The Stories that Make Us: European Holocaust Narratives and the Promise of Albanian Cosmopolitan Memory Practices (original) (raw)
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Jelena Subotić’s book is an important contribution to memory studies scholarship because it shows how the mechanism of memory appropriation connects state-led remembrance practices with the processes of national identity formation. Through the comparative analysis of Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, Subotić argues that Holocaust remembrance in these states is less about remembering the Holocaust – or acknowledging the states’ own responsibilities for the forced displacement and mass killing of the Jewish population on their territories – and more about the political use of the memory of the Holocaust in the context of the postcommunist transition and national identity insecurities. Yellow Star, Red Star, and particularly its chapters on Serbia and Croatia, nicely complement the existing literature – such as the work of Keith Brown, Siniša Malešević, Vjekoslav Perica, Dejan Jović, Emil Kerenji, Vjeran Pavlaković, Jelena Đureinović, Tamara Banjeglav, and Ana Ljubojević, among others – ...
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.
Südosteuropa, 2017
The author analyses the scholarship, remembrance, and commemoration of the Holocaust in Macedonia and Bulgaria after 1989. She re-examines interpretive schisms between former communists and anticommunists, explores changes in one of the major lieux de mémoire in Bulgaria, the ‘rescue’ of its Jews, and juxtaposes it to the killing of those Jews who lived in Bulgarian-occupied territories. She contextualizes the Bulgarian-Macedonian controversies within European and global frameworks, looking at the process of the institutionalization of Holocaust remembrance in the two countries. She then considers the role of international Jewish communities and the effects of a European Union that since the enlargement of 2007 has been moulding a ‘European’ commemorative landscape from fear of yet another East-West divide. In her conclusion the author outlines an agenda for a transnational social history of anti-Jewish policies and persecutions, and looks at who might be its major actors in Bulgaria and Macedonia.
Holocaust and genocide memorialisation policies in the Western Balkans and Israel/Palestine
In this article I approach memory construction as one of the crucial categories through which human rights values are invoked to impose moral responsibilities for past atrocities. In the conflict and post-conflict settings, however, memory construction is quite often used to define and reinforce ethnic boundaries. Analysing putative Holocaust-genocide nexuses in different conflict (Israel and Palestine) and post-conflict (Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina) settings, I argue that it is precisely the transition from a supposed ‘duty to remember’ to an internationally supported policy-oriented and mandatory ‘proper way of remembrance’ that brings justice for some victims but renders many other victim groups invisible. I suggest that the attempts to enforce memorialisation policies set a stage for competition not only over nominal recognition of past atrocities, but also over who gets to be ‘memorialized’ as the ultimate victim. Thus, rather than strengthening human rights values in conflict and post-conflict societies, an internationally supported ‘proper way of remembrance’ often results in strengthening further divisions and ethnic nationalism.
Political memory after state death: the abandoned Yugoslav national pavilion at Auschwitz
Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2019
This article explores the relationship between political memory, state ontological security, and populist movements after state death. When a state dies, ideological space opens up for new state agents to narrate a different version of the past, one that delegitimizes the ideological underpinning of the old state order and creates ontological insecurity in the new polity. Populism becomes an especially attractive ideology, as it feeds on a sense of insecurity at home and abroad. The argument is illustrated with the case study of transformed Holocaust remembrance after the death of Yugoslavia. Tracing the history of the Yugoslav memorial exhibition at Auschwitz, the article demonstrates ways in which post-Yugoslav Holocaust remembrance has focused on delegitimizing Yugoslavia’s communist past, especially its antifascism. Once antifascism is removed from state political memory, political space opens up for a revival and ideological normalization of populist—and at its most extreme—fascist ideological movements in the present.
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The argument focuses on the reception of the globalized narrative of the Holocaust in the regional memories of East‐Central Europe, in particular Poland. It is argued that this narrative has not been successfully integrated into the regional memory, partly because of the narrative's own deficiencies and partly due to the specific nature of the way in which regional memories have been produced. Instead, it has contributed to the split of collective and social memories in the region as well as to further fragmentation of each of these two kinds of memory. In result we may say that in post‐communist Poland the Holocaust has been commemorated on the level of official institutions, rituals of memory, and elitist discourses, but not necessarily remembered on the level of social memory. It is claimed that to understand this phenomenon we should put the remembrance and commemoration of the Holocaust in the context of the post‐communist transformation, in which the memory of the Holocaust has been constructed rather than retrieved in the process of re‐composition of identities that faced existential insecurity. The non‐Jewish Poles, who in the 1990s experienced the structural trauma of transformation, turned to the past not to learn the truth but to strengthen the group's sense of continuity in time. In this process many of them perceived the cosmopolitan Holocaust narrative as an instrument of the economic/cultural colonization of Eastern Europe in which the historical suffering of the non‐Jewish East Europeans is not properly recognized. Thus the elitist efforts to reconnect with the European discourse and to critically examine one's own identity has clashed with the mainstream's politics of mnemonic security as part of the strategy of collective immortalization that contributed to the development of antagonistic memories and deepened social cleavage.
Trauma and Recovery: Re-Signifying Communist-era Sites of Memory in Contemporary Albania
Significant heritage sites from the Communist era in Albania can reveal much about local interaction with and resistance to state authority, and they hold promise as a means of confronting the personal and collective traumas of the recent past. The primary argument is that these sites should be 're-signified' to serve as both memorials and teaching tools for the next generations, rather than erased from the landscape. This kind of 're-signification' of heritage that represents a traumatic past has taken place in post-colonial and post-conflict contexts, as well, and these situations can serve as a model for how this process might work in a post-Communist society. The final two sentences read: "Across Albania, many tangible reminders of the traumas of the Communist past remain unacknowledged, while others have been leveled before their relationship to local memory had been explored. In the coming years, the processes of making heritage and writing history will continue, but Albanians today have the opportunity to employ these processes in a way that heals past traumas and preserves their material heritage in commemoration of local resistance, resilience and inspiration."
Holocaust Discourse as a Screen Memory: the Serbian Case
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"Our Victims Define Our Borders": Commemorating Yugoslav Partisans in the Italo-Yugoslav Borderland
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This article discusses local cultures of remembrance of Yugoslav partisans fallen during World War II in Trieste, now part of Italy, and investigates the role of memory activists in managing vernacular memory over time. The author analyses the interplay between memory and the production of space, something which has been neglected in other studies of memory formation. On the basis of local newspaper articles, archival material, and oral interviews, the essay examines the ideological imprint on the local cultural landscape, contributing to a more complex understanding of memory engagement. The focus is on grassroots initiatives rather than state-sponsored heritage projects. This article argues that memory initiatives are not solely the outcome of national narratives and top-down ideological impositions. It shows that official narratives have to negotiate with vernacular forms of memory engagement in the production of a local mnemonic landscape.