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Remembrance, History, and Justice

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Remembrance, History, and Justice REMEMBRANCE, HISTORY, AND JUSTICE i6 Justice 00 book.indb 1 2015.09.04. 9:48 i6 Justice 00 book.indb 2 2015.09.04. 9:48 ,REMEMBRANCE, HISTORY, AND JUSTICE Coming to Terms with Traumatic Pasts in Democratic Societies Edited by VLADIMIR TISMANEANU and BOGDAN C. IACOB Central European University Press Budapest–New York i6 Justice 00 book.indb 3 2015.09.04. 9:48 © 2015 the editors Published in 2015 by Central European University Press An imprint of the Central European University Limited Liability Company Nádor utca 11, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary Tel: +36-1-327-3138 or 327-3000 Fax: +36-1-327-3183 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.ceupress.com 224 West 57th Street, New York NY 10019, USA Tel: +1-212-547-6932 Fax: +1-646-557-2416 E-mail: [email protected] All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher. ISBN 978-963-386-092-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-963-386-101-1 (paperback) LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Remembrance, history, and justice : coming to terms with traumatic pasts in democratic societies / edited by Vladimir Tismaneanu and Bogdan C. Iacob. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-9633860922 (hardbound : alk. paper) 1. Europe, Eastern—Politics and government—1989– 2. Collective memory—Eu- rope, Eastern. 3. Memory—Political aspects—Europe, Eastern. 4. Democratiza- tion—Social aspects—Europe, Eastern. 5. Europe, Eastern—Historiography—So- cial aspects. 6. Europe, Eastern—Historiography—Political aspects. 7. Social jus- tice—Europe, Eastern. 8. Post-communism—Europe, Eastern. 9. Fascism—So- cial aspects—Europe, Eastern. 10. Dictatorship—Social aspects—Europe, Eastern. I. Tismaneanu, Vladimir. II. Iacob, Bogdan. DJK51.R46 2015 323.4’90947—dc23 2014046041 Printed in Hungary i6 Justice 00 book.indb 4 2015.09.04. 9:48 Table of Contents VLADIMIR TISMANEANU and BOGDAN C. IACOB Introduction �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 1 Part One POLITICS OF MEMORY AND CONSTRUCTING DEMOCRACY TIMOTHY SNYDER European Mass Killing and European Commemoration . 23 DANIEL CHIROT Why World War II Memories Remain So Troubled in Europe and East Asia ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 45 EUSEBIO MUJAL-LEÓN AND ERIC LANGENBACHER Post-Authoritarian Memories in Europe and Latin America ������� 69 JEFFREY HERF Divided Memory Revisited: The Nazi Past in West Germany and in Postwar Palestine ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 103 ALEXANDRU GUSSI On the Relationship Between Politics of Memory and the State’s Attitude toward the Communist Past ���������������������������������������� 125 i6 Justice 00 book.indb 5 2015.09.04. 9:48 vi Table of Contents Part Two HISTORIES AND THEIR PUBLICS VLADIMIR TISMANEANU Democracy, Memory, and Moral Justice . 145 DAVID BRANDENBERGER Promotion of a Usable Past: Official Efforts to Rewrite Russo- Soviet History, 2000–2014 191 JAN-WERNER MÜLLER Germany’s Two Processes of “Coming to Terms with the Past” —Failures, After All? ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 213 Part Three SEARCHING FOR CLOSURE IN DEMOCRATIZING SOCIETIES ANDRZEJ PACZKOWSKI Twenty-Five Years “After” —– The Ambivalence of Settling Accounts with Communism: The Polish Case . 239 RALUCA GROSESCU AND RALUCA URSACHI The Romanian Revolution in Court: What Narratives About 1989? . 257 VLADIMIR PETROVIć Slobodan Milošević in the Hague: Failed Success of a Historical Trial ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 295 CHARLES VILLA-VICENCIO The South African Transition: Then and Now . 311 CRISTIAN VASILE Scholarship and Public Memory: The Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (PCACDR) ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 329 i6 Justice 00 book.indb 6 2015.09.04. 9:48 Table of Contents vii IGOR CAşU Moldova under the Soviet Communist Regime: History and Memory ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 347 Part Four COMPETING NARRATIVES OF TROUBLED PASTS JOHN CONNELLY Coming to Terms with Catholic-Jewish Relations in the Polish Catholic Church ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 375 LEONIDAS DONSKIS After Communism: Identity and Morality in the Baltic Countries . 387 BOGDAN C. IACOB The Romanian Communist Past and the Entrapment of Polemics . 417 NIKOLAI VUKOV Past Intransient/Transiting Past: Remembering the Victims and the Representation of Communist Past in Bulgaria . 475 List of Contributors . 497 Index . 501 i6 Justice 00 book.indb 7 2015.09.04. 9:48 i6 Justice 00 book.indb 8 2015.09.04. 9:48 VLADIMIR TISMANEANU and BOGDAN C. IACOB Introduction Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński once wrote that “when think- ing about the fall of any dictatorship, one should have no illusions that the whole system comes to an end like a bad dream. A dictator- ship … leaves behind an empty, sour field on which the tree of thought won’t grow quickly.”1 The twentieth century has left behind a painful and complicated legacy of massive trauma, monstrous crimes, radi- cal social engineering, and collective/individual guilt syndromes that were often the premises for and the specters haunting the process of democratization in the various societies that emerged out of these pro- foundly destructuring contexts. More often than not, the past appears as a devastated landscape full of corpses, dashed illusions, failed myths, betrayed promises, and unprocessed memories. Over a decade into the twenty-first century, the historical experience of the previous one is still fundamentally shaping how we envisage our contemporary world at personal, local, national, continental, and global levels. The burden of authoritarian pasts brought whole societies into international conversa- tions about their histories. Identities are essentially defined by dual pro- cesses of remembrance and historicization of large-scale state sponsored violence. Policies of transitional justice have increasingly acquired a transnational character. Since the late 1980s, there has been a prolifera- 1 Quoted in Adam Hochschild, “Shadowlands. Marci Shore’s ‘Taste of As- hes’,” New York Times, April 26, 2013 (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/ books/review/marci-shores-taste-of-ashes.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, last accessed April 30, 2013). i6 Justice 00 book.indb 1 2015.09.04. 9:48 2 REMEMBRANCE, HISTORY, AND JUSTICE tion of truth commissions across very diverse geographical areas. In the former socialist bloc, there appeared a plethora of “Gauck-type” agen- cies for keeping secret police files or institutes of national memory deal- ing with the traumatic legacies of either the communist period or the entire totalitarian experience (i.e., fascism or Nazi occupation). Many times these institutions are the result of emulation and dialogue with earlier similar incarnations in other countries. All in all, the underlin- ing presupposition that defines this culture of remembrance, historici- zation, and justice, which has consistently developed in over two and a half decades, is that long-term, state-endorsed amnesia ultimately sub- verts and even delegitimizes post-dictatorial democracies. In post-authoritarian societies, responsibility, empathy, tolerance, trust, and also reconciliation are essentially dependent on confronting the penumbra of one’s recent past. In struggling to explain and under- stand the consequences of radical evil and the pathologies of political extremism, both history and memory find themselves pushed to the limit. From the Holocaust to the Gulag, from genocide to sociocide, from ethnic cleansing to apartheid, from mass murder to crimes against humanity, the twentieth century forced us to find new ways to confront and remember shattered pasts. Far from having this experience now behind us, the latter stays with us. We have yet to learn all of its lessons. This volume is a collective effort to analyze how the interplay between memory, history, and justice generates insight that is multifariously rel- evant for comprehending the present and future of democracy without becoming limited to a Europe-centric framework of understanding. This book is structured with three complementary and intercon- nected trajectories: the public use of history, politics of memory, and transitional justice. Subsequently, the contributors deal with trauma and the reconstitution of democratic communities, with the multiple publics of historical inquiry in the context of a shift from authoritarian- ism to pluralism, with the competing narratives resultant of the process of Aufarbeitung, and last but not least, with the juridical and investiga- tive efforts to acknowledge and punish the crimes and abuses of the past. One can hardly complain that there is a scarcity of scholarship in the general topics discussed here. We believe, however, that Remem- brance, History, and Justice is innovative from the point of view of its thematic, methodological, and geographical breadth. Additionally, it brings together an eminent group of authors, who have
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