MadNihilist
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09:04:46 pm on November 11, 2009 | # |
Leipzig is a very good place from which to approach eastern Europe. For those coming from further west the city is a halfway stop, even if the train connections are not as good as perhaps one might have hoped twenty years ago, when the Iron Curtain disappeared. Leipzig is connected to eastern Europe and its history by a thousand threads – one need only think of the foundation of its university, or of the long-distance trade routes. At their intersection arose the trade fair, which during the Cold War became a sluice chamber, a contact yard between the hemispheres that opened for a moment every year. And consider the renewed interest in eastern Europe in Leipzig today, its book fair and its academic and research institutions, which have become trademarks of the city.
So why should anyone from outside take the trouble of essaying an approach to the East in a place which is already so close – geographically, culturally, and academically? All the more so, since the topic of this conference is general and does not imply a question to which one must provide an answer. The chain of ideas “History of memory, places of memory, strata of memory” is more a set of associations and is intended to delimit an area.
- “History of memory” stands for the far from trivial and often forgotten insight that memory itself has a history, a historical place. To understand this encourages us to be cautious and modest.
- “Places of memory” stands for the fact that all memory is attached to places where history took place. This insight teaches us an attitude and perception appropriate to the concreteness and complexity of the world.
- “Strata of memory” is the term that brings both of these together, place and time, as a “chronotope”, to quote Mikhail Bakhtin, which can be exposed and explored in a quasi-archaeological procedure.
What is here subdivided into history of memory, places of memory, and strata of memory can be summed up or condensed in the questions: How do the Europeans in their reunited continent deal with their divided and variously specific memories? What does it mean for western Europeans, and Germans in particular, to familiarise themselves with the memories of “the other”? What is the likelihood of a common European culture of memory? Is something like a European space of memory conceivable?
It is almost unbelievable that it is already twenty years since 1989 – that is the span of a generation. There are secondary schoolchildren and students for whom it is all literally prehistory. To us – in whatever way we may have been there – it seems like yesterday. Who still remembers that when we were students in West Berlin the underground trains passed through stations that were walled up and patrolled by border guards?
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