Performing the Past
Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe
Distributed for Amsterdam University Press
Throughout Europe, narratives about the past circulate at a dizzying speed, and producing and selling these narratives is big business. In museums, in cinema and opera houses, in schools, and even on the Internet, Europeans are using the power of performance to craft stories that ultimately define the ways their audiences understand and remember history.
Performing the Past offers unparalleled insights into the philosophical, literary, musical, and historical frameworks within which the past has entered into the European imagination. The essays in this volume, from such internationally renowned scholars as Reinhart Koselleck, Jan Assmann, Jane Caplan, Marianne Hirsch, Leo Spitzer, Peter Burke, and Alessandro Portelli, investigate various national and disciplinary traditions to explain how Europeans see themselves in the past, in the present, and in the years to come.
“Performing the Past is a dazzling collection of essays by scholars who share a passion for the performative nature of history, memory, and identity. The volume offers refreshing insights for anyone interested in the past.”
Preface
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
The performance of the past: memory, history, identity
Jay Winter
Framework
2 Re-framing memory. Between individual and collective forms of constructing the past
Aleida Assmann
3 Repetitive structures in language and history
Reinhart Koselleck
4 Unstuck in time. Or: the sudden presence of the past
Chris Lorenz
The Performative Turn
5 Co-memorations. Performing the past
Peter Burke
6 'Indelible memories.' The tattooed body as theatre of memory
Jane Caplan
7 Incongruous images. 'Before, during, and after' the Holocaust
Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer
8 Radio Clandestina: from oral history to the theater
Alessandro Portelli
Media and the Arts
9 Music and memory in Mozart's Zauberflöte
Jan Assmann
10 The many afterlives of Ivanhoe
Ann Rigney
11 Novels and their readers, memories and their social frameworks
Joep Leerssen
12 Indigestible images. On the ethics and limits of representation
Frank van Vree
Identity, Politics and the Performance of History
13 'In these days of convulsive political change.'
Discourse and display in the revolutionary museum, 1793-1815
Frans Grijzenhout
14 Restitution as a means of remembrance
Evocation of the recent past in the Czech Republic and in Poland after 1989
Stanislaw Tyszka
15 European identity and the politics of remembrance
Chiara Bottici
About the authors
List of illustrations
History: European History
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