INTERVIEW: Max Bergholz on violence, memory and the difficult path toward reconciliation

An internationally recognized scholar of intercommunal violence and historical memory, Concordia professor Max Bergholz studies how ordinary communities can shift from long periods of peaceful coexistence to episodes of extraordinary violence, and how those events continue to shape identities across generations.

Following his recent receipt of the Dan David Prize — the world's largest history prize — Bergholz spoke with Concordia News about what his research reveals, his upcoming book Our Truths: Violence and the Challenge of a Common Humanity, and why understanding the past requires seeing both ourselves and others in a more complicated light.

What first drew you to study intercommunal violence and historical memory?

Max Bergholz: The part of the world at the heart of my research — the lands of the former Yugoslavia — has been shaped during the twentieth century by long periods of peace and short periods of massive intercommunal violence.

I am most interested in how people who are viewed from the outside as supposedly so different have found ways to live in peace, and what caused them to decide to kill their neighbours in particular moments of dramatic historical change.

Searching for answers to these questions not only helps us better comprehend the prospects for peace and violence in this part of Europe; they also provide us with more general insights that can shed light on similar contexts throughout our world, both in the past and present.

Your work often focuses on a single town or community. What can one place teach us about conflict more broadly?

MB: I've long been interested in the study of small places because this level of analysis holds the greatest potential to tell us something new about complex human behaviour.

By carefully excavating the history of one corner of Europe in my first book, I discovered a compelling way to confront a major puzzle: Does ethnicity and nationalism lead to violence, as many assume? Or can violence on an ethnic axis actually produce profoundly antagonistic waves of ethnic identification and nationalism?

The long journey to tell the story of intimate killing in a small Bosnian town ultimately led to a globally significant challenge: How do we explain the causes and consequences of intercommunal violence in multiethnic communities?

Your next book explores memory through the Croatian town of Glina. What questions are you trying to answer?

MB: In and around the Croatian town of Glina between May and August 1941, Croatian fascists murdered nearly 2,000 of their Serbian neighbours. Today, on the site where the Serbian Orthodox church once stood – and where mass killings took place – stands a community centre called the "Croatian House." If you were to visit Glina today, you would never know what happened there.

This disturbing question marks the point of departure for my new book.

Why do we sometimes choose to silence our violent past? Can such silences be broken? Does doing so help communities better grapple with the consequences of violence – or can it instead become a powerful means of mobilizing future violence?

These questions echo far beyond one Croatian town. They resonate across many conflict-ridden parts of our contemporary world.

What have you learned about what allows communities to move forward after violence?

MB: “Moving forward” after intercommunal violence rarely happens in a way that does not include some form of silencing.

As the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen has written: “When we say always remember and never forget, we usually mean to always remember and never forget what was done to us... What we really wish to remember is our humanity and the inhumanity of others.”

This approach is unlikely to lead to reconciliation.

For that delicate process to begin, people must become willing to see themselves and their neighbours in a way that many never wish to contemplate: as largely the same — as human beings who are all vulnerable to being hurt and who all possess a terrifying capacity to hurt others.

What do you hope readers ultimately take away from your research?

MB: None of us are immune to silencing the painful memories of those with whom we have been in conflict.

Those once silenced and subjected to unjust forms of memory are entirely capable of instituting new silences once they attain positions of power.

The story of the small Croatian town I'm now researching suggests that reconciliation — if it can ever be attained — requires a deeply challenging landscape of memory whereby all groups recall their own losses and those of others, while also acknowledging and remembering the violence they themselves committed.