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11 - Changing Memories of the Shoah in Post-Communist Countries: New Memories and Conflicts
- Edited by Thomas DeGloma, Hunter College, City University of New York, Janet Jacobs, University of Colorado Boulder
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- Book:
- Interpreting Contentious Memory
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 28 June 2023, pp 217-235
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Summary
Memory is never static, but rather a construction embedded in changing personal, social, and temporal settings. Memory is never neutral, and reflects the interaction between personal and dominant collective memories. When a political culture changes, recollections and collective memories become contested, and new ones become dominant and come to the fore. This is clearly visible when we look at the “new” histories in the post-communist world, where the surge of commemorative work that highlights the World War II-era victimization of citizens by communist forces is driven by agents with nationalist ideologies and agendas competing with the memories of the Shoah. These form part of the mnemonic tensions in many places throughout Europe which seek to identify victims and perpetrators and their histories and focus on their own particular sufferings; they want to be recognized. Their arguments reveal how nationalist ideologies can conflict with widely accepted versions of history. The result is a political effort to monopolize victimhood, and an appeal to the West to take suffering under communism more seriously. It is a renewed nationalist narrative that celebrates a past that is replete with struggles for freedom and pride, one that has been viciously suppressed for decades. The new view can be imposed by the state or a dominant political group, and any resistance to its acceptance can be punished, since the new regimes are typically undemocratic and intolerant of opposing views. In this chapter, I discuss some important cases and show how history has become politicized.
Nationalism, pride, and shame about the past have created new historical canons and destroyed old ones. Historical research is subordinated to the forces of politics that seek to remember or to forget. This is most acute in Russia, where an assault against the NGO Memorial and the kind of research being done there tries to silence the counter-histories of historians who listen to stories of oppression, persecution, murder, and the sad lives of the millions who were sent to the Gulag. Memorial has excavated a shameful past which is not embraced by those who want a positive history of Russian heroism that celebrates the fight against the Nazis without mentioning the communist terror. Memorial has created an enormous archive, and participants are actively interviewing everywhere in Russia, even deep in Siberia.
Dutch Jewish Women: Integration and Modernity
- Edited by Judith Frishman, Hetty Berg, J. de Jong, W. Koetsenruijter
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- Book:
- Dutch Jewry in a Cultural Maelstrom, 1880-1940
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 26 January 2021
- Print publication:
- 03 October 2008, pp 183-194
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Summary
Once there was a vision: the hope and conviction that Jews would integrate into Dutch society. This hope existed especially among the progressive Jews: intelligentsia, liberals, and socialists. In recent decades, historians advocating a range of theories on the historical evolution of the Jewish role in the Western world have brought a number of historical figures to the fore. There were circles and places, movements, societies, and political parties where Jews were granted equality, and equal opportunity. In Dutch historiography, a specific and vast role has been assigned to socialism, in which, since the end of the nineteenth century, distinctions between Jews and non-Jews were minimal compared to elsewhere in the world. The transition to socialism has been considered an act of assimilation and thus a step away from Jewish tradition. Modern historical research has challenged this idea by showing precisely how socialism was part of a Jewish tradition that confronted integration and modernity. In many ways it was unclear how, in becoming members of a society dominated by Christian values, Jews would relate to Judaism, to tradition, to religion, and to culture. These questions are central to the work of scholars and in the descriptions of observers who attest to ambivalence. This is in fact the experience of most minority cultures adapting to the surrounding, hegemonic culture.
JEWS AS “CITIZENS OF THE WORLD”: A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS?
One of our eyewitnesses was a feminist who wrote in 1906: “We won some good young helpers [for the movement]. It is clear that they are always Jewish girls. With us and elsewhere. Courage and intelligence are to be found in those girls like nowhere else.” In 1928, the same person wrote: “It is certain I am going to sell my house and my belongings and then I will become the wandering Jewess, perhaps a tramp.” The author of this quote called herself a citizen of the world in her written memoirs. I quote Aletta Jacobs, whose Jewishness the collective Dutch memory seems to have forgotten, though she was surrounded by Jewish friends, and, as I might argue, typically subject to the abovementioned ambivalence. Is there a contradiction between her self-evident “we, the Jews”, and the apparently simultaneous denial of her Jewishness?