Memorials In The Aftermath Of Armed Conflict: From History To Heritage 3030180905, 9783030180904, 9783030180911

Table of contents :
Acknowledgement......Page 6
Contents......Page 8
Notes on Contributors......Page 10
List of Figures......Page 15
Introduction......Page 20
Historiography: The Long View......Page 27
What Memorials and Memorialisation Activities Do: Form, Function, and Affect......Page 37
Sacrifice and Debt......Page 38
Citations and Resonances, Performativity, and Ritualisation......Page 39
Fashion and Trends, Distributed Qualities......Page 42
Structure of Volume......Page 45
Bibliography......Page 49
Chapter 2: Polarised Topography of Rival Memories: The Commemorations of the 11th March 2004 Train Bombings in Madrid......Page 52
Official Memorials, Grassroots Memorials and Traumatic Events: The Spatial Dimension of Commemorations......Page 53
Traumatic Events and Memorialisation Processes......Page 54
The Politics of the Victims Associations Linked to 11-M......Page 55
The Spatial Dimension of Memory Rivalries......Page 57
At the Centre of Commemoration: The Conflictive Memorialisation of Atocha Train Station......Page 59
The Memorial Rectification of Atocha Station as Contested Process......Page 61
The 11-M Monument: An ‘Empty’ Memorial?......Page 63
Beyond Atocha: The Topographic Polarisation of 11-M Memorial Sites......Page 66
The Ideological Appropriation of a Memorial Site......Page 68
Different Places, Different Meanings......Page 71
Conclusions......Page 73
Bibliography......Page 77
Chapter 3: From Salvation to Struggle: Commemoration, Affect, and Agency in Cyprus......Page 80
On Myths and Legends......Page 84
Forgetting and Remembering Erenköy......Page 90
Repurposing a Struggle......Page 98
Conclusion......Page 105
Bibliography......Page 109
Introduction......Page 113
Approaching Solovetsky......Page 115
Two Notes on Terminology......Page 116
Dark Pasts in Literature and History......Page 117
From Empire to Socialist Republic: 1914–1921......Page 118
The Solovki Special Purpose Camp: 1921–1939......Page 119
Silent Remembrance: 1945–1987......Page 120
Commemoration: 1991–Present......Page 121
The Solovetsky Transfiguration Monastery......Page 123
The Gulag Museum and Memorial Plaza......Page 125
Archaeological Museum......Page 127
Balancing the Past(s) or ‘Dark’ Heritage: Rectified, Sanctified, or Neither?......Page 129
Gulag Victims, the Church, and the State......Page 132
Conclusion......Page 136
Bibliography......Page 139
Chapter 5: Potočari Memorial Center and Commemorations of the Srebrenica Genocide......Page 144
Background: The Genocide of 1995......Page 145
The Memorial in the Politics of Post-Dayton Bosnia......Page 149
Building the Center in Potočari......Page 152
Design and Meaning of the Memorial Center......Page 156
Commemoration Practice and Mass Meetings......Page 162
Future Meaning of the Potočari Memorial Center......Page 167
Books and Articles......Page 172
Documents......Page 173
Media......Page 174
Chapter 6: Conflicted Memorials and the Need to Look Forward. The Interplay Between Remembering and Forgetting in Mostar and on the Kosovo Field......Page 176
Setting the Scene......Page 177
Memorials in Mostar......Page 181
The Ruins of Mostar: Contested Places of Remembrance and Activism......Page 183
Gazimestan: A Place of Avoidance in Kosovo......Page 187
Conclusion......Page 193
Bibliography......Page 195
Internet References......Page 199
A Memorial Betwixt and Between......Page 200
A Place of Execution......Page 202
Exhumation......Page 203
Making a ‘Red City’3......Page 205
Bogdanović’s Memorial......Page 209
Dudik and the Fracturing of Yugoslavia’s Memory Culture......Page 214
Urbicide......Page 217
Dudik Reinterpreted: Republika Srpska Krajina......Page 219
Dudik in the Grad Heroj: From Memorial Complex to Football Fields......Page 222
Restoration......Page 227
Conclusion: A Memorial in Flux......Page 231
Bibliography......Page 235
Chapter 8: From Socialist ‘Memorialkombinat’ to a Place of Learning. The Heidefriedhof Cemetery in Dresden as an Arena for Competing Cultures of Memory......Page 245
1936–1944: Woodland Cemetery and War Preparations......Page 247
1945: Mass Grave......Page 249
1954: Memorial Grove for the Victims of the Bombing......Page 250
1955: ‘Memorial Grove for the Victims of Fascism’......Page 253
1965: Memorial Grove for the Fighters Against Fascism and Those Persecuted by the Nazi Regime......Page 255
1969–1989: Central Memorial Site......Page 259
1990: War Memorial......Page 261
Since 2005: Contested Place of Memory......Page 262
Places, Rituals and Spaces in Plural Cultures of Memory......Page 265
Collective Memory......Page 266
Culture of Memory......Page 267
Places of Memory......Page 269
Rituals......Page 270
Spaces of Memory......Page 272
Group with Biographical Links to Victims of the 1945 Air Raids Buried at the Heidefriedhof Cemetery......Page 273
Groups with Biographical Links to Anti-Fascists Buried at the Heidefriedhof Cemetery......Page 274
Group with Biographical Links to the City of Dresden......Page 277
Group of Activists of Conservative (Usually Ruling Majority) Parties......Page 278
Group of Activists of Left-Wing/Social Democratic (Usually Opposition) Parties......Page 279
Group of Right-Wing Extremist and Revisionist Activists......Page 280
Group of Left-Wing Activists......Page 281
References to the Past and Their Visible Traces......Page 282
Mourning......Page 283
Anti-fascism......Page 284
Historical Revisionism......Page 285
Heidefriedhof Cemetery as a Place of Learning......Page 286
Bibliography......Page 289
Chapter 9: The Isted Lion: From Memorial of War to Monument of Friendship......Page 294
Monument to Victory or Memorial to the Dead?......Page 295
The Lion is Taken to Berlin......Page 299
Changing Symbolic Interpretations......Page 301
Discussions About Returning the Isted Lion, 1920–1939......Page 302
The Spoils of War in 1945......Page 303
Annual Memorial Ceremonies......Page 304
The Isted Lion as a Leftwing Joke and a Pacifist Mahn-mal......Page 307
The Lion ‘Returns’ to Flensburg, with New Symbolism......Page 309
Inauguration 10 September 2011......Page 311
The Dynamism of Cultural Heritage......Page 315
Bibliography......Page 317
Index......Page 319

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CULTURAL HERITAGE AND CONFLICT

Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict From History to Heritage Edited by Marie Louise Stig Sørensen Dacia Viejo-Rose · Paola Filippucci

Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict Series Editors Ihab Saloul University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands Rob van der Laarse University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands Britt Baillie Wits City Institute, University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, South Africa

This book series explores the relationship between cultural heritage and conflict. The key themes of the series are the heritage and memory of war and conflict, contested heritage, and competing memories. The series editors seek books that analyze the dynamics of the past from the perspective of tangible and intangible remnants, spaces, and traces as well as heritage appropriations and restitutions, significations, musealizations, and mediatizations in the present. Books in the series should address topics such as the politics of heritage and conflict, identity and trauma, mourning and reconciliation, nationalism and ethnicity, diaspora and intergenerational memories, painful heritage and terrorscapes, as well as the mediated reenactments of conflicted pasts. Professor Ihab Saloul is founder and research co-director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM) at University of Amsterdam and Professor of Memory Studies and Narrative at the Umberto Eco Centre at Bologna University. Saloul’s interests include cultural memory and identity politics, narrative theory and visual analysis, conflict and trauma, Diaspora and migration as well as contemporary cultural thought in the Middle East. Professor Rob van der Laarse is Westerbork Professor of Heritage of Conflict and War at VU University Amsterdam. Van der Laarse’s research focuses on (early) modern European elite and intellectual cultures, cultural landscape, heritage and identity politics, and the cultural roots and postwar memory of the Holocaust and other forms of mass violence. Dr. Britt Baillie is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Wits City Institute, University of the Witwatersrand and a founding member of the Centre for Urban Conflict Studies at the University of Cambridge. Baillie’s interests include the politics of cultural heritage, urban heritage, religious heritage, living heritage, heritage as commons, and contested heritage. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14638

Marie Louise Stig Sørensen Dacia Viejo-Rose  •  Paola Filippucci Editors

Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict From History to Heritage

Editors Marie Louise Stig Sørensen University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

Dacia Viejo-Rose University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

Paola Filippucci Murray Edwards College University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict ISBN 978-3-030-18090-4    ISBN 978-3-030-18091-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18091-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Double exposure of war memorial and Anzac poppy on a cross. Credit: Jill Ferry / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgement

The idea of this volume first arose from research conducted as part of the Cultural Heritage and the Reconstruction of Identities after Conflict (CRIC) project funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013 grant no 217411). Throughout the various case studies and analyses, memorials and memorialisation appeared as core parts of the processes through which the present deals with past events and projects aspirations as well as claims on the future. This theme became a shared cross-disciplinary concern of relevance to many cases and areas. We would like to acknowledge all project participants, including the ones not contributing to this volume, for their important contributions to the development of the project, its range of case studies, and discussions. We are also grateful for the assistance given by the numerous helpers and facilitators during fieldwork, and to the many who shared their memories and insights through interviews and conversations; they are too numerous to mention, but their important contributions should be acknowledged. The final content of this volume did, however, move beyond the CRIC project to complement its findings through wider ranging case studies and a diversity of approaches. The editors have benefitted enormously for having access to the Heritage Research Group at the University of Cambridge and being able to discuss some of the intricate and varied issues that arise around memorials and memorialisation with a number of people. We cannot name all the participants of these discussions but would like to mention Drs Gillian

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Carr, Pablo Alonso Gonzalez, Liliana Janik, and Hyun Kyung Lee. We are grateful to Flaminia Bartolini for her help at the proof stage and to Ben Davenport for his help in getting the illustrations together. Additional images from some of the case studies can be found on www. dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/214815, and YouTube presentations aiming to give the readers an impression of some of the places are available on www.youtube.com/user/CRICResearchProject

Contents

1 Memorials and Memorialisation: History, Forms, and Affects  1 Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, Dacia Viejo-Rose, and Paola Filippucci 2 Polarised Topography of Rival Memories: The Commemorations of the 11th March 2004 Train Bombings in Madrid 33 Gérôme Truc and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero 3 From Salvation to Struggle: Commemoration, Affect, and Agency in Cyprus 61 Rebecca Bryant and Mete Hatay 4 Heritagization of the Gulag: A Case Study from the Solovetsky Islands 95 Margaret Comer 5 Potočari Memorial Center and Commemorations of the Srebrenica Genocide127 Dzenan Sahovic

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CONTENTS

6 Conflicted Memorials and the Need to Look Forward. The Interplay Between Remembering and Forgetting in Mostar and on the Kosovo Field159 Gustav Wollentz 7 The Dudik Memorial Complex: Commemoration and Changing Regimes in the Contested City of Vukovar183 Britt Baillie 8 From Socialist ‘Memorialkombinat’ to a Place of Learning. The Heidefriedhof Cemetery in Dresden as an Arena for Competing Cultures of Memory229 Matthias Neutzner 9 The Isted Lion: From Memorial of War to Monument of Friendship279 Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and Inge Adriansen Index305

Notes on Contributors

Inge Adriansen  is emeritus professor at Syddansk University and curator at Museum Sønderjylland, Sønderborg Slot, Denmark. She holds a PhD in Nordic Ethnology and Cultural History from Copenhagen University and is an expert on the socio-cultural and political life of the border-­region of Schleswig-Holstein during the last centuries. She has published extensively on the Prussian wars, national symbols, and memorial sites. Amongst her publications are Nationale symboler i Det danske Rige 1830–2000 (2003), and Erindringssteder i Danmark – Monumenter, mindesmærker og mødesteder (2010), both from Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen. Sadly, Adriansen died before this volume went to press, but she saw the draft and was very pleased to know that it would be published together with so many interesting case studies. She will be missed in the field of memorial studies. Britt Baillie  is an honorary research associate at both the University of Pretoria and the Wits City Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is a founding member of the Centre for Urban Conflict Research at the University of Cambridge. Previously, she has held post-­doctoral positions at the University of Pretoria, the University of Cambridge, and VU University Amsterdam. She has also been an affiliated lecturer at the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, and the Director of Studies for Archaeology and Anthropology at Peterhouse College. She co-edited Locating Urban Conflicts: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Everyday with Wendy Pullan (2013 Palgrave) and is a co-editor of the Palgrave Studies of Cultural Heritage and Conflict series with Ihab Saloul and Rob van der Laarse. Rebecca  Bryant is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University and Director of the Sovereignty and Social Contestation research programme. She has worked extensively on ethnic conflict, displacement, post-conflict reconciliation, and practices of coexistence on both sides of the Cyprus Green Line, and, in 2016, has completed a four-­ year research project on everyday life in unrecognized states, funded by the Norwegian Research Council. She is the author, most recently, of The Past in Pieces: Belonging in the New Cyprus (2012); co-author (with Mete Hatay) of the forthcoming De Facto Dreams: Building the So-Called State (University of Pennsylvania); and editor of Post-­Ottoman Coexistence: Sharing Space in the Shadow of Conflict (2016). Margaret Comer  has recently completed her PhD studies in Archaeology (Heritage Studies) at the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral research, funded by the Gates Cambridge Trust, focuses on changing patterns of commemoration and memorialization of Soviet repression at sites in Russia connected to the former gulag system and Great Terror. Generally, she is interested in contested memories and memorializations of twentieth-century terror in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as in the uses of mortuary architecture and graves in the construction and reinforcement of national identities. Paola Filippucci  is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Murray Edwards College, the University of Cambridge with a background in both social anthropology and archaeology. She has long-term research interests in the perception of the past and heritage in Europe. She has been an investigator on several major international interdisciplinary projects in Europe, including the European Union project  ‘Cultural Heritage and the Reconstruction of Identities After Conflict’ (CRIC, 2008–­2012). She has conducted extensive field research on postwar reconstruction and perceptions of war heritage and the social memory of war on the Western Front battlefields of France and Belgium; this is the object of a number of publications and a monograph in preparation. Mete Hatay  is a senior research consultant in the Peace Research Institute Oslo Cyprus Centre and has been a member of staff since its establishment in 2005. His research focuses primarily on Cyprus, where he has written

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widely on minorities and religion, the politics of d ­ emography, displacement, and cultural heritage. He is co-author, with Rebecca Bryant, of the forthcoming De Facto Dreams: Building the So-Called State (University of Pennsylvania), which examines the creation of an unrecognized state in Cyprus’s north after the island’s division in 1974. His research concerns post-conflict returns and remixing, and the history and international politics of models for negotiated settlements. Matthias Neutzner  finished his studies in aviation technology and data processing as a certified engineer. He dealt in different professional positions in communication processes at the interfaces of society and technology and is employed as a Management Consultant for public administrations. As a historian, he has been researching on topics of German National Socialism and World War II as well as on the politics of history and cultures of memory related to these events. Neutzner is the author of several monographs and media productions on this topic. He is the founder and chairman of MEMORARE PACEM.  Association for a Culture of Peace, a Dresden-based NGO that uses intergenerational and intercultural encounter, reminiscence, and art to foster peace and human rights. Dzenan Sahovic  is Director of the European CBRNE Center, a centre for the advanced studies of societal security and vulnerability, in particular, connected to incidents involving (C)hemical, (B)iological, (R)adioactive, (N)uclear, or (E)xplosive substances. He completed his PhD at the Department of Political Science, Umeå University, with the thesis ‘Socio-Cultural Viability of International Intervention in War-Torn Societies: A Case Study of Bosnia Herzegovina’. Since 2006 he has been Lecturer in Political Science and Peace and Conflict Studies at the same Department. In 1999, he was a programme assistant at the International Organization for Migration (IOM) Balkans Head Office in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. He is also Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at the Department of Political Science, Umeå University. Cristina  Sánchez-Carretero is a staff researcher at the Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), where she coordinates the anthropological team and leads a research line dedicated to ‘Processes of Heritage Formation: Memory, Identities and Conflict’. She holds a PhD from the University of

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Pennsylvania (2002). Her areas of interest are memorials, processes of traditionalization and heritage formation; heritage and conflict, the intersection of migration and heritage. She has published extensively on these topics, including the books Heritage, Pilgrimage and the Camino to Finisterre: Walking to the End of the World (2015), El Archivo del Duelo. Análisis de la respuesta ciudadana ante los atentados del 11 de marzo en Madrid (Madrid: CSIC, 2011), Grassroots Memorials. The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death (2011), co-edited with Peter Jan Margry. Marie  Louise  Stig  Sørensen  is Professor of European Prehistory and Heritage Studies at the University of Cambridge and Emeritus Professor of Bronze Age studies at Leiden University, The Netherlands. She has  coordinated the University of Cambridge’s Postgraduate degree in ‘Archaeological Heritage and Museums’  since 1990, one of the earliest degree courses in this field. She has considerable research experience, has supervised a large number of PhD projects, and mentored several post-­ doctoral researchers. Her interest within Heritage Studies has mainly focused upon the link between heritage and identity with specific attention towards gender and nationalism, and more recently on the post-­ conflict reconstruction of heritage and how it may impact notions of belonging. She was the PI on the EU funded project ‘Cultural Heritage and the Reconstruction of Identities after Conflict’ (CRIC 2008–2012). Amongst her publications related to heritage are Heritage Studies: Methods and Approaches (co-edited with John Carman, 2009) and War and Cultural Heritage: Biographies of Place (co-edited with D.  Viejo-Rose, 2015). The latter provides a range of case studies of reconstruction of heritage sites after conflict. Gérôme Truc  is a sociologist and a tenured research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), working at the Institut des Sciences sociales du Politique (the University of Paris Nanterre and ENS Paris-Saclay), where he leads a research group on social responses to terrorist attacks. He holds a PhD from the EHESS (2014). Specialized in moral and political sociology, his work focuses on social responses to terrorist attacks as well as collective memory. His book Sidérations: une sociologie des attentats (Presses Universitaires de France, 2016) has been published as Shell Shocked: The Social Response to Terrorist Attacks (2017).

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Dacia Viejo-Rose  is Lecturer in Heritage and the Politics of the Past at the University of Cambridge, where she takes part in coordinating the postgraduate degree programme in heritage and museum studies. She is also Director of Studies in Archaeology at Selwyn College, Cambridge. She was a British Academy postdoctoral fellow (2012–2014) based at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, the University of Cambridge, on a research project exploring cultural violence and violence against culture and a postdoctoral fellow on the Cultural Heritage and the Reconstruction of Identities after Conflict – EU FP7 (CRIC) project. She is the author of Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Heritage and Memory after Civil War (2011) and co-editor of War and Cultural Heritage: Biographies of Place (2015). Previously, Viejo-Rose was the coordinator of the European Cultural Foundation’s UK national committee (2002– 2005) and worked at UNESCO (2000–2002), where among other things she managed the Cities for Peace Prize. Gustav  Wollentz  defended his  PhD in 2018  at the  Graduate School Human Development in Landscapes, Kiel University, focusing on the relationship between difficult heritage and temporalities, which involved fieldwork in Mostar and Kosova. He received his Bachelor and Master degrees in Archaeology from Linnaeus University in Sweden. He was previously (2012–2013) involved in the research project ‘One hundred thousand years back and forth: Archaeology meets Radioactive waste’, led by Cornelius Holtorf and Anders Högberg at Linnaeus University, to study future perspectives within heritage studies. He is part of the team involved with the excavation and research on the ring fort Sandby Borg, on Öland, Sweden, where a massacre took place during the migration period. He is currently also part of the AHRC funded ‘Heritage futures’ project, and working as a research assistant at the Nordic Centre for Heritage Learning and Creativity.

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

The central battlefield monument and Ossuary at Verdun. (Source: Authors) 11 Fig. 1.2 The central memorial stone at Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery for the victims of the 1995 Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. (Source: Authors) 16 Fig. 1.3 Rachel Whiteread’s Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial [Mahnmal für die 65.000 ermordeten österreichischen Juden und Jüdinnen der Shoah] on location in Vienna. (Source: K RebaySalisbury)25 Fig. 2.1 Map of Madrid that includes places of the bombings, the commemorative sites linked to AVT and related associations, and A11-M and related associations. (Source: Gérôme Truc and Anxo Rodríguez Paz) 40 Fig. 2.2 (a–c) Evolution of grassroots memorials in Atocha from 2006 (a), 2007 (b) to 2009 (c). (Source: Gérôme Truc) 43 Figs. 2.3 Atocha 11-M monument from the inside (Fig. 2.3) and an and 2.4 external view (Fig. 2.4). (Source: Gérôme Truc) 45 Fig. 2.5 (a, b) Official commemorations in 2006 and 2011 at the different sites. (Source: Juan Pablo Venditti) 48 Fig. 2.6 (a, b) Grassroots memorials in 2006 and 2011 at the different sites. (Source: Juan Pablo Venditti) 51 Fig. 3.1 Map delimiting northern Cyprus. The Erenköy exclave is in the west. (Source: B Davenport) 66 Fig. 3.2 Photo of young female villager taking up arms. (Source: Özer Hatay Archive) 78

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5

Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4

(a, b) Families honor their dead with incense and blessed water. (Source: Authors) 80 Photo of Erenköy villagers living in caves, c. 1965. (Source: Özer Hatay Archive) 81 Visitors take photographs in front of the caves where Erenköy villagers lived during the siege period. (Source: Authors) 82 The Erenköy mosque, now a museum of the ‘struggle.’ (Source: Authors)83 Map of heritage sites, Solovetsky Settlement. (Source: Original illustration by S. Ahmed) 106 Interior, Gulag Museum. (Source: Author) 107 Memorial Plaza, Solovetsky Settlement. (Source: Author) 108 Solovetsky Stone, Memorial Plaza. (Source: Author) 109 Interior, Archaeological Museum. (Source: Author) 110 Map of Bosnia-Herzogovina showing its post Dayton divisions. (Source: B Davenport) 129 (a, b) The Islamic elements at the central structure at the Srebrenica-­Potočari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide: (a) shows the central open mosque (Musala), (b) shows the indication of prayer rugs facing Mecca. (Source: M L S Sørensen) 140 (a, b) Part of the cemetery at the Srebrenica-­ Potočari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide. (Source: M L S Sørensen) 141 (a, b) The naming of the dead as part of the Srebrenica-­Potočari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide. (Source: M L S Sørensen) 142 (a, b) Memorial Center at Srebrenica in the former battery factory. (a) the center seen from the cemetery. (Source: Author), (b) part of the exhibition space within the memorial center. (Source: M L S Sørensen) 144 The memorial monument at the village of Kravica, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. (Source: M L S Sørensen) 145 (a, b) Burials during the annual commemoration at the Srebrenica Genocide. (Source: Author) 149 The detonated monument for the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. (Source: Author 2015) 164 Stari Most. (Source: Author 2015) 167 A ruin (a building used as a university library before the war) was declared a fascist free zone. (Source: Author 2016) 169 An art installation inside a ruin consisting of wrapped papers hanging down from the trees. (Source: M Barišić)169

  List of Figures 

Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5

Fig. 7.6

Fig. 7.7 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3

Fig. 8.4

Fig. 8.5

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Gazimestan monument. (Source: Author) 171 The celebration of Vidovdan 28th of June 2016, on top of Gazimestan. (Source: Author) 172 Exhumations at Dudik 1945. (Source: Vukovar City Museum 2016)188 Red star topped memorial obelisk at Dudik with Bogdanović’s memorial under construction in the background circa 1979. (Source: Vukovar City Museum 2016) 189 Bogdanović’s memorial under construction circa 1979. (Source: Vukovar City Museum, 2016) 195 Commemoration ceremony at Dudik 1980. (Source: Vukovar City Museum, 2016) 198 Bogdanović’s memorial ruined and looted. The šajke in the foreground is but one of many marred by shrapnel. The replica Pannonian well, paved pathways and outer fencing were all destroyed. (Source: Author) 202 The FC Mitnice crest depicting the iconic Vukovar water tower destroyed in the 1991 siege set against a šahovnica background. Beyond the football field, the ruins of Bogdanović’s Dudik memorial can be seen. The club juxtapositions the symbol of the suffering of the Homeland War with the Second World War memorial. (Source: Author) 211 The ruined water tower framed by the two sections of the memorial to the victims of Ovčara erected in Mitnice in 2012. Dudik lies a few hundred meters away. (Source: Author) 212 Heidefriedhof Dresden, 18 June 1947: Graves of February 1945 air raid victims, burial field A. (Source: Landeshauptstadt Dresden, Archiv Stadtplanungsamt) 234 Heidefriedhof Dresden, 22 June 1963: ‘Memorial grove for the victims of the bombing’. (Source: SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek, Erich Höhne & Erich Pohl) 236 Heidefriedhof Dresden, 13 February 1955: Wreath-laying ceremony at the anniversary day of the 1945 air raids. (Source: SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek, Erich Höhne & Erich Pohl)238 Heidefriedhof Dresden, 22 June 1963, ‘Memorial grove for the victims of the bombing’: The inscription of the new concave wall of remembrance is made. In the background, the wooden memorial cross is still visible. (Source: Landeshauptstadt Dresden, Archiv Stadtplanungsamt) 240 Heidefriedhof Dresden, September 1965: Overall view of the memorial complex including the new ‘Memorial grove for the

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List of Figures

fighters against fascism and those persecuted by the Nazi regime’. (Source: SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek, Erich Höhne & Erich Pohl) 241 Fig. 8.6 Heidefriedhof Dresden, 12 September 1965: Inauguration ceremony of the ‘Memorial grove for the fighters against fascism and those persecuted by the Nazi regime’. A delegation of French Resistance veterans in front of a column bearing the name Oradour. In 1944, the French village Oradour-sur-Glane was the site of a massacre on the civilian population by German SS troops. (Source: SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek, Erich Höhne & Erich Pohl) 242 Fig. 8.7 Heidefriedhof Dresden, 14 September 1969: ‘International Day of Commemoration for the victims of fascism’. Members of the state children organisation ‘Junge Pioniere’ in front of the columns remembering Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. (Source: SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek, Erich Höhne & Erich Pohl) 244 Fig. 8.8 Heidefriedhof Dresden, July 1964: State funeral for Otto Buchwitz (Born 1879. Prominent German Social democrat, imprisoned by Nazi Germany, leading SED official). (Source: SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek, Erich Höhne & Erich Pohl)245 Fig. 8.9 (a) Heidefriedhof Dresden, 13 February 2007: Protest rally of ‘Antideutsche’ left-wing group in front of the cemetery entrance. (Source: Author). (b) Heidefriedhof Dresden, 13 February 2012: Police force preventing left-wing protesters from entering the cemetery. (Source: Till Neutzner) 247 Fig. 8.10 Heidefriedhof Dresden, 13 February 2013: Media recording the ceremonial activities of the prime minister of Saxony, the speaker of the Saxon parliament and the Lord Mayor of Dresden. (Source: Author) 248 Fig. 8.11 Heidefriedhof Dresden, 24 November 2014: Wall of remembrance with graffiti ‘DEUTSCHE TÄTER KEINE OPFER (German perpetrators [are] no victims). (Source: Heike Richter) 249 Fig. 9.1 Most of the roughly 800 Danish soldiers who died at the Battle of Isted on 25 July 1850 were buried in a large mass grave in the Sankt Marie Cemetery in Flensburg. In 1851 a memorial plaque commemorating 44 officers and 7 other ranks were placed at the cemetery. The two larger stones on the left in the picture commemorate two generals who died in the battle. This burial place became one of the most important memorials to

  List of Figures 

Fig. 9.2

Fig. 9.3 Fig. 9.4

Fig. 9.5 Fig. 9.6

Fig. 9.7

Fig. 9.8

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the First Schleswig War. (Source: Museum Sønderjylland  – Sønderborg Slot) 281 Woodcut in the German journal Illustrirte Zeitung. In German the Isted Lion was referred to as ‘der Flensburger Löwe’ (‘the Flensburg Lion’). The bronze statue, 3.75 metres tall, is shown here from its most majestic side—or from its most threatening side—depending on political position. (Source: Museum Sønderjylland – Sønderborg Slot) 283 The German artist Wilhelm Busch’s drawing from 1862 aptly expresses the German interpretation of the memorial. (Source: Museum Sønderjylland – Sønderborg Slot) 285 The woodcut from 1864, ‘Uebermuth thut selten gut’ [Arrogance rarely leads to anything good], shows SchleswigHolstein patriots in the process of removing the memorial. This woodcut is from Hamburg, where the removal of the Isted Lion was celebrated with popular ballads, performed by street singers and organ grinders. In the process of removal the Lion’s tail and minor parts of its anatomy were blown off, and these pieces were later made into souvenirs, such as rings and candlesticks. (Source: Museum Sønderjylland  – Sønderborg Slot)286 (a, b) In 1945, American troops took down the Isted Lion and transported it from Berlin to Copenhagen. (Source: Museum Sønderjylland – Sønderborg Slot) 290 The Danish Foreign Minister, John Christmas Møller, making a speech at the reception of the Isted Lion in Copenhagen in October 1945. (Source: Museum Sønderjylland – Sønderborg Slot)291 The arrival of the Lion at the cemetery in Flensburg was a major event. It stood on the ground for two days, giving people a fascinating opportunity to get close to it. Here we see the author welcoming the big, bronze animal back to Schleswig. (Source: Kim Holm, Museum Sønderjylland  – Sønderborg Slot)297 The inauguration on 10 September 2011 took the form of a German-­Danish ceremony, with speeches by the Danish Prince Joachim and prominent politicians. However, no national symbols were used as the Isted Lion was now meant to symbolise friendship and trust between the two nations. (Source: Kim Holm, Museum Sønderjylland – Sønderborg Slot) 299

CHAPTER 1

Memorials and Memorialisation: History, Forms, and Affects Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, Dacia Viejo-Rose, and Paola Filippucci

Introduction The construction of memorials is a well-established cultural practice, widely recognised and expected. We hear about them; how they are planned, designed, debated, altered, and sometimes removed. They are celebrated, inaugurated, and critiqued; and they become the focal point for anniversaries and forms of memorialisation through which accounts of events are staged. Memorials have become a part of our cultural toolkit. It is taken for granted that major events need memorials, and it has also become commonplace to see such memorials being recast and reinterpreted to suit changing social conditions and needs including the vagaries of ideologies. On our TV screens, we have witnessed the removal of statues of leading communist figures, first from countries within the former M. L. S. Sørensen (*) • D. Viejo-Rose University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] P. Filippucci Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. L. S. Sørensen et al. (eds.), Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18091-1_1

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communist bloc of Eastern Europe and then throughout the former Soviet Union. More recently, the removal of the Rhodes statue from the University of Cape Town in 2015 not only became internationally debated through the Internet, it also inspired similar claims against monuments elsewhere.1 In various ways, memorials and memorialisation activities are attracting attention, and they often provide a confused mix of genuine emotive involvement, political propaganda, and media interests. It is within this complex node of interconnections that the raison d’être for this volume is to be found. Some have seen this rise as a distinct form of contemporary cultural practice. Erika Doss, discussing the phenomenon in the United States in contemporary times, refers to it as ‘memorial mania’ and argues that: Memorials of all kinds […] are flourishing in America today. Their omnipresence can be explained by what I call memorial mania: an obsession with issues of memory and history and an urgent desire to express and claim these issues in visible public contexts. Today’s growing numbers of memorials represent heightened anxieties about who and what should be remembered in America. (Doss 2010: 2)

The intensified presence of memorials and various forms of memorialisation activities are, however, not just one form amongst a range of modern cultural practices; instead, they are more distinct and specific in their agency. They are deeply involved with how we perceive and argue about the past and its significance for and influences on contemporary actions. For example, in 2009 on Armistice Day, the Champs-Élysées in Paris were closed off to traffic. The President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, stood side by side under the Arc de Triomphe and in front of France’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The speeches of the two leaders were somewhat predictable, but as a symbolic act, the event was forceful and eloquent. German and French flags lined the Champs-Élysées, uniformed German and French military personnel stood beneath the Arc de Triomphe, the French and German anthems were played, and a German and a French child accompanied the two Heads of State, symbolising a future of friendship. All of this took place in the presence of French veterans from World War Two. To conclude the ceremony the European anthem (Beethoven’s Ode to Joy) was played, and blue and yellow balloons were released (the colours of the European Union flag but likewise a colour each from the French (blue) and German

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(yellow) flags). These kinds of stage settings provide persuasive and impressive displays of selective memory at work, and they are highly affective. At this event, although each speech ended in ‘long live France, long live Germany, long live Franco-German friendship’, it was notable how both leaders seemed to move effortlessly from a representation of common suffering during World War One to a shared jubilation over the fall of the Berlin Wall with little mention of World War Two, the last time that German flags and uniforms were on display on the Champs-Élysées on such a scale. Moreover, the speeches avoided references to any sense of responsibility for the wars and the destruction they caused. The event exemplified how collective memories of shared events can be represented in a new light, given new significance, and used to overshadow, or silence, other memories. The unspoken or silenced, however, is more than an absence as it marks its own effects, including creating distance, misunderstandings, and resentment within communities. At first glance, these cultural forms may appear straightforward, we feel that we understand their intentions and histories; yet, they are far from simple. Their complexity arises, in particular, from two features. The first is the ongoing battle for control over narratives, whether national or local, universal or particularistic, and the role that memorials and memorialisation activities have in providing a focal point for such narratives. The second feature is directly linked to this, for the continuously changing narrative sits in tension with memorials’ seemingly intrinsic character of stability and timelessness. Ontologically, there is no room for change, and to suggest that a memory of something, an event or a person, can change seriously challenges the very reason for memorials. Within memorials we thus have a struggle between the notion of ‘memory as truth’, on the one hand, and the practice of ‘memory as being negotiable’, on the other hand. This tension is especially explicit during periods of political transition when the past and how it is represented becomes more openly negotiated (see the chapters by Baillie, Comer, and Sahovic in this volume). Memory becomes salient in a different way when the generation that experienced events first-hand is no longer around. Scholars of cultural memory have argued that a shift occurs when those with living memory of events are no longer present to share the narrows and cemented official narrative (Assmann 2006, 2008a, b). In line with this, Geoffrey White’s (2016) two decades of observation at Pearl Harbour and the USS Arizona Memorial appear to indicate the effect of changing generations: as the witness generation disappears, spaces open up for previously unheard

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accounts. White argues that the loss of living voices allows the more nuanced lived experience to merge, and in turn, a diversification of the official (White 2016). Memorials also leak meaning. They do not all, and not equally effectively, remain open for engagement and understanding. Simple matters, such as the choice of material, for example whether granite or sandstone is used, may at the time of their construction have had an obvious cultural connotation that was readily appreciated by the wider public, but that easy understanding may be lost with time. So, memorials can ‘die’, lose relevance, or become just a familiar sight within a public park without any perceivable associations, vacuous of meaning and intent. We pass such memorials, yet, we hardly notice them—they have been absorbed by their surroundings. But while they are active, memorials can be used purposefully in focussing public attention on certain events and can play dominant roles in ongoing struggles over the accepted versions of these events; alternatively, they may be used for new purposes, such as to build peace. As illustrated in this volume, memorials may be repurposed through debates about meaning and interpretations but also, sometimes, through modifications of their physical fabric. Overall, memorials and memorialisation are therefore significant, but unstable, parts of the cultural landscape. In response to these developments, the last 30 years have seen substantial scholarship focussed on interconnected questions about memory, memorials, memorialisation, and anniversaries. New concepts such as memorialscape (Carr 2012), spontaneous memorialisation (e.g. Haney et al. 1997), grassroots memorials (Margry and Sànchez-Carretero 2011), and distributed memorials (Sørensen and Adriansen 2015) have been formulated to capture some of the qualities observed within these practices, and older discussions, in particular, Maurice Halbwach’s 1950 and 1980 reflection on collective memory, have gained new relevance. Out of this, a canon of central arguments and ideas has emerged, such as Pierra Nora’s concept of a lieu de mémoire (1984–1992, 1989), Jay Winter’s sustained analysis and reassessment of the memory effects of the Great War (e.g. Winter 1998, 2008) and Aleida Assmann (2006) and Jan Assmann’s (2008b) writings on communicative and cultural memory; in turn, these have become widely used, debated, and incorporated in cross-disciplinary discussions and analyses. Despite, or in part exactly because of this burst of research, it has also become increasingly clear that we need more focussed analyses of the processes of change that these cultural forms undergo and mediate. To better

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comprehend them—their central roles and diffuse affects—we need, in particular, to understand the tension between stability and instability. How, for instance, are changes instigated, and how may the meaning of a particular memorial or memorialisation practice ‘settle’, move beyond change? We also suggest that the semiotics of memorials and memorialisation need to be analysed, as it is through these dimensions that they work on us. Memorials and memorialisation activities have a language and means of affect. We also see increased borrowing, or citation, between them; as their reach becomes ever more international, their most effective forms are copied. Understanding such trends better we may also begin to comprehend the ritualisation that takes place and the range of connotations that often arise around memorials as a result. The staging of memorialisation is clearly a powerful cultural and political tool, and the role of performativity in inducting social understanding is core to how collective cultural memory and claims are constructed, updated, and changed. These are some of the ‘tools’ through which communities construct their understanding of past events and through that their claims on the future. Understanding how such powerful claims are made and transformed is important. The short distance between ritualisation and sacralisation is also worthy of attention. The transformation from spontaneous to agreed and formalised, and thus authorised, memorials and practices may provide one key to this, and several of the chapters in this volume deal with this process. In a sense, these cultural forms go through ‘life cycles’, and their meanings are transient even if their forms may be durable. This, however, also makes them vulnerable to appropriation (as when the state or central government ‘takes over’) as well as malleable in terms of political and social agendas. The focus in this volume is on two distinct manifestations of memorial practice: memorials and memorialisation. Memorials as objects of material culture are constructed and used for the remembrance of a person(s) or event(s); but in their specificities, including their forms, fabric, and intentions, they vary widely. They are found across the globe and commemorate a broad array of historical contexts. They may function as memory markers for people or deeds, have specific political and ideological messages, make promises or set goals, mourn events, or celebrate achievements. Their intentions may be explicitly didactic or more open-ended, but they have intentions. Memorials are also affected by trends and fashion. Memorialisation is the performative act linked to remembrance, usually repeated at certain intervals. Such performances involve various

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activities, often choreographed, and they aim at remembering and ­honouring. They draw on the drama and effects of rituals. They are often closely tied to anniversaries, whether these are annual, such as Armistice Day, or ‘big events’, such as the centenary of the beginning of World War One in 2014. They contain a temporal rhythm and often become part of calendars of national and international observances. Amongst the different forms and functions of memorials and memorialisation, this volume is particularly concerned with those that result from the urge to make statements about collective, and sometimes mass, death and suffering resulting from war and armed conflict. Such memorials and memorialisation have a long history (see below) and may reflect a fundamental aspect of the human psyche. In particular, it is clear that responding to collective death that can be represented as a sacrifice (‘they died for us’), such as death in war or combat, provides a very particular and powerful cultural-political focus that is qualitatively different from responses to casualties due, for example, to natural catastrophes. The memorials to and memorialisation of war and conflict stand apart from other monuments and practices, and it is due to their distinct functions and rationales that they gain a wide significance. They do not only encapsulate or trigger emotions; they are also supremely political landmarks in the public space. The distinction drawn in the nineteenth century between memorials marking the death of an individual versus collective/mass deaths is significant for understanding their particularities; the journey that they have taken to their current focus on the collective and the derived associative dimensions are central to the implied intentions of the memorials. This is not least because they construct an ‘us’ and ‘them’ distinction both in the suffering and in the mourning. As discussed later, within this collective, the individual becomes an abstracted person, as in the trope of the ‘unknown soldier’, or is included in the collective through roll-calls, as is manifest in the listing of names (e.g. Laqueur 2015). In this collective focus, memorials and memorialisation assume and articulate individual and social debts and promises, and, through this, they contribute to both political narratives and the construction of notions of heritage and inheritance (Viejo-Rose 2011). Further insight into the forms and functions of memorial processes depends on more comprehensive knowledge of how their meaning can change, become contested and transformed, on detailed scrutiny of the practices that evolve around them. To this end, the present volume focusses on case studies. The case studies included vary in terms of the

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historical period that the memorial or memorialisation under scrutiny refers to, but they all investigate practices and concerns that continue to be played out. In order to reap the benefits from investigating different contexts, they also vary geographically. The cases are, however, all located in Europe and Russia with several focussed on the very complex use of memorials in the former Yugoslavia. A substantial reason for not including examples from further afield at this stage was our aim to obtain a degree of coherence. Large-scale global comparisons of memorials and memorialisation practices will eventually be extremely important and valuable, but at this stage of research, a degree of equivalence and cohesion is key. The chapters work together as a collective analysis precisely because they are influenced by roughly similar cultural ontologies. The broadly shared cultural norms in the societies in question mean that it is possible to identify shared interpretative tropes and familiar semiotics and to investigate the action of cultural actors who work with broadly similar notions of authenticity and moral justice, referencing similar architectural, artistic, and cultural norms. In other words, there is a degree of shared cultural capital, a commonness of attitudes that may even be specified as a kind of heritage capital and which underwrites shared recognition of symbolic acts. Sharing such fundamental notions of the memorial process, as the chapters detail, affect, and underwrite the norms that are displayed and negotiated therein, is essential for understanding what means are put into play to create or change the meanings associated with memorial activities. Thus, the focus of the volume is on the role of memorials in articulating changing and often competing claims on collective memories and narratives about traumatic events associated with war and conflict, including terrorist attacks. The rationale for this focus is the central yet underexplored roles that these narratives have in the creation of both heritage per se and of contemporary notions of heritage rights; in other words, contestations around authorised versions of shared pasts (see also Aleida Assmann 2008a). As already stated, the focus is two-fold: on memorials as providing seemingly fixed points for narratives and claims on the past, and on memorialisation activities as performative reminders. In the analysis, we reveal the malleable yet resistant character of these memorial gestures. From the case studies, memorials and memorialisation emerge as arenas for both confirming acts of ritualisation and as loci for disruptions and debates. Truc and Sánchez-Carretero’s chapter analysing the memorial gestures that followed the Madrid train bombings in 2004 is an exemplary case of spontaneous memorialisation and reveals how opposed political discourses can appropriate and compete resulting in a fractured memorialscape.

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As a background to the chapters, in the following section we briefly outline the historiography of memorials and memorialisation; the aim, far from providing an exhaustive overview, is to point to the long history of memorial activities and, having done so, to speculate on what underpins recent changes. Based on this background, we introduce reflections on how memorials and memorialisation ‘work’, what are the means through which they acquire affective dimensions?

Historiography: The Long View The current spate of memorials and memorialisation has been represented by some observers as a modern, even a recent, phenomenon (Doss 2010; Huyssen 2003). Alternatively, others argue that memorials satisfy a universal human need that can be traced far back in time. This opposition is, however, too crude and is based on either a privileging of contemporary forms and functions or a universalisation of the motivations behind memorials. Memorials were clearly constructed before the modern era, but they have not functioned in the same manner through time: as the nature of society has changed, the rationales for memorials have also shifted. From a long historical perspective, the dominant memorial forms were monuments built by emperors, monarchs, and other leaders aiming at aggrandisement, legitimisation, and self-promotion or propaganda. Early Imperial rulers, or indeed their followers, erected monuments celebrating their prowess, military accomplishments, or victories over enemies. They built monuments on the sites where their fathers were buried and at the sites intended for their own burials. These, however, were essentially victory monuments—there is no mourning within them, and war itself is often absent or only indirectly alluded to, for example, in the depiction of conquered people. The famous Trajan’s Colum completed in AD 113 to celebrate the Roman Emperor Trajan’s triumph over the Dacians is one such example. Although its decoration is explicitly narrative, its content is only indirectly about violence and victimhood (despite the violence that must have taken place), and instead it mainly focusses on the technology of war: the crafting of bridges to cross rivers, building projects, soldiers participating in rituals, or orderly evacuations. Sheila Dillon’s reading of the monument argues that this selection of motifs satisfied propagandistic aims of appeasing the urban Roman population who mistrusted the army (Dillon 2006: 258f). So even in this early example, the memorial is not just a mnemonic of an event, it is also a selective account shaped around specific contemporary concerns and the desire to both placate these

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c­ oncerns and use them politically. Typical of the public monumental and memorial culture of such early complex political systems is a focus on significant individuals and victory, whether this was the monarchs or his generals; the socially elevated person is at the centre. It is also distinct that these were often memorials to living people, celebrating their feats and through that their positions, thus confirming the order of things; these were not retrospective statements. A major change came with the development of the nation-state. Needing its citizens, but unable to command them to the same extent or by the same direct means as earlier monarchies and empires, the political structure of the nation-state necessitated that its citizens volunteer a sense of bonding and belonging to the nation. One way of achieving that is through communicating notions of shared deeds, collective experiences, and common history: a shared heritage (Anderson 1991; Gillis 1994). In nation-states, people are cast as a public contracted to the state. Its memorials are, therefore, often focussed on seminal events related to the genesis of the state (or the people), and they are public and shared. It is within the nation-state that we see the history of memorials in its richest detail. Thus, while the memorials of empires were built around themes of aggrandisement, such as the Chinese imperial tombs or Lenin’s mausoleum with their concerns for the eternal presence or preservation of the individual, the nation-state builds memorials to itself, to its history. The Siegessäule (Victory Column) in Berlin is one such memorial. Originally dedicated as a victory monument to the Danish-Prussian War of 1864, when it was finished, references to the Prussian victories against Austria (1866) and France (1870–71) were incorporated, and the monument became dedicated to the unification wars that created the Greater Germany; it became a lieu de mémoire, a site encapsulating national symbolic significance. Through such practices, nations gain landscapes of historical collective memory—memorialscapes (Carr 2012). Key milestones in this panorama are monuments that commemorate acts of heroism, of triumph over invaders, ennobling events, or moments of martyrdom, sacrifice, and suffering. Throughout this development, some memorials remained focussed on the celebration and marking of individuals and their deeds; but the character of such individuals broadened reaching beyond the confines of the upper classes and the military to include explorers and scientists, for instance. These individuals have gradually been supplemented with greater recognition of the contribution of other groups in society: in the ­twentieth

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century, the common soldier (e.g. Laqueur 1994), and at the start of the twenty-first century, the recognition of, for example, women, nurses, ambulance drivers, and even animals, such as warhorses.2 Through this expansion, citizens of the state (its imagined communities, cf. Anderson 1991) have been invited to identify with claims about the distinct nature of the nation and its foundational myths with the latter largely ensconced in accounts of enterprise and military prowess. In this development, memorials have increasingly become about materialising claims on history. It is in the selection of seminal events to be commemorated, and how they are interpreted and performed, that we observe some of the most obvious shifts and transformations in memorial practice during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We identify three particular shifts within this: (1) the object of commemoration, (2) the nature and location of the site designated for commemoration, and (3) the tone or message that is being used in the communication. Whereas throughout the nineteenth century, officers were celebrated and received public expressions of gratitude via the language of memorials, common soldiers killed in combat were not commemorated. In some of the nineteenth-century battles, such as the Crimean War (1856) and the First and Second Schleswig wars (1848 and 1864), soldiers were buried in marked collective military burial sites, essentially mass burials not separated into individual graves. This began to change during the late nineteenth century reflecting a new attitude towards the ‘masses’ and by extension towards the deaths of common soldiers (Mosse 1990). An example of this change is how the dead soldiers of the Franco-Prussian War (1870) were treated as representatives of their nations and therefore worthy of respect; Article 16 of the Treaty of Frankfurt (1871) stated that both German and French authorities would agree to respect and maintain the tombs of soldiers buried within their territories (Varley 2008: 326). From then on, ossuaries and war cemeteries became a common feature of war commemoration in this part of Europe, with some of the earliest examples being the ossuaries at Bazeilles and Sedan, both constructed in the 1870s in eastern France (Login 2012: 181). This memorial form became a trope with the Verdun Ossuary for the unidentified soldiers from World War One that opened to the public in 1932 giving the ossuary a monumental and sacralised format (Amat et al. 2015). However, while most of the war cemeteries would now include some kind of ossuaries for the thousands of unidentified bones, these did not everywhere become part, or even the focus, of memorials. It is possible

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that we here see a division along religious lines, with Catholic countries having a long tradition of ossuaries and the display of human remains within churches, suggesting that traditional normative understandings of bodies also influenced the preferred memorial forms (see Laqueur 2015) (Fig. 1.1). From a British perspective, memorials to the Boer Wars (1880–81 and 1899–1902) are commonly seen to indicate this seminal change as

Fig. 1.1  The central battlefield monument and Ossuary at Verdun. (Source: Authors)

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c­ommon soldiers were included in the memorials and the roll-call of names became established as a war memorial trope. This crystallised during World War One, when the names of all the fallen became listed on a range of memorials erected in different places at ‘home’, including in schools, places of work, and the parishes of regiments. The focus on recognising and formally remembering everyone who fell, which became so important in World War One, has over time led to demands for inclusion of a widening group of victims and casualties, especially in recent decades. In an ongoing process, new memorials are being erected for ‘forgotten’ victims of wars and names are being added to the roll-calls. In Britain, a surge arose after the pardoning of those executed for deserting during World War One, as this in many instances caused relatives to apply for the inclusion of names along with those of their former regiment. That this still matters may seem surprising, but the memorials for the soldiers of these wars still hold sway over peoples’ emotions. In connection with the 2006 British pardon of 300 World War One soldiers, the account on the BBC included a story about one of them, Private Harry Farr. [He was] shot for cowardice in 1916 aged 25. His family said they were “overwhelmed” [because of the pardon]. They have been campaigning for years for him to be pardoned, arguing that he was suffering from shell-shock and should not have been sent back to the trenches. … After Wednesday’s announcement, Pte Farr’s daughter Gertrude Harris, now 93, said: “Well to be truthful, I’m overwhelmed. I prayed that it would happen in my lifetime but I never realised really that it would. It’s come really as a shock today. ... We were determined for my mother’ sake because she always said he was no coward, he was a very brave soldier and he fought for his country and he died fighting for his country”. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4796579. stm consulted 24 November 2016)3

A further major shift around World War One was that most of those fallen in battle were buried in war cemeteries close to the battle sites, with each nation creating its own burial spaces away from home, maintained by specialised agencies in charge of their long-term upkeep (e.g. Crane 2013; Mosse 1990; Sherman 1999; Winter 1998). Several thousand of such battlefield cemeteries were constructed after 1918; more were created in the aftermath of World War Two. These cemeteries, away from home and close to the battlefields, while acknowledging the individual deaths,

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­ onetheless also came to represent the collective—both through the sheer n number of identical graves within them and through the use of a central memorial monument that embraced all the death within the site. Moreover, while monuments on or near to battlefields have a long history (Carman and Carman 2006), the shift in the late nineteenth century, which became crystallised after World War One, was that they came to be as much about memorialisation as about celebration (Login 2012: 182). An interesting nuance of the shifts—from singular to collective, located at ‘home’ or at the site of death, celebratory to mourning—is that whereas the many statues of generals and political leaders were often erected in the immediate aftermath of an event rather than at the death of the person, the memorials of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are solidly focussed on the dead, with an associated rhetoric of sacrifice and mourning. In Britain and the Commonwealth, this is captured through the often-repeated phrase ‘lest we forget’, while in France it is often expressed through the expression devoir de mémoire, the ‘duty’ of memory. The shift in tone away from celebration to memory and mourning has become even stronger during the twenty-first century, with public collective memorials centred on the idea of victimhood, and, in turn, acquiring a strong normative form with a rhetorical and artistic language recognised by a broad international public, as well as being ever more inclusive in terms of who counts as a victim (including building and places). Memorialisation has also developed as a performative dimension of both the individual’s and the collective need not to forget, and as a means for various groups and agencies to position themselves within a past-­ present-­future socio-political space. These practices shift the form of public acts of remembering from a focus on physical manifestations to active participation in a shared activity. The historiography of public memorialisation practices is not very clear, but we propose that memorialisation understood as a process through which societies collectively and publicly express mourning over those lost in war is largely a phenomenon that began in the twentieth century. Since the Roman period, we have seen welcoming parades during which victorious armies were celebrated, but the public recognition of loss was largely absent in earlier practices. Arguably, the combination of greater attention towards the need of the masses and the changing nature of warfare with its massive scale of death have been important in the formation of the kind of memorialisation practices that we are now familiar with.

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The schism between the celebration of victory and the mourning of loss is illuminated by the conflict arising in Britain in 1919 around the appropriate nature of celebration and commemoration. On 19 July 1919, a Peace Day parade was to be held in London, but many veterans refused to participate in what they saw as militaristic celebrations. In response, four days before the first anniversary of Armistice Day, King George V announced that a two-minute silence would be observed (Gregory 1994), thus, in effect, moving the focus from a celebration to a memorialisation. The latter was to become a fixed part of the British calendar. The Royal British Legion explains its form and purpose as: Each year at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we observe a Two Minute Silence. Armistice Day on 11 November marks the end of the First World War and is a day to remember and honour those who have paid the price for our freedom. (http://www.britishlegion.org. uk/remembrance/how-we-remember/two-minute-silence/, consulted 25 November 2016)

On their website, The Royal British Legion includes a section on ‘How to observe the Two Minute Silence’ in which they describe the ‘ingredients’ and the programme to be followed, a clear indication of the formalisation and standardisation of these events, even as the actual forms of memorial continue to evolve.4 Several monuments were constructed to stand along the route of the Peace Day parade in London on that July day in 1919. One of these was made by the architect Edward Lutyens, who had been commissioned to design a temporary structure for the parade (Greenberg 1989). His design, a wood and plaster cenotaph with the words ‘The Glorious Dead’, connected with some of the public needs at the time, became a venue for responding to the war in a new manner: public memorialisation of loss. A newspaper commentary a few months later noted: These flags and three wreaths of laurel, with their scarlet bindings blood-red down the white sides, are the messages of the Government to the Dead. But about its 20ft. base the monument carries what the people say, and it surely is speech as was never said in such way before. … Hour after hour, day after day, week after week they come; the men bareheaded and silent, the women wiping away quiet tears ….And from faded posy of snapdragon and hedgerow weed to exquisite boughton anchors and crosses and wreaths, each is a definite word to some man who will never come back. (Lancaster 1919: 7)

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By the end of July, pressures from the public together with a general change in attitude caused the government to decide that the Cenotaph should be recreated in a permanent material and designated Britain’s official war memorial (Greenberg 1989: 5). The stone Cenotaph was revealed at 11  a.m. on 11 November 1920, and, over the next three days, the monument was visited by 400,000 people (ibid. 11). The particular form of this memorial subsequently influenced memorial designs throughout Britain and the Commonwealth: a replica was built in Bermuda in 1920, a scaled-down version in Auckland in 1922, an almost exact copy in Hong Kong in 1923, and an exact copy in London, Ontario, in 1934. Such changes do not go unnoticed nor are they the outcome of some kind of automatic evolution; rather, they are part of a continuous rectification of the image of the state and its relationships with its citizens. Within this, there is a tension between the memory and mourning of the individual as a private concern, and the desire for public recognition of loss and ‘sacrifice’, which arguably helps to provide meaning in relation to wider, collective concerns (see e.g. Lloyd 1998: 173). For the English war dead, this tension was brought to the fore in connection with debates about the memorialisation of World War One battle deaths. This led to the decision to bury each individual dead under a separate, standardised headstone within larger war cemeteries so that all may be equal in death, above and beyond military rank and social class (for a detailed discussion see Crane 2013). This signalled a major shift in the public policy of commemoration, marking an emphasis on the sacrifice of the common man (and to a lesser degree woman, child, and animal). At the same time, the choice of identical headstones, on which the only personal element is the name, points to an abstract notion of the individual as part of an undifferentiated mass, comparable in its generality to the ‘unknown soldier’. The latter was another new memorial type to emerge in response to the losses of this war (see Crane 2013; Gregory 1994; Winter 1998). The war cemeteries also, and very controversially, overrode the war dead’s private links to home and family as they now became ‘owned’ by the nation (Crane 2013). However, as collective mourning and memorialisation have become the norm, people now actively pursue the inclusion of their loved ones in collective sites and memorial acts. This is, for instance, the case when visitors deposit personal items, such as toys or other mementoes at memorials, or the innumerable personal notes deposited in so-called ‘spontaneous memorials’ at sites of terrorist atrocity (see Margry and Sánchez-­Carretero 2011).

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This emphasis on public memorial practices has led to an increased tendency of merging different wars together, especially the two world wars, with memorials being used as historical markers that are continuously updated and added to. This began after World War Two, when the names of the dead were added to local war memorials for World War One, but it has continued to expand. In Britain, for instance, Remembrance Sunday is now commonly used for remembrance of the dead of all twentieth- and twenty-first-century wars. This act of updating can, in some cases, be used to explicitly make the point that a conflict is not yet over, or at least that the reckoning is still ongoing. The ‘Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina’ (for details see Chap. 5) is an example of this. On the central memorial plaque, the number of victims is followed by an ellipsis as a reminder that there may be more victims yet to be located, accounted for, and buried there, and that the memorial, therefore, is a work in progress (Fig. 1.2).

Fig. 1.2  The central memorial stone at Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery for the victims of the 1995 Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. (Source: Authors)

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In many ways, World War One acts as a threshold in most parts of Europe for how victims of war are commemorated. There are, of course, also regional differences in memorial culture, for example, notably for European countries that remained neutral during the world wars, or due to how particular historical events may have left different formative impressions or profound scars. But in areas involved in the world wars, these conflicts often eclipse earlier ones and have become the main focus of memorialisation. With the exception of the Napoleonic wars, various national wars of the nineteenth century are, therefore, generally not included in our widely shared memorial cultures. In England, for instance, the Crimean War (1853–56) is hardly acknowledged anymore despite the presence of memorials in many local parishes. This is not because the scale of the war was modest—more than 100,000 soldiers died, of which more than 21,000 were British—nor because it was a small affair in a far off corner—Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and Sardinia were all involved. Rather, it seems to be the case that ‘[t]here are no public funds for war graves, and while the World War One and Two graves, and those of later conflicts, enjoy the support of a special War Graves Commission, the Crimean is an orphan for whom no-one takes responsibility’.5 Why have some wars become orphaned of memorial ownership? We think this is primarily due to the sense of some wars providing ‘usable past’ (Brooks 1918, after Olick 2007) that contributes to fostering personal claims and collective memories which ensure a sense of attachment, collective empathy, and emotional involvement.6 As Winter and Sivan (1999: 16) put it, collective memory has a ‘shelf-life’ partly linked to the physical lifespan of individual memorial actors; as they pass away, memory artefacts may cease to act as memory aids. It seems that with time, our connection to even long-lasting and brutal wars changes as the shift from communicative to cultural memory takes place, and, in that shift, not all wars have the characteristics that make it possible for them to be absorbed into national narratives of heroism, sacrifice, and belonging. Remembrance of the Crimean dead in England is, therefore, now either personal or regional (found in parish cemeteries), but not a commonly shared narrative. A telling exception to this is ‘The Guards Crimean War Memorial’ erected in 1859 at Waterloo Place, London, and dedicated ‘To the memory of 2152 Officers, Non-Com. Officers and Privates of the BRIGADE OF GUARDS who fell during the war with Russia in 1854–56. Erected by their Comrades’. This is thought to be the first public memorial in Britain dedi-

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cated to all ranks; the monument was, however, pulled down in 1914 and re-erected 30 feet north of its original position to make space for the statues of Florence Nightingale and Sidney Herbert,7 that now front the Crimean War Memorial. Here, it seems that the focus on a heroic individual, Nightingale, has replaced an attempt at focussing on common soldiers. As the British/Allied involvement in the Crimean War came to be seen as a logistical, medical, and tactical failure and mismanagement, the refocus on a heroine was a helpful distraction.

What Memorials and Memorialisation Activities Do: Form, Function, and Affect The specific intentions underwriting memorials and memorialisation, as well as their forms vary. This, in turn, influences the ways in which they function, in particular, who they are aimed at and what kind of reactions they solicit. Behind such specificity, we can, nonetheless, locate certain common features that reveal how memorials and memorialisation ‘work’, and how they acquire affective dimensions. These can be summarised by reference to a number of rhetorical devices as well as material and performative qualities. The history of various collective responses to the experience of mass violent death reveals the presence throughout the last two hundred years of well-rehearsed memorial tropes, whether these be the ‘roll-call’ plaques or the representative figures returning home from war or frozen in mid-­ action. Such narrative forms provide commonly understood rhetorical devices through which particular understandings of events are constructed and consumed. These cultural forms, moreover, appear to provide an outlet for a collective reaction to the event and especially its horror. But the responses usually go beyond such basic reactions, as claims about how the event should be interpreted, including who the victims are and who the perpetrators are, commonly are woven into their narratives. They are, therefore, never merely about those who suffered or our acknowledgement of our debt to them; they also help guide how events are understood and responded to, how the past is part of the present and also the future. These cultural forms are important socio-cultural ‘tools’ that play central roles in societies’ historical self-understanding and in their claims about identity and community. They shape feelings of identity and play a role in the construction of state legitimacy. In this process, as illustrated by the

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case studies included in this volume, various qualities of the physical structures, citations to other monuments, rhetorical aspects such as the listing and reading out of names, and ritualised acts are used to generate desired understandings, and it is through alterations and manipulation of these same elements that changes can be injected into the meaning of memorials and memorialisation. A number of such elements are considered next. Sacrifice and Debt A common theme is about recognising the link between sacrifice and debt. One of the earliest explicit memorials in Europe that aimed to convey this message may be the epitaph by Simonides engraved on the commemorative stone placed on top of the burial mound for the Spartans at Thermopylae after their defeat in battle in 480 BC.8 It is the epitaph’s call for recognition and remembering that sets it apart from just being a mass burial. It has been translated in a number of ways. William Golding, stating that it could not be translated only paraphrased (1965: 26), provides the following version: ‘Stranger, tell the Spartans that we behaved as they would wish us to, and are buried here’ (1965: 26). The reference to the stranger (passing by) is a consistent phrasing in the various translations and it rings true through time capturing a modern expectation of memorials having messages that can be passed on. This notion of sacrifices has echoed through time and it has become one of the central tropes of war memorials, with their function being to instil a notion in the spectator of being indebted. These memorials strive to give sense to the sacrifices and sufferings (for further discussion see Winter 1998, 2008). In the particular case of Thermopylae, this message/messaging has become integral to the iconic status of the battle, contributing to a core European interpretative trope about sacrifice and freedom. William Golding captured this consequential sense of debt when, after his tour to the site of the battle, he wrote: I came to myself in a great stillness, to find that I was standing by the little mound. This is the mound of Leonidas [the Spartan commander], with its dust and rank grass, its flowers and lizards, its stones, scruffy laurels and hot gusts of wind. I knew now that something real happened here. It is not just that the human spirit reacts directly and beyond all argument to a story of sacrifice and courage, as a wine glass must vibrate to the sound of a violin. It is also because, way back and at the hundredth remove, that company stood right in the line of history. A little of Leonidas lies in the fact that I can go

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where I like and write what I like. He contributed to set us free. (W. Golding 1965: 25, our emphasis)

This notion of sacrifice and debt has become one of the most central tropes within memorial and memorialisation rhetoric, and one which in turn opens history and our claims on it to strong emotive engagement. It also, however, means that these cultural forms have a potency that makes them the target for various forms of manipulation. When a political group presents itself as the representatives of those who made ‘the ultimate sacrifice’, the corresponding debt is passed onto society at large, examples of this abound in the inter-war Europe of the 1920s and 1930s. Memorials can come to be used as a means of trying to quell social mobilisation and critique of the state. In Francoist Spain, for instance, memorials to the ‘glorious martyrs’ were planted throughout the national territory by means of a centrally planned and orchestrated policy of monumental dispersal. These memorial markers were used to intimidate and prevent any resistance to the authoritarian rule. By using a language of martyrdom, not honouring the debt to the self-proclaimed heirs of the martyrs—the state and church partnership—became sacrilegious (Viejo-Rose 2011). Linking future actions to this potency is a powerful move. In addition, this trope provides a ready-made language for new memorials and linked activities. Citations and Resonances, Performativity, and Ritualisation It is also interesting to note that whereas some memorials lose their resonance, become irrelevant, and disappear from collective knowledge and memory, others are clearly able to touch us across time; we feel empathy with the loss they express. Over time, such memorials have provided us with core emotional and interpretive tropes; they have created expectations about the nature and roles of memorials—what they are, how they should ‘work’ on us, and how in turn we shall respond to them. As seen in this volume, memorials and memorialisation are part of processes of changing meanings, competing claims, and, most significantly, of how we understand history and place ourselves within it; but they also draw on traditions and shared norms. For instance, the epitaph discussed above has provided us with an archetype that resonates through later reactions to violent collective death; and citing this memorial or its text has been used both as an assurance, or, alternatively, as a means of protest. Such use of

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citations does not stabilise the discourses, but it offers a means of making connections through time and space. Examples of memorial citation can, therefore, be used to locate and clarify some of the core characteristics which have been brought forward to today. Studies of war poetry illuminate these echoes and resonances through time. H. W. Garrod’s ‘Epitaph: Neuve Chapelle’ (from 1919), for instance, provides an explicit echo of Simonides epitaph through the lines ‘Tell them at home, there’s nothing here to hide: We took our orders, asked no questions, died’9 (Hibberd and Onions 2008: 46). The referencing is not merely textual; however, genres for the physical form of the memorials have developed with international fashions and tastes affecting design. Within this development, we can discern an emerging semiotic—common traits that allow memorials and memorialisation to become recognisable for what they are. One of the most obvious shared features is the practice of condensing messages, using symbols, and making references to other similar forms, all with the aim of communicating a core narrative about the event, the loss, and how to respond. The condensing of meaning is seen, for example, in how events and time are presented. Aiming at making these widely understandable, common shortcuts are used: ‘1914–18’ means World War One will all its pain and devastation, enemies and allies. As a widespread semantic sign, it is explanatory by itself; and it is powerful in its simplicity, it can be filled with local meaning. In this manner, the sign works as a kind of logo, it is there to draw attention but it does not set out the meaning that any individual or group may add. The numbers work beyond language: ‘1914–18’ can be used by most10 of the countries affected by World War One. Being condensed like that the association it may give rise to can simultaneously be universal and locally specific. Similarly, in honouring the dead, the roll-call—in other words the listing of the names of the individual casualties—has become a widespread trope. This has a strong affective dimension as the emphasis on the individual humanises the war, drawing on emotions and empathy, while the list of names materialises the scale of the losses. The simplicity of the called-for responses—listen, honour, Never Again, ‘dead for France’11—is similarly effective. The tone of such requests is simultaneously authoritarian and communal, guiding us towards a codified sentiment even as it leaves space for personal emotions. The use of the ‘we’, even when not explicitly stated, is also highly evocative, creating layers of involvement—we honoured them and we will never forget.

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To gain legitimacy and potency, memorialisation also needs to be recognisable for what it is; this is commonly done by the selective use of widespread symbols (such as the red poppy in Britain or the cornflower in France) and semiotic signs as well as theatrical devices, such as the staging and carefully choreographed movements. Foremost is the procession— this provides a focal point that enables a progression and the creation of a climax, in short, a performance. It is usually elaborated through music, flowers, flags, and iconic objects. It is also common for a selected cast of individuals to be present: survivors, relatives, children, or veterans may also be included drawing out various dimensions of the events to which the memorialisation is dedicated. Importantly, memorialisation also has a tendency towards ritualisation and potentially even sanctification. To understand this process better, it is worth paying attention to repetition as a core characteristic of memorialisation, as it is due to this that ritualisation develops. Repetition means that a normative notion of the right and proper format is maintained, and it is through participating in the repetition that one, individually or as a group, inscribe oneself into the narrative and its claims. Inducing change to such a ritualised space may look difficult (cf. Bloch 1974); but in practice, we see it appearing in two ways. Because memorialisation is a performative practice, its realisation depends on enactment and actors. In practice, this means that it is based on recalling and agreeing on how it has ‘always’ been done; this opens up the space for small changes or ‘copying errors’: replacing one piece of music with another, asking another person to lay the flowers. Even simple things like having to use a different route because of roadwork interrupts the stability of the event. The other means of change is based on deliberate decisions to alter procedures, for example, by including another group, or by altering the reasons behind parts of the processes; such changes are vividly illustrated in the case study of the Heidefriedhof in Dresden discussed in this volume by Neutzner. Some changes cannot be arrived at without centralised decisions, however, and these, therefore, reveal larger political reinterpretations of how past events should be memorialised, often with an eye to contemporary social and political issues. For instance, the inclusion of German soldiers in the annual memorialisation activities for the 1920 re-unification of northern Slesvig with Denmark could not just emerge on its own, but rather was driven by the aim to achieve public recognition of Danes and Germans as co-inhabiting one memorial event; the change had to be stage-set top-down (Sørensen and Adriansen 2015). Such changes are often based on protracted political as well as public

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debates about the proper use of memorial activities. Ongoing debates in Britain about the inclusion of war casualties from recent conflicts in Armistice Day anniversary events, for example, have raised considerable public discussions about what is proper and right. Fashion and Trends, Distributed Qualities Above we briefly noted that memorials and memorialisations are subject to fashion, they follow trends. To fully understand this dimension, we need more detailed investigation at a level of complexity that includes issues of globalisation and dominance, as well as some of the traits that give prevailing styles desirability and fuel fashion. Clearly, these are intriguing and interesting connections, but here we limit ourselves to reflecting on two characteristics: the distributive qualities of memorials and the dominance of international tastes and associated architectural forms. The notions of networks and distributed memorials (Sørensen and Adriansen 2015: 34–5) may help us to understand some of the trends towards similarity that are so characteristics for these cultural forms. Memorials and memorialisation no longer exist without awareness of their counterparts in other areas—especially and typically neighbouring regions or places used by others involved in the same conflict. These places have a kind of pregiven recognition of, almost loyalty to, one another. This will cause them to drift towards physical forms that are mutually recognisable, so that the interpretation of the event and the purpose of the memorial become readily understood and shared; as is the case of the Cenotaphs throughout the Commonwealth or the ossuaries in Western Europe. These become networks of memorial sites that ‘talk’ to and reference each other, they work together to create an overall understanding of the event and its scale. One may say that every single war memorial in Britain is part of the memorial to war and every single Armistice Day event is part of its memorialisation. The memorials constructed in Yugoslavia under the regime of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia offer another powerful example of memorials ‘working together’ as the monuments together were used to spread the message of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ throughout the region in order to bind the different ethnic groups together (Sahovic and Zulumovic 2015). Another aspect of the seeming standardisation of memorial forms is that they enter into competition with one another: competition about who suffered most or about who is most diligent in paying homage to a particular narrative of sacrifice.

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The aesthetics and design language of memorials have become increasingly global; irrespective of the specific local concerns their materialisations have been moving towards similarities. This is about mimicry and copying, but it is also about dominance and power relations. One of the mechanisms that encourages the dominance of certain architectural ideas has been the reliance on international design competitions for major memorials—as a practice this tends to disconnect local communities, and especially mourners, from the final decisions making about form as such decisions are delegated to official taste-holders, the highest purveyors and gatekeepers of taste. This insistence on taste is commonly exercised when spontaneous and grassroots memorials become embraced by wider society and their ‘tasteless messiness’ become replaced by ‘proper’ forms, as vividly discussed by Truc and Sánchez-Carretero (Chap. 2) with regard to the fate of the spontaneous memorialisation arising from the 11th March 2004 train bombings in Madrid. A striking example of this process is found in the project of the international monument erected in 1967 at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland. Although a range of spontaneous personal memorials had grown up outside the camp since its liberation, these were all erased and replaced by an official memorial based on an international competition to select the ‘best design’. Although a substantial number of artists, around 400, entered the competition, the decision-making process was fraught with problems. These included such divisive issues as the nationality of the artists, questions about who was being memorialised, and clashes between East and West European notions of preferred artistic styles. In the end, an international team of Polish and Italian sculptures and architects were given the task. Being the authorised memorial for this enormously important site, the monument soon became an object of contestation, including the content of its text, in particular disputes over the number of victims and the exclusion/inclusion of references to Jews. Amongst other ongoing ‘corrections’, such disputes led to the original plaque being removed in 1995 to rectify the number of victims and to mention the Jews. There has also been considerable subsequent discussion about why Oskar Hansen’s design,12 which is now seen as ‘an uncompromising attempt to redefine the notion of a public monument’ (Murwaska-­ Muthesius 2002) was not chosen. It is now expected that an important memorial will have to be linked to an important artist and that its forms will be found through an international competition; local people and various stakeholders become largely

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absent from, or downplayed within, this process. Such tensions between the insiders to the event to be memorialised and the prerogative assigned to the artist is illustrated by some of the controversies that arose from Rachel Whiteread’s Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial (Mahnmal für die 65.000 ermordeten österreichischen Juden und Jüdinnen der Shoah) unveiled in Vienna in 2000. An international jury chose Whiteread’s design unanimously, but it immediately sparked protests from a wide spectrum of Viennese communities and interest groups (Carley 2010) (Fig.1.3). In Britain, the plan to erect a Holocaust Memorial next to Westminster is also typical of this focus on internationally renowned artists as indicated by how the media reporting on the final stage of the process: On Holocaust Memorial Day, 10 shortlisted designs for the memorial were made public by some of the biggest names in art and architecture, such as

Fig. 1.3  Rachel Whiteread’s Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial [Mahnmal für die 65.000 ermordeten österreichischen Juden und Jüdinnen der Shoah] on location in Vienna. (Source: K Rebay-Salisbury)

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Lord Foster, Sir David Adjaye with Ron Arad, Anish Kapoor with Zaha Hadid Architects, Daniel Libeskind, Rachel Whiteread with Caruso St John. They employ many of the tropes of modern memorialising – digging into the ground, mute forms, fractured walls, light descending from above, the gathering of stones to represent lost lives  – but there is too little sign in either their briefing or in their design of deep thought about the memorial’s purpose. They don’t examine what it is to make this piece of work here and now. (Rowan Moore 2017)

Structure of Volume The case studies that follow analyse a wide range of memorials and memorialisation activities looking at how each represents distinct intentions and claims. Their particular concern is to analyse the processes of change, whether this is through a site being confirmed as part of a new official memorial, as is the case for the Gulag heritage in Russia, or a site’s meaning being recast totally, as is the case for the Isted Lion, a memorial from the First Danish-Prussian War of 1854. The case studies, focussing on examples from Bosnia Herzegovina, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Germany, Kosovo/a, Russia, and Spain reveal the influential role of memorials and memorialisation activities even decades after the events they were constructed to commemorate. They show how selected memorials evolve over time to suit new social and political needs. So do memorials matter? The answer from these case studies is a resounding ‘yes’, and yet, as we will see, they do not always have the impact that is intended or assumed or desired. They are also often highly problematic tools used for historical re-narratives shaped around contemporary needs and desires. The chapters are organised roughly along the idea of memorials having life cycles, so the volume starts with the sites that are still in the process of becoming and then moves towards more sated sites as they progress towards the end of active engagement. In the process, the chapters collectively detail the roles and effects of competing claims, changing stakeholders, and debates, and how these are involved in deciding on the character of memorials and memorialisation. The very first stage towards memorialisation can be a spontaneous, or grassroots, movement, as discussed explicitly in Gérôme Truc and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero chapter on the Madrid bombing (Chap. 2) but also present as a notion in many of the other chapters, such as the discussion of the development towards memorialisation in Rebecca Bryant and Mete Hatay’s analysis of the

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recently emerging pilgrimage to Erenkoy in Cyprus (Chap. 3), Margaret Comer’s analysis of the heritagisation of the Gulag history on the Solovetsky Islands, Russia (Chap. 4) and Dzenan Sahovic’s detailed account of the background to and emerging usage of the Srebrenica Memorial Centre, Bosnia Herzegovina (Chap. 5). This, however, is an unstable form and it is easily taken over, moved towards either erasure or formalisation as civic bodies, or even the state, appropriate a site and formalises it. This process is also illustrated by the aforementioned chapters. But the development is not always just linear—from informal to formal. This is illustrated by both Gustav Wollentz’s discussion of emerging reactions and alternative uses of memorials and war ruins drawing on examples from Mostar, Bosnia Herzogovina, and Kosovo (Chap. 6) and Britt Baillie’s discussion of the Dudik Memorial Complex in Vukovar, Croatia (Chap. 7). Their examples show how the fate of memorial complexes, despite inherent architectural value as well as significant historical resonances, can be caught up in a surge of ethnic political reappraisals about what pasts are desired; both chapters also suggest that youth may need other kinds of spaces to remember or address the past. In contrast to the sense of short-termism that these chapters present, Matthias Neutzner’s detailed account (Chap. 8) of the Heidefriedhof, Dresden’s prime cemetery to its dead including perpetrators and victims from World War Two, provides a strong sense of the longue durée with its echoes through time. Long termism is also illustrated by Inge Adriansen’s account (Chap. 9) of the Isted Lion, a victory memorial for which the last stage in its long journey was the top-down attempt at recasting it as a memorial to friendship. The authors of these chapters come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds with archaeology, anthropology, history, and political science being the predominant ones. As a result, in each chapter, the case study is approached using distinct methodological tools and sensitivities with some conducting memorial ethnographies and others drawing more heavily on archival sources. That said, at one point or another, all of the authors engaged in lengthy conversations with each other and/or with the editors of the volume and so in this cross-disciplinarity there is a common purpose that, we feel, strengthens the ‘sum of the parts’. What the methodological approaches also have in common is that they are all situated in and informed by the materiality of memorials and the moment of memorialising and thus have a distinct presentist focus in their analysis. While this volume does not aim to layout ‘good practice’ guidelines for memorial practice, two of the authors are practitioners—Adriansen was a

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museum curator and Neutzner is a leading community activist. This lends their reflections insights into the practicalities of memorial practices and the negotiations that underlie them. Neutzner’s piece on the Heidefriedhof especially speaks to the difficulties of managing the groups that uphold different, often antagonistic, memorial narratives. By collectively delving into these complex and convoluted histories, the chapters aid reflection on what may be the future role of memorials and memorialisation—do we need them? And what do we need them for? Do they, or could they, play positive instrumental roles, for example, in reconciliations or will they always prolong divisions and resentment? As regards such reflections, the chapters demonstrate that memorials and memorialisation activities typically are used for particularistic rather than general political purposes, and they show how easily they become subject to political appropriation. It seems that they are not natural partners to reconciliation—although with time they may become more open for such reinterpretations. At the same time, as these cultural forms are so closely linked to conflicts and their aftermaths they should have the potentials to be used for the negotiations of new agreements or understandings between former warring partners; but for that to materialise we need to think about memorials as not being primarily about time past, but as formed around future aspirations. Further insights into the ‘workings’ of these cultural forms may then help us to design contemporary versions that lend themselves not just to ever wider social groups but also to social practices that are future orientated rather than backward looking.

Notes 1. #Rhodes Must Fall 2. There is a distinct trend towards ever wider inclusion. In June 2015, a Memorial to the warhorses shipped from Hampshire during World War One was unveiled in Romsey, England. A fundraising drive to create a memorial in ‘tribute to all the animals that served, suffered and died alongside the British, Commonwealth and Allied forces in the wars and conflicts of the 20th century’ financed ‘The Animals in War Memorial’ now standing at the edge of Hyde Park, London. While the fund is now closed their website is maintained by the British ‘War Memorials Trust’ (­ http://www. animalsinwar.org.uk/). 3. Such blanket pardons predictably result in substantial debates; these include interesting tensions between historians’ insistence that history should not be tampered with (i.e. warning against the distortion of histori-

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cal facts) and relatives’ demand for injustices to be redressed. (e.g. through rhetoric like: I personally haven’t got final closure. I will only get that when Bernard’s name is on the role of honour in the cathedral of his home town of Derry, in Northern Ireland, and on the war memorial in Derry, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4797969.stm, consulted 24 November 2016.) 4. See, for instance, several of the memorials created for the centenary of World War One, from the famous 2014 ‘Blood Swept Lands and Sea of Red’ memorial installation at the Tower of London, to the RBL online initiative ‘Every Man Remembered’, and the ‘We Are Here’ Somme tribute in British train stations for the centenary of the battle on 1 July 2016. See http://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/ tower-of-london-remembers/about-the-installation/; http://www.britishlegion.org.uk/remembrance/ww1-centenary/every-man-remembered/; https://becausewearehere.co.uk/ 5. https://victorianstudiescentre.wordpress.com/2014/01/11/ a-sore-sight-britains-crumbling-crimean-memorials-and-the-campaign-torestore-them/, consulted 24 November 2016. 6. Synthesising Brooks, Olick writes: ‘[A] “usable past” is thus an invention or at least a retrospective reconstruction to serve the needs of the present’ (Olick 2007:19). 7. Sidney Herbet was Secretary at War during the Crimean War and a close ally of Nightingale. 8. The original epitaph was engraved on a commemorative stone placed on top of the burial mound. It has not survived, but the epitaph was engraved on a new stone in 1955. There is some dispute about whether the epitaph is actually attributable to Simonides (Molyneux 1992: 183f); but this has not affected the almost mythological status of this attribution in popular presentations, and references to Simonides and Thermopylae are plentiful including in travel writing. 9. For a detailed discussion see Vandiver 2011: 10ff. 10. Except Italy which entered the war in 1915, so that the conflict there is known as ‘la Guerra ’15-’18’. 11. ‘Mort pour la France’ is the ritualised response after each name has been read out during the Armistice Day ceremonies (see e.g. Prost 2002). 12. A famous Polish architect who is now considered to never have been properly recognised by the West.

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Bibliography Amat, J.-P., P.  Filippucci, and E.  Savoret. 2015. The Cemetery of France: Reconstruction and Memorialization on the Battlefield of Verdun (France). In War and Cultural Heritage. Biographies of Place, ed. M.L.S.  Sørensen and D. Viejo-Rose, 46–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University press. Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Assmann, A. 2006. Memory, Individual and Collective. In The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, ed. R.E.  Goodin and C.  Tilly, 210–224. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2008a. Transformations Between History and Memory. Social Research 8 (1): 49–72. Assmann, J. 2008b. Communicative and Cultural Memory. In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. A.  Erll and A. Nünning, 109–118. Berlin: de Gruyter. Bloch, M. 1974. Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation: Is Religion an Extreme form of Traditional Authority? European Journal of Sociology 15: 55–81. Carly, R. 2010. Silent Witness: Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library. Idea Journal Interior Ecologies: 24–39. Carman, J., and P.  Carman. 2006. Bloody Meadows: Investigating Landscapes of Battle. Stroud: The History Press. Carr, G. 2012. Examining the Memorialscape of Occupation and Liberation: A Case Study from the Channel Islands. International Journal of Heritage Studies 18 (2): 174–193. Crane, D. 2013. Empires of the Dead. How One Man’s Vision Led to the Creation of WWI’s War Graves. London: William Collins. Dillon, S. 2006. Women on the Columns of Trajan and Marcus and the Visual Language of Roman Victory. In Representations of War in Ancient Rome, ed. S. Dillon and K.E. Welch, 244–270. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doss, E. 2010. Memorial Mania. Public Feelings in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gillis, J.R., ed. 1994. Commemorations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Golding, W. 1965. The Hot Gates and Other Occasional Pieces. London: Faber & Faber. Greenberg, A. 1989. Lutyens’s Cenotaph. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 48 (1): 5–23. Gregory, Adrian. 1994. The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day, 1919–1946 (Legacy of the Great War). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Halbwach, M. 1950. La mémoire collective. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———. 1980. The Collective Memory. New York: Harper & Row Colophon Books.

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Haney, C.A., C.  Leimer, and J.  Lowery. 1997. Spontaneous Memorialization: Violent Death and Emerging Mourning Ritual. Omega 35 (2): 159–171. Hibberd, D., and J.  Onions. 2008. The Winter of the World. Poems of the Great War. London: Constable. Huyssen, A. 2003. Present Pasts. Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. California: Stanford University Press. Lancaster, G.B. 1919. The Glorious Dead Cenotaph in Whitehall. Ashburton Guardian, October 31, p. 7. Laqueur, T.W. 1994. Memory and Naming in the Great War. In Commemorations, ed. J.R. Gillis, 150–167. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2015. The Work of the Dead. A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lloyd, D.W. 1998. Battlefield Tourism. Pilgrimage and Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia and Canada 1919–1939. London: Bloomsbury. Login, E. 2012. War Memorials in Sedan and Metz: The Evolution of War Memorialization on Eastern France. Journal of Conflict Archaeology 17 (3): 177–198. Margry, J.A., and C. Sánchez-Carretero. 2011. Grassroots Memorials. The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death. Oxford: Berghahn. Molyneux, J.H. 1992. Simonides: A Historical Study. Wauconda: BolchazyCarducci. Moore, R. 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/feb/05/ britain-holocaust-memorial-shortlist-victoria-tower-gardens-london?CMP= Share_iOSApp_Other consulted 6 February 2017. Mosse, G.L. 1990. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. New York: Oxford University Press. Murwaska-Muthesius, K. 2002. Oskar Hansen and the Auschwitz ‘Countermemorial,’ 1958–59. In ARTMARGINS, www.artmargins.com/ index.php/featured-ar ticles/311-oskar-hansen-and-the-auschwitzqcountermemorialq-1958-59 Nora, P. 1984–1992. Les Lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1989. Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Representations 26: 7–24. Olick, J.K. 2007. From Useable Pasts to the Return of the Repressed. Hedgehog Review 9 (2, Summer): 19. Prost, A. 2002. War Memorials of the Great War: Monuments to the Fallen. In Republican Identities in War and Peace. Representations of France in the 19th and 20th Century, ed. A. Prost, 11–34. London: Berg. Sahovic, D., and D. Zulumovic. 2015. Changing Meaning of Second World War Monuments in Post-Dayton Bosnia Herzegovina: A Case Study of the Kozara Monument and Memorial Complex. In War and Cultural Heritage. Biographies

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of Place, ed. M.L.S.  Sørensen and D.  Viejo-Rose, 208–224. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sherman, D.J. 1999. The Construction of Memory in Interwar France. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Sørensen, M.L.S., and I.  Adriansen. 2015. Dybbøl: The Construction and Reconstruction of a Memorial Landscape. In War and Cultural Heritage. Biographies of Place, ed. M.L.S.  Sørensen and D. Viejo-Rose, 18–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vandiver, E. 2011. Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Varley, K. 2008. Under the Shadow of Defeat: The War 1870–71 in French Memory. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Viejo-Rose, D. 2011 October. Memorial Functions: Intent, Impact and the Right to Remember. Memory Studies 4 (4): 465–488. White, Geoffrey M. 2016. Memorializing Pearl Harbor. Unfinished Histories and the Work of Remembrance. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Winter, J. 1998. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2008. Sites of Memory and the Shadow of War. In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. A.  Erll and A. Nüning, 61–74. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Winter, J., and E. Sivan. 1999. Setting the Framework. In War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, ed. J.  Winter and E.  Sivan, 6–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Polarised Topography of Rival Memories: The Commemorations of the 11th March 2004 Train Bombings in Madrid Gérôme Truc and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

The commemorative practices of the 11th March 2004 train bombings in Madrid (11-M) involve many aspects, where mourning is linked to political protests, solidarity with the victims, and rejection of terrorism or anti-­ war sentiment. This chapter is centred on how individuals and organisations appropriate sites and enact mourning events, as well as the practices involved in the commemoration of anniversaries and the reproduction of these practices over time. We look at certain types of ‘technologies of memory’ drawing on Marita Sturken’s application of Foucault’s notion of technologies of the self. According to Sturken, ‘the memorial is perhaps the most traditional kind of memory object or technology’ (Sturken 1997: 10). In this traditional sense, the term ‘memorial’ classically refers to something material: a monument—a statue or a piece of architecture—or G. Truc (*) French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] C. Sánchez-Carretero (*) Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. L. S. Sørensen et al. (eds.), Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18091-1_2

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a plaque put somewhere as a reminder of what took place there. However, in a broader sense, we can speak about ‘memorial’ to designate various forms of performances, such as commemorative ceremonies, gatherings, concerts, and readings of poems or lists of names (Young 1993). At the intersection of the material and performative is a type of non-institutional memorial: the ‘grassroots memorial’, which consists of the aggregation of flowers, candles, and other ephemeral memorabilia. This type of memorial could be observed in Madrid after the 11-M attacks (Sánchez-Carretero 2011; Truc 2018), as well as after other traumatic events (Santino 2006; Margry and Sánchez-Carretero 2011). By focusing on the spatial dimension of the memorialisation process, this chapter explores the tension between these different forms of memorials, and shows how it can lead to a topographic polarisation within the city landscape in relation to rivalries between groups that do not remember an event in the same way, or do not commemorate it for the same purposes. In the first section, we start by exploring the array of commemorative events after the 11-M attacks, with special focus on the differences between official memorials and grassroots memorials, and follow with an analysis of their spatial dynamics. In the second and third sections, we move to the results of our investigation, based primarily on ethnographic observations of the different memorial sites from the second to the seventh anniversaries of 11-M attacks and in particular those around the Atocha train station, from 2005 to 2011. We show how tensions and rivalries around memorial sites that appear in the anniversaries progressively constructed a polarised topography of 11-M memories in the Spanish capital.

Official Memorials, Grassroots Memorials and Traumatic Events: The Spatial Dimension of Commemorations Conflicts are symbolically negotiated in the ways they are remembered and commemorated; conversely, contested performances express and reproduce uneasy memories of conflicts. This is not only relevant to how wars and battles are commemorated; other types of traumatic events also use the same technologies of memory. For instance, the untimely death of people as a result of a natural catastrophe, random acts of violence or a terrorist attack can similarly provoke traumatic memory and result in col-

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lective acts of remembrance. Here, we use the expression ‘traumatic event’ to refer to an event that provokes reactions in society at large that go beyond the mourning process that an individual faces when s/he suffers a loss. Deaths that provoke the type of reactions such as those observed after the 11-M attacks can be described as ‘traumatic’ in this sense (Alexander 2012; Edkins 2003). The mourners did not necessarily know the deceased, but they nonetheless expressed a shared feeling of bereavement and showed a need to participate in mourning and memorial practices. As part of commemorations, various sites can be used or created: for instance, monuments, cemeteries, museums, and plaques on streets and buildings—memorial in a traditional sense. Other commemorative practices, however, are ephemeral, constituted by activities that leave no permanent traces and constitute memorial performances like concerts, festivals, demonstrations. In both cases, these sites and events can be linked to heritage. As Viejo-Rose points out, ‘there are other important elements in maintaining a “memory” of traumatic historical events that are more explicitly linked to heritage: ritualized commemorative events and anniversaries, monuments, museum collections, archives, cemeteries, and re-enactments’ (Viejo-Rose 2011a: 59). More than two decades ago, Sider and Smith (1997) dedicated a volume to how commemorations and the silences that surround them come into being and are institutionalised. Anniversaries, as a type of commemorations, are also constructed in relation to silences and make sense because of the silences that surround the event. These are silences in a double sense: the silence of the rest of the year, because an anniversary cannot exist if every day the same event is commemorated, and also the silence of the ‘others’ who are not commemorated in the anniversary.1 The silences of Spain’s recent past, in particular, the silences surrounding the conflicted relationship with the victims of the Civil War (1936–1939), have modelled memorialscapes in Spain (Viejo-Rose 2011b). These silences are materialised in who gets to be commemorated and by whom, and this in turn is at the base of the conflicts of memories and the polarisation process of memorial sites. Traumatic Events and Memorialisation Processes A common phenomenon in response to traumatic events today is the appearance of grassroots memorials—also called spontaneous shrines—on sites associated with the event. This particular type of commemorative practice does not necessarily intend to be permanent, yet it often follows a

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clear material pattern and design, without being arranged by a constituted group or organisation (Margry and Sánchez-Carretero 2011: 3; Ortiz 2011; Sánchez-Carretero 2011; Truc 2018). Grassroots memorials are usually created at the place where the death occurred instead of the sanctioned sites for conducting mourning rituals, such as cemeteries, churches, or secular places such as morgues. As such, they can be seen as the expression of non-institutional initiatives to memorialise a site in relation to what took place there, and reciprocally to keep in this exact place the memory of the traumatic event. In this sense, grassroots memorials are not to be confused with official memorials. Margry and Sánchez-Carretero (2011) coined the term ‘grassroots memorials’ to overcome the interpretative shortcomings of previous ways of referring to this phenomenon, such as ‘spontaneous shrines’ (Santino 1992, 2004, 2006; Grider 2001, 2007), ‘improvised memorials’ (Margry and Sánchez-Carretero 2007) or ‘temporary memorials’ (Doss 2008). The ritual practice of grassroots memorials arises when the death of ‘others’ is particularly shocking to society at large, and it has become an expected response in recent decades. Grassroots memorials indicate levels of social distress experienced in response to a particular event in ways that other memorials might not; they signal an event that is felt as traumatic by a group. These memorials differ from official memorials because of their ephemerality, their necessarily performative character and their tendency to make demands. By the latter, we mean that they ask for action to be taken, even if it is expressed through questions—‘Why?’—or outrage— ‘This shouldn’t have happened!’ As Santino points out, commemorating death is often used to address or change a situation or condition (Santino 2011: 70), and grassroots memorials respond to traumatic events through a communicative gesture that asks for action. The memorials not only aim to commemorate the death or deaths but also to express various emotions, to protest, to vindicate, or to demand that similar tragedies should not be repeated. In this respect, the 11-M attacks have also marked a shift in how victims of violence are publicly memorialised in Spain, in particular, incorporating grassroots memorialisation alongside more established forms. The Politics of the Victims Associations Linked to 11-M On 11 March 2004, ten bombs exploded at approximately 7:30 a.m. in four commuter trains located in Atocha, El Pozo, Santa Eugenia train sta-

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tions and Téllez Street, a small alleyway located just before the trains’ entrance to Atocha station. The number of victims officially recognised after the court hearing was 191 deceased and 1858 injured. The political context in which the bombings occurred is an important element in understanding the meanings of the sites of memory and their evolution over the years. The attacks were perpetrated three days before the Spanish general election. The results of the election made the socialist Rodríguez Zapatero the head of the new government while the conservative Aznar from the party Partido Popular (PP) lost the election. Various interpretations of the events offered different explanations about the responsibility for the bombings and the relationship between the attacks and the change in government (Bali 2007; Fishman 2007). A ‘conspiracy’ theory about the responsibility for the bombings—linking ETA, the socialist party, and Al-Qaeda—was alive for a decade, supported in particular by a group called Peones Negros Libres, and some associations of victims. The mediatisation of this conspiracy narrative and the political instrumentalisation of the victims had serious implications in terms of memorialisation and the tensions that arose at subsequent anniversaries. The Peones Negros Libres use the slogan ‘we want to know the truth’. That phrase was repeatedly employed just after the attacks in protests against the allegedly misleading information provided by the then Aznar’s government right before the 2004 general elections. The Peones appropriated the slogan, the site of Atocha, and the use of grassroots memorials while changing their original meaning. They turned the sentence ‘we want to know the truth’ into a symbol of their conspiracy theory. The victims’ associations were also politicised and instrumentalised by the media and the local government of Madrid. There are three victims’ associations, two of them dedicated exclusively to 11-M victims (Asociación 11-M Afectados de Terrorismo and Asociación de Ayuda a las Víctimas del 11-M) and a third, AVT (Asociación Víctimas de Terrorismo), which was founded in 1981 and is mainly formed by ETA victims but includes some victims from the 11-M attacks. In addition, the Fundación Víctimas de Terrorismo is an overarching structure that includes all these groups plus other associations and foundations. The AVT gathers a significant number of victims of ETA and is a powerful lobby in Spain, particularly close to the conservative Partido Popular (PP). The Asociación de Ayuda a las Víctimas del 11-M (AAV11-M) was founded in 2004 with the help of AVT and with the more specific aim of ‘supporting 11-M victims’; however, this association has dwindled in size, due to a lack of subscriptions and insufficient

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financial support. The Asociación 11-M Afectados de Terrorismo (A11-M), is the most active one—in the timeframe analysed in this chapter, 2005– 2011—and has the most members linked directly to the 11-M attacks. Certain conservative press outlets associate this group with the socialist party, an idea that is not supported by the association itself. The Spatial Dimension of Memory Rivalries In relation to the plurality of groups linked to 11-M, the commemorations of the 11-M attacks are characterised by a multiplicity of sites and claims. First of all, there is the multiplicity of sites that were affected by the explosions and into which eventually grassroots memorials were incorporated. As mentioned earlier, four sites were involved: the stations of Atocha, Santa Eugenia, and El Pozo, and the railway tracks located along Téllez Street. Secondly, one can look at the multiple ways of collectively memorialising these attacks: above and beyond the victims’ association, many groups of people, affected to varying degrees and each with its own perspective, became the ‘audience’ for commemorations. As in any traumatic event, the memory of 11-M includes multi-layered perspectives and claims depending on these audiences: it is not the same in Madrid as in the rest of Spain, in Europe or other parts of the world. It is not the same for the direct victims, for the people close to them, for those who helped at the scene of the attacks, for those who were victims of attacks other than the ones in Madrid, or for the people who have never been directly involved in any attack whatsoever and followed the 11-M events through the media. As a result of such multiplicity, every year on the 11-M anniversary in Madrid alone over ten different memorial acts are organised and promoted by various authorities (e.g. the city hall, regional presidency, national government, and European institutions) and civil society actors (e.g. associations of victims, neighbourhood associations, and political associations). Another consequence of this multiplicity is that the location of memorial acts and ceremonies shifts from one year to the next, and groups with different memories of the event, such as victims’ associations, manifest their rivalry in the proximity to the sites of the attacks. Both the spatial shifting and the rivalries exemplify the sociological principle highlighted by Maurice Halbwachs (2008) that in order to remain vivid, memories need to be localised. In other words, for memory to be maintained and transmitted through time, it needs to become situated spatially (Truc 2012a). The act of remembering what took place involves the capacity to identify a

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place. This might be the reason why the four sites hit by the 11-M attacks immediately became the objects of spontaneous memorialisation, achieved through the creation of grassroots memorials aiming at maintaining the memory of the exact places where people lost their lives. For this same reason, several official monuments built in memory of the victims have been inaugurated since 2004 in different places. Sites of spontaneous memorialisation are often turned into places of institutionalised memory: today there are monuments near each of the stations involved in the 11-M attacks (along with the Alcalá de Henares station where the terrorists and several of their victims boarded the trains). This transformation is neither systematic nor the corollary of grassroots memorials. On the contrary, sometimes there may be a desire to avoid the permanent transformation of sites into official places of memory and remove traces of the tragedy. As we will see below, this is partly what has happened after 11-M within the Atocha station itself. At the same time, there can be attempts to create ad hoc official memorials elsewhere, in places not directly linked to the commemorated event but rather chosen according to criteria such as accessibility and availability for memorial practices. For instance, a Bosque del Recuerdo (Forest of Remembrance) for the attacks was inaugurated in March 2005 inside the Retiro Park, where no bomb attack occurred on 11th March. In such a case, a tension between grassroots memorials, attached to the exact place of the event, and such ad hoc memorial sites can arise, as these are aimed at convincing people to gather elsewhere than at the exact place where the event occurred. As a result of these issues, four distinct changes in memorial practices related to 11-M have been observed in Madrid from 2004 to 2011: 1. There has been an increase in and a spatial diffusion of the places affected by 11-M remembrance, extending beyond the actual sites where the bombs exploded. 2. The dates, number, and type of commemorative events have not been firmly established from one year to the next. 3. Rival commemorative aims and tensions among the various organising bodies resulted in events being scheduled at different sites but at the same time, or in the same place but at different times. 4. The appropriation of certain official memorial places by some groups to the detriment of others has led to a polarisation of 11-M memories within the topographical space of the city of Madrid (see Fig. 2.1).

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Fig. 2.1  Map of Madrid that includes places of the bombings, the commemorative sites linked to AVT and related associations, and A11-M and related associations. (Source: Gérôme Truc and Anxo Rodríguez Paz)

As we will see next, behind empirically observable topographical phenomena, there lie both shifting relationships among the range of 11-M memories and an evolution of the significance assigned by different groups to the event.

At the Centre of Commemoration: The Conflictive Memorialisation of Atocha Train Station The American geographer Kenneth E. Foote has proposed a typology of the fate of sites that have been hit by a ‘traumatic’ event, such as a massacre or an attack, distinguishing between obliteration, rectification,

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­ esignation, and sanctification (Foote 2003). Obliteration consists of the d destruction and deletion of all traces of the event where it has taken place, in order to give the impression that it never happened. In Spain this is the case, for instance, with Civil War-related mass graves and, in a more general sense, all those that Joël Candau defined as ‘places of amnesia’ (2005: 125). In the case of ‘rectification’, the site of the event is modified in a way that aims at removing all those elements that might bring back painful memories, without necessarily attempting to erase all traces of the event. This is a common practice adopted in cases of industrial disasters or plane crashes, for instance. Designation is the creation of an indicator that ‘something’ has taken place on that site or in its proximity. The best example of this is the use of commemorative plaques. It often accompanies rectification and sanctification. Finally, Foote identifies sanctification of a site when it is materially and ritually altered by some form of memorial practice by a group, or a community, affected by the event: Sanctification is a natural response to the grief of community loss. The creation of memorials both honors the victims of the disaster and helps the community to mourn. Relatively few tragedies result in sanctification, however. Many factors are involved, but the most important is whether the tragedy touches a single, relatively homogeneous, self-identified community, one that comes to view the tragedy as a common, public loss. Members of such communities share a sense of identity […] that encourages them to view the disaster as a loss to the group as a whole rather than as losses to isolated individuals and families. (Foote 2003: 15–16)

According to Foote, then, sanctification does not necessarily involve a religious or spiritual component, but rather the observance of rituals surrounding the memorial site. The case of the Atocha station suggests that, with time, several types of response can coexist at the same site. Right after the 11-M attacks the station, having been their epicentre, became the site of spontaneous sanctification which took the form of grassroots memorials created and visited by thousands of people who prayed at them and which were maintained within the station premises until June 2004. Like Ground Zero in New York after 9/11, Atocha became what Randall Collins calls ‘the central sacred place for the commemorative cult’ (Collins 2004: 72). It was not, however, realistic that the main train station in Madrid, a place where

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tens of thousands of travellers transit every day, could be permanently filled by such an accumulation of flowers, candles, messages, and a variety of objects. In an open letter written on 31 May 2004, the station’s employees declared that it had become very hard for them to work with the daily reminder of the dramatic event, and expressed their wish to remove the grassroots memorials and replace them with a permanent yet more discrete artefact.2 That was the first step of Atocha’s process of rectification. The Memorial Rectification of Atocha Station as Contested Process Once the grassroots memorials were withdrawn, rectification was realised through the inauguration, on 9 June 2004, of a new installation replacing the spontaneous sanctification of the station with a ‘virtual sanctuary’ as defined by the Minister who presided over the opening.3 The installation, called Espacio de Palabras (Space of Words), was made up of video monitors and interactive terminals that allowed anyone to write messages of sympathy for the victims. Atocha’s cleaning staff was also ordered to prevent anyone from leaving objects in the station premises and to clean any graffiti. The same installation was set up at the stations of El Pozo and Santa Eugenia. These installations, which remained active until the summer of 2007, were in turn removed shortly after the opening of an official monument dedicated to the victims in Atocha station, in an event organised on the third anniversary of the attacks.4 Despite these measures, on every anniversary of the attacks between 2005 and 2007 grassroots memorials continued to appear spontaneously inside the Atocha station, although they never lasted more than 24 hours because of the instructions to the cleaning staff. The resurgence of these acts of sanctification, according to Foote’s categories, went against official attempts at the station’s rectification. This caused tension as observed during field research at the site of Atocha: for instance, people would refuse to use the interactive terminals (which were judged as too impersonal) and insist on leaving handwritten messages or graffiti; others directed their frustration at the cleaning staff when they were seen to be throwing away flowers or extinguishing candles recently deposited in the memory of the victims (Truc and Bazin, 2019). While tensions were still heated on the second anniversary of the attacks in 2006, they diminished because of more acts of rectification and eventually faded away. After 2007, on every anniversary of the attacks spontaneous memorials in Atocha dwindled from year to year, until they almost entirely disappeared (see Fig. 2.2 a–c).

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Fig. 2.2  (a–c) Evolution of grassroots memorials in Atocha from 2006 (a), 2007 (b) to 2009 (c). (Source: Gérôme Truc)

On 11 March 2011, one could only spot a few bunches of flowers, candles, and other objects left by people inside the station, while there were practically no messages, compared to the thousands of messages and objects deposited in 2004 and 2005 and the several hundred still visible in 2006. By contrast, as we shall see, grassroots memorials are still significantly present at the other sites affected by the attacks, Téllez Street and El Pozo and Santa Eugenia stations. The rectification of Atocha station is unlikely to have occurred if it had not been for other 11-M memorial areas being ‘designated’ at the same time. In May 2004, a small memorial garden was built, with 192 cypress and olive trees symbolising the total number of victims—191 dead in the trains, plus a policeman who died during the assault on the perpetrators’ apartment a few days later. Formerly known as the Bosque de los Ausentes (Forest of the Departed), it was eventually renamed Bosque del Recuerdo (Forest of Remembrance) after a request from the victims’ relatives. Originally built in front of the station for the occasion of the wedding of

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the then Prince Felipe—currently King Felipe VI of Spain—this garden was moved to the Retiro Park a few hundred metres north of the station in the autumn of 2004. It was the first official 11-M memorial and was officially inaugurated on the first anniversary of the attacks, on 11 March 2005. In addition, a few weeks after the attacks a commemorative plaque was put on the façade of the Presidency of the Region building, situated in the square at Puerta del Sol, in the heart of Madrid, where it matched the commemorative plaque for Madrid’s popular uprising against Napoleon’s troops, the famous ‘2 de mayo’ [2 of May]. The 11-M Monument: An ‘Empty’ Memorial? All these memorial markers installed in the very centre of the city provided some response to people’s need for a site until a monument in memory of the 11-M victims could be constructed. A project for such a monument was initiated in July 2004, corresponding with the start of the rectification process of Atocha station. Rapidly, the decision was taken to build it in the middle of the Puerta de Atocha, right in front of the main station entrance, where emergency services parked on the day of the bombings and victims escaped of the station. The chosen project, conceived by a team of five young architects, the FAM Studio, included two parts: a very abstract cylinder-like glass monument, situated in the middle of a roundabout; and a room for meditation located beneath this glass monument, inside the train station (see Figs. 2.3 and 2.4). Due to technical problems, its construction lasted over two years. The opening was scheduled for the first, then the second anniversary of the attacks, but did not take place until three years after the event, on 11 March 2007. People’s expectations for the monument were high, and a large crowd of spectators gathered around Atocha station for the opening ceremony, perhaps also because the day happened to be a Sunday. The inauguration could not, however, have fallen on a worse date: in March 2007, the trial against the perpetrators of the 11-M attacks had already been going on for a month, and the already tense atmosphere was exacerbated by rivalries arising between different groups who held on to different memories and who supported opposite theories about the perpetrators and the reasons for the attacks. Other tensions arose from the fact that Spain would hold its next general elections within a year, and that the opposition party, Partido Popular, never ceased attacking the political mesures taken by Zapatero’s Government against terrorism. In the wake

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Figs. 2.3 and 2.4  Atocha 11-M monument from the inside (Fig. 2.3) and an external view (Fig. 2.4). (Source: Gérôme Truc)

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of the inauguration in Atocha, several thousand people crowded the streets of Madrid and demonstrated in defence of the Spanish Constitution. These tensions led to open conflict among those who had come to witness the inauguration. Especially after the ceremony when several hundred people assembled at the monument, verbal fights started between groups lasting for several hours, until the police dispersed the protesters (Truc 2011b). Thus, the main official 11-M memorial immediately failed to be the consensual and unifying place of memory it was supposed to be. Its creation also disappointed some of the victims of the attacks. The project originally consisted of a glass cylinder through which, from the room beneath, one should have been able to read the list of the names of the deceased on the train attacks. On the day of the inauguration, without notice, the victims and their families learned that the list of names had been replaced by a number of sympathy messages, selected among those collected at the station right after the attacks. The public authorities promoting the project had decided to place a copy of the nominative list of the deceased in the entrance to the monument, where it is impossible to stop and meditate in memory of someone.5 Not only did the victims and victims’ families find out about this change the opening day, but they were also more shocked when they discovered several spelling mistakes in the list. As a result, when we asked about this monument to the vice-president of the association 11-M Afectados del Terrorismo, his first reaction was to say: ‘This is not our monument!’6 As a result, during the official commemoration organised the following year by the Spanish State at the monument, on 11 March 2008, many seats that had been reserved for the victims and victims’ families remained empty. And since no other official commemoration has been organised in front of it even, for the tenth anniversary of the attacks: on 11 March 2014, the national ceremony, held in the presence of the Royal family, took place in the Almudena Cathedral. At the very most the mayor of Madrid laid a wreath in the room beneath the monument on each anniversary of the attacks, during an act that lasts no more than a few minutes, sometimes along with representatives of the Spanish Government. Without going so far as to say that Atocha station is now a place for oblivion rather than of memory, it is clear that rectification, in Kenneth E. Foote’s terms, globally has prevailed. Another good illustration of the prevalence of rectification over sanctification of Atocha station in relation to 11-M memory is given by the fact that hardly any sign indicates the

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monument’s location. The architects designed a specific signalisation, but the Madrid authorities never put it into place.7 In other words, people who already have the 11-M attacks in mind can find it and understand its meaning; meanwhile, many others can pass by the memorial without remembering the train bombings. The architects who conceived this memorial had named their project ‘blue emptiness’, since it had to represent the emptiness that was left by the death of 191 people; and the monument is not only symbolically ‘empty’, but also physically so, as no objects are allowed to be deposited within it, and as the room is pressurised and, for this reason, candles cannot burn. This official memorial is therefore in sharp contrast with the grassroots memorials that preceded it, in which candles were an essential component. Thus, in many respects, we can say that the creation of an official memorial at Atocha station has paradoxically contributed to empty the place of symbols attached to the memory of 11-M. But it is striking to observe that, meanwhile, 11-M memorialisation practices have been strengthened in other places.

Beyond Atocha: The Topographic Polarisation of 11-M Memorial Sites The inauguration of the monument dedicated to 11-M victims in Atocha was the crowning achievement of the growing ‘war for memories’ that developed around the attacks because it allowed an encounter between audiences who otherwise take part in different yearly 11-M commemorative events. As mentioned earlier, one could generally observe at this time in Madrid over ten different memorial acts on each 11-M anniversary, characterised by spatio-temporal polarisation. Commemorative practices were held at the same location but at different times, whereas others were held at the same time but at different locations (See Figs. 2.5a, b). A significant example of the first case (same place different times) is the fact that since 2007 both the CC.OO and UGT unions,8 together with the Actors’ Union and the association 11-M Afectados del Terrorismo (A11-M) have organised a yearly ceremony at the entrance to the Atocha station at around 10 a.m. On the same day, all public authorities (including the Mayor of Madrid or the Spanish government, depending on the year) participate in a different ceremony, generally scheduled around 12 p.m. (e.g. this was the case in 2007 for the monument’s inauguration); the action group Peones Negros Libres also organises a gathering every year

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Fig. 2.5  (a, b) Official commemorations in 2006 and 2011 at the different sites. (Source: Juan Pablo Venditti)

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at the same location, always at 8 p.m.. Sometimes, misunderstandings can arise and interfere with the separate use of the same space; for instance, in 2010 the Mayor of Madrid went to lay a wreath at Atocha station at 10 a.m. (instead of the usual 12 p.m.) while, at the same time, both CC. OO and UGT unions and the A11-M attended their usual commemoration ceremony outside of the station. Therefore, on that day, two rival ceremonies took place simultaneously at Atocha, a few metres apart, with their participants doing their best to avoid each other. An example of the second scenario (same time different places) is that in 2009 the A11-M organised a ceremony in Téllez Street at 12:30 p.m., while the Asociación Víctimas del Terrorismo (AVT), along with the Asociación de Ayuda a las Víctimas del 11-M (AAV11-M), held its own ceremony at the same time in the Retiro. The same scenario has been repeated since then. A11-M pays tribute to the memory of the victims at 12 p.m. on 11 March at sites where the attacks took place—Téllez Street in 2009, Santa Eugenia in 2010, and El Pozo in 2011—while at the same time AVT (with the AAV11-M) holds a ceremony in the Retiro. Rival commemorative events around 11-M are therefore characterised by topographic polarisation, which has strengthened over the years: certain groups choose to keep their memories alive by organising events in sites originally affected by the attacks and marked by grassroots memorials, whereas other groups decisively turn towards official memorials. The Ideological Appropriation of a Memorial Site The AVT, which tends to appropriate the Bosque del Recuerdo placed inside the Retiro Park, has existed, as explained in the first section, since long before the 11th March 2004 attacks. It has become the main advocate of the non-specificity of the 11-M attacks, reducing them to the status of a terrorist attack so to speak ‘like any other’. The association equates it to attacks carried out by ETA and refuses to distinguish between different forms of ‘terrorism’ claiming that an involvement of ETA in the 11-M attacks cannot be excluded (although neither the police enquiries nor the trial to 11-M initiators were able to substantiate this theory). As a result, every time the AVT organises a commemorative event on 11th March, even today, this is done less to pay a tribute to the ‘11-M anniversary’ than to mark the European Day for Victims of Terrorism (declared to be on 11th March), a commemorative event that the association pushed European institutions to adopt with the support of some elected members

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of the European People’s Party (Truc 2012b). The AVT was never keen to organise ceremonies at the original locations where 11-M attacks took place. On the contrary, since 2005 it has organised its own commemorative event inside the Retiro Park, far from all the grassroots memorials. As no official ceremony has been organised at the Bosque del Recuerdo since 2006—the place having been superseded by the Atocha monument—the AVT has effectively appropriated the Bosque and has organized its commemorative event there on every 11th March. The Bosque del Recuerdo is the only 11-M memorial site in Madrid that is topographically apart from the original sites where the attacks were memorialised in 2004. For example, in the square at Puerta del Sol, where a commemorative plaque was put a few weeks after the attacks to honour those who helped the victims, and where both the Regional Presidency and the Mayor of Madrid organise, in the morning of every 11th March, a commemorative ceremony, people spontaneously gathered in 2004  in order to show their indignation and their solidarity towards the victims; and grassroots memorials were created there, just as inside the premises of all the stations involved in the attacks and in Téllez Street. Nothing of the sort ever happened at the Retiro Park, which is perhaps why this space could be appropriated by an action group such as the AVT, whose agenda has always been to use the 11-M commemoration to highlight the more general cause of all victims of terrorism. This also explains the fact that, although since its inauguration in 2005 the Bosque has hosted some grassroots memorials on 11-M anniversaries, they have been few in number, even fewer than in Atocha where, unlike in the Retiro Park, measures were officially taken to discourage them. Up to 2007, around 50 objects, including flowers, candles, and messages, accumulated each year in the Bosque del Recuerdo, compared to hundreds of objects in Atocha. By 2011, the average had fallen to ten objects per year (see Figs. 2.6a, b). Although the A11-M was originally responsible for changing the Retiro garden’s name, its members never really felt a link to this location, which represents, in their eyes, a purely institutional site still largely alien to the perspective of 11-M victims.9 The president of the A11-M, Pilar Manjón, was present at the national commemorative ceremony organised at the Bosque on the second anniversary; but apart from this one instance, the association and its members have otherwise chosen to focus their attention on other commemorative events organised each year at the sites of the attacks. In addition, they also encourage a variety of grassroots initiatives taken at other locations across Spain to honour the memory of 11-M victims.10

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Fig. 2.6  (a, b) Grassroots memorials in 2006 and 2011 at the different sites. (Source: Juan Pablo Venditti)

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Different Places, Different Meanings Since its foundation, the A11-M has prevented public 11-M commemorative acts from taking precedence over the private mourning of the families affected by the attacks, as well as trying to prevent official ceremonies from prevailing over non-official ones, which they define as the ‘abrazo social’ (social hug).11 Both in their speeches and publications, the association’s representatives openly oppose any attempt to transform the 11-M victims into some sorts of ‘heroes’ who died for a greater cause, such as ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, or ‘the Spanish nation’—themes which, by contrast, are located at the heart of the AVT’s narrative.12 Instead, according to A11-M leaders the people who died on 11 March died for nothing, or rather, they did not die for some cause as much as they died because of the war in Iraq and the foreign policy of Aznar’s government.13 In the first couple of years of the 11-M anniversary events, several central areas of Madrid not directly connected with the attacks were also used by the two rival associations, each with distinct memorial interpretations of 11-M. This was the case of two prestigious cultural centres, the Ateneo and the Circulo de Bellas Artes. The latter notably became the stage of the on-going antagonism between the associations: in 2006, AVT and AAV11-M chose the location to celebrate the Second European Day for Victims of Terrorism and organised a public event there at 11  a.m., whereas in 2008 and 2009, exactly at the same time and in the same place, both the CC.OO and UGT unions, along with the Actors’ Union and the A11-M, held commemorative acts there in memory of 11-M victims. Nearby, in the Spanish Parliament, the Spanish Foundation of Victims of Terrorism organised a commemorative event on 11 March 2010 that exceptionally brought together the representatives of all associations among whose members were 11-M victims. The event was broadcast on television and aimed at pacifying the controversies that had been provoked annually by rival commemorative events until then, but it did not replace the commemorations organised by these associations on the day. Such a unifying commemorative event, organised in the centre of the city and at the heart of one of the most important sites of political power in Spain, thus represented a very occasional counter-example, a kind of exception confirming the rule: that of the topographical polarisation of the collective memories of the 11-M attacks. In 2011 like before, people were still assembling on each 11th March at El Pozo and Santa Eugenia stations, as well as in Téllez Street, located

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in working-class neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Madrid. They continued to create grassroots memorials there on every anniversary that remained on site for a period of between two weeks and more than a month. Grassroots memorials at Téllez Street have even increased in volume since 2009 when the A11-M first organised a commemorative action attended by around a hundred people. Since then, Téllez Street has partially become a permanent memorial area—a sign that some relatives of the victims have invested in this space, only a few hundred metres from Atocha, in reaction to the rectification of the station. A small garden has been set up by the municipal authorities in front of the railings, replacing what until 2010 was a bare patch of ground, and several engraved memorial plaques have been fixed on the fences along the railroad tracks. In addition, real and plastic flowers are deposited there and not removed from one year to another. The making of durable grassroots memorials has been supported by the A11-M that has backed neighbourhood associations such as the one that led to the creation of the small garden in Téllez Street. At the same time, the association fought for several years together with the residents of El Pozo to push the city council to finance the construction of a monument at the entrance of the El Pozo station, at the exact place of the former grassroots memorials, on the basis that it was here that most people (68) lost their lives on 11 March 2004. They won their fight and the inauguration of the monument, held on 11 March 2011, exemplified once again the rivalries that have characterised the memory of 11-M events. The A11-­ M, together with El Pozo residents who were at the origin of the project, had announced the ceremony for 8 p.m. (the usual time for commemorative acts organised in El Pozo on every anniversary of the attacks, as it allows residents to attend the ceremony after work); whereas the city hall authorities unilaterally decreed the ‘official’ inauguration be scheduled at 10.30 a.m.—that is, at a time where the members of the A11-M would be attending another commemorative ceremony in Atocha, along with both CC.OO and UGT unions who, since 2008, have become recurring attendees of such events. The morning ceremony assembled several notables, along with right-wing politicians, some representatives of the associations AVT and AAV11-M, many journalists and a few hundred onlookers (mostly retired people); by contrast, the evening inauguration featured the representatives of the A11-M, together with left-wing politicians and over a thousand residents of all ages. The only person who spoke from the platform at both ceremonies was the monument’s architect.

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The preservation of 11-M memory in the places where the attacks occurred is primarily due to the people who were most directly affected by these attacks. Some of those who lost a loved one on that day attempt to preserve his (or her) memory in the exact place where he (or she) lost his (or her) life. In contrast, those who have been more indirectly affected by 11-M attacks accept more easily to commemorate them by using more ad hoc places of memory. Thus, although the AVT became mainly attached to the Bosque del Recuerdo, this doesn’t prevent some victims’ families who are close to this association from taking their own initiative: on the evening of 10 March, they usually organise a wake in the centre of Alcalá de Henares. After that, on the morning of 11 March they retrace the victims’ journey at the same hour of the attacks, getting off the trains at every station in order to lay flowers on the platforms: starting from Alcalá de Henares, their first stop is Santa Eugenia, next El Pozo, then Atocha, and finally they reach Téllez Street, on foot. The preservation of grassroots memorials on each and every original site where the attacks occurred, not to mention their institutionalisation realised through permanent monuments, thus relies on the work of individuals who were personally involved with 11-M events. This is, for example, also the case of a Santa Eugenia resident who stands in front of the station, on every morning of 11th March, holding a message in memory of the victims that all passers­by can read.

Conclusions In one of the very first articles published about the commemoration of 11-M attacks, Anna Lisa Tota compares it with the memorialisation of terror attacks in Italy. While many of them are, for fear of the Mafia, subject to what Kenneth E. Foote calls an obliteration of memory, the Bologna train station bombings represents, since its first anniversary on 2 August 1981 a singular case of what she calls a ‘perfect remembering’ (Tota 2005: 55), supported by the victims’ association, civil society and the local government: the attack is commemorated each year with the same ritual, at the same time and in the same place, in front of the station, where a monument has been erected. On the basis of media coverage of the earlier stage of the memorialisation of 11-M attacks, Tota was inclined to think that it would be likely to follow the Bologna’s pattern. To her eyes, it seemed quite obvious that Atocha station would quickly become the main memorial site of the 11-M in Madrid, the centre of a commemorative cult identi-

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cally reproduced each year (Tota 2005: 75). Nevertheless, years of ethnographic fieldwork reveal a far more complex picture, as we saw here. Every year in Madrid over ten different commemorative events take place on 11th March, a minority of which is held in Atocha, and official commemorations of the 11-M bombings have not been the same two years in a row. Thus, since 2005, many different places have hosted a variety of memorial acts. The general trend has been one of topographic polarisation throughout the Madrid landscape of rival 11-M memories. Individuals who hold onto their personal memories of the event—for instance, in relation to private mourning—are keen to commemorate at the sites where the attacks occurred. In these same places, grassroots memorials were spontaneously created starting from the day after the bombings and, since then, they have regularly risen from their own ashes. By contrast, those who assimilate 11-M commemoration with public memorialising of all victims of terrorism prefer institutionalised memorial sites located in the city centre with no direct relationship with the original sites of the attacks. Topographic polarisation is understood as the phenomenon by which different groups bearing their own 11-M memories, and giving to them different meanings, tend increasingly to occupy memorial sites that are distant from each other by organising simultaneously their own commemorative actions. The polarisation means that the public, being unable to attend more than one event at the same time, has to ‘choose a side’. Those for whom the 11-M memory is to be widely incorporated into the memory of ‘all victims of terrorism’—especially because they keep on sustaining the idea of a link between the 11-M events and ETA—gather at certain sites of memory distinct from the areas where, on 11 March 2004, the bombings took place. People who have taken such a stance can be mainly found at the Retiro, as well as near the square of the Puerta del Sol, where they attend the yearly morning ceremony organised by both regional and Madrid municipal authorities. In 2008, on the occasion of the European Day for Victims of Terrorism, members of the AVT organised a ceremony at 8 p.m. at the former town hall square, while in 2009, at the same hour, another commemorative event was held at the Square of the Dominican Republic, where one of the worst ETA attacks took place on 14 July 1986.14 They thus challenged the uniqueness of 11-M attacks by using the 11th March anniversary to mark sites linked to ETA attacks, and, therefore, unrelated to 11-M. Conversely, those for whom the 11-M remains a unique event, set apart from other terrorist attacks Spain has endured, are

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more attached to the sites where the attacks occurred as they strive to mark the memory of these events. These competing groups have in common to have turned away from the official monument built in Atocha station in memory of the victims, where no major national commemoration has been organised since 2008, even for the tenth and the fifteenth anniversaries. In this respect, the Atocha station has become less relevant for memory and mourning: it has gone through a ‘rectification’ process that allows it to be again today a train station before a memorial site. This is further suggested by the fact that the only group who habitually demonstrates at the entrance to the station—not just on 11 March, but on the 11th day of every month—is the Peones Negros Libres, an action group formed by people who genuinely believe that 11-M attacks were the result of a conspiracy, that links jihadist terrorism with ETA and the Socialist government; and who loudly claim that they have no relationship with the victims, while declaring that their fight is exclusively carried out in the name of their love of ‘truth’. In addition, this action group linked to extremist right-wing movements carries out monthly performative acts of depositing offerings in front of Atocha’s monument, thus imitating the aesthetics of grassroots memorials that were created at the station after the attacks (Sánchez-Carretero 2011). By doing so, they appropriate the site of Atocha and the pattern of spontaneous memorialisation to fill offerings with new meanings far removed from the original mourning rituals. For example, the Peones Negros repeat ‘we want to know the truth’, which is the same sentence repeated by people in the streets immediately after the attacks. For this reason, their acts may be perceived as offensive towards the memory of the victims. But the fact that public authorities tolerate these demonstrations at the entrance to Atocha station, and that no passerby around seems to care about it, also indicates that Atocha is no more the hub of 11-M commemoration. Whether western societies are currently witnessing a phase of ‘memorial mania’ (Doss 2008), the fact is that memorial practices related to traumatic events have been taking a variety of new forms. Here, our focus has been on anniversaries, as a particular type of memory practice. Anniversaries can be marked for a variety of reasons, but they have in common the celebration15—in the Durkheimian sense—of the date when an event took place; and they are performed to commemorate that event in a specific location. To celebrate what took place implies to have a site where to commemorate, a memorial site. In the case of anniversaries of traumatic events, the memorial site is often the exact site where people died, but, as we have

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explored, that is not always the case. In fact, as the 11-M case clearly exemplifies, there can be several memorial sites for conflicting, collective memorialisations. In the case of the Madrid bombings, the polarisation of memorial sites highlights the difficulty of integrating all the different collective memorialisations into a single public memory, promoted by Spanish or Madrid authorities through official commemorations.

Notes 1. Regarding the silence of the other, Grider analyses the problematic relationships that arise in the case when perpetrators are also memorialized in the case, for instance, of the Columbine massacre (Grider 2007, 2011). 2. ‘Carta abierta de los trabajadores y trabajadoras de Madrid Atocha Cercanías’, reproduced after the request of the authors on Rojo y Negro, a paper published by the CGT trade union (Confederación General del Trabajo), on 31st May 2004. This open letter does not mean that the station’s employers were insensitive to the attacks or that they did not take part in the sanctification in their own way: on the contrary, a significant evidence of their active participation is a paper sheet found at the station in June 2004, in which they printed the message ‘The employers of the “Puerta de Atocha” station in Madrid express their sympathy to the victims of the 11-M attack and to their families’ (Document DP-2651 of the Archivo del Duelo, Archivo Histórico Ferroviario, Madrid). 3. Reuters dispatch, 10th June 2004, ‘Atocha acoge un ‘santuario virtual’ por las víctimas del 11-M’. 4. For further information about the device, see Truc (2011a). 5. From an interview of G. Truc with one of the architects of the monument, Madrid, 26th February 2010. 6. From an interview of G. Truc with the Vice-President of the Association ‘11-M.  Afectados del Terrorismo’, Fuenlabrada (Madrid), 4th March 2010. 7. From an interview of G. Truc with one of the architects of the monument, Madrid, 26th February 2010. 8. Comisiones Obreras (CC.OO) and Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) are the two most important labour unions in Spain. 9. From an interview of G. Truc with the Vice-President of the Association ‘11-M.  Afectados del Terrorismo’, Fuenlabrada (Madrid), 4th March 2010. 10. Particularly through the column « Archivo del Recuerdo » published on the magazine IIMagina, released by the association since 2010.

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11. From a meeting of the authors with the representatives of the association, Madrid, 24th September 2009. On the ‘social hag’ see also Sánchez-­ Carretero (2011). 12. From an interview of G. Truc with the Vice-President of the Association ‘11-M.  Afectados del Terrorismo’, Fuenlabrada (Madrid), 4th March 2010 (interview with A11-M leaders, 4 March 2010). See also the different declarations and published interviews released by the President of the association, Pilar Manjón, over the past ten years, beginning with his speech in front of the 11-M parliamentary commission of investigation on December 2004. 13. From an interview of G. Truc with the Vice-President of the Association ‘11-M.  Afectados del Terrorismo’, Fuenlabrada (Madrid), 4th March 2010. On the distinction between ‘dead for the cause of’ / ‘dead because of’, see Barcellini (2010). 14. An attack against Civil Guard buses. 15. See Abrahams (1982, 1987) for a reflection on the vocabulary of celebrations.

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Weber’s “Objectivity” Reconsidered, ed. Laurence H.  McFalls, 261–289. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Foote, K.E. 2003 (1997). Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy. Austin: University of Texas Press. Graham, B., and Y. Whelan. 2007. The Legacies of the Dead: Commemorating the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25 (3): 476–495. Grider, S. 2001. Spontaneous Shrines: A Modern Response to Tragedy and Disaster. New Directions in Folklore 5. Available at www.temple.edu/english/ isllc/newfolk/shrines_update.html. Accessed 21 Oct 2011. ———. 2007. Public Grief and the Politics of Memorial. Contesting Memory of “The Shooters” at Columbine High School. Anthropology Today 23 (3): 3–7. ———. 2011. Memorializing Shooters with Their Victims: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University. In Grassroots Memorials. The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, ed. Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-­ Carretero, 108–142. New York/Oxford: Berghahn. Halbwachs, M. 2008 (1941). La Topographie légendaire des évangiles en Terre sainte. Paris: PUF.  Partial translation in English: On Collective Memory, ed. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Margry, P.J., and C.  Sánchez-Carretero. 2007. The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death. Anthropology Today 23 (3): 1–2. ———. 2011. Rethinking Memorialization: The Concept of Grassroots Memorials. In Grassroots Memorials. The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, ed. Margry and Sánchez-Carretero, 1–48. Oxford: Berghahn. Ortiz, C. 2011. Memoriales del atentado del 11 de marzo en Madrid. In El Archivo del duelo. Análisis de la respuesta ciudadana ante los atentados del 11 de marzo en Madrid, ed. Sánchez-Carretero, 33–67. Madrid: CSIC. Sánchez-Carretero, C. 2006. Trains of Workers, Trains of Death: Some Reflections After the March 11 Attacks in Madrid. In Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death, ed. Jack Santino, 333–347. New York: Palgrave. ———. 2011. El Archivo del Duelo. In El Archivo del duelo. Análisis de la respuesta ciudadana ante los atentados del 11 de marzo en Madrid, ed. Sánchez-­ Carretero, 11–32. Madrid: CSIC. Santino, J. 1992. “Not an Important Failure”. Spontaneous Shrines and Rites of Death and Politics in Northern Ireland. In Displayed in Mortal Light, ed. M. McCaughan. Antrim: Arts Council, [no pagination]. ———. 2004. Performance Commemoratives, the Personal, and the Public: Spontaneous Shrines, Emergent Ritual, and the Field of Folklore. Journal of American Folklore 117: 363–372. ———. 2006. Performative Commemoratives: Spontaneous Srines and the Public Memorialization of Death. In Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death, ed. Jack Santino, 5–15. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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———. 2011. The Carnivalesque and the Ritualesque. Journal of American Folklore 124 (491): 61–73. Sider, G., and G.  Smith. 1997. Between History and Histories: The Making of Silences Epidemic and Commemorations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sturken, M. 1997. Tangled Memories. The Vietnam War, the Aids Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tota, A.L. 2005. Terrorism and Collective Memories: Comparing Bologna, Naples, Madrid 11 March. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 46 (1–2): 55–78. Truc, G. 2011a. Espacio de Palabras y rituales de solidaridad en Atocha. In El Archivo del Duelo. Análisis de la respuesta ciudadana ante los atentados del 11 de marzo en Madrid, ed. Cristina Sánchez-Carretero, 207–227. Madrid: CSIC. ———. 2011b. Le politique aux marges de la commémoration. Une ethnographie des cérémonies de commémoration officielle des attentats du 11 mars 2004 à Madrid. In Du civil au politique. Ethnographies du vivre-ensemble, ed. Mathieu Berger et al., 205–227. Bruxelles: Peter Lang. ———. 2012a. Memory of Places and Places of Memory. For a Halbwachsian Socio-Ethnography of Memory. International Social Science Journal 203– 204: 147–159. ———. 2012b. Aux victimes du terrorisme, l’Europe reconnaissante ? Portée et limites de la Journée Européenne en mémoire des Victimes du Terrorisme. Politique européenne 37: 132–154. ———. 2018. Shell Shocked. The Social Response to Terrorist Attacks. Cambridge: Polity Press. Truc, G. and M. Bazin. 2019. Les gardiens de la mémoire : mobilisations et conflits d’appropriation autour de mémoriaux post-attentats à Madrid, Londres et Paris. Ethnologie française 173 (1): 63–75. Viejo-Rose, D. 2011a. Destruction and Reconstruction of Heritage: Impacts on Memory and Identity. In Heritage, Memory and Identity, ed. Helmut Anheier, Yudhishthir Raj Isar, and Dacia Viejo-Rose, 53–69. Los Angeles: Sage. ———. 2011b. Memorial Functions: Intent, Impact and the Right to Remember. Memory Studies 4 (4): 465–480. Young, J. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 3

From Salvation to Struggle: Commemoration, Affect, and Agency in Cyprus Rebecca Bryant and Mete Hatay

This chapter explores a commemoration of a battle, an act of collective remembrance that has gained significance since the early 2000s in a resignifying of local history in divided Cyprus.1 The local history in question is that of the Turkish Cypriot minority, while the commemoration’s enactment each year provokes ire in Greek Cypriot media, in the island’s south.2 The site of the ceremony is the village of Kokkina, known in Turkish as Erenköy,3 a Turkish Cypriot-administered exclave in the island’s south. Located in the remote Tylliria region of the island, Erenköy was part of a cluster of five small, Turkish hamlets that experienced extreme isolation and military bombardment during the conflict period.4 Because of events that occurred there then, the name ‘Erenköy’ has become synecdochal with the only part of Turkish Cypriot collective memory of the conflict that has acquired the status of ‘legend’ or ‘epic.’5 R. Bryant (*) Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] M. Hatay Peace Research Institute Oslo Cyprus Centre, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. L. S. Sørensen et al. (eds.), Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18091-1_3

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In 1964, the village became the site of a major battle that we describe below. It also became a symbol for the Turkish Cypriot struggle of that period. Today, thousands of Turkish Cypriots each year make the pilgrimage to the south, to this isolated spot, to remember those who died there. Because it was a battle, there were of course lives lost on both sides, and indeed the Tylliria battle constituted the single greatest loss of life for the Greek Cypriot community during the conflict leading up to 1974. Greek Cypriot public discussion of that battle, however, reflects no knowledge of Turkish Cypriot losses—a reflection not only of the division of the island, but also of a division of the conflict’s history. Instead, the Turkish Cypriot commemoration is viewed as a celebration, and each year there is much media discussion of why, some years ago, the Greek Cypriot leader was willing to sign an agreement allowing Turkish Cypriots to cross by land to the exclave, rather than traveling by boat, as they had done in the past. In 2017, there was so much public criticism of this agreement that the Deputy Government Spokesman Victoras Papadopoulos found it necessary to reiterate the government’s condemnation of the ‘celebrations’: “[I] t goes without saying that [the government] condemns the bombings and atrocities against the Greek Cypriots by Turkey in 1964, but also the celebrations of the Turkish Cypriots for such a heinous anniversary.”6 Our analysis of this commemoration builds on a body of work, dating to the 1970s, that demonstrates the role of symbols and rituals, particularly commemorations, in producing and reproducing a sense of nationhood (e.g., Francis 2005; Mach 1993; Smith 1988, 1999), as well as a critical body of research that shows how hegemonic narratives of the collective and its past are always contested and challenged (e.g., Ashplant et al. 2000; Bryan 2000). Our particular concern here, however, lies with the historical experience that we find so often falls into the gaps between the polarization of hegemonic and counterhegemonic that dominates this literature. In our own research, we have found that the terms ‘nationalist’ and ‘anti-nationalist,’ ‘hegemonic’ and ‘counterhegemonic,’ are often insufficient to understand the ways in which average persons act as what Jay Winter (1999) calls “agents of remembrance,” or how individual experience may inform, shape, and be shaped by communal memory. Our concern with this polarization emerges from our ethnographic research, where we observe that a dualism born in the academy has shaped everyday politics. As long-time researchers on Cyprus, we have been dissatisfied with the too-neat division, drawn both in local politics and in the academy, between supposedly dualistic histories described as Right and

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Left, nationalist and anti-nationalist, top-down and bottom-up, violent and peace-loving. This has led, for instance, to both local and international expectations that having a left-wing leader or party in power should automatically lead to success at the negotiating table, or to assumptions that the Left’s history of the conflict must be more likely to bring reconciliation. As we discuss more below, however, both hegemonic and counterhegemonic narratives engage in forms of mythologization that ignore certain historical experiences and sacralize others. In our own research, then, we have found that this neat division obscures more than it explains about the failures of historical reconciliation in Cyprus and the region. To give an example: in approximately three hundred formal and informal interviews that Bryant conducted with displaced Turkish Cypriots and their children, the ways in which they narrated their lives and experiences often appeared directly to conflict with the political views that they expressed. While almost all were in favor of a federation that would reunite the island, almost all of the same people expressed a desire never again to live in close proximity with persons from the other community.7 Similarly, Joyce Dalsheim has demonstrated how, in the discourse and education of left-wing, liberal Israeli Jews there is nevertheless an absence of Palestinians, one that portrays them not as a threat but rather as “an uncanny other, not fully recognised, not fully known, somehow magically imagined away, and for all these reasons that much more frightening” (Dalsheim 2004: 166– 167). These examples point to the ways in which historical experience and the stories that narrate it may not neatly align with political convictions and may challenge the categorization of particular narratives into the hegemonic and counterhegemonic, nationalist and anti-nationalist. Looked at from the outside, the Erenköy commemoration might appear to be part of a hegemonic narrative, what one Greek Cypriot politician called a ‘celebration of hate.’8 Yet many of those who make the pilgrimage to the site consider themselves to be left-wing and supporters of reconciliation. Like the Orange Parades in Northern Ireland that give “the appearance of continuity in an annual commemorative occasion” while containing “clear evidence of political changes both within and outside the event” (Bryan 2000: 8), we cannot assume that the use of symbols and the form of a commemoration map neatly onto political alignments. In our case, at a time when nationalism and nationalist symbols are in decline among Turkish Cypriots, and when most young people have a healthy skepticism regarding the nationalist histories that they learn in school, attendance at the Erenköy commemoration is steadily rising.

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In this chapter, we suggest that a shift of academic focus from the mythic to the epic and from the past to the future provides us with better tools for understanding the longevity and resistance to change of particular narratives of past events. The idea that national histories are a type of myth is today pervasive in scholarship (e.g., Anderson 1983; Misztal 2003; Overing 1997; Handelman 2004; Hosking and Schöpflin 1997; Schöpflin 1997; Seal 2004), with critics of nationalist histories often demonstrating the ways in which such histories are mythologized and thereby sacralized, making the nation into a ‘mythical construct’ (Grant 2017: 13; also Fulbrook 1997; Godfrey and Unger 2004) that renders its history immune to critique (Barthes 1972; Archard 1995). Our subject here, however, is one that Turkish Cypriots have always called a ‘legend’ or ‘epic,’ a historical form that we find gives us a more complex way of understanding the narrativization of communal experience. Indeed, as we will see, while myth points us to a distant past of origins, epic points us to lived history which may be repurposed for particular visions of the present and future. Looking at the Erenköy commemoration through the lens of legend or epic also allows us to build on David Henig’s concept of ‘vernacular histories,’ stories “in which grand (nationalized) historical narratives, local historical consciousness, and personal memories intersect” (2017: 43). The concept of vernacular histories, in turn, intersects in interesting ways with Jay Winter’s observation that when average person’s perform commemorative rituals, they are doing liminal work that “occupies the space between individual memory and the national theatre of collective memory choreographed by social and political leaders” (Winter 1999: 41; see also Hynes 1999). Winter (1995, 1999) emphasizes the role of such agents in creating acts of remembrance that exist in the space between the public and the private, mobilizing both individual actors and their memories and the agents of the state for purposes that often exist laterally to official narratives. These lateral narratives, moreover, may be repurposed as time and circumstances change. In the case that we describe below, participants in the commemoration of the Erenköy battle shift between triumphalism and loss, between rebellion and mourning. The commemoration contains elements of both hegemonic and counterhegemonic narratives, but these have been repurposed or reterritorialized. We take the term ‘reterritorialization’ from Deleuze and Guattari (1987), for whom it is the counterpart of deterritorialization, both aspects of resignification. In some cases, such as ours, this may involve a repurposing of official narratives, deterritorializing them from the terrain

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of nationalist ideology and its countermemory and reterritorializing them in ways that look similar but are affectively quite different. As we describe below, reterritorialization creates an affective shift from passivity to agency, from victimhood to action. In particular, we describe the entangled themes of salvation, sacrifice, solidarity, and struggle as core elements of the legend or epic that are not mutually contradictory. The affect of agency that emerges only reinforces Erenköy and its commemoration as central to what it means to be a Turkish Cypriot today.

On Myths and Legends It was 6 a.m. on an August morning when we boarded a bus arranged by the Erenköy Fighters’ Association (Erenköy Mücahit Derneği) and departed the northern town of Kyrenia heading southwest toward the Erenköy exclave. Along the way, our bus picked up passengers from nearby villages and eventually merged with a larger convoy. By the time we reached the newly opened Limnitis/Yeşilırmak checkpoint in the west of the island, the number of buses had risen to more than a hundred. Our fellow passengers were families and couples, some elderly, as well as a handful of children, and most had brought stocks of water and sandwiches for lunch. As we rode, we conversed with our fellow passengers, including men who had fought at Erenköy and their wives. The atmosphere was one of subdued excitement. Part of that excitement derived from the exceptional nature of the trip, which allowed us into a closed military area into which civilians were normally not permitted. Today, while the surrounding hamlets are in ruin, Erenköy hosts a lonely contingent of Turkish Cypriot conscripts in what has become the only territorial exclave of the unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. While families of the fallen had long been permitted access by boat on this day, the opening of a land route in 2009 made it possible for larger numbers of people to make the journey. Some of these were former fighters, but others were individuals who saw Erenköy as a significant site in Turkish Cypriot history. This was not any simple excursion but was one specifically intended to honor the dead and viscerally experience the site of legend. Indeed, the reverential comportment of the travelers, the exceptionality of the day and our admission to the site, and the sense of this being a journey that one would not often make all gave the event the air of a pilgrimage. As though acknowledging that, several friends who later learned of our excursion would jokingly c­ omment,

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‘Hacı oldunuz,’ ‘You’ve become pilgrims,’ derived from the hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca.9 Erenköy’s exclave status is not insignificant to our story, because the manner in which it became an exclave and the reasons it has remained so both describe and explain the significance of this tiny village in Turkish Cypriot vernacular history (Fig. 3.1). Indeed, the village’s exclave exceptionality comes to stand for the exceptionality of the ‘legend’ or ‘epic’ itself—those designations already indicating the extraordinary feats of a person or group. What is interesting in our case is that while the name of the village today connotes epic or legendary action, the heroes of that epic keep shifting. The background to the legend is the narrative arc of the Cyprus conflict. In most Turkish Cypriot narratives, the first important date is 1955, when Greek Cypriots began a struggle against British colonial rule intended to unite the island with Greece. The minority Turkish Cypriot community objected to a future in Greece and instead demanded the

Fig. 3.1  Map delimiting northern Cyprus. The Erenköy exclave is in the west. (Source: B Davenport)

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­ artition of the island and the unification of its two parts with the two p ‘motherlands,’ Greece and Turkey. In 1957, Turkish Cypriots formed their own guerrilla organization to achieve this aim, and the first widespread inter-­communal fighting began. A year later, negotiations resulted in the bi-­communal Republic of Cyprus, declared in 1960, with a powersharing constitution that left the majority Greek Cypriot community dissatisfied.10 Within three years, there was a breakdown of constitutional order and renewed inter-communal fighting. While in most Greek Cypriot narratives that breakdown resulted from a rebellion of the minority against the majority’s attempts to change the constitution, in the ways that most Turkish Cypriots relate those events, it was the year when they were attacked and retreated into militarized enclaves. Those enclaves were besieged for more than four years, and only after the Republic’s president unilaterally decided to lift the siege in 1968 were Turkish Cypriots able to exit without safety concerns. After that date, many left the enclaves daily to go to work, but they returned to those ghettoes in the evenings until 1974. In that year, a splinter Greek Cypriot guerrilla organization, in collaboration with the Greek junta government, attempted a coup against the Republic’s president that was intended to unite the island with Greece. This provoked a Turkish military intervention, the flight of large numbers of Cypriots to either side of the ceasefire line, and the de facto division of the island, eventually resulting in the establishment of an unrecognized Turkish Cypriot state in the island’s north. While today Greek Cypriots remember 20 July 1974 as a tragic date, it is officially commemorated in the island’s north as a date of liberation. In an important early work on collective memory and commemoration, Yael Zerubavel proposes that an act of commemoration produces a “commemorative narrative […] a story about a particular past that accounts for this ritualized remembrance and provides a moral message for the group members” (Zerubavel 1997: 6). She skillfully demonstrates how the cycle of commemoration in Israel aids in constructing what she calls a “master commemorative narrative” that shapes collective memory and gives a “story line” to the past. The 20 July commemorations in Cyprus would be an example of this, where in the north official celebrations have told a tale of triumph and liberation. According to Zerubavel, contests over how to hold a commemoration, are contests about narrating the past in particular ways, presumably shaping what is to be remembered and what forgotten. We will certainly see these contests in the following pages.

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The assumption of Zerubavel’s schema that we will challenge below is that the master commemorative narrative is hegemonic and that it is opposed by countermemory, which “is essentially oppositional and stands in hostile and subversive relation to collective memory” (ibid., 10). According to Zerubavel, it is through such countermemories, which seep into and challenge the hegemonic narrative, that changes may occur in the master narrative. Building on her work, for instance, one researcher has studied an anti-militaristic Independence Day celebration in Israel, which she views as explicitly counterhegemonic: The two ceremonies show different approaches in their celebrations. While the state ceremony tends to conceal socio-political problems, is patriotic, uncritical of the regime, emotional, militarist, and presents an idealized picture of Israeli society, the alternative ceremony is explicitly antimilitaristic: it criticizes government policies, points to problems in society, advocates human rights, and is in support of the peace process. (Krieg 2012: 33)

Moreover, Krieg describes the ceremony as “a part of the fierce fight between the right and the left-wing that divides Israeli society” (ibid. 35). Zerubavel’s account has resonances with other works of the period that attempt to understand the workings of hegemony, especially James Scott’s ‘weapons of the weak,’ or ways in which the powerless challenge power. And like more recent anthropological works that show how we may choose to mold ourselves as religious subjects (Mahmood 2004) or as subjects of the state (Jansen 2014, 2015), we find that the dualism of hegemony and counterhegemony is particularly insufficient when dealing with the complex subject of how we remember both individually and collectively. Nevertheless, this duality has infiltrated many post-conflict spaces, creating ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ or ‘reconciliatory’ and ‘divisive,’ narratives of the conflict. In Cyprus, this duality of hegemonic and counterhegemonic narratives has become an accepted part of scholarship on the politics of history (e.g., Papadakis 1998, 2003). At the same time, as in Israel, it rather neatly maps onto the political division of Right and Left, which in the island is primarily a division between nationalists and those who describe themselves as anti-nationalist. For almost four decades, the official narratives in the Turkish Cypriot community were nationalist ones that emphasized their victimization at the hands of Greek Cypriots between approximately 1955 and 1974. That official history appeared in schoolbooks in photographs of corpses and crying women, and it appeared in

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everyday life in, for instance, the large numbers of streets in what is now north Cyprus that are named after şehits, or martyrs. In the triumphant statues and monuments that celebrate the 1974 ‘victory,’ but also in the officially sanctioned memorials that mourn their losses, the narrative attempted to subsume individual suffering in a sweep of history in which their victimization by Greek Cypriots was ‘rectified’ by a Turkish military victory. The Left on both sides of the island has been primarily responsible for counternarratives that acquire their own semi-official historical arc. If the official Turkish Cypriot narrative has been that of an essential antagonism between two groups in which the numerical majority attempted to oppress and even to eliminate the minority until a ‘big brother’ stepped in, the semi-official Leftist position has been that Cypriots were all essentially one until divided by the machinations of imperial powers who manipulated the Greek and Turkish governments and, by extension, their ‘kin’ communities in the island (e.g., Panayiotou 2006, 2012; also Bryant and Hatay forthcoming). If the narrative of the Right never mentions cooperation and coexistence before conflict, the narrative of the Left erases any tension or difference that existed prior to the armed struggle. What makes the latter position semi-official is that while it has not been the dominant position, it has provided the primary counternarrative that has occasionally acquired prominence when Leftist parties were in power. Moreover, as one analysis of these complementary narratives notes, “the leftist ‘unofficial’ history may strengthen the official discourse by appearing co-opted and confined within the same rhetoric” (Chatzipanagiotidou 2012: 96). What both the dominant official narrative and its Leftist counternarrative have in common is a focus on identifying victims and perpetrators and subsuming narratives of suffering into larger ideological narratives, whether nationalist or otherwise. In contrast, the commemoration that we study here is, as we will show, one of reclaimed agency. It does not entirely reject the dominant narrative but rather repurposes and reterritorializes it in the creation of vernacular histories that interweave historical experience and communal narrative. The vernacular aspect of this history-making is summarized in a tendency to refer to the battle as ‘the Erenköy legend’ or even more frequently as ‘the Erenköy epic’ (Erenköy efsanesi or Erenköy destanı)—the only part of Turkish Cypriot recent history that has acquired that status. Referring to it in that way emphasizes the extraordinary status of real events, but also their narration. After all, epics are the sorts of stories that in the past would

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have been related in Cyprus and much of the region by wandering bards, who sung their tales and whose listeners derived much of their pleasure from the forms of narration. We contrast this local attribution of the status of epic to the story of the battle with a tendency in studies of collective memory and commemoration to focus on ‘master narratives’ that often take the form of national or political myth (e.g., Godfrey and Unger 2004; Hosking and Schöpfin 1997; Kapferer 1988). In regard to the etymology of the word, Bruce Lincoln remarks, “Mythos . . . was the speech of the preeminent, above all poets and kings, a genre (like them) possessed of high authority” (1999: 10). While myth has acquired many other meanings since the ancient Greeks, it retains its connotations of singularity and sacrality or authority, particularly when used in reference to the nation-state. Indeed, myth is often viewed as the sine qua non of nationalist narrativizing: “Myths simplify, exaggerate, dramatise or reinterpret events into a form that serves as a symbolic statement about social order and reinforces social cohesion and functional unity” (Grant 2017: 16). One reason for the focus on myth-making is that, as Paul Ricoeur usefully notes in his monumental study of memory and forgetting, while beginnings are historic, origins are mythic (Ricoeur 2004: 140). Moreover, it is important for our purposes that some of the most common national myths are myths about war (Purcell 2000; Seal 2004). Wars are also what we might call ‘originary’ events, events that produce new orders, that begin new eras. In other words, we may speculate that wars inevitably produce myths because they are not only about glory and sacrifice, but also about origins. Within this literature, myths are viewed as useful for the present, as important “for what they reflect about contemporary society, rather than their historical accuracy” (Wilson 2013: 21). This contrast of presentism and historical accuracy, moreover, has a lengthy genealogy going back at least to Ernst Renan, who remarked that the historical error that accompanies myth-making was essential to the construction of nation-states, while “progress in historical studies is often a danger to nationality” (Renan 1947: 202). This means that while such myths have a relationship to history, “History aims for the truth, whereas myth begins as truth” (Stewart 2017: 133). As we will see, it is precisely this idea of a simplified, sacralized story that promotes exclusion of other stories that cannot describe the various forms of entangled meaning that are expressed

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in the idea of a ‘legend’ or ‘epic’ and that emerge in practices of commemoration. Instead, that vernacular history-making is uneven, often disjointed, and allows room for contested and even conflicting strands of narrative. The commemoration of the Battle of Erenköy is one that, over time, has shifted from a triumphalism symbolized in monuments to an act of mourning at the graves of the fallen. As we know from the famous scenes of Lenin’s and Stalin’s statues being toppled in the post-Soviet space, monuments may lose their meaning when the victories they supposedly commemorate are reinterpreted as defeats. Triumphalism often fades with the passing of time. Memorials to the dead, however, signify loss, grief, and the sacrifice of life. While monuments remind us and usually inscribe loss of life as the price for victory, memorials call on us to be “mindful” (Donohoe 2002: 235). And while monuments tend to rise triumphally from the ground, usually offering few words, memorials tend to be closer to the ground and inscribed with the names of those lost. “Monuments are not generally built to commemorate defeats; the defeated dead are remembered in memorials” (Sturken 1991: 129). This transaction with death is what can make the act of commemoration a form of history-making, one in which actors call on repertoires of cultural and religious symbolism and gestures, and in which private loss and suffering are entangled with public histories and collective memory.

Forgetting and Remembering Erenköy One of the main differences between epic and myth is that unlike the latter, epic is not sacralized and so does not acquire the status of the structural and formulaic that so fascinated anthropologists like Claude Levi-Strauss with regard to myth. Moreover, because an epic is presumed to be based on real events, it lends itself to various forms of narration. In Cyprus one of the ways in which the narratives’ status as legend becomes apparent is in the tendency to write and recite it as an epic poem, as a bard would do. The tendency to narrate the legend in poetry began even as the battle was ongoing, and in the period leading up to 1974 dozens of books of poetry were published about Erenköy, two of which had the title The Erenköy Epic (Erenköy Destanı).11 The epic poetry form continues today with YouTube videos of former fighters and villagers, who either tell the story in epic verse form or in a recitational style that suggests poetry.

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Unlike myth, the elaborated narration of the epic form allows the story’s beginning and ending to shift depending on the perspective from which the story is told. While the epic form suggests the grand and heroic, it also often involves the transformation of ordinary people and circumstances through exceptional events. As a result, as we will see, it also opens the possibility for the overlapping and coexistence of alternative narratives that, rather than detracting from the epic, only add to its status as legend. In the case of the ‘Erenköy epic,’ some versions of the tale begin in the summer of 1958, when several village men boarded a small fishing boat and made their way across about 60 kilometers of sea to the south coast of Turkey in search of weapons. These four men and seventeen others soon became known as bereketçi, literally the ‘bringers of blessings,’ because of the bridgehead they established to smuggle guns (the ‘blessings,’ or bereket) into the island. This involved 28 trips by fishing boat to Turkey during this period and the loss of several village men’s lives (Elmasoğlu 2014: 65). In other versions, the legend begins in the summer of 1964, when in response to reports of attacks on Turkish neighborhoods and villages approximately 500 young Turkish Cypriot university students left their studies in the UK and Turkey and volunteered to be smuggled into the island. As one man interviewed for a documentary film on Erenköy described that period, We were following events from the press, the newspapers, the radio, but of course in those days there were no televisions or mobile phones. When the massacres began, and our mothers and fathers and siblings are there, we asked ourselves what business we had in school. We went in search of a way to get to Cyprus with the idea that we needed to take our place in the armed conflict.12

His description is echoed in numerous oral histories and autobiographies narrating the period, all of which describe the desperation of the students studying abroad to return to protect their families (see, e.g., the numerous narratives in Mengüç 2005). In documentary films and subsequent writings about the period, this mass enlistment of the best and brightest of the Turkish Cypriot youth and their deployment to a remote village is sometimes referred to as ‘The Epic of the Cypriot Turkish Youth’ (Kıbrıs Türk Gençliğinin Destanı). Bryant has noted elsewhere (2012b) that there are many similarities between the creation of this version of the ‘Erenköy epic’ and the Anzac myth, the

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tale of Australian soldiers’ valiant fight at Gallipoli.13 Both particularly shared the idea of ‘pure’ sacrifice of the best and brightest young men of a generation. Indeed, virtually all male Turkish Cypriot university students had landed on that beachhead, which by 1964 was surrounded by Greek Cypriot troops and that they were expected to defend.14 By the time the young men arrived in Erenköy, villagers from the surrounding hamlets had already taken refuge there after attacks by Greek and Greek Cypriot forces in the previous months. In early August 1964, approximately two thousand Greek and Greek Cypriot forces began the most substantial attack on Erenköy, bombing the village with heavy weapons from the mountains and government patrol boats.15 After two days of bombardment, the Turkish military intervened, sending warplanes to strafe and bomb the surrounding Greek Cypriot villages, hitting both military targets and civilian areas. Fifty persons were killed in those attacks, 19 of those being civilians. For approximately 40 years, Turkish Cypriot memorialization emphasized those killed in this battle, but particularly their ‘rescue’ or ‘salvation’ by the Turkish military. The Erenköy epic was subsumed into a larger national myth of Turkish Cypriots’ salvation by Turkey, its willingness to intervene to protect its Cypriot ‘kin.’ After 1974, the island’s north was filled with memorials and museums to the Turkish Cypriot dead, while triumphal monuments celebrated the Turkish military victory. While Turkey was the ‘hero,’ the ‘savior,’ then, Turkish Cypriots were not only extras on the set of history, but extras who had no speaking parts, whose roles were those of suffering victims and martyrs, but not heroes. Indeed, so strong was the focus on ‘salvation’ by Turkey that for several decades the main Erenköy commemoration was held at a monument built in honor of Cengiz Topel, a young pilot who was shot down during the Turkish military intervention, captured by Greek Cypriot soldiers, and lynched. After 1974, the Turkish Cypriot administration erected a monument in honor of the young man at the site where his plane was supposed to have crashed. Although 21 young Turkish Cypriot men died during their service at Erenköy, Cengiz Topel was the single Turkish soldier to lose his life there, and he became a symbol of the sacrifices Turkey was willing to make for Turkish Cypriots. Indeed, after 1964 Cengiz Topel’s name was given to hospitals and schools, to streets and associations. His face was familiar to all Turkish Cypriots, many of whom named their children after him. Within this framework, Erenköy officially became an event in which the active participation of young Turkish Cypriot men was

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­ ritten instead as their salvation by the mighty force of Turkish jets, w embodied in the person of Cengiz Topel. However, entangled within this official narrative that subsumes the Erenköy epic under the arc of national myth, there is already a countercurrent of narrative, another version of the Erenköy legend that emphasizes Turkish Cypriot rather than Turkish sacrifices. For about four decades, this countercurrent appeared to be officially ‘forgotten,’ even if it was not erased from collective memory. Paul Ricoeur (2004) refers to a ‘reserve of forgetting’ to indicate those aspects of memory and history that are forgotten but available to consciousness. The Erenköy legend that emphasized the young men’s struggle was not forgotten in this sense, as it existed in collective memory and could easily be called upon, for instance when politicians who had fought at Erenköy would refer to their service there in their biographies. Neither could we call this alternative version of the same events a ‘counternarrative’ or ‘countermemory,’ as it did not reject the official narrative but rather gave it different emphasis. Instead, we believe that this and other versions of the legend indicate what we call ‘countercurrents’ of remembrance, or currents that may intersect with, fold into, or run in parallel to and alongside official narratives of lived events. This, we believe, is the usefulness of the legendary or epic form, which allows for stylized recitation of events that also opens the door for multiple interpretations and ways of telling the tale. In this sense, the epic of the young men’s ‘pure’ sacrifice could always exist alongside the national myth of salvation without contradiction. Even in 2003, before the beginning of the commemorations that we describe below, the official website of the TRNC Public Information Office announcing the 39th anniversary of the Erenköy struggle noted: Erenköy serves as a sign that Turkey will always be at the side of the Turks of Cyprus for as long as they resist, and so was not left to the Greeks but is instead the site of a memorial service every 8 August in which our martyrs are honored, and a chance is given for our young people to learn a lesson by going to see Erenköy, one of the most important turning points in the struggle for existence of the Turks of Cyprus [authors’ emphasis].16

As we explain below, commemorations at the time (2003) were limited by problems of access to the exclave, the resolution of which would subsequently make the commemoration one of the most important events in the Turkish Cypriot ritual calendar.

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Right around the time of the announcement above, the ‘Erenköy epic’ reemerged as a key moment in Turkish Cypriot history. The turn of the millennium was a time that brought many changes to the Turkish Cypriot community (see Hatay and Bryant 2008; Bryant and Hatay 2011). Since the island’s division in 1974 and the establishment of a de facto state in the island’s north, Turkish Cypriots living there had been isolated because of their state’s nonrecognition. This isolation only increased with the declaration of the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus in 1974, a state that would be recognized only by Turkey. As a result of this isolation, Turkish Cypriots became politically, economically, and militarily dependent on and tied to Turkey. Those ties have included Turkish troops stationed in the island, dependence on Turkey’s financial aid, and adoption of the Turkish currency and Turkish banking system in order to make international financial transactions. These forms of dependency helped lead, in 2000, to a collapse of local financial institutions, to be followed in 2001 by an economic crash in Turkey. The latter crisis, especially, led to increased dissatisfaction with their isolation as citizens of an unrecognized state. When the RoC was given a date for entry to the European Union (EU), and Turkish Cypriots were presented with a United Nations plan for reunification that would have allowed them to enter the EU with their Greek Cypriot neighbors, Turkish Cypriots gathered in mass rallies to protest their nationalist leadership, which intransigently refused to negotiate an agreement. By 2004, Turkish Cypriots had overturned the status quo of almost four decades, bringing to office a Leftist leader who put emphasis on his Cypriot, rather than Turkish, identity. Although this rebellion was accomplished with the aid of Turkey, which had just acquired its own leadership that tore down the status quo, it was perceived as an important historical moment for Turkish Cypriots, who during that period found motivation and voice. It was also during this period that the Erenköy epic reemerged as a polyphonic story of sacrifice, solidarity, and struggle. Suddenly, a spate of memoirs appeared, as well as one collection of such memories by more than one hundred Erenköy fighters. Before 2002 only one book had been published on the subject, and that to mark the 25th anniversary of the battle in 1989. Since 2002, however, more than a dozen books have been published, of which eight are memoirs of men who fought at Erenköy (e.g., Albayrak 2005; Camgöz 2008; Köken 2004; Laptalı 2003, 2004; Mengüç 2005). All of these books appeared at a particular historical conjuncture, one in which Turkish Cypriots were once again engaged in a

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struggle. This was a struggle that many on the Left perceived as a struggle for independence and self-determination and that many on the Right perceived as a struggle for existence. Many of these newly published narratives told not of the Turkish military strike but of what happened afterward, when the students and villagers were trapped in the village for more than a year, often on the verge of starvation. For the survivors, then, a battle that was supposedly ‘won’ by Turkish forces, a story that ended with the arrival of Turkish jets, had a more ambiguous ending. In many of those narratives, the fighters describe being ‘abandoned’ by the Turkish military and officers, left to suffer in that remote area for months after the heroic Turkish ‘rescue.’ What they describe through this story of ‘abandonment’ is their own solidarity and struggle, allowing Turkish Cypriots to acquire a place as heroes of their own history. An example of this can be seen in the preface of the 2008 memoirs of Erdal Camgöz, a veteran of Erenköy, who explains why he spent two years of his life working on the book: This book tells the story of a cross-section of the lives of young men who, even before the flood of change brought by the ’68 Generation, didn’t just have demonstrations in the squares but raced each other to the front for freedom, to protect their real identities, and because they heard the call of the homeland in their hearts. In 1964, 561 young men landed in Erenköy as fighters, challenging the uncertainty of the future. About 500 of these young men constituted almost the entirety of that period’s male university students. These educated Cyprus youth were the heroes of one of the most important turning-points of the Cypriot Turkish Freedom War, namely the Battle of Erenköy. (Camgöz 2008: xxxi)

Between 2003 and 2008, then, a change had occurred, one that emphasized the heroic nature of the struggle and depicted the Turkish Cypriot fighters as heroes in a battle of epic proportions. This was also clear in former president Mehmet Ali Talat’s 2008 speech in honor of the 44th anniversary of Erenköy, when he noted that “Erenköy is an example of the kinds of solidarity of which the Turks of Cyprus are capable in order to ensure their existence in this country.”17 The Erenköy fighters were especially suited to fill this role, because they were perceived not only as having engaged in instinctive defense, but as having sacrificed and as having fought selflessly. However, in response to this initial spate of memoir-production and exaltation of Erenköy heroes,

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another version of the epic began to emerge, one written by the villagers who had established the bridgehead for smuggling weapons; who had fought alongside the students; and who had remained in the village for more than a decade after the students were evacuated in 1965. In the villagers’ versions of the epic, the heroes do not engage in ‘pure’ sacrifice for their country or community, although they suggest, like former president Talat above, that their struggle and what they endured may come to stand synechdochally for the struggle of the Turkish Cypriot people. Rather, their version of events describes the extraordinary acts of ordinary people in defending their families and their village. During this period, living conditions were primitive, supplies were short, and the entire community became militarized. Moreover, the villagers’ versions of the epic emphasize their refusal to surrender the village after 1974 and their insistence on defending it for two more years. It was because of this refusal to surrender that the village remained in the hands of the Turkish Cypriot military and led to its current exceptional status as an exclave. If the students’ narrative gave the story of Turkish salvation a more ambiguous ending, the villagers’ narrative temporally extends the story of struggle, exceeding two moments of ‘salvation’ that should have provided ‘endings’—both the 1964 arrival of Turkish jets, after which they were trapped in the village for another decade, and the 1974 Turkish military intervention, after which they still refused to surrender. Indeed, the villagers’ narratives in every way exceed the neat boundaries of national myths, providing an excess of meaning that is available for reinterpretation. Their suffering far exceeded that of other enclaves during the 1964–74 period, since the village was remote and inaccessible but also an exposed target. Villagers we interviewed told us that they made beds from dried seaweed and were often on the verge of starvation. In another exception, women emphasized not only their resourcefulness in, for instance, making shelters from driftwood, but also their willingness to fight and die. Young women without children to care for took up weapons. As one elderly woman expressed it, “We protected ourselves, we protected our country, and we protected our honor” (Fig. 3.2).18 While the ‘epic’ had previously focused on the sacrifices of the students, a recent book by an Erenköy villager emphasizes the heroics of the hamlet’s inhabitants and conflicts with the students, whom the author describes as spoiled young men unable to endure the hardships of trench life (Vurana 2011). Despite villagers’ desire to reclaim the story, what nevertheless unites the student-fighters’ narratives with those of the villagers is an emphasis

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Fig. 3.2  Photo of young female villager taking up arms. (Source: Özer Hatay Archive)

not on Turkey’s intervention but on struggle, on the ‘fighting spirit’ of Turkish Cypriots, who were able to express solidarity during years of deprivation. Both these narratives, then, contrast with the older official one that incorporated the Erenköy narrative into a national myth of salvation by Turkey that also demanded Türkiye’ye şükran [thankfulness to Turkey] and diminished the role of Turkish Cypriots in the making of their own history. Moreover, while the national myth is a story that is complete, with a distinct beginning and ending, the ways that both the student-fighters and the villagers narrate their ‘epic’ show us that beginnings and endings may be ambiguous, stretched, and excessive.

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If we were to leave our story here, it might appear that the epic is rewritten in opposition to the myth, that it stands as a counternarrative or countermemory to a hegemonic way of writing Turkish Cypriot history. This is where the commemoration is important for what it shows us about how personal memory, local histories in epic or legendary form, and national myths become entangled in vernacular histories. In particular, we wish to show how those entanglements in the act of commemoration may repurpose or reterritorialize elements of both myth and epic in the creation of affective orientations to the future.

Repurposing a Struggle The Erenköy commemoration occurs on 8 August each year, the date of the 1964 Turkish military intervention. This also happens to be the hottest time of the year, when the sun bores down and dust swirls from the village’s dirt roads. Today, only the stone walls of the former village still stand, and in that season the bare, surrounding hills are parched and brown. When we arrived at Erenköy during our first pilgrimage to the site, canopies had already been erected to protect travelers from the heat, and a brass band was fiddling restlessly. Our initial destination was the şehitlik [martyrs’ cemetery], which was surrounded by an iron fence and the only area in full shade, under pine trees and a large canopy. Pilgrims milled around and sat on the ground, fanning themselves. Others looked out for the arrival of dignitaries, which would mark the beginning of the ceremony. A group of elderly former fighters stood at attention in their uniforms as members of the press photographed them. A Turkish warship flying Turkish and Turkish Cypriot flags were anchored just off shore. With the arrival by helicopter of political and military officials, the band struck up a march, and the gates to the cemetery were opened. Politicians and military officers filed to one side of the cemetery, where the official ceremony was to take place, while villagers surged into the cemetery itself, carrying flowers and candles. The official ceremony took place with speeches and a full military salute. Meanwhile, those with loved ones buried in the cemetery ignored the official ceremony and engaged in their own rituals of laying flowers, sprinkling the graves with blessed water, and lighting incense. Since the monument was separate from the cemetery itself, participants in the official ceremony had their backs to the cemetery. As a result, they did not observe the prayers and ritual acts in which the families were engaged. The families’ personal acts

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Fig. 3.3  (a, b) Families honor their dead with incense and blessed water. (Source: Authors)

of mourning took place simultaneously with, yet separate from, the formal acts of folding the flag and firing a military salute (Fig. 3.3). Once the ceremony ended, we gradually filed out of the cemetery, returning to the unrelenting August sun and making our way down a dusty road through the center of the ruined village. Along the way, many of our fellow pilgrims stopped to take photographs at the mouths of caves, where the villagers of Erenköy had taken refuge and many had lived for several years. There were no explanatory signs to indicate this, but everyone seemed to know the stories of the caves and to have seen the photographs of small children and elderly persons emerging from them (Figs. 3.4 and 3.5). On the other side of the village, the Turkish Cypriot military had set up rows of tents, and the fighters’ association had arranged for tables where people could eat. Young Turkish Cypriot conscripts stood under a tree handing out boxes of fried chicken. At the entrance to the site was also an

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Fig. 3.4  Photo of Erenköy villagers living in caves, c. 1965. (Source: Özer Hatay Archive)

open-air exhibition of Erenköy photographs. We took refuge under one of the tents while children in costume danced to folk tunes under the midday sun. The children’s groups all came from the villages in the north to which the residents of Erenköy and surrounding hamlets had been relocated after 1976. Once the entertainment had ended, we gathered our energy to make the last stop on our route, a mosque-museum (Fig. 3.6). The small village structure, no longer used as a place of worship, had instead become the one of the main centers of attraction in an otherwise desolate hamlet. Inside the museum, there were photographs and objects from the struggle, and one former fighter with a voluminous mustache posed in uniform while the young people took photographs. Before long, exhausted pilgrims began to file back to the buses, where they took refuge in the air conditioning, and many began to sleep. This is the barest sketch of the ceremony and cannot begin to encapsulate the variety of expectations and intentions with which people undertook the journey. The three ‘heroes’ of the narrative—the Turkish army, the Turkish Cypriot fighters, and the villagers—were all present

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Fig. 3.5  Visitors take photographs in front of the caves where Erenköy villagers lived during the siege period. (Source: Authors)

s­ imultaneously, but there seemed to be only minimal congruence between them. The political leaders and Turkish army officers performing the official ceremony, their backs to the mourning villagers, emphasized the symbolic nature of Erenköy as the site of Turkey’s first intervention, as well as the first loss of Turkish Cypriot fighters and Turkish military personnel during the conflict. Former fighters were there to see the site where they had fought and to mourn their fallen friends. Villagers, for their part, were there to see the ruins of their former village and to mourn their loved ones, appearing to pay little attention to the formal ceremony unfolding a few meters away. Despite these overlapping and seemingly incongruent intentions and practices, Erenköy has grown in recent years as a pilgrimage site, in tandem with its growing emphasis in communal memory. In the past, there were two separate ceremonies commemorating the date: one official ceremony at the Cengiz Topel monument, located now within the borders of the TRNC around 40 kilometers from Erenköy, and the other the ceremony of veterans and the families of ‘martyrs,’ who would each year take

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Fig. 3.6  The Erenköy mosque, now a museum of the ‘struggle.’ (Source: Authors)

a boat from within the TRNC’s perimeter to this small exclave. The latter was an event with little fanfare in which families engaged quietly. In the past decade, however, commemorations of Erenköy and visits to the site have increased both in size and importance. In 2003 only 150 people attended the ceremony, but the number grew to 450  in 2005, and in 2009, after some pressure to allow travel by land, the number was over 1000. It was after the opening of land access that the mosque was converted to a museum displaying photos of fallen fighters. At the same time, the status of officials attending the ceremonies rose such that by 2009 all the highest military officers on the island attended, and not long afterward the president of the TRNC also began to speak at the ceremony. This meant that although a ceremony continued at the Topel monument, it lost importance even as an official commemoration. Indeed, despite the

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Erenköy commemoration date falling during the month of Ramadan in 2011 and 2012, the numbers continued to rise from 1200  in 2011 to 1600 in 2012.19 In 2014, the number rose to 2100.20 Hence, Erenköy has gone from being a site of quiet commemoration to a site of ceremony and pilgrimage including highly public and political displays of remembrance. This change, moreover, is part of a wider shift in commemorative practices among Turkish Cypriots. The Erenköy pilgrimage is part of a larger season of commemorations, beginning on 20 July, the anniversary of the Turkish military intervention in 1974; continuing on 1 August, the date of the official establishment of Turkish Cypriots’ paramilitary organization in 1958; and concluding on 8 August, the date of the pilgrimage. While participation in these events in the past proceeded in descending order, with most participation in the 20 July event, in the last decade participation in that event has fallen significantly. Indeed, Turkish Cypriots have increasingly lost interest in commemorations or national holidays perceived as associated with the Republic of Turkey and the Turkish military, and they have begun to resist the intrinsically militaristic nature of these ceremonies. At the same time that attendance at the military parades on 20 July was declining, participation in the Erenköy pilgrimage was rising. The growing emphasis not on salvation but on struggle was one that began to reshape Turkish Cypriots’ narrative of these events, and it was also an emphasis that could unite Turkish Cypriots across the political spectrum. Because almost all Turkish Cypriot males who could hold a gun had been fighters between 1964 and 1974, the emphasis on their own struggle, rather than Turkey’s salvation of them, was one on which both nationalists and those in favor of reconciliation could agree. In response to this growing lack of interest in, indeed cynicism toward, the official ceremonies and their militarism, a group of nationalist Turkish Cypriots decided in 2010 to hold an alternative 20 July ceremony, one that featured both well-known Turkish entertainers and Turkish Cypriots as active participants. The ceremony, known as Şafak Nöbeti, or Dawn Watch, begins on the evening of 19 July on the beach where the Turkish military first landed in 1974. That stretch of sand today also happens to be home to one of the most popular and exclusive beach clubs in the island’s north, situated below an impressive monument in the shape of an abstract hand rising from the sea. Singers and other entertainers are brought from Turkey, and participants remain on the beach throughout the night, holding torches and waiting for the ‘arrival’ of Turkish troops

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at dawn. Just at dawn, Turkish Cypriot fighters and Turkish veterans of 1974 take the stage to receive the thanks of the waiting crowd. While the official ceremony later in the day continues to be attended mostly by officials, the crowds for the Dawn Watch have grown, with thousands in attendance every year. It is effectively an all-night party with a patriotic theme, but one that also requires attendees’ participation rather than passive observation. This is implied in the name, as the word nöbet means ‘to watch,’ ‘to guard,’ or ‘to be on duty,’ and asks that all who attend remain ‘on duty’ to bring in the dawn of the Turkish military arrival. Like the repurposing of the 20 July anniversary from passive observation of military parades to an active ‘guard duty’ carried out as all-night beach party, so the ‘Erenköy epic’ has been resignified as the ‘Erenköy Resistance Epic’ or even the ‘Glorious Erenköy Resistance Epic’ (Şanlı Erenköy Direniş Destanı), while official and vernacular histories have been brought in tandem. The ceremonies and acts of mourning side-by-­side do not cancel each other but rather repurpose or reterritorialize each other. As in Deleuze and Guattari’s example of the orchid and the wasp, the presence of military officers and politicians allows a ‘becoming monumental’ of the personal and informal memorialization, just as military and official collaboration with the families and fighters’ association in the commemoration allows a ‘becoming vernacular’ of what would otherwise be a sparsely attended official ceremony. This allows us to see, in turn, how the various versions of the ‘epic’ may intersect, overlap, and entangle without needing to cancel each other out. We have emphasized not the official commemorative narrative and its countermemory but rather countercurrents of memory and history that have always existed within the epic form. Generally, such countercurrents do not challenge the role of Turkey in helping Turkish Cypriots to establish their own state. What they do instead is emphasize the active role played by Turkish Cypriots in the struggle, which paved the way for Turkey’s intervention. Moreover, one of the main changes in that narrative form is that it goes from a story with an ending—‘Turkey saved us, and we established a state’—to a story of ongoing struggle. It goes, then, from a story that is completed to one that remains incomplete. And while the nationalist narrative that emphasized thankfulness to Turkey called on Turkish Cypriots to be wary with regard to their Greek Cypriot neighbors, the moral of this new narrative is more diffuse.21 By leaving the ending open, it calls on Turkish Cypriots to be ready for struggle and gives to the epic an affect of agency, though unlike the

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national myths of official narrative it does not prescribe for them the object of that struggle. Rather, it appears to accomplish what Sara Ahmed calls the formative role of collective feelings, which she describes as making “‘the collective’ appear as if it were a body in the first place” (Ahmed 2004: 27). Not only this, however, but in stressing an affect of agency the narrative appears to steer that collective body into the future.

Conclusion The Erenköy Fighters Association today has a new headquarters and museum outside Nicosia, Cyprus’s divided capital, and has established a Facebook page where one can find comments from interested citizens who have participated in their events or visited the association. One businessman who happened to be in the vicinity of the new headquarters for work stopped by the association and wrote afterward on their webpage about his experience. After explaining that he was the son of an Erenköy fighter, he remarked, I commemorate our martyrs with respect. May they rest in peace. We will work even harder today than we have worked before to crown your struggle with an agreement in which Turkish Cypriots will be essential element [founding community]. Let that be our promise!

The agreement to which he refers is a negotiated solution to the Cyprus division, talks for which were underway at the time of his writing. One of the key elements in those negotiations since their inception in the 1960s has been that Turkish Cypriots would continue to be a founding community (what the commentator calls an ‘essential element,’ aslı unsur) of any federal state to be established. In this comment, then, the author suggests that the unfinished business of the struggle could be completed only by an agreement that would grant Turkish Cypriots political equality. It is a comment that expresses a particular disposition toward the future, what we have called here an affect of agency. Indeed, our use of the term ‘affect’ relies as much on its etymology in the Latin affectus, or disposition, as it does on the ‘affective turn’ in the social sciences. By an ‘affect of agency’ we mean here the transmission, through acts of commemoration, of dispositions such as resolve, determination, and endurance that appear both to describe who ‘the Turkish Cypriot’ is today and to constitute it.22

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What this suggests to us, then, is that while commemorations associated with national myths may be concerned with narrative closure, the capacity to write or rewrite one’s own story into larger narratives not only forecloses closure but also belies any neat historical endings. If reterritorialized narratives, as we have suggested, are ways in which the same story may be resignified and acquire a different affect, vernacular histories may point us more toward the future than the past. This suggests to us, then, that studies of commemoration would benefit from paying as much attention to the epic as to the mythic, and to the vernacular repurposing that may exceed the closure of official histories.

Notes 1. This chapter was written as part of a four-year interdisciplinary project, Cultural Heritage and the Reconstruction of Identities after Conflict (CRIC), funded by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme and led by Dr. Marie-Louise Stig Sorensen of Cambridge University’s Archaeology Department, with the Peace Research Institute Oslo’s Cyprus Centre as a project partner. 2. A growing transitional justice literature on memorialization and commemoration attempts to address the ways in which stubbornly lasting memorials to violence and its victims may impede or promote peace (e.g., Duncan 2009; Hepworth 2014; Jinks 2014; MacDonald 2006; Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996). As numerous scholars of peace education have noted, one of the primary problems is how to enable mourning, and how to teach future generations about the conflict, without producing enmity (e.g., Cole 2007; Zembylas 2014). Although a full discussion of this problem is beyond the scope of this chapter, we wish to acknowledge that the commemoration discussed here is similarly contested. In that regard, this chapter offers the modest contribution of illuminating a ceremony that holds central significance in the Turkish Cypriot historical imaginary but is almost unknown in the island’s south. 3. In this chapter, we will refer to the village only by its Turkish name, because this is the way in which it has entered Turkish Cypriot history, and it is the only name by which most Turkish Cypriots know it. 4. From their establishment, probably sometime in the nineteenth century, the villages were Muslim and Greek-speaking. The village acquired its Turkish name during a flurry of toponym changes in 1958, when the Turkish Cypriot leadership of the time, in the form of the Turkish Cypriot Federation of Institutions (Kıbrıs Türk Kurumlar Federasyonu), undertook to change the names of all Turkish or Turkish-majority villages and

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neighborhoods. As we describe elsewhere (Bryant and Hatay forthcoming 2020), this was a process in which villagers were consulted and their approval sought. 5. The Erenköy battle’s significance in Turkish Cypriot collective memory has constituted a side interest of both authors for more than two decades, with Bryant (2004) first writing about its continuing symbolic significance in the Turkish Cypriot political terrain and later about forms of historical revision (2012b). This chapter, then, is based on archival research, oral histories and memoirs, and interviews with former fighters and villagers over a period of about 20 years, as well as ethnographic research since 2008 on the battle’s commemoration. 6. http://www.kibrispostasi.com/c1-KIBRIS_POSTASI_GAZETESI/ j159/a33233-Erenkoy-ruhu-bitti-mi 7. For a sample of these interviews, see Bryant (2010, 2012a). 8. http://cyprus-mail.com/2014/08/09/turkish-cypriots-mark-kokkinavictory-as-survivors-recall-bombings/ 9. For observations on a very similar secular pilgrimage and ‘pilgrims’ motivations for undertaking the journey, see Hyde and Harman (2011). 10. One anonymous reader of this chapter asked if Turkish Cypriots were not also dissatisfied, as the reader presumed that Turkish Cypriots worked for partition. In a previous article (Bryant and Hatay 2011) and a forthcoming book (Bryant and Hatay forthcoming 2020), we examine the institutions of a state-within-a-state that emerged during the enclave period of the 1960s, and the ways in which an unrecognized state emerged after the island’s division in 1974. In our survey of newspapers of the period of the 1960s and 1970s, and in around four hundred interviews with Turkish Cypriot displaced persons, administrators, and politicians, we did not encounter anyone who was dissatisfied with the 1960 Republic of Cyprus, although they did anticipate that it would not last. Both of these responses should not be surprising, as the RoC constitution gave a numerical minority of 18% the right to occupy 30% of the civil service positions, as well as a crucial veto right over legislation. Turkish Cypriots tended to be satisfied with the arrangement but also aware of Greek Cypriot dissatisfaction with the compromise. 11. The two books of that title were written by former fighter Oktay Öksüzoğlu and Turkish Cypriot political leader Rauf Raif Denktaş, who had been banished from the island and made a secret landing there by fishing boat in 1964. Turkish Cypriot poet Mehmet Yaşın, in a history of Turkish Cypriot poetry, describes an “Erenköy Movement” and claims that these books of poetry “were like diaries that put the conflict on paper. They are full of frightening images, aggressive expressions, and a dark state of mind” (2005: 107). See also Kıbrıs Türk Milli Şiirler Antolojisi (1971).

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12. “The Fighters of the Cyprus Epic” (Kıbrıs Destanı Mücahitler), https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdjWl7wwWYQ&t=686s 13. Bruce Kapferer, for instance, argues that the Anzac myth constitutes a core element of Australian nationalism because of its emphasis on egalitarian individualism (Kapferer 1988: 121 ff). See also Scates (2008), Slade (2003), and Ziino (2006). 14. It was the discovery of the village’s function that led to the Greek Cypriot armed forces’ attack five years later, though there also appears to have been considerable misinformation involved, as the area is still commonly believed to have been a beachhead for the landing of Turkish troops. While Greek Cypriot journalist Makarios Droushiotis does say that most of those landing at the beachhead were Turkish Cypriot students, he claims that “in five days the Turks had landed 500 men a day at Mansoura” (Droushiotis 2006: 28). This would have amounted to at least 2500 fighters, whereas all memoirs and writings of men who were stationed there and villagers themselves state that the total figure was a bit over 500. 15. For details on the troop build-up and the attack, see Report by the SecretaryGeneral on the United Nations Operation in Cyprus, S/5950, 10 September 1964, pp. 21–22. 16. http://www.trncinfo.com/TANITMADAIRESI/ARSIV2003/ TURKCEarsiv/AGUSTOS/080803.htm#3 17. h t t p : / / w w w. t u r k i s h f o r u m . c o m / c o n t e n t / 2 0 0 8 / 0 8 / 0 9 / erenkoy-direnisi%E2%80%99nin-44-yildonumu/ 18. ‘ For a longer transcription of this interview, see Bryant (2012b). 19. Figures provided by the Erenköy Fighters Association. 20. Stefanos Evripidou, “Turkish Cypriots mark Kokkina ‘victory,’ as survivors recall bombings,” 9 August 2014, http://cyprus-mail.com/2014/08/09/ turkish-cypriots-mark-kokkina-victory-as-survivors-recall-bombings/ 21. An anonymous reader asked if the affect of agency produced may be in opposition to Turkey, particularly as Turkish Cypriots’ relations with that country have grown increasingly tense in recent years as a result of political developments in Turkey and their effect on the island. We find that what the ceremony shows is in fact the affective complexity of that relationship, which may contain elements of both love and loathing, of both gratitude and resentment, at the same time. 22. In what appears to be the only other academic study of commemoration and affect, Stockwell (2014) examines women’s narratives of violence both by the Argentinian government and by left-wing guerrillas to argue that “the affect generated by shared memories of trauma acts as an invisible yet potent cultural force” (p.  42). This seems to suggest that shared affect constructed through commemoration regarding others constitutes an ­important impediment to reconciliation. While our argument does not discount the role of mourning and trauma in the Erenköy commemorations, we point to the ways in which affect may be explicitly future-oriented.

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Bibliography Ahmed, S. 2004. Collective Feelings: Or, the Impressions Left by Others. Theory, Culture and Society 21 (2): 25–42. Albayrak, M. 2005. Bir Erenköy Mücahidinin Anıları. Famagusta: Grafik Film Matbaa. Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Archard, D. 1995. Myths, Lies and Historical Truth: A Defence of Nationalism. Political Studies XLIII: 472–481. Ashplant, T.G., G. Dawson, and M. Roper. 2000. The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration: Contexts, Structures and Dynamics. In The Politics of War and Commemoration, ed. T.G.  Ashplant, G.  Dawson, and M.  Roper. London: Routledge. Barthes, R. 1972. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang. Bryan, D. 2000. Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual, Tradition and Control. London: Pluto Press. Bryant, R. 2004. Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus. London: I. B. Tauris. ———. 2010. The Past in Pieces: Belonging in the New Cyprus. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2012a. Displacement in Cyprus—Consequences of Civil and Military Strife, Report No. 2, Life Stories: Turkish Cypriot Community. Nicosia: PRIO Cyprus Centre. ———. 2012b. The Fractures of a Struggle: Remembering and Forgetting Erenköy. In Cyprus and the Politics of Memory: History, Community, and Conflict, ed. R. Bryant and Y. Papadakis. London: I.B. Tauris. Bryant, R., and M. Hatay. 2011. Guns and Guitars: Simulating Sovereignty in a State of Siege. American Ethnologist 38 (4): 631–649. ———. 2020. (forthcoming). Sovereignty Suspended: Building the So-Called State. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Camgöz, Erdal. 2008. Kıbrıs’a İlk Çıkarma 1964 Oradaydım. Ankara: Kozan Ofset. Chatzipanagiotidou, Evropi. 2012. The ‘Leftovers’ of History: Reconsidering the ‘Unofficial’ History of the Left in Cyprus and the Cypriot Diaspora. In Cyprus and the Politics of Memory: History, Community and Conflict, ed. R. Bryant and Y. Papadakis, 94–117. London: I. B. Tauris. Cole, E. 2007. Teaching the Violent Past: History Education and Reconciliation. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Dalsheim, J. 2004. Settler Nationalism, Collective Memories of Violence and the ‘Uncanny Other’. Social Identities 10 (2): 151–170. Deleuze, G., and F.  Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated and with an Introduction by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Donohoe, J. 2002. Dwelling with Monuments. Philosophy and Geography 5 (2): 235–242. Droushiotis, M. 2006. Cyprus 1974: Greek Coup and Turkish Invasion. Mannheim und Mohnesee: Bibliopolis. Duncan, C.R. 2009. Monuments and Martyrdom: Memorializing the Dead in Post-Conflict North Maluku. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 165 (4): 429–458. Elmasoğlu, Fadıl. 2014. Erenköy ve Hayat. Nicosia: Işık Kitabevi. Francis, D. 2005. National Dreams: Myth, Memory and Canadian History. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Fulbrook, M. 1997. Myth-Making and National Identity: The Case of the GDR. In Myths and Nationhood, ed. G. Hosking and G. Schopflin. New York: Routledge. Godfrey, S., and F. Unger, eds. 2004. The Shifting Foundations of Modern Nation-­ States: Realignments of Belonging. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Grant, P. 2017. National Myth and the First World War in Modern Popular Music. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Handelman, D. 2004. Nationalism and the Israeli State: Bureaucratic Logic in Public Events. Oxford: Berg. Hatay, M., and R.  Bryant. 2008. The Jasmine Scent of Nicosia: On Returns, Revolutions, and the Longing for Forbidden Pasts. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 26 (2): 423–449. Henig, D. 2017. Prayer as a History: Of Witnesses, Martyrs, and Plural Pasts in Post-War Bosnia-Herzegovina. Social Analysis 61 (1): 41–54. Hepworth, A. 2014. Sites of Memory and Dismemory: The Valley of the Fallen in Spain. Journal of Genocide Research 16 (4): 463–485. Hosking, G.A., and G.  Schöpfin, eds. 1997. Myths and Nationhood. New  York: Routledge. Hyde, K.F., and S. Harman. 2011. Motives for a Secular Pilgrimage to the Gallipoli Battlefields. Tourism Management 32: 1341–1351. Hynes, S. 1999. Personal Narratives and Commemoration. In War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, ed. J. Winter and E. Sivan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jansen, S. 2014. Hope For/Against the State: Gridding in a Besieged Sarajevo Suburb. Ethnos 79 (2): 238–260. ———. 2015. Yearnings in the Meantime: ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Jinks, R. 2014. Thinking Comparatively About Genocide Memorialization. Journal of Genocide Research 16 (4): 423–440. Kapferer, B. 1988. Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press. Kıbrıs Türk Milli Şiirler Antolojisi. 1971. Nicosia: Ergenekon Yayınları.

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Köken, Rüstem. 2004. 64 Küşağı bir Kıbrıslı’nın Anıları. Ankara: Başak Matbaacılık. Krieg, L.J. 2012. A Fight for Countermemory and Counteridentity: The Alternative Ceremony of Independence Day in Israel. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 101 (1): 33–48. Laptalı, H. 2003. Erenköy Sürüngeni: Özgürlüğün Bedeli, I.  Cilt. Istanbul: Ufuk Matbaası. ———. 2004. Erenköy Sürüngeni: Özgürlük geleceğe, gelecek ise umutlara kalmıştı, II. Cilt. Istanbul: Ufuk Matbaası. Lincoln, Bruce. 1999. Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacDonald, S. 2006. Undesirable Heritage: Fascist Material Culture and Historical Consciousness in Nuremberg. International Journal of Heritage Studies 12 (1): 9–28. Mach, Z. 1993. Symbols, Conflict and Identity. Albany: State University of New York Press. Mahmood, S. 2004. The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mengüç, A. 2005. Anılarda Erenköy. Istanbul: Bir-Mat Matbaacılık. Misztal, B.A. 2003. Theories of Social Remembering. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Overing, J. 1997. The Role of Myth: An Anthropological Perspective, or: The Reality of the Really Made-Up. In Myths and Nationhood, ed. G. Hosking and G. Schöpfl, 1–18. New York: Routledge. Panayiotou, A. 2006. Lenin in the Coffee Shop. Postcolonial Studies 9 (3): 267–280. ———. 2012. Hegemony, Permissible Public Discourse and Lower Class Political Culture. In Cyprus and the Politics of Memory: History, Community and Conflict, ed. R. Bryant and Y. Papadakis, 71–93. London: I. B. Tauris. Papadakis, Y. 1998. Greek Cypriot Narratives of History and Collective Identity: Nationalism as a Contested Process. American Ethnologist 25 (2): 149–165. ———. 2003. Nation, Narrative and Commemoration: Political Ritual in Divided Cyprus. History and Anthropology 14 (3): 253–270. Purcell, S.J. 2000. War, Memory and National Identity in the Twentieth Century. National Identities 2 (2): 187–195. Renan, E. 1947. Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? In Oeuvres complêtes de Ernst Renan, ed. H. Psichari. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Ricoeur, P. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scates, B. 2008. Memorialising Gallipoli: Manufacturing Memory at Anzac. Public History Review 15: 47–59.

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Schöpflin, G. 1997. The Functions of Myth and a Taxonomy of Myths. In Myths and Nationhood, ed. G.  Hosking and G.  Schöpflin, 19–34. New  York: Routledge. Seal, G. 2004. Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Serter, V.Z. 1979. Kıbrıs Tarihi. Nicosia: Halkın Sesi. Slade, P. 2003. Gallipoli Thanotourism: The Meaning of Anzac. Annals of Tourism Research 30 (4): 779–794. Smith, A.D. 1988. The Myth of the ‘Modern Nation’ and the Myths of Nations. Ethnic and Racial Studies 11 (1): 1–26. ———. 1999. Myths and Memories of the Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stewart, C. 2017. Uncanny History: Temporal Topology in the Post-Ottoman World. Social Analysis 61 (1): 129–142. Stockwell, J. 2014. ‘The Country That Doesn’t Want to Heal Itself’: The Burden of History, Affect, and Women’s Memories in Post-Dictatorial Argentina. International Journal of Conflict and Violence 8 (1): 30–44. Sturken, M. 1991. The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Representations 35, Special Issue: Monumental Histories, 118–142. Tunbridge, J.E., and G.J. Ashworth. 1996. Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Chichester: Wiley. Vurana, H. 2011. Kuzeybatı Dilirga. Nicosia: Hamit Vurana. Wilson, R. 2013. Cultural Heritage of the Great War in Britain. Farnham: Ashgate. Winter, J. 1995. Sites of Memory: Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999. Forms of Kinship and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Great War. In War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, ed. J.  Winter and E. Sivan, 40–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yaşın, M., ed. 2005. Kıbrıs Şiiri Antolojisi. Istanbul: Adam Yayınları. Zembylas, Michalinos. 2014. Unmasking the Entanglements of Violence, Difficult Knowledge, and Schooling. Religious Education 109 (3): 258–262. Zerubavel, Y. 1997. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ziino, B. 2006. Who Owns Gallipoli? Australia’s Gallipoli Anxieties, 1915–2005. Journal of Australian Studies 30 (88): 1–12.

CHAPTER 4

Heritagization of the Gulag: A Case Study from the Solovetsky Islands Margaret Comer

Introduction Totalitarian regimes are characterized by their tendency and ability to silence voices that dissent or tell stories that their leaders would prefer remain unheard. When such regimes end, there is often a wave of disclosures and remembrance by victims of state repression. What happens to such dissonant memories depends on the attitudes of the new state toward uncomfortable truths and, in particular, toward their place in national history and identity. The Soviet and Russian attitudes toward the gulag system comprise a very revealing case study of this relationship. In the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, there was a surge in studies of how the citizens of the recently independent countries were constructing their identities and coming to terms with events they had been unable to memorialize or, sometimes, even publicly remember (see, e.g., Etkind 2013; Verdery 1999; Watson 1994). However, few of these studies have focused on Russian struggles to come to terms with gulag heritage and memories. This chapter hopes to go some way towards filling that gap by categorizing and analyzing the various forms and narratives of M. Comer (*) Cambridge Heritage Research Centre, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. L. S. Sørensen et al. (eds.), Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18091-1_4

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memorialization of the victims of Soviet repression at the site of the first Soviet gulag. This chapter focuses on the Solovetsky Islands, site of the prison camp complex that spawned the entire gulag system. Although the conflict between the monks of the Solovetsky Monastery and island residents has received some media coverage (see, e.g., Schwirtz 2007), this does not depict the full tableau of actors and motivations involved in gulag heritage presentation and interpretation. The roles that Solovetsky gulag heritage has played in shaping, as opposed to being shaped by, official memorialization, as well as public, collective, and private memory within and beyond the island, remain unstudied. This is particularly unfortunate because the Solovetsky Islands offer a significant opportunity to study the role that painful heritage plays both in a community’s self-conception and in the way it presents itself to outsiders. The Solovetsky Islands, also known as the Solovki Islands or simply Solovki, lie within the White Sea. Ice and severe weather mean that tourist travel is effectively restricted to the summer months. Year-round, a small colony of monks lives at the monastery; in all, the island’s permanent population is roughly a thousand people (Garrels 2010). An unknown number of people (the figure fluctuates between tens and hundreds of thousands) were sent to the Solovetsky gulag between 1921 and 1939 for alleged crimes against the fledging Soviet Union (Burgess 2007: 195). It was noted for its unusual brutality, and tens of thousands of people died. This was documented by several inmate writers, and commented on by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived several gulag camps although he was not personally an inmate on Solovki. The camp, as Solzhenitsyn first asserted in a much adopted metaphor, was the model for all gulags that followed: the first island of the gulag archipelago (1985: 194–195). The memoirs of inmates are often noted for their depictions of extreme brutality and human resilience, but they also contain many reflections on memory, justice, and retribution (see, among many others, Adamova-Sliozberg 2011; Ginzburg 1981; Likhachev 2000). The monastery was closed during the gulag era but reopened again in 1992. The monastic community has since gone to great lengths to commemorate gulag victims (Schwirtz 2007). In contrast, the official documents relating to the site’s 1992 inscription on the World Heritage List make little mention of the gulag, focusing instead on the monastery’s architectural and religious legacies. The word ‘gulag’ was in fact never mentioned in the original statement of Outstanding Universal Value (UNESCO 1992), and few details were provided about that period. Clearly, there is

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some ­‘dissonance’ in the different ways this heritage is presented (see Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996). Little has been written about the role of the Solovetsky gulag’s heritage in the construction of Russian identity and memory, although Zuzanna Bogumił’s (2018) recent work on how different stakeholders produced museums, memorials, and other heritage relating to Soviet repression in the mid-1980s and 1990s ‘carnival of memory’ is deeply researched and compelling. For a well-­visited site that served as the model for every later gulag, this lacuna is surprising. Some of this may be due to the difficulty faced in researching such subjects during the Soviet era, but, considering the new regimes of memory and identity developed since 1991, the under-examination of the site merits scrutiny into the role of the gulag in commemoration and memory today.

Approaching Solovetsky In order to engage analytically with the site, a form of site biography, an approach exemplified by the work of Sharon Macdonald (2009) and in the volume Heritage and War (Sørensen and Viejo-Rose 2015), is used. The approach focuses on the effects that architectural remains and landscape features have on physical heritagescapes and vice versa, and it is well-suited to exploring the changes that the site of the Solovetsky gulag has undergone over the past hundred years. Decisions about a site’s use and preservation both reflect and shape various constructions of meanings, which may include identity construction processes and debates over how best to commemorate, memorialize, and/or ‘forget’ elements of painful heritage. These decisions, moreover, take place at several levels, including governmental or ‘public’ levels and personal memory (Macdonald 2009: 19–20). The approach also helps to identify individuals and groups who have taken responsibility for preserving gulag heritage, and it pays attention to the ways in which the heritage itself has impacted its landscape and interpretations. This approach seems especially apt for a project concerning pre- and post-Soviet Russian memories of repression, since public acknowledgment of these aspects was so thoroughly suppressed on the ‘official’ level for many years. Further, both public and private memories of repression and its aftermath often display a marked ambivalence. Excerpts from survivor memoirs and other literary works that engage with memory or memories of Soviet repression reflect this ambivalence, and so these help to explore the role(s) of gulag heritage in interpreting and presenting the island’s history and identity. Moreover, since many of the Solovki State Museum-­ Preserve’s museums are located inside historic buildings, all of which were

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used during the Solovetsky gulag period, the site biography approach allows for an analysis of interpretation that takes place at the landscape level as well as on rhetorical and ideological levels.

Two Notes on Terminology Although the archetypical ‘guardians of memory’ have been defined as ‘ordinary people’ who have taken it upon themselves to physically and/or symbolically ‘safeguard […] the memory and heritage’ of an era or event that would otherwise be forgotten (Carr 2015), the writers, publishers, and disseminators of gulag survivor memoirs can also be considered to be guardians of memory. Their literary testimonies and the often covert actions necessary to produce, protect, and distribute these works within and outside of the Soviet Union were just as much actions that safeguarded memory as were the foundation of the Gulag Museum and the creation of the memorial park on Big Solovetsky Island. If it were not for these first-­ hand accounts or compilations thereof, conceptions of the Solovetsky camps and the gulag system as a whole would have been very different, both within and outside the Soviet Union. Carr’s characterization of a ‘guardian of countermemory’, who fills the same role as a guardian of memory but in service of a ‘marginalised’ or ‘controversial narrative of events’ (2015), provides an interesting angle on this term. At the time these memoirs were written, the writers were indeed guardians of countermemory, since their work contradicted ‘official’ narratives of Soviet social history and technological progress. Arguably, however, in the mid-1980s, these writers became guardians of memory instead: their accounts became the new ‘truth’ as citizens accepted their histories of repression and its impacts—and, crucially, this was done with some level of government support (Adler 2005: 1094). On a different note, the history of Soviet era prisons and labor camps on the Solovetsky Islands is complex; over its years of operation, the camp changed names half a dozen times. In addition, the role of this prison complex in initiating the form of labor camp that would spread across the Soviet Union and become known as ‘gulags’ is paramount in Russian memory, as Solzhenitsyn’s (1985: 212–13) work and others testify. In fact, the word ‘gulag’ is an acronym; the word is drawn from the first ­initials of words that comprise ГУЛАГ (GULAG, or Glavnoye Upravleniye LAGerey i koloniy1), the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Labor Settlements. Thus, when discussing the heritage of all of the Soviet prison camps and related installations in the Solovetsky Islands,

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I will refer to the site as ‘the Solovetsky gulag’ or ‘the Solovki gulag’. Where a more specific designation is needed, I will use the appropriate individual terminology.

Dark Pasts in Literature and History Works on ‘painful’, ‘dark’, and ‘traumatic’ heritage have made significant contributions to heritage studies and to wider understandings of how people and communities process trauma when constructing memories and identities (see, e.g., Biran et al. 2011; Carr 2014; Foote 1997; Macdonald 2009; Sather-Wagstaff 2011). This study, however, does not simply focus on the physical marks trauma leaves on a landscape or person. The way Soviet people conceptualized their identities and past(s) changed dramatically in the face of the twentieth century’s overwhelming experiences of violence, suffering, and loss (Merridale 2000: 416–18). These shifts in perception and construction of meaning were, in turn, passed on to generations that had no first-hand experience of these events. This inheritance of traumatic memory has been termed ‘postmemory’, which Hirsch defines as ‘the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that precede their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right’ (2008: 103). In the Solovetsky Islands, visitors from the former USSR are likely to have been influenced by the cultural post-memory of Soviet repression, which influences how gulag heritage is presented and received. The transition between memory and post-memory, however, has been complicated by years of enforced official silence about Soviet gulags; some of the implications and repercussions of this silence can be found when examining the interactions of subaltern, collective, and public memory. The inclusion of gulag remembrance in ‘official’ USSR/Russian memory from the mid-1980s is an excellent example of how a previously subaltern memory can become a public one (Adler 2005; Assmann 2008). The decades before 1991 saw the rise of samizdat literature, works that often dissented from official party lines on policy, history, and memory. Although some gulag memoirs were written by inmates who had escaped to the West (technically tamizdat), most such authors had to write in secret, and their works were passed around by hand; once smuggled abroad, they had tremendous impacts on perceptions of life in the Soviet Union. In a society where memory was subject to ‘discursive cleansing’

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(Finnin 2011), samizdat was indispensable to circulating narratives of the gulag and repression beyond the realm of individual memory. Russian scholars, too, have produced works on gulags, but they mostly fall into the realm of pure historical chronicle, like the compiling of lists of names and maps of prisons and labor camp sites. This was a significant achievement, since convincing the authorities to open archives and other repositories had taken decades. Without these champions of truth, researchers in Russia and abroad would have very little primary data to work with, and it is this research that has allowed scholars everywhere to come closer to understanding the true human cost of Soviet repression. A smaller number of recent works have examined the material traces of Russia’s past repression (see especially Bogumił 2018), and these are often aimed at a wide audience beyond academia alone (see Gessen 2018). Heritage studies as a ‘discipline’ that focuses on the material remains of the past, as opposed to memory or cultural studies, is mostly undertaken at the grassroots level in contemporary Russia and remains under-­published and under-publicized.

The Solovetsky Islands The site biography begins by tracing the physical and ideological changes imposed on the site, organized by each era’s governing regime and ideology. As I show below, each of these changes affected the islands’ various heritages, and they were each realized by different groups that, in their own way, assisted in preserving (or not preserving) heritage(s). Chronological phases of history (e.g., the reign of Stalin, the reign of Khrushchev, post-Soviet Russia) rarely coincide perfectly with ‘phases of memory’ (Macdonald 2009: 19–20) affected by pivotal ‘memory events’ (Etkind 2013: 178–79) that change the ways in which memory is perceived and/or commemorated. The following chronology is organized around such ‘phases of memory’, identifying and contextualizing each in turn. From Empire to Socialist Republic: 1914–1921 By 1914, the Solovetsky Transfiguration Monastery on Big Solovetsky Island had become a center of ecclesiastical and economic power (Robson 2004: 187–196). Since its medieval foundation, its position in the White Sea and its religious and mercantile connections with Moscow had made

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it one of the area’s richest economic centers. It also trained many Russian Orthodox Church leaders over the centuries, including Patriarch Nikon2 himself. A full overview of the long struggle between Patriarch Nikon’s reformed Orthodox Church and the Old Believers3 is impossible here, but it is worth noting that, ironically, Anzer Island later became a refuge for Old Believers. By 1555, this legacy of religious strife, combined with the islands’ role as a place of exile or prison for high-status political dissidents (Robson 2004: 42), was already contributing to the islands’ reputation as a place of exile. However, with the Russian Revolution, everything changed dramatically. The exquisitely designed monastery was officially closed in 1920, when Bolsheviks ransacked it for gold and jewels. The Solovki Special Purpose Camp: 1921–1939 The islands’ most notorious period began in 1921, with the establishment of the Solovki Special Purpose Camp by a special decree of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. Crucially, although Stalin is popularly associated with Soviet purges and repression, the seeds of this first island of the gulag archipelago were planted by Lenin, which many Solovetsky survivors and organizations like Memorial4 insist should not be forgotten (see Quinn-­ Judge 1988). The monastery buildings were used as headquarters, barracks, and other facilities (discussed below), with new construction further changing the island’s landscape. Until the mid-1920s, however, the situation was not unbearable for all inmates. Most were involved in physical labor of some kind, but some were allowed to undertake scientific research, act, or write; some of the research on Solovki’s natural and historic heritage was even published (Likhachev 2000: 150–1). At this time, the idea of using labor to ‘reform’ miscreants and dissidents into model Soviet citizens was publicly championed and dominated the ‘official’ narrative of the camps (see Daria 2012). However, between 1924 and 1926, camp-wide reorganizations led by a former inmate named Naftaly Frenkel5 altered the system to make it more of an economic enterprise, driven by slave labor, than a rehabilitative facility (Applebaum 2004: 54–55). Conditions became much worse at the camp after these changes. Infamously, the system of giving more food to those who could work hard and putting the weak or sick on starvation rations was initiated here (Doukelski 2004: 60). This system spread across all of the gulag system and came to symbolize the starkest cruelties of Stalinist repression. The Solovki camp closed in 1939, but the camps spawned by it continued to operate, in some cases

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until the late 1980s, as was the case at Perm in the Ural region of European Russia. The Great Patriotic War: 1939–1945 Memories of the islands’ gulag past may have been repressed within the Soviet Union after 1939, but the Solovetsky Islands themselves were not abandoned to nature. In fact, in 1942, the exigencies of World War II necessitated the opening of a naval school. In photographs from this period, the docks that previously harbored boats carrying inmates to and from the islands were still crowded, but this time with different naval boats, and the men milling around were neatly uniformed. Many of the gulag’s former barracks and office buildings—both repurposed monastic buildings and those built new during the gulag era—were refitted for cadets’ and officers’ use. Beyond these reuses of the islands’ built heritage, the islands’ other heritages went officially unremarked upon during this period. The naval school operated until 1945, graduating thousands of officers. A reunion in 1972 drew hundreds of alumni, and the experience was made into a propaganda film that is now showcased at the Naval School Museum. Silent Remembrance: 1945–1987 After the school’s closure, the island lay quiet until the late 1950s, when it was opened to academic research. The greatest shift in activity came in 1974, when the entirety of the islands was designated a ‘Museum Preserve’ (UNESCO 1992: 2), following the 1967 establishment of the ‘Solovki Historical and Architectural Museum’ (Kodola 2006: 102). Tourism to the islands began to grow, as did permanent occupation, which necessitated improved infrastructure (Solovki State Historical and Architectural Museum-Preserve 2007a). Many researchers actively documented and preserved different aspects of the islands’ past, from maritime heritage to limited physical restoration at the monastery. However, most archaeology focused on the distant past, and ethnographic work focused on indigenous and rural Karelian cultures (Solovki State Historical and Architectural Museum-Preserve 2007a). This second post-gulag phase explicitly allowed research and preservation initiatives relating to the island’s tangible and intangible, historic and natural heritage. Nonetheless, public commemoration and memorialization of the Solovetsky gulag remained suppressed.

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Glasnost and Perestroika: 1988–19916 Behind the scenes, the literary guardians of countermemory and their supporters had been quietly protecting gulag heritage. Their efforts reached public consciousness in 1988, with the release of a documentary detailing the Solovetsky gulag’s abuses (Solovki State Historical and Architectural Museum-Preserve 2007b), and gained enormous importance for public understanding of the period. This glasnost phase of memory coincided with a society-wide pattern of publicly discussing and disseminating information about Soviet repression. In 1989, a permanent exhibition about the gulag opened, and the first commemoration for the victims of repression was held (Yakovleva 2011: 11). The monastery reopened in 1990, restoring a living religious heritage. Perhaps, the most powerfully symbolic event, however, was the prominent 1990 installation of the Solovetsky Stone in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square, across from the former secret police headquarters. This followed the 1989 installation and dedication of a Solovetsky Stone in the Solovetsky Settlement itself. Representatives of the newly founded Memorial organization, some of whom, as former inmates of the gulag system writ large or as family members of those interned at Solovki, had strong ties to the islands, were instrumental in the push for these memorials (Yakovleva 2011: 11). Solovetsky Stones were later dedicated in Saint Petersburg and Arkhangelsk, demonstrating the post-glasnost and post-perestroika spread of these new forms of memorialization. Commemoration: 1991–Present In 1991, the new Russian Federation needed to rebuild its economy, trading communism for capitalism. Just as importantly, however, the state needed a new ideology. As the early 1990s proceeded, chaos affected the lives of many ordinary Russians. Inflation soared, while basic services like electricity were unreliable. First Boris Yeltsin and then his successor, President Vladimir Putin, responded, in part, by re-embracing the Russian Orthodox Church as a cornerstone of Russian life and morality (Anderson 2007). Tellingly, the ‘Cultural and Historic Ensemble of the Solovetsky Islands’ was made a World Heritage Site in 1992. The year 1991 was the first year independent Russia could have submitted nomination dossiers, so official recognition of the Solovetsky Islands as being of World Heritage caliber was evidently a high priority for the new nation’s heritage and

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­ iplomatic sectors. Reading the nomination dossier, it is clear that this was d not because the new Russia wanted the world to remember the horrors of the gulag. Instead, the site’s ‘Long Description’ calls it ‘an outstanding example of a monastic settlement in the inhospitable environment of northern Europe’ (UNESCO 1992: 4). The document includes scant information about the gulag period, beyond noting the presence of the ‘“Solovky” State Farm [… which] was abolished in 1923, when the islands became special camps, housing political and other prisoners in wooden huts (most of which have been preserved)’ (UNESCO 1992: 2). There is no mention of the status of the ‘Solovky State Farm’ as the pioneering camp of the gulag system. However, a 2017 Statement of Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) written to comply with UNESCO’s new regulations does state more explicitly: ‘The Solovetsky complex represents all periods of the history of the archipelago and the Russian North in general […] The Solovki [sic] is often recognized by the public as one of the first and best known Soviet special purpose camps of the GULAG’ (UNESCO 2017). Nevertheless, overall, the statement retains its focus on the religious and architectural ‘value’ of the monastery itself. Once the site had been inscribed, the concurrent influx of tourists necessitated improvements to tourism infrastructure (e.g., hotels, the Solovetsky Excursion Center) and to oral and written interpretation. The islands boast myriad attractions, including beluga whales (who breed just offshore in the summer) and other natural attractions, as well as rich religious and pre-1917 historical legacies. The current phase preserves and presents several different types of heritage to visitors, including previously suppressed narratives and memories of the Solovetsky gulag. Official institutions and individuals alike can participate in these preservation and dissemination attempts, as illustrated by the ongoing Days of Remembrance for gulag victims, held each August (Solovki State Historical and Architectural Museum-Preserve 2014). The gulag is not hidden, but neither is it presented as the kind of tourist attraction that would draw many visitors solely on its own merits. Tourism is lucrative for the islands.7 Indeed, the Solovetsky Settlement is embarking on a new development plan, which will include a secondary school building, hospital building, and airport terminal (Solovetsky Archipelago 2012). Thus, the monastery, the tourism industry, and the Solovki State Museum-Preserve each have vested interests in preserving and protecting island heritage—but which parts? With an approximate 60,000 tourists in 2014 (Solovetsky Archipelago 2014), the status of the

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Solovetsky Islands as a heritage site that attracts tourists is not in question. The questions concern which heritage(s) those tourists come to see, which heritage(s) the monks and other islanders wish them to see, and why certain parts of Solovki’s past are actively promoted and remembered over others.

Different Sites, Different Pasts Having considered the last century’s history and phases of memory, we will now examine presentations of Solovetsky heritage(s) at five Solovetsky Settlement sites (Fig. 4.1), paying special attention to the role that heritage of the Solovetsky gulag  is given (or not) in portraying the islands’ history and identity. Although, as the following sketches of each heritage site in the main settlement of Big Solovetsky Island will show, there is no single coherent heritage ‘narrative’ that connects all five sites, it is also not a matter of simply forgetting or erasing the islands’ repressive heritage. Aspects of the repressive past are explicitly or implicitly present at many of these sites; mapping the connections between explicit, tacit, and erased narratives within and between these sites will display the diversity of foregrounded histories across the island and allow for a more accurate analysis of underlying attitudes toward the heritage of repression and its place in Russian history and politics over time. The Solovetsky Transfiguration Monastery The subject of repression is not ignored in either the guided tours offered in the Solovetsky monastery or in the interpretative materials available at the site. However, the subject is presented with a particular slant. In the refectory, several large interpretative panels showcase dozens of photographs from different memorial services held by the monastery’s monks since 1990. Many of these were specifically meant to remember and mourn the victims of the Solovetsky gulag, a duty that the monastery has ­shouldered since its re-establishment. Although the monastic community feels a strong sense of stewardship toward the victims of Soviet repression and the safeguarding of their memory, the events connected to repression are not made the linchpins of interpretation at the monastery, either in the course of tour narration or in interpretative materials. Inside one of the monastery’s small museums, mostly filled with empty display cases, visitors are directed towards an elaborate audiovisual display depicting the Bolsheviks

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Fig. 4.1  Map of heritage sites, Solovetsky Settlement. (Source: Original illustration by S. Ahmed)

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ransacking the monastery. An animated video shows crowds burning and robbing the monastery; underneath lie several burned religious objects. It is clear that the exhibit’s designers, whether monks or outside contractors or a combination of the two groups, intend to emphasize the physical and sacrilegious damage that the monastery suffered. The Gulag Museum and Memorial Plaza The visitor numbers at the Solovetsky Settlement’s Gulag Museum, like those of many of the smaller indoor museums on the island, appear highly weather-dependent. I visited during a violent thunderstorm, when roughly 25 visitors took part in an impromptu tour of the museum, given by Olga Bochkareva, a woman who has been instrumental in founding and designing this museum and other Solovetsky commemorative initiatives. The tour covered three large rooms and lasted for nearly two hours. Although Ms. Bochkareva’s interpretation was astoundingly detailed, she kept the attention of a good part of the group; most of the others did not leave the museum, but were instead engrossed in reading one of hundreds of text panels or flipping through books of known survivors and victims (Fig. 4.2).

Fig. 4.2  Interior, Gulag Museum. (Source: Author)

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In contrast to a common criticism of so-called ‘dark heritage’ sites, this level of interest was not sustained because the material was thrillingly gruesome; in fact, very little of the written or oral interpretation was gory. Instead, the material was overwhelming in the sheer scope of information and conveyed the hopeless, trapped nature of the prisoners’ plight. During the last section of the tour, the visitors are facing a wall of pictures of people’s faces; all of them died in the Solovetsky gulag, and the sight is arresting. After the tour had ended, at least half a dozen people of all ages lingered to flip through the books of documents and watch a video in the back room. The video played official government footage from the ‘Solovki State Farm’ in the early years of the Solovetsky gulag’s existence. It showed inmates corralling foxes at the fur operation, chopping trees, and performing in  plays. None of the shots showed anything remotely violent, which made the experience even more unsettling, like seeing a Potemkin village in full illusory status. As mentioned, the first Solovetsky Stone monument was placed in the Memorial Plaza, which lies a few hundred feet away from the museum, at the end of a small paved walkway lined with benches and a birch grove (Fig. 4.3). The birch grove, according to museum interpretation, was planted in the late

Fig. 4.3  Memorial Plaza, Solovetsky Settlement. (Source: Author)

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1980s by residents who had discovered a mass grave of gulag victims there. It is meant to be a tacit memorial to them. At the other end of the park are half a dozen small memorials, commissioned, paid for, and installed by Memorial and several national and political groups (e.g., Ukrainians, anarchists, Orthodox priests). These include Russia’s first Solovetsky Stone monument made from an island boulder (Fig. 4.4; discussed above). All had at least one floral offering or candle set in front when I visited, and all are well-tended. What struck me about the park was the life inside it: young women pushed strollers, and children ran by with small trucks. This was not a solemn memorial; although the monuments are carefully cared for, it is a place of life and re-use, not eternal mourning. Unlike Young’s (2009) descriptions of the struggles of Oświęcim residents, the residents of the Solovetsky Settlement seem to neatly balance this manifestation of dark heritage with the exigencies of modern life. Archaeological Museum The Archaeological Museum, located within the Solovetsky Monastery, is like the Gulag Museum and the Museum of the Naval School (discussed

Fig. 4.4  Solovetsky Stone, Memorial Plaza. (Source: Author)

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below) in that its interpretative signs and other materials appear to be quite new and up-to-date, if wordy (see Fig. 4.5). According to the young woman who was watching over the museum at the time of fieldwork in 2014, it had opened ‘six or seven years ago’, and the number of visitors fluctuated with the weather.8 The subject matter of an archaeological museum might not seem to have any intrinsic connection to the islands’ heritage of repression, especially since they have not to date been the site of high-profile, large excavations of mass graves like those at Sandormokh (Merridale 2000). The exhibits focus on the prehistoric stone labyrinths found across the islands, as well as on experimental archaeology projects. These include building canoes out of birch bark or animal skins and sailing them between the islands, just as the prehistoric inhabitants of Karelia would have done (Kodola 2006: 34–6). There is also a computer terminal on which visitors can look up different excavations. None of the projects listed are, specifically, gulag archaeology. However, archaeological excavations of the old monastery buildings took place in 1927 and 1928, during the Special Purpose Camp era. Since inmates served in a number capacities that were not strictly economic, it is possible

Fig. 4.5  Interior, Archaeological Museum. (Source: Author)

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that some helped the archaeologists to excavate. Here, the connections to the Solovetsky gulag are merely hinted at; although firm links between it and archaeology exist, this is not a prominent narrative at the museum, which instead focuses on more distant pasts. The Naval School Museum The Naval School Museum, opened at the same time as the Archaeological Museum, differs from the other museums run by the Solovki State Museum-Preserve in several aspects. Most noticeably, unlike at the Gulag and Archaeological Museums, the museum’s interpretative panels and signs are not covered by paragraphs of detailed information.9 Although the design of the museum is quite modern, whole sections of artifacts and documents are presented without comment or interpretation. The most striking example of this is the wall of achievement certificates. What jump out at the viewers are not the names or skills being lauded on the pages, but the myriad portraits of Stalin—one on each certificate. Beyond the panels displaying the names of every single graduate of the Naval School, the most information to be gained at this museum comes from a black-­ and-­white video of a 1972 naval cadet reunion that took place on the island. The documentary is an excellent example of Soviet propaganda, as it combines men re-living their youth with memories of Soviet sacrifices made during the Great Patriotic War.10 In one scene, in which the former cadets are responding to a roll call, the response to one name is a terse recitation of where the young man died, followed by a shot of a Soviet ship sinking. The emphasis placed on military suffering and loss here mirrors the emphasis placed, in all but the Archaeological Museum, on the suffering and loss endured by those presented as each museum’s core ­‘constituency’— variously, Orthodox monks and devout believers, young naval officers lost to war, and all victims of Soviet repression at the Solovetsky gulag and related sites. The connections between these different patterns of loss and repression, however, are left unexplored at each site. Balancing the Past(s) or ‘Dark’ Heritage: Rectified, Sanctified, or Neither? Visitors to the Solovetsky Islands encounter a site with a rich legacy—or rather, legacies, since the natural, cultural, and historic ensemble (to borrow UNESCO’s phrase) is made up of millennia of unique environmental

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development, tens of thousands of years of human use, hundreds of years of monastic activity, eighteen years as a brutal site of repression and incarceration, and over two decades of renewed religious life. Which of these myriad histories and heritages are primarily presented to visitors, and what are the reasons for their dominance? Many places of mass repression, incarceration, and death become identified with those events (Logan and Reeves 2009: 1). The Solovetsky Islands, in contrast, are not fully defined by the Solovetsky gulag. Beyond the Gulag Museum, none of the museums and sites within the Solovki State complex devotes a significant portion of interpretation to the gulag era, even though each is inextricably linked to it. Furthermore, even sites that are indelibly marked by association with the gulag’s human rights abuses are not wholly defined by them. For instance, the island’s best-­ stocked produkti, or small grocery store, is housed in a former Solovetsky gulag barrack; its history is prominently identified on a plaque placed by the Solovki State Museum-Preserve on the building’s front. Other such former barracks, similarly marked, serve as houses. One is identified as being the Children’s Barracks, quite possibly the site of Maxim Gorky’s infamous, perhaps apocryphal, conversation with a doomed child inmate (relayed in Solzhenitsyn 1985: 191–2); it is now an informal market. As in the memorial park, everyday life goes on in each of these buildings. Grandmothers quiz store clerks about the bread’s freshness, and teenagers buy beer. The buildings’ former pasts are not forgotten per se; they are officially and visibly commemorated for anyone who cares to read the signs. However, the island’s gulag heritage has not been allowed to dictate these structures’ activities and identities in the present. This may be because the Solovetsky Settlement lacks well-defined boundaries (at least officially). Beyond the monastery’s walls, gulag sites on the island are identified by separate signs on buildings or by small memorials. However, this does not mean that these smaller buildings played peripheral roles in Solovetsky gulag activities. The barracks were never just sites of lodging; people suffered and died there from starvation, overwork, and abuse. Besides being sites of incarceration, they are sites of death, dark heritage in more than one sense. It might seem, at first glance, to be unfathomable that a physical site of mass repression does not hold innate meaning. Although some have questioned the impulse to preserve such sites (e.g., Ashworth 2010), often, there still seems to be an underlying assumption in dark heritage literature that there is likely to be an essential value in preserving the sites associated

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with mass repression or crimes against humanity that are widely recognized as such. This is an attitude that is especially evident in Long and Reeves’s conclusions about a final Khmer Rouge stronghold: ‘Our conclusion, which does not come easily to us as heritage professionals committed to our field and the power of heritage as a force for remembrance, is that preservation of the Anlong Veng sites does little or nothing to further understanding or commemoration’ of the Khmer Rouge period and its atrocities (2009: 80). This phrasing, couched as it is in terms of a non‘easy’ conclusion, reveals the underlying assumption that the value of these sites is often innate; this value has to be specifically disproven in order for a site connected with such mass violence and death to be considered unworthy of preservation. Even then, it is somewhat difficult for scholars to accept. The dichotomy presented in most dark tourism literature regarding iconic sites associated with mass campaigns of violent repression is between preserving them  as dedicated memorials to their victims or ignoring or obliterating that past (see, e.g., Lennon and Foley 2000: 166–8). The mix of clear, explicit acknowledgment and everyday repurposing seen in the Solovetsky Settlement’s former gulag barracks has not been analyzed in a similar manner. Billig’s concept of ‘banal nationalism’ describes the type of symbolic identity building and strengthening that takes place on an everyday level—examples include flying a national flag in front of one’s house or speaking of one’s country in family terms (1995: 8). These repurposed barracks have not been configured to support Russian nationalism, but the idea that powerful messages about heritage and identity can be contained in seemingly ‘banal’ aspects of quotidian life is certainly relevant here. One could perhaps term the Solovki phenomenon ‘banal memorialization’. Similarly, although turning dark or conflict heritage sites into commercially concerned ventures that focus on ‘selling’ the war or prison experience and associated souvenirs is certainly a well-known phenomenon (e.g., Strange and Kempa 2003), that is not the situation here. The grocery store is not selling gulag refrigerator magnets; it is selling milk, crackers, and frozen dumplings, because those are items island residents need. Within Foote’s (1997) framework for classifying forms of memorialization of violence, the repurposed former barracks do not fit any of the four categories he proposed. Admittedly, Foote’s work focuses solely on American commemorations of tragedy, but this classificatory framework remains useful for sites around the world. The barracks sites are not rectified, because they certainly have not been returned to original use; neither have

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they been obliterated, because they are still standing and prominently marked with their histories. They are not sanctified, because they have not been turned into sites of solemn remembrance, and they are not simply designated, because they have not merely been marked as a site of tragedy worthy of remembrance—they have also been given new, decidedly non-­ commemorative roles to fill in the island’s post-gulag economy and society. One could argue that the case of the Solovetsky barracks embodies a mixture of designation and rectification, but this fails to capture the unique sense of cultivated ambivalence and commemorative choice that the site presents to each visitor. Thus, I propose that they have been ‘compartmentalized’, a theoretical category that incorporates elements of designation and rectification but does not fit neatly into either one. Similarly, compartmentalization is here not a fifth category of Foote’s typology but an idea that can sit alongside it or be used without it. The former barracks buildings and the site of the mass grave have been carefully marked—their gulag heritage is accessible for any viewer, visitor or resident, who happens or chooses to notice it. The past is neatly commemorated, but it is not allowed to overshadow the present. This model of dark heritage presentation compartmentalizes each era and presents them as equals; each person who interacts with it can choose which of the building’s roles to privilege, and each encounter with the building can entail a different relationship between it and the viewer. The local government, Solovki State Museum-­ Preserve, and residents have left the choice open, in a way that is unique among similar sites of mass incarceration and violence. Whether this is unique to the Solovetsky Islands or whether this is a pattern found at other gulag sites cannot be ascertained from this case study alone; what is clear is that existing frameworks for presenting, interpreting, and c­ onceptualizing the heritage of mass repression do not provide sufficient models for understanding these compartmentalized sites of suffering.

Gulag Victims, the Church, and the State Inside the monastery complex itself, most of the exhibit cases are sparsely filled or empty, and interpretation is solidly pre-digital. However, the exhibit on the monastery’s ransacking stands out for its technological complexity and obvious expense. Another exhibition of restored icons is similarly intricate, but a prominent plaque by the door announces that it received major funding from the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, among others. There is  no such sign for this display; the

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Solovetsky Monastery has chosen to funnel money towards a state-of-theart exhibit that highlights a specific episode of desecration and destruction inflicted on a religious site by atheist Bolsheviks, while other aspects of the Solovetsky gulag era are not thus emphasized. This focus on the effects of repression on the Orthodox Church is also apparent in a set of interpretative panels. Placed in a hallway leading to a large chapel, each board is covered with dozens of small photographs and holds thousands of words of interpretation. They tell the story of repression of monastic communities, including those on the Solovetsky Islands, and of devout Russian Orthodox citizens. Although it is true that many inmates at the Solovetsky gulag were persecuted for their religious beliefs, and that some former Solovetsky monks were kept there to teach inmates how to farm, fish, and so forth (Applebaum 2004: 48), the emphasis on religious inmates does not tell the full stories of tens of thousands of fellow zeks.11 The religious population of the camp was never a majority of the total (ibid.: 48). This imbalance is even more striking when one considers that many prisoners, along with the infirmary and other gulag facilities, were housed inside existing monastery structures. The monastery’s buildings were not left untouched by repression, and neither were they simply neglected; many crimes took place there (Likhachev 2000: 97). Yet the monks have chosen to funnel their exhibition resources toward memorializing losses felt by the religious community. Moving away from the monastery to the recently reorganized museums of the monastery and the World Heritage Site—all run by the Solovki State Museum-Preserve—I again suggest that it is not so much a question of silencing as one of compartmentalization. Now that the Gulag Museum has reopened outside of the monastery walls, the monastery can focus its resources on its religious heritage. This includes tending to believers’ pastoral needs, but it also means that the monastery can justifiably concentrate its interpretation on Orthodox suffering. Since 1991, the Russian Orthodox Church has taken a leading role in memorializing victims of repression throughout Russia, which has actually led to some controversy, since not all victims were Orthodox (Kishkovsky 2007). The Solovetsky Monastery has taken on the duty of ritually memorializing Solovetsky gulag victims, but it does so in an overtly religious manner—the large wooden crosses that are visible throughout the islands are meant as both memorials to the victims of repression and as Orthodox remembrances of all departed souls (Dorman 2010: 334). However, in light of the assumed mantle of memorializing victims of repression, the concept of compartmentalization alone

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does not fully explain these interpretative decisions. The larger political framework in which Russian Orthodoxy conceptualizes and remembers its heritage must also be examined. In particular, post-­USSR Russia, suddenly lacking an overarching ideology, found the Russian Orthodox Church an expedient choice for a cultural glue to hold the country together (Sidorov 2006). For the monastery, focusing on the plight of believers is politically savvy. In the current political climate, the Russian government cannot claim that devout Russian Orthodox clergy and believers ‘deserved’ repression. The islands’ gulag heritage is virtually invisible in the two remaining museums run by the Solovki State Museum-Preserve, even though the ostensible subject of each has indelible links to the Solovetsky gulag. The role of inmate labor in several archaeological excavations, as well as the ways Stalinist purges affected Soviet military readiness during World War II, are not addressed. At the Naval Museum, the lack of written information and detail may be a reflection of the ambivalence many Russians feel about Stalin’s regime. His repressive programs were unquestionably responsible for millions of deaths and millions of displacements and imprisonments, and his purges and defensive stances led to millions of unnecessary civilian and military deaths during World War II (Ward 1996: 170). He is also, however, widely regarded as the man who saved Russia— and the world—from Hitler and the ‘fascists’ (see poll by Levada Center 2017). Beginning with Gorbachev’s reforms, publication of the effects of Stalinist repression led to increasing criticism of the human rights abuses of his and other Soviet regimes (Adler 2005: 1096–7). The current semi-­ rehabilitation of Stalin and his reputation, in which President Vladimir Putin himself has been known to participate (see Matthews 2007), speaks to the current uneasy balancing of Stalin’s crimes against his other deeds. At the Naval School Museum, it is safer to focus on the hijinks and patriotic tragedies of young boys than it is to broach the wider implications of Stalinism. Due partly to these complex contemporary challenges, these museums’ connections to the Solovetsky gulag are not explored, allowing the archaeological and naval heritages to appear disconnected from gulag heritage. The Solovki State Museum-Preserve has chosen not to present Solovetsky gulag heritage as the lens through which all of the islands’ history should be viewed. This interpretative decision is different from, for instance, the presentation of surviving Nazi death or labor camps, and neither is it observed in Cambodia’s killing fields or at such designated tourist and/or

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remembrance sites in any other community that has seen mass civilian repression and murder on a scale akin to that of the waves of Soviet repression—let alone any such sites that have been inscribed on the World Heritage List. Such sites are usually either memorialized as sites of tragedy, or they are not marked or commemorated at all. The series of decisions that has ended with the entire area not being marked as a site of tragedy merits further investigation. Part of the explanation for such differences may be attributed to whether there are clearly acknowledged and agreed-upon villains connected to a site, and also whether there is a clear understanding of who the victors are and, therefore, who has the moral authority to make decisions. The Nuremberg Trials brought Nazi perpetrators of crimes against humanity to justice. Khmer Rouge operatives have been found guilty of genocide. In these cases, although every single perpetrator was not brought to justice, the symbolic value of the trials sent strong messages about right and wrong to victims and offenders alike, although whether any benefits were lasting and significant is debatable (see, e.g., Mendeloff 2009). However, no such society-wide reckoning process has taken place in Russia. Although some called for such proceedings after 1991, many scholars of Russian memory conclude that they will never take place for various reasons. Hochschild, for example, argues that ‘Memorial’s call has always been for truth – above all, for the complete opening of all official archives – and not for vengeance’ (1995: 18). It is not that Soviet repression has been forgotten, the charge to ‘remember’ the victims and their ordeals still reverberates among organizations like Memorial and Vozvrashchenie.12 Pinning blame on any specific person, however, is a different matter. There is a fear that such a campaign might cause further rifts in society; as Merridale asserts, in Russia, ‘legal inquisitions have a tainted pedigree. Digging out names, reopening old quarrels, is a dangerous path to choose. The trouble is that the other choice is abdication, another silence, yet more fear’ (2000: 429–30). How does a society effectively memorialize a system of massive human rights abuses while eliding the identity or identities of the perpetrators? Individual people carried out all of the individual repressive acts—it is not factually accurate to simply blame Stalin or ‘the system’. But is it possible to acknowledge this in memorial practice without running the risk of another ‘inquisition’? Perhaps, then, the compartmentalization visible both at the monastery and at associated Solovki State Museum-Preserve sites is simply an embodiment of a society-wide ambivalent attitude toward Russia’s gulag legacy:

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the heritage is carefully documented and preserved for those who wish to remember, but no one is forced to unwillingly confront the legacy of decades of Soviet repression. In a country that is still unsure of how to remember and come to terms with its decades of repression, making information available for those who want it, while allowing a certain blindness among those who do not wish to acknowledge it, may be the option that glues together a society constantly on the verge of fragmentation. This is especially true because many current and former political leaders—including, notably, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev—were directly involved with repressive mechanisms (Suny 2011: 419–420). Further, many current political and business leaders are descended from or were themselves members of the nomenklatura, or the high-status class of managers that enjoyed all the privileges of the Soviet Union up until its end (see, e.g., Haynes and Hasan 2003 for detailed analyses of these social trajectories). There are many people and institutions that stand to lose much in terms of reputation if too much attention is paid to the details of what happened and if too much emphasis is placed on finding those who could be ‘blamed’. Will such reluctance change as generations of leaders age out and as political tides shift in Russia? No one, of course, can say for sure, but ambivalence in the present keeps all options open for the future.

Conclusion The case of the Solovetsky gulag is important as it illustrates the fragmentary and, at times, contradictory process whereby sites of historical activity becoming heritagized and, thus, a focus for memorialization. Although the role of Solovki as the gulag archipelago’s first ‘island’, as well as the long history of censorship and dissident suppression in the Soviet Union, makes the islands’ memorial trajectory interesting on its own, the study of the site reveals larger patterns of dark heritage site heritagization. In particular, the concept of ‘compartmentalization’, in which interpretation acknowledges suffering and wrongdoing without foregrounding that narrative amongst others offered, offers a useful lens through which to view such interpretative practices that seem to reflect wider societal ambivalence(s). This case study demonstrates the central and varying roles of diverse stakeholders as these have different interests and see the importance of history through different lenses. It is clear that the tourist industry, the Solovki State Historical and Architectural Museum-Preserve, and the

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monastic community are the three major present-day stakeholders. The dedicated groups that run each of the islands’ specialized museums—the Archaeological Museum, the Gulag Museum, and the Museum of the Naval School—also keep the memories of their specific legacies alive, just as dedicated groups have done for each since the late 1950s and before, if the gulag-era efforts of imprisoned scholars are taken into account. The literary guardians of countermemory and their supporters within Memorial and related organizations were and are instrumental in sustaining memories of the Solovetsky gulag and its victims. Each of these stakeholders today presents their narrative(s) of remembrance at various sites around the island. Although direct confrontations between dissonant narratives are rare, the absence of countervailing or alternative narratives at certain sites hints at the multifaceted, fundamentally dissonant nature of the islands’ heritage. More broadly, today, the island is a heritage kaleidoscope—viewed from one angle, the seashore is an environmental jewel, famous for its belugas. From another angle, atop a monastery turret, it is one of the most sacred sites in Russian Orthodoxy. From yet another, near the memorial birch grove, it is a place of untold suffering and repression in its own right and a symbol of a system of terror that affected millions. From many angles, however, it is a mixture of these elements. Although the local community could have chosen, as some communities recovering from authoritarian regimes of terror and repression have, to foreground the islands’ heritage as a site of mass suffering and death, the islands as a whole have pursued compartmentalization. The gulag heritage is not ignored or covered up, but it is not the center of attention either. The tangible and intangible heritage of the Solovetsky gulag is safeguarded, but its existence and ramifications are not the overarching narrative presented to visitors or residents. Thus, the interplay of public and private memories and post-­ memory remains central to the project of remembering Solovki’s victims. The lack of one single, overarching heritage narrative for Solovki, regardless of whether or not such a narrative would focus on the gulag, is not a straightforward reflection of past or present censorship or repression; instead, this multivocality of narratives reflects the changing roles the island has been made to play by changing casts of stakeholders and other actors over time. The current ‘compartmentalization’ strategy of making the gulag past available for active remembrance, but not making that past the islands’ main heritage, signals that the community would not welcome any censorious

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pressure. Though both major communities avoid letting the gulag exclusively define the island, neither do they bury it. Each of the memorials in the island’s Memorial Plaza explicitly or implicitly states a promise to never forget the victims who suffered and died in the Solovetsky gulag. Many of the survivors who lived to tell their stories state that they wish to make sure no one ever forgets what happened, and Memorial’s and Vozvrashchenie’s feelings are apparent in their names. Privately, many stakeholders, on and off the island, will continue to remember the Solovetsky zeks and their fates, but they will face the same issues as others who remember mass traumas of the twentieth century, as survivors die off and traumatic memory is transformed into traumatic post-memory (see Loshitzky 2009 for an account of Holocaust post-memory formation in Israel). What will the consequences be for Russia if memories of the gulag’s victims are forgotten at the institutional and public levels? A refusal by dominant groups to acknowledge campaigns of suppression and repression against other groups can both reflect and reinforce cycles of neglect and discrimination. However, Soviet repression is a different case altogether: although punitive campaigns against different nationalities and ethnicities were common, millions were repressed by people they would have considered svoi—their own. Since denunciations and confessions often had people implicating their socioeconomic peers, how can anyone differentiate on the scale of a population between victims and oppressors? In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn (1985) rages repeatedly that there was never a Nuremberg Trial for repression’s perpetrators. Yet Hochschild quotes a man whose grandfather was a victim of repression asking how a trial could prosecute ‘practically the whole country … It wouldn’t stand to reason to try to find out who are more guilty than the others and to prosecute them. It would trigger the same conflict again, but in the opposite direction’ (1995: 18). This man, a Memorial volunteer, clearly believes that pursuing the truth is a better route to justice and remembrance than are accusatory tribunals. These complex issues could all benefit from more sustained study at a wider range of field sites across the former Soviet Union. If Russia does head back into a period of censorship regarding Soviet wrongs, however, the history of gulag heritage in the Solovetsky Islands suggests that those misdeeds will never be completely forgotten—though they may be temporarily silenced, they will live on in the minds of those who remember (or post-remember) and on the pages and sites that overtly or passively keep alive the memories of survivors and victims. Their stories have not yet ended; they are still being inscribed across the landscape.

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Notes 1. Главное управление лагерей и колоний. 2. The seventeenth-century Russian Orthodox Patriarch whose reforms led to a violent church schism. 3. Believers who broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church to protest Patriarch Nikon’s reforms. 4. Memorial, founded in 1987, is a human rights organization that focuses on documenting and commemorating Soviet repression, with a special focus on naming and identifying victims. 5. Frenkel’s biography remains mysterious; he entered the Solovetsky gulag in 1923 as an inmate, but, within several years, he was serving as camp commandant and later oversaw the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal. 6. Glasnost (‘freedom’) and  perestroika (‘restructuring’) were two policies instituted under Soviet President Gorbachev in the late 1980s; where perestroika focused on small economic reforms, glasnost’s relaxation of censorship opened archives and allowed widespread public discussion of Soviet repression. 7. An in-depth study of religious pilgrims to the Solovetsky Islands is not within the scope of this work, but they provide an interesting counterpoint to the ‘regular’ tourists, since their presence underlines the centrality of the island’s Orthodox heritage. 8. Personal communication, 4 July 2014. 9. A camera malfunction erased photographs of this museum, along with many others; although I have endeavored to replace lost images, replacements are not always available, as is the case here. 10. Within Russia and the former Soviet Union, this moniker is widely used to denote the Soviet Union’s period of active military engagements during World War II, from the German invasion of the Soviet Union to V-E Day. 11. Slang term for a gulag inmate, from zakliuchyonnyi, or ‘incarcerated’. 12. Vozvrashchenie, meaning ‘Return’, was founded in 1989 and is similar to Memorial; it works ‘to publish memoirs that salvage repressed history so as to reserve it in the public domain, and to assist survivors of the terror’ (Adler 2004: 125).

Bibliography Adamova-Sliozberg, O.L. 2011. My Journey: How One Woman Survived Stalin’s Gulag. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Adler, N. 2004. The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

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———. 2005. The Future of the Soviet Past Remains Unpredictable: The Resurrection of Soviet Symbols Amidst the Exhumation of Mass Graves. Europe-Asia Studies 57 (8): 1093–1119. Anderson, J. 2007. Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church: Asymmetric Symphonia? Journal of International Affairs 61 (1): 185–218. Applebaum, A. 2004. Gulag: A History. London: Penguin Books. Ashworth, G.J. 2010. Holocaust Tourism: The Experience of Kraków-Kazimierz. International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education 11 (4): 363–367. Assmann, A. 2008. Transformations Between History and Memory. Social Research 75 (1): 49–72. Billig, M. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Biran, A., Y. Poria, and G. Oren. 2011. Sought Experiences at (Dark) Heritage Sites. Annals of Tourism Research 38 (3): 820–841. Bogumił, Z. 2018. Gulag Memories: The Rediscovery and Commemoration of Russia’s Repressive Past. New York: Berghahn Books. Burgess, J.P. 2007. Community of Prayer, Historical Museum, or Recreational Playground? Challenges to the Revival of the Monastic Community at Solovki, Russia. International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 7 (3): 194–209. Carr, G. 2014. Legacies of Occupation: Heritage, Memory, and Archaeology in the Channel Islands. New York: Springer. ———. 2015. Islands of War, Guardians of Memory: The Afterlife of the German Occupation in the British Channel Islands. In Heritage and Memory: Responses from Small Islands, ed. G. Carr and K. Reeves, 75–91. New York: Routledge. Daria, T. 2012. Use of Correctional and Labour Measures on the Inmates of the Solovetsky Camp in the 1920s and 1930s. Arctic Review on Law and Politics 3 (2): 186–199. Dorman, V. 2010. От Соловков до Бутово: Русская православная церковь и память о советских репрессиях в постсоветской России. Laboratorium 2: 327–347. Doukelski, V. 2004. Vie Quotidienne: Quand la faim tue les sentiments. In Goulag: le peuple des zeks, ed. G. Piron, 59–62. Geneva: Infolio. Etkind, A. 2013. Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Finnin, R. 2011. Forgetting Nothing, Forgetting No One: Boris Chichibabin, Viktor Nekipelov, and the Deportation of the Crimean Tatars. The Modern Language Review 106 (4): 1091–1124. Foote, K.E. 1997. Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy. Austin: University of Texas Press. Garrels, A. 2010. Residents, Church Vie for History-Rich Russian Islands. NPR, November 6. Available from http://www.npr.org. 6 Mar 2014.

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Gessen, M. 2018. Never Remember: Searching for Stalin’s Gulags in Putin’s Russia. New York: Columbia Global Reports. Ginzburg, E.S. 1981. Within the Whirlwind. London: Collins and Harvill. Haynes, M., and R. Hasan. 2003. A Century of State Murder? Death and Policy in Twentieth-Century Russia. London: Pluto Press. Hirsch, M. 2008. The Generation of Postmemory. Poetics Today 29 (1): 103–128. Hochschild, A. 1995. The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. London: Serpent’s Tail. Kishkovsky, S. 2007. Former Killing Ground Becomes Shrine to Stalin’s Victims. The New York Times, June 8. Available from http://www.newyorktimes.com. 18 Aug 2014. Kodola, O. 2006. Russia: The Solovetsky Archipelago: Guidebook. Trans. N. Rozova. Arkhangelsk: Pravda Severa. Lennon, J., and M.  Foley. 2000. Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster. London: Continuum. Levada Center. 2017. Выдающиеся Люди [Online]. Available http://www.levada. ru/2017/06/26/vydayushhiesya-lyudi/. 3 June 2018. Likhachev, D.S. 2000. Reflections on the Russian Soul. Budapest: Central European University Press. Logan, W., and K. Reeves. 2009. Introduction: Remembering Places of Pain and Shame. In Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with ‘Difficult Heritage’, ed. W. Logan and K. Reeves, 1–14. London: Routledge. Long, C., and K. Reeves. 2009. Dig a Hole and Bury the Past in It’: Reconciliation and the Heritage of Genocide in Cambodia. In Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with ‘Difficult Heritage’, ed. W. Logan and K. Reeves, 68–81. Loshitzky, Y. 2009. Postmemory Cinema: Second-Generation Israelis Screen the Holocaust in Don’t Touch My Holocaust. In The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, ed. T.G.  Ashplant, G.  Dawson, and M.  Roper, 182–200. London: Routledge. Macdonald, S. 2009. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. London: Routledge. Matthews, O. 2007. Back to the U.S.S.R. by Pushing a Patriotic View of History and the Humanities, the Kremlin Is Reshaping the Russian Mind, August 20. Available from http://www.newsweek.com. 15 Aug 2014. Mendeloff, D. 2009. Trauma and Vengeance: Assessing the Psychological and Emotional Effects of Post-Conflict Justice. Human Rights Quarterly 31 (3): 592–623. Merridale, C. 2000. Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia. London: Granta Books.

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Quinn-Judge, P. 1988. Soviets Inch Toward Ultimate Taboo: Reassessing Lenin’s Role. Christian Science Monitor, October 31. Available from http://www. csmonitor.com/ 12 Aug 2014. Robson, R.R. 2004. Solovki: The Story of Russia Told Through Its Most Remarkable Islands. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sather-Wagstaff, J. 2011. Heritage That Hurts: Tourists in the Memoryscapes of September 11. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Schwirtz, M. 2007. Tourists, Monks and History: Whose Islands Are They?. New York Times, September 18. Available from http://www.nytimes.com. 4 Mar 2014. Sidorov, D. 2006. Post-Imperial Third Romes: Resurrections of a Russian Orthodox Geopolitical Metaphor. Geopolitics 11 (2): 317–347. Solovetsky Archipelago. 2012. Construction Projects [Online]. Available http:// my-solovki.ru/en/program/objects-of-construction/. 15 July 2014. ———. 2014. Почти 60 тысяч туристов посетили Соловецкий архипелаг в этом году [Online]. Available http://мои-соловки.рф/archipelago/events/ 1739/. 18 Aug 2014. Solovki State Historical and Architectural Museum-Preserve. 2007a. История музея: 1967–1974 гг [Online]. Available http://www.solovky.ru/reserve/history/1967-1974.shtml. 21 June 2014. ———. 2007b. История музея: 1975–1998 гг [Online]. Available http://www. solovky.ru/reserve/history/1975-1998.shtml. 21 June 2014. ———. 2014. На Соловках почтят память жертв политических репрессий [Online]. Available http://www.solovky.ru/reserve/ties/releases/2014/08/ 05/340.shtml. 20 Aug 2014. Solzhenitsyn, A.I. 1985. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. New York: Harper & Row. Sørensen, M.L.S., and D.  Viejo-Rose, eds. 2015. War and Cultural Heritage: Biographies of Place. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strange, C., and M. Kempa. 2003. Shades of Dark Tourism: Alcatraz and Robben Island. Annals of Tourism Research 30 (2): 386–405. Suny, R.G. 2011. The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Tunbridge, J.E., and G.J. Ashworth. 1996. Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Chichester: Wiley. UNESCO. 1992. Advisory Body Evaluation: World Heritage List, No 632, Solovetskii [Online]. Available http://whc.unesco.org/archive/advisory_body_evaluation/ 632.pdf. 01 Apr 2016. ———. 2017. WHC/17/41. COM8E [Online]. Available http://whc.unesco.org/ archive/2015/whc15-39com-8ERev-en.pdf. 29 Jan 2018.

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Verdery, K. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press. Ward, C. 1996. Stalin’s Russia. London: Arnold. Watson, R.S., ed. 1994. Memory, History, and Opposition Under State Socialism. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Yakovleva, A.P. 2011. Экспозиция «Соловетцкие лагеря и тюрьма. 1920–1939». Solovetsky: Solovki State Historical and Architectural Museum-Preserve. Young, K. 2009. Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Challenges of Heritage Management Following the Cold War. In Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with ‘Difficult Heritage’, ed. W. Logan and K. Reeves, 50–67. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 5

Potočari Memorial Center and Commemorations of the Srebrenica Genocide Dzenan Sahovic

The act of genocide committed by Bosnian Serb forces on 11 July 1995 in Srebrenica in Eastern Bosnia Herzegovina left behind dozens of mass-­ graves with the bodies of more than 8000 Bošnjak boys and men. Since the fragile peace brought to Bosnia by the Dayton Peace Agreement, the fate of Srebrenica has been one of the main issues standing in the way of any meaningful reconciliation process between the Bosnian ethnic groups. Over the past 20 years, the Serb side has barely acknowledged any past wrongdoing at Srebrenica, while the Bošnjaks increasingly view the site as their symbolic place of mourning and remembering, making it central to the Bošnjak nation-building process. The conflicting views of the different groups were brought into the open with the building of the Potočari Memorial Center outside Srebrenica. The local Serb political elites attempted to stop the construction of the site, so that the Office of the High Representative of the International Community to Bosnia Herzegovina (the OHR) had to override local political decisions. Since then, the Potočari Memorial Center and the burial site have been a focus D. Sahovic (*) Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. L. S. Sørensen et al. (eds.), Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18091-1_5

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of Bosnian political performance at least once a year: at the annual burial ceremonies held every 11th of July, on the day of the fall of Srebrenica. The day 11 July 2015 marked 20 years since the Srebrenica genocide, the largest war crime on European soil since the end of the Second World War. Close to 50,000 Bošnjaks1 gathered on this day at the Potočari memorial site outside Srebrenica to partake in the burial ceremonies of newly identified victims excavated from mass-graves in the area. That year, 136 bodies were to be buried next to the 6214 already identified and buried in similar ceremonies in previous years. A number of dignitaries, politicians, diplomats, and international guests attended the 20th anniversary. Former US President Bill Clinton, the EU High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini, Princess Anne of Great Britain, and numerous other presidents and prime ministers went to Potočari to pay their respects. Even the Serbian Prime Minister Alexandar Vučić attended, although Serbia still disputes the term genocide, despite the rulings of the international courts.2 Vučić’s visit stirred emotions to such a degree that the angry crowd whistled, threw rocks, and even physically attacked the Serbian Prime Minister who had to flee with the help of his security staff and local police forces (Dzidic and Panic 2015). The shared burial ceremonies have grown in size over time and have become increasingly politicized, as Bosnian nationalist elites in various ways connect their political agendas to the site. Srebrenica undoubtedly plays a role in Bosnian post-war politics, and the place has become directly linked to a number of processes of key importance for peace in Bosnia. This chapter seeks to understand and explain events in Srebrenica since the end of the Bosnian war, in particular in connection to the building of the Potočari Memorial Center and the annual burial ceremonies. The two decades since the war ended are divided into three periods: (1) the political organization of Srebrenica survivors and their return, (2) the burial ceremonies and politicization of the commemoration day, and (3) a post-­ burial ceremonies period that has first emerged only recently, 20  years after the Genocide of 1995 (Fig. 5.1).

Background: The Genocide of 1995 Srebrenica is located in the far east of Bosnia and Herzegovina, close to the Drina river and the state border with Serbia. The small town of Srebrenica was first mentioned in 1271 when it was described as the ­easternmost  Franciscan settlement called Bosna Argentaria, a fact later

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Fig. 5.1  Map of Bosnia-Herzogovina showing its post Dayton divisions. (Source: B Davenport)

used by many scholars as proof that the Drina river is a natural boundary separating eastern Orthodox and western Catholic civilizations. During the first (1918–1941), and especially the second (1945–1992) Yugoslavia, the town became a regional industrial center. The standard of living was high in comparison to similar Yugoslav towns, and members of different ethnic groups lived together in harmony, as they did everywhere in former Yugoslavia.3 In the official census of 1991, Srebrenica had 37,000 inhabitants: Bosnian Muslims (73%), Bosnian Serbs (25%), Bosnian Croats (1%), and others (2%) (Mašić 1996). During the conflict of 1992–1995 within the wartime logic of creating ethnically homogenous and ethnically cleansed territories, Eastern Bosnia was of particular importance for the Bosnian Serbs. As longs as the ­majority

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of the population in the area were Bosnian Muslims, it was geo-­politically difficult for a unified Serb state to exist as it would have a large cluster of non-Serbs in its very center. In the words of Radovan Radinović, a military expert testifying in defense of the later convicted Serb commander Radislav Krstić at the ICTY in the Hague: “without Srednje Podrinje,4 Republika Srpska couldn’t exist, and neither could any ethnically united Serb territory”.5 Ethnic cleansing of the region was therefore a priority in the Bosnian Serb wartime agenda and already in April 1992, at the very start of the fighting in Bosnia, a swift military action by paramilitary groups caused the first flow of Bosnian Muslim refugees. Tens of thousands of people left their homes and escaped to other parts of Bosnia or abroad, while tens of thousands found refuge in three enclaves of Bosnian resistance in the east: the towns of Goražde, Srebrenica, and Žepa (Honig and Both 1997: 77). During the first year of the war, the Srebrenica enclave grew to include almost 95% of the municipality, and it became connected to two smaller enclaves at Žepa and Cerska. Although without direct contact with the rest of Bosnian-held territories and thus an extremely vulnerable island amid Serb-controlled areas,6 the size of the enclave was becoming a real threat to Serb plans for Eastern Bosnia. The first substantial direct Serb military attack against the Srebrenica enclave started in January 1993 causing thousands of additional refugees from surrounding villages to escape to already overcrowded downtown Srebrenica. People were sleeping in the streets during the cold winter nights (Mašić 1999). The humanitarian catastrophe and the prospect of the enclave falling into Serb hands with presumably disastrous results led the French general Morillon, who was leading the UN peacekeepers in Srebrenica, to place the town under UN protection. Pressured by the UN forces on the ground,7 the UN Security Council proclaimed Srebrenica a so-called Safe Area in resolution No 819 of 16 April 1993.8 The area was to be “protected from military attacks or any other hostile activities”.9 The UN Security Council’s creation of the Srebrenica Safe Area was followed by a demilitarization agreement signed by both Serb and Bosnian commanders-­in-chief; the UN peacekeeping forces subsequently entered the safe area and established a UN base in Potočari, a suburb of Srebrenica. The UN reports from Srebrenica over the following two years show that while there was a degree of military stability with only a few incidents provoked by both sides, a dramatic humanitarian catastrophe continued to unfold and life conditions in Srebrenica itself remained inhumane. The population of the town and the UN forces protecting it were both

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­ ependent on the willingness of the Serb forces surrounding the enclave d to allow supplies and aid into the town. Early in 1995, supplies to the town were frequently interrupted and the UN forces became aware of a reinforcement of Serb forces who were now better equipped and more disciplined than before, suggesting that military action against the safe area was imminent. Their assessments were correct, the Serb forces began a third and final major attack on 6 July 1995; five days later the enclave fell into Serb hands. The people of Srebrenica tried to flee through the woods, or gathered around the UN camp in Potočari just outside Srebrenica. In the first hours after entering the city center, Serb soldiers started separating women and children from men aged from 16 to 65. Some executions of Bosnian Muslim men started immediately even though the UN forces were still present at the site. Women and children were deported in buses to the nearest territory under Bosnian army control with the help of the Dutch UN forces, while buses with the remaining men and boys left unescorted. Most of the men were transported to different locations around the enclave and murdered. Killings continued for a few days; ten days after the fall of Srebrenica, the UN left a completely empty Potočari camp. In addition to the civilians around the Potočari UN base, there were approximately 15,000 Bosnian soldiers in the area. They attempted to fight their way through to the Bosnian controlled territory (Zülch 1998: 29) but their attempts were largely unsuccessful. Many of the men were ambushed and killed along the way or after surrendering.10 However, many did survive what became known as the March of Death. From 16 July until the end of the month, groups of men kept turning up in the Tuzla area with horrific testimonies of mass-executions, much to the despair of the thousands of women and children from Srebrenica waiting for their husbands and sons in the newly established refugee camps there. During a few days starting on 11 July 1995, the Bosnian Serb forces committed the largest single war crime in Europe since the Second World War. Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb army commander-in-chief and his associate Radislav Krstić organized and oversaw the systematic killing of more than 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys. Even though the Bosnian Serb authorities tried to hide the bodies in mass-graves in different locations around Srebrenica, the scale of the crime soon became known through the testimonies of survivors (Power 2003: 240; Rohde 1998: 238), and it was subsequently confirmed through the work of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), which undertook

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the excavation of bodies from mass-graves and DNA analysis of the remains (Rohde 1998: 238). The Srebrenica genocide was the most crucial event in the Bosnian war. It was, in a sense, a paradoxical result of the international presence in Bosnia. Yet, it was also the event that ignited a renewed resolve of the international community to end the war, through use of force if needed. Later in 1995, US fighters bombed Serb positions throughout Bosnia, and in the autumn of 1995, the tide began to turn for the Bosnian Serb side as they lost military dominance. Conditions were set for a peace agreement to be brokered in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Memorial in the Politics of Post-Dayton Bosnia In the weeks following the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement of December 1995, 60,000 heavily armed NATO troops arrived in Bosnia and the post-conflict peace process began. While the presence of international military forces guaranteed the ceasefire, the implementation of the civilian aspects of the agreement immediately proved to be a much more difficult task (for further details, see Bildt 1998). For this purpose, the architects of the Dayton agreement established the Office of the High Representative of the International Community in Bosnia Herzegovina (the OHR) that was to oversee the implementation of the agreement and act as an arbiter with the authority to interpret the agreement. In practice, this meant that the international community had protectorate-like powers in Bosnia, including powers to remove politicians from power and make binding decisions.11 These powers were necessary because the peace agreement left Bosnia united into a common state yet divided into two ethnically defined entities (Republika Srpska and the Federation) and conflicts between the groups regarding sovereignty over the Bosnian state continued—not through armed conflict but in political, cultural, and other societal arenas. In simplified terms, the Bosnian government side continued to try to strengthen the Bosnian state and its institutions, perceiving the Dayton Bosnia Herzegovina as a temporary measure leading toward unification of the country into a single multiethnic state without Republika Srpska, whereas the Bosnian Serbs understood the Dayton Agreement as a temporary step on the path to independence of Republika Srpska and possibly even its unification with Serbia. To complicate matters further, the main Bošnjak nationalist party increasingly abandoned the struggle to

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reunite the ethnically divided society focusing more and more on the Bošnjak nation-building project. In this fragile post-war environment, the survivors and families of the victims of the Srebrenica genocide started organizing themselves and claiming their rights. Soon after the exhumation of mass-graves began, the idea of a permanent place of commemoration and a common burial place surfaced in  local political debates. Immediately after the war, the main nationalist parties on the Bošnjak side argued that burials should take place as close to Srebrenica as possible, but on the Federation side of the inter-entity border. The argument was that it would be difficult to ask the victims’ families to return to Srebrenica, now in Republika Srpska, to mourn their dead. For the social democratic opposition to the nationalist parties, the intention to bury the dead within the territory of the Federation was a betrayal of the idea of a united Bosnia in which refugees were supposed to return home reversing the effects of the ethnic cleansing. It was argued that burial in the Federation would be a “clear sign of manipulation of the survivors who want to return and bury their family members in Srebrenica”.12 These early debates about where to mourn and memorialize the events and victims of the war show the significance of Srebrenica for the national politics, that is, for the political leadership in Sarajevo. It was not merely a question of using Srebrenica to gain votes and mobilize support, as the wider perspective of patriotism and its connection to either the Bošnjak ethnic group (as in the case of Bošnjak nationalist Party of Democratic Action (Stranka Demokratske Accije or SDA)) or Bosnia as a country (as in the case of the social democratic party (Socijaldemokratska Partija BiH or SDP)) were brought into play. In contrast to the debates and conflicts on the political scene in Sarajevo and in the Federation, the Bosnian Serb political parties were far more united in their view on the events in Srebrenica. At first, there were constant attempts to deny that war crimes had ever happened in Srebrenica, despite overwhelming evidence. For the first anniversary in July 1996, the Serb authorities organized a celebration of the anniversary of the liberation of the town of Srebrenica, an action that was strongly condemned by a UN representative as a “complete lack of regret in the context of obvious mass of evidence of war atrocities”.13 During the early post-Dayton period, there was no space for any alternative views about the events in Srebrenica among the Bosnian Serbs parties. As all or close to all political parties were nationalist in character, the political discussion was focused only on the question of who was the best guardian of Serb interests and of the

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Republika Srpska, that is, which party would have the most anti-Bosnian political program. Recognizing the war crimes in Srebrenica was not a viable political option at the time. Later, the government of Republika Srpska was forced by the representatives of the International Community to conduct an investigation into the events at Srebrenica. The first report of the Republika Srpska Agency for Cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia was published in 2002. Rather than continuing to deny the crimes, this report attempted to minimize their scale. The killing of thousands of boys and men was blamed on military clashes in and around Srebrenica; high-ranking officials were quoted as saying that “there is not a single truth about Srebrenica”, or “it is not debatable that something happened in Srebrenica but continued attempts of the victims to settle this in courts is against possible future reconciliation between the groups”.14 Furthermore, the report engaged in a numbers game, questioning the estimated number of victims, arguing that probably the number was far smaller than eight thousand. The report was rejected by the representatives of the International Community who judged it to be “simply incorrect”15 and “against common sense”,16 and it was described in the local media as “the best possible thing done in the worst possible way”.17 Still, this first report did acknowledge that something had happened at Srebrenica and that many people lost their lives there; this was a step forward from previous outright denials. A second report was published in 2004, heavily influenced by the ICTY conviction of one of the architects of the crime in Srebrenica, Radoslav Krstić, who was convicted of war crimes and genocide. The report was produced by an independent commission supported by the Government of Republika Srpska, and it concluded that war crimes in Srebrenica did indeed happen as evidence presented at The Hague tribunal had showed. The report also included evidence collected by the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) during excavation of 32 mass-­ graves with 7779 victims.18 Dragan Čavić, the president of Republika Srpska at the time, stated that “these nine days of the Srebrenica tragedy are the darkest pages in the history of the Serb people”.19 The report, although a positive step, was consequently politicized from both the Bošnjak and Serb sides. Instead of using it for opening a path toward reconciliation, the Bošnjak political parties and officials used it as the main weapon against the very existence of Republika Srpska, arguing that the Republic should be immediately abolished as it was built on genocide. Using the fate of the Srebrenica refugees as the main argument, they were

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demanding that the Srebrenica municipality must become a part of the Federation, that is, that the Dayton inter-entity boundaries should be changed.20 For the Serb political parties, the report was understood as something forced upon them by the International Community and thus not to be taken seriously. In the 2006 election, the question of the Srebrenica report was one of the main reasons for the defeat of the Serb Democratic Party (Srpska Demokratska Stranka, SDS) and its president Čavić, who could not shake off accusations of betraying the Serb cause because he accepted the report as true. He was replaced by the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (Savez Nezavisnih Socijaldemokrata or SNSD) party of Milorad Dodik, with the most radical secessionist and revisionist politics, which created a new political situation that reversed some of the positive reconciliatory steps that had been taken until then. It is telling that in 2010 there was an attempt by the government of Republika Srpska to revive the first report denying that the war crimes had ever happened. The OHR reacted to this action as “a despicable attempt to question that genocide took place in Srebrenica in July 1995 by deliberately distorting established historical and legal facts, and propagating misinformation and disinformation with the intent to obscure the truth”.21 The attempt was clearly part of a pre-election mobilization campaign, but still it shows how the question of Srebrenica remains central in Bosnian politics, used by both Bošnjak and Serb nationalist parties in order to spread hostility and distrust among the ethnic groups and thereby gain support for nationalist and separatist agendas.

Building the Center in Potočari As the stories of the horrors in Srebrenica gained increased support from the evidence gathered by international experts and international courts in the late 1990s (including improvements in the methods for assessing the number of victims), the question of how to commemorate and memorialize what had happened became of utmost significance for the Bošnjak side. Post-war discussions about the events took place among the families of victims organized in the association of Women of Srebrenica. They promoted the idea of “Srebrenica – the global anti-war center” as the symbolic place of the “memory of our children and our dearest… with the intention to bury all the dead in one place, but not in a common grave […] to demonstrate the inability of the international community to ­protect civilians […]”.22 In this early postwar period, when the freedom of movement was limited and virtually no refugees had returned to their

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homes in Eastern Bosnia, the government in Sarajevo announced that the final decision should be made by the time of the commemoration ceremony of 1998. Once again, there was the idea of creating a memorial center in village of Ravne in the Federation, but near to the line marking the Republika Srpska. As with the discussion of the burial place, this produced an internal Bošnjak political conflict. For the opposition, such a solution would be a clear “sign of the will to finally destroy Bosnia and Herzegovina and the continued manipulation of the people of Srebrenica”.23 Intense political quarrels about the options for a Srebrenica memorial site even provoked the Muslim religious leader in Bosnia, Reis Mustafa Ceric, to state that “Srebrenica can’t be the means for manipulative political games”.24 The Srebrenica victims’ associations were against any external interference and argued that only the survivors should make the decision.25 The organization “Mothers of Srebrenica and Žepa enclaves” organized a survey about three possible options: the village of Ravne near Kladanj, the village of Potočari outside Srebrenica where the UN had had its headquarters, or individual burials in family cemeteries or local village graveyards. Almost 83% of those polled found Potočari the most appropriate location.26 The results were presented to Wolfgang Petritsch, the High Representative at the time, requesting that the OHR create conditions for burials in Potočari and nowhere else. The OHR’s view was that the international community could get involved only when all interested parties and the government had reached an agreement about the place and the form of burials.27 In other words, the OHR’s initial approach was to leave the problem to the domestic political actors. The reaction on the Serb side in the ethnically cleansed municipality of Srebrenica was to accept that the burial site should be within the municipal territory but they were strongly against the Potočari site. Their counter-proposals were of sites further away from Srebrenica, out of sight and with poor road access. The Bošnjak side and the associations of the victims interpreted these proposals as the Serb local authorities intending to “hide” the burial site, in a sense equivalent to the attempts to hide the bodies in mass-graves.28 As time passed without any decision, local debates were effectively stopped by the OHR‘s ‘Decision on the Location of a Cemetery and the Monument for the Victims of Srebrenica’ issued on 25 October 2000. This decision settled on the option preferred by the families, the site in Potočari in the Republika Srpska, with the motivation that “further delay in determining the final resting place and a site for the memorial for those who perished in the aforesaid slaughter would be an affront to humanity”.29

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The OHR High Representative Wolfgang Petritsch stated that the main reason for this decision was that the cemetery and a memorial center could become a “means of bringing reconciliation to the peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which will in turn promote the return of displaced persons and refugees and permanent peace”.30 The OHR decision on Potočari was seen as not prejudging alternative symbolic meanings of the site. That perception was explained, a few months before the decision, by the Srebrenica association as: Ten thousand Muslim tombstones (mezar) […] which testify to the cowardice, indifference, conspiracy and prejudice of UNPROFOR and other ­organizations from democratic and human parts of the world […] has to be a marker of the time when Srebrenica occurred, in the same way as Jasenovac or Auschwitz are the markers of the time when they happened. Only then will it not be forgotten. Only then shall we live more easily with the pain. Only then shall we live more easily with our neighbors and ourselves.31

The Memorial Center in Potočari was recognized, shaped, and practically established through two more OHR’s decisions, “The Decision Establishing and Registering the Foundation of the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial Centre and Cemetery”32 and “The Decision Ordering the Transfer of Ownership of the Battery Factory to the Foundation of the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery”.33 The role of the International Community remained significant once the site was established. The first executive board of the foundation included, among others, General Michael Dodson, the commander of the Stabilization Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina (SFOR), Jacques Paul Klein, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General, and Thomas Miller, US Ambassador to Bosnia Herzegovina. The foundation also included the Bošnjak member of the Bosnian presidency who chaired the meetings, the minister for human rights and refugees, and Reis-ul-lema, the highest religious authority for Bosnian Muslims. The internationalization of the memorial center foundation is also emphasized by the fact that all members of the executive board had to be appointed by the Special Advisory Working Group led by the OHR. Thus, the main perception in the local community and the victims’ associations was that the foundation was ‘owned’ by the OHR, because the local political elites had failed to reach an agreement.34 Despite the decisions of the OHR and the makeup of the Foundation, the construction work was continuously obstructed by the local Serb

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authorities. The obstruction pushed the OHR to eventually issue yet another decision on the matter: “The Decision Enacting the Law on the Center for the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide”.35 In this decision, the Memorial Center became the legal successor of the Foundation “Srebrenica-Potočari”, Memorial and Cemetery, constituted as legal entity with the governing Board responsible to the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina.36 Effectively, this meant that the ground of the center was under the jurisdiction of a state institution, rather than a territorial entity or municipality property. The High Representative explained that he “couldn’t finish his mandate leaving this law (and the memorial center) victimized by political games and manoeuvers”.37 The decision fulfilled the wishes of the Srebrenica survivors to have a memorial center protected by state authorities and not dependent on local Serb authorities. For Hatidža Mehmedović, the president of the association Srebrenica Mothers, this was a just solution as it meant that the memorial center was now “on the ground of Bosnia and Herzegovina and not of Republika Srpska, the product of blood and genocide”.38 The response of Republika Srpska was outrage and the accusation that the OHR was biased, succumbing to “extreme demands from the Muslim side”, and questioning the possible violation of the Dayton agreement and of the constitutional and legal system of Republika Srpska and Bosnia and Herzegovina.39 The construction of the Srebrenica Memorial Center started in 2001 despite considerable political controversy among Bošnjak elites, against the will of the local Serb authorities and the Serb nationalist parties, and by virtue of a decree by representatives of the international community.40 The plan was to finish all the work before the next commemoration, but the work was delayed for technical reasons41 and due to obstruction by the local authorities42 and misuse of funds.43 The opening ceremony was held on 20 September 2003. The OHR invited former US president Bill Clinton, who stated that this was “the wish of the families of the war ­victims”.44 Srebrenica’s victims associations only supported this half-­ heartedly. While most Bošnjaks felt gratitude toward the US for eventually ending the war, many questioned why Washington did not take action sooner.45 Nevertheless, the center was opened by an international dignitary, forced through by the international presence in Bosnia and financed internationally. Even after the center was built and opened, the OHR had to intervene by making the memorial site a state institution, removing any possibilities for local Serb authorities to obstruct the use and further devel-

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opment of the site. It was certainly a difficult process, perhaps not surprisingly considering the difference in views in the Serb and Bošnjak communities about what had happened in Srebrenica and what Srebrenica stood for.

Design and Meaning of the Memorial Center The memorial center and the burial site were designed as two separate but complementary parts on each side of the Srebrenica-Bratunac road. On one side is the cemetery and the sacral part of the memorial shaped like the petals of a flower. This part was created first due to the pressing need to begin burial of the first exhumed bodies. The burial site was built according to an Islamic architectural tradition. The most recognizable part is the open mosque (Musala) built for the purpose of religious worship, including a place for preaching (mimber) and a symmetrical open space for participants of the rituals (sadžd). Around the Musala is the Srebrenica Wall of Memories, a wall with the 8372 engraved names of the genocide victims. The burial ground itself consists of thousands of graves in rows with traditional Islamic white tombstones (turbe). Tombstones also stretch across the hill side, “not unlike the First World War cemetery in northern France” (Bardgett 2005: 30). A museum displaying Tarih Samaran’s photographs documenting the search for missing persons and mass-graves, the process of identifying victims and their burials46 is close to the entrance (Figs. 5.2, 5.3, and 5.4). The second part of the Srebrenica Memorial Center is a memorial room placed across the road in the former battery factory, which was the UN Dutch base where thousands of refugees from Srebrenica sought sanctuary. This part was opened later than the sacral part of the memorial, on 9 November 2007, and built with donations from the  British and Dutch governments.47 The memorial room is used for showing a documentary film about the events of 1995, produced by Leslie Woodhead and Muhamed Mujkić, and holds an exhibition presenting belongings found in mass-graves in 20 display cases; the intention is to “personalize the faith of 8000 men and boys killed after the fall of Srebrenica”.48 As explained by Suzanne Bardgett, director of the Holocaust Exhibition at London’s Imperial War Museum, and adviser for the memorial room, these personal belongings are “like the shoes from Auschwitz or the excavated detritus from the Einsatzgruppen killing sites, the possessions of those who died are now preserved for posterity’s record” (Bardgett 2005: 31). The design

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Fig. 5.2  (a, b) The Islamic elements at the central structure at the Srebrenica-­ Potočari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide: (a) shows the central open mosque (Musala), (b) shows the indication of prayer rugs facing Mecca. (Source: M L S Sørensen)

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Fig. 5.3  (a, b) Part of the cemetery at the Srebrenica-­Potočari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide. (Source: M L S Sørensen)

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Fig. 5.4  (a, b) The naming of the dead as part of the Srebrenica-­Potočari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide. (Source: M L S Sørensen)

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of the memorial makes clear that its intention is remembrance, and perhaps even education and reconciliation. This was also expressed by Beriz Belkić, president of the Srebrenica Memorial Center Foundation, who stated that this “was the place where people were taken to die and from this place we should send a message of courage, hope, faith in life and faith in people”.49 The designer, Aida Daidžić, stated that she views the memorial room as a place of paradox: “It needs to be both a meeting point and a point of confrontation, a place in which it’s possible to get understanding and a place that underscores that these events are in fact impossible to understand” (Bardgett 2005: 31) (Fig. 5.5). The different meanings of the two parts of the memorial complex are intentional and clearly visible. The large open part of the memorial complex and the burial grounds are next to the busy road, thus making this a visible reminder for the local population. Its monumental size makes ignoring and avoiding it quite difficult; the site is an always-present possibility for an apology, reconciliation, or a different and more positive future. Unfortunately, the site is also a place of conflict. As the Serb side does not recognize the war crimes in Srebrenica, or at least does not recognize them as an act of genocide, the site is contested within the local community. Very few or no Serbs visit the site and the Serb local community generally does not participate in the annual commemorations. In addition, the local Serb authorities have created at least a couple of ‘competing’ sites within just a few miles’ radius from Potočari. There is a memorial room to the fallen Serbs in Bratunac, and a large Orthodox cross and a monument in the village of Kravica has the number of Serbs killed by the Muslims in the last war (3267) and in the Second World War (6469) engraved on it. This continuation of the conflict through the manipulation of history, the counting of bodies and a competition for dominance of the landscape through monuments has been severely condemned by the representatives of the international community. Nevertheless, the site continues to be a place of conflict and the position, design, size, and meaning of the Srebrenica burial site continues to impact on political processes in the local communities. It is not merely a place of mourning for the families of the victims and the survivors of genocide – it is a place of the struggle for recognition of the suffering and the rights of the Bošnjak nation, as well as a symbol of the continuity of Bošnjaks in Eastern Bosnia despite almost complete ethnic cleansing in the 1990s (Fig. 5.6). Contrary to the burial part, which aims at both the local community and the mourners, the memorial room within the battery factory has much

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Fig. 5.5  (a, b) Memorial Center at Srebrenica in the former battery factory. (a) the center seen from the cemetery. (Source: Author), (b) part of the exhibition space within the memorial center. (Source: M L S Sørensen)

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Fig. 5.6  The memorial monument at the village of Kravica, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. (Source: M L S Sørensen)

wider connotations. Using the former UN base for the memorial room was meaningful and intentional, as this was not only the refuge for tens of thousands of civilians but also the headquarters of the Dutch UN battalion. Thus, the intention behind the design is also to target the conscience  of the world: the international community and its security mechanisms, the UN and the EU and their international institutions, that allowed genocide to happen on their watch.

Commemoration Practice and Mass Meetings Once a year on the anniversary of the genocide, the Srebrenica Memorial Center and its meaning are brought into focus for the local, Bosnian, regional, and even global publics. Even before the center was built, 11 July was commemorated in other parts of Bosnia, mainly in Tuzla where most of the women of Srebrenica took refuge after the war. In this first period from 1996 until the start of organized visits to Srebrenica in 1999, the victims and survivors could not come back to Eastern Bosnia to mourn

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their dead despite the agreement on free movement within Bosnia and Herzegovina, as Serb nationalists posed serious threats to their safety, something that was perceived at the time as “yet another insult to the families of the victims”.50 The commemorative events in Tuzla were a mix of different yet connected articulations of suffering. Apart from mourning, the events were used to express growing frustration about the continuing poor conditions and uncertainties of refugee life, protests against the inadequate representation of their interests, and the unsolved social and economic situation (Ghedini 1996). Another major problem was the lack of information about missing persons. When the war ended, rumors circulated that the missing men were being held in Serbian mines (Pollack 2003). The message repeated over and over on hundreds of banners was “We have to know the truth about our sons, brothers and husbands” together with the names of the missing.51 The repetition of this message transcended individual suffering and added to the strong collective sense of loss, putting immense pressure on the political leadership. As Swanee Hunt has pointed out, “the mourning of thousands became a cry for action articulated by women leaders and amplified by the global media, creating even more pressure for a political response” (Hunt 2005). In addition, the very first commemoration held in July 1996 was used by politicians for ethnic mobilization within the Bošnjak ethnic group. The president of the Federation of Bosnia Herzegovina and a high-ranking official from the largest Bošnjak party, Ejup Ganić, made a purely political speech raising the specter of new political divisions within the Bošnjak nation which “the people should not allow to continue, because only together are we strong enough to come back to Srebrenica”.52 Given that this rhetoric was used only three months before the first post-war election, in front of 40,000 people most of whom were refugees from the Srebrenica area, the speech marked the start of an interparty competition for the votes of the refugees and internally displaced people (IDP) that would reoccur in years to come. A similar party polarization took place during all subsequent commemoration ceremonies; for many, this was extremely tasteless. Bosnian journalist Gojko Berić wrote, for example, that “every manipulation of the Srebrenica women for the political purposes should be considered as a new crime against them”.53 Unfortunately, the rumours about men held in captivity were eventually proven false and the destiny of the missing was indeed the worse imaginable. As the understanding spread that all missing men and boys were in fact dead, the anniversaries changed in character turning into more overtly

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Islamic religious burials and commemoration practices. However, despite the shift of focus, the political connotations of the commemoration ceremonies persisted. The complexity of emotions connected to the anniversaries is visible in the naming of the ceremonies—“Do not forget the dead, but think about the living”, “No Dayton without the survivors”, and “Who betrayed us?” These different and sometimes contradictory messages indicate the complexity of grief together with the frustration and insecurity with a difficult socio-economic and political life in refugee camps. The second phase of commemoration practices began with the stabilization of the political conditions in post-war Bosnia, as the Dayton agreement implementation process took hold. The refugee return process was slowly starting and freedom of movement became a reality, at least enough to make traveling to Srebrenica possible. The obstruction of the refugee returns process became largely institutional connected to property rights and other legal matters, and was no longer a question of ‘spontaneous street-demonstrations’ or violence toward the refugees. After several unsuccessful attempts to visit their homes, the women of Srebrenica began organized visits to Srebrenica in the summer of 1998. According to Hasan Nuhanović, one of the very few men surviving Potočari, this was possible only because the international armed forces escorted and secured the visits to Potočari in both 1998 and 1999. In 2000, it was the American ambassador to Bosnia, Thomas Miller, who took the lead and with strong support from the representatives of the international community, the OHR and the UN, as well as the local political elites, he visited and officially proclaimed the site at Potočari as the main site of the fifth anniversary.54 Thereafter, Potočari, as the largest “ossuary of Bošnjaks”55 became the main collective place of mourning and remembering. Thousands of women came to the site in the year 2000 and a heavy security apparatus had to be put in place to guarantee their security and the security of the visiting international dignitaries. The phase that started with the fifth anniversary can be characterized as a period of institutionalization of the site of Potočari as the main place of mourning and remembering. The practice of traveling to Potočari and mourning the dead on the territory of Republika Srpska caused considerable friction. Commemorations included use of religious artifacts and practices and as these were seen as signs of ‘ownership’ of the site they were perceived by the Serb side as a provocation. The political elites in Republika Srpska, who at the time still denied or minimized the ­importance of the events at Srebrenica, were absent at the Potočari ­commemoration

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and the local authorities protested and ridiculed the event with statements such as “Potočari is the place where no civilians could have been wounded or killed, because this is simply not characteristic of the Serb soldier and the Serb heroic military history”.56 Optimistic observers who had expected catharsis and the start of a reconciliation process in the local community were disappointed. Still, as Hasan Nuhanović later described it, this first official commemoration in Potočari was a “huge victory that helped in the efforts to build a memorial center”.57 The next major political gathering in Srebrenica was the opening of the center in Potočari in 2003. In the presence of more than 30,000 people, former president Clinton made a speech expressing the hope that it would be possible to build a peaceful Bosnia and Herzegovina and he urged that Srebrenica should become a global reminder to all humanity. However, Sulejman Tihić, the Bošnjak member of the Presidency, criticized the role of the international community that had “calmly observed what was going on in Bosnia for years before it decided to react and stop the bloodshed and genocide”. The ceremony also included speeches from relatives of the victims, such as Advija Ibrahimović, a girl who lost both parents in Potočari, who stressed that Potočari is and needs to become a site of collective memory, a sacred object “which will not allow us to forget”.58 The opening ceremony was the first mass gathering of this type at the site, with international dignitaries and local political elites stressing the wider importance of Srebrenica in Bosnia, in the region and even internationally. The commemorations in subsequent years were strongly connected to the burial of the victims. As mass-graves were found and excavated, the victims were identified and transported to Srebrenica for burial, often during the annual collective burial ceremonies on 11 July. The very strong Islamic influence in the burial ceremonies is worth noticing as Bosnia, a part of formerly socialist Yugoslavia, used to be a very secular society. It is possible that many of the dead were not practicing Muslims and would most likely have been buried in a more non-confessional manner if done privately. It seems that the post-war message that “our names and our religion are the reasons for brutality and crimes against us”59 called forth an emphasis on religion (Fig. 5.7). In recent years, the burials and religious rituals have become inseparable from political rallies and mass-gatherings of Bošnjaks, or more specifically the Bošnjak nationalist parties and the more radical Bošnjak population. Mass-gatherings are politicized even more on more important anniversaries and in election years. The fifteenth anniversary in 2010

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Fig. 5.7  (a, b) Burials during the annual commemoration at the Srebrenica Genocide. (Source: Author)

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became a massive event with one of the largest burial ceremonies ever. The Potočari memorial was overcrowded by grieving Srebrenica survivors, Bosnian politicians, and international guests with their respective security staff, and tens of thousands of Bošnjaks who came to listen to speeches before the coming elections. Some observers have noted that commemorations look like any other village festival or fair, with the exception that what is bought and sold is “human suffering and bones of the dead”.60 Indeed, a trend toward unsuitable commercial activities at the commemoration ceremonies can be seen, as souvenirs and street food are being sold in close proximity to the burial site. The commemoration in 2015 became even more problematic. Since it was the 20th anniversary of the 1995 events, it attracted large crowds and many international dignitaries, including the Serbian Prime Minister Vučić. It was intensely debated in the Bosnian media whether Vučić should attend at all, and when he indeed attended and attempted to pay his respects, his presence resulted in violent attacks by the crowd who were throwing stones and glass bottles, and it was only due to luck that Vučić escaped unharmed.61 This politicization of the commemorations on 11 July continues and even seems to intensify; this is most likely due to the general political situation in the country. The political conflicts between the Serb and Bošnjak leadership, as well as internal political conflicts within the Bošnjak political elites seem to influence not just how commemorations are organized but how they are portrayed in the media.

Future Meaning of the Potočari Memorial Center The Potočari memorial center outside Srebrenica is indeed a very intense and important place. In the Bosnian political context, where Bošnjak and Serb ethno-political elites are still in conflict over the most basic questions of statehood, this site has become a battleground of conflicting narratives about guilt regarding the Bosnian war and the legitimacy of the national interests of different ethnic groups. The Potočari Memorial Center serves a number of purposes as was the intention of the OHR and the international community when deciding to create the site. Firstly, providing a common burial place was the primary objective. In the late 1990s, some victim families had argued that burial places should be closer to where the refugees resettled, and definitely not in Serb-held territory. However, these sentiments have changed and almost all the victims of the Srebrenica genocide are buried at the site.

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Very few families have opted to bury the remains of their loved ones elsewhere in Bosnia. Secondly, the site was designed to be a place where the families of victims could come to mourn their dead. This was uncertain at the beginning of the process, as it was feared that families would not dare come to Srebrenica. However, as the security situation in Bosnia has improved, access to the site is no longer a problem and mourners are coming to the site both as groups for the commemoration day, and privately throughout the year. Thirdly, there was an ambition that the Potočari Memorial Center should serve an educational purpose. Today, the center welcomes 120,000 visitors every year, mostly from the Federation side, but also from abroad. School children and interested adults come to learn about genocide similarly to how they learn from memorial centers dedicated to the Second World War. The museum and memorial room with exhibits of photographs and films are particularly powerful tools for conveying the horrors of 1995. Nonetheless, there were also ambitions that have not yet been achieved. The Srebrenica Memorial Center was envisioned as a place of reconciliation between the groups, a place where the truth would surface and where the Serbs could experience a catharsis, as concentration camps in Germany and Poland served that purpose for the German people after the Second World War. Apart from visits by a handful of Serb opposition politicians, NGOs, and intellectuals, however, the site in Srebrenica is largely ignored in the public discourse in Republika Srpska. It is perceived as an anti-Serb creation sponsored by the international community and it thus fits nicely into the dominant narrative about unfair treatment of the Serb side following the war, a narrative where everyone is equally guilty and suffering was equally distributed between the ethnic groups. Reconciliation is therefore not an aspect to which the Potočari Memorial Center contributes to as yet. It could even be argued that it does the opposite. Srebrenica seems to have become a new line of conflict between the groups, a conflict of narratives about what really happened in the war. The Potočari Memorial Center has also initiated processes that were not intended when the site was constructed. Firstly, there are now competing sites created by the Serb side. The previously mentioned monument in Kravica is an obvious attempt at providing a competing narrative about Serb suffering, sorrow, and mourning; it also attempts to minimize the meaning of more than 8000 killed at Srebrenica by emphasizing the even larger numbers of local Serbs killed in wars. Most likely, this competition and disputes over the numbers of dead seriously hamper ­reconciliation

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between the groups. Secondly, an unintended consequence of the Potočari Memorial Center is the ethno-political sense of ownership of the site. For many, Bošnjak nationalists Srebrenica is increasingly seen as the place of re-birth of the Bošnjak nation, much in the same way as the Serbs view the loss at Kosovo polje in 1389 as the birthplace of the Serb nation. Thus, the commemorative ceremonies have over time become ‘owned’ by the nationalist Bošnjak political parties, and the events themselves are becoming ethno-political events where political agendas concerning the future of Bosnia Herzegovina are in focus, rather than events focused on mourning and remembering of the past. With time, the commemorative practices at the Potočari Memorial Center are likely to change in character. Burials of victims will come to an end as most victims have now been identified and buried. This raises the question of the form that future anniversaries will take. There are, as we see it, two potential paths. On the one hand, the unresolved political conflicts between the ethnic groups might lead to an even deeper conflict of narratives about victimhood in Eastern Bosnia and an even stronger sense of Bošnjak nationalism in the yearly commemoration ceremonies. On the other hand, the passage of time and an improved political situation might slowly lead to a change of meaning of the site, moving closer to the originally envisioned idea of a site of remembrance, reconciliation, and education.

Notes 1. ‘Bošnjak’ is the official term for Bosnian Muslim ethnic group. The terms are used inter-changeably. 2. The International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has repeatedly ruled in cases where Serb officers were convicted of genocide. For more, see www.icty.org 3. Fond za humanitarno društvo (2002), Haške presude: Dražen Erdemović i Goran Jelisić, Haški Tribunal: Dokumenta V, Beograd, p. 77. 4. Srednje Podrinje is the Serb name of the part of the Drina river valley where Srebrenica is located. 5. Fond za humanitarno društvo (2002), Haške presude: Dražen Erdemović i Goran Jelisić, p. 77. 6. Fond za humanitarno društvo (2002), Haške presude: Dražen Erdemović i Goran Jelisić, p. 77. 7. The well-known instance when French General Morillon, in order to calm the masses of civilians surrounding the UN trucks, said that Srebrenica was

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under UN protection, presumably without the approval from UN headquarters in New York. 8. UN Security Council Resolution No 819, www.un.org 9. Fond za humanitarno društvo (2002), Haške presude: Dražen Erdemović i Goran Jelisić, p. 79. 10. ICTY: Srebrenica 1995. Zločini nad Bošnjacima u Srebrenici za vrijeme agresije na Republiku Bosnu i Hercegovinu 1991–1995, pp. 291–338. 11. These powers were further strengthened by the Peace Implementation Council at its meeting in Bonn in 1997. For more on OHR powers in Bosnia, see Sahovic 2007. 12. Smajlović, S. (1998), Manipulacija Srebreničanima, Oslobođenje, Vol.18.007, 17.07.1998. 13. P.A. (1996), Ne kaju se zbog zvjerstava, Oslobođenje, Vol.17.273, 13.07.1996. 14. Bečirević, A. (2002), Masovne grobnice nad 12.000 Bošnjaka svjedoće o genocidu, Oslobođenje, Vol.19.995, 04.09.2002. 15. Statement of the Embassy of USA in BiH: Monstruozni zločini u Srebrenici su istina, Oslobođenje, Vol.19.957, 06.09.2002. 16. Statement of the High Representative in BiH Paddy Ashdown: Izvještaj protivan zdravom razumu, Oslobođenje Vol.19.955, 04.09.2002. 17. Bakšić, Hamza (2002), OK, da popričamo, Oslobođenje, Vol.19.957, 06.09.2002. 18. Report of the Goverment of Republika Srpska (2004), Događaji u i oko Srebrenice od 10. do 19. Jula 1995, Banja Luka. 19. The full speech of Dragan Čavić: Crna strana istorije srpskog naroda, Oslobođenje, Vol.20.163, 24.06.2004. 20. Omeragić, A. (2004), Srebreničanke traže da Srebrenica i Republika Srpska konačno postanu dio BiH, Oslobođenje, Vol.20.627, 07.07.2004. 21. OHR (2004), “RS Government Special Session A Distasteful Attempt to Question Genocide”, 20.04.2010, www.ohr.int. 22. Jahić, V. and Hasić, A., Srebrenica opomena svijetu, Oslobođenje, Vol.17.274, 12.071996. 23. Smajlović, S. (1998), Manipulacija Srebreničanima, Oslobođenje, Vol.18.007, 17.07.1998. 24. Smajlović, S. (1998), Istina se ne može sakriti, Oslobođenje, Vol.18.009, 19.07.1998. 25. V.K.(2000), Memorijalni centar u Potočarima, Bilten Srebrenica, Vol.9, No.3, Tuzla 26. Data from the website of the Society for Threatened Peoples, http:// www.gfbv-sa.com.ba/srebrenb.html 27. V.K.(2000), Memorijalni centar u Potočarima, Bilten Srebrenica, Vol.9, No.3, Tuzla.

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28. V.K.(2000), Memorijalni centar u Potočarima, Bilten Srebrenica, Vol.9, No.3, Tuzla. 29. OHR (2000), Decision on a location of the cemetery and a monument for the victims of the Srebrenica, 25.10.2000, www.ohr.int 30. OHR (2000), Decision on a location of the cemetery and a monument for the victims of the Srebrenica, 25.10.2000, www.ohr.int 31. N.H. (2000), Mezarje, Bilten Srebrenica, Vol.19, Vol.10, No III, Tuzla. 32. OHR (2001), Decision establishing and registering the Foundation of the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery, www.ohr.int 33. OHR (2003), Decision ordering the transfer of ownership of the Battery Factory “AS” a.d. -Srebrenica to the Foundation of the SrebrenicaPotočari Memorial and Cemetery and establishing an ad hoc Battery Factory “AS” a.d.- Srebrenica compensation Commission, www.ohr.int 34. Bečirović, Asaf (2006), Gazda Fondacije je OHR, Oslobođenje, Vol.21.251, 23.03.2006. 35. OHR (2007), Decision Enacting the Law on the Center for the SrebrenicaPotočari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide, www.ohr.int 36. OHR (2007), Decision Enacting the Law on the Center for the SrebrenicaPotočari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide, www.ohr.int 37. Omeragić, A. (2007), Država zasšitnik mezarja u Potočarima, Oslobođenje, Vol.21.711, 26.06.2007. 38. Omeragić, A. (2007), Država zasšitnik mezarja u Potočarima, Oslobođenje, Vol.21.711, 26.06.2007. 39. Katana, G. (2007), Visoki predstavnik prekršio ustav BiH, Oslobođenje, Vol.21.711, 26.06.2007. 40. Smajlović, S. (2001), Opomena da se zlo ne smije više nikada ponoviti, Oslobođenje, Vol.19.536, 12.07.2001. 41. T.K. (2002), Počeo rad na lokaciji memorijalnog centra, Bilten Srebrenica, Vol.24, No 3, Tuzla. 42. Bečirović, Asaf (2003), Ubice grade spomenik srebreničkim žrtvama, Oslobođenje, Vol.20.116, 12.02.2003. 43. Arnautović, Marija (2010), Pronevjerene su milijarde donacija, Slobodna Evropa, www.slobodnaevropa.org/content/bih_donacije/1934881.html 44. Rožajac, S. (2003), Prikupljeno 8 miliona maraka, Oslobođenje, Vol.20.290, 05.08.2003. 45. Hawton, Nick (2003) Clinton unveils Bosnia memorial, BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3124642.stm 46. Samarah, Tarik (2005), Srebrenica, Ministarstvo kulture, obrazovanja i sporta Federacije BiH, Sarajevo.

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47. Smajlović, Sakib (2007), Pomoći žrtvama da nose teret jula 1995, Oslobođenje, Vol.21.725, 10.07.2007. 48. Detailed information about contents of the memorial room can be found at Memorial Centre website: http://www.Potočarimc.ba/_ba/ssoba/ 49. Smajlović, Sakib (2007), Pomoći žrtvama da nose teret jula 1995, Oslobođenje, Vol.21.725, 10.07.2007. 50. Kasalo, S. (1996), Ponovo osramoćene srebreničanke, Oslobođenje, Vol.17.640, 13.07.1997. 51. Jahić, V. and Hasić, A., Srebrenica opomena svijetu, Oslobođenje, Vol.17.274, 12.071996. 52. Jahić, V.(1996), Ne damo da nas dijele, Oslobođenje, Vol.17.275, 13.07.1996. 53. Berić, Gojko (1998), Srebrenica, Oslobođenje, Vol.18.000, 10.07.1998. 54. Interview with Hasan Nuhanovic, http://zepskiforum.informe.com/ forum/da-se-ne-zaboravi-f72/11-07-1995-t497.html 55. Hodžić, Šefko (2000), Da tuga bude nada, da kazna bude pravda, Oslobođenje, Vol.19.178, 12.07.2000. 56. Smajlović, S. (2000), U Potočarima nijue bilo ni povrijeđenih ni ubijenih, Oslobođenje, Vol.19165, 29.06.2000. 57. Interview with Hasan Nuhanovic, http://zepskiforum.informe.com/ forum/da-se-ne-zaboravi-f72/11-07-1995-t497.html 58. The speech of Advija Ibrahimović in Srebrenica-Potočari, Spomen obilježje i mezarje (2003), p. 40. 59. O.D. (1998), Ubijani zbog imena i vjere, Oslobođenje, Vol.17993, 03.07.1998. 60. Minarevic Sopta, Martina (2011), Srebrenica  – Srpska mitomanija, Bosnjacka patetika i Hrvatsko nista, Index.hr., 7.7.2011. 61. Dzidic Denis and Panic Katarina (2015), Attack on Vucic at Srebrenica Widely Condemned, Balkaninsight, 13.07.2015.

Bibliography Books

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Bardgett, S. 2005. Remembering Srebrenica. Museums Journal 08. 2005 Pages. Bildt, C. 1998. Peace Journey: The Struggle for Peace in Bosnia. London: George Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Čekić, S. (2000). Izvještaj o srebrenici-Izvještaj Generalnog sekretara UN-a prema Rezoluciji Generalne skupštine 53/35 (1998.), 15. novembar 1999, Genocid u Srebrenici, “Sigurnoj zoni”Ujedinjenih nacija, jula 1995, Institut za istraživanje zločina protiv čovječnosti i međunarodnog prava, Sarajevo.

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Ghedini, P. 1996. Heroic Women in Srebrenica. Christian Science Monitor August 12 (88, 180). Honig, J.W., and N. Both. 1997. Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime. New York: Penguin Books. Konjicija, A. 1998. Srebrenica 1995. Zločini nad Bošnjacima u Srebrenici za vrijeme agresije na Republiku Bosnu i Hercegovinu 1991–1995. Zbornik radova sa međunarodnog naučnog skupa, održanog u Sarajevu, 12. jula 1997; S. Čekić. Sarajevo, Institut za istraživanje zločina protiv čovječnosti i međunarodnog prava. Vol. 1. Mašić, N. 1996. Istina o Bratuncu: agresija, genocid i oslobodilacka borba 1992– 1995. Tuzla: Opština Bratunac. {Mašić, 1996 #1}. ———. 1999. Srebrenica: Agresija, otpor, izdaja, genocid. Srebrenica: Općina Srebrenica. N.H. 2000. Mezarje. Bilten Srebrenica 19–10(III). Tuzla.  Pollack, C. 2003. Intentions of Burial: Mourning, Politics, and Memorials Following the Massacre at Srebrenica. Death Studies 27: 125–142. Power, S. 2003. Problem from Hell: America and Age of Genocide. New  York: Perennial. Rohde, D. 1998. Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre Since World War II. Boulder: Westview Press. Sahovic, D. 2007. Socio-Cultural Viability of International Intervention in Post-­ War Societies. Umeå: Print & Media. Samarah, T. 2005. Srebrenica, Ministarstvo kulture, obrazovanja i sporta Federacije BiH. Sarajevo/Zagreb: Synopsis. Hunt, Swanee. 2005. The First Commemoration. In Srebrenica – Remembrance for the Future, ed. Čurak Nerzuk. Sarajevo: Heinrich Boll Foundation. V.K. 2000. Memorijalni centar u Potočarima. Bilten Srebrenica 9 (3), Tuzla Zülch, T. 1998. Zločin genocida u Srebrenici, Zbornik radova sa međunarodnog naučnog skupa, održanog u Sarajevu, 12. jula 1997 Vol. 1. In Čekić, S. Institut za istraživanje zločina protiv čovječnosti i međunarodnog prava, Sarajevo.

Documents Fond za humanitarno društvo. 2002. Haške presude: Dražen Erdemović i Goran Jelisić, Haški Tribunal: Dokumenta V, Beograd. ICTY: Srebrenica. 1995. Zločini nad Bošnjacima u Srebrenici za vrijeme agresije na Republiku Bosnu i Hercegovinu 1991–1995, www.icty.org OHR. 2000. Decision on a Location of the Cemetery and a Monument for the Victims of the Srebrenica, 25 Oct 2000, www.ohr.int ———. 2001. Decision Establishing and Registering the Foundation of the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery, www.ohr.int ———. 2003. Decision Ordering the Transfer of Ownership of the Battery Factory “AS” a.d -Srebrenica to the Foundation of the Srebrenica-Potočari

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Memorial and Cemetery and Establishing an ad hoc Battery Factory “AS” a.d.Srebrenica Compensation Commission, www.ohr.int ———. 2004. RS Government Special Session a Distasteful Attempt to Question Genocide, 20 Apr 2010, www.ohr.int ——— 2007. Decision Enacting the Law on the Center for the Srebrenica-­ Potočari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide, www. ohr.int Report of the Government of Republika Srpska. 2004. Događaji u i oko Srebrenice od 10. do 19. Jula 1995, Banja Luka. UN Security Council Resolution No 819, www.un.org

Media Advija Ibrahimović in Srebrenica-Potočari, Spomen obilježje i mezarje. 2003. Organizacioni odbor za obilježavanje 11.jula 1995, Srebrenica Arnautović, Marija. 2010. Pronevjerene su milijarde donacija. Slobodna Evropa. www.slobodnaevropa.org/content/bih_donacije/1934881.html Bakšić, Hamza. 2002. OK, da popričamo. Oslobođenje 19 (957), 6 Sept 2002 Bečirević, Asaf 2002, Masovne grobnice nad 12.000 Bošnjaka svjedoće o genocidu. Oslobođenje 19 (995), 4 Sept 2002 Bečirović, Asaf. 2003. Ubice grade spomenik srebreničkim žrtvama, Oslobođenje 20 (116), 12 Feb 2003. ———. 2006. Gazda Fondacije je OHR. Oslobođenje 21 (251), 23 Mar 2006. Berić, Gojko. 1998. Srebrenica. Oslobođenje 18 (000), 10 July 1998. Bil Clinton in Srebrenica-Potočari, Spomen obilježje i mezarje. 2003. Organizacioni odbor za obilježavanje 11.jula 1995. Srebrenica. Crna strana istorije srpskog naroda. Oslobođenje 20 (163), 24 June 2004 Dzidic, Denis and Panic, Katarina. 2015. Attack on Vucic at Srebrenica Widely Condemned. Balkaninsight, 13 July 2015. Hasan Nuhanovic, Interview. http://zepskiforum.informe.com/forum/da-sene-zaboravi-f72/11-07-1995-t497.html Hawton, Nick. 2003. Clinton unveils Bosnia memorial. BBC News. http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3124642.stm Hodžić, Šefko. 2000. Da tuga bude nada, da kazna bude pravda. Oslobođenje 19 (178), 12 July 2000. Jahić, V. 1996. Ne damo da nas dijele. Oslobođenje (17) 275, 13 July 1996. Jahić, V. and Hasić, A. 1996. Srebrenica opomena svijetu. Oslobođenje 17 (274), 12 July 1996. Kasalo, S. 1996. Ponovo osramoćene srebreničanke. Oslobođenje 17 (640), 13 July 1997. Katana, G. 2007. Visoki predstavnik prekršio ustav BiH. Oslobođenje 21 (711), 26 July 2007.

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Minarevic Sopta, Martina. 2011. Srebrenica – Srpska mitomanija, Bosnjacka patetika i Hrvatsko nista. Index.hr, 7 July 2011 O.D. 1998. Ubijani zbog imena i vjere. Oslobođenje 17993, 3 July 1998. Omeragić, A. 2004. Srebreničanke traže da Srebrenica i Republika Srpska konačno postanu dio BiH. Oslobođenje 20 (627), 7 July 2004. ———. 2007. Država zasšitnik mezarja u Potočarima. Oslobođenje 21 (711), 26 June 2007 P.A. 1996. Ne kaju se zbog zvjerstava. Oslobođenje 17(273), 13 July 1996. Rožajac, S. 2003. Prikupljeno 8 miliona maraka. Oslobođenje 20 (290), 5 Aug 2003. Smajlović, S. 1998a. Manipulacija Srebreničanima. Oslobođenje 18 (007), 17 July 1998. ———. 1998b. Istina se ne može sakriti. Oslobođenje 18 (009), 19 July 1998. ———. 2000. U Potočarima nijue bilo ni povrijeđenih ni ubijenih. Oslobođenje 19165, 29 June 2000. ———. 2001. Opomena da se zlo ne smije više nikada ponoviti. Oslobođenje 19 (536), 12 July 2001. ———. 2007. Pomoći žrtvama da nose teret jula 1995. Oslobođenje 21 (725), 10 July 2007. Statement of the Embassy of USA in BiH: Monstruozni zločini u Srebrenici su istina. Oslobođenje 19 (957), 6 Sep 2002. Statement of the High Representative in BiH Paddy Ashdown: Izvještaj protivan zdravom razumu. Oslobođenje 19 (955), 4 Sep 2002. T.K. 2002. Počeo rad na lokaciji memorijalnog centra. Bilten Srebrenica 24 (3), Tuzla.

CHAPTER 6

Conflicted Memorials and the Need to Look Forward. The Interplay Between Remembering and Forgetting in Mostar and on the Kosovo Field Gustav Wollentz Within heritage studies, memory is often understood as endangered, while heritage is approached as a medium to counter the fading of memories. This is based on the assumption that the loss of memories is an inherently negative process (Connerton 2008): by forgetting elements of our past we forget elements of ourselves. However, if we accept that forgetting can be an active and even a conscious process (Forty and Küchler 1999), and that all narratives constructed about the past include silencing parts of history (Trouillot 1995), it becomes difficult to maintain this as an unquestioned truth. In other words, forgetting is part of creating who we are and who we want to be. Even though these ideas are not necessarily controversial within heritage studies, their implications are rarely discussed, despite their potential significance for how post-conflict communities may navigate a future that

G. Wollentz (*) The Nordic Centre of Heritage Learning and Creativity, Östersund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. L. S. Sørensen et al. (eds.), Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18091-1_6

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is not totally constrained by their past. Within heritage and memory studies the loss of memories is usually studied in connection with political ­top-­down attempts at controlling and regulating certain narratives of the past, while silencing what is regarded as unwanted ones. Although the motivation behind agreements to forget are varied, they are often forced and can be a real concern for marginalized people. Forgetting is often used as a form of oppression by political institutions (see Anheier and Isar 2011). It is, however, important to recognize cases of deliberate forgetting initiated by individuals themselves as a much-needed deliverance, especially in post-­war contexts. Since memory has spatial dimensions (see Halbwachs 1980: 128, 1992; Nora 1989; Connerton 1989, 2009) and can be stimulated by visual clues, it is clear that memorials may play a highly important role within such processes. Fieldwork carried out in Mostar, Bosnia Herzegovina, and on the Kosovo Field between 2015 and 2016 in the aftermath of the ethno-­ religious wars that touched both these regions during the 1990s, helps to illuminate aspects of constructive forgetting. On the basis of these observations this chapter aims to challenge routinely made assumptions about positive and negative valuations of remembering and forgetting. In the post-war period ethnic identities came to be the primary marker of the heritage of both Bosnia Herzegovina (Makaš 2007) and Kosovo (Herscher 2010), to the exclusion of other values and meanings. A clear-­ cut correlation between specific elements of the heritage and certain ethnic identities has been articulated both through political initiatives within the countries and through the activities of international organizations (Makaš 2007; Walasek 2015). The connection between ethnicity and heritage is aptly illustrated by any studies of the memorials and memorialisation activities in this area; the area therefore also provides a powerful basis for reflecting on future forms and purposes of such cultural practices.

Setting the Scene The past cannot be retrieved as if it were a library filled with books; it is always retrieved through constructed narratives (Trouillot 1995). Jörn Rüsen discusses different types of narratives (1987) and concludes that narratives of mourning and forgiving can be made to serve as “cultural strategies in overcoming ethnocentrism” (Rüsen 2004: 70), through “integrating negative historical experiences into the master narrative of one’s own group” (ibid. 69). By negative historical experiences, Rüsen

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explicitly refers to experiences which challenge the concept of perpetrator (the others) and victim (the own group). This idea is relevant in the ­context of memorials, since they commonly engage with narratives of mourning; but it also raises questions about how mourning and forgiving are physically represented, and about whether the lack of integration of negative historical experiences can explain why some memorials increase ethnocentrism rather than decrease it. Looking at recent memorials within the western world, it has been argued that focus is placed upon the sacrifices of the dead, or even the unexplainable nature of violence (Winter 2008: 69), but rarely on any aspects of forgiving. We may therefore have to ask whether, as Janine Clark states, too much memory can serve as a hindrance to narratives of forgiving (Clark 2013), and as a corollary, whether and how memorials may act beyond past-orientated mourning. Using observations made during fieldwork in post-war Bosnia Herzegovina and Kosovo, it will be argued here that with better insight into why memorials are needed (or not) and contested within post-war contexts it may be possible to understand how to add new and more progressive meanings and values to memorial places. Such potentials are a particular significant concern with regard to memorials which currently are more commonly used to stress ethnocentrism or division. The complexity of memorials is closely related to the fact that violence is a disruptive as well as a creative practice. Michael Jackson wrote “Violence sunders things that belong together, makes passive that which has the power to act, renders inert that which moves, muffles and silences that which speaks, and reduces being to nothingness” (Jackson 2013: 90). During the wars in Bosnia Herzegovina and Kosovo, violence was not only directed towards human beings or strategic targets, but also the heritage itself, which was widely targeted for deliberate destruction (Bevan 2007; Herscher 2010; Riedlmayer 2002; Walasek 2015). Such widespread destruction of heritage is not, however, best approached as the end of a particular memory, but should be understood as an attempt at manifesting (often ethnic) identities of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, calling these identities into being through the practices of destruction (Herscher 2010). Ethnic identities are here understood as the outcome of ways of perceiving and constructing the world, rather than as essential and substantial “things in the world” (Brubaker 2004: 17). Therefore, being such fluid and dynamic constructions, ethnic identities have to be performed, and the destruction of heritage can be one example of such a performance causing the signifiers of identities to be dismantled and giving raise to the need for them to

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be reassembled. Both are processes that draw on and contribute to heritage. These acts of destruction thus serve as “compensations for their [the ethnic identities] otherwise fugitive presence.” (Herscher 2010: 91). Destruction of heritage is simultaneously construction of heritage because heritage is not fixed, it is a continuous meaning-making process which is embodied (Smith 2006) and concerned with assembling futures rather than representing pasts (Harrison 2015; Högberg et al. 2017). However, we also need to consider which particular future claims are assembled through the heritage: shared or divisive ones? It is here that the need to look forward may play a role. In a post-war situation, there is often a desire to forget certain memories, because they are difficult to cope with and prevent moving forward. Due to memories’ spatial dimensions, this desire for forgetting may be projected on to certain physical elements in the landscape, be it a particular monument representing certain values or a ruin that reminds people of the war. This does not mean that memories can and should be erased just by removing a physical construct (see Bille et al. 2010; González-Ruibal and Ortiz 2015; Holtorf 2015), but it means that there may be benefits arising from places that can be orientated towards the future through initiating discussions, activities, or reflections concerning what the future may look like and how the future may be actively shaped through our present-day activities (see Högberg et al. 2017). The significance of future perspectives in a post-war context has been articulated by the social anthropologist Stef Jansen: “To practically engage in a feasible home-making project with regard to a particular place (…) required an ability to invest it with at least some dimensions of a future, with some hope” (Jansen 2009: 57). It follows that for some places, looking forward may add more positive values to a place than looking back. In my fieldwork this was shown by how many people interviewed saw the memorials in Mostar as having increased rather than decreased tension between communities, while ruins that could have served as ideal memorials, often due to having been destroyed during the war, were instead sometimes employed, by young people, for distinctly future-oriented activities, i.e. used as part of political activism, as will be shown later in this chapter. By places of looking forward, I refer to places where individually constructed, and thereby unavoidably plural, aspirations for the future explicitly play a role in how they are experienced. In turn this will inform attitudes to the heritage of these places. Their pluralism will make the heritage of such places open and subject to change. This is different from

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political top-down attempts at employing the past to institutionalize a specific view of the future, since these attempts often serve to silence the plurality of perspectives within a community (Trouillot 1995; Wertsch and Billingsley 2011). Significantly, places of remembrance and places of looking forward are not opposites, but mutually constituted; many memorials include more or less explicit imperatives for the future, often expressed through the idea of ‘never again’ (Macdonald 2009: 95). Furthermore, looking forward does not necessarily mean forgetting crimes against humanity by sweeping them under the carpet. On the contrary, in order for forgetting to ‘work’ it seems that a notion of truth and justice needs to be satisfied – without some kind of closure it is difficult to move forward (see, for example, Viejo-Rose’s discussion of the post Franco ‘Pact of Silence’ in Spain; 2011: 150–195). I do, however, suggest that it is occasionally important to accept that there are incidents in wartime which people do not need to be constantly reminded about, and that there may be ways to add new and more progressive values to places connected to such incidents. The complex interplay between imagining the future and remembering the past in the aftermath of conflict, or between a desire for change and forgetting, and a need for stability and continuity, is often embodied by memorials. In the western world, a growing acknowledgement of this complexity has led to a move from memorials consisting of concrete figures of war heroes or national symbols, to attempts at materializing absences, signifying loss (Winter 2008: 69). In this context, monuments have sometimes been replaced by ‘empty’, unmarked rooms or buildings (such as in Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, Walther 2012) or by spaces/landscapes (as in the commemoration plan for the World Trade Center, Bevan 2007: 198–199). However, within Mostar and the field of Kosovo, such ‘empty’ or ‘open’ memorials have not been constructed after the 1990s wars, raising questions about the narratives communicated by the public memorials and places of memorialization at these sites. Do they only communicate narratives of mourning, or do they also contain messages about forgiving, and if not, what kind of futures do they assemble? With these questions in mind, the case studies provide us with a means of critically discussing the interplay of remembering and forgetting, as it manifests itself through specific memorials and practices of commemoration, or, as is also the case, through specific practices of looking towards the future rather than the past, as well as practices which may serve as acts of deliberate forgetting and/or distancing to the past.

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Memorials in Mostar Mostar is usually presented in  local media and in academia as a divided city, consisting of a Bosnian Croat-dominated Western side and a Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak)-dominated Eastern side (for the issue of ethnic categorization in Bosnia and Herzegovina see Bringa 1995 and Sorabji 1995). Most of the official memorials can be approached in the light of this division, because there are no monuments commemorating all the victims from the two sieges of Mostar between 1992 and 1994 (Makaš 2007). Furthermore, there are tensions concerning the memorials as illustrated by the destruction in January 2013 of a memorial for the army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was erected close to the city hall on the so-called western part of the city (http://www.balkaninsight. com/en/article/memorial-dedicated-to-bosnian-army-members-blownup, accessed 23 August 2018). In 2016, nearly four years after its detonation, the monument still stands in ruins (Fig.  6.1). Many of those

Fig. 6.1  The detonated monument for the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. (Source: Author 2015)

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interviewed interpret this as a conscious attempt by politicians to enforce the memory of a divided city. Whether this is true or not, it showcases that memory is a political and contentious tool in Mostar. The fixation on division does, however, fail to reveal the complexity within the city. I have argued elsewhere that the constant focus on division hides more than it illuminates (Wollentz 2017), since it insinuates a static image of two (ethnic) peoples frozen in an eternal antagonism, rather than a dynamic city of persons interacting and communicating (cf. Duijzings 2000: 207). There are multiple other perceived divisions alongside and sometimes underlying ethnic identities, including that between ‘civilized’ (urban) and ‘uncivilized’ (rural) (Stefansson 2007), between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people (Kolind 2007), ordinary people and corrupt people (Hromadžić 2013), and between different generations (Palmberger 2010, 2016). In sum, there are several identities present in the city other than simply Croat or Bosniak (i.e. Jansen 2010). If we follow the social theorist Rogers Brubaker then “(e)thnicity, race, and nation should be conceptualized (…) rather in relational, processual, dynamic, eventful, and disaggregated terms.” (Brubaker 2004: 12) If this conceptualization is not undertaken, there is a risk in enforcing ethnocentrism (see also Carabelli 2016, 2018). Where does this leave us with regard to the memorials of Mostar? Through the interviews conducted it became clear that the official memorials dotted around Mostar are seen by most of the people I interviewed as a political and forced attempt at constructing memory, in which specific onesided views of a divided past are reinforced in the present and aimed towards a future of division. Many of the interviewees expressed that they are tired of a city filled with so many memorials but with so little meaning in terms of mourning and forgiving. The whole process is often regarded as a political charade. It need not be so. In her study, Emily Makaš highlights sites within the city with the potential for joint mourning but which have not been used in such a way. An example is the burial site at Liska Street in the western part of the city. Prior to the removal and reburial of most of the Croat people who were buried there,1 this burial site included victims of the war from both the Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat population (Makaš 2007: 287–292). The general impression, based on my interview data, and also found in other research undertaken (see for example Nikolić 2012), is that for many people in Mostar the official memorials and practices of commemoration have little positive meaning in terms of overcoming ethnocentrism. On the contrary, among my interview partners, these

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practices are often perceived to feed division by being controlled politically and by focusing on messages of victimhood and suffering rather than conveying inclusive messages (for a more detailed account of the role of memorials and memorial practices in Mostar see Makaš 2007; Nikolić 2012; Palmberger 2016). Let us instead turn to the ruins within the city.

The Ruins of Mostar: Contested Places of Remembrance and Activism The problematic aspect of memorials raises the question of how, where, and why specific memories of the war should be materialized. Ruins have come to represent a different form of memorialization in Mostar, and if we accept that heritage is not solely concerned with representing pasts, but also of assembling futures (Harrison 2015), we need to ask what kind of future claims and visions the ruins assemble, and if these represent futures where people could feel that they belong (see also Jansen 2007, 2009), in other words: futures that people aspire to live in. During a recent international conference (World Archaeology Congress, Kyoto, September 2016), a discussion opened up about whether the famous Ottoman bridge Stari Most (Fig.  6.2), which was destroyed in November 1993 due to shelling from the HVO (Croatian Defence Council), should have been reconstructed at all. This discussion was probably inspired by examples such as the Frauenkirche in Dresden, Germany, where the ruin of the church was an important and contested place of remembrance, while the reconstructed church lost some of that significance (Rehberg and Neutzner 2015). In the introduction to The Art of Forgetting, Adrian Forty writes: “The lesson of both the Dresden and the Moscow projects is that the filling of a void, whose emptiness has exercised diverse collective memories, ends by excluding all but a single dominant one.” (Forty 1999: 10) Drawing on two cases, the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche and the rebuilding of Christ the Saviour church in Moscow, Forty makes a general statement concerning the problem of filling ‘voids’. However, may there not be cases where there is a danger in not filling a void, depending on the various practices of remembering that this void is employed for and the futures assembled through these practices? Even though the reconstruction process of Stari Most can and should be ­criticized (Grodach 2002; Walasek 2015: 212–215), the vast majority of people I interviewed in Mostar were very happy that the ‘new’ old bridge was reconstructed. People often told me that Mostar would not be Mostar

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Fig. 6.2  Stari Most. (Source: Author 2015)

if the bridge was not there. The bridge was commonly referred to as a family member or even as part of the body of the person. One person emotionally told me that he did not think he would survive if it was destroyed a second time. It seems as if the reconstructed bridge is important since it can help manifest a sense of stability and permanence within the city, primarily through the practices (for instance diving from it or simply crossing it) occurring on and in relation to it (see Connor 2015). When interviewing older people about the ruins as a form of memorial, the idea was often met with incredulity. For example, an elderly woman living in the area of the old city of Mostar, told me: “It is ugly to see them. It reminds me of bad memories of the war. I am also angry at tourists who are coming here to take photos of buildings that are destroyed and of the bullet holes. Why are they taking pictures of something that is so ugly?“ For this woman, the ruins are not only unnecessary reminders of a war of which she does not need constant reminders, they are also ugly. The picture of the Mostar that she considers as home is one

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of a beautiful city. One hotel owner in his fifties, living in the old city, also seemed to get angry, “It is sick to even think that someone leaves buildings in their destroyed state just to remind you of the war. I cannot believe that someone has theories that these buildings are left to remind people. It is a sick theory. How can a human mind be that sick to think of such a theory?” The perspective of ruins as ugly and unnecessary reminders of war is often contrasted with people’s own personal memories of Mostar as a city that was and should be beautiful. Pre-war Mostar is explained as a ‘normal’ and ‘beautiful’ city, whereas the ruins are seen as a hindrance to achieve the same state of beautiful permanence that was found before. However, this should not be misinterpreted as suggesting that most people would like the ruins to simply be destroyed and replaced with new buildings, as highlighted by the protests in January 2017 against the destruction of the ruin of an important Austrian Hungarian building built in 1900 by the architect Josip Vancaš (https://dpumh. org/2017/01/16/o-donosenju-odluka-i-degradaciji-urbanogatkiva-mostara-uz-najavljeno-rusenje-ostataka-robne-kuce-nama/ accessed 23 August 2018). The protests argued for a reconstruction (partially or completely) of the building rather than gradually demolishing it, as has been proposed by SDA (the largest Bosnian Muslim political party). This further exemplifies the need to move towards normality expressed by several of the interviewees, a normality which is being represented by the imagined/remembered beauty of Pre-war Mostar. However, the situation of the ruins in Mostar is more complex, partly due to the generally unruly character of ruins (DeSilvey 2017; Moshenska 2014, 2015). For many young people, some of the ruins have become places of meeting and gathering. The walls of the ruins are constantly painted with graffiti with messages mostly relating to football and politics (from all sides of the political spectrum). Artwork is also made in them, and political activism is sometimes expressed through them (see also Carabelli 2018: 148–149). Some of the ruins even serve as vibrant and future-oriented pieces of heritage, vastly contrasting the picture expressed by older people. The ruin close to The Old Gymnasium (Gimnazija Mostar), which was used as a university library before the war, is an example of such appropriation. The entrance to the ruin has been declared a fascist-free zone through graffiti. Furthermore, when visiting the site an art installation was found inside the ruin (Fig. 6.3 and 6.4). However, the young people told me that the ruins are not used for this purpose due to their connection to war and trauma, but first and foremost because they

Fig. 6.3  A ruin (a building used as a university library before the war) was declared a fascist free zone. (Source: Author 2016)

Fig. 6.4  An art installation inside a ruin consisting of wrapped papers hanging down from the trees. (Source: M Barišić)

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can serve as zones where they can meet and act without adults interfering. Therefore, for the young people of Mostar, the ruins do not specifically serve as memorials, but rather as zones where they can escape the kind of rules of conduct that would be expected in a normal house or public space. This makes these spaces ideal for being transformed into places of youth activism, which is primarily concerned with looking forward, not backward. However, not necessarily exclusively, see Wollentz et al. (2019) for an account of how the socialist past in former Yugoslavia is employed in forward-oriented youth activism. This is not based on ignorance of the past, the young people are well aware of the war that caused these buildings to stand in ruin, rather it can be interpreted as a way for some young people to gain a certain degree of authority over the past. By these forms of youth activism, the narratives of suffering and victimhood that may otherwise be generated through the ruins are challenged, and more ­progressive (forward-oriented) values and meanings are highlighted. In sum, the use of these ruins by many young people in the city, employs a different form of memorial practice, which is often distinctly engaging with the ruins through looking towards the future instead of the past. This kind of practice is concerned with denying significance to negative narratives specifically related to these ruins as ruins, where they play a role within narratives of victimhood and suffering, towards more progressive values and meanings. Through this it becomes clear that the ruins may be employed within different memory-practices depending on which generation the persons belong to, and that these practices involve various negotiations of how specific pasts are made meaningful (or denied relevance) in the present.

Gazimestan: A Place of Avoidance in Kosovo The memorial space in Kosovo is different from that of Mostar. The vast majority of the population in Kosovo are Kosovo Albanians, whereas Serbians mostly live in protected enclaves. It is less than 20 years since the war ended, and the Serbian government has still to recognize the independence of Kosovo. In Kosovo, the memorials are usually statues of men who fought in the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army), built in socialist style (for discussions of the war see Judah 2000). Instead of looking at the memorials of the recent war (see Di Lellio and Schwandner-Sievers 2006; Germizaj 2011; Krasniqi 2011; Maliqi 2014; Sweeney 2015), I will discuss what I identify as a ‘place of avoidance’, namely the Gazimestan monument on the field of Kosovo, a few kilometres northwest of Pristina (Fig. 6.5). My focus is on the place as present-day heritage.2

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Fig. 6.5  Gazimestan monument. (Source: Author)

The monument was constructed by the architect Aleksandar Deroko, on commission from the Serbian government in Belgrade in 1953, in remembrance of the medieval Battle of Kosovo of 1389, between the Ottomans and a coalition of Christian forces. The myth of this battle has been highly misused by Serbian politicians as well as religious leaders to claim an ‘eternal’ right to the land of Kosovo, opposed to the Kosovo Albanians (Bieber 2002; Colović 2011; Djokić 2009; Duijzings 2000: 176–202, 2005). In recent years this rhetoric of entitlement was most famously expressed when Slobodan Milošević gave a speech at the site in 1989, at the 600th anniversary of the battle. At every so-called Vidovdan, a celebration held annually at the anniversary of the battle on the 28th of June, Serbians gather at the Gazimestan monument, singing nationalistic songs and wearing nationalistic clothes (Fig. 6.6). Because of the outright provocations taking place, these remembrance practices in their present-­ day form exacerbate tension within the region. The practices have less to do with history, and more with the reconstruction of the past in the pres-

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Fig. 6.6  The celebration of Vidovdan 28th of June 2016, on top of Gazimestan. (Source: Author)

ent and using it to make claims on the future (Connerton 1989; see also Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Sadly, the future envisioned through these institutionalized practices is of a Kosovo divided between Kosovo Albanians and Serbians. Today, the monument is guarded 24 hours a day by police, as well as surrounded by a high fence. However, the Battle of Kosovo is not exclusively used to spread hatred and xenophobia, but also holds varying degrees of significance for many ‘regular’ (i.e. not particular political or nationalistic fundamentalist) Serbian families, for whom the monument helps to feel a sense of belonging within Kosovo today, where they are a minority. The role and purpose of Vidovdan as a tradition has changed throughout times and will continue to do so (Ćirković 2004: 85; Duijzings 2000: 176–202, 2005; Emmert 1990: 142), and as a tradition it is not inherently either positive or negative. It is, therefore, more insightful to focus on the specific activities carried out in connection with the tradition, and on the various actors exploiting the myth within their own personal and/or nationalistic agendas. Such cases of nationalistic/politicised use can be very different from how ‘regular’ Serbian families experience and take part in the tradition, with varying degrees of commitment and significance.

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To add a further complexity, Albanians also fought in the medieval battle and there is an oral tradition about the battle among some Kosovo Albanians, as documented by Anna Di Lellio (2009). This aspect is largely neglected in academia and by the media, and it is also absent from the text panels on the monument itself. The latter, moreover, are only in Cyrillic, reinforcing the impression that this was solely a Serbian battle. Interviews conducted with people who live at or near the site of the battle, who are primarily Kosovo Albanians, reveal strategies of coping with a place which is politically used against them. The primary strategy is to transform it into a place of avoidance. For example, people who before the war used to visit the area for picnics (or other leisurely activities) because of the beauty of the landscape, no longer visit it. Several of those interviewed expressed reluctance against visiting or going near the place, without any apparent or explicit reason. Those among the Kosovo Albanian population who said that they still go to the place were almost exclusively people who work professionally with the heritage of the area, who sometimes take visitors there to show them the site. People often told me that they were not visiting the site because it had no meaning for them, neither positive nor negative. One woman in her thirties, who was working at the municipality in Obilić (also known as Kastriot), close to the Gazimestan monument, described Gazimestan as a more or less forgotten monument, the kind of monument people go by without noticing or visiting. Later on in the interview it became clear that she knew that Serbians were still using the monument on Vidovdan, but that she did not wish to discuss that topic. In general, many people interviewed were uncomfortable speaking about the way some Serbians use the monument. One unemployed man in his early forties, living in Obilić, who had fought in the KLA and who was still traumatized by his experiences from the war, called the monument “ours”, as in Kosovo Albanian. This does not mean that he deemed the heritage of the site important. He wanted to explain that if Kosovo Albanians had been bothered with the monument they would have destroyed it. However, it is not destroyed because it means “nothing for us”. A second, related strategy of coping with the site, is to produce trivializing narratives. As one man in his forties working as an archaeologist and living in Pristina, explained to me: But Serbs they celebrate it, they call it Vidovdan. They celebrate it everywhere, and they are very … actually they are very proud of this feast [humour in his voice]. But to tell the truth, for me it is a very, I would even say tragic-­ comical situation because you are celebrating a loss!

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This process can be understood through Sharon Macdonald’s work on undesirable heritage, in which she argues for a process of banalization as part of disputing the very status of a place of heritage (Macdonald 2006, 2009). If heritage is regarded as a legitimizing discourse that is sacral and undisputable in nature, acts of trivializing it are attempts at ‘profanation’ which make the place ‘non-sacral’, and thus not part of the heritage even if it is part of the past (Macdonald 2009: 80–101). Furthermore, humour is an empowering element in narrations, since it gives a liberating sense of distance from sensitive memories (Jackson 2013: 176). The disputed nature of Gazimestan as heritage can be illustrated through the following quote from the same man: Now, to tell the truth, I have never talked about this before in the context that I have no good feelings towards that monument. Now I realize it. GW: Now you realize it? Now, during this interview, I realize that I am a little bit agitated. Why we, the Kosovo Albanians, didn’t do any resistance to say: “no, this is not only your monument, this is also our monument!” (…) We didn’t do our part.

It seems that a new realization struck this man during the interview, which also shows how any kind of fieldwork is part of a creative and active process which may create new narratives and meanings about heritage. This interview also suggests that these strategies of attachment or non-­ attachment are often operating on a level which may not be completely conceptualized; they are embodied, incorporated, and often routinized, remaining subconscious (cf. Connerton 1989). They can serve as strategies to cope with places which act as spatial reminders of unwanted memories. However, such strategies do not always work, as this unemployed man in his forties, living in Obilić, told me: I would destroy it [Gazimestan monument] completely and also ten meters beneath it. To remove it with its roots. So that we could never remember it again. Like, for example, if I go with my children, he [the child] wants to know what it is about, [and] when I decide to talk about it: that every year I had a traumatic day when they [Serbs] came. So I would remove it and not talk about it at all. GW: Not talk about it with your children even? No, no. I don’t want them to know about it. GW: Do you think it can be important to remember some things?

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At least it should be removed physically. From the mind it can never be removed. Just not to be seen, because it is always in the mind. (…) I don’t want to explain this to my child, and tomorrow, [that he has] bad feeling to Serbs (…). So I want it to be deleted and my children in the future to have good relationships with everyone.

These words suggest that strategies of avoidance and trivializing are not always successful in making the place less sensitive or politically loaded. The wish for the absence of a particular memory can result in the wish for certain spatial features to be removed, even though no such correlation can be drawn in practice. As was argued previously, destruction is a generative act, and there is no certainty that it will lead to a decrease in remembering practices. Taking other cases of destruction into consideration, it is even likely that it may increase these forms of practices (see Bille et al. 2010; Holtorf 2015; González-Ruibal and Ortiz 2015). Since it is the institutionalized practices, rather than the monument itself, which exacerbate tension in the region, such an act of destruction would most likely increase rather than decrease ethnocentrism. It is significant to highlight that the vast majority of those interviewed among the Kosovo Albanian population had no desire to see the monument destroyed, but were coping with it through the above-mentioned strategies, making the monument insignificant and trivial, locating it as part of the past which should still be present in the landscape, but which is best left forgotten and unvisited. In practice, what could be done about the Gazimestan monument is not to destroy it but to add new values to it, through including more perspectives at the site, i.e. pluralizing the past (see Ashworth et al. 2007). By adding text panels in the Albanian language stating that Albanians also fought in the battle and that there is an oral tradition about the battle in certain areas among the Kosovo Albanian population, the singular narrative presented at the moment would be challenged. This might make the monument less exclusive and more open for a discussion and negotiation concerning the current status and role of the place as heritage (or not heritage). This perspective was shared among the Kosovo Albanians I interviewed who professionally worked with the heritage of the region. However, it was also expressed that such an initiative had to be shared with Serbs and that it had to be a slow and gradual process. The Gazimestan monument raises the question of whether the monument, in its current state and role, is best left trivialized and avoided by

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the Kosovo Albanian population, and that it may be precisely through the acts of avoidance and trivialization that the monument is being given a future. In other words, perhaps by denying the monument significance and relevance, an alternative future may be assembled, other than the one of ethnocentric division which is currently being presented through the one-sided text panels at the site and manifested through the practices of commemoration on Vidovdan. Through these strategies, the monument can still be left within the landscape. Even though this does not specifically serve to create any hopeful narratives of mourning and forgiving, it may be more positive and progressive than the narratives of ethnocentrism that could otherwise easily be generated within the current situation.

Conclusion The discussion of attitudes towards the ruins in Mostar and of the avoidance of the Gazimestan monument in Kosovo suggests that in our understanding of memorials we need to consider not only how they refer to the past, but also whether and how they can act as places for looking forward, and/or places of permanence/continuity. These aspects need not be mutually exclusive. In Mostar, for many older people the ruins are ugly reminders of unpleasant memories, a hindrance to achieving a state of stability and permanence, while for many young people they can serve as future-oriented zones of activism, where narratives of ‘suffering’ and ‘victimhood’ are challenged for more progressive values and meanings. In the field of Kosovo, the Gazimestan monument may be given a future precisely through strategies that serve to deny it relevance. More precisely, by locating the monument as an insignificant part of the past, strategies of trivialization and avoidance may serve to deny significance to the narratives of ethnocentrism that the monument would otherwise help to create in its present-day form and through the present-day activities at the site. Consequently, I advocate a more nuanced approach to memories, which does not view remembering or forgetting as inherently either ­positive or negative, and which could propose multiple ways of transforming places of heritage in terms of future aspirations beyond divided and conflicted communities. Importantly, this is not about seeing a value in forgetting as opposed to remembering, or an encouragement of ignoring

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the past, but about recognizing the value and potential of heritage as an empowering tool to envision different futures. Acknowledgements  During the field work conducted I received crucial help from Marko Barišić, Damir Ugljen, Dea Luma and Edona Rugova, who helped me as translators during several of the interviews and through stimulating discussions. Furthermore, I have to thank Cornelius Holtorf, Antonia Davidovic, Artur Ribeiro, Milinda Hoo and Marko Barišić for commenting on earlier drafts of this chapter, giving me valuable suggestions improving the chapter, as well as Paola Filippucci and Marie Louise Stig Sørensen for perceptive comments sharpening the arguments. Another thank you goes to Johannes Müller, Vedrana Tutiš Šimunović, Milot Berisha, Boban Todorović, Enver Rexha, Haxhi Methmetaj, Tatjana Mićević-Durić, Ivanka Miličević-Capek and the reviewers. Finally, I thank the editors for asking me to contribute to this volume. I also owe a large debt towards all the anonymous interview partners, who gave me their time and insights. The project was funded by the DFG through the Graduate School Human Development in Landscapes, Kiel University, Grant Name: GSC 208/2.

Note About the Fieldwork The field work was carried out during several visits to Mostar and Kosovo in 2015 and 2016. More precisely, the field work in Mostar consisted of 22 in depth interviews with 24 people generally lasting between one and two hours, carried out in April and May 2015, as well as in May 2016. The focus of the interviews was on people who experienced the war from within Mostar but also on people in the city professionally working with the heritage. I was also spending a lot of time with, and befriending, many young activists in Mostar, getting a perspective of how the heritage could be employed through youth activism. The field work in Kosovo consists of 26 in-depth interviews with 29 people, carried out in November and December 2015, March 2016 as well as in June 2016. The focus was on people who experienced the war from within Kosovo, from both the Serbian and Albanian population, and who currently live close to or at the site of where the medieval battle is supposed to have taken place. I also observed the Vidovdan celebration at the Gazimestan monument on the 28th of June 2016. The interviews were carried out in Serbo-Croatian, Albanian and when possible, English. For the interviews in Serbo-Croatian and Albanian I relied on translators, as thanked in the acknowledgements, with whom I worked closely. The research was part of a PhD project conducted at the Graduate School Human Development in Landscapes, Kiel University, 2014–2018.

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Notes 1. The joint burial at Liska Street led to a tragic incident of violence, when on Bayram in 1997, a group of a few hundred Bosnian Muslims, including the then Mayor Safet Oručević, approached the cemetery in order to pay their respect to the victims. The west Mostar Police began beating them with batons as soon as they crossed the boulevard into west Mostar. Eventually, the west Mostar police started firing into the crowd, killing one man and injuring several others. Since then, most of the Bosnian Croats buried at Liska Street have been exhumed and buried elsewhere (Makaš 2007: 287–292). 2. For those interested in the historical battle, see Fine (1987), Emmert (1990), Vucinich and Emmert (1991), Malcolm (1998: 140), Ćirković (2004: 77–119), and see Rexha (2009) for a historiography of Serbian research written from a Kosovo Albanian perspective.

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Herscher, A. 2010. Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict. California: Stanford University Press. Hobsbawm, E., and T. Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Högberg, A., C.  Holtorf, S.  May, and G.  Wollentz. 2017. No Future in Archaeological Heritage Management? World Archaeology 49 (5): 639–647. Holtorf, C. 2015. Averting Loss Aversion in Cultural Heritage. International Journal of Heritage Studies 21 (4): 405–421. Hromadžić, A. 2013. Discourses of Trans-Ethnic Narod in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 41 (1): 259–275. Jackson, M. 2013. The Politics of Storytelling: Variations on a Theme by Hannah Arendt. 2nd ed. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Jansen, S. 2007. Troubled Locations: Return, the Life Course, and Transformations of ‘Home’ in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Focaal—European Journal of Anthropology 49: 15–30. https://doi.org/10.3167/foc.2007.490103. ———. 2009. Hope and the State in the Anthropology of Home: Preliminary Notes. In Ethnologia Europaea, ed. O.  Löfgren and R.  Bendix. Journal of European Ethnology, 39: 54–60. ———. 2010. Of Wolves and Men: Postwar Reconciliation and the Gender of Inter-National Encounters. Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 57: 33–49. https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2010.570103. Judah, T. 2000. Kosovo: War and Revenge. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kolind, T. 2007. In Search of “Decent People”: Resistance to Ethnicization of Everyday Life Among the Muslims of Stolac. In The New Bosnian Mosaic. Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society, ed. X. Bougarel, E. Helms, and G. Duijzings, 123–138. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Krasniqi, E. 2011. Memorials in Kosovo Today. Made in KS: Periodical Dedicated to Learning from the Past in Kosovo 6, Pristina. Macdonald, S. 2006. Undesirable Heritage: Fascist Material Culture and Historical Consciousness in Nuremberg. International Journal of Heritage Studies 12 (1): 9–28. ———. 2009. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. London: Routledge. Makaš, E. 2007. Representing Competing Identities: Building and Rebuilding in Postwar Mostar, Bosnia-Hercegovina. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Cornell University. Malcolm, N. 1998. Kosovo: A Short History. London: Macmillan. Maliqi, S. 2014. The War of Symbols: Remembrance in Kosovo. In Monument: The Changing Face of Remembrance, ed. D.  Brumund and C. Pfeifer, 28–29. Belgrade: Forum ZFD.

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Moshenska, G. 2014. Children in Ruins. Bombsites as Playgrounds in Second World War Britain. In Ruin Memories: Materialities, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past, ed. B.  Olsen and Þ. Pétursdóttir, 230–249. London: Routledge. ———. 2015. Curated Ruins and the Endurance of Conflict Heritage. Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites 17 (1): 77–90. Nikolić, D. 2012. Tre städer, två broar och ett museum. Minne, politik och världsarv i Bosnien och Hercegovina. PhD Thesis, Lund University. Nora, P. 1989. Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Memory and Counter Memory 26: 7–24. Palmberger, M. 2010. Distancing Personal Experiences from the Collective: Discursive Tactics Among Youth in Post-War Mostar. L’Europe en formation 357: 107–124. ———. 2016. How Generations Remember. Conflicting Histories and Shared Memories in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rehberg, K.S., and M. Neutzner. 2015. The Dresden Frauenkirche as a Contested Symbol: The Architecture of Remembrance after War. In War and Cultural Heritage: Biographies of Place, ed. M.L.S. Sørensen and D. Viejo-Rose, 98–127. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rexha, E. 2009. Historiografia Serbe Per Kosoven (XIII–XIX). Prishtine. Riedlmayer, A. 2002. Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992–1996: A Post-War Survey of Selected Municipalities. Bosnia-Herzegovina Cultural Heritage Report. Cambridge, MA. Rüsen, J. 1987. Historical Narration: Foundation, Types, Reason. In History and Theory (6;4;24) The Representation of Historical Events, 87–97.  New Jersey: Wiley for Wesleyan University. ———. 2004. How to Overcome Ethnocentrism: Approaches to a Culture of Recognition by History in the 21st Century. Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies (June): 59–74. New Jersey: Wiley for Wesleyan University. Smith, L. 2006. Uses of Heritage. New York: Routledge. Sorabji, C. 1995. A Very Modern War: Terror and Territory in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In War, a Cruel Necessity?: The Bases of Institutionalized Violence, ed. R. Hinde and H.E. Watson, 80–95. London: Tauris. Stefansson, A. 2007. Urban Exile: Locals, Newcomers and the Cultural Transformation of Sarajevo. In The New Bosnian Mosaic. Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society, ed. X.  Bougarel, E.  Helms, and G. Duijzings, 59–77. London: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Sweeney, J. 2015. Post-War Memorialisation and Dealing with the Past in the Republic of Kosovo. Pristina: Centre for Research, Documentation and Publication (CRDP).

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Trouillot, M.R. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Viejo-Rose, D. 2011. Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Heritage and Memory After Civil War. Brighton: Sussex Academic. Vucinich, W., and T.  Emmert, eds. 1991. Kosovo: Legacy of a Medieval Battle. Minnesota: University of Minnesota. Walasek, H. 2015. Bosnia and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage. London: Routledge. Walther, S. 2012. “Imagined Communities” in Contemporary Holocaust Exhibitions of the 1990s. A Comparison of Berlin und London. In National Museums and the Negotiation of Difficult Pasts, ed. D. Poulot, J.M. Lanzarote Gurial and F. Bodenstein. EuNaMus Report (8): 91–109. Wertsch, J., and Doc M.  Billingsley. 2011. The Role of Narratives in Commemoration: Remembering as Mediated Action. In Heritage, Memory and Identity, ed. H. Anheier and Y. Raj Isar, 25–38. London: Sage Publications. Winter, J. 2008. Sites of Memory and the Shadow of War. In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. A.  Erll and A. Nüning, 61–74. Berlin: de Gruyter. Wollentz, G. 2017. Making a Home in Mostar: Heritage and the Temporalities of Belonging. International Journal of Heritage Studies 23 (10): 928–945. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1347891. Wollentz, G., M. Barišić, and N. Sammar. 2019. Youth Activism and Dignity in Postwar Mostar – Envisioning a Shared Future Through Heritage. Space and Polity 23 (2): 197–215. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2019.1635443.

Internet References http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/memorial-dedicated-to-bosnian-army-members-blown-up. Retrieved 23 Aug 2018. https://dpumh.org/2017/01/16/o-donosenju-odluka-i-degradacijiurbanoga-tkiva-mostara-uz-najavljeno-rusenje-ostataka-robne-kuce-nama/. Retrieved 23 Aug 2018.

CHAPTER 7

The Dudik Memorial Complex: Commemoration and Changing Regimes in the Contested City of Vukovar Britt Baillie

A Memorial Betwixt and Between Socialist Yugoslavia’s1 war memorials were erected between the Second World War, which resulted in the formation of the state, and the wars of the 1990s that violently ripped it apart. They were created in a non-aligned country that was attempting to foster a middle way between the two Cold War blocs and their respective ideologies (Thaler et al. 2012). As vehicles of Bratstvo i Jedinstvo (Brotherhood and Unity), they attempted to suture the wounds between the belligerent ethnic groups. Their creators walked the fine line between producing works of art and propaganda. These memorials mediated a relationship between times: negotiating a convoluted past in transition towards a future socialist utopia (Burghardt and Kirn 2014: 122). Today, as the successor states move from war towards peace, these memorials are caught in between, mired in the memory wars that characterise ‘conflict-time’ (Baillie 2013). They remain marked by

B. Baillie (*) Wits City Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa © The Author(s) 2019 M. L. S. Sørensen et al. (eds.), Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18091-1_7

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their “in-betweenness, symbolizing not only the socialist past and antifascist struggle but also a past that has been appropriated differently by different people” (Begić and Mraović 2014: 14 emphasis mine). As signifiers of both the promises and failures of socialism, their meanings and values are, and always have been, brokered “between [the] various voices” of affected relatives, veteran groups, politicians, local residents, artists, and academics (Videkanic 2013: 7, 145, emphasis mine). In their prime, Socialist Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist memorials and monuments attracted millions of visitors. There was barely a village in the country which did not have a war memorial. Stylistically, they range from ground breaking iconic modernist works to parochial realist sculptures. Together they form(ed) a network of symbolic sites that still generate a consciously constructed Yugoslav space (Kirn 2016: 118). After Yugoslavia fragmented, some were destroyed or removed, whilst others have been meticulously repaired and/or celebrated. Today, as their meanings are renegotiated “rather than exclamation points for their time, they [have] become enigmatic question marks in contemporary space” (Osborne 2001: 19). As products of a politically and ideologically convoluted war, Yugoslavia’s memorials were immediately embroiled in the ‘red-black’ (Pavlaković and Perak 2017: 268) ideological divisions of the region. Socialist Yugoslavia itself has a complex legacy—Croat (ultra)nationalists view it as a period of thinly masked Serbian hegemony, whilst Yugo-­ nostalgists regard it as ‘common’ or ‘shared’ past marked by peace and prosperity (Begić and Mraović 2014: 14). For (ultra) nationalist Serbs, it is the crimes of the Ustaše (Croat fascist ultranationalists, who ruled Croatia from 1941–1945), against their co-ethnics whose victims many of these memorials commemorate, which drives their continued commemorative importance. After the violent collapse of Yugoslavia, these memorials continue to cast their long shadows over present-day actions and understandings. This is seen, for example, in Croatia and within that country nowhere is it more pertinent than in the highly fraught border city of Vukovar. This chapter explores the biography of the Dudik memorial complex in Vukovar, Croatia. From 1941 to 1943 the Ustaše used Dudik as an execution ground. The majority of those executed were ethnic Serbs, who were accused, according to Buljan (1984), of aiding and abetting the Partisans. Yet, here, and across Socialist Yugoslavia, the dead were Yugoslavised: “retroactively reinterpreted as politically active victims” whilst their ethnic

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identities were downplayed (Karge 2012: 108). In response to ‘failed’ attempts to ‘appropriately’ convey the party’s slogan of Brotherhood and Unity at Dudik, Bogdan Bogdanović, one of Socialist Yugoslavia’s premier memorial designers, was drafted in to convert it into a key node in Yugoslavia’s memorialscape. However, the state “cracked as rapidly” as the memorials “most emphatically celebrating it” (Schrader 2014: 9). In 1991, the three-month siege of Vukovar was described by Bogdanović as an episode of ‘urbicide’—the ‘ritual’ killing of a city because it is a place of (the memory of) pluralism (Bogdanović 1994). The Dudik Memorial Park was badly damaged in the fighting that ensued. This siege was the harbinger of the urban warfare which epitomised the collapse of Yugoslavia. Ultimately, Croats were ethnically cleansed from the city. This asymmetrical battle, pitted approximately 2000 branitelji (defenders) against the Yugoslav National Army, the fourth largest army in Europe at the time. For Croats, the siege transformed Vukovar into the Grad Heroj (Hero City) (Banjeglav 2012: 12). Subsequently, the collective memory of Dudik as a Second World War memorial has been eclipsed by Croatia’s overriding concentration on commemorating the victims of the more recent ‘Homeland War’. After its partial conversion into a football club by branitelji, a heterogeneous group have appropriated and restored some of the Dudik complex. In what is today an ethnically divided city, this counter hegemonic project highlights the fragility of memorials as permanent loci of remembrance and begs the question of what role Socialist Yugoslavia’s memorials will play in the future.

A Place of Execution On 6 April 1941, Axis powers invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. On 10 April an Ustaša government was set up in the newly-formed Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska- NDH). Days later, the arrests of ethnic Serbs, Jews, Roma and suspected Communist sympathizers began (Gojko and Majski 1977: 24). The Ustaša Minister of Legislation, Milovan Žanić stated “there is no method that we as Ustasha will not use to make this country truly Croatian and clean it of Serbs…” (quoted in Sindbæk 2012: 31). For many, after the erection of a transit camp on the grounds of the Eltz Manor, Vukovar became just a gateway to the concentration camps at Jasenovac, Gradiška, and further afield. By the end of the war, although estimates vary, approximately 300,000 or 15% of the NDH’s Serb population had been killed (Sindbæk 2012: 34).

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The Partisans led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia under the command of Josip Broz Tito, became one of Europe’s most effective anti-­ ­ Axis resistance movements. Having been banned in 1921, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia worked through extremely repressive conditions to ultimately become a force which could unite many of Yugoslavia’s constituent groups against the Axis powers with relatively limited external assistance. Although allegiances shifted, the Partisans at times fought both the Ustaše and Četniks2 as well as the wider Axis forces (Malcolm 1996: 188). Although the Communist Party’s Second Congress had been hosted in Vukovar in 1920, support for the Partisans within the city itself was initially limited (Majski 1985: 29). However, Serbs residing in the NDH began to swell the ranks of the Partisans as they fled “the Ustaša terror” (Pavlaković and Perak 2017: 274). In response to the shooting of an Ustaša member in the nearby village of Bobota on 25 July 1941, the authorities rounded up and arrested residents seemingly at random (Buljan 1984). After a summary hearing without adequate representation, the accused were executed at the edge of Vukovar’s southern suburb of Mitnice in a field where the dudik (mulberry) grew. The violence escalated in 1942 as Partisan forces fighting under the slogan ‘Not a grain of wheat for the Occupant’ sought to prevent the Ustaše and German forces from reaping the harvest from Slavonia ‘the breadbasket of Yugoslavia’ (Majski 1985: 31; Sekulić 1978: 6). With tensions rising and skirmishes breaking out in the nearby Fruška Gora mountains, Viktor Tomić was sent to Vukovar by Ante Pavelić, leader of the Ustaše, to oversee “a large-scale expatriation” of “unwanted civilians” from the area (Klajn 2007: 99). Mass executions were purported to have been carried out by Tomić’s henchmen (Klajn 2007: 100). On 9 February 1943 the last victims tried by the Ustaše court in Vukovar were shot at Dudik (Gojko and Majski 1977: 201). Battles for Vukovar began in December 1944 but the city was not in Partisan control until April 1945.

Exhumation The victorious Partisans inherited a land where all “religions and nationalities ended the war as victims and victors, cowards and heroes, torturers and tortured, traitors and loyalists on all possible sides” (Lovrenović 2001:

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176). Seeking to secure a complete monopoly on power, the Partisans killed tens of thousands of “traitorous collaborators and reactionary counter-­revolutionary forces” (mainly Ustaše and Četniks) in the immediate post-war years (Sindbæk 2012: 41, 84). Glenny (1996: 148) argues that the new regime attempted to throw the history of inter-ethnic conflict into the “deep freeze”. Indeed, textbooks and the popular press presented the Partisans and the Communist leadership as infallible whilst the internal conflicts of the war were subordinated to the main pattern of liberation struggle against the fascist occupiers. Yet, the ‘fratricidal’ massacres of the Second World War “were neither ignored, nor silenced” by the regime (Sindbæk 2012: 19, 45). Rather “responsibility for war crimes were ascribed to foreign occupiers and internal, now dead or exiled traitors and enemies” (ibid. 43). Efforts were made to ensure that war guilt was attributed only to ‘traitors and collaborators’ in an effort to distribute blame equally across Yugoslavia’s constituent ethnic groups. It was repeatedly stressed that these groups had not had the support of the popular masses and only remained in power by means of terror—thereby distancing them from the common people. The State Commission for establishing the Crimes of the Occupying Forces and their Collaborators (Zemaljska komisija za utvrđivanje zločina okupatora i njihovih pomagača) carried out exhumations at Dudik in 1945 (Gojko and Majski 1977: 230). Although the ethnic identities of the victims were downplayed in the original reports, according to the Consulate of the Republic of Serbia (2017) 384 of the victims exhumed were from what is today the Republic of Serbia, 71 from the Republic of Croatia and 2 from Bosnia and Hercegovina. Yet, rumours continued to circulate of both a much higher and much lower death toll at the site (Starčević 1975: 1–4; Niebyl 2016). This idea took on new life from the 1980s, when revisionist scholars accused Socialist Yugoslavia of falsifying data to prop up its regime (Pavlaković and Perak 2017: 290). According to Yugoslav-era publications, relatives were encouraged to repatriate the remains of their loved ones to their local cemeteries. Some of the more fragmentary remains which were not claimed were re-buried at Dudik (Report Number 5/1945 quoted in Gojko and Majski 1977: 260). The remains of the majority of victims were placed in the collective grave created for fallen members of the Fifth Vojvodina Brigade and the Red Army in Vukovar (Savez Antifašističkih Boraca i Antifašista RH 2017) (Fig. 7.1).

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Fig. 7.1  Exhumations at Dudik 1945. (Source: Vukovar City Museum 2016)

Making a ‘Red City’3 Industrialisation, urbanisation and memorialisation programmes made Yugoslav cities ‘machines’ for producing socialist subjects (Thaler et  al. 2012: 120). To foster Brotherhood and Unity, the regime encouraged ethnic Serb families and members of other ethnic groups to move (back) to Vukovar (Fig. 7.2). The participation of large numbers of Serbs in the Partisan movement resulted in their (perceived) overrepresentation in the local administration, the police, the Yugoslav Army, and the Party (Pavlaković 2014b: 362). The Savez udruženja boraca Narodnooslobodilačkog rata (Association of Fighters of the National Liberation War) was established in 1947 (David 2012: 12). At its founding, Tito instructed: “Your task is to be in the front lines everywhere and to continue nurturing our tradition everywhere, to preserve the great accomplishments of the National Liberation Battle” (quoted in Peitler-Selakov 2014: 16). The association was very efficient in

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Fig. 7.2  Red star topped memorial obelisk at Dudik with Bogdanović’s memorial under construction in the background circa 1979. (Source: Vukovar City Museum 2016)

its work, erecting almost three monuments and memorials per day for a sixteen-year period (Bergholz 2007: 65). The memorials sought to ensure the state monopoly over memory by framing the Second World War in Yugoslavia as a National Liberation Movement—simultaneously a socialist revolution and a military victory over the Axis powers and their domestic

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‘collaborators’. Whilst new memorials were being erected, Yugoslavia was simultaneously purged of symbols regarded as counter-revolutionary or ethnically divisive,4 including nearly every monument erected during the NDH (Pavlaković 2014b: 379). By 1990, within the county of Vukovar, there were 25 monuments dedicated to the National Liberation Struggle, 51 busts, 44 memorial plaques and the Dudik Memorial Park in addition to 14 known mass graves dating from the Second World War (Vukovar Anti-Fascist Union quoted in Bošnjak 2009).5 For Croatian revisionist scholars like Cvikić, the “permanent revolutionary transformation of Vukovar … took on a form of sophisticated violence from within which the totalitarian communist elite maintained a political monopoly…[it] enabled the Serb ethnic minority in Vukovar municipality to smoothly develop its ethnic identity, which continually empowered the totalitarian communist elite with the selective memory of the trauma of the collective victimhood of the Ustaša terror” (2016: 248; 241, 251). Grassroots commemorations were held at Dudik in the immediate post-war period although the sites where individuals had been reinterred became the primary loci of remembrance. In 1959, the area around the mass graves was fenced in and two obelisks were raised by veterans to mark the 40th anniversary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Ustić 1969: 5). By 1969, several plaques could be found at Dudik. One, contradicting the official exhumation and court reports, read: “Around 1500 people perished here from Vukovar and surroundings, amongst them the members of the Communist party of Yugoslavia and Unity of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia” (Ustić 1969: 5).6 Many Croats chafed at this Yugoslavisation. Indeed, Starčević (1975: 1–4) reflected that initially the terror evoked by Dudik mostly resonated with the “Serb mercenaries” and only later spread “to all those who did not think the same as Pavelić and his conspirators, bloodthirsty thugs, traitors of the peoples and servants of the occupier.” Under the heading ‘Making Brotherhood and Unity of the people during the war’ the Croatian War Veterans Union in 1960 lamented “one cannot see this on the commemorative plaques; this cooperation based on the idea of Brotherhood and Unity, how it in fact had been forged and consolidated by our people’s masses – all of this has not been registered anywhere on these memorials” (quoted in Karge 2009: 53). While other mediums allowed the government to ethnically balance war

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guilt, locations at which the Ustaša had committed grievous crimes against predominantly Serb victims remained “unwieldy memory spaces” (ibid: 55). The actions of relatives and local veteran’s associations to remember these v­ ictims, despite the ‘master narrative’ of Brotherhood and Unity, dared the political elite to accelerate solutions for sites like these (ibid. 58). The contested nature of these sites meant that in the Yugoslav context, the symbolic incursion Socialist-era memorials was probably experienced as ‘most intrusive’ by Croats (Begić and Mraović 2014: 18). In 1971, tensions came to a head in the Croat nationalist revival known as the ‘Croatian Spring’. This movement reawakened Serb fears of a return of fascism to Croatia. Tito cracked down on the movement, purging and imprisoning its participants, temporarily ending further calls for Croatian independence. The need to counter nationalist resurgences put memorial constructions back onto the state’s agenda “at a time when the achievements of the revolution were in need of reiteration” (Mills 2012: 545). In 1973, the mass graves and associated memorials at Dudik were pronounced a Monument of Culture (Bošnjak 2009). Yet at Dudik the nationalist fallout could already be seen: the memorial and its enclosure were damaged and had fallen into disrepair (Čehajić 1975: 5). Many memorials across the region suffered similar fates begging the question of to what extent they had been accepted by their respective local populations. Some were vandalised or destroyed shortly after their erection; others were made the butt of jokes; a few were used as pasture for farm animals or plots for growing cabbages (Bergholz 2007: 76; 91). In Zagreb, leaflets were distributed calling for the destruction Bogdanović’s Jasenovac memorial calling it a “Serbian monument on Croatian soil” (Seiss 2011: 89). Commemorations for fallen Ustaša members were hosted beyond the borders of Yugoslavia and the graves of Ustaša within the country continued to attract clandestine commemorative activities (Bergholz 2007: 88; Pavlaković 2010: 134). These ‘uses’ and counter commemorations point to “the fissures in the fabric of modernity under socialism and the fact that the socialist state apparatuses were incapable of fully subsuming citizenry into the phantasmagoria of their politics” (Videkanic 2013: 220). In 1975, to mark the 30th anniversary of liberation, the first official commemoration at Dudik was held and a Committee (Odbor za izgradnju i uređenje Spomen parka Dudik—The Committee for the Construction and Renovation of the Dudik Memorial Park) was selected to oversee the rememorialization of the site. The 1970s marked a turning point in

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Socialist Yugoslavia in which many existing ‘failed’ memorials were replaced by new efforts (Đurić 2015: 138). In 1976, Vukovar City Council declared that the commemorations at Dudik would be given priority over all other city events (Vukovarske Novine 1976: 1). The Committee framed the need for the new edifice in Party rhetoric: The assignment of raising a monument and arranging Dudik as a memorial park derives from the basic interests of working people and citizens, to symbolize and celebrate its meaning in a visible and dignified way, and to permanently mark the heroic mass deaths of the revolutionary … That is why Dudik needs to be transformed into an authentic marker of the revolution and human freedom in which the future generations will find courage and permanent inspiration in the fight for the victory of the revolution and humane human relations in our autonomous socialist society (Odbor za izgradnju i uređenje Spomen parka Dudik 1977: 2).7

Bogdanović’s Memorial The committee selected a memorial designed by Bogdan Bogdanović, a Serb Partisan veteran, noted urbanist, prolific writer, architecture professor, one-time mayor of Belgrade and later a dissident under Milošević. His twenty-two memorials, erected between 1952 and 1990, located in five of the six Republics of Socialist Yugoslavia were designed to be supranational, multi-ethnic, trans-religious and life-affirming (Achleitner 2013: 6; Lawler 2013: 9; Šimpraga 2012). After the Tito-Stalin split of 1948, Yugoslavia shunned Socialist Realism, which epitomised the ‘new art’ of the Eastern Bloc, and sought alternatives. Bogdanović (quoted in Seiss 2011: 86) reflected For many colleagues my archetypical, anthropological memorial constructions were totally incomprehensible, even unacceptable because of their unusual symbolism. But for Tito, for the Yugoslav leading communists, they were a welcome proof of the artistic independence of the country from the Soviet cultural hegemony… That was probably also a reason why I could do a lot of the things that I wanted to do at the time.

Sveta Lukic describes the Yugoslav ‘socialist aestheticism’ that emerged in this period as a marriage of convenience between art and the political establishment. She writes:

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The politicized and vain society of the 1960s preferred art that did not disturb, or ask puzzling or ‘problematic’ questions. Aestheticism aimed at discussion of formal laws and pictorial problems was modern enough to appease the general Yugoslav complex of being ‘open to the west’, traditional enough to satisfy bourgeois tastes developed in the general atmosphere of social conformity, and inert enough to fit into the myth of a happy and unified social whole—in short, it had all the elements to conform to the politically constructed image of the society. (Sveta Lukic 1975: 11, quoted in Videkanic 2013: 120)

Whilst his contemporaries grappled with socialist modernism, Bogdanović’s memorials are regarded as early examples of his own brand of surrealist postmodernism (Thaler et al. 2012: 228). His works sought to get into a deep layer of the collective subconscious (Đurić 2015: 160). He achieved this through the construction of ‘fictive archaeology’: appropriating elements of historic or ancient architecture (Vuković 2011: 9). By engaging with a long durée perspective, his work attempted to organically tie the past to the present erasing “the hierarchies of any particular historical moment, thus allowing the universal to emerge out of the particular” through “transhistorical borrowings” (Thaler et al. 2012: 226). His first memorial, constructed in 1952, was dedicated to Jewish victims of fascism at the Sephardic cemetery in Belgrade (Vuković 2011: 2). It is notable for its avoidance of symbols such as the red star or hammer and sickle so common in memorials that preceded it. Here, he used fragments from bombed buildings as spolia to create the walls that line the pathways of the memorial and ancient symbols to create a new language which sought to transcend ethnic differences (Ristić 2013). In his subsequent memorials, he continued to employ an ‘open system’ of symbols which enabled multiple interpretations (Seiss 2011: 89). He combined “disparate historical references with almost frivolous ease, realizing that in memorials, the associative and subconscious meanings tend to survive far longer than any precise, historically specific interpretations” (Thaler et al. 2012: 227). The mythical allusions Bogdanović’s memorials employed were aligned with the regime’s tendency to mythologize the war; whilst their lack of specificity enabled them to downplay the ethnic dimensions of the conflict (Thaler et  al. 2012: 228). They “buried Socialist Yugoslavia’s troubled roots into a distant indeterminant past to enable the construction of its future” (ibid. 228). This lack of clarity was often rejected by both the

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relatives of victims and perpetrators (Seiss 2011: 89). Although Bogdanović professed autonomy in his designs, his works manifested as symbols of political power (Videkanic 2013: 145). He declared, “I didn’t enjoy ­building these monuments. I did it because it was my duty, and because I saw that I could meet the challenge in an anti-monumental way” (quoted in Mirlesse 2008). By attempting to create anti-monuments, he sought to free memory from ideological and iconographic references and therefore from overt propaganda. It is these qualities that enable Fontana-Giusti (2014: 41) to read his works as sharp and profound critiques of the state which had to be veiled in order for them to be built. Bogdanović believed that as he had dedicated his memorials to the victims of the Second World War “there was little risk that they would be hijacked by national triumphalism” (quoted in Mirlesse 2008). His works did not explicitly allude to the war itself but rather looked towards a future “that could only exist thanks to the fact that others had given their life” (Mackic 2014). While preparing his designs, he often chose not to engage with witness accounts, photographs and other records (Achleitner 2013: 41). Instead, he decided he “would neither look for nor find inspiration by bringing the evil back to life” (ibid. 7). Yet, what Bogdanović termed ‘monsters’ peer out of many of his memorials, “perhaps being an allusion to the banished grimaces of a future fascism looming (and how right he was)” (ibid. 123). Bogdanović reflected that his own intentions for the design of the memorial at Dudik changed over time. In an interview in 1977 he noted that at Dudik, his initial design showed “Monsters, raged animal of evil that scares, and threatens man …under the purity of victory torches!” (Mrkušić 1977: 4). However, by 1979, echoing the semiotics of his iconic ‘Stone Flower’ at Jasenovac (1966), Bogdanović told the memorial committee that “… the figures of evil would no longer be symbols of fascism and war deaths, but would take on significantly milder appearances representing the new life and optimism. On each rock figure boats will be carved as symbols of our trip towards the future” (Levar 1979: 2) (Fig. 7.3). The Dudik Memorial Park for Victims of Fascism (1978–1980), winner of the prestigious Piranesi Award in 1989, is one of the last memorials that Bogdanović constructed.8 He referred to it as “the best, perhaps, among my monuments” (quoted in Rossini and Corritore 2007). It consists of five up to 18-meter-tall concrete cones clad in Bosnian diorite with wooden super structures topped with copper sheeting. Protruding from

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Fig. 7.3  Bogdanović’s memorial under construction circa 1979. (Source: Vukovar City Museum, 2016)

the earth “like the tips of sunken towers”, the cones bring the past into the present with their peaks pointing towards the future (Achleitner 2013: 162). The cones, which some regard as representing each of the former Yugoslavia’s constituent ethnic groups (see Niebyl 2016), created a tight corridor through which visitors passed. This pathway opened up into a descent onto a flat stage which could accommodate an audience of up to 3000 for outdoor performances. Socialist Yugoslavia’s memorial parks were designed to be hybrid complexes that merged the functions of mourning and politics. The stage turned the memorial into a ‘set’ whilst the surroundings were turned into parks staging the memorials themselves (Burghardt and Kirn 2014: 104). Twenty-seven diorite blocks bearing carved reliefs of šajke (a type of boat used on the Danube) with curved gondola-like bow and stern ‘floated’ alongside the cones. Their loose grouping was inspired by the movements of two classes of children Bogdanović brought to Dudik. He told them “Boys and girls. Here something terrible happened that should

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never be forgotten. Look at the boats. They are the boats of your future” (Komac and Guillén 2011: 34). The layout of the cones (representing the city) adjacent to the boats mirrored Vukovar’s location on the Danube. Fascinated throughout his career by the rise and demise of urban spaces, Bogdanović visited and drew inspiration from many war damaged cities across Europe (Mackic 2014). Dudik bears similarities with his Mostar memorial complex, which was designed as a necropolis to parallel the city of the living (ibid.). Bogdanović referred to Dudik as a mausoleum, which he compared to the magnificent tomb of the Etruscan king Lars Porsenna, who according to legend besieged Rome in 508 BC (Bužančić 1982). Porsenna’s tomb was later razed to the ground along with the rest of the city of Clusium by the Romans in 89  BC—oddly foreshadowing the fate of Bogadanović’s ‘tribute’ to it. Bogdanović often drew his memorials in a future state of ruin teaching his students that all architecture and every city will eventually become a ruin (Komac and Guillén 2011: 35). Yet, during the two years of Dudik’s construction, Bogdanović confided “I would often sleep in the car. Everything seemed so quiet, almost idyllic. I could never imagine that what came later could ever happen” (ibid. 35). In the volume Der Stadt und der Todt (1993), Bogdanović returned to his design for Dudik casting his experience in a different light. Rather than drawing inspiration from the nearby archaeological site of Vućedol, as he had expected, he found himself returning to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s theory outlined in 1823 Architektonisch-naturhistorisches Problem, in which Goethe suggested that silt or ash had partially buried the columns of the Macellum of Pozzuoli (which he believed to be the Temple of Serapis) and at the same time held back water, forming a lagoon above sea level thereby solving the ‘mystery’ which perplexed scholars at the time as to why the structure’s columns contain bands of mollusk holes. Bogdanović wrote that inspired by this interpretation: I began to draw contours of buildings and cities, I sketched them buried by a flame and ash rain … only the pinnacles protruding from the earth … whoever saw the granite and copper cone on Dudik, could rightly imagine a whole city buried underneath (Bogdanović 1993: 10).

His published post-factum sketches depict “a frightening vision of Vukovar destroyed, a whole year before this unhappy city was destroyed [as] we already were saturated with para-psychological, black, gloomy

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forebodings” (ibid. 12). In 1990, the cover of Arhitektov bilten (volume 105–106) showed a photomontage of a Bogdanović sketch in red ink superimposed on a black and white picture of the memorial making it appear as if it was bleeding.

Dudik and the Fracturing of Yugoslavia’s Memory Culture Tito died on 4 May 1980 leaving behind no apparent heir. A power battle ensued over the next decade with appeals to ethno-nationalism garnering rapid support. The Dudik Memorial Park was inaugurated on 26 June 1980 to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the Second Communist Party Conference, which had been held in Vukovar. It opened just as Yugoslavia began to be prised apart. By this point, the committee had spent 17 million dinars, much of which had been solicited from Vukovar’s factories and institutions (Bogunović 1980: 2). The mass participation of locals in both the financing and construction of Socialist-era memorials is often ignored by those who regard their erection as soley top-down initiatives (Karge 2009). However, Sindbæk (2012: 116) asserts that memorialisation agendas were usually led by Serb veterans and that local Croats were allegedly pressured to pay for these projects (Fig. 7.4). Approximately 5.5 hectares of land were levelled for the creation of the park and a 100-metre buffer zone was created around it to prevent residential encroachment (Bogunović 1980: 2; Ustić 1978: 3). Monumentality in this era was not only reflected by the size of the central memorial but more often by the size of the space of the memorial complex as a whole (Đurić 2015: 137). Although management of the site was given to Vukovar City Museum, the planned 345 square meter entrance building, which included an exhibition room, restaurant and shop, had yet to be completed. The Committee sought to raise Dudik’s “status on the federal level” through the participation of artists from across Yugoslavia and to ensure that the focus of the events was “anti–war, on all the components of current revolution and Brotherhood and Unity” (Vukovarske Novine 1979: 3). By 1987, 10,000 people attended the televised ceremony at Dudik which featured performances by a cast of 1500 (Brlić-Jovanović 1987: 1). Ustić noted that “Dudik is more and more present not only in our hearts

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Fig. 7.4  Commemoration ceremony at Dudik 1980. (Source: Vukovar City Museum, 2016)

but almost in our everyday activities” (1980: 4).9 The memorial park became the backdrop for other Yugoslav rites of passage, such as acceptance into the Pioneers (the more politically charged Yugoslav equivalent of the Boy Scout movement) (Vukovarske Novine 1985: 7). Mass participation in commemorative events at Yugoslavian memorials allowed individuals to become an organic part of the socialist whole providing an important symbolic infrastructure for the socialist society in becoming (Videkanic 2013: 196;195). Just as the Dudik Memorial Park started to attempt to bind the wounds of fratricidal conflict, the massive loans taken out by Tito began to undermine the economy, heightening underlying ethnic tensions. In this new climate, the media began to foreground the inter-ethnic violence of the Second World War, war crimes committed by the Partisans themselves, and the oppressive nature of the socialist regime in the immediate post-­ war period. Revisionist works by Serbs focused on the idea that the twentieth century had been a history of continuous Serb suffering. For the first time, the Serbs explicitly connected Ustaša crimes to broader Croatian nationalism (Sindbæk 2012: 205). In 1986, Andrija Artuković, a senior

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figure in the NDH, was extradited from the US. His trial spawned further polemical media coverage. In 1987, exploiting rising Serb nationalism, Milosevic became President of the League of Communists of Serbia. Once in power, he sought to strengthen Serbia’s centralised rule of Yugoslavia. In 1989, at the ­commemorations of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, after years of perceived anti-Serb activity in the province, he declared that ‘armed battles’ might be required to secure Serbia’s development. Milosevic stoked nationalist sentiment to oust the leadership of Montenegro, Vojvodina, and Kosovo. This effectively meant that Milosevic and his supporters held power in four out of the eight republics and autonomous provinces that made-up Socialist Yugoslavia. Opposition members accused Milosevic of making Yugoslavia into ‘Serboslavia’ or seeking to create a ‘Greater Serbia’ (Berg and Shoup 1999: 100). The subsequent refusal to allow the Croatian candidate to take over the rotating presidency was a turning-point. Stipe Mesić, the Croatian representative who took  over the presidency, was soon overshadowed by the popular leader Franjo Tuđman. Tuđman had originally fought for the Partisans during the Second World War but reverted to nationalism during the Croatian Spring. In 1981, he was tried for amongst other things denying the official number of victims at Jasenovac—for which he was imprisoned. A sustained media campaign by the Milosevic regime paired speeches by Tuđman and Pavelić (the leader of the Ustaše and the Independent State of Croatia during the Second World War) on television (Hartmann 2002: 165). Meanwhile, Serbs began organising mass rallies at Second World War memorials in Croatia, such as Petrova Gora, Jasenovac, and Srb, stressing the Ustaše crimes against their co-ethnics whilst re-actualising senses of threat and victimisation. The Croatian media reported on the presence of Četnik symbols at these gatherings (Sindbæk 2012: 191). The ethnic identities of victims, which had been downplayed by Socialist Yugoslavia, were now given a privileged position by revisionists. The appropriation of Socialist-era memorials by Serbs enhanced their rejection by other ethnic groups (Sahovic and Zulumovic 2015). The revisionism regarding the numbers of deceased made Jasenovac, and in particular its memorial by Bogdanović, a key symbol in justifying the subsequent Serb uprisings against an allegedly “reawakened Ustaša state” (Pavlaković 2014c: 49). As tensions rose, the Second World War once again became a battlefield between Croats and Serbs.

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Although officially still a part of Yugoslavia, the new Croatian sabor (parliament) declared the Republic to be the ‘homeland’ of the (ethnic) Croat nation. It then ushered in the ‘revolution of the symbols’—renaming streets and squares, and resurrecting emblems from the Middle Ages, which had been appropriated by the NDH, like the šahovnica, the red and white checkerboard pattern. Tuđman’s party ensured that the victims of the Partisans (portrayed as predominantly Croat) and the Ustaša were both commemorated to “unite Croats of all political backgrounds against a common enemy, the Serbs” (cf. Banjeglav 2012: 10). To challenge Serb nationalists’ claims to a monopoly on Second World War victimhood a counter-victimisation narrative “about the Greater Serbian-communist genocide against the Croats” was unleashed (Mijatović 1997 quoted in Sindbæk 2012: 196). As the one-party state began to disintegrate, ultranationalist parties were formed in both Croatia and Serbia drawing respectively on Ustaša and Četnik legacies. A ‘security dilemma’ began to mount. Both sides felt the threat of the other and began arming themselves in ‘self-defence’. The Hrvatska demokratska zajednica (HDZ  -  Croatian Democratic Union) won the 1990 elections in Mitnica (the suburb in which Dudik is located). Yet, the Social Democratic Party, the successor party of the Communist Party, won in Vukovar. Nevertheless, on 21 December 1990, the Srpska Autonomna Oblast (SAO-Serbian Autonomous Region) centred on Knin was declared—seeking initially to remain a part of the post-succession rump state of Yugoslavia.

Urbicide Croatia declared its independence on 25 June 1991 under Tuđman’s leadership of the HDZ.  In response, Serbs in eastern Croatia declared the independence of the Srpska autonomna oblast Istočna Slavonija, Baranja i Zapadni Srijem (Serbian Autonomous Region of Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Srem). This became one of three discontiguous SAOs which united in 1992 to comprise the Republika Srpska Krajina (RSK). Milosevic stated: I want to make it completely clear that it should not occur to anyone that a part of the Serbian nation will be allowed to go with them [Croat separatists] . Because the history of the Serbian nation in the Independent State of Croatia is too tragic to risk such a fate again (quoted in Harris 1997: 23).

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War broke out in Croatia. In August 1991, the multi-ethnic city of Vukovar was besieged by the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) and Serb paramilitary forces. According to official Croatian statistics 1556 people were killed, 22061 ethnic Croats were displaced and approximately 10000 ethnic Croats were taken prisoner (Vlada Republike Hrvatske 2003: section 2). In 1991, no other European city since the Second World War had sustained as much wartime destruction as Vukovar (Karač 1997: 48). Bogdanović wrote “now—and before our very eyes—a great city has turned into a great necropolis … leaving behind the skeleton of Vukovar” (1994: 67, 72). In a city in which approximately 80 percent of the population had at least one great grand parent who was of another ethnicity, neighbours turned on neighbours, obliterating years of mutual trust (Tauber 2001: 2). The crimes of the Second World War were regularly referred to as a framework for understanding the present (Sindbæk 2012: 201). For Croats, the JNA soldiers who took part in the siege of Vukovar were retroactively linked with the Partisans because they wore the red star (Koren 2015: 27). Milosevic presented the JNA as continuing the Partisan battle against a revived ‘Ustaša’, but he allowed paramilitary units (many of whom were self-styled Četniks including followers of Vojislav Šešelj) to take part in the siege. Far right paramilitaries members of the Croatian Party of Rights Hrvatska stranka prava also joined the fray. Many of those who volunteered for the paramilitary forces were hardcore football supporters mobilised by their respective fan clubs (Sindbæk 2013: 1012). Although the opposing forces were referred to in the Croatian press as “Četniks” or the “Serbo-Communist army of occupation” and in the Serbian Press as “Ustaša” (Kurspahić 2003: 74–75) both forces were multi-ethnic. Yet, the destruction and ethnic cleansing of Vukovar quashed any dregs of Brotherhood and Unity. The suburb of Mitnica, in which Dudik is situated, an HDZ stronghold, witnessed some of the heaviest fighting. Its water tower was repeatedly shelled due to recurrent attempts to fly the Croatian flag from its summit. This ruin has become iconic of the ‘Homeland War’. Dudik was badly damaged during the siege. It became one of the city’s many “ruins of hate and ignorance, making them the memorial for a memorial” (Achleitner 2013: 162). Komac and Guillén (2011: 32) speculated that “Bogdanović liked it even better like that: a ruin is the sweetest death for architecture.” However, Bogdanović claimed that he in part regarded Dudik’s damage during the war as an act of “revenge against me” by the Milošević regime due to his outspoken dissidence (Rossini and Corritore 2007) (Fig. 7.5).

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Fig. 7.5  Bogdanović’s memorial ruined and looted. The šajke in the foreground is but one of many marred by shrapnel. The replica Pannonian well, paved pathways and outer fencing were all destroyed. (Source: Author)

Dudik Reinterpreted: Republika Srpska Krajina On the first day after the ‘liberation’ of Vukovar, Belgrade television stations broadcast a statement by an official who claimed that Vukovar would be reconstructed in such a way that “it’ll be older and much prettier than

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before” (Karač et al. 2008: 1090–1091). In 1992, a round table of experts on Serbian television agreed that Vukovar should be rebuilt in ‘Byzantine style’—alien to the region but characteristic of Serbian Orthodox architecture in Serbia and Kosovo (quoted in Povrzanović 1993). RSK authorities, however, noted that they intended to reconstruct Vukovar in the spirit of the local ‘Serbian Baroque’ (Živić 2008: 29). Bogdanović declared that these visions were “an architectural fraud if there ever was one” (1994: 53). Yet, for these planners, their new city had to have an architecture fitting for their new “capital of the Serbian territory on the right bank of the Danube” (Klemenĉić and Schofield 2001: 26). Shortly after the ‘liberation’, a tour company from Belgrade began Tours of Warning —showing visitors how the ‘Ustaše fighters’ had forced the JNA to destroy Vukovar (Šulc 1991: 18). RSK officials built a discourse of a ‘liberated’ Vukovar based on linking anti-fascism with the ‘sacredness’ of Serbian Orthodox land claims (Žanić 2010). Further damage was inflicted on Vukovar’s Croat cultural heritage during this period as a form of ‘retrospective ethnic cleansing’ (Baillie 2010; Bevan 2006: 42). RSK officials focused on erecting and preserving “monuments to the fallen fighters, antifascists from the Second World War, [and] this war’s fallen soldiers” (Balić 1997: 129).10 As relations between Milošević and the RSK’s Knin based leadership began to sour, the RSK sought unification with the Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina. At this point, the Krajina leadership tried to build legitimacy through symbols and the construction of historical narratives that challenged not only those of the newly independent Croatian state, but those of communist Yugoslavia as well. Milan Babić, the RSK president, banned all communist parties, organizations, and movements in 1992 and enacted an amnesty for former Četniks (ibid. 900). This shift, coupled with the RSK’s economic paralysis, explains the destruction of selected Socialist-era memorials (mainly those celebrating Croat heroes or victims) in the RSK and why Dudik and other key sites remained in ruin (Pavlaković 2014b: 382). The repurposing of Socialist-era memorials to commemorate ‘Serb’ victims was asserted through the erection of additional plaques and Orthodox crosses or chapels in the RSK and other Serb dominated areas. Both Bogdanović’s Memorial to the Victims of the Wars of Independence, 1804–1945, in Knjaževac, Serbia, and his Bela Crkva, Serbia memorial were subjected to revisionist alterations and interpretations (Lawler 2013: 105; 2015: 108). In the RSK, his Jasenovac memorial was reimagined

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“exclusively as a symbol of Serb victimization that legitimized the violent rebellion against the democratically elected Croatian government”. In 1995, RSK authorities laid wreaths at Dudik declaring: … in the year when we commemorate half a century of the victory over fascism … the Serbian people, once again, for the umpteenth time have been attacked, still suffer and die … Over the last 50 years, the Croats have prepared the field, this proven, genocidal nation … attacked the Serbian people ... (Građanski 1995: 3).11

In the non-RSK territories of what is today Croatia, emphasis shifted to focusing on the atrocities committed against Croats by Partisans and Četniks (Budak 2004: 153). Cafes named after members of the Ustaše proliferated around the country and several cities named streets after Ustaše ‘heroes’ (see Goldstein and Goldstein 2001: 597). Ramet notes that at least for some Croats “to love Croatia meant to embrace those who had murdered large numbers of Serbs” (2007: 1). The Association of Antifascist Veterans of Croatia estimated that nearly 3000 Partisan memorials were damaged or destroyed in the 1990s (Perica 2006: 316). Their analysis of the data indicates that the most targeted memorials were those that commemorated Serb and Jewish victims, emphasized the role of the Communist Party in the resistance movement, featured prominent red stars or Cyrillic script, or highlighted Brotherhood and Unity (Pavlaković 2014b: 378). Their destruction was evidently tolerated by the state as no individuals were ever prosecuted for these acts (Pavlaković 2014a: 25). This ‘de-memorialisation’ was furthered by local authorities, who used administrative methods to have additional Socialist-­era memorials removed from public spaces such as Bogdanović’s memorial in Klis (removed in 1996) (Potkonjak and Pletenac 2016: 70). Socialist-era memorials were targeted in Croatia, because they opposed nationalism, primarily commemorated Serb victims, glorified the Partisans, and were reminders of Yugoslavism (Burghardt and Kirn 2014: 120; Galway 2016; Kirn and Berghardt 2011: 73). Milorad Pupovac, president of the Serbian National Council, claimed that participation in the Partisan movement was a crucial element of Croatian Serb identity, making the destruction of Socialist-era memorials a form of ‘memorycide’ (Balić

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1997: 8; Pavlaković 2014b: 378). These destructive acts had a “dual purpose: to differentiate us from them, and to make the ethnic other feel unwelcome and out of place in our majority areas” (Begić and Mraović (2014: 14, 25). However, despite their destruction, each site has become a “signifier of two signifieds: itself and what is absent, its demolished predecessor.” (Yampolsky 1995: 100). Mirroring RSK practices, other Socialist-era memorials in Croat held territories were repurposed, their red stars replaced with Catholic crosses, their antifascist slogans ‘overwritten’ with nationalist ones (Karge 2007: 25). In this spirit, Tuđman proposed that Jasenovac be turned into a memorial for all Croat victims of the Second World War in addition to the non-Croat victims of the Ustaša (Sindbæk 2012: 19). New memorials were erected across the country to victims of the ‘Homeland War’ as well as Croat victims of the Second World War and the Socialist-era. This positioned Socialist Yugoslavian edifices in a memorialscape of competing ethnic victimhoods. The Socialist Yugoslavian memorials which remained intact were progressively decontextualized from their original meaning and intent as Socialist-era history was delegitimised as a common Yugoslav past (Uskokovic 2013: 183). Museuification or neglect might have (inadvertently) preserved the tangible presence of some Socialist Yugoslavian memorials, but implied that they no longer have an active role in the present (Burghardt and Kirn 2014: 121).

Dudik in the Grad Heroj: From Memorial Complex to Football Fields In 1995 the Croatian military launched the highly controversial Operation Storm to regain control of a large part of the RSK.  The SAO in which Vukovar was located was the only part of the RSK which was not taken by military force. It was instead ‘Peacefully reintegrated’ from 1996–1998 under the United Nations Transitional Authority for Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium into the fabric of Croatia. Croats returned to the city in 1998. In 2011, a guide at one of the city’s new ‘Homeland War’ memorials described Vukovar as a city that “is cut in half. There are Croat café bars and Serb café bars, Croat schools and Serb schools. It is divided.” (Interview 20 November 2011). If “there is a test-case for reconciliation … after the Balkan wars, Vukovar is it, and the results are disappointing” (Jungvirth 2006).

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Returning Croats found that new Serb symbols had been installed in ‘their’ city—a cross with four ‘C‘s12 on the newly restored Serbian Orthodox church, memorials and a cemetery for fallen Serb war heroes, and monuments to the Serb ‘liberation’ of the city. These conveyed the symbolic and de facto domination of Serbs, signalling to the expelled Croats that they were not welcome back (cf. Begić and Mraović 2014: 26). Not a single RSK edifice has survived the return of the Croat refugees unscathed (Baillie 2013; Žanić 2014: 51). In addition, the Vukovar Anti-Fascist Organisation estimates that 80% of the county’s Socialistera monuments and memorials have been destroyed or removed (Bošnjak 2009).13 After reintegration a dwindling number of Serbs continued to gather annually at the cemetery for fallen Serb war heroes in Vukovar and at the memorial erected in the neighbouring village of Borovo Selo to host counter-commemorations (Baillie 2013: 126; Kardov 2006: 75, Žanić 2007: 84). The Socialist period as well as Serb narratives of the siege and its aftermath have been rendered the new ‘whispered histories’ as public space in Vukovar has become progressively Croatised (Kardov 2007: 76). In 1999, the Croatian Parliament declared November 18 “Remembrance Day for the victims of Vukovar 1991”. Now, Vukovar has the highest concentration of ‘Homeland War’ monuments and memorials of any Croatian city (Baillie 2013: 115). Dežulović (2014) writes that today “There is no other purpose [of] Vukovar besides the ceremonial one”. The post-­ Reintegration ‘memorial mania’ (Doss 2010) has failed to integrate or in some cases has actively facilitated the ‘forgetting’ of the trauma of others (cf. Potkonjak and Pletenac 2016: 69). In response to the perceived inability of the ICTY to penalise individual Serb perpetrators ‘appropriately’, and the indictments against Croat commanders for alleged war crimes in Operation Storm, the Croatian government issued the Declaration on the Homeland War (2000). It states that Croatia “led a just and legitimate, defensive and liberating war, and not a war of conquest and aggression against anyone.” To counter any lingering relativization of responsibility, Croat Vukovarians use public memorials to ascribe accountability for the crimes committed in 1991 to the collective ‘Serb aggressors’ (Baillie 2013: 126; Žanić 2007: 85–86). This term is frequently used on Vukovar’s ‘Homeland War’ memorials and museums thereby creating the illusion of depluralised ‘selves’ (in this case Croats defined as the victim/hero) against a homogenised and stereotyped ‘other’ (Baillie 2013: 117). Alternative depictions of Serbs have largely

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disappeared from the city’s public space (Žanić et  al. 2016: 255). The distribution of guilt or perpetrator status across Yugoslavia’s constituents groups so frequently employed by the socialist regime has been outright rejected by the successor states. ‘Homeland War’ memorials, in stark contrast to their predecessors, are laden with the kind of religious and ethnonational symbolism that would have been prohibited in socialist Yugoslavia. In the new Croato-centric vision of history, the Ustaša’s persecution of Serbs was radically backgrounded as Croat victimisation was foregrounded (Sindbæk 2012: 197–198). Indeed, one textbook went so far as to state “The martyred Vukovar is the symbol of the aggressor’s bestiality and Croatian suffering [making it] ‘the Croatian Bleiburg14 of the Homeland War’ (Vujčić 1998: 229). A survey conducted in 2012 of 811 residents revealed that a majority of Serb respondents valued Vukovar as an anti-fascist city (referring to its Partisan legacy), while Croats predominantly regard it as the ‘Homeland War’ Hero City (Žanić 2014: 49). Each group has claimed ‘their’ war. Given this polarisation, Dudik did not feature on the Croatian reconstruction agenda for Vukovar from 1997–2008 (Kaštelan-Macan 1997; Vlada Republike Hrvatske 2003). In the resulting Croatisation of the city, the main square’s Partisan monument was removed and replaced with a bust of Tuđman (2003) and a plaque to the ‘Innocent Croatian victims of communist terror’ was erected in the city’s main catholic church (2005) (Kraljić 2005: 4; Žanić 2008: 43).15 A holding camp used by the Ustaše to detain those later executed at Dudik or sent to concentration camps had its memorial plaque removed (Đokić 2015). In 2015, the city controversially allowed this structure, damaged in the ‘Homeland War’, to be adorned with large advertising billboards (ibid). After Tuđman’s death in 1999, attitudes towards the Partisan past began to shift. The HDZ began distancing itself from the revalorisation of the Ustaše in the understanding “that the country needed to adopt European paradigms of remembrance, particularly in relation to the Holocaust in order to facilitate its entry into the EU” (Pavlaković and Perak 2017: 280). In this new climate, artists and civil society activists began to question socialist Yugoslavia’s legacy.16 Their exhibitions and art works sought to challenge dominant regimes of remembrance by using Yugoslavian memorials to recuperate the Partisan/ Yugoslavian (counter-) archive from the nationalistic reinvention of tradition that wracked the 1980s and 1990s (Kirn 2016: 104). They “returned to the public space the ideas that were literally expelled from it” (Krištofić 2018).

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In 2010, the book Spomeniks, by Dutch photographer Jan Kempenaers, depicted iconic Socialist-era memorials destroyed, vandalised, or decaying across the former Yugoslavia marking a rise in international interest. These photographs depicted these memorials as “pure sculpture in a desolate landscape… Their stance is neutral, referring to nothing but themselves” (Neutelings 2008). Their reduction to exotic art forms enabled their (political) abandonment rendering them irrational manifestations of the ‘totalitarian imagination’ (Burghardt and Kirn 2014: 120; Hatherley 2016; Kulić 2015). Whether vilified or celebrated, Yugoslavia continues to be a significant model through or against which contemporary personal identities within the region are expressed or formed (Velikonja 2009: 537). For some of those who lived through it, the Socialist-era was a golden age of peace, high living standards, and inter-ethnic friendships. For subaltern youths, Yugonostalgia became an anti-nationalist, antifascist, cosmopolitan statement within the polarized successor state society. For others it is a resistance strategy of preserving one’s personal history and group identity against the new ideological narratives, historical revisionisms, and imposed amnesia (ibid. 547). Yugonostalgia is completely rejected by many branitelji and Croat Vukovarians. In 2014, a group of branitelji camped in front of Ministry of War Veterans offices in Zagreb using the slogan “In 1991 against Yugoslavia, in 2014 against Yugoslavs!” (Koren 2015: 29). The memory wars centred on the Second World War and the interpretations of the socialist era continue to be interlinked with the ongoing contestations regarding the ‘Homeland War’. For example, the Croatian government publicly acknowledged some of the crimes that had been committed against ethnic Serbs at the official10th anniversary of Operation Storm in 2005  in Knin. In response, far right opposition members and retired army personnel frustrated with this acquiescence and the government’s involvement with extraditing General Ante Gotovina staged counter commemorations (Banjeglav 2012: 22). In July 2003 at the Memorial Football Tournament of the Defenders of Vukovar in Borovo Naselje, the organizing committee refused to allow a Serb boy to participate in the tournament due to his ethnicity. The committee announced, “This tournament is dedicated to the Croatian defenders and a Serb can’t play here” (Quoted in Kardov 2007: 77). A ‘Homeland War’ memorial bearing a large cross erected at this club Croatised the space. In this climate, with opposing votes from members of the Independent Democratic Serb Party (Samostalna demokratska srpska

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stranka (SDSS), Vukovar council in 2005 voted to turn parts of the Dudik Memorial Park into a sports centre whilst agreeing to repair the memorial itself (Vukovarske Novine 2005). The city’s Serb community “was against the idea to, in the place of the killings of innocent victims, build a sports centre” (Bošnjak 2009). Dragan Crnogorac, the president of Joint Council of Municipalities,17 stated “This field is a place where in the Second World War terrible crimes were committed and where the bones of the innocent victims were [found]. It is inadmissible that on this place of crime today the new generations play football” (Bošnjak 2009).18 The continued ruined state of the memorial and the use of the area as a football field was interpreted as a “second murder of the heroes” of socialism. The ‘Croatian Football Club Mitnica’ [sic] was founded in 2008 by branitelji who adopted the figure of the Vukovar water tower ruined during the siege as their emblem (Karaula 2010). The vice president of the club called for “places for Croats in Vukovar”.19 The nationalist and militaristic identity of the club is clearly visible on its website as are its aims to progressively take over and Croatise parts of the memorial park (Naef 2015: 22). Due to opposition from the SDSS, the city withdrew funding for the planned sports facilities. In response, the branitelji, using voluntary labor and donations, established a football pitch on the site. Although it does not impinge directly on the main memorial, it does not respect and significantly reduces the original site plan which called for open spaces for reflection as well as a museum/entrance facility. In support of the club, the Croatian Ministry of Reconstruction and Development donated two prefabricated houses (previously used for settling internally displaced people) to be converted into changing rooms (Marošević 2011). Only the predominantly ethnic Serb Hajduk Vera team has to date articulated reluctance to play on this pitch. However, FC Mitnice members have fired back querying what would happen if Croat clubs refused to play “in some Serb villages whose pitches are 50 meters from where people were killed [in the ‘Homeland War’]” (Bradarić 2012 quoted in Žanić 2014: 45). In the Yugoslav successor states, football has become a continuation of conflict by other means—a kind of war by proxy (Mills 2010: 1127). Indeed, the terms Flash and Storm (taken from the military operations against the RSK) were used to describe the Zagreb football team Dinamo’s thrashing of Belgrade’s Partizans 5-0  in 1997 after which fans began chanting ‘Vukovar’ (Sindbæk 2012: 1020). One member of the ‘Croatian Football Club Mitnica’ (Hrvatski Nogometni Klub Mitnica-HNK

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Mitnica), speculates that “the Serbian Association are persistently working to ensure that our football pitch, and therefore the club, move from Dudik, because in their opinion there is not enough room for the ­memorial site at Dudik” (quoted in Marošević 2011). An SDSS representative told the city council “You have the legal means of destroying the club there … demolish it and set up the memorial” (Vukovar City Council Meeting transcript quoted in Marošević 2011). Club members claim that “HNK Mitnica does not in any way challenge the victims of the Second World War, nor the location of innocent victims, but we think that the Dudik [memorial] has enough space (several thousand square meters of space)!” (quoted in Marošević 2011). In 2013, the club decided to host an event entitled ‘Lopotom protiv nasilja, rasizna ii siromaštva’ (Football against violence, racism and poverty) to which they invited Roma footballers, a move which the local anti-fascists found ‘extremely inappropriate’ and regarded as an “expression of extreme disrespect which ignored the feelings of the descendants of those who lost their lives there” (Memorijalni Park Dudik-Vukovar 2013) (Fig. 7.6). In 2012 the city opened a new ‘Homeland War’ memorial in Mitnica in commemoration of its 82 fallen branitelji, 20 of whom were killed at the Ovčara mass grave approximately 5 km away. Ovčara was Europe’s largest post-Second World War mass grave until larger graves were found in Bosnia. In 2017, the conversion of Mitnica’s water tower, the football club’s symbol, into a memorial centre formally began. The ‘Homeland War’ memorials in Mitnica can in part be understood as further attempts to symbolically supplant Dudik—which has already been discursively erased from the city’s maps and signs. The Vukovar Tourism Board’s website (2018) neither has sections mentioning the Second World War nor socialist Yugoslavia in its ‘History’ section nor does it mention the site of Dudik or any other Yugoslav-era memorials as potential sites to visit (Fig. 7.7).

Restoration Anti-fascist organisations in Vukovar and the surrounding areas continued to host small scale commemorative events at Dudik and have been actively calling for its reconstruction since the RSK period (Bošnjak 2009). Serb political parties in the city as well as the Ministry for Diaspora of the Republic of Serbia have also called for the memorial’s reconstruction. In April 2007, the Vukovar branches of the SDSS and the HDZ signed an

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Fig. 7.6  The FC Mitnice crest depicting the iconic Vukovar water tower destroyed in the 1991 siege set against a šahovnica background. Beyond the football field, the ruins of Bogdanović’s Dudik memorial can be seen. The club juxtapositions the symbol of the suffering of the Homeland War with the Second World War memorial. (Source: Author)

agreement “on the implementation of programs of mutual interest for the city” including the reconstruction of the Dudik memorial complex (Dalje 2008).20 However, by 2008 the president of the Vukovar branch of the SDSS Vojislav Stanimirovic complained that the HDZ was only implementing projects which benefitted Croats (ibid.). Outside of Vukovar, Croatian architects and historians began to consider an application for UNESCO World Heritage status for a transnational series of Socialist-era monuments which will include the Dudik Memorial Park (Bačić 2013; Uskokovic 2013: 87). In August 2013, a petition seeking the restoration of Dudik was issued by Ars Publicae, a Zagreb based activist group partly sponsored by the Croatian Ministry of Culture. The petition received hundreds of signatures from public figures and professional associations (Vizkultur 2013). However, one of the

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Fig. 7.7  The ruined water tower framed by the two sections of the memorial to the victims of Ovčara erected in Mitnice in 2012. Dudik lies a few hundred meters away. (Source: Author)

organisers lamented “the complete lack of reaction of the local community” (quoted in Bačić 2013).21 The 2013 initiatives were launched in a climate of increased ethnic tension in Vukovar. The 2011 census results indicated that more than one third of Vukovar’s population was composed of ethnic Serbs. The city was therefore required to install signage on public buildings in both the Latin (Croat) and Cyrillic (Serb) alphabets in order to be in compliance with the Constitutional Act on the Rights of National Minorities. Many branitleji and Croat residents believe that Vukovar should be exempted from the application of this law given the devastation wrought by the 1991 siege. In particular, the idea that the inscriptions on the city’s ‘Homeland War’ memorials would have to be featured in Cyrillic caused dismay (Žanić 2014: 46). Serbian President Tomislav Nikolić in May 2012, previously an open advocate of the creation of a Greater Serbia, heightened tensions

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when he stated that Croat refugees have no reason to return to Vukovar because it “was a Serb city” (see Dente 2016: 84). On 2 September 2013 bilingual signs were broken and protests in Vukovar began followed by demonstrations and further vandalism against bilingual signs across the country (e.g. Zagreb, Split and Dubrovnik). On 13 September, the memorial to Serb victims of the ‘Homeland War’ in Golubić was destroyed (Joint Council of Municipalities 2013). On 18 November those opposing the erection of dual language signs prevented (and in 2014 attempted to prevent) the State delegation, which included the Croatian president and prime minister, from participating at the front of the annual commemoration procession marking the fall of Vukovar (Koren 2015: 29). On 2 December, the Director of the Jasenovac Memorial Centre received threatening messages (ibid.). In 2015, the HDZ-dominated Vukovar City Council adopted amendments to the city statute preventing the erection of dual script signage.  A July 2019 Constitutional Court decision overturned some of the Vukovar City Council’s statue changes decreeing, amongst other things, that Vukovar will need to introduce bilingual signage (Vladisavljevic 2019). Despite a lack of interest from city and county authorities, the SDSS and the Croatian Ministry of Culture reached an agreement in late 2014 to co-finance the reconstruction of the cones, access road and parking lot of the Dudik Memorial (Radio Borovo 2016). In October 2015, Vukovar City Museum hosted the traveling exhibition ‘Bogdan Bogdanović: The Doomed Architect’, the city’s first post-war celebration of the architect. However, the election of the HDZ’s candidate for president, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović who removed a bust of Tito from the presidential office and refused to take part in the official commemorations at Jasenovac choosing instead to attend the Bleiburg commemorations, resulted in a return to the party’s rhetoric of the 1990s (Koren 2015: 14). Tensions were further fueled when the President of the Serbian Progressive Party’s called for a Serbian Orthodox ceremony to be included in the annual commemorative activities at Dudik that year. The first phase of reconstruction of Dudik was completed in February 2016 with 40 square meters of copper applied to the repaired cones (Matić 2016). The memorial park was then (2016) added to the ‘Register of Cultural Goods of Croatia’. The project was carried out amidst a scandal in which the Croatian Minister of Culture, Zlatko Hasanbegović, was accused of posing for a photograph in his younger days wearing an Ustaše

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cap (Radio Dunav 2016). Hasanbegović has published work in which he labels Ustaše fighters ‘victims’ and ‘martyrs’ (Simicevic 2016). He has also called (2015) on the Croatian government to stop sponsoring the ­commemorations at Jasenovac, which honour the victims of the Ustaše, because in his view they do not commemorate the victims but rather seek to rehabilitate Yugoslav communism (ibid.). To mark Anti-fascist Day in 2016, the Mayor (HDZ) Ivan Peneva led the commemorations at Dudik. He stated “We honor all victims of fascism of the Second World War with the clear intention to condemn the fascist regime as a great evil that befell mankind, but at the same time, Croatian history, unfortunately so wants, with equal conviction to condemn the Communist Party as a totalitarian regime” (Dnevnik 2016). He added that it was “sufficient that there is a memorial to antifascism in Vukovar, it is [now] necessary to turn to Croatia’s future and leave the past to historians” (ibid).22 The city has not to date reversed its decision to allow a large section of the site to be used as a football ground. Perhaps now that the memorial has been restored, the city feels that the onus is off in terms of deciding the role of the memorial within civic life.

Conclusion: A Memorial in Flux After the witch-hunt against him by the Milosevic regime, Bogdanović spent the end of his life exiled in Vienna longing for the former Yugoslavia to be populated by cities in which “to be an urban man means to be neither a Serb nor a Croat, and instead to behave as though these distinctions no longer matter, as if they stopped at the gates of the city” (quoted in Mirlesse 2008). He dreamt of a “Europe without monuments … to death and disaster.” (ibid). Yet, monuments, memorials and other visual statements, both new and those which have populated the city for some time, continue to polarise Vukovar and other cities across the former Yugoslavia. The ambiguous nature of Dudik and other iconic Socialist-era memorials “sets them up [for foreigners] as ripe objects of curiosity; internet bric-­a-­brac, divorced from their original meanings” (Time-Out 2018). A tour was launched for foreign tourists in 2018 to visit these sites, including Dudik and an exhibition at MOMA put these memorials back in the limelight (ibid.). Both help to recontextualise them. Yet, their revalorisation by architects and historians for their aesthetic values has yet to gar-

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ner them renewed domestic popular appreciation (Uskokovic 2013). Begić and Mraović (2014: 28) call for these memorials to be allowed to fall into ruin, as the “ruin’s memory no longer belongs to anyone. Because of this, memory becomes indeterminate, and thus nonlinear. The ruin does not bring us back to a definite temporal point.” It seems that this was precisely the aim of Bogdanović’s original design for Dudik. However, as the Dudik case eloquently demonstrates, an ambiguous nature does not by any means make a memorial immune to contestation or nationalist appropriation. Dudik reminds us that the ‘conflict potential’ of a memorial is not necessarily encapsulated in its design or even in its associated text. Rather, public narratives can be activated by the mere (co-)presence of (competing) signs of memory. It is widely recognised that monuments can be divisive. Yet, memorials are seen to “verge close to sacredness”, their victims “sacrosanct” (Doss 2010: 38). As Ignatieff notes “All that dying is a kind of inexhaustible reservoir of legitimacy for these monuments [and memorials].” (1984: 158). These qualities buffer these subjects and sites from critique, rendering them beyond reproach (Doss 2010: 74). The deeply troubling ‘numbers games’ which have been played with victim counts in the former-Yugoslavia and the attendant ‘guilt burdens’ levied on various communities has (re)made memorials as political as any monument. In Vukovar, the post-reintegration focus on the ‘Homeland War’ era has obfuscated longer term patterns of ethnic tensions. Simultaneously, Croat historical revisionism has vilified the Partisans and Socialist Yugoslavia. This in turn negates ‘shared’ histories of inter-ethnic peace and cooperation whilst reinforcing the notion of the impossibility of Yugoslavia given the ‘ancient hatreds’ which ostensibly festered in the region. The new semiotics employed by HNK Mitnice, coupled with the site’s increasing appropriation as an ethnic Serb space of remembrance, has transformed the complex into yet another reminder of and battleground for ethno-politics. The Dudik case has enabled us to look beyond the actions of the dominant community to observe how memorials can be mobilised at the margins of the prevailing symbolic regime. The mere presence of a memorial dedicated to a ‘different’ memory has enabled Dudik to be activated as a site of resistance by the minority community and other actors. Its historical ‘legitimacy’ has ensured that Dudik is more palatable as a site of ‘Serb’ memory than an RSK site could be (at least in the present political cli-

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mate). However, the ability for minority groups to mobilise this site to enhance contemporary recognition is curtailed by broader trends in the city and beyond. Kirn and Berghardt (2011: 74) contend that “As physical witnesses, the monuments are not only witnesses to WWII and the partisan struggle, but they have become monuments to Yugoslavia itself; to its irreverently ­ progressive anti-nationalist and anti-fascist perspective.” Fontana-Giusti (2014: 36) lauds the vital role that they play in challenging the dominant practices of power and restricting their claims to knowledge. As forms of what Assmann (2011: 127) terms ‘storage memory’ Socialist Yugoslavian memorials have become repositories of a kind of collective cultural unconscious comprising all of the surviving products of a society’s past that have become obsolete or marginalised. As a reminder of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’, Dudik and other Yugoslavera memorials offer a counter hegemonic vision of the past and future for those who do not identify with the ethno-nationalism that underpins the post-Yugoslav nations. Yet, Pavlaković (2010: 145) reminds us that “Until the commemorative culture of World War Two in Croatia and the former Yugoslavia becomes more inclusive and recognizes the plurality of victims and the plurality of collective memories, it will continue to serve specific interest groups”. Kirn queries whether Socialist Yugoslavia’s memorials can provide an alternative between Yugonostalgia and anti-communist demonization (2016: 105). Herscher (2013), echoing the creators of these memorials, questions whether the memory of a common multi-ethnic heritage embodied in Yugoslavian memorials can truly serve as an antidote to mend the violence which has taken place between ethnic groups. Perhaps Dudik’s true power is as a memorial in between: in its ability to perpetuate the never-to be-resolved debate (Young 1992) about the meanings of the Second World War and Socialist Yugoslavia. Acknowledgements  The research for this paper has been conducted under the auspices and with thanks to: the Capital Cities Institutional Research Theme, University of Pretoria; The Wits City Institute, the Conflict in Cities and the Contested State ESRC Large Grant Project (RES-060-25-00150), University of Cambridge; The Centre for Urban Conflicts Research, University of Cambridge; and the Terrorscapes Research project, VU Amsterdam/the University of Amsterdam. A special thanks goes to Nikolina Bejlo Komšić, Bruno Marić, Željko Troha, and Andre Edelinski for assistance with translation.

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Notes 1. I use this term to refer both to the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (1945–1963) and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1963– 1992). This entity should not be confused with the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929–1941) which predated it. 2. Serb ultranationalists accused of the ethnic cleansing of 47,000–300,000 Croats and Bosniaks. 3. See Žanić (2008: 40). 4. In Vukovar, this included the removal of a plaque on the Hrvatski Dom (Croatian Cultural Centre) dedicated to the 1000 anniversary of the Croatian kingdom erected in 1925, as well as the “Hrvatska žena  – Hrvatima Vukovara” [Croat women-Croat Vukovar) and the rededication of the building into a non-ethnic Centre of Culture during the 1960s (Karač and Šimčić 2007: 212–213). 5. Hrženjak (2002) records 84 monuments, 19 busts, 103 memorials, five memorial museums, two memorial centres and 1 memorial relief dedicated to the NOB in Vukovar-Srijem county in 1990. 6. Ovdje je poginulo oko 1500 ljudi iz Vukovara i okoline, među njima članovi Komunističke partije Jugoslavije i Saveza komunističke omladine Jugoslavije. 7. Zadaci podizanja spomenika i uređenja Dudika kao memorijalnog parka proizlaze iz osnovnih interesa radnih ljudi i građana, da se na vidan I dostojanstven način simbolizira i obilježi njegov značaj i da se trajno obilježi herojstvo masovnog umiranja u revolucionarnij i klasnoj borbi od ustaničke. Zato Dudik treba pretvoriti u autentičan biljeg revolucije i ljudske slobode u kojem će sva pokoljenja nalaziti ohrabrenje i trajnu inspiraciju u borbi za pobjedu revolucionarnih i humanističkih ljudskih odnosa u našem samoupravnom socijalističkom društvu. 8. Later memorials include: Garavice memorial park near Bihać, 1981; Popina memorial park near Vrnjačka Banja, 1981; Guardian of Freedom Monument in Klis, 1988 (see Lawler 2013: 12). 9. Dudik je sve prisutniji ne samo u našim srcima već i u gotovo svakodnevnim aktivnostima. 10. U toku 1995. g. Regionalni zavod za zaštitu kulturnih I prirodnih dobara u Vukovaru kontinuirano je radio na evidenciji spomenika palih boraca – antifašista Drugog svetskog rata, palih boraca ovog otadžbinskog rata i žrtava fašističkog terora oba rata. 11. … и то у години када обележавамо пола века победе над фашизмом... јер је Српски народ још једном, по ко зна који пут нападну, јер, српски народ и даље пати и страда... Свих ових 50 година припремао се терен и поново је преко Хрвата, тог проверено, геноцидног народа и вековно нечијих слуга, удари на српски народ – на православље...

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12. The four C’s stand for Samo sloga Srbina spasava (Само слога Србина спасава) a Serbian nationalist slogan which translates as ‘Only Serbian Unity Saves Serbs’. 13. Hrženjak (2002) records that by 2000 two memorials had been demolished, 14 memorial damaged, 1 memorial had been repurposed, 10 ­memorial busts had been removed and 35 plaques had been removed or damaged in Vukovar county. 14. A site in Austria where commemorations are held to remember fleeing members of the Ustaša and other forces who were killed by the Partisans at the end of the Second World War. The site has been the subject of revisionism since the 1980s. See Pavlaković, V. 2010. Deifying the Defeated: Commemorating Bleiburg since 1990; L’Europe en Formation 3 (357), 125–147. 15. ‘Nevinim hrvatskim žrtvama komunističkog terora’. 16. See exhibitions and works such as: What, How and For Whom?, On the occasion of the 152nd anniversary of the Communist Manifesto (Croatian Association of Artists in Zagreb, 2000), Bandaging the wounded (Siniša Labrović, Sinj 2000) Damnatio Memoriae (Bogdan Žižić’s 2001), Scene for a New Heritage (David Maljković, 2004–2006), Infertile Grounds (Sandra Vitaljić 2009), Neo NOB (Ivan Fijolić, Zagreb 2012), Monuments in Transition: The Destruction of NOB Partisan Monuments in Croatia (Lana Lovrenčić, Tihana Pupovac and Rebecca Mackay Zagreb, 2012) the Virtual Museum Dotrščina (Saša Šimpraga and the Documenta, Center for Dealing with the Past 2012 to 2017), The 70th anniversary of ZAVNOH (Petra Milički and Niko Mihaljević for the Serb National Council, Zagreb, 2014), Monument (Igor Grubić 2017). 17. This council was established by the 1995 Erdut Agreement to protect ethnic Serb interests in Vukovar and Osijek counties. 18. To igralište je mesto gde su u Drugom svetskom ratu učinjeni stravični zločini i gde su bile kosti nevinih žrtava. Nedopustivo je da na mestu zločina danas neke druge generacije igraju fudbal ili se vesele. 19. Ima li mjesta za hrvate u Vukovaru?. 20. Sporazum o suradnji klubova vijećnika HDZ-a i SDSS-a u Gradskome vijeću potpisali su u travnju 2007. 21. potpuni izostanak reakcije lokalne zajednice. 22. …и то у години када обележавамо пола века победе над фашизмом…

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Buljan, Z. 1984. Memorijalni Park Dudik Vukovar. Vukovar: Općinsko vijeće saveza sindikata hrvatske. Burghardt, R., and G.  Kirn. 2014. Yugoslavian Partisan Memorials: Hybrid Memorial Architecture and Objects of Revolutionary Aesthetics. In Signal:03, ed. A. Dunn and J. MacPhee, 98–131. Oakland: PM Press. Bužančić, V. 1982. Spomen-park Dudik, Vukovar. Zagreb: Galerija Spektar. Čehajić, J. 1975. Dudik ostaje naša obaveza. Vukovarske Novine, January 25, p. 5. Consulate of the Republic of Serbia. 2017. Memorijalni spomenici oslobodiačka rotova. http://www.gk-srbije-vukovar.hr/memspomenici.html. Accessed 14 Jan 2017. Cvikić, S. 2016. Vukovar u drugoj polovici 20 Stoljeća: Društveni uzroci nasilja. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis: University of Zagreb. Dalje. 2008. SDSS smatra da HDZ u Vukovaru zanemaruje Srbe. Dalje. http:// dalje.com/hr-hr vatska/sdss-smatra-da-hdz-u-vukovaru-zanemarujesrbe/200849. 6 November 2008. David, L. 2012. A Difficult Past in Serbia: The State-Sponsored Project of Remembering and Forgetting. Paper presented at the ASN annual Conference, Columbia University, New York, April 19–21. Dente, D. 2016. Sorry for Srebrenica? Public Apologies and Genocide in the Western Balkans. In Disputed Memory: Emotions and Memory Politics in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, ed. T.  Sindbæk and B.  Törnquist-Plewa, 65–94. Berlin: De Gruyter. Dežulović, B. 2014. Vukovar: A Life-Sized Monument to the Dead City. South Eastern European Media Observatory. http://mediaobservatory.net/radar/ vukovar-life-size-monument-dead-city. Posted 16 March 2014. Accessed 1 Apr 2014. Dnevnik. 2016. Znate li što danas slavimo? Dnevnik. http://dnevnik.hr/vijesti/ hrvatska/slavi-se-dan-antifasisticke-borbe%2D%2D-441067.html. 22 June 2016. Accessed 18 Jan 2017. Đokić, L. 2015. Reklame na stratišđđ. Vesti Online. http://www.vesti-online. com/Vesti/Ex-YU/523185/Reklame-na-stratistu. 4 October 2015. Accessed 18 Jan 2017. Doss, E. 2010. Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Đurić, I. 2015. Memorials without Memory: Bogdan Bogdanović and Yugoslav Memorial Architecture in the Changed Social and Political Context. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Rome. Available at https://web.uniroma1.it/dottcomparch/sites/default/files/27Djuric.pdf Fontana-Giusti, G.K. 2014. Bogdan Bogdanović: Dissident in Life, Architecture and Writing. In Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence, ed. I.  Wiezman, 33–44. London: Routledge.

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Halifax, Nova Scotia. Available on-line in English and French at www. metropolis.net Pavlaković, V. 2010. Deifying the Defeated: Commemorating Bleiburg Since 1990. L’Europe en Formation 357 (3): 125–147. ———. 2014a. Contested Histories and Monumental Pasts: Croatia’s Culture of Remembrance. In Monumenti: The Changing Face of Remembrance, 24–25. Belgrade: Forum Ziviler Friedensdienst. ———. 2014b. Blowing Up Brotherhood and Unity: The Fate of World War Two Cultural Heritage in Lika. In The Politics of Heritage and Memory, ed. P. Jurlina, 351–426. Zagreb: University of Zagreb. ———. 2014c. Jasenovac ‘Stone’ Flower. In Monumenti: The Changing Face of Remembrance, 48–49. Belgrade: Forum Ziviler Friedensdienst. Pavlaković, V., and B. Perak. 2017. How Does this Monument Make You Feel? Measuring Emotional Responses to War Memorials in Croatia in T.  In The Twentieth Century in European Memory, ed. S.  Andersen and B.  Törnquist-­ Plewa. Leiden: Brill. Peitler-Selakov, M. 2014. Memorial Art in Serbia from the Balkan Wars Until Today. In Monumenti: The Changing Face of Remembrance, 16–17. Belgrade: Forum Ziviler Friedensdienst. Perica, V. 2006. The Most Catholic Country in Europe? Church, State and Society in Contemporary Croatia. Religion, State and Society 34 (4): 311–346. Potkonjak, S., and T.  Pletenac. 2016. The Art and Craft of Memory: Re-Memorialization Practices in Post-Socialist Croatia. In Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory and Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian Literature and Culture, ed. V. Beronja and S. Vervaet, 65–82. Berlin: De Gruyter. Povrzanović, M. 1993. Ethnography of a War: Croatia 1991–92. Anthropology of East Europe Review. Special Issue: War Among the Yugoslavs 11(1–2). http:// condor.depaul.edu/~rrotenbe/aeer/aeer11_1/povrzanovic.html. At 12 May 2006. Radio Borovo. 2016. Obnova Dudika, February 11. http://radio-borovo. hr/2016/02/11/obnova-dudika/&prev=search. Accessed 17 Jan 2017. Radio Dunav. 2016. Dunav Info, November 2. www.radio-dunav.hr/dunav-info11-02-2016-1300h/&prev=search. Accessed 17 Jan 2016. Ramet, S. 2007. Civic Values in Democratic Transition. In Democratic Transition in Croatia: Value Transformation, Education and Media, ed. S.  Ramet and D. Matić, 1–30. College Station: Texas A and M Press. Ristić, I. 2013. Bogdan Bogdanović: The Practice of Architecture under Changing Political Regimes in Yugoslavia, Archfondas. http://www.archfondas.lt/leidiniu/en/alf-04/ivan-ristic-bogdan-bogdanovic-%E2%80%93-practice-architecture-under-changing-political-regimes-yugosl. Accessed 22 July 2015.

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CHAPTER 8

From Socialist ‘Memorialkombinat’ to a Place of Learning. The Heidefriedhof Cemetery in Dresden as an Arena for Competing Cultures of Memory Matthias Neutzner In recent years, anyone coming to the Heidefriedhof cemetery for the annual commemorations on 13 February, the anniversary of the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945, was coming to a state of siege: the main entrance was guarded by a massive police presence, opposite hundreds of demonstrators not allowed entry protesting loudly. Those who passed the identity checks were greeted by a noticeably tense atmosphere. Led by the mayor of Dresden and the prime minister of Saxony, delegates of social institutions performed a ceremonially encrusted ritual together with diplomats from the victorious powers in the Second World War—observed by practically equal numbers of journalists, scientific analysts and research teams representing critical groups from all over the country. With a few exceptions, the actual target group of the commemoration, the people of Dresden, had long since ceased to play a significant role. The congregation of political representatives thus remained alone, nervously vigilant about protesters who might break through the cordon and disturb the M. Neutzner (*) Independent Researcher, Dresden, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. L. S. Sørensen et al. (eds.), Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18091-1_8

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ceremony, and, above all, anxious about the possible behaviour of members of right-wing extremist parties. Sentiments, ranging from concern to shock, would erupt in the media in the following days and in the manoeuvre reports of activists. On 17 February 2014, the local newspaper Sächsische Zeitung printed a prophetic summary of the regularly miscarried ritual: ‘The remembrance … at the Heidefriedhof cemetery was organised for what is probably the last time in this established form’ (Reinhard 2014: 15). And indeed, as the 70th anniversary of the bombing approached, an occasion of political importance also at federal level, the city authorities capitulated and cancelled Dresden’s longest standing commemoration in 2015. The political risk had become too great in view of the renewed worldwide media attention. The Heidefriedhof cemetery in Dresden is by no means the first historical burial site to become a venue of controversy and diverging claims to historical truth. Cemeteries are inseparable from the cultures of memory as they institutionalise collective memories in symbols and rituals. And where different groups have opposite objectives when referencing the past, cemeteries can become a subject of social debate. This gives rise to controversial interpretations, attempts to occupy and defend, initiatives against existing or for new symbols, boycotts, counter-rituals or reforms of the present use—and all this is commonly done in emotionally charged tones, as the collectively adopted graves, after all, are associated with an aura of finality, or even sacredness, which is difficult to refute and thus all the more suitable as a means of authenticating references to the past. The history of the Heidefriedhof cemetery in Dresden—or, more precisely, of the two-hectare memorial complex which dominates its meaning in the context of remembrance—illustrates these complexities with a rare degree of continuity and intensity. This chapter first outlines the complex and ambivalent history of the memorial site. It is considered particularly important to reflect on the multitude of factors which shaped its biography, for example, the interactions between political intentions, functional requirements, cultural tendencies, economic circumstances, and personal or social conditions. In this way, it becomes clear how, in any given period, it is the socially dominant and empowered groups who exert decisive influence through their specific interpretation and exploitation of the past. Consequently, social upheavals must necessarily lead to modification of the character and use of a place of memory. But, there are also astonishing aspects of continuity across the changes in political system.

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The second section discusses the motives of the various social groups and the means by which locations are anchored in their collective memory and thus established as an element of their group-specific culture of memory. In this context, memorial sites must be understood as a stage on which historical meaning evolves performatively—by way of interactions and enactments whose essence spans the whole gamut between individual mourning and political rally, between secular state funeral and religious reverence, between ceremonial ritual and guerrilla protest.1 The third section is devoted to a closer analysis of how these mechanisms are legible in today’s palimpsest of the memorials on the Heidefriedhof cemetery. To this end, traces of individual references to the past are sought in the spatial, natural, architectural and symbolic forms of the complex. In the fourth section, these considerations culminate in a discussion of appropriate contemporary uses for a site with such a dense history. The focus is the recent proposal to develop the burial, memorial and garden complex for historico-political education, to transform the cemetery—as a place of memory—into a place of learning.

Biography of the Place of Memory 1936–1944: Woodland Cemetery and War Preparations In 1927, the City of Dresden began work to establish a central municipal cemetery in a newly acquired area of forest on the northwest outskirts of the city, hoping to finally solve its urgent capacity problems. In their planning, the city authorities took up the principles of the cemetery reform movement which had already formed in the decades before the First World War. Like a number of parallel initiatives, for example, in arts and architecture, it had its roots in critical engagement with the social and cultural dislocations which followed from rapid industrialisation.2 The reformers rejected the ‘cemetery pomp’ of the Gründerzeit period as an expression of ‘unhealthy’ social separation, as moral degeneracy and aesthetic disorientation (Sörries 2009: 177). Instead, they sought to develop new meanings and forms appropriate to the time. Convinced that all people are equal in death, they demanded a cemetery without class distinctions, and one that was developed in harmony with nature. A radical new outcome of this movement was the concept of a woodland cemetery (Sörries 2009: 179–183).

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These developments were interrupted by the First World War, but thereafter the cemetery reform gained a new centre in Dresden. In 1921, numerous professional and trade associations chose the city for their founding of a new Reich Committee for Cemeteries and Memorials, whose goal was to unify the reform efforts and to assert their joint demands (Schoenfeld 2003: 164). Dresden was ideally suited for this role—as a city with widely famous parks and gardens, as one of the centres of German horticulture, and as an acclaimed venue for large-scale garden exhibitions. It is thus not surprising that the reform ideals set the course for the concurrent Dresden cemetery project. The municipal planners designed a generous woodland cemetery, with the ambitions of this being an exemplary response to the challenges of cemetery administration. This premise remained valid even after the National Socialists (NS) came to power in 1933. The NS protagonists had no trouble aligning the principles of the cemetery reform with their own ideology: the woodland location was now explained through links to old Aryan tradition. The egalitarian burial sites of the cemetery reformists were also compatible with the supposedly classless Volksgemeinschaft. The lyrical natural ideal of the reform cemeteries could easily be comprised by ‘the National Socialist spirit’ as the ‘nation’s characteristic and native cultural landscape’ (Balke 1937). Notwithstanding the völkisch vocabulary, the planning for Dresden’s woodland cemetery was above all an expression of continuity in the sense of the cemetery reform: the sober functionality and thriftiness of the gravesites were to be cradled in the atmospheric impression of an idealised heathland, created as the product of elaborate landscaping in the carefully preserved pinewood forest. When the first funerals were at last held in 1936, the new complex certainly achieved the desired effect: the press praised the cemetery as ‘an island of peace [and] a place of tranquil seclusion’ (Dresdner Anzeiger, 13 October 1936: 5). From 1937 onwards, the underlying landscaping concept was perpetuated in the official name: Heidefriedhof (Heide ­ means heath). At this time, all spheres of public life were being prepared for war. This gave the cemeteries two new fields of responsibility. In preparations for air raids, suitable sites were designated for ‘mass burials’ already in 1938,3 and with the outbreak of the war, the Wehrmacht High Command issued an order requiring ‘the creation of joint burial ground’ for fallen military personnel.4 It was only logical that these tasks should be assigned to the new Heidefriedhof cemetery, where adequate vacant areas were available. In March 1939, the plans were extended to include a ‘memorial grove’,

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which was to serve as a resting place for the expected victims of the war. Not required for military casualties of the Dresden-based Wehrmacht forces, no concrete need arose until around the beginning of 1944, when the Allied bombing raids began to threaten Dresden, and the city administration commenced extensive preparations for the expected heavy destruction and ‘large number of fatalities’ among the civilian population (Neutzner 2003: 27). Four rectangular areas with rows of graves for 10,000 victims were marked out in the reserved sections of the Heidefriedhof cemetery, improvised paths were created and terraces for a small circular ‘memorial place’ were excavated (Neutzner 2016: 76). 1945: Mass Grave When Dresden became the target of massive air raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, the scale of the catastrophe surpassed even the pessimistic assumptions of the responsible authorities. Already on the first day after the firestorm, the presciently assigned municipal ‘burial teams’ began to dig out the marked graves at the Heidefriedhof cemetery, assisted by prisoners of war. Recovered bodies began to arrive daily—over 9000 in the first week alone, most of whom were brought the 8 kilometres from the city centre by horse and cart. The bodies were laid out under the trees at the edge of the burial field, where police officers tried to determine their identity. The documentation officer of the burial team then recorded the information, before the bodies were placed into the graves—without coffins, lying on their sides and packed together as closely as possible. After filling, the graves were marked with narrow wooden slates bearing the registration numbers of the persons buried therein. It was not long before it became necessary to further extend the site. In addition, a trench was excavated along the central axis of the complex for the ashes of those victims whose bodies had been cremated on the Altmarkt square in the city centre due to a lack of transport. In total, around 17,600 of the 25,000 people who lost their lives in Dresden in February 1945 were buried at the Heidefriedhof cemetery (Neutzner, Schönherr et al. 2010: 38f). The grave-side ‘honouring of the dead’, as planned by the Nazi party (the National Socialist state party, NSDAP), no longer took place. Instead, the NS propaganda exploited the catastrophe for a last broad and successful campaign. Dresden was immediately portrayed as a unique and innocent city of art, devoid of any significance for the war. The propagandists could rely on Dresden’s reputation as a culture centre of European rank,

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which outshone even the considerable military importance of the city and furthermore secured international attention. With dramatic reports and highly exaggerated casualty figures, the propaganda narrative shaped a superlative: the Dresden firestorm was claimed to be the greatest civilian catastrophe of the whole war. When Germany surrendered a few weeks later, the austere reality of the provisional graves at the Heidefriedhof cemetery had already been superseded by a propagandistically created, almost mythical Dresden narrative of countless and nameless victims. Dresden became a code word for the suffering brought upon the Germans by the Allied bombing, and thus a potential means of exonerating the crimes of the National Socialist regime (Neutzner 2005a). 1954: Memorial Grove for the Victims of the Bombing The burial sites for the air raid victims remained desolate during the immediate post-war years (Fig. 8.1). The catastrophic economic situation precluded even an interim restructuring of the area, and it was left to families

Fig. 8.1  Heidefriedhof Dresden, 18 June 1947: Graves of February 1945 air raid victims, burial field A. (Source: Landeshauptstadt Dresden, Archiv Stadtplanungsamt)

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and relatives to erect provisional gravestones. Public pressure on the responsible authorities grew unabated—and pointed out that similar tasks had long since been accomplished in Western Germany. With no prospect of available resources, the city administration fell back on vague announcements and continually new planning; in 1948, it even organised a wide-­ scale design competition. But the results of this competition failed to come any closer to fruition. The head of the municipal cemeteries administration reported that several ‘artful designs’ had been received, but that the architects concerned had ‘not taken into consideration, that the German people had become very poor’.5 And indeed, the first improvised attempt at construction in 1949 ground to a halt after a few months due to a lack of materials and left behind additional devastation. In the meantime, however, the criticised state of the burial sites had also become unacceptable from a different perspective: simultaneously with the founding of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), its Communist rulers in Eastern Germany began to use memories of the destruction of the city in their Cold War propaganda. In mass gatherings, all over the country, the example of Dresden was presented to corroborate the accusation that the ‘imperialist West’ was guilty of war crimes and renewed ‘warmongering’, while the GDR was portrayed as a peace state completely free of historical responsibility for the Nazi dictatorship. To lend the greatest possible weight to the indictment, the state agitators resorted to the Dresden narrative which had been established so successfully by the NS propaganda. When the Berlin politburo of the GDR state party Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) adopted the first national Dresden campaign at the end of 1949, it was inevitable that the graves of those who died on 13 February 1945 would be shifted into the spotlight; but, it was too late to restore them to a respectable condition before the approaching fifth anniversary of the bombing. Consequently, the first official wreath-laying ceremony at the Heidefriedhof cemetery on 13 February 1950 took place in front of a makeshift monument, serving not only as a backdrop, but also as a screen hiding the dismal burial sites behind. A further two years passed before the redesigning of the complex began in earnest. To enable incorporation of the planned memorial grove, the improvised marking of individual graves had to be abandoned—overriding the vehement opposition of the affected families. Guided by the traditional egalitarian ideal of the cemetery reform, and bound by  current historical and political interpretations, the cemetery architects felt that it

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was necessary to forego any form of individuality regarding the graves. Those who lost their lives on 13 February 1945 were thus reduced once and for all to countless and now also nameless victims; the symbolic narrative was lent material substance. By February 1954, nine years after the air raids, the work on the memorial grove for the victims of the bombing was for the most part completed. The trade and local press praised the result as a place of ‘truly unpretentious dignity [which radiated] peace and tranquillity’ (Beinlich 1955: 25), ‘a beautiful symphony of green in all its shades’ (Sächsisches Tageblatt, 18 (273), 1963) (Fig. 8.2). These verbal imagery shows just how strongly the landscaping aspects dominated the perception of the place. Various symbolic architectural elements had been included in previous plans, but all had gradually been discarded due to a lack of resources. Consequently, the gateway to the memorial grove became a solitary monumental sandstone block standing at the centre of a rectangular forecourt, devoid of all ornamental decoration and with merely a brief inscription that supported the superlative of

Fig. 8.2  Heidefriedhof Dresden, 22 June 1963: ‘Memorial grove for the victims of the bombing’. (Source: SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek, Erich Höhne & Erich Pohl)

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the Dresden narrative: rather than specifying a concrete figure, it was ­chosen to present the victims as countless and nameless—‘HOW MANY DIED? WHO KNOWS THE NUMBER?’ From the memorial stone, a path followed the axis between the now uniformly laid out burial fields. Four low pillow stones with poetic adages were arranged along each side of the path as places to lay flowers and wreaths instead of the unmarked individual graves. The memorial grove ended in a slightly raised terrace with the ash grave framed by narrow stone bands. Behind, a wooden cross was erected as a vanishing point for the central axis—again a provisional solution born out of material shortages. Embraced by the closely surrounding pine woods, visitors experienced the memorial grove above all as a garden of remembrance. In this respect, the landscape architects from the City Administration—who had already been involved in the earlier planning of the 1930s—remained true to their traditional convictions: untouched by the upheavals within society, they defended the cemetery’s earlier reform principles. The design ideal was still a woodland garden. The large, anonymous burial fields were now covered by almost 100,000 heathland scrubs, interspersed with more than 3000 conifers and other trees. Together, they formed one of ‘the most magnificent and ceremonious landscaped gardens in Europe’, as acknowledged branch expert Karl Förster wrote in the Munich-based journal of the German Society for Garden Design and Cultural Landscapes. He was enthusiastic in his praise for the ‘masterly natural layout’ with its ‘innovative and compelling’ beauty, ‘whose intensity surpassed all preconceptions’ (Förster 1961: 328–329). Relieved that their task had at last been accomplished—and in such exemplary fashion—the cemetery administration sent photographs to West Germany, as proof ‘that the GDR had not forgotten the innocent victims of the terror raids’.6 In the ritual choreography of the annual anniversaries of the bombing, however, the Heidefriedhof cemetery remained a secondary venue; the morning wreath-laying at the graves of the victims represented merely the start signal for an annual series of mass gatherings at locations symbolic for the destruction and reconstruction in the city centre (Fig. 8.3). 1955: ‘Memorial Grove for the Victims of Fascism’ Parallel to the arduous struggles to achieve a dignified frame for the graves of the bombing victims, the responsible authorities faced a further chal-

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Fig. 8.3  Heidefriedhof Dresden, 13 February 1955: Wreath-laying ceremony at the anniversary day of the 1945 air raids. (Source: SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek, Erich Höhne & Erich Pohl)

lenge: it was also necessary to honour the victims of the National Socialist regime. The GDR presented itself as a continuation of an antifascist tradition and it vehemently dissociated itself from the West German Federal Republic. At the same time, and with support from the Soviet occupying power, the Communists claimed interpretational sovereignty over past events. They positioned themselves as the heirs of a fighting resistance against fascism, to whom leadership would fall in a new, anti-fascist Germany. As legitimation for the prerogative of power, the Communist contribution to resistance against National Socialism needed to be emphasised to the disadvantage of other resistance and victim groups. As a result, the graves of those whose death was congruent with the dictated interpretation gained particular significance. Consequently, already in September 1945, a provisional burial place for the victims of fascism was also established in Dresden and used for propaganda purposes. When it was found to be insufficient, several years were spent searching for alternatives, concentrating on the option of

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the Heidefriedhof cemetery. Planning began in earnest in 1948. One year later, the cemetery administration sought to solve the task by simply extending the recently commenced building work on the memorial grove for the victims of the bombing. The round area of the immediately adjacent memorial place had already been levelled in 1939 and could be incorporated with relatively little additional outlay. The City administration quickly elaborated plans for a memorial for the victims of fascism but the project had to be abandoned shortly afterwards due to the lack of means. Nonetheless, from 1949 onwards, the close spatial proximity of the future memorials for the bombing victims and the victims of fascism was no longer questioned. Over the following years, planning adhered to this orientation; with the continual delays and setbacks, it was first necessary to use an improvised location: a provisional burial place was created in 1951/52, followed by a small and plainly designed memorial grove in a separate area in 1954/55. It was here that the annual public demonstrations were held on the Memorial Day for the Victims of Fascism and on the birth and death anniversaries of prominent resistance fighters. 1965: Memorial Grove for the Fighters Against Fascism and Those Persecuted by the Nazi Regime The capacity of the second provisional burial ground was exhausted already in 1961. In this situation, the SED and the City Administration decided to solve the problem once and for all, by making available ­sufficient space for the graves of all former fighters and persecution victims who were still alive. To this end, they resorted once more to the original idea, though they now required more space than would have been realised with a separate round area alongside the memorial grove for the bombing victims. The plan was instead to make use of the whole cutting through the forest and to create a ‘consistently integrated complex’ in a ‘generous layout’.7 The larger, then still uncultivated stretch of the cutting was reserved for the graves of resistance fighters and those persecuted by the Nazi regime. The terraced area previously intended as a memorial place was filled and expanded into a similarly round open space for demonstrations. This at the same time produced a single, 450-metre-long processional avenue; but given the anti-religious ideology of the state party, it was entirely unacceptable for this axis to end with a Christian symbol, so the

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Fig. 8.4  Heidefriedhof Dresden, 22 June 1963, ‘Memorial grove for the victims of the bombing’: The inscription of the new concave wall of remembrance is made. In the background, the wooden memorial cross is still visible. (Source: Landeshauptstadt Dresden, Archiv Stadtplanungsamt)

wooden cross of the memorial grove for the bombing victims was removed and replaced with a concave wall of remembrance (Fig. 8.4). In this spatial dramaturgy, remembrance for the victims of February 1945 was combined with the cultivation of an anti-fascist tradition—although there were followers, accomplices and NS perpetrators among their number. Even so, there was no dissent from representatives of anti-­fascist interests. On the contrary: Where the propaganda narrative of the destruction of Dresden had effectively cloaked the co-responsibility of the city for the NS dictatorship and war, there was now a broad conviction of common victimhood—as victims of the fascists and the war which they had begun (Fig. 8.5). The layout of the demonstration venue at the centre of the memorial complex confirmed this historical interpretation. Seven columns with place names were arranged on each side of the circular area dissected by the central avenue. Dresden was mentioned alongside the names of European towns and villages associated with German war crimes—inserted between Coventry and Leningrad. On the other side of the circle, the

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Fig. 8.5  Heidefriedhof Dresden, September 1965: Overall view of the memorial complex including the new ‘Memorial grove for the fighters against fascism and those persecuted by the Nazi regime’. (Source: SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek, Erich Höhne & Erich Pohl)

columns bear names symbolic for the holocaust, from Auschwitz to Theresienstadt. All the names represent accusation against Nazi Germany. The destruction of Dresden is thus interpreted explicitly as a consequence of National Socialism, any responsibility of its citizens is suppressed. This classification of the Dresden bombing as a senseless destruction of an innocent city was widely shared in the decades after the Second World War on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Popular scientific and artistic works had reinforced the NS propaganda narrative worldwide, charging it with symbolism, but at the same time stripping all historical contexts. Even at the memorial site which was created in the Czech village of Lidice in 1955 to remember a massacre committed by the German occupants in 1942, there

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Fig. 8.6  Heidefriedhof Dresden, 12 September 1965: Inauguration ceremony of the ‘Memorial grove for the fighters against fascism and those persecuted by the Nazi regime’. A delegation of French Resistance veterans in front of a column bearing the name Oradour. In 1944, the French village Oradour-sur-Glane was the site of a massacre on the civilian population by German SS troops. (Source: SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek, Erich Höhne & Erich Pohl)

is a monumental installation with a similar series of names: there, too, Dresden is remembered accusingly as a victim. The inauguration of the new memorial grove for the fighters against fascism and those persecuted by the Nazi regime on 12 September 1965 was staged by the GDR state party as a ‘culmination of mass political endeavour’, at which ‘tens of thousands of Dresden citizens [and] delegations of resistance fighters’8 from Eastern and Western Europe participated (Fig. 8.6). The propagandistic alignment followed a long-canonised

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triad of legitimation, avowal and distinction: The participants in the ‘memorial rally’ were to understand the GDR as an implementation of the ‘ideals of the anti-fascist struggle for freedom’, while its citizens were to pledge themselves to the ‘socialist state and its humanistic, peace-loving policy’ and—together with West European anti-fascists—stand up against ‘West German imperialism’.9 1969–1989: Central Memorial Site The monumental installation was from then on an annual focus of above all the anti-fascist tradition in the GDR. Rallies on national memorial days counted thousands, often tens of thousands of participants, for example, on the annual Memorial Day for the Victims of Fascism or on the anniversaries of the founding of the GDR, the state party SED or the National People’s Army (Fig. 8.7). In addition, the graves of prominent anti-fascists were regularly the venues for commemorative and political ceremonies organised by smaller groups from schools, enterprises and other organisations. In many cases, references were established between respect for the dead and the present day: awards were presented at the graves, promotions were announced, obligations reinforced and the festive initiation into social organisations was celebrated (Fig.  8.8). Compared with the intensive maintenance of anti-fascist tradition, remembrance of the wartime bombing receded into the background; even so, the city administration continued to adhere to the annual wreath-laying on 13 February. Four years after the restructuring of the site, a resolution of the Council of Ministers of the GDR heralded a new round of planning. In preparation for the 20th anniversary of the founding of the GDR in 1969, it was decided that the traditional references were to be accentuated, in order to contribute ‘in a particular manner to strengthening of the national ­consciousness of the people and to development of the historical consciousness of our youth’. The city council of the City of Dresden now sought to transform the cemetery memorials into a ‘central memorial site’, emphasising an even closer integration of the two sections of the complex, along with improvements at certain points and above all the realisation of an ‘artistic layout’. The plans involved ‘sculptural solutions’ for the preludial entries to the complex, for the round demonstration area at its ­centre and for the concluding grave site of the bombing victims. The narrative of this spatial imagery was to lead from the ‘sacrifice and suffering of the committed fighters against fascism [to their] victory [and the commit-

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Fig. 8.7  Heidefriedhof Dresden, 14 September 1969: ‘International Day of Commemoration for the victims of fascism’. Members of the state children organisation ‘Junge Pioniere’ in front of the columns remembering Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. (Source: SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek, Erich Höhne & Erich Pohl)

ment to] preserve peace’. The burial area for those who died during the bombing was to counter-pose the ‘Anglo-American terror raids’ to the liberation by the Soviet Army and their support for reconstruction of the country.10 While the general construction work was realised as planned, the intended artistic adornment was quickly abandoned, after the first drafts failed to convince and the propagandistic occasion of the anniversary passed. Through renunciation of the sculptural symbolism, the formal stringency of the memorial complex, with its primacy of garden design and small, high-quality architectural elements, was retained. It now represented a kind of ‘Memorialkombinat’: Analogously to the planned economy of the GDR, where the individual manufacturing units of an industrial branch were grouped into central enterprises—the so-called Kombinat (combine)—the Memorialkombinat Heidefriedhof bundled the state-­ controlled production of narratives and interpretations of the past. In this way, a historical basis for the socialist identity of the city and region was to be established and strengthened.

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Fig. 8.8  Heidefriedhof Dresden, July 1964: State funeral for Otto Buchwitz (Born 1879. Prominent German Social democrat, imprisoned by Nazi Germany, leading SED official). (Source: SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek, Erich Höhne & Erich Pohl)

1990: War Memorial Two decades later, in May 1989, a memorial remembering Soviet forced labourers and prisoners of war was added to the ensemble. In a phase of growing social agony and explicit rejection of the perestroika in the Soviet Union, this new memorial was arranged at the periphery of the cemetery, spatially apart from the monumental installations commemorating the German victims of National Socialism. Five months after this, GDR society collapsed and the priorities regarding the memorial complex at Heidefriedhof cemetery changed once more. The only official ceremony which was retained was the laying of wreaths on the anniversary of the bombing raids, which had commenced in 1950 and could be considered traditional. While the date 13 February gradually became established as a national day of remembrance for reunified Germany, the memorial ritual at the Heidefriedhof cemetery developed into a ceremonially orchestrated routine. The city leaders were joined by the Saxon state government from 1992, and also by

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diplomatic representatives of Great Britain and the USA from 1994. The larger part of the memorial complex, which was devoted to the resistance against National Socialism, was now ignored in both ­official ceremony and public awareness. It must be said, however, that individual groups within the local community still undertook efforts to uphold this perspective of remembrance through events of their own. At the same time, state and municipal means were invested in preservation of the overall complex, as a site protected by law both as a cultural monument and as a war cemetery. Since 2005: Contested Place of Memory The annual wreath-laying on 13 February, which was now held according to a fixed pattern began to acquire a controversial character in 2005. After right-wing extremist organisations gained seats both in the Saxon state parliament and on the Dresden City Council, their representatives belonged to the circle of invited participants at the remembrance ceremonies due to protocol. They used the ritual for public affirmation of their revisionist interpretation of history and anti-democratic convictions. This quickly gave rise to corresponding protest; the Heidefriedhof cemetery was on 13 February now a highly contested and emotionally charged place of memory. Activists of anti-nationalist groups attempted to disturb the ceremony on a regular basis (Fig. 8.9). Other social actors—for example, the Jewish Community in 2008—demonstratively withdrew their participation and developed their own symbolic forms of remembrance. The controversial debate also served to polarise the political camps: while the conservative majority on the City Council defended the rituals as tradition, the opposition parties, organisations and initiatives which belonged essentially to the more social democratic and left-wing political spectrum demanded fundamental changes. The nature of the accompanying critical discourse remained  antagonistic  and—even in its academic expressions— failed to support informed argumentation and democratic opinion-building. On a number of occasions, for example, in an initiative of the ALLIANCE 90/THE GREENS group dating from 2011, it was demanded that modifications be made to the substance of the complex in order to render revisionist historical interpretations impossible.11 By ­contrast, the City Administration reaffirmed conservative interpretations by erecting a new symbol. In September 2010, the bronze sculpture of a ‘mourning girl’ was placed at the entrance to the complex and, through this one-sided reference to the experience of suffering, spurned the opportunity to draw attention to the contradictions and ambivalences inherent to the cemetery as a place of memory.

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Fig. 8.9  (a) Heidefriedhof Dresden, 13 February 2007: Protest rally of ‘Antideutsche’ left-wing group in front of the cemetery entrance. (Source: Author). (b) Heidefriedhof Dresden, 13 February 2012: Police force preventing left-wing protesters from entering the cemetery. (Source: Till Neutzner)

As attendance at the official commemoration gradually lapsed into something of an annual obligation for certain representatives of society, the media, academic circles and critical activists, more and more ordinary citizens stayed away (Fig. 8.10). In the years between 2009 and 2013, permanent pressure from citizens’ initiatives forced the hesitant city leadership to

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Fig. 8.10  Heidefriedhof Dresden, 13 February 2013: Media recording the ceremonial activities of the prime minister of Saxony, the speaker of the Saxon parliament and the Lord Mayor of Dresden. (Source: Author)

gradually revise the agenda of the commemoration: An address was introduced into the previously speechless ritual, in order to enable explicit admonishing of the interpretations rejected by the local democratic society. Modification of the spatial choreography and the symbols used permitted more individual gestures of remembrance. But, since this still fell short of a fundamental reorientation, it was not sufficient to lastingly forestall the participation of right-wing extremist groups. Public criticism swelled once more. In advance of the 70th anniversary of the bombing, the city leaders finally gave up the ceremonial cemetery ritual. In its place, citizen’s groups now offer support to the predominantly elderly mourners for whom the anniversary is an occasion for private remembrance at the graves. Parallel to this, there has been a shift in the balance of political power in Dresden City Hall. The conservative parties had been unable to defend their long-standing City Council majority in 2014, and when the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (Christlich-Demokratische Union Deutschlands, CDU) also surrendered the office of mayor of the city a year later, this allowed an opening of the social debate about the past among

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Fig. 8.11  Heidefriedhof Dresden, 24 November 2014: Wall of remembrance with graffiti ‘DEUTSCHE TÄTER KEINE OPFER (German perpetrators [are] no victims). (Source: Heike Richter)

Dresden citizens. The forgoing of an official cemetery ritual was now affirmed by a broad alliance of democratic parties and organisations. As committed citizens began to work on how to develop the memorial complex for historico-political education, a new public controversy about suitable remembrance rituals at the graves of the Dresden bombing victims flared up in the regional and national press in the weeks before 13 February 2016. The Heidefriedhof cemetery is apparently still an emotionalised place of reference for various groups and their divergent interpretations of the past (Fig. 8.11).

Places, Rituals and Spaces in Plural Cultures of Memory The complicated, changeful and contradictory biography of the memorial complex at the Heidefriedhof cemetery in Dresden makes it an ideal example by which to illustrate fundamental aspects of social debates about the past. It shows how social groups foster their own specific representations of the past within collective memory, how their interpretations are reflected in cultures of memory, within which rituals develop, places of memory evolve and spaces of memory are formed.

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In the following, these five central concepts will be introduced briefly and defined operationally for the purposes of the present analysis. As methodological instruments, they can be used to identify the decisive social actors who have drawn references to the Heidefriedhof cemetery as a place of memory, each with noticeably distinct cultures of memory that share certain elements, but diverge in many others. Collective Memory It is evident that the relationships which people (whether as individuals or collectives) establish with the past are not only multifaceted, but also indicative of their respective present. It is thus not surprising that they have been a long-standing subject of debate and research, resulting in a scarcely surveyable abundance of observations, abstractions and models—especially since the increasingly interdisciplinary coupling of previously separate approaches from the social, cultural and natural sciences over the past decades. One concept that has attracted sustained interest is that of collective memory, which Maurice Halbwachs used to define interactions between an individual’s memories and his or her social environment almost a century ago (Halbwachs 1925, 1950). In the meantime, the term has come to be used in two ways—firstly to describe the socio-cultural shaping of individual memory, and secondly as a metaphor for different forms of the social acquisition and use of the past (Petermann 2014: 213). The described developments at the Heidefriedhof cemetery illustrate both mechanisms: By asserting that those who died in the air raids were solely victims (of fascism and imperialism), for example, GDR historical policy made it easy for relatives not just to withhold individual memories of co-responsibility or guilt, but even to permanently suppress those memories and to replace them with stereotypical formulations of dissociation from the NS regime. In this way, the historico-political framework exerted a lasting influence on biographical narratives. At the same time, the memories of the group members were ‘smooth and harmonised’. Individual memory is thus always exposed to super individual and hence collective influence. Yet, collective memory is only realised when it is taken up and constantly refreshed by individuals. Consequently, collective memory must be understood as the ‘entirety of all those processes which acquire significance through the mutual interactions of the past and present in socio-­cultural contexts’ (Erll 2005: 101).

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Culture of Memory If the complex interactions within collective memory are shared by a specific group of persons at a given point in time, the result can be summarised under the notion of a culture of memory. A culture of memory describes the time-specific construction of collective memories, comprising the entirety of mental, social and material references to the past within a group. The mental dimension refers to the codes and schemata which enable and shape common remembrance—such as stereotypes, conceptions of history and moral values. The social dimension of a culture of memory is formed by the institutions and practices which contribute to the group’s accumulation, conservation and retrieval of knowledge regarding the past—such as historical narratives or commemorative rituals. The material dimension, finally, embraces the media used by the group to record contents of memory and to render them accessible—such as documents, artefacts, texts or monuments (Erll 2005: 102f). The foundation for any culture of memory is therefore a definable social group. This group differs from other groups in that the individual references to the past of its members display specific commonalities within the group, but specific differences compared to the memories of persons outside the group. They thus represent a unique collective memory. The criteria by which to distinguish cultures of memory and their underlying social groups, therefore, are neither exclusively spatial (e.g. ‘the citizens of Dresden’), socio-demographic (e.g. ‘the generation which experienced the Second World War’), political (e.g. ‘the supporters of conservative parties’) nor related to milieu or lifestyle (e.g. ‘traditionalist, patriotic’). The significant aspects are rather the practices and objectives of the references to the past, along with the accordingly elaborated narratives and interpretations. This can be illustrated with an example. Persons with biographical links to victims of the February 1945 air raids who are buried within the memorial complex of the Heidefriedhof cemetery naturally share certain common and group-specific memory contents. Their practice of remembrance is guided by objectives such as biographical self-assurance, striving for the social recognition of biographies and warning against military violence. The dominant narrative of their remembrance is that of the catastrophe of February 1945, through which war is interpreted above all as an experience of suffering for the civilian population. The Heidefriedhof cemetery,

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in its role as a place of burial, is exceptionally important for this group. The common reference to the past is here concentrated on mourning, honouring of the dead and a commitment to peace. The anonymisation of the graves enforced in the early 1950s, however, impedes individual gestures. Instead, the group uses above all the public rituals on the two relevant commemorative dates—13 February as the anniversary of the air raids, and Totensonntag, the last Sunday before Advent, into  which (although a celebration of Protestant Prussian origin) public remembrance of all those deceased is bundled in predominantly secular Saxony. This example is a furthermore illustration of the abstraction which is necessarily linked with concepts such as collective memory and culture of memory: It goes without saying that not all references to the past of all members of the aforementioned group will be identical. A member of the military, for example, will derive different conclusions from the remembrance for relatives who died in war than would a convinced pacifist. In theoretical terms, this means that individuals develop relationships with the past as participants in more than just one collective memory; they are thus also members of several cultures of memory. This remains unproblematic as long as the expressions of remembrance within each culture are associated with different spheres—such as the immediate social environment (family), or cultural, religious or political contexts. As soon as two groups represent the normative demands of divergent interpretations within the same sphere, however, an individual who is a member of both groups faces a loyalty conflict. Taking the above example once more: Soldiers and pacifists are able to confirm their common biographical status as relatives of victims of war within the context of a joint remembrance ritual; if, on the other hand, the burial complex were to be used for a military ceremony, the latter would protest. Extending the observation, it can be generalised that expressions of several collective memories exist side by side in every society. In a democratically constituted society, the references to the past will thus also be manifested in a plurality of cultures of remembrance represented by different groups. The manner in which the individual groups functionalise the past is determined by the most assertive group actors—whether they are aware of this or not. If the references to the past of different groups stand in opposition, then their cultures of remembrance will also be in competition with each other. If group interests change, this will subsequently change both the previously shaped culture of memory and the correspondingly competing collective memories.

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Places of Memory The memorial complex of the Heidefriedhof in Dresden is in the first instance a physical place which can be described by way of its location, geographical extent, geological features, climate, flora and fauna, material and building infrastructures, and numerous further attributes. As described in the first section of this chapter, this place only became a burial and memorial site through the deliberate assignment of functions by specific social actors. They initiated changes to its architectural, natural and symbolic character and established ritualised social practices. In this way, the place acquired the purpose of objectifying and, within the framework of the assigned interpretations, of providing access to the past as a vehicle for legitimation and representation. This assignment of symbolic meaning and social function thus transforms the physical place into a place of memory. It nevertheless remains a place. In contrast to Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire (Nora 1984–1992) and their many successors, where the notion of place embraced a broad spectrum of cultural phenomena relevant to remembrance, place of memory is here understood in its much narrower sense, that is, limited to physically real places.12 This means that an awareness of the natural circumstances of the place of memory is retained, in addition to its symbolic and functional qualities. The graves of resistance fighters against National Socialism, for example, were ideally suited as authentication of the GDR’s self-perception as an anti-fascist society, but at the same time called for special mobilisation due to the secluded location of the cemetery and the occasionally adverse weather conditions on the dates of remembrance. Places of memory which are used by a particular group to record and/ or retrieve references to the past belong to the material dimension of the culture of memory concerned. Even so, they are also closely connected with the social and mental aspects of collective memory. In the case of the Heidefriedhof cemetery, for example, an institution—the City of Dresden—oversees what it considers to be appropriate forms of use; both the administrative institution and the affected rituals belong to the social dimension. On the other hand, the memorial complex incorporates ­various symbols (such as texts, names, graphic elements, forms, spatial relationships, etc.), which the users interpret in accordance with their available codes and schemata—both aspects of the mental dimension of cultures of memory.

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Two properties of the Heidefriedhof cemetery as a place of memory must be given special mention at this point—firstly the specific aura of the burial site, and secondly the sequentiality of its spatial structure. At the heart of the memorial complex, the visitor encounters the graves of persons whose deaths express a level of tragedy and drama far beyond that of natural passing. This refers above all to the scarcely imaginable number of bombing victims buried here, but also to the members of the anti-fascist resistance and the victims of National Socialism. When narratives of the past are related at their graves, this happens with such emotionality that an almost sacral atmosphere is created—especially when emotions are amplified in the context of a ritual. In this sense, the place of memory is an especially suitable means by which to confirm the fundamental normative claims of individual groups. At the same time, the embodied aura excludes any forms of use which offend against the proper sense of reverence of the social majority. (This also limits the possibilities for the authorities to forestall any undesirable activities: All too forceful police operations at the graves would attract public criticism and must thus retreat to outside the cemetery itself.) It is also the graves which lend the memorial complex its specific spatial structure. Viewed from the gateway, they are arranged sequentially. To reach the section devoted to those who died during the bombing of the city, visitors must pass first through the section remembering the victims of National Socialism and finally the graves honouring GDR functionaries and ‘meritorious citizens’. Even if only a small part of this path is walked, the generous sightlines make the overall sequence remain ever-present. The challenge for every actor using the place of memory is thus to establish a specific reference to all sections of the complex; selective use is spatially impossible for larger groups. The sequentiality of the complex defines the basic pattern for the staging of remembrance, namely, the procession. As they walk solemnly along the central axis, participants are forced to develop a representative relationship to the individual sections—even if that simply means ignoring the graves of a particular section. Rituals If places of memory are to become important as references to the past for a given group, they must be developed and incorporated into the group’s practical experience by way of social activity. Without an active relationship to the place in question, the embodied narratives, interpretations and

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symbols of the past remain ineffective. If they are not affirmed in active social use for longer periods of time (and thus also not adapted to constantly evolving situations), the social significance of a place of memory is lost. The most important functional means of a place of memory is the ritual. From the functionalist perspective, rituals can be defined as ‘stylised actions with a high symbolic content which are performed repeatedly on certain occasions and with a specific intention’ (Petermann 2014: 216). In the context of cultures of memory, rituals are a source of social meaning, by symbolically fitting certain present-day situations into an ordered and comprehensible historical structure. They legitimise social orders and intentions where these can be interpreted as inevitable consequences of the past13 or the beneficial conclusions to be drawn from historical experiences. By creating a historical foundation of myths and narratives to ­support the self-image of the group, rituals of collective memory promote the integration of the group members. At the same time, however, they may also serve as demarcation from rival groups, and are thus primarily disintegrative in nature, by seeking historical justification for the hegemonic claims of the group or at least for its identity boundaries. Ritual messages are not only directed at the participants of a given ritual; ­non-participants are also reached, for example, via the media—and they are in some cases the actual addressees (Platvoet 2008: 185f). These characteristics are revealed in many ritual practices from the history of the Heidefriedhof cemetery. Throughout the GDR era, for example, the morning wreath-laying on the anniversary of the bombing addressed two distinct audiences, and conveyed individually weighted messages in accordance with their specific political situation: it targeted both the domestic population and the public in the West, most notably in the Federal Republic of Germany. With regard to the GDR citizens, the ritual had an integrated purpose, aiming to mobilise the citizens’ support for current political campaigns, while for the West German public— addressed through personal guests and media reports—was to be shown the moral superiority of a peaceful, socially just people’s democracy. The historical practice of wreath-laying at the Heidefriedhof cemetery also illustrates a further aspect of politically instrumentalised rituals of remembrance, namely their ability to manipulate. This is based on the use of highly emotionalised symbols and biased or even ahistorical narratives of the past. Nevertheless, even the most efficacious rituals are generally unable to synchronise interpretations of the past and the present-day attitudes for all target groups. Especially where different groups take part in a

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ritual, each will interpret its symbols and messages differently based on their own interpretations of the past, intentions and cultural disposition. During the 1980s, for example, GDR citizens who doubted the state’s commitment to peace drew completely different conclusions from the joint ritual than those intended by the state. For them, the Heidefriedhof cemetery became a part of an imagined space of memory, which embraced several places around the city and linked them symbolically through a historically legitimised call for peace. The centre of this spatial construct was the ruin of the Dresden Frauenkirche, where civic remembrance rituals aside from official GDR politics had been concentrated from 1982 onwards (Rehberg and Neutzner 2015). Spaces of Memory When a group establishes a place of memory, this will rarely be a solitary, let alone exclusive, location. To achieve sufficient reach, intensity and sustainability, the group will develop a network of significant places. These places are inter-referenced in that they reference narratives of the past decisive for the group.14 They provide opportunities to extend the spatial and temporal scope of the practised rituals—either to reinforce communication through simultaneity or to perpetuate impact through succession of events. The denser the network of places of memory, and the more intensively they are used, the greater the chance that the group will be able to assert its particular interpretations of the past. In this way, the narrow geographical reference underlying collective memory is expanded into a broader space in two respects: Firstly, a physical space is defined, marking the locations of the individual places of memory and their interconnecting infrastructure. Secondly, the actors involved in the collective memory constitute a ‘social action space’ (Petermann 2007: 16), which is a cognitive dimension. Within any culture of memory, both space structures are interlinked: important material resources for communication and interaction are drawn from the physical space; but through the action space, the physical places acquire their meaning as a collective memory advancing the consolidation of places of memory. The intensive ritual use of the memorial complex at the Heidefriedhof cemetery during the GDR years illustrates these correlations well. The graves and memorials for the anti-fascist resistance fighters and victims of National Socialism, for example, were embedded in a dense regional and national network of places of memory, which represented both a physical

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space and the focal points for a cognitive construct. These places of memory were intensively used as venues for ritual action—whether decentralised tributes and propagandistic rallies or educational and art projects. Communicated society-wide, all this created an action space which was intended to validate and affirm anti-fascism as the dominant historical narrative and central founding myth of GDR society. Current Cultures of Memory Referencing the Heidefriedhof Cemetery The insights arising from the above discussion can now be applied to the  current developments regarding the Heidefriedhof cemetery. The decision to forego an official commemoration ritual on the anniversary of the air raids from 2015 marked the transition to a new phase, and the further outcome of this is still unforeseeable. As a place of memory, the cemetery remains of concern for the groups who shaped developments earlier, and, if necessary, they can at any time remobilise this powerful stage and attempt to lay claim on its meaning. Based on the above-mentioned criteria for distinguishing individual cultures of memory, it is ­possible to identify eight different groups with interest in the future of the Heidefriedhof cemetery. Three of these are defined by biographical characteristics, four belong to a particular political milieu, and one group was formed to embrace all actors with an interest based on historico-political education. The resulting different cultures of memory and their most important characteristics are listed in the Table 8.1 below and thereafter further discussed. Group with Biographical Links to Victims of the 1945 Air Raids Buried at the Heidefriedhof Cemetery This group adopt the memorial complex primarily as a burial site for remembering departed relatives and friends—with, as time passes, decreasing sense of mourning. They seek assurance for their own biographies and to reinforce family ties. At the same time, their collective memory carries the expectation that society should recognise the suffering of those who died. It is rooted in powerful narratives of war and affliction, handed down within families, together with accounts of the arduous, but ultimately successful reconstruction, and memories of a general commitment to peace in the post-war years.

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The anonymised graves of those who died in the air raids are today scarcely discernible within the memorial complex. Not only is there no indication of the location of individual graves, even the burial areas themselves, which were collectivised and landscaped in the 1950s, are not marked as such. Even so, some families have preserved their knowledge of the approximate location of individual graves over the decades. The flowers which are occasionally placed at certain spots on the anniversary of the bombing raids are witness to such knowledge and remembrance. In ­general, however, private gestures of remembrance are laid substitutively at the memorial wall at the end of the complex. The increasing conflicts in the years around 2005 led to greater numbers of members from this group to stay away from the official wreath-­ laying ceremony. The source of their indignation was not so much the participation of right-wing extremist groups, which remained outwardly inconspicuous and went to lengths to portray normality, but rather the vociferous protest against the right, the objective of which was to disturb the ritual. In this atmosphere of siege, police protection and provocation, any form of personal remembrance was difficult. Individual gestures were shifted to other less controversial dates. Since the discontinuation of the wreath-laying ceremony, citizen’s groups have offered alternative possibilities by stripping all performative elements of the obsolete ritual and providing a framework for individual gestures of remembrance. Groups with Biographical Links to Anti-Fascists Buried at the Heidefriedhof Cemetery Those who remember relatives and friends among the anti-fascists who are buried in the cemetery are similarly addressing a direct loss related to their own biographies. In this case, it is also mourning and biographical self-­ assurance that are the motives for remembrance. However, unlike members of the previous group, they are able to refer to individual graves. Biographical details of the anti-fascists buried at the site are recorded— albeit in accordance with the strict idea of egalitarianism applied since 1965: individual steles each bear just the names and the years of birth and death of up to 50 persons. The location of individual urns is marked only approximately by the stele. The individuality of those buried was reduced in favour of the collective narrative of ‘resistance against fascism’. Even so, biographical recognition by GDR society was for decades a characteristic aspect of remembrance practised by relatives and friends of

5

Activists of left-wing/social democratic (usually opposition) parties

Primarily political reference 4 Activists of conservative (usually ruling majority) parties

Interpretational sovereignty over past events Specific regional identity Defence against right-wing extremist instrumentalisation Preservation of a positive city image Interpretational sovereignty over past events Defence against right-wing extremist instrumentalisation Preservation of a positive city image

Primarily biographical reference 1 Biographical links to Mourning victims of the 1945 Biographical self-assurance air raids buried in Biographical recognition the cemetery Warning to preserve peace 2 Biographical links to Mourning the anti-fascists Biographical self-assurance buried here Biographical recognition Stand against right-wing extremism 3 Biographical links to Biographical recognition the city of Dresden

Local responsibility for the NS dictatorship Negative developments in historical policy and cultures of memory after 1990

Wartime destruction of the city ‘Peaceful revolution’ of 1989 Reconstruction after 1990 Frauenkirche as a symbol of reconciliation

Destruction of the city in war-time bombing Reconstruction

Public commemoration Public symbolic actions (human chain)

(continued)

Political deficits in Saxony since Political demonstration 1990—also in historical policy Public symbolic actions Deconstruction of an exemplary (human chain) city myth Commitment to a free and democratic basic order

Exemplary city myth Political success story since 1990 Positive regional identity

Historical victory over National Individual remembrance Socialism Burials Commitment to anti-fascism Public honouring of the dead Political demonstration Exemplary city myth Public honouring of the dead Public commemoration

Resistance against National Socialism Reconstruction up to 1989

Individual remembrance Public honouring of the dead

Preferred ritual actions

Suffering of the civilian population in war Commitment to peace

Dominant interpretation of the past

Experience of suffering in the Second World War

Characterisation of the Key objectives of the reference to Dominant narrative of the past group practising the culture the past of memory

Table 8.1  Current cultures of memory referencing the Heidefriedhof cemetery as a place of memory

Historico-political education 8 Actors with Historico-political education educational interests Promotion of a peace culture, democracy and human rights

Complexities and Historical responsibility contradictions in the history of Action options and action the city obligations Experiences of engagement and resistance Experiences of guilt and failure

Historical policy deficits in Saxony and the Federal Republic of Germany Deconstruction of an exemplary city myth Commitment to civil disobedience

Left-wing activist groups

7

Interpretational sovereignty over past events Defence against right-wing extremist instrumentalisation (In part) fundamental social criticism

Exemplary city myth Historical guilt of Germany’s war opponents Rejection of the democratic social order

Right-wing Interpretational sovereignty extremist, revisionist over past events parties and groups Relativising of NS crimes Promotion of nationalist thinking Recognition as an established political actor

6

Suffering of the German civilian population in the Second World War Historical guilt of Germany’s war opponents Responsibility of Western democracies for present-day wars Local responsibility for the NS dictatorship Negative developments in historical policy and cultures of memory after 1990

Dominant interpretation of the past

Characterisation of the Key objectives of the reference to Dominant narrative of the past group practising the culture the past of memory

Table 8.1 (continued)

Discussion Art projects Educational activities

Political demonstration (In part) blocking of right-wing extremist actions (In part) disturbance of established remembrance rituals

Public commemoration Silent march Political demonstration

Preferred ritual actions

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the anti-fascists buried at the cemetery. By contrast, the conservative parties which subsequently dominated politics in Saxony from 1990 marginalised public remembrance for the resistance against National Socialism—and here especially the contributions made to this resistance by communists. The objective of the culture of memory established by those with biographical links to anti-fascists buried at the cemetery is thus to restore public recognition of the remembered individuals. It tends to be more politically inspired than that of those who lost relatives and friends in February 1945, which could be indicative of their adopting the convictions of those remembered. Alongside support for left-wing political objectives, the upholding of anti-fascist traditions is expressed above all in engagement against contemporary right-wing extremism. With the Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime/Federation of Antifascists (VVN-BdA), an institutionalised structure exists to bundle these interests from the organisational perspective. The narrative core of the culture of memory for this social group is the successful resistance against historical National Socialism. At the same time, positive aspects of GDR society are emphasised, in particular its anti-­ fascist state doctrine. Both references to the past are also manifested in the burials which still take place since anti-fascists who were granted state ­recognition by the GDR are entitled to be buried in the memorial grove of the Heidefriedhof cemetery. Group with Biographical Links to the City of Dresden Alongside the descendants of those buried at the Heidefriedhof cemetery, the memorial complex is also important for a social group whose biographies contain close, contextually specific and emotional links to Dresden as a city and home. For their culture of memory, the reference to narratives of destruction and reconstruction of the city are its characteristics. Their recourse of the past is aimed above all at recognition of the life achievements of the generation which experienced the Second World War and of those born in the immediate post-war years. This motive acquired new urgency for both generations with the social upheavals after 1989, when the majority of those who lived in the former GDR experienced a more or less dramatic devaluation of their biographies. This is countered, for example, through reference to the outstanding achievement of having reconstructed the severely destroyed city under great sacrifice. In this context, the group draws on the fundamental city myth of Dresden, which elevates the cultural value of the city, the circumstances of

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the destruction and the restoration of its cultural importance to a superlative of uniqueness—as illustrated in an exemplary manner by the nationally and internationally radiating narrative of the rebuilding of the Dresden Frauenkirche (Rehberg and Neutzner 2015). The alignment of personal biographies to the mythically charged city narrative enhances the value of own life achievements. A functional identity reference is established and cemented by public commemoration of the destruction of the city in 1945. Group of Activists of Conservative (Usually Ruling Majority) Parties The objective of the culture of memory established by the conservative political majority in the state of Saxony and its capital Dresden is to defend interpretational sovereignty over regional history since 1945. This political debate is mainly directed against the largest opposition party, Die Linke (The Left), which the conservative side perceives as perpetuation of the GDR state party SED. The conservative historical policy has focussed on two narratives of the past. On one hand, GDR society is portrayed exclusively as a dictatorship, in order to assign retrospective responsibility to left-wing political opponents and to delegitimise the latter with respect to any references to tradition. On the other hand, conservative actors also attempt to occupy the heroic narrative of the peaceful revolution of 1989 and to present developments since then as their exclusive success story. The CDU, in particular, can hereby portray itself as the custodian of freedom and prosperity, and thus underline its prerogative of power. The same objective is served by explicit identity politics: In comparisons with the other East German federal states, it is claimed that Saxony is extraordinary, headstrong and successful, while the conservative parties present themselves as specifically Saxon (Jesse et al. 2014: 298f). In this constellation of objectives, continuation of the wreath-laying ceremony on the anniversary of the bombing after 1990 was initially an opportunity to utilise the widely emanating Dresden remembrance to place regional politics in an international spotlight. At the same time, the CDU incorporated the Dresden city myth of exemplary destruction and rebirth into the success story of Saxony under conservative government. The wreath-laying at the memorial wall, whose text affirms the ahistorical superlative of the destruction narrative, served as a counterpoint to the celebrated achievements of reconstruction. It was accordingly consistent that the ritual ignored the burial areas of the anti-fascists.

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This—from the conservative perspective—successful continuation of the ritual at the Heidefriedhof cemetery turned to failure after 2005. The reasons can be found not so much in the increasing instrumentalisation of the wreath-laying by right-wing extremist groups, which was at first tolerated by the conservatives, but rather in the nationwide protest against such instrumentalisation, causing the official Dresden remembrance to be perceived as a sign of historical policy failure. More and more concerned about the image of conservative-governed Saxony and its capital Dresden, unsuccessful attempts were undertaken to adapt the ritual, before it was finally abandoned before the 70th anniversary of the bombing. Since then, the Heidefriedhof cemetery has played no further role in the conservative culture of memory. Symbolic ritual has instead been shifted into the city centre, where a human chain around the old city generates more powerful media images for the marketing of historical policy. Group of Activists of Left-Wing/Social Democratic (Usually Opposition) Parties In the political constellation in Dresden and Saxony, public remembrances relating to the bombing of the city were of minor importance for the opposition parties in the first decade after 1990. The wreath-laying on the annual anniversaries was attended merely as a part of an unreflected tradition, in the sense of an obligation for elected representatives. It was only after left-wing activists criticised the swelling occupation of the date by right-wing extremists, mobilised a nationwide protest and extended their criticism to the wreath-laying ceremony that the opposition parties gradually began to debate the historical and political constellations of Dresden remembrance and its specific manifestation at the Heidefriedhof cemetery. Parallel to this, the failure of conservative historical policy to prevent right-­ wing extremist instrumentalisation became a topic for political dispute with the CDU. Against this background, the central objective of the opposition parties’ culture of memory became a defence against the right-wing extremist instrumentalisation of memories of the bombing, which also permitted differentiation from the conservative majority parties. To this end, they adopted the narrative of the city of Dresden as historically co-responsible for National Socialist crimes, introduced into the debate by the protest groups. Through deconstruction of the purported ‘innocence’ of a city of art, a core topos of the NS propaganda narrative, it was hoped that the

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symbol-laden remembrance of the bombing could be called into question. At the same time, the opposition parties supported debates on the history of Dresden during National Socialism and the Second World War, as already begun by citizen’s groups and the academic community. As a result, the hesitant CDU leaders were now pressed into making changes to the wreath-laying ritual, with the intention of rendering it impossible for the right-wing extremists to continue their participation. After the final failure of the official ritual, interest in the various aspects of the Heidefriedhof cemetery, ebbed away rapidly among the opposition parties. Group of Right-Wing Extremist and Revisionist Activists After the right-wing extremist National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) and an NPD-controlled electoral alliance gained seats in the state parliament and on the Dresden city council in 2004, its representatives, as parliamentarians, were automatically invited to officially attend the wreath-­ laying. In the culture of memory of the right-wing extremist scene, public remembrance surrounding the bombing of the Dresden had already gained prominence. It offered the possibility to weigh up the suffering of the German civilian population under aerial bombardment against the crimes of Nazi Germany, against the holocaust and genocide. By doing so, the right-wing extremist actors sought to liberate German National Socialism from its historical stigma in order to be able to openly connect with its ideological premises and render their own nationalist, racist and anti-democratic standpoints socially compatible. The symbolic narrative of the destruction of Dresden is especially suited for such instrumentalisation, as decades of propagandistic use had already elevated it into the realms of a mythical superlative. Participation in the wreath-laying at the Heidefriedhof cemetery became an opportunity for the actors of the right-wing scene to communicate their historical standpoints publicly. Through the involvement in the official ritual, they were at the same time able to present themselves as an inherent element of political reality in the Federal Republic of Germany. Thus, they placed themselves demonstratively within the given procedures of the ritual, acted in a disciplined and reverent manner, and provoked mainly through their revisionist inscriptions on wreath ribbons. Even the increasing protest against their presence played into their hands at first: the provocation from left-wing activists, in particular, being intended to disturb the cemetery ritual, permitted the NPD to present itself, in contrast,

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as an upholder of respectful remembrance for the victims of the war. Right through to 2014, the municipal powers found no sustainable means to prevent the participation of right-wing extremist groups. After abandonment of the official ceremony, the right-wing extremist groups also quickly lost interest in the Heidefriedhof cemetery. They could have selected to occupy the ritual void, but a commemorative ritual solely for their own followers was evidently unattractive—the attention-­ catching potentials were too limited. Group of Left-Wing Activists Already in 1995, when the 50th anniversary of the bombing saw Dresden affirmed as a national historical symbol of reunited Germany, a month-­ long national controversy arose as to the legitimacy of public remembrance referring to the suffering of the German population in the Second World War. Individual groups from the broad left-wing activist spectrum also condemned the remembrance as an attempt to relativize historical responsibility for the crimes of German National Socialism. At this same time, the first public actions against the right-wing extremist actors in Dresden were organised. As the scale of instrumentalisation by the right-­ wing scene gradually increased, it was initially the left-wing activist groups who carried the weight of public protest. At the end of the 1990s, the spectrum of actors ‘against the right’ broadened rapidly; around 2005, when the conflicts had become very aggravated, it reached practically every institution and initiative of the local democratic society. With their national and even European networks the organisations also mobilised support far beyond the immediate municipal context. Within the left-wing activist protest movement, individual groups developed a variety of standpoints and action forms, depending on their ideological positions and subcultural character—from fundamental rejection of all forms of remembrance relating to the experience of wartime bombing to promotion of a differentiated historical debate, from garish and provocative disruption of the staging of remembrance in Dresden to balanced scientific elucidation. This has given rise to different cultures of memory, though all share the reference to two narratives. One is placed on reminders of the historical responsibility for National Socialist crimes and the other on criticism of the negative developments in historical policy in Dresden and Saxony, which are taken to have enabled right-wing extremist instrumentalisation. In this context, the wreath-laying ceremony at the

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Heidefriedhof cemetery acquires special symbolic meaning, as a regularly recurring opportunity to observe and criticise the right-wing extremist occupation of remembrance in Dresden. Year after year, several hundred anti-Germans—a group committed to protest against anti-Semitism and ‘Germanness’ (understood as a reactionary political standpoint)—besieged the cemetery gates. With a strong police presence regularly preventing any effective disruption, and increasingly isolated within the left-wing activist scene, they abandoned their protest already several years before the stop of the official cemetery ritual. After the final abandonment of a wreath-laying ceremony—and thus the end of the right-wing extremist occupation—the Heidefriedhof cemetery is no longer in the focus of left-wing activist actors. Group of Actors with Educational Interests As an alternative to either biographical or party political motivations, a new approach has been developed. For several years, individual citizens and citizen’s groups have been working to develop joint remembrance as a foundation for historico-political education and as a means to promote peace, democracy and human rights. Despite different political and cultural backgrounds, they share the approach that the narratives of the past should be used to illustrate the complexities and contradictions embedded in historical experiences, and to help understand individual decisions and actions in terms of their specific historical contexts. Within such objective, the memorial complex at the Heidefriedhof cemetery could come to serve as a place of learning, as discussed below.

References to the Past and Their Visible Traces The developments sketched above show clearly how, over the course of the complex history of the memorial site at the Heidefriedhof cemetery, different social actors inscribed their particular narratives, interpretations and appeals into the spatial structures and the natural, architectural and symbolic forms of the place. Through their social and mental actions, the individual groups continually retrieved this content of collective memory. In doing so, depending on their changing interests, certain elements of the interpretations were emphasised and other were marginalised. This required repeated variation of the narratives of the past inscribed into the cemetery complex—the place of memory was subject to constant transcription.15

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Against this background, it is important to learn whether and, if so, how such inscriptions are still legible at the concrete place. Five references to the past retrieved from within the framework of different cultures of memory serve as examples. In the conflicts surrounding the place of memory over the past decades, counter-narratives have been positioned as argumentation against each of these perspectives; these counter-narratives are also briefly outlined. Mourning For the generation who lived through the Second World War, the Heidefriedhof cemetery was foremost associated with a deeply disturbing experience, namely their confrontation with the mass deaths of friends, relatives and neighbours, without meaningful explanation and collective solidarity. They remained excluded from the burials in mass graves at the strictly cordoned-off cemetery. Neither the foundering NS dictatorship nor the subsequent post-war society, with its fixation on a new beginning, offered scope or rituals for collective mourning. Even the informal community of solidarity around the improvised graves on the Heidefriedhof cemetery was lost after the enforced collectivisation. The objective of the annual memorial rituals in the years which followed was mobilisation rather than mourning. Amidst the aura of the burial site, and renouncing any brusque agitation, the staging nevertheless created a certain sense of community, which could at least in parts be treated as a mourning collective. This gradually faded into the background as the years passed, and it had disappeared completely by 1977, when the responsible authorities forwent any further participation of the population, and the wreath-laying became a proxy routine for appointed functionaries. Even after 1990, there was no return to an atmosphere of authentic collective mourning, or any kind of empathetic remembrance for the dead. In today’s fragmented society, such communities of mourning are in any case only conceivable as a short-term product of media mobilisation, but hardly conceivable in remembrance of a long past occasion of sheer unimaginable death and destruction.16 Even so, mourning—as a function of memory—remains visible in its historical connotation in the memorial complex: The memorial groves from the 1950s to 1960s, and similarly the bronze statue added in 2010, offer contrasting approaches to the subject of mourning as a social and individual reaction to loss.

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Peace It was above all through the expressive garden landscaping that the designers were able to lend the burial site a reverently hopeful atmosphere, ­creating a sense of peace (for details see Neutzner (2006)). This focus was reflected explicitly in the eight stone pillows arranged either side of the central axis to enable the laying of flowers. Their partly slogan-like partly poeticised adages invoked counter-posed images of life and death, war and peace. As they walked through the burial site, visitors were addressed as part of a collective ‘us’ in dialogue with the nameless ‘them’ of the dead: Their fate assumed the status of a warning, an appeal to fight for peace. Their ‘legacy’ was to be fulfilled ‘in our reconstruction’. This symbolism, which still can be experienced today, points in exemplary manner to the role of peace as the central motif of the GDR state claims to the symbol of Dresden. State propaganda responded to the yearning for peace of the wartime generation with a simple formula: Socialism = Guarantee for peace. This was by all means a powerful motor of social adhesion and mobilisation, but later surrendered this impact in the course of the critical developments of the 1980s. Instead, the call to preserve peace became one of the central topic of the critical debate which eventually led to the collapse of the GDR political system. When, from 2005 onwards, the memorial complex shifted back into public focus, the fierce controversies over the revisionist instrumentalisation of remembrance completely obscured the peace dimension of the site. Today, therefore, it is above all the symbolism of the memorials from the 1950s which refers explicitly to the subject of peace. Anti-fascism In the mid-1960s, the expansion and reorganisation of the memorial complex made anti-fascism the dominant theme of political staging at the Heidefriedhof cemetery. The function of the historical place was now to authenticate the central origin myth of the project to build an East German society.17 For today’s visitors, this can be witnessed both in the spatial dramaturgy and in the monumental nature of the memorial for Anti-fascist resistance fighters. At the same time, it is evident that those who died in the air raids were also integrated into the symbolic interpretative framework of ‘victims of fascism’. The columns around the circular rally area at the centre of the memorial complex place Dresden in the context of places of

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memory related to the holocaust and National Socialist war crimes. In recent years, this juxtaposition has made the central circular area one of the most criticised, but at the same time also one of the most interesting elements of the memorial complex. It is exemplary in the way it visualises concurrency, ambivalence and contradictions in the interpretation of history—after all, the staging stands both for empathy with the victims and for the instrumentalisation of their suffering, it points to historical contextualisation but also produces an ahistorical masking. A City’s Identity While the offered identity of anti-fascism eventually failed through the conflict with GDR realities, the staging of remembrance at the Heidefriedhof cemetery was successful in supporting another local origin narrative: Dresden could here depict itself as unique—a unique place of culture and suffering. The elaborately designed memorials reinforced the cultural aspirations of the ‘Florence on the Elbe’. The graves of the bombing victims authenticated the overdrawn catastrophe. The Heidefriedhof cemetery thus represents one of the two poles of a still potent city myth.18 While the Baroque Frauenkirche stands for the mythically elevated past and the perceived miracle of its resurrection, the cemetery memorials signify the historical symbol of destruction. Historical Revisionism As already indicated, the symbolic narrative of the ‘destruction of Dresden’, originally constructed by NS war propaganda, was consolidated above all through further decades of propaganda, and thus firmly inscribed in collective consciousness far beyond the borders of the East German state. It was accepted that ‘Dresden 1945’ could become an exemplary code word for the suffering of the German people in the Second World War and thus an attractive starting point for revisionist argumentation. The freely interpretable superlative of the countless and nameless Dresden victims, as asserted in the text on the memorial wall at the Heidefriedhof cemetery, was—and still is—placed along Auschwitz. It was thus only logical that, over several years, parliamentarians representing right-wing extremist parties laid wreathes with inscriptions remembering the ‘German victims’ of the ‘bombing holocaust’ within the framework of the official remembrance ritual. It is documented that the

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symbols found at the Heidefriedhof cemetery facilitate such a revisionist interpretation of history. Aside from documentary evidence, this can be recognised in the ahistorical ductus of the memorial text. However, as regard to the often criticised circle of columns around the central rally area, the situation is somewhat different: here, the succession of place names is not conducive to such an interpretation, as Dresden is staged as a victim of fascism rather than of the Allied war opponents. Counter-narratives As described, it was mainly the right-wing instrumentalisation which triggered public debate about the memorial complex and its use. In line with general aggravation after 2005 over the disputes regarding Dresden as a place of memory, criticism of its specific embodiment at the Heidefriedhof cemetery also broadened. Counter-narratives contradicted all of the aforementioned interpretations—without exception. Mourning now appeared to be a mere alibi and references to peace and anti-fascism were seen to have been devalued through GDR propaganda. The self-image of culture and exemplary suffering was countered with criticism of suppressed co-­ responsibility for the NS crimes and ahistorical exaggerations. These counter-narratives can be traced from the documentary records of various protest actions. Their material signs are also found at the memorial complex itself, for example, in the vestiges of graffiti and other damage, which was repeatedly remedied but for precisely that reason remains discernible. Neglect and the beginning decay of individual elements—in particular the memorial for the anti-fascist resistance fighters—are moreover indications of the changed values of those who hold political responsibility.

Heidefriedhof Cemetery as a Place of Learning With the city’s decision to forego an official remembrance ritual before the 70th anniversary of the bombing raids, the ‘biography’ of the memorial complex on the Heidefriedhof cemetery entered a new phase in February 2015. Today, two years later, the status of the site within the landscape of remembrance in Dresden has already changed significantly. After the discontinuation of the publicly staged and increasingly confrontational events, the interest of supra-regional political actors, media and researchers has quickly waned. This, in turn, has improved the conditions for a

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fundamental redefinition of the social use of the memorial complex. The questions now are whether it will be possible to realise the potential embodied in such a complex and contradictory place in a manner appropriate for a democratic and pluralistic society. Will individual social groups again attempt to occupy this powerful stage to publicly assert their particular interpretations of the past? Or will the burial and memorial complex at the Heidefriedhof cemetery gradually fade from the public eye? Individual citizens’ initiatives have already been working for several years on an alternative concept to the evidently obsolete remembrance ritual: if the memorial complex were to be approached from the perspective of its historically evolved character and the conflict-laden history of its use, it could well be developed as a vehicle for historical and political education. The Heidefriedhof cemetery holds diverse potential as a place of learning. For informed visitors, the spatial structures and the natural, architectural and symbolic forms of the memorial complex expose a multiplicity of partially contradictory interpretations of history. If this could be supplemented by documentation of the genesis and past use of the complex, visitors would be able to trace how latent narratives and values were suggested and politically functionalised in the respective eras. Additionally, visitors would gain an awareness for the performative production of historical meaning: Their own movements across this stage would enable them to experience for themselves how the selection and sequence of places and the interaction with the encountered symbols evoke or suppress certain interpretations of history. When developing the Heidefriedhof cemetery into a place of learning, the intention, however, is neither to formulate a fixed curriculum nor to stage the place in the sense of predefined perceptions.19 If historical debate in a democratic society is understood as an open, transparent and contested process of negotiation (Siebeck 2013: 31), this means that all forms of ‘occupation’ by way of finalised interpretations must be avoided. Instead, exploration and discovery should be preferred over the museally choreographed imparting of knowledge. The burial and memorial complex should be addressed as a place anchored in the present, leaving room for individual comprehension of its biographical tiers and breaks. The objective of historico-political education is above all to promote political judgement and the ability to act politically through a discursive engagement with history.20 In this context, the Heidefriedhof cemetery is an ideal place to experience how history is shaped by concrete social actors,

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how it is grasped as a narrative on past events, and how it is used to legitimise social orders and strengthen cohesion within communities. It is enormously relevant to be able to judge such correlations, as history on a daily basis is a subject of argumentation with political aims.

Notes 1. Concerning performative aspects of appropriation of the past, see Winter (2010). Concerning the theory of rituals, see introductory: Bellinger, Krieger (2008). Concerning the relation between space and ritual, see Petermann (2007). Concerning political rituals, see Voigt (1989). Concerning rituals in politics of history, see Wesel (2003). Concerning mourning and funeral rituals, see introductory Assmann, Maciejewski et al. (2007), and in respect of GDR, see Redlin (2009), Schulz (2013: 182–2001). 2. For an overview of reform movements important for Dresden, see Menzhausen, J. (1993) ‘Dresdner Reformbewegung nach 1900’, in: Dresdner Hefte 36: 2–6. 3. Administration of cemetery Elias-, Trinitatis- und Johannisfriedhof (9 June 1938). Letter to City of Dresden, Burial office (Bestattungsamt) [letter] Archive Johannisfriedhof, E.1.I, without page numbers. 4. Ev.-luth. Landeskirchenamt Sachsen (9 September 1940). Circular to all parish councils [circular] Archiv Johannisfriedhof, E.1.I, without page numbers. 5. Stadtarchiv Dresden, 9.1.14, 817, p. 52. 6. City of Dresden, Burial institution (Bestattungseinrichtungen) (12 May 1954) [note] Stadtarchiv Dresden, 9.1.14, 817, without page numbers. 7. Dresden City Council (6 June 1962) Draft for council session [draft] Stadtarchiv Dresden, 4.2.2, 77, p. 58. 8. Sächsische Zeitung, 21 (216), 12 September 1966: p. 1. 9. Dresden City Council (18 August 1965) Draft for council session [draft] Stadtarchiv Dresden, 4.2.2, 109, p. 144. 10. Dresden City Council (28 August 1969) Draft for council session [draft] Stadtarchiv Dresden, 4.2.3, 182, p. 5. 11. BÜNDNIS 90 / DIE GRÜNEN, Kreisverband Dresden (12 October 2013) Decision Dresden city party convention [decision]. Available at: http://gruenedresden.de/userspace/SN/kv_dresden/Dokumente/ Beschluesse/beschluss_heidefriedhof.pdf [Accessed 1 November 2015]. 12. Lossau and Flitner designate places like this as ‘thematic places’ (Themenorte) (Lossau, Flitner 2005, 11).

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13. Therefore, different constructions of causality can be used as arguments— that is, continuation of traditions, redeeming of claims, redress for injustice, inevitability of certain developments and more. 14. This is similar to the concept of distributed memorials developed by Sørensen and Adriansen (2015: 34). 15. Concerning the broad discourse on memory and memorization, see introductory: Erll (2005) and Gudehus, Eichenberg et al. (2010). 16. Concerning mourning, see introductory: Sörries (2012), focussed on politics and cultures of memory: Maciejewski (2007), Rüsen (1996), Brumlik (1992). 17. Concerning anti-fascism as founding myth of GDR society, see introductory: Münkler (2010: 421–453) and Zimmerling (2000: 37–168). 18. Concerning identity and myth in connection with the Dresden 1945 remembrance, see Rehberg, Neutzner (2015). 19. For the role of places as a medium of cultures of memory, see the summary and essential considerations at Siebeck (2013). 20. For key concepts of historico-political education see Ständige Konferenz der Kultusminister (2014).

Bibliography Assmann, J. 1992. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. München: Beck. Assmann, A. 2003. Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. München: Beck. ———. 2006. Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. München: Beck. Assmann, J., F. Maciejewski, and A. Michaelis, eds. 2007. Der Abschied von den Toten. Trauerrituale im Kulturvergleich. Göttingen: Wallstein. Balke, H. 1937. Grundsätzliche Stellungnahme zum heutigen Friedhofsproblem. In Gartenkunst. Zeitschrift für das gesamte Garten- und Siedlungswesen / Landschaftsgestaltung / Friedhofskultur / Gartentechnik 50 (11): 242. Beinlich, J. 1955. Der Ehrenhain auf dem Dresdner Heidefriedhof. Deutsche Friedhofskultur. Zeitschrift für das gesamte Friedhofswesen 45 (3): 25. Bellinger, A., and D.J. Krieger. 2008. Ritualtheorien. Ein einführendes Handbuch. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Bergander, G. 1994. Dresden im Luftkrieg: Vorgeschichte, Zerstörung, Folgen. 2nd ed. Weimar/Köln/Wien: Böhlau. Bialas, W. 2003. Antifaschismus als Sinnstiftung. Konturen eines ostdeutschen Konzepts. In Die NS-Diktatur im deutschen Erinnerungsdiskurs, 151–170. Opladen: Leske + Budrich.

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Botsch, G. 2012. Die extreme Rechte in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1949 bis heute. Darmstadt: WBG. Brumlik, M. 1992. Trauerrituale und politische Kultur nach der Shoah in der Bundesrepublik. In Holocaust: Die Grenzen des Verstehens. Eine Debatte über die Besetzung der Geschichte, 191–211. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Christmann, G.B. 2004. Dresdens Glanz, Stolz der Dresdner: Lokale Kommunikation, Stadtkultur und städtische Identität. Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag. Dovermann, U., ed. 2011. Linksextremismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung. Dresdner Anzeiger, October 13, 1936: 5. Erll, A. 2005. Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen. Stuttgart/ Weimar: Metzler. Fibich, P. 1999. Gedenkstätten, Mahnmale und Ehrenfriedhöfe für die Verfolgten des Nationalsozialismus  – Ihre landschaftsarchitektonische Gestaltung in Deutschland 1945 bis 1960. Ph.D., Technische Universität Dresden. Förster, K. 1961. Gedenkgarten in Dresden. Garten und Landschaft. Hefte der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Gartenkunst und Landschaftspflege 71 (11): 328–329. Gieseke, D., and H.  Welter. 2012. Das Menschenmögliche. Zur Renovierung der deutschen Erinnerungskultur. Hamburg: Edition Körber-Stiftung. Grossmann, T. 2002. Ergänzende Pflanzungen im Ehrenhain Heidefriedhof Dresden. Diploma Thesis, Technische Universität Dresden. Grunenberg, A. 1993. Antifaschismus – ein deutscher Mythos. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Gudehus, C., A.  Eichenberg, and H.  Welzer, eds. 2010. Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Stuttgart: Metzler. Halbwachs, M. 1925. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Alcan. ———. 1950. La mémoire collective. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Irving, D.J.C. 1963. The Destruction of Dresden. London: William Kimber. Jesse, E., T. Schubert, and T. Thieme. 2014. Politik in Sachsen. Wiesbaden: Springer. Joel, T. 2013. The Dresden Firebombing. Memory and the Politics of Commemorating Destruction. London: Tauris. Knigge, V. 2005. Statt eines Nachworts: Abschied der Erinnerung. Anmerkungen zum notwendigen Wandel der Gedenkkultur in Deutschland. In Verbrechen erinnern. Die Auseinandersetzung mit Holocaust und Völkermord, ed. V. Knigge and N. Frei, 443–460. München: Beck. Koschmieder, C. 2011. Die Entstehung der ‚Antideutschen‘ und die Spaltung der linksradikalen Szene. In Linksextremismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, ed. U.  Dovermann, vol. 2011, 183–200. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung. Lossau, J., and M. Flitner. 2005. Ortsbesichtigung. Eine Einleitung. In Themenorte, ed. M. Flitner and J. Lossau, 7–23. Münster: LIT. Maciejewski, F. 2007. Trauer ohne Riten  – Riten ohne Trauer. Deutsche Volkstrauer nach 1945′. In Der Abschied von den Toten. Trauerrituale im

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Kulturvergleich, ed. J. Assmann, F. Maciejewski, and A. Michaelis, 245–266. Göttingen: Wallstein. Meinel, S. 1980. Rekonstruktion und Erweiterung des Heidefriedhofes Dresden. Diploma Thesis, Technische Universität Dresden. Münkler, H. 2010. Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Neutzner, M., ed. 2003. Martha Heinrich Acht  – Dresden 1944/45. 4th ed. Dresden: Verlag der Kunst. ———. 2005a. Vom Alltäglichen zum Exemplarischen. Dresden als Chiffre für den Luftkrieg der Alliierten. In Das rote Leuchten. Dresden und der Bombenkrieg, ed. O.  Reinhard, M.  Neutzner, and W.  Hesse, 110–127. Dresden: Edition Sächsische Zeitung. ———. 2005b. Vom Anklagen zum Erinnern. Die Erzählung vom 13. Februar. In Das rote Leuchten. Dresden und der Bombenkrieg, ed. O. Reinhard, M. Neutzner, and W. Hesse, 128–163. Dresden: Edition Sächsische Zeitung. ———. 2005c. Die Erzählung vom 13. Februar. Dresdner Hefte 84: 38–48. ———. 2006. Dresden! – Die Erinnerung an den 13. Februar. In Geschichte der Stadt Dresden, Von der Reichsgründung bis zur Gegenwart, ed. H. Starke, vol. 3, 517–528. Stuttgart: Thelem. ———. 2016. Heidefriedhof: Lernen am konfliktbeladenen Erinnerungsort. Dresdner Hefte 127: 75–85. Neutzner, M., Schönherr, N., von Plato, A., and Schnatz, H. 2010. Abschlussbericht der Historikerkommission zu den Luftangriffen auf Dresden zwischen dem 13. und 15. Februar 1945, [Online]. Available at https://www.dresden.de/ media/pdf/stadtarchiv/Historikerkommission_Dresden1945_ Abschlussbericht_V1_14a.pdf. Accessed 5 Feb 2017. Nora, P. 1984–1992. Les lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard. Petermann, S. 2007. Rituale machen Räume. Zum kollektiven Gedenken der Schlacht von Verdun und der Landung in der Normandie. Bielefeld: Transcript. ———. 2014. Erinnern und Gedenken. In Schlüsselbegriffe der Kultur- und Sozialgeographie, ed. J.  Lossau, T.  Freytag, and R.  Lippuner, 210–226. Stuttgart: Ullmer. Platvoet, J. 2008. Das Ritual in pluralistischen Gesellschaften. In Rithualtheorien. Ein einführendes Handbuch, ed. A.  Belliger and D.J.  Krieger, 173–190. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Redlin, J. 2009. Säkulare Totenrituale. Totenehrung, Staatsbegräbnis und private Bestattung in der DDR. Münster: Waxmann. Rehberg, K.-S. 2002. Das Canaletto-Syndrom. Dresden als imaginäre Stadt. In Ausdruck und Gebrauch. Dresdner wissenschaftliche Halbjahreshefte für Architektur, Wohnen, Umwelt, ed. A. Hahn, vol. 1, 78–88. Dresden: Thelem. ———. 2005. Dresden als Raum des Imaginären. »Eigengeschichte« und Mythenbildung als Quelle städtischer Identitätskonstruktionen. Dresdner Hefte 84: 88–99.

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Rehberg, K.-S., and M. Neutzner. 2015. The Dresden Frauenkirche as a Contested Symbol: The Architecture of Remembrance After War. In War and Cultural Heritage. Biografies of Place, ed. M.L.  Stig Sørensen and D.  Viejo-Rose, 98–127. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reinhard, O. 2014. Den Opfern nicht mehr den Rücken zukehren. Sächsische Zeitung, February 17, 2014: 15. Robertson-von-Trotha, C.Y., ed. 2012. Rechtsextremismus in Deutschland und Europa. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Rüsen, J. 1996. Trauer als historische Kategorie. Überlegungen zur Erinnerung an den Holocaust in der Geschichtskultur der Gegenwart. In Erlebnis  – Gedächtnis – Sinn. Authentische und kontruierte Erinnerung, 57–78. Frankfurt/ Main/New York: Campus. Schoenfeld, H. 2003. Rationalisierung der Friedhöfe. Die Friedhofsreformbewegung von den Anfängen bis in die Zeit des Nationalsozialismus. In Raum für Tote. Die Geschichte der Friedhöfe von den Gräberstraßen der Römerzeit bis zur anonymen Bestattung, ed. R. Sörries, 163–194. Braunschweig: Thalacker. Schulz, F.R. 2013. Death in East Germany 1945–1990. New  York/ Oxford: Berghahn. Siebeck, C. 2013. Verräumlichtes Gedächtnis. Gedenkstätten an historische Orten: »Topolaterie« oder »Orte von Belang«? In Schwierige Orte. Regionale Erinnerung, Gedenkstätten, Museen, ed. J.  H. Ulbricht, 25–42. Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag. Sørensen, M.L.S., and I.  Adriansen. 2015. Dybbol: The Construction and Reconstruction of a Memorial Landscape. In War and Cultural Heritage: Biographies of Place, ed. M.L.S. Sørensen and D. Viejo-Rose, 18–45. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sörries, R. 2009. Ruhe sanft. Kulturgeschichte des Friedhofs. Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker. ———. 2012. Herzliches Beileid. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Trauer. Darmstadt: WBG. Ständige Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. 2014. Erinnern für die Zukunft. Empfehlungen zur Erinnerungskultur als Gegenstand historisch-politischer Bildung in der Schule, [Online]. Available at www.kmk.org/fileadmin/pdf/PresseUndAktuelles/ 2014/2014-12-11-Empfehlung_Erinnern_fuer_die_Zukunft.pdf. Accessed 1 Nov 2015. Stätte des Friedens im Waldesgrün. Sächsisches Tageblatt, 18 (237) 1963. Stein, M. 2000. Friedhöfe in Dresden. Dresden: Verlag der Kunst. Steinberg, S. 2013. Nicht Gedenkort, sondern Lernort. Was der Dresdner Heidefriedhof erzählt und erzählen könnte. In Gedenken abschaffen. Kritik am Diskurs zur Bombardierung Dresdens 1945, 105–116. Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag. Taylor, F. 2004. Dresden. Tuesday, 13 February 1945. London: Bloomsbury.

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Voigt, R. 1989. Mythen, Rituale und Symbole in der Politik. In Politik der Symbole. Symbole der Politik, 9–37. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Wesel, R. 2003. Gedenken als Ritual: Zum politischen Sinn »sinnentleerter Rituale«. In Die NS-Diktatur im deutschen Erinnerungsdiskurs, ed. W. Bergem, 17–40. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Winter, J. 2010. The Performance of the Past: Memory, History, Identity. In Performing the Past. Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe. Amsterdam, ed. K. Tilmans, F. van Vree, and J. Winter, 11–23. Amsterdam: University Press. Zimmerling, R. 2000. Mythen in der Politik der DDR. Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung politischer Mythen. Opladen: Leske + Budrich.

CHAPTER 9

The Isted Lion: From Memorial of War to Monument of Friendship Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and Inge Adriansen

The bronze sculpture known as the Isted Lion is an interesting example of a memorial site of continuously changing meaning. Not only its meaning but also its physical location has changed over time—as it has been moved between towns and countries. Each move has been part of a process of politically motivated reinterpretations not just of the war, which the monument marks, but also of the wider context of the conflict and of changing political aspirations. The changing meanings and political interpretations have been closely intertwined with strong emotions and debates in the German-Danish borderland over some 150 years. But why this monument in particular? A concise answer is: because it has been able to act as the receptacle of widely different and contradictory remembrances. It speaks Inge Adriansen is deceased at the time of publication. M. L. S. Sørensen (*) University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] I. Adriansen (Deceased) Syddansk University, Odense, Denmark Sønderjylland Museum, Sønderborg Slot, Sønderborg, Denmark © The Author(s) 2019 M. L. S. Sørensen et al. (eds.), Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18091-1_9

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of an important event, possesses an inherent value as a work of art, and embodies a cultural heritage that is uncomfortable for both nations, but in its present location it also stands for reconciliation and a rejection of nationalist sentiments. This chapter aims to trace the history of this monument and its changing interpretations, and it details the debates that have surrounded its successive roles and meanings. In doing so it provides a close reading of how changing meanings are fabricated.

Monument to Victory or Memorial to the Dead? The Battle of Isted took place in July 1850 in the Danish Monarchy near the village of Istedt in the Duchy of Schleswig, in what is now the region Schleswig-Holstein within Germany. It was the bloody highpoint in a civil war that raged for three years (1848–1851), later known as the First Schleswig War. The causes of this conflict can be traced to national and political tensions within the Danish Monarchy in the 1840s, including at that time the Kingdom of Denmark and the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, and thus a multicultural and multilingual realm. However, a new ideal about polity had been growing since the 1830s: that of a nation state in which the entire population shared one language. The realisation of this ideal would ultimately lead to the disintegration of the Danish Monarchy, and forces were at work to achieve precisely that both in Denmark and in the Duchies.1 In Denmark, the national liberals wanted a state consisting of the Kingdom of Denmark and the Duchy of Schleswig, excluding the German-speaking Duchy of Holstein. The national liberals in Schleswig and Holstein, however, preferred a state comprising the two duchies independent of Denmark. The two movements shared the aim of creating a nation state and both laid claim to the geographical area of Schleswig in which Danish and German languages and cultures were closely interwoven. 1848 was a year of revolution in Europe. Revolutionary fervour spread to the Duchies, resulting in a bloody civil war in which the rebels received support from a number of German states, mainly Prussia. The culmination of this conflict was the Battle of Isted in 1850. The forces of Schleswig-­Holstein, numbering 26,800 troops, faced 37,500 men of the Danish army. The two armies clashed on 25 July, and the battle became the ­biggest, and one of the bloodiest in Danish history. At the end of the day, the forces of Schleswig-Holstein withdrew in defeat. The Danish casualties totalled 2900 killed and wounded, while those of the

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Schleswig-Holstein forces amounted to 1734 killed and wounded. Most of the fallen Danes were buried in a mass grave in the cemetery in the town of Flensburg2 in 1850. The German and Schleswig-Holstein soldiers were buried together in other mass graves. Even though the Danish victory was modest, it was nevertheless celebrated with gusto (Adriansen 1993: 90) (Fig. 9.1). In 1851, the Schleswig-Holstein government, including its troops, was disbanded, and the Danish Monarchy was re-established; but the underlying conflicts remained unresolved. According to Bishop Jørgen Hansen in Northern Schleswig, a period of reconciliation was essential to allow wounds to heal in the wake of a civil war (Adriansen 1993: 87), but not all agreed with his point of view. The national liberal move-

Fig. 9.1  Most of the roughly 800 Danish soldiers who died at the Battle of Isted on 25 July 1850 were buried in a large mass grave in the Sankt Marie Cemetery in Flensburg. In 1851 a memorial plaque commemorating 44 officers and 7 other ranks were placed at the cemetery. The two larger stones on the left in the picture commemorate two generals who died in the battle. This burial place became one of the most important memorials to the First Schleswig War. (Source: Museum Sønderjylland – Sønderborg Slot)

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ment—a powerful force in Danish society and the leading party in the Parliament—failed to recognise this need. Instead, prominent national liberals took the initiative to raise monuments to victory on sites where some of the battles of the civil war had been fought, including one to commemorate the Battle of Isted. This monument, in the form of a colossal lion, was created by H. W. Bissen, a sculptor native to Schleswig. The plinth had an inscription by the Danish national poet Carl Ploug and read, ‘Faithful and loyal warriors have bravely defended old Denmark’. It was an overt political statement of the national liberal Danish position because a lion was featured in the coats of arms of both Denmark and Schleswig, but not of Holstein (Adriansen 2003: 59–64, 304–07). If the monument had been erected on the battlefield itself, it is unlikely that it would have given rise to much protest, as this was a common way of commemorating battles during this period. However, it was raised in 1862 as a cenotaph at the cemetery in Flensburg. To make room for it, one of the mass graves containing the soldiers from Schleswig-Holstein, who had perished in the Battle of Isted, was erased. The people behind the initiative claimed that the statue was a simple sepulchral monument (Adriansen 1993: 84.), but it is hard to view a four metres tall lion sitting on an equally high plinth, radiating strength and power, as a memorial to the fallen. The plinth itself was adorned with four round bronze reliefs depicting prominent officers from the battle. As only two of these men fell in the battle, it was clear that the monument was not only to the fallen, but also to victory (Fig. 9.2). The lion sculpture was part of a grandiose monument to Danish nationalism placed within a cemetery A giant burial mound was constructed over the grave containing the Danish fallen. This referenced prehistoric burial mounds which in the nineteenth century had been accorded special significance as symbols of Denmark’s glorious past (Sørensen 1996). In addition, a tall flagpole was erected to fly the Danish flag—the first time that this flag was used as a decorative element in a cemetery. In this manner, the lion monument was part of a larger memorial complex that combined various symbolic elements to form a Gesamtkunstwerk—an excellent example of the consolidation of a variety of national symbols into a single dominant one. The official inauguration took place in 1862 on the twelfth anniversary of the battle and it reiterated the nation-building spirit of the monument. Four Danish government ministers and 5000 spectators assembled in the churchyard. The national liberal exponent, professor and theologian H. N.

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Fig. 9.2  Woodcut in the German journal Illustrirte Zeitung. In German the Isted Lion was referred to as ‘der Flensburger Löwe’ (‘the Flensburg Lion’). The bronze statue, 3.75 metres tall, is shown here from its most majestic side—or from its most threatening side—depending on political position. (Source: Museum Sønderjylland – Sønderborg Slot)

Clausen, delivered the inauguration address. He attempted to find a balance between celebrating the victory and honouring the fallen: Hold your head high above the graves of the victorious heroes, as a symbol of the inheritance of the Nordic people passed on from family to family: that watchful, undaunted, persevering manly courage … So stand proud, you noble memorial to victory! You stand not as a provocation … you are to encourage loyal and heroic defence against anyone who dares threaten the peace of our border (cit. in Adriansen 1993: 84, translation by author).

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After the speech, the spectators sang nationalist songs from the First Schleswig War. No one could be in any doubt that the Isted Lion was to symbolise the unity between Denmark and Schleswig, and also that it expressed the desire to defend the ‘fatherland’. This sentiment was clearly echoed in the inscription on the plinth proclaiming that faithful and loyal men had fought bravely to protect Denmark’s heritage and honour. The writer and poet, Hans Christian Andersen, who attended the inauguration of the memorial, afterwards referred to this in his diary questioningly: ‘What will happen if an enemy should defeat us here?’ (Adriansen 1993: 91).

The Lion is Taken to Berlin To most inhabitants of Schleswig-Holstein the monument was an insult and a major source of provocation (Fig.  9.3).3 The lion represented a political ideal to which they were vehemently opposed—and just eighteen months later they exacted revenge. A new Schleswig War broke out on 1 February 1864, and this time Denmark faced the combined might of Prussia and Austria, and lost. The Danish forces were quickly forced to retreat to the Dybbøl fortifications in North Schleswig. When Flensburg was taken by German troops, a group of Schleswig-Holstein citizens decided to remove the Isted Lion from the cemetery (Fig. 9.4). This ‘patriotic’ act was not appreciated in Berlin. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck considered it a barbaric act and protested in the strongest terms: “It is a completely disgraceful act to destroy or merely to remove an enemy monument especially when it has an artistic character” (cit. in Graef 1937: 307). The removal, however, could not be undone. The Lion was initially stored in Flensburg and then, three years later, on the initiative of General Friedrich von Wrangel, it was carried triumphally to Berlin and exhibited as a trophy in the inner courtyard of the Zeughaus Museum on Unter den Linden. However, the monument was too big for this location, so ten years later it was moved once more, this time to the cadet academy in Berlin-Lichterfelde. It should be noted that returning it to Flensburg was out of the question at the time, because it was still unwanted in that city, as it symbolised Danish supremacy and the civil war. At the cadet academy, the Isted Lion was presented to the young cadets both as a spoil of war, taken by the victorious Prussians, and as a pro memoria recalling that Germany had once been weak and divided, but was now reunited, all its

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Fig. 9.3  The German artist Wilhelm Busch’s drawing from 1862 aptly expresses the German interpretation of the memorial. (Source: Museum Sønderjylland  – Sønderborg Slot)

states gathered together in one Empire. For example, in 1912 the head of the academy declared in a speech for the cadets that the Isted Lion was created in a period of weakness which would never occur again (Adriansen 1993: 103).

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Fig. 9.4  The woodcut from 1864, ‘Uebermuth thut selten gut’ [Arrogance rarely leads to anything good], shows Schleswig-Holstein patriots in the process of removing the memorial. This woodcut is from Hamburg, where the removal of the Isted Lion was celebrated with popular ballads, performed by street singers and organ grinders. In the process of removal the Lion’s tail and minor parts of its anatomy were blown off, and these pieces were later made into souvenirs, such as rings and candlesticks. (Source: Museum Sønderjylland – Sønderborg Slot)

Changing Symbolic Interpretations In the wake of the war of 1864 (after which Denmark lost the Duchies and a substantial part of its southern territories to Germany), the Isted Lion took on new meaning both in North Schleswig and in Denmark.

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For the latter, it now symbolised the ills that German forces had inflicted on the Danish nation over the years. Many plaster copies were manufactured on a scale of 1:16, and proudly displayed in private homes as mementoes to the loss of Schleswig, and images of the statue were used to illustrate many different sorts of books (Adriansen 1993: 107; Henningsen 2010: 119). Carl Ploug, the national liberal Danish poet who had composed the inscription for the Lion’s plinth, wrote a verse in 1869 about the removal of the monument and its transport to Berlin: ‘It now stands proud, a reminder strong/of all the wrong that you have done/It stands in place as a monument/to a people’s spirit unduly rent’ (Adriansen 1993: 106). In Berlin, however, the Isted Lion was seen as a symbol of something completely different. Wilhelm Conrad, a Berlin merchant, commissioned a cast of the Isted Lion in zinc—a material that was considerably cheaper than the bronze of the original—and had it erected in a park near Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin in 1869.4 The area was called Alsen (the Prussian/German name for the Als Island, site of one of the 1864 battles) and the street leading up to the plinth, where the Lion stood, was called Düppelstrasse (‘Düppel’ is the German name for Dybbøl, the site of the decisive battle in 1864, for details of the memorials of the battle at Dybbøl , see Sørensen and Adriansen 2015). The Wannsee Lion and the naming of the two streets were intended to hammer home the message that the Prussian forces had won the Second Schleswig War in 1864. In erecting this copy of the imposing monument, Conrad hoped to honour his neighbour, Prince Friedrich Carl, the leading German commander of the 1864 campaign. The plinth was decorated not with portraits of Danish officers, but with a medallion depicting the Prince himself and an inscription about the crossing to the island of Als in 1864. The copy of a Danish victory monument from the First Schleswig War was thus now being used to commemorate the German victory in the Second Schleswig War.

Discussions About Returning the Isted Lion, 1920–1939 After the defeat of Germany in World War One, negotiations regarding a referendum in Schleswig took place at the Versailles Conference. Among the topics discussed was the return of objects that had been removed from Schleswig ‘without lawful reason’. A Danish memorandum was written on this subject and mentioned the Isted Lion. It was proposed that the

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­ onument be returned, with a view to re-installing it in Flensburg or m elsewhere in Schleswig—depending on in which the country the city would be located after the post-referendum border was drawn. In the referendum the majority in Flensburg voted to stay in Germany while in the northern part of Schleswig the majority of the population was pro-Danish and the area became incorporated into Denmark in 1920. Many Danes, however, continued to dream that the southern part of Schleswig, in spite of its pro-German majority, would ‘come home’ one day. The Isted Lion became a symbol of this dream, and it was widely used to stir up nationalist sentiments. It also became something of a rallying point for the Danish minority in South Schleswig. For the German population, the loss of North Schleswig was a hard blow. They feared Danish offensives into South Schleswig and saw the Isted Lion as a symbol of Danish ambitions. Oberbürgermeister (mayor) Todsen advised against a return of the monument in 1921 with these words: “The Danes would exult, and the monument would be a place of national pilgrimage” (Henningsen 2010: 115). For this reason, the response from Flensburg to any suggestion of moving the monument back was a resounding ‘No’. This attitude was backed by the President of the regional government of Schleswig: “The Lion is a provocative memorial of the highest order; re-erecting it on its original site is sure to cause friction between Germans and Danes” (ibid.). The general atmosphere in the border region following the referendum made the return of the Lion unthinkable and thus it stayed in Berlin. When the Nazis seized power in 1933, however, German-Danish relations strangely enough began to thaw. The Nazis wanted peace with their neighbours to the north, and the issue of returning the Isted Lion was discussed as a symbol of bridge-building. Lengthy consideration was given to returning the Lion to Denmark as a gift from Hitler to King Christian X, following the signing of the non-aggression pact between Germany and Denmark (Henningsen 2010: 116f). These promises were neglected with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 and the occupation of Denmark by German forces in 1940.

The Spoils of War in 1945 The transfer of the Isted Lion from Berlin to Denmark in 1945 was not an expression of thanks from Germany for the non-aggression pact with Denmark. Rather, the transfer was facilitated by the American forces of

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occupation in Germany. For the second time in its history the Lion was treated as spoils of war. The transfer was organised at the initiative of a Danish journalist, who happened upon the monument in Lichterfelde in the summer of 1945 and pressed for its return to Denmark. His proposal was put to General Eisenhower, who requested an official statement from Denmark about the issue. This was formulated succinctly by Christmas Møller, the Danish Foreign Minister: “I cannot imagine anything that would make the American people more popular with the people of Denmark than the restoration of the Isted Lion to its rightful place in Denmark. The matter should be pursued with expediency” (Adriansen 1993: 108) (Figs. 9.5 and 9.6). And so it came to pass. In autumn 1945, American troops transported the monument to Denmark, where it was placed at the Royal Danish Arsenal Museum in Copenhagen. On 23 October, it was officially handed back to the Danish nation, represented by King Christian X. He expressed his thanks with the following words: “I accept the Isted Lion with my thanks to those who brought it here, and to those who laid down their lives that we may be free … When conditions permit, I believe that it should be erected in Flensburg as a reminder of the times we have witnessed, and as a memorial to all those who lost their lives in the First Schleswig War” (Adriansen 1993: 108).5 As such, the King expressed the official Danish position: the Isted Lion can be returned to the cemetery in Flensburg, when Flensburg wants it. This, however, was definitely not what the majority of Flensburg’s population wanted then. After 1945 Flensburg remained in Germany and the old resentment against this monument flared up again, because the Isted Lion was now being used more explicitly by the Danish minority in Germany and patriots in Denmark as a symbol of their unremitting struggle to have the border redrawn further to the south. For instance, the artist Jeppe Madsen-Ohlsen made a painting with the Isted Lion in 1948 with the programmatic and hopeful title “The day is breaking”. In the painting, broken irons were placed in front of the monument, an image reflecting the wish to incorporate Southern Schleswig into Denmark.

Annual Memorial Ceremonies Many Danes were less than satisfied with the placement of the Isted Lion in Copenhagen, and numerous suggestions were put forward over the post-war years for its relocation to sites elsewhere in Denmark. However,

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Fig. 9.5  (a, b) In 1945, American troops took down the Isted Lion and transported it from Berlin to Copenhagen. (Source: Museum Sønderjylland  – Sønderborg Slot)

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Fig. 9.6  The Danish Foreign Minister, John Christmas Møller, making a speech at the reception of the Isted Lion in Copenhagen in October 1945. (Source: Museum Sønderjylland – Sønderborg Slot)

each was rejected on the grounds that the only appropriate location for it was Flensburg. On the German side of the border, several politicians and cultural figures in the 1960s proposed that Flensburg accept the Isted Lion (Leppien 1992: 5; Thomsen 1992: 15), but their suggestions were always met with a storm of protest (Henningsen and Schwensen 2012: 20). The Lion was perceived as a symbol of Danish imperialism and dreams of owning South Schleswig—so it was unwanted. The discussion flared up again in 1992–93, when a newspaper editor and prominent member of the German minority in Denmark, Siegfried Matlok, proposed that the Isted Lion be returned to Flensburg to symbolise the end of border conflicts between Denmark and Germany. This suggestion provoked a heated debate in Flensburg, and Matlok was accused of ‘fouling his own nest’—a strong accusation, indeed (Adriansen 2011:

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123). Opinions were sharply divided, depending on the symbolic value assigned to the monument by each side of the debate. The Isted Lion, like any other national symbol, reified whatever message it was endowed with. For some Danes, the lion remained a symbol of the will to defend the country. For instance, it was used on posters for the Home Guard. To most people in Copenhagen, however, the Isted Lion was simply one of the many statues in the city. It affected only a few people and was largely ignored—except on 25 July, the anniversary of the Battle of Isted. On that day, memorial ceremonies were held both in Copenhagen and at the cemetery in Flensburg. In Copenhagen, the ceremony was presided over by Grænseforeningen (the Danish Border Association) and particularly attracted Danish citizens with national conservative leanings. In Flensburg, members of the Danish minority gathered at the burial mound and the vacant plot where the monument once stood. The principal speaker every year was the editor-in-chief of the Danish minority newspaper. In both locations, those assembled sang Danish patriotic songs. In 1999, the Isted Lion was restored as part of to the refurbishment of the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen and placed in a more prominent position than before. There seemed little doubt that it had arrived at its final resting place, but this was not to be the case: in 2008, the Isted Lion was once more on the political agenda in Flensburg.

The Isted Lion as a Leftwing Joke and a Pacifist Mahn-mal The person who took the initiative to have the monument returned to Flensburg was Heinz-Werner Jezewski, spokesman in the Flensburg Municipal Council for the political party Die Linke. Jezewski is not only a socialist but also a pacifist and idealist. Die Linke’s party manifesto is specifically opposed to all war memorials and to nationalism in any shape or form. After visiting the memorial landscape of the 1864 battle at Dybbøl Hill and the Dybbøl History Centre in 2008, Jezewski felt that there was greater need for an anti-war symbol than for presentations of the history of war, and he conceived the idea of turning the Isted Lion into a humorous anti-war memorial (Jezewski 2009). The celebrated German artist, Joseph Beuys, had demonstrated on more than one occasion that it is possible to transmute symbols of power into something else, for example by morphing a Tsar’s crown into a ‘peace rabbit’. The

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Isted Lion should undergo a similar metamorphosis, concluded Jezewski (Henningsen and Schwensen 2012: 26–27).6 Jezewski argued that it should be given a new plinth and erected at a different location in Flensburg, where it could become a place of celebration within the present-day climate of peaceful cooperation across the border. The new installation should ideally have a touch of humour and encourage a playful engagement: the plinth, for example, could allow for people to walk or crawl through it, and—most importantly—it should carry an inscription with a contemporary message. The old, nationalistic ‘Denk-Mal’ (‘memor-ial’) should be transformed into a modern, trans-national ‘Mahn-Mal’ (‘remind-er’) (ibid. 27–33). Jezewski presented his ideas to the other political groups in the Municipal Council, whose agreement was needed if the proposal was to be realised. At this point, the idea of the return of the Isted Lion was taken up by the Chief Mayor, Klaus Tscheuschner of the conservative CDU party, whose basic thinking was quite different. As far as he was concerned, returning the Isted Lion would be an excellent way of branding and raising the profile of Flensburg; it would clearly demonstrate that all the rhetoric about positive cooperation across the border was not just hot air, and that the old conflicts and historical differences between Danes and Germans had been definitively overcome. One year on, in 2009, Flensburg would be celebrating its 725th anniversary and what better way to mark this than with the return of the Lion? This, he thought, would call for a royal visit from Denmark, which in turn would mean the presence of the German Federal Government. Furthermore, mayoral elections were due to take place in 2010; the move to return the Isted Lion would hopefully win him more votes from the Danish minority in Flensburg, approximately 25% of the electorate in the municipality. The proposal from Die Linke thus metamorphosed into a proposal from the CDU and the other parties, and the idea of putting a fool’s cap on the Lion, metaphorically speaking, and of using the monument for fun and games was forgotten. A large majority in the Council, including the Danish group, voted to have the Lion brought back as a symbol of German-Danish friendship. Because it would be embarrassing for the Council to approve the return of the memorial only to have the project vetoed by Denmark, behind the scenes and with great discretion, the proposal had been presented to the Danish government and had received its stamp of approval.

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The Lion ‘Returns’ to Flensburg, with New Symbolism The decision about the proposed transfer to Flensburg led to a great deal of debate, primarily taking place in the opinion columns of various newspapers. The Danes were well aware that the Lion would be endowed with a new symbolic meaning—from war memorial to a friendship monument—and that this metamorphosis was acceptable to the government and to a majority in the Folketing [Danish Parliament]. Jezewski’s more radical proposal involving a new site and a completely different plinth would not have been acceptable in Denmark. North of the border, some letter-writers to newspapers expressed their pleasure at the prospect of Denmark and Danishness becoming more prominent in Flensburg, while others feared attacks on the statue. South of the border, too, opinions were divided among both Germans and Danes. The location of the most hotly disputed monument in the history of Denmark was not, however, a matter to be decided by letters to the editor. At the same time as the Danish government approved the relocation it also commissioned a comprehensive restoration of the monument including a replica of the original plinth to be made of Swedish granite. Thus, in Copenhagen, tradition won over the idea of transforming the statue by giving it a new location and a new plinth. Meanwhile in Flensburg, ideals were defeated by more mundane considerations. When making its decision, the City Council had stipulated that the city should not incur any form of expense in connection with the return of the Lion (Henningsen and Schwensen 2012: 66). The Chief Mayor only gained the almost unanimous support of the Council by promising this, and it was clearly formulated as a condition in the wording of the decision. This meant that the Danish State and private Danish foundations paid for the restoration of the bronze sculpture, for its transport, and for the new plinth. The total cost was 407,000 Euros, 95% of which came from Danish sources (ibid. 51–52). Surprisingly, there were no debates in Denmark about whether it was right to spend this money on returning a sculpture to its original site in Germany, possibly because those political parties that normally called for a reduction in state expenditure were also strongly in favour of spreading information about Denmark’s glorious past. The Danes were very insistent that the placement of the monument in the cemetery, as well as the plinth and the restoration work should be as accurate, ‘authentic’, and close to the original as possible. The notion of authenticity was a central element in the process of return, so it is remark-

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able that though the plinth was meant to be an exact replica, the inscriptions on the two plaques at the front and back of the plinth were totally altered. This gave the reconstructed memorial a new meaning (Sørensen 2012). The copper plaque on the front of the plinth originally carried the following inscription in Danish (the translation to English in square brackets is provided for the purpose of this article): ISTED DEN 25. JULI 1850 DET DANSKE FOLK SATTE DETTE MINDE [ISTED 25 JULY 1850 THE DANISH PEOPLE SET THIS MEMORIAL]

The third bottom line had been erased when the Lion was in Berlin. During the 2011 restoration, the original copper plaque was not restored; only the original top two lines were preserved and a supplementary plaque (in German) was added to them stressing the new message that the newly-­ returned statue was meant to communicate. In the final ‘restored’ plague only the top two lines were original, and while the top three lines were in Danish the bottom three ones were in German. ISTED DEN 25. JULI 1850 REJST 1862 2011 WIEDER ERRICHTET ALS ZEICHEN VON FREUNDSCHAFT UND VERTRAUEN ZWISCHEN DÄNEN UND DEUTSCHEN [ISTED 25 JULY 1850 ERECTED 1862 2011 ERECTED ONCE MORE AS A SIGN OF FRIENDSHIP AND TRUST BETWEEN DANES AND GERMANS]

In this case, authenticity was made secondary to the new political message. The same was true of the inscription on the plaque originally placed at the rear of the plinth. The original copper plaque had carried a verse written by Carl Ploug, a newspaper editor with national liberal sympathies:

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TROFASTE KÆMPER I FARENS STUND MANDIG HAR VÆRGET VOR ODELSGRUND. TROSKAB SKAL VAGT VED GRAVEN VÆRE. MANDOM SKAL SKÆRME ARV OG ÆRE. [FAITHFUL THE WARRIORS BOLDY DID STAND DANGER TO BANISH FROM OUR BIRTHRIGHT LAND FEALTY STANDS WATCH OVER THIS THEIR GRAVE YARD VALIANCE OUR BLOOD LINE AND HONOUR SHALL GUARD]

This inscription was undamaged, but the references to the Battle of Isted in 1850 and to the faithful and valiant Danish soldiers reflected the fact that the Isted Lion was originally a war memorial –and this was in conflict with the inscription on the front stating that the statue was a symbol of friendship. The plaque was therefore handed over to the nearby city museum, Museumsberg, and a new plaque was set up outlining the biography of the statue (Sørensen 2012). 1862 FLENSBORG 1868 BERLIN 1945 KØBENHAVN 2011 FLENSBURG

No mention is made of the three wars that determined the statue’s odyssey: the First Schleswig War and the Battle of Isted in 1850; the Second Schleswig War (1864) , when the statue was removed and later transferred to Berlin; and World War Two, after which the statue was moved to Copenhagen. Moreover, only the slight variation in spelling (‘Flensborg/ Flensburg’) discreetly indicates that the town has been under both Danish and German rule. This is completely in accordance with the statue’s new message, focusing not on the history of war, but on the peaceful coexistence of nations (Fig. 9.7).

Inauguration 10 September 2011 The return of the Isted Lion to Flensburg was marked by a light-hearted exhibition at Museumsberg, the city museum in Flensburg under the title, ‘Well roared, Lion’. The exhibition was a joint venture with the Museum

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Fig. 9.7  The arrival of the Lion at the cemetery in Flensburg was a major event. It stood on the ground for two days, giving people a fascinating opportunity to get close to it. Here we see the author welcoming the big, bronze animal back to Schleswig. (Source: Kim Holm, Museum Sønderjylland – Sønderborg Slot)

at Sønderborg Castle (Denmark) and exemplified the happy relations between neighbours: the background for the Second Schleswig War and the eventful history of the memorial were explained, but with a touch of humour throughout and without significant nationalist undertones. On 11 September 2011, the restoration of the Isted Lion to its original location was celebrated in Flensburg in the presence of representatives of the governments of Denmark, Germany and Schleswig-Holstein, and of the Danish royal family. Several official speeches were made, all citing the return of the memorial as a symbol of good relations between neighbours. In his speech, the younger son of Queen Margrethe, Prince Joachim, reminded the gathering that it was the Minister President of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck, who had saved the statue from total destruction in 1863, and the Danish Minister of Culture, Per Stig Møller, began his speech with a quote from the former German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer:

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“The history of the world is also the sum of what might have been avoided” (Henningsen and Schwensen 2012: 65). The Isted Lion, Stig Møller said, showed how necessary it was to know the past in order to shape the future: “(...) to avoid repetition of the errors and atrocities of the past’, while in his speech, the German Ambassador to Denmark said that ‘the return of the statue emphasised that relations between Germany and Denmark had never been better’ (ibid. 66–68). Carl Holst, a prominent regional politician, made a more pragmatic speech, stressing that the return of the Lion was an important element in the creation of a common Danish-German industrial area in which economic growth would be given high priority. In other words, praises were sung, though the speakers came from very different standpoints (Fig. 9.8). The inauguration created a good deal of interest in the regional press, both Danish and German, and here the message of the restored memorial was clearly understood. This was not the case in certain sections of the national media: some Danish newspapers printed articles about the return of the Danish victory monument to Flensburg under such headings as: ‘The Isted Lion roars again!’ In the same vein, several German newspapers ignored the fact that the return of the Lion was a conciliatory gesture from both sides. There were not many critical voices raised in the media, but those that were, Danish and German, were motivated by deeply-felt national-­ conservative misgivings. Remarkably, no one criticised the staging of the festive occasion as a whole, which was conceived as a theatrical performance in which the music provided a festive, informal setting, far removed from the solemn, militaristic mood of the original inauguration ceremony in 1862 (Sørensen 2012: 14). There were no national symbols such as flags or anthems, but rather a merry, light-hearted party mood with such popular tunes as “Always look on the bright side” and “The Lion sleeps tonight” from the Disney musical, The Lion King. In the same tone was the special exhibition about the history of the Isted Lion designed by the city museum entitled ‘Well roared, Lion’, referring both to Shakespeare’s comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and to the popular German children’s book by Max Kruse (Sørensen 2012). The colourful exhibition poster was a collage, the most prominent elements of which were beer labels. The few sceptical voices that were raised on both sides of the border did not make themselves heard in the official proceedings, but were voiced in newspaper articles and letters to the editor. On the Danish side, Søren

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Fig. 9.8  The inauguration on 10 September 2011 took the form of a German-­ Danish ceremony, with speeches by the Danish Prince Joachim and prominent politicians. However, no national symbols were used as the Isted Lion was now meant to symbolise friendship and trust between the two nations. (Source: Kim Holm, Museum Sønderjylland – Sønderborg Slot)

Krarup MP of the Danish Peoples Party was a vehement critic. At the outset he had warmly advocated the return of the Isted Lion, but only as an unequivocally Danish memorial; he felt that at the inauguration ceremony the Danish element had lost out to—in fact had been completely smothered by—the German element, especially because most of the speeches had been in German.7 An equally critical German reaction was expressed by an official, Hans-Joachim von Leesen, Business Manager of the Schleswig-Holsteinischer Heimatbund, who had been against the return of the memorial for decades. Taking the opposite view to Søren Krarup, he saw the inauguration ceremony as promoting Danish rather than German patriotism.8 These opposed critical views clearly illustrate the multiplicity of perspectives that the monument still provokes even today.

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The Memorial as a General Educational Challenge One cannot help wondering why so much time and money was spent on restoring the Lion, finding granite of just the right hue, and recreating the original interplay between the memorial and the National Romantic burial mound in the cemetery, while little energy or resources were spent on explaining and communicating the significance of the memorial: its chequered and fascinating history and the way in which its symbolic value has repeatedly changed. Despite all the care taken in the reconstruction, there is a glaring lack of historical authenticity. As the cemetery has been radically changed since 1862, the sculpture no longer dominates the scene as it did then but is surrounded by green bushes and overshadowed by a tall oak tree. Close to the Isted Lion are graves from the Second Schleswig War of 1864. Past and present are thus so interwoven that some kind of expert and detailed communication programme is called for if casual visitors are to understand even a little of what it all represents. A comprehensive educational programme was developed to this end in 2010 by a historian, Dr. Jörn-Peter Leppien. Drawing on his many years of experience as a teacher at a high school in Flensburg, he proposed the introduction of multilingual information boards at the cemetery, designed with ‘aesthetic reticence’ and with QR codes and Apps to supply supplementary pictures and information. In addition, there would be a website for the Isted Lion, where all the stories about it could be presented in detail, as well as updated current issues or themes. Finally, he proposed that the city museum should stage a permanent exhibition about the Isted Lion memorial, as reflected in contemporary art, cartoons, etc. Leppien suggested that the considerable volume of material should be prepared by German and Danish historians and museum staff working together (Leppien 2010: 140–146). At the time of writing, only a little of all this had been done, but the local government in Flensburg had declared its intention of translating it into practice. Thus the ‘return’ of this major monument, politically well-intentioned and technically well-executed, may be said to be well under way, but incomplete.

The Dynamism of Cultural Heritage The Isted Lion is one of the most politicised of all Danish memorials. It was created to memorialise a war and commemorate a victory in the civil war of 1850, and set up twelve years later in the area ravaged by that war.

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Two years after that when Denmark was invaded by Prussia and Austria it was taken down and removed. It then became spoils of war, first in Berlin and later in Copenhagen. The idea of moving it back and re-situating it at the original site in 2011 arose as a political move by left-wing German pacifists in Flensburg. But this initiative was quickly appropriated by right-­ wing politicians, who justified the repatriation of the monument in terms of place-branding and the economic growth it would foster. This justification was adopted by other politicians, both in Schleswig-Holstein and in Denmark. A Danish politician, Carl Holst, put it this way in his speech at the inauguration: ‘We must not forget the past, but neither must we forget the present. We must not reject our neighbours, but join together to invest in progress, education, infrastructure and cooperation across the border’ (Henningsen and Schwensen 2012: 106). The purposes and agendas of the Isted Lion have been multifarious and sometimes contradictory. The Isted Lion has undergone several metamorphoses, starting out as a symbol of a Danish victory, becoming spoils of war, and ending up, for now, as an expression of Danish-German amity. These transformations indicate that cultural heritage is not static. It is always current needs that define which aspects of the past are granted the status of being ‘true’ history. The Isted Lion will thus now officially stand as a symbol of the fact that the relationship between Danes and Germans has improved. How many other symbolic values will be attributed to this particular monument, only time will tell. Sites of memory are often reinterpreted, and they gain vitality through a renewed usage that is sometimes far removed from the event they were originally intended to commemorate. They should therefore be viewed from the perspective of who uses such sites of memory, for what purpose, and with what agenda? The political use of our cultural heritage has always been made, and as researchers we must ask these questions and thereby maintain a critical distance when looking at new interpretations. In the case of the repatriation of the Isted Lion, on the one hand, we may be happy that a stone has been removed from the shoe of cooperation between the two nations, while on the other hand we may lament a serious loss of historical awareness.

Notes 1. Sønderjyllands Historie, vol. 2: 72 (Aabenraa: Historisk Samfund for Sønderjylland)

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2. Flensburg is a town now located in northern Germany close to the German-­ Danish border, until 1864 is was located within Denmark and spelled Flensborg. 3. See the magazine Ueber Land und Meer, April 1864. 4. Where it still stands. 5. The King’s speech was radio broadcasted. 6. Interview with Heinz-Werner Jezewski 2011  in the archives in Museum Sønderjylland. 7. Flensborg Avis 2011, 15 September. 8. Deutschland-Journal 2011: 69–71.

Bibliography Adriansen, I. 1993. Der Istedt-Löwe  – ein nationales Monument mit wechselndem Symbolwert. In Der Istedt Löwe. Ein nationales Denkmal und sein Schicksal, ed. B.  Poulsen and U.  Schulte-Wülwer. Herning: Poul Kristensens Forlag. ———. 2003. Nationale Symboler i Det danske Rige. Vol. 1–2. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag. ———. 2011. Denkmal und Dynamit. Denkmälerstreit im deutsch-dänischen Grenzland. Neumünster: Wachholtz Verlag. Graef, F. 1937. Der Löwe von Istedt und die Kriegergräber auf dem alten Friedhof in Flensburg. Zeitschrift für Schleswig-Holsteinische Geschichte 65: 255–316. Henningsen, L. 2010. Der Istedt-Löwe – Geschichte und Politik. Vom Misstrauen zur Freundschaft. Grenzfriedenshefte 2: 109–126. Henningsen, L., and B. Schwensen, eds. 2012. I venskab og tillid. Istedløvens tilbagevenden til Flensborg i 2011/In Freundschaft und Vertrauen. Die Rückkehr des Istedtlöwen nach Flensburg 2011. Flensburg: Studieafdelingen ved Dansk Centralbibliotek and Gesellschaft für Flensburger Stadtgeschichte. Jezewski, H.W. 2009. Die Zeit ist reif für neue Symbole. Flensborg Avis 4 June 2009. Leppien, J.P. 1992. Debatte um ein Denkmal. Die Grenzfriedenshefte und der Istedt-Löwe. Grenzfriedenshefte 1: 3–6. ———. 2010. Der Istedt-Löwe  – ein Denkmal mit vielen Gesichten. Grenzfriedenshefte 2: 127–150. Sørensen, M.L.S. 1996. The Fall of a Nation. The Birth of a Subject: The National Use of Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Denmark. In Nationalism and Archaeology in Europe, ed. M. Diaz-Andreu and T. Champion, 24–47. London: UCL Press. ———. 2012. Velkommen hjem eller velkommen tilbage  – refleksioner over Istedløven. PLUK fra forskningen i Sønderjylland 1: 11–15.

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Sørensen, M.L.S., and I.  Adriansen. 2015. Dybbøl: The Construction and Reconstruction of a Memorial Landscape. In War and Cultural Heritage: Biographies of Place, ed. M.L.S.  Sørensen and D.  Viejo-Rose, 18–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomsen, A. 1992. Die Zeit ist reif! Der Löwe soll zurückkehren. Grenzfriedenshefte 1: 25–28.

Index1

A Agents of remembrance, 62 Air raid, 232–234, 236, 250–252, 257–258, 268 Amnesia, 208 places of, 41 Anniversary, 1, 4, 6, 14, 23, 33–35, 37, 38, 42, 44, 46, 47, 49, 50, 52–56, 62, 74–76, 84, 85, 128, 133, 145–148, 150, 152, 171, 190, 191, 197, 199, 208, 217n4, 229, 230, 235, 237–239, 243–245, 248, 252, 255, 257, 258, 262, 263, 265, 270, 282, 292, 293 Anti-fascist, 184, 207, 210, 216, 238, 240, 243, 250, 253, 254, 256, 258–262, 268–270 Arc de Triomphe, 2 Armistice Day, 2, 6, 14, 23, 29n11 Atocha, 34, 36–56

Auschwitz, 137, 139, 241, 244, 269 Authenticity, 7, 294, 295, 300 B Berlin Siegessäule, 9 Wall, 3 Blame, 117, 118, 134, 187 Boer Wars, 11 Bogdanović, Bogdan, 185, 189, 191–197, 199, 201–204, 211, 213–215 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 16, 128, 132, 136–138, 145, 146, 148, 164, 203 Bosniak, 164, 165 Britain, 12–17, 22, 23, 25, 246 Brotherhood and unity, 23, 183, 185, 188, 190, 191, 197, 201, 204, 216

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 M. L. S. Sørensen et al. (eds.), Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18091-1

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INDEX

C Cambodia, 116 Khmer Rouge, 117 Cemetery, 10, 12, 15–17, 27, 35, 36, 79, 80, 136–139, 178n1, 187, 193, 206, 229–272, 281, 282, 284, 289, 292, 294, 300 woodland, 231–233, 237 Cenotaph, 14, 15, 23, 282 Censorship, 118–120, 121n6 Ceremony, 2, 34, 38, 44, 46, 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 61, 68, 79–85, 87n2, 89n21, 128, 136, 138, 146–148, 150, 152, 197, 213, 230, 235, 243, 245, 246, 252, 258, 262, 263, 265, 266, 289–292, 298, 299 Champs-Élysées, 2, 3 Choreography, 237, 248 Class, 9, 15, 118, 195, 231 Cold War, 183, 235 Commemoration, 10, 14, 15, 33–57, 61–87, 87n2, 97, 102–105, 113, 127–152, 163, 165, 176, 183–216, 229, 230, 247, 257, 262 Commemorative landscape, 163 Commemorative practice, 33, 35, 47, 84, 152 Community, 3, 5, 10, 18, 24, 25, 28, 41, 62, 63, 66–69, 75, 77, 86, 96, 99, 105, 115, 117, 119, 120, 132, 135–139, 143, 145, 147, 148, 150, 151, 159, 162, 163, 176, 209, 212, 215, 246, 264, 267, 272 Concentration camp, 24, 151, 185, 207 Contestation, 7, 24, 208, 215 Copenhagen, 289, 292, 294, 296, 301 Countermemory, 65, 68, 74, 79, 85, 98, 103, 119

Counter-narrative, 69, 74, 79, 267, 270 Crimean War (1853–1856), 10, 17, 18, 29n7 Croatia Democratic Union, 200 independence, 191, 200 Spring, 191, 199 Cyprus, Republic of, 26, 27, 61–87 D Danish-Prussian War, 9, 26 Dayton Peace Agreement, 127, 132 Denmark, 22, 26, 280, 282, 284, 286, 288, 289, 291, 293, 294, 297, 298, 301 Devoir de mémoire, 13 Displacement, 116 Dissonance, 97 Dresden Allied bombing of, 229, 233, 234 destruction of, 240, 241, 262, 264, 269 Frauenkirche, 166, 256, 262 Dudik Memorial Complex, 27, 183–216 Dybbøl, 284, 287, 292 battle of, 287, 292 E Epitaph, 19–21, 29n8 Erdut Agreement, 218n17 Erenköy battle of, 64, 69, 71, 73, 88n5 epic, 61, 64, 69, 72–75, 77, 85 ETA, 37, 49, 55, 56 Ethnic cleansing, 130, 133, 143, 201, 203, 217n2 Ethnocentrism, 160, 161, 165, 175, 176 Ethno-nationalism, 197, 216

 INDEX 

F Fascism, 191, 194, 204, 238, 242, 243, 250, 258, 270 victims of, 193, 214, 237–240, 243, 268 Fatherland, 284 Flensburg, 281, 282, 284, 288, 289, 291–298, 300, 301, 302n2 Forgetting, 70–79, 105, 159–177, 206 France, 2, 3, 9, 10, 13, 17, 21, 22, 139 Franco, Francisco, 3, 10 Francoism memorials, 20 policies, 20 Future, 2, 5, 18, 20, 28, 64, 66, 76, 79, 86, 87, 87n2, 118, 134, 143, 150–152, 159, 160, 162, 163, 165, 166, 168, 170, 172, 175–177, 183, 185, 192–196, 214, 216, 239, 257, 298 G Gallipoli, 73 Gazimestan monument, 170, 171, 173–177 Genocide, 16, 117, 127–152, 200, 264 Germany German Democratic Republic, 235, 237, 238, 242–245, 250, 254–258, 261, 262, 268–270, 273n17 unification, 9 West German Federal Republic, West Germany, 238, 255, 264 Glasnost, 103, 121n6 Grassroots, 4, 24, 26, 34–39, 41–43, 47, 49–56, 100, 190 Grave, 10, 13, 17, 41, 71, 79, 109, 110, 114, 135, 139, 187, 190,

307

191, 210, 230, 233–239, 243, 248, 252–254, 256, 258, 267, 269, 282, 283, 300 Great Patriotic War, 102, 111 Greece, 66, 67 Gulag, 26, 27, 95–120 H Hansen, Oscar, 24 Heidefriedhof cemetery, 229–272 Heritage capital, 7 dark, 99, 108, 109, 111–114, 118 deliberate destruction, 161 painful, 96, 97, 99 rights, 7 Heritagescape, 97 Heritagisation/heritagization, 27, 95–120 History, 1–28, 61, 95, 134, 171, 187, 230, 280 claims on, 2, 18, 20 Holocaust, 120, 207, 241, 264, 269 Holstein, 280, 282 Homeland War, 185, 201, 205–210, 212, 213, 215 Human rights, 68, 112, 116, 117, 121n4, 137, 266 I Identity, 18, 41, 75, 76, 95, 97, 99, 105, 112, 113, 117, 160–162, 165, 185, 187, 190, 199, 204, 208, 209, 229, 233, 255, 262, 269 Installations, 42, 98, 103, 168, 242, 243, 245, 293 Internal Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), 131, 134 Internally displaced people (IDP), 146, 209

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International Criminal Tribunal (ICT), 134 Isted Battle of, 280, 282, 292, 296 Lion, 26, 27, 279–301 J Jasenovac, 137, 185, 191, 194, 199, 203, 205, 213, 214 Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, 25 K Kosovo Battle of, 171, 172, 199 Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), 170, 173 L Landscape cultural, 4, 232 of memory, 9 Left-wing, 53, 63, 68, 89n22, 246, 261–266, 301 Legitimacy, 18, 22, 150, 203, 215, 265 Lenin, 71, 101 mausoleum, 9 Lieu de mémoire, 4, 9 London, 14, 15, 17, 28n2, 139 M Madrid Alcalá de Henares train station, 39, 54 Atocha train station, 34, 36, 38, 40–47, 54 El Pozo train station, 36, 38, 42, 43, 52–54

Retiro, 39, 44, 49, 50, 55 Santa Eugenia train station, 36, 38, 42, 43, 52, 54 train bombings, 7, 24, 33–57 Martyrdom, 9, 20 Martyrs, 20, 69, 73, 74, 82, 86, 214 glorious, 20 Mass burial, 10, 19, 232 Mass grave, 41, 109, 110, 114, 127, 128, 131, 133, 136, 139, 148, 190, 191, 210, 233–234, 267, 281, 282 Media journalists, 53, 89n14, 146, 229, 289 reporting, 25 Memento, 15, 287 Memorabilia, 34 Memorial aesthetics, 24, 56 appropriation of, 39, 49–50, 215 citation, 21 complex, 27, 143, 196, 197, 205–210, 230, 240, 244–246, 249, 251, 253, 254, 256–258, 261, 266–271, 282 construction of, 1 contested, 6, 42–44, 161, 183–216 distributed, 4, 23, 273n14 forms, 8, 10, 11, 23 garden, 43 grassroots, 4, 24, 34–38, 41–43, 47, 49–51, 55, 56 grove, 119, 232, 234–241, 261, 267 improvised, 36 inauguration, 42, 242, 284 institutionalised, 55 landscape, 208, 292 mania, 2, 56, 206 modification, 4

 INDEX 

official, 24, 26, 34–38, 47, 49, 164, 165 plaza, 107–109, 120 practice, 5, 10, 16, 27, 28, 35, 39, 41, 56, 117, 166, 170 process, 6, 7 semiotics of, 5 spontaneous, 15, 24, 35, 41, 42, 55 temporary, 36 Memorialisation banal, 113 historiography of, 8, 13 performative, 5, 7, 13, 22 spontaneous, 4, 7, 24, 39, 56 Memorialscape, 4, 7, 9, 35, 185, 205 Memory collective, 3, 4, 7, 9, 17, 61, 64, 67, 68, 70, 71, 74, 88n5, 148, 166, 185, 216, 230, 231, 249–253, 255–257, 266 communicative, 4, 17 conflicting, 7, 34, 35, 61, 267 cultural, 3–5, 17 culture of, 231, 251–253, 256, 261–264 duty of, 13 events, 3, 34, 53, 100, 105 guardians of, 98 institutionalised, 39 living, 3 as negotiable, 3 obliteration of, 54 of oppression, 160 phases of, 100, 105 place of, 46, 230–247, 250, 253–257, 266, 267, 270 private, 96, 97, 119 public, 57, 99 regimes of, 97 space of, 256 technologies of, 33, 34 topography of, 33–57

309

traumatic, 34–36, 99, 120 as truth, 3 wars, 183, 208 Milošević, Slobodan, 171, 192, 199–201, 203, 214 Monastery, 96, 101–107, 110, 112, 114–117, 119 Monument, 2, 6, 8, 9, 13–15, 18, 19, 23, 24, 33, 35, 39, 42, 44, 46, 47, 50, 53, 54, 56, 69, 71, 73, 79, 84, 108, 109, 136, 143, 151, 162–164, 170–177, 184, 189, 190, 192, 194, 203, 206, 207, 211, 214–216, 217n5, 235, 246, 251, 279–284, 287–289, 292–294, 298–301 of friendship, 279–301 Moral justice, 7 Moscow, 100, 103, 166 Mostar, 27, 159–177, 178n1, 196 Mourning, 6, 8, 13–15, 33, 35, 36, 52, 55, 56, 64, 71, 80, 82, 85, 87n2, 89n22, 109, 127, 143, 146, 147, 151, 152, 160, 161, 163, 165, 176, 195, 231, 252, 257, 258, 267, 270 Multivocality, 119 Museum, 28, 35, 73, 81, 83, 86, 97, 105, 107–112, 115, 116, 119, 121n9, 139, 151, 206, 209, 217n5, 296, 298, 300 N Narrative counter, 69, 267, 270 national, 17, 85 Nationalism, 62, 63, 89n13, 113, 152, 184, 191, 198–200, 204, 205, 209, 215, 218n12, 264, 282, 292 National myth, 70, 73, 74, 77–79, 86, 87

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INDEX

National Socialism (NS), 232–235, 238, 240, 241, 245, 246, 250, 253, 254, 256, 261, 263–265, 267, 269, 270 National symbol, 163, 282, 292, 298, 299 Nation-building, 127, 133, 282 Nazi, 116, 117, 233, 235, 239–243, 264, 288 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), 132 Nuremberg Trials, 117, 120 O Occupation, 102, 201, 263, 266, 271, 288, 289 Office of the High Representative (OHR), 132, 135–138, 147, 150, 153n11 Ossuary Bazeilles, 10 Sedan, 10 Verdun, 10 P Pacifism, 252, 292–293, 301 Pact of Silence, 163 Paris, 2 Partisan monument, 207 Partisans, 184, 186–188, 192, 198– 201, 204, 207, 215, 216, 218n14 Peace Day parade, 14 Pearl Harbour, 3 Perestroika, 103, 121n6, 245 Performance, 5, 22, 34, 35, 128, 195, 197, 298 Places of amnesia, 41 Poland, 24, 151 Polarisation, 34, 35, 39, 47–55, 57, 62, 146, 207

Postmemory, 99, 119, 120 Potočari, 128, 130, 131, 135–139, 143, 147, 148, 150 Potočari Memorial Centre, 127–152 Prison camp, 96, 98 Pristina, 170, 173 Propaganda, 2, 8, 102, 111, 183, 194, 233–235, 238, 240, 241, 263, 268–270 R Reconciliation, 28, 63, 84, 89n22, 127, 134, 137, 143, 148, 151, 152, 205, 280, 281 Rectification, 15, 40–44, 46, 53, 56, 114 Refugee, 130, 131, 133–135, 137, 139, 146, 147, 150, 206, 213 return, 147 Remembrance agents of, 62 Sunday, 16 Republika Srpska, 130, 132–136, 138, 147, 151, 203 Resilience, 96 Reterritorialization, 64, 65 Retribution, 96 Rhodes statue, 2 Right-wing, 53, 56, 230, 246, 258, 261, 263–266, 269, 270, 301 Ritual, 6, 8, 36, 41, 54, 56, 62, 64, 74, 79, 139, 148, 185, 229–231, 237, 246–267, 269–271 Royal British Legion, 14 Ruin, 27, 65, 82, 159–177, 196, 201, 203, 211, 215, 256 Russia Orthodox Church, 101, 103, 114–116, 121n3 Revolution, 101

 INDEX 

S Sacrifice, 6, 9, 13, 15, 17, 19–20, 23, 65, 70, 71, 73–75, 77, 111, 161, 243, 261 Sanctuary, 42, 139 sanctification, 42 Sarajevo, 133, 136 Schleswig, 280–282, 284, 286–289, 291, 297 Schleswig War First, 10, 280, 281, 284, 287, 289, 296 Second, 10, 287, 296, 297, 300 Sephardic, 193 Serbian, 128, 146, 150, 170–173, 177, 178n2, 184, 191, 200, 203, 204, 212, 218n12 Silence, 3, 14, 35, 57n1, 95, 99, 117, 161, 163 Silencing, 115, 159, 160 Solovetsky gulag, 96–99, 102, 103, 105, 108, 111, 112, 115, 116, 119, 120, 121n5 Islands, 27, 95–120 Monastery, 96, 105, 109, 115 Stone, 103, 108, 109 Soviet Union, 2, 95, 96, 98, 99, 102, 118, 120, 121n10, 245 Spain, 26, 35–38, 41, 44, 50, 52, 55, 163 civil war, 35, 41 Spontaneous shrines, 35, 36 Srebrenica victims association, 136, 138 Women of, 135, 145, 147 Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial, 16, 137, 138, 140–142 Stalin, 71, 100, 101, 111, 116, 117 Stalinism, 101, 116

311

Stalinist purges, 116 repression, 101, 116 Survivor, 22, 76, 89n20, 97, 98, 107, 120, 121n12, 128, 131, 133, 136, 138, 143, 145, 147, 150 T Terrorism 11-M attacks, 34–39, 41, 44, 47, 49, 50, 54–56, 57n2 9/11 attacks, 41 Thermopylae, 19, 29n8 Tito, Josip Broz, 186, 188, 191, 192, 197, 198, 213 Topel, Cengiz, 73, 74, 82 Topel monument, 82, 83 Topography, 33–57 Totalitarianism, 95, 190, 214 Tourism, 96, 102, 104, 113, 167 Tradition, 11, 20, 139, 172, 173, 175, 188, 207, 232, 238, 240, 243, 246, 261–263, 273n13, 294 Trajan’s Colum, 8 Trauma, 89n22, 99, 168, 190, 206 site of, 35, 36, 38, 40, 56, 173 Treaty of Frankfurt, 10 Trees, 43, 79, 108, 233, 237 Turkey, 62, 67, 72–75, 78, 82, 84, 85, 89n21 Tylliria, 61 battle of, 62 U UN Camp, 131 Security Council, 130 UNPROFOR, 137 Unknown Soldier, 2 Tomb of, 2

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INDEX

Urbicide, 185, 200–202 Ustaše, 184, 186, 187, 199, 203, 204, 207, 213, 214 V Verdun, 10, 11 Victimhood, 8, 13, 65, 152, 166, 170, 176, 190, 200, 205, 240 Victims associations, 36–38, 54, 136–138 families, 46, 54, 133, 146, 150, 151 memory of, 39, 42, 44, 49, 50, 52–56 rivalry, 38 Vienna, 25, 214 Violence, 8, 34, 36, 87n2, 89n22, 99, 113, 114, 147, 161, 178n1, 186, 190, 198, 210, 216, 251 Vukovar, 27, 183–216

W War cemetery, 10, 12, 15, 246 War Graves Commission, 17 Whiteread, Rachel, 25, 26 World Heritage, 96, 103, 115, 117, 211 World War I, 14, 29n4, 139, 231, 232 World War II, 102, 116, 121n10, 128, 189, 205, 265, 288 Y Yugoslavia Communist Party of, 186, 190 International Criminal Tribunal for the former, 134, 152n2 Kingdom of, 185, 217n1 Yugoslav National Army (JNA), 185, 201, 203