Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Walke, Anika

Titel

Book Reviews: Memory Laws, Memory Wars: The Politics of the Past in Europe and Russia. By Nikolay Koposov,. New Studies in East European History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. xvi, 321 pp. Notes. Chronology. Index. $29.00, paper

Ist Teil von

• Slavic Review, 2019, Vol.78 (2), p.526-529

Ort / Verlag

Stanford: Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Quelle

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The amendment, proposed by the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party and approved by the Polish parliament on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27), was to impose sanctions of up to three years imprisonment on “those who publicly and notwithstanding facts attribute to Poland or the Polish Nation the co-responsibility for the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich … or for other crimes that constitute crimes against peace, humanity or military crimes or those who in another way diminish responsibility of the actual perpetrators of those crimes.” Recent attacks on scholars like Jan Tomasz Gross and Jan Grabowski, who have contributed much to our understanding of Polish-Jewish relationships during the German occupation, support an interpretation of the law as a thinly veiled attack on those who advocate for a critical view of Polish history that, among others, addresses antisemitism and the robbery and murder of Jews by Poles. In 2017, Uladzislau Belavusau and Aleksandra Gliszczyńska-Grabias edited a collection of essays, Law and Memory: Towards Legal Governance of History, on select national, European, and international laws that regulate memory and are supposed to play a crucial role in the creation of an integrated European value system. [...]of this shift, some historians—including some who initially supported the Gayssot Act—began to warn against unanticipated consequences and turned to defending the craft of History against attempts to curtail it.