Preliminary Programme

In Russia, almost two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Stalin’s popularity soared in nationwide polls, as many recalled the country’s former prestige and their previous sense of security. Likewise, many Serbs, who formed the largest group in former Yugoslavia, look back with nostalgia to a time of greater national pride and material comfort – for themselves. By contrast the dominated ethnic populations in that same nation at that same time were frustrated in their striving for national pride. Each polity has a story fashioned by selected and connected events that promote its national interests.
Although the physical battle in former Yugoslavia has ended, the divisiveness remains, and is perpetuated by competing narratives of what happened and why. And in Russia, an increasingly emergent “invisible Stalinism” has once again given victims of the repression little validation of their experience. This paper looks at the disjunction of narratives in Russia and Serbia, and seeks to explain some of the impediments to official truth-telling. (Show less)

In my presentation, I wish to focus on selected themes of one Holocaust related history and one story; the Eichmann Trial and the Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Off and on, both this trial and its renowned interpreter have generated controversy in Israeli society, the last round taking place in the year 2000.

In Israel, the Eichmann trial was a transformative event; it has changed not only what this society thought of the Holocaust and its victims, but also what it thought of itself and its place in the world. Being conceptualized and conducted as a political trial, truth telling and truth-value were not its primary aim. The formal components of the trial’s narratives, the witnesses’ testimonies, were selected and employed to produce justice in the legal sense, not to reveal the historical truth. Moreover, by the late 1950s, with the formative stage of nation building drawing to a close and the pioneering spirit waning, enhancing Israelis’ commitment to the Zionist ethos needed a boost. It was in this context that the tabooed experience of the Shoah was revitalized and recruited as a counter-metaphor; an ideological vaccine for the ailing body politics of Israel. Arendt’s report of the trial, on the other hand, was not an easy report to digest in the early 1960s; it brought neither solace nor closure and it did not celebrate the new Jewish nationalism by investing it with a redemptive meaning. Rather, Arendt provided an angry and at times subversive analysis that focused on three significant themes: the administration, the aims and the lessons of the trial, on Eichmann the criminal bureaucrat, and on the behavior of the victims during the Shoah. She offered an important counter-narrative to the one presented by the prosecution. Her narrative was often and continuously misunderstood and read out of its historical context. Interestingly, it turned the American Jewish community and many Israeli intellectuals against her, although as I shall demonstrate much of her thinking was accepted by the Israeli legal system and its social order prior to the trial, but was conveniently "forgotten" by the 1960s. Indeed, I shall argue that much of what angered the Israeli public, when it did, had little to do with the Shoah and much to do with its use as a proof for the validity of the Zionist prognosis. Utilizing the historical record and its Arendtian interpretation and its representation , I shall probe where is truth telling and truth value is optimal, and what is the relationship, if any, among the two. (Show less)