Yellow Star, Red Star

Holocaust Remembrance after Communism

Jelena Suboti?

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501742422
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Olocausto

Yellow Star, Red Star asks why Holocaust memory continues to be so deeply troubled—ignored, appropriated, and obfuscated—throughout Eastern Europe, even though it was in those lands that most of the extermination campaign occurred. As part of accession to the European Union, Jelena Suboti? shows, East European states were required to adopt, participate in, and contribute to the established Western narrative of the Holocaust. This requirement created anxiety and resentment in post-communist states: Holocaust memory replaced communist terror as the dominant narrative in Eastern Europe, focusing instead on predominantly Jewish suffering in World War II. Influencing the European Union's own memory politics and legislation in the process, post-communist states have attempted to reconcile these two memories by pursuing new strategies of Holocaust remembrance. The memory, symbols, and imagery of the Holocaust have been appropriated to represent crimes of communism.

Yellow Star, Red Star presents in-depth accounts of Holocaust remembrance practices in Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, and extends the discussion to other East European states. The book demonstrates how countries of the region used Holocaust remembrance as a political strategy to resolve their contemporary "ontological insecurities"—insecurities about their identities, about their international status, and about their relationships with other international actors. As Suboti? concludes, Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe has never been about the Holocaust or about the desire to remember the past, whether during communism or in its aftermath. Rather, it has been about managing national identities in a precarious and uncertain world.

CHAPTER 1

The Politics of Holocaust Remembrance after Communism

The Holocaust holds a central place in the global public memory of the twentieth century, especially in the West.1 It is the paradigmatic trauma of that century, and a formative event and one of the foundational stories of the European Union.2

This was not always the case. What we today refer to as “the Holocaust” did not exist as a concept or as a marker in global collective memory prior to the early 1960s.3 Holocaust memory has developed over time, and has gone through various phases in various countries and over various periods. The Holocaust we understand today is not the Holocaust as it was understood in the immediate aftermath of WWII, and it is certainly not understood in the same way across different countries—especially in Germany, Israel, and the United States, perhaps the most critical countries for the development of Holocaust memory in the West. The concept of “the Holocaust,” therefore, did not really exist for at least a decade after the end of WWII.4

The development and transformation of Holocaust memory is often grouped into three phases: the immediate post-WWII period, the rising awareness since the 1960s, and the consolidation of a global memory of the Holocaust since the early 1990s. In the immediate aftermath of WWII, the Holocaust was not recognized as a unique event with its own trajectory, meaning, and consequence, but was subsumed under the broad understanding of WWII, and as one of many examples of Nazi cruelty and extensive war crimes.5 This was the case in the West, which memorialized its victory over fascism and resistance to the occupation, the victory of democracy over totalitarianism, and above all else, the military triumph of the Allied forces. The Nuremberg trials, clearly the most important “memory event” of this period, presented abundant documentary evidence of Nazi extermination policies, but this evidence was universalized to all Nazi victims without focusing on particularly Jewish suffering.6

But this was also the case in the Soviet-dominated East, which placed events of the WWII within a larger narrative of communist revolutionary triumph and antifascist heroism.7 Communist memory was hegemonic memory, not open to alternative or particular claims on suffering, such as the suffering of the Jews. In fact, communist regimes in the immediate aftermath of the war had a very clear understanding of who constituted a “victim of fascism” and who was not included and, thus, did not deserve such remembrance. In a July 1945 statement by the German Communist Party (in the Soviet Occupied Zone), this categorization was made very explicit:

There are millions of people who are victims of fascism, who have lost their home, their apartment, their belongings. Victims of fascism are the men who had to become soldiers and were deployed in Hitler’s battalions, those who had to give their lives for Hitler’s criminal war. Victims of fascism are the Jews who were persecuted and murdered as victims of racial mania, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the work-shy. But we cannot stretch the term “victims of fascism” to include them. They have all endured much and suffered greatly, but they did not fight.8

Starting with the 1960s, a more discreet narrative of the Holocaust emerges in the West, in large part due to major Holocaust trials—of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 and the Auschwitz Trials in Frankfurt in 1964. These trials and their media coverage provided detailed accounts of the horrors of the Holocaust and began to build a narrative of the Holocaust as a uniquely catastrophic historical event, spatially and temporarily located within the larger context of WWII, but in its meaning and significance for the predominantly Jewish victims, now placed outside of the war, standing on its own. Another significant memory event in this period was the 1978 American TV show Holocaust and especially its broadcast in Germany in 1979, which then further solidified the main narrative arc of the Holocaust, popularized it for mass audiences, and created a visual representation of the Holocaust that has since remained mostly stable.9

At the same time, in communist Eastern Europe, Holocaust remembrance was exclusively produced through the framework of antifascism because this link established the communist regime with its new postwar identity and provided it with ongoing political legitimacy. Communist Holocaust remembrance, as Jeffrey Herf notes, was built on “Marxist orthodoxy which placed the Jewish question on the margins of the class struggle, viewed anti-Semitism primarily as a tool to divide the working class (rather than as a belief system with autonomous and widespread impact) and fascism as a product of capitalism.”10

More broadly, throughout Soviet-controlled communist Europe, the memory of WWII was reduced to the memory of the victory of the Soviet Union over fascist forces.11 The communist focus on antifascism as a military and ideological battle with the ultimate triumph of the communist idea, therefore, completely effaced the unique experience of the Jews during WWII. For example, while Buchenwald concentration camp was a central site of memory in the GDR throughout the communist period, its presence in the East German narrative of WWII was about fascist persecution of communists and, ultimately, communist revolt and liberation—a narrative that completely marginalized the Jews who were killed at Buchenwald and ignored the role of the US troops in camp liberation while glorifying and embellishing communist resistance in the camp.12

This effacing of the Jewish experience under communism also continued after the war, as the Jewish identity—especially its religious element—was drowned out by the new construction of the supranational, de-ethnicized, and secular subject. The two ways of remembering, East and West, therefore, diverged almost immediately after the war and developed in quite different directions throughout the postwar period.

Holocaust as Universal Memory

Since the 1990s, as part of the larger global shifts after the Cold War, yet another narrative of the Holocaust has developed, which anchors the Holocaust to the emerging narrative of global human rights after the collapse of communism. Holocaust memory in this period began to solidify as an issue of human rights, the foundational event in the growing architecture of international justice, institutionalized in the establishment of international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and the permanent International Criminal Court, all within one decade. Invoked as a warning that the promise of “never again” has been unfulfilled in the aftermath of genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, the Holocaust becomes a narrative of atrocity prevention, forward- as much as backward-looking. Steven Spielberg’s massively successful film Schindler’s List (1993) presented the visual narration of the Holocaust but also this period’s particularly appealing messages of rescue and survival. The opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, that same year provided a physical place for Holocaust memory and a historical account that removes the stories of the Holocaust from their immediate locations (the memorials at former concentration camps or ghetto sites, for example), and makes them denationalized and universal. A “cosmopolitan memory” of the Holocaust was born.13

Holocaust remembrance since the 1990s, then, has contributed to the formation of a common European cultural memory. It is so central to European identity that it has become a “contemporary European entry ticket,” where joining, contributing, and participating in a shared memory of the Holocaust defines what a European state is, especially for late Eastern European entrants to the EU.14

While this cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust has global reach, its main storylines are canonized in the West.15 As Maria Mälksoo argues, “The centrality of this event in the political consciousness of contemporary Western society has dictated the tuning and hierarchical organization of the overall public remembrance of WWII, totalitarian crimes and modern mass death.”16 From the perspective of the East, even the scholarly field of memory studies has developed within the context of this Western imperialist blind spot and has ignored Eastern European contributions.17

European Holocaust memory, in other words, has taken on a particular mnemonic code—a way of remembering—of its own. The memory of Jewish suffering was a critical element of this code, as, in the poignant words of Tony Judt, “the recovered memory of Europe’s dead Jews has become the very definition and guarantee of the continent’s restored humanity. It wasn’t always so.”18

The new universal memory of the Holocaust has over time expanded beyond the centrality of the Jewish experience to also include the victimization of the Roma and Sinti ethnic groups, homosexuals, and the disabled, with some of the first historical work on these victims published in the 1970s.19 Parallel to the narrative of Holocaust victims, a central element of the cosmopolitan Holocaust memory is memory of resistance—both Jewish resistance and broader antifascist resistance to the Nazi regime. Much of this resistance, of course, was resistance by communists, which is a particularly problematic “memory knot” for the postcommunist Holocaust narrative, as I describe in detail later in the book.20

Over time, however, the Western, cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust also began to subtly efface the Jews. In its focus on universal lessons of the Holocaust, on broader issues of racism, human rights abuses, crimes against humanity, mass atrocity, and education for tolerance, equality, and democracy, this narrative pushed aside the uniqueness of the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. The mission of the Anne Frank House, for example, is increasingly to educate the youth about the perils of discrimination and broader issues of social justice, and less on the specifically Jewish experience of Anne Frank herself. More bluntly, when it was first unveiled in Ottawa in 2017, the Canadian National Holocaust Memorial failed to mention the Jews at all, but instead commemorated “millions of men, women and children murdered during the Holocaust.”21 As Holocaust memory in the West developed from a particular story about the tragedy of the Jews into a universal lesson about inhumanity, the Jews have partly disappeared from this memory.22

The cosmopolitan memory approach to Holocaust remembrance, further, overlooks the fundamental cleavage in European memory, which is that the memory of the Holocaust in postcommunist Europe is qualitatively different from the memory of the Holocaust as developed in the West. This is because the Holocaust simply does not signify the central “good vs. evil” narrative in the East in the same manner it does in the West. The role of evil in postcommunist Europe is, instead, reserved for communism, as the more recent and immediate source of oppression and victimization. The encroaching (Western) European centrality of the Holocaust is therefore threatening and destabilizing to these state identities. That is the principal problem that this book takes on.

Auschwitz vs. the Gulag

The narrative of Stalinism was just as much constructed as was the narrative of the Holocaust. The construction of what we today understand as the Stalinist gulag owes much to literary sensations, such as the Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandar Solzhenitsyn, published in English in 1973, and since translated into more than thirty languages, which provided the first detailed survivor account of the network of Stalin’s prison and torture camps. Another important literary work was Life and Fate, a semi-fictionalized memoir of the Holocaust and of subsequent communist oppression in the Soviet Union, written by Vasily Grossman and published posthumously in Switzerland in 1980.

But these two early accounts themselves arose out of very different political motivations. Solzhenitsyn, a Russian nationalist, from the beginning pitted the memory of Stalinism against that of the Holocaust. Grossman, in contrast, turned against Soviet ideology in large part in revulsion against Stalin’s censorship of the...