Q&A

The Politics of Memory

Discussing past atrocities is an important step to preventing them in the future, say Rochester scholars. Interview by Sharon Dickman

CONFERENCE COHOSTS: Ewa Hauser, director of the Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies, and Fredrick Harris, associate professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of African-American Politics, say exploring how nations remember slavery, genocide, and war can help prevent atrocities in the future.

As vivid as personal recollections can be, they may not tell the full story of an event or a life. More chilling is the knowledge that “official” records can hide a nation’s past. Can the truth about war, genocide, and slavery ever be told?

Rochester and Warsaw University in Poland organized “Comparative Perspectives on Race, Nationalism, and the Politics of Memory—Poland and the United States” to let scholars address significant, unresolved issues facing both countries. Support from the Fulbright Scholar Program brought Rochester faculty and academics from other American universities together in Warsaw on March 7 and 8 with experts from Poland. It was the capstone event of a continuing, two-year collaboration between Rochester and Warsaw developed by Ewa Hauser, director of Rochester’s Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies.

She and Fredrick Harris, associate professor of political science and director of Rochester’s Center for the Study of African-American Politics, cohosted the conference. They discuss the urgency of its theme and the need for dialogue.

Why did you decide to deal with these themes for a conference?

Harris: History is important, but equally important is how societies remember the past as well as how individuals remember the past. How is it that people construct and reconstruct the past to provide meaning to what’s happening to them in the present? You have national memory, the memory of social groups—particularly marginalized social groups —and also the memories of individuals in all those categories. To discuss this across two very different societies with legacies of race and ethnic divisions sheds light on how people remember the past, and how those memories instruct present-day concerns about politics and society. It’s a unique experience.

Hauser: Part of the inspiration for organizing the conference, and we hope a book, was the work of Aleksander Hertz, a Polish-Jewish sociologist who lived in New York City after World War II and wrote about the contributions of Jews to Polish culture. His book, The Jews in Polish Culture, specifically dealt with the comparison of the structural place of African Americans in American society and the Jews within Polish society. I was struck by the astuteness of his observations and felt that something very interesting could come from talking about these two cultures.

What do you mean by the “politics of memory”?

Hauser: Politicians and historians create memory in texts and films, and rewrite memory and rewrite history. This is the “politics of memory” for me. Poland has experienced numerous rewritings of its history by the political agendas of various Communist factions. Within the 45 years of the Communist period, there were different ways that events were addressed or not addressed or silenced completely.

“Comparative Perspectives on Race, Nationalism and the Politics of Memory—Poland and the United States”
Rochester faculty also making presentations at the March conference in Warsaw included Gerald Gamm, associate professor and chair of political science, Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, assistant professor of political science, and Jeffrey Tucker, assistant professor of English.

With the coming of the pluralistic democracy in 1989, one of the most important issues has been looking at how history and memories have changed the official record. At the conference, one paper addressed the politics of memory of the Kielce pogrom. Kielce happens to be a district where I grew up. I was in a discussion group in my high school that especially dealt with local history. Yet I never knew that there was a pogrom of Jews in Kielce in 1946 until I read it in a Solidarity paper, which first brought it to light in 1980. During that period of free Solidarity from 1980 to 1981, censorship was lifted and I found out to my great horror that men, women, and children were killed by a group of Polish citizens after World War II and the Holocaust. That memory was suppressed by both the central authorities and the collective memory of the local population.

Harris: Memory can work in various ways. It can be very powerful for groups who are trying to address their grievances. On the other hand, it can be used by the state to push a political ideology and can contribute to what one can describe as the myth of the nation.

For instance, our current memories of the civil rights movement are dominated by Martin Luther King Jr., the symbol of King, bringing the races together, the individual triumph of a person like Rosa Parks. The focus is on reconciliation rather than talking about the casualties of the movement, the tragedies, or even the question of restitution. Because of that, excluded groups can develop a counter-memory—a memory that’s counter to the official statement of what happened.

This reminds me of an encounter I had with my great-grandmother, who was nearly 100. She had this huge wicker basket of photographs of relatives, and my sister and I pointed to a picture of her father-in-law and asked whatever happened to him. And her voice cracked. She told us the story about his being taken by the Klan and thrown in the river. These very personal memories, like the lynching of African Americans in the South, are suppressed and not a part of the national discourse.

Many other countries could be examined in this same way. What benefits can come from these interactions?

Harris: People’s attempts to grapple with the past are not unique to any one society. King would describe it as man’s inhumanity to man. The experiences in the United States and Poland can be played out in South America with the disappearance of political activists in Chile. What should happen to General Augusto Pinochet and his complicity in the murder of political activists? Some people would argue that we need not think about the past, just move forward. We’ve seen the massacres in China during World War II, the use of comfort women in Korea by the Japanese. It’s not only “a black thing”: It’s a Polish thing, it’s a Japanese thing, it’s a Chinese thing, it’s a Jewish thing. This is all a part of the human experience.

How do countries and individuals deal with the aftermath of these conflicts and killings?

Harris: Here we are some 40 years later, and we finally see some prosecutions of those who murdered people during the civil rights movement. The Justice Department is reopening the Emmett Till case and this August will be the 50th anniversary of his death. There also is a move by the state of Mississippi to bring to trial a suspect in the murder of three civil rights workers. These events show that people can learn from experiences and try to prevent atrocities in the future.

Hauser: The Poles had to deal with the horrors of German war crimes in Poland that touched every single family. The German occupation of Poland from 1939 to 1945 was brutal. There was no family in Poland after the Second World War that did not lose at least one person. My mother’s brother was killed in a concentration camp following the Warsaw uprising, where he fought as one of the thousands of young insurgents against the German occupation.

The matters of collective memory of injustice experienced, suffered, and perpetrated are extremely complicated in Poland. But what is most important now is that some 60 years after World War II, the hope of “reconciliation” between the Polish and Jewish collective memories will have a chance to be achieved and preserved. A museum of Jewish culture will be built as a common project of the new Poland and American Jewish Congress in Warsaw on the site of the wartime ghetto.