Abstract: Raoul Wallenberg is widely remembered for his humanitarian activity on behalf of the Hungarian Jews in Budapest at the end of World War II, and is known as the Swedish diplomat who disappeared into the Soviet Gulag in 1945. While he successfully combated Nazi racial extermination politics, he fell victim to Stalinist communism – yet another barbaric, totalitarian regime of the 20th century.
Given Wallenberg’s biography, his mission and his unresolved fate it is no wonder that Wallenberg became a figure of mythic dimensions. It is the mixture of heroics and victimhood, as well as the seemingly endless potential of possible adaptations that secures this historic figure and his mythic after-narratives its longevity. While it is without doubt the man behind the myth who deserves credit – first the man’s realness gives the myth credibility – it is the myth that secures the man’s popularity. The man and his myth depend on each other.
In this article, I will give an overview of how Wallenberg was perceived and described by survivors, in popular scholarly literature, how he has been researched by historians, and how he has been presented in different media. It will become apparent that the narrators have sought to satisfy different needs, e.g. psychological, political, and commercial ones. The narrators’ intention and attitude towards the historic person and the myth which surrounds him is of primary importance. I will show how different approaches to, and uses of, the myth exist side by side and nourish one another. And yet they can all simultaneously claim existence in their own right. By providing examples from different times and places, I like to illustrate that the popular images of Wallenberg are far less one-sided, stereotypical and homogeneous than they are often portrayed and hope to draw attention to the great potential that the Wallenberg narrative has today, as his 100th anniversary approaches in 2012.
Abstract: Das Holocaust- und Zweit-Weltkriegs-Gedenken und die daraus erwachsenen Erzählungen haben auch in der Schweiz ihre Spuren hinterlassen. Die vorhandenen „Denkmäler“ sind jedoch nicht allein materieller oder monumentaler Natur. Das jeweils Sagbare und Unsagbare zeigt sich auch im musikalischen und literarischen Schaffen, in Biografien und Selbstzeugnissen, in Spiel- und Dokumentarfilmen, in Ortsbildern, Lehrmitteln und Schulstunden sowie in Debatten über Restitutions- oder Rehabilitierungsforderungen. In diesem Buch werden unterschiedliche Aspekte und Modi der kulturellen Erinnerung versammelt, und gleichzeitig stellen die darin zur Sprache kommenden Erzählweisen ein Plädoyer der transnationalen Lesart von Holocaust-Gedenken dar. Aus dem semantische wie territoriale Grenzen überschreitenden Wissen lässt sich einiges für die eigene Disposition lernen. Deswegen geht dieser Sammelband von der Schweiz aus, trägt aber ebenso Beispiele vor, die dänische, deutsche, israelische, österreichische, schwedische oder ungarische Belange berühren.
Abstract: The article analyses the longstanding ambition of the nationalist elite in Serbia to have the site of the former Nazi concentration camp Sajmište in Belgrade transformed into a ‘Serbian Yad Vashem’, i.e. a memorial to Serbian victims of genocide in the Independent State of Croatia and the suffering of Serbs in the Ustasha-run concentration camp Jasenovac in Croatia. By deconstructing various assumptions about the historical link between Sajmište and Jasenovac which have been used to justify this initiative, the chapter draws attention to the tradition of manipulation of the history of the two camps in Serbia. It also shows that the origins of the contentious interpretation of the history of Sajmište, lie, in part, in the ‘memory wars’ between Serbian and Croatian nationalists who, in the 1990s, skilfully manipulated the history of both Sajmište and Jasenovac, all in the context of mutual accusations of ‘genocidal tendencies’, complicity in the Holocaust and antisemitism. Therefore, debates about Sajmište and its links with Jasenovac should be seen as yet another example of the interdependence between Serbian and Croatian nationalist discourses, which, over the past three decades have resisted attempts to forge a historically grounded culture of remembrance of the victims of the Second World War in Yugoslavia. Also, through the story of the memorialisation of Sajmište, the chapter points to the lasting effect which events of the 1990s have had on historical memory in Serbia, especially in relation to the Holocaust, and other crimes perpetrated in Yugoslavia between 1941 and 1945.
Abstract: Following Hoskins’ often-cited notion of “new memories” (Hoskins 2001), which are generated by traditional media in the broadcast-era, now, in a post-broadcast age, we seem to face yet another “memory boom” (Huyssen 2003), also known as a “connective turn” (Hoskins 2011). Instead of focusing on the consequences of this connective turn, however, in this paper, we aim to conceptualize another kind of (dis)connection: we analyse the interrelatedness of various – digital and analogue, virtual and material – memories. Focusing on the diverse practices of memorialising the Hungarian Shoah, and more specifically, on the controversy over the Memorial to the Victims of German Occupation in the urban, as well as digital space, we do not only show how memories (dis)connect an actual and a virtual community, but also how these different kinds of memories (dis)connect with each other in the urban and digital space.
Abstract: W artykule poddałam analizie strategie obrazowania Zagłady w inicjatywach upamiętniają-cych społeczności żydowskie w lokalnej Polsce. Zagłada Żydów jest przykładem trudnej pa-mięci, która podważa grupowe wartości i normy społeczne, co w przypadku lokalnych spo-łeczności wiąże się z doświadczeniami „bycia blisko Zagłady”. Pozycja względem cierpieniaspołeczności żydowskiej stała się punktem wyjścia zróżnicowanych postaw (współ)odpowie-dzialności i (współ)uczestnictwa członków lokalnych społeczności w zagładzie Żydów. Czę-sto pamięć o tych wydarzeniach pozostawała przedmiotem lokalnego przekazu potocznegopo wojnie. W związku z tym w powojennych miejscowościach, do Zagłady zamieszkiwanychprzez liczne społeczności żydowskie, uformowały się specyiczne wspólnoty pamięci cha-rakteryzujące się zmową milczenia dotyczącą lokalnej historii i kultury żydowskiej. W ostat-nim czasie w tak ukształtowanych przestrzeniach społecznych można zaobserwować corazwięcej inicjatyw upamiętniających, które przywołują różne aspekty lokalnego dziedzictważydowskiego. W składających się na upamiętnianie praktykach i produktach pamięci grupaopowiada zwykle o sobie samej. Przywoływanie – głównie przez nieżydowskich mieszkań-ców – historii i kultury Żydów w przestrzeniach mniejszych miejscowości jest zatem sytuacjąproblematyczną etycznie. W artykule analizuję składające się na upamiętnienie praktyki (dnipamięci, wykłady, inscenizacje, spacery) i produkty pamięci (książki, ilmy dokumentalne,wystawy w lokalnych muzeach, pomniki) dotyczące zagłady lokalnych Żydów pod względemformy, treści i zaangażowanych w nie aktorów społecznych. Pozwala to scharakteryzować, jakgrupa postrzega samą siebie bądź chce być postrzegana w kontekście przywoływanej histo-rii Zagłady. Ważne pozostaje, co w konkretnym wizerunku przeszłości pozostaje nieobecnei przemilczane. W artykule wyróżniam trzy strategie obrazowania zagłady Żydów: 1) neu-tralizowania i zamykania trudnych tematów; 2) równoważenia, wyłączania i podporządko-wywania historii zagłady Żydów; 3) włączenia i uznania pamięci żydowskiej. Zastosowałamkrytyczną analizę dyskursu, odwołując się m.in. do analizy przemocy ilosemickiej ElżbietyJanickiej i Tomasza Żukowskiego. Przywołuję wyniki m.in. socjologicznych badań jakościo-wych zrealizowanych studiów przypadków w Bobowej, Dąbrowie Tarnowskiej i Rymanowie(2010–2016). Przeprowadziłam wówczas analizę danych zastanych, indywidualne wywiadypogłębione oraz wywiady grupowe, jak i obserwację uczestniczącą.
Abstract: In this article, I discuss what I term “Jewface” minstrelsy performance and “Jewfaçade” display in three contemporary contexts with highly divergent historical backgrounds: East-Central Europe, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Jewish Autonomous Republic, a fictitious-sounding but real colony established by Stalin in far eastern Russia near China and still extant today. Jewface encompasses music, dance, theater, and extra-theatrical modes of performance, in which non-Jews dress up and act like “Jews,” as historically imagined; Jewfaçade encompasses museum-type installations, as well as architectural and decorative constructions, depicting imagined “Jewish” life. These “Diaspora Disneys” vary from the education- and tolerance-oriented to the crassly exploitative and commercial to the bizarrely confused. None have much to do with actual Jews, but all convey a tremendous amount regarding dominant “host” cultures’ anxieties over not only their roles in past persecution and genocide but also their own present cultures, politics, and positions in the wider world today. Further, they present a wide array of models of memoriological projection and desire, in what I explicate as spectra of “plethoric” to “voidic” memoriological scenarios and “negotiatory” to “constitutory” memoriological strategies.
Abstract: A “Jew-themed” restaurant provides its patrons with broad-brimmed black hats with foot-long sidecurls to wear, and the menu has no prices; patrons must bargain, or “Jew,” the staff down. A play billed as a tribute to a lost Jewish community ends in a gag: Death throws back his shroud to reveal an open-brain-pate wig, à la the horror flick Nightmare on Elm Street. In a “traditional Jewish wedding dance,” “Jewish wealth” is represented by a local luxury: vacuum-packed juice boxes. In parts of the world where Jews, once populous, have nearly vanished because of oppression, forced exile, and genocide, non-Jews now strive to re-enact what has been lost. In this essay, I will consider three general cases of what I term “Jewface” minstrelsy and
“Jewfaçade” display, in Krakow, Poland; the village of Hervás in western Spain; and Birobidzhan, capital city of Russia’s far-eastern Jewish Autonomous Region, which is known as Birobidzhan as well. Jewface-resembling the “blackface” prevalent in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-is the practice of music, dance, theatre, and/or extra-theatrical types of performance, primarily by non-Jews, intended to convey notions of historical Jewish life and culture. Jewfaçade involves architectural and decorative constructions, again mainly by nonJews, meant to evoke ideas of the Jew in similar ways. Ruth Ellen Gruber, the team of Daniela Flesler and Adrian Pérez Melgosa, and other journalists and scholars have documented what Michael Brenner has called “Jewish culture without Jews” in Poland and Spain, as well as elsewhere in Europe (Brenner 1997: 152). However, no comparative study has been made, and no scholar has approached this topic with regard to Birobidzhan. I will provide brief overviews of Jewface and Jewfaçade activities in Krakow, Hervás, and Birobidzhan. I will then demonstrate the ways in which the notions of the figure of the Jew and of local Jewish history are performed, or acted out in these three comparative geographical contexts. These cases, as, in conclusion, I will argue, represent three very different approaches to public memory and memorialization with regard to the Jew, and perhaps in regard to troubled historical legacies more generally.
Abstract: In 2015, Spain approved a law that offered citizenship to the descendants of Sephardi Jews expelled in 1492. Drawing on archival, ethnographic, and historical sources, I show that this law belongs to a political genealogy of philosephardism in which the “return” of Sephardi Jews has been imagined as a way to usher in a deferred Spanish modernity. Borrowing from anthropological theories of “racial fusion,” philosephardic thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century saw Sephardi Jews as inheritors of a racial mixture that made them living repositories of an earlier moment of national greatness. The senator Ángel Pulido, trained as an anthropologist, channeled these intellectual currents into an international campaign advocating the repatriation of Sephardi Jews. Linking this racial logic to an affective one, Pulido asserted that Sephardi Jews did not “harbor rancor” for the Expulsion, but instead felt love and nostalgia toward Spain, and could thus be trusted as loyal subjects who would help resurrect its empire. Today, affective criteria continue to be enmeshed in debates about who qualifies for inclusion and are inextricable from the histories of racial thought that made earlier exclusions possible. Like its precursors, the 2015 Sephardic citizenship law rhetorically fashioned Sephardi Jews as fundamentally Spanish, not only making claims about Sephardi Jews, but also making claims on them. Reckoning with how rancor and other sentiments have helped buttress such claims exposes the recalcitrant hold that philosephardic thought has on Spain's present, even those “progressive” political projects that promise to “return” what has been lost.
Abstract: At the core of the debate in Ukraine about Babi Yar lies the Holocaust. Between 1941 and 1943 1.5 million Jews perished in Ukraine, yet a full understanding of that tragedy has been suppressed consistently by ideologies and interpretations of history that minimize or ignore this tragedy. For Soviet ideologues, admitting to the existence of the Holocaust would have been against the tenet of a “Soviet people” and the aggressive strategy of eliminating national and religious identities. A similar logic of oneness is being applied now in the ideological formation of an independent Ukraine. However, rather than one Soviet people, now there is one Ukrainian people under which numerous historical tragedies are being subsumed, and the unique national tragedies of other peoples on the territory of Ukraine, such as the massive destruction of Jews, is again being suppressed. According to this political idea assiduously advocated most recently during the Yushchenko presidency, the twentieth century in Ukraine was a battle for liberation. Within this new, exclusive history, the Holocaust, again, has found no real place. The author reviews the complicated history regarding the memorialization of the Jewish tragedy in Babi Yar through three broad chronological periods: 1943–1960, 1961–1991, and 1992–2009.
Topics: Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Antisemitism, Holocaust, Holocaust Survivors, Holocaust Survivors: Children of, Holocaust Commemoration, Memory, Memorial, Post-War Reconstruction, Post-1989, Jewish Renewal, Post-War Jewish History
Abstract: In a time of national introspection regarding the country’s involvement in the persecution of Jews, Poland has begun to reimagine spaces of and for Jewishness in the Polish landscape, not as a form of nostalgia but as a way to encourage the pluralization of contemporary society. The essays in this book explore issues of the restoration, restitution, memorializing, and tourism that have brought present inhabitants into contact with initiatives to revive Jewish sites. They reveal that an emergent Jewish presence in both urban and rural landscapes exists in conflict and collaboration with other remembered minorities, engaging in complex negotiations with local, regional, national, and international groups and interests. With its emphasis on spaces and built environments, this volume illuminates the role of the material world in the complex encounter with the Jewish past in contemporary Poland.
Contents:
Introduction / Erica Lehrer and Michael Meng
1. “Oświęcim”/ “Auschwitz”: Archeology of a Mnemonic Battleground / Geneviève Zubrzycki
2. Restitution of Communal Property and the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland / Stanislaw Tyszka
3. Muranów as a Ruin: Layered Memories in Postwar Warsaw / Michael Meng
4. Stettin, Szczecin, and the “Third Space.” Urban nostalgia in the German/Polish/Jewish borderlands / Magdalena Waligórska
5. Rediscovering the Jewish Past in the Polish Provinces: The Socio-Economics of Nostalgia / Monika Murzyn-Kupisz
6. Amnesia, Nostalgia, and Reconstruction: Shifting Modes of Memory in Poland’s Jewish Spaces / Slawomir Kapralski
7. Jewish Heritage, Pluralism, and Milieux de Memoire: the case of Krakow’s Kazimierz / Erica Lehrer
8. The Ethnic Cleansing of the German-Polish-Jewish ‘Lodzermensch’ / Winson Chu
9. Stony Survivors: Images of Jewish Space on the Polish Landscape / Robert L. Cohn
10. Reading the Palimpsest / Konstanty Gebert
11. A Jew, a Cemetery, and a Polish Village: A Tale of the Restoration of Memory
Jonathan Webber
12. The Museum of the History of Polish Jews: A Post-War, Post-Holocaust, Post-Communist Story / Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Epilogue: Jewish Spaces and their Future / Diana Pinto
Abstract: A bennünket körülvevő világot azáltal lakjuk be, hogy jelentéssel töltjük
meg. Sokszor ugyanannak a térnek a legkülönbözőbb jelentései alakulnak ki.
A jelentéshez pedig használat társul, legyen szó az ünnepek rítusairól vagy a
mindennapok rutinjairól. A különböző csoportok különbözőképpen használhatják
ugyanazt a teret. A tér – puszta fizikai megjelenésén túl – a kogníció
szintjére is kivetül: tapasztaljuk, ábrázoljuk azt, s emlékezünk rá, elbeszéléseinkben
újraalkotjuk azt. Mindehhez keretet pedig az a csoport szolgáltat,
amelyhez tartozunk.
Hacar hakados Makave – a Makói Szent Udvar alatt a makói orthodox
főrabbi belzi chászid mintákat követő dédunokáját, Simon Lemberger rabbit
közösségi vallási tekintélyként elismerő elszármazott makói orthodox zsidók
értendők, akik többnyire a Szentföldön, részben pedig az USA-ban, Bécsben,
Londonban és Ausztráliában élnek.
A történeti Magyarország területéről különböző világvárosokban újraalakult
orthodox és chászid zsidó közösségek gyökeres változásokra adott válasza
az azoj ví in der alter chájm elve lett, amely szerint ugyanúgy kell tenni
mindent, mint a régi hazában. Ennek újratapasztalását 1994-től a makói világ
találkozók segítik.
A felújított orthodox zsinagóga a makóiság egyik fő jelképévé vált. Az egykori
Nagy és Kis zsidó utca a zarándoklatok során a felmenők elveszített
világát segít felidézni. A közösségi és genealógiai emlékezet szempontjából
hasonló jelentőségűek a közösség egykori temetői, amelyek a makói közösség
folytonosságát jelenítik meg az 1740 körüli püspöki telepítéstől a 20. század
közepéig. Vorhand Mózes rabbi emléke körül pedig egy új nemzedéki emlékezet
és „makóiság” új környezetbe illeszkedő önértelmezése alakul ki.
