Introduction
Between the years 2000 and 2015 novels on the Greek civil war (1946–9) flooded the Greek literary market: they outnumber the novels produced between the outbreak of the civil unrest and the fall of the dictatorship of 21 April 1967 and they are in total two and a half times more than the novels published after the transition to democracy (known as Metapolitefsi)Footnote 2 in 1974.Footnote 3 The spectral resonance of the civil conflict in the 2000s raises important questions as to why the burden of the 1940s weighs heavily upon generations with no experiential connection to these events. It is the ethical underpinnings and the mediated nature of the remembrance of an unlived past that constitute the focus of this article.
The Greek civil war remains one of the most hotly debated conflicts in Modern Greek history.Footnote 4 In military terms, I understand the civil war as the conflict between the Communist-backed Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) and people with Leftist allegiances on one side, and the US-supported monarchist National Army and ultra-Right-wing paramilitary gangs on the other between 1946 and 1949. The conflict concluded with the Democratic Army's defeat and its retreat across the Albanian border. In terms of its socio-political dynamics, pre-liberation local hostilities and the collapse of civil society caused outbreaks of armed conflict in rural areas prior to 1946.Footnote 5 Social polarization and the containment of Communism continued unabated during the post-war period of illiberal democracy (1949–67).Footnote 6 Accordingly, I find the term ‘long civil war’ useful to describe the ruptures and continuities in practices of political violence and social exclusion from the 1940s until the fall of the dictatorship.Footnote 7
Inspired by Hispanic Studies, I here use the concept of the ‘novel of the Greek civil war’ to describe novels that thematize histories of violence or injustice unfolding during the long civil war.Footnote 8 I also use it to encourage the study of the civil war novel in its own right, as a hybrid literary genre conversing with other media and official memory. Although a considerable number of studies have been devoted to the novels published before or during the Metapolitefsi,Footnote 9 post-2000s narratives remain vastly un(der)explored.Footnote 10 Drawing on the theoretical framework of ‘postmemory’, this article offers readings of contemporary civil war novels with a focus on the mediatedness and ethics of remembrance. A postmemorial reading of contemporary civil war novels is well worth undertaking as it deepens our understanding of how artistic forms mediate the transfer of difficult memories to the next generations.Footnote 11 Additionally, insights from civil war narratives can be extended to and juxtaposed with the recent crop of novels dramatizing the impact of troubling historical events on future generations.Footnote 12
The following sections ask why authors memorialize the civil strife seventy years on and explore how they deal with inherited memories of violence and pain. First, I offer an interpretation for the literary upsurge of the civil war since the 2000s and introduce Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory. The article then moves on to a close reading of selected second-generation narratives. I argue that the characters’ immersion in personal and cultural archives is triggered by the urgency to recover buried memories of the past while recognizing that forgetting and excluding are inevitably nested in practices of remembering. It is my intention to show that ‘postmemorial writings’Footnote 13 of the Greek civil war are inflected by the ethical concerns of a new generation of authors, who strive to repair past wrongs and break with agendas of forgetting. In this sense, I intend to re-orientate the critical discussions about the cultural representations of the 1940s from the lexicon of (inherited) trauma to the notion of responsibility in the present. To make these points palpable, I explore three second-generation novels: Ελληνικόσταυρόλɛξο (2000) by Thomas Skassis, Λɛυκήπɛτσέταστορινγκ (2006)by Nikos Davvetas and Χορɛύουνοιɛλέφαντɛς(2012) by SophiaNikolaidou.
Explosion of civil war memories in the twenty-first century
The literary critic Vangelis Chatzivassileiou was the first to talk about a ‘new round’ in civil war fiction in the 2000s.Footnote 14 Other critics read contemporary civil war novels as historical fiction that looks backwards in order to understand the present and envision the future.Footnote 15 I maintain that a critical reading of twenty-first-century civil war fiction requires it to be contextualized within the Greek memory industry and the bourgeoning international second-generation literature. Next, I suggest a reading of the novels through the lens of postmemory and express my reservations about the dubious conflation of postmemory and trauma.
First, Thanasis Valtinos’ novel Ορθοκωστά (1994) should be considered as passing the baton to a new generation of writers.Footnote 16Ορθοκωστά achieved notoriety for the memorialization of ‘Red’ (Left-wing) violence in Valtinos’ native village in the Peloponnese in 1943–4, during the German Occupation. Valtinos’ novel consists of a synthesis of childhood memories and co-villagers’ narratives in what appears to be an arbitrary selection of documents from ‘the working archive of an oral historian’.Footnote 17 In many ways Valtinos’ ethnographic fieldwork was aligned with the ‘social turn’ of civil war historiography in the 1990s.Footnote 18 Rather than claiming that memory and transmitted knowledge have truth-bearing qualities, Ορθοκωστά brought attention to them as discursive constructs.Footnote 19 Furthermore, by ‘giving voice to the Right’,Footnote 20 Valtinos challenged the authority of Left-wingers as the mainstream testimonial subjects, providing for a more inclusive ethics of memory of the 1940s, yet also provoking strong reactions. As I will go on to show, Valtinos’ techniques—the preoccupation with the legacies of political violence, the representation of ‘forgotten’ subjects, and archival poetics (involving some sort of investigation)—fundamentally influenced the new generations of writers.
Ορθοκωστά came to be intimately linked with the so-called ‘historiographical debate’ of the mid-2000s, which brings me to my second point, the profusion of civil war remembrance in scholarly debates and public fora. A Greek version of the Historikerstreit, the historiographical debate unfolded in the newspaper Τα Νέα in 2004 and its polemics are better understood in the context of the memory politics that preceded it.Footnote 21 The divisive legacies of the 1940s were buried thrice under the politics of consensus and national reconciliation (in 1974 by New Democracy; in 1982 by PASOK; and in 1989 by the coalition government).Footnote 22 Since the 1990s and the withdrawal of political and institutional actors from civil war debates, historians and intellectual elites have sought, in fairly controversial ways, to undo the Metapolitefsi's reparation policies which were based on silence.Footnote 23 In this sense, The Greek Historikerstreit made the civil war more public, more relevant, and more contested than before. At the same time, it carved out a space for the public representation of the defeated and the winners, albeit in an irreconcilable manner.
In light of the above, the 2000s saw the development of a prolific memory industry commodifying the civil war, in which the Greek book industry all too eagerly joined. Here, the example of Spain, where a similar trend developed earlier on, is instructive. Between 1989 and 2011, 181 novels using the Spanish civil war as their subject-matter were published in Spain. A considerable number of these were translated into English, went through different editions, and were adapted into film.Footnote 24 David Becerra Mayor observes that, although these novels were branded as novels of ‘historical memory’ (this term is used in Spain to refer to the memory of the Republic and Francoist repression), in many of them the Spanish civil war operates solely as an aesthetic backdrop. The Spanish case suggests that a literary trend may be a plausible explanation, mutatis mutandis, for the popularity and marketing of Greek civil war literature between the years 2000 and 2015. After the steep decline in publications about the civil war during 1974 and 1999, a large number of novels about the civil war were commercially successful, by Greek standards, although inaudible and inaccessible to non-Greek audiences.Footnote 25 What I'm suggesting here is a kind of civil war fatigue captured in the author Christos Asteriou's 2019 interview characteristically entitled ‘I am not interested in writing about the civil war’.Footnote 26
Although domestic public debates go some way towards explaining the recent rise in novels related to the civil war, it is my intention to show that Greek novels should be contextualized within the ‘emergence of memory as a key cultural and political concern in Western societies’ since the 1980s.Footnote 27 In particular, they are a belated response to the (trans)national literature concerned with the impact of traumatic historical events on the next generations.Footnote 28 Perhaps the most tangible difference between contemporary Greek civil war novels and Valtinos’ narrative is that they elide representation of the past in favour of representing its residue in the present. To address the ways in which second-generation novels deal with civil war suffering, I borrow Marianne Hirsch's concept of ‘postmemory’. Hirsch is preoccupied with the ethics and aesthetics of the artistic production of the descendants of Holocaust survivors. In her most recent elaboration of the concept, she explains:
‘Postmemory’ describes the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before – to the experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Postmemory's connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection and creation.Footnote 29
There are three angles of Hirsch's theoretical framework that are relevant to my argument. First, postmemory is a ‘structure of inter- and transgenerational transmission of traumatic knowledge’ to subsequent generations that yearn to reconnect with events that preceded their birth.Footnote 30 Although Hirsch is careful not to brand postmemory as traumatic or a real memory, but as a generational structure of remembrance, the use of words such as ‘witness[ing] by adoption’ and ‘identification’Footnote 31 has raised various criticisms on the ethics of the transference of testimonial authority from the survivors to their descendants.Footnote 32 Secondly, postmemory entwines inter-generational (familial) and trans-generational (cultural and societal) transmission, and therefore the past becomes available to subsequent generations through acts of projection, empathy, and affiliation. Thirdly, a less discussed take on postmemory concerns its ethical relation to the oppressed or persecuted, as ‘a means to account for the power structures animating forgetting, oblivion, and erasure and thus to engage in acts of repair and redress’.Footnote 33 From this viewpoint, postmemory becomes a valuable tool for critical readings of second-generation civil war texts, not as appropriations of traumatic experiences, but as more or less productive projects of uncovering and representing formerly silenced histories so as to do justice to the ghosts of history.
There are numerous, almost archetypical, thematic characteristics in contemporary Greek civil war narratives that resonate with Hirsch's theory and can be boiled down to the following template.Footnote 34 Mostly male characters with no direct experience of civil strife engage in relentless archival searches in response to family secrets and a sense of unsettledness triggered by an undetermined responsibility for past suffering. The bulk of these characters practise professions that provide for the formulation of different forms of inquiries (i.e. investigative journalists, students or researchers) without, however, adopting the authoritative agenda of the historian. The construction of characters as researchers echoes the generational position of authors with no experiential connection to the civil war.Footnote 35 For them, archival investigation is a conscious effort to offer correctives and to complement the silences of historical records.Footnote 36
The analyses of the novels by Thomas Skassis, Nikos Davvetas and Sophia Nikolaidou serve to illustrate that the characters’ postmemorial practices are propped up by archival searches, ultimately laying bare the descendants’ urgency to mourn personal and collective losses, despite their inability to get to the bottom of a difficult past. I choose to discuss these three novels as they negotiate different forms of postmemory (familial postmemory in Skassis versus cultural transmission in Davvetas and Nikolaidou) and stretch evenly across the temporal spectrum of the civil war novels' circulation since 2000.
What did you do in the civil war, Daddy? Ελληνικό σταυρόλɛξo
The convoluted plot of Ελληνικό σταυρόλɛξο by Thomas Skassis (b. 1953) revolves around the ways in which familial memory is passed on to the next generation through cultural and archival refractions—a narrative trope that gains traction in novels published later in the 2000s. The protagonist's paternal quest lends a threefold structure to the novel, focusing attention not only on the workings of postmemory but also on the artificiality of the narrative.Footnote 37
Part 1, entitled ‘Across’, broaches the character's ‘archival impulse’.Footnote 38 It tells the story of Sotiris Sotiriou, an investigative journalist, whose life is turned upside down after he attends an academic conference on the intersections between history and fictionFootnote 39 and decides to search for the ‘generation of the father’.Footnote 40 Part 2, entitled ‘Down’, records the outcomes of his painstaking research: a two-hundred-page torrent of historical entries and place-names gleaned from official archives. Part 3, entitled ‘The Arsenal of the solver’, comprises a wide range of private and official documents from Sotiris’ family archive ranging from newspaper clippings and official reports to oral interviews with civil war survivors and excerpts from the narrator's diary. The fact that the muddled solution to his memory riddle comes from private archives suggests the pivotal role of familial postmemory in the text.Footnote 41
Although the self-reflexivity and impenetrable archival accumulation in Ελληνικό σταυρόλɛξο has stirred scholarly interpretations of the novel as metafiction,Footnote 42 my approach here differs significantly. I want to reclaim the ethics of (post)memory in the protagonist's practices of assemblage, selection, and arrangement of archival material, in agreement with Hirsch's remark that postmemorial work relies on the archive to ‘reclaim historical specificity and context, rather than jettisoning these in a familiar postmodern move’.Footnote 43 In this light, what on the surface appears as a labyrinthine archive acquires more concrete meaning through the protagonist's effort to reunite with his deceased father and, in so doing, to uncover stories of injustice covered under a thick veil of oblivion.
One has to reach the final pages of Ελληνικό σταυρόλɛξο to fully grasp the workings of postmemory in the novel, captured in the following lines:
He wanted to see the invisible father, so he sought History. He wanted to know the story, so he looked for the truth. He wanted to find the truth, so he strove to excavate memory from the well of oblivion. But the quest for old memory for whomever did not live, did not see, did not hear, is only the quest for language: the language of the father. And this language was the same as his: the same words, but with a different meaning. [my emphasis]Footnote 44
As this quotation suggests, the narrator's urge to compensate for paternal loss takes the form of an arduous process of narrative reconstruction of the familial past (‘quest for language’). Sotiris seeks to ‘know’ and establish affective connections with the ‘invisible’ father, as a result of growing up with two aunts, whose apprehension about passing on dangerous memories prevented them from talking about him.Footnote 45 In an important sense, the protagonist's amnesia of his childhood, his father, and pre-dictatorship Greece hints at the Metapolitefsi's politics of silencing the thorny aspects of recent history.
It is only after high school final exams that one of his aunts hands Sotiris a sealed folder with scant information about his father and very few of his belongings. At the time, he buries the folder in a chest of drawers, as he is reluctant to disclose family secrets or ask questions that would, presumably, not be answered in the oblivious post-dictatorial years. As noted earlier, it is not until his thirties that language evocative of the father awakens the dormant urge to look backwards. The narrator works meticulously as an archivist to categorize his father's papers so to make sense of his life-history. What can be gauged from the fragmented archival evidence and conflicting family stories is that his father fought with the Democratic Army and was subsequently imprisoned for political dissidence. He bought his release from prison with the help of his partner's Right-wing father in exchange for his ‘disappearance’ in socialist Eastern Europe.
Nevertheless, postmemorial work can only partly recuperate the narrator's absent memory, as the family archive is mediated not only by family silences but also by cultural forgetting. Sotiris' diary entries describe postmemorial work as ‘this seemingly incoherent interchange of primary memory images, which have been forged by the senses, and of transmitted ones, which have been entrusted by narratives’ and clarifies that ‘everything revolved around the same centre: […] the quest for the father's history’.Footnote 46 This passage draws attention to postmemorial dynamics as the connecting thread of the ‘seemingly incoherent’ material in Ελληνικό σταυρόλɛξο. Likewise, by the end of his archival search, Sotiris’ recognizes that ‘the shadow of the father had now formed a silhouette. He could feel it next to him, around him, everywhere and nowhere – like homeland’.Footnote 47 The father's omnipresence, spectral yet homely, brings home the emotionally powerful but also elusive connection between ancestors and descendants.
With this in mind, I want to establish Ελληνικό σταυρόλɛξο as part of a genealogy of civil war novels that, inspired by Valtinos’ archival poetics, digs up forgotten histories. Fairly early in the novel, Sotiris defends Skassis’ literary agenda, noting that adhering to novelistic conventions would only lead him
to stitch together fragments of a story already written with all its bells and whistles by some and with a mournful march and whispering bitterness by others, and, in this way, to rehearse the ideology embedded in the standpoint of each writer. […] the attribution of a great many events to the protagonists who, as it is said, ‘marked’ them […] ignored the faceless majority of those who were taken by the winds but survived by preserving or relinquishing material goods, human relationships, faith and dignity.Footnote 48
Here, Skassis’ departure from traditional metanarratives of the 1940s that legitimize the views of the ‘winners’ or the ‘vanquished’ is grounded in his concern to represent the morally ambiguous ‘faceless majority’. Near the end of the novel, Sotiris is faced with an attempt to blackmail him into stopping his journalistic investigation with the documentary evidence that his father was a repentee (δηλωσίας)Footnote 49 and a police informant. Sotiris has a hard time stomaching this unexpected news, yet readers are kept in the dark regarding his next steps; they only learn about his death in a fatal motorcycle accident, an open ending that leaves many questions unanswered. If anything, Sotiris’ father's morally questionable identity has important implications for second-generation fiction's engagement with non-normative Left-wing subjects, the descendants’ guilt for their ancestors’ wrongs, and the mediation of postmemory through archival silences and omissions.
On the battlefield of memory: Λɛυκή πɛτσέτα στο ρινγκ
A different angle of postmemorial work unfolds in Λɛυκή πɛτσέτα στο ρινγκ by Nikos Davvetas (b. 1960), the second part of his trilogy, that began with Το θήραμα (2004)and concluded with H Εβραία νύφη (2009).Footnote 50 In all three novels, Davvetas concerns himself with second-generation male protagonists with dysfunctional familial relationships and fragile health. Their dives into the cultural archive reveal family secrets that force them to confront the impact of the 1940s on their personal histories.
Λɛυκή πɛτσέτα deals with the resonance of Left-wing violence in the life of an unnamed middle-aged journalist who prepares atribute articlefor thefifty-fifth anniversary of theDecember 1944 Events (Δɛκɛμβριανά).Footnote 51 The narrator's research brings him to the Left-wing neighbourhood in Athens where he was brought up, and where Communist hardliners murdered two dissenting leftists of Asia Minor descent: a Trotskyist intellectual and a reputedly homosexual humanist doctor.Footnote 52 The narrator tapes thirteen eyewitness testimonies so as to elucidate the conditions of the murders, yet the deeper he delves into the case, the more impenetrable the past becomes, as his informants' guilty silence conceals key facts about the crime. Ultimately, a plot twist unveils the narrator's intimate connection to ostensibly distant wrongdoings and serves to destabilize the rigid categories of victim, perpetrator, and bystander. These points are inextricably linked and frame the remainder of this section.
The unnamed narrator undertakes this investigative project out of curiosity, galvanized by his informants’ conflicting testimonies and the urgency to do justice to the two unknown victims of the December bloodshed. The memories of Resistance veterans pivot on the uniform narrative of martyrdom and heroic sacrifice and conceal unlawful or shameful acts of internecine violence. Some of them are presented as having used their anti-fascist credentials for political purposes during the Metapolitefsi, in line with the political culture that favoured the remembrance of a unified Resistance past.Footnote 53 Inspired by childhood memories and family stories,Footnote 54 Davvetas’ novels create cracks in the shaky ground of the master narrative of the Resistance. In an important sense, Λɛυκή πɛτσέτα echoes revisionist historiography, insofar as it interrogates the ideological underpinnings of Left-wing violence and proposes that pre-existing enmities and personal interests also led to extreme atrocities. This becomes palpable in the editor-in-chief's words that ‘[a]s fights rage for the takeover of power, some decide to settle personal differences and kill those acquaintances whom they don't like […] [i]n this confrontation ideology plays the least important role’.Footnote 55 I do not suggest that Davvetas co-opts historiographic agendas. Rather, he addresses the conditions that generated brutal ELAS violence and explores the plethora of positions that Left-wingers occupied in this spectrum of aggression, domination, and injustice.
The difficulty of making judgments about each side's political responsibility during the December Uprising is made palpable by the narrator's inability to reconstruct the past.Footnote 56 In his own words, ‘I couldn't see any mural, just faded colours on the back of collapsed plaster, bullet holes, pieces of dried mud. How would all these form faces and facts?’Footnote 57 These words resound with Aris Alexandrou's novel Το κιβώτιο (1975), wherein the symbolic imagery of the unfinished jigsaw puzzle expresses the fragmentation of memory, the unreliability of archival material, and the inability to acknowledge responsibility for past wrongs.Footnote 58 The suspense (and frustration) which build up as the protagonist dives deeper into the historical archive and tracks down several eyewitnesses to the murder (or their descendants) questions the purposes and significance of his belated investigation and knowledge production. As the narrator puts it close to the end of the novel, ‘[w]hat do I, ultimately, aim to achieve with this research? To do justice fifty-five years on? Is anyone interested in such a prospect nowadays? And who is so incorruptible […] as to do it?’.Footnote 59 This passage raises important implications about the ways in which the second generation reckons with a difficult past and redresses historical injustices. It finds parallels in the literary treatment of inherited guilt by Skassis and Nikolaidou.
The meaning of the above questions is further clarified in the closure of the novel, in which the narrator's inherited implication comes into play. In an unsettling interview with his father-in-law, it transpires that the narrator's mother was tangentially involved in the Trotskyist's murder. Overwhelmed by this discovery, the protagonist immediately drops the investigation and the desire to write about the December Events, claiming that ‘I did not care, after all, to find out who pulled the strings in this messy tangle of executions. I could not afford any more losses’.Footnote 60 This plot twist is crucial to the purposes of this section. The narrator's mother's involvement in the murder underscores that in civil strife, all subjects are implicated in and inhabit different locations of aggression, although they might not directly exert violence over each other.Footnote 61 From this viewpoint, Λɛυκήπɛτσέτα's dramatization of a Left-wing woman's involvement in civil war violence converses with Alexandros Kotzias’ novella Ιαγουάρος.Footnote 62 Unlike Kotzias’ portrayal of the first-generation's gendered experience of the 1940s through the self-victimizing discourse of a Communist hardliner (Dimitra), Davvetas centres on the inheritance of responsibility by the descendants.
I do not agree with Kerstin Jentsch-Mancor that halting memory and archival research points to the narrator's refusal to ‘face the darker aspects of the past of his own family history’.Footnote 63 It is true that Davvetas’ protagonist does not confront his mother. The preservation of uncomfortable family silences seems to gesture to his recognition that some secrets of the 1940s cannot be understood by the descendants. However, dropping his journalistic project is not proof of moral evasion but a refusal to deliver to the readers a definite verdict of guilt or acquittal. This moral stance stems from two intricately linked factors analysed in this section: on the one hand, the fact that the survivors’ testimonies reveal different shades of culpability; on the other, the painful knowledge of maternal complicity and, concomitantly, his own links with past violence and suffering.
The Polk connection: Χορɛύουν οι ɛλέφαντɛς
In the last part of my argument, I will discuss Χορɛύουν οι ɛλέφαντɛς by Sophia Nikolaidou (b. 1968). The novel offers a reflection on uncomfortable historical events that linger on in the next generations.Footnote 64Χορɛύουν οι ɛλέφαντɛς (2012) is the second part of a trilogy that consists of Απόψɛ δɛν έχουμɛ φίλους (2010; awarded the Athens Prize for Literature in 2011) and Στο τέλος νικάω ɛγώ (2017). The novels are concerned with the imprint of divisive pasts—collaborationism during the Axis Occupation,Footnote 65 the Greek civil war, and the National Schism (Εθνικός Διχασμός)Footnote 66 respectively— on the lives of recurring characters inhabiting late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Thessaloniki.Footnote 67
Χορɛύουν οι ɛλέφαντɛς follows the story of a high-school student, Minas, whose teenage rebellion kicks off with his refusal to sit the Greek university entrance exams. Instead, he takes a term essay in history, under the supervision of the old-fashioned teacher Soukiouroglou (referred to by his nickname, Souk). An ordinary assignment develops into a full-on investigation of an unsolved case of the 1940s: the notorious assassination of the American journalist George Polk in May 1948. As John Iatrides notes in a recent article, ‘Polk's reporting on developments in Greece was highly critical of the Greek authorities, whom he regarded as incompetent and corrupt, and of the U.S. government for supporting a repressive regime’.Footnote 68 The absence of ‘hard facts’ and the country's heavy reliance on U.S. military and humanitarian aid led to the arrest and false conviction of the journalist Grigoris Staktopoulos.
In Χορɛύουν οι ɛλέφαντɛς, Polk is referred to as Jack Talas and Staktopoulos as Manolis Gris. The ‘Gris case’ unfolds through a miscellany of key testimonies: the members of Gris’ family, the corrupt Thessaloniki Chief of Police, and a U.S. Foreign Office investigator. In an interview, Nikolaidou notes:
I was really interested in putting together two different ages of Modern Greek history. I wanted to capture the historical adventure of my country. Some things change, because circumstances around us have changed as well. Other things remain hidden and unpunished – they poison everything. Some are carried from one generation to the next. We think that we have left our past behind. Alas, we always find it ahead. [my emphasis]Footnote 69
Taking my cue from Nikolaidou's words, I read Minas’ confrontation with his ancestors’ collective responsibility and the exclusionary logics of the archive as a tale of the commitment on the part of the next generations (the grandchildren in particular) to repair historical injustice and social forgetting. His postmemorial work involves intellectual labour together with acts of imagination and affiliation with the past.
Similarly to Davvetas’ unnamed protagonist, Minas’ research does not seek to unmask the perpetrator behind this blurry episode of the civil war. Instead, Minas’ historical research is an exercise in the recognition of ‘the multiple versions of reality’.Footnote 70 According to one of his informants, absolute knowledge of the past is prejudiced by the function of historical archives as sites of loss, destruction, and deliberate fabrication:
Reality is the ultimate construction—just ask the lawyers and journalists, whose careers rest on that construction. Other people have trouble understanding that […] The dictatorship of the truth. The tyranny of good intentions. There's nothing more dangerous for a family or a country. Historians show up after the fact. They rummage through the locked drawers, discover forgotten papers, conduct their research, pass judgement. […] It would surprise you how easily a piece of evidence can disappear, a signature can be forgotten.Footnote 71
Here, grandfather Dinopoulos, who acted as Gris’ lawyer in the 1940s, raises the issue of the politics of the archive, and, in particular, the vested interests of archive-makers (historians and journalists) in authenticating specific (hi)stories and erasing others. Gris’ unfair trial and elimination from Greek collective memory expose to the young Minas the sordid underbelly of official archives as sources of professional opportunism and political authority. It is because of this acknowledgement that the next generation's sense of responsibility towards the preservation of the cultural memory of the 1940s emerges so powerfully.
What ethics of remembrance does Χορɛύουν οι ɛλέφαντɛς subscribe to? The novel is brought to an end with a number of counterfactual speculations about ‘all that might have been, if Greece were a country where silence was not hereditary, like genetic material’.Footnote 72 The point I want to make here is that Minas’ investigative (post)memorial work is illustrative of the new generation's need to break with its ancestors’ silence and fear. For example, Minas’ father made considerable progress with his journalistic investigation of the Gris case during the Metapolitefsi. However, his mentor at the newspaper, a networker with important political ties, urged him to halt the investigation, as ‘resolving that case wasn't among the newspaper's immediate priorities, much less those of the country’.Footnote 73 Minas’ father agreed to bury his personal archive and this decision granted him a promotion the following year.
In this sense, Minas’ father's hand-over of the sealed cardboard boxes of archive material to his son is a legacy of shamefully buried memories that summons the third generation to publicly represent historical wrongs.Footnote 74 Indeed, Minas’ presentation of his findings departs from the language of martyrdom or demonization that constructs innocent victims or evil perpetrators and concludes that:
the situation was created by friends and enemies both. Right or wrong, the result is the same: an innocent man went to jail. Case closed. […] Minas had come to realize that justice is an abstract concept. Perfect on paper. But in practice, riddled with qualifications, asterisks, interpretations, clashes of opinion.Footnote 75
For Minas, the just remembrance of Gris’ unjust conviction amounts to making known the numerous alternative scenarios that ‘might have been’, to borrow Nikolaidou's words cited earlier in this section. Minas seeks to reveal the multiplicity of individuals, practices, and personal interests that converged to render Gris a victim of whitewash and enduring injustice.
Ultimately, Nikolaidou demonstrates how the inheritance of histories of violence and injustice is refracted through the horizons of socio-political havoc.Footnote 76 Specifically, she uses the memories of Greece's subjugation to global financial and political powers (such as U.S. Foreign Aid) during the civil war as uncomfortable reverberations of the neo-colonial and protectionist narratives that served to legitimize the implementation of austerity measures during the Greek crisis.Footnote 77 The narrative flashbacks between past (1948) and present (2010–11) enable Minas’ belated affiliation with the unjustly convicted man, while Gris is re-imagined as the objectified alter-ego of Greek society in the wake of the crisis.Footnote 78 Seen from this angle, Minas’ initial disgust at the Greek educational system and his opposition to the formalization of history-learning through standardized testing strike home how the new generation seeks to form living, intimate connections with the past. As I have shown, Minas’ postmemorial work challenges the idea of history as universal knowledge and reclaims the affective attachments and plural postmemories through which later generations reckon with past wrongs.
Conclusion
My reading of these three novels by Skassis, Davvetas, and Nikolaidou has focused on the transmitted knowledge of the civil war to the subsequent generations and, in so doing, has addressed the continued relevance and commodification of the civil conflict in the twentieth-first-century Greek memory industry. By steering clear of the concept of trauma, so intimately woven with critical discussions of postmemory, this article has approached contemporary Greek novelists as ‘a generation of historical consciousness in society’Footnote 79 whose narrative choices are responsible for the recovery or exclusion of histories from the cultural archive.
I have sought to establish that in all three novels postmemorial practices drive the characters to relentless searches in private and official archives as a response to family secrets that ‘have roots in the past and reverberations in the present’.Footnote 80 Family secrets are intimately linked with collective amnesias, much as personal unsettledness marks the reverberation of a violent past in the present. Skassis’ text fictionalizes familial postmemory punctuated with archival fragments of public and historical narratives. In the novels by Davvetas and Nikolaidou, the characters affiliate with the victims of the civil war through eyewitness testimony and archival research; their family links to the 1940s surface later in the text. Additionally, I illustrated that postmemorial practices do not hinge upon definite closures or hasty moral judgments. Davvetas’ and Nikolaidou's protagonists underscore the moral ambiguity of political violence. In all three novels, the characters acknowledge their failure to complete their investigative journey, because they are dependent on untrustworthy records and social forgetting. The characters’ shared responsibility (and at times guilt) for past wrongdoings is illustrative of an ethical commitment to the past on the part of contemporary Greek writers—a timely response to a divisive war whose public memory has been so heavily burdened by polarized interpretations.
Vassiliki Kaisidou is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her doctoral project explores how the Geek civil war of 1946 to 1949 is remembered and represented in autobiographical and fictional writings over three generations. She holds a BA (2015) in Greek Language and Literature from the University of Athens and an MA in Modern Greek from the University of Oxford (2016). Her research interests include modern Greek history and literature, Mediterranean studies and memory studies.
