Suffering as a Zero Sum Game: Holocaust History, National Identity, and the Politics of Memory in Post-Soviet Lithuania

This paper explores the intersections of international standards, historical justice, and the politics of memory in longstanding debates over Holocaust education and remembrance in Lithuania. Accepting that legislation and policy are technologies of power (Foucault, 1997) used to organize societies and influence how individuals "construct themselves as subjects" (Shore, 1997), this paper demonstrates the ways in which a transnational dialogue adopted for EU accession has become the impetus for local debates over the conception of Lithuanian national identity. Using a sociocultural approach based on 18 months of anthropologic fieldwork in Lithuania, this paper finds that after the fall of communism in 1991, the introduction of a transnational EU identity project contributed to the resurrection of a WWII past in Eastern Europe that demanded a historical reckoning of local participation in Nazi atrocities. While the facts of the Holocaust are not in debate, what they mean to "Lithuanian history" is still highly contested in Lithuania. While conservative groups continue to frame the Holocaust as relevant only to Jews and the west (and have subsequently reanimated a version of the swastika to symbolize Lithuanian purity), a small group of teachers across Lithuania has conversely started to incorporate Jewish civilization and the tragic Holocaust history as part of a more multicultural interpretation of "the nation," challenging not only how Lithuanians view themselves within the Lithuanian context, but across the European Union as well.