Overview

"Memories of Mass Repression: Narrating Life Stories in the Aftermath of Atrocity presents the results of researchers working with the voices of witnesses. Its stories include the witnesses, victims and survivors; they also reflect the subjective experience of the study of such narratives. The work contributes to the development of the field of oral history, where the creation of the narrative is considered an act of interaction between the text of the narrator and the listener. The contributors are particularly interested in ways in which memory is created and molded. The interactions of different, even conflicting, memories of other individuals and society as a whole are considered.In writing the history of genocide, """"emotional"""" memory and """"objective"""" research are interwoven and inseparable. It is as much the historian's task to decipher witness accounts, as it is to interpret traditional written sources. These sometimes antagonistic narratives of memory fashioned and mobilized within public and private arenas, together with the ensuing conflicts, paradoxes, and contradictions that they unleash, are all part of efforts to come to terms with what happened. Mining memory is the only way in which we can hope to arrive at a truer, and less biased, historical account of events.Memory is at some level selective. Most believers in political movements that turned out to be the opposite of what they promised confront such emotions. When given a proper forum, stories that are in opposition to dominant memories, or in conflict with our own memories, can effectively battle collective forgetting. This volume offers the reader a subjective vision of history without falsifying the objective reality of human survival."

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9781412808538

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Reviews

-[An] essay collection assessing memories of survivors of 20th-century genocides, colonial atrocities, and political repressions as scholarly sources for historical, sociological, and psychological studies of such events. Well-known experts contribute the essays; case studies treat the Bosnian War, Rwanda, the Holocaust (both concentration camp inmates and non-Jewish forced labor), South Africa, French violence in Algeria, a Soviet gulag, and Turkey. All the essays are up to date and show strong awareness of current scholarly concerns in the subfields of survivor testimonies and of historiographical debates over how to write the history of genocides... Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students/faculty.- --S. R. Boettcher, Choice

All the essays are up to date and show strong awareness of current scholarly concerns in the subfields of survivor testimonies and of historiographical debates over how to write the history of genocides. Particularly strong contributions are made by Norman Naimark and Selma Leydesdorff (each writing on Srebrenica), Jacob R. Boersema (on a local instance of Rwandan genocide), and Andreas Pet (on survivors of a Holocaust-era razzia in Budapest). Recommended. S.R. Boettcher, Choice

Author Information

Nanci Adler is senior researcher at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, an organization of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the University of Amsterdam. Selma Leydesdorff is professor of oral history and culture at the University of Amsterdam and co-editor of the Memory and Narrative Series for Transaction Publishers. Mary Chamberlain is professor of modern social history at Oxford Brookes University and former co-editor of the Memory and Narrative Series for Transaction Publishers. Leyla Neyzi, an anthropologist and oral historian, is associate professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabanci University, Istanbul.

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