Christina Winkler
Junior Fellow (04/2014 – 08/2014)

The Russian view on the Shoah: Official remembrance versus individual memory of the Holocaust in contemporary Russia – a comparison.

As the legal successor to the Soviet Union, public remembrance of the war and Nazi Germany’s Soviet victims lies with the Russian Federation. But even though more than two million Holocaust victims were Soviet citizens, the Nazi genocide is strangely absent in Russia’s official memory of World War II. Gorbachev’s politics of ‘Glasnost’ changed public remembrance dramatically. Following a period of transition during the Yeltsin era, today Russia has returned to the Soviet narrative of the heroic victory over fascism, a unifying link the majority of Russians identify with. But as memory studies have shown, there is always an exchange between the personal memories of an individual and the collective memory of the social group to which a person belongs. My dissertation aims to identify and analyze this exchange by comparing collective forms of remembrance to forms of historical transmission and individual memories of people living near former killing sites. I’m focusing my research on the city of Rostov-on-Don, Russia's largest Holocaust site.

Christina Winkler, born in Flensburg, Germany, MA in Slavic Studies and Macroeconomics (1999), as well as in Holocaust Studies (2009). Has worked at the Goethe Institute in Volgograd (2000-2001), the Otto Benecke Foundation (2002), the „Petersburger Dialog“ (2002-2005) as well as the program „Journalists International“ of the Freie Universität Berlin (2006-2009). Since 2010 doctoral scholarship student at the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the University of Leicester and the Ernst-Ludwig-Ehrlich Studienwerk in Berlin (2011-2013).