The ban on commemorating the Shoah
The long journey from Soviet taboo to remembrance
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Speech is silver, but silence is golden. So it was with Soviet memories of the Holocaust: they lasted just as long as they could be used for the purposes of victory in the war. By the time of the 1948 anti-Jewish trials at the latest, it was impossible to remember the Jews as a special group among the victims of the war. Work on the Black Book about the mass murder of the Jews was stopped. Literature and the cinema began to deal with the issue for the first time during the Thaw. Since perestroika and the disintegration of the USSR, it has become possible to discuss the issue in public. However, it has still not found its rightful place in Russia’s culture of remembrance.
(Osteuropa 4-6/2005, pp. 149–164)