Stephen Wilmer

Enactments and Re-enactments in the Public Sphere: Resorting to Farce as Cultural Nostalgia

The twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain evoked a number of commemorative events in Central and Eastern Europe. Frequently these were institutionally sanctioned re-enactments to stage significant moments of collective memory in the public sphere. In so doing they contrasted strongly with the events that they commemorated, which normally resulted from interventions by counter-publics seizing the public space in a subversive or counter-normative performative act. This paper will consider the relationship between the original staging of such events as the Baltic Way and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and their commemorative celebrations. The Baltic Way, a 600 km human chain that linked Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, can be seen as an embodied performance of national as well as transnational solidarity. It challenged the Soviet interpretation of history, countering the assertion that the Baltic countries entered willingly into the Soviet Union, and demonstrated, through the participation of approximately 2 million people, the popular opposition to Soviet domination. By taking over the public sphere for their own purposes, the Baltic peoples challenged the Soviet interpretation of history and redrew national boundaries. The re-enactment of this and similar events in 2009, sanctioned by their respective governments, ironized the original actions and caused the public to question whether such re-enactments were appropriate or whether they trivialized the original. Invoking the ideas of Jurgen Habermas, Michael Warner and Pierre Nora, the paper will question the role of re-enactments as expressions of cultural nostalgia and nationalism in the public sphere.