Part II - Imaginations of Europe: Nazism and Stalinism Rethought

Summary

AS EXPLAINED ABOVE, the eastern expansion of the EU turned its memory politics into a contest in which two different frameworks of memory battled for predominance: a Western framework adhering to the “uniqueness-of-the-Holocaust frame and an Eastern framework espousing the “Communism-equally-evil frame.” In part II I will ask what happens to these opposing perspectives when they are taken out of the political realm and negotiated in fictional writings. The authors analyzed here—Vladimir Vertlib, Katja Petrowskaja, and Barbara Honigmann— seek to re-create a multilayered understanding of European histories by “bring(ing) disparate histories into contact with each other,” namely the histories of Nazism and Socialism. By narrating individual experiences of atrocities and war in the Eastern and Central European areas, their literatures of mnemonic migration crucially destabilize traditional modes of selection and amnesia that have governed the Western imagination of Europe. In the vein of Ann Rigney's theory, I suggest that Vertlib’s, Petrowskaja’s, and Honigmann's writings exemplify artistic works that are consciously shaped to promote understanding between different “zones” of Europe, explicitly using literature as a means of “encouraging people to look beyond their present social frame of reference.” Vertlib's autofictional protagonists interconnect several of these “zones” through an ongoing process of migration in which the protagonist accumulates various private and collective memories, thus in the sense of Rothberg bringing memories from the Soviet Union, Israel, Austria, and the USA “into contact with each other.” In addition, Vertlib employs the genre of the historical novel, which, according to Rigney, tends to act “in crucial ways as a mediator or ‘connector’ between different mnemonic communities.” Petrowskaja writes history by establishing a complex metalanguage that allows her to reconstruct the amnesia about the Holocaust in the (former) Soviet Union in general—and the Ukraine in particular—as well as to trace the close interconnection between victimization and perpetration in Eastern Europe. Whereas Petrowskaja seeks to uncover the murder of her great-grandmothers at Babi Yar and deals with society's and her family's distortion of the past, Honigmann redefines her family history as a gradual process of decay of the family's essential Jewish identity and reintroduces the tradition of endless travel from exile to exile that her parents had tried to end.