Mediating Historical Responsibility brings together leading scholars and new voices in the interdisciplinary fields of memory studies, history, and cultural studies to explore the ways culture, and cultural representations, have been at the forefront of bringing the memory of past injustices to the attention of audiences for many years. Engaging with the darkest pages of twentieth-century European history, dealing with the legacy of colonialism, war crimes, genocides, dictatorships, and racism, the authors of this collection of critical essays address Europe’s ‘difficult pasts’ through the study of cultural products, examining historical narratives, literary texts, films, documentaries, theatre, poetry, graphic novels, visual artworks, material heritage, and the cultural and political reception of official government reports. Adopting an intermedial approach to the study of European history, the book probes the relationship between memory and responsibility, investigating what it means to take responsibility for the past and showing how cultural products are fundamentally entangled in this process.

lgli/Mediating Historical Responsibility.pdf

Saur, K. G., Verlag. ein Imprint der Walter de Gruyter GmbH

düsseldorf university press. in Walter de Gruyter GmbH

de Gruyter, Walter, GmbH

Germany, Germany

1, PS, 2024

Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction
Historical Responsibility and the Mediation of Difficult Pasts
Responsibility and the Mediation of History
Memory as Interpretation: A Hermeneutics of Agency, Historical Responsibility, and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung [Visitation]
Beyond Neutrality: Historianship and Moral Judgement
Impure Memory and the Figurine: Rithy Panh’s L’Image manquante [The Missing Picture]
Responsibility, Complicity, and the Poetics of Discomfort: Commemorating Dictatorships in Contemporary Central and Eastern European Documentary Fiction
Legacies of Colonialism
End of Empire (Channel 4, 1985) and the Public Memory of Decolonisation in Britain
Why Care about the Violence of the Past? Addressing Collective Responsibility in British Debates about Colonial Violence during the Mau Mau Insurgency
Haunting Debris: The Transnational Legacies of Italy’s Colonial Past in Addis Ababa
Genocides
The Holocaust and Decolonisation in Contemporary Ukrainian Commemorative Culture, Literature, and Art
Symbolic Responsibility: Holocaust Memory in Romania through Radu Jude’s Archival Documentaries
Between Guiltless Responsibility and Current French Interests: Uncovering Motive in the Media Coverage of the Duclert Report in Le Monde and the Rwandan New Times and Pan African Review
Memories of Dictatorships and World War II
Memory Unboxed: Reckoning with German Memories of the Second World War in Nora Krug’s Heimat: A German Family Album (2018)
“Democratic Memory,” Public History, and Responsibility in Spain
Communism without Guilt: Autobiographical Family Narratives of Communists in Poland
Fighting Racism and Rethinking Belonging
Remembering Migration, Rethinking Belonging: Saša Stanišić’s Herkunft [Where You Come From]
Archive of Solidarity after Hanau: Remembering Right-Wing Terror, Racism, and Antisemitism in Germany
Private Memory, Postmemory, and Public Memory in a Battlefield: Mediterranean Border Crossings, Italian Public Discourse on the Invasion, and the Counter-Public Political Project of a Common Postcolonial (Post-)Memory
Contributors
Index

Mediating Memories and Responsibility brings together leading scholars and new voices in the interdisciplinary fields of memory studies, history, and cultural studies to explore the ways culture, and cultural representations, have been at the forefront of bringing the memory of past injustices to the attention of audiences for many years. Engaging with the darkest pages of twentieth-century European history, dealing with the legacy of colonialism, war crimes, genocides, dictatorships, and racism, the authors of this collection of critical essays address Europe’s ‘difficult pasts’ through the study of cultural products, examining historical narratives, literary texts, films, documentaries, theatre, poetry, graphic novels, visual artworks, material heritage, and the cultural and political reception of official government reports. Adopting an intermedial approach to the study of European history, the book probes the relationship between memory and responsibility, investigating what it means to take responsibility for the past and showing how cultural products are fundamentally entangled in this process.

2024-08-16