Hello. Welcome to our second panel in which we will explore the relationship between hegemonic memories, silence and nationalism.
Please allow me to welcome our first panellist. The first speaker is Barbara Tornquist.
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Barbara is a professor of European studies and the dean of research for the John Faculty of Humanities and Theology at Lloyd University, Sweden.
She's a prominent scholar, scholar in the field of memory studies and a prolific author with four monographs and 25 edited volumes and counting.
Her research focuses on difficult heritage and contested identities of in between places such as Central, Eastern and North European Borderlands.
Presently, she's working on a research project entitled Lessons from Communist and Nazi History and Genealogical Approach.
Her presentation is entitled Changing National Changing Narratives about the Past of Wroclaw Struggles over hegemony in a city.
Please, Barbara, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Johanna, for this very nice the present presentation of me.
And they jump directly to my 12 minutes.
I will see if I minuted. Let me start to present your main objective of my presentation.
It is to discuss and describe and analyse the dynamics between the demonic memories and
counter memories using the case of the local memory of the Polish city of Wroclaw.
And this is based on the study am actually on two studies,
one I did in 2014 2015 with my colleagues in the world 12 and on the second study that they started just this year,
which is a follow up of the previous one, aimed to investigate how this dynamics is ongoing,
how the local memories are influenced by the this nationalist conservative town on the national level of politics in Poland.
So this is this kind of stages in developing off of her demonic memories and counter-narrative that they want to present.
I would also like to touch upon the theoretical question, which I will not have time to to elaborate on,
but I think it's important to think about that in the context of my presentation and this about the relation
between the demonic narratives of the past and its relation to official memory and popular memory.
The question which is important is to ask when a narrative becomes demonic,
is it enough that it is dominating in official memory and promote it from above?
Or do you need a swell to see the reflection in popular memory on the level of
the good or how how they relate to this official narrative projected from above?
So I think this is something which it was important to discuss Fonda.
But why the case or whatsoever? Why is it so interesting?
It is precisely because in context of this of this symposium, it's a good example of post-conflict city.
Both of is situated on the territory of that before the Second World War belong to Germany,
and it was taken over by Poland in 1945 due to the agreement.
And what happened was that the inhabitants of the city were expelled and replaced by Polish people
coming from east and central and eastern territories taken from Poland by Soviet Soviet Union.
So the German inhabitants that completely dominated the battle to have this disappeared after
the Second World War and the Polish inhabitants had to deal with this legacy of the German past,
which was very problematic to them because not the least because of the Second World War.
So what happens in the years following the war was that the new rulers of Poland on central
level and local level established a narrative about Wordsworth is being ever polish.
So in a way, they will claim that those who belong to Polish territory in the mediaeval times and later was lost for Germany.
But but now returned so to say to mother ship and it was the justice of peace returned to Poland.
And in line of this narrative, there was an idea that all remnants and traces of the German past of the German cultural legacy should be in a.
What in principle?
What actually it's actually happened and what we see here is a kind of interesting and it kind of coincidence of two wheels on the on the one side,
it's the communist government that wants to have this erasure of the German past.
But there is also it fits very well with the needs of the on the grassroots level of the inhabitants of both of the two things, two different factors.
One is that there is a well established narrative template in the Polish culture about Germans
as a kind of eternal and add this eternal enemies always want to control Polish people.
And in the context of the world, after the Second World War, it was this template was even more strengthened.
And there was also a need on the Polish migrants to the city to be rooted and make the city the home.
Why? What they wanted and to make it all of us or to say to it to a place.
It's alien, it's German. And the last factor, which was important in the context it was.
Feeling of insecurity amongst the inhabitants that when we interviewed them,
they always told us that for many years they were afraid the Germans will come back and take this, they'll take this territory again.
So in this way, it was a very strong, modern national narrative of this local history.
However, it is interesting that we could trace, but it started to be questioned by the generation born in both south after the war.
So to say children to talk to the migrants and dispossessed started very slowly in the 1970s, and it was strengthened in the 1980s,
especially within cycles of the democratic anti-communist opposition that inverdale
to have local oppositional activists that questioned this this narrative.
And it was precisely this, these people belonging to this activity and the people in opposition in this.
But the later took over the local government in the 12th after the fall of communism in 1989.
So since 1989, and the boats were ruled by by the liberal parties, even if they were, of course, several elections.
But it is always the liberals who who won this elections and dominated and dominated until today,
and the local government and these people were very much decisive on the point that they want to change this nationalist narrative,
although to have and worked to present the bill to have a symbol of courage and reconciliation.
So they walk through and acknowledge and recognise the German cultural legacy in the city by
rewriting local history and putting up new monuments and new exhibitions in the local museums,
even coming back to the some German names in the city.
But this, of course, was not very much uploaded by all, but they was quite a strong resistance against that.
They would say it was a conflict between this dominant narrative coming from above on the local rulers and the
counter-narrative on the grassroots level that could be summarised in the question put quite many times in the media,
especially social media, when the people ask, is it about the German memory of the German votes?
Well, that the German it not in the Polish memo of votes that was objective here.
So there were several conflicts.
One especially interesting was about the changing of the name of this quite impressive building in the world with so-called Yahoo Natalia Sabino Hall,
which was called in German times into a communist time.
It was baptised two people a whole.
And then the local authorities in the 1990s came back to their old name and suggested the recognition of the German cultural heritage.
It was very much a post. I don't have time to to elaborate on on this question, but this conflict was rather illustrative for this.
This tension between between the local narrative projected film at birth and the reactions on the grassroots level.
So what happened after some decades of this despotic think of a new kind of narrative was that both to a authorities,
local authorities in tune to down the German,
this German menace of the city and instead started to promote new narrative about both What
is it that could be called in a kind of myth because both were 90 45 was not multicultural,
but very much dominated by Germans? But of course, if you dig down in in the past,
you can refer to two times when the votes have belong to Poland, to Czech Clown, to hubs, book and so on.
And so it was done in this in this new narrative,
which was promoted also in order as it was playing to us by by the representative of the local rulers, that it was then to change.
Local identity and votes were Workforce Bank City of in the counties and very much inscribed in EU politics of memory,
emphasising the cultural diversity. Interesting example of this is the co-author of and for the New Nation,
an initiative done in cooperation between and between local authorities and grassroots initiative, making it a symbol of multiculturalism.
The Yohann, should they end now or can they continue some minutes?
Unfortunately, I have to ask you maybe to do up here, I'm sorry.
Yes, OK. So let me say just that after 2015, I feel the turn on in Poland after and after taking after the nationalist conservative town in Poland.
In these local authorities, it has to meet a challenge of visibility of very strong even for counter-narratives.
I don't have time to elaborate on this, but it includes verbal attacks on the liberal measures of those who are faking it
to the courts because in accusing them of betraying Polish national interests,
selling the secret to the Germans and so on and so on.
So what what I am seeing now in my current investigation of the city that the local authorities that change their strategy,
they don't want to approach the past in such a very challenging and way as they did before,
but instead they they avoid the past and to focus on defence of the image of all too
often tolerant and inclusive city by forming a new strategy so the past is avoided.
But still, they try to use it as a springboard for the full keeping alive.
This is creating new identity of both worlds.
OK. I think I have to. Thank you for your attention.
Thank you, Barbara. Sorry about that.
It's OK, it's Craig's presentation is entitled Post Memory in Post-Conflict Societies Reflections from Lebanon Crake Over to you.
Great. I and thank you once again for your kind invitation.
It's a pleasure to be part of this symposium.
The themes are indeed central to my own research in the Middle East and also my own personal experience growing up in Belfast.
The title of my talk was memory and post-conflict societies reflections from Lebanon.
I think it's a little problematic, and that is the nature of post when we understand memory and post-conflict.
As Baraka has argued, the prefix of post is indeed deceptive because it implies a clean break from the past when, in fact, what what.
In actuality, the past continues to haunt the present through lingering legacies of violence, humiliation and injustice.
There are probably no more poignant a symbol of the legacy of the Lebanese Civil War than that of its new war museum, Beirut.
This is a 1920s style alderman building the Barakat building that was at the junction and at the heart of the Lebanese Civil War and Beirut,
and divided the East West along the Damascus Highway.
And it also was a significant sniper point for the Lebanese forces.
For years, it was a ruinous reminder of the destructive past,
but pressure grew for the redevelopment, particularly through Solidaire of Beirut sine time.
And it was only the intervention of architects and civil activists paved this building and turned it into Lebanon's first or Breeze's dam.
So we can see here in the images it still remains quite empty as a shell.
It opens in 2017, and it hosts art exhibitions and seminars.
In fact, one of the first was by Zena El Charlene's sacred catastrophe,
and she constructed 17000 gripping poles in the second and third floors of this
building as a representation of the disappeared in the Lebanese Civil War.
Despite an official recruitment process, Beirut still has no curator or even a permanent collection dealing with the war.
It remains a minority very much in limbo, a reminder of the past,
but mostly an aesthetic backdrop for cultural and civil society events unable to really provide critical historical examination.
As Ella Davis and I argue, and she took these these wonderful images to install a permanent exhibition of Beirut, Beirut that is,
to turn the building into a memorial site into a museum would be a radical step towards an official history of the Civil War,
and this would be near impossible to agree on what that narrative should actually recount.
But it would also implicate the sit and acknowledging the violent past of the present political elite Ba'ath Beirut, I think,
asked challenging questions of Lebanese society and what can actually be remembered and forgotten particularly high.
Can such a project be realised when there's recent instability and ongoing protests?
In fact, has the right to tell less history,
and Hajjah Incorporated incorporate conflicting and contested narratives on what should the next generation of Lebanese?
How do they actually view this building? And in my work, I've been interested in the next generation.
I interviewed Lebanese students many years ago during this process of reconstruction, and their views were very varied.
For some, it was a total rejection. The building in the museum represents a Christian Lebanese forces symbol of death for others.
It's not the right time. It's still too sensitive, as Ruben says, how many innocent people were shot from those windows?
Another Lebanese young person, Pierre, said maybe they should just keep the shell images powerful enough.
We don't know what actually happened inside.
Some Lebanese youth are more sceptical, Rahsaan says it's an exploitive attempt to cash in on Beirut's violent past.
Probably we'll be running Civil War tours and free militia T-shirts and baseball caps.
Aya, 17, from Shia and Beirut, is much more reflective, she argues.
It provokes us to remember and ask questions about the war.
To think about what happened in these specific buildings and to decide it must never happen again.
I think it needs diverging youthful responses.
We see some of the post-war narratives and debates on whether memory is needed to stop a repetition of the conflict.
Whether forgetting would actually provide a main. This is not returning to violence or a complete rejection.
Lebanese war, which occurred between 75 and 1990, killing around 150000 people, displacing over two thirds of the population,
was led by a Thai peace in 1990 that included amnesty, but also public censorship of any discussion on an official level of the conflict.
But instead, memory discourses have been promoted by activists, by scholars, and they're still very much prevalent in local oral traditions.
My research has explored these multiple polyvalent memories and the transcription and transformation.
Synchrony in the lives of the next generation of posts, memory generation.
That's what I want to briefly look at.
The concept of post memory loss of memory is best defined as a residential type of memory, a recollection of an event, not personal experience.
A socially felt a traumatic rupture that indelibly scars a nation, a religious group, a community or a family.
Ryan Hersh posits this concept in relation to the overwhelming weight of Holocaust memory and its discursive power,
particularly through photographs and visual images to share Jewish historical consciousness.
Rehearsed post memory exists is this powerful particular form of memory because its connexion is to an object,
it's not mediated through recollection directly, but imaginative investment and creation.
It helps provide the gnomic frames and schemata for affirming social identities communal traditions,
but also it can imprison people within historical discourses,
she argues, that have silenced us verbally that defined narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension.
In other words, first memory suggests the traumatic historical events,
whether distance by time or distorted by political design, they cannot easily be beverage or forgotten.
And what I became interested in one plus memory read, such as focus on the Holocaust,
its applicability to other post-conflict settings, settings of rupture, violence,
genocide, displacement and increasing work across looking South America, Southeast Asian,
Northern Ireland, the Balkans have applied post memory frames and in a way,
looking to enter generational transmission of trauma, not just through photographs,
as Hirsch highlights, but through visual sites, urban landscapes, the remnants of the past,
how they affect the Senate because these are the memory skips that inform identity formation,
the trauma skips that immediately connects us to past conflict.
So how does both memory work?
In a Lebanese context, a few years ago, I conducted over 100 interviews with Lebanese students for my book Memory and Forgetting in Lebanon,
but also more recently to focus on the nine surveys reveal again whose memory at work.
These are just some of the narratives, as Allen argues.
I was born in 1990 when it all ended, but I hear all the stories like pictures of the war, life, memories of the buildings and what happened there.
Sometimes when we drive through an area, I'm reminded of the past, the violence, destruction.
It's still stateside to you. Rami instead talks about the deaths.
The events, much like the Troubles in Northern Ireland,
the Lebanese Civil War is referred to as the advance, and they remain a big void, a nebulous concept.
You don't know what's inside. You know what's black. You know what's there.
It's ominous. We don't know what's inside. George, a 21 year old as St. Joseph University student, says At times I wanted to close my eyes,
ears and cover and cover my ears to my parents stories of war.
It was their conflict, not mine. I don't want to carry their burdens if these memories are difficult to escape.
Johnny, they appear late and sometimes in unexpected places.
Both memory and Lebanon is light, foreboding and at times inescapable.
I just want to very briefly look at some of the most prominent narratives post memory narratives that are prevalent within Lebanese society.
And of course, this is understanding post memory is a dynamic, contextual phenomenon.
Firstly, we see rejection the idea that this was not our war, it was theirs, and this is common.
Our son, Tony wrote a book, The Lebanese War, and it was called the War of Others on our side.
This popularised the idea that the Lebanese conflict was mostly due to external intervention that had limited Lebanese involvement.
But I think this idea has been subverted by a generation who focus very much on the guilt and responsibility of the previous generation.
There was some rejected. There is also an Easter, a strange attraction and curiosity, or is the same in one cafe 1975,
this cafe was closed, but it became popular in a part of Beirut.
It was a cafe, but you could come set in underground bunkers for life as part remnants, graffiti,
and you were curious and asked to ask the owner of this bar what exactly was going on.
He said the war is over, but many people need to think about what happened with many different ages of people,
some older who love the nostalgia, the music, the songs. Some young people.
They don't even know anything about the war, but they're interested in experiencing something about it.
So there's rejection nostalgia, but I think also quite common is the narrative theme of recurrence.
The idea that the war continues an invisible, visible war.
Even though the war ended in 1990, the same protagonists, those former militia leaders of the politicians,
there are recurring tensions and certain neighbourhoods of Beirut that the conflict and war is ongoing.
Fourthly, there's the narrative of redemption.
In fact, many young people do not want to focus just on victimhood and suffering on a personal resilience and bravery,
why their family was able to move beyond the war.
This has also turned into a narrative that is redirected to war.
Instead of focussing on internal conflict, it focuses on an existential struggle against Israel.
This is very much seen in Hezbollah's Museum of Resistance Tourism, a terrorist jihadi centre,
as Nasrallah calls it, open in May 2010, 10 years after Israel withdrew from Lebanon.
And it's a space where you can see Hezbollah weaponry and also Israeli tanks and confiscated material from former wars.
It becomes the site of this both physical. It's built into a hill where there's there's resistance tunnels, but it's also spiritual or supernatural.
The idea of sacrifice and the argument that Hezbollah have become the creators on site the fires of South Lebanon again,
this is quite a controversial argument. Finally, war memory is provoked and resistance and revolution.
In fact, what we see it is infused with contemporary struggles that becomes an idiom for political change.
And it takes new forms and popular uprisings, whether in 2006 U.S. campaign of or 2019.
And you said the protest over the recycling of Bloody.
It's like our page and we can hear the Lebanese politicians and the argument that some trash should not be recycled
through 2019 again as a critical attack on the Lebanese sectarian system as part of the new post-war legacy.
So what are the findings very quickly on Lebanese post memory?
And what I would argue my research suggests is the persistence of civil war memory resistance
to official silence on selective and subversive and the discourses that it creates.
What we find is that disorientated and disillusioned and liminal generation, they're trying to reconcile public censure and private anguish.
They're trying to reconcile the history that is not really discussed in schools or publicly, but yet is on everyone's lips.
This tension, and it's the mass migration depression ongoing within society.
What evidence is also there or memories can be easily mobilised during periods of flux and instability,
reactivating grievances and contemporary tensions.
We've seen this very much in communal hostility around identity politics over anniversary dates of the war,
particular neighbourhoods that were engaged in conflict, and just recently in the 7th of May, a Hezbollah takeover in 2008.
We see this over war memory.
No taking place on Twitter.
Whether the 7th of May was a glorious day for many supporters of Hezbollah or a day of shame particularly looked at by the Sunni community.
Thank you, sir. Finally, I just post memory work in post-conflict settings.
I just want to make a few brief points.
Another is that we see the proliferation of post memory studies, and it's also taking new interdisciplinary forms.
Trauma studies, psychological accounts, post memory can fade into polarised identities.
It provides a repertoire for future confrontations and violence, and there can be transgenerational attachment to victimhood.
memorialisation sites of practise alive for this effect of an embodied connexion to the past.
But I just also say while postmodernity can be used to to transfer conflict and hostilities,
there is a possibility for greater interaction with transitional justice working through.
As Hirsch herself argues, perhaps it's only in subsequent generations that trauma can be witnessed and work through,
so we'll need to look at post memory and its interventions and education processes, and perhaps also mediation.
I'll just end there. Thanks. Thank you very much.
Unfortunately, we almost don't have time for a Q&A, but still let me through one for maybe all of you and whoever wants to take it, take it.
What? What is needed for a narrative or a memory to become hegemonic?
I may start because it was one of my questions, so when they worked with this paper, because in my view, that they really had the money.
Can we speak of when we have this, this overlapping between on the one side official memory promoted by by the old elites or intellectual elites?
But if they also can take roots in the popular memory in a way when they start to circulate and be internalised by people at large,
then I think that's an but we can speak about the real hegemony.
And so in my case, in votes for this post-war state, in local memory of well.
But then we have this time of post-communist time when these strong official in memory promoted on the local level.
And if they silenced to some, some to some extent, even sometimes a consciousness to silence the count, the memo is on the grassroots level.
But the question is it as long is this this new narrative now to really become internalised in the popular memory?
Is it? Can we speak about the alleged gunman or not?
I wonder. Thank you.
Thank you. Thanks to all our panellists for your insightful contribution and also many thanks to the members of the audience for the questions.
I would like to strongly encourage you to stay online and to use the chat function to try to answer at least some of them.
And now we will conclude our morning session and break for lunch and to let all the information sink in as well.
We will, as I said, we will leave this room open for another approximately 20 minutes and enable the chip
function so that you can chat with the panellists and the audience and if you wish.
So we will meet again at 1:00 p.m. London time.
1:00 PM British Summertime and to join us.
That's very important. Please use the afternoon session link, which we sent you as well.
Which we provided to you by email. See you again in one hour.
Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Our pleasure.
Bye bye.