Communism in twentieth-century Europe is predominantly narrated as a totalitarian movement and/or regime. This book aims to go beyond this narrative and provide an alternative framework to describe the communist past. This reframing is possible thanks to the concepts of generation and gender, which are used in the book as analytical categories in an intersectional overlap. The publication covers twentieth-century Poland, Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, the Soviet Union/Russia, former Yugoslavia, Turkish communities in West Germany, Italy, and Cuba (as a comparative point of reference). It provides a theoretical frame and overview chapters on several important gender and generation narratives about communism, anticommunism, and postcommunism. Its starting point is the belief that although methodological reflection on communism, as well as on generations and gender, is conducted extensively in contemporary research, the overlapping of these three terms is still rare. The main focus in the first part is on methodological issues. The second part features studies which depict the possibility of generational-gender interpretations of history. The third part is informed by biographical perspectives. The last part shows how the problem of generations and gender is staged via the medium of literature and how it can be narrated.

The Afterlife of the Shoah in Central and Eastern European Cultures is a collection of essays by literary scholars from Germany, the US, and Central Eastern Europe offering insight into the specific ways of representing the Shoah and its aftereffects as well as its entanglement with other catastrophic events in the region. Introducing the conceptual frame of postcatastrophe, the collected essays explore the discursive and artistic space the Shoah occupies in the countries between Moscow and Berlin. Postcatastrophe is informed by the knowledge of other concepts of "post" and shares their insight into forms of transmission and latency; in contrast to them, explores the after-effects of extreme events on a collective, aesthetic, and political rather than a personal level. The articles use the concept of postcatastrophe as a key to understanding the entangled and conflicted cultures of remembrance in postsocialist literatures and the arts dealing with events, phenomena, and developments that refuse to remain in the past and still continue to shape perceptions of today's societies in Eastern Europe. As a contribution to memory studies as well as to literary criticism with a special focus on Shoah remembrance after socialism, this book is of great interest to students and scholars of European history, and those interested in historical memory more broadly.

Communism in twentieth-century Europe is predominantly narrated as a totalitarian movement and/or regime. This book aims to go beyond this narrative and provide an alternative framework to describe the communist past. This reframing is possible thanks to the concepts of generation and gender, which are used in the book as analytical categories in an intersectional overlap. The publication covers twentieth-century Poland, Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, the Soviet Union/Russia, former Yugoslavia, Turkish communities in West Germany, Italy, and Cuba (as a comparative point of reference). It provides a theoretical frame and overview chapters on several important gender and generation narratives about communism, anticommunism, and postcommunism. Its starting point is the belief that although methodological reflection on communism, as well as on generations and gender, is conducted extensively in contemporary research, the overlapping of these three terms is still rare. The main focus in the first part is on methodological issues. The second part features studies which depict the possibility of generational-gender interpretations of history. The third part is informed by biographical perspectives. The last part shows how the problem of generations and gender is staged via the medium of literature and how it can be narrated.

The concept of "camp narratives" rather than "Holocaust narratives" or "Gulag narratives" is based on the assumption that literary accounts of camp experiences share common traits, aesthetically as well as thematically. The book presents readings of camp literature that underscore the similarities between texts about Soviet gulag camps, Nazi camps and about other camp experiences. While literature about Nazi concentration camps still serves as a point of reference for camp narratives in the same way that the Holocaust serves as a point of reference for other genocidal operations, socialist labor and penal camps have become transnational lieux de memoire in their own right since 1989. This volume intends to provide a theoretical frame as well as an overview of several important European camp literatures and case studies of iconic camp narratives and to take a comparative and transnational perspective on the genre of the camp narrative.

The concept of "camp narratives" rather than "Holocaust narratives" or "Gulag narratives" is based on the assumption that literary accounts of camp experiences share common traits, aesthetically as well as thematically. The book presents readings of camp literature that underscore the similarities between texts about Soviet gulag camps, Nazi camps and about other camp experiences. While literature about Nazi concentration camps still serves as a point of reference for camp narratives in the same way that the Holocaust serves as a point of reference for other genocidal operations, socialist labor and penal camps have become transnational lieux de memoire in their own right since 1989. This volume intends to provide a theoretical frame as well as an overview of several important European camp literatures and case studies of iconic camp narratives and to take a comparative and transnational perspective on the genre of the camp narrative.

This book analyzes the ideology-based reception of Adam Mickiewicz in Communist Poland and of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in East Germany, the dynamics of that process and the strategies used to exploit the iconic status of the poets for the purpose of reaffirming the legitimacy of the new system. The basic question tackled here concerns the similarities and differences between the Polish and German styles of harnessing poets into the service of politics. These issues are presented in view of the cultural and political life, i.e. public appearances by prominent politicians and culture activists, Marxist history of literature and literary works that ennobled Mickiewicz and Goethe in a hagiographic manner.

This anthology presents a selection of texts on Polish socialist realist literature, written from the early 1980s to date. They depict a comprehensive picture of this literary phenomenon: starting from its holistic interpretations, through detailed analyses of the poetics of literary and political texts and a presentation of specific, also untypical embodiments of this artistic doctrine, to descriptions of the functioning of the institutions of literary life under socialist realism. All the texts in this anthology share a historically and culturally determined general methodological perspective, representing a combination of the Polish version of structuralism in literary studies - on the descriptive plane - with the anti-communist attitude on the plane of evaluation of presented phenomena.

Der Band behandelt die Nachwirkungen und das Nachleben der Shoah in Polen und in Deutschland. Die Begriffe des Postkatastrophischen und der Vergegenwartigung verweisen darauf, dass die Beitrage den Schwerpunkt nicht auf das eigentliche Ereignis, sondern auf sein Nachleben legen, d.h. auf die Art und Weise, wie die Shoah in Kunsten, Medien und durch Institutionen prasent gehalten wird. Der Sammelband untersucht Formen medialer Vermittlung der Shoah. Die Beitrager arbeiten die asthetischen und diskursiven Eigenheiten sowie die Besonderheiten deutscher oder polnischer Konstellationen heraus. Die Schwerpunkte der Auseinandersetzungen liegen einerseits in oeffentlichen und historischen Diskursen, andererseits im Bereich asthetischer Vermittlung.