Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Post-World War II anti-Semitic pogroms in East and East Central Europe: collective violence and popular culture

2019; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 26; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13507486.2019.1611744

1469-8293

Péter Apor, Tamás Kende, Michala Lônčíková, Valentin Săndulescu,

Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

In late 1945 and the Summer of 1946, a series of horrific assaults against surviving Jewish communities occurred in postwar East Central Europe, particularly in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Ukraine, Russia and Romania. The pogrom in the polish town of Kielce on 4 July 1946 is arguably the most infamous case. Roughly a month later similar atrocities occurred in the Hungarian industrial town Miskolc on 30 July and 1 August 1946 and in various localities in Slovakia between 1 and 5 August. These were preceded by pogroms in the Hungarian village Kunmadaras on 22 May 1946, in Slovakia, in Topoľčany on 24 September 1945, on 4–7 September in Kiev, Ukraine (USSR) and on 8 July Rubtsovsk, Russia (USSR). The collection of articles seek to fill in three important lacunae of current scholarship: first, it adds the so far missing in-depth socio-cultural histories of popular anti-Semitic pogroms in Slovakia, Hungary, the USSR and Romania next to the already existing work on Poland; second, it focuses on the connections between popular culture and collective violence so far largely neglected; and, third, it is the first comparative investigation into the topic. The main goal of the articles is to analyze the specific conditions of postwar popular anti-Semitism and to understand how peasants and workers distanced and excluded their neighbours during 1945 and 1946. Authors explore the genesis and consequences of collective violence committed by ordinary people in four sub-themes: 1, the idea of ‘legitimate violence’ in postwar popular cultures; 2, the public image of Jews and the Holocaust after 1945; 3, the popular memory of the war; 4, the political uses and abuses of the pogroms.