Prade-Weiss, Juliane

During the past 15 years, literatures from Central and Eastern Europe have been marked by   a boom of (documentary) fiction portraying complicity with 20th century totalitarianisms. These texts portray involvement in Nazi perpetration and Soviet or other terror. Since understanding the past serves requirements of the present, the boom prompts the question: Why the interest in past complicities now? My hypothesis is that the texts address convergences between involvements in past acts of mass violence and current forms of participation in wrongdoings of humanitarian, ecological, or other natures in neoliberalism. While these issues differ profoundly, they are related in structural and historical terms: Structurally, both present the challenge of forming a nuanced notion of participation, the idea and promise at the heart of democracy, digital media, and consumer capitalism that is highly valued yet poorly conceptualized. Historically, both issues are related since justifications of past involvements have established the terminology, narratives, and heuristics in which terror, repression, and acts of mass violence are subsequently discussed by inscribing them into cultural traditions, thus forming the frame for negotiating current problematic involvements. The convergence of past and present complicities is of particular interest in view of the global crisis of political participation, which is undermined by an often unwilling but inevitable participation in detrimental structures that can be linked to the increasing delegitimization of democracy and the retreat to identitarian ideologies. 

Approaches to complicity in Eastern European literatures are particularly interesting against this background as the experience of totalitarianism and political (mass) violence spread over several generations. This means that “[c]ategories such as victims, perpetrators, collaborators and bystanders, often used in the Western discourse about World War II, are very difficult to apply” as individuals and groups have often “shifted their roles with the many, often violent, turns in the history” of the realm (1). My contribution will focus on Maria Stepanova’s 2019 novel Памяти памяти (“In Memory of Memory”, 2021), which addresses the critical participation of analysis in forming the aftermath of mass violence, not least in the context of the political instrumentalization of cultural memory for the sake of justifying current repression, silencing, and political violence (2).

(1) Sindbæk Andersen, Tea and Barbara Törnquist-Plewa. 2016. Disputed Memory: Emotions and Memory Politics in Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe. Berlin: deGruyter. 

(2) Weiss-Wendt, Anton, and Nanci Adler. 2021. The Future of the Soviet Past: The Politics of History in Putin’s Russia. Bloomington: Indiana U P.