“Speaking through monuments”: memorial culture of war in the context of a narrative turn

Annotation

The article addresses the practices of commerce in architecture and sculpture of the 20th-21st centuries. The subject of the study is famous memorials dedicated to the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War. The historical tragedy of the war is presented through the analysis of memorial culture, revealing different types of “talking” about the war. The application of methodological principles of post-metaphysical philosophy of history, the principles of narrative and spatial “turn” makes it possible to explicate the multiplicity and complexity of interpretations of the traumatic past. The monument is considered as a complex narrative that constructs history through various forms of visualization of cultural meanings. Four famous monuments (The Khatyn Memorial, The Shoes on the Danube Bank, The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, The Rzhev Memorial to the Soviet Soldier) are presented as forms of narratives that in their own way interpret the tragedy of the World War. The work substantiates the idea that the monument “materializes” the narrative nature of the past, productively combining the objectivity of history (memorials are dedicated to specific historical events) and the position of the narrator in collective memory (representing different “voices”). In deciphering the narrative nature of specific monuments, an “archetypal layer” of meanings is revealed, embedding the culture and politics of memory of the 20th-21st centuries (Modern societies) into universal practices of sacralization of the exploits and victims of war.

Keywords

• history
• memory
• narrative turn
• spatial turn
• historical narrative
• monument
• war
• mythologization
• sacralization
• construction of meanings
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