Research Proposal - Comparative Politics of Memory: Commemoration of Terror in Russia and Germany

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 Comparative Politics of Memory:

Commemoration of Terror in Russia and Germany

Alexander Etkind

(with participation of Sandra Evans and Olga Chepurnaia)

Subject

In the middle of the 20th century Russia and Germany killed many millions of their citizens for non-military purposes.  Keeping the memory of crimes committed by the state alive is an important function of the nation-state.

According to some calculations (Per Ahlmark 1998), the total number of victims of the internal violence (“democides”) of the 20th century was larger than the total number of victims of all international wars, including the two World Wars.  There is an important tradition of comparison between two main cases of the great terror, the Soviet (1917-1953) and the German (1933-1945), in terms of their mechanisms, aims and results (Hanna Arendt 1951; Kershaw 1999).  This proposed project concentrates on a different and unexplored issue, the comparative study of Russian and German national cultures of the memory of terror.  The current project is the first attempt at such a study. It combines field studies in Russia with relevant analysis of German research on memory, and aims at comparative analysis of both in the frame of European cultural studies. We will trace the asymmetrical patterns of denial and guilt, mediated by cultural traditions, political interests, and exterior environments. 

Issues Involved

The symmetry of evil does not imply the symmetry of memory.

Though national terrors in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, usually called the Holocaust and the GULAG, resulted in equal millions of victims, the national memory of these victims are very different in two countries. In Germany, there are dozens of monuments on the sites of Nazi concentration camps, numerous memorials and museums, and an established tradition of scholarship in the field of memory. In Russia, it is very hard to find a monument, a cemetery, a museum, a database devoted to memory of the Terror.

Cultural vehicles of memory are many

The most obvious forms of public commemoration are monuments and museums.  Their number, visibility, and cultural significance in Russia are certainly less than in Germany.  Still, there are other important forms of cultural memory in Russia, which may be similar to or different from those in Germany. These forms are mainly connected to the textual domain, including poetry, imaginative literature, popular history, biographies, memoirs, historical studies, and political debates.  Our main subject is the relation between monuments, which are made of stone and steel, and texts, which are made of letters and feelings, in two national cultures of memory.

Memory of national terror is of global concern

Though cultural memory is rightly considered to be a national issue, there are important mechanisms of globalization of memory. If significant catastrophes, natural, technological or political, are coming to be domains of international concern, why is memory of such (or larger) catastrophes in the past not of similar concern? On global scale, understanding how the Gulag is remembered is important because it can serve as a check on uncritical belief in state action.  Of course, memory of the murdered is never value-free, if only for the reason that it calls for the memory of their murderers, and therefore for moral evaluation and sometimes for legal judgment. Globalization of memory meets resistance like other dimensions of globalization. A comparative study of these issues will point to the international negligence of the questions of memory, as well as to the mutual ignorance of these affairs in the West and in the East. 

Background

This project deals with the problems traditionally addressed in Holocaust studies, such as the limits of human representation.  A more specific challenge to our comparative study is created by the asymmetry of knowledge. 

The project is facilitated by the rich theoretical tradition of memory studies in France (summarized by Pierre Nora) and Germany (summarized by Aleida Assmann).  However, there is no systematic study of memory of the terror in Russia, and there is no comparative research on cultural memory in Russia and Germany.  On the German part, there is a rich framework of data available to researchers. On the Russian part, this project is seriously hindered by the relative deficit of empirical evidence. There is no study that focuses on monuments, museums, and cultural traditions related to the memory of terror in Soviet Russia. There is also no tradition of professional (historiographical, philosophical, or legal) debate on the questions of guilt (collective, institutional, or individual), justice, and memory. Equally embarrassing is the fact that, at least so far, there is no attempt to compensate the survivors of GULAG and no official data on the survivors exists.  However, there is an important social movement called “Memorial”, which keeps track of local attempts to mark the sites of GULAG with monuments, exhibitions, or inscriptions.

Structural Hypothesis

In culture, as in a computer, there are two forms of memory, hard and soft. One ultimately needs the other. Monuments without inscriptions are mute; texts without monuments are ephemeral.

Soft memory consists primarily of texts (including literary, historical and other narratives), while hard memory consists primarily of monuments (and sometimes, state laws and court decisions). Museums, cemeteries, commemorative festivities, guided tours, and history textbooks are complicated systems that demonstrate permanent, multilevel interactions between the hardware (sculptures, obelisks, memorials, historical places in vivo or in illustrations) and the software (guidebooks, directions, inscriptions, historical studies, commentaries etc.) of cultural memory. As in a computer, there are problems of compatibility. Certain versions of software and hardware are compatible, and others are not.

Political Hypothesis

Hard memory is usually the responsibility of the state, soft memory is the domain of society.  Although two different opinions on the same historical subject are perfectly legitimate, no two monuments can exist on the same spot.

Political theory of national guilt relies on the concept of collective guilt developed by Karl Jaspers.  It also returns to Edmund Burke’s dictum, that the social contract is negotiated between living and dead generations, rather than between living people and existing power.  Such theory would take into account different conditions of memorialization in different nation-states.  Hypothetically, the most important factor is the perceived continuity of the current nation-state from the former terrorist one (continuity which is perceived in Russia as much stronger than in Germany).  In contemporary societies, cultural memory is an important part of the public sphere (as defined by Jurgen Habermas), though it is structured by different principles.  There is no pluralism in hard memory.  Documents about the same event can be multiple and divergent, and opinions on it are legitimately controversial, while a site of historical memory intrinsically allows for only one monument.  Intellectual debate about the past is pluralistic, but monuments are singular.  A historical debate cannot provide a final conclusion to the question of memory – a monument does.

Historical Hypothesis

The hardening of memory is a cultural process with specific functions, conditions, thresholds, and sources of resistance. 

Memory without monuments is vulnerable to cyclical, recurrent process of refutations and denials.  Guilt feelings can be consoled by new voices, and even the most influential texts can be confronted with new texts.  The hardening of memory is usually confronted with political and psychological resistance. In a democratic society, the hardening of memory needs relative consensus in the public sphere. Such consensus follows after, and because, the intensity of the “soft” debates reaches a certain threshold.  No memory is absolutely hard: monuments may be removed, capital cities may be transferred and/or renamed, and even mummies (from Pharaoh’s to Lenin’s) are unstable. Still, the hardening of memory promises that the issue will not return, that the demons of the past are exorcised, that the present exists and is granted importance.

Comparative Hypothesis

Though comparable in scope, the atrocities of German Nazism and Soviet Communism left profoundly different memories in their countries.   German memory tends to take “hard” forms, and the current debates emphasize the deficit of “soft” experiential content.   Russian memory, on the other hand, tends to take “soft” forms, and the current debates emphasize the deficit of “hard” memorialization.

In both cases, the horrible past leaves a difficult heritage, but due to unique combinations of political circumstances, these two cultures elaborated different forms of dealing with it.  German memory erected “hardware” monuments, museums etc., with a consequent cultural debate regarding the means to revive and re-inspire it, to escape complete petrification of memory.  Russian memory is pervaded with “software” texts and “immediate” experiences, which do not fix into stable, indisputable, monumental forms. These differences are both structural and historical.  Russian memory must confront the same stages of memory transformation (from soft to hard, from texts to monuments), which Germany had to confront in its past.  Though the Russian development of memory is slow and painful, it is more autonomous than the German development, which was partially induced by foreign pressures.

Composition of Research

Due to the inequality of our knowledge of memorials in these two respective countries, the current study will concentrate on field study in Russia, combined with an analytical review of the situation in Germany.  In Russia, we will explore approximately 60 initiatives of memory, both completed and unrealized.   We will concentrate on the Northern regions of Russia, from St Petersburg to Belomor-kanal and Solovki.

We will be equally interested in accomplished monuments and in the attempts to erect them (later called “initiatives of memory”), whether they were successful or not.  The field study will concentrate on three regions of Russia, which have been selected because of the concentration of the important sites of GULAG: North-Western Russia, including Karelian Republic, Komi Republic and Belomor-Kanal, and Petersburg

Methods of the Field Study

1. Cultural study of the “hard” forms of commemoration:

We will photograph monuments, copy inscriptions, describe exhibitions, and document unaccomplished projects.

2. Oral history of initiatives of memory:

Interviews with initiators of memory and local authorities will identify their projects, motivations and support groups, as well as the nature of resistance to memory (political, psychological; official, informal; local, federal) that confronted these initiatives.

3. Sociological study of social movements which initiate commemoration:

We will check the applicability of the current theorizing about the “new social movements” to the “Memorial” and similar societies.. 

4. Literary analysis of fictional literature and pop-history devoted to the GULAG:

We will subject these materials to interpretive analysis with a special interest in the themes of memory, monuments, collective guilt, responsibility for the past etc.

 

Scope of the analytical review of the German debate on memory

We will investigate the current debate about the newest German initiatives of memory, and reinterpret these debate in terms of our comparative experience and the hard-soft distinction. 

Expected results

The research monograph will be prepared in two versions, Russian and English.  We have an agreement with the leading Russian publishing house that specializes in non-fiction, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, concernng the publication of this book.  Separately, a series of essays published in national magazines will put the main argument and the documentation of the project into the current public debate. 

Participants of the project

Alexander Etkind, Professor, Department of Political Science and Sociology, European University at St.Petersburg

B.A. and M.A. (1978), Leningrad State University; PhD (1985) Bekhterev Institute, Leningrad; Habilitation (1996) University of Helsinki, Finland. Senior Researcher (1987-1997), Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences. Visiting fellow/professor at Stanford (1993), Harvard (1995), New York University (1999), Georgetown (2002). Senior fellow at the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences (1997), Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, 1997-1998, Wissenschaftkolleg in Berlin (1998-1999). Author: The Psychology of Post-Totalitarianism in Russia, London, 1992 (with Leonid Gozman); Eros of the Impossible. The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Russian edition 1993, French 1995 by PUF, German 1996 by Kiepenhauer, English 1997 by Westview); Sodom and Psyche. Essays on the Intellectual History of Russian Modernity (Russian edition 1996); Christs and Whips. Mystical Sects, Russian Literature, and the Revolution (Russian edition 1998); Interpretation of Travels. Russia and America in Travelogues and Intertexts (Russian edition 2001)

Sandra Evans, M.A. from the European University at St. Petersburg, graduate student at the Free University in Berlin

Olga Chepurnaia, doctoral student of the European University at St. Petersburg