Reader zum Workshop „Brustzeichen ‚Ost`. Die Erinnerungen

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1
The
New
School
Psychology
Bulletin
2009,
Vol.
6,
No.
2
Copyright
2009
by
The
New
School
for
Social
Research
Print
ISSN:
1931‐793X;
Online
ISSN:
1931‐7948
Stalinism,
Memory
and
Commemoration:
Russia’s
dealing
with
the
past
Dr.
Christian
Volk
Humboldt
University,
Berlin
In
the
last
twenty‐five
years
there
has
been
a
significant
change
in
the
way
political
communities
deal
with
their
past.
A
“national”
policy
of
remembrance,
which
highlights
the
heroic
deeds
of
its
members,
commemorates
its
own
victims
and
crimes
inflicted
by
other
entities,
and
forgets
about
crimes
commit‐
ted
in
the
name
of
one’s
own
community
seems
to
be
replaced
by
a
“post‐national”
policy
of
remebrance.
In
several
countries
dealing
with
the
dark
sides
of
one’s
history
has
become
a
significant
topos
within
a
policy
of
remembrance
and
cultural
commemoration.
In
contrast,
a
country
like
Russia
refuses
to
step
into
this
process
of
establishing
a
new
post‐national
régime
d’historicité
and
refers
to
history
only
in
or‐
der
to
strengthen
its
national
identity:
While
remembering
its
effort
in
defeating
Germany
in
the
“Great
Fatherland
War,”
Russian
society
forgets
about
the
trauma
of
the
Gulag
and
crimes
committed
in
its
name
in
other
former
states
of
the
Soviet
Union.
My
paper
argues
that
the
specific
setting
of
Russia’s
official
policy
of
remembrance
is
due
to
the
notion
of
a
society
of
heroes
once
forcibly
institutionalized
as
the
constitutive
historiographical
principle
by
Stalin’s
regime.
Regarding
to
the
discourse
in
the
field
of
memory
such
a
forced
interconnection
between
historiography
and
memory
could
be
characterized
as
»occupied
memory«.
Although
Russia’s
official
policy
of
remembrance
passed
through
several
quite
dif‐
ferent
phases,
nowadays,
however,
a
critical
approach
to
Russia’s
past
has
been
replaced
by
a
“patriotic
consensus”
that
expresses
a
new
–
or
better
–
an
old
Russian
concept
of
identity.
I.
Introduction
There
is
a
deep
connection
between
WWII,
the
Great
Fatherland
War,
as
the
Russians
refer
to
it,
and
the
Gulag
Archipelago
in
the
memory
of
Russia.1
Solzhenitsyn
seems
to
have
this
connec‐
tion
in
mind
when
he
refers
to
a
Russian
saying
in
the
prolog
of
his
book
on
the
“GULag
Archipel‐
ago.”
The
first
part
of
this
Russian
say‐ing
says:
“No
don't!
Don't
dig
up
the
past!
Dwell
on
the
past
and
you'll
lose
an
eye”
(Solzhenitsyn,
1985,
pp.
xvi).
In
what
follows
I
will
try
to
explain
why
the
“way
of
remembering”
WWII
and
misremember‐
ing
the
mass
crimes
and
victims
of
the
Gulag
are
directly
connected
with
one
another.
What
is
meant
by
“way
of
remembering?”
The
experences
of
WWII
for
Russia
are,
as
Maria
Ferretti
puts
it,
“tragic
ambivalent”
(Ferretti,
2005,
pp.
47).
It
is
striking
that
the
official
remembrance
of
WWII
is
possible
only
in
the
framework
of
a
heroic
story.
Gulag
is
both,
an
acronym
for
Glavnoje
Upravlenije
Ispravitelno­trudovych
Lagerej
i
kolonij
which
means
the
„Chief
Administration
of
Corrective
Labor
Camps
and
Colonies“
and
a
synonym
for
the
Soviet
system
of
repression
existing
of
forced
labor
camps,
penal
camps,
prisons
etc.
Although
camps
had
existed
in
the
tsar
empire
and
under
Lenin’s
regime
as
well,
the
quality
of
those
camps
changed
in
1929
when
Stalin
came
to
power.
The
number
of
people
who
died
in
the
Gulag
differ
tremen‐
dously
from
source
to
source.
However,
it
is
estimated
today
that
around
20
Million
people
were
killed
or
died
in
these
camps
between
1929
and
1953
(Stalin’s
death).
1
Neither
is
there
space
for
events
like
Katyn,2
the
fear
of
death
of
the
soldiers,
Stalin’s
inhuman
mil‐
itary
commands,
nor
is
there
a
chance
to
inter‐
pret
the
war
itself
in
another
framework.
The
situation
of
the
frontoviki
(guerillas),
for
instance,
could
also
be
interpreted
in
terms
of
free
self‐
determination
rather
than
unquestioned
mil‐
itary
obedience
and
trust
in
the
unlimited
capa‐
bility
of
the
military
leader.
Anyhow,
that’s
not
the
case
in
Russia.
I
will
argue
that
the
way
of
dealing
with
WWII
on
the
one
hand
and
the
Gulag
on
the
other
can
be
explained
by
the
role
and
function
they
are
playing
within
the
context
of
Russian
cultural
memory.
In
order
to
explicate
this
role
and
function,
I
will
refer
to
the
theoretical
debates
on
memory
and
history,
and
elaborate
on
the
structural
diff‐
erence
between
a
democratic
culture
of
comm.‐
emoration
and
a
totalitarian
one.
What
is
char‐
acteristic
for
a
totalitarian
culture
of
commemo‐
ration
is
a
so‐called
“occupied
memory”
(Arnold,
1998,
pp.
18).
Afterwards
I
will
elucidate
that
the
specific
setting
of
Russia’s
official
policy
of
reme‐
mbrance
is
due
to
the
notion
of
a
society
of
her‐
oes
once
forcibly
institutionalized
as
the
consti‐
tutive
historiographical
principle
by
Stalin’s
regi‐
me.
Although
Russia’s
official
policy
of
remem‐
Katyn
is
a
synonym
for
the
killing
of
thousands
of
Polish
military
officers,
Polish
policemen,
intellectuals
and
civilian
prisoners
by
the
Soviet
secret
police
(NKVD)
in
the
early
1940s
in
a
forest
close
to
the
Russian
city
Katyn.
In
1990,
Mikhail
Gorbachev
for
the
first
time
formally
expressed
profound
regret
and
admitted
Soviet
secret
police
responsibility
2
2
51
STALINISM,
MEMORY,
AND
COMMEMORATION
brance
passed
through
several
quite
different
phases,
however,
there
is
neither
room
for
mou‐
rning,
contemplation,
nor
reflection
for
the
victi‐
ms
of
the
regime.
II.
Memory,
historiographical
iterations
and
the
totalitarian
state
Remembrance,
past
or
memory
are
anything
but
clear
and
easy
concepts;
they
are
ambivalent
and
difficult
to
deal
with.
Properly
speaking,
neither
memory
nor
“the
past”
exist
per
se.
Mem‐
ory,
remembrance,
or
“the
past”
are
results
of
an
ongoing,
conscious,
or
unconscious
proc‐ess
of
narrative
construction
which
is
initiated,
guided
or
perhaps
even
controlled
by
various
actors
and
multipliers.
Moreover,
there
are
at
least
as
many
different
designs
of
memory
or
remembrance
as
individuals
living
in
one
society.
Nevertheless,
one
could
speak
of
something
like
“collective
me‐
mory”
in
order
to
express
similar
or
even
cong‐
ruent
approaches
towards
the
past
which
could
be
identified
within
a
society.
The
philosophical
discussion
about
this
so‐
cial
dimension
of
memory
starts
with
Nietzsche.
In
the
On
the
Genealogy
of
Morals
Nietzsche
maintained
that
it
is
the
process
of
memory‐for‐
mation
that
enables
an
individual
to
overcome
the
pure
subjectivity
of
his
or
her
own
interests
and
to
enter
into
social
commitments
(Nietzsche,
1972a).
More
than
fifty
years
later,
in
his
studies
on
the
social
dimension
of
memory,
Maurice
Hal‐
bwachs
revealed
how
individual
memory
is
cons‐
tituted
through
communication
with
other
mem‐
bers
of
society
and
by
belonging
to
a
certain
group,
such
as
family
or
neighborhood.
It
was
Halbwachs
who
introduced
the
concept
of
collec‐
tive
memory
and
defined
it
as
a
shared
account
of
the
past
by
a
group
of
people
(Halbwachs
1992).
However,
for
Halbwachs,
the
collective
memory
of
a
certain
group
was
bound
in
space
and
time.
By
releasing
memory
from
these
ties
by
means
of
symbols
and
cultural
molding,
Pierre
Nora
enha‐
nced
the
theory
of
memory.
The
idea
of
a
nation
as
an
abstract
community
defining
its
self‐perce‐
ption
by
transcending
time
and
space
with
symb‐
ols
and
cultural
codes
is
rooted
at
the
core
of
No‐
ra’s
thinking
on
memory
(Nora,
1990).
In
his
st‐
udies
on
“cultural
memory,”
Jan
Assmann
specif‐
ies
the
idea
of
memory
and
replaces
the
mystic
term
“collective
memory”
by
a
more
precise
con‐
cept:
for
Assmann
there
are
two
different
types
of
memory
within
a
community
–
“communica‐
tive”
and
“cultural
memory.”
While
“communica‐
tive
memory”
is
fairly
un‐organized,
unstructur‐
ed
and
formed
by
communication
of
every
day
life
situations,
cultural
memory
is
distant
from
every
day
life
and
is
constituted
by
cultural
mol‐
ding
–
such
as
texts,
rites,
or
memorials,
as
well
as
institutionalized
communication
such
as
recit‐
ation,
solemnization,
or
contemplation.
The
self‐
perception
of
a
nation,
for
Assmann,
derives
from
the
content
of
its
cultural
memory
(Assmann,
1988;
Assmann,
1995).
However,
Pierre
Nora
maintains
that
remem‐
brance
also
works
by
projecting,
by
tuning
out,
by
repressing
one
aspect
for
the
sake
of
another.
In
short:
the
way
“cultural
memory”
works
could
be
far
from
being
“objective,”
from
serving
jus‐
tice.
Aleida
Assmann
refers
to
this
problem
by
distinguishing
the
concept
of
memory
into
the
special
tasks
memory
could
per‐form:
On
the
one
hand,
Aleida
Assmann
mentions
the
“functional
memory”
or
“inhabited
memory”
(Assmann
&
Aleida,
1995).
This
kind
of
memory
is
linked
to
a
special
group
or
institution
and
is
concerned
with
the
creation
of
meaning
as
well
as
with
gui‐
ding
the
process
of
identity‐formation
for
a
cer‐
tain
community.
“Functional
memory”
is
quite
selective
in
choosing
aspects
of
the
past
as
worth
remembering:
Only
those
aspects
of
history
are
taken
into
account,
which
are
crucial
for
the
creation
of
meaning.
“Functional
memory”
igno‐
res
all
those
events
which
are
less
or
not
impor‐
tant
or
sometimes
even
dangerous
for
the
self‐
under‐standing
of
a
community.
The
job
of
the
“functional
memory”
is
to
convey
values,
which
can
help
to
design
a
community,
to
sustain
ident‐
ity,
and
to
provide
norms
for
acting.
On
the
other
hand
Aleida
Assmann
introduces
the
term
“unin‐
habited
memory”
or
“storage
memory.”
“Storage
memory”
radically
separates
between
past,
pres‐
ent,
and
future
and
ignores
all
norms
and
values.
Aleida
Assmann
speaks
of
this
kind
of
memory
as
a
“stuffed
and
dusty
storeroom,“
as
a
“memory
of
memories,”
(Assmann
&
Aleida,
1995)
or
uses
the
metaphor
of
a
“historical
archive.”
This
historical
archive
stores
information
for
the
use
of
specialists.
An
archive
is
not
a
mu‐
seum;
it
is
not
designed
for
public
access
and
popular
presentations.
It
differs
from
what
is
publicly
exposed
in
the
same
way
that
great
museum
shows
differ
from
array
of
objects
in
the
stuffed
storerooms
in
the
subterranean
tracts
of
museums.
There
is,
of
course,
some
order
and
arrangement
[...]
too,
but
it
is
one
that
ensures
only
the
retrieval
of
information,
not
an
intellec‐
tually
or
emotionally
effective
display.
The
arch‐
ive,
in
other
words,
is
not
a
form
of
presentation
3
VOLK
but
of
preservation;
it
collects
and
stores
infor‐
mation,
it
does
not
arrange,
exhibit,
process,
or
interpret
it.”
(Assmann
&
Aleida,
2006,
pp.
270)
Among
artists,
curators
of
museums,
etc.
it
is
the
task
of
the
historians
to
transform
these
different
kinds
of
information
into
knowledge;
to
dig
up
long­forgotten
sources,
to
make
visible
and
create
effective
frames
of
attention
for
stuff
that
had
long
remained
beyond
the
scope
of
interest.
In
other
words,
the
storage
memory
where
hist­
orians
rely
on
is
“pure
potential,
a
possible
source
of
information,
nothing
more.”
By
drawing
a
distinction
between
storing
and
the
creation
of
meaning,
historiography
for
Assmann
becomes
one
form
of
cultural
memory.
Moreover,
by
doing
so,
Assmann
overcomes
the
separation
of
history
and
memory
–
as
it
adheres
in
the
work
of
Niet­
zsche,
Halbwachs,
and
Nora.
The
relation
betwe­
en
history
and
memory
is
not
interpreted
as
a
du­
alistic
opposition
anymore
but
rather
as
a
persp­
ective
relation.
What
should
be
meant
by
per­
spective
relation?
By
linking
“functional
memory”
with
“stor‐
age
memory,”
the
creation
of
meaning
and
the
formation
of
identity
is
not
completely
dissolved
from
a
rational
discourse.
To
be
more
precise:
on
the
one
hand
there
is
open
discourse
which
is
first
and
foremost
concerned
with
the
quest‐
ion
of
historical
“truth”
or
a
more
adequate
pre‐
sentation
and
perception
of
historical
events.
On
the
other
hand,
linking
the
creation
of
mea‐ning
and
formation
of
identity
with
historiography
provides
the
justified
possibility
that
the
“cul‐
tural
memory”
of
a
community
is
able
to
change.
To
sum
up:
In
communities,
for
instance,
in
modern
democracies,
with
a
critical
historiog‐
raphy
–
with
an
open
and
controversial
discour‐
se
on
history
(or
at
least
the
possibility
to
it),
wi‐
th
a
process
one
could
describe
according
to
Se‐
yla
Benhabib
as
“historiographical
iterations”3
where
“principles
and
norms
are
reappropri‐
ated
and
reiterated”
(Benhabib,
2004,
pp.
113)
by
all
participants
in
the
discourse
on
history
and
the
past
–
mythologisation
of
the
past
could
be
prevented.
In
such
communities
the
process
of
identity‐formation
and
self‐perception
can
only
be
proceed
on
the
ground
of
discussion
wi‐
th
and
in
challenge
by
the
discourse,
which
is
ta‐
3
At
this
point
I
rely
on
Seyla
Benhabibs
concept
of
“democratic
iteration”
and
I
refer
this
concept
to
the
discourse
on
history
and
memory
(Benhabib,
2004).
king
place
in
historiography
and
all
historical
sc‐
iences
respectively.
Since
in
the
Soviet
Union
historiography
was
guided
by
anything
but
an
open
discourse,
Sabine
Arnold,
following
Aleida
Assmann,
chara‐
cterizes
the
memory
in
totalitarian
states
as
an
“occupied
memory”
(Arnold,
1998,
pp.
18).
The
concept
of
“occupied
memory”
refers
to
the
rep‐
ressive
and
manipulating
control
of
the
pro‐cess
of
memory‐formation
by
state
authorities.
In
totalitarian
states
the
purpose
of
history
is
to
embed
the
present
community
in
a
long,
mighty,
honorable
and
glorious
tradition,
which
should
bind
the
members
of
the
community
to
this
tra‐
dition.
Historical
events
which
support
this
pur‐
pose
are
conserved
by
cultural
molding
and
a
policy
of
remembrance;
while
those
events
dist‐
urbing
the
designated
image
of
memory
of
the
totalitarian
state
are
removed
and
destructed
by
revised
history.
In
Origins
of
Totalitarianism,
Hannah
Arendt
gives
an
illuminating
example
for
the
revised
history
of
totalitarian
states
wh‐
en
she
points
to
the
power
it
takes
to
rewrite
the
history
of
the
Russian
Revolution
in
such
a
way
that
in
the
end
“no
man
by
the
name
of
Tro‐
tsky
was
ever
commander‐in‐chief
of
the
Red
Army”
(Arendt,
1994,
pp.
356).
By
means
of
a
manipulative
approach
tow‐
ards
history
every
member
of
the
community
is
forced
to
follow
a
certain
set
of
norms
of
action;
norms
which
determine
each
member’s
place
in
the
community.
The
difference
between
storage
and
revision
on
the
one
hand
and
identity‐form‐
ation
and
creation
of
meaning
is
dissolved
in
case
of
an
occupied
memory.
The
access
to
arc‐
hives
is
restricted
or
prohibited.
Under
these
circumstances
historiography
is
just
producing
myths
for
the
sake
of
a
certain
not‐ion
of
iden‐
tity
instead
of
undermining
them.
In
the
Soviet
Union,
under
Stalin’s
com‐
mand,
historiography
became
a
means
to
establ‐
ish
a
certain
notion
of
identity
upon
the
com‐
munity.
Due
to
the
amalgamation
of
historiogr‐
aphy
and
memory
in
the
totalitarian
Soviet
Union,
it
is
possible
by
unfolding
those
princples
on
which
identity
should
be
created
and
which
historiography
has
to
obey,
to
disclose
the
logic
of
the
culture
of
commemoration.
III.
Determining
Historiography
A
close
look
at
Stalinist
historiography
re‐
veals
the
above‐mentioned
occupation
of
mem‐
ory.
The
fundamental
rearrangement
of
the
way
of
teaching
history
at
school
as
well
as
the
reopen‐
52
4
53
STALINISM,
MEMORY,
AND
COMMEMORATION
ing
of
the
departments
of
history
relies
on
a
resolution
of
the
Communist
Party
of
the
Soviet
Union
(CPSU)
from
15
March
1934.
Due
to
this
resolution
the
idea
of
Marxism‐Leninism
was
more
or
less
replaced
by
a
patriotic
reorien‐
tation:
the
concept
of
“soviet
patriotism”
was
established
as
an
ideological
principle
of
histo‐
riography,
therefore,
it
became
the
duty
of
every
historian
and
each
person
who
deals
with
matters
of
historical
interests
to
interpret
the
past
in
such
a
way
that
the
patriotic
feelings
and
emotions
were
encouraged,
that
it
showed
the
heroic
tradition
every
member
of
the
present
community
is
embedded
and
that
positive
valu‐
es
and
norms
could
be
derived
from
former
historical
events.
If
at
all,
the
scientific
standard
was
of
secondary
importance
(Geyer,
1985).
Due
to
this
reform
the
so‐called
“Father‐
lands
history”
covers
the
history
of
all
nations
and
people
who
have
ever
lived
on
the
territory
of
the
Soviet
Union
and
traces
back
to
the
oldest
times.
However,
since
Russia
and
its
history
is
abrogated
in
the
history
of
the
Soviet
Union,
there
is
no
history
of
Russia
within
the
scope
of
the
“Fatherland
history”
at
all
–
as
a
history
of
the
Ukraine,
for
example,
is.
To
sum
up,
the
“Fatherlands
history”
or
the
history
of
the
Soviet
Union
meant
nothing
else
than
historiography
in
continuity
with
the
Russian
empire.
The
his‐
tory
of
all
non‐Russian
peoples
and
communi‐
ties
of
the
Soviet
Union
appears
as
a
mere
att‐
achment
to
the
“great
tradition”
of
Russia.
However,
placing
the
Soviet
Union
in
the
tradition
of
the
Russian
empire
helps
to
esta‐
blish
one
ethnic
paradigm
at
the
ground
of
hist‐
oriography:
narodnost.
The
idea
of
narodnost,
which
means
a
set
of
values
and
norms
charac‐
terizing
the
ethnic‐national
customs
and
ethnic‐
national
culture
of
Russia
could
be
regarded
as
the
heart
of
Russian
nationalism.
Narodnost,
as
Renner
puts
it,
is
the
summation
of
all
non‐
governmental
attributes
of
the
nation.
In
the
19th
century
the
so‐called
“Slavophiles“
opposed
narodnost
to
the
western
ideal
of
individualism
on
the
one
hand
and
to
the
notion
of
patriotism
given
by
tsar
empire
on
the
other.
One
out
of
many
important
aspects
of
the
guiding
principle
of
society
is
the
concept
sobornost.
Sobornost
expresses
a
strong
feeling
of
“togetherness”
or
“integrality.”
The
term
was
coined
by
Slavophiles
to
underline
the
need
for
cooperation
between
people
at
the
expense
of
the
western
idea
of
individualism.
Supplmented
by
the
principle
of
celostnost,
which
stands
for
the
idea
of
thinking
and
feeling
in
holistic
terms,
both
aspects
of
narodnost
express
the
culture
of
consent
of
a
rural‐patriarchic
Russia.
Cultural
autonomy
(samobytnost)
and
the
need
to
bec‐ome
a
great
power
(dseriawa)
are
further
cruci‐al
aspects
of
narodnost
(Renner,
2000).
Both
ref‐er
to
the
myth
of
“Moscow
as
the
3rd
Rome”
whi‐ch
deals
with
the
legitimacy
for
this
claim
to
be
or
to
become
a
super
power.
Obedience
to
auth‐
orities
(samoderzavie)
is
another
aspect
of
naro­
dnost.
Without
a
strong
government
or
political
leader,
as
Simon
put
it,
the
Russian
states
prov‐
ed
to
be
unable
to
govern
Russian
society
(Sim‐
on,
1995).
With
all
means
of
cultural
molding
(histori‐
ography,
history
lessons,
monuments
etc.),
Stalin’s
regime
established
narodnost
as
the
guiding
principle
of
historiography
–
a
principle
which
reflects
the
historical
reality
of
the
social
organization
of
Russia
on
the
one
hand
and
he‐
lps
to
structure
the
cultural
memory
of
the
cou‐
ntry
for
decades
on
the
other.
Since
historiogra‐
phy
was
degenerated
to
a
means
of
identity
‐
formation
and
creation
of
meaning
examining
the
idea
of
narodnost
gives
an
adequate
illustra‐
tion
of
the
soviet
culture
of
commemoration:
state‐worshipping,
anti‐individualism,
obedence
to
authorities,
and
nationalism.
Although
Stal‐
in’s
regime
was
able
to
establish
structures
in
cultural
memory
which
support
their
claim
for
domination
the
question
remains
with
what
kind
of
content
these
structures
should
be
filled
with?
In
other
words,
how
could
social
cohesion
be
provided?
IV.
Bound
by
a
society
of
heroes
In
the
aftermath
of
the
Russian
Revolution
the
political
leaders
faced
the
question
of
how
to
motivate
the
people
to
join
the
project
of
Russia’s
social
reorganization?
Maxim
Gorky
se‐
ems
to
give
an
adequate
answer
with
his
com‐
ments
on
heroes
symbolized
by
the
prolele‐
tariat.
This
notion
of
a
hero
which
is,
as
Guen‐
ther
puts
it
“an
indispensable
element
of
every
totalitarian
culture”
(Guenther,
1993,
pp.
7)
combines
all
appealing
and
aggressive
energy
which
was
regarded
to
be
necessary
to
mobilize
the
masses
of
people.
Influenced
by
Nietzsche’s
superman,
the
Russian
folklore
movement,
Marx
and
the
“literary
romantic,”
Gorky
characterizes
the
new
Russian
man
as
a
self‐sacrificing
fighter
for
a
better
world
–
a
man
acting
only
for
the
sake
of
the
community
and
by
doing
so
emanci‐
pating
himself
(Guenther,
1994).
5
VOLK
By
establishing
the
canon
of
values
of
so‐
cialist
realism
as
the
aesthetic
paradigm
for
lit‐
erature,
art,
and
culture
at
the
beginning
of
the
1930s,
Soviet
regime
was
able
to
produce
her‐
oes
ad
libitum.
Moreover,
the
regime
could
char‐
acterize
these
heroes
in
such
a
way
that
they
fit
into
the
political
efforts
and
requirements
they
want
to
accomplish.
Since
1934
the
Soviet
hero
cult
was
institutionalized
systematically.
Nevertheless,
for
the
purpose
of
establish‐
ing
the
hero
cult
in
society
the
political
instru‐
mentalization
of
the
Second
World
War
has
been
paramount.
WWII,
the
Great
Fatherland
War,
not
only
marks
the
take‐off
of
this
political
instrumentalization,
but
the
remembrance
of
dead
soldiers
in
particular
and
WWII
in
general
undoubtedly
crown
the
approach
of
hero‐wor‐
shiping,
too.
With
their
deaths
the
soldiers
lost
their
individual
characters
and
were
stylized
in‐
to
supra‐individual
heroic
persons
who
lost
the‐
ir
lives
relying
upon
the
unlimited
capability
of
the
military
leader,
the
future
of
the
Soviet
Uni‐
on,
the
values
it
represents,
and
its
cultural
sup‐
remacy.
Although
the
soldiers
became
the
most
significant
subject
of
the
soviet
hero
myth,
my
few
remarks
have
already
shown
that
this
ill‐
ustration
of
the
soldiers
fit
into
the
structure
of
the
cultural
memory
designed
by
Stalinist
his‐
toriography.
Events
and
facts
like
the
Hitle‐
r/Stalin‐pact,
the
killing
of
the
polish
officers
in
Katyn,
the
fear
of
death
of
the
soldiers,
the
bru‐
talization
in
war,
the
lousy
military
equipment,
the
lack
of
food,
and
innumerable
suicide
squ‐
ads,
do
not
make
their
way
into
Russian
histor‐
iography.
Although
the
way
of
dealing
with
the
soldi‐
ers
in
the
context
of
hero‐worshipping
slightly
changed
in
the
aftermath
of
the
20th
Congress
of
the
Communist
Party
where
mass‐heroism
was
initially
propagated,
WWII
still
holds
the
highest
rank
in
the
soviet
conception
of
history.
Friedrich
Kuebart
for
example
outlines
to
what
extent
the
20th
anniversary
of
the
Soviet
victory
caused
an
enormous
stir
of
patriotic
activity
–
especially
for
pupils
and
young
people.
Field
trips
to
battlefields
and
visiting
former
soldiers
of
the
Red
Army
allowed
kids
and
young
people
to
familiarize
with
the
fundamental
historical
impact
of
the
Great
Fatherland
War
and
its
deeper
meaning
for
the
history
of
the
Soviet
Union.
Almost
every
school
became
a
sponsor
of
a
former
soldier
who
was
invited
to
give
a
talk
and
tell
his
story
on
official
Remembrance
Days.
However,
mourning,
contemplation,
and
reflec‐
tion
were
suppressed
by
the
demand
of
stren‐
gth,
optimism,
obedience
and
the
fulfillment
of
duty
(Kuebart,
1967).
Again,
the
hero
cult
deals
as
the
crucial
means.
Especially
in
the
aftermath
of
the
20th
Congress
of
the
Communist
Party,
the
foundation
of
veteran’s
organizations
was
pus‐
hed
forward.
Firstly,
commemorating
should
be
organized
on
a
broader
scale.
Secondly,
Khrus‐
hchev’s
regime
wanted
to
enhance
the
status
of
the
masses
at
the
expense
of
Stalin.
Mass‐hero‐
ism
gained
access
into
everyday
life:
shiftwork‐
ing
became
as
heroic
as
holding
a
volunteer
position.
In
return
for
their
“heroic
deeds”
wo‐
rkers
were
pictured
in
administrative
facilities,
schools
and
universities,
factories
and
even
next
to
highways.
In
the
Soviet
Union
heroic
deeds
belong
to
everyday
life.
Of
course,
propagating
mass
heroism
became
possible
because
of
the
economic
prosperity
of
1960s
and
1970s.
How‐
ever,
conveyed
by
all
kinds
of
means
of
educa‐
tion
and
propaganda,
as
Sabine
Arnold
puts
it,
the
hero
cult
framed
the
individual
and
collec‐
tive
self‐consciousness
of
three
generations.
Since
Marxian
terminology
was
far
from
being
sufficient
to
mobilize
society,
Gorky’s
hero
myth
deals
as
the
“decisive
promoter
of
con‐
sciousness‐building”
(Arnold,
1998,
pp.
9)
in
order
to
internalize
and
repeat
patriotic
emotions,
fe‐elings
and
meaningful
identities.
The
“agitation
to
happiness“
(Guenther,
1994)
was
based
upon
concepts
such
as
loyalty,
nationhood,
the
Fatherland,
homeland,
mold,
or
blood
bond
which
were
formed
to
a
conglomer‐
ate
of
norms
–
formed
by
a
terminology
which
is
more
accessible
than
a
Marxian
terminology
(Geyer,
19‐85).
Stylized
to
heroes
the
soldiers
of
WWII
easily
and
accessibly
incorporate
loyal‐
ties,
emotions
and
procedures
demanded
by
the
regime.
The
soldiers
of
WWII
represented
the
prototype
of
the
homo
sovieticus,
as
Ignatow
maintains,
and
additionally
they
show
a
remarkable
simil‐arity
with
the
ideal
of
the
traditional
Russian
man
(Ignatow,
1999).
To
summarize,
the
cultural
memory
–
which
was
an
“occupied
memory”
–
was
determined
in
two
ways:
on
the
one
hand,
by
establishing
nar­
odnost
as
the
guiding
principle
of
historiography
Stalin’s
regime
structures
the
cultural
memory
in
a
hierarchical
way
that
maintains
thecultural
and
historical
supremacy
of
Russia,
as
well
as
the
duty
that
everybody
has
to
subordinate
his
life
to
the
needs
of
the
nation
and
the
cohesion
of
the
country.
From
this
follows
that
remem‐
brance
of
WWII
is
only
possible
in
terms
of
obedience,
belief
in
the
political
leaders
and
authorities
and
sacrificing
oneself
for
the
sake
of
54
6
55
STALINISM,
MEMORY,
AND
COMMEMORATION
Russia.
Remembering
the
experience
of
the
guerillas,
for
instance,
in
terms
of
creativity,
free
thinkers
who
disobey
senseless
commands
and
who
arrange
their
way
of
living
and
surviving
separated
from
the
“helpful“
control
of
the
mil‐
itary
leaders
did
not
and
does
not
fit
into
the
hierarchical
structure
of
Russia’s
cultural
mem‐
ory.
On
the
other
hand,
the
remembrance
of
the
soldiers
not
only
had
to
follow
a
certain
struc‐
ture;
it
also
had
to
fulfill
an
emotional
purpose:
as
heroes
the
soldiers
should
represent
all
the
necessary
values
such
as
strength,
optimism,
pure
hearts
of
patriotism,
undaunted
by
death,
and
so
on.
The
Great
Fatherland
War
should
sy‐
mbolize
all
the
attitudes
which
are
necessary
to
build
up
a
glorious
future
of
the
Soviet
Union
(Plaggenborg,
2001).
Due
to
the
special
setting
of
the
content
there
was
no
space
for
mourning,
tears
and
trauma
in
the
cultural
memory
of
Russia.
In
short:
Historiography
of
the
Soviet
Union
combined
a
hierarchical
structure
with
value‐formatting
and
emotional
substance:
the
hero
myth.
V.
The
Gulag
and
the
“Holes
of
oblivion”
But
where
are
the
victims
of
the
Gulag
–
the
victims
of
Stalinism?
In
what
follows
I
will
give
two
different
answers
to
this
question:
the
first
answer
is
directly
linked
to
the
status
of
WWII
in
the
cultural
memory
of
Russia
and
the
notion
of
a
society
of
heroes.
For
the
second
answer,
I
will
follow
Dan
Diner
and
point
to
the
special
setting
and
arrangement
of
the
Gulag
as
a
mass
crime.
However,
I
will
show
how
these
two
diff‐
erent
approaches
to
the
question
of
misremem‐
bering
the
Gulag
could
be
linked
together
today.
The
existence
of
the
Gulag
does
not
fit
into
the
picture
of
society
of
heroes
at
all.
I
just
want
to
give
one
brief
but
illuminative
example
–
but
of
course
there
are
many
since
every
form
of
domination
needs
some
support
by
the
people;
otherwise
it
could
not
exist
for
years.
The
exa‐
mple
comes
from
Hannah
Arendt.
Again,
in
the
Origins
of
Totalitarianism
Arendt
maintains
that
denouncing
friends
became
a
crucial
mean
to
confirm
ones
loyalty
with
the
regime.
More‐
over,
denouncing
somebody
provides
circum‐
stantial
evidence
which
brings
an
accusation
of
non‐existent
crimes
(Arendt,
1994).
Due
to
this
shameful
cooperation
between
the
regime
and
the
people
the
heroic
deeds
of
the
Great
Fathe‐
rland
War
seem
to
be
more
pleasant
to
reme‐
mber.
Beyond
official
policy
undoubtedly
it
is
more
pleasant
to
rem‐ember
the
heroic
deeds
of
defeating
Nazi‐Germany
in
the
Great
Fatherland
War
and
to
join
the
project
of
building
up
“true
socialism”
than
flipping
the
dark
chapter
of
the
Gulag
open
and
facing
one’s
own
possible
resp‐
onsibility.
In
1885,
Nietzsche
had
already
poi‐
nted
to
this
kind
of
mechanism
in
Beyond
good
and
evil:
“’I
have
done
that’
says
my
memory.
I
could
not
have
done
that
–
says
my
pride
and
remains
implacable.
Finally,
my
memory
gives
up”
(Nietzsche,
1972b,
pp.
71).
However,
by
comparing
letters
of
former
soldiers
with
the
interviews
they
gave
many
years
later,
Sabine
Arnold
elaborates
that
mem‐
ory
–
at
least
the
individual
one
–
is
able
to
give
up
only
to
a
certain
extent.
While
reporting
from
war
situations
the
soldiers’
remembrances
are
swept
away
and
repressed
by
official
gilded
me‐
mories
and
their
special
language.
Retrospec‐
tively,
the
former
desire
for
safety
and
well‐be‐
ing
which
became
apparent
in
the
letters
is
re‐
placed
by
the
language
of
the
regime
–
camara‐
derie
and
front
solidarity.
Nevertheless,
at
the
same
time
Arnold
discovers
that
due
to
experi‐
enced
fear
of
death,
for
instance,
there
are
lay‐
ers
in
the
individual
memory
which
are
resist‐
ant
against
those
manipulating
approaches
of
state‐heroism
and
which
appear
to
them
in
their
dreams.
During
the
20th
century
the
Soviet
Union’s
or
Russia’s
official
policy
of
remembrance
in
regard
to
the
crimes
of
Stalinism
and
the
Comm‐
unist
Party
passed
through
several
quite
differ‐
ent
phases:
under
Khrushchev’s
and
Brezhnev’s
reigning
periods
of
de‐
and
re‐Stalinization
alt‐
ernated.
The
resolution
from
October
8th
1959,
regarding
the
history
lessons
at
schools
gives
some
interesting
information
on
the
policy
of
remembrance
of
those
days.
Although
the
teachers
are
asked
to
separate
Stalin’s
regime
from
the
tradition
and
historical
function
of
the
communist
party,
the
fundamental
idea
and
principle
of
historiography,
narodnost,
remained
untouched.
Rather,
history
lessons
at
schools
and
universities
should
maintain
the
role
of
the
masses
as
the
true
creators
of
history
and
the
Communist
Party
as
the
leading,
controlling
and
directing
power
of
soviet
society.
A
procommu‐
nist
approach
at
the
beginning
of
glasnost
and
perestroika
with
emphasis
on
demonizing
Stalin
for
the
sake
of
the
communist
movement
was
removed
by
an
anticommunist,
one
which
res‐
ulted
in
the
breakdown
of
the
Soviet
Union.
Nowadays,
however,
a
critical
approach
to
Rus‐
sia’s
past
has
been
replaced
by
a
“patriotic
con‐
sensus”
(Sperling,
2001)
that
expresses
a
new
7
VOLK
–
or
old
–
Russian
concept
of
identity
rely‐ing
on
the
idea
of
narodnost.
The
supposed
glorious
times
of
Russia
and
the
Soviet
Union
–
such
as
the
pre‐Revolutionary
times
of
the
tsar
empire,
the
social,
scientific
and
cultural
achie‐vements
of
Communism
and,
of
course,
the
“Great
Fatherland
War”
–
serve
as
a
fix‐point
of
ori‐
entation
for
a
better
future.
For
this
purpose,
the
political
instrumentalization
of
WWII
is
cru‐
cial,
because
the
official
interpretation
should
provide
those
values
which
are
supposed
to
help
in
achieving
this
better
future
of
a
powerful
Russia
which
includes
obedience,
belief
in
the
political
leader
(Putin‐cult),
social
and
political
cohesion,
feeling
of
togetherness,
the
glorious
nation
etc.
This
one‐dimensional
interpretation
of
WWII
–
by
playing
down
the
historical
impact
and
moral
dimension
of
the
Gulag
–
is
imple‐
mented
by
a
policy
of
remembrance:
the
access
to
archives
is
possible
only
to
a
very
limited
degree,
the
design
of
school
books
is
in
accor‐
dance
with
political
interests,
major
parts
of
the
press
are
controlled
by
government
and
other
possible
actors
in
the
field
of
a
policy
of
remem‐
brance
trying
to
draw
another,
a
different
pict‐
ure
of
history
–
such
as
the
Society
Memorial4
–
suffer
tremendously
from
state
op‐pression.
Among
the
effectiveness
of
hero
myth,
Dan
Diner
puts
emphasis
on
another
reason
for
misremembering
the
Gulag:
For
Diner
the
logic
of
individual
memory
is
relevant
to
a
lesser
extent;
rather
he
points
to
the
preconditions
w‐
hich
are
necessary
to
constitute
something
like
a
common
memory
of
a
group.
Following
Halb‐
wachs,
Diner
maintains
the
connection
between
memory
and
the
self‐perception
as
a
group
of
people.
Seeing
from
this
perspective
it
is
crucial
that
dealing
with
the
Gulag
primarily
results
in
a
critique
of
Stalin’s
regime;
while
in
contrast,
in
the
case
of
the
Holocaust
the
German
nation
is
the
central
point
of
reference:
For
Nazi‐Germ‐
any,
regime
and
nation
coincide.
Therefore,
one
could
speak
of
the
Nazi
crimes
as
German
cri‐
mes
and
the
holocaust
is
classified
as
genocide
done
by
the
German
nation.
By
con‐trast,
the
crimes
of
Stalinism,
as
Diner
puts
it,
are
classi‐
fied
as
crimes
by
the
regime
against
the
own
population.
Since
Stalin’s
coming
to
power
the
Soviet
Union
has
been
a
community
of
perpetra‐
tors
and
victims,
and,
additionally,
this
relation
becomes
more
complex
since
the
perpetrators
of
today
became
the
victims
of
tomorrow
–
and
the
other
way
round:
In
the
course
of
Stalin’s
periodical
purges
those
parts
of
party
officers
often
were
eliminated
who
had
been
responsi‐
ble
for
the
elimination
of
others
before
(Diner,
1995).
Moreover,
reports
from
the
camps
exp‐
ose
that
one
cannot
speak
of
unconditional
solidarity
among
the
camp’s
prisoner
at
all.
Those
women
who
were
accused
for
sedition
quite
often
became
victims
of
rape
and
sexual
abuse
by
other
camp’s
prisoners
(Lewin,
2001).
Another
aspect
is
the
fact
that
the
justifica‐
tion
of
the
mass
crimes
of
Stalinism
are
given
on
social
ground.
Certain
groups,
such
as
Kulaks,
Trotskyist,
critical
intelligenzija
etc.
were
des‐
troyed
due
to
their
social
position.
In
contrast,
the
Nazis
annihilated
people
like
Jews,
Slavs,
Si‐
nti
and
Romanies
on
racial
ground.
As
an
Aryan
–
and
under
the
precondition
of
not
opp‐osing
the
regime–one
could
feel
safe.
In
Stalinism
pure
arbitrariness
ruled
under
which
not
even
Stalin
himself
could
feel
safe.
For
the
Stal‐inist
terror,
therefore,
one
can
say
that
no
specific
group
of
victims
faces
a
definite
nameable
group
of
perpetrators.
For
Diner,
this
kind
of
internal
regime
crimes
asks
for
a
complete
other
disc‐
ourse
of
remembrance
than
in
case
of
a
commu‐
nity
is
accused
for
mass
crimes
by
another
one
(Diner,
1995).
Accordingly,
the
divergent
reme‐
mbrance
of
the
Shoah
and
the
Gulag
point
to
the
high
significance
of
questions
like
who
is
reme‐
mbering,
what
kind
of
events
are
remembered
and
in
which
tradition
of
commemoration
the
community
is
embedded,
for
establishing
a
cert‐
ain
historical
narrative
at
the
roots
the
political
community
(Diner,
1996)
political
com‐munity
(Diner,
1996)
Today,
however,
this
set‐ting
of
remembrance
seems
to
change.
After
the
break‐
down
of
the
Soviet
Union
several
countries
like
Ukraine,
Poland,
the
Baltic
states,
etc.
try
to
establish
the
remembrances
of
the
crimes
of
the
Soviet
Union
as
one
pillar
of
their
new
national
self‐understanding
and
use
it
to
build
up
their
national
identity.
It
seems
obvious
that
in
these
countries
the
nationalization
or
ethnicization
of
the
remembrance
of
the
Gulag
challenge
the
Ru‐
ssian
approach
to
establish
WWII
as
a
norma‐
tive
fix
point
in
Russian
history.
Aga‐in,
this
shows
how
Gulag
and
WWII
are
directly
bound
together
in
the
cultural
memory
of
Russia.
The
Society
Memorial
is
a
Russian
non‐governmental
human
rights
organizations
and
it
is
one
of
the
most
important
agents
in
the
field
of
memory
and
remem‐
brance.
Memorial
was
founded
by
Andrei
Sacharow
in
1988.
4
56
8
57
STALINISM,
MEMORY,
AND
COMMEMORATION
VI.
Conclusion
In
conclusion,
I
drew
a
very
rough
picture
of
the
setting
of
the
cultural
memory
of
Russia
and
of
the
agents
and
multipliers
influencing
it.
One
cannot
deny
that
compared
to
Stalinism
the
occ‐
upation
of
memory
eased
during
Khruschev’s
and
Brezhnev’s
reigns,
the
intensity
of
terror
de‐
creased
and
that
this
gave
rise
to
the
old
Russ‐
ian
tradition
of
samizdat
–
as
an
alternative
to
the
official
memory
(Hosking,
1989).
The
Samiz‐
dat
not
only
was
the
basis
for
Memorial,
it
also
reveals
that
there
is
another
Russian
tradition
and
culture
maintaining
discourse,
disagrement
and
free
speech
in
Russian
terms
–
and
not
in
Western
terms
per
se
–
buried
or
half‐buried
by
state‐authorities
during
decades.
Memorial
kno‐
ws
that
telling
another
story
and
giving
realm
to
other
stories
of
those
years
during
WWII
not
only
is
a
historiographical
but
also
a
democratic
project.
At
the
beginning
of
my
paper
I
referred
to
Solzhenitsyn
and
the
first
part
of
the
Russian
proverb.
I
said
that
it
characterizes
the
way
of
Russian’s
dealing
with
the
past.
In
almost
the
sa‐
me
manner
the
second
and
last
part
of
the
pro‐
verb
fits
with
the
consequences
emerging
form
such
a
way
of
dealing
with
the
past;
because
the
proverb
goes
on
to
say:
“Forget
the
past
and
you'll
lose
both
eyes”
(Solzhenitsyn,
1985,
pp.
xvi).
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10
European Review of History—Revue européenne d’histoire, 2015
Vol. 22, No. 2, 389–410, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2015.1008418
‘And now imagine her or him as a slave, a pitiful slave with no rights’:
child forced labourers in the culture of remembrance of the USSR and
post-Soviet Ukraine
Gelinada Grinchenko*
V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Kharkiv, Ukraine
Downloaded by [Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin] at 03:54 12 May 2015
(Received 13 May 2014; accepted 30 December 2014)
This article examines the various components of the image of Soviet children, who
were deported to Nazi Germany during the Second World War to perform forced
labour, within the culture of remembrance of the USSR and post-Soviet Ukraine. In her
analysis, the author emphasises that throughout the Soviet period the topic of forced
labour had mostly instrumental significance and was used for a variety of propaganda
tasks: during the war, to mobilise the population to struggle against the enemy; in its
aftermath, to underscore and contrast the essence and policies of the post-war Western
‘democracies’ and the USSR; and, from the late 1960s, to accuse capitalist countries,
above all the Federal Republic of Germany, of preparing for undertakings such as a
new war or an arms race. With the collapse of the USSR, the Ostarbeiters’ ‘territory of
memory’ enlarged dramatically. In the new climate of democratic transformation, there
were socio-legal initiatives which aimed to regulate the status of forced labourers, and
the first steps were taken towards institutionalising Ostarbeiter associations. This, in
turn, facilitated the process of analysing the construction and presentation of the image
of the child Ostarbeiter on the level of state-legal regulation, institutional support,
public interest and scholarly research that is taking place in contemporary Ukraine.
Keywords: Ostarbeiter; child forced labourers; culture of remembrance; Second
World War
According to the Law of Ukraine ‘On the Social Protection of Children of War’1, a war
child is a citizen of Ukraine who experienced the war during his/her childhood and was
under the age of 18 at the end of the war, or ‘whose childhood coincided with the years of
the Second World War if s/he was born before 1927’. Passed in 2004, this law was
Ukraine’s recognition of the difficult lives of some of its citizens: children of war.
It established their legal status, outlined the foundations for their social protection and
guaranteed their social protection through state provision of benefits and social support.
Alongside other laws that recognised people who lived through the Second World War and
aimed to provide them social protection, the 2004 law fuelled public interest in the fate of
children of war and fostered the study, commemoration and honouring of their experience.
The lives and destinies of children of war varied and their collective experience of the
calamities of war also came to include life under German occupation (or ‘life with the
enemy’, according to the apt description coined by some writers), life in evacuation, daily
life on the home front and the heroics of the front. Among these children were those who
ended up against their will outside the borders of their native land, working as forced
labourers for the Nazi regime.
*Email: [email protected]
q 2015 Taylor & Francis
11
390
G. Grinchenko
Downloaded by [Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin] at 03:54 12 May 2015
In this article I will identify the place that these children (called child Ostarbeiters in
contemporary literature) occupy in the culture of memory in the USSR and post-Soviet
Ukraine, and will indicate the main trends of how their experience of living in a foreign
country as forced labourers is remembered today.2
My research draws on sources ranging from agitational-propaganda materials
disseminated during the war and literary works published during and after the war, to
contemporarily published memoirs and recorded oral histories of former child
Ostarbeiters, various Ukrainian laws setting forth the status and rights of former forced
labourers, numerous announcements about the activities of civic organisations, and
various measures aimed at raising awareness of the history and memory of underage
Ukrainian slaves of the Third Reich.
Years, figures, definitions: the deportation of child Ostarbeiters and their exploitation
as forced labourers
For a general definition of the Ostarbeiters, I will use that of Mark Spoerer in his book
Forced Labour under the Swastika:
Ostarbeiter are workers of non-German origin who were registered (recruited) in the
Reichskommissariat Ukraine, Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien, as well as in regions
located farther east of these Kommissariats and the former free states of Latvia and Estonia,
who were deported after the occupation by the Wehrmacht to the Third Reich, including the
protectorates of Bohemia and Moravia, and who were engaged in labour there.3
Regarding other children who were deported for forced labour, I will refer to the 2004
law ‘On the Social Protection of Children of War’. Therefore, I will treat individuals born
in 1927 or later and who ended up as forced labourers as child Ostarbeiters. They include
pre-schoolers (up to seven years old) and adolescents (up to 16 years old).4 Children who
were born 1943– 5 in places where their parents were forcibly detained and where they
carried out forced labour are also included, at the very least because of the post-war
attitude to them.
As the German scholar Johannes-Dieter Steinert aptly notes in his recently published
monograph, despite forced labour in the Third Reich being one of the most studied topics,
the exact number of forced labourers has yet to be established. This is also the case with
regard to people who were deported as forced labourers when they were children or
teenagers. Steinert devotes one chapter to examining many statistical estimates that have
yet to be fully established, settling on the approximate figure of 1.5 million Polish and
Soviet child forced labourers.5
Without delving into a discussion of figures, I will say, however, that in addition to
the other difficulties linked to establishing an exact figure, there is the problem of setting
an age limit: who should be regarded as a child forced labourer? If one follows the logic
of the above-cited Law of Ukraine concerning ‘children of war’, then the 1927 birth
year becomes ‘controversial’ in a certain sense. According to the data cited by Mark
Spoerer and Jochen Fleischhacker in their article ‘Forced Laborers in Nazi Germany:
Categories, Numbers, and Survivors’6, 3.9% of Soviet citizens who were born in 1928 –
32 and deported as forced labourers to the Third Reich were men and 4.4% women.
However, in this same table, people born in 1927 are included in the largest age group
of Soviet citizens labelled ‘slaves of the Third Reich’. This group includes young
people who were born in 1923 –7, comprising 35.4% of all male forced labourers
(citizens of the USSR), and girls, who comprised 49.9% of all female forced labourers
(citizens of the USSR).
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To conclude this brief survey of statistical difficulties and divergences, I will cite the
quantitative indicators proposed by the Russian scholar Pavel Polian, who states that of the
approximately 5.5 million Soviet citizens repatriated to the USSR after the war, nearly
30% were children aged 16 years and younger – in other words, close to 1.8 million
people. However, Polian also includes in this figure infants who were born in Nazi
captivity and after their parents’ liberation as a result of official and unofficial marriages
between Soviet citizens.7
Finally, a few words are needed about the dynamics of deportation and the specific
features of how the labour of ‘young Ostarbeiters’ was put to use in Germany. Between
spring 1942 and spring 1943, children from the occupied territories of the USSR aged 10
and older arrived in Germany mostly together with their families subject to mobilisation.
At the same time, according to the regulation in force, every second person in a family was
supposed to be fit for work. As of April 1943, physically strong children aged 10 and older
could be used for agricultural work, and from late 1943 it was permitted to use children to
clean up rubble after air raids. From mid-1943, children began arriving in Germany with
their families, who were refugees and evacuees. According to the regulations, a child over
the age of 14 was supposed to work only four hours a day. In late 1943, the age limit was
dropped to 10 years, and the four-hour limitation on child labour was abolished in May
1944. Child Ostarbeiters were put to work in almost every place where adult citizens from
occupied territories were forced to toil: in industry, agriculture, utility companies, and in
construction; specifically, building sites and railways (in some cases, children as young as
seven worked in the latter areas).8
Child Ostarbeiters in the Soviet culture of memory
In my earlier articles I postulated the artificiality of the post-Soviet theory about the
repression during the Soviet era of the history and memory of Soviet forced labourers in
the Third Reich, and discussed the dynamics and features of the construction of the
image of forced labour in the Soviet and post-Soviet culture of memory, as well as the
‘discourse of suffering’ as the main content-creating feature of this process.9 In singling
out the specific features associated with the exploitation of the image of the child
Ostarbeiter, I demonstrated that throughout the war this use was part and parcel of the
general efforts of Soviet war propaganda, which aimed to mobilise the entire Soviet
population in the struggle against the hated enemy who, owing to his attitude to the
civilian population, was depicted as a bloody monster, cannibal, slave owner and
exploiter with no trace of human characteristics. The image of children occupied one of
the central and ‘most emotional’ places in this propaganda campaign, as this image was
an endless source of potential tension and compassion. At the same time, it was precisely
the image of a child, whom the hateful enemy was maiming, killing, raping, trampling its
dignity and working it to the bone, which was supposed to underscore the anti-human
and evil essence of this enemy.
The mobilisational use of the image of a child who is exploited and oppressed by a
German slave owner lasted throughout the war years thanks to virtually every possible
propaganda device, above all, agitational brochures, posters, letters, accounts and
testimonies that were published in a variety of formats. One of the most distinctive
examples of how Soviet propaganda exploited the image of an enslaved child was the
agitational brochure, a phrase from one of which appears in the title of this article.
Published in 1943, the brochure10 contains a passionate and extraordinarily emotional
appeal to all Soviet people, both those who are fighting and those working on the home
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G. Grinchenko
front: ‘Beat to death the slave traders and child-killers in German uniforms! Beat them
with fire and work! We did not raise our children for the German butchers to test their
knives on their bodies! Nor did we protect and cherish our children so that they would
perish in fascist servitude!’ (Figure 1). This appeal, which was meant to strike a chord with
every Soviet citizen, resounded against a background of the image of a young child
deported into slavery, who does not sleep at night and calls out for mama; in the daytime
this child works his fingers to the bone for the accursed enemy, is whipped and hears only
abusive language. The bestial essence of the enemy was also underscored in phrases
recounting the rape of Soviet schoolgirls by drunken Germans, girls being infected with
venereal diseases and the sale of Soviet girls to German brothels.
The emotional co-experience and compassion for the fate of an enslaved child, based on
visual perception, was also designed to be conveyed by posters. The most popular and
widely disseminated examples of agitational propaganda on this topic were two posters
from 1942: Viktor Koretsky’s poster captioned ‘Fighter, save me from slavery!’ and Dmitrii
Shmarinov’s poster emblazoned with the words: ‘I am waiting for you, warrior-liberator!’.
Both of these posters portray children, whose enslavement is symbolically emphasised by
small tablets with numbers hanging around their necks; the expression on the children’s
faces leaves no doubt about their dire straits and their excessively arduous work.
Figure 1.
1943).
The cover of a brochure authored by E. Kononenko, Otomsti nemtsu (Moscow: OGIZ,
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Another popular device for implanting a certain image of forced labour in the Soviet
consciousness was the publication of first-hand reports from forced labourers, such as
letters sent from slavery, narratives and testimonies of those who managed to return
from slavery either by escaping, or due to illness.11 Of course, small children did not send
letters or write their reminiscences. Despite the fact that a certain collective image of
young people who had been sent into ‘Fascist slavery’, including adolescents and youths,
was predominant in Soviet times, in these publications the school age of the narrator or
author of a letter was emphasised both in the opening lines (‘When the Germans came I
was in seventh grade’) and signatures (account/letter written by a senior pupil, schoolchild
and so on).
In contrast to agitational brochures and posters, such publications were issued both
during the war and in the early post-war years. Their goal was not so much to mobilise the
population in the fight against the enemy as to reinforce a certain image of forced labour in
the public consciousness (or collective memory). It was impossible to ignore this question
and expunge it from people’s awareness. After all, at issue here, according to many
researchers today, were several million Soviet citizens who were supposed to integrate
themselves into the post-war society on their return to the Soviet Union and, most
importantly, to work – but this time for their own country, which was then in desperate
need of manpower. This intention to integrate and further exploit this group’s labour
potential was embodied in the marginal, yet absolutely legitimate, place that the memory
of forced labour in Nazi Germany came to occupy in the general Soviet memory of the
war. Throughout the post-war years, various materials were published and became
accessible to a large number of Soviet citizens: letters, works of folklore and
autobiographical writings by former Ostarbeiters, along with the poetry and prose of
Soviet writers, and scholarly research on forced labour by Soviet academics. As for the
content of the Soviet ‘memory project’ about forced labour in the Third Reich, its main
components were elevated suffering and the heroic spirit of rebelliousness and feats. One
distinctive feature is that the main heroes of this project (chiefly a slave girl and a
rebellious youth; however, there were other combinations and exceptions) were frequently
under 16, i.e. they were children rather than youths on their way to becoming ‘adults’.
Also, the experience of Soviet citizens who had been deported for forced labour as
adolescents formed the nucleus of a small number of extraordinarily significant creative
works that offered Soviet readers a complex and specific picture of exhausting labour in a
foreign country, and the unfamiliar and often unendurable conditions of daily life and
survival.12 It is no exaggeration to say that the experiences of these children were twice as
difficult as those endured by adults; as the Russian novelist Vitalii Semin noted appositely,
in those circumstances ‘the entire system of a child’s orientation in this world was ruined.
Children were taken in by the most reliable signs of sound judgment, mercy, goodness,
which were defined by instinct itself: an elderly person, an intelligent person, a person
wearing a white smock . . . ’ In this example about the system of signifiers in childhood,
which was turned upside down in the conditions of forced labour, the author describes the
abuse of children by elderly guards:
Nearly all the camp policemen were elderly people. They had reached the age where a person
is called opa in Germany. An opa is a grandfather, an old person, a father. This is a
respectfully familiar word that one can use to address an elderly person on the street. I first
heard it in a transit camp. That’s how camp policemen were called . . . Here everything
collapsed at once: the loss of loved ones, starvation rations [aimed] at extreme emaciation, the
vile, thin gruel – an insult. The unsystematic walloping [administered by policemen lined up]
abreast came to an end, and systematic beatings began. The opas acted swiftly, brutally, and
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cheerfully. They not only beat with a special device for beatings – rubber, a rubber truncheon
– but also with [their] legs, hands, and whatever they could lay their hands on at the
moment.13
In contrast to Semin’s novel, a unique confession about suffering, pain and survival in
the conditions of so-called ‘everyday, commonplace fascism’, in the writings of other
Soviet writers about forced labour, erstwhile schoolchildren wage a struggle or mount some
kind of resistance for the most part: they sabotage mobilisation and evade the deportations,
in their workplaces they try to break something, cause some sort of damage, set something
on fire; that is, they do whatever they can to raise a protest. All these children are active
subjects, that is, they are active individuals in the literal sense. Here the image of a
schoolchild living in a hostile situation and struggling against the enemy in all
circumstances shared the same semantic space as the heroes of the Young Pioneer
Organisation of the Soviet Union, figures that were familiar to every Soviet child of the postwar generations: a symbol of the steadfastness and courage of Soviet children who, shoulder
to shoulder with adults, championed the liberty and independence of their fatherland.14
Throughout the Soviet period, the topic of forced labour had a primarily instrumental
significance, and it was used for various types of propaganda tasks: during the war, to
mobilise the population in the struggle against the enemy; in the war’s aftermath, to
underscore and contrast the essence and policies of the post-war Western ‘democracies’
and the USSR; and from the late 1960s, to accuse the capitalist countries, above all the
Federal Republic of Germany, of preparing for a new war and an arms race, and other such
undertakings.15 In addition – and this fact must be taken into consideration – topics
dealing with Soviet citizens, including children, who performed forced labour in the Third
Reich, were reflected in ‘official’ Soviet literature whose precise target audience was
children; these books were published under the rubric of ‘children’s literature’ or were
accompanied with the recommendation ‘for schoolchildren in the middle and upper
grades’. In other words, besides its propaganda use, the image of the child forced labourer
also played a patriotic and educational role. Naturally, this image was not so much a massproduced one that, as a result of this, was literally drummed into the heads of Soviet
schoolchildren as it was an image of the Pioneer-hero16; it supplemented, or rather defined,
the limit of the official ‘space of memory’ about the war and constituted a legitimate, albeit
marginal, personage.
In any discussion regarding Ostarbeiter children in the Soviet memory project, it is
crucial to highlight the practical absence of any mention of children who were born in
slavery. This is not surprising given that, in the semantic framework of the Soviet version
of the memory of the Third Reich’s slaves, forced labour either caused suffering or gave
rise to resistance but under no circumstances facilitated the emergence of children,
especially those who were the products of parents of different nationalities. In its turn,
Soviet creative literature, if it even mentioned the presence of infants in the work camps,
did so parenthetically and elliptically. The sole exception is the novel Ostarbeiter, cowritten by the Ukrainian authors Ivan Zozulia and Ivan Vlasenko, in which, in keeping
with the slavery topic, such a child is born, but it is the product of the extramarital relations
between the protagonist and his lover, the wife of a Gestapo officer. Of course, this was a
highly untypical situation, considering the realities of forced labour, and in my view it was
simply invented by the two writers. But, at the very least, they tried to broach this topic in
order to draw attention to the phenomenon of forced labourers returning from Germany,
accompanied by their children who were born there.17
I will underscore once again the age question with regard to Soviet Ukrainian citizens
who were deported for forced labour and the problem of recreating the experience and
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memory of these young people in the Soviet discourse of the Great Patriotic War. If we
consider individuals aged 18 and younger who were sent to perform forced labour as child
Ostarbeiters, as Professor Johannes-Dieter Steinert proposes, this will necessitate viewing
nearly the entire forced-labour discourse that was created in Soviet times as one based on
subjects connected precisely with ‘children’. However, this Soviet discourse of forced
labour mostly functioned through the definition of ‘youth’, not ‘children’, not least of all
because at that time in the USSR people of 16 years and older were viewed not as children
requiring care, but as citizens fully capable of work. As regards certain types of crimes, the
age of criminal responsibility was 12.18
Finally, as regards the discussion of the realities of social existence and daily life rather
than the created world of collective memory and its representations, it is high time to
correct a notion that became widespread in the post-Soviet period: that after the war the
Ostarbeiters were generally persecuted. If such persecution did indeed take place, it was of
a non-criminal nature and unsystematic, and cases were exaggerated and hyperbolised
during the first years following the collapse of the USSR. Current research indicates that
after the war the Soviet government worked to gradually restore the political status of the
Ostarbeiters, who were no longer subject to criminal prosecution for ‘working’ for the
enemy, awarding social-protection guarantees, among other measures. Moreover,
Ostarbeiters had retained their uninterrupted general seniority, while the seniority of
invalids was supplemented by their period of work in Germany. Repatriated Soviet women
with large families had the right to obtain assistance and benefits.19 However, for a certain
period of time after their repatriation former forced labourers did not have the right to
choose their place of residence, and they faced restrictions when they applied for jobs (if
they were adults) or registered for studies (if a former child forced labourer wanted to
study); for a long time they were closely controlled and supervised by the state.20 Thus,
those trainloads of Ostarbeiters heading from Germany straight to Siberia – as was widely
believed in the 1990s – were not a characteristic or routine phenomenon.
Child Ostarbeiters in contemporary Ukraine’s culture of memory
The early 1990s were marked by immense changes both of a geopolitical and
socioeconomic nature, as well as by the transformations that took place in the sphere of the
culture of memory, including its content richness, and commemorative strategies and
practices. From the standpoints of the culture of memory and memory politics, the main
feature of that period for post-Soviet countries was the scathing criticism of the Soviet past
and the search for and ‘filling in’ of a large number of ‘blank spots’ in this history. In those
years, the memory of forced labour during the Second World War, among other topics,
gained new life and new expression, which coincided with monetary payments that began
to be issued to this category of citizens.21 In my view, it is this very combination of
circumstances that triggered the emergence and continuing coexistence of several levels of
(re)creation and (re)presentation of memory about the Ostarbeiters: state-legal (this
served as the driving force for (re)creating an appropriate memory including the urgent
need for legal regulation and the creation of a normative base for obtaining monetary
compensation from abroad); institutional (a distinctive feature of which was the creation
of a certain number of civic organisations, unions and associations, firstly, those uniting
former forced labourers, and, secondly, citizens who saw their main task as providing
assistance and protection and honouring the memory of this category of war participants);
public (where the policy of issuing compensation and granting, initially, war-veteran
status to Ostarbeiters and, later, the status of victims of Nazi persecutions determined
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significant public interest in their history and memory and thereby stimulated the writing
and publication of memoirs, participation in projects to record oral histories, the fate and
experiences of former forced labourers received much attention in documentary films,
theatre productions, museum exhibitions and travelling exhibits, as well as the publication
of popular books and literary works); and scholarly (top priority continues to be given to
new sources published by academics while the study of the topic is based on a blend of
political and social histories of forced labour, with a clear-cut emphasis on the latter: the
daily practices of existence in the conditions of forced labour exploitation and post-war
adaptation, as well as the subjective attitude to these processes on the part of their direct
participants – Ukrainian Ostarbeiters).22 The memory of child Ostarbeiters occupies a
place in each of these levels, each with its distinctive features.
The state –legal level
From the early stages of its independence, Ukraine actively took part in the negotiations
started during Soviet times about humanitarian assistance to the victims of Nazi crimes,
and the right of people who worked on German territory during the Second World War to
receive this assistance. As a result of these negotiations, held in 1993, the Ukrainian
National Fund for Mutual Understanding and Reconciliation was founded in accordance
with Decree no. 453 issued by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine on 16 June 1993. Until
2007 this fund issued compensation payments to former Ukrainian Ostarbeiters. However,
these payments required an appropriate legal foundation and special legal status for the
Ostarbeiters, for which purpose the following resolutions were passed in Ukraine: the first,
in 1995, was the Resolution of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine concerning amendments
and supplements to the 1993 law ‘Concerning the Status of War Veterans, Their Social
Protection Guarantees’ (in which Ostarbeiters were also named as war veterans); and the
second, ‘Concerning the Victims of Nazi Persecutions’ handed down on 23 March 2000
(in which Ostarbeiters were named among the victims); this latter piece of legislation was
indispensable for obtaining compensation from the German ‘Memory, Responsibility, and
the Future’ fund.
One issue that is crucial to the topic examined in this article is that the standards of the
first of the above-named laws established social and legal protection for individuals who
were minors during the war and now have the status of war veterans. Included among war
veterans were combatants, war invalids and participants of the war. In accordance with the
law, henceforth former underage inmates (under 16 when they were imprisoned) of
concentration camps, ghettos and other places of forcible detention created by Nazi
Germany and its allies during the Second World War, as well as children born in the places
where their parents were forcibly detained, were considered on par with combatants.
A separate point in the list of individuals considered victims of Nazi persecution in the
2000 law on victims of Nazi persecution focused on ‘children who were born in the places
of their parents’ forcible detention and in the places where their parents carried out forced
labour’. In discussing the various levels of public interest in the memory of child
Ostarbeiters in post-Soviet Ukraine, it must be stressed that the very existence of such
children was first defined and acknowledged on the state level; as mentioned earlier, these
children were absent from the Soviet space of memory.
The current social protection for this category of war participants and victims of
Nazi persecution is one component of the state’s care for its citizens. It includes
monetary payments, aid in kind, benefits, subsidies, medical assistance, medical
products, rehabilitation devices, assistive mobility devices and social services, as well
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as compensation payments, humanitarian aid from civic organisations, and other forms
of support.23
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The institutional level
To this day, various institutions, such as associations, unions and civic organisations,
continue to play a leading role in forming the contemporary culture of the memory of
forced labour in general, and the labour performed by child Ostarbeiters in particular.
The main organisation is the Ukrainian Union of Prisoners– Victims of Nazism
(USVZhN), the first to highlight the existence of and need to honour the experience of
children who were imprisoned during the war. This organisation’s activities date back to
1988, when, on the initiative of the Ukrainian writer and journalist Volodymyr Lytvynov,
an initial meeting was held in Kiev, followed by the founding of the World Union of
Former Underage Prisoners of Fascist Concentration Camps as part of the V. I. Lenin
Soviet Children’s Fund. Over a three-year period (until the collapse of the USSR) the
energetic efforts of the Fund and the Union led to the passage of two government decisions
in favour of this category of war participants, as well as to the creation of the InterDepartmental Commission of the USSR, whose mandate was to establish facts related to
the incarceration of children in concentration camps, prisons and ghettos.24 In early 1991
the Ukrainian Union of Former Underage Prisoners of Fascist Concentration Camps was
created on the initiative of Ukrainian oblasts and municipal branches of the World Union
of Former Underage Prisoners of Fascist Concentration Camps. In June 1993 it was
reregistered as an organisation of ‘former underage prisoners of fascism’, and renamed in
October 1998 as the Ukrainian Union of Prisoners –Victims of Nazism. A new statute was
adopted, according to which members of the Union, regardless of age, ‘could be former
prisoners of fascist concentration camps, ghettos, and other places of forcible detention
who were deported under duress to perform forced labour in Germany or countries
occupied by it, as well as children who were born in the places where their parents were
held for forced labour’.25
Thus, the very initiative to commemorate the experience and memory of underage
prisoners of Nazi Germany and champion their interests acted as a powerful spur for the
institutionalisation of associations uniting all victims of Nazism in Ukraine. Regardless of
the fact that the Union has been representing the interests of Ukrainian former victims of
Nazism of all age groups since 1993, initiatives to preserve the memory of the ‘children of
war’ and champion their rights constitute the majority of the USVZhN’s activities.
In their turn, compensation payments, social assistance and diverse activities aimed at
commemorating the memory of the victims of Nazi persecution have characterised the
work, since its inception, of the Ukrainian National Fund for Mutual Understanding and
Reconciliation as well as of its successor, the international civic organisation
‘International Foundation “Mutual Understanding and Tolerance”’, which was founded
in 2008. For several consecutive years it has organised a competition for projects aimed at
preserving the historical memory of the victims of the Second World War. In 2013 the
topic was ‘Children of the Second World War through the Eyes of Contemporary
Children’. The immense interest in this topic demonstrated by the general public, and
young people in particular, is attested to by the fact that approximately 700 works (texts
accompanied by drawings) were submitted to the competition from all over Ukraine, each
of these works describing the fate of someone who was maimed by the war or conveying
someone’s account and memory. Some works explored the destinies of children who
toiled as forced labourers in Germany (Figures 2 and 3). Of unquestionable importance
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Figure 2. Anastaziia Tsenova (13 years old; village of Bohdanivka, Chernihiv raion, Zaporizhia
oblast), Goodbye, My Childhood. Paper and gouache. The caption states: ‘School is over and the
transportation of workers to Germany began . . . We lived in poverty, we had nothing to wear:
tarpaulin boots, woolen stockings and a coat. Sister just bought for herself and had to lose.
We arrived at the station Velykyi Tokmak. There were people from the whole region. While the train
running mothers began to lose consciousness, cry, yell . . . Nobody knew if they would see their
children alive or buried [sic ] . . . .’ From an interview with Kateryna Demchuk (b. 1926). Source:
Children’s Art: Works Exhibition of the All-Ukrainian Contest II Finalists: “The Fate of Children in
the Years of World War II in Students’ Drawings,” Exhibition Catalogue (Kiev, 2013), 31.
from the standpoint of the contemporary Ukrainian culture of memory about the Second
World War is the fact that, in recreating its events and horrors to produce a composite
picture of the sufferings endured by the Ukrainian people, young Ukrainians today without
fail include those who laboured in extraordinarily difficult conditions, and against their
will on the territory of the Third Reich, including children.
Besides these two ‘core’ organisations working on behalf of the Ostarbeiters and other
victims of Nazism, there are several civic organisations in Ukraine whose work is focused
specifically on children of war: Protection for Children of the War (a nationwide
association of Ukrainian citizens who were under 18 years of age when the Second World
War ended; the founding conference was held in 1996) and Help for Children of the War
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Figure 3. Dmytro Havryliak (16 years old; village of Krylos, Halych raion, Ivano-Frankivsk
oblast), Childhood Burnt by War. Paper, watercolour, and ink. The caption states: ‘My parents
travelled in the train from Germany to Ukraine with demobilised soldiers. The soldiers took the
child, and the mother ran the whole day, crying, from wagon to wagon because she thought that the
child had been stolen. But the soldiers missed the child and wanted to hug her. Father said that they
gave the child back in the evening. The soldiers gave lots of things to the child, but customs control
took everything away. Even the pram was taken away. My father said many times: “You are very
dear to me, because I was carrying you on my shoulders for three hundred kilometres [sic ]’”. From
an interview with Kateryna Honchar (b. 1944). Source: Children’s Art: Works Exhibition of the AllUkrainian Contest II Finalists: “The Fate of Children in the Years of World War II in Students’
Drawings,” Exhibition Catalogue (Kiev, 2013), 30.
(set up by the National Founding Conference held on 22 May 2010), as well as a number of
municipal organisations called Children of the War.
The public level
A large number of humanitarian and cultural-educational projects about the victims of
Nazism are implemented by these organisations, which aim to provide social protection
for those who suffered, commemorating their experience and honouring their memory.
Thanks to their co-operation with international donor organisations, these associations
organise visits by former captives to their places of imprisonment and foster
communication between Ukrainian schoolchildren and young people and their
counterparts in other countries, publish memoirs, hold press conferences, issue press
statements, and appear on radio and television. This work helps to raise public awareness
about the experience and sufferings of war victims, including those who were children
during the Second World War.
For example, in Ukraine in the 2000s, these organisations and publishers were
instrumental in publishing a substantial number of memoirs written by people who became
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forced labourers when they were children or teenagers. These memoirs have appeared in
collections26 and as separate publications. Inessa Mirchevskaia is the author of one
noteworthy memoir. Here is a particularly moving episode. Little Inessa became a forced
labourer at the age of 10. For some time she lived with her mother in a work camp, where
she toiled in the kitchen with other children. One day, following a visit to the camp of a
commission charged with examining the children in preparation for deportation, Inessa’s
mother refused to go to work in order to remain with her daughter and prevent her from
being deported. For her disobedience the mother was sent to a punishment cell; her
execution was to take place the next morning. On the square stood a gallows to which the
woman was led in the presence of all the camp residents, including little Inessa. Suddenly
a woman came up to the commandant and told him something.
He called me (I already had a pretty good understanding of German). I approached him. The
commandant asked me if it was true that I turned eleven today. I said yes. Then he said: ‘So
it’s your birthday today!’ He considered for a moment. Then he shouted something to those
who were dragging my mother. They came up to him. He inspected my mother from top to
bottom and said: ‘Your mother violated camp order, but . . . But you turned eleven today, yes?
Today is your birthday. A rather original idea has occurred to me: I will give you a present . . .
I will give you a costly and original present, the kind that no one has ever received!’ . . . He
gave me my mother, my dear, own mummy. We rushed to each other, hugged, kissed,
caressed, and touched each other.
We were permitted to go to the barrack. Mummy was covered with bruises . . . I bunched my
hands into little fists, but what could I do! He had the power to execute and the power to
pardon. And he pardoned. That was his whim, his will.27
This episode, as well as a number of other incidents that are embedded in the memories
of former child slaves and which have been published in the collection Pam’iat 0 zarady
maibut 0 noho (Memory for the Sake of the Future, ed. N. Sliesarieva), served as the basis of
a brilliant and penetrating documentary play entitled Zhaivir dlia Olenky (A Skylark for
Olenka), written, directed and produced in 2011 by Andrii Senchuk, director of the Kievbased Incunabula Youth Theater. The cast was composed exclusively of young people,
and the viewers of the first performances were authors of memoirs: former child labourers
of Nazi Germany. On the stage in the opening scene is a theatre stage that has been
transformed into a camp barrack, where bunk beds stand amidst the clutter of discarded
stage decorations. The set was meant to resemble the interior of a private dramatic theatre
located on the outskirts of the Upper Silesian city of Beuthen (Germany; today, Bytom,
Poland), which became the site of an Ostarbeiter camp during the Second World War.
Outside, a camp loudspeaker blasts music, a melody from an operetta. Suddenly a young
girl named Nastia appears in the spotlight. She is making flowers out of paper and coloured
rags. She narrates the following:
I was thirteen. The war. The fascists captured my Dnipropetrovsk. In forty-three I was brought
here by force. I became an ‘Ostarbeiter’. That’s what the Germans called people from the
East, mostly from Ukraine, whom they forced to work for them. At the time I lived in a camp
consisting of several barracks, behind barbed wire and under armed guard. Before the war this
barrack had been the hall of a private theatre, but now Ostarbeiters were held here. The camp
commandant wanted to keep the stage and the curtains; he considered himself a theatre and
music lover. That is why music was always heard in the camp. Over a period of two years I
saw more than a thousand people on this stage, and then, in June forty-three more than two
hundred people were housed here.28
In general, young Ukrainians today are taking a very active part in projects that seek to
commemorate the fate of their peers who, 70 years ago, were forced to leave their native
land and brought to an unfamiliar, cruel world of abuse, exhausting work and premature
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adulthood. These young people do not overlook another topic that is only just now
beginning to attract the attention of scholars and which has not been the subject of any
historical research: the post-war experience of children of Ostarbeiters who were born in
Germany in 1944– 5. Between February 2007 and August 2008 Alternatyva-V, the
Ukrainian Association for Youth Cooperation and Friends of the Neuengamme
Concentration Camp Memorial, carried out a joint project entitled ‘The Fate of Children
of Former Forced Labourers Who Were Born in Germany in 1944– 1945’. As a result of
prior agreements and recorded interviews, 20 biographies were collected (10 in the form of
video interviews and 10 in the form of written questions and answers), published by the
Friends of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial in the form of a brochure
entitled The Fate of the Children of Former Eastern Workers Born in 1944 –1945 in
Germany.29 In the afterword to this publication, the compilers and initiators of this project,
Janine Dressler and Kristina Ulrich, make some very interesting observations and
inferences that should be further developed and analysed:
The preliminary assumption that women became pregnant deliberately in Germany in order to
return to Ukraine was not confirmed. There is no question that young women had absolutely
no idea about sexual relations and birth control, and this was precisely why they became
pregnant . . . What is striking is that during the interviews respondents talked more about their
birthplace and the time their parents spent as forced labourers in Germany, and less about their
lives from 1945 to 2007– 8. Perhaps the reasons for this are the following: the topic of forced
labour in Germany was taboo until 1991, and the respondents have still not got over this. The
respondents did not want to talk about Soviet times because this is connected with painful
memories. To this day they are ashamed that they were born in Germany.30
In contemporary Ukraine’s public discourse, interest in topics connected with young
Ukrainians who were forced labourers in Germany and their children who were born there
is tied with a personal, special attitude to this question on the part of citizens whose
families had the same experience. In contrast to the above-mentioned publications that
discuss the feeling of shame and sense of tragedy, in these cases we have an example of a
respectful attitude to such stories, one that is based on the sense that the trials and
tribulations of life in Nazi slavery gave rise to their new and strong families and that this
experience cemented their attitude to life. In order to ensure that their relatives’ stories do
not vanish without a trace, the caring descendants have also devoted creative works to
them, like the young Ukrainian writer Roksoliana S0 oma, who wrote and published the
novel Vacation in Tangermünde.31 The author’s mother, the fifth and last child in her
family, looked after her parents, Pavlo and Maria Kulyk, from whom she often heard
stories about their life, which she committed to memory and then transmitted to her
daughter Roksoliana. Her novel explores her grandparents’ lives: their incredible love
story and difficult experiences in 1942 –5 in Germany, where they married and where their
first child was born. The author begins her novel thus:
Concealed behind this title, which at first glance seems to presage an adventure novel about an
exciting journey and relaxation in an exotic place called Tangermünde, are in fact the tragic
destinies of millions of Soviet people who at one time found themselves in a foreign and
horrible country by compulsion, against their will, which, in addition to the ingrained brand of
the ‘Ostarbeiter’, damaged their souls and destinies and destroyed others.32
In addition to being immortalised in literature, the topic of children born in conditions
of slavery and the tragedies connected with growing up, more often than not in singleparent families and sometimes in a foreign country, is also reflected in post-Soviet
documentary films. In an earlier article I cited the example of the 2003 documentary film
Roses for Signora Raı̈sa, which is based on real-life events. I will recap briefly here: the
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film recounts the story of Katia (Kateryna) Khanina, a girl from Kharkiv, her lover Mario
Siniscalti, an Italian man from Sorrento, and their son Stefano, who was born in Germany
in early 1946. Katia and Mario worked in the same factory, but in 1946 Katia was
repatriated to the USSR, while little Stefano and his father were repatriated to Italy.
While Stefano was growing up, he was aware that his mother lived somewhere far away,
but it took him many decades to find her. With the onset of perestroika, the situation
changed rapidly: during President Gorbachev’s visit to Milan, his wife Raisa noticed
someone in the crowd – Stefano – holding up a poster saying, ‘Help me find my
mother!’ She offered her assistance and soon afterwards Katia Khanina was located in a
small village near Kharkiv. Stefano was the first to pay her a visit, followed later by
his father Mario. The story has a happy ending: the wedding of these two elderly
people took place first in Ukraine and then in Italy, where Katia moved to join her
husband and son.
This film was very well received by post-Soviet television audiences, as it concerns
what people hold dearest: timeless love – real, eternal and faithful. The social significance
of this film and the public’s huge response to it are attested by the fact that the first
Ukrainian documentary film festival, Kontakt, which took place in Kiev in April 2005,
opened with the screening of this Russian-made film that was attended by the son of Katia
and Mario, Stefano, as well as by the incumbent Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko,
and his wife. According to Liga.net, a Ukrainian news website, President Yushchenko
emphasised in his speech to the festival participants that many Ukrainians had shared the
fate that befell this particular family, revealing that his own parents had met each other
while in forced labour in Nazi Germany. Yushchenko presented Kateryna Khanina a
medal commemorating the ‘60th Anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War of
1941 –1945’, as well as an embroidered towel in memory of her native country. This
medal was accepted by her son who thanked Yushchenko for his attention to their family,
noting that he was proud of the fact that he, too, is a Ukrainian.33
Concluding this overview of the public dimension of the memory of child
Ostarbeiters, I would like to highlight the visual embodiment of this memory, specifically
the monument to Ostarbeiters that was erected in 2005 in Babyn Yar (Babi Yar). This
monument is dedicated to all victims of Nazism, including those who were forced to work
in Nazi Germany. The monument slab symbolises a wall of memory, one side of which
bears the inscription Pam’iat 0 zarady maibutn 0 oho (Memory for the sake of the future),
with the Latin letter ‘V’ carved in place of the required apostrophe in the Ukrainian word
Pam’iat 0 , along with the letters ‘Ost’, a truncated version of the word ‘Ostarbeiters’. Next
to it stands the figure of a little girl who, according to the designers of the memorial,
symbolises the future. In my view, however, the figure of the little girl can be interpreted
another way: as a memorial to the innocent children who were fated to experience
suffering, pain and death in a faraway, hostile country.
The scholarly level
Despite the immense number of studies on various aspects of the history and memory of
the Second World War, researchers have only recently begun to study the experience, fate
and memory of the children who lived through those terrible years and to devote attention
to their commemoration in the culture of the various countries or societies. As justly noted
by the compilers of the recently published collection Children and War (focused in part on
the fate of children in so-called ‘new wars’), the surge of interest in studying the
experience and memory of children who lived through the Second World War
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has to be explained by the changing of the generational guard among the survivors . . . This
new focus on children is also reflected by the memorials to commemorate the
Kindertransport, which have been installed in recent years at London’s Liverpool Station,
Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse railway station, in Rotterdam, and at Vienna’s main railway station,
the Westbahnhof. A similar generational change took place in the societies of the perpetrators:
Germans and Austrians who experienced the war as children took over the role of war
witnesses from the soldiers of the German Wehrmacht. Thus, the impact of World War II on
children and on their lives afterwards is given special consideration. Moreover, intensified
focus on children’s experiences and their strategies for dealing with what they went through is
evident in Eastern Europe as well.34
A collection of articles with an emphasis on the study of children’s memories of the
Second World War was recently published in the post-Soviet space. Published in the
Russian city of Krasnodar in 2010, the collection The Second World War in Children’s
‘Framework of Memory’35, contains articles written by specialists in the fields of history,
psychology, pedagogical anthropology and others. The featured articles explore children’s
memories of the war in relation to public, ‘official’, models, the specific character of
children’s recollections of the war in the autobiographies of adults, and the mechanisms for
conveying and transforming these recollections throughout the life of an individual and
society on the whole. Both of the above-mentioned collections have a clear-cut
interdisciplinary character. But unlike the articles based on the proceedings of a conference
that took place in Salzburg, the volume of research published in Russia is not directly
focused on the experiences of children caught up in the war. For the most part, these articles
highlight other questions that are determined by the specific character of development and
topical questions in post-Soviet historiography, such as the scholarly legitimisation of
‘another memory’ of the war, related questions pertaining to methodological principles and
sources of this kind of research, and the mindful consideration of the sociocultural context of
existing practices governing the reinterpretation and redefinition of collective identities.
A similar situation exists in the substantial body of current historical literature on
forced labour in the Third Reich, only a small proportion of which is devoted to the history
and memory of children who were engaged in forced labour. This particularly concerns
children who were deported from the occupied territories of the USSR, that is, those
territories that became the largest suppliers of manpower for programmes aimed at putting
foreign civilians to work in Nazi Germany. In the absence of a special monograph
published in the post-Soviet space, until recently most of the information about children
who were forcibly deported to Germany appeared only in the works of the Russian
researcher Pavel Polian, in which he presents statistics on the number of these children and
reveals the dynamics and features of deportation and engagement in forced labour. The
first monograph that specifically addresses the fate of Soviet and Polish children who were
forced to work both in Germany and occupied Europe was written by Johannes-Dieter
Steinert, Professor of Modern European History at the University of Wolverhampton
and published only in 2013.36 Based on substantial archival materials, recorded oral
histories and published memoirs (including those that discuss the fate of children who
were deported from Ukraine or whose authors are Ukrainian former child Ostarbeiters),
his study explores two main issues: first, the participation of military and civilian
departments in the organisation of deportations and forced labour, as well as various
interconnections between child forced labour and the policy of Germanisation; and,
second, the experience of deportation and forced labour as reflected in the oral histories of
former child forced labourers.
In general, oral-history projects to record the memoirs of former forced labourers, a
large number of which were completed in post-Soviet countries in the last 20 years,
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constitute, in my opinion, a very significant and conspicuous phenomenon marked not
only by the reflection of the experience of living in slavery but also by the result of
contemporary methods of (re)creating and disseminating the memory of these events;
that is, they are a specific semantic synopsis of all state, legal, scholarly and public
efforts to commemorate the history and memory of this group of war victims. Ultimately,
they not only offer the public a look at the unique experience of forced labour during the
Nazi era but also convey the current view and understanding of this slavery and the
models of explanations and generalisations that were formulated within the framework of
the contemporary culture of memory of the ‘slaves of the Third Reich’. Once again I
must stress the fact that, if one accepts the classification according to which a child
forced labourer is someone who performed forced labour aged 18 or younger, then nearly
half of the oral narratives recorded in the post-Soviet period should be included in any
scrutiny of the features of the oral-history recreation of the forced-labour experience.
In the concluding section of this article I mention accounts provided by people born in
the 1930s, who were deported to serve as forced labour together with their parents or
other family members and whose oral interviews were recorded as part of projects in
which I was directly involved. It goes without saying that these oral-history narratives
are extremely varied, for the destiny of every individual is unique. However, from the
standpoint of the specific features associated with the process of recalling these events,
the accounts of former child Ostarbeiters contain certain similarities that may be
summarised as follows.
Elaborating on the conclusions reached by Johannes-Dieter Steinert and drawing on
Valeriia Nurkova’s psychological studies of ‘children’s memories’ of the war37, I consider
the following to be the main features of reminiscences of a wartime childhood and which
was spent in forced labour in Germany: first, most of the stories and incidents described in
these memoirs are extraordinarily vivid ‘bursts of memory’ that maintain a specific
‘metre’ of space in conformity with the narrator’s age or the conditions in which s/he
perceives a given situation and in which the ‘world of experiences’ that took place at the
very moment when an event was fixed in time is actualised. These are ‘living pictures’ that
literally ‘stand before the eyes’ of those who recall them. These pictures are often a set of
unrelated sketches arrayed in a certain chain; more often than not the quintessence of
feelings wrested out of time and space, in which fear is predominant: ‘I remember two
apartments. One apartment was in town. Because I was often completely alone there, I sat
underneath the table; the tablecloth hung low . . . and I always hid there. I had such fear
that I always sat there.’38
Along with the intense fear that plagued a small child in the conditions of slavery, there
are frequent references to the humiliation experienced by the child or which it witnessed in
relation to other people, mainly its parents:
Of course, they were unclothed and humiliated. Of course, there was humiliation. Like a beast,
like a beast. Mother and father worked, as did my older brother; he was eight years older; how
old was he—thirteen? So, he worked . . . And, of course they had the look of animals, you
could say; wooden clogs, everything on them was dirty and greasy because no clothing
whatsoever was supplied, only wooden clogs.39
Typically, references to humiliation suffered at the hands of the Germans often go
hand in hand with memoirists’ indignant comments on the behaviour of ‘their own’ Soviet
people after the war ended, including fellow citizens and even relatives:
My mother was in Germany, and when we arrived in the Union [that is, the USSR] after the
war, Uncle, daddy’s brother – he was a lieutenant-general said: ‘If I had known that you had
gone voluntarily to Germany, I would have shot you myself.’ That’s what he said to mama.
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But mother, who was never at a loss for words, says: ‘So you swine are accusing me of
something. That means you went somewhere’ – but she said it ‘in Russian’ [that is, she used
foul language—G.G.] – you abandoned us, we were scoffed at here, we experienced a lot of
fear here. And then we were driven here. Where were you, our protectors? And you say that
you would have shot me?’ . . . I remember my postwar childhood . . . People knew that I had
been in Germany; they teased me for being a ‘German’; I remember that this was not very
pleasant for mama. Do you understand? There you have it. And no one ever talked about this.
They tried to keep quiet. They were afraid.40
Framing the experience of living in forced labour conditions by referring to the
symmetrical oppression on the part of ‘foreign’ Germans and ‘our’ fellow citizens is an
interesting example of the contemporary culture of memory, in which Ukrainian
Ostarbeiters are presented for the most part as Hitler’s slaves and Stalin’s orphans.41
Contemporary productions (for example, Ostarbeiter) as well as literature (Serhii
Baturyn’s novel OST) and the recently published memoirs of underage workers in the
Third Reich mentioned earlier are also constructed according to this pattern:
‘Why do you have a German accent? To which Ukrainian party do you belong?’ the
investigator asked. After my contradictory response he came toward me slowly and with a
bored glance, without enthusiasm, he knocked me from the stool onto the floor with his fist.
And this was what happened during each of the three interrogations. I must note that the twometre-tall Hitlerite policeman Berger, who beat me for reading the Ukrainian Herald, the
newspaper of the Ukrainian National Federation one year before the investigator did,
demonstrated more emotion during the torture than the Stalinist oprichnik. But these two
monsters had one trait in common: hatred of Ukrainians.42
Another feature of memoirs about war childhood in general43 and childhood spent in
forced labour in Germany in particular is that, in addition to bursts of memory, these
reminiscences contain a large cast of characters and entire groups of people who are united
by various traits: from the generalised, non-personified ‘our people’ and ‘Germans’ to
‘occupiers’, ‘fascists’, ‘SS men’, ‘prisoners of war’, ‘Ostarbeiters’ and so on, who are
discernible by their social markers. Even in mentioning a specific person, Ukrainian
narrators tend to present a certain whole image that is meant to absorb, in the narrator’s view,
the most characteristic features of, for example, the enemy, the oppressor, even if this image
departs markedly from reality. Like, for example, the images of the members of one family,
the image of someone being ‘hung round with’ weapons is clearly hyperbolised:
And so we ended up with this family, these nationalists, SS people. And the grandmother, and
the daughter, and the son . . . (Pause) he was in the army. On the Eastern Front. And the three
of them, draped with weapons, that’s how they walked around. We were here for a long time.
(Pause) Well, it was cleaner than in the camp . . . (In an undertone) . . . It was horrible . . . She
has a lash, and this, and a submachine gun, a Schmeisser. Yes. And a pistol, she carried one
around, too. (Pause, sigh).44
Another distinctive feature of these reminiscences is that, alongside references to the
trials and tribulations of war, our narrators nevertheless also tried to recall episodes from
their childhood that were connected with games, toys, and children’s recreational
activities:
Kids. You know what kids are like. They only have one thing on their minds. They needed
dolls, some rags. They found them at the garbage dump. There was some kind of sewing plant
there and some sort of rags. For me it was the highest degree of happiness to collect these rags.
There’s nothing like it! So, [we made] some kind of dolls out of these rags . . . After all, a
child needs to play. Childhood is childhood.45
It would appear that such references play a very important compensatory role, as they
support the narrator’s feeling that his or her childhood was not entirely lost in the
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whirlwind of war. A similar compensatory role, but one that accords meaning to the entire
experience of the war years, is played by the ‘historical content’ of memoirs of war
childhood. At issue here is the perception of historical events as facts related to one’s
personal biography, in relation to which the narrator occupies four different psychological
stances: Participant, Eyewitness, Contemporary and Heir of historical experience.46 It is
interesting to note that in oral histories about children’s experiences of living in forced
labour conditions the first two stances often coincide. This constitutes the final feature of
these stories, which I will discuss here. According to my observations, many former child
Ostarbeiters in their autobiographical narratives also recount their own experience of
slavery, which is presented in fragmentary fashion but ‘from inside’ the events that are
being described (that is, they are in the position of Participant), and parallel to this they
provide a description, not of what happened to them but, more often than not, what
happened to ‘adult’ participants of certain events; in this process they seem to be
positioned ‘on the sidelines’ and are not physically included in the situations that they are
recalling (the Eyewitness stance). As a result, these oral histories recreate both the most
personal sense of life in the conditions of forced labour – from the stance of an
‘I-Participant’ of an event – and the social, solidarity-based significance of this experience
as part of the general tragic fate of the entire Ukrainian nation during the war.
Conclusions
The figure of a child against whom Nazi Germany committed the crime of forcible
deportation to Germany where s/he was compelled to work (age permitting) occupies a
specific place in the memory politics of the USSR and post-Soviet Ukraine. In Soviet
propaganda and agitation during the war and in the early post-war years, the figure of a
young child transported to a foreign land played a purely mobilisational and consolidating
role, inasmuch as it was part of the general image of forced labour and constituted its most
expressive and emotional component. In the 1950s – 80s, again within the framework of
the place occupied by forced labour topics in the memory politics of the USSR, the figure
of the child Ostarbeiter underscored the Nazis’ inhumane policies toward civilians in
general and forced labourers in particular; concentrated within it was a strong emotionalaffective potential for exerting influence on Soviet citizenry and, more importantly, on
Soviet children. It is worth noting that the literary work about forced labour in Germany
that sparked the strongest reader response during the Soviet era was a novel written from
the point of view of a child – a teenager – who became a forced labourer at the age of 15.
In the post-Soviet period, societal and scholarly interest in the history and memory of
forced labour during the Nazi era was sparked by the payments to this category of Nazi
victims, which were already being issued by the Federal Republic of Germany, by the
activities of organisations and funds that were specially created to issue these payments
and humanitarian aid, and by the broad rejection of Soviet heritage – typical of the 1990s
– within the context of changes in the general vector of history-writing in favour of the
formation of national historiographies. This situation gave rise to the attitude toward the
memory of forced labour as a memory that is being rediscovered and whose goal it is to
honour victims and maintain attention on the issue of forced labour and its
commemoration, which was ‘overlooked’ during the Soviet era. Against this backdrop,
vivid interest has been observed since the 1990s in the recreation of, among other things,
the experience and memory of former child Ostarbeiters. In the contemporary culture of
memory, this interest has been reflected on the level of state-legal regulation, institutional
support, public interest and scholarly research. At the same time, the recorded oral
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histories of former child forced labourers are becoming the product and generalisation of
current tools that are used in the (re)creation and dissemination of the memory of child
forced labourers; these instruments are the semantic synopsis of all state, legal, scholarly
and public efforts aimed at commemorating the history and memory of this group of war
victims. Based on these stories, films are being made, novels and plays are being written,
and plays and shows are being produced, all of which help to preserve knowledge and
experience of this aspect of the Second World War, as well as sustain an international
dialogue between victims of the war and contemporary youth.
Acknowledgements
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This article was translated from Ukrainian by Marta D. Olynyk.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
From the “General Clauses” of the Law of Ukraine “On the Social Protection of Children of
War” located at: http://zakon4.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/2195-15
For the most informative website on the history of forced labour in German, English and
Russian, featuring bibliographies, documents, references to archival collections and other
related information, see http://www.bundesarchiv.de/zwangsarbeit/index.html.en
Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz, 94.
On this point I disagree with Johannes-Dieter Steinert, who regards as child forced labourers
those who were under 18 years of age when they were compelled to perform this type of work.
See Steinert, Deportation und Zwangsarbeit.
Ibid., 28, 278.
Spoerer and Fleischhacker, “Forced Laborers in Nazi Germany,” 199 (Table 9: Age Structure
of Selected Forced-Labor Groups by Year of Birth [in Percent]).
Polian, “Ne-pe-re-no-sy-mo!;” Nikolai Karpov, “Malen0 kii Ostarbeiter,” 5.
Ibid., 6 – 8.
Grinchenko, “The Ostarbeiter of Nazi Germany in Soviet and Post-Soviet Ukrainian Historical
Memory,” 401 – 26; idem, “(Re)Constructing Suffering: ‘Fascist Captivity’ in Soviet
Commemorative Culture,” 243 – 61. See also in German: Grinchenko, “Ukrainische
Zwangsarbeiter im Dritten Reich,” 371– 402.
Kononenko, Otomsti nemtsu, 28.
From late 1944 onwards this set of written testimonies came to include letters, diaries and
albums that were discovered by Soviet troops in territories outside the borders of the USSR.
The Ukrainian writer Mykola Smolenchuk and his Russian colleague Vitalii Semin were both
born in 1927.
Semin, Nagrudnyi znak OST, 82
For example, the Ukrainian writer Mykola Smolenchuk’s novel The Grey Generation,
published in 1965, corresponded to the fundamental theses of the general Soviet discourse of
the Great Patriotic War. The main hero and his friends straight away launch a struggle in
Germany against the enslavers, and even though the antifascist underground is depicted in the
novel through the author’s hints and the hero’s conjectures, for the purposes of their own
struggle these young people opt for acts of sabotage, setting fire to fields of rye, and taking part
in the destruction of a guard and a traitor in the penal battalion. See Smolenchuk, Syve
pokolinnia: roman. For another literary portrayal of unvanquished, young Soviet patriots in
German slavery, see Avramenko, Hintsi z nevoli: povist 0 .
One revealing publication that appeared in the late 1960s–early 1970s was the 53-page-long
article “Zabuty nemozhna! Rozpovid0 pro te, iak rozkrylasia strashna istoriia hitlerivs0 koï
katorhy,” published in 1970 in the journal Znamia, one of the most important official
periodicals of the Soviet era. In the opening lines, the two authors explain its topicality by the
confrontational and tense political atmosphere of that period, which emerged against the
background of the discovery of numerous “new pro-fascist movements in the FRG [Federal
Republic of Germany]” and the “scandalously mild sentences” that were handed down to Nazi
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G. Grinchenko
war criminals, including the “notorious trial of the Auschwitz executioners . . . who got off
with only a mild scare”. See Iurii Zhukov and Roza Izmailova, “Zabyt0 nel0 zia!”
16. For detailed discussion of the literature of the Young Pioneer Organisation of the Soviet Union
as an ideological, agitational-propagandistic, and functional phenomenon, see Svetlana
Leont0 eva, “Literatura pionerskoi organizatsii.”
17. In the novel, the girlfriend dies and the main hero, Kuz0 ma Kovtiuk, takes little Johann away
with him. Together with Kuz0 ma’s fellow countrywoman, Katia, who has agreed to become his
wife and Johann’s mother, the hero leaves liberated Bremen and sets out on the journey home.
18. My three articles cited in n.9, which are devoted mainly to the Soviet memory project about
forced labourers of the Third Reich, are based on materials that mostly address the experience
and memory specifically of young people who were deported to Germany in keeping with
orders and mobilisational lists mandating that all individuals born no later than 1926 were
subject to “independent” deportation, i.e., without their families.
19. Sin0 ova, “Pravove rehuliuvannia sotsial0 noho zakhystu ostarbaiteriv,” 13. The author also
emphasises that the term “Ostarbeiter” was not used in legislative acts regulating social
policies on participants of the war. Instead, the terms “repatriants” or “former forced labourers
deported by force to Germany and its allied countries” appeared in these documents. This
coincides with my observations about the absence of the word “Ostarbeiter” even in the public
space of the former Soviet Union, where one of the rare exceptions was the novel Ostarbaiter
(1980), co-written by the Ukrainian writers Ivan Zozulia and Ivan Vlasenko.
20. Pastushenko, “V’i¨zd repatriantiv do Kyieva zaboroneno . . . ,” 38.
21. A large body of literature exists on the negotiations and decisions concerning the issuance and
practice of implementing these payments, but it is mostly in the German and English
languages. In the post-Soviet space, Pavel Polian’s book is still the most detailed study on the
launch of these payments. See Polian, Zhertvy dvukh diktatur. Some facts and a description of
the payment policy are presented in Liudmyla Sin0 ova’s dissertation: see n.18.
22. I did not apply this differentiated approach to examining the recreation of the memory of child
Ostarbeiters during the Soviet period because of the absence of both a socio-legal initiative
concerning the regulation of the status of forced labourers and attempts to institutionalise their
associations. However, the scholarly and public dimensions of the construction and transmission
of the memory of this group of war participants in the works listed in n.9 were examined.
23. Sin0 ova, “Pravove rehuliuvannia.”
24. Pam’iat 0 zarady maibutn 0 oho, 8.
25. See the USVZhN website, located at http://usvzn.com/?p¼1480.
26. See the four-volume collection Pam’iat 0 zarady maibutn 0 oho, published jointly by the
Ukrainian Union of Prisoners – Victims of Nazism and the Ukrainian National Fund for Mutual
Understanding and Reconciliation.
27. Mirchevskaia, . . . I on podaril mne mamu: vospominaniia, 89.
28. http://usvzn.com/?p¼1940.
29. Dolia ditei kolyshnikh skhidnykh robitnykiv, narodzhenykh u 1944 – 1945 rokakh u
Nimechchyni, comp. Ianina Dresler [Janine Dressler]. (Blurb on the cover notes that these
materials are designed for use in elementary schools and may be reproduced for this purpose.)
30. Ibid., 61 – 3.
31. S0 oma, Vakatsii¨ u Tangermiunde: roman.
32. Ibid., 5.
33. http://news.liga.net/news/old/255500-prezident-prinyal-uchastie-v-otkrytii-pervogo-ukr
ainskogo-mezhdunarodnogo-festivalya-dokumentalnogo-.htm
34. Embacher et al., Children and War: Past and Present, 12.
35. Rozhkov, Vtoraia mirovaia voina v detskikh “ramkakh pamiati”: sbornik statei. For a selection
of articles and discussions of questions relating to the history, anthropology, sociology and
ethnography of childhood, see also the website of the Working Group on the History and
Culturology of Childhood at the Department of History and the Theory of Culture, Russian
State University for the Humanities, located at: http://childcult.rsuh.ru/
36. See Steinert, Deportation und Zwangsarbeit. In his introduction, the author notes that the next
volume will be devoted to Jewish children who became forced labourers.
37. Nurkova, “‘Voina i mir”: voennoe izmerenie v vospominaniiakh o detstve.”
38. Oral-history interview with Olena Kalashnikova, in Grinchenko, Nevyhadane: Usni istoriı̈
ostarbaiteriv, 152.
30
European Review of History—Revue européenne d’histoire
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
409
Oral-history interview with Valentyna Ivanivna Kuz0 mina, ibid., 119.
Oral-history interview with Kalashnikova, ibid., 153.
In the late 1990s the formula “The Ostarbeiters of Ukraine: Hitler’s slaves, Stalin’s orphans”
first appeared in the works of Mykhailo Koval0 . It subsequently constituted the main direction
of the (re)creation of the memory of forced labour both in the public space and scholarly
discourse of post-Soviet Ukraine.
Havrylenko, “Ne chas mynaie, a mynaiem my,” 97.
Nurkova, “‘Voina i mir.’”
Transcript of an interview with Elena Murashova, in Projekt “Dokumentation ehemaliger
Zwangs- und Sklavenarbeiter.”
Oral-history interview with Kuz0 mina, in Grinchenko, Nevyhadane, 120.
Nurkova, “Voina i mir,” 200.
Downloaded by [Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin] at 03:54 12 May 2015
Notes on contributor
Gelinada Grinchenko – historian, Professor of History at the Department of Ukrainian Studies
(Faculty of Philosophy, V. N. Karazin National University, Kharkiv, Ukraine), Head of the
Ukrainian Oral History Association. Currently she is a member of the European research network
COST ‘In Search for Transcultural Memory’, and Project Partner of EU’s 7th Framework
Programme for Research and Technological Development ‘EUBORDERSCAPES: Bordering,
Political Landscapes and Social Arenas: Potentials and Challenges of Evolving Border Concepts in a
post-Cold War World’. Her main areas of research are oral history, the history and memory of
forcing to labour during World War II, war and post-war politics of memory, border studies. She has
edited several books and journals, and published many chapters and peer-reviewed articles on these
issues. Her latest authored book is An Oral History of Forcing to Labour: Method, Contexts, Texts
(Kharkiv, 2012).
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32
Journal of Loss and Trauma, 10:347–358, 2005
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Inc.
ISSN: 1532-5024 print/1532-5032 online
DOI: 10.1080/15325020590956774
CHALLENGES ASSOCIATED WITH THE STUDY OF
RESILIENCE TO TRAUMA IN HOLOCAUST
SURVIVORS
LIAT AYALON
Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital, University of California,
San Francisco, California, USA
To date, the majority of research on the Holocaust has focused on the pathological
sequelae associated with exposure to severe trauma. While this line of research is
extremely important in understanding trauma-related psychopathology, it ignores
the experience of those who managed to resume adaptive life despite the horrendous effects of the Holocaust. This article reviews the current state of knowledge
on resilience to trauma in light of the numerous challenges associated with
launching this type of research with survivors of the Holocaust. A more balanced
approach that identifies the pathological as well as the resilient aspects in the life
of Holocaust survivors is likely to provide important clinical and theoretical
information about survival following exposure to severe trauma.
The pathological sequelae of the Holocaust are well documented.
Approximately 46.8% of Holocaust survivors show signs of posttraumatic stress disorder several decades after the Holocaust (Kuch
& Cox, 1992). In addition, Holocaust survivors report higher levels
of depression, anxiety, and physiological symptoms than the general population (Kuch & Cox, 1992; Kahana, Harel, & Kahana,
1989). Furthermore, ample research has shown that the negative
effects of the Holocaust continue far beyond the survivors’ generation and affect the second and third generations of Holocaust survivors as well (Rubenstein, Cutter, & Templer, 1989–1990).
Psychological and psychiatric research on the Holocaust has
focused primarily on the pathological aspects associated with
severe exposure to trauma. The clinical terminology and research
framework following the Holocaust were oriented toward
Received 2 February 2005; accepted 16 March 2005.
Address correspondence to Liat Ayalon, Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital, 401
Parnassus Ave., Box CPT, San Francisco, CA 94122, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
347
33
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L. Ayalon
explaining and describing the pathology. Term such as survivor
syndrome (Neiderland, 1968) or KZ (Chodoff, 1963; Eitinger,
1964) caught on easily and have been employed widely in describing the pathological consequences of the Holocaust and in guiding
research on the Holocaust throughout the years.
The Holocaust experience is qualitatively different from other
traumatic experiences and, therefore, can provide unique and
important information about trauma as well as about resilience.
Unlike natural disasters, medical illnesses, or loss of loved ones
due to natural occurrences, the traumas suffered by Holocaust survivors were intentionally inflicted by human beings. In addition,
unlike many other victims of violence, rape, and abuse, the
Holocaust was experienced by a large segment of society at least
partially as a group and not only as individuals.
In many ways, the Holocaust is similar to other genocides that
took place in Africa, Europe, Central America, and Asia. In all
cases, ethnic cleansing took place and entire communities were
exposed to murder, abuse, and trauma. These genocides, however,
occurred in different cultures and eras. Additionally, even though
many times ethnic cleansing was supported by the government,
the support was never as explicit and organized as during the
Holocaust. Furthermore, though always too late, the world has
always responded in an attempt to end the ethnic cleansing in
the case of other genocides. World War II, on the other hand,
was never initiated in order to end the Holocaust. These characteristics make the Holocaust unique for the study of trauma in its most
severe form. Furthermore, the fact that the Holocaust took place
more than 50 years ago provides an opportunity to view its effects
using a developmental perspective. Its position as the most
extreme form of widely experienced trauma makes it useful for
the study of resiliency characteristics across different types of
traumas.
Unfortunately, to date, not enough research has been conducted on resilience to trauma in Holocaust survivors. While there is
an abundance of research on the pathological sequelae of the
Holocaust, far less attention has been given to those who, despite
exposure to severe atrocities, were able to establish a relative
healthy and productive life. Studying those who were able to
resume productive functioning following exposure to severe traumas is as important as studying the pathological aspects associated
34
Resilience to Trauma in Holocaust Survivors
349
with trauma, because it provides information about the adaptive
nature of human beings. As survivors of the Holocaust are aging
and dying, there is an increasing need to identify and document
their efforts and means of survival. In order to provide a more
realistic view of survivors’ experiences, both the pathological and
resilient aspects of survival should be studied. This knowledge
about the adaptation of aging survivors years after the Holocaust
can further guide our work with survivors of other genocides.
Views on Resilience
In psychology, a shift has been taking place in recent years from
focusing on the pathological to focusing on the adaptive nature
of human beings, and positive psychology has been gaining a
respectful place as a valuable paradigm. Terms such as hardiness
(Kobasa, 1979), resilience (Rutter, 1985; Werner, 1989), posttraumatic growth (Calhoun & Tedeschi, 1989–1990; Tennen & Affleck,
1999), stress inoculation (Meichenbaum & Novaco, 1985), salutogenesis (Antonovsky, 1991), positive illusions (Taylor & Brown,
1988), and thriving (O’Leary & Ickovics, 1995) have been receiving increased attention and have been studied extensively in
relation to a variety of traumatic events, such as struggles with a
variety of medical conditions, bereavement, and abuse.
It has been proposed that when individuals are confronted
with challenge, they may respond in one of four ways: succumb
to the event, survive and continue to function, recover and return
to baseline, or thrive by flourishing beyond their original level of
functioning (O’Leary & Ickovics, 1995). Resilience has been identified as a relatively homeostatic construct that represents the ability
of the individual to restore equilibrium (Carver, 1998). Other definitions of resilience include the capacity for recovery and maintenance of adaptive functioning following incapacity (Garmezy,
1991), the positive side of adaptation following exhaustive circumstances (Masten, 1989), or sustained competence under stress
(Werner, 1995; Werner & Smith, 1992).
Protective mechanisms associated with resilience include both
individual and social resources (Garmezy, 1983). Individual characteristics that are considered to be protective include intelligence,
positive temperament, sociability, communication skills (Garmezy,
1991), beliefs in internal control (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1995),
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L. Ayalon
self-efficacy, a sense of coherence, hardiness (Moos & Schaefer,
1990; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1995), optimism (Folkman, 1997;
Moos & Schaefer, 1990; O’Leary & Ickovics, 1995; Tedeschi &
Calhoun, 1995), and active problem-oriented coping ability
(Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1995). Social factors, such as positive
parent-child attachment, parental warmth, family cohesion, close
relationships with caring adults, social support, nonpunitive social
environments, and supportive communities, also have been
associated with resilience (Garmezy, 1991; Olsson et al., 2003).
It has been acknowledged that resilience in one sphere does
not guarantee resilience in other spheres and that positive and
negative effects of trauma and stress can co-occur (Ryff & Singer,
2003).
Resilience in Holocaust Survivors
Researchers who have attempted to identify nonpathological
aspects associated with the Holocaust have concluded that it is
difficult to make a distinction between the pathological and the
nonpathological aspects of the Holocaust because the two often
co-occur (Davidson, 1992; Langer, 1990). It has been argued that
the majority of survivors demonstrate psychological vulnerability.
Yet, many of these symptoms are considered normative given the
level of exposure to traumatic experiences (Davidson, 1992).
Others have argued that the sheer ability to continue with one’s life
after the Holocaust provides an evidence of resilience (Frankl,
1963) and that survivors are relatively similar in their functioning
to the general population (Hass, 1995; Leon, Butcher, Kleinman,
Goldberg, & Almagor, 1981). Furthermore, Shanan and Shahar
(1983) found that, relative to a control group, Holocaust survivors
tended to be more task oriented, to cope more actively, and to
express more favorable attitudes toward family, friends, and work.
Holocaust survivors also reported more stability and satisfaction
with their current situation. Based on a review of the literature,
Lomranz (1995) argued that scientifically sound research on the
Holocaust has shown that survivors manifest levels of adaptation
and well-being that are similar to or greater than those of nonHolocaust populations.
A development perspective of recovery and adaptation
following the Holocaust has been identified by several researchers
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Resilience to Trauma in Holocaust Survivors
351
(Davidson, 1992; Fogelman, 1991; Hass, 1995). These researchers
have argued that, following liberation, different responses became
adaptive at different periods of the survivor’s life. During the initial
stages of liberation, survivors adapted by using denial and by
rebuilding their family and community. This stage was followed
by an outburst of emotional grief reactions in later years due to
the realization of the magnitude of their loss. In the final stage, survivors tended to search for meaning in their experiences and
attempted to attain a sense of connection with their past.
Based on past research, a variety of factors associated with
resilience in Holocaust survivors have been identified. These
include personality characteristics, factors associated with conditions during the war, and factors associated with postwar conditions. Because of the extreme nature of the Holocaust, some
have argued that prewar conditions had little effect on postwar
adaptation (Rappoport, 1968), and almost no attempt has been
made to study the role of prewar conditions.
Personality characteristics identified as contributing to resilience and to better adaptation among survivors include denial
and overactivity, particularly during the war and immediately after
the war (Davidson, 1992); the use of instrumental coping (Harel,
Kahana, & Kahana, 1988); and the use of compensatory mechanisms such as constriction of cognitive functioning and detachment
(Shanan & Shahar, 1983). Belief in God, belief in being special
because of surviving past traumatic experiences, and the ability
to enjoy life despite the uncertainty of the future also are considered adaptive mechanisms (Greene, 2002; Hass, 1995). Based
on interviews with Holocaust survivors, Helmreich (1992) suggested 10 qualities that assisted survivors to adapt to their new life
after the war: flexibility, assertiveness, tenacity, optimism, intelligence, distancing ability, group consciousness, assimilating the
knowledge of survival, finding meaning in one’s life, and courage.
Factors related to conditions during the war that are associated
with resilience include retaining contact with family members or
friends during the war, establishing social contacts and being able
to obtain social support, and having better access to food and shelter (Davidson, 1992; Hass, 1995). Experiencing torture and starvation for a shorter period of time or with less severity also has
been identified as contributing to better postwar adaptation
(Rosen, Reynolds, Yaeger, Houck, & Hurwitz, 1991). Younger
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L. Ayalon
age during the Holocaust was identified by several researchers as
an advantage, because youth showed greater flexibility and openness to experiences that allowed them to rebuild their lives after
the war (Davidson, 1992; Hass, 1995). However, in contrast, quantitative research has shown that younger age during the Holocaust
was associated with greater psychopathology in later years (Shanan
& Shahar, 1983).
It also has been argued that the social context after the war
played an important role in survivors’ recovery. Many of the survivors immigrated to Israel, where they were immediately forced
to engage in building a new society. The unstable security situation
in Israel provided survivors with an outlet for personal anger
(Hass, 1995), while the matter-of-fact attitude with which the Israeli
society had treated survivors helped them in their efforts to rebuild
their lives (Davidson, 1992). In addition, the kibbutz, a communal
living arrangement adapted by some survivors who settled in
Israel, provided an adaptive structure because it assisted in replacing the destroyed family structure (Klein & Reinharz, 1972).
Researchers have also found that those survivors who participated
in communal activities, felt part of the community, had a supportive family, engaged in artistic expression, gave testimonies, and
attended self-help groups were more successful in their efforts to
rebuild their lives (Davidson, 1992; Greene, 2002; Harel et al.,
1988; Hass, 1995).
Challenges Associated With the Study of Resilience in
Holocaust Survivors
The study of resilience to trauma in Holocaust survivors has been
limited for a number of reasons. The pathological aspects associated
with the Holocaust experience are so salient and easy to detect that
they immediately call for attention. Research that does not focus on
the pathological carries the risk of underestimating or even minimizing the horrible consequences of the Holocaust. This not only
undermines the personal experiences of Holocaust survivors, but
also has dangerous political implications because of the risk that
some may use the findings as a means to deny the horrendous effects
of the Holocaust. At the same time, not mentioning the adaptive nature of some of the survivors pathologizes their experiences. To complicate things, impairment was financially rewarded following the
38
Resilience to Trauma in Holocaust Survivors
353
war; survivors were eligible for compensation from Germany only if
they demonstrated direct physical or psychological sequelae associated with the Holocaust (Davidson, 1992). This guided both researchers’ and subjects’ focus on the pathological. Another conflict faced
by survivors and researchers was the fact that demonstrating the
long-term pathological effects of the Holocaust implied for survivors
that they were defeated, whereas denying the existence of such
effects suggested that the war was benign (Hass, 1995).
Initially, the majority of research on the Holocaust was guided
by psychoanalytic and psychodynamic theories (Lomranz, 1995).
While later attempts were made to more rigorously study pathological aspects associated with the Holocaust independently of a psychodynamic or a psychoanalytic orientation, no such efforts were made
to study the resilient factors associated with survival. Furthermore,
most initial research on the Holocaust was conducted by psychiatrists,
and therefore those survivors who sought psychiatric help were most
easily accessible for research purposes. Most research on resilience
and adaptation is based on case studies or qualitative interviews that
are often combined with personal experiences of the authors, with little attempt to systematically identify factors associated with resilience.
The use of convenience samples and the lack of well-defined control
groups are additional weaknesses of this line of research. In addition,
past research did not distinguish adequately between survivors.
The term Holocaust survivor was poorly defined and often included
Jews who lived in Germany under the Nazi regime but had left
Germany prior to World War II, those who lived in hiding during
the war, and those who lived in concentration and death camps
(Fogelman, 1991) as well as non-Jews who were subject to Nazi
persecution. While all of these individuals were affected by the Nazi
regime, their experiences likely have been dramatically different.
While studies of the Holocaust provide unique opportunities
for understanding the effects of trauma at the individual and
societal levels, the experiences are heterogeneous and vary dramatically across individuals. Length of exposure to trauma, types
of traumas experienced or observed, and extent of loss are likely
to be important in explaining postwar adaptation. All of these variables are extremely difficult to assess because of their subjective
nature (Krinsley & Weathers, 1995). The fact that the Holocaust
took place over 50 years ago also makes it difficult to identify
the particular ingredients responsible for pathological versus
39
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L. Ayalon
nonpathological aspects. Throughout the years, many confounding
variables may have had an effect on survivors’ levels of functioning, and the time elapsed may have affected the ability of survivors
to describe their past experiences. Furthermore, it has been
demonstrated that recall of traumatic events is influenced by memory problems, biases, distortions, and underreporting of events
(Vrana & Lauterbach, 1994; Zimmerman, 1983) and that accurate
recall is most likely to occur for events taking place in the recent
past (Clements & Turnip, 1996).
A common definition of resilience such as a homeostatic
return to premorbid functioning (Carver, 1998) is difficult to study.
This definition involves certain assumptions about the individual’s
premorbid conditions. Given that most living survivors were relatively young at the time of the Holocaust and that most survivors
were exposed to traumatic events over a period of several years,
return to premorbid functioning can be considered as a regression
and not necessarily as a sign of adaptation. A more adequate definition in the case of Holocaust survivors would be the ability to
adapt adequately socially and professionally to postwar situations.
However, this definition also is difficult to assess empirically
because of its subjective nature and lack of universal standards.
Only a small fraction of the Jews who lived in Europe prior to
World War II survived. Therefore, it is likely that those Jews who
survived the war represent a unique group (Weinfeld, Sigal, &
Eaton, 1981). Research on Holocaust survivors has to take into
consideration the fact that survivors may have been a more resilient group to begin with, especially those who are still alive decades
following the Holocaust. Furthermore, even when nonpsychiatric
samples are studied, it is likely that those who agree to participate
in such studies represent a selective group of survivors. This is supported by the finding that giving testimonies serves as a positive
coping method and that the ability to reflect on one’s life and integrate past experiences is highly therapeutic for trauma survivors
(Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1995).
Future Directions
To date, there has been almost no systematic research on
factors associated with resilience to trauma in Holocaust survivors.
Several directions should be taken in order to provide more
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Resilience to Trauma in Holocaust Survivors
355
comprehensive and useful information on the topic. First, research
in nonclinical populations is much needed. Research should more
rigorously focus on the personality characteristics, coping style,
social context (i.e., family, community, and country of residency),
and cultural background of Holocaust survivors as well as on the
second and third generations of survivors.
Second, most of the research on the topic has been qualitative.
Much of this research did not distinguish between the personal
experiences and views of the researchers and the findings based
on interviews of survivors. Furthermore, most researchers did
not adequately describe the qualitative methodology employed
to obtain or analyze the results. In addition, researchers did not
attempt to use quantitative methodology to support qualitative
findings. Initially, research is likely to remain primarily qualitative
in nature because of the dearth of information. Also, because of the
long period of time elapsed, most research is likely to be retrospective in nature. However, research should employ a more rigorous
methodology of selecting or sampling both survivors and controls
by preselecting dimensions for comparison, such as demographic
characteristics or trauma experiences. Assessing multiple groups
of survivors and controls may assist in better capturing their
heterogeneity and complexity (Shmotkin & Lomranz, 1998).
Third, a more systematic distinction among pre-Holocaust,
Holocaust, and post-Holocaust experiences should occur, and
resilience factors should be identified according to their specific
occurrence in time. Fourth, despite theoretical advances in the general literature on the nature of resilience and adaptation to trauma,
there has been no attempt to integrate the current research paradigm into the study of the Holocaust. Testing the applicability of
some of the theoretical models of resilience and adaptation to
the Holocaust experience is likely to provide important information about the similarities and distinctions between the
Holocaust experience and other traumas. The use of common
measures of growth and resilience may be justified and may contribute to the connection between recent trends in psychology
and the study of the Holocaust.
Fifth, because the Holocaust took place several decades ago,
there is an opportunity to assess survivors’ ability for resilience
not only based on reports of past experiences, but in relation to
current stressors in their life. This may provide a developmental
41
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L. Ayalon
perspective that outlines the connection between the ability to
adjust to past traumas during childhood and adolescence and the
ability to cope with traumas in late adulthood.
Finally, while there is a plethora of research on survival guilt
following the Holocaust, there is no research on the ability of survivors to solve their moral dilemmas and resolve their feelings of
guilt. This line of research may have important implications for
the understanding of posttrauma adaptation in Holocaust survivors.
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44
Mortality, Vol. 12, No. 2, May 2007
‘‘I never talked’’: enforced silence, non-narrative
memory, and the Gulag
JEHANNE M. GHEITH
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
ABSTRACT Jehanne Gheith’s essay comes from a larger project of life history interviews with Gulag
survivors which she conducted over several years (multiple interviews with each person). The Gulag is
typically left out of Western histories of traumatic memory in the twentieth century. Gheith argues that
this omission is connected to the silence around the Gulag in Russia and to the fact that the dominant
models for traumatic memory are based on the Holocaust, an experience that does not fit for Gulag
survivors. Many trauma theorists place narrative (telling the story) at the center of healing from
trauma. Yet, for some 50 years after the height of Stalin’s purges, Gulag survivors risked severe
punishment if they discussed their experiences in the labor camps so that this kind of narrative approach
was not open to them. One of the major effects of the enforced silence, Gheith argues, is that absent the
narrative option, Gulag survivors developed creative, non-narrative ways to deal with their memories
and experiences. Deploying a case study methodology, Gheith argues for the need to include the Gulag
in discourse on traumatic memory and to seriously consider modes of healing or repair that are not
primarily organized around narrative.
KEYWORDS:
trauma; memory; Gulag; Russia
[H]aunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is
happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and
always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to
experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition
(Gordon, 1997, p. 8).
This essay springs from a question that keeps returning to (haunt) me: Why does
the Holocaust preoccupy the Western imagination and why does the Gulag barely
inhabit it? How is it possible that serious books on trauma, historical tragedy, and
memory in the twentieth century barely mention the Gulag in which some 10 – 20
million people died and whose effects continue to be far-reaching? (Antze &
Lambek, 1996; Bal, Crewe & Spitzer, 1999; Caruth, 1996; Miller & Tougaw,
Correspondence: Dr. Jehanne M. Gheith, Slavic and Eurasian Studies Department, Duke
University, Box 90259, Durham, NC 27708-0259, USA. Fax: 919-660-3141.
E-mail: [email protected]
ISSN 1357-6275 (print) ISSN 1469-9885 (online) ! 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13576270701255149
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J. M. Gheith
2002; Stern, 2006). Perhaps, like most of the most important questions, mine is
ultimately unanswerable in terms of proof. Yet it demands exploring.
To clear the ground, some of the tangible, but to my mind, deeply insufficient,
reasons that the Gulag has left so few ripples for most of those outside of its direct
sphere will be identified:
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
It’s in the nature of the catastrophe: many people (scholars, survivors, and
others) have argued or assumed that the Holocaust is a real limit event
(and concomitantly, the Gulag and other twentieth-century tragedies are
of a substantially different order) (Friedlander, 1992; Miller & Tougaw,
2002; Stern, 2006);
After World War II and with the founding of Israel, an international
dialogue has been created about the Holocaust that does not exist in the
case of the Gulag;
The Soviet Union was an ally of the USA and Western Europe in World
War II;
Conversely, Communism was seen as an enemy of Western democracies
later and we have not wanted to understand our enemies as people;
The Gulag lasted for a very long time and there were no public trials (cf.
Nuremberg) and no public accountability. Indeed, the Communist
government that incarcerated people in the labor camps continued in
power until 1991.
These reasons are all part of the story, and in this essay the fifth reason has particular
import. But there is more here: a deeper understanding of how Gulag survivors
remember and narrate their experiences will help to make the Gulag experience part
of Western understandings of catastrophic experience and also will expand the
categories through which we understand traumatic loss and how to deal with it.
This essay is part of a larger project in which this author has conducted multiple
interviews over several years with 13 survivors of the Gulag.1 My interviews are life
history interviews; my group of interviewees includes three workers and ten
members of the intelligentsia; nine were women and four men. Interviewing the
same people several times, in depth, and over time, has been important for dealing
with the sensitive topic of the Gulag as interviewees have increasingly trusted me
with more information in follow-up interviews. In these interviews, the processes
of memory and narration are traced: what people tell and how they tell it; what
they remember and how that affects them in the present. This is the under-story of
the Gulag, a rooted sense of how people lived with the experience of authoritarian
violence of the camps when they could not discuss that openly.2
My aim is to look directly at what is not usually looked at, what haunts. To look,
as Derrida puts it, ‘‘not in order to chase away the ghosts, but this time to grant
them the right . . . to . . . a hospitable memory . . . out of a concern for justice’’
(Derrida, 1994, p. 175).3 Even today, there is little public discourse about the
Gulag in Russia; it continues to be widely ignored or denied but its traces are
clearly visible in literature, in life, and at the edges of public discourse
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Silence, non-narrative memory, and the Gulag
161
(Toker, 2000). Thus, while the term ‘‘haunting’’ will not often be used in this
essay, the very recovery and discussion of the memories discussed here shows
some of the ways that the Gulag shadows or haunts people in the post-Soviet
Union today.4 My hope, too, is that the Gulag will come to haunt readers in the
ways that the Holocaust and other major events of the twentieth century do.
Here it is important to say a little about how the terms ‘‘narrative’’ and ‘‘nonnarrative’’ are used. Many scholars and clinicians discuss narrative as an
important element for working through the experiences of traumatic or ambiguous
loss (e.g., Boss, 2006; Caruth, 1996; Felman & Laub, 1992; Herman, 1992;
Langer, 1991). By narrative approach, they generally mean sharing one’s story in a
supportive environment. In this essay, non-narrative is used to mean ways of
working through a loss that do not involve verbal recovery or where verbal
accounts are a secondary or tertiary factor.
A series of historical and cultural factors have combined so that many of the
ways that Russians experience and deal with the Gulag are sharply different from
what most Western readers expect from stories of trauma; an emphasis on the
non-narrative is one of these. This emphasis came into being for historical reasons.
For some 50 years, Gulag survivors risked severe punishment for talking about
their times in the labor camps: thus, there was a long silence about the Gulag in
Russian society until the late 1980s. Partly as a result of this imperative not to
speak, Gulag survivors often find non-narrative ways to deal with their time in the
Gulag. Because, in the USA and the UK our most powerful ways of
understanding trauma center around narrative, we have had a hard time
interpreting the Soviet and post-Soviet experience, a hard time seeing the nonnarrative as powerful. A second factor that it is important to underline: the Gulag
was in many ways continuous with Soviet society. This means that it is harder to
separate the trauma of the Gulag from the trauma of living in Soviet society (or
even to decide if trauma is the right word for this living).
A third factor, related to both of these: certain interpretations of the Holocaust
(and perhaps the Vietnam War) have become authoritative around historical
catastrophe and trauma; where Gulag survivors’ experience and narration differ
from these, they become less visible. This distance is particularly poignant
because, as my interviewees make clear, Gulag and Holocaust share powerful,
intimate roots in World War II.
In the introduction to a recent book on trauma, Nancy K. Miller and Jason
Tougaw note the force of discourse about the Holocaust for trauma studies:
If the Holocaust supplies the paradigm of modern, incommensurable suffering,
many of the ethical and aesthetic, moral and formal dilemmas involved in
bearing witness to the horrors of the Holocaust reappear and are reconfigured in
different national and political contexts. This is not to suggest that other kinds
of disaster should be compared in literal ways to the Holocaust as a limit event.
Rather, . . . the Holocaust has produced a discourse—a set of terms and debates
about the nature of trauma, testimony, witness, and community—that has
affected other domains of meditation on the forms the representation of extreme
human suffering seems to engender and require (Miller & Tougaw, 2004, p. 4).
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J. M. Gheith
Here Miller and Tougaw sum up the way that the figure of the Holocaust has
become a kind of interpretive master discourse for trauma: it is the main point of
comparison for other traumas and it provides the terms of the debate. These terms
do not work for many Gulag survivors and this is part of the reason that the Gulag
remains outside of the discourse on historical tragedies of the twentieth century:
we have become so used to ‘‘trauma’’ being defined in certain ways that we do not
know how to interpret the catastrophic suffering of the Gulag: it does not look like
anything we know.
Irina Paperno, one of the foremost scholars of Russian culture working today,
argues that the terms ‘‘‘testimony’ and ‘trauma,’ insofar as they imply the
therapeutic nature of recollection and revelation; and ‘mastering of the past’’’ do
not fit Soviet realities (Paperno, 2002, pp. 577 – 578, 610). Paperno does not
directly address the Gulag but her claim that testimony and trauma mean
something different in the Soviet context and that that difference is in large part
related to a specific understanding of the ‘‘therapeutic nature of recollection and
revelation’’ is crucial for my argument. Where Paperno fruitfully suspends these
terms, this paper will explore the testimony and trauma difference in the historical
context of the Soviet Union. This essay will show how Gulag survivors’
experiences raise questions about the generally accepted idea that narrative is
the necessary basis for healing of traumatic experience. In exploring why certain
terms are inadequate for the Gulag, this author hopes also to illuminate how
assuming them interrupts the capacity of the Gulag to haunt us.
Background on the Gulag
The Gulag, which literally means, ‘‘Main Camp Administration’’ (Glavnoe
Upravlenie Lagerei) was formally instituted in the 1930s5 but the system evolved
over the 1920s. One of the main proto-Gulag camps opened on the arctic
Solovetskii islands (Solovki) in 1923. And the Gulag closed only in the 1980s,
although, as one of the people interviewed noted: ‘‘It could always reopen’’
(Dmitrii Pavlov, personal communication, August 3, 1998). The Gulag system
spread throughout the former Soviet Union: through the Urals, Siberia, Central
Asia, with one of the largest camp systems being in Kazakhstan. Throughout this
essay, the term ‘‘Gulag’’ will be used in its broadest sense: to refer not only to
those camps run by the Main Camp Administration but also to the whole complex
of Stalinist prisons, labor camps, and exile.
As historian Steven Barnes (2003) has recently argued, the corrective labor
camps of the Gulag were set up as part of the larger Soviet social system: if labor
was to make the new Soviet man and create socialism on earth, then the Gulag
corrective labor camps were an important part of that project. There were
educational sections in the Gulag; there were camp newspapers, camp theaters,
and athletic teams. Yet the camps were also unbearably cruel: guards, as many
prisoners noted, even if they started as good people, were quickly corrupted by the
absolute power that was allowed them in the Gulag. Inmates were shot for little
or no reason. Prisoners were often forced to go outside with few clothes on in
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Silence, non-narrative memory, and the Gulag
163
40 degree frost; food quotas were set up so that if prisoners accomplished their
labor goals, they got a larger amount of food; this resulted in the slow starvation of
many as once you began to weaken, you could never meet your labor norm.
Torture was common. On Solovki, prisoners were ‘‘presented to the mosquitoes’’:
stripped naked and tied up in a swamp so that the mosquitoes could feast. In the
Gulag camps, pregnant female prisoners were beaten severely; unsurprisingly,
their babies swiftly died. Prisoners were forced out to hard labor in brutal weather
conditions with not enough food; they were forced to bury other prisoners in
swamps or permafrost; they were forced on to the ‘‘conveyor belt,’’ days and
nights of interrogation with no sleep.
This is a different order of cruelty from that of the Holocaust camps. There were
no gas chambers in the Gulag and the goal was not efficient, inhuman destruction
as it was for the Nazis. The destructiveness of the Gulag has the horror not of
intentionality but of indifference. Estimates of how many people died during the
Gulag range from roughly 4 million to 20 million (Bacon, 1994; Conquest, 1997;
Getty, Rittersporn, & Zemskov, 1993; Rosefielde, 1996; Wheatcroft, 1996). Mass
graves are still being discovered; one with 300 bodies was found on Solovki in the
summer of 2005.
Even the fact that we have such widely varying estimates of the death toll of the
Gulag is evidence of the disruption, catastrophe, and indifference of these years. The
question of how many people died is a question that matters and that we can never
answer. Does one rely on the mortality statistics kept by the camp administration?
But they had different incentives at different times: sometimes having too many
deaths was punishable and sometimes it was the other way round and the camp
figures reflect that. Sometimes Gulag deaths were counted as World War II military
deaths in order to lessen the one category and increase the other. Does one rely on
mortality in an average year and compare that to mortality during the Gulag? This,
again, is not very accurate. It is one of the facets of the Gulag and its aftereffects that
we cannot even know who or how many were lost. This not knowing underlines the
vast impersonal, mass inhumanity, and collective indifference of the Gulag to human
life. Also, this focus on quantity sometimes deflects us from what we can know about
the long-term effects of the Gulag for Soviet and post-Soviet society.
The toll of the Gulag extends far beyond the death count. Many people’s lives
were destroyed: children, whose parents were arrested and shot, spent their lives
trying to find out what happened to their family; people who were put in the Gulag
spent their lives trying to build a life, they often had difficulty finding work and
dealing with the psychological and physical disruption of these years. And what
about the guards and their children; the denouncers and their family and friends?
The social effects are searing, long-lasting, and often just that little bit under the
surface that makes it difficult to bring into the realm of language and tangibility.
Enforced silence, narrative imperatives, and Gulag survivor responses
Speaking out of and to this massive indifference is a complicated endeavor.
Following Paperno’s lead, it can be argued that the concept of ‘‘testimony’’ can
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J. M. Gheith
only roughly be applied to the Gulag. The grounds for testimony did not exist in the
Soviet context: there were few places where it was safe to speak of one’s experiences
since the communist regime that had incarcerated people continued in power for
the next 50 years. The external imperatives for Gulag survivors not to speak about
their experiences in the camps were often internalized as the following quotations
from some of my interviewees indicates. I asked Mikhail (who had been sent to the
White Sea Canal corrective labor camp for ‘‘Anti-Soviet Activity’’) if he talked with
anyone about being in the Gulag after his time there. His response was swift:
What are you talking about! If I had talked they wouldn’t have given me a job!
And in general they would have sent me out as a private . . . to the hottest point
at the front. To the Germans . . . So . . . A conversation on this theme . . . Well,
some people knew that we had there . . . especially towards the end when we
came from Stalingrad . . . to reinforce . . . in the Vologda region. There they
poured into us . . . 90% prisoners . . . former ones. 90% former prisoners! Well,
so . . . Of course people knew that there could never be a conversation on this
theme. They didn’t talk . . . They went into battle in the same way as everybody
else. . . .’’ (Mikhail Afanasievich, personal communication, June 15, 1998).
Thus the imperative not to speak about experience of the Gulag held even if you
were going into battle.
Maria was sent to a children’s home when her parents were arrested in 1937. As
a daughter of ‘‘enemies of the people,’’ her position in society was precarious when
she returned to Leningrad in 1940; if anyone had told the authorities about her
parents, she risked not being able to remain at the institute where she was
studying. Maria put it this way:
Maria: ‘‘No one denounced me. No one denounced me. But I was very careful
all the time. I never spoke on the topic. I said nothing. I never talked about my
parents, nothing like that.’’
Interviewer: ‘‘Was it hard not to talk about it?’’
Maria (surprised at the question): ‘‘Well, it was necessary. I had to not talk with
anyone. Well, with those who were closest to me, those I worked next to and
lived near and all. Never.’’
(Maria Stanislavovna, personal communication, June 12, 1998)
Maria was 14 years old when her parents were arrested (and, as she later learned,
shot). But even as a child, she knew that she could not talk about what had
happened to her family. The imperative not to talk was learned early and lasted
long.
Others were subject to a ‘‘gag rule’’; they were asked to sign documents saying
they would not talk about their experiences in prison or the Gulag. Nina, whose
mother was probably shot (certainly disappeared) during the German occupation
of Kiev (1941 – 1943), and who was herself later arrested by the Russians said:
And so I was there [in prison] for 3 years . . . Stalin died, they called me and said:
‘‘we’re letting you out because of the amnesty. . . . But [they added] you can’t
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Silence, non-narrative memory, and the Gulag
165
tell anyone that you were in prison. And give us your signature that you won’t
tell anyone that you were arrested.’’ As if . . . They arrested me and I was
teaching tenth grade, . . . in school. . . . Now I was supposed to return to work
and where had I been for 3 years? ‘‘You can’t tell anyone’’ . . . Well, life went like
this: they didn’t let me teach at the school: I had been arrested under a political
article . . . But I could work as a secretary. The secretary got only 30 rubles a
month . . . My neighbors—I lived in a communal apartment, I swear, I didn’t
have anything to eat, there was nothing to eat and I would make noises like this
(she raps with her spoon on a plate), like that, so that the neighbors thought that
it was food . . . It’s hard to convey. . .6
So, even starving, the imperative not to talk held.
As many scholars have noted traumatic memory is difficult, perhaps impossible,
to articulate (Boss, 2006; Herman, 1992; Langer, 1991). The statements above
show that, in Soviet Russia, powerful extrinsic imperatives were added to this
internally complicated relationship about telling or not telling painful experience.
People risked punishment if they did talk. It was a volatile combination of internal
and external suppression: the climate of suspicion was pervasive; people were
deeply afraid to talk about their experiences as they did not know who might
denounce them to the authorities; they were right to be afraid but this fear also
reinforced the imperative not to tell.
Many of the major theorists of trauma argue that telling one’s experiences is the
first step to healing (Bal et al., 1999; Caruth, 1996; Felman & Laub, 1992;
Herman, 1992). Even Pauline Boss (2006), whose work on ambiguous loss has
many resonances with the losses of Gulag survivors, focuses on narration and does
not envision a society in which telling one’s experiences was prohibited. And in
our cultural circumstances, these theorists are right: to break the silence of shame
is vital. And yet, to insist on narration as part of the process of repair7 for those
who survived the Gulag is not realistic as this option was not open to them.
In order to explore this difference more fully it is important to examine some of
the terms of Holocaust discourse. Dori Laub is one of the pioneers of this field; he
is a psychoanalyst who has conducted numerous interviews with Holocaust
survivors through the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale
(a project he co-founded) and he is himself a survivor of the Holocaust. His work
has been definitive in setting the terms within which the testimony of Holocaust
survivors has been understood.
Laub contends that ‘‘Massive trauma precludes its registration. . . . To undo this
entrapment in a fate that cannot be known, cannot be told, but can only be
repeated, a therapeutic process—a process of constructing a narrative, of
reconstructing a history and essentially, of re-externalizing the event—has to be
set in motion. This . . . can occur and take effect only when one can articulate and
transmit the story’’ (Felman & Laub, 1992, p. 69). Other influential theorists argue
in a similar vein (Bal et al., 1999; Caruth, 1996; Herman, 1992).8 This focus on
narrative in a therapeutic process and on memory as accessible only in repetition
have made it more difficult for us to see and relate to the pain of the Gulag which
is shaped in very different terms.
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Many people who survived the Gulag remember in ways that do not involve
repetition compulsion, flashbacks, or direct narration. Rather, they find ways to
remember that involve caring in some daily way for the very things that they
associate with the original hurt. Demonstrating these associations demands long
quotations and extensive interpretation of them. Thus, the case study method,
frequently used in discussions of those who have survived catastrophic loss
(Felman & Laub, 1992; Langer, 1991) and in oral histories (Bertaux, Thompson, &
Rotkirch, 2004; Engel & Posadskaya, 1998; Portelli, 1991), will be deployed. This
is similar to the methodology deployed in my book manuscript where each section
is structured around two or three survivor accounts. Such a methodology
accomplishes two goals: (1) because these memories are not widely known, it
allows them to find their way into public discourse; and (2) the nature of memory
and its interpretation means that short quotations from all of the interviews would
not demonstrate the context and sense of the memories discussed. This paper will
explore only two examples here, those of Mikhail and Nina, and will concentrate on
the interviews with Nina as a way to demonstrate some of the in-depth, long-term
traces of the Gulag in individual memory. Given the mass dehumanization of the
Gulag, it is particularly important to focus on the processes of individual memory;
this has not been the focus of the existing scholarship.9
Mikhail Afanasievich (quoted above) was a former kulak10 sent, in 1940, to the
Belomor Canal camp11 (named as he put it ‘‘for the Great Criminal Stalin’’)—and
one of the most deadly of the Gulag camps. Two and a half years later, Mikhail
was sent to the front to fight for his country—not something he did very
enthusiastically: ‘‘They had to send me at gunpoint,’’ he boomed. The first thing
Mikhail told me was that he had named his enormous German shepherd Joseph
Stalin. And he waited for me to react. I outwaited him and he said: ‘‘Why did
I name the dog Stalin? So that we won’t forget . . . chtoby ne zabyt’’ (Mikhail
Afanasievich, personal communication, June 15, 1998). As I watched him interact
with the dog, though, I saw that this naming was also a way for Mikhail to assert
control: ‘‘Joseph, come here, lie down, play dead.’’ And, in being responsible for
‘‘Stalin’’ over time, Mikhail came to care deeply about him (feeding, watering,
making sure he was healthy—and Stalin was very healthy).
Nina Ivanovna, also mentioned above, was 16 years old in 1941 when she
escaped briefly from Kiev when the city was taken over by the Nazis. She was
brought back and, one day, she came home from school to find a seal on her
apartment door, blocking entrance to her home. She then found out that her
mother, Zoya Mikhailovna, had been arrested; later she was told that her mother
had been shot and killed by the Germans. The pretext was that Zoya Mikhailovna,
a music teacher, had been kind to a student who was Jewish. Eight years later,
Nina herself was arrested by the Russians for being a German spy.
Nina was put in prison for 3 years. When released after the war, she did not feel she
could tell anyone about her experiences, and she decided to name a daughter Zoya
Mikhailovna after her mother. This meant that she had to find a man named Mikhail
to marry, which she did: ‘‘So I decided no matter what happened to have a daughter.
People later asked me: ‘Were you sure you’d have a daughter (dochka) what if you
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had a son?’ It never entered my head. It was impossible. That is, it had to be a
daughter and she was born. And it turned out that [in this way] I got such a greeting
from Mama. Well, it was very good because my daughter relieved me very strongly of
my past sufferings. My daughter is good, talented. She studied music, finished high
school and studied at the institute. That’s how good she was and still is.’’
Nina did not tell her daughter the story of her name until the 1990s. She showed
me pictures, now standing on their bookcase, of her mother and her daughter. She
said proudly: ‘‘Well, look up there, it’s a small photograph from a document
(propusk). That’s Mama, my Mama, shot by the Fascists.’’ The thought of her
mother was immediately connected for Nina with the thought of the Nazis; the
connection was deep and intimate. This immediacy, even 50 years after her mother
had been shot, indicates the power of Nina’s naming her daughter after her mother.
Although both Mikhail Afanasievich and Nina Ivanovna used naming as a way
to remember, they did so in very different ways. Mikhail’s opposition was directed
against the government while Nina’s was a protest of an intimate loss. Everyone
knew who Stalin was and so Mikhail’s protest was visible to anyone who knew the
dog’s name. No one in Moscow knew that Nina had named her daughter after her
mother; hers was a more private, though at least equally defiant, tribute. And this
became a poignant, powerful memorial as Nina turned that shattering loss into
new life.
These are complicated, creative ways of remembering and avenging. Both
namings kept the memory insistently in view in the present and meant that Nina
Ivanovna and Mikhail Afanasievich had to bump into and work through those
memories on a daily basis. Nina and Mikhail chose to care—in concrete and
practical as well as emotional ways—for a being named after someone associated
with the deep pain. While there is a reenactment of the catastrophic pain in these
namings, their modes of memory differ significantly from the repetition
compulsion that Laub (1992), Caruth (1996), and others describe. Rather than
unconsciously repeating the original tragedy in a way that causes new harm, both
Nina and Mikhail found ways to remember and closely relate to it (both
consciously and unconsciously) on a daily basis and to turn it into new growth;
they were able to consciously access their memories in relation to the dog or the
daughter and to transform this into a different life, a life that integrated the past
into the present and future rather than a life that is primarily focused on the past as
a hard, unbreakable node.
Nina’s story illustrates the process of non-narrative healing or repair. Although
I have struggled with how best to present this, I have decided that giving some very
long excerpts will be most effective as it will show something of how she
understood both the original pain of war and occupation and her later time in
prison as well as her process of working through those experiences. Nina’s story
also illustrates the profound connections between World War II and the Gulag: for
many Gulag survivors, the two are inseparable (Adler, 2002; Applebaum, 2003;
Merridale, 2000).
I recognize the irony of using narrative to talk about the non-narrative. Although
the experiences were originally not narrated, we can know them only through
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narrative. Nina’s story powerfully demonstrates this connection of narrative and
non-narrative. It is in the way she tells her story that it becomes clear that—and
how—these experiences and memories were accessible to her throughout the years
in which she did not discuss them. And it is in the way she tells her story that one
sees the process of healing or repair unfold.
As noted above, Nina Ivanovna was 16 in 1941 when the Nazis took over Kiev.
In 1950, she was put in prison by the Russians; they accused her of having been a
German spy—primarily because she had survived the occupation and knew
German. Her relationship with German culture played a significant role in landing
her in prison and also in the ways that she worked through her experiences of war
and prison. There are three primary moments in her relationship with German
culture: first in the occupation of Kiev, then in being punished by the Russians for
having survived that occupation, and later, in the 1990s, spending time with young
German men who, in lieu of army service were helping those whose countries the
Nazis had destroyed (some German women also volunteered, though they had no
mandatory army service to fulfill).
Nina describes the occupation and the German soldiers killing and confiscating:
‘‘So they came into Kiev and they began to kill. . . . Soldiers, officers. Well, they
killed them, it was a war after all, at first, somehow . . . well, they killed and killed.
And later there began to be these orders, by the Germans . . . ‘Aufruf.’’’
(She turns to me: ‘‘Do you know any German? ‘Aufruf’ in German means ‘An
Announcement.’’’)
She returns to her narrative: ‘‘Then the orders came: in Russian, German, and
Ukrainian languages there were orders: turn in your radios. There were no
televisions then . . . Bicycles had to be turned in and radios. Later you had to turn
in warm clothes, later still other things. . .’’
As Nina continues her story, she begins to mix past and present; she has recently
visited Kiev with the German boys and they begin to make their way into her
narrative here:
‘‘And the German soldiers accepted the radios and the radios reached to the
ceiling, there were storehouses. And they began to explode. And after that there
began, you know, these . . . actions. I don’t even know how to say this . . . It was
awful . . . So several minutes, .. let’s say at 11:05 . . . And they killed everyone who
went out onto the street. The Germans sat at home for these 5 minutes. But
whoever went out onto the street. . . . So I showed the boys the monument . . . . and
there were bushes there. And there a German soldier, a machine gunner
lay . . . And you couldn’t see him . . . Five streets come out onto that square. And
he’s there—with a machine gun. And if anyone came out from any street—anyone,
a kid, it didn’t matter to him—he would destroy all, all of them. At first it was
for 5 minutes, later—a little longer, and before their retreat there were 15
minute . . . actions . . . They killed everyone.’’
Nina’s narrative here may be a bit difficult to follow: when the citizens of Kiev
turned in their radios, some of them included an explosive device in the radios.
Rightly seeing this as sabotage, the Germans responded with severe punishment:
setting curfews, not always letting the local population know that if they were out
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after 11:00 p.m. they would be shot—and then shooting anyone who was outside
after that time. And when Nina says ‘‘I showed the boys the monument . . .’’ she is
referring to a later trip with the German boys—a major joy in Nina’s life.
In addition to the general horror of the occupation, Nina’s pain was deeply
personal as her mother, Zoya Mikhailovna, was (probably) shot by the Germans
and Nina never knew precisely what had happened to her. Nina had to leave Kiev
at this time for work in the fields (a mandatory trip that was part of her schooling).
When she came back to Kiev she learned that her mother had been arrested by the
Germans.
As Nina puts it: ‘‘So I went with the German boys when they were there [in Kiev]
in the autumn . . . I showed them: ‘see, that’s where the Gestapo was’. . .’’ Then
she moves back into the time of the occupation and says: ‘‘The first time they [the
Gestapo] took a package from me for Mama. Some things . . . And the second
time they said: ‘she’s not here, she’s been sent away’ . . . In the papers, see, at this
time there was an announcement that someone had escaped and in order to scare
the others, all the prisoners had been shot. So it was just in this period . . . I didn’t
see Mama again’’ (Nina Ivanovna, personal communication, August 11, 1998).
The fact that Nina does not know her mother’s fate for certain; that the modes
of knowing were so disrupted and unclear; that she was left to figure out what had
happened for herself; all of this was common and these are among the long-lasting
effects of the Gulag.
Nina did not know the fate of her mother, but it is very likely that Zoya
Mikhailovna had been shot.12 And again the German boys creep into her story as
she shows them their and her history: ‘‘that’s where the Gestapo was . . .’’ These
boys were descendants of those Nina thought of as the occupiers, those who had
occupied her city, whose presence in her city marked a fundamental break in her
life. The past and present mix here: By sharing her past with these German boys,
by bringing Germans to the site of the German occupation, Nina begins to create a
new present.
Soon after this, the Russians took control of Kiev again. And Nina, like many
others, was punished for having survived the occupation. Nina: ‘‘And when they
liberated the city and our Soviet troops came in, then my sufferings during the
occupation seemed very small. I had been in the occupation, that is, I was already
basically branded.’’
And then she discusses her own arrest, a story that demonstrates the inexorable,
nightmare logic of the Gulag. The Russian interrogators said to Nina: ‘‘‘You were
in the occupation, that means that you are a German spy.’ Me: ‘But they arrested
my Mama!’ Them: ‘Prove it!’’’
Nina continues: ‘‘This was all pretense, they played out the scene. . . . And for
my activity as a spy, they said, this version was very convenient for me. That is:
I had made all this up, well, and Mama—that was on purpose, a kind of legend.
Mama was there to provide a connection and I was here . . . But they found guilt.
And I signed everything. And they found guilt in an interesting way: ‘Aufruf!’ That
means an announcement. They asked: ‘Did you read it?’ I said: ‘Yes.’ ‘In what
language?’ I said: ‘I read it in all three languages. I read it in Russian because that
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is my native language. I read it in Ukrainian because this is Ukraine. I read it in
German because that is the language I learned in school, I studied German in
school. I found it interesting that I could understand, that I could hear
everything . . . I read it in all three languages.’ They put that in the minutes . . .’’
And then the interrogators asked: ‘‘‘And was it the Fascists who put the
announcement up everywhere? The Fascists, the Occupiers?’
Nina: ‘It was the Occupiers.’
Interrogators: ‘She studied Fascist literature . . . Did you discuss this with
anyone?’’’
Nina turns to me: ‘‘Well, how could I not discuss it with anyone? Let’s say I met
you on the street, I would ask: ‘Did you turn in your radio?’ ‘Did you turn in
your warm things?’ If I’m talking with you, that means I’m already discussing it.
‘I discussed it!’’’
The upshot of this conversation was that Nina was put in prison. She said: ‘‘And
the captain who read me the sentence said: ‘3 years of prison. Incarceration in a
prison for active counterrevolutionary activity in the period of the German-Fascist
occupation.’ He read in a bass voice and with such emotion that if at the end he
had said the words: ‘she will be shot’ it would have been completely natural. And
he leaned down to me . . . And we were alone together in . . . —a little room—well
not a room. . . . And he—was huge, so big and I, very little, stood before him, my
hands behind my back. I didn’t have a belt because maybe I’d suddenly hang
myself or some such thing. And so I stood in some little t-shirt, half naked before
him, with my hands behind my back. I’m standing there and he’s reading. And
then he bent down to me and said: ‘Well, when we want to apologize, we give 3
years.’ And that was that. That’s how they apologized.’’
Nina was in prison for 3 years; she often wanted to die both during that time and
after getting out of prison. After she was released, she found she could not cross
the street; she ached all over; she did not want to communicate with others. These
are all classic markers of traumatic experience. It is Nina’s way of dealing with
them that differs from the descriptions of trauma and ‘‘testimony’’ that figure so
largely in discussions of Holocaust survivors.
Narrating the experience was a strategy that was not available to Nina. She
found other ways to cope with these memories: through naming her daughter after
her mother, and then through the relationships with the German boys. Would she
have been able to work through her experiences of war and Gulag more quickly if
she could have narrated them directly? Perhaps. But that is something the
historical situation of Soviet Russia did not allow and so it is important to look at
what people did do given the absence of the possibility of moving toward healing
through narrative.
For Nina, her relationship with the German boys was one of the primary ways
that she began moving into an internal peace. She said: ‘‘I really like when people
look me in the eyes, when they believe me, when they understand me and when
they forgive me if need be . . . There’s another very important thing: with these
same German boys. Fascists and Germans—for me these were synonyms.’’ Right
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after this, she talks about hearing German for the first time after the war, more
than 10 years after the occupation. The effect on Nina was dramatic: ‘‘And I heard
German language and I had to go into the bushes and I sobbed there and for 3
days I didn’t leave home, for 3 days I couldn’t look at anyone . . . I love German,
I love German speech, I love the music, the sharpness and all of that, because
everything is expressed there. You understand, I love the whole culture: Heine,
Goethe, Mozart . . . Schiller, I don’t know, it makes me melt, I love it, but—when
I heard this German speech I didn’t associate it with genius, I associated it only
with . . . trra-ta-ta (imitates automatic fire). And so, having heard German
speech— . . . And only these boys, these German boys and girls . . .’’
The German youth had come to Russia, as Nina put it, ‘‘to care for our sick, our
lonely, sometimes broken people. Well, how could you not bow before this? It was
the first time in my life I had seen this up close! For me Germans and Fascists
immediately got a little bit separated. . . . Fascists and Communists . . . you
understand they somehow for me were on one side of the barricade. And now
I saw people. I saw people . . . with blue eyes, welcoming, neat, with such a big
sense of responsibility and decency.’’ This was a transformative moment—from
seeing the Germans as Fascists and Occupiers, directly responsible for her
mother’s death and indirectly for her own time in prison to seeing them as people:
‘‘And you know something of my relationship to humanity changed thanks to
seeing their humanity, purity, kindness . . .’’
Just as with Mikhail’s naming the dog Stalin and Nina’s own naming her
daughter after her mother, the beginnings of repair, for Nina, came through
relationship. One last long quotation from my interviews with Nina Ivanovna that
shows much about the process of her moving to a kind of inner freedom. In the
Soviet years, Nina had tried to get help from the medical profession. She knew
something was wrong; she was isolated, afraid to go out, afraid to communicate
with others: ‘‘I went to doctors . . . But the doctors said, ‘You’re normal. If you can
analyse your condition, then you’re normal.’ But sometimes it was too much for me
and then nothing helped, not my will, nothing—well I wouldn’t want to see
anyone . . . and that’s it. . . . Rarely—lately, this happens rarely. When it happens;
I don’t want to see anyone, I don’t want to talk on the phone. I don’t pick it up—
I can’t . . . This is called depression. And then my grandchildren came along—such
a joy because there are two of them and I love children so . . . A kind of release, a
very great release . . . and so such a soul kind of endless joy . . . Well, now I have
become liberated (raskrepostilas) a bit with these German boys because for me
Germans were enemy number one and now they have stopped being enemies.
They have stopped being enemies and things are much easier for me . . . Although I
still, in a Christian way . . . the priest said: ‘forgive, forgive [the Nazis]’ and I forgive
but—that’s a formality as if I were writing a document, and in my heart there’s still
a weight’’ (Nina Ivanovna, personal communication, August 11, 1998).
This quotation is rich and dense and needs to be explored from multiple angles.
First, it shows how unavailable ‘‘testimony’’ was in Soviet circumstances. Nina
tried to tell her story to doctors and they would not listen. It was dangerous for
anyone, including doctors, to listen to such testimony; if they did not report it to
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the authorities, they too, could get into trouble. The Gulag had not been fully
publicly condemned and so a Gulag mentality of fear continued to operate
throughout Soviet Russia.
Second, this quotation demonstrates the limited capacities of Soviet psychology.
The profession of psychology was rarely practiced or patronized in the former
Soviet Union. As Martin Miller (1998) notes, psychoanalysis, in fact, was officially
forbidden for much of the Soviet period. And, even if you went to a professional
with fairly intense symptoms (Nina Ivanovna at this point could not cross a street),
not much support was offered. Nina’s comment here also indicates the extent to
which categories such as ‘‘depression’’ were fairly new to Russians in the 1990s.
It may not come through in the written version, but Nina’s oral intonation
indicates clearly that when she says, ‘‘This is called depression,’’ she is explaining
a concept she thinks will be unfamiliar; it is new to her and she is sharing that with
me. The fact that Freud’s ideas were relatively unknown in the Soviet Union is
relevant for understanding how discourse about trauma is shaped differently there:
there has been little chance for Freud’s ideas on trauma to circulate and to be
refined as they have been in Western contexts.
Finally, when Nina says that through her relationship with the German youth,
she is ‘‘beginning to be liberated,’’ she uses the word raskrepostilas. One of the
roots of this word is serfdom, so this literally means something like to become
unserfed.13 There are other, more common Russian words available for
‘‘liberation’’ (e.g., osvobodilas) but Nina gives her growing sense of inner freedom
the weight of historical association and the power of a social movement.
Nina here offers a complex commentary on the process of ‘‘becoming unserfed’’
after time in the Gulag system. Through relationship with the German youth,
through relating to her grandchildren, through the beginnings of faith, she moves
into inner freedom. For almost 50 years, she could not talk about her experiences
in the Gulag. But she could take delight in her grandchildren. And that freed her
to be open to the help of the German youth. All of this is part of her inner, gradual
movement into (if not healing then into) a capacity to face and live with the
experiences of imprisonment.
Conclusion
In listening to those interviewed, it becomes clear that, in the face of widespread
prohibitions on narrating their experiences, these survivors found intensely
creative ways to deal with their painful memories through image and naming and
through caring for beings associated with their difficult experiences (Mikhail’s
dog, Nina’s daughter). This relational, non-narrative approach was common
among the Gulag survivors interviewed here, and is also evident in the interviews
others have conducted (Adler, 2002; Bertaux et al., 2004; Merridale, 2000),
although, until now, no one has analysed them in terms of what they show about
how people remember when silence is externally enforced. These dynamics are
complicated; they come across—or haunt—most powerfully in an in-depth
accounting.
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These memories, carried by those who lived through it, are some of the powerful
traces of the Gulag in post-Soviet society. These accounts also demonstrate the
need to look for and value paths of repair that are not primarily narrative in nature.
In shifting focus in this way, it is hoped that it will be easier to bring the Gulag and
its memory forms into public discourse on historical catastrophe and traumatic
memory.
Acknowledgement
My thanks to Jane Calow, editor of this Special Issue on Mortality, to Bonnie
Lidback, and to David Need, my husband, whose comments on drafts of this essay
have been invaluable.
Notes
[1] I also base my comments on information from others who have interviewed Gulag survivors
(e.g., Adler, 2002; Merridale, 2000). For an argument about the ways a small sample size can
yield representative information, see the ‘‘Introduction’’ in Bertaux et al. (2004).
[2] Because of the sensitive nature of the subject, I spoke only with those people who wanted to
discuss their Gulag experiences. Ten of these were found through Memorial, an organization
that has worked with Gulag survivors since 1989 and three were found through informal
networks as I wanted to interview people who had not joined any organization of Gulag
survivors. All interviews were conducted in Russian by me. At each stage of the project, I
discussed the interviews with a Russian colleague, Elena Koshkareva: she helped me to
formulate questions and to process the information after the interviews.
[3] Derrida is discussing exorcizing ghosts while I focus more on honoring and giving substance to
the experiences of Gulag survivors; perhaps that is a form of exorcism.
[4] This would be a good point at which to note the complexity of dealing with oral narratives.
There has been an intense debate among historians about the uses and pitfalls of oral history. I
roughly follow Alessandro Portelli’s approach: he argues that oral narratives tell us about how
people understand experience and how that shifts over time, even if there are occasional factual
inaccuracies. Also see Bertaux et al. (2004) for why oral history is especially important for
understanding post-Soviet society given the deliberate deceptions of official Soviet history. For
a more in-depth discussion of the problems and possibilities of conducting oral history in
Russia today, see Gheith, 2006.
[5] This was a gradual evolution and so it is hard to assign a precise date. The OGPU (forerunner
of the KGB) began taking over a large percentage of the prison system in 1929; by the mid
1930s, the secret police controlled the Soviet Union’s ‘‘vast prisoner workforce’’ and
reorganized under several names, eventually settling on GULag. See Applebaum (2003, p. 50).
[6] All quotations by Nina Ivanovna are from an interview I conducted with her on May 2, 1998,
unless otherwise noted.
[7] I am more comfortable with the language of ‘‘repair’’ than I am with the notion of ‘‘healing,’’ a
concept that has multiple resonances in large part because of Holocaust debates around the
term. In using the language of healing it is too easy to assume or prescribe Western-based
modes of healing. By ‘‘repair’’ I mean the ongoing process of dealing with catastrophic change
and loss, attempts both small and large to understand, live with, and engage this loss.
[8] Some scholars have begun to question the universality of narrative as healing (see Antze &
Lambek, 1996; Leys, 2000).
[9] For a more comparative approach, see Adler (2002), Gheith (n.d.) and Merridale (2000).
[10] Kulaks were ostensibly ‘‘wealthy’’ peasants: it was a catch-all category for those peasants who
either resisted being moved to a collective farm or had property that the authorities wanted to
appropriate. It became a category for anyone of the peasant class who was perceived as resisting
the move to the new Soviet paradise; and this classification, like so many of those applied in the
Gulag years, could be based on remarkably little evidence.
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[11] The Belomor or White Sea Canal project joined the White Sea and the Baltic Sea. The canal
was Stalin’s pet project and it symbolized the growth of Soviet Power. It had to be completed in
a very short time (18 months, 1932 – 1933, with later maintenance as in Mikhail’s case); it had
to be dug with rudimentary tools (prisoners describe using their hands). It was built on time
and Stalin proclaimed it as a great victory; a festive, commemorative book was published on the
opening of the canal. Estimates of death of those who built the canal range from 10,000 to
100,000. And the canal is so shallow that most ships cannot use it.
[12] In two separate interviews, Nina noted that she was told that her mother had been shot by the
husband of a woman who had been in prison with her mother. She was never sure how to
evaluate this information.
[13] In Russian krepost means fortress, strength; krepostnoi means serf.
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DERRIDA, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new
international (Peggy Kamuf, Trans.). New York: Routledge.
DOKA, K. (1989). Disenfranchised grief: Recognizing hidden sorrow. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
ENGEL, B., & POSADKSAYA-VANDERBECK, A. (1998). A revolution of their own: Voices of women in
Soviet history. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
FELMAN, S., & LAUB, D. (1992). Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history.
New York: Routledge.
Friedlander, S. (Ed.). (1992). Probing the limits of representation: Nazism and the ‘‘final solution.’’
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
GETTY, J. A., RITTERSPORN, G. T., & ZEMSKOV, V. N. (1993). Victims of the Soviet penal system in
the pre-war years: a first approach on the basis of archival evidence. American Historical Review,
98, 1017 – 1049.
GHEITH, J. M (2006, November). No eto trudno peredat: Interviews with Gulag survivors and problems in
oral history. Paper presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies
convention, Washington DC, USA.
GHEITH, J. M. (n.d.). A dog named Stalin: Memory, trauma, and the Gulag. Unpublished manuscript.
GORDON, A. F. (1997). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
HERMAN, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: the aftermath of violence from domestic abuse to political
terror. New York: Basic Books.
LACAPRA, D. (2001). Writing history, writing trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
LANGER, L. (1991). Holocaust testimonies: the ruins of memory. New Haven: Yale University Press.
LEYS, R. (2000). Trauma. A genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
LIFTON, R. J. (1973). Home from the war: Vietnam veterans. New York: Simon and Schuster.
60
Silence, non-narrative memory, and the Gulag
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MERRIDALE, C. (2000). Night of stone: Death and memory in twentieth-century Russia. New York:
Penguin.
MILLER, M. (1998). Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
MILLER, N. K., & TOUGAW, J. (Eds.). (2002). Extremities: Trauma, testimony, and community. Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
PAPERNO, I. (2002). Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and
Eurasian History, 3, 577 – 610.
PORTELLI, A. (1991). The death of Luigi Trastulli and other stories: Form and meaning in oral history.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
ROSEFIELDE, S. (1996). Stalinism in post-Communist perspective: New evidence on killings, forced
labour and economic growth in the 1930s. Europe-Asia Studies, 48, 959 – 987.
STERN, S. J. (2006). Battling for hearts and minds: Memory struggles in Pinochet’s Chile. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
TAL, K. (1996). Worlds of hurt: Reading the literatures of trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
TOKER, L. (2000). Return from the archipelago: Narratives of Gulag survivors. Bloomington: Indiana
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WHEATCROFT, S. (1996). The scale and nature of German and Soviet repression and mass killings,
1930 – 45. Europe-Asia Studies, 48, 1319 – 1353.
Biographical Note
Jehanne M Gheith is Associate Professor and Chair of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke
University. She has published and edited books and articles on gender and memory in Russia. She is
currently working on A dog named Stalin: Memory, trauma, and the Gulag and co-editing a collection
of oral histories of Gulag survivors. She has co-facilitated bereavement groups and is working toward
a dual MSW/MDiv degree with a focus on bereavement.
61
History and Theory 51 (May 2012), 193-220
© Wesleyan University 2012 ISSN: 0018-2656
ARE EMOTIONS A KIND OF PRACTICE
(AND IS THAT WHAT MAKES THEM HAVE A HISTORY)?
A BOURDIEUIAN APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING EMOTION
MONIQUE SCHEER1
ABSTRACT
The term “emotional practices” is gaining currency in the historical study of emotions.
This essay discusses the theoretical and methodological implications of this concept. A
definition of emotion informed by practice theory promises to bridge persistent dichotomies with which historians of emotion grapple, such as body and mind, structure and
agency, as well as expression and experience. Practice theory emphasizes the importance
of habituation and social context and is thus consistent with, and could enrich, psychological models of situated, distributed, and embodied cognition and their approaches to the
study of emotion.
It is suggested here that practices not only generate emotions, but that emotions themselves can be viewed as a practical engagement with the world. Conceiving of emotions as
practices means understanding them as emerging from bodily dispositions conditioned by
a social context, which always has cultural and historical specificity. Emotion-as-practice
is bound up with and dependent on “emotional practices,” defined here as practices involving the self (as body and mind), language, material artifacts, the environment, and other
people. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, the essay emphasizes that the
body is not a static, timeless, universal foundation that produces ahistorical emotional
arousal, but is itself socially situated, adaptive, trained, plastic, and thus historical. Four
kinds of emotional practices that make use of the capacities of a body trained by specific
social settings and power relations are sketched out—mobilizing, naming, communicating,
and regulating emotion—as are consequences for method in historical research.
Keywords: history of emotions, emotional practices, practice theory, Pierre Bourdieu,
habitus, emotives, history of the self
Practice theory, which has had a significant impact on sociology, anthropology, and
cultural history in recent years, has also begun to provide a framework for thinking
1. This article would not have come into being without the intense intellectual exchange I enjoyed
with many colleagues and visiting scholars at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max
Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, for which I am very grateful. I also thank the
members of the Amsterdam Center for Cross-Disciplinary Emotion and Sensory Studies for discussing parts of this paper with me, and those who read it and gave me valuable comments: Juliane Brauer,
Ute Frevert, Benno Gammerl, Bettina Hitzer, Uffa Jensen, Anja Laukötter, Kaspar Maase, Stephanie
Olsen, Margrit Pernau, Jan Plamper, Joseph Prestel, Bill Reddy, Anne Schmidt, and Tine van Osselaer. I also thank Clara Polley and Friederike Schmidt for their excellent research assistance. Most
especially, I thank Pascal Eitler, whose invitation to collaborate on an article on emotions and the
body was the first step toward developing the ideas in this article (Pascal Eitler and Monique Scheer,
“Emotionengeschichte als Körpergeschichte: Eine heuristische Perspektive auf religiöse Konversionen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 35 [2009], 282-313).
62
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MONIQUE SCHEER
about emotions, though sometimes only implicitly. The term “emotional practices”
has often been used without a detailed discussion of the theoretical background or
its implications.2 Without such reflection, one could surmise that emotional practices are things people do that are accompanied by emotion. This interpretation
would conceptually separate emotion from practice and undermine the potential of
the idea of emotional practices as things people do in order to have emotions, or
“doing emotions” in a performative sense, which would implicate thinking of emotions themselves as a kind of practice. The philosopher Robert C. Solomon has recommended thinking of emotions as acts: “They are not entities in consciousness,”
he writes, but “acts of consciousness,” which is itself, following the phenomenological school in philosophy, “the activity of intending in the world.”3 Thus, he has
pointed out that emotions are indeed something we do, not just have. By focusing
on consciousness, such an approach may, however, neglect the contribution of the
body as well as the significance of the fact that the world is socially ordered, both
of which are central to the notion of practice and may explain its attractiveness for
historians, anthropologists, and sociologists of emotion.
This essay is an attempt to think through the emerging use of the notion of
“emotional practices” in these disciplines, to put it on firmer theoretical footing. Are practices simply the vehicles for emotions, or can emotions themselves
be conceived of as practice as it is defined in practice theory? What would be
gained by such a conception for historically grounded research on emotions? I
will develop answers to these questions in the following five sections, beginning
with a discussion of the two main analytical categories: (1) definitions of emotion from psychology and their relevance for historians, and (2) a definition of
practice based primarily on the work of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Then (3)
I explore the concept of emotion that practice theory offers, (4) sketch out areas
in which it can best be implemented, and (5) close with remarks on the methodological consequences of such an understanding of emotion for the cultural and
historical disciplines.
2. This could also be said of other central concepts of Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory, such as
“emotional fields” or “emotional capital.” There are exceptions: on the latter term, see Michalinos
Zembylas, “Emotional Capital and Education: Theoretical Insights from Bourdieu,” British Journal
of Educational Studies 55 (2007) 443-463. The term “emotional habitus” has also received some
theoretical attention, though I find it somewhat problematic because it is either redundant or implicitly
divides the habitus in a way that runs counter to Bourdieu’s theory. See Gesa Stedman, Stemming
the Torrent: Expression and Control in the Victorian Discourses on Emotion, 1830–1872 (Aldershot,
UK: Ashgate, 2002); Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge,
UK: Polity Press, 2007), and idem, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of
Self-Help (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). See also Habitus in Habitat I: Emotion
and Motion, ed. Sabine Flach, Daniel Margulies, and Jan Söffner (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 7-22,
and Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics:Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 34-42. The sociologist Norman K. Denzin uses the term “emotional
practice” in On Understanding Emotion (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1984), 89, but his argument
proceeds from philosophical phenomenology, not practice theory.
3. Robert C. Solomon, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 155, 157.
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ARE EMOTIONS A KIND OF PRACTICE?
195
I. EMOTIONS ARE IN BOTH MIND AND BODY
Though “emotion” has been notoriously difficult to pin down and define,4 it is
generally agreed that emotions are something people experience and something
they do. We have emotions and we manifest emotions. Much of the difficulty in
defining them has come from the traditional view that these are two essentially
different activities. Some definitions focus on the “inner” side of emotions, the
experience, some on the “outer,” the expression or bodily manifestation. William
James famously defined emotion as physical arousal.5 Neo-Jamesians, such as
neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, continue to distinguish between bodily changes
(emotion) and the mental perception and interpretation of them in the brain
(feeling).6 This approach locates the seat of emotion at its purported origin in
the body. In contrast, cognitivists in psychology and philosophy do not view the
bodily components as the essence of emotion. For them, it is a mental event, most
closely comparable to appraisals, evaluations, and judgments;7 bodily arousal is
considered unspecific, secondary, and nonessential for understanding emotion.
Historians have been drawn to the cognitivist approach because it removed
the stigma attached to emotion as something less than cognition. Feelings, like
thoughts, could thus be said to undergo historical change and be subject to the
forces of society and culture.8 Historians have also drawn on the work of social
scientists who focus on emotion as a medium of communication, the role emotion plays in human exchanges, and the rules that govern emotion as a medium of
communication.9 Thinking of emotion in this way made it like language, subject
to conventions, learned from other members of a group, and deployed creatively.
Historians were also inspired by the work of anthropologists, who discovered
strikingly different emotion concepts in non-Western cultures.10 They sought to
denaturalize emotions, making them “preeminently cultural.”11 Many of them
4. See the recent debate on defining emotion in the journal Emotion Review, especially its October
2010 issue.
5. William James, “What is an Emotion?” Mind 9 (1884), 188-205.
6. Antonio R. Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando, FL:
Harcourt, 2003).
7. In philosophy, see Robert C. Solomon, The Passions (New York: Doubleday, 1976), and Martha
C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2001). Appraisal theory in psychology has been developed by Nico H. Frijda; see
his The Emotions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
8. Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review
107 (2002), 821-845.
9. For example, Arlie R. Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Shinobu Kitayama and Hazel Markus, Emotion and
Culture: Empirical Studies of Mutual Influence (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1994); Niklas Luhmann, Liebe als Passion: Zur Codierung von Intimität (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1982).
10. Catherine A. Lutz and Geoffrey M. White, “The Anthropology of Emotions,” Annual Review
of Anthropology 15 (1986), 405-436.
11. Catherine A. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and
Their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988 ), 5.
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did not interrogate the contribution of the body to emotional experience, thus
it appeared to be more or less determined by language. Though the subfield of
medical anthropology was engaged in a lively discussion on emotion as part of
an anthropology of the body,12 historians preferred to read those anthropologists
who likened emotion to discourse.13
Historians’ attraction to these approaches suggests that they believe that in
order to historicize emotion, it is necessary to detach it from the body, thus construing the body as somehow ahistorical.14 They have often worked from a model
of human subjectivity that pits the self against social norms and “true feeling”
against convention, thus reproducing the divide between experience and expression (ruled by norms or “discourse”) while claiming that historians can access
only the latter, and thus never the “real” emotions.15 They leave us with the
somewhat dissatisfying sense that the history of emotions can only be a history
of half of the phenomenon, abdicating the other half to the natural sciences rather
than integrating it into a historical study.
Recent theorizing in consciousness studies and the philosophy of mind has
opened up an interesting possibility for solving this dichotomy of “inner” feeling
and “outer” manifestation. Under the rubric of Extended Mind Theory (EMT) a
number of scholars have argued that we need not think of experience and activity as separate phenomena, but instead view experience itself as something we
do—and that we do with our entire bodies, not just the brain.16 The philosopher
Alva Noë puts it this way: Thinking, feeling, and perceiving are “not something
the brain achieves on its own. Consciousness requires the joint operation of brain,
body, and world. Indeed, consciousness is an achievement of the whole animal in
its environmental context.”17 His externalization of experience owes a great deal
to the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and his argument emphasizes
fundamentals of psychology important to William James in the early twentieth
12. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret M. Lock, “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to
Future Work in Medical Anthropology,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1 (1987), 6-41; Margot
L. Lyon and John M. Barbalet, “Society’s Body: Emotion and the ‘Somatization’ of Social Theory,”
in Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, ed. Thomas J. Csordas
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 48-67; John Leavitt, “Meaning and Feeling in
the Anthropology of Emotions,” American Ethnologist 23 (1996), 514-539; Margot L. Lyon, “The
Material Body, Social Processes and Emotion: ‘Techniques of the Body’ Revisited,” Body & Society
3 (1997), 83-101.
13. Language and the Politics of Emotion, ed. Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
14. For example, C. Stephen Jaeger, “Emotions and Sensibilities: Some Preluding Thoughts,”
in Codierungen von Emotionen im Mittelalter, ed. C. Stephen Jaeger and Ingrid Kasten (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 2003), vii-xii, in which the author distinguishes between emotions and sensibilities and
claims that only the latter can be studied by historians, as the former are “private sensations” that
“would appear not to have any history, to be primal, natural, instinctual, and unchangingly nebulous.”
15. The most influential argument in this regard is Peter Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90
(1985), 813-836. See also Jan Plamper, “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy,
Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns,” History and Theory 49 (2010), 237-265, esp. Rosenwein’s
remarks (258-260) and Stearns’s comment (262).
16. See the seminal paper by Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis
58 (1998), 7-19.
17. Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009 ), 10.
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ARE EMOTIONS A KIND OF PRACTICE?
197
century, such as nonconceptual forms of cognition, the role of habituation, and
organic plasticity.18 These aspects, also central to sociological practice theory,
urge a closer examination of EMT’s congruence and compatibility with it.
One consequence of this perspective is to say that, in affirming that emotion is linked to cognition, we should not assume that cognition is confined
to a Cartesian mind separate from the body, but that cognition is itself always
“embodied,”19 “grounded,”20 and “distributed.”21 A family of approaches in cognitive psychology grouped broadly under the heading of “situated cognition”22
includes activities formerly excluded from thought because they proceed without
attention directed toward them. These are the automated and habitual processes
of everyday assessing, deciding, and motivating; these are practiced, skillful
interactions with people and the environment that do not presuppose an acute
awareness of beliefs and desires, though it may arise in the process.
Like EMT for consciousness, these fields in psychological research aim to
loosen the brain’s grip on cognition. Their experiments test the hypothesis that
thinking is not only achieved conceptually (primarily with or like language), but
also in the body’s sensorimotor systems (so that things like bodily posture and
gestures matter) and in our environments, encompassing people and manipulated
objects to which we “offload” information processing, knowledge, memory, and
perception. The socially and environmentally contextualized body thinks along
with the brain. From this point of view, calling emotions a form of cognition in
fact does not successfully extract them from the body (beyond the brain), and
conversely, the fact that emotional processes occur in the (peripheral) body does
not make them separate from the mind, that is, only perceived or monitored by
the brain.
Much emotion-related research from the perspective of situated cognition has
not set about to redefine emotion, but has viewed it as part of the “situation,”
focusing on the ways that affective responses support cognition, comprehension,
and social ties.23 The philosophers of science Paul E. Griffiths and Andrea Scarantino have recently argued, however, that “a situated approach to emotion already
18. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Holt, 1890). Though he
acknowledges that all organic tissue is to some extent capable of “yielding,” changing form and
organization without losing structure completely, he emphasizes the particular “aptitude of the brain
for acquiring habits” (103) and the “extraordinary degree” of plasticity of nervous tissue in the body
(105), seeing in these the material basis of consciousness.
19. Margaret Wilson, “Six Views of Embodied Cognition,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 9
(2002), 625-636.
20. Lawrence W. Barsalou, “Grounded Cognition,” Annual Review of Psychology 59 (2008),
617-645.
21. Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
22. For an overview, see The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, ed. Philip Robbins
and Murat Aydede (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Work at the intersection of
anthropology and cognitive science also contributes to this paradigm; see, for example, Jean Lave,
Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1988).
23. See, for example, Keith Oatley, “The Sentiments and Beliefs of Distributed Cognition,” in
How Feelings Influence Thoughts: Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction, ed. Nico H. Frijda,
Antony S. R. Manstead, and Sascha Bem (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
78-107; Paula M. Niedenthal, “Embodying Emotion,” Science 316 (2007), 1002-1005; Paula M. Niedenthal and Marcus Maringer, “Embodied Emotion Considered,” Emotion Review 1 (2009), 122-128.
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exists and is backed by a substantial experimental literature.”24 According to this
approach, emotions are:
1. Designed to function in a social context . . . 2. Forms of skillful engagement with the
world that need not be mediated by conceptual thought; 3. Scaffolded by the environment, both synchronically, in the unfolding of a particular emotional performance, and
diachronically, in the acquisition of an emotional repertoire; 4. Dynamically coupled to an
environment which both influences and is influenced by the unfolding of the emotion.25
Historians are experts at analyzing the way things are situated. These four
statements alone seem to make the case that this approach is compatible with the
notion that emotions must necessarily have a history, as they each link cognitiveemotional processing to elements that themselves are subject to historical change
and cultural specificity: “social context,” “skill,” “performance,” “repertoire,”
and “environment.” These concepts also resonate with Bourdieu’s use of the term
“practice,” which, I would argue, could enrich this perspective substantially and
provide a methodology for historical study.
The approach proposed here suggests that the distinction between “inner” and
“outer” sides of emotion is not given, but is rather a product of the way we habitually “do” the experience. Practice may create an “inner” and “outer” to emotion
with the “ex-pression” of feelings originating inside and then moving from inner
to outer. But practice may also create bodily manifestations seemingly independent
from the mind, ego, or subject, depending on historically and culturally specific
habits and context. For this reason, I use the terms “emotions” and “feelings” not
in Damasio’s sense, but interchangeably.26 I am in agreement with Damasio and
James, however, in viewing the involvement of the body as the conditio sine qua
non for the definition of an act of consciousness as “emotion.”27 I aim to build
on the work of historian William Reddy, who draws heavily from research in the
cognitive and neurosciences to develop a concept of emotions that bridges the science/humanities divide.28 His work touches on practice theory,29 but has not fully
24. Paul E. Griffiths and Andrea Scarantino, “Emotions in the Wild: The Situated Perspective on
Emotion,” in Robbins and Aydede, eds., Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, 438.
25. Griffiths and Scarantino, “Emotions in the Wild,” 437-438.
26. I choose not to use the term “affect” because it refers to only part of the physiological-psychological-social complex of emotion, singling it out as somehow more significant than the other aspects
and running the risk of reductionism. More specifically, “affect” denotes the precultural “first step”
in an emotional process conceived of as linear (from affect/sensation through cultural signification to
emotion), whereas I am promoting a model of emotional response based on John Dewey’s notion of
a circuit (see below). For a cogent critique of the “affect” concept in recent cultural theory, see Ruth
Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (Spring 2011), 434-472.
27. See James, “What is an Emotion?” 193-194, and Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, 86-87,
where he distinguishes between thought and feeling by virtue of the brain’s representations of the
body involved in perception, thus causing us to say “I feel happy” and not “I think happy.” This is,
of course, possible only in languages in which a clear distinction is made between “thought” and
“emotion,” which does not seem to be the case, for example, in Bali (see Unni Wikan, “Toward an
Experience-near Anthropology,” Cultural Anthropology 6 [1991], 285-305). Be that as it may, in the
interest of clarifying terms for a history that presupposes a distinct object called “emotion,” I will
make the distinction in order to clarify my usage.
28. William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
29. Reddy addresses Wittgensteinian concepts closely related to ones developed in practice theory
in his “Emotional Styles and Modern Forms of Life,” in Sexualized Brains: Scientific Modeling of
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199
developed its potential for an understanding of emotions. In my view, what needs
to be emphasized is the mutual embeddedness of minds, bodies, and social relations
in order to historicize the body and its contributions to the learned experience of
emotion.
II. PRACTICES ARE EXECUTED BY A KNOWING BODY
The theory of practice that emerged at the intersection of philosophical phenomenology, sociology, and anthropology and concerned itself with overcoming
the dichotomies of subject/object, mind/body, and individual/society has not
included an elaborate discussion of the topic of emotions. If at all, emotions have
been treated as part of “the internal” (thoughts, feelings, attitudes, motivations)
or en passant as “bodily impulses” (drives, reactions), but hardly theorized as a
category in and of itself.30 Nevertheless, concepts from practice theory, particularly those coined by Bourdieu,31 are implemented in studies of emotion by some
social scientists and humanities scholars. For this reason, I will draw primarily
on his particular brand of practice theory in the following brief characterization
of the concept of practice.32 As should become clear, Bourdieu’s theory is particularly useful for studying emotion because it elaborates most thoroughly the
infusion of the physical body with social structure, both of which participate in
the production of emotional experience.
Emotional Intelligence from a Cultural Perspective, ed. Nicole Karafyllis and Gotlind Ulshöfer
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 81-100. He briefly discusses the compatibility of findings in
cognitive neuroscience with the work of practice theorists such as Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, William Sewell, and Sherry Ortner in this article, as well as in his “Saying Something New: Practice
Theory and Cognitive Neuroscience,” Arcadia 44 (2009), 8-23. Though Reddy mentions the habitus
concept twice in The Navigation of Feeling, one has the impression that he is hesitant about the
potential of Bourdieu’s theory, perhaps because the role of individual agency in practice—important
to Reddy’s framework—is not considered to be one of Bourdieu’s strong suits.
30. One of the more direct discussions of the implications of practice theory for the study of
emotion has been offered by the sociologist Andreas Reckwitz. See his Das hybride Subjekt: Eine
Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne (Weilerswist: Velbrück,
2006). On emotion in particular, see idem, “Umkämpfte Maskulinität: Zur Transformation männlicher
Subjektformen und ihrer Affektivitäten,” in Die Präsenz der Gefühle. Männlichkeit und Emotion in
der Moderne, ed. Manuel Borutta and Nina Verheyen (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010), 57-79, and idem,
“Affective Spaces: A Praxeological Outlook,” Rethinking History (forthcoming 2012). Though I
agree with many of his arguments, our approaches part ways at his use of the term “affect.”
31. In addition to those mentioned in note 2, calls for using a Bourdieuian approach have been
advanced by, among others, Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod, “Emotion, Discourse, and the
Politics of Everyday Life,” in Lutz and Abu-Lughod, eds., Language and the Politics of Emotion,
1-23, esp. 12, and Fay Bound Alberti, “Medical History and Emotion Theory,” in Medicine, Emotion
and Disease, 1700-1950, ed. Fay Bound Alberti (Houndmills, UK, and New York: Palgrave, 2006),
xiii-xxix, esp. xvii-xviii.
32. Other important contributions to a practice approach include Sherry B. Ortner, “Theory in
Anthropology since the Sixties,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (1984), 126-166;
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984); Theodore R. Schatzki, Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian
Approach to Human Activity and the Social (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and The
Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, ed. Theodore Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von
Savigny (New York: Routledge, 2001).
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Practice is action; it refers—in one frequently cited definition—to a “nexus of
doings and sayings.”33 Though it can encompass intentional, deliberate action, it
also includes, and indeed stresses, habituated behavior executed without much
cognitive attention paid. It differs from action in the Weberian sense of intentional,
meaningful behavior, which presupposes a metaphysical subject that more or less
knows what it is doing and why. In practice theory, subjects (or agents) are not
viewed as prior to practices, but rather as the product of them; subjects “exist only
within the execution of social practices: a single subject ‘is’ (essentially)—even
in his or her ‘inner’ processes of reflection, feeling, remembering, planning,
etc.—the sequence of acts in which he or she participates in social practices in his
or her everyday life.”34 These acts “range from ephemeral doings to stable longterm patterns of activity.”35 They can require “relevant equipment and material
culture,” or rely on “vocabulary and other linguistic forms or performances.”36
For the purposes of emotional practice it is important to note that these acts are
not only habituated and automatically executed movements of the body, but also
encompass a learned, culturally specific, and habitual distribution of attention to
“inner” processes of thought, feeling, and perception.37 Depending on where and
when we live, we learn to keep our thoughts and feelings to ourselves (or not), to
listen to our hearts (or our heads), to be “true to ourselves” and to know what we
want. These are not universal features of subjectivity. The history of the self in the
West has shown that the concepts on which such practices are based—interiority,
self-reflexivity, distinct faculties of feeling and thinking—have been intensely
cultivated at certain times in specific social and cultural constellations.38 And since
attending to “inner” experience is a practice, it is also always embodied, dependent
on brain cells, bodily postures, and the disciplining or habituating of these.
The individual subject in practice theory is not conceivable without the body.
The subject emerges from, is maintained by, and is fused with the body while it
makes use of the body’s innate and acquired capacities. It is, in fact, illegitimate
from the point of view of practice theory to make sharp ontological distinctions
between the subject and the body, so that the use of the term “body” must be
understood as always intertwined with “mind”—though in this text it is sometimes
necessary to distinguish between the two in order to emphasize the contribution
of the bodily organism to emotional experience. The materiality of the body provides not only the locus of the competence, dispositions, and behavioral routines
of practice, it is also the “stuff” with and on which practices work. The body is
33. Schatzki, Social Practices, 89.
34. Andreas Reckwitz, “Basic Elements of a Theory of Social Practices: A Perspective in Social
Theory,” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 32 (2003), 296 (my translation). This German-language article is
a more detailed version of Andreas Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development
in Culturalist Theorizing,” European Journal of Social Theory 5 (2002), 245-265.
35. Joseph Rouse, “Practice Theory,” in Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, ed. Dov M.
Gabbay, Paul Thagard, and John Woods, vol. 15 of Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, ed.
Stephen Turner and Mark Risjord (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006), 499.
36. Ibid.
37. Cf. Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory,” 249-251.
38. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1989); Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present,
ed. Ray Porter (London: Routledge, 1997).
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actor and instrument. It is conceived of not as an assembly of organic material
and processes alone, but as a knowing body, one that stores information from
past experiences in habituated processes and contributes this knowledge to human
activity and consciousness. For this reason, the anthropologists Margaret Lock and
Nancy Scheper-Hughes refer to this non-Cartesian entity as a “mindful body.”39
The habitual use of the body’s muscular, autonomic, sensorimotor, hormonal,
and other capacities does not leave them unaffected. The body is deeply shaped
by the habitus, a term Bourdieu (by way of Marcel Mauss) adapted from Aristotelian and Scholastic traditions to denote a “system of cognitive and motivating
structures” that correspond to social positioning. These structures are “dispositions durably inculcated by the possibilities and impossibilities, freedoms and
necessities, opportunities and prohibitions inscribed in the objective conditions”
of society and thus are “objectively compatible with these conditions and in a
sense pre-adapted to their demands.” The habitus consists of “schemes of perception, thought, and action” that produce individual and collective practices,
which in turn reproduce the generative schemes.40 Subsumed within the habitus
is “hexis,” Bourdieu’s more specific term for the socially conditioned physical
body, its gestures and postures. These are not distinct: the habitus as a whole is
fused with the body, which is thus infused with the temporality of society, though
this fact is lost in everyday practice. “The habitus—embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history—is the active presence of
the whole past of which it is the product.”41 The body thus cannot be timeless; it
contains history at multiple levels. This consists not only of the sedimentations
of evolutionary time, but also the history of the society in which the organism
is embedded, and its own history of constantly being molded by the practices it
executes.
The body also provides the habitus with something to shape; it is not radically
or arbitrarily modifiable, and it dictates the range of practices available. Clearly,
no human society will develop a dance step that requires five feet or a musical
instrument made for a hand with eight digits. A blind person would not partake
in practices involving visual stimuli the same way a seeing person does. Yet, a
bright line between nature and culture cannot be drawn on or in the body because
human beings hardly leave anything about themselves or their environment
untouched. Whatever physical apparatuses, functions, and strivings evolution
and parentage may have imparted to a human organism, these cannot remain
pristine after birth into a community. It might indeed be difficult to determine
which bodily structures and processes are not utilized, neglected, modified, or
conditioned by cultural activity in some way.
From this point of view, automatic behaviors, reflexes, spontaneous responses—
categories to which emotions have traditionally belonged42—are not “purely bio39. Scheper-Hughes and Lock, “The Mindful Body.” See also the illuminating essay by Thomas J.
Csordas, “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology,” Ethos 18 (1990), 5-47.
40. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 53-54.
41. Ibid., 56.
42. Defining emotions as involuntary reflexes has a long history beginning with Charles Darwin’s Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (1872). Silvan Tomkins’s definition of emotions
as “affect programs” belong to this tradition (Affect Imagery Consciousness, vols. 1-4 [New York:
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MONIQUE SCHEER
logical” or free of culture just because they are executed by the body without the
conscious participation of volition or cognition. They are more fruitfully thought
of as habits43 emerging where bodily capacities and cultural requirements meet.
The skillful use of the body in automatic movements, impulses, and activations is a
learned practice, acquired through mimesis, making lasting changes in the body and
brain.44 Habitual postures and movements build up muscle tissue, innervation, and
blood vessels in one area and not another, shorten some tendons, lengthen others,
affect bone density and shape, and induce specific development of brain tissue.45
Practices are guided by what Bourdieu calls the “practical sense” stored in the
habitus. Individuals behave according to the patterns that their community (class,
milieu, subculture) requires, but not just in the sense of deliberately learning rules of
“appropriate” behavior—as formulated in etiquette manuals—and “obeying” them.
Practice theory is more interested in implicit knowledge, in the largely unconscious
sense of what correct behavior in a given situation would be, in the “feel for the
game.”46 Thus, practices are skillful behaviors, dependent (as the term suggests)
on practice until they become automatic. The classic example used to illustrate
this principle is that of the pianist, whose hands eventually know how to execute a
piece of music on the instrument without conscious attention paid to the placement
of the fingers, or of the soccer player for whom dribbling the ball at high speeds
has become “second nature.” People move about in their social environments in
much the same manner, in most cases supremely practiced at the subtleties of
movement, posture, gesture, and expression that connect them with others as well
as communicate to themselves who they are. These practices are neither “natural”
nor random; they adhere to a learned repertoire that positions a person in a social
field and constitutes participation in that field’s “game.” They are not executed as
a mere reproduction of norms, but rather according to what Bourdieu refers to as
“strategy” and the practical sense that emerges from the habitus.47
Springer, 1962–1992]), as does Paul Ekman’s study of involuntary, universal facial expressions
(Emotion in the Human Face: Guidelines for Research and an Integration of Findings [New York:
Pergamon, 1972]).
43. As Reddy has pointed out (Navigation of Feeling, 55), there are psychologists who have
defined emotions as automatized cognitive habits: Alice M. Isen and Gregory A. Diamond, “Affect
and Automaticity,” in Unintended Thought: Limits of Awareness, Intention and Control, ed. James B.
Uleman and J. A. Bargh (New York: Guilford Press, 1989), 124-152.
44. Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 136137, where he speaks of “learning in the sense of a selective, durable transformation of the body
through the reinforcement or weakening of synaptic connections.” William James cites in this regard
the biological axiom “la fonction fait l’organe” (Principles, I, 109).
45. Some studies on the effects of muscular training and practice on brain anatomy include Sara
L. Bengtsson et al., “Extensive Piano Practicing Has Regionally Specific Effects on White Matter
Development,” Nature Neuroscience 8 (2005), 1148-1150; Bogdan Draganski et al., “Neuroplasticity: Changes in Grey Matter Induced by Training,“ Nature 427 (2004), 311-312. Recent research into
the physical effects of meditation practices suggests that attention distribution may also leave material
traces in brain structures. See Britta K. Hölzel et al., “Mindfulness Practice Leads to Increases in
Regional Brain Gray Matter Density,” Psychiatry Research 191, no. 1 (2011), 36-43; and A. Chiesa
and A. Serretti, “A Systematic Review of Neurobiological and Clinical Features of Mindfulness
Meditations,” Psychological Medicine 40, no. 8 (2010), 1239-1252.
46. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 66.
47. Cf. Pierre Lamaison and Pierre Bourdieu, “From Rules to Strategies: An Interview with Pierre
Bourdieu,” Cultural Anthropology 1 (1986), 110-120.
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ARE EMOTIONS A KIND OF PRACTICE?
203
As we have seen, the situated-cognition approach to emotion has a decidedly
practice-theoretical bent. The nonconceptual cognition and automaticity it is
interested in rely heavily on the kinds of implicit knowledge and abilities that
Bourdieu subsumes under the “practical sense.” By conceiving of emotions as
“goal-oriented responses,”48 however, it is important to avoid thinking of “strategic” in a superficially instrumental sense. While allowing that actors often do
consciously strategize, Bourdieu also reminds us that strategy does not always
follow an intentional, goal-oriented logic, but rather is also often guided by the
embodied memories of past coping strategies, habits following the logic of everyday practice, an intentionality not necessarily based on propositional thought.
Emotions can thus be strategic without implicating conscious goal-orientation—
they can even be at odds with conscious wills and desires, but nevertheless be
oriented toward goals presented by social scripts.
Bourdieu describes habitus as an incorporation of structure, both in the LéviStraussian and Marxian sense, of symbolic and economic order, which it then
unconsciously reproduces and supports. This has led many to criticize Bourdieu’s theory as a form of social determinism that leaves far too little room for
individual agency. Bourdieu may indeed posit an actor less “loosely structured”49
than do some other practice theorists. Michel de Certeau openly berates Bourdieu
for claiming that actors are unconscious, calling the habitus “a mystical reality,”
a “blanket Bourdieu’s theory throws over tactics as if to put out their fire.”50 In
his zealous opposition to rationalist, intentionalist theories of action, particularly
in his early writings, Bourdieu did in fact emphasize, perhaps overemphasize,
the structural side of the habitus, the unconscious “doxa” in which practices are
embedded.51 However, it would be a mistake to assume that his theory leaves
no room for individuality and thus for personal agency, however socially conditioned it must of necessity be. The “singularity of . . . social trajectories,”
contact with different institutions in the course of a lifetime, such as the family,
the village, the neighborhood, school, church, the military, a shop, a production line, a corporation, creates an individual habitus. Though “dominated by
the earliest experiences, of the experiences statistically common to members of
the same class,” the habitus of each individual is, in Bourdieu’s view, “a unique
48. Griffiths and Scarantino, “Emotions in the Wild,” 439.
49. Sherry Ortner, High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 198.
50. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984), 58-59. “Tactics” refer in de Certeau’s work to the “art of the weak,” a kind of subversive
trickery, a locus for creativity and resistance in the face of the grand “strategies” of subjects and
institutions with “will and power” (36-37).
51. In so doing, Bourdieu’s theory tends to ascribe a political orientation to the body, like that of
William James, who called habit society’s “most precious conservative agent . . . [which] keeps us
all within the bounds of ordinance” (Principles, I, 121). Bourdieu has also been taken to task for his
ethnographic representation of Kabyle society, central to the development of his concept of habitus;
cf. Herman Roodenburg, “Pierre Bourdieu: Issues of Embodiment and Authenticity,” Etnofoor 17
(2005), 215-226.
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MONIQUE SCHEER
integration.”52 Thus, the individual agency that emerges from the habitus is
dependent on socialization, but not reduced to it.53
The habitus must be static and binding to a certain extent, if it is to be more
than just a loose cloak that can be thrown off on a whim.54 At the same time,
the set of dispositions is not established once and for all, but is dependent on
confirmation in everyday practices. Since the habitus does not dictate the exact
course of action in practice but rather provides a “feel” for the appropriate movements, gestures, facial expressions, pitch of the voice, and so on, it leaves space
for behaviors not entirely and always predictable, which can also instantiate
change and resistance rather than preprogrammed reproduction.55 Social practice
is spontaneous while drawing on conventional forms, individual by virtue of a
unique montage of embodied social structures. Thus, in order to theorize a history
of feeling, it is not necessary to posit change-producing friction between social
structure and individual agency or between cultural demands and the timeless,
universal “truth” of a body whose functions and structures remain untouched by
their uses. A habitus may conflict with a changing social environment, and it is
equally likely that friction will ensue when actors/bodies enact cultural scripts
out of place. The plurality of practices suffices to explain historical changes
and shifts, because they collide with one another, causing misunderstandings,
conflicts, and crossovers between fields.56 Furthermore, as Diana Coole has
pointed out, “the body’s political reactions are not naturally either conservative or
transgressive. They vary according to its situation.” Rather than positing agents/
subjects as the ultimate originators of historical change, Coole suggests thinking
of bodily capacities such as emotions as one end of a spectrum of “agentic capacities” that emerge in practice.57
III. EMOTIONS EMERGE FROM BODILY KNOWLEDGE
In his works, Bourdieu rarely addresses emotion directly as a category of analysis,
preferring to use terms such as thought and behavior, being and action.58 Emotions
52. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 60. See the critical discussion of Bourdieu’s habitus concept in
David Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 95-116, and in Bernard Lahire, The Plural Actor (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press,
2010). Lahire has developed more fully the notion of the “multi-socialized and multi-determined
individual” confronted with a plurality of contexts in which to deploy behaviors and practices on the
basis of Bourdieu’s habitus theory. He argues for a social analysis that is at once “dispositional” and
“contextual” (x-xi).
53. Judith Butler similarly argues that agency is radically conditioned by society, but is not fully
constrained by it; see her The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997), 15.
54. As Erving Goffmann once said: “When they issue uniforms, they issue skins,” to which Arlie
Hochschild added “and two inches of flesh.” See Arlie Russell Hochschild, “Emotion Work, Feelings
Rules, and Social Structure,” American Journal of Sociology 85 (1979) 556, citing Erving Goffmann,
Frame Analysis (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
55. The subversive potential of repetitive practices is more strongly articulated in Judith Butler,
Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), and idem, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge,
1993) than in Bourdieu’s work.
56. Cf. Reckwitz, “Basic Elements,” 296.
57. Diana Coole, “Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities,” Political Studies 53 (2005), 130.
58. This may explain why his theory has been largely neglected by anthropologists and sociolo-
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are implicit in many passages, but his terminology varies and indeed reproduces
some of the dichotomies he seeks to undermine. For instance, in the Pascalian
Meditations, he discusses feelings or sensations in phenomenological terms as the
means with which the habitus makes a connection with the world, as the moment,
indeed the epitome, of the convergence of subject and object.59 In another passage,
he uses Freudian language to speak of emotions as drives and affects.60 In Masculine Domination he distinguishes between “bodily emotions” on the one hand, and
“passions and sentiments” on the other, implying a somehow “less bodily” emotional experience.61 In the Logic of Practice, however, he states that both thoughts
and feelings emerge from “inductive states of the body.”62
Bourdieu’s varying perspectives on emotion reflect different practices of emotion, which are, however, consistently anchored in the habitus.63 As body knowledge, the habitus is contrasted with conceptual knowledge in Bourdieu’s work. In
this way, the habitus is construed so as to oppose rationality in the rational-choice
theory he so assiduously combatted, but without being irrational, as it follows a
practical logic. Emotions also follow this practical logic embedded in social relations.64 Like all practices, they are simultaneously spontaneous and conventional.
The habitus specifies what is “feelable” in a specific setting, orients the mind/
body in a certain direction without making the outcome fully predictable. Emotions can thus be viewed as acts executed by a mindful body, as cultural practices.
These practices are interconnected with other practices that manipulate and
activate the body, as Bourdieu suggests in a famous passage from the Logic of
Practice, because bodies
as actors know, give rise to states of mind. Thus the attention paid to staging in great collective ceremonies derives not only from the concern to give a solemn representation of
the group (manifest in the splendour of baroque festivals) but also, as many uses of singing
and dancing show, from the less visible intention of ordering thoughts and suggesting feelings through the rigorous marshalling of practices and the orderly disposition of bodies, in
particular the bodily expression of emotion, in laughter or tears.65
This formulation of emotion in Bourdieu’s work can be compared with anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo’s construal of emotions as “embodied thoughts.”66
gists of emotion. The anthropologist Deborah Reed-Danahay has discussed the place of emotion in
Bourdieu’s concept of habitus in her Locating Bourdieu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2005), 99-128. She points out its connections with his examinations of taste and the nexus of economic interest and affective ties in families.
59. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 142.
60. Ibid., 167.
61. Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, transl. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2001), 38.
62. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 69.
63. Bourdieu suggests that the habitus is the location of emotion when he speaks in Masculine
Domination of the “passion of the . . . habitus” (39).
64. See Lutz, Unnatural Emotions, for an eloquent explication of the embeddedness of emotions
in social relations.
65. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 69.
66. Michelle Z. Rosaldo, “Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling,” in Culture Theory:
Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, ed. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), 137-157, esp. 143: “embodied thoughts [are] thoughts seeped
with the apprehension that ‘I am involved’,” a statement that appears to draw on a phenomenologically inspired stance comparable to Bourdieu’s.
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MONIQUE SCHEER
Just as thoughts arise in connection with a perception or the processing of information, so do emotions arise as thoughts of the body, as elements of the body’s
knowledge and memory, as its appraisal of a situation. And like thoughts, emotions are active and passive in that they can be a more or less voluntary sentiment,
but they can also emerge from the receptiveness that dispositions create.
This is not to ascribe to the body the kind of agency traditionally attributed to
the liberal self. Saying that emotions emerge from bodily knowledge does not
make “habitus” just another word for “subject.” Rather, the habitus is the precondition for subjectification, for example, by determining the level of inhibition to
shedding tears that is part and parcel of gender performance. It can and does produce the behaviors and thought patterns of intentionality or a “free will,” if that is
what a specific community demands of its subjects.67 The “interior” as the locus
of “true feelings” and the self is also a product of a habitus that daily engages in
denigrating the “exterior” and “emancipating” the subject from it. Thinking of
emotions as practices means integrating the history of feeling into the study of
socially produced subjectivities.68
Conceiving of emotions as practices or acts also provides a way of counterbalancing the dominant language of emotions as always and essentially reactions,
or triggered responses. In his seminal articles on emotion and the reflex arc, John
Dewey criticized the stimulus-response model as reproducing the mind-body
split.69 He suggested thinking of the “reflex arc” as an “organic circuit” that only
functions if connected in a circular flow. This means that the stimulus is constituted by the response and vice-versa. The “teleological distinction” of cause and
effect is not understandable as ontology but only as functions within the circuit
with reference to a goal.70 Such a conceptualization would imply that the “triggers” of emotional “reactions” are constituted by those emotional acts, a constitution that can only be accurately clarified by examining the situation in which it
took place and understanding the cultural meanings of the emotion/trigger circuit.
Instead of searching the historical record for the “trigger” to explain the emotion
that followed, the emotions can be viewed as the meaningful cultural activity of
ascribing, interpreting, and constructing an event as a trigger.
Rejecting a linear model of emotional processes also rearranges the question
of whether emotion-as-practice implies an active doing as opposed to a passive
experience of emotions. Emotions involve many capacities of the body—facial
expressions, firings of neurons, thought processes, production of tears or sweat,
67. How volition is construed and experienced across cultures is explored in Toward an Anthropology of the Will, ed. Keith M. Murphy and C. Jason Throop (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2010).
68. Reckwitz, Das hybride Subjekt, 131-155; see also approaches to subjectivity from anthropology: Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007), 9-25; from intellectual history: Taylor, Sources of the Self;
and from the history of science: Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self
(London: Free Associations Books, 1999).
69. John Dewey, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” Psychological Review 3, no. 4 (1896),
357-370, esp. 357-358. On emotion, see idem, “The Theory of Emotion. (1) Emotional Attitudes,”
Psychological Review 1, no. 6 (1894), 553-569 and idem, “The Theory of Emotion. (2) The Significance of Emotions,” Psychological Review 2, no. 1 (1895), 13-32.
70. Dewey, “Reflex Arc,” 365.
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ARE EMOTIONS A KIND OF PRACTICE?
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expletives, changes in heart rate and breathing, gestures, postures, and movements—which can take place anywhere along a continuum from wholly conscious and deliberate to completely inadvertent, shifting in the course of their
execution along this continuum. There is practiced and unpracticed weeping,
intentional and unintentional laughter, spontaneous and re-enacted blushing.
Which of these is more “real” or legitimate than the other and for what reasons is
a judgment, not inherent in the emotional practice itself. The claim that emotions
“happen to” the subject splits mind from body, locating the subject in the mind.
On this reading, the emotions are viewed as outside the subject and thus acquire
a sort of autonomy. This autonomy can be perceived as a threat to the subject’s
own purported freedom as in Enlightenment discourses on the passions,71 or it can
be valorized as in current affect theory in which the physiological aspect of emotion alone, imagined as “pure intensity,” promises escape from the incessantly
signifying force of culture.72
But why does this ascription of “autonomy” to emotions always seem to enlist
notions of the “physiological” that are assumed to be outside of culture? Why
should the body be any more autonomous than the self? In Bourdieu’s terms,
emotions are acts of the self, but in the “insidious complicity that a body slipping
from the control of consciousness and will maintains with the censures inherent
in the social structures.”73 Or, to phrase it less pessimistically, the habits of the
mindful body are executed outside of consciousness and rely on social scripts
from historically situated fields. That is to say, a distinction between incorporated
society and the parts of the body generating emotion is hard to make. The physiological contains both the organic and the social, which cooperate in the production of emotion. And, as with other practices, the feeling self executes emotions,
and experiences them in varying degrees and proportions, as inside and outside,
subjective and objective, depending on the situation.
As Michel Foucault argued, subjectivity can be achieved only through passivity.74 We are subjected by and through emotions—the fact that they “overcome”
us and are outside our control is the embodied effect of our ties to other people,
as well as to social conventions, to values, to language. Emotions do not pit their
agency and autonomy against ours; they emerge from the very fact that subjectivity and autonomy are always bounded by the conditions of their existence, by the
fundamental sociability of the human body and self.
For Bourdieu, this fact is particularly pertinent to the distribution of power in
society, which is incorporated into the body and produces corresponding thinking, feeling, and behavior. Domination is achieved, he writes, through “symbolic
71. Here the passions, as Thomas Dixon phrased it, are viewed as “mini-agents” outside the subject; see his From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 106.
72. This is the argument presented in Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect,
Sensation (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 35: “The autonomy of affect
. . . is its openness,” and the moment it is “[f]ormed, qualified, situated,” it is “captured” (emphasis
in the original).
73. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 39.
74. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983),
208-224.
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violence,” meaning the compelling, even coercive, logic of a symbolic order that
is reproduced day after day in micro and macro acts of body and language.
Symbolic force is a form of power that is exerted on bodies, directly and as if by magic,
without any physical constraint; but this magic works only on the basis of the dispositions
deposited, like springs, at the deepest level of the body. If it can act like the release of a
spring, that is, with a very weak expenditure of energy, this is because it does no more than
trigger the dispositions that the work of inculcation and embodiment has deposited in those
who are thereby primed for it. In other words, it finds its conditions of possibility, and
its economic equivalent (in an expanded sense of the word “economic”), in the immense
preliminary labor that is needed to bring about a durable transformation of bodies and to
produce the permanent dispositions that it triggers and awakens.75
Thus, Bourdieu continues, in “practical acts of knowledge and recognition”
the dominated “often unwittingly, sometimes unwillingly, contribute to their
own domination.” These acts “often take the form of bodily emotions—shame,
humiliation, timidity, anxiety, guilt—or passions and sentiments—love, admiration, respect. These emotions are all the more powerful when they are betrayed in
visible manifestations such as blushing, stuttering, clumsiness, trembling, anger
or impotent rage, so many ways of submitting, even despite oneself.”76 In this
passage, Bourdieu comes closest to naming emotions as practices. He gives the
example of societies in which women are excluded from public spaces; they are
thereby denied the opportunity to develop habits of everyday, anonymous social
contact with male strangers, and thus develop a “socially imposed agoraphobia.”
Their terror of the public space leads them to exclude themselves from it.77
Depending on the validity attributed to the “truth” of emotions, such feelings
can be experienced as a nuisance, a reflex of the body in spite of the fact that one
“knows better,” or they can be taken to mean that this is how things should be,
this is how “nature” intends it. Such a discourse depoliticizes the emotions by
naturalizing them and endowing them with fundamental autonomy thus denying
their social and historical contingency.78 In spite of all the evidence of pessimism
in his work, in light of his various political engagements, it can be argued that
Bourdieu’s intellectual project was, in the final analysis, an emancipatory one
that sought to increase consciousness of these workings of the habitus, thus
effecting change.79 Bourdieu’s approach allows for the recognition of the politics
of emotion, which in the end is an intervention that increases the domain of agency by denaturalizing bodily impulses. As Reddy’s work has convincingly shown,
dissonance between feelings and thoughts is just the kind of clash of practices
that can generate personal, social, and historical change. Conversely, consonance
between conceptual and bodily knowledge makes each especially convincing,
important, or real. Human beings may cultivate and attach significance to this
75. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 38.
76. Ibid., 38-39.
77. Ibid., 39.
78. For a detailed study of how the shift from the philosophical and theological concepts of “passions,” “affections,” and “sentiments” to the psychological concept of bodily “emotions” removed
them from the moral sphere in the course of the nineteenth century, see Dixon, From Passions to
Emotions.
79. For more on Bourdieu’s political engagements, see Swartz, Culture and Power, 266-269.
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ARE EMOTIONS A KIND OF PRACTICE?
209
kind of consonance in their practices, but they also pay attention to, reflect on,
and learn from the dissonance.80
IV. EMOTIONAL PRACTICES
Viewing emotion as a kind of practice means recognizing that it is always embodied, that an emotion without a medium for experience cannot be described as one.
Access to emotion-as-practice—the bodily act of experience and expression—in
historical sources or ethnographic work is achieved through and in connection
with other doings and sayings on which emotion-as-practice is dependent and
intertwined, such as speaking, gesturing, remembering, manipulating objects, and
perceiving sounds, smells, and spaces. I have termed these “doings and sayings”
“emotional practices,” which build on the embodied knowledge of the habituated
links that form complexes of mind/body actions. In the following, I will sketch
out four overlapping categories of emotional practices that can be studied as part
of a history of emotions. These categories pick up on existing approaches with the
intent to infuse them with a new vocabulary, that of practice theory.
1. Mobilizing
Emotional practices are habits, rituals, and everyday pastimes that aid us in
achieving a certain emotional state. This includes the striving for a desired feeling as well as the modifying of one that is not desirable. Emotional practices in
this sense are manipulations of body and mind to evoke feelings where there are
none, to focus diffuse arousals and give them an intelligible shape, or to change
or remove emotions already there. In other words, they are part of what is often
referred to as “emotional management” and the ongoing learning and maintaining of an emotional repertoire. These practices are very often distributed, that
is, carried out together with other people, artifacts, aesthetic arrangements, and
technologies. This will often mean that we implement such means on our own by
seeking out certain spaces, music, photographs, or other personal memorabilia to
manage our moods. But we are also sometimes simply confronted with an emotional setup. The presence of other people, a crowd expressing emotion loudly,
or music not of our own choosing can cause us to do an emotion and can lead to
other managing practices.
An example of this kind of emotional practice is courtship. It is connected with
widely variable “doings and sayings” throughout history and between cultures,
involving changing technologies (from love letters to the cell phone and the internet) and changing venues (from supervised visits to dates to parties). Research
has focused on how these practices are embedded in cultural norms and economic
interests, but they also serve to cultivate a certain kind of feeling between potential marriage partners—which can range from dutiful obedience, to honor, to pas-
80. On practices of negotiating the inner and outer in early modern Europe, see John J. Martin,
Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); see also Reddy,
Navigation of Feeling, 154-172 on sincerity and sentimentalism, and Solomon’s neo-Stoic formulation in True to Our Feelings, 121-122.
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sion, admiration, familiarity, or respect. Courtship, then, is not just a behavior but
has performative effects on the constitution of feelings and the (gendered) self.
Media use is an extremely important emotional practice.81 Listening to music,
visiting a museum, attending a theater performance, watching a film or TV show,
playing a video game, or reading a novel, for example, can modulate our feelings
to a greater or lesser degree. These emotions are deeply embedded in culture
though many media products are enjoyable only to a relatively small circle of
connoisseurs and thus create subcultures of taste and enjoyment. They can also
be relatively short-lived—some popular films and novels appear strange or no
longer resonate with the audience after only a few years. Consuming older media
can, however, be a means of experiencing the differentness (and sameness) of a
past era, providing its own emotional experiences. Media consumption is part of
a broader practice of the aesthetics of the everyday, surrounding oneself with the
beautiful, familiar, comfortable, or stylish. Establishing and maintaining a pleasant feeling—even the pleasantly unpleasant, such as the thrilling fear and disgust
of horror films—in aesthetic practices represents a broad subset of emotional
practices, which also include actions associated with unpleasant feelings of sadness, anger, or regret.
The anthropologist Victor Turner saw in ritual behavior a means for canalizing
negative emotions and minimizing their destructive power for the community, a
notion predicated on the hydraulic model of the self. A practice-theory approach
would emphasize the use of rituals (in the broadest sense) as a means of achieving,
training, articulating, and modulating emotions for personal as well as social purposes. Christian practices of penance, for example, are not viewed as expressing
a feeling of ruefulness or repentance that exists (or perhaps does not) prior to the
act, but rather as a means of achieving an embodied experience of regret (whether
it succeeds or not). Penance can mobilize the body in varying ways, causing one to
experience pain or discomfort by wearing a cilice or walking long distances on the
knees, by focusing attention on painful memories, by listening to a rousing fireand-brimstone sermon together with others. Enlightenment discourses that emphasize a “natural” tendency toward pleasant feelings and avoidance of negative ones
may make such practices appear pathological, but they are evidence of ways in
which pain and suffering can be agentive in the sense proposed by Talal Asad.82
Political activism also relies on the practice of negative feelings, as every good
speaker knows. Conceptual knowledge that war crimes are morally wrong may
not in and of itself lead to feelings of disgust and anger, or if so, only weakly.
This knowledge can be transformed into bodily knowledge and thus be buttressed
by reading or hearing of concrete details, viewing photographs, discussing with
others in shared outrage, marching and chanting at demonstrations, or watching
others do so. The word “can” is important here, because part of the dynamic of
performance is its unexpected outcome. Emotional practices exist because people
81. On the intersection of media studies and the history of emotions, see Die Massen bewegen:
Medien und Emotionen in der Moderne, ed. Frank Bösch and Manuel Borutta (Frankfurt am Main:
Campus Verlag, 2006).
82. Talal Asad, “Thinking about Agency and Pain,” in idem, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 67-99.
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211
assume that they usually work, but they are not “techniques of the body” in the
sense that they will always produce a desired effect. As long as they usually do
produce the desired effect they will continue to be cultivated, whereas if they regularly fail—due to other, intervening emotional habits—they will be discarded.83
Emotional practices can be carried out alone, but they are frequently embedded in social settings. Other people’s bodies are implicated in practice because
viewing them induces feelings. These effects are stored in the habitus, which
provides socially anchored responses to others. Shame wells up in the cheeks
in answer to a contemptuous glance; compassion propels one toward the pain
in another’s face. However, these reactions are always already tightly bound up
with apprehensions of who the other is, whether they are higher or lower in rank
than oneself, if they are like or unlike oneself, if they are victims or perpetrators.
This apprehension is not necessarily—or even usually—achieved conceptually,
but mimetically through the habitus.
Likewise, horizontal effects of the group experience on emotions (“emotional
contagion”) are also mediated by habitual predispositions to acting within a
group, a practical sense of the relations within it, and its broader social context.
Centuries of reflection on the effects of observing others’ bodies and voices on
the stage, on the soapbox, or in the pulpit have elaborated, refined, and revised
emotional practices. Theories of rhetoric and of the emotional effects of music
and theatrical performance form the basis of emotional theories that inform
and arise from current emotional practices. The use of claqueurs in the theater,
professional mourners at funerals, or laugh tracks on television build upon this
knowledge, while their rejection is indicative of their waning effectiveness and/
or of changing attitudes about their use.84
Finally, consumption of mood-altering substances intervenes in the materiality
of emotional processes. It may be argued that drug ingestion requires no practice
or accomplishment, as it is a completely mechanical chemical process. This may
be true in many cases, though the well-documented “placebo effect” reminds us
that bodily experience is shaped by more than just physiological changes. In any
case, managing and shaping such effects is indeed a learned skill, and a given
culture may cultivate it or neglect it, leading to different effects.85 Getting “high”
is not explainable solely as a chemical reaction alone. It is deeply embedded in
codes, norms, and social functions, and its ubiquity as a cultural practice—as
well as the ubiquity of strong prohibitions against it—is indicative of its effectiveness.86 Drug ingestion is only one (perhaps the quickest and simplest) way of
manipulating the body to achieve, for example, joviality or even ecstasy. It can
be complemented—or replaced—by practices involving intense sensory stimulation (loud music, repetitive drumbeats, chanting, droning) and bodily movements
that affect balance (rocking, twirling, dancing). These practices, too, are the
83. Reddy, “Emotional Styles,” also refers to “practical familiarity with what works . . . and what
does not work” in the “handling of emotional feedback” (96). Thus, “emotional styles rise and fall” (85).
84. James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995), 246-248.
85. See also Daniel L. Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2008), 112-189.
86. Angus Bancroft, Drugs, Intoxication and Society (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009).
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object of vehement debate, and are countered by practices intended not to stir the
body, which is held in postures and movements that point “inward.” Interiorizing
practices sustain a habitus that erects and maintains a boundary between “inner”
and “outer” and can train inner capacities to the point of virtuosity (such as the
“religious musicality” to which Max Weber referred).87
In situ one will find a combination of different practices that aim at the mobilization of psychophysical capacities in order to achieve aesthetic experiences
and embodied forms of meaning. Entertaining and hospitality frequently entail
music and conviviality and mood-altering foods and beverages; films and certain
forms of theater employ a variety of media to steer emotional communication,
as do religious rituals, which not only convey meaning, but also a certain kind
of emotionality. These practices are subject to change over time, and transformations of emotional practices impact emotion-as-practice in certain groups at
certain points in history.
2. Naming
Reddy’s concept of “emotives” stresses the performative nature of emotional
expression. Putting a name on our feelings is part and parcel of experiencing
them. Expression organizes the experience—or to use Reddy’s terminology from
cognitive psychology, an emotive such as “I am angry” brings into attention
thought material hitherto activated but outside awareness. It is amorphous and
unintelligible until it has been shaped by mental attention. Reddy notes that emotives have unexpected outcomes, but that they very often succeed and that people
generally use them (based on their practical experience with their effectiveness)
to achieve certain emotional states.88 The use of emotives is emotional practice.
Many historians of emotion have looked for “emotion talk” in personal letters, emphasizing the cognitive process of producing emotives. However, writing
about feelings, talking about feelings (for example in the context of therapy),
or putting a name on our emotions is always bound up in a bodily practice. The
specific situation matters: The formulation of thought is different when one is
moving a pen across paper or typing on a keyboard as opposed to when one
is speaking. Writing for oneself, as in a diary, while sitting alone has interiorizing effects, whereas speaking out loud while in view of a dialogic partner has
exteriorizing ones. The social relationship of the two speakers affects the bodily
dimension of the emotion in tone of voice, heart rate, and facial expression, which
are all guided by the practical sense of the habitus, somewhere between deliberate
control and unconscious habit.89
87. See Tanya Luhrmann, “What Counts as Data?” in Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and
Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience, ed. James Davies and Dimitrina Spencer (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2010), 212-238. Luhrmann attributes a significant role to proclivity (228), and
seems to suggest that these are inborn talents for certain religious practices. It would, however, be
difficult to determine in a given experiment whether people’s proclivity stems from their genes or
their habitus.
88. See William M. Reddy, “Sentimentalism and Its Erasure: The Role of Emotions in the Era of
the French Revolution,” Journal of Modern History 72 (2000), 109-152, esp. 131 for the “common
response” of confirmation of emotives and the “escalation of intensity” that ensues.
89. Plamper, “The History of Emotions,” 242, refers to this embodied character as the prosody of
speech and links it to social context, hinting at the work of the habitus in producing emotives.
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Reddy and others have pointed out that emotions are not natural kinds, that
any specific conglomeration of activated thought material is sui generis.90 Like
snowflakes, every emotion is unique and gets put into a category—is typified—
only through naming. The possibility that the body (whether through vasomotor
changes or the activation of certain areas of the brain) contributes information that
makes a certain naming more or less likely does not justify the conclusion that
these physical contributions form the basis or the location of the “actual” emotion. The concept of habitus implies that there is complicity between discursive
codes and socially prepared bodies. Stimuli, Bourdieu claims, work only when
“they encounter agents conditioned to recognize them.”91 Conversely, the body
can evoke a certain set of words when habitualized bodily activations building
on inborn and acquired programs are deeply entangled with a socially generated
script. Emotives themselves acquire their specific meaning only in their socially
situated usage. The statement “I hate you,” or a gesture of contempt, mean different things depending on the way they are performed (whispered, shouted, or with
a giggle) and by and to whom they are performed. In this sense, emotions can
be seen as the product of a meaningful intersection of socially situated concepts
and bodies.92
For this reason, discursive practices that involve the interpretation of feeling
(or what Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod call “emotional discourse”93) are
of as much interest to a history of emotions as the norms, orders of knowledge,
and ideologies (“discourse on emotion”94) discussed below. This applies not only
to the initial experience and its signification but also to remembered feelings. In
retrospect, emotional experiences can be reinterpreted and, in a sense, re-experienced, and sometimes it is only long after the fact that we “understand” what
our feelings “actually” were. The work of signifying and resignifying emotions is
done not only at the kitchen table with family and friends, but also through entire
industries dedicated to improving “emotional intelligence”95 and new media
genres, perhaps best exemplified by the afternoon talk show.96 The discourse of
therapy has become firmly anchored in everyday speech, circulating ever more
90. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 102. See also Paul E. Griffiths, “Is Emotion a Natural Kind?”
in Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, ed. Robert C. Solomon (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 233-249.
91. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 53.
92. Plamper, “The History of Emotions,” 241-242. Reddy has often been criticized for not adequately theorizing the role of the body in emotional experience, which Plamper calls “logocentrism.”
Reddy explains here that it is a result of his stipulation that emotives be conscious: “We utter (or
execute) them in the hope that our actual full response will match the words we utter or gestures we
make,” hopes that are frequently dashed. Thus described, the emotives go in only one direction—a
disembodied mind manages or explores its “self,” which includes an unruly body. But the model of
top-down processing Reddy proposes (“Saying Something New,” 17-21) includes bodily inputs, proprioceptive, and sensorimotor perceptions. A blush could thus be viewed as an emotive contributing
to self-exploration. We have only learned to regard it as a “mark of sincerity,” giving it great power
to bring our emotional experience in line with it.
93. Lutz and Abu-Lughod, “Emotion, Discourse, and the Politics of Everyday Life,” 10.
94. Ibid.
95. This term as it is used in management seminars for businessmen and -women is from Daniel
Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ (New York: Bantam, 1995).
96. See Eva Illouz, Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
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widely through globalized media,97 thus modifying emotives and pushing the
language of emotion in ever new directions.
Habits of naming emotions are clearly historically variable—new words
emerge for new emotions all the time. In India, for example, the rise of the
romantic narrative in Bollywood films has disseminated the use of the English
phrase “I love you” in Hindi dialogue to perform a feeling hitherto not habitualized in marriages or courtship.98 If naming emotions makes them available to
experience, then charting changes in naming means writing a history of feeling
in the fullest sense.
3. Communicating
Emotions are perhaps most obviously practices when they are involved in communication. Because people know that emotions do things in social contexts, they
use them as means of exchange.99 For this purpose, the expression of emotion
is key, as is—in the terminology of speech-act theory already important in the
discussion of emotives—the issue of whether and how they succeed. The success
of an emotional performance depends on the skill of the performer as well as
that of its recipient(s) to interpret it. Performances can indicate how important it
is for the recipient to decode the expression in the way it is intended. The coach
shouting loudly at her team is insuring that they understand she is communicating anger. The politician publicly expressing sadness at tragic events affecting
his constituency will compose his face and modulate his voice in a manner that
unequivocally conveys this feeling. Composing emotion is facilitated by clear,
socially agreed-upon signs, but these are no guarantee that the message will be
read as intended. Some politicians are unable to convince observers of their emotion, just as the expressions offered by some romantic partners leave their lovers
in the dark about their feelings.
Reading emotion in faces, gestures, vocal patterns, bodily postures, or manifestations such as tears, changing skin color, or heavy breathing is a complex
process that functions on a multisensory level and involves different modes
of knowledge. It includes judgments about the situational context, the actors
involved, and social expectations. Interpreting an emotion “correctly” is sometimes made more difficult by apparently contradictory bits of information that
have to be accommodated and brought into a framework that makes sense. It is
also complicated by the practical knowledge that expressions may not correspond
with what is felt “inside.” The cultivation of a boundary between the inner and
outer is achieved in a whole set of complex practices around the notion of sincerity, whose cultural variations have frequently been commented on.100 The accom97. Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche (New York: Free
Press, 2010).
98. Rachel Dwyer, “Kiss and Tell: Expressing Love in Hindi Movies,” in Love in South Asia: A
Cultural History, ed. Francesca Orsini (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 289302.
99. Emotions as a means of exchange in religious practice is explicated in John Corrigan, Business
of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002).
100. Webb Keane, “Sincerity, ‘Modernity,’ and the Protestants,” Cultural Anthropology 17
(2002), 65-92.
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plishment of sincere communication (or its discernment by an observer) depends
heavily on bodily performances—tone of voice, facial expression, movements
and gestures—that have been culturally transmitted. The stereotype of “Eastern”
hypocrisy and insincerity included descriptions of bodily performances that did
not conform to Western notions of honest expression.101 Reddy has also commented on the catastrophic effects of a rigid ideology of sincerity, which places
high performative demands on actors.102 The deeply ingrained emotional practice
of striving to bring avowal into congruence with “actual feeling,” to adapt Lionel Trilling’s famous definition,103 is what construes “inner” feeling as “actual,”
rendering expression or avowal dependent on it. A “performance” can by this
definition never be genuine.
Notions of interiority and sincerity are so deeply embedded in the modern Western habitus that they creep into scientific and scholarly definitions of emotion and
inform research questions and interpretations as well. An “ethnopsychology”104
that emerges under specific historical and cultural circumstances can be universalized, turning other cultural and historical configurations into conundrums:
Were the emotional expressions of medieval kings “mere” performances,
planned and insincere?105 Are conventionalized emotions “real” at all? When
one conceives of feeling as a kind of practice, these questions become the object
of inquiry: In what historical situations do such issues become pertinent?106 Is
involuntary bodily arousal construed as more “real” than deliberate expression,
and if so, why? Rather than seeking to reconstruct emotional “truth,” the question
becomes how and why historical actors mobilized their bodies in certain ways,
cultivated specific skilled performances, and debated emotional practices among
themselves.
4. Regulating
The study of emotional norms is one of the classic fields of emotion research.
Terms such as “feeling rules,” “display rules,” and “emotionology” have been
coined to denote the demands social etiquette places on the management of
emotions,107 and historical studies have examined their transformations over time.
101. Arjun Appadurai, “Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu India,” in Lutz and
Abu-Lughod, eds., Language and the Politics of Emotion, 92-112. On entangled conceptions of sincerity in the colonial period, see Margrit Pernau, “Teaching Emotions: Encounter between Victorian
Values and Indo-Persian Concepts of Civility in Nineteenth-Century Delhi,” in Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Insitutions in Colonial India, ed. Indra Sengupta and Daud Ali, Palgrave Studies
in Cultural and Intellectual History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 227-247, esp. 229-232.
102. Reddy, “Sentimentalism and Its Erasure,” 118: “sincerity must be considered a specialized
skill.”
103. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 2.
104. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions, 83-86.
105. See the current debate in medieval history between Gerd Althoff and Peter Dinzelbacher over
“panritualism” and the interpretation of emotions, discussed in Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Thinking
Historically about Medieval Emotions,” History Compass 8 (2010), 828-842.
106. Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism, 110: the “desire to connect speech with feeling”
is a “characteristically modern” concern.
107. Hochschild, The Managed Heart; Paul Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen, and Phoebe Ellsworth,
Emotion in the Human Face: Guidelines for Research and an Integration of Findings (Elmsford, NY:
Pergamon, 1972); Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of
Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90 (1985), 813-836.
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When such studies assume that the emotional experience itself is “hard-wired” or
otherwise independent of societal expectations, they depart from the standpoint
of practice theory, which assumes that emotions do not have an existence prior
to or completely separate from social scripts. The expectations of the group are
implicated in learned habits of feeling and stored in the habitus. The acquisition
of the sensibility, or emotional style, of a group proceeds via tacit socialization
as well as explicit instruction: boys are specifically told not to cry, girls to swallow their anger.
The acquisition of a general sensibility is also made explicit in concepts of éducation sentimentale and programs of teaching aesthetic appreciation of literature,
art, music, and religion, which assume that some feelings (often viewed as the
“highest” or “most true”) can be experienced only if one has acquired a certain
acquaintance with the material. Here the training of feeling is—in practice—
viewed as necessary and desirable (whereas the necessity of learning is denied
to the emotions deemed more “primitive” and thought to be executed by the
body as a mere reflex). Important from the perspective of practice theory is the
assumption that this learning of emotional response is not only conceptual—an
understanding of the catechism, the twelve-tone scale, or the ideological undertones of abstract expressionism—but also embodied, and that the imparting of the
desired emotional response involves imparting the requisite bodily disposition,
for example in the silent, reverent postures and minimal movements that support
interiorization.
Emotional norms are informed and authorized by orders of knowledge, to use
Foucault’s term, such as that which constitutes emotion and reason as opposites.
This fundamental dichotomy correlates with a series of other homologous dualisms, such as female–male, nature–culture, savage–civilized, childish–mature,
animal–human, exterior–interior, private–public, and so on, which provide
mutual overlap and support. They inform the sense of what is “proper” feeling in
the performance and reading of emotional expression. Investigating the habitus of
a certain time period and social group also involves analyzing the epistemology
implicit in the norms shared by what Barbara Rosenwein has called an “emotional community.”108
Rosenwein has pointed out that her concept of “emotional communities”
conceptually allows for more pluralism than Reddy’s “emotional regime” (and
its complement, the “emotional refuge”).109 However, “community” or “regime”
(like “habitus”) can suffer from the same problems as the concept of “culture” if
it is seen as a coherent, somewhat mentalized, and rather static system of shared
values, behaviors, and so on.110 In historical writing, these concepts need to be
drawn into the everyday of social life via an emphasis on the practices that generate and sustain such a community or culture. A more flexible notion would be
that of “emotional style,” a term less binding and more conscious than “habitus,”
108. Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
109. Ibid., 23.
110. Cf. Lila Abu-Lughod, “Writing against Culture,” in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in
the Present, ed. Richard Fox (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991), 137-162.
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ARE EMOTIONS A KIND OF PRACTICE?
217
though a clear distinction is difficult to make.111 As Benno Gammerl has pointed
out, emotional styles interact with spaces, construing them, for example, as public
or private, and are in turn shaped by the kinds of spaces they are performed in.112
People inhabit and move around in spaces as much as in communities, and the
notion of spaces emphasizes the body and its senses more than does the notion of
the value system of a community.
The fashion of heightened emotionality in the Age of Sentimentalism in the
eighteenth century, arguably the most intensely examined moment in the history
of emotions in the modern period, might be viewed as an emotional style rather
than habitus, because it was relatively easily reversed and many chose not to participate in it to begin with.113 The rejection of this style conformed to a bourgeois
habitus that Bourdieu describes as “the refusal to surrender to nature, which is
the mark of dominant groups—who start with self-control.”114 A dominant style
or habitus is continually challenged by countercultures, be they sentimentalists, romantics, or the hippies of the 1960s.115 To describe their emotionality
as “excessive” makes sense only in relation to a standard, which also changes
through time and is bound to a dominant social group. Rather than conceiving of
them as “less controlled,” a practice-theory approach looks for signs of emotional
norms and expectations within this particular emotional style, which follows its
own logic and provides its own meanings, and investigates just how it challenges
the dominant group.
V. CONSEQUENCES FOR METHOD
A definition of emotion based on practice theory has the distinct advantage that
it will not, in most cases, be found in the source material. It does not reproduce
assumptions in the sources, confirming their “truth,” but provides an analytical
perspective from the outside, allowing for a critique of past theories of emotion,
especially their strategies of naturalization and interiorization as well as their
implications in power relations and social hierarchies.
Methodologically, a history of emotions inspired by practice theory entails
thinking harder about what people are doing, and to working out the specific
situatedness of these doings. It means trying to get a look at bodies and artifacts
of the past. Of course, these are always mediated by the source material available, but this is not a problem encountered by historians alone. All access to
data is mediated by the tools of research, be they in the library or the lab. The
objects used in emotional practices of the past—images, literature, musical notation, film, or household items—may still be available for direct observation and
analysis. Fictional representations in literature, theater, and film can be analyzed
111. See Reddy, “Emotional Styles.” I thank Benno Gammerl for many fruitful discussions to
clarify this term.
112. Benno Gammerl, “Emotional Styles: Concepts and Challenges in Researching Emotions,”
Rethinking History (forthcoming 2012).
113. Reddy, ”Sentimentalism and Its Erasure.”
114. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, transl. Richard
Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 40.
115. Cf. Reckwitz, Das hybride Subjekt, 204-242, 289-336, 452-500.
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as artifacts used by actors in their emotional practices, as providers of templates
of language and gesture as well as mediators of social norms. Texts will remain
the main sources, not only for discourses and implicit orders of knowledge, but
also for emotives and other emotional practices.
Practice theory also encourages us to read textual sources for traces of
observable action. The history of emotions has traditionally viewed first-person
accounts as the royal road to individual feeling, and as documents of emotives
and the practice of introspection they remain important. But this method should
not reproduce the assumption that “real” emotions—the ones worth writing
about—are necessarily internal and private. Attending to practices means attending to observable behavior, suggesting that third-person accounts read with the
requisite source criticism would also be valid documents of emotional practices.
These could include reports by journalists, scholars, police, court reporters, stenographers, travelers, missionaries and so on.
Emotion-as-practice is learned, meaning that feelings are transferred between
people intergenerationally or through socializing processes between adults.
Historians can attempt to reconstruct the circulation and modification of emotional practices especially when there is contestation in this process, which could
indicate that a certain emotional practice is no longer working for some people.
Subversive performances, changes in ritual formulas, genres that fall out of favor
can all be clues to follow. Conflicts over emotional practices will provide particularly rewarding objects of study, as they produce many sources for explicating
clashing emotional styles. These contain explicit and implicit assumptions about
how emotions work, how they should be lived out, and what they mean; they are
also tied to underlying concepts of the self, personal agency, and the moral values
that flow from them.
How do we know when a source is talking about an emotion? The use of
language that links the body with the mind (metaphors that vary culturally and
change over time) can serve as a signpost such as when actors speak of their
“blood boiling,” when they “feel” and “sense” their thoughts, or describe a
physical space or movement in their immaterial, “inner” parts. In these cases, the
experience of emotions is very often described as a merging of body and mind, as
a physical involvement in thought. Shifts in this language will likely be accompanied by shifts in bodily practices, as they support one another. An increase in talk
of “interiority,” for example, will also involve the creation of private spaces and
practices of outward stillness in public places. Criticism of other emotional styles
will be associated with abstention from and denigration of concomitant bodily
habits. And yet it is also likely that change in habitus and change in language can
proceed at different rates, the body lagging behind language, for example,116 causing an emotional practice to acquire a new name but not yet be able to organize
a feeling in the body. Relevant contexts could include instances of bodily training such as a highly developed ability to faint, an inability to produce tears, or
the specifics of pain perception. All of these, of course, place clear limits on the
116. Bourdieu refers to the inertia of the body/habitus as “hysteresis” (Logic of Practice, 59).
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ARE EMOTIONS A KIND OF PRACTICE?
219
historian’s ability to naively empathize with the emotions they find in sources, as
their own bodies are likely trained differently.
The history of emotions has often been viewed as an enterprise plagued with
the problem of reliable source material. How are we to know what people “really”
felt if they kept it to themselves and left no historical record? What do we do with
the emotions that we do not find in the source material even when we believe
they should be there? What if soldiers at the front lines reveal no indication of
fear, or victims of social discrimination show no anger, or violent perpetrators no
remorse? Must we assume that the sources document dishonesty or even denial?
It is, of course, necessary to look beyond first-person expression and consult a
broad range of sources with observations from many different perspectives to
confirm whether the expected emotion is missing in all of them. Explicit denials
or prohibitions of certain feelings can be treated as emotives, an indication that
the feeling is in the available repertoire. But understanding emotions as practices
also means taking into account the practical uses of emotions in social settings,
as sociologists of emotions have advocated from the beginning. If there is no
relational reason to communicate or enact or guard against an emotion, then it
should be considered absent.
We must also be aware that there may be a very different subjectivity in
play that does not conform to the liberal notions that underlie our own assumptions about how psyches work. Historicizing emotion means scrutinizing these
assumptions before coming to conclusions about our material. A “missing emotion” may be one heavily proscribed or inopportune but it may also really be
missing. According to the embodied account of experience, there are no thoughts
and feelings that are not manifested in bodily processes, actions, in spoken or
written words, or supported by material objects. It is their materiality that makes
them available to the senses and to memory. What’s more, emotions cannot be
conjured out of thin air: The specific feeling of honor made available to bourgeois practitioners of dueling in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, for
example, is lost when the duel falls out of use.117
VI. CONCLUSION
Many historical studies of emotion have tended to base their definition of emotion on models from classic emotion psychology or philosophy, which tend to
reduce it to either mechanical processes of the body or cognitive processes of
the mind. Newer research from the emerging fields of extended mind theory
and situated cognition proceeds from the thesis that thought and emotion are
embodied and understandable only in their social context. This view is far more
compatible with practice theory, an approach in the social and historical sciences
that is gaining more attention from historians of emotion. It views emotion as
an act situated in and composed of interdependent cognitive, somatic, and social
components, mixed in varying proportions, depending on the practical logic of
117. See Ute Frevert, Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel (Oxford: Polity
Press, 1995), and idem, Emotions in History: Lost and Found. The Natalie Zemon Davis Annual
Lectures (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011).
88
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MONIQUE SCHEER
the situation in which it takes place. It offers a way to integrate the material,
bodily facets of emotional processes without having to resort to the ahistorical,
universalist assumption that the body is conditioned only by evolution. From the
perspective of practice theory, emotional arousals that seem to be purely physical
are actually deeply socialized. The body’s capacities and functions change, not
only in evolutionary time but also in human history, which is to say that societies shape brain structures and organic functions. If indeed fMRI scans show the
neural correlates of emotion, then they must be read as images of a “used” brain,
one molded by the practices of a specific culture, thus turning variations between
scans of members of different social groups into meaningful data.
The use of the term “emotional practices” should imply 1) that emotions not
only follow from things people do, but are themselves a form of practice, because
they are an action of a mindful body; 2) that this feeling subject is not prior to but
emerges in the doing of emotion; and 3) that a definition of emotion must include
the body and its functions, not in the sense of a universal, pristine, biological
base, but as a locus for innate and learned capacities deeply shaped by habitual
practices.
Thinking of emotion as a kind of practice can help historians get over the sense
that the history of emotions can only be a history of changing emotional norms
and expectations but not a record of change in feeling. Emotions change over
time not only because norms, expectations, words, and concepts that shape experience are modified, but also because the practices in which they are embodied,
and bodies themselves, undergo transformation.
Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft
Tübingen, Germany
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