From the Editor

As the incoming Senior Editor of History & Memory, it is my pleasure to introduce the five diverse and engaging articles that compose this issue. With their analysis of how race and racism influence what is remembered (and also forgotten) in American society, their discussion of the underlying, perhaps unavoidable, tension between personal and collective memories in late and post-Soviet societies as well as in Germany and in Israel, and an examination of how battle sites are discussed in Japanese travelogues, the contributions to this issue probe the underlying tension between history and memory from a variety of methodological perspectives in a range of geographic and historical settings.

The issue begins with an article by Larry Durst on the debates regarding the memory of Paul Robeson at his alma mater, Rutgers. Focusing on the ostensible contradiction between Robeson’s achievements as, among others, Rutgers’ first football All-American and his trenchant critique of American society and longtime association with communism, Durst examines how student leaders, faculty members and university officials clashed over the proper ways to commemorate Robeson’s legacy on campus. Ultimately, Durst’s analysis is not only about Robeson, per se, but also about “the complex forces that fought over his legacy for their own personal, political and institutional purposes over half a century ago” (29).

Patrick Hagopian probes similar themes regarding the intersection between race and memory in American society in his article on the deliberations and decisions behind the design of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, DC. Hagopian argues that Dr. King’s image was transformed over the past half century from a potential threat to American society in the mid-1960s to a universal symbol of social improvement and equality. Reflecting this transformation, the memorial that was ultimately created was “an oddly ‘color-blind’ commemoration of King” that underscores the post-racial, “universalist fantasies of the memorial’s planners” (63 and 62). As a result, Hagopian charges that: “It is not clear what the public learns about the person to whom the memorial is dedicated, nor about the causes to which he dedicated his life” (64).

Helga Lenart-Cheng takes the reader from Cold War America to late and post-Soviet societies with an analysis of the work of Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mixing oral history and journalistic approaches, Alexievich’s corpus allows Lenart-Cheng to explore “the complex relationship between individual and collective remembering in totalitarian and post-totalitarian regimes” (87). Based on Alexievich’s writings, Lenart-Cheng maintains that “collective remembering ‘happens’ in a polyphonic manner, distributed between voices and texts, in a contested process,” in which people ultimately “witness alongside each other, as co-witnesses” (101).

Lilach Naishtat-Bornstein’s article on Holocaust survivor Karla Raveh also revolves around the tension between personal and collective memories. Raveh, who was born in the German town of Lemgo and moved to Israel after the war, became a living vessel of memory for many in Lemgo after her memoirs were published and the Lemgo municipality converted her childhood home into a museum that included a separate apartment where Raveh would spend her summers. Raveh’s activities in Germany are contrasted to her obscurity in Israel. According to Naishtat-Bornstein, the gap between Raveh’s role as a public witness in Germany and her anonymity in Israel underscores many of the differences between the memory of the Holocaust in the two countries.

This issue concludes with Ryota Nishino’s analysis of travelogues written by Japanese visitors to battle sites of the Pacific War. Probing the intersection between tourism, war and memory, Nishino argues that many of these works exhibit “an ethnocentric identification with …the grief of the [Japanese] soldiers” and, as a result, often “overlook the suffering of the islanders and the Allied troops during the war … thus performing an imaginary reconquest of the foreign destination” (168). Turning to larger issues regarding the connection between tourism and memory, Nishino concludes that “the travelogues suggest that travel performs the paradoxical role of confirming existing biases” (168).