Key topics of the 2015 EUSTORY History Competitions were dictatorship and oppression
At regular intervals, participants of national EUSTORY History Competitions are asked to look at a given broad topic from a personal, specific angle. In the most recent competitions, a noticeable number of youths turned their attention to questions of dictatorship and oppression. Since 2009, the member states of the European Union have been remembering the victims of Stalinism and Nazism on 23 August of each year. The contributions of the 16 to 19-years olds demonstrate how important it is for them to remember the different experiences of dictatorship in order to ensure a democratic coexistence.
Examples from the Ukrainian, Russian and German competitions.
In the Ukraine, participants of the EUSTORY Competition did research on an independent national remembrance of the Second World War. They looked into the history of memorial sites, street names and museums, they visited archives and spoke to contemporary witnesses. In doing so, they expressed the wish for a stronger emphasis on the Ukrainian experiences of war and dictatorship versus the generalised historical narrative of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the format of the Ukrainian competition stipulates that the pupils present their work to the local public, thus making available their findings to the people in their region and include them in the discussion.
Finalists of the Russian history competition also worked on the history of political oppression. In a workshop, pupils were invited by MEMORIAL, the Russian human rights organisation and organiser of the history competition, to make suggestions for memorials for victims of dictatorship and oppression. They also explored how those places at which people had been arrested or deported by Soviet authorities could be marked or turned into a memorial sites in memory of the victims of the totalitarian regime in the Soviet Union. Pupils worked on their suggestions together with artists of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. The results were presented in the meeting and events centre of MEMORIAL and will be shown in the GULAG Museum in Moscow later this year.
In the German history competition, participants also looked at experiences with dictatorship, especially Nazism. Some pupils examined the experiences of their relatives during the Nazi era and the Second World War and found out that personal memories of the everyday routine of war and oppression are often sensitive issues. One participant looked into the history of her grandfather. Shortly after the war he was born as an illegitimate child of an SS man who was managing the accommodation at the Mauthausen Concentration Camp. The child was given up for adoption and found new parents. Only late in life did he deal with the fate of his biological mother and his half-sister.
With their submissions the young people intended to break existing taboos, scrutinise the silence and repression and take a critical look at the commemorative culture in the national but also in the familial contexts. What unites the young people is the clonclusion that people's individual experiences of dictatorship must not be forgotten.
"In Europe, the Second World War, National Socialism, Communism and oppression left scars that will take time to heal. Experiences of war and dictatorship live on in future generations. Thus, it is important that we deal with them all over Europe on a personal, academic and social level. There is no statute of limitation on these historic experiences," stresses Gabriele Woidelko, Spokesperson of EUSTORY's Steering Committee.
More than 170,000 young people have so far participated in the competitions and approximately 1,000 of them took part in EUSTORY encounters.