Landscape biographies of commemoration

Abstract

All social structures, ranging from world-wide cultural communities to local networks of individuals, develop more or less specific memory cultures to connect places, buildings and land to memories and notions of ancestry and origin. One can focus on several histories in the landscape or bring one moment in time to the exclusive attention. This paper will discuss two examples of landscapes of commemoration using a landscape-biographical approach. This approach is used to demonstrate a multi-vocal past with its complex overlapping layers of social, economic and political history. Wars are etched on the memories of nations, communities and individuals. What people remember, and how, changes with time, especially now that historic events are disappearing in living memory. This paper analyses how nations, local communities and individuals reshaped their violent past through time.