Conclusion: European Memories and the Margins of Europe: Sarajevo Theatre Tragedy and Three Prayers for One Wish

Abstract

The end of the forty-year Cold War that split the postwar European continent provided an impetus for rethinking the past all over Europe, as well as for the study of “European memory.” A commitment on the part of European countries to “work through the past” as individual nations, and the often contentious negotiations about what to remember and what to forget, ran parallel with the search for a transnational memory of the conflicts, contentions, complexity, and ambiguity of Europe’s past. In Performing European Memories I joined these debates to explore the intersections between contemporary European theatre and performance, the interdisciplinary field of memory studies, and current preoccupations with the politics of memory in Europe. Asking whether a genuinely shared European memory is possible while simultaneously addressing the dangers of a single homogenised European memory, I examined the contradictions, specificities, continuities, and discontinuities in the European shared and unshared pasts as represented in the works of Harold Pinter, Tadeusz Kantor, Andrzej Wajda, Heiner Muller, and Artur Żmijewski. Showing the different ways in which these artists engage with the traumatic experiences of the Holocaust, the Stalinist Gulags, colonialism, and imperialism, I argued that their works challenge their audiences’ historical imagination and renew their affective engagement with Europe’s past.