By Siobhan Kattago, October 29th, 2012 
If National Socialism and Communism are remembered primarily through the prism of trauma, pre-communist days or certain aspects of communism are increasingly remembered through the warm haze of nostalgia. Recalling the past through the eyes of traumatized victimhood runs the risk of projecting individual psychology onto collectivities such as nations or people. Museums that depict history though the eyes of victimhood remove historical events from time in order to focus on traumatic moments of suffering. Likewise, monuments to national suffering, while representing key moments, tend to reduce the complexity of historical events into clear visual images that appeal to primal emotions. Recent areas of memory studies that are devoted to the importance of trauma tend to divide the world into two groups: perpetrators and victims. However, what cannot be discussed in a traumatic reading of history are the gray areas of collaboration or passivity. What happens if individuals were neither perpetrators nor victims?
Nostalgia is even more attractive than trauma because it softens time by offering a beautiful image of the past. Inscribed in heritage sites and national folklore, nostalgia offers a simple and powerful image of the nation through the eyes of culture. Clearly there are problems in reading history through the eyes of trauma, because one receives a distorted understanding of the past solely from the perspective of the victim. In a similar way, nostalgia forgets the difficulties of the past by recalling only what was pleasant and what often coincides with the youth of the one remembering.
Both trauma and nostalgia engage in what Tony Judt would call a “mis-memory.” A mis-memory is not necessarily forgetfulness, nor is it an outright lie. However, a mis-memory borders dangerously on mythology by dividing the world into occupying forces and victims, good and evil. Both trauma and nostalgia are mis-memories because they fixate on particular aspects of the past and reject anything that threatens their singular definition.
Thus, those in eastern Europe, who see the past solely through the eyes of national victimhood might view the Holocaust as a threat to a pristine understanding of their national suffering as . . .
Read more: European Memory vs. European History II: The Limits of Trauma and Nostalgia
By Siobhan Kattago, October 26th, 2012 
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, Europe has gone through unprecedented changes. Two decades later, there are still conflicting ideas about what Europe means and who belongs or should belong. Moreover, there still is a long shadow cast by the Holocaust, with distinct differences in how to live under the shadow. While there seems to be a tacit understanding in Western Europe of the importance of the Holocaust in twentieth century Europe, there is a rising focus on national suffering in many east European countries that marginalizes the European genocide. Memory and history are in tension, weakening understanding of national pasts and challenging the connection between the east and the west of Europe, weakening European unity.
In the former Soviet country of Estonia, for example, where I have lived for the past decade, the Holocaust is viewed as marginal to the central narrative of Estonian victimhood at the hands of two occupations: Nazi and Communist. There is a lack of knowledge, coupled with the sense that even if there had been Jews murdered on the territory of Estonia, Estonians had nothing to do with them. The problems of collaboration and anti-Semitism in Estonia are not generally addressed. Instead, the Holocaust is externalized, and treated as a German and Jewish issue that is foreign to Estonian national history. Tony Judt’s distinction between memory and history in his posthumous book, Thinking the Twentieth Century (written with Timothy Snyder) highlights the problem.
I profoundly believe in the difference between history and memory; to allow memory to replace history is dangerous. Whereas history of necessity takes the form of a record, endlessly rewritten and re-tested against old and new evidence, memory is keyed to public, non-scholarly purposes: a theme park, a memorial, a museum, a building, a television program, an event, a day, a flag. (Judt 2012: 277)
Judt’s point is important because when memories of certain key events are lifted out of time, they are all too easily raised to the level of myth. Particularly in narratives . . .
Read more: European Memory vs. European History: A Critical View From Estonia
By Tomasz Kitlinski, September 4th, 2012 
The performance of Pussy Riot and its repression represent the deep political challenge of post communist authoritarianism and its progressive – transgressive alternatives. This is the first of two posts by Kitlinski that have great significance for Eastern Europe and beyond. -Jeff
Don’t let Putin fool you. Banishing Pussy Riot to a penal colony allowed the Russian leader to reassert his rule. Democracy be damned. Civil rights, religious freedom, and gender equality from herein would be subject to his purview. The ex-KGB officer’s message wasn’t just aimed at Russia. It was directed at all of Eastern Europe, too.
For anyone familiar with the history of regional politics, Putin’s positioning was thick with signifiers. Pussy Riot’s sentencing would please fellow reactionaries, obviously, as well as help serve as a salve for social distress. It also confirmed that the post-Communist period was formally over. Authoritarian capitalism is the rule of the day. There’s no alternative.
The political transition in post-Communist countries has turned majoritarian, as ex-Soviet bloc states start to formalize discrimination against pro-democracy forces. Curiously, this reaction, of what can only be described as the ancien regime, both Stalinist, and its antecedents, focuses on sexual dissidence, to broadcast its worldview. In the Ukraine, it’s Femen. In my own home, Poland, it’s Dorota Nieznalska, an artist who was convicted of blasphemy.
It’s a familiar story, one that Pussy Riot’s Nadia Tolokonnikova was quick to point out, when, in her closing statement, she compared her band’s fate to the trial of Socrates, and the kenosis of Christ. Jesus was “raving mad,” she reminded her religiously observant tormentors. “If the authorities, tsars, presidents, prime ministers, the people and judges understood what ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ meant, they would not put the innocent on trial.” Tolokonnikov also cited the prophet Hosea, in the Hebrew Bible: “For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice.” Surely, the authorities were not thrilled.
Pussy Riot’s choice of Jewish scripture is of course telling, as well as calculated. The prophets argue for forgiveness (Hosea forgave . . .
Read more: Pussy Riot vs. The Pseudo Religious of Eastern Europe
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