‘Will I ever be old enough to know?’ (Hannah Kliger, present volume, p. 63)
‘I am, indeed, made of the histories and languages of others.’ (Eva Karpinski, present volume, p. 104).
To be forced to leave one’s community, family, and country as a result of an armed conflict or natural disaster has been described as an expulsion from the social order (Nail 2015, p. 1). This kind of forced migration can lead to feelings of displacement and the loss of community and affects all aspects of individual and family life, including the lives of members of the next generation: ‘Children of refugees inherit their parents’ knowledge of the fragility of place, their suspicion of the notion of home.’ (Hirsch and Spitzer 2003, p. 93). Forced displacement is not a new phenomenon, nor is it a temporary one. The accelerated political and economic transformations that result from shifting socio-ethnic patterns are likely to remain a constant in the human experience. ‘The twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant. At the turn of the century, there were more regional and international migrants than ever before in recorded history’ (Nail 2015, p. 1). However, how do we respond to memories of forced displacement? Are these memories of the past, when shared and integrated at the discourse memory level, of any help in dealing with current forced migrations of populations? What exactly represents forced displacement, and how are we affected by it? In addition, how do women cope with displacement and the loss of their homes? This last topic was chosen in relation to the totalitarian regimes that dominated Central and Eastern Europe until recently and, more specifically, with the process of coming to terms with the past as it has developed in some of the countries in this part of Europe. This volume seeks to explore the different mechanisms and millieux used by women to come to terms with the past, and the research has been constructed around the variety and complexity of their stories within the context of Central and Eastern Europe. The lines that both unite and separate the volume chapters are not geographically determined, even though some references to specific places in Central and Eastern Europe are provided; rather, they are determined by the women’s narratives of the past and the ways in which the creative process is used for appropriating it. The main question of this volume focuses on the willingness of European society to recuperate the stories of the past from the perspective of women and on the memory spaces created for alternative narratives . This is the question of the ‘addressable other’ without whom such stories cannot be told: ‘The absence of an empathic listener, or more radically, the absence of an addressable other, an other who can hear the anguish of one’s memories and thus affirm and recognize their realness, annihilates the story.’ (Laub 1992, p. 67).
In countries previously dominated by totalitarian regimes, where the trust and social bonds between people were largely destroyed, the process of coming to terms with the past involves confronting the collective trauma, personal histories, and individual traumas, as well as listening to and accepting the stories and accounts of others. Referring to the communist past of Eastern Europe, Tony Judt described exactly this penetration of totalitarian regimes into people’s lives: ‘It is not for any real and imagined crimes that people feel a sort of shame at having lived in and under communism, it is for their daily lies and infinite tiny compromises.’ (2005, p. 102). Why is this process of coming to terms with the past so important? Moreover, why must we make room for women’s narratives of the past? It is the credo of this volume that ‘[a]s long as the telling of stories of trauma continues to meet with resistance and denial, the psychic effects of the past remain to poison the present’ (Leydesdorff et al. 1999, p. 17). Are women’s narratives of the past a form of counter-narrative? The alternative stories of the past are exceptionally important and need to be integrated at the level of collective memory discourses, but are these stories counter-narratives to institutional history and memory discourse? In addition, what does it mean to contest the past? This volume seeks to further explore the meaning offered by Katherine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone,1 for whom to contest the past does not mean to present a conflicting account of it, but rather to address the ‘question of who or what is entitled to speak for the past in the present.’ (2003, p. 1). This volume is an edited work structured to give a coherent and comprehensive view of women’s narratives, life writings, and the postmemory of displacement in Central and Eastern Europe, including a balanced amount of theoretical approaches and empirical, in-depth analyses in each chapter. The women’s narratives from Central and Eastern Europe are approached from a multidisciplinary point of view, addressing social, cultural, and ethnic aspects. The three sections of the volume—‘Generations and narratives of (post)memory’, ‘Sites of (post)memory’, and ‘History and (post)memory’—address the topic of women’s narratives and representations of the past in relation to the mediums used and the mechanisms of transmitting and coping with the past. The connections between chapters allow for non-sequential reading, as many theoretical topics and questions cross and unite the three parts of the volume. The first part addresses the quest for personal (post)memory from the perspective of the second- and third-generations. The touching collaboration established in reconstructing individual and family (post)memories offers invaluable insights into the effects of displacement, coping mechanisms, and resilience. The chapters here also offer emotional glimpses of the women’s capacity to explore and reconstruct their narrative identities using their mothers’ and grandmothers’ memories of the past, and how they cope with their own (post)memory of displacement. Adopting Alina Sufaru’s observation that the text itself becomes, in Eva Hoffman’s case, a site of (post)memory, the second part of the volume brings into discussion different sites and develops further this topic in relation to the creative process—Dubravka Ugrešić case—and visual text in the case of Sophia Turkiewicz. Targeting the multiple forms of displacement in Herta Müller’s prose, Mihaela Ursa focuses her chapter on the writer capacity to use the identity displacement to mediate and remediate different places of memory. The last part questions the past in relation to the process of coming to terms with it in the countries where the trauma of abusive regimes destroyed social bonds and had a lasting impact on the lives of the people. Is the past knowledge a key for the present politics of memory? Are women’s voices being heard and appreciated? Finally, are these societies prepared to accept and integrate women’s narratives of the past into the public memory discourse?
Memory and the Remembrance of the Past
‘The past is a foreign country’, stated David Lowenthal, so we need to approach it carefully, with wonder and openness. At the same time, this ‘foreign country’ of the recent past is constructed based on the memory and experiences of our parents and grandparents. Thus, it is never completely estranged, as the links that connect one generation and another never cease to exist, even if they can be disrupted by major historical and social events. ‘We can remember only thanks to the fact that somebody has remembered before us’ commented Luisa Passerini. Thus, ‘[r]emembering has to be conceived as a highly inter-subjective relationship’ (2009, p. 2). Remembering the past is not an isolated, individual process, as it includes postmemory (Hirsch 1997), which is formed during and based on interactions with others, and the process of listening and becoming witnesses to their narratives. But how is the past intergenerational memory transmitted and what mechanisms are activated during its transmission? How can one truly separate personal memories from institutional forms, and personal experiences from political or ideological representations that often surround the collective remembrance? Della Pollock pointed out that every story and individual narrative is more than personal, as it is not possible to ‘own’ history at the personal level: ‘Any one story is embedded in layers of remembering and storying. Remembering is necessarily a public act whose politics are bound up with the refusal to be isolated, insulated, inoculated against both complicity with and contested over claims of ownership.’ (2005, p. 5). To remember the past, especially referring to events that include major social and political changes, means to negotiate between different layers of the personal, political, and public memory. The lines that both unite and separate these strata of memory offer valuable clues about how one remembers the past. No narrative of the past is ‘written’ in isolation, not the personal, public, nor the gender-determined narratives; all are interrelated and influenced by past and present historical frames. The remembering process is influenced by the memories of our family and society, the political and cultural contexts, our present needs, and images projected from the present into the historical past. These images are determined by our personal aspirations and dreams, as well as by the public agenda. The past and its remembrance are summoned to respond to our present questions: What did we choose to remember from the past in order to make the present more accessible for us? How can we interpret past wrongs so that our personal and collective lives become more valuable? Critics of memory studies, whether they focus on personal memory or the institutionalization of memory at the level of national archives,2 have pointed out the fluid nature of remembrance, as well as the suspicion of past political or social manipulation in order to adequately respond to present needs. Vieda Skultans resumes this situation:
Whatever the rights and wrongs of such accusations, we know that personal memory is fluid and easily influenced, co...