Remembrance, History, and Justice: Coming to terms with traumatic pasts in democratic societies

"The twentieth century has left behind a painful and complicated legacy of massive trauma, monstrous crimes, radical social engineering, or collective/individual guilt syndromes that were often the premises for and the specters haunting the process of democratization in the various societies that emerged out of these profoundly de-structuring contexts.

The present collection of essays is a state of the art reassessment and analysis of how the interplay between memory, history, and justice generates insight that is multifariously relevant for comprehending the present and future of democracy without becoming limited to a Europe-centric framework of understanding. The volume is structured on three complementary and interconnected trajectories: the public use of history, politics of memory, and transitional justice."

"The present book is a state of the art reassessment and analysis of how the interplay between memory, history, and justice generates insight that is multifariously relevant for comprehending the present and future of democracy without becoming limited to a Europe-centric framework of understanding. The volume is structured on three complementary and interconnected trajectories: the public use of history, politics of memory, and transitional justice. Subsequently, the contributors deal with trauma and the reconstitution of democratic communities, with the multiple publics of historical inquiry in the context of a shift from authoritarianism to pluralism, with the competing narratives resultant of the process of Aufarbeitung, and last but not least, with the juridical and investigative efforts to acknowledge and punish the crimes and abuses of the past. It brings together historiography with memory studies, intellectual and legal history, political analysis with theoretical insight. It integrates local and regional experiences with traumatic pasts into a global structure that offers the possibility of more general conclusions about the memory of a century touched by the 'reek of cruelty'. The authors situate the process of coming to terms with the past (communism, fascism, authoritarianism, failed democracies) in Eastern Europe (including the Western Balkans) and the former Soviet space within the larger context of discussing the memory and history of the post-war period. At the same time, the European overview is compared with other cases of post-authoritarian transitions such as those in Latin America, South Africa, Japan, and the Middle East. The result is a clustered big picture of practices of remembrance, reckoning, and historiographical reevaluation"--Provided by publisher

"The present book is a state of the art reassessment and analysis of how the interplay between memory, history, and justice generates insight that is multifariously relevant for comprehending the present and future of democracy without becoming limited to a Europe-centric framework of understanding. The volume is structured on three complementary and interconnected trajectories: the public use of history, politics of memory, and transitional justice. Subsequently, the contributors deal with trauma and the reconstitution of democratic communities, with the multiple publics of historical inquiry in the context of a shift from authoritarianism to pluralism, with the competing narratives resultant of the process of Aufarbeitung, and last but not least, with the juridical and investigative efforts to acknowledge and punish the crimes and abuses of the past. It brings together historiography with memory studies, intellectual and legal history, political analysis with theoretical insight. It integrates local and regional experiences with traumatic pasts into a global structure that offers the possibility of more general conclusions about the memory of a century touched by the 'reek of cruelty'. The authors situate the process of coming to terms with the past (communism, fascism, authoritarianism, failed democracies) in Eastern Europe (including the Western Balkans) and the former Soviet space within the larger context of discussing the memory and history of the post-war period. At the same time, the European overview is compared with other cases of post-authoritarian transitions such as those in Latin America, South Africa, Japan, and the Middle East. The result is a clustered big picture of practices of remembrance, reckoning, and historiographical reevaluation"--Provided by publisher.

Introduction /Vladimir Tismaneanu and Bogdan C. Iacob --Part One.Politics of Memory and Constructing Democracy --European mass killing and European commemoration /Timothy Snyder --Why World War II memories remain so troubled in Europe and East Asia /Daniel Chirot --Post-authoritarian memories in Europe and Latin America /Eusebio Mujal-León and Eric Langenbacher --Divided memory revisited : the Nazi past in West Germany and in postwar Palestine /Jeffrey Herf --On the relationship between politics of memory and the state's rapport with the communist past /Alexandru Gussi --Part Two.Histories and Their Publics --Democracy, memory, and moral justice /Vladimir Tismaneanu --The difficulty of overcoming the communist legacy in public memory of the past : Poland, Ukraine, and Russia in comparative perspective /Mark Kramer --Promotion of a usable past : official efforts to rewrite Russo-Soviet history, 2000-2013 /David Brandenberger --Germany's two processes of "coming to terms with the past" : failures, after all? /Jan-Werner Müller --Part Three.Searching for Closure in Democratizing Societies --Twenty-five years "after" : the ambivalence of settling accounts with communism : the Polish case /Andrzej Paczkowski --The Romanian revolution in court : what narratives about 1989? /Raluca Grosescu and Raluca Ursachi --Slobodan Milosevic in the Hague : failed success of a historical trial /Vladimir Petrović --The South Africa transition : then and now /Charles Villa-Vicencio --Scholarship and public memory : the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (PCACDR) /Cristian Vasile --Moldova under the Soviet communist regime : history and memory /Igor Caşu --Part Four.Competing Narratives of Troubled Pasts --Coming to terms with Catholic-Jewish relations in the Polish Catholic church /John Connelly --After communism : identity and morality in the Baltic countries /Leonidas Donskis --The Romanian communist past and the entrapment of polemics /Bogdan C. Iacob --Past intransient/transiting past : remembering the victims and the representation of communist past in Bulgaria /Nikolai Vukov.

The twentieth century has left behind a painful and complicated legacy of massive trauma, monstrous crimes, radical social engineering, or collective/individual guilt syndromes that were often the premises for and the specters haunting the process of democratization in the various societies that emerged out of these profoundly de-structuring contexts. The present collection of essays is a state of the art reassessment and analysis of how the interplay between memory, history, and justice generates insight that is multifariously relevant for comprehending the present and future of democracy without becoming limited to a Europe-centric framework of understanding. The volume is structured on three complementary and interconnected trajectories: the public use of history, politics of memory, and transitional justice.