Introduction

In the last 15 years the interest has been growing rapidly in the field of collective memory in general and concerning the impact of the Holocaust after 1945 in particular. At the same time it is also evident that the public treatment of the Holocaust in political debate and mass media has become a European wide phenomenon, at least within the EU. Accordingly there are many studies, but mostly concerning a limited number of countries and themes. The comparative aspect has also received attention. David S. Wyman’s comparative anthology “The World Reacts to the Holocaust” covering most continents was a pioneer undertaking in 1996.1 In the last years some anthologies have been published in which Germany is compared to other countries.2 However, these studies usually lack a common theoretical approach and have the character of separates country studies. The ambitious aim of the Swedish research project “The Holocaust and the European Historical Culture” is such a comparison within an integrated theoretical framework. The countries studied are Israel, Germany (West and East), Austria, Scandinavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Ukraine and Croatia. Key words are historical culture, historical consciousness and uses of history. The project is headed by Klas-Göran Karlsson, who has developed a typology for the uses of history.

At a conference in Lund in May 2003, commentators were invited to comment on the different articles in the first book from the project: “Echoes of the Holocaust. Historical Cultures in Contemporary Europe” (Nordic Academic Press, Lund 2003). The anthology must be seen as a work in progress, allowing input from other scholarly milieus.

Theoretical framework and larger context

Jörn Rüsen (Essen) agreed in most respects with the theoretical framework given in the introduction by Karlsson (“The Holocaust as a Problem of Historical Culture. Theoretical and Analytical Challenges”). Though he found the category of non-use of history logically impossible, and also wanted to talk about aesthetical and religious uses.

His main point was that mourning, senselessness and discontinuity must be integrated into the works of historians by a “secondary traumatization”. “We need a new culture of mourning” where suffering must receive a larger importance. His argument was that the Holocaust was a traumatic, catastrophic event destroying the patterns of interpretation and the “pre-given collective identity”, pre-given in the sense that we all are born into a historical setting which we cannot choose. Rüsen also stressed the universalistic aspect of the Holocaust: It was a break with human values, and meant that also the perpetrators must be mourned in the sense that the event was a loss of humanity. He was critical to many of the ways the Holocaust is dealt with today, foremost different forms of trivialization. He saw the third generation’s talk of “we the perpetrators” in his periodization of West German ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ of the Holocaust as something positive.

Commemoration forests, victim myths and TV reception

Dalia Ofer (Jerusalem) in positive words shortly commented on the article “Calendar, Context and Commemoration. Establishing an Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day” by Mikael Tossavainen. She also presented her case study on the debate on how to commemorate the fates of the Jews under Bulgarian rule through monuments in Israel. Those who were Bulgarian citizens were spared although the country was allied to Germany; on the other hand the Macedonian and Thracian Jews in the occupied areas were sent to the German death camps. The initiative to commemorate king Boris III as a rescuer came in 1993, but met with opposition from Macedonian and Thracian Jews. Ofer distinguished five categories of voices in the protests: the personal, the moral, the political, the national, and the historical. The final result was – after the question had been investigated by a state committee – that one encompassing monument should replace those three already built.

The development in Austria was commented on by Oliver Rathkolb (Vienna/Chicago) starting from the article “The Presence of the Holocaust. ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ in West Germany, East Germany and Austria” by Pär Frohnert. Unfortunately the German aspects were only shortly under discussion as the commentator with short notice had announced that he wouldn’t turn up. Rathkolb gave an exposé of the Austrian ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ which for a long time was characterized by the non-presence of the Holocaust. The most important factor has been the victim theory. The Allies already during the war described Austria as the first victim of Germany’s aggression, a status confirmed after the war and strengthened by the Cold War when Austria was wanted as a neutral state. Another hindrance to cope with the Nazi past was the fact that Austria had experienced a home-made dictatorship preceding the ‘Anschluss’. In comparison with West Germany, where Rüsen meant that the first generation of silence and concealment had lasted into the 1960s, the Austrian first generation lasted up to the 1980s. Rathkolb saw the Waldheim debate, the generation change and foremost the end of the Cold War as the most important causes to the change in attitudes.

In her comment on Ulf Zander’s “Holocaust at the Limits. Historical Culture and the Nazi Genocide in the Television Era”, Cecilie Felicia Stokholm Banke (Copenhagen) concentrated on the Danish debate before the airing of the TV series in 1979 which was realized only after long discussions and an initial rejection from the Danish state television company. She also linked the many negative reactions in Western Europe to the dramatization to the role as bystanders during the Holocaust, in comparison to the US which in her eyes had reacted on the persecutions of the Jews.

Polish, Slovak and Ukrainian dilemmas

Starting from his comment on Kristian Gerner (“Ambivalence, Bivalence and Polyvalence. Historical Culture in the German-Polish Borderlands”), Prof. Wladyslaw Bulhac (Warsaw) extended the discussion about competing and shifting identities to the Polish borderlands in the East against Lithuania and Ukraine. The definition of Polish culture and the place of the Jews had varied. Iwona Irwin-Zarecka (Waterloo, Canada) gave her comment on Barbara Törnquist-Plewa’s article “The Jedwabne Killings – A Challenge for Polish Collective Memory”. She gave some examples that the massacre in Jedwabne, where Poles murdered their own Jewish neighbours (so the title of Jan Gross’ book) during the German occupation, hadn’t been a taboo during all the years after the war. She talked about a “layered silence”. Directly after the war there was room for Jewish testimonies, but the great change came in 1967/68 when Poland took an official anti-Israeli standpoint in the Middle East conflict and through a campaign against the 10,000 remaining Jews wanted to distract political unrest and avoid a Prague spring. Many Jews emigrated and now the Jews disappeared as victims of the Holocaust, only Poles were victims. “Poles didn’t kill any Jews” was the predominating narrative. The democratization in the 1980s gave opportunities to discuss the matter again and paved the way to Gross’ book in 2000.

In his comment on Tomas Sniegon’s article “Their Genocide, or Ours? The Holocaust as a Litmus Test of Czech and Slovak Identities” Ivan Kamenec (Bratislava) gave an overview of the Holocaust in Slovakia and how the memory had been dealt with after 1945. Being a satellite state with a kind of clerical-fascist dictatorship totally dependent on Nazi Germany, Slovakia during the war administered the deportations of most of the Slovak Jews to the death camps. Even after the war pogroms continued. The Jews had long been seen as the others in contrast to the Slovak catholic nation. This religious aspect was one factor in concealing the persecution and extermination of the Jews. Research within the field was mostly done by non-Slovaks, and after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 the Holocaust became taboo within historical research. After 1989/90 the situation changed, and all political parties distanced themselves from the former state actions. Monuments were erected and editions with source materials published. At the same time there are also attempts of new myth constructions, even from scholars in Bratislava.

Uffe Ostergaard (Copenhagen) commented on Johan Öhman’s “From Famine to Forgotten Holocaust. The 1932–1933 Famine in Ukrainian Historical Studies”. Ostergaard concentrated his comment on the question of terminology in respect to Holocaust and genocide. He formulated the question when the change in terminology had come: from the Ukrainian famine “like a Holocaust” to “as a Holocaust”. This was also a process where the Ukraine went from perpetrator to victim.

Concluding remarks

With some focus on Eastern Europe the comments and the discussions offered thorough treatments of the ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ in several countries, some of them insufficiently known before. As the first book from the project was a kind of work in progress it was very important to get this input and also to establish direct personal contacts with specialists from other countries.

In the discussions some of the participants stressed that the historians should keep to their professional capacity, i.e. to reconstruction. As Iwona Irwin-Zarecka put it: “Let the artists do the traumatization”. As she stressed that the Holocaust should not be seen as something extraordinary, she had an important concluding request to the project members to reflect over the fact that they at this very moment are interested in Holocaust memory.

Notes:
1 David S. Wyman (ed.), The World Reacts to the Holocaust, Baltimore/London 1996.
2 E.g. Rolf Steininger (ed.), Der Umgang mit dem Holocaust. Europa – USA – Israel, Wien/Köln/Weimar 1994; Werner Bergmann/Rainer Erb/Albert Lichtblau (eds.), Schwieriges Erbe. Der Umgang mit Nationalsozialismus und Antisemitismus in Österreich, der DDR und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Frankfurt a.M./New York 1995; Jürgen Danyel (ed.), Die geteilte Vergangenheit. Zum Umgang mit Nationalsozialismus und Widerstand in beiden deutschen Staaten, Berlin 1995; Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory. The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys, Cambridge, Mass. 1997; Volkhard Knigge/Norbert Frei (eds.), Verbrechen erinnern. Die Auseinandersetzung mit Holocaust und Völkermord, München 2002.