Bitter War of Memory
Victoria Khiterer
Geisteswissenschaften, Kunst, Musik / Geschichte
Beschreibung
Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration discusses the efforts to memorialize the Babyn Yar massacre. Babyn Yar is one of the largest Holocaust sites in the Soviet Union and modern Ukraine, where the Nazis and their collaborators killed virtually all the Jews who remained in the city during the occupation.
After the war, Soviet ideology suppressed commemoration of the Holocaust, instead conceptualizing the universal suffering of the Soviet people during the war. Police dispersed unauthorized commemoration meetings of Jewish activists at Babyn Yar. A monument “for one hundred thousand citizens of Kyiv and prisoners of the war” was erected in Babyn Yar in 1976, but the Holocaust was not mentioned in its inscription.
With the collapse of communism, state anti-Semitism ended. Holocaust commemoration became an important part of national memory politics in independent Ukraine. In the last few decades, over thirty monuments have been built at Babyn Yar, which are dedicated to the memory of Jews, Roma, members of the resistance movement, and other people executed there. However, heated debates continue about the commemoration of the Babyn Yar massacre.
Rezensionen
"Victoria Khiterer has written an important addition to the growing scholarship on Babyn Yar, the largest Holocaust site in the Soviet Union. On the backdrop of the history of Kyivan Jewry during the Soviet and post-Soviet years, she offers a thoroughly researched and insightful exploration of Babyn Yar’s contested memory. Drawing on new archival sources, memoirs, and interviews, she chronicles the memory wars that erupted over this site of massacres from Stalin’s Black Years, through Khrushchev’s Thaw, into the Perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union, until the present day with Russia’s war against Ukraine. This monograph raises key questions in the study of the politics of memory in the aftermath of genocide."
"Babyn Yar was one of the largest killing grounds of Jews in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. It has been estimated that the Nazis, with the support of their local collaborators, murdered from 70,000 to 80,000 Jews there, as well as many prisoners of war, Roma, members of the Soviet underground movement, and Ukrainian nationalists. In all, about 100,000 people were killed in the ravine. Victoria Khiterer examines in a clear and dispassionate way why it took so long for a monument to be built on the site and how it can be made a center for Holocaust research and commemoration in Ukraine. This major path-breaking monograph will transform our understanding both of the way the Holocaust was carried out in Ukraine and how it has been remembered in the nearly eighty years since the end of the war."
"Babyn Yar—the name goes down in infamy. During two days in the fall of 1941, the Nazis shot over 33,000 Kyivan Jews. The story hardly ends there, and Victoria Khiterer knows it all, including the people who lived and died in Kyiv—community leaders, rabbis, lawyers, business elite, and those lower on the social ladder, especially mothers, children, the elderly, and the infirm. She knows the identities of the Nazi perpetrators, those who helped Jews and those who did not. But she also knows the site's afterlife and exposes the politics of memory, describing the meetings of those who refused to forget and the persecution by those who demanded forgetfulness. In this way Khiterer tells us about power, society, and memory—who makes the rules, who places the monuments, and who forbids other voices. To understand Ukraine of yore and today, <i>Bitter War of Memory</i> is a necessary read."
Kundenbewertungen
memory politics, mental illness, Roma, Ukraine, mentally ill people, Soviet Union, Holocaust, memory studies, Kyiv, World War II, Soviet Security Services, aftermath of the Holocaust, Jewish activism, the Nazi occupation, commemoration and memorialization of the Holocaust, KGB, Refusenik Movement, Babyn Yar, anti-Semitism, Jews, pogrom