IN-PERSON: Prague – Section B

Abstract

In March 2022, Russian missiles damaged a memorial park in Kyiv dedicated to the 1941 Babyn-Yar massacre, which took place in a nearby ravine. This was one of the worst atrocities in German Occupied Europe, yet for decades it remained unacknowledged, its site degraded by urban development, and erased from history and public memory. The enduring struggle to commemorate the massacre and the victims, who were mostly Jews, and to safeguard the site from further eradication, affirms Babyn-Yar’s significance as a sacred and contested space, at the crossroads between competing narratives and national identities, conflicts of culture and heritage, and different modes of commemoration. As this paper will explore, memory politics seep into other cultural realms including the cinema, wherein films depicting the Holocaust can also be viewed as contested spaces. In his documentary Babyn Yar: Context (2020), filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa uses a compilation of archival footage, eyewitness testimony and sound effects to restore Babyn Yar from oblivion, and thus force our confrontation with the past. The film has been criticized, on the one hand, for its recreation of the massacre and construction of a new narrative to fill the void of silence and erasure. On the other hand, it is credited with having shifted the scope and terrain of remembrance, to engage more directly with the present. Loznitsa’s film, which anticipated the current disaster in Ukraine, demonstrates that contested spaces represent crucial, but often unheeded, interventions into the politics of memory, through which such atrocities are endlessly relived.