International Handbook of Practical Theology

There are events in the liveso fi ndividuals,c ommunities,a nd even entire nations, which have as erious impact.T ragic events. Someo ft hese affect manyp eople. Among these, for example, are military conflicts,t errorist incidents, natural disasters,m ining accidents¹,a ir disasters,s hip and ferry wrecks and mass traffic accidents. Events originallye xperienced as individual losses make up another group, but families affected in this way, remember them together. Commemorative acts remembering traffic accidents or mountaineering victims² are one such example. We must not overlook commemorations for loved ones who have died naturallya nd whose familymembers honour them in commemorative acts, oftencarried out in privatei napastoral context. Political prisoners who died or were executed in prison during the rise of socialism in Czechoslovakia mayb ec onsidered as pecial group;c ommemorations take place as part of memorial gatherings for political prisoners. Similar in character are commemorative acts in significant places of human suffering.A se xamples of such we can mention Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland; the execution room with ag uillotine and equipment for execution by hanging in Prague Pankrác prison, where1 ,075 people weree xecuted under German occupation (referred to in the Czech Republic as sekyrárna (the axe-room) from the words ekera(axe)), or the Czech villageL idice, whose inhabitants werem assacred after an assassination attempt on Heydrich duringt he Second World Wara nd the villagew as razed to the ground. In such places,m emorialst akep lace on anniversaries even several decades later,and these are intended as areminder and ashow of respect for the memory of the victims. This article will explore such intentions,a sw ella st he array of additional goals of commemoration, remembrance, and reconciliation.  Fore xample,the miningd isaster on 8 th August 1956 where 262m iners died in the Boisd uC azier mine in the Marcinelle parish,which is part of the town Charleroi in Belgium.  Fore xample, am emorial servicet akes placea nnuallya tt he Symbolic Cemetery near Popradské mountain-lake in the HighT atras (Slovakia). OpenAccess. ©2 022A lbin Masarik, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative CommonsA ttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Traditiones, 2018

This article discusses war cemeteries from the First World War located near Łódź, Poland. From among approximately two hundred such cemeteries, I have selected a few, all of them established after the Battle of Łódź in 1914, to serve as an example for describing others as well. I view a First World War cemetery as a space that retains traces of human activity, and I describe past and present actions intended to commemorate the fallen soldiers and to sacralize the past. Architectural elements and human actions comprise a document that reports on reality; they are materials that produce a narrative about the present and constitute evidence of patterns in modes of acting and thinking that are present in culture. Avtorica v članku obravnava vojna pokopališča v bližini Lodža na Poljskem, nastala v prvi svetovni vojni.. Med dvesto pokopališči je izbrala tista iz leta 1914 po bitki pri Lodžu kot primer, s katerim ponazarja tudi poznejša. V pokopališčih prve svetovne vojne vidi prostore, ki razkrivajo sledove človeške dejavnosti. Ob tem opisuje pretekle in sedanje aktivnosti, s katerimi ohranjajo spomin na padle vojake in sakralizirajo preteklost. Arhitekturni elementi in človeške aktivnosti so vtkani v te priče preteklosti, ki poročajo o nekdanji resničnosti. So gradiva, ki ustvarjajo pripovedi o sedanjosti in dokaze o vzorcih v načinih delovanja in razmišljanja. Ključne besede: vojno pokopališče, sled, komemorativne prakse, prva svetovna vojna, bitka pri Lodžu, Lodž WAR CEMETERIES A cemetery is a clearly delineated place where a community buries its deceased members in keeping with accepted religious, ethnic, and social principles and customary practices. From the semiotic and cultural point of view, every cemetery may be assumed to be a text of culture. According to Jacek Kolbuszewski, it is "a set of signs that are organized on the basis of a directive-or rather a set of directives-and are typical to the phenomenon of the culture of death (or to its local, ethnic, or denominational subculture)." This set of signs "is produced, on the basis of an a priori assumption, solely by external elements, which create the cemetery's infrastructure and which are unconcealed, perceptible, and intentionally exposed. It is owing to these signs that the given space is identified-first as a cemetery, and then more specifically in terms of denomination and ethnicity, as well as in social, cultural, and, of course, chronological and historical categories" (Kolbuszewski 1994). This article focuses on a very particular type of cemetery: war cemeteries, or necropo-lises associated with a concrete episode of the conflict. These are sites designated for burying soldiers that fell on the battlefield or that died of wounds incurred during fighting, regardless of their nationality or denomination. A war cemetery is an enclosed area where no new interments are carried out; it belongs to the past and constitutes its representation.

The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies, 2019

Relations between explicit and implicit memory of traumatic events are discussed in context of common memory manipulations for present political reasons. Destructive consequences of stirring up group cohesion with negative emotions are emphasized. Reaction for traumatic event is discussed in context of mourning process. Memory of Shoah as unique traumatic experience is analyzed in perspective of commemoration and part of group common memory. Frizzing of individual memory process is suggested to be a consequence. Ways of commemoration of the Shoah and victims of the Holocaust in form of monuments are used as examples. As well as selected pieces of art. being a form of individual mourning memory, trauma, mourning Jacek Bomba: Psychotherapy Center,

Handbook on the Politics of Memory, Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, 2023

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2008

Catholic churches in Poland are not merely sacred objects. In terms of Polish history, they have contributed to the creation of the country's national identity, particularly in the nineteenth century and during the Second World War. To this day, they remain a national place of remembrance. Contemporary witnesses, who gradually become a part of history themselves, strive to unite their fate with that of other Polish generations through signs of remembrance. One of several examples that display the commemorative nature of sacred institutions is the chapel located within the garrison church in Wrocław which is dedicated to Poles who were deported to Siberia (Zesłańców Sybiru).

2001

construct and expand but rather to shrink and focus the framework in which we view contemporary commemorative forms. Shifting the scale of vision from the national and grandiose to the particular and ordinary might help transform our understanding of monuments. In villages and towns throughout Europe, small groups of people have always tried to find meaning in the relationship between sites of memory, where commemoration happens, and collective remembrance. It is this communal activity and its achievements that I shall explore. Why shift the focus from high to low politics, from capital cities to obscure towns, from national leaders to average citizens? For one reason, great national sites of memory are exceptional, their histories a misleading guide to other, humbler sites. For another, contemporary cultural history emphasizes the mix of many voices. The study of society is no longer the top-down study of dominant groups; cultural history is a chorus, with some voices louder than o...

AICGSGERMAN-AMERICANISSUES DEALING WITH THE PAST IN SPACES, PLACES, ACTIONS, AND INSTITUTIONS OF MEMORY: A COMPARATIVE REFLECTION ON EUROPEAN EXPERIENCES, 2016

This paper explores various avenues remembrance and commemoration of the Holocaust and Nazi Crimes have found in Germany. An untranslatable German term was coined after the horrendous crimes committed during the Nazi era: Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or dealing with the past. But other than the word “dealing” in English, “Bewältigung” actually means to suggest that one can confront, work through, cope with, and eventually “settle” the past. This was of course naïve, wishful thinking or, as the writer and lawyer Bernhard Schlink suggested, a “longing for the impossible.” The sister-word coined in this context, the equally untranslatable Wiedergutmachung (literally “to make good again” or repair), which referred to the actions and measures taken after the destruction of the "Third Reich" to address the consequences of its crimes, is equally naïve. But of course the past is irreversible and the enormous and horrendous crimes committed—in particular the crimes committed against Jews in Europe, which have since been referred to by the rather inaccurate Greek term for a sacrificial burning “Holocaust” or the Hebrew term “Shoah”—have become universally synonymous with a breach of the norms of civilization without precedent in modern times and beyond repair: the murder of approximately 6 million people and the destruction of an entire culture and civilization, in particular in Central and Eastern Europe.

Historical Archaeology, 2019

This article focuses on the processes of me-morialization and heritagization through a case study from Oulu, Finland, where a cast-iron rail encircling a pine tree constitutes a memorial marking the site of the country's last official execution by hanging in 1916. The memorial and its immediate surroundings are examined here through historical documents and maps, tree-ring data, interviews, and the results of small-scale archaeological excavations. The evidence indicates various modes of interaction-crosses carved on the memorial tree, a magical cache, finds pertaining mainly to the consumption of intoxicating substances-exposing a lesser-known and more intimate side of the site biography than is evident from written records. Finally, both individual and national practices of remembering and forgetting related to the memorial highlight the way memorialization transformed the death of an ordinary man into a nationalistic symbol to be used and exploited in various quarters during the past century. Extracto Este artículo se centra en los procesos de conmemoración y herencia a través de un estudio de caso de Oulu, Finlandia, donde un riel de hierro fundido que rodea un pino constituye un monumento que marca el lugar de la última ejecución oficial en la horca en 1916. Se examinan el monumento y sus alrededores inmediatos a través de documentos y mapas históricos, datos de anillos de árbol, entrevistas y los resultados de excavaciones arqueológicas a pequeña escala. La evidencia indica varios modos de interacción: cruces talladas en el árbol conmemorativo, un escondite mágico, hallazgos relacionados principalmente con el consumo de sustancias intoxicantes, revelando un lado menos conocido y más íntimo de la biografía del sitio que el que se desprende de los registros escritos. Finalmente, las prácticas individuales y nacionales de recordar y olvidar relacionadas con el memorial resaltan la manera en que la memorialización transformó la muerte de un hombre común en un símbolo nacionalista para ser utilizado y explotado en varios sectores durante el siglo pasado.