An Idiot's Tale: Memories and Histories of the HolocaustThe Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution. Christopher BrowningFacing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1943- 1945. David EngelThe End of the Holocaust: The Liberation of the Camps. Jon BridgmanIn the Shadow of Death: Living Outside the Gates of Mauthausen. Gordon J. HorwitzPerpretrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945. Raul HilbergAssassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust. Pierre Vidal-Naquet , Jeffrey MehlmanRemembering in Vain: The Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes against Humanity. Alain Finkielkraut , Roxanne Lapidus , Sima Godfrey , Alice Y. KaplanHolocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. Lawrence L. Langer

1995 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-82
Author(s):  
Omer Bartov
Keyword(s):  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Final Solution ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Polish Government

Populism and Memory: Legislation of the Past in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia

2021 ◽  
pp. 088832542095080
Author(s):  
Nikolay Koposov
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Democratic Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Initial Stage ◽  
The Holocaust

This article belongs to the special cluster “Here to Stay: The Politics of History in Eastern Europe”, guest-edited by Félix Krawatzek & George Soroka. The rise of historical memory, which began in the 1970s and 1980s, has made the past an increasingly important soft-power resource. At its initial stage, the rise of memory contributed to the decay of self-congratulatory national narratives and to the formation of a “cosmopolitan” memory centered on the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity and informed by the notion of state repentance for the wrongdoings of the past. Laws criminalizing the denial of these crimes, which were adopted in “old” continental democracies in the 1980s and 1990s, were a characteristic expression of this democratic culture of memory. However, with the rise of national populism and the formation of the authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and Poland in the 2000s and 2010s, the politics of memory has taken a significantly different turn. National populists are remarkably persistent in whitewashing their countries’ history and using it to promote nationalist mobilization. This process has manifested itself in the formation of new types of memory laws, which shift the blame for historical injustices to other countries (the 1998 Polish, the 2000 Czech, the 2010 Lithuanian, the June 2010 Hungarian, and the 2014 Latvian statutes) and, in some cases, openly protect the memory of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity (the 2005 Turkish, the 2014 Russian, the 2015 Ukrainian, the 2006 and the 2018 Polish enactments). The article examines Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian legislation regarding the past that demonstrates the current linkage between populism and memory.

Crimes and Accountability in Shakespeare

1998 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodor Meron
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Final Solution ◽  
The South ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
High Ranking ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
The Holocaust

Accountability for crimes, a theme central to Shakespeare’s plays, is also extraordinarily pertinent to our times. Newspapers have reported on the care taken by the leaders of the former Yugoslavia to order atrocities against “enemy” populations only in the most indirect and euphemistic way. Even the Nazi leaders constantly resorted to euphemisms in referring to the Holocaust. No explicit written order from Hitler to carry out the final solution has ever been found. At the height of their power, the Nazis treated the data on the killing of Jews as top secret. Similarly, a high-ranking member of the former security police told the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that written instructions to kill antiapartheid activists were never given; squad members who carried out the killings simply got “a nod of the head or a wink-wink kind of attitude.”

Barbarous Nationalism and the Liberal International Order: Reflections on the ‘Is,’ the ‘Ought,’ and the ‘Can’

1996 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 439-462
Author(s):  
Carol A.L. Prager
Keyword(s):  
International System ◽  
International Order ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
First Time ◽  
Second World

It's a mistake to endow the Holocaust or any other massive case of crimes against humanity with cosmic significance. We want to do it because we think the moral enormity of the events should be balanced by an equally grand theory. But it's not. The attempt to do so is poignant.Alain FinkielkrautSavage ethnonationalism, dating back to the end of the eighteenth century, and violent ethnic conflict, as ancient as history, are sometimes viewed as if for the first time in the post-Cold War era. Still, it is the case that the end of the discipline imposed by the bipolar international system has permitted temporarily repressed ethnic and nationalist passions to reassert themselves. In response, a vast literature has sprung up discussing what states should do about genocide and ethnic cleansing, the gravest human rights abuses. In what follows I will consider barbarous nationalism in the context of the liberal international order put into place at the end of the Second World War, the roles of politics, law and morality forming a sub text to that discussion.

Dancing with Death and Salvaging Jewish Culture inAusteriaandThe Dybbuk

Slavic Review ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 761-781 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriella Safran
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Film Festivals ◽  
The West ◽  
Martial Law ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Humanitarian Values ◽  
Polish Government

Jerzy Kawalerowicz told reporters that he made his 1982 film,Austeria(The inn) to commemorate the Polish-Jewish people and culture destroyed in the Holocaust. This non-Jewish Polish director, known best in the west for hisMother Joanna of the Angels(a depiction of death and possession at a medieval French convent), grew up among Jews in the eastern part of Poland. He had been struck by the Polish-Jewish author Julian Stryjkowski's 1966 novella,Austeria,a haunting depiction of Jewish life in Galicia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Kawalerowicz—with Stryjkowski—immediately decided to turn the book into a movie. After the Six-Day War in 1967 sparked an “anti-Zionist campaign” in Poland, however, the Polish government found the Jewish topic of their screenplay “politically unacceptable.” In 1981, the film was granted permission and funding. It was completed in 1982, following the crackdown on Solidarity and the imposition of martial law. The authorities allowed its distribution, having determined that it displayed “humanitarian values” and that it did not represent a political threat. In the capacity of a quasiofficial expression of Polish regret at the passing of the Jews, and perhaps as a demonstration of liberalism aimed at the western critics of the new regime,Austeriawas widely promoted and exported to film festivals abroad.

Dubious Premises—Evil Conclusions: Moral Reasoning at the Nuremberg Trials

2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
EDMUND D. PELLEGRINO ◽  
DAVID C. THOMASMA
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Human Experimentation ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Free World ◽  
Military Tribunal ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
Medical Morality ◽  
Nuremberg Trials ◽  
Nazi Physicians

Fifty years ago, 23 Nazi physicians were defendants before a military tribunal in Nuremberg, charged with crimes against humanity. During that trial, the world learned of their personal roles in human experimentation with political and military prisoners, mass eugenic sterilizations, state-ordered euthanasia of the “unfit,” and the program of genocide we now know as the Holocaust. These physicians, and their colleagues who did not stand trial, were universally condemned in the free world as ethical pariahs. The term “Nazi doctor” became the paradigm for total defection from the most rudimentary elements of medical morality. The caduceus literally became the instrument of the swastika.

Paul Celan, Poet of the Holocaust

Worldview ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 19 (12) ◽  
pp. 24-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luitgard N. Wundheiler
Keyword(s):  
Special Treatment ◽  
German Language ◽  
Final Solution ◽  
Paul Celan ◽  
Public Address ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Pass Through ◽  
The One ◽  
Native Tongue

The Jewish poet, Paul Celan, was born in Czernovitz, Rumania, in 1920 and committed suicide in Paris in 1970. His native tongue was German. He wrote eight volumes of poetry, all in German, although he spent almost half his life in France and was fluent in several languages. In a public address delivered in Bremen in 1958, on the occasion of being awarded a literary prize, he spoke of the German language as the one possession that had remained "reachable, close, and unlost in the midst of losses…although it had to pass through a thousand darknesses of deathdealing speech." German is the language of Holderlin, Biichner, and Rilke, all of whom Celan admired, but also the language in which the words Endlösung (final solution), Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), and judenrein (cleansed of Jews) were coined.

History-writing in Turkey through securitization discourses and gendered narratives

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-344
Author(s):  
Bengi Bezirgan-Tanış
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
History Writing ◽  
National Interests ◽  
External Threats ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
Turkish State

Since the official history-writing is a defining aspect for the formation and consolidation of nation-states, it is crucial to explore the attempts to legitimize particular discourses regarding historical atrocities. The selective representations of the past, in this regard, contradict counter-memories and propagate hegemonic patterns of remembrance and/or forgetting of past crimes. This article accordingly addresses how the representations of counter-memories as threats to national security and the silencing of gender-specific experiences and remembrances by sanctioned historical narratives become manifest in the history-making of the Turkish nation-state. By focusing on the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide as two cases of crimes against humanity, it is intended to discuss the shifting positions and roles that the Turkish state adopts in the remembering and forgetting of historical offences. The article argues that through prioritizing national security and national interests, the securitization of memory reconstructs collective traumas of distinct ethnic and religious groups on the basis of a nation-state’s perceived internal and external threats. It also claims that the competing voices of women and their distinct experiences and patterns of remembrance and forgetting past atrocities are suppressed for the sake of the preservation of national security. By incorporating the issue of gender into the debate on the securitization of memory, this article elucidates the mismatch between positions of femininity and masculinity within the official national historiography of the Turkish state.

A Hyper-Ethics of Irreconcilable Contradictions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Banki
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The One

This chapter is a reading of Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Forgiveness (Le Pardon (1967)) in relation to what he wrote elsewhere on the topic of forgiveness and the Holocaust. The interest of Jankélévitch’s work is that he recognizes an irreconcilable contradiction between, on the one hand, the sacred absolute of love from which comes the duty to forgive even the unforgivable and, on the other hand, crimes against humanity, which attack “the very essence, the humanness of the human and constitute the most sacrilegious of all faults.” As early as 1948, Jankélévitch spoke of the possibility of forgiveness for Nazi crimes. Twenty-three years later, however, he declared forgiveness to be impossible and immoral, when he affirmed: “Forgiveness died in the death camps.” Jankélévitch is unable to maintain a coherent position with regard to forgiveness and the Holocaust. However, this should not be considered to be simply a fault, a lack of moral and/or intellectual probity. This chapter also raises the question of the ‘privilege’ given to the Holocaust over other comparable crimes against humanity.

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