Realms of Memory

Remembering Partition in the Punjab

The partition of British India is a story of extreme communal violence, mass rape, honor killings, abduction, and forced migration.  It is a story where the same individuals, depending on which side of the border they found themselves, could be both victims or perpetrators.  Dr. Pippa Virdee, author of From the Ashes of 1947: Reimagining the Punjab, discusses the challenge of memorializing partition on the August 1st episode of Realms of Memory.  

Memory Activism in Germany

Nottingham Trent University historian Jenny Wüstenberg, author of Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany, argues that Germany experienced a dramatic transformation of its memorial culture during the 1980s.  It was in the course of this decade that Germany pivoted from commemorating the German victims of World War II to the victims of Nazi crimes and terror during the years from 1933 to 1945.  By focusing on the role of Germans as perpetrators and the suffering experienced by the victims of the Nazi regime, this negative memory culture deepens democracy by connecting the past to the present and reinforcing the importance of tolerance, respect for difference and equal rights.  

Memory Activism in Germany

German memory culture underwent a dramatic transformation in decades after World War II.  In the immediate aftermath of the war the memories of veterans, Germans expelled from their ancestral homes in Central and Eastern Europe, and the victims of allied bombings dominated the remembrance of the Nazi era.  By the 1980s the focus had almost completely shifted to the perpetrators of the Holocaust and the diverse groups victimized by the Nazi regime.  To understand this change tune in to the July 4th episode of Realms of Memory.  Listen to a conversation with Nottingham Trent University Professor Jenny Wüstenberg and a discussion of her book, Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany.

Turkish and Kurdish Memories of the Armenian Genocide

The beginnings of many nations are marred by traumatic memories.  This is certainly true for Turkey.  The modern Republic of Turkey began with the dispossession and even eradication of many of the ethnic and religious minorities who had lived for centuries within the borders of the Ottoman Empire.  The Armenian genocide is one of the most prominent examples.  In Violence and Genocide in Kurdish Memory:  Exploring the Remembrance of the Armenian Genocide through Life Stories, author Eren Yetkin argues that from the time of the genocide, which took place between 1915 and 1918, the government of Turkey has chosen to deny rather than confront the past.  While Kurds acknowledge their participation in the genocide they explain it in terms of an instrumentalization thesis in which they were manipulated by Turkish authorities and Kurdish elites.  For Kurds, remembering the Armenian Genocide helps them to talk about their own long history of victimization.  

Turkish and Kurdish Memories of the Armenian Genocide

The  Armenian genocide would not have been possible without the active participation of local populations.  Kurds, who often coexisted in the same towns and cities with Armenians, undoubtedly played a part in the genocide.  Eren Yetkin, a sociologist at Koblenz University in Germany, explores the memories of the Armenian genocide in Turkey.  Author of Violence and Genocide in Kurdish Memory:  Exploring the Remembrance of the Armenian Genocide through Life Stories, Yetkin is particularly interested in how Turkey’s Kurdish community remembers this past.  For more, listen to the June 6th episode of the Realms of Memory podcast.  

War Memorialization in the Philippines

After fleecing billions of dollars from the Philippines, torturing and murdering thousands during the period of martial law, Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was removed from power through a popular uprising in 1986.  How was it possible that his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., was elected as president in 2022?  Dr. John Lee Candelaria, from Hiroshima University, argues that a long history of memorializing heros and forgetting the victims of the nation’s past, has much to do with the reality of the Philippines present.  From the influence exerted by American authorities during their half century of rule in the Philippines to the dependence on Japanese aid in the present, larger political forces have played a major role in shaping the parameters of official memory in the Philippines.

War Memorialization in the Philippines

How can we understand the nostalgia for the Marcos past that inspired many Filipinos to vote for Ferdinand Marcos Jr.? How was a possible to forget the billions of dollars stolen from the state or the thousands of Filipinos who were tortured or murdered during the period of martial law?  Dr. John Lee Candelaria, from Hiroshima University, argues that memories of past wars in the Philippines offer important insights into the psyche of todays voters.  For more, listen to the May 9th episode of the Realms of Memory podcast.  

Memory Activism in Israel-Palestine

Just as Israeli-Palestinian relations reached a new low in the early 2000s, memory activists in Israel embraced a strategy of confronting the past to resolve the crisis in the present.  Dr. Yifat Gutman, author of Memory Activism: Reimagining the Past for the Future in Israel-Palestine, discusses how memory activists tackled the taboo subject of 1948.  Through tours of ruined and abandoned Palestinian villages and testimonies of their former residents, memory activists tried to promote awareness of the Nakba, or the destruction in Arabic as Palestinians refer to 1948. The hope was that awareness would lead to public recognition and ultimately responsibility for the past.

Victims of Commemoration in Turkey

A few months after his Justice and Development Party or AKP won Turkey’s general elections in 2011, then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on his fellow citizens to confront the past.  In the years that followed several prominent sites of state sponsored violence targeting ethnic and religious minorities and former political opponents of the regime were slated to become memorials and museums.  What inspired this desire to confront the past?  What were these sites of memory?  How did the violent histories of these sites complicate these initiatives?  These are the questions Professor Eray Çaylı examines in his recent book Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past in Turkey.  

Memory and Violence in Syria

Through her research on Syria, SOAS, University of London Professor Salwa Ismail argues that violence needs to be understood as a deliberate method of rule.  Author of The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria, Ismail cautions us not to reduce regimes that perpetrate heinous human rights violations to despotic, backward, cultures of aggression.  Extreme forms of violence, such as  torture or massacres, or ordinary forms of policing and surveillance, need to be understood as methods of rule aimed at dehumanizing, debilitating, and crushing the will to resist and dissent. The rule of violence has an enduring effect by using fear and terror to sear itself into the memory of its victims.