Postdoctoral Research Project - Dr. Meike Wulf

The Iconography of Memories of Resistance in Contemporary Estonia and Slovenia

This research aims to develop a comparative perspective on the legacy of war and post-war memories in post-Soviet Estonia and post-socialist Slovenia. It concentrates on urban sites of contested memory, such as monuments, war memorials, museums, other significant buildings such as Churches and prisons, cemeteries, urban practices of public commemorations, as well as on the artistic representation on screen, stage, and (more ephemeral) in graffiti. Apart from an analysis of these actual urban sites of memory in Estonia and Slovenia, the research is based on qualitative interviews with architects, city planers, politicians, local historians, filmmakers and artists, who are involved in the changing urban landscape and with representations of the recent past therein. Hereby the research is guided by three main objectives: Firstly, to establish the differences in the historical cultures of a post-socialist and post-Soviet country at the example of Slovenia and Estonia. Secondly, to shed light on the dynamic interrelation between city and identity and to explore how specific urban experiences sustain a sense of identity through times of foreign rule and periods of socio-political rupture (granted cities as sites of memory can sustain identity, in as much as changes in the spatial formation and of urban practices, the displacement of these lieux de mémoire, potentially alter group identities).

Thirdly, to illustrate whose version of the past is represented and pronounced in the city architecture and whose sites of memory were displaced or erased after 1945 (1991 respectively); that is, to spot ways in which the Other is excluded and marginalised from the urban landscape in processes of historical revisionism, political hegemonistaion, ethnic homogenisation, and practices of a ‘nationalising state’. As most recently illustrated by the social riots surrounding the removal of the Soviet era Bronze Solder in Tallinn in April 2007, urban sites of memory can become contested terrain for different societal groups (e.g. veteran organisations). Quintessentially, these competing social groups use the public space to rally for the official recognition of their specific interpretation of the past and different identity narratives deriving from them. The research identifies foundational narratives of collective suffering and collective resistance (i.e. the partisan myth) in contemporary Estonia and Slovenia and explores how these are reflected in the cityscapes.

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