European Cultural Memory Post-89 [1 ed.] 9789401208895, 9789042036185

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EUROPEAN STUDIES

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EUROPEAN STUDIES An Interdisciplinary Series in European Culture, History and Politics Executive Editor Menno Spiering, University of Amsterdam [email protected] Series Editors Robert Harmsen, Université du Luxembourg Joep Leerssen, Universiteit van Amsterdam Menno Spiering, Universiteit van Amsterdam Thomas M. Wilson, Binghamton University, State University of New York

EUROPEAN STUDIES An Interdisciplinary Series in European Culture, History and Politics 30

EUROPEAN CULTURAL MEMORY POST-89

Edited by Conny Mithander, John Sundholm and Adrian Velicu

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013

Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de "ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence". The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. ISBN: 978-90-420-3618-5 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0889-5 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013 Printed in The Netherlands

NOTE FOR CONTRIBUTORS European Studies is published several times a year. Each issue is dedicated to a specific theme falling within the broad scope of European Studies. Contributors approach the theme from a wide range of disciplinary and, particularly, interdisciplinary perspectives. The Editorial board welcomes suggestions for other future projects to be produced by guest editors. In particular, European Studies may provide a vehicle for the publication of thematically focused conference and colloquium proceedings. Editorial enquiries may be directed to the series executive editor. Subscription details and a list of back issues are available from the publisher’s web site: www.rodopi.nl.

CONTENTS Authors in this volume

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CONNY MITHANDER, JOHN SUNDHOLM, ADRIAN VELICU Introduction

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JULIA CREET The House of Terror and the Holocaust Memorial Centre: Resentment and Melancholia in Post-89 Hungary

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EGLĖ RINDZEVIČIŪTĖ Institutional Entrepreneurs of a Difficult Past: the Organisation of Knowledge Regimes in Post-Soviet Lithuanian Museums 63 TOMAS SNIEGON Implementing Post-Communist National Memory in the Czech Republic and Slovakia

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BARBARA TÖRNQUIST-PLEWA Coming to Terms with Anti-Semitism: Jan T. Gross’s Writings and the Construction of Cultural Trauma in Post-Communist Poland

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ADRIAN VELICU The Moral Witness in Post-89 Romania

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CONNY MITHANDER From the Holocaust to the Gulag: The Crimes of Nazism and Communism in Swedish Post-89 Memory Politics

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JOHN SUNDHOLM Finland at War on Screen since 1989: Affirmative Historiography and Prosthetic Memory 209 OWEN EVANS Memory, Melodrama and History: The Return of the Past in Contemporary Popular Film in Germany

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VERONIKA ZANGL Austria’s Post-89: Staging Suppressed Memory in Elfriede Jelinek’s and Thomas Bernhard’s Plays Burgtheater and Heldenplatz

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BO PETERSSON The Eternal Great Power Meets the Recurring Times of Troubles: Twin Political Myths in Contemporary Russian Politics

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AUTHORS IN THIS VOLUME JULIA CREET is Associate Professor at York University in Toronto. She is the co-editor (with Andreas Kitzmann) of Memory and Migration – multidisciplinary approaches to memory studies (2011), and the producer and director of a documentary, ‘MUM,’ (2008) about the memoirs of a holocaust survivor who tried to forget. She has published numerous essays and book chapters on archives, memory and testimony in various academic and literary publications including The Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Applied Semiotics, West Coast Line and Exile, as well as in edited collections in Sweden, Hungary, Poland and the Netherlands. OWEN EVANS is Professor of Film in the Media Department at Edge Hill University. He has published widely on GDR literature and European cinema, including monographs on Günter de Bruyn and German literary biography, and recent articles on Das Leben der Anderen, Sophie Scholl: Die letzten Tage, the European Film Festival and Sight and Sound. He is co-founding editor of the international journals Studies in European Cinema and the Journal of European Popular Culture and co-founding director of the European Cinema Research Forum (ECRF). CONNY MITHANDER is Reader in the History of Ideas at Karlstad University. His research focuses on how left- and right-wing intellectuals have handled the memories and the experience of fascism and communism. Publications include ‘”Let Us Forget the Evil Memories”: Fascism and the Second World War from the Perspective of a Swedish Fascist’, in Collective Traumas: Memories of War and Conflict in 20th-Century Europe coedited together with John Sundholm and Maria Holmgren-Troy (P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2007). BO PETERSSON is Professor of Political Science and IMER (International Migration and Ethnic Relations) at Malmö University. His major publications in English include Stories about Strangers: Swedish Media Constructions of Socio-Cultural Risk (2006); National Self-Images and Regional Identities in Russia ( 2001); Bo Petersson & Katharine Tyler (eds): Majority Cultures and the Everyday Politics of Difference (2008); as well as articles in journals such as Development, European Societies and International Journal of Cultural Studies. EGLĖ RINDZEVIČIŪTĖ is a Research Fellow at the Gothenburg Research Institute (GRI) of the University of Gothenburg, and at Sciences Po in Paris. Her research focuses on the history of knowledge-based governance. Recent publications include Constructing Soviet Cultural Policy: Cyber-

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netics and Governance in Lithuania After World War II (2008), ‘When Formal Organisations Meet Informal Relations in Soviet Lithuania’, Lithuanian Historical Studies (2011), and ‘Post-Soviet Transformation of Lithuanian State Cultural Policy: The Meanings of Democratisation’, The International Journal of Cultural Policy (2012). TOMAS SNIEGON is a lecturer in European Studies at the University of Lund. His research focuses on places and functions of the Holocaust memory in various historical cultures and on the development of the Soviet forms of Communism during the Cold War. His publications include Den försvunna historien. Förintelsen i tjeckisk och slovakisk historiekultur (2008), ‘Schindler’s List Comes to Schindler’s Homeland’, in The Holocaust on Post-War Battlefields, ed. Klas-Göran Karlsson and Ulf Zander (2006), and ‘Looking Back, Going Forward. Czech and Slovak Dominating Historical Narratives of “The Long 1990s”, in Cultural Transformations after Communism: Central and Eastern Europe in Focus, ed. Barbara Törnquist-Plewa and Krzystof Stala (2011). JOHN SUNDHOLM is Professor in Film Studies at Karlstad University. He has published extensively on experimental film, minor cinema and memory studies in journals such as Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Framework, Journal of Aesthetics Culture, New Cinemas and Studies in European Cinema. He is the co-editor of Memory Work (2005), Collective Traumas (2007), From Sign to Signal (2012); editor of Historical Dictionary of Scandinavian Cinema (2012) and co-author of A History of Swedish Experimental Film Culture (2010). BARBARA TÖRNQUIST-PLEWA is Professor of Central and Eastern European Studies and Director of the Centre for European Studies at Lund University, Sweden. Her research focus is nationalism and national identities in Central and Eastern Europe, collective memory, myths, symbols and cultural integration in Europe. Publications include: The Wheel of Polish Fortune (1992); History, Language and Society in the Borderlands of Europe; Ukraine and Belarus in Focus (2006); Cultural Transformations after Communism (co-edited with K. Stala, 2011). ADRIAN VELICU is Reader in the History of Ideas at Karlstad University. His research interests have lately concentrated on the intellectual history of the eighteenth century and on cultural memory. Recent publications include Civic Catechisms and Reason in the French Revolution (Ashgate, 2010)

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and ‘Cultural Memory between the National and the Transnational’ in the Journal of Aesthetics & Culture (2011). VERONIKA ZANGL is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Theatre, of the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests cover: poetics and aesthetics of witness accounts after the Shoah as well as memory narratives after 1945, particularly theatre and drama as loci of memory. Publications include: ‘Soma Morgenstern: “I’m not a witness”. Exil – Sprache – Glaube’ in Feuchtwanger und Exil. Glaube und Kultur 1933-1945. ‘Der Tag wird kommen’, ed. Frank Stern (2011) and Poetik nach dem Holocaust. Erinnerungen – Tatsachen – Geschichten ( 2009).

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INTRODUCTION Conny Mithander, John Sundholm and Adrian Velicu The collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 caused a chain of major events in European history: the unification of Germany in 1990, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the so-called fourth and fifth enlargement of the European Union, encompassing Austria, Finland and Sweden in 1995; followed by most of the Eastern European countries including Malta and Cyprus in 2004, Bulgaria and Romania in 2007. Today, in 2012, amidst the contemporary politics of the European Union with its various political and financial crises the visions of hope and joy from the autumn of 1989 seem a distant memory, lending history the sense of a truly foreign country. The Balkan War, the financial crisis in Greece, the rising right-wing nationalism in Hungary, and the formation of populist nationalist parties in Finland and Sweden, as well as the ethnic nationalism of Russia, are examples of recent happenings that overshadow the hope and the future envisioned beyond the ruins of the Berlin Wall. Twenty years later, the euphoria seems to be forgotten and it looks as if 1989 was a minor intermission in the history of Europe. What if the Austria of Jörg Haider was an early prediction of what would follow, namely a return to the old Europe, not the Europe that was supposed to have been reborn after 1989? However, the fact that the fall of the Berlin Wall was the beginning of a new era is an undisputed matter. But, what 1989 really signifies, what it actually brought to an end and what it started are still open questions. Thus, the aim of this book is to re-examine the subject of Europe post-89 by exploring the different meanings and effects that 1989 has had for the memory work and politics of memory for some of those countries that were late-comers to the European Union (Austria, the Czech Republic, unified Germany, Hungary, Finland, Lithuania, Poland,

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Romania, Slovakia and Sweden), together with Europe’s significant Other, Russia. Post-89 and the End of the Post-War Era One of the most influential scholars who has argued for the significance of the year 1989 was Tony Judt. According to Judt, 1989 marked an end to the post-war era which had been designed in Yalta in 1945 (Judt 2005). The fall of the Wall and the collapse of communism constituted the end of the Second World War and, therefore, the period 1945-1989 is the epilogue of the War. Hence, post-1989 encompasses a range of years and events that point both backwards and forwards and includes the end of the Cold War, the unification of Germany, the collapse of Soviet Union, as well as the enlargement of the European Union; episodes that implied a profound cultural, geographical and political remapping of Europe. Naturally, this affected the memory culture as well. Whereas in 1945 there was much that was in need of being forgotten, 1989 required a lot to be remembered. Thus, the 1990s witnessed the undertaking of several revisions of the post-war memory culture, both officially due to state interventions and demands from the European Union, and locally through initiatives by individual actions and minority groups. Old truths and hegemonic narratives could be tested anew, often supported by the post-modern memory turn that claimed that all memories were of equal significance. However, the memory of a contested past such as war, terror and genocide causes conflicts. What should be remembered? Whose testimony can be trusted? Who has the right to claim to be a victim? Moreover, if, as Judt has claimed, 1989 marked the end of the Second World War, then it was also the moment to remember the war events. These events in turn evoked the two major themes of the Second World War: Nazism and the Holocaust. The focus on the evil and horror of the War implied that the new Europe was to be built on the condemnation of Nazism, as well as a shared agreement of being partly responsible for the Holocaust. These evil acts constituted the common ground on which a new European identity and memory culture could be rebuilt, or as Judt has put it: ‘Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket’ (Judt 2005, 803). This shift of focus implied that, in contrast to how the various European nations had hitherto fostered their memory culture, by inventing a common glorious culture and origin, now the

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common ground was a negative image of the past: that of a history of guilt, or a politics of regret as Jeffrey Olick coined it (Olick 2007). Hence, the common European values pictured in the 1990s were rather a shared culture of guilt and expiation (Karlsson 2008). Every nation that strived for full membership in the family of Europe had to adjust its national narratives about the Second World War into a moral story. That the Holocaust constituted the European entry-ticket became especially controversial in the Eastern European countries, which had another memory of horror to manage which was much closer in time, namely that of communism – the era that the fall of the Berlin Wall, in fact, brought to an end. Another important event in this reconstruction of a guilt-ridden past was the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust that took place in Sweden in 2000. The conference gathered leading politicians and researchers together and became a key event in the establishment of the Holocaust as a pan-European and global affair. Thus, the parameters of good and bad were transferred from its previous national framework into a transnational one. Whereas earlier only Germany was forced to build its politics of memory on a negative foundation, now every country had to share the burden. Part of the politics of the Stockholm Conference was the ‘Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research’ (ITF) that today comprises most of the countries in the EU as its members, except for Bulgaria, Cyprus, Ireland, Malta, Portugal and Slovenia.1 These countries are marginal when it comes to European politics, but their absence from ITF indicates that it is not a simple task to create a European community of commemoration, especially when it comes to such a contested issue as the Second World War. Wars are without doubt one of the most important events when it comes to laying foundational myths, which nations establish in order to create a rationale for a country. What one nation desires to remember another one tries to forget. Thus, the agenda is set for potential conflicts, not only because the past is being revised due to the new situation, but also because foundations are being laid for the future. New ones replace old hegemonies, and there is a perpetual struggle over whose memory and history should be reproduced for whom. One such recurrent and contested issue is, in particular for the Eastern 1

Finland became a member as late as 2010.

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European countries, the competing commemorations of the horrors of the Holocaust and Communism. This controversy has, however, also provoked debates in peaceful countries such as Sweden, thus demonstrating that memory processes are far from predictable. Accordingly, the aim of this book is to show how various European countries are dealing with the renegotiation of their past, participating in a new politics of memory due to the situation post-89. A further aim is to show that the fall of the Berlin Wall not only concerns Germany but the whole of Europe. In addition, this collection of essays intends to outline the different circumstances in each country and to show that, consequently, the strategies for dealing with the past in the new European setting also differ. In the clash between established national memory culture and new transnational memory politics each nation seeks its own path due to its geopolitical location, cultural patterns, political circumstances, and last but not least, individual history. By comparing a set of countries that are seldom at the centre of the discussion – Austria, Finland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Sweden – together with the obvious key players Germany and Russia, we hope to shed new light on how 1989 and its aftermath has affected European cultural memory. We are of the opinion that Judt’s thesis about 1989 as a radical break in European history is far too simple, something that recent political events have also proved. In the regular memory struggle between present and past there is often an overestimation in the influence of the former, especially when considering political projects such as the European Union. Therefore, many of the case studies presented in this book also show how post-89 has evoked and enforced continuities and earlier historical trajectories.2 The aim of this collection is not to provide a complete picture, but to point out the intricacies of existing ones and to show the various memory processes that are taking place in all their complexities and contradictions.

In fact, it has recently been suggested that the German controversy concerning Germany constituting a special case during the Cold War, a Sonderweg, should rather be considered as a model for each European country. What is mutual is a memory culture that is full of contradictions, discontinuities and continuities (Stråth 2011). 2

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Current Research Although cultural memory has been at the centre of recent scholarship, the notion has not been used in order to analyse key events such as Europe post-89 (Erll and Nünning 2008). The use of Raymond Williams’s concept ‘structure of feelings’ to make sense of post-89 Europe stood out a few years ago against the dominating approaches derived, above all, from political science and sociology (Kennedy 2002). A recent study has signalled a fresh orientation that concentrates on the significance of culture and history in analysing the changes in the wake of 1989 (Brier 2002). This is a consequence of the disillusionment with the results of social and political theory on post-communist studies (Bönker and Wielgohs 2008). Over the past two decades, research areas and patterns concerning the commotion of 1989 and its implications have acquired an increasingly clear contour. Democratisation and transitology, lustration and European enlargement, to name some of the main fields of inquiry, have benefited from valuable approaches in political science, sociology and economics. Their justified focus on the importance of one particular date and on the changes in the former Communist countries has nevertheless overshadowed other relevant moments and transformations. A fresh approach seems overdue. This collection offers juxtapositions of issues of cultural memory in national or transnational contexts which differ from those recurring in the prevailing research paradigm after 1989. By means of concepts and approaches from the field of memory studies, the present investigations explore continuities, discontinuities and contrasts determined by time and place boundaries that do not obey obvious patterns. As suggested above, there are chronological points of reference that compete with 1989. Whether it was the impact on Finland of the collapse of Soviet Union in 1991, or Sweden coming to terms with its recent past as it contemplated EU membership a few years later, or Romania’s repeated attempts to disentangle what vanished from what survived after 1989, or the Waldheim-affair in Austria in 1986, all reveal a complexity that doesn’t respect neat geographical boundaries or particular decisive moments in time. Thus, the notion of ‘post-89’ is used in this collection to signify the symbolic shift into a new order of cultural memory, whether it took place in 1991 in Finland, or 1986 in Austria, whereas we use ‘1989’ in order to indicate the actual year.

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Various collections, monographs or shorter studies have, in fact, deployed an interdisciplinary approach with or without resorting to notions of memory. One such collection considered the manner in which ‘contestations about historical memory revolve around definitions of wartime roles’ (Lebow 2006, 20-21). While aware of a range of theoretical approaches that they occasionally criticised, the editors insist that the focus of this collection is on the ‘institutionalization of memory’ in national contexts (Lebow, Kansteiner and Fogu 2006, 293). This manner of ascribing to, and establishing a dominant meaning of, particular memories differs from the kind of institutional framework proper—the institutes of national memory—within which other scholars have investigated the study of memory (Kopecek 2008). In this collection where the theme is the revision of key historical issues and events in the wake of post-89, the authors confine themselves to examples from East Central Europe and pursue questions of historical re-evaluation that only occasionally resort to notions derived from memory studies. An investigation into the way the 1956 Hungarian Revolution is remembered after the fall of the Wall (Mink 2008, 169) is an example. Another set of case studies also proceeds from the framework of national contexts but pursues the manner in which these contexts contribute to a European identity against the background of EU enlargement after 1989. The particular interest of the authors is to establish how ‘collective memories are contrasted, debated and reorganized’ in the new ‘European public sphere’ (Spohn 2005, 1). A few scholarly essays have added to the range of alternative patterns. The investigation of the legacy of the past in one particular case (Estonia) challenges the ‘memory of victimhood’ as defined by the focus on the Holocaust by directing attention to the victims of Communism (Kattago 2009, 376). When a shorter study explores the impact of memory on the ethics of post-communist politics, the distinction between public and communal memory subsumes the former under the latter (DeLue 2006, 397). In this case, the investigation looks at the importance of ‘public memory of radical injustice’ in the process of democratisation (405). The cultural approach that resorts to various concepts of memory reinforces its assertion by means of historical arguments. Attempts to break the research patterns have offered interdisciplinary approaches that, for instance, bring together cultural studies and postcolonialism (Forrester et al. 2004, 19). Although in this particular anthology the authors confine themselves to Eastern Europe, they do attempt

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to overcome the standard divisions by ‘deconstructing the East-West binary in a racialised post-authoritarian context that examines equally past and present, all the players and their complicated histories’ (Ibid, 10). Another analysis has attempted to go ‘beyond fixed categories (EastWest)’ by avoiding the obvious fault-lines caused by the decades preceding 1989 and by trying to define a common European memory (Challand 2009, 403). However, resorting to the concept of heterochrony, the author argues in this case that memories of the Holocaust and of the communist totalitarian experience point to different time-scales where the Erinnerungsarbeit of the latter is yet to be properly performed. As the present collection also illustrates each country has its own chronology, a unique way of both interpreting and handling post-89. There is no common European Zeitorte. As previously mentioned, one of the aims of this collection (i.e. to pursue the effects of post-89 beyond the standard post-communist framework) has resulted in bringing together countries like Austria, Finland and Sweden. This constellation has also been the subject of research where the fate of political neutrality after the fall of the Berlin Wall is the focus of specific investigation within the field of political science (Fereira-Pereira 2006). The change from ‘Neutrocentrism’ to ‘Eurocentrism’, essential for the European integration of these countries and their degree of commitment to international forms of cooperation on defence outline one kind of impact that post-89 has had on these states (Ibid, 102). Within the range of work that stretches from considering post-89 in terms of post-Cold War global consequences (Engel 2009) to the particularly local impact on ethnic boundaries (Kürti and Langman 1997), the attempts to analyze less obvious patterns are varied. Indeed, pursuing the global implications of the events of 1989 has lifted the discussion beyond the immediate concerns imposed by the region and the moment of that year. Explaining the authors’ interest in the views of the American, Soviet, European and Chinese leaders and pointing out that ‘[t]he year 1989 was a global phenomenon in every sense’, the editor of one anthology argues that, above all, ‘[e]verything changed because the four principal geostrategic players of that year drew four fundamentally different conclusions about why change had occurred’ (Engel 2009, 7, 30). At the other end of the spectrum, focussing on regions but still with an eye on ‘globalism’, the editors of another collection have endeavoured to ‘locate

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the questions of post-communist national and ethnic identities, as well as interethnic conflicts’ within a framework that relates to Appadurai’s ‘global ethnoscape’ and Hannerz ‘global ecumene’ (Kürti and Langman 1997, 4). In between, there are the studies referred to above that have endeavoured to apply predominantly cultural concepts and theories to which our own collection contributes analyses that integrate the subject of post-89 into the field of memory studies. Beyond the Nation? The fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath, post-89, are a challenge to the European nation-states and to memory studies. Some of the foundational concepts of research on memory, such as nation and place, have to be revised (Assmann and Conrad 2010; Creet 2010). National memory has been especially the main focus of many studies and, in particular, in relation to major conflicts such as the two World Wars of the twentieth century (Lebow et al 2006; Mithander et al 2007; Olick 2005). The other key subject of memory studies has, of course, been the Holocaust, a perspective that transcends and challenges the national as point of departure or objective for that research (Eaglestone 2004; La Capra 1998; Levy and Sznaider 2002). Inspired by the initiatives of the European Union, scholars such as Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider have even suggested that the Holocaust actually might not only constitute a model for Europe, but also for ‘memory unbound’, or ‘cosmopolitan memory’, i.e. memory freed from national boundaries. That form of memory would then not only constitute a more appropriate model for memory in a globalised world, but also act as an example of how to create memory practices for a common humanity, a moral of memory as Avishai Margalit would have it, something that was clearly one of the objectives of the Stockholm Forum (Margalit 2002). Levy and Sznaider’s notion of cosmopolitan memory is inspired by Ulrich Beck’s vision of cosmopolitanism and his characterisation of a new identity for contemporary mobile citizens, namely that of ‘inclusive distinction’, an identity that enables different loyalties simultaneously (Beck 2000). There are, of course, still boundaries; therefore it is a question of ‘distinctions’, but the boundaries are increasingly inclusive and heterogeneous. Thus region, nation and transnational should not be considered as excluding categories, but as part of a web and as a moving pattern, enabling complementary distinctions with a broad register of

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different identities. From such a perspective then, the nation is not the bottom-line anymore, although not erased in full either, but merely one of several available parameters for framing different collective memory practices. Accordingly, the subject of Europe post-89 brings the problem of the nation-state and national memory to the fore. The collapse of the communist-bloc and the enlargement of the European Union is an amalgamated narrative about strengthened regions, weakened nation-states, rising nationalism, increasing cosmopolitanism and a higher degree of mobility and of dual or multiple citizenship. Moreover, as stated earlier, the Holocaust has become the point of departure for European memory post-89, forcing nations to revise their national(ist) histories, attempts that in particular clash with those countries that struggle with the memory of communism. It is this complicated nexus of competing perspectives and strategies that we want to highlight in this book and not to sanction a specific standpoint. That the Holocaust has become a transnational horizon for a new European community is more a political aim than a given fact. Despite the ten years that have elapsed since the Stockholm Forum declared the position of Holocaust as a mutual European ‘site of memory’, countries like Finland still struggle with the shift of perspective from the national to the transnational, from national victimisation to perpetrators of the Holocaust, whereas the Eastern European countries are wrestling with the process of prioritisation of the Holocaust due to their communist past. These clashes between different memory projects, transnational decrees and national turmoil, are a further reminder that post-89 is a highly complex phenomenon. Ruptures occurred, but not only new paths and trajectories emerged, old ones reappeared creating new conflicts. Hence, if the issue of the nation (the territory), the national (the sentiment) and the nation-state (the socio-political organisation) has been questioned anew post-89, it is worth remembering that, although the nation has often constituted the framework for memory studies, the field of memory studies has been sceptical towards the notion of the nation. The legacy of Maurice Halbwachs stresses the constructed character of memory, that every memory effort is a social act and therefore a creation by someone that is not only made in order to honour and remember the past, but also composed in the present with the aim to manoeuvre the future. The field of memory studies is not so much an outcome of

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strengthened memory as such, or of a heightened historical awareness. Rather the opposite, as the founding father of contemporary memory studies, Pierre Nora claimed: the rising interest in memory is not taking place because there is too much memory around; it is because ‘true’ memory is in decline (Nora 1996). Jay Winter has also reminded us of how both memory and nation are entangled in Nora’s project: ‘The memory boom […] both announces and hastens the death of the nationstate’ (Winter 2006, 284). There is no doubt regarding Nora’s own standpoint in the current deconstruction of the nation and the nation-state and his position has therefore received a lot of criticism. Nora’s project has been considered as a nostalgic longing for ‘organic’ memory and the mourning over a disintegrating France. Henry Rousso, for example, puts it bluntly: ‘the concept “sites of memory” is […] perhaps the last manifestation of a type of classical national history that arose in the nineteenth century with the emergence of the nation-state’ (Rousso 2007, 28). Hence, post-89 is without doubt a major event that forced Europe and its nations into a new beginning, and therefore also challenges memory studies. However, the case studies included in this book show that this is a process which is more complicated and that the signification of 1989 has often been exaggerated. With this genealogy of contemporary memory studies in mind, it is quite reasonable that Europe post-89 is the next logical step for any memory research that strives to understand how collective memory is built and rebuilt in contemporary Europe. Not because the nation, nationalism and nation-state are disappearing, but because they are forced to be renegotiated due to a radically new historical situation. It is in this process that the notion of cultural memory becomes an important tool and object for analysing the changes that are taking place. The concept of cultural memory originates from Aleida and Jan Assmann’s work, although both treat the notions somewhat differently and especially Jan Assmann elaborates and changes his concept of cultural memory throughout his work (A. Assmann 1999; J. Assmann 1992; Erll and Nünning 2008). But, as in the perpetual debate on the relation between history and memory, the point is not so much to pin down either of them, but instead to use the contested ground or tension between the concepts as the starting point for analysis. Thus, whereas the notion of cultural memory may largely be understood as shared materialised memory, memory gone public and constituting essential material in

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the use and re-use of the history of the past of a group or collective, it also points to the dialectics between cultural memory and communicative memory, the latter a notion introduced by Jan Assmann. According to Jan Assmann communicative and cultural memory have two different time-dimensions (J. Assmann 1992). Communicative memory is identical with the generation that is experiencing the event in question, whereas cultural memory is the collective memory and material produced that is established in order to outlive the first generation. Hence cultural memory becomes the crucial public arena for different generations and other groups to intervene, or to take part, in the ongoing process of remembering and reconstructing the past. Communicative memory, on the other hand, is memory in process, as it were, formed by actual witnesses. Thus, cultural memory is the actual memory material produced, public statements and therefore sites of cultural and political struggle vis-à-vis the use and re-use of the past (A. Assmann 1999; Winter 2006). The films, novels, museums, policies and public discussions analysed in this collection constitute therefore essential memory materials that are crucial interventions in the making of contemporary European memory. Chapter Summaries This collection opens with several studies of the institutionalisation of such attempts to shape contemporary memory in three Eastern Central European cases. Julia Creet’s phenomenological approach to two Hungarian museums, The House of Terror and the Holocaust Centre, explores the implications of the ressentiment and melancholia associated in different ways with these two institutions. The discussion shows that, although the Nazi and Communist past evoked by the former museum and the persecution of the Jews by the latter amount to different narratives, these specific evocations stem from the common aim of reinforcing a certain version of memory of the events. A pair of institutions dealing with Nazi genocide and communist terror also constitutes the subject of Eglė Rindzevičiūtė. The Vilna Gaon Jewish Museum and the Museum of the Victims of Genocide are two Lithuanian examples of ‘institutional entrepreneurship’ intended to consolidate the validity of particular sets of judgments on the past. Treating the emergence of these institutions as heterogeneous production processes where the role of the actor needs redefining, this inquiry draws attention to the complexity of their genesis and their impact on the understanding and recollection of

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the past. Tomas Sniegon scrutinises laws that enabled the establishment of The Nation’s Memory Institute in Bratislava and of The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague. This contribution argues that, while the ostensible aim of these institutes has been to expose Nazi and Communist dictatorial practices, a close analysis of the legal justification for their foundation reveals ideological motives. This kind of institutionalisation of national memory turns out to be, at least at one level, an ideological use of history. Confrontation with the past after 1989 in Eastern Central Europe has taken other forms as well. The debate in Poland following the publication of Jan T. Gross’s Fear highlighted tensions concerning the anti-Semitic legacy. Employing the concepts of memory carrier and cultural trauma, Barbara Törnquist-Plewa examines the reactions to Fear and maps the resulting intellectual and political landscape in the country. This discussion of coping strategies with trauma challenges the normative aspects of the theory of cultural trauma. Norms of a different kind underlie Adrian Velicu’s discussion of the moral witness in post-89 Romania. This investigation shows that bearing testimony of Communist oppression highlights unsettling continuities in post-89 Romania. Under the circumstances, moral witnesses can opt for a confrontational stance or non-committal accounts of their suffering. Indeed, the commendable status of the moral witness has attracted aspiring moral witnesses as well. The analysis singles out the category of the combative moral witness as a notion overlooked by scholarly work on the subject and characteristic of the tensions in the years after the collapse of the dictatorship in this country. The two Nordic countries included in this collection illustrate different options in the post-89 period. Although the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War facilitated fresh confrontations with the local collective memory, regional concerns entailed a different time table where the importance of 1989 was somewhat toned down. Conny Mithander’s work on the politics of memory as discerned in the complex Swedish campaign known as ‘Living History’ pursues the debates about coming to terms with sensitive moments in the history of the country. While this campaign, including a national information offensive as well as an institutional approach, was the result of a political initiative with an eye on joining the European Union, it also had scholarly aims in so far as it stimulated research on the country’s attitude towards the crimes of

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fascism and communism. The discussion examines the controversy stirred by the belated addition of studying the crimes of communism and draws attention to the ‘asymmetry’ characterising the collective memory, indeed the politics of memory, in Sweden. Finland’s problematic involvement in the Second World War and its proximity to the former Soviet Union adds to the complexity of post-89 memory work. John Sundholm points out that the time framework relevant for this discussion is determined by 1991 when the Soviet Union ceased to exist and 1995 when Finland joined the EU. An examination of Finnish war films and, more particularly, their reception by the critics and the public serves to explain the articulation of various discourses in the country’s film history. Further, the analysis investigates the function and reproduction of these discourses in the post-89 context. Sundholm clarifies the impact that these developments have had on the hegemonic narrative where the film The Unknown Soldier, based on Väinö Linna’s novel, preserves its classic status. In the spirit of this collection which attempts to discern less explored patterns and implications of the commotion of 1989, Owen Evans discusses the reconstruction of the past through the narrative mode of melodrama as expressed in two recent German films. The treatment of the material in the context of post-89 suggests that this dominant mode presupposes a shift from communicative to cultural memory. Moreover, the confrontation with the past in the post-reunification era by means of popular history films takes on therapeutic dimensions, justifying an understanding of the phenomenon in terms of ‘therapeutic historiography’. Even more elusive patterns emerge in Veronika Zangl’s contribution on Austria in relation to post-89. This contribution argues that the shift in Austria’s cultural memory anticipates, in some respects, the more general reorientation caused by the collapse of communism. A number of debates in the mid-1980s concerning Austria’s role in the Second World War and its outlook concerning the Holocaust touched a raw nerve, reviving unwanted memories. This analysis discusses the extent to which these memories were ‘lost’ or recovered and how this confrontation with the past is related to Austria as one of the victims or perpetrators of the atrocities during the Second World War. The case of the defunct Soviet Union and its heir, Russia, is both an exception to the other contributions in this book and yet one of the explanatory factors to the events of 1989 and, indeed, of a series of post-

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89 processes and reflections. Bo Petersson draws attention to the specific schedule of the post-Soviet/neo-Russian developments and pursues two significant myths significant to the country’s identity and collective memory: Russia’s predestination to be a great power (including the Soviet parenthesis) and the recurring ‘Time of Troubles’ that thwarted its grand destiny. Bringing together historical patterns and contemporary concerns, Petersson employs these analytical instruments to throw light on the post-1991 presidencies of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. This discussion shows how attempts at establishing a national leader’s legitimacy draws on collective cultural memory, and adds a further aspect to the complexity of these issues which feature throughout the entire sequence of these studies. A renewed scrutiny of the various meanings that 1989 had for the countries discussed shows, therefore, some of the aspects that add to the complexity of this period. These additional perceptions and implications of 1989 have been highlighted by examining the workings of collective, indeed cultural, memory. The use of a range of concepts featuring in the dynamic field of memory studies have enabled the contributions gathered here to identify significant developments overlooked by an otherwise justifiable focus on the immediate impact of the political changes in 1989 and 1991. Whether these developments concern foundation myths, moral testimony, a sense of guilt or claims of victimhood, they require an approach and a readiness to shift the emphasis from the overwhelming importance of 1989 (and 1991) to later or indeed earlier stages and actions for the present contributions to yield fresh insights. This collection draws attention to the need for another sort of shift of emphasis through the variety of examples collected here. They provide material less explored in the scholarly works on 1989 during the last two decades and make up a range of case studies that acquires a coherence of its own within the framework of memory studies.

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References Assman, Aleida. 1999. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Munich: Beck. Assmann, Aleida and Sebastian Conrad, eds. 2010. Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Assmann, Jan. 1992. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. Munich: Beck. Beck, Ulrich. 2000. What is Globalization? Cambridge: Polity Press. Bönker, Frank and Jan Wielgohs, eds. 2008. Postsozialistische Transformation und europäische (Des-)Integration. Bilanz und Perspektiven. Marburg: Metropolis. Brier, Robert. 2009. ‘Historicizing 1989: Transnational Culture and the Political Transformation of East-Central Europe’. European Journal of Social Theory, 12.3, 337-357. Challand, Benoît. 2009. ‘1989, Contested Memories and the Shifting Cognitive Maps of Europe’. European Journal of Social Theory, 12.3, 397-408. Creet, Julia and Andreas Kitzmann, eds. 2010. Memory and Migration. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Creet, Julia. 2010 Introduction. In Memory and Migration. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies eds. Julia Creet and Andreas Kitzmann, x-xx. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. DeLue, Steven. 2006. ‘The Enlightenment, Public Memory, Liberalism and the Post-Communist World’. East European Politics and Societies, 20.3, 395-418. Eaglestone, Robert. 2004. The Holocaust and the Postmodern. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eder, Klaus and Wilfried Spohn, eds. 2005. Collective Memory and European Identity: The Effects of Integration and Enlargement. Aldershot: Ashgate. Engel, Jeffrey A., ed. 2009. The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Erll, Astrid and Ansgar Nünning, eds. 2008. Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter. Fereira-Pereira, Laura C. 2006. ‘Inside the Fence but Outside the Walls: Austria, Finland and Sweden in the Post-Cold War Security Architecture’. Cooperation and Conflict, 41: 99-122. Forrester, Sibela et al., eds. 2004. Over The Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures through an East-West Gaze. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jarausch, Konrad H. and Thomas Lindenberger, eds. 2007. Conflicted Memories. Europeanizing Contemporary Histories. Oxford: Berghahn. Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. New York: Penguin. Karlsson, Klas-Göran. 2008. Med folkmord i fokus: Förintelsens plats i den europeiska historiekulturen. Stockholm: Forum för levande historia. Kattago, Siobhan. 2009. ‘Agreeing to Disagree on the Legacies of Recent History: Memory, Pluralism and Europe after 1989’. European Journal of Social Theory 12. 3, 375-395. Kennedy, Michael D., ed. 2002. Cultural Formations of Postcommunism: Emancipation, Transition, Nation and War. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

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Kopecek, Michal, ed. 2008. Past in the Making: Historical Revisionism in Central Europe after 1989. Budapest: Central European University Press. Kopecek, Michal. 2008. In Search of ‘National Memory:’ The Politics of History, Nostalgia and the Historiography of Communism in the Czech Republic and East Central Europe. In Past in the Making: Historical Revisionism in Central Europe after 1989, ed. Michal Kopecek, 75-95. Budapest: Central European University Press. Kürti, László and Juliet Langman, eds. 1997. Beyond Borders: Remaking Cultural Identities in the New East and Central Europe. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. La Capra, Dominick. 1998. History and Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lebow, Richard Ned, Wulf Kansteiner and Claudio Fogu, eds. 2006. The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe. Durham: Duke University Press. Levy, Daniel and Natan Sznaider. 2002. ‘Memory Unbound. The Holocaust and The Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory’. European Journal of Social Theory 5.1: 87-106. Mithander, Conny, John Sundholm and Maria Holmgren Troy, eds. 2007. Collective Traumas: Memories of War and Conflict in 20th-Century Europe. Brussels: PIE – Peter Lang. Margalit, Avishai. 2002. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mink, András. 2008. The Revisions of the 1956 Hungarian Revolutions. In Past in the Making: Historical Revisionism in Central Europe after 1989, ed. Michal Kopecek, 169-178. Budapest: Central European University Press. Nora, Pierre. 1996. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press. Olick, Jeffrey K. 2005. In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Olick, Jeffrey K. 2007. The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility. London: Routledge. Rousso, Henry. 2007. History of Memory, Policies of The Past: What for? In Conflicted Memories. Europeanizing Contemporary Histories, eds. Konrad H. Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger, 23-36. Oxford: Berghahn. Spohn, Willfried. 2005. National Identities and Collective Memory in an Enlarged Europe. In Collective Memory and European Identity: The Effects of Integration and Enlargement, eds. Klaus Eder and Wilfried Spohn, 1-14. Aldershot: Ashgate. Stråth, Bo. 2011. Nordic Foundation Myths after 1945. A European Context. In Nordic Narratives of the Second World War, eds. Henrik Stenius, Mirja Österberg and Johan Östling, 149-170. Lund: Nordic Academic Press. Winter, Jay. 2006. Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press.

EUROPEAN STUDIES 30 (2013): 29-62

THE HOUSE OF TERROR AND THE HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL CENTRE: RESENTMENT AND MELANCHOLIA IN POST-89 HUNGARY Julia Creet Abstract The Terror Háza (House of Terror, 2002) and the Holocaust Dokumentacios Kozpont es emlekgyujtemeny (The Holocaust Documentation and Memorial Centre, 2004) opened in Budapest within two years of each other. Together, these two museums are illustrative of the phenomenology and competing affective narratives of Hungarian national memory post-89, and of post-communist countries more generally.1 While each museum purports to tell a specific history, both are manifestations of the political struggle over the national memory of the Second World War and its aftermath, a history that has been substantially rewritten since the end of Communism. The House of Terror enacts the ‘double occupation’ of Nazism and Communism and the Holocaust Memorial Centre archives and the deportation of the Hungarian Jews and Roma. Each museum aestheticises an affective phenomenology of historical victimisation, provoking ressentiment and melancholia respectively in visitors as a means of staging moral values and perpetuating contested memories.

1 See, for example, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė’s contribution in this volume on Lithuania; the 2010 debates in The European Parliament about the naming of 23 August as the ‘European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism’ following the controversial 2008 Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism http://praguedeclaration.org/; and recent influential books such as Tony Judt’s Postwar and Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands.

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Competing Miseries In April 2002, the Terror Háza (House of Terror) museum opened at 60 Andrássy Boulevard, a grand avenue on the Pest side of Budapest. The museum is dedicated to the history of the ‘double occupation’ and the ideological and physical violence that took place in the building, first as the ‘House of Loyalty’ of the Nylas (the Arrow Cross), the Hungarian fascists from 1937 to 1944, and afterwards, from 1946 to 1956, as the headquarters of the Hungarian Communist political police (the PRO, ÁVR, ÁVH), both of which used its cellars for the torture of political prisoners and, in the case of the Arrow Cross, to carry out executions. The ‘story of the House’ as Hungarian historian István Rév put it, ‘is carved from one solid piece: it is the story of undifferentiated terror from the moment of the German occupation [March 19, 1944] until the summer of 1991, when 57 years later, the Soviet army left the territory of Hungary’ (2005, 313). Two years later, in 2004, The Holocaust Documentation and Memorial Centre, the first state-funded Holocaust museum in Eastern Europe, also opened in Budapest, in a revived 1920s synagogue in a nondescript neighbourhood on the west side of Pest. Both museums opened to a barrage of controversy about the political manipulation of cultural and institutional memory post-89. These museums (I use the term advisedly) are not designed primarily to house objects, but to deploy the objects they do house in the service of emotions as means to political ends. ‘Notably’, writes Hilde Hine, a philosopher of museum theory and practice, ‘museums now advance themselves as public institutions with a primary responsibility to people and their values rather than to the value of objects. Thus an interest in phenomenology and affect has displaced the taxonomic and preservative impulse with which modern museums began’ (2000, 67). Following this key observation about the phenomenological nature of contemporary museums and the values they reflect and promote, I will offer a reading of the aesthetic practices of memory deployed in each museum and the manner in which they generate emotional experiences for visitors, ressentiment and melancholia respectively. These emotions, provoked by our identification with their imaginary objects and their associated values, create and perpetuate collective memories of historical victimisation, staging competing narratives that contribute to the polarisation of Hungarian cultural and historical memory post-89. The discourse of these two museums is a study in ‘comparative victimhood’, as Tony Judt has characterised the tension throughout

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Eastern Europe post-89 (Judt 2005, 826-830).2 The discourse of victimhood and ressentiment and its correlation, the discourse of rights, is one that has been imported from the West. Though Nietzsche, in the Genealogy of Morals, traces it back to the beginnings of Christian morality as a form of Jewish revenge. Similarly, we might observe that the efforts to establish Jewish memory and, concomitantly, a unified Jewish identity in Hungary post-89, undertaken and supported to some extent by foreign (or deported, displaced and re-migrated) interests and funds, was one of the conduits through which the division and memorialisation and suffering became the justified rhetoric of a new rightist nationalism. Yet, the discourse of victimisation also has a long European history, particularly in Hungary, as Aleida Assmann argued in her assessment of the strategic uses of selective national memory in the cause of European unification (Assmann 2007, 17 et passim). Reconciliation with the past, as Elena Lamberti writes, ‘is a painful and difficult process that can be fully achieved only if we acknowledge first, as individuals and as groups, that the same land is inhabited by contrasting memories and by divided memories’ (Lamberti and Fortunati 2009, 8). In a large part, these divided memories are provoked by mismatched sentiments, ressentiment on the part of nationalists who feel they were under the thumb of successive invading evils for forty-five years, and melancholia on the part of Hungarians of Jewish descent whose communities were destroyed by a nation to which they fervently wanted to and still belong. The Past is Over … and Continues Museums are generally built at the beginning of a new era to ‘mark the end of a collectively perceived traumatic experience and signal that ‘“we” have moved on’ (Wodak and Richardson 2009, 231). The House of Terror fits this mould, declaring the end of two successive foreign-imposed totalitarian regimes as its organising principle. As Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced at the opening ceremony, Hungary had ‘slammed the door on the sick twentieth century’. In contrast, the Holocaust Centre, modelled on any number of Western Holocaust museums, works specifically against closure, invoking the continuity or potential According to Judt it is history told from the point of view of the victim rather than the victor that allows for the ‘equivalence’ of the crimes of Nazism and Communism, where the suffering of victims is undifferentiated, regardless of the motives of the persecutors. 2

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resurgence of political and social sentiments of intolerance. Though I call both institutions ‘museums’, only the House of Terror counts as a museum in that it documents specific totalitarian systems that can be declared artefacts in Hungary, though it relies heavily on first-hand memory of life under communism, which is very much alive and will be for decades to come. The Holocaust Centre, on the other hand, calls itself a ‘Memorial Centre’, suggesting the ongoing nature of its enterprise, though first-hand memory of the events is nearly extinguished. Yet, both museums are designed to provoke contemporary feelings about the histories they present. Both museums are exercises in the reconfiguration of collective memory post-89 – and are almost entirely at odds with each other. Though their temporalities are sequential, and their contemporaneous construction means that they share the same cultural context, the temporal distance of the two museums is quite another story. The Holocaust Memorial Centre, a reconstruction of a sixty years history along the lines of a new interpretation; the House of Terror, the invocation of a recently-ended past in need of being redeployed. The Holocaust Memorial Centre is a museum of the discontinuity of Jewish memory in Hungary, which serves the project of reviving Jewish identity and teaching moral lessons, while the House of Terror would instate a continuity of the memory of Communism in aid of ridding the country of post-communist liberalism. The House of Terror and the Holocaust Centre, both sites of ‘commissioned memory’ (Azaryahu 2003, 16), leave the other to tell the sordid bits of the story that everyone remembers but would rather forget unless it is politically advantageous to do so. These two museums have studiously avoided any possibility of establishing a shared memory (Margalit 2002, 48) between them or their visitors, or of reconciliation.3 According to the director of the Holocaust Centre, Dr. László Harsányi, there is little conversation between these two museums, though they overlap briefly in their reconstruction of the crucial years of 1944-1946.4 Margalit argues that shared memory involves a ‘division of labour’: ‘shared memory in a modern society travels from person to person through institutions, such as archives, and through communal mnemonic devices, such as monuments and names of streets. (…) these complicated communal institutions are responsible, to a large extent, for our shared memories’ (2002, 54). 4 Personal Interview. Budapest. 25 March, 2010. 3

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The House of Terror, though an international tourist attraction, is primarily designed for native Hungarians, while the Holocaust Centre would welcome, if they would come, visitors from everywhere. Of the two, the House of Terror, addressing Hungarians whose lives were shaped by Communism, has been wildly successful, while the Holocaust Centre, which remembers a culture that was largely eliminated for the second half of the twentieth century, is generally deserted. The aesthetic/symbolic contrast is marked: the House of Terror is full to overflowing with sensory experience, a flamboyant theme park designed primarily to communicate the insidious pervasiveness of the Communist political apparatus, oddly contrasting a time which is invariably described as grey;5 the Holocaust Centre is consciously a museum of emptiness, of sensory deprivation and fading life-lines.6 The aesthetics of each museum and the affect produced in turn are ressentiment and melancholia respectively, moralistic memories that are ultimately unproductive. Harsányi observed that while the House of Terror is a cultic place for conservatives, left-liberals have no relationship to symbolism and have not embraced the Memorial Centre in any fashion. Moreover, left-liberal shame makes it difficult to deal with national memory and ethnic divisions, an inhibition not felt by conservatives (Harsányi 2010). The success of a museum depends to a large extent on the experience and affirmation it offers, as indicated by museologist John Falk (2009). The House of Terror: Domesticity It is ironic, or cynical, that the material metaphor of the house, the most domestic space, is used as a museum of the most foreign, of ‘double occupation’. The insistent and easily-absorbed premise of the House of Terror is that the tenants were evil, but the house itself was blameless. Hungary was occupied by both the German and Red armies (also Hungary’s liberator), those are historical facts; what the museum exposes, sometimes in spite of itself, is the domesticity of those occupations, how Hungary both fostered and assimilated these ideologies. Viktor Orbán, a 5 The House of Terror’s creative force was Hollywood set designer Attila F. Kóvacs. 6 A good example of emptiness as a trope by which to represent the absence of those killed in the Holocaust is the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Emptied of its furnishings by the German police after the Frank family was discovered, the house as museum is reconstructed as an unoccupied space, echoing the finality of absence rather than the years the family spent in hiding.

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former member of the Communist Party (as every Hungarian politician pre-1989 necessarily was), opened the House of Terror six weeks before the 2002 national elections on 23 February, the inaugural ‘Victims of Communism Memorial Day’, a day his rightist government, Fidesz (1998-2002, 2010- ), instituted to balance ‘Holocaust Memorial Day’, which had been introduced by the previous government, the socialist MSZP. Rév argues that the opening of the House of Terror was the most important political event leading up to the election (2005, 299), which Orbán’s party was set to lose to a coalition of liberals and socialists, even though the museum failed to win Orbán, who had exhibited his own despotic ways, an immediate second term. Politically motivated, expensive7 and garish, the Terror Háza became a ‘lightening rod’ for controversy and a rally point for the far-right Hungarian Freedom and Life Party (MIEP), the precursor of the current farright party, Jobbik and its ‘home guard’.8 As Mária Schmidt, one of Orbán’s chief advisers and the curator of the House of Terror said to Thomas Fuller of the New York Times, without apology, ‘Is there anything in history that is not related to politics? (…) The political motivation of those who work here is to show that the system ‘of terror was terrible – the Communist terror was terrible. Today in Hungary you cannot use the word “Communist”’. People act as though that part of history never happened’ (2002). Indeed, a strange silence followed the end of Communism, which had, in Hungary, demolished itself from the inside, voting in 1988 for a multi-party system after the removal of János Kádár, Secretary General since 1956. The transition from Communism to a liberal ‘bourgeois’ democracy was remarkably un-revolutionary, and the political players, though variously renamed, remained to a large extent, in place.9 This internal reform, the demands of 1956 finally met thirty-two years

7 The House of Terror cost approximately twenty million dollars (USD) of taxpayers money in an era when Hungary was suffering financially. 8 The ‘Home Guard’, a paramilitary organisation modelled after the Nazi black shirts, was outlawed in 2009. 9 See Timothy Garton Ash’s chapter ‘Budapest: the last funeral’ in The Magic Lantern for a reasonably coherent summary of the rebranding of political parties. ‘So confusing was the political scene [in March 1990] that when pollsters included in one of their surveys the name of a wholly fictional, the Hungarian Democratic Party, twelve percent of those asked said they supported it’ (60).

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later, had the odd effect of depriving Hungarians of any sense of revolution or revenge.10 Its domestic and docile ending suggested ‘that, unlike Fascism, Communism [had] finally and truly come to an end, and that there [was] neither the need nor the time to remember it, to face it, or to talk about it’ (Rév 2005, 236). So rapidly did Hungary westernise – it was already the most western of the eastern block – that a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hungarians visiting the bustling streets of Budapest ‘would easily forget about political history, were they not reminded by the existence of the House of Terror’ (Rátz 2006, 244). In order to revive the reviled face of Communism, the House of Terror collapses Stalinism, the 1956 revolution, the execution of its leader Imre Nagy, whose reburial as a hero in 1989 was the mark of a free Hungary, and the late Kádár regime. And visitors have flocked to it, 500,000 in the first few years, primarily Hungarians, ‘an almost compulsory sight for all domestic tourists’ (Rátz 244-247). For non-Hungarians, Budapest has been ‘endowed with a fascinating, if somewhat bizarre, new tourist attraction’ (Szanto 2003, 42). 11

10 Rév states: ‘In Hungary there was no revolution in 1989, not even a velvet one, as in Prague. There were no strikes, no large-scale demonstrations, no signs of massive popular unrest. Hungarians skeptically watched the not-so-dramatic suicide of the system. (…) The regime melted like butter in late summer sunshine. Even in its demise, Communism succeeded in not denying itself. Its strange death fooled the people one more time by denying them the experience of their sovereignty. Communism killed itself instead of letting the people do it themselves. There were no special dates that could be remembered as decisive in the course of political transformation. The only event that was, and still is, considered in a strange way as crucial was the reburial of the revolutionary Prime Minister Imre Nagy on June 16, 1989’ (30). 11 Along with the Statue Park (now Memento Park), on the outskirts of Budapest, where the icons of Communism have been banished for their own protection, the House of Terror is a venue by which, Hungary, cannily, has been one of the few formerly Soviet-block countries to capitalize on post-Communism. András Szánto, born in Budapest, Director of the Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University in the United States, gives us this irresistible and succinct introduction to the House of Terror and its memorial politics. His tone, ironic, sceptical, though not dismissive, is common to commentators: ‘Say you’re running a small East European country. The place is a mess. Your fellow citizens have been mistreating each other for centuries. The last 50 years, especially, were a blood-drenched saga of murder and mind control under a string of foreign and home-grown despots. Now you want to send a message that the bad old days are over. What do you do? You build a history museum’. (2003, 42)

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Ressentiment: Fear 60 Andrássy út is centrally located on the grandest Budapest boulevard, formerly ‘Stalin Avenue’, and before that the avenue of the scions of the Hungarian Jewish industrialists. The Terror Haza’s famous façade, designed by János Sándor and Kálmán Újszászy, reaches over the sidewalk, casting the shadows of its stencilled ‘TERROR’, a catchy word post9/11. The pengefal, the ‘blade wall’ of the façade, continues down each side of the building, slicing the sidewalk and forcing pedestrians to walk through its portals. The building seems emboldened by its notorious history. Oval-framed photographs embedded in the exterior wall announce exhibit A, the faces of the persecuted, to those who wait in the line-ups of mandatory high-school tours. The House of Terror keeps the message simple: two invading evils, two periods of terror, one considerably longer and more important than the other, an oppressed but plucky nation. Two plinth monuments, one in memory of the victims of the Arrow Cross Terror on the left, the other of Communism on the right, amplify the divided entry of the neorenaissance hallway. The symbolism would be stronger were the plinths appropriately left and right for the viewer, though perhaps one can read the positioning perspectivally; we see the museum from its own point of view. The museum embodies the things it purports to ‘musealize’: fascist in its philosophy and architecture, as Rév argues (2005, 294-8), resurrecting the most striking images of communism. Turning left towards the cashier12 takes you by a tank, at shoulder level, sitting menacingly in spilling oil, emblematic of spilled blood, in a three-story atrium with faces etched white on black in rows that reach to the third story. ‘Victims’. The oil smells, the tank is dusty, the faces are stylised, anonymous, hard-edged; the effect is, indeed, unsettling, vaguely terrifying. This is a museum of feeling, designed, as its director declared, to display terror in all is sensational aspects in the form of a historical ‘happening’ (Kovács 2003, 164). The House of Terror warns against the excesses of former totalitarian states, and future ones: Only we can protect you from this (which we know intimately). On the landing to the first floor, and gracing the cover of the museum catalogue, indicating its draw and power, is a large, stylised, female Through what would have been the courtyard of the elegant 1880s apartment building constructed by the respected architect Adolf Festy (Losonczy 2006, 5). 12

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nude statue, without sensual or sexual denotation or connotation. She grips in her right fist a writhing serpent, her left clenched and poised to strike its rasping maw. ‘Küzdelem’ ‘Struggle’. Mikus Sándor, 1955. Against fascism? Of socialism? Eve in the garden? Or is she Hungary battling its dual invading evils? In which case the snake won. In the context of the House of Terror, the struggle of the statue is entirely ambiguous. It could be ironic, but not in such a flawless setting. If it is cynical, as Éva Kovács says is the tone of the entire edifice, then the figure has been pre-empted; the snake is still terrifyingly totalitarian, in all its guises, but the figure and her fist belongs to the now. One would forgive a viewer for being confused but nonetheless frightened. Cynicism Kovács reads the affective intentions of the museum as: ‘The House of Terror takes our cloudy historical knowledge of Nazism and Communism up a dark alley – it exhibits half truths in spurious surroundings… The exhibit produces visitors who leave full of even more frustration and resentment than they came with’ (2003, 167). The problem with halftruths is that it is difficult to pinpoint which half is which. As Kovács observes, ‘the cynical politics of remembrance has a very different effect on its audience than does the ironic sort. It makes reflection impossible, precluding any confrontation with the past, hindering humour and laughter. It demands submissive reception and it serves up this reparation in return: here, we can grieve for ourselves and pass sentence on others’ (2003, 167). The incitement of ressentiment as a political tool begins with a large map of pre-Trianon Hungary. Nationalist memory is still significantly organised around Hungary’s largest loss, inflicted by independence votes and the Treaty of Trianon, which reduced The Kingdom of Hungary in the process of the dissolution of the bellicose Austro-Hungarian Empire to an isolated and far more homogeneous heart of its former self. The dream of a reunified greater Hungary motivated political alliances from the 1920s onwards, keeping alive the memory of Hungary’s greatness as part of an empire rather than a small, linguistically isolated, economically fragile, and politically vulnerable country. Trianon remains Hungary’s most ‘open wound’, a trauma that became a foundational myth for the modern nation (Gerner 2007, 79). The House of Terror’s historical gloss gives us this anodyne admission of post-First World War politics: ‘Territo-

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rial revision by peaceful means and the reinstatement of the historical Hungary became her focus’ (6).13 Buried in this narrative is a fundamental resentment towards the West, which forsook and punished Hungary after the First World War and would do so again after the Second World War, trading it off to the Soviet Union, and again in 1956, doing nothing to help a democratic uprising from being crushed by Soviet tanks.14 Distrust of the West is central to the Hungarian story, but you won’t find that said explicitly here, particularly given the memory demands of entry into the European Union, which Hungary was set to join in 2004. Harkening back to earlier empires or expressing a distrust of the West were dangerous indications for EU membership, and though the acknowledgement of the Holocaust was mandatory, how former eastern block countries choose to remember Communism was their own business.15 Not so buried in this resentment is the accusation that the Jews were responsible for Trianon, imposed on the country after the murderous rampage of Béla Kun and his Jewish Bolsheviks. There is little historical logic to the claim, but between the wars Hungary’s obsession with retrieving her territories was intricately bound with the question of what to do with her Jews, who now represented a much larger, wealthier and concentrated minority than in the former Empire. Nietzsche’s polemical framing of ressentiment as the basis for a discourse of morals and rights in his essay On the Genealogy of Morality, slightly reframed, proves useful here. The hypocrisy of the oppressor is 13 The House of Terror provides little interpretive material on the museum walls (and almost none in English), though it provides a historical gloss in the form of information sheets in English and Hungarian at the beginning of each thematic section. Collected, these form the historical narrative of the catalogue, published in English in 2008. All page numbers are from the catalogue. 14 In his memoirs, Cardinal Mindszenty is blunt about the failure of the West to intervene. ‘The solidarity of the Western World with my fighting nation was beyond all doubt and was expressed in magnificent words; but we are bitterly conscious that our cries for help met with no response or deeds . . . The two losers in the Hungarian struggle for freedom were on the one hand world communism, whose moral standing sank to a new low, and on the other hand the West and the United Nations, whose impotence was exposed. But the West was blind as well as impotent. (...) It took a sea of Hungarian blood to make the West aware to some degree of the nature of the Soviet system. But all efforts to elicit action from the West failed’ (1974, 215). 15 The editors of this volume, following Judt’s claim that ‘Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket’ (803), provide a good discussion of the centrality of the ‘reconstruction of a guilt-ridden past’ to pan-Europeanness. The House of Terror treads a fine line here, acknowledging the Hungarian Holocaust, but refusing any notion of collective guilt.

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the source of the moral goodness of the oppressed, yet the figure is one of his own creation: ‘imagine “the enemy” as conceived of by the man of ressentiment – and here we have his deed, his creation: he has conceptualized “the evil enemy,” “the evil one” and as a basic idea, to which he now thinks up a copy and counterpart, the “good one” – himself!’ (Nietzsche 2007, 22). Ressentiment needs this external other, ‘this essential orientation to the outside instead of back onto itself’ (Nietzsche 2007, 20). The slave mentality of envy and impotence that characterises the moral man in Nietzsche’s view is not necessarily helpful given that I am arguing for a certain manipulation of collective memory and hence political agency. What is potent in this provocation of resentment is the combination of moral righteousness, externalization and an unwillingness to come to terms with the past. As Avishai Margalit argues in the closing thoughts of his Ethics of Memory, successful forgiving is predicated on relinquishing the resentment that accompanies the memory of harm (2002, 208). The provocation of garden-variety resentment and a more moralistic ressentiment are the obvious markers of a politic that has no interest in accurate remembering or in reconciliation. Disavowal Disavowal of the domestic roots of both of these ‘occupations’ is key to the externalisation of evil that in the House of Terror becomes an intentional blur of fascism, communism, the West and Judaism. The room headed by the map of pre-1920 Hungary is divided down the middle with a free-standing partition, red on the side that faces us as we enter, ‘Communist Occupation’, black on the other, ‘Nazi Occupation’, flipping the historical sequence of the ‘double occupation’, oriented by emotional proximity. Heavy electronic music composed by Hungarian synth pop musician Ákos provides the soundtrack for the coming of the Red Menace, with video footage of the Red Army, the signing of the MolotovRibbentrop Pact, and military parades along Red Square embedded in the red wall. On the black side we see Hitler and rallies in Berlin, footage of deportations and photographs of Bergen-Belsen (to the same soundtrack). The catalogue tells us that Hungary was provoked, perhaps mistakenly, to declare war on the Soviet Union in 1941, only to find itself ‘caught in the crossfire’. ‘Allied with one another, and subsequently locked in a life-and-death battle, the two totalitarian dictatorships strove for a new order that had no place for an independent Hungary’.

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In the shadowy Arrow Cross room at the head of a long black table stands a stuffed figure meant to be Ferenc Szálasi, the Arrow Cross leader, with a picture of his face projected onto its blank nylon head. The room delivers a message of secrecy, but the Arrow Cross was not a clandestine organization.16 Voters were attracted to its ‘social programs, its anti-Semitic and nationalist demagoguery, as well as its radicalism’, the handout tells us, ‘Szálasi’s Hungarianist movement had grown into a significant political force after the introduction of the secret ballot. Without German help and support, however, it could have never become a potential governing factor’ (Schmidt 2008, 10). And yet, as the copy for a later room explains, ‘in the 1939 parliamentary elections the Arrow Cross became the second strongest party … supported by an electorate numbering close to one million (Schmidt 2008, 15). This exhibit has not worn well and Szálasi’s nylon is beginning to fray. ‘[T]he vengeance of the powerless man, assaults his opponent – naturally in effigy’ (Nietzsche 2007, 21). On the walls, monitors with ‘informative’ images, including ‘the deportation of the Hungarian Jewry’, the catalogue tells us. This spatial arrangement suggests the deportation of 600,000 and death of 400,000 Hungarian Jews suggests that the Szálasi’s Arrow Cross and not Horthy’s democratic government were responsible. The thousands of Jews and political resisters shot into the Danube by the ‘thugs’ of the Arrow Cross, are represented, movingly though obscurely, by a film-noir projection of ice-flows. Subjugation The dirty secrets and hidden collective memories of the next occupation begin without transition. From the domesticity of Szálasi’s table, we step into the vastness of the Gulag across a carpet map of Soviet forcedlabour camps, those in which Hungarians had been primarily imprisoned marked with striking, underlit, conical displays containing cups, cutlery, boots, clothing, religious objects, ‘relics, the original paraphernalia used by the detainees’ (Schmidt 2008, 13). The catalogue explains the history of the system of Soviet camps established in the 1920s and used to imprison enemies of the state, mainly from non-Russian zones. Counting Which, as Anne-Marie Losonczy cogently argues, is the dominant trope of postcommunist Hungarian memory and museology, and of the House of Terror in particular, clearly enunciated in the catalogue, which illustrates and validates historical truths, ‘by way of exposing a collective memory hidden until now’ (2006, 5). 16

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Hungarian soldiers who were ‘taken prisoner’, somewhere in the neighbourhood of ‘600-700 thousand former Hungarian citizens ended up in Soviet captivity’.17 Desperately in need of labour, though not more mouths to feed, the Soviets indiscriminately shipped Hungarians to Russia to work in the mines, the forests and the railways. The Gulag Archipelago became available (officially) in Hungary only in 1988 contributing to a new discussion of Hungarian victims. The extent of the Soviet Gulag is a relatively new history and its accounting is highly unstable. Here history and geography are expansive, the only place where the museum leaves its parochial focus. The rest of the museum organises itself, room by room, according to each mechanism of Communist humiliation and subjugation, the tropes of ressentiment beginning again and again in 1945 or just before. ‘Changing clothes’ is a room of lockers animated by the metallic sounds of clanging doors opening and closing; rotating in the middle are Hungarian Arrow Cross and Hungarian Communist Party uniforms, stitched backto-back. Video clips show how the ‘entire country changed from one warped regime to a new, just as warped, inhumane regime’ (Schmidt 2008, 15). Widespread denazification had its practical limits and the Communist Party needed whatever members it could recruit by whatever means to build its numbers, necessary in countries such as Hungary, purged of most of its Jews and its ethnic Germans, to maintain political, industrial and administrative offices (Judt 2005, 60). So what is the message of this room? We should remember Fascism and Communism were 17 In ‘Malenki Robot’ – Hungarian Forced Labourers in the Soviet Union (1944–1955)’, Tamaz Stark observes: ‘Since historiography has kept silent about the ‘malenki robot’ phenomenon in Hungary, the dark chronicle of Soviet occupation has mainly lived on and spread within families and as oral tradition. In the Hungarian territory occupied by the Red Army, armed men gathered people from the streets and took them away with the excuse of the removal of ruins. The expression ‘malenkaia rabota’ (a little work) was used to justify their actions and to offer reassurance. It indicated that there will be need for the work of the civilians, though for a short time only. Today, the expression, perceived as ‘malenki robot’ by the Hungarians, evokes memories of deportation to the Soviet Union and forced labour’ (Stark 2005, 155). Stark’s excellent archival research provides very precise numbers, but the overall tone, descriptors (though not outcomes) of this article are identical to any number I have read (and a few that I have written) on the deportations of the Hungarian Jews. At stake in the overall equation is the uniqueness of the Holocaust as an event of a special kind of brutality and hence, one that elevates its victims to a special moral status.

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two sides of the same coin and that the communists were former fascists, or fascists in hiding and that Communism’s ouster also flushed out those fascist tendencies. Here a historical truth is turned to a contemporary lie, a screen for the right-leaning political interests that sought to tar the post-89 socialist party with the feathers of the post-war fascists turned communists, a double slight-of-hand designed to distance Orbán and Fidesz from any association with either movement, even though, Orbán, a former a leader of the Young Communists, enacted a similar turn, this time from left to right. The accusation of fascism is a well-used cudgel in Hungary. The spectre of reactionary, counter-revolutionary or fascist elements was one the communist Party used to characterise any anti-communist activity, drawing a straight line between the White terror of 1919, which brought Horthy to power, to the Arrow Cross of 1944, whose primary enemies were the Bolsheviks, and to the ‘counter-revolution’ of 1956. The Whiteterror of 1919, according to the Council of the People’s Tribunal of the Supreme Court in 1957, ‘was the predecessor and harbinger of Hitler’s fascism and Szálasi’s reign of terror…’ (quoted in Rév 2005, 212). While Rév argues that this politically expedient narrative of fascist anti-communist continuity was a form of backshadowing, in the context of the machinations in the House of Terror, one can see the useful malleability of the accusation of Fascism as a deflection, now wielded against Communism. The imposition of communist rule was the greater occupation of the two totalitarian regimes, not only by the number of years of ‘occupation’, but also because it was more inimical to traditional Hungarianism. ‘The Fifties’, the room of the ‘darkest period of communism in Hungary’, is orchestrated by Soviet music so loud that it drowns out my headset. The hall is a series of voting booths in plush red, representing the end of Hungarian democracy, over which preside unnamed portraits of Lenin, Mátyás Rákosi (the General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party from 1946 to 1956) and Stalin, an open ‘Ballot Box’, lettered gold on red, lies in front of them. Democracy was briefly re-established after the War, with the majority of the country voting for the right-wing Smallholders Party. Over the next four years, the Communists bought, manipulated, stole and fabricated votes until by the spring of 1949, voters could vote only for a party slate. The party methods were insidious and backed by violence and purges. The hammer and sickle crown the party platform, symbols now outlawed outside the museum,

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along with those of Hungarian Nazism. A quote from Stalin follows on the wall of the ironically pastoral surveillance room, ‘Workaday Communism’: ‘Hungary must be punished in an exemplary fashion’ (1946). ‘Resistance’ is represented by three desks and three chairs: a plain, wooden kitchen set; a peasant hand-hewn table and chair, and a polished Victorian set, each with its appropriate light, everyday, anonymous and empty. Between 1945 and 1956 some fifty thousand people in more than fifty cases were tried for sedition; 400 were executed, these included war criminals and ‘enemies of the state’, a category for the politically brave or unlucky. Here the rhetoric is utterly heroic. ‘The brave ones, who defied the atrocious terror regime, were wiped out and buried in unmarked graves (…) We do not know the names of many of them, and the old lies still keep circulating about some of them. Yet they were true heroes’. What lies? Only those who remember will know. The sincerity of the room seems maudlin set against the heavy irony of most of what we have seen so far. The collapse of the historical narrative into assumed memories of rumours fills the emptiness of the space evoking the enemies of the state who were stripped of their identities, made to disappear entirely. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, the museum assumes that its visitors will bring truth and rumour to it, revivifying family history, old sorrows, old fears and fresh resentment. The moral goodness of these anonymous victims – which includes all of the war criminals – is unquestionable. For a visitor who does not have these memories or associations, the room is an empty, puzzling space that reinforces the overall impression of the House of Terror as a domestic museum addressed to an audience not in need of education – the mission of most museums – but of potent reminders, in which case, to what end? In his afterward to The Magic Lantern, his observations of ’89 in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague, Timothy Garton Ash suggests that Eastern Europe would have done well to establish a truth and reconciliation process; instead Orbán built the House of Terror. Down the back stairs, across the balcony in front of greyed-out windows looking down at the tank below, closer to the victim faces, we encounter in ‘Resettlement and Deportation’ a ‘ZIM’ automobile, ‘a frightening relic of the time’ (Schmidt 2008, 27), used to pick up ‘class aliens’ dispatching them to prison and forced labour. Shrouded in black scrim, the veil of night and the black window-curtains of the Party limousines, the interior of the car is illuminated by stage lighting and radio

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soundtrack that fades and brightens to reveal plush-red velvet seats on which rests the loathed icons of the hammer and sicle. The beauty and excesses of the car’s staging fights with the idea of terror that it is explicitly meant to convey. It concretises the memory of fear, of the ‘panic-bell’ rung in the middle of the night, but the interpretive text works backwards to blend all of the war and post-war deportations into one undifferentiated atrocity. ‘In the spring and summer of 1944, hundreds of thousands were deported from Hungary. The Tragedy of the Jews was followed by the local German population’s tragedy’. Between 1946 and 1948, some two hundred thousand ethnic Germans were expelled and mostly resettled in Allied-occupied Germany, those who had belonged to pro-Nazi Volksbund, but primarily, those ‘whose houses and lands were worth expropriating’ (Schmidt 2008, 27). Most of the terrorism of Communism is easy to link back to the physical building of Andrássy út including the ‘Torture Chamber’, the only room in the building that has been preserved in its original form, but the crimes against the countryside take more ingenuity. ‘Compulsory Deliveries’ is a narrow, twisting passageway of white blocks we are meant to understand as lard, symbolic of the exploitation of the Hungarian peasantry and the destruction of its traditional lifestyle and values under the guise of reparation payments and a planned economy. Intermittent white pigs symbolise the black market, saintly pigs really, resisting the Soviet-style system. From this claustrophobic maze, we move from the countryside back to the building, to the ÁVO entrance hall dominated by an official plaque with photographs of ‘the fist of the party’, ‘Our political investigation state security authority workers’.18 We are at the door of Gábor Péter (born Benjámin Eisenberger), head of the PRO, ÁVO and the ÁVH. A normal, if austere office is sliced in half by silver-grey-black paint that covers everything, half the desk, the floor, walls, ceilings, chairs. Small screens, in blue-grey noir, show ‘communists who at first were the regime’s leaders, later its prisoners and victims’ under the guise of anti-Zionism. Each room has a small emblematic plaque at the door, which is generally easy to miss, but Péter’s shows his figure rising out of a pair of scissors. An uneducated Jew, trained as a barber, the scissors 18 Members of the Police Main Command Political Department (PRO), the Hungarian State Police State Protection Department (ÁVO) and the State Protection Authority (ÁVH) chiefs-of-staff.

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symbolise this traditionally Jewish profession, Péter is, by metonymic extension, the body of ÁVH itself. Communism was widely regarded as a Jewish movement in Hungary, beginning with the murderous Bolshevik Béla Kun from whom Admiral Horthy had saved Hungary. But, Communism and the political police did become, after the Second World War, the vehicle through which the Jews enacted some measure of revenge. How we put this together with the earlier room of ‘Changing Clothes’, is up to us. The confusion grows, but the exhibit remains onmessage. Communism was taken up by Jews and fascists to enact retribution on ordinary Hungarians to the enrichment of the Soviet Union with the tacit agreement of the West. Amorality If the product of ressentiment is the moral man, then amorality is hallmark of the corrupt oppressor. Three rooms in particular evince this lesson. ‘Travesty of Justice’, The Hall of Propaganda and Daily Life’, and ‘Religion’. The papier maché room of Justice, one wall of dossiers (which are only false fronts) revealing a niche behind a hidden door with a plushred velvet chair, represents the show trials of the People’s Court, culminating in more than 35,000 prison sentences between 1945 and 1953. Rolled into this are war-crimes tribunals, but the most terrifying abuse of the judiciary came in the year after the 1956 revolution, when one hundred and fifty-two revolutionaries were executed. The second paper room, ‘the period’s absurd and ridiculous propaganda’, is a study in socialist realism and posed photographs, the happy face of the police state. This room is left to speak for itself, assuming that it will elicit guffaws and head-shakes supplied by the memory of the difference between daily life and appearances. ‘The mind-set suggested by the crudely garish posters was just as mendacious and miserable as the ideology behind it’, the catalogue reminds us (Schmidt 2008, 43). Dishonesty became an instituted social norm. Václav Havel observed that the crucial ‘line of conflict’ was not between people and state, but rather embodied in each individual ‘for everyone in his or her own way is both a victim and a supporter of the system’ (quoted in Ash 1990, 138). This truism is necessarily shunted aside in the name of establishing the moral goodness of the oppressed, most explicitly embodied in a buried Catholicism and the figure of Cardinal Mindszenty.

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‘Religion’ is illuminated by a room-length cross – the largest object in the museum – that lies exposed, under-lit, exhumed from just under the floorboards. A bank of loudspeakers at the far end blare propaganda from the ‘ungodly’ regimes that substituted the cult of personality and collective victimisation for God and individual sin and responsibility. The documentation of the persecution of the churches here and in the torture chamber and in the following room, dedicated to the memory of Cardinal Mindszenty, is the most extensive anywhere in the museum.19 Turning to Judaism, the narrative allows that the Catholic Church did not ‘gainsay the pre-war shameful Jewish Laws’, but that when the Jews were clearly in peril, came to their aid, and provides a list of names of ‘but a few shining examples’. The Communist crimes against religion in the name of ideologues who would replace God with the image of man, opens the door for a discussion of anti-Semitism that is worth quoting at length. After the persecution of the Jews, mass murders, deportations and the wave of emigration following the war, less than [a] hundred and fifty thousand (1.4%) persons professed to be Jewish in the census of 1949 [in contrast to the 70% who identified as Catholic]. Hungarian Jewry, which had traditionally regarded itself as Hungarian by nationality and Jewish by religion, had suffered racial discrimination and horrendous persecution. As a consequence, its dual affiliation loosened; because of that, and the promise of the establishment of a Jewish state, many of them became attracted to Zionism (…) In 1953, on Soviet demand and according to the Soviet recipe, preparations were initiated for a great Zionist show trial. It has to be noted that in the Soviet-type regimes free play was given to overt anti-Semitism under the slogan of ‘anti-Zionism’. For their own protection, party leaders frequently channelled the populace’s mounting despair and grudge against the terror organs in the direction of anti-Semitism. This was so, because a significant number of party leaders and members of its terrorist organizations (PRO, ÁVO, ÁVH, KATPOL, GRO) were of Jewish origin, who did not only disavow their God, but their country and their roots as well when they became the inhumane communist ideology’s toadies. (Schmidt 2008, 51)

19 The text explains the manner in which the Communists broke the leadership of the Church, supplanted compliant ‘peace-priests’, and subjected its followers to intimidation and interrogation, closing down many of the monastic orders, filling its jails with Catholic monks and nuns as well as Calvinists and Lutherans. The room dedicated to Cardinal Mindszenty, just a few video monitors, tells the story of the separation of Church and State, the end to compulsory religious education, the stripping of wealth and lands from the Catholic Church and Mindszenty’s life-time of resistance.

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Here at last we have the implicit message of the museum made absolutely explicit: post-war Communism was a corrupt regime, which took revenge on Catholic Hungary through willing toadies: Godless, ungrateful, inhumane, Jews, traitors to their faith and their country. According to Nietzsche, those who are bathed in ressentiment don’t want revenge per se, ‘but the victory of God, the just God, over the Godless’ (2007, 29). The House of Terror is as much about the resurgence of a Catholic Hungary as it is about any political system. Revelation and Revenge Visitors must now enter an elevator which takes four minutes to descend two floors to the basement where the exercise of terror, mostly thematic and ideological until now, is physically recreated in reconstituted prison cells. On the way down we are held captive to the testimony of a custodian who cleaned up after the secret hangings of political prisoners. He worked at another building entirely, but this museum is extensible as is the idea of Budapest’s secret underground itself. The cellars, the reconstructed subterranean prison, are the most Tussaud-like, complete with cells of various dimensions and purposes and six replica scaffolds with records of executions and rejected appeals for clemency. The names of the martyrs are announced over the loudspeakers. The dubious reconstruction of the cellars builds the pre-existing, powerfully phantasmatic idea of rumoured underground prisons. The truth of the brutality of both regimes, though by now we have forgotten about the Arrow Cross, lies in the reconstruction of the empty cellars that may or may not have existed. Here more than anywhere else in the museum, imaginative truth is deployed as present truth (Hein 2000, 62). As Hine argues, ‘commemorative exhibits are conceived less to impart information about events than to stimulate a corresponding feeling or experience in museum visitors’ (2000, 65). Thus, we might ask what kind of identificatory affirmation torture chambers and scaffolds invite. The answer is provided as we enter the final rooms. We see footage of Soviet Tanks withdrawing and a liberation speech by Viktor Orbán. On the opposite wall is the ‘victimizers gallery’, better known as the wall of shame, photographs of those associated with the worst of the communist abuses, irrespective of any charges having been brought against them. At the end of this hall-way room there is a space that visitors cannot enter, the ‘Hall of Tears’, a dark room filled with illuminated

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crosses, marking unmarked graves, some of which now bear the star of David as an afterthought. The House of Terror indicts the West and its unwillingness to bring Communism to account for its crimes, because, according to Maria Schmidt, if it did it might have ‘risked destroying its carefully built up self-image, and thereby the legitimacy of the Western democracies’ (quoted in Fuller 2002, np). More importantly, it intends to correct an historical imbalance by calling Communism to account, a moral mission the West didn’t have the stomach for. But this is a tricky balance, given that Hungary was on track to join the European Union in 2004 and thus, finally, the West itself. The House serves to fan a sense of being aggrieved, but also to divert public memory away from politically inconvenient (and still powerful) targets of Western Europe and the Allied administrators of the post-First World War and Second World War reparation treaties, towards powers that are no longer significant, Nazism and domestic Communism. Most disturbingly, however, it primes in visitors ressentiment, provoking feelings of fear, powerlessness, moral superiority and revenge against past regimes no longer in existence, a ressentiment that must find some satisfaction in the present, primarily in the resurrection of Catholicism, distrust of the left and antipathy towards Godless Jews. The Holocaust Memorial Centre: Melancholic Identification If the primary affect of the House of Terror is ressentiment – moral outrage and revenge – the affect of the Holocaust Centre is melancholy and shame. From the outside The Holocaust Documentation and Memorial Centre does not blend into its neighbourhood. Off the beaten track for tourists, on the west side of Pest, down a small street that cannot accommodate visitor parking or tour buses, the Museum seems designed to keep people out. Walled off from the neighbourhood around it on Páva Street, it is as defensive as the Terror House is aggressive. Beautiful, but hard angled and asymmetrical in contrast to the uniformity of the faded pastel and grey nineteenth-century apartments that surround it, the smooth yellow granite of the buttress walls is softened by the plants that spill from the top, alive, but on guard. As in any Jewish public building in Budapest, security is manifestly obvious. Close-circuit cameras are trained at every angle; heavy stainless steel doors open to a narrow entryway framed by a metal detector through which one must enter. Welcome

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to the memory of the Holocaust in Hungary, heavily guarded and at hard angles to Hungarian nationalism and national memory. While Budapest currently has the largest existent Jewish population in Eastern Europe, the rest of the country, from which the majority of Hungarian Jews were deported, has virtually no Jewish presence or memory, and so the museum seems misplaced as a marker for the deportations. Disconnected from the other Jewish attractions such as the Dohány Street Synagogue, and modest compared to the grandeur and location of the House of Terror, the Holocaust Centre was sidelined from the outset. Though state funded, some of the funding for this museum came from international sources.20 ‘It was a heinous crime that was committed by Hungarian people against Hungarian people’, said MSZP Prime Minister Péter Medgyessy, a former member of the Communist party, at the inauguration in 2004. It had 40,000 visitors the first year, but only 10,000 by 2008, a tenth of the attendance of The House of Terror. The Holocaust Centre was cautious given the context in which it emerged. Dedicated to the ‘memory of the victims of the Hungarian Holocaust’, and in contrast to the sudden occupations and spikes of emotion of the House of Terror, the Centre is designed to show the steady progression from the deprivation of rights to genocide. The underlying theme of the exhibits is the relationship between the state and its citizens, illustrated by ‘the suffering, persecutions and murder of those Hungarian citizens who were condemned to physical annihilation on the basis of racist ideology’, in this case, the Jews and Roma. The Centre presents this history as an irrational hatred, an inhuman, racist purge, though not without its economic benefits for the state and its citizens. But this is a relatively new framing of the Holocaust in Hungary. Immediate post-war political contingencies, and a wish to see themselves as allied with the victors rather than victims, the official voice of the Hungarian Jews cast them not as victims of racism, but as political resistors, as anti-fascists who paid dearly for their democratic ideals.21 As Rév 20 France, which donated $500,000 to the Memorial Centre, was represented at the opening by the then-Foreign Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, along with Israeli President Moshe Katsav and Hungarian-born U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos from California. 21 In 1946, the National Office of the Hungarian Israelites made this announcement: ‘It is a publicly known fact that the Hungarian and German fascists exceedingly humiliated the Hungarian Jews, robbed them of all their means of subsistence, and wiped out two thirds or perhaps three fourths of them with the sole justification that

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explains: ‘Those East Europeans who found themselves defenceless among the ruins left behind by the suddenly departed Communists, discovered the Holocaust and the construct of Fascism as anti-Semitism only after 1989’ (238 See also Cucu 2009, 129). In the ‘Communist reading of recent history, anti-Semitism and race hatred were just a mask on the face of Fascism that had nothing to do with its true nature. Race hatred and national and religious persecution in this interpretation are not the defining characteristics of Fascism, which is why it is so easy to incite hatred in the eastern half of Europe today’ (Rév 2005, 237). AntiSemitic discourse, quashed by racelessness under communism, resurfaced without shame. The cautionary tale that the museum would tell is not, as in the case of Yad Vashem or The Washington Holocaust Museum, or the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, a situation where those who visit know and believe the moral story already. For Hungarian Jews, it is crucial to remember that Hungarian ‘democracy’ is fully capable of whipping up the not-so-latent forces of antiSemitism embedded in Hungarian nationalism, while for Hungarians more generally the claim that ‘the Germans made us do it’, has served national memory well. The aim of the museum is intended to be broadly educational, aimed precisely at the hordes of high-school students who adore the House of Terror. But for them the message would be one of national and personal shame, a much harder affect to achieve than the colourful revenge of the House of Terror. Unlike the House of Terror, whose objects and images are powerfully emotive through a sense of widespread familiarity and distain, the Memorial Centre must evoke its absent subjects in the service of identification in order to create an experience of absence and loss. It is easier says Lazlo Csosz, the historian who is head of collections for the Centre, to remind people of being heroes and victims – everyone fought communism – than perpetrators and bystanders. The identification is melancholic, in the sense that it they were the enemies of Fascism and the spiritual ally of the democratic powers; that they wished and worked for the victory of the anti-Fascist Allied forces’ (quoted in Rév 2005, 224). Subsequently, under Communism, Nazism and Fascism, were understood as anti-Communist movements, whose interests lay in capitalism and fighting the Bolsheviks. Anti-Semitism, was, therefore, a by-product of imperialism and antiCommunism and not a sentiment, movement or consequence to be addressed on its own. That Stalin would provoke his own purges of Jewish members was another history that could be suppressed under the cloak of doctrinal secularism and enforced homogeneity.

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produces its objects, Jews, out of undifferentiated Hungarians. The loss is a loss of assimilation, of being othered and expelled by the body of the nation, but the object, the Hungarian of Israelite origins, was an imaginary object to begin with. Deprivation The narrative of the Centre is a cautionary tale about accelerating phases of deprivation, of rights, of property, of freedom, of human dignity and, finally, the deprivation of life itself. This continuity is not without complexity; under the proudly anti-Semitic Admiral Horthy, the lives of the majority of Hungarian Jews were not in direct jeopardy prior to 19 March 1944. The pervading sense of loss begins when one descends the stairs, part of the disorientation of the structure as a whole, designed by István Mányi, whose asymmetries symbolise the ‘distorted and twisted time of the Holocaust’. The exhibit is a series of rooms and corridors, all on one floor and swathed in semi-darkness, dramatic, oppressive and tedious. Sensory deprivation is the mode of the Holocaust Centre. Memory in this enactment takes place in the less-obvious recesses of consciousness rather than the onslaught of perception. Folk music, Roma or kleszmer – they are quite similar – plays softly; objects are suspended in conical rays of off-kilter, light-box time capsules: a book, a candlestick, a cup and saucer, a watch, a Torah cover, personal, but anonymous. Encased in plexiglas, these specimens are static, but the patina of time moves on as a green crust of oxidation creeps around their edges. These are not evidentiary objects; they do not prove anything, but instead evoke the affect of absence and abandonment. As Hine observes, that the object thus redirected from evidence, ‘valorizes emotive over cognitive meaning. It identifies the experiential with the empathic, and in calling for a reality of experience, it covertly gives priority to the evocation of feeling’ (2000, 79). These objects command a feeling of reverence for the relics of lost owners, exactly as the ‘relics’ of the victims of the Gulag do in the House of Terror, whose destruction must both be symbolised and personalised. Running horizontally along every wall are lines of light that create a visual echo of the vertical displays, emphasising the varying angles of the time capsules. Each line represents a life-line, shining until it ends abruptly. One might think of these as contrary synchronic and diachronic axes, where the objects are intended to bring the past and the present

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together into a synchronic relationship, while the horizontal lines, in effect, mark the end of time. As one follows the exhibit, the lines become fewer and fewer. Each extinguished lifeline contributes to the atmospheric darkness. It took me a while to realise that the lines had a life and death of their own. I saw slats in cattle-cars. Unlike the House of Terror, where the building itself is the most authentic part of the museum and the exhibits are made to speak its secrets, the Holocaust Centre was built without a consensus about the tasks of the building and its structure or what it would house. Csosz laments that the building was constructed without thought to the exhibition space prohibiting, for example, the display of a cattle wagon used to transport the Hungarian deportees to the concentration camps, a central exhibit of both the Washington Holocaust Memorial and Yad Vashem. Constrained by its space, the Memorial Centre must rely heavily on selection, symbolisation and story to create pathos, to feel pain and loss personally. Quiet fear and chronological demise are the organising sensations. Identification The stories of five representative families, four Jewish and one Roma (Gypsy) suture the exhibits into one continuous narrative. The Institution hopes that students get acquainted with Jewish families and lives and not see the victims of the Holocaust merely as a faceless crowd. Let them explore the buildings and institutions of Hungarian Jewry; let them look in to their everyday life, holidays, traditions and customs; let them become familiar with the experience and the achievements of the historical co-existence with the Gentile majority so that they can appreciate the destruction and horrible absence (Karsai, Kádár, and Vági 2006, 77).

The problem with this strategy is the double-edged nature of identification, to identify as such and to be identified as such. While the museum would humanise Jews and Roma for other Hungarians, it plays into these racial divisions, a legacy of post-Trianon politics.22 While the Holocaust 22 In 1920, Hungary passed the so-called Numerus Clausus law (repealed in 1928), a law that restricted university entrance by proportion of population. Widely understood as the first anti-Semitic law of modern Europe, a law that was designed to protect the economic interests of Hungarian Christians became a blue print for the shift from identifying Magyars of the Israelite faith, the vast majority of whom considered themselves Hungarians first, to a racial group – Zsidos: Jews. Later the distinctions became finer. ‘In a cynical but revealing statement regarding the Jews in Hungary, Horthy

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Centre would fight against the racism of the categories of Roma and Jew, invoking instead the notion of Hungarian citizenship, it has little choice but to use these racial categories in the context in which they were and continue to be deployed. The exhibition reflects this fundamental conflict between the history of assimilation and its manifest failure, the difference between Jewish Hungarians and Hungarian Jews. Each family’s story is narrated in a bank of five video monitors that recur strategically. Were one to take the time to listen to each, it would take many hours, slowing the visitors pace to long periods of immobility. The pace encourages melancholic contemplation, risking boredom, in contrast to the frenetic assaults of the House of Terror. Instability As visitors move into the next room of the exhibit, the sense of instability is produced by a building soundscape of mobility, walking boots, horse steps, marching armies: these are the interbellum years. The floor slopes down underneath our feet, and continues downhill for most of the exhibit, a technique borrowed from Yad Vashem, a kinaesthetic cue both literal and metaphoric meant to produce a feeling of decline, and, perhaps, in combination with the sound-track, uncertainty about in whose footsteps we follow. The second room shows us the road to the Holocaust in Hungary. Nothing is at right angles, indicative of capricious turns of fate and the impossibility of establishing absolute historical cause and effect. The museum resists a chronological presentation, organising itself according to every phase of deprivation and persecution, much of which took place well before the Germans invaded and the Arrow Cross came to power. This room should evoke the shame of a nation that embraced anti-Semitism before German National Socialism (see note 23). The walls and hanging room dividers are covered in propaganda, laws, texts, photographs and video projections. The effect is cumulative, overwhelming, but at the same time, not self-evident, particularly for non-Hungarian speakers. The flatness of the exhibit, in contrast to the stage prop remarked that the Galician Jews (a reference to non-assimilated Jews) could be done away with, but that the Jews who had been incorporated into the élite and those necessary for the economy should be protected. Between 1939 and 1941 a radicalization of antisemitic feelings led to laws being passed that separated Jew from Gentile, but this time explicitly using race as a criterion (Benziger 2005, 470).

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dimensionality of the House of Terror, contributes to the flatness of affect. Collaboration The complicated story of the third hall is the phase of plunder. Hungarian Jews had contributed significantly to the modernisation and industrialisation of Hungary, but had, in the process, amassed about 20% to 25% of the nation’s wealth, a success that generated resentment from the First World War onwards. The plunder of Jewish wealth, which many Christian Hungarians believed belonged to them anyway, benefited a great number of ordinary Hungarians before and after the German occupation. Pictures of synagogues piled high with expropriated goods cannot but convey a double message of privilege and dispossession; placards requisitioning Jewish property solidify the utterly quotidian quality of the expropriation. The exhibit tells us that almost every family got something and many families still own these things. One of the most unsettling facts is that anti-Semitism was more pronounced in 1945 than it was in 1944 because those Jews who returned wanted their property back. Of the family narratives we follow the most prominent is that of the Hatvany-Deutch, Chorin and Weiss families, an intermarried group of ‘upper-class capitalists’, who owned the largest industrial complex in Hungary, the Manfred-Weiss works, which supplied the army with everything from airplanes to ammunition. What the Memorial Centre plays down is that the Jewish industrialists represented by this family complex made huge profits from the War. Ambivalence is not a memory stain that anyone wants.23 In exchange for a twenty-five year transfer of the István Deák makes the point bluntly: In March 1944, at a time when most of the over three million Polish Jews were dead, 95 percent of the Hungarian Jews and thousands of Jewish refugees from abroad were alive, and the Jewish factory owners and bankers in Budapest derived immense profits from the manufacture of arms for the German and Hungarian armies. In fact, whenever Hitler pushed Horthy to take drastic measures against the Hungarian Jews, the latter replied that this would bring the collapse of the Hungarian war industry. No one likes to discuss this subject today, but it must be said here that the immediate interest of the Jews, namely survival, was not necessarily identical with the interest of the Allies, which was to defeat Germany, or with the interest of such satellite regimes as that of Hungary, for whom some resistance to German demands might conceivably have brought better treatment after the war (Deák, Gross, and Judt 2000, 58). 23

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company to the Third Reich, the majority of the members of these families were allowed to flee to Portugal. The integrity of the Centre with respect to the historical record and the manner in which it complicates any easy narrative of victimisation is laudable. At the same time, implicated in the revival of the discourse of historical and contemporary antiSemitism is another pre- and post-Communist distinction, that of class (Bodo 2010).24 The other family narratives are carefully chosen, based on available archival materials and testimony, to reflect a range of representative lives, urban, and rural, Orthodox (there are few images of the Hassidim), and secular, wealthy and middle-class, but nonetheless, all are merchants except for the Roma family of agricultural labourers. As we move into ghettoisation and deportation, ‘Deprived of Freedom’, the museum gets quieter and quieter. The footsteps fall more lightly, syncopated with the sound of heartbeats. It becomes hard to breath. Here we find detailed maps of the ghettos across the country, the train routes to the death camps, the German invasion, and the beginning of the deportations. Compare the historical summary of the Holocaust Centre: ‘The collaboration of the civil administration and law enforcement agencies was the engine of the Hungarian Holocaust (Karsai, Kádár, and Vági 2006, 30-31),25 with the passive phrasing of the same action in the House of Terror catalogue: ‘The new government handed over the countryside’s Jewish population to the Nazi’s murderous racial hatred (Schmidt 2008, 9). Here we have a crux of the conflict of memory in Hungary easily simplified (too easily simplified) into the distinction between passive occupation and active collaboration.26 The question of class runs deep in the fissure between the Centre and the House of Terror, as Csósz explained to me. With the demise of teaching as a respected profession in the country, teachers are increasingly poorer and conservative and these are the teachers who would never bring their students to the Centre. 25 ‘Eichmann himself had some twenty officers under him, his Kommando numbered fewer than 150 persons . . . the Hungarian authorities transported 437,000 Jews. … Horthy did not resign after the German occupation, practically legitimising the operation of the new government [which he appointed]’ (Karsai, Kádár, and Vági 2006, 30-31) 26 The House of Terror focuses on the Arrow Cross as a way of containing and deflecting the larger issue of the collaboration and complicity of the Hungarian Government. The Holocaust Memorial Centre does the opposite. The killings by the Arrow Cross are minimised as the aberrant actions of an out-of-control gang, and Szálasi is acknowledged as less eager for the deportations than Sztójay, appointed by Horthy, under whom the majority of deportations had taken place. 24

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Shock The deprivations end at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which opens to the larger picture of the destruction of the European Jewry. These well-worn images can still induce shock, but one of the most powerful exhibits of the gallery is about time. The rapidity of Hungarian deportations (437,000 people in seven weeks) has been reconstructed as the timeline of a transport on an arbitrary day, 26 May 1944, from the minute it arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau at 9:14 to 14:57 when the victims are spit out of the ovens as cadavers. Black and white photographs are brought partially to life with tinted yellow-stars and the colouring of particular places and people, for example, SS men, a Crematorium, Joseph Mengele. Colour has the affect of the present, black and white, the past. Unlike the House of Terror where colour is shocking in its vibrancy, here the wan washes intimate life, consciousness and death. Screens show overlapping pictures and maps, returning to Budapest at the end, close to home. We are again given the stories of the four Jewish and one Roma family, each ending with the survival of one or more family members, but the deaths of many more. The floor slopes up and we stumble back to life. Ambivalence The last two sections of the permanent exhibit deal with ‘Responses’ and ‘Liberation and Calling to Account’: responses of ‘Gentiles’, overwhelmingly indifferent except for a courageous few, the Churches, mostly incendiary, and the various Jewish dilemmas – controversies in hindsight – passivity, Zionism, the silence of the Jewish Council and the Kasztner train. The effort to strike a balance presents a more nuanced historical picture, but suggests also the ambivalence that was the source of much Jewish disavowal and disidentification after the War. The lights come up and the sound track is military. Again we see the capsules, but now without objects, evincing an empty liberation. The Russian victory, cast so terrifyingly across town, is here salvation. With absolute clarity one sees that the divided memories of Hungary began well before the War started and were probably most profoundly formed during the siege of Budapest and its immediate aftermath. The convictions of 27,000 people of war crimes by the people’s courts and the 146 executions between 1945 and 1948, seem entirely justified in this context, but The Holocaust Centre makes sure to end its discussion of the trials before 1950. Political memory is very much a question of how one segments time. The end of the

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exhibit nods to the rescuers, as much to provide something to balance the complete shame of rejection as to recognize the limited number of people and institutions that helped. So, we are left with the idea that Hungarians of Jewish descent, were, by the end of the War, without question, Jews, who lived and died at the hands of the Hungarians – which is exactly the opposite of what the museum wants to convey. The Roma, though also victims of the Holocaust, are included in the Centre, to some extent, as a way of buffering the isolation of the Jews. The story of the Bogdán-Kolompár Family who had settled in Bicsérd after decades of ‘wandering’, were also sent to Dachau in the end. But their story, so clearly of another ‘race’ and class, does not really temper the primary historical narrative of assimilation and expulsion and re-assimilation (in no small part through Communism) that is the through line of the Hungarian Jews. That the Roma are the most overtly persecuted group in Hungary today points even more profoundly at the difficulty of learning lessons from the memory of the Holocaust. Disidentification Exiting the exhibition we follow the ramp up to a beautifully reconstructed synagogue, one of the last built in Budapest (1923-24), designed by the ‘grandmaster of Jewish temple construction’, which had been used for welfare and poor kitchens (Frojimovics and Komoróczy 1999, 469). Its colours seem almost too blue, too gold; it too has the sheen of the hyperreal. The synagogue is used as additional space for exhibits and events. Beside it is a much smaller, active temple, which is supported by the museum and the community, but, appropriately, is not part of the museum itself as it is a manifestation of living culture. Harsányi estimates that 5,000-10,000 members pay tithes out of a population of approximately 100,000 of Jewish descent. So the synagogue itself, the final glorious, light-filled space of restoration is rather an empty signifier of the melancholic imagination of the community. That the history of the holocaust in Hungary has been so easily confined to the history of the Hungarian Jews (and Roma) leaves the loss one-sided and the object unsure. The mood and message of the Holocaust Centre is more ambivalent than the House of Terror. The melancholic loss is both that of belonging to the nation and of a group of people identified by their de-

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struction, an impossible incorporation that provokes a certain aggression towards both objects. Conclusions: Quality vs. Quantity of Affect While the museums together document a continuous history, realised in the liberty to remember afforded by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, both are built on the profound discontinuities and distortions of memory, severed at distinct temporal markers, for very different political reasons. When the House of Terror opened to criticism that only a tenth of its exhibition space was dedicated to Hungarian Fascism and the Holocaust, the defence was that the Holocaust Centre would address that episode in detail. Conveniently, the House of Terror holds to a Communist understanding of Fascism as a primarily anti-communist movement, and antiSemitism a by-product of the economics of war and ideology, rather than one driven by stereotypes and racism, a difference in the framing of Hungarian memory that explains a great deal about the affective strategies of each museum. Communism acts as a screen memory for the disavowal of the Holocaust, or its minimisation, while the construction of the memory of the Hungarian Holocaust must try and build a narrative of collective identity, where assimilation and Jewish diversity was the norm, avoiding the problem of the association of Jews with Communism. Charles Maier argues that the memory of Fascism is ‘hot’, more emotionally laden than the memory of Communism, muddied by post-totalitarianism, as was the Kádar regime.27 The memory of Fascism poses a more difficult question to bystanders, ‘not about whether we would have been fascists, but about whether we would have been anti-fascists; and the answer is often a disturbing “No”’ (Maier 2001, np), in contrast to the question of complicity with Communism where ‘[t]hose who did not collaborate do not feel the need to confess to themselves that they might have easily done so. After all, they lived under the regime, were tested, and remained uncorrupted’ (Maier 2001, np). Yet it is the House of Terror that delivers the dramatic blows of the double occupation, draw27 ‘Stalinist terror was stochastic – an atrocious guessing game – because no one could predict who would be the next to be ‘unmasked’ as a wrecker or a conspirator. Nazi terror, however, struck its victims according to their discernable qualities: above all, their ethnicity – long branded, in the case of Jews. Stochastic terror has the shorter half-life; targeted terror bequeaths hot memory (Maier 2001, np).

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ing crowds and offering moral rectitude, while the Holocaust Centre reaches fewer people and seems less affecting. Indeed, Claus Leggewie turns Maier’s characterisation on its head in that ‘the hot memory of eastern central European history is not the persecution of the Jews, it is primarily the consequences of the Soviet occupation, followed by the contribution to the Communist regime made by those states themselves’ (2006, np).28 Given the mildness of Communist memory immediately after 1989, one has to surmise that memorial temperatures have been inflamed, in part by the sublimation of a history of anti-Semitism into the memory of Communism. I think quality rather than intensity of affect might be a better way to understand the difference between staged memories of Communism and that of the Holocaust, ressentiment versus melancholia, though I suspect one would, on closer examination, find some overlap. Given that these two museums rely on identification and sensation to stage and disseminate constituent memories, it matters that I am the daughter of a deported Hungarian of Jewish origin. And yet, if these museums do nothing to dislodge that (dis)identification, then I cannot be one of the people who might help reconcile what seem to be impossibly absolute divisions of Hungarian memory. Hungary seems to be moving away from a nation interested in reconciliation to one that is reinforcing contrasting and divided memories, finding it easier to rehearse old scripts, aided in large part by the official memory organs, the solidifying of nationalist sentiment in the face of economic crisis, ethnic conflict and the restriction of the press29 – a toxic brew that has lead historically to the social tragedies that both museums would say are memories.30

28 See also ‘A Tour of the Battleground: The Seven Circles of Pan-European Memory’ (Leggewie 2008), and Heidemarie Uhl, who, similarly observes that ‘in postCommunist Eastern Europe, it is Communism that is the “hottest issue” of the politics of memory’ (2009, 59). Hedvig Turai is more ambivalent about this reversal given the irreverence of Communist kitsch, which would be an unimaginable breach of ‘etiquette’ with respect to the symbols of Fascism (2009, 99). 29 Hungary’s term as head of the EU council has been tainted by the controversy over the Hungarian Government’s attempt to limit the freedom of the Hungarian Press (Ekholm and Svärd-Yliehto). 30 According to Canadian Political Scientist, Andras Gollner, Hungary is slipping fast into a democracy at risk, a country whose uses of the past post-89 are blatantly instrumental, and a country in which public confidence in institutions is at the bottom of any country in the former eastern bloc (Gollner 2010).

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References Adam, Christopher. Save Hungary’s Archives | Preserve the Historical Archives of Hungarian State Security. http://hungarianarchives.com/. Ash, Timothy Garton. 1990. The magic lantern: the revolution of ’89 witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague. New York: Vintage Books. Assmann, A. 2007. ‘EUROPE: ACOMMUNITY OF MEMORY?’ GHI Bulletin, no. 40: 11-25. http://www.ghi-dc.org/index.php?option=com_ content&view=article&id=134&Itemid=100. Azaryahu, Maoz. 2003. ‘RePlacing Memory: the reorientation of Buchenwald’. Cultural Geographies 10 (1) (January 1): 1 -20. doi:10.1191/1474474003eu265oa. Beke, Laszlo. 1957. A student’s diary: Budapest, October 16-November 1, 1956. Trans. Leon Kossar and Ralph M. Zoltan. New York:Viking Press. Benziger, Karl. 2005. ‘The Trial of László Bárdossy. The Second World War and Factional Politics in Contemporary Hungary’. Journal of Contemporary History 40 (3) (July 1): 465-481. Bodo, Bela. 2010. ‘Hungarian Aristocracy and the White Terror’. Journal of Contemporary History 45 (4) (October 1): 703-724. Creet, Julia, and Andreas Kitzmann, eds. 2011. Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies. University of Toronto Press. Cucu, Alina-Sandra, and Florin Faje. 2009. ‘Remembering Death, Remembering Life: Two Social Memory Sites in Budapest’. Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia 1: 123-142. Deák, István, Jan Tomasz Gross, and Tony Judt. 2000. The politics of retribution in Europe: World War II and its aftermath. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Ekholm, Kai, and Tarja Svärd-Yliehto. The New Press and Media Act in Hungary. International Federation of Library Associations. http://www.ifla.org/ en/publications/the-new-press-and-media-act-in-hungary. Falk, John H. 2009. Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Frojimovics, Kinga, and Géza Komoróczy. 1999. Jewish Budapest: monuments, rites, history. Budapest: Central European University Press. Fuller, Thomas. 2002. ‘Stark History / Some see a stunt: Memory becomes battleground in Budapest’s House of Terror’. New York Times, August 2. Gerner, Kristian. 2007. Open Wounds? Trianon, the Holocaust and the Hungarian Trauma. In Collective Traumas: Memories of War and Conflict in 20th-Century Europe, eds. Conny Mithander, John Sundholm and Maria Holmgren Troy, 79-110. Brussel: P.I.E. - Peter Lang. Gollner, Andras. 2010. In Connected Understanding: Prospects for sustainable democracy in Hungary. Montreal, Canada, May 30. Harsányi, László. 2010. March 25. Hine, Hilde S. 2000. The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books.

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Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. New York: Penguin Press. Karsai, László, Gábor Kádár, and Zoltán Vági. 2006. From Deprivation of Rights to Genocide: To the Memory of the Victims of the Hungarian Holocaust. Budapest: Hungarian National Museum. Kertesz, Stephen. 1953. ‘The Expulsion of the Germans from Hungary: A Study in Postwar Diplomacy’. The Review of Politics 15 (2) (April 1): 179-208. Kiss, Tamás. 2003. Museum facade ruling. March 6. http://www.museumsecurity.org/03/030.html. Kovács, Eva. 2003. ‘The Cynical and the Ironical–Remembering Communism in Hungary’. Regio-Minorities, Politics, Society-English Edition (1): 155. Lamberti, Elena, and Vita Fortunati. 2009. Memories and Representations of War: The Case of World War I and World War II. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Leggewie, C. 2006. ‘Equally Criminal? Totalitarian Experience and European Memory’. Trans. Simon Garnett. Eurozine 15: 2006–06. Leggewie, C. 2008. ‘A Tour of the Battleground: The Seven Circles of PanEuropean Memory’. Social Research: An International Quarterly 75 (1): 217–234. Losonczy, Anne-Marie. 2006. ‘Deux figures muséales de la mémoire en Hongrie post-communiste (Muséification du passé récent entre deux régimes)’. Etudes balkaniques (2): 147. Maier, Charles S. 2001. Hot Memory/Cold Memory: The Political Half-Life of Fascism and Communism by Charles S. Maier - Project Syndicate. September 21. http://www.project-syndicate.org/ commentary/maier2/English. Margalit, Avishai. 2002. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Mark, James. 2005. ‘Remembering Rape: Divided Social Memory and the Red Army in Hungary 1944-1945’ Past & Present 188: 133-161. Mindszenty, Jo zsef. 1974. Memoirs. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Macmillan. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Keith Ansell-Pearson, ed, and Carol Diethe, trans. 2007. On the Genealogy of Morality. New York: Cambridge University Press. Palonen, E. 2009. ‘Political Polarisation and Populism in Contemporary Hungary’. Parliamentary Affairs 62 (2): 318. Rátz, Tamara. 2006. ‘Interpretation in the House of Terror, Budapest’. Cultural tourism in a changing world: politics, participation and (re) presentation: 244–56. Rév, István. 2005. Retroactive justice: prehistory of post-communism. Stanford University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, history, forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schmidt, Maria, ed. 2008. Terror Haza, Andrassy ut 60. = House of Terror, Andrassy ut 60. Trans. Ann Major. Budapest: Public Endowment for Research in Central and East-European History and Society. Szanto, Andras. 2003. ‘Terror on Andrássy Boulevard’. Print 57 (1): 41-47.

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Turai, H. 2009. ‘Past Unmastered: Hot and Cold Memory in Hungary’. Third Text 23 (1): 97. Uhl, Heidemarie. 2009. ‘Conflicting Cultures of Memory in Europe: New Borders between East and West?’ Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs III (3): 5972. Ungváry, Krisztián, John Lukacs, and Ladislaus Löb. 2006. The Siege of Budapest: One Hundred Days in World War II. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wodak, Ruth, and John E. Richardson. 2009. ‘On the politics of remembering (or not)’. Critical Discourse Studies 6 (4) (November): 231-235. doi:10.1080/17405900903180954.

EUROPEAN STUDIES 30 (2013): 63-95

INSTITUTIONAL ENTREPRENEURS OF A DIFFICULT PAST: THE ORGANISATION OF KNOWLEDGE REGIMES IN POST-SOVIET LITHUANIAN MUSEUMS

Eglė Rindzevičiūtė1 Abstract This chapter responds to recent critiques of the public uses of histories of the Holocaust and communist crimes in Lithuania by exploring the creation of the Museum of Genocide Victims and Vilna Gaon Jewish Museum in Vilnius. It has become a cliche to argue that Lithuanian public sector organisations, particularly museums, emphasise the terrible legacy of communist crimes and that they tend to forget and even actively avoid making public - information about the killings of Lithuania’s Jews. Participation of ethnic Lithuanians in the Holocaust, such critiques argue, is particularly obscured. This study provides empirical data which questions this view: it brings to attention the history of Vilna Gaon Jewish Museum, the existence of which has so far been overlooked by many scholars. In addition, this chapter suggests that in order to better understand the development of museum exhibitions about difficult periods in Lithuania’s past, the Holocaust and communist crimes, it is necessary to go beyond the prevailing theoretical framework which analyses museum exhibitions as representations. Given that museums are highly heterogeneous organisations, which function as a result of collaboration (but not necessarily consensus) among many different actors, it is useful to I am grateful to my informants for their time and help. I thank Peter Aronsson, Barbara Czarniawska, David Gaunt, Vytautas Petronis, Irina Sandomirskaja, Darius Staliūnas and the editors for their helpful comments and suggestions. The views expressed and any errors are the author’s only. 1

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Eglė Rindzevičiūtė study them as public knowledge regimes, a theoretical perspective developed by Michel Foucault and his followers. This Foucauldian approach is enriched with the organisational theory of ‘institutional entrepreneurs’, promoted by Paul DiMagio, which focuses particularly sharply on the potentially controversial role of individuals in creating and institutionalising organisations.

The killing of European Jews during the Second World War has become a key component of a shared European past (Judt 2005, 803). However, the unifying powers of the Holocaust have been questioned (Probst 2003). Commemoration of the Holocaust appears to compete with commemoration of other disasters in terms of both public attention and economic resources. Some argue that tension between public commemorations of communist terror and the Holocaust perpetuated the EastWest divide (Lebow, Kansteiner & Fogu 2006). The West was not interested in communist terror while Eastern Europeans failed to appropriately recognise, commemorate and disseminate knowledge about the Holocaust (Weiss-Wendt 2008; Banke 2004; Mark 2010a). In addition, Eastern European scholarly and public discourses often considered the Holocaust alongside the communist terror, a view that has remained controversial in both public and academic spheres (LaCapra 1996; Rosenbaum 1996; Snyder 2010). Lithuania, a country whose Jewish community was almost entirely destroyed in the Holocaust, appeared at the centre of these debates.2 The 2000s saw a growth in studies about Jewish history and the Holocaust in Lithuania.3 At the same time studies about the communist terror grew exponentially. Vigorous production of new histories and multiple public In all ca. 195,000-196,000 or 95% of the Jewish population were lost (Lietuva 1940-1990 2005, 222). In 1939 there were ca. 200,000 Jews in Lithuania; many more than in Estonia (5,000) or Latvia (93,000) (Misiunas and Taagepera 2006, 61). 3 During the last two decades so many studies have been published about the history of Lithuania’s Jews and the Holocaust that a full list would take up too much space; however, work by Solomonas Atamukas, Liudas Truska, Alfonsas Eidintas, Saulius Sužiedėlis, Christoph Dieckmann and Saulius Sužiedėlis, Darius Staliūnas, David Gaunt and Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė must be mentioned. Some studies (Eidintas 2003) were conceived as an explicit acknowledgement of the role of Lithuanians in the Holocaust. There are few studies about the institutionalisation of the Holocaust and the communist regime in the heritage sector, although new empirical work has recently been published (Čepaitienė 2005, Lankauskas 2006, Vitkus 2010, Mark 2010a). 2

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projects of commemoration suggest the formation of a new regime of public knowledge, which feature tensions, deep disagreements and even harsh confrontations. Challenging as it is, this process is also fascinating from the point of view of a contemporary historian as facing an opportunity to explore a mechanism of history-in-the-making. This chapter analyses the production of new public knowledge regimes evolving around arguably the most complicated subjects in Lithuania’s history, the Holocaust and communist crimes. According to Michel Foucault (1972), knowledge or truth regimes could be understood as complexes of rules, objects and organisations which enable the establishment of certain types of statements and judgments as truthful and valid and render other types of statements and judgments as not truthful and invalid. ‘Knowledge regimes’ are multiple and internally heterogeneous. They are constituted by scientific and non-scientific discourses, are assembled by various actors and rely on material structures (Jasanoff 2005). As Knorr-Cettina (1982) and Poovey (1998) demonstrated, natural sciences rather produce than discover facts by means of intellectual and material tools. History is not exempt from this mode of mediated production. Hence, analysis of public knowledge regimes about the past needs to study not only human actors, but also mediators: material settings, devices and organisational systems. The analysis of knowledge regimes may gain from approaching them in terms of ‘institutional entrepreneurship’, an approach developed in organisation sociology which uses the analytical language of actornetwork-theory. According to Paul DiMaggio (1988, 14), ‘new institutions arise when organized actors with sufficient resources see in them an opportunity to realize interests which they value highly’. An institutional entrepreneur, however, is not identical to an organisation builder: the former aims to enhance the status of the organisation in its environment, whereas the latter is engaged in the construction of a functioning organisation.4 Although an institutional entrepreneur may have a clear idea about their interests and even envision an organisation that will be a means to their fulfilment, their intentions may not be fully realised 4 I rely on Czarniawska’s (2009, 424) definition of an institution as ‘an (observable) pattern of collective action (social practice), justified by a correspondent norm’. An organisation is understood as a formal system of relations, which are designed to achieve a certain purpose. An organisation may or may not be perceived as institution, or an expression of a particular norm.

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(Czarniawska 2009). Institutional entrepreneurs may lack the organisational skills to deal with material reality, or technical structures which may become obstacles (Latour 2005). Organisation builders may lack of awareness of norms which justify practices in their sector and therefore fail as institutional entrepreneurs. I focus on the construction of two organisations, dedicated to research, commemoration and education about the Nazi genocide and communist terror: Vilna Gaon Jewish Museum (the Jewish Museum) and the Museum of Genocide Victims (the Genocide Museum) in Vilnius. Both museums can be regarded as landmarks in the overhaul of the Soviet version of the Nazi genocide and Lithuania’s incorporation into the Soviet Union. On 6 September 1989 the Lithuanian Supreme Council recreated the Jewish Museum (first established in 1944) in Vilnius. Three years later, the Museum of Victims of Genocide, dedicated first and foremost to the communist terror, was established. These two organisations developed in distinct ways, their relations to governmental policies were not straightforward and both struggled to get institutionalised. Why focus on museums? Museums, as Tony Bennett (2004) suggests, work as laboratories of history: they are used to collect, store, preserve, interpret and display objects and in this way to produce them as historical facts. Museum creators seek to assemble the past from significant items and to construct an explanatory narrative about them. Whereas professional historians communicate mainly through verbal texts, museum creators combine words with moving and stationary images, objects, buildings and even entire sites, both man-made and natural (Pearce 1992; Knell, Aronsson & Amundsen 2010). Well-established museums may be regarded as institutionalised organisations of knowledge regimes. However, professional historical narratives are not simply replicated by museums. This study highlights the importance of the internal rules of the cultural sector in shaping a particular type of public knowledge regime that is called ‘cultural memory’ (Kitzmann, Mithander & Sundholm 2005, 17). Traditionally meant to symbolise the power and glory of their founders, in the twentieth century many museums became dedicated to painful and shameful events. These museums of a difficult past inevitably deal with highly conflicting stories and their organisation is often far from simple. However, existing studies of Lithuanian museums dedicated to a

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difficult past draw on the assumption that museums are expressions of consensus, particularly the consensus of allegedly unitary ethnic-nationalist elites (Mark 2010a; Budryte 2004). In turn, the narratives that are disseminated through the museums are further attributed to macro actors, such as ‘national elites’, ‘the state’ or even ‘society’. As a result a scholar constructs a macro actor of an ethnic, nationalising state that broadcasts its official version of the history to the population. This chapter suggests that this linear model of the post-Soviet construction of public knowledge regimes is grossly oversimplified. On the contrary, this chapter shows that the production of museums does not entirely build on consensus among the involved actors. Here it is useful to turn to sociologists of organisations who observed that consensus is not at all necessary for cooperation (Weick 1969/1979, 89-118; Star & Griesemer 1989). Involved actors may have very divergent views; however, they manage to work together by engaging in acts of translation. Museums under construction rely on boundary objects, or items, which participate in multiple social and political worlds. It is these objects (buildings, sites, documents, artifacts) which are at the centre of translations. It is therefore paramount to explore in-depth the production of cultural organisations in order to understand the formation of ‘cultural memory’. My study is based on specially conducted interviews with museum workers and policy makers, analysis of the museums’ exhibitions, and secondary sources. Due to the limitations of space, this chapter does not contain an exhaustive analysis of the history of these museums; neither does it deal with the otherwise interesting reception of the museums’ exhibitions. It draws on interview material in order to gain useful insights into the construction of these new organisations. The findings testify to a greater complexity in the production and public dissemination of post-Soviet regimes of historical knowledge than is usually assumed by Western scholars (e.g. Weiss-Wendt 2008). The study reveals the role of local initiatives and the significance of entrepreneurship, questions linear models of governmental policy for public history and demonstrates the importance of the institutional logic of the cultural sector.

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The Collapse of State Socialism and Emergence of New Knowledge Regimes The secret Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the deportations of the local population to Siberia, and the killings that accompanied the ‘war after the war’, the fights against Soviet occupation in 1944-1952, and killings and repressions perpetrated by the KGB in the 1950s-1980s, were taboos in Soviet public discourse and even in private conversations (Misiunas and Taagepera 2006, 39-43). The years 1988-1990 marked an important turn in the public uses of history in Lithuania. Created on 3 June 1988 the Lithuanian Reconstruction Movement (Sąjūdis) undertook a wide-spanning revision of Lithuania’s history. A special commission, chaired by the composer Julius Juzeliūnas and the historian Mečys Laurinkus, was created to explore Stalinist crimes. One of the first deeds of this commission was the publication of documents regarding mass deportations.5 Commemoration of the losses of Lithuania’s population started before Lithuania regained its independence (1990) and before the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991). The first public commemoration of the beginning of mass deportations to Siberia was organised on 23 August 1987 (Black Ribbon day). A day of Mourning and Hope was nominated for 14 June to commemorate the first deportations to Siberia in 1940. In 1988 previously censored national dates and symbols were introduced into public knowledge: the interwar tricolour flag and the national anthem were reinstated, the national day (16 February 1918) was celebrated in spontaneous demonstrations. In 1989 the conclusion of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact (23 August) was marked by a live human chain which connected Vilnius with Tallinn (Misiunas and Taagepera 2006, 313-327). At the end of the year the Lithuanian Communist Party (LCP) separated from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. These projects of the public reclamation of knowledge of independent statehood were fed with stories about the suffering and death of the Lithuanian population. Time and again it was recalled in parliamentary debates that during the Second World War Lithuania lost about a third of its population, or 780,922 inhabitants, including Jews and those who

5 All in all between 1940 and 1952 about 135,500 inhabitants of Lithuania were deported, of whom about 32,000 were children (Grunskis 1996). Tarptautinė komisija nacių ir sovietinio okupacinių režimų nusikaltimams Lietuvoje tirti, Antrosios sovietinės okupacijos pirmasis etapas (1944-1953), 20 April 2005. Also: www.komisija.lt/ /body.php?&m=1176284239.

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escaped to the West between 1940 and 1952.6 These numbers, 95 per cent (of Lithuania’s Jews) and 30 per cent (of Lithuania’s inhabitants including Jews), commanded the attention of politicians and mobilised resources. Material infrastructure was developed: monuments, public commemoration events, education programmes, museums, exhibitions, community support programmes, and last but not least, financial compensation for victims or their relatives. In October 1994 the Fund for the Support of the Victims of the Genocide and Resistance of the Lithuanian Inhabitants was established.7 The President’s decree created a work group to ‘increase the coherence and harmoniousness of Lithuanian state policy in the area of the cultural heritage of the Jewish national minority, in solving the problems related to the genocide of Jews in Lithuania during the Second World War and in developing closer relations with the state of Israel’.8 Uncountable resources were also called into action, such as public pleas for forgiveness by heads of state. In 1995 the Lithuanian president Algirdas Brazauskas apologised in the Knesset: ‘I, the president of Lithuania, bow my head in the commemoration of more than 200,000 Lithuania’s Jews killed. I am asking for your forgiveness for those Lithuanians who mercilessly killed, shot, deported and robbed the Jews’.9 The apology (which was also made by the Prime Minister Šleževičius in 1994) was well received by the Israelis, although not by all the Lithuanian press (Lane 2001, 156). European and NATO integration played an important role in the formation of new public knowledge regimes, mainly by offering considerable financial resources and support networks for new research and education. A particularly significant international body was the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (ITF) established by the Swedish Prime Minister, Data source: www.genocid.lt. The list of victims, which the Fund supports both ‘materially and morally’, includes those who suffered for hiding individuals of Jewish and other ethnicities and victims of the genocide and their family members in general. Lietuvos gyventojų genocido ir rezistencijos aukų rėmimo fondo nuostatai, LR Government, 18 October 1994. 8 The group included the Parliament chancellor Neris Germanas, the head of the Lithuanian archives department Gediminas Ilgūnas and the historian Romas Misiūnas, at that time Lithuania’s Ambassador to Israel. 9 My translation – E.R. (Ramelienė 2010). In addition, in April 1994 Brazauskas delivered a speech at the Council of Europe, in which he acknowledged the responsibility of Lithuanians for the Holocaust. 6 7

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Göran Persson, in 1998.10 Lithuania has participated in the ITF since 2000 and became a member in 2002. In addition, in 1998, following an initiative by Rabbi Andrew Baker of the American-Jewish Committee, the President of Lithuania established an International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania (similar commissions were founded in Latvia and Estonia). ‘To sort out our difficult history’ was perceived as an important part of Lithuania’s integration in Western economic and security structures. As a high ranking diplomat put it, there was a consensus at the governmental level that Lithuania could not possibly be treated as a ‘normal state’ if it did not know its history (interview with diplomat Mantas, 2011).11 The Lithuanian government continued to invest both materially and symbolically in public awareness about its difficult past. The year 2011 was declared the Year to Commemorate the Lithuanian Inhabitants Who Became Victims of the Holocaust (with the emphasis on Jewish victims). This year was also declared to be the Year of the Defence of Freedom and Commemoration of the Great Losses (with the emphasis on communist terror).12 It is against this context of sustained governmental involvement in large collaborative schemes and publicity campaigns that the development of the analysed museums has to be understood. In this way since 1990 there has been a strong consensus at governmental level that the Holocaust and communist crimes needed to be explored, understood and that the public had to be educated about this difficult past. Translations of new narratives into the material settings of museums, unsurprisingly, entailed many modifications. This process of translation was not backed by any consensus among cultural operators, who were in charge of organisation building.

10 ITF is coordinated nationally by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The main clients of the ITF, however, are the ministries of culture and education and cultural organisations. 11 The Commission was headed by the politician and creator of the Jewish Museum Emanuelis Zingeris, and was dedicated to professional historical research, conducted by international teams. Research reports sought to establish consensus among Lithuanian, Israeli, German and other historians. My informants noted that the Commission sough to establish closure by finding a balanced and scientific interpretation of Lithuania’s difficult past. Interviews with Simas (2011); Mantas (2011). See http://www.komisija.lt/n/body.php?&m=1173522142. 12 LR Parliament decision no. XI-1017, Vilnius, 21 September 2010.

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Museums as Organisations A national museum is a particular type of museum which has evolved since the eighteenth century (Aronsson 2010): it is a public sector organisation that either holds a special administrative status in the state cultural sector and/or boasts a significant collection. According to the current official definition, in Lithuania a national museum is a museum based on an old collection of ‘national significance’. Upon their establishment, neither the Genocide nor the Jewish museums had a particularly old collection. The core of these museums had to be identified and assembled. In 2011 the Genocide Museum was classified as ‘an agency museum’ which belongs to the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania (GRRC), a state funded public organisation. Subordinated to the Ministry of Culture, the Jewish Museum holds the status of ‘a republican museum’. Both museums are subsidised from the government budget, but they also attract external funding. Since its establishment the Jewish Museum has been a larger and better funded organisation: the Jewish Museum was twice the size of the Genocide Museum, owned more real estate assets, employed more staff and received bigger state subsidies than the Genocide Museum.13 It therefore may seem that the Jewish Museum was perceived as a more important museum by the government, but also this may mean that the directors of the Jewish Museum were more skilful organisation builders who managed better to leverage the government funds. Just how important is the organisational form of museums in the work of public regimes of knowledge about the past? The museum as an organisation is already heavily invested with meaning as museums are formed around valuable things and, in turn, they confer value on things by acquiring them. However, the answer also depends on visitor num13 In 2006 the Jewish Museum employed a staff of 75 (with 25 trained museologists). The Genocide Museum employed a staff of 31 (with 5 trained museologists). However, the Genocide Museum receives scholarly support from GRR. In 2006 the Jewish Museum received an income of 1,904,480 Litas (896,850 Litas from renting venues). The income of the Genocide Museum was considerably smaller (1,575,949 Litas), but box office income (50,219 Litas) was five times bigger than the Jewish Museum (9,900 Litas). Therefore Mark (2010), who described ‘a small Jewish museum’ in the context of the prioritised and supposedly ‘large’ Genocide Museum, was not right to suggest that Jewish heritage in Lithuanian museums was actively suppressed by ‘Lithuanian nationalists’.

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bers: a museum which no one attends does not influence the public. There exist well-attended and economically successful museums of atrocities, pain and shame, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland and the Jewish Museum in Berlin (Logan & Reeves 2009). In Lithuania, the museums that attract most paying visitors are dedicated to fun and recreation. The most popular is the Lithuanian Sea Museum (an aquarium), which in 2006 exceeded both the Jewish and Genocide museums in terms of box office income (3,942,400 Litas), followed by the Trakai History Museum, a spectacular medieval castle (2,753,600 Litas).14 The popularity of Grūtas Park, a private museum of Soviet statues, that combines recreation, entertainment and an ironic take on the Soviet past was reflected in ticket sales (849,549 Litas).15 Only in 2009 did the Genocide Museum enter the ranks of the most popular museums in Lithuania: box office income grew to 2,005,800 Litas. It is curious that at the same time state subsidy decreased: the total income was only 2,179,495 Litas in 2009. The Jewish Museum lagged behind in terms of popularity: box office receipts were only 18,600 Litas (total income 2,375,000 Litas).16 Museums, of course, are not the most efficient organisational form of mass education. Although all museums perform a didactic function, their value lies elsewhere, in their work as laboratories of history (research, collection and publication) and in their pure existence as institutions or expressions of norms which are held to be important. I will go on to show how the construction of the Jewish Museum and the Genocide Museum placed greater emphasis on being laboratories of history and disregarded the importance of getting institutionalised within the cultural sector.

14 This data represents only paying visitors and does not show visitors who are entitled to free entrance. Unfortunately, there is no data available about total number of visitors. 15 Lietuvos muziejai, 3, 2007, 46, 49; Lietuvos muziejai, 4, 2007, 39-44. Grūtas park is located not in ‘a mosquito-infested drained swamp’, but on the edge of Druskininkai, a popular spa town which attracts large numbers of visitors all year-round. It is certainly not ‘a marginal space where the power of monumental objects could be deadened’, as Mark (2010a, 62, 84) has put it. 16 Data from the website of the LR Ministry of Culture, ‘2009 muzieju statistika’. www.muza.lt.

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The Jewish Museum As mentioned above, according to Lithuanian state cultural policy the character of the collection is the fundamental component that determines the administrative status of a museum. The Jewish Museum, unsurprisingly, constructs its genealogy through its collection. The collection is the heart of the organisational identity of a new museum. The 1989 founding act stressed that the Jewish Museum was not established, but re-established. The new organisation was constructed as an heir to pre-war organisations: the Yiddish studies institute (YIVO) and Jewish museums in Vilnius and Kaunas, and particularly their collections. The idea of establishing a Jewish museum in Vilnius was first voiced by a famous medical doctor, Tsemakh Shabad, in 1911. A few years later (1913 and 1919) the Friends of the Jewish Antiquity Society in Vilnius created an historical-ethnographic museum in Vilnius. When Poland occupied the Vilnius region the Society and the museum moved to Kaunas (1931). The owners and name of the museum changed several times, however, before the Second World War a sizeable collection of various things relating to the life of the Jewish community had been accumulated: works of fine art and religious manuscripts, songs and photographs, memoirs and handicrafts. When Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940, the Jewish museum, like most of museums in the country, was ‘nationalised’ or subordinated under Narkompros, the Peoples’ Commissariat of Enlightenment, and later under the newly established Academy of Science of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania (LSSR). The communist government closed YIVO in 1941; books in Hebrew were purged from public libraries (Lietuva 1940-1990 2005, 129-30). That a new Jewish museum in Vilnius was organised immediately after the Holocaust is the most striking moment in this story. Following the retreat of the Nazis and Soviet re-occupation in 1944 a museum was established in the former Vilnius ghetto. Its creators, who included Zelig Kalmanovich, Polish bibliographer Herman Kruk, and the famous poet Abraham Sutzkever, collected testimonies of Holocaust survivors and documents, particularly Nazi legislation about Jews. Under the auspices of Narkompros, the museum was headed by Shmaryahu Kaczerginski and was situated in the former library on Strašūno street. German war prisoners were used as help to install the displays. The exhibition consisted of two rooms. The first hall was dedicated to Nazi anti-Jewish

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policy, which was juxtaposed with documents of Jewish cultural life, such as posters, performance programmes, poems, drawings and photographs. The second hall was dedicated to the killing of Jews in Paneriai. One wall was covered with photographs which depicted the road which Jews had to walk to the killing site in Paneriai. Other walls featured photographs of the killings and images of the emptied ghetto. Besides documentary footage, objects from the killing site were also displayed (Kostanian 2001, 10-13). The organisers of the museum were aware of the strict ideological framework which regulated Soviet museums’ work: the Jewish tragedy jeopardised the Marxist-Leninist narrative about the advance of communism. Systematically recurring Soviet anti-Semitic policies formed an especially hostile environment. To embed the museum into the official Soviet cultural discourse, an exhibition dedicated to the Jewish writer Sholom Aleikhem, who was included in the Soviet literary cannon, was added (Kostanian 2001, 10-14). This did not help as its timing could hardly have been worse. After 1946 the Cold War intensified and the Soviet government introduced harsh measures against Western cultural influences. Soviet anti-Semitism, which was part of their anti-Western approach, further escalated with Stalin’s anti-Jewish campaign. In July 1949 the museum, which never opened to the public, was officially closed down. Although the collection was scattered, not everything was lost: the librarian Antanas Ulpys took care to save parts of the collection in several museums and archives. Particularly rare manuscripts were stored in the Books Palace (Bramson-Alpernienė 2009). The Soviet narrative of the Second World War emphasised the heroism of the Red Army in contrast to Nazi crimes (Weiner 2001; Young 2009; Gaunt 2010). Absorbed into the category of ‘peaceful Soviet citizens’, Jews were not mentioned as a group which experienced a particularly horrible fate.17 However, knowledge about the Holocaust was not entirely suppressed. Stories about saviours of Jews were published in the Soviet Lithuanian press from 1944 (Bendikaite 2010, 137). There were also some studies about the Holocaust published in Soviet Lithuania (e.g. Kaunas ghetto and its fighters 1969). The 1960s saw the publication of memoirs of Holocaust survivors. Targeted at school children, these books 17 The post-war period saw a gravely flawed process in which only about 1,300 killers of Jews were sentenced in 1945-1965 (Geleževičius 41, cf Vitkus 296; Anušauskas and Zingeris 2008).

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were written in stiff prose and carefully observed the rules of the Soviet representation of the Second World War. Jews, the stories went, were killed by beastly Nazi Germans, and those who were lucky to survive were saved by generous and caring Soviet soldiers (Rolnikaitė 1963). To be sure, it is hard to estimate how widely such literature was read. A more significant contribution was made by the writer Balys Sruoga (1896-1947), who was imprisoned in Stutthof death camp. Having survived the camp, Sruoga returned to Vilnius in May 1945 and immediately wrote a memoir Dievų miškas (The Forest of Gods), which strikingly resembles Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (1946). Sruoga depicted the death camp’s reality as surreal and sometimes comic, ruled by inhuman laws of survival. Devoid of any glorification of the war experience, the book was first withheld by the censors, but was published posthumously in 1957. As it was reprinted six times (every five years) and was part of school reading lists, The Forest of Gods undoubtedly contributed to public knowledge about the Nazi death camps, which stood in a stark contrast to heroic Soviet narratives of the War. This book, however, attributed mass killings to the Nazis. The same approach was implemented in the Soviet treatment of mass murder sites, the Ninth Fort in Kaunas and Paneriai/Ponary near Vilnius. Completed in 1913, the Ninth Fort served as a prison for many organisations before it was used as the only death camp in Lithuania.18 The Ninth Fort was established as a state museum in 1958 and its first exhibition about Nazi crimes was opened in 1959. In 1960 examinations of the killing site started. In 1984 an imposing 32-meter tall sculpture by Antanas Ambraziūnas was erected and a new exhibition pavilion was

18 The Ninth Fort was one of the earliest death camps: fourteen pits for mass graves were dug as early as October 1941. About 30,000 of Kaunas’s Jews, and Jews who were brought from other countries, were buried alongside about 15,000 other prisoners (Ben-Naftali 2004, 380). The killing was carried out by the German command, Lithuanian police battalions and the Ninth Fort’s permanent garrison, which mainly consisted of Lithuanians. For more about the Holocaust in Kaunas city and surrounding area see Bubnys (2004, 286-293) and Waldemar Ginsberg’s memoir (1998). Kaunas and Vilnius ghettoes and the participation of Lithuanians in the killings are described in Lietuva 1940-1990 (2005, 201-222). For a good overview about Lithuanian’ attitudes to Jews during the interwar period and the build up to the Holocaust see Yitzhak Arad (1976); Saulius Sužiedėlis (2004); Alvydas Nikžentaitis, Stefan Schreiner & Darius Staliūnas (2004).

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built.19 Paneriai killing site, situated in a forest near Vilnius, was marked with a monument to Nazi victims as early as 1948, shortly before the Jewish Museum with its exhibition about Paneriai was shut down (1949). Later, in 1960, Paneriai saw the opening of a small museum, an effort of local history researchers, which became a branch of the Vilnius-based Museum of Revolution. The wooden building of the Paneriai museum burned down in 1983. In 1985 a new building was built and the site was somewhat tidied up. Memorial gravestones continued to bear inscriptions about Soviet citizens only. Although the Second World War was paramount in Soviet ideology, the dedicated memorial sites were not perceived as particularly valuable heritage by Soviet Lithuanian cultural policy makers. Numerous memoirs, recently published by high Soviet Lithuanian cultural policy officials, mention victims’ memorials only in passing (Jakelaitis 2002, 6; Šepetys 2005). Focused on fine arts and open-air ethnographic museums, opera and drama theatres and medieval heritage reconstructions, neither did the Soviet Lithuanian administrators engage with the Jewish cultural legacy nor with the Holocaust. Paneriai became home to a military garrison; a railway track was built on the massacre site. The Jewish ghetto in Vilnius was not commemorated in any way. Synagogues fell into disrepair as they were used as storage buildings; most painfully, the remains of Vilna Great Synagogue were destroyed in the 1950s. Jewish cemeteries vanished in overgrown grass; gravestones were used in pavements and masonry, most infamously to construct the steps to Tauras hill in Vilnius. Post-Soviet Revisions Soviet historiography sometimes described the ‘local population’ or ‘Jewish Zionists’ as perpetrators (Staliūnas 2010, 125-7), yet the typical Soviet narrative portrayed Lithuanians as passive actors, victims of the Nazi regime. A similar approach was held by Lithuanian historians in exile who, however, blamed Sovietisation itself for the Holocaust: ‘the Soviet destruction of national elites had eliminated one element of social control over the most primitive segments of the population’ (Misiunas and On my first visit to the Ninth Fort (as a Soviet school pupil) in the 1980s I was frightened to enter as the gate was guarded by a life-size figure of a Nazi soldier. The point could not been made more clearly: it was Nazi fascists who were to blame for what happened at the Ninth Fort. 19

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Taagepera 2006, 61). Lithuania’s Jews were not commemorated in the gatherings of émigré Lithuanians (Vitkus 2010, 290).20 However, even before Lithuania’s separation from the Soviet Union there emerged public awareness that the Soviet version of the Holocaust had to be revised. New legislation, publications and exhibitions became dedicated to the Holocaust, spelled out the role of Lithuanians in the Jewish disaster and sought to make this knowledge available to the public. The suppressed story of Lithuania’s Jews returned to public life as part of the widely-ranging national liberation movement. The cultural revival of the Jewish community took place before the political system of the LSSR was overhauled. The establishment of a new, freely elected government, headed by Vytautas Landsbergis, who, according to several informants, was personally concerned about the fate of Lithuania’s Jews, might have helped. In addition, verbatim reports of parliamentary debates reveal that the first freely elected Lithuanian government and Parliament agreed about the need to address and take responsibility for the Holocaust.21 In May 1990, one month after the declaration of independence, the LR Supreme Council made a statement containing an apology to Jews killed during the Nazi occupation and pointing out that ethnic Lithuanians were among the killers.22 Further, the statement promised 20 Even the recent account of Baltic nationalisms by Dovile Budryte (2005) omitted the Holocaust when describing population changes during the Second World War. That Budryte addressed the Holocaust only in the last chapter dedicated to the use of genocide in the construction of post-Soviet ‘collective memory’, reveals the persistent bias in theorising Baltic or Lithuanian nationalisms as structurally separate from the history of Jews. 21 ‘Your pain is my pain for the loss of so many innocent lives, for the reason that so many of my fellow nationals participated in the killings, and also because the Lithuanian nation, which lost its statehood and was repeatedly occupied in 1940-1941, did not manage to decrease the Jewish genocide or to mount effective resistance to it. It is the most tragical and painful part of the history that both you and me share’. Vytautas Landsbergis, ‘Izraelis, Jeruzalė. Izraelio Kneseto pirmininkui Gerb. Ponui Dovui Šilanskiui’, 26 June 1990. Landsbergis promised to inscribe the Jewish victims in the Soviet built memorial site at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas. 22 ‘Dėl žydų tautos genocido Lietuvoje hitlerinės okupacijos metais’, Vilnius, 8 May 1990. A member of parliament explicitly described Lithuanian perpetrators in his statement: ‘The Jewish community suffered most during Hitler’s occupation and it is very unfortunate and very sad that many of our nationals due to their stupidity, naiveness, being seduced or seeking for revenge assisted the Hitlerians, German fascists in the extermination of Jews in the territory of Lithuania. And not only in the territory of Lithuania. Of course, part of the nation, honour to them, protected Jews under those harsh conditions, guarded their children. (...) However, no one has yet issued a statement of repentance in the name of all of us, in the name of Lithuania, in the name of

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that the Lithuanian state would ‘take care of commemoration of victims of the Jewish genocide’ and that any expressions of anti-Semitism would not be tolerated (it was controversially received by the international community). In October 1990 the LR Government declared 23 September as a day to commemorate the Jewish genocide. Decisions to tidy up cemeteries and burials of the victims of the Jewish genocide, to mark the Jewish heritage and to remove Jewish gravestones used in masonry constructions, were taken in June and August 1991. A commission for awarding individuals who saved Jews the Cross of Saving of the Dying was founded in November 1991. First initiatives to restore the Jewish heritage were taken by surviving members of the Jewish community, but some Lithuanians were also actively involved. Probably the most distinctive figure was the cultural geographer Česlovas Kudaba (1934-1993), the head of a newly established Lithuanian branch of the Soviet Culture Fund (1987). According to his colleagues, Kudaba actively encouraged representatives of ethnic minorities to organise themselves into cultural societies.23 In 1987 a group of supporters of Jewish culture was formed under the auspices of the newly established Culture Fund. On this basis the Lithuanian Jewish Cultural Association (renamed the Lithuanian Jewish Community in 1991) was established to be headed by the philologist Emanuelis Zingeris in 1988. On 25 September 1988 a march took place to commemorate the extermination of the Vilnius ghetto. In their interviews the organisers of the Vilna Gaon Jewish Museum traced the idea of this museum back to the early 1980s. According to Markas Zingeris and Emanuelis Zingeris, it was the discovery of the literary heritage of the Lithuanian Jewish community banished by the Soviets that led them to think of establishing a museum. Emanuelis Zingeris organised an exhibition of Jewish literary culture in Vilnius University as early as 1983. However, the exhibition never opened and the KGB interrogated the staff of the philology department. In 1984 Markas Zingeris published a poetry book Namas iš kedro (A Cedar House) which featured many references to Jewish cultural heritage. Some of these poems were translated into Russian and Yiddish and, according

the Lithuanian nation.’ 23 Interviews with the Lithuanian Jewish cultural operator Rūta (2011) and the Jewish Museum employee Vytas (2011).

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to its author, consciously sought to revive the vanished world of Lithuania’s Jews.24 In 1988 a large exhibition The Art of Lithuania’s Jews: 17th – 20th Centuries was organised by Emanuelis Zingeris. A collaboration of the LSSR Art Museum (LAM), the Lithuanian Fund of Culture and the Lithuanian Jewish Society for Culture, the exhibition was opened at LAM in Kaunas and at the City Hall in Vilnius. The first public assembling of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union, The Art of Lithuania’s Jews attracted visitors from other Soviet republics and the West, for example, the Litvak painter Nehemiia Arbit-Blat came from New York. The importance of bringing the Jewish legacy to the public signalled a radical change in the Soviet regime of knowledge: the opening was attended by members of the LSSR Central Committee but not by the Minister of Culture (Šepetys 2005); national television produced and broadcast a film about the exhibition.25 The vanished lives of Jews and surviving members of the Jewish community were assembled and staged in public. The momentum created by the exhibition was not wasted: in 1989 the Jewish Museum was re-established by the LSSR Supreme Council and Emanuelis Zingeris was appointed director.26 In the early 1990s the recently reformed Ministry of Culture and Education abolished direct management of state cultural organisations (Rindzevičiūtė 2009). The museum’s director had a lot of room to manoeuvre when constructing this new organisation. These manoeuvres, however, were constrained by the disastrous economic situation. In the early 1990s Lithuania’s economy declined more severely than the US economy during the Great Depression. In 1993-1994 inflation rates reached 231% (Grennes 1997, 10). Soviet museum workers were never well paid, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union the economic situation of the cultural sector looked particularly grim. In 1989 the average salary of a museum worker was 111-113 roubles per month, just above a state pension in 1989 (Jokubaitis & Klimavičius 1991, 151-156; ‘Kada kultūra...’ 1989, 4). In 1993, when market prices were introduced, an average museum worker’s salary was 103 Litas or 25 USD. Given that the existing Lithuanian muInterviews with Emanuelis Zingeris (2011) and Markas Zingeris (2010). Interview with former museum employee Tomas (2011). 26 The LR government decision (13 February 1991) explicitly stated that the creation of the State Jewish Museum was the re-establishment of the Jewish Museum of 1944. 24 25

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seums were in economic trouble, the builders of a new museum faced an especially tough challenge. From the beginning the Jewish Museum to a large extent relied on volunteer work. Being interested in literature, the director prioritised engagement with the surviving Jewish community, the collection of literary heritage and documentation of the Holocaust. According to interviews with the museum’s workers, the team was created from the few surviving members of Jewish community who could read Yiddish. Another museum worker recalled envisioning the Jewish Museum as a statement about Europeanness and the modernity of Litvak Jewish art and literature.27 Emanuelis Zingeris, however, was only employed as the director for 1989-1990. From 1990 to 2000, being a full-time politician, Emanuelis Zingeris continued to do volunteer work as the museum’s director and then was again employed as the director for 2000-2004. In 2004 Emanuelis Zingeris was replaced by his brother Markas Zingeris. The development of the Jewish Museum was strongly influenced by these two individual organisation builders. Graduates in Lithuanian philology, both of them were keenly interested in literature and theatre. Besides its focus on modernist Jewish art, the museum cultivated its profile as a cultural centre which involved both the local and the international Jewish community. It was both the interests of the organisation builders and the material resources available which formed the character of the Jewish Museum. A building is always crucially important for a museum. The early 1990s was not only the time of liberation of suppressed knowledge about the past, but also the time of restitution of real estate. In 1990 many museums of revolution and atheism were closed down.28 The Jewish Museum inherited its material structures from the Museum of Revolution: the Paneriai memorial museum and a green-painted wooden house, which held exhibitions about the LCP Central Committee (Kostanian

27 Interviews with museum employee Lina (2011) and former museum employee Tomas (2011). 28 Many atheism museums were installed in churches, which were to be returned to the Catholic Church. Some Jewish religious objects were preserved in such museums of atheism. The closing of the Museum of Revolution, a high ministry official recalled, was particularly difficult, because its director was part of the state security apparatus. Interview with heritage sector worker Marius (2011).

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2001, 16).29 The latter building was soon nicknamed as ‘the Green House’. Located on edge of the Old Town, the Green House was to become home to the Holocaust exhibition. The first exhibition that focused on the killings in Paneriai and other places opened in 1990.30 Besides the Green House and Paneriai museum, the Jewish Museum received two other buildings. A building that housed a Jewish cultural centre in the interwar period was dedicated to the Tolerance Centre (TC, 2001). Another building on Pylimas street was used for the administration and repository. Large parts of the TC and Pylimas buildings were rented out to Jewish organisations and to the European Commission. This decision proved to be vital for the Jewish Museum as it was a good source of income, but it jeopardised the museum’s administrators in the eyes of other cultural sector workers who saw this as a missed opportunity to install larger exhibitions (Interview with Marius 2011). From the very beginning the Jewish Museum developed as a state cultural organisation which, according to a high official of the Ministry of Culture, was typical of the 1990s.31 The Museum had several branches and eventually created even more (the Jacques Lipschitz gallery). Amateurs played an important role in the formation of this new museum. Holocaust survivors were invited or came forward to help in the production of the Holocaust exhibition and to work as tour guides, such as Rachilė Margolis, who was a prisoner in the Vilnius ghetto and later a partisan (Kostanian 2001, 14-16). Amateurism was not only a resource, but also an obstacle in the institutionalisation of the Jewish Museum in the existing environment of other museums. When interviewed, cultural operators complained that the Jewish Museum did not benefit as much as it could have done from consultations with more experienced museum workers. The informants described the exhibition displays and repository of the Jewish Museum as substandard according to their own professional criteria. These heritage professionals emphasised both a lack of things on display, which they saw as the core of any museum, and the low quality of the architecture 29 For a brief moment the Jewish Museum was also in charge of the main building itself. Later this building was refurbished and opened as the National Art Gallery in 2009. 30 In Paneriai two monuments for Jews were built in 1990-1991, as well as a monument for murdered Poles (1989) and Lithuanians (1993). All of them were funded by private donors. 31 Interview with an employee of the Ministry of Culture, Saulius (2011).

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of display. In turn, Jewish Museum workers also regretted the lack of display materials: they complained that artifacts which could be part of the collection and display were confiscated by the Nazis and the rest got scattered or lost during the Soviet occupation. On the other hand, Jewish Museum workers expressed their pride in the written documents which this museum had collected (manuscripts, oral history testimonies) or produced in publications.32 They clearly did not identify their organisation with the collection and display of objects. The way in which the Jewish Museum dealt with its material structure and things became an obstacle for recognition of its status as a ‘proper museum’. The renovation of the building was high on the agenda of the museum’s director, but the buildings were little adjusted to housing and displaying collections. The Green House had five small halls, but the TC, being previously home to a flourishing theatre company, was dominated by a performance stage. The exhibition halls appeared to be additional in relation to the stage and inadequate to display a large amount of objects. Indeed, it is texts and images which abound at the Jewish Museum’s exhibitions. A visit to the Jewish Museum, as a result, is an experience similar to reading a book. Exhibitions at the Jewish Museum Current exhibitions at the Jewish Museum were reorganised or newly installed in 2009-2010. In the 1990s meagre state subsidies barely sufficed for salaries and the maintenance of buildings. All permanent exhibitions, therefore, were funded from additional national and international sources, so numerous that there is not enough space to list them here. The most important and fully-fledged exhibition about the killing of the Lithuanian Jews is situated in the Green House. Although located a stone’s throw from the Old Town, the building is hard to see from Pylimas street, a main avenue used by drivers to by-pass the city centre.33 One does not stumble into the Green House purely by chance. The door to the museum is locked and visitors have to ring a bell to be admitted. The exhibition display is principally a poster exhibition, although it also contains some impressive artifacts, for example, a whetstone made from a Jewish gravestone. Funded principally by Israeli and US organisaInterviews with Jewish Museum employees Tomas (2011) and Lina (2011). New direction signs to the Jewish Museum were recently installed by the Vilnius municipality. 32

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tions in the 2000s, the exhibition starts with an overview of the history of Lithuania’s Jews and proceeds to further halls dedicated to the Holocaust. The narrative of the Holocaust exhibition does not stop at the end of the Second World War: the visitor is informed that ‘the Nazi policy of the extermination of Jews was replaced with the Stalinist policy of spiritual extermination’. If Lithuanian perpetrators were named in the displays of the Nazi period, the efforts of the Soviet regime to restrict the life of Jews and erase the memory of the Holocaust were not attributed to particular individuals. The exhibition highlights the fact that the rebirth of Jewish cultural life and public uses of knowledge about their painful past started only during the Lithuanian national revival. The Holocaust exhibition is therefore integrated into the Lithuanian narrative of Soviet suppression and liberating nationalism. The Holocaust is also exhibited at the Tolerance Centre (TC), which is located at the interwar building of the Jewish cultural centre and situated about ten minutes walking distance from the Green House. The TC features a special exhibition, ‘The Rescued Child Tells about the Shoah’, which is dedicated to the people who saved Jews. Organised in cooperation with TFI, the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture, Vilnius-the European Capital of Culture (2009), the Claims Conference and private donors, this exhibition was curated by Danutė Selčinskaja of the Jewish Museum. ‘The Rescued Child’ was inspired by the Yad Vashem museum in Israel and based on stories and materials provided by about 100 persons. The architecture of the exhibition unfolds like a Borgesian library of life stories. The displays, upright printed posters and texts in horizontal drawers, are installed in twisted corridors which lead the visitor through the geography and chronology of the Holocaust in Lithuania. The narrow space enhances the visitor’s sensations, which range between feelings of claustrophobia and intimacy. Before entering the exhibition, the visitor is encouraged to pick up a smooth rounded stone to leave at the end of the route, which concludes in a tiny but tall chamber, which resembles the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem. The walls of the chamber are decorated by hundreds of black and white photographs of children; their faces light up when the visitor places the stone on a dedicated shelf. Striking as it is, ‘The Rescued Child’ does not contain objects, only printed texts and images (both moving and still). Finally, the Holocaust is presented in another poster exhibition ‘Jewish Life in Lithuania’, the production of which was initiated by the Anne

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Frank House in the Netherlands. This display was created as a travelling exhibition for school children and later installed in one of TC’s corridors. As the corridor was too short, some free standing posters seem ‘hidden away’ from the visitor. Unfortunately, one of these ‘hidden’ posters concerns information about the participation of Lithuanians in the killing of Jews. Nevertheless, the content of the posters makes explicit the importance of Jews in Lithuania’s history and the role of ethnic Lithuanians in the Holocaust. In this exhibition Jews were inscribed in the traditional narrative of Lithuania’s history which emphasised the power of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the fear of Poland, the struggle for a nation-state. On the other hand, the exhibition sought to describe Lithuania’s Jews through the category of civic citizenship, which was not limited to ethnic belonging. A poster ‘The Nazi occupation, 1941-1944’ acknowledged that equation of Jews with communists was Nazi propaganda which was also shared by some Lithuanians. The poster ‘Holocaust in Lithuania’ states that there were 100 Lithuanian ‘local collaborators’ of the Vilnius Special Troup which killed Jews in Paneriai and elsewhere. Indicating that there were about 200 murder sites in Lithuania, one poster did not spare the words to describe the horror of participation: ‘The killings on former Soviet territory were particularly brutal and were accompanied by torture. The rampaging of the killers was carried out without restraint or fear of publicity’.34 The Jewish Museum, to conclude, clearly communicated the break with the Soviet version of the Holocaust. It spelled out the role of Lithuanians in the Jewish disaster and introduced Litvaks’ cultural heritage, principally professional arts, to the public. However, the Jewish Museum lacked a signature building or site (Paneriai is so remote from the city centre, that it is close to impossible to get there by public transport and visits to Paneriai museum need to be pre-booked). For various reasons, the Jewish Museum also lacked things fit for exhibition. As a result, the Jewish Museum struggled to achieve high symbolic status and institutionalise itself as ‘proper museum’ in the cultural field. It seems that this lack of recognition from other cultural operators stemmed from its material structure, that is, the use of the buildings and arrangement of displays, and not from the subject of the museum. Indeed, the case of the 34

Original translation.

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Genocide Museum also hints at material structure as an obstacle to the institutionalisation of a new museum. The Museum of Genocide Victims35 The formation of the Genocide Museum was embedded in the process of de-Sovietisation, conceived as removal of the apparatus of Soviet repression, such as the Soviet Army, the KGB, and the Communist Party. A shortage of documentation makes it difficult to establish the exact number of KGB staff and collaborators in Lithuania. Existing data, however, suggests that the KGB network was quite sizeable: in 1991 there were 6,377 KGB agents. Since 1940, according to Anušauskas, about 100,000 Lithuanian citizens collaborated with the KGB. It is estimated that in the 2000s there were about 25-35,000 citizens in Lithuania who had previously collaborated with the KGB (Anušauskas 2008, 224). Hence, there were many individuals who would prefer to forget and not commemorate the victims of communist terror. Parliamentary debates revealed disagreements about the treatment of KGB agents. Whereas some insisted that KGB repressions and crimes should not be forgotten and that KGB collaborators should be named, others held that membership of the KGB was little different from any other membership in a Soviet organisation and that KGB members should be allowed to remain invisible.36 The establishment of the Genocide Museum was regarded as an especially important statement in the construction of a public regime of knowledge.37 Here the process was principally driven by the Union of 35 The title of the museum contains the highly contested term ‘genocide’. Since the late 1980s, this term was often used to describe Soviet terrorisation of the Lithuanian population. The problem was that ‘genocide’, a term created by a Polish-Jewish lawyer Rafal Lemkin in 1943, was introduced in international law with a meaning that did not include killings on the basis of social or political categorisation. As Snyder (2010, 41213) notes, the decision to limit the meaning of ‘genocide’ to extermination of ethnic groups well expressed the interests of the Soviet Union. 36 As Anušauskas indicated, it was the Conservative Party government which initiated more active measures in dealing with the issue of KGB agents. The Social Democrat party, mainly composed of former Lithuanian Communist Party members, typically did not pursue active policies in this area (Anušauskas 2008, 225). 37 In 2008 the Genocide Museum was expanded to include Tuskulėnai memorial park, a newly reconstructed manor and park. Tuskulėnai was used by the NKGB/MGB to imprison, torture and bury their victims (in total 724) in 1944-1947. It is planned that the manor house will contain the exhibition A project: ‘Homo sovieticus’ which would focus on various aspects of Soviet repressions of everyday

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Political Prisoners and Deportees (UPPD), an organisation that was first started as a Club of Deportees (July 1988) and later evolved into an important political party. The importance conferred upon the KGB headquarters as a material statement about Lithuania’s history makes the lack of acknowledgment of the Holocaust in this museum starker. It took about eighteen years for the Genocide Museum to include the Holocaust in its displays. In 2010 a documentary film about the massacre of Jews in Paneriai was installed as part of the permanent exhibition. In 2011 there are ongoing talks about opening one of the prison cells as a display of the Holocaust. The title of the museum is also being reconsidered. Just like the Jewish Museum, the Genocide Museum was established in an economically adverse climate, but unlike the director of the Jewish Museum, the director of the Genocide Museum did not demonstrate the capacity to strengthen the new organisation. The Genocide Museum was less active in gaining both staff and buildings. This was partially because from the very beginning the Genocide Museum was strongly connected with a particular building. Built in a typical imperial historicist style in 1899, the ornate building stirred a chill of terror for passers-by on Gediminas Avenue. During 1944-1990 it was used as the LSSR KGB headquarters and a security prison, but it was also used by the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation.38 On 23 March 1990 the Lithuanian Supreme Council ordered the KGB to disband and on 1 October 1991 the KGB officially ceased to exist in Lithuania. The building was eventually vacated.39 From 1993 to 1996 members of UPPD guarded the KGB archives around the clock in order to prevent documents being moved and destroyed (Anušauskas 2008, 225). According to an historian who was involved in the creation of this museum, at that time there was a clear understanding that a museum had to be created as quickly as possible in the former KGB building. The interviewee recalled that the fact that the building also belonged to the

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NKVD (People’s Commissariat of State Security, 1934-1946) and the KGB (State Security Committee, 1954-1991). For an overview of KGB history in Lithuania see Arvydas Anušauskas (2008). 39 The KGB attempted to continue its operations under different organisational forms, for instance, private security firms, in Lithuania until 1993 (Anušauskas 2008, 186, 223-224). 38

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Gestapo was forgotten.40 There were no special discussions about the title either, because the word ‘genocide’ was used to describe communist crimes by émigré Lithuanian intellectuals and abounded in the Lithuanian press since 1988.41 It was the UPPD, officials from the Ministry of Culture and Education and several historians who undertook the organisation of this new museum. Upon its establishment the Genocide Museum was a miniscule organisation: its staff consisted of one young historian, later appointed director, Gintaras Vaičiūnas. The principle task was to sort out the documents that the KGB had left behind.42 The KGB left its Vilnius headquarters in a state of chaos: folders were scattered on floors, mixed with shredded papers and photographs of tortured partisans of the 1940s. The heritage expert from the Ministry of Culture and Education remembered some spots which looked like blood stains, which, however, were soon painted over. Along with the importance of the documents the Genocide Museum had a significant material structure to build upon: the Gestapo-KGB building with its offices, prison cells and execution grounds that were all in use until relatively recently. Indeed, UPPD members wanted to establish a large museum which would occupy the whole building. However, material reality proved to be different: a large part of the building was given to house courts, while a smaller section was allocated to the newly established Special Archives. The museum received only one wing. Material settings were a problem for the new organisation, the director did not seem to have a clear strategy of using the building and the things in his charge. An informant recalled that the courts wanted to transform the inner yard, which was used for the prisoners’ daily walks, still surrounded by the original barbed wire, into a car park.43 The heritage department at the Ministry of Culture succeeded in keeping the yards for the museum; indeed, these yards were used to store some So-

The building was used as a headquarters and a prison by the Gestapo and a garrison by Sonderkommando in 1941-1944. It is thought that the building was not used to imprison Jews, who were either held in nearby Lukiškės prison or transported straight to Paneriai. 41 Interview with Simas (2011). See also Anušauskas (2001). 42 Victims were allowed to access their KGB files only after 1996 (Anušauskas 2008, 245). 43 Interview with the Lithuanian historian Simas (2011). 40

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viet statues before the establishment of Grūtas Park.44 During renovation of the courts’ side of the building, lots of valuable objects at the museum, such as cables made with expensive metals, mysteriously went missing. Many other everyday things, used by the KGB, were simply thrown away as garbage. The Genocide Museum was initially preoccupied with KGB files, which were of vital importance in the light of ongoing discussions about restitution, compensation and lustration. The focus on documents and neglect of material evidence would later compromise its status as a ‘proper museum’. For several years the Genocide Museum only displayed repainted prison cells to the public. The director was not trained as a museum expert and the first members of staff consisted of amateurs, such as former prisoners and deportees, who worked as tour guides. Here amateurship was both an asset and an obstacle. On the one hand, some guides, a professional historian recalled, often told factually inaccurate stories. The number of victims was especially exaggerated. On the other hand, some of the guides were especially talented in conveying their personal experiences as prisoners. When it came to amateurship, the largest problem indicated by the informants was the director, who lacked both organisation-building skills and institutional entrepreneurship. Particularly damaging was his lack of attention to the material structure: prison cells were repainted instead of kept ‘as they were found’, the few remaining objects, such as typewriters and telephone listening devices used by the KGB, were thrown away or lost. A good deal of cable wiring used for surveillance was removed. An interesting incident took place in 1994: the inefficient director was replaced without consultation with the UPPD. The UPPD staged a sit-in protest in the prison cells. For about one year museum visitors could witness some of the former prisoners sitting in the cells in which they were previously imprisoned and tortured (Simas 2011). This situation was somehow ameliorated in 1995, when there emerged an idea that research about communist and Nazi crimes should be centralised in one dedicated organisation. Again, the economic situation played an important role. The existing Centre for Research about Repressions (1993) was seriously underfunded. Having sorted out the KGB files, the Centre for Research About Genocide and Resistance of 44

Interview with Marius (2011).

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Lithuania’s Inhabitants (1992, reorganised in 1994) expanded its studies to address wider historical questions. It was thought that it would be financially beneficial for all these organisations, including the Genocide Museum, to be united into one research centre. In 1997 these organisations were merged, and funding increased. A new museum director, Eugenijus Peikštenis, who was trained as a professional historian and had some experience of museum work, was appointed. From the early 2000s the museum was renovated and exhibition displays were installed on the ground and first floors. Exhibitions at the Genocide Museum The permanent exhibition of the Genocide Museum focuses on Soviet victims and perpetrators. It covers the entire Soviet period, from the Soviet occupation to Sąjūdis. A particular focus is on armed resistance to the communist government (1944-1953) and the fate of political prisoners and deportees. The exhibition explicitly states that Lithuanians were both among the killers and killed: several halls are dedicated to KGB staff, whose names and photographs are displayed. The Genocide Museum constructs a romantic image of the Lithuanian nation under repression: there is a clear strategy of romanticisation and heroification of Lithuanian anti-Soviet partisans and deportees. Although the building was used as the Gestapo headquarters, the Holocaust featured in the displays only in passing: Jews were mentioned on a glass plate, which listed Lithuania’s lost population during the Nazi and Soviet occupations. Located in the main corridor of the ground-floor exhibition, this plate, however, did not contain either the term ‘Holocaust’ or ‘Shoah’. It is noteworthy that a fifteen-minute long documentary film ‘Nazi Germany structures of repression, which worked on Gediminas 36, Vilnius, 1941-1944’ started being shown in the first hall, dedicated to Soviet occupation of Lithuania, only in 2010. Composed of documentaries and specially shot footage, the film communicated rather well the horror of the extermination of Lithuania’s Jews and furnished precise information about participation of Lithuanians in the Holocaust. However, a printed museum guide that was circulated in 2010 was not updated: it did not mention the Holocaust at all, even as part of the Nazi occupation (Rudienė & Juozevičiūtė 2006, 30-31). Additionally, the exhibition about Soviet deportations did not mention Jews, although

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proportionately more Jews were deported than Lithuanians (Gaunt 2010). Just like the Jewish Museum, the Genocide Museum was focused on text and image-based displays. The historical exhibition display combined printed poster techniques with a display of original objects. Featuring both bilingual texts and photographs, the glass prints also perform as see-through display windows through which a visitor may glance at other exhibits, for example, furniture which was originally situated in a KGB officer’s room or objects used by anti-Soviet partisans. The execution chamber was wholly renovated and created an impression of a terrarium: various archaeological findings from KGB killing sites were exhibited on sand under the glass floor.45 Despite quite extensive sanitation, the building still contains potential to communicate its horrible past to a visitor: the soft-padded torture chamber presents perhaps the most ghastly physical experience.46 Conclusions: The Making of Cultural Memory This chapter argues that the knowledge regimes around the difficult past of Lithuania could be better understood if treated as processes of production. In this process of production various heterogeneous actors were involved: more or less capable museum workers, amateurs, professional historians, politicians, national and international organisations. At different stages different actors fed into the construction of the museums and, most importantly, not all of these actors shared the same narrative of the past. Mark (2010a, 110) points out correctly that the exhibitions at the Genocide Museum omitted the Nazi period from the story of Lithuanian suffering. Nevertheless, he prematurely jumped to the conclusion that the exhibition at the Genocide Museum was an expression of consensus among producers of public knowledge regimes in Lithuania. Moreover, Mark was not entirely right to suggest that there was a unitary ethnocentric narrative about the Lithuanian past at play and that this narrative dominated public knowledge regimes. Findings at the Tuskulėnai murder site posed another material problem for museum workers, as archaeologists discovered that bones of innocent victims and criminals, killed by the KGB, were so entangled together that it was difficult to reassemble them into individual skeletons (Mark 2010). 46 Although an interviewed heritage professional regretted that the soft-padded torture chamber was deep cleaned by the museum workers. 45

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This chapter, in contrast, demonstrates that the museum versions of post-Soviet narratives about Lithuania’s difficult past were hybrid and their production did not follow a linear model. It was neither a top-down nor a bottom-up process. The construction of the analysed museums could rather be understood as a heterogeneous process in which nonhuman actors were of high importance. Although the human actors involved in the Jewish Museum inscribed the history of Lithuania’s Jews into dominant narratives of Lithuanian statehood, they did not succeed in establishing the museum as a visible cultural authority in the broader cultural field. Although the Centre which owns the Genocide Museum conducted and published a lot of research about the Holocaust, this was not displayed in the museum’s exhibitions. A kind of compartmentalisation of histories emerged as the Holocaust and communist terror were housed in two different organisations. One informant explained this situation as being rooted in the administrative logic of the state cultural sector, which sought to avoid duplications.47 While this might be true, this chapter details the importance of museum workers in configuring particular stories about the difficult past. After all, it is the museum workers who establish themselves as gate keepers between the collection and display, it is they who decide which objects will be displayed and in what way. Both museums developed relatively successfully as organisations: in an economically adverse climate, they accumulated and maintained their staff, renovated buildings and installed exhibitions. However, the interviews revealed that this was not enough for these organisations to institutionalise themselves, that is, to establish themselves as cultural authorities among other older museums. These new museums actively sought to perform as laboratories of history. Headed by historians and philologists, both the Jewish and Genocide museums focused more on verbal inscription; they collected and produced history with the help of texts. At the same time they found it difficult to deal with material items, particularly objects which were traditionally regarded as the core of a ‘proper’ museum. Instead, both museums focused on documentation: collection of texts and images, research and publication of further texts. Neither museum featured a consistent and explicit ideology of forming collections and displays. Indeed, it seems that the museum staff mainly ‘played it by 47

Interview with the historian Simas (2011).

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ear’; the narratives in the displays evolved incrementally and, perhaps, even sporadically. Consequently, the heritage professionals interviewed held that both museums insufficiently utilised the resources offered by their buildings. In other words, the workers at the Genocide and Jewish museums failed to recognise the importance of particular material mediators for the identity of their organisations. In the language of the sociology of organisations, they did not sufficiently engage in translation of crucial boundary objects which were held important by other actors in their field: objects, buildings and sites.48 Finally, the analysed cases demonstrate that the exhibitions at both the Jewish Museum and the Genocide Museum were not exclusively dedicated to ‘victimisation of the nation under Communism’ (Mark 2010a, 118). On the contrary, both museums emphasised that Lithuanians were also perpetrators as killers of Jews or KGB members. Contested as they are, the Jewish and Genocide museums nevertheless constitute an important break away from the romantic narrative that glorified the Lithuanian nation, assembling a new and different story for the public regime of knowledge about Lithuania’s past.

References Anušauskas, Arvydas. 2008. KGB Lietuvoje: Slaptosios veiklos bruožai, Vilnius: Asociacija Atvažiavo meška. Anušauskas, Arvydas. 2001. ‘“Genocido” sąvoka Lietuvos istorijoje’, Genocidas ir rezistencija, 2: 105-108. Arad, Yitzhak. 1976. ‘“The Final Solution” in Lithuania in the Light of German Documentation’. Yad Vashem Studies, 11, 234-272. Aronsson, Peter. 2010. Explaining National Museums: Exploring Comparative Approaches to the Study of National Museums. In National Museums: Studies from around the World, eds. Simon Knell, Peter Aronsson and Arne Buge Amundsen, 29-54. London & New York: Routledge. Ben-Naftali, Aya. 2004. Collaboration and Resistance: The Ninth Fort as a Test Case. In Collaboration and Resistance during the Holocaust: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia,

48 Of course, this is not a unique case of ‘museums without objects’. All over the world newly built museums increasingly rely on moving and stationary images and verbal texts and seem to abandon the traditional boundary objects of museum work; see, for example, Göteborg City Museum or a new permanent exhibition about the history of Sweden at the National History Museum in Stockholm that opened in 2010.

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Lithuania, eds. David Gaund, Paul A. Levine and Laura Palosuo, 361-382. Bern: Peter Lang. Banke, Cecilie Felicia Stokholm. 2004. Holocaust and the Decline of European Values. In Holocaust Heritage: Inquiries into European Historical Culture, eds. Klas-Göran Karlsson and Ulf Zander, 87-104. Malmö: Sekel. Bennett, Tony. 2004. Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism. London & New York: Routledge. Bramson-Alpernienė, Esfir, ed. 2009. Prie judaikos lobio. Vilnius: LNNB. Bubnys, Arūnas. 2004. The Holocaust in the Lithuanian Province in 1941: The Kaunas District. In Collaboration of Resistance During the Holocaust: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, eds. David Gaunt, Paul A. Levine and Laura Palosuo, 283-312. Bern: Peter Lang. Czarniawska, Barbara. 2009. ‘Emerging Institutions: Pyramids or Anthills?’ Organization Studies, 30, 4, 422-441. Dieckmann, Christoph and Saulius Sužiedėlis. 2006. The Persecution and Mass Murder of Lithuanian Jews during Summer and Fall of 1941. Vilnius: Margi raštai. DiMaggio, Paul. 1988. Interest and Agency in Institutional Theory. In Institutional Patterns and Organizations: Culture and Environment, ed. L. G. Zucker, 322. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger. Eidintas, Alfonsas. 2003. Jews, Lithuanians and the Holocaust. Vilnius: Versus Aureus. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. New York: Pantheon Books. Gaunt, David. 2010. Reichskommissariat Ostland. In The Routledge History of the Holocaust, ed. Jonathan C. Friedmann, 210-220. London & New York: Routledge. Ginsberg, Waldemar. 1998. And Kovno Wept. Beth Shalom. Grunskis, Eugenijus. 1996. Lietuvos gyventojų trėmimai 1940-1941, 1945-1953. Vilnius: Lietuvos istorijos institutas. Jasanoff, Sheila. 2005. Designs on Nature. Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, New York: The Penguin Press. ‘Kada kultūra atgaus prestižą?’ 1989. Kultūros barai, 12: 4. Kitzmann, Andreas, Conny Mithander and John Sundholm. 2005. Introduction. In Memory Work: The Theory and Practice of Memory, eds. Andreas Kitzmann, Conny Mithander and John Sundholm, 9-24. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Knell, Simon, Peter Aronsson and Arne Buge Amundsen, eds. 2010. National Museums: Studies from around the World. London & New York: Routledge. Knorr-Cetina, Karin. 1981. The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford & New York: Pergamon Press.

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Kostanian, Rachilė. 2001. ‘Valstybinio Vilniaus Gaono žydų muziejaus istorija.’ Žydų muziejus, Vilnius, 10-13. Jokubaitis, Alvydas and Raimunas Klimavičius. 1991. ‘Lietuvos muziejininkystė kryžkelėje’, Muziejai ir paminklai, 9: 151-156. LaCapra, Dominick. 1996. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Lane, Thomas. 2001. Lithuania: Stepping Westward. London and New York: Routledge. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lebow, Richard Ned, Wulf Kansteiner, and Cladio Fogu, eds. 2006. The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Lankauskas, Gediminas. 2006. ‘Sensuous (Re)Collections: The Sight and Taste of Socialism at Grutas Statue Park, Lithuania’. Senses and Society, 1, no.1, 2752. Logan William and Keir Reeves, eds. 2009. Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with ’Difficult Heritage’. London and New York: Routledge. Mark, James. 2010. ‘What Remains? Anti-Communism, Forensic Archaeology, and the Retelling of the National Past in Lithuania and Romania’. Past and Present, Supplement 5, 276-300. Mark, James. 2010a. The Unfinished Revolution: Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe. Yale University Press. Misiunas, Romuald, and Rein Taagepera. 2006. The Baltic States: Years of Dependence, 1940-1990. London: Hurst & Company. Nikžentaitis, Alvydas, Stefan Schreiner and Darius Staliūnas. 2004. The Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi. Oberländer, Erwin. 2011. Soviet Genocide in Latvia? Conflicting Cultures of Remembrance of Stalin’s Policy, 1940-1953. In Forgotten Pages in Baltic History: Diversity and Inclusion, eds. Martyn Housden & David J. Smith, 239-261. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi. Pearce, Susan. 1992. Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Poovey, Mary. 1998. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Ramelienė, Raimonda. 2010. ‘Premjeras rengiasi į Šventąją žemę.’ Lietuvos žinios, 25 November 2010. Rindzevičiūtė, Eglė. 2010. ‘Soviet Lithuanians, Amber and the “The New Balts”: Historical Narratives of National and Regional Identities in Lithuanian Museums, 1940-2009’. Culture Unbound no. 2: 665-694. Rindzevičiūtė, Eglė. 2010. ‘Imagining the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: The Politics and Economics of the Rebuilding of Trakai Castle and the “Palace of Sovereigns” in Vilnius’. Central Europe, 8, no. 2: 180-202.

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Rindzevičiūtė, Eglė. 2009. ‘From Authoritarian to Democratic Cultural Policy: Making Sense of De-Sovietisation in Lithuania after 1990’. Nordisk kulturpolitisk tidskrift/The Nordic Journal of Cultural Policy, 12, no. 1: 191-221. Rolnikaitė, Maša. 1963. Turiu papasakoti. Vilnius, Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla. Rosenbaum, Alan S, ed. 1996. Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide. Boulder, Co: Westview Press. Rudienė, Virginija Vilma Juozevičiūtė. 2006. Genocido aukų muziejus: ekspozicijų gidas. Vilnius: LGGRTC. Snyder, Timothy. 2010. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. London: The Bodley Head. Staliūnas, Darius. 2010. ‘Žydų istorija lietuviškos istoriografijos kontekstuose’. In Abipusis pažinimas: lietuvių ir žydų kultūriniai saitai, ed. Jurgita ŠiaučiūnaitėVerbickienė, 119-134. Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla. Star, Susan Lei and James R. Griesemer. 1989. ‘Institutional Ecology, “Translations” and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39’. Social Studies of Science, 19: 387420. Sužiedėlis, Saulius. 2004. ‘Foreign Saviors, Native Disciples: Collaboration in Lithuania, 1940-1945’. In Collaboration and Resistance During the Holocaust: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, eds. David Gaunt, Paul A. Levine and Laura Palosuo, 313-360. Bern: Peter Lang. Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė, Jurgita, ed. 2010. Abipusis pažinimas: lietuvių ir žydų kultūriniai saitai. Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla. Tomkiewicz, Monika. 2008. Zbrodnia w Ponarach 1941-1944. Warsaw: IPN. Vitkus, Hektoras. 2010. Holokausto atminties problema ir jos poveikis lietuviųžydų santykiui. In Abipusis pažinimas: lietuvių ir žydų kultūriniai saitai, eds. Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė, 275-308. Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla. Weiner, Amir. 2001. Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Weick, Karl E. 1979. The Social Psychology of Organizing. New York: McGraw-Hill Inc. Weiss-Wendt, Anton. 2008. ‘Why the Holocaust Does Not Matter to Estonians.’ Journal of Baltic Studies, 39, no. 4: 475-497. Young, Katie. 2009. Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Challenges of Heritage Management Following the Cold War. In Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with ‘Difficult Heritage’, eds. William Logan and Keir Reeves, 50-67. London and New York: Routledge.

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IMPLEMENTING POST-COMMUNIST NATIONAL MEMORY IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC AND SLOVAKIA Tomas Sniegon Abstract This chapter contains an analysis of two similar attempts to institutionalise ‘national memory’ in the Czech Republic and Slovakia after the fall of Communism and dissolution of Czechoslovakia. The study focuses on two documents that create a legal basis for such institutionalisation and on the main actors who initiated the decisions to create these institutes. It is argued that although the original reasons explaining the necessity to establish these new institutes in Bratislava and Prague were defined firstly as moral and scientific, the institutes became primarily ideological tools of the new governing post-Communist elites that served to centralise control of the collective ‘national’ memory. In 2002 and 2007, two similar institutes were established in the Slovakian capital Bratislava and the Czech capital Prague. The first one was named Ústav pamäti národa (ÚPN, The Nation’s Memory Institute), the second one Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů (ÚSTR, The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes). According to their founders, both these institutes were supposed to bring their societies moral satisfaction for struggling in the past, by disclosing unlawful practices of oppressive forces from two of the most brutal dictatorial regimes of the twentieth century, Nazism and Communism. Moreover, they were supposed to produce new scholarly works about these two regimes and contribute to the democratic education of new generations of young Czechs and Slovaks.

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Both institutes were supposed to deal with the period that began in the late 1930s and ended in the late 1980s when, with the exception of 1939 to 1945, Czechs and Slovaks were living in a common state with their lives heavily affected initially by the German occupation and the Second World War, and later by Soviet dominance and the Cold War. The key moments that the impact these two periods had on the life of the Czechs and Slovaks under Nazism and Communism became what the German historian Jörn Rüsen calls ‘borderline events’ (Rüsen 2001, 232-253). Due to the traumatic nature of these events for the Czechs and the Slovaks, and the fact that these changes could not be explained within already existing and previously dominating historical narratives, it is possible to classify them as ‘catastrophic events’ that made searching for a new sense of history and creating new historical narratives inevitable (Rüsen 2004, 46; Cavalli 2008, 169-182). Even though the vast majority of the Czechoslovak society saw the change from Communism to a pluralistic system as positive, the process of creating new post-Communist narratives was far from easy (Kopeček 2008, 232-264; Kolář and Kopeček 2007, 173-248). Public debates surrounding the Slovak ÚPN and Czech ÚSTR clearly illustrated these problems. This shared history has made the ÚPN and the ÚSTR special in the post-Communist part of Europe. Institutes of National Memory were also established in some other countries of the former Soviet Bloc, such as Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. None of these, however, were as closely connected by the shared past they were about to study as the Czech and the Slovak institutes. Similar subjects of study and similar characteristics of work do not necessarily mean that ÚPN and ÚSTR became mirror images of each other. Different perceptions of traumatic history in the Czech and Slovak republics and different development in these two successor states of the former Czechoslovakia turned these seemingly very similar institutes into two institutions with different priorities and even with partly different functions in their societies. The main purpose of this chapter is to show that while the original reasons explaining the necessity to establish these new institutes in Bratislava and Prague were defined firstly as moral and scientific, ÚPN and ÚSTR became primarily ideological tools of the new governing post-Communist elites that served to centralise control of collective ‘national’ memory.

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Here, national memory cannot be understood as a network of symbols, values, rites, and local traditions, i.e. collective memory that is initiated and that comes from below. On the contrary, the ‘national memory’ that has been mentioned here is a centralised and institutionalised type of collective memory that corresponds with Aleida Assmann’s definition of political collective memory (Assmann 2006, 210-224), and is according to Jan Assman ‘a top-down institution which depends on the political organisation that institutes it’ (Assmann 2010, 122). The main concept used in this chapter, however, is not the concept of collective memory that connects the present and the past, but the concept of historical consciousness that inseparably connects these two time dimensions with the future. Historical consciousness is a mental process that illustrates how people orientate themselves in a flow of time, and search for their identity in time, by relating the understanding of their own present situation to, on the one hand experiences and memories of the past while on the other hand, expectations and fears in relation to the future (Jeismann 1979, 42). This chapter is not an analysis of all the activities of the ÚPN and ÚSTR. Instead, it focuses on two laws – one Czech and one Slovak that became essential for the constitution of the institutes and clearly demarcated fields of their activity. Since both the institutes were statecontrolled, all potential deviations of the work of their employees from these laws could be eventually classified as unlawful. Both laws are treated here as products of historical consciousness of those forces that dominated the process of their creation. Such an understanding of both institutes as manifestations or products of historical consciousness of various individuals and groups in the Czech and Slovak republics makes an analysis of time and circumstance against decisions about the institutes more important than the analyses of the periods that are the institutes’ main focus. Historical consciousness is possible to study only if we study its concrete manifestations. Swedish historian, Klas-Göran Karlsson, described the process during which these concrete manifestations are created as usage of history. To use history, according to Karlsson, means to activate historical consciousness to concrete actions. This means that the question of how history is produced becomes more central than the question of how history is received. In order to study differences and similarities between different manifestations of historical consciousness,

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Karlsson developed a typology of various uses of history: existential, moral, ideological, political and scholarly-scientific (Karlsson 2003, 38-43). Three of them – moral, scholarly-scientific and ideological – are central to my argument since they correspond with the main goals formulated by those who supported the laws about the Czech and Slovak institutes. In Karlsson’s functionalist model, scientific use of history is defined as a history usage that has been developed around the question of what is true or false in the interpretation of the past. It is based on a professional and exclusive theoretical-analytical and methodological system of rules within the scientific discipline of history as a taught subject. Moral history usage expresses thoughts about questions of right and wrong in history, about good and bad. History is activated here and becomes a moralpolitical power in a time when political liberalisation or another radical change makes it possible to bring earlier unnoticed or consciously suppressed historical questions into the political-cultural agenda. Ideological history usage arises in connection with questions about power and legitimacy; it is connected to those systems of ideas that exploit history in order to justify a position of power. The goal is to invoke ‘historical laws’ and ‘objective needs’ in order to construct a relevant contextual meaning which legitimises a certain power position and rationalises it by portraying history in such a way that mistakes and problems on the road to power are toned down, banalised or ignored. The borders between these attitudes are not always exactly clear and different ways of using history can be combined. Therefore the typology is not intended to be used in a normative way. However, with its help it is possible to better understand needs and intentions of the main actors. Provided that the use of history in the cases of ÚPN and ÚSTR indeed was primarily ideological, however, who are the winners and which moments have been toned down or ignored? Inspired by the German and Polish Models The main inspiration for most of the institutes of national memory in post-Communist Europe became the German Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, (Office of the Federal Commissioner Preserving the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic, or simply BStU) that was established in 1990. After its first director, former East German theologian, journalist and politician Joachim Gauck, the

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BStU became known as the ‘Gauck Institute’. The main task of this institute was to make the documents of the former East German secret service Stasi accessible to those who were affected by the Stasi’s activities. Former citizens of the GDR were able to visit the institute to find out what the Stasi knew about them and who the informants were. The institute was also trying to reconstruct documents that the Stasi tried to destroy during the GDR’s final days. During the Stasi era the archive was used against those who became victims of the East German regime, while after the fall of the GDR attention focused on former perpetrators. Thanks to the Gauck Institute, the public could learn about the structure and activities of the Stasi and the victims should get, at least, moral satisfaction. Such an idea became attractive for the founders of the ÚPN in Bratislava and ÚSTR in Prague. Instytut pamieci narodowej (IPN, Institute of National Memory) in Warsaw became another source of inspiration for Prague and Bratislava. IPN was established by the Polish parliament in Warsaw in 1998. It started its work in 2000 but could not be seen as an exact copy of the Gauck Institute in Berlin. Its role in Polish society was intended to be more important than the role of its Berlin counterpart in Germany. One of the most important differences was the fact that the Gauck Institute, according to German law, was not supposed to affect new German ‘national memory’ and thus directly influence the process of creation of a new German national identity. The Polish institute, however, was supposed to do this. It was, for example, supposed to preserve the memory of ‘Polish patriotic traditions’.1 It has its branches not only in the capital but all over Poland. While the Gauck Institute focused exclusively on the period of the so-called German Democratic Republic, i.e. the development only in one part of what became a re-united Germany and its development only after the end of the Second World War, the Polish institute focused on Polish history both during the Second World War and during the postwar period. The Gauck Institute was understood much more as a part of the biography verification process than as a part of de-communisation of German society. The documents of the former East German secret po-

1 The Institute of National Remembrance Guide. http://www.ipn.gov.pl/portal/ en/1/2/Institute_of_National_Remembrance__Commission_for_the_Prosecution_of _Crimes_agai.html

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lice were not automatically used as a compromising material against top politicians of the ‘new’, i.e. re-united Germany (Mink 2008, 469-490). The last aspect I want to mention due to its relevance for the debates in Bratislava and Prague is the fact that the name of the Polish institute became The Institute of National Remembrance – Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation. This means that the IPN was supposed to take part in investigations of Communist ‘crimes against the Polish nation’. While the institutional involvement in investigations of the crimes of Communism will be discussed later, it is also necessary to point out that due to a complicated ethnic situation in Czechoslovakia it was more problematic to see just one single nation as a victim of ‘anti-national’ activities from the outside. When they were planning to found ÚPN and ÚSTR, the initiators of these ideas in Prague and Bratislava had a chance to follow and analyse all aspects of the work of the institutes in Berlin and Warsaw. The Slovak and Czech development, however, showed that the German and Polish experience with their institutes was not taken very seriously despite the fact that comparative analyses of the Gauck Institute and IPN could avoid some important structural problems that both UPN and ÚSTR had to struggle with. The texts of the laws about the institutes adopted in the Czech Republic and Slovakia show this ignorance to these crucial aspects very clearly. National Memory in Slovak Law The Nation’s Memory Institute in Bratislava was created by a special ‘Nation Memory Act’ 553/2002, adopted by the Slovak Parliament on 19 August 2002.2 National memory is supposed to be influenced by allowing the Slovak public access to documents of former ‘oppressive institutions’ from the periods of Nazi and Communist dictatorships from the years 1939-1989, which are treated as a single ‘period of oppression’. Such a definition, however, is highly problematic. A periodisation like this pays no attention to differences in the development of Slovakia between 1939 and 1989, though at least five different stages can be studied during this time: 1939-1944, 1944-1945, 1945-1948, 1948-1968, Act on Disclosure of Documents Regarding the Activity of State Security Authorities in the Period 1939 - 1989 and on Founding the Nation’s Memory Institute (Ústav pamäti národa) and on Amending Certain Acts. http://www.upn.gov. sk/data/pdf/553_2002_en.pdf 2

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and 1968-1989. During the first and second period, Slovakia became for the first time in history a nation state. However, it was not created by a free democratic choice of the Slovak people but by Hitler’s Germany that totally controlled Slovakia’s foreign and defence policy. Led by a Catholic Priest, Joseph Tiso, as ‘Führer’ and by the Hlinka´s Slovak People’s Party (HSLS), Slovakia became one of the closest allies of the Third Reich. During the first period, Slovakia was not occupied by German troops. The occupation came during the late summer of 1944 when resistance against the Tiso regime culminated. By the end of the Second World War, the first ever Slovak state in history ceased to exist and Slovakia became a part of a renewed Czechoslovakia that it previously had belonged to during the interwar period. Thus, the period between 1945 and 1948 meant on one side a renewal of a pluralistic parliamentary democratic regime, but on the other side, paving the way to a Soviet-type Communist regime. The support for Communism was stronger among the Czechs than among the Slovaks. Despite numerous political problems, however, the character of this regime was very different from both the Tiso regime before 1945 and the Communist regime after 1948. The Slovak law completely ignored this difference. Between 1948 and 1989, Czechoslovakia became a part of the Soviet Bloc dominated by the Soviet Union. All political power belonged to the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) and its Slovak offset, the Communist Party of Slovakia (KSS). Like the HSLS during the Second World War, KSČ forbade all political opposition in the country. Like the wartime regime, even the Communist regime could be divided into two periods, this time connected to Soviet instead of German military occupation. Until 1968, Czechoslovakia was not occupied by Soviet troops. The situation changed dramatically after the invasion against the so-called Prague Spring in August 1968. Then, the massive presence of the Soviet army on the Czechoslovak territory continued until the end of the Cold War. No reasons why the entire period 1939-1989 is treated as a single monolithic block are specified in Slovak law. Despite the fact that the lawmakers in the title use the term ‘national memory’, the law contains no definition of what it understands as ‘memory’ and ‘nation’. However, the law distinguishes between the Slovak nation and the members of

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‘nationalities living in Slovakia’. Here, too, it is unclear if these nationalities are understood as part of the Slovak nation or not. This aspect is especially important with regards to the relationship between the ‘Slovak nation’ and the Slovak Jewish population during the Second World War. Even though Slovakia was not occupied by Germany before 1944, the Slovak regime deported almost 60,000 Jews to the extermination camps. More than 10,000 Jewish Slovaks were deported during the German occupation 1944-1945. While referring to the term nation, the law praises a ‘tradition of the Slovak nation’s fight against the occupants, fascism and communism’. At the same time, the Slovak nation as such is not made responsible for the ‘period of oppression’. Here, the ‘state that violated human rights and its own laws’ is seen as guilty. Thus, the terms ‘nation’ and ‘state’ are seen as antagonist with regard to non-democratic regimes. The state, which is not specified in ethnic terms, is seen as an oppressor of the Slovak nation. As the law concludes, ‘no activity of the state against its citizens that is contrary to law can be classified as state secret or forgotten’. The goals given to the new institute by the law are very extensive. It is, however, possible to sum them up and divide them into the three already mentioned categories: First, moral aspects focus on a need not to forget and ‘bring satisfaction to those whose lives were harmed by the state that violated human rights and broke its own laws’. Second, scientific aspects stress the need to learn more about the past. The institute should ‘completely and objectively evaluate the period of oppression’. It should analyse ways and reasons for loss of freedom, it should study ‘fascist and communist regimes and their ideologies’ and the ways in which both the Slovaks and foreigners were involved in developing these regimes. Third, ideological goals stressed the need to condemn oppressions of the state from the periods of dictatorship and to ‘promote ideas of freedom and democracy against the regimes similar to Nazism and Communism’. While Nazism and Communism are treated as equal here, there is no specification of what regimes are considered as ‘similar’ to them. Czech Law The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague, that was also supposed to be called the Institute of National Memory according to

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the original plans,3 was established by the law 181/2007 in The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and the Security Services Archive, and on Amendments of some Acts. The Czech Parliament adopted the law on 8 June 2007, almost exactly five years later after the adoption of the Slovak institute in Bratislava.4 The new institute started its work in February 2008. Unlike the Slovak case, the period that is supposed to be covered by the Czech institute’s activity is divided into two periods that do not exactly follow each other: the period of oppression from 30 September 1938 to 4 May 1945, and period of Communist totalitarian power between 25 February 1948 and 29 December 1989. The first date, 30 September 1938, refers to the so-called Munich Agreement between Germany, Italy, Great Britain and France, which put Czechoslovakia under full German control. Because of the agreement, Czechoslovakia immediately lost its borderline regions where the majority of the population was German. Some months after the Munich Treaty, the rest of the Czechoslovak republic was destroyed and a Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia was established in its Czech part. The ‘period of oppression’ ends one day before the start of an uprising in Prague, i.e. four days before the end of the Second World War. The second period starts three years after the war with a communist coup d’état in 1948 and ends on the day when the Czechoslovak parliament removed a paragraph about the dominating role of the Communist Party in Czechoslovak society from the Czechoslovak constitution in 1989. Despite an indication of differences between the two periods in question, both are equalised in the Institute’s name as ‘totalitarian regimes’ (see note 84). The term ‘national memory’ is not explicitly mentioned in the Czech law (the reason why it was avoided will be explained later). The form of the law, however, is very similar to the Slovak ‘Nation’s Memory Act’. Even here, ambitions are much higher than merely making the institute

Návrh zákona o Ústavu paměti národa a změně některých dalších zákonů, presented to the Upper house of the Czech Parliament, Senát, in 2006. http://www.senat.cz/ xqw/xervlet/ pssenat/historie?T=62&O=6 4 Act of 8 June 2007 on the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and the Security Services Archive, and on Amendments of some Acts. http://www.ustrcr.cz/ data/pdf/normy/act181-2007.pdf 3

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an ordinary archive for handling documents of the secret services that were previously classified as top secret. The text of the law mentions ‘huge amount of victims, losses and damages on the Czech nation and other nations that suffered in the territory of the Czech Republic during the periods of totalitarian dictatorships’ and ‘patriotic tradition of resistance of the society against occupation and various forms of totalitarianism’ (see note 82). As in Slovakia, the Czech law specifies moral, scholarly and ideological ambitions. The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes ‘studies and independently evaluates the period of oppression and the period of Communist totalitarian dictatorship, it studies anti-democratic and criminal activity of various state institutions, especially security forces, and it also studies criminal activity of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia as well as other organisations based on communist ideology’ (Act of 8 June 2007, 3). Moreover, the institute is supposed to ‘analyse reasons and ways of destruction of a democratic regime during the Communist totalitarian power, documents involvement of Czech and foreign persons in the Czechoslovak communist regime and in the resistance against it’ (Act of 8 June 2007, 4). One of several important differences between the Czech and the Slovak institute is the extent of the institute’s involvement in prosecution and punishment of the crimes from the periods of oppression. While the ÚPN in Bratislava is according to law obliged to participate in this process by cooperating with the office of the Attorney General of the Slovak republic (Generální prokuraturou Slovenské republiky) and even to initiate new prosecutions (which makes the ÚPN very similar to the IPN in Warsaw), the Czech ÚSTR has no such obligation according to the Czech law.5 Who Controls the Institutionalised National Memory? An important question that helps to explain the intentions of those who initiated and founded the institutes is the question of power control. In both cases, the institutes are led by institute boards – the Czech board has seven, and the Slovak board nine members. The head of the Czech board is a director while the Slovak board is headed by a chairman. This point was included in the original proposal. However, there was no mention about it in the final text. 5

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Members of the board are elected for six years in Slovakia and five years in the Czech case. In Slovakia, the right to nominate members of the board is divided between President, parliament and government. The parliament, Národná rada Slovenskej republiky, elects five members of the board including the chairman, two members are chosen by the government and two by the President. In the Czech case, concentration of power is even higher; all decisions about new members are in the hands of the Senát, the upper house of the Parliament. While proposals can be made by more organisations and institutions that are specified by the law, the final decision can only be made by 81 members of the Senate. Thus, those political parties that control the Senate control nominations of members of the board. The Senate became a part of the Czech political system in 1993; since then, the conservative Civic Democratic Party (Občanská demokratická strana, ODS) held a majority until 2010. Demands on those who can be elected as board members are seemingly identical in both Slovak and Czech law: the candidates must be ‘irreproachable’ in the Slovak case and ‘irreproachable’ and ‘reliable’ in the Czech case. Both of these terms are specified in detail. To match the request for ‘irreproachability’ according to the Slovak law, a candidate must not be a former member of the Communist Party or other parties that were fully controlled by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia/Slovakia between 1948-1989. Moreover, a candidate must not be a former employee of the security services or registered as a collaborator of these services. This condition covers the entire ‘period of oppression’ 1939-1989. This means that while the request of irreproachability in terms of membership in the security services covers both the Second World War and the Communist period, the same request in terms of membership in a political party that was responsible for a dictatorship covers only the Communist period. Thus, former members of Hlinka’s Party (HSLS) from the years 1939-1945 can become leaders of ÚPN in Bratislava if they were ‘only’ involved in the party’s activities and not in activities of security and secret services of the Slovak wartime state. The fact that the HSLS dominated the Slovak political system during this time in a similar way that the Communist Party did later in the whole of Czechoslovakia is completely ignored. In this point, the Slovak law contradicts its basic aim to treat equally both the wartime political regime and post-war regime as one single ‘period of oppression’. Hlinka’s party, which was the only Slovak political party allowed in

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Tiso’s Slovakia, is not given responsibility for oppressions made by the Slovak state. The Czech definition of ‘irreproachability’ and ‘reliability’ focuses exclusively on the Communist period and does not include the wartime period at all. An ‘irreproachable’ and ‘reliable’ person must not be a former member or candidate of membership of the Communist Party. He or she must not be a former collaborator of the security service or intelligence service of Communist Czechoslovakia or other state that used to belong to the Soviet Bloc and its military organisation, the Warsaw Pact. With regards to the period 1938-1945, which in Bohemia and Moravia was dominated by Nazi rule, there are no restrictions for the candidates. Thus, in fact, a person that collaborated with the Protectorate’s or even Third Reich’s oppressive forces in the past can become member of the ÚSTR’s council. This, of course, only on the condition that such a person never became a member of the Communist Party or collaborator of communist oppressive forces after the War. Prevailing or even exclusive focus of both these definitions of impeccability during the Communist period indicates that impeccability from the time of the Communist dictatorship is more important for the control of ‘national memory’ and ‘studies of totalitarian regimes’ than the same attitude from the Second World War. Can such a lower request regarding the wartime period depend simply on the time factor? The lawmakers could believe that they did not have to be equally careful because of the fact that the wartime generations were too old and therefore no longer eligible for the leadership of the ÚPN or ÚSTR. At least two arguments oppose such an idea. In the Slovak case, the time or age factor can be excluded totally. If those generations that became adults during the Second World War were generally considered too old for the job, the law about the ÚPN would ignore them completely, i.e. without even mentioning a necessary impeccability of the candidates in their relationship to the oppressive forces of Tiso’s Slovak republic. The fact that only the request of impeccability towards the Hlinka’s party is missing while the wartime period is not ignored in general clearly proves a selective attitude of the Slovak lawmakers who did not wish to put the Hlinka’s party on the same level as the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia or Slovakia, even though they unified both historical periods as the time of non-freedom.

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The second argument against any ‘accidental ignorance’ comes from the Czech model. It is true that the ignorance to moral aspects connected to the Second World War is more applicable there which might make the idea about low suitability of the wartime generations for leading positions within ÚSTR more convincing. However, the Czech model shows that these generations were by no means intentionally excluded automatically. The first, and until then only, chairman of the ÚSTR council, Naděžda Kavalírová, head of the Confederation of Political Prisoners of the Czech Republic, was born in 1923. Thus, Kavalírová belongs to the generation that reached an adult age at the beginning of the Second World War and could therefore carry full responsibility for all its acts during the Second World War. She was found suitable for becoming a chairman of the ÚSTR council in 2007. According to the Czech law, it was not necessary to check her political past before the Communist period.6 Why the candidates who want to influence the work of the institute for studies of two totalitarian regimes should prove their moral qualities only in their relationship to only one of these regimes remains unclear. The Czech law offers no response to this question. However, in a broader context, it is evident that the institute was originally intended to focus only on research of the Communist regime. As I will show, the reference to the years of the Second World War was added much later and without careful consideration. This also makes the ÚSTR in Prague different from ÚPN in Bratislava. This difference is much more evident if we study the act of establishing of the ÚSTR not as a structure but as a process. The Czech Way to Institutionalised Memory The Communist regime in Czechoslovakia ended in 1989, and the Czechoslovak federation split into the Czech and Slovak republic on 1 January 1993. Thus, the Institute of National Memory in Bratislava was 6 It must be added here that Kavalírová was never questioned because of her wartime past. Despite that, she became a controversial person because of her leadership in the Confederation of Political Prisoners. She was indeed persecuted by the Communist régime in the 1950s but after the Soviet led invasion in Czechoslovakia in 1968, she worked in one of the ministries. She became accused of being a member of some pro-Communist organisations after the invasion but despite this criticism, she remained at the head of the Confederation of Political Prisoners of the Czech Republic.

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established thirteen years, and the Institute for Studies of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague seventeen years after the fall of Communism. With regard to the fact that the Gauck Institute in Germany was already founded in 1990, why did the same step take such a long time in the case of Slovakia and more particularly in the Czech republic? The Czech political need ‘to come to terms with the past’, especially with the Communist past, by creating a new institution of Czech collective memory as late as 2007 might seem more surprising than the similar Slovak need in 2002. Already by the early 1990s, the Czech Republic was considered as a country with the most consistent attitude towards the Communist regime among all post-Communist states. Unlike new political elites in Poland or Hungary, the Czech post-communist political elites did not need to compromise in ‘round table negotiations’ with representatives of the dying communist party in their country (Rupnik 2002, 9-26). Thus, all political power and the archives appeared almost immediately under the control of the new regime. This made Czechoslovakia before the split of the common state more similar to Germany than to Poland or Hungary. Coming to terms with the communist past, indeed, started in Prague soon after November 1989. The ÚSTR was not the very first institution directed to fight with the legacy of the communist system. The entire process, however, was problematic and controversial from the very beginning. According to the statistics, some 250,000 individuals were sentenced to prison for political reasons during the Communist period in Czechoslovakia, and about 240 individuals were sentenced to death. Another 2,500-3,000 persons died at the hands of the Communist police, while imprisoned or interned in the so-called ‘camps of forced labour’. The legislative process that was supposed to come to terms with the legacy of the communist period started immediately after 1989. Already by April 1990, the then Czechoslovak parliament approved a law about rehabilitation of the victims of communism. Another law about restitutions of private possessions confiscated by the communist regime, and about screenings that were supposed to stop people collaborating with the oppressive forces of the communist dictatorship to gain new positions in the post-communist leading state organisations, was adopted soon thereafter. As the French sociologist and historian Françoise Mayer pointed out, already these two laws covering both purges in state admin-

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istration and rehabilitations of former victims were part of the political attitude to the past, because they were intended as general norms for definitions of what was and was not legitimate. ‘In both these cases, an absence of legal proceedings meant creation of two categories, those who were guilty and those who were victims. The offenders were allowed to be “disqualified” while the victims were allowed to get satisfaction. Single circumstances that could show how individuals could make their commitments to the regime were not examined.’ (Mayer 2009, 66). The legal process continued after the break-up of Czechoslovakia, first by an approval of a radical ‘Act on Lawlessness of the Communist Regime and on Resistance Against It’ in July 1993 and a year later by creating the Office for the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism (ÚDV). The Act on Lawlessness of the Communist Regime and on Resistance Against It was not actually a penal law but rather a moral declaration. Compared to previous steps, however, it radically turned attention to the question of responsibility for the Communist system. While the victims were in main focus earlier, this act grimly defined the perpetrators and stated that the leading officials of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia carried the main responsibility for the Communist system and its negative impacts. This law constituted a legal framework that was used as a base for a new Czechoslovak institute, Úřad pro dokumentaci a vyšetřování zločinů komunismu (ÚDV, The Office of the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism). As an institution with the right both to document and to investigate, the ÚDV became actively involved in investigations and trials against the prominent figures of the Czechoslovak communist regime. It was The Office of the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism that paved the way to an institutionalied Czech (and to a certain extent even Slovak) collective memory of the communist regime. The Office was established in 1992, i.e. already before the division of Czechoslovakia, and included even the so-called Coordination Centre for investigation of violence against the Czech nation 19451989. As the centre’s name suggests, the perpetrator of such violence was separated from the Czech nation. Since the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and the oppressive forces of the Communist regime were understood as the perpetrators, it was clear that they were treated as non-compatible with the victimised Czech nation. Such a tendency to

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externalise perpetrators from a victimised nation was still very apparent fifteen years later when The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes started to work. The Office of the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism was directly inspired by the Gauck Institute in Germany but, unlike the German institute, it was subordinated not to the Parliament but to the Czech ministry of interior. The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (ÚSTR) resembled, in 2007 its predecessor, ÚDV, in a number of aspects. For example, the first director of the ÚSTR, Pavel Žáček, worked first in the ÚDV in the 1990s. During the years 1998-1999 he was a deputy director of the ÚDV. Among other institutions created by the post-Communist Czech politicians and dealing with ‘coming to terms’ with the Communist or ‘totalitarian’ past already during the 1990s was a ‘governmental commission of historians’ that was studying and analysing the Soviet-led invasion of the Warsaw Pact in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the following defeat of the Prague Spring reform movement until 1970 (Komise vlády ČSFR pro analýzu událostí, 1967-1970). Besides, a number of academic institutions, such as The Institute for Contemporary History in Prague and several Czech universities, were focusing on modern Czechoslovak history. Those scholars who were closely connected with the policy of the former Communist regime in Czechoslovakia from the previous decades disappeared almost completely from all these places. Moreover, the Czech penalty law was modernised in 2001 and public denial, questioning or approval of the ‘Nazi and Communist genocides or other Nazi or Communist crimes against humanity’ became – according to a paragraph 261 – illegal. Due to these facts, a need for yet another institution that would be by law obliged ‘to study, independently evaluate the periods of non-freedom and the Communist totalitarian power, to analyse anti-democratic and criminal activity of the organs of state, especially its security forces, and criminal activity of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia as well as other organisations based on Communist ideology’ did not seem very convincing in 2007. Already in the early stages, the idea of a new institute of national memory was strongly questioned, not only by those who could seem to be directly affected by such an activity, such as, for exam-

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ple, supporters of the old Communist regime.7 Together with scientific aspects of the institution that was by law obliged to make sense of the Czech ‘national’ history, even the moral incentives of the authors of the proposal became a subject of this criticism. Therefore, the new round of the ‘fight against Communism’, represented by the creation of the ÚSTR, should be explained rather by the political situation in the Czech republic in the beginning of the twentyfirst century, than by a fact that an institute of national memory was going to rapidly enrich the Czech scientific research of the Communist system or bring a new, previously missing moral quality into the Czech process of coming to terms with the Communist past. (The Nazi past is not intentionally mentioned here because, as it will be shown, it had not been discussed at all until the very late stages of the development). Post-Communist Fear of the Post-Communist Communists Until the late 1990s, right-wing political parties dominated the Czech political arena. An important aspect of this dominance was the fact that these parties did not place themselves into any specific ‘Czech right-wing political tradition’ that was rooted in the period before the Second World War. These parties considered themselves as completely new parties without history. This naturally does not mean that the politicians did not use history at all; however, no historical narrative that could be described as a post-Communist right-wing interpretation of history was formulated during that time (Sniegon 2010, 191). On the contrary, the two most important oppositional left-wing political parties, the ‘renewed’ Social Democrats and ‘old’ Communists, did seek their social democratic, reform communist or hard-line-communist ‘historical roots’, which made them – especially in discussions about the guilt for communism - automatically much more vulnerable than the right. The Social Democratic Party, for example, presented itself as ‘the oldest Czech political party’ despite the fact that it did not exist between 1948 and 1989. This historical connection led immediately to discussions about social democratic guilt for the Communist coup d’état in 1948, when collaboration between Czech communists and Social Democrats led to the political fusion of these parties into the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The fact that the institutionalised Czech ‘national mem7

http://www.rozhlas.cz/cro6/stop/_zprava/495699

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ory’ was, according to original intentions, meant to be based only on studies of Communist terror was from the point of view of the new right-wing political parties very favourable, since nobody could make right-wing politics responsible for the communist oppression (the parties of the political right were forbidden during the Communist rule and their activities were due to various reasons limited already during the first post-war years, i.e. before February 1948). On the other hand, if the period of Nazism and German occupation was included from the very beginning, it could eventually even open discussions about the Czech political right’s attitudes to the Munich treaty, the period immediately before the occupation and raise questions of collaboration with the Third Reich. All these debates were potentially much more problematic than the debates that exclusively focused on Communism. The proposal to create yet another new institute dealing with crimes of the Communist regime was presented for the first time officially in late November 2005 by nineteen deputies of the Senate, the upper house of the Czech parliament. No less than seventeen of these deputies were members of the conservative Civic Democratic Party (ODS).8 While presenting the proposal in the Senate, the Senators pointed out a necessity to centralise control of documents about oppressions of the Communist regime and to secure better public access to these documents as main reasons for their activity. Such needs suggested that the new institution was supposed to have the character of an archive; there was no mention of a new ‘national memory’. The institute, however, was not supposed to replace the already existing Office of the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism, ÚDV. The proposal of a new institution that would ‘independently evaluate the crimes of the Communist system’ was not based on detailed analyses of the work of the already existing institutions controlled by the government. It did not specify why the already existing institutions were insufficient and why it was impossible to simply improve the already existing institutions and legal norms. 8 Parlament Ceské republiky Senát, 5. funkcní období 2005. Návrh senátoru Jirího Lišky, Josefa Pavlaty, Aleny Paleckové, Václava Jehlicky, Martina Mejstríka, Pavla Sušického, Tomáše Julínka, Jirího Šnebergera, Františka Príhody, Jana Nádvorníka, Vlastimila Sehnala, Aleny Venhodové, Karla Tejnory, Milana Bureše, Zdenka Janalíka, Vítezslava Vavrouška, Františka Kopeckého, Jirího Nedomy a Miloslava Pelce (http://www.ustrcr.cz/data/pdf/chronologie/051129-185.pdf).

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While the new institute was not supposed to help punish crimes from the communist era through the legal system, as was the case with the already existing Office of the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism, it was supposed to ‘reveal communist officials as well as organizers and instigators on political and ideological levels’ who were ‘co-responsible for crimes and other matters’ during the communist era. There was no specification of what ‘other matters’ meant or how exactly these people were to be responsible for such things. While explaining the ideological need for a new institute, the initiators even related this need to a topical global situation after 11 September 2001 in the USA: ‘Ideologies that despise human lives and use malicious terrorism in their fight against civilized societies are partly connected with ideology of Communism’ (Parliamentary Draft 2005, 1). Therefore, according to the Senate members who initiated the proposal, it was necessary ‘to see improvement of our knowledge about practices of oppressive forces of the totalitarian regime as an important contribution to the actual fight against international terrorism’. Here, the proposed institute clearly exceeded the competences of an archive. While presenting the proposal in the upper house of the Czech parliament half a year later, in June 2006, the deputy-chairman of the Senate, Jan Liška, stressed the need of a ‘united national memory’ at the same time he assured that the law about the new institute ‘cannot dictate how history is supposed to be understood’. He added that ‘the past can be unpleasant for some’ and that ‘non-memory can be much more pleasant than memory’ for these political forces. The shift between ideas of an anti-communist archive and the institute of national memory came at the time when the Czech political arena experienced an important change. As a result of parliamentary elections, the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) became the biggest political force in the newly elected Czech parliament in early June 2006. Both the right and the left, however, earned one hundred places in the lower house parliament with two hundred seats. The situation was immediately described as a ‘stalemate’. Nevertheless, the 2006 elections ended an eightyear long period with the Social Democratic Party as the leader of the Czech government. The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia was no longer attacked as a party that aspired to a global revolution but as the main Social Democratic ally on the left. It was not radically reformed after

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1989 and still saw itself as a direct successor to the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. It was evident that the Communist Party had established itself well in the post-communist Czech political system; the noncommunist left was not able to succeed in the political battle against the right-wing coalition without the communist votes, even though the Social Democrats refused to build government coalitions with the Communists. During what the Czech political scientist, Vladmimír Handl, described as a period of communist ‘consolidation and growth’, the Communist Party occasionally became the third biggest Czech political party in the Czech Republic (Handl 2008, 91-115). The Communists did not succeed to block the proposal by protesting at the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic. Despite that, the idea of a new Czech Institute of National Memory was further modified before its approval in the Czech Parliament’s lower house, Poslanecká sněmovna. The connection between communism and post-9/11 terrorism, for example, was deleted as such a discussion was never found relevant for the Czech society with no eventual connection between Communism and Islamic terrorism. There was no other such discussion in Parliament either. The main change between June 2006 and the final approval by both houses of the Czech Parliament in 2007 was the fact that the proposed Institute of National Memory quickly became The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, and that the focus of the institute was equally quickly broadened from only Communism to two totalitarian regimes, i.e. the event of the period of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia during the Second World War. After long debates the lower house of the Parliament, Poslanecká sněmovna, adopted the law on 2 May 2007, as a ‘Law about the Institute of National Memory’ still focusing only on the period of Communism.9 Only a few weeks later, however, the Senate received the same document in another form that spoke about The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes.10 Thus, the focus on the Second World War as well as 9 Parlament C9eské republiky POSLANECKÁ SNE9MOVNA 2007?5. volební období, 308 USNESENÍ Poslanecké sne9movny ze 14. schu °ze 2. kve9tna 2007 k senátnímu návrhu zákona o Ústavu pame9ti národa a o zme9ne9 ne9kterých zákonu /sne9movnítisk15/-tr9etíc9tení. http://www.ustrcr.cz/data/pdf/chronologie/070502-308.pdf. 10 68. Usnesení výboru pro zahraniční věci, obranu a bezpečnost ze 14 schůze, konané dne 6. června 2007 k návrhu zákona o Ústavu pro studium totalitních režimů a o Archivu bezpečnostních složek a změně některých zákonů. http://www.ustrcr.cz/

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the new name was added into the original document on the way from one parliamentary house to the other within a single month. Compared to the discussions about how to approach and institutionalise the period of the Communist regime, discussions about how to deal with the Nazi occupation were neglected. The final form of the law, approved by the two chambers of the Czech Parliament under two different names, is possible to read as a backtracking caused by a criticism of the originally very primitively defined ‘national memory’ and as a compromise between the left and the right in their view of the place of Communism in Czech(oslovak) history. The new institute could not be seen as a new initiator of ‘Czech national memory’ but avoided the label as exclusively ‘anti-communist’. At the same time, it still focused primarily on crimes of the Communist regime and the activities of its supporters. The Slovak Way The process leading to the The Nation’s Memory Institute in Slovakia was simpler than in the Czech republic. While the Czech process did not get support from those who actively fought against the communist regime before 1989, including the first post-communist Czechoslovak and Czech president Václav Havel, creation of the Nation’s Memory Institute in Slovakia became possible thanks to an initiative of two people, Ján Čarnogurský and Ján Langoš, who during the 1980s belonged to the most active dissident groups in the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia. Ján Čarnogurský was a lawyer and a Christian Democratic Slovak politician who in 1991, one year before the division of Czechoslovak federation, became Prime Minister of Slovakia. His father had been a deputy of the Slovak parliament during the Second World War and member of Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party. In 1998, Ján Čarnogurský became Minister of Justice in Slovakia and remained there until 2002. It was during this time the Nation’s Memory Institute was established as a part of the Slovak Ministry of Justice. Ján Langoš became a deputy of the Czechoslovak federal parliament shortly after the fall of Communism and the Czechoslovak minister of interior. He remained minister until the summer of 1992. Thus, already before the break-up of Czechoslovakia, Langoš was one of the key peodata/pdf/chronologie/070606-68.pdf

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ple who—then still on a federal Czechoslovak level-actively initiated the first post-communist attempts to come to terms with the communist past from both a moral and a legal point of view. The foundation of the institute in Bratislava after the division of Czechoslovakia can be seen very much as a continuity of Ján Langoš’s activity within new conditions. This continuity, however, was interrupted by a political situation in the new Slovak Republic during the period 1993-1997 when the government headed by the controversial Slovak Prime Minister, Vladimír Mečiar, was in power. When the political power changed, Ján Langoš became the leading person behind the legislation about the Nation’s Memory Institute. No institute similar to The Nation’s Memory Institute existed in Slovakia before 2002, not even a counterpart of the Office of the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism. Only in 2000, seven years after Czechoslovakia was divided, The Unit for Documentation of Crimes of Communism was set up under the auspices of the Ministry of Justice headed by Čarnogurský. This unit was, in fact, the only predecessor of the ÚPN that was established ten years after declaration of Slovak independence. From this point of view, the difference between the ÚPN’s function in the Slovak society and ÚSTR’s function in the Czech society is very important. The Czechoslovak law about lustrace (screening law) was approved for Slovakia but the Slovak part of the dying federation stopped paying attention in 1992. The Slovak elites showed less will to dissociate with the communist regime, until the end of the Mečiar era in 1998, than their Czech counterparts (Šimečka 2007, 399-403). On the one hand, a number of Slovak politicians were members of the Communist Party before 1989, even though they did not occupy the most important positions. On the other hand, the power of the new Slovak elites, unlike the Czech case, was never challenged by a non-reformed Communist Party; the old Slovak communist party was dissolved and its members split into several other, new parties, at the same time when no new communist Party was created in the independent Slovakia (Kopeček 2003). With the absence of both strong conservative and strong extreme left political tendencies, there was no interest to push ahead an idea about an institution which would be similar to the Gauck Institute in Germany or even to the Czech Office of the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism.

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The situation became different after the parliamentary elections in 1998 when, for the first time in independent Slovak politics, a new government coalition came to power that started to distance itself from the non-democratic Slovak past during the Second World War and the time that followed. Important catalysts to change were firstly the start of negotiations between Slovakia and the European Union about Slovakia’s membership there, and secondly similar negotiations between Slovakia and NATO. During the Mečiar era, the EU and NATO boycotted such tendencies. However, during the first two post-Mečiar election periods, Slovakia reached full membership of both the EU and NATO. Ján Langoš, then an adviser to the Minister of Justice, became the head of the ÚPN at the beginning of the organisation in 2003. In the editorial of the quarterly Pamäť národa that was first published by the ÚPN in 2004, he especially stressed the European dimension of the memory process. ‘The truth about European past is our common heritage and it should be accessible to us as well as to people from the West. Therefore, together with our counterpart institutes from Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, we have sent a letter to the chairman of the European Commission, Mr. Romano Prodi, and asked him to transfer our activity to the level of the European Union’.11 Especially the steps condemning oppressions of the wartime Slovak state and the attitude of Tiso’s Slovakia against its Jewish citizens during the Holocaust can be understood as a contribution of the new Slovak political elites after 1998 to the process of the EU enlargement and an attempt to convince the Union that the new Slovak democracy is qualified for full EU membership and dedicated to building a new ‘European memory’ (Lášticová and Findor 2008). The fight for democracy fits into a new Slovak national-European historical narrative that was supposed to give legitimacy to the Slovak entrance to the EU (Sniegon 2008, 213-256). Thus, the role of the foundation of the ÚPN in the process of Slovakia’s Europeanisation is another important difference between the Czech and Slovak debates about the ‘national memory’. The Czech institute, unlike the Slovak one, was founded first after the Czech entrance into the EU. The Slovak parliament approved the law about The Nation’s Memory Institute in summer 2002. The government coalition could not at that time be characterised as clearly right-wing oriented. Its main unifying Pamäť národa, October 2004, p.2. http://www.upn.gov.sk/data/pamat-naroda-002004/pamat-naroda-00-2004.pdf 11

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aspect was first of all resistance against the former Mečiar course of Slovakia’s development before 1998. Even some members of the opposition voted in favour of the new law. Left and right perspective in this case was not as evident as in the Czech case. A dividing line was rather the attitude towards extreme Slovak nationalism that experienced a constant boom between 1990 and 1998. The Slovak president Rudolf Schuster, who until 1989 was a member of the Communist Party, disliked the new law. After the president’s veto, however, the parliament was strong enough to enforce the law regardless. Making clear his ideological standpoint, Ján Langoš described the law as ‘the most important anti-Communist law in Slovakia’. Langoš remained at the head of the ÚPN until 2006 when he tragically died in a car accident. ÚPN and ÚSTR as Regulators of Scholarly History By establishing The Nation’s Memory Institute in Bratislava and The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague as institutional promoters of a ‘correct memory’ of the key non-democratic periods in the development of modern Czechoslovakia based on a legal basis, the lawmakers strictly limited the field of possible activities for those historians who found their work in both institutes. From the point of view of scholarly history, such limitations became highly problematic. The evidence that clearly dominates the work of the institutes is based on observations and documents of the former oppressed security forces of two non-democratic regimes. Those historians who work in the institutes are by law obliged to condemn these forces and their activities, this without paying attention to possible individual variations. Thus, those who are collectively condemned are, first of all, former employees of the oppressive forces and their collaborators and agents. It became possible to publish archival information about their names and activities and denounce them morally in public by the institutes’ historians themselves. While, to some extent, such a procedure could be quite understandable in a society that lived under dictatorships for such a long time, it also negatively affected innocent people who were registered as collaborators on false grounds or those who were forced to collaborate under special circumstances against their will. In the Czech Republic, the attention often turned to well-known public names – writers, actors or singers – making scandals of this kind very popular in the media.

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History according to both these laws, however, left very little room for analyses of broader circumstances that led to the non-democratic regimes in Czechoslovakia and that on the contrary could raise provocative questions with the potential to challenge a united ‘national memory’ by calling for ‘national’ self-reflection instead. Similarly, the clearly practical tasks of the institutes’ work meant that important theoretical questions that have dramatically changed history as a scholarly discipline during the last decades were left aside. One of these examples is a complete absence of any scholarly research that studies relations between history, memory, historical consciousness and national, ethnic, religious or social identity. This became especially paradoxical in the Slovak case since the Slovak Nation’s Memory Institute carries the term ‘memory’ in its name. Instead of focusing on questions about the relation between the past, the present and the future, it has been focusing on its own nation, but even here, theoretical aspects of nation-building processes were not viewed as important. Similarly, despite the reference to ‘totalitarian regimes’ in the name of the Czech institute, there has been no theoretical research based on theories of ‘totalitarism’. Instead of a comparative study of the period of Nazism and Communism in Czechoslovakia, both dictatorships are almost automatically understood as equal. This proves that ideologically based thinking of the politicians who supported the institutes was given the highest priority at the expense of the scientific use of history, but it also indicates that historians who became employed by the institutes generally accepted such a prerequisite. The laws on the ÚPN and ÚSTR have been primarily based on a very traditional, positivistic perception of history and on a belief that a ‘right’ or ‘correct’ understanding of history is only possible if the people know enough about the past and condemn the perpetrators (Kopeček 2008, 76-90). To give a few examples of how absolutely essential questions can be missed in this context: How can the war crimes of the Slovak wartime regime from the time Slovakia was not occupied by Germany be explained without challenging an idea of the unity of the Slovak nation? Similarly, how to explain the fact that Czechoslovakia became a communist state while it was not occupied by the Soviet Union? Why did the Communist Party in 1948 have no less than 2,5 million members, which was about 25 per cent of the entire population? Why was the most rigid

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and stable form of communism in the entire region born ‘in the economically most advanced Central European society’ (Rupnik 2002, 9-26)? These – and many other – sensitive questions have been left aside. Conclusions: Old Ideological use of History Replaced by a New One The idea of establishing an institute of ‘national memory’ came to Slovakia and the Czech republic from outside and was found inspiring in both these cases. Slovakia took over the concept of the Polish IPN in Warsaw, the Czech republic copied both Polish and Slovak cases. However, in neither of these two cases was the inspiration followed by a profound discussion about how to adjust the concept to the local conditions and how to eventually make it work in order to develop the new post-Communist democratic process of coming to terms with the past. Even though moral and scientific aspects were mentioned among the main reasons to establish a new institute both in Slovakia and in the Czech Republic, both ÚPN and ÚSTR can be seen primarily as ideological projects. While the goals of the moral use of history are, according to Karlsson’s typology, rehabilitation and reconciliation, the goals in the Czech and Slovak cases were rather connected with confrontation and proof of collective guilt. By recognition and condemnation of this collective guilt of the clearly defined group of perpetrators the new ‘national memory’ was supposed to help the new leaders and ‘new’ post-Communist Czech and Slovak nations to be recognised as exclusively positive. As the scientific use of history often stresses and analyses specific aspects and parts of historic development and its interpretations, here it was supposed to be understood that the entire course of the Czech and Slovak history has lead to the desired results. The laws about the ÚPN in Bratislava and ÚSTR in Prague were both – though under different circumstances – adopted first of all in order to present a new and ‘compact’ interpretation of the most traumatic past that could be – in an institutionalised form and with the support of the state – presented as ‘national’ and understood as more or less official. In this context, they can be understood as centralised attempts to create a new national Czech and Slovak historical narrative. An ideological attitude seems to be more evident in the Czech case where the outcome of the ÚSTR’s research could in fact legitimise only the right-wing post-Communist politics.

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This does not mean that the ÚPN and ÚSTR could not have any moral or scientific effects in their respective countries. However, necessities to reach political goals within particular political forces became in both processes in question more important than questions about how to develop historical memory in new democratic conditions, or how to offer pluralistic perceptions of history to new post-Communist generations.

References Assmann, Aleida. 2006. Memory, Individual and Collective. In The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, eds. Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly, 210-224. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Assmann, Jan. 2010. Globalization, Universalism, and the Erosion of Cultural Memory. In Memory in a Global Age, eds. Assmann, Aleida and Conrad, Sebastian, 121-137. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cavalli, Alessandro. 2008. Memory and Identity: How Memory Is Reconstructed after Catastrophic Events. In Meaning and Representation in History, ed. Jörn Rüsen, 169-182. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books. Handl, Vladimír. 2008. Transformace komunistické strany: Od strategie levicového ústupu k evropeizaci. In Kapitoly z dějin české demokracie po roce 1989, eds. Adéla Gjuričová, and Michal Kopeček, 91-115. Prague, Litomyšl: Paseka. Jeismann, Karl-Ernst. 1979. Gestchichtsbewusstsein. In Handbuch der Geschichtsdidaktik. Vol 1, eds. Klaus Bergmann, et al., 42-45. Düsseldorf: Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann. Karlsson, Klas-Göran. 2003. The Holocaust as a Problem of Historical Culture. Theoretical and Analytical Challenges. In Echoes of the Holocaust. Historical Cultures in Contemporary Europe, eds. Karlsson, Klas-Göran and Ulf Zander, 9-58. Lund: Nordic Academic Press. Kolář, Pavel and Michal Kopeček. 2007. A Difficult Quest for New Paradigms: Czech Historiography After 1989. In Narratives Unbound, Historical Studies in Post-Communist Eastern Europe, eds. Sorin Antohi, Balász Trencsényi and Péter Apor, 173-248. Budapest: Central European University Press. Kopeček, Lubomír. 2003. Od Mečiara k Dzurindovi. Slovenská politika a politický systém v prvním desetiletí samostatnosti. Brno: Masarykova univerzita. Kopeček, Michal. 2008. Historická paměť a liberální nacionalismus v Česku a střední Evropě po roce 1989. In Kapitoly z dějin moderní české demokracie po roce 1989, eds. Adéla Gjuričová and Michal Kopeček, 232-264. Prague: Paseka.

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Kopeček, Michal. 2008. In Search of National Memory. In Past in the Making: Historical Revisionism in Central Europe after 1989, ed. Michal Kopeček, 75-96. Budapest: Central European University Press. Lášticová, Barbara and Andrej Findor. 2008. From regime legitimation to democratic museum pedagogy? Studying Europeanization at the Museum of Slovak National Uprising. In Politics of Collective Memory: Cultural Patterns of Commemorative Practices in Post-War Europe, eds. Barbara Lášticová and Andrej Findor, 237-258. Vienna: LIT Verlag. Mayer, Françoise. 2009. Češi a jejich komunismus. Paměť a politická identita. Prague: Argo. Mink, Georges. 2008. ‘Between Reconciliation and the Reactivation of the Past Conflicts in Europe: Rethinking Social Memory Paradigms’, Czech Sociological Review 3: 469-490. Rupnik, Jacques. 2002. ‘Politika vyrovnávání s komunistickou minulostí. Česká zkušenost’. Soudobé dějiny 1: 9-26. Rüsen, Jörn. 2001. Holocaust, Memory and Identity Building: Metahistorical Considerations in the Case of (West) German. In Disturbing Remains: Memory, History and Crisis in the Twentieth Century, eds. Michael S. Roth and Charles G. Salas, 252-270. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. Rüsen, Jörn. 2004. Interpreting the Holocaust. Some Theoretical Issues. In Holocaust Herritage. Inquiries into European Historical Cultures, eds. Klas-Göran Karlsson and Ulf Zander, 35-62. Malmö: Sekel. Šimečka, Martin. 2007. Poznajte svojho agenta. In Slovenská otázka dnes, ed. László Szigeti, 399-403. Bratislava: Kalligram. Sniegon, Tomas. 2008. Den försvunna historien. Förintelsen i tjeckisk och slovakisk historiekultur. Lund: Lunds universitet. Sniegon, Tomas. 2010. Looking Back, Going Forward. Czech and Slovak Traumatic History in Dominating Historical Narratives of the Long 1990s. In Cultural and Social Transformations after Communism: East Central Europe in Focus, eds. Barbara Törnquist-Plewa and Krzystof Stala, 180-213. Malmö: Sekel.

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COMING TO TERMS WITH ANTI-SEMITISM: JAN T. GROSS’S WRITINGS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF CULTURAL TRAUMA IN POST-COMMUNIST POLAND Barbara Törnquist-Plewa Abstract Since 1989 the Polish have struggled with their history and memory. The most heated debates were provoked by two historical books, Neighbors (Sąsiedzi 2000) and Fear (2006, Strach, Polish trans. 2008). The author of these books, Jan T. Gross, challenged the Poles’ view of themselves as solely innocent victims of German Nazism, showing how anti-Semitism could lead them to kill Jews both during and after the war. This chapter analyses the Polish reactions to Gross’s book Fear and identifies amongst them a number of coping strategies typical of a trauma situation. The author argues that the memory of Polish anti-Semitism during and after the Holocaust became established as a cultural trauma in post-communist Poland and Jan T. Gross’s writings have played a crucial role in this process. This chapter demonstrates how the cultural trauma has been constructed but at the same time points to the fact that it has not yet resulted in a radical revision of Polish memory and identity. Thus the study shows the weakness of the normative aspects of the theory of cultural trauma. The construction of cultural trauma does not necessarily lead to empathy, greater moral responsibility and reconciliation as postulated by the authors of the theory. The end of the Cold War and the fall of communism entailed many changes in Poland in the ways history was written and the past recollected. Since 1989 many heated debates about the past have taken place. Surprisingly, the stormiest debate did not concern communist crimes, but

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Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust and the immediate post-war years. The two most discussed historical books in post-communist Poland, Sąsiedzi (2000, English trans. Neighbors 2001) and Fear (2006; Polish trans. Strach, 2008) dealt with anti-Semitism in Poland during and after the Second World War. The author of these books, the Polish-American scholar Jan T. Gross challenged the Poles’ view of themselves as solely innocent victims of German Nazism, showing how anti-Semitism could also have led them to kill Jews both during and after the War. Gross’s books awoke strong emotions and Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz even led to his opponents trying to press legal charges against him for ‘defaming the Polish nation’.1 At the same time he was praised by a large part of the Polish intellectual elite for his contribution to making the Poles face the anti-Semitic legacy in their country and to start dealing with it. This had never been raised in Communist Poland where the regime had used anti-Semitism as a political weapon and the subject was made taboo. There are many reasons for the involvement of parts of the Polish elite in remembering the Holocaust and the Polish role in it. One of them is the determination to ‘Europeanise’ Polish national identity by subscribing to the idea, wide-spread in EU countries since the 1990s, that the memory of the Holocaust is fundamental to European identity, a lesson to remember in order to build a more tolerant and democratic Europe. The huge public discussions about Polish guilt that took place during some years before and after Poland’s entry to the EU inscribed the country in the general trend of European politics of memory, namely the politics of regret, guilt and expiation.2 Trying to change a nation’s collective memory from focusing on the glorious days to the days of guilt and shame is an enormous challenge. In the following I focus on Gross’s writings as such an attempt. However, because Gross’s book Neighbors has already been analysed by several researchers, including myself (Törnquist-Plewa 2003, 141-176. Compare with Michlic and

The Prosecutor’s Office in Kracow examined whether it was possible to prosecute Gross on the basis of Article 132 of the Polish Penal Law for ‘official libel against the Polish nation, claiming that it had participated in, organised or been responsible for communist or Nazi crimes’. However, the authorities concluded that the accusations were unmotivated. 2 See introduction to this volume. Compare with Olick 2007. 1

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Polonsky 2003). I will concentrate on Gross’s second book Fear (Strach).3 I analyse the Polish reactions to Fear by using the theory of cultural trauma as it has been formulated in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (2004), co-authored by Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka. In the light of this theory I argue for the hypothesis that Jan T. Gross has acted as a memory ‘carrier’ and actively participated in turning the memory of Polish wrong-doings towards Jews into a cultural trauma in Polish contemporary society. His books can be seen as a kind of shock therapy. By forcing the broad Polish public to feel the traumatic experience of seeing itself as a perpetrator, he wanted the Poles to question the traditional master narrative of Polish identity as a nation of heroes and victims, and urged them to construct a new more liberal and inclusive narrative, free from narrow national particularism and anti-Semitism. The question is how successful this construction of cultural trauma has been and what the results tell us about Polish society and about the limitations of the cultural trauma theory. Cultural Trauma The authors of the theory of cultural trauma strongly emphasise the difference between their concept of trauma and the concept of psychological trauma, collective or individual, as it has been widely used in social sciences. Cultural trauma is not a natural result of events painful to a group. It is not automatically born out of the event, but always socially constructed. Not all social crises or mass sufferings become traumas. Collective traumas occur when the memory carriers succeed in representing social pain as a fundamental threat to the community, thus persuading their audience that it has become strongly influenced by an event that has marked the group’s memory (Alexander 2004, 1). Smelser defines cultural trauma as: a memory accepted and publicly given credence by a relevant membership group and evoking an event or situation which is a) laden with negative affect b) represented as indelible

3 The Polish version of Fear differs from the English original, containing major differences concerning both content and style. This is why I have exclusively used the Polish version in the following analysis. The translations are mine.

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It is important to emphasise that the concept of cultural trauma as formulated by Alexander et al. does not merely signify the feeling of a fundamental injury done to a collective. Alexander goes as far as giving it a normative dimension, seeing the construction of cultural trauma as a process of moral–practical action: ‘By allowing members of wider publics to participate in the pain of others, cultural traumas broaden the realm of social understanding and sympathy, and they provide powerful avenues for new forms of social incorporation’ (Alexander 2004, 24). Alexander particularly applied the theory of cultural trauma to the Holocaust memory, seeing it as a paradigmatic example of the construction of cultural trauma in Western civilisation with a potential to become global memory. However, if we look from this perspective on the Holocaust memory in Poland we could claim that until the publication of Gross’s two books at the beginning of the twenty-first century there have been very few attempts to turn the Holocaust memory into a Polish cultural trauma. The dominating tendency until recently has been in Steinlauf’s term the ‘Polonisation’ of the Holocaust (Steinlauf 1997, 70). This means focusing on the Poles’ own suffering during the War and avoiding confronting the question of anti-Semitism and its role in Polish society during and immediately after the Holocaust. The death of about three million Polish citizens of Jewish origin has not until recently been constructed as a traumatic experience that raises questions about moral responsibility and leads to a need of ‘narrating new foundations’ (Eyerman 2004, 63) of Polish identity. To be sure, the subject had already been raised in several publications before the publication of Gross’s two books,4 but none of them received much public attention or stirred up so many feelings that it would be justified to discuss them in terms of the construction of collective trauma. The involvement of the whole Polish elite in the debate on Neighbors and Fear, the scale and intensity of these debates, the amount of copies sold and the enormous 4 Among these few we can, for example, mention Jan Błoński, ‘Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto’, Tygodnik Powszechny, nr 2, 1987, Barbara Engelking, Zagłada i pamięć, Warsaw: IfiS PAN 1994, Feliks Tych, Długi cień zagłady, Warsaw: ŻIH 1999, Jan Gross, Upiorna dekada, Krakow: Universitas 1998; Maria Janion, Do Europy tak, ale razem z naszymi umarłymi, Warsaw: Sic! 2000.

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media attention, make these cases exceptional and worth analysing in the light of the cultural trauma theory. The Traumatic Message What then was the message conveyed by Gross in Fear? What kind of trauma was articulated? Gross claims that considerable damage had been done to Polish society by not dealing with the heritage of anti-Semitism and the question of guilt in relation to those Polish Jews who were its victims. He himself rarely uses the word ‘trauma’, but what he does do corresponds to the first stage in the process that Jeffrey Alexander describes as ‘the construction of cultural trauma’ (Alexander 2004, 11). Gross formulates a narrative about an enormously destructive process and upsetting events, which demand emotional, symbolic and perhaps even institutional atonement. He argues that the Polish collective memory of the Second World War contains lies and omissions. This goes first and foremost for the Poles’ attitudes towards Jews. Polish society failed the difficult moral test it was put to as Hitler turned the country into the largest arena for the Holocaust. The majority of the Polish people were indifferent to the fate of the Jews and many became, in one way or another, participants in the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism was the main reason why there was little solidarity with the Jews in Polish society. These negative attitudes did not change when the Poles were faced with Jewish suffering and the aim of Fear was precisely to demonstrate that anti-Semitism continued in Poland in the post-war years. Gross describes its manifold expressions focusing on a pogrom that took place in Kielce in 1946, when 42 people were killed. He demonstrates the inertia of Polish society in the face of expressions of anti-Semitism. The Communist regime did not dare confront the population on this point and instead tried to use anti-Semitism in its fight with the opposition which it indiscriminately accused of anti-Semitism. Nor did the leaders of the Church, with a few praiseworthy exceptions, make use of their authority in order to influence the population in a positive direction. They even made declarations revealing their antiSemitic prejudice. Polish intellectuals were shocked by the Kielce pogrom, and expressed their despair, but they mainly remained helpless and chose to view the Kielce events either as a political provocation from the new powers in place or an act of hooliganism by the dregs of society.

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Gross asks important questions as to the reasons why anti-Semitism could continue to live in Poland after the Holocaust. He sums up these main reasons with the word that he has used as the title of his book, namely Fear. Fear on several levels: fear of losing economic advantages gained from the Jews, fear of – even solely morally – having to answer for taking part in the Holocaust in one way or another, and last but not least, the fear of the Poles of themselves, of the dark frightening side which people and society demonstrated when they were put to the test during the Holocaust. This fear might be described as some kind of trauma even if Gross does not call it by that name. He writes instead: ‘Living among people incapable of naming the state of moral fall in which we too have participated, we fear for our own destiny’ (Gross 2008, 310). The all-encompassing fear gives, according to Gross, nourishment to Polish anti-Semitism and poisons Polish society, making it insecure, xenophobic and full of complexes. The only way in which to handle this is to confront the issue of guilt, take on responsibility and reformulate national memory. Gross’s book constitutes an appeal for this, his message aims not only at knowledge but also at therapy. In practice he calls for working through the trauma. According to the authors of the theory of cultural trauma, working through trauma demands precisely the creation of new narratives about the past in order to face present and future needs. It is the need to reconcile ourselves not only with ‘the others’ but also with oneself, i.e. to accept the ‘new master narrative of national identity’ (Giesen 2004, 146). It is about incorporating painful or shameful memories into ‘a reconstituted narrative’. In Fear, Gross presents proof of anti-Semitism and Polish crimes against Jews during and after the Second World War. To a large extent, these were well-known to Polish historians but not to people born after the War. Thus the merit of Gross was awareness-raising, but not only that. He achieved a strong emotional reaction among his readers, which shows that he succeeded in releasing a ‘spiral of signification’ (Alexander 2004, 11) in the construction of cultural trauma, when the trauma is represented, imagined and experienced. He achieved this not by the presentation of facts per se, but through the way he represented them. I cannot present a close reading of the rhetoric used in Fear due to the limits of space, and I will restrict myself to just a few remarks on this point.

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A closer analysis of the rhetorical design of Fear shows that the whole book has the character of a fierce speech to the Polish nation. It displays the clear characteristics of a classic deliberative speech (with the aim to convince and make people act) but it also carries some features of demonstrative speech, aiming to influence the perception, and some elements of legal speech, intended in this case to formulate a charge. Charges in Fear are aimed at two groups in particular – nationalist Catholics (called by Gross ‘Catho-Endecja’), and the Polish Catholic Church. The first, according to Gross, instigated hatred towards Jews and poisoned Polish discourse with anti-Semitism, while the latter failed in its vocation and faith because it did not appeal strongly enough to Polish Catholics to apply the Christian ethics of mercy, help and charity towards the Jews. However, Gross also directs his accusations against the Polish intelligentsia, criticising them for elitism and self-deception that kept it from realising the extent and consequences of anti-Semitism. Gross must have been aware of the fact that the weight of his argumentation notwithstanding, strong feelings would be aroused when he held the Catholic Church and the intelligentsia responsible, since they are the two forces to which Polish collective memory ascribes the status of leaders of the nation. The rhetorical strategies used by Gross show that the primary purpose of Fear is not to convey facts, inform and discuss, but to convince, argue and arouse feelings.5 Fear is written in a colloquial, forceful, emotional style. Gross does not at all try to suppress the traces of his acting as narrator and interpreter, as historians traditionally do. On the contrary, being the narrative subject he is explicitly represented as the catalyst for the general consensus that the author is trying to achieve – a modified view of the history of Polish-Jewish relations during and after the War. The representation of the past in Fear is well-documented and based on primary sources such as the testimonies of victims, witnesses or perpetrators, found in transcripts from police and court interrogations, as well as in personal letters, diaries and memoirs. Even those historians who objected to Gross’s interpretation had few criticisms to make against the way in which he used the source material. The scientific criticism was primarily concerned with two matters, namely the lack of a presentation of the historical context of the events described, and For other examples of the deployment of affect in practices of memory see Julia Creet’s contribution to this volume on Hungary. 5

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Gross’s rhetoric in the book.6 By historical context the critics meant the post-war situation in Poland: wide-spread demoralisation in Polish society which for a number of years had to witness the lack of value of human life, hunger and poverty, frustration and insecurity as communists came to power, the weakened position of the Church and the fear of the elites of the new regime.7 Gross later explained that he regretted not including a chapter about this, which he had written and published in the English version of his book. On the other hand, this ‘omission’ is in line with his discursive and rhetorical strategy used in the Polish version. If the goal is to achieve a change in the Poles’ view of themselves it must happen through shock therapy (i.e. in Alexander’s terms via the construction of cultural trauma), a naked truth delivery without an anaesthetic. It was precisely in this way that he could give his message the traumatic quality. The strong criticism against the rhetoric in Gross’s text missed, in my view, an important point. Fear was written not only with an epistemological purpose, but also a moral one. Judging from the reaction to Gross’s book the value of his work lies not primarily in his contribution to the body of existing knowledge, but in its functionality and perfomativity. He presented the facts in such a provocative and engaging way that it released social energy. The value of his work should be judged not only in terms of the degree to which it retrospectively fills the gaps of history or fails to do so, but first and foremost in terms of what it does and allows others to do in the present. Fear would not have fulfilled the role of a catalyst of collective remembrance if Gross had chosen another kind of rhetorical representation. The authors of the theory of cultural trauma claim that both imagination and affects are crucial for construction of cultural trauma: (…) those interested in establishing a historical event or situation as traumatic must speak in a language that will reach individual people. And since affect plays such a salient role in alerting individuals to threatening and traumatising phenomena, experiencing a language of negative affect is a necessary condition for believing that a cultural trauma exists or is threatening (Smelser 2004, 40-41). See voices in the debate collected in the volume Wokół Strachu 2008. These points were made by several historians such as Bożena Szaynok, Dariusz Stola, Paweł Machcewicz and others. See a selection of newspaper articles, interviews and other voices in the debate collected in Wokół Strachu 2008. 6 7

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This combination of using the language of affect while telling about past events and at the same time pointing to the present relevance makes Gross’s narrative performance different from much conventional historiographical writing, that to a large extent follows the positivistic tradition enjoining stylistic distance and neutrality. The rhetorical and discursive tools applied by Gross are more in line with postmodern historiography that attempts to blur the lines between writing history and fiction.8 Fear can be seen as a kind of hybrid, something in-between historiographical and literary, yet non-fictional writing.9 This does not diminish the value of his work at all – on the contrary, in combining discursive and narrative practises from historiography and literature in representing the past Gross succeeded in what others failed – to articulate trauma and shake up Polish society. The Carriers of Cultural Trauma In the context of the Polish debates on Neigbours and Fear Jan T. Gross stands out as the main mnemonic actor and carrier of cultural trauma. However, he was not alone in this, as he represents a larger group of liberal and leftist liberal Polish intellectuals who wish to break away from the traditional martyrological narrative. The kernel of this group was already formed during the Communist times and to judge from his biography, Gross already belonged to these circles. In the 1960s he became engaged in a left-wing oppositional grouping called the ‘revisionists’ (e.g. Kołakowski, Brus, Bauman). Together with Adam Michnik he was part of an oppositional student group at Warsaw University calling themselves ‘komandosi’. After having been active in student protests against the regime in March 1968, Gross was imprisoned and after his release he left Poland. About a decade later, in 1976, several of his former colleagues created the underground organisation KOR, which had already began to work towards an open and pluralist Polish society.10 After the fall of communism they gathered around the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza with Adam Michnik at its head and continued their endeavour with renewed 8 Prominent examples are the writings by Natalie Zemon Davies. For her ‘credo’ see Davies 1991, 12-13. 9 See remarks about differences between historiography and literature in Rigney 2009. 10 An example of this early commitment is the essay by the KOR founder Jan Józef Lipski ‘Dwie ojczyzny, dwa patriotyzmy’, (‘Two fatherlands, two patriotisms’), which received much attention after its publication in Kultura, no.10/409, in 1981 in Paris.

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impetus. In order to reshape Polish national identity, make it more open, democratic and free from xenophobia, these liberal intellectuals wish to remould Polish collective memory. They believe that the Poles must retell their own history, to a lesser degree centred on themselves and with more regard to ‘others’ that have lived in Poland for centuries, for instance Jews, Ukrainians, or Belorussians. They, and Gross with them, consider that the first step in this direction would be to rethink the roots, expressions and legacy of Polish anti-Semitism. These were the ideological motives that could be discerned when Gross appeared on the Polish public arena with his works, as a ‘carrier’ of the Polish cultural trauma. He shares these motives not only with the left-wing liberal intelligentsia, but also with Catholic intellectuals grouped around the reviews Tygodnik Powszechny and Więź. The publishing house Znak that issued the Polish edition of Fear (Strach, 2008) is run precisely by Catholic intellectuals, who for a long time have advocated discussing and dealing with Polish anti-Semitism.11 The Catholic intellectuals grouped around Tygodnik Powszechny view the fight against antiSemitism in moral terms. They consider that evil must be discussed and condemned in order to allow the Poles to build their national community as a moral community, with high moral values such as human dignity, equality and tolerance. Therefore, Christians who are guilty in relation to Jews should be active in the struggle against this evil (see Woźniakowski, 2008 in editor’s introduction to Strach). Jan T. Gross was thus not the sole ‘carrier of cultural trauma’ in Poland. At his side there was a part of the Catholic intelligentsia and, first and foremost, relatively broad groups of the liberal and leftist liberal intelligentsia. They were the collective ‘carrier’ that used the media (primarily Gazeta Wyborcza and Tygodnik Powszechny) as an arena in order to articulate and reinforce the message that Gross conveyed in Fear. Many of them, as I have already pointed out, started to deal with anti-Semitism in Poland before 1989. This indicates some amount of continuity in memory work between communist and democratic Poland, at least at the level of memory carriers.

Tygodnik Powszechny was the first to break the taboo in Communist Poland by publishing in 1987 (nr 2) Jan Błoński’s essay ‘Poor Poles look at the Ghetto’, which led to the first public debate on the Poles’ attitudes towards the Jews during the Holocaust. 11

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The Context of the Traumatic Message In order to better understand the form and content of Fear, as well as its reception in Poland, it is important to describe the historical and political context in which the book was written and received. This context may be summed up in the concept of ‘the politics of history of the Fourth Republic’. ‘The politics of history’, also called ‘politics of memory’ might be described as activities aiming at establishing or modifying the collective memory of a community. It is often a question of an ideological and political use of history (mainly for legitimising and mobilising). It may, however, also include an existential or moral use of the past. Every society has its politics of memory in one form or another. In Poland, this was particularly brought to the fore when one of the largest political parties, ‘Law and Justice’ (PIS) put the politics of memory on its agenda in its 2004 political programme. It declared that Poland needed modern politics of memory for cultivating and spreading Polish historical and cultural values (Decree No.1/09/04 of the Political Council of PIS – Rada Polityczna Prawa i Sprawiedlowości – 11 September 2004). This policy was put into place when PIS won the parliamentary elections in 2005 and declared that its electoral victory was the beginning of the socalled ‘Fourth Republic’ (‘IV Rzeczpospolita’). The Third Republic had been governed by the left and by liberals, and PIS disapproved of their politics of memory. This, according to PIS, weakened the nation’s identity and cohesion. Moreover the ‘Third Republic’ ruled either by LeftLiberals or post-Communists represented the politics of ‘drawing a thick line’ in relation to Communist Poland, while PIS called for a radical settling of accounts with the Communist past and introduced a comprehensive ‘lustration’, i.e. a close look at the citizens previous contacts with the security police in Communist Poland. In its view on politics of memory the Polish right was inspired by the founder of the nationalist party ‘Endecja’, Roman Dmowski (1864-1939), who considered that the task of the political elite was to unite the nation around a common view of the past, which would be a source of pride and strength. Thus, internal and external critics of national history would be fought against, and every citizen would be called upon to respect and defend the national heritage. In accordance with this rationale, PIS considered that the way the Liberals and the Left-wing presented Poland’s history deepened the Poles’ inferiority complex (Nijakowski 2008, 200) while the politics of memory of the Right would strive to promote national confidence

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(Nijakowski, 2008, 193-194). One important goal for the policy of PIS was ‘to form a positive image of Poland’, both among its own citizens and abroad.12 The advocates of these politics of memory tended to dismiss any facts showing that Poles would be guilty of any misdeeds against other peoples, for instance Jews. The Polish sociologist Nijakowski considers precisely Jan T. Gross’s book published in 2000 on the Jedwabne murders as a catalyst for shaping Right-wing politics of memory (TörnquistPlewa 2003, 165). While Liberals and the Left viewed Neighbors as an opportunity for Polish society to come clean about anti-Semitism and become more open, democratic and pluralistic, the Right saw Gross’s book as detrimental to the Polish national interests. Against this background Jan T. Gross’s book Fear (2008), may be viewed as the next step in the Polish Liberals struggle against the Right about Polish collective memory. Jan T. Gross must have been fully aware of the fact that he was entering this ongoing battle. With Fear written while Poland was governed by PIS and published during the major offensive of that party regarding politics of memory, Gross became one of the main actors in the raging ideological struggle. The construction of the memory of Polish anti-Semitic violence as cultural trauma was part of this struggle. It is possible to find several instances in Fear which demonstrate Gross’s direct attack on and polemics with the politics of memory of PIS (Gross 2008, 202, 234). The most obvious proof is his attack on the Polish Catholic Church, glorified by PIS for its role in Polish history. Against this glorification, Gross chose to show those instances in history where the Polish Catholic Church and its leaders did not live up to the ethical ideals and values which they claimed to represent. The main example is the indifferent, and sometime even apologetically, anti-Semitic reaction to the Kielce pogrom among the Polish clergy. He also demonstrated the moral defeat of the Church during and immediately after the War. The cherished Christian values were incapable of resisting antiSemitism, and Christian brotherly love was rarely shown towards Jewish inhabitants in occupied Poland. According to Gross, one reason for the 12 The new politics of memory was formulated by historians connected to the PIS. The main examples of their writings are: Polityka historyczna. Historycy – politycy – prasa. IPN: Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego 2005 ; Cichocki, Marek A. Władza i pamięć O politycznej funkcji historii, both published by Ośrodek Myśli Politycznej im. J. Tischnera Kraków 2005; Kostro, Robert, Merta, Tomasz (eds) Pamięć i odpowiedzialność, Ośrodek Myśli Politycznej Centrum Konserwatywne Kraków-Wrocław 2008.

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ethical defeat of Polish Catholicism lies in its blending with nationalist ideology as it was shaped by the ‘Endecja’. In order to attack this ideological formation, Gross coins a polemic and propagandistic concept, ‘katoendecja’13 (Catho-Endecja), referring to catholic nationalists. It is clear that Gross views PIS in contemporary Poland as heirs to the ‘Catho-Endecja’. The harsh criticism of the role played by ‘CathoEndecja’ in Polish history, presented in Fear, simultaneously becomes critical of its contemporary heirs who prevent Poles from taking a critical look at their history and dealing with the legacy of anti-Semitism. The Reception of the Traumatic Message How did the Poles react to the traumatic message sent in Fear? In order to answer this question I have analysed the debate on Fear in the main Polish newspapers representing a wide political spectrum, debates broadcast on radio and television,14 as well as some opinion polls published in connection with the debate. First of all it should be pointed out that the debate was intense and lasted about three months. About a month after its publication Gazeta Wyborcza carried out an opinion poll which showed that 51% of the people interviewed had read the book or had heard about it.15 Gross was invited to take part in a series of open debates about the theses in the book. These debates were held in several university towns and attracted huge crowds, both those approving the book and those opposing it. Gross’s readers grasped his passionate appeal to confront guilt and shame and use this experience to cure Polish society of xenophobia. He was described in the debate as an ‘historian with a mission’ (Wokół Strachu 2008, 303), an ‘exorcist’ and an ‘opener of wounds’ (Szostkiewicz 2008) and even a moralist (Klich, Alexandra, Szaynok, Bożena, ‘Gross – moralista nie historyk’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 2008-01-25). Three main types of reactions emerged from the examination of articles and statements published during the debate: positive, hostile and strongly critical. The positive reaction was first and foremost expressed 13 This is achieved by means of analogy with ‘żydokomuna’ (Judeo-Communism) and ‘katolewica’ (Catholic left), see Gross 2008, 185. 14 The articles that I refer to while analysing the debate have been found on the Internet during the debate or in the special collection of articles and other voices in the debate gathered in Wokół Strachu 2008. 15 The poll was conducted on a representative sample of 1056 persons aged 15 and over. See Piotr Pacewicz ‘Sondaż GW’, Gazeta.pl ; 2008-02-13.

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in the liberal and left-liberal press: Gazeta Wyborcza, Polityka, Wprost, Newsweek, as well as in liberal-catholic circles represented by intellectuals around the publishing house Znak and the review Tygodnik Powszechny. Voices in these media expressed their firm support for Gross’s message and most often also defended the rhetoric he used in his text. It was seen as necessary in order to awaken consciences (Wokół Strachu 2008, 345). The sharp, sometimes even provocative formulations, generalisation and sometimes black-and-white accounts were necessary in order to arouse feelings and provoke discussions.16 Those that supported Gross did not hide the fact that the purpose of the book was not merely to describe the past but primarily to achieve a change in Polish identity. They considered it important that the Poles should critically scrutinise their national Messianic myth about the Polish nation, as always an innocent victim suffering for the sake of others. They should also carry out a critical examination of their collective memory of the Second World War and incorporate into it the Polish guilt towards their Jewish neighbours (see, for example, Bortnowska, Halina ‘Patrzeć na ekshumację’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 2008-02-05). The editor-in-chief of the publishing house Znak motivated his decision to publish Fear in Polish by his hope that the book through empathy with Jewish victims and the will to shoulder responsibility for the past might pave the way for overcoming the remains of anti-Semitism in Polish society17. Polish liberal media agreed to a considerable extent with Gross in his criticism of the role played by the Polish Catholic Church and its ambiguous attitude towards anti-Semitism in the Polish society. They also expressed their disappointment with the highest leaders of the Church repudiating the theses in Fear (Obirek, Stanisław ‘Kościół potrzebuje Grossa’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 2008-02-07). The liberal press also made use of the debate around Fear as an opportunity to criticise the politics of history conducted by PIS during its time in government, which according to the liberals, had been detrimental to the development of an open and pluralist society in Poland (Beylin. Marek, ‘Żydzi, Polacy, Strach’, Gazeta 16 See, for example, Friszke, Andrzej ‘Gross i chłopcy narodowcy’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 2008-02-16/17, Beylin, Marek ‘Żydzi, Polacy, Strach’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 2008 - 0112/13; Szostkiewicz 2008. 17 Henryk Woźniakowski’s answer to the open letter issued by Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, see Wokół Strachu 2008, 76.

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Wyborcza , 2008 01-12/13). The liberal media used Fear for taking an ideological stand against the Right and expressing their vision of the future Polish society. They marked their distance not only towards PIS, but even more towards extreme Right circles who during the debate went in for defamation of Gross and the clearly anti-Semitic insinuations. The supporters of Gross pointed out these anti-Semitic moves and described the Right as nationalistic, intolerant and anti-democratic. They attempted to marginalise the voice of the extreme Right as invalid, unethical and without any right to exist in a democratic society. The positive reception of Fear in much of the liberal media had its counterpart in the hostile reception in the press representing the Conservatives and extreme Right, first and foremost Nasz Dziennik, but also Myśl Polska and Najwyższy Czas. Their main spokesperson was Jerzy Robert Nowak, an arch-conservative historian who travelled all around Poland in order to lecture on Gross’s ‘lies’. The hostile reactions were expressed in the aggressive language used in attacking Gross, full of stigmatising expressions and insults (see Pogonowski, Iwo Cyprian ‘Perfidia Grossa’, Nasz Dziennik, 2008-02-19; Jerzy Robert Nowak, ‘Oskarżam Grossa i Znak’, Nasz Dziennik, 200801-26-27). Gross himself was called a ‘Jewish chauvinist’ and projected as an enemy of Poland. His book was declared to be a libellous attack on Poles and the Polish Catholic Church. Gross, whose Jewish origins were stressed time and again, was said to be an instrument in order to force Poland to pay damages to Jews and even to Germans for the areas they had lost to Poland after the Second World War (Nowak 2008). According to this narrative, Poles were victims of a Jewish conspiracy, in which the media supporting Gross took part. These media were called ‘Polishlanguage media’, i.e. not genuinely Polish. It was insinuated that Gazeta Wyborcza was in Jewish hands (since its editor-in-chief, Adam Michnik, was of Jewish origin) while Newsweek and Dziennik represented German interests because they were owned by German companies (Nowak 2008). The Polish publishers of Fear, Znak, were, according to this discourse ‘quasi-catholic’ and only looking for gain from Gross’s book (Nowak, Jerzy Robert ‘Szkalowanie Kosciola katolickiego’, Nasz Dziennik, 200802-07). This discourse created a clear opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘We’ were ‘genuine Poles’ and ‘they’ were the enemies of the Poles, i.e.; Jews, Germans and those not genuine Poles that read Gazeta Wyborcza, criticise the Church, support the rights of gays and lesbians and are en-

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thusiastic EU advocates. Genuine Poles are defined as arduous Catholics and a nation of victims and heroes. Any anti-Semitism among Poles was denied. According to Nowak and his cronies, the Poles rescued Jews en masse. However, the Jews did not show any gratitude, cooperating instead with Poland’s enemies – the Soviet Union and the Polish Communist regime Isakowicz – Zaleski 2008). The ‘Judeo-Communism’ stereotype was very much alive in this discourse. The picture of Polish-Jewish relations was negative and the Jews were to blame. They were depicted as a people who always have seen only their own suffering and continuously demand that Poles bear the guilt and apologise (see interview with the reverend Waldemar Chrostowski and Jerzy R. Nowak in Nasz Dziennik, 2008-02-16/17). In the debate, Gross’s opponents on the extreme Right were conducting something that may be described as ‘scapegoating’. According to the social psychologist Smelser it is a classic ‘coping strategy’ (Smelser 2004, 51-54) in dealing with trauma, a reaction of blaming the other for the traumatic event, frequently even the victim, instead of facing one’s own responsibility. Those who adopted this strategy totally denied the existence of any Polish trauma connected with the Holocaust and the Jews. They denied Gross and his Polish supporters the right to make this kind of claim and excluded them symbolically from the Polish community. Between the highly polarised discourses described above we find a broad spectrum of voices critical of Gross’s message but which cannot be classified as anti-Semitic or excluding. Such voices came to the fore primarily in the newspapers Rzeczpospolita or Dziennik, the Catholic review Więź and partly Tygodnik Powszechny as well – the latter two are wellknown for their efforts to establish a Polish-Jewish dialogue. At one end of the spectrum were those that agreed with the main thesis in Fear and shared Gross’s commitment to fighting anti-Semitism, but who nevertheless were highly critical of his way of treating the subject matter, and of his rhetoric. Among these critics we find some historians, many of them specialists in Polish modern history (e.g.; Szaynok, Stola, Machcewicz, Skarga, Paczkowski) and several Catholic intellectuals involved in the Polish-Jewish dialogue. The first-named mainly pointed out the weak points of the book as a scientific product: the lack of context for the events described, gross generalisations, exaggerations, emotional and value-laden vocabulary which they considered belonged to the

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field of journalism, not scientific history writing.18 The main problem for these critics who were basically positive towards Gross was the question whether his provocative, traumatising style was the right way to start dealing with anti-Semitism in Poland. Most critics were in agreement that Fear was valuable mainly for those parts that were based on Jewish testimonials and conveyed Jewish experiences from the 1940s to Poles who most often knew all too little about them. On the other hand, those parts where Gross formulates his accusations against Polish society could easily be understood as unjust and insulting and lead to the readers dismissing the message (e.g. Skarga, Barbara ‘Zawiść zdolna do wszystkiego’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 2008-01-26). This was feared by a number of Gross’s supporters, e.g. Agnieszka Arnold (see ‘Polacy, Żydzi i ... Strach’, Kraj, 2008-01-14), as well as by his harsh critics in the newspaper Rzeczpospolita. They declared that the language of the book was too aggressive (Wiścicki Tomasz ‘Katolickim wydawcom nie może być wszystko jedno’, Rzeczpospolita 2008-01-23), that it might be viewed as insulting, release defence mechanisms and in that way constitute a backlash in the reconciliation process between Jews and Poles (Semka Piotr, ‘Strach cofnął dialog o całą epokę’, Rzeczpospolita, 2008-01-16; See also Terlikowski, Tomasz P. ‘Strach czyli propagandowy akt oskarzenia zamiast historii’, Rzeczpospolita, 2008-01-11). One of the highest leaders in the Polish Church, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, went as far in his criticism as writing an open letter to the publishers of Znak, reproaching them for publishing a book that contributed to tensions in the nation ‘at the same time awakening the demons of anti-Polonism and anti-Semitism’ (see Wokół Strachu 2008, 74-75). Archbishop Życiński was not quite as condemning, but he too declared that ‘Gross’s book causes injury and divisions’ and the formulations such as ‘Catho-Endecja’ and ‘theological cannibalism’ have no place in a culture of dialogue (Życiński 2008). Życinski’s and Dziwisz’s declarations were representative of the official stance of the Polish Church on the subject of Fear. The Church considered that it had been treated unjustly in the book. Several Catholic writers considered that Gross had been merciless against the Church and Polish Catholics (see discussion in Wokół Strachu 2008, 320-321). The whole Church was depicted as a collaborator with the Nazis since many priests and Catholics had been guilty of sins of See, for example, an interview with Stola Dariusz, ‘Nieudana próba Grossa’ Gazeta Wyborcza , 2008-01-19/20 or Machcewicz 2008. 18

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omission against Jews throughout the 1940s (see discussion in Wokół Strachu 2008, 331). In the debate the church defended itself by describing the difficult circumstances under which it had acted, first during the Nazi occupation and then during Communism (Czakowska, Ewa K. ‘Prymas był manipulowany’, Rzeczpospolita, 2008-01-18) and reproached Gross for exaggerations and an anachronistic viewpoint, i.e. condemning the past from the ethical convictions of today. It should be stressed that the highest ecclesiastical leaders were very careful in choosing their critical words and did not wish to be associated with the attacks on Gross from the Catholic extreme Right. While some Catholic priests were helpful in organising open lectures with Jerzy R. Nowak who attacked Gross, the Church hierarchy distanced themselves from this (see ‘Życiński o ideologu Radia Maryja’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 200805-25). The Church leaders placed themselves in the middle of the broad scale of Gross’s critics. A much more radical critical stance was taken by PIS-friendly historians linked to IPN (Institute for National Memory) as well as the journalists in Rzeczpospolita and Dziennik. They considered Gross’s book not only damaging to the Polish-Jewish dialogue but to Poland generally. Firstly, it was detrimental to the image of Poland in the world by reinforcing in the West the stereotype of eternal Polish antiSemitism (Ziemkiewicz, Rafał A. ‘Jesteśmy skazani na bezsilność’, Rzeczpospolita, 2008-02-20). Secondly, Gross was destroying the positive element in the Poles’ view of themselves and thus contributed to increasing their inferiority complex and weakening Polish national identity (Ziemkiewicz, Rafał A. ‘Strach krytykować’, Rzeczpospolita, 2008-01-14). Gross’s critics on this side focused on a defence of the positive image of Polish actions in the 1940s. They were of the opinion that Gross had marginalised Polish suffering in order to emphasise that of the Jews (see Gontarczyk Piotr, ‘Daleko od prawdy’, Rzeczpospolita, 2008-01-12). They highlighted those Poles that had rescued Jews and reminded their readers that Poland was the only occupied country in Europe where assisting Jews was punishable by death (see Stanisław Meducki’s voice in the discussion reported in Wokół Strachu 2008, 314). They denied that antiSemitism was a mass phenomenon and considered the representation in Fear a caricature (Gontarczyk Piotr, ‘Daleko od prawdy’, Rzeczpospolita, 2008-01-12). The reason for the Poles’ post-war negative attitude towards Jews was first and foremost sought in the stereotype of the Jewish Communist, a stereotype alive and well in Polish society since the inter-

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war years and strengthened when Jews became over-represented in the power structures of the Communist regime. Gross’s critics were of the opinion that he too lightly completely dismissed the representation of Jewish Communism as an explanatory element (Machcewicz 2008, Żaryn Jan, ‘Pogarda dla kontekstu’, Rzeczpospolita, 2008-01-19/20). After the War, Poles and Jews had a very differing perception of the new regime which attracted well-educated Jews. To the Poles they were a privileged group, indifferent to the persecutions of many Poles by the new regime. These two differing perceptions of the situation further enlarged the gulf between Poles and Jews. Thus Gross’s critics applied an old, already familiar defence strategy against accusations of anti-Semitism, i.e. to deny the scale of anti-Semitism and seek explanations of the anti-Semitism that existed. With reference to the social psychologist Smelser these reactions may be described as ‘coping strategies’ in a trauma situation and defined as ‘dissociation’ and ‘repression’ – avoiding the confrontation with a message that threatens one’s identity and self-perception. However, one could find in the debate an even stronger expression of ‘repression’ as a ‘coping strategy’. A prime example are those who declared that the book should be ignored, since it does not bring any new elements to the Polish collective memory, has nothing to do with science and may only be seen as a political gimmick from the Left using Gross in their ideological battle against PIS and the whole of the Catholic Right. (This was particularly stressed by Janusz Kurtyka, the president of the Institute for National Memory, Dziennik 2008-01-17.) According to these voices, anti-Semitism is a pseudo-problem in Poland today without any importance. Poland is one of the most pro-Israeli countries in the world and the only reason for bringing anti-Semitism into discussion is that the Left and the Left-wing liberals use it as an ideological, political and pedagogical tool in order to achieve their vision of Polish society (see Krasowski Robert, ‘Antysemityzm jako problem polityczny’, Dziennik Polska Europa Swiat, 2008-01-18; Lisicki Pawel, ‘Żydzi, Polacy i przeszłość’, Rzeczpospolita, 2008-01-11). However, the Poles do not need any discussion of that kind. They are tired of continuous ideological manoeuvres from the Left and the Right, and wish to concentrate on current issues, not on the past. The Poles had already dealt with anti-Semitism, much thanks to the debate on Jedwabne. They could now live complex-free and build a modern Poland which they would shape in their own way, not imitating

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the West. They no longer needed any heated debates on anti-Semitism, gay and lesbian rights, the right to abortion, i.e., implicitly, those issues that the West considers important. Instead, the Poles would focus on pragmatic goals linked to the modernisation of their country (Gowin, Jarosław, ‘Polacy nauczyli się samych siebie’, Dziennik, 2008-02-16). Those who represented these kind of views in the debate dismissed the traumatising memory of anti-Semitic violence and Polish guilt, repressed it and chose to focus on the future. It emerges from the Polish debate on Fear that the reception of Gross’s message divided the Poles into three camps, by and large corresponding to the three big party political and ideological camps in the country: the Left and Liberals (including Catholic liberals) at one end, the Conservatives and extreme Right at the other end with the centre-Right in the middle. Thus the debate became extremely politicised and ideologicised. The left-wing liberals (Gross’s supporters) and the Right (Gross’s enemies) in particular made active use of the memory of the Kielce pogrom for ideological purposes in order to convey their diametrically different visions of Poland’s past, present and future. Compared with the debate on Neighbors, analysed in an earlier essay (TörnquistPlewa 2003), the one on Fear was more politicised. While the memory of the Jedwabne killing was used in 2001 for existential and moral purposes as much as for goals of politics and ideology, the memory of Kielce and post-war Polish anti-Semitism was used mainly politically and ideologically in order to legitimise the programmes of the Left-wing liberals and the Right respectively, and mobilise supporters. As the journalist, Kinga Dunin, pointed out in a comment: ‘empathy and compassion are far too rarely mentioned in this debate’ (see ‘I słowo Żyd wciąż nie jest w polszczyźnie słowem neutralnym’, Wysokie obcasy, annex to Gazeta Wyborcza, 2008-02-11). Another difference to the Jedwabne debate was the generally harsher criticism against Gross, particularly from the media. The Catholic intellectual reviews Tygodnik Powszechny and Więź which wholeheartedly defended Neighbors, were doubtful or critical with regard to Fear; the large newspaper Rzeczpospolita that had supported Gross during the Jedwabne debate was now clearly negative. The strongly negative tone against Gross is surprising to the extent that it would have been expected that the Jedwabne debate had made the Poles more prepared to receive criticism, accept their guilt and discuss

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anti-Semitism. The debate on Fear does not demonstrate this. The same defence mechanisms, the same types of arguments as in the Jedwabne debate turned up again during the latter debate. The harsh tone against Gross in 2008 may be explained by the reaction to his rhetoric, his harsh criticism of the Church (difficult to handle for many Catholics), but also the fact that his work became an instrument in the fierce ideological battle on the politics of memory between the liberals and the Right. Jan Gross’s Writings and Polish Cultural Trauma The results of the analysis of the debate on Fear justify in my view the thesis that the memory of Polish anti-Semitism during and after the Holocaust may be qualified as cultural trauma. The treatment of this memory in Poland shows the features that, according to the authors of the trauma theory (Alexander et al. 2004a), are typical of cultural trauma. Events in the past that were manifestations of anti-Semitic violence have been highlighted as culturally relevant. Furthermore, the memory of these events is represented as painful and damaging, rendering problematic those national myths of victimhood and suffering that have been felt as essential for the integrity of the Polish nation. Finally, this memory is associated with strong negative affects, mostly shame and guilt.19 When analysing the debate about Fear we can discern those mechanisms and agents that, according to the authors of the theory of cultural trauma, are involved in the process of trauma making. Thus a claim of traumatic cultural damage (for example, a threat to cultural values, identity, etc.) has been established by deliberate efforts on the part of mnemonic carriers – intellectuals, journalists, politicians. The main arenas for the articulation of cultural trauma have been the media and history as a scholarly discipline. Jan T. Gross’s great merit as a carrier of cultural trauma is that he has through his way of writing been capable to act in both arenas – to communicate both with historians and the broad public. Crucial for his success as a carrier of cultural trauma, besides the necessary support he received from other carriers, was his use of the language of negative affect. Perhaps, this kind of language does not promote dialogue and reconciliation, but it is a necessary condition for making people believe that a cultural trauma exists or is threatening.20 See the general characteristics of cultural trauma described by Smelser 2004, 36. This is because affect plays an important role in alerting individuals to threatening and traumatising phenomena (Smelser 2004, 41). 19 20

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A sign showing that a memory has been established as a cultural trauma is constant, recurrent struggle about this memory (Smelser 2004, 42). The debate on Fear is an example of such a recurrent struggle and confirms the idea that the debate on Jedwabne in 2001 was a breaking point in the construction of the memory of Polish anti-Semitism as a cultural trauma. Furthermore, Smelser claims that there is often in the case of collective trauma an interest in representing the trauma as indelible – a national shame or a permanent scar. The group that stands for this interest tries to sustain the status of historical memory as a trauma in order to reach specific goals. In case of the Polish trauma of the memory of Polish anti-Semitic violence inflicted on Jews, the liberals are the interest group that uses the trauma in order to transform Polish identity, making it more open and pluralistic. Once a historical memory is constructed as a national trauma for which the society has to be held in some way responsible, it leads to a struggle and to attempts to remove the traumatic memory. According to Smelser, we can see here almost the same repertoire of coping strategies as the individuals use in coping with psychological traumas.21 There are many different adaptive and defensive strategies. Those that can be easily identified in Polish debates on anti-Semitism are, for example: dissociation (‘it is not our memory’), scapegoating, reversal (to love what one has previously hated and vice versa) and finally repression and denial. Typical reactions connected with coping strategies are the tendency either to avoid the traumatic memory (‘we have to put it behind us’) or relive it (‘we must always remember’). Here, also, belongs the will to convert the negative event into one with positive implications: ‘it will become a lesson for us and future generations’ or ‘this memory will transform our identity into a better one’. The last strategy is aimed at healing the trauma by such revision of identity that accommodates the traumatic memory by suspending the traumatic tension between memory and identity. It was exactly this solution that was suggested by the carriers of cultural trauma in Poland both in the debate on Neighbors (Törnquist-Plewa 2003, 158162) and on Fear.

The reason for it is that both collective and individual representations of trauma involve affect. Using the language of affect in collective representations make these representations easily identifiable, understood and shared by many. See Smelser 2004, 46-48. 21

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However, the above analysis of the reception of Fear shows that there is a relatively small group of Poles, mostly highly educated and mostly with liberal or leftists convictions that accepts or promotes this solution. What we can see in general in Polish society is a great ambivalence in judgment in relation to the memory of anti-Semitism.22 Smelser remarked that ‘Once endowed with status of ambivalence (…) cultural traumas manifest a tendency towards producing political polarization...’ (Smelser 2004, 55). This is exactly what happened in the Polish case. There are ongoing struggles about the meaning and assessment of the traumatic memory of anti-Semitism. In this struggle two political groups (the liberals and the nationalistic right) adopted two, totally opposing and mutually excluding views and declared each other’s discourses as illegitimate. While the debate on Neighbors aroused some hopes that the established cultural trauma could be healed in the near future, the reactions to Fear give evidence to the opposite. All the coping strategies adopted in the debate on Jedwabne were still in place in the debate on Fear and the latter debate has not diminished the ambivalence in the judgment of the traumatic memory. It would seem that the Poles will, for a foreseeable future, continue to engage in almost compulsive examining and re-examining of their relations to Jews, bringing new aspects of the trauma, reinterpreting and battling over this memory. Thus on the one hand it could be stated that the post-Communist period brought changes in the remembrance of Polish-Jewish relations by breaking the silence around Polish guilt and constructing this memory as a cultural trauma. On the other hand, however, the trauma has not been reworked yet. Poland most probably faces a prolonged process of collective grouping, negotiation and contestation over the proper meaning to be assigned to this memory, the proper locus of responsibility and proper forms of commemoration. Conclusions: Strength and Weakness of the Theory of Cultural Trauma Applying the cultural trauma theory to the Polish debates about antiSemitism that took place in the first decade of the twenty-first century 22 Besides the debate a proof of it can be found in opinion polls, see Pacewicz, Piotr, ‘Sondaż Gazety Wyborczej’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 2008-02-13, see also Opinion poll carried out by TNS OBOP among a representative sample of 1004 people, on 10-14 January 2008 and then 3-7 April 2008. See the report ‘Strach Grossa niewiele zmienił poglądy Polaków’, Gazeta Wyborcza 2008-04-24.

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makes it possible to understand their highly emotional temperature, radicalism and socio-psychological mechanisms involved. This theory also delivers concepts and instruments for analysing the complex processes of changes of the collective memory. It identifies the construction of cultural trauma as a powerful strategy to bring about such changes. It helps to pin down social agents involved in articulating collective memory, scrutinising their messages, their activities and better understanding the reaction to them. By emphasising the ongoing process of construction, contestation and negotiation over memories, the theory helps us see sources of the dynamics of collective memory. The Polish case analysed above also shows, however, the main weakness of this theory, namely its normative dimension suggested by Alexander. One conclusion we can draw from the Polish case is that the construction of cultural trauma, even a successful one, cannot automatically be seen as a process of moral–practical action that helps in the reconstruction of the group’s collective identity, making it more open and less excluding. The carriers of trauma may pursue other goals than an open, including society, sometimes even the opposite. But even if the carriers of trauma are well-meaning like Gross and his supporters in the Polish case, there is still no guarantee that the cultural trauma they constructed will have a positive outcome. The feelings of injury and threat connected to trauma can be used to evoke vengeance, resentment and hostility and there is much empirical evidence that they are often used in this way. There are traumas of perpetrators and traumas of victims and both can lead to either positive or negative consequences for society. To see oneself as a perpetrator can result in taking responsibility for the past, making amends and symbolic reparations, but it may also lead to paralysing shame and resentment towards the victims. To construct the trauma of victims aims towards reaching the point of forgiving and towards freeing oneself from the pain, but it can result in feelings of vengeance and constant threat. It is very difficult for the carriers of cultural trauma to foresee the outcome of the trauma construction because it depends on the societal context that includes many factors they cannot control. Therefore, in opposition to Alexander, I would like to claim that cultural trauma may, but does not necessarily have to, lead to empathy, greater moral responsibility and reconciliation. The Polish case, analysed here, points to the problems connected to construction of cultural trauma specifically and making the Holocaust the focal point of European re-

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membrance generally. The post-communist societies, such as the Polish one, need more time to adjust their national narratives to the European moral story of the Holocaust. They need time and more stable democratic development before they can recognise their shared guilt in what happened to European Jews. Reworking trauma requires time. Therefore, the political pressure put on these countries by treating recognition of the partial responsibility for the Holocaust as ‘entry ticket’23 to the European community may result in the expected declarations by the politicians but not real, deep changes in the collective memories of the society.

References

Alexander, Jeffrey. 2004a. Towards a Theory of Cultural Trauma. In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, by Alexander J., R., B, Giesen, N. Smelser and P. Sztompka, 1-30. Berkeley: University of California Press. Alexander, Jeffrey. 2004b. On the Social Construction of Moral Universals. In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, by Alexander J., R., B, Giesen, N. Smelser and P. Sztompka, 196-263, Berkeley: University of California Press. Błoński, Jan. 1987. ‘Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto’, Tygodnik Powszechny, no. 2. Davis, Natalie Zemon. 1991. ‘Stories and the Hunger to Know (In Lieu of Introduction)’, Litteraria Pragensia, 1:1, 12-13. Eyerman, Ron. 2004. Cultural Trauma, Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, by Alexander J., R., B, Giesen, N. Smelser and P. Sztompka, 60-111. Berkeley: University of California Press. Giesen, Bernhard. 2004. The Trauma of Perpetrators. The Holocaust as the Traumatic Reference of German National Identity. In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, by Alexander J., R., B, Giesen, N. Smelser and P. Sztompka, 112-154, Berkeley: University of California Press. Gross, Jan T. 2000. Sąsiedzi. Historia zagłady żydowskiego miasteczka. Sejny: Pogranicze. Gross, Jan T. 2001. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gross, Jan. T. 2006. Fear: Anti-semitism in Poland after Auschwitz:an essay in historical interpretation. New York: Random House. Gross, Jan T. 2008. Strach. Kraków: Znak. Isakowicz – Zaleski, Ks. Tadeusz. 2008, ‘Fałszerze historii’, Gazeta Polska, nr.4 Machcewicz, Paweł. 2008. ‘Odcienie czerni’, Tygodnik Powszechny, nr.2.

23

See quotation from Tony Judt in the introduction to this book.

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Michlic, Joanna and Anthony Polonsky, eds. 2003. Neighbors Respond, The Controversy about Jedwabne. Princeton University Press. Nowak, Jerzy R. 2008 (interview) ‘Gross tej wojny nie wygra’, Myśl Polska, nr 9 Rigney, Ann. 2009. ‘All this happened, more or less; What a Novelist made of the Bombing of Dresden’. History and Theory, Theme Issue 47 (May): 5-24. Smelser, Neal J. 2004. Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma. In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, by Alexander J., R., B, Giesen, N. Smelser and P. Sztompka, 31-59. Berkeley: University of California Press. Steinlauf, Michael C. 1997. Bondage to the Dead. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press. Szostkiewicz, Adam. 2008. ‘Ezorcysta Gross. Rozdrapywaczy ran nie lubi się nie tylko u nas’. Tygodnik Powszechny, nr 4. Törnquist-Plewa, Barbara. 2003. The Jedwabne Killing – a Challenge for Polish Collective Memory. An Analysis of the Polish Debate on Jan Gross’s book Neighbours. In Echoes of the Holocaust, eds. Klas-Göran Karlsson and Ulf Zander. Lund: Nordic Academic Press. Olick, Jeffrey. 2007. The Politics of Regret. London: Routledge. Wokół Strachu. Dyskusja o książce Jana T.Grossa 2008. Kraków: Znak. Woźniakowski, Henryk, 2008. Od Wydawcy. In Strach Kraków: Znak. Życiński, Józef, ‘Książka Grossa rani i dzieli’, www.Gazeta.pl 2008-01-13, consulted 2008-03-01.

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THE MORAL WITNESS IN POST-89 ROMANIA Adrian Velicu Abstract An exploration of the nature of testimonies about the communist dictatorship in Romania enables this chapter to outline the particular stance of the moral combative witness. The analysis employs Avishai Margalit’s concept of the moral witness in order to expand its range by suggesting that the particular circumstances of the transition to post-communism in Romania turned recollections of battling with and suffering under communism into challenges to the post-89 leadership. An examination of the elucidatory nature of the moral testimony shows the source of knowledge and trust that lend the combative moral witnesses their credibility and force, something lacking in the aspiring moral witness. The changes in post-89 Romania have ranged from the emergence of new political parties and trade unions to that of periodicals and publishing houses. Along with the institutional revival there have also emerged new kinds of moral obligations and specific identities. The steady stream of memoirs, documentaries and interviews about the communist period has reinforced the role and identity of the moral witness. As in other cases, the Holocaust being the best-known example, the moral witness has enjoyed a notable status even if, at times, a contested one. A witness’s direct experience can hardly be challenged; yet his or her memory lends itself to reflection, to critical comment and occasionally to distortion. Indeed, bearing testimony means not only reviving the past but also an act of political commitment or of disculpation as is the case in the particular case of post-communist Romania where characters compro-

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mised by their earlier leading positions reappeared in the country’s leadership. The fraught nature of testimony further derives from the unclear circumstances in which prominent veteran communists marginalised by Nicolae Ceausescu took over the political leadership in December 1989. The violent incidents that accompanied the power take-over appeared in some cases unmotivated and in others contradictory (for instance, bullet marks and other damage which did not fit the official explanations about who was attacking whom during the tense days following the collapse of the Ceausescu regime). Over one thousand died, many in incidents still unexplained twenty years later, a period of turbulence culminating in the descent of almost twenty thousand miners in Bucharest in June 1990 to ‘help’ President Iliescu preserve ‘stability’ by destroying the headquarters of the opposition political parties, by beating up students and devastating university buildings did not exactly reinforce the legitimacy of the new political leaders. The presence of former nomenklatura members at the top of the new political leadership, backed by retinues of clients in most institutions, including the security services, explains why moral testimony contains a confrontational aspect. Recollections of tense moments during the communist dictatorship may well amount to reflections on ethical aspects, but they also constitute forceful moral challenges against people tainted by the past but still powerful in the present. I would argue that this confrontational stance has been a strong but overlooked feature in the memory landscape of post-89 Romania. Therefore, the present discussion of the identity of the moral witness in postcommunist Romania suggests that the significance of the moral witness as discussed by Avishai Margalit within the ethics of memory gains by adding the category of the combative moral witness (Margalit 2002). The combative moral witness is not necessarily part of every moral enquiry into processes of recollection. However, landscapes of memory such as that of post-89 Romania display this example. Moreover, a proper investigation of the post-89 dynamics of memory here requires the use of such a category. The lack of a proper lustration process or law in Romania as, for instance, in the case of the Czech Republic meant that numbers of individuals compromised by their activity under the dictatorship continued to hold similar, if not the same jobs, after 1989. Thus, the post-89 testimony of their actions that caused suffering to opponents of

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communism has turned memory into a direct challenge that highlights issues of moral responsibility. For the purposes of this analysis, the moral witness is the individual who bears testimony relating to issues of right and wrong in general, and to norms of behaviour in particular. On the basis of this working definition, this enquiry argues that the shaping of the identity of the moral witness in post-89 Romania has been deployed in three ways, leading to three distinct types: the combative, the contemplative, and the aspiring moral witness. The combative moral witness regards his testimony as an intellectual weapon in an ongoing conflict with the former party apparatchiks regrouped in fresh power networks in post-1989 Romania. The contemplative moral witness relies on the corrective impact of simply presenting accounts of earlier unjust suffering in a good cause. The ambiguous but telling case of the aspiring moral witness concerns the claims of individuals who detect the presence of this specific role and attempt to exploit it from the compromised position of the direct or indirect perpetrator. In examining the manner in which the identity of the moral witness has taken shape in post-89 Romania, this discussion resorts to the memoirs of those who experienced the persecution of the communist authorities and to their statements made in various interviews and TV documentaries. There were very few people in Romania who publicly opposed the communist dictatorship or took any significant initiative to undermine it. The accounts selected here belong to some of these solitary opponents who had to pay for their integrity and who, more than anyone, were entitled to and did reflect on issues of right and wrong after 1989. The criterion of including in this analysis the accounts of the aspiring witnesses was their active part in the ruling or the oppressive mechanism of the dictatorship which indicates the gap between their position before 1989 and their public claims afterwards. There are indeed numerous memoirs about the suffering under the Communist dictatorship published before 1989. However, because the focus here is on the identity of the moral witness in the post-89 period, the relevance of the testimonies articulated after the fall of the dictatorship is obvious. The moral witness of the pre-89 period has the intention and experiences the obligation of bearing testimony, whereas the moral witness that steps forth after the collapse of the dictatorship has in addition the knowledge and the confirmation that the cause was worth it.

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A last preliminary qualification: the present analysis treats testimony as recollection. One of the standard images of the moral witness is the early Christian instantly bearing testimony to his or her faith when confronted by the persecutor and promptly suffering for it. Bearing witness to an experience while it is going on presupposes synchronic testimony and may well involve risk. However, since the present discussion concentrates on the uses of memory after 1989 in Romania, as well as on aspects of continuity, the focus is on diachronic testimony. A Contested Concept? Apparently straightforward, the notion of the moral witness has over time revealed a complexity that has turned it into a contested concept. A recollection relating to questions of right and wrong is easy enough to distinguish from simply remembering the past. Matters become more complicated when the recollection becomes part of a discussion about how one ought to have acted in a particular situation. In circumstances of having to choose between difficult alternatives while weighing risks and facing dangers some individuals considered it right to opt for the hard way, to take the risks and to suffer the consequences. Inevitably, the memory of these episodes carry claims about the proper way to act, claims that may cause resentment because of their uncompromising tone and that may be perceived as implicit reproaches. As ever in ethics, there are few clear-cut rules acceptable to all. Who is a moral witness? And why? Avishai Margalit, Jay Winter and Jeffrey Blustein offer a number of definitions and explanations, some of which prove useful here (Margalit 2002, Winter 2006, Bluestein 2008). Before I proceed with my own reflections on the notion of the moral witness and with the investigation of its significance in post-89 Romania, I briefly outline these scholars’ thoughts on the subject. For Avishai Margalit the main traits of the moral witness are ‘knowledge-by-acquaintance of suffering’ which presupposes witnessing ‘the combination of evil and the suffering it produces’, being ‘at personal risk’, and having ‘a moral purpose’ (Margalit 2002, 148-151). Elsewhere in his argument, Margalit reluctantly admits that the moral witness is occasionally allowed to compromise without losing this status (Margalit 2002, 162). His reluctance is understandable since a compromise entails avoiding or considerably attenuating the element of risk; thus, by this concession, Margalit heavily qualifies one of his defining conditions: the

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risk-taking of the moral witness. Margalit’s definition also includes three ‘marks’ of the moral witness: experience, evidence and elucidation. Since the last feature is important for the present enquiry, I return to it later. The concept of authority, closely related to Margalit’s requirement of direct experience, serves as a further claim that consolidates the stance of the moral witness in Jeffrey Blustein’s argument (Blustein 2008, 309). It can hardly be denied that the witness’s authority continues after he or she ceases to be at risk if bearing testimony; that may explain why Blustein does not include ‘being at risk’ as a decisive condition. However, by extending the epistemic and moral authority to the descendants of the original victims, Blustein strays into controversial territory (Blustein 2008, 314). He is willing to consider the status of the ‘proxy witness’ where direct experience is no longer a defining feature (Blustein 2008, 309 and 345ff). True to his principle of ‘knowledge-by-acquaintance of suffering’, Margalit rejects the possibility that ‘the witness by proxy’ can be a moral witness (Margalit 2002, 172ff). While Jay Winter accepts Margalit’s definition of the moral witness on the whole, he adds the decisive feature of contextualisation (Winter 2006, 242-243). According to Winter, testimony belongs to varying contexts of competing narrations and of truth claims in specific political circumstances. A witness’s account may challenge other versions of particular events, rejecting the accepted outlook, hence the additional importance of context. The specific nature of the moral testimony leads to Winter’s second distinct qualification of Margalit’s views of the moral witness. Unlike Margalit, who considers that this kind of witness is the ‘agent’ of collective memory (Margalit 2002, 147), Winter argues that moral witnesses have their own autonomy as individuals and do not necessarily represent collective identities. The very opposition against current clichés entails an isolated viewpoint that rivals that of the mainstream collective memory (Winter 2006, 269). In fact, by arguing that the moral witness bears testimony ‘against the grain’, Winter emphasises the individual quality of the memory and questions its role as transmitter of collective memory. I return in the final section of this study to the problem of the moral witness vis-à-vis individual and collective memory. As for the rather unclear feature of risk-taking as defining the moral witness, Winter agrees with Margalit, only to proceed and treat as moral witnesses two individuals who bear testimony long after the event when free from any danger (a Great War veteran who in the late 1920s questions the

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presentation of the war, and the 1960s testimony of a Holocaust survivor). In this discussion of the moral witness in post-89 Romania the defining features are direct experience of unjust suffering and, above all, the moral intention of the testimony. The element of intention is decisive for Margalit’s understanding of the moral witness, something that the present analysis adopts as well. Yet, by holding that ‘a moral purpose is an essential ingredient of a moral witness’, Margalit suggests that this is a necessary but not a sufficient condition: the element of risk or danger is also required to satisfy the definition (Margalit 2002, 151). That is why one need stress, yet again, that if dealing with the moral witness in the context of memory studies is to make sense at all, one should also be able to take into account testimony that emerges some time after the event when the witness may no longer be at risk. Inevitably, some of the categories outlined here (contemplative, combative, aspiring) may partly overlap. The main features are, however, recognisable enough to receive separate attention. A few more clarifications are useful at this point. The very militancy of the kind of moral witness outlined here points to strands of continuity after the shift in the political regime: the collapse of the communist system appears to have left unfinished business which needs to be engaged with in post-89 politics. As for the contemplative trait, the present discussion regards contemplation in terms of detached display, not in the sense of the Aristotelian distinction between the active and the contemplative (or philosophical) life where the latter is to be preferred. Finally, a clarification regarding the aspiring moral witness as understood by Margalit (2003, 159). His inclusion of this notion in a discussion of the moral witness serves to explore the moral ambiguity of the ‘traitor’ who wants to bear testimony. The present analysis takes this concept in a different direction because the empirical material (post-89 memoirs and interviews) offers a fruitful line of enquiry. The aspiring moral witness appears here in a version that Margalit does not consider, namely the perpetrator’s delayed indignation or justification where recollection touches on norms of behaviour. The sensitive cases of the near or would-be victims attempting to assume the identity of the moral witness further complicate the meaning and analytical use of Margalit’s idea of moral ambiguity, but they are not part of the present argument.

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I would argue that one of Margalit’s three ‘marks’ of the moral witness, elucidation, is particularly helpful in clarifying the outlook of the various kinds of moral witness. Margalit treats elucidation as a form of understanding derived from Wittgenstein. In this case, understanding emerges through contact with an expression of the experience rather than with an explanation of its historical circumstances. It is a kind of understanding gained by ‘an elucidatory description of what took place so that we can link the experience of the victims with our own meagre experience’ (Margalit 2002, 169). The present study highlights elucidation because it contributes decisively to the nature of the recollection that the moral witnesses as ‘carriers of memory’ pass on. The assumption is that a certain kind of testimony acquires a moral quality not necessarily by handing down facts, but by evoking a sense of the predicament in the confrontation with unjust suffering. This emphasis does not mean that the analysis treats elucidation in isolation from the other two features, i.e. experience and evidence. In addition to Margalit’s view of the function of elucidation, I suggest that in the murky circumstances of the transition from communism to post-communism in Romania the concept has an additional role. Besides bearing testimony by conveying a particular experience in an effort to throw light on the past, some of the moral witnesses regard their testimony as an intervention in a combat with constellations of interests and forces that survived in a more or less disguised fashion after 1989. The militant moral witnesses offer a contrast to the contemplative ones by wielding the relevance of their recollections as weapons in the post-89 political process. In a more comprehensive manner, elucidation ties in with the contemplative, the combative and the aspiring witnesses by the specific manner in which these categories bring past experience to the present. While the contemplative witness presents suffering in terms of a general outlook on human nature, the combative witness applies testimony to present norms. As for the aspiring witness’s testimony, it invites the audience to re-enact the ambiguity of the experience, as it strains to bridge the distance between the initial position and the subsequent aspiration. The concern with elucidation in a moral context suggests the contours of an area where ethics and epistemology partly overlap. That is why obligation and normativity are two additional important concepts

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here. The uses of memory in these circumstances outline the framework in which the individual remembers. The witnesses’ frequent statements about their sense of duty to preserve the memory of their experiences suggest how obligation underlies the act of bearing testimony, while recollection of past injustice cannot but deal with norms. An enquiry into the elucidatory role of the post-89 moral witness needs therefore to take into account questions of truth as well as questions of obligation and normativity. The meaning of elucidation that Margalit borrows from Wittgenstein complicates matters epistemologically since it has to do with the witness conveying a sense of experience rather than precise details of particular circumstances. Yet, through the feature of elucidation the audience acquire a new insight. Nevertheless, it goes without saying that the witness has to be credible. That is why one can hardly separate elucidation from experience and evidence. The credibility of the witness and the reliability of the evidence thus explain the epistemological connection. But, above all, the moral testimony has a clear judgmental intention concerning right and wrong which explains the moral connection. In so far as it is a question of standards, epistemology and ethics outline a zone where evidence-based criteria of meaning and norms of behaviour converge. On normativity one point needs to be made at this stage; it concerns the moral value of bearing testimony as such (Blustein 2008, 332). Bearing witness shows one’s allegiance to ‘the moral norms that were breached by wrongdoing’ in the past (Blustein 2008, 333). When the Romanian philosopher and physicist Horia-Roman Patapievici warns against the ‘denial of memory’ after the collapse of the communist regime, he attaches a particular value to bearing witness. The warning against forgetting or remaining silent turns the act of remembering into an obligation. By his emphasis on the act and the actor, Patapievici reinforces the interdependence between memory and the particular identity of the witness (Patapievici 1990, 195ff). Making a Mark Patapievici offers a good example of the combative moral witness. He has repeatedly discussed the perpetuation of pre-89 mechanisms of power in new forms in the early 1990s. He therefore sees his and others’ testimony as a direct use of memory in an ongoing campaign. His own testimony is brief but poignant. Arrested along with many demonstrators

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on 21 December 1989 in Bucharest, he spent the last night of Ceausescu’s dictatorship suffering and witnessing extreme police brutality. On 22 December at noon Ceausescu fled by helicopter from the roof of the Central Committee building which was surrounded by a mass of protesters. The prison guards announced to Patapievici and the other demonstrators arrested together with him that the dictator was gone and released everybody. Severely beaten, some maimed for life, these people were invited to resume their lives under a new political regime as if nothing had happened. On the previous evening, in one of the vans that moved the demonstrators from the police headquarters to an underground prison outside the capital, Patapievici noticed a man who had lost his sight after being repeatedly hit on the head. The uncompromising way in which Patapievici regards his role opens one of his chief texts on the importance of memory: ‘The survivor’s law is to bear witness. From now on, he obeys the moral imperative of seeing the world in the name of those who have ceased to see’ (Patapievici 1990, 7). Writing that the happenings of that night have never been the object of an enquiry and that the perpetrators are still at large, Patapievici conceives his testimony as a permanent accusation in an unfinished trial. He explains that he tries to go beyond the straightforward presentation of evidence and attempts to connect his experience with that of the reader. In these texts, as elsewhere in his writings, this witness finds it incomprehensible that most citizens do not express the kind of moral condemnation and do not take the kind of steps that would redress the earlier wrong-doing. He detects a failure of understanding which he tries to repair by an effort of elucidation. Patapievici acts in this way despite his gloomy explanation that, in various degrees, most people had been accomplices to the wrong-doing. Patapievici was present at the end. The politician Corneliu Coposu experienced the beginning over forty-five years earlier. Although very young, Coposu was already a prominent figure in the Peasant National Party which enjoyed the largest support of all political parties. He was arrested and imprisoned for seventeen years. In addition to simply recounting his experience, Coposu, who died in 1995, applied his testimony to the battle of ideas and norms that characterised the early 1990s. Throughout these years he established himself as one of the main political figures of the opposition. During this period, short of being arrested,

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he and his party, along with other opposition parties, encountered many of the same obstacles experienced in the mid-1940s when the communists had eliminated all opponents. Profoundly worrying continuities marked the period following the collapse of Ceausescu’s regime. Thus, Coposu’s testimony constitutes a challenge to the newly established leadership. A very active politician despite his frail health and advanced age, he was also extremely pessimistic, as he admitted in his Confessions. According to him, about two thirds of the people in the two generations covered by the communist period ‘are not recoverable’ because of the kind of education, intellectual atmosphere and mentality they were exposed to and which they absorbed (Coposu 1998, 94). Needless to say, that means a good deal of the population in post-89 Romania. Irrespective of the accuracy of this estimation, this polemical summing up of memories, assuming continuity as an unavoidable condition, conveys beyond the shadow of a doubt the confrontational stance of this moral witness. The kind of unjust suffering the diplomat Mircea Raceanu experienced brings in an additional dimension to the status and identity of the moral witness. He was arrested in Bucharest in January 1989 for providing information to the CIA which in that context meant opposing the dictatorship. He was interrogated throughout most of the year, tried and sentenced to death. Subsequently, the sentence was commuted to twenty years in prison. Although the authorities did not know it at the time of his arrest, Raceanu had also been involved in organising the initial stage of the open letter of protest sent to Ceausescu by six Communist Party veterans. Five of them had previously been members of the leadership at the highest level; the sixth, Raceanu’s father, well-known for his underground communist activities before 1945 had not held any top position. By all accounts, Raceanu junior could have made his own life easier during the interrogation by disclosing details about the letter. The letter was published in the West in March 1989 and had a wide international echo. Its impact inside Romania allegedly contributed to the further weakening of the Ceausescu regime. However, within the political and legal framework of the communist dictatorship Raceanu was found guilty of espionage activities. Once the chief manifest intention of Raceanu’s intelligence activity became reality, namely undermining the dictatorship, he was regarded as someone who fought an oppressive system and suffered for it. His account points to

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the more or less visible continuities between the communist regime and the post-communist period. Considering his post-89 testimony as a way to combat the surviving and influential political and security networks of the communist years, Raceanu is a clear case of the combative moral witness. His struggle against disguised elements of the oppressive system did not cease on 22 December 1989. The very circumstances of his release appear to prove the seamless activity of the repressive system in some of its areas in the days immediately following December 1989 as well as afterwards. During the week of demonstrations that led to Ceausescu’s flight on Friday 22 December, the prison in central Bucharest where Raceanu had been held for a year was filling up. He had been alone in his cell throughout most of the year, but on the evening of 21 December there were six additional inmates. On the following day, when the helicopter carrying Ceausescu was fading into the distance, signalling the official collapse of the regime, all prisoners but one had been released. The tumult of the previous days ceased. The prison was quiet. The one detainee left was Mircea Raceanu. He relates that he had heard demonstrators shouting in the street that Ceausescu had fled. It turned out that radio news bulletins informed the listeners that all political prisoners ‘including Mircea Raceanu’ had been released that day. Yet, when his wife came to the prison and asked about his whereabouts, she was told that he had been transferred to another prison in Transylvania; all this time he was still locked up in his cell. Raceanu was eventually released on the evening of 23 December. A few weeks later, in the presence of other persons from the provisional leadership, he asked one of its members why the delay; the answer was that there were probably plans to ‘liquidate’ him in the general confusion (Raceanu 2009, 471-472). Months later, the USA ambassador in Bucharest told him that the Americans had similar suspicions. Throughout 1990, Raceanu criticised President Iliescu and the new authorities, accusing them of crypto-communism. Although the new leaders suggested that he should leave Romania and settle in the USA, he refused until two attempts against his and his wife’s lives persuaded them to leave the country. This must be one of the most conspicuous cases of bearing testimony about an act of official injustice starting before 1989 and continuing after 1989. It is a kind of testimony that, apart from summoning up the past,

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aims a direct accusation at the ‘inertia’ of the security organs and of the political interests backing it. Raceanu claims time and again that his intelligence activity was meant to undermine the dictatorship (Raceanu 2009, 27 & passim). He also mentions the multitude of would-be dissidents that ‘have increased like mushrooms’ after 1989 (Raceanu 2009, 205). His testimony has therefore to do with several types of right and wrong. He implies that it is unbecoming, if not downright unethical, of numbers of people to lay claim to a status they are not entitled to, namely the status of opponents of the repressive system before 1989. More forcefully, he repeatedly points out that persons who directly and brutally enforced the control exercised by the communist authorities still hold influential positions or have even been promoted. His testimony raises grave questions about key episodes during the power shift in December 1989 that have not yet been answered. Through his interviews and public speeches in 1990, Raceanu therefore took the kind of risk that would satisfy the initial definition of the moral witness as advanced by Margalit. Among the persons who, according to Raceanu, suddenly crowded the detention centre on the morning of 22 December 1989 was the physicist Gabriel Andreescu. Unlike most of the other fresh inmates, he had not demonstrated in the streets on the previous evening because his movements were restricted. Andreescu had been brought to Bucharest by the security services from the provincial town where he had been forcibly moved after his frequent protests resulting in arrests during the 1980s. Once moved to a prison in Bucharest, he was subjected to the familiar routine – search, registration, assignment to a (crowded) cell – only to be released after a few hours. This bizarre move undertaken by the security services betrays their temporary confusion. The information gleaned solely from the prison registers would puzzle the historian confined to this evidence. Andreescu’s memory of the surly, fearful but suddenly polite officers who processed him on the morning of 22 December contrasts with his recollections of them a few months later: selfconfident, well-dressed businessmen or civil servants smoothly slotted into comfortable jobs, their renewed assertiveness, power and influence raising further questions about the process of transition. After 1989, Andreescu along with other former opponents of the communist dictatorship encountered considerable obstacles in gaining access to their security files. This in itself shows how the slow process of lustration in Romania, compared with other former communist coun-

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tries, motivates and requires the contribution of the moral witness. There is a more specific consequence of the discrepancy between the ‘incomplete’ or doctored archives and the complexity of the past. According to Andreescu, the ‘surviving’ file on him is meant to give a distorted image of his dissident activities. This discrepancy moves Andreescu to pass a remark that carries the sense of obligation to remember in order to counteract the wilful institutional distortions: ‘Once living memory is gone, an innocent researcher will draw the conclusion that, judging by my file, the security services dealt with a suspected spy’ (Andreescu 2009, 135). In addition to other accusations, the security services had claimed that Andreescu’s contacts with a Western diplomat who smuggled abroad his protest messages involved passing on information that ‘damaged’ the Romanian state; in fact, such messages contained rather innocuous estimations of the (officially inflated) wheat crop. Consequently, Andreescu wants to put the record straight in his autobiographical reflections. Whether or not he considers intelligence gathering beneath his dignity (in which case there is a clash of norms with Raceanu who was proud to combat the dictatorship in that manner), Andreescu certainly wants to leave a complete account of his intentions and activities. He not only deems that he ought to pass on his own recollections of the period, but also clarify the set of norms that guided him. The nature of these norms appears from the gratitude he expressed towards the exile organisations and initiatives that publicised and backed the protest actions initiated in the East. Andreescu stated that the exiles share the ‘credit’ of these protest actions, even if they did not run the ‘risks’ (Andreescu 2009, 205). As for his own actions, he considered that they were well worth undertaking even if they implied danger. Unlike Herta Müller (see below), Andreescu has not reproached any of his fellow-citizens in Romania for not having supported him. However, his mention of risks implies courage to brave the repressive measures as well as the integrity to continue along this path (he declined several times the offer to settle in the West). His reference to protest actions as deserving credit has moral connotations. He does not spell out whether more than just the tiny minority of dissidents ought to have acted in the same manner; there is no criticism of his fellow-citizens that they did not actively opposed the dictatorship. Yet, he evokes the issue in moral terms: when confronted with questions of right and wrong one has to choose. And this witness lets the readers to draw their own conclusions.

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Perhaps the most extraordinary kind of testimony in this particular example is the discovery that Andreescu made in his father’s file. Dissatisfied with the few pages from his own file that the authorities made available, he managed to gain access to the far bulkier surveillance file on his father. This particular section of the file covered the late 1980s when, as a result of his actions against the political system, the authorities forced Gabriel Andreescu to leave Bucharest and move to his native provincial town where he lived with his parents. This move was meant to prevent him from contacting foreign correspondents or diplomats. The surveillance of the father had in fact started as far back as 1952 because of his ‘dubious’ social background: the family had owned a few acres of land and one of his relatives was a priest. Andreescu came across long transcriptions of conversations in the household. Almost two decades after the event, his parents dead by now, he was reading faithful transcriptions of the family’s monitored conversations. The rooms had been bugged; the tapes were painstakingly transcribed and placed in his father’s file. Reading these transcripts, Andreescu recounts that he was both moved and stunned. The contrast between the banal chats and the highly fraught moments of that period constitute a kind of testimony whose general context most Romanian readers recognise but whose detailed implications and everyday impact remains unknown to those not directly involved. The element of elucidation in this particular moral testimony stands out more obviously than in other cases discussed here. The security employee on his dawn shift would carefully note the date and time, summing up the chief points of the conversation: ‘On 11/11 1989, at 5.30 a.m. “Andreica” and “Gabi” wake up. “Gabi” is in a good mood, humming various melodies. Wife [G’s mother]: Stop that. I want to sleep some more” (Andreescu, 2009: 228; ‘Andreica’ was the father’s code name, ‘Gabi’ was the son’s). Later on, there is news of Todor Jivkov’s fall: ‘A: They haven’t heard, (…) they weren’t at home. They haven’t heard of Jivkov. G: You think so? A: So, they haven’t changed’ (Andreescu 2009, 229). A week later, after the dictatorship’s collapse in Bulgaria, there was news of Jivkov having to stand trial. The family, including a guest (C), mentioned the matter and referred to Ceausescu whose name the security officers never transcribed: ‘A: Look at Jivkov, they want to put him on trial. Wife: None of your business. C: For me there’s only one name that counts. The others don’t matter. A:

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Have you heard that one: [Ceausescu] and his master pushed the land close to disaster. Wife: Shut up!’ (Andreescu 2009, 231; I have freely adapted A’s rhyming slogan; ‘his master’ referred to Elena Ceausescu whom people thought dominated her husband). The transcriptions go on in this manner, recording the smallest remark. The file contains about one thousand pages. Not all are surveillance transcripts but this testimony of the excruciating dullness and, at the same time, of the sinister intrusion of the surveillance work suggests to the reader the size of the security apparatus and its focus. Retrieving the past under these circumstances conveys a sense that goes beyond factual evidence or direct experience. Paradoxically enough, these were moments when people were in the privacy of their home, not in an interrogation room. But, by presenting these moments free from (direct) persecution as part of the repressive system, Andreescu finds a particularly idiosyncratic way of bearing witness. At the specific moments recorded here he was not undergoing any conspicuous suffering, humming merrily as he did, according to the tapes, and neither was he wrestling with any moral issue. The witness is rather the reader of these extracts who imagines the dissident in the atmosphere of the late 1980s. In order to make sense of this testimony, the reader has to reconstruct the moment by means of these transcripts and judge the significance of Andreescu’s attitude. In fact, the reader turns into a secondary witness who has to do the work of elucidation. Patapievici talks about the obligation to bear witness, Coposu considers that he has to deploy his recollections against the adversities of history; Raceanu gives his underground militancy a moral interpretation, while Andreescu pointedly refers to the credit that opposition against a repressive system deserves. The concrete circumstances in which they acquired their ‘knowledge-by-acquaintance of suffering’ varies but they share the effort to convey knowledge-by-elucidation, as it were, through their testimony. The case of the lecturer in French, Doina Cornea, shows that elucidation featuring in her testimony conveys a sense of the mood in her pre-89 account, and a sense of compromising concealment in her post-89. More than anyone in the previous examples, Doina Cornea was known both in Romania and abroad as a frank opponent of the regime. Cornea had written several open letters and appeals in the 1980s, asking for democratic reforms and attacking the communist regime. She wrote

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and distributed pamphlets outside factory gates in her home town Cluj, the largest in Transylvania. She supported the workers’ strike in Brasov in 1987. Interviews with, and documentaries about, her on French national television as well as visits to her home by persons such as the British Ambassador in Bucharest (he was beaten up outside her gate and prevented from entering the house) or a prominent Dutch politician (same treatment) made her known and protected her to a certain extent from the more gruesome fate of obscure opponents to the regime. Even so, the authorities sacked her from her job at the university, imprisoned her several times, and harassed her in various ways, including close surveillance round the clock and the occasional beating in the street. In early 1990, the national and international prestige of Doina Cornea as a campaigner against communist oppression raised her to the highest levels of power. Among her colleagues, there was the former party dignitary, Silviu Brucan, apparently the ‘éminence grise’ of the new provisional leadership. When Cornea asked him about the meaning of several obscure and violent episodes during 22-26 December, when the army tried to deal with mysterious commando groups that provoked panic in Bucharest and elsewhere, Brucan kept giving her evasive answers.1 Whichever way one interprets Margalit’s definition, Doina Cornea comes very close to the exemplary moral witness. Before 1989 she openly stood up against the dictatorship when she acquired more than her share of ‘knowledge-by-acquaintance of suffering’, bearing testimony to all this despite constant risks. Considering the subject of the present study, it is even more relevant that even after 1989 Cornea opposed what she regarded as a manipulative leadership with unsettling repressive tendencies. Once more, she took serious risks as the flood of death threats, coordinated press slander and various obstructions demonstrate; one such obstruction was cutting off the sound of her TV broadcast to the nation in the wake of Ceausescu’s flight. Cornea’s national prestige and international fame as an articulate and resilient opponent of the communist regime in the 1980s determined the post-89 provisional government to use her as a figurehead of the Front for National Salvation that had taken power after Ceausescu’s fall. Almost immediately, Cornea questioned the credentials and intentions of the new leaders, and soon after resigned her position, while continuing 1

See www.memoria.ro/?location=view_article&id1572, 16 September 2011.

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her criticism. In what appeared as an officially organised press campaign against her, the papers accused her of having sympathised with the Fascist Iron Guard (she was ten years old when that organisation was banned) and of wanting to sell Romania to the capitalists (along with many others, she had asked for reforms favouring market economy). Besides satisfying more than one definition of the moral witness, Doina Cornea’s testimony provides evidence of worrying aspects of institutional and even ideological continuity despite the apparent break in 1989. After Ceausescu’s fall she came across the prosecutors who put her in prison before 1989 and who did not seem unduly worried about the collapse of communism. Moreover, the proposals for new legislation had a rather familiar pre-1989 ring. Some of the new bills concerning economic reform bore the stamp of the recently compromised communist economic outlook, shunning private enterprise and suspicious of foreign investment, this suspicion frequently turning into nationalist slogans. The survival of hastily reorganised power networks and revival of dogmas backed by nationalism, point to the relevance of Cornea’s continuing moral stance. The relationship between politics and morality recurs in the book of conversations between her and a French journalist, bearing the sceptical title Liberté?, and straddling 1989 through a series of recollections and contemporary reflections. This recurring relationship is in fact a sensitive one. The interviewer challenges Cornea to explain why she appears to regard herself as a moral witness rather than a political opponent, a distinction that, at least in her case, she forcefully rejects (Cornea 1990, 100103). Here as well as several times later when the issue recurs in the discussion, Cornea insists that there is no difference between a moral and a political stance. She prefers instead to make a distinction between political attitudes and political actions, declining to pursue the latter but determined to adopt the former. By political action, Cornea means joining a party and being active in politics. In the early 1990s, quite a few Romanian intellectuals considered joining a political party as something discreditable, mainly because of the associations with party membership before 1989. They opted for remaining above the political fray and cultivated what they took to be an objective tone, fondly believing that they would enjoy an advisory role. The result was that neither the general public nor the active politicians paid much attention to them. This was the context in which Cornea distanced herself from concrete political

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activity, insisting on articulating an attitude, in fact bearing testimony with a moral purpose. I have dwelt at some length on the category of the combative moral witness since in the case of post-89 Romania it shows how a particular use of testimony questions claims of radical change. The recollections that maintain a moral commitment in current politics define one particular facet of the identity of the moral witness. There is another kind of moral witness who trusts in simply recollecting his predicament. The Mirror and the Filter of Experience Few opponents of the communist regime in Romania have puzzled the public as much as the novelist Nicolae Breban. In the late 1960s he enjoyed popular and critical success, he was the editor of the most influential literary periodical and substitute member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. When the ‘July Theses’ appeared in 1971, introducing a new period of dogmatism, he was on a visit to Paris. After Le Monde published his protest against the new ideological turn, Breban returned to Romania to face the wrath of the authorities. He was promptly dismissed from his job and lost his political position. However, he was not arrested. Shunned by the literary world, no longer mentioned in print, he nevertheless managed with great difficulty to publish a few novels without making ideological compromises. The fact intrigued both friends and foes who became even more surprised when in the 1980s he was allowed to leave Romania and settle in Paris. It should be added that in his earlier travels he had acquired German citizenship since, on his mother’s side, he belongs to the German minority in Romania. Unlike Herta Müller though, he has always written in Romanian. In remembering those times, Breban explains that he does not want to ‘inform’ the reader about concrete details but rather ‘to suggest an atmosphere, a climate, the “air” of certain social and psychological reflexes’ (Breban 2004, 2: 71; italics in the original). This illustrates particularly well the aspect of elucidation as one of the chief elements of the moral witness. Indeed, Breban’s readers know most of the facts. Less known is the aim of the writer’s undertaking. The recurring preoccupation with morality may help to enlighten the reader on this matter (Breban 2004, 2: 16, 18 and passim). When Breban recollects his motives more precisely, he attempts to make the reader understand a two-fold impact stemming from two sources: an external one related to political

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oppression and an internal one that has to do with the fear of ‘adapting’ too well (Breban 2004, 2: 114). The fear of an all too successful adaptation appears retrospectively as a further political gesture: he doubts the value of a spectacular rise in a system where making a brilliant ‘career’ implies accepting a set of morally compromising conventions. Unlike most examples used in this study, Breban did not have to undergo physical suffering. He does not elaborate on the psychological pressures but they cannot be dismissed, if one keeps in mind the political context and the ordeal of the witnesses discussed above. He is careful not to claim more than he can justify. His choice was particularly stark in comparison with that of most of the other witnesses quoted here: a literary and political career at the highest level or a life haunted by fear, uncertainty and obscurity. Jay Winter’s emphasis on contextualisation would involve too detailed an account here, but the basic circumstances that determined Breban’s option derive from the contemporary tension between right and wrong. The manner in which his recollections justify his chosen norms of behaviour exercises the reader’s intellectual as well as imaginative faculties. The detached outlook of the contemplative witness has been best summed up by Ion Ioanid’s words closing a Romanian TV documentary: ‘We don’t want anything. We don’t want to move anyone to tears. We simply want you to accept us as witnesses’.2 If not to emotions, the appeal is then surely to reason. And since the will to bear testimony presupposes a sense of obligation, the outlook is once more that of a testimony that resorts to elucidation. Ioanid has recounted his experiences in prison, including a glimpse of the outside world during his famous escape, in a detailed narration stretching over several volumes. In so far as he recollects unjust persecution, the narration deals with concepts of good and evil, and his testimony contains an implicit moral intention. An explicit intention appears in Sanda Stolojan’s memoirs. She justifies her testimony through a need to explain (Stolojan 2009, 16). As she argues, she expects to understand better through the distance of memory and exile. While she, as a witness, makes this effort of comprehension, the reader accompanies her in the attempt. Unlike her husband, Stolojan did not spend time in prison, but she suffered injustice because of her social and political background. 2

See www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pWr4Y6f4YQ, 10 May 2011.

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As suggested above, some witnesses appear to claim more than they are entitled to. When it comes to the aspiring moral witness, I intend to expand Margalit’s concept by adding the aspiration of the perpetrator to bear testimony. A clear illustration of this stance is the case of the prison inspector keen to step forward and recollect his indignation when faced with suffering caused by his presence. He tells his story in one of a long series of documentaries produced by Romanian Television charting the political persecution during the communist regime. The man was employed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a body among whose functions was that of running the penitentiary system. While visiting a prison in Eastern Romania holding political detainees, the inspector witnessed the physical ordeal and humiliation of all the inmates, amounting to several hundred, gathered in the central yard. Somewhat puzzled by the scale of the punishment, he soon understood that it was an action occasioned by his arrival. It appeared that the zealous prison director wanted to impress the official visitor from Bucharest by his forceful handling of the ‘enemies of the people’. The TV interviewer’s question why the inspector did not stop the ordeal elicits at first an evasive answer (‘I did put it to him, in general […]’), and after a few indignant remarks (‘He tried to impress me […] these people brought along [their own cruelty]’) he hits upon the key phrase: ‘I told him. (…) This is a crime against humanity. [Pause] I did tell him’.3 The inspector insists that at the time he condemned the cruelty he witnessed and, clearly, considers that it is important to recall the episode in order to establish his righteous outlook on the matter. Admitting that he was part of the repressive apparatus and that the prison director’s fear not to be regarded as too soft caused the extra suffering, the inspector candidly indicates the distance between the indirect persecutor and the subsequent moral witness, as well as the effort needed to abandon the former role and assume the latter identity. An intriguing case is that of Silviu Curticeanu who in the late 1970s and 1980s was Ceausescu’s legal adviser and, in time, administrative factotum. After 1989 Curticeanu was sentenced to several years in prison because, according to the minutes of one of the last meetings of the Communist Party’s Executive Committee, he joined those who insisted that the security forces should open fire against the protesters. Appar3

See www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wBayGade68, 13 May 2011.

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ently, the defence minister had refused to give such an order and was later found dead at his desk; the official news broadcast while Ceausescu was still in power announced that the minister had committed suicide. Curticeanu is aware of the temptation of aspiring towards the identity of the moral witness. In the introduction to his memoirs written while imprisoned along with other party dignitaries after 1989, he asserts that he wants to be a just witness and not a judge of past events (Curticeanu 2000, 9). At the same time, he is worried that in his confessions he has not struck the right balance between memory and forgetting and that he has not had ‘the force, wisdom and detachment to sort out the good deeds from the bad ones’ (Curticeanu 2000, 8). His further fears are that any criticism of the post-89 period may seem the cantankerous attitude of someone lacking moral authority. By ‘experiencing the suffering of the act of remembrance’, he insists that the aim is not to prove his innocence (Curticeanu 2000, 10). Yet, the moral intention is present and so is the will to bear testimony. Adopting the outlook of the unjustly condemned victim, these memoirs dwell both on prison life after 1989 and on the time of working closely with Ceausescu. Curticeanu qualifies his option that led him to the top of the power apparatus as a mistake, recollecting the activity at that level as an extremely frustrating period during which he had to cope with the increasingly unpredictable behaviour of the leader and with the infuriating interference of his wife. The image is of someone who cannot turn back, in fact of someone who suffers but is trying to do his best. Despite Curticeanu’s initial promise not to judge, this testimony does turn into a judgment of regrettable options and inevitable actions. Whatever the initial worries about the intentions and aspirations of this testimony, the whole exercise ends up as an aspiration to discern good from evil and justify one’s position. This constant feature of Curticeanu’s testimony shows that he aspires to the status of the moral witness; however, the specific circumstances of his deed prevent him from assuming the proper identity of the moral witness. Both the prison inspector and the dictator’s legal adviser are witnesses, their testimony attempts to show their righteousness and their efforts tend towards assuming a role they are aware of. Yet, their gesture remains an unfulfilled wish. The experience that these witnesses claim to bring to the present is that of mute indignation as they attempt to explain their invidious position then and now; hence, their relevance regarding

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the strands of continuity that complicate the political and social world of post-89 Romania. The perpetrator’s choice to bear testimony is a way of avoiding the responsibility conferred by membership in the mechanism of repression whose actions entail collective responsibility. This responsibility also derives from a sense of common purpose that binds together the group or collective that makes up the system of repression. By distancing oneself from this common purpose, the testimony of the perpetrator grants him the status of a witness on the right side of the moral issue. The perpetrator performed the deed but his heart was not in it; he did it against his conscience which supposedly absolves him from moral blame. The aspiration towards the status of the moral witness touches the extremes. As the examples show, the range of candidates stretches from the prison inspector in the example above to the philosopher in the example below, an intellectual full of integrity even if not an outspoken opponent of the communist regime. A brief but telling exchange in the discussion between Herta Müller and the philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu furnishes a particular kind of evidence about the temptation of aspiring to the status of moral witness.4 This discussion was part of a series a conversations with notable intellectuals in front of a large audience. Müller had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. A supplementary background note is in order here: by the 1980s, the communist authorities adopted a law according to which everybody who owned a typewriter had to register it officially, give a sample of its type, and subsequently present it once a year in order for the sample to be checked and updated. The typed text of a protest leaflet or a letter could quite easily lead to the instrument and its owner. Owning a typewriter and not presenting it for the yearly official control meant breaking the law and risking unpleasant consequences. Discussing ways of opposing the dictatorship, Liiceanu retorts that, unlike Müller, he did not present his typewriter for the obligatory annual control; in other words Müller obeyed the absurd regulation, while Liiceanu did not. Considering the contrast between the repeated interrogations and sackings to which Müller had been subjected among other persecutions, and Liiceanu’s fairly undisturbed life as a philosopher and 4

See www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTPDAQCGlbk&feature=related, 21 May 2011.

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researcher who occasionally could bring out a good book and even travel to the West, his gesture to outdo the persecuted writer with his own minimal gesture of defiance betrays the temptation of claiming an unwarranted status (pace Andrei Plesu, another admirable intellectual and, this time, outspoken dissident, who defended Liiceanu afterwards). A charitable interpretation would be that Liiceanu was flippant, although aware of the difference between Müller and himself as opponents of the dictatorship. An uncharitable but more realistic interpretation would be that at that moment he attached an excessive ethical significance to his recollections. It has to be emphasised that Liiceanu has time and again demonstrated his probity but without publicly standing up to the dictatorship before 1989. His remark may have been unintentional, but it is so much more revealing of the temptation to overstate one’s moral credentials. Converging Testimonies All the testimonies discussed above derive from direct experience. They relate episodes where the individual was involved in extreme situations. As this discussion draws to a close, it is necessary to qualify one of the main features in Jay Winter’s definition of the moral witness, namely bearing testimony ‘against the grain’. I achieve this by resorting to contextualising the testimony, something that Winter also considers very important. Winter employs as his clearest example the First World War veteran Norton Cru’s evocation of his experiences in the trenches and his fierce criticism of the War in the face of the subsequent commemorations and triumphalism of the great majority of the people. This is the evidence that Winter deploys in order to question Margalit’s view of the moral witness as the carrier of the collective memory. For Winter collective memory, or the memory that the community chooses to perpetuate, is at odds with the minority of moral witnesses like Cru. That is clearly how matters stand in Norton Cru’s case. It is not, however, the case with the post-89 testimonies in Romania (or the rest of Eastern Europe, for that matter). The moral witnesses may be in a minority but not because their image of the past challenges that of the general public; there is a general consensus that the system that collapsed in 1989 was a repressive one. They are in a minority because they dared to oppose the system and suffered for it, or suffered unjustly even without opposing it. They do not bear testimony ‘against the grain’ and their claim to the status of moral witness is not diminished by that. However, Jay Winter raises the

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important issue of the tension between the idiosyncrasy of the individual moral testimony and collective memory. How is the former assimilated into the latter while still preserving the distinct identity of the moral witness? I would suggest that the concepts of norm and trust explain to what extent the moral witnesses’ individual memories eventually become part of the collective memory. Since contextualising is crucial, I have confined my argument to the circumstances of pre- and post-89 Romania. The direct experience of the moral witness passes into the collective memory because it is filtered through a generally accepted set of norms of behaviour. The community treats the individual’s idiosyncratic and specific testimony as an example of a general set of circumstances: when faced with evil or suffering or both, standing up to the perpetrator of an injustice becomes exemplary, as in the case of Doina Cornea. The individual experience may well remain unknown to the majority who assimilate it through the process of elucidation and preserve it through its significance. Linking the particular incident with its general, indeed moral, significance appears as one way in which to bridge the individuality of the testimony ‘against the grain’ with the quality of the agent, i.e. the moral witness, as the carrier of collective memory. The identity of the moral witness may well be assumed by the individual but it is properly sanctioned only when the audience grants it. Trust is of essence for an audience to recognise someone as a moral witness. On the issue of trust, Jeffrey Blustein agrees with Margalit: trust in the individual comes before evaluating the truth of the testimony (Blustein, 2008, 310). Even if the untrustworthy speaker presents a true account, his testimony encounters scepticism. Margalit’s distinction between the attitude towards a witness and that towards his testimony (Margalit 2002, 180) allows the witness an authority that precedes the reliability of his account. It goes without saying that this sort of trust derives from knowledge about the individual’s actions before 1989 and his or her behaviour under the pressures of political persecution. The public knowledge about the few individuals who stood up to the communist dictatorship entails a confidence in their motives that precedes the testimony. Apart from the fact that the witnesses’ accounts can be checked for accuracy, their moral status in the confused post-89 political landscape in Romania lends credence to their recollections. That is why, to take two contrasting examples, Gabriel Andreescu’s status as a moral

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witness is unchallenged while Silviu Curticeanu’s is dubious. Treating the witness separately from the testimony outlines the contours of the specific identity that this study has explored, an identity that Andreescu exemplifies but that Curticeanu only aspires to. In a discussion about the connection between knowledge and trust in the context of bearing testimony, Jonathan Adler has dismissed ‘the alleged opposition between trust and knowledge’; however, he admits that there is ‘an inescapable level of vulnerability’ in the case of informants whose accounts cannot be checked (Adler 2002, 140). Nevertheless, it is hardly possible to transmit knowledge without relying on trust when testimony is the main source; hence, trust and knowledge are ‘compatible’ (Adler 2002, 141). I would add that on a scale between belief and knowledge (i.e. justified belief) trust occupies an intermediary place, receiving the benefit of the doubt from the audience on extra-epistemological grounds – for instance, moral – and providing reasons to consolidate warranted belief, namely knowledge. Crucially, in the concrete context of post-89 Romania, trust is established because the specific moral testimony is able to enter collective memory through the shared general context that both witness and audience have in common. Moreover, trust means that the role of bearing testimony requires the convergence of the moral witness’s ‘epistemic advantage’ and of the audience’s ‘epistemic humility’, both being Blustein’s terms (2008, 312). When Blustein adds that ‘in addition to the epistemic, the authority conferred by the actual experiences of injustice is partly moral in nature’ (2008, 312), he points to the manner in which epistemology and ethics overlap in the context of bearing moral testimony. I would finally suggest that in order to realise how this convergence occurs one needs to qualify Blustein’s epistemic by Margalit’s elucidatory dimension of moral testimony. Elucidation as defined by Margalit diminishes the rigidity of the boundaries between epistemology and ethics and thus compounds the effect of recollection. This effect consequently reinforces the status of the ‘carrier’ of memory and consolidates the identity of the moral witness.

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References Adler, Jonathan E. 2002. Belief’s Own Ethics. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Andreescu, Gabriel. 2009. L-am urit pe Ceausescu: Ani, oameni,disidenta. Iasi: Polirom. Blustein, Jeffrey. 2008. The Moral Demands of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Breban, Nicolae. 2004. Memorii. Vol.2, Sensul vietii. Iasi: Polirom. Coposu, Corneliu. 1998. Confessions: Dialogues with Doina Alexandru. Tr. Elena Popescu. Boulder: East European Monographs. Cornea, Doina. 1990. Liberté?. Paris: Criterion. Ioanid, Ion. 1991. Inchisoarea noastra cea de toate zilele. Vol. 1. Bucharest: Albatros. Margalit, Avishai. 2002. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP. Patapievici, Horia-Roman. 1996. Politice. Bucharest: Humanitas. Raceanu, Mircea. 2009. Infern ’89: Povestea unui condamnat la moarte. 2d rev.ed. Bucharest: Curtea Veche. Stolojan, Sanda & Vlad. 2009. Sa nu plecam toti odata. Bucharest: Humanitas. Winter, Jay. 2006. Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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FROM THE HOLOCAUST TO THE GULAG: THE CRIMES OF NAZISM AND COMMUNISM IN SWEDISH POST-89 MEMORY POLITICS Conny Mithander Abstract In comparison with many other European countries, Sweden constitutes a special case when dealing with Europe’s dark past. Each country has a characteristic feature in this respect, but Sweden differs in several ways. A distinctive feature is that in the 1990s Sweden assumed a great guilt regarding the Holocaust, although Sweden’s guilt is not as great when compared with other countries. Another distinctive feature about Sweden is that Communism and its criminal history are very sensitive issues, particularly among intellectuals, despite the lack of concrete experience of Communism. In Sweden, as well as in most other countries, there is widespread consensus about Nazi evil, both as ideology and practice. The crimes of Communism are, however, a minefield where the debaters promptly take on dogmatic ideological outlooks. Consequently, in Sweden it is not possible to agree about the role of Communism in the country’s memory politics. This asymmetry in Swedish memory politics is obvious in the reactions to the government’s Living History project and its information campaigns about the crimes of Communism and Nazism. The educational campaign about Nazism (1997) didn’t cause any protests, while the information campaign about communism (2006) provoked ample dissension and ideological deadlocks. When History Caught up with Sweden This chapter concerns memory politics in Sweden after 1989. The primary empirical material consists of the vast project of information and

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history didactics called ‘Living History’. The project is here perceived as a central agent of memory politics in the Swedish post-89 processing of Europe’s dark past. Through the concept of memory politics I wish to emphasise that memories, and memories of groups in particular, are politically loaded. Regardless of whether the particular memory is used to support or challenge prevailing ideologies, it cannot avoid becoming a subject of dispute. Memory, history and oblivion therefore tend to be used and abused for various political and ideological purposes. Moreover, the purpose of propagating a politically loaded collective or individual memory is not so much to retain a static past, but to readjust the memory and give it life so as to enable its usage within the arguments over the political issues of today and tomorrow. In the field of international memory research there is a strong interest in the intersection and interaction between memory and politics. There is, however, no consensus on the concept of memory politics or the politics of memory. On the contrary, the term is used in many different ways, often without any clear definition being applied at all. In cases when the concept is defined very widely it does not become analytically rewarding. In The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Lebow et al. 2006), we find one attempt at making a clear delimitation of the field and the interaction between memory and politics. The focus of this work is on institutional memory: ‘Institutional memory describes efforts by political elites, their supporters, and their opponents to construct meaning of the past and propagate them more widely or impose them on other members of society’ (13). It is in accordance with this meaning of the concept that I define the Swedish Living History project as an institution of memory politics. The focus is on the political and instructive use of history and memory by political and intellectual elites. This is both about the concrete agents of memory politics and the political and ideological dimension – indeed about the explosive force – of the artefacts of memory culture. The Living History project was established in 1997 by the Swedish Social Democratic government led by the Prime Minister of Sweden at that time, Göran Persson, who was personally involved in initiating the project. In 2003, Living History was institutionalised and made permanent as a state authority named the Living History Forum (LHF). This Forum was an entirely new kind of organisation and did not have a

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direct counterpart anywhere in the world. Initially, the aim of the Living History Forum was to provide the Swedish people, above all the youth, with information on the issue of the Holocaust. This was to be the starting-point for the promotion of work on democracy, tolerance and human rights in contemporary Swedish society. In 2006, when Sweden lost its Socialist government, the awareness campaign was expanded to include also the crimes of Communism. This caused debates and arguments, as we shall see later. In the Living History Project I also wish to include the four international conferences in Stockholm (2000-04) on the theme of genocide and the Holocaust which were initiated by the Social Democratic government. The conferences brought vast international prestige for Sweden, not least for Göran Persson. In the late 1990s, the Social Democratic government also initiated a number of extensive research projects on Sweden’s relationship to the Holocaust and to Communism.1 Background The Living History Project can be perceived as an offshoot of the debates on guilt which broke out in Sweden against the background posed by the fall of the Berlin Wall. One of these debates concerned the role of Sweden under the Hitler era and the possible shared burden of guilt that Sweden carried for the Holocaust. Another debate included the crimes of Communism and the moral guilt of the Swedish Left. The starting point for the first debate, the one on the problem of guilt during the War, was the pamphlet Heder och samvete. Sverige och andra världskriget (Honour and conscience. Sweden and the Second World War [1991]), written by the journalist Maria-Pia Boëthius. In the book, she criticised what she claimed to be the mendacious official story of Sweden and the War, which had dominated the whole post-war era and stated that neutral Sweden had a blameless past; that Sweden both morally and ideologically had been on the ‘good’ side during the War. The fact that Sweden had conceded to the German demands – exported iron ore and 1 Earmarked money was channelled to the big research project ‘Sweden’s relationship to Nazism, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust’ as well as to the project ‘Crimes against humanity under Communist regimes’ through various research councils. It can also be mentioned that in 1998 the Government gave Uppsala University the task of founding a centre of knowledge and a programme for education and research on issues concerning the Holocaust and genocide.

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ball bearings; accepted the transportation through Sweden of more than two million German soldiers and one hundred thousand German railway trucks carrying arms; ‘J’-stamps in Jewish passports; the establishment of internment camps; censorship and registration of views to silence domestic criticism of Nazi Germany – had been the only way of keeping Sweden out of the War, according to the official story. It was all about the survival of a small nation, it was said. The good connections between Swedish financial and cultural establishment with Hitler’s Germany during the 1930s and 1940s were covered up and suppressed from the collective memory after the War, Boëthius claimed. So also was the circumstance that the collaboration with Hitler’s Germany was accepted by a majority of the Swedish population. All the difficult questions of shared guilt with regard to the Holocaust were thus never discussed by the Swedish public due to the politics of concessions vis-à-vis Nazi Germany.2 Boëthius did not present any new facts, but her strongly moralising and prosecuting style of criticism of Sweden’s role during the Hitler era became paradigmatic for an indignant confrontation with Sweden’s old image of its national self. In an interview in 1997, Boëthius said that it was explicitly the fall of the Berlin Wall that made a critical self-examination possible. Before 1989 no one had wanted to publish her articles on Sweden and the Second World War. ‘But after 1989 everything changed. Suddenly there was a great interest and one was allowed to say things that previously had been taboo’ (Hultman and Wirtén 1997, 18).

2 The historian Johan Östling who has studied the Swedish processing of the Nazi experience in the aftermath of the Second World War claims that it was a specific interpretation of Nazism - wide-spread in Sweden after the War - that contributed to the delay of Swedish self-examination (Östling 2008). Differently from the debate in the international community throughout the 1940s and 1950s, where Nazism was seen either as a totalitarian ideology related to Stalinism or as part of a common European movement, it was considered a specifically German phenomenon in Sweden. The Holocaust was thus perceived as a theme concerning the Germans and the Jews, not the Swedes. Barbro Eberan, who has studied the German debate on guilt, presents a psychological explanation and poses the question whether it is not the case that feelings of shame and guilt lie deeper in Sweden than in the countries that were at war or occupied. This would be the reason for the hesitation of the Swedes to confront their role during the Hitler era (Eberan 2011). See also Eberan, 2007.

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The second debate on guilt, the one on the problems of the guilt of Communism, can be said to have commenced on 6 May 1991.3 This was the day when the neo-Liberal think-tank and publishing house Timbro organised a conference in Stockholm on the theme of ‘The moral guilt of the Left’. The starting point for the conference was the issue of socialist and communist conceptions of guilt. The conference resulted among other things in a book with the same title as the conference (Ahlmark et al. 1991). One of the driving forces of the Swedish debate on the moral guilt of the Left was the Liberal writer and politician Per Ahlmark. Ahlmark was chair of the Liberal People’s Party for the period 19751978 and deputy Prime Minister from 1976 to 1978. Three years after the conference he published the pamphlet Vänstern och tyranniet (The Left and tyranny [1994]). In that, Ahlmark reminded people of things that many members of the Swedish Left of 1968 wanted to forget. He named a number of leading Swedish left-wing intellectuals and quoted what they had said in defence of Communist dictatorships over the years. The book gave rise to a heated debate in the media where many who felt accused defended themselves by arguing that they had been ‘idealists’ fighting for a good cause. Ahlmark consequently became the more or less most prominent object of hatred within the Swedish Left.4 The first debate on guilt, the one on Sweden and the Holocaust, can be said to have reached its culmination through Prime Minister Göran Persson’s inaugural speech at the international conference on the Holocaust in Stockholm in 2000. On this occasion, he apologised on behalf of Sweden for the Swedish politics of concession towards Nazi Germany during the Second World War; a politics that prolonged the War and indirectly contributed to the Holocaust, according to Persson. The second debate, the one on the crimes of Communism, still continues. Living History is connected also with another Swedish topic for discussion, one which is more orientated towards contemporary society and which came to play an important part for the emergence of the project. This topic is about the development of what was claimed to be a very militant and violently orientated racism and neo-Nazism among Swedish youth throughout the 1990s. It was above all against this growAfter the fall of real socialism in 1989-92 the gates were opened for a critical investigation of the guilt of the Left in Sweden’ (Ljunggren 2009, 251). 4 Ahlmark has included some of the voices of the debate over the book as part of a supplement to the revised pocket edition of 2003 (Ahlmark 2003, 275-292). 3

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ing racism and neo-Nazism that the information campaign on the Holocaust was supposed to be a remedy. However, the emergence of Living History and the fact that Sweden officially accepted a shared collective guilt for the Holocaust must also be understood in a larger European context. Living History, and the international conferences on the Holocaust and genocide in Stockholm were examples of a strongly increasing interest in the Holocaust in Europe and the world during the twentieth century. Europe’s negative experiences of persecutions, ethnic cleansings, and genocide were turned into a moral dogma, into something that the European Union (EU) and the world could gather around in order to fight it by means of information, education, and research.5 The historian Klas-Göran Karlsson accordingly situates Living History in the culture of guilt and repentance which, according to him, developed in Europe after the end of the Cold War: in order to be accepted into that new community of values in which the Holocaust was a central component in the making of identities, a history of Sweden’s actions during the Hitler era in the shape of a moral narrative of responsibility, guilt, and repentance was needed (Karlsson 2003).6 The Living History project and the conferences on the Holocaust signalled that Sweden now acknowledged its part of the horrors of war generally and the genocide on the Jews in particular, and showed the world community that Sweden repented for its part. My study culminates in two conclusions. The first conclusion is that Sweden officially exaggerated the Swedish guilt after the fall of the Berlin Wall due to a strong wish to adapt to that culture of guilt and repentance (to borrow Karlsson’s wording) that permeates the European project of 5 In 1991, Sweden took a big step closer towards Europe. Throughout the whole post-war era Sweden had actually occupied a distanced position towards Europe. The Nordic countries had been the obvious arena for close co-operation and identity. In 1991, Sweden applied for membership of the EC (the European Community), the predecessor of today’s EU, which was founded in 1993. After a referendum on membership in the EU in 1994, in which the Swedish people gave their consent, Sweden joined the EU in the following year. Sweden held the presidency of the EU in the first half of 2001. Living History can accordingly be seen as a part of the Swedish integration into the new Europe which developed after the end of the Cold War, and to which the acknowledgment of guilt became the entrance ticket. 6 Being an expert on Eastern Europe, Klas-Göran Karlsson came to have a central role in the information campaign on Communism organised by the Living History Forum in 2006. In the same year he became a member of the board of the Living History Forum.

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integration. The second conclusion is that it is not the Second World War or the Holocaust, but the crimes of Communism and the shared guilt of Communist ideology which is the big, controversial issue in Sweden. We can clearly see that this is the case from the reactions to the information campaign organised by Living History on the crimes of Communism and the Swedish reception of Le livre noir de Communisme (The Black Book of Communism, 1997). Since Sweden, differently from many other countries, was not directly affected by the major tragedies of the twentieth century, i.e. Nazism and Communism, the Swedish debate is not so much about actual history as about ideology and politics. Therefore the debate often also becomes moral, as it is not possible to point out particular offenders and particular victims. The Stockholm Conference on the Holocaust Göran Persson’s speech at the conference in Stockholm in 2000, in which he apologised for Sweden’s role during the Hitler era, is a clear expression of the change that the Swedish national self-image went through during the 1990s. The image of Sweden as a bystander nation – a nation standing outside of the War and the Holocaust – developed into an image of a nation of offenders, a nation of crooks, carrying a shared guilt for the Holocaust. From the information campaign on Sweden and the Holocaust organised by Living History, we will later see more expressions of this new and negative self-image. The Stockholm Conference on the Holocaust in 2000 under the heading of ‘The Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust. Education, Remembrance and Research on the Holocaust’ represented something new within international collaboration: over the fifty-five years that had passed since the end of the Second World War, no conference at international governmental level had brought to the fore the issue of remembering the Holocaust. This first conference was successful and was followed by three more conferences.7 Twenty-two Heads of State and Government as well as other representatives of forty-six countries participated, making a total of seven hundred delegates. The more prominent politicians included the German Chancellor Gerhardt Schröder, the 2001: Combating Intolerance; 2002: Truth, Justice and Reconciliation, and 2004: Preventing Genocide – Threats and Responsibility. 7

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Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak,8 the Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, the French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, and the Czech President Václav Havel. The writer and Nobel peace laureate Elie Wiesel was the honorary chairman, Professor Yehuda Bauer from the International Centre for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem, Israel, acted as scientific advisor.9 The explicit aim of the Stockholm conferences was the creation of a meeting-point for the exchange of information, knowledge, ideas and perspectives between people working at expert, decision-making and practical level. The following two primary questions were in focus: 1: What can we learn from the Holocaust, and how can its study alert contemporary society to the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, ethnic conflict and other expressions of hate and discrimination? Can we predict the conditions which create persecution and genocide, and prevent their reoccurrence? 2: What can and should political, civic and religious leaders do to promote Holocaust education, remembrance and research?10 Göran Persson opened the conference by an emotional speech in which he emphasised the need for attempting to understand the nearly ungraspable horror that the Holocaust had implied. He talked about the duty to remember – that forgetting would be treachery to those who survived. Persson also talked about the danger of contemporary antidemocratic forces and deniers of the Holocaust continuing to gain support and adherents. The big danger, according to Persson, was the possibility that we do not learn from history. That was why, he said, he had taken the initiative to the Living History project in 1997. The aim was to distribute knowledge of the Holocaust but also to create an active dia8 No Israeli Prime Minister had visited Sweden since David Ben Gurion thirtyseven years before. In that respect the conference on the Holocaust was the beginning of the Swedish Social Democratic government’s, and above all Göran Persson’s, increasingly friendly politics towards Israel. Previous Social Democratic governments had been critical of Israel and had had a close relationship with Yassir Arafat and the PLO (the Palestine Liberation Organization). 9 Bauer was the scientific advisor also for the government’s campaign Living History in 1997. 10 See ‘Background. A Conference on Education, Remembrance and Research.’ www.humanrights.gov.se/stockholmforum/2000/page879.2011.10.05.

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logue on democratic and humanist values between generations. Persson further stated that the Swedish Living History project was just a beginning. Now it was important to move on and look for greater knowledge and understanding of the dark spots in Sweden’s twentieth-century history. Persson expressed his regret and also apologised for Swedish behaviour during the Second World War: Today, we know that Swedish authorities failed in the performance of their duty during the Second World War. The Swedish Government deeply regrets that we have to make such an observation. The moral and political responsibility for what Swedish society did – or failed to do – during the war will always be with us. (Persson 2000a)

Persson finished his speech with the call: ‘Learning the lessons of the past is a task without end.’ Persson also gave two speeches at the Great Synagogue of Stockholm. One of the speeches was given on the day before the Holocaust Conference when the World Jewish Congress held its inaugural meeting prior to the conference, and one on 27 January, which was the fifty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. After Persson’s first speech at the Great Synagogue, where Persson was strongly self-critical of Sweden’s role during the Hitler era, Elie Wiesel honoured him for his ‘open Swedish self-criticism’: ‘very few leaders in the world have the courage to say what you said’. Wiesel also emotionally expressed his gratitude to Persson: ‘I am not a Swede so I do not know what place you will be given in Swedish history… I hope it will be a good one. But your place in Jewish history will be one of honour’.11 The Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak also praised Persson: ‘On behalf of the Jewish people and the state of Israel, I wish to express profound appreciation to the people of Sweden, and particularity to Prime Minister Persson’.12 Barak expressed a hope that more European governments should follow Sweden’s example and realise the same programme of education on the Holocaust as Sweden had done. On 27 January a memorial ceremony was also held in the Swedish Parliament. Persson gave a memorial speech in which he said, among 11 ‘Nobelpristagaren hyllade Persson’ (The Nobel laureate honoured Persson), Aftonbladet, 26 January 2000. 12 Barak, Ehud. 2000. Message by the Prime Minister of Israel at the Ceremonial Opening, 26 January 2000. www.humanrights.gov.se/stockholmforum/2000/ page897.2011.10.05.

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other things, that 27 January was to become an official remembrance day in Sweden: Auschwitz – a testimony to the evil of man in our times, in our modern, civilised Europe. Fifty-five years ago today the gates of hell on earth opened. This day, we are gathering here in a remembrance of the Holocaust. We remember the victims and honour those who survived. We remember those who performed heroic deeds, courageous people like Raoul Wallenberg whose memorial stands here in the Swedish parliament. Today, exactly 55 years after the liberation of Auschwitz I am pleased to announce that the 27th of January will be the official Swedish Remembrance Day for the Holocaust. I hope that this day will win the hearts of the Swedish people and generate many different activities in homes, schools and cultural life. (Persson 2000b)

In his speech to the Parliament, Persson further said that the Swedish government would work for the establishment of a new institution – the Living History Forum – the purpose of which would be the formation of a permanent centre for remembrance, research, and dialogue on the Holocaust. Persson emphasised the importance of students and teachers, parents and children, politicians and experts discussing the connection between Europe’s dark past and the dangers that contemporary Europe was facing. The underlying mechanisms had to be understood. The task was about bringing the lessons of the past into the struggle against the dark forces of the present: racism, hostility to foreigners, and neo-Nazism. One important result of the Stockholm Conference in 2000 was the so called Stockholm Declaration which has come to be regarded as a milestone in the international struggle against racism, anti-Semitism, and the negligence of history.13 The Declaration states that the Holocaust will always have a universal moral meaning; that it can guide us to understand the human predisposition for both good and evil. It is further said that the constant reminder of the Holocaust is a guarantee that something similar will never be repeated. After a state committee had investigated the possibility to create a permanent centre of knowledge on questions concerning democracy, tolerance, and human rights with a starting-point in the Holocaust, like the one Persson had called for, the Government agency ‘Forum för Declaration on the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust. www. humanrights.gov.se/stockholmforum/2000/page1806.2011.10.05. 13

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levande historia’ (The Living History Forum) was founded on 1 June 2003. With the crimes against humanity in memory, the explicit aim of the Forum’s activities was to strengthen people’s will to actively work for the equal value of all people.14 The commissioner of the Forum from its foundation in 2006 was the historian Helene Lööw who had researched Swedish Nazism and racism. Lööw was succeeded in 2007 by the theologian Eskil Franck. Living History: From Consensus to Conflict Living History’s history of evolution is remarkable in terms of memory politics. As said above, it began in 1997 with the information campaign that Göran Persson initiated and over whose birth and usefulness there was wide political consensus. Eleven years later, the information campaign had developed into a heated debate over Communism, with obvious political and ideological characteristics. According to Persson, the background to his initiative was a research report on the attitudes on, among other things, the Holocaust and democracy among the youth. The report claimed (as it was to be interpreted when it was published and acknowledged in the Swedish media) that one third of Swedish youth in the study were uncertain of – or even denied – the existence of the Holocaust. And only half of the young people were in full agreement that democracy was the best way to govern a country (Lange et al. 1997, 59). In his memoirs, Göran Persson tells that he was ‘appalled’ by the contents of the report (Persson 2007, 246). In addition, in the debate between the party leaders on 11 June 1997, which was the day after the report had been published in the Swedish media, Persson initiated an information campaign on the Holocaust. In his opening speech he made the following declaration: In the autumn the Government will approach all Swedish homes with children of school age and offer them information on the events of the Second World War; on the kind of view on human beings that was to be found behind the extermination of the Jews. But this will be done not only as a history lesson, not only as a dialogue about what once was, but above all as 14 The instructions from the Government literally stated: ‘The Living History Forum is to be a national centre on questions concerning democracy, tolerance, and human rights. The work of the Centre is to have its starting-point in the Holocaust. The overarching goal of the Forum is to be the strengthening and increased awareness of the equal value of all people’ (SOU 2001:5, 85).

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a reminder of what – if we do not keep the discussion alive – could happen again. (Persson 2007, 247)

The purpose was to remind people that this could happen again if we did not keep alive the discussion and the debate. As already pointed out, the approach received broad political support. No party represented in parliament countered the idea of an information campaign on the Second World War and the Holocaust initiated by the state (Persson 2007, 247). The Holocaust Campaign As a base for the information campaign on the Holocaust a book was produced called … om detta må ni berätta …: en bok om förintelsen i Europa 1933-1945 … (… Tell Ye Your Children …: A Book on the Holocaust in Europe 1933-1945). The book was published on 27 January 1998, which was the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.15 The purpose was to provide the Swedish public, and youth in particular, with knowledge of the Holocaust. It was hoped that such knowledge would work in the present as a means against anti-Semitism, racism, and contempt for democracy. The starting-point for the campaign was that all adults in Swedish society had a responsibility to pass on the memory of the Holocaust. This was not just the responsibility of the school; parents and other adults, too, had to pass on democratic values and knowledge. The book was distributed free of charge to more than a million families with children in elementary school and to others who had actively ordered it.16 It was translated into seven languages – English and six major immigrant languages: Arabic, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Finnish, Persian, Spanish, and Turkish. During the years 1997-2000, Living History organised a number of seminars and conferences with the Holocaust as their starting-point. The role of Sweden during the Holocaust was not on the agenda as part of the Holocaust campaign in 1997. It was only in 2005, due to the information campaign ‘Sweden and the Holocaust’ – which lasted for The book is written by the historian of ideas Stéphane Bruchfeld and the historian Paul Levine. As far as I know, no historian of ideas was involved in the information campaign on the crimes of Communism, in which the issue of ideology was toned down for a focus on régimes. This is a fact which reflects the differing character of the two campaigns. 16 Today more than 1.3 million copies have been distributed. 15

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two years – that the Forum began to focus on the theme. The campaign on Sweden and the Holocaust built on new research results from the previously mentioned Swedish research programme on Nazism – ‘Sweden’s relation to Nazism, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust’ (SveNaz) – which had been completed shortly before the campaign started.17 The revaluation of Sweden’s role during the Hitler era is clearly expressed in the central problem of the campaign: ‘Why and in which ways did Sweden contribute to the Holocaust?’ All the activities of the campaign were connected to this issue. According to the website, the explicit aim was said to be the complication of the often over-simplified image of Sweden as a neutral and isolated island in a Europe torn by war: ‘An island where the business sector takes advantage of continued business with Germany. Where institutions perform experiments on the “mentally deficient”. Where German Nazis get inspiration from Swedish racial politics. Where we expel Jews who later die in Auschwitz’.18 We also find the theme of Sweden and the Holocaust in the new and expanded edition of the book …om detta må ni berätta… (…tell ye your children...). In 2009 it was supplemented with a new chapter explicitly on Sweden and the Holocaust (Bruchfeld and Levine 2009, 51-70). In a newspaper interview at the time of publication, one of the authors of the book, Paul A. Levine, stated that their intention with the supplement was to provide a ‘counter-image’ to the widespread notion that the Swedish government did what was in its powers during the War and that it therefore should not be blamed (Neuman 2009). Another aim with the new and expanded edition, according to Levine, was to deconstruct some of the common ‘myths’ about Sweden and the Second World War; for instance, the myth that the Swedes had been unaware of what was going on or that they had come to know about what the Nazis were doing with the Jews at a later point in time. From August 1942 the Swedish authorities knew what was going on, and as from September the same year Swedish newspapers started reporting on the death camps, reports Levine. He also states that Swedish trade with Nazi Germany prolonged the War, but for how long is unclear. In 2010, Levine published the book Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest on the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, the person who became something of a symbol of the resistance to 17 For a summary and reflection on the research results from the SveNaz project, see Åmark 2011. 18 www.levandehist.se

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the Nazis. In this book, Levine deconstructed the myth of Wallenberg, claiming that Wallenberg had characteristics which did not cohere with the image of the hero – as a racist with a dubious attitude to Jews – and that he was a minor character in the Holocaust.19 The Information Campaign on Communism After the change of government in 2006 when Sweden got a non-socialist government, the task of the LHF was expanded to include dissemination of information and research on the misdeeds of Communism and other crimes against humanity.20 The Minister for Cultural affairs, Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth of the Conservative Party, motivated the task in claiming that Communism was a deadly ideology: ‘Communism is an ideology that has harvested and continues to harvest many victims. It is therefore important to cast light on and provide not least the growing generation with information on the black history of Communism’ (The Cabinet Office and the Ministries 2006). Already by the time when Living History was established in 1997, requests had been made above all by politicians and moulders of public opinion on the political right that an information campaign on the crimes of Communism be launched (Persson 2007, 247). In October 1998 a proposal was sent to the Social Democratic government that such a campaign be created. The proposal, however, was stopped by the Social Democrat and deputy Prime Minister, Lena Hjelm-Wallén, with the motivation that Communism, differently from Nazism, was no longer vigorous. Moreover, in a newspaper interview, Hjelm-Wallén claimed that it is not possible to compare Nazism and Communism as the Nazi murders were the result of a 19 As early as 2004 Attila Lajos criticised the image of the hero and the mythologisation of Wallenberg. See Lajos 2004. 20 The politically independent association Upplysning om kommunismen (UOK) (Information on Communism) was founded the same year. The aim of the association was said to be ‘the dissemination of knowledge of Communism, its background, ideology, and impact, as well as the call for watchfulness of totalitarian and anti-democratic movements.’ The UOK performs a similar work to the work of information and enlightening as the Living History Forum. The UOK publishes information material, reports, and teaching materials, organises seminars, exhibitions, and memorial ceremonies of the victims of Communism. As far as I know, it has been difficult, though, to bring about organised co-operation between the UOK and the LHF. This is probably for political reasons: the UOK is closely attached to Swedish enterprises and the Nonsocialist parties. For information on the UOK, see www.upplysningom kommunismen.se.

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‘decision’ to exterminate whereas the Soviet misdeeds ‘came about’ by means of an unsuccessful policy (See Gerner 2000). The campaign on Communism predominantly aimed at teachers of history and social studies as well as pupils of upper secondary school.21 Mapping and compilation of research in the field has been included as part of its task, as well as the initiation of further research when needed. The work consists of seminars, educational activities, and exhibitions around the country.22 The campaign is geographically delimited to the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia, and temporally to the period 1917-1989. As has been said above, the scientific advisor for the campaign is the historian KlasGöran Karlsson. The explicit aim of the campaign, which was publicly launched in March 2008, is to increase the knowledge of crimes committed under Communist regimes to all teachers of social studies and history, and among pupils at upper secondary school. The information campaign on Communism has been able to apply ready-made forms from the first campaign, the one on the Holocaust: extensive school material in the shape of a fact folder, a free magazine, teachers’ guides, exhibitions, lectures, and teachers’ seminars. A research inventory of Swedish and international research in the field has also been made in accordance with the task given by the Government.23 The book Brott mot mänskligheten under kommunistiska regimer (Crimes against humanity under Communist regimes, 2008) is central to the campaign. The perspective is nevertheless different in the material on the crimes of Communism compared to that on Nazism. In the first campaign, the one on the Holocaust, a direct connection was made between ideology (racism, anti-Semitism, the vision of a new Europe built on a racial elite) and the crimes that were committed by Nazi Germany. The 21 The background to the focus on pupils at upper secondary school was a study that ‘Stiftelsen för upplysning om kommunismens brott mot mänskligheten’ (The foundation for information on the crimes of Communism against humanity) undertook in 2001 on pupils knowledge of and attitudes to the crimes of Nazism and Communism against humanity. The study showed that knowledge of the Communist crimes was lacking among the pupils at upper secondary school compared to their knowledge of the corresponding Nazi crimes. See Küng and Franco de Castro 2001. 22 Which is the task that the Government has given the Living History Forum? www.levandehistoria.se/faq/kommunistiskaregimer. 23 The research overview, which is about the research on Russia/the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia, was made by Klas-Göran Karlsson and his colleague Michael Schoenhals. See Karlsson and Schoenhals 2008.

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campaign on Communism, on the contrary, toned down the role of ideology and focused instead on the crimes of regimes. A different narrative technique was thus chosen – a legalistic instead of an ideo-historical one. In the work, the Communist regimes of the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia are prosecuted for ‘crimes against humanity’ and found guilty on a large scale and over a long period of time. What is also missing from the information campaigns on the Communist crimes is a campaign about Sweden and the attitudes of the Swedes to Communism, corresponding to the campaign on Sweden and the Holocaust. There was, however, close cooperation between the Forum and the Swedish Research Council’s research programme ‘Kommunistiska regimer’ (Communist regimes) during 2000-2004, in which Sweden and the position of the Swedes on the Communist states were thematised. In 2005, the anthology Kommunismens ansikten (The faces of Communism) was published with several scholars from the research programme participating and in 2006, the Forum published an offprint from the anthology.24 In that way, it could be said, Sweden and Communism became a part of the activities of the Forum, without, however, a campaign of its own on the theme of Sweden and the position of the Swedes on the Communist regimes having been created. Maybe one reason for the fact that there never was a campaign on Sweden and Communism was the circumstance that this issue was, and remains, a sensitive one in Sweden. Conflict: The Historians’ Appeal The campaign on the Holocaust did not give rise to any protests within the Swedish research community or in the public debate in general. The history of the genocide on the Jews is ideologically and scientifically uncontroversial in Sweden like in many other Western countries. The few critical voices against the Holocaust campaign that I have come across are those of Swedish history revisionists and anti-Semites on the ultra-nationalist right and the criticism is to be found mostly on the

Särtryck ur antologin kommunismens ansikten. (‘Offprint from the Anthology the Faces of Communism’). The Living History Forum, 2006. A study guide to accompany the anthology was also developed by the Forum. The guide can be accessed at www.levandehistoria.se. 24

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internet.25 However, when the task of the Forum was expanded so as to include information on the crimes of Communism, a strong criticism of the Forum’s activities arose and demands were made that the Forum should discontinue them. As early as 2003, Vänsterpartiet (The Left Party of Sweden), previously Vänsterpartiet kommunisterna (The Left Party – Communists), criticised the Forum in a parliamentary motion and expressed the wish that the institution be discontinued. In the motion, fears for a ‘biased image of reality’ were expressed, fears which, it was claimed, were confirmed in the shape of a ‘pro-West tendency’ in the activities of the Forum: the circumstance that ‘evil’ was consistently situated outside the ‘Liberal Capitalist civilization of the West’. The motion was also critical of the fact that ‘anti-Communism had acquired a lot of space’ in the activities of the Forum.26 Criticism was also expressed by the Right. From those quarters it was stated that the Forum had made an inaccurate interpretation of the mission given by the government when the focus was moved away from Communism as an ideology to Communism as a regime.27 The commissioner for Living History, Eskil Franck, motivated the Forum’s position by stating that crimes are committed by ‘single individuals’, ‘not by ideologies’ (Neuman 2008). Having been criticised by the non-Socialist government among others, Franck retreated and repudiated his previous view that Communist ideology had no explanatory value when it came to the misdeeds of Communist regimes (Franck 2007). Communism also turned out to be a sensitive subject within the research community. What fired the debate was an appeal against the 25 See for instance www.se.altermedia.info/2008/01/17/forum-for-levandehistoria-eller-forum-för-judisk-etnisk-aktivism/ 26 See www.mynewsdesk.com/se/pressroom/vansterpartiet/pressrelease/view/27273. 27 This accusation was made, among others, by Claes Arvidsson, editorial writer at the non-socialist daily Svenska Dagbladet, who in two articles in the paper ‘Förfärande okunskap om kommunismen’ (Appalling ignorance of Communism) 26 November 2007, and ‘Varför är de så rädda?’ (Why are they so scared?) 17 December 2007, stated that the LHF board marginalised Communism as an ideology in its campaign. The reason for this, Arvidsson claimed, was that the board did not want to get into trouble with the political Left to which some of the board members belonged, among them the chairman of the board Karl-Petter Thorwaldsson. The imbalance between the two campaigns also showed in the allocation of resources, according to Arvidsson: only 1520 percent of the LHF’s entire budget was allocated to the campaign on the crimes against humanity committed by Communist regimes.

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LHF, ‘the historians’ appeal’, which was signed by 253 scholars, most of whom were historians. The appeal was published on 2 April 2008 in the biggest daily paper in Sweden, Dagens Nyheter.28 Among other things, the appeal said that ‘the Living History Forum is used opportunistically for a historiography of the service of the state’ and that ‘the history subject is made into a battle-field for an ideological campaign by the government.’ The authority should therefore be scrapped. The historian Håkan Blomqvist, who was one of those who had initiated the petition and an active Socialist, published an article in the leftist newspaper Aftonbladet the same day. In the article he slaughtered the campaign materials (Blomqvist 2008). Blomqvist called for a ‘historicisation’ of the Communist regimes – that they be seen as part of a historical period that structurally, politically, and culturally were connected with what preceded them. He also called for information on the crimes of Capitalism and colonialism: ‘The class oppression under Capitalism with its destitution, misery, and social wrath over injustices is completely conspicuous by its absence.’ So were ‘(t)he colonial genocides committed by the imperialist powers, their military threats, and war’. One of the more hardy critics of the information campaign on the Communist terror was the historian and cultural editor at Aftonbladet Åsa Linderborg, a well-known spokesperson of the Left, who claimed that the whole campaign was a political action from the non-socialist quarters with the aim to warn pupils of ‘utopias of equality and justice’ (Linderborg 2008).29 Two historians, both of them articulate anti-Communists, responded. Klas-Göran Karlsson, one of the historians behind the campaign materials, claimed that the appeal was a symptom of certain scholars’ difficulties to acknowledge the misdeeds of Communism. Karlsson indicated that this difficulty was ideologically motivated – the fact that quite a few of the signatories were or had a past as Socialists or Communists was no coincidence – on the contrary. It was not the existence of the LHF as such that made the signatories react so strongly, but the new theme: the crimes of Communism (Karlsson 2008). Karlsson’s colleague, Kim 28 ‘The government makes history into an ideological battlefield’, Dagens Nyheter 2 April 2008. The appeal can also be found on the web: ‘Upprop mot statlig kampanjhistoria – undertecknare.’ www.Historikeruppropet.se/undertecknare.htm. At the moment of writing (September 2011) the number of signatories amounts to about 460. 29 In 2009, the year before the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Linderborg tells about her sorrow at its fall. See Linderborg 2009.

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Salomon, also questioned the credibility of the appeal. Salomon agreed with the critics that these kinds of information campaigns initiated by the state were not good, but at the same time he claimed that the appeal lacked credibility. It was an expression of faltering logic and double standards. Why did the signatories not protest when the first information campaign, that on the Holocaust, was carried through? ‘It is obviously only when Communism is put on the bench of the accused that the information is defined as ideological. Obviously the government is readily allowed to act as historians in certain matters but not in others’ (Salomon 2008). The historians’ appeal was also criticised by people who had actual experiences of Communism. Leo Kramár, writer and translator born and bred in Czechoslovakia and living in Sweden since 1949, had experiences of both Nazism and Communism. He claimed that the scholars’ appeal was a political action under a scientific cover: ‘It is a mobilisation by the academic Left who feel provoked and threatened. The truth stings and to believing Marxists every comparison between Communism and Nazism is a blasphemy worse than death. Having young people acquire a correct picture of the extension of the Communist genocides is dangerous’ (Kramár 2008). Ana Maria Narti, a journalist who immigrated to Sweden from Communist Romania in 1970, makes the same interpretation and criticises scholars and officials at the Forum who refuse to realise the connection between Communism as an ideology and its practice (Narti 2008). At the university in Växjö the petition caused internal dispute. Emil Uddhammar, professor of political science, strongly attacked those colleagues who had signed the appeal. Their actions had been a ‘disgrace’ for the university and students were warned of applying for a place at Växjö. Students should be aware that courses at the disciplines of history and sociology are carried through where the denial of history is at its most concentrated. The public is warned and each and everyone should separately study the results which the scholars who have signed the appeal at these disciplines peddle, as the objective of truth might be neglected also in more respects than those regarding the crimes of Communism against humanity. (Uddhammar 2008)

Those who felt accused by Uddhammar’s criticism demanded that he present a public apology. One of the signatories of the appeal, the professor of sociology Gunnar Olofsson, wrote to the Rector of the univer-

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sity pointing out that Uddhammar’s article would ‘have consequences for Uddhammar himself both at the university level and at the departmental and faculty levels’. The same day Olofsson wrote to the head of the department of social science, saying that it would be difficult to ‘re-include’ Uddhammar into a ‘collegial context’.30 In other words: Uddhammar would be frozen out. The Forum’s commissioner Eskil Franck eventually also entered the debate on whether the authority was politicised and claimed in an interview that the criticism against it was unjustified. The authority was not concerned with research as such but with the supply of research results from the scholarly community, he stated. He also underscored that the Government had exerted no undue control as far as the content of the campaign was concerned. Like many other critics of the scholars’ appeal, the Minister of Education Jan Björklund, a non-socialist minister with responsibility for the upper secondary school, interpreted the petition as an expression of the double standards of the Left – that the misdeeds of Nazism and Communism were measured on different scales: ‘I see among the signatories many active Communists and it is odd that they react exactly at the point when the task is extended so as to also include the mass murders of Communism. No one protested as long as Nazism was at stake’. Björklund further claimed that the initiative of founding the Living History Forum had been necessary as history teaching in schools had not always been up to standard.31

30 On the controversy at Växjö university, see the articles ‘Kollegor kräver offentlig ursäkt’ (Colleagues demand a public apology) and ‘Debatten har kommit att handla om Uddhammar’ (The debate has come to be about Uddhammar) in Smålandsposten 8 and 14 April 2008. 31 Franck’s and Björklund’s views have been accessed from an interview in the daily paper Svenska Dagbladet, ‘Historia slagfält för ideologiska regeringskampanjer’ (History as a battlefield for ideological government campaigns), 13 December 2008.

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Dinner with Pol Pot In the year after the scholars’ appeal a new debate on the Forum occurred in connection with an exhibition in 2009: Middag med Pol Pot – En utställning om ideologiska skygglappar och selektivt seende (Dinner with Pol Pot – an exhibition on ideological blinkers and selective vision). The exhibition gave rise to very strong reactions. The purpose of the exhibition was to raise the question why it was that Swedes who had supported Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge did not notice the mass murder that was going on. The exhibition relates how four left-wing supporters of the Sweden-Kampuchea Friendship Association, headed by the Swedish writer and Maoist Jan Myrdal, travelled to Cambodia in 1978 as officially invited guests. They visited workers’ communes, hospitals, and factories. Of the labour camps, mass executions, and persecutions of intellectuals they saw nothing. Through the exhibition the Forum wished to show how ideological convictions – Communist convictions in this case – make us blind to certain abuses and defend what we see. In connection with the exhibition a campaign film was produced – Mao-glasögon (Mao-glasses).32 The film makes fun of the participants’ blindness. They see only smiling people; poor but happy. Outside of their vision enforced labour, terror, starvation, and mass murder occur. And in the commercial it is said: ‘Are you too tired of mass murder, torture, and dictatorship that oppress and exterminate? Then you must try Mao-glasses. Do like Gunnar Bergström and Jan Myrdal – go to the land of Democratic Kampuchea’. Myrdal called the film ‘a shame’ (Myrdal 2009). Others said it ‘had been ordered on behalf of the non-socialist government’ (Linder 2009). The exhibition was reported to the Parliamentary Ombudsman (Justitiemannen, JO) as it was said to ‘offend’ and ‘make ridicule of’ individual Swedish citizens.33 The Ombudsman delivered a decision in April The film is accessible at www.youtube.com/watch?v=04IfpCGX61s. This was not the first time that the Living History Forum was reported to the Parliamentary Ombudsman. In 2006, the report Antisemitiska attityder och föreställningar i Sverige (Anti-Semitic attitudes and ideas in Sweden), written by the historian of ideas Henrik Bachner and the criminologist Jonas Ring, had been reported. The report was interpreted as claiming that there were widespread anti-Jewish prejudices and attitudes among the Swedish population. Due to incorrect scientific methods, critics claimed, the report had come to exaggerate the existence of anti-Semitism in Sweden. Helene Lööw, the Commissioner of the Forum, was pointed out as being partly responsible for having misinformed the public. The report, which was financed and published by the Living History Forum, was largely made within the National Council for Crime 32 33

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2010: the film, it was said in the decision, had intentionally been designed so as to make ridicule of those who took part in the journey to Cambodia. And this was in conflict with the rules for an authority of state information.34 The exhibition was closed and Eskil Franck apologised in public (Franck 2010). After heavy revision the exhibition was reopened in January 2011. The Good Will of Communism One interesting study in this context is that written by Valter Lundell (2011). He has made in-depth interviews with twenty professional Swedish history mediators against the background of the 2008 debate on the Living History Forum’s information campaign on the crimes of Communist regimes. Nine of the interviewees are university historians, who all of them signed the appeal in 2008, eleven are upper secondary school teachers of history who did not sign the appeal. The history mediators have been selected also on generational grounds. One group consists of so called ‘sixty-eighters’ – they were born in the 1940s and 1950s. The other group consists of ‘eighty-niners’ born in the late 1960s or early 1970s. The aim of the study is to find out how Swedish historians related to Communism as an ideology and a violent regime after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Lundell confronts them with questions concerning particularly sensitive and burning topics, such as the ideological relations between Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, the comparison with Nazism, and the importance of ideology for violence. The responses are interpreted by means of three interpretative paradigms typical for ideals: totalitarianism, revisionism, and post-revisionism. The totalitarian interpretation dominated throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the revisionist interpretation during the 1970s and 1980s, and the post-revisionist interpretation emerged after 1989 and was a critical reaction to the two dominant interpretative perspectives of the Cold War period. The outcome of the analysis shows, among other things, that the idea of basically ‘good’ Communism is well represented among the twenty interviewees, both among the scholars and the teachers, and among the Prevention (Brottsförebyggande rådet, BRÅ). It is accessible on the authority’s website: www.levandehistoria.se. 34 See www.jo.se/Page.aspx?Menuld=106&MainMenuld=106&Language=sv& ObjectClass=DynamX_SFS_Decision&Id=5222. .

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‘sixty-eighters’ and the ‘eighty-niners’. According to Lundell, there is thus reason to assume that the belief in good Communism is well anchored also within the Swedish culture of memory and history; that it is part of our collective memory and therefore stable in relation to changes in the world. The belief that Communism is a basically good idea has consequences, according to Lundell, when the past is processed. It interferes with a relaxed and open discussion of the crimes of Communism. Furthermore, the crimes of Communism constitute no disaster to the ideology as it is disengaged from the criminal history. The belief in Communism as good also makes the Communist offender nearly unthinkable. Several interviewees claimed that Communists were good people who did not want to, but were forced to commit assaults, and that they, differently from the Nazis who did so out of evil and desire, committed them reluctantly and with sorrow. The change of names for the information campaign on Communism Lundell understands as a concession to the resistance of the collective memory. Nothing like that was needed when it came to Nazism. Then it was possible to talk about the ‘crimes of Nazism’. It is Lundell’s opinion that the belief in ‘Communism as good’ makes it difficult for information on the Communist crimes to enter consciousness, which is why information campaigns on these crimes have little impact. Lundell’s conclusion is that ‘1989’ has had little impact on the Swedish processing of Communism. The belief in Communism as good seems to have survived both the Cold War and the breakdown of Communism in the east and it has been handed down by the generation of ‘sixty-eight’ to the ‘eighty-niners’. This is shown, among other things, by the fact that not one of the twenty interviewees had a post-revisionist view, but continued to interpret the crimes of Communism using the two big interpretative paradigms of the Cold War. However, without the Living History project and its information campaign on the Holocaust, the intense debate on Communism would hardly have started. This is a development that few could anticipate in 1997 when the campaign began. Debate on the Black Book of Communism The controversy over the role and potentially shared responsibility of the Communist idea for the terror committed by the Communist regimes, is also found in the Swedish debate following on the publication in 1997 of

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Le livre noir de Communisme, which was published in Swedish in the spring of 1999. The Black Book brought about a violent debate in France and shattered the nation. It was followed by a series of writings for and against the book, as well as seminars and debates on television. The book was even discussed in the French Parliament. For ten weeks the book was ranked number one on the bestseller list and it was printed in more than 200,000 copies. It was not the figures of eighty-five to one hundred million dead or any facts that appalled the French, but the introduction by the principal editor, the historian Stéphane Courtois, where he equalled Communism and Nazism. According to Courtois, Communism is an equally criminal ideology and an equally criminal social system as Nazism. In both systems, he claimed, deliberate mass murders of a specific category of human beings were committed. Moreover, committing genocide of a class enemy does not differ from genocides of racial enemies. The following formulation in the introduction has become famous: ‘the death by starvation of an Ukrainian kulak child as a result of a deliberate famine orchestrated by the Stalinist regimes rates the same as the death by starvation of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto during the famine brought about by the Nazi regime’ (Courtois 1999, 9). Courtois did not want to keep ideologies and the exertion of power by various regimes separate, either. The misdeeds were ideologically motivated: the vision of creating a new human being and a new society made terror and murder legitimate means for achieving the big goal. The Black Book also gave rise to a debate in Sweden and here, too, it was the comparison of Communism and Nazism that was the focal point, as well as the issue of the responsibility for the terror shared by Communist ideology. Let us take a closer look at four representative contributions to the debate where the distinction between those who were for and those who were against is clear.35 The first contribution from 1998 is a positive review of the Black Book by the journalist Ingvar

As a consequence of the Swedish publication of the Black Book, three books related to the theme were published in Sweden. One - Skott, 1999 - was written from the same perspective as that by Courtois; two provided counter-fire from the Left: Bensaïd and Blomqvist, 1999, and Etzler and Appelkvist, 1999. 35

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Oja.36 Oja describes the book as a mapping of ‘the bloody effects of the Communist ideology’. To the question how an idea that was said to have goodness as its starting-point could end in mass murder, he replies: ‘the Communist ideology is an ideology that for the purposes of a brighter tomorrow, today demands victims by any means’ (Oja 1998). A similar position in the debate was taken by the literary scholar and publisher Peter Luthersson, who was an outspoken critic of the 1968 Left and of Communism. Luthersson, too, claimed that the logic of genocide resides in the ideology. ‘Communism dreamt of keeping up a state which was socially homogeneous. The Nazis dreamt of establishing a state which was ethnically homogeneous. In the one as well as in the other case the logic of genocide is part of the ideology and not the outcome of the independent actions of any one individual in power’. (Luthersson 1999). It was Luthersson’s view that as long as this symmetry was not accepted as a fact the settling of Communism was insufficient. However, there were those who did not accept the symmetry. SvenEric Liedman, professor of the history of ideas, one of the front figures of the Swedish Left, and one of the many who signed the appeal against the Living History Forum,37 rejected Courtois’s conclusions (Liedman 1999). The question whether Nazism and Communism could be equalled he called ‘misleading’. The outcome, the consequences, were similar, but Communism was radically different from Nazism, according to Liedman: ‘its ultimate intention is good’. Another difference, according to Liedman, was that Communism, differently from Nazism, had been inspired by great social philosophers with Marx as the clearest example. The ancestors of Nazism he called a ‘bunch of lunatics and superannuated academics’. Liedman, however, did not want to absolve Marx from a certain responsibility for the bestialities of the twentieth century. There was, according to Liedman, a ‘dark spot in Marx’: the view of conflict, that is, the idea that conflicts in Capitalist society – where class conflict was crucial – could only be solved by battle, through ‘social war’. This dan36 Ingvar Oja had personal experience of Communism. As a foreign correspondent at the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, Oja had lived and worked in China for three years during the second half of the 1970s. 37 A few years after the appeal had been launched, Liedman comments on the Living History Forum and calls the authority a ‘curious institution’ where the ‘state gives orders to produce certain results where free research should be made’ (2011, 243).

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gerous idea lived on in the tradition after Marx and it had, according to Liedman, contributed to the legitimisation of the misdeeds of Communism. But the reasons for the violence of Communism Liedman found outside of the Communist tradition – in the brutality of the First World War and a total indifference to the number of dead, one’s own or those of one’s adversaries. It was, he claimed, this indifference that lived on in Lenin’s and Hitler’s empires. Also the sociologist Per Månsson defended the Communist ideology. He, too, was a left-wing intellectual. In a number of debate articles he attacked those who believed that the oppression in the Communist countries had ideological causes. One of these articles carries the telling headline ‘Ideologin är ingen massmördare’ (Ideology is no mass murderer) (Månsson 1999a). If one believes that it is ideologies, not acting people, that carry the guilt for what is happening in the world, one makes it easy for oneself, Månsson said, as if the question was not about the motifs that drive people to act one way or the other. Like Liedman he also claimed that Communism, differently from Nazism, ‘was not intended to be oppressive’. ‘It is an emancipating ideology’. Månsson’s categorical statement that people, not ideologies, kill, does not apply to Nazism, however: ‘In this respect Nazism is a relatively simple phenomenon since the ideology and the actions are largely coherent’. In his article, Månsson attacked Lars Leijonborg, the leader of the Liberal People’s Party, and one of the driving forces behind the information campaign on the crimes of Communism. Leijonborg’s intention was not, according to Månsson, to bring up what had actually happened in the Soviet Union and the other Communist states. His motifs were within domestic politics and contemporary politics: they were an attack on the contemporary Swedish Left. In a review of Staffan Skott’s – journalist and expert on Russia – anti-Communist book Aldrig mer! (Never again!, 1999) where the connection between ideology and practice is clear, Månsson returned to the theme of the guilt of the ideology (Månsson 1999b). He called Skott’s book an ‘intellectual scandal’. Skott was, according to Månsson, out to ‘stigmatise Communism’ which was wrong, as Communism, as said according to Månsson, was not equal to mass murder. He ended his review by playing out the Stalin card: ‘Everyone who has read anything out of Stalin’s Soviet Union recognises himself, although black has been turned into white and the other way round, and this has probably not been the purpose’.

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Conclusions: Swedish Characteristics: From the Holocaust to the Gulag Settlements of the past are not uncomplicated and often bring about vehement national debates. Also in a country like Sweden, which, in comparison with many other European countries, painlessly escaped the horrors of the twentieth century, the processing of the past is not painless. Compared to many other European countries, Sweden is a separate case in many respects. Every country, of course, has its characteristic way of processing the past, but Sweden, I wish to claim, stands out in many instances. One such instance of Sweden being exceptional was when it, during the 1990s, imposed upon itself the great guilt for the Holocaust. Judging by the discussion of Sweden’s guilt one could get the impression that Sweden had been more Nazi than Nazi Germany itself – that Auschwitz was situated in Sweden and not in Poland. Despite its politics of concessions towards Nazi Germany, Sweden in many ways actually stood outside the bloody history of the Second World War and the country’s shared guilt for the Holocaust cannot, if we compare it with a number of other countries, be said to be particularly great. The reason for the exaggeration of the Swedish guilt by Sweden itself probably lies in what KlasGöran Karlsson has pointed to: the circumstance that self-imposed guilt was the entrance ticket to the EU. And why not be best in class and impose upon oneself a great guilt? That way Sweden could appear as a moral superpower and a model for others, despite its littleness.38 Another distinctive characteristic is that Communism in Sweden is a very sensitive theme above all among intellectuals, despite the fact that we in Sweden, differently from the peoples in the previous Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, do not have any concrete experiences of Communism.39 No concrete offenders, no concrete victims. No violent groups Sweden had perceived itself in the role of world conscience already in the 1960s and 1970s: as a protector of humanist and democratic values. An enchanted world spoke about ‘The Swedish model’. And the Swedish politician Olof Palme, Prime Minister from 1969 to 1976 and from 1982 to1986, was elevated during the 1970s to the status of ‘great internationalist’. On the importance of the myth of the superpower for the Swedish self-image, see Mithander 2000. 39 The fact that in Sweden it is, above all, intellectuals who perceive Communism as a sensitive theme is due to the circumstance that Communism in Sweden has attracted intellectuals explicitly – writers, academics, journalists. For many decades the public debate, politics, and cultural life were influenced by the Left of 1968. The traditional Swedish working-class have voted for the Social Democrats. The Social Democrats 38

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on the left, no left terrorism as in Italy and Germany. Despite this the theme is a minefield, as the debaters are quickly bogged down in ideological trenches, disregarding the amount of new facts about the crime records that have become accessible after the fall of the Soviet empire. In spite of all this, it is not possible to unite over the role of the Communist experience in Swedish memory culture and historiography. This we clearly saw in the reactions to Living History’s information campaign on Communism. On the evils of Nazism, both as an ideology and a practice, there is widespread consensus and homogeneity in Sweden like in most other countries. Few, if any, thus protested against Living History’s information campaign on the crimes of Nazism in 1997, but, as we have seen, the information campaign in 2006 on the crimes of Communism gave rise to strong sentiments and great disunity and ideological deadlocks. The most debated and burning issues are, as we have seen, the question of the role of Communist ideology in the crime history of Communism, as well as the question whether Communism can be compared with Nazism. As we have seen, this set of problems is also given expression in the campaign materials. One important difference is that when Nazism is concerned it is the ideology behind the misdeeds that is in focus, whereas in regard of Communism the focus is instead on the regimes that were responsible for the misdeeds. The ideological and political dimension of the issues also shows in that the debaters on the left wanted to exempt the ideology from the responsibility for the crimes of Communism. The debaters on the right, and those with experience of Communism, claimed that there was a clear connection between the ideology and the practice, and they saw similarities between Communism and Nazism both as ideologies and regimes. Recent Swedish research (Lundell 2011) on the Swedish reception of Nazism and Communism after the fall of the Wall shows that the image of Communism as an essentially good idea, as an unfulfilled promise of a good and equal society, has survived the Cold War and the breakdown of European Communism in 1989-1992. It also shows that the idea is still strongly anchored in the Swedish collective memory and that this conception tinges the processing of the past as well as expectations of held an uninterrupted position in the government for more than forty years (19321976) and it was only in 1991 that Sweden got a Prime Minister from the Right, the present Foreign Minister Carl Bildt.

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the future. If this is the case, the belief in ‘the good idea’ can partly explain why the Swedish Left of 1968 did not confront itself (Ljunggren 2009). As they have fought for what is ‘good’ and ‘right’ there is nothing to apologise for. And if the idea has remained undefiled by the dirt of history, Communism can still appear as a hope and promise of a better future – despite the bloody history of real Communism. The conception of the good ideology might also explain why the unwillingness of the Swedish Left to critically process its political and ideological heritage has not, differently from cases of Nazi sympathies in Sweden, been perceived as conspicuous by the public or led to political or social marginalisation.40 There is a lack of concrete historical anchoring, which is shown in there being few manifestations of memory culture on the crimes and victims of Nazism and Communism in Sweden. This is true above all for Communism: it has not been possible to achieve a broad political coalition around the few that there are. On the contrary, we see a clear political division. Let me exemplify. 23 August is the international remembrance day of the victims of Nazism, Communism, and other totalitarian ideologies.41 Since 2009, 23 August is also a day of remembrance in Sweden. The initiative came from the previously mentioned organisation UOK (Upplysning om kommunismen) (IC, Information on Communism). The political-ideological load and asymmetry of the Swedish memory culture on Nazism and Communism show, in the fact that no representatives of the Left Party, the Green Party, or the Social Democratic Party have participated in the remembrance day since its establish-

40 The biggest Communist party in Sweden, the ‘Left Party – Communists’ did away with the ‘C’ in 1991 and became the Left Party, but the party leader, Lars Ohly, continued to call himself a Communist up until 2005 when he gave in due to internal criticism. Since 1989, the party has appointed committees on three occasions to investigate their own history. The problem with these committees is that they have consisted of historians and other scholars who were either close to the party or party members. 41 The background to remembrance day is that on 23 August 1939 the so called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed, i.e. the pact of co-operation and non-aggression between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The pact led to the German and Soviet attack on Poland and can thus be seen as a direct cause of the outbreak of the Second World War. The remembrance day is organised in accordance with three international resolutions (the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe 2006, the Parliamentary Assembly of the OSCE 2009 and the European Parliament 2009).

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ment in 2009. Only politicians from the non-Socialist government parties have taken part. This lack of anchoring in what actually happened in the past often makes the Swedish debates on guilt abstract and strongly moralising and ideological. This is true above all of the debate on Communism, but also of the debate over guilt and the Second World War: they are quickly characterised as either right or left.

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Narti, Ana Maria. 2008. Kommunismen ska visst jämföras med fascism. Expressen 17 March. Neuman, Ricki. 2008. Svårt hitta rätta vägen för fostran till tolerans. Svenska Dagbladet, 22 March. Neuman,Ricki. 2009. Ny bild av Sverige under krigsåren. Svenska Dagbladet, 25 August. Oja, Ingvar. 1998. Kommunismens slutlikvid. Dagens Nyheter 15 February. Östling, Johan. 2008. Nazismens sensmoral: Svenska erfarenheter i andra världskrigets efterdyningar. Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis. Persson, Göran 2000a. Opening address by the Prime Minister of Sweden at the Ceremonial Opening. www.humanrights.gov.se/stockholmsforum/ 2000/page900.2011.10.05. Persson, Göran. 2000b. Speech at the Swedish Parliament by the Prime Minist e r of S w e d e n , G ö r a n P e r s s o n 2 7 J a n u a r y 2 0 0 0 . www.humanrights.gov.se/stockholmforum/2000/page806.2011.10.05. Persson, Göran 2000c. Speech at the Remembrance Ceremony at the Great Synagogue of Stockholm by the Prime Minister of Sweden, Göran Persson. www.humanrights.gov.se/stockholmforum/2000/page1808.2011.10.05. Persson, Göran. 2007. Min väg, mina val. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag. Regeringskansliet 2006. Uppdrag till Forum för levande historia om kommunismens brott mot mänskligheten. Pressmeddelande. 21 December 2006. www.regeringen.se/sb/d/7597/a/74429 Salomon, Kim. 2008. Uppropet saknar trovärdighet. Svenska Dagbladet, 3 April. Särtryck ur antologin kommunismens ansikten. 2006. Forum för levande historia. Skott, Staffan. 1999. Aldrig mer! Lund: Hjalmarson & Högberg. SOU 2001:5. Forum för Levande historia. Betänkande av Kommittén Forum för Levande Historia. The Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust. Proceedings. 2000. Stockholm: Regeringskansliet. Uddhammar, Emil. 2008. En skamfläck för Växjö universitet. Smålandsposten, 4 April.

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FINLAND AT WAR ON SCREEN SINCE 1989: AFFIRMATIVE HISTORIOGRAPHY AND PROSTHETIC MEMORY John Sundholm Abstract This chapter deals with Finnish cultural memory post-89 through an analysis of Finnish war films and their reception during the years 1989-2007. The discursive formation of Tuntematon Sotilas (The Unknown Soldier) is used as a point of departure for the study. It is argued that the discursive formation is characterised by four discourses: the historical discourse, the discourse of the witness, the discourse of victimisation and the discourse of the defensive victory, which remain intact despite radical turns in Finnish history and foreign policy since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Thus, although there is a change into post-modern cultural memory the hegemony of previous discourses are not overturned due to a persistent nationalist and affirmative historiography. In the history of Finland post-89 the years 1991 and 1995 are of significant importance. During the autumn of 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and in 1995 Finland became a member of the European Union. The grand Eastern neighbour had exerted extensive influence on Finnish society since the peace treaty of 1944. Due to the Soviet Union’s victory over Finland substantial war debts had to be paid and nearly 10% of the territory was lost. However, the material losses were not the only concessions Finland was forced into; the growing presence of the Soviet Union in post-war Finland put pressure on Finnish politics and culture that generated a wide-ranging self-censorship. A term was thus coined; Finnlandisierung (Finlandisation), that is, exaggerated submissive behav-

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iour vis-à-vis the mighty neighbour considering that Finland was a sovereign country.1 For the Finns Finlandisation was simply practiced in the name of real-politik: it was the condition for small states under the pressure of superpowers due to their geopolitical situation. No crucial decision could be made that challenged the mighty neighbour. Hence, the period immediately after 1944 and that of the Cold War entailed a new interpretation of the war events, an interpretation that in large parts was a split between the official Finnish politics and what people actually thought and felt, a rift between civic society and official politics. Thus, as Markku Jokisipilä has claimed, the Cold War meant that the historical events of the war were never processed properly; therefore, with post-89 a revision of the interpretations of what actually happened became possible (Jokisipilä 2007, 11).2 In Finland the year 1991 inaugurated such a historical process, enabling the liberation of Finnish foreign policy and closing the post-war situation. The next step taken was to join the European Union. Today there is no doubt that Finland’s incentive for joining the EU was primarily a political one; it was a question of securing the nation’s sovereignty and dealing with the geopolitical position by joining an international community.3 Consequently, the delicate situation of Finland after 1944 had wideranging effects, affecting political and cultural life in general as well as popular and professional historiography. But, this not only because of concerns regarding opinions in the East, new conflicts could also stir up old internal tensions concerning the grim Civil War of 1918. The historian Antti Kujala states in his recent research on the killings of Soviet prisoners of war, that his work would have been impossible to carry out in post-war Finland, because such research would not only have called for reactions from the Soviet Union, but also left-wing parties might 1 The term was originally coined by the German conservative politician Franz Josef Strauss during the Cold War. Strauss was critical of the new and soft Ostpolitik that, according to him, would lead to a Finnlandisierung of West Germany by the Soviet Union. 2 For an excellent analysis of how the post-war situation structured Finnish historiography, see Oula Silvennoinen. 2009. ‘Still Under Examination. Coming to Terms with Finland’s Alliance with Nazi Germany’. Yad Vashem Studies. 37:2: 67-92. 3 In a broadcast TV-interview on 23 April 2005, Secretary General of the President’s Office, Jaakko Kalela, said that President Mauno Koivisto began to prepare Finland’s EU membership application immediately after Gennady Yanayev’s coup in the Soviet Union in August 1991. See Hämäläinen, Unto. 2005. ‘Miten Suomi livahti länteen?’ (How Did Finland Slip off to the West?), Helsingin Sanomat. 1 May.

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have seized the opportunity to use the results for their own political agenda.4 Kujala furthermore implies that the main consequences of such an ill-timed research project would have questioned the numerous commemorations of the war events and hence the living memory sustained by war veterans (Kujala 2008, 12). The integration with the European Union in 1995 challenged both nationalist and internationalist standpoints and sentiments; therefore, the decision to join the EU may be interpreted both as a national and an international undertaking. It may also be claimed that the Finlandisation became substituted by an Europeanisation, a transference that did not change the nationalism that had survived since the Soviet influence. Obviously one of the strongholds for such nationalist sentiment was the war narratives, in particular, stories about the two wars fought against the Soviet Union, the Winter War (1939-40) and the Continuation War (1941-44).5 The Discursive Formation of The Unknown Soldier By far the most important of the different war narratives is The Unknown Soldier. It appeared first as a novel written by a young and minor working-class writer, Väinö Linna, who joined the Finnish forces shortly after the end of the Winter War. Linna was only 19 years old when drafted and he stayed at the front until the end of the Continuation War. At the time when his novel was published, ten years after being disbanded, Finland was still in a state of shock. In an interview from 1978

4 It is estimated that out of 65,000 prisoners of war 22,000 died, mostly because of disease and lack of food; 1,200 were illegally executed. Research on Finland’s relations with Nazi Germany has been generally overlooked. For example, as late as 2008 Oula Silvennoinen managed to prove in his PhD thesis, Salaiset aseveljet: Suomen ja Saksan turvallisuuspoliisiyhteistyö 1933-1944, that there existed an Einsatz Kommando Finnland during the Second World War that co-operated with the Finnish secret police. Silvennoinen’s PhD caused huge interest in the Finnish media and brought to the fore the discussion of Finland’s actual relations with Nazi Germany. 5 Thus the last war, the Lapland War (1944-1945), is usually ignored. The Lapland War was fought against Germany in northern Finland and it was the outcome of the peace treaty from the autumn of 1944 which demanded that Finland remove the Germans. The human losses were minor on both sides, but the German troops destroyed almost half of all the buildings in Lapland. The major cities and towns were, more or less, completely burnt down.

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Linna stated that when his novel reached the bookstores in December 1954 ‘the war was still buzzing in people’s heads’.6 The Unknown Soldier is written from the point of view of the common soldier depicting the Continuation War in a satirical and naturalist manner. The choice of perspective is crucial because it enabled Linna to direct harsh critique against the officers and the nationalistic propaganda. Being a war veteran, although only 24 years of age when returning from the front, his was clearly a legitimate voice. As expected, The Unknown Soldier caused a fierce debate and especially the army and leading literary critics were highly critical.7 However, the leading film company at the time, Suomen Filmiteollisuus spotted a box office hit and within one year after the novel had been published a film adaptation had its grand opening. Whereas the novel had been a solitary former soldier’s work, all the major personalities in Finnish society lined up for the film premiere of Finland’s most expensive narrative feature until then. Among the audience were the President and officers of the highest rank although both the army and the minister of foreign affairs had tried to hinder the production. After the premiere everyone agreed that the film was not only a brilliant feature but also a truthful depiction of the War. Thus, the film constituted a survival story for the nation, a cultural trauma as I have called it in another study, that is, a narrative that managed to address the common public, producing consent regarding how to consider the war events (Sundholm 2007). When transferred to the screen, The Unknown Soldier became a reconstruction of a story that was well-known for recording isolated events and as a literary work, yet now retold for the entire nation in such a manner that people were able to work through their past; enabling the nation to forget the most controversial memories. The narrative of The Unknown Soldier came to frame the history of Finnish war films and Finnish cultural memory of the war events. It established the future rules of the genre, in fact, only a handful of films were made during the 1960s to the 1980s.8 The hegemonic position of Interview with Linna in Suomen Kuvalehti no. 2 (1978). The best overview up to date is still Nils-Börje Stormbom’s biography from 1963: Stormbom, N-B. 1963.Väinö Linna: Kirjailijan tie ja teokset. Helsinki: WSOY. 8 The following war films were made between the two versions of The Unknown Soldier: Rintamalotta (1956), Evakko (1956), Pikku Ilona ja hänen karitsansa (1957), Niskavuori taistelee (1957), Pojat (1962), Sissit (1963), Päämaja (1970), Vartioitu kylä 1944 (1978), Kainuu 39 (1979), Pedon Merkki (1981). 6 7

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The Unknown Soldier was not even challenged by a remake in colour and stereo in 1985, made to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the first version. Thus, the adaptation from 1955 became the genre that all other war stories had to relate to. With reference to the Wittgensteinian metaphor of family resemblance regarding the notion of genre one may say that The Unknown Soldier became the unchallenged patriarch and father figure in the house of Finnish war fiction. Whereas I have previously studied The Unknown Soldier as a founding narrative, myth and cultural trauma, this study will shift the perspective from that of a specific narrative into approaching The Unknown Soldier as a discursive formation that has disseminated different discourses throughout Finnish film history. Firstly I will single out the major discourses that constitute the formation and then, by analysing the public reception of Finnish war films between the years 1989 to 2007, examine how the discourses function and are reproduced due to the situation of post-89.9 While the material consists of film that has been shown publicly in cinemas, I consider the material to be cultural memory in a very general sense, signifying sociocultural material that links the past with the present (Assmann 2008).10 However, a distinction between communicative memory and cultural memory, that is, between everyday, living While I use discourse analysis as my method, I will not analyse the individual films as such compared, for example, with Vesa Vares’ study of Finnish war films and popular comics (Vares 2007). The films will be primarily considered as articulations in the field of the discursive formation and thus the main focus is on both the relations between the discourses and the institutional framework of the films, that is, the reception and debate in the press as well as decisions regarding public funding of the films. Most of the material used for this essay is archive paper clippings held at the Finnish National Audiovisual Archive, KAVA, as well as statistics from the Finnish Film Foundation available at their web-site http://www.ses.fi. In most cases I only refer to those sources in general. In November 2007 Kristian Smed’s provocative adaptation of The Unknown Soldier for the Finnish National Theatre opened. It played for two years and raised a huge debate. For an analysis of the play and its reception see Hana Worthen. 2011. ‘”Finland is dead, dead, dead”: Ethics and National Identity in Kristian Smed’s The Unknown Soldier’. TDR: The Drama Review, 56:2, 34-55. 10 Jan Assmann has a relativley clear-cut definition in the introduction to his book Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1992, but elaborates the concept later on. Very often scholars refer to ‘the Assmanns’ although their concepts are quite different. I also consider it a flaw that Jan Assmann situates cultural memory into a specific time frame, that is, considers cultural memory to be material that is at least 80 years old (removed from the everyday and the communicative memory), because he therefore tends to overlook the intricate dialectics between generations and cultural and communicative memory. 9

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memory that is in a sense a not yet materialised memory, and memory that has become frozen into public commemoration, artifacts and other cultural material, is vital for the present case-study. It is evident that we are dealing with a completely different situation when both communicative and cultural memory are present; a situation in which the first generation ‘living memory’ is still alive, but where the remembered events are sufficiently old for vast cultural materials which depict and commemorate the events in question to also be present, along with other generations lacking first-hand experience of the actual happenings. This is exactly the question with the multifaceted constellation of war memories during the 1990s in Finland. In order to be able to approach the complicated amalgamation of memory practices and positions enacted during a short period of time (1989-2007) I will use discourse analysis. Hence, the notions of ‘discursive formation’ and ‘discourse’ in Michel Foucault’s sense are of importance, in addition to Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s concept of the ‘nodal point’, i.e. the privileged centre around which all discourses move and that turns out to be the core of the constellation of discourses (Foucault 1989; Laclau and Mouffe 2001). The notion of discursive formation is informative for this study because it underlines the point that the reproduction of patterns and practices of acting, being and comprehension is the result of the ‘dispersion’ of various discourses and not of actual choice and personal or collective will (Foucault 1989, 31-39). Thus, discourses as such are not keys for understanding the constellation; they are rather effects and symptoms of a cultural order and situation; of the situation of Finland post-1944 and how the country dealt with the new order during the era of the Cold War (Kendall and Wickham 1999). However, in order to add a dynamic dimension to the Foucauldian approach, thus enabling agency and struggle over meaning, I incorporate Laclau’s and Mouffe’s concept of nodal point, although their discourse theory as such will not be used. Whereas my previous study focused on the founding of a cultural trauma and its reproduction, the focal point in this approach is how the narrative of The Unknown Soldier becomes hegemonic and is able to reproduce patterns and practices that are both articulated and unarticulated. The adaptation of the novel for the screen was thus not only crucial for manufacturing consent, the film medium enabled an array of quite unarticulated opinions and conceptions to be projected on the

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screen, whereas the novel – being a more direct critique – implied more evident articulations and statements because of the medium used, written language. Pre-1989 and the Hegemony of The Unknown Soldier A crucial moment for studying the hegemonic position of The Unknown Soldier is the year 1985. At this time a new film version of the original novel had its premiere. The 1985 film was directed by one of the most established, albeit controversial directors of the time, Rauno Mollberg, supported by Väinö Linna himself who agreed to contribute to the scriptwriting. Linna also took part in the promotion of the film and a significant number of established Finnish male actors were enrolled. However, despite the thorough production and marketing of The Unknown Soldier the remake proved unable to challenge the hegemony of the earlier version. The remake soon fell into oblivion and The Unknown Soldier of 1955 secured its position as an all-time classic during the 1990s, being broadcast annually on Independence Day by public television.11 Through a reading of the reception of the remake it is possible to discern articulations that reflect the discourses which are essential for the hegemony of the established narrative of The Unknown Soldier: 1) The historical discourse. This is the articulation of the view that every war film is foremost a historical document and only partly fiction. Thus, memory – the experience and re-experiences of the events – is fused with history. Moreover, this discourse becomes a gatekeeper in regard to which stories can be told and every depiction becomes evaluated in relation to the established and sanctioned history, it is not viewed as fiction in its own right. 2) The discourse of the witness. Every film needs to be sanctioned by a war witness. After every premiere veterans are interviewed regarding whether the film is a truthful depiction of the war events. This discourse is also closely connected with the question of an 11 Another example of how soon the remake was removed from the cultural memory is that historian Henrik Meinander refers in his major work on Finland of 1944 to the film version of The Unknown Soldier (Meinander 2009, 396). The original version has been shown on public television more than 20 times since its release and the film was introduced as part of the celebration of Independence Day in 1995 and has been broadcast annually since 2000. According to statistics from the Finnish Film Foundation The Unknown Soldier of 1955 was the most popular feature film shown on public television in 2006 which was broadcast at midday on Independence Day.

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ethics of memory, of what constitutes the correct way of remembering past events: should memory practice follow the imperative of epistemology (what did happen?) or that of ethics (the argument that one has to be considerate regarding those who took part in the war events).12 3) The discourse of victimisation. As Heikki Ylikangas has pointed out the crucial pattern in Finnish war memory is to concentrate upon the perspective of the victim, a basic tactic in order to avoid the question of guilt (Ylikangas 2004b). Accordingly, war memory focused on the battles during the summer of 1944 – when the Finnish forces with substantial help from German troops and arsenal managed to halt the Soviet offensive – as a way to downplay what actually started the War. Therefore the Continuation War, which was, in fact, an attack on the Soviet Union conducted together with Hitler’s Third Reich, may be regarded as a defensive struggle and hence a story about victimisation.13 Furthermore, the defence war is even transformed into a ‘defensive victory’ being fought against a superior enemy. 4) The discourse of defensive victory.14 This is obviously closely allied with the discourse on victimisation. If every articulation regarding the war events is tied to the discourse of victimisation, that the War was a result of attacks and aggressions, the counterattacks and the losses may, of course, be justified. These four discourses constitute the discursive formation that is being reproduced. The discursive formation upholds the hegemony of the interpretation of the war events and determines the premises for new articulations. The nodal point, that is, the privileged sign that fixes the meaning and therefore forms the crucial centre for the discursive formation, is ‘the moral witness’. The concept is coined by Avishai Margalit 12 I have dealt with this question of ethics vs. epistemology in another study of The Unknown Soldier as cultural trauma in the essay ‘The Cultural Trauma Process, or The Ethics and Mobility of Memory’ (Sundholm 2011). 13 This is one of the controversies in Finnish historiography, that is, did Finland fight a separate war or were they allied with the Third Reich? In order to clear the positions and reach a public decision the President, Tarja Halonen, organised a hearing with leading researchers on 19 November 2009. The majority considered the interpretation of Finland fighting a separate war as outdated and being a result of the post-war political condition rather than of proper scholarship. http://jokisipila.blogspot. com/2008_11_01_archive.html (1 June 2010) 14 The term ‘defensive victory’ (torjuntavoitto) was introduced in Finland by Lieutenant General K. L. Oesch in 1956. Oesch, a born Karelian and trained as an officer in Germany and France, was in command of the troops during the Soviet offensive in the summer of 1944 on the Karelian Isthmus.

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who defines it in the following way: a moral witness has encountered both evil and suffered, and has been at personal risk. Margalit includes two senses of risk: ‘the risk of being a victim and the risk of being a witness’ (Margalit 2002, 148-150). The former means that the moral witness belongs to the group of people towards whom the evil is being done and who is at risk of being annihilated, the latter that there is a risk in the task of documenting of what is taking place. In the discursive formation of The Unknown Soldier it is the risk of the victim that is established. This explains the significance of the discourse of the defensive victory: the whole nation was at risk during the summer of 1944 because if the Soviet forces had not been stopped the country would have been occupied and wiped off the map as a sovereign nation. When comparing the two versions of The Unknown Soldier it is evident how the latter film disregarded the discourses that constituted the premises for the success. Although Mollberg and Linna strived to make a film that was more truthful to the original novel and therefore a narrative that would confront the hegemony of the previous one, the new articulation did not succeed in establishing another discourse that could have challenged the established formation and hegemony. One of the most significant traits of the 1955 version was the careful blending of history and memory, of archival footage and fictitious events.15 Archival footage was not used in the second version, which thus ignored the signification of the historical discourse. In the 1985 version of The Unknown Soldier the point of view was that of the individual soldier; the scenes were shot with a shaky hand-held camera simulating actual experience of the events. Neither did the film succeed in establishing a discourse of witnessing. Since Mollberg was more interested in following the critical edge of the novel – and had a pacifist agenda – he disregarded the perspective of the living memory and Linna was not able to fulfil that function either; his position had changed from being a witness of the events into being the founding father of the narrative. In accordance with its critical perspective the opening scene in The Unknown Soldier of 1985 is confrontational and personal; the viewer is taken into a hut where conscription is taking place. The camera focuses on the naked bodies of the recruits being examined by a doctor. In contrast, in the 1955 version the opening shot depicts a handful of soldiers, For an analysis of the blending of the different modes and diegetic levels, see Sundholm 2007. 15

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retreating and burying a companion accompanied by the music from Jean Sibelius’ bombastic Finlandia. The prologue ends with the platoon leaving, while the music shifts into a more affirmative tone and the sun rises. Thus, whereas both films establish a discourse of victimisation, the hegemonic version of 1955 suggests that the cause was good whereas the version of 1985 gives no relief whatsoever. Hence, there is no room for a discourse of defensive victory, of national victimisation. Indeed, Mollberg and Linna even included a scene from the novel that had been ignored in the hegemonic story. When the troops are fleeing due to the Soviet attack during the summer of 1944 an officer executes a soldier who is refusing to halt. The film narrative of 1955 did show executions of soldiers as well, but that depiction was never coupled with the events from the summer of 1944 on the Karelian Isthmus; hence Mollberg and Linna came to challenge the commemoration of the defensive victory in their remake.16 The events during the summer of 1944 are another nodal point for Finnish historiography and have spawned a Historikerstreit; due to their mythological position they constitute a culmination point in the cultural memory of the war events (Ylikangas 2007, 2009; Kulomaa and Nieminen 2008). Accordingly, the production and release of the feature film Talvisota (The Winter War) in 1989 was a way of securing and making use of the established discourses, the Winter War being the most suitable war for the reproduction of the discourses of victimisation and heroic defence. The Winter War was consequently well liked by the audience, but criticised by the film critics in contrast to the 1985 version of The Unknown Soldier. The film (which was the most expensive production at the time) was marketed internationally with the following description: ‘The Winter War is about human endurance, about what is called “The Miracle of the Winter War”. What gave the ill-equipped defenders of a small nation the strength to hold back an awesome enemy in the face of countless odds?’17 During the production a major article was published on Independence Day 6 December 1988 in the conservative newspaper Uusi Suomi with the title: ‘The Winter War is finally able to address young

16 In a letter to the editor a reader of the leading newspaper Helsingin Sanomat complains that Mollberg forgot the defensive victory, HS 22 Dec. 1985. 17 Marketing material, folder on The Winter War, KAVA, Helsinki.

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people of today’.18 The article criticises Väinö Linna’s novel by claiming that ‘the myth of the lost war and overt militarism’ was one of the main points of The Unknown Soldier, a theme that was eagerly picked up by the young leftists in the 1960s and the 1970s when pacifism reigned. One of the actors concludes in an interview that he realised that Finland was entirely alone at the time of the war events and, moreover, that he is beginning to be worried about the increasing globalisation. Hence, the spirit of the production of the film and the film in itself are proof that the discursive hegemony of the narrative of The Unknown Soldier of 1955 was intact. When it comes to aesthetics, both films concentrate on depicting the experience of war and they are exactly the same extensive length, three hours and eighteen minutes. Whereas The Unknown Soldier of 1985 has no apparent protagonist, The Winter War follows one character throughout the narrative. Both films are positioned as part of the national culture of commemoration: The Winter War premiered on 30 November, the day when the actual war started and, hence was released for the fiftieth anniversary; the remake of The Unknown Soldier had its premiere on Independence Day, thirty years after the first version. It is noteworthy that whereas the critics appreciated the critical edge of the 1985 film, both the pacifism and the shift in perspective from the nation as victim to that of the common soldier, The Winter War was criticised – albeit moderately – for its nationalism and obsession with collective pain and suffering.19 Critics abroad were of the same opinion; they judged the film as old-fashioned and as an internal Finnish affair.20 Since the production company had reckoned with a box office hit, which the film clearly was in Finland, they invested large sums in marketing the film abroad, but The Winter War failed on the international market. That the film did not succeed on the American market was perhaps not such a big surprise; the failure in Europe was, however, quite an eyeopener for the producers. The month of November, which for the Finns Tom Kalima. 1988.