11
Public Memory, Commemoration, and Transitional
Justice: Reconﬁguring the Past in Public Space
Duncan Light and Craig Young
Transitional justice is usually addressed through institutional processes such
as lustration, restitution, prosecution, and truth commissions, around which a
comprehensive academic literature has developed. However, this chapter
explores a relatively neglected symbolic dimension of transitional justice,1
namely practices of memorialization and commemoration that are represented,
played out, and contested in urban space. There is widespread
acknowledgment within the transitional justice literature that memorialization
– in the form of monuments, statues, and museums – has a key role to play
in healing the wounds of the communist past. Such memorials “represent a
critical terrain where the past is confronted and conﬂict can be addressed.”2
Memorialization is a means of giving recognition to those who suffered hardship,
repression, exile, or death under communist regimes. The practice
makes a visible statement about what (and who) a political order considers
worthy of remembrance and is a means of reaching large numbers of people
over an extended time period.
This chapter focuses on the ways in which transitional justice for the victims
of communist regimes is expressed in the highly complex entanglement of
urban cultural landscapes, public memory, and commemorative sites and
practices. We contend that attempts to shape public memory through practices
of commemoration and memorialization are important (if neglected)
aspects of transitional justice, that have much to tell us about how postcommunist
societies choose to remember and forget the period of
Communist Party rule. Following a review of the relationships between public
memory and urban space, we begin by examining efforts to erase the commemorative
landscape produced by communist regimes. We then look at the
variety of initiatives (by diverse elites and publics) to commemorate the
victims of communist regimes, with particular reference to monuments,
memorials, and museums. We also highlight the importance of both domestic
233
and international tourism to these sites of memory as central to the way in
which they “work.”
public memory, commemoration, and urban space
Public memory can be deﬁned as “a body of beliefs and ideas about the past
that help a public or society understand both its past, present, and by implication,
its future.”3
It is not only a society’s collective understanding of the
past, but also the ways that this past is represented in the present.4
Since
memory is integral to the formation of identities, collective (or public) memory
has long been important in the construction of collective identities.5
In
particular, nation-states construct and promote a particular understanding of
the past within nation-building projects that are intended to foster social
cohesion and allegiance to a particular “imagined community.”6
The formation
of such a collective memory involves choices about what a society wishes
to remember. Nevertheless, while states may play a leading role in the construction
of collective memory they do not enjoy a monopoly over this process.
Instead, various elites and publics both within and without the state (each of
which may be fractured by competing and contesting agendas) participate in
the process7
so that the formation of public memory is a ﬂuid process of
negotiation.8
Public memory “emerges from the intersection of ofﬁcial and
vernacular cultural expressions”9
and, for this reason, it is best regarded as an
activity or process, rather than an outcome.10
Public memory is a process which is worked out in the public arena. This is
achieved through various practices of remembrance and commemoration
intended to reify public memory by turning it into visual spectacle. In particular,
human geographers argue that urban space – or landscape – is essential to
the “working” of public memory.11
All political orders seek to create an
“ofﬁcial public landscape”12
intended as a rhetorical statement of speciﬁc
political values. Remembrance and commemoration are central aspects of
such landscapes: Edensor13
has coined the term “memoryscape” for those parts
of the urban landscape that are given over to collective remembrance. The
urban environment can be the setting for a range of temporary (if cyclical)
commemorative practices including ceremonies, parades, festivals, and rituals.
However, most forms of commemoration are permanent and include
statues, monuments, memorials, and other public buildings, along with commemorative
names attached to streets, buildings, and other urban landmarks.
Such commemorative practices concretize “ofﬁcial” conceptions of public
memory, rendering it immutable in the public arena. They can also be sites for
the expression of opposition to and contestation of this ofﬁcial public memory.
234 Duncan Light and Craig Young
Since public memory is produced in a particular political context it is
vulnerable to political change. In particular, all shifts of political power
“generate a reconﬁguration of the ‘known past.’”14
This issue is of particular
relevance in post-communist societies which have sought to build political
identities based on an emphatic rejection of communism (a strategy which
generally enjoyed widespread popular support). Such societies faced the
need for a new, appropriate, and “usable” past to replace now discredited
communist-era constructions of the collective past. The most readily available
exemplar was that of the period before communist rule.15
Therefore, Central
and Eastern Europe has focused on the pre-communist past as the model for a
post-communist future. As Katherine Verdery argued, this is about effectively
excising the communist period from the historical time line and connecting
the post-communist present with the period before World War II.16
This
enabled post-communist societies to “resume” the historical trajectory that
they would have followed had it not been for the “aberration” of four decades
of communist rule. Clearly in post-communist contexts, the past is ﬂuid and
ﬂexible, with different state and non-state groups competing to establish a new
historical narrative (see Chapter 7 in this volume).
Similarly, public memory is also in a state of reformation.17
Within the
political transformation from totalitarianism to democracy, post-communist
societies face new choices about what (and who) they want to remember, and
how (and where) this remembrance will be enacted. At the same time as
seeking to forget communism, the new societies want to remember the
repression and violence of the former regime and to honor the victims of
state persecution. There may also desire to remember the events that brought
about the collapse of communist regimes (even if, in some cases, these events
did not in themselves bring about a clear break with those regimes). Moreover,
given that the urban landscape is central to the expression of public memory
these debates will, in some way, be worked out in urban space. In particular,
there will be a signiﬁcant remaking of the commemorative landscape. People
and events honored by the previous regime will be de-commemorated and
their memorials removed from the public arena. New acts of commemoration
will subsequently follow in a way that accords with the political values and
public memory of the new regime.
In this way, practices of commemoration and memorialization within the
urban landscape can be important (if often overlooked) elements of transitional
justice projects in post-communist states. Indeed, memorialization and
collective remembrance are fundamental processes in societies recovering
from traumatic pasts.18
Barsalou and Baxter argue that memorialization has
a number of roles in such projects: it offers symbolic reparations to the victims
Public Memory, Commemoration, and Transitional Justice 235
of violence; it can promote reconciliation; it can encourage engagement with
education programs about the recent past; and it creates speciﬁc sites that can
be the focus both of individual mourning and ofﬁcial ceremonies of remem-
brance.19
Of particular relevance to this chapter is that memorialization makes
a highly visible statement in the public arena about a post-communist society’s
commitment to a new set of political values. In fact, of all the forms of
transitional justice, memorialization is the most visible and can have an
impact on the everyday lives of the greatest number of people. However, to
date, there has been only sporadic attention in the transitional justice literature
to the role of memorialization projects within the urban landscape. This
reﬂects a broader context in which political scientists have paid relatively little
attention to the role of monuments and memorials as political symbols.20
In
the following sections we explore changing practices of memorialization in
post-communist Central and Eastern Europe, focusing ﬁrst on the removal of
the commemorative landscapes created by communist regimes, and then on
efforts to create new memorial sites and landscapes within transitional justice
projects.
erasing the commemorative landscape of communism
When communist regimes came to power in the late 1940s they immediately
set about remaking public memory. This was principally achieved through a
comprehensive rewriting of history and total control over the education
system. It also included a comprehensive remaking of the urban landscape
to decommemorate the historical narrative associated with the discredited
former regime. Since communist regimes attached special importance to the
transformative power of public space for creating a new socialist conscious-
ness,21
the public arena effectively became an instrument of state propaganda.
An entirely new commemorative landscape was produced which was saturated
with a variety of symbols (including statues, memorials, monuments, plaques,
murals, banners, and slogans) that were intended to shape the ways that people
thought about their individual and collective pasts.22
As communist regimes collapsed in 1989 their ofﬁcial commemorative
landscapes swiftly became the targets of protest, resulting in the familiar
process of “landscape cleansing.”23
This activity was initiated by the populace
during the euphoria that accompanied the collapse of communist rule and
was continued by the new post-communist administrations. This process
satisﬁed the demand to see evidence of political change.24
Czepczyn´ski
identiﬁes a number of strategies for landscape cleansing: removal, renaming,
rededication, and reuse.25
The most visible strategy is removal, where
236 Duncan Light and Craig Young
monuments placed by the communist states were directly expunged from the
urban arena. By far the most iconic images of the collapse of communist
regimes were the removal of statues of Soviet ﬁgures such as Lenin. These
events required considerable organization and resources and so were usually
orchestrated by the state.26
They provided a dramatic and highly visible
proclamation that political order was changing. However, in most cases the
eradication of communist statuary was both less spectacular and less immediate,
with most removals taking place quietly during the early years of post-
communism.27
Only in a few instances were communist monuments
destroyed in situ, the dynamiting of Georgi Dimitrov’s mausoleum in Soﬁa
in 1999 being the best example.28
In most instances communist monuments and statues were not destroyed
but instead they were simply moved to new locations. For example, in
Hungary, the Budapest city authority made the decision in 1991 to remove
over forty communist-era statues and monuments and relocate them in an
open-air museum on the edge of the city, named “Statuepark,” which opened
to visitors in 1993. This strategy allowed the monuments to be retained both as
historical artifacts and as reminders of a traumatic past but in a way that
emasculated their symbolic power within the urban landscape.29
In other
cases, the removal of communist statues was vigorously contested. The best
example is the “Bronze Soldier” in Tallinn, Estonia, which commemorated
Soviet soldiers who had fallen in the liberation of the city at the end of World
War II. As an obviously Soviet symbol, its presence in the city centre was
unwelcome for the post-communist Estonian government, which, in 2007,
made the decision to move the memorial to a military cemetery on the edge of
the city. This provoked violent protest by Estonia’s Russian minority, who
interpreted the removal of the statue as an attack on their heritage and
identity.30
A less dramatic strategy was the renaming of streets, buildings, and other
urban landmarks to de-commemorate events and personalities from
communist-era historiography. This practice has been termed “toponymic
cleansing.”31
Such renaming is “an act of political propaganda with immense
proclamative value and public resonance”32
: it makes an immediate statement
that public memory is changing and is relatively quick and simple to implement.
Renaming was intended to decommemorate the communist past and
place a new narrative of national history and memory into public space.
However, renaming urban streets and buildings was relatively limited in
scale and was most prominent in the central areas of towns and cities. Since
many toponyms allocated during the communist era had no ideological
connotations, they did not need to be renamed. For example, in Bucharest
Public Memory, Commemoration, and Transitional Justice 237
only 6.6 percent of the city’s streets were renamed after 1989.33
In other postcommunist
cities, the proportion was lower.
Strategies of rededication and reuse were applied mostly to museums.
Communist regimes attached considerable importance to museums34
as a
means of socialist propaganda so that hundreds of new museums were established
in communist Central and Eastern Europe. Most countries had at least
one museum dedicated entirely to the history and activities of that country’s
Communist Party. These were complemented by a network of regional and
local museums, all of which interpreted local history through the lens of
Marxism-Leninism. With the fall of communism, the museums dedicated
to Party history were swiftly closed. Some reopened as different museums (for
example, in Bucharest the former History Museum of the Communist Party
and of the Revolutionary and Democratic Movement of Romania reopened in
1990 as the Museum of the Romanian Peasant35
), while in other cases the
buildings were put to entirely new uses. As the formerly communist states were
gripped by “collective amnesia” about the recent past almost all museums
simply closed any galleries which dealt with the communist period: the
displays remained in place but in locked rooms with no public access.
Ba˘dica36
describes this as the “black hole paradigm” where the historical
narrative presented in museums simply ended in 1945.
Overall, the efforts to neutralize the commemorative symbols of communism
(and the public memory that they represented) was a crude ﬁrst step in
achieving redress for the abuses and hardship of the communist era. However,
the process of landscape cleansing was always partial. It was applied most
thoroughly to the central parts of cities (particularly capitals) and to a lesser
extent (sometimes hardly at all) in more peripheral districts. Its target was the
most visible and iconic symbols of the communist regime, while smaller or
more inconspicuous symbols were often ignored or overlooked. Removing or
reconﬁguring the commemorative landscape of communism effectively
cleared space in the urban arena for an entirely new set of commemorative
practices speciﬁcally intended to remember the victims and abuses of communism.
These are discussed in the following section.
commemorating the victims of and resistance
to communist regimes
Within strategies to redeﬁne public memory there have been two broad
strands to the remaking of commemorative landscapes. First, in the effort
to (re)establish a “normal” past post-communist societies have attempted to
correct the distortions of communist-era historiography. In addition to
238 Duncan Light and Craig Young
de-commemorating key ﬁgures from the communist version of history there
has been a focus on reinstating and re-commemorating those people (politicians
and monarchs) who were excised from public memory by communist
historians. This, in turn, resulted in new practices of memorialization in the
public arena and, once the ofﬁcial public landscape had been decommunized,
it could be repopulated with new monuments, statues, memorials,
and toponyms. The most straightforward way to do this was by returning
streets to their pre-communist commemorative names. For example, in central
Bucharest fourteen streets commemorating pre-communist politicians
that had been renamed by the communist regime returned to their former
names, as did four streets that commemorated the Romanian monarchy.37
Over time, new statues and monuments were commissioned to commemorate
those ﬁgures who had been disavowed during the communist period. For
example, a statue of Toma´sˇ Masaryk was erected in Prague in 2000, and a
statue of King Carol I (based on an earlier statue destroyed by the communist
regime) was unveiled in Bucharest in 2010. Such practices represent a symbolic
correction of a form of historical injustice, although they are not usually
considered as part of transitional justice projects.
Second, post-communist societies faced the challenge of how to remember
the communist period and how to commemorate its victims. Although in
many countries there was an initial desire to forget the communist past
completely, at a later stage there was general agreement that the abuses of
communism should be memorialized. The construction of memorials, monuments,
and museums is a means of acknowledging the abuses of the communist
era, giving recognition to the victims, and promoting a sense of social
cohesion and belonging that is rooted in a traumatic recent past.38
A range of
actors both within and outside the state participate in such memorialization.
In some countries, governments have been very active in promoting remembrance
of the abuses of communist regimes as a form of transitional justice that
compliments other legal and institutional measures.39
States can also use
practices of memorialization to afﬁrm and legitimate (to both domestic and
international audiences) their commitment to political values that are the
antithesis of communism.40
Civil society groups and non-governmental
organizations have also been active in memorializing the communist past,
particularly in those countries where former communist ofﬁcials have
remained in power and have been more unwilling to condemn the communist
era.41
In addition, ordinary individuals can also be involved in the process
of remembrance through creating and placing their own, informal memorials
in the urban landscape. The commemorative landscape is therefore characterized
by a bricolage of memorial forms, dedicated to different subjects and
Public Memory, Commemoration, and Transitional Justice 239
groups, in a wide range of locations, and with a wide range of sponsors. In what
follows, we focus on two broad categories of memorialization: (1) monuments
and memorials and (2) museums (with associated practices of tourism).
Monuments and Memorials
For states engaged in enacting transitional justice, the erection of monuments
and statues in the public arena has provided one means of recognition of
communist-era injustices. As a result, there are many examples of such commemoration,
although it is by no means a thorough, consistent, and comprehensive
practice. Indeed, what is perhaps surprising is the relative paucity of
such memorials combined with the controversy that they sometimes generate.
Representing the condemnation of the communist past and its injustices
through memorialization is not, therefore, a straightforward process.
The memorials that have been erected differ widely in terms of their form,
the subject that they commemorate, and the sponsoring organization behind
them. Some memorials commemorate the actions and death of a speciﬁc
individual. While they focus on the sacriﬁce of the individual they implicitly
draw attention to the broader injustices of the regimes responsible. Examples
here include the monument in Prague to Jan Palach, the student who committed
suicide in January 1969 in protest against the Soviet repression of the
Prague Spring. A bronze cross is now embedded into the spot outside the
national museum where he died. Palach is also commemorated through
the naming of a square in Prague, several other memorials throughout
Europe, and even the naming (by a Czech astronomer) of an asteroid after
him. Other memorials are dedicated to groups of individuals who died in
speciﬁc sites. A key example is the memorials to those killed trying to cross the
Berlin Wall. The White Crosses memorial features seven crosses inscribed
with the names of thirteen people who were killed in this way. First erected by
a private group in 1971 in West Berlin, it has always been associated with
key symbolic parts of the urban landscape, initially being located near the
Reichstag and now beside the ofﬁces of the new uniﬁed German government.
Deaths associated with the Berlin Wall are also commemorated generically at
the Gedenksta¨tte Berliner Mauer (Berlin Wall Memorial).
Some memorials acknowledge deaths associated with speciﬁc events or more
broadly with speciﬁc aspects of totalitarian oppression. These include a series of
memorials to victims of the KGB in Tartu, Vilnius, Riga, and Potsdam, and
memorials to the Katyn massacre. In Moldova a stone cross at Ra˘zeni commemorates
the ten victims of the Soviet-led massacre of 1941, while in Chis¸ina˘u
there is a Memorial to the Victims of Stalinist Repression. A plaque in a square
240 Duncan Light and Craig Young
just off Rustavelli Avenue in Tbilisi, Georgia, commemorates those killed by
Soviet forces during protests in 1956 (protests partly motivated by the denouncement
of Stalin). In Gdan´sk (Poland) the Monument to the Fallen Shipyard
Workers of 1970 memorial was unusually erected during the communist period
itself (in 1980). Other memorial sites are aimed more broadly at remembering
the national experience of communism. For example, the Memorial to the
Victims of Communism in Prague, erected in 2002, seeks to shape the collective
memory of those who died under Czechoslovak communism. Supported
by the local authority and the Confederation of Political Prisoners (KPV) it
seeks to commemorate those who suffered politically and personally, detailing
the numbers shot or who died in prison, were arrested or exiled. A bronze
plaque reads: “The memorial to the victims of communism is dedicated to all
victims not only those who were jailed or executed but also those whose lives
were ruined by totalitarian despotism.” This memorial has attracted some
criticism for its gendered nature (no female ﬁgures are represented) and for
its aesthetic qualities, raising the issue of the public reception of such forms of
commemoration.
Finally, some monuments commemorate collective suffering under communism
and are intended to denounce the period as a whole. Such monuments
sometimes prove to be controversial. The Gloria Victis Memorial is
located on the outskirts of Budapest, Hungary, and seeks to honor “the
100 million victims of communism.”42
This memorial, the ﬁrst to commemorate
all the victims of communist repression, was erected in 2006 (the ﬁftieth
anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution). This memorial is more complex
than those commemorating individuals or speciﬁc groups, and incorporates
local, national, and international representations of the victimization of
citizens. It includes a world map of victims; memorials to the Ukrainian
minority in Hungary; tablets commemorating the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,
Jewish and Roma victims of communism, and the Katyn massacre; and the
text of Resolution 1481 (2006) of the Council of Europe on The Necessity of
International Condemnation of the Crimes Committed by Totalitarian
Communist Regimes. Clearly such a memorialization process becomes signiﬁcantly
more complex when trying to represent the suffering of all the
victims of communism, compared to the memory of an individual.
In addition to memorializing the abuses of communist regimes, various
monuments commemorate the events that brought about the overthrow of
communist regimes in 1989. Pearce suggests that some post-communist states
have encountered problems in trying to establish ofﬁcial commemorative practices
around the events of 1989 (such as which key dates or events should form
the basis of state-sponsored commemoration).43
In some cases, the ofﬁcial
Public Memory, Commemoration, and Transitional Justice 241
narrative of events is strongly contested. For example, in 2005 Romania erected a
Memorial of Rebirth in Bucharest to symbolize the struggle against the Nicolae
Ceausescu regime and to commemorate those who died in the violent “revolution”
of 1989. It is the ofﬁcial site of remembrance and the setting for state-led
performances and rituals which attempt to shape post-communist visions of
Romania’s past and future. However, the monument has been roundly
criticized on aesthetic and architectural grounds. Moreover, the site holds little
resonance for many Romanians who interpret the events of December 1989
more as a coup d’e´tat than a genuine popular revolution. Consequently, the
Memorial of Rebirth has failed to become the focus of popular allegiance and its
role in shaping public memory among Romanians is unclear.
This overview of the use of monuments, plaques, statues, and memorials is
not intended to be exhaustive, but instead seeks to demonstrate the range of
types of demoralization practices which attempt to place transitional justice
into the public arena. There is not space here to discuss in detail the design
and symbolism of each of these sites (although this is an important subject for
further research). Moreover, we know relatively little about the public reaction
to and reception of such commemorative landscapes. However, the examples
above give hints of how even what might appear to be a straightforward
process – condemning communism and commemorating its victims in public
space – can be contested and subject to debate. The example of the Memorial
of Rebirth illustrates that while political elites may seek to shape transitional
justice projects and the remembrance of the victims of communism, they may
not always succeed. Instead, projects to shape commemoration and public
memory can sometimes be contested and challenged by the populace. The
public reception of sites and practices of demoralization remains a neglected
aspect of transitional justice.
Museums and Tourism
To fully appreciate the role of museums in transitional justice projects it is
important to recognize that museums are not simply collections of objects put
on public display for the education and entertainment of visitors. Instead,
museums have always had a broader ideological purpose. They are a form of
public culture through which political elites tell a society about itself and
where it has come from. In particular, museums that are sponsored by the state
have an important role in “telling the national story.” They are institutions that
are intended to be visited by the citizenry and which have a clearly articulated
educational mission. They aim to communicate a particular understanding of
the past and thus play a signiﬁcant role in the making (and remaking) of public
242 Duncan Light and Craig Young
memory. More broadly, as a means of “staging” the nation44
museums contribute
to the formation of collective identities and their importance within
nation-building projects is widely acknowledged.45
As the earlier discussion
noted, communist regimes were fully aware of the educative and propagandist
role of museums in communicating their political agenda (and the associated
narrative of national history) to a broad public.
In the post-communist context, museums are important “vehicles of mem-
ory”46
within projects to memorialize the communist past. In particular,
museums can tell the story of the oppression, human rights abuses, and
suffering inﬂicted by communist regimes. This, obviously, is a story that has
not been formally told before (since it was not something that communist
regimes were likely to draw attention to). Moreover, museums can interpret
the communist period from the perspective of the people who lived through it.
This is a bottom-up narrative of history that focuses on everyday lives of
ordinary people, rather than the macro-political agenda of the communist
state and its leading party. Memorial museums also interpret communist rule
for future generations who did not experience it themselves in order to help
them understand the experiences that shaped their parents’ and grandparents’
generation. Museums can also be locations for ceremonies and rituals
intended to commemorate the victims of communist rule. Overall, memorial
museums that are established as part of transitional justice projects are institutions
intended to encourage remembrance, reﬂection, and civic engage-
ment.47
However, they are not just about the communist past: museums can
also be used to make an unambiguous statement about a state’s postcommunist
political identity and aspirations. In this context, they are sites
for “performances of democracy, not static representations of national iden-
tity.”48
The use of museums in this way is as ideological as anything seen
during the communist period but for entirely different ends.
What is important, but frequently overlooked, is the role of tourism in this
process. Memorial museums are intended to be visited (and as such they
function as visitor “attractions” even if their subject matter is far from attractive).
Some of the visitors to memorial museums will be children and young
people, studying the communist period as part of their educational curriculum.
However, most people will be visiting during their leisure time.
Furthermore, many of these people will be tourists (conventionally deﬁned
as people staying away from their home area for at least 24 hours) who can
be both domestic (citizens of a country traveling within that country) and
international (visitors from other countries). Although political scientists may
be inclined to dismiss tourism as trivial and with little to offer in understanding
politics, there is growing interest within the discipline of tourism studies in
Public Memory, Commemoration, and Transitional Justice 243
the ways that tourism can contribute to broader political projects and objec-
tives.49
For example, visiting historic buildings and monuments is a means of
“connecting” with the broader community of the nation.50
As such, tourism
can be identiﬁed as one form of banal nationalism.51
Tourism can also be used
to project political identities to an external audience. For example, recent
studies have explored how the Central and Eastern European countries have
used their state-sponsored tourism promotional materials to project a distinctly
post-communist political identity to the wider world.52
In the context of transitional justice projects, tourism at memorials and
museums can be used to communicate a message about the communist past
and the post-communist future. Moreover, many of the visitors to such places
will be heritage tourists who are interested in and receptive to learning during
their leisure time.53
For domestic tourists, the visit to a memorial museum
performs the same role as other monuments and memorials: it is a reminder of
the traumas of the recent past, a recognition of the victims of that past, a
warning to future generations, an afﬁrmation of the rejection of communism,
and a commitment to broader “European” values. However, international
tourists are an equally important (and sometimes numerically dominant)
audience (and for this reason most memorial museums make extensive use
of displays and interpretation in the English language and often in a range of
other European languages). Most international visitors will have no direct
experience of living under communist rule (and often little background
knowledge or understanding of communism). Therefore, museums are a
way of telling such visitors the story of “what we lived through” and “the events
that shaped us.” This is also a way of afﬁrming and legitimating a commitment
to the same political and economic agendas that have underpinned European
integration since World War II.
There are an increasing number of museums in the Central and Eastern
European countries that explicitly address the communist era. Most countries
have a national museum (usually a monumental building located in the
capital city) and these frequently include a gallery dedicated to the recent
past (although such galleries are fairly neutral historical accounts of the
communist period). There are also museums speciﬁcally dedicated to interpreting
the nature of life in a communist state. Some (such as the Museum of
Communism in Prague or the DDR Museum in Berlin) have been set up by
private entrepreneurs to cater to the interest of Western visitors, rather than
being intended to contribute to transitional justice projects. However, many
other museums have been established with the direct or indirect support of the
state authorities speciﬁcally to remember the abuses and victims of communist
rule. Perhaps the best examples are Estonia’s Museum of Occupations
244 Duncan Light and Craig Young
(which opened in 2003 in a purpose-built structure), the Museum of the
Occupation of Latvia (opened 1993), and Lithuania’s Museum of Genocide
Victims (established 1992 in the former headquarters of the Soviet Security
service). Each is located in the respective capital city. All are run by foundations
with state support. The motto of Latvia’s museum, “Remembering,
Commemorating, Reminding,”54
clearly indicates the place of the museum
within the broader project of achieving transitional justice. The displays of
these museums focus on the nature of totalitarian rule; its impact on politics,
economy, and domestic life; the nature of domestic repression and human
rights abuses; the activities of resistance groups; and the struggle for and
achievement of independence in the early 1990s. All receive large numbers
of foreign tourists and are included in the itineraries of visiting politicians and
dignitaries.
Other museums have been opened in buildings that were formerly prisons
or were associated in other ways with the repressive apparatus of communist
regimes. The conversion of such buildings into memorial museums is a form
of symbolic “re-inscription” that is intended to give them a new use for
memorializing the practices that they formerly hosted. The best example is
the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance in Sighet,
Romania. This opened in 1998 in a building that had formerly been used as a
prison and in which the majority of the pre-World War II Romanian political,
military, social, and academic elite had been imprisoned after the communist
regime took power. The museum was developed by the Civic Academy
Foundation (a non-governmental organization) with the ﬁnancial support of
the Council of Europe. It hosts summer schools for young Romanians and
publishes regular volumes of academic study about the communist era.55
Its
signiﬁcance as a site of public remembrance of the human rights abuses of the
communist regime was recognized by the Romanian government, which
declared it a site of national interest in 1997.
Another celebrated example is the former headquarters of the East German
security service (the Stasi) in Berlin, which opened as a memorial and research
centre in November 1990. The site was managed by a non-governmental civil
rights organization, although with the support of the German government.
The complex includes a museum with displays about the history and activities
of the Stasi. Elsewhere in Berlin, a former Stasi prison and interrogation centre
opened in 1994 as a museum and memorial (the Berlin-Hohenscho¨nhausen
Memorial). It is run by a private foundation with government support and
aims to encourage “a critical awareness of the methods and consequences of
political persecution and suppression in the communist dictatorship.”56
Another example is Budapest’s House of Terror, again established by a public
Public Memory, Commemoration, and Transitional Justice 245
foundation with government backing. It is housed in the former headquarters
of the Hungarian security police (A´ VH). This site is intended as a memorial
to those Hungarians who were interrogated and tortured by the communist
regime, an interpretation of life in communist Hungary, and an account of the
struggle against the communist regime which ended in 1989.57
Signiﬁcantly, it
is also one of Budapest’s most popular tourist attractions. Elsewhere throughout
post-communist Central and Eastern Europe there are numerous smaller
prisons and interrogation centers that have been turned into museums,
intended for both domestic and international visitors.
Memorial museums are not without their critics. Although tourism is one of
the principal means through which memorial sites are encountered, there has
long been a tendency to dismiss the practices of visitors to such places as trivial
or insigniﬁcant. At best, tourists who visit places associated with trauma or
tragedy are regarded as passive and unquestioning consumers incapable of
fully appreciating the signiﬁcance of the story presented to them and, at worst,
as shallow thrill-seekers motivated by “a morbid and senseless curiosity.”58
However, recent research in the disciplines of tourism studies and anthropology
has demonstrated that the behavior of visitors to memorial places is far
more purposeful and signiﬁcant than is often appreciated and that visitors can
undertake highly meaningful acts of remembrance and engagement with the
subject matter they encounter.59
Other authors accept that visits to memorial
museums may be associated with short-term learning, understanding, and
changed attitudes but they question the longer-term impacts of such visits in
bringing about deeper learning and a broader engagement with the issues of
transitional justice.60
Overall, the consumption of memorial museums by
their visitors is clearly a subject which merits much fuller research.
conclusion
Issues of memorialization and the reformulation of public memory are often
considered to be “soft” aspects of transitional justice, and consequently they
have not received as much academic attention as the “hard” politics of truth
commissions, lustration, or restitution. However, we argue that the issue of
shaping public memory through commemorative practices and landscapes is
an integral element of transitional justice projects which merits much fuller
investigation. In concluding, we highlight the importance of considering the
cultural politics of transitional justice and we identify the lessons of accepting
such a perspective.
One lesson that emerges from considering public memory and its expression
in the urban landscape is that transitional justice is not only played
246 Duncan Light and Craig Young
out in the spaces of courtrooms, legislatures, and administrations. It is also
worked out in public squares, memorial landscapes, and museums. We need
to recognize the vast range of sites and spaces in which multiple practices
of transitional justice works, through the initiatives of both elites and publics.
In this context, it is important to acknowledge that the past itself (and ways
that it is represented and memorialized) is ﬂuid, multifaceted, and contested.
While states are active players in the commemoration of the communist past
and in broader efforts to shape public memory, they do not have a monopoly on
the process. Instead, there are a range of other organizations and individuals
involved in such commemoration, and consequently there is a diverse range of
monuments, memorials, and museums dedicated to the abuses and victims of
communist regimes. These are sites where individual and personal negotiations
of transitional justice occur, alongside the ofﬁcial memorials, ceremonies, and
rituals sponsored by the state.
Another key issue is the reach of these spaces of transitional justice. While
processes such as lustration and even restitution symbolically show that postcommunist
states are acting to address past injustices, in societal terms their
impact may be relatively limited. Not everyone in society was able to reclaim
property or necessarily had a personal connection to key ﬁgures who were
placed on trial. Hence, such practices arguably may have a limited impact on
the everyday lives and practices of the majority of the population. However,
monuments and commemorative landscapes can reach far more people in the
course of their daily lives and to address their wish for justice in a much more
immediate and visible way. For most people, commemoration in the public
arena is a form of public recognition that is important in coming to terms with
past injustices.
Furthermore, there are important temporal aspects to transitional justice
that should be considered. The largest waves of restitution have been completed
and there is probably considerably less scope for lustration (since those
who could be tried either already have been, or are too old, or have died).
Memorialization in the public arena has a potentially much longer impact
with the possibility of shaping public memory across generations. Twenty-ﬁve
years have now elapsed since 1989 and perhaps the forms of transitional justice
projects must reﬂect this. Shaping public memory through commemorative
landscapes may well assume a greater importance as other processes decrease
in frequency and effectiveness. If the purpose of such memorialization is to
help society to move on (without forgetting) then public commemorative
landscapes perhaps hold the key. The construction of memorial landscapes
may follow on from other, more contentious, processes of transitional justice
(which, in turn, may shape the nature of commemorative practices). If such
Public Memory, Commemoration, and Transitional Justice 247
commemoration becomes a more long-term form of transitional justice which
persists in public space for decades to come, then it will require careful
consideration and management.
The ﬁnal lesson from our chapter is that there is a need to explore
public reception of landscapes and memorialization. This is the area in
which the literature is most weakly developed. As Barsalou and Baxter
suggest, “The impact of all transitional justice processes – memorialization
among them – remains under-researched.”61
They note the difﬁculty in
determining what memorialization actually contributes to reconciliation
and justice. Thus, we need to explore questions such as: How do people
relate to memorials and landscapes linked to transitional justice projects in
their everyday lives? Do memorials work effectively as vehicles of transitional
justice? Are they sites of remembrance or contestation, or do they simply
become a backdrop to the everyday use of space in the city? Are they even
regarded with apathy or simply ignored? Again, these issues have temporal
and generational dimensions, and will vary across multiple publics and
elites. For example, some authors are skeptical about the long-term impact
of museums on the public consciousness.62
Furthermore, as Clark suggests,
there is a danger that too much memorialization may inhibit societies’ ability
to move on.63
Moreover, different generations may have very different
responses to the ways in which commemorative landscapes function as
part of transitional justice, responses shaped by interactions between the
generations mediated through the family and representations of history. An
important issue for further research is the public reception of memorialization
aimed at righting the wrongs of the communist era in order to help
support the longer-term achievement of transitional justice and its expression
in public space.
notes
1. Janine N. Clark, “Reconciliation through Remembrance? War Memorials and the
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2. Brendon Hamber, Liz Sˇevcˇenko, and Ereshnee Naidu, “Utopian Dreams or
Practical Possibilities? The Challenges of Evaluating the Impact of
Memorialization in Societies in Transition,” International Journal of Transitional
Justice 4, no. 3 (2010): 397.
3. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism
in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992): 15.
4. Kenneth E. Foote and Maoz Azaryahu, “Towards a Geography of Memory:
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Political and Military Sociology 35, no. 1 (2007): 127.
248 Duncan Light and Craig Young
5. John R. Gillis, “Memory and Identity: The History of a Eelationship,” in
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6. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread
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250 Duncan Light and Craig Young
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Public Memory, Commemoration, and Transitional Justice 251