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• W4290659050 abstract "Churches and religious groups throughout Eastern and Central Europe were affected by state socialism in different ways. While some collaborated with Communist regimes, others bitterly opposed them, but all entered the 1990s with questions and ambiguities surrounding their honor and credibility unanswered. Edited by two of the foremost experts on religion and transitional justice in the region, this fascinating volume draws on research from secret police archives and public debates over lustration to examine how churches navigated both socialism and postsocialism and how they have dealt with accusations that their members were complicit in Communist crimes. Seven of the case studies come from Central and Eastern Europe (Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania), and another five concern former republics of the Soviet Union (Russia, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). Justice involves much more than just punishing the guilty, of course. As Gregor Buß points out in his chapter on the Catholic Church in East Germany, “This process includes the restitution of church property abusively confiscated by the communist authorities; the compensation packages offered in lieu of assets that cannot be returned; the prosecution of Communist Party officials, Stasi agents, and prison guards who victimized and persecuted clergy and faithful; the rewriting of history books in view of reflecting the churches’ plight during communist times; the rehabilitation of priests and believers unjustly imprisoned sometimes before 1989; the opening of museums, exhibitions, and archives; the commemoration of past victims and their suffering; and memorialization projects” (p. 6). This volume deals with each of these to various extents, depending largely on which had the most impact on the churches involved.The approaches of the chapters are remarkably uniform for a collected volume, and each author seems to be responding to the same set of questions. Every chapter covers how a particular church was repressed and persecuted by the authorities, the extent to which senior church figures collaborated with the regime, how knowledge of their collaboration became public, and steps taken to address the problems raised by public discussions of the past or to bring offending individuals to justice. The chapters are descriptive rather than argumentative, meaning that the book avoids the tensions created by competing theoretical frameworks and reads like an authoritative textbook covering a wide variety of cases across a broad region. The lack of theorizing is disappointing but only really becomes problematic in the victim–collaborator binary that is used throughout the book. Most cases were not so clear-cut, and individuals faced what Holocaust historian Lawrence Langer calls “choiceless choices.” Some people agreed to become informants after being tortured or threatened with death to themselves or their families; others did so for promotion or financial gain. Some provided detailed, frequent reports on their colleagues; others provided information of so little value that they were eventually abandoned as informants. Others were implicated in networks of complicity without being guilty in a judicial sense. In East Germany, ten Catholic priests were even appointed by the Church to talk to the secret police because the Church felt that it was better to engage with the authorities directly than to hope to avoid being infiltrated. Moreover, secret police files rarely contain as much information as the researcher would like, and the information that is there is not always reliable. Binaries such as victim versus collaborator are effective in situations where transitional justice must be served, but they are not so useful for scholars hoping to discover what actually happened. Complicating that binary and showing how it was produced and performed in postsocialist contexts would have been more useful than the current approach, which implies that postsocialist debates emerged directly out of what did and did not happen under communism.Discovering exactly if, how, and why people worked together with secret police is difficult and in many cases impossible. Not all researchers receive the same level of access to files, which creates problems for authors who have not been able to consult archives that might have shed more light on their case studies. Some scholars are overly optimistic about their archival access, with Momchil Metodiev writing that in Bulgaria, “in the course of the last thirty years all archives have been opened and all secrets revealed” (p. 113), as if the archives contain a complete record of the past. In her chapter on the Catholic Church in Albania, on the other hand, Ines Angeli Murzaku states unequivocally that “there was no collaboration between the Catholic Church and the government during the communist dictatorship” (p. 137). The Catholic Church was indeed heavily persecuted by the state, and as a community, Albanian Catholics did resist under persecution better than perhaps any other major religious group discussed in the book. As Murzaku notes, however, the Albanian archives allow only selective access to researchers, and hearsay from scholars who have seen more of the files than Murzaku suggests that some individuals in the Catholic Church did indeed collaborate with the dictatorship. In other cases, the files that are available need to be read more carefully and triangulated with other sources. In his discussion of the Romanian Orthodox Church, Lucian Turcescu claims that Valerian Trifa was “a well-known Iron Guard figure who appears to have instigated the legionary rebellion against Marshall Ion Antonescu in 1941 that led to the murder of some 120 Jews, the torture of 2,000 others, and the sacking of numerous synagogues and Jewish businesses in Bucharest” (p. 98). Trifa was indeed involved in the attacks on Jews during the rebellion, but he was far from being the instigator of the rebellion itself. Accuracy matters when dealing with sensitive histories such as these, and making unduly categorical claims about what people did or did not do undermines the reliability of what is otherwise a superbly researched collection.Such difficulties reinforce the value of this book, which helps to complicate our understanding of religion and transitional justice at the very places where it wrestles to find the right words to describe the past and pushes our analytical categories to their limits. A welcome addition to a growing secondary literature, this book will be read with great interest by specialists in postsocialism, transitional justice, and Church history." @default.
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• W4290659050 date "2022-06-01" @default.
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• W4290659050 title "Churches, Memory and Justice in Post-Communism" @default.
• W4290659050 doi "https://doi.org/10.5325/hiperboreea.9.1.0143" @default.
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