Case Closed? History, Memory and the Drive to Seal the Sins of the Twentieth Century

Case Closed?History, Memory and the Drive to Seal the Sins of the Twentieth Century Scott Ury What should we remember, what can we afford to forget, what must we forget? Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi As the first quarter of the twenty-first century comes to a close, scholars in the lands that were once parts of vast empires that extended across Europe and Eurasia, from the metropolitan centers of Berlin and Rome in the west to the border lands of Poland and Kazakhstan in the east to the shatterzones of Yugoslavia and Turkey in the south, continue to dedicate their intellectual energies and scholarly resources to writing about the memory of the twentieth century, one characterized, forged and remembered through the combined extremities of fascism and totalitarianism, famine and war, ethnic cleansing and genocide. For many, the act of turning to the memory of the twentieth century's dark, haunted past is very often personal as scholars frequently write about their hometowns, nations of birth, or even, at times, their own family or personal histories.1 Over time, the image that emerges is not only one of a growing interest in and a subsequent boom of memory studies but also of an entire generation steeped in crisis and seeking catharsis.2 Confronted with the ostensible knowledge of unspeakable crimes and haunted by the burdens of lands soaked in blood (often that of various "Others"), scholars, activists and artists turn, time and again, to intellectual or ceremonial acts End Page 1 of remembering not only to record the past but also, perhaps, as a means of overcoming it. Often, it seems as though the very process of writing about the memory of such traumatic pasts serves a cathartic purpose, one designed to distance oneself from and overcome, if possible, the past and its ethical, if not existential, curses and burdens. As part of this larger process, a generation of post–Cold War scholars have sought to forge new narratives—local, national, transnational—that are designed to rise above and distance contemporary society from the brief, horrific century, one that began with the outbreak of World War I in Sarajevo in August of 1914, continued with the Nazi invasion of Poland in September of 1939 and concluded in the Srebrenica genocide of July of 1995. As the progenitor of the field of memory studies Maurice Halbwachs, who was arrested by the Gestapo in Paris and deported to Buchenwald where he died of dysentery in early 1945, noted, "contemplative memory or dreamlike memory helps us to escape society."3 This larger, generational drive to use the study of memory as a means to differentiate between historical eras is augmented further by the widespread interpretation of the events of 1989 as a moment of radical disrupture. Time and again, key scholars have written about 1989 as marking the dawn of a new era, one that emerged out of and was shaped by the peaceful revolutions that swept east central Europe over the course of that symbolic year.4 For many, 1989 serves not only as a mnemonic device used to mark a turning point in Europe's long, tortured history, but also as a caesura, a clear break in time, culture and being that helps separate and categorize two radically divergent historical epochs and their respective civilizational agendas. Hence, memory, and even more so, the very act of remembering 1989 as a caesura, reinforces the sense of stark division between the present and the past across contemporary Europe and Eurasia. Despite these and other efforts aimed at separation and containment, the constant flow of information that continues to appear and reappear on our computer (or phone) screens forces many of us to confront reports and images of contemporary conflicts that challenge the various scholarly efforts to seal the sins of the twentieth century deep within the historian's carefully constructed vault of memory. As the guns of war and the images of horror continue to rage between Russia and Ukraine and between Israel and Hamas, it becomes increasingly clear that decades of combined efforts End Page 2 to domesticate past horrors by transforming them into historical accounts of the past reveal not only how...