Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe

Blacker, Uilleam

doi:10.4324/9781315690865

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Over the last four decades or so, writers and intellectuals, mayors and councillors, entrepreneurs and activists, have with increasing participation and interest among ordinary people, worked to uncover the traces of lost urban others and to inscribe them anew into contemporary cityscapes, and thus into contemporary memory cultures and contemporary identities. 64…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Imagined City: The Great Flood of 1997 as a Foundation Story of Wrocław

Biskupska

2023

East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures

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Wrocław started its existence on the ruins of German Breslau, several dozen years ago, as a result of the Potsdam Conference. The article is a voice in the discussion about the situation of the city, which, deprived of the possibility to draw on its foreign cultural heritage (the existence of which was ignored in official studies), still struggles with the problem of defining its identity. I present this issue, based on the actions taken by the elites since the beginning of the Polish city of Wrocław. These elites have been creating successive narrative “identity projects” for Wrocław’s citizens. The main thread of my analysis is the city’s foundation story, built in relation to the flood that Wrocław experienced in 1997. According to this story, the fight against the water flooding the city became a watershed moment in the city’s history; it was a shock, thanks to which the citizens of Wrocław finally became conscious citizens, felt an emotional bond with their city and took responsibility for the testimonies of its pre-war, non-Polish past. All this happened several decades after creating Wrocław in 1945 and promoting, for decades, its unquestionable Polishness. I confront this foundation story with the image of this flood that emerges from the statements of ordinary residents of the city. The flood of 1997, as seen by ordinary citizens of Wrocław, is built from memories of the mundane but acute impediments of everyday life, neighbourly support and post-flood waste.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Imagined City: The Great Flood of 1997 as a Foundation Story of Wrocław

Biskupska

2023

East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures

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“…Particular attention should be paid to an article by U. Blacker, in which he demonstrates how the creation of the image of a martyr becomes a performative act that can destroy the symbolic order and trigger a reaction of debunking the legitimacy of the political elite (Blacker 2015: 257-260). In a recent book, U. Blacker addresses in more detail the methods of forming martyrological thinking in Eastern Europe, turning victims into martyrs in the context of overcoming the communist heritage and strengthening national identity (Blacker 2019).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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2021

FEJF

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Bringing into focus the ways of how to approach trauma instead of defining the object of research is becoming increasingly important. This also indicates that the range of approaches to trauma that informs cultural inquiry is widening, and is moving away from one singular paradigm posited as universal. Trauma scholars have demonstrated, on the one hand, the importance of particular experiences, specific cases, individual features of experiencing, remembering, and narrating trauma. On the other hand, they have pointed out the impact of cultural "scripts" shaped by broader cultural understandings and social and cultural regulations and preferences that shape the possibilities of the representation of traumatic experience. This special issue seeks to recognize and negotiate the individual and collective dimensions of trauma as well as their interwovenness, with a focus on the (post)-Soviet and Eastern European experience. It does so by addressing the generalizing theoretical models as well as the practical, material, and experimental aspects of trauma. Thus, it seeks to disentangle and clarify the links between the collective and the individual, the theoretical and the practical, and finally, the universal and the specific, the global and the local.

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Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

The Imagined City: The Great Flood of 1997 as a Foundation Story of Wrocław

The Imagined City: The Great Flood of 1997 as a Foundation Story of Wrocław

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