1989 in European Vernacular Memory

Breuer, Lars; Delius, Anna

doi:10.1177/0888325417710078

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 2 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Indeed, it is an adage to say that the 1989 events, as a point of rupture and change worldwide have been contested ever since in eastern Europe because of its uncertain aftermath (Mark 2010;Pop Eleches 2014;Petrescu and Petrescu 2014;Breuer and Delius 2017;Laczó and Wawrzyniak 2017). In what were largely national debates, the remembrance of the mass civil protests was filtered by accusations of an unsubstantial political change.…”

Section: Challenging the Reconciliatory Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

On political heritage: remembering and disavowing 1989

Dolghin

2018

Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/dimitris-christopoulos/humanrights-in-state-of-perpetual-emergency] of refugees mobilized several memorial narratives which had been the backbone of European memory. Historian Dan Stone has recently made a detailed foray into the locus of the Holocaust as a historical narrative meant to support the ethical argument for solidarity and conclude that remembrance represents just a small fraction of the necessary historicization. The memorial neglect of its history was at the time a recurrent account of the reluctant political attitudes emerging around the frontiers of Europe. This article traces a similar now transnational difficult history inscribed into the European narrative, 1989, and investigated the conditions in which it became a topic of interest in 2014-2015. I locate their invocation in a longer term perspective on the ebbs and flows of the history of 1989 becoming political heritage. This article argues that 1989, as both consensus and competing memory, has been increasingly polarized through these two opposing perspectives more recently. In order to flesh out and interpret these dynamics, I first contextualize how an initially consensus-driven memory narrative around 1989 had by 2014 solidified into two divergent collective memory discourses, suggestive of the populist abatement. It was in the 1990s that the perspective on 1989 generally consolidated the events into a pre-emptive memory, wherein remembrance represented an act of political citizenship supported by a civic narrative of disobedience which would be able to be called on in anticipation of a threat to the new liberal polity. Yet such "negative" political heritage, otherwise a European transnational memorial perspective, gradually emerged as a prop for identity politics. Here, I focus on the tensions in Romanian and Hungarian memorial debates. Indeed, since roughly 2010, this former pre-emption remembrance is being increasingly integrated into discourses of sovereignty and more recently played into the mobilization of the memory of 1989 as a defensive narrative. I consequently consider its invocation in the recent debate on refugees and a wider spectrum of clashing notions of citizenship, state and the public, all leaning on a narrative of the "authoritarian past. As both sides were (and are) employing an increasingly selective historical imaginary, the competition around the memory of 1989 shows how appropriating a revolutionary heritage is in fact instrumental to authoritarian prone politics .

show abstract

Section: Challenging the Reconciliatory Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

On political heritage: remembering and disavowing 1989

Dolghin

2018

Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Exploring Populism Through the Politics of Commemoration

Wyss¹

2021

Europe-Asia Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Experience of Systemic Transformation in Contemporary Biographical Narratives of Older Poles

Życzyńska-Ciołek

2019

QSR

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The aim of this article is to explore whether—from the subjective perspective of people born before the end of WWII—systemic transformation brought about significant changes in their individual lives, and if yes—what was the meaning of those changes for them. In particular, I examine how experiences related to the events that preceded systemic transformation in Poland or took place during its most intensive stage are reflected in contemporary biographical narratives of 49 persons aged 72 or more, for whom the period of professional activity, in whole or in major part, occurred in the times of the Polish People’s Republic. I perform the analysis in three steps. First, I investigate the place of systemic transformation in the narratives, and consider the reasons why it is relatively often absent or poorly reflected there. Second, I present thematic motifs prevailing in those interviews where references to the systemic change appear. In the third step, I investigate the meaning of experiences connected with transformation for the narrators, the accompanying emotions—some of them still persisting—and ways in which the narrators incorporated those experiences into their biographies. The underlying narratives come from people who were drawn for a nationwide quantitative panel survey many years ago, in 1987, and participated in it for the next 25-30 years.

show abstract

1989 in European Vernacular Memory

Cited by 3 publications

References 2 publications

On political heritage: remembering and disavowing 1989

On political heritage: remembering and disavowing 1989

Exploring Populism Through the Politics of Commemoration

The Experience of Systemic Transformation in Contemporary Biographical Narratives of Older Poles

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About