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In Malaysia, even the ghosts are transnational. Rani Manicka’s 2002 debut novel The Rice Mother follows the intergenerational narratives of a diasporic Ceylonese family in Malaysia. As they reflect on the atrocities of the Second World War and Japanese Occupation – notably the abduction and presumed murder of the eldest daughter, Mohini, by Japanese soldiers – each family member shares their haunted relationship with Mohini’s ghost. While Avery Gordon and Kathleen Brogan have examined how hauntings can characterize social or ethnic loss, Mohini’s hauntings are unique to the Ceylonese diaspora in Malaysia. In addition to the family members encountering her ghost through dreams – significant connections to the spiritual world in Hindu mythology – Mohini’s character is inspired by the mohini pey, a legendary ghost from Southern India and Sri Lanka. However, the discrepancy between mohini the ghost and Mohini the character interrogates the malleability of memory across generations. How might hauntings – manifestations of the traumatic past – change as generations evolve and reaffiliate cultural memory over time? Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, this paper examines the family’s evolving relationship with Mohini’s ghost and argues that the residual power of diasporic heritage inherited through storytelling provides a path for generational healing in a new homeland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractFor centuries, international reparations were commonly exacted as a form of victor’s justice after war. Following World War II, however, the bitter legacy of the Treaty of Versailles and West Germany’s compensation of Nazism’s victim shifted this practice, ushering in a novel moral economy of international reparations. Yet, while recent decades have seen increased transnational activism around reparations, as well as interstate aid payments and official apologies, international reparations remain infrequent, and agreements often fail to end financial claims. This paper argues that one explanation for this lackluster record is a central paradox relating to finality. Though international reparations are designed to settle accounts and provide a basis for deeper reconciliation, by opening issues of traumatic memory to public debate, they often achieve the opposite effect and inspire a cascade of further financial claims. As evidence, we examine three cases of international reparations’ occurrence and rejection: Germany’s reparations for Nazi-era crimes, the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) formation following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and reparations negotiated but removed from the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. Employing process tracing methods on archival documents, we demonstrate in each case how this paradox helps explain international reparations’ limitations as a practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay adds to previous research of Putinism an investigation of the political thought and foreign outlooks of Russia's Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev and Head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Sergei Naryshkin, with a focus on their statements between 2006 to 2020. The paper outlines Patrushev's and Naryshkin's thoughts regarding the United States, Ukraine, and the idea of multipolarity/polycentrism. We then introduce Patrushev's critique of liberal values and color revolutions, and Naryshkin's statements on the memory of World War II and Western institutions. The salience of these altogether seven topics is interpreted with reference to three classical topoi in Russian political thought: the Slavophile vs. Westerners controversy, the single-stream theory, and the civilizational paradigm. Our conclusions inform the ongoing debate on whether to conceptualize Putinism as either an ideology or a mentality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arthur C. Danto's distinction between monuments and memorials proposes a differentiation between two ideologically-determined modes of commemoration, encompassing not just architectural symbols of the past but also all other forms of cultural 'remembering', including documentary, literary, and cinematic forms of representation. My discussion will focus on a photographic album significantly entitled The Last Good War and the transhistorical depictions of the war veteran in the film Memorial Day. The purpose of this paper is to underscore the ideological ambivalences at the heart of the American Second World War veteran 'craze', which not only paved the way for overriding the post-Vietnam War cultural legacy, but also served to ethically and ideologically legitimize contemporary US military interventions in national (collective) memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural heritage is an integral part of a people's identity, both for future generations and for preservation of historical memory and cultural development. In the face of the aggression of the Russian Federation, preservation of Ukraine's cultural heritage requires the joint efforts of national and international organisations, scientists and cultural experts. The paper compares the loss and damage brought about by Russia's war on Ukraine since 2014 to the loss and damage inflicted by Germany during World War II. Both aggressors have inflicted serious damage with large-scale theft and looting of cultural values on the territory of Ukraine, destroying architectural monuments, museums and libraries, with the aim of erasing national awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Bal’s narratology, underlaid by participant observation, and complemented by interviews, this paper provides a cultural analysis of the permanent exhibition of the Schindler Factory Museum which opened in 2010 in Krakow, Poland. The paper points to current heritage making processes in connection to both the communist period and World War II (WWII) in Poland. The paper suggests that despite an apparent focus on WWII, the exhibition narrative may, albeit indirectly, address the history written under communism and its protracted collective memory. Such an analysis offers a case to investigate cultural heritage as participating and reflecting dynamics between history writing and memory in contemporary Poland between local, national and transcultural memory making processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the different ways in which the Battle of Okinawa in World War II is presented in and beyond formal education, using narratives and photos in Japan's state-authorized history textbooks and at a local museum. Specifically, this study examines 15 upper secondary school textbooks issued by six publishing companies from across the political spectrum and analyzes the narratives and photos used in these textbooks to depict and explain the Battle of Okinawa, together with the digital archives and official guidebook of the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum (OPPMM). The arguments and findings are three-fold. First, despite the line-by-line scrutiny of textbook contents by the state, individual textbooks show different narratives of the battle, and the monolithic view regarding the "Japanese textbook" is not sustained. Second, there are general differences of the battle's presentations between the school textbooks as a group and the OPPMM. Third, a crucial gap between them in presenting the Battle of Okinawa and World War II is in the perception of the "enemy". This gap needs to be understood, as the museum's presentation implies, with a prolonged relationship of contestation between Okinawa and "mainland Japan", dating back to the late 19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Issue of First World War Studies considers the specifically American literary and cultural production of the First World War and what distinguishes it from other national war literatures and cultures. Together the articles seek to assess how we should characterize, theorize and categorize American First World War cultural production. Despite the many memorials and memory sites to American participation, and the impact of the recent centenary, public memory of the conflict in the US remains minimal, overshadowed by the Civil War on one side and the Second World War and the Vietnam War on the other. The Eurocentric focus of the key works of First World War cultural criticism – by Paul Fussell, Samuel Hynes, Modris Eksteins and Jay Winter – is perhaps due to what Hazel Hutchison notes as the strange place of the war in American cultural memory, as a war which 'has never quite captured the public imagination' (The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War, 2015). Instead it is usually focused through the 'lost generation' writers of the 1920s: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, et al. Bringing together a range of scholars and drawing predominantly on literature and film by male and female non-combatants as well as participants, the case studies here consider American First World War novels, poetry, political papers, film, and screenplays. Interdisciplinary readings allow the contributors to find generic tropes and connections across different media. In this way we seek to contribute to an ongoing conversation about American First World War cultural production, and a critical field that is very much still in the process of formation and consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social & Cultural Geography is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper looks at how the memory and, subsequently, narratives of the Waffen SS "Galicia," later known as the 1st Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army, are being (re)constructed and presented to a wider audience by scholars, politicians, and World War II veterans. The narratives and political framings of the "Galicia" Division tend to divide into two dichotomous approaches, each presenting itself as "historical truth." On the one hand, the ex-members are often portrayed as traitors, opportunists, and war criminals. On the other, ex-"Galicians" are seen as those who arguably chose "the lesser of two evils" and joined the German Army in order to defend their motherland against the Soviet invasion and build a nucleus for the Ukrainian army. Rather than follow the well-trodden paths of attempting to justify or condemn the Division's actions, this paper analyzes how the interpretations of the Division's identity are presented in contemporary debates, addressing at the same time the concept of memory. It offers a discussion of the political framing of history in contemporary Ukraine and of the challenges that Ukrainian historiography faces with regard to the question of World War II in general and the "Galicia" Division in particular. In this way the paper seeks to contribute to an understanding of the institutionalization of memory and the shaping of national identity through existing and newly emerged narratives about World War II in contemporary Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines contrasting memories of Soviet and émigré discourses in Ukrainian literature. The Soviet discourse tended to sanitize the war experience, exploiting the concept of the Great Patriotic War, along the ideological lines of the socialist realist style in literature, with a designated set of topics and characteristics to glorify this war, including the leading role of the Communist party, and Soviet messianism. Despite some periods of liberalization, this model remained under the tight control of the Moscow centre and was reinforced after Brezhnev's re-introduction of Victory Day. Presenting an alternative voice, the émigré discourse is shown as a more vibrant one, which found itself on a mission to undermine the mono-centric nature of the imperial discourse and record the complex truth about the war. Being a deliberate attempt to battle for its own representation, the émigré discourse, though with its own biases, addressed all those issues ignored in Soviet literature, including the critical attitude of Ukrainians to the Soviet regime and the war, the portrayal of the resistance movement, and the presentation of World War II as a tragedy for the Ukrainian nation, caught between fascism and Bolshevism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the formation of place-based war memories in contemporary Japan by examining the Japanese grassroots movements to preserve war-related sites within the local and national politics of “cultural property,” and the developments in which the Ichigayadai Building No. 1 in Tokyo and the Matsushiro Underground Imperial General Headquarters Complex in Nagano are conserved to recall the memories of the Asia-Pacific War in Japan. Both places embody the war of aggression carried out by Imperial Japan in the twentieth century. The Ichigaya site was home to the Imperial General Headquarters during the war. The Matsushiro site refers to gigantic underground shelters and tunnels built at the end of the war to relocate the Imperial General Headquarters of the Ichigaya site. Both sites gained social and national attention in the 1990s by raising questions of how to convey memories of suffering caused as well as suffering experienced to the next generation. By introducing the struggles to conserve war-related sites, I argue that contemporary Japan's public memory-making and -remaking processes are shaped by contestants to reclaim places. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes the popular response to Soviet myths in the post-Soviet period through the lens of the complicated treatment of Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia. As arguably the most famous Soviet World War II martyr, Kosmodem'ianskaia's image splintered after glasnost' and has been located at the nexus of debate in various media since 1991. This paper poses questions about the fracturing of national memory when a nation has undergone upheaval: about the stability of heroes, about citizens' responses to them, and about heroes' transformation in the new regime. Catriona Kelly has demonstrated that the treatment of a national hero can illuminate the circumstances that produced the hero and the cultural climate of subsequent decades. Building on her work, this article asks "Why and how has the image of Kosmodem'ianskaia remained relevant while other Soviet heroes have been neglected since 1991?" This article posits that Kosmodem'ianskaia's continued significance lies above all in the flexibility of her image and the transitional aspects of her body. Her depictions in various contexts represent prominent responses to the authoritarian regime which gave birth to both Kosmodem'ianskaia and her legacy. The variety of her images demonstrates the continued relevance of this figure two decades after the collapse of the USSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 15 February 2002 a new World War II interpretive centre was opened in Singapore. A colonial bungalow was redeveloped by the National Archives of Singapore to commemorate the Malay Regiment and particularly the officers and soldiers who made a heroic stand against Japanese forces in one of the last battles before the fall of Singapore. This centre, Reflections at Bukit Chandu, has significance in terms of local heritage development, public memory of war, national education initiatives, and also in relation to the changing role of archives in Singapore. This paper serves as an exploration of this heritage site and uses this as a starting point for considering public history in Singapore and importantly a new direction for the National Archives of Singapore, as it played the key role in developing this site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the workings of ghosts in Second World War London, particularly what they reveal about the experience, representation, and management of life under fire. It brings together urban-historical, psychological, and cultural/commemorative approaches in tracing how ghosts were used to articulate the turbulence of bombardment. Arguing that ghosts represent a useful tool for bridging the gap between different readings of wartime London, the article pays attention to the universal dimensions of air raids and particular local variations. The article suggests that the workings of ghosts—and the psychology of believing more broadly—represent an important, if neglected, aspect of the civilian experience of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the life stories and the obscured past of the Latvian Roma with a focus on narratives of persecution during World War II. These narratives, while preserved in family circles and communicative memory, lack wider attention as the commemoration of victims of genocide is not well developed in Latvia. This research attempts to understand what prevents memories from entering the public sphere. For that, the author turns to Romani memory culture and other social factors that can influence the perpetuation of the collective memory of genocide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

R. Bidlack and N. Lomagin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); L.A. Kirschenbaum I The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments i (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); A. Peri, I The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad i (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); A. Zemskov-Züge I Zwischen politischen Strukturen und Zeitzeugenschaft. A key aspect of the current siege boom is not the siege itself, but the memory of it. The siege, which has always been directly connected with the personal histories of a huge number of siege survivors and their relatives and descendants, transforms before our eyes into a trope for social mobilization that gives rise not just to disputes, but also to actions. Projects to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad have predictably given rise to a wave of public debates about the history of the siege: its significance for the city's and country's history, the correspondence of existing memory to the scale of the tragedy, and the adequacy of the state's practices to commemorate it. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines how the traumatic experiences of previous Indo-European or Indische generations shape future generations' intergenerational family dynamics and practices within home environments. By analysing life story interviews with Indo-Europeans from the first, second and third generation within twenty-one families, we illustrate how intergenerational hauntings are embodied, expressed and negotiated among various generations within home environments. The Indo-European diaspora has multi-generational 'mixed' Dutch-Indonesian ancestry and collective memories of the colonial Dutch East Indies, the Japanese occupation of Indonesia during the Second World War, the Indonesian National Revolution, and families' subsequent repatriation to the Netherlands. Shaped by their alleged success in having silently assimilated in the Netherlands, public narratives often neglect Indo-Europeans' daily realities and histories. We argue that personal and collective histories of war violence, racialized violence and displacement are deeply ingrained in Indo-European intergenerational and gendered family dynamics and practices in home environments. These intergenerational hauntings are imbued in both presence and absence in the various atmospheres and social and physical spaces of home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined whether and how conversational roles shape the extent to which details and recollections surrounding World War II (WWII) emerge in family conversations. Each family was tasked with collaboratively discussing four topics surrounding WWII specific to Belgium. We then conducted both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The former compared the collaborative recall with each family member's individual recall; the latter focused on the conversational roles and dynamics within each family. While the results suggest that familial discussions lead to more "old" (from the individual recollection) recollections than "new" recollections, about 40% new recollections did emerge; however, with fewer personal details surrounding the discussed recollections. Although, the extent to which more details and new recollections emerged during the conversations across families depended on the conversational roles adopted by each discussant. Our results are discussed in terms of the importance of conversational roles in understanding when and how memories may emerge within a conversation and, in turn, transmit across generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rediscovery of State "Roots" As Anthony Smith explains, claiming antiquity, or an early, first, and uninterrupted continuous presence in the area inhabited by members of the nation is one of the key components of nationhood myths.[7] In the post-Yugoslav region, this largely meant "rediscovering" an ancient past, along with emphasising the "golden era" of the nation. Our analysis below thus focuses primarily on nationalizing memory at the official (state) level, though we also comment on the role of non-state actors and international processes in supporting or opposing state memory politics, as well as their manifestation in popular culture. While the role of the state is still most important in establishing hegemonic narratives of the nation, other non-state actors actively participate in promoting or opposing these narratives, while international processes such as Europeanisation and the ICTY proceedings importantly affect state memory politics. The post-Yugoslav region is frequently taken as a textbook example of how states can harness the past as a tool for the needs of the present. [Extracted from the article]

Addressing eight online focus groups in the four Visegrád Countries (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic), the researchers specifically asked the participants questions designed to examine the relationship between competitive victimhood and antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and Holocaust distortion. Putin insists he launched the "special operation" because "Ukraine's government is "openly neo-Nazi" and "pro-Nazi", controlled by 'little Nazis.'"[21] These assertions not only cast Ukraine as an enemy on the scale of Nazi Germany, but also allude to Soviet suffering and losses in World War II at the hands of the Nazis. Of course, one need not equate the crimes against ethnic Belarussians to the crimes committed during the Holocaust in order to highlight them, nor should the Holocaust be ignored when confronting the history of Belarus during World War II. According to Nikolay Koposov, who has written about Eastern European memory laws, this legislation "was an obvious attempt to downplay the importance of the Holocaust and present the Poles rather than the Jews as Hitler's main victims."[26] A certain ambivalence toward the Holocaust has remained, however, even in the Polish judiciary. [Extracted from the article]

During 1941, while France was being crushed under the iron fist of the Third Reich, the cartoonists Edmond François Calvo, and Victor Dancette began work on La Bête est Morte – La guerre Mondiale Chez Les Animaux [The Beast is Dead: The World War Among the Animals]. The two, secretly wrote and drew a cartoon epic that reimagined the history of the French nation during the war and cast animals as the warring nations. During 1944, a few months after the liberation, the first part of the work was published under the title Quand la Bête est Déchaînée [When the Beast is Unleashed]. The second part appeared a year later, as Quand la Bête est Terrassée [When the Beast is Defeated]. This article presents a literary and ideological discussion of both parts of La Bête est Morte, which is also the first graphic novel written to allegorically depict the Second World War and the Holocaust. The article also examines ways in which La Bête est Morte took part in the establishment and preservation of the Gaullist narrative and of the French collective memory of the war and its events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eastern Europe is the scene of multiple memory conflicts, especially between the Russian Federation and other regional states. Typically, analyses of these conflicts examine contradictions between opposed accounts, critique distortions of the historical record, and attempt to establish corrected narratives. Instead, the present article examines how seemingly incommensurate accounts may be elements of larger structures of entangled mutual reinforcement. Analysis is directed toward Latvian and Russian documentary film accounts of World War II, and reveals how alternate regimes of truth may operate not to destabilize one another, but rather to reinforce opposition and to support symmetrical occlusions in memory discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue, stemming out of the AHRC-funded Teaching and Learning War Research Network (2017–2020), is published at an important juncture in cultural memory: as the focus of public commemorative events in Britain and the Commonwealth shifts from the First to the Second World War, including the Holocaust. Not only does it showcase exciting and cutting-edge research, but it also aims to stimulate conversation and 'forward-thinking' about commemorative cycles over the next two-and-a-half decades (2025–2045). The three research articles and four provocations focus, in different ways, on the question of 'hidden histories' in the expectation of a need to ensure that diversity, multi-perspectivity, complexity, and contention remain at the heart of 'national' commemorative processes (whether in Britain or elsewhere). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last two decades, Amedeo Guillet (1909–2010) has been turned into a public and military hero. His exploits as a guerrilla leader in Italian East Africa in 1941 have been exaggerated to forge a narrative of an honourable resistance against overwhelming odds. Thereby, Guillet has been showcased as a romanticized colonial explorer who was an apolitical and timeless Italian officer. He has been compared to Lawrence of Arabia in order to raise his international visibility, while his genuine Italian brand is perpetuated domestically. By elevating him to an official role model, the Italian Army has gained a focal point for military heroism that was also acceptable in the public memory as the embodiment of a 'glorious' defeat narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the little-known history of Japanese Latin American internment during WWII. Classified as 'illegal aliens' and 'enemy aliens', 2,264 Japanese Latin Americans were stripped of citizenship from their home countries, denied rights in the United States, and ultimately deprived reconciliation due to their undocumented status. Using the traces of this history as a case study, I explore the strategic memories Japanese Latin Americans create about non-place – spaces of statelessness or states of exception – that allow them to make claims about state violence committed against them under these conditions, and, second, argue that demands for justice against political violence entail not only bringing light to erased histories but also developing engaged acts of reception that account for survivors' claims to the memories of non-place. Visual testimonies, such as the Denshō Digital Archive and the short documentary Hidden Internment: The Art Shibayama Story (2004), affectively connect a viewer/listener to the memory of trauma, to an inexpressible haunting, and thus are critical platforms for creating a collective memory between survivors and the digital generation of postmemory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the evolution of the so‐called 'red museums' in Yugoslavia (1945‐1991). Focusing on how Yugoslavian post‐war museums were established, organised and operated, the article reveals changes in the way historical discourses were reinterpreted in efforts to promote new national narratives. In recent years, the use of personal narratives in national museums, particularly at the National Museum of Contemporary History, has played a central role in reshaping national narratives of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the participant generation passes away, the current moment of Second World War cultural memory is suffused with a sense of an imminent ending and of our passing into a new phase of engagement beyond living memory, a phase which – so it is often held – will be the poorer for lacking the validating presence of first hand witnesses; it may even constitute a kind of closure. This essay takes this observation as a point of departure for a wider exploration of this contemporary landscape of remembrance which, it is argued, is peculiarly and multiply fraught with anxieties about authenticity. It begins by discussing how the steady disappearance of the participant generation serves as a foundation for this anxiety, looking at how it has helped to fuel particular sorts of mnemonic activity as part and parcel of a post-Cold War boom in Second World War remembrance. It then explores some wider aspects of that remembrance which are generating new concerns about authenticity and interrogating it in novel terms. Finally, it makes the case for what can be gained by viewing contemporary Second World War cultural memory through this particular lens and sets out a research agenda for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay critically examines the current duality of Russian-Ukrainian intercultural relations and explores the subject of politics of active and selective memory as the claimed root of current controversies and military tensions. Through rhetorical analysis of historical and contemporary national narratives, it demonstrates how culturally defining experience of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War is remembered, rethought, and reused by respective parties to reinvent the Self and the Br/Other, as well as rethink ones positionality on the world arena. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article is a result of field studies on the transformations of multicultural heritage in the east-central European cities of Cracow, Wrocław, Lviv and Chernivtsi. In all these cities, a majority of the pre-war populations (and in Wrocław, practically all pre-war residents) disappeared as a result of WWII. After decades of silence imposed by the ruling communist elites, collective memories of the post-war populations are now surfacing in public discourse. Precisely how the contemporary populations living in the zones of ‘dismembered multiethnicity’ approach the past's cultural diversity in the everyday life remains, however, an underinvestigated topic. Under these circumstances, ethnography proves to be an innovative methodological approach particularly suited to studying local expressions of transnational memory. Based on the methodological approach of multi-sited ethnography, the article examines thematic restaurants which allude to cultures of some perished ethnic groups (in particular, Jews, Poles and Germans). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2012, a new Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened in Moscow -- an event unthinkable during the Soviet regime. Financed at the level of $50 million, created by an international crew of academics and museum designers, and located in a landmark building, the museum immediately rose to a position of cultural prominence in the Russian museum scene. Using interactive technology and multimedia, the museum's core exhibition presents several centuries of complex local Jewish history, including the Second World War period. Naturally, the Holocaust is an important part of the story. Olga Gershenson's essay analyzes the museum's relationship to Holocaust history and memory in the post-Soviet context. She describes the museum's struggle to reconcile a Soviet understanding of the "Great Patriotic War" with a dominant Western narrative of the Holocaust, while also bringing the Holocaust in the Soviet Union to a broader audience via the museum. Through recorded testimonies, period documents, and film, the museum's display narrates the events of the Holocaust on Soviet soil. This is a significant revision of the Soviet-era discourse, which universalized and externalized the Holocaust. But this important revision is limited by the museum's choice to avoid the subject of local collaborators and bystanders. The museum shies away from the most pernicious aspect of the Holocaust history on Soviet soil, missing an opportunity to take historic responsibility and confront the difficult past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between school and cultural knowledge of Second World War in contemporary Poland. Drawing on analysis of 126 student responses to well-known photographs (photo elicitation), the author addresses what it means for schoolchildren to learn about an aspect of a contested past, the Holocaust, within the frame of Second World War in Poland. This research illuminates shared cultural narratives about war. Importantly, this work unearthed dissonant responses from a subset of students who recognized a feature of the photograph that other students overlooked, and experienced the start of a schematic shift in understanding. The author builds on the tenets of schema theory and collective memory in attempting to explain how children learn about controversial events that do not fit social frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines the role of political factors in attitudes toward World War II in contemporary Ukraine. The research question is which factors determine public views of the principal warring sides and their leaders in Ukraine. The analysis of the 2012 Kyiv International Institute of Sociology survey shows that regional values, political party preferences, ethnicity, language, and age have significant effects on views of the Red Army and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) during the war and attitudes toward the wartime activities of Joseph Stalin and Roman Shukhevych. Public perceptions of the German Army and Adolf Hitler in Ukraine do not vary much across regions, political parties, and ethnic, language, age, and sex groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Modern & Contemporary France is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores the core propositions articulated by several public actors in the so-called Bandera debate, i.e., discussions about the usable past and legacy of the wartime Ukrainian nationalist insurgency and its central symbolic figure, Stepan Bandera. In Western Ukraine, popular historical imagery as well as intellectual polemics about the "Ukrainization" of World War II challenged both the Soviet myth of the Great Patriotic War and the European model of politics of regret. Correspondingly, one of the main ideas conveyed during the Bandera debate in Western Ukraine was the necessity of liberalization of the national politics of memory, i.e., the process of opening the political discourses and public debate to the circulation of diverse voices and narratives concerning the national past, a circulation unrestrained by political pressure. Generally, however, wartime events and figures continue to be presented in line with dichotomous national discourses. As the example of a chain of restaurants exploiting the theme of World War II demonstrates, one-dimensional interpretations of the contentious past suggested to the public by the actors involved in the commercialization of historical knowledge may have far-reaching, unpredictable implications. This is especially true in post-Orange Western Ukraine where politics--including the politics of memory--is increasingly determined by ultra-right forces such as VO Svoboda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the following questions: how and with the aid of which resources was the memory of forced labour during World War II constructed and recreated in the public space of Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine? How has the perception of the place of forced labourers in the general pantheon of war participants changed? And what kinds of transformations took place in the meaningful emphases and symbolic accretion of images associated with this group of people? The initial focus is on the Soviet version of this memory because some correction must be made to the theory that was formulated in the early 1990s and which gradually acquired normative significance in post-Soviet (including Ukrainian) journalism and scholarly literature: namely, that the history, creativity, and memory of this population group were "forgotten" in the official Soviet version of the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the ways in which post-Soviet debates over whether and how to remember the defeats of the early period of World War II were shaped by earlier Soviet-era debates over war memory and legitimacy. It argues that the reaction against the Khrushchev thaw in the early Brezhnev era--which eventually gave rise to the quintessentially late socialist "war cult"--initially led to a deep contestation between the state and some of the Soviet intelligentsia, not only regarding the Soviet narrative of 1941, but also over the broader question of whether Soviet public memory could and should accommodate defeats and trauma as well as celebration of victory. Though promptly curtailed by the exercise of party-state authority, this debate quickly resurfaced in glasnost', when debates over the early war once again became a crucible for disputes over broader questions of Soviet memory and its role in legitimating (or re-legitimating) Soviet power. These two debates are then compared with the strikingly similar dynamics of war memory contestation in post-Soviet Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The annihilation of the European Jews, the Holocaust, had in ensuing decades occupied a different place in the collective memory of Scandinavian countries than in other parts of former Nazi dominated Europe. This was due to most Scandinavian Jews, and especially Danish Jews, being rescued from deportation and extermination in the Nazi extermination camps. This made the rescue of the Jews central to the collective memory of the German occupation, and it might explain why the Holocaust was long concealed behind this ‘master narrative’. In more recent years, historical research has advanced a more nuanced view of the Danish rescue in October 1943. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article studies history-related texts in three popular newspapers as contributions to the construction of historical memory and national identity in post-Soviet Ukraine. After a quantitative thematic analysis of history pages in terms of their geographical and chronological priorities, I focus on representations on these and other pages of one crucial event of the past: World War Two. The analysis demonstrates that in Ukrainian media, the past in general and the last war in particular has been a subject of incessant but largely inconspicuous competition between the opposing versions of Ukraine's history which I call the Soviet and nationalist narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay explores the relationship between epideictic discourse and war through the analysis of George W. Bush's August 20, 2005, address at the Naval Air Station near San Diego, ostensibly to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Allied victory over Japan. The case also serves as an exemplar for how Bush routinely interwove epideictic appeals with collective memories of World War II in order to promote the Iraq war and deflect criticism of his policies there. Bush praised the greatest generation and linked it to the current generation; blamed and dehumanized enemies of the past and present; advocated for war based on 'lessons' from the past; and reinforced a shared identity to instill both obligation and confidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceiving of the visual as a significant force in the production and dissemination of collective memory, we argue that a new genre of World War Two films has recently emerged that form part of a new discursive “regime of memory” about the war and those that fought and lived through it, constituting a commemoration as much about reflecting on the present as it is about remembering the past. First, we argue that these films seek to reaffirm a (particular conception of a) US national identity and military patriotism in the post-Cold War era by importing World War Two as the key meta-narrative of America's relationship to war in order to “correct” and help “erase” Vietnam's more negative discursive rendering. Second, we argue that these films attempt to rewrite the history of World War Two by elevating and illuminating the role of the US at the expense of the Allies, further serving to reaffirm America's position of political and military dominance in the current age, and third, that these films form part of a celebration of the generation that fought World War Two, which may accord them a position of nostalgic and sentimental greatness, as their collective spirit and notions of duty and service shine against the foil of what might frequently be seen as our own present moral ambivalence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores practices of collective war remembrance in the socialist Yugoslavia. Memory of the Second World War in Yugoslavia has often been described as 'frozen', and this is seen as having led to the eruption of formerly suppressed memories at the end of the 1980s. To challenge this assumption, the author studies the negotiation of practices of collective war remembrance in Yugoslavia, and highlights the dynamic character of war remembrance even under the circumstances of state-controlled public remembering. Two examples are explored: practices of erecting local war monuments during the 1950s, and the emergence and activities of 'fictive kinship groups' struggling for public acknowledgement of a site of memory for the victims of the Jasenovac former Concentration Camp in Croatia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like most aspects of German politics and society after 1945, post-war German foreign policy has traditionally been greatly influenced by the legacy of Germany's National Socialist past and the Second World War. The semi-sovereign and divided nature of the West German state along with the strong argumentative force of collective memory in foreign policy discourse ensured a strong presence of Germany's historical legacy in both institutional and discursive terms resulting in a foreign policy which was characterised by self-limitation, a strong commitment to multilateralism and a civilian foreign policy culture. This article will argue that the interpretation of German collective memory of the Holocaust and the Second World War underwent significant changes under the red-green governments between 1998 and 2005, in particular with regard to the use of force. Although German collective memory continued to be present during this period, it lost its predictability and was used in a variety of crises to justify a range of responses, including military action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Polish collective memory of World War II integrates the Soviet occupation of the eastern areas, and the Nazi occupation in the west. Analysis of mass media communication shows that both pre-1989, and after that date different interpretations of events from that era were presented. Surveys carried out from 1965 to 2004 demonstrate that for the majority of Poles World War II gives them reason to be proud, and few see any cause for shame. The war experience of family members is also a common topic between family and friends. Recalling or passing down war experiences in a private, family setting stems from the fact that in Europe World War II affected everybody, civilians included. The presence of "personal perspectives" in the memory of World War II is a sign of the development of the "postnational" attitude toward the past. Another expression of this attitude is the drive to preserve the memory of concrete individuals, victims of the war, as well as to accept the remembrance of those who fought on the other side. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mass flight and expulsion of German populations from their traditional homelands in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe after the Second World War was an act on an unprecedented scale; more than 13 million Germans were affected by this forced migration. Their integration into the two postwar German states is today widely regarded as a great success story. However, this came at a cost: the refugees and expellees had to integrate into the postwar polity, economy and society without their memories and experiences receiving due recognition in a common narrative of the receiving areas. With the unification of the two German states, flight and expulsion have begun to be linked into an overall German collective memory. However, the remembrance of individual pain suffered by Germans must not be allowed to blur the German responsibility for the crimes committed during the Nazi period, and the jury is still out on whether the difficult task of combining the two will be mastered successfully or whether old prejudices and fears will resurface instead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]