Memory, Forgetting and the Legacy of Post-1945 Displacement in Russia and Eastern Europe (BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies)

Blacker, Uilleam

ISBN 10: 1138914363 / ISBN 13: 9781138914360

Published by Routledge, 2019

About this Item

pp. 240.

Seller Inventory # 373680681

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Memory, Forgetting and the Legacy of Post-1945 Displacement in Russia and Eastern Europe (BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies)
• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication Date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1138914363
• ISBN 13: 9781138914360
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

After the Second World War, millions of people across Eastern Europe, displaced as a result of wartime destruction, deportations and redrawing of state boundaries, found themselves living in cities that were filled with the traces of the foreign cultures of the former inhabitants. In the immediate post-war period these traces were not acknowledged, the new inhabitants going along with official policies of oblivion, the national narratives of new post-war regimes, and the memorializing of the victors. In time, however, and increasingly over recent decades, the former "other pasts" have been embraced and taken on board as part of local cultural memory. This book explores this interesting and increasingly important phenomenon. It examines official ideologies, popular memory, literature, film, memorialization and tourism to show how other pasts are being incorporated into local cultural memory. It relates these developments to cultural theory and argues that the relationship between urban space, cultural memory and identity in Eastern Europe is increasingly becoming a question not only of cultural politics, but also of consumption and choice, alongside a tendency towards the cosmopolitanization of memory.

About the Author

Uilleam Blacker is a lecturer in comparative Russian and East European culture at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.