Preface

In Rashomon (1950), Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa recounts a murder through multiple standpoints: eyewitnesses, accused, and even dead victim, through a medium, an approach groundbreaking both for 1950s cinematic standards and for narrative construction generally. It demonstrated the legitimacy of the subjective viewpoint—even more directly than had been done in literature, in, say, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960). Rashomon demonstrated that we remember differently, as individuals, and as generations. In this book, I investigate three generations’ memories of the authoritarian European South’s transition to democracy in the 1970s, and its aftermath. I explore these remembrances without a relativist approach to historical facts: the same events imprint differently on memory according to generational belonging. The result is a multivocal text: ambiguity, like memory itself, abounds. Half a century after Kurosawa’s film, a quarter of the way round the globe due west from Japan, a different artistic performance materialized—one that is also vital to this book’s inception. In Athens in 2001, theatre director Michael Marmarinos staged the avant-garde play ‘National Hymn’ blending seemingly disparate memories of Greece’s turbulent transition from military dictatorship to democracy, juxtaposing momentous events collectively experienced, with private, individual memories. It presented the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, large anti-fascist concerts after the collapse of the Colonels’ authoritarian regime, and the victory of socialist PASOK in the 1981 elections alongside personal memories just as deep: ‘My father passed away’/‘I hit my head in the yard and almost died’. Marmarinos showed that the political calendar does not necessarily correspond to the personal. But, perhaps there could indeed be convergences: watching the play I wondered, ‘but when, during the transition, did these convergences happen?’