Social media challenge several established concepts of memory research. In particular, the day-to-day mundane discourse of social media blur the essential distinction between commemorative and non-commemorative memory. We address these challenges by presenting a methodological framework that explores the dynamics of social memory on various social media. Our method combines top-down data mining with a bottom-up analysis tailored to each platform. We demonstrate the application of our approach by studying how the Holocaust is remembered in different corpora, including a dataset of 5.3 million Facebook posts and comments collected between 2015 and 2017 and a 5 million Tweets and Retweets dataset collected in 2021. We first identify the mnemonic agents initiating the discussion of the memory of the Holocaust and those responding to it. Second, we compare the macro-rhythms of Holocaust discourse on the two platforms, identifying peaks and mundane discussions that extend beyond commemorative occasions. Third, we identify distinctive language and cultural norms specific to the memorialization of the Holocaust on each platform. We conceptualize these dynamics as ‘Mnemonic Markers’ and discuss them as potential pathways for memory researchers who wish to explore the unique memory dynamics afforded by social media.

For many Russians, the Russia–Ukraine war became a starting point for rethinking their identity. And thinking about their personal and national future played a significant role in this process. This article is based on the analysis of the interviews I collected during the first year of the war. It examines how imagining the future activates a variety of defense mechanisms, which can be situated in four unique, yet not mutually exclusive, defensive discourse strategies. The primary focus is the connections among future thinking, agency, defensiveness, and identity. The whole spectrum of different and, in some cases, opposite visions of the future and the fact that the majority of respondents used more than one defensive discourse strategies can be a sign of a significant fragmentation – on individual and collective levels. This fragmentation is almost invisible if we consider the public opinion polling or Putin's approval rating. This paper gives crucial insights into what remains hidden in the statistics and presents a more complex picture of Russian society in a time of war.

In April 2022, journalists at the tech website 9to5Mac discovered that photographs taken at sites related to the Holocaust would no longer appear in the Memories feature of Apple's Photos app. This article examines how news of this decision was received by the public through analysis of the comment section that followed the original 9to5Mac post. The perspectives on display in this public forum provide insight into the evolving public perception of automated memory technologies and the potential consequences of their use. Through this analysis, several interrelated areas of public concern emerge. These include the boundaries of platform intervention for governing access to content, the subjective qualities of personal photographs, and the metrics upon which algorithmic memory systems operate. Though opinions vary, this comment section captures an illustrative range of sentiment towards Apple Memories and this intervention into the memories of its users. This range demonstrates a degree of scepticism, alarm, and dissatisfaction rising among users who are increasingly aware of how algorithms are influencing their memories.

When we study the Jewish-national historiography of the last quarter of the 19th century, there is a tendency to pass directly from Smolenskin’s doctrine to the Zionist-cultural approach of Ahad Ha’am and his students, omitting the works written in between. However, even before the emergence of Ahad Ha’am as a cultural icon in the Jewish national movement, some Hibbat Zion activists engaged in Hebrew cultural activities directed at shaping national Jewish consciousness. The main figures in this trend were Saul Pinchas Rabinowitz and Avraham Shalom Friedberg. Their world view was based on education that advocated proto-nationalism: Jewish solidarity, love of the Hebrew language, promoting Hebrew newspapers, and preserving Jewish tradition. To this they added settlement in Eretz Israel as a solution for the harsh conditions of the Jews in Russia. They edited literary and scientific collections in Hebrew and Jewish historiography and wrote historical monographs and biographies. In this way, they sought to introduce national historical protagonists instead of the Hasskala’s pantheon of historical characters to vividly illuminate periods of historical “golden ages” suited to the national ideology and teach the lesson of historical history—that Hibbat Zion is the solution to the plight of Jews and Judaism.

What qualifies as a political event is a core question for social and historical research. This article argues that the use of temporal structures in narratives of political and social developments contributes significantly to the making and unmaking of events. We show how arguments that draw upon history play a particularly important role in transforming the everyday unfolding of politics into discernable events with a clear time bracket. Through this lens, we investigate the 2016 Brexit referendum as an event that has triggered extensive debates about both Europe’s experiences of the past and political expectations for its future. Conflicting assessments of history are crucial for understanding how and when Brexit became an event of European significance and why it then ceased to be so. This case also enables us to distinguish more clearly between the agent-centered focus on the event itself, and the analytical ex-post assessment as a critical juncture. Methodologically, the article demonstrates the value of a multi-perspective approach for qualitative analyses with a focus on Brexit narratives articulated across several EU countries and the United Kingdom.

In this article, I examine efforts to rewrite school history in Putin's Russia, efforts whose precedents in Russia can be traced back to the nineteenth century. I explore this process from the perspective of recent scholarship on ‘collective future thinking’ and demonstrate how a particular feeling – anxiety – shaped Russian and Soviet efforts to change history textbooks. I describe those created in Russia, focusing on their future component and the emotional message accompanying them. In contrast to some other countries, where narratives may be revised or replaced by new ones in accordance with the development of societies and political regimes, in Russia, there is evidence that previous narrative templates continue to coexist. The state may privilege one or another narrative primary in response to emotional pressures, and in some cases, this pushes people towards aggression and even death. I argue that anxiety about the future has forced the current Russian regime to initiate a school history rewriting in the midst of the Russia-Ukraine war, allowing the state to use collective memory to convince people to engage in a brutal conflict.

This article is dedicated to the absent presence and mnemonic remains of the socialist-era monuments in eastern Europe. Mnemonic remains is a metaphor I employ in this paper to direct our attention to the physical absence of monuments after their removal. But it also speaks of a monument’s role in absentia, its continued existence in and its effects on the collective memory beyond its physical presence. The phenomenon, sporadically acknowledged but rarely subject of investigation in academic literature, is explored and illustrated through the lens of the removed V.I. Lenin monument in Riga. The absent monument, I contend, performs the function of a phantom monument, exerting mnemonic agency beyond its physical presence through its representational value for other memory projects. This is highlighted through the study of the proposed and completed, but never unveiled, monument to Konstantīns Čakste on the site of the former Lenin monument in Riga.

This contribution results from a place of serious discomfort regarding recent public and academic discussions in Germany, where Holocaust memory and its political instrumentalization have seemed to produce a growing dogmatism, harming academic freedom. Because we both direct university research centers in Berlin and Los Angeles dedicated to the study of the Holocaust, we have decided to join forces and share our particular German perspectives on this debate. Our views are in part generational, in part personal.

This study identifies the mnemonic strategies of the Slovak extreme-right Ľudová Strana Naše Slovensko (ĽSNS) / People’s Party Our Slovakia as a means of establishing a mnemonic alliance with Putin’s Russia. ĽSNS’s construction of mnemonic culture surrounding two critical events in Slovak history – the 1944 Slovak National Uprising and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet army and its allies – is marked by an effort to overcome the ideological divide between its extreme-right ideology and Russia’s identity and memory politics rooted in its anti-fascist heritage. Those two events represent an uneasy terrain for building political and mnemonic alliances between ĽSNS and Putin’s Russia. Even though these two historical milestones represent a seemingly unmasterable past and an obstacle in an ĽSNS-Russia alliance, the party implemented several mnemonic strategies to reconfigure the place of these two key historical events in national memory and clear the path for a closer alliance with Putin’s Russia. We argue that ĽSNS’s memory construction is multidirectional rather than competitive or discordant. We unpack ĽSNS’s memory construction and identify multidirectional effects and trajectories as vectors for building a mnemonic alliance with Putin’s Russia.

This essay focuses on analyzing the history of the evolution of the nationalist memory narrative in recent memory politics in Ukraine. It observes the political rehabilitation of the radical nationalist movement and its leaders and organizations, followed by public recognition and glorification, and the evolution of this memory narrative since the beginning of the 1990s from local memory to the centerpiece of the state politics of memory. This article examines the memorialization and commemoration of the nationalist movement at regional and national levels (sites of memory, memorial dates, renaming of topographical objects, movies, TV series, etc.), policies aimed at the promotion of the nationalist historical myth, political controversies, roles of major actors, public debates on these issues, societal responses, and international disputes.

The assassination of the dictator Park Chung Hee by his intelligence chief Kim Chae-gyu was a momentous events in South Korean history, which garnered two feature-length filmic depictions released fifteen years apart in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The President's Last Bang, released in 2005, was an irreverent black comedy in which all those involved that fateful evening were villains in their own right. The Man Standing Next, from 2020, took a much different tack. Kim gained a righteousness and revolutionary motivation that had been absent in the portrayal in the earlier film, in which Kim's intentions remained open to interpretation. This article analyzes the changes in Kim's depiction in the context of shifting respective political contexts, particularly the impeachment of Park's daughter Park Geun-hye in 2016, and the shadow cast by the legacies of authoritarianism, the specter of which seemed to loom over Korea again during the younger Park's administration. Consequently, the outpouring of public fervor in the ensuing candlelight vigils reaffirmed societal support for democracy and consequently elevated Kim Chae-gyu, Park's bane, to the role of champion of Korean democracy when it seemed under threat once again.