Abstract
Abstract: The author discusses uncommemorated and under-remembered sites of past violence in terms of the conditions of their transformation into memory sites. Commemorative ceremonies, which may be staged at non-sites of memory, are presented as affective media of memory and identity, demonstrating social responses to the sites, as well as placing the local past in the context of supra-local memory forms. The argument is grounded in the material gathered from fieldwork during the research project on uncommemorated sites of genocide in Poland and, predominantly, in a detailed case study of a ceremony witnessed by the author in 2016 in Radecznica (Lublin Voivodship) at a burial site of victims of the “Holocaust by bullets”. In the article the discourse of speeches delivered during the ceremony is analyzed, on the assumption that they can reveal rules of national Polish memory culture dictating what may be commemorated and how cultural mechanisms have a power to hinder commemoration. As a result, seven distinctive framings of past events that kept returning in subsequent speeches were identified and interpreted as “memory devices” that enable and facilitate recollection, but also mark out the limits of what can be remembered and passed on.
Highlights
East-Central European landscape encompasses multiple unmemorialized and under-remembered sites of past violence, related to the Holocaust, and to ethnic conflicts during and right after World War II
Roma Sendyka dubbed these localizations “non-sites of memory”, pointing out that “the victims who should be commemorated on such sites typically have a collective identity distinct from the society currently living in the area, whose self-conception is threatened by the occurrence of the non-site of memory”; as a result, nonsites can be problematically “transformed, manipulated, neglected, or contested” (2016b: 700)
The establishment of a monument or memorial is one of many possible ways of transforming a site into a lieu de mémoire, appealing to collective memory and historical consciousness. It is an occasion on which non-sites of memory may become the stage of ceremonial events
Summary
East-Central European landscape encompasses multiple unmemorialized and under-remembered sites of past violence, related to the Holocaust, and to ethnic conflicts during and right after World War II. Kobielska: Ceremonial events at non-sites of memory: Seven framings of a difficult past
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