Our member, Prof. Zsuzsa Millei (Tampere University, Finland), and her co-editors, Dr. Nelli Piattoeva (Tampere University, Finland) and Iveta Silova (Arizona State University, US), talk about their edited collection, (An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War (Open Book Publishers, 2024).
In this open-access e-book, we present childhood memories of the Cold War as part of an anarchive – an ever changing collection of texts, material objects, bodies, artworks, memories, movements, performances, emotions, and lived histories.
The book sprung from collective biography workshops, which brought together academics and artists from both state-(post)socialist and capitalist societies to recount their childhood and schooling experiences during and after the Cold War. The aim was not necessarily to give witness to an era but, rather, to explore together the textures of everyday life by sharing childhood memories.
Our anarchive, this book, works with memory stories to restore and re-story the conventional narratives and official histories of the Cold War, a bygone era that is mostly memorialized in political terms and interpreted with construed binaries of East-West.
The book is our political and artistic intervention. The memories (also available on our website for reading and analysis), chapters, and artworks shared by memory workshop participants represent childhoods in state-socialist countries during the 1970s-1980s and the postsocialist period of the 1990s. The book critically explores everyday life and growing up during and after the Cold War period, creating and weaving together various observations and threads that emerged during our collective engagements with the memory workshop participants, as well as with colleagues.
Through scientific and artistic means we critically explore commonalities, differences, and nuances across historical divides of East-West, as well as their contemporary legacies and the dynamics of remembering. This makes a contribution to at least three fields of research: studies of childhood, Cold War, and memory.
Assembling together artwork, photographs, memory stories, and academic essays, we sought to make this book accessible and engaging. Our aim was to preserve academic rigor and theoretical depth while inviting readers to explore our shared past, present, and future together, and to be inspired to think of their own past and childhood memories.
We wrote this book as a collective – under our combined name Mnemo ZIN (Zsuzsa Millei, Iveta Silova and Nelli Piattoeva) – expanding our decade-long collaboration as scholars and friends to jointly recall our childhood memories. Our collective name acknowledges the interdependent nature of our work against the individualist, hierarchical, and competitive culture of modern academia. By working in close collaboration with more than 70 scholars and artists during the past 5 years, we showcase this book as a result of carrying out more relational, kind, and slow science and art.
Springing from this politics, the open-access book seeks to overcome binaries, such as East/West or scholarly/artistic engagements of knowing. In addition, it aims at challenging power dynamics between research objects and subjects, as well as capitalist and colonial hierarchies of authorship, ownership, and knowledge production.
The 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall inspired a plethora of representations of (post)socialist pasts, presents, and futures. Among those were biographical and memory texts of various genres, as well as museum and art exhibits across the region and elsewhere.
While many of these engagements created important reflective moments, working with memories are never innocent acts. We were motivated to keep at the forefront the political nature of memory. We thus kept in view memory as linked to trauma and nostalgia, memory as potentially naïve or officially produced, and memory as offering distorted histories, all serving a variety of political, academic, and personal agendas. We also continued engaging with questions about objectivity and memory, the use of memory for research, and self-performance in one’s own memory.
We also sought to describe how collective memory work connects people to one another, and to examine the memory tellers’ negotiations between their personal and public/social memory.
To connect with childhood studies, we were interested in the everyday experiences of childhood, children’s views of the world, and subject formation recounted in memories and within the larger socio-political processes of the Cold War, which have rarely been explored before from this perspective. We took memory as a lived process of making sense of time and experience and as a resource to explore relations between public and private life, between agency and power, and between the past, present and future.
We also saw the possibilities of memory work in art and teaching, especially in a world that continues to perpetuate the binary relations and subjecthoods produced during the Cold War and animated violently in contemporary contexts of geopolitics and war. The memory stories have become the threads that weave us together, reminding us of the shared humanity that binds us.
[Here we offer two threads that as editors we began to weave together while reading the book.]
Memory as pedagogy
Children’s learning in the socialist societies has been habitually portrayed as top-down and dominated by formal education or public pedagogies relaying official state ideologies. However, a different picture emerges when we examine the learning experiences portrayed in the memories where children keenly observe and partake in their everyday environments, in or beyond formal schooling. They collect, engage with, and puzzle together over adults’ minor gestures, gossips, smells, colors, textures, snippets of news in the media or the presence and use of consumption products to create their own understandings of life. Memories particularly attune us to learning that is fluid and emerges relationally with everyday objects or affective atmospheres, and foreground learning beyond the notion of conscious sense-making. For instance, experiencing the scarcity of feminine hygienic products, girls learned about the controversial status of women in their respective societies. Moreover, by handling self-made menstruation pads or observing and connecting other objects and practices from stains on clothes to female pets in heat they developed an understanding about menstruation amidst the silence of adults, introduced their own intimate practices, and experienced controversial feelings that range from shame to independence and competence (as in Katarzyna Gawlitz and Zsuzsa Millei’s exploration of menstruation).
Sometimes objects instigate children to misbehave and learn about “the other” beyond the official narratives, such as in the case of a child pressing the forbidden buttons on a TV-set in East Germany (see a chapter by Ivana Polic). Learning with objects is induced by and induces different affective states, including pleasure, curiosity, and desire that are less frequently referenced in research or media depicting everyday life and consumption in socialist societies. The affective and sensory experiences of the “other side” mediated by clothing catalogs, photographs, TV-programmes or make-up serve as a means of getting to know the West and the world at large, but also of engaging in relationships at home. Experiencing the West often entwines with childrens’ own maturation, developing perceptions of themselves and their intergenerational relations (Jennifer Patico and Ivana Polic’s chapters). Curiosity about “the other” flourished on the Western side of the Iron Curtain too with children questioning the official narratives and developing their own interpretations of “the other” through literature or music (see more in Ivana Polic’s chapter).
The anarchived memories operate as pedagogical devices in academic teaching and learning with the more-than-human world that both socialist and capitalist modernities perceive as a passive object of learning for perpetual extraction and progress (Elena Albarrán). The course in comparative Cold War childhoods created for the post-socialist generation born in the 2000s intimates the diversity of Cold War experiences and helps to understand the role of individuals as historical actors navigating historical forces then and now (Elena Albarrán). Memories shared by family members and recorded and analyzed by students make a distant history matter in the present in ways that a detached description of historical events and actors cannot achieve: the nuances and inconsistencies of history, the subjectivity of human actors and the permeabilities of the Iron Curtain come into sharp focus (also in Pia Koivunen’s chapter). By engaging students with the stories but also the popular culture of the Cold War period, learning with memories as a pedagogical device reaches beyond historical knowledge to cultivate intergenerational empathy. Memories help us to re-member and re-learn from and with our plant-kin, where both memories and plants act as teachers in the process (Jiang et al., 2023). Here, the learning is bodily, emotional, and spiritual, building on “the arts of noticing” (Tsing, 2015, p. 37) the multispecies common worlds we inhabit in our research and practice. Recollecting and learning through ecomemories cultivates curiosity, reciprocity, care, and gratitude to plants and other more-than-human companions. In this re-learning, intergenerational and interspecies relationships and mutual vulnerability nourish each other to reinstate the forgotten ways of being in and with the animate world (Jieyu Jiang, Esther Pretti, Keti Tsotniashvili, Dilraba Anayatova, Ann Nielsen, and Iveta Silova).
Restor(y)ing memory for the Anthropocene
Reading through the chapters, parallels emerge between the two major events in the late history of modernity: the breakdown of the state socialist systems in Southeast/Central Europe and the former Soviet Union and the ‘patchy’ unraveling of the anthropocene on a global scale (Tsing, 2015). Memories extend history into the present and trouble the feeling of discontinuity between generations and at the same time highlight the multiplicity of futures. The state socialist systems seemed immutable and steadily progressing into the infinite and bright future of communism (Yurchak, 1997). The disestablishment of the so-called Second World was abrupt, but nevertheless unsurprising - and sort of expected - by the majority of its people. With its disappearance, the future it had created became unrealized and discarded. “Unrealized” or “unrealizable” futures destabilize the straightforward assumption that “pasts and presents have futures, that things just keep on going, that time and history keep unfolding” (Wenzel, 2017, p. 502). Today, youth and children question the very existence of a future for them. This unrealizable future’s past is what we are living now, reminding us that we are in fact authoring the im/possibility of their very futures now.
Cold War childhood memories richly animate the triumph of modern technological progress in stories of the infinite growth and the development promised by fossil fuels (see Foster et al., 2022, ZIN & da Rosa Ribeiro, 2023). Memories also reveal other ways of relating to the world and other ways of engaging in collective remembering with the inclusion of more-than-human companions. As we listen to the memory stories about the children touching a dead bird, children listening to the orchestra of bees or stories of children engaging with farm animals and plants (Jiang et al.), we recall the moments of our multisensory awareness, recognizing our bodily belonging in a more-than-human world. In turn, we might start to remember the relations with Earth and cosmos, while re-animating our capacity for wonder, empathy, care, and reciprocity. Anarchiving incites practices of restror(y)ing, challenging fascination with originality understood narrowly as newness. By doing so, the anarchive confronts the modern desire for progress as a never-ending production of new, dominant logic that has also extended to artistic work (see a chapter by Raisa Foster). There is an inspiring parallel between upcycling existing materials, ideas, and artworks to create sustainable practices and continuity in the arts and museum practices, and the restor(y)ing of memories for envisioning a future that connects and sustains all planetary companions. Starting with memories recounting our world-making relations, we can story futures that connect generations across past, present, and future, that make kin and place without the imposed human domination or nature/culture divisions, a future that sustains care, reciprocity, and humility for life.