Postcommunist Constellations: Memory Cultures of the Holocaust in Central and Eastern Europe

Since the collapse of communism in 1989-91, scholars have offered a number of conceptual paradigms to encapsulate the mnemonic entanglement of the Holocaust with painful gentile experiences of Soviet terror and the Second World War in Central and Eastern Europe. These entanglements have typically been fraught and competitive, involving appropriations of Jewish Holocaust memory as a means of legitimising gentile victimhood on the one hand, and the importation of Western, Jewish-centred narratives on the other - often as a pathway to EU accession. They have also been highly public, and continue to play out in political debates, education, scholarship, the arts, and even legal spheres, often with polarising effects. The construction of representational narratives of the Holocaust in formerly communist nations thus tend to be characterised by the binary doubles to which Eastern and Western memory cultures have typically been seen to pertain: namely, concentrationary/extra-concentrationary sites; neat/primitive killing; Nazi/Soviet regimes; Jewish/gentile victimhood and democratic/nationalistic as well as civilised/uncivilised societies. 'Postcommunist constellations’ is the term used in this thesis to designate the dialogic, supranational canon of cultural texts from formerly communist nations on the axes of conventionally ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ European Holocaust remembrance. Finding expression in art, literature, film, memorials and museums, these constellations simultaneously resist the view of Eastern European memorial practices as out of sync with those of the West, and fill in the memorial gaps created by structural forgetting and revisionist configurations of the past in Central-Eastern Europe. Focusing on twenty-first century memory cultures that have surfaced in the last decade or so in particular, the present thesis connects the historical, geopolitical and representational coordinates of extra-concentrationary killing during the Holocaust years in an attempt to draw Western attention to these historical episodes and build a decolonial picture of marginalised victim narratives. The decolonial lens developed throughout the thesis figures both explicitly, via a critical engagement with the historical racialisation of Jews, Roma and Bosnian Muslims, and implicitly, by analysing non-hierarchical literary and artistic representations of genocide and extreme violence in the region. In so doing, it affords a theoretical Western perspective of specific case studies or micro histories of Holocaust killing that draw upon Ukraine, Poland, Romania and Romanian-administered territories and the former Yugoslavia. While interrogating the continued prevalence of Holocaust relativism in Central-Eastern Europe, the thesis shows how artists, activists and specific institutions are coming to terms with the past in new and productive localised ways