Growing in the Shadow of Antifascism

Kata Bohus, Stephan Stach, Peter Hallama (eds)

Title: Growing in the Shadow of Antifascism
Subtitle: Remembering the Holocaust in State-Socialist Eastern Europe
Editors: Kata Bohus; Stephan Stach; Peter Hallama
Price: € 141,00 excl. VAT
ISBN: 9789633864357
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 340
Language: English
Publication date: 30 - 09 - 2022
Dimensions: 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Categories
Discipline: Social and Political Sciences
Imprint: CEU Press
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Table of Contents

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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

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.

Editors