From the Editor

Abstract

From the Editor José Brunner The five articles that appear in this issue of History & Memory all address the tension or ambivalence that is inherent in commemorations of the past. While commemorative endeavors are selective, evoking a particular aspect of the past that is considered significant for the present and thought to hold a lesson for the future, the past itself is far more complex than the story that is told about it in the present, and there is always more than one cause in the present that can be served by the past. Sooner or later, a number of conflictual and contradictory stories emerge, which undermine each other’s claim to exclusivity. The politics of the past therefore point to the plurality of memory, to its openness and variability, rather than to the well-defined and demarcated significance of a legacy. Jan C. Jansen traces the struggles over the commemoration of Emir ‘Abd al-Qadir, the most prominent leader of the nineteenth-century Algerian resistance against the French colonial invasion. Was ‘Abd al-Qadir, who united Arab tribes to fight Christian invaders in the 1830s and ended up controlling large parts of central and western Algeria, the first Algerian anticolonialist nationalist? Or, since he made deals with the French invaders and later, in Syrian exile, maintained links with France, was he a leader whom the French could commemorate by erecting a “statue of the defeated”? As Jansen shows, from the days following World War I to Algerian independence, the ambiguities and contradictions in ‘Abd al-Qadir’s politics enabled both sides, colonialists and anticolonialists, to seek to establish a specific image of the national hero that would serve their own purposes. Andrew Demshuk examines another fierce battle over the commemoration of a historical figure. Taking us to the heady days when the Third Reich gave way to a communist regime in East Germany, he discusses the intense dispute in Leipzig over the remains of Johann Sebastian Bach—whether they should be placed in a new mausoleum to be built on the ruins of the Johanniskirche, where he had been buried, or transferred to a new shrine in the Thomaskirche in time for the 200th anniversary of [End Page 1] his death in 1950. Demshuk shows that all concerned were keenly aware that the debate on the proper resting place for Bach’s bones was in fact a struggle over the shape of Leipzig’s postwar urban landscape. How does one welcome visitors to a Holocaust museum? How can a Holocaust museum be hospitable? This is the provocative question Rachel E. Perry confronts in her essay on Michal Rovner’s Living Landscape, a video installation that covers an entire wall at the entrance to the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum. Rather than scenes of persecution and extermination, Living Landscape shows everyday scenes from prewar east European Jewish life, thus introducing a space for life, joy, community, youth and family into the dark rooms of a museum, in which mass death is depicted and remembered. Drawing on the work of the French philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, Perry argues that in creating a kind of “twilight zone” Living Landscape not only offers hospitality in a Holocaust museum, but also problematizes the very notion of hospitality. Jo Laycock examines memoirs by Armenians who had followed Stalin’s invitation to leave their diaspora communities in order to “repatriate” to the Soviet Republic of Armenia, but returned to the diaspora when they realized that instead of a warm homecoming, Soviet Armenia offered poverty, isolation and repression. Laycock shows that although all these memoirs resonate with the overarching Armenian national narrative of suffering and survival, they also expose divisions both between homeland and diaspora and within the diaspora. Thus they not only reaffirm traditional conceptions of Armenian identity but also problematize standard narratives of Armenian history and belonging. Finally, Roland Burke turns our attention to postage stamps, a medium of commemoration that rarely features in the literature on historical memory. Analyzing the United Nations’ international program to commemorate the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights on stamps, he shows how the hundreds of stamps, issued by around 120 states in the course of more than...