JournalTOCs

Heritage, Memory and Conflict Journal
Number of Followers: 15

This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Online) 2666-5050
Published by Pensoft

[58 journals]

A virtual place of memory: Virtual reality as a method for
communicating conflicted heritage at Camp Westerbork
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 87-93
  DOI : 10.3897/ijhmc.3.71198
  Authors : Jitte Waagen, Tijm Lanjouw, Maurice de Kleijn : An important goal of the project Accessing Campscapes: inclusive strategies for using European Conflicted Heritage (iC-ACCESS), has been to develop inclusive approaches for the presentation and communication of contending perspectives on Nazi and Stalinist sites (Dolghin et al. 2017). A key objective for treating these ‘heritagescapes’ has been to ‘develop state-of-the-art strategies and implement innovative tools which provide sustainable in-situ and virtual forms of investigation, presentation and representation’ (Van der Laarse 2020). A central issue which is gaining increasing attention in heritage studies and management is the dilemma of preserving and exhibiting material remnants of Wehrmacht and SS-barracks or residencies at Holocaust memorial camps which are generally framed as victimhood sites. The Commander’s house at Herinneringscentrum Westerbork is a case in point and can be placed in different perspectives on the history of the camp terrain and all related sensibilities on its meaning as an object of heritage. In order to realise an application that can accommodate these perspectives, iC-ACCESS project leader Prof. dr. R. van der Laarse contracted two laboratories specialised consecutively in 3D visualisation technologies and spatial information to cooperate on its development, the 4D Research Lab (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and the SPINlab (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). This paper illustrates the ideas, discussions and choices related to the production of the ‘Campscapes – Westerbork Commander’s House App’, provides a concise technical description of the actual application and presents a short prospection on potential future developments. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:15 +030
Campscapes in and through testimonies: New approaches to researching
and representing oral history interviews in memorial museums
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 75-86
  DOI : 10.3897/hmc.3.82514
  Authors : Zuzanna Dziuban, Cord Pagenstecher : This paper discusses the role of audio and visual testimonies in safeguarding, understanding, presenting, validating and decentering the history and memory campscapes, be it, for researchers, practitioners, memory activists, or museum visitors. Its primary objective is to present and contextualize two research tools developed within the framework of the project Accessing Campscapes: Strategies for Using European Conflicted Heritage: the Campscapes Testimony Catalogue, a new directory of oral history interviews devoted to selected camps covered within the scope of the project; and the online environment Remembering Westerbork: Learning with Interviews – a prototype of an online display environment presenting survivors’ experiences to today’s visitors in an exemplary memorial that opens up, expands and complexifies the paradigmatic narrative offered by the campscape at the on-site exhibition. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:14 +030
“Jungle law reigned among the prisoners”: the meaning of
cannibalism in the testimonies of Nazi concentration camps’ survivors
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 71-74
  DOI : 10.3897/hmc.3.69956
  Authors : Kobi Kabalek : What do Holocaust survivors do when they refer to cannibalism in their testimonies' This piece argues that they do not merely describe what they have witnessed or heard of, but also ponder the boundaries of humanity. For centuries, Europeans have made references to cannibalism in various depictions for drawing the line between “civilized” and “uncivilized.” In accordance with studies that examine cannibalism in other historical contexts, I argue that in attempting to express a sense of the radical dehumanization in the Nazi camps and convey its horror, some survivors’ accounts reconstruct the appalling reality of the camps as parallels to familiar, older stories of cannibalism that take place in remote, brutal places deprived of civilization. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:13 +030
Exhibiting Jasenovac: Controversies, manipulations and politics of
memory
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 65-69
  DOI : 10.3897/ijhmc.3.71583
  Authors : Andriana Bencic Kuznar, Vjeran Pavlakovic : The Jasenovac Concentration Camp prevails as one of the most potent symbols that continues to fuel ideological and ethno-national divisions in Croatia and neighboring Yugoslav successor states. We argue that mnemonic actors who distort the history, memory, and representations of Jasenovac through commemorative speeches, exhibitions, and political discourse are by no means new. The misuses of the Jasenovac tragedy, vividly present during socialist Yugoslavia, continue to the present day. Drawing upon the history of mediating Jasenovac as well as recent examples of commemorative speeches and problematic exhibitions, this article highlights some of the present-day struggles surrounding this former campscape. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:12 +030
Re-emerging memories: humanitarianism and sovereignty in the Târgu
Jiu Camp
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 57-63
  DOI : 10.3897/ijhmc.3.71277
  Authors : Dana Dolghin : This article briefly charts the debates surrounding the afterlife of a heritage space of political violence, the Târgu Jiu camp in Western Romania, and locates the ensuing narratives in the current contestations of the liberal democratic consensus in Central and Eastern Europe. The camp was an important Holocaust site and an equally relevant space for the early communist movement. Contrary to similar sites where competing interpretations of these histories are at play, this camp has been largely absent from debates on public memory of past political violence nationally. The significance of this space for local political history has been silenced. This article concerns itself with the long dynamic of silencing difficult heritage, its causes and implications and the selective perspectives on certain histories it entails. Târgu Jiu is a microcosm of this entanglement. Emerging in Romanian media and public debate at the time of the 2014 “refugee” reception crisis, this newly retrieved collecting memory of the camp capitalized on a history of past internal European displacement, Romanian victimhood and a sense of persecuted national sovereignty. Silencing made room for newer selective histories of this heritage space. Specifically, the complex history of the camp was appropriated into a type of politics of memory that reconfigures narratives about “liberal” values in the region. This article discusses the processes through which liberal, “European” values are appropriated and instrumentalized for the very opposite principles. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:11 +030
Holocaust symbolism in the Belarusian memory of Maly Trostenets
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 51-56
  DOI : 10.3897/ijhmc.3.71255
  Authors : Anne-Lise Bobeldijk : This article analyzes the memorial complex that was built in 2015 at the site of the former Nazi camp Maly Trostenets. Although the complex has incorporated symbolism connected to how the Holocaust is remembered in Western Europe, it does not overcome some of the aspects of the old Soviet narrative of the Great Patriotic War. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:10 +030
Ponar and the will to remember: Holocaust commemorations in Soviet
Lithuania
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 47-50
  DOI : 10.3897/ijhmc.3.70389
  Authors : Milda Jakulytė-Vasil : This article explores the post-war history of the largest mass murder site in Lithuania, Ponar, and attempts by Jewish survivors to commemorate Holocaust victims during the period of Soviet occupation (1944–1990). The research shows that in spite of the ruling authorities creating significant obstacles for the small Jewish population to hold commemorations and over the course of the various physical transformations of Ponar, the site remained one of the most significant and most symbolic for Jewish identity and Jewish resistance to state policies. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:09 +030
Beyond mass graves: exhuming Francoist concentration camps
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 39-45
  DOI : 10.3897/hmc.3.71312
  Authors : Laura Muñoz-Encinar : As several historical investigations have revealed, between 130,000 and 150,000 Republicans were executed during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1977). The Francoist repressive strategy – unleashed after the coup d’état of 17 July 1936 – developed complex mechanisms of physical and psychological punishment. The continuing subjugation of those still living was enacted through concentration camps, prisons and forced labour. During the War and Franco’s dictatorship, there were nearly three hundred concentration camps, and between 367,000 and 500,000 prisoners went through those camps. During the transition to democracy, neither the State nor the judiciary investigated mass crimes connected to the repression and execution of left-wing Republicans. After Franco’s death, some family groups recovered some of these bodies buried in unmarked mass graves without scientific involvement. In the year 2000, the first scientific exhumations took place, and since then, more than 400 mass graves have been opened, and up to 9.000 bodies have been recovered. The memory of the victims of Franco’s violence has been mainly centralised on mass graves. The opening of mass graves has positioned the Spanish Civil War case within the international sphere of human rights violations and has also opened a new window of opportunity for the analysis of Francoist concentration camps. In this article, I provide a holistic study of mass graves that combines archaeology and forensic anthropology with historical and ethnographic research in order to examine, in detail, both the burials and the broader landscape of the repression. In this contribution, I focus on the Concentration Camp of Castuera, in southwestern Spain, a forgotten campscape, and show how mass graves, which have become widely known as sites of research and commemoration in Spain, were closely related to the camps’ complex repressive system. My results have allowed me to conduct an integrated analysis of this context of political violence. I conclude that archaeology and forensic anthropology have played a crucial role in elucidating the functioning and social reality of Spanish camps, whilst enabling new narratives about past Francoist repression. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:08 +030
Archaeology of Zigeunerlager: Results of the 2018–2019 investigation at
the Roma detention camp in Lety
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 31-38
  DOI : 10.3897/hmc.3.84017
  Authors : Pavel Vařeka : Archaeological research in Let carried out within the framework of the Accessing Campscapes project has revealed the location, and preserved material traces, of the Roma detention camp from the period of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, the area of which was partly destroyed and superseded by the industrial pig farm in the 1970s. The investigations have not only produced tangible evidence regarding the camp operation, structure, buildings and living conditions of the inmates but have also provided a means for the Roma to reclaim their neglected heritage. The planned Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Bohemia will take account of the results of the archaeological project and transform the site into a Romani memorialscape. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:07 +030
Holocaust victims, Jewish law and the ethics of archaeological
investigations
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 25-30
  DOI : 10.3897/hmc.3.69978
  Authors : Caroline Sturdy Colls, Kevin Colls : Dead bodies – and the graves in which they are interred – are often highly contested within Holocaust campscapes. Although photographs of bodies at places like Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Ohrdruf emerged in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the exhumation of mass graves of Holocaust victims for either judicial or humanitarian reasons has become something of a taboo subject. Whilst some see dead bodies in these environments as evidence of a crime, others view them as relatives, friends, and loved ones who require a proper burial, a marked burial site, or should be left undisturbed. Disputes arise between governments, communities, individuals, and religious groups when accounting for Halacha (Jewish Law) and the dead. This paper highlights how a non-invasive methodology, derived from archaeology and other disciplines, offers one way of locating and classifying graves whilst respecting the ethical sensitivities involved in their investigation. This is a growing field of research and one which has proven ability and future potential to shed new light on the crimes perpetrated across the European Holocaust landscape. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:06 +030
Uncovering war crimes: Hidden graves of the Falstad forest
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 19-24
  DOI : 10.3897/hmc.3.94923
  Authors : Marek E. Jasinski, Andrzej Ossowski, Kate Spradley : This paper presents and discusses historical and archaeological data regarding war crimes committed by Nazi occupants during Second World War in the vicinity of the SS Prison Camp Falstad in Central Norway, and the issue of still unknown graves of executed prisoners in the Falstad Forest. Specialists from several Norwegian and foreign institutions are at present developing a set of advanced methods to be deployed during surveys of the Forest in search of hidden graves. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:05 +030
Graves of the ‘Other’: Norway and the commemoration of
soviet prisoners of war
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 15-18
  DOI : 10.3897/hmc.3.71298
  Authors : Marianne Neerland Soleim : The memory of other nationalities and their wartime suffering on Norwegian soil are mainly part of a local narrative. While the subject of Soviet prisoners of war is common knowledge in local historical studies, both oral and written, there is virtually no space for a living memory about the Soviet POWs on a national level. Despite forming the largest group of casualties on Norwegian soil during the war, the Soviet POWs have not been included at the national level of the Norwegian history of occupation. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:04 +030
The mass graves of Hohne and the French attempt (and failure) at
exhumation (1958–1969)
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 11-13
  DOI : 10.3897/hmc.3.74126
  Authors : Jean-Marc Dreyfus : The Bergen Belsen Nazi concentration camp has been widely described and studied, especially as the images taken by British troops at the moment of the camp's liberation shaped the very representation of Nazi crimes and the Holocaust. Much less-known are the debates about the exhumations of more than 20 000 corpses of inmates, the ones who died in the weeks before or after the liberation. The French mission in search of corpses of deportees, the so-called 'Garban mission', tried to negotiate the access to the camp grounds. After an international uproar and a decade of negotiations, the permission was finally not granted. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:03 +030
To count or not to count: British politics of framing and the condition
of “illegal infiltree” in the Bergen-Belsen DP camp (1945–1948)
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 5-10
  DOI : 10.3897/hmc.3.70896
  Authors : Sofia Lovegrove : This article explores the politics of humanitarian assistance in the aftermath of the Second World War, by examining the act of framing certain groups of Jewish refugees as “infiltrees”, in the context of the British occupation zone of Germany, and the Bergen-Belsen DP camp more specifically. Based on archival sources and the available literature, it dissects this legal categorisation to help understand who the different individuals categorised as infiltrees were, the wider political conjuncture that informed this framing, and the real consequences felt by those who were framed as such. This article demonstrates the extent to which the attribution of legal categories to those on the move, with tangible effects for those individuals, represents a deeply politicised practice in Europe, which has been operating at least since the first half of the twentieth century, and which continues today. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:02 +030
From the last hut of Monowitz to the last hut of Belsen
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 1-4
  DOI : 10.3897/hmc.3.97869
  Authors : Robert Jan van Pelt : The article offers an in-depth investigation into the history of, and post-war practices around, the most fundamental and indispensable architectural structure of the Nazi camps: the wooden prefabricated barrack hut. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:01 +030
Entanglements of art and memory activism in Hungary’s
illiberal democracy
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 2: 61-75
  DOI : 10.3897/hmc.2.70927
  Authors : Reka Deim : This paper explores how art contributes to the articulation of memories that counter the official historical narrative of Hungary’s self-proclaimed political and ideological system, illiberal democracy. Amid deepening polarization between Europe’s post-colonialist and post-socialist countries, the Hungarian government promotes a Christian conservative national identity against the “liberal” values of Western Europe. Systematic appropriation of historical traumas is at the core of such efforts, which largely manifests in removing, erecting and reinstating memorials, as well as in the re-signification of trauma sites. Insufficient civic involvement in rewriting histories generates new ways of resistance, which I demonstrate through the case study of a protest-performance organized by the Living Memorial activist group as a response to the government’s decision to displace the memorial of Imre Nagy in 2018. I seek to understand the dynamics between top-down memory politics, civil resistance and art within the conceptual apparatus of the “memory activism nexus” (Rigney 2018, 2020) and “multidirectional memories” (Rothberg 2009). I argue that artistic memory activism has limited potential to transform the dynamics of memory in a context where a national conservative political force has gradually taken control over historical narratives, triggering inevitably polarizing responses in the society. Although profoundly embedded in local histories, the case-study may offer new ways of negotiating traumatic heritages through the entanglement of art and memory activism. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 12 Jan 2022 18:00:07 +020
Memory, art and intergenerational transmission. Artistic practices with
young people in memory sites in Argentina
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 2: 51-60
  DOI : 10.3897/hmc.2.71191
  Authors : Lizel Tornay, Victoria Alvarez, Fabricio Laino Sanchis, Mariana Paganini : This text analyzes recent experiences with young people from Middle Schools of the city of Buenos Aires (Argentina) in Memory Sites of this city. Our inquiry is interested in the intergenerational transmission referring to the traumatic past around the last military dictatorship established in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. With this interest, two experiences designed through artistic languages are analyzed: the Posters Project from the Memory Park and the use of poetry in the guided visits to the Memory Site at "El Olimpo", former Clandestine Detention Center for Torture and Extermination, both spaces of the city of Buenos Aires. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 12 Jan 2022 18:00:06 +020
Art and memory: Magdalenas por el Cauca
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 2: 39-49
  DOI : 10.3897/ijhmc.2.70846
  Authors : Neyla Graciela Pardo Abril : Adopting an interdisciplinary framework of Memory Studies and Art and employing semiotics with a multimodal and multimedia character, it is explored how social groups in Colombia memorialise the violence of the internal armed conflict. The reflection associates the victims’ experiences with those expressions of commemoration and remembrance that are narratives embodied in visual and scenic art. It is explored how a semiotic landscape of memory is created through a performative artistic proposal. In this landscape, not only cultural frames can be determined, but also the semiotic-discursive resources that give meaning to the relationship between art and memory. The aim is to characterise the performance known as Magdalenas por el Cauca (2008) which was recorded audiovisually in several spaces on the internet. It means that, in addition to the ephemeral mise-en-scène, there are records of the performative and communicative work. In this article, we analyse the video X PEREGRINACION TRUJILLO y MAGDALENAS POR EL CAUCA (2010), one of the records that perpetuates Magdalenas por el Cauca. This reparation act is an audiovisual narrative with ethical and political character and produced collectively by relatives of victims, witnesses, artists and other interlocutors, which interpret and assign new meanings to the performance. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 12 Jan 2022 18:00:05 +020
Hypermnesia and Amnesia: Remembering (with) the Body and Post-Conflict
Memorials and Architectures
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 2: 29-38
  DOI : 10.3897/hmc.2.70827
  Authors : Andrea Borsari, Giovanni Leoni : The article consists of two parts. The first part (§§ 1–2) investigates the indiscriminate and absolute remembering and forgetting of everything, hypermnesia and amnesia as the extreme terms that research has used and uses for the different phenomena of memory, both in individuals and in social and political forms. In the face of these shifts it is thus indispensable to re-establish a critique of the paradoxical effects of memory aids and, at the same time, to seek new forms of remembrance that by mixing an experiential dimension and public sphere refocus the attention on the connection between latency, tension and experiential triggers of involuntary memory and on the ability to break through the fictions of collective memory. On this basis, the second part of the article (§§ 3–4) analyses how the experience of political and racial deportation during World War II drastically changed the idea of memorial architecture. More specifically, the analysis deals with a kind of memorial device that must represent and memorialise persons whose bodies have been deliberately cancelled. The aim is to present and analyse the artistic and architectonic efforts to refer to those forgotten bodies, on the one hand, and on the other hand to point out how for these new kind of memorials the body of the visitor is asked to participate, both physically and emotionally, in this somehow paradoxical search for lost bodies, offering oneself as a substitute. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 12 Jan 2022 18:00:04 +020
Trauma and allegory: truthfulness in fact and fiction. Making a
private archive productive
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 2: 19-27
  DOI : 10.3897/hmc.2.70631
  Authors : Lars Ebert : Herengracht 401 (H401), until 2019 known as Castrum Peregrini, represents the complex and intriguing history of a hermetic community of artists and scholars in Amsterdam which was formed in the years of the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands, 1940–1945.This article attempts to take stock on what we have learned in these ten years about the history of the place, as an indicator of memory politics. It also reflects on the hermeneutic gap of what we cannot know of H401’s history as we lack experiential knowledge of eyewitnesses. As the author argues below, the site of H401 shows how the ‘hermeneutic gap’ can offer a chance to make an archive, such as in the case of ‘the house on Herengracht 401’, productive and meaningful through the artistic practice of research. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 12 Jan 2022 18:00:03 +020
Constant consensus building: art and conflict in the ESMA museum and site
of memory
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 2: 7-18
  DOI : 10.3897/ijhmc.2.72349
  Authors : Alejandra Naftal : This article describes the history, development and social role of the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory, which is located on the grounds of the former clandestine centre for detention, torture and extermination, in the intergenerational transmission of traumatic memories of the Argentinian dictatorship. The project is characterised by the cumulative effort of artistic expression, public debate, conflict and tension. Through the presentation of different artistic installations and plays, the article explains the focal function of art practices in spaces of memory that are strongly linked to a traumatic past, as well as how undertaking these practices can lead to the establishment of consensus. HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 12 Jan 2022 18:00:02 +020
Spaces of memory
- Abstract: Heritage, Memory and Conflict 2: 1-5
  DOI : 10.3897/ijhmc.2.e78980
  Authors : Cristina Demaria, Anna Maria Lorusso, Patrizia Violi, Ihab Saloul : HTML XML PDF
  PubDate: Wed, 12 Jan 2022 18:00:01 +020