Cultural Memories – serie

Why do you throw a coin into the Trevi Fountain and make a wish?This book links cultural memory with the materiality of the Trevi Fountain as historical monument and uses this perspective to examine its imagery in art, literature, film and music, concluding with the e-Trevi on the internet. How memory takes different pathways is of current interest in memory studies and the cross-disciplinary approach taken here considers how memory travels between media as well as exploring related issues such as forgetting and media convergence.Yet there is a dark side to the Trevi, previously unexplored, of memory linked to water, which runs counter to its usual blue sky image, and this ambiguity is unravelled. The book also conveys the international, national and localized meanings of the Fountain and describes the changing ideologies that are hidden in the many performances the monument is made to give. The Trevi is symbolic of both commodification and misogyny, symbols that flow with changing and contemporary meanings. Throw your coin with care!

The complex intertwining of history, memory, space, place and identity in borderlands is the topic of this edited collection. Using a transnational analysis of multi-layered cases from the northern Adriatic and Central Europe, the essays address fundamental questions in the history of the twentieth century. The geographical areas under scrutiny have experienced regular re-drawings of political borders, reconfigurations of state orders, and changes in ideological frameworks. The symbolic boundaries that formed the mental map of the modern world were located here: West vs East, Latin vs German vs Slavic, European vs Oriental, antifascism vs fascism, capitalism vs communism, etc. These symbolic dimensions influence the local reality, intersecting with international developments and global processes. How these changes in ideology, state and the resulting spatial politics have functioned within varying historical frameworks, and what we can learn from their changing meanings, is the main focus of this volume. Its content represents a privileged perspective on understanding ruptures as well as continuities in memory cultures, commemorative practices, situational identifications and the varying politics of the past in European borderlands.

In the postcolonial reassessment of history, the themes of colonialism, decolonisation and individual and collective memory have always been intertwined, but it is only recently that the transcultural turn in memory studies has enabled proper dialogue between memory studies and postcolonial studies. This volume explores the synergies and tensions between memory studies and postcolonial studies across literatures and media from Europe, Africa and the Americas, and intersections with Asia. It makes a unique contribution to this growing international and interdisciplinary field by considering an unprecedented range of languages and sources that promotes dialogue across comparative literature, English and American studies, media studies, history and art history, and modern languages (French, German, Greek, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian-Croatian, Spanish). Combining theoretical discussion with innovative case studies, the chapters consider various postcolonial politics of memory (with a focus on Africa); diasporic, traumatic and «multidirectional memory» (M. Rothberg) in postcolonial perspective; performative and linguistic aspects of postcolonial memory; and transcultural memoryscapes ranging from the Black Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, from overseas colonialism to the intra-European legacies of Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian/Soviet imperialism. This far-reaching enquiry promotes comparative postcolonial studies as a means of creating more integrated frames of reference for research and teaching on the interface between memory and postcolonialism.

When Europe fell prey to totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century, the Slovene artist Tone Kralj responded to the cruellest oppression by systematically depicting his own and his community’s resistance against Fascism and Nazism in public spaces, under the very nose of the regime. As incredible as it may seem, the regime never discovered and punished his rebellious actions. The painter embedded his ideological subversion of Fascism and Nazism in wall paintings in more than fifty Catholic churches along the Slovene–Italian ethnic border, thus disseminating his subversive message among the people with whom he shared the same cultural memory. With many of them covering a surface area of several square metres, the church paintings introduced Hitler and Mussolini into Biblical visual narratives, portraying the two dictators with irony and grotesqueness as villainous Biblical characters, often in the role of hangmen, murderers or clowns. The symbols of their regimes were incorporated into Biblical scenes depicting eschatological dimensions of the struggle between good and evil, thus spreading – in the time of the most brutal fascistization – the painter’s firm belief in the historical downfall of the Fascist and Nazi regimes.

The Great War set in motion all of the subsequent violence of the twentieth century. The war took millions of lives, led to the fall of four empires, established new nations, and negatively affected others. During and after the war, individuals and communities struggled to find expression for their wartime encounters and communal as well as individual mourning. Throughout this time of enormous upheaval, many artists redefined their role in society, among them writers, performers, painters, and composers. Some sought to renew or re-establish their place in the postwar climate, while others longed for an irretrievable past, and still others tried to break with the past entirely.This volume offers a significant interdisciplinary contribution to the study of modern war, exploring the ways that artists contributed to wartime culture – both representing and shaping it – as well as the ways in which wartime culture influenced artistic expressions. Artists’ places within and against reconstruction efforts illuminate the struggles of the day. The essays included represent a transnational perspective and seek to examine how artists dealt with the experience of conflict and mourning and their role in (re-)establishing creative practices in the changing climate of the interwar years.

The former camp of Fossoli in northern Italy was established in 1942 by the Royal Italian Army as a camp for prisoners of war, later becoming a Nazi-Fascist concentration and transit camp for political opponents, Jews and forced labourers. After the war it became a Catholic community for orphans and a camp for refugees from the former Italian territories of Istria until 1970. A complex system of memory and heritage stems from the legacy of the former camp: its remains, the Museum and Monument to the Political and Racial Deportee by architects BBPR, and the synagogues of Carpi. The Fondazione Fossoli, created in Carpi in 1996, manages this legacy with the purpose of preserving and transmitting the historical memory of the Fossoli camp. Linking together the history of the Holocaust, the resistance to Nazi-Fascism and the political and civic commitment that inspired the birth of the Italian Republic after the dictatorship and the war, Fossoli lies at the very core of Italy’s contemporary cultural memory. The essays in this volume analyse, from different disciplinary perspectives, the material and immaterial heritage that constitutes a rich and articulated memorial system today.Texts by Lorenzo Bertucelli, Matteo Cassani Simonetti, Pierluigi Castagnetti, Paolo Faccio, Robert S. C. Gordon, Viviana Gravano, Giovanni Leoni, Marzia Luppi, Roberta Mira, Daniele Salerno, Andrea Ugolini and Patrizia Violi.

How can the afterlives of anticapitalist and antidictatorship resistance enliven contemporary imaginaries of social justice? Where can the legacies of authoritarianism be spatially located and challenged? And what roles can film play in reckoning with these spectral inheritances?Picturing Ghosts addresses these questions in relation to postdictatorship Chile, a country that has become a nodal point in global geopolitical narratives about the obsolescence of socialism, the birth of neoliberalism and «the end of history». Exploring how the Chilean «transition to democracy» has been narrated in film, the book focuses on stories of haunting and rebellion that unsettle hegemonic temporalities and frameworks of memory. Engaging with the idea of haunting as a trope, a conceptual metaphor and a structure of feeling, it considers different approaches to reckoning with the present past as an emancipatory presence – a multiplicity of unfinished projects and unanswered questions that the cultural imaginary of late capitalism hastens to smooth over.Through a cartographic approach to analysis, this study looks beyond established landscapes of memorialisation in Chile, encountering rebellious subjects and stories in houses and haciendas, poblaciones, the presidential palace, the Atacama Desert, shopping malls, public schools and university campuses. In doing so, it contributes to an emerging field of research that problematises the dominant spatial and temporal imaginaries of «post-conflict» transitions, striving to construct more inclusive and transformative conceptions of truth, justice and emancipation.

«Multidisciplinary and comparative, Camps of Transit, Sites of Memory brings new materials and approaches to the study of Fascist, wartime and postwar concentration and transit camps in Italy, as well as their legacies. An essential volume for the continuing study of this complex subject.»(Professor Mia Fuller, University of California, Berkeley)Camps and places of transit assume relevance in certain contexts and in relation to specific events of the contemporary age: from genocide to voluntary or forced migration, from camps for prisoners of war to the management of refugees in conflicts or catastrophes. In the phases of transition to normality that follow such events, places of transit can be used for different, sometimes opposing purposes, such as the control and/or elimination of certain social groups, or as the protection of persons for humanitarian aims.This volume investigates the relationship between camps and places of transit from three main perspectives: the history of transit camps in various countries and times; the relationship between such spaces, whose architectural characterization is fragile and difficult to recognize, and the great memorial and symbolic relevance of them; and, finally, the concepts of transit and camp, and changes in the meaning of such places and the memorial and educational practices related to them.With contributions by Antonis Antoniou, John R. Barruzza, Chiara Becattini, Vando Borghi, Matteo Cassani Simonetti, Francesco Delizia, Robert S. C. Gordon, Ivano Gorzanelli, Hans-Christian Jasch, Borbála Klacsmann, Andrea Luccaroni, Marco Minardi, Roberta Mira, Elena Pirazzoli, Francesca Rolandi, Laurence Schram, Claudio Sgarbi, Andrea Ugolini and Riki Van Boeschoten.

«A completely fascinating volume. Essential reading on the development of art and cultural history in the twentieth century. It confirms Edgar Wind as one of the master thinkers in both domains. Difficult, mercurial and always original, his work has never ceased to be stimulating, as this book so vividly shows. No one who heard his lectures as the first Professor of Art History at Oxford, or his 1960 Reith lectures entitled Art and Anarchy has ever forgotten the richness of their content or the elegance with which he delivered them. His brilliance and his complicated character could not emerge more clearly than in this outstanding series of essays – one as compelling as the other. It could hardly be otherwise. This is a team of both younger and more senior scholars headed by Jaynie Anderson (more responsible than any for the revival of Wind’s reputation), that includes Oswyn Murray (who knew him well), and Elizabeth Sears (who knows the complex cast of characters involved in the history of the great institute founded by Aby Warburg in Hamburg better than anyone else). Here are rich accounts of Wind’s challenges to Warburg’s colleagues and protegés such as Ernst Cassirer, Fritz Saxl, Erwin Panofsky and many others, as well as his fundamental role in the transfer of the Institute to London and the consequences of his unfortunate separation from it.»(David Freedberg, Pierre Matisse Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, Columbia University)«This close attention to Edgar Wind is long overdue. The vast range of interests and ideas of the German-trained mainstay of art history in England at last find proper tribute and assessment in this volume. Not only are his own close studies of cultural symbols examined anew, but his dialogues with mentors are also assessed. This collection of scholarly essays provides a much-needed suggestion of Wind’s own contributions and should spark a vital return to his legacy.»(Larry Silver, Farquhar Professor of Art History, Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania)Edgar Wind (1900–1971) was a cosmopolitan scholar who made important contributions to many disciplines, including philosophy, Renaissance art history and modern art criticism.This book considers a crucial question: to understand the work of an art historian, how important is it to know their life story? In the case of Edgar Wind, biography and scholarly endeavour are intimately connected. His intellectual exchanges with leading art historians, philosophers and artists of his day were essential for his research. Moreover, his wife, Margaret Wind, was determined to establish an Edgar Wind Archive after his death.This book is the first comprehensive study in English of Wind’s intellectual achievements.Open Access Chapter 4 is available hereOpen Access Chapter 7 is available here

«Through marvelously attentive case studies of a handful of works, some canonical, others obscure, Mark Stuart-Smith provides the most thorough exploration so far of Juan Muñoz’s mesmerizing and haunted world. He inhabits the works, analyzing their mechanisms, materialities and drama, while at the same time connecting them to histories of politics, art and thought of great urgency to Muñoz and no less urgency now. This book has much to say not only about the forces and voices of silence but also about Muñoz’s extraordinary struggle to make art that could hold its own against the fascinations of image and spectacle.»(Michael Brenson, author of David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor (2022))The spectacular international success of the Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz has tended to encourage a critical framing of the artist’s work within narratives of global postmodernist innovation. This book, the first in-depth study of the central idea of silence in Muñoz’s work, aims to position him more clearly within his historical moment, by reading his work against the silences of Spanish politics and culture in post-Civil War Spain.Drawing on a wealth of documents, beginning with Muñoz’s student notebooks, the book shows how silence and memory defined and shaped his art. A range of methodologies from within Muñoz’s own intellectual horizon is applied to explore a progression from the implied silences of his sculptural installations to the literal sounds and silences of his first radio piece. Muñoz’s silencing strategies are analysed across different mediums, both visual and verbal, to show how his art probes and reanimates the uncanny memory of Spain’s traumatic past.

«A unique, invaluable, and potent reminder that the past shapes the future and yet all the while is being rewritten and reinterpreted.»(Dr. Dennis Deletant, OBE, Emeritus Professor, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London)«Points out on almost every page that the past always reappears; the fate of the victims, their persecutors and descendants is intertwined in one way or another.»(Dr. Péter Krausz, Chairman, Jewish Roots in Győr Foundation)«Returning to his parents’ home country, the author uncovers the history of the Austrian-Hungarian border region. He works through layers of truth and falsification, and gives a fascinating insight into the history of this region»(Dr. Erwin A. Schmidl, retired director of the Institute of Strategy and Security Policy of the Austrian National Defense Academy, president of the Austrian Commission of Military History)How do we remember the past? What do we choose to remember? And, just as important, what has been forgotten and erased from public memory, and where do we find the erased and forgotten reminders of the wrenching events that defined the twentieth century?This book examines how Hungarians and Austrians living along their common border remember, distort, forget, and ignore episodes marking recent times, among them World War I, the collapse of the Habsburg empire, postwar instability, the Treaty of Trianon, World War II and the Holocaust, removal of ethnic Germans, the Iron Curtain and 1956 revolution, the end of Soviet rule, and the post-1989 migration crisis. The book examines the shaping of memory, both public and private, of this tumultuous century of upheaval, including war, revolution, systematic theft, and murder, along with changes in political regimes, national borders, and demographics.The author draws on fifteen years of travel in the borderlands from his home in Győr, the largest city in the region, along with published sources and conversations with residents. Part social history and part memoir, this highly illustrated book contains sixteen maps and sixty illustrations to help readers find the answers.

Th​is​​ b​ook offers a survey of post-World War II German-language post-memorial writing.​ An analysis​ of​ the books by​ Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Wolfgang Koeppen​ e​xposes the difficult path of German writing about the Holocaust. Koeppen’s unauthorized ​​appropriation of Jakob Littner’s survivor memoir serves as the frame for th​is study,​​ ​expos​ing​​ ​the difference​s​ between perpetrator and victim perspectives. The various attempts ​by​ the current generation​ of authors​ to bridge th​is​ ​divide​ ​reflect​ the renewed interest and changed attitude​s​ towards the Holocaust ​that emerged ​in Germany after ​R​eunification. Included in this volume are W. G. Sebald’s imaginary dialogue between a victim and a perpetrator, Ursula Krechel’s exploration of Jewish life in Shanghai from a Jewish perspective, Iris Hanika’s presentation of the distraught mindset of a member of Germany’s second perpetrator generation, and Kevin Vennemann’s ​narrative about​ a Jewish child in​ the midst of​ a Polish massacre.

The Great War continues to play a prominent role in contemporary consciousness. With commemorative activities involving seventy-two countries, its centenary is a titanic undertaking: not only ‘the centenary to end all centenaries’ but the first truly global period of remembrance. In this innovative volume, the authors examine First World War commemoration in an international, multidisciplinary and comparative context. The contributions draw on history, politics, geography, cultural studies and sociology to interrogate the continuities and tensions that have shaped national commemoration and the social and political forces that condition this unique international event. New studies of Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific address the relationship between increasingly fractured grand narratives of history and the renewed role of the state in mediating between individual and collective memories. Released to coincide with the beginning of the 2014–2018 centenary period, this collection illuminates the fluid and often contested relationships amongst nation, history and memory in Great War commemoration.

Migrant Memories provides an innovative perspective on the power of cultural memory and the influence of cinema on the Italian diaspora in Britain. Based on extensive interviews with Southern Italian migrants and their children, this study offers a fresh understanding of the migrants’ journey from Italy to Britain since the early 1950s. The volume examines how the experience of contemporary Italian identity has been mediated through film, photography and popular culture through the generations. Beginning with an analysis of the films of Frank Capra and Anthony Minghella, the book goes on to address the popular melodramas of Raffaello Matarazzo and ultimately argues that cinema, and the memory of it, had a significant influence on the identity formation of first-generation Italians in Britain. Coupled with this analysis of cinema's relationship to migration, the cultural memory of the Italian diaspora is explored through traditions of education, religion, marriage and cuisine. The volume highlights the complexities of cultural history and migration at a time when debates about immigration in Britain have become politically and culturally urgent.

Fragile Memory, Shifting Impunity is an interdisciplinary study of commemorative sites related to human rights violations committed primarily during dictatorial rule in Argentina (1976–1983) and Uruguay (1973–1985). Taking as a departure point the ‘politics of memory’ – a term that acknowledges memory’s propensity for engagement beyond the cultural sphere – this study shifts the focus away from exclusively aesthetic and architectural readings of marches, memorials and monuments to instead analyse their emergence and transformation in post-dictatorship Argentina and Uruguay. This book incorporates the role of state and societal actors and conflicts underpinning commemorative processes into its analysis, reading the sites within shifting contexts of impunity to explore their relationship to memory, truth seeking and justice in the long aftermath of dictatorship.

The Cold War left indelible traces on the city, where polarities on the global stage crystallized and intersected with political and social dynamics predating and bypassing the Blocs. This collection taps into the rich fabric of memories, histories and cultural interactions of thirteen cities worldwide and the lived experience of urban communities during the long Cold War: activated and mobilized by atomic technologies, taking tourist photographs, attending commercial fairs, enjoying the cinema and the ballet, singing in choirs, paying respect in local cemeteries, visiting museums, and responding to town councils, unions and the local press. Literature, film, photography, the press, the monument, the cemetery, the factory, the ruin, the archive and the natural ecosystem are some of the key frameworks of cultural production elucidated here with a view to countering and exploding received myths about the Cold War.

One of Europe’s youngest nations and the most recent member-state of the European Union, Croatia, forged its national identity in the so-called Homeland War, the bloody civil conflict that raged between 1991 and 1995 and ultimately led to independence from Yugoslavia. Since then, a culture of war commemoration has emerged that continues to shape and define contemporary Croatia.This book focuses on the practices at the heart of this ongoing commemorative process. It addresses three fields of activity: commemorative war museums as official spaces for the shifting mediation of the public remembrance of war; the city of Vukovar as a unique site of divisive, politicized memory culture; and subjective forms of testimony, such as memoirs and satirical cartoons, which corroborate and challenge public discourses of war remembrance.The book draws on the latest methodological approaches in museology, memory studies and political research in Central Europe and the Balkans as well as autobiography and self-writing. It makes accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time key primary and secondary texts in Croatian and thus stands as a useful source for an informed understanding of Croatia’s place in Europe today.

Networked Remembrance is the first book to explore questions of urban memory within what are some of the most commonly experienced subterranean margins of the contemporary city: underground railways. Using London’s and Berlin’s underground railways as comparative case studies, this book reveals how social memories are spatially produced – through practices of cartography and toponymy, memory work and memorialization, exploration and artistic appropriation – within the everyday and concealed places associated with these transport networks.Through numerous empirical excavations, this book highlights an array of different mnemonic actors, processes, structures and discourses that have determined the forms of «networked remembrance» associated with the subterranean stations and sections of the London Underground and Berlin U- and S-Bahn. In turn, it invites readers to descend into the «buried memories» that are often imperceptible to those travelling by rail beneath the British and German capitals and encourages them to ask what other memories might lie latent in the infrastructural landscapes beneath their feet.This book was the winner of the 2014 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Memory Studies.

What is a memory of the future? Is it a myth, a fiction of a severed arm, a post-human debate or a broken time machine? In an increasingly insecure future-world there is an urgency to consider and debate these questions. Memories of the Future: On Countervision addresses these concerns by speculating on the connections between memory and futurity in fields such as counter-histories, women’s studies, science fiction, art and design, technology, philosophy and politics. This book reveals how these subjects regenerate at the intersections of vision, counter-cultural production and the former present. The volume links the re-imaginings of memory into the present with topics such as the fever dream allegory of the adolescent social experience, soft technologies of future dress, reinventions of monetary exchange, rekindled subjectivities of school days, and technics and human progression. These countervisions argue against the homogenizing status quo of the present in order to challenge the customs, traditions and conventions of the past and propositions of the future.