Erinnerungsräume / Spaces of Memory – serie

This volume explores how narratives and iconographic codes in literature, art, music, material culture and social, political, and economic discourses were appropriated and thereby – sometimes radically – transformed by religious agents, and how religious narrations, discourses and iconographic practices were reimagined and used (up to radical deconstruction) in non-religious contexts as well as in different or transformed religious contexts. Religious appropriation is thereby conceived as practice of memory, drawing on reused – and creating transformed – narrative and visual spaces of imagination. The dimension of memory will contribute to a more differentiated typology of practices of appropriation, their forms, functions and functionalisation. Agency and power relations will be important factors in the individual contributions of this trans-disciplinary volume that links approaches from memory studies, religious history, literary studies, and art history.

This volume approaches the memory of abuses of power in past and present societies from a transdisciplinary perspective. On the one hand methodological approaches and schemes of analysis are developed from the point of view of philosophy and theory of history, history didactics, literary studies, anthropology, Church and religious history. On the other hand, the contributions deal with case studies that pay special attention to the Holocaust, to mass violence and war, the history of slavery, missionary history and sexual abuse. The focus is on narratives of memory, politics of history, the relation between historiography, public memory, restitution and reparation, but also on empowerment and participation in civil society and by victims of violence in the creation of public memory, spaces of commemoration and memorials regarding instances of abuse of power.