From the Editor

National historical narratives tend to be moralistic, heroic, and often mythical. Private memories are more likely to be ambiguous and open to the future. With the exception of the first article, which critiques the way in which historical insights are attributed to an acclaimed novel, contributions to this issue explore how historical memory is affected by tensions and transitions between the private and the public spheres as well as between the local and the national.

Authors of historical novels are often credited with being able to capture the lived experience of the past better than historians. Nathan Bracher questions this assumption via a critical discussion of the enthusiastic reception of Éric Vuillard’s L’Ordre du jour, which won the Prix Goncourt in 2017. The novel, which portrays events leading up to the Anschluss, has been applauded for taking us “behind the scenes of history.” However, as Bracher shows, this impression of realism is created by the author’s talent for cinematic representation and pointillist satirical portraits, whose appeal rests upon the popular suspicion of industrial magnates and a naïve understanding of historical processes.

Each year in August thousands of Turkish Cypriots make a pilgrimage to Erenköy, a tiny village in the south of their island, to remember and mourn those who died there in a battle against Greek Cypriots in 1964. Rebecca Bryant and Mete Hatay’s ethnographic study of the commemorative journeys to this isolated exclave questions the well-entrenched categorization of historical narratives into the hegemonic and counterhegemonic, nationalist and antinationalist. They show that rather than rejecting the official narrative in the Turkish Cypriot community, which emphasized their victimization at the hands of Greek Cypriots and salvation by the Turkish military, the pilgrimages add countercurrents that stress the active role played by Turkish Cypriot fighters and mourn their sacrifice. Thus the commemoration of the battle has shifted from a celebration of a military triumph to an assertion of the agency of the local community.

In the early 1980s two radical left-wing groups declared war against the Peruvian state: the Maoist Shining Path, and the Soviet-inspired Tupac Amaru. In the course of the following two decades a violent conflict, in which all parties committed brutal acts, tore Peru apart. Martha-Cecilia Dietrich shows how the stories of insurgency and state violence that she was told by political prisoners and relatives of victims of the armed conflict undermine the dominant narrative of guilty perpetrators and innocent victims that silences more ambiguous and multifaceted memories in order to conform to current legal and political exigencies.

Ann-Marie Foster examines the motives of war veterans and their families for donating personal objects from the First World War to the Durham Light Infantry Museum, a small regimental museum in the northeast of England. The letters that accompanied these donations reveal that especially first-generation donors were driven by the urge to find a safe repository for their memories to ensure their permanence, although in some instances their descendants later sought the return of some items, which they held to be an integral part of their family narrative. Foster argues that the transmission of memories from the private realm to the public domain of the museum places the museum at the intersection between communicative and cultural memory.

In 1976 the Parliament of the Socialist Republic of Croatia, at that time part of Yugoslavia, established a Committee for Memorializing Historical Events and Personalities, which subsequently undertook to register and categorize all memorials in Croatia connected to the national liberation struggle during World War II and to establish criteria for commemorating the Partisans and “victims of Fascist terror,” in particular by establishing large memorial parks. In their analysis of the social and political factors that influenced the policy of remembrance in the 1970s and 1980s, Daniel Vojak, Filip Tomić and Neven Kovačev show that the Yugoslav regime’s official narrative of the war, which used a discourse of brotherhood and unity to obscure the ethnic affiliation of the victims of the murderous policies of the Nazi-backed Independent State of Croatia (Serbs, Jews and Roma), was gradually undermined in the course of...