Encounters with Troubled Pasts in Contemporary Dutch and Greek Historiography

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