“Counter-history” under state socialism in east central Europe is the overarching topic explored in this volume edited by Peter Hallama and Stephan Stach. The editors and authors of this volume set out to complicate the narrative that a “return of history” and a “return to memory” took place after the demise of communism in 1989 (9). In fact, history and memory had already been returning from the 1970s onwards through the practice of “counter-history” as a discourse of dissidence in the region. This discourse challenged the “socialist master narrative” in several ways from exposing falsifications and breaking taboos, or shedding light on so-called “blank spots.” In addition, it could provide an alternative interpretation of national history, although “counter-history” did not necessarily imply a wholesale negation or dichotomous contrast to the official version of history, nor was it without its own pitfalls. Rather, it “perverted the legitimizing function of history for the socialist system into its delegitimization and simultaneously became a resource for the legitimization of dissident and oppositional activity” (18).

The volume brings together ten authored chapters dealing with specific themes and manifestations of “counter-history” in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. The volume's main topical focus rests on the Second World War and the Holocaust, given the importance of these historical events for the foundation myths of the socialist regimes in the region. Within this framework, one discerns a pattern of “counter-historical” narratives dealing with resistance or victimhood. Two chapters deal with resistance to the Nazis. Christhardt Henschel provides a comparative discussion of how it was presented by the East German and Polish opposition respectively, while Joanna Urbanek and Florian Peeters assess the impact of the tradition of Polish wartime resistance and the Warsaw Uprising, specifically on the opposition in the late state-socialist era. Poland's opposition was able to instrumentalize a much less ambiguous “counter-history,” as it could invoke the example of the Polish non-communist resistance whereas their East German counterparts had a more complex narrative to navigate vis-à-vis the anti-fascist foundation myth of the East German state. Moreover, the strong identification of the Polish opposition with the wartime resistance and the romantic myth of the Warsaw Uprising evolved to transcend its “counter-historical” framework and materialize into one of the foundations upon which a new official post-1989 historical narrative came to be based.

While the Polish opposition could indeed construct a heroic counter-narrative to challenge the hegemony of the official socialist history, other countries' dissident narratives proved to be more complicated. The ambiguities of interpreting the immediate postwar years in Czechoslovakia are explored by Alena Fialová and Adam Dobeš. Both chapters show how the official narrative of the Second World War was deconstructed, raising questions of responsibility on the one hand and offering alternative assessments of liberation on the other hand. The tension between resistance (or heroism) and victimhood is a constant element resonating in the history and “counter-history” of the Second World War in east central Europe.

The volume tackles the notion of victimhood in five chapters. Three of these, by Stephan Stach, Peter Hallama, and Richard Esbenhade deal with the Holocaust and its remembrance. While the socialist regimes drew their claims to legitimacy by articulating their anti-fascist credentials vis-à-vis the Nazi crimes, the opposition managed in some cases through its own commemorative practices to portray the Holocaust as an indictment of totalitarianism in general. The “counter-historical” critique of the regimes' minimizing of Jewish victimhood also provided a potential impetus towards a more self-critical reflection on the role of the central European societies towards Jews during the war—though this was not self-evident as the memory politics in the years after 1989 have demonstrated. Biana Hoenig similarly tackles an erstwhile taboo subject: the postwar expulsion of ethnic Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia. The chapter discusses how the topic reverberated in dissident discussions based on texts by Polish opposition activist Jan Józef Lipski and the Slovak historian Ján Mlynárik. Finally, Sabine Stach reflects upon the problem of “student martyrdom” and how the myth of November 17, 1939 contributed to a subversive narrative of students perishing while opposing oppression that ultimately helped delegitimize the socialist regime in Czechoslovakia. Although it helped incite generational solidarity against the regime, the student victimhood narrative effectively disappeared after 1989.

Not all contributions in the volume deal with the Second World War or the Holocaust directly. Silke Plate's chapter explores the significance of visual representations of the Polish Second Republic through a study of underground postage stamps produced by the Polish anti-communist opposition during the martial law and normalization years of the 1980s. While the practice of an underground postal service in these years was inspired by Polish wartime resistance, it also provided a framework to project the oppositional activity of the 1980s as part of a “counter-state,” drawing upon a consensus built around a particular narrative of the Polish interwar state, one that was significantly opposed to the official socialist narrative concerning this epoch.

Taken as a whole, the volume elucidates on an interesting aspect of dissident activity under state socialism—that of countering the official historical narrative by the party-state. Not only does the volume shed more light on this usually somewhat ignored undertaking of opposition movements under communism, but it also serves to enrich our contextual understanding of the problems in east central Europe related to the sometimes controversial “politics of history and memory” in the countries of the region after the demise of communism in 1989. Since it is possible to trace some of the fault lines of present-day memory and history politics' contentious aspects in the region to the erstwhile “counter-history” under state socialism, one can see this volume's collection of case studies as a valuable contribution to broaden the scope of today's ongoing debates.