History, Memory and Social Movements

History, Memory and Social Movements

Organisatoren
Stefan Berger, Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University, Bochum; Sean Scalmer, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne
Ort
Bochum
Land
Deutschland
Vom - Bis
19.07.2017 - 20.07.2017
Url der Konferenzwebsite
Von
Kate Davison, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne

Renewed disputes over public memorial statues at the heart of grassroots responses to neo-Nazi mobilisations within and beyond the United States have once again signalled the need for historians to better come to terms with the connections between memory, social movements and memorialisation. This was the aim of the “History, Memory, and Social Movements” conference on 19-20 July 2017 hosted by the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University, Bochum. The gathering was part of an ongoing collaborative project with the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, jointly led by Stefan Berger (Bochum) and Sean Scalmer (Melbourne). The project overall aims to bring the fields of social movement history and memory studies into more active dialogue.

In their opening remarks, Berger and Scalmer highlighted three aspects that had framed the goals of the conference and the collaborative project more broadly. Firstly, there has been a tendency within memory studies so far to focus on questions of ‘national’ memory and the conflicts or public discussions they prompt: analysing how and what is memorialised and commemorated by national authorities and governments, which monuments and narratives receive state attention (and perhaps funding), and how these memory politics play into the politics of the present. A second feature has been a methodological predilection within memory studies to focus on trauma, whether individually or collectively experienced. These two factors have both meant that social movements have remained un- or under-investigated within the field.

Likewise, social movement historians are yet to fully investigate the role of memory in past political traditions, events and organisations. As the presentations showed, memory, memorialisation and commemoration have been key tools within social movement activity and discourse throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, and have had political, practical, social, moral, emotional and other functions. A third aspect that framed and prompted the conference (and the collaborative project more broadly) is the pressing need for more transnational perspectives and comparisons within both fields.

Across the two days, seventeen papers in total were presented, grouped into themed panels. Some were organised according to type of social movement, spanning the labour movement, anarchism/syndicalism, communists, peace movements, environmental and urban movements, grassroots commemorative movements, and movements for gay or LGBTIQ rights. Others were organised around theoretical or methodological concerns.

The opening presentation by ANN RIGNEY (Utrecht) directly responded to the issue raised by Berger and Scalmer in their introduction: anxious to move memory studies beyond trauma, Rigney urged historians to look also at how social movements have just as much used memory as a mechanism of hope, positivity and optimism. In her current research on transnational memories of Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland, literary concepts such as embodied performance assist her to understand what she called the ‘melodramatic character [of] the way the event is remembered’: what are the ‘capture mechanisms’ for keeping memories of positivity and hope alive, when faced with such bloody outcomes? Performance theory, she noted, reminds us that for those actually performing an event, the experience is or may be totally different and even celebratory, despite later outcomes.

This idea was echoed by DENNIS BOS (Leiden), in a presentation on memories of the Paris Commune. In the decades afterward, the Commune was variously remembered, by participants and then later labour movements in France and beyond, as a galvanising moment: Communard commemoration rituals, songs, pamphlets, re-enactments, tale-telling at banquets and memoirs translated rapidly into several other languages meant that the legend of the Commune ended up being far more influential than the event itself, in terms of outcomes for sympathisers. This raised questions of whether we can defy time and reproduce the pleasure experienced in historical events – even the ones that are remembered as traumatic.

This discussion about moving beyond manifestations of mourning, trauma and loss within social movements to paying more attention to those of positivity, hope and optimism was taken up repeatedly throughout the conference. We saw how in some social movements, such as the movement for gay rights explored by KATE DAVISON (Melbourne), hope, optimism and organising strength has been drawn precisely from the practice of ‘reclaiming’ symbols of past trauma such as the pink triangle, used transnationally from the early 1970s as a central motif for public memorials to homosexual victims of the Holocaust. Similarly, rituals commonly associated with mourning, such as wreath-laying, was utilised in the 1980s by gay and lesbian activists from Melbourne and Sydney to Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen as a protest strategy to politically demonstrate the continuities in past and present oppression. Other presentations focused on movements memorialising actual victories, such as SEAN SCALMER’s (Melbourne) explanation of commemorative rituals marking the achievement in 1856 of an eight-hour working day by the Australian labour movement, which among other things took the form of annual festive parades and celebratory picnics.

These rituals often reflect dominant prejudices (Chinese Australians were excluded) but also serve the creation of a common and unified identity by those who are included. Exclusion and inclusion in labour movement memory was also the theme of LIAM BYRNE’s (Melbourne) paper, which zoomed in on personal memory and the use of memoirs by activists, particularly women, as political interventions and correctives to collective memory.

As noted by Berger and Scalmer, this concept of the ‘memory activist’ has in recent times been advanced by several scholars. While meanings of the concept vary, its political suggestiveness makes it a good starting point for just one of the ways memory plays into and is shaped by social movements, and vice versa. A number of papers explored how this concept can be applied to grassroots political projects built explicitly around memory gathering and commemoration, such as citizens’ initiatives to create, shift or reorganise the focus of public memorials to victims of war in Russia and Germany, whether in physical public space or using online platforms. MISCHA GABOWITSCH (Potsdam) in his presentation on the Russian commemorative movement Immortal Regiment – an online platform to document fallen Russian soldiers in the Second World War – identified three different types of social movements: top-down political movements, local or grassroots movements, and what he called ‘copycat’ movements like Immortal Regiment. These are decentralised network-style movements deliberately lacking a central leadership structure, and often present themselves as non-political. In such non-state movements, memory itself – through commemorative practices – functions as a form of civic engagement or intervention, and they can have transnational effects, impacts and connections. JENNY WÜSTENBERG (Toronto) extended this to examine the transition from ‘memory work’ to ‘memory protest’, as well as the distinction between ‘memory movements’ and ‘movements that mobilise around memory’, by comparing the German history workshop movement (Geschichtswerkstattbewegung) to the movement for memorials (Gedenkstättenbewegung).

An important question prompted by these papers was whether there is a danger that memory replaces activism – certainly there is a continuum between activism mobilised around memory on the one hand, and organisations dedicated purely to commemoration on the other, yet there are important distinctions as well. Several of the papers demonstrated how such commemorative movements can often be explicitly interventionist, particularly where present-day reparations, compensation or other inter-state diplomatic relations are concerned. DAVID LOWE’s (Geelong) paper examining last year’s 60th anniversary of the commencement of atomic weapons testing in Maralinga, in the Australian desert, touched upon the continued relevance of contested collective memory where state and non-state actors are at odds. In his analysis of official and unofficial commemorative events, Lowe found that while many protest memories pitch the Maralinga tests as ‘the last great play of colonialism’, there can also often be found a note of nationalism in response to British colonialism, raising questions about the way oppositional or contradictory memory narratives can possibly be both pro- and anti-state at the same time.

A series of papers focusing on peace, labour and communist movements in post-war West Germany brought together the many (still urgent) questions around the way Germany did, and does, work through issues of collective memory regarding the Second World War. We saw how memory was used strategically in numerous ways: not only in ‘official’ and ‘non-official’ West German memories of pre-1945 communism, as part of TILL KÖSSLER’s (Bochum) investigation, but also as a strategic mechanism in court cases against alleged Communists to delegitimise the rival German state during the Cold War as SARAH LANGWALD (Bochum) pointed out. Frequently, West German prosecutors and judges delegitimised the GDR, and KPD-orientated defendants did the same with the FRG. As precursors of détente, (groups of) defenders tried to mediate between these different positions and conflicting memories. ALRUN BERGER (Bochum) stressed the political dimension of memory work that was imbedded in the peace movements’ admonitory and conscientious protest against nuclear weapons during the early 1960s. She argued that the peace activists challenged the post-war political consensus by bringing a contrasting remembrance, or rather, a counter-memory into the early 1960s’ West German public sphere. Even before the war, remembrance became an activist strategy among syndicalist, communist and social democrat groups in the Weimar period, and became constitutive of their political identities and conflicts. The way they commemorated events such as the Kapp Putsch shifted and altered over time, taking a sharp turn towards anti-fascism after 1945, as JULE EHMS (Bochum) described.

Another major focus was on environmental, urban and peace activism of the 1970s-1980s. Their cross-over to labour movements was explored by CHRISTIAN WICKE (Utrecht) in his comparative presentation on memory during and since the workers-settlement initiatives in the German Ruhr region and the Sydney green bans in the 1970s. IAIN McINTYRE’s (Melbourne) presentation focused on memory strategies employed by movements, such as song and music in the environmental movement. STEPHEN MILDER (Groningen) focused on environmental activists’ memories of the Wyhl nuclear reactor protests in the 1970s. Another paper by RICHARD ROHRMOSER (Mannheim) examined records of trials resulting from protests against nuclear missiles in Mutlangen in the 1980s to reveal how the memory and history of the Second World War was a prevailing theme in the defence cases of German peace movement activists in court.

Aside from taking up several of the questions raised above, something future conferences addressing memory and social movements may do is examine whether we can think about memory cultures within social movements as communities of memory, or adopting insights from the history of emotions, as constitutive of ‘emotional communities’ (Barbara Rosenwein).

Another aspect future conferences may wish to address is the way memory, memorialisation and commemoration shape and are shaped by explicitly right-wing movements. In his presentation on how German trade unions have commemorated 1 May variously throughout the twentieth century, STEFAN BERGER (Bochum) did note that although overwhelmingly a date on the leftist calendar, it has also been commemorated by right-wing groups. If the primary question of his presentation was how to trade unions create and use memorialisation rituals, it may also be worth asking how grassroots and non-state right-wing movements and organisations do and what they have drawn from it.

The right-wing mobilisations in the US city of Charlottesville in August 2017 were in part in ‘defence’ of public statues commemorating former slave owners. Social movement and labour history can especially benefit here from important work being done in the field of memory studies to assess the way memory is being mobilised by governments, states and political parties of the present to achieve policy or ideological goals. There is much work to be done to bring these two fields into a more productive dialogue, but as this conference shows, the material is rich, and the benefits manifold.

Conference Overview:

Conference Opening
Stefan Berger (Bochum) / Sean Scalmer (Melbourne): Welcome address

Alternative Conceptions, Traditions and Theoretical Reflections on Memory in Social Movements

Ann Rigney (Utrecht): The Afterlife of Hope
Mischa Gabowitsch (Potsdam): Protest and Commemorative Movements in Present-Day Russia: Unexpected Structural Similarities
Moderation: Christian Wicke (Utrecht)
Discussion

The Memory of the Labour Movement

Stefan Berger (Bochum): How Do Trade Unions Remember? Preliminary Thoughts on a Wide-Open Research Area
Liam Byrne (Melbourne): Labours Lives Lost? Personal and Political Memory in the Australian Labour Movement
Sean Scalmer (Melbourne): Remembering the Movement for Eight Hours. Commemoration and Mobilisation in Australia
Moderation: Christian Wicke (Utrecht)
Discussion

The Memory of Anarchism and Syndicalism

Dennis Bos (Leiden): The Influence of the Paris Commune of 1871 and its Memory within the International Anarchist, Socialist and Communist Movement
Jule Ehms (Bochum): “Devoted by the organized workers of the city”. The Remembrance of the Märzgefallenen by Workers’ Organizations during the Weimar Republic
Moderation: Alrun Berger (Bochum)
Discussion

The Memory of Communists and Leftists

Till Kössler (Bochum): The Memory of Communism in West Germany
Sarah Langwald (Bochum): Memory as a Strategy in Court? Dealing with the Past in Trials against Communists in 1950s/60s West Germany
Moderation: Liam Byrne (Melbourne)
Discussion

The Memory of Movements for Peace

Alrun Berger (Bochum): The Role of Sacrifice and Mourning within the West German Peace Movement of the early 1960s
David Lowe (Geelong): Atomic Testing in Australia. Memories, Mobilisations and Mistrust
Richard Rohrmoser (Mannheim): “Grassroots Security Police”. Nonviolent Protests against Nuclear Missiles in Mutlangen, 1983-1987
Moderation: Jule Ehms (Bochum)
Discussion

The Memory of Environmental and Urban Movements

Stephen Milder (Groningen): “We said no!” Remembering the Resistance at Wyhl in the 1970s and Today
Christian Wicke (Utrecht): Memory Motives “within”, “of” and “by” Social Movements. The Workers-Settlement Initiatives in the Ruhr and the Sydney Green Bans
Iain McIntyre (Melbourne): “The FBI stole my fiddle”. Song and Memory in US Radical Environmentalism, 1979-1995
Moderation: Sarah Langwald (Bochum)
Discussion

From Local to Global. Protest Strategies and Memory Activism

Jenny Wüstenberg (Toronto): From Memory Work to Memory Protest. How Movements Transformed Institutions of Remembrance in Germany
Kate Davison (Melbourne): Queer Memorials and Absences. Public LGBTIQ Commemoration Strategies in Transnational Perspective
Moderation: Iain McIntyre (Melbourne)
Discussion


Redaktion
Veröffentlicht am
Autor(en)
Beiträger