Politics and Cultures of Liberation pdf download

Politics and Cultures of Liberation – Media, Memory, and Projections of Democracy

Edited by – Hans Bak, Frank Mehring and Mathilde Roza Frank

POLITICS AND CULTURES OF LIBERATION – MEDIA, MEMORY, AND PROJECTIONS OF DEMOCRACY

At the opening of the exhibition Routes of Liberation:  European Legacies of the Second World War, in Brussels on 13 February 2013, Martin Schulz, then President of the European Parliament, identified the development of multiple- perspectives on war, liberation, and remembrance as a desirable or even necessary European aspiration.

Referring to Albert Camus’ conviction that human beings may not be “entirely guilty” when looking at past developments in history, he agreed with the French philosopher and author that they are not “wholly innocent” either, since it is they who shape future developments of history. Schulz went on to remind his audience that “man would be wholly guilty if he started to forget.”2

The issue raised by Schulz, the importance of remembering, is an urgent and complicated one: how can we counterbalance- dimensional processes and acts of repression, exclusion, erasure, forgetting, and misinformation that often characterize(d) remembrances of the processes of war and liberation in favour of understanding the multidirectional, competing, and often conflicting dimensions of remembering war and liberation?

Looking back on the course of the 20th century, including the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union, the themes of war and liberation play a central role in the collective memory of many Europeans, shaping both national and supranational perspectives on how the ideal of democracy should be anchored, preserved, and projected.

 At the same time, the term liberation is loaded with connotations vastly different across the various nations involved, depending on political and cultural contexts.3 Since liberation embodies not