Last speaker of today and our second keynote is Professor Yelena Subarctic,
who's a professor in the Department of Political Science at Georgia State University.
She writes broadly about international relations theory, memory politics, human rights,
transitional justice, international ethics, state identity and politics of the Western Balkans.
Her first book that I actually extensively drew on during my Ph.D. was called Tajik or is called Had You Just as dealing with the past in the Balkans.
It was published in 2009, and it examined the contested way in which international norms of transitional justice were appropriated by domestic elites,
basically hijacked by domestic elites across the Western Balkans in the 1990s and 2000s.
She's a recipient of a number of research, grants and awards, and her latest book about which we're going to hear as well a little bit yellow
star Red Star Holocaust Remembrance after communism that was published in 2009,
just recently won the Joseph Rothschild prise in nationalism and ethnic studies.
Congratulations. And so her presentation today will be a reflection on the book with the title
Hegemonic Narratives of Holocaust Remembrance in post-Communist Eastern Europe.
Yelena, thank you so much for joining us. I know it's morning for you. You're in Atlanta, so good morning and welcome.
The floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you for organising this.
I'm really sorry that we're not all together. This is a poor substitute, but we'll do our best.
So what I'm going to do is try to share my screen because I have some images to show you as I go through it.
And then I will talk a little bit about the images and then we'll hopefully have a few minutes for for Q&A at the end.
So let me try to figure out how to do this.
So share my screen. Go.
Their work. Perfect.
Okay, good. All right.
In Ober 2017, a commemorative plaque in memory of the 200000 poles murdered in Warsaw in the German death camp, Carl Rochelle was unveiled in Warsaw.
This was a sombre ceremony, with the local priest performing Catholic rites and a representative of the Polish army honouring the dead.
The only problem? Almost none of this was true.
There indeed did exist the camp in Warsaw, where a few thousand Polish citizens died during the German occupation.
But after the burning of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943,
this camp was turned into a concentration and extermination camp for Jews brought in from other parts of Europe,
who were used as slave labour to clear the charred remains of the ghetto.
A total of some twenty thousand people died in this camp.
Most of them Jews, the Polish citizen movement behind this commemorative project was therefore not just
commemorating victims of their own ethnic group at the expense of their victims.
This is an unremarkable and largely ubiquitous feature of commemorative politics everywhere.
What is, however remarkable,
is that the very clear purpose of this commemoration was to put it in direct competition with the memory of the Holocaust,
especially in Poland, the geographic heart of the Genocide.
This is not historic. Anderson, Poland has been going on for quite some time and has attracted much international attention.
In 2018,
the Polish government passed a law that criminalised the use of the phrase Polish death camps to designate a Nazi death camps in occupied Poland,
such as Auschwitz to Brinker and many others,
but also criminalise any insinuation that individual Poles may have committed anti-Jewish crimes during the Holocaust.
At its most extreme, the new Polish remembrance has been averted.
Even the basic understanding of the Holocaust, as in this cartoon published in a right wing Polish mag,
is that depicts the so-called Holocaust, the alleged annihilation of Poles by collaborating Jews and Nazis.
But Poland is hardly alone as a document in my book, Yellow Star, Red Star, Holocaust Remembrance After Communism.
This new historical revisionism has been flourishing across post-communist Europe and is surely visible in historical monuments and memorials.
History, textbooks and rehabilitation and restitution laws.
I found a remarkably strong but nationally flavoured trend of appropriation of Holocaust memory,
especially its narrative and visual repertoire, to instead tell the story of communist oppression.
For example, in 2014, the Historical Museum of Serbia in Belgrade put up a highly publicised exhibition
in the name of the people political repression in Serbia 1944 to 1953,
which promised to display new historical documents and evidence of communist crimes carried out by communist Yugoslavia in the first post-war years.
The most stunning visual artefact displayed was a well known photograph of emaciated prisoners.
One of them pictured here is Elie Wiesel in the Nazi Buchenwald concentration camp.
The picture was taken by a United States Army soldier at Camp Liberation in April 1945.
In the Belgrade exhibition, however, this chronic image, which is one of the most famous photographs of the Holocaust,
was displayed in the section devoted to the Yugoslav communist era camp for political prisoners on the Adriatic island of Gali Optech,
with the caption The example of leading condition of our prisoners.
The visual message of this display was very clearly the communist oppression looked like the Holocaust.
Similarly, in Hungary, the House of Terror museum that opened in 2002 in Budapest.
It's the story of Hungary's 20th century experience as a nation victim of the foreign communist and to a much lesser extent, foreign fascist regime.
The House of Terror goes out of its way to bring home the message that fascism and communism were flip sides of the same coin.
There are multiple visual representations of black totalitarianism and red totalitarianism of the black
arrow crossed juxtaposed with the red star of the fascist uniform juxtaposed with a communist uniform.
Obviously, equation of the two totalitarian regimes is not new, nor particularly surprising.
What is more interesting is that the blunt message of this state institution is presented through the appropriation of not just Holocaust imagery,
but also Holocaust Museum visual displays. Most directly, the House of Terror uses the motto of the Tower of Faces,
portraits of Holocaust victims projected onto the entire length of walls in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,
D.C., to project portraits of Hungarian victims of communism.
Well, the of tears in the basement of the Budapest Museum is a is a visual repurposing of the children's memorial at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
And if the government of Viktor Orban, Hungary has further embarked on a spectacular urban revision of its 20th century history,
the memorial to the homes of the German occupation erected in Budapest in 2014,
memorialises Hungary,
the country as the main victim of the German occupation by a not very subtle depiction of Germany's imperial eagle crushing of Hungary,
which is symbolised by Archangel Gabriel. The memorial was unveiled overnight.
And with no accompanying official opening ceremony in order to avoid any public debate and expected protests.
Indeed, immediately upon unveiling Holocaust survivors or their family members placed hundreds of handwritten notes,
pictures and objects outside the memorial that you can see in this picture.
They told a story of 430000 Jews who were deported from Hungary, mostly to Auschwitz.
The quickest rate of protection in the history of the Holocaust,
taking less than two months and done with the active participation of Hungarian civil servants.
And in a manner similar to many new public monuments, museums and memorials across post-communist Europe,
the Budapest Memorial uses architecture as a tool to express myths of nationhood as part of a staged strategy of new visual remembrance of the past.
Specifically, it narratively replaces the memory of the Holocaust and a catastrophe of Hungarian Jewish annihilation
as the central memory of World War Two in Hungary with the memory of Hungarian victimhood and innocence.
It also purposefully replaces the responsibility for the murder of Hungarian Jews from
Hungary's axis allied government and places it firmly with Germany presenting fascism.
And its extermination policies as alien foreign intrusions into the Hungarian body politic.
This shift, therefore completely removes the history of the Holocaust in Hungary.
Before the German occupation in 1944, the period that left 60000 Hungarian Jews killed as early as 1942,
extermination carried out not by Germans, but by Hungarian forces under the rule of Regent Meatless for.
So this new type of Holocaust remembrance that I document in the book is not exactly denial.
Viktor Orban even declared 2014 a year of Holocaust commemoration.
However problematic, it does not prominently feature voices that deny the Holocaust as a historical fact,
nor challenge its most established realities. It is also not quite the same as trivialisation.
While the emphasis always is on the larger ethnic suffering, it is relatively rare to hear outright belittling of Jewish victimisation.
A more nuanced way of understanding this type of Holocaust remembrance is is memory appropriation,
where the memory of the Holocaust is used to memorialise a different kind of suffering,
such as suffering under communism or suffering from ethnic violence perpetrated by other groups.
And as my book demonstrates, this process is not simply a by-product of post-communist transitions.
It is in fact an integral part of the political strategy of post-communist states,
which are basing their contemporary legitimacy on a complete rejection of
communism and a renewed connexion to the pre communist mythically nationally,
pure and above all, ethnic character of states.
It is this rejection of communist doctrinaire supra nationalism and its replacement
with old fashioned ethnic nationalism that colours how the Holocaust is remembered.
And in a global environment of anti-communism,
this nationalised Holocaust remembrance has also completely erased the memory of communist anti-fascist resistance as it's constituted part.
And this exclusion provides contemporary anti-communist regimes their legitimacy shields.
Holocaust remembrance, then, is no longer about the Holocaust at all, but is about very acute legitimacy needs of post-communist states,
which are building their identity as fundamentally anti-communist, which then in turn helps them be perceived as more legitimately European.
To understand this process, I argue that most communist states today are dealing with conflicting sources of insecurity.
They're anxious to be perceived as fully European by, quote unquote core Western European states, a status that remains fleeting,
especially in the aftermath of the openly a.m. Eastern European rhetoric of the euro crisis and more recently, Brexit.
Being fully European, however, means sharing in the cosmopolitan European narratives of the 20th century,
perhaps the strongest being the narrative of the Holocaust.
The European narrative of the Holocaust, which understands it as the foundational block of post-war European identity,
has created stress and resentment in post-communist states,
which have been asked to accept and contribute to this primarily Western European account as members or candidate states of the European Union.
The problem is that the cosmopolitan Holocaust memory, as developed in the West,
simply does not narratively fit with a very different set of Holocaust memories in post-communist Europe.
This lack of fit is evident primarily in the lack of centrality of the shore as the
defining memory of the 20th century experience across the post-communist space.
Instead of the memory of the Holocaust.
Eastern European states after communism constructed their national identities on the memory of Stalinism and Soviet occupation,
as well as pre communist ethnic conflict with other states.
The European Central to the Holocaust then replaces the central issue of communist and ethnic victimisation as the dominant
organising narrative of post-communist states and is therefore threatening and destabilising to these state identities.
So in the book, I document how influencing the European Union's own memory politics and legislation,
the process post-communist states have attempted to resolve these insecurities by putting forward a new kind of Holocaust
remembrance where the memory symbols and imagery of the Holocaust become appropriated to represent crimes of communism.
So the criminal past is not fully denied, but the responsibility for it is misdirected.
And this accomplishes two things. It absolves the nation from acknowledging responsibility for its criminal past,
while at the same time it makes communism as a political project criminal.
By delegitimizing communism. post-Communist states have also removed anti-fascist resistance from the core memory of the Holocaust,
which has been allowed for a revival in ideological normalisation of fascist ideological movements in the present.
But the sensuality of the Holocaust as a foundational European narrative is also soundly rejected across much of post-communist
Europe because of its perceived elevation of Jewish victimhood above victimhood of other regional majority ethnic groups,
a move that is increasingly openly resented. Further,
the European Holocaust memory focus on Jewish suffering is also begrudged in much of the region because it brings about discussion about
extensive and deep local complicity in the Holocaust and material and political benefits of the complete Jewish absence across Eastern Europe.
Jewish businesses, homes and property have over decades of looting,
followed by communist seizures slowly morphed into the general economy with difficult and sporadic attempts at restitution.
Contemporary Holocaust remembrance practises such as those sanctions,
but a Polish or Hungarian government avoid these difficult discussions by
deflecting all responsibility for the genocide of the Jews onto Nazi Germany,
absolving the national past from any appearance of impropriety or crime.
So my book aims to put these episodes of memory inversion in a contemporary political
context by arguing that they're not isolated instances of competing memory,
but instead critical elements of national strategies of political legitimacy.
They served to reposition national narratives in opposition, both to those of communism, but also those historically embraced by Western Europe.
And instead, they claim a national identity that rejects multiculturalism and is rebuilt along ethnic majoritarian lines.
It is quite clear that cultural issues of identity and history have been integral
to the rise and consolidation of populism in post-communist east Europe,
as the question of who are the real victims of history has been central to the populist enterprise.
The fact that East European victimisation under communism is not adequately
understood and appreciated in the West is the central grievance of these movements,
and it feeds into a new cycle of victimisation. This time, the perceived oppression by Western liberal ideas such as gender, ideology,
feminism, LGBTQ rights or even more dramatically, Middle Eastern migration and refugee flows.
The core of populist resentment is the issue of cultural imposition and a deepest cultural imposition
is the imposition of memory of their own past that I thank you very much and I'm going to try and get.
Nadia, thank you so much, Yelena. So far, we only have one question which I will pose to you in a second, but I was wondering when you were speaking,
my question was going to be how does this all play into the hands of populists?
And then you introduced your last slide into the question away from me.
But I was still wondering as a heated debate, starting currently,
especially in studies of nationalism and populism about, you know, as populism even a useful term.
And how does the how does the usage of these various types of interpretations or memory inversions that you're calling them?
How does this play into the hands of populists?
Are they actually populists or are they nationalists because you were, for example, you you mentioned or on the slides you had our Slovakia.
And you know, a lot of people would argue, well, those are not really populist SA nationalists because they are using a lot of these
tropes from the past for nationalist purposes rather than just populist purposes.
And I was just wondering, how did you how did you deal with this conceptual clarity in terms of these,
these two terms, populism and nationalism and how that plays into your book?
Yeah, my book is not centrally about populism, so I think in some ways I sidestep that debate.
But what what was interesting for me and what is relevant is that the argument that I'm making in the book is that
the unresolved understanding of your nationalist past fundamentally organises how you understand your present.
So to the extent that there's a core of nativism nationalism,
a move to ethnic homogeneity that is integral to this populist movements, to that extent, they're interesting to me.
I was there. It's less interesting to me to what extent they're anti-elitist or they're kind of economically populist.
That is not something that is of the core interest,
but what is of core interest is this return to the idea of a nation is a unit that's made of a homogeneous ethnic body.
And almost all of these movements that we now call populist have that dimension.
They're all anti-immigration. They're all into multiculturalism. A lot of them are Semitic, a lot of them are anti-Roma.
And so that core is in the argument that I'm building reflective of a larger kind of
victimisation narrative that has coloured how even official hegemonic narratives of the past,
including the narrative of the Holocaust, is remembered in those countries. Mm hmm.
Thank you very much. So actually, with Peter from Oxford, it's asking or saying excellent point about who's who.
Is the Holocaust, but isn't the same true with ethnicity who suffered most in a in a legitimation?
Right? Is there something new except performative ity?
She's asking, Is there something new in this?
Well, I mean, I guess I guess if I understand the question correctly, the question is, look, what is this type of victimisation?
A type of and of course, you know, interpretation and appropriation of Holocaust narrative is a type of comparative victimisation.
So obviously, you know, I mean, it's it's it's in the universe of cases of competitive victimisation.
So, you know, in this case, it's a competitive victimisation over over the struggle between the memory of the 20th century.
So the fight between the memory of the Holocaust versus the memory of communist crimes.
So certainly the concept of memory appropriation or memory replacement or any of
these other ways in which memory is instrumentalized can travel from the Holocaust,
universal cases or the 20th century to many other competitive victimisation cases.
And you know, I know that there were other presentations today that talk about many other cases of competitive victimisation.
You know, all the way from Rwanda to Zimbabwe and everywhere else.
So certainly this is part of the example of competitive victimisation.
What is interesting to me and what motivated me to write the book is the way in which the insecure national identities in Eastern Europe,
as they relate to the hegemony narratives of the European Union,
play into a very warped idea about the history of 20th century, both in the East and the West.
That was the motivating factor here.
There's a related question to this competitive victimhood, or why do we have to only think that there's only one true victim,
Abigail Brentford is asking us academics and educators or even just in our personal lives.
Do you have any advice for convincing others that there, that there doesn't have to be one true victim of history,
but we can recognise different people's traumas without taking it away from from our traumas?
Good luck. That's an excellent question. And it's very it's very hard, I mean, you know, we're all, you know,
living through a particular political moment of competitive victimisation, you know, both under UK and certainly me here.
And he had his state's, let alone the East European countries that I talked about.
So. So this is something that we all deal with every day.
And I think, you know, if I have if if I have a moral purpose, if you will, with this book,
in addition to kind of intellectual exercise and research, it's something that I call in the book Memories Solidarity.
And this is how my book ends with what I say. It's a call to memory solidarity, which is really this idea that the question brings is that how can we?
Have. Memory that is not ours.
So how come how can we share in the memory of others victimisation without denying that we also suffered?
And so is there a place for us to have solidarity of this memory?
And how do you then present that in very important instruments of education, such as, for example, history textbooks or media representation?
And of course, there is a way to do that. And there's there's nothing inherent in in anybody's individual memory or your family
memory or your societal memory that says that only your own suffering must be recognised.
In fact, I would argue that unless suffering of others is recognised, your own doesn't cannot come to the surface either.
So I think it's really incredibly important to contextualise memories of different groups in a way that that shows that solidarity that,
yes, my family has suffered in this way. And yes, I was a victim of communism.
And yes, my grandfather was arrested by communists, which is all what I talk about my own family in the book.
And then I talk about how why that's important to for me as having a particular family history to then
have solidarity with the history of all the others who had a very different experience and in many ways,
much worse experience of the 20th century than my own family did.
And I think putting those family histories and discussions in in a dialogue is really necessary to to properly, if anything else,
to properly memorialise the incredible suffering that has occurred in our region, the East European region of the 20th century, but also everywhere.
We have a few more questions. And I'll then direct you if you were able to answer those questions in writing on the on the Q&A function.
But let me actually, this is quite a topical question, given what's just happened in Sarajevo over the weekend.
We have a question by Emil Armonk. How do you see the commemorative mass held in Sarajevo this weekend by the Catholic Church?
Are we seeing an increasing resurgence of World War to memory politics in the Balkans?
And how does it compete with narratives of the narratives of the 1990s? I will direct you to my chapters two and three in the book.
That's that's what the book is about. So I have a whole chapter on Croatia, which deals with that exact same question.
And the question, of course, is a critical one. So what I argue in the book is absolutely there is a resurgence,
and I dedicate a whole chapter to Croatia because the resurgence of neo fascist narratives and ideology in Croatia has been quite alarming.
And it's not that new,
but it's it's kind of escalated since around 2016 to the point where even many World War Two era fascist insignia are no longer illegal.
So it's a little bit like allowing swastikas to be worn in Germany.
So that kind of a similar thing is being allowed now in Croatia in different ways.
And so just for those who don't know, the Bleiberg ceremony is a annual commemoration of what these Croatian nationalists call victims of communism,
who were in 1945, mostly a group of Croatian far right fascist fighters who were captured as prisoners of war by the Yugoslav partisans.
And then many of them were killed. So it's a it's a war crime, certainly.
But in the mythology of Croatian right wing fascist movement, this has become what they would call the Holocaust of to martyrs.
So I spend a lot of time in the book talking about how they're actually using the language of the Holocaust, even though they,
these fascists were the ones committing crimes of the Holocaust who claimed that they were the victims of the Holocaust.
So this this is, I mean, a really kind of unbelievable inversion of history that happens every year.
And this was quite alarming that this was now organised by the Catholic Church in Sarajevo of all places,
and Sarajevo was occupied by the Independent, the fascist, independent state of Croatia during World War Two.
Almost the entire Jewish community was was killed, and it was this type of provocation and really inversion of history is.
Is extremely alarming, and it points also to the normalisation of this kind of discourse and to also
the rising power of the Catholic Church as as the arbiter of of the past.
And the Catholic Church has a very difficult task of its own when it comes to the Holocaust and crimes of the 20th century.
So in some ways, they're kind of whitewashing their own role in it.
And this does relate very directly to the wars of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia,
as the Croatian side was seen by the Serbs in the 1990s as a kind of continuation of this fascist history.
And the opposite was obviously understood by Croats when it comes to Serbian World War Two armed forces.
So there's a there's a very clear linkage in how these memories and how these
narratives live and then how they're utilised for much more recent violence.
Thank you. We have a few more questions.
I was going to wrap up, but actually I'm just going to yell and just give you a flavour of some of the questions you ask.
And I was asking about if you could also comment on KDR and what would be the reference points there and also comment
on how does the East European appropriation of Holocaust memorialisation compared to the West European appropriation,
especially in terms of the removal of Jews, Jews stigmatisation that was so extensive.
One of my former students are actually current students is also asking about how do other victims of Holocaust homosexuals,
Sinti and Roma play within these narratives? Ross Smith is asking about what's the role of storytelling in this?
Because in our first keynote, we heard a lot about the power of the story and how stories are crafted and curated to resonate with audiences.
So she's asking, how does some of the issues that you outlined?
How does that what's the role of storytelling in this and whether there are some global templates?
I think this is where we'll have to end the discussion, however. I would encourage you to keep posting questions.
Yelena will hopefully still have a few more minutes to have a look at them and answer in a written form.
But I just really want to thank you, Gil, and I know it's quite early morning for you.
So thank you very much for joining us. And by this, we basically wrap up the conference.
I'm going to hand over the floor to to Yohanna in a moment, but I just want to thank you all for participating.
I want to say that we've discussed actually quite a lot more than what we initially hope we would because a lot of the discussions were so rich.
And not only did we touch about the different actors, the roles of international actors, national and grassroots in terms of economic politics.
But we've also looked at different ideas of competing narratives, competing victimhood.
And I think the fundamental question that we will have to start answering is how do we actually understand these
hegemonic narratives and what is their role in the current changing world in terms of resurgence of nationalism,
in terms of populism, in terms of using Right-Wing narratives,
for justifying new new policies that we're seeing currently in this in this pandemic crisis?
And I will tell you a bit more about our next steps. I just want to thank you all for participating on our behalf.
It really was a fascinating discussion and conversation that we've had.
I'm only really sorry that we are not able now to mingle and have in-person discussions about all of these topics.
But let's hope this is soon over and we will be able to see each other again.
Thank you very much. Over to you. Even though the symposium is now over, this is not the end.
From the very beginning, we envisioned a tangible outcome from this joint endeavour.
And after receiving very positive reactions from prospective contributors,
and especially now after hearing all the presentations and how they really relate and mixed together,
we are certain that we will put together a special issue based on today's symposium.
The special issue will allow us to continue the conversations we've had today,
and this will further allow us to delve deeper into the shared features and common dynamics of hegemonic narratives,
which hopefully will allow us to understand better. As Jesse said,
what are really hegemonic narratives and also to fully appreciate at the same time the uniqueness and specificities of each of the cases.
And that's definitely something to look forward to, and we will keep you updated.
We also recorded today's presentations and of course, subject to permission.
We will make them available online. So please check our web page where you will be able to find further information in due time.
And finally, throughout the day, we've been active on Twitter and if you haven't done so already, have a look at in our four hegemonic narratives.
And you can also find our emails on our website.
And, of course, the most important path. Thank you, Jesse, for doing the heavy lifting and for being the driving force behind us all, it's wonderful.
Also, many thanks to Katherine and Laura for all they support.
And thank you all for joining us today. Into very much thank you for your help and everything you've done.
Good bye, everyone, and hopefully see you soon.