Memory Competition or Memory Collaboration? Politics, Networks, and Social Actors in Memories of Dictatorship

Abstract

Jones investigates recent moves to network memorials, museums, and institutes of memory dedicated to human rights abuses committed under left-wing dictatorships in Central and Eastern Europe. Focusing on memorial museums in Germany and Romania, the chapter considers how non-state elite actors are using these networks to negotiate a European memory of communism founded on models of totalitarianism and acting as a potential challenge to the position of the Holocaust as the locus of post-1945 European identity. Drawing on Esref Aksu’s conceptualization of “institutional memory” to demonstrate how such elites operate across borders, Jones shows how groupings beyond and within the boundaries of individual states interact in complex ways to negotiate new narratives about the past. She develops the concept of “collaborative memory” to capture the impact of non-state elite actors in the European public sphere, in which memories are shared, but differently interpreted both within and across borders, and where each national collective is integrated not only culturally, but also politically, with supra- and transnational institutions, traditions, and concerns.