Преломления памяти: Вторая мировая война в мемориальной культуре советской и постсоветской Литвы

ENThis book tells the story of the development of the memory of the Second World War in Lithuania in a new way. Focusing on the history of museums, memorials and war monuments, Ekaterina Makhotina reveals a variety of actors, memory practices and historical discourses from the first days of the war to 2013. Lithuania's experience during the German occupation is a unique one in the context of the war-time Europe: in no other country has the German command so quickly and so systematically begun to pursue a policy of total elimination of the Jewish population. Lithuania has almost completely lost its Jewish citizens. This specific experience could not but affect the conflict in the development of cultural memory about the war in Soviet Lithuania. While the function of the first military monuments and museums was to demonstrate the presence of the Soviet power in Lithuania, in the 1960s heroism and resistance of Lithuanians against Nazism were the central motive. Such “lithuaniazation” of heroes and victims of the German occupation could not but entail an understatement of the role of Jews in the partisan movement and marginalization of this group of victims in the official representation of history.After the perestroika and the return of Lithuanian state sovereignty in 1990, the “experienced history” and, above all, the experience of the victims of Stalinism became central to the public representation of history. Almost all memorials related to the terror of the German occupiers and the suffering of the local population were defined as places of Soviet propaganda and liquidated. In a few cases, “double memorials” were opened, reflecting the thesis about the equivalence of the crimes of the Nazi and Communist regimes. At the same time, after independence, the topic of the Holocaust and overcoming the commemorative taboo received attention not only from the few survivors, former ghetto partisans and their descendants, but also at the state level. Contemporary cultural memory in Lithuania is not homogeneous, but is characterized by constant changes and refractions. Various “alternative memories” in Lithuania itself as well as the global discourse of Holocaust remembrance challenge the state policy of national self-victimisation. [From the publication]