Authors

Daiva Price¹;  ¹ Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania

Discussion

This presentation will examine the challenges of coming to terms with the history of Holocaust in Lithuania in the context of the European Union project Kaunas - European Capital of Culture 2022. Kaunas' European Capital of Culture bid was unique in that it was the only one to offer a full programme dedicated to the city's complex history and memory. The application identified problems of history and memory such as "collective amnesia" and "selective memory". This meant that in the relationship of the city's inhabitants to history, World War II was eliminated as 'not our' history, and the narrative of the city's history was constructed on the basis of nostalgic and romanticized stories about the interwar period as a 'golden period' or 'our' trauma - the Soviet occupation.
The Kaunas European Capital of Culture 2022 project has proposed a separate programme to explore and address these issues of history and memory - Memory Office. The objectives of the Memory Office programme were to evoke the city's multi-ethnic memory, to speak about the complex history, and at the same time to evoke values such as openness to the Other and the Different, dialogue, and empathy. The programme, which has been active in the field of memory since 2017, has presented dozens of projects dedicated to Jewish memory and the Holocaust, including the book "Kaunas Jews", concerts, exhibitions, performances and the Litvak Culture Forum. A separate programme was created to evoke the multiethnic memory of the Kaunas district towns where the majority of the population was Jewish before World War II. The aim was to recall the stories of the Holocaust and to tell about the fate of the Jews who lived there. The programme, which took place in the towns of Kaunas district, offered not only to remember forgotten stories but also to rethink local identity on the basis of formerly suppressed memory.
This paper will explore whether district communities embraced this new narrative, if they accepted those elements of the identity they were offered. It will explore how the European Union project and cosmopolitan memory strategies have intertwined with agonistic and antagonistic memory narratives.