After memory : World War II in contemporary Eastern European literatures / Matthias Schwartz, Nina Weller, Heike Winkel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schwartz, Matthias, author.

Weller, Nina, author.

Winkel, Heike, 1971- author.

Series:

Media and cultural memory ; Volume 29.

Media and Cultural Memory ; Volume 29

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

East European literature--21st century--History and criticism.

East European literature.

World War, 1939-1945--Literature and the war.

World War, 1939-1945.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (VII, 479 p.)

Place of Publication:

Berlin ; Boston, MA : Walter de Gruyter GmbH, [2021]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Even seventy-five years after the end of World War II, the commemorative cultures surrounding the War and the Holocaust in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe are anything but fixed. The fierce debates on how to deal with the past among the newly constituted nation states in these regions have already received much attention by scholars in cultural and memory studies. The present volume posits that literature as a medium can help us understand the shifting attitudes towards World War II and the Holocaust in post-Communist Europe in recent years. These shifts point to new commemorative cultures shaping up ‘after memory’. Contemporary literary representations of World War II and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe do not merely extend or replace older practices of remembrance and testimony, but reflect on these now defunct or superseded narratives. New narratives of remembrance are conditioned by a fundamentally new social and political context, one that emerged from the devaluation of socialist commemorative rituals and as a response to the loss of private and family memory narratives. The volume offers insights into the diverse literatures of Eastern Europe and their ways of depicting the area’s contested heritage.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

After Memory: Introduction

Growing in the Cracks: On Ecologies of the Margins

I Imaginary Adoptions: Family Histories and Personal Legacies

Bodies of Evidence: Memory, the Forensic Imagination and Family Histories about former Yugoslavia

Transnational Aspects of Postmemory in Third-Generation Fiction: The ‘Contrapuntal’ Cases of Piotr Paziński and Erwin Mortier

Ghost-Writing World War II Memories: Romanian Holocaust Survivors’ Life Stories in Post-Cold War Western Societies

Legacies of Stalinism and the Gulag: Manifestations of Trauma and Post Memory

II Revisionist Appropriations: National Belongings and Collective Identities

Is the Past a Secret Language? The Jewish Other and the Holocaust in Iurii Vynnychuk’s Novel Tango of Death

Post-Imperial Resentments: Alternative Histories of World War II in Popular Post-Soviet Speculative Fiction

Chetniks and Partisans: Conflicting Narratives in Contemporary Serbian Literature

Delectatio Morosa: Reflections on Affective Compensation, Conflation, and Fantasy in Polish Memory Culture

III Fictional Interventions: Alternate Narratives and Subverted Mythologies

‘Spectral Stories’: Fictional Re-Inventions of the Holocaust in Contemporary Polish Literature

Counterfactuals and (Counter)memory: Im/possible Modes of ‘Undoing’ the Great Patriotic War

The ‘Gift of Memory’ and the ‘Gift of Oblivion’: Holocaust and World War II in Contemporary Hungarian Literature

De-Mythologising History: On the Fictional and Phantasmatic Dismantling of the Leningrad Blockade Narrative

IV Imaginative Reconfigurations: Average Heroes and Ambivalent Subjectivities

Digging up Skulls, Fighting with Words: On Radka Denemarková’s Novel Money from Hitler

Layers of the Crypt: Baltic Women’s Postmemory of World War II in Life Stories and Fiction

Bridging the Gaps: The Poetics of Postmemory in the Czech Graphic Novel Alois Nebel

Obsessed with the Past: On the Topicality of the Historical Novel in Eastern Europe Today

Appendix

Acknowledgments

Notes on Contributors

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

3-11-071383-7

OCLC:

1253313600