Lithuania. Fractured and Contested Memory Regimes

• DiVA: knygos tekstas

ENLike other countries in the region and indeed throughout Europe, the past is used in Lithuania as a critical resource in the ongoing task of nation building, and as a proxy sphere of contestation among various political interests. There is little that is new in this approach, which dates to the historicism of the nationalist movement of the late 19th century and continued throughout the various national and foreign occupational regimes that have been established on this territory up to the present day. In order to characterize the structure and agency behind the production of memory in today’s Lithuania, it is useful to draw on Bernhard and Kubik’s typology of ‘memory actors’ and the three ideal types of memory regimes: unifed, pillarized and fractured. In a unifed memory regime, there is one dominant interpretation that is not contested. In a pillarized regime, several contrasting interpretations co-exist; memory actors may debate but they accept that there can be diferent points of view. In Lithuania today, the memory regime is arguably fractured due to the prominence of ‘memory warriors’ who cannot accept the discrete validity of certain other interpretations of the past. The main point of contention concerns interpretations of WWII and the accent placed on the traumatic events that took place at the time, including the Holocaust under German occupation and the mass repression, deportations and collectivization that took place under the Soviet occupation. The ongoing signifcance of these traumatic events is entangled with the loss of national sovereignty to the USSR during WWII (1940), followed by three years of German occupation from 1941 to 1944, and the Soviet re-conquest in 1945. Since the restoration of national sovereignty in 1991, the memory of WWII has evolved in tandem with various projects of nation building and identity politics. [Extract, p. 80]