Perceptions of the Holocaust in Film and Literature: Changes in Jewish-Soviet Holocaust Memory in the Ukraine (1945 to the 2010s)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Viktoriya Sukovata
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 535026791

Using five exemplary case studies, the research project explores the changes of Holocaust memory in Ukraine in the context of political, ideological, and social transformations from the immediate post-war period and the Cold War until the 2010s. The key sources are autobiographical writings, novels and, above all, films created by authors of Jewish origin. The planned project’s main epistemological interest is focused on works that neither at the time nor today became known to a wider audience in the West and which have also been partially forgotten in post-Soviet Ukrainian culture. The project explores how these documents of literary and media commemoration have formed their specific statements and their respective genres between Jewish testimony and Soviet memory politics. One aim is to show how much they thereby represent a specific memory-cultural alloy of a particular and a general memory, and how they can be better understood if they are analysed as the result of a compromise between primary memories and political interpretation.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position