Terms of Endearment: The Politics of Holocaust Remembrance in Post-Communist Europe

Why do we teach children history, and why do we construct public monuments and museums devoted to remembering the past? Children are taught history and adults are reminded of their country's past not because knowing history, as it actually happened, is valued for its own sake, but because elites want their people to identify with their country, to love it, to accept the obligations of citizenship, and, when necessary, to sacrifice their lives for it. Sociology began as a field with the concern that once the bonds of tradition had eroded, the sources of solidarity binding societies together would have to be different, and one of the most important projects they identified was the "nation." The nation is built upon stories we tell ourselves, mostly feel-good stories about origins and overcoming adversity.

What if American children learned in school the following? The core history of the country is essentially one of an intolerant religious group coming to the new world, establishing a society that would first carry out a genocide, import enslaved Africans, and pass laws to preserve slavery for as long as possible. If this is what children learned and this lesson were reinforced in the public square, what sort of obligations could the state place on its citizens? It's difficult to say, but of course we don't do that. We teach the fairy-tale version (pilgrims sharing food with native people at Thanksgiving, the good fight against slavery in the civil war, the liberation of the world from Nazi tyranny under US leadership, the victory of the civil rights movement) so that our children love the country, and only then do we add layers of complexity over time, slowly going through some of the more painful events and aspects of the American experience. Scholars and citizens disagree about what should be included in this syllabus of pain, which heroes should have their statues preserved or removed, how much the suffering of others not included in the feel-good version should be thematized in schools, museums, and public monuments. If a country as secure as the United States worries about its own identity when considering the darker periods of its history, this can only be more difficult in newly created countries or those that have experienced regime change.

In her thoroughly researched and engagingly presented comparative study of the politics of Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe after communism, Jelena Subotić does exactly that with in-depth case studies of Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania (plus extensions to Slovakia, Ukraine, and Russia). She asks why it should be so difficult for the East European countries to acknowledge their histories of indifference and complicity during the Holocaust. Her answer is highly original and, like all good ideas, deceptively simple. She invokes the term "ontological insecurity" to account for the phenomenon of Holocaust obfuscation. In the post-communist world, it is no longer possible for countries simply to deny the Holocaust occurred or reject some measure of their population's complicity. This poses a huge dilemma. Acknowledging their guilt or even the truth of what happened threatens to discredit the story they like to tell themselves and others about their own virtue, their own victimhood, the injustices they suffered. Promoting the historical truth about what happened threatens their own sense of who they are, and for countries that are uncertain about their own existence, for states with "small country nationalism," these narratives of virtue, victimhood, and injustice are too valuable to dilute with what are perceived as rival Jewish stories of suffering, which they themselves helped bring about or simply ignored. The result is a politics that Subotić terms "mneumonic," by which she means memory politics in which elites carefully police the boundaries of public discourse so as not to offend national sensibilities while also staying in the good graces of the new Western hegemons. It involves officially sanctioned institutions, laws, memorials, curricula, treaties, museums, art exhibits, and plays. In all of these cases, the Holocaust is put to use as an instrument in delegitimizing and criminalizing the communist past...