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After Memory

World War II in Contemporary Eastern European Literatures
  • Edited by: Matthias Schwartz , Nina Weller and Heike Winkel
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2021
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Media and Cultural Memory
This book is in the series
Volume 29 | Media and Cultural Memory

About this book

Even seventy-five years after the end of World War II, the commemorative cultures surrounding the War and the Holocaust in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe are anything but fixed. The fierce debates on how to deal with the past among the newly constituted nation states in these regions have already received much attention by scholars in cultural and memory studies. The present volume posits that literature as a medium can help us understand the shifting attitudes towards World War II and the Holocaust in post-Communist Europe in recent years. These shifts point to new commemorative cultures shaping up ‘after memory’. Contemporary literary representations of World War II and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe do not merely extend or replace older practices of remembrance and testimony, but reflect on these now defunct or superseded narratives. New narratives of remembrance are conditioned by a fundamentally new social and political context, one that emerged from the devaluation of socialist commemorative rituals and as a response to the loss of private and family memory narratives. The volume offers insights into the diverse literatures of Eastern Europe and their ways of depicting the area’s contested heritage.

Author / Editor information

Matthias Schwartz, Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin; Nina Weller, Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder); Heike Winkel, Berlin.　

Supplementary Materials

Topics

  • Publicly Available

    Frontmatter

    I
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  • Publicly Available

    Contents

    V
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    After Memory: Introduction

    1
    Matthias Schwartz, Nina Weller and Heike Winkel
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    Growing in the Cracks: On Ecologies of the Margins

    21
    bellu& bellu
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  • I Imaginary Adoptions: Family Histories and Personal Legacies
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    Bodies of Evidence: Memory, the Forensic Imagination and Family Histories about former Yugoslavia

    32
    Stephenie Young
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    Transnational Aspects of Postmemory in Third-Generation Fiction: The ‘Contrapuntal’ Cases of Piotr Paziński and Erwin Mortier

    61
    Kris Van Heuckelom
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    Ghost-Writing World War II Memories: Romanian Holocaust Survivors’ Life Stories in Post-Cold War Western Societies

    83
    Dana Mihăilescu
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    Legacies of Stalinism and the Gulag: Manifestations of Trauma and Post Memory

    111
    Ernst van Alphen
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  • II Revisionist Appropriations: National Belongings and Collective Identities
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    Is the Past a Secret Language? The Jewish Other and the Holocaust in Iurii Vynnychuk’s Novel Tango of Death

    132
    Roman Dubasevych
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    Post-Imperial Resentments: Alternative Histories of World War II in Popular Post-Soviet Speculative Fiction

    171
    Maria Galina
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    Chetniks and Partisans: Conflicting Narratives in Contemporary Serbian Literature

    197
    Davor Beganović
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    Delectatio Morosa: Reflections on Affective Compensation, Conflation, and Fantasy in Polish Memory Culture

    219
    Joanna Niżyńska
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  • III Fictional Interventions: Alternate Narratives and Subverted Mythologies
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    ‘Spectral Stories’: Fictional Re-Inventions of the Holocaust in Contemporary Polish Literature

    248
    Aleksandra Ubertowska
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    Counterfactuals and (Counter)memory: Im/possible Modes of ‘Undoing’ the Great Patriotic War

    265
    Brigitte Obermayr
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    The ‘Gift of Memory’ and the ‘Gift of Oblivion’: Holocaust and World War II in Contemporary Hungarian Literature

    277
    Stephan Krause
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    De-Mythologising History: On the Fictional and Phantasmatic Dismantling of the Leningrad Blockade Narrative

    303
    Nina Weller
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  • IV Imaginative Reconfigurations: Average Heroes and Ambivalent Subjectivities
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    Digging up Skulls, Fighting with Words: On Radka Denemarková’s Novel Money from Hitler

    334
    Heike Winkel
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    Layers of the Crypt: Baltic Women’s Postmemory of World War II in Life Stories and Fiction

    361
    Tiina Kirss and Rutt Hinrikus
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    Bridging the Gaps: The Poetics of Postmemory in the Czech Graphic Novel Alois Nebel

    409
    Madlene Hagemann and Gernot Howanitz
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    Obsessed with the Past: On the Topicality of the Historical Novel in Eastern Europe Today

    429
    Matthias Schwartz
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  • Appendix
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    Acknowledgments

    457
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    Notes on Contributors

    459
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    Index

    465
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
June 8, 2021
eBook ISBN:
9783110713831
Hardcover published on:
June 8, 2021
Hardcover ISBN:
9783110713732
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Front matter:
7
Main content:
479
Illustrations:
7
Coloured Illustrations:
9
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110713831
eBook ISBN: 9783110713831
Hardcover ISBN: 9783110713732
Keywords for this book
World War II Memory; World War II in Literature; Theory of Memory; Eastern European Cultures
Audience(s) for this book
Scholars, students and a broader audience interested in memory, Eastern European, literary, cultural and media studies
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