Holocaust Memory and the Cold War

Remembering across the Iron Curtain

Anna Koch, Stephan Stach

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2024
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110672770
• Subtopic: Teaching History
• Index: History

Even before World War II had ended, survivors, historians, writers, and artists tried to make sense of the Holocaust. To do so, they relied on belief systems and narratives that, as the bloc confrontation intensified, were increasingly shaped by Cold War thinking. Foregrounding the Cold War's role in shaping Holocaust memory, this book highlights how the global conflict between East and West influenced research, legal proceedings, and collective as well as individual memories of the murder of European Jews. Contributions focusing on different parts of the world reveal commonalities, differences, and entanglements between Eastern and Western memories of the Holocaust. Examining Holocaust memory from various disciplinary perspectives, the authors highlight the many ways in which scholars, writers, artists, and survivors both countered and contributed to dominant narratives shaped by oppositional ideological stances. While such distinct ideological positions often mattered greatly, at other times a shared interest in bringing perpetrators to justice, commemorating victims, and providing testimony to the atrocities committed against Europe's Jews led to cooperation and exchange across the Iron Curtain.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction Holocaust Memory and the Cold War: Remembering across the Iron Curtain
• The New York Black Book of 1946: A United Jewish Response to Nazi Crimes
• Israeli Holocaust Memory and the Cold War
• “The Communist Schism in Jewish Life”: Transnational Politics and Holocaust Commemorations among Parisian Jews during the Cold War
• The Cold War and Holocaust Memorialization in Soviet Publications of the 1960s
• Writing Holocaust History across the Iron Curtain: Alberto Nirenstein’s A Tower from the Enemy / Ricorda cosa ti ha fatto Amalek
• East-West Encounters at the Adolf-Heinz Beckerle Trial (1967–1968): How Holocaust Knowledge and Remembrance Went Global
• Accountability and the Cold War: The Eichmann Trial and Holocaust Representation in the Soviet Union
• Moral Universalism in the East: Anti-Fascist Humanism and the Memory of the Holocaust in Zoltán Fábri’s Film Late Season (1967)
• A Tableau of a Crime Taking Shape under the Viewer’s Gaze: The Trajectories of Yosef Kuzkovski’s The Last Way (1944–1970)
• The West German View of the Holocaust in the Occupied Soviet Union: The Case of Am grünen Strand der Spree, 1955–1960
• “The Second Death”: Günther Andersʼ Travels to Postwar Berlin
• Fighting Nazis and Confronting the Past: The German Democratic Republic and the National Committee against Nazis in the United States
• Index