Remembering and Memorializing German-Romanian Gulag Victims in the USSR through Historical Documents and Historical Fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-116
Author(s):  
Anca Holden
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Collective Trauma ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Labor Camps ◽  
Museum Exhibition

This paper examines the memory of the Romanian-German victims of the Soviet Gulag as recorded in recent collections of testimonies and interviews, a museum exhibition, an audio-visual documentary project, and Herta Müller’s 2009 novel Atemschaukel. It employs Alexander Etkind’s notions of “soft memory” and “hard memory” to discuss some of the key historical and political events that have impeded the establishing of consensual remembrance policies of the Soviet Gulag in communist Romania. I show how both German and Romanian communities since 1990 have memorialized the Gulag and discuss Atemschaukel as a legitimate impulse to document both personal and collective trauma of the second and subsequent generations. I argue that in the absence of a crystallized, hard memory, the historical documents and the historical fiction analyzed serve as viable examples of soft memory that succeed in memorializing the forced labor camps experience in its collective and individual forms.

scholarly journals Negotiating Real Space and Real Time in Red Jacket: A Novel

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 281-295
Author(s):  
Pamela C. Mordecai
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Real Space ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Weather Events

Analysis of her 2015 novel, “Red Jacket” by author Pamela Mordecai showing how the tools of space and time were used to provide realism to the story. This was done by describing real events that happened over the space of the story including weather events, political events as well as geographical descriptions to give an idea of fictional locations. Red Jacket is neither fabulist tale nor historical fiction. It is a made-up story, set at a time marked by events, some real and some imaginary, and set in places, some real and some imaginary.

Death and Redemption

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven A. Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Socialist Society ◽  
Labor Camps ◽  
Penal Institution ◽  
Karaganda Region

This book offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the role of the Gulag—the Soviet Union's vast system of forced-labor camps, internal exile, and prisons—in Soviet society. Soviet authorities undoubtedly had the means to exterminate all the prisoners who passed through the Gulag, but unlike the Nazis they did not conceive of their concentration camps as instruments of genocide. This book argues that the Gulag must be understood primarily as a penal institution where prisoners were given one final chance to reintegrate into Soviet society. Millions whom authorities deemed “re-educated” through brutal forced labor were allowed to leave. Millions more who “failed” never got out alive. Drawing on newly opened archives in Russia and Kazakhstan as well as memoirs by actual prisoners, the book shows how the Gulag was integral to the Soviet goal of building a utopian socialist society. It takes readers into the Gulag itself, focusing on one outpost of the Gulag system in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan, a location that featured the full panoply of Soviet detention institutions. The book traces the Gulag experience from its beginnings after the 1917 Russian Revolution to its decline following the 1953 death of Stalin. It reveals how the Gulag defined the border between those who would re-enter Soviet society and those who would be excluded through death.

Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein (eds.), The Holocaust and North Africa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. 352 pp.

2021 ◽  
pp. 263-264
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
North African ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Labor Camps ◽  
Almost All

This chapter discusses The Holocaust and North Africa (2019), a collection of fifteen essays edited by Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein. As this collection makes clear, the Holocaust did not target European Jewry exclusively. North African Jews of Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan, and Libyan origin were also subjected to German, French, or Italian occupation. While the focus is on North Africa, no attempt is made to remove it from the geographical margins of Holocaust history. Instead, almost all of the essays point to what was clearly unique to North Africa: the link between antisemitism and colonialism. The book is divided into four sections, with the first two parts examining the interface between the Holocaust and colonial North Africa. Topics covered include the application of race laws, the expropriation of Jewish property, and the internment of Jews in forced labor camps.

Gulag Letters

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arsenii Formakov
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
English Language ◽  
Language Translation ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Labor Camps ◽  
Labor System ◽  
Camp Life

Memoirs and works of fiction that describe the Stalinist Gulag often depict labor camps as entirely cut off from the rest of Soviet society. In fact, however, many prisoners corresponded at least sporadically with relatives either through the official, censored Gulag mail system or by smuggling letters out of camp with free laborers. Examples of such correspondence that survive to the present day represent a powerful, largely unstudied historical source with the potential to fundamentally change the way we understand both the Soviet forced labor system and Stalinist society in general. Gulag Letters offers readers an English-language translation of the letters of a single Gulag inmate, the journalist, poet, and novelist Arsenii Formakov (1900-1983), who was a prominent member of Latvia’s large and vibrant Russian Old Believer community during the interwar period. Formakov was arrested by the Soviet secret police in June 1940 as part of a broad round-up of anti-Soviet elements that began just weeks after the Soviet Union forcibly annexed Latvia, and survived two terms in Soviet labor camps (1940-1947 and 1949-1955). The letters that he mailed home to his wife and children while serving these sentences reveal the surprising porousness of the Gulag and the variability of labor camp life and describe the difficult conditions that prisoners faced during and after World War II. They also represent an important eye-witness account of the experience of Latvian citizens deported to internment sites in the Soviet interior during the 1940s.

Yugoslav Camp Literature: Rediscovering the Ghost of a Nation's Past-Present-Future

Slavic Review ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 46 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 513-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oskar Gruenwald
Keyword(s):  
Human Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Prison Literature ◽  
Labor Camps

They [prison and camp authorities] wanted to lower men to the animal level. And they succeeded. There, I realized that life should not be lived for its own sake. Life should be lived for the sake of a goal, faith, freedom, and truth.Radoslav Kostić-Katunac, Look, Lord, To the Other Side: Yugoslavia's GulagAleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn has immortalized Soviet camp literature. In contrast, Yugoslav prison and camp literature is virtually unknown. Yet, if literature indeed mirrors the human soul and even a nation's conscience—as Solzhenitsyn intimates— then it may also convey the human experience across time and space, language and culture. The question arises: Is camp and prison literature merely a sigh of wronged souls or is it a literary genre in its own right? If it is a genre, is it accessible at all to those not initiated in the Sisyphus-like context of human suffering etched into the world's Gulag archipelagos of prisons and forced labor camps? Let us assume for the sake of argument that it is, indeed, accessible to outsiders. The question still remains: Why bother with prison or camp literature— those heavy sighs of distraught creatures—rhyme or not? The answer is that if we forget camp literature, we might forget our own selves.

scholarly journals Archival Reenactement and the Role of Fiction

2022 ◽  
pp. 91-98
Author(s):  
Roberta Agnese
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Mixed Media ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
The Past ◽  
With Memory ◽  
The Web

The Atlas Group created a digital mixed-media archive of contemporary Lebanese history, made up of produced and found documents. These archives look immediately ambiguous: they don’t collect historical documents; they actually contain visual artefacts created by the Lebanese artist Walid Raad. These digital mixed-media archives — partly accessible on the web but also physically exhibited and performed — are not intended to preserve the memory of the past, but they become indeed useful to actualize history by giving it back in the form of a historical fiction. What if archives should not deal with memory, but with amnesia? And what kind of historical temporality do they re-activate?

David Silberklang, Gates of Tears: The Holocaust in the Lublin District. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2013. 497 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Forced Labor ◽  
First Year ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Administrative Structure ◽  
Population Movements ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Labor Camps ◽  
Regional History

This chapter reviews the book Gates of Tears: The Holocaust in the Lublin District (2013), by David Silberklang. Gates of Tears tells the story of the administrative structure of the Lublin district in Poland during the Holocaust. It explores forced population movements during the first year of German occupation, forced labor, resettlements and ghettos during 1940 and 1941, deportations, and the forced labor camps after 1942. Silberklang analyzes the interplay of center and periphery within the Nazi Party apparatus in the development of German policy toward the Jews, refracted through the multiple lenses of the civil administration and the security bureaucracy. The book, based on massive archival research, highlights the importance of regional history and local studies for historians of the Holocaust in Poland.

Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Golfo Alexopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Medical Care ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Penal System ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Labor Camps ◽  
New View

This book is a new and chilling study of lethal human exploitation in the Soviet forced labor camps, one of the pillars of Stalinist terror. The book is a shocking study of life and death in Stalin's Gulag. It demonstrates how the ruthless exploitation of prisoners, their hunger, and a lack of medical care turned the camps into destructive-labor camps, and suggests that these forced labor camps were often administered as death camps. Examining the Gulag penal system through the lens of health, medicine, and human exploitation, this book draws from previously inaccessible archives to offer a chilling new view of one of the pillars of Stalinist terror.

scholarly journals Narrativa, imagem e potência em “Tudo o que tenho levo comigo”, de Herta Müller

Scriptorium ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 33267
Author(s):  
Lóren Cristine Ferreira Cuadros
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Psychological Violence ◽  
Testimonial Literature ◽  
Labor Camp ◽  
Labor Camps ◽  
Physical And Psychological Violence

O romance “Tudo o que tenho levo comigo”, da escritora romeno-alemã Herta Müller, é constituído por uma série de imagens poéticas que são produto da visão pictórica de seu narrador, Leo Auberg. Aos dezessete anos, o jovem romeno é deportado para um gulag após a ocupação de seu país pelas tropas soviéticas e encontra na observação da beleza dos elementos de seu cotidiano no campo de trabalhos forçados uma forma de resistir à violência física e psicológica a que é submetido. O presente trabalho tem como objetivo sugerir que em vez de encobrir os horrores dos gulags, a estetização presente na obra de Müller evidencia a crueldade dos crimes cometidos pelos soviéticos tornando-a, portanto, tão válida quanto as narrativas testemunhais sobre o assunto.*** Narrative, imagery and potency in Herta Müller’s “Atemschaukel” ***“The Hunger Angel”, a novel by Romanian-born German author Herta Müller, consists of successive ima- gery arising from the picturesque vision of its narrator, Leo Auberg. At the age of seventeen, the young Romanian is deported to a gulag after the occupation of his country by Soviet troops and finds in observing the beauty of the elements of his daily life at the forced labor camp a way of resisting the physical and psychological violence to which he is subjected. This article aims to suggest that instead of concealing the horrors of the forced labor camps, the aestheticization found in Müller’s novel rather emphasizes the cruelty of the crimes committed by the Soviets, thus making it as valid as testimonial literature works on the subject.Keywords: Comparative Literature; Gulag; Herta Müller; Imagery.

scholarly journals ACTIVITIES OF THE FORCED LABOR CAMP IN THE CHUVASH AUTONOMOUS REGION IN THE TOWN OF CHEBOKSARY

2021 ◽  
pp. 22-26
Author(s):  
Elena V. Vyrlan
Keyword(s):  
Regional Level ◽  
Volga Region ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Autonomous Region ◽  
Labor Camp ◽  
Historical Archive ◽  
Labor Camps ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chuvash Republic ◽  
The Town

The article attempts to analyze the activities of forced labor camps using as an the example the functioning of the Forced Labor Camp of the Chuvash Autonomous Region (ChAO) in 1920–1921. The work is based on previously unpublished sources of the State Historical Archive of the Chuvash Republic. The study shows the features of classifying the prisoners, their number in the forced labor camp of the Chuvash Autonomous Region in the town of Cheboksary, the regime restrictions imposed on them, it also analyses the most frequent violations of discipline in the camp, shows the issues of the camp organization and the conditions of service in it, the system of employees’ remuneration, as well as the difficulties in the institution’s functioning under existing socio-economic situation during the years of mass famine in the Volga region. The history of establishment and operation of forced labor camps is currently poorly covered, especially at the regional level. Basing on the results of the study, the author makes a conclusion on the reasons for liquidation of forced labor camps, as well as on the need for detailed studying the regional aspects of the problem under consideration.

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