Nach dem Vergessen: Rekurse auf den Holocaust in Ostmitteleuropa nach 1989

Since the 1990s, memorial culture in Eastern Europe has been dealing with the legacy of the state's ideologized politics of memory and at the same time participating in transnational developments in the politics of memory. The disparities in the memory of the Holocaust are particularly explosive. On the one hand, the corrections of traditional historical images bring hitherto concealed moments of the past to light; on the other hand, they provoke polarizing debates that address different groups of victims of the overlapping historical catastrophes in this part of Europe. This volume brings together contributions that focus on the anamnestic memory processes – after forgetting – in post-communist East Central Europe from a cultural studies perspective. Attention is given to discursive transformations as well as symbolic, including literary, cinematic, and artistic representations and interventions. The focus of the publication is on Poland, because in no other East-Central European country is the Holocaust currently so central to the understanding of its own history in the 20th century and is negotiated with comparable intensity in public discourse, media, literature, film, theater, and the visual arts.