Introduction: Theorising Europe and Recollection

Abstract

Discussing the ways in which memories of the Second World War have shaped the imagined geography of Europe, the French historian Henry Rousso quotes with approval the Dutch specialist on sites of memory, Pim den Boer, who argues that Europe “needs sites of memory: not as a mnemonic technique merely to identify mutilated bodies, but in order to make people understand, forgive, and forget” (Rousso, 2007: 28). To Rousso, this means that “European memory must be conceived within a horizon of expectation rather than within a space of experience, and is therefore something that has yet to be built rather than something to be exhumed” (2007: 28). I share these authors’ concerns over the role memory has come to play in the reorganisation of the European political landscape in the wake of perestroika and the Iron Curtain’s collapse. In Performing European Memories, I examine the part played by cultures of remembrance in shoring up the borders of emerging postwar national or supranational (“western European,” “Warsaw pact,” “pan-European”) identities. At the same time, however, through my analysis of the works by Heiner Müller, Tadeusz Kantor, Harold Pinter, Andrzej Wajda, Artur Żmijewski, and several others, I also seek to point to the simultaneous difficulty and necessity of confronting bodies from the past, bodies which retain the marks of politics, history, and reverence.