Memory Judenrein and Its Discontents
1/2010
Forum AI
REMEMBERING FRIENDS, FOES, AND NEIGHBORS
In the present issue, AI continues the discussion, which started in the Ukrainian journal Ukraina Moderna, of American historian Omer Bartov’s book, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton University Press, 2007). We publish Bartov’s introduction to the Ukrainian-language edition of his book, which is currently being prepared. This introduction features, among other things, Bartov’s responses to critical arguments published in Ukrainian academic periodicals. We hope that our discussion goes beyond an evaluation of the achievements and shortcomings of a particular book, and instead focuses on the mechanisms through which historical memory defines contemporary borders of “our” and “their” communities and pasts.
Service to the Empire and National Loyalty: Imperial and Finnish Biographies of the Enckells, 1850–1917
Marina Vituhnovskaja
4/2009
Published in Russian, see Russian pages of this website.
SUMMARY:
Marina Vituhnovskaja writes about two generations of the Finnish (Swedish by origin) Enckell family, approaching their biographies and interpreting their choices in favor of dynastic, national, imperial, or some hybrid of loyalties within the larger context of Finnish elites’ integration into the Russian empire. On the basis of diverse archival materials, largely unknown to scholars, memoirs, and other sources, the author reconstructs “imperial biographies” of the Russian general and hero of the Russian-Turkish war Carl Enckell (1839–1921) and one of his sons, colonel Oscar Paul Enckell (1878–1960), who chose a traditional strategy of imperial integration through military service and became one of the chief officers in the Russian military intelligence. He started his military carrier at the time when Finland’s officers in the Russian military service were increasingly regarded as national traitors in Finland and at the same time met ambivalent reception in the Russian society. His father nervously reacted to the changing political situation that made impossible his and his generation’s mixed loyalty (to Finland, the dynasty, and the Russian empire). Oscar Enckell tended to socialize in cosmopolitan circles, stressing his supranational identity and European culture, and positioned himself as a Europeanized representative of the strong and influential European state – Russia. Until the last moment of the empire he remained a loyal servant to this state and until the end of his life maintained friendly relationships with old friends from the multinational military milieu to which he formerly belonged. Oscar resisted both Russification and Finnish nationalism. Even upon assuming an important military post in independent Finland (1919), Oscar Enckell preserved his European-cosmopolitan-supranational orientation, which developed in response to the challenge of imperial integration at the time of rising nationalisms.
Published in Russian, see Russian pages of this website.
SUMMARY:
This is a Russian version of the text originally published in Ukrainian in the Kiev journal Ukraina Moderna. Gerasimov summarizes the rhetorical strategies of Bartov’s opponents (in their critique of his book Erased) and shows their unintentional outcome: the construction of a profoundly colonial image of Ukraine as requiring special standards for the assessment of its past and present. In this logic, Bartov’s approach is anticolonial in that it considers Ukraine fully accountable for its traumatic past, just as any other European country. Gerasimov shares his “insider” knowledge of Bartov’s next book – a “thick description” of the Jewish elimination in Buchach, Bartov’s family town, based on hundreds of interviews and providing “hard” evidence lacking in Erased (for which it was criticized). Gerasimov predicts that this future book can play the role of Ukrainian analogue to the Neighbors by Jan Gross if Ukrainian intellectuals persist in denying and refusing to discuss specific contexts and features of the Galician version of Ukrainian nationalism and the implications of the present-day politics of memory in the region.