Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | S | Social Research

A tour of the battleground: the seven circles of pan-European memory.

Article Excerpt
"WE HAVE NO MONEY, NO COLLECTION, AND NO LOCATION." THIS USED to be Krzystof Pomian's succinct answer, delivered with an impish smile, to the question of what one could expect to see in the planned Musee de l'Europe in Brussels. We found out last fall, during the museum's inauguration, that the museologist, born in Warsaw but who has long been living in Paris, has been able to rectify these deficits. The exhibit, located in the beautiful Thurn and Taxis Palace, is called "C'est notre histoire. 50 arts de l'histoire europeenne" (It's Our History. 50 Years of European History), and is well worth seeing.

Before the inauguration, there was been no dearth of sarcastic proclamations that Europe now has--if not a constitution--at least a museum. But is Europe ripe for a museum? The people we call Europeans include many millions of European Union citizens, the Swiss, the Ukrainians, the Turks, the Norwegians, the Croatians, the Serbs, and the Albanians. The more interesting question, therefore, is whether this largest Not-Yet-People on Earth shares memories and perhaps a common sense of history.

Indeed, should Europeans share memories? Each of the European nations has accumulated a stockpile of tales and myths that allow its citizens to act in solidarity within set boundaries. What, then, does that imply for a united Europe? In what way do Europeans have a "shared memory"? (1) Skeptics are wary of any supranational exaltation of a European idea that would encroach upon the sovereignty of the individual states or the parliaments of the member nations. Those who smell such dangers (in London as well as in Paris or Athens, let alone in Warsaw) will also consider pan-European commemoration a waste of effort, liable only to stir up old conflicts and quarrelling. This is evident in the debates about expulsions and ethnic cleansings since 1944. Nothing could more starkly highlight how historical conflicts can be used as bargaining chips than the demand by the Polish head of state during the European constitutional debate that the number of Nazi victims needed to be counted in order to assess correctly Poland's proportional votes in today's Europe. For those with a strong national consciousness, the notion of a supranational Europe is best understood primarily as a free-trade zone, which acts collectively only when attacked heavily from the outside. From this perspective, only defensive battles against external enemies and internal barbarians like the Nazis are worth remembering.

The defeat of the Nazis in May 1945 is indeed commemorated by almost the entire continent. But even that can trigger a fight, as became apparent in the Estonian capital of Tallinn in 2007. The removal of a Soviet cenotaph from the center of the Estonian capital, a monument understandably viewed by the Baltic people as a symbol of decades of occupation and oppression, led to a genuine political crisis between Estonia and the Russian federation. Note, though, that it did not cause a crisis between Russia and the European Union, which indicates how little the EU felt affected by this event.

With an eye on exactly this kind of experience marked by the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, Jose Semprun, a prisoner in Buchenwald from 1943 to 1945, demanded in his speech on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the National Socialist (NS) concentration camps that European enlargement could only succeed culturally and existentially "when our memories have been shared and brought together as one."

Clearly then, anyone who wishes to bestow a collective identity on European society must consider the discussion and recognition of disputed memories to be as important, say, as treaties, a common currency and open borders. This poses a broad problem, however: today's Europe, in contrast to its earlier nations, is unable to showcase heroic feats; plumbing the depths of history can only remind us of the large catastrophes of the twentieth century. Declared outsiders and old enemies would have to be explicitly included. If we want to give this almost desperate attempt against a renationalization of memory a chance, we must display the anchor points of supra- and transnational memory as concentric circles, and tie them to specific dates and locations, starting with January 27, 1945 in Auschwitz.

THE FIRST CIRCLE: THE HOLOCAUST AS A NEGATIVE FOUNDING MYTH

By now all of Europe commemorates the day of the liberation of the death camp Auschwitz as Holocaust Memorial Day. The joint recourse to this singular crime against humanity, the murder of European Jews, is the offer of a negative founding myth for Europe. At first glance, this Europeanization of a German politics of history (Timothy Ash ironically called it a "German DIN-standard," that is, the Deutsches Institut fur Normung e.V., or DIN: the German Institute for Standardization) appears plausible since anti-Semitism and fascism did indeed occur across Europe, and the murder of the Jews would not have been possible without the broad collaboration of European governments and people. A Memorial de la Shoah is a matter of course in today's Paris, and even Poland, after the debate concerning the not at all...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!