The Politics of Holocaust Remembrance after Communism

This chapter presents the theoretical argument about state responses to various ontological insecurities they face in the aftermath of a great political transformation—the end of communism—and links this framework to the issue of political memory. Rethinking the concepts of cosmopolitan versus national memory, especially as they relate to Holocaust remembrance, the chapter introduces the notion of memory appropriation. It outlines the major historical junctures in the development of a “European” cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust and discusses ways in which this remembrance is in conflict with the postcommunist, Eastern European narrative of World War II, the Holocaust being far from the central element of this story. The chapter describes various strategies of political resistance postcommunist states engaged in during this narrative dialogue with the West. But it was not only Eastern European states that changed their remembrance to appear more “European.” The postcommunist states also successfully changed the European Union (EU) approach to memory by pushing the EU to adopt the Eastern European position on the twentieth century's “two totalitarianisms.”