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Ghosts of War
Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus
Franziska Exeler (Author)
9781501762734
Hardback, published 15 April 2022
360 pages, 13 b&w halftones, 5 maps - 5 Maps - 13 Halftones, black and white
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.8 cm, 0.907 kg
Ghosts of War is a major achievement and should lend itself to wide use in classrooms and by researchers. It is poised to become standard reading for anyone interested in the Soviet postwar period. Overall, Exeler provides a multifaceted and well-narrated overview of Belarusian society during World War II and its aftermath Ghosts of War is a well-researched and impressive work that deserves extensive attention. A key strength of the book is its consistent focus on individuals' complex motives, experiences, and choices. In Ghosts of War, Franziska Exeler provides a complex and well constructed exploration of Belarus's violent past during World War II."
How do states and societies confront the legacies of war and occupation, and what do truth, guilt, and justice mean in that process? In Ghosts of War, Franziska Exeler examines people's wartime choices and their aftermath in Belarus, a war-ravaged Soviet republic that was under Nazi occupation during the Second World War. After the Red Army reestablished control over Belarus, one question shaped encounters between the returning Soviet authorities and those who had lived under Nazi rule, between soldiers and family members, reevacuees and colleagues, Holocaust survivors and their neighbors: What did you do during the war? Ghosts of War analyzes the prosecution and punishment of Soviet citizens accused of wartime collaboration with the Nazis and shows how individuals sought justice, revenge, or assistance from neighbors and courts. The book uncovers the many absences, silences, and conflicts that were never resolved, as well as the truths that could only be spoken in private, yet it also investigates the extent to which individuals accommodated, contested, and reshaped official Soviet war memory. The result is a gripping examination of how efforts at coming to terms with the past played out within, and at times through, a dictatorship.
Introduction: Truth, Guilt, and Justice in an Illiberal State
1. Contested Space: An East European Borderland before 1941
2. At the Heart of Darkness: Wartime Choices, 1941–1944
3. Post-1944: The Moment of Return
4. Determining Guilt: The Soviet Politics of Retribution
5. Loss, Grief, and Reckonings: Personal Responses to the Ghosts of War
6. Belarus, the Partisan Republic: Narrating the Years of War and Occupation
Afterword
Note on Wartime Losses