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Reined into the service of the Cold War confrontation, antifascist ideology overshadowed the narrative about the Holocaust in the communist states of Eastern Europe. This led to the Western notion that in the Soviet Bloc there was a systematic suppression of the memory of the mass murder of European Jews. Going beyond disputing the mistaken opposition between "communist falsification" of history and the "repressed authentic" interpretation of the Jewish catastrophe, this work presents and analyzes the ways as the Holocaust was conceptualized in the Soviet-ruled parts of Europe.

The authors provide various interpretations of the relationship between antifascism and Holocaust memory in the communist countries, arguing that the predominance of an antifascist agenda and the acknowledgment of the Jewish catastrophe were far from mutually exclusive. The interactions included acts of negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing. Detailed case studies describe how both individuals and institutions were able to use anti-fascism as a framework to test and widen the boundaries for discussion of the Nazi genocide. The studies build on the new historiography of communism, focusing on everyday life and individual agency, revealing the formation of a great variety of concrete, local memory practices.

"The chapters contribute to differentiate our understanding of the rooms for intellectual and mnemonic manoeuvre within the ideological framing of the official Soviet and state socialist memory of the war. The various perspectives presented in the chapters are tied together convincingly by the editors? introduction. They offer a coherent and insightful framing that makes the volume an important contribution to the understanding of Holocaust memory in Eastern European societies during state socialism."
http://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-131854?Monika Heinemann, H-Soz-Kult
"Erscheint die Zuspitzung auf die Frage nach den Spielräumen des Antifaschismus für das Verständnis der Nachgeschichte des Holocaust in Osteuropa sinnvoll. Das hier vorliegende Format eines internationalen Tagungsbandes mit einer Fülle von Fallstudien zu unterschiedlichen Ländern und Formen des Umgangs mit der Judenverfolgung ist besonders hilfreich, um das Verständnis für Vernetzungen, Gemeinsamkeiten und nationale Unterschiede zu schärfen. Der vorliegende Band lädt zu weiteren kritischen Auseinandersetzungen mit der Thematik ein, auch mit Blick auf andere Disziplinen wie etwa die Filmwissenschaft."?Sara Berger, Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung
"Erscheint die Zuspitzung auf die Frage nach den Spielräumen des Antifaschismus für das Verständnis der Nachgeschichte des Holocaust in Osteuropa sinnvoll. Das hier vorliegende Format eines internationalen Tagungsbandes mit einer Fülle von Fallstudien zu unterschiedlichen Ländern und Formen des Umgangs mit der Judenverfolgung ist besonders hilfreich, um das Verständnis für Vernetzungen, Gemeinsamkeiten und nationale Unterschiede zu schärfen."
http://www.sehepunkte.de/2024/09/39562.html?Sara Berger, Sehepunkte

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Table of Contents:

Figures

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Kata Bohus, Peter Hallama, Stephan Stach

PART I. Historiography

Edition of Documents from the Ringelblum Archive (the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto) in Stalinist Poland

Katarzyna Person, Agnieszka Żółkiewska

"A Great Civic and Scientific Duty of Our Historiography." Czech Historians and the Holocaust in the 1970s and 1980s

Peter Hallama

The Conflicted Identities of Helmut Eschwege: Communist, Jew and Historian of the Holocaust in the German Democratic Republic

Benjamin Lapp

PART II. Sites of Memory

Parallel Memories? Public Memorialization of the Antifascist Struggle and Martyr Memorial Services in the Hungarian Jewish Community during Early Communism

Kata Bohus

Holocaust Narrative(s) in Soviet Holocaust Narrative(s) in Soviet Lithuania: The Case of the Ninth Fort Museum in Kaunas

Gintar? Malinauskait?

Memory Incarnate: Jewish Sites in Communist Poland and the Perception of the Shoah

Yechiel Weizman

PART III. Artistic Representations

Toward a Soviet Holocaust Novel: Traumatic Memory and Socialist Realist Aesthetics in Anatolii Rybakov?s Heavy Sand

Anja Tippner

Commissioned Memory. Official Representations of the Holocaust in Hungarian Art (1955?1965)

Daniel Véri

Towards a Shared Memory? The Hungarian Holocaust in Mass-Market Socialist Literature, 1956-1970

Richard S. Esbenshade

PART IV. Media and Public Debate

Distrusting the Parks: Heinz Knobloch?s Journalism and the Memory of the Shoah in the GDR

Alexander Walther

?We Pledge, as if It was the Highest Sanctum, to Preserve the Memory.? Sovetish Heymland, Facets of Holocaust Commemoration in the Soviet Union and the Cold War

Miriam Schulz

"The Jewish Diaries [?] Undergo One Edition after the Other." Early Polish Holocaust Documentation, East German Anti-Fascism and the Emergence of Holocaust Memory in Socialism

Stephan Stach

Conclusion

Making Sense of the Holocaust in Socialist Eastern Europe

Audrey Kichelewski

Contributors

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