Remembrance, History, and Justice Coming to terms with traumatic pasts in democratic societies / edited by Vladimir Tismaneanu and Bogdan C. Iacob.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tismaneanu, Vladimir., Editor.

Contributor:

Iacob, Bogdan.

Tismaneanu, Vladimir.

Knowledge Unlatched, Funder.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Dictatorship--Social aspects--Europe, Eastern.

Dictatorship.

Fascism--Social aspects--Europe, Eastern.

Fascism.

Post-communism--Europe, Eastern.

Post-communism.

Social justice--Europe, Eastern.

Social justice.

Democratization--Social aspects--Europe, Eastern.

Democratization.

Memory--Political aspects--Europe, Eastern.

Memory.

Collective memory--Europe, Eastern.

Collective memory.

Europe, Eastern--Historiography--Political aspects.

Europe, Eastern.

Europe, Eastern--Historiography--Social aspects.

Europe, Eastern--Politics and government--1989-.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (516 p.)

Place of Publication:

Budapest : Central European University Press, 2015.

Language Note:

English

Biography/History:

Iacob Bogdan C. : Bogdan C. Iacob is Post Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Exeter. Tismaneanu Vladimir : Vladimir Tismaneanu is Professor of politics and Director of the Center for the Study of Post-communist Societies at University of Maryland (College Park).

Summary:

"The present book is a state of the art reassessment and analysis of how the interplay between memory, history, and justice generates insight that is multifariously relevant for comprehending the present and future of democracy without becoming limited to a Europe-centric framework of understanding. The volume is structured on three complementary and interconnected 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 authoritarianism to pluralism, with the competing narratives resultant of the process of Aufarbeitung, and last but not least, with the juridical and investigative efforts to acknowledge and punish the crimes and abuses of the past. It brings together historiography with memory studies, intellectual and legal history, political analysis with theoretical insight. It integrates local and regional experiences with traumatic pasts into a global structure that offers the possibility of more general conclusions about the memory of a century touched by the 'reek of cruelty'. The authors situate the process of coming to terms with the past (communism, fascism, authoritarianism, failed democracies) in Eastern Europe (including the Western Balkans) and the former Soviet space within the larger context of discussing the memory and history of the post-war period. At the same time, the European overview is compared with other cases of post-authoritarian transitions such as those in Latin America, South Africa, Japan, and the Middle East. The result is a clustered big picture of practices of remembrance, reckoning, and historiographical reevaluation"--Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Part One

Introduction / Vladimir Tismaneanu and Bogdan C. Iacob

European mass killing and European commemoration / Timothy Snyder

Part Two. Politics of memory and constructing democracy

Why World War II memories remain so troubled in Europe and East Asia / Daniel Chirot

Post-authoritarian memories in Europe and Latin America / Eusebio Mujal-Leon and Eric Langenbacher

Divided memory revisited : the Nazi past in West Germany and in postwar Palestine / Jeffrey Herf

On the relationship between politics of memory and the state's rapport with the communist past / Alexandru Gussi

Part Three. Histories and their publics

Democracy, memory, and moral justice / Vladimir Tismaneanu

The difficulty of overcoming the communist legacy in public memory of the past : Poland, Ukraine, and Russia in comparative perspective / Mark Kramer

Promotion of a usable past : official efforts to rewrite Russo-Soviet history, 2000-2013 / David Brandenberger

Germany's two processes of "coming to terms with the past" : failures, after all? / Jan-Werner Müller

Part Four. Searching for closure in democratizing societies

Twenty-five years "after" : the ambivalence of settling accounts with communism : the Polish case / Andrzej Paczkowski

The Romanian revolution in court : what narratives about 1989? / Raluca Grosescu and Raluca Ursachi

Slobodan Milosevic in the Hague : failed success of a historical trial / Vladimir Petrovic

The South Africa transition : then and now / Charles Villa-Vicencio

Scholarship and public memory : the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (PCACDR) / Cristian Vasile

Moldova under the Soviet communist regime : history and memory / Igor Casu

Part Five. Competing narratives of troubled pasts

Coming to terms with Catholic-Jewish relations in the Polish Catholic church / John Connelly

After communism : identity and morality in the Baltic countries / Leonidas Donskis

The Romanian communist past and the entrapment of polemics / Bogdan C. Iacob

Past intransient/transiting past : remembering the victims and the representation of communist past in Bulgaria / Nikolai Vukov.

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

CC BY-NC-ND

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-003-72165-6

963-386-093-8

9781003721659

OCLC:

927154859

Publisher Number:

https://doi.org/10.7829/j.ctt19z399m

Access Restriction:

Unrestricted online access.