Cultures of History Forum (Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena)
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In 2012, while conferring a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom on the Polish anti-Nazi resistance fighter Jan Karski, US president Barack Obama inadvertently touched off the greatest crisis in US-Polish relations in recent memory. It was his use of the phrase "Polish death camps" in his speech that set Polish officials off demanding an apology. The article takes this incident as an opportunity to reflect on the sensitivities and pitfalls of addressing recent Polish history during Nazi occupation.
The "Museum of Socialist Art" in Sofia is the first state-supported museum focused on the communist period in Bulgaria. Paying attention to debatable issues regarding its concept and structure, the article outlines the anxieties of the Bulgarian public about this museum, particularly regarding the "resurrection" of socialist ideology and the "re-habilitation" of artistic production during communist rule. It shows the lack of clear principles in the selection and arrangement of the exhibited items, and the hesitation to take a critical stance on the former regime.
As Serbia began legislative debate on whether to renew a 2003 law on lustration, public debates erupted concerning issues of archival access and of dealing with past and present office holders who had allegedly committed mass human rights violations. An analysis of the public discourses, involving both media and civil society, however, shows that this subject is still largely up in the air.
The Hague Tribunal (ICTY) is one of the most important transitional justice institutions with regard to the wars in former Yugoslavia. This article focusses on the different perceptions of the acquittals of the Croatian war-time generals Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markač by the Appeals Chamber of the ICTY in 2012. While this verdict was greatly welcomed in Croatia (96 percent of the population), it was met with outrage in Serbia.
The three-part German miniseries "Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter" (Generation War) gave rise to a heated German-Polish debate that focused on the depiction of members of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) as anti-Semitic. The article reconstructs this debate, demonstrating the widespread German ignorance about recent Polish history. It also concludes that the way the controversy was jointly moderated by both German and Polish actors was positive.
The past years have seen a growing public debate among Romanian writers both in Germany and Romania, and increasingly a wider public, over the nature and extent of certain writers' collaboration with Ceauşescu's secret police, the Securitate. This article traces the key positions and characteristics of that debate, offering insights into Romania's present-day process of confronting its communist past.
Michal Pullmann's book “The End of the Experiment” distanced itself from earlier approaches to the last period of state socialism from a methodological and theoretical perspective and thus provoked a debate at various levels in the Czech Republic. This article focuses on these debates, which first and foremost touch the question of the characteristics of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia until 1989.
The recent debate between Éva Kovács and Krisztián Ungváry, two Hungarian intellectuals, about the memory of Trianon took place in a political context that was defined by new government policies and laws regarding dual citizenship for Hungarians living outside state borders and by ongoing political and symbolic conflicts between Slovakia and Hungary. These conflicts are deeply intertwined with the divergent interpretations of the shared history. The article reviews the main arguments made in this debate and identifies the issues that were left untouched.
Dealing with the communist past was one of the constitutive elements of the new or reborn democracies of East Central Europe after 1989. 'Coming to terms with the communist past' was especially important as a means of securing the legitimacy of new democratic regimes. This article provides an overview of how this process was shaped in the Czech Republic and touches upon the most significant events and actors since 1989.
A new exhibition was opened in Belgrade on 1 December 2012, the ninety-fifth anniversary of the unification of South Slavs in The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. This was a symbolic opening day. Journalists from all over the region flocked to the museum to cover the event. Curiously enough, in the politically divided societies of ex-Yugoslavia, it seemed that everyone could agree upon one thing: an exhibition about Yugoslav history and the very existence of the country was not only desirable, but also necessary.