Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, Europe has gone through unprecedented changes. Two decades later, there are still conflicting ideas about what Europe means and who belongs or should belong. Moreover, there still is a long shadow cast by the Holocaust, with distinct differences in how to live under the shadow. While there seems to be a tacit understanding in Western Europe of the importance of the Holocaust in twentieth century Europe, there is a rising focus on national suffering in many east European countries that marginalizes the European genocide. Memory and history are in tension, weakening understanding of national pasts and challenging the connection between the east and the west of Europe, weakening European unity.

In the former Soviet country of Estonia, for example, where I have lived for the past decade, the Holocaust is viewed as marginal to the central narrative of Estonian victimhood at the hands of two occupations: Nazi and Communist. There is a lack of knowledge, coupled with the sense that even if there had been Jews murdered on the territory of Estonia, Estonians had nothing to do with them. The problems of collaboration and anti-Semitism in Estonia are not generally addressed. Instead, the Holocaust is externalized, and treated as a German and Jewish issue that is foreign to Estonian national history. Tony Judt’s distinction between memory and history in his posthumous book, Thinking the Twentieth Century (written with Timothy Snyder) highlights the problem.

I profoundly believe in the difference between history and memory; to allow memory to replace history is dangerous. Whereas history of necessity takes the form of a record, endlessly rewritten and re-tested against old and new evidence, memory is keyed to public, non-scholarly purposes: a theme park, a memorial, a museum, a building, a television program, an event, a day, a flag. (Judt 2012: 277)

Judt’s point is important because when memories of certain key events are lifted out of time, they are all too easily raised to the level of myth. Particularly in narratives of national suffering, there is less room for the suffering of others. As Judt cautions: “Without history, memory is open to abuse. But if history comes first, then memory has a template and a guide against which it can work and be assessed.” (Ibid., 278)

While new monuments and museums to the crimes of National Socialism and Communism indicate a steady interest in representing the past in stone, less emphasis might be placed on the memorization and memorialization of past crimes; and more on a common understanding of the past. As it is now, in the building of monuments to the past, old patterns of intolerance and hostility are still present.

More historical research into both the crimes of Communism and the Holocaust in Europe is needed to provide a balanced understanding of what has happened on the continent since 1933. Indeed, as Tony Judt observed, in his epilogue to Postwar: “Europe might be united, but European memory remained deeply asymmetrical.” (Judt 2005: 826) Given the enormity of Europe’s past, belonging to Europe entails bearing collective responsibility for the history not only of one’s individual nation, but also for Europe as a whole.

But it’s not only the younger generations of protesters who increasingly have recourse to digital and mobile media in their activism. Old-timers are discovering new media technologies as well. This was exemplified in the recent publication of a series of photo albums on Facebook, containing hundreds of snapshots of Italian activists from a 1970s student movement, the so-called “Movement of ’77.” This was not the first attempt to reunite the 1977 generation, and yet, it has never been so successful. What makes Facebook different? Are we dealing with plain nostalgia here? I would rather argue that these digital photo albums, which open up a whole new perspective on the 1970s, as they turn attention away from dominant memories of terrorism and violence, have potentials in that they contribute to a more inclusive, alternative “history from below.”

In 2011, Time Magazine elected global activists “person of the year”. That same year, Italian student protests which had occurred 35 years ago revived on the web as photographer Enrico Scuro – class of ’77 – uploaded his photographic collection to Facebook. In doing so, he unchained enthusiastic reactions from former protesters, who tagged themselves into the photographs and left comments of all sorts. People also sent Scuro their own photographs, thus contributing to what has become something of an online family album, currently containing over 3,000 photographs. As they narrated personal anecdotes, complemented by other people’s recollections, the former protesters collectively reconstructed the (hi)story of a generation, a history not tainted by traumatic memories of terrorism and political violence – typical of the official and public version of the Italian 1970s. Furthermore, the Facebook rage led to a series of reunions outside the virtual world and, a few months ago, to the publication of a selection of the photographs in book form. So what made Facebook different from previous attempts to gather the 1977 generation?

Facebook helps individuals develop a sense of belonging to a wider community, for example by joining or “liking” groups. The online sharing of photographs reinforces this sense of belonging. It prompts acts of recollection in an interactive and public context, turning the photographs into an occasion for a collective and oral “show and tell,” like the real-life viewing of, say, holiday snapshots or family albums among family members and friends.

Indeed, Facebook reproduces orality in a very similar way as when you’re going through a photo album. The tags and comments, which read very much like spontaneous, real-life or telephone conversations, substitute the pointing out of people or places in an album. This effect is amplified by the use of a wide range of special characters, text symbols and emoticons.

Facebook also changes concepts of private and public, as personal stories and identities are shared in a collective setting. Some of the most intimate photographs in Scuro’s albums, for example, include snapshots of women during or shortly before/after child labour. But then private photographs are always also public and social, in that they depend on shared understandings and conventions.

Nostalgia inevitably plays an important role here. Unlike other European countries, the 1968 protests in Italy were not a one-off event, but extended well into the 1970s, culminating in 1977. In some locations, such as the popular university town of Bologna, the student movement of 1977 had a highly creative and fun-loving character. Things changed, though, after the violent death of a student during riots in March: terrorism and heroin rapidly disarmed the ’77 generation, leaving the former protesters with little more than beautiful memories and bitter critiques of Berlusconian politics.

But the albums don’t simply reply to the generation’s yearning for what is no longer attainable: nostalgia can also provide empowerment. The 1977 photo albums on Facebook then offer a positive and progressive sense of memory retrieval, as people or events that have been left out of official history are now re-inserted into a collective and alternative history from below, thus allowing for a more inclusive history of the 1970s.

It’s obvious, though, that these digital archives don’t fix memories in time, eventually. The options within Facebook to remove tags, comments and photographs, as well as to add tags without control, allow people to manipulate the past. This may explain why Scuro decided to publish a selection of the photographs in book form, thus bringing the digitized photographs back into the analogue sphere. This underscores the unstable character of social networks while demonstrating how people, in the end, prefer the material and tangible photograph to its digital counterpart.

For most of this week, we have been exploring the relationship between art and politics, a topic with which I have been deeply involved, both personally and professionally. We started with a discussion of political censorship. We debated the distinction between art and propaganda. And we explored how aesthetic interpretation supports hope. The power and limits of art were debated. Memory, unexpectedly, at least for me, was central in the discussion. I turned to the reflections of a novelist, Milan Kundera, on the obligation of the artist in my post exploring the special quality of art as opposed to propaganda. And now I turn to Kundera again in confronting memory, a problem that also appeared in Benoit Challand’s post on a discussion between his New York students and colleagues in Gaza City.

Kundera opens his novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting with a depiction of an impressive event. He tells the story of the Communist leader, Klement Gottwald, giving a speech in February, 1948, to an audience of hundreds of thousands. It was cold and the snow was falling heavily. Next to Gottwald was Clementis. Gottwald was without a hat. “Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald’s head.” The propaganda department took a photo of the historic event, of the Party leader addressing the masses, marking the beginning of “Communist Bohemia.” “Every child knew the photograph, from seeing it on posters, and in schoolbooks and museums.” Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section purged him from all history. He was airbrushed out of the photo. “Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on the balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only a balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the hat on Gottwald’s head.”

In presenting this event, Kundera sets the theme of his book: systematic forgetting, amusingly depicted. Note that in Kundera’s story what is remembered is determined by the needs of the present. This is the position of Maurice Halbwachs, the sociologist who presented the classical sociological position on collective memory. But the past resists manipulation in surprising ways, something that particularly interested the great critical theorist, Walter Benjamin. Yet, in Kundera’s account, these are not just two general tendencies. Under totalitarian conditions “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

This struggle is at work in the case of Judy Taylor’s labor mural, as we were able to consider it in the post by Vince Carducci, which was supplemented by photos of the work provided by the artist. Governor Paul LePage wielding his official powers, extending the unofficial power of the tea party, removed a memorial mural commissioned to remember highlights in Maine labor history. This is enforced forgetting, at one with the anti-union policies around the country today. Not only are specific labor unions under attack, there is an attempt to erase the memory of union struggles.

Yet, this controversy, from a sociological point of view, is complicated by the fact that every act of collective remembering involves forgetting as well. We pay attention to the moments in labor history that Taylor, with the assistance of a labor historian, chooses to depict, but we forget others that could have been portrayed. Michael Corey with local knowledge reminds us of this. There is a point of view in the work. It emphasizes labor management struggles and not cooperation. Other events point to a different story. The mural is a work that remembers and forgets. But, I wouldn’t call this propaganda, as Vince Carducci does, although I understand why he chooses to do so. The work illuminates from a position.

I am, though, more concerned with the special kind of forgetting and distortion as imagined by Kundera, suggesting that there aren’t just two political positions, each with its propaganda. LePage’s actions could have appeared in Kundera’s novel. It involves not just the human condition, as we remember some things, we forget others. But a more tyrannical condition, where forgetting is a force against memory, connected to a political project.

Art, unlike propaganda, is subtle and how it remembers and makes it possible for us to see things has more to do with metaphor and illumination than with facts. Thus, the story that Kundera tells in his novel, the fate of Clementis’s hat, is a work of imagination, though it is true as such.

Bridges are not novels. But when they are built in ways that don’t just get us from here to there (I think of bridges such as the Kosciusko Bridge in New York), they also tell stories, or at least they inspire us to tell stories. In a modest way, a few weeks ago in the wake of the Japanese catastrophes, two bridges on the old Rockefeller estate told stories to me, which I conveyed to you. More profoundly, Ivo Andric’s The Bridge on the Drina, told a story of hope which Elzbieta Matynia considered in her post this week. Althue Serre mistook artistic expression and imagination for a factual report, and in the process, dismissed the theoretical insight that art provides. He misses the vital link between memory and imagination.

How we remember as much as what we remember matters, in works of art and in everyday interactions.  When we talk to each other across political and cultural divides, we see things that we otherwise wouldn’t see. Benoit Challand’s class learned more profoundly about the political struggles in North Africa and the Middle East, by speaking to a group of Palestinians in Gaza. They heard first hand reports of a demonstration and its repression by those who were involved, or at least by those who were much more closely connected to the movement. In their conversation, the New Yorkers saw things that have been invisible to consumers of the mass media, including our great hometown paper (I say this with no irony intended), The New York Times. Those who took part in the discussion will not forget what those who observe Palestine through the media cannot even know.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” But it’s complicated.