Abstract
This article is part of the special cluster titled Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine since the 1990s, guest edited by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe.
This special section examines how debates on local participation in the mass murder of the Jews during the Second World War have evolved in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. The comparative approach adopted in this collection has highlighted the common problems in these four countries in coming to terms with the “dark past”—those aspects of the national past that provoke shame, guilt, and regret. Like the contributors to this collection I believe it is debate among historians that offers the best chance to move forward and that the intervention of politicians has had a clearly deleterious effect. This debate needs to be conducted in an open and collegial manner although we may differ strongly in our conclusions. We should always remember that the past cannot be altered. We can only accept the tragic and shocking events that have occurred and try to learn from them. This is a process that could begin in northeastern Europe only after the collapse of the communist system—a coming to terms with the many neglected and taboo aspects of the past in all four countries. The first stage of approaching such issues has usually been from a moral point of view—a settlement of long-overdue accounts, often accompanied by apologies for past behaviour. It seemed that we were reaching a second stage, where apologetics would increasingly be replaced by careful and detailed research based on archives and reliable first-hand testimony.
Memory is blind to all but the groups it binds. History, on the other hand, belongs to everyone and no-one, whence its claim to universal authority.
The theme of this important and timely special section of East European Politics and Societies is “Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine: Historical Research, Public Debates, and Methodological Disputes.” Until quite recently, it seemed that real progress was being made in understanding the origins and character of the genocide that the Nazis attempted during the Second World War to inflict on the Jewish people. This research was often accompanied by acrimonious debates that have only been possible in situations where the political culture permitted a public reckoning with the more dubious aspects of the national past and where there was a high level of acceptance of the practice of national self-criticism. However, these exchanges seemed to have led to some degree of consensus. Not surprisingly, they have gone furthest in Germany, first in the Federal Republic and subsequently in the united Germany established in 1989. Starting with the controversy aroused by publication of Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht in 1961, German historians have undertaken a thorough and complex re-examination of their country’s past, which culminated in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s, the debate over Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners and that between Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer on the validity of survivor testimony. The research they produced has greatly clarified the problems of how the Nazis came to power, the nature of the regime they established, and how they came to adopt and implement their anti-Jewish genocide. However, as Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe points out in his introduction to this collection, these debates have been rather Germanocentric and, for various reasons, have not placed much stress on local collaboration, whether of states or local populations, in the Nazi genocidal project.
A similar wide-ranging debate developed in France, although it started somewhat later, over the character of the Vichy regime, the nature of the antisemitic policies it implemented and its responsibility for the deaths of perhaps a quarter of French Jews in the Holocaust. Analogous attempts to “overcome the past” have been undertaken in the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and Switzerland and elsewhere in Western and Central Europe.
In east-central Europe, such debates, with one exception, that of Poland, only really began in 1989-1991 with the collapse of communism in the region. In the Polish case, a debate on the question of the responsibility of the local population for the fate of the Jews in the Nazi genocide did begin immediately after the war, but was stifled by the imposition of a rigidly Stalinist regime in 1947. It resumed vigorously in the 1980s. Elsewhere, both in the states which during the Second World War were allied with the Nazis and in those areas where no state-level collaborationist regimes were established by the Nazis, as in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, discussion of this complex topic only really began after the end of communism. Since then, there has been considerable dispute about the role of General Ion Antonescu in Romania and Father Tiso in Slovakia and of the conduct of the Nazi satellite regimes in Hungary and Croatia. There has also been a good deal of debate in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and rather less in Ukraine and Belarus, about the participation of local militias and nationalist partisans in the mass murder of Jews.
This collection examines how these debates have evolved in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. The issues in these debates are well analyzed in Rossoliński-Liebe’s introduction, and there is no need to rehearse them here. It should be pointed out that these have not been only internal matters, since Jewish survivors from these countries and many others in the Jewish world, where the collective memory of these events was very different from that of the Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians, have also played an active role in the attempts to reshape this memory. Several articles stress the importance of this testimony.
The comparative approach adopted in this collection has highlighted the common problems in these five countries in coming to terms with the “dark past”—those aspects of the national past that provoke shame, guilt, and regret. Like the contributors to this collection I believe it is debate among historians that offers the best chance to move forward and that the intervention of politicians has had a clearly deleterious effect. This debate needs to be conducted in an open and collegial manner although we may differ strongly in our conclusions. We should always remember that the past cannot be altered. We can only accept the tragic and shocking events that have occurred and try to learn from them. This is a process that could begin in north-eastern Europe only after the collapse of the communist system—a coming to terms with many neglected and taboo aspects of the past in all four countries. The first stage of approaching such issues has usually been from a moral point of view—a settlement of long-overdue accounts, often accompanied by apologies for past behaviour.
It seemed that we were reaching a second stage, where apologetics would increasingly be replaced by careful and detailed research based on archives and reliable first-hand testimony. One could hope that we were moving beyond strongly held competing and incompatible narratives of the past to reach some consensus acceptable to all those of goodwill emerging from serious debates between people of different views. This is not to deny, as Rossoliński-Liebe points out in his introduction, that many aspects of the Holocaust in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine remain “shrouded in darkness” and still need investigation. Unfortunately, this approach to history has been challenged in all four countries, as has also been the case elsewhere. This has sometimes been described as a conflict between a more self-critical school of historians and one that is willing to find explanations for some of the negative aspects of national behaviour. What is needed is to find some common ground through debate.
However, the conflict is more deep-rooted and reflects a clash between two views of society. One sees society as made up of different and often competing groups in which understandings of the past may differ and in which a reckoning with the negative aspects of the national history is necessary for building a pluralistic, outward looking, and tolerant polity. It sees the nation as something that emerged in particular circumstances and whose identity can change over time. The other is centred on the nation and the communities of which it is composed, which are seen as primordial and transcending the transient individuals of whom they are made up. This can also be seen, as Pierre Nora has argued, as a conflict between history and memory. As Brian Porter-Szűcs has argued in the Polish case, this is why history is vitally important for the ruling Prawo i Sprawiedliwość party (PiS—Law and Justice), for which it is “the biography of the national community and the source of the traditions and values that hold everything together.”
1
The Institute for National Memory (now under PiS control) defined the goal of historical study in 2016, after it came under PiS control, as follows: Historical policy refers to the interpretation of facts, lives, and events and is assessed according to the interests of the society and the nation, as an element that has a long-range character and constitutes the foundation of state policies. Historical policy is a type of history that serves to shape the historical consciousness of society, including economic and territorial consciousness, as well as to strengthen public discourse about the past in the direction of nurturing national bonds regardless of the momentary policies of the state.
2
The issue here is not historical truth as such; instead, history is important because it is the “long-range . . . foundation of the state.” It is those stories that a community tells and retells in order to establish a bond between generations and to teach young people what “we” believe—one of those factors that must never be contested or debated. To quote Porter-Szűcs again, The supporters of PiS complain about historical accounts that refuse to clearly identify who is a hero and who a villain, who a victim and who a perpetrator, who a martyr and who an oppressor. When historians say (as we are inclined to do) that our scholarship should reveal the complexities, nuances, and multiple perspectives of the past, we are directly repudiating the role that PiS believes we should play. . . . What was lacking [in the scholarly historiography] was a clear, unambiguous account that was sanctified by public commemorations, evoked in lofty speeches, immortalized in inspiring films and novels, and above all taught to everyone in school. PiS wants to establish a canon of stories that everyone knows, that everyone evokes to identify the good guys and the bad guys, that everyone treats with solemnity and reverence as the unquestioned and unchanging core of their shared identity.
3
Official custodians of memory in Lithuania and Ukraine, such as the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania and the Centre for Research into the Liberation Movement in Ukraine are also committed to this concept of history and enjoy some support from their respective governments. The same process can be observed in Belarus, although it is less pronounced and often takes a neo-Soviet form. In Germany, the more liberal concept of historical scholarship does seem to be holding its own, but is also under fire. This is not the only challenge we face. More moderate critics of the type of history that is represented in this collection have claimed it devotes excessive attention to the “dark past” and to the Holocaust and the suffering of the Jews, in particular. They see this history as nihilistic. “What is the point of maintaining the nation if its history is, on the one side, centred on absolute suffering and, on the other, on criminal hatred?” We also have to respond to those post-modern thinkers who see as imperative emancipation from the chains of the past. In the words of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
To respond effectively to this new intellectual climate, as to the general rise of populism, will not be easy. One would like to believe that there is a reverse Gresham’s law in historical scholarship, that good history will drive out the bad. Those who have contributed to this collection have certainly made a contribution to a nuanced, archival-based, and dispassionate account of the difficult problems of the Holocaust. We need to continue to pursue this approach and to find ways of reaching a wider audience. The trans-national nature of this endeavour, which is evident in this volume, is crucial. It will show how similar situations gave rise to similar reactions and that the issue is not one of a unique “national guilt.” Also useful is the notion of “conceptualization” that helps to explain the complex, complicated, and contradictory nature of the Holocaust and how it can be studied as a transnational and European process. In addition, we need to take as a model in our analysis the “integrated history” practised by Saul Friedländer.
Our goal should be to encourage scholarship based on a wide range of sources, from a variety of points of view and in different locations that will ultimately make possible a degree of normalization both in the attitudes of Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians to the now disputed past and to their relations with their Jewish neighbours. We should not fear this task—as John Adams put it in 1770, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” In the last analysis, a history that seeks to explain and understand the past, avoiding anachronism and making use of the widest range of available evidence, is more convincing than one intended to bolster national myths.