European Memory: Universalising the Past?

EuropEan rEviEw of History: rEvuE EuropéEnnE d'HistoirE, 2017 voL. 24, no. 4, 495–506 https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2017.1307811 Promise and challenge of European Memory Friedemann Pestela, Rieke Trimçevb, Gregor Feindtc and Félix Krawatzekd a albert-Ludwigs-universität freiburg, Historisches seminar, freiburg im Breisgau, Germany; bErnst-Moritzarndt-universität Greifswald, institut für politik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, Greifswald, Germany; c department of History, Leibniz institute of European History, Mainz, Germany; ddepartment of politics and international relations, nuffield College, university of oxford, united Kingdom ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This introduction identifies the ubiquitous, but controversial, public and academic debate on European Memory as a key for articulating assumptions and expectations about an enhanced process of European integration via references to Europe’s past. The authors outline contradictions that constitute this discourse by pointing to its inherently conflictive potential and carve out the implicit and explicit normative assumptions of European Memory. Albeit acknowledging differences in memories of twentieth-century mass violence, references to European Memory promise to overcome the conflicts inherent in the historical experiences of such violence. Confronting this bias, this special issue postulates an understanding of European Memory as a discursive reality rather than a normative ideal. European Memory becomes manifest whenever actors refer to ‘Europe’ in their interpretations of the past. Further developing an understanding of ‘entangled memory’, the contributions of this special issue share a common interest in the universalizing potential of references to European Memory. They demonstrate how mnemonic practices may lose contextual references and link or even transfer to other memories in order to articulate claims of relevance on a European level. received 30 May 2016 accepted 14 february 2017 KEYWORDS European Memory; entangled memory; universalization; European integration Introduction In 2012, the European Union received the Nobel Peace Prize for the ‘advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights’.1 Rewarding European success in coming to terms with its violent past, memory came into the very core of the EU’s accomplishments. The Spanish newspaper El País shrewdly resumed the Nobel Committee’s statement on this decision: ‘Sometimes the old arguments are the best ones: The Nobel Prize Committee decided that Europe without memory would not be Europe for much longer.’2 After 1945, the emerging project of European integration successively turned the EU into a moral persona with radiance beyond its original political borders. With the end of the Cold War, European integration had seemingly achieved a hitherto unknown level of normative and political rapprochement. The Nobel Peace Prize raised memory to the status of normatively charged concepts such as peace, CONTACT friedemann pestel friedemann.pestel@geschichte.uni-freiburg.de © 2017 informa uK Limited, trading as taylor & francis Group 496 F. PESTEL ET AL. democracy and human rights. Moreover, the award substantiated a claim that scholars have formulated over the last 15 years, namely that a particularly European way of remembering exemplified the pacifying and the integrating power of ‘universalizing’ memory.3 Within the rapidly growing field of interdisciplinary memory studies, the turn to Europe developed new empirical ground after national collective memories had been exhaustively mapped.4 This promised to free memory studies from its implicit nationalizing bias, proving that memory transcends national borders and enriches social frames.5 While earlier debates on European Memory were not necessarily focused on a particular type of memory,6 the commemoration of mass violence swiftly turned to the paradigm case of European Memory.7 Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider elevated European Memory to a key example for cosmopolitan Holocaust memory. Sharing the memory of the continent’s cruellest history of mass murder helped to ‘facilitate the formation of transnational memory cultures’.8 Aleida Assmann went as far as arguing that the Holocaust served as Europe’s ‘negative founding myth’. In accordance with Claus Leggewie and Volkhard Knigge, she stressed that commemorating the victims of mass violence provided a model to render conflictive memories in different nation-states ‘compatible with other memories’.9 Such a ‘dialogical’ remembrance assumed reciprocal recognition of universal suffering beyond any discursive borders. In contrast to the partial ways of national remembrance, the attribute ‘European’ became gradually synonymous with an ‘impartial’ way of facing the past. With the post-1989 dynamics of European integration, the paradigm of impartial remembering stretched beyond its original points of reference: France and (Western) Germany.10 In fact, it transformed Western European experiences into Europe-wide norms of dealing with the past and aimed at normatively integrating Eastern Europe especially. These norms have since also guided memory practices in post-socialist societies, transnational Human Rights organizations or memory scholarship.11 In what follows, we will refer to these norms as European Memory Regime. However, neither this academic narrative nor the enthusiastic reception of the Nobel Peace Prize in the European public sphere and among European politicians could disguise the potential conflicts within this European Memory Regime. In 2004, the Latvian member of the European Parliament, Sandra Kalniete, soon after her country’s EU Commissioner, compared the atrocities of Stalinism with those of the Holocaust. For a German-Jewish perspective Kalniete’s speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair challenged the singularity of the Holocaust in German memory discourse, whereas such a comparison was consensual, if not mandatory, for Central and Eastern European intellectuals and formed a transnational memory of its own.12 Four years later, the European Parliament declared 23 August the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism, but since then only Central and Eastern European member-states and Sweden have agreed to adopt this mnemonic practice. Obviously, impartial commemoration of mass violence struggled to translate into other mnemonic discourse. However, a division according to an East–West logic is not the only source of conflict that is inherent to a European Memory Regime. A comparison of the dynamics of the memories of 9 November 1989 and 23 August 1939 makes clear that the EU Parliament preferred 1939 in order to acknowledge the violence experienced across Central and Eastern Europe. However, notably left-wing MEPs expressed concerns about a distortion of history when Soviet and Nazi crimes were set equal.13 Two more recent examples underline that the discourse on European Memory has become deadlocked. First, the refugee crisis has pressured the universal self-understanding EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 497 of the European Memory regime. In his 2015 State of the Union address, Jean-Claude Juncker urged all Europeans ‘to remember well that Europe is a continent where nearly everyone has at one time been a refugee’.14 He unfolded a panorama of migration reaching from seventeenth-century French Huguenots and the transatlantic migrations of the nineteenth century to refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and Francoist Spain in the 1930s and 1940s and opponents of Communism since the 1950s. Juncker’s panorama privileged past experiences of emigration and persecution at the expense of stories about immigration and integration. In this spirit, public debates in EU member-states made proof of an ‘absolute dismemory’15 of national experiences of coerced migration as well as immigration and integration in a period when numerous European countries become the target of both economic and forced migration. Such observations often link to the call for learning the lessons from (migration) history. However, one state is frequently presented as the exception to the rule of ‘dismemory’: Germany. According to the Italian newspaper La Stampa, to take just one example, when Germany opened its borders to refugees in September 2015, it had not only ‘paid off its bills with the past’, but Angela Merkel had overridden the image of a ‘cruel and hostile Germany’16 from European Memory. Yet, such attempts to civilize the national debates on refugee politics through the evocation of a forceful, reconciliatory European Memory could not bridge the widening cleavages within and between the member-states of the EU on this topic. Second, under the impression of the 2015 Paris terror attacks, the debate shifted from a focus on migration to migrants themselves. Does the imperative of social and political integration in particular of Arab migrants into European societies also comprise integration into Europe’s memory? French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy argued that the Islamic countries were the only part of the world that had not yet undertaken their ‘travail de mémoire’17 of acknowledging the significance of Fascism and the Holocaust even beyond Europe. In Germany, as in other countries, the refugee crisis renewed a reflection about the significance of Holocaust memory for political culture, a question that became too obvious in 2015 when refugees were accommodated in buildings within the premises of former concentration-camp sites as in Dachau or Buchenwald.18 Regardless of this symbolic continuity, the historian and director of the Buchenwald memorial place, Volkhard Knigge, called for a ‘new memorial culture’ that would provide voluntary political education at the sites of mass violence.19 However, the manifold experiences of mass violence of refugees themselves conflict with such codifications of memory, which are central for many integration programmes and also accompanied by calls for a ‘European’ Islam.20 The question therefore arises whether the obligation of refugees to integrate into the European Memory regime correlates with remembering their own experiences of violence. The above examples of immigration and emigration as well as the integration of migrant communities in a European Memory Regime spurred by the 2015 terror attacks illustrate that current discourse on European Memory has arrived at a dead end. Therefore, within this special issue we are not adding yet another layer to these debates. Instead we are studying the discourse of the debates themselves. In order to do so, we approach the act of remembering something as European not as the expression of a ‘European’ nature of its object or the interpretation, but instead as the self-understanding of this mnemonic utterance as European.21 In this respect, universalizing memory practices are processes in which interpretational patterns of the past lose contextual references and enhance their potential to be linked or even transferred to other memories. This analytical perspective on 498 F. PESTEL ET AL. universalizing memory practices unravels the normative scope of contemporary European Memory discourse. At the same time, from a comparative perspective, dominant European patterns of remembrance might turn out to be merely one of numerous competing patterns of universalizing memory. In the case of Europe, a more systematic perspective on universalizing memory practices displays two inner contradictions of the prevailing discourse: exclusion and conflict. First, while the position of impartiality epitomized by Europe promised to integrate the different memories of mass violence experienced across the continent, European Memory brought about its own forms of exclusion. As the above examples of remembering Stalinism and mass migration have already hinted at, the ideal of ‘reciprocal memory’ not only remained an ideal, but turned out to legitimize what can be better described as a monologue. The ‘European negative founding myth’ centred on Holocaust memory was indeed a claim of Western European intellectuals and politicians, who have since enshrined Western European memories throughout the new political formation of an enlarged political Europe.22 Referring to their core concept of ‘cosmopolitanism’, Levy and Sznaider have already shown their awareness of this bias: ‘Despite its declaration to recognize otherness, core European cosmopolitanism is falling back into an established pattern of othering.’23 The addressees in the newly acceding member-states were only left to accept that founding myth of the Holocaust imperative; any attempts to take up, reformulate and contribute to this claim would lead to open conflict or silence. On a European level, a small group of MEPs from Central and Eastern European countries challenged the singularity of the Holocaust which underpinned the shared European past created by EU institutions. National and transnational memories of suffering across the new member-states remain in tension with the universalized Holocaust memory.24 In Polish conservative discourse, for instance, such an affirmation of an East–West distinction is not merely based on a strong self-image, but draws upon a particular image of the Western ‘other’ that stands for a strong and consolidated practice of remembering. Western mnemonic discourse is considered to be neglectful of Polish topics and Polish mnemonic claims.25 This lack of representation of Polish memory triggers manifold campaigns to include Polish historical phenomena, such as the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 or Solidarność into an allegedly canonical European Memory.26 In the case of Katyń, the symbol for the execution of around 22,000 Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD, even other Central and Eastern European actors, such as Lithuanian politician Vytautas Landsbergis, called for the recognition of Polish suffering in European Memory.27 This claim also penetrates post-dictatorial Spanish and Portuguese memory discourse. Here, the recognition of the Holocaust imperative implies the explicit integration of experiences of civil war, mass violence and revolution or transition to democracy as a constitutive part of European Memory. The resulting tension intensified in 2004 with the Eastern enlargement of the EU. By then Portugal, and especially Spain, were no longer the only EU member-states (except from reunified Eastern Germany and the rarely evoked case of Greece) with experiences of dictatorship reaching into the second half of the twentieth century. From 2004, in a period when the pacto de olvido had become frail, they had to face the claims of Central and Eastern European EU members who tried to integrate Stalinism into the European mnemonic canon. Such a confrontation led Spanish actors across the political board and memory activists such as the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica to explicitly put forward the country’s own way of democratization, and by that memories of Francoism, as a path toward Europe. The memory of Francoism EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 499 turned into an integral complement to a Europeanized Holocaust memory or even into a controversial model for European Memory from a Spanish perspective.28 Second, while the European Memory regime promised to pacify those memory conflicts that had proved only to perpetuate the struggles they had risen from, it brought about its own forms of conflict. The Ukrainian Holodomor, the 1932‒33 death by hunger in Soviet Ukraine with five to seven million dead civilians, illustrates the conflictuality stemming from universalizing memory practices. Ukraine’s European identity has always been a central question for Soviet rulers. Timothy Snyder underlines the explicit mutual dependency of Ukraine and Europe29 and places Ukrainian suffering during Stalinism and the Second World War into a European context: ‘No European country was subject to such intense colonization as Ukraine, and no European country suffered more: it was the deadliest place on earth between 1933 and 1945.’30 However, in memory outside of Ukraine, this suffering is hardly present.31 Despite the numerous Ukrainians who fought with the Red Army, the Red Army and the Soviet war effort entered memory as Russian. If, following this logic, the Red Army was Russian, Ukraine must have been its opponent or worse a Nazi collaborator, and is therefore frequently ignored as a space of confrontation in the Second World War.32 By consequence, in Soviet and post-Soviet Russian memory, the Great Fatherland War took place without Ukrainians (and Jews). Even more so, in the long-lasting and recently intensified regional and political division of the country, such post-Soviet Russian narratives of the war prevail in Eastern Ukraine and contribute to post-Soviet Ukrainian memories.33 When Ukrainians seek to place the Holodomor into a European narrative of victimhood that stems from memories of the Second World War, such attempts lead to clashes between European, Ukrainian and Russian memories of the war and Stalinism. If European Memory integrated the Holodomor in return, this would challenge the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Finally, if Russian memory were to admit the Holodomor, the heroic narrative of the Soviet–Russian victory against fascism culminating in den’ pobedy (Victory Day) would be questioned.34 These thoroughly ambiguous facets of universalizing memory practices motivate the collection of articles in this special issue. Standing for very different examples of universalizing memory practices, all case studies moreover share a common methodological approach, which sustains the comparative frame. Conceptualizing entangled memory as universalizing memory This special issue further develops a novel approach toward European Memory as entangled memory.35 Our approach conceptualizes memory as acts of remembering, that is as speech acts that claim to represent a reality understood as past. This perspective stresses that language is constitutive of memory, relating the latter thereby to discursive conditions: Acts of remembering produce meaning (that is why there are acts); but they can only do so by relying on existing languages of memory. Hence, they do not emerge independent from a historical context. Memory therefore follows rules, the iteration of which contributes to emerging patterns of interpretation so that the reiterations of mnemonic rules can also change the mnemonic rule. Yet, such an approach does not restrict memory scholarship to enumerating single detached acts of remembering. Instead, our approach of entangled memory proposes that acts of remembering interlink with processes of objectification through which specific linkages with spatial and temporal contexts are brought into dialogue. Taking up the innovations 500 F. PESTEL ET AL. of recent memory studies,36 we suggest calling these objectifications mnemonic signifiers. Acts of remembering refer to a texture of mnemonic signifiers such as the ‘Great War’, ‘68’, ‘Enlightenment’, ‘Maria Skłodowska-Curie’ or ‘Versailles’. Studying such signifiers enables researchers to relate competing and temporally changing interpretations of the past, rather than studying the materiality or factuality of the signified. If memory is understood in such a way, the study of memory turns into a history of interpretations ‘as past’. The articles of this special issue aim at unravelling how, within such a history, acts of remembering, by way of repetition, take shape in patterns of interpretation. Inversely, such patterns constrain, enable and suggest distinct acts of remembering. Universalizing memory practices characterize the transformation of such patterns of interpretation. We analyse this process of universalizing memory over time and at any given moment in time: the diachronic and synchronic dimension. (1) The interpretation of any mnemonic signifier evolves over time. From the perspective of the mnemonic signifier, patterns of interpretation are interrelated over time as each individual act of remembering is an iteration or alteration of older mnemonic rules.37 In a more systematic way, one of the guiding questions for scholarship is: How does a pattern of interpretation α of the mnemonic signifier Ω at one point in time tx relate to patterns of interpretation existent at earlier moments tx-n? For example, how does, in 2027, a pacifist interpretation of a specific political event, for instance the war in Syria or the EU’s winning of the Nobel Prize, relate to the prevailing ways of remembering this event in 2017? Moreover, what continuities, changes or ruptures does this interpretation of Ω at tx convey in relation to tx-n also compared to general patterns such as ideologies or values? In our example, how does this pacifist interpretation of the event strengthen or revolutionize typical pacifist political languages or compare to the rules of diplomacy within a region? (2) The interpretation of any mnemonic signifier differs across social contexts. The mnemonic signifier relates patterns of interpretation in time as competing acts of remembering interact. Framed in a more systematic way, the guiding question is: How does a pattern of interpretation α of the signifier Ω at tx relate to Ω(βtx) – another interpretation of the same signifier at the same point in time? For instance, how does the aforementioned pacifist interpretation of a specific political event distinguish itself from a feminist interpretation uttered at the same moment in time? Moreover, what degrees of similarities or differences are established between two synchronic interpretations α and β? Overall, the mnemonic signifier Ω is thought of as representing the sum of interpretations at tx and tx-n. These multiple interpretations α, β, n shape the meaning of the mnemonic signifier depending on the relative influence they have. In current memory discourse ‘Europe’ has turned into one of the most noteworthy and variable referents across national, social and ideological contexts. The articles in this special issue explore how the process of Europeanization of various mnemonic signifiers enables or impedes strategies of universalization over time and in time. Relying on the attempts at formalizing the analytic process outlined above we can now think about the process of universalization as an increasing discursive independence of a mnemonic signifier from the specific and distinct experience in which it emerged. In a more formal way: EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 501 (1) Over time, universalizing memory practices reduce the relative weight of the temporal reference x. (2) In time, universalizing memory practices reduce differences between α, β and further ways of interpreting Ω. In sum, the weakening of the positional reference α and the temporal reference x increases the chances of a mnemonic signifier Ωa to shape the interpretations of other mnemonic signifiers Ωb,c,…n. The study of universalizing memory practices is therefore particularly apt to bring to the fore the auto-transformative capacities of languages of memory.38 Comparing universalizing practices in European Memory In this special issue, we apply our methodological framework of entangled memory to the study of what actors refer to as European Memory in time and over time. This framework enables us to formulate three comparative assumptions on universalizing memory practices that allow for refining our understanding of the relation between mnemonic signifiers and their discursive contexts. These assumptions provide a way, first, to examine heterogeneity in European Memory; second, to unravel mnemonic regions of Europe; and, third, to identify demarcations of Europe. These assumptions guided the selection of the five case studies and they provide the comparative frame for Rieke Trimçev’s concluding reflections. (1) (2) The example of the Europeanization of mnemonic signifiers shows how universalizing memory practices lead to specific ways of handling the inextricable heterogeneity of competing acts of remembering. Labelling conflicting experiences such as forced migration of Germans from the East or French youth mobilization in 1968 as part of European Memory is indicative of this attempt at tackling heterogeneity. On the symbolic level, transcending their original discursive context, conflicts of interpretation reveal implicitly shared rules of ‘European Memory’. And these rules can also – that is the rationale of this discourse – outline the limits within which conflicting memory claims can legitimately be brought forward. In return, this also means that other acts of remembering are rendered illegitimate and thereby excluded from the language game of European Memory. Compared through the lens of our case studies, universalizing memory practices reveal inherent hierarchies in mnemonic discourse and, in particular, contested claims for participation and recognition that mobilize the category of ‘Europe’. Though not strictly speaking representative of all possible discursive formations of European Memory, the cases of ‘the Turks’, ‘Versailles’, ‘Flight and Expulsion’, ‘1968’ and ‘Srebrenica’, illuminate different spaces of historical experiences marked by complex processes of nation-building and legacies of multi-ethnic empires. Maintaining a constructivist understanding of the spatial dimension of Europe we take the actors in memory conflicts as a starting point for extricating the mental maps of European Memory. This implies that regional anchorage of mnemonic signifiers does not constrain their wider diffusion. Such cross-regional diffusions are most striking in constellations where alleged boundaries, for example, between ‘East’ and ‘West’, become permeable and shift our attention away from actors’ intentions toward the influential effects of perception and appropriation. For instance, Srebrenica memory is neither restricted to debates in former Yugoslavia 502 F. PESTEL ET AL. (3) nor to international organizations, but importantly reach out to France and the Netherlands. The discursive topographies presented in this special issue carve out an inherent dualism between an imagined centre and shifting peripheries that becomes most salient in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. As the case studies on ‘The Turks’ and ‘Srebrenica’ demonstrate there are actors in these regions who position themselves as periphery to the alleged Western core of European Memory or contest the existence of such a core. Defining the boundaries of Europe characterizes another dimension of spatiality inherent in practices of universalizing European Memory. Inside of Europe, constructions establishing what is the outside of Europe define criteria to qualify certain mnemonic interpretations as European. Figures like ‘the Turks’ establish boundaries that, in return, provoke new mnemonic conflicts and claims for belonging on both sides. Debates on European Memory also contribute to re-provincializing Europe as they point to the complicated relationship between the ‘universal’ and the ‘global’ from extra-European points of view. As the two cases with strong connections to French ideas of universalism – ‘Versailles’ and ‘1968’ – highlight, these global entanglements are not restricted to particular ideologies or moments in time. This special issue engages with ongoing debates on forms, possibilities and contents of European Memory. Relying on the concept of ‘entangled memory’, we develop a discursive understanding of dealing with the past in relation to the category of Europe. This interpretative frame questions explicit or implicit normative assumptions about European Memory as a way to come to terms with Europe’s conflictive historical legacies. Contributing to the third wave of memory studies, the case studies presented in this special issue shed new light on constellations of memory beyond the nation-state. As Rieke Trimçev’s concluding article argues, the perspective of universalizing memory practices pays close attention to the shifting contextual references of European Memory. Developing two modes of ‘equivalence’ and ‘co-ordination’ allows for differentiating how actors deal with heterogeneity, establish mental maps of memory and construct temporal regimes. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2012/eu-facts.html (accessed May 12, 2016); for recent EU memory politics Kaiser, “Clash of Cultures;” Plessow, “The Interplay;” Settele, “Including Exclusion.” Claudi Pérez, “Un Nobel para impulsar la UE en crisis,” El País, October 13, 2012. Assmann, “Europe;” Leggewie, “Schlachtfeld Europa;” Sierp, History, Memory; Bottici and Challand, Imagining Europe. Nora, Les lieux de mémoire. For the subsequent national projects, see Kończal, “Erinnerungsorte.” See Hudemann, “Saar-Lor-Lux;” Kolboom and Grzonka, Gedächtnisorte; Kmec et al., Lieux de mémoire au Luxembourg; Pakier and Stråth, A European Memory?; Plessow, “The Interplay” as opening the field beyond the nation-state. Boer, “Lieux de mémoire;” Traba, “Wporwadzenie;” Troebst, “Konzentrische Kreise;” Bottici and Challand, Imagining Europe. See, for instance, Snyder, Bloodlands. Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust, 4; for a similar understanding of Holocaust memory, Schwan, “Europäische Erinnerungskulturen.” EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 503 Assmann, “Europe,” 22; see also Knigge, “Zur Zukunft der Erinnerung;” Leggewie, “Schlachtfeld Europa.” François et al., Geschichtspolitik. Recent studies, such as Pakier and Wawrzyniak, ‘Memory and Change’, have criticized the overly normative approach of Western European mnemonic actors towards Eastern Europe and stressed that such a narrative of mnemonic backwardness is similarly reproduced within memory studies. On the one hand, Salomon Korn, “NS- und Sowjetverbrechen: Sandra Kalnietes falsche Gleichsetzung,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 31, 2004, 13; on the other hand, Adam Krzemiński, “To odprysk niemieckiej debaty na temat odpowiedzialności i za komunizm, i za nazizm,” Gazeta Wyborcza, March 28, 2004. For a more detailed analysis see Zessin-Jurek, “Rise.” Sierp, “1939 versus 1989.” Jean-Claude Juncker, “State of the Union 2015: Time for Honesty, Unity and Solidarity,” http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-15-5614_en.htm (accessed May 12, 2016). “Europa se atasca con los refugiados,” Diario Córdoba, September 15, 2015; see also “Recordemos Gurs,” El Periódico de Aragon, February 7, 2016; Federigo Argentieri, “Le radici storiche della durezza ungherese,” Corriere della Sera, September 16, 2015; Arno Widmann, “Abschied von der Festung,” Frankfurter Rundschau, September 7, 2015. Ferdinando Camon, “La Germania chiude i conti con il passato,” La Stampa, September 9, 2015; see also Jonathan Freedland, “Mama Merkel Has Consigned the ‘Ugly’ Germany to History,” The Guardian, September 15, 2015. Bernard-Henri Lévy, “I musulmani delle nostre città ora ci dicano con chi stanno,” Corriere della Sera, November 16, 2015. Danilo Taino, “I profughi ospitati a Buchenwald e la necessità di insegnare l’Olocausto ai nuovi arrivati,” Corriere della Sera, September 14, 2015; Sophie Hardach, “The Refugees Housed at Dachau: ‘Where Else Should I Live?’” The Guardian, September 19, 2015. Volkhard Knigge, “Deine, meine, unsere Erinnerung,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, December 11, 2015. As called for by the leader of the German Green Party, Cem Özdemir. See Danilo Taino, “I profughi ospitati a Buchenwald.” Feindt et al., “Entangled Memory,” 27‒9. Although a new European framework can be said to emerge at the political horizon with the 2009 resolution by the European Parliament, it is nevertheless telling that no member-state of the EU 15, except for Sweden, has ratified this resolution. Levy and Sznaider, “Memories of Europe.” Neumayer, “Integrating the Central European Past,” 358. See also, Kattago “Agreeing to Disagree.” Piotr Semka, “Wspólnota ponad krzywdami,” Rzeczpospolita, August 14, 2009; “Pamięć o roku 1939,” Rzeczpospolita, August 22, 2009; Napiórkowski, “Powstanie warszawskie.” “Pamięć powstania,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 2, 2007; Jarosław Murawski, “Walka o pamięć Europejczyków,” Rzeczpospolita, July 29, 2005; Andrzej Kaczyński, “Od ‘Solidarności’ do wolności,” Rzeczpospolita, August 30, 2005. Typically these invocations of a broader European Memory occur around anniversaries. Etkind et al., “Remembering Katyn,” 96. Loff, “1989;” Kraft, “Europäische Peripherie;” Boyd, “The Politics of History.” This Europeanization process was an important subject in Spanish press discourse; see Joan Saura, “Memoria antifacista,” El País, September 10, 2004; “Memoria histórica: clases de Transición para eurodiputados,” El Mundo, June 9, 2006; Roberto Rodríguez Aramayo, “Los republicanos y la memoria europea,” El País, July 29, 2009; Tomás Díez Vivas, “Opinión,” ABC, January 8, 2010. Snyder, “Europe and Ukraine,” 10. Ibid., 3. For the recognition of Holodomor memory in post-Soviet Ukraine see Snyder, “Forum” and for the absence of knowledge about the Holodomor idem, Bloodlands, 389. 504 F. PESTEL ET AL. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. Idem, “Europe and Ukraine,” 5. For an analysis of this ignorance, see Feindt, “Todesspiel.” Zhurzhenko, “Shared Memory Culture?” Sapoval, “Lügen und Schweigen.” Feindt et al., “Entangled Memory.” Prominently, Moritz Csáky criticized the classical concept of national lieux de mémoire or Erinnerungsorte as too static and even homogenizing. Instead of deconstruction the polyphonic and multilayered memory beyond a single social group, such projects tended to enshrine the memory of one group. Csáky, “Die Mehrdeutigkeit von Gedächtnis und Erinnerung.” For such a hybrid understanding of memory, see also Erll, “Travelling Memory;” Feindt et al., “Entangled Memory,” 31‒3. 37. Krawatzek and Trimçev, “Eine Kritik des Gedächtnisbegriffes.” 38. The conclusion to this special issue will further spell out the concept of ‘universalizing’ memory practices and compare it to other approaches in memory studies. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Funding This work was supported by the John Fell Fund, University of Oxford [grant number CTD11450]. Notes on contributors Friedemann Pestel is a lecturer in modern European history at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. He was a research fellow at the German Historical Institutes in Paris and London and at the University of Vienna. His research interests and publications include the French and Haitian Revolutions, political emigration in the age of revolutions, the history of classical musical life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and memory studies. In 2015, he published his book Kosmopoliten wider Willen: Die monarchiens als Revolutionsemigranten [Reluctant cosmopolitans: The monarchiens as émigrés of the French Revolution] with Oldenbourg-De Gruyter. Rieke Trimçev teaches Political Theory and the History of Political Ideas at the University of Greifswald. Her PhD thesis studies the metaphors of play, game and theatre in 20th century political thought; she defended it at the University of Augsburg in 2017. Her research focuses on conceptual history and metaphor history, theories of political representation and memory studies. In 2012–2013, she was a visiting doctoral student at the University Paris VII and at the University of Oxford. She is book review editor of the academic journal Contributions to the History of Concepts and board member of CONCEPTA, an International Research School in Conceptual History. Gregor Feindt is a research fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz. His research concentrates on the transnational and conceptual history of Central Europe, especially Poland and Czechoslovakia, with a focus on labour and industrial life. He has recently published Auf der Suche nach politischer Gemeinschaft: Oppositionelles Denken zur Nation im ostmitteleuropäischen Samizdat 1976–1992 [Seeking political community: Oppositional political thought toward the nation in Eastern Central European samizdat] with Oldenbourg-De Gruyter. Félix Krawatzek is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow based at the University of Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations and a research fellow at Nuffield College. In 2017, he is a visiting scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. He finished his DPhil in 2015 after studies at the University of Kent (BA), the Institut d’Études Politiques in Lille (MA), and the University of Oxford (MSc). He was a visiting fellow at Sciences Po Paris (Centre d’études et de recherches internationales) in 2012–2013. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 505 Bibliography Assmann, Aleida. “Europe: A Community of Memory? Twentieth Annual Lecture of the GHI, November 16, 2006.” GHI Bulletin 40 (2007): 11–25. Baberowski, Jörg. “Forum: Politics of History in Eastern Europe. With contributions from Ivo Banac, Michal Kopeček, Egidijus Aleksandravičius, Andriy Portnov, Krisztián Ungváry and Włodzmierz Borodziej.” Journal of Modern European History 8, no. 2 (2010): 141–163. Boer, Pim den. “Lieux de mémoire et l’identité de l’Europe.” In Lieux de mémoire et identités nationales, edited by Pim den Boer and Willem Frijhoff, 11–29. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1993. Bottici, Chiara, and Benoît Challand. Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory, and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Boyd, Carolyn P. “The Politics of History and Memory in Democratic Spain.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science no. 617 (2008): 133–148. Csáky, Moritz. “Die Mehrdeutigkeit von Gedächtnis und Erinnerung: Ein kritischer Beitrag zur historischen Gedächtnisforschung.” Accessed May 12, 2016. http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen. de/603/1/csaky-gedaechtnis.pdf Erll, Astrid. “Travelling Memory: Whither Memory Studies?” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 4–18. Etkind, Alexander, Rory Finnin, and Uilleam Blacker. Remembering Katyn. Malden: Polity Press, 2012. Feindt, Gregor, Félix Krawatzek, Daniela Mehler, Friedemann Pestel, and Rieke Trimçev. “Entangled Memory: Toward A Third Wave In Memory Studies.” History and Theory 53 (2014): 24–44. Feindt, Gregor. “Erinnerung an das ‘Todesspiel von Kiew’: Perspektiven für eine Erinnerungsforschung zu Sport in Osteuropa.” In Digitales Handbuch zur Geschichte des Sports in Osteuropa, edited by Anke Hilbrenner et al. (forthcoming), preprint. Accessed May 12, 2016. http://www.ios-regensburg. de/fileadmin/doc/Sportgeschichte/Feindt_Erinnerungen.pdf François, Étienne, Kornelia Kończal, Robert Traba, and Stefan Troebst, eds. Geschichtspolitik in Europa seit 1989: Deutschland, Frankreich und Polen im internationalen Vergleich. Moderne europäische Geschichte 3. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012. Hudemann, Rainer. “Saar-Lor-Lux: Vernetzungen in einer europäischen Kernzone.” Accessed May 12, 2016. http://www.memotransfront.uni-saarland.de/pdf/konzept.pdf. Kaiser, Wolfram. “Clash of Cultures: Two Milieus in the European Union’s ‘A New Narrative for Europe’ Project.” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 23, no. 3 (2015): 364–377. Kattago, Siobhan. “Agreeing to Disagree on the Legacies of Recent History – Memory, Pluralism and Europe after 1989.” International Journal of Social Theory 12, no. 3 (2009): 375–395. Kmec, Sonja, Benôit Majerus, Michel Margue, and Pit Péporté, eds. Lieux de mémoire au Luxembourg: Usages du passé et construction nationale. Luxemburg: Éditions Saint-Paul, 2008. Knigge, Volkhard. “Zur Zukunft der Erinnerung.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 25–26 (2010): 10–16. Kolboom, Ingo, and Sabine A. Grzonka, eds. Gedächtnisorte im anderen Amerika: Tradition und Moderne in Québec. Heidelberg: Synchron, 2002. Kończal, Kornelia. “Erinnerungsorte: Über die Karriere eines folgenreichen Konzepts.” In Deutschpolnische Erinnerungsorte, Band 4: Reflexionen, edited by Hans Henning Hahn and Robert Traba, 79–106. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2013. Kraft, Claudia. “‘Europäische Peripherie’ – ‘Europäische Identität’: Über den Umgang mit der Vergangenheit im zusammenwachsenden Europa am Beispiel Polens und Spaniens.” Jahrbuch für europäische Geschichte 4 (2003): 11–37. Krawatzek, Félix, and Rieke Trimçev. “Eine Kritik des Gedächtnisbegriffes als soziale Kategorie.” Jahrbuch für Politik und Geschichte 4 (2013): 159–176. Leggewie, Claus. “Schlachtfeld Europa: Transnationale Erinnerung und europäische Identität.” Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik no. 2 (2009): 81–93. Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006. Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. “Memories of Europe: Cosmopolitanism and Its Others.” In Cosmopolitanism and Europe, edited by Chris Rumford, 158–177. Studies in Social and Political Thought 15. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. 506 F. PESTEL ET AL. Loff, Manuel. “1989 im Kontext portugiesischer Kontroversen über die jüngste Vergangenheit: Die rechte Rhetorik zweier Diktaturen.” In Geschichtspolitik in Europa seit, edited by François et al., 396–426, 1989. Napiórkowski, Marcin. “Powstanie warszawskie, czyli ortografia pamięci.” Znak 69, no. 5 (2014): 82–89. Neumayer, Laure. “Integrating the Central European Past into a Common Narrative: The Mobilizations Around the ‘Crimes of Communism’ in the European Parliament.” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 23, no. 3 (2015): 344–363. Nora, Pierre, ed. Les lieux de mémoire. 7 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1984‒92. Pakier, Małgorzata, and Bo Stråth, eds. A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. Pakier, Małgorzata, and Joanna Wawrzyniak. “Memory Change in Eastern Europe: How Special?” In Memory and Change in Europe. Eastern Perspectives, edited by Małgorzata Pakier, and Joanna Wawrzyniak, 1–20. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016. Plessow, Oliver. “The Interplay of the European Commission, Researcher and Educator Networks and Transnational Agencies in the Promotion of a Pan-European Holocaust Memory.” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 23, no. 3 (2015): 378–390. Sapoval, Jurij. “Lügen und Schweigen: Die unterdrückte Erinnerung an den Holodomor.” Osteuropa 54, no. 12 (2009): 131–145. Schwan, Gesine. “Europäische Erinnerungskulturen.” In Abendland unter? Reden über Europa, edited by Henning Schulte-Noelle and Michael M. Thoss, 145–149. Kreuzlingen, München: Hugendubel, 2007. Settele, Veronika. “Including Exclusion in European Memory? Politics of Remembrance at the House of European History.” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 23, no. 3 (2015): 405–416. Sierp, Aline. History, Memory, and Trans-European Identity: Unifying Divisions. Routledge Studies in Modern European History 23. New York: Routledge, 2014. Sierp, Aline. “1939 versus 1989 – A Missed Opportunity to Create a European Lieu de Memoire?” East European Politics & Societies 31 (forthcoming). Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. London: Vintage, 2011. Snyder, Timothy. “Europe and Ukraine: Past and Future.” Accessed May 2, 2016. http://www.eurozine. com/articles/2014-04-16-snyder-en.html Traba, Robert. “Wporwadzenie.” In Pamięć: Wyzwanie dla nowoczesnej Europy, edited by Robert Traba and Agnieszka Grzybkowska, 19–20. Olsztyn: Wydawnictwo Borussia, 2008. Troebst, Stefan. “Konzentrische Kreise oder Haleckische Geschichtsregionen?” In Kultur im Konflikt: Claus Leggewie Revisited, edited by Christoph Bieber, Benjamin Drechsel, and AnneKatrin Lang, 49–54. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010. Zessin-Jurek, Lidia. “The Rise of an East European Community of Memory? On Lobbying for the Gulag Memory via Brussels,” In Memory and Change in Europe. Eastern Perspectives, edited by Małgorzata Pakier, and Joanna Wawrzyniak, 131–149. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016. Zhurzhenko, Tatiana. “Shared Memory Culture? Nationalizing the ‘Great Patriotic War’ in the Ukrainian-Russian borderlands.” In European Memory: Eastern Perspectives, edited by Małgorzata Pakier, and Joanna Wawrzyniak, 169–192. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016. EuropEan rEviEw of History: rEvuE EuropéEnnE d'HistoirE, 2017 voL. 24, no. 4, 507–526 https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2017.1307814 Europe’s other? The Turks and shifting borders of memory Simon Hadler fonds zur forderung der wissenschaftlichen forschung (fwf), sensengasse 1, vienna, 1090, austria ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Since the fifteenth century, the ‘Turks’ have represented the paradigmatic other of Europe. Even in times without violent conflict, the ‘Turks’ delimited the mental border of Europe towards the ‘Orient’ and served for identity-building in East Central Europe. In that region, the commemoration of the Turkish menace substantiated claims of being part of Europe over the last 200 years. Societies in peripheral regions could thereby redraw Europe’s frontiers in their favour. A comparison across Eastern European countries demonstrates how attempts at an inner homogenization through instrumentalization of an imagined external enemy contradict the plurality of interpretations of the past. received 31 May 2016 accepted 14 february 2017 KEYWORDS turks; East Central Europe; enemy image; bulwark; European Memory Europe, the Turks and memories of a conflicted relationship: a patchwork of political functions in East Central Europe Between their first military successes on the Balkan Peninsula in the mid-fourteenth century and the capture of Constantinople in 1453, descriptions of the new neighbours called ‘Turks’ spread across Europe. These descriptions referred to concepts that were already applied to the residents of former foreign empires with names such as ‘Saracens’, ‘Ishmaelites’, ‘Hagarenes’ or ‘Arabs’.1 The Christian worldview tried to integrate the scant information about these peoples by looking for explanations in the Bible and in the writings of the Church Fathers.2 The stereotypes generated in this process proved to be extremely long-lasting and structured the European memory of the Ottomans. These generalizations were even retained after learning about the Turks via multiple cultural contacts, major and minor military confrontations, exchanges of embassies, trade in goods and people, or individual travel. As long as the military successes against the Ottoman Empire remained limited – often-mentioned turning points are the years 1571 (Battle of Lepanto) and 1683 (Battle of Vienna) – the dominant description of the Turks was full of cruelty, sexual promiscuity and immorality, interspersed with those biblical, apocalyptic interpretations passed on from medieval times. In countless pamphlets, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Turks were called Oriental bloodhounds who steal women and defile and dismember them when they are pregnant, and who impale children, kill slaves and pursue clergymen. Particularly in Protestant prints and sermons they were seen as the biblical CONTACT simon Hadler simon.hadler@fwf.ac.at © 2017 informa uK Limited, trading as taylor & francis Group 508 S. HADLER peoples Gog and Magog that fought on the side of Satan against Christ. In this sense, the Turk was the Antichrist, the archenemy of all Christendom. Consequently, it was not possible to enter into a contract or to make peace with him.3 During the time of the Great Turkish War (1683–99) new images of the Turks were added to the old ones in Europe. On the one hand, they became an object of ridicule, were looked at with condescension, and were seen as barbarians. On the other hand, ‘new forms of understanding and effort regarding the Ottoman Empire, the Turks and Islam’4 arose with the Enlightenment. Beginning with the French aristocracy, a taste for the exotic and the foreign emerged, everything ‘Turkish’ became fashionable. This development was manifested for example in courtly celebrations and especially in art.5 The enthusiasm for the imagined Orient found its way into paintings, into the theatre, into literature or music. Mozart’s ‘Abduction from the Seraglio’ or the story collection Arabian Nights, for the first time translated into French in 1704, are just the most famous examples of this fashion. In addition to the increase of various images of the Turk due to European military victories around 1700 and the Enlightenment, another plurality of images existed: local and regional experiences with the Ottoman other. The memories of these experiences were passed on in different ways; they always changed, often faded away, and some were reinvented later. These memories range from traumatic violence to tricky shrewdness, from heroic victories to collaboration with the enemy. In short, there was a wide range of different images and memories of the Turks in diachronic as well as in synchronic perspective. All these images and memories could fulfil various social functions such as the homogenization of a social group, that is, the production of internal equality by separation from another or by identifying, via imagined common ancestors, as a community of destiny through a common experienced disaster or heroic deed. Along with internal homogenization, the demarcation of the external accentuates certain group values and encourages public declarations to share those values. Another frequently observed function is the potential to mobilize for or against a particular idea or a specific group. This may include financial as well as non-material support. The mobilization against other groups is associated with another common function: the parallelization of a former military opponent with a current enemy. On the one hand, the old negative stereotypical characteristics can be transferred; on the other hand – and this seems to me a widespread use – the commemorated friend-foe dichotomy can be adopted for current conflicts to mark the other as a clearly identifiable enemy. Virtually any sort of group identity is imaginable and in the case of the memory of the Turks these identities may relate to, for example, religion, denomination, social strata and the nation, but also to a city, a village or a region. They may be highly politicized or remain in a folkloric or touristic framework. This is particularly true for the reference to Europe. In less harmful cases, it involves a backward projection of the current presence and importance of Europe in public discourse. But Europe – or additional, often not clearly separated terms like Christianity, civilization, the West or Abendland – is a frequently used reference, structuring the plurality of memories of the Turks. Agents of memory use it in a variety of local, regional, national or supranational contexts that otherwise often compete with each other. In light of the social, cultural, national or religious heterogeneity of Europe, Europe as a discursive reference can somehow be understood as a compromise acceptable for many players in the competing game of interpretation the past. At the same time, references to Europe still include the possibility of exclusion and the diminishing of other groups, inside and outside. Furthermore, the use EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 509 of the reference Europe is subject to frequent changes, just like the memory of the Turks in general. Tracing these changes and the various uses of the concept of Europe is the central objective in the following pages. For this purpose, a series of cases from Central Eastern Europe – including Poland, Ukraine, Austria, Hungary, Serbia and Croatia – will be presented, focusing on the period from the nineteenth century to the present time. The specific characteristics of the memory discourses in question motivate the selection of these case studies. Especially since the nineteenth century the link between Europe and the memories of the Turks is to a great extent focused on the issue of borders and of belonging to a space of civilization, that is – to Europe. Furthermore, Central Eastern Europe was over centuries a zone of both conflict and contact with the Ottoman Empire and therefore offers vast amounts of material to be commemorated. Starting with current examples of the use of the memory of the Turks, in the following sections we go back into the more distant past. However, the complexity and wide variety of the memory discourse in this region entails that this order is not always kept. Furthermore, because of the heterogeneity, the individual examples are not explored in depth – the main goal of this study is to answer the proposed questions by giving overviews of the diverse variations of the use of the past and to pull together these separate strands in a concluding summary. This aim corresponds to the methodological approach: the analyses of some cases, like the ones about Polish or Austrian discourses, or about the memories of the battle of Saint Gotthard/Szentgotthárd in 1664, are based mainly on primary sources. Examples from the southeast of Europe rely largely on secondary literature. The selection of the sources aims at presenting a range as wide and varying as the length of this article allows. However, this choice cannot cover all voices of the discourses about the memory of the Turks. These include opponents of the Islamophobic representations or critics of nationalistic views of history. This seems reasonable insofar as this study is about the use (in terms of instrumentalization) of the past, whereas critics of nationalistic or Islamophobic discourses generally try to counteract such instrumentalizations. This also means that alleged national memories or representations should not be understood as homogeneous, in line with the theoretical considerations about memory in this special issue. One last note: Historically, the term Turk is not the correct one for the subjects or the members of the troops of the Ottoman Empire, which consisted of a large number of peoples with various religious affiliations, languages and traditions. Turks were only one of them. But there are two reasons why the term is nonetheless used in this article. First, it is a source term commonly used throughout Europe for centuries; and, secondly, the subjects of the Ottoman Empire are not the issue here. It is about the images other people made of them. Traces of current uses of the memory of the Turks In 2008, the city of Cracow celebrated the 325th anniversary of the relief of Vienna. As in 1883, 1933 and 1983, the elaborately staged commemoration focused on the Polish King Jan III Sobieski and his troops, who played a leading role in liberating the city after almost two months under siege by the Ottoman Army. The commemoration in 2008 is to a certain extent a paradigmatic case to show which functions the memory of the Turks can still fulfil in the present – or should fulfil, since there is some doubt concerning the success of the event. 510 S. HADLER As part of the extensive programme, a stunning spectacle on the Błonia meadows stands out. There, the liberation of Vienna was re-enacted with extensive special effects: fire; smoke; a laser show; and actors in historical costumes and on horses. The next day, the same actors with King Sobieski at the head of the parade entered the city, where they were celebrated as the winners of the battle. However, the event did not attract particular attention, certainly not out of town. Only the local edition of the daily Gazeta Wyborcza dealt with this issue in several articles and criticized the waste of money and the self-glorification of the initiators, especially the city councillor responsible, Paweł Bystrowski. He defended himself by stressing the importance of this historic day, which reaches far beyond the borders of the city and the country. According to him, the anniversary should encourage reflection on the history of Poland and Europe as well as about what Europeans connect from past centuries to today. Bystrowski also asked whether the geopolitical map today really is so different from that of the times of Sobieski (when Christendom was saved against ‘radical Islam’): ‘Today we are seeing a consolidated Russian empire and we live in a state of threat from a warring Islam.’6 Bystrowski emphasized not only the historical and contemporary togetherness of Poland and Europe, but marks Russia and radical Islam as the ‘Turks’ of today. Also Jerzy Petrus, the vice-director of the castle on Wawel Hill, underlined the importance of the historic day. The liberation of Vienna in 1683 was one of three events – in addition to the Battle of Tannenberg/Grunwald in 1410 and the Battle of Warsaw in 1920 – that have influenced the history of Europe.7 In addition, there was a link between Europe and Christianity in the official schedule of the celebration, most obvious in the title of the conference ‘What Europe for Christianity? What Christianity for Europe?’8 The anniversary pursued several aims. On the one hand, it is about entertainment for both residents of the city and the tourist crowd. Medieval markets and re-enactment of a battle do not include a political message, but they are part of the attempt to strengthen the image of Cracow as a festival city by staging spectacular events. The political importance of remembering 1683 was moderated through the media. The statements of Bystrowski and Petrus clearly demonstrated that not only the achievements of Sobieski were celebrated but also Poland’s. The act of liberation by the king was not a singular event, but was a prime example of the historical and current relationship between Poland, Europe and an – interchangeable – hostile other. It has always been Poland that saved Europe from barbarism, be that the Teutonic Order, the Turks or the Bolsheviks. Thus Poland has historically proven its connection with Europe and its crucial role for its continued existence. Aside from the benefits of commemorating 1683 for propagating national narratives by means of using Europe as an argument, it is important to point out another often intended use of the memory of the Turks: the transfer of the idea of the historical enemy to current opponents. The historic Turk, against whom Europe once defended itself, serves as a model for today’s foes – according to the Cracowian city councillor Bystrowski, these are Russia and Islamic fundamentalism. Here, the discursive operator of the Turks has been decontextualized to a degree that it can be applied to any other social group. In that way, the memory of the victory of 1683 conveys the hopeful message that these new enemies can be defeated in the future. Public interest in certain historical events accumulates around anniversaries. But even outside these temporal rhythms, the mental image of the historic conflict between Christian Europe and the Islamic Ottoman Empire serves as a model for current conflicts. A tragic EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 511 recent example is the assassinations undertaken by the Norwegian right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik. Just before the killings on 22 July 2011, he published a 1500-page text titled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence.9 The reference to the second Turkish siege of Vienna is not only restricted to the title. The name of the anti-Islamic blog Gates of Vienna, which he repeatedly cites, also refers to the Battle of Vienna. Breivik dates this battle to the 11th instead of the 12th of September in order to make a connection to the attacks on the World Trade Center.10 Four hundred years after the relief of Vienna, in 2083, a conservative revolution should have liberated Europe from the influence of Islam and multiculturalism. Breivik draws on the widespread image of a decisive battle between two forces diametrically opposed in religious, cultural and civilizational respects, a struggle between good and evil. He uses it to provide explanations for imagined problems in the present, to give lessons for the future, and to draw a line between one’s own group and the other. This border runs between a utopian conservative and monocultural Europe and the imagined internal and external enemies, that is, multiculturalists, humanists, globalists and Muslims. The example of Breivik using the past fits perfectly to a noteworthy observation quite often made in recent years, especially since the turn of the millennium: the conflict with the Ottoman Empire is getting updated. Individuals and groups for the most part from the right-wing political spectrum do that, for example, in the wake of political campaigns. The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), for instance, sent voters comic books with Viennese and Austrian fables in the run-up to the elections in Vienna in 2010 and to the elections for the National Council in 2013. Among these were stories of the so-called Turk of Purbach in the province of Burgenland,11 the first Turkish siege of Vienna in 1529, and another about the siege of 1683.12 These stories were mainly designed to conjure up the danger of the Islamization of the country, to persuade immigrants to integrate (by adopting the Catholic faith and enslavement, as in the case of the Turk of Purbach), and to mobilize citizens for the defence of their own European culture. The Austrian branch of the right-wing extremist Identitarian movement disseminates their ideology by using references to the Turkish sieges of Vienna on the internet and on stickers in public places. One of the images shows famous Viennese sights in silhouette with the inscription ‘Identitarian zone since 1683’. Another shows a coat of arms with the words ‘Vienna Bulwark Europe in the spirit of 1529, 1683, 2012’. Also at various events of far right-wing branches of Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Abendland), such as at a demonstration in Munich in November 2015, there were posters with allusions to the Turkish sieges with slogans like ‘Elector of Bavaria Maximilian Emanuel II – King of Poland John III Sobieski – saviours of Europe anno 1683 – model for Pegida’. These examples have in common that specific ideas of the past become associated with the present and the future. Such a time structure is substantially different from a more historical one where the – violent – past and the present are to a large extent separated. A factor that makes it easier to use past wars against the Ottoman Empire for political purposes today is the vast knowledge of stories and legends about this past in the general public. This is the case for instance in Eastern Austria, an area of intensive contacts between hostile troops and the civilian population from the late fifteenth to the seventeenth century. The use of this specific past to parallelize the commemorated Turk with current others is remarkable. In recent years and decades these others are mainly Muslims, migrants or ‘guest workers’ and especially immigrants of Turkish origin. Following are only two notable examples from the 512 S. HADLER conservative political camp. The Mayor of Graz, Siegfried Nagl of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), used such an equation to emphasize the historical importance of his city for Western Europe: ‘Graz has always been the last bulwark of Western Europe against the Turkish attacks. Graz has a long history of defence against the Turks. We still wage this defensive fight today but by other means, that is diplomacy.’13 Another example is the former bishop of St. Pölten, Kurt Krenn, who popularized the saying ‘the third Turkish siege’.14 Both cases demonstrate a direct connection as mentioned previously among past, present and future. Unlike the core regions of the Habsburg Empire, southeastern Europe was, however, not only in military contact with the Ottomans, but was for centuries under their rule. After the end of Ottoman rule, various political players, especially among Serbs and Croats, used the memory of the Turks to stigmatize others. Particularly in Serbia there exists a long anti-Ottoman tradition that was of great importance in the process of national development. This tradition includes memories such as the Battle of Kosovo Polje (1389), which was recalled in Serbian epics as a defeat by treachery. At least two consequences can be derived from this. Firstly, the enemy was denied superiority; secondly, from that point forward the Serbs were called to unity in order to obtain a future victory. It is no coincidence that the present national emblem bears the words ‘Only unity saves the Serbs’ (Samo sloga Srbina spasava).15 Out of this way of thinking another distinction arose in the nationalist discourse, namely between the ‘real Turks’ on the one hand and the Bosnians as ‘not real Turks’ (poturica) on the other hand.16 To the latter the stigma of being traitors is attached. Another important historical point of reference is the struggle for independence in the early nineteenth century. Accordingly, the so-called Skull Tower (Ćelekula), where in 1809 the skulls of Serbian insurgents were immured by the Ottomans, became a place of national pilgrimage – especially after the erection of a memorial church at the end of the nineteenth century.17 The image of the Turks functioned also for the labelling of Austria-Hungary as an enemy. In a pamphlet by the Serbian nationalist society Narodno Odbrana from 1911, the Habsburg Empire was called the ‘New Turks’, coming ‘from the North, more fearful and dangerous than the old; stronger in civilization and more advanced economically, our northern enemies come against us.’18 Also Srebrenica is connected with memories of the fight for independence against the Ottomans. Because of this, the conquest of the city in 1995 was interpreted as an act of revenge for the loss of territory at the beginning of the nineteenth century.19 Particularly in these years, before and during the wars in Yugoslavia, nationalists frequently instrumentalized historical events and myths. The Second World War was especially in their focus, but motifs from the history of the conflicts with the Turks were also used. Tanja Popović quotes some examples of then popular folk music, where the myths of the Battle of Kosovo Polje were connected with Đorđe Petrović, the leader of the First Serbian Uprising against the Ottomans, and with Slobodan Milošević.20 This specific nationalistic picture of Serbian history, taking together the memories of the Second World War and the Turkish menace – as it could also be seen in textbooks of the 1990s – is one ‘of messianic suffering, threat and constant physical endangering up to a “centuries old” danger of “genocide” under the Ottoman conquest, during the First and Second World War and till today.’21 These only briefly touched-on cases serve as examples for uses of the memory of the Turks for political purposes – and in Austria and Serbia especially the use for the stigmatization of the current other. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 513 Among Croatians, stressing the distance to the Ottoman Empire played a much smaller role for the formation of the national ideology. Although the Turks were seen as oppressors, they were at least not the only ones. Next to them there were Hungarians and Germans/ Austrians as well. Of great importance were the conflicts with the Ottoman Empire, however, in regard to the attribution of Croatia as an antemurale christianitatis.22 This self-image was still useful in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to accuse Europe of ingratitude, because Croats have for centuries ensured the safe and untroubled development of the West while their own development was thwarted. This can be seen, for instance, by means of the representations of Petar Zrinski and Krsto Frankopan, which became very important in Croatian national memory from the second half of the nineteenth century. Zrinski and Frankopan participated in a conspiracy after the ceasefire agreement of Vasvár in 1664 between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, which had disadvantageous effects for some of the Croatian and Hungarian noblemen. Because of their execution, Zrinski and Frankopan were viewed as martyrs since the second half of the nineteenth century. Until the present day, many parts of Croatian society cannot comprehend why heroes who fought for the liberation of Europe from the Turkish yoke were punished with death.23 Another variation of the functionalization of the past since the nineteenth century is not to focus on the past foe, but on his harmful influence. That is, to treat other peoples as inferior because of having once been in the sphere of this influence. It is interesting that this, from the viewpoint of nationalist Croats, did not affect the Bosnians as much as the Serbs. The reason is that Bosnians were seen as Croats whose national consciousness still waits to be awakened.24 Regarding the Serbs, such hope was illusory even from a nationalist perspective. When Serbs were seen as barbaric, as Asiatic Turks and as significantly different from Croats, these stereotypes could be justified as consequences of the long-term eastern influence. As one example, Ante Trumbić, the first Foreign Minister of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes – at a time when he had already turned against the Serb-dominated, authoritarian policy – explained that Serbia lived under the influence of Byzantium, and then under Turkish domination; while we here lived under the influence of the West, first in an independent state existence and then in association with other nations of the Slavic, German, Magyar, and Latin race, especially during the time of Habsburg rule. As a consequence of this, Serbia has developed in one direction, and we here in another. The difference has, in every way, been a great one, and the condition found on the two sides is completely different.25 In this and in similar discourses, the borders of the Ottoman Empire and its influence were retrospectively understood as marking clear civilizational differences. The same can, for instance, be seen in the context of the Great Power politics of the Habsburgs. In this case, the Turkish image of the enemy was used to define the recently occupied Bosnia as an in-between zone and as a civilizational task.26 The eminent politician and historian Joseph Alexander Helfert distinguished the Turkish Muslims as non-civilizable from the Slavic Muslims who are ‘independent and unmixed of alien elements’.27 Because of this their cultural level can be raised to the heights of the Croatian civilization. Such categorizations are rooted in political discourses of the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire increasingly came under pressure and had long ago lost its menacing reputation. Now, it was not its threat or its cruelty but its backwardness which could be used to characterize various other groups of people. These transmissions of enemy images 514 S. HADLER remained effective on the Balkan Peninsula until the recent past, with their golden period during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. These examples have much in common. They illustrate the relevance and urgency of the memories of the Turks in different European countries. In all cases it is about a betterment of the self and a devaluation of others. The traditional idea of a clear cultural contrast to the Ottoman Empire – whether in terms of the threatening or the barbarian Turk – is transferred to current enemies. Mostly, one’s own refers to one’s own nation. But even then, one’s own is defined in reference to Europe. Currently, Europe stands for that side of the dichotomy of good and evil that has changed its name several times in the past to things like Christianity, the West or simply civilization. One more thing the examples have in common: today, they are marginalized within a liberal political discourse. Parallelizing the historical Turks with citizens of neighbouring countries or with immigrants usually faces a lot of opposition. Also in the historiography, the conflict with the Ottoman Empire has lost much of the unambiguity that had been so dominant for centuries. Generally speaking, there was never a lack of detailed descriptions of Turkish atrocities in historical works. Only in the second half of the twentieth century is a change noticeable with regard to commemorations to try to avoid triumphalism. Nevertheless, also in the last few decades the traditional dichotomies have still been translated into their respective political contexts. With two case studies about jubilees in Austria this process will be traced in the 300-year anniversaries of the battle of Saint Gotthard/Szentgotthárd in 1964 and of the relief of Vienna in 1983. Commemorating the victory against the hereditary enemy in the context of the Cold War In the summer of 1964, the small village of Mogersdorf in the Austrian province of Burgenland, in close proximity to the Iron Curtain, celebrated the battle between the allied Christian troops under the command of the imperial Field Marshal Count Raimundo Montecuccoli against the army of the Ottoman Grand Vizier Ahmed Köprülü in 1664 for whole week. News of the victory against the hereditary enemy (Erbfeind) had once spread throughout Europe generating great hope. Three hundred years later, an extensive programme was themed ‘Under the Sign of European Unity’. With this slogan, the organizers of the event made a reference to the heterogeneity of the allied army, even consisting of French units. Furthermore, it referred to the current political context of the division of Europe, which was especially tangible in Mogersdorf. The village suffered from its geographical location especially in economic and demographic terms. This situation was the background for the numerous calls for unity, peace and overcoming political division during the festivities.28 The speech by the provincial governor Hans Bögl can be seen as an example of the move away from triumphalist commemoration. Bögl stressed ‘that it is not about honouring false heroism, but about celebrating the idea of tolerance and mutual understanding’.29 For the organizers of the anniversary event it was about a twofold reinterpretation. Firstly, they tried to avoid a degradation of the historic military opponent. This attitude would be reflected 20 years later in the erection of a monument commemorating the Ottoman soldiers killed in the battle. Secondly, they made an effort to depict a positive reinterpretation of their own peripheral situation by transforming their small village in the last corner of the free world to a bridgehead to cross borders. The latter succeeded a few years later with the establishment EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 515 of an annual conference, the International Cultural History Symposium, with participants from Burgenland, Styria, Hungary, Croatia and Slovenia. However, despite these significant breaks with previous traditions there are some continuities. This includes a sense of superiority, based on a specifically Austrian variation of the Abendland ideology. This is evident in statements like the one by the Minister of Education Theodor Piffl-Percevic about the Austrians as the ‘most European among Europeans’.30 Another example is a speech by Federal Chancellor Josef Klaus on the Austrian task to unify nations, a task that includes the maintenance and spread of culture.31 This Austrian sense of mission was mostly understood as a Christian one and was directed to the East and the southeast of Europe. In this respect, its clearest manifestation in the course of the anniversary was the construction of a 15m-high cross on a hill above the village, visible far beyond the Iron Curtain. Although during the event the bridging function of the monument was stressed, it was a clear sign of sharp distinction with respect to the Ottomans as well as to the socialist countries. In a report in the regional newspaper Sonntagspost this implicit idea behind the monument was clearly expressed: ‘A few centuries ago the cross as the symbol of the Christian Abendland and the crescent as the symbol of Islam were separated from each other in that place, just the same as today the countries of the free West and the Eastern Bloc countries.’32 Older narratives seem to continue to have an effect on the anniversary in 1964 when there was a normative dichotomy still noticeable with Austria at the top of a Christian-shaped Europe chosen to bring light into the darkness of the oppressed in the socialist East. The bipolarity of Europe during the Cold War also provided the background for the next example of a commemoration of a military conflict with the Ottoman Empire almost 20 years later. Although the commemoration of the victory at Saint Gotthard in 1964 was an event staged with considerable efforts, Mogersdorf could not compete with Vienna in the same way that the battle in 1664 could not match the second Turkish siege of 1683 in terms of prominence. Accordingly, the programme of the three hundredth anniversary in 1983 was larger and the events were accompanied by a flood of scientific publications and journalism. As in 1964, traditional stereotypes of the cruel or humiliated Turks were officially avoided. Instead, an interest in the cultural influence of the Ottoman Empire was shown and the newspapers reported on the living conditions of the Turkish ‘migrant workers’. As in 1964, much had also been said about hope, peace and international understanding. This was partly due to the fact that the organizers were aware of the history of the anniversaries of 1683. They tried to make a clear distinction from the events of 50 years ago, when the Deutsche Katholikentag, as part of the 250-year jubilee, was an elaborately staged prelude to the upcoming Austrofascism. In September 1933, Engelbert Dollfuss and other representatives of the Christian Social Party and the paramilitary militia (Heimwehr) declared not only the National Socialists but in particular the Social Democrats to be the Turks of today. Only some months later, in February 1934, the socialist forces were heavily defeated militarily followed by a push into illegality. The anniversary year of 1983 was characterized by the Polish Pope John Paul II visiting Vienna, speaking several times about the ‘Christian roots of Europe’. The Pope’s visit put the anniversary of the relief of Vienna into the context of the current international political situation, in particular the suppression of the Polish opposition movement or the planned stationing of nuclear-armed Pershing II medium-range missiles in Europe, strengthening the peace movement as a response. For this reason, it was no surprise that Catholic and 516 S. HADLER anti-Communist elements were predominant in 1983. As a result, and similar to the commemoration almost 20 years earlier in 1964, the subtext of the anniversary year tells of the attempt to constitute a Christian community fighting against the infidel or atheist enemy. The visit of John Paul II officially took place within the programme of the Austrian Katholikentag. That alone is a noteworthy similarity to the events of 1933. In addition, the discussions about the theme of the Katholikentag illustrates some characteristic aspects of the jubilee, like the difficulties in distancing themselves from the events of 1933, the still dominant Christian element, or the emphasis on the European dimension of the memory of 1683. The original idea was ‘Christian Europe’ (Das christliche Europa) and, for the so-called Europe Vesper at the Heldenplatz, ‘Europe – heritage and mission of Christians’ (Europa – Erbe und Auftrag der Christen). But the theme for the Katholikentag had to be changed to ‘Hope’ not least because one of the general meetings in 1933 was entitled ‘The Abendland as a Christian community of nations’ (Das Abendland als christliche Völkergemeinschaft). The subtitle of Vesper was also removed. Only Europe remained as a positive reference, as can also be seen from the highly successful exhibition at the Vienna Museum bearing the title ‘The Turks at the Gates of Vienna – Europe and the Decision at the Danube’ (Die Türken vor Wien – Europa und die Entscheidung an der Donau). Europe and the memory of the Turks in the golden age of nationalization In 1964, as in 1983, Europe represented a discursive frame of reference insofar as the commemorated events were considered as being of pan-European relevance. This use of the term Europe differed from the one before the second half of the twentieth century. At that time, Europe was also an important reference, but mainly for the purpose of highlighting individual persons or nations as the ‘saviours of Europe’. The previously mentioned case of Croatia, which considered itself a bulwark and therefore a protector of Christendom since the fifteenth century, is only one of several examples. Whether it was Christendom or Europe that had to be protected was interchangeable depending on the agents of memory and the temporal context. Other references could be one’s own nation, one’s own city, Central Europe, the Abendland or the West. The boundaries between these terms were often blurred, but Europe was increasingly explicitly mentioned in the nineteenth century when the churchly sovereignty over the discourse about the past decreased and various national interpretations gained importance. These national uses of the term Europe were often connected with the antemurale christianitatis and the bulwark myths. Representatives of various nations tried to show that it was their willingness to make sacrifices and their courage to fight that averted disasters from Europe or Christendom. That is why Europe owes these single nations gratitude. Although the nineteenth century is rightly called an age of secularization, the significance of religious interpretative patterns can nevertheless hardly be underestimated, also beyond the present article. After all, there are good reasons to assume that the political concept of Europe emerged in the first place out of the conflict with the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century. Amongst others, the humanist and later Pope Enea Silvio Piccolomini was one of the persons supporting this connection.33 Ideas of Europe, Christendom and an external infidel enemy were closely linked since then. Strikingly, recent research has called the period from the beginning of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century the ‘Second Confessional Age’.34 Not least by using modern media, the churches were able to EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 517 centralize their power and to reach many more people than before. Hence, their voices in various debates became loud and clear. However, even if the arguments used in the discussions about the historical Turks were not explicitly religious but more in the tradition of Enlightenment, these still referred implicitly to a profoundly Christian-shaped Europe.35 The above-mentioned commemorations in 1964 and 1983 already demonstrated the still formative role of religion for the idea of Europe even by the second half of the twentieth century, despite all ambivalences. Even more recently were the debates about a reference to God in the preamble of the planned European constitution or about Turkish accession to the European Union, disparagingly called a Christian Club.36 It is not without reason that the ‘return of religion’ is a widely discussed topic, not only among researchers.37 Apart from these long-lasting Christian traditions and even though the memory of conflicts with the Ottoman Empire was also widespread in the centuries before, in the course of the nineteenth century a development was set in motion that changed the politics of memory from scratch. Now, the bourgeoisie increasingly appeared as an agent of memory and competed in this way with the court, the nobility and the church. The historical narratives now referred to the nation as the new highly influential reference point. In the Central European area, the development of nationalization of societies and, linked to this, the view of history, accelerated increasingly from the mid-nineteenth century and is still not completed in some cases. The focus on the nation by no means made the reference to Europe obsolete. On the contrary, the memory of the Turks served exceedingly to justify historically the belonging of a nation to Europe – meant as an area of civilization and culture in contrast to one of barbarism and despotism. The early-modern bulwark of Christianity changed into the bastion against barbarism. A further difference lies in the fact that the new discourse of memory was predominantly a peripheral one, based on the regions in eastern and southeastern Europe: in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Austria or Croatia the memories of the Turks did not serve to draw the borders of the nation but of Europe and civilization. These examples bring to the fore the mental maps drawn by universalizing memory practices. A good example of this development is Poland. The aristocratic republic waged a number of wars against the Ottoman Empire, but enjoyed temporarily close economic and cultural relations as well. These expanded after the partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century based, among other things, on the Russian Empire as a common enemy. Now, the Ottoman Empire offered a place of retreat to Polish insurgents. Accordingly, the memories of the military conflicts were less about a devaluation of the historical opponent but a glorification of one’s own deeds. This approach has not always been successful. For example, during the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Vienna, the reference to the glorious past of the Rzeczpospolita should have served the reigning King Stanisław August Poniatowski to get support for his own reform policy. Even though the military successes of Jan III Sobieski were acknowledged – at the end of the eighteenth century the Relief of Vienna was considered a tragic turning point in history: the Poles saved the Emperor and the whole of Europe but at the same time the rise of the Habsburg Empire into a Central European Great Power began, leading to its involvement in the partition of Poland-Lithuania about 100 years later. It took another 100 years, until the next major anniversary of the second Turkish siege, that the wound was healed. It was Galicia, the former Polish-Lithuanian region under Habsburg reign, where in 1883 a variety of commemorative events were held. This was due 518 S. HADLER to, inter alia, the fact that at this time there was no opportunity for patriotic events in the Polish territories of the Russian Empire; another reason was the possibility of constructing a series of spatial references to the biography of Sobieski and his campaign of 1683; above all, the Polish population of Galicia in particular enjoyed greater cultural freedoms since the 1860s that led to an increasing development of national activities. All this served as the basis for a successful staging of the commemoration of 1683. Despite all the differences between the Galician conservatives and the more nationalistic democrats, both could agree with the idea that the deed of Sobieski clearly expressed the everlasting connectedness of Poland to the West. Inseparably connected to this was the topos of Poland as the saviour of Christianity and civilization as it was voiced, for instance, by Crakow’s former president Mikołaj Zyblikiewicz at the opening of the jubilee exhibition, orating on the struggle of two worlds, the barbarous East and the Christian civilization of the West with Poland as its bulwark.38 Obviously, this topos was used to underline the superior morality of one’s own nation. The liberal daily Nowa Reforma wrote, for example: ‘But surely no one dares to deny that the battle of Vienna was a day of greatest glory for Poland and, more importantly, it was a day of great civilizational merits of the Polish nation, a proof of our worldwide historical significance.’39 For this reason it was imperative to arrange a truly European commemoration. It should be European so far as the historical event was epochal for European civilization. 40 Even the conservative daily Czas stressed that Poland had freed Europe from the barbarians and therefore the celebration should be of Catholic and civilizational nature.41 This memory narrative was primarily an isolated Polish one and therefore somehow a peripheral discourse. In Vienna, the front line of the battle over the correct interpretation of the past was between the German-liberal bourgeoisie and conservative circles of the church, the government and the court. The deeds of King Sobieski were of no major significance in these discussions – which was annoying for the Polish side. Thus, Polish representatives were outraged by a plaque at the Kahlenberg where only ‘Polish auxiliary peoples’42 were mentioned. Also publications like the one of the monarchist historian Onno Klopp,43 who stated Charles V, Duke of Lorraine, was the saviour of Vienna and who wrote that Polish troops had hardly been involved in the battles, called for a response – given, for example, by the Polish historian and politician Józef Szujski and the daily newspapers Czas and Gazeta Narodowa.44 Even the well-known Cracowian history painter Jan Matejko felt the need to bring the peripheral Polish discourse to the centre: he decided to exhibit his monumental painting Sobieski pod Wiedniem not only in Vienna, but donated it later to the Vatican. Fifty years later, in 1933, the memory of 1683 was still current and of great consequence, but the commemoration occurred in a completely different political context. Now, it was not so much about making King Sobieski a hero but placing him next to the most powerful man in the current Polish state, Józef Piłsudski. In tribute to him Cracow organized a parade of cavalry regiments. The memory of Sobieski and his victory in Vienna as well as the military staging of the commemoration served only to establish continuity between Jan III Sobieski and Józef Piłsudski, to legitimize the powerful political position of the Marshall.45 Following this dominant narrative, Sobieski was the last military winner of ancient Poland, while Piłsudski was the first one of modern Poland. Both saved Europe and changed the course of history. To add more weight to this interpretation, the conservative Czas reprinted favourable quotations in Western European newspapers. According to the Times, Sobieski’s historical deed was as crucial as that of Piłsudski in 1920 when he saved Europe from Bolshevism;46 and La Suisse reported the genius of Sobieski and Piłsudski and 1683 EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 519 and 1920 as key dates for the history of Europe.47 It is obvious that such quotations served to prove the European-wide significance of the Polish interpretation of the past. In general, it can be stated that all efforts to get recognition for having been a historic bulwark are aimed at a clear demarcation – it is about a border separating civilization and barbarism. This Polish hierarchy of space faced resistance from their eastern neighbours, in particular from Ukrainian agents of memory. Among Ukrainians there existed an own bulwark myth since the seventeenth century by imagining the Cossacks as defenders of Orthodoxy against the infidels. By the nineteenth century this myth was expanded to the image of the entire Ukrainian people as a bulwark of Europe.48 Already in 1845 the GalicianUkrainian intellectual Denys Zubryc’kyj claimed this role for the Ruthenians:49 ‘The foreign writers note incorrectly that Poland has protected Europe and Christendom from the incursions of the Tartars. We, we, the Ruthenians have this honor.’50 The rivalry between Poles and Ukrainians reached its peak in the course of the aforementioned 200-year anniversary of the relief of Vienna in 1883. While the Poles throughout Galicia and especially in Cracow celebrated Sobieski and thereby tried to use the Ruthenian rural population to serve their own issues, the reactions of some of the Ruthenian intellectuals were ambivalent. Several tried to reclaim Sobieski for themselves by referring to his birthplace Oles’ko/ Olesko. Others, like the writer Ivan Franko, criticized the king for making the advance of the Ottoman Empire possible only by his passive policy. His strong commitment in the battle of Vienna only undid his past failures.51 It took some time for the Ukrainian share of ‘Europe’s saving’ to be recognized also in Europe itself. While the ‘Polish auxiliary peoples’ and King Sobieski have been commemorated on the Kahlenberg since 1883 and 1904, it was not until 1983 that the Cossacks were honoured with a plaque at the neighbouring Leopoldsberg. Further installations of monuments in Vienna followed after the independence of Ukraine in 2003 and 2013. These initiatives make it clear that the nationalization of the memory of the Turks, the claim to be part of Europe and the desire for its recognition outside the borders of their own country, is not yet completed even in present times. Very similar arguments with respect to the memory of the Turks can also be observed in the case of Hungary. Because of its geographical location, the Kingdom of Hungary was for centuries engaged in repeated armed conflicts with the Ottoman Empire and was therefore referred to as antemurale christianitatis. However, the Battle of Mohács in 1526 and the conquest of Buda in 1541 were followed by one and a half centuries of – direct and indirect – Ottoman rule, while a part of the Kingdom was under the control of the Habsburgs. Again and again, wide parts of the Hungarian nobility were unhappy with the lack of effort on the part of the Habsburgs to drive the Turks from their land. The consequences were conspiracies, rebellions and more or less successful attempts to cooperate with the Porte, resulting in a change of European public opinion about Hungary from a defender of Christianity to a traitor.52 This was not without effects on the way past military conflicts were commemorated in Hungary after the Ottoman threat ended, especially since the middle of the nineteenth century. Although defeats such as the one in Mohács were stylized into national traumas, in the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century an ethnic relationship between Hungarians and Turks was widely discussed. In this context, some influential Hungarian intellectuals imagined the nation as a mediator between East and West, like for instance the Hungarian k.u.k. Ministry of Finance and Administrator of 520 S. HADLER the Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina in a speech at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1883. He described Hungary as being on the border of the Orient and the Occident, qualifying the country as a mediator between the cultures.53 Nineteenth-century fears of the growing power of Czarist Russia and of Pan-Slavism were further elements of a political thaw in the Hungarian-Ottoman relationship.54 As a result of this discourse and especially since 1848, not only the Turks but other opponents, and especially the Habsburgs, could be considered the real enemies. This can be best illustrated by the monument for the Hungarian King Louis II who fell in the Battle of Mohács. It was built in 1864 by an officer of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848–49, who was sentenced to death in Arad but managed to escape. Accordingly, this Turk Memorial was directed against Austria, but also against Russia and Croatia.55 The same pattern can be seen in Hungary with regard to the memory of the battle of Szentgotthárd/Saint Gotthard in 1664 from the mid-nineteenth century – namely, as a betrayal of the Habsburgs by the so-called ‘shameful peace’ of Vasvár/Eisenburg. This way of thinking was explicitly extended to the entire European West at the 400-year anniversary of the tough defence of Kőszeg/Güns, as it can be read on the commemorative plaque at the newly built Heroes Gate: ‘In memory of the few victoriously resisting 700 heroes, fighting under the leadership of Miklós Jurisics, against an army of hundreds of thousands, on the occasion of the four hundredth anniversary of the Turkish siege in 1532. Kőszeg – which is gifted with Trianon by the so-protected west.’ While Polish and Ukrainian agents of memory could hope for the recognition of their nation’s belonging to Europe by highlighting their historic role as bulwarks, such a hope was reversed in Hungary after 1920 in frustration and cynicism. Another variation of the function of the bulwark myth can be well illustrated based on the example of Vienna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While for Polish, Ukrainian and Hungarian agents of memory it was often of high importance to participate in determining the memory discourse from their peripheral position, the focus of the Viennese agents was far more on internal power struggles. The 200-year anniversary of the second Turkish siege became a public area of conflict between the German liberal city government and the conservative alliance of church, court and government. This conflict was also reflected in two different monument projects: for the mayor of Vienna Johann Andreas von Liebenberg on the one hand (1890), and the so-called Türkenbefreiungsdenkmal (Turks Liberation Monument) in St Stephen’s Cathedral on the other (1894). In both cases, the supporters of these monuments pointed to the historical and current significance of the siege and the relief of Vienna and presented the threat as particularly huge, the liberation according to this as heroic. The image of Vienna as a bulwark proved to be particularly effective. It was used, for instance, by the Gesamt-Comités für das Türkenbefreiungsdenkmal (Committee for the Turks Liberation Monument) in an appeal for funds, which emphasized the immediate threat to Central Europe: The rescue of Vienna from the Turkish threat in 1683 was an event incomparable with another one for centuries with regard to its world-historical significance. On the top and in front of the walls of our city not only the Austrian monarchy was rescued but because Vienna was the bulwark of the whole Western world against the massively increased power of the Ottomans, Europe’s Christianity was saved as well. This interpretation corresponded to that of the official church, as the epistle of Pope Leo XIII to the Viennese Archbishop Celestine Joseph Ganglbauer shows. In this text, the coalition EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 521 of church and state was regarded as the main reason for the military success. Not only were Vienna and the kingdom rescued, but also Christianity, since otherwise the ‘Mohammedan superstition’ would have spread all over Europe. The German Liberals also saw Vienna in the year 1683 as a ‘bulwark of Christian culture’. Understanding themselves as a ‘bulwark of modern culture’, the German Liberals called for taking defence against ‘the Turks of today’ that were the Christian conservatives. Like the Ottomans 200 years earlier, Conservatives would also fail, given the defence readiness of the liberal-inclined citizens.56 The aim of the agents of memory was therefore to make it clear who the current enemy was by using the memory of 1683. For the German liberals, these were the conservatives; for the Catholic side, these could be the liberals, as it appeared, for instance, from the already mentioned epistle of Pope Leo XIII.57 However, the Jews could also be parallelized with the Turks, as the anti-Semitic pastor Joseph Deckert, the initiator of the construction of St Joseph’s church on the occasion of the anniversary of the siege, did in 1894: ‘Don’t we live in even greater danger than the people in Vienna two hundred years ago? Back then the slave chains only threatened; now we are wearing them already.’58 This quote provides a strong example of the logic of equivalences typical of universalizing memory practices. As already mentioned, in the context of the next major anniversary of the siege of 1683 in the year 1933, the reference to the historic Turk served to discredit first of all the enemies within.59 In the emerging ‘Corporative State’, these were aside from the Nazis, and especially the Social Democrats who threatened the Occident as the ‘new storm from the east’.60 Some generalizations as results In summary, for the memory of the Turks especially in the Central European region a number of highly influential developments since the nineteenth century can be named. Firstly, the nationalization of memory has to be mentioned, which began to overlap other patterns of interpretation like those of the church or the nobility. In addition, the interested audience expanded more and more. This was due not least to the increase in opportunities for political participation and a growing media market. Especially in the context of major anniversaries, this resulted in an accelerated circulation of memory discourses in wider sections of the population and in temptations to use these memories for political purposes. The memory of the Turks underwent thereby, on the one hand, a differentiation and isolation: the representatives of individual nations or political communities were increasingly in competition with each other about the interpretation of the past and for the honour of saving Europe, civilization or Christianity. On the other hand, the memory of the Turks also flattened. The national framing significantly reduced the multiplicity of available memory patterns. This can be seen, for instance, in the decline of local pluralism or in the content-related reduction of the commemorated narratives. For political purposes, for drawing decisive boundaries, clear friend–foe images served much better than the ambiguous grey of historical traditions. Accordingly, the long periods of neighbourliness without belligerent action and the numerous contacts by travellers, trade or in everyday life, the population of the border regions were hardly remembered, just like the heterogeneity of the enemy who did not consist of the stereotypical Muslim Turks. Also, the positive and neutral writings and characterizations of the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire, not unusual at least since the end of the seventeenth century as part of the so-called Turkish fashion, were not part of the general memory discourses. Given the politically useful friend–foe scheme, the intra-European 522 S. HADLER conflicts of the past received little attention as well. That is no surprise. The cooperation of different countries with the Ottomans – France is just the most outstanding example61 –, the disastrous social and religious tensions, or the devastating wars in history fly in the face of the easy black-and-white scheme. Based on these reductions of content in the memory discourses, the results of this study about the memory of the Turks in East Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be summarized as follows: (1) In memory discourses, the heterogeneity of the Ottoman foe and the manifold relations with him were mainly ignored. Furthermore, the use of Europe in these discourses was often related to ignorance toward inner-European differences and conflicts. Finally, to construct continuities and traditions, the respective current idea of Europe was projected into the past. (2) This inner homogenization was related to a strengthening and enhancement of the idea of one’s own: Europe was addressed in particular to claim the superiority of one’s own culture and civilization, meaning that the attributions to the outer other – the Turks – defined ex negativo the positive aspects of Europe. (3) This function was even more pointed where the question of the borders of this Europe were raised. In the eastern and southeastern periphery it was about belonging to this space of a superior culture and civilization. Furthermore, labelling one’s own group as a border guard, as an antemuralis, indicates for the rest of Europe the historical duty of gratitude. (4) This is a significant reason why mainly players from the periphery tried to continuously update the memories of the Turks. As long as this memory discourse in combination with reference to Europe is manifested as a discourse of border demarcation, it will not stop being triumphant. The term periphery can in this case be understood in two ways: in a geographical sense as in this study by selecting specific regions; and in terms of a place in the current European political spectrum. While in large parts of the political discourse and in the vast majority of the historical scholarship, the memories of the Turks are not used for vulgar constructions of enemy images any more, such uses still occur at the periphery of the liberal-democratic political discourse in Europe. Following the discussion of this article, this sort of periphery predominantly consists of Christian-conservative, nationalistic and Islamophobic agents of memory. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. For the long-term perspective of the relationship between Europe and Islam see Tolan et al., Europe and the Islamic World. Tolan, Saracens. Wrede, Das Reich und seine Feinde, 72–80, 92–9. Grothaus, “Türkenbild,” 64. Kramp, “Mythos, Mode, Maskerade.” For the era of romanticism see, for example, Cavaliero, Ottomania. Paweł Bystrowski, "Bronię pomysłu" (= Czytelnicy do “Gazety”), Gazeta Wyborcza, September 17, 2008, 2. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 523 Marek Bartosik, "Sobieski pod Wiedniem, Turcjo, marsz do Unii," Gazeta Wyborcza, September 12, 2008, 13. "Okrągłe 325 lat minęło," Gazeta Wyborcza, September 13, 2008, 3. Berwick, 2083. A Polish-Italian film production from the year 2012 draws the same line between the historic conflict more than 300 years ago and current Islamic terrorism by choosing the title September Eleven 1683. See "Vernichtende Kritiken für ‘September Eleven 1683’," DiePresse.com, October 17, 2012, http://diepresse.com/home/kultur/film/1302224/Vernichtende-Kritiken-fuerSeptember-Eleven-1683 (accessed May 22, 2016). FPÖ, Sagen aus Österreich. FPÖ, Sagen aus Wien. Walter Müller, "‘Bollwerk’ gegen Türkei-Beitritt," derstandard.at, July 15, 2005, http:// derstandard.at/2097522 (accessed January 26, 2016). “Krenn: ‘Die dritte Türkenbelagerung’,” derstandard.at, October 19, 2002, http://derstandard. at/1044208 (accessed January 26, 2016). Prole, "Erinnerung als Bedrohung," 321f. Ibid.; Jansen, "‘Why Do They Hate Us?,’" 218. Makuljević, "Public Monuments," 36f. Narodna Odbrana, Izdanje Stredisnog Odbora Narodne Odbrane. Quoted from "AustroHungarian Red Book," 350. See the article by Daniela Mehler in this special issue. Popović, Die Mythologisierung des Alltags, 136f. Höpken, "History Education," 117. For an overview of various ideas of their own country as an antemurale christianitatis see, for example, Srodecki, "Antemurale Christianitatis"; in particular about Croatia see Žanić, "The Symbolic Identity of Croatia in the Triangle Crossroads-Bulwark-Bridge." See Hadler, "Der Kriegsort Mogersdorf/St. Gotthard," 415–7. Todorova, "The Ottoman Menace," 146. Trumbić, "Elaborat o hrvatskom pitanju." Quoted from Patterson, "The Futile Crescent?," 130. See Hadler and Feichtinger, "Feinde zu Gegnern und Gegner zu Feinden," 270. Helfert, Bosnisches, 201. Zimmermann, 1664–1964, 32. "Landeshauptmann Bögl, Mahnung aus der Vergangenheit," Burgenländische Freiheit, August 1, 1964. "Eine Mahnung zur Einheit an die Völker Europas," Kleine Zeitung, August 4, 1964. "Mogersdorf als Symbol für Europa," Wiener Zeitung, August 4, 1964. "Die Türken marschieren gegen Graz," Sonntagspost, August 2, 1964. See, for example, Mertens, "Funktionen und Überlieferungen lateinischer Türkenreden." Blaschke, "Ein Zweites Konfessionelles Zeitalter?" See, for example, Perkins, Christendom and European Identity, 255–82. See for instance Casanova, "Religion, European Secular Identities, and European Integration." See for instance Riesebrodt, Die Rückkehr der Religionen; Graf, Die Wiederkehr der Götter. Sierżęga, "Centralny komitet," 87–8. Nowa Reforma, August 19, 1883, 1. "Korespondencya ‘Nowej Reformy’," Nowa Reforma, September 9, 1883. "Przegląd Polityczny," Czas, September 11, 1883. Sierżęga, "Centralny komitet," 88f. Klopp, Das Jahr 1683. Dabrowski, Commemorations, 53; Sierżęga, Obchody 200, 30. Also the priest and member of the Austrian Imperial Council, Jan Chełmecki, responded with a reply to Klopp's publication. His comments appeared in German, Polish and Italian. Chełmecki, König Johann Sobieski. About Piłsudski’s attempt to construct a personal continuity between Polish rulers or heroes and himself see Hein, Der Piłsudski-Kult, 286–90. "‘Times’ o oswobodzeniu Wiednia przez króla Sobieskiego," Czas, September 13, 1933. 524 S. HADLER 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. "Rok 1683 i 1920," Czas, September 14, 1933. Wöller, "Die Türken zitterten," 267. in the Habsburg Empire Ukrainians were named Ruthenians (Ruthenen). Qtd. Wöller, Bollwerk-Mythos, 269. Ibid., 278. Forgó, "Überlegungen zum Wandel des Osmanenbildes," 86. Von Kállay, "Ungarn an den Grenzen des Orients und des Occidents," 489; see also Spannenberger and Őze, "‘Wir brauchen Mohács!,’" 335–7. Ágoston, "The Image of the Ottomans in Hungarian Historiography," 16. Balogh, "Ungarische Erinnerungsmuster und ihre Wendepunkte," 132. "Unsere Türken von heute," Neues Wiener Tagblatt, September 11, 1890. "Das päpstliche Sendschreiben über die Säcularfeier," Neue Freie Presse (Morgenblatt), September 12, 1883: ‘Also nowadays, the Church is fiercely targeted, although by other enemies and by other means. Not so much external as internal enemies point their arms at the Catholic cause in a bloodless, but sharp and disastrous struggle.’ Deckert, Türkennoth und Judenherrschaft, 17. Suppanz, "An der ‘Kulturfront des Abendlandes,’" 181. Allgemeiner Deutscher Katholikentag, 18. See, for example, Isom-Verhaaren, Allies with the Infidel. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. ORCID Simon Hadler http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3115-5534 Bibliography Ágoston, Gábor. “The image of the Ottomans in Hungarian historiography.” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 61, no. 1–2 (2008): 15–26. Balogh, László Levente. “Ungarische Erinnerungsmuster und ihre Wendepunkte: Mohács als Epochenkategorie und Erinnerungsort.” In Der erinnerte Feind, edited by Johann Heiss and Johannes Feichtinger, 121–140. Wien: Mandelbaum, 2013. Berwick, Andrew. 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. London, 2011. Blaschke, Olaf. “Das 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Zweites Konfessionelles Zeitalter?” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26 (2000): 38–75. Casanova, José. “Religion, European secular identities, and European integration.” In Religion in an Expanding Europe, edited by Timothy A. Byrnes and Peter J. Katzenstein, 65–92. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Cavaliero, Roderick. Ottomania: The Romantics and the Myth of the Islamic Orient. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013. Chełmecki, Jan. König Johann Sobieski und die Befreiung Wiens: Eine kritische Abhandlung anläßlich der zweiten Säcularfeier des am 12. September 1683 erfolgten Entsatzes von Wien. Vienna: Braumüller, 1883. Dabrowski, Patrice M. Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004. Deckert, Joseph. Türkennoth und Judenherrschaft. Vienna-Weinhaus: Verlag des Sendboten des heil. Joseph, 1894. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 525 Forgó, András. “Überlegungen zum Wandel des Osmanenbildes im Königreich Ungarn der Frühen Neuzeit.” In Repräsentationen der Islamischen Welt im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Gabriele Haug-Moritz and Ludolf Pelizaeus, 75–94. Münster: Aschendorff, 2010. FPÖ, ed. Sagen aus Österreich. Vienna, 2013. FPÖ Wien, ed. Sagen aus Wien. Vienna, 2010. Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm. Die Wiederkehr der Götter: Religion in der modernen Kultur. München: C. H. Beck, 2004. Grothaus, Maximilian. “Zum Türkenbild in der Adels- und Volkskultur der Habsburgermonarchie von 1650 bis 1900.” In Das Osmanische Reich und Europa 1683 bis 1789: Konflikt, Entspannung und Austausch, edited by Gernot Heiss and Grete Klingenstein, 63–88. Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1983. Hadler, Simon. “Der Kriegsort Mogersdorf/St. Gotthard und der Friedensort Eisenburg/Vasvár in der österreichischen, ungarischen und kroatischen Erinnerungskultur.” In Die Schlacht von Mogersdorf/ St. Gotthard und der Friede von Eisenburg/Vasvár. Rahmenbedingungen, Akteure, Auswirkungen und Rezeption eines europäischen Ereignisses, edited by Karin Sperl, Martin Scheutz, and Arno Strohmeyer, 391–419. Eisenstadt: Amt der Burgenländischen Landesregierung, Abteilung 7, 2015. Hadler, Simon, and Johannes Feichtinger. “Feinde zu Gegnern und Gegner zu Feinden – Feindbilder als transnationale Gedächtnis stabilisierende Kategorie in Zentraleuropa.” In Gedächtnis im 21. Jahrhundert. Zur Neuverhandlung eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Leitbegriffs, edited by Ljiljana Radonic and Heidemarie Uhl, 263–280. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016. Hein, Heidi. Der Piłsudski-Kult und seine Bedeutung für den polnischen Staat 1926–1939. Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2002. Helfert, Frhr [Joseph] von. Bosnisches [Bosnian]. Vienna: Manz, 1879. Höpken, Wolfgang. “History Education and Yugoslav (Dis-)Integration.” In Öl ins Feuer? Schulbücher, ethnische Stereotypen und Gewalt in Südosteuropa. / Oil on Fire? Textbooks, Ethnic Stereotypes and Violence in South-Eastern Europe, edited by Wolfgang Höpken, 99–124. Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1996. Isom-Verhaaren, Christine. Allies with the Infidel: The Ottoman and French Alliance in the Sixteenth Century. London: I.P. Tauris, 2011. Jansen, Stef. “‘Why do they hate us?’ Everyday Serbian Nationalist Knowledge of Muslim Hatred.” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 13, no. 2 (2003): 215–237. Klopp, Onno. Das Jahr 1683 und der folgende große Türkenkrieg bis zum Frieden von Carlowitz 1699 [The Year 1683 and the Following Great Turkish War Until the Peace of Carlowitz 1699]. Graz: Styria, 1882. Kramp, Mario. “Mythos, Mode, Maskerade. Der türkische Orient als Provinz des europäischen Rokoko.” In “Die Türken kommen!” Exotik und Erotik: Mozart in Koblenz und die OrientSehnsucht in der Kunst, edited by Beate Dorfey and Mario Kamp, 67–93. Koblenz: Verlag der Landesarchivverwaltung Rheinland-Pfalz, 2006. Makuljević, Nenad. “Public Monuments, Memorial Churches and the Creation of Serbian National Identity in the 19th Century.” In Balkan Memories: Media Constructions of National and Transnational History, edited by Tanja Zimmermann, 33–40. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012. Mertens, Dieter. “Europa, id est patria, domus propria, sedes nostra... Zu Funktionen und Überlieferungen lateinischer Türkenreden im 15. Jahrhundert.” In Europa und die osmanische Expansion im ausgehenden Mittelalter (Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung Beiheft 20), edited by Franz-Reiner Erkens, 39–57. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997. Narodna Odbrana. Izdanje Stredisnog Odbora Narodne Odbrane. Belgrade, 1911. Patterson, Patrick Hyder. “The Futile Crescent? Judging the Legacies of Ottoman Rule in Croatian History.” Austrian History Yearbook 40 (2009): 125–140. Perkins, Mary. Christendom and European Identity: The Legacy of a Grand Narrative since 1789. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004. Popović, Tanja. Die Mythologisierung des Alltags: Kollektive Erinnerungen, Geschichtsbilder und Vergangenheitskultur in Serbien und Montenegro seit Mitte der 1980er Jahre Zürich: Pano Verlag, 2003. 526 S. HADLER Prole, Dragan. “Erinnerung als Bedrohung. Zum Türkengedächtnis in Serbien.” In Geschichtspolitik und Türkenbelagerung, edited by Johannes Feichtinger and Johann Heiss, 318–338. Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2013. Riesebrodt, Martin. Die Rückkehr der Religionen: Fundamentalismus und der ‘Kampf der Kulturen’. München: C. H. Beck, 2000. Sierżęga, Paweł. Obchody 200: rocznicy odsieczy wiedeńskiej w Galicji (1883 r.). Rzeszow: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Rzeszowskiego, 2003. Sierżęga, Paweł. “Centralny komitet jubileuszowy w przygotowaniach obchodów 200. rocznicy odsieczy wiedeńskiej w Galicji.” In Z przeszłości Europy Środkowowschodniej, edited by Jadwiga Hoff, 76–99. Rzeszów: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Rzewszowskiego, 2002. Spannenberger, Norbert and Sándor Őze. “‘Wir brauchen Mohács!’ Historiographie und politische Instrumentalisierung der Erinnerung an eine nationale Niederlage in Ungarn.” In Südosteuropa. Von vormoderner Vielfalt und nationalstaatlicher Vereinheitlichung. Festschrift für Edgar Hösch, edited by Konrad Clewing and Oliver Jens Schmitt, 327–347. München: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2005. Srodecki, Paul. “Antemurale Christianitatis.” In Religiöse Erinnerungsorte in Ostmitteleuropa. Konstitution und Konkurrenz im nationen- und epochenübergreifenden Zugriff, edited by Joachim Bahlcke, Stefan Rohdewald, and Thomas Wünsch, 804–822. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013. Suppanz, Werner. “An der ‘Kulturfront des Abendlandes’: Diskurse und Inszenierungen der ‘Türkenabwehr’ im Austrofaschismus.” In Der erinnerte Feind, edited by Johann Heiss and Johannes Feichtinger, 162–184. Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2013. Todorova, Maria. “The Ottoman Menace in Post-Habsburg Historiography.” Austrian History Yearbook 40 (2009): 141–147. Tolan, John V. Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Tolan, John, Gilles Veinstein, and Henry Laurens. Europe and the Islamic World. A History. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013. Trumbić, Ante. “Elaborat o hrvatskom pitanju.” In Izabrani politički spisi, edited by Ante Trumbić. Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 1998. Von Kállay, Benjamin. “Ungarn an den Grenzen des Orients und des Occidents: Gelesen in der XLIII. feierlichen Jahressitzung der ungarischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.” In Ungarische Revue. Mit Unterstützung der ungarischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, edited by Paul Hunfalvy and Gustav Heinrich, 428–489. Budapest: Friedrich Kilian, 1883. Wöller, Burkhard. “‘Die Türken zitterten – aber nicht vor den Polen, sondern vor den Kosaken’: Der Bollwerk-Mythos bei den galizischen Ruthenen.” In Der erinnerte Feind, edited by Johannes Feichtinger and Johann Heiss, 265–284. Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2013. Wrede, Martin. Das Reich und seine Feinde: Politische Feindbilder in der reichspatriotischen Publizistik zwischen Westfälischem Frieden und Siebenjährigem Krieg Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2004. “Austro-Hungarian Red Book: Official English Edition: With an Introduction.” The American Journal of International Law 9, no. 4 (1915) Supplement: Official Documents: 309–413. Allgemeiner Deutscher Katholikentag Wien 1933. 7. bis 12. September. Vienna: Verlag des Katholikentagkomitees, 1934. Žanić, Ivo. “The symbolic identity of Croatia in the triangle crossroads-bulwark-bridge.” In Myths and Boundaries in South-Eastern Europe, edited by Pål Kolstø, 35–76. London: Hurst & Co, 2005. Zimmermann, Edmund. 1664–1964: Mogersdorf. Im Zeichen der europäischen Einheit. Ein Bericht anläßlich der 300-Jahrfeier der Türkenschlacht bei Mogersdorf. Eisenstadt: Gemeinde Mogersdorf, 1964. EuropEan rEviEw of History: rEvuE EuropéEnnE d'HistoirE, 2017 voL. 24, no. 4, 527–551 https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2017.1307810 Memory that governs by itself? Appropriations of Versailles memory Friedemann Pestel albert-Ludwigs-universität freiburg, Historisches seminar, freiburg im Breisgau, Germany ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Versailles memory has been a cornerstone of the traditional paradigm of lieux de mémoire. However, its transnational dimension has never been fully explored. Covering more than three centuries, this article identifies three antagonistic patterns of transnational Versailles memory that carry ambivalent references to ‘Europe’: war versus peace; monarchical versus republican legitimization; and universalistic versus particularistic conceptions of power. Actors referred to Versailles’ architecture to substantiate their positions toward French hegemonic ambitions: from counter-buildings by the Sun King’s rivals; political redefinitions during changing regimes after 1789 via FrancoGerman rivalries in the War of 1870; international reactions to the Peace Conference in 1919; and up to Versailles as a World Heritage Site. Analysing these three constitutive patterns, this article challenges the dominant Franco-centrist Versailles master narrative as non-French actors contested such hegemonic views. References to Versailles as a symbol of both American and Brazilian national independence also bring out global dimensions of Versailles memory. received 29 May 2016 accepted 18 february 2017 KEYWORDS versailles; legitimacy; hegemony; European memory; entangled memory Introduction Memories of Versailles stretching from the age of the Sun King to the peace conference of 1919 are prominent in the French and German collections of lieux de mémoire.1 In a rather affirmative form, accounts of Versailles have also made their way into the first attempts towards the third – transnational – wave of memory studies.2 In the first years of the twenty-first century, however, Versailles memory seemed to be largely absent from public, and in particular political, discourse, mainly after, in 2003, the French National Assembly and the German Bundestag had celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the Élysée Treaty as a symbol for European unification at Versailles.3 More recently, Versailles references were politicized again particularly by opponents of the European Union’s austerity politics: the former Greek Financial Secretary Yannis Varoufakis speaking not only of a ‘Mini-Versailles Treaty’4 imposed on his country, but of a ‘New Versailles’5 haunting Europe illustrates this negative image of Versailles fostered by the political Left. Reaching well beyond economic considerations, Varoufakis used the CONTACT friedemann pestel friedemann.pestel@geschichte.uni-freiburg.de © 2017 informa uK Limited, trading as taylor & francis Group 528 F. PESTEL historical parallel with the peace conference in 1919 to denounce a hegemonic mismatch in the power relations among the EU member-states that solely benefited Germany. With the Paris terror attacks of November 2015, Versailles memory seemed to take yet another path, away from transnational significance toward a symbol for national unity. François Hollande’s choice of Versailles to deliver a discours martial to the two united chambers of the French Parliament had primarily pragmatic motives: since the late nineteenth century, the Hall of Congress in the Palace has been the only site where the National Assembly and the Senate could deliberate together. Under the Fifth Republic these sessions were held for significant occasions, and the state of emergency after 13 November 2015 clearly fell into this category. Hollande’s call for unity and solidarity backed by the ‘historical grandeur of the place’6 found a positive echo with Pierre Nora, the founding father of the national lieux de mémoire paradigm, who rejoiced over this ‘graceful return of national symbols.’7 Another historian, Xavier Mauduit, observed that Hollande had chosen well the different sites of his speeches to the nation after the terror attacks: the Élysée Palace representing the Republic, Versailles representing the monarchy, and the Hôtel des Invalides as symbol for France’s military glory.8 Hollande’s reference to Versailles was, however, more complex than this ‘patriotic renewal without precedence since postwar times’9 praised by historians and journalists. It was not without deliberation that the President underlined in Versailles that though it was France that had been hit by terrorism, it was ‘Europe’ that had been attacked. As a consequence, he grounded a military response to the ‘Islamic State’ on European solidarity.10 This reference mobilized a different, though clearly entangled, strand of memory emphasizing the international and historical impact of political decisions related to Versailles over the centuries. It is striking to see, despite a seemingly national invocation of Versailles, that these most recent references follow three well-established patterns that have marked conflictive Versailles memories over centuries well beyond the national frame: first, a long-term antagonism of war and peace – in particular, but not exclusively, between France and the German states – re-emerging in 2015 in the asymmetric form of Islamist terror; second, tensions between monarchical and republican appropriations of Versailles still resonating in the political self-understanding of French Presidents.11 Finally, these patterns mark cornerstones of universal versus particularistic conceptions of political power since the days of Louis XIV.12 In analysing these three constitutive patterns of Versailles memory in a transnational perspective, this article challenges both older national Versailles narratives as enshrined in the lieux de mémoire collections and a persistent Franco-German bias around key moments such as 1871 or 1919 that are symptomatic of the two nations’ ‘over-relation’ identified by Peter Sloterdijk.13 Versailles becomes a poignant case for studying competing narratives of universalizing patterns of memory taking into account long-term ambivalences between national and transnational, European and extra-European interpretations that have marked Versailles memories over 350 years. This distinctive longue durée of mnemonic patterns can be explained by the double topical quality of Versailles as an architectural work of art and a symbol of political power.14 This article first brings out how contemporaries and later generations who appropriated and transformed Louis XIV’s symbolic and political legacy remained by and large under the influence of the initial concept and construction of the palace itself. I subsequently argue that the rupture of the French Revolution shifted Versailles references from the present to the past and made Versailles available for competing narratives of French and European history that reflect the political schisms of the post-revolutionary regimes. The re-appropriation EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 529 of different time layers for present conflicts sheds light on the interrelations between key moments of Versailles’ mnemonic history such as the Franco-German War of 1870 and the peace conference in 1919 following the persistent antagonisms. The purpose here is to deconstruct the teleology of both Francocentrist and Franco-German Versailles master narratives by also including outside perspectives from North and South America that bring out global dimensions of Versailles memory. Whereas North American Versailles memory impacted on the debates in Europe after the First as well as after the Second World War, the case of nineteenth- to twenty-first-century Brazil highlights to what extent Versailles memory served to legitimize or delegitimize the representation of political power within post-colonial and republican nation-building processes. Finally, I pay attention to the long-neglected tensions of the twentieth-century post-war period between national and transnational visions of Versailles. For the sources of this work, I do not aim at an empirically detailed reconstruction of the conflicts considered. Instead, I opt for statements that particularly bring out contestation and controversies about competing patterns of interpretation. The material used therefore includes travel accounts, correspondences, sermons, memoirs, diaries, textbooks, press articles up to blog entries, alongside a selection of visual representations emphasizing the differing viewpoints contemporaries took on Versailles. From reception to memory: Versailles and universal claims for monarchical power Versailles’ construction in the later seventeenth century linked immediately to Louis XIV’s political understanding as a monarch. By transferring the royal residence from Paris to Versailles, he not only reacted to his traumatic childhood experiences in Paris during the Fronde, but also cherished the memory of his father Louis XIII who had built a hunting lodge at the site. The lasting dualism between war and peace was already manifest in the construction works that alternated with Louis’s military campaigns. Architectural representation became the political complement to his struggle for French hegemony: both attempts were constitutive for Louis’s glory and France’s power.15 Even though the king mainly aimed for French supremacy in Europe, Versailles was not conceived as a specifically European symbol of power, but represented Louis’s understanding of gloire universelle. The interior decorations of the palace acquainted visitors with France’s relations to different European nations, but the famous Escalier des Ambassadeurs displayed allegories of the four continents: Europe, America, Asia and Africa.16 Similarly, the Hall of Mirrors, another place of staged encounters with the ‘greatest king of the world’, hosted the most sumptuous receptions for foreign delegations from Persia, Siam and China.17 Iconography, especially in the Hall of Mirrors, played a pivotal role for foreign reception at Versailles. Instead of mythological scenes, Louis XIV opted for having the ceilings painted with his own military and political triumphs – which at the same time were defeats of his adversaries – reaching from the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659 to the Peace of Nijmegen in 1678.18 To increase the impact on the largest possible audience, the paintings carried carefully chosen inscriptions that subsequently would have a strong influence on how contemporaries as well as later generations perceived Versailles as a symbol for monarchical power inside and outside France.19 Because of Versailles’ openness to the public, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century palace and park quickly developed into popular destinations for domestic and foreign 530 F. PESTEL visitors, in particular nobles on a Grand Tour, as well as artists and scholars.20 Visitors were subject to royal propaganda in which Louis XIV himself took an active part and influenced long-term reception patterns. His Manière de montrer les jardins de Versailles, for example, provided guidelines for what visitors should be shown and which information, that is, glorification of his power, they should be given.21 The royal guidebook, together with flourishing official or semi-official descriptions, standardized visitors’ experiences and developed narratives that marked Versailles’ international image during the ancien régime.22 Other courts adapted Versailles’ political semiotics for their own purposes of representation imitating its architectural concept or copying parts of the palace. Building these ‘new’ Versailles did not always imply admiration or even recognition of French hegemony. Quite to the contrary, Louis XIV’s enemies in the Netherlands or in the Holy Roman Empire used their ‘Counter-Versailles’ to express discontinuity and contestation.23 As the case of Blenheim Palace, the most political example of these ‘Counter-Versailles’, demonstrates, building politics around 1700 already contained aspects of memory politics. Blenheim symbolically aimed at delegitimizing Louis XIV’s quest for European hegemony as an ambition that would henceforth belong to the past. Following the 1704 victory of the Anglo-Imperial alliance against French and Bavarian troops at Blindheim in the War of Spanish Succession, Queen Anne of England rewarded her victorious commander, the Duke of Marlborough, with a country house. The façade decorations combined military glorification and symbols of national victory with an explicit humiliation of the French enemy: cannonballs, reversed Bourbon lilies, and a French cock torn to pieces by an English lion left no doubt about the new power constellation.24 Moreover, statues of chroniclers retained the victory in the annals of history for later generations eradicating Louis’s gloire, and it was only consistent that the Sun King himself was exposed to visitors as a trophy of victory. By placing a colossal bust of Louis XIV captured from the citadel of Tournai on the south-east façade of Blenheim Palace, Marlborough gave proof to contemporaries and posterity that England now regarded the Versailles system as obsolete. In France, Versailles persisted as a symbol both of the king’s personal and France’s national gloire, of both domestic and foreign power, also under Louis XIV’s successors. Yet, critical voices emerging during the reign of Louis XVI pointed toward a possible end to the long-lasting monarchical system centred on the palace. Simultaneous with France’s financial crisis of the 1780s and a shift of aristocratic social life from Versailles to Paris, travel accounts increasingly related symptoms of decay. In contrast to Grand Tour visitors, non-noble travellers started to observe an anachronism between the monarchical decorum and the spirit of their own present time: ‘Presumably, with changing minds, all these beauties will share the fate of all human undertakings and gradually disappear,’25 noted the German travel writer Johann Jacob Volkmann on the eve of the Revolution. On 5 October 1789, these ‘changed minds’ took the shape of a Parisian populace taking the royal family and the court with them to the capital. This day marked Versailles’ transition to the sphere of memory: having continuously represented monarchical power for more than a century, Versailles from 1789 on became the symbol of a past order and as such developed into an interpretative resource for nineteenth- and twentieth-century political tensions. A museum for French history: Versailles and the post-revolutionary nation A crucial part of the post-1789 shift from Versailles experience to Versailles memory, or from ancien régime monarchical glorification to the vilification of tyranny, was the revolutionaries’ decision to use Versailles as a symbolic source for republican legitimization.26 EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 531 Within the antagonism of republican liberty versus monarchical oppression as new pattern of interpretation, Versailles played an important role, also because the value of its works of art was considered constitutive for the entire French nation beyond ideological schisms. Instead of demolishing the former residence, the National Convention transformed the palace into a museum as ‘the only way of preserving the monuments of arts even those that carry the odious image of despotism’.27 Significantly, none of France’s post-revolutionary monarchs moved back to Versailles. Instead, nineteenth-century Versailles served as a screen for the political dealings with the legacy of the ancien régime and the Revolution. Versailles memory turned into an indicator for the fragile relation between the form of government and the nation. Both Napoleon and Louis XVIII renovated and rebuilt parts of the palace to express their monarchical authority, but deliberately stood back from moving their residence away from the people of Paris representing the nation. Only the last Bourbon king, Louis-Philippe, attempting a definite reconciliation between monarchical tradition and revolutionary accomplishments, undertook a large-scale revitalization in the wake of the Revolution of July 1830 merging the ideological schisms in post-revolutionary Versailles memory into a general narrative of French history. Exhibiting toutes les gloires de la France in a National Museum aimed at substantiating the Citizen King’s fragmented political legitimacy and presenting his reign as the apotheosis of the French nation’s historical role.28 This ambitious task demanded considerable resources. As the centrepiece of the Palace-Museum, Louis-Philippe created a Battles Gallery – 33 scenes of French victories from Merovingian to Napoleonic times – flanked by two halls dedicated to the victorious revolutionary army of 1792 with young Louis-Philippe in its ranks and the Revolution of 1830 as final point.29 Analogies with Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors framed by the Salon of War and the Salon of Peace were too obvious. In contrast to the coherent narrative of the Sun King’s glory, LouisPhilippe’s historical synthesis immediately provoked criticism for its patchwork character and blind spots. For the sake of the July Monarchy as the self-proclaimed climax of French history the exhibition largely neglected ‘weak’ kings as well as the Wars of Religion, Jacobin Terror or the Restoration period.30 On the positive side of the balance sheet the National Museum’s syncretism integrated the memories of all political groups: notoriously suspect republicans and Bonapartists found themselves represented by the nation’s military glory, old aristocratic families were permitted to place their blazons in the ‘Hall of Crusades’.31 Victor Hugo, a staunch royalist in his young days and by then one of the pillars of the new system, did not minimize his praise for Louis-Philippe’s homogenizing memory work: Having accomplished this work … is having transformed a monarchical into a national monument. It means having placed an idea into this immense building, having anchored the present in the past, 1789 towards 1688, the Emperor with the king, Napoleon with Louis XIV; in one word: having given to the magnificent book that we call French history this magnificent binding that we call Versailles.32 On the negative side of the balance sheet, however, were the mixed reactions of foreign visitors to this nationalized narrative. Originally, Louis-Philippe had attempted to put France’s victorious present-past into a European context by accentuating ties with foreign dynasties, not least to downplay his position as a ‘newcomer’ among his peer monarchs.33In addition to the contradiction between his monarchical vision of France in Europe and the museum’s national narrative, foreign visitors hardly found any European interpretations in the National Museum, but a new hegemonic view on national histories: ‘Every Spaniard, Austrian or Prussian must feel deeply offended by particular paintings that are ostentatiously 532 F. PESTEL displayed here, the more so as they often distort history,’34 complained the Prussian poet and composer Ludwig Rellstab. French visitors also struggled with Louis-Philippe’s vision of history depending on whether they considered him a ‘king’ or a ‘citizen’. In the first case, the museum lacked ideological clarity expressing the decay of monarchical power rather than its new national glory. In the second case, the opening of the museum meant the transmission of a national symbol from royal authority into the hands of the people. Nineteenth-century contemporaries did not see Versailles as a symbolic entity as under the Sun King any longer. The shift from ancien régime court culture to the present-past of a post-revolutionary regime considerably enlarged the variety of interpretations. Nonetheless, Versailles also confronted visitors with irritating ancien régime layers in places where it ‘talked’ to them. For the inauguration banquet LouisPhilippe took his seat in the centre of the Hall of Mirrors, directly under a historical inscription. At a period when French politicians controversially discussed the king’s constitutional authority around the principle of Le roi règne mais ne gouverne pas (Adolphe Thiers), the ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors provided a provocative comment from the past on the present: Le Roy Gouverne Par Lui-même (The King governs by himself, Figure 1).35 Figure 1. Charles Lebrun, ‘LE rOY GOUVERNE pAR LUI-MÊME, 1661’, 1679‒1684, palace of versailles, Hall of Mirrors, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/49/Charles_Le_Brun_-_Le_roi_ gouverne_par_lui-m%C3%aame%2C_1661_-_Google_art_project.jpg/2048px-Charles_Le_Brun_-_ Le_roi_gouverne_par_lui-m%C3%aame%2C_1661_-_Google_art_project.jpg (accessed 2 May 2016). EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 533 With regard to the political tensions of post-revolutionary France, the continuous reuse of Versailles during the Empire, the Restoration period and the July Monarchy may seem surprising. It nonetheless points to its reconciling potential from different political angles. As reactions to Louis-Philippe’s ambitious historical programme show, however, attempts at decreasing conflictive historical contexts by merging them into a holistic and universal narrative of the past gave rise to new particularistic claims. Instead of integrating political antagonisms through the longue durée of national history Versailles’s new role as a metonymy for the nation’s present-past risked dissatisfying all sides at the cost of the monarch’s legitimacy. Even if the museum lost much of its importance with the Revolution of 1848, the provocative impact of Versailles’ symbolic repertoire persisted. In particular, the difference between the allegorical ceiling paintings and the current affairs taking place underneath gave new momentum to politicized Versailles memories both with regard to domestic and foreign politics. Triumph and revenge between France and Germany in 1871 The National Museum was certainly not the primary point of interest for the German princes, militaries, artists and journalists making their headquarters at Versailles after the capitulation of the French Army in 1870. But the panorama of ‘arrogant craziness’36 in the Battles Gallery seemed evocative for their understanding of the Franco-Prussian War as revenge for earlier French humiliations experienced between Louis XIV and Napoleon: No shadow, of course, on Louis XIV’s government, … everywhere tidy conquests of burning cities, martial glory, while they drink champagne in the foreground. Nowhere are fuming the ruins of the castle of Heidelberg and the destroyed villages of the Palatinate against the sky. Nowhere the paintings tell of the terrible thunderstorm that rises smashingly from the poisonous depth of Louis XIV and XV’s vices, atrocities and infatuation over the kindest-hearted of the Bourbons [Louis XVI]. If one imagines French history from these paintings, it is virtually incomprehensible why all these virtuous heroes and victors of battles were pushed from the throne charged with more or less weighty curses from the French nation.37 In Versailles, the idea of a kleindeutsch empire under Prussian leadership rejecting both the decadent absolutist and destructive revolutionary narrative seemed the logical response to the two versions of French hegemony displayed in the National Museum and the Hall of Mirrors. By consequence, under the Prussian occupation of 1870, Versailles became the most prominent symbol of Franco-German relations because the German side interpreted its visual decoration as the antithesis to the emerging German nation-state. The occupiers were obsessed with historical parallels: they took possession of the palace on the day when the Paris populace of 1789 had driven Louis XVI out of his residence and celebrated the anniversary of the battle of Leipzig in 1813 with Grandes Eaux in the park. When the palace first served as a military hospital, German magazines included illustrations carefully choosing scenes from ‘German’ history, namely the Napoleonic wars, displayed in the National Museum (Figure 2).38 The Prussian King William, as the only living eyewitness of that time, remembered his first visit to Versailles after Napoleon’s defeat in 1814.39 534 F. PESTEL Figure 2. otto Günther, The German Christmas Tree in the Hall of Fame of Versailles. in die Gartenlaube. illustrirtes familienblatt, 1871, no 6: 109, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/die_ Gartenlaube_%281871%29_109.jpg (accessed 2 May 2016). from the paintings in the Battles Gallery the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and napoleon on horseback are clearly visible. After the Hall of Mirrors had been liberated from housing sickbeds in honour of the Emperor’s proclamation on 18 January 1871 – the anniversary of the coronation of the first Prussian king in 1701 – its original architecture became an integral part of the ceremony, also because the occupiers were convinced that the palace had been built from seventeenth-century ‘German’ spoils of war.40 The imperial podium was placed toward the Salon of War whereas the entire side toward the Salon of Peace was carefully left empty given that the siege of Paris still held. Consequently, two pieces of the ceiling paintings attracted everyone’s attention together with their inscriptions: the Alliance De L’Allemagne Et De L’Espagne Avec La Hollande, interpreted as an allusion to the outbreak of the current war, namely the crisis of Spanish succession, and the Passage Du Rhin En Présence Des Ennemis. Given that Louis XIV as the conqueror of Strasbourg and devastator of the Palatinate was above all seen as enemy to ‘Germany’ now taking justice, it mattered little that this scene from the Franco-Dutch War of the 1670s explicitly opposed the idea of hereditary enmity with France.41 The historical connection between the Sun King’s omnipresent gloire and the elderly German Emperor required moral arguments that substantiated the national and Protestant character of the German Empire. The Prussian court chaplain Bernhard Rogge made the most famous of the Hall’s inscriptions the core of his sermon to an extent that irritated even well-meaning listeners. In contrast to the inauguration of the National Museum in 1837, the ceiling’s centrepiece no longer provoked debates on constitutional monarchy, but – translated into the German context – served as a warning against hubris and impiousness: EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 535 Those who in vain arrogance once made these halls into idolatrous temples of earthly majesty, who in arrogant presumption have defied with their own power and chosen the proud word ‘The King governs by himself ’ as the slogan of their throne …, they have disappeared with all their vain pomp and in their foolishness; and those who, after them, have been raised by the waves of revolutions, who have looked for support in the people’s favour and the votes of the masses, they have also been wrecked.42 The symbolic purpose of the proclamation ceremony was to establish nineteenth-century Germany in the location of seventeenth-century France as proof of the ‘mnemonics of world history’43 that left no provocation without revenge. The German princes and militaries to a certain degree acknowledged Louis XIV’s self-declared superiority, but at the same time historicized it. The memory of his gloire mirrored in the French humiliation of ‘Germany’ up to 1870 had become a past issue eclipsed by ‘All-Germany’s’44 revenge. The painter Anton von Werner was in charge of putting this historical moment on canvas.45 He had himself attended the proclamation ceremony and studied the historical paintings in the National Museum at the occasion. For his first version of the Emperor’s proclamation, painted as a present for the German princes on the occasion William’s eightieth birthday in 1877, he decided to give the Versailles founding act a higher truth (Figure 3). What characterizes his painting, which for artistic reasons differs in various details from the original scene, is, however, an accurate reproduction of the architectural ornaments, in particular the two inscriptions referring to the anti-French alliance and the passage of the Rhine. When this painting was exhibited in the imperial residence in Berlin it became part of the palace’s eighteenth-century decoration, which itself had once been inspired by Versailles. As the time layers between the painting’s content and its architectural context melted into each other, the Berlin palace became another ‘Counter-Versailles’. Figure 3. anton von werner, The Emperor Proclamation in Versailles, 1877 (Berlin palace version), original destroyed in 1945; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/die_ Kaiserproklamation_1871_%28anton_von_werner%29.jpg (accessed 2 May 2016). the well-known smallscale Friedrichsruh version of this scene painted by werner in 1885 is most often reproduced instead of this lost first version, thus, strictly speaking, our visual memory relies on the ‘wrong’ picture. 536 F. PESTEL Also for the French the German occupation of Versailles was an issue of both past and present: right-wing sympathisers denounced it as an attack on the entire French nation in all its historical dimensions. The republican Left saw William I as the immediate dictatorial successor of Napoleon III.46 However, the view up to the ceiling provided the consolation of eternal French superiority, if not in the present, then as a horizon of expectation: ‘at the ceiling, what an impressive contrast, Louis XIV who has been humiliated here is still triumphing; on the chimney of the Salon of War the same Louis XIV tramples Germany underfoot.’47 The national connotations Versailles had taken since Louis-Philippe now showed their effects facing the German enemy. The Hall of Mirrors and the Battles Gallery helped to transcend the ignominious defeat: compared to 23 victorious French attacks on German territory displayed in the Museum, the paintings showed only one Prussian invasion in France (1792).48 The seventeenth-century inscriptions gave hope for better times: ‘The former arrogance of France’s neighbours: all these glorious reminiscences of the past have not been painted to make them laugh. And the Consecration Hall, and the Hall of 1792, and the Battle Gallery, and the Marengo Hall! All this made them understand undoubtedly that also France knows the path of victory.’49 After the end of German occupation and the conclusion of the preliminary peace, Versailles’s political significance was linked again with the antagonism between the monarchy and the republic as it had been in the post-revolutionary period. Whereas the Paris Commune symbolized revolutionary and republican France ready to make sacrifices for the sake of the nation, the latently royalist former residence hosted a largely anti-republican National Assembly and the provisional government. Paris and Versailles became incarnations of the Deux France.50 The Hall of Mirrors, once a military hospital and a proclamation site, the provisional government now converted into a dormitory for homeless deputies.51 The opera hosted the National Assembly, the Battles Gallery the Post Ministry. When the political institutions of the Third Republic moved back to Paris at the end of the 1870s and only reassembled for joint sessions of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate in the newly built Hall of Congress, Louis-Philippe’s National Museum reopened to the public. The late nineteenth century saw various initiatives to reattribute political functions to Versailles that would prove both compatible with the republican order and serve to symbolically acquit France of the 1870 defeat. Plans of a Lully and Rameau festival as a French anti-Bayreuth were considered; the centenary of the Revolution in 1889 emphasized the republican legacy. A more lasting innovation was the reception of foreign monarchs in the old residence by republican officials starting with Czar Nicholas II in 1896 to cement the anti-German Franco-Russian defensive alliance.52 Versailles outside of Europe The dominating Franco-German perspective on Versailles memory has led most scholars to ignore the extra-European radiance of this mnemonic signifier, though appropriations especially by actors in North and South America provide perspectives on Versailles’ universalism beyond the viewing point of its French core. In a specific way, the mnemonic antagonisms of war versus peace and monarchy versus republic also played an important role in Brazil and the United States where they underpinned narratives of national independence and, in particular in Brazil, claims for the political participation of the people. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 537 Brazilian Versailles memory substantially relies on the historian Manuel de Oliveira Lima’s account of the way to Brazilian independence published in the centennial year of 1908. This anniversary referred to a novel form of decolonization, that is, the inversion of the relationship between the European metropole and the colonial periphery. In 1808, under the pressure of the Napoleonic wars, the Portuguese court under Prince Regent Dom João left Lisbon, moved to the colony and settled in Rio de Janeiro. In his account, Oliveira Lima explained the political integration of the local colonial elites into the court of the Prince Regent using the model of domesticating French nobility at Versailles under Louis XIV. For Oliveira Lima, the Portuguese royal family, under the spell of the tropics, had given in to Brazil’s exoticism, but also used European culture, slavery and race as categories of distinction to establish their authority in the new residence. As a consequence, Versalhes tropical became the catchword of a historical narrative that predated Brazilian independence in 1822 to the arrival of the imperial Prince regent as founder of the post-colonial nation.53 The reference to Versailles as a symbol of monarchical culture also helped to explain why Brazil, in contrast to the overall republican independence movement in Latin America, kept the ancient dynasty and remained a monarchy until 1889. During the interwar period the Versalhes tropical signifier took a new signification in the context of urban modernization. In 1930, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro charged the French architect Alfred Agache with an urban masterplan to boost Rio’s international radiance with an important enlargement scheme.54 For the design of the city’s new sea facade, Agache took inspiration from the palace and park of Versailles and developed a model for representative building in republican Brazil. His plans were taken on in the 1960s for the construction of the new capital in Brasília when architect Lúcio Costo conceived the central Praça dos Três Poderes as a ‘Versailles of the people’.55 Versailles memory as an explanatory factor of absolutist power and court culture in early-nineteenth-century Brazil, its subsequent reinterpretation for republican urbanism in the 1930s, and finally its shift to a symbol of political mass participation and separation of powers in the 1960s characterizes the Brazilian nation-building process from monarchy to democracy. However, from the 1970s, the Versailles reference turned negative as the new capital, built far away from the poverty and crime of the favelas, became more frequently associated with profligacy, corruption and military authoritarianism.56 Even today, representatives of the Brazilian far Left, contrary to Oscar Niemeyer’s idea of social equality expressed through architecture, denounce Brasília’s ‘nobliáquico’ and feudal spirit and wonder whether the capital will know the same fate of rupture as the French royal residence in 1789.57 For them, the inability of French absolutism to reform provides a sinister outlook for its South American counterpart, that is, Brazilian capitalism. Now, Brasília marks the limit and no longer the potential of democratizing the mnemonic signifier ‘Versailles’, as it is inextricably linked in Brazilian discourse to its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century radiance. In contrast to the Brazilian case mobilizing the dichotomy of monarchy versus republic, this distinction became blurry in American Versailles memory which drew on the reference to the late ancien régime in a clearly positive way. As the recognition of American independence was the result of the Paris and Versailles Treaties of 1783, American memory relied mainly on the opposition of war and peace. Whereas this reference virtually played no role in nineteenth-century European Versailles discourse, a positive image of Versailles 538 F. PESTEL developed in the United States and substantiated political and cultural relations with France, reaching its peak with the American entry into the First World War.58 In gratitude for the American war effort, French authorities in 1919 added a ‘Hall of American Independence’ to the National Museum in Versailles. But the historical narrative the French side had in mind was a longer one: by integrating the United States into toutes les gloires de la France the French interpreted American First World War engagement as compensation for their support of the American colonies in the War of Independence in the eighteenth century. However, this historical cross-over conflicted with the common linkage of independence, liberation and republicanism. American Versailles memory included a positive vision of France’s last ancien régime monarch Louis XVI as the guarantor of independence. For the inauguration of the American Hall, French authorities therefore grudgingly had to accept the American wish to display portraits of Louis XVI and his Foreign Secretary. But tellingly, neither the French Minister of Education nor the American ambassador mentioned them in their commemorative speeches. Only the ‘democratic’ General La Fayette served as a figure of compromise.59 The French admittance of America to Versailles did not serve exclusively symbolic purposes, but also paid off financially when it came to attracting American funding for the extremely costly renovation of the palace and the park in the interwar period. American philanthropists, with John D. Rockefeller Jr at their head, between 1923 and 1936 donated US$23 million for reconstruction counteracting complaints from the French far Right about the republic’s disinterest in the monarchical heritage.60 A similar initiative took place after the Second World War, and until now, the ‘American Friends of Versailles’ foundation contributes substantially to maintenance and refurbishment works, not least as a gesture of commemorating American independence.61 Outside Europe, Versailles memory was closely linked to processes of decolonization and post-colonial nation-building, whereas European memory conflicts, especially its post-revolutionary time layers, played virtually no role. Brazilian and American memories reduced the complexity of European Versailles contexts and showed the versatility of the seventeenthand eighteenth-century mnemonic time layers. Only with the 1919 peace conference did these diverging memories on both sides of the Atlantic intertwine and demand complex transfers of meanings that point to the growing global dimension of twentieth-century Versailles memory. The aporia of the ‘second’ peace of Versailles in 1919 It was Abbé Wetterlé, an Alsatian deputy of the German Reichstag, who as early as 1914 apparently made the suggestion for hosting a peace conference in Versailles. During the war, the French government expressed a similar idea in discussions with the United States, morally justifying the location by French war sacrifices. Versailles, as the birthplace of German ‘world dominance’, should also mark the end of these aspirations. The Allies were far from unanimous about this French fixation on their ‘first’ Versailles of 1871: British diplomats evoked negative memories of the 1814 peace negotiations in Paris; the United States first opted for neutral Geneva, but then gave in to the French plan, also due to their strong 1783 Versailles attachment.62 The different motives of the war parties had two lasting consequences. First, for the British and the Americans, the French 1919 re-enactment of 1871 in reverse was a backward-looking EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 539 aporia. If Britons and Americans had specific national Versailles references at all, they followed different temporalities than the Franco-German pattern. Second, memories of the 1919 Versailles Treaty and the other Paris Treaties that are of crucial importance for the Central European nation-states emerging from the First World War are only partially connected with the complicated time layers of Franco-German Versailles references. It is doubtful whether Polish ‘Versailles’ memory is actually dominated by the semantic link to ‘Louis’s royal residence’63, as postulates Włodzimierz Borodziej, rather than by territorial, demographic or economic settlements after the First World War. As Borodziej demonstrates, references to pre-1919 time layers of Versailles are mostly lacking in Polish memory. This observation also holds true for ‘Saint Germain’ or ‘Trianon’ as mnemonic signifiers for other Central and Eastern European societies. By consequence, the focus here remains on the continuities or explicit references to earlier Versailles interpretations that were renegotiated at the 1919 conference without stretching for – not yet analysed – possible entanglements between broader Versailles memories in the long-term and ‘1919’ memories in a stricter sense.64 As the German side had done for the 1871 proclamation, the French government carefully staged the political chronology toward the treaty. The peace conference began on the anniversary of the proclamation of the German Empire, the German delegation received the text of the treaty exactly four years to the day after the German Navy sunk the British ocean liner Lusitania, and the signing took place five years after the assassinations in Sarajevo. This obsession with a new canon of historical parallels was a personal concern for French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau who, in 1919, was the only surviving member of the 1871 National Assembly meeting in Versailles.65 For Clemenceau, the second Versailles of 1919 was to eradicate the first Versailles of the 1871 preliminary peace and Empire proclamation and to re-establish France’s glory of the days of the Sun King. When the chief conservator guided him through the Hall of Mirrors, he left no doubt about Clemenceau’s historical place: ‘You have finished the work of the great men of the monarchy. You humiliated the House of Austria and destroyed the Empire as Richelieu and Louis XIV had dreamed about.’66 The other ‘first’ Versailles, namely the American Treaty of 1783, did not enter into this revenge scheme, except for the aforementioned commemoration hall in the National Museum that contemporaries saw in the light of the Wilsonian programme of the liberation of peoples.67 American and British witnesses of the signature ceremony in the Hall of Mirrors with their diverging Versailles memories and generational backgrounds either did not comment on Clemenceau’s careful staging or their reactions were disapproving. The highly symbolic invitation of five gueules cassées for the ceremony remained largely unnoticed both by the allies and the Germans.68 For John Maynard Keynes, Clemenceau’s obsession with historical revenge, reflecting an older strand of universalism, was irresponsible given the global challenge of the peace conference and thus its new universal significance: ‘This is the policy of an old man, whose most vivid impressions and most lively imagination are of the past and not of the future. He sees the issue in terms of France and Germany, not of humanity and European civilization struggling forward to a new order.’69 His colleague James Wycliffe Headlam-Morley underlined that this revanchist shortcoming fell behind the task of the peace conference: ‘As a matter of fact, what was really being done was not merely to make peace with Germany, but to sign the Covenant of the League of Nations, but of this no one seems to think.’70 Like seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visitors to Versailles the 1919 conference participants also raised their eyes to the ceiling. What they saw and, most notably, 540 F. PESTEL read, hardly corresponded to what was currently taking place in the Hall. British diplomat Harold Nicolson commented: ‘Clemenceau is already seated under the heavy ceiling as we arrive. “Le roi,” runs the scroll above him, “gouverne par lui-même.” He looks small and yellow. A crunched homunculus.’71 Whereas, in 1871, the triumphant proclamation ceremony had been clearly orientated toward the ‘war’ side of the Hall of Mirrors – the imperial podium was erected in front of the Salon of War – neither the Salon of Peace nor the allegory of the Peace of Nijmegen on the opposite wall were utilized as symbolic resources for lasting peace in 1919. The French hegemonic potential of mimetic re-enactment showed its limits given the high number of observers who had no immediate relation with the Franco-German Versailles narrative. Rather than following Clemenceau’s new triumphant attempt, they remarked on a sharp contrast between the allegorical ceiling ‘look[ing] down contemptuously, from its regal and colourful beauty’ and ‘the frock coats and tall hats – which have survived this war’.72 The painter William Orpen captured precisely this tension in the official painting of the 1919 Versailles Treaty commissioned by the Imperial War Figure 4. william orpen, The Signing of the Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, 1919, London, imperial war Museum; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/orpen%2C_william_%28sir%29_% 28ra%29_-_the_signing_of_peace_in_the_Hall_of_Mirrors%2C_versailles%2C_28th_June_1919_-_ Google_art_project.jpg?uselang=de (accessed 2 May 2016). EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 541 Museum. Unlike Werner’s work from 1877, Orpen’s The Signing of the Peace in the Hall of Mirrors no longer presented a historical apotheosis (Figure 4). Placing the inscription Le Roy gouverne par luy-même into the central axis of the painting, right beyond Clemenceau, he gave a sarcastically distorted view of the Hall of Mirrors dwarfing the politicians and diplomats in their ‘frock coats’ underneath.73 Given the high expectations, the impression the 1919 Versailles ceremony made on the audience remained limited. It was mainly the local population of Versailles who in their ‘legitimate pride’74 approved of the symbolic revenge for the humiliation of 1870/1 by a multitude of commemorative activities and the foundation of the League to Perpetuate over the Ages the Memory of the German Crimes. The last act in the Franco-German play of revenge took place in 1940 when the swastika fluttered over Versailles.75 The administration of the French National Museums to which Versailles belonged had already started to make arrangements for a possible menace after the ‘appeasement’ crisis in autumn 1938 in order to prepare for an efficient evacuation of the palace’s treasures of art. After the German occupation of France, Joseph Goebbels came as a visitor to the Museum already closed to the public since the outbreak of the war. The Berlin Philharmonic under Eugen Jochum gave a concert in the chapel affirming the alleged hegemony of ‘German’ art. Wehrmacht soldiers arriving in great numbers at the palace used pocket mirrors to make clear the Hall of Mirrors as their point of interest. For these German visitors, Versailles during the Second World War continued to represent a double symbol of German national superiority and humiliation, but also provided an opportunity for symbolic revenge.76 However, the conservators had removed those parts of the ceiling decorations from the Hall that represented Louis XIV’s victories over the Holy Roman Empire and Prussia. It is noteworthy that the Vichy regime also took an interest in Versailles and even considered transferring its seat of government to Trianon. Although Versailles would then have become part of the unoccupied zone libre the Vichy authorities that were attracted by Versailles’ prestige as a national and anti-republican symbol at the same time feared for their scope of action at the immediate proximity of the German occupants.77 These fears and concerns about vandalism notwithstanding, French authorities presumed that the German occupants would hardly damage this national symbol. In 1944, American troops occupied Versailles – for an interestingly similar reason: protecting a national symbol – not of 1871 or 1919, but, of course, of 1783. Post-war Versailles between Roman national and world history By the end of the Second World War the antagonism between war and peace had come to a standstill. Versailles memory of the second half of the twentieth century followed two new variants of the older patterns: renationalization and reuniversalization. French national Versailles memory reflected the political crises of the Fourth Republic. Against the background of the experience of German occupation and the Vichy regime, rapidly changing governments and colonial warfare in Indochina and Algeria, Versailles counted among the few ‘great things that the French have done together’.78 This renewed idea of Versailles as core of national consciousness not only connected with the nineteenth-century tradition, but, as in the interwar years, also drew public attention to fundraising for urgent restoration works. Large-scale events took place like the 1953 spectacle of tableaux vivants under the 542 F. PESTEL evocative title À toutes les gloires de la France.79 The financial outcome of this publicity campaign was insufficient. It was again the Rockefeller family who relieved the cash-strapped French government by providing another 100 million Francs, sparking polemics as French communists regarded the acceptance of ‘foreign alms’ as a betrayal of national pride.80 The central medium for national popularization of Versailles in the post-war years was cinema. Among the more than 50 Versailles films produced over the twentieth century two-thirds were French productions or co-productions. More than half of them evoked the days of the ancien régime, another 10 the turning point of the Revolution, and only eight were situated in the present day.81 The most comprehensive example of this nexus of monarchical heritage and national experience was Sacha Guitry’s 1953 epos Si Versailles m’était conté stretching from the seventeenth to the twentieth century and supported by the French Ministry of Culture. With first ideas stemming from the occupation period to demonstrate invincible French glory, the film, according to its director, was to serve, above all, ‘France’s sacred interests’.82 The principal character of this contribution to the post-war roman national was of course Louis XIV played by Guitry himself appearing as a visionary guard of the nation: ‘I am convinced that in one, two or three hundred years the one who will reign over France will protect it as much as it is the testimony of my country’s greatness,’83 says the king in the film. Transnational aspects in Versailles’ history – except for a few words from Benjamin Franklin – did not appear. In a scene showing a tour through the Hall of Mirrors around 1900, the guide bluntly declares that he does not want to talk about the events that took place there in 1871. The film’s reception was mixed. Royalists complained about lacking respect for the monarchy and too much emphasis on histoires d’alcôve. Communists agreeing on the film’s frivolous character castigated the anecdotic dealing with ‘outbursts of popular rage’. The ‘Friends of Versailles’ and historians pointed out historical inaccuracies. The polemics ended up in the National Assembly around the question of whether the government had co-financed the production, which was not the case. To the contrary, Guitry left to the state another 75 million Francs for the renovation works. These funds came from the revenues of this most successful French film of the 1950s with seven million viewers.84 The national emphasis lost parts of its importance with the foundation of the Fifth Republic in 1958 and gave way to reuniversalization. One constitutional change of the new presidential system was the popular election of the head of state, thus the palace was no longer required for presidential elections, which had been held there by the two legislative chambers since 1871. The Presidents of the Fifth Republic, instead, built on a feature that had contributed to Versailles’ early transnational reputation and had later been taken up by the Second Empire and Third Republic: the reception of state visitors. In particular, Charles de Gaulle cherished the monarchical heritage to an extent that he developed reception ceremonies according to the rank and importance of each visitor, reserving the palace itself mainly for ‘sovereigns of ancient dynasty’. His successors, however, were more pragmatic and received Leonid Brezhnev in Versailles and hosted the G7 summit of 1982 there.85 Also in the field of monument conservation and tourism, Versailles’ radiance reached a global level in the later twentieth century. An important role fell upon UNESCO that listed the palace and park in 1979 as a world heritage site. Curiously, the justification remained Euro-, if not Franco-centric, attributing global relevance to Versailles by its impact on early-modern ‘Europe francisée’.86 The complex time layers of Versailles memory were again reduced to Louis XIV and preference was given to his universalistic, but hegemonic, EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 543 interpretation. In that sense, the UNESCO world heritage listing did not go beyond an earlier UNESCO project from the 1950s: a textbook of French civilization commissioned in the heyday of the roman national with Lucien Febvre, an active contributor to the UNESCO’s world history project.87 The purpose of this work, which has been published only recently, was to show the international dimension of national developments within a world history framework. In a chapter titled ‘The Europe of Versailles’ Febvre and his co-author, the young François Crouzet, particularly emphasized Versailles as an embodiment of French classicism they saw as ‘universal in its radiance because it was universal in its principle’,88 but their examples remained entirely confined to Europe and were not specified in detail. Compared to Guitry’s film, this Annales vision was certainly more open, but still kept a hegemonic stance that finally seemed to have impeded the publication of the work. There is no doubt that mass tourism was one lasting consequence of Versailles’ world heritage status. The present number of 30,000 visitors daily from all over the globe leaves the members of Louis’s XIV court far behind and gives proof of the global radiance of the palace.89 Many come for the Hall of Mirrors, which has recently been restored to its seventeenth-century state, relinquishing all immediate traces of 1871 or 1919. Also, LouisPhilippe’s museum fades behind this ‘classical’ Versailles and, by the way, often remains closed due to a lack of staff. Not to forget: Versailles provides the laser-illuminated scenery for popular mass events such as the two concerts given by Pink Floyd in 1988. An audience of 200,000 made the municipal administration rejoice that after three centuries Versailles had now finally become ‘universal’.90 Such a broader perspective of post-war Versailles memory contextualizes the re-emergence of the Franco-German narrative, but now as a shared memory and under European auspices as it is best illustrated by the fortieth anniversary of the Élysée Treaty in 2003.91 In contrast to 1963, the 2003 commemorations were not staged as a project of statesmen – Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer – but as an encounter between two reconciled nations represented by their parliaments. Searching for a location that ‘mirrored’ the longterm vicissitudes of Franco-German relations, the French organizers opted for Versailles. The two groups of deputies celebrated a ‘Franco-German day’ consisting of a lunch in LouisPhilippe’s Battles Gallery followed by a joint session in the Third Republic’s Hall of Congress. In their speeches, both Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and President Jacques Chirac linked the Élysée Treaty to the historical layers that became manifest in Versailles. Whereas Chirac mentioned the Empire proclamation of 1871 and, as a direct consequence, the treaty of 1919, Schröder presented a historically broader and ideologically more diverse panorama referring to Versailles as an architectural model for German residences, but also to the ‘values of the French Revolution’. Despite Schröder’s search for positive Versailles references, the bellicose character of the two statesmen’s narratives hardly underpinned the present state of reconciliation and friendship. Therefore, both of them evoked the Élysée Treaty as bridge between a violent Franco-German past represented by Versailles and the path toward a common future in a ‘reunited Europe’.92 The 2003 celebrations at Versailles would open ‘a new chapter in the history of Europe’ – a Europe that both speakers identified with the moteur franco-allemand.93 It is, however, revealing for the self-fulfilling logics of Franco-German relations at that time that foreign commentators denounced this vision of Europe as an indicator of Franco-German hegemony in current European politics. In 2003, the mnemonic signifier Versailles also endorsed the Franco-German ‘no’ to military intervention in the Iraq war. 544 F. PESTEL Given Britain’s support of the United States’ Iraq politics, British journalists contested that the ‘odd couple’94 spoke up in the name of Europe, but admitted that Versailles’ decorum of glory and dominance only emphasized its own problematic relation with the main EU member-states on the continent. Reactions of the French and German press also lacked enthusiasm about the choice of Versailles that evoked separate rather than shared memories and represented exclusion in 2003 just as in 1871 or 1919: ‘The many small states as victims of the two great powers’ trial of strength are not convened. And once more Versailles is not a good symbol for Europe.’95 Conclusion: from hegemony to depolitization? By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the three constitutive patterns of Versailles memory have largely been subject to historicization. The Franco-German war–peace antagonism last seen in 1940 melted into the master narrative of Franco-German reconciliation within the context of European integration. The 2003 celebrations of the Élysée Treaty reflected this ‘benign alienation’96 that Peter Sloterdijk sees as the post-war lesson taken from the previous ‘overrelation’. However, the polemics around the Iraq war also indicated Versailles still retained a certain potential for drawing a line between inclusion and exclusion on a European scale that François Hollande, in 2015, used to mark the frontier between European solidarity and Islamist terror. The dichotomy between monarchy and republic has been entirely eclipsed to the extent that the categories have become interchangeable. The presidents from the Third to the Fifth Republics happily welcomed crowned monarchs in their role as presidents of the Republic. During the 2003 Franco-German celebrations, the German Social Democratic deputy Monika Griefhan told French journalists that the reason for her belated first visit to Versailles was that she had considered it too ‘bourgeois’ in her younger days.97 Within French domestic politics, Versailles has lost its constitutive role under the Fifth Republic. However, it still hosts joint sessions of the legislative chambers deliberating issues of national, and thereby European, importance, such as the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and other EU agreements.98 As François Hollande’s 2015 discours martial demonstrates, Versailles once more serves as a symbol of both national unity and the call for European solidarity. The third pattern of universalism versus particularism appears to be the most persistent one. It manifested itself in Louis XIV’s aspirations for glory beyond France and the contestation of this alleged hegemony by his fellow monarchs and France’s neighbours, but also in the controversies on Versailles’ significance in the revolutionary period and the extra-European appropriations over the long nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the differences between Franco-German inside perspectives and reactions from the outside on Versailles memory as in the 1919 peace conference gave way to coexisting and partially overlapping national and transnational appropriations between French, European and global significations of Versailles. The controversial capacity as a mnemonic signifier nonetheless declined. The universalizing features of early twenty-first-century Versailles memory are eclectic, if not arbitrary. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 545 Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. Himelfarb, “Versailles, fonctions et legends;” Schulze, “Versailles;” following this older national paradigm, Oppermann, Le Versailles des présidents. See François, “Auf der Suche nach dem europäischen Gedächtnis;” Borodziej, “Versailles und Jalta und Potsdam;” though developing a transnational perspective leaves aside the role of pre-1919 references in later interpretations of the Versailles Treaty. For the ‘third wave’, see Feindt et al., “Entangled Memory.” See the final section of this article. Das Gespräch mit Yannis Varoufakis: “Die Sprache der Macht,” Handelszeitung, March 3, 2015. Varoufakis, “A New Versailles Treaty Haunts Europe (And This Time It Is Not Just Me Thinking So …).”. Sophie de Menthon, “Le mot de la semaine: pacte,” Valeurs actuelles, November 26, 2015. Pierre Nora, “Le retour en grâce des symbols nationaux,” Le Figaro, November 27, 2015. Xavier Alonso Paris, “L’hommage aux victimes de Paris s’est paré de bleu-blanc-rouge,” 24 Heures, November 28, 2015. Ibid. Hollande, “Discours du président de la République devant le Parlement réuni en Congrès.” Oppermann, Le Versailles des présidents. Ziegler, Louis XIV et ses ennemis. Sloterdijk, Theorie der Nachkriegszeiten, 65; for a reinterpretation of the longue durée of Franco-German relations from this angle see Leonhard, “Nationen und Emotionen.” Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV; Da Vinha, Le Versailles de Louis XIV. U. Schultz, Versailles, 8–9 and 24; Allain, “Das Schloß von Versailles,” 59; Chaline, Le règne de Louis XIV, 232. Chaline, Le règne de Louis XIV, 275–9; Da Vinha, Le Versailles de Louis XIV, 273–8. Da Vinha, Le Versailles de Louis XIV, 213–5; Sabatier, “Les itinéraires des ambassadeurs.” See Cortequisse, La Galerie des Glaces; Constans, “Les galeries de Versailles.” See, for Louis XIV’s symbolic politics, Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV. Berger, “Tourists During the Reign of the Sun King;” Berger and Hedin, Diplomatic Tours. Louis XIV, Manière de montrer les jardins de Versailles. Völkel, Schloßbesichtigungen in der Frühen Neuzeit; Da Vinha, Le Versailles de Louis XIV, 287–9; Krause, “Versailles als Monument Ludwigs XIV.;” Ziegler, Louis XIV et ses ennemis. Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV, 169–77; Höpel, “The Versailles Model.” Junkelmann, Theatrum belli. Account by Johann Jacob Vollmann from 1787/88, quoted from Struck, Nicht West – nicht Ost. 71–2; in a similar tone Mercier, L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante, vol. 3, 202–10. See Ferrand, Ils ont sauvé Versailles, 47–65; U. Schultz, Versailles, 163–5; Völkel, Schloßbesichtigungen in der Frühen Neuzeit, 74–5. Quoted from Léonard-Roques, “Avant-propos,” 12. Gaehtgens, Versailles als Nationaldenkmal; Gaehtgens, “Le Musée historique de Versailles;” Marrinan, Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe; Bajou, “Versailles en 1837.” Revelatory for the museum’s national emphasis is the display of a globe at the ceiling of the 1830 hall carrying the inscription ‘France;’ cf. Rausch, Konstitution und Revolution, 270. Gaehtgens, Versailles als Nationaldenkmal, 247–52; Ferrand, Ils ont sauvé Versailles, 121–40. Cvetkovski, “Modalitäten des Ausstellens,” 253–64; U. Schultz, Versailles, 170. Victor Hugo, Feuilles paginées, quoted in Bajou, “Versailles en 1837,” 126; also ChenetFaugeras, “Le Versailles de Hugo un Versailles madrépore,” 53–65. See Plessen, “Versailles et l’Europe, l’Europe à Versailles.” Ludwig Rellstab, Paris im Frühjahr 1843, quoted from Gaehtgens, Versailles als Nationaldenkmal, 340–1. Bajou, “Versailles en 1837,” 122. Daheim 7 (1870/71), No. 7, November 12, 1870, 106. Ibid., 107; for the broader context of the national enemy images, Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde. 546 F. PESTEL 38. See Becker, Bilder von Krieg und Nation, 380–98. 39. Roth, La guerre de 1870, 196–7; Louis Battifol, “La proclamation de l’Empire allemand à Versailles (18 janvier 1871),” La Revue de Paris, 1919, 634‒6; Delerot, Versailles pendant l’occupation, 126–7 and 193. 40. Cassel, Gedanken beim Einzug in Versailles, 7. 41. Bartmann, Anton von Werner: Geschichte in Bildern, 105; Frederick III, Das Kriegstagebuch von 1870/71, 342. 42. Rogge, “Weiherede bei der feierlichen Proklamirung des deutschen Kaiserreiches, 18. Januar 1871,” Gott war mit uns, 42. The crown prince criticised Rogge’s pathos. Frederick III, Das Kriegstagebuch von 1870/71, 341–2; for the ceremony, see also Toeche-Mittler, Die Kaiserproklamation in Versailles; Blumenthal, Tagebücher, 232–3. 43. Cassel, Gedanken beim Einzug in Versailles, 4. 44. This phrase by Anton von Werner is quoted in Bartmann, Anton von Werner: Geschichte in Bildern, 105. 45. See also Gaehtgens, Anton von Werner. 46. Cf. Madelénat, “Le 18 janvier.” 47. Battifol, “La proclamation de l’Empire allemand à Versailles,” 650. 48. Delerot, Versailles pendant l’occupation, 209. In fact, Prussian troops entered France in 1792, 1814 and 1815. 49. Le Monde illustré, November 26, 1870, quoted in Contour, Chroniques de Versailles, 138. 50. Durand-Le Guern, “Versailles et la Commune.” 51. Oppermann, Le Versailles des présidents, 21–5. 52. See Nolhac, La résurrection de Versailles; Oppermann, Le Versailles des presidents, 78–9. 53. Oliveira Lima, Dom João VI no Brasil, 88. For the context of his work see K. Schultz, Tropical Versailles, 1–5. 54. Underwood, “Alfred Agache.” 55. Ibid., 162–3; Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, xxxv. 56. Vesentini, A Capital da geopolítica, 21. 57. Frank Svensson (a member of the central committee of the Brazilian Communist Party), “Brasília, Versalhes brasileira,” December 2, 2009, http://pcb.org.br/portal/index.php?option=com_co ntent&view=article&id=69:brasilia-versalhes-brasileira&catid=36:diversos (accessed May 2, 2016); Fabio Beno, “Brasil Feudal – Brasília como Versalhes,” July 20, 2009, Notisul, http://www.notisul.com.br/n/opiniao/brasil_feudal_brasilia_como_versalhes-18226 (accessed May 2, 2016); “Brasília, Versalhes Tupiniquim,” April 26, 2010, https://riorevolta. wordpress.com/2010/04/26/brasilia-versalhes-tupiniquim/ (accessed May 2, 2016, here the quotation). 58. Richard, Versailles: The American Story. 59. Nolhac, La résurrection de Versailles, 76. 60. Richard, Versailles: The American Story, 122–38; Oppermann, Le Versailles des présidents, 58–62. 61. Cf. Van der Kemp, The Versailles Foundation; Ferrand, Gérald Van der Kemp. 62. Allain, “Das Schloß von Versailles,” 64–5; Zorgbibe, Wilson, 284–5; Krumeich, “Versailles 1919;” Ferrand, Ils ont sauvé Versailles, 238; Sharp, The Versailles Settlement, 20; Oppermann, Le Versailles des presidents, 65–6. 63. Borodziej, “Versailles und Jalta und Potsdam,” 363 64. See, for example, for Hungarian Trianon memory without references to long-term Versailles memories Klimó, “Trianon und ‘1956’;” Bihari, “Images of Defeat;” Gerner, “Between the Holocaust and Trianon;” Gyáni, “Memory of Trianon.” 65. Bariéty, “Das Deutsche Reich im französischen Urteil, 1871–1945,” 204. For the staging and actors’ perspectives on the peace conferences, Steller, Diplomatie von Angesicht zu Angesicht, 431–70. 66. Nolhac, La résurrection de Versailles, 187. 67. Oppermann, Le Versailles des presidents, 72. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 547 68. Audoin-Rouzeau, “Die Delegation der ‘gueules cassées’ in Versailles;” Kolb, Der Frieden von Versailles, 9; Steller, Diplomatie von Angesicht zu Angesicht, 462–4. An exception is Greene, Letters 1915–1928, 107. 69. Keynes, Economic Consequences, 23. 70. Headlam-Morley, Memoir, 179. 71. Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919, 301. 72. Greene, Letters 1915–1928, 106. 73. Sharp, Consequences of Peace, 221; Orpen, An Onlooker in France, 220–3; Upstone, William Orpen, 43–6. 74. The City Council of Versailles, April 24, 1919, quoted in Boulet, “L’opinion locale,” 119. 75. Ladoué, Et Versailles fut sauvegardé; Oppermann, Le Versailles des presidents, 89–101. 76. Cf. Oppermann, Le Versailles des presidents, 92. 77. Ibid., 95‒7. 78. André Malraux quoted in Ferrand, Ils ont sauvé Versailles, 271; see also Léonard-Roques, “Crises et fractures,” 392. 79. Oppermann “Versailles comme outil de propagande,” 125. 80. Ibid., 124. 81. This analysis is based on Bourgès, Versailles au cinéma. 82. Guitry, Et Versailles vous est conté, 14. 83. Guitry, Si Versailles m’était conté, 33. 84. Baeque, “Versailles à l’écran;” Oppermann, “Versailles comme outil de propagande,” 124; Ferrand, Gérald Van der Kemp, 86. 85. Oppermann, Le Versailles des presidents, 141–72. 86. UNESCO, “Advisory Body Evaluation.” 87. Betts, “Humanity’s New Heritage.” 88. Febvre and Crouzet, Nous sommes des sang-mêlés, 249; cf. also Green, “French History,” 556–8. 89. Cf. Oppermann, Le Versailles des présidents, 10. 90. Pageard, Mémoires de Versailles, 184–5. 91. Cf. Defrance and Pfeil, Der Élysée-Vertrag; for the 2003 celebrations especially Frank, “Der Élysée-Vertrag.” 92. See the minutes of the joint session of the two parliaments, http://www.assemblee-nationale. fr/12/pdf/cri/2002-2003/assemblee-bundestag-4.pdf (accessed May 2, 2016). 93. The Franco-German history textbook subsequently substantiated this belated shared lieu de mémoire; Geiss and Le Quintrec, Histoire/Geschichte, vol. 3, 42–3; Geiss, Henri, and Le Quintrec, Histoire/Geschichte vol. 2, 302–3. 94. “Handshakes across the Rhine,” The International Herald Tribune, January 24, 2003; Philip Delves Broughton, “France and Germany are Friends Reunited: the 40th Anniversary of the Elysee Treaty is Marked by Bonhomie and Back-Slapping,” The Daily Telegraph, January 23, 2003; “Symbolic Moment that Underlines Britain’s Isolation in Europe,” The Independent, January 23, 2003; Lara Marlowe, “Schroeder and Chirac Salute Common Destiny,” The Irish Times, January 23, 2003. 95. Berthold Seewald, “Versailles ist der falsche Ort,” Die Welt, January 22, 2003; Daniel Scheidermann, “Tout va alles gut...,” Le Monde, January 25, 2003. 96. Sloterdijk, Theorie der Nachkriegszeiten, 9. 97. “Le jour où la France et l’Allemagne ont célébré leur réconciliation,” Le Monde, January 24, 2003. 98. Oppermann, Le Versailles des présidents, 75. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. 548 F. PESTEL Notes on contributor Friedemann Pestel is a lecturer in modern European history at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. He was a research fellow at the German Historical Institutes in Paris and London and at the University of Vienna. His research interests include the French and Haitian Revolutions, political emigration in the Age of Revolutions, the history of classical musical life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and memory studies. In 2015, he published his book Kosmopoliten wider Willen: Die monarchiens als Revolutionsemigranten (Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Monarchiens as Émigrés of the French Revolution) with Oldenbourg-De Gruyter. 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Gaehtgens, Thomas W. “Le Musée historique de Versailles.” In Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 2: La Nation, edited by Pierre Nora, 1781–1801. Quarto. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Geiss, Peter, and Guillaume Le Quintrec. Histoire/Geschichte, vol. 3: Europa und die Welt seit 1945. Stuttgart: Klett, 2007. Geiss, Peter, Daniel Henri, and Guillaume Le Quintrec. Histoire/Geschichte, vol. 2: Europa und die Welt vom Wiener Kongress bis 1945. Stuttgart: Klett, 2008. Giedion, Sigfried. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. Green, Nancy L. “French History and the Transnational Turn.” French Historical Studies 37 (2014): 551–564. Greene, Warwick. Letters 1915–1928, edited by Richard W. Hale. Cambridge, MA, 1931. Guitry, Sacha. Et Versailles vous est conté. Paris: R. Solar, 1954. Guitry, Sacha. Si Versailles m’était conté. Paris: R. Solar, 1954. Gyáni, Gábor. “The Memory of Trianon as a Political Instrument in Hungary Today.” In The Convolutions of Historical Politics, edited by Alexei Miller, Maria Lipman, 91‒155. Budapest/New York: Central European University Press, 2014. Headlam-Morley, James W. A Memoir of the Paris Peace Conference, 1919, edited by Agnes HeadlamMorley, Russell Bryant and Anna Cienciala. London: Methuen, 1972. 550 F. PESTEL Himelfarb, Hélène. “Versailles, fonctions et légendes.” In Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 1: La République, edited by Pierre Nora, 1283–1329. Quarto. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Hollande, François. “Discours du président de la République devant le Parlement réuni en Congrès.” November 16, 2015, Accessed May 2, 2016. http://www.elysee.fr/declarations/article/discours-dupresident-de-la-republique-devant-le-parlement-reuni-en-congres-3/ Höpel, Thomas. “The Versailles Model.” Accessed May 2, 2016. http://ieg-ego.eu/de/threads/modelleund-stereotypen/das-modell-versailles Jeismann, Michael. Das Vaterland der Feinde: Studien zum nationalen Feindbegriff und Selbstverständnis in Deutschland und Frankreich, 1792–1918. Sprache und Geschichte 19. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992. Junkelmann, Marcus. Theatrum belli: Die Schlacht von Höchstädt 1704 und die Schlösser von Schleißheim und Blenheim. Arte & Marte 1. Herzberg: Bautz, 2000. Keynes, John M. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes 2. London/Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1971. Klimó, Árpád von. “Trianon und ‘1956’ – Öffentliche Erinnerung in Ungarn.” Ost-West. Europäische Perspektiven 2 (2007): 100–107. Kolb, Eberhard. Der Frieden von Versailles. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2005. Krause, Katharina. “Versailles als Monument Ludwigs XIV.” In Bourbon – Habsburg – Oranien: Konkurrierende Modelle im dynastischen Europa um 1700, edited by Christoph Kampmann et al., 85–95. Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 2008. Krumeich, Gerd. “Versailles 1919: Der Krieg in den Köpfen.” In Versailles 1919: Ziele – Wirkung – Wahrnehmung, edited by Gerd Krumeich, 53–64. Schriften der Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte N.F., 14. Essen: Klartext, 2001. Ladoué, Pierre. Et Versailles fut sauvegardé: souvenirs d’un conservateur, 1939–1941. Paris: Lefebvre, 1960. Léonard-Roques, Véronique, ed. Versailles dans la littérature: Mémoire et imaginaire aux XIXe et XXe siècles. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2005. Léonard-Roques, Véronique. “Avant-propos.” In Versailles dans la littérature, edited by LéonardRoques, 9–22, 2005. Léonard-Roques, Véronique. “Crises et fractures de l’Histoire le XXe siècle au miroir de Versailles.” In Versailles dans la littérature, edited by Léonard-Roques, 381–397, 2005. Leonhard, Jörn. “Nationen und Emotionen nach dem Zeitalter der Extreme? Deutschland und Frankreich im 20. Jahrhundert.” In Vergleich und Verflechtung: Deutschland und Frankreich im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Jörn Leonhard, 7–25. Studien des Frankreich-Zentrums der Universität Freiburg 22. Berlin: Schmidt, 2015. Louis XIV. Manière de montrer les jardins de Versailles. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1992. Madelénat, Daniel. “Le 18 janvier: contraintes, apories et diversités d’une évocation littéraire française (1871–1900).” In Versailles dans la littérature, edited by Léonard-Roques, 343–355, 2005. Marrinan, Michael. Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe: Art and Ideology in Orléanist France, 1830– 1848. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988. Mercier, Louis Sébastien. L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante: Rêve s’il en fût jamais. 3 vols. Paris: s.n., 1786. Nicolson, Harold. Peacemaking 1919. London: Constable, 1945. Nolhac, Pierre de. La résurrection de Versailles: Souvenirs d’un conservateur, 1887–1920, edited by Christophe Pincemaille. Paris: Perrin, 2002. Oliveira Lima, Manuel de. Dom João VI no Brasil. 3rd ed. Rio de Janeiro, 1996. Oppermann, Fabien. Le Versailles des présidents: 150 ans de vie républicaine chez le Roi-Soleil. Lieux et expressions du pouvoir. Paris: Fayard, 2015. Oppermann, Fabien. “Versailles comme outil de propagande républicaine au XXe siècle.” In Les Républiques en propagande: Pluralisme politique et propagande, entre déni et institutionnalisation, XIXe-XXIe siècles, edited by Denis Rolland, Didier Georgakakis and Yves Déloye, 115–126. Paris: Harmattan, 2006. Orpen, William. An Onlooker in France: A Critical Edition of the Artist’s War Memoirs, edited by Robert Upstone and Angela Weight. London: Paul Holberton, 2008. Pageard, Robert. Mémoires de Versailles: Témoignages, souvenirs, évocations. Paris: Hervas, 1989. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 551 Plessen, Marie-Louise von. “Versailles et l’Europe, l’Europe à Versailles.” In Le musée révélé: L’histoire de France au Château de Versailles, edited by Laurent Gervereau and Claire Constans, 147–153. Paris/Versailles: R. Laffont, Château de Versailles, 2005. Rausch, Fabian. “Konstitution und Revolution: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Verfassung in Frankreich 1814‒1851.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation., Freiburg, 2016. Richard, Pascale. Versailles: The American Story. Paris: Alain de Gourcuff, 1999. Rogge, Bernhard. Gott war mit uns – Ihm sei die Ehre: Eine Sammlung von Predigten und Reden im Feldzuge von 1870/71. Berlin: Rauch, 1871. Roth, François. La guerre de 1870. Paris: Fayard, 1990. Sabatier, Gérard. “Les itinéraires des ambassadeurs pour les audiences à Versailles au temps de Louis XIV.” In Diplomatisches Zeremoniell in Europa und im mittleren Osten in der frühen Neuzeit, edited by Ralph Kauz, Giorgio Rota and Jan P. Niederkorn, 187–211. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009. Schultz, Kirsten. Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821. New York: Routledge, 2001. Schultz, Uwe. Versailles: Die Sonne Frankreichs. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2002. Schulze, Hagen. “Versailles.” In Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, edited by I. Étienne François and Hagen Schulze, 407–421. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2002. Sharp, Alan. The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking after the First World War, 1919‒1923. 2nd ed., The Making of the 20th Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Sharp, Alan. Consequences of Peace: The Versailles Settlement: Aftermath and Legacy, 1919–2010. London: Haus, 2010. Sloterdijk, Peter. Theorie der Nachkriegszeiten: Bemerkungen zu den deutsch-französischen Beziehungen seit 1945. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008. Steller, Verena. Diplomatie von Angesicht zu Angesicht: Diplomatische Handlungsformen in den deutschfranzösischen Beziehungen 1870–1919. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2011. Struck, Bernhard. Nicht West – nicht Ost: Frankreich und Polen in der Wahrnehmung deutscher Reisender zwischen 1750 und 1850. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006. Toeche-Mittler, Theodor. Die Kaiserproklamation in Versailles am 18. Januar 1871. Berlin: Mittler, 1896. Underwood, David K. “Alfred Agache, French Sociology, and Modern Urbanism in France and Brazil.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 50 (1991): 130–166. UNESCO. “Advisory Body Evaluation.” Accessed May 2, 2016. http://whc.unesco.org/archive/ advisory_body_evaluation/83bis.pdf Upstone, Robert, ed. William Orpen: Politics, Sex & Death. London: Wilson, 2005. Van der Kemp, Gérald. The Versailles Foundation. Versailles, 1972. Varoufakis, Yannis. “A New Versailles Treaty Haunts Europe (And This Time It Is Not Just Me Thinking So…).” November 21, 2010, Accessed May 2, 2016. https://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2010/11/21/a-newversailles-treaty-haunts-europe-and-this-time-it-is-not-just-me-thinking-so/ Vesentini, José William. A Capital da geopolítica. São Paulo: Ática, 1987. Völkel, Michaela. Schloßbesichtigungen in der Frühen Neuzeit: Ein Beitrag zur Frage nach der Öffentlichkeit höfischer Repräsentation. Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2007. Ziegler, Hendrik. Louis XIV et ses ennemis: Image, propagande et contestation. Paris, Versailles: Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art; Centre de recherche du château de Versailles; Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2013. Zorgbibe, Charles. Wilson: Un croisé à la Maison-Blanche. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1998. EuropEan rEviEw of History: rEvuE EuropéEnnE d'HistoirE, 2017 voL. 24, no. 4, 552–577 https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2017.1307813 From ‘flight and expulsion’ to migration: contextualizing German victims of forced migration Gregor Feindt department of History, Leibniz institute of European History, Mainz, Germany ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY The forced migration of twelve million Germans was central to German memory after 1945, and reflects fundamental changes in remembering the Second World War, that is, refocusing from German victims, such as expellees, to the victims of Germany in the Holocaust. Within this discourse, ‘flight and expulsion’ demonstrates Germany’s entangledness with her eastern neighbours and is turned into a European and transnational mnemonic discourse with the debates over a ‘Centre against Expulsions’ in the 2000s. This article studies ‘flight and expulsion’ between two mnemonic patterns, that is, the loss of the homeland against migration. After the collective imagination of a lost homeland in the east, the emerging Holocaust memory both marginalized ‘flight and expulsion’ in the late 1970s and introduced new patterns of commemoration. These patterns enabled a turn toward individual victimhood and the decontextualization of ‘flight and expulsion’ from the Second World War. The ‘Centre against Expulsions’ project demonstrates the coordination of the German example with other cases of forced migration and the claim for a universal commemoration of past expulsion and the condemnation of any future attempts. The case of Syrian civil-war refugees, however, reveals that such forms of decontextualization only in part transfer into humanitarian imperatives. received 31 May 2016 accepted 14 february 2017 KEYWORDS forced migration; flight and expulsion; entangled memory; transnational memory; Europeanization; German–polish relations Introduction In August 2015, Sascha Lobo, a blogger well known to the German-language internet, suggested in a TV debate that refugees coming to Germany were in fact ‘expellees’. His contribution to one of the central political shows on German public television touched a sore spot and immediately provoked a harsh reaction in the studio. The conservative politician Joachim Herrmann responded: ‘I hope you mean no harm, but it is an insult to the expellees, to those really expelled seventy years ago, to place them in this context.’1 As the quarrel proceeded, Lobo made sure he was talking about civil-war refugees from Syria while Hermann claimed that he had referred to southeast European Roma coming to Germany for economic reasons. In interpreting the Syrian refugee crisis – and proposing possible solutions for it – politicians, scholars, NGO representatives and other actors involved turned to historical examples, CONTACT Gregor feindt feindt@ieg-mainz.de © 2017 informa uK Limited, trading as taylor & francis Group EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 553 both supporting and opposing the reception of refugees. The controversy between Lobo and Hermann is just one case in point. A few weeks later in September 2015 German historians debated in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung whether the integration of Syrian refugees was feasible for German society. A group of young migration scholars, Jannis Panagiotidis, Patrice Poutrus and Frank Wolff, argued that the integration of German expellees in West Germany was difficult and highly controversial, but proved successful over a longer period and eventually evoked a positive memory of integration.2 Similarly, Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, referred to the manifold experience of forced migration in European history and underlined that Europe was able to cope with millions of refugees.3 The approximation of forced migration from Syria with ‘flight and expulsion’ reveals the central position of ‘flight and expulsion’ in German memory. Moreover, such a reference permits analysis of the ambivalence of conceptualizing and commemorating this German experience of forced migration that has lasted until the present day. Employing the term ‘expellees’ (Vertriebene), Lobo pointed to the specific judicial status of the twelve million German forced migrants after the Second World War and used the historic reference as an argument in the current context. He pointed to the integration of those historic expellees as a successful example to his claim that Germany should receive Syrian refugees. Hermann’s response demonstrated in turn the meaningful differentiation between legitimate and illegitimate migration and revealed that the distinction between refugees and economic migrants was unclear. The heated debate on migration is but one actualization of the history of ‘flight and expulsion’ and reaches well beyond the situation in the summer of 2015. It illustrates a more general controversy in Germany, and partly in an international discourse, whether it is possible or even necessary to understand forced migration as a universalizing experience of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.4 In the context of an increasingly global memory regime, the question ensues: should those historically forced to migrate be recognized as universal human victims, regardless of the historical context of their migration, and moreover do those currently forced to migrate deserve assistance and protection? This debate reflects upon another development in the reference to ‘flight and expulsion’ that is its frequent decontextualization of historical argument and transfer to other topics. Such struggles over the appropriate commemoration of history eventually marked off the moral foundation of urgent political decision-making, for instance in dealing with Syrian refugees. The term ‘flight and expulsion’ (Flucht und Vertreibung), as such, does not relate to any other case of forced migration beyond the Germans in 1945–48. At the end and in the aftermath of the Second World War approximately twelve million Germans had to leave their homes in the German territories east of the rivers Oder and Neisse, the Sudetenland and other regions of central and southeastern Europe. Their flight from war, chaotic evacuation, ‘wild’ expulsion or organized resettlement was a last step in a long series of forced migration. Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians, members of different German minorities, and several other ethnic groups in this region migrated under force beginning in 1938.5 This massive displacement of population turned the ethnic diversity of Central Europe into the homogeneity of nation-states,6 a dramatic change that probably outweighed the socialist take-over’s transformative power in those countries.7 In the German discourse on forced migration all those events concerning Germans would be summarized as ‘flight and expulsion’, a dual term that correlates with the official status of ‘expellees’ and enshrined a perception of the 554 G. FEINDT violent and brutal expulsion of the civilian population often without further notice to the war context. Since the 2000s, the memory of ‘flight and expulsion’ was and is highly contested both within Germany and outside Germany and formed an important debate in the new controversies on German victimhood that had evolved a few years earlier.8 Now, actors across the political spectrum framed ‘flight and expulsion’ as European. Most prominently, the project of a ‘Centre against Expulsions’ initiated in 1999 presented different cases of forced migration under an overarching narrative. Nevertheless, such universal references permeated older layers of the mnemonic discourse and mobilized further mnemonic signifiers such as ‘Heimat’, the ‘German East’ or the ‘Holocaust’. Although this commemoration centres on Germany, especially West Germany since the forced migration of Germans was taboo in the former GDR, it is situated in a transnational context as, for instance, Poland and the Czech Republic share a memory of this forced migration as ‘resettlement’ and also bring forward their memory in a European setting. This article will study the memory of ‘flight and expulsion’ with a focus on Germany and broaden this perspective in moments of mnemonic conflicts beyond the nation-state. In this regard, the article employs an understanding of memory as polyphonic and multi-layered and analyses this entangled memory as a ‘multimedia collage’.9 Therefore, the argument takes into account a variety of both actors and sources and positions these in a dynamic historical context. The article will proceed in five steps. First, it will analyse how the experience of forced migration transformed into memory in the aftermath of the Second World War. Second, this article carves out the influence of external stimuli, such as Holocaust memory and the normalization of German–Polish relations for the memory of ‘flight and expulsion’ since the late 1970s. In a third step, the controversial ‘Centre against Expulsions’, which decontextualized ‘flight and expulsion’, is coordinated with other cases of forced migration and brought forward in mnemonic interpretations as European. Fourth, new musealizations of forced migration established two patterns of interpretation: successful integration and the ongoing traumatization of victims. It will be argued, fifth, that scholars as memory experts employed a multiperspectivity of ‘flight and expulsion’ and political activists transposed it into humanitarian practice arguing for the support of Syrian refugees. Inventing expulsion and providing Heimat After the experience of forced migration, the narrative of ‘flight and expulsion’ formed the foundation of commemorating forced migration and dealing with these migrants in Germany. German politicians, the Allied occupation and representatives of expellees contributed to this interpretation and framed German migrants from the east as one single group of expellees with their various former settlement areas as a lost Heimat. This section demonstrates that such reduction of difference in experience placed ‘flight and expulsion’ within the broader context of the Cold War and made use of older mnemonic signifiers. Soon after the Second World War and the forced migration of Germans from the east, both expellee organizations and politicians strove to enclose the migration experience and defined the concepts of expulsion and Heimat. The most significant document of this homogenizing narrative was the Charter of German expellees that representatives of different expellee organizations declared on 5 August 1950. The Charter gained significance for EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 555 expellees themselves and serves until today as a point of reference for the commemoration of ‘flight and expulsion’ or for further demands. For instance, in February 2011 several, mostly conservative, members of the Bundestag suggested that 5 August should become a national day of remembrance for expulsion and contended that the Charter illustrated the successful integration of expellees into German society and their organizations’ contribution to the process of European integration.10 However, in the context of 1950 the Charter demanded first and foremost the social integration of expellees and their political participation in the Federal Republic of Germany. Signed by dignitaries of all important expellee organizations, the Charter claimed to represent all those ‘affected most by the harm of those times’ and expressed German victimhood. Both in style and language the Charter assumed the function of a constitution for the victims of ‘flight and expulsion’, defined their needs and their political claims. In this declamatory style, the Charter renounced violence and professed the expellees’ will to contribute to the ‘reconstruction of Germany and Europe’. Aiming at a broader German public, the reference to a ‘free and unified Europe’11 linked to anticommunist discourse and referred to the central political concept of the Adenauer era, Western and Christian occident (Abendland).12 The Charter highlighted two concepts that came to dominate the German discourse on forced migration for several years: the notion of ‘expellees’ and the ‘right to the homeland’ (Recht auf die Heimat, often Recht auf Heimat). The authors had thoughtfully chosen from a broad variety of available terms, such as ‘refugees’, ‘resettlers’, ‘immigrants’ or ‘new citizens’, and adopted ‘expellee’ as a self-identification.13 Naming the forced migrants expellees originated in official documents of the US Military Government and aimed at conceptualizing the process of migration as completed and irreversible.14 The Charter extended this term to all different forms of forced migration, integrating the different personal experiences and emphasizing violent expulsion.15 Furthermore, the representatives attributed expulsion with the concept Heimat that had underpinned the discourse on the German nation since the nineteenth century. Since the struggle for national unification Heimat symbolized the rootedness of the individual in his homeland and summarized these numerous homelands as an abstract value.16 Eventually, the Federal Expellee Law of 1953 implemented the term ‘expellee from the homeland’ (Heimatvertriebener) as an inheritable legal status that entitled expellees to financial support. Focusing on an abstract Heimat in the east overarched the home regions of the expellees, such as Silesia, the Sudetenland17 or Bessarabia and reduced the complexity of such different homelands. The lost Heimat, also, mobilized earlier imaginations of the German East, another nineteenth-century discourse. Similarly to Heimat, the East served as an invented tradition of the German national movement and reified a German-Slavic conflict since the Middle Ages. It had gained new prominence during Nazi rule when the Lebensraum ideology advocated the renewed colonization of Poland and the Soviet Union.18 Accordingly, ‘flight and expulsion’ meant the loss of German land that had been cultivated for 800 years and was now under the rule of communist Slavs. Thus referring to the German East combined racist and anticommunist themes, and could also rely on official support. The Federal Republic of Germany brought forward the legal claim on the borders of 1937 and maintained this claim – also affecting the GDR and leading to a policy on non-recognition until 1970 – in the constitution. The legal concept of a right to the homeland argued that the experiences of expulsion and losing the Heimat were open and contemporary questions. Until the late 1960s, both expellee 556 G. FEINDT representatives and numerous Ostforscher, that is, scholars working on the former German East, postulated a right to the homeland and influenced the domestic West German discourse on ‘flight and expulsion’. However, when legal scholars such as Rudolf Laun strove to introduce this concept into international legal discourse, deducing it from universal human rights and therefore adding it to the emerging global human-rights discourse, they failed.19 With the social and economic integration of expellees into West German society, the lost Heimat in the East turned into a nostalgic past. Whereas from the perspective of the expellees’ representatives, the right to the homeland could only be fulfilled with the return of German expellees into their former places of residence, such a return turned into an abstract and unrealistic demand.20 This became evident when between 1961 and 1965 the Protestant Church in Germany debated Germany’s relationship with her eastern neighbours. The Church prepared a memorandum on those relations, but the expellees’ organizations – until then the unquestioned experts on matters of the East – largely failed to influence its content and excluded themselves from the debates within the Church. Whereas expellee experts sought a theological backing of the Heimat and conceptualized forced migration as a violation of the God-given natural order,21 the memorandum suggested abandoning legal territorial claims for the sake of peace.22 Instead of backing the right to a homeland, the memorandum demanded a more complete integration of expellees into West German society. Although this claim provoked harsh reaction, both in politics and the public sphere, the Federal Republic abandoned the legal claim by 1972 after the Bundestag had ratified the Warsaw treaty and ‘flight and expulsion’ clearly emerged as part of the past. Conceptual transfers from Holocaust memory With geopolitical détente, the anticommunist references of ‘flight and expulsion’ had lost their mobilizing appeal. Since the 1980s, German society increasingly focused on the Holocaust in remembering the Second World War. This section argues that the dominance of Holocaust memory in Germany directly triggered new forms of remembering ‘flight and expulsion’, namely in the form of personalized victimhood. With the normalization of German–Polish relations and the growing acceptance of the GDR, the organized expellees lost the semantic safeguarding of the German East. As their demands had remained unchanged – both in content and language – since the end of the war, the expellee organizations occupied a more and more radical position within West German society that had integrated expellees and came to accept the geopolitical status. Eventually the radical stance of those organizations resulted in their self-marginalization.23 In fact, claims for the German East, so fiercely argued a few years ago, disappeared from public debate and knowledge about the region lost its significance, for example, in school curricula.24 In common language, East Germany clearly signified the GDR and since 1975 German trains would be directed, for instance, to a Polish Wrocław instead of the allegedly German Breslau.25 Instead of returning permanently and physically, those who had experienced forced migration had turned to a virtual Heimat, that is, the imagination of a lost and distant place that lived only in their memory and manifold publications.26 This literary ‘re-encounter’27 with their former homelands unclosed an independent and open relationship of many expellees with the organizations and demonstrated that the mobilization of such representatives was political rather than cultural.28 In addition, travelling to Poland or EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 557 Czechoslovakia had become more and more accessible since the 1970s and visiting their former hometowns became a common phenomenon for the generation of experience and remains to be significant today. Even more so, these ‘homesick tourists’ remained by and large the only Germans to visit the former German East before 1989 and gained expert knowledge.29 Visualizing the new reality and the Polish and Czech self-appropriation30 of the former German East eventually complemented the experience of forced migration and often contradicted previous anti-Polish stereotypes. Many expellees developed a more balanced perception of Poland and Czechoslovakia than what the organizations’ officials would publicly present.31 The decreasing presence of the topic in public debate did not indicate a taboo around the expellees or did not suggest their ‘second expulsion’, as the German historian Manfred Kittel has argued,32 but it indicated instead a shift in mnemonic focus and the medialization of memory. From 1982 onward, the Kohl government sponsored the expellees’ organizations and enabled them to erect small monuments and commemorative plaques, especially in rural areas, a practice that would continue after the reunification in former East Germany.33 This led to the paradoxical phenomenon that the marginalized memory of forced migration gained even more stability among those expellees who actively participated in such organizations or attended their small museums and community centres, the so-called Heimatstuben. In fact, Kohl’s policy of evoking the openness of the German question, that is, a possible reunification with the GDR, and abandoning the legal claims to now Polish territories even strengthened such memory of ‘flight and expulsion’, marginalized and detached from the rest of society.34 The marginalization of ‘flight and expulsion’ was accompanied by the emerging mnemonic signifier of the Holocaust that gained more and more importance within German society and eventually reshaped the rules of commemorating forced migration. Since the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in 1963–65, German society was aware of the atrocities of the Holocaust and the societal commemoration of the war turned its focus from German victims to German perpetrators.35 However, this knowledge remained on an intellectual basis and reached broader strata of German society only with the help of new forms of medialization. In January 1979, German public television broadcast the American mini-series Holocaust and caused both consternation and controversies.36 The fictional, but highly accurate, drama around the Weiss family suggested a new and more compassionate popular understanding of the Holocaust. The series narrated personal stories behind crimes that so far had remained on a solely abstract level. In contrast to Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl – a book that sold 700,000 copies in Germany between 1950 and 1955, and was also successful as a drama on stage and in cinemas37 – the fictional series displayed the actual deportation and killing of Jews. This concentration on individual victims and their deaths complemented an earlier shift of the 1960s, when German Holocaust memory had emphasized individual German perpetrators.38 Holocaust, the series, however, established Jews as the central victims of the Nazis. About every third German adult watched the entire series over four nights on regional television and the general reception was overwhelmingly positive.39 In the following two decades and across several disputes, such as the Historikerstreit in 1986–87,40 the photo exhibition of Wehrmacht crimes in 1996–9941 or the controversy between Martin Walser and Ignaz Bubis in 1998,42 it became clear that German mnemonic discourse accepted responsibility for Nazi crimes and the Holocaust was at the indisputable centre of these ‘politics of regret’.43 558 G. FEINDT The media innovation of ‘Holocaust’ and the portrayal of German guilt seemed controversial among conservative politicians and caused fears of a further marginalization of ‘flight and expulsion’. Just two years later, in 1981, German television broadcast a three-part documentary entitled Flight and Expulsion. The programme introduced eyewitness reports as a narrative tool – a revolutionary style at the time – and presented individual victimhood. Many contemporaries, both in favour and critical toward Flight and Expulsion, considered it to be a counterpart to the successful American programme.44 In contrast to Holocaust, the documentary on the forced migration of Germans was aired on the first nation-wide channel and not on regional channels. This rivalry was also associated with the producing regional broadcasting agencies, as the allegedly leftist WDR had organized the purchase and distribution of Holocaust – whereas the conservative Bayrische Rundfunk had started to produce shows on forced migration immediately afterwards. Flight and Expulsion attracted an audience of six to ten million viewers and successfully reintroduced the topic into societal discourse.45 A commentator in the liberal weekly Die Zeit even suggested the documentary was a ‘pedagogic achievement’ and demonstration of how Germany had neglected her own suffering,46 but such voices remained temporary. In retrospect, the transfer of mnemonic techniques from Holocaust memory and the usage of eyewitness reports became crucial for the commemoration of ‘flight and expulsion’ in a media society. After German reunification in 1989, two external stimuli added to the commemoration of ‘flight and expulsion’ in German society. First, the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia brought forced migration again to the public eye. As approximately 350,000 refugees came to Germany and the atrocities of war pervaded television news programmes, actual forced migration became present in Germany for the first time after the Second World War.47 The new semantics of ‘ethnic cleansing’ contributed to the understanding of such forced migration and was distinct from but still close to the concept of genocide.48 Second, a newly established normality in German–Polish and German–Czech relations allowed for debates on ‘resettlement’ – as forced migration was framed in these countries – and reflected on Germany. The Polish and Czech confrontation with a violent past took up earlier strands of the 1980s when the democratic opposition had debated forced migration. These mostly liberal intellectuals employed moral universality and pointed to the nexus of nationalist violence and communist oppression in their countries.49 In consequence, both the Polish and the Czech debate during transformation condemned forced migration as inhumane, but highlighted the necessities of the post-war situation and most voices refrained from admitting Polish or Czech guilt.50 Such considerations demonstrated the possibility of comparing forced migration as the two societies had witnessed many different aspects of the phenomenon themselves,51 but influenced the German debate merely in the small circles of intellectuals interested in Central Europe and the growing scholarship on forced migration. In contrast to these external reconfigurations the German commemoration of ‘flight and expulsion’ remained static and lacked both ‘taboo and passion’.52 Although the German reunification marked the integration of approximately two million East Germans who had declared themselves expellees,53 their experiences of both forced migration and real tabooization did not contribute to a broader debate on forced migration. Officially, ‘refugees’ or ‘expellees’ had not existed in the former GDR, as according to communist propaganda all migrants had been resettled and became ‘new citizens’ (Neubürger) of the GDR. In fact, most of the initial integration aid for forced migrants in East Germany came under the umbrella of social change and the redistribution of private possession rather than charity.54 Whereas EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 559 the efforts of the Bund der Vertriebenen (Federation of Expellees, BdV) in East Germany were mostly limited to erecting new commemorative plaques and the organizations failed to attract new support, the reasons for self-declaration as expellees were obviously not political, but rather nostalgic or even economic.55 With rise of historical documentaries and, somewhat later, period dramas in the mid1990s, the emotionalization and individualization of victims shaped a new narrative of ‘forced migration’ and provided a new pattern of absolute victimhood outside any specific context. Similarly to the TV series Holocaust mentioned earlier, the global memory regime of the Holocaust emerging in the 1990s triggered new debates about the memory of the Second World War and the alleged threat of a biological loss of memory. Whereas the older framework of collective victimhood during forced migration reflected the limitations of German society that had both experienced the Second World War under the concept of a Volksgemeinschaft,56 the emerging focus on individual stories and personal victimhood was in line with a society leaning toward individualism. The new narrative mode of filming eyewitnesses created the illusion of emotional authenticity.57 Interviewees presented their experiences often in tears and the programmes mostly omitted a broader explanation of what had happened.58 In an atmosphere of rediscovering history, the generation of experience played a crucial role in mediating the Second World War and its violence to a younger generation. Unlike former reports of witnesses that came in support of collective and territorial claims, this dramatization focused on individuals and their personal traumatic fate.59 Here, ‘flight and expulsion’ was one discursive strand in an intensified reappropriation of German victimhood since the mid-1990s. As most interviewees had been children at the time of their forced migration such retrospective sequences added to the picture of innocent victims unrelated to the war.60 The historical context of the events and the Nazi rule as such played no significant role in the new TV programmes61 that presented the German expellees as universal human victims of mass violence. A ‘Centre against Expulsions’ and the turn toward European memory With the proposition of a ‘Centre against Expulsions’ the memory of ‘flight and expulsion’ turned transnational. With fierce controversies in Poland, the debate entangled German and Polish mnemonic discourse and produced manifold, often emotionalized, cross-references. Moreover, the German debate took up other examples of forced migration in Europe and brought up the interpretation of forced migration as a European phenomenon. This section will enquire into the historical background of such arguments and place them in between nationalist interpretations of the 1950s and a mode of Europeanizing the memory of ‘flight and expulsion’. In 1999 the newly elected BdV’s chairperson Erika Steinbach proposed a ‘Centre against Expulsions’ and aimed for the new capital Berlin as the place for ‘more than a monument or a memorial’.62 In her speech at the organization’s annual rally, Tag der Heimat, Steinbach stressed that such a centre should be a ‘warning to the people, to outlaw and prevent expulsions’.63 Steinbach referred to manifold cases of expulsions during the twentieth century and especially to the case of Kosovo where such forced migration was taking place right at this time, ‘at our doorstep, here in Europe’.64 Thinking strictly along the German example, Steinbach extended the specific vocabulary of ‘flight and expulsion’ and suggested in the title of her speech – ‘Divers weights, and divers measures, both of them are alike 560 G. FEINDT abomination to the Lord’65 – that other cases of expulsion were crimes of the same value as the expulsion of Germans after 1945. With this global perspective and the reference to human rights in the rally’s motto (‘human rights are indivisible’) the BdV employed a general perspective on forced migration that had been absent from the expellee organizations since the 1970s. Accordingly, the newly founded and BdV-influenced trust ‘Centre against Expulsions’ postulated that any commemoration of expulsion was ‘not merely a concern of the German expellees, but part of an all-German fate and all-German, even European history’.66 Steinbach’s most powerful argument claimed that the lack of remembrance of ‘flight and expulsion’ made new and repeated atrocities possible. The plans for such a centre in Berlin proved highly controversial and triggered counter-proposals for other European cities. In 1999, after long-lasting debates, the Bundestag had also decided to erect a federal memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe in the centre of Berlin, close to the Parliament itself. During the general reconstruction of Berlin’s city centre and government district, Steinbach sought a chance to ensure a lasting and dignified commemoration of ‘flight and expulsion’ in the political centre of Germany. In contrast, from an Eastern and Central European perspective Berlin marked the source of the Second World War and was, therefore, unacceptable. Markus Meckel, a German Social Democrat and member of the Bundestag, proposed a ‘European Centre against Expulsions’ in Wrocław that would be planned and organized by all concerned countries and, therefore, integrate the conflicting memories. With this concept of a joint centre Meckel won the support of many politicians, scholars and intellectuals mainly from Germany and Poland.67 Polish intellectuals such as Adam Michnik and Leszek Kołakowski lobbied the cause in German newspapers and called for a project that was European through integrating Europeans in a shared museum, but the concept failed to convince Steinbach and the BdV.68 In Poland, Steinbach’s appeal to commemorate Germans as victims of the war caused public concerns over German revisionism that allegedly strove for changing the historical truth and would eventually claim lost possessions in the former German territories. Conservative publicists rallied against the planned centre suggesting that such a decontextualized commemoration of forced migration would cause a ‘moral levelling’ and questioned the acceptance of an overwhelming German guilt.69 On the background of prevalent debates about Poles murdering their Jewish neighbours during the Second World War – a controversy that revolved around Jan Tomasz Gross’s book on Jedwabne, a village in Eastern Poland70 – Steinbach’s idea of a ‘Centre against Expulsions’ contributed to the destabilization of Polish self-images. Instead of presenting Polish victimhood, such a centre might conceivably bring up examples of Poles acting as perpetrators during the Second World War. This inner-Polish controversy over the moral integrity of Poland during the Second World War unsettled national self-awareness and consequently overshadowed what had been an open German–Polish scholarly debate on forced migration in the 1990s. More dramatically, the coming EU accession raised legal questions concerning the former German territories and individual claims to lost property, which fuelled fears of losing national sovereignty in the European Union. German politicians, for instance, the conservative candidate for the chancellorship Edmund Stoiber, called for the abolishment of decrees and legislation that had permitted forced migration. Such calls, and the strong resistance in Polish media,71 materialized in the scenario of Germans returning to western Poland, either buying land and real estate or even using European law to regain their former property. The Preußische Treuhand, a private company close to the expellee organization EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 561 Landmannschaft Schlesien (Territorial Association of Silesia), prepared such legal actions and consequently nourished fears even though it represented no more than five individual cases. Eventually these reservations led to special clauses in the accession agreements that prevented Germans from purchasing land in Poland for seven years. In this heated situation, the mnemonic debate took place within national boundaries and the cross-reference to other positions led to a confrontational emotionalization. For instance, Wprost, a Polish weekly well known for its polemic style and an adversary of the expellees’ organizations for some time, portrayed Steinbach in an SS uniform riding on the back of Chancellor Schröder and published the cartoon in September 2003 on its front page.72 The image received great attention in Germany73 and these reactions illustrate the entanglement of mnemonic discourse between Germany and Poland. The emotional confrontation even endorsed national frames of interpreting forced migration. In the Polish case the communist narrative of a ‘justified punishment’ and the demonization of the BdV returned;74 and in Germany older demands for the integration of expellees into German society reappeared as demands to integrate German expellees into German memory, to commemorate them as victims during the Second World War. In this controversy Europe served as the omnipresent horizon of expectation, both for German and Polish voices. They differed, nevertheless, in their concept of Europe and more importantly in the object of such a Europeanization of forced migration itself or its commemoration. On the background of the EU enlargement, in August 2005, the German government initiated, together with Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity to develop a ‘European culture of remembrance’ in the ‘spirit of reconciliation’.75 This network did not substitute the planned centre that was still fiercely debated but aimed at framing the project in an international cooperation. However, the Czech Republic and Austria, both of whom had taken part in the first negotiations, would not support the initial consensus and revealed an inherent weakness of the institution, its political dependency. After a new, conservative and nationalist government in Poland took office in November 2005 and the network’s members could not decide on its programme, an advisory board was not installed before 2010 and the remembrance network was likened to a ‘stillbirth’.76 New museums of integration versus victimization European musealizations of ‘flight and expulsion’ sought to overcome the national frames of commemorating the forced migration of Germans with two new narratives: successful integration or traumatic and lasting victimization. Both interpretations generalized victimhood and decontexualized the German phenomenon, stressed the multitude of forced migration in the twentieth century, and related it to other cases of forced migration. This section enquires into the narrative innovation of the institutional project in the ongoing debate about a ‘Centre against Expulsion’. In 2005 and 2006, two exhibitions organized by the Haus der Geschichte museum and the ‘Centre against Expulsion’ trust presented a more detailed approach toward Europeanizing the memory of forced migration and pointed to the two narratives of flight and expulsion as European: universality and polyphony. For a short period of time, the two exhibitions were installed in the very centre of Berlin opposite each other and allowed the interested public to compare the two approaches easily. 562 G. FEINDT Flight, Expulsion, Integration77 was a temporary exhibition that embedded ‘flight and expulsion’ into a post-war German story of success. The Bonn-based museum Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland – known for its affirmative and educational approach toward the contemporary history of Germany – conceptualized the temporary exhibition for its main museum in the former capital. Here, forced migration posed as a phenomenon that permeated Europe after the First World War. The museum employed a dense narration of individual stories with videos of contemporary witnesses and summarized the greater context of forced migration. This narrative aimed to resolve the experience of forced migration in the conclusive integration of forced migrants into West German society after 1945 and transformed victims of forced migration into self-determined individuals.78 This positive narration reduced the topic’s high complexity and carefully evaded a neat orientation along the BdV narrative and Steinbach’s emphasis on victimhood.79 The exhibition was highly successful and very well attended. Both the German and the highly sensitized Polish press commented on the exhibition very positively.80 The parallel exhibition Coerced Paths curated by the ‘Centre against Expulsions’ trust focused on the ongoing and repeated traumatization of forced migrants and integrated them into traditional narratives of the German East. Similarly to Flight, Expulsion, Integration, the exhibition presented a European perspective from the Armenian genocide to the Yugoslav wars. However, the exhibition did not aim to explain forced migration as such and also left open how resettlement – a respected concept of conflict prevention rooted in international law – had turned into a significant crime against humanity.81 With this lack of a wider perspective and a simple coordination of different cases of forced migration, German ‘flight and expulsion’ outweighed other examples. In consequence, the exhibition brought forward a German perspective of German victimhood backed up by other examples that would provide fresh memories of acute traumatization, such as the Yugoslav wars. This presentation of German victimhood, however, reactivated nationalizing interpretations of the German East that had lost prominence since the 1970s. This bias of stressing German victims and renewing older nationalist patterns under the interpretative framework of Europeanization became even more obvious in two follow-up exhibitions of the ‘Centre against Expulsions’ trust that brought up the medieval German colonialization (Ostsiedlung) and the lost homeland.82 The two museal interpretations reveal a fundamental contradiction within this German discourse, namely the clash of two layers of experience, trauma and integration. The memory of a successful integration of expellees contradicted their traumatization and lost its hegemonic position within the commemoration of forced migration. This came to the fore during the process of mnemonic Europeanization when the apologists of the ‘Centre against Expulsions’ took up other European examples of forced migration to support their claims. Linking the forced migration of 1945–48 to more contemporary cases and, hence, pluralizing the German term of flight and expulsion, this narrative evaded overcoming the past conflicts that stood behind the original expression. More importantly, the narrative of a permanent and traumatizing expulsion maintained the argument of a lost Heimat. In contrast to the narrative of integration and its presupposition of a new and post-migration home, the project of a ‘Centre against Expulsions’ brought forward an understanding of Heimat and consequently the German East that had prevailed until the 1960s. In this situation of a German–Polish mnemonic conflict, another institutional and state organized project attempted to enshrine a European solution and follow Steinbach’s EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 563 demands for a ‘Centre against Expulsions’. In December 2008, the German government decided to install a federal foundation titled Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation to realize the museum project in cooperation with the Eastern neighbours.83 The plan, notwithstanding, was less of a compromise but accumulated conflicting positions and largely followed the centre’s concept. Similarly to demands by Steinbach and the Bund der Vertriebenen that elevated the 1950 Charter of German expellees to a milestone of European reconciliation, the new federal foundation intended to highlight ‘how much the European idea had determined the readiness of the German expellees such as the foundation “Centre against Expulsion” for reconciliation with neighbouring peoples and for integration.’84 In 2010, several conservative members of the Bundestag called accordingly for 5 August, the day of the Charter’s proclamation, to be declared a ‘memorial day for the victims of expulsion’.85 The pronunciation of such European and reconciliatory merits of the expellees’ organizations was highly controversial.86 Nevertheless, it stressed the discursive potential of ‘Europe’: labelling a mnemonic interpretation as European proved crucial for its wide acceptance within a political discourse. Admittedly, the extensive usage of Europe as an attribute of memory emptied the signifier ‘Europe’ extensively. Just as the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity struggled to bring an institutionalized European commemoration into practice, the new German foundation began its works under difficult circumstances. After long and public discussion about the foundation’s board, Steinbach withdrew her intention to participate in the planning of the state-funded museum. Other representatives of the BdV also failed to find public and international acceptance, as they had a long record of revisionist opinions.87 Initially, the international scholarly advisory board gathered historians from both Germany and other countries. However, especially Polish historians such as Krzysztof Ruchniewicz or Piotr Madajczyk came under attack in their home country with conservative and nationalist historians and publicists accusing them of national unreliability because of their work on such boards.88 Transposing ‘flight and expulsion’ in memory and humanitarian practice With the controversial debate on a ‘Centre against Expulsions’, historians proved increasingly important as experts and referred again to Europe as a source of mnemonic legitimacy. Moreover, current events added another point of reference: the high numbers of Syrian war refugees coming to Germany in 2015 and 2016 stimulated comparison between German expellees and such contemporary forced migrants. This section will enquire into scholarly debates that transgressed the specific context of forced migration and its memory. It will therefore elaborate, first, how scholarly multiperspectivity assumed a mnemonic position of its own, and, second, how debates about Syrian war refugees brought about a new understanding of ‘flight and expulsion’. Fierce controversies are typical for the negotiation of contemporary history and often fail to foster the ongoing research on relevant topics, such as forced migration and its mnemonic representation.89 In the conflict about a ‘Centre against Expulsions’, especially historians with a focus on Eastern European history and German-Polish relations served as experts and transferred interpretational patterns derived from scholarly discourse into the debate on the memory of forced migration. However, two modes of expert positions can be distinguished: on the one hand, expert interventions supporting a specific discursive position; and on the other, experts establishing a unique scholarly position within general discourse. 564 G. FEINDT First, some historians such as Andreas Kossert or Manfred Kittel maintained Steinbach’s claim that there was no dignified commemoration of forced migration and further emphasized this impression with their scholarly work and institutional support.90 Other historians such as Eva and Hans-Henning Hahn reacted against the planned centre with harsh and polemic criticism and attacked the expellee organizations as such.91 Second, and more interestingly, several collectives of authors, mostly consisting of historians with a long reputation in international scholarly collaborations such as Dieter Bingen, Włodzimierz Borodziej, Stefan Troebst or Krzysztof Ruchniewicz, took a different stand and called for a less emotionalized debate.92 At the very beginning of the German–Polish quarrels, for instance the Copernicus group – a loosely organized think tank of German and Polish academics – questioned the prevailing national epistemology of the debate and suggested that a ‘shared view on expulsion opens up an understanding for the suffering of others’.93 In this, they transferred dialogical patterns of presenting German–Polish history that the joint textbook commission had established from the 1970s onward and implemented them into the context of memorial places and museums.94 The most elaborated example of such a dialogical musealization was a joint concept of seven German historians for the planned Berlin museum. Debating if ‘flight and expulsion’ should be studied and presented from the perspective of migration studies, nationalism studies or the history of violence in the twentieth century this meant a meaningful innovation.95 In 2010, two years after the federal Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation trust had been established and yet had failed to present a concept for the museum, the group proposed a multiperspective musealization organized along the history of three cities. The historians, affiliated with the German-Czech and German-Slovak commission of historians, advised against any additive narrative structure that would present cases of violence or forced migration without differentiation, for instance, comparing too easily ‘flight and expulsion’ with other examples of forced migrations or the Holocaust.96 The various scholarly concepts of dialogue and multiperspectivity aimed at integrating mnemonic difference and enabled coordination of contradictory mnemonic interpretations with regard to both mnemonic difference within a nation and such difference between national discourse. In contrast to the pluralization of forced migration as proposed, for example, by the exhibition Coerced Paths that summed up unrelated cases of forced migrations to a ‘century of expulsions’, expert historians such as the collective of authors affiliated with the German-Czech Commission of historians drew a picture of a multi-faceted conflict. They reflected the broad historical research on the topic and included several and repeated forced migrations into a narrative that referred to Europe as a consciously heterogeneous constellation of memory. This article argues that such an attempt of translating scholarly multiperspectivity into public commemoration can be understood as the merging of a practice of moral universalization with mnemonic heterogeneity. In this case, Europe poses as the presupposed and institutionalized imagination of the mnemonic others and forms a holistic third party of commemorating mass violence such as ‘flight and expulsion’.97 With the influential narrative of a successful integration of expellees into West German society that had been brought forward, for instance, by the Haus der Geschichte and its Flight, Expulsion, Integration exhibition, the debate on ‘flight and expulsion’ mobilized the omnipresent concept of integration that had permeated the various migration debates since the 1970s. Applying such a concept linked the debate about German victimhood with other EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 565 forms of migration, for instance the economic migration of Gastarbeiter or, more at the present time, refugees coming to Europe across the Mediterranean.98 The following section will study how such decontextualization mobilized humanitarian action and questioned mnemonic positions on ‘flight and expulsion’. Here, the Syrian refugee crisis mentioned earlier serves as an example of how current events constitute the mnemonic frame of ‘flight and expulsion’ and consequently questioned the self-understanding of expellees. The crisis confronted the memory of forced migration as a universalizing experience with a new group of actual victims coming to Germany and manifested the visible experience of forced migration. The various calls for a European and global memory of forced migration raised during the debate on a ‘Centre against Expulsions’ coordinated ‘flight and expulsion’ with other examples of violent population movement, especially with cases that happened in present days. This pattern of re-actualization and coordination – that for instance Steinbach used in 1999 to raise awareness for the commemoration of German victims99 – proved stable when German politicians conceptualized the Syrian civil war and its refugees with ‘flight and expulsion’. For instance, as early as 2013 federal President Joachim Gauck used the German experience of supporting expellees after the Second World War as a recurring reference when he advocated the acceptance of refugees coming to Germany.100 Accordingly, in the German public sphere the semantics of ‘flight and expulsion’ provided a language for describing the events in Syria and thus accompanied the transfer of mnemonic patterns.101 During the summer of 2015, Germany witnessed a wave of support and even euphoria for Syrian refugees from broad strata of society. In this specific situation, the implicit equalization of all forms of migration became a leitmotif of the German discussion, referring both to the humanitarian imperative of supporting refugees and successful earlier experiences. One of many examples of humanitarian argumentation, Franz Alt, a well-known publicist, presented a short and oversimplified history of refugees throughout world history. Linking Jesus with the Dalai Lama, Alt’s ‘call for international solidarity’ argued that refugees and migrants in general contributed strongly to their host society and served as cultural go-betweens.102 Dieter Zetsche, the Daimler chairperson, expressed his hopes for a new Wirtschaftswunder with the help of motivated and skilled Syrians, comparing them with Gastarbeiter.103 Although clearly different in ethical derivation and trajectory, such universalizing conceptualizations of the Syrian forced migration drew on the mnemonic decontextualization of forced migration that was established around the planned ‘Centre against Expulsions’. In the atmosphere of social approval for humanitarian action, the coordination of Syrian refugees with German expellees reached the expellees’ organization and revealed the limitations of such comparison. In August 2015, the BdV’s new president Bernd Fabritius, a conservative member of the Bundestag for Munich, joined the empathy for the Syrian victims of forced migration that was especially visible in the city of Munich itself. In his speech at the annual Tag der Heimat – in 2015 under the motto ‘expulsion is injustice – then and today’ and clearly commenting on current events – he wished to welcome the refugees with ‘open hearts’ and ‘with even more empathy than our mothers and fathers received seventy years ago’. Referring to the refugees as ‘sorely afflicted people’ (leidgeprüfte Menschen, a term that resembles the 1950 Charter of the expellees), he emphasized the differences in the integration of German expellees and present-day Syrian refugees with special regard to cultural and religious difference. Regardless of the present challenges of such an integration into 566 G. FEINDT German society, Fabritius called for solidarity with the victims of expulsion, but demanded a ‘clear differentiation between [those] and such people, who had NOT been expelled, but opted for voluntary migration, mostly for economic reasons’. Fabritius, therefore, attempted to limit the ongoing interpretative approximation of different forms of migration, marking forced migration as exclusively fit for empathy and social support. In this perspective, the BdV’s president declared that the organization’s new destiny was to support those refugees in their integration into German society.104 Fabritius’s speech suggested a new self-understanding that some observers considered to be a ‘reinvention’ of the expellee organizations.105 In addition to Fabritius, Andreas Kossert, a historian often close to the BdV, presented in the weekly Die Zeit post-war refuges as ‘triggers of an unexpected modernization’ in Germany and called for more confidence in the successful integration of present-day refugees into German society. More symbolically, Kossert put the trolley that many refugees used to carry their few possessions during their forced migration on a level with ‘today’s boat drifting on the Mediterranean’.106 But, despite the simultaneous public attention after the aforementioned controversy between Hermann and Lobo, the debate on the analogy of German expellees and Syrian refugees soon ebbed away after autumn 2015. The BdV reached only short-term significance in the debate and even Fabritius’s significant speech was mostly absent from German media. In another speech, three months later before the Bundestag, Fabritius narrowed down his previous call for an openhearted integration of Syrian refugees significantly. When arguing against the reception of further civil-war refugees, he again referred to the experience of expellees. This time and reflecting voices within German society and his own party critical towards the reception of further refugees, Fabritius suggested that it was best to accommodate Syrians close to their homeland, that is, in Turkey.107 Instead of calling for empathy and positive reception, the expellees’ expertise now provided a tool to restrict further Syrian refugees from coming to Germany. Yet, Fabritius’ second speech failed to receive any public recognition. In this situation, German media did not take the organized expellees for experts on issues of forced migration any longer. With the growing number of Syrian refugees and the lack of any joint European effort, the German debate witnessed more and more critical positions toward the integration of Syrians. Eventually the mnemonic pattern of a universalizing concept of victimhood and the analogy to ‘flight and expulsion’ disappeared. Conclusion: integrating German victims of forced migration This article demonstrated the mobilizing power of forced migration in twenty- and twenty-first century memory. Well beyond the German example of ‘flight and expulsion’, victimization promises moral and eventually political empowerment and claims a universal position. However, the case under scrutiny highlights the ambiguity of these mobilizing references. The following will stress the aspects of this process: the conceptualization of victimhood, the decontextualization of mass violence, the transfer of moral guidelines to contemporary questions, and eventually the aporia of universalizing the memory of mass violence. First, the memory of ‘flight and expulsion’ developed intensively over time and saw two significant changes in the conceptualization of the victims of such forced migration. Had the commemoration of the expellees’ organizations and the German government in the EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 567 1950s and 1960s focused on ‘integrative discourses on victims’108 that framed victimhood as collective and clearly national, the understanding of German victims developed over time into a memory of individual and universal human victims. This turn changed the meaning of expulsion as such. Early utterance stressed the loss of a homeland, or more collectively the loss of the German east, whereas the second phase of ‘flight and expulsion’ emphasized violence against expellees and their individual suffering. Second, this reinterpretation of ‘flight and expulsion’ reflects on the imminent influence of Holocaust memory and its narration of victimhood. This influence is therefore the first and foremost example of decontextualization in commemorating mass violence. Here, the clear context of forced migration dissolved in favour of universal victims and the moral condemnation of the crime. Such a pattern first came up in the human-rights reference of the 1950s and 1960s around the ‘right to a homeland’ concept that omitted the place of the experience within the Second World War and on the background of German war crimes. Both forms of decontextualization provided a moral basis for legal and institutional claims but also introduced reciprocal and equal commemoration. In other words, commemorating the forced migration of Germans after 1945 under the concept of universal victimhood necessarily called for the commemoration of similar events in other places and at other times. Third, ‘flight and expulsion’ is an eminent example of transposing moral guidelines to other, mostly present-day cases of forced migration. During the Yugoslav wars in the early 1990s and especially during the Syrian refugee crisis, ‘flight and expulsion’ served as a point of reference both for accepting refugees and providing humanitarian aid, and in rare cases proposing other solutions that prevented refugees from coming to Germany. The latter example is the case of Bernd Fabritius, a Bund der Vertriebenen representative who changed his political agenda within a few months and demonstrated that universalizing memory did not necessarily support universal humanitarianism, but clearly served the cause of a historical victim group. This is but one example of the aporia of universalizing victimhood in mnemonic interpretations of ‘flight and expulsion’, especially those brought forward by the Bund der Vertriebenen and the ‘Centre against Expulsions’, who failed to follow this normative transfer. For instance, the exhibition Coerced Paths presented a multiperspective history of forced migration but centred on the German examples and eventually applied culturalist and nationalist interpretations of a German east that did not include a reciprocal or self-reflexive moment, nor did it align with universal prevention of crimes against humanity. The only obvious example of decontextualizing not only the events commemorated but the groups commemorating the events helps to clarify this mnemonic aporia. As German and Polish scholars with a background in international and multiperspective research presented concepts of commemorating forced migrations beyond the group identities of experience they established a European third party that presupposed other memories and formed a multiperspective and widely impartial mnemonic interpretation. This introduced a specific mode of commemoration into the debate that went beyond the prevalently binary episteme of mnemonic conflicts.109 Similarly, the transposition of such moral universality into contemporary political questions such as how to deal with refugees from the Syrian civil war lays bare the aporia of impartiality and reciprocity in commemorating mass violence. In the light of the Syrian refugee crisis, the memory of ‘flight and expulsion’, both in Germany and her Eastern neighbouring countries, has nearly disappeared from the public debate and only serves as a point of reference for current debates on the integration of other migrants. This adds to the picture of a memory that since the 1970s lacked clear and 568 G. FEINDT long-lasting hegemonic narratives and positions and demonstrates that the universality of ‘flight and expulsion’ merely served as an argument in support of specific claims, but did not change the concept of forced migration in a broader understanding. Consequently, in the 2010s, ‘flight and expulsion’ more and more referred to one case in the diverse history of migration to Germany and not an example of mass violence and German victimhood. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. Original quote: “Ich hoffe, Sie meinen es nicht so bös', aber es ist eine Beleidigung der Vertriebenen, der wirklich damals vor 70 Jahren Vertriebenen, die in diesen Kontext zu stellen.” “Beleidigung der Vertriebenen,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, August 28, 2015, http:// www.sueddeutsche.de/medien/2.220/umstrittene-aeusserung-von-joachim-herrmannbeleidigung-der-vertriebenen-1.2625337 (accessed January 26, 2017). Lobo referred to an idea the Journalist Mario Sixtus made public on Twitter a few weeks before the incident. Mario Sixtus, “Tweet, 22.07.2015,” Twitter, https://twitter.com/sixtus/status/623857358444306432 (accessed January 26, 2017). Jannis Panagiotidis, Patrice Poutrus, and Frank Wolff, “Integration ist machbar, Nachbar,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 29, 2015. The authors referred to an earlier intervention Jörg Baberowski, “Europa ist gar keine Wertegemeinschaft,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 14, 2015. Jean-Claude Juncker, “State of the Union 2015: Time for Honesty, Unity and Solidarity, September 9, 2015,” http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-15-5614_en.htm (accessed January 26, 2017). For instance, Gatrell, Making, 283, advocates a history of the twentieth century through the lens of refugees. In addition to this Nazi-enforced migration, the Stalinist Soviet Union employed a regime of mass deportation in the Great Terror and during the Second World War. Snyder, Bloodlands. Mazower, Dark Continent; Naimark, Fires of Hatred. See for a recent attempt to narrate the contemporary history of Central Europe as a history of mobilities: Krzoska, Ein Land unterwegs. German victimhood had been a persistent topic in West German debates, as Margalit: Germany Remembers, demonstrates. However, these controversies intensified in the middle of the 1990s with debates about the Allied bombings of German cities such as Dresden. Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory,” 190; for the concept of entangled memory see, Feindt et al., “Entangled Memory.” “Antrag der Abgeordneten Klaus Brähmig et al., 60 Jahre Charta der deutschen Heimatvertriebenen – Aussöhnung vollenden, Deutscher Bundestag Drucksache 17/4193,” http://dipbt.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/17/041/1704193.pdf (accessed January 26, 2017). All quotes: “Charta der deutschen Heimatvertriebenen vom 5. August 1950,” http://www.dhm. de/datenbank/img.php?img=20043507&format=1, (accessed January 26, 2017). Schildt, Zwischen Abendland und Amerika, 26. Beer, “Flüchtlinge – Ausgewiesene – Neubürger – Heimatvertriebene,” 149f. Stickler, “Ostdeutsch heißt Gesamtdeutsch,” 10. E. Hahn and H. H. Hahn, Vertreibung im deutschen Erinnern, 495, for instance, stress that 4.8 million forced migrants resettled under the control of the Allied military government are the most disregarded group of expellees. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials. The Sudetenland was itself an abstract umbrella term that emerged after 1918 to describe the Czechoslovak border regions, in which the German minority formed a local majority. Demshuk, The Lost German East, xx. Wildenthal, Language of Human Rights, 58–60. Demshuk, “What was the ‘Right to the Heimat’?” For instance, opinion polls showed that 30% of West Germans rejected a return by 1959. Cf. Jahrbuch für öffentliche Meinung, 505. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 569 21. Rudolph, Evangelische Kirche und Vertriebene, 46–9, see for a Catholic position, Voßkamp, Katholische Kirche und Vertriebene, 232–4. 22. Die Lage der Vertriebenen, 37. See Feindt, “Zwischen ‘Recht auf Heimat.’” For a similar Catholic position, see the Bensberg Circle, an unofficial group of Catholic intellectuals and theologians. Bensberger Kreis, Memorandum. 23. Struve, “‘Vertreibung’ und ‘Aussiedlung’,” 293. 24. Kittel, Vertreibung der Vertriebenen? 90–2. 25. Ibid., 127; Lotz, Die Deutung des Verlusts, 133. 26. Hartwich, “Wirtualny Heimat;” Beer, ed., Das Heimatbuch; Eisler, Verwaltete Erinnerung. 27. Lehmann, Im Fremden ungewollt zuhaus, 144. 28. This applies especially for expellees from southeastern Europe; see Faehndrich, Eine endliche Geschichte, 216. 29. Demshuk, “Heimaturlauber.” 30. Cf. examples of imagining such realms as Polish: Thum, Uprooted; Hartwich, Das schlesische Riesengebirge. It is striking that this self-appropriation came along with the public forgetting of forced migration – both of the migration of previous and current inhabitants of the area. Wylegała, Przesiedlenia a pamięć, 434. 31. Faehndrich, Eine endliche Geschichte, 216. 32. Kittel, Vertreibung der Vertriebenen. For a critique of Kittel’s argument, see Lotz, Deutung, 207. 33. Hesse, “Denkmäler und Gedenkstätten,” 115. 34. For Kohl’s strategy, see Korte, Deutschlandpolitik, 247–54; Wicke, Helmut Kohl's Quest for Normality, 150–3. 35. Wolfrum, Die geglückte Demokratie, 277. 36. Schulz, “Film und Fernsehen.” 37. Levy and Sznaider, Holocaust, 59–64. 38. Horn, Erinnerungsbilder. 39. Wilke, “Fernsehserie.” 40. The Historikerstreit centred on the possible or impossible comparison between Nazi and Stalinist mass violence. See for an analysis, Große Kracht, “Der Historikerstreit.” 41. The exhibition caused major controversies since its launch in 1995 and toured several German cities. The authors withdrew it in 1999 after claims that pictures portrayed crimes other than those of the Wehrmacht, but renewed the exhibition in 2001. Hartmann, Hürter and Jureit, Verbrechen der Wehrmacht. 42. The controversy drew upon the position of the Holocaust in German memory, see Schirrmacher, Die Walser-Bubis-Debatte. 43. Olick, The Politics of Regret. 44. See, for instance, the commissioning editors’ explanation, Mühlfenzl, “Warum erst jetzt?” 8. 45. Kittel, Vertreibung der Vertriebenen, 159. 46. Janßen, “Für das Leben gezeichnet,” Die Zeit, February 20, 1981. 47. Franzen, “Der Diskurs als Ziel?,” 5. 48. Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 2–4. 49. Danubius, “Tézy;” Lipski, “Two Fatherlands – Two Patriotisms.” For a contextualization in oppositional discourse, see Feindt, Auf der Suche nach politischer Gemeinschaft, 195–9 and 206–21. 50. Majewski, “Zwischen Versöhnung,” 39–41. 51. Kraft, “Platz der Vertreibung,” 342–8. For an overview of the debates, see Bachmann, Verlorene Heimat; Petr Pithart et al., Die abgeschobene Geschichte. 52. Röger, Flucht, Vertreibung und Umsiedlung, 69. 53. Ibid., 50. 54. For a concise comparison, see Ther, Deutsche und polnische Vertriebene. 55. Probably at least part of this new self-identification 45 years after the original experience came from financial aid. In accordance to the original “equalization of burdens” (Lastenausgleich), a large-scale financial transfer on behalf of the expellees, a new law opened such ways for Eastern Germany in 1994. See Röger, Flucht, Vertreibung und Umsiedlung, 50. 570 G. FEINDT 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. Bajohr and Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft; Thießen, “Erinnerungen an die ‘Volksgemeinschaft’.” Franzen, “In der neuen Mitte,” 51. Ther, “Diskurs,” 35. Röger, Flucht, Vertreibung und Umsiedlung, 161–2. This was mostly exemplified with the Allied bombings of Dresden. See, Benda-Beckmann, German Historians, 271–333, Berek, Interaction between national and local memory. Röger, “Zeitzeugen.” Franzen, “Diskurs,” 10. Steinbach, “Zweierlei Gewicht,” 28. Ibid., 22. Proverbs 20:10 (King James Version). “Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen,” 287. “Gemeinsame Erinnerung als Schritt in die Zukunft: Für ein Europäisches Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen, Zwangsaussiedlungen und Deportationen – Geschichte in Europa gemeinsam aufarbeiten, Juli 2003,” http://markus-meckel.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/AufrufEurop%C3%A4isches-Zentrum-gegen-Vertreibungen_mit-Unterzeichnern.pdf (accessed January 26, 2017). Adam Michnik, “Breslau, nicht Berlin,” Die Welt, May 15, 2002; Leszek Kolakowski, “Noch einmal: Über das Schlimmste,” Die Zeit, September 18, 2003. Piotr Semka, “Za wcześnie na Wroclaw,” Rzeczpospolita, March 28, 2002. The debate revolved around Jan Tomasz Gross’s book Neighbors, published in Poland in 2000, and on Jedwabne. Majewski, “Zwischen Versöhnung,” 48–50. A similar debate revolved around the so-called Beneš decrees that regulated the forced migration of Germans from Czechoslovakia. Sławomir Sieradzki, “Niemiecki koń trojański,” Wprost, March 21, 2003. For instance, Thomas Urban, “Troja in Warschau,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, September 18, 2003. Röger, Flucht, Vertreibung und Umsiedlung, 115 and 213–7. “Absichtserklärung,” 307. Troebst, “Wiederbelebung einer ‘Totgeburt’? Das Europäische Netzwerk Erinnerung und Solidarität: Polen-Analysen 33, May 20, 2008,” http://www.laender-analysen.de/polen/pdf/ PolenAnalysen33.pdf (accessed January 26, 2017). Rösgen, ed., Flucht, Vertreibung, Integration. For a detailed description of the exhibition, see Völkering, Flucht und Vertreibung im Museum, 78–83. Ibid., 77–8. Franziska Augstein, “Auf dem Leiterwagen,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, December 3, 2005; Sabine Voßkamp, “Ausstellungs-Rezension zu: Flucht, Vertreibung, Integration 03.12.200517.04.2006, Bonn, in: H-Soz-u-Kult, March 18, 2006,” http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin. de/rezensionen/id=35&type=rezausstellungen (accessed January 26, 2017). Jürgen Günther, “Annäherung an ein heikles Thema,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, December 16, 2005. See for a summary: “Pressestimmen zur Ausstellung Flucht, Vertreibung, Integration Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Bonn vom 3. Dezember 2005 – 17. April 2006,” http://www.zeitgeschichte-online.de/sites/default/files/documents/presse_ ausstellung_bonn_0.pdf (accessed January 26, 2017). Puttkamer, “Irrwege des Erinnerns,” 290. See Die Gerufenen: Deutsches Leben in Mittel- und Osteuropa, http://www.ausstellungdiegerufenen.de/index.php (accessed May 17, 2016). A third exhibition focused on the integration of expellees after 1945. See Angekommen: Die Integration der Vertriebenen in Deutschland, http://www.ausstellung-angekommen.de/ (accessed January 26, 2017). This was the result of the grand coalition’s compromise to support a “visible sign” as a memorial for the forced migration of Germans after the Second World War. See “Gemeinsam für Deutschland – mit Mut und Menschlichkeit, Koalitionsvertrag zwischen CDU, CSU und SPD, 11.11.2005,” https://www.cdu.de/system/tdf/media/dokumente/05_11_11_Koalitionsvertrag_ Langfassung_navigierbar_0.pdf?file=1&type=field_collection_item&id=543, 114 (accessed January 26, 2017). EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 571 84. “Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (19.03.2008) “Sichtbares Zeichen gegen Flucht und Vertreibung Ausstellungs-, Dokumentations- und Informationszentrum in Berlin,” http://www.sfvv.de/sites/default/files/downloads/ konzeption_bundesregierung_2008_sfvv.pdf (accessed January 26, 2017). 85. “Antrag der Abgeordneten,” 4. Eventually, Germany initiated such a memorial day in 2014 and opted for 20 June, the international day of the refugee. Although the federal states of Hessen and Bavaria had introduced memorial days of their own to be held in September, the public commemoration of ‘flight and expulsion’ proved a niche topic. Dräger, “Ein Hoch.” 86. For various examples of these organizations protesting against calls for reconciliation with Poland for the sake of territorial claims, see Heller, Macht, Kirche, Politik, 86; Boll, “Der Bensberger Kreis.” For the Nazi past of many early functionaries of the expellees’ organizations, see Schwartz, Funktionäre mit Vergangenheit. 87. Steinbach, for instance, had written about ‘extermination camps’ for Germans in a newspaper article, Erika Steinbach, “Das Leid von 15 Millionen vertriebenen Deutschen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 8, 2000, and Hartmut Saenger, another BdV-candidate doubted the guilt for the Second World War. See Franziska Augstein, “Versöhnen oder verhöhnen,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 31, 2010. In total, the board comprises 19 members: four members of the Bundestag, three government representatives, six representatives of the BdV and two representatives each for the Protestant Church in Germany, the Catholic Church and the Central Council of Jews in Germany. 88. A first wave of such accusations prevailed in 2005–7 with Marek A. Cichocki, an advisor to the Polish President Lech Kaczyński, Darisuz Gawin, the director of the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising, and Zdzisław Krasnodębski, a Polish sociologist teaching in Germany, being the most prominent critics. See Gawin, Pamięć i odpowiedzialność; Cichocki and Kosiewski, Pamięć jako przedmiot władzy. The concept of strong national politics of history based on an antagonism toward Germany appeared again under the new national-conservative government since 2015. See Bogdan Musiał, “Triumf niemieckiej Propagandy,” W Sieci, February 8, 2016. 89. Sabrow et al., “Einleitung,” 14. 90. Both Kittel, Vertreibung der Vertriebenen, and Kossert, Kalte Heimat, argued that the Heimatvertriebenen composed a distinct social group that is represented by Steinbach and her Bund der Vertriebenen. In 2009 and 2010 both assumed positions in the new ‘Centre against Expulsion’ foundation, Kittel as a director (until 2014) and Kossert as a research consultant. 91. E. Hahn and H.H. Hahn, Die Vertreibung. Several reviews considered the book at least in part a ‘pamphlet’. See Röger, “Review;” Winfried Halder, “Ein schiefes Bild?” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 12, 2011. 92. Ther, “Diskurs,” 29. See for the history of these commissions Guth, Geschichte als Politik; Strobel, Transnationale Wissenschafts- und Verhandlungskultur. 93. “Arbeitspapier VI der Kopernikus-Gruppe ‘Europäisches Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen’ Handlungsempfehlungen für eine Konzeption,” http://www.deutsches-polen-institut.de/ politik/kopernikus-gruppe/arbeitspapier-vi/ (accessed January 26, 2017); cf. “Bonner Erklärung.” 94. Röger, Flucht, Vertreibung und Umsiedlung, 179–80. 95. See http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/index.asp?pn=texte&id=1350 (accessed January 26, 2017). 96. Martin Schulze Wessel et al., “Konzeptionelle Überlegungen für die Ausstellungen der ‘Stiftung Flucht, Vertreibung, Versöhnung’ (2010),” http://www.hsozkult.de/daten/2010/ Konzeptpapier_Vertreibungen_ausstellen_Aber_wie.pdf (accessed January 26, 2017). The concept received vivid reaction, often criticizing the too complicated and intellectual approach feeling more like a book than a museum. 97. For a wider discussion of this epistemic shift see, Esslinger et al., Die Figur des Dritten; Bedorf et al., Theorien des Dritten. 98. Wolfgang Görl, “Von Verdun bis Lampedusa,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 11, 2014. 99. Steinbach, “Zweierlei Gewicht.” 572 G. FEINDT 100. Gauck used this argument for the first time in his 2013 Christmas Address and repeated the analogy frequently “Weihnachtsansprache 2013 von Bundespräsident Joachim Gauck,” http://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Reden/2013/12/131225Weihnachtsansprache-2013.pdf;jsessionid=7A65C839A4CB94485DEB85E633AD074F.2_ cid388?__blob=publicationFile, 2 (accessed January 26, 2017). 101. For instance, Martin Gehlen and Christian Böhme, “Das grenzenlose Drama der syrischen Flüchtlinge,” Tagesspiegel, October 26, 2014. 102. Alt, however, integrated refugees, forced migrants, repatriates and economic migrants into a single group and considers migrants as such a cultural stimulus. Alt, Flüchtling, 9. 103. “Flüchtlinge könnten Wirtschaftswunder bringen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 15, 2015. Some publicists openly questioned his comparison as ahistorical; see, for instance, Virginia Kirst, “Was Flüchtlinge von Gastarbeitern unterscheidet,” Die Welt, September 18, 2015. 104. All quotations Bernd Fabritius, “Ansprache zum Tag der Heimat des Bundes der Vertriebenen am 29. August 2015 in der Berliner Urania,” http://www.bund-der-vertriebenen.de/ presse/news-detail/datum/2015/09/03/ansprache-zum-tag-der-heimat-des-bundes-dervertriebenen-am-29-august-2015-in-der-berliner-urania.html (accessed January 26, 2017). Capitals according to the original. 105. Karsten Kammholz, “Vertriebene erfinden sich durch Flüchtlingshilfe neu,” Die Welt, September 9, 2015. 106. Andreas Kossert, “Flüchtlinge: Böhmen, Pommern, Syrien,” Die Zeit, October 12, 2015. It goes without saying that such comparison is often simplistic, as Beer, “Die ‘Flüchtlingsfrage,’” emphasizes. 107. Bernd Fabritius, “[Speech], Plenarprotokoll der Deutschen Bundestages,” 18. Wahlperiode, 148. Sitzung, 17. Dezember 2015, pp. 14386–14388, http://dipbt.bundestag.de/doc/ btp/18/18146.pdf (accessed January 26, 2017). 108. Goschler, “Versöhnung und Viktimisierung,” 874. 109. Koschorke, Ein neues Paradigma der Kulturwissenschaften. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes on contributor Gregor Feindt is a research fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz. His research concentrates on the transnational and conceptual history of twentieth-century Central Europe, especially Poland and Czechoslovakia. 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Accessed January, 2017. http://www.deutsches-polen-institut.de/politik/kopernikus-gruppe/arbeitspapier-vi/. “Bonner Erklärung.” In Vertreibung gesamteuropäisch erinnern: Gemeinsam - nicht getrennt! edited by. Historisches Forschungszentrum der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 7–9. Bonn: Historisches Forschungszentrum, 2007. “Charta der deutschen Heimatvertriebenen vom 5. August 1950.” Lebendiges Museum Online. Accessed January 26, 2017. http://www.hdg.de/lemo/html/dokumente/JahreDesAufbausInOstUndWest_ erklaerungChartaDerHeimatvertriebenen/index.html. “Gemeinsam für Deutschland – mit Mut und Menschlichkeit, Koalitionsvertrag zwischen CDU, CSU und SPD, 11.11.2005.” Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands. 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Accessed January 26, 2017. http://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Reden/2013/12/ 131225-Weihnachtsansprache-2013.pdf;jsessionid=7A65C839A4CB94485DEB85E633AD074F.2_ cid388?__blob=publicationFile. “Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen. Stiftung der deutschen Heimatvertriebenen Berlin: ‘Aufgaben und Ziele’, Juni 2000.” In Diskurse über Zwangsmigrationen in Zentraleuropa: Geschichtspolitik, Fachdebatten, literarisches und lokales Erinnern seit 1989, Veröffentlichungen des Collegium Carolinum 108, edited by Peter Haslinger, K. Erik Franzen, and Martin Schulze Wessel, 287–288. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2010. EuropEan rEviEw of History: rEvuE EuropéEnnE d’HistoirE, 2017 voL. 24, no. 4, 578–605 https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2017.1307809 Made in France? The (re-)invention of ‘Mai 68’ Félix Krawatzek nuffield College, university of oxford, oxford, united Kingdom ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Whenever young people protest, references to the French ‘Mai 68’ are quickly made. For nearly 50 years, former activists and journalists have turned events in the Latin Quarter in Paris into the main symbol for the potential of youth to pressure governments. Western European politicians and scholars easily index ‘Mai 68’ as the positive core of ‘European Memory’. French accounts during the historical moment initially emphasized, however, the global experience of student unrest. Such interpretations understood mobilization in Mexico, Poland and Nigeria as sharing one horizon of expectation and turned worldwide anti-authoritarian student unrest into an interpretive frame. With the unfolding of events in France, the French narrative shifted from a globally experienced present to a nationally framed ‘évènement’ of the past. This shift from lived experience to memory turned the student mobilization into a succession of French historical events coined ‘les évènements de mai-juin 68’. The commemoration of French events as a paradigmatic case sidelined mobilization in other European, Asian, African and Latin American countries. Meanwhile, this nationalization gave way to a pacified Franco-centred narrative which could be juxtaposed to the European memory scale whilst neglecting its internal contradictions stemming from the diverse European and global peripheries. received 26 May 2016 accepted 17 february 2017 KEYWORDS Mobilization 1968; france; European memory; entangled memory Introduction On 16 May 2008, Aleksei Andreev, journalist at the moderately regime-critical Novye Izvestiya, affirmed: ‘Exactly forty years ago, European youth gave all its power to their imagination.’1 Amongst the global outpouring of writings on the fortieth anniversary of ‘68’, such Russian comments are a particularly striking interpretive layer. Since 2005, Putin’s seemingly unshakeable authoritarian rule had been destabilized, driven by the mobilization of young men and women. However short-lived this anti-regime mobilization, by 2008, oppositional movements still had sparks of hope for democratic change.2 Andreev’s article therefore programmatically reminded Russian youth of its potential to shake regime foundations as he pointed to the key symbol of European youth in a revolt that ‘changed the entire Western civilisation’. The Russian journalist insisted that the epicentre of ‘68’ was Europe, for him the ‘Western World’, but in particular Paris. For Andreev, the mobilized CONTACT félix Krawatzek felix.krawatzek@politics.ox.ac.uk © 2017 informa uK Limited, trading as taylor & francis Group EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 579 youth put an end ‘to the bourgeois world of their own fathers and to the boring sermons of the “old comrades”.’ This profound change ‘from the barricades’ happened in a bloodless way; Andreev’s historical interpretation therefore implicitly legitimized and empowered the bloodless ‘Colour Revolutions’ in neighbouring post-communist countries.3 Seen from 2008, Paris represents the core of ‘68’ memories. From that core, the significant cultural and political changes across the ‘old continent’ followed. Memories cultivated by witnesses, descendants or the wider public turned ‘68’ into a positive mnemonic signifier even further afield than Europe. I argue that the mnemonic rules of the French ‘Mai 68’, which rely on a reduction of the contradictory experiences during 1968 itself, could become universally applicable across very different instances of political mobilization past and present. How did the process of mnemonic reduction unfold and what was its consequence? I suggest that in the remaking of ‘68’ through memory, the contradictory experiences of the lived present have been reduced. Through this reduction, the particularized French case was emptied of most of its controversial content and thus reduced, ‘68’ has transformed into a cipher through which actors could plausibly link very different experiences. Across Western Europe, actors have derived ideals of European unity and a common future by referring to the dreams of ‘68’. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, when asked about ‘European identity’ affirmed: Yes, after all 1968 was a European movement. It had different motives but it was happening in many places in Europe. And this anti-authoritarian rebellion has provoked a new type of society across Europe. Today, man is on the way to a common identity.4 Devoted academics themselves strive for mnemonic integration of those who are unjustifiably excluded in collective memory. Chris Reynolds sees ‘clear parallels between events in Northern Ireland and France’, since ‘a “68-style” movement took place [in Northern Ireland]’.5 Its absence in a ‘European collective memory’ cannot be justified by differences in context, as ‘such specificities have not precluded other nations from joining the roster’.6 Looking at Scandinavia, Thomas Jørgensen maintains that a ‘democratic revolt’ united the ‘European 1968’. He attempts to include the Scandinavian 1968 into the ‘general European picture’, challenging its absence in the historiography.7 Scholars are part of the ‘68’ memory cycle. The next wave of ‘68’ publications and conferences around 2018 is already being prepared. Descendants and scholars will further develop ‘68’ memories, revolving around the (nostalgic) memories centred on questions of the student actors, the duration of ‘68’, its (non-)violence, or the effects on France and other countries. Eastern European actors have also extended their ‘68’ over time. They now participate in the mnemonic realm with ‘68’ references that leave it open as to whether the specific point of reference is Paris or Prague. In July 2015, Donald Tusk, the European Council’s liberal-conservative Polish President updated the ‘present past’ of ‘68’ in Europe in different interviews about the economic situation in Greece: To my mind, the atmosphere today is very similar to 1968 in Europe. I feel a state of mind, maybe not revolutionary but of impatience … But when impatience becomes a collective sentiment, it can lead to a revolution. The massive unemployment of young people is maybe the most striking and visible reason.8 Tusk places contemporary Europe into one shared horizon of experience and expectation and refers to one single ‘68’ void of contradictions and sufficiently open for universal application. 580 F. KRAWATZEK Current attempts – from activists, descendants or scholars – to expand the scope of ‘68’ spatially and/or temporally, in many ways back to the transnational and polyphonic experience of the years around 1968, point to the overly positive connotation of the signifier ‘68’. But the positive and universal ‘68’ has always known a conservative counter-interpretation that gained influence in France by the end of Chirac’s presidency in 2007. Unlike the expansive positive memory, Sarkozy’s interpretation restricted ‘68’ to France and shunned references to the movement’s European or global dimensions. Instead, he accused ‘Mai 68’ of having imposed ‘moral and intellectual relativism’ on France. With sarcasm, he reduced ‘68’ to the slogan ‘Vivre sans contrainte et jouir sans entrave’, which illustrated why ‘68’ destroyed the excellent Republican school tradition of Jules Ferry that enabled French citizens, and by the implication of French Republicanism’s universal radiance also the rest of the world, to absorb one culture and its shared morals, talk to one another, and live together.9 In 2013, the mariage pour tous mobilization reiterated the conservative reuse of ‘68’ memory.10 The movement’s key spokesperson, Frigide Barjot, underlined this continuity: ‘We want to be at the initiative of a “counter-May 68” which is not backward-looking but represents clearly a burst towards the future.’11 The mariage pour tous mobilization opposed what ‘68’ signified – its members restaged an event that in iconography and slogans compared to ‘68’.12 Though la manif pour tous draws on the nation as a frame of reference, political scientist Gaël Brustier argues that this movement actually opposed values that ‘Europe’ had come to stand for after the rejection by referendum of the European Constitutional Treaty in 2005, notably a lack of accountability, as political elites were criticized for not having adequately responded to the results of the referenda.13 Sarkozy and la manif pour tous illustrate the magnitude of a conservative and explicitly national ‘68’. A profound societal division over the legal status of same-sex parents rendered the mnemonic plurality visible.14 Within conservative interpretations, Europe, understood as an institutional structure, is a threat. Conservative politician Laurent Wauquiez discards Europe, emphasizing instead the importance of religiously inspired values for France: ‘I will never let the judges of the ECHR [European Court of Human Rights] who have no political legitimacy, dictate to me my vision of the family.’ This article’s argument develops in three steps. First, by drawing on scholarly literature from around 2008, I emphasize the extent to which mnemonic frames have their bearing on scholarship. Frequently, academics have reiterated mnemonic frames that expose a historical space of experience which is in many ways similar to that of participants and observers. Questions of geographical scale, actors and significance structured the dominant scholarly narratives around 2008. Second, around the year 1968, when the mobilization was part of the lived experience, debates in leading newspapers understood the unrest and its motivation in a global dimension which decisively impacted on the interpretive frames of ‘68’.15 The press drew on an array of spatial, temporal and social references and this struggle about the meaning of ‘68’ was itself part of the unfolding of the mobilization. Gradually, ‘68’ turned from lived experience to memory as the mobilization was ongoing. In memory, references to events occurring beyond France became less prominent, detaching the mobilization from its initial global context. Instead, temporal and spatial references revolving primarily around France itself took hold, updating older mnemonic signifiers of French national history and placing the mobilization in their succession. The mobilization thus understood was shortlived, coined les évènements de mai-juin 68. Third, between 1968 and the present, several overarching themes have united the gradually evolving memory as manifest in academia and EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 581 the wider public. At every decadal anniversary, mnemonic rules became cemented. These unified and nationalized mnemonic rules turned into global icons of ‘68’; resonating with long-established images about idealistic youth, they were persuasive to a large audience. I. Scholars as actors in memory: scales, actors, significance Memories of ‘68’ remain a crucial topic to deliberate about current political and social controversies.16 Research has uniquely contributed to those memories, blurring distinctions between academics and partisans.17 An interpretation of ‘68’ memories that equates a diversity of national or social experiences with a very particular French experience comprised of Paris, students and a debate about the significance of the mobilization became universally persuasive. Those prevailing mnemonic frames structure much of the scholarly debate which is itself reacting on contributions by witnesses and descendants. Bursting the nation? The growth of transnational and post-colonial approaches in history has given rise to comparative work in memory studies.18 Gradually the investigation of the ordering function of transnational categories and the processes of transfer and diffusion came to the attention of ‘68’ memory scholars. Indeed, recent contributions rightly criticize that most research has remained focused on the revolt’s traditional epicentres, i.e. Paris, Berlin or Rome, neglecting transnational components that enabled and shaped how contemporaries of the 1960s understood their period.19 Robert Gildea, James Mark and Anette Warring’s volume suggests that activists had a shared reading of post-war European political developments ‘which framed the collective experience of 1968 in Europe’.20 They pursue and locate, drawing on oral history and the Europeanness of 1968, and show the consciousness for the geographical stretch across Europe.21 But Europe represented only one possible transnational frame of reference. Others put centre stage the diversity that transnational categories of experience communicate. Different temporal and spatial scales characterized the experience of ‘68’ and actors moved between France, Europe and the world when interpreting their present.22 Accordingly, the global setting within which political and social actors placed mobilization, for instance in Germany and the United States, has received attention.23 Given the extensive transfer of ideas and practices, other contributions illustrate the importance of overcoming dichotomies like foreign and domestic to appreciate ‘68’.24 Such recent work develops previous comparative studies, which pointed to transnational contacts,25 and reflexively integrates questions of scale. However, an important strand in scholarship finds it less disturbing to reproduce and legitimize categories of interpretation of memory. In particular French researchers, sometimes former participants, reiterate the Paris-centred narrative and dismiss transnational links, such as the demonstrations against the Vietnam War, as ‘disconnected from reality’.26 Still, contributions from outside of France remain enclosed in a national horizon and for the most part Paris. Michael Seidman emphasizes that radical students were a marginalized minority and Gaullist France succeeded in adapting to the demands of the average student.27 Also Kristin Ross remains restricted to the national and underplays the crucial role of transnational diffusion.28 National analyses prevail in the literature,29 even if they might compare different national developments they only rarely study diffusion or entanglements.30 582 F. KRAWATZEK Descendants equally reproduce those same national categories. In direct response to Sarkozy’s criticism of ‘68’, the philosophers André and Raphaël Glucksmann published their dialogue about the French, primarily Parisian, ‘68’.31 Various accounts by former activists similarly turn the national frame into an acceptable truth as a container for memories of ‘68’32 and Virginie Linhart’s book about her father places his activism in a strictly national frame.33 Though Patrick Rotman acknowledges the importance of the Vietnam War and an emerging global youth culture, for the actual unfolding of events he falls back on the national frame and neglects transnational circulation of actors and ideas.34 Opposing this reduction and reflecting his own transnational biography, Daniel Cohn-Bendit insists on the importance of the global dimension for understanding ‘68’ and has long tried to move beyond nation-centred interpretations.35 Research on regional or group specificities serves as a corrective to such nation-centred memory. These studies can contribute to understanding memories’ entanglements and ideally permit appreciation of the different ways in which the global experiences have translated into concrete actions. By emphasizing specificities, this stand in scholarship deconstructs reductionist and homogenizing voices in memory and tries to also shift the memory discourse toward a polyphonic perspective.36 Meanwhile, the prevailing interpretations of ‘68’ have spatially truncated ‘68’ to Paris. Through those interpretations, the mnemonic signifier ‘Mai 68’ turned into a symbol of national revolt, which became void of contradictions, and thus emptied could travel across national contexts. Was everyone young? Memories of ‘68’ have to determine the actors. Most memories published by witnesses put students or youth in the central position37 and scholars mostly confirm these mnemonic rules.38 Kristin Ross, however, forcefully challenged this convenient mnemonic consensus. She develops a critique of the student-centred narrative contained in French historiography and memory: For May ‘68 in fact had very little to do with the interests of the social group – students or ‘youth’ – who sparked the action. What has come to be called ‘the events of May’ consisted mainly in students ceasing to function as students, workers as workers, and farmers as farmers: May was a crisis in functionalism.39 This questioning of the student narrative further paved the way for thinking about other neglected voices. Recent scholarship underlines, for instance, the role of workers and that firms acted as political spaces, opposing a prevailing view that reduces firms to pure sites of production40 or strives to include peasants into ‘68’ to value the changing social and economic relations that ‘68’ enabled in rural France.41 Glorifying student-centred perspectives also had its opponents, in part because scholarship by 2008 increasingly directed its attention to disturbing elements. By comparing France and Italy, Mammone challenges the national and the social scale of memory. Looking at developments in political culture, he emphasizes the enabling side of diffusion for the extreme Right and how the mobilization around 1968 strengthened neo-fascist movements and political strategies.42 Others excluded previously from ‘68’ are slowly emerging in scholarship but remain side-lined voices, such as the outraged footballers of May 1968.43 Those scholars who look beyond the foremost student or youth narrative, reflexively work with one key category of ‘68’ memories. But it is the reduction to one social group which EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 583 has given way to the universalization of ‘68’. It is by setting everyone who participated in ‘68’ functionally equal to students that memories of ‘68’ become universally applicable. It therefore becomes irrelevant as to whether or not everyone had been young. Did the barricades change France? Along a third axis, memory and scholarship on ‘68’ fall into one of two camps: ‘Either it is … sublime and great or monstrous and absurd, either important or insignificant’, as Edgar Morin, Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort argued in 1988.44 Indeed, scholars and other actors tend to pronounce very firm views on this issue, claiming for instance that ‘68’ had no long-term consequences in an analysis that ends in June,45 or that the short movement had always failed to challenge democracy.46 On the other side, former activists such as Geismar maintain that the French mobilization ‘profoundly transformed the patterns of relationships between people’.47 And in particular, scholars looking beyond the student core highlight the long-term consequences. Vigna emphasizes for instance the impact of ‘68’ on enabling later worker mobilizations through acquired experiences.48 Most scholars now reach beyond the short-term histories that dominate acts or remembrance. To contextualize the degree of change, Gerard De Groot refers to the ‘disorderly decade’ as a prism to understand ‘68’49 and Paul Hockenos understands ‘68’ as part of global post-1945 history.50 The question of the historical and value significance of ‘68’ is important for the mnemonic signifier’s universalizing capacity. Depending on the ideological position, acts of remembrance within and beyond France respectively find the ‘important or insignificant’ version suitable to plait their own particular ‘68’ narrative – Prague, Stockholm, Belfast – into the reduced ‘Mai 68’. II. Europe as lived reality: explain, enable, extrapolate ‘68’ On 24 May 1968, Paul Johnson, editor of the London-based New Statesman, marvelled about a ‘New Spectre Haunting Europe’. Johnson, from an outside perspective, placed the student mobilization in historical parallelism to the, according to him, explicitly European revolutions of 1848. ‘As in 1848, each outbreak in each European capital contains the seeds of another elsewhere, as students gain courage from the success and audacity of their foreign brethren, and learn from their mistakes.’51 Privileging the European frame, he interpreted ‘68’ as part of the French and European, but not British, present, a lived experience, not (yet) qualifying as memory. Interpretations of ‘68’ as lived experience emphasized the transnational and with that scale placed French events into the global present. A spatially and temporally diverse set of references characterized ‘68’ as lived experience and ‘Europe’ was one of those references. This European frame remained permeable to other transnational categories of experience and contemporaries swiftly adjusted scales in their interpretations. A transnational mobilization ‘aux quatre coins de l’Europe’ Just prior to the unfolding of events in France, Alain Touraine explained why there can be no student movement in Europe: Above all Europe embodies today too much the middle class of nations for there to emerge easily movements that are entirely responsible for their aims and their motivations. It is not 584 F. KRAWATZEK in this continent that the most dramatic social and political conflicts of the world are situated today. Europe’s students participate in the large movements of history only indirectly, by proxy.52 Europe as an historical entity justified his reading of the present and granted meaning to his expected future of French calm. The political Left argued the opposite, embedding the mouvement action universitaire in a European context to give promise to the French movements. In late March, when France was still calm, Le Combat emphasized that students were not isolated but inspired by demands formulated across Europe, putting their awaited mobilization into a shared frame.53 For students, events unfolding in their local European neighbourhood constituted a mobilizing opportunity. Representatives of ‘European university movements’ travelled to France and expressed support for French ambitions.54 Even the conservative press anticipated a youth contestation, already referring to the youth as ‘a new generation of revolutionaries’ (the previous one was the generation of Red October) able to ‘erase the profound divisions of Europe after the war’. Describing their motivations as new-romantic, Jacques Buisson placed French youth in a European zeitgeist.55 During May 1968, the European frame emphasized particularities of the European students. A Protestant weekly claimed: ‘What characterises the student revolt in particular in Europe, where reason and morals do not survive, unlike in Anglo-Saxon countries, is its absence of structure.’56 A similarly contradictory pattern of mobilization characterized Europe’s youth, in the borders of the EEC (European Economic Community). Observers underlined contacts between Western European students and interpreted the mobilization as thus being European. The reference to university problems shared across Europe strengthened such interpretations. L’Express also underlined the similarity of demands and methods ‘aux quatre coins de l’Europe’.57 Communists explained the similarity in the student contestation across Europe with the continent’s fundamental socio-economic changes over the last 20 years. This experience of change united students who grew up with national liberation movements in Asia and Latin America, with the spread of radio and TV. L’Humanité and other left-wing interpretations explicitly put the European experience which united the young generation in a global horizon of experience and stressed Europe’s global embeddedness.58 However, Thierry Pfister, national secretary of the socialist students SFIO (French Section of the Workers’ International), affirmed that despite a European-wide student mobilization, demands hardly compared: If we assist at an essentially political fight in the name of liberty in Madrid just as in Warsaw, to the contrary, in Germany and Italy the demands have their origins much more in the university and aim at categorically overthrowing the outdated structures of occidental European universities.59 For him, Western European student movements lacked a genuine mobilizing theme, whereas those in Eastern Europe and Spain had legitimate demands for democracy. The political Right emphasized this actual disunity of youth. Youth in ‘oriental Europe’ legitimately sought liberation from Moscow’s yoke, whereas Paris had no monopoly on the troubles. L’Express portrayed differences and commonalities of European youth mobilizations, eventually suggesting similarities with mobilized youth in Tokyo, Venezuela or Peru.60 Popular outlets justified Alain Peyrefitte’s decision to close Nanterre. The Minister of Education, forced to resign in the aftermath of ‘68’, saw as the source of the upheaval ‘the desire for imitation: certain French students who learnt that students in other European countries made rackets and destroyed everything, wanted to do just like them.’ Such a EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 585 conservative interpretation approved the way Pierre Grappin kept order and criticized Europe as the space through which violence diffused easily.61 Others similarly warned that contagious violence, the ‘irrepressible fever’ of university youth was a ‘European phenomenon’. Delegitimizing the mobilization as unjustified, the European space covered only parts of Western Europe: Paris, Rome and Berlin.62 Reinforcing the mobilization through transnational references Student movements aimed at overcoming the distinction between Western and Eastern Europe. The recognition of shared reasons for mobilization crucially legitimized students’ demands. Jacques Sauvageot, vice president of the student syndicate UNEF, emphasized that ‘there is no fundamental difference to the student movements that have emerged in Eastern Europe and that also convey the refusal of a certain ideological mould imposed on the students.’63 In a European space of contestation, the rejection of authoritarianism united students. Sauvageot could reiterate a socialist narrative of expected revolutions across Europe which were led by France. Western media generally welcomed the Prague Spring and approved of activists’ violence in Communist Europe. It seemed therefore promising for student leaders to make their own contestation sound similar to the one in Czechoslovakia or Poland, an important shift compared to Pfister’s view expressed just one week earlier. Numerous interpretations drew historical parallels between 1968 and a history of French revolutions. Akin to the mimetic revolution, the persistent restaging of the French Revolution during upheavals of the nineteenth century,64 in 1968 participants imitated previous French revolutions that had not been part of their lived experience. They restaged revolutionary practices taken from the French historical arsenal of revolutions. By restaging the country’s revolutionary past, the present of 1968 melted with a shared horizon of revolution. Notable references to 1848, the beginning of the Second Republic, created an impression that the revolutionary moment had come once again and that regime change, the already experienced future of 1848, was a necessity in 1968 given the constructed historical parallelisms. The historical comparison programmatically increased the magnitude and legitimized the on-going mobilization. In continuity with 1848, extensive interpersonal networks across Europe provided a feeling of community to European youth. The New Statesman’s British readership got the impression that European youth, men and women, but not necessarily Britons, were ‘inspired by common attitudes, grievances, disgusts and doctrines, which leap across the frontiers’.65 Indeed, given the mix of languages students spoke, Johnson referred with admiration to the ‘pentecostal mood’, comprehension beyond linguistic differences.66 He pursued his empowering Europeanizing narrative by equating Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the German student leader in France and self-proclaimed European, with Robespierre: ‘This jovial young Robespierre, with his flaming red hair and piercing blue eyes, has the true revolutionary’s gift of combining a philosophy which can be reasoned, slogans which can be shouted and a mad-dog taste for taking positions by frontal assault.’ In a similar tone, Philippe Saint-Marc underlined the inspirational European frame and parallels between 1838 and 1968, two attempts to overcome the undemocratic structures that had emerged 23 years after a major European war. For Saint-Marc, the mobilization in both years relied on global inspirations and the youth mobilization across the globe challenged adult society in Europe.67 Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, founder of L’Express, linked historical Europe to other transnational frames when referring to the commonplace ‘politics 586 F. KRAWATZEK was a lie’. He emphasized that this was the case all across Europe and even the industrialized world, East and West.68 Speaking to a French audience, he illustrated the lies by mentioning the ‘colonial empire’, ‘the victory of 1918’ or Poincaré’s ‘bonne gestion’, but maintained that the phenomenon existed across the industrialized world in both East and West. Figure 1. interdit de séjour pour crime d’impérialisme (1968). source: image provided by victoria university Library (toronto), repository of the posters. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 587 Beyond the European, students mobilized larger transnational references. Posters testified to their desire to maintain the transnationally shared motivation for mobilization. One poster stressed the globally shared goal of smashing capitalism and opposing US-led imperialism. The Student Comité d’Action presented ‘Ni卐on’ as the unquestionable driver of imperialist crimes across the world and in different social groups, but de Gaulle, old and feeble, simply supported him (Figure 1). Other posters made at the Sorbonne during Figure 2. tricontinentale sorbonne (1968, atelier populaire. Ex-Ecole des Beaux-arts). source: image provided by victoria university Library (toronto), repository of the posters. 588 F. KRAWATZEK 1968 similarly underlined unity with oppressed peoples across three continents (Figure 2), mobilized against the expulsion of their ‘foreign comrades’,69 or their hope that the people win against the tanks.70 Ludivine Bantigny explores similar global references, finding, for instance: ‘When the Mouvement du 22 Mars titles itself as such, it makes a political reference to the Mouvement du 26 juillet launched by Fidel Castro in Cuba in 1953; but it also functions as dynamic, giving a new impulse, kneaded of hesitation and of experimentation.’71 Creating a future with Europe Europe served as a reference point to lengthen the revolutionary moment in writings by activists. Glucksmann prolonged the present of ‘68’ and emphasized: ‘Excluded from official calculations, the spectre of revolution demonstrated in the streets that it still haunts Europe.’72 His analysis unified European movements in a decisive moment with the capacity to liberate Europe from control exercised in Washington and Moscow.73 The idea of Europe could convey one idealized future that spanned across the continent’s internal division. Commentators underlined personal contacts between youth with supposedly European attitudes and described a young generation aiming for generational renewal. During the intense mobilization, Jacques Duhamel argued in Le Monde that those in power destroyed the European project but that youth were aware that nationalism provided no alternative: ‘As a perspective forward, which those in power destroyed in the name of a nationalism, remained the mystique of Europe and youth evidently felt that nationalism provided no future for themselves and the solidarity with the “third world”.’ Europe, for Duhamel, was one option for society’s future and he called for a dialogue to explore this possibility.74 François Mitterrand similarly underlined that ‘youth believed in Europe’, which the political power, however, destroyed. Taking the example of a European space of research, he emphasized that a European future is the only way to help France realize its ambitions and that this conformed to what the youth wanted.75 Shifts from lived experience to memory are contested and occur gradually. A clear line of demarcation cannot be drawn. This ambivalence can be seen in the cited article by Johnson. The author also deviated from the trans-European narrative and suggested that there was something unique about France: One of the reasons why France today must fascinate any student of politics is that the Gaullist government has contrived to make every mistake in the book. (It’s fair to add that it has some distinguished precursors, notably the governments of Louis XVI, Charles X, Louis-Philippe and Louis-Napoléon). This perspective contains the elements that substantiate the nationalized interpretation turning ‘68’ into memory, namely the attempt to present France as the paradigmatic case of student revolt. III. From experience to memory: Universal France The earliest struggles in France about what ‘68’ ought to mean as memory gave no prominent place to mobilizations in other European, Asian and Latin American countries. During 1968, memories about ‘Mai 68’ revolved around national temporal and spatial references and placed the current mobilization into succession of a French past. Understood this EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 589 way, ‘68’ became les évènements de mai 68, short-lived and Paris-centred. Memory, unlike interpretations as lived experience, marginalized the global dimension of unrest. This process of particularizing the French experience itself made possible the ensuing, universal application of the mnemonic rules of ‘Mai 68’ in numerous national or social ‘68’s. This particularization, which was to some extent a pacification, allowed ‘Mai 68’ to operate as a universally meaningful and benign, thus politically less controversial, signifier. Contracting spatial references ‘Everyone knows U.S. students eat ice cream all day.’ In The New Yorker, Paris-based Mavis Gallant underlined after the first barricades and just prior to the general strike in May, that whenever she mentioned that the student movement originated in the United States she merely received ‘skeptical smiles’.76 In France it became quickly implausible to believe that US consumer teens started this upheaval and when understanding ‘68’ as part of the past, media, and the earliest books, already printed in June, reduced ‘68’ to Paris. This interpretive contraction gave coherence to the diverse and contradictory ‘68’ mobilizations across the globe. In the shift to memory it was possible to frame the French events as the critical expression of a phenomenon with global repercussions. Once the first wave of uncertainty and excitement had vanished, the nation provided a convenient and reassuring lens that enabled commentators to integrate ‘68’ into a historical narrative that conformed with public ideas. The nationalization of the désordre is prominent in interpretations that referenced the French revolutionary context. Intellectuals reiterated historical parallels, notably the revolution of 1848. However, at the end of May, Jacques Chastenet, member of the French Academy, placed 1848, unlike earlier comments, in an exclusively French realm. Addressing a conservative audience, he underlined that 1848 eventually led to nothing but violence and repression.77 Next in the chronicle, on Le Figaro’s cover page of 31 May, were pictures of protestors in the centre of Paris and congratulations to de Gaulle for having regained control of French destiny in the wake of his broadcast on 30 May. De Gaulle underlined that he was not going to retreat from politics and instead assumed the responsibilities linked with his mandate.78 Detached from the global context of unrest, Chastenet’s historical perspective ended the present of ‘68’. A similar strategy reduced the spatial complexity by treating ‘68’ as the odd one out in a French revolutionary past. The storming of the Bastille and the revolutions of 1848 had lastingly changed France, whereas the désordre of 1968 failed to do so. Jean Fayard, writer and journalist, cited surveys underlining the fact that within weeks, the population of Paris changed from being in favour of the demands of the mobilization to opposing them.79 Contemporary commentators were aware of the simultaneity between the Prague Spring and May 1968. Interpretations that referred to both also allowed affirmation that the struggle in Prague was part of the present, whereas the one in Paris was not. In Raymond Aron’s comparison, Prague was of the present time, he underlined that core French values, notably liberty of expression and the rule of law, were in clear opposition to political regimes across ‘communist Europe’ notably in its idealistic centre (Soviet Union, Poland, ‘oriental Germany’). However, the movement in Paris was not of the present and became merely background, also because liberty of expression and rule of law were practised in France.80 590 F. KRAWATZEK However, during 1968 French anti-internationalist discourses asking for the protection of national boundaries expanded: ‘Too many foreigners in France – they should all be helping construct Socialism in their own countries, if they happen to be Polish, for instance’ underlined one student.81 Mavis Gallant noted in her writings in The New Yorker how the foreign was also a threat to French values over time: ‘If we don’t eat as well as we used to in France, and if we don’t make love as often as we used to, it is because of the Americans.’82 Discussing ‘68’ in the modus memory, she underlined the extent to which the climate at the end of May 1968 was opposed, for instance, to the removal of custom duties for free trade between the members of the European Economic Union83 and turned ever more anti-American: If they [the Americans] had not created the Vietnam situation, de G. would not have been obliged to oppose it. If he had not been obliged to oppose it, the students would never have begun thinking in terms of opposition. It’s all the Americans’ fault.84 The political Left maintained a counter-interpretation to those spatial reductions in memory. David Rousset85 reaffirmed the global embeddedness and internal diversity of Europe: Everywhere in the world, in Eastern Europe as in Western Europe, in the United States as in the Soviet Union, in Latin America as in the Middle East or Asia, we witness a revolutionary relief which is as much a generational fact as it as a response to the contradictions of the new global society.86 In 1969, Rousset saw the need for a European federation reaffirmed, given Europe’s staggering economic and political delays to the United States. Though ‘68’ in France had become of the past, referring to its persistent present in other regions enabled it to update political demands made in France during ‘68’. Shortening and deepening temporal references In memory, the temporal frame of ‘68’ itself quickly shortened. Such interpretations put an end to the mobilization by referring to it as the ‘évènements de mai(-juin) 68’. Simultaneously, temporal references deepened and comparisons to French revolutionary history became prominent. From July 1968 onwards intellectuals increasingly treated the désordre as a historical subject. Jean Fayard’s attention to ‘68’ stems from a purely historical point of view87 and by August 1968 Frédéric Gausson reduced the mobilization to la révolte de Mai – an interpretation that shortened the movement’s time horizon and reduced it to a simple student revolt without impact. When discussing various books that came out in the summer of 1968, Gausson suggested a historical distance to the events.88 Conjoined with the limitations in space, the temporal reduction prepared the way for the national iconization of ‘68’. This forcing of ‘68’ into national memory removed its present relevance and underlined that understanding two centuries of national history was sufficient to understand developments in France: ‘The troubles of May 1968 prove it once again: the big events of our times are often intimately linked with other episodes of modern French history.’89 This shift to a short-lived and nation-centred, eventually Paris-centred, upheaval persisted during more extended early interpretations of ‘68’ in memory. Journalists published books on the mobilization that agreed with such a reduced interpretive take.90 Servan-Schreiber noted ‘this explosion of May … will be nothing, and without any future’.91 Published in August 1968, Raymond Aron, himself an engaged participant against ‘68’, disputes the movement’s significance; for him it was already of the past, a clearly national past.92 By the summer of 1968, ‘68’ had ended. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 591 Activists tried to oppose such temporal, spatial and also social shortenings. During later demonstrations, one encounters placards referring to the ‘prolonged struggle’ that originated in May 68, also attempting to capitalize on the first anniversary in 1969 (Figure 3). Figure 3. Mai 68–69. source: image provided by General Collection. Beinecke rare Book & Manuscript Library, yale university. 592 F. KRAWATZEK The shortening temporal frame of ‘68’ functioned in tandem with deepened temporal references. This historical embeddedness provided a lens to attribute meaning to the most recent part of what was now a French past. The very symbol of May offered itself to a nationalized interpretation of French politics. Events of 13 May 1958 – the Algiers Putsch – which led to the passage from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic, constituted the single most significant, immediately preceding mnemonic signifier.93 In 1968, French media reported on those events by emphasizing the importance of de Gaulle and his close entourage, which suited a narrative of French events unfolding disconnected from decolonization movements elsewhere in the world. The youth rejected the new nationalism that symbolically linked with the day of the Algiers Putsch and embraced Europe: “Europe! Once again the ideal is recalled.”94 This first decadal anniversary of the putsch created itself an expectation that once again the right moment had come to change politics by revolutionary means. The nationalized facet of 1958 dominated in 1968, despite numerous alternative interpretive possibilities.95 Newspapers placed pictures of the protests of May 1958 alongside the youth and worker mobilization of May 1968. Visuals of May 1958 were strikingly similar to pictures that circulated in French newspapers in the first half of May 1968, that is, crowds of people demonstrating on the streets and police violence visible through tear gas. In the indubitably national narrative, commentators read history forward to suggest decisive continuities between 1958 and 1968.96 Le Monde, for instance, assumed similarities between the two May days and underlined the role of the large-scale demonstrations before and on each 13 May.97 Also on the level of symbols continuity was striking – three-plus-two rhythm used to stand for ‘Al-gé-rie fran-çaise’ but in May 1968 became ‘C-R-S S-S’. Claims that 13 May 1958 still conditioned France’s political life seemed intuitively plausible and nationalized and singularized French political history.98 The period immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War further characterized the mnemonic realm in 1968. Alain Vernay emphasized that leaders across ‘occidental capitals’ remembered the crisis of 1936 ‘to avoid repeating the same mistakes’ given that ‘the shock and psychological trauma were comparable and that there were a sufficient number of similarities between the two periods to learn lessons from the past.’99 Despite all differences between these two moments, Vernay emphasized that there were lessons to be learnt from 1936.100 Numerous commemorative anniversaries followed this pattern of a national past that understood ‘68’ as the most recent continuation of this history. The updating of memories of the First World War by Philippe Barrès, son of Maurice, stood out. Barrès, journalist at Le Figaro and himself a young participant in the First World War, claimed that the sacrifices made by young French soldiers in the last months of the war in 1918 enabled French youth to protest 50 years later in 1968. With this historical weight, he accused the youth of 1968 of not respecting the heritage of their national ancestors. He retraced the stories of comrades lost on the battlefield and concludes: ‘It is thanks to Audra, Bacon, Lebigot that our youth in 1968 have the liberty to “contest”. One would want that those who claim this liberty do so with a little more modesty.’ The cipher 1968 had an important historical weight linking heroism with national grandeur. ‘The nation as a whole’ could become a homogenous actor of war commemoration. The president personified the suffering nation and spoke in its name.101 General Bethouart summarized: ‘Just like Easter for the Church, November 11 is for France her resurrection.’102 EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 593 By November, the mobilization of May as part of history can be discussed alongside debates about 1918. The Franco-centric narrative of history interlinked with retrospective analyses of the mobilization of 1968. Alfred Grosser, the Franco-German intellectual, emphasized the extensive commemoration in France during 1968. By stressing the national importance of remembrance, he accused youth of having rejected the national past just months earlier. The young people, according to him, rejected the national past as they rejected the paternal generation and mobilized instead for an international cause. However, ‘one always dies for his country’ and with the war he underlined the importance of remembering the national past.103 Not only commentators undertook this historical deepening. Activists put themselves into continuity with national history, involuntarily contributing to the emerging understanding of ‘68’ being of the past. The CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail) underlined that ‘Saint-Germain was reminiscent of Charonne’,104 which emphasized itself the national prism for understanding ‘68’ in France and contributed to shortening the duration of ‘68’. In the transition from experience to memory, ‘68’ triggered far-reaching historical references that have persisted over time. Also, in 2008, one encountered references to 1789 in Le Point, the 1930s in Le Nouvel Observateur, the situation before de Gaulle came to power in 1958 and the end of the Fourth Republic by Jean-François Copé, or even the similarities in the economic crisis of the interwar period and the one since 2008.105 Reducing actors: conflict of generations An increasingly exclusive focus on the student revolt complemented the spatial and temporal contraction. Through this synecdoche, early memories marginalized the workers’ uprising or those mobilizations that did not fit a positive student narrative. Generational readings provided an early prism for understanding ‘68’, one which the earliest sociological writings had found particularly appealing by focusing on youth and students.106 The first books reviewed in Le Monde about May 1968 considered the university as the exclusive location.107 ‘The revolt of the students which bursted in Paris in May 1968 and gained all faculties, grandes écoles and even the secondary schools, is the most important youth revolt which the 20th century has known thus far.’108 In the immediate aftermath, Jean Joussellin made ‘68’ a student movement and his interpretations further testified to the spatial and temporal reduction. Portraying France as the key country, he argued that the French movement invigorated student revolutions across Europe and the world. He admitted that not all youth agreed on the same values but found this generational reading more convincing than an emphasis, for instance, on political cleavages.109 Being part of the past, ‘68’ created a caesura that implied: ‘We certainly get closer to a different “world” that will require many renewals of men and their modes of existence.’ Commentators also welcomed Gérard Mendel’s La révolte contre le père as the most solid and deepest explanation of the ‘évènements de Mai 68’.110 Generational transmission seemed to fail and references to the student uprising strengthened this argument, which Mendel developed further in 1969.111 Early academic writings further substantiated interpretations of ‘68’ as generational event. Belden Fields granted significant power to students: ‘During the last two weeks of May 1968, it looked as though the Gaullist regime had little chance of surviving the revolt begun by students at Nanterre.’112 His writings bear the traces of the French memory shift. In his student-centred reading, the mobilization’s catalyst laid within 594 F. KRAWATZEK France (the reactions to the Mouvement du 22 Mars) and the emerging mystification of student power can well be sensed.113 Others emphasized instead that the youth in general were the driving force of the events. Alfred Sauvy placed ‘68’ in the grand scheme of things, from the emergence of the youth in the sixteenth century to its current situation. Sauvy justified and legitimized the mobilization of ‘68’: Preliminary observation: whatever the reproaches are that one can make against young people, whatever their simplifications and also their wrongdoings, the entire responsibility is up to now incumbent on the preceding generations and which have not only turned out to be incapable of mastering the trajectory of their fate, but who have also made the heavy mistake of pretending to assure their own security, sacrificing the youth in all dimensions.114 Idealizing the power of student movements as the ‘ethical, idealistic spirit in human history’, Lewis Feuer explained why the French ‘68’ had to fail: ‘In short, in France in the spring of 1968, generational struggle could not easily coalesce with class struggle. Society had become too prosperous, and the working classes too well organised, for the student intellectuals to fulfil their longed-for role as an elite.’115 His global analysis of students’ movements echoed the mnemonic shifts: focused on May, Paris and the students whom, in the French case, failed to realize their ambitions. IV. Expanding and stabilizing mnemonic rules over time In the aftermath of ‘68’ participants, observers and scholars suggested countless interpretations substantiated by a gradually narrower set of mnemonic rules. These rules began to make ‘68’ and in the remaining space, it is hardly possible to do justice to the complex and shifting meanings and political functions of these updates over almost 50 years. Recently, Silja Behre analysed the memories of ‘68’ within France and Germany.116 Her analysis affirms what this article exemplifies: the guiding categories of the memories of ‘68’ had already emerged in the 1970s. In subsequent years, variation on those themes characterized the mnemonic landscape. Similarly, Reynolds states that ‘the fourth decennial commemoration has seen the consolidation and confirmation of what can be described as a narrow portrayal of the 1968 events.’117 Echoing the opening concerns, this last section turns attention to questions of scale and shifts in memory between national, European and other transnational references over time. Reiterating the national and further reducing ‘68’ The first decennial anniversary of ‘68’ occurred in the context of the Left’s defeat in the legislative elections of March 1978. This defeat seemingly confirmed that ‘68’ was of the past. Publications, films and radio broadcasts on the topic privileged the students of the Latin Quarter. Images of strikes, occupations of factories or events in the provinces were rare.118 Illustrating the threefold reduction of categories of meaning of the preceding section, Pierre Viansson-Ponté, editorialist at Le Monde, coined in an influential chronicle the term ‘lost generation’.119 His chronicle paid exclusive attention to France and he reiterated his interpretation over time and across different outlets,120 emphasizing the national frame as the most pertinent for understanding ‘68’.121 Maurice Grimaud’s popular testimony about his involvement in the events as chief of police in Paris added to an iconization of Paris as a key place of confrontation.122 Some attempts to oppose those reductions were audible in 1978, EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 595 but as we saw in the analysis of the mnemonic rules in 2008, over time they had remained marginalized. Robert Linhart provided one such counter-narrative by presenting how he as a temporary worker at Citroen experienced ‘68’.123 Jacques and Danielle Rancière criticized the reduction of ‘68’ to a ‘photo-souvenir’.124 Also Delale and Ragache’s richly illustrated publication underlined the importance of the international pre-history, the significance of ‘68’ for the workers and the simultaneity of events in Prague.125 But such opposition to the lost historical complexity of ‘68’ became gradually less prominent. Whereas 1978 was still characterized by a certain diversity of who could speak about ‘68’, Kristin Ross shows that this had changed significantly around 1988. Only a small number of authorized sociologists and ex-student leaders received public attention.126 In the 1980s, the process of disembodying the memory of ‘68’, detaching it from the transnational complexity that had characterized interpretations of 1968 as present experience, had advanced. In the French national context, ‘68’ became a mnemonic signifier cemented by various interpretations. During the 1980s, without its political conflicts, ‘68’ became ‘the era of void’,127 a de-conflictualized memory that could dominate the national realm.128 Hamon and Rotman’s important and commercially successful publications on ‘68’ set the tone of French memory: a cultural revolution carried out by a new student generation based in the Latin Quarter.129 The question of political generations and ‘68’ became commonplace.130 The mnemonic rules had no space for workers, the provinces, the anonymous masses or Europe.131 Those publications most discussed in France itself ignored the importance of transnational entanglements. As a rule, later publications hardly challenged this mnemonic consensus. Jean-Pierre Le Goff, for instance, reiterated the importance of ‘68’ for French society or the causal role of structural problems at the university and completely ignored the workers. The focus of his book, testifying to the rules of memory, was the question of the significance of ‘68’ for France today.132 Expanding to Europe and other transnational references Integration into the national frame simplified and pacified ‘68’. The earliest interpretive shifts from lived experience to memory during the event itself prepared the possibility of this reduction as they emptied the event of internal contradictions. Mainly from the 1990s onwards, scholars cautiously extended the national setting by undertaking comparative work.133 This opening was part of the rise of comparative history and what became thinkable after the fall of the Iron Curtain and with the promise of increased European integration. The pacified mnemonic signifier ‘68’ travelled across space and could be applied in different contexts. By the 2000s, the mnemonic rules formulated in the French setting had gradually expanded and became applicable to European and other transnational frames.134 In 1997, a team of researchers around Étienne François explored the question: “1968 – a European year?”135 François emphasized the ‘plural unity’ of 1968, with diverse political discontent in Western (France, Italy and West Germany) and Eastern (mainly Poland and Czechoslovakia) Europe. With this focus on events in Europe’s geographical core, François drew continuities between 1968 and 1989.136 When, in 1988, the Polish-born socialist journalist Daniel Singer reflected on ‘68’, he emphasized a European space of experience. Singer illustrated what has emerged as the paradigmatic case of ‘68’ after 20 years. Shortened time horizons of the events in memory, beginning on 3 May and ending, at the latest, on 30 June, when the political Right had 596 F. KRAWATZEK returned to power. Likewise, he reproduced the spatial limitations considering Paris, truly representing ‘68’, the former ‘capital of revolutionary hope’.137 For him, the state of Europe in the late 1980s, characterized by unemployment, fading welfare states and inequality was a reminder of the importance of the ‘spirit of May’. The European Left could only re-emerge forcefully if it had the courage to address the questions which ‘68’ put on the table.138 Also scholars from across Central and Eastern Europe, in the aftermath of 1989/91, tried to integrate ‘their’ ‘68’ into the European frame. Navrátil, for instance, emphasizes that ‘the events which unfolded 1968 in the ČSSR, do have a non-negligible position in the European-wide chain for facts and social processes’. Arguing that in Czech history, the number eight represents a magical cipher, from the Munich Agreement of 1938, the anti-European Soviet imposition on Czechoslovakia against its natural traditions in 1948 to 1968 sustained this claim.139 Navrátil illustrated the extent to which Czech memories turned the eight into a mythical cipher and upheld that 1988, 20 years after the failed attempt to liberalize Czechoslovakia, those expectations were reborn and placed again into a European framework of liberal democracy and human rights. Others drew on Europe as historical spaces and historical contextualization amplified the meaning of ‘68’. At the same time, it blurs differences about how different countries experienced ‘68’. Emmanuel Terray attempted to highlight parallels of movements across Europe.140 The former Maoist militant and anthropologist argued for shared features of different movements and by exploring two paradigmatic European cases on either side of the Iron Curtain, France and Czechoslovakia, he emphasized the intellectuals’ key role in ‘68’: ‘In this way, European intellectuals have again found a role on the political stage which they had increasingly lost after 1848.’141 This juxtaposition of Prague and Paris allowed dialogue about a pan-European ‘68’. Rupnik, albeit conscious of differences, maintained in 2008: ‘The Prague Spring, along with May ‘68, was seen as the expression of uprisings which, albeit in differing political contexts, challenged the status quo that had been imposed by the Cold War and sought for alternative kinds of society.’142 On this level of generality, the simultaneity of events in 1968 swiftly becomes a mnemonic unity and differences merely exist on the level of ‘legacies’. Interest in transnational frames of memory has become more frequent. The cultural project ‘crossing 68/89’ emphasized a ‘globally shared attitude concerning protest, ideology, objectives, and themes’.143 Current memories acknowledge the role of the media around 1968 to create a global present of unrest. The shifting memory discourse thereby updates unheard experiences over almost 40 years of commemoration and that scholars pick up with comparative projects. They forcefully question the value of nation-centred narratives that the mnemonic consensus imposed on scholarship. V. Conclusion: ‘68’ from global to national to universal Today, ‘68’ can be encountered across the globe to strengthen or discredit student mobilizations. In the Russian context, such venerating references had amplified the might of student mobilization. The conservative counter-interpretation of ‘68’ also travelled across space and time. More recently, protesting youth in Hong Kong reused slogans of ‘68’ and one commentator underlined that these kinds of youth movements were ephemeral: ‘But for all the fireworks, it [1968] was nothing compared to 1848, 1830 and 1789. De Gaulle EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 597 called an election and won a landslide. The French economy quickly recovered. The revolt achieved minor reforms within the national university system but little else.’144 In a process of interpretive reduction at the shift from experience to memory, ‘68’ turned from a transnational experience with an important European but also a global horizon of expectation into national memories. With events unfolding in France, the interpretations of ‘68’ gradually nationalized and framed the mobilization as an ‘évènement’ of the past. As a nationalized mnemonic signifier, the students in Paris became the paradigmatic case for what ‘68’ was to mean across the globe, side-lining mobilizations in other countries. In this process of reduction, the universal appeal of ‘68’ developed as the idea of ‘68’ became applicable to very different spatial and temporal contexts, in particular the European memory scale. The universal appeal of ‘68’ certainly also links to the structure of the mnemonic signifier’s symbol, a cypher rather than a term. A cipher can seemingly accommodate many contradictory memories, leaving it unclear whether one refers to Paris, Prague or Berlin. Nobody wants to be excluded from the remarkable case of universal memory that ‘68’ has become, and it does not need to exclude anybody in particular. This does not mean that ‘68’ is not without critics, but even criticism cannot challenge the universal implications of ‘68’. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. Aleksei Andreev, “Svoboda vystupat’,” Novye Izvestiya, May 16, 2008. Krawatzek, “Fallen Vanguards and Vanished Rebels? Political Youth Involvement in Extraordinary Times.” Mobilized youth re-activated some of the symbols linked with ‘68’, such as the raised fist, which was printed on t-shirts. On “Colour Revolutions:” Bunce and Wolchik, “International Diffusion and Postcommunist Electoral Revolutions;” Beissinger, “Structure and Example in Modular Political Phenomena.” Importantly, these ‘Revolutions’ have often themselves been advanced as a proof of a country’s Europeanness, for example, in Georgia. Schäfer, “Daniel Cohn-Bendit: ‘Es ist viel schwieriger heute jung zu sein.’” Reynolds, “The Collective European Memory of 1968,” 8. Reynolds, Sous les pavés ... the Troubles, 160. Jørgensen, “The Scandinavian 1968 in a European Perspective,” 326. “Donald Tusk: l’accord avec la Grèce ‘a permis d’éviter le risque de chaos, d’une banqueroute’,” Le Monde Economie, July 16, 2015. Sarkozy’s speech triggered numerous prominent reactions, testifying to prevailing positive memories of ‘68’, amongst the direct reactions Filoche, Mai 68, histoire sans fin: Liquider mai 68?; Glucksmann and Glucksmann, Mai 68 expliqué à Nicolas Sarkozy; Weber, Faut-il liquider mai 68? In the context of the controversial legalization of same-sex marriage, the ‘mariage pour tous’, extended social mobilization took place all across France. “Un Mai 68 à l’envers ?,” La Croix, April 2, 2013. “Un Mai 68 à l’envers ?,” Le Figaro, April 19, 2013 mentions inter alia the youthfulness of the participants, a gap between political parties and the Parliament, or the lack of debate in Parliament. Brustier, Le mai 68 conservateur: que restera-t-il de ‘La manif pour tous’ ? For theoretical remarks on conflict to understand the evolution of mnemonic signifiers: Feindt et al., “Entangled Memory,” 37–9. Bellanger, Histoire générale de la presse française. Tome V : De 1958 à nos jours, 205. Klimke, “Revisiting the Revolution.” On the futile distinction between historian and participant for ‘68’, see in particular Kraushaar, 1968 als Mythos, Chiffre und Zäsur, 253–357. 598 F. KRAWATZEK 18. For a critical discussion of this third wave, see Feindt et al., “Entangled Memory;” Erll, “Travelling Memory.” 19. Gildea and Mark, “Introduction,” 3. 20. Clifford, Gildea, and Mark, “Awakenings,” 44. 21. Gildea, Mark, and Warring, Europe’s 1968. 22. Zancarini-Fournel, Le moment 68. 23. Klimke, The Other Alliance. 24. Davis et al., Changing the World, Changing Oneself. 25. Horn, The Spirit of '68; Fraser, 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt; Fink, Gassert, and Junker, 1968: The World Transformed; Dreyfus-Armand et al., Les années 68 le temps de la contestation; Jalabert, “Aux origines de la génération 1968;” Marwick, The Sixties. A more recent overview on the global simultaneity Frei, 1968: Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest. 26. Sirinelli, Mai 68: l’événement Janus, 341. 27. Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution. 28. Ross, “Federalism and Democratization in Russia.” 29. For an overview Jackson, “The Mystery of May 1968;” Gildea, “Forty Years On: French Writing on 1968 in 2008;” Gassert, “Das kurze ‘1968’ zwischen Geschichtswissenschaft und Erinnerungskultur.” 30. A particular focus in scholarship is on the Franco-German couple, the alleged motor of European integration, Gotto et al., Krisen und Krisenbewusstsein in Deutschland und Frankreich in den 1960er Jahren. 31. Sarkozy’s criticism was embarrassing for André Glucksmann who supported Sarkozy’s earlier campaign. Daniel Cohn-Bendit criticized him virulently for this support, being on Ségolène Royal’s side. Glucksmann and Glucksmann, Mai 68 expliqué à Nicolas Sarkozy. 32. Amongst many, see for instance Filoche, Mai 68, histoire sans fin. Liquider mai 68?; Weber, Que reste-t-il de mai 68?; Weber, Faut-il liquider mai 68? 33. Virginie is Robert Linhart’s daughter, leader and founding father of the Maoist movement UJCML. V. Linhart, Le jour où mon père s’est tu. 34. Rotman and Devillairs, Mai 68 raconté à ceux qui ne l’ont pas vécu. 35. Cohn-Bendit, Paoli, and Viard, Forget 68. See also Cohn-Bendit, Nous l’avons tant aimée, la révolution. 36. Damamme and Gobille, Mai-juin 1968. But many group-specific studies expose how the national frame conditions mnemonic rules. Audigier, Génération gaulliste l’Union. 37. Rotman and Devillairs, Mai 68 raconté à ceux qui ne l’ont pas vécu; Geismar, Mon mai 68; Méchin, Mon mai 68; Sportès, Ils ont tué Pierre Overney. 38. Sirinelli, Les baby-boomers une génération; Sirinelli, “Générations, générations;” Audigier, Génération gaulliste l’Union. 39. Ross, May '68 and its Afterlives, 24–5. 40. Vigna, L’ insubordination ouvrière dans les années 68. 41. Bruneau, “Quand des paysans deviennent ‘soixante-huitards’.” 42. Mammone, “The Transnational Reaction to 1968.” 43. Simon, Leiblang, and Mahjoub, Les enragés du foot. 44. Morin, Lefort, and Castoriadis, Mai 68 la brèche. 45. Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution. 46. Sirinelli, Mai 68: l’événement Janus. 47. Geismar, Mon mai 68, 247. 48. Vigna, L’ insubordination ouvrière dans les années 68. 49. De Groot, The 60s Unplugged. 50. Hockenos, Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic. 51. “The New Spectre Haunting Europe,” New Statesman, May 24, 1968. 52. “Naissance d’un mouvement étudiant,” Le Monde, March 7, 1968. 53. “La faculté des lettres de Nanterre est fermée jusqu’à lundi,” Le Combat, March 3, 1968. 54. “Les mouvements d‘étudiants,” Le Monde, April 1, 1968. 55. “Le malaise étudiant à la TV,” La Croix, May 9, 1968. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 599 “Émeutes au quartier Latin,” Réforme, May 11, 1968. “Etudiants: l’insurrection,” L’Express, May 13, 1968. “Aspirations des étudiants et objectifs de la classe ouvrière,” L’Humanité, May 15, 1968. “Refus du passé,” Le Monde, May 8, 1968. “La jeunesse occidentale se laisse entraîner par les agents de la subversion mondiale,” L’Express, May 15, 1968. “Voici pourquoi Peyrefitte a décidé de fermer la Fac des lettres de Nanterre,” France Soir, May 4, 1968. “Poussée de fièvre,” Les Echos, May 7, 1968. “Le point de non-retour,” Tribune Socialiste, May 16, 1968. Deinet, Die mimetische Revolution; for the diachronic depth in memory, see Feindt et al., “Entangled Memory,” 34. The parallel between 1848 and 1968 can be frequently encountered in activists writing about that period. For instance Glucksmann in 1968 maintained: ‘The May struggles publicly demonstrate the revolt of modern productive forces as a whole against bourgeois relations of production. Not for a century has a movement more closely resembled the very movement of 1848 that Marx had in mind.’ Glucksmann, “Strategy and Revolution in France 1968,” 121. And evoking Europe gives legitimacy to the activists as Marx himself portrayed ‘Europe’ as a revolutionary actor: ‘Europe will leap from its seat and exultantly exclaim: “Well grubbed, old mole!”’ Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. “The New Spectre Haunting Europe,” New Statesman, May 24, 1968. Saint-Marc refers to the enthusiastic reception by French youth in 1838 of American experiments with communist cities: “Une jeunesse en quête d’espérance,” La Croix, May 15, 1968. “Il s’agit du pouvoir,” L’Express, May 13, 1968. Perussaux, Les affiches de Mai 68, 26. Ibid., 36. Bantigny, “Le temps politisé,” 218. Glucksmann, “Strategy and Revolution in France 1968,” 67. Ibid., 69. “Désarmer et dialoguer,” Le Monde, May 9, 1968. “A l’assemblée: Sévères critiques de notre politique universitaire qui ne prépare pas les jeunes à la vie active,” L’Aurore, May 9, 1968. Gallant, “Reflections: The Events in May: A Paris Notebook – 1,” The New Yorker, September 14, 1968, 92. “1848: Une révolution spontanée,” Le Figaro, May 31, 1968. CVEC Board of Trustees, “Address given by Charles de Gaulle on the events of May 1968,” CVEC. http://www.cvce.eu/en/obj/address_given_by_charles_de_gaulle_on_the_events_of_ may_1968_paris_30_may_1968-en-77c0d5bf-e29b-4f73–97f8-bff6c17d00f0.html. “L’horaire des révolutions,” Le Figaro, July 16, 1968. “Prague et Paris,” Le Figaro, July 7, 1968. Gallant, “Reflections: The Events in May: A Paris Notebook – 1,” 76. Gallant, “Reflections: The Events in May: A Paris Notebook – 2,” The New Yorker, September 21, 1968, 75. Ibid., 97–103 describes the degree of nationalism amongst students by the end of May. Ibid., 76. A left-wing Gaullist who had called for a European federation of socialists in the Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire just after 1945. “L’étape capitale,” Notre République, February 7, 1969. “L’horaire des révolutions,” Le Figaro, July 19, 1968. “La révolte de Mai à travers les livres,” Le Monde, August 24, 1968. “Le refrain des barricades: 1830, 1848, 1871, 1934, 1968,” Le Figaro, April 15, 1969. Labro, Ce n’est qu’un début; Rioux and Backmann, L’Explosion de mai, 11 mai 1968. Servan-Schreiber, Le réveil de la France, 12. 600 F. KRAWATZEK 92. 93. 94. 95. Aron, La Révolution introuvable. Elgey, Notre histoire la quatrième république. “Les jeunes et la bombe,” Démocratie Moderne, May 5, 1968. For instance, a contextualization in a broader history of decolonization Hargreaves, Decolonization in Africa. 96. Another interpretation underlined that 1958 was “constituteur” but “1968” merely a “révolution culturelle”: “D’un 13 Mai à l‘autre,” La Croix, May 15, 1968. 97. “Les journées de Mai 1958,” Le Monde, May 12, 1968. 98. “Il y a 10 ans: le 13 mai,” Le Figaro, May 13, 1968. 99. “Les leçons de la crise de 1936 ne peuvent s’oublier en 1968,” Le Figaro, July 6, 1968; refers to the massive workers’ strikes in May and June 1936 following the election of the Popular Front in May 1936, which led to the signature of the Accords de Matignon. 100. See also Monchablon, “Mouvement étudiant 1936 et mouvement étudiant 1968.” Related historical contextualizations referred to the 29 September 1938 ‘diktat de Munich’. “Munich,” L’Humanité, August 28, 1968; “Prague 30 ans après Munich,” La Croix, October 1, 1968; “D’un coup de Prague à l’autre,” Le Figaro, October 2, 1968. 101. “Cinquante ans après, la France se souvient,” Le Figaro, November 12, 1968. 102. “Le sens d’un anniversaire,” Le Figaro, November 11, 1968. 103. “Commémorations,” Le Monde, November 12, 1968. 104. Charonne refers to the act of police violence at the Charonne metro station in Paris on 8 February 1962 during demonstrations against the Algerian War. Kravetz, Bellour, and Karsenty, L’insurrection étudiante, 250. For more examples of this appropriation of the national past, see Bantigny, “Le temps politisé,” 223–6. 105. “L’humeur des jours: La chronique de Bruno Frappat; La tête en arrière,” La Croix, April 27, 2013. 106. Workers, peasants and students opposed this narrow prism; see, for instance, some of the posters and slogans reproduced in Perussaux, Les affiches de Mai 68. – in particular 24. 107. “La révolte de Mai à travers les livres,” Le Monde, August 24, 1968. 108. Joussellin, Les révoltes des jeunes, 5. 109. Ibid., 222. 110. Perignon, review of La révolte contre le père, by Gérard Mendel. 111. Mendel, La crise de générations. This fact questions Gildea’s claim that “[i]t was not until the twentieth anniversary of the events of 1968 that those involved in it were first described by activists, social scientists and historians as a generation.” Gildea, “‘La hantise de devenir vieux cons comme ses parents,’” 32. 112. Fields, “The Revolution Betrayed,” 337. 113. A similar emphasis on universities: Seale and McConville, Red Flag/Black Flag. 114. Sauvy, La révolte des jeunes, 251; some early writings still granted space to workers or managers, for example, Rioux and Backmann, L’Explosion de mai, 11 mai 1968. 115. Feuer, The Conflict of Generations, 283–4. 116. Behre, Bewegte Erinnerung. 117. Reynolds, Memories of May ‘68, 130. 118. Zancarini-Fournel, Le moment 68, 52–8. 119. “Génération perdue,” Le Monde, September 5, 1976. 120. “La mise en livre: libérez Mai 68,” Libération, July 18, 1978. 121. For more discussion see Zancarini-Fournel, “1968: histoire, mémoire et commémoration.” 122. Grimaud, En mai, fais ce qu’il te plaît. 123. Linhart himself was a former student at the ENS, close to Althusser. He was hired as ‘établi’ in the autumn of 1968: R. Linhart, L’etabli. 124. They criticize the ‘nouvelle philosophie’ and the distortion of what the events actually were about. In the example of Foucault and Sartre, who came to represent ‘philosophes dans la rue’, were instead intellectuals linked with the ‘Gauche prolétarienne’. During 1968 it was impossible to present intellectuals in the street given that the revolution was directed ‘against EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 601 knowledge and academic authority.’ Rancière and Rancière, “La légende des philosophes (Les intellectuels et la traversée du gauchisme),” 14. Delale and Ragache, La France de 68. Ross, “Establishing Consensus,” 651. Lipovetsky, L’ère du vide; Lipovetsky, L’empire de l'éphémère. Rioux, “À propos des célébrations décennales du mai français,” 53–6. Hamon and Rotman, Génération: Les années de rêve; Hamon and Rotman, Génération: Les années de poudre, see also amongst countless publications the Paris-centred narrative in Joffrin, Mai 68 histoire des événements. Bertaux, Linhart, and le Wita, “Mai 1968 et la formation de générations politiques en France.” Démerin, “Mai 68–Mai 88: Choses tues,” 171. A notable exception was Weber’s Vingt ans après but his book, which gives ample attention to workers, the ‘esprit du temps’ after the Second World War and the international entanglements, received only little attention in the memory discourse of its time. Weber, Vingt ans après. Le Goff, Mai 68, l’héritage impossible. Similar: Sirinelli, Les baby-boomers une génération. Note 23; also Marwick, “Youth Culture and the Cultural Revolution of the Long Sixties.” For the notion of mnemonic rules: Feindt et al., “Entangled Memory.” François, 1968-ein europäisches Jahr? Ibid., 14. Singer, Prelude to Revolution, 18. Singer, “Twenty Years On: May 68 Revisited,” 34–5. It is noteworthy that Singer already attempted to Europeanize ‘68’ by 1970, placing it in an accelerating pace of historical change in Europe. Singer, Prelude to Revolution, xiii. ‘But February 1948 implies above all that the Czechoslovak society was gradually detached from its historical anchorage, its traditions, the Christian civilization of Western Europe and instead replanted in a different, alien civilizational sphere of the East, of Byzantium.’ Navrátil, “Historische Hintergründe der tschechoslowakischen Reformen von 1968 und ihre internationalen Aspekte,” 96. Terray, “1968: Glanz und Elend der Intellektuellen.” Ibid., 39. Rupnik, “1968: The Year of Two Springs,” eurozine. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/200805-16-rupnik-en.html. Danyel, Schevardo, and Kruhl, Crossing 68/89, 120. “Hong Kong Protesters should take Heed of the 1968 French Revolt,” South China Morning Post, October 8, 2014. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Funding This work was supported by the John Fell Fund [grant number 152/005]. Notes on contributor Félix Krawatzek is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow based at the University of Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations and a research fellow at Nuffield College. In 2017, he is a visiting scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. He finished his DPhil in 2015 after studies at the University of Kent (BA), the Institut d’Études Politiques in Lille (MA), and the University of Oxford (MSc). He was a visiting fellow at Sciences Po Paris (Centre d’études et de recherches internationales) in 2012–13. 602 F. KRAWATZEK ORCID Félix Krawatzek http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1108-6087 References Aron, Raymond. La Révolution introuvable, Réflexions sur la Révolution de mai. En Toute Liberté. Paris: Fayard, 1968. Audigier, François. Génération Gaulliste: L’Union des Jeunes pour le progrès, une école de formation politique, 1965–1975. Collection Histoire Contemporaine. Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 2005. Bantigny, Ludivine. “Le temps politisé. Quelques enjeux politiques de la conscience historique en mai-juin 68.” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 117, no. 1 (2013): 215–229. Behre, Silja. Bewegte Erinnerung: Deutungskämpfe um “1968” in deutsch-französischer Perspektive. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016. Beissinger, Mark. “Structure and Example in Modular Political Phenomena: Diffusion of the Bulldozer/ Rose/Orange/Tulip Revolutions.” Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 2 (2007): 259–276. Bellanger, Claude. Histoire générale de la presse française. Tome V: De 1958 à nos jours. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1969. Bertaux, Daniel, Danièle Linhart, and Beatrix le Wita. “Mai 1968 et la formation de générations politiques en France.” Le Mouvement social, no. 143 (1988): 75–89. Bruneau, Ivan. “Quand Des Paysans Deviennent ‘Soixante-Huitards’.” In Mai-Juin 1968, edited by Dominique Damamme and Boris Gobille, 344–356. Paris: Editions de l’Atelier, 2008. Brustier, Gaël. 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Crossing 68/89: Grenzüberschreitungen und Schnittpunkte zwischen den Umbrüchen = Crossing 68/89: Překračavání Hranic a Průsečíky Mezi Přelomy. Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2008. Davis, Belinda, Wilfried Mausbach, Martin Klimke, and Carla MacDougall, eds. Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Collective Identities in West Germany and the U.S. In the 1960s and 1970s, Protest, Culture and Society, Vol. 3. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. De Groot, Gerard J. The 60s Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade. London: Pan, 2009. Deinet, Klaus. Die mimetische Revolution: Oder die französische Linke und die Re-Inszenierung der Französischen Revolution im 19. Jahrhundert (1848–1871). Beihefte der Francia. Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 2001. Delale, Alain, and Gilles Ragache. La France de 68: “Soyons réalistes, demandons l’impossible”. Paris: Seuil, 1978. Démerin, Patrick. “Mai 68-mai 88: Choses tues.” Le Débat 51, no. 4 (1988): 173–178. Dreyfus-Armand, Geneviève, Robert Frank, Marie-Françoise Lévy, and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, eds. Les années 68: Le temps de la contestation, Histoire du temps présent. Bruxelles: Éd. Complexe, 2000. Elgey, Georgette. Notre histoire la Quatrième république: De Gaulle à Matignon: La République des Tourmentes 1954–1959. Paris: Fayard, 2012. Erll, Astrid. “Travelling Memory.” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 4–18. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 603 Feindt, Gregor, Félix Krawatzek, Daniela Mehler, Friedemann Pestel, and Rieke Trimçev. “Entangled Memory: Toward a Third Wave in Memory Studies.” History and Theory 53, no. 1 (2014): 24–44. Feuer, Lewis. The Conflict of Generations: The Character and Significance of Student Movements. London: Heinemann Educational, 1969. Fields, A. Belden. “The Revolution Betrayed: The French Student Revolt of May-June, 1968.” In The Student Revolution: A Global Analysis, edited by Philip G. Altbach, 337–353. Bombay: Lalvani Publishing House, 1970. Filoche, Gérard. Mai 68, histoire sans fin: Liquider mai 68 ? Même pas en rêve !. Coup De Gueule. Paris: J.-C. Gawsewitch, 2007. Fink, Carole, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker. 1968: The World Transformed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. François, Etienne, ed. 1968-Ein europäisches Jahr? Beiträge zur Universalgeschichte und vergleichenden Gesellschaftsforschung, Vol. 6. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1997. Fraser, Ronald. 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt. London: Chatto & Windus, 1988. Frei, Norbert. 1968: Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008. Gallant, Mavis. “Reflections: The Events in May: A Paris Notebook – 1.” The New Yorker, September 14, 1968, 58–124. Gallant, Mavis. “Reflections: The Events in May: A Paris Notebook – 2.” The New Yorker, September 21, 1968, 43–134. Gassert, Philipp. “Das kurze ‘1968’ zwischen Geschichtswissenschaft und Erinnerungskultur: Neuere Forschungen zur Protestgeschichte Der 1960er-Jahre.” H-Soz-u-Kult (2010). Accessed May 6, 2016. http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/forum/2010-04-001 Geismar, Alain. Mon mai 68. Paris: Perrin, 2008. Gildea, Robert. “Forty Years On: French Writing on 1968 in 2008”. French History 23, no. 1 (Mar 2009): 108–119. Gildea, Robert. “‘La hantise de devenir vieux cons comme ses parents’: Activist Definition of the 1968 Generation in France.” In “Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation”: Conflicts of Generation Building and Europe’s 1968, edited by Anna Von der Goltz, 31–50. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011. Gildea, Robert, and James Mark. “Introduction.” In Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt, edited by Robert Gildea, James Mark, and Anette Warring, 1–18. . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Gildea, Robert, James Mark, and Anette Warring, eds. Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Glucksmann, André. “Strategy and Revolution in France 1968.” New Left Review 52, NovemberDecember (1968): 67–121. Glucksmann, André, and Raphaël Glucksmann. Mai 68 expliqué à Nicolas Sarkozy. Médiations. Paris: Denoël, 2008. Gotto, Bernhard, Horst Möller, Nicole Pelletier, and Jean Mondot, eds. Krisen und Krisenbewusstsein in Deutschland und Frankreich in den 1960er Jahren, Schriftenreihe der Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. Sondernrummer. München: Oldenbourg, 2012. Grimaud, Maurice. En mai, fais ce qu’il te plaît. Paris: Stock, 1977. Hamon, Hervé, and Patrick Rotman. Génération: Les années de poudre. Paris: Seuil, 1988. Hamon, Hervé, and Patrick Rotman. Génération : Les années de rêve. Paris: Seuil, 1987. Hargreaves, John D. Decolonization in Africa. Postwar World. 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1996. Hockenos, Paul. Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: An Alternative History of Postwar Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Horn, Gerd-Rainer. The Spirit of ‘68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Jackson, Julian. “The Mystery of May 1968.” French Historical Studies 33, no. 4 (2010): 625–653. Jalabert, Laurent. “Aux origines de la génération 1968: Les étudiants français et la guerre du Vietnam.” Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire, no. 55 (1997): 69–81. Joffrin, Laurent. Mai 68-: Histoire des événements. Points politique. Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1988. Jørgensen, Thomas Ekman. “The Scandinavian 1968 in a European Perspective.” Scandinavian Journal of History 33, no. 4 (2008): 326–338. 604 F. KRAWATZEK Joussellin, Jean. Les révoltes des jeunes. Paris: Éd. ouvrières, 1968. Klimke, Martin. The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties. America in the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Klimke, Martin. “Revisiting the Revolution: The Sixties in Transnational Cultural Memory.” In Memories of 1968: International Perspectives, edited by Ingo Cornils and Sarah Waters, 25–47. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. Kraushaar, Wolfgang. 1968 als Mythos, Chiffre und Zäsur. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2000. Kravetz, Marc, Raymond Bellour, and Annette Karsenty. L’insurrection étudiante: 2–13 mai 1968. Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1968. Krawatzek, Félix. “Fallen Vanguards and Vanished Rebels? Political Youth Involvement in Extraordinary Times.” In East European Youth Cultures, edited by Matthias Schwartz and Heike Winkel, 177–201. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016. Labro, Philippe, ed. Ce n’est qu’un début. Édition spéciale. Paris: Publications premières, 1968. Le Goff, Jean-Pierre. Mai 68, L’héritage impossible. Paris: La Découverte, 1998. Linhart, Robert. L’etabli. Documents. Paris: Éd. de Minuit, 1978. Linhart, Virginie. Le jour où mon père s’est tu. Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2008. Lipovetsky, Gilles. L’empire le l’éphémère: La mode et son destin dans les sociétés modernes. Bibliothèque des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Lipovetsky, Gilles. L’ère du vide: Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain. Les essais. Paris: Gallimard, 1983. Mammone, Andrea. “The Transnational Reaction to 1968: Neo-Fascist Fronts and Political Cultures in France and Italy.” Contemporary European History 17, no. 2 (2008): 213–236. Marwick, Arthur. The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, C.1958–C.1974. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Marwick, Arthur. “Youth Culture and the Cultural Revolution of the Long Sixties.” In Between Marx and Coca-Cola : Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960–1980, edited by Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried, 39–58. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006. Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr & Company, [1852] 1907. Accessed May 6, 2016). http://www.archive.org/details/theeighteenthbru00marxuoft Méchin, Aline. Mon mai 68. Collection roman jeunesse. Clichy: Éd. du Jasmin, 2009. Mendel, Gérard. La crise de générations: Étude sociopsychanalytique. Paris: Payot, 1969. Mendel, Gérard. La révolte contre le père. Paris: Payot, 1968. Monchablon, Alain. “Mouvement étudiant 1936 et mouvement ètudiant 1968: Une comparaison impossible?” Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 74, no. 1 (2004): 70–73. Morin, Edgar, Claude Lefort, and Cornelius Castoriadis. Mai 68: La Brèche: Suivi de vingt ans après. Paris: Fayard, 2008. Navrátil, Jaromir. “Historische Hintergründe der Tschechoslowakischen Reformen von 1968 und ihre internationalen Aspekte.” In 1968—Ein europäisches Jahr?, edited by Etienne François, 95–101. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1997. Perignon, Sylvain. “Review of La révolte contre le père, by Gérard Mendel.” L’Homme et la société Année 14, no. 1 (1969): 259–260. Perussaux, Charles. Les affiches de mai 68, ou, l’imagination graphique. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1982. Rancière, Danielle, and Jacques Rancière. “La légende des philosophes (Les intellectuels et la traversée du Gauchisme).” Révoltes logiques Les lauriers de mai ou les chemins du pouvoir (1968–1978), no. Février no. 25 (1978): 7–25. Reynolds, Chris. “The Collective European Memory of 1968: The Case of Northern Ireland.” Études irlandaises 36, no. 36-1 (2011): 73–90. Reynolds, Chris. Memories of May ‘68: France’s Convenient Consensus. French and Francophone Studies. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011. Reynolds, Chris. Sous les pavés ... the Troubles: Northern Ireland, France and the European Collective Memory of 1968. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2014. Rioux, Jean-Pierre. “À propos des célébrations décennales du mai français.” Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire 23, no. 1 (1989): 49–58. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 605 Rioux, Lucien, and René Backmann. L’explosion de mai, 11 mai 1968, Histoire complète des “évènements”. Ce Jour-Là. Paris: R. Laffont, 1968. Ross, Cameron. “Federalism and Democratization in Russia.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 33, no. 4 (2000): 403–420. Ross, Kristin. “Establishing Consensus: May ‘68 in France as Seen from the 1980s.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 3 (2002): 650–676. Ross, Kristin. May ‘68 and Its Afterlives. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Rotman, Patrick, and Laurence Devillairs. Mai 68 raconté à ceux qui ne l’ont pas vécu. Paris: Seuil, 2008. Rupnik, Jacques. “1968: The Year of Two Springs.” Eurozine. Accessed May 6, 2016. http://www. eurozine.com/articles/2008-05-16-rupnik-en.html Sauvy, Alfred. La révolte des jeunes. Questions d’actualité. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1970. Schäfer, Antonia. “Daniel Cohn-Bendit: ‘Es ist viel schwieriger heute jung zu sein’.” Cafebabel. Accessed May 06, 2016. http://www.cafebabel.de/gesellschaft/artikel/daniel-cohn-bendit-es-istviel-schwieriger-heute-jung-zu-sein.html Seale, Patrick, and Maureen McConville. Red Flag/Black Flag; French Revolution, 1968. New York: Ballantine Books, 1968. Seidman, Michael. The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968. New York: Berghahn Books, 2004. Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques. Le réveil de la France. mai-juin 1968. Paris: Denoël, 1968. Simon, François-René, Alain Leiblang, and Faouzi Mahjoub. Les enragés du foot: L’autre mai 68. Arrêts de jeu. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2008. Singer, Daniel. Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968. London: Cape, 1970. Singer, Daniel. “Twenty Years On: May 68 Revisited.” Monthly Review Archive 40, no. 2 (1988): 18–37. Sirinelli, Jean-François. “Générations, générations.” Vingtième siècle: Revue d’histoire 98, no. 2 (2008): 113–124. Sirinelli, Jean-François. Les baby-boomers une génération, 1945–1969. Paris: Fayard, 2003. Sirinelli, Jean-François. Mai 68: L’événement Janus. Paris: Fayard, 2008. Sportès, Morgan. Ils ont tué Pierre Overney. Paris: Grasset, 2008. Terray, Emmanuel. “1968: Glanz und Elend der Intellektuellen.” In 1968—Ein europäisches Jahr?, edited by Etienne François, 37–41. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1997. Vigna, Xavier. L’ insubordination ouvrière dans les années 68: Essai d’histoire politique des usines. Histoire. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2007. Weber, Henri. Faut-il liquider mai 68 ? Essai sur les interprétations des “événements”. Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2008. Weber, Henri. Que reste-t-il de mai 68? Essai sur les interprétations des événements. Points. Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1998. Weber, Henri. Vingt ans après : Que reste-t-il de 68?. Paris: Seuil, 1988. Zancarini-Fournel, Michelle. “1968 : histoire, mémoire et commémoration.” Espaces Temps 59, no. 1 (1995): 146–156. Zancarini-Fournel, Michelle. Le moment 68 : Une histoire contestée. L’univers historique. Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2008. EuropEan rEviEw of History: rEvuE EuropéEnnE d'HistoirE , 2017 voL. 24, no. 4, 606–630 https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2017.1307812 The last ‘never again’? Srebrenica and the making of a memory imperative Daniela Mehler Goethe university frankfurt, frankfurt am Main, Germany ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Controversy overshadowed preparations for the twentieth anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, as conflict arose over the adoption of a number of commemorative resolutions: while motions in the Parliament of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the United Nations Security Council were blocked, the US House of Representatives and the European Parliament did adopt declarations. The article outlines how the memory of Srebrenica was de-contextualized from particular interpretations of the past and re-contextualized in favour of universal frames of interpretation. Starting from the interpretations pertaining to Srebrenica from the early 1990s, processes of dealing with the massacre in reports have made it possible to process the lessons learnt from the experience as a narration of progress. In parallel with efforts to establish legal accountability and a local memorial for the massacre’s victims, there has been a series of resolutions commemorating Srebrenica contributing to the formation of a Srebrenica memory regime. That regime mirrors the Holocaust-based global cultural memory imperative, a set of norms and rules of behaviour that was re-actualized and expanded on by Srebrenica as a symbol for the unfulfilled hope of a final ‘never again’. The commemoration of Srebrenica has become a universal ethical imperative that has spread far beyond the actors involved in the 1995 events. The 2015 controversy has to be understood as a (local) act of resistance against the recognition of Srebrenica as genocide and against the selective character of the Srebrenica memory regime. received 31 May 2016 accepted 14 february 2017 KEYWORDS srebrenica; genocide; European memory; entangled memory; memory Introduction As a prelude to the twentieth anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide of July 1995, in which more than 8000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys were killed, four resolutions were drafted intended to commemorate the massacre. Controversy overshadowed the preparations and took the place of solemn acts of symbolic politics of memory: while the Parliament of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) failed to pass resolutions, the US House of Representatives and the European Parliament (EP) adopted resolutions. The latter reaffirmed the view of the events in the official European CONTACT daniela Mehler mehler@pvw.uni-frankfurt.de © 2017 informa uK Limited, trading as taylor & francis Group EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 607 culture of remembrance as the ‘biggest war crime to take place in Europe since the end of the Second World War’.1 The UNSC and Bosnia-Herzegovina resolutions’ failure was rooted in the expectation to qualify Srebrenica as a genocide as per the International Tribunal of the Former Yugoslavia’s (ICTY) convictions and in the ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – an interpretation that is contested in the region. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serb representatives unanimously voted against the resolution. In the UNSC, Russia sided with the Serb position and vetoed the draft resolution, arguing its wording isolated the Srebrenica incident, de-contextualized the massacre from the broader war context and that adoption could have destabilizing effects in the region. I argue that the blockade against both resolutions has to be understood as resistance to the imperatives of a Srebrenica memory regime that expands on and re-actualizes the Holocaust-based ‘global cultural “memory imperative”’ identified by Levy and Sznaider.2 In this process, the memory of Srebrenica is de-contextualized from particular interpretations of the past and re-contextualized in favour of universal frames of interpretation. As excluded, neglected or silenced interpretations are the key to understanding the current arena of memory conflict, the following survey reintegrates earlier and competing interpretations of Srebrenica. The article develops in four steps. As interpretative patterns of genocide and responsibility before and during the massacre in Srebrenica have shaped the experience and the formation of memory, I will start by outlining the divergent perspectives of the warring factions and the role of the international community in 1995. Secondly, I will briefly examine the investigations and reports conducted by the institutions and countries that were involved in the event, establishing their historical account of the event and their assigning of political and moral responsibility. This part will show how processes of fact-finding and facing the past have been transformed in national and institutional narratives of progress. A third section focuses on the subsequent policy of commemoration by resolutions promoting a specific form of memory of Srebrenica – a policy that challenges sovereignty and stabilizes rules on how to remember: the memory of Srebrenica as an internationally recognized genocide that has to be acknowledged as such and carries an obligation to actively prevent another genocide. In conclusion, I will discuss the specific dynamic configuration and the conflict-inducing implications of this Srebrenica memory regime and give explanations for the 2015 controversy. The present past of Srebrenica: from memory to experience to memory In the 1980s, a polemical historiographical and political debate on the use of the term ‘genocide’ took place in Yugoslavia, creating a situation in which the labelling of mass violence as genocide was symbolically charged and stripped of its narrow legal definition. Being a victim of genocide became essential for ethnic identity.3 Serbian and to some extent also Bosnian nationalist mobilization was especially characterized by references to past ‘genocides’ during the Second World War, earlier legacies of mass violence against one’s own group as well as the alleged impending risk of a new genocide. By the beginning of the 1990s, on the Serbian side, remembering and commemorating historical genocide events such as the Battle of Kosovo of 1389, the First Serbian Uprising of 1804–13 and the Second World War was considered crucial and was used to promote military preparations and 608 D. MEHLER revenge. Some Bosniak intellectuals shared the Serb interest regarding historical cases of genocide, establishing a legacy of genocide towards the end of the Ottoman rule, during the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and during the Second World War.4 However, Bosniak leaders did not openly call for military preparations, but used the memory of the Second World War to emphasize the need for international protection.5 When the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina started in spring 1992, Bosnian Serb units were occupying Srebrenica and Eastern Bosnia. Only several weeks later, Bosniak units re-captured Srebrenica, which became a symbol of Bosniak resistance as it was the first town to be liberated. Starting in April 1992, Bosniak units started counter-offensives against the neighbouring Serb-dominated communities of Bratunac, Skelani and Kravica, leading to an expansion of the Bosniak-controlled territory around Srebrenica without ending the siege of the town. Fuelled by an ethno-nationalist media discourse, fear in the Serb communities in eastern Bosnia that the region of Srebrenica could again become an ‘epicentre of genocide’6 proved reasonable considering the violence of the Bosniak forces from Srebrenica against the neighbouring Serb villages in 1992 and 1993. A few months after the start of the war, the Bosniak use of the genocide analogy was taken up by journalists, who confronted the Western public with pictures of Bosnian Serb concentration camps resembling Nazi death camps. In August 1992, in reaction to these pictures, American Jewish lobby groups successfully raised public awareness and applied the Holocaust analogy to the conflict in Bosnia with Serbs as Nazis and Bosnian Muslims as Jews.7 Foreign governments carefully avoided adopting the term ‘genocide’ so as not to invoke the Genocide Convention, evading the obligation of military intervention and debates on interfering with internal affairs. Among diplomats, journalists and politicians however, the term ‘ethnic cleansing’, derived from the Serbo-Croatian term etničko čišćenje, was used to describe various methods of the violent removal of local populations characterizing the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. 8 The vague term became confused with the conceptualization of the crime of genocide, and its definition broadened in popular usage. UN General Assembly Resolution 47/121 of 18 December 1992 explicitly mentioned the ‘abhorrent policy of “ethnic cleansing”, which is a form of genocide’.9 When Bosnia-Herzegovina filed proceedings at the ICJ concerning the application of the Genocide Convention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in March 1993, the Bosniak leadership considered war crimes committed against the Bosnian people as genocide. The introduction prominently started with a Holocaust analogy: ‘[N]ot since the end of the Second World War and the revelations of the horrors of Nazi “Final Solution” has Europe witnessed the utter destruction of a People.’10 The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in turn saw the on-going terror as a continuation and repetition of the violence against the Serbian population during the Second World War, referring in its report to the UN to the genocide campaign of ‘Croatian-Moslem fascist legions’11 against the Serbian people in 1942/3 and calling the recent war crimes committed by Muslim military and paramilitary units against Serbians in the communities of Bratunac, Skelani and Srebrenica war crimes and crimes of genocide. Although the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina had been an international affair from its very beginning, the international community only reluctantly assumed responsibility. Reactions to the on-going warfare progressed from unsuccessful attempts at peace talks brokered by the European Community, violated arms embargos, no-fly zones and the deployment of the EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 609 aid relief and peace-keeping mission UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR)12 to the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on the UN level. Srebrenica raised international attention in April 1993 when French UN General Philippe Morillon promised enclave inhabitants protection after Serb offensives had caused an influx of thousands of refugees that subsequently led to a humanitarian crisis. In response to this situation, the only recently inaugurated pro-Bosniak Clinton administration lobbied in Europe for a ‘lift and strike’ approach. This was intended to provide the basis for a political settlement of the conflict by lifting the arms embargo and thereby strengthening local proxies to achieve parity between the warring parties. Simultaneously, NATO air strikes were to be used as a threat to Bosnian Serbs. The British and French governments used their peacekeeping troops on Bosnian and Croatian soil as a safeguard against military action and announced that, in that scenario, they would withdraw their troops. British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd even predicted that lifting the arms embargo would create a ‘level killing field’.13 In a comment to the BBC, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher denounced this as disgraceful phrasing and harshly criticized the European Council, and implicitly her successor in office, for their inaction: I am ashamed of the E.C., and this is happening in the heart of Europe, and they have not done any more to stop it. It is within Europe’s sphere of influence. It should be within Europe’s sphere of conscience – there is no conscience. We have been a little like an accomplice to massacre. 14 The Clinton administration represented the failure of the lift and strike initiative as a move to reach an allied consensus, and, quickly thereafter, a French counter-policy was implemented with the adoption of UN Resolution 819, fulfilling General Morillon’s promise to the inhabitants of Srebrenica by protecting the enclave with UNPROFOR troops. Although the enclave had officially been demilitarized by the implementation of the UN safe area in April 1993, it hosted the 28th division of the Bosniak Army and was a base for attacks on Serb villages. With reference to the suffering of the neighbouring communities, Serb political and military leaders justified the military offensive against Srebrenica as necessary and preventive self-defence against Muslims. When General Ratko Mladić’s troops entered Srebrenica on 11 July, he stated in an interview to Serbian state television that he had made Srebrenica a present to the Serbian people as a kind of expiation for the Serbian defeat against the Turks in 1809, announcing that the time had come to take revenge on the Turks in the region.15 As known today, the intelligence services of the US and UK already knew at the beginning of June 1995 that the Bosnian Serb army intended to capture the three enclaves of Srebrenica, Žepa and Goražde, but did not share that information with the Dutch battalion in Srebrenica. French UN General Bernard Janvier did not respond to the Dutch demand for NATO air strikes that might have stopped the advance of Mladić’s units. The Dutch battalion was a mere bystander to the massacre, and UN and EU diplomats neither confronted Bosnian Serb leaders with the events in Srebrenica nor did they call for action.16 With this reluctance to provide sustained political and military support to the ‘safe areas’ in mind, the UNSC and EP resolutions on Srebrenica, adopted while the genocide was in full swing, seem perplexing today. The UNSC condemned the Bosnian Serb offensive against the safe area and especially the detention of and attacks on UN personnel. It announced taking measures to prevent further threats to the peace or acts of aggression, demanded the withdrawal of Bosnian Serbs from the safe areas and requested the UN Secretary-General to use all resources available to him to restore the status of 1993.17 In contrast, the EP took 610 D. MEHLER sides when it admitted ‘hearing the call of the prime minister of the Republic of BosniaHerzegovina to come to the rescue of his people’ and legitimized the use of self-defence stating that it ‘believes that the people of Bosnia are risking their lives to defend the values on which the European Union is founded’.18 Furthermore, the EP harshly criticized the UN policy, rejecting its ‘“neutrality” tantamount to complicity which makes no distinction between those practicing ethnic cleansing and their victims’. On the other hand, it passed on responsibility to the domestic and UN levels calling for an end to the UN’s ‘ambiguous policy of containment’.19 In the weeks following the massacre, US media and NGOs exerted moral pressure on the US government by invoking the Holocaust precedent and arguing that the US was again allowing genocide to proceed.20 Finally, the legacy of the war crimes at Srebrenica catalysed a US response that restored US international leadership and ended the war in Bosnia using military force.21 Since 1995, Srebrenica has become a focal point of memorialization. This memorialization is structured by the patterns of interpretation that prevailed during the conflict. The conflicting parties have used Holocaust analogies and genocide references since the very beginning of the war. Pictures of Bosniak prisoners and the scale of the Srebrenica massacre made it possible for an international public to invoke the Holocaust precedent and promote advocacy. War crimes against Bosnian Serbs however were not reflected to the same extent. Different perspectives of the peacekeeping actors on Srebrenica reflected disputes over leadership between the United States, the UN and the EU and its member-states, who reiterated their belief that Bosnia belonged to Europe. While the international community did not adopt the term ‘genocide’, the analogy of Second World War war crimes was used to legitimize the bombing of Bosnian Serbs. Investigating Srebrenica: facing failure, determining responsibility In parallel to efforts to establish legal accountability for the massacre, Bosnian state organs and parts of the international community underwent processes of introspection and self-reflection, partly in response to public and even international pressure. From 1996 to 2004, the Parliament in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the UN General Assembly and parliaments in France, the Netherlands and the Republika Srpska discussed reports on the massacre. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Bosniak press and relatives of those killed in the massacre raised questions about the responsibility of the political and army leadership in Sarajevo, alleging that the Bosniak forces in Srebrenica received little support for their self-defence. In August 1996, the chief commander of the Bosnian army responded to this criticism and presented a report on the circumstances of the fall of Srebrenica to the Bosnian Parliament.22 The subsequent debate resulted in an almost unanimously adopted resolution concluding that ‘[t]he international community is responsible for having allowed the Serb aggressor to commit an unprecedented genocide and massacre against the Bosniak population’ and stating that Sarajevo authorities had warned the international community of Serb military preparations and that the Bosniak armed forces ‘could do nothing more to protect and defend Srebrenica’.23 With this resolution, allegations about an indirect responsibility of the Bosnian army and the government were silenced to a great extent, although it was frequently politicized in internal Bosniak rivalries. The same year, the Bosnian government declared 11 July a ‘Day of Remembrance of Civilian Victims of Fascist Aggression’, commemorating EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 611 all civilian victims and assigning responsibility to fascist aggression.24 In the following years, victim organizations, the Islamic community and Bosniak politicians lobbied for a memorial in Srebrenica, constructing a dominant Bosniak narrative of Srebrenica as a symbol of Muslim victimhood downplaying military aspects. This process was reflected in the removal of 1800 men from Srebrenica from army registries25 and in assigning war victims the status of martyrs (šehid)26, signifying that their deaths were acts of resistance for Islam. Local Serb communities and politicians have established counter-monuments and counter-commemorations to show that the attacks on Serb villages are an inseparable part of the Srebrenica story, while they have refused to acknowledge the Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing at the beginning of the war. Serbian politicians have equated Serb and Bosniak guilt and suffering, emphasizing individual responsibility in order to depoliticize the massacre.27 In the UN narrative, the Srebrenica massacre has become an example of the UNSC’s failure to match mandates with the means to fulfil them. A 1999 report stated, in summary, that ‘by error, misjudgement and an inability to recognize the scope of the evil confronting us, we failed to do our part to help save the people of Srebrenica from the Serb campaign of mass murder.’28 The failures regarding Srebrenica have undermined the self-perception of the organization as a civilizing force committed to resolving conflicts. The report concluded with the comment that the perpetrators ‘reminded the world and, in particular, the United Nations, that evil exists in the world. They taught us also that the United Nations global commitment to ending conflict does not preclude moral judgements, but makes them necessary.’29 The memory of the Srebrenica massacre, as a representation of evil, has become a moral cause. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who was the head of UN peacekeeping in 1995, has adopted this interpretation stating that ‘Bosnia was as much a moral cause as a military conflict. The tragedy of Srebrenica will haunt our history forever.’30 He has called on the organization and its members to undergo a process of reflection and analysis. The broken promise of General Morillon to the inhabitants of Srebrenica made the French relation to Srebrenica special. Furthermore, his successor in office, General Janvier, opposed air-strike intervention that could have stopped the advance of Bosnian Serb troops towards Srebrenica.31 From July 2000 on, the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), which lost 22 local staff in the massacre, lobbied for a commission of inquiry ‘to establish the extent to which the political and military actions of France were responsible for the paralysis of the UN and NATO during the attack on Srebrenica’.32 In 2001, the French Parliament discussed an expert commission’s report that concluded that the failure in Srebrenica ‘is to be found in the absence of affirmed political will to intervene in Srebrenica: of France, of the United Kingdom, the United Nations, and the Bosniak authorities in Sarajevo themselves’.33 The report paid tribute to the role of France as a UNSC permanent member and admitted that Janvier had underestimated the Bosnian Serbs and should have ordered air strikes. The report urged particularly France, the UK and the United States to provide the necessary means to the ICTY.34 Although the members of the Dutch battalion were praised by Prince Willem Alexander after their return to the Netherlands, the question of their responsibility prevailed in the public discourse. While society at large expressed sympathy for the victims’ fate and their relatives, particularly demonstrated in people’s willingness to donate money,35 political and military leaders made reference to the limited mandate of the mission and said that everything possible had been done. Rejecting a full parliamentary inquiry, the government 612 D. MEHLER ordered a report by an independent scholarly commission that in 2002 concluded that the Dutch battalion had no chance to keep the non-existent peace. The report pointed out the government’s responsibility, concluding that ‘humanitarian motivation and political ambitions drove the Netherlands to undertake an ill-conceived and virtually impossible peace mission’36 and criticized the lack of political coordination within the cabinet and the military’s reluctance to share information with the government. After the report was released, the government of Prime Minister Wim Kok accepted responsibility, partly on behalf of the international community, distanced itself from any admission of guilt and resigned from office. The 2003 report ‘Mission without Peace’ by the subsequently established parliamentary inquiry commission toned down controversial points and concluded that the Dutch battalion had clearly failed, but could have hardly influenced the situation it was in and deemed the Kok administration’s resignation an appropriate response to the failure of Dutch and international political leaders in the case of Srebrenica.37 Following these assessments, the Minister of Defence referred to the rehabilitation of the Dutch battalion ‘as political fact’ in a parliamentary debate.38 The Republika Srpska’s introspection was characterized by the norm of accountability emphasized by the ICTY and the international community, as reflected in the policy of international bodies securing the post-war settlement in Bosnia-Herzegovina.39 The Republika Srpska Bureau for Relations with the ICTY published the ‘Report about Case Srebrenica’40 in September 2002, claiming that during the alleged massacre only 100 civilians were unlawfully killed while 1900 died in combat or from exhaustion. Furthermore, it accused the International Committee of the Red Cross of fabricating its findings concerning the killings. After Bosniak and international representatives and the media had severely condemned the revisionist report leaked in the run-up to the Bosnian general elections, the Republika Srpska government disowned the report. At the same time, the internationally appointed Bosnian Human Rights Chamber dealt with a motion from over 1800 individuals representing the families of the missing in Srebrenica and querying the Republika Srpska as to the fate and whereabouts of their relatives. Having deemed earlier Republika Srpska reports on Srebrenica unsatisfactory,41 the Chamber decided in March 2003 that Republika Srpska organs had to pay the victims US$2 million in compensation and that the sum should be used to build a memorial at the burial site and to set up a commission investigating Srebrenica. Under pressure by the High Representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Republika Srpska government established the temporary ‘Commission for Investigation of the Events in and around Srebrenica between 10 and 19 July 1995’ in December 2003. When its interim report42 in June 2004 admitted the Srebrenica massacre took place, the president of the Republika Srpska, Dragan Čavić, described the massacre in Srebrenica as a ‘black page in the history of the Serb people’.43 The commissions’ final report acknowledged that 7000 individuals had been killed in grave human-rights violations during the Srebrenica massacre and named 32 previously unknown locations of mass graves. A public apology by the Republika Srpska government to the victims followed. In October 2005, the commission completed its work and submitted a list of Bosnian Serb troops suspected of being involved in the Srebrenica massacre to the Bosnian War Crimes Chamber. In comparing the cases described, we observe institutional processes of facing the past by the UN, France and the Netherlands who created their own narratives and a public discourse about the responsibility for the massacre and admitted their failure in allowing Srebrenica to happen, albeit to varying degrees. They all have pointed to each other, demanded that the EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 613 perpetrators be held accountable and made assurances that they would support the work of the ICTY. Already in evaluating the reports, they consigned the massacre to the past, paving the way for narratives of institutional and national progress, using the massacre as a practical lesson in rethinking approaches to peacekeeping, allowing them to present themselves as robust peacekeeping partners on the international stage. In contrast, the Republika Srpska only reluctantly produced a report on Srebrenica when forced by the internationally controlled state construction supporting the implementation of the norm of accountability. Remembering by declaration: establishing a Srebrenica memory regime Instead of investigating their own involvement in the Srebrenica events, the United States, the EP and the UK44 have lobbied for the acknowledgement of Srebrenica as genocide by taking a leading role in international commemorational policies. Their leadership as norm entrepreneurs as well as the advocacy of diaspora groups have contributed to today’s situation where Srebrenica is commemorated across the globe. Concurrently with these processes, organizations in Bosnia-Herzegovina representing victims and their relatives have pushed for a memorial located at the former Dutch battalion compound in Srebrenica-Potočari. Starting in 2000, the High Representative for BosniaHerzegovina worked to find support with the international community for expressing their ‘mea culpa’45 about their role in the massacre, especially after the ICTY had qualified the massacre as genocide in 2001.46 Disputes among the international community were resolved in a joint effort for commemoration adopting a narrative of events that is close to the official Bosniak version.47 By invitation of victim families, former US President Bill Clinton opened the memorial cemetery complex in Potočari in September 2003, declaring that ‘Srebrenica was the beginning of the end of genocide in Europe’ and that Srebrenica might become a ‘sober reminder of our common humanity’.48 The 2004 confirmation by the ICTY appeal chamber of the 2001 ruling that genocide had occurred in Srebrenica was a decisive step for the on-going institutionalization of Srebrenica memory.49 While there are still disagreements concerning the circumstances leading to it, the judgement made the qualification of the Srebrenica massacre as genocide a legal fact and supported the cause of Srebrenica memory advocacy.50 On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Srebrenica in 2005, as a result of Bosniak diaspora lobbying for the political acknowledgment of the massacre, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution on Srebrenica.51 The House of Representatives shared its conviction that ‘the policies of aggression and ethnic cleansing as implemented by Serb forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995 meet the terms defining the crime of genocide.’52 Equating the whole Bosnian Serb war policy with genocide in this way has to be understood as pro-Bosniak advocacy against the background of on-going proceedings before the ICJ and in contrast to the ICTY’s scope. With regard to contemporary policy, the House of Representatives expressed their conviction that the UN and its member-states should accept their share of responsibility and should constantly seek to ensure that this kind of failure is not repeated in future. Furthermore, they explained that the prosecution of perpetrators and the full cooperation with the ICTY was in the national interest of the United States and called for continuing support of the Bosnian peace settlement by the United States. The Senate affirmed the declaration with an almost identical declaration. 614 D. MEHLER Only a few days later, the EP passed a resolution on Srebrenica responding to the release of the ‘Scorpions’53 video tape during the trial of Slobodan Milošević. The tape showed the killing of six Bosniak men and triggered uproar as it established a direct link between the massacre and the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs. Admitting that ‘shortfalls in the EU decision-making mechanisms and the lack of a genuine common foreign and security policy also played a negative role in the determination of the events’ of the massacre, the EP demanded an adequate commemoration of ‘the Srebrenica-Potočari act of genocide’ and stressed that ‘this unbearable shame in Europe should be considered forever the last massacre carried out in the name of ethnic ideology.’ The Parliament formulated a ‘never again’ stating its will ‘to do everything in its power to prevent such acts of monstrous barbarism from happening in Europe’. While commemorating and honouring the victims of Srebrenica on the one hand, the Parliament formulated its expectations towards Serbia on the other, spelling out the EU’s strategy concerning ex-Yugoslav states’ accession to transitional justice processes, most explicitly the full cooperation with the ICTY, but also symbolic gestures of atonement for past crimes. The EP expressed regret that its Serbian counterpart had failed to adopt a resolution. It encouraged the Serbian government ‘to take action to confront the nation with its past’ and expressed its concern regarding Serbian public opinion, which was characterized by a lack of recognition of war crimes against Muslim civilians and the on-going sympathy for indicted war criminals. Intending to fight the distortion of historical facts, the Parliament then suggested establishing a truth and reconciliation commission in Bosnia-Herzegovina.54 On the same day, Kosovo’s Parliament also adopted a Srebrenica resolution using the opportunity to show commitment to international norms and taking a self-confident stance towards Serbia-Montenegro in the prelude to the process leading to the status of international protectorate. The resolution drew parallels between the victims of Srebrenica and the people of Kosovo ‘who had been the object of the same genocide ideology’.55 Serbian human-rights activists took the approaching tenth anniversary of the massacre as an occasion to lobby for an official condemnation of the Srebrenica massacre.56 Their proposal, demanding a change in government policy to confront the problem of genocide denial in Serbian society, found the support of two Members of Parliament. After the publication of the ‘Scorpions’ tape had shaken the Serbian public and international reception had put pressure on political representatives to respond, a highly charged discussion started on the shape a draft declaration on Srebrenica might take. Due to the ideological divisions regarding the singularity of Srebrenica and Serb victimhood, in the end, none of the five proposed declaration texts57 went through. The Council of Ministers of Serbia and Montenegro strictly condemned the massacre of Srebrenica as ‘war crimes committed against Bosnian prisoners of wars and civilians’.58 It did not take responsibility for the crime on behalf of the state or its organs, but distanced the state union, its people and historical and cultural legacy from the deeds of its predecessor regime. The Council of Ministers asked the victim’s relatives to differentiate between the perpetrators and the peoples of Serbia and Montenegro, claiming most citizens had opposed the undemocratic regime of terror. 59 For the state union, the Srebrenica massacre was a great crime perpetrated against the history, tradition and culture of the Serbian and Montenegrin people as well as against all the victims in the wars on the territory of the former Yugoslavia and in the two World Wars. Regardless of who the perpetrators and the victims were, the crimes should not be EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 615 forgotten.60 As a symbolic gesture, President Boris Tadić took part in the commemoration ceremony in Potočari. In February 2007, the ICJ judgement in the Bosnian genocide case against Serbia found that the only instance of genocide in the Bosnian War was the Srebrenica massacre. It stated that Serbia had helped finance the Bosnian Serb war effort, but rejected the claim of Serbia’s complicity in the war and in the massacre in Srebrenica. Instead, Serbia was found guilty of having failed to prevent the Srebrenica massacre and to punish genocide.61 Both Bosniaks and Serbs saw the judgement as judicial absolution of Serbia and tried to use it for their respective purposes. The Bosniak and Croat members of the presidency of BosniaHerzegovina sent a letter to the UN Secretary-General seeking international support for their reading of the judgement as a demand to annul all results of the genocide – in other words: the abolishment of Republika Srpska as a ‘genocidal creation’.62 Serbian President Boris Tadić, however, promoted the idea of a declaration condemning Srebrenica. An advocacy coalition around the Liberal Democratic Party responded to the judgement with a substantial proposal for a Srebrenica declaration, demanding comprehensive legislation to fulfil the ICJ decision, including the criminalization of any glorification, justification or relativization of genocide as well as lustration and educational measures.63 As in 2005, no support for a declaration was found due to ideological divisions. In the aftermath of the ICJ judgement, the idea of criminalizing genocide denial gained attention with respect to Srebrenica, probably under the impression of the UN General Assembly’s resolution on Holocaust denial.64 Not only did Serbian human-rights activists advocate this idea, but also, two months later, a Bosniak member of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Parliament proposed legislation on criminalizing the denial of the Holocaust, genocide and crimes against humanity. In 2009, the call for an inclusion in the country’s criminal code was repeated. Such legislation would be in line with a European Council framework decision65 and would remove the basis for denying Srebrenica the qualification of genocide domestically.66 As a follow-up to an encounter at the 2008 commemoration ceremony in Srebrenica, a delegation of the NGO Mothers of Enclaves of Srebrenica and Žepa Association visited the European Parliament in October 2008. On this occasion, they handed over a proposal for a resolution declaring 11 July a European day of genocide to European Parliament VicePresident Diana Wallis and Slovenian delegate Jelko Kacin, both members of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) group. Their initiative resulted in a joint motion and in the adoption of a resolution in January 2009. The European Parliament found a formulaic compromise, commemorating all the victims of the atrocities during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, but stressing the special status of Srebrenica. In order to ‘commemorate appropriately’, the Parliament called on all of its member-states and the countries of the Western Balkans to recognize 11 July as the day for the commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide. It called for efforts to bring the people responsible for the massacres to justice and stressed the importance of reconciliation as part of the European integration process.67 Some European countries were not swayed to follow the European Parliament’s call to make 11 July a national day of commemoration. When confronted by a political opponent, Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen said he saw no reason to act. According to him, Srebrenica had an important place in Dutch history and its commemoration was not limited to one day a year with reference to the inclusion of Srebrenica in the official ‘Canon of the Netherlands’. In this virtual national master-narrative, Srebrenica is memorialized 616 D. MEHLER as an example of Dutch peacekeeping not having sufficient control of a UN mission and a practical lesson to act more cautiously on future requests for military support. 68 Working on their paths to EU accession, the countries of the Western Balkans complied with the EP’s call and adopted declarations on Srebrenica establishing 11 July as a day of commemoration. Practically without any public attention, Croatia passed a Srebrenica resolution in July 2009 not touching on the matter of responsibility. With regard to the domestic Serbian minority and probably to the fact that the country itself was part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia by the time of the 1995 massacre, the Montenegrin resolution of July 2009 avoided the question of responsibility and the term genocide. In Serbia, a new initiative for a Srebrenica resolution by the Social Democratic Party failed to draw public attention. Macedonia adopted a Srebrenica resolution marking 11 July as a genocide remembrance day in February 2010. In March 2010 and only months after Serbia submitted its application for EU membership, Serbia adopted a resolution on Srebrenica by a majority of just two votes – a result that reflected the balance of power at the time. Three months of public debate did not mediate the prevailing political divisions on the topic, although the ruling coalition had proposed a compromise declaration avoiding the genocide label and announced a second declaration for the Serbian victims to appease nationalist voices.69 The Parliament eventually condemned the crime committed against the Bosniak population of Srebrenica as set forth in the ICJ judgement. Envisioning a reciprocal acknowledgement of crimes, the Parliament called on other states of former Yugoslavia to condemn crimes against the Serbian people in the same way.70 While victim groups from Bosnia-Herzegovina strongly criticized the resolution for not using the term ‘genocide’, President Tadić called the adoption of the Srebrenica declaration the ‘highest act of patriotism’.71 In front of an international audience he commented on the Srebrenica resolution that by ‘taking the lead in regional reconciliation, Serbia has opened the door for others to step through, in the hope that we can together build a prosperous and inclusive future as members of the European Union – our central strategic priority.’72 While the Srebrenica declaration was primarily an instrument of foreign policy with European integration in mind,73 the follow-up declaration on Serbian victims, adopted in October 2010, addressed the domestic audience and did not cause international repercussions. The Parliament condemned the crimes committed against Serbs in the armed conflicts of the 1990s, called on other countries to condemn the crimes committed against Serbs and expressed solidarity with the victims of the 1999 NATO bombing.74 The declaration pointed to the persisting perception that international institutions did not treat victims equally and exhibited bias in prosecuting, evaluating and commemorating crimes against Serbs. Although the declaration on Serbian victims had been expected to appease the nationalist opposition, their representatives did not support the declaration and criticized its weak wording and the ruling coalition’s reluctance regarding foreign affairs.75 The Bosnian Parliament saw several initiatives to adopt a Srebrenica resolution that either failed to find enough support or were blocked by Republika Srpska members. On the entity level, the government of the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared 11 July Srebrenica Genocide Day in 2010. In 2011, the European Parliament’s Srebrenica resolution was adopted on the cantonal level in Sarajevo and Goražde and most significantly on the municipal level in Srebrenica itself. When the latter was adopted, the Bosnian Serb members walked out declaring the resolution was unacceptable to the Serbian people.76 EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 617 Through the activism of Bosnian diaspora groups, Srebrenica remembrance spread from Europe across the globe. The annual commemorative activities of 11 July are a ‘widely embraced grassroots trend’ in Bosnian diaspora communities, allowing them to combine public memorialization, reassertion of collective identity and political activism.77 In 2010, the Canadian Parliament reacted to calls from Bosnian diaspora groups and adopted a Srebrenica resolution, declaring 11 July an annual national day of remembrance. In 2012, the Australian Parliament passed one of the most comprehensive motions on the Srebrenica genocide, recognizing the genocide and acknowledging that through the migrant settlers in Australia the tragedy of Srebrenica had become an Australian story too.78 In contrast to these cases of Bosnian diaspora groups advocating political recognition, the UK charity Remembering Srebrenica, founded in 2013 and staffed by British citizens of Muslim descent not linked to Bosnia, took up the EP’s Srebrenica resolution and started organizing the first official state remembrance ceremony of the Srebrenica genocide in London in 2013. To mark Srebrenica Memorial Day, the Prime Minister met with survivors at Downing Street.79 In 2014, the anniversary was marked by a whole week of commemorative activities. With the twentieth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre approaching, in late spring 2015 commemorative acts and declarations were prepared across the globe. In May, the Canadian Parliament reaffirmed its 2010 Srebrenica resolution, which recognized 11 July as the annual national Srebrenica Remembrance Day. Following requests by the Congress of North American Bosniaks and the Institute for Research of Genocide, Srebrenica, with this second resolution, was included in the Genocide Remembrance, Condemnation and Awareness Month taking place every April and thereby associated with the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Rwandan genocide and Ukrainian Famine genocide (Holodomor).80 In June, just 10 days after the Stabilization and Association Agreement with the EU entered into force, Bosniak members of the Bosnian Parliament made another attempt at adopting a Srebrenica resolution, intending to ‘create conditions to remove the burden of the perpetrators from the nation in Bosnia and Herzegovina’.81 With regard to activities on the international level before the Srebrenica anniversary and to cases of Republika Srpska leaders denying the genocide at the time, they intended to establish a policy of zero tolerance towards the denial of what they considered a globally recognized fact. Bosnian Serb representatives unanimously voted out the resolution, considering it an attack on their community and a destabilizing factor for the country. 82 On the same day, the former Bosniak army commander in the enclave of Srebrenica between 1992 and 1995, Naser Orić, who is seen as a hero by some Bosniaks for his role in combatting Bosnian Serb forces before the 1995 massacre, was arrested in Switzerland. After having been acquitted of all major charges due to a lack of evidence before the ICTY, the arrest was the result of a Serbian warrant on suspicion of war crimes against the civilian populations in the villages surrounding the Srebrenica municipality in July 1992. Expecting public turmoil at the transfer of Orić to Serbian authorities, the mayor of the Srebrenica municipality had already ordered the delay of the imminent Srebrenica commemoration ceremony. Swiss authorities however decided to hand over Orić to Bosnia-Herzegovina based on his Bosnian nationality and because of where the crime was committed. In response to this decision, the president of the Republika Srpska called the Srebrenica genocide ‘the biggest sham of the 20th century’ and announced a referendum on the entity level concerning the Bosnian judiciary as it was biased against Serbs.83 618 D. MEHLER On the level of the UNSC, some members of the UK-led Preparatory Committee84 saw adopting a resolution on the Srebrenica genocide as a logical follow-up to the 2014 resolution on the prevention of and fight against genocide adopted on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. 85 This initiative became a matter of contention for the directly affected Serb communities of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia and among UNSC members. Russia sided with the (Bosnian) Serb position and argued the draft would isolate the Srebrenica incident and not take the broader war context into account. It pointed to the political disagreement on Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina earlier that month, questioned the appropriateness of a UNSC resolution and raised concerns about the effects on the stability of the region. Based on that, Russia proposed to refer to all crimes during the war and to the Dayton Peace Accords and not to name Srebrenica specifically. While the Preparatory Committee organized a high-level event to commemorate the victims of the atrocity,86 the Serbian chairman of the Bosnian Presidency, Mladen Ivanić, directed the attention to the lack of domestic consensus on the occurrences in Srebrenica and to the threat of them being used for political purposes. He proposed an approach that pays ‘respect to the innocent victims of other peoples, because Serbs and Croats were killed in this war too, and to make an appeal to all of them to turn together towards the future’. 87 The UK representative announced that the fact that there were victims on all sides was to be included in the draft.88 He made clear that the resolution did not intend to link the Srebrenica genocide to the Serb people, but to urge the acknowledgment of the legal fact of a genocide having taken place and to condemn all rhetoric of denial. The Serbian President Tomislav Nikolić protested with letters to all heads of state of UNSC member-states and even to Queen Elizabeth II. 89 While dissent prevailed in negotiations over a UNSC resolution, the UK commemorated Srebrenica on the highest level. A commemorative debate in the House of Commons demonstrated the self-perception of the members and the government as those who had understood the lessons taught by the massacre, recalling the experience of a ‘mainstream European country descended into brutality’.90 Members shared their conviction that genocide will occur again ‘if each generation does not learn the lessons’.91 The members of the House drew several analogies, particularly to recognized cases of genocide like the Holocaust and Rwanda, as well as to on-going atrocities in North Africa, Iraq, Syria and Burma, some of which were referred to as genocide as well. Some praised the UK’s leading role in Europe regarding the introduction of a day of remembrance, one describing the country as being ‘probably the only one still doing it properly. The Rest of Europe has a lot of catching up to do so.’92 The Minister for Europe, David Lidington, resolved that ‘we will never again stand by and close our eyes’,93 referring to the country’s commitment to genocide prevention on the international stage. In the UNSC, the briefing and voting on the Srebrenica resolution was postponed several times. The protest from the Republika Srpska and Serbia notwithstanding, the final draft condemned Srebrenica as genocide and explained that ‘acceptance of the tragic events at Srebrenica as genocide is a prerequisite for reconciliation.’ It called ‘to acknowledge and accept the fact’ and condemned ‘denial of this genocide as hindering efforts towards reconciliation’.94 On 8 July, the UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson opened the debate and presented the UN’s institutional narrative: 50 years after the Holocaust and the organization’s founding, the failures in Rwanda and Srebrenica had shown the UN’s deficiencies. As a lesson from these failures, the prevention of acts such as those has become an imperative. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 619 The institutional learning process resulted in the establishment of a new system including a Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and a Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect.95 Comparing the ‘catastrophe’ of Srebrenica and an array of concurrent crises facing the UN in Syria, Sudan, the Central African Republic, as well as Burundi and Myanmar, High Commissioner of Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein considered further massacres likely as long as there was no respect for the UN.96 He acknowledged with regard to the Bosnian war that the ‘fact that all sides committed crimes was true, but this did not mean that all sides were equally guilty – not when scale and proportion were factored in’.97 In the following vote, the draft resolution failed due to a Russian veto.98 In their statements, the delegates expressed their view of Srebrenica and their displeasure with the preparation of the resolution and the result of the vote. While some criticized the confrontational draft, 99 others censured the abuse of the veto in such a sensitive case. Delegates drew various analogies and enumerated past war crimes and genocide, for example, in ‘Rwanda, Srebrenica, Iraq and Palestine and Sabra and Shatila’ 100 or current sensibilities in ‘South Sudan, Syria and the spread of the Islamic state in Iraq and Levant’,101 calling the Council to act in unity. While the UN draft resolution failed, the US House of Representatives adopted a second Srebrenica resolution. Based on the first document in 2005, the 2015 resolution supported Bosniak advocacy in raising awareness of the crimes committed in the Prijedor region in 1992 constituting genocide.102 The House extended its political scope from acknowledging Srebrenica as genocide to a policy that condemned all statements denying or calling into question that the massacre of Srebrenica constituted genocide. Drawing conclusions from Srebrenica, the House of Representatives urged the US interagency committee Atrocities Prevention Board to ‘issue informed guidance on how to prevent similar incidents from recurring in the future, paying particular regard to troubled countries including but not limited to Syria, the Central African Republic, and Burundi’.103 One day later, the EP adopted a commemorative declaration on Srebrenica. The joint motion104 stated that the act of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Srebrenica and its surroundings ‘should serve as a fresh reminder of the dangers of extreme forms of nationalism and intolerance in society, further exacerbated in the framework of war’. The Parliament took into account that the events in Srebrenica created ‘long-lasting obstacles to political reconciliation among ethnic groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina’. It was probably this insight that made the Parliament explicitly recognize both, ‘all the victims of the Srebrenica genocide and of all the atrocities during the wars in former Yugoslavia’. The resolution described ‘the will to prevent the recurrence of wars and crimes against international humanitarian law in Europe’ as the main motivation for the European integration process. Any denial of the Srebrenica genocide was expressly rejected. Similar to the expectations towards Serbia in 2005, the EP emphasized the need for political representatives in Bosnia-Herzegovina ‘to acknowledge the past in order to work successfully together towards a better future for all citizens of the country’. Promoting European integration as the best path to reconciliation, the Parliament stressed the role of education and culture and expressed its support for the role of NGOs like the Mothers of Srebrenica and Žepa Enclaves in this process.105 Conclusion: a regime of resolutions reflecting rules of behaviour Levy and Sznaider have described the emergence of a Holocaust-based global cultural ‘memory imperative’106 that finds its expression in a set of political and normative expectations to 620 D. MEHLER engage with past injustices. The memorialization of Srebrenica followed in the wake of that memory imperative, built on its structures and re-actualized and expanded it. Prerequisite for that development was the use of the Holocaust analogy. Even before the massacre of Srebrenica had been committed, Serbs had seen Srebrenica as the site of genocide, whereas Bosniaks considered the whole military campaign to be genocide. Both parties used Holocaust analogies that were taken up selectively by international media and advocacy groups. Internationally, this led to a dichotomous perception of victims and perpetrators and the adoption of familiar forms of dealing with human-rights abuses: enforcing the norm of accountability; dealing with national or institutional deeds in reports and commissions; demanding apologies; institutionalizing forms of symbolic remembrance; and rejecting or even criminalizing denial. The Srebrenica memory regime advanced the ethical imperative derived from the Holocaust: any failure to prevent war crimes and crimes of genocide should be made to stand before a collective conscience to acknowledge that recognition and remembrance are prerequisites for moving forward. This is reflected in the peacekeeping actors’ portrayal of the ‘lesson of Srebrenica’ as a narrative of progress. Once confronted with their past failures, they present Srebrenica as a final ‘never again’ serving as a reminder of the presence of evil in the world. What is found today is the prevalent notion that past inaction and indifference are to be compensated by a commitment in the present to prevent genocide in the future. Besides groups representing victims and their relatives and human-rights advocacy groups, the peacekeeping actors are the main norm entrepreneurs promoting the cause of Srebrenica memory. The United States and especially the EU and the UN have taken a leading role. The Srebrenica resolutions have established a memory regime spreading the memory of Srebrenica across the globe, which fulfils the function of symbolic integration: the negative remembrance of the genocide serves as an expression of affiliation with a political community characterized by a particular moral legitimacy referencing universal norms as human rights and the genocide convention. The resolutions support the ICTY and ICJ judgements, and convey a legal narrative, particularly the definition of the Srebrenica massacre as genocide, to a broader public. For the most part, however, they do not reflect the fact that the use of the term ‘genocide’ is contested in the region itself. Views vary from the conviction that Srebrenica was a crime, but no genocide – in 2015, a majority of Serb citizens still held that conviction107 – to the narrower perspective, in line with the legal situation, that only the Srebrenica massacre qualified as genocide and finally to the Bosniak perspective of classifying the entire war as a genocidal campaign. For the conflict parties, the notion of genocide still is a political benefit, while the ‘genocide or not’ dichotomy and the obsession with the label of genocide overshadows processes of social transformation. The Srebrenica resolutions represent a network of normative positions towards Srebrenica that express the soft power of its authors. Partly, these norms find their expression in implicit or explicit expectations for the behaviour of third parties, e.g. the resolutions of the European Parliament of 2005 concerning Serbia and of 2009 concerning Bosnia-Herzegovina. This imposition of memory has largely ignored the role of latency in understanding war crimes and accelerated processes of identity building. The on-going prosecution of and process of coming to terms with war crimes like Srebrenica continually re-actualizes them as ‘present past’, allowing for and sometimes provoking defensive movements nurturing retrospective victimhood and resentment, resistance and renationalization.108 EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 621 With the invocation of the still unfulfilled hope of ‘never again’, the memory of Srebrenica has become part of a global human-rights discourse focusing on the memorialization of past genocides and human-rights abuses to legitimize and advocate progress in this field. This formation of a global consciousness is also illustrated by the inclusion of Srebrenica in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum109 and reflected by the UN resolutions on the Holocaust and Rwanda as well as the failed resolution on Srebrenica intended to commemorate genocide, to fight for its recognition and its prevention as a form of change. The risk of history repeating the failures of the past has provided a basis for debating humanitarian interventionism and challenging the prohibition of the use of force and the notion of absolute respect of a state’s sovereignty. Results include the institutionalization of principles like the responsibility to protect and the acceptance of military-conflict resolution and interventions as a matter of course. The Srebrenica massacre and the claim that lessons have been learnt from it are used to legitimize current foreign policy, and Srebrenica, as a word, has become a mobilizing force in various discursive contexts.110 While allowing for the reduction of Srebrenica to a symbol that stands alongside other cases of genocide, but also large-scale human-rights abuses not yet recognized as genocide, the Srebrenica memory regime defines clear boundaries: refusals to refer to the Srebrenica massacre as genocide and attempts at discussing its context will often result in accusations of genocide denial. This stimulus-response scheme falls short in questioning and reflecting on the prevailing dominance of legal narratives and the power relations determining discourses of genocide denial. The memory of Srebrenica is of special relevance to Europe. Although the situation in Srebrenica had been of no particular importance to Europe for a long time, repeated assertions of its being a part of Europe starting in 1993 and the efforts and failures of the EU’s foreign and security policy turned Srebrenica into a genuinely European affair. The EU and its member-states have taken responsibility for the legacy of the Srebrenica genocide in post-war Bosnia. Simultaneously, the Union has made transitional justice processes a condition of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s accession and has used its resolutions as a driving force challenging its national sovereignty and producing results and spill-over effects. Also, the EU has included Srebrenica in its negative founding myth as the greatest war crime to take place in Europe since the Second World War and as the last genocide the Union will ever allow to happen. The remembrance controversy of 2015 can be explained, beyond the refusal to recognize the Srebrenica massacre as genocide, by the selective character of the Srebrenica memory regime, which silences voices lobbying for the acknowledgement of unpunished crimes against the Serbian population that were organized in Srebrenica and occurred before the massacre inflicted on the Bosniak population in July 1995. The 2015 controversy points to different mnemonic rules in the various mnemonic communities: from a Serbian perspective, equating Serbian and Bosniak victimhood in Srebrenica is legitimate, while from an international perspective this notion of equivalence violates the rules of the Srebrenica memory regime. In adopting separate resolutions, one directed at the international community and one directed at Serbian victims, the Serbian government went along with this rule in 2010. Conversely, and contrary to the more inclusive European Parliament resolution of 2009, the UN draft resolution’s wording could not be supported by Serbs as it did not sufficiently recognize their suffering and insisted on the acknowledgement of Srebrenica as genocide.111 622 D. MEHLER The propagation of Srebrenica memory on the highest level, the UN, suffered a setback because of Russia’s veto. However, advocacy groups and the governments supporting the cause will continue to pressure and challenge divergent national efforts. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. European Parliament, European Parliament Resolution of 9 July 2015 on the Srebrenica Commemoration. Levy and Sznaider, Human Rights and Memory, 4. Nielsen, “Surmounting the Myopic Focus on Genocide,” 22 ff. Ibid., 23. Duijzings, “Commemorating Srebrenica,” 150. Ibid., 151. Levy and Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter, 184–90. For a contemporary analysis, see Petrović, “Ethnic Cleansing: An Attempt at Methodology;” for a general discussion of the similarities between ethnic cleansing and genocide in the context of Bosnia’s and Croatia’s genocide claims against Serbia before the International Court of Justice, see Singleterry, “Ethnic Cleansing and Genocidal Intent,” 41–3. United Nations General Assembly, The Situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2. ICJ, Case Concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina vs. Serbia and Montenegro), Application of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1. United Nations General Assembly, Letter Dated 24 May 1993, 5. The mission’s capacities and mandate were expanded gradually. Overall, troops from 22 countries participated; the largest contingents of soldiers were deployed by France and the United Kingdom, followed by Jordan and Pakistan. Roger Cohen, “US and Allies Differ on Arms for Bosnia Muslims,” The New York Times, April 22, 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/22/world/us-and-allies-differ-on-armsfor-bosnia-muslims.html Margaret Thatcher, TV interview for BBC (Attacks British Policy towards Bosnia), April 13, 1993, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/110821. As a response to the British policy of securing the continuation of the arms embargo, Bosnia-Herzegovina intended to file proceedings against the United Kingdom before the ICJ in November 1993, claiming that it and other permanent members of the UNSC illegally imposed an arms embargo that would prevent them from exercising their right to self-defence. On the pressure on BosniaHerzegovina not to initiate proceedings see Boyle, The Bosnian People Charge Genocide, Postscript. Duijzings, “Commemorating Srebrenica,” 142. Florence Hartmann and Ed Vulliamy, “How Britain and the US Decided to Abandon Srebrenica to its Fate,” The Guardian, July 4, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/ jul/04/how-britain-and-us-abandoned-srebrenica-massacre-1995 United Nations Security Council, Resolution 1004. European Parliament, European Parliament Resolution on Srebrenica. Ibid. Power, “A Problem from Hell,” 430 ff. Bellou, “Srebrenica – The War Crimes Legacy.” In March 1994, the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina was created although the Parliament of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina elected in 1990 had not been dissolved. In the period from March 1994 to September 1996, both institutions coexisted within the territory under Bosniak or Croat control. The Parliament elected in 1990 at times held sessions as the Parliament of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and sometimes as Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which case only Bosniak and Croat deputies convened. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 623 23. According to the tape recording of the 20th session of the Parliament of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina held in Sarajevo on 1 August 1996, written version: Irfan Ajmović (SDA), 23/2, cited in Bougarel, “Reopening the Wounds?,” 115. 24. Duijzings, “Commemorating Srebrenica,” 164. 25. Mustafić, Planirani haos, 25, 34–35. Ibran Mustafić was a Bosniak politician in Srebrenica during the war and a soldier in the Bosniak army. After the war, he headed a family association from Srebrenica and reported about war crimes committed by the Bosniak division in Srebrenica, supporting the Serbian narrative. He is still actively involved in Republika Srpska politics. 26. Nettelfield, Courting Democracy, 107 f. 27. Duijzings, “Commemorating Srebrenica,” 162. 28. United Nations General Assembly, Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 53/35: The Fall of Srebrenica, 108. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Also, there were rumours of an unwritten agreement between him and the Bosnian Serb army that French soldiers held hostage would be set free if he were to abstain from ordering air strikes in the case of an attack on Srebrenica. Henry Porter, “France's Role in a Bosnian Massacre,” The Observer, 22 April 2001, http://www.theguardian.com/observer/comment/ story/0,6903,476501,00.html 32. Nettelfield, Courting Democracy, 120. 33. National Assembly of France, Rapport d’Information sur les Événements de Srebrenica, 187. 34. Ibid. France lacked full support with the ICTY as it opposed its officers giving testimony before the court. 35. Nettelfield, Courting Democracy, 117. 36. NIOD, Srebrenica: Reconstruction, Background, Consequences and Analyses, 1424. 37. House of Representatives of the Netherlands, Parliamentary Inquiry Commission, Rapport: Missie zonder vrede, 445–52. 38. Klep, “A Tale of Two Commissions,” 77. 39. See extensively on the development that led to the acknowledgement of the Srebrenica massacre in the Republika Srpska in Nettelfied, Courting Democracy, 122–8 and Picard and Zinbo, “The Long Road to Admission.” 40. Trifunović, Report about Case Srebrenica (The First Part). A second part never followed. 41. Nettelfield, Courting Democracy, 124 f. 42. Government of the Republika Srpska, Commission to Investigate the Events in and around Srebrenica from July 10th to 19th 1995, Events in and around Srebrenica from 10th to 19th July 1995. 43. “Serb Leader’s Srebrenica Regret,” BBC, June 23, 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ europe/3831599.stm 44. Bellou pointed to earlier UK assistance in providing the keystone memorial in SrebrenicaPotočari and the support of a memorial-room exhibition which was delayed because of local and international political friction, Bellou, “Srebrenica – The War Crimes Legacy,” 389. 45. Duijzings, “Commemorating Srebrenica,” 165. 46. ICTY, Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstić. Trial Chamber, Judgement. 47. Duijzings, “Commemorating Srebrenica,” 165. 48. United States Embassy Sarajevo. “Address by Former President Clinton.” 49. ICTY, Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstić. Appeal Chamber, Judgement. The instrument of pleabargaining prevented a range of indicted persons before the ICTY from being charged with genocide. See on this topic and its effects for reconciliation Clark, “Plea Bargaining at the ICTY.” 50. The definition of the Srebrenica massacre as genocide has been a matter of dispute among legal scholars as it established a precedent in interpreting the dolus specialis of the Genocide Convention, the specific intent to destroy a group in whole or in part and hereby expanded the definition of genocide. The politicization of this scholarly debate and its reflection in legal 624 D. MEHLER 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. practice in recent scholarly accusations that international legal findings of crimes other than genocide constitute ʻgenocide denial’ are particularly troubling, see Nielsen, “Surmounting the Myopic Focus on Genocide,” 25–8. United States House of Representatives, Expressing the Sense of the House of Representatives Regarding the Massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995. Since 2005, several cities in the United States have passed resolutions and proclamations recognizing the Srebrenica genocide; see Nettelfield and Wagner, Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide, 341, n. 27. Ibid. From 1991 on, the Scorpions were a regular unit of the Yugoslav Army under the command of Republika Srpska Krajina, until 1995, when the command passed to the Serbian Interior Ministry. As Gordy notes, there is a dispute about the date when command passed to the Serbian Interior Ministry; see Gordy, Guilt, Responsibility, and Denial, 225. On the reception of the Scorpion video in the Serbian population and political reactions, see Zveržhanovski, “Watching War Crimes.” European Parliament, The Balkans: 10 Years after Srebrenica. Assembly of Kosovo, Resolution No. 02–556/05. An alliance of human-rights organizations and NGOs in Belgrade (Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, Committee of Lawyers' for Human Rights, Belgrade Circle, Woman in Black, the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, Civic Initiative, the Centre for Cultural Decontamination and the Humanitarian Rights Centre) demanded a condemnation of the Srebrenica massacre in an open letter; see in greater detail Mehler, How Serbians Face the Past, 186 ff. and Dragović-Soso, “Apologising for Srebrenica,” 167ff. The first, written by several Belgrade-based NGOs and proposed in the Parliamentary Assembly by two representatives of the liberal GSS and social-democratic SDU, was countered by declarations of the national-monarchist SPO, the national conservative DSS, the nationalist SRS, the social-democratic DS and a compromise version from Predrag Marković, the President of the Assembly. See in detail Mehler, How Serbians Face the Past, 273–6. R.D./M.T. “Odbrana zločina je takođe zločin” [The defence of a crime is also a crime], Danas, June 16, 2005, 1. The statement that a large majority of the citizens of Serbia and Montenegro had opposed the Milošević-Regime is highly exaggerated and should be understood as the protagonists’ idealistic self-perception ex post. Demonstrations against the regime were frequent, but limited in extent. The political opposition was divided, relatively marginal and in part cooperated with the regime. Few opposed the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was only in spring 2000 that the student protests of OTPOR and the unification of the political opposition made possible a mobilization that resulted in the ‘revolution’ of 5 October 2000 and the resignation of Milošević. R.D./M.T. “Odbrana zločina je takođe zločin” [The defence of a crime is also a crime], Danas, June 16, 2005, 1. International Court of Justice, Case Concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina vs. Serbia and Montenegro), Judgement. To understand the court’s judgement, the most illuminating article on the Bosnian Genocide case with regard to the strategies of both parties might be Dimitrijević and Milanović, “The Strange Story of the Bosnian Genocide Case.” “Bosnian Presidency Members Call for Abolition of Entities,” BalkanInsight, June 18, 2007, http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/bosnian-presidency-members-call-for-abolitionof-entities. Initiative of the coalition around the LDP: Predlog Deklaracije o genocidu u Srebrenici. Furthermore, two small parties from northern Serbian Vojvodina proposed a joint text, demanding the prosecution of perpetrators and facilitators of the massacre and acknowledging the involvement of high state representatives in the preparation, realization and covering up of the crimes in Srebrenica, Mehler, How Serbians Face the Past, 277–9. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 625 64. United Nations General Assembly, Holocaust Denial. The resolution condemned without reservation any denial of the Holocaust, with only Iran publicly disassociating itself from the consensus resolution. 65. European Council, Council Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA. 66. Nielsen pointed to incidents in 2011 when accusations of appeasement and of acquiescing in genocide denial were used by Bosniaks to attack members of their own group who deviate from the party line, see Nielsen, “Surmounting the Myopic Focus on Genocide,” 31. 67. European Parliament, European Parliament Resolution of 15 January 2009 on Srebrenica. 68. Rijsdijk, “‘Forever Connected,’” 144ff. In the ‘Canon of the Netherlands’ the Dutch historical canon is narrated in 50 pictures, one of them is Srebrenica, http://entoen.nu/srebrenica. 69. On the discussion and the parliamentary debate see Mehler, How Serbians Face the Past, 211–18; Dragović-Soso, “Apologising for Srebrenica,” 170–3. 70. National Assembly of Serbia, Deklaracija Narodne Skupštine Republike Srbije o osudi zločina u Srebrenici. 71. Tanjug, “Tadić: Čin najvišeg patriotizma” [Tadić: highest act of patriotism], Politika, April 1, 2010, A1. 72. Tadić, “An Apology for Srebrenica.” 73. Dragović-Soso, “Apologising for Srebrenica,” 165. 74. National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia, Deklaracija Narodne skupštine Republike Srbije o osudi zločina učinjenih nad pripadnicima srpskog naroda i građanima Srbije. 75. Mehler, How Serbians Face the Past, 281ff. The following Serbian government shared its impression of diverging standards of accountability on an international level when it presided over the United Nations General Assembly and conducted a debate on the role of international criminal justice in reconciliation on 10 April 2013. The United States and Croatia refused to participate; some participants such as the president of the ICTY cancelled their participation. 76. Karčić, “Remembering by Resolution: The Case of Srebrenica,” 206. 77. Halilovich, “Long-Distance Mourning,” 410. 78. Ibid., 414. 79. David Cameron, “18th Anniversary of the Srebrenica Genocide.” 80. Canada Parliament, House of Commons, Debates. 81. Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 13. sjednica Predstavničkog doma Parlamentarne skupštine Bosne i Hercegovine, 75. 82. Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Prijedlog rezolucije o genocidu u Srebrenici. The document saw 25 votes in favour, 13 against, while four abstained. 83. “Dodik: Srebrenica ʻnajveća prevara 20. vijeka’” [Dodik: Srebrenica ʻthe biggest sham of the 20th century’], Radio Slobodna Evropa, June 25, 2015, http://www.slobodnaevropa.org/ archive/news/20150625/500/500.html?id=27093445&nocache=1. 84. Participants were the missions of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chile, France, Germany, Jamaica, Jordan, Italy, Lichtenstein, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States; five of those governments provided troops to the UNPROFOR mission. 85. United Nations Security Council, Resolution 2150. 86. United Nations News Center, “Recalling ‘Responsibility to Protect’ UN Pays Tribute to Victims of Srebrenica Genocide,” news release, July 1, 2015. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story. asp?NewsID=51317#.Vrc1q1lv8Ul. 87. United Nations, Note Verbale Dated 1 July 2015 from the Permanent Mission of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the United Nations. 88. United Nations, Letter Dated 2 July 2015 from the Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland to the United Nations. 89. The latter was published by Serbian media outlets and harshly criticized as a blundering and scandalous diplomatic move. See, until end of the paragraph: “Bruka i sramota! Tomislav Nikolić kraljici Elizabeti uputio tajno pismo na ćirilici! [Disgrace and shame! Tomislav Nikolić sent Queen Elizabeth a secret letter in Cyrillic!], Teleprompter, July 6, 2015, 626 D. MEHLER http://www.teleprompter.rs/bruka-i-sramota-tomislav-nikolic-kraljici-elizabeti-uputio-tajnopismo-na-cirilici-foto.html. 90. United Kingdom House of Commons, Debate on the Srebrenica Genocide, col. 42WH. 91. Ibid., col. 48 WH. 92. Ibid., col. 47 WH. 93. Ibid., col. 55 WH. 94. United Nations Security Council, Jordan, Lithuania, Malaysia, New Zealand, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and United Nations of America: Draft Resolution. 95. United Nations Security Council, The Situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 8 July 2015, 2. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid., 5. 98. Angola, China, Nigeria and Venezuela abstained. 99. In partly polemic utterances, supporters of the resolutions demanded that the fact that genocide had occurred be recognized as a prerequisite for reconciliation; the US delegate accused their Russian counterpart of denying that genocide had taken place in Srebrenica. The Russian delegate responded to criticism from France, the UK and the United States by asking why there had been no meeting or resolution on the anniversaries of war crimes committed in Vietnam or during the invasion of Iraq and criticized that ‘the humanism of these delegations can be switched on and off depending on political circumstances.’ United Nations Security Council, The Situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 8 July 2015, 22. 100. Venezuelan delegate, ibid., 10. The Holocaust and Rwanda were often cited. 101. UK delegate, ibid., 20. 102. The qualification of the crimes committed in the Prijedor area in 1992 as genocide was not reflected in the verdict of the ICTY against Radovan Karadzić due to lack of evidence for the genocidal intent to kill Bosnian Muslims or Bosnian Croats in the municipalities of Bratunac, Foča, Ključ, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Vlasenica and Zvornik; see ICTY, Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžić. Trial Judgement Summary for Radovan Karadžić, 2. 103. Ibid. 104. The joint motion replaced the motion of the different factions. In their draft, the Greens/ European Free Alliance group called on the EU organs and member-states to investigate whether EU citizens facilitated or committed war crimes in Bosnia; see European Parliament, Igor Šoltes, Terry Reintke, Ulrike Lunacek, Davor Škrlec on behalf of the Verts/ALE Group, Motion for a Resolution on the Srebrenica Commemoration. They probably referred to the widely hushed-up involvement of Greek volunteers in the Bosnian war and especially during the Srebrenica massacre. That fact recently gained new attention through investigative journalists who succeeded in linking the Greek volunteers’ participation in war crimes and their involvement in the Golden Dawn Party. Also one House of Commons member mentioned the involvement of Greek volunteers in Srebrenica, United Kingdom House of Commons, Debate on the Srebrenica Genocide, 43 WH. For extensive information on Greek support of the war in Bosnia, see Michas, Unholy Alliance. 105. European Parliament, European Parliament Resolution of 9 July 2015 on the Srebrenica Commemoration. 106. Levy and Sznaider, Human Rights and Memory, 4. 107. “Šta Srbija misli o Srebrenici?” [What does Serbia think of Srebrenica?] B92, June 26, http://www.b92.net/info/vesti/index.php?yyyy=2015&mm=06&dd=26&nav_ 2015, category=11&nav_id=1008848. 108. With regard to similar effects of making the cooperation with the ICTY a condition of the EU accession process, see Spoerri, “Justice Imposed,” 1874. 109. Concurrently with the adoptions of Srebrenica resolutions in 2005, a Srebrenica photo exhibition opened at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. In 2009, Srebrenica was incorporated as a contemporary case of genocide in the permanent special exhibition ‘From Memory to Action: Meeting the Challenge of Genocide’, which explores ‘three contemporary cases of genocide’ – Rwanda, Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Darfur region of Sudan, see https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/museum- EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 627 exhibitions/from-memory-to-action-meeting-the-challenge-of-genocide. In contrast to statements made by US representatives and others calling for action to stop the atrocities in Darfur, the UN concluded in 2005 that no genocidal policy in the legal sense of the term had been pursued. Nonetheless, the report insists that ‘the crimes against humanity and war crimes that have been committed in Darfur may be no less serious and heinous than genocide.’United Nations, Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, 4. 110. A prominent example was the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, who urged international action to be taken in the case of the besieged Kobane, warning that another Srebrenica could be ‘imminent’; United Nations News Center, “As ISIL Advances on Syrian Town, UN Envoy Urges International Action to Avoid ‘massacre’,” news release, October 10, 2014. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=49052. Already in 2012, a Srebrenica survivor and Bosnian politician applied the analogy of Bosnia and especially Srebrenica to the situation in Syria and particularly to Homs in an article published in major newspapers, in, among others, Spain, Germany, Turkey and Yemen; see Suljagić, Emir and Reuf Bajrović. “The Line That Stretches from Srebrenica to Homs,” Transitions Online, March 2, 2012, www.tol.org/client/article/23024-the-line-that-stretchesfrom-srebrenica-to-homs.html. 111. The draft resolution stated that there were innocent victims on all sides during the conflict in Bosnia and expressed its sympathy for and solidarity with all of them and further called for all proven war crimes to be condemned. It identified denials of the Srebrenica genocide as efforts hindering reconciliation. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes on contributor Daniela Mehler is a human resources officer at Goethe University Frankfurt and a political scientist. She finished her PhD in the research training group Cultural Orientation and Institutional Order in South-Eastern Europe at Friedrich Schiller University Jena after studies in political science, East European history and peace and conflict studies at the Universities of Marburg, Ljubljana and Giessen. In 2015, she published her book Serbische Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. 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Duijzings, Ger. “Commemorating Srebrenica: Histories of Violence and the Politics of Memory in Eastern Bosnia.” In The new Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a PostWar Society, edited by Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Ger Duijzings, 141–166. Aldershot: Ashplant, 2007. European Commission. Communication From the Commission to the European Parliament, The Council, The European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: EU Enlargement Strategy, COM(2015) 611 final, 10.11.2015. European Council. Council Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA on Combating Certain Forms and Expressions of Racism and Xenophobia by Means of Criminal Law, 28 November 2008, OJ L 328/55, 6.12.2008. European Union, European Parliament. European Parliament Resolution of 15 January 2009 on Srebrenica, 15 January 2009, OJ C 46E, 24.2.2010, 111–113. European Union, European Parliament. European Parliament Resolution of 9 July 2015 on the Srebrenica Commemoration, P8_TA-PROV(2015)02762015. European Union, European Parliament. European Parliament Resolution on Srebrenica, 13 July 1995, OJ C 249, 25.9.1995, 168. European Union, European Parliament, Igor Šoltes, Terry Reintke, and Ulrike Lunacek. Davor Škrlec on behalf of the Verts/ALE Group, Motion for a Resolution on the Srebrenica Commemoration, 7 July 2015, B8-0716/2015. European Union, European Parliament. The Balkans: 10 Years after Srebrenica. European Parliament Resolution on Srebrenica, 7 July 2005, OJ C 157E, 6.7.2006, 468–471. Gordy, Eric. Guilt, Responsibility, and Denial: The Past at Stake in Post-Milošević Serbia. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Government of the Republika Srpska. Commission to Investigate the Events in and around Srebrenica from July 10th to 19th 1995, Events in and around Srebrenica from 10th to 19th July 1995, June 2004. Halilovich, Hariz. “Long-distance Mourning and Synchronised Memories in a Global Context: Commemorating Srebrenica in Diaspora.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 35, no. 3 (2015): 410–422. Harris, Marshall. “Introduction.” In The Bosnian People Charge Genocide: Proceedings at the International Court of Justice Concerning Bosnia v. Serbia on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, edited by Francis Anthony Boyle, xi–xix. Amherst: Aletheia Press 1996. Hayden, Robert M. “Recounting the Dead. The Rediscovery and Redefinition of Wartime Massacres in Late- and Post-Communist Yugoslavia.” In Memory, History and Opposition under State Socialism, edited by Rubie S. Watson, 167–184, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1994. House of Representatives of the Netherlands, Parliamentary Inquiry Commission. Rapport: Missie zonder vrede [Report: Mission without Peace]. Tweede Kamerstuk 28506, no. 2-3, 2003. http:// www.parlement.com/9291000/d/tk28506_3.pdf Hughes, Gerald R. The Postwar Legacy of Appeasement: British Foreign Policy since 1945. London/ New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Initiative of the coalition around the LDP: Predlog Deklaracije o genocidu u Srebrenici [Draft Declaration on the Genocide in Srebrenica] in Helsinška povelja XII, no. 103–104 (2007): 47. International Court of Justice. Case Concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina vs. Serbia and Montenegro). Application of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, March 20, 1993. International Court of Justice. Case Concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina vs. Serbia and Montenegro). Judgement, February 26, 2007. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 629 International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia. Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstić. Trial Chamber, Judgement, August 2, 2001. International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia. Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstić. Appeal Chamber, Judgement, April 19, 2004. International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia. Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžić. Trial Judgement Summary for Radovan Karadžić, March 24, 2016. Karčić, Hamza. “Remembering by Resolution: The Case of Srebrenica.” Journal of Genocide Research 17, no. 2 (2015): 201–210. Karčić, Hikmet. “‘Fear Not, For You Have Brothers in Greece’: A Research Note.” Genocide Studies and Prevention 3, no. 1 (2008): 147–152. Klep, Christ. “A Tale of Two Commissions: Dutch Parliamentary Inquiries during the Srebrenica Aftermath.” In Investigating Srebrenica: Institutions, Facts, Responsibilities, edited by Isabelle Delpla, Xavier Bougarel and Jean-Louis Fournel, 67–85, New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012. Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust [Memory in the Global Age: The Holocaust]. Frankfurt am Main: Beck, 2007. Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. Human Rights and Memory. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Mehler, Daniela. Serbische Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. Normwandel und Deutungskämpfe im Umgang mit Kriegsverbrechen 1991-2012 [How Serbians Face the Past. Normative Change and Interpretational Conflict in Dealing with War Crimes 1991-2012]. Global Studies. Bielefeld: transcript 2015. Michas, Takis. Unholy Alliance. Greece and Milošević’s Serbia. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002. Mustafić, Ibran. Planirani haos 1990–1996 [Planned Chaos 1990–1996]. Sarajevo: UG Majke Srebrenice i Podrinja, 2008. National Assembly of France. Rapport d’Information sur les Événements de Srebrenica [Information Report on the Events in Srebrenica], 22 November 2001, D.I.A.N. No. 62/2001. National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia. Deklaracija Narodne Skupštine Republike Srbije o osudi zločina u Srebrenici [Declaration of the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia on the Condemnation of the Crime in Srebrenica], 31 March 2010, Službeni glasnik RS No. 6/2010. National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia, Deklaracija Narodne Skupštine Republike Srbije o osudi zločina učinjenih nad pripadnicima srpskog naroda i građanima Srbije [Declaration of the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia on the Condemnation of Crimes Perpetrated Against the Serbian People and Citizens of Serbia], 14 October 2010, Službeni glasnik RS No. 31/2010. Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (NIOD - Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies). Srebrenica: Reconstruction, Background, Consequences and Analyses of the Fall of a ‘Safe Area’, 10 April 2002. Nettelfield, Lara, and Sarah E. Wagner. Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Nettelfield, Lara J. Courting Democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Hague Tribunal’s Impact in a Postwar State. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Nielsen, Christian Axboe. “Surmounting the Myopic Focus on Genocide: The Case of the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Journal of Genocide Research 15, no. 1 (2013): 21–39. Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina. 13. sjednica Predstavničkog doma Parliamentarne skupštine Bosne i Hercegovine. Stenogram [13. Session of the House of Representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Shorthand], 10 June 2015, https://www. parlament.ba/sadrzaj/plenarne_sjednice/Default.aspx?wsid=48271 Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Prijedlog rezolucije o genocidu u Srebrenici [Draft Resolution on the Genocide in Srebrenica], 19 May 2015, 01-02-2-710/15. Petrović, Dražen. “Ethnic Cleansing: An Attempt at Methodology.” European Journal of International Law 5, no. 3 (1994): 1–19. Picard, Michéle, and Asta Zinbo. “The Long Road to Admission. Report of the Government of the Republika Srpska.” In Investigating Srebrenica: Institutions, Facts, Responsibilities, edited by Isabelle Delpla, Xavier Bougarel and Jean-Louis Fournel, 131–148. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012. 630 D. MEHLER Power, Samantha. “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Rijsdijk, Erna. “‘Forever Connected’: State Narratives and the Dutch Memory of Srebrenica.” In Narratives of Justice In and Out of the Courtroom: Former Yugoslavia and Beyond, edited by Dubravka Zarkov and Marlies Glasius, 131–146. Cham: Springer, 2014. Simms, Brendan. Unfinest Hour: How Britain Helped to Destroy Bosnia. London: Penguin Press, 2001. Singleterry, Douglas. “ʻEthnic Cleansing’ and Genocidal Intent: A Failure of Judicial Interpretation?” Genocide Studies and Prevention 5, no. 1 (2010): 39–67. Spoerri, Marlene. “Justice Imposed: How Policies of Conditionality Effect Transitional Justice in the Former Yugoslavia.” Europe-Asia Studies 63, no. 10 (2011): 1827–1851. Tadić, Boris. “An Apology for Srebrenica.” The Wall Street Journal. Accessed April 16, 2010. http:// www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303695604575182284149946008 Trifunović, Darko. Report about Case Srebrenica (The First Part). Banja Luka: Documentation Center of the Republic Srpska / Bureau of Government of RS for Relation with ICTY, 2002. United Kingdom House of Commons. Debate on the Srebrenica Genocide (20th Anniversary), 7 July 2015, col. 35–57WH. United Nations General Assembly. Holocaust Denial, 26 January 2007, A/Res/61/255. United Nations General Assembly. Letter Dated 24 May 1993 from the Chargé d’affaires a. i. of the Permanent Mission of Yugoslavia to the United Nations Addressed to the Secretary-General, A/48/177. United Nations General Assembly. 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Letter Dated 2 July 2015 from the Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland to the United Nations Addressed to the President of the Security Council, 2 July 2015, S/2015/506. United Nations. Note Verbale dated 1 July 2015 from the Permanent Mission of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the United Nations Addressed to the Secretary-General, 1 July 2015, S/2015/504. United Nations. Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations Secretary-General Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1564. Accessed 25 January 2005. www. un.org/news/dh/sudan/com_inq_darfur.pdf United States Embassy Sarajevo. “Address by Former President Clinton at the Opening of the Srebrenica Memorial.” news release. Accessed September 20, 2003. http://web.archive.org/ web/20041017000021/http://sarajevo.usembassy.gov/hlights/2003/en/030920e0.htm United States House of Representatives. Expressing the Sense of the House of Representatives Regarding the Massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995, 27 June 2005, H. Res. 199 EH. United States House of Representatives. Expressing the Sense of the House of Representatives Regarding Srebrenica, 9 July 2015, H. Res. 310 EH. Zveržhanovski, Ivan. “Watching War Crimes. The Srebrenica Video and the Serbian Attitudes to the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre.” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 7, no. 3 (2007): 417–430. EuropEan rEviEw of History: rEvuE EuropéEnnE d’HistoirE, 2017 voL. 24, no. 4, 631–644 https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2017.1307815 Two models of universalizing memory practices Rieke Trimçev department for political science and Communication studies, Ernst-Moritz-arndt-universität Greifswald, Greifswald, Germany ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This essay conceptualizes ‘universalizing memory practices’ that are at the centre of the present special issue on ‘European Memory: Universalizing the Past?’. By comparing the case studies, the article brings out two models of universalizing memory practices that either establish equivalence among different interpretations of the past or coordinate between them. First, actors establish equivalence by defining rules under which heterogeneous memories can be subsumed. Equivalence decontextualizes memories and divests them of temporal references. Here, the integration of mnemonic difference expands a mnemonic realm from its centre. Second, through coordination, memory actors connect different layers of interpretation that all refer to their own time and context. By rendering explicit the implicit rules of how those interpretations compete, actors open up a general standpoint of multiple temporalities. From this standpoint, reinterpretations can stretch the boundaries of mnemonic realms. received 6 June 2016 accepted 20 february 2017 KEYWORDS Memory studies; universalization; European Memory; transnational memory Introduction [L]e devoir de mémoire risque fort d’être inefficace en l’absence du devoir de penser. — Claude Lefort, ‘Le refus de penser le totalitarisme’1 In an interview given in 2005, one year before his death, German historian Reinhart Koselleck pronounced his strong reservations against the notion of collective memory. Beyond the personal story that his words reveal, Koselleck brings to the fore a core problem of universalizing memory practices. It is therefore worth quoting his statement at length: As for identity and collective memory I believe that it strongly depends on linguistic presuppositions of speakers impregnated with ideology. And my personal position concerning this subject is strictly against collective memory, given that I have been submitted to the collective memory of the Nazi years during twelve years of my life. Any kind of collective memory displeases me because I know that true memory is independent from the so-called collective memory, and my position in regards to this is that my memory depends on my experience and nothing else. No matter what else people might say, I know my own personal experiences and I will not forgo any of them. I have the right to keep my personal experiences just as I have memorized them, and the events kept in my memory constitute my personal identity.2 Koselleck here struggles with the problem that, when it comes to memory and speaking about past experiences, the impacts of socially shared languages can pose a particularly CONTACT rieke trimçev rieke.trimcev@uni-greifswald.de © 2017 informa uK Limited, trading as taylor & francis Group 632 R. TRIMÇEV strong threat to the individual and his experiences. He therefore tries to erect a clear-cut boundary between socially shared and individual interpretations of past experiences. To readers familiar with Koselleck’s work, this comes as a surprise; few scholars have grasped as clearly as he did the extent to which the thinkable and the sayable are framed by the linguistic presuppositions of social and political languages. Are we therefore to dismiss this sudden and emphatic invocation of an ‘independent’, ‘personal’ and ‘true’ memory, or can we make sense of the underlying intuition also from a theoretically convincing angle? Of course, from today’s perspective, the too simplistic confrontation between collective and individual memory does not hold; it has been overcome by the insights into the profound non-private constitution of remembering even the most private moments of life.3 Nevertheless, Koselleck’s admonishment does remain of topical interest. The languages of memory can be productive and empowering, they might even bear emancipatory possibilities4 – but they can also silence marginal voices. While this holds true for all social and political languages, the efficacy of silencing effects can be particularly strong within the languages of memory. When a speaker claims to represent with his words the reality of another person, she can point out the distance between his picture and its referent, that is, she can ‘read back’ his claim.5 But when this reality has disappeared, on what grounds can one prove the inappropriateness of a representation? Universalizing memory practices shed light precisely on the processes through which languages of memory can (but do not have to) gradually gain autonomy from their contexts of emergence, fundamentally reallocating the strategies and options available to actors in memory conflicts. My essay concludes the European Review of History–Revue européenne d’histoire special issue on ‘European Memory: Universalizing the Past?’ by unfolding this core idea in four steps. The first part will carve out an approach of universalizing memory practices by distinguishing it from other approaches to studying memory beyond the national frame. In the second and third part, I will draw a comparative line through the five case studies and suggest two different models of universalizing memory practices, which I call ‘equivalence’ and ‘coordination’. By way of conclusion, a final part will highlight the implications of this distinction for our understanding of memory conflicts. What are universalizing memory practices? As the introduction to this special issue has pointed out, the case of ‘European Memory’ today stands for a decisive threshold in both memory and its reflexive reception in memory studies – it represents the question of the future of memory practices formed through the era of the nation-state. Against this background, the analysis of universalizing memory practices deliberately distinguishes itself from other approaches to studying memories beyond the national frame. Spelling out the differences to the three most prominent groups of approaches – transnational, entangled or multidirectional, and cosmopolitan memory – will help to investigate the singular features of universalizing memory practices. While all these approaches are more sensible to seize the potential transformations of memory practices than exclusively nation-centred memory studies were, the study of universalizing memory practices calls for particular attention to the qualitative nature of such transformations. In short, universalizing memory practices divest memory scripts of contextualizing references and increase their spread to the interpretation of other past experiences. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 633 First, transnational approaches to memory have pertinently questioned the ‘appropriate spatial units of analysis’.6 The ‘methodological nationalism’7 of early memory studies had located social memories in a uniform spatial unit – the nation. The first attempts to prove that memory could transcend national borders replicated the old ‘logic of either-or’8 and piled up mnemonic spaces on a vertical scale. Within this logic, ‘European Memory’ could only be thought of as the sum of national memories. Transnational memory studies, more convincingly, stressed the ‘multi-scalarity’9 of memory practices, in which the local was no longer contained in the national, and the national no longer contained in the global, but which interlocked these different scales within ‘multiple mnemonic memberships’.10 These advances indeed laid the groundwork for approaching universalizing memory practices. But a central characteristic of the latter lies in a blind spot of transnational approaches: Even though they have given important insights in the carriers, media and contents of ‘travelling memory’,11 transnational memory studies’ burden of proof lies on spatial or contextual inscriptions and re-inscriptions of memory. These contextual references are thus attributed an argumentative weight that the study of universalizing memory practices, for a particular set of cases, calls into question; it complements transnational approaches by illuminating those memory practices whose spread relies on the fact that contextual references have become a merely contingent feature. In order to grasp this phenomenon, this special issue is, second, indebted to theories of ‘multidirectional’ or ‘entangled memory’.12 This second group of approaches does not so much seek to transcend memory studies’ national habitus by rethinking its scales, but by rethinking the concept of memory itself. These approaches stress the plurality and conflictuality inherent in memory practices,13 and thus break with the identitarian logic of the previous methodological nationalism in memory studies. Each act of remembering appears to be the ‘knot’, 14 linking multiple and heterogeneous social positions and cultural references in the here and now, from which several timelines weave into historical meanings. From within such a theoretical framework, the attention to universalizing memory practices highlights a qualitative difference. It focuses the dimension of movement, bringing to the fore the auto-transformative qualities of some, but not all, memory practices. The case studies therefore did not study universal, but universalizing memory practices, thus always paying close attention to their movement character. What is interesting about memory practices, once we acknowledge their entangled or multidirectional features, is that they can gradually alter the script or pattern that constitutes them. This capacity of drawing a qualitative distinction links the approach put forward here, third, to cosmopolitan approaches in memory studies.15 In the example of Holocaust memory, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider have diagnosed a globalized, dialogical memory culture, which they advocate as ‘cosmopolitan’ insofar as it ‘manifests itself in identifying with the victims of “the others”’.16 Building on the theory of ‘second modernity’ put forward by sociologist Ulrich Beck, cosmopolitan memory is not seen as a replacement of national memory cultures, but as their sceptical and self-reflexive complement.17 The binary distinction between national and cosmopolitan memory cultures not only provides an empirically fertile perspective, but it also paves the way to a positive normative charging of cosmopolitan memory. For Levy and Sznaider, the alternative to a relapse into national, heroic memory is the more modest self-reflexive cosmopolitan memory, though not without its own problems. This becomes particularly clear in the author’s position within the debate on ‘European Memory’: if ‘cosmopolitan Europe is the institutionalized self-critique of the 634 R. TRIMÇEV European way’, then ‘[t]he task is to establish the forward-looking forms of memory of a cosmopolitan European self-critique against national war and founding myths.’18 As Levy and Sznaider have conceded themselves in a more recent text, the memory practices submitting to this regime have not always met the cosmopolitan promise: ‘Despite its declaration to recognize otherness, core European cosmopolitanism is falling back into established patterns of “othering”.’19 The study of ‘universalizing memory practices’ attempts to take seriously the ambiguity articulated here and to regain analytical distance and a sense of discrimination. Beyond the alternative between particularistic and universalized memory practices, actors dispose of alternative strategies within the emergence of those memory practices that transcend the space and the logic of the nation. Thus, while we follow Levy and Sznaider in stressing the qualitative dimension in the transformations of memory that we witness today, universalizing memory practices are not judged to be a necessarily normatively superior way of remembering. To sum up, universalizing memory practices are a qualitative transformation of memory practices.20 They are processes in which the patterns or scripts according to which past experiences are remembered lose those positions that link them back to a specific context and a specific point in chronological time. On the one hand, universalizing memory practices reduce differences between different patterns of interpreting the same experience or event, or, in the terms suggested by the introduction, the same mnemonic signifier. The assertion of the notion of Heimatvertriebene analysed by Gregor Feindt in his contribution to this special issue is an example of such a process. Here, the concept of Heimat omitted specifying contextual references to Silesia, the Sudetenland or Bessarabia.21 On the other hand, universalizing memory practices can also reduce the weight of temporal specifications.22 May/June 1968, as Félix Krawatzek’s article suggests, in the course of its universalization, is more and more detached from its temporal embedding. Within the semantic horizon of this mnemonic signifier, there is no April and no July 1968, no before and no after, but only an abstract time of youth upheaval. At the same time, these two ways of reducing a mnemonic script enhance the probability of connecting it with other signifiers. Flucht und Vertreibung, for instance, joins the memory of Germanic-Slavic conflicts. The more the memory of May/ June 1968 is abstracted from its original context, the more it can be linked, for example, to the memory of the Prague Spring. This example illustrates that the weakening of positional and temporal references increases the chances of a mnemonic signifier to influence the interpretations of other mnemonic signifiers. Universalizing memory practices thus concern the much-debated question of whether memory obeys a logic of scarcity or rather a logic of mutual enhancement: ‘What happens when different histories confront each other in the public space? Does the remembrance of one history erase others from view?’23 In Gregor Feindt’s case study, conservative politician Joachim Herrmann assumed that the use of the category of Vertriebener for contemporary migrants would ‘steal’ from the post-1945 expellees their share in German collective consciousness.24 On the other hand, memories of Auschwitz did provide international visibility to the massacre in Srebrenica from early on.25 In sum, the examples in this special issue show that it is not easy to take sides in this question: it is impossible to decide whether social memory is either competitive or mutually enhancing. It can be both. Indeed, universalizing the memory scripts of one past experience can make more likely the articulation of other past experiences. In other words, actors do not have to choose to either remember event A or event B, but remembering one event can help to remember the other. But this EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 635 situation of mutual gain does not mean that there is no cost to it. At the same time, certain interpretations of A will become less likely. For instance, the link between the memory of May 1968 and the memory of the so-called colour revolutions26 renders the former transnational, but yet does not do more justice to the initial transnational dimension of the experience of May 1968. Universalizing memory as equivalence In what follows, I want to make sense of this ambivalence by sketching two different models of universalizing memory practices, which I call ‘equivalence’ and ‘coordination’. While in practice both types interact, their analytical distinction is nevertheless beneficial: ‘equivalence’ and ‘coordination’ represent two fundamentally different modes of handling the plurality and heterogeneity of mnemonic interpretations opening up once memory practices transcend national borders. The integration of heterogeneity is the first of three aspects with regard to which I will compare the two models of universalizing memory practices. A second distinctive feature is their way of mapping the mnemonic space, and, third, their way of structuring the social experience of time. Examples from the case studies will serve as illustration. Languages of memory provide patterns of interpreting past experiences. As these languages become more ‘universal’, they can travel from context to context and speakers can take up these languages in order to articulate other experiences and memories in the patterns of interpretation that these languages suggest. In a first model, this is achieved through a process of equating different mnemonic signifiers with each other. Within this special issue, such a logic of equivalence could be most strikingly studied in Simon Hadler’s contribution to this special issue: the memory of the ‘Turks’ is abstracted so strongly from any concrete experiential background that virtually any other social group can be equated with the ‘Turks’. For Austrian Catholics in the late nineteenth century, their liberal opponents were the ‘Turks’ of their time; for liberals, on the other hand, the ‘Turks’ were their enemy conservatives; and for anti-Semitic priest Deckert in 1894, the Jews took this role.27 In the 1980s, communism was painted as the Turkish threat of the age of the Cold War.28 Memories of ‘1968’ further illustrate that the rhetoric of ‘Europe’ may serve to catalyse a universalization through equivalence. In a Europeanized narrative, the cipher of 1968 is so thoroughly abstracted that concurrent references to events in Warsaw, Madrid, Northern Ireland or Prague are no longer surprising or contradictory. Thanks to the close-up perspective that Félix Krawatzek takes up in his case study on this more recent mnemonic signifier, we can trace how universalization through equivalence unfolds in two steps. In a first phase, the plurality of interpretations of 1968, and in particular a transnational dimension to its experience, are reduced to one narrative with clear foci: 1968 became a national, French event, carried out by ‘the youth’, and happened in Paris in the month of May 1968.29 To be sure, within these focalized positions, there remains room for alternative interpretations and contestation. As Félix Krawatzek has shown, even conservative actors can take up memories of 1968 by repeating its mobilizing grammar for a contrary political aim, such as the opposition to same-sex marriages in 2013.30 Interpretations that highlight aspects outside the syntagmatic elements provided by the dominant pattern of interpretation, as, for instance, those that stress the role of peasants as actors of 1968,31 will yet sound nonsensical outside a protected discursive space such as academic research. This particular feature of the first reduction of the memory narrative is an important point to stress: a universalized 636 R. TRIMÇEV narrative is by no means one which is told in an identical manner by all actors. Rather, it is a narrative that makes different particular variations visible to each other32 because they all follow the same rhythm of narration. But this remaining room for plurality and possibly even for contestation should not blind one to the fact that this is only possible on the basis of an initial reduction of possible interpretations. This reduction of possible interpretations in a first phase then turns out to build the foundation for an ever wider diffusion and radiance in a second phase. Once ‘1968’ is clearly synonymous to ‘May’, ‘youth’ and ‘Paris’, all these elements can be linked to other phenomena – ‘Paris’ can be exchanged for ‘Europe’ (Daniel Cohn-Bendit) or ‘Hong Kong’.33 A similar two-phase process of universalization can be observed in Daniela Mehler’s case study on Srebrenica memory in this special issue. By introducing both the experience and the memory into the legal pattern of ‘genocide’, the possibilities of interpretation are narrowed down. This example also illustrates once more that it is not through consent, but through contestation, that this reduction of possible interpretations to a clearly structured narrative of a few, highly controversial, positions is brought about. On the basis of this initial reduction, Srebrenica memory can be linked to the memory of the Rwandan genocide or influence the international community’s dealing with particularly critical moments in the Syrian civil war, such as in Homs in 2012 or in Kobanê in 2014.34 Here, universalizing practices of remembering catalyse the discursive availability of Holocaust memory and provide a model of how to speak publicly about mass violence in a controlled way. The distinctive trait of the model of equivalence’s way of dealing with heterogeneity of interpretations is thus to put them under a common set of rules: if an act of interpreting the past conforms to certain features, it can join its object to the chain of equivalents. We might be surprised that youth protests in China are named in one breath with 1968. But once they do enter this analogy, it is not difficult to predict the kind of conclusions to be drawn. Unsurprisingly, the South China Morning Post mobilizes the analogy in 2014 in order to recall the merely ephemeral character of such protests.35 The syntagmatic structure of the dominant pattern of interpretation has not changed – only a further example has been added to the list of paradigmatic elements that it can suggest. Universalizing memory practices also translate into spatial imaginaries. In general, the broadening of possible audiences is mapped as an expansion of the mnemonically integrated space. Within the first model, this expansion proceeds on an axis reaching from ‘centre’ to ‘periphery’. Bulwark rhetoric, as presented in Simon Hadler’s contribution, is a case in point. In Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Austria or Croatia, heroic memories of victories over the ‘Turks’ have served since the sixteenth century to claim that by constituting an antemurale christianitatis, these nations stood for Europe as a whole and its core historical achievements and values.36 In their claim of belonging to Europe, such memory practices follow a paradoxical interplay of distance and proximity that is characteristic to processes of representation. On the one hand, the claim to stand for the whole of Europe assumes a fundamental resemblance between both poles of this metonymical relationship. It is only on the basis of this resemblance (here: in civilizational achievements) that ‘Europe’ can be present in the singular historical deed. But, simultaneously, the idea of standing for Europe elevates the latter to something that is yet not fully present, but a distant yardstick whose criteria can never be entirely met. The case study on 1968 memory revealed a similar phenomenon. After ‘Paris’ had come to comprise all the different sites of action, universalizing adaptations of 1968 added to this mnemonic signifier’s radiance by restaging ‘Paris’ in China or Eastern Central Europe. In this manner, universalization through equivalence gives EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 637 rise to an idea of centrality. With regard to the mnemonic map of Europe, a particularly auto-referential memory practice like Versailles-memory, could only amplify the idea of centrality. As Friedemann Pestel has highlighted in his contribution to this special issue, ideas of a ‘Europe of Versailles’, as articulated by historian Lucien Febvre or UNESCO, translated hegemonic radiance from France to Europe.37 There is a second aspect to the spatial implications of universalizing memory practices. Next to the relation between centre and periphery that they organize, they also form an underlying conception of the quality of the boundaries of the mnemonic space. In the case of the first model of universalizing memory practices, the logic of equivalences steered by a centre translates into the invocation of a clear-cut boundary between an inside and an outside. In the case study of Simon Hadler, the asymmetrical counter-concepts of civilization and barbarism provide a possible articulation of such an effect.38 But, to refer to a more recent example, references of ‘European Memory’ are sometimes used in this manner. Since 1995, and particularly through the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust in 2000, Holocaust memory has become what Emanuel Droit has called an unofficial criterion for EU membership.39 The underlying rationale: Europe ends where the ‘unprecedented character of the Holocaust’ and its ‘universal meaning’ as a ‘touchstone in our understanding in the human capacity for evil’ are not actively admitted.40 Finally, does this model of universalizing memory practices not also structure time experience in a very peculiar way? In order to articulate memory from the more general perspective of time experiences, we have to go beyond a bias that has accompanied the occupation with memory since the late twentieth century: that is, the idea that memory would be ‘the other’ of modern time. In a recent article, Helge Jordheim re-described what we have become used to calling ‘modern time’ as a peculiar work on the genuine multiplicity of time experiences. If we free ourselves from the modernity/memory opposition, we can approach universalizing memory practices as another way of achieving what modern time achieved: the integration of multiple experiences of time. That human beings experience time in accordance with each other, Jordheim argues, ‘is never a given, but always a product of work, of a complex set of linguistic, conceptual, and technological practices of synchronization’.41 Universalizing memory practices through ‘equivalence’ or ‘coordination’, from the perspective of time experience, are two different ‘practices of synchronization’. Through equivalence, memories retreat from the ‘simple’ past, continuously emerging from the present, into a foundational pre-past. As Félix Krawatzek noted, the more 1968 was temporally shortened to ‘the events of May’, the more this mnemonic signifier was linked to other historical moments, such as the 1958 ‘Algiers putch’, workers strikes in 1936, and inserted into a French history of revolution.42 With regard to the debate about a possible ‘European Memory’, attempts to create a new experience of synchronicity are particularly strong within development of Holocaust memory into a negative ‘foundational myth for the European Union’.43 The Holocaust, formed into a political myth, is ‘extract[ed] from the historical continuum in which it is embedded’ and ‘turned into a starting point of communal history,’ as Helmut Dubiel remarked.44 Universalizing memory practices as coordination The reader of the case studies will have been confronted with examples that, although they do not obey the particularistic and homogenizing logic of national memory, cannot 638 R. TRIMÇEV be explained with a grammar of equivalence. The core ambivalence that universalizing memory practices brings about is not, as Levy, Sznaider and also Beck would suggest, the conflicting interplay of universalized and re-particularized narratives.45 Consider for instance Friedemann Pestel’s analysis of Brazilian adaptations of Versailles memory: obviously, Versailles loses contextual references when it is introduced into a republican urban project.46 This example evades the logic of equivalence. But it is also far from ‘falling back’ into a presumed particularistic, national narrative. It is simply a thoroughly different kind of universalizing, context-transcending memory that I will carve out, in the following, as a work of ‘coordinating’ different scripts. How does this second model of universalizing memory practices, first, handle heterogeneous and possibly even conflictive interpretations? Consider the portrait of Louis XVI displayed in the Hall of American Independence, inaugurated in 1919 in gratitude to the American war effort in the National Museum in Versailles.47 As Friedemann Pestel remarked, this painting, even if it was not mentioned in any of the official speeches, represented a moment of disruption within the revolution-centred script that the French side had thought to exhibit. Inopportune within an attempt to insert the Franco-American alliance during the War of Independence in the 1770s into an adjusted, republicanized narrative of French gloire, the monarch’s portrait modestly added yet another, dissonant vision of history to the exhibition. Importantly for the model of universalizing memory practices that I want to sketch here, it abstained from formulating a larger common denominator, a meta-rule able to reconcile interpretational differences. Comparable to the often awkward linkage of two sentences through a simple ‘and’, without specifying the causal, temporal or conditional logic of this syntactic relation through conjunctions such as ‘because’, ‘after’ or ‘if ’, the two interpretations were merely coordinated. If above, I quoted several invocations of ‘Europe’ within memory debates a catalyst for equivalence, the case studies also brought to the fore examples where the concept of Europe played the role of a coordinating ‘and’. For instance, in the explosive debate around a ‘Centre against Expulsions’, claims for a European perspective were also raised by transnational groups of scholars focusing on Eastern and Central Europe that searched for ways to link different stories of forced migration beyond the dominant narrative of victimization.48 Yet, in order to avoid a possible misunderstanding, coordination is by no means a practice of remembering that comes ‘closer’ to authentic experiences, their complexities, or their ambiguities. As much as any other universalizing memory practice, coordination is only possible on the condition of a prior reduction of a mnemonic script, mostly by way of intense memory conflicts. Recall Gregor Feindt’s confrontation of the exhibition Flight, Expulsion, Integration hosted by the Berlin-based Haus der Geschichte and its counterpart exhibition organized by the ‘Centre against Expulsion’ foundation.49 The former exhibition tried to evade a discussion centred on victimhood and, above all, the dead-end of hierarchies of victims that any comparative approach would fall back into; rather, it attempted to juxtapose different experiences of forced migration, attentive to their own time and context. But what can be judged, from the point of view of the dividing lines of the memory conflicts in the 2000s, surely as a re-contextualization and addition of complexity, of course also had finally to articulate the principle emerging from this narrative: that is, instead of on victimhood, it centred on narratives of integration. Without a doubt, many memories were not articulable within such a frame – that is the point and the problem of universalizing memory practices – but it did allow for forming a comparison that displayed all its elements in their own rights. By coordinating different EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 639 memories rather than by equating them,50 this exhibition could intervene into an ongoing contested memory by redefining the terrain of contestation. The same example also helps to distinguish the spatial imaginary formed within the model of coordination. The dissemination of mnemonic signifiers characteristic of universalizing memory practices is not mapped as an expansion of a centre toward a periphery. Rather, it is a zoom in as well as a widening that can proceed from any point of the mnemonic map. In the case of the exhibition Flight, Expulsion, Integration in Haus der Geschichte, this translated into a different position of the German case on the mnemonic map. Rather than its centre, confirmed in its pivotal meaning by all other listed cases, it was de-centred and turned into one junction amongst many on the mnemonic map of ‘flight and expulsion’.51 The case of Russian interpretations of 1968 further shows that within the model of coordination, the expansion of the mnemonic space does not have to proceed through a metonymical relation between a newly adhering periphery and a radiant centre, but can proceed from different points of the mnemonic map. When in 2008, Russian journalist Aleksei Andreev draws an analogy between Russian anti-regime mobilization and the French 1968, he also elevates the importance of the so-called colour revolutions in the early 2000s.52 This decentring in turn also blurs the clear distinctions between an inside and an outside achieved through equating different memories under a single rule. This becomes particularly clear in the case of more recent Versailles memories. As Friedemann Pestel argued, Versailles is a mnemonic signifier whose interpretation and dissemination from early on proceeded according to clear rules – references to Versailles negotiated the questions of war and peace, monarchy and republic, and the scope of a historically variable hegemony. The Franco-German reconciliation after the Second World War, through a constant effort to coordinate the conflicting memories that Versailles evoked on both sides of the Rhine, gradually suspended this signifier’s dichotomies. As a consequence, references to Versailles also lost their polemical capacity to draw clear borders between ‘us’ and ‘them’. How does, finally, universalizing through coordination synchronize different interpretations of the past? My suggestion is that it gives rise to a time experience of different speeds. It confers a sense that practices of remembering, though they might intersect and influence each other, continue at their own speed. Typically, we encounter articulations of such time experiences in what will be read at first sight as contradictory statements from the viewpoint of objective time. The massacre of Srebrenica, in the course of its interpretation through the lens of the analogy to the Holocaust Daniela Mehler worked out, is presented as the ‘last never again’.53 By condensing the ‘Srebrenica memory imperative’ in these words, Daniela Mehler brings to the fore a potential paradoxical multiplicity in the time experience of remembering Srebrenica: While the ‘never again’ confirms the foundational time created through Holocaust memory, the qualification as the ‘last’ incident of this kind suggests that the travail de mémoire can never retreat into a pre-past and has always to begin anew. In a similar vein, the multiplication of days of remembrance within the European Union can be understood in this manner. The highly controversial supplementing of the Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January through a European Remembrance Day for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism on 23 August indicates a similar phenomenon.54 The European Parliament resolution on European conscience and totalitarianism from 2 April 2009 both acknowledges ‘the uniqueness of the Holocaust’ and differentiates in the same breath between different ‘dominant historical experience[s]’ in Western and Central Eastern Europe, advocating a particular understanding for the latter’s ‘double legacy of dictatorship’.55 640 R. TRIMÇEV Conclusion If there is something like European Memory, the introduction to this special issue suggested, it is not only much more of a site of conflict than many of its emphatic political invocations suggest. It is also a different site of conflict than academic contributors have assumed. By studying the universalizing transformations of memory practices beyond the nation-states, the different contributions tried to nuance the understanding of what precisely is at stake in these conflicts. From a simultaneously comparative and more theoretical angle, the previous concluding pages suggest that there are two distinct ‘grammars’ according to which actors lead their conflict in such processes of reduction and diffusion of mnemonic scripts. By equating different memories with each other, actors subsume heterogeneous memories under a pre-existing set of rules. Through coordinating different memories, actors connect different layers of interpretation that all refer to their own time and context. Coordination requires learning how to build the bridges between heterogeneous memories; only in the end might one be able to describe the ‘tertium comparationis’ which emerged in the process of coordination. Of course, the borders between these two types are fluent. The integration-centred narrative of ‘flight and expulsion’, for instance, in the 2000s coordinated different European experiences of forced migration without hierarchizing them; in the context of the refugee crisis, it has recently been tried anew. If successful, it might yet serve as a new rule of equivalence between different memories. Nevertheless, from the viewpoint of a particular moment of conflicting interpretations of the past, there remains an important difference. Memory conflicts that transfer their claims to stand in for other memories – that is, which universalize – through equivalence, will have to accept a predefined terrain. Memory conflicts whose actors proceed through coordination will search to redefine the site of conflict and bring into play interpretations that were until then less visible. In its focus on memory conflicts, the present special issue has joined contemporary attempts to link memory studies to larger socio-theoretical projects that aim at understanding the productive role of conflicts in social life. However laudable and welcome such efforts are, here, memory students face a decision: should the opening of memory studies proceed by way of an insertion of memory study’s empirical materials into existing theories? Or should memory studies not try themselves to draw theoretical conclusions out of their own empirical findings and translate these theoretical conclusions back to social theory? One might suggest that the model of universalizing memory practices of equivalence, not only in name, recalls central assumptions of hegemonic theory, which has indeed found some popularity amongst memory scholars lately.56 While this seems to speak for the first option, another finding yet advises caution. From a perspective informed by hegemony theory, the productive features of coordinating universalizing memory practices would simply fall out of view. As this special issue hence suggests, memory studies have all the potential to attempt the yet more difficult second path. Notes 1. 2. 3. Lefort, “Le refus de penser le totalitarisme,” 6. Koselleck, “Conceptual History, Memory and Identity,” 113. This had been the core insight with which Maurice Halbwachs’ Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire opened the first wave of social memory studies. For a reconstruction of this argument, also see Krawatzek and Trimҫev, “Eine Kritik des Gedächtnisbegriffes als soziale Kategorie.” EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 641 Rothberg for instance underlines that globalized Holocaust memory has ‘contributed to the articulation of other histories’. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 6. He particularly mentions American memories of slavery and French memories of the Algerian War of Independence, as well as an example also studied in more detail – and with more ambiguous conclusions – in this special issue, namely the massacre of Srebrenica. See Saward, The Representative Claim. Cesari and Rigney, “Introduction,” 5. The term has been coined by Ulrich Beck, Macht und Gegenmacht im globalen Zeitalter, and adapted to memory studies, amongst others, by Cesari and Rigney, “Introduction.” Beck, Der kosmopolitische Blick, 12. Cesari and Rigney, “Introduction,” 5. This aspect is most poignantly worked out by Erll, “Travelling Memory,” 3. For an instructive example of a transnationally oriented study within the discourse on ‘European Memory’, see Kraft, “‘Europäische Peripherie’ – ‘Europäische Identität’.” Erll, “Travelling Memory.” Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory; Feindt et al., “Entangled Memory.” See, for instance, Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 3. In a polemic stance toward Pierre Nora’s ‘lieux de mémoire’ (sites of memory), Rothberg advanced the notion of ‘nœuds de mémoire’ (knotted networks of memory), see Rothberg, “Between Memory and Memory,” 7. Levy and Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter; for a critical contextualization of Levy and Sznaider’s project in cosmopolitanism discourse, see Cento Bull and Hansen, “On Agonistic Memory,” 2–3. Beck, Levy, and Sznaider, “Cosmopolitanization of Memory,” 116. Levy and Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter, 240. Both quotations are taken from Beck, Levy, and Sznaider, “Cosmopolitanization of Memory,” 120. Levy and Sznaider, “Memories of Europe,” 174. For the following, also compare Pestel et al., “Promise and Challenge of European Memory,”. See Feindt, “From ‘Flight and Expulsion’ to Migration,” 555. This aspect is also stated by Levy and Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter, 11. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 2. See Feindt, “From ‘Flight and Expulsion’ to Migration,” 552. Compare Mehler, “The Last ‘Never Again’?,” 610, as well as Levy and Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter, 194–211. Compare Krawatzek, “Made in France?,” 579. See Hadler, “Europe’s Other?,” 521. Hadler, “Europe’s Other?,” 514–516. Krawatzek, “Made in France?,” 588–594. Krawatzek, “Made in France?,” 580. See Krawatzek, “Made in France?,” 582. This is stressed in the case of the cosmopolitan Holocaust memory by Beck, Levy and Sznaider: ‘The disaster of the Holocaust became the source for a world-conscience, by which we do not mean some globally homogenous conscience, but a “local” conscience in which universal memories of the Holocaust combine with particular memories and manifest themselves in different places.’ Beck, Levy, and Sznaider, “Cosmopolitanization of Memory,” 117. Compare Krawatzek, “Made in France?,” 579, 596. See Mehler, “The Last ‘Never Again’?,” 627, endnote 110. Compare Krawatzek, “Made in France?,” 596–597, especially endnote 144. Compare Hadler, “Europe’s Other?,” 516. Compare Pestel, “Memory that Governs by Itself?,” 542–543. See Hadler, “Europe’s Other?,” 517. Droit, “Die Shoah: Von einem westeuropäischen zu einem transeuropäischen Erinnerungsort?,” 260, as well as Assmann, Auf dem Weg zu einer europäischen Erinnerungskultur, 32–5. 642 R. TRIMÇEV 40. All quotations are taken from International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust,” https://www.holocaustremembrance. com/about-us/stockholm-declaration (accessed May 24, 2016). Helmut Dubiel provides a particularly pertinent description of the process of universalization manifest in this episode: ‘Concepts, symbols, and images are taken out of their immediate context and are employed to code, in a single term, the collective pain that people inflict upon others.’ The Holocaust therefore ‘operates as the symbolic boundary between the good and the absolute evil’; for both quotations see Dubiel, “The Remembrance of the Holocaust,” 61. 41. Jordheim, “Introduction: Multiple Times and the Work of Synchronization,” 505. 42. Compare Krawatzek, “Made in France?,” 592. 43. Dubiel, “The Remembrance of the Holocaust,” 68. The author also describes the different phases in this development. In an affirmative manner, the Holocaust as a ‘European founding myth’ is for instance put forward by Assmann, Auf dem Weg zu einer europäischen Erinnerungskultur, 29 and 32. For critical reflections on the idea of a ‘negative founding myth’ see, for instance, Lothar Probst, “Founding Myths in Europe.” 44. Dubiel, “The Remembrance of the Holocaust,” 68. 45. Beck, Levy, and Sznaider, “Cosmopolitanization of Memory,” 116. 46. Pestel, “Memory that Governs by Itself?,” 537. 47. Ibid. 48. Feindt, “From ‘Flight and Expulsion’ to Migration,” 560. 49. Feindt, “From ‘Flight and Expulsion’ to Migration,” 561–563. 50. Indeed, comparisons only become problematic and, for many actors, intolerably competitive, inside a logic of equivalence. 51. Feindt, “From ‘Flight and Expulsion’ to Migration,” 562. 52. Compare Krawatzek, “Made in France?,” 578. 53. See Mehler, “The Last ‘Never Again’?,” 620. 54. For a detailed and very instructive study of the controversies surrounding the European Remembrance Day for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism, see the study by Troebst, “Die Europäische Union als ‘Gedächtnis und Gewissen Europas’?” 55. European Parliament, “European Parliament Resolution of 2 April 2009 on European http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc. Conscience and Totalitarianism,” do?type=TA&reference=P6-TA-2009-0213&language=EN&ring=P6-RC-2009-0165 (accessed May 24, 2016). 56. For an adaption to hegemony theory to the realm of memory, see Molden, “Resistant Pasts Versus Mnemonic Hegemony,” and earlier Marchart, “Das historisch-politische Gedächtnis.” For a translation of Chantal Mouffe’s ‘agonism’ into memory theory, see Cento Bull and Hansen, “On Agonistic Memory.” Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes on contributor Rieke Trimçev teaches Political Theory and the History of Political Ideas at the University of Greifswald. Her PhD thesis studies the metaphors of play, game and theatre in 20th century political thought; she defended it at the University of Augsburg in 2017. Her research focuses on conceptual history and metaphor history, theories of political representation and memory studies. In 2012–13, she was a visiting doctoral student at the University Paris VII and at the University of Oxford. She is a book review editor of the academic journal Contributions to the History of Concepts and a board member of CONCEPTA, an International Research School in Conceptual History. EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D’HISTOIRE 643 Bibliography Assmann, Aleida. Der kosmopolitische Blick, oder: Krieg ist Frieden. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004. Assmann, Aleida. Auf dem Weg zu einer europäischen Erinnerungskultur. Vienna: Picus, 2012. Beck, Ulrich. Macht und Gegenmacht im globalen Zeitalter. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. 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