The Negotiated Past: the Memory of the Second World War in Post-Communist Romania

Author(s): Aneta Mihaylova / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2015

Soon after the collapse of communism in Romania the period of the Second World War became the focus of heated debates with two intertwined issues related to it, namely – the personality of the wartime leader Marshal Ion Antonescu and the topic of the Holocaust. The article traces the emergence and evolution of these debates, while also paying attention to the way in which the European and Euro-Atlantic perspective of the country affected the memory of these particular issues. It comes to the conclusion that the memory of the Second World War was somehow “negotiated” and suited to fit the present-day necessities of post-communist Romania and raises doubts whether the outside pressure on Romania’s revisiting this dark chapter of its history wasn’t in a way counterproductive, leaving the possibility of the existence of two parallel versions of the past – one for internal and one for external use.

Culture de la mémoire en Bulgarie d’aujourd’hui à propos de la déportation des Juifs des territoires sous administration bulgare en 1943

Author(s): Nadya Danova / Language(s): French Issue: 1-2/2015

The aim of the communication is to present the different manners utilized in contemporary Bulgaria for facing the painful problem of the participation of Bulgarian authorities in the deportation of the Jews from Thrace and Macedonia during World War II. On the basis of examples from the historiography, textbooks, literature, cinema, museums, memorials and public debate are discussed the difficulties in the construction of one common and indivisible memory on events connected to the theme of responsibility and guilt, throwing the long shadow of the past on the actuality.

Języki jidysz i żydowsko-hiszpański jako wskaźniki tożsamości – na przykładzie żydowskich tekstów prasowych pierwszej połowy XX wieku

Author(s): Izabela Olszewska,Aleksandra Twardowska / Language(s): English Issue: 5/2016

The paper shows an image and functions of Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish languages among Jewish Diaspora groups – the Balkan Sephardim and the Ashkenazim (the Ostjuden group) – in the period from the beginning of the twentieth century until the outbreak of World War II. The study is based on the articles from Jewish weeklies, magazines and newspapers from pre-war Bosnia and Hercegovina and from Germany/Poland. It demonstrates a double-sided attitude towards the languages. On the one hand – an image of the languages as determinants of Jewish identity. Touching on this theme, the authors of the paper also try to highlight the images of Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish and as determinants in a narrower sense – of the Sephardi/Ashkenazi identity in that period. On the other hand, the paper shows a tendency to treat the languages as “corrupted” and “dying” languages, and as factors slowing down the assimilation of Jewish groups and also as an obstacle for Zionist ideologies.

Kształtowanie popularnej wiedzy o Holocauście na przykładzie trzech artykułów z polskiej, hebrajskiej i angielskiej Wikipedii

Author(s): Daniel Wolniewicz-Slomka / Language(s): English Issue: 08/2016

The goal of this article is to examine how different events and phenomena related to the Second World War and the Holocaust are framed via Wikipedia articles written in Polish, Hebrew and English. Departing from the pillars of the theory of framing in mass media, the article conducts a content analysis of three articles, in three different languages. The articles under analysis are the following: “Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp”, “The Pogrom in Jedwabne”, and “Righteous Among the Nations”. The analysis will use the four roles of frames as categories, determined by Entman: definition of the problem/phenomenon, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and treatment recommendation. Analyzing how the articles fulfill each of the roles in the different languages, the research hypothesis is that the framing of the phenomena will differ between the versions, and each version will follow pillars of the collective memory of the Holocaust in its respective country. Findings, however, are not in complete compliance with this hypothesis.

Историческата памет в контекста на спасяването на евреите по време на Втората световна война. Уводни думи

Author(s): Mateusz Szpytma / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 4/2017

Pisać w trzecim języku: przestrzeń między świętym a świeckim w myśli Gershoma Scholema i Jacquesa Derridy

Author(s): Karen C. Underhill / Language(s): Polish Issue: 5/2016

This article explores Gershom Scholem’s ‘On Our Language: A Confession’ (an open letter to Franz Rosenzweig on the secularisation of the Hebrew language) as well as Jacques Derrida’s essay on Scholem’s text. Underhill draws on the figure of the palimpsest and the cabbalistic concept of language in her attempt to reconstruct both texts. She also borrows Derrida’s notion of the ‘third language’ on the border between sacred and profane language.

(Nie)pamięć zbiorowa Polaków jako skuteczna regulacja emocji

Author(s): Michał Bilewicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2016

Bilewicz applies notions borrowed from the psychology of emotions to understand collective (im)memory in Poland, with a particular focus on defensive reactions to new historical data on Poles’ negative behaviour. Based on James Gross’ concept of emotion regulation, Bilewicz elaborates a model of downregulating collective moral emotions (such as guilt and shame). He then applies this model to the debate on the Jedwabne pogrom. He also outlines systematic social psychological studies that support his proposed emotion downregulation model. The article concludes with a discussion of alternative ways of presenting negative history – ways that overcome those defensive emotion regulatory processes.

Osobliwe zrządzenie Opatrzności Bożej… Polska pamięć Zagłady w perspektywie katolicko-narodowej

Author(s): Jacek Leociak / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2016

The Jewish Holocaust has a special place in Polish discourses on memory. It would be hard to overestimate its importance in constructing a model of Polish identity. But Leociak points out a weakness in Polish Holocaust memory – one that appears especially in narratives about saving Jews. The rhetoric, poetics and metaphors of these discourses – both private and public – are astonishingly durable, given the changing political context. This article is a preliminary exploration of a certain type of Polish discourse on Holocaust memory, one that has a long tradition but is now gaining prominence. It could be described as a Catholic-national discourse, where both elements have equal weight, affirming its rootedness in the ideology of the prewar Catholic National Democracy formation (also known as ND or ‘Endecja’).

Doświadczenie bez nazwy. „Oświęcim” ≠ Auschwitz

Author(s): Agnieszka Dauksza / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2016

Dauksza examines the status of non-Jewish Polish concentration camp survivors. Their wartime experience and the way in which they functioned after the war has always been and continues to be different from the Jewish experience. Based on empirical studies, Dauksza argues that the problem is that their experience is ‘an experience without a name’: unable to name it, they are also unable to experience what happened to a significant group of Poles during the occupation. The question concerns not only actual former prisoners and their relatives – as the framework of post-memory transfer would suggest – but also individuals who for several years lived in fear of being deported, as well as those who witnessed the deportation of others, including Jews.

Żydzi i zagłada w polskich kulturach pamięci: między antagonizmem i agonem

Author(s): Sławomir Kapralski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2016

25 years ago, Polish gentiles were interviewed on the disappearance of their Jewish neighbours. Kapralski re-examines those interviews in order to revise current attitudes to this kind of memory. He presents memory as a product of current constellations of the remembering subject’s interests, whereby the subject is embroiled in existential efforts to construct mnemonic safety, which in turn is the basis for processes of reconstructing collective memory. These processes were particularly vital in the context of the uncertainty that marked the transformation in the 1990s – a transformation that Kapralski frames in terms of a structural trauma that shapes memories about historical trauma. Such a framing of memories of the Jews means that they have been publicly commemorated in Poland, but they are not remembered within the structures of communicative memory.

Семейство Улма от Маркова. Символ на поляците, екзекутирани за подпомагане на евреи по време на Втората световна война

Author(s): Mateusz Szpytma / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 5/2017

The article presents one of the tragic stories that took place during the World War II in occupied Poland. It describes the fate of one rural family playing an important role in Markova and its surroundings by engaging it in various public initiatives. The article describes the situation in occupied Markova, the chronology of the crime against Jews and Poles, the efforts to punish the perpetrators, and the actions aimed at perpetuating the heroic life and death of the Ulma family.

Б. Цеков, З. Кръстева, П. Неделева, М. Манолова, Е. Георгиев, Ал. Салупо. Антиеврейското законодателство в Европа и България. Правни изследвания. С., И-т за модерна политика. Център за еврейски изследвания при СУ „Св. Климент Охридски“, 2015. 232 с.

Author(s): Nikolay Poppetrov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 5-6/2016

Book Review

Czechoslovakism in Mentalities of Košice’s Inhabitants and Its Implementation in the Public Space of the City in the Interwar Era

Author(s): Ondrej Ficeri / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

The establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918 was refused by a large proportion of its inhabitants, mainly from the part of Czechoslovak Germans and Hungarians. Beside them, a certain number of Slovaks rebelled against the state project of Czech and Slovak political elites as well. Some of them preferred to remain in the frame of the historical Hungary because they shared with Hungarians for centuries transmitted cultural patterns and cultural repertoire, the use of which came by implementing the idea of Czechoslovakism to the threat. Rebelling attitudes against Czechoslovak statehood were registered especially in the ethnically heterogeneous regions and cities which were located in the contact zone between the territories with the majority Slovak population on the one side and the minority Hungarian one on the other. Analysing the archival documents, the author of the paper focuses firstly on reactions of indigenous inhabitants of Slovak origin of the city of Košice to the establishment of Czechoslovakia, secondly, on pursuits of the political elites to implement the Czechoslovak state idea in the public space of the city, its successes, failures and tensions between the Czechoslovak and Slovak (autonomous) camps of nationalists. Thirdly, the analysis of the electoral behaviour stands in the spotlight, according to which the majority of local indigenous Slovaks voted the oppositionist parties what indicates that, in the long term, the idea of the Czechoslovak state was refused by these inhabitants. The purpose of the study lies in recognizing differentiated attitudes of the Slovak interwar (mainly urban) society to the Czechoslovak statehood and, hence, in outlining an alternative story to the traditional, in the cultural memory reproduced narrative about the establishment of Czechoslovakia as a “national liberation”.

A Case of Successful Transitional Justice

Author(s): Jakub Gortat / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

Germany is an example of a country which has been implementing transitional justice for decades and is still active in this field. What is more, contemporary Germans have recently come to terms with their not-so-distant past and their negligence in this area by showing the falsehood, backwardness, and injustice as negative foundations of the young Federal Republic. This article evokes the person of Fritz Bauer, the prosecutor in the state of Hessen. His struggle for human dignity and the memory of his achievements after his death exemplify an accomplished case of transitional justice and the memory of it. During his lifetime he contributed to bringing to trial numerous Nazi criminals, even at the cost of habitual threats and disregard. Forgotten for a few decades, Bauer and his legacy have been recently rediscovered and studied. Eventually, Bauer became a movie character and was finally brought back to the collective memory of Germans. The belated, but a well-deserved wave of popularity of Fritz Bauer in the German culture memory proves that reflections on the transitional justice are still topical and important.

Call for Papers MemoScapes, issue 3/2019: Regional, National, Local, and Social Identities in Central Europe and the Black Sea Region in the last 100 years

Author(s): / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2018

Our current issue aims at finding answers to the question of identities in Central Europe and the Black Sea Region (BSR) from different perspectives: national, regional, local, and social. Its purpose is twofold: on the one hand, to describe and analyze the construction, adaptation, evolution and transmission of the national/local/cultural identities in Central and Eastern Europe and the Caucasus seen as processes under Western influences but bearing local meanings and acquiring special shapes and contents, and, on the other, to see what is at stake in building an European identity and its influence on the national/regional/local/cultural identities of Central and Eastern Europe as well as the Caucasus.

Ставането мъж в Стария Завет. Нов труд по джендър библеистика в България.

Author(s): Julia Jordanova-Pancheva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2018

За книгата: Милена Кирова. Героичното тяло. История и мъжественост в Еврейската Библия. Кн. 2. София, ИК „Кибеа“, 2017. [Kirova, Milena. The Heroic Body. History and Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible. Part 2. Kibea Publishing house, Sofia, 2017.]

Милена Кирова. Героичното тяло. История и мъжественост в еврейската Библия. София, 2017

Author(s): Kristina Dimitrova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2018

Католическата църква и антисемитизмът в Хърватия по време на Втората световна война (1941–1945)

Author(s): Irina Ognyanova-Krivoshieva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 5-6/2017

Under direct German influence, anti-Semitism and racism were imposed as a state ideology and policy in the Independent State of Croatia during the Second World War, and thousands of Jews became victims of that. The lack of political opposition in the country turns the Catholic Church in the only opponent and corrective of the Holocaust. Since it could not protect all Jews whose destiny was decided in Berlin, not in Zagreb, the only realistic program of action of the Catholic Church was to at least champion for the Jews of mixed marriages, those who had adopted Catholicism, the children, the elderly people and others. As a result, many were taken to Dalmatia (in the Italian occupation zone) or outside the country.

BEYOND THE “VALLEY OF TEARS”: REASSESSING THE NARRATIVE OF DECLINE IN SALONICAN JEWISH HISTORIOGRAPHY

Author(s): Devin E. Naar / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2018

Scholars have relied upon diverse methodologies and sources to produce a new corpus of studies about Salonica’s Jews that explores the impact of the end of the Ottoman Empire and the consolidation of the Greek nation-state. Much of the newer scholarship, however, reinforces the perception that Salonica’s Jews experienced a period of “decline” after the city’s incorporation into the Greek state (1912 – 1913) that culminated in their deportation to Auschwitz (1943). This study investigates why such a lachrymose and teleological interpretation of Salonican Jewish history persists today. By reference to new sources and a different interpretive lens, this article also challenges conventional wisdom concerning key turning points in the narrative of the city’s Jews: a major fire (1917), a compulsory Sunday closing law (1924), and the first major act of anti-Jewish violence (1931). The article thus offers a new approach to assessing the encounters between the multiplicities of Jews in Salonica and the Greek state.

A POETIC MIRROR REFLECTING 20th CENTURY MULTI-CULTURAL SALONIKA

Author(s): Renée Levine Melammed / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2018

Bouena Sarfatty was born in Salonika in 1916 to a Sephardi family. After World War II, she memorialized her birthplace by composing hundreds of Ladino verses (coplas) about Jewish life in the twentieth century. Her phenomenal memory and personal insights provide a poetic mirror that reflects the multi-cultural environment which she experienced personally. The poems appearing below reflect her thoughts about the process of modernization, whether of language, education, dress or mentalité. European influences created a cosmopolitan city that clearly affected Jewish life. The changes that transpired following the devastating fire of 1917 often harmed the development of this community that had been so vibrant and essential for centuries. Be that as it may, the poems written by this native Salonikan present a unique glimpse into the mindset and experiences of multilingual Jews attempting to adapt to the twentieth century and life in a multi-cultural city.