Politics of memory

The two sides in the conflict in Cyprus maintain widely divergent and contrasting memories of the events that split the island. The term selective memory is applied by psychologists to people suffering from head injuries who retain some memories, but have amnesia about others. Societal trauma, such as war, seems to have a similar effect. Recollections that are shaped out of a phenomenon common to many countries traumatized by war and repression, may be remembered in radically different ways by people who experienced similar events.

The selectivity may also serve a political purpose, for example to justify the claims of one group over a competing group. Cyprus is a poignant case for this phenomenon. The longstanding conflict on the island reflects deep roots in the "motherlands" of the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot peoples.[2]

In Germany, the term "politics of history"/"history politics" (Geschichtspolitik) was propounded by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in late 1980s during the Historikerstreit discussion on how to memorialise the Nazi Germany and World War II.[3]

Speeches by politicians often deal with issues of how to memorialize the past. Richard von Weizsäcker as Bundespräsident identified two modes of memorializing the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945 in his famous 1985 speech: this date can be seen as defeat or liberation. Weizsäcker backed the latter Interpretation. In this regard, such moments as the first official "Day of Commemoration for Victims of National Socialism", on January 20, 1996, led to Bundespräsident Roman Herzog remarking in his address to the German Parliament that "Remembrance gives us strength, since it helps to keep us from going astray."[4] In similar, but somewhat opposing measure, Gerhard Schröder sought to move beyond this in saying the generation that committed such deeds has passed, and a new generation does not have the same fault because they simply weren't there to be responsible.

Good examples for politics of memory could be seen in national monuments and the discourses surrounding their construction. The construction of a holocaust memorial in memory of the murdered Jews of Europe at a central location in Berlin was met with protests but also with strong support. Likewise the National Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny was deemed inappropriate by some onlookers and a discussion revolved around the question whether the lack of a differentiation between victims and perpetrators is adequate or not.[5]

The question if and how to memorise Germans expelled from Poland in the aftermath of World War II has been constantly debated in both West Germany and Poland. Such questions are so difficult because it requires a moral judgement of these events. These judgements differ remarkably. For instance, the Federation of German Expellees called on Poland to pay compensation for lost property to Germans from what after 1945 became Polish territory, a claim that is consistently declined by Poland.[6]

Similarly there have been debates in Germany whether the legacy of World War II implies that Germany's military should be confined to purely defensive measure like peacekeeping or, contrary to this, this legacy can be a justification of an active enforcement of human rights which also might involve preemptive strikes.[7]

In Poland, the issue of history politics have risen to the state level when in 2015 it was announced that the works had started on the "Strategy of Polish Political Policy" ("Strategia Polskiej Polityki Historycznej"). President Andrzej Duda announced that "carrying out the historical policy is one of the most important activities of the president".[8]

The history in Russia has been highly politicized since the times of the Soviet Union. in the 2000s Vladimir Putin's regime undertook a new revision of history under the pretext of the defense of the national past against the alleged slanderers. As a first step of this defense was the establishment of the commission to handle "the attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia’s interests" in May 2009.[3]

The central topic of the new "history politics" has become World War II.[3]

The 2018 book of Mariëlle Wijermars Memory Politics in Contemporary Russia Television, Cinema and the State analyses the effects of various actors, such as the government, the Russian Orthodox Church, cultural figures, and radical thinkers, such as Aleksandr Dugin, on Russian memory politics, and its usage in legitimizing the government and discrediting the opposition.[9]

Croatian researcher Snježana Koren analyzed the history politics in Yugoslavia by analyzing teaching of history at school during 1945-1960, an immediate aftermath of World War II. The traced both internal and external influences on the state's politics of history, in particular how it was affected by the affiliation with the Soviet Union and the subsequent Soviet-Yugoslav split. She also analyzed the differences in the narratives in different Yugoslav republics.[10]