Cultural Identities and Politics of the Past in Post-Socialist Education Policies

In keeping with the conference aim to explore different meanings of resilience, my paper examines the role of memory politics in post-Soviet societies integrating historical narratives of Nazi and Soviet collaboration into national curricula. Based on ten years of anthropological research on the Baltic States, especially Lithuania, this paper uses theories of transnational governmentality (Foucault, 1991; Ferguson and Gupta, 2002) to understand how NATO and EU accession policies for the promotion of Holocaust education became cultural flashpoints in countries that experienced both Nazi and Soviet occupation. By observing and interviewing educators, policy makers, and civil society actors in four countries, this paper finds that different cultural conceptions of the “required” elements for coming to terms with the past have contributed to backlash in some groups against open discourse about the Holocaust and WWII. Many individuals in Lithuania argue that the devastation of WWII and the Soviet occupation were so vast that the resilience of the country exists in “not looking back”; however, western conceptions of reconciliation espouse the need to “confront” painful events of the past. The contemporary effects of such debates are visible in the rise of right-leaning political parties that frame national resilience around the promotion of an ethnic (rather than civic) national identity. Following Chari and Verdery (2009), who argue that post-socialist societies are looking for new “enemies of the state” against whom to define their national identity, this paper suggests that current approaches to teaching about the Holocaust in Europe often exacerbate social disregard for it.