Performing European Memories: Trauma, Ethics, Politics by Milija Gluhovic [Review]

The title of Milija Gluhovic’s book offers a description of its scope whilst implicitly raising an interesting set of questions concerning the relations between its terms. With chapters devoted, respectively, to readings of specific works by Heiner Müller, Tadeusz Kantor, and Harold Pinter, Gluhovic’s analysis aims to participate in its subject by addressing the present political context in which European leaders (including, notoriously, David Cameron at the 2011 Munich Security Conference) have taken to proclaiming the failure of ‘multiculturalism’. The title of the performance with which the book’s case studies conclude – Sarajevo Theatre Tragedy (2010) – is poignantly resonant here, as a testimony to the conflict that ended the multinational Yugoslavia and which gave us the phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’. Here the possibility – or even the promise – of ‘performing memories’ is to offer a dialogue between ethics and politics.