Between Paris and Warsaw

multidirectional memory, ethics, and historical responsibility

Michael Rothberg

pp. 81-101

in: Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind, Julie Fedor (eds), Memory and theory in Eastern Europe, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

In his 2010 keynote lecture at the inaugural event of Cambridge University's "Memory at War" research project, historian Jay Winter provided a succinct motto for a new direction in Memory Studies. Referencing discussions at "European Union meetings on the question of creating a European history," Winter remarked that "it's been evident that the turn toward the east is the key move in scholarly work. If you shift the centre of gravity of Europe from Paris to Warsaw, it looks different. And it has to be done."¹ Shifting the center of gravity of Memory Studies from Paris to Warsaw, Winter continued, would "allo[w] for a reconfiguration of European space" and would "deal with the notion of a common European past" in an original and valuable way. I am sympathetic to Winter's proposal to reconfigure European space and impressed by the Memory at War project's efforts to develop, in their words, a "memory paradigm" in order to understand "cultural and political transformations in Eastern Europe"— especially in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia—as "differential responses to legacies and traumas of the imperial, Soviet, and national pasts."² Although Warsaw as a site of memory plays a large role in my chapter, my contribution to rethinking memory and theory in Eastern Europe entails approaching Warsaw from diverse, non-Polish perspectives.

Cited authors

Winter Jay