Stories of a nation's past are fundamentally about the political present. At the core of historical remembering lies evidence of contemporary state legitimacy and justification for the boundaries of the nation as it is imagined in the present. In her latest book, Jelena Subotić interrogates the political utility of Holocaust remembrance in post-communist East Europe. She offers nuanced case studies of Soviet and non-Soviet communist spaces, demonstrating how emerging successor states filtered contemporary political interests through memories of communism and the Holocaust, and appropriated the Holocaust “to search for their own genocides” (226). Subotić further examines the continued evolution of Holocaust remembrance within a wider political landscape, as post-communist state narratives chafe against the pressure to conform to the Western Holocaust narrative, a precondition for recognition as part of “cosmopolitan Europe.”

Subotić employs the phrase “memory appropriation,” to signify a transferred victimhood. The Holocaust is “used to memorialize a different kind of suffering,” blurring Holocaust victims into victims of fascism, obscuring culpability for past crimes, and obfuscating responsibility in more recent wars (9). Memories unsuited to the current political moment are filtered out. In post-communist Europe, memory appropriation is bound up with acute competing sources of “ontological insecurity”: a state's insecurity about identity, status, legitimacy, and so forth, particularly in relation to international actors (10). Subotić shows how the promises and pressures of EU ascendency challenge post-communist state ideological/political legitimacy, heightening ontological insecurity.

Herein lies the “memory knot” at the core of Subotić's project. Holocaust memory in post-communist Europe differs qualitatively from the West, where a meta-narrative has emerged with clear victims (Jews) and villains (Nazis) (22). Communist state narratives framed World War II as “the people's victory over fascism,” subsuming Holocaust victims to “victims of fascism.” Emerging post-communist states appropriated Holocaust remembrance from communism's already appropriated Holocaust memory. Nascent states found legitimacy by rejecting communism and promoting a renewed connection to the pre-communist, mythically pure, ethnic state (9). In this narrative, communism and fascism are two sides of an occupying evil, an amalgamated interruption of the nation's destiny. The people (ethnically imagined) are dually victims of fascism and communism. This “victimhood nationalism” is further entrenched by Western demands for a memory that discounts the narrative of collective suffering upon which the nation was formed.

A poignant story in the book's preface illustrates this “memory knot.” Subotić describes discovering her grandfather's collaboration with Serbia's Nazi occupiers, eventual turn to the resistance, and subsequent concentration-camp internment. Their family story was always framed through “anti-communism.” Her grandfather's humiliation in communist Yugoslavia and her grandmother's haunted memories of the Russian Revolution were core to a story that, Subotić notes, “had largely been one of our own suffering—(leaving) little room for the memory of suffering others” (xv). Confronting her grandfather's collusion and the erasure it implied exposed uninterrogated elements of her family history. This resonates with Serbia's political history, wherein the communist Yugoslav narrative subsumed the Holocaust, leaving no space for Jewish suffering except as “victims of fascism.” Communism became the antagonist, the source of individual and collective suffering against which the past and present are narrated.

The ensuing introductory chapter, “The Big Grey Truck,” lays out this argument and provides the study's theoretical framework. Beginning with a critique of the paradigmatic Western Holocaust narrative, Subotić traces Holocaust memory through several epistemic shifts in East and West. Importantly, Subotić takes seriously the idea that, to achieve and maintain popular legitimacy, political narratives must necessarily be reinforced and maintained beyond the state, through a multiplicity of cultural texts and contexts at every level. Probing a host of post-communist memory sites and cultural artifacts (museums, monuments, history textbooks), she demonstrates how cultural remembrance (or lack thereof) reflects, shapes, and reinforces state interests. Although better-known examples, like Budapest's House of Terror, are used to great effect, the most keenly impactful artifacts are specific to her judiciously selected case studies: Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania.

Chapters 2 (about Serbia) and 3 (about Croatia) are inevitably in conversation. Elaborating Holocaust history and its appropriation within and beyond Yugoslavia, these chapters demonstrate how competing post-communist nationalisms in the 1990s reappropriated and weaponized Holocaust narratives, and how each renegotiated historical remembrance as moves toward EU ascendancy exacerbated ontological anxieties. Subotić's deep cultural and political understanding of former Yugoslavia is evident throughout these chapters. Her attention to Semlin (Staro Sajmište), a former Jewish internment and deportation camp in Belgrade that is today a “grotesque site of non-memory” (4), is particularly illuminating. She further considers a 2014 exhibition in Serbia's National Museum, In the Name of the People: Political Repression in Serbia 1944–1953. A blatant historical misrepresentation, the exhibit flagrantly appropriated Holocaust images to equate communism and fascism. Subotić also considers the appropriation of the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia—an exemplar of shifting historical Holocaust narratives. Subject to competing nationalist historical revision in the 1990s, Jasenovac continues to be an important (and contentious) site of political (non)memory for both Serbs and Croats.

Chapter 4 considers history and memory in Lithuania, a state that has been much more central to the study of Holocaust history than Serbia or Croatia. Subotić argues that the memory of Lithuanian Jews threatens the contemporary state's ontological security, which depends on an ethnically homogenous Lithuania that is itself the product of an appropriated but unacknowledged genocide. Adding to the scholarly value of this book, Subotić also explores Soviet influence in Lithuanian political narratives, placing Soviet and Yugoslav communism and post-communist legacies in conversation. The concluding chapter briefly compares other post-communist spaces (Ukraine and Slovakia, for example) and considers Russia's outsized influence in post-Soviet state narratives. Subotić ultimately advocates for “memory solidarity” (227), an acknowledging of the contemporary state's indebtedness to a legacy of collusion and suffering, of inclusion and exclusion.

Subotić's excavation of Holocaust crimes and victims in the Balkans is a significant contribution to Holocaust history and to scholarship on memory politics in former Yugoslavia. Further, her consideration of ontological insecurity and political memory in response to EU pressure is elucidatory. Here the condition of ontological insecurity is revealed. To be recognized (and recognizable) to the European Union, states must properly memorialize Holocaust victims and acknowledge their own culpability. Appropriated memory must be relinquished and political narratives reshaped. Yet the European Union plays an uninterrogated role in the maintenance and proliferation of nationalist historical narratives. The implications of this dynamic are significant.

The Western subject position possesses an inherent blind spot that renders unintelligible some aspects of contemporary post-communist state narratives. Calling attention to the liminality produced in this blind spot, Subotić offers us a cypher, inviting us to see and understand post-communist states with greater complexity.

Moreover, ontological anxieties are not only evident in fledgling nations. They are continually negotiated even in seemingly stable states. Who counts as a recognizable subject, to whom, under what conditions? This is the real political power of historical narratives: to shape, reflect, and reinforce state power through assumptions about who counts as “us,” who counts as “Other,” and who does not count at all. Ontological insecurity is certainly exacerbated in the wake of political or social upheaval, but these same processes are at work always and everywhere to some extent and degree.

This is the book's grand contribution. The omnipresent nature of Holocaust memory makes it a meaningful frame for critiquing the political utility of historical narratives, writ large. Subotić's case studies represent sites of urgency and upheaval, negotiating acute ontological insecurities at several very visible points in recent history. Hence, shifting historical narratives are more readily “seeable.” But the broader relevance of this book lies in the framework it provides to interrogate state narratives bound up with mounting ontological insecurities worldwide right now. As far-right movements surge globally and states struggle to negotiate the subsequent ontological anxieties, this book has much to teach and is growing more relevant by the hour.