The volume in hand throws light on historical encounters with troubled pasts in contemporary Dutch and Greek historiography. Contributors, experts in their respective research fields with a wide range of scholarly publications, eschew dominant national accounts, deconstruct top-down narratives, and situate the historical subject(s) at the centre of the analysis.
Troubled pasts are the outcome of local, national and international conflicts, of the continuous quest for growth and dominance, of Colonialism and Great Power rivalry, of ideologically-motivated purges, of Genocide, of National Liberation Struggles, and of Civil Wars. They go hand-in-hand with a great deal of human suffering and horrendous atrocities against civilians on ethnic, religious, racial and political grounds. The examination of troubled pasts and their accompanying imagery raise enduring questions: Whose past is remembered? How is the past appropriated and memorialised? Which pasts are at best neglected, at worst silenced ¿ and why?
Encounters with Troubled Pasts addresses such issues by reference to Dutch colonialism in the New World and South East Asia, the Greek campaign in Asia Minor, the Shoah and its aftermath in Greece and the Netherlands, the Greek Civil War of the 1940s, Transitional Justice in Post-Soviet Russia and the Massacre of Srebrenica. It will be of interest to postgraduate students and academics working on Colonialism, the Shoah, modern Dutch and Greek History, Memory and on Oral History.
Contents
Preface
About the Contributors
An Undigested Past. The Netherlands and its Colonial History
Frank van Vree
Pride, Shame, Responsibility: New Historical and Heritage Studies on the Holocaust and Slavery
Dienke Hondius
The Other Side of the ¿Catastrophe¿: Greek Army Atrocities During the Asia Minor Campaign (1919-1922)
Tasos Kostopoulos
An Unclaimed Past: The Shoah in Athens
Philip Carabott
The Silent Tree: Collaborationism, Political Power and Collective Guilt. A Dutch-Greek Case Study in Memory
Riki van Boeschoten
A Ticket of Re-admission into Dutch Society: The Controversy on Amsterdam¿s Monument of Jewish Gratitude (1950)
Roel Hijink and Bart Wallet
Persecution Through Demonisation, Condemnation Through Silence: Reflecting on Left-Wing Violence in 1940s Greece
Iason Chandrinos
The ¿Morality Narrative¿ on Jewish Rescue in Greece: Commemorative Practices and Representations
Anna Maria Droumpouki
¿Narratives Don¿t Burn¿: Understanding Oral Testimonies and Conceptions of Loyalty Among Exiled Greek Minorities in Central Asia After the Stalinist Repressions
Eftihia Voutira
Narratives Competing for the Public Space in Post-Soviet Russia: A Case Study in Challenges to Transitional Justice
Nanci Adler
The Narratives of the Survivors of Srebrenica
Selma Leydesdorff