This article explores the political and discursive framing of the emerging project Holocaust Museum of Greece (HMG) based in Thessaloniki (announced in 2013). As an “in situ” Holocaust museum, the HMG could represent an important step toward recognizing Jewish suffering in a country where—compared with the rest of Europe—unprecedentedly high levels of antisemitic attitudes have been recorded over the past decade. Supported by a qualitative media analysis and supplemented with data from our online survey, we explore how HMG stakeholders and potential local visitors reflect on the project. Occurring amid contemporary endeavors in Holocaust commemoration and Greek-German reconciliation, we connect it with their persistence in combating far-right tendencies and antisemitism. Specifically, we investigate whose memory HMG stakeholders aim to display, how they reflect on dominant Greek historical narratives and whether they express a clear memory commitment and a genuine effort to produce a more integrated historical interpretation of the Holocaust in Greece.

This article examines the Soviet system of territorial autonomy by studying its impact on the Jewish population of Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s. While the new Soviet state created national republics, districts, and village councils for its non-Russian nationalities, Ukraine’s Jewish population was faced with a dilemma: Ukrainian Jews lived predominantly in cities, but urban space could not be claimed for Jewish territorial autonomy because the Soviet government hoped that peasant immigration would produce a Ukrainian working class. Without an autonomous status, many Jews felt threatened by the increasing influx of Ukrainians and the spread of Ukrainian-language institutions. Offered as a consolation prize, the Soviet Yiddishization initiative failed to cater to the needs of many Jews who preferred the Russian language as a means for social mobility. Attempts to resettle urban Jews in compact agricultural colonies suitable for territorial autonomy never reached the necessary scale. In conclusion, this article argues that the incompatibility of Soviet territorial autonomy with Ukrainian Jewish needs anticipated the Soviet state’s inability to accommodate the increasingly urban, heterogeneous, transnational, multilingual, and mobile society that emerged in the postwar Soviet Union.

In 1941, thousands of Jews from the regions of Bukovina and Bessarabia were deported to ghettos and camps in Romanian-occupied Transnistria to join local Ukranian Jews and other deportees. This article is a case study of the Shargorod ghetto, one of the largest ghettos in Transnistria, that reveals how individuals interned there, and in similar ghettos, survived despite their different social, economic, and cultural backgrounds. An examination based on regions allows for a better understanding of the diverse Jewish communities in Romania and how these differences influenced the lives of local Jews and deportees during the formidable years in Shargorod. Their major successes, as well as their failures, present a picture of entangled community identity in the face of disease, starvation, and forced labor. The survival of the Jewish population of Shargorod from 1941 to 1944 is analyzed through the selection of leadership by the ghetto inhabitants (specifically, Meier Teich’s role as ghetto leader), the entrepreneurial actions and aid that arose, and the format and agenda adopted by the ghetto’s cultural institutions.

Scholars frequently portray the end of the Habsburg Monarchy as driven by nationalist revolutions in the provinces. The experience of the Jiu Valley, Transylvania’s largest coal basin, demonstrates that nationalism was neither the only basis for revolution nor the most popular in all parts of the province. The multiethnic working class of Jiu embraced revolution as a response to state failures to provide basic services in a worsening wartime economy, even as state demand for coal rose. The miners created the Black Diamond Republic in October 1918 as Austro-Hungarian armies collapsed in an effort to actively negotiate their status after the war. The miners embraced revolution not as a bid for independence or ethnic secession but as a means to maintain local union power and negotiate the conditions of their inclusion in either Romania or Hungary. While “Romanian” and “Hungarian” councils were formed, such identities in Jiu were also linked to occupation (worker, peasant, or intellectual) rather than clear definitions of ethnicity.

In 1848, Habsburg Trieste became the target of German nationalists gathered in Frankfurt. The Frankfurt parliament, born out of the revolutions of 1848, has been widely depicted as a liberal experience. Yet its nationalist stances, which included the creation of a unitary German state through the absorption of vast multiethnic regions of the Habsburg monarchy, whose Austrian crownlands were part of the German Confederation, bear witness to the illiberal nature of the Frankfurt parenthesis of 1848–1849. Notwithstanding the assimilatory tendencies of the Frankfurt parliament, Italian activists in Trieste supported the inclusion of the Habsburg port in an enlarged Germany, hoping to break away from Habsburg rule, which they portrayed as oppressive. This article argues that the contradictory Italian support for the German Confederation highlights the paradoxes at the basis of nationalist movements at their onset, while also pointing to the difficulty that nation-states would soon witness in dealing with other ethnic groups within their borders. On the contrary, it was the Habsburg monarchy that, in its centuries-long tradition of accommodating different ethnicities into its fold, represented what to present-day observers comes closer to political liberalism than the so-called liberal national parties that opposed Habsburg rule.

This article looks at different strategies in which authoritarianism operated in relation to the redesign of Skopje during the rule of the conservative party VMRO-DPMNE and its leader Nikola Gruevski. It argues that the promoters of the urban project called “Skopje 2014” relied on a set of nondemocratic mechanisms and involvement and coordination of various individuals and institutions on all levels to implement and legitimize the project and expand its political dominance. These ranged from state-driven mechanisms and urban design strategies to contributions of non-state groups, thus demonstrating a systematic effort behind the makeover of Skopje. Examining the project through the concept of authoritarianism, the article goes beyond (methodological) nationalism to understand the complexity of the revamp of North Macedonia’s capital. It also demonstrates how the party used its ideological principles to leave its enduring mark on Skopje’s urban environment. Additionally, the article points out the need to study urban space politics in the context of hybrid and competitive authoritarian regimes.

Inspired by microhistory, this essay explores the wartime plight of a football stadium and the multi-ethnic club that called it home as a means of understanding Bosnia and Herzegovina's descent into conflict, the siege of Sarajevo, and the impact upon civilians. Like the suburb of the same name, Grbavica became part of the frontline during the siege. Deprived of its home, FK Željezničar continued to function, while players, staff, and supporters longed for a return to the shattered ground. At a local level, the organization offers a means of visualizing the development of the Grbavica suburb, from its socialist foundations to its post-Dayton reintegration. In this way, the life of the stadium and those who frequent it map onto the history of Yugoslavia, its dissolution, and the independent republic that emerged in its wake. Moreover, the wartime partition of the stadium, the club, and its supporters’ group – all of which were claimed by actors on both sides of the frontline – were representative of political developments in a state where the ethnic balance was forcibly reengineered. This reconstruction of Grbavica's war harnesses original photographic evidence, oral history, maps, contemporary journalism, and the transcripts of the Hague Tribunal.

This article revisits the French region of Brittany on the basis of sustained empirical research over a 25-year period. It identifies the twin use of influence and identity as forming a key part of an accepted and largely diffused territorial repertoire, based on affirming distinctiveness for reasons of vertical linkage, as well as horizontal capacity building. This article explores the different facets of this model of territorial influence. The two twin dimensions concern: first, a well-versed mechanism of lobbying central institutions and actors to defend the Breton interest; second, the use of territorial identity markers to forward the regional cause, relying on social movements and a broad capacity for regional mobilization. Within this overarching context, the Breton case demonstrates an intelligent instrumental use of identity and identity markers, but mainstream Breton forces recognize that this only makes sense in the light of the national level of regulation and structure of opportunities. The logic of this position is to integrate the Brittany region into a national model of territorial integration, while playing up identity markers to secure the maximum benefit for the region.

This article discusses the ways in which the spread and the overwhelming popularity of Turkish television series in Southeastern Europe influence the change in perception of Turks and Turkey, as well as how the serials are transforming the image of the Balkans and the Ottoman legacy in Turkey. Television serials significantly contributed to the shifting popular image of the “other,” and initiated interactions unimaginable even a decade ago. These exchanges are both following and encouraging the breakdown of geohistorical boundaries that were set by the nationalist narratives in these regions at the turn of the 20th century, toward a more nuanced understanding of a shared past and a postnational future.

As everybody is well aware, human rights is an extremely broad topic, so what I would like to do is make a few basic points with some illustrations and then sum up with some ideas and discussion. Much of the grand scheme for reforming the Soviet system has touched on issues that fall under the rubric of human rights, broadly construed. Human rights discussions are no longer constrained by the traditional Soviet emphasis on social and economic rights and now encompass a variety of civil and political rights. As I see it, the fundamental issue with respect to human rights is the propping up of the rule of law. The concept of the rule of law has been elevated to previously unknown heights and is extolled as a fundamental underpinning of the entire process of democratization. It lends itself to the reduction of arbitrary actions (or at least it should), it encourages glasnost', and it enhances support for perestroika because it is intrinsic to any process of democratization. This reliance on the rule of law is absolutely essential as a component of any process that is linked to de-Stalinization. The abuses of the Stalin years are routinely excoriated, and the message being conveyed is that constitutionally guaranteed rights of citizens will be upheld, constitutional reform will proceed, and legislation will be enacted to protect a host of rights not addressed by the Constitution.

By the end of the nineteenth century Russian legislation regarding Jews was a congeries of self-contractions and inconsistencies. On the one hand, Jews were hemmed in by numerous restrictions and repressive measures in regard to their residence rights, economic activities, communal organization, educational opportunities, and even religious practices. On the other hand, the limits of discrimination were often ill-defined, being expanded by some laws and contracted by others; in some cases important privileges were granted to various categories of Jews (for example, the right to live outside the Pale of Jewish Settlement) or to the Jewish community as a whole (for example, the right to collect certain taxes). In addition, the enforcement of this hodge-podge of rules and regulations varied from place to place and from time to time.

Writing in 1862, the testy Slavophile publicist and editor Ivan Aksakov complained:

In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson stressed the role that literature, and particularly the development of the novel, actually played in building a nation as an “imagined community.” Others have emphasized how building a national literature has often gone hand in hand with the creation of a national identity (e.g. Thiesse; Jusdanis). All have underlined the strong relationship between nationalism and literature: literature is a concrete tool that builds the nation as a community; literature also serves to build and spread a national identity.

The concepts of “reform” and “revision” need considerable elaboration before a systematic study of their political ramifications can be undertaken. Common usage in the West seems to indicate that “reform” in communist systems means change towards political pluralism, less ideology, and greater participation by the citizenry in political communication, aggregation, and decision-making. “Revision” and “revisionism,” which are essentially communist concepts, are also interpreted to indicate a process of “loosening up” the autocratic, bureaucratic, and ideological nature of contemporary political and socio-economic systems in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

In Western historical consciousness, National Socialist mass murder has become permanently identified with the Jewish Holocaust, Adolf Hitler's maniacal project to annihilate European Jewry. From its earliest days, the Nazi Party sought to exclude Jews from German public life, and when the Nazis came to power in January 1933, their anti-Jewish animus became official policy. What followed was legal disemancipation of German Jews, physical attacks on their persons, ghettoization, deportation, and physical extermination in the East. The story of the Holocaust is well known and generally accepted. Yet two years before German Jewish policy swerved from persecution and harassment to genocide, the Nazis were already involved in state-organized killing of another disfavored minority. Unlike the destruction of European Jews, the murder of this group—the mentally disabled—occurred within the Reich's own borders. Launched with the signing of a “Hitler decree” in October 1939 (backdated to 1 September), the centrally organized program targeted so-called “incurable” patients, whose lives were to be ended by a doctor-administered “mercy death” (Gnadentod). The Nazis attached the term “euthanasia” to their program of destruction, bolstering their rationale for it with humanitarian arguments and cost-based justifications, the latter legitimizing euthanasia as a means to free up scarce resources for use by “valuable” Germans. Over time, the restrictive use of euthanasia just for incurable patients ended; thereafter, the Nazis extended the killing program to healthier patients, sick concentration camp inmates, Jewish patients, and a variety of “asocials” (juvenile delinquents, beggars, tramps, prostitutes). The technology of murder developed in the “euthanasia” program—carbon monoxide asphyxiation in gas chambers camouflaged as shower rooms—would become the model for the first death camps in Poland. Many of the “euthanasia” personnel were likewise transferred to the Polish extermination centers, where they applied the techniques of mass death—refined in murdering the disabled—to the murder of the European Jews.