WORLD WAR II REVISITED: NEW APPROACHES AND INTERPRETATIONS IN THE NATIONAL HISTORIOGRAPHIES OF BULGARIA AND ROMANIA AFTER 1989 (original) (raw)
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REVISITING THE COMMUNIST PAST: HISTORIOGRAPHY, POLITICS AND MEMORIALS IN BULGARIA AFTER 1989
Almost three decades after the fall of the communist regime (1989-2016) and ten years after the country’s accession to the EU (2007), Bulgarians still adopt contradictory stances in terms of their recent communist history and seem unable to be reconciled with it. This paper aims to show the manner in which the debate has been conducted through an examination of the following interrelated issues: the reassessment of the communist past and revision of the master narrative that contemporary historians have embarked on, the political developments, the fate of communist monuments and commemorative days, and the construction of anti-communist memorials.
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How does historiography contribute to the creation of the official narrative? What is the relationship between historical study and nation building? How does historical writing affect collective memory? How do historians deal with events that fit uncomfortably into the official narrative? This paper addresses such issues focusing on Bulgarian historiography and the paradigm of WWI. Almost one hundred years after its end, WWI is still not a popular topic in Bulgaria despite its serious impact on the country’s political, socio-economic, and ideological developments. It has attracted little scholarly attention over time, being thus understudied. In contrast to WWII, there is no separate entry on WWI in the old library catalogue cabinet of the St Cyril and Methodius National Library in Sofia, which is still in use, although it is gradually being replaced by an electronic catalogue. In addition, there are only a few relevant publications displayed in Bulgarian bookshops, which include translations of foreign books dealing with various international aspects of the First World War rather than Bulgaria’s involvement. The remark made by Richard Crampton in 2007 that ‘The first world war remains the area of modern Bulgarian history most in need of further research and analysis’ (468) still holds to a great extent. In this context the aim of my paper is twofold: on the one hand, to shed light on the ideological factors that made WWI an overlooked issue, and on the other, to show how this war is represented and interpreted by the historians who wrote about it.
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Remembering World War II has always been controversial in Romania. It was controversial during communist times, as the official propaganda discourse did not fit most people's attitudes and memories of the war. It remained controversial at the end of Ceausescu era, when important figures of the war, such as Ion Antonescu, head of State during World War II, an ally of Hitler and artisan of fascist policies in Romania, were officially rehabilitated when Ceausescu himself denounced the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as illegitimate. It stayed controversial during the post-communist period, which has witnessed both continuity in discourse in line with the national communism of the Ceausescu epoch and a new narrative which condemns the genocidal actions of the Romanian government toward Jews and Roma. The aim of this study is twofold; on the one hand, I shall describe and interpret the public memory of World War II in Romania from the end of the war until today, and, on the other, I will try to see to what extent the public discourse has mingled with personal experience in the life stories of people who experienced World War II as either participants or witnesses.
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The pivotal role of the Bulgarian Communist Party in the anti-fascist resistance movement and of the Soviet Union in liberating Bulgaria from fascism were the two central pillars of the narrative of the history and memory of Second World War in communist Bulgaria. The end of communism marked the beginning of a new reading of the past and an increased public interest in topics and personalities, whose historical evaluation had been caught in the grip of the established ideological canon for decades. The reassessment of Bulgarian national history also referred to the period of the Second World War. The new historical narrative necessitated also re-evaluation of the memory of the period and its visual representation. In the new political environment after 1989, when Bulgarian society was desperately seeking to break away from its recent past, the presence in public space of the ideologically grounded monuments built during the previous regime became problematic, because they represented the most visible part of the communist legacy. The question of the fate of World War II-era monuments in Bulgaria is part of the larger issue of the fate of the communist legacy, which is relevant to the whole of Eastern Europe. The aim of this article is to present in a synthesized form the changes that took place in the memory of World War II and its visual representation in post-communist Bulgaria with a major focus on the fate of the monuments devoted to the war that were built during the socialist period.