From Hero's Death to Suffering Victim: Reflections on the "Post-Heroic" Culture of Memory / Andreas Wirsching -- Victim Identities and the Dynamics of "Authentication": Patterns of Shaping, Ranking, and Reassessment / Michael Schwartz -- Eastern European Shoah Victims and the Problem of Group Identity / Ingo Loose -- History on Trial before the Social Welfare Courts: Holocaust Survivors, German Judges, and the Struggle for "Ghetto Pensions" / Jurgen Zarusky -- Construction of Victimhood in Contemporary China: Toward a Post-Heroic Representation of History? / Daqing Yang -- The "Death of Manila" in the Second World War and Its Postwar Commemoration / Nakano Satoshi -- Air Raid Victims in Japan's Collective Remembrance of War / James Orr -- Between Memory and Policy: How Societies of Leningrad Siege Survivors Remember the War / Tatiana Voronina -- Victims, Perpetrators, or Both? How History Textbooks and History Teachers in Post-Soviet Lithuania Remember Postwar Partisans / Barbara Christophe -- In Search of a Usable Memory: The Politics of History and the Day of Commemoration for German Forced Migrants after the Second World War / Mathias Beer -- Of Italian Perpetrators and Victims: Forced Migration in the Italian-Yugoslavian Border Region, 1922-1954 / Tobias Hof -- Defiant Victims: The Deportation of the Chechens and the Memory of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and Russia / Moritz Florin -- East Asian Victimhood Goes to Paris: A Consideration of Second World War-Related Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Nominations to UNESCO's Memory of the World Project / Lori Watt.
Summary:
"The shadow of the Second World War was filled with many terrible crimes, such as genocide, forced migration and labour, human-made famine, forced sterilizations, and dispossession. None of these atrocities were new, but they all occurred on an unprecedented scale. Authenticity and Victimhood after the Second World War examines victim groups constructed in the twentieth century in the aftermath of these experiences. The collection explores the concept of authenticity through an examination of victims' histories and the construction of victimhood in Europe and East Asia. Chapters consider how notions of historical authenticity influence the self-identification and public recognition of a given social group, the tensions arising from individual and group experiences of victimhood, and the resulting, sometimes divergent, interpretation of historical events. Drawing from case studies on topics including the Holocaust, the siege of Leningrad, American air raids on Japan, and forced migrations from Eastern Europe, Authenticity and Victimhood after the Second World War shows the trends towards a victim-centred collective memory and the role trends play in memory politics and public commemorative culture."-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.