NZ: Special Issue on the memory of World War II in Russia

[Elena Gapova]

FYI: Special issue of "Neprikosnovennyi zapas" on war and memory

 http://www.eurozine.com/partner/nz/current-issue.html

Summary for NZ 40-41 (2/2005)

 This double issue of NZ is devoted to the memory of World War II in Russia,
Germany, and Europe - 60 years after the end of recent history's greatest
armed conflict. Just like our special edition on Russia as part of Europe in
2003, this issue has been prepared jointly, and is published simultaneously
in two languages by NZ and the Berlin-based monthly Osteuropa. This time,
however, the Russian version is more comprehensive, presenting a number of
original articles not featured in its German counterpart, as well as
translations of a number of French, German, and English texts on collective
memory and World War II.

Our first, theoretical section features a chapter from Maurice Halbwachs's
posthumously published book, Collective Memory, where he developed and
revised the ideas first outlined in his classic, The Social Framework of
Memory. Entitled Collective memory and historical memory, this excerpt
explains Halbwachs's distinction between historical, collective, and
personal memory, and shows how personal memory always draws on collective
structures to test, correct, and supplement its own recollections of past
events. Harald Welzer, director of the Centre for the Interdisciplinary
Study of Memory in Essen, provides an update which focuses specifically on
personal memories of the Second World War, drawing on recent work in
psychology and neuroscience (History, memory, and the presence of the past:
memory as a political arena). This section also contains a Russian
translation of Theodor Adorno's seminal 1959 lecture, What does 'working
through the past' mean?, a critical analysis of collective strategies of
guilt denial prevalent in post-war western Germany.

The next section, 'Russia and Germany: remembering and overcoming the past',
is devoted to general surveys of public memory of World War II in Russia and
Germany. It starts with a detailed interpretive article by sociologist Lev
Gudkov, who draws on survey data collected since 1989 to define the role of
memory of the Great Patriotic War in the structure of Russian identity.
Gudkov illustrates the paramount and unrivalled significance of the war
among all other events in Russian history, as judged by public opinion, and
unveils the mechanisms that block all attempts at a critical reappraisal of
the war or at including the grassroots, everyday vision of wartime life into
the official heroic picture, which serves to legitimate the Soviet and
post-Soviet political regime (The fetters of victory: how the war provides
Russia with its identity). Historian Alexander Boroznyak provides a critical
survey of the memory of the war in the Federal Republic of Germany and its
evolution since 1945. He shows how the debate on WWII and German guilt has
developed in waves corresponding more or less to successive wartime and
post-war generations (Waves of historical memory in the FRG). Art historians
Monika Flacke and Ulrike Schmiegelt look at the other side of the Iron
Curtain and describe the ways in which the eastern German state built its
identity on the idea of anti-fascism and a denial of eastern Germans'
involvement in Nazi crimes. They make special reference to the visual and
symbolic means employed to institutionalize that vision, such as the famous
statue in Berlin's Treptow Park, or the Buchenwald memorial (The GDR. From
darkness to the stars: a state in the spirit of anti-fascism). After these
general surveys, we continue with critical appraisals of commemorative
traditions in Russia and Germany. Maria Ferretti argues that, while in
post-war western Europe there was a consensus to build the new democratic
polities upon a shared memory of democratic anti-fascism, the memory of the
Great Patriotic War in Russia served only to prop up the totalitarian regime
(Unreconciled memory: war, Stalinism, and the shadows of patriotism). Jörg
Echternkamp stresses the tensions between views of 1945 as a national
catastrophe and as a national liberation that have prevailed in western
Germany ever since the event (The 'German catastrophe'? Remembering World
War II in Germany). In his essay on the historiography of the Great
Patriotic War in the USSR and Russia, Joachim Hösler asks, echoing Adorno,
What does 'working through the past' mean? The Great Patriotic War in Soviet
and Russian historiography, reviewing the debate on the war among Soviet and
Russian historians from the earliest appearance of critical voices in the
1960s, through the 'revelations' of Perestroika, to new work published since
some state archives were opened in the early 1990s. Finally, Helmut König
takes another critical look at the evolution of the memory of WWII in
western Germany, stressing especially how the myth of an untainted Wehrmacht
and the idea of Germans as victims of the war for a long time made it
difficult to come to terms with collective guilt and responsibility (From
silence to remembrance: the Shoah and World War II in the political
consciousness of the FRG).

Our columnist Alexei Levinson devotes his 'Sociological notes' to an
analysis of recent survey data showing that Russians believe all of Russia's
wars throughout the twentieth century, with the sole exception of the Great
Patriotic War, but including the two Chechen wars, to have been 'unjust'.

Next we turn to 'Forms of memory', a choice of articles on the different
ways in which the memory of the Second World War has expressed itself in
Germany and Russia. Irina Shcherbakova, the supervisor of a Russia-wide
essay competition for schoolchildren organised by Memorial, describes how
the Great Patriotic War presents itself to 15-20-year-olds today, how the
memory of the war is passed on from generation to generation, and what
regional and thematic variety is displayed in the over 15 000 essays that
have been submitted since 1999 (Looking at the memory map: young people
report on the war). Irina Pruss draws upon the same sources to make more
general observations on how the memory of WWII 'functions' with post-Soviet
teenagers. She especially stresses the co-existence of an 'official' and an
'unofficial' memory of the war, the former always coming to the fore in
public contexts and the latter being confined to the private sphere
(Grandmothers and their contemporary teenage grandchildren: another
perspective on Soviet history). Zhanna Kormina and Sergei Shtyrkov present
the findings of their anthropological fieldwork in rural areas of the Pskov
region, which was occupied by the Germans between 1941 and 1944. Through
their interviews with local inhabitants of all generations, they reconstruct
patterns of social behaviour, collaboration, and resistance, and public and
private memories of the occupation and subsequent liberation (No one and
nothing is forgotten: the occupation as oral history). Historians of culture
Natalia Konradova and Anna Ryleva contribute a richly illustrated piece
describing the history and social functions of WWII memorials in Russia and
Germany, drawing especially on their fieldwork in small towns around Moscow
(Heroes and victims: memorials in Russia and Germany). In another
illustrated article, Natalia Danilova looks at Continuity and change:
memorials to the Afghan war, 1979-1989, by showing how the commemoration of
that 'lesser' conflict has evolved in the shadow of the 'Great' war, and how
veterans' associations have set up memorials expressing their particular
vision of duty, loyalty, and death. Pavel Polian provides a critical
examination of the state-sponsored committee officially in charge of the
sixtieth anniversary festivities in May 2005, and shows how its activities
(or lack thereof) express Russian top-level bureaucrats' view of war
veterans and victims of the war (The Victory Committee as a natural
monopoly). Georgy Ramazashvili tells the story of censorship and secrecy in
the main Russian archive for military history, and his struggle against it
('Keeping history clean' as a profession: the Central Archive of the
Ministry of Defence). Gabriele Freitag, a research fellow with the German
foundation in charge of paying compensations to foreigners who were deported
by the Nazi regime to Germany to do forced labour, describes the
foundation's work and reactions by some of the recipients (Forced labour
under Nazism, 60 years later: the work of the Foundation for Memory,
Responsibility, and the Future). Dorothea Redepenning, in a wide-sweeping
comparative essay, looks at how western and eastern European composers have
tried to express the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust in their
music, and how the rigid dichotomy of 'anti-heroic' dodecaphonic music in
the West and large triumphant works in the USSR has slowly softened and
yielded to a more pluralistic musical culture (Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto
in Auschwitz: music against war and violence).

This naturally introduces the next section, entitled 'The
Internationalisation of Memory'. This starts with an article by French
historian Pierre Nora, Reasons for the current upsurge in memory, which
takes the French case as a starting point for general reflections about the
replacement of historiography by memory in public representations of the
recent past. Andreas Langenohl describes the international circulation of
symbols of WWII as it is displayed in official commemorative ceremonies such
as the anniversaries of D-Day or the end of the war (State visits:
internationalised commemoration of World War II in Russia and Germany). The
other articles in this section are 'country profiles' that show how the
memory of WWII has evolved in a number of European countries apart from
Germany and Russia. Vladislav Hrynevych writes about Ukraine (Divided
memory: World War II as remembered in Ukraine), Eva-Clarita Onken deals with
the Latvian case (From a history of liberation to a history of occupation.
The perception and memory of WWII in Latvia after 1945), Sergei Romanenko
tackles former Yugoslavia (Has World War II ended in the territory of
disintegrated Yugoslavia?), and Alessandro Portelli analyses an episode that
mirrors the complexity of the memory of WWII in Italy (The massacre at Fosse
Ardeatine: history, myth, ritual, and symbol).

The next section, 'Partial Amnesia', starts with an essay by historian Ilya
Altman which traces The ban on commemorating the Shoah: the long journey
from Soviet taboo to remembrance. Starting with the tragic story of the
Jewish Anti-fascist Committee's Black Book and ending with the creation of
the Holocaust Centre in Moscow and a range of Holocaust museums in the
former Soviet republics, Altman reviews the stages of the difficult and
unfinished process of making the Holocaust a part of the collective memory
of WWII in the USSR, Russia, and the other successor states. Journalist and
director Richard Chaim Schneider casts a highly critical glance at
commemorations of the Holocaust in Germany, which he portrays as a highly
self-centred and hollow practice that takes no notice of Jewish concerns
(German rituals of coping with the past. The return of the dead Jews and the
disappearance of the living Jews. An analytic-polemical essay). Wolfram
Wette tackles the most tenacious German myth about WWII, the idea that the
Wehrmacht fought a 'clean war' and wasn't involved in Hitler's crimes
against humanity (Hitler's Wehrmacht: stages of the debate on a German
legend). Two articles deal with the role of female soldiers on both sides of
World War II: Franka Maubach presents her research on The Wehrmacht's
'helpers': a paradigmatic figure of the end of the war, while Olga Nikonova
provides a survey of recent work on women in the Red Army (The big silence:
women in the war). Beate Fieseler recalls another neglected minority: The
suffering of the victors: invalids of the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet
Union. Finally, Jörg Ganzenmüller draws attention to Secondary theatre of
war: the siege of Leningrad in German memory. This is a followed by an
interview with a survivor of the blockade, Nikolai Viktorovich.
In his 'Humane economics' column, Yevgeny Saburov reflects upon the economic
equivalents of concepts such as love, hope, and memory, and argues that the
memory of Russia's former greatness acts as an obstacle to investment into
its future.

There follows a section on literary reminiscences of the war. Il'ya Kukulin
provides a detailed survey of reflections of the war in Soviet official and
unofficial literature, quoting from a range of works that have only been
published in recent years (The regulation of pain: coping with traumatic
experiences in Soviet war literature). Volker Hage looks at German writers'
treatment of the bombings of German cities in the final years of the war
(Buried feelings: how German writers coped with the allied bombing). Klaus
Städtke contributes a short essay on Vassily Grossman's novel, Life and
Fate, which he portrays as a theory of totalitarianism comparable with the
work of Hannah Arendt.

Our final thematic section, 'The war on the screen', opens with the
transcript of a debate on Russian media and WWII that took place in October
2004 at a conference organised by NZ. Journalists Yelena Nemykh, Konstantin
Eggert, and Sergey Parkhomenko, as well as Alexei Simonov, president of the
Glasnost Foundation, discuss a documentary radio and TV interview series
called The Birth of Victory, as well as wider issues of the post-Soviet
Russian media and their treatment of the Great Patriotic War. As a
counterpoint, German media critic Hanno Loewy analyses a recent German
documentary on the Holocaust, and shows how the media dramatisation of the
Holocaust at the hands of German TV guru Guido Knopp leads to a dangerous
trivialisation of this difficult topic (Holokaust under a full moon:
comments on a ZDF documentary from the perspective of the theory of genre).
Finally, cinema historian Neya Zorkaya analyses Wartime cinema:
visualizations between 1941 and 1945 that were presented in war-time Soviet
movies and shaped cinematic representations of the war for decades to come.

Our 'New institutions' section presents the Holocaust Centre, an institution
devoted to promoting awareness of the Holocaust in Russia.

Two very detailed 'Journal reviews' cover Russian periodicals in both
political and social studies and culture, dwelling specifically on a number
of special issues devoted to memory and the Second World War.

The 'New books' section contains reviews of over a dozen recent Russian and
German books on memory and history.

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