Narrative Convergences and Clashes: German, Israeli, and Ukrainian Constellations of Holocaust Memory through Babi Yar Commemorations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2024
Summary
In 1941, more than one hundred thousand people were murdered by the German Wehrmacht (army), supported by some Ukrainian collaborators, including Ukrainian auxiliary policemen. With nearly thirty-four thousand Jews murdered, this event would constitute the largest single Nazi shooting of Jewish victims in the Soviet Union. Referencing these complex historical events, their contested legacy, and later attempts to commemorate them, this essay explains how German, Israeli, and Ukrainian state actors have engaged in Babi Yar memorialization practices as a way of interacting with the Holocaust legacy more broadly. The discussion is grounded in discourse analysis of the three nations’ presidents and their participation in the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Babi Yar events in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2016. These speeches illustrate a modern development in regional Holocaust memorialization discourse; namely, the way in which representative German, Israeli, and Ukrainian narratives clash while at the same time partially overlapping.
No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone.
I am afraid.
—Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1961More than fifty years have passed since Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko penned his poignant tribute to Babi Yar (alternatively spelled in Ukrainian Babyn Yar). At the time of his writing, this rumination was provocative for more than just its underlying accusation. Kyiv—site of the Nazi murder of some thirty-four thousand Jews—was the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and still firmly embedded within the Soviet Union. Any discussion of Ukraine's largest mass gravesite was one of the many forbidden topics of the day. In the wake of the Babi Yar executions, Soviet leaders followed a familiar pattern of repression, scrubbing references to the singling out of Jews—who prior to the German occupation in June 1941 had comprised approximately 20 percent of Kyiv's population— in the official documentation of these events. When Yevtushenko was moved to write the above poem in 1961 after observing city officials dumping garbage into the ravine where victims’ remains were interred, Soviet Union premier Nikita Khrushchev personally condemned his poem as historically erroneous and immature. This same year, however, marked yet another tragedy that would have lasting consequences for the legacy of Babi Yar: a burst dam claimed the lives of nearly one hundred fifty people and washed World War II–era human remains into Kyiv's residential areas.
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- NexusEssays in German Jewish Studies, pp. 79 - 100Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2023