Worlds of Memory

In thisexacting re-examination of paramilitary violence upon border Protestants within Northern Ireland, The Northern Ireland Conflict on the Margins of History illuminates the understudied impact the Troubles had upon the Protestant community’s physical, economic, and cultural presence within the border counties.

Microhistories of Memory takes the culturally significant West German novel, radio play, and television series Through the Night (originally Am grünen Strand der Spree, 1955-1960), depicting the mass shootings of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union during World War II, and provides an in-depth look into work’s circulation, reception, production, and popularity in the public sphere.

In the wake of recent protests against police violence and racism, calls to dismantle problematic memorials have reverberated around the globe. This is not a new phenomenon, however, nor is it limited to the Anglo-Saxon world. De-Commemoration focuses on the concept of de-commemoration as it relates to remembrance.

Theorizing and explaining the process of collective memory of Poland’s communist past, Weaponizing the Past explores contemporary politicizations of the past, national belonging and the production of anti-Semitism.

The Right to Memory looks beyond everyday memory and commemoration practices, focusing instead on how memory relates to human rights and socio-legal constructs in order to legitimize and protect groups and individuals.

For the first time, this volume creates a sustained study that positions together transnational memory and relational sociology to consider the memory of the GDR. Towards a Collaborative Memory advances the field of transnational memory studies and develops new theoretical approaches that re-evaluate our understanding of actor-driven European memory.

This book analyzes, within the realms of national literature and film, recent Australian and Canadian attempts to reconcile with Indigenous populations in the wake of forced child removal. As Hanna Teichler demonstrates, their systematic emphasis on the subjectivity of the victim is carnivalesque, temporarily overturning discursive hierarchies.

Nordic War Stories explores the commonalities and divergences among the five Nordic countries, examining formal and informal national historiographies alongside representations of the second world war in canonical literary works, memoirs, and films. Together, they comprise a valuable companion that challenges the myth of Scandinavian homogeneity while demonstrating the powerful influence that the war continues to exert on national self-conceptions.

Organized around Argentine “memory wars” since the 1970s, The Struggle for the Past undertakes an innovative exploration of memory’s dynamic social character. In addition to its analysis of how human rights movements have inflected public memory and democratization in Argentina, it also gives an illuminating account of the emergence and development of Memory Studies as a field.

During five years of field research in Italy and the Netherlands, the “Bodies Across Borders: Oral and Visual Memory in Europe and Beyond” (BABE) team examined the connection between mobility and memory in Europe. This volume, the outcome of that project, engages with the tensions between roots and routes, history and memory, minds and bodies, macrostructures and micro stories, and control and resistance.

The dynamics of transnational memory play a central role in modern politics, from postsocialist efforts at transitional justice to the global legacies of colonialism. Yet, the relatively young subfield of transnational memory studies remains underdeveloped and fractured across numerous disciplines, even as nascent, boundary-crossing theories on topics such as multi-vocal, traveling, or entangled remembrance suggest new ways of negotiating difficult political questions. This volume brings together theoretical and practical considerations to provide transnational memory scholars with an interdisciplinary investigation into agency—the “who” and the “how” of cross-border commemoration that motivates activists and fascinates observers.

Resettlers and Survivors focuses on two groups of Bukovinians—ethnic Germans and German-speaking Jews—who navigated dramatically changed political and social circumstances in 1945. This study gives a nuanced account of how they dealt with the difficult legacies of World War II, while exploring Bukovina’s significance for them as both a geographical location and a “place of memory.”

This innovative study develops the concept of “retro” to describe the nuanced and ironic depiction of the past as seen in Czech popular culture. It locates a distinctively retro aesthetic in Czech literature, film, and other cultural forms, enriching our understanding of not only the nation’s memory culture, but also the ways in which popular culture can structure collective memory.

What do ordinary Germans think of their country’s Nazi past? Do young Germans just want to "move on?" Combining observation, interviews, and archival work, the studies conducted in this book explore these questions to reveal the complexity of history and how young Germans view Nazism’s place in contemporary society.