Tor Einar Fagerland and Thomas Brandt
The Program for Cultural Heritage Management, Department of Historical and Classical Studies,
The Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Abstract for a paper
The inaugural conference of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies
Gothenburg, June 2012.
The terrorist attacks of 22 July 2011 and the stages of Memory in the Norwegian Memorial Landscape: A preliminary sketch
On 22 July, 2011, two murderous attacks took place in Oslo and at Utøya, Norway, that would create a tragic watershed in Norwegian history. 77 people were killed, many of them teenagers. Shortly after the terrorist attacks at Utøya and at the Governmental Quarters in Oslo, spontaneous ways of expressing sorrow and grief began to appear. Nearby Utøya and at several places in central Oslo, flowers, notes with written statements and others markers soon began to pile up. The following days a huge number of Norwegians participated in marches and assemblies throughout the country. These expressions of shared grief and shared commitment to specific values and ideals (like open society and democracy) were by many young people described as something new (“we have changed”), while many older people compared the situation and the sentiments to the war years (1940-45).
In this paper we intend to start sketching out how the commemorations of 22 July will fit into – or even challenge - the Norwegian memorial landscape.
It has been argued that the Norwegian national culture of memory for long has been one-dimensional and traditional both in terms of content and in its monumental representations, especially regarding our commemoration of WW2.[1] New research confirms this, but detects in addition also an influence and a willingness to adapt to the new international trends advocating for a more open-ended approach to the past.[2] Our analysis is influenced by James E. Young’s ‘Stages of Memory’, a theory developed in connection with the processes leading up the central memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (opened 2005) and the 9/11 Memorial in New York (opened 2011).[3] Through a critical engagement with Young’s theoretical framework we seek to put the memorialization of 22 July into an international context. Since so many young people were affected by the July 22 events it will be highly interesting to see whether the memorial debate on the national (Utøya, Governmental Quarter) and on the different local levels (we will especially focus on the Trøndelag region) will fit into the traditional pattern of Norwegian commemoration, or if coming manifestations of 22 July will represent new approaches to painful and ambiguous memories.
In the early days after the tragedy spontaneous expressions of grief and more formal organized events co-existed side by and side and sometimes also melted together. A few weeks after the attack the mountains of letters and (by then faded) flowers laid down by ordinary citizens, were collected and put in storage by the National Archive authorities. While such a material collection will be of value for research, it also demonstrates the interconnectedness between the official and the individual sentiments regarding the 22 July in this first phase. In the following phases this merging of public and private memory is likely to become more complicated. 22 July is a still ongoing event. Our analysis of the memorial process will therefore necessarily be work in progress for a long time and our conclusions presented at the conference in June 2012 are preliminary.
[1] Anne Eriksen, Historie, minne, myte, Oslo 1999.
[2] For an analysis of the Norwegian memory culture at present see Fagerland 2012 (forthcoming). For examples of newer commemorative trends internationally see Richard Crownshaw, Jane Kilby, Antony Rowland (eds.), The Future of Memory, London 2010, Aleida Assmann, “Memory, Individual and collective”, Robert E. Goodin, Charles Tilly (eds.), The Oxford handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, Oxford 2006 and Aleida Assmann, “Canon and Archive”, Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning (eds.), A companion to cultural memory studies, Berlin/New York 2010 and Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, Memory in a Global Age. Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, Macmillan 2010.
[3] James E. Young, At Memory's Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture, Yale University Press, 2000 and Young 2006.