2000
Eurozine
2000
2010-03-19
Abstracts for 2000 11/2009
Interview with Rudolf W.
Rudolf W., a German economist and entrepreneur, talks about his political opposition in the GDR.
Martin Sabrow
"Change" or "revolution"
Beside the agreement on the consequences, there is no consensus on the interpretation of 1989 in Germany: was it a revolution or just a change? 1989 as locus of memory does still not exist but political interpretations ("revolution") have surfaced. According to Sabrow, the lack of consensus can be explained by four causes: temporal distance, altering narratives about the GDR, historical causes ("revolution" as collapse without individual actors), and the main source: the change in the general European memory culture. "Nation", "class", "advancement" or "revolution" are no longer paradigms of the European historical consciousness.
Interview with László Nagy
The Hungarian chemical engineer László Nagy talks about the organization of the Pan-European Picnic in 1989.
Claude Karnoouh
Thoughts on the Romanian political police
Karnoouh, a French anthropologist, states that the (often anti-Semitic) incrimination and observation of the leftist Western European researchers by the Romanian political police under the communist regime, grew out of the nationalist changes in Romanian politics of the 1970s. There were changes not only in the rhetoric of the Party: the turn was mental as well, and can be described by the term denial. The creation of an enemy, suspicion against leftist foreigners (the potentially most dangerous critics), secured the separation and control of the population and the status of the elite. From this point of view, the role of the Securitate in the Romanian political transition can be better understood.
Endre Bojtár
E-mail
Complement for Timothy Snyder's article ("Holocaust: The ignored reality" in 2000 10/2009). Snyder left out of his account the four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews killed in Auschwitz, and tens of thousands of Hungarians who were dispelled from Czechoslovakia after 1945. To get an accurate view of the Holocaust, the Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews) should be counted as a separate unity.