Performing the Past

Jay Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University. Karin Tilmans is a cultural historian, fellow of the Department of History and Civilisation, and academic coordinator of the Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies, both at the European University Institute. Frank van Vree is an historian and professor of journalism at the Universiteit van Amsterdam.

Performing the Past is a dazzling collection of essays by scholars who share a passion for the performative nature of history, memory, and identity. The volume offers refreshing insights for anyone interested in the past. Joanna Bourke, professor of History at Birkbeck College, London

• Table of Contents - 6 Preface - 8 Acknowledgements - 10 CH1. The performance of the past: memory, history, identity - 12 CH2. Re-framing memory. Between individual and collective forms of constructing the past - 36 CH3. Repetitive structures in language and history - 52 CH4. Unstuck in time. Or: the sudden presence of the past - 68 CH5. Co-memorations. Performing the past - 106 CH6. ‘Indelible memories’: the tattooed body as theatre of memory - 120 CH7. Incongruous images. ‘Before, during, and after’ the Holocaust - 148 CH8. Radio Clandestina: from oral history to the theatre - 176 CH9. Music and memory in Mozart’s Zauberflöte - 188 CH10. The many afterlives of Ivanhoe - 208 CH11. Novels and their readers, memories and their social frameworks - 236 CH12. Indigestible images. On the ethics and limits of representation - 258 CH13. ‘In these days of convulsive political change’. Discourse and display in the revolutionary museum, 1793-1815 - 288 CH14. Restitution as a means of remembrance. Evocations of the recent past in the Czech Republic and Poland after 1989 - 306 CH15. European identity and the politics of remembrance - 336 About the Authors - 362 List of Illustrations - 368