Description
Book SynopsisThe Second World War was filled with many terrible crimes, such as genocide, forced migration and labour, human-made famine, forced sterilizations, and dispossession, that occurred on an unprecedented scale. Authenticity and Victimhood after the Second World War examines victim groups constructed in the twentieth century in the aftermath of these experiences. The collection explores the concept of authenticity through an examination of victims’ histories and the construction of victimhood in Europe and East Asia. Chapters consider how notions of historical authenticity influence the self-identification and public recognition of a given social group, the tensions arising from individual and group experiences of victimhood, and the resulting, sometimes divergent, interpretation of historical events.
Drawing from case studies on topics including the Holocaust, the siege of Leningrad, American air raids on Japan, and forced migrations from Eastern Europe,
Table of Contents
Introduction: Authenticity and Victimhood after the Second World War Randall Hansen, Achim Saupe, Andreas Wirsching, and Daqing Yang Part One: Methodological and Theoretical Approaches 1. From Hero’s Death to Suffering Victim? Reflections on the “Post-Heroic” Culture of Memory Andreas Wirsching 2. Victim Identities in the Public Sphere: Patterns of Shaping, Ranking, and Reassessment Michael Schwartz Part Two: Victims of Genocide and Massacres 3. Eastern European Shoah Victims and the Problem of Group Identity Ingo Loose 4. History on Trial before the Social Welfare Courts: Holocaust Survivors, German Judges, and the Struggle for “Ghetto Pensions” Jürgen Zarusky 5. Construction of Victimhood in Contemporary China: Toward a Post-Heroic Representation of History? Daqing Yang 6. “The Death of Manila” in World War II and Its Postwar Commemoration Satoshi Nakano Part Three: War Victims 7. Air Raid Victims in Japan’s Collective Remembrance of War James Orr 8. Between Memory and Policy: How Societies of Leningrad Siege Survivors Remember the War Tatiana Voronina 9. Victims or Perpetrators or Both? How History Textbooks and History Teachers in Post-Soviet Lithuania Remember Postwar Partisans Barbara Christophe Part Four: Victims of Forced Migration and Deportations 10. In Search of a Usable Memory: Politics of History and the Commemoration Day for German Forced Migrants after World War II Mathias Beer 11. Of Italian Perpetrators and Victims: Forced Migration in the Italian-Yugoslavian Border Region (1922–54) Tobias Hof 12. Defiant Victims: The Deportation of the Chechens and the Memory of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and Russia Moritz Florin 13. East Asian Victimhood Goes to Paris: A Consideration of WWII-Related Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Nominations to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Project Lori Watt
