055 Remembering, Reliving, and Recycling Heroic Histories in Postwar East Central Europe

Friday, March 14, 2014: 2:00 PM-3:45 PM
Council (Omni Shoreham)
East Central Europe has had more than its share of extreme politics leading one historian to call the region “bloodlands.” In the 1930s and 1940s East Central Europe, like the rest of the continent, saw the mobilization of fascist movements. Some of these, like the Legion of the Archangel Michael (or the Iron Guard) in Romania were deeply and fanatically religious. The Legion took violent action against politicians, those it considered traitors, and Jews, and justified its actions theologically in a mutual relationship with the Romanian Orthodox Church. With the Second World War the region witnessed a prolonged period of unprecedented brutality, violence and genocide met at times by occasional resistance to the occupiers. This panel examines the ways in which moments of this traumatic history was resurrected, reimagined and reinterpreted for different purposes after the war by the communist regime, by those imprisoned in communist jails, and later still, by anticommunists who had survived communism. The panel includes papers on the afterlife of the suppressed Legion of the Archangel Michael in Romania during the communist and post-communist periods, and of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, by members of the Czech resistance.
Organizer:
Irina Livezeanu
Chair:
Daina Eglitis
Discussant:
Irina Livezeanu
Resurrecting Fascists as Orthodox Saints
Roland Clark, Eastern Connecticut State University
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