Between Absence and Presence: Negotiating the Commemoration of Nazi Injustice in East and West Germany as well as Poland

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel explores the diverse ways in which the memory of Nazi injustice was shaped through monuments and memory activism by non-state as well as state-driven commemoration activities postwar Eastern Europe. Dr. Batya Brutin examines Holocaust monuments in Poland. She is analyzing their artistic forms, historiographical contexts, and their represented narratives commemorating the Jewish victims and their heritage in the country. Sarah Grandke investigates the role of non-Jewish and Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) as early memory activists immediately after liberation, focusing on the Flossenbürg concentration camp. It was a contested site shaped by Polish-Catholic DPs memory activists alongside other persecuted groups such as Ukrainian and Lithuanian nationalists. Verena Meier interrogates the absence of monuments for persecuted Sinti and Roma in East Germany, revealing the GDR’s antifascist narrative’s failure to acknowledge their racial persecution. Together, these presentations highlight the diverse activities of commemorating Nazi injustice against different victim groups as well as the tensions, omissions, and evolving landscapes of remembrance.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Jakub Grzegorz Galeziowski, U of Warsaw (Poland)

Papers

• Holocaust Monuments in Poland: Forms, Meanings, and Messages - Batya Brutin, Beit Berl College (Israel)

• Former Concentration Camps as Spaces of Action for the Present and Imagined Future: DPs as Memory Activists and the Controversial Case of the Flossenbürg Mausoleum - Sarah Grandke, U of Regensburg (Germany)

• Antifascist Blind Spots or Deliberate Forgetting?: Absence of Monuments for the Persecuted Sinti and Roma in East Germany - Verena Meier, U of Heidelberg (Germany)

Discussant

• Daina S. Eglitis, George Washington U