Suchergebnisse

"Only another German can jolt us out of our eternal boycotting of history" -- Between the West and the East in Europe -- Germans in Romania: a brief historical background -- The Self and the Other -- "A valuable and unmistakable contribution to the life of Romanian society" -- "They who have no Germans, should buy some" -- "The rich villages around Sibiu and Braşov have been invaded by the Gypsy migration" -- Conclusions

Only another German can jolt us out of our eternal boycotting of history -- Europe : the West and the East, betwixt and between -- Germans in Romania : a brief historical background -- The self and the other -- A valuable and unmistakable contribution to the life of Romanian society -- They who have no Germans, should buy some -- The rich villages around Sibiu and Brasov have been invaded by the Gypsy migration -- Conclusions.

The memory boom and the related emergence of cosmopolitan victimhood-centred memories, increasingly criticized for depoliticizing the past and thus contributing to the depoliticization of the present, have been simultaneous with the curtailment of the welfare state, the abandonment of the politics of redistribution, the erosion of social and economic rights, and the growth in social and economic inequalities. Yet if the latter are often being considered to be among the reasons leading to the current right-wing populist wave in Europe and elsewhere or at least are seen as entangled therewith, the relevance of the memory boom for these developments has not been properly interrogated.
Against this background, this contribution makes a plea for a critical appreciation of the linkages between the memory boom and the global ascension of neoliberalism. It acknowledges the contemporaneity of the two phenomena, which have been fundamentally informing our present age, roughly since the end of the 1970s, and calls for a critical engagement with their interwoven character. In doing this, it argues that scholarship should pay particular attention to the relationship between past, present, and future that the neoliberal turn in its various shapes and guises implies, as well as to the regimes of temporality that underlie various instantiations of the memory boom. It ends by taking heed of recent theorizations in memory studies and by asking to what extent can they be used in order to have a better grasp of the critical juncture we are currently lying at and to contribute to a radical change of the political status quo. Thus, the article makes some preliminary steps towards disentangling the interconnections between the memory boom and the neoliberal turn, and aims to provide a blueprint for a substantial future research project that should look in depth at these entanglements.

The memory boom, a multifaceted process fundamentally consisting in the increasing presence of the past in the present, occurred in practice simultaneously with the ostensible (transnational) stabilization of a neoliberal consensus, itself a complex process informed by deregulation, privatization, the abandonment of the politics of redistribution and the erosion of social and economic rights. By drawing attention to the concurrent characters of the history of the memory boom and the history of neoliberalism, this contribution aims to push towards an engagement with the ways in which economic transformation and memory are intertwined. This should enable us to better understand the critical political and mnemonic juncture that we find ourselves at. The question arising is whether memory has in any way the necessary critical potentialities to underlie the pursuit and realization of a radically democratic present and future. Author's noteI make a similar argument in an article titled "Towards a Disentanglement of the Links between the Memory Boom and the Neoliberal Turn", forthcoming in the online journal "Intersections". The two texts borrow from each other.

This article analyzes the Military History Museum (MHM) in Dresden against the backdrop of recent theoretical elaborations on agonistic memory, as opposed to the cosmopolitan and antagonistic modes of remembering. It argues that the MHM attempts to combine two functions of the museum: the museum as forum and the museum as temple. By examining the concept underpinning the reorganization of the permanent exhibition of the MHM, and by bringing examples from both the permanent and temporary xhibitions, the article shows that the discourse of the MHM presents some relevant compatibilities with the principles of agonistic memory, yet does not embrace agonism to the full. The article also suggests that the agonistic mode of remembering requires rejecting the notion of the museum as temple.

I begin the present paper by providing an overview of the afterlife of Frederick the Great's earthly remains. I then continue by presenting the mise-en-scène of Frederick's last (until now?) reburial, together with the conflicts and debates surrounding this event. Subsequently, I elaborate on the main conceptual frameworks dealing with dead body politics and thus seeming at first glance suitable for explaining the sinuous afterlife of the royal corpse of Frederick. Directly connected with this attempt at theoretical clarification, I comment upon the extent to which these frameworks furnish the appropriate instruments to make sense of the fate of Frederick the Great's dead body and of the reinterment that took place on 17 August 1991, in Potsdam. At the same time, I also aim to explicitly show how the 1991 reinterment of Frederick the Great, and that of his father, Frederick William I, differs to a large extent from apparently similar or akin events.

This article argues that positive representations of the German minority in post-1989 Romania, discernible in specific memory and identity discourses, are linked to an internalized self-orientalizing view of Romanianness and to a symbolic wish to "belong to Europe," present in Romanian society and displayed on the Romanian political scene. In other words, it maintains that a phenomenon describable as "philo-Germanism without Germans" in contemporary Romania is tightly connected with the production and reproduction of symbolic geographies whose aim is to insert Romania into the "civilized" Western/European world.

Hitler's coming to power in Germany had its key consequences upon the fate of the German minorities in Central and Eastern Europe. The German community in Romania constituted no exception. After 1933, a process of radicalization can be noticed in the case of the Transylvanian Saxons, one of the several German-speaking groups in Romania. The phenomenon has already been analyzed in its political and economic dimensions, yet not so much in its social ones. This article looks at the latter aspect, its argument being that the Nazification of the Transylvanian Saxon community can be best comprehended by using a conceptual framework developed by political scientist Donald Horowitz in the early 1970s. The analysis uses a series of contemporary sources (diaries, issues of the official periodical of the Lutheran Church in Transylvania,Kirchliche Blätter), but also a wide range of secondary sources, academic and literary. Consequently, the article shows that especially after 1933, the Lutheran affiliation, highly relevant for the production and reproduction of the traditional model of Transylvanian Saxon identity, shifted from the status of a criterion of identity to a mere identification indicium. At the same time, the attraction of a (Pan-) German identity, with its Nazi anchors, became stronger and the center of gravity for Transylvanian Saxon identity radically moved towards German ethnicity, in its National-Socialist understanding.