David ClarkeCardiff University | CU
David Clarke
PhD in German
About
43
Publications
5,195
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219
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
I joined Cardiff University as Professor of Modern German Studies in October 2018. I studied at the Universities of Leeds, London (UCL) and Wales (Swansea). I later taught as a Lektor at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and then as a lecturer in German at the Nottingham Trent University, and as Senior Lecturer at the University of Bath. My current research focuses on the politics of memory and transitional justice, the representation of conflict in museums, heritage and cultural diplomacy.
Additional affiliations
October 2018 - October 2018
February 2012 - present
Position
- Understanding the Role of Cultural Products in Cultural Diplomacy
Description
- http://www.bath.ac.uk/polis/networks/role-cultural-products-cultural-diplomacy/
October 2001 - February 2003
Publications
Publications (43)
This article examines the work of two diasporic memory organizations, Kresy-Siberia and Houshamadyan, which have both developed Internet platforms to collect and share information about lost homelands: in the former case, the pre-Second World War eastern borderlands of Poland; in the latter, the Armenian communities of the Ottoman Empire that were...
This chapter examines the rituals developed by loyalists of the state socialist regime of the German Democratic Republic in order to manage their stigmatized identities in the wake of what they perceive to be the disaster of the collapse of the East Germany and German unification.
This chapter addresses forms of ritualization that emerged in different countries in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
This article undertakes a rhetorical analysis of two European armed forces museums (the National Army Museum in London and the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden) in order to show how such institutions provide a space for the negotiation of civil–military relations in ‘post-military’ societies. It argues that both museums construct a wor...
In this chapter we analyse a number of war museums across Europe, in order to assess the extent to which national(istic) narratives are being subverted and challenged by cosmopolitan and/or agonistic ones. While the representation of violent conflict in war museums lends itself very easily to adversarial contrapositions of friends and foe, it can a...
This chapter evaluates the design and delivery of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), ‘How We Remember War and Violence: Theory and Practice’, based on the findings of the ‘Unsettling Remembering and Social Cohesion in Transnational Europe’ research project. It briefly considers the development of MOOCs and the challenges of using online spaces to...
PLEASE NOTE: This publication is currently available to download for free using the DOI link above (or here: https://oxfordre.com/internationalstudies/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.001.0001/acrefore-9780190846626-e-543).
Cultural diplomacy designates a policy field, in which states seek to mobilize their cultural resources to achieve foreign...
In light of recent controversies around the removal or modification of public commemorative art, such as memorials and monuments, this paper interrogates the value of competing approaches to counter-memorial practice using the framework of agonistic memory. It argues that much counter-memorial practice today, as it relates to historical memory, is...
This article examines the mobilization of historical memory as a resource for cultural diplomacy through the medium of the museum. Noting the increasing trend for states to incorporate “dark heritage” of conflict into their cultural diplomacy strategies, the article examines the recent case of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, which has...
A literature review created for the Disputed Territories and Memory (DisTerrMem) project.
National heritage, and particularly "difficult" heritage, does not exist in isolation from the heritage of other countries. Russia's relationship to Germany is a salient case in point in the Putin era, in which a more cosmopolitan approach to the history of the Second World War in many European states has been challenged by a reversion to nationali...
This article compares two documentary films that address an apparent crisis of post-witnessing at memorials that commemorate the victims of National Socialism. In the context of contemporary debates about appropriate behaviour for tourists at sites of “dark” or “difficult” heritage, Sergei Loznitsa’s Austerlitz (2016) and Rex Bloomstein’s KZ (2006)...
The post-war Federal Republic of Germany faced the task of addressing the plight of the victims of state socialism under the Soviet occupation of eastern Germany and in the German Democratic Republic, many of whom fled to the west. These victims were not passive objects of the West German state’s policy, but organized themselves into associations t...
The conclusion summarizes the findings of the study and discusses their broader applicability to the management of the relationships between victims’ organizations, the political system, and museum professionals and historians in the context of transitional justice and memory politics, both within Germany and further afield.
This chapter seeks to explain conflicts between heritage professionals and historians, on the one hand, and victims’ organizations on the other. Analysing heritage organizations in systems theory terms as organizations of the scientific system, it shows how heritage professionals in the post-unification period came to define standards of museology...
This chapter begins by considering in greater depth the nature of organizations in systems theory, with reference to Luhmann’s concept of structural coupling, in order to explain interactions between organizations of victims of state socialism and the political system in post-war West Germany. The chapter analyses the history of the oldest and larg...
This chapter discusses the significance of compensation as a mechanism of transitional justice before analysing the development of the forms of compensation put in place in West Germany to address the situation of the victims of state socialism in the post-war period. It shows how German unification reopened the question of compensation and how vic...
National heritage, and particularly “difficult” heritage, does not exist in isolation from the heritage of other countries. Russia's relationship to Germany is a salient case in point in the Putin era, in which a more cosmopolitan approach to the history of the Second World War in many European states has been challenged by a reversion to nationali...
This chapter outlines the official politics of memory in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in relation to National Socialism. It charts the development of antifascist memory in the GDR and discusses the relationship between the commemoration of the antifascist resistance struggle and the ruling Socialist Unity Party claim to legitimate power. It...
While positively connoted tangible cultural heritage is widely recognized as an asset to states in their exercise of soft power, the value of sites of ‘dark heritage’ in the context of soft power strategies has not yet been fully explored. This article offers a theoretical framework for the analysis of the multiple soft power potentialities inheren...
Focusing on the case of the Leistikowstraße Memorial Museum in Potsdam, which commemorates victims of Soviet occupation after 1945, this article seeks to understand how conflicts can arise over such institutions, paying attention to the politicization of memory, the professional discourse of historians and museum practitioners, the demands of victi...
Taking the Vereinigung der Opfer des Stalinismus (Association of the Victims of Stalinism) as a case study, this article argues that civil society organisations which claim to represent the interests of victims of historical injustice must seek to construct and propagate notions of the political and social relevance of victimhood. They must do so i...
Finnish–Estonian author Sofi Oksanen’s novel Purge (2008) explores one woman’s experience of political violence and its repercussions in Estonia from the 1930s to the 1990s. The novel’s reception in Estonia included accusations that the text painted a simplified version of history, setting ‘good’ Estonian victims against ‘bad’ Russian perpetrators....
Cultural diplomacy continues to attract significant interest as a potential means for states to exercise ‘soft power’. However, policy-makers and academics who assert the efficacy of cultural diplomacy in terms of influencing foreign publics and states rarely consider how cultural products are actually received abroad. This article proposes that th...
This article assesses the potential for memory of communism to become part of the EU’s memory culture by comparing three contrasting case studies: the Baltic states, Hungary, and Germany. It argues that, rather than the emergence of a western European memory culture that is challenged by a uniform eastern memory culture within the EU, as some comme...
One side effect of Europe’s recent economic troubles has arguably been a shift in the focus of discussion about Germany’s future away from an inward-looking concern with the achievement of “inner unity” and towards more outward-looking debates over Germany’s predominance in the European Union and in the management of the European economy. The perio...
This article examines the evolution of the compensation legislation for victims of human rights abuses in the former German Democratic Republic, and considers the reasons for the continuing dissatisfaction among victims' organisations following the most recent significant revision of the relevant laws in 2007. It charts political debates about adeq...
Reinhard Jirgl's Abtrünnig: Roman aus der nervösen Zeit is an aesthetically complex text which explores the function of autobiographical self-reflection through fictional means. Its protagonist and narrator tells the story of his own frustration and failure, a story which appears inevitably to end in violence. However, the structure of the text, wh...
Writing in 2001, the Harvard professor Charles S. Maier, one of the most distinguished historians of twentieth-century Germany, suggested that the memory of communism in Eastern Europe, and in East Germany in particular, was in the process of becoming a ‘cold’ memory. At the same time, he noted, the means by which the crimes of National Socialism s...
This article examines the evocation of Dresden in the 1980s in Uwe Tellkamp's bestselling novel Der Turm (2008). The article highlights how Bakhtin's notion of ‘chronotopes’ can illuminate the spatial politics of the city as imagined by Tellkamp and the critique of its ‘Bildungsbürgertum’ formulated in his novel. Whereas the inhabitants of the ‘Tur...
This chapter examines the representation of the family and its relationship to the power of the GDR state in the texts Uberich. Protokollkomödie in den Tod, Abschied von den Feinden and Kaffer. Nachrichten aus dem zerstörten=Leben. Jirgl's representation of familial socialisation and his critique of psychoanalysis are shown to bear a number of simi...
This chapter examines the dialogue with the dead in Christoph Hein's novels Horns Ende and In seiner frühen Kindheit ein Garten. Whereas the former revisits the story of a victim of political oppression in the GDR and implicitly calls for a revision of East German history, which would take such victims into account and challenge the official discou...
This article examines a number of recent European films that tackle the issue of migration from former communist countries to Western Europe. The key films discussed in the article all seek to show how the West is constructed as an object of desire for the inhabitants of the former communist bloc and how the protagonists' fantasies of the West are...
Given that, at least in economic terms, the women of the former GDR are often described as the ‘losers’ of the unification process, it may seem surprising that the two films examined in this article should focus on the difficulties of men in coming to terms with the process of social transformation which followed the ‘Wende’ in the new federal stat...
Christoph Hein is one of the best-known authors of the former GDR, and his works of fiction have been widely interpreted as responses to and critiques of socialist society. In this study, David Clarke undertakes a detailed analysis of all of Christoph Hein’s major works of fiction from Der fremde Freund (1982) to Willenbrock (2000) in order to expl...
Projects
Projects (3)
Disputed Territories and Memory (DisTerrMem) is a three-year project funded by Horizon 2020, the European Union’s biggest research and innovation programme.
DisTerrMem brings together an international team of researchers from six organisations who are working collaboratively to explore the management of competing memories of disputed territories across borders.
https://www.disterrmem.eu/
A monograph on the victim activism, compensation and memorialization of the victims of Soviet occupation and the SED regime in Germany since 1950.
The main purpose of this project is to deliver new empirical yet also theoretically informed knowledge of those memory
agents, practices and contexts capable of countering fixed and essentialist war and conflict memories, opening them to
reflexive reinterpretation and change. Theoretically, the project will develop the concept of an agonistic ethico-political mode
of remembering as distinct from the antagonistic and cosmopolitan modes, and provide a thick description of their defining
characteristics. A related aim is to assess which of the two reflective modes, the cosmopolitan or the agonistic, best
contributes to a shared European ethico-political framework and transnational solidarity.
Empirically, the project will test the different ethico-political modes of remembering in contemporary heritage discourses and
practices by different memory milieus located at various territorial scales in relation to some of the armed conflicts of the 20th
century with an enduring legacy. By exploring the relationship between 1) the modes of remembering being negotiated and
contested in various European settings; 2) the memory agents promoting them (heritage professionals, policy-makers,
historians, creative artists, socio-political activists); and 3) material and immaterial heritage (museums, burial sites, media,
visual and written culture), the project will assess how, why and in which contexts certain modes of remembering the violent
past are able to prevail as well as their articulation with various territorial identities.
