Читать книгу Diversity in the East-Central European Borderlands - Группа авторов - Страница 10

Following a long tradition of viewing cityscapes as books and literary palimpsests, it has often been assumed that traces of the bygone diversity can be read “between the lines,” sometimes even as coherent subchapters, by philosophically-minded local flâneurs, scholars sensitized to cultural-historical details, and even by inquisitive tourists. Alternatively, cityscapes may be viewed as codes and signs (Huyssen 2003) relating not only to texts and narratives, but also to practices, emotions, and attitudes. The question is, what exactly can be “decoded” in the urban spaces nowadays, under what circumstances, and by whom? Can urban newcomers and their descendants feel deeper attachment to the sites that used to be “emotional magnets” (Collins 2004: 80) for the previous populations? How are these parts of the cityscape actualized in our time, if at all? And how can one make sense of urban “voids”? Contemporary cityscapes are populated not so much by ghosts and spirits of the past, but by living people with their own ideas about belonging, origins, and community. Hence, when dealing with present-day borderland cityscapes, the analyst steps into a hybrid space of action, memory, hearsay, and imagination imbedded into—and constitutive for—the “material city” (see Boyer 1994; Crang and Travlou 2001; Srinivas 2001; Huyssen 2003; Crinson 2005; Legg 2007; Till 2005; Jordan 2006; Törnquist-Plewa 2016).

Throughout this edited volume, the contributors have tried to make sense of the complex interplay between the mosaic-like built environments typical of Eastern European cities marked by “dismembered multiethnicity” (Follis 2012: 181), and the contemporary attitudes to the pre-war urban populations who created these milieus, but perished in the twentieth century. The authors have been primarily interested in how some clues available in present-day urban environments correlate with identity-forming knowledge about the past, often referred to as cultural or collective memories (Assmann J. 2010: 123; Kansteiner 2002: 179–97; Radstone and Hodgkin 2003). Following the sociological current in Memory Studies (for example, Olick 2007: 114–115), it makes sense to abandon the idea of material milieus as something that “contains” or “preserves” cultural memories. After all, memories cannot emanate from the stones. Material environments are complex products of practices and ideologies, which actualize cultural memories of constantly changing urban populations in a myriad of ways (see Connerton 1989; Boyer 1994; Crang and Travlou 2001; Huyssen 2003; Hoelscher and Alderman 2004; Crinson 2005; Hebbert 2005; Jordan 2006; Foote and Azaryahu 2007; Legg 2007). Moreover, it cannot go unnoticed that for the current populations the legacies of urban pasts are a matter of active imagining and virtualization rather than a painstaking recollection of the past in its own right. As Andreas Huyssen explains, in urban contexts, “an urban imaginary in its temporal reach may well put different things in one place: memories of what there was before, imagined alternatives to what there is. The strong marks of present space merge in the imaginary with traces of the past, erasures, losses, and heterotopias” (Huyssen 2003: 7).

Following the analytical framework suggested by the anthropologist Setha Low, urban memories may be approached as a necessary attribute of the social construction of the city space. Unlike the social production of space that comprises social, economic, ideological, and technological factors focusing on the physical creation of the material setting, the social construction of space is underpinned by daily exchanges, memories, and images which convey symbolic meanings (Low 1996: 862). Although urban memory links to concrete physical imprints of the city, nevertheless, much like other types of memory—personal, generational, political, and cultural—it tends to defy “the orthodoxy of correct interpretation” (Huyssen 2003: 19). Meanwhile, efforts to impose correct interpretations of the cityscape are a daily enterprise undertaken by multiple groups and individuals. If earlier it was Marxist-Leninist ideology that edited the East-Central European urban milieus by means of removing monuments, toponymics, and inscriptions and bulldozing religious edifices, nowadays one witnesses efforts to cleanse the urban landscape of the vestiges of socialist histories by similar means, removing undesirable traces from the streets and city maps, as has recently been the case in Ukraine on the wave that followed the adoption of the so-called de-communization laws.

An obvious specificity of urban memory compared with other analytically distinguished memory types is its complex relation to space and materiality. Well-used, but also vividly criticized for being too static and nostalgic, the concept of lieux de mémoire is still a workable analytical approach allowing us to frame entanglements of urban space, historical materiality and cultural memory (Nora and Kritzman 1996–1998). Alternative, but also complementary analytical suggestions evoke metaphors of texts, arenas, and performances, and thus enable unpacking of the dynamic and improvisatory nature of urban memorial landscapes (Dwyer and Alderman 2008: 165–78). Remembrance is performative rather than simply reproductive, as when people come together to do the work of remembrance, the story they fashion is different from those that have come before (Tilmans, van Vree, and Winter 2010: 7). Hence, again, the past is constantly affirmed and transformed through discourses and practices evoking imagination and virtualization of the past understood as “construction of what might, ought, or could have existed but actually did not; and, one step further, the construction of what the visitors expect to have existed but actually could not have” (Ashworth 1991: 192).

The performative aspect of cultures of remembrance is underpinned by “imaginative investment, projection, and creation” (Hirsch 2008: 107) practiced by memory actors. Varying grades and forms of such actualization of memories about the urban past make the mnemonic landscapes of the four chosen cities dissimilar. As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, while the “weight of the past,” exemplified by cultural links, architectural environment, and structuring of historical narratives, is largely comparable in Lviv, Wrocław, Chişinău, and Chernivtsi, the “choice of the past” (Mink and Neumayer 2013: 10)—charged with the interests, emotions, and imagination of the contemporary rank-and-file urbanites, mnemonic activists, politicians, and cultural experts—is what makes the difference. Or, to use the already mentioned metaphor from Aleida Assmann, while these cities are haunted by similar ghosts of the past, they purposefully seek contact with different spirits of the past.

Almost seventy years after the events that stripped Wrocław, Lviv, Chişinău, and Chernivtsi of most of their pre-war populations, the progeny of newcomers—much like today’s descendants of pre-war urbanites that live mainly abroad—have no first-hand personal memory either of these dramatic events or of the way of life that preceded them. In this respect, these two important groups of memory actors—who currently commission monuments, renovate religious buildings, organize commemorative events, and make efforts to preserve memories about the cities they care about—are in the same situation. Both actively “choose” the past they strive to elucidate and reenact. Both experiment with imagination and virtualization of “their own” histories. Nevertheless, the sources of their creative work, second-hand knowledge, and emotional attachment to the past, are different. Typically, the offspring of the older population groups rely on family archives and personal stories of relatives, while the children of the newcomers extract their knowledge about the past primarily from much more fragmentary and impersonal sources that do not speak for themselves (e.g., the architectural environment, movies, literary works, interiors, and artifacts). The difference between these two types of memory work may be conceptualized in terms of the difference between postmemory (Hirsch 2008), the afterlife of “living” memory of witnesses shared across generations of “legitimate custodians,” and prosthetic memory, a past reconstructed from the position of emotional and aesthetical distance. Prosthetic memories are generated not within families, but rather through accessible public domains such as literature, film, museums, and theater (Landsberg 2004). As a product of various mediations, they tend to be visual-factual rather than sensual-emotional (O’Keeffe 2007: 5).

Combinations of both types of memory work are especially evident in connection with public commemorative initiatives and the symbolic marking of public urban spaces. Without denying that oftentimes “[g]uilt, resentment, denial, powerful political taboos, and the imperative of dealing with the national trauma all combined to block the formation of memory of vanished others” (Blacker 2013: 178), several contributions to this volume (in particular, the articles by Felcher, Larsson, and Otrishchenko) contend that the work of filling tangible and intangible “voids” of the post-war urban environments in Eastern Europe has not only frustrating limitations, but also enabling qualities. Although transnational commemorative co-operation around the legacy of the perished urban groups and partial Europeanization of commemorative discourses often looks like a superficial “disturbance of homogeneity” (Furumark 2013) from above and outside, nevertheless one should not dismiss their impact on urbanites and their perception of cultural diversity. Equally, despite the fact that the efforts of the present-day inhabitants of the four cities to come to terms with difficult pasts may not always be unalloyed success stories, it would be inherently wrong to imply that the capacity to “read” and “feel” urban places of memory is something reserved only for the legitimate custodians of postmemory.