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Aline Sierp: "The MSA hopes to be a true world gathering for excellent memory scholarship and exchange" Aline Sierp is Assistant Professor (tenured) in European Studies at Maastricht University. She is the co-founder and co-president of the Memory Studies Association and the Council of European Studies’ Research Network on Transnational Memory and Identity in Europe. Aline Sierp holds a PhD in Comparative European Politics and History (cum laude) from the University of Siena (IT). Her MA in European History, Politics, Policy and Society (with distinction) was jointly awarded by the University of Bath (UK), Sciences Po Paris (FR) and the University of Siena (IT). Before joining Maastricht University, Aline Sierp worked as researcher at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site (DE) where she was responsible for human rights education in the international office. During her studies, she completed traineeships at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, the United Nations in Turin and the German Embassy in Rome. Aline Sierp's research interests cover collective memory after experiences of human rights violations, questions of identity and European integration. She has published widely on memory and identity issues and is the author of “History, Memory and Transeuropean Identity: Unifying Divisions” (Routledge, 2014, paperback 2017). Why did you decide to be a researcher in the field of memory studies? I think a part of the reason is connected to my background. I grew up in Germany, which as you know is a country where memory plays a very big role. I was socialized into that from an early age onwards. I have always been interested in the history of World War II and how it is commemorated. When I moved to Italy, I realized that people there look at this memory in a very different way. I perceived these differences between Italy and Germany, which triggered me to write my MA thesis on the question why World War II is commemorated differently in Italy and in Germany. When I started my PhD thesis I initially wanted to do something completely different. I was interested in Euroscepticism. The question why young people become more and more Eurosceptic. When I started doing the research came back to my MA thesis’ topic about commemorations and memory studies and I realised how much this topic still fascinated me. I then decided to change the topic of my thesis and I started writing a PhD thesis on memory studies. Since that time, I am continuing to work in that field. I have experience as a researcher not only in Academia but in the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site as well. So this topic has followed me for years now. During my visit to Verona I was surprised by the approach towards the Italian memory of Second World War. There are only a few monuments, which are dedicated to the antifascist partisans and Holocaust victims. The majority of Verona's monuments which are built after the Second World War are dedicated to the representatives of different Italian combat arms: navy, aviation, tanks divisions and many others. Most of them have vague inscriptions, as an example: "To military drivers" and so on. But monuments design obviously points out Mussolini's fascist era. I have seen two more distinct monuments. The first one is a commemorative plaque dedicated to the "Our heroes of El-Alamein", and the second one is the monument dedicated to military sappers, with the inscription announcing that those brave soldiers managed to cross many rivers, including Dnieper and Don. It is well known that during the North African and Russian military campaigns fascist Italy was the German Nazis devoted ally. Can you say a few words about such Italian memory phenomena, which is not typical to other leading European countries? This is a very big question and it would probably take me a couple of hours to answer in greater depth. In short what I can say is that Italy has had a very peculiar memory constellation due to the fact that the country changed sides in 1943 which allowed it to concentrate exclusively on the last two years of the war and to portray itself both as victim of Nazi Germany and as resistance fighters who liberated their country with their own hands. This together with a peculiar political situation in which Italy was governed by the same party for more than 60 years led to a ‘frozen’ memory framework. Can you tell the history of the MSA? The Memory Studies Association (MSA) began in discussions at the 2016 Council for European Studies’ “Research Network on Transnational Memory and Identity” meeting in Philadelphia led by me and Jenny Wüstenberg (and attended by Jeff Olick) — although the idea had much older roots in a friendly dinner Jeff Olick had with Astrid Erll and Anne Rigney in Giessen more than 10 years ago. The sense of these discussions, and others in between with a wide variety of others who have helped shape the project, was that there had in the previous 10–20 years been a proliferation of different yet often overlapping networks and organizations, most centered around regional and substantive foci. As much as these networks facilitate important dialogue, however, their separateness, and sometimes temporary nature, has also occasionally had the effect of fragmenting discussions. Moreover, with the advancement of memory studies as a body of work — with key debates, shared literatures, and overlapping concepts — there was a sense that a fair amount of duplication was taking place. On one hand, there has been a proliferation of different concepts and terms, on the other hand, often very different uses of the same terms, and there has been a fair amount of reinventing the wheel. Could we find a way to bring these many different conversations into a larger dialogue with each other, thus eliminating redundancy, though certainly not wishing to establish uniformity? The Association’s aim is to reach out to already existing, often rather disparate, networks and smaller scholarly groups working on memory issues, as well as to provide a home to researchoriented practitioners and policymakers. Networking and exchange will be key during our annual conferences, workshops, and research gatherings. Our hope is that people who have previously not worked together may start to collaborate in the future. And, if not, at least there might be productive cross-fertilizations and intellectual friendships — across disciplines, regions, and purposes. The MSA thus hopes to be the central forum for scholars from around the world and across disciplines who are interested in memory studies. Its goal is to further establish and extend the status of memory studies as a field, institutionalizing memory studies in a way that is able to provide fundamental knowledge about the importance and function of memories in the public and private realm. To be sure, we are well aware that there are cognate enterprises, in many cases of much longer standing: there are already associations for the study of heritage, oral history, archives, museology, trauma, and the like (and let us not forget historiography!), to say nothing of the extensive work on memory within the biological and psychological sciences. Our goal is not to compete with or supplant such associations, just as it is not to compete with the many extant networks and centers for social and cultural memory studies that already exist. Rather, it is to multiply and synergize the very different approaches and networks that exist in them. One of our core convictions is that although these different enterprises address in some cases radically different forms, locations, and media of apprehending and representing our existence in time, there is something essential to be gained by asking when and where the varieties of mnemonic products and practices that constitute the broad umbrella of memory affect each other, and in what ways. We hope that the Association will discover many similarities and clarify important differences. In some cases, this will result in productive joining, and in others in judicious (though, we hope, always respectful) splitting. The Association was symbolically launched at its inaugural conference in Amsterdam in December 2016, which was attended by more than 200 scholars and practitioners. In the meantime, the association has registered as a scholarly association in the Netherlands, and its legal establishment was aided by the University of Maastricht, where I am a faculty member. We have established a website (www.memorystudiesassociation.org), which will be developed into the main hub for accessing information, resources, and opportunities for debate about and within the field. The Association has issued a call for general membership (which we make mindful of the many demands we all face for our time, attention, and financial support). And the second meeting of the full Association took place in Copenhagen from the 14–16 December 2017. In the future, we hope to be able to organize conferences that will be more accessible for colleagues beyond the European region; the MSA hopes to be a true world gathering for excellent memory scholarship and exchange. Please can you name the main objectives of the MSA? Our specific ambitions include the following (though we invite your contributions to revising and expanding this list): To move beyond the Euro/Anglo centrism that has underwritten — though not exclusively, and that is the point! — the development of the field. We thus aim to bring scholars from different regions to the table. One concrete mechanism, as just mentioned, will be to ensure that our conferences take place in different parts of the world, thought we also hope that membership in the Association, with online resources and opportunities to join specific working groups of cross-regional nature, can serve as a connector for scholars from around the world. and for new avenues of intellectual exchange regardless of physical co-presence. To draw in practitioners, artists, and policymakers, making the MSA a forum not only for scholarly debate but also one through which scholars can make connections to more practical realms, and practitioners and producers of memory can be informed about the state of the art in memory scholarship. To explore the possibilities for, and limits on, genuinely interdisciplinary work and crossdisciplinary exchange. At our annual conferences, we will offer a series of didactic disciplinary workshops (e.g. on best practices in methodology and on cross-fertilization between mnemonic approaches in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences) and bring together innovative scholars from different disciplines for roundtable debates about points of contact and collaboration. To continue to work on exploring the boundaries between social/cultural concepts of memory and psychological/neurological ones. We will proactively reach out to those academic communities that are organized through the journal Memory and that meet every 5 years at the International Conference on Memory. The goal will be to go beyond paying lip-service to interdisciplinarity by fostering practical venues for exchange and a spirit of learning from each other without privileging one disciplinary perspective. To attract, build bridges to, and offer a home for our existing “sister fields,” such as heritage studies, oral history, transitional justice, archival studies, and others which have already made such important contributions to a nuanced understanding of the past. To represent the interests of memory studies as a community of professionals –– including offering professional development activities and career boosting services — and to actively develop the field through institution-building and training of new cohorts by means of a mentoring program for graduate students in memory studies and PhD training workshops at every annual conference. To increase the visibility of memory studies with both state-based and private funders of academic research and community outreach, as well as with publishers. Not only is this a crucial step toward increased institutionalization and sustainability of the field, but it should also have a positive effect on the career options for junior scholars of memory. Academics at the beginning of their career are often faced with difficult choices about how much energy to invest in memory studies (as opposed to their more established home discipline). Raising the profile of memory studies will result in a better outlook on tenure and promotion for those who publish in the field and ultimately will mean that they can contribute more productively to it (and to more practice-oriented fields of remembrance). To offer our expertise on memory political concerns as they arise in public affairs and ethical debates. We believe that memory — broadly conceived — is an issue that has been gaining importance in international and domestic politics and that deserves our engagement as public intellectuals. Scholarly perspectives — and their often slower temporalities and distanced vantage points — have a unique contribution to make in reflecting on — and in — contemporary debates. To develop the MSA into an organization that remains open to input from all interested parties and flexible to the changing nature of the field as memory studies evolves and expands further. Can you say a few words about the last conference of the MSA in Copenhagen (how many people from different countries took part, the main events, how do you evaluate the results)? In Copenhagen we had over 600 participants from over 40 different countries. All five continents were represented. So it was a truly international conference. We had both junior and senior scholars, we had scholars and practitioners, we had people coming from universities and outside of universities. The program included 77 research panels and round tables. We had eight turbo talks sessions, which had 10 presentations per session or around 80 different presentations. We had five poster sessions, which included 69 posters presentations. We also had some workshops on methodology, on teaching, on careers in Memory Studies. We had a little film festival, we had a book raffle and of course we had many opportunities for networking during coffee lunches and two receptions. We had different key notes speakers. They included Marianne Hirsh, Jan Gross and Joshua Oppenheimer. Astrid Erll, Ann Rigney, Carol Gluck, Patrick Hutton and Paco Ferrandiz participated in the round table ‘The Horizons of Memory Studies’. Some of the main scholars in the field of Memory Studies including Daniel Levy, Jan Kubik, William Hirst, Siobhan Kattago, Jeffrey Olick and Wulf Kansteiner, were among the participants. The conference was a huge success judging from the amount of positive feedback and ‘thank you’ messages we received afterwards., Many people came up to us saying ‘Wow, I have never been to such big memory conference’. I think what happened is that that people who represent different disciplines: sociology, psychology, political studies and others felt that the MSA has given Memory studies a common house. How does the MSA plan to organize the next conference in Madrid? The MSA conference in Madrid is going to be in June 2019 so exactly in one and a half year. We moved it to the summer because we have the impression that it is easier for people to come in June not in December plus the weather is nicer in June. It give us also a little bit more time to prepare this because we do expect much more participants than we had in Copenhagen, which was already very big. We have a local organizing committee in Madrid and we had a meeting with the local organizers on 27–29 January to prepare, to check out the venues and to see what we can offer there. We will try to combine the experience we got in Amsterdam and Copenhagen. We are trying to get more administrative support this time because we had a very small team in Copenhagen which made it very difficult to organize the conference. So we hope by June of 2019 that we will have more people joining us, more people involved in the preparations and hopefully also having a bigger budget which will allow us to outsource some of the tasks that we did ourselves during the last conference. The “Manifesto” of the MSA was published in “The Memory Studies Journal”. How does the MSA collaborate with that journal? We made a special agreement with SAGE, who is publishing the “Memory Studies Journal”. According to that agreement members of the MSA get access to the journal publications for free. On top of that, every first issue of the year will be edited by the MSA. We have decided that next one will be edited by the two local organizers of the MSA conference in Copenhagen Tea Sindbæk Andersen and Jessica Ortner. We would like to thanks them for their voluntarily activities during the conference and I am sure they will edit the first special issue of the Memory Studies Journal in the best way possible. On top of that, SAGE is going finance the first book award and the best paper prize in the next years. We start with that in 2018, and I hope the awards ceremony will be held during the Madrid conference. During the Second conference of the MSA we discussed the problems of the Multilanguage's MSA activity. Can you say a few words concerning that important point regarding international organizations? We are very much aware of the fact that not everybody speaks English and that important research has been done in other languages. We want to be inclusive and we want to be as encompassing as possible and not exclude people because we offer information only in English. So we very much aware of this need. The main problem at the moment is twofold. First of all, if you start producing things in other languages you have to come up some kind of hierarchy . We are little bit afraid of choosing one or two languages and then having other languages not been represented. So we have to carefully think of where we want to start investing money to translate making sure that no language group feels somehow overlooked. It was a part of our discussion in Copenhagen and I think we did come to a good conclusion of trying at least to cover the main languages which a lot of people speak: Spanish, French and Russian. Those three languages already cover a lot of ground. And the second problem is of course the resources. We have a very tight budget at the moment and it is very expensive to translate all the materials and not only translate it, but keep it up to date,. I think we will start by translating bits and pieces, especially those parts of the web-site which are not changed constantly. I hope that in the near future we can offer a lot of other languages to make sure that people, who do not speak English well, can still contribute. I should reaffirm that the “Historical Expertise” team is ready to translate the content of the MSA web-site in Russian for free. That is a very great idea. We are very grateful for that. I hope the Russian section of the MSA web-site will appear very quickly. How can the Russian academics take part in the activities of the MSA? What advantages would they have by being members of the MSA? First of all to take part in activities you can become a member and as a member you get access to all types of resources. On our web-site we have the members-only area which offers reading recommendations, written by members for members. We have job-listings in the memory studies field, we have several discussion forums, we have an area of career advice, which I think is particularly interesting for young scholars. We have a teaching resources page for people who want to share their syllabi . We get a quite number of discounted books, either offering a discount when you order the book, or offering a discount for the whole memory series of Palgrave, for example. And then we have access to the “Memory Studies Journal”. We offer travel grants for members who want to come to the annual conferences. We have several awards, for the best book and for the best paper presented during the annual conference. These are however all material benefits. I think much more important is getting access to a very big network. We had more than six hundred participants in Copenhagen, we expect around a thousand in Madrid next year and we have over five hundred paying members of the MSA, which all are listed in the members directory. If you are looking for someone, who is working on trauma and remembrance in Argentina and you want to start an international project or workshop you can find people who work on this topic on our web-site. I think the biggest benefit is the network which allows people to get into contact and to cooperate. Most of the Russian memory researchers do not get any financial support from their academic institutions to participate in conferences, and traveling abroad is too expensive for them. Does the MSA have any opportunities to provide any grants for those researchers? We are very much aware of this problem. There are a lot of scholars who got this problem and not only in the Central and East European Countries, in Russia and in the Global South. I myself had to pay everything out of my pocket as well despite the fact that I was one of the organizers of the conference. That means we are very much aware of the difficulties especially for those researchers who have no access to funds and have comparably low salaries. I think there is a big difference between a scholar who has no funding from Germany and his colleague, for example, from Africa. For the conference in Copenhagen we have made over three thousand euros for travel grants available. Anyone could apply at this point and we gave grants especially to young scholars who often do not have salaries. Our budget is very tight. We have started from zero. We have no paid staff. We are all working voluntarily. Our budget is dependent on the number of members. If more and more people will decide to become MSA members, if we manage to recruit more sustainable members who are prepared to pay a little bit more than others and if we get more people to help us acquire funding, then we will be able to get more travel grants for the participants of the MSA conference in Madrid next year. Does the MSA plan to open the national branches of the Association? The Historical Expertize journal has united more than two hundred authors. Would you think, if is possible to open a branch of the MSA in Russia on the base of our journal? And what should we do in order to achieve that? I think that is actually a great idea. There seems to be quite a big demand for that from different countries. We got the same question from researchers from Great Britain and from Poland. We very much welcome this development. I think regional and national branches of the MSA would be something we would like to support. The local branches and different subsections might help to connect researchers of particular regions, to enable them to organize local and international activities: conferences, workshops etc. I think if there is a demand and a willingness from Russian researches to do that they can certainly count on our support. We are in the process of thinking on the best way to do this and because we are still in the process we welcome any ideas on this. I think if “Historical Expertize” can support this by for example getting the word out and facilitating collaboration we certainly very much welcome this. Thank you a lot for your informative interview.

Marianne Hirsch: "I do believe that personal experience can be the laboratory for research and also for theoretical explanation" Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is the Director of Columba’s Center for the Study of Social Difference. The main publications: The Mother / Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Indiana University Press, 1989. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Harvard University Press, 1997. Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, co-written with Leo Spitzer. University of California Press, 2010. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. Columbia University Press, 2012. School Photos in Liquid Time, co-written with Leo Spitzer, University of Washington Press, 2019. There is a ‘theoretical’ assumption that a researcher should be emotionally distanced from the object of his or her research. Maybe it is relevant for physics, chemistry and biology but not for humanistic studies. We are always emotionally involved but do not always reflect on that. You are the author of the concept of postmemory, which plays a crucial role in current memory studies. I have just finished reading your and your husband Leo Spitzer’s book ‘Ghosts of home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory’. The core of it is based on your personal postmemory. It is an excellent ‘laboratory’, which impressively demonstrates that personal background of a researcher is not an obstacle but, on the contrary, is a powerful source for creation of historical research and theoretical concepts. It would be very interesting to have a discussion about how your family experience influenced your work in memory studies. ‘Ghosts of Home’ is not translated into Russian; therefore I have to ask some biographical questions. 1.Your parents were from Czernowitz and experienced tragic turns of history before, during and just after the Second World War in their home city: the far-right and anti-Semitic Rumanian regime (1938-40), Stalin’s repressions (1940-41), German Nazis invasion and the Rumanian Holocaust (1941-44), the new wave of Stalin’s repressions (1944 and after). How did they manage to survive in such deadly circumstances? Yes, indeed my parents lived through these very turbulent historical events. Even prior to 1940, there were anti-Semitic measures in Rumania and my parents personally suffered various hardships during that time. For example my father was not able to study engineering at the university in Cernauti and had to go to Brno (Czechoslovakia) instead. My mother, who wanted to study medicine, was not accepted to medicine faculty in Cernauti because there was a quota for Jewish students so she had to enter the language faculty. So their lives were definitely affected by Rumanian antisemitism. The first Soviet invasion in 1940-41 was also a very difficult time for them. They were both taking care of their families and their parents. Both learned Russian very quickly in order to be able to work. For my father, who had been a Jewish socialist, there was some hope that under Soviet regime the Jewish people would be treated better compared to the rest of Europe. When Rumanians in collaboration with Nazis returned in the summer of 1941 things really began to close down for them. The Ghetto in Cernauti was established in October 1941. My parents managed to get a special permit, which was given by the Rumanian mayor of Cernauti Traian Popovici, who really wanted to save the Jews of the city and avoid mass deportations to Transnistria, which affected two thirds of the Jewish population of the city. When the Ghetto was dissolved six weeks later, my parents could return home and manage to survive the war by remaining in the city of Cernauti. They were forced to wear the yellow star, they were worried about subsequent deportations and they were trying to feed their families, because their parents were quite elderly. So it was a very difficult time. They had considered fleeing to the Soviet Union in June of 1941, as some Cernauti Jews did that, but they decided that it is impossible because of the care of the families. They struggled a lot and it was very difficult but certainly not as bad as it was fo0r families deported to Transnistria, where half of them did not survive. 2.The scale of Stalin’s repressions was a few times less than the death toll of the Rumanian Holocaust. Nevertheless your parents preferred to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Rumania in 1945. What reasons did they have for such a difficult decision? How did they get a permission for emigration in the situation where were heavy restrictions of moving abroad? My parents survived Rumanian antisemitism, Nazis repressions and Stalin’s regime. Cernauti was annexed again by the Soviet Union in 1944 and, of course, the local Jews were liberated from the Nazis but for many of them it was still a very difficult time. Some of them were taken to do force labor in the Soviet mines in the Donbass region. Others were drafted into the Soviet army. People saw the corruption and repressions of the Soviet regime and they aimed to move to the West. My parents, who were originally fairly enthusiastic about the possibilities of socialism, were very shortly disillusioned. Consequently, along with thousands of Jews, they emigrated to Rumania, because Bukovina, the region where my parents lived, was divided into the Soviet and Rumanian parts. People from the Rumanian region of Southern Bukovina could get permission to rejoin their families. In my understanding, it was an anti-Semitic gesture of the Soviet regime. I think the Soviet authorities wanted to get rid of the Jews because they were concerned that they would have a referendum in Northern Bukovina about joining the USSR and Jews could vote against that. In 1945-46 a lot of Jews were given permission to move to Rumania. My parents fled with false documents acquired from Jews from the Southern Bukovina, who had previously perished in Transnistria. They had to pay for those documents. My parents emigrated first in 1945, and their families followed in 1946. Shortly after that Rumania was became communist and their possibilities for further emigration closed down. Why did your parents not take the advice of a Jewish NKVD officer to leave Rumania immediately and stayed there for next fifteen years? After 1947 a lot of Jewish communists held leading government positions. Did that affect the attitude of Rumanians towards the Jewish minority? There was definitely a high level of antisemitism in Rumania: both a traditional religiously motivated antisemitism and a modern one politically and economically motivated. The Jews were trapped between political opponents. The nationalists blamed the Jews for being ‘communists’, and communists blamed them for being agents of the ‘capitalist West’. My parents could not leave Rumania for a long time because their parents were quite elderly and they had sick relatives. Probably there were some other reasons as well: emigration is hard; and they had just survived the wa and many hardships. I think eventually my parents regretted not having moved earlier. By 1961 my grandparents had died and nothing held my parents in Rumania. A lot of soviet Jews, who got permissions to immigrate to Israel, preferred to stay in Austria prior to moving to the US. Your family did the same and why did they not go to Israel? Did you experience any problems in Austria and how long were you there? When we left Rumania we only had entry visas to Israel and transit visas to Austria. With no passport, we were stateless. We arrived in Austria with an understanding that we are staying there only for one day before departure to Israel. My parents decided to stay in Austria longer for different reasons. Even though that my father in his youth was a labor Zionist and a member of ‘Hashomer Hatzair, which is the socialist Zionist youth organization, by that time he was already wary of what he called “the Jewish experiment in Israel” and aware of many political problems. For my mother there was a concern about the new language and dfficult climate. This is why they decided to stay in Austria to take some time to decide where they could build a new life. My parents could not take any possessions from Rumania; the only thing they had was their professions. My father was fifty, my mother was forty four, so they wanted to figure out where they could live the rest of their lives in relative comfort and freedom, contrary to the hardships of their past. It was very difficult in Austria. My father was an engineer and although he got a job right away, he did not have the visas to work permanently . My father decided that the U.S. and its democratic system would correspond closer to his ideals. After a year we got a permission to enter to the US on the basis of an Austrian quota system. How difficult was it for your family to adapt in American society? Did you get support of the local Jewish community? Did you ever experience anti-Semitic attitude from your peers or anybody else? When we came to the US in 1961, economically it was a very good time. It was the time of Sputnik and science developed very fast. It was very easy for my parents to find jobs, the father as an engineer and the mother as a language teacher, she taught English in Europe and now she taught French in the United States. So their integration from the material prospective was not difficult. We were welcomed by the Jewish community in Providence Rhode Island, who helped us to settle. They rented an apartment for us and furnished it by the volunteer work of the Jewish community members. They were very generous and we are extremely grateful to them. My mother experienced more difficulties in integration as she found the United States culture very foreign in relation to her Central European background. My father was very enthusiastic to become an American. We did come across some anti-Semitism in the United States but the Jewish community in the places where we lived was quite strong and prominent so in comparison with Europe it was much less. Your family lived through four repressive regimes and three emigrations. Did you reflect how your personal background influenced the choice of memory studies as a field in your academic research? After being in academia for more than four decades, I tend to believe that a lot of our work is personally motivated, even if we are enjoined or encouraged to have some objective distance from our studies. Certainly my work is inflected by my personal circumstances and I embrace that, I do not fight that. I was involved in feminism where it was both personal and political also, and it was professional as well. Feminism offered a space for political work that was also theoretical as it involved rethinking accepted categories and paradigms. I do believe that personal experience can be a laboratory for research and for theoretical explanation as well. When I started working with memory studies, a field that I helped to develop in the mid-eighties, and for many of us, who worked hard to build that field, personal circumstances served precisely as a platform to thinking together. The notion of postmemory that I developed certainly came out of a personal sense in which my parents’ war time experiences formed the fabric of my own recollections, even though I did not experience them myself and I did not literally remember them. I felt that certain moments of their history were a part of my own memory and I felt that I had to find the term to describe that phenomenon. But that was not just my own experience; I read a lot of works of Jewish writers and artists of the second generation, and also descendants of American slaves and from other catastrophic histories. I felt that their evocations shared certain qualities of my own experience. Inths sense, the personal is also connected to others who have a similar experience – it is trans-personal. In the mid-eighties, when memory studies started, the memory of the Second World War came to the prominence in scholarship. First of all, the archives started opening especially after the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Soviet Union and people could do new historical research. Secondly, people of my generation were ready to listen to survivors of the Nazis Holocaust, of the Soviet regime and so on. It took some time before we were ready to listen to stories of that kind and there was also an anxiety that survivors will die out and we would not be offered their stories. Many scholars of a community who became interested in memory studies in the mid-eighties were influenced by personal family circumstances but not only by that. On which occasions did you receive information of your parents’ tragic experience? Were there any family traditions of remembering (Jewish festivals, meetings with relatives and friends, family celebrations and so on) or was it mentioned occasionally? Many children of survivors of the Holocaust and other catastrophes report that their parents did not talk about the war and because of the silence they had to figure out themselves what happened or did not happen to their families. This was not the case for my family and my community. I grew up in Bucharest in a community of people from Czernowitz. Some of them, for example my grandparents who lived in Rumania since 1918, had never learned Rumanian, everybody spoke German and cooked meals that originated in Czernowitz. Rumanian culture was very strange for them. In that community they spoke about the ‘War’, they did not use the word ‘Holocaust’, the war came up all the time. I mean that practically every day stories were told about the war and what we knew about Transnistria. It was not related to any religious holidays because members of my family were not observant. And also there were no large family gatherings because that community was so scattered. Many people remained in the Soviet Union so we could not see each other for a long time. Many of our family members emigrated to Australia, Israel, Canada, United States, and to many parts of Europe. So there were stories which my parents still did not know. I remember when my cousins, who stayed in Chernovtsy, came to Bucharest in 1958, and we shared the stories about the deportation to Transnistria and about other relatives. So this all was very much alive, all the time. Of course I did not really connect some of these stories to I learned later about the Nazis camps like Auschwitz, about the experience of the Jews of the rest of Europe. I should say that my parents always considered that even though they lived in very difficult times, it was nothing like what other Jews of Western Europe lived through, who experienced the deportations to Nazis camps. When the term ‘survivors’ began to be used in the United States in 1980’s and I pointed out to my parents that they are Holocaust survivors by the definition of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, they resisted that term. My parents did live in the Ghetto and wore the yellow star, but they believed that this term should be only restricted to the survivors of Nazis concentration camps. Your parents same as many Jewish residents of Czernowitz were taught to respect high-level German culture. For a famous Czernowitzer Paul Celan it was the personal tragedy that the bearers of that culture managed to create the Holocaust. Did your parents feel the same? The Jews of Czernowitz were very much assimilated. Even my grandparents’ generation had switched from speaking Yiddish to German and they absolutely felt that German culture was their culture and the German language was their language, they claimed it as their own. A significant German language Jewish literature was produced in Czernowitz even in the generation that preceded Paul Celan. Before the 1940’s, Czernowitz Jewish writers wrote in German even though they were living in Rumania. Celan and my parents were educated in Rumania, they went to Rumanian school, but they mastered literary German. They were, of course, disillusioned. For Celan it was, as you described, a personal tragedy. But my parents did not give up German, it was still their language, they did not equate the culture they much admired and writers, whom they read, to a Nazis regime, they managed to separate the Nazis from the German culture, that they still claimed as their own. Of course Celan later wrote that Germans have to wash and clean their language before they can use it again because it was so contaminated by Nazi rhetoric an disfigurement. German culture and language remained very important for my parents, partly because a lot of writers, whom they read in German, Stefan Zweig, Lion Feuchtwanger and others, they identified with as Jewish writers. How did your visits to Chernivtsy and working on ‘Ghosts at home’ change your personal postmemory? How did the ‘places of memory's effect’ work in your case? This is a really great question and difficult one. I think that hearing the stories, where the places of Czernowitz were described to me as a child very powerfully and vividly, has created a kind of mental picture. Postmemorial works of writers and artists of the second generation are composed of shadows and traces that often have nothing specific to connect postmemory to concrete material space and time. These imaginings are concretized when you visit the place itself, which is still the place but is not exactly the same place because so many years have passed and culture has changed. That is an uncanny experience. So I still remember how I did imagine a specific place my parents talked about, the place near the train station, from which they were almost deported, about where they decided to go back to the Ghetto and try to get permits to stay. They always described that place in a certain way, but when I went with them to see it, it actually looked quite different from how I imagined it. And now I have two pictures, I have the mental picture which I always carry with me, and I have the picture of a memory of being in that place. In the first picture it was a corner, in the other one it is a crossing of four roads, which is very symbolic, of course to be stopping at the crossroads and turning one way instead another way. That became very symbolic for me. So my personal postmemories were definitely affected by the specific visit but the visit did not eradicate the images I had before. And it is an interesting thing how memory works, memory is layered. The personal memory is layered with memory of other people, with cultural memory, with literary imagining. So I think that personal and family memory is always shaped by public discourses, by images which circulate in media and I think that the personal is never just strictly individual. And that is how I described what happened during the journey back to Chernivtsy with my parents. Which projects are you working on now? What are your plans for the future? I am still working on the memory studies where I have two different projects. The one is in collaboration with my husband and a historian Leo Spitzer. We are working on the book about the school pictures and class photographs called ‘The school photos and their afterlives’. That project was inspired by our research on Czernowitz, because we were interested in that genre of school photography. Those pictures are evidence how schooling works to assimilate children into community, into collective and how those collectives were set in the regimes where were persecutions, where was discrimination, and where was exclusion. Czernowitz is an interesting part of this book because Jews felt very comfortable in that city and in the school photos you can see the integration of Jews and non-Jews studying in the same public schools, and despite that Jews were separated from majority culture and deported to Transnistria. This book is not only about the Jewish ordeal but also about other regimes where minority’s cultures were assimilated, African Americans, Native Americans, and other minorities in different parts of Europe. Another project is my general book about memory for the future. I am very interested in cultural memory, which is a concern not only in Jewish history but other tragic and violent events. I am studying how the tragic incidents in history of different nations were reflected in relations to each other, how they are rethinking in the twenty first century and how that changed the notion of cultural memory. So those are my plans right now. Thank you very much for your interview

Страсти по юбилею. 140-летие освобождения Болгарии от османского владычества в российской и болгарской политической риторике Р. Михнева «Хранить доброе отношение к России после всего случившегося будет еще труднее!» Ключевые слова: Россия, Болгария, Русско-турецкая война 1877–1878 гг., Русская православная церковь, патриарх Кирилл. Аннотация. В своей речи в марте 2018 г. на торжествах по случаю 140-летия освобождения Болгарии от османского владычества, президент страны Румен Радев выразил благодарность не единой русской армии, а отдельным народам, оказавшим болгарам помощь в освободительной борьбе. Выступление Радева стало объектом полемики со стороны главы Русской православной церкви патриарха Кирилла. Михнева Румяна — доктор истории, профессор Софийского университета (Республика Болгария); ruan@abv.bg DOI 10.31754/2409-6105-2018-2-100-127 Болгария торжественно отметила 140­-летие освобождения от османского владычества в ходе Русско­-турецкой войны 1877–1878 гг. Неожиданно резонансным оказалось выступление президента страны Румена Радева, который, выступая на праздничном параде, выразил признательность не единой русской армии, а народам Российской империи, ее составляющим, в том числе полякам, финнам, украинцам, латышам и т. д. Были упомянуты и румыны, что нисколько не удивительно, ведь румынская армия выступала союзницей русской армии в той кампании. Были названы также сербы и черногорцы, внесшие свой вклад в антиосманскую борьбу. Выступление президента Радева стало на следующий день объектом полемики со стороны главы Русской православной церкви патриарха Кирилла, прилетевшего на торжественные богослужения в кафедральном соборе св. Александра Невского по случаю юбилея окончания победоносной для России войны. «Хочу откровенно сказать, что для меня трудно было слышать все эти ссылки на участие других стран в освобождении Болгарии. Ни польский сейм, ни литовский сейм не принимали решения о начале войны с османской Турцией», — передает выступление святейшего патриарха сообщение ТАСС. «Россия выступила одна, презрев собственное благополучие и возможную политическую выгоду от невмешательства в конфликт. Здесь пролили кровь десятки тысяч русских солдат… Россия не посмотрела на Европу. Движимая своей любовью, ослабленная и не имеющая никакой политической поддержки в мире, начала борьбу. Это великий пример того, как духовная, культурная солидарность превозмогает политический прагматизм. Я рад, что могу вам это сказать». В выступлении патриарха содержался и призыв к средствам массовой информации: «Надеюсь, средства массовой информации нас слышат и передадут некоторое разочарование в том, что мы услышали неправильную историческую интерпретацию событий, связанных с освобождением Болгарии». В ответ на критику главы РПЦ президент Радев заметил, что имел в виду народы, сражавшиеся в составе русской армии: «мы уважаем каждую каплю крови, пролитой на болгарской земле» и мы «нисколько не недооцениваем вклад русской армии в освобождение Болгарии. Но русская армия была многонациональная, и мы чтим память каждой нации». Что же касается роли России, уже тот факт, что война называется русско-­турецкой, говорит сам за себя. Впрочем, эти объяснения не до конца удовлетворили патриарха Кирилла, который, если верить сообщению ТАСС, заметил, что имя царя­-освободителя Александра II так и не прозвучало в выступлении болгарского президента, хотя церемония и происходила у его памятника (кстати, именем царя-­освободителя назван и центральный проспект болгарской столицы). Не совсем понятно, что патриарх Кирилл имел в виду, когда упомянул, что имя императора Александра II не прозвучало на церемонии. Во всяком случае на официальном сайте президента Радева приводится следующий пассаж из его речи: «Не забудем и слова манифеста императора Александра II, объявившего войну Османской империи, поскольку “к этому обязывает чувство справедливости и наше собственное достоинство”». А что касается перечисления народов, то фраза в его речи сформулирована, согласно официальному сайту, следующим образом: «На полях брани Русско­-турецкой освободительной войны погибли воины многих народов: русские, румыны, финны, украинцы, белорусы, поляки, литовцы, сербы и черногорцы. Для всех них Болгария — последнее пристанище, мы их чтим как своих героев». За русскими вполне логично следуют румыны, ведь румынская армия была представлена на полях сражений достаточно солидными войсковыми формированиями, король Румынии Кароль выступал в качестве союзника Александра II. Призыв патриарха Кирилла к средствам массовой информации был услышан официальными российскими СМИ, которые весьма жестко прокомментировали позицию болгарской стороны, нашедшую выражение в словах президента Радева. Ситуацию комментирует доктор исторических наук профессор Румяна Михнева, член национального комитета по празднованию 140­-й годовщины Освобождения Болгарии и секретарь содружества русистов Болгарии (более полная версия ее выступления приводится в фейсбуке): «Обидно слышать на первом российском телеканале обвинения нас, болгар, в неблагодарности. Неблагодарными (а иногда прибегали и к более сильным словам) по сути назвали тех, кто построил более 500 памятников, мемориалов, посвященных памяти русским, погибшим в той войне; нас, болгар, которые учат своих детей правде, которые не растеряли своего достоинства, берегут свой патриотизм и свое уважение к вашим предкам-освободителям, о которых некоторые критики Болгарии вспоминают только от случая к случаю и, приезжая в Болгарию, иногда забывают под солнцем и музыкой черноморских волн, не проявляя желания подняться пешком на Шипку почтить своих предков. Визит проходил на волне огромной радости православных болгар, и почему-­то никто не написал и не сказал о том, что на Шипке не было в тот день других знамен, кроме болгарских и российских. И что с того, что были названы народы, представители которых являлись подданными Российской империи? А разве Сталин, в 1945 г. на торжественном приеме по случаю Победы, не благодарил вначале разные народы поименно, а в конце поблагодарил великий русский народ? Да, это была русская армия, но кровь за Болгарию проливали люди разных национальностей, среди них были и поляки, и евреи, и украинцы. В эмоциональных речах президента Болгарии и на Шипке, и в Софии не было ничего неправдивого и политически некорректного. В ходе одной из церемоний Радев цитировал не только «Дневник писателя» Достоевского, но и царский манифест. Сама главная церемония происходила у памятника российскому императору, в центре Софии, на ее главной улице, около Парламента и кафедрального собора, носящего имя Святого Александра Невского и построенного на деньги многих тысяч болгар. А кстати, много ли в России осталось памятников героям той войны? После 1918 г. часть из них снесли, герои той войны надолго выпали из медийного и образовательного пространства, а значит из исторической памяти. Однако в Болгарии мы их помнили, чтили и оберегали места памяти. Назовите мне другое государство в мире, где такое происходит, где именами ваших героев — Столетова, Дондукова-­Корсакова, Скобелева, Гурко, Циммермана, Игнатьева, Калитина — названо так много улиц, площадей, бульваров, деревень. Боюсь, что многие среди молодых россиян сегодня даже не знают некоторых из этих имен… И к сожалению, советники не напомнили в нужный момент главе РПЦ, что и румынская армия воевала рядом с русской, и что в событиях на той же стороне участвовали представлявшие свои молодые государства сербы и черногорцы. Не хочется комментировать неадекватный тон официальной российской стороны, хочется лишь заметить, что президент Радев честно и открыто защищал наши русско­болгарские духовные связи и назвал их в своем выступлении “политическим капиталом”. И как минимум удивляет позиция прессы. Гнев патриарха в интерпретации журналистов был обращен не против антироссийских болгарских политиков (а таковые есть у нас и во власти, даже и в самом правительстве, с этим трудно спорить), а против президента и всей Болгарии. Российские СМИ накинулись на президента. В одной газете появилась даже статья со словом “отчитал” в заголовке. Кого отчитал уважаемый глава РПЦ? Президента независимой страны?! Зачем это надо было делать? Возводить на эшафот всю страну и ее законного президента? Некоторые из слов комментаторов, прозвучавших на первом канале России, могли бы стать casus belli в иные времена… Неужели, по мнению тех, кто организует вещание на первом российском телеканале, моя страна всецело состоит только из русофобов, хамов и людей неблагодарных? Но мы ведь видели потом на сайте РПЦ и как светилось лицо патриарха, слышали его слова на проводах в аэропорту. Его тоже всецело захватила та эмоциональная атмосфера, которая сложилась к нашей радости в эти дни. Кому все это было надо? Если это была просто медийная провокация, можно считать, что она удалась на славу. Все наши русофобские болгарские издания и политические силы нашли новый прекрасный повод для очередных атак на всех, кто уважает Россию, чтит наши исторические связи и ведет себя достойно во всех ситуациях. Я знаю, что хранить доброе отношение к России после всего случившегося будет еще труднее. Заполучил ли кто­то политические дивиденды в результате этого? Да, прежде всего болгарские русофобы, а вот в России кто? Мне совсем не понятно». Mihneva Rumyana — doctor of history, professor of Sofia University (Republic of Bulgaria)