Estonia and Sofi Oksanen | Russian Colonialism, and the Privilege of Having Been Occupied by Both Nazis and Communists

[Russia has never been “an overseas kind of empire”, she adds, rather a state that’s sought to exploit and colonise its European neighbours. Oksanen says that, growing up in Finland, she learned about the country’s past at school. But she was taught nothing of Estonia and had to fill in the gaps from oral history. Her mother’s family has lived in western Estonia, near Haapsalu, since the 15th century; she emigrated to Finland in the 70s, and when Sofi was a child, she would travel to Soviet Estonia to see her grandparents.

Her family reflects Estonia’s 20th‑century divisions, she says. Her grandfather joined the Forest Brothers, a partisan group that fought against Soviet rule during and after the war. He accepted amnesty following Stalin’s death. “He was always reminded of his past. He became a very silent man,” Oksanen says. One of her grandfather’s brothers was deported to Siberia. Another carried out the deportations. He was subsequently hailed as a communist war hero.

“It’s a typical Estonian story. The Baltics were doubly occupied, so these stories were common. There were victims of the terror sitting around the same table with people who had been tools of that terror.” Oksanen says ethnic Russians who resettled in Estonia after 1945 had no idea they were living in a once-sovereign country. Estonia had vanished. Of her collaborating great-uncle, she says: “He wasn’t a nice person.”]  Read the full article | THE GUARDIAN

Jennifer Teege and her Grandfather | When Gesture Becomes Event

When a black German woman discovered her grandfather was the Nazi villain of ‘Schindler’s List’

[The discovery came like a bolt from the blue in the summer of 2008, when she was 38 years old, as she relates in the memoir “Amon,” which was published in German in 2013 (co-authored with the German journalist Nikola Sellmair), and is due out in English this April under the title “My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past.”]

Read the full article | HAARETZ

Deconstruction as Pretext | Paul de Man and Academia | Simulacra

Read the full article | The Weekly Standard Book Review

When de Man died in 1983, he was at the height of his influence…. Deconstruction was an academic orthodoxy, and its high priests—Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom (since then something of an apostate)—were the well-remunerated guardians of its sacred truths. After de Man’s death, appreciations appeared in prominent literary weeklies, and new volumes gathered together his unpublished and uncollected work. His memorial service in New Haven, where he had been Sterling professor of humanities and head of the comparative literature department at Yale, was the equivalent of a state funeral.

Then, in 1988, a graduate student made an astonishing discovery. Between 1940 and 1942, unbeknownst to any of his academic peers, Paul de Man had written nearly 200 articles, most of them on ostensibly literary themes, for two collaborationist newspapers. These articles, which were soon translated and published in the United States, saw de Man praising generic “Western” writers for their ability to shake off the cultural baggage of Jewish mediocrity and endorsing the idea that all of Europe’s Jews should be deported en masse, through Franz Rademacher’s so-called Madagascar Plan.

8 Photographs From the Real “Monuments Men”—Who Saved Art and Treasure From the Nazis

8 Photographs From the Real “Monuments Men”—Who Saved Art and Treasure From the Nazis

Mother Jones

Monuments Men is based on the true story of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) program (whose men and women were known as “Monuments Men”) established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943 to help rescue art and cultural property from obliteration during World War II. The Monuments Men included servicemembers and art historians who aided in tracking down, identifying, and returning priceless works of art stolen by Hitler’s forces.

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler: In the Name of Their Mothers is the story of a group of young Polish women, some barely out of their teens, who outwitted the Nazis during World War II to rescue thousands of Jewish children from certain death.

Alice Sommer Herz | Everything is a Gift

Alice Sommer Herz died yesterday. She was the oldest known Holocaust survivor. And she was a pianist.

Oldest Known Holocaust Survivor Dies at 110

Oldest Known Holocaust Survivor Dies at 110

There are many remarkable things to say about Alice Herz-Sommer, who until her death in London on Sunday was thought to be the world’s oldest survivor of the Nazi Holocaust.

To start with, there’s her age: Herz-Sommer was 110. Then there are the people she knew, including writer Franz Kafka — who died in 1924. But what has particularly touched us as we’ve read about her this morning is her amazingly positive view of the world. [NPR]

Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine | by Timothy Snyder

Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine | by Timothy Snyder

(from the New York Review of Books):

The protesters represent every group of Ukrainian citizens: Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers (although most Ukrainians are bilingual), people from the cities and the countryside, people from all regions of the country, members of all political parties, the young and the old, Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Every major Christian denomination is represented by believers and most of them by clergy. The Crimean Tatars march in impressive numbers, and Jewish leaders have made a point of supporting the movement. The diversity of the Maidan is impressive: the group that monitors hospitals so that the regime cannot kidnap the wounded is run by young feminists. An important hotline that protesters call when they need help is staffed by LGBT activists.

Monuments Men Attempts to Shed Some Light Into the Unprecedented Stealing of Art by the Nazis | Here is the Real Thing: The Rape of Europa

Before George Clooney’s “Monuments Men”, “The Rape of Europa” eloquently illustrated the extent of Nazi Art plundering and the efforts of Allied forces to minimize the damage.

Lidegaard’s Book: Countrymen | Danish Jews | Ambiguity of Virtue

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115670/denmark-holocaust-bo-lidegaards-countrymen-reviewed

The book Countrymen, Danish Jews, and the ambiguity of virtue