Restoration of Fallen Soldiers to the Pantheon of National Heroes

Abstract

Abstract The five commemorations discussed in this chapter illustrate revisionist strategies that both whitewash the history of Nazi collaboration and homegrown fascism and blackwash the history of communism. Fascist forces and Nazi collaborators, such as the Ustaše in Croatia and the Waffen-SS in Latvia and Ukraine, are the focus of commemorations that construct an exculpatory and anti-communist memory narrative. Two additional anti-communist forces, Poland’s so-called “cursed soldiers” and resistors of the Red Army’s siege of Budapest, have been mythologized in the service of a national-conservative agenda. These memory challenges operate in a different environment than their counterparts in Western Europe, where the dominant Holocaust-centered memory culture and official commemorations became targets of right-wing mnemonic instrumentalization. In Eastern Europe, the memory cultures are still in flux; they are moving away from Soviet and communist era narratives as they seek to accommodate their national pasts in the broader European mnemonic landscape.