Muiston ja muistamisen politiikka

Authors

• Heino Nyyssönen

Abstract

Memory and commemoration as part of collective identity, and difficulties dealing with the past are the focus of this article. The politics of memory as manifest in anniversaries, national holidays, and memorials has to do with the notion of the past in general and with how the past is represented and maintained in the present. The idea of the past as well as the notion of the temporalisation of politics is connected to German Geschichtskultur, Geschichtspolitik and Erinnerungspolitik. Not only memory and forgetting were separated, but also remembrance, i.e. bringing to mind and causing to forget, which could be used to preserve as well as to undo identities. Most of the examples are taken from Hungarian discussions in the 1990s.