Difficult History Research Articles

Disability in German-Speaking Europe: History, Memory, Culture ed. by Linda Leskau, Tanja Nusser, and Katherine Sorrels

Reviewed by: Disability in German-Speaking Europe: History, Memory, Culture ed. by Linda Leskau, Tanja Nusser, and Katherine Sorrels Petra Watzke Disability in German-Speaking Europe: History, Memory, Culture. Edited by Linda Leskau, Tanja Nusser, and Katherine Sorrels. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2022. Pp. 249. Hardcover $99.00. ISBN 978-1640141087. German-speaking Europe has a complicated relationship with disability. Although roughly 10–20% of the population in German-speaking countries is disabled, disabled people are often treated as an afterthought in efforts to achieve diversity, equity, and inclusivity. The lackluster media response to the murder of four disabled people by a caregiver in Potsdam in 2021 emphasizes the role that ableist attitudes play in the disdain for disabled people. Even though the general reaction to this tragic event indicates persistent prejudices about disability, attitudes are slowly changing. This change is due to general societal shifts, continued disability activism, and, at least partially, the increased presence of Disability Studies in the academic institutions of German-speaking countries, where it has grown into an established interdisciplinary method of inquiry since the early 2000s. This volume builds upon and engages with discourses of disability studies in German-speaking Europe and is overall informed by a literary and cultural studies approach to this topic. The volume traces sociocultural attempts to define, frame, and control disability from the Middle Ages to the present. The individual contributions are from scholars in Canada, Germany, and the United States and cover a wide range of academic disciplines, including history, German studies, and sociology. This interdisciplinary approach suits the complexity of the topic and allows the reader to see continuities in the conceptualization of disability in different time periods, genres, and methodologies. The individual contributions are divided into three sections that are largely informed by the methodologies of their different disciplines. The first section, "Negotiating Interpersonal Relationships: Historical Perspectives," examines the processes by which normative definitions of disability are negotiated on the individual level. The articles' subject matters range from the pre-modern to the mid-twentieth century in judicial and educational settings, and in a doctor-patient relationship. Ashley Elrod's article "Moral Madness: Representations of Prodigality, Disability, and Competence in German Legal History" uses two legal cases from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century to trace the liminal category of prodigality between impairment and moral failure. The case studies not only demonstrate changes in the categorization of disability, especially with the establishment of psychiatric and psychoanalytic professions, but also show how pre-modern attitudes stigmatizing disability as deviant survived into modern times. The unreflected stigmatization of disability is examined in the other two articles in this section. The second section, "Reckoning with the Past: Reconstruction of Memory," engages with the institutionalization, pathologization, and persecution of disabled [End Page 179] people in the first half of the twentieth century in order to demonstrate how this difficult history has been dealt with (or ignored) since. Dagmar Herzog's article, "From the Disability Murder Archive: Ernst Klee's Confrontation of the Public with Nazism's First Genocide," excels at demonstrating how traumatic past events have informed ableist attitudes throughout the twentieth century. Her article discusses the work of the journalist and disability activist Klee who, in the 1970s and 80s, uncovered extant documentation of the Nazi's eugenics program aimed at the annihilation of disabled persons, commonly referred to as the T4 program. The article emphasizes Klee's important work Euthanasie im NS-Staat: Die Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens for confronting the public with the Nazis' widespread euthanasia program, even though the work was dismissed by academics in its own time. Tracing Klee's research process and the narrative structure he builds around the case files he discovered, Herzog reevaluates Klee's work as an important contribution to reckoning with the past in disability activism and disability studies. The third section, "Intersections and Diversity: The Lens of Culture," includes articles by German studies scholars focused on close readings of a variety of very different texts that provide mostly intersectional approaches to disability. Waltraud Maierhofer's reading of Alissa Walter's novel about the blind Maria Theresa Paradies, entitled Am Anfang war die Nachtmusik (1992), exemplifies this. The novel is...

Rapid Response Collecting and the Irish Abortion Referendum

The last decade in Ireland has seen rapid societal change, including the enshrining of equal marriage and women’s right to bodily autonomy in the constitution via public referendum. In response, the National Museum of Ireland enacted a programme of collecting the material culture of such significant contemporary events in Ireland, which led to the formal establishment of the Contemporary Ireland Collection. The material culture of the referendum on the abolishment of the 8th Amendment of the Irish Constitution (Repeal the 8th) to allow for the legal termination of pregnancy formed the nucleus of the collection, and the rationale behind the identification of the representative themes and subsequent object choices has become the template on which further contemporary collecting is now based. This has enabled the institution and its curators to work collaboratively with the public in the expansion of its collections to fill the historic gaps and become more inclusive and representative of Ireland’s varied and difficult history.

Review of the Monograph “The Monetary System of Russia: Formation through Reforms”

The review considers a collective monograph edited by M. N. Konyagina, dedicated to the history of the formation of the modern domestic monetary system, the beginning of which comes from the reign of the young Ivan the Terrible. The theme of the book today is relevant not only in the context of improving the financial literacy of citizens, the formation of knowledge among students acquiring an economic specialty, but also to demonstrate the fact that the Russian ruble has repeatedly been stable, and the domestic monetary system has outpaced the European ones at certain historical stages. The publication discusses the structure of the publication, highlights particularly interesting developments, emphasizes the contribution of the co-authors not only to the monograph itself, but also to the development of thematic areas, which is confirmed by numerous published works by them. The reviewer gives an overall high positive assessment of the reviewed work, as well as recommendations for further deepening the subject under study.The author of the review is convinced that the book will be useful for students of the educational fields “Economics”, “Management”, “Business Informatics”, “State and Municipal Administration”, teachers, business representatives in the field of financial intermediation, as well as a wide range of readers for understanding economic processes in the difficult history of Russia.

The Ledra Palace Hotel and the ‘difficult history’ of modern Cyprus

This paper explores the extent to which the recent turbulent history of Cyprus is reflected in an emblematic building, the Ledra Palace Hotel. The hotel is situated on Nicosia's buffer zone, the Green Line that, since 1964, has divided the island into Greek Cypriot and Turkish sectors. Since its establishment in 1949 the Ledra Palace has been the background of the country's key historical events. In this paper, the Ledra Palace is analysed as an integral part of Cyprus’ cultural heritage which contributes to the understanding and negotiation of the island's difficult past.

There was a silly teacher in Mâcon … Nonsense et écriture créative au service de la polyvalence en master MEEF 1er degré

This article describes a series of creative writing projects used in teaching English as a second language to MA students in a primary school teaching degree (MEEF 1er degré), as English is now one of the many subjects they will have to teach. Creative writing workshops based on children’s books such as Julia Donaldson’s Chocolate Mousse for Greedy Goose, on songs and poems, especially limericks, not only allowed those students to practice vocabulary and syntax, but also to work on phonetics.By involving creativity, these activities did not only improve these students’ sound awareness, they arguably helped to reconnect them with the English language, and sometimes to heal their relationship with English and with the difficult process of learning languages. As schoolteachers, the prospect of having to teach a language they did not choose, with which they sometimes have a difficult history, is a major source of anxiety. Poetry and rhyming children stories allow them to experience language as a sensory material, as a means of creating emotions and fun, which they will then share with their own pupils.

Gender, Race, and the French Imperial Republic

Gender, Race, and the French Imperial Republic Amelia H. Lyons (bio) Nimisha Barton, Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France, 1880–1945. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. 306 pp. ISBN 9781501749636 (cl); 9781501749681 (ebook). Françoise Vergès, The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism. Translated by Kaiama L. Glover. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 184 pp. ISBN 9781478008521 (cl); 9781478009412 (pb); 9781478008866 (ebook). Sarah J. Zimmerman, Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers' Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2020. 318 pp. ISBN 9780821424223 (cl); 9780821424476 (pb); 9780821440674 (pdf). When French people of color raised their voices as part of the global Black Lives Matter movement and brought increased attention to endemic institutional racism in France, President Emmanuel Macron responded by blaming foreign influences, especially "Anglo-Saxon traditions based on a different history, which is not ours," for fomenting separatism that led to the spread of "Islamo-leftism" and the corruption of French society. He worried that "children of the Republic," who had never experienced colonialism and whose parents and grandparents had lived in France, were being tempted to revisit "post-colonial or anti-colonial discourse."1 In short, the French government argued that scholars like those whose works are being reviewed here are to blame for putting "radical" and "activist" ideas that intend "to divide, to fracture, to pinpoint the enemy" into the minds of French people of color.2 This view that racism is not a French problem has roots in French history and in a range of contemporary issues that infantilize, minimize, and deny the agency of French people of color. Moreover, it assumes that the traumas of colonialism, decolonization, neocolonialism, and systemic, institutional racism are somehow not French. It pretends that the French are unaware, until told by anglophone scholars, that their own family histories have a fraught relationship with the French imperial republic. The French do not need to read these works to understand their own experiences; nevertheless, academic work plays an important role in analyzing the connections between the past and the present. Recent publications by Françoise Vergès, Sarah Zimmerman, and Nimisha Barton are excellent examples of the kind of academic work that President Marcon and others malign. All three provide careful, scholarly research that underscores the connections between racism and the management of women's bodies. Together these works help [End Page 156] us to understand that the tenets of French republicanism, with its claims to secularism and universality, are not separate from, but part of an interconnected history of France that includes systemic racial and gender discrimination and violence. We need this scholarship, as Kaiama Glover states in her thoughtful translator's introduction to Vergès's book, because for most of white France "the concept of race is perceived as incommensurable with progressive discourse. Race per se does not exist in France" (xiv). These books are part of a growing body of scholarship intended to force France to grapple with its difficult history and to demand that the French accept race as a constituent element of French history, society, and national identity. In her recently translated book, The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism, Françoise Vergès, a French, antiracist feminist and public intellectual, intentionally disrupts the contention that a critical examination of the intersections of systemic racial and gender discrimination is both foreign to and intends to corrupt the French people. Vergès's goal is to expose, through the politics and history of reproduction, how French colonial power continues to function. To do so, she examines the largely forgotten case of French doctors' regulation and violation of women's bodies in the department of Réunion for over a decade, mainly in the 1960s. As she puts it, by studying the "management of women's wombs," her book serves as "an act of historical reparation for the raced, despised, and exploited women of France's overseas departments" (3). Vergès begins with a history of the violent conquest of Réunion, followed by the story of Doctor Moreau and others who used French fears about overpopulation to justify aborting and sterilizing thousands of pregnant Réunionese women without...

ADSA® Presidential Report

ADSA® Presidential Report

Exploring and Interpreting the History of Slavery at James Madison’s Montpelier

Archaeology’s importance to understanding and exploring difficult histories should be considered an essential tool in the public history toolbox. This paper will explore how the Department of Archaeology at The Montpelier Foundation in Orange, Virginia, interprets the lives of over 350 individuals enslaved by James Madison, the nation’s fourth president. To do so, we use the Rubric of best practices, standards established by the National Summit on Teaching Slavery held in 2018 and published by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in a document called Engaging Descendant Communities in the Interpretation of Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites. This paper examines how the Montpelier Archaeology Department has developed a research and interpretive program that puts the Rubric into practice, making the case that public historians and heritage organizations must robustly engage archaeologists and the discipline of archaeology in all aspects of its research and interpretation.

Seeking to live more peacefully with painful histories

In this interview, Chaste Uwihoreye describes his work with young people in Rwanda, from collective truth-telling conversations to supporting child-headed households in ways that foster, rather than undermine, children’s leadership. Chaste draws on Rwandan songs, poems and proverbs as forms of cultural acknowledgement and comfort in workshops with very large groups of young people. These workshops begin with a ‘story gifting’ process that acknowledges what has happened to the young people and their families, and at the same time creates new stories about ways of living together with difficult histories. Metaphoric practices are described, including an umbrella exercise in which people depict the problems they are facing in the present as rain, and the skills and knowledges that they use to face these problems as a protective umbrella. Memories are transformed into a ‘usable past’ that can be used to generate songs, poems or artworks. Possession of these tangible forms provides options for action: whether to share a song, burn a poem or keep a drawing. Chaste describes solidarity camps (Ingando) in which young people can be together and witness each other’s suffering and strength, and be trained and supported to facilitate group work with other young people. In the shadow of genocide, Chaste shares the hopeful collective work of remembering painful histories in ways that enable people to act and to live good lives in the present.

Applying Commemorative Museum Pedagogy to Public Music Studies

Applying Commemorative Museum Pedagogy to Public Music Studies

Guest Editors’ Introduction: Opening Conversations that Matter in Public Music Studies

Guest Editors’ Introduction: Opening Conversations that Matter in Public Music Studies

Pioneer Mother

Pioneer Mother

Repicturing the Restoration: New Art to Expand Our Understanding

Repicturing the Restoration: New Art to Expand Our Understanding

Courage, resistance and vulnerability in memory culture: Swedish Museum education and the representation of the Holocaust survivor at the turn of the twenty-first century

This article provides a Swedish perspective on critical memory culture and the use of difficult history in museum education. It is based on a detailed study of the educational resource the Teacher’s Guide, published by the Swedish Museum of Cultural History in Lund named Kulturen in 2006 in connection with their permanent exhibition, To Survive. Voices from Ravensbrück. The Guide shows how women, imprisoned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, found ways to resist their situation and overcome their victim position. It also relates to the role Sweden played in the rescue of the women from the camp. First, the article explicates the narrative structure of the guidebook and examines how it characterises the survivors as resistance heroines and presents their story as a story of courage. Then, the article relates the Teacher’s Guide to two contemporary phenomena in Sweden: a governmental educational campaign to raise young people’s awareness of the Holocaust and foster engagement in resistance to present neo-fascism and a historiographical debate taking issue with negative and difficult aspects of Sweden’s involvement in the Second World War. The Teacher’s Guide is discussed based on Aleida Assmann’s concept of self-critical memory culture, Judith Butler’s notion of vulnerability and the concept of difficult history in museum pedagogy. It is argued that by emphasising courage and neglecting vulnerability in its story of resistance, the Guide deprives the audience of the opportunity of responding adequately to the difficult history of surviving the Holocaust as a history of ambiguity. Ultimately, it is argued that the Guide constitutes a hindrance to the emergence of a self-critical memory culture on the Holocaust in Sweden.

Addressing the elephant in the room: Ethics as an organizing concept in history education

Ethics is the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ in history education in settler-colonial nations. It is foundational to teaching and learning history and engaging with the ongoing effects of the past in the present. Yet its place in history curricula and teaching continues to be ignored, understated, confused, and challenged. This article illustrates how ethical judgment is central to four commonly identified rationales for teaching history in schools: citizenship education, historical consciousness, historical thinking, and difficult histories. The article urges more explicit attention to ethics as an organizing concept in history education to enable students to appreciate the complex lived realities that constitute history and to explore the diverse perspectives that have contributed to sometimes-difficult decisions. We argue that ethics can humanize history, enrich students’ historical understandings, and offer a usable past. However, given the varied approaches to ethical judgment across the four orientations to teaching history, we stress the need for the mindful deployment of ethical judgment in curriculum design. Using an example from the 2021 draft Aotearoa New Zealand’s Histories curriculum, we demonstrate what “ethical judgment” could be called upon to do, and the impoverished approach to history education that would exist without it.

Myth-Making: On-going Impacts of Historical Education Policy on Beliefs About Māori in Education

The history of educational policy-making in Aotearoa New Zealand is also a history in myth-making. Myths about Māori in education are deeply embedded in educational and social thought, because they have their origins in the first political interactions between Māori and Pākeha. These interactions were motivated by contradicting forces—Māori determination to participate in the changing economic and technological landscape, contrasted against British perceptions of their own cultural superiority and inherent right to rule indigenous populations. British superiority was enshrined in aggressive and racist laws that disenfranchised and dispossessed Māori of lands, resources, economies, and attempted to de-culturalise Māori. Laws were in turn translated to policy and practice that reinforced deep seeded myths that have negatively positioned Māori socially, politically and educationally. As Aotearoa New Zealand education progresses toward a commitment to teach our dual and difficult histories, it is necessary to also expose and analyse the ways negative positioning of Māori has been purposefully built into our education system. Understanding how political histories have influenced our education system may better equip education professionals to identify and question their own conscious and unconscious biases, and to challenge and change a system that has its origins racist philosophy, reinforced by policy. Education professionals who are able to deconstruct carefully fortified, damaging myth-making about Māori will be well positioned to lead authentic movement toward a shared future.

Introduction On the Histories and Futures of Black New England Studies

Introduction On the Histories and Futures of Black New England Studies

The return of suppressed memories in Eastern Europe: Locality and unsilencing difficult histories

This introductory article contextualizes theoretical and methodological frameworks for analyzing difficult pasts through arts, and articulates historical and current political realities in Eastern Europe which are at the core of this special issue. It contributes to the debates in memory studies particularly based on the post-Soviet experience. We introduce scholarly and artistic efforts to integrate difficult and uncomfortable facets of pasts into local and transnational histories, and further consider how recent research attempts to integrate local specificities while maintaining a relational approach by adopting transnational, transcultural, translocal, and cross-cultural perspectives. Rethinking how different artistic media contribute to processing suppressed memories, we propose the notion of “unsilencing” difficult memories in reference to the breaking of silences that sometimes run through generations and the articulation of which can change public perception of the past. Such acts of unsilencing can contribute to nuancing understanding about the relationships between locality, silencing, and remembering.

Private photos and Holocaust testimony: A complex relationship

ABSTRACT This article explores the legibility of photos taken by Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. Many museums have collected private photos from survivors, and use them to illustrate Holocaust testimony. But photos and testimonies are not always neatly aligned; private photos can also confound audience expectations. We focus on four case studies, comprising photos taken in Poland, Germany, and the UK, and interviewed survivors about their significance. Testimonies and personal photos, we conclude, reveal different but complementary aspects of Jewish experiences during the Holocaust, and, if read together, can enrich the way in which modern audiences engage with this difficult history.

Review: Curating America’s Painful Past: Memory, Museums, and the National Imagination, by Tim Gruenewald

Review: <i>Curating America’s Painful Past: Memory, Museums, and the National Imagination</i>, by Tim Gruenewald