Nationalization through Internationalization. Writing, Remembering, and Commemorating the Holocaust in Macedonia and Bulgaria after 1989

Abstract

The author analyses the scholarship, remembrance, and commemoration of the Holocaust in Macedonia and Bulgaria after 1989. She re-examines interpretive schisms between former communists and anticommunists, explores changes in one of the major lieux de mémoire in Bulgaria, the ‘rescue’ of its Jews, and juxtaposes it to the killing of those Jews who lived in Bulgarian-occupied territories. She contextualizes the Bulgarian-Macedonian controversies within European and global frameworks, looking at the process of the institutionalization of Holocaust remembrance in the two countries. She then considers the role of international Jewish communities and the effects of a European Union that since the enlargement of 2007 has been moulding a ‘European’ commemorative landscape from fear of yet another East-West divide. In her conclusion the author outlines an agenda for a transnational social history of anti-Jewish policies and persecutions, and looks at who might be its major actors in Bulgaria and Macedonia.