Decentering "Cosmopolitan" Holocaust Memory

In her book, Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism, Jelena Subotić masterfully dissects the mnemonic strategies employed by state actors in post-communist Europe in the wake of the post-1989 geopolitical realignment. She analyzes ways in which those states aim to blunt the threatening political edge of Holocaust memory and domesticate it for nation-building purposes. In the core of the book—three case studies, focusing on Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania—Subotić shows how these different states have appropriated the narrative tropes and strategies, and sometimes even the tone of Holocaust memorialization, to foreground the story of national victimhood at the center of their respective nation-building projects. Through this process of appropriation, Holocaust memory is removed from its historical context and reduced to remembering a few disjointed episodes, whose sacralization and ritual commemoration, instead of raising disconcerting questions about practical dangers of nationalist homogenization or organized exclusion, instead foreground historical national victimhood under communism. Jewish victims of the Holocaust are thus marginalized, their exclusion from the nation cemented; the "real" victim that emerges from this narrative aided by Holocaust commemoration practices is the (non-Jewish) nation, victimized by communism and in critical need of post-communist reshaping.

Central to this project of appropriation and distortion of Holocaust memory is the revision of the history of the communist past, and Subotić's analysis brings together three different cases to the theoretical framework of "ontological insecurity." In the wake of the fall of communism and the new European and global reconfiguration, peripheral state actors from the formerly communist world find themselves in need of new national myths. The narratives of the "return to Europe" and "two totalitarianisms" are powerful anchors of what, in this paradigm, would constitute "ontological security"; in this rendering of history, the Holocaust is decentered, and its horrors are repurposed to narrate the story of postwar suffering under communism.

Although Subotić's argument brilliantly situates Serbia's, Croatia's, and Lithuania's revisionist narratives into this broader theoretical framework, this is not an entirely novel contribution to our understanding of strategies of Holocaust relativization and outright denial employed in nationalist projects. In an exceptional, yet often overlooked book that is almost two decades old, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism, István Rév showed how a Hungarian nationalist post- (and anti-) communist narrative was forged, relying heavily on the repurposing of history, in the decade or so immediately following the rupture of 1989. While Subotić's argument is about states, Rév was writing about a transitional period on the individual level, one closely resembling what could be called "ontological insecurity": "Gone were the certainties, the pillars of one's life…. What remained was unknown. At that point between the lost and the not-yet comprehended, historians, politicians, and professional and amateur self-proclaimed experts offered support to remake the world."¹ Yet Rév was also living and working amid these expert remakers of the world, and his focus was, somewhat narrowly, on Hungary. Subotić's perspective, on the other hand, comes a generation later, to offer a more sweeping argument about "Holocaust remembrance after communism," as the subtitle of the book states. And while Rév's idiosyncratic book offers wonderful musings on the vagaries of historical revision and its poetic in/justices, Subotić's framework of "ontological insecurity" expertly weaves together disparate strategies of appropriation and revision to provide a "missing link in the existing literature," as her fellow political scientist Mila Dragojević has noted, "examining the memorialization practices and processes of national identity formation."²

Another important contribution of Yellow Star, Red Star is the shift of focus—through important comparative lens—to southeastern Europe. There is a significant body of scholarship on Holocaust memory and its turns in different contexts—the United States, Israel, central and western Europe, contexts constituting "centers," to a lesser or greater extent, of post-Holocaust Jewish life.³ Jewish history has explored the topics of Holocaust memory and memorialization for at least a generation already, but bringing the post-Yugoslav space into the conversation is a trailblazing and necessary move. Political scientists and historians...