Living among the ghosts of others

urban postmemory in Eastern Europe

Uilleam Blacker

pp. 173-193

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

Abstract

According to Marianne Hirsch, the "postmemory" of experiences that were not ours can be passed down to us across generations in family narratives and artifacts. This includes memories of places.¹ Hirsch applies her idea to the children of survivors of the Holocaust, and their postmemories of distant places that are important in family memory, but which they have never visited. This chapter takes Hirsch's idea and applies it to another group who have a stake in this complex intersection of place and memory—the present inhabitants of those distant places. These people can also be said to be the subjects of postmemory. They may often have no direct familial or community link to the pasts of the places they inhabit; yet they do have access to these pasts through a variety of postmemory media, from poetry and memorials to guided tours and kitsch restaurants. While such forms are employed in the production and consumption of nostalgia in cities all over the world, they have a particular significance in Eastern Europe, where urban spaces often contain memories that are either uncomfortable for or alien to their inhabitants. The following analysis will focus on a number of such urban spaces, mainly in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, and attempt to interrogate ideas about memory, forgetting, and place that originate in Western memory paradigms through the prism of the East European context.