This essay takes the novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić as a starting point for a discussion of why the notion of a post-Yugoslav or post-communist cultural memory seems to be a contradiction in terms. The manifest impossibility of forming a collective post-Yugoslav memory provokes a reflection on how cultural and collective memory has been used in post-communist Eastern Europe to historify the communist past, which further has served the revival of a nationalist agenda. Ugrešić offers a counter memory, if we understand the term from Foucault as something that escapes the forming of identities. Finally, I suggest the notion of negative memory, as introduced by Reinhardt Koselleck, as a more apposite term for approaching memory in the post-communist sphere and in the unfolding catastrophes of the modern world.
Essay by
Tora Lane
December 11, 2023
This paper analyzes Soviet and Russian spy films with respect to maintaining and transmitting memories of the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) in popular culture. The new Russian post-Soviet cinema (after the 2000s) about the “war spies” is considered not only with regard to its entertainment and ideological functions, but also with regard to its function as a “post-memory” of the traumatic experiences of the war and the Nazi occupation. The new Russian cinema about espionage and spies reinterprets the issues of dependent people, Stalinist repressions, and traumatic memories that were absent in Soviet cinema.
Essay by
Viktoriya Sukovata
June 17, 2019
The author argues that the history of the Holocaust is the history of Europe; "as Europeans, we all continue to live it".
"It is not wise to appropriate to ourselves the story of suffering, because even in the short term such a course will lead to isolation and a rise in anti-Semitism."
By
Andrea Petö
October 18, 2014
+ Florence Fröhlig, Painful legacy of World War II: Nazi forced enlistment: Alsatian/Mosellan prisoners of war and the Soviet prison camp of Tambov, Stockholm University 2013, Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 242 pages
By
Susanne Nylund Skog
February 4, 2014
The results of the present study, the first of its kind in Bulgaria, demonstrate the scope of the historical memory of Bulgarian citizens. The work reveals how consolidated and coherent the historical memory of the majority group is, and at the same time how fragmented the memories of the minority groups can be.
By
Evelina Kelbecheva
November 11, 2013
Issue 2024, 4: 
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.