Living in Germany and Hungary, occasionally in Austria or Poland, visitng Czech and France; or being in Japan. I'm an aspiring historian of the twentieth-century Central Europe, where no one yet fully makes sense of. ANNA NAKAI: researchmap.jp/annnakai
ケンブリッジ大学出版のElements: Soviet and Post-Soviet Historyというシリーズの、その名も『The Iron Curtain: A Short History of Socialist Borders』（Lorenz M. Luthi著）がOpen Accessになっていたので、早速ダウンロードして読んだ。著者はカナダのマギル大学で近現代史を教えていて、もともと中ソ関係に関する著作などがある。
似たようなアプローチの本としてはMaek Kramer編著の『Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain： The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989』などもあるけれど、Lüthiの著作は「鉄のカーテン」という言葉の含意と実態にこだわったもの。
2025年12月、カリフォルニア大学バークレー校のロシア史家であるユーリ・スリョースキン（Yuri Slezkine）がThe New York Reviewに『The West: The History of an Idea』とゲオルギオス・ヴァロウサキス（いうGeorgios Varouxakis）の本の書評をNYRBに寄稿して、「ロシア」は西側が自己定義に必要とする概念でその逆ではないこと、また、ウクライナを「エスノクラシー（民族集団による支配体制）」と論じたことなどに批判が集まった事例。
「Men in the Vans, Women on the Streets: Gender, Resistance, and Forced Mobilization in Ukraine and Ex-Yugoslavia」に登壇予定だった5名のうち、ヴォロディーミル・イシュチェンコとマルタ・ハヴリシュコはウクライナ市民もあり、それぞれドイツとアメリカで研究を続けている。前者は階級的な要素がウクライナの現代政治に与えている影響の大きさがどのようにメインストリームの研究のなかで無視されているのかという左派的な分析で知られ、後者は戦時のウクライナ民族主義や戦時の女性に対する暴力の研究で知られている。
Marina Abramović, My Grandma, My East (Central) Europe——Entangled Euro-East Asian Historical Account:
Two days ago, I landed in Ljubljana and almost immediately saw the gigantic poster of the Marina Abramović–Ulay exhibition, feeling simply excited and deciding to go there soon after my baggage claim. I went there for a few-week fellowship, at the institute where my friends work, and thus obviously felt overly cheerful as I passed through the small airport corridor filled with the promotion of the Lipizzaner stud farm.
Waiting for my suitcase, then, I received a message from my family about my grandma’s hospitalization back home and her rather critical condition, for which my father says, “Better to come back if you do not have any urgent programs.” Maybe I indeed had the program, but, hey, I was at the airport; dragging my very sleepy and unreliable brain that was cocktailed with various deadlines and obligations, after some calls to my partner and friends, I jumped to the conclusion, paid for a 1200 EUR ticket on the spot, and jumped on the plane. Without saying a nice goodbye, a see-you type of greeting, to my beloved artist.
…..Yes, I do like Abramović’s work; I was instantly intrigued by this retrospective exhibition of the art duo at Cukrarna, and do you think that is so typical of a quasi-Westerner who is just supposed to appreciate anything praised at the Guggenheim as an aesthetically salient experience?
Well, here is a bit of a story that may excuse my predictable attraction in some ways.
***
Believe it or not, Marina Abramović was my first, sort of, conscious encounter with the region so-called East-Central Europe—which by now has become a Frankensteined part of my mind and body, with residency in and frequent travel/commute among the region for more than 15+ years.
It was eighteen-year-old me who visited a local museum in a rather insignificant rural town in the western Japan area, where they held a large-scale solo exhibition of Marina Abramović. It was entitled The Star, and they even printed a solid exhibition art book co-written by curators from other Japanese museums.
The time was 2004; even after the rapid economic downfall of the 1990s, even in a remote town of ca. 111,000 inhabitants, in Japan of not-yet-visible tourists on the streets, there nevertheless remained the cultural capital and practical management skill for organizing and successfully accommodating such by-then internationally renowned artists’ signature pieces.
I remember I stayed almost half an hour in front of the pictures and video of the Balkan Baroque installation from Venice 1997, with Abramović herself dressed in white and shaving off the meat from the bones. I could not stop staring at what she was doing, reflecting a lot and ending up in the exhibition three more times after school (or with classes skipped) to understand what was at stake, what she intended to do, and what it meant to be.
With very little (next to no) knowledge of the massacres and wars of the 1990s—which were in the textbooks, but students did not learn them because contemporary history would not be the subject of university entrance exams, as it was considered less established for testing interpretations—I began processing words like partisan, communism, anti-communism, genocide, and so-called East-Central Europe, with some help from time and Susan Sontag, as well as many, many other books and authors.
Today, I went to the very same museum, a 20-minute drive away from my home. The exhibition was interesting; the liminal space built by Yoshio Taniguchi was pleasing and perhaps enjoyed by even more people, including a handful of tourists, than the past Abramović exhibition. Yet I felt very nostalgic. My mixed feelings of relief (that the museum does still exist) and sadness (to clearly identify their financial struggle, with no colored brochures for the exhibition, etc., etc.) dramatically heightened when I was going down the stairs to the entrance where they had once put a huge picture of the Balkan Baroque.
Being born and growing up in a rural town in Japan in the 1990s–early 2000s was not an unfavorable experience. Culture was offered in abundance, if you looked properly for it; there were glimmers and grains everywhere, and you could at least have some means to reach the Serbian woman artist by being there. That, I believe, was very special. Maybe I was lucky; maybe I got to the right place at the right time. Nevertheless, the fact that a local museum could execute such an ambitious project sufficiently suggested the unique environment the country had been in since around that time.
Western and European cultural productions—mainly high culture, but underground included—were well translated, like mushrooms popping up one after another, circulated via commercial logistics of convenience, and generally well received by college-educated, but non-graduate-level-educated civilians who wanted to learn from the world outside. Okay, I admit that it was as much a consequence of capitalism and consumerism, aesthetizing and thus desensitizing politics, just as W. Benjamin’s explanation of Fascism makes a full sense of.
Nevertheless, for a naïve eighteen-year-old, it was nothing but a revelation. She now knew she needed to use her interests for good causes, for the development of intellectual ability—not just waste them nowhere, the place she thought she was standing.
https://www.mimoca.jp/
(The featured artist of the museum, Genichiro Inokuma, was from the small city called Marugame, Kagawa prefecture.)
***
I visited Serbia two years later after the exhibition.
I went to Novi Sad to join an art and human rights summer camp.
I studied in Prague another year after that. It was not Balkan, but, well, I had that option.
Shortly before I turned twenty-four, I moved to Warsaw.
Since then, I haven't lived in Japan.
That meant I saw my grandmother at most twice a year, for about a week each time.
***
My grandma—the reason I came back two days ago, and the indirect reason behind today’s museum visit—experienced the war. She belonged to the generation, among many others, who had to spend some of the “prettiest years of her life” in “cities crumbled down,” where “a lot of people around me were killed—in factories, in the sea, and on nameless islands,” and who “lost the chance to dress up like a girl she should,” just as in Noriko Ibaragi’s poem (see here, too: https://www.ronnowpoetry.com/.../WhenIWasPrettiest.html; I often compare her to a Japanese Szymborska).
While I could enjoy my careless teenage days—studying, giggling, dancing, quarreling, crying, and above all laughing—she spent her days and years sitting in shelters, growing potatoes on barren soil, and waiting for the meaningless war to end.
Speaking of the Emperor’s unconditional surrender broadcast on August 15, 1945, my grandma said that she was not listening carefully at all. The sound quality was too bad to decipher accurately; there was no sentiment, no mourning for heroic loss, no thoughts on what it could mean to lose—only a quick reflection: “I could maybe eat better things now.”
***
In fact, my very interest in European history began to grow when my ninth-grade history teacher made the class watch a documentary on the Holocaust (actually a very good one from the Japanese state broadcaster NHK). That was the first time I learned that horrible things did not occur only to my grandparents—also the moment when I first became conscious of what Japan did in Asia.
I did not immediately associate the Holocaust I saw with the term East (or Central) Europe; I was simply thinking that the camps were located somewhere in Europe. In any case, I do not know whether showing Holocaust footage—general war atrocity scenes with some dead bodies included—was the best pedagogy of all time, but it definitely resonated and materialized through my grandparents’ stories.
And yet, a few years later—with the images I saw in Abramović’s Balkan Baroque—the war images I had encountered finally met and tightly combined with the term East (Central) Europe, the word that defines and haunts the current version of myself.
Audio from Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present. Hear the artist speak about her work.
***
In Japan, the Holocaust, or Shoah, became an integral part of intellectual vocabulary and had occupied a disproportionally large spot of cultural critique since around the late 1990s to, say, the early 2010s, both in media and academia. Films, TV productions, etc., all contributed to seriously arranged, overly complicated debates over problems of history and society, which should have been allocated more to regional and local perspectives in Asia. The Holocaust debate, to me seems, was utilized as a bypass to discuss atrocities caused by Japan. The double bind of dialogue around moral (ir)responsibility captured vocabularies that should have been built upon authentic domestic words and ideas, and in a sense they were hijacked, overwritten, and turned into discussion for discussion’s sake—words in vain.
My understanding is that, therefore, not many people successfully addressed either the Holocaust or Japanese wartime crimes, and that lingering impact is still visible today. To a certain extent, my interest in East (and Central) Europe was based on this disguise of stern rationality and morality that could not contribute to creating a national discourse on tremendous human loss, in both quantity and quality. Am I the part of the insensitive postwar generation that nulled everything by relativizing and taking roots out of the original contexts???
My grandma is still in a critical condition. I do not know whether she will make it this time—medically speaking, it is less likely, but who knows.
I wish I could talk with her.
I wish I could apologize to her for not appreciating peace enough to create meaningful things out of it.
まず、二井の著作における「共生」は、表紙にある英題からわかるように「Living Together（to live together）」というアーレント自身が用いていた表現の翻訳にあたる。活動的生などとつながる、アーレントの中心的な概念としての「ともに生きること」である。co-existenceでもco-habitationでもない、この「live together」が非常に人間的で、人間中心主義的とさえ響くことも確かである。
他方、渡邉の著作における共生は、co-habitationとこのアーレントのlive togetherの間を、どのように埋め、どのように思考するかという言葉として解釈できるのではないかと思う。つまり人間が人間と交流をするなかで、それでも生まれていく隙間のようなものがあり、その隙間を、本来であれば live together の対象とならないかもしれないいきものたちとの co-habitation によって埋め、つなぎ直し、そこから live together の物質的条件を明らかにしていくような印象を受けるのである。
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