Holocaust, War and Transnational Memory

Testimony from Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Literature

Stijn Vervaet

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317121411
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Until now, there has been little scholarly attention given to the ways in which Eastern European Holocaust fiction can contribute to current debates about transnational and transgenerational memory. Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literary narratives about the Holocaust offer a particularly interesting case because time and again Holocaust memory is represented as intersecting with other stories of extreme violence: with the suffering of the non-Jewish South-Slav population during the Second World War, with the fate of victims of Stalinist terror, and with the victims of ethnic cleansing in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

This book examines the emergence and transformations of Holocaust memory in the socialist Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav eras. It discusses literary texts about the Holocaust by Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav writers, situating their oeuvre in the historical and discursive context in which it emerged and paying attention to its reception at the time. The book shows how in the writing of different generational groups (the survivor generation, the 1.5, and the second and third generations), the Holocaust is a motif for understanding the nature of extreme violence, locally and globally. The book offers comparative studies of several authors as well as readings of the work of individual writers. It uncovers forgotten authors and discusses internationally well-known and translated authors such as Danilo Kiš and David Albahari. By focusing on work by Jewish and non-Jewish authors of three generations, it sheds light on the ethical and aesthetical aspects of the transgenerational transmission of Holocaust memory in the Yugoslav context. As such, this book will appeal to both students and scholars of Holocaust studies, cultural memory studies, literary studies, cultural history, cultural sociology, Balkan studies, and Eastern European politics.

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Part I

The generation of survivors

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1 Holocaust testimony in socialist Yugoslavia

Introduction

For a long time, the Holocaust remained a taboo topic in some communist countries, whereas in others there was a form of institutionalized anti-Semitism (Snyder 339–378; for a more nuanced account, see Gitelman 1997). However, the way in which the Holocaust was perceived and commemorated in socialist Yugoslavia differed significantly from the situation in other Eastern European countries. In the wake of the Second World War, Yugoslavia developed a memory culture that revolved around notions of partisan heroism and collective martyrdom for the communist revolution. Within the frame of this memory culture, survivor testimonies were treated as “historical material” that was useful to document the “occupier’s” war crimes for either legal or ideological purposes, specifically to sustain the broader historical narrative about the righteousness of the revolution (Byford, “Shortly”).

This chapter explores Yugoslav Holocaust testimony from the early 1950s against the backdrop of socialist memory culture. I will focus on József Debreczeni’s memoir The Cold Crematorium (Hideg Krematórium: Auschwitz regénye; 1950), one of the first published testimonies by a Yugoslav Holocaust survivor. Framed as “a novel,” Debreczeni’s first-person narrative signals a certain tension between what was at the time (by the authors, the publisher, or the general public) perceived as testimony and what as fiction. Drawing on Robert Eaglestone’s claim that Holocaust testimony should be read as a genre in itself (16–71), I read Debreczeni’s work as “a text of testimony”—as a narrative that in a realist vein describes the horrors of the camps yet at the same time deploys specific narrative strategies to undermine readers’ identification with the narrator’s experience, thus preventing an all-too-easy consumption or assimilation of the narrative.

Through analyzing the narrative strategies of The Cold Crematorium and briefly mapping its publication history and reception, I will demonstrate that on more than one level the text complements, gives nuance to, and even counters the official Yugoslav memory narrative related to the Second World War and the Holocaust. I will argue that the text suggests a notion of testimony about the Second World War that differed significantly from the state’s by bringing to the Yugoslav reader a story about a personal experience of the Nazi concentration and death camps that moves beyond the attestation of atrocities for legal or ideological purposes. At the same time, the fact that the text was published and translated by large, state publishing houses suggests that socialist memory culture was less hegemonic than assumed. Before turning to the text, I will briefly outline the main characteristics of the memory culture of socialist Yugoslavia related to the Second World War and the Holocaust.

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Holocaust remembrance under the sign of “brotherhood and unity”

Following Tito’s break with Stalin and the Cominform in 1948, Yugoslavia started designing its own socialist politics. Yugoslavia’s “alternative path to communism” resulted in not only a closer economic collaboration with the US and Western Europe but also a more liberal cultural policy. As a consequence, Yugoslavia never had a strong tradition of socialist realism.¹ This means that with the exception of overt nationalist or anti-communist rhetoric, writers were relatively free to write about all kinds of topics, including, within certain limitations, the Holocaust. The Yugoslav communists developed a distinct teleological historical narrative diverging from the Soviet one and centering instead on Tito’s communist partisan movement and its role in the liberation of the country.² This had important implications for the way in which Yugoslavia’s recent war experience was framed and addressed in official historiography, commemorative events, and, most pertinently to our discussion, how the state dealt with eyewitness accounts by camp survivors.

Established in 1943, the Yugoslav State Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Perpetrated by the Occupiers and their Accomplices (Državna komisija za utvrđivanje zločina okupatora i njihovih pomagača) started work the same year and went to great pains to document atrocities committed by the Nazis and their allies, including the crimes committed in the concentration camps that had existed on Yugoslav soil. However, as Jovan Byford has shown, survivor testimonies and eyewitness accounts collected by the Commission were regarded solely as “historical material” rather than as accounts of individual acts of human suffering (“Shortly” 27). Eyewitness accounts were used either as evidence in trials against war criminals or grounds to underpin Yugoslavia’s claims for war reparations on the international level. Eyewitnesses were additionally expected to contribute to the country’s “revolutionary history,” and survivor accounts were presented and edited in a way which “fuse[d] together the dominant ideological motifs of [collective] suffering and resistance” (27). This resulted in the expectation that “testimonies would focus on facts—places, names, and dates related either to specific crimes or noteworthy acts of heroism” (Byford, “Remembering” 67).

While the official Yugoslav historiography of the Second World War centered on heroic acts of communist partisan resistance against the Nazi occupiers, it simultaneously aimed to smooth over the (memory of the) ethnic tensions that had so violently disrupted this multinational country during the war. In this context, it needs to be pointed out that during the Second World War more people died as a consequence of inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic violence than at the hands of Nazi Germany and its Italian or Hungarian allies (see Kočović 2005). The construction of collective memory in socialist Yugoslavia revolved specifically around the traumas of the Second World War and followed the dictum of “brotherhood and unity” (bratstvo i jedinstvo). Coined during the war to stress that the partisan movement was open to all ethnic and religious groups, the slogan further helped the communist party distance itself from the national politics of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which had tried to create an integral Yugoslav national identity. After the war, the slogan was used to promote the argument that the Yugoslav nation could be strong only when united, as exemplified by the experience of the Second World War, when they had successfully fought a common enemy (Jović 56 ff.).

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In essence, the collective narrative promoted by the state refused to acknowledge the victims of the Second World War in ethnic terms. All victims of the war were subsumed under the larger category of “victims of fascism” (žrtve fašizma), regardless of whether they had died as political opponents fighting the Nazis or were killed because of their ethnicity—that is, as victims of the plans of the Nazis and their local allies to annihilate Jews and Gypsies, of the Ustashe’s mass killings of Serbs on the territory of the Independent Croatian State, or of the Chetniks’ killings of Muslims in Eastern Bosnia (Byford, “Shortly” 24; Kerenji 179–185; Koljanin 267). Monuments to the fallen heroes of the partisan revolution and to the victims of fascism were erected across the country (Karge 2010), and in addition to novels, partisan films became the most popular medium to disseminate this historical narrative that, like two sides of the same coin, had both a heroic and a martyrological face.³ The hero/martyr dichotomy, however, was not solely characteristic of socialist Yugoslavia. Annette Wieviorka reminds us that, in the immediate post-war years, it was quite common to perceive victims of the Holocaust (and of the Second World War in general) as either heroes or martyrs who died for a certain cause. She refers to the text on the plaque of what was meant to become the first monument to the victims of the Holocaust in New York in 1947: “This is the site for the American memorial to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto battle April–May 1943 and to the six million Jews of Europe martyred in the cause of human liberty” (Era 47–48; emphasis added).

Although Jewish suffering during what would come to be known as the Holocaust was thus officially incorporated into the larger narrative of suffering and resistance of the Yugoslav peoples during the war, Jewish leaders in Yugoslavia, as historian Emil Kerenji emphasizes, “did not ‘silence’ or otherwise downplay the Holocaust” (192–193). Long before such state-supported commemoration existed in Europe or the US, Jewish leaders successfully campaigned in 1952 for the erection of five monuments dedicated “to Jewish victims of fascism in Yugoslavia” (Kerenji 193). By comparison, the first French memorial to the victims of the Holocaust was erected from 1953 to 1956. The first stone was laid in 1953, and the monument was inaugurated three years later. Initially called “Tomb of the Unknown Jewish Martyr,” its name was changed to “Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr” in 1974 (Wieviorka “Lieu”). Wieviorka mistakenly notes that “until the early 1960s, it was the only public memorial [to the victims of the Holocaust] located in a public space in the world” (Era 51). The only memorial erected with state support that preceded both the 1952 monuments in Yugoslavia and the one in Paris would be Nathan Rapoport’s Warsaw Ghetto Monument, dedicated to the memory of the Warsaw Uprising (more specifically, “To the Jewish People—Its Heroes and Its Martyrs,” as inscribed on the monument in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew), which was unveiled on 19 April 1948.⁴ Featuring inscriptions in Hebrew and Jewish motifs, the 1952 monuments erected in Yugoslavia “simultaneously conveyed two different cultural contexts—one compatible with the reigning ideological mode of commemorating WWII [. . .] and one more elusive, and accessible only to those familiar with Jewish culture and tradition” (Kerenji 213). Even though the Yugoslav monuments are not of the same impressive dimensions, this double- sidedness is something they have in common with Rapoport’s monument: on the one hand, there is socialism’s universalizing message, and on the other hand, a clear acknowledgment of the specific Jewish suffering.

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Not unlike in the US, Israel, and much of Western Europe (Wieviorka, Era 56 ff.; Cesarani 2005), the Eichmann trial of 1961–1962 also was a watershed moment in Yugoslavia because it introduced the specificity and the magnitude of the Nazi genocide of the European Jews to the general public (Kerenji 187 ff.). Nevertheless, it would be an exaggeration to claim that the Holocaust remained entirely unacknowledged or was even silenced in the years preceding the trial, as has already been demonstrated by Kerenji’s assessment of the small-scale commemorations and monuments from the early 1950s. A closer look at a Holocaust survivor testimony from the 1950s shows that the case of early Yugoslav Holocaust commemoration was actually more complex regarding the appropriation of Jewish suffering by the Yugoslav master narrative and concerning the pre-/post-Eichmann trial dichotomy.

In my subsequent discussion of The Cold Crematorium, I will show that literature, or testimony presented as literature, had the potential to move beyond the ideologically imbued understanding of witnessing characteristic of socialist Yugoslav memory culture and, at least in part, to counter the appropriation of Jewish suffering by the Yugoslav master narrative.⁵ In my exploration of the interplay between the official narrative and Holocaust memory, I will discuss several factors that determine the limits of appropriation of Holocaust survivors’ testimony by the hegemonic discourse, ranging ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Holocaust, War and Transnational Memory
• Memory Studies: Global Constellations
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I The Generation of Survivors
• Part II The 1.5 Generation
• Part III The Second and Third Generations
• Concluding Remarks
• Index