victimization of the Filipino people. It was far easier to recall a golden era when there was less bribery, crime, corruption and more law and order. Lee Candelaria’s participation in the podcast project, entitled Podkas, is inspired by the desire to better educate Filipinos about their past by featuring the insights of professional historians. By providing a more reliable alternative to Filipinos, who might otherwise turn to questionable sources on social media, the aim of Podkas is to bolster democracy in the Philippines through a better understanding of the past.
John Lee CandelariaDr. John Lee Candelaria is a research fellow at the Graduate School for Humanities and Social Sciences at Hiroshima University where he recently completed his doctorate. His dissertation is titled States and Stones: War Memorialization and Nation Building in Twentieth-Century Southeast Asia. He is also one of the hosts of Podkas: Conversations on Philippine History, Politics, and Society.
Just as Israeli-Palestinian relations reached a new low in the early 2000s, memory activists in Israel embraced a strategy of confronting the past to resolve the crisis in the present. Dr. Yifat Gutman, author of Memory Activism: Reimagining the Past for the Future in Israel-Palestine, discusses how memory activists tackled the taboo subject of 1948. Through tours of ruined and abandoned Palestinian villages and testimonies of their former residents, memory activists tried to promote awareness of the Nakba, or the destruction in Arabic as Palestinians refer to 1948. The hope was that awareness would lead to public recognition and ultimately responsibility for the past. The Oslo Accords of the mid-1990s was the high water point of optimism about resolving the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An historic agreement between Israeli leaders Yizak Rabin and Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, the Oslo Accords put the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip on a path to statehood and political independence. The unraveling of the Oslo Accords in the years that followed caused Israelis-Palestinian relations to spiral into new depths of violence and division. The Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising which erupted in the occupied territories in October 2000, claimed thousands of lives. Israeli authorities responded by building a separation wall between parts of the West Bank and Israel. That same October 2000, protests that turned violent among Palestinian-Israeli citizens in a community in northern Israel ended in over a dozen deaths. By the early 2000s, Israeli-Palestinian relations had reached a new low. It was within the divisive and conflict riddled context of the early 2000s that memory activism took shape in Israel. Inspired by the Truth and Reconciliation Commision in South Africa and historical justice efforts in other post-conflict countries such as the former Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland, memory activism is based on a three stage process. First, awareness of past wrongs, or knowing, needs to be achieved. This can happen through a variety of means such as truth commissions or testimonies. Second, the assumption was that knowing would lead to public acknowledgement. The Third and final stage is responsibility or acting on this public acknowledgement through concrete efforts to make amends for past injustices. Memory activism was a break with the pragmatic thinking of the Oslo days or the hope that peace could be achieved through territorial and political sovereignty concessions without taking history into account. This was the period of the people to people, or P2P, industry where exchanges and meetings between Israelis and Palestinians were supposed to shatter stereotypes and lead to greater mutual understanding, respect, and recognition. Rather than aiming at mutual recognition, memory activists understood Israeli-Palestinian relations to be asymmetrical and focused first and foremost on promoting awareness among Israelis for responsibility in displacing and disenfranchising the Palestinian population. Above all this meant challenging the dominant narrative of 1948 or the story of the creation of the state of Israel. In Memory Activism: Reimagining the Past for the Future in Israel-Palestine, Yifat Gutman studies three memory activist initiatives that took shape in the early 2000s. Common to all three projects was the goal of breaking the silence about the Nakba. Both Baladna (our Homeland in Arabic), run by Palestinian-Israelis and Zochrot (we remember in Hebrew) a Jewish-Israeli NGO, use tours of Palestinian villages ruined and left abandoned by the fighting in 1948. Former Palestinian residents of these communities offer testimonials of life before, during, and after 1948. Tours and testimonies, Yifat explains, are core features of Israeli memory culture. Tours were first used in the years after 1948 as a means of helping Jewish settlers from Eastern Europe to develop ties to their new homeland through a strategy that was referred to as “conquering the land with our feet” and remain a regular part of the national school curriculum. Testimonies gained wide currency following the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the leading Nazi organizers of the Holocaust. Israel’s Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust and Remembrance Center houses over 100,000 audio, video, and written testimonies. So pervasive and familiar are tours and testimonies that they make it easier for participants in the memory activist tours to accept stories of the Nakba. These tours typically focus on daily life and often include the experience of women—a universalist dimension that also helps their message to resonate. The shift from future to past in the political arena and the centrality of claims for historical justice have been extremely visible in the region in the second half of the 1990s and in the 2000s. As future visions for the region disappeared in the aftermath of the Oslo Peace Accords and violence and physical separation increased, each side further fortified its position through a discourse of historical rights. The past has become a central and crucial arena for political struggle. Yifat Gutman, Memory Activism: Reimagining the Past for the Future in Israel-PalestineThe third memory activist initiative is Autobiography of City. A joint Jewish and Palestinian Israeli project, Autobiography of a City is based in Jaffa and focuses on memories of Palestinian life in the city prior to 1948. It does so through video recorded testimonies compiled in a digital data base which visitors can use to select and combine stories to create an ever changing narrative of the city’s Palestinian past. The stories can in turn be mapped on to the city as an audio tour of Jaffa’s Palestinian memoryscape. Artists have also used the database as inspiration for memory inspired work superimposed over the current cityscape. For a community without its own Yad Vashem, the digital database serves as an archive of memories for Jaffa’s Palestinian population. If one of the primary objectives of memory activists in Israel was to achieve awareness of the Nakba, the passing of the Nakba Law in 2011 represented a major achievement. At first glance this statement seems counter intuitive because the Nakba Law wasn’t an official act of recognition by Israel. Instead, it was a backlash against the growing awareness and support for the Palestinians narrative of 1948. The Nakba Law was an effort to use the legal system to suppress the memory of the Nakba. It did so by threatening to fine any state financed organization that assisted with the commemoration of the Nakba on Israel’s Independence Day. It was the government’s response to Nakba, and the even greater public awareness that resulted from debates surrounding the Nakba Law, that made it a success for memory activists. Once an unfamiliar term to most Israelis, by the time of the passing of the Nakba Law the Palestinian narrative of 1948 was well-known in Israel. If Israelis became familiar with the Nakba the assumption that awareness would lead to public acknowledgement and finally to responsibility proved wrong. Yifat explains that this three stage model was based on the South African case in particular. South Africa, however, is a post-conflict country in which the state played a leading role in orchestrating the process of promoting awareness. Israel is a mid-conflict country in which the state is opposed to efforts to promote awareness and public acknowledgement—as evidenced by the enactment of the Nakba Law. Yifat concludes that the South African model works best in post-conflict countries where the government, or a significant segment of the population, have already taken responsibility for past wrongs and can push the process forward. Another way of understanding the failure of the three stage South African model in Israel is the very different relationship to the past in post and mid-conflict countries. In post-conflict countries like South Africa there may be efforts to confront the past but the overriding objective is to find closure and leave the past behind. In mid-conflict countries, where strife and discord are ongoing, the past takes on an entirely different role. Rather than leaving the past behind, the goal is to use the past to prevent future conflict. The very different function of the past mid-conflict contexts makes it difficult to move from awareness to public acknowledgment. Nearly twenty years on, what conclusions can we draw from memory activism as a strategy for confronting the past and attempting to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? It is true that the taboo subject of 1948 has been shattered as memory activists have helped broaden awareness of the Palestinian narrative of dispossession and displacement. The Nakba is no longer a little understood Arabic term in Israel. However, the second stage of achieving public recognition that might lead to responsibility has not been achieved. While a significant percentage of Palestinian-Israelis have enjoyed considerable social promotion in Israel, most continue to be disadvantaged, second-class citizens subject to Israeli fears and suspicions. Organizations like Zachrot that promote the Palestinian narrative of 1948 are viewed as collaborating with the enemy. The current political crisis in Israel over the judicial system may serve as an opportunity to unite Palestinian and Jewish Israelis but so far it has remained as Jewish-Israeli conflict.
A few months after his Justice and Development Party or AKP won Turkey’s general elections in 2011, then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on his fellow citizens to confront the past. In the years that followed several prominent sites of state sponsored violence targeting ethnic and religious minorities and former political opponents of the regime were slated to become memorials and museums. What inspired this desire to confront the past? What were these sites of memory? How did the violent histories of these sites complicate these initiatives? These are the questions Professor Eray Çaylı examines in his recent book Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past in Turkey.
The impetus for confronting the past came from several directions. Already a longtime member of the NATO Western military alliance, Turkey’s leadership was interested in benefiting from membership in the expanded European Union. Reckoning with its history of state sponsored violence and adopting more liberal and conciliatory positions toward victimized ethnic and religious minorities would better align Turkey with European norms and expectations. Moreover, many ethnic and religious minorities, such as Kurds and Alevis, had long sought greater rights and recognition within Turkey.
Eray Çaylı looks at three sites in particular that were selected to become museums and memorials. The first was the former Madimak Hotel in Sivas, site of the 1993 arson attack that killed two hotel workers and thirty three guests who had come to Sivas to participate in an annual Alevi cultural festival. The hotel was set aflame by an angry mob while government authorities looked on. The Madimak Hotel was converted into the Science and Cultural Center with a special “Memory Corner” devoted to the incident. The two other sites were both prisons. Ulucanlar Prison in Ankara housed many of the leftist political opponents of the regime during the turbulent 1960s and early 1970s. It was at Ulucanlar that the leaders of the 1968 student movement were hanged. Diyarbakir Prison is located in Turkey’s Kurdish heartland and gained notoriety in the 1980s as the site where Kurdish activists were tortured under the orders of Turkey’s military rulers. Ulucanlar was converted into a museum while Diyarbakir is in the process of becoming a museum.
With his training in architecture and anthropology, Çaylı isn’t just interested in how structures like museums and memorials represent the past or project a vision of the future. Çaylı wants to show how the built environment is layered with history and memory and has the ability to inspire and generate political action. The Madimak Hotel, for example, wasn’t just located in the Alevi heartland of Sivas, the site was also in close proximity to the location where Pir Sultan Abdal, a sixteenth century minstrel and prominent Alevi martyr was executed for refusing to respect Ottoman power. The Alevi cultural festival was named after Pir Sultan Abdal and the violence in Sivas began with attacks on the “Minstrels Monument” placed just outside the festival’s main venue. Holding the festival in Sivas was regarded by many Alevis as the reclaiming of a space infused with historical significance. In much the same way some Alevis regarded the arson attack on the Madimak Hotels as a continuation of a long history of Alevi martyrdom. It is not just the memory of the event but also the layers of history and memory associated with the place that inspire Alevi activists to return to Sivas every year since the attack to preserve the memory of the victims and to fight for Alevi rights and recognition in Turkey.
The book argues that the benchmark against which to appraise commemoration is not the instances of violence and injustice it proclaims to overcome but rather those that exist alongside or within it and are at times even exacerbated by it. Eray Çayli, Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past in Turkey.
Çaylı notes that memories of the past associated with specific sites can also have a transethnic dimension. Hardships and misfortune experienced by one ethnic or religious group in the present can be understood in terms of the suffering of other groups in the past. Sivas and Diyarbakir historically had large Armenian populations and both sites figured prominently in the Armenian genocide. Many public buildings in the heart of Turkey’s capital of Ankara, such as Ulucanlar Prison, are located on land seized during the Armenian genocide. Natural geographic features, such as streams and brooks, still have colloquial names, such as bloody brook or consignment stream, that recall the region’s violent past. Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, or attacks on particular groups like Alevis in the Sivas arson attack, are often understood as the consequence of a dark past coming around again.
Memories of the past can sometimes result in understandings of memorial projects that were not necessarily the intention of the creators. For example, the Madimak Hotel, converted into the Science and Cultural Center, was intentionally left incomplete with entire floors that remained empty. The stated aims of this provisional status were to allow participants to shape the future form, contents, and function of the establishment. In practice, however, the provisional character of the project triggered conspiratorial thinking as many wondered if the true goal was to cater to the interests of the Alevi community. Drawing from a long history of paranoia about foreign threats to Turkish sovereignty stretching back to the Sèvres Treaty following World War I, the unfinished Science Culture Center fueled imaginations about possible Alevi schemes and plots.
Similarly, a long history of seeing the nation through the lens of victimization had an important bearing on the transformation of Ulucanlar Prison into a museum. Former leftist political inmates lobbied for the museum to become a site that would educate visitors about repression of the political left. The local chapter of the Chamber of Architects which became involved in the design of the museum was also determined to preserve the specificity of the experience of the political left at Ulucanlar. In particular, they are wanted to feature the execution at Ulucanlar of the leaders of the 1968 student revolutionary movement. They wanted to show how the regime imprisoned and tortured thousands of activists following the 1980 coup. Lastly, they wanted to highlight the suppression of efforts by prisoners between 1999 and 2000 to protest through hunger strikes against the use of solitary confinement.
In the end, however, the hopes and aspirations of the former inmates and the architects who supported them were swept aside. Local authorities who took control of the project stripped the museum of much of its historical specificity. One section of the prison, deemed to have little historical value, was leveled and replaced with a garden. Bathrooms where prisoners who engaged in hunger strikes were violently beaten were given a facelift that masked their dark past. There was even talk of transforming the isolation cells that triggered the hunger strikes into tourist attractions where visitors could pay for the experience of being locked up.
When it came to the actual inmates we see an equally dramatic rewriting of the story of Ulucanlar. Personal objects of famous prisoners include those of individuals, such as Erdoğan, who never spent time at Ulucanlar. Biographies of former inmates indiscriminately lump together individuals from across the political spectrum. Sound recordings intended to convey conversations between prisoners are devoid of all political content. Photographs of the former 1968 revolutionary student leaders hanged at Ulucanlar are located in the courtyard but without historical or biographical information. Moreover, the gallows, made infamous for their use on the revolutionary student leaders, are put on display behind bars with a sign proclaiming how Turkey, following the end of military rule, abolished capital punishment. By depoliticizing and decontextualizing the past Ulucanlar becomes a repository for how the nation was victimized by the era of military rule.
Among the three sites of memory which Çaylı discusses, Diyarbakir has only recently begun the process of being converted into a museum. Similar to how natural disasters or attacks on religious minorities in the present can trigger memories of violence from the past, seemingly innocuous events in the present recall Diyarbakir’s dark past. When local students were asked to paint the outer walls of the prison with paintings and inspirational quotes from famous artists and writers, former inmates remembered the use of painting as a technology of torture. A common form of punishment for Kurdish prisoners was to force them to paint the walls of the prison with Turkish nationalist slogans and portraits of Turkish national heroes. It was in protest to this use of painting that several inmates secretly stockpiled the flammable elements used to make the paint and self immolated on May 18, 1982. These memories persist not only in the minds of former inmates but through the films, novels, and drawings of artists who survived this experience.
Eray ÇaylıEray Çaylı is Professor of Human Geography with a Focus on Violence and Security in the Anthropocene at the University of Hamburg. He previously spent over a decade at University College London and the London School of Economics. He is the author of Architectures of Emergency in Turkey: Heritage, Displacement and Catastrophe (with Pinar Aykac and Seven Ercan), İklimin Estetiği: Antroposen Sanatı Ve Mimarlığı Üzerine Denemeler (Winner of 2021 Cevdet Kudret Literature Award), and Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past in Turkey.
A few months after his Justice and Development Party or AKP won Turkey’s general elections in 2011, then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on his fellow citizens to confront the past. In the years that followed several prominent sites of state sponsored violence targeting ethnic and religious minorities and former political opponents of the regime were slated to become memorials and museums. What inspired this desire to confront the past? What were these sites of memory? How did the violent histories of these sites complicate these initiatives? These are the questions Professor Eray Çaylı examines in his recent book Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past in Turkey.
The impetus for confronting the past came from several directions. Already a longtime member of the NATO Western military alliance, Turkey’s leadership was interested in benefiting from membership in the expanded European Union. Reckoning with its history of state sponsored violence and adopting more liberal and conciliatory positions toward victimized ethnic and religious minorities would better align Turkey with European norms and expectations. Moreover, many ethnic and religious minorities, such as Kurds and Alevis, had long sought greater rights and recognition within Turkey.
Eray Çaylı looks at three sites in particular that were selected to become museums and memorials. The first was the former Madimak Hotel in Sivas, site of the 1993 arson attack that killed two hotel workers and thirty three guests who had come to Sivas to participate in an annual Alevi cultural festival. The hotel was set aflame by an angry mob while government authorities looked on. The Madimak Hotel was converted into the Science and Cultural Center with a special “Memory Corner” devoted to the incident. The two other sites were both prisons. Ulucanlar Prison in Ankara housed many of the leftist political opponents of the regime during the turbulent 1960s and early 1970s. It was at Ulucanlar that the leaders of the 1968 student movement were hanged. Diyarbakir Prison is located in Turkey’s Kurdish heartland and gained notoriety in the 1980s as the site where Kurdish activists were tortured under the orders of Turkey’s military rulers. Ulucanlar was converted into a museum while Diyarbakir is in the process of becoming a museum.
With his training in architecture and anthropology, Çaylı isn’t just interested in how structures like museums and memorials represent the past or project a vision of the future. Çaylı wants to show how the built environment is layered with history and memory and has the ability to inspire and generate political action. The Madimak Hotel, for example, wasn’t just located in the Alevi heartland of Sivas, the site was also in close proximity to the location where Pir Sultan Abdal, a sixteenth century minstrel and prominent Alevi martyr was executed for refusing to respect Ottoman power. The Alevi cultural festival was named after Pir Sultan Abdal and the violence in Sivas began with attacks on the “Minstrels Monument” placed just outside the festival’s main venue. Holding the festival in Sivas was regarded by many Alevis as the reclaiming of a space infused with historical significance. In much the same way some Alevis regarded the arson attack on the Madimak Hotels as a continuation of a long history of Alevi martyrdom. It is not just the memory of the event but also the layers of history and memory associated with the place that inspire Alevi activists to return to Sivas every year since the attack to preserve the memory of the victims and to fight for Alevi rights and recognition in Turkey.
The book argues that the benchmark against which to appraise commemoration is not the instances of violence and injustice it proclaims to overcome but rather those that exist alongside or within it and are at times even exacerbated by it. Eray Çayli, Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past in Turkey.
Çaylı notes that memories of the past associated with specific sites can also have a transethnic dimension. Hardships and misfortune experienced by one ethnic or religious group in the present can be understood in terms of the suffering of other groups in the past. Sivas and Diyarbakir historically had large Armenian populations and both sites figured prominently in the Armenian genocide. Many public buildings in the heart of Turkey’s capital of Ankara, such as Ulucanlar Prison, are located on land seized during the Armenian genocide. Natural geographic features, such as streams and brooks, still have colloquial names, such as bloody brook or consignment stream, that recall the region’s violent past. Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, or attacks on particular groups like Alevis in the Sivas arson attack, are often understood as the consequence of a dark past coming around again.
Memories of the past can sometimes result in understandings of memorial projects that were not necessarily the intention of the creators. For example, the Madimak Hotel, converted into the Science and Cultural Center, was intentionally left incomplete with entire floors that remained empty. The stated aims of this provisional status were to allow participants to shape the future form, contents, and function of the establishment. In practice, however, the provisional character of the project triggered conspiratorial thinking as many wondered if the true goal was to cater to the interests of the Alevi community. Drawing from a long history of paranoia about foreign threats to Turkish sovereignty stretching back to the Sèvres Treaty following World War I, the unfinished Science Culture Center fueled imaginations about possible Alevi schemes and plots.
Similarly, a long history of seeing the nation through the lens of victimization had an important bearing on the transformation of Ulucanlar Prison into a museum. Former leftist political inmates lobbied for the museum to become a site that would educate visitors about repression of the political left. The local chapter of the Chamber of Architects which became involved in the design of the museum was also determined to preserve the specificity of the experience of the political left at Ulucanlar. In particular, they are wanted to feature the execution at Ulucanlar of the leaders of the 1968 student revolutionary movement. They wanted to show how the regime imprisoned and tortured thousands of activists following the 1980 coup. Lastly, they wanted to highlight the suppression of efforts by prisoners between 1999 and 2000 to protest through hunger strikes against the use of solitary confinement.
In the end, however, the hopes and aspirations of the former inmates and the architects who supported them were swept aside. Local authorities who took control of the project stripped the museum of much of its historical specificity. One section of the prison, deemed to have little historical value, was leveled and replaced with a garden. Bathrooms where prisoners who engaged in hunger strikes were violently beaten were given a facelift that masked their dark past. There was even talk of transforming the isolation cells that triggered the hunger strikes into tourist attractions where visitors could pay for the experience of being locked up.
When it came to the actual inmates we see an equally dramatic rewriting of the story of Ulucanlar. Personal objects of famous prisoners include those of individuals, such as Erdoğan, who never spent time at Ulucanlar. Biographies of former inmates indiscriminately lump together individuals from across the political spectrum. Sound recordings intended to convey conversations between prisoners are devoid of all political content. Photographs of the former 1968 revolutionary student leaders hanged at Ulucanlar are located in the courtyard but without historical or biographical information. Moreover, the gallows, made infamous for their use on the revolutionary student leaders, are put on display behind bars with a sign proclaiming how Turkey, following the end of military rule, abolished capital punishment. By depoliticizing and decontextualizing the past Ulucanlar becomes a repository for how the nation was victimized by the era of military rule.
Among the three sites of memory which Çaylı discusses, Diyarbakir has only recently begun the process of being converted into a museum. Similar to how natural disasters or attacks on religious minorities in the present can trigger memories of violence from the past, seemingly innocuous events in the present recall Diyarbakir’s dark past. When local students were asked to paint the outer walls of the prison with paintings and inspirational quotes from famous artists and writers, former inmates remembered the use of painting as a technology of torture. A common form of punishment for Kurdish prisoners was to force them to paint the walls of the prison with Turkish nationalist slogans and portraits of Turkish national heroes. It was in protest to this use of painting that several inmates secretly stockpiled the flammable elements used to make the paint and self immolated on May 18, 1982. These memories persist not only in the minds of former inmates but through the films, novels, and drawings of artists who survived this experience.
Eray ÇaylıEray Çaylı is Professor of Human Geography with a Focus on Violence and Security in the Anthropocene at the University of Hamburg. He previously spent over a decade at University College London and the London School of Economics. He is the author of Architectures of Emergency in Turkey: Heritage, Displacement and Catastrophe (with Pinar Aykac and Seven Ercan), İklimin Estetiği: Antroposen Sanatı Ve Mimarlığı Üzerine Denemeler (Winner of 2021 Cevdet Kudret Literature Award), and Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past in Turkey.
Through her research on Syria, SOAS, University of London Professor Salwa Ismail argues that violence needs to be understood as a deliberate method of rule. Author of The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria, Ismail cautions us not to reduce regimes that perpetrate heinous human rights violations to despotic, backward, cultures of aggression. Extreme forms of violence, such as torture or massacres, or ordinary forms of policing and surveillance, need to be understood as methods of rule aimed at dehumanizing, debilitating, and crushing the will to resist and dissent. The rule of violence has an enduring effect by using fear and terror to sear itself into the memory of its victims.
The Ba’ath Party has ruled Syria ever since it first seized power in 1963. Among its earliest actions, justified in terms of the need to safeguard the revolutionary goals of the party and because of the state of war with Israel, was to declare a state of emergency. This state of emergency, which would remain in place for the next fifty years, suspended normal rights while granting government authorities extraordinary powers. If suspected of very broadly and often vaguely defined seditious activities, citizens could be summarily arrested without charges and detained for indefinite periods of time. Complementary laws made political forms of association illegal. Gatherings of more than three people could be construed as a crime. It was within the context that the constitution established the Ba’ath Party’s monopoly over political power.
Armed with a wide range of extra-legal powers the primary enemies of the Syrian state were internal more than external. Beginning in the mid-1970s, after Hafez al-Asad seized power, communist and Marxists activists were kidnapped and disappeared. Syrian security forces experienced a dramatic expansion with the creation of a wide range of departments to oversee political, military, and civilian life. A network of prisons ballooned as Syrian authorities pursued a policy of mass interment. Special paramilitary units carried out massacres in cities and villages where critics of the regime resided. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood and their armed offshoot, the Combatant Vanguard, topped the list of official enemies of the state. In 1980, membership in the Muslim Brotherhood became a crime punishable by death.
As the state ramped up its institutions of repression it is more accurate to regard Syria under Hafez al-Asad as existing in a state of perpetual civil war. While Syrians were technically not at war with other Syrians, the government discursively divided the population into patriots and traitors, loyalists and enemies within. The Muslim Brotherhood, which was regarded as the greatest threat to the regime, was cast as a cancer on the nation which had to be cut out and removed. It was this sharp division of the population into the healthy and the diseased that drove the kinds of extreme forms of violence witnessed in other contexts such as Francoist Spain.
The spectacular violence of Hama stoked fears and horrified. Meanwhile, the imposed silence meant that Hama’s horrors loomed large and the menace of more violence inhabited the landscape and its people. Thus, the people lived in anticipation of the massacre, pondering what would make one ready for it, or what could be done to avoid it or forestall it. The ghost of Hama lived on in embodied memories of humiliation – memories that were both constraining and demanding of action. Salwa Ismail, The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria.
Perhaps the most notable example of extreme violence under the regime of Hafez al-Asad occured in the city of Hama. The assault by government forces on the city of Hama in February 1982 was officially a response to an Islamic insurgency. Hama was a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood, membership in which had become a capital offense in 1980. But Hama had an even older history as a site of leftist opposition to the regime. The military assault on Hama, and the massacres that took place across the city, can be understood as a brutal lesson to the rest of the nation of the fate in store for those who opposed the regime.
What made Hama loom even larger as a source of fear in the memory of Syrians was the ambiguity and silence that surrounded it. There was never any official death toll, although the numbers could have been as high as 30,000. Hama was never commemorated or incorporated into official historical accounts of the nation. The massacres at Hama were not even referred to directly by name but rather as “the events of Hama.” It was the unspeakable horror that took place at Hama that seared it into the memory of Syrians. The fear that the government might “do Hama again” served as a powerful and enduring means of constraining resistance and opposition to the regime.
The Syrian prison system also functioned as a tool for reeducating dissidents and opponents of the regime. But rather than operating along the lines of a modern correctional institution, Syrian prisons sought to break the spirit of detainees as a means of eradicating deviant thinking. Torture, malnutrition, exposure to the elements, and array of pychological forms of humiliation and abuse were meant to strip prisoners of their humanity so dissent would become impossible. Tadmur prison, the most infamous of the prisons under Hafez al-Asad, processed at least 20,000 of the 100,000 prisoners incarcerated during this period. The memoirs of former detainees are replete with recollections of bodily and psychological forms of violence inflicted on inmates—some of whom languished at Tadmur for a decade or more.
But in this struggle over the minds and souls of the interned, prisoners devised methods of resistance that allowed them to preserve their humanity. In some cases prisoners fashioned ordinary implements denied by the prison out of whatever was available to them. In others, younger prisoners might volunteer for duties that exposed them to physical violence as a way of shielding older, more vulnerable detainees. Memory functioned as an important means of retaining one’s humanity, even under the most dire circumstances. Prisoners memorized the layout of their cells or the details of an ordinary day. Prisoners condemned to execution left wills and donated what little they had while other prisons remembered them through funerary rites.
Civilian life under the Asads bore many resemblances to the universe of the incarcerated. Constant shortages of basic goods made precarity a pronounced feature of everyday life. Syrians who recalled living through the 1980s and 1990s often explained their struggle to make ends meet and the exhaustion it entailed as the reasons why resistance to the regime was impossible. With watchers everywhere, from baby sitters to bakery owners, it was necessary to be constantly vigilant about not saying or revealing anything compromising about oneself or others. Developing a finely tuned interpersonal radar to detect who might be in service of the myriad state security departments became a question of survival.
The 2011 uprising was sometimes cast as a revolution against their parents’ generation. This was because of the powerful memories of how parents tried to discourage their children from doing anything that might ensnare them in the tentacles of the security state. Better to blend it, or to “walk along the wall,” as the colloquial expression went, than stand out and be singled out by the authorities. Families, and fathers in particular, were remembered as a constraining factor and an impediment to their children taking a stand against the regime. Authoritarian fathers were blamed for reinforcing a “culture of obedience.”
It was the resentment of the culture of fear and silence that played a major role in sparking the 2011 uprising. But despite years of civil war and the exodus of millions of Syrians, little has changed. The regime of Bachir al-Asad ended the state of emergency but only as a superficial concession. The security state remains firmly in place and an even greater number of Syrians are subjected to the expansive system of prisons and detention centers. Saydnaya Military Prison has replaced Tadmur as the state’s most infamous site of detention and violence. The Ba’th Party continues to dominate political life. The rule of violence remains the primary modality of the government of Syria.
Salwa IsmailSalwa Ismail is Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London. She is the author of Rethinking Islamist Politics: Culture, the State and Islamism, Political Life in Cairo's New Quarters: Encountering the Everyday State, Rethinking Islamist Politics: Culture, the State and Islamism, and The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria.
In October 1967 Nigerian federal troops slaughtered hundreds of innocent civilians in the town of Asaba. Elizabeth Bird, anthropologist and Professor Emerita at the University of South Florida, argues that the Asaba massacre wasn’t just one of the many atrocities committed during the Nigerian Civil War. It was a pivotal event that prolonged a conflict that claimed over a million lives. What were the causes of the Asaba Massacre? How did it prolong the war? How did it affect the lives of the people of Asaba and how it has been remembered? Liz Bird, co-author with Fraser Ottanelli of The Asaba Massacre: Trauma, Memory, and the Nigerian Civil War, provides answers to these questions.
Prior to the age of European expansion there was no Nigeria. From the late fifteenth century, when the Portuguese first arrived in West Africa, the region consisted of various kingdoms with hundreds of different ethnic groups. It was the British who consolidated what became Nigeria into an administrative unit beginning in the late nineteenth century. When the process was complete, in 1914, Nigeria was composed of two regions with very different histories and populations. The northern region was predominantly Muslim with historic trading ties to the Muslim world. The British governed northern Nigeria through a policy of indirect rule, leaving in place traditional rulers while retaining ultimate power. In the north the British banned missionary work and Western educational institutions. The southern region was predominantly non-Muslim and was exposed for a longer period of time to European traders, missionaries, and Western education. The Igbo, who resided in the south, were more receptive to Western culture and became the most educated segment of Nigerian society. As the British transitioned from empire to self rule, the Igbo were best positioned to dominate openings in the civil service, trade, and white collar professions.
When independence finally came in 1960, Nigeria was torn by ethnic suspicions and resentments. Further fueling sentiments of distrust was the Federal parliamentary structure the British put in place before their departure. The Northern Region represented roughly half the population and dominated the Federal parliament. The largely Igbo Eastern Region, the mixed ethnic Midwestern Region, and the Western Region encompassed the remainder of the population. Corruption, violence, and political instability characterized the opening years of Nigerian independence. In early 1966 a group of primarily Igbo officers (Igbo dominated the officier class) seized power in a coup proclaiming their goal of ending corruption, instability, and racial strife. But by murdering a number of top Northern officials, including the prime minister, the coup leaders only inflamed ethnic fears of an Igbo desire to seize power. The coup ended up triggering ethnic riots or pogroms, mostly in the Northern Region, targeting Igbo people. Major General Aguiyi Ironsi, an Igbo installed in power after the coup, was himself overthrown and murdered a few months later and replaced by Lieutenant-Colonel Yakubu Gowon, from what was hoped to be a less controversial ethnic group. Gowan was unable to stem the violence which claimed as many as 30,000 Igbo lives and led to an exodus of over a million Igbo from the Western and Northern Regions to the largely Eastern Igbo Region.
In May 1967 the military governor of the Eastern Region, Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, decided the Igbo were no longer safe in Nigeria. Convinced that the Eastern Region had the human and material resources to become a viable nation, Ojukwu proclaimed the Eastern Region to be the independent Republic of Biafra in May 1967. Unwilling to tolerate the breakup of Nigeria, especially the oil rich region of Biafra, Gowan ordered federal troops into Biafra in July 1967. After some initial gains which federal forces were unable to consolidate, Biafrans made the bold move of deciding to go on the offensive by attacking West through the Midwestern Region. Biafran troops made it as far as the outskirts of the Western Region capital of Lagos. It was at this point that hastily reinforced federal troops pushed Biafran forces all the way back across the Niger River that separates the Eastern and the Midwestern Regions. To secure their retreat Biafran forces destroyed the recently constructed Niger Bridge, leaving federal troops frustrated across the river in early October 1967 in the Midwestern town of Asaba, officially part of Nigeria.
Bird and Ottanelli note that while the Asaba Massacre is commemorated and commonly recounted as a singular event that occured on October 7th, the killings actually began as soon as Federal Troops reached Asaba. On October 6th Federal troops searched and ransacked homes, extorted money, detained and murdered Asaban men and boys accused of being Biafran collaborators—a common but unfounded charge. In some instances soldiers had lists of senior civil servants from Benin who sought refuge in Asaba. In other cases the violence was random, striking those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. A group of boys playing soccer, for instance, were forced to dig their own graves, and summarily shot. Several hundred people were killed throughout the town that day.
It was in reaction to the bloodletting on October 6th that the elders of Asaba gathered that evening to formulate a strategy to end the violence. They settled on a plan that had worked in other Midwestern towns. They would organize an official procession the next day, with participants encouraged to wear akwa ocha, ceremonial white garments signifying peace. Headed by town dignitaries, they would carry signs proclaiming their loyalty to “One Nigeria.” The procession would offer a demonstration of respect and loyalty to Nigeria and would dispel suspicions that Asabans, who were predominantly Igbo, were supporters of Eastern Igbo in Biafra.
While many refused to participate in the procession, hundreds did, encouraged by the pleas of town elders to join. As many as 4,000 eventually paraded along a route following Nnebisi Road through the center of town. Flanked by soldiers on both sides, some participants were randomly pulled from the procession and shot. When they reached the corner of Ogbogonogo and Ogbeke markets, the women and young boys were separated from the men. The large-scale killings began with groups designated for execution. The violence quickly escalated to a full scale massacre when troops carrying and using machine guns mounted on vehicles opened fire on the remaining men and boys. The exact number of victims remains unknown, Bird and Ottanneli suggest somewhere between 700 and 800.
The international press failed to cover the Asaba Massacre. When The Times of London finally published a feature story months later in 1968, it diminished the significance of the violence as an aberration triggered by Asaban attacks on federal troops. Archival records uncovered by Bird and Ottanelli reveal that British authorities, the main backers and arms suppliers to the Nigerian government, were well aware of the violence. They were especially alarmed by the insubordinate and unpredictable conduct of Colonel Murtala Muhammad, in command of the Second Division, which occupied Asaba and played the leading role in the massacre. However, British authorities were even more preoccupied by the interests of British companies such as Shell and BP in the oil riches of Eastern Nigeria and the Delta region. Determined to avoid a public relations problem, British authorities were not supportive of press coverage that might reveal the crimes of the Nigerian military. Moreover, the British government failed to use its influence to bring a halt to the unrestrained violence of Nigerian troops toward civilian populations.
Bird and Ottanelli argue that the failure of the international press and the British government to condemn the massacre had serious repercussions. Completely undeterred, Nigerian troops went on to commit additional war crimes that claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians. Most importantly, the government of Biafra circulated the news of the violence as a powerful means of convincing Igbos that the Nigerian government’s true aim was the complete and total annihilation of the Igbo population. It was the fear of what federal troops would do if they won the war that kept Biafran forces fighting for over two more years in what Liz Bird argues was a hopeless conflict. Encircled and cut off from outside sources of supply, it was starvation and disease that transformed Biafra into a humanitarian catastrophe with a death toll of 1-2 million.
We argue that the deaths in Asaba did have meaning, and that there is value in reinscribing uncomfortable histories into a nation’s sanctioned memory, acknowledging the lingering legacy of injustice and contributing to meaningful reconciliation. S. Elizabeth Bird and Fraser Ottanelli, The Asaba Massacre: Trauma, Memory, and the Nigerian Civil War. For the people of Asaba the impact of the massacre lasted for generations. Igbo culture, Bird and Ottanelli explain, is patriarchal and patrilineal. Men play the leading role in both the community and within their families. The massacre decimated the ranks of many of the most senior and accomplished men in Asaba. Brothers who might normally assist the wives and children of a deceased brother were too few in number to respond to the overwhelming need. Entire life fortunes of once successful families were reversed by the massacre. Sons and daughters who might otherwise have earned professional degrees never attended or had to leave school to help support their families. Deprived of all traditional support, mothers had to assume traditionally male roles as heads of families.
Asaba native Robert Uriah moved with his wife Veronica to the town of Kano in northern Nigeria where he became a successful tailor. Ify, one of Robert’s ten children born in Kano, recalled the family’s comfortable life with servants and driver who took her to school. Abasa was a summer holiday destination until the pogroms convinced Robert to flee to Asaba with his family. Robert, together with his sons Paul and Emma, were killed in the massacre while a third son was seriously wounded. In addition to those killed in her immediate family, 49 year old Veronica lost nine more members of her extended family. Determined to see her children succeed, Veronica became a trader and was able to put all of her surviving children through school.
Men represented the largest numbers of Asabans killed during the massacre and much of the memorialization has been devoted to men. The names on the privately funded cenotaph devoted to the massacre are mostly men and mostly prominent members of the community. As such the cenotaph recalls the very real impact of the massacre on the community. However, it fails to convey the ways in which women picked up the pieces and helped families survive, and in some cases, as with the Uriah family, even prosper. It also overlooks the victimization of the many women raped or abandoned with the children of federal troops—children regarded as a stain on the purity of the community and a malediction contributing to the decline of Asaba.
The official policy of the Nigerian government has been to move on and forget the memory of the civil war. After the conclusion of the fighting, the name of Biafra was erased from the map and the war was largely left out of the school curriculum. Even the end of military rule in 1999 and over two decades of civilian government have done little to integrate the civil war into the national memory. In the case of Asaba’s eastern Igbo cousins across the Niger River, the failure to confront the past only compounds sentiments of bitterness and frustration. While the Nigerian government promised to promote peace and reconciliation, the policies it pursued stripped the Igbo population of much of their wealth, land, and jobs.
However, several developments contributed to a memory boom in Nigeria. First, was the 1994 publication of Emmanuel Okocha’s Blood on the Niger. Written by a journalist whose father died in the massacre, Blood on the Niger shattered the silence about the massacre. Second, in 1999, the return to civilian government inspired the creation of the Oputa Panel to look at crimes and abuses of power committed in Nigeria since independence. Although the Oputa Panel ultimately unraveled in acriminony and never published its findings, it did hold televised hearings that conveyed little known histories to a national audience. Among these histories was the story of the Abasa Massacre. Third, was the creation of the internet which gave Nigerians, especially those in the diaspora, a new outlet to discuss previously neglected histories.
While new online forums have helped shed light on previously silenced histories, they have also distorted the historical record and inflamed passions. It was precisely because of the misuses and abuses of the past online that Liz Bird decided to share her work on the web. She posted a video documentary on Vimeo entitled Most Vulnerable Nigerians: The Legacy of the Asaba Massacres. She wrote the Wikipedia entry on the Asaba Massacre. The website, The Asaba Memorial Project, includes links to these resources, articles written by Bird and Ottanelli, and additional suggested readings on the Nigerian Civil War. The site offers an account of the civil war and the massacre complete with maps, photos, and video extracts of first hand accounts. The site also contains information on the collaboration between University of South Florida faculty and the people of Assaba on commemorative events, including the 50th anniversary of the Asaba Massacre in 2017. The Asaba Memorial Project is an invaluable resource for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of what happened in Asaba during the Nigerian Civil War and the efforts to commemorate the massacre.
The ongoing challenge for the people of Asaba is how to remember and commemorate the massacre in ways that promote peace, justice, and reconciliation. This is especially difficult within an increasingly acrimonious environment in Nigeria. From Boko Haram to the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, the emergence of Biafran separatist movements are among the many centrifugal forces that now tear at the seams of Nigeria. While the Igbo of Asaba share many of the resentments of their Eastern cousins, they have no desire to support the cause of separatism. The collaboration with Bird, Ottanelli, and the faculty at the University of South Florida is part of the process of achieving a better understanding and documenting what happened in Asaba as a basis for future legal action. But in contrast with Biafra, Bird and Ottanelli argue that memorialization efforts in Asaba are geared toward reconciliation. They are based on the conviction that the only way to overcome the divisions of the present and to move toward a more united future is through an honest accounting of the past. It is incumbent upon academics, as Bird and Ottanelli have demonstrated, to play a part in this process.**
**I would like to thank Liz Bird for sharing and allowing me to use photos of the Asaba Massacre cenotaph and the Uriah family in Kano. I would also like to thank Liz for allowing me to use images from the Asaba Memorial Project website on the podcast social media sites. Liz Bird's essay, "Stories from the Forgotten War," recently placed at the International Human Rights Arts Festival.
S. Elizabeth BirdLiz Bird is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. She is author of For Enquiring Minds: A Cultural Study of Supermarket Tabloids, The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World, Surviving Biafra: A Niger Wife's Story (with Rosina Umelo), and The Asaba Massacre: Trauma, Memory, and the Nigerian Civil War (with Fraser M. Ottanelli)
In Memory and Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda, Tim Longman argues that the memory of the genocide has been instrumentalized by the long-ruling Rwandan Patriot Front or RPF. By casting itself as the selfless liberator of the Tusti minority, the RPF has used the genocide to mask its own crimes, abuses of power, and political ambitions. Showcasing the horrors of the genocide at commemorative sites helps the RPF to justify its own brand of authoritarian rule. Suspicious and distrustful of both the Hutu majority and Tutsi minority, the RPF’s top down approach to governance has failed to move the country beyond its deeply rooted ethnic divisions. When Tim attended a commemoration at a place called Murambi in 1996, two years after the genocide, he was shocked by what he witnessed. Murambi was a school, still under construction at the time of the genocide. Drawn to the site by false promises of shelter and protection, as many as 5,000 Tutsis were murdered at Murambi. As director of the Human Rights Watch office in Rwanda, Tim was one of many dignitaries from around the globe to attend the commemoration. What he witnessed were the remains of bodies, covered in lime to prevent their decomposition, carefully placed on display around the school. Some rooms featured skulls, other rooms featured the bones of children, there was even the remains of a women with a stick placed between her legs to convey how women were also subjected to rape. What unsettled Tim was how the bodies at Murambi, in complete disregard for the wishes of the victims’ families or traditional Rwandan burial practices, were used to shock visitors with the violence of the genocide. The bodies Tim witnessed were eventually buried in a mass memorial grave at the site but other bodies found in the region were brought to replace them. Tim notes that the 1996 commemoration at Murambi was still an early stage in the politics of memory in Rwanda. In the years since, this use of bodies at other genocide commemoration sites around the country has become a more standardized means of anchoring the memory of the horror of the genocide, the victimization of the Tutsi minority, the responsibility of the Hutu majority, the failure of the international community to react, and the savior role of the RPF in ending the genocide. Beyond the use of bodies to shock and horrify, commemorative sites distort the past by inflating the number of dead. Whereas some 5,000 lives were lost at Murambi the number of dead has risen over time to as many as 50,000. Perhaps the most blatant example of this inflation of the dead is the Kigali Genocide Memorial. Site of an ultra modern, high tech museum devoted to the genocide, and an obligatory stop for international dignitaries, the Kigali Genocide Memorial also proclaims to be the final resting place for over 250,000 victims of the genocide. But according to an official census in 1991 the entire population of Kigali was 234,000 and only a minority were Tutsi. Moreover, much of the population fled the capital after the start of the genocide. Tim concludes that while there may be 250,000 buried at the Kigali Memorial it is not at all clear who they are and who killed them. A crucial purpose of the genocide memorials and commemorations is to reinforce the centrality of the genocide to Rwandan history. With memorials present in most communities, people are regularly reminded of the genocide. Tutsi, particularly repatriés, are reminded of the peril that they face as a minority group, while Hutu are reminded of the atrocities for which they are responsible and that explain their need to remain silent and accept RPF rule. The pointed refusal publicly to commemorate those killed by the RPF sends a message that these deaths, while perhaps unfortunate, are not socially meaningful. The erasure of the physical traces of RPF massacres underlines the government's rhetoric about the historical insignificance of deaths outside the genocide as accidental and non-systematic, and thus not worth remembering. Timothy Longman, Memory and Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda. To fully grasp the particular dynamics of the memory work in Rwanda it is important to recognize the refugee roots of the RPF. Most of the leaders of the RPF, including long-time ruler Paul Kagame, grew up in Tusti refugee communities outside of Rwanda. Thousands of Tutsis were driven into exile in the 1960s and 1970s in response to the ethnic violence and discriminatory policies of the Hutu led government that seized power in Rwanda in 1959. The RPF was created in Southern Uganda, home to Paul Kagame and many of the RPF elite. It was in Uganda that Paul Kagame and Fred Rwigyema, founder of the RPF, joined a rebel movement in the 1980s, led by Yoweri Museveni, that successfully toppled the government of Uganda and put Museveni in power—where he still remains president. Kagame became Museveni’s first head of security in Uganda. It was the experience and confidence gained in Uganda that inspired the RPF’s efforts to invade Rwanda in 1990. Following Rwigyema’s murder, under mysterious circumstances at the start of the conflict, Kagame became the head of RPF forces and led them to victory in 1994. Rwigyema is now considered a national hero and is buried at the Hero’s Cemetery in Kigali. While the RPF casts its intervention in Rwandan as a selfless act aimed at ending the genocide and saving the Tutsi minority, Tim argues that the real motive was power. Moreover, this act of military aggression lent greater credence to the genocidal rhetoric of the Rwandan regime and helped fuel the violence. The tendency, especially in the West, to conflate the genocide in Rwanda with the Holocaust, ignores the fact the while some 500,000 died in the genocide the RPF killed 100,000 to 200,000 in its invasion of Rwanda and its later military intervention in Congo. Because the RFP was outside of Rwanda during the genocide, Tim believes that it lacks a real understanding of what actually happened. He argues that the RPF regards both Tutsis and Hutus who remained in Rwanda with a considerable degree of distrust and suspicion. Tutsis are held suspect because of doubts about what they may have done to survive the genocide. Did they betray their own? Did they prostitute themselves? Hutus are regarded as a genocidal population who wholeheartedly embraced the rhetoric of hate and both willingly and actively participated in the slaughter of the Tutsi population. Tim notes that this skewed perception of the Hutu majority ignores the fact that most Hutus didn’t participate in the genocide and those who did, did so for a variety of reasons, many of which had nothing to do with ethnic hatred. Convinced that Hutu hatred of Tutsis was driven by a false historical narrative, the RPF crafted a new narrative. Tim notes that while this new narrative was less harmful, it also lacks historical veracity. While the old narrative overstated the rigidity and significance of ethnic identities in Rwanda, the new narrative understates them as having little or no real grounding in Rwandan history. Similarly, by casting the Hutu seizure of power in 1959 as the first genocide in Rwanda, the new narrative ignores legitimate Hutu grievances at being disenfranchised by the colonial regime and reduced to second class status. The new narrative, in its quest to erase the significance of ethnic identities, fails to confront the reality of Tutsi collaboration with a colonial regime which gave them a privileged status while discriminating against Hutus. Moreover, the new narrative casts all of Rwandan history as leading inexorably toward the genocide, ignoring long periods of peaceful relations between Hutus and Tutsis and how the genocide was really a desperate effort to bolster the declining popularity of a long ruling regime. Forgetting, Tim reminds us, is just as important as remembering in the construction of national narratives. Tim offers several examples of this in the Rwandan case. The first is the home of Grégoire Kayibanda, first president of Rwanda. Deposed in 1973, Kayibanda spent his remaining days in his house just outside of Kigali. After the RPF seized power in 1994 the house was allowed to fall into disrepair as a reminder that Kayibanda’s Hutu nationalist and anti-Tutsi policies were anathema in the new Rwanda. The second is Kibeho, where the RPF massacred 2,000 to 4,000 internally displaced people (IDP) in April 1995 in their efforts to close IDP camps around the country. Although well-documented and witnessed by a number of outside observers, there is nothing at Kibeho to memorialize those massacred by the RPF. However, there are memorials at the site devoted to the victims of the genocide who also died there. Similarly, there has been no effort by the RPF to memorialize the thousands of Hutus who were killed when the RPF attacked remnants of the former Rwandan military mixed with innocent civilians at refugee camps along the Congo border with Rwanda. While it is right to commemorate the genocide, Tim remarks that many Hutu feel that they have no right to commemorate Hutu lives lost to RPF violence. Beginning with the end of apartheid rule in South Africa the idea that transitional justice should entail some process of truth and reconciliation has gained greater support. In the Rwandan case there was much optimism that gacaca courts could facilitate the airing of past grievances in ways that would help the country move toward a more peaceful future. It was precisely because gacaca courts were based on a traditional form of local justice that they seemed to offer an ideal means of opening a constructive dialogue about the past. In the end, however, Tutsi victims were afraid to press changes in the absence of the protection of a family support system that no longer existed after the genocide. Moreover, few Hutu were willing to confess to crimes beyond property theft. Although most convictions were based on property theft, those convicted were still labeled as participants in the genocide and excluded from jobs in local government. Because gacaca courts ended up trying and convicting over one million Hutu men, they effectively labeled the majority of Hutu as perpetrators and Tutsi, by extension, as victims. The frustration caused by this anchoring of the Hutu/Tutsi, perpetrator/victim divide was compounded by the fact that the RPF also banned the use of ethnic labels making it impossible to discuss the true complexity of what happened during the genocide. The United Nations did create an International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in late 1994. The ICTR was effective in bringing to justice many of the top leaders of the genocidal regime and preventing the formation of a rival government in absentia. While the jurisdiction of the court included all crimes against humanity committed during the genocide, no charges were brought against the RPF. When Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte considered doing so, the RPF was able to pressure the United Nations into forcing her dismissal. Tim notes justice did come from the creation of the ICTR but it was partial justice at best. Tim adds that what transitional justice often ignores is what most victims really want. Transitional justice is typically a top down process imposed by international or political elites without any real consultation with victimized populations. In the case of Rwanda, what most people wanted were reparations to help rebuild their lives. With the loss of family support systems, and often property and possessions, the genocide impoverished Tutsis in Rwanda. Perhaps the greatest failure of the court system was a grossly insufficient response to the dire economic straits of Tutsis in post-genocide Rwanda. The RPF has been very effective in attracting international investment and using this money to bring about many positive changes in Rwanda. Dramatic improvements in the health care and education systems have lowered child malnutrition and increased adult literacy. Urban renewal programs have transformed the capital of Kigali into a city with paved streets, brick sidewalks, fountains, glass towers, shopping and entertainment districts. Inspired by the Political Action Party which transformed Singapore from a third to first world nation, the RPF has high hopes that far sighted economic planning will lift all Rwandans causing economic divisions to fade over time. In practice, however, what we see is the same top down approach applied to economic planning and development. In the absence of trust or confidence in the people, decisions are made from above with little or no consultation. Most people just go along because they feel they have no choice or are afraid of the repercussions of not doing so. Beneath the surface, Tim remarks, there is very real discontent. Because of the high degree of securitization, Tim doesn’t believe that an outbreak of violence is likely in Rwanda, but he argues that many Rwandans are dissatisfied that their voices are not being heard. There is a deepening conviction and resentment that most of the wealth created by the RPF is going to a small Tutsi elite with origins in the refugee community. Timothy LongmanTimothy Longman is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Pardee School of Global Studies. He his Professor of Political Science and International Relations and Director of CURA, the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at Boston University. He is the author of Proxy Targets: Civilians in the War in Burundi, The Healing of Memories: African Christian Responses to Politically Induced Trauma, Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda, and Memory and Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda.
The bones of the tens of thousands of victims of the Franco regime buried in mass graves throughout Spain are now telling their stories. Nicole Iturriaga, author of Exhuming Violent Histories: Forensics, Memory, and Rewriting Spain’s Past, chronicles the rise of the international forensics human rights movement and how it is helping to shatter the silence about the crimes of the Spanish Civil War and Franco era. Building on a movement originating in Argentina, organizations like the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain (ARMH), are using the power of forensic science to reveal the crimes of the past and to foster openness and reconciliation in the present.
The Spanish Civil War stemmed from a backlash to modernization efforts by the newly created Republican regime during the early 1930s. Efforts to implement a range of progressive measures, from land reform and wealth redistribution to divorce and legalized abortion, were deeply unsettling to the aristocratic elite and the Catholic Church which traditionally dominated Spanish society. Growing tensions caused by the drive to transform Spain into a modern democratic republic were even more volatile in light of Spain’s long history of military coups. It was precisely because of the fear of a military coup that Republican authorities relegated conservative generals, like Francisco Franco, to assignments outside Spain in Spanish Morocco.
It was from Spanish Morocco, with the support of Moroccan troops, that Franco launched his attack on the Second Republic. The zeal of Franco and the right-wing generals who backed the coup, was reminiscent of the Middle Ages and the reconquest of Spain from the Muslim Moors. In fact, they used the code word Covadonga for the rebellion, a direct reference to the reconquest. The generals viewed the Republic as a leftist cancer on the nation which needed to be cut out, at whatever cost, from the body politic.
The cost was significant. Massacres took place all over the countries—even where Franco’s forces met little resistance. Anyone deemed to have a progressive background—from Freemasons and teachers in a Montessori school to members of a Rotary club or peasants learning how to read—could be targeted for murder. Union members and large numbers of teachers were imprisoned then executed. Many were tortured, stabbed, or thrown to their deaths from buildings and bridges. Most were buried in unmarked mass graves scattered throughout the country. Between 114,000 and 140,000 died in extrajudicial killings.
Both during and well after the civil war, women of the left were singled out for especially cruel forms of violence. Unknown numbers of women were raped in prison, allowed to give birth before being executed, then had their babies placed with conservative families. The decades-long history of baby stealing in Spain began with the theories of Nazi trained Antonio Vallejo-Nájera, chief psychiatrist for the army, who believed that the Marxist “red gene” could be transmitted from parents to children. Placing these children with healthy conservative families was thought to be a remedy for the defect. In addition, women were subjected to a variety of gendered forms of violence and humiliation including having their heads shaved, being forced to drink castor oil and forced to walk through town centers while defecating on themselves.
Holes are being opened in the silence. May this hole begin to pierce that silence. And may the sounds of what happened during those years arise. Emilio Silva from Unearthing the Truth about Spain’s mass graves.
Even after the fighting ended, as many as 20,000 were sentenced and condemned to execution by military kangaroo courts. Some 400,000 more were given prison sentences that, in some cases, lasted decades. From canals to dams, many of Spain’s post war infrastructure projects were built with forced labor taken from the ranks of these Republican prisoners. The Valley of the Fallen, Franco’s grandiose mausoleum and monument to the civil war war dead, was built with forced laborers, many of whom died during the construction. To escape these reprisals, over 400,000 Republican and Republican sympathizers fled the country.
In the years after the civil war former Republicans were reduced to second class citizens. They were denied certain kinds of jobs and many had had their businesses and property confiscated. The Franco regime waged a form of psychic war on the former Republicans. National holidays were transformed into victory festivals used to anchor the memory of Republican treachery and betrayal. Families of the victims were denied all forms of commemoration or mourning. Widows were denied death certificates making it impossible for them to remarry. While the surviving family members of the nationalist dead received pensions and jobs, the widows and children of Republican dead received nothing. Beyond being perpetually shamed and humiliated as Rojos or Reds, most Republicans were reduced to poverty.
The government dominated the narrative of the civil war. In public school students were taught that the civil war was a Crusade and a war of liberation. Government buildings across the nation became sites of memory used to reinforce the victor’s narrative. Scrolls with the names of nationalists dead were inscribed on the walls of public buildings. All Spanish churches added the name of right wing hero, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, on their walls. Some even incorporated the Falangist flag into their stained glass windows. The largest Francoists moment was the Valley of the Fallen. A massive mausoleum that houses the bodies of 30,000 civil war dead. It includes a basilica, a monastery, and 150 meter high cross (492 feet) built by 20,000 Republican forced laborers—many of whom died during the construction.
When Franco died in 1975, two years after his chosen military successor was assassinated, Spain began a three year transition to democracy that ended in 1978 with the drafting of a new constitution. Fear of a coup and return to military rule were real and rampant throughout this period. The El Abrazo (the Hug) monument in Madrid commemorates the four lawyers and a trade unionist linked to the Communist Party of Spain who were assassinated by a fascist gunman on 24 January 1977. In 1981, military officers attempted a coup in which 150 soldiers of the Guardia Civil occupied and held members of Spain’s Congress of Deputies hostage for 22 hours.
In light of the extreme instability of the period and the fragile nature of the new democracy, both the political left and right decided to extend a general amnesty for all past crimes associated with the Franco regime. The Pact of Forgetting (pacto del olvido) was regarded for many years as the gold standard for regimes transitioning from authoritarian rule to democracy. An emphasis on truth and reconciliation and transitional justice did not come until years later, following the wars in the former Yugoslavia and after the end of apartheid in South Africa in the mid-1990s. However, rather than simply forgiving and forgetting, this pact perpetuated the fears and silence of the Franco years.
Everything began to change in the 1990s due to two developments—the international universal jurisdiction law and the international forensics human rights movement. The international universal jurisdiction law had its roots in the immediate postwar period and efforts to establish a legal response to the horrors of the Holocaust. Universal jurisdiction is based on the conviction that some crimes are so grave that they transcend international borders—war crimes, torture, crimes against humanity, piracy, hijacking, terrorism, etc…Universal jurisdiction gives domestic courts the right to initiate and pursue criminal cases against persons or regimes beyond their borders. It was through the recourse to universal jurisdiction, for example, that the state of Israel prosecuted the former high ranking Nazi official, Adolf Eichmann, for his role in the Holocaust. Universal jurisdiction, however, was not widely used until the 1990s, following the end of the Cold War.
In Spain, it was judge Baltasar Garzón who used universal jurisdiction, in 1998, to call for the extradition and trial of former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet, then receiving medical treatment in England, was charged with the disappearance of thousands of Chileans and several Spanish citizens. However, the perceived hypocrisy of attempting to prosecute a foreign dictator while ignoring crimes at home triggered outrage in Spain. It was at this point that the Spanish citizens began to more actively challenge the official policy of silence about the past.
The international forensics human rights movement had its roots in Argentina following the collapse of the military dictatorship in 1983. Victims groups, and most importantly, the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Maya, demanded information about the over 30,000 “disappeared” by the military dictatorship. The transitional government invited forensic scientist Clyde Snow, who had made his name for identifying the skull of the infamous Nazi scientist Joseph Mengele, to form a forensic science team in Argentina. Snow established the Argentine Forensic Science Anthropology Team known better as EAAF after its Spanish acronym. The EAAF would used DNA blood testing to reveal that the military dictatorship had stolen hundreds of babies from their murdered mothers. This was the first time that forensic science was used to challenge and shatter an official narrative and reshape the collective memory of state terror. By the 1990s the EAAF had worked in over forty countries, participated in a number of truth commissions, and set up other teams in countries like Guatemala, Cyprus, and Peru.
The convergence of the rise of the international forensics human rights movement and universal jurisdiction in Spain happened through the person of Emilio Silva. Silva was a journalist who was outraged about Spain initiating a criminal case against Pinochet but doing nothing in response to its own Francoist past. As a journalist he used his platform to write an article entitled “My Grandfather too was a Desaparecido (disappeared person).” He was later contacted by a forensic anthropologist who offered to help locate the remains of his grandfather. After finding the bones of his grandfather in 2000, along with the remains of twelve other victims in the shared mass grave, Silva together with Santiago Macias, went on to found the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH).
Using the methods developed in Argentina and with EAAF support, ARMH would go on to become one the leading drivers of the historical memory recovery movement in Spain. By embedding herself within the ARMH, Nicole Iturriaga offers unique insights into their memory work. She divides her findings into three parts. The first reveals how ARMH uses its fieldwork to attract local participants and to encourage and facilitate the sharing of difficult stories. Second, she shows how ARMH excavation sites become mobile classrooms that use science as an apolitical tool to expose the crimes of the past. Third, she discusses how homage and reburial ceremonies for the recovered victims and their families offer a means of truth and reconciliation that get amplified and conveyed to larger audiences through the media.
Nicole fitting entitles her chapter on ARMH excavation sites as a “Scientific Trojan Horse.” ARMH only goes to communities after first being invited by victims’ families then doing the historical and archival research to identify the birth and death dates and possible location of the remains. After posting announcements in local papers, ARMH teams use their excavation sites to spark interest and curiosity as a means of drawing and implicating local participants. Everything from the safety vests with ARMH logos to the special tools and equipment used by the site workers are meant to entice and invite onlookers. Anyone who does approach the site is welcomed and encouraged to ask questions. Moreover, large standing posters display the pictures of the victims and explain the work of ARMH. It is this Trojan Horse strategy of drawing crowds that encourages and helps locals to feel safe enough to share stories they may have never told beyond their family circle.
Once visitors gather at the excavation site ARMH specialists offer impromptu classes. Classes are used to cast the work of ARMH within a depoliticized framework by stressing that the aim of the association is to give families closure. The right to grieve and bury the dead is regarded as a universal right that transcends politics. Rather than trying to impart a pre-established narrative, the classes convey how the tools of forensic science simply reveal the causes of death—tools that have much credibility due the popularity of CSI dramas. However, visible proof of a bullet hole in a skull or an earring and a hair pin still resting on the skeletal remains of a head are a powerful means of letting the dead tell the story of the gruesome and indiscriminate nature of past violence. Given the sensitivity of this past there are always those who will denounce efforts to open unhealed wounds. Yet the objectives and methods used by ARMH help them initiate long overdue conversations among all parties in the former conflict.
While the details of homage and burial ceremonies are left to the family members of the victims, both are an important part of the work of ARMH. Homage and burial ceremonies are a means of reclaiming the names and identities of those who were erased by the Franco regime. By voicing and reincorporating these names and lives into their communities and into the narrative of the nation, ARMH plays an instrumental role in breaking the silence of the past. In many instances these ceremonies are reported and communicated to larger audiences by the media. Media coverage not only amplifies the work of ARMH but the choice of words such as victim or murder and the use of active rather than passive voice helps lift the shame and burden long placed on the victims and their families. Finally, homage ceremonies give local authorities the opportunity to air views about the past. In some instances, Nicole was surprised to witness how members of conservative parties historically inclined to maintain the pact of silence, voiced their sorrow for the suffering and pain caused by past violence. The expression of these sentiments offered the closest substitute to date for an official apology to the victims and their families.
Nicole concludes her book by highlighting how we cannot fully understand the work of ARMH without taking into account its connections to transnational networks. She uses the case of Timoteo Mendieta Alcalá to make this point. Timoteo was a local union president and one of the thousands tried and executed by the Franco regime after the civil war and buried in a mass grave. Seventy four year later, Argentinean Judge Maria Servini de Cubría recorded the testimony of Timoteo’s then eighty-seven-year-old daughter Ascensión, along with 150 other testimonies, and initiated a case against the Franco regime for a long list of crimes ranging from torture to the stealing of babies. It was through the relentless work of Juge de Cubría that Spanish courts finally gave permission to exhume the body of Timoteo—the first time in history, Nicole notes, that Spanish authorities complied with the decision of a foreign magistrate to exhume a victim of Francoist violence. The case of Timoteo reveals both the power of the international law of universal jurisdiction and transnational advocacy networks to shed light on difficult national pasts.
Spanish authorities did pass a historical memory law in 2007 but it lacked teeth. It didn’t revoke the 1977 amnesty law and didn’t not require the state to take responsibility for identifying and exhuming the bodies of the victims of the Franco regime. It did offer limited funds for exhumation efforts which contributed to over 9,000 bodies being exhumed between 2000 and the writing of Nicole’s book. However, larger crises, Nicole notes, undercut efforts by the state to pursue more aggressive memory strategies. The housing crisis of 2008, for instance, caused so much hardship that it derailed earlier aims of the government to remove fascist symbols from across the country. After Franco’s body was exhumed from the Valley of the Fallen in October, 2019, covid struck the following year once against sidelining plans for more aggressive memory initiatives.
In recent weeks the Socialist government of Spain has taken dramatic steps to confront the past. Spain’s New Democratic Memory Law, which came into effect on October 21st, pardons the victims of the Franco regime sentenced for political or religious beliefs, sexual or ideological orientation. The state will now promote the search for and exhumation of the remains of victims of the Franco regime, work until now done primarily by memory associations. Under the new law, the legacy of the Franco era will be incorporated into the compulsory school curriculum and required for anyone seeking civil service employment. Critics argue that the law does not go far enough, pointing out that it does not address key legal issues such as the identification and prosecution of perpetrators of past crimes. Still, for a country that, for decades, used the pact of forgetting to bury the crimes of the past, the New Democratic Memory law is a significant step in the direction of confronting the past.
Nicole IturriagaNicole Iturriaga is an assistant professor in the Departments of Criminology, Law and Society and Sociology (by courtesy) at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Exhuming Violent Histories: Forensics, Memory and the Rewriting of Spain's Past.
Over a decade of civil war tore apart the tiny Central American nation of El Salvador. Throughout the 1980s the United States poured billions of dollars into the conflict to stop the spread of communism in Central America. Beyond the massive loss of life and even greater human displacement, deathsquads and special military units massacred, tortured, and disappeared civilian populations caught in the crossfire. When a peace agreement was finally reached in 1992, all sides agreed to a general amnesty. There would be no trials, no effort to identify the perpetrators of human rights abuses or war crimes. Yet beginning in the 1990s, El Salvador experienced an unprecedented outpouring of personal accounts of the war from the former participants. Furman University historian Erik Ching, author of Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle Over Memory, tells us what we can learn from these accounts about the civil war and those who fought it.
Two-thirds the size of Belgium or roughly equal to Massachusetts, El Salvador became one of the world’s top five coffee producers by the early twentieth century. Grown at high elevations on volcanic slopes, it was its rich soil that was the source of El Salvador’s coffee growing wealth. However, two of three main coffee producing regions were occupied by peasant communities who had lived there since the time of the Spanish empire. Moreover, many of these communities had sizable indigenous populations. The story of the rise of El Salvador’s coffee industry is one of the expropriation of this land from the people who had lived there for centuries. This process began in the 1880s with a series of decrees that abolished all communal landholding.
As it reached its coffee producing zenith, most agricultural land in El Salvador was held by a small number of elite families. As with many other Central American states, El Salvador became a mono crop economy relying on coffee for 90% of its exports. The wealth of this economy benefited only a minute elite segment of society with a growing peasant and often indigenous population reduced to the status of rural laborers. To safeguard the status quo elites relied increasingly on coercive means. Large number of local men were recruited to police the population. After an extremely brief period of reformist government that lasted only nine months in 1931, the military seized power and would remain in power for the next fifty years. The first of these military rulers, General Maximiliano Martínez, set the brutal precedent for how El Salvador’s military governments would respond to rural protests for reform. When peasants rose up in rebellion in 1932 in western El Salvador the government responded with massive bloodshed. Within a two week period thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, were killed in what became known as la Matanza (the Massacre).
Efforts to promote land reform or industrialization in El Salvador that would alleviate the problems of rural poverty alway met too much opposition from landed elites to achieve meaningful change. Despite their greater willingness to experiment with reforms, military regimes continued to rely more on brute force to maintain order. During the 1960s and 1970s the military leadership created a 100,000 strong, largely peasant manned, paramilitary force called Organización Democrática Nacionalista or ORDEN to quell dissent in the countryside. Whatever hopes for peaceful reform that may have remained were crushed in 1972 when military leaders resorted to massive electoral fraud to steal the presidential election from José Napoleón Duarte, head of a coalition of centrist and leftist parties. Historian Erik Ching notes that it was the stolen 1972 presidential elections that was most often cited by former guerillas as the reason why they abandoned all hope for peaceful change and decided to take up arms against the government.
Five militant organizations took shape by the 1970s, three with roots in or directly connected to El Salvador’s Communist Party. All of these organizations were originally urban-based. It was the links they formed with the rural population, beginning in the mid-1970s, that allowed them to tap into a much broader base of support. The final event that allowed for the start of the civil war was the unification of these organizations in 1980 into the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN)—named after, Farabundo Martí, one of the leaders of the 1932 revolt and a founder of the Communist Party in Central America. One of the more impressive features of the civil war, argues Ching, was the ability of these disparate organizations to maintain a united front against the Salvadoran army for over twelve years.
Although guerilla forces had been fighting the army for years, the civil war in El Salvador did not formally begin until January 1981. The plan for a quick victory was based on the success of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and Castro’s forces in Cuba. An all out attack on the army would trigger a popular uprising that would topple the regime. Fully aware of Ronald Reagan’s campaign promise to take a tough stand against the spread of communism in Central America, the offensive was planned to begin before Reagan took office in January 1981. However, the January offensive failed to trigger the hoped for mass uprising and the insurgents were unable to match the strength of the Salvadoran army. As a result, the guerillas retreated to their respective strongholds and what was originally conceived as a quick victory became a prolonged war of insurgency in the countryside.
Guerilla efforts to expand their areas of control succeeded for the first few years of the war. However, with growing US support, the Salvadoran army was revamped to meet the new guerilla threat. In addition to expanding in size, new elite battalions were created to hunt down and neutralize guerrilla resistance. The most infamous example was the Atlacatl Battalion, trained by US military advisors at Fort Bragg in counterinsurgency tactics. It was the Atlacatl Battalion, notes Ching, that was responsible for many of the worst human rights abuses during the civil war—most notably at El Mozote in December 1981 where over a thousand civilians were killed in a single day.
The guerillas also had their own special forces units, such as the Rafael Arce Zablah Brigade (BRAZ), and were able to beat back the army until they controlled 25% of the territory in 1983. However, it was in this same year that the Reagan administration dramatically ramped up its support for the Salvadoran government. This support included advanced weapons systems, fixed wing fighters, and attack helicopters. The insurgents responded by disbanding larger fighting units like the BRAZ and adopting smaller hit and run tactics hoping to exhaust government forces in a war of attrition. As each side sought ways to counter the other, the fighting stretched out for years. It was the ability of the insurgents to smuggle tons of munitions and food into the country, despite US ships patrolling Salvadoran shores and the use of US surveillance aircraft and satellites, that allowed them to stay the course for over a decade.
In the face of the existence of these four memory communities, and their mutually exclusive renditions of the war, one cannot help but wonder how stable postwar El Salvador can be, particularly in the face of so many destabilizing pressures, such as economic stagnation, gang violence, drug trafficking and out migration. Erik Ching, Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle Over Memory. Just as the war seemed to reach a stalemate, Ching notes that four developments brought all sides to the peace table. The first was a Tete style offensive, in November 1989, when the insurgents showed that they still had sufficient means to take the fight to the heart of the capital of San Salvador. The military’s brutal handling of the attack—carpet bombing poor neighborhoods and assassinating six Jesuit priests at the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (UCA)—caused international outrage. Second, the guerrillas acquired surface-to-air missiles which significantly diminished the government’s control of the skies. Third, the Cold War came to an end, eliminating the most important motive for US involvement. Fourth, the Sandinistas were voted out of office in Niguaga in 1990, removing a key ally for the guerillas. It was these four factors, argues Ching, that drove all sides to the bargaining table.
The peace deal that was reached required the FLMN to disband its army, turn over its weapons, and transform itself into a legitimate political party. The Salvadoran army, in turn, was downsized and the military branches most implicated in human rights abuses were dismantled. The national police was also restructured to include some elements of the FMLN. Despite these significant changes, there was no major landform or structural changes to the economy. While El Salvador successfully transitioned from a military regime to a democracy, the decision was made not to pursue any kind of process of truth and reconciliation. A general amnesty law was passed which made it impossible to adjudicate the crimes of the past.
In the absence of any court of law to examine the past, Ching argues that Salvadorans seem to have opted to make their own case to the court of public opinion. Shortly after the war, Ching notes that there was an explosion of memoirs and testimonials about the war produced by the former combatants. These accounts, Ching adds, were completely unprecedented in El Salvador..
Intrigued by this outpouring of memories, Ching examined thousands of pages of these accounts to see what they revealed about the war and those who fought it. Ching was surprised that the accounts fell neatly into the four major groups who participated in the war—civilian elites, military officers, guerilla commanders and rank and file soldiers. While each of these groups exhibited a striking uniformity, what surprised Ching were the divisions that became apparent between former allies in the conflict.
The accounts of civilian elites and military officers demonstrated pronounced sentiments of mutual suspicion and distrust. Civilian elites distrusted what they regarded as the reformist inclinations of military officers and their lack of commitment to the liberal economic order. Military officers, they feared, would be all too willing to sacrifice the economic interests of the civilian elites in order to maintain the peace. Military officers saw civilian elites as too deeply entrenched in the desire to preserve their wealth and privilege. In their opinion, it was the unwillingness of political elites to support much needed reforms that was the source of rural resentment and unrest. The accounts of civilian elites, adds Ching, hardly mentioned the role of military officers in winning the war. Instead, they featured their own political initiatives, like the creation of the ARENA (National Republican Alliance) political party and their privately financed paramilitary forces as being the key contributors to the end of the war.
Guerrilla commanders and their rank and file soldiers were also far removed in how they recalled the war. Guerrillas commanders came from privileged and often sheltered backgrounds. Their accounts were filled with fond memories of comfortable and supportive family life. It was only as young adults, either through the teachings of Catholic liberation theology, or by personally witnessing or experiencing the brutality and violence of the regime that they gradually became politicized and committed to revolutionary action. While Ching stresses that rank and file peasant soldiers were also radicalized by liberationist theology, the only accounts available to him exhibited a very different perspective on the war. Rank and file testimonials—transcribed oral accounts from largely illiterate peasant fighters—cast their decision to go to war not as the product of a gradual political awakening but rather the inescapable response to a conflict that came to their communities.
These four memory communities, as Ching labels them, also had very different views on the final outcome of the civil war. Guerrilla commanders tended to be the most optimistic. They pointed to the very real achievement of bringing an end to military rule and establishing a functioning democracy in which they became key participants. The response of civilian elites was somewhat mixed. While they were grateful to have preserved their personal holdings and the liberal economic order, they were uneasy about the new climate of violence and insecurity in El Salvador. Military officers voiced their pride in their twelve year fight on behalf of the defense of the nation and their success in preventing the guerillas from toppling the government—although many remained convinced they could have won the war. Rank and file peasant guerillas soldiers were the most pessimistic in their views on the outcome of the war. They had fought for fundamental structural reforms to the economic order. These reforms never happened. While their commanders were able to return to their privileged lives, the disbanded peasant soldiers faced an even more impoverished and insecure future.
Years after the end of the civil war in El Salvador the fight continues to rage through the memoirs and testimonials of the former combatants. The outpouring of these personal accounts demonstrates the need and desire of Salvadorans to confront the past. Cloistered into their own respective memory communities, there is little opportunity for the kind dialogue that might build trust between these important segments of Salvadoran society. As Erik Ching makes abundantly clear, these accounts are replete with sentiments of distrust and suspicion. There is still little desire to shed light on the crimes of the past and much pessimism remains about the outcome of the war. With El Salvodor’s recent turn toward authoritarian rule the prospects for a peaceful resolution to the nation’s unfinished memory wars look increasingly bleak.*
I would like to thank the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen in San Salvador for allowing me to use some of the photos from their rich collection on the civil war in El Salvador. I would also like to thank the Google El Salvador Studies Working Group for sharing suggestions on the additional resources below: * For a list of books, films and additional educational resource on Central America see Teaching Central America. * See this link to the Spanish language version of the British filmmaker Richard Duffy's documentary, The Past is Not History, on the community of Arcatao, El Salvador, hard hit by state violence during the 1980s and 1990s. * Filmaker Patricia Goudvis' film from the early 1990s, If a Mango Tree Could Speak, looks at the wars in Central America from the perspective of children. Also see her related website, When we were young, there was a war. * A recent issue of the on-line journal Realidad features a number of articles on memory and El Salvador. * For another perspective on memories of the civil war see Mike Anastario's Parcels: Memories of Salvadoran Migration*.
Erik Ching Erik Ching is the Walter Kenneth Mattison Professor of History, Interim Associate Provost for Engaged Learning and Director of Undergraduate Research at Furman University. He is the author of Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle Over Memory, Authoritarian El Salvador: Politics and the Origins of the Military Regimes, 1880-1949, and Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador: The Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton, and the Politics of Historical Memory (with Hector Lindo-Fuentes).
Soviet leaders struggled to confront the memory of the repressions on two occasions. First, in the period immediately following the death of Stalin, and second, three decades later, in the final years of the Soviet Union. In Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR, Kathleen Smith argues that on both occupations Soviet leaders hoped that the past could be examined in limited ways to move society forward. In both periods, conservatives lamented efforts to shine light on the dark spots of the Soviet past, fearful that they or the institutions they administered would be implicated in any fuller accounting of the past. While conservatives gained the upper hand for most of the history of the Soviet Union, they were never able to silence those who sought to speak out about the injustices of the past and present. Yet at the very moment that truth telling gained state sanction and unprecedented momentum, the Soviet Union collapsed. In terms of the media and political participation, the Russian Federation that succeeded the Soviet Union was a dramatically freer and more open society. But the failure to confront the past deprived the Russian Federation and its people of a vital resource to resist the return to authoritarian rule.
The repressions is an amorphous term that refers to the human dislocation, famine, and loss of life inflicted by the Soviet state on its people. It is a term that has antecedents in the Lenin years but is typically restricted to the policies and rule of Stalin. The classic understanding of the repressions evokes Stalin’s rein of terror during the 1930s when millions were either executed as enemies of the state or deported to a far flung nextwork of forced labor camps commonly known as the Gulag Archipelago. Yet the repressions went far beyond this conventional understanding. It is a term which also includes widespread famine, class warfare, and deportations that accompanied collectivization—the eradication of traditional small peasant farms and their replacement with large, mechanized, state-run collective farms. It is a term that includes a wide variety of ethnic groups, deported to distant regions of the Soviet Union, because of their suspected disloyalty. To the present day, there is no agreed upon number of victims of the repressions. Izabella Tabarovsky, of the Kennan Institute, describes Stalin’s repressions as “possibly the largest and least understood crime of the twentieth century.” The fears and suspicions that afflict Russians today, Tabarovsky argues, are connected to the unresolved trauma of the Soviet past.
Kathleen Smith describes the initial reaction of Soviet leaders to Stalin’s death as one of fear and trepidation. Bracing for a potential popular backlash, they placed the army on high alert. When the reaction was the hoped for one of shock, grief and sorrow, Soviet leaders embarked on what Smith labels as a policy of “silent destalinization.” The state media stopped paying regular homage to Stalin’s greatness as the cult of personality was wound down. Soon, no mention would be made of Stalin’s birthday. To safeguard themselves and to make a public statement about the end of the politics of mass terror, Soviet leaders ordered the arrest of Lavrenty Beria, long-time head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, who was condemned and later executed for a mix of real and fabricated charges. Despite Beria’s conviction, millions continued to languish in the sprawling network of forced labor camps commonly known as the Gulag. Monuments have no magical powers, even if one could be placed in front of every prison and mass grave, but civic involvement in governing the public realm does preserve private memory as an alternative to official propaganda. Kathleen E. Smith, Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR. Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, believed that for the Soviet Union to move in a new direction, it was necessary to criticize the Stalinist past. At the 20th Party Congress in 1956, Khrushchev denounced the excesses of Stalin’s personality cult and use of terror as a “violation of collective leadership” and a break with Lenin’s use of “persuasion” instead of force. Smith notes that while Khrushchev denounced the repressions, he diminished their scope and scale and cast the Communist Party as the greatest victim. At the same time he deflected responsibility from the party by arguing that Stalin kept them in the dark, exploited their trust and confidence, and used the politics of fear to silence those even in his closest circles. In a concession to conservatives, still fearful of the possible ramifications of any admission of guilt, Khrushchev gave the speech to a closed session of the congress without discussion, as such it became known as the “Secret Speech.”
While Khrushchev never initiated any far reaching institutional reforms, he did shatter the notion of party infallibility and ushered in a period of openness and critical reflection known as the Thaw. The Thaw reached its peak, according to Smith, in the period between 1961 and 1962, when authors like Alexander Solzhenitsyn were allowed to publish accounts about the experience of life in the Gulag. But these treatments of the past had their limits. They were supposed to be constructive assessments that would help move society forward rather than scathing indictments of the entire Soviet establishment. While Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, may have conveyed the horrors of the Gulag, it did so by featuring the noble qualities of the Russian everyman. Perhaps for the same reasons, when the millions of forced laborers were finally released from the Gulag in the years following Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, they were not encouraged to talk about their experience. While several hundred thousand Gulag prisoners were rehabilitated, the convictions remained in place for the vast majority and continued to stigmatize returnees and their families.
With Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, conservatives finally gained the upper hand and maintained it for most of the remaining years of the Soviet Union. Under Leonid Brezhnev, who rose to the top leadership position and retained it until his death in 1982, the number of rehabilitations shrunk to a trickle. While the party never reversed its earlier decisions, destalinization fell out of favor with the authorities. Instead of mass terror, the state relied on selective imprisonment, commitment to mental heath asylums, or exile to silence its critics. Yet even during the Brezhnev era, sometime referred as “The Freeze,” efforts by intellectuals and activists to criticize the past never ceased. Relying on the privacy of kitchen table conversations, underground self-publishing or “Samizdat” press, and outlets through the foreign press or radio stations such as Radio Free Europe or Voice of America that could broadcast back into the Soviet Union, they continued to disseminate their work. In fact, when Solzhenitsyn released The Gulag Archipelago, a much more comprehensive critique of the Soviet system, he was sentenced to exile not only for the content of his work but because he leaked it to the foreign media.
When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the youngest Soviet leader since Stalin, his intention was not to open the floodgates to the past. But by loosening the reins of control, and like Khrushchev, through his convictions about the possibilities of reform and renewal through constructive criticism, he inadvertently unleashed a tidal wave of popular memory. The memory boom under Gorbachev went far beyond anything experienced during the Khrushchev era. Although unsanctioned and at the mercy of party support, Gorbachev’s reforms sparked an explosion of clubs specializing in everything from sports to the environment. In the realm of history, the Memorial Society (later known as Memorial International) became the most prominent organization seeking to preserve the memory and seek justice for the victims of the repressions. Because of its decentralized structure, Smith notes, Memorial’s members could focus their energy and resources on whatever issues mattered most in their locality.
In Moscow, Memorial organized a “Week of Conscience” exhibit (see header photo). Smith comments that the organizers plastered the walls of a small worker’s club with all kinds of material people had sent to Memorial—letters with their family stories, photos of victims, examples of Samizdat literature. Smith adds that the exhibition even included a wheelbarrow, like those used in the Gulag, which visitors filled with donations to fund the construction of a memorial to the victims of Stalin’s repressions. It was envisioned that this memorial would be in a centrally located area with special significance. In Moscow, the Memorial Society placed a boulder from the Solovetsky Islands, the location of the first Soviet concentration camp, opposite the infamous secret police headquarters as a placeholder for a future memorial that was never built.
In contrast to the Khrushchev era, the memory boom under Gorbachev was tinged with nationalism. The airing of crimes from Stalinist past, such as the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the annexation of the Baltic states, fueled growing centrifugal forces within the Soviet Union. Unable to keep pace or control the forces he had set in motion, Gorbachev and ultimately the entire Soviet Union, were swept away in a failed August 1991 hardliner coup to return to the past. Boris Yeltsin, who emerged as the head of the newly created Russian Federation, the core and largest part of the old Soviet Union, had an opportunity to build on this grassroots memory movement to put the new regime on a more democratic footing.
Smith cautions that the freedoms of association, press, and speech that existed during the Yeltsin era are worlds removed from those of Russia today. She adds that while the West could certainly have done more to smooth the transition to democracy, only Russians could do the work of confronting the past and paving the way for a more democratic future. Yeltsin’s failure to seize the moment to draw a line between the Soviet past and the Russian Federation, to initiate institutional reform or some form of transitional justice, did much to facilitate the rise of Putin’s authoritarian regime and the kind of militaristic zeal we see in Russia today.
Kathleen E. Smith Kathleen Smith is a Teaching Professor of post-Communist Studies in the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She is the author of Remembering Stalin's Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR, Mythmaking in the New Russia, and Moscow 1956: The Silenced Spring.
Soviet leaders struggled to confront the memory of the repressions on two occasions. First, in the period immediately following the death of Stalin, and second, three decades later, in the final years of the Soviet Union. In Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR, Kathleen Smith argues that on both occupations Soviet leaders hoped that the past could be examined in limited ways to move society forward. In both periods, conservatives lamented efforts to shine light on the dark spots of the Soviet past, fearful that they or the institutions they administered would be implicated in any fuller accounting of the past. While conservatives gained the upper hand for most of the history of the Soviet Union, they were never able to silence those who sought to speak out about the injustices of the past and present. Yet at the very moment that truth telling gained state sanction and unprecedented momentum, the Soviet Union collapsed. In terms of the media and political participation, the Russian Federation that succeeded the Soviet Union was a dramatically freer and more open society. But the failure to confront the past deprived the Russian Federation and its people of a vital resource to resist the return to authoritarian rule.
The repressions is an amorphous term that refers to the human dislocation, famine, and loss of life inflicted by the Soviet state on its people. It is a term that has antecedents in the Lenin years but is typically restricted to the policies and rule of Stalin. The classic understanding of the repressions evokes Stalin’s rein of terror during the 1930s when millions were either executed as enemies of the state or deported to a far flung nextwork of forced labor camps commonly known as the Gulag Archipelago. Yet the repressions went far beyond this conventional understanding. It is a term which also includes widespread famine, class warfare, and deportations that accompanied collectivization—the eradication of traditional small peasant farms and their replacement with large, mechanized, state-run collective farms. It is a term that includes a wide variety of ethnic groups, deported to distant regions of the Soviet Union, because of their suspected disloyalty. To the present day, there is no agreed upon number of victims of the repressions. Izabella Tabarovsky, of the Kennan Institute, describes Stalin’s repressions as “possibly the largest and least understood crime of the twentieth century.” The fears and suspicions that afflict Russians today, Tabarovsky argues, are connected to the unresolved trauma of the Soviet past. Kathleen Smith describes the initial reaction of Soviet leaders to Stalin’s death as one of fear and trepidation. Bracing for a potential popular backlash, they placed the army on high alert. When the reaction was the hoped for one of shock, grief and sorrow, Soviet leaders embarked on what Smith labels as a policy of “silent destalinization.” The state media stopped paying regular homage to Stalin’s greatness as the cult of personality was wound down. Soon, no mention would be made of Stalin’s birthday. To safeguard themselves and to make a public statement about the end of the politics of mass terror, Soviet leaders ordered the arrest of Lavrenty Beria, long-time head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, who was condemned and later executed for a mix of real and fabricated charges. Despite Beria’s conviction, millions continued to languish in the sprawling network of forced labor camps commonly known as the Gulag.
Monuments have no magical powers, even if one could be placed in front of every prison and mass grave, but civic involvement in governing the public realm does preserve private memory as an alternative to official propaganda. Kathleen E. Smith, Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR. Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, believed that for the Soviet Union to move in a new direction, it was necessary to criticize the Stalinist past. At the 20th Party Congress in 1956, Khrushchev denounced the excesses of Stalin’s personality cult and use of terror as a “violation of collective leadership” and a break with Lenin’s use of “persuasion” instead of force. Smith notes that while Khrushchev denounced the repressions, he diminished their scope and scale and cast the Communist Party as the greatest victim. At the same time he deflected responsibility from the party by arguing that Stalin kept them in the dark, exploited their trust and confidence, and used the politics of fear to silence those even in his closest circles. In a concession to conservatives, still fearful of the possible ramifications of any admission of guilt, Khrushchev gave the speech to a closed session of the congress without discussion, as such it became known as the “Secret Speech.”
While Khrushchev never initiated any far reaching institutional reforms, he did shatter the notion of party infallibility and ushered in a period of openness and critical reflection known as the Thaw. The Thaw reached its peak, according to Smith, in the period between 1961 and 1962, when authors like Alexander Solzhenitsyn were allowed to publish accounts about the experience of life in the Gulag. But these treatments of the past had their limits. They were supposed to be constructive assessments that would help move society forward rather than scathing indictments of the entire Soviet establishment. While Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, may have conveyed the horrors of the Gulag, it did so by featuring the noble qualities of the Russian everyman. Perhaps for the same reasons, when the millions of forced laborers were finally released from the Gulag in the years following Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, they were not encouraged to talk about their experience. While several hundred thousand Gulag prisoners were rehabilitated, the convictions remained in place for the vast majority and continued to stigmatize returnees and their families.
With Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, conservatives finally gained the upper hand and maintained it for most of the remaining years of the Soviet Union. Under Leonid Brezhnev, who rose to the top leadership position and retained it until his death in 1982, the number of rehabilitations shrunk to a trickle. While the party never reversed its earlier decisions, destalinization fell out of favor with the authorities. Instead of mass terror, the state relied on selective imprisonment, commitment to mental heath asylums, or exile to silence its critics. Yet even during the Brezhnev era, sometime referred as “The Freeze,” efforts by intellectuals and activists to criticize the past never ceased. Relying on the privacy of kitchen table conversations, underground self-publishing or “Samizdat” press, and outlets through the foreign press or radio stations such as Radio Free Europe or Voice of America that could broadcast back into the Soviet Union, they continued to disseminate their work. In fact, when Solzhenitsyn released The Gulag Archipelago, a much more comprehensive critique of the Soviet system, he was sentenced to exile not only for the content of his work but because he leaked it to the foreign media.
When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the youngest Soviet leader since Stalin, his intention was not to open the floodgates to the past. But by loosening the reins of control, and like Khrushchev, through his convictions about the possibilities of reform and renewal through constructive criticism, he inadvertently unleashed a tidal wave of popular memory. The memory boom under Gorbachev went far beyond anything experienced during the Khrushchev era. Although unsanctioned and at the mercy of party support, Gorbachev’s reforms sparked an explosion of clubs specializing in everything from sports to the environment. In the realm of history, the Memorial Society (later known as Memorial International) became the most prominent organization seeking to preserve the memory and seek justice for the victims of the repressions. Because of its decentralized structure, Smith notes, Memorial’s members could focus their energy and resources on whatever issues mattered most in their locality.
In Moscow, Memorial organized a “Week of Conscience” exhibit (see header photo). Smith comments that the organizers plastered the walls of a small worker’s club with all kinds of material people had sent to Memorial—letters with their family stories, photos of victims, examples of Samizdat literature. Smith adds that the exhibition even included a wheelbarrow, like those used in the Gulag, which visitors filled with donations to fund the construction of a memorial to the victims of Stalin’s repressions. It was envisioned that this memorial would be in a centrally located area with special significance. In Moscow, the Memorial Society placed a boulder from the Solovetsky Islands, the location of the first Soviet concentration camp, opposite the infamous secret police headquarters as a placeholder for a future memorial that was never built.
In contrast to the Khrushchev era, the memory boom under Gorbachev was tinged with nationalism. The airing of crimes from Stalinist past, such as the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the annexation of the Baltic states, fueled growing centrifugal forces within the Soviet Union. Unable to keep pace or control the forces he had set in motion, Gorbachev and ultimately the entire Soviet Union, were swept away in a failed August 1991 hardliner coup to return to the past. Boris Yeltsin, who emerged as the head of the newly created Russian Federation, the core and largest part of the old Soviet Union, had an opportunity to build on this grassroots memory movement to put the new regime on a more democratic footing.
Smith cautions that the freedoms of association, press, and speech that existed during the Yeltsin era are worlds removed from those of Russia today. She adds that while the West could certainly have done more to smooth the transition to democracy, only Russians could do the work of confronting the past and paving the way for a more democratic future. Yeltsin’s failure to seize the moment to draw a line between the Soviet past and the Russian Federation, to initiate institutional reform or some form of transitional justice, did much to facilitate the rise of Putin’s authoritarian regime and the kind of militaristic zeal we see in Russia today.
Kathleen E. Smith Kathleen Smith is a Teaching Professor of post-Communist Studies in the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She is the author of Remembering Stalin's Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR, Mythmaking in the New Russia, and Moscow 1956: The Silenced Spring.
The militarism we see in Russia today has much to do with the rehabilitation of the memory of Stalin. The Stalin of the Great Terror, mass famine, and deportations has been recast as an unfortunate but necessary prelude to the victory over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriot War. In Bringing Stalin Back In: Memory Politics and the Creation of a Useable Past in Putin’s Russia, Todd Nelson argues that this reimagining of Stalin is the deliberate work of Putin after his rise to power over twenty years ago. Putin used everything from schools and the media to memorials and museums to craft a new Stalin narrative to instill Russians with a sense of national pride and to bolster the legitimacy of his authoritarian regime.
Todd argues that as Russia transitioned from the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation there was real, organic nostalgia for the Soviet past. But the source of Soviet nostalgia during the 1990s had nothing to do with the celebration of the genius of Stalin in engineering the victory over Nazi Germany. Instead, many Russians longed for the stability of the Brezhnev years. Spanning most of the 1960s to the early 1980s, this was the period of Soviet history closest in memory for most Russians. It was a time when the Soviet Union rivaled the United States in the space race and rose to international prominence as a superpower. Given the economic instability and political turmoil of the Yeltsin years, it is not surprising that many Russians looked back to the Brezhnev era through rose colored glasses.
Putin succeeded in tapping into and subverting this nostalgia for the Soviet past through the creation of a new Stalin narrative. The chief obstacle to celebrating Stalin, Todd explains, has always been the challenge of reconciling what he describes as the “two Stalins.” One the one hand you had the ruthless Stalin associated with the deaths of millions of Soviet civilians during period of collectivization and mass terror. On the other had you had Stalin’s success in defending the nation again the invasion of Nazi Germany and liberating much of Europe from German rule. The new Stalin narrative reconciled the two Stalins by casting the darker period as an unfortunate but necessary precondition for the modernization of the Soviet Union and the resulting victory over Nazi Germany. Because of the magnitude of the loss of Soviet lives in the fight against Nazi Germany (nearly 30 million, roughly half of whom were civilians), the Great Patriotic War has become a sacrosanct subject and any criticism of the conduct of the war is considered blasphemy. By subsuming the horrors of the Stalin era within the larger story of the war, the crimes of the Stalinist past were both diminished and inoculated against criticism.
The teaching of history is central to the diffusion of the new Stalin narrative. Todd points out that during the Yeltin years the state loosened its grip on how and what students learned in school about their national past. Teachers were given a wide degree of latitude as the education system became more decentralized and a number of new textbooks were published, all with a critical take on the Soviet past. Reasserting centralized, state control over the education system and the teaching of history in particular, was an early priority for Putin. History textbooks favored by the state were distributed free of charge to Russian schools. These textbooks made the story of the repressions as dry and impersonal as possible while dramatizing the story of the Great Patriotic War. Moreover, as state exams included fewer and fewer questions on the repressions, teachers spent less and less time on the subject.
The nature of the human rights abuses of the Stalinist era has had effects that linger in Russia to this day making it likely that any democratization truly representing the will of the people in Russia must first be preceded by a reckoning with the past. Todd Nelson, Bringing Stalin Back In: Memory Politics and the Creation of a Useable Past in Putin’s Russia Similarly, Todd notes that monuments and museums devoted to the Great Patriotic War are omnipresent in Russia. Typically located in central areas within easy reach of public transportation and clearly delineated by an array of street signs, museums and monuments featuring the Great Patriotic are unavoidable features of the Russian memory scape. Far fewer in number, monuments and museums that tell the story of the repressions are often located in out of the way locations and poorly served by public transportation. Whereas the message offered by monuments and museums devoted to the Great Patriotic War is dramatic and engaging, the story of the repressions is often presented in a garbled and confused fashion. Visiting the Solovetsky Islands, site of the first Glug labor camps, Todd recalled how he was surprised by the signage that had the wrong dates for repressions and dramatically diminished the actual numbers of people who passed through the camps. The fact that abstract art is used for many monuments featuring the repressions is, in Todd’s opinion, a deliberate choice to make them as inoffensive to the state as possible.
In his research sampling of Russian television, Todd found a disporporiate amount of air time devoted to the Great Patriotic War. What little coverage of the repressions he did find came at off hour, low traffic times—typically late at night. Hollywood-style special effects and action-adventure formats are now commonly used to draw viewers. This strategy is abundantly evident in recent movie releases like T-34, a World War II action-adventure featuring a Soviet military crew and their T-34 tank. Funded largely by the Russian Ministry of Culture, the Daily Beast describes T-34 as Fast & Furious with tanks, and warns about its dangerous influence on Russian viewers. “T-34 glamorizes a strain of militaristic, backward-looking nationalism that the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin is counting on to mobilize ‘real’ Russians against their ‘fascist’ enemies, a list that includes gays, feminists, Western Europeans and anyone who dares to challenge Putin's generational grip on power.” It is precisely this militarization of Russian society, through the crafting of the Stalin narrative, that Todd warns about in his book.
Controlling the narrative also requires preventative actions against all those who might challenge the official narrative. One of Putin’s first actions after arriving in power was to crack down on the once vibrant independent Russian press that had thrived during the Yeltsin years. Before state controls became even more restrictive, after the invasion of Ukraine, Todd notes that most of the media censorship was self imposed. Everyone knew, Todd explains, how far you could go before crossing the line of what was unacceptable to the state. Some media outlets, he adds, were willing to get closer to this line than others.
The state controlled non-governmental organizations through a series of NGO laws. Organizations that received foreign funding, which is usually the case with human rights organizations, were subjected to burdensome registration and reporting requirements. In the course of the Putin years these bureaucratic control measures became increasingly cumbersome. Libel was recriminalized, restrictions were imposed on the right to organize protests or rallies, and requirements were imposed mandating that organizations that received funding from abroad register as foreign agents—a stigmatizing designation that suggested traitorous ties with foreign governments. In December 2021, Memorial International, Russia’s most prominent human rights organization and staunchest advocate for the preservation of the memory of the repressions, was finally abolished after being charged with failing to comply with Russia’s foreign agents law.
Todd argues that the rise to prominence of the Stalin narrative wasn’t inevitable in Russia. In transitioning from an authoritarian communist regime with a repressive past to a more democratic government with greater individual rights and freedoms, Todd argues that Russians failed to carry out any form of transitional justice. Without any real effort to confront the past or to overhaul inherited repressive institutions, the opportunity was missed to put Russia on a more solid democratic footing. Todd blames this in part on the complexity of Stalin’s terror where many of those who carried out the Terror were later consumed by it making it difficult to clearly delineate between victims and perpetrators. He also points to the failure of western governments, and the United States in particular, to do more to ease the transition to democracy. The economic chaos of the 1990s undermined Russian confidence in democracy and sapped popular interest in confronting the past. For most Russians, simply finding the means to make ends meet became their primary concern.
The Stalin narrative stresses all that Russians can and have achieved under strong authoritarian rulers. It is a narrative that justifies and offers legitimacy for the Putin regime while discrediting the turbulent and unsettling Russian experience with democracy under Yeltsin. The Stalin narrative subverted a very real, organic nostalgia in the 1990s for the Brezhnev era by yoking it to a revamped understanding of Stalin where mass murder was minimized and justified as a precondition for the victory over Nazi Germany. Anchored in the sacrifices and triumphs of the Great Patriotic War, the Stalin narrative has helped Putin tighten his grip on power while rallying his people around the horrors of the war in Ukraine. Putin’s Russia is a stark reminder of all that can happen when we fail to take up the challenge of confronting the past.
Todd H. Nelson Todd Nelson is an assistant professor in the Political Science Department at Cleveland State University.
With the Communist victory in China in 1949 nearly one million civil war refugees flooded into Taiwan—the largest out migration from China in the modern era. Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, author of The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan, helps us understand the relationship between trauma and memory in new ways. He reveals how the memories of mainlander refugees changed over time and the therapeutic role they served. He sheds light on how mainlander refugees and their descendants used their memory work to lay claim to a new home in Taiwan. Perhaps most importantly, Dominic reveals how his own personal journey of understanding might offer the promise of reconciliation between long embattled communities who see the past in very different ways.
To properly understand the nature of the trauma experienced by mainlander refugees, Dominic argues that we need to break with the Western psychoanalytic tradition. This tradition frames trauma as a singular event that destabilizes the identity of the individual by leaving behind memories that are damaged, repressed or simply too painful to recall. Without access to your past, in the Western tradition, your identity is left broken and incomplete. The path to healing goes through the licensed therapeutic professional whose job is to help the individual to come to terms with this trauma by recovering or repairing repressed or broken memories of a still painful past.
In the Chinese case, Dominic believes that it is more helpful to think of trauma in relation to place. It is the experience of being uprooted and torn from one’s ancestral homeland that is traumatizing. It is a trauma experienced by a group or community who might end up being subject to multiple traumas. Through the collective memory work of the community, efforts are made to repair the damage caused by the separation from one’s native place. Memory is never lost or damaged, it is the community that draws selectively from the past to restore the community’s broken or incomplete identity.
Recognizing that memory is not history, Dominic devotes his opening chapter to establishing the historical evidence for the trauma caused by the great exodus. He points out that this trauma was experienced both by mainlander civil war refugees (waishengren) and by native-born Taiwanese (benshengren) subjected to this wave of displaced people. From personal stories and interviews with mainlanders exiles to recently declassified government documents and contemporary newspaper ads, Dominic draws from a variety of sources to convey the impact of the great exodus. He references the hundreds of newspaper classified ads searching for missing persons or individuals separated from their families seeking new adoptive parents to convey the dislocation and desperate need for new family connections. He uses records from the Taiwan Provincial Police Administration to underscore the rise in crime and suicidate rates among the refugee population. Minutes from high-level government meetings underscore the pronounced concern about the susceptibility of soldiers to depression and suicide—especially among the unknown thousands kidnapped by the Nationists and forced to serve in the military.
The influx of hundreds of thousands of mainlander refugees who took scarce housing and increased the level of crime and insecurity had an undeniable impact on the native-born Taiwanese population. But just as the descendants of mainlander refugees choose to omit these repercussions from their memory work on the great exodus, so do native-born Taiwanese. The memories that seem most important to native born Taiwanese are those of the 228 Incident and the White Terror when the newly installed Nationalist goverment brutally suppressed popular resistence by what Dominic describes as the “semi-Japanized Taiwanese elites.” There is little doubt, however, that the presence of thousands of renegade and often unruly soldiers created a climate of fear and insecurity—especially after decades of order and stability under Japanese rule.
Turning to the memory work of mainlander refugees, Dominic notes that the experience of the great exodus was not aired publicly until the 1980s. This was largely due to political suppression. The goal of the Nationalist regime was to return and retake China. Dwelling on traumatic memories of the defeat and the trauma of the great exodus would only highlight the shame and humiliation of having lost the civil war.
But beyond government suppression, Dominic argues that the memories that were most meaningful to mainlander exiles during the 1950s were sojourner memories from the Great Resistance War against Japan. These memories became salient in the 1950s because they recalled an earlier time when the mainlander refugees community was also displaced from their native homes. These were comforting memories because they offered the reassurance that the stay in Taiwan would also be temporary and they would eventually be able to return home. Memories of wartime sojourning, Dominic finds, were pervasive during the 1950s in a wide variety of non-fiction writings from travelogues and essays to self-reflective pieces on daily life.
History is not a panacea for curing historical traumas. Yet, the possibility of finding empathy, reconciliation, and an approach to transitional justice agreeable to communities and nations torn apart by painful memories arises from a historically informed understanding that puts these memories in proper perspective. Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan. This mentality of wartime sojourning, Dominic explains, can also help us understand what he describes as the “unholy alliance” between the mainlander refugee community and the ruling Nationalist government. While this alliance often goes unquestioned from the outside, there were deep rifts of suspicion between the two sides. Unknown thousands of soldiers, Dominic reminds us, were abducted and forced to serve in the Nationlist army. Large numbers of these soldiers found themselves exiled in Taiwan, far from their families and unable to return home for decades. Low pay, political suppression, and corruption only added to the resentments toward the Nationalist regime. The Nationalist government was equally suspicious of the political loyalties of the unvetted thousand of exiles who flooded into Taiwan after the Communist victory in 1949. Dominate notes that while mainlander refugees represented only 10-15% of Taiwan’s population, they accounted for over 40% of the victims of state violence. It was the powerful longing to return home, and the sentiment that the Nationalist regime was the only and best chance of realizing this dream, that resulted in this unholy alliance.
Maintaining these sojourner memories, however, was only possible as long as the Nationalist regime in Taiwan could maintain the illusion that it would indeed return to retake China. After 1958 this became increasingly difficult. In 1958, when fighting once again resumed between Mao’s forces and Chiang’s troops still occupying islands near the coast of the Fujian Province, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles flew to Taipei to meet with Chiang. In return for US support Dulles demanded that Chiang would not escalate the current crisis or attack the PRC in the future without consulting Washington first. In what became known as the American Joint Communiqué of 1958, Chiang Kai-Shek publicly acknowledged that henceforth political means, not force, would be used to resolve differences with China.
It was from the 1960s to the mid-1980s, that we see the emergence of a second memory regime which Dominic labels as cultural nostalgia. At the heart of this period of cultural nostalgia was the proliferation of native place associations. Organized around shared places of origin, members of native place association drew largely from memory to collect everything from songs and poems to recipes and folklore. Members devoted considerable sums, in some cases their entire life savings, to finance bulletin and reference magazines to circulate this information with the hope of transmitting their culture to the next generation and to reduce the guilt that came from what Dominic describes as the “social trauma of the diminishing hope of return.”
This period was not simply one of nostalgia for a home that most now believed they would never again, it was also about putting down roots in Taiwan. By financing magazines, graveyards or even museums devoted to their places of origin members were also investing significant resources in Taiwan. Dominic notes that some of the associations became deeply involved in local root seeking. They sought out evidence, however thin and unsubstantiated, that ancestors from a much earlier period may have settled in Taiwan. This need to find a genealogy, however fictive and fabricated, was central to the process of repairing the trauma of being uprooted by finding new roots in Taiwan.
The period of cultural nostalgia and native place associations came to an end in the 1980s because of larger political developments in China and Taiwan. Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping it became possible to return to China. As part of the move to democratization and in response to popular pressure, Chiang Ching-Kuo, who assumed the leadership position in Taiwan after the death of his father, Chiang Kai Shek, decided to end the forty year ban on travel to Taiwan. The work of native place associations was no longer necessary because access to the real native place was now possible.
Despite these developments, Dominic notes the return home was still long and extremely difficult. Because Taiwan, or the Republic of China, still did not recognize Communist China, or the Peoples’ Republic of China, it was necessary to travel through places like Hong Kong or Japan. This, and the need to bring gifts for family and relatives, added to the extremely expensive cost of the trip. But the most difficult part of the return home was acknowledging the existence of wives and children in China to their families in Taiwan. Before returning home, mainlander refugees had to come clean to their families in Taiwan about the truth of the families in China.
Despite all of these difficulties the greatest shock came when the returnees finally reached their native places only to discover that everything had changed. Family and relatives who remained in China and lived through the Mao years had internalized a very different set of values, concerns, and even forms of speech. The importance of ancestor worship, a central preoccupation of returnees, had come under attack during the Mao era as a form of superstition. Many family tombs were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Moreover, relatives of mainlander exiles who remained in China, suffered disproportionately during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution because of their ties to a population of perceived traitors and enemies of the state. After the initial shedding of tears when mainlander exiles reunited with family and relatives after decades of forced separation, the expectation that those who remained in China would be compensated soon followed. Strained family relations combined with now unrecognizable native places resulted in a profound trauma, the trauma of the return home.
This trauma was compounded when the returnees came back to Taiwan only to find that they had now become a resented and suspect minority. As Taiwan began to go through the process of democratization it was natural that mainlander refugees and their children, long associated with the nationalist regime, would be regarded as a privileged minority responsible for the injustices experienced by native-born Taiwanese. At the very moment that mainlander refugees were ready to embrace Taiwan as their home they now had to fight for their place in Taiwan.
It was at this particular juncture that memories of the great exodus, suppressed publically for forty years, finally surfaced. These memories were evoked not by the first generation but by their children and grandchildren. These later generations had never identified with the older generation’s native place association. As early as the 1970s younger generations began to take up their own memory work, focusing on the people and places that were most meaningful to them. Their focus was on the impoverished and poorly treated old military veterans they had come to know during their military service. In response to urban renewal plans that threatened to level the places where they had grown up, they also took a particular interest in the preservation of military family villages. Originally planned as temporary accommodations by the nationalist regime for soldiers and their families, they became long term places of residence. Central to the memories and connection to Taiwan of the generations raised there, many have been converted to museums. Perhaps the most prominent example is Sisinan Military Families’ Village located close to Taiwan’s landmark building, Taipei 101.
It was within the particular context of the trauma of the return home, followed by the trauma of the return to a Taiwan that now regarded them as a suspect minority, that younger generations of mainlander exiles merged their earlier memory work into stories about the great exodus. The outpouring of memories of the great exodus at this very moment, Dominic asserts, was for later generations of mainlander exiles to lay claim to Taiwan as their home. This claim was based on the assertion that their families came to Taiwan as refugees, just as most Taiwanese came as migrants, and that they have just as much of a right to see Taiwan as their home.
Given Dominic’s focus on the traumas that shaped the memories of mainlander exiles and their descendants in Taiwan one might conclude that he is a member of this community. Only at the end of his book does he reveal that his ancestors migrated to Taiwan during the Quing Dynasty and that his family suffered from the Nationalist government. He, like many other members of his community, harbored deep resentments and misgivings about the mainlander population in Taiwan. For Dominic, the value of his personal journey in writing this book is how it helped him develop a degree of empathy for mainlanders in Taiwan. While he has no illusions about the possibility of long embattled communities finding common ground through a shared understanding of their traumatic experiences, he is convinced that an informed historical perspective can help. It was through his own archival research that he came to appreciate the very real nature of trauma experienced by the mainlander population and the therapeutic role of memory. Rather than simply dismissing memory as selective and self- serving, an historical awareness can help us understand why another community remembers the past in its own way. History may not cure historical traumas but it may be an important means of fostering empathy and moving towards reconciliation.*
Photo: At Shanghai North railway station, 1949. Photo courtesy of Virtual Cities Project (Institut d’Asie Orientale, Lyons, France).
*My interview with Dominic took place on November 8, 2021.
Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri
Liverpool was the world’s leading slave trading port in the eighteenth century. How has the memory of the slave trade persisted in Liverpool over the past two hundred years? Jessica Moody, lecturer in public history at the University of Bristol and author of The Persistence of Memory: Remembering slavery in Liverpool, ‘slaving capital of the world,’ argues that memory of the slave trade has persisted through the language of public debates that intermittently surface about the city’s past. It has persisted through the hostility aimed at and the memory work of Liverpool born blacks, the country’s oldest black community. It has persisted in celebrations of the city’s founding that coincide with the anniversary of the abolition of slavery. It has persisted through the stories about the places around the city where slaves may have been bought, sold, chained, and held.
The magnitude of Liverpool’s role in the slave trade and the impact of this commerce on the city cannot be overstated. In the span of just about fifty years, during the last half of the eighteenth century, Liverpool ships transported over 1.4 million Africans to the Americas. In roughly half a century Liverpool ships carried ten percent of all the Africans transported during entire four hundred year history of the transatlantic slave trade. The slave trade made Liverpool a magnet for immigrants from Scotland, Wales, and surrounding areas. The city’s population increased ten fold over the course of the eighteen century. By the end of the eighteen century, nearly one in eight Liverpool families was dependent on the slave trade. Beyond tradesmen, craftsmen, and sailors, the slave trade drove the rise of Liverpool’s banking and insurance industry. The sons of Liverpool slave merchants went on to Oxford and Cambridge, the country’s most prestigious universities.
While there was tremendous fear about the potential economic repercussions of the end of the slave trade, the city was able to survive the economic shock. One of the ways in which the memory of the slave trade persists in public discourse, Jessica notes, is the notion that if Liverpool overcame abolition then the slave trade could never have really mattered to Liverpool. Diminishing the significance of the slave trade was also a way for Liverpool to get in line with the new more progressive abolitionist narrative of British identity that took shape in the nineteenth century. “It would be accurate to say that what Britain has remembered is not slavery, but abolition,” Jessica notes. “The country achieved this through the celebration of national heroes—William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, Fowell Buxton and other figures.” The commemoration of particular anniversaries also played a part in the construction of this abolitionist narrative. “In particular, the centenary of the Emancipation Act in 1933 and 1934 and, of course, the Abolition Acts as well.” On the national level, Jessica stresses, “Britain will talk far more in public discourse and in public memory about its own history of abolition, celebrating the idea that it abolished its own slave trade, without really mentioning the previous four hundred years.” Remembering abolition and forgetting the slave trade in the nineteenth century, Jessica adds, “was also a way of justifying imperial expansion into Africa to try and abolish the East African slave trade, the Muslim and Arab trades. It became a usable past.”
As a millennial, Jessica considers her own exposure to the history of the slave trade and the British Empire through the British education system as being very typical of her generation. “I didn’t learn about the transatlantic slave trade, transatlantic slavery or anything about the British Empire in school.” Only in places that had a direct connection to this history, like Bristol or Liverpool, Jessica adds, was this history sometimes added to local studies curriculum. “I knew nothing about this. I thought that slavery was something that happened in America, in the United States. Or something that was to do with Africa. I did not know and did not understand how central Europe was and that Britain had played such a huge part.” Only after moving to Liverpool in 2003 for her university studies did Jessica discover this past. While taking an open-top red bus tour around the city with her grandparents and stopping at the Albert Dock, Jessica heard a recorded voice describe how Liverpool traded products with the entire world. In a matter-of-fact tone, the recording added that Liverpool was also “number one for slavery.” “I thought that was a very strange way of phrasing such a huge involvement with such a difficult history. I think it was from there that I learned about it and looked more into it.” With permanent museum exhibitions devoted to this history since 1994, Jessica notes that Liverpool was one of the few places in Britain, at the time, where you could learn about Britain and slavery.
In her research on how Liverpool remembers the slave trade Jessica tried to look at a wide variety of public sources. These sources included Liverpool’s first written histories and guidebooks as well as a number of leaflets and newsletters published across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “What I found,” Jessica remarks, “were some really regularly repeated narrative structures.” These narratives are like deeply grooved ways of thinking about the city that persist across the centuries. One the most prominent recurring narratives is the idea that Liverpool won at the slave trade. “This goes back to the red bus tour I took with my grandparents. You had historians in the nineteenth through to the twenty-first century saying Liverpool beat Bristol and London out of the slave trade.”
While the idea that Liverpool succeeded in the slave trade has had long staying power, there are also narratives in which Liverpool is ridiculed for excelling at such a despicable commerce. “One of the more interesting historical narratives that repeats across different media,” Jessica adds, “is this idea of dissonance.” Jessica explains that “by the early twentieth century, slavery and the slave trade is seen as both the glory and the shame of Liverpool. It’s seen as something that was glorious, it was something to take pride in, and is now seen as shameful, as morally corrupt, as something that is anti what British national identity is. Because by this point Britain has an anti-slavery empire. That becomes part of the raison d’être for pushing further into Africa, for taking control of different peoples, for apparently their own good.”
Another enduring subject of debate centers on the actual presence of slaves on Liverpool soil. Whether actual slaves lived in the city, whether they were bought and sold in Liverpool, Jessica notes, “becomes a real focus of debate.” “I guess it’s because it brings it home in a way that talking about ships and triangular trade and goods doesn’t really. Because those are all, sort of, inanimate things. Whereas people, that’s the human aspect. That’s the real trauma of this history.”
What makes it impossible to suppress the memory of the slave trade in Liverpool is the city’s black community. Liverpool has the country’s oldest black population stretching back at least two hundred years. Liverpool born blacks, as members of this community call themselves, have a distinct identity shaped by a long history of racially motivated violence and discriminatory policies. It was the mobilization of this community, both as memory actors and through clashes with city authorities, that helped foster a greater degree of awareness and public recognition of the history of the slave trade in Liverpool.
In contrast to most blacks in Britain with roots in the Caribbean, Liverpool’s black community comes primarily from West Africa. Stories like that of the Empire Windrush, the ship which brought many of the earliest Jamaican blacks to Britain in 1948, are well known. “However, Liverpool has black families, of African and Caribbean descent who can trace their family trees back to the eighteenth century.” Some have a direct connection to the slave trade but most are tied to peripheral activities. “West African elites,” Jessica explains, “sent their children to learn about the trade. Then, into the nineteenth century, you get a lot of men in particular, working on the steamship lines from West Africa to Liverpool. So you have this long, historical black presence and one that is English, that has families, that marry, that settle in the city, and have longevity. And for a long time they were treated terribly. There was a lot of institutionalized, systemic racism through employment, education, housing, you name it, and at the hands of the city authorities and universities as well the museums, cultural organizations too.”
While narratives about the city’s past might celebrate how Liverpool beat Bristol and London out of the slave trade, Jessica notes, there is a “huge dissonance between the stories that aren’t being told, of course, in relation to people of African descent.” “What’s also really important,” Jessica stresses, “is that people of African descent in the city are also active agents in memory work as well.” Here Jessica comments on the example of Eric Scott Lynch who gave slavery walking tours of the city starting in the 1970s until late into his life. A self-educated guide, Lynch informed guest on his walking tours about the connection between Liverpool’s buildings and the history of empire and slavery. Institutions such as the Charles Wootton College, named after a black sailor murdered in race riots in Liverpool in 1919, ran a black studies course and history workshops targeting minority populations.
“One of the most poignant ways the black community led the way in resisting these problematic narratives,” Jessica remarks “was through the kinds of resistance we see in the 1980s.” Riots erupted in a number of British inner cities in the early 1980s. The 1981 riots in Toxteth, Liverpool were the largest. “What we see after this is a sort of reaction by city authorities to try and make some moves in the right direction. So you have reports that are written. A report called ‘Loosen the Shackles,’” Jessica remarks, is “quite ominously titled in ways that connect it metaphorically to Liverpool and slavery. And it’s also after that that you start to get the museums introducing different displays.”
Beyond it’s black community what makes Liverpool unique is its dual anniversaries. Liverpool’s founding date is 1207 when a letter patent was granted by King John making Liverpool a free borough. Because the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act was passed in 1807, when city authorities decide to celebrate the Liverpool’s 700th anniversary in 1907, they also had to contend with the 100th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. This was a time of tremendous growth and prosperity, a time when some of Liverpool’s most prominent buildings were erected such as the Three Graces—the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building, and the Port of Liverpool Building. City authorities wanted to celebrate Liverpool’s birthday to foster a greater degree of civic pride and to challenge critics who claimed that Liverpool had no culture, was just a commercial town, and its people were ignorant of its history.
Emulating the commemorative practices of other cities, Liverpool authorities decided to showcase a huge historical pageant with a parade of horse drawn cars. Because each car, in chronological order, would feature different themes, events, and people in the city’s history, it was impossible to leave out the slave trade. “So they end up having to have a car that celebrates the slave trade in this procession that has allegorical figures. There’s a female figure in the middle epitomizing wealth, there are people playing slave traders, like Hugh Crow, and then you have actual African people, black African people in this procession, taking on the parts of slaves, and there are chains all around this car.” What resulted, Jessica notes, was an “awkward juxtaposition of a difficult and horrific history in a pantomime” which celebrated the past while downplaying and sanitizing it. Reflecting the imperial paternalism of the day, Jessica remarks how the slave car was followed by the philanthropy car. “So you have the slave trade car, then you have the philanthropy car. And it’s almost like this is an atonement. This one makes up for the other. And it’s celebrating these philanthropic figures of Liverpool who made their money in slavery as well.”
Then, in 1957, Liverpool celebrated its 750th anniversary. This is not as grandiose as 1907, because of the budget strapped reality of Britain after World War II, but there are exhibitions, leaflets, and even a five hundred page commemorative history of Liverpool given to dignitaries invited to attend the event. “In this written history, the author at the time, George Chandler, severely downplayed Liverpool’s role in the slave trade. There was only a page on it.” When we move on to 2007 and Liverpool’s 800th birthday, even less attention is given to the slave trade. “It’s the year before Liverpool is given the capital of culture title from Europe and it’s the bicentennial of the abolition of slavery. It was a time when events were taking place up and down the country, not just at port cities but in landlocked places, archives, community centers, theaters and museums. Lots of things were going on so it wasn’t just Liverpool and Bristol. What happens in that year, is that compared to 1907 and 1957, slavery is talked about the least in Liverpool’s birthday celebrations. Perhaps because it’s been compartmentalized into the bicentennial.”
As Liverpool celebrates its dual anniversaries we also see the evolution of its leading citizen, William Roscoe. “Williams Roscoe, I think, is an interesting barometer of what’s going on in public memory of slavery in Liverpool at different points in time. He eventually becomes a hero of the city and is celebrated for lots of different reasons.” Jessica explains that when Liverpool is criticized for its perceived lack of culture Roscoe’s achievements as a poet and patron of the arts are spotlighted. But when Roscoe died in 1831, and his friends and supporters wanted to remember his role in the abolition movement, city authorities were cold to the idea. “They don’t want anything that references African people or chains.” Much later, in the twentieth century, Jessica notes, Roscoe is reimagined. “This happens a lot, I think, with civic heroes. These figures who in relation to place and identity are used and reused, invented and reinvented, overtime for what they can celebrate in that particular given moment. What people feel they need in that given moment.” So when Britain is commemorating the centenary of the Abolition Acts in 1933 and 1934, Roscoe is reinvented as an anti-slavery hero. “And then you find he’s often used in debates as sort of counter argument to Liverpool’s intense involvement in slavery and the slave trade; but we had William Roscoe, and William Roscoe voted to abolish this trade.”
Whether actual slaves lived in the city, whether they were bought and sold in Liverpool, Jessica notes, “becomes a real focus of debate.” “I guess it’s because it brings it home in a way that talking about ships and triangular trade and goods doesn’t really. Because those are all, sort of, inanimate things. Whereas people, that’s the human aspect. That’s the real trauma of this history.”
Museums that addressed the history of the slave trade in Britain traditionally did so by celebrating the biographies of the leading abolitionists. The William Wilberforce House in Hull, the Cowper and Newton Museum in Buckinghamshire, and the Wisbech Museum in Cambridgeshire, tell the story of the architects of the anti-slavery movement. It wasn’t until the 1990s that we see the creation of the first public institutions devoted to the history of the transatlantic slave trade. The establishment of the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery in Liverpool in 1994, followed by the International Slavery Museum in 2007, mark a shift in national public memory from abolition to slavery. The development of these museums, however, was fraught with challenges and difficulties. In particular, questions about who should be involved in the museum planning process, whose story should be told, had the potential to deepen racial divisions and to reinforce an older abolitionist national identity.
While Liverpool has had more permanent museums devoted to the history of the slavery than anywhere else in Britain, Jessica remarks that “we shouldn’t see museums as a solution to a problem. We shouldn’t say that we fixed forgetting or we fixed Liverpool’s public memory of slavery.” “British museums didn’t have much experience with histories implicating minority communities,” Jessica notes, “so it was a learning process understanding how to include them in the planning.” With the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery there were intense conversations about how to use language that humanized and broke with the tradition of commodifying Africans. As part of this desire to give Africans more agency the decision was made to include displays on Africa before slavery. But despite these efforts museums had a long association with white dominated power structures and collections built on a history of imperialism which engendered sentiments of distrust among blacks.
One important source of tension with the black community and the International Slavery Musuem is the treatment of contemporary forms of slavery. “Things like human trafficking, sex trafficking, wage slavery, bonded labor, the kinds of things that charities like Anti-Slavery International, who also have historic roots through British abolitionism, are tackling. Some people of African descent in the city don’t think those things are the same.” A central concern is that the focus on these contemporary issues might divert attention from the history and direct legacies of transatlantic slavery, “namely anti-black racism.” “So you are not talking about that as much as you are talking about sweatshops in Indonesia. And that’s seen as, in some cases, maybe a deflection, maybe an expression of neo-abolitionism. There is an idea that white saviors are coming into this again.”
In 1999 Liverpool became the first city in England to issue an official apology for its role in the slave trade. It was part of a global wave of apologies which some historians have argued were part of an international memory boom triggered by the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II and the commemoration of the Holocaust. Jessica argues that apologies need to be understood as speech acts. They are performed by particular actors, targeting specific audiences with carefully selected words and clearly defined objectives. It was in many respects the muddled nature of the apology issued by Liverpool’s City Council that caused it to fall flat.
“As a speech act,” Jessica explains, “you need to know who the apology is coming from, who it is going to, and what the actual content of that apology is.” She notes that Liverpool’s apology was criticized for being rushed, driven by a perceived desire to get it done before the end of the millennium. It was seen as possibly being driven by the political careers of those involved. Moreover it wasn’t exactly clear who was issuing the apology. “The way it was performed made it seem like it was coming from the city council as the leading authoritative body of the city but the language read as a collective we that was more about the whole city.” Moreover, for an apology to work, Jessica wondered, “don’t they have to accept it? I don’t think this was something that was accepted. A lot of people of African descent were concerned by how it had taken place. Little consultation, little sense of what happens next. Is an apology on its own enough or should there be actions that go with it? A lot of people didn’t see any actions that came out of it.”
While Liverpool lacks a memorial to enslaved Africans what it does have is a rich memoryscape. These are spaces around the city with layers of stories linking them to enslaved African people. “Whether they are true or not, what’s important about them is that they persist and people keep telling them. This idea that there were enslaved African people who were bought and sold in the city, who lived, married, had children, died here. This idea of people being physically present in the city. Enslaved African people being the human part of this history is really poignant.”
Many of the stories about enslaved people in Liverpool center on areas along the River Mercey. In the eighteenth century the River Mercey came up to a road called Goree. Gorée is an island off Senegal which functioned as a transit point—although contested by some historians—for large numbers of slaves from West Africa. The Maison d’Esclaves (House of Slaves), a UNESCO world heritage site, is located on Gorée. The use of the name Goree for a part of Liverpool long associated with stories about slaves only reinforces this connection.
The area surrounding the Goree warehouses, built in the late eighteen-century and finally demolished in the mid-twentieth century, is layered with decades of stories about enslaved Africans. Now vanished physical features like metal rings have long been connected to stories about enslaved Africans being chained to them. There are stories that Africans were sold in a nearby square known as Goree Piazza. Stories persist about tunnels and special holding rooms under building where slaves were held. “Again this isn’t that it necessarily happened,” Jessica comments, “but people are connecting iconography in their built environment and making connections to the human story. So you might see a ring by a pillar and think someone could have been chained to that.” When the Goree warehouses were finally destroyed Jessica finds it “wonderfully ironic” that an office block was built on the same location and named Wilberforce House. “So you get this displacement of a difficult memory of slavery with a more comforting memory or narrative of abolition in that place.”
Memories of our darkest chapters may be exorcized from official memory but they still persist in public memory. In the case of Liverpool, memories of the slave trade persist in the form of narratives of pride and shame about the city’s past. They persist through debates about whether slaves were bought or sold, lived or died in Liverpool. They persist through sites of unofficial memory where stories about the presence of slaves stretch across time.
Motivated in large part by the struggle of Liverpool born blacks for justice and recognition, city authorities have made efforts to grapple with the history of the slave trade. From the opening of permanent museum displays to the issuing of an official apology, meaningful steps have been taken to start the process of confronting the past. This is an important departure for a country that has until now sought solace in the narrative of abolition. But as evidenced by the muddled nature of the apology and the neo-abolitionist message of the International Slavery Musuem, this is a process fraught with challenges and difficulties with much more work to be done.
Jessica Moody Jessica Moody is a lecturer in public history at the University of Bristol.
Visits by high level Japanese dignitaries to Yasukuni Shrine have provoked outrage among Japan’s neighbors and unease among its own citizens. Why has Yasukuni become such a lightning rod for the memory wars about Japan’s past? In this episode of Realms of Memory, Akiko Takenaka, Associate Professor of History at the University of Kentucky, and author of Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar, helps us understand how the meaning of Yasukuni has changed over time and why it has become the nation’s most controversial memory site.
Yasukuni’s history is intimately associated with the creation of the modern Japanese nation during the Meiji Restoration beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The same leaders who introduced a series of dramatic reforms and initiatives intended to break with Japan’s past also saw the need to create a site of reverence and respect for the nation’s war dead. Historically divided into warring localities, Japan never had a unified military. The ability to imagine the sacrifices of the nation’s war dead was an integral part of the process of helping the Japanese imagine the modern nation.
Shrines in Japan did have a long history of functioning as sacred spaces where the living could pay their respects to the dead. However, shrines were also important sites of leisure and entertainment. For decades after its creation, visitors came to Yasukuni because of traditional forms of entertainment such as sumo matches, freak shows and fireworks as well as novel western attractions such as circuses and horse races. Located on Kudan Hill in close proximity to Tokyo, Yasunki also offered beautiful views of Tokyo Bay and the capital. Few who came to Yasukuni in its first decades were aware that it was a shrine for the nation’s war dead. For the vast majority of visitors it was above all a site of leisure and entertainment.
It was only over time, as Japan embarked on imperialist wars of expansion against China then Russia, that Yasukuni became a site for the celebration of Japan’s military victories. Yasukuni, together with Ueno Park and the grounds in front of the imperial palace, were linked together by lantern and victory parades. It was a period when the state orchestrated what Akiko describes as the institutionalization of joy. Beyond these celebrations, however, there was still very little awareness of the growing number of war dead who were being enshrined at Yasukuni.
The transformation of Yasukuni into a sacred site and a belief system had much to do with the creation of the national education system. Yasukuni was included in the very first national textbooks published in 1904. As early as the elementary school years, children learned about the structures on the shrine grounds, the history of the shrine, and how it was the highest imaginable honor for young men who died fighting for the nation to be enshrined there. Akiko explains that instruction from these textbooks was often coordinated to coincide with festivals at the shrine that took place in the spring and fall. Gradually, the Ministry of Education mandated the inclusion of rituals pertaining to Yasukuni into everyday school activities and pressured school administrators to bring students to visit the shrine as part of traditional elementary, middle, and high school graduation trips.
With the onset of the Asia-Pacific War in 1931 the use of groups activities to help instill proper forms of respect and reverence for the war dead took on a much greater magnitude of importance. Schools, youth groups, neighborhood associations, and workplaces organized group activities which were often compulsory, and functioned as a powerful mechanism for the promotion of conformist ways of behaving and thinking about the war dead. Akiko explains that by seeing how others conducted themselves and how others seemed to be feeling, outwardly conformist activities could become internalized beliefs. “This was a practice in indoctrination and some people would start to believe the actions they were taking.”
When the cremated remains of Japanese soldiers were repatriated to the homeland, government authorities went to incredible lengths to orchestrate ceremonies and rituals of respect. Akiko recounts the story of one ordinary foot soldier whose ashes were carried back to Japan from Manchuria by a specially assigned officer. The long return route was punctuated by multiple memorial services as well as representatives of women’s associations and veterans groups who paid their respects at scores of stations along the way. When the remains finally reached the deceased’s home town, thousands attended the funeral and offerings were made by the emperor and empress as well as top military officers.
The most significant memorial service was the shōkon ceremony at Yasukuni when the fallen soldiers would be enshrined in a ritual that united their spirits with that of a god who defended the nation. Not only were select family members given special invitations and subsidized transportation to attend the ritual, they were also offered a multi-day sightseeing tour of the capital and a thick photo album to bring home to share with their family and community. The investment made by the government to demonstrate its respect for the fallen was staggering.
Over eighty years on there is still no agreed upon memory of the Asia-Pacific War in Japan. Yasukuni remains at the heart of the divergent ways the Japanese remember this fifteen year conflict.
While enshrinement at Yasukuni continued unabated throughout the war, the rising number of dead caused an evitable backlog. Only ten percent of the war dead had been enshrined at Yasukuni at the war’s conclusion. General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, who governed Japan in the immediate postwar years and oversaw the drafting of Japan’s present day constitution, spared the shrine from destruction. However, Japan’s new constitution mandated what was tantamount to a separation of church and state which banned the Japan’s government from direct involvement with Yasukuni. Central to the rise of the Liberal Democratic Party or LDP, which governed Japan for much of the postwar period, was its support for Yasukuni which was now a private religious entity. Akiko asserts that the “LDP pretty much came to power by catering to the bereaved families by promising to restore Yasukuni to its former glory.”
What sparked international outrage, however, was the decision by high level LDP officials to visit Yasukuni. LDP officials, Akiko explains, had always visited Yasukuni but they had gone to great lengths to avoid doing so in an official capacity. They were especially careful not to go to Yasukuni on August 15th, the day when Japan commemorates the Emperor’s radio address ending the war. All of this changed in 1985 when Prime Minister Nakasone made the decision to visit Yasukuni on August 15 as the head of Japan’s government. “China is enraged,” Akiko remarks, “because the optics, you know, the prime minister, the leader of Japan, going to pay tribute to a shrine in which Class A war criminals are worshiped. The optics of that was just so horrible. That’s when the Yasukuni issue really becomes an issue.”
Yasukuni wasn’t just an international issue that enraged Japan’s neighbors, it also caused serious rifts at home. Okinawans, whose prefecture was the only place where fighting had actually taken place on Japanese soil, were shocked to discover that their loved ones were also enshrined at Yasukuni. A once independent kingdom, annexed by Japan in the nineteen century, many Okinawans felt that they had been brutally treated by the Japanese military and sacrificed by the Tokyo government in a hopeless conflict.
Akiko explains that Yasukuni, a site devoted to the military war dead, ended up including civilians because of the War-Injured and War-Bereaved Families Act or Engohō in Japanese. Passed by the LDP in 1952, two days after the end of Allied occupation, Engohō granted a pension to war-bereaved families. Because many Okinawans aided the Japanese military, Engohō was extended in 1953 to the Okinawan civilian population. Keeping its promise to support the now privatized and resource strapped Yasukuni shrine, which still faced the monumental task of enshrining nearly ninety percent of the war dead, the ruling LDP shared the records of all those who applied for Engohō support with the shrine administrators. This allowed the shrine to efficiently register all the names and personal details of the remaining war dead. Okinawan civilians ended up being indiscriminately included in this massive data dump and enshrined at Yasukuni. Akiko notes that “there are names of a one-year-old and a ninety-something-year-old man who died, who clearly did not aid the military, but their names ended up being included into the register of the shrine.”
How the Japanese remember the Asia-Pacific War today and how they think about Yasukuni is profoundly shaped by important generational differences. Akiko identifies two generations in particular. An older generation exposed to the nationalist education system and the devastation of Japan at the end of the war and a younger generation, born well after the war, in a time of peace and unprecedented prosperity. It was this older generation who felt a tremendous sense of betrayal at the end of the war. Not only does this older generation tend to be the most critical of Yasukuni as a surviving legacy of the wartime regime, it has also been the driving force behind Japan’s commitment to peace education.
Japan has the preponderance of the world’s peace museums. Many of these peace museums, Akiko explains, began in areas that experienced heavy bombing at the end of the war. The emphasis on the air raids in these peace museums, however, tends to depict the Japanese as victims of the war. “Victimhood narratives sell,” Akiko notes,”and a victimhood narrative is a very convenient way to build a collective identity. And who wants to remember your country as the oppressor?” Akiko added that those who returned from the war were not proud of their experiences and didn’t want to talk about it. The most vocal ended up being the women or children who experienced Japan’s devastation at the end of the war. The memory trigger for those who created these peace museums was the Vietnam war. Japan functioned as a staging ground for the American war in Vietnam. As the first televised war, Vietnam evoked powerful memories of Japan’s recent past.
The younger generation, born well after the war, are caught between narratives of suffering and victimization that pervade post-war Japanese society and the outrage by Japan’s neighbors that it has not done enough to make amends for the past. In her own childhood, Akiko recalls how she consumed this narrative of victimization that was omnipresent in everything from animated films to childrens’ books. But this narrative is clearly at odds with another narrative that Japan hasn’t done enough to work through the past, to apologize to its neighbors. “I think a lot of the younger generation now are being caught in between this,” Akiko commented, especially the youngest generation whose parents or even their parents never experienced the war. “This time period is not being taken up in mandatory education in particular, and not even high schools, which means that many youths are at a loss, I think, when it comes to Japan’s past.”
The Yushukan military museum, located on the shrine grounds, has been revamped to appeal to this younger generation, by offering a more uplifting version of Japan’s past. The museum takes visitors chronologically through Japan’s past wars from the Sino-Japanese and the Russo-Japanese war but the main focus is on the Asia-Pacific War. Yushukan tells the story of the Asia-Pacific War in a very revisionist way, “using objects like war-stained uniforms, tools or weapons, and letters that these men wrote back home.” “In the last couple of rooms,” Akiko adds, “you see hundreds of photographs. You are surrounded by photographs of the faces of the men who are enshrined at Yasukuni, and several women.” Visitors encounter these photographs after experiencing a narrative of how Japan fought back and defended itself. “If you are coming into this as a sort of blank slate because you don’t really learn about modern Japan in school,” Akiko remarks, you can leave with a sense of pride in Japan’s wartime past and gratitude for the sacrifices of its soldiers. Reading the entries left by visitors in Yusukan’s guest books, Akiko sees the effect that the museum can have on young minds. “It is a very dangerous tool.”
Over eighty years on there is still no agreed upon memory of the Asia-Pacific War in Japan. Yasukuni remains at the heart of the divergent ways the Japanese remember this fifteen year conflict. For some, stories of heroism and Japan’s defense of Asia are a powerfully appealing narrative of the past. For others, the experience of suffering and victimization are the most pronounced memories of the Asia-Pacific War. These unresolved memories continue to fuel sentiments of distrust among Japan’s neighbors, complicating the possibility of Japan taking a leadership role in the region.
But beyond international relations, divisions over the past may be taking a toll on the Japanese themselves. In The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory, and Identity in in Japan, author Akiko Hashimoto points out that the Japanese are endemically negative. Surveys show high levels of distrust among the Japanese toward their political leaders and low levels of self esteem compared with other nations. To come to terms with the past Hashimoto believes that the Japanese need to move beyond simplistic ways of framing the past in terms of victims, heroes, or perpetrators. But when I asked Akiko Takenaka why her book had not been translated into Japanese she said that it was precisely because Japanese publishers disapproved that she had not taken a clear stand for or against the shrine. In the memory wars that continue to rage in Japan, there may still be insufficient space to reflect on the complexity of the past in ways that may help the Japanese to move forward toward a better future.
Akiko TakenakaAkiko Takenaka is an associate professor of history at the University of Kentucky
How did Germany go from being an international pariah at the end of World War II to a leader of the European Union and one of the most trusted nations on the planet? In Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, Susan Neiman, director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin, argues that having the courage to confront the past did much to transform Germany’s image at home and abroad. In this debut episode of Realms of Memory, Susan Neiman explains how Germany was able to take up the challenge of addressing its darkest chapter and what other nations can learn from the Germans.
Any visitor to Berlin today will experience first hand the German willingness to face and atone for the nation’s past crimes. A glass dome, symbolizing a desire for transparency, now tops the Reichstag, the German parliament building. A Holocaust memorial takes up five acres of prime real estate at the very heart of the nation’s capital. Artist Gunter Demnig has embedded over 61,000 stolpersteine or stumbling stones, bronze pavers engraved with the names and deportation dates of the victims of the Holocaust, on the streets and in front of the homes where the victims once lived.
Susan asserts that there are three important lessons we can take from the Germans. The first lesson is that this willingness to confront the past takes a long time and will invariably meet with considerable pushback. Decades after the war most Germans continued to believe that they were the war’s greatest victims. A traveling exhibition organized by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research in the 1990s on how the Wehrmacht, the German military, was complicit in the crimes of the Nazi past, triggered a massive public outcry and a storm of media debate. Given that over 18 million men served in the Wehrmacht, most Germans had a father, grandfather or other family member implicated in this past. It far was more comforting to think the crimes of the Nazi regime were limited to special killing units like the SS and not ordinary Germans, especially loved ones. Although the role of the Wehrmacht in the brutal treatment of prisoners of war and populations in occupied territories is a subject that has been thoroughly documented by scholars, Susan points out that there is always a gap between academic scholarship and public awareness.
The second lesson lesson is that there is no one way of confronting the past, not even for the Germans. Germany was divided after the war into a democratic West Germany and a communist East Germany. Contrary to popular opinion, East Germans were actually far ahead of West Germany in addressing the Nazi past. Given that most of the leaders of East Germany were devoted communists, persecuted by the Nazis, and forced to flee to places like the Soviet Union during the war, it should come as no surprise that they were more committed to rooting out all vestiges of the previous regime. When it came to purging the civil service, putting former Nazis on trail, and transforming the education system, far more was done in East than in West Germany.
In West Germany, the vast majority of former Nazi educators and civil servants remained in their jobs well into the 1960s. The Nuremberg Trials were generally dismissed by Germans as victors’ justice and as the Cold War heated up American occupying forces became far more interested in fighting communists than hunting down former Nazis. One of the main differences between East and West Germany, Susan explains, is that efforts to address the Nazi past was a top down process in the East and a bottom up one in the West. Change was imposed from above in East Germany whereas it came from below in the West.
The third and perhaps most important lesson is that it is possible for nations to confront their darkest chapters and to come out the better for it. It may have taken the Germans decades but Germany is now a more trusted and respected nation and one of the most welcoming countries on the planet. When the Middle East erupted in violence with the rise of Isis, Germany welcomed over a million refugees within the span of a year—far more than any other country in Europe. With the fighting in Ukraine and the exodus of several million Ukrainians, Germany is once again poised to welcome unknown numbers of new refugees. Susan is convinced that if the Germans can confront their past and come out the better for it than so can any other nation.
Susan doesn’t believe there was a single turning point in West German history or that we can even credit generational change for transforming the mental landscape regarding the Nazi past. It was rather an array of civil society initiatives that gradually created pressure from below to acknowledge and make amends for past crimes. It was a slow process that began in the 1950s with church groups and intellectuals. The Wehrmacht Exhibition is one of the more prominent examples of this bottom up approach to memory in Germany.
Susan is quick to point out that working through the past is always an incomplete process and Germany still has more work to do. However, Germany is exceptional in one important respect. Most countries, Susan explains, would rather see themselves as heroes. When this isn’t possible they generally cast themselves as victims. While Germans do see themselves as victims of the Nazi past they recognize that others suffered far more than they did and it was Germany’s fault. Germans are exceptional precisely because they have found the courage to see themselves as perpetrators.
Having the courage to face and take responsibility for the past can deepen the bonds of trust and confidence both at home and abroad. If ever there was a time when this is most needed, it is now.
Beyond the difficulties, duration, and pushback, the most important lesson other nations can take from the Germans is the far reaching benefits of an honest and open accounting of the past. Having the courage to face and take responsibility for the past can deepen the bonds of trust and confidence both at home and abroad. If ever there was a time when this is most needed, it is now.
Susan Neiman
Susan Neiman is Director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Susan studied philosophy at Harvard and the Freie Universität, Berlin and was a professor of philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant, Evil in Modern Thought, Fremde sehen anders, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists, Why Grow Up?, Widerstand der Vernunft. Ein Manifest in postfaktischen Zeiten, and Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil
From the toppling of Civil War monuments to Putin’s claims about Nazis in Ukraine, memories of the past are everywhere. Realms of Memory is a podcast that looks at how countries confront their darkest chapters, what they gain by doing so, and what happens when they fail to take up this challenge. We feature the insights of leading experts on a wide range of difficult national memories.