IntroductionMuseums and Monuments: Memorials of Violent Pasts in Urban Spaces Ulrike Capdepón, Aline Sierp, and Jill Strauss Over the last thirty years, there have been ever increasing numbers of memorial projects worldwide that address the histories of mass violence, genocides, recent wars, dictatorships and systematic human rights abuses. Along with the growing numbers of memory initiatives, the theoretical field of memory studies has developed concurrently. Writing on the influence of symbolism and ritual on remembrance in the early 1990s, historian John Bodnar noted the dearth of literature on collective memory in urban spaces.1 Over the next three decades this strand has grown exponentially. In the introduction to their special issue from 2008, “Collective Memory and the Politics of Urban Space,” Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman and Maoz Azaryahu argued that the choices individuals and groups make to remember or forget are “embedded within and constrained by particular socio-spatial conditions.”2 Meanwhile, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider had already coined the term “cosmopolitan memory” to describe how cultural memory is not limited to localities but, in fact, goes beyond borders. They reasoned that just as individual and collective memories are interconnected processes, so too, local and global memory making are symbiotic.3 Drawing on developments in the field, from local framings of memory to transnational perspectives, this special issue focuses on the role of various memory practices in urban space. When places hold multiple and often opposing memories, the question of whose histories are remembered and publicly shared, or marginalized and excluded, becomes crucial for understanding social dynamics and political change. Coming from the fields of anthropology, communication, history and political science, this interdisciplinary group of scholars presents various case studies of public representation of contested history in cities located in Europe and the Americas to discuss theoretical and [End Page 5] methodological approaches in memory studies. Toward that end, the articles address the following questions: To what extent is there a common thread in the motivation to portray contested history in spaces of public memory display? And related to this, in what ways are memorialization practices informed by transnational perspectives? Finally, how do political forces and civil society activists shape public debates regarding the representation of a contested past in urban space? This collection examines how museums and memory sites construct historical narratives through processes of preservation, education and public exhibition. Aline Sierp’s article on the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism considers how and why Munich, the birthplace of Nazism, was able to avoid for seventy years publicly acknowledging and documenting its role in Hitler’s rise to power. Sierp refers to the influence of transnational memory processes when analyzing the museum that was ultimately constructed and shows how they shaped the museum’s decision to design exhibitions to educate and engage visitors on taking responsibility. Cosmopolitan memory and glocalization—a concept also used to describe how ideas and practices are adopted globally and then adapted to suit the local situation—are employed by Jan Gryta in his article on the history of the creation of the museum in Oskar Schindler’s Factory in Kraków, Poland. In this case, given Schindler’s role in saving the lives of more than one-thousand Jewish internees, memorializing the factory itself was not in question. Influenced by international best practices of museum exhibition design, the museum director and curators envisioned portrayals of the daily lives of all residents of Kraków, but this met with resistance from city officials. The conflict centered on how best to represent the Poles who were both victims and perpetrators in a country unwilling to acknowledge its culpability even five decades later. Whether or not monuments, museums and symbolic acts like street or place names are physically tied to “authentic” places of memory, they often function as powerful political tools. In Buenos Aires, the former clandestine torture and extermination center ESMA, originally the school of the Argentine navy, today houses a memorial museum in the building that was the headquarters of repression and disappearance during the Argentine dictatorship (1976–83). In her article on the Ex-ESMA, Susana Kaiser compares visitor and museum staff experiences of the site...
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Dec 7, 2023
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