This article examines the controversy surrounding the street names symbolizing the Franco dictatorship (1939–75) in Madrid. The Memory Law, passed in 2007, which sought to eradicate Francoist symbols in the public sphere, was ignored by Madrid's conservative mayoral administration until 2015 when a new mayor announced the official removal of Francoist street names from the cityscape. The article discusses the negotiation of contested memorialization processes and how different political forces shape commemorative practices in urban space. By addressing the political, discursive, academic and legal fields of action, it focuses in particular on civil society's and grassroots attempts to replace Francoist street names with new ones demonstrating how a cityscape is a vehicle for ongoing struggles over memory in the present.

The centennial of José Martí's birth and the construction of monuments and buildings dedicated to his memory in Havana's Civic Plaza in 1953 continued a long-standing tradition of utilizing the martyr's memory to fit the priorities of the Cuban state. This article focuses on how this and other celebrations in commemoration of Cuba's War of Independence heroes that were held during the illegitimate regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista (1952–58) reflected the dictator's claim that his 1952 coup was a unique and authentic "revolution" but also became contested spaces where Cuba's social and political actors asserted their rights as faithful interpreters of Cuba's independence struggles and heirs of its heroes.

This article explores the divisive commemoration of the battle of Erenköy, which has gained significance since the early 2000s in a resignifying of Turkish Cypriot history. Over time, the commemoration has shifted from a triumphalism symbolized in monuments to an act of mourning at the graves of the fallen. We show through this commemoration how actors have repurposed official narratives, deterritorializing them from the terrain of nationalist ideology and its countermemory and reterritorializing them in ways that look similar but are affectively quite different. We argue that this repurposing of the ritual produces an affect of agency among participants that is open-ended and future oriented.

From the Editor José Brunner Three contributions to this issue discuss the politics of memory at centenary events in France, Russia and Cuba. Two contributions explore contrasting national narratives on violent conflicts, one dealing with the attempt to construct a joint Russian-German site of memory, the other juxtaposing two contradictory sites of memory relating to the Cyprus conflict. During celebrations to commemorate the centenary of the Great War, French state actors stressed the contribution that indigenous troops recruited in the colonies had made to the war effort, while neglecting the participation of over 70,000 pied-noir settler soldiers who lived in North Africa but were of European origin. Through a close reading of the pieds-noirs' own testimonies, Claire Eldridge shows that their complex identities and allegiances do not fit easily into the clear-cut categories of French/foreign or colonizer/colonized that shape the colonial logic of French commemoration projects. She argues that the case of the pieds-noirs points to the need to engage with the colonial past in a way that reflects "the complexities of the era and the actors concerned." James Richter examines the various ways in which the Kremlin sought to "tame" the legacy of the 1917 October Revolution during its centenary. Its integration into a thousand-year-long cyclical narrative turned it into one of many "times of troubles" that are said to characterize transitions in Russian history, while the nationalist emphasis on Russia's struggle in the Great Patriotic War and the projection of a more positive image of Stalin eclipsed the revolutionary legacy of the Bolshevik victory. Moreover, instead of ideological conflict, ceremonies highlighted personal testimony, and, rather than celebrating the emergence of constitutional government in February 1917, the Kremlin mourned the demise of imperial sovereignty. Richter argues that the Russian leadership used the centenary to disseminate the message that "times of troubles" are always followed by authoritarian governments that guide the Russian people to its historical destiny. [End Page 1] David Clarke and Zofia Wόycicka discuss how German and Russian experts have been engaged in cultural diplomacy in order to create a museum of the Second World War, whose historical narrative can be acceptable to both countries. Examining the negotiations and disagreements that accompanied the redesign of the permanent exhibition in the German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, they point to the difficulties entailed in the attempts to present a new historical understanding that reconciles the diverging national approaches to the war. Instead, they argue, in the current display, the Russian perspective has gained a dominance that can undermine its credibility among its audience. The lawyer, journalist and poet José Martí, who formed the Cuban Revolutionary Party and died in battle against Spanish troops, is considered the father of Cuba's 1895 independence struggle. Exploring the memory politics in Cuba after the coup that brought Fulgencio Batista to power in 1952, Daniel J. Fernández Guevara describes how the commemorative events and grandiose building projects in honor of the centenaries of the birth of Martí and other War of Independence heroes were used to assert Batista's political legitimacy, while broad sectors of Cuban society, from the opposition parties to labor unions and black Cubans, used these sites to protest against the regime and enlisted Martí's image in their struggle for a democratic republic. John Burke examines how two very different sites of memory—the Turkish Cypriot Museum of Barbarism, located in Nicosia in the former home of Turkish Cypriot civilians who were murdered by Greek Cypriot paramilitaries in 1963, and a Greek Cypriot elementary level schoolbook containing stories, poems and images of the homes lost by Greek Cypriot refugees—use the concept of the home as a powerful trope to transmit divergent messages on the conflict in Cyprus. Both present crimes perpetrated against individuals and families, seeking emotional impact without providing a broader historical explanation. Burke concludes: "Each frames its narrative around the intimacy and familiarity of the home to create an identification with the broader intercommunal struggle on Cyprus." [End Page 2] Copyright © 2019 The Trustees of Indiana University

This article uncovers the role of the Spanish publisher Carlos Barral in promoting knowledge of the Holocaust through a number of publishing ventures beginning in the late 1950s. Based on research in the Archivo General de la Administración, it sets Barral's endeavors in the context of the Franco regime's resistance to the public airing of Nazi crimes in Spain. After considering the historical factors that help explain why Franco's regime was reluctant to tolerate an uninhibited public awareness of the extermination of the European Jews, the article examines how and why Carlos Barral made it his duty to promote knowledge of the horrors the regime was eager to hide

From the Editor José Brunner All contributions to this issue discuss the role of private individuals and civil society memory activists in the construction of collective memories and historical consciousness. The first three articles deal with various ways in which memory politics serve minority communities to bolster their identity. Huw Halstead explores transcultural cross-references in the discourse of Greek expatriates from Turkey and in YouTube videos dealing with Greek-Turkish relationships, which establish analogies between the oppression of the Greeks by the Turks, on the one hand, and the Armenian genocide, the persecution of the Kurds and Nazi atrocities against the Jews, on the other. He concludes that such "knotting" between different histories casts them neither in a cosmopolitan nor in a postnational mold, nor does it construct hierarchies of suffering. He suggests that while historical equivalences may foster solidarity among different nationalities, they can also be used to strengthen national histories and identities. Valentina Rozas-Krause examines four decades of memory politics surrounding the site of the former Tanforan Assembly Center in California, a temporary detention camp where Japanese and Japanese American citizens were imprisoned during World War II. She discusses the different forms of commemoration at the site, from the successive dedication of three memorial plaques, each with a different wording, erected by Japanese American groups of activists between 1980 and 2007, to a photographic exhibition held at a nearby train station and finally the current plan for a future Tanforan memorial that is to include a bronze sculpture and a memorial plaza. She suggests that the continuing commemorative interventions at Tanforan reflect not only the changes in the Japanese American community and the surrounding urban landscape but also that community's sense that its demands for apology have remained unfulfilled. Torgrim Sneve Guttormsen's article centers on the bronze sculpture of the Viking seafarer Leif Erikson that was erected in late nineteenth-century Boston in order to make a Scandinavian foundation myth of the United States present in public space. Since many more monuments to Leif Erikson, [End Page 1] reputed to be the first European to have discovered America, were subsequently erected in the United States and Europe, Guttormsen considers the Boston monument part of a broader memory culture. He shows how Leif Erikson continues to serve the American Scandinavian community as a focal figure in its struggles for political recognition by personifying Protestant values of commerce, hard work, progress and enlightenment. Rather than relegating the monument to a heritage culture whose heyday has passed, Guttormsen suggests that it could be used to mediate reflection on immigration politics, humanistic ethics and questions of injustice. The last two essays deal with the role of books in fostering historical memory. Samuel O'Donoghue describes how the Spanish publisher Carlos Barral was the first to effectively challenge the Franco regime's silence on the Holocaust, which stemmed from the Spanish radical right's anti-Semitism and its flirtation with Nazism. Barral's determination to disseminate Holocaust awareness in Spain led him to initiate and promote Spanish translations of some of the first important historical and fictional works on the Holocaust. O'Donoghue shows that the regime's censors were willing to permit the publication of books dealing with the Holocaust as long as these did not express a more general antifascist sentiment that implicated Spain or portray Republicans and communists as heroes. According to O'Donoghue, it was thanks to Barral that Spanish readers had, at least from the beginning of the 1960s, access to knowledge about the Holocaust. Astrid Rasch examines four memoirs by Alexandra Fuller and Peter Godwin, two expatriate Zimbabweans writing about Africa for the West. Rasch uses the term "postcolonial nostalgia" for a perspective that conjoins a critique of colonial rule, condemnation of Rhodesian crimes and acknowledgment of personal participation and racism with subtle nostalgic tendencies. She shows how Fuller and Godwin are able to simultaneously condemn and romanticize the settler colonial past of Zimbabwe by presenting their families as caught up in illusions and unaware of the consequences of their racism. Conjuring up depoliticized images of childhood naiveté, wholesome domesticity as well as intimacy with black servants, their memoirs contrast a happier and...

This article seeks to demonstrate how the myth of Troy is still relevant to modern-day European culture and identity, drawing on Gregor Feindt et al.'s concept of "entangled memory" as a theoretical foundation. In order to support this claim, it discusses Wolfgang Petersen's movie Troy (2004), the successful exhibition Troy—Dream and Reality that opened in Germany in 2001; the heated debate sparked by this exhibition among German scholars; and the political discussion about Turkey's unsuccessful application for membership in the European Union, in which references to Troy played a surprising role.

This article analyzes the role of historical memories of Henry Kissinger, former US national security advisor and secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations, in post-9/11 foreign policy debates in the United States. It argues that the Kissinger of the Cold War has become a historical icon and an important point of reference for many in the twenty-first century who seek to shape popular American understandings of contemporary international affairs. Furthermore, it argues that an analysis of Kissinger is useful in understanding how historical figures can utilize their own celebrity to steer the popular remembrance and deployment of memories of themselves.