Memory images: Holocaust memory in Balkan cinema(s) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Serbia joined the ITF (Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research) in 2011. This resulted in increased institutional efforts to pay more attention to Holocaust education and commemoration. However, critics have observed that many of these state-supported initiatives use the Holocaust to conceal the state’s role as perpetrator or accomplice in mass war crimes and genocide committed during the Second World War and during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Against this backdrop, I discuss two recent Serbian Holocaust novels, Ivan Ivanji’s Man of Ashes (2006) and Zoran Penevski’s Less Important Crimes (2005), and Goran Paskaljević’s film When Day Breaks (2012). I argue that Holocaust memory in these works does not function as a ‘screen memory’ – one memory that covers up or suppresses other, undesired memories – but as a prism through which memories of the recent Yugoslav past as well as stories of present injustice, which the dominant political elites and mainstream society would prefer to forget or not to see, are filtered and brought to light. Ivanji, who is well acquainted with the politics of memory both in Germany and Serbia, also reflects critically upon the current globalization of Holocaust remembrance, thus providing feedback on the possibilities and limits of the memorial culture stimulated by the ITF.
"Nevena Daković (ed.), Representation of the Holocaust in the Balkans in Arts and Media"
Review by Aleksandra Kolaković Aleksandra Kolaković, "Nevena Daković (ed.), Representation of the Holocaust in the Balkans in Arts and Media", S:I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods. DocumentatiON (2016) 1,, 146–149. ISSN 2408-9192 The Holocaust is one of the most important themes in historiography – not least for its historic relevance. Within the rich history of the Balkans, marked by wars, shifts of borders, and discontinuity, the Holocaust as a topic was, until recently, only explored by historians. But the picture of the greatest sufferings in human history is constantly changing, meaning that the Holocaust must be examined from various perspectives in order to reach an objective conclusion. The academic conference Representation of the Holocaust in the Balkans in Arts and Media, which took place from 2 to 4 October 2014 in Belgrade, investigated new modes of (re)viewing the Holocaust in arts and media. Edited by Nevena Daković, professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts at the University of Arts, Belgrade, the conference proceedings include 14 academic papers published on various aspects of the topic; the project was financially supported by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia, and realised in partnership and cooperation with the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, the Centre for Culture and Cultural Studies in Skopje, the Belgrade Youth Centre and the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris. As David Bathrick 1 has pointed out, visual representations of the Holocaust have proved to be an absolutely integral but also highly contested means by which to understand and remember the Nazi atrocities of the Second World War. These vehicles of memories and memorial complexes, the black-and-white photographs of the concentration and death camps, as well as the memories of traumatised survivors , are given new meanings in the contexts of arts and media. The conference attempted to map the corpus of different arts and media texts, systematise it, and use it for constructing a multidirectional memory of the Balkans' past. Special attention was paid to the role of the culture of remembrance, the institutionalisation of memory , film, and other aspects of memory and their interpretation. The focus of papers written by eminent researchers and compiled in the conference proceedings Representation of the Holocaust in the Balkans in Arts and Media is on the language of arts and media, and the aesthetic, ethical, political, philosophical and historical engagement with the Shoah. One group of papers is dedicated to representations of the Holocaust in film, radio and television in the Balkans from the Second World War to the present day (former Yugoslavia, Serbia, Bulgaria, former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). In the article (Im)possible Witness: The Revelation of the Himmelkommando, Nevena Daković reveals how cleverly the eponymous film from 1961 moved the limits of representation.
The trauma of the others!? Yugoslav holocaust films of the 1960s
Filozofija I Drustvo, 2022
The aim of this paper is to map the reconfiguration and displacement of the emerging trauma of the Holocaust in the cinematic narratives of SFR Yugoslavia. The analysis of three nearly forgotten Yugoslav films of the 1960s-Killer on Leave (Mörder auf Urlaub/Ubica na odsustvu/Ubica je došao iz prošlosti, 1965, Boško Bošković), Witness Out of Hell (Bittere Kräuter/Gorke trave, 1966, Žika Mitrović) and Smoke (Dim, 1967, Slobodan Kosovalić)-follows Kansteiner's thesis about the changes of Holocaust memorial narratives in the films shown on German television in the 1970s. Accordingly, I claim that the analyzed films position the trauma of the Holocaust as a crime committed by others, over there, and then in the past. Further, they broaden the trauma to accommodate the diversified roles of victims, perpetrators, witnesses and bystanders, and help the Germans (and other Europeans as well) come to terms with the Nazi criminal legacy and their own role. The co-productional terms allow the films to balance the memory of the Holocaust as both anti-fascist (East Germany) and cosmopolitan, multidirectional (West Germany) within the real Yugoslav/German symbolic narrative space and its intrinsic poetics (e.g., memorialization and sacralization).
Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-first Century: Memory, Images, and the Ethics of Representation
2017
In recent yearssince the turn of the twenty-first century, to be precisewe have witnessed an undeniable proliferation of Holocaust films in Europe. At the same time, several academic disciplines, such as Holocaust studies and memory studies, have given a lot of scholarly attention to Holocaust films. This new volume, edited by Oleksandr Kobrynksyy and Gerd Bayer, both at the University of Erlangen-Nurnberg, represents one of the latest books within this trend.
Tzvetan Todorov, who was a Bulgarian-French structuralist critic of literature and poetry, "turned his talents toward analysis of human behavior during the Holocaust of World War II, examining the virtues that inspired heroic conduct and the forces that produced horrific evil in the concentration camps" (Tzvetan Todorov Biography, n.d.). In this given work I will present an overview and analysis of his one of the famous and important articles: "The Uses and Abuses of Memory." What do totalitarian regimes do? What is a memory and why it is important? How can we use the past and in particular, which uses are good or bad?
2019
This paper seeks to examine contemporary European cinema by exploring views of the post-Holocaust period (1945-1965) during the 2010s. These films revisit their respective nation's traumatic past seventy years after the end of World War II and offer a new perspective on the modes of memory and ways of processing the past. To raise questions about common mod of Holocaust remembrance and differences in the ways Hungarian, Polish, and Austrian films refer to their nations' pasts, this paper examines representations of Holocaust trauma in three major feature films: "1945" (Ferenc Török, Hungary, 2017), "Ida" (Paweł Pawlikowski, Poland, 2013), and "Murer-Anatomy of a Trial" (Christian Frosch, Austria, 2018). These films are part of a slow, ambiguous process of acknowledging the past that entails a struggle over victimhood and the issue of collaboration.
Few episodes in Polish turbulent modern history are as politically contested as the question of the Polish response to the destruction of the Jewish populations and Jewish culture by the Nazi Germany in the Holocaust. The last two decades have witnessed the emergence of scholarly, political and artistic attempts at troubling the subject positions of "heroism" and "victimhood" on which the Polish historical identity has been strongly premised. The central focus of these alternative narratives of the war and the Holocaust has been the question of Polish anti-Semitism, and in particular Poles' problematic ethical position of witnesses or bystanders in the Holocaust where the collective national subject has found itself deeply implicated in the history of suffering and attempted destruction of its neighbouring other-the Jewish people. This paper focuses on recent cinematic narratives of these troubling relations and traumatic stories in collective Polish-Jewish memories. The paper asks how these filmic representations have (a) negotiated and dealt with the disruption of the national Polish identity based (in the language of the Kleinian psychoanalysis) on the "paranoid-schizoid position" (where the subject expels anything that troubles its unambiguous self-perception as a "martyr" or a "hero"), and have (b) admitted and worked with the "depressive position" (where the national subject comes to apprehend itself as both the victimizer and the victimized). In the conceptual framework of the paper, these two positions of the Kleinian psychoanalysis are subsequently related to the complex narrative processes of working-through national trauma.
Holocaust Discourse as a Screen Memory: the Serbian Case
I argue in this article that holocaust memory discourse in Serbia is currently being promoted by the state as part of its efforts to conceal any political space where an encounter between the state and the civil society may be able to occur and redirect public debate regarding the wars of the 1990s. Thus, instead of dealing with their roles and responsibilities, Serbian governments are engaged in reframing and obscuring the contested elements of their national past. In Serbia holocaust memory is brought up to the fore as a platform for articulating national interests and thus is activated as a screen-memory. I will show here how holocaust discourse has served the domestic political elite in the course of the last decade so that Serbian victims continue to be equated with Holocaust victims and the righteous nature of the wars of the 1990s is established. Furthermore, I will show that holocaust memory discourse is instrumentalized to better Serbia’ s image on the international stage.