Book Review: Mediating Historical Responsibility: Memories of ‘Difficult Pasts’ in European Cultures

At the beginning of last July, an important book was published by the esteemed German publishing house, De Gruyter, which specializes in academic research. The book, edited by Italian researcher Guido Bartolini, a specialist in cultural memory studies, is titled: Mediating Historical Responsibility: Memories of ‘Difficult Pasts’ in European Cultures.

This book brings together prominent researchers and new voices from various interdisciplinary fields such as memory studies, history, and cultural studies to explore how culture and cultural representations are at the forefront of continuously bringing the memory of past injustices to the public’s attention.

By addressing the pages of injustice in 20th-century European history and dealing with the legacy of colonialism, war crimes, genocides, dictatorships, and racism, the book’s authors examine Europe’s unjust past by studying cultural products and scrutinizing historical narratives, literary texts, films, documentaries, theater, poetry, graphic novels, visual arts, material heritage, and the cultural and political reception of official government reports.

Some of the book’s key chapters include:

• Historical Responsibility and Mediating the Difficult Past by Guido Bartolini and Joseph Ford
• Beyond Neutrality: Historiography and Moral Judgment by Donald Bloxham
• “Democratic Memory,” Public History, and Responsibility in Spain by Alison Ribeiro de Menezes
• Why Do We Care About Past Violence? Addressing Collective Responsibility in British Debates on Colonial Violence during the Mau Mau Rebellion by Itay Lotem
• Troubling Debris: The Transnational Legacy of Italy’s Colonial Past in Addis Ababa by Charles Burdett and Gianmarco Mancosu
• Private Memory, Post-Memory, and Public Memory on the Battlefield: Mediterranean Border Crossings and Italian Public Discourse on the Invasion by Gaia Giuliani

The authors of the book start from the premise that cultural products—literary texts, documentaries, graphic novels, visual artworks, historical narratives, digital resources, and other human-made artifacts with symbolic meaning—provide a unique platform for experiencing unsettling encounters with difficult pasts. Thus, they are a distinctive terrain for exploring and reflecting on issues of responsibility.

The book adopts a mediatory approach to studying European history, exploring the relationship between memory and responsibility, examining the meaning of taking responsibility for the past, and demonstrating how cultural products are fundamentally intertwined in this process.

Responsibility has become an urgent concern in our globalized world. In Europe, many of the most significant public debates in recent years, such as those surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the displacement of migrants and asylum seekers, and the environmental crisis caused by human activities and climate change, have highlighted the growing importance of responsibility issues in our societies and cultures.

The authors of this book argue that responsibility is not merely a concept to be used in relation to contemporary issues; it also has significant implications for how we think about the past and the role of memory in negotiating a relationship with it.

If memory refers to the total context in which “biological, medial, or social processes link the past with the present,” and if we agree that it is never about a series of isolated events—since it generates “manuscript copies” with “multi-directional” effects—then it is clear that memory engages humans in a global network of interconnected histories and stories.

To delve deeper into the network of relationships intertwined through memory between the present and the past, this volume brings the idea of responsibility to the forefront. Although responsibility has always been a broad concern in memory studies research, its importance has tended to remain implicit and unstructured. The volume argues that more critical attention should be given to understanding the concept of responsibility, which can provide the foundation for developing a sound relationship between the past, present, and future, built on human solidarity.

In analyzing the concept of the difficult past, the authors of the book use a common understanding of difficulty to capture the discomfort experienced by members of communities with strong memories when referring to specific, troubling violent events of the past.

According to Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, a “difficult past” is not necessarily more tragic than other past events that are commemorated; what constitutes a difficult past is the inherent moral shock, conflicts, tensions, and struggles. Similarly, in her discussions of the architectural heritage of the Nazi past, Sharon Macdonald emphasizes how “difficult heritage” is associated with “a past recognized as meaningful in the present, but also contested and awkward for public reconciliation with a positive, self-affirming contemporary identity.”

For Macdonald, the past is considered “difficult” because of the way it “threatens to penetrate the present in destructive ways, opening social divisions, perhaps by playing on an imagined, even nightmarish, future.”

The concept refers to historical events that are not glorious and thus require complex and painful collective negotiations that lead to many disputes.

The chapters of this book aim to explore the concept of disturbance and anxiety that are part of the difficult past, in a reflective and generative manner, by studying examples of cultural production that disturb uncritical and self-serving historical and heritage narratives.

The book’s authors are not necessarily direct experts in theories of responsibility, but they have used their expertise in literature, film, cultural studies, memory studies, and European history to present and reflect on the functions and values that responsibility can acquire in the cultural memory of the difficult past.

As a result, instead of imposing a rigid, predetermined concept of responsibility, the authors have adopted an inductive approach: they began with specific case studies chosen by the authors for discussion in order to derive broader and more general considerations about the relationship between memory and responsibility that arise from studying the cultural production of the difficult past.

This not only provided the authors with greater freedom but also facilitated the emergence of the multiple values that responsibility can possess.

The book offers significant insights into the study of memory and European cultures, helping to dismantle the violent entanglements accumulated between the West and East, and between the North and South.

The book focuses on the many crimes committed by Europeans in the past century, highlighting the self-critical practices within European cultures that attempt to negotiate memories of past wrongs, and shaping a reservoir of concepts that can help European societies develop and cultivate a critical memory of the past.

The pursuit of such critical engagement with the past is by no means unique to European cultures—any cultural system that has led to injustice can generate memory narratives of this kind. However, Europe’s violent past and the highlighting of cultural practices that offer fruitful engagement with the history of injustice on which Europe was built contribute to dissecting the injustices that have permeated the orientations of dominant powers in the 20th century against communities and peoples.

The book is also an important endeavor in the ongoing consciousness movement sweeping across various European countries that have practiced different forms of colonialism and have a different history of injustice in which they were involved. These are numerous calls by researchers in the fields of memory, complicity, and responsibility regarding the need to acknowledge the commission of injustices.

The book also calls for exploring the ways in which the researchers themselves are implicated in the past they study, through deconstructing dominant narratives and unethical forms of storytelling, and through situating themselves in the present, and how the cultural systems they are part of intertwine with a history of injustice.

This book does not propose a guiding model for remembering the difficult past, nor does it offer easy shortcuts for dealing with past injustices. On the contrary, a more comprehensive confrontation with the idea of responsibility is seen as a means to explicitly reflect on the many difficult, complex, and troubling aspects that are part of the process of dealing with the past, which often remain implicit in ready-made expressions such as “reconciliation with” or “facing” the past.

According to the book’s authors, focusing on cultural mediation is the key to unlocking less systematic and more chaotic perspectives that can enrich our understanding of memory, responsibility, and the process of dealing with the past, and help us identify ways in which the present can build a productive ethical relationship with historical injustice.