Realms of Memory

German memory culture underwent a dramatic transformation in decades after World War II.  In the immediate aftermath of the war the memories of veterans, Germans expelled from their ancestral homes in Central and Eastern Europe, and the victims of allied bombings dominated the remembrance of the Nazi era.  By the 1980s the focus had almost completely shifted to the perpetrators of the Holocaust an...

The beginnings of many nations are marred by traumatic memories.  This is certainly true for Turkey.  The modern Republic of Turkey began with the dispossession and even eradication of many of the ethnic and religious minorities who had lived for centuries within the borders of the Ottoman Empire.  The Armenian genocide is one of the most prominent examples.  In Violence and Genocide in Kurdish Me...

The  Armenian genocide would not have been possible without the active participation of local populations.  Kurds, who often coexisted in the same towns and cities with Armenians, undoubtedly played a part in the genocide.  Eren Yetkin, a sociologist at Koblenz University in Germany, explores the memories of the Armenian genocide in Turkey.  Author of Violence and Genocide in Kurdish Memory:  Expl...

After fleecing billions of dollars from the Philippines, torturing and murdering thousands during the period of martial law, Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was removed from power through a popular uprising in 1986.  How was it possible that his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., was elected as president in 2022?  Dr. John Lee Candelaria, from Hiroshima University, argues that a long history of memorializing heros a...

How can we understand the nostalgia for the Marcos past that inspired many Filipinos to vote for Ferdinand Marcos Jr.? How was a possible to forget the billions of dollars stolen from the state or the thousands of Filipinos who were tortured or murdered during the period of martial law?  Dr. John Lee Candelaria, from Hiroshima University, argues that memories of past wars in the Philippines offer...

Just as Israeli-Palestinian relations reached a new low in the early 2000s, memory activists in Israel embraced a strategy of confronting the past to resolve the crisis in the present.  Dr. Yifat Gutman, author of Memory Activism: Reimagining the Past for the Future in Israel-Palestine , discusses how memory activists tackled the taboo subject of 1948.  Through tours of ruined and abandoned Palest...

A few months after his Justice and Development Party or AKP won Turkey’s general elections in 2011, then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on his fellow citizens to confront the past.  In the years that followed several prominent sites of state sponsored violence targeting ethnic and religious minorities and former political opponents of the regime were slated to become memorials and muse...

Through her research on Syria, SOAS, University of London Professor Salwa Ismail argues that violence needs to be understood as a deliberate method of rule.  Author of The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria , Ismail cautions us not to reduce regimes that perpetrate heinous human rights violations to despotic, backward, cultures of aggression.  Extreme forms of violence,...

In October 1967 Nigerian federal troops slaughtered hundreds of innocent civilians in the town of Asaba.  Elizabeth Bird, anthropologist and professor emerita at the University of South Florida, argues that the Asaba Massacre wasn’t just one of the many atrocities committed during the Nigerian Civil War.  It was a pivotal event that prolonged a conflict that claimed over a million lives. What were...

In Memory and Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda, Tim Longman argues that the memory of the genocide has been instrumentalized by the long-ruling Rwandan Patriot Front or RPF.  By casting itself as the selfless liberator of the Tusti minority, the RPF has used the genocide to mask its own crimes, abuses of power, and political ambitions.  Showcasing the horrors of the genocide at commemorative sites...

The bones of the tens of thousands of victims of the Franco regime buried in mass graves throughout Spain are now telling their stories.  Nicole Iturriaga, author of Exhuming Violent Histories: Forensics, Memory, and Rewriting Spain’s Past , chronicles the rise of the international forensics human rights movement and how it is helping to shatter the silence about the crimes of the Spanish Civil Wa...

Over a decade of civil war tore apart the tiny Central American nation of El Salvador.  Throughout the 1980s the United States poured billions of dollars into the conflict to stop the spread of communism in Central America.  Beyond the massive loss of life and even greater human displacement, deathsquads and special military units massacred, tortured, and disappeared civilian populations caught in...

In Part 2 of Remembering Stalin’s Victims,  Georgetown University Professor Kathleen Smith explains how a conservative backlash swept Khrushchev from power and ended the first attempt to confront the Stalinist past.  While destalinization persisted in the form of the dissident movement, the nearly twenty year Brezhnev era that followed was one of official silence about the crimes of the past.  It...

The early decades of the Soviet Union were marred by massive human dislocation, terror, and loss of life known collectively as the repressions.  With antecedents in the Lenin years but more closely associated with Stalin, Soviet leaders struggled on two occasions to confront the memory of the repressions.  Kathleen Smith, author of Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the US...

The militarism we see in Russia today has much to do with the rehabilitation of the memory of Stalin.  The Stalin of the Great Terror, mass famine, and deportations has been recast as an unfortunate but necessary prelude to the victory over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriot War.  In Bringing Stalin Back In: Memory Politics and the Creation of a Useable Past in Putin’s Russia , Todd Nelson argues t...

With the Communist victory in China in 1949 nearly one million civil war refugees flooded into Taiwan—the largest out migration from China in the modern era.  Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, author of The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan , helps us understand the relationship between trauma and memory in new ways.  He reveals how the memories of mainlander refugees c...

How has the slave trade been remembered in Liverpool—the world’s leading slave-trading port city in the eighteenth century?  Jessica Moody, author of The Persistence of Memory: Remembering Slavery in Liverpool, ‘slaving capital of the world,’ explains how the slave trade has never been forgotten in Liverpool. It has lived on through public debates about the city’s identity, through the city’s anni...

Why has Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine become such a lightning rod for the memory wars in Japan about the Asia-Pacific War?  Akiko Takenaka, author of Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar , helps us understand how the meaning of Yasukuni has changed over time and why it has become the nation’s most controversial memory site.  

How did Germany go from being an international pariah at the end of World War II to a leader of the European Union and one of the most trusted nations on the planet? In Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil , Susan Neiman argues that having the courage to confront the past did much to transform Germany’s image at home and abroad. 

Realms of Memory is a podcast that looks at how countries confront their darkest chapters, what they gain by doing so, and what happens when they fail to take up this challenge.  We feature the insights of leading experts on a wide range of difficult national memories.