Burying the Alliance
Interment, Repatriation and the Politics of the Sacred in Occupied Germany
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10074333 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stan Bernstein (0000-0001-5116-3828, National Research University Higher School of Economics, corresponding author), Seth Bernstein (Russian Federation) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 52 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 710-730 |
| Publication date | 2016-07-12 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Contemporary History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-0094 • E-ISSN: 1461-7250 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022009416644665 |
| OpenAlex | W2472115792 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
In 1945 Europe was a vast graveyard. The diaspora of the dead was perhaps most prominent in Germany, where the dead of the four occupying forces were spread across the country. As the allies worked through the postwar settlement with Germany, they considered another pressing question: How to treat the dead? The case of occupied Germany highlights different approaches to commemoration. Soviet officials commemorated the war dead as symbols of the collective sacrifice of the USSR in Eastern Europe, while the western allies desired to identify and rebury fallen soldiers to meet the expectations of their domestic audiences. Despite these differences, the politics of the sacred surrounding the dead necessitated that the allies engage one another. As the occupation regimes of France, the United Kingdom and the United States of America embarked on their mission to retrieve their dead from the Soviet zone, USSR officials reacted with skepticism and hostility. But rather than rejecting what they viewed as attempts at espionage, Soviet officers traded the western dead for their own sacred mission – the chance to return living Soviet repatriates from the western zones of occupation. Even as animosity grew in the emerging Cold War, occupation officials made uneasy compromises across the iron curtain
Alliance · Ancient history · Archaeology · Diaspora · Economic history · Political science · Politics · Repatriation · Sacrifice · European history and politics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2023 (4) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |