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In 1989, after few decades of Soviet disinformation, a fourth investigation by the state commission finally recognized Bykivnia, located on the outskirt of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, as being a burial place for victims of the Soviet regime. Later in 1994, the Historical and Cultural Reserve "Bykivnians'ky Graves" was launched at the site, marking the initial point of the state remembrance of victims of Soviet political repressions and consequently indicating the importance of the victimhood narrative when portraying the Soviet past. This article examines the historical recognition of Bykivnia and the development of a martyrological landscape on the site in context with the establishment of state legislative actions and commemorative policies regarding victims of Soviet political repressions. The case study of Bykivnia should provide a basic understanding of domestic and international contradictions when creating a victimhood narrative and will question approaches taken for adapting this narrative in building a national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between Forensics and Philology: Przemysław Dakowicz and Nationalist Poetry in Contemporary Poland Using the texts of the poet and literary scholar Przemysław Dakowicz as an example, this article analyzes how the traditional martyrological discourse of the ‘romantic paradigm’ (Maria Janion) is revived in contemporary Polish poetry. The aesthetic and political instrumentalization of the symbolic link between the mass execution of Katyń in 1940 and the air crash of Smolensk in 2010 is of particular importance in this context, and, in approaching these subjects, I will suggest reading Dakowicz’s obsessive interest in the physical remains of the dead as a poetic implementation of the forensic turn that has critically manifested itself in recent years in the research of mass violence and crimes of genocide. In my discussion of the historical-political and poetic implications of this turn, I argue that Dakowicz performs a shift from the perspective of the witness to an event to that of the witness to the exhumation of physical remains and that this is how his professional background as a literary scholar comes into play. In dealing with the remnants of dead bodies, Dakowicz engages competing strategies of archiving (sighting, sifting, and safekeeping) on the one hand and hermeneutics (interpretation, revitalization) on the other. The works of the Polish historian Ewa Domańska serve as further theoretical background to this discussion (“Nekros: Introduction to the Ontology of the Dead Body,“ 2017, in Polish).

This article explores the relationship between political expediency, perception management, and governmental goals. The subject matter forms the research question of “How a tool such as perception management can be used to politically expedite a government’s interests and goals?” It is understood that these ends can be achieved through the usage of perception management by constructing them from a given audience’s interests and values. The concept of perception management is introduced to the reader and illustrated by the example of the United States government’s knowledge of the Katyń Forest Massacre. This article is presented in two parts – the United States’ initial conclusion that the Nazi party was responsible for the massacre and its later reassignment of fault to the Soviet Union. The first instance which involved the reconstruction of truth, was used to politically advance the United States’ cooperation with the Soviet Union in fighting Hitler’s Germany. The second instance also involved the revelation of truth and was used to justify its fight against the North Korean communists. This article should effectively demonstrate how the practice of perception management has been used historically by the United States government to expediate its political goals. The instrumentalization of Katyń is important as it may inspire the reader to consider why certain events take hold of the media’s attention versus others, and how these events specifically may relate to domestic and international political issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between political expediency, perception management, and governmental goals. The subject matter forms the research question of “How a tool such as perception management can be used to politically expedite a government’s interests and goals?” It is understood that these ends can be achieved through the usage of perception management by constructing them from a given audience’s interests and values. The concept of perception management is introduced to the reader and illustrated by the example of the United States government’s knowledge of the Katyń Forest Massacre. This article is presented in two parts – the United States’ initial conclusion that the Nazi party was responsible for the massacre and its later reassignment of fault to the Soviet Union. The first instance which involved the reconstruction of truth, was used to politically advance the United States’ cooperation with the Soviet Union in fighting Hitler’s Germany. The second instance also involved the revelation of truth and was used to justify its fight against the North Korean communists. This article should effectively demonstrate how the practice of perception management has been used historically by the United States government to expediate its political goals. The instrumentalization of Katyń is important as it may inspire the reader to consider why certain events take hold of the media’s attention versus others, and how these events specifically may relate to domestic and international political issues.

Józef Czapski's intimate, enigmatic paintings, depicting everyday chores, ordinary objects, landscapes devoid of picturesqueness, as if involuntarily induce viewers to contemplate. Yet this hushed reality is unsettling, dramatic and full of understatement. The author of these canvases was a respected publicist of the Parisian "Culture", an art critic, a noble man, regarded as the conscience of Polish emigration after 1945. Throughout his life he tried to reconcile his homosexuality, which he saw as his predicament, and deep religiousness, intermittently lost and regained. He was one of the greatest cosmopolitans among Poles and a hermit perpetually surrounded by people - a man of suffering, who himself claimed that his life was a streak of luck. He was someone who attracted others with his spiritual beauty, and yet he wished, as he wrote explicitly, to paint suffering amplified to a scream. According to the author of the essay, these paradoxes and Czapski's attempts to reconcile contradictions allow us to read his biography as an example of a maximized life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the circumstances of the USSR's breaking off diplomatic relations with Poland in April 1943. The main research problem is the sequence of events in the Polish-Soviet relations in the period from July 1941, i.e. from the signing of the Sikorski-Majski pact, to April 1943, which consequently led to their breaking. The theoretical basis is constituted by the source documents and the basic literature on the subject. The primary research method was a critical analysis of sources and literature. On the basis of the conducted research, the author argues that the matter of the graves of the Polish officers murdered in Smolensk was only a pretext to make a decision to break off the diplomatic relations with the government of General Władysław Sikorski by the USSR and to start cooperation with Polish communists gathered in the Union of Polish Patriots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the judicial practice of the Hungarian people’s courts (népbíróságok) in matters related to Katyń remains relatively unknown, this article’s objective is to address this area of historical (as well as legal) research. It focuses on demonstrating general outlines of the problem by a detailed analysis of some of the most notable cases against Hungarian major war criminals. It seeks to explain the role these proceedings played within the the policy of obliterating the memory of Katyń and why the members of pre-war ruling elite were charged on the grounds of their activities concerning the Katyń massacre. Furthermore, this article attempts to demonstrate in what way these accusations were important in proceedings against major Hungarian war criminals. What was the legal basis invoked whenever the defendants were accused of Katyń-related issues? How did the People’s Courts handle these charges? And finally, what (if any) was the eventual role of the Soviets in the proceedings? As the matter under examination lies at the crossroads of history and law (as legal judgments that mentioned Katyń in their content are the center of the analysis), the methodology used compiles the process traditionally used in historical research with standard legal interpretation tools. Combining both methods while analyzing the object through the lens of the judiciary perspective, this article places the outcomes of the examined legal proceedings in a broader historical context that allows noticing the legacies produced by People’s Courts sealing the Soviet lies in mid 1940s. This article posits that during proceedings and in judgments, Katyń was only discussed at the margins of primary considerations. Besides, at the current stage of scientific development, there’s a lack of evidence that the Soviets exerted any pressures on the Hungarian judiciary, at least in the aspects concerning matters related to Katyń. Neither were they interested in using Hungarian judiciary channels to pursue their own specific Katyń-related goals, still less to use them as a tribune to minimize their failure in attributing the responsibility for this crime to the Nazis in Nuremberg. It seems, therefore, that Katyń-related cases before the népbíróságok were solely intra-domestically oriented, and their goals never went beyond one of the instruments of obliterating the memory of Katyń within Hungarian society. Still, they produced some concrete social effects nonetheless. Firstly, as the criminal prosecutions were just only one of the plethora of instruments set in motion to eradicate the memory about Katyń in Hungary, their deterrent or dissuasive effect (especially during the Stalinist era) should not be underestimated. Secondly, by placing Katyń within the context of the antisemitic crimes for which some of the defendants were sentenced to death, the legacy left by the People’s Courts dramatically complicated the decoupling process of the Soviet murder of Polish officers from the rest of Nazi/Arrow Cross propaganda. This confusion makes the Katyń tragedy a hostage of the discussion on the People’s Court’s role as such. Finally, as the analysis below is limited to some most notable cases of Hungarian major war criminals, this article plays only an indicatory role. Therefore, setting aside these conclusions, one should not forget that many additional questions (e.g. the total number of people sentenced or otherwise punished for “Katyń propaganda,” comparative approaches with similar processes in other East-Central European states) still beg further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role played by the 1940 Katyń massacre in structuring foreign relations between post-communist Poland and Russia. In so doing, it offers a theoretical model through which to understand the combative politics over history that have burgeoned in Eastern and Central Europe after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Tracing how political discourse over the massacre has evolved from the late 1980s to the present, it examines the impact of exogenous influences and changing geopolitical realities on how this event is recalled within these two states, which exhibit markedly different relationships to their shared past. Questions of regime type, relative standing within the region, and how—as well as by whom—interstate discourse over contentious historical events is initiated are all central to the model of dispute origination developed herein, as is the presence of various institutional factors, chief among them membership in the supranational European Union (EU). A shadow study of Polish–Ukrainian relations concerning history, focusing on the mass killing of ethnic Poles that took place in Volhynia and eastern Galicia in the period 1943–1945, is also undertaken in order to illuminate the significant differences in how the past has been politically activated in relations between the respective post-Soviet dyads of Poland–Russia and Poland–Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En 1940 la URSS fusiló a 21.000 intelectuales y oficiales polacos en el bosque de Katyn. La masacre fue ocultada por el gobierno ruso y descubierta por los alemanes en 1943, quienes la emplearon con fines propagandísticos. En paralelo, la Unión Soviética responsabilizó a las SS de su autoría, involucrando a los países aliados a su favor. El objetivo del artículo es aportar a la historia política y diplomática argentina. Para ello se vincula la recepción pública de la masacre con los enunciados de la política exterior de nuestro país y con cómo ellos fueron usados por los distintos actores políticos internos. En el primer apartado se presenta la política exterior de los gobiernos de Roberto Ortiz (1938-1942) y Ramón Castillo (1942-1943) y se la relaciona con los informes de los cónsules argentinos en Europa acerca del descubrimiento de las fosas comunes de los oficiales polacos. En el segundo apartado, se analizan las repercusiones en la opinión pública argentina de los hallazgos de Katyn, interpretándolas en función de los distintos alineamientos del campo político local frente a la posición neutral del gobierno argentino en relación a la guerra y de las reconfiguraciones de política doméstica.

The drama of Katyń. The theory of colors, Julia Holewińska based on Józef Czapski's Old Bielsko Memories, although largely processed. The protagonist of the play is Józef Czapski, a painter-capist, writer, intellectual, prisoner of Starobielsk, Pawliszczew Boru, Griazowiec, who builds his paintings in the performance with colors. The setting for these events is Kozielsk, where the artist was not held, which proves that this is not Czapski's biography, nor is it a documentary account of camp life. The playwright, on the basis of a harsh and humiliating reality, showed human sensitivity. In Holewińska's drama, Czapski acts as a guide through the camp experience through the eyes of a colorist. In each sequence, the artist expresses his view of color in art. There are two more allegorical characters in the drama: Our Lady of Kazan, who embodies three beings: Our Lady of Kazan (The Blessed Virgin of Kazan) -- as the sacred, the real pilot Janina Lewandowska, and femininity in general. The second allegorical figure is the great Katyń liar, who personifies the whole apparatus of repression and oppression of the NKVD. The background for the conversations between these characters is a two-person choir -- one out of a thousand and the Second of thousand. Art of Katyń. The theory of colors is devoted to painful historical events, despite the fact that it is subject to various playwriting procedures, it is moving in its meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Book review of REMEMBERING KATYN, by Etkind & Finnen et al., by Thomas Kreuzberger.

The article dwells on the Russian/Soviet trace in Canto LXXVII by Ezra Pound where he mentioned Katyn (written as “Katin”, line 42). After the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest in 1943, the Nazi government decided to organize propaganda campaigns in order to blame the Soviets and to break the Grand Alliance. German embassies in Italy, Finland, Czechoslovak Republic, Belgium and some other countries were inviting writers to Katyn and encouraging them to publish essays and feuilletons on their impressions. Ezra Pound, who lived in Italy at that time, was invited by Gotthardt Maucksch, an employee of the cultural department of the German Embassy in Rome. The poet was interested in traveling there but was refused a visa. The paper comments reports written by the international delegation representatives who visited Katyn, most of which were anti-Soviet. During his stay at St Elizabeths Hospital, Pound followed the news on the Madden Committee investigation of the Katyn massacre (1951–1952) and referred to Katyn in his letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti. Back to Italy, Pound reestablished contact with Gotthardt Maucksch (his name, written as Maukch, also appeared in the Katyn context in Canto LXXVII). However, Maucksch did not leave any memories that could shed light on his post-war literary contacts with Pound. Documents on the Foreign Ministry plan to invite Pound to join the intended trip to Katyn in 1943 were destroyed during the bombings of Berlin in World War II.

Artykuł przedstawia sylwetkę ppłk. Rudolfa Ksieniewicza, jednego z oficerów wojska Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej. Urodzony na estońskiej wyspie Dago, po przeprowadzce z rodziną zamieszkał w głębi Rosji. Aby ulżyć finansowo rodzicom, wstąpił do armii rosyjskiej. Pnąc się po szczeblach kariery, został w końcu jednym z organizatorów Wojska Polskiego na Syberii. W wyniku walk dostał się do niewoli bolszewickiej, w której pozostawał do października 1921 r. W wolnej Polsce kontynuował karierę wojskowego, osiągając stopień podpułkownika i stanowisko I zastępcy dowódcy 45 pułku piechoty w Równem na Wołyniu. W 1939 r. po mobilizacji 13 Dywizji Piechoty pozostał w Równem, którego został komendantem garnizonu. Po wkroczeniu Armii Czerwonej 17 września dostał się do niewoli i wiosną 1940 r. został zamordowany przez Sowietów w bliżej nieznanych okolicznościach.

This article addresses one of the most sensitive present-day issues in modern international relations - the Katyn tragedy. The unbiased outlook on this historical and international problem permits to restore the historical justice, to present objectively the picture of killing the Polish officers.

The Katyn forest massacre, which refers to the murder of approximately 15,000 Polish military officers after they were taken as prisoners of war during the Second World War, both led to violent controversy for historians as to the identity of the true culprits and had inevitable consequences in politics. The real important question seems to be less whether the Soviet Government or Nazi Germany conducted the Katyn massacre than how it has been embedded in historical and political realities. This article attempts to move beyond the analyses of Katyn that have conventionally drawn on Realpolitik concerns of Germany and the Soviets as well as other relevant actors, and addresses how different actors have put the Katyn massacre to different political uses while changing, exploiting, manipulating and most importantly believing miscellaneous realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a tremendous volume of literature dealing with the Katyn Massacre of the Second World War on different dimensions. However, the reasons behind the Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin/Medvedev administrations' acceptance of the Soviet responsibility in the Katyn Massacre have not been systematically analyzed. This article focuses on the political, economic and strategic reasons behind the acceptance of Soviet responsibility by the Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin/Medvedev administrations in the massacre. It is argued that, Katyn initiatives were designed as a foreign policy tool by those administrations. There were also periods under Gorbachev's, Yeltsin's and Putin/Medvedev's leadership in which the Katyn initiatives were abandoned. This article also aims to reveal the reasons for the abandonment of the Katyn initiatives. According to the article, the main reason for the Gorbachev's Katyn initiative was the fear of losing Poland, and the main reason for Yeltsin's Katyn initiative was his pro- Western foreign policy. Lastly, Putin/Medvedev administration's Katyn initiative was associated with the aim of proving the needlessness of a missile defense system to be deployed in Poland. It has been observed that since 2003, the Russian Federation has returned towards a traditional policy of denial of its responsibility in the Katyn massacre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article analyzes biographical narrations referring to the daily life of families of the victims murdered by Soviet troops in Katyn and other places in the former USSR. The text includes 12 biographical interviews and recorded memories of Katyn families. The text describes the years from the interwar period to the fall of Communism in Poland. The article describes memories of the Second Polish Republic period when families of Polish officers constituted the highest social class, about the moment of saying goodbye to a father who was setting off to the front and then was taken prisoner by Soviets. Using postcards and letters sent from prisoner-of-war camps, which are attached to the article, the author presents the context of the correspondence of families with their close relatives, the sudden break of this correspondence and the anxiety connected with this lack of messages from the camps. The author carries out a detailed analysis of the process of impossibility of accepting the death of loved ones by their families. The text also addresses the issue of the “Katyn lie” and its influence on the lives of families in the Polish People’s Republic, celebrating holidays, their social status after the Second World War and many others. Being aware that the topic is far from being fully described, the author poses a few significant research questions at the end of the discussion that require further analysis.

A comparative analysis of the two monuments erected on one of the streets in the area of the former Warsaw Ghetto, the Umschlagplatz monument (1988) and the Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East (Pomnik Poległym i Pomordowanym na Wschodzie) (1995), shows how the equation of Nazism with Stalinism, if not with communism, has become inscribed in the symbolic topography of that place. The stake in this operation is the 'Holocaustisation' of the "Polish fate," epitomised by deportations into the interior of the USSR and the massacre in Katyń. The anticommunist discourse with a still un-defused anti-Semitic potential (the myth of Judaeo-communism, the double genocide theory) constitutes the overall narrative framework. The result is the rationalisation (presentation as a well deserved punishment or self-defence) of the stances of the majority of Polish society and its behaviour toward Jews during the Holocaust. Instead of upsetting the heroic-martyrological narratives about the dominant group's past, the increasing knowledge about the facts leads only to their mutation and strengthening. The context of this phenomenon is the politics of memory adopted by Poland and the Baltic states on the European forum. Its dynamic consists in shifting the limits of the European memory compromise, that is, in rationalisation of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism in an attempt to preserve one's image as the hero and victim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is in tended to provide a legally sound explanation of why and how the contemporary International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law legal frameworks offer tools to address the uncertain ty, lack of in formation, and the consequences thereof in relation to missin g persons and victims of enforced disappearances in the context of armed conflicts which predated the adoption of such frameworks. To this end, three scenarios will be examin ed: the contemporary claims of the families of those who were killed in the Katyń massacre in 1940; the claims for in formation and justice of the families of thousands who were subjected to enforced disappearances durin g the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939; and the identification efforts concernin g those reported missin g while in volved in military operations in the context of the 1944 Kaprolat/Hasselmann in cident which took place durin g the Second World War. The analysis of these scenarios is conducive to the development of more general reflections that would feed in to the debate over the legal relevance of the distant past in light of today's in ternational legal framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article places the mass shootings at Katyn, in which the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) killed thousands of Polish prisoners of war in 1940, in the context of a German-Soviet entangled history which strives to go beyond the abstract power hierarchies underpinning previous comparative studies of dictatorships. The fact that Goebbels’ otherwise implausible propaganda mentioned the actual persecutors of Katyn in 1943 made a long lasting impression on patterns of interpretation. The same may be said of Stalin’s attempt to discredit those who doubted the alleged German responsibility for this event as collaborators of the ‘Third Reich’. Contradictory positions which dated from the Second World War continued to effect the interpretations of Katyn during the Cold War to considerable effect. The author addresses the silence surrounding this event, its mystification and the pandering to popular taste which were particularly prevalent in western understandings of this event. The article therefore contributes towards the historicisation of the historical culture of the Cold War. Katyn amounts to a didactic play about the selectivity of historical narratives which continues to pervade contemporary debates about the European memory of the world wars. ∗ ∗ ∗ Der Aufsatz setzt die Massenerschießungen von Katyn, bei denen der NKWD 1940 Tausende polnischer Kriegsgefangener tötete, in den Kontext einer deutsch-sowjetischen Verflechtungsgeschichte, um die abstrakten Gewalthierarchien früherer Diktaturvergleiche zu überwinden. Dass Goebbels’ sonst wenig glaubwürdige Propaganda 1943 die wirklichen Täter nannte, prägte die langfristigen Kommunikationsmuster ebenso wie Stalins Versuch, Zweifler an der angeblichen deutschen Täterschaft als Kollaborateure des „Dritten Reichs“ zu diskreditieren. In den Deutungen von Katyn während des Kalten Kriegs wirkten die konträren Sichtweisen aus der Zeit des Zweiten Weltkriegs folgenreich nach. Analysiert werden das Beschweigen, die Verrätselung und die Boulevardisierung Katyns vor allem in der westlichen Rezeption; so trägt der Aufsatz dazu bei, die Geschichtskultur des Kalten Kriegs zu historisieren. Katyn ist ein Lehrstück über die Selektivität historischer Narrationen, das bis in aktuelle Debatten um eine europäische Weltkriegserinnerung hineinreicht.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses the topics presented within the issue, which focus on the memory, culture and history associated with the 75th anniversary of the Katyń massacres, against Polish prisoners ordered by the leader of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin.

The Polish case of Janowiec and Others v. Russia was initiated by a group of close relatives of victims of the 1940 Katyń Massacres. Only in 1990 did the Soviet Union recognize that it had perpetrated the massacres. The applicants in the Janowiec case alleged that the Russian investigation into the massacres, which commenced in 1990 as transparent proceedings but was terminated in 2004 in secrecy, cannot be considered effective under the Convention. Furthermore, inasmuch as the Russian military prosecutors and courts held that the Polish prisoners-of-war “had disappeared” in the spring of 1940 or—if “hypothetically” killed—there might have existed just cause for such an execution, the applicants complained that such statements denied established historical facts and were tantamount to the denigrating and inhuman treatment prohibited by the Convention. The Grand Chamber judgment was not in the applicants’ favor. By a majority, the judges either declined to hear the case on its merits or held that there had been no violation of the Convention, turning—as the four minority judges wrote in their dissent—“the applicants’ long history of justice delayed into a permanent case of justice denied.” This article is a personal account of the principal lawyer acting on behalf of the applicants in the Janowiec case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By appearance it would seem that Rodziny Katyńskie—the Katyń Families—are a veterans’ organization. The elderly, the last witnesses of the terrible Second World War, make up the majority of members. But these are not heroes, and they are not veterans. Who are they? In the first days after Poland regained its independence, after the first free elections of 4 June 1989, people from many cities leave the quiet of their homes and for the first time in their lives start talking about the history of their fathers, who had gone missing after 17 September 1939. The Katyń Families were formed. Statutes were written, and the aims of the organization were defined: explaining all of the circumstances of the Katyń Massacres, finding all of the locations where Polish prisoners of war died, and, finally, accomplishing their dignified burial in Polish War Cemeteries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the cover of state secrets in order to suppress and conceal the conclusions of the Katyń investigation is a violation of current Russian law. And yet Russian prosecutors have engaged in a cover-up of the documentation involved in the long-standing international investigation into the Katyń Massacres of 1940. The outcome of the investigation is a far cry from a truthful accounting, instead attesting to the prosecutors’ eagerness to avoid any indictment of the USSR’s former top leadership, and more generally to their attempts to sweep the entire affair under the carpet. First, the Katyń Massacres are characterized not as a war crime but merely as an abuse of power by authorities. Second, the scope of culpability has been deliberately circumscribed: both Stalin and the Politburo members who approved the massacres have been absolved of blame. Third, the inquest shows serious lapses, as no complete list of victims has been made public—an essential step for both completeness of the investigation and for the possibility of the victims’ subsequent rehabilitation. This article explains in detail the political and legal logic behind this treatment of Katyń-related documentation by the Russian political establishment since the dawn of the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking theoretical cues from the respective works of Jan and Aleida Assmann and Dan Diner, this article has two fundamentally linked goals: to historicize Polish cultural memory of Katyń, emplotting it within a narrative arc encompassing the seven decades separating 1943 from 2015; and to identify individual and collective agency within the history of Polish memory of Katyń. Certainly, the word “Katyń” exists variously as toponym, as metonym, as rallying cry. Yet the historical narratives anchored in that word are the outcomes of actions taken by concrete actors—individuals, states, social movements, international institutions. Although this article takes seriously the many theoretical frameworks undergirding the academic study of collective memory, its principal focus is the balance of historical contingency and structure that has constituted discrete, identifiable episodes of both commemorating and forgetting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Established Czech precedent has made the town of Terezín an important literary symbol of Holocaust memory, used in the 1960s to construct myths of Czech innocent victimhood. Jáchym Topol’s novel,The Devil’s Workshop(2009), returns to the theme with great originality, avoiding such myths by using a compromised first-person Czech narrator, who is involved in setting up ‘dissident’ commemorative museums at Terezín and in Belarus. These draw on documented accounts of real atrocities for their authenticity. Competitive in national terms, commercialized, and ethically compromised, they are finally, arguably inevitably, silenced. Topol’s ‘truth-telling’ is discussed in the context of Theodor W. Adorno’s criticism of committed Holocaust literature, Benedict Anderson’s interpretation of museums as commercialized constructions of nationality, and Timothy Snyder’s historical account of the killings in Eastern Europe; the ambiguous pessimism of his novel stands up well to criticism and, it is argued, has lessons even for historians of the Holocaust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the way Makavejev utilises historical sources, most importantly different types of films about the Second World War in Innocence Unprotected (1968), Sweet Movie (1974) and Gorilla Bathes at Noon (1993). However, in his use of documentary footage and history the director tends to privilege small narratives and unusual, even whimsical incidents over those belonging to grand historical narratives. Moreover, he juxtaposes his material in a way which further undermines grand narratives and by the same token hegemonic explanations of human experience. Makavejev's take on history links him to postmodernism and poststructuralism, with their rejection of totalitarianism in thinking in favour of embracing of the contingent and the uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with British foreign policy and the legacy of the Munich Agreement during and after the Second World War. It argues that contemporary policy requirements necessitated an unapologetic attitude to the past that often entailed the adoption of evasive legal formulae. Thus, while West Germany and Czechoslovakia achieved a modus vivendi in 1973, the British refused to repudiate Munich ab initio and applauded the West German decision to do likewise. London steadfastly maintained this position until 1992, three years after the end of the Cold War. This article explores the reasoning in British policy formulation and demonstrates that while historians discussed the ‘shame’ of Munich, policymakers rarely experienced feelings of guilt – seeking instead to derive the maximum possible benefit from the continuing significance of Munich. Furthermore, many of the actions of the British government during the Second World War, not least with regard to the Katyń massacres and the Yalta Conference, reinforced the idea that Munich had been a creature of its time and a ‘necessary evil’. Drawing extensively on primary sources, this article will make a contribution to the historiography of British foreign relations and that of collective institutional memory and appeasement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper examines representations of the Katyn massacre in Polish literature in the context of the wider cultural memory of the tragedy in Poland. The paper discusses a range of representations of Katyn, from Wajda's film to the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert, but focuses primarily on the fiction of Włodzimierz Odojewski. Referring to theories of Holocaust memory and trauma, such as those of Dominick LaCapra, Giorgio Agamben, and Cathy Caruth, the paper examines the nature of Katyn in Polish cultural memory as reflected in literature. The paper argues that, because of the specific nature of the massacre, to which no witnesses remained, memory discourse on Katyn becomes a discourse about memory, rather than of memory. Because of the lack of witness testimony, literature has avoided direct representations of the crime, which remains unseen and unknown. It is rather the cause of truth and the recognition of that truth by Russia, which stands for the perpetrator, that have become the focus of Katyn memory, rather than the event itself.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the deep political and cultural impact of the plane crash on April 10, 2010. The tragedy that cost the life of a president, Lech Kaczyński, his wife, and a group of leading parliamentarians across political divides took place near the traumatically laden site of the Katyń forest and has led to a crisis of communal symbolic language. The crisis has been apparent in the radical polarization of Polish society over the rhetoric of the main political parties and their interpretations of the crash. However, the crisis transcends the political arena and indicates that Polish society no longer shares a unifying meta-narrative to form its sense of national identity. The author analyzes this process of societal polarization by looking at the stages of mourning—shock of the symbolic absurd, communitas, and the Wawel controversy—and the utilization of the communal affect in the presidential campaign led by the president’s twin brother, Jarosław Kaczyński. The campaign is characterized by the appropriation of the crash as Law and Justice’s “foundational myth” coupled with the language of indeterminacy and deferral to define a political program. At the same time, the crisis is fueled by the utilization of a reductive version of the Romantic paradigm, in which the late president is sacralized (as in Rymkiewicz’s poem) and by the proliferation of conspiracy theories that antagonize the society towards the current government and Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article has been inspired by the author's editing of F. Beneš' Memoirs 1938-45. One of the strongest challenges for the former Czechoslovak President Beneš was the relationship with the Soviet Union. Did Beneš, who formed his government in exile in the West, succumb to Stalin's will during his visit in Moscow in late 1943 or later, during the communist putsch of 1948? The author believes that Beneš' decision to push eastwards, for the sake of building a closer relationship with Soviet Russia, was formulated much earlier, as a response to the western betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938. However, Beneš' motivation in the process of rebuilding Czechoslovakia was geopolitical rather than ideological, aiming at three objectives: a common border with the USSR (which entailed the sacrifice of Subcarpathian Ruthenia); crushing Slovak autonomy and reinforcing the Czecho-Slovak link; and the transfer of non-Slavic minorities, the Sudeten Germans and Hungarians. Moscow, rather than London or Washington, seemed to have satisfied Beneš' objectives. This pragmatic dependence on Stalin led also to Beneš' unwavering acceptance of the Soviet version of the Katyn massacre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]