Growing in the Shadow of Antifascism: Remembering the Holocaust in State-Socialist Eastern Europe

Reined into the service of the Cold War confrontation, antifascist ideology overshadowed the narrative about the Holocaust in the communist states of Eastern Europe. This led to the Western notion that in the Soviet Bloc there was a systematic suppression of the memory of the mass murder of European Jews. Going beyond disputing the mistaken opposition between “communist falsification” of history and the “repressed authentic” interpretation of the Jewish catastrophe, this work presents and analyzes the ways as the Holocaust was conceptualized in the Soviet-ruled parts of Europe. The authors provide various interpretations of the relationship between antifascism and Holocaust memory in the communist countries, arguing that the predominance of an antifascist agenda and the acknowledgment of the Jewish catastrophe were far from mutually exclusive. The interactions included acts of negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing. Detailed case studies describe how both individuals and institutions were able to use anti-fascism as a framework to test and widen the boundaries for discussion of the Nazi genocide. The studies build on the new historiography of communism, focusing on everyday life and individual agency, revealing the formation of a great variety of concrete, local memory practices.

Table of Contents:
Figures Acronyms and Abbreviations Acknowledgements Introduction Kata Bohus, Peter Hallama, Stephan Stach PART I. Historiography Edition of Documents from the Ringelblum Archive (the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto) in Stalinist Poland Katarzyna Person, Agnieszka Żółkiewska “A Great Civic and Scientific Duty of Our Historiography.” Czech Historians and the Holocaust in the 1970s and 1980s Peter Hallama The Conflicted Identities of Helmut Eschwege: Communist, Jew and Historian of the Holocaust in the German Democratic Republic Benjamin Lapp PART II. Sites of Memory Parallel Memories? Public Memorialization of the Antifascist Struggle and Martyr Memorial Services in the Hungarian Jewish Community during Early Communism Kata Bohus Holocaust Narrative(s) in Soviet Holocaust Narrative(s) in Soviet Lithuania: The Case of the Ninth Fort Museum in Kaunas Gintarė Malinauskaitė Memory Incarnate: Jewish Sites in Communist Poland and the Perception of the Shoah Yechiel Weizman PART III. Artistic Representations Toward a Soviet Holocaust Novel: Traumatic Memory and Socialist Realist Aesthetics in Anatolii Rybakov’s Heavy Sand Anja Tippner Commissioned Memory. Official Representations of the Holocaust in Hungarian Art (1955–1965) Daniel Véri Towards a Shared Memory? The Hungarian Holocaust in Mass-Market Socialist Literature, 1956-1970 Richard S. Esbenshade PART IV. Media and Public Debate Distrusting the Parks: Heinz Knobloch’s Journalism and the Memory of the Shoah in the GDR Alexander Walther ‘We Pledge, as if It was the Highest Sanctum, to Preserve the Memory.’ Sovetish Heymland, Facets of Holocaust Commemoration in the Soviet Union and the Cold War Miriam Schulz “The Jewish Diaries […] Undergo One Edition after the Other.” Early Polish Holocaust Documentation, East German Anti-Fascism and the Emergence of Holocaust Memory in Socialism Stephan Stach Conclusion Making Sense of the Holocaust in Socialist Eastern Europe Audrey Kichelewski Contributors

About the Author :
Dr. Kata Bohus is senior research advisor at the University of Tromsø Stephan Stach is a historian at Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, Leipzig. Dr. Peter Hallama is research fellow at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

Review :
"The chapters contribute to differentiate our understanding of the rooms for intellectual and mnemonic manoeuvre within the ideological framing of the official Soviet and state socialist memory of the war. The various perspectives presented in the chapters are tied together convincingly by the editors’ introduction. They offer a coherent and insightful framing that makes the volume an important contribution to the understanding of Holocaust memory in Eastern European societies during state socialism." http://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-131854 "Erscheint die Zuspitzung auf die Frage nach den Spielräumen des Antifaschismus für das Verständnis der Nachgeschichte des Holocaust in Osteuropa sinnvoll. Das hier vorliegende Format eines internationalen Tagungsbandes mit einer Fülle von Fallstudien zu unterschiedlichen Ländern und Formen des Umgangs mit der Judenverfolgung ist besonders hilfreich, um das Verständnis für Vernetzungen, Gemeinsamkeiten und nationale Unterschiede zu schärfen. Der vorliegende Band lädt zu weiteren kritischen Auseinandersetzungen mit der Thematik ein, auch mit Blick auf andere Disziplinen wie etwa die Filmwissenschaft." "Erscheint die Zuspitzung auf die Frage nach den Spielräumen des Antifaschismus für das Verständnis der Nachgeschichte des Holocaust in Osteuropa sinnvoll. Das hier vorliegende Format eines internationalen Tagungsbandes mit einer Fülle von Fallstudien zu unterschiedlichen Ländern und Formen des Umgangs mit der Judenverfolgung ist besonders hilfreich, um das Verständnis für Vernetzungen, Gemeinsamkeiten und nationale Unterschiede zu schärfen." http://www.sehepunkte.de/2024/09/39562.html