Abstract
Discussing the ways in which memories of the Second World War have shaped the imagined geography of Europe, the French historian Henry Rousso quotes with approval the Dutch specialist on sites of memory, Pim den Boer, who argues that Europe “needs sites of memory: not as a mnemonic technique merely to identify mutilated bodies, but in order to make people understand, forgive, and forget” (Rousso, 2007: 28). To Rousso, this means that “European memory must be conceived within a horizon of expectation rather than within a space of experience, and is therefore something that has yet to be built rather than something to be exhumed” (2007: 28). I share these authors’ concerns over the role memory has come to play in the reorganisation of the European political landscape in the wake of perestroika and the Iron Curtain’s collapse. In Performing European Memories, I examine the part played by cultures of remembrance in shoring up the borders of emerging postwar national or supranational (“western European,” “Warsaw pact,” “pan-European”) identities. At the same time, however, through my analysis of the works by Heiner Müller, Tadeusz Kantor, Harold Pinter, Andrzej Wajda, Artur Żmijewski, and several others, I also seek to point to the simultaneous difficulty and necessity of confronting bodies from the past, bodies which retain the marks of politics, history, and reverence.
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Notes
Independently of a query concerning the relation of memory and history in recent scholarship focusing on the twentieth century, a number of studies have attempted to place the idea of memory in historical perspective during premodern periods. Frances A. Yates’s The Art of Memory (1966) traces transformations in ars memoria — the rhetorical art of memorising through spatial images — from Roman times through the Renaissance, where the art of memory persisted in the humanist tradition despite its decline due to the spread of the printing press.
Janet Coleman’s Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (1992) offers a comprehensive history of theories of memory from antiquity through later medieval times. In The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1990) and The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (1998), Mary Carruthers demonstrates the persistence of memory training even with the spread of texts, which resulted in the highly mixed oral-literate nature of medieval cultures. Lina Bolzoni’s study, The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press (2001) deals with the practices related to memory in sixteenth-century culture. A number of other recent works in the field of intellectual history have attempted to grapple with the intriguing problem of the historicity of the phenomenon of memory in the West. This idea of historicity of memory has been inspired in part by Pierre Nora’s essay “Between Memory and History” (1989) which introduced the multivolume series he directed, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (1996–98). In this vein,
Patrick H. Hutton’s History as an Art of Memory (1993),
Mat K. Matsuda’s The Memory of the Modern (1996), and
Richard Terdiman’s Present Past: Modernity and Memory Crisis (1993) all centre on the historical transformations to which, according to the different perspectives of their works, “memory has been subject.” Like Nora, they link this historicity of the social and cultural role of memory to the radical transformations that Western civilisation has undergone in the modern period.
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© 2013 Milija Gluhovic
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Gluhovic, M. (2013). Introduction: Theorising Europe and Recollection. In: Performing European Memories. Studies in International Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137338525_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137338525_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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