New Europe College Regional Program Yearbook 2001-2002

NIKOLAI VUKOV
1970:11 sq) which marked the period. In Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald,
for example, statues depicted defiant male prisoners with raised fists and
their staunch Soviet “liberators”. As J. Young points out, they were not so
much intended to mark loss of life but rather to illustrate the glory of
resistance and to celebrate the socialist victory over fascism (Young
1993:74). In this way, Cl. Koonz observes, they taught the lesson
that fascism and monopoly capitalism bore the responsibility for the war
crimes; that the German working class, led by the Communist party, and
aided by Soviet troops, had bravely resisted Nazi rule; and that this heroic
heritage set the stage for the GDR’s unflagging battle against international
capitalism in the future (Koontz 1994:265-266).
Similarly, the red stars on the memorial plaques at Auschwitz were
not merely there competing with the yellow stars that symbolized the
Jewish catastrophe, but were also rewriting memory through the narrative
of heroic resistance which foreshadows victory. Or, to take another
example, in the Warsaw uprising memorial, where the iconographic
position is that of heroism rather than suffering” (Heathcote 1999:70),
Jewish rebels are depicted sharing in much of the pattern of representation
of communist fighters and heroes. 10
Resistance in the East was symbolized primarily by the Communist
party and by the martyrdom of its leaders (Young 1993:73), the same way
as victory was appropriated only as a result of the exploits of the Soviet
army and of the communist party members in the countries of Eastern
Europe. This found expression in the numerous monuments to the Soviet
army, the majority of which was created immediately after the war,
before any other permanent symbols of power of the new political order
existed (Aman 1992:35). As Aman has pointed out, there were already
about 200 such monuments in East Germany by the 1950s, and in Poland
there were more than 300 (Aman 1992:37). One of the most representative
examples of this is the Soviet victory monument in Berlin-Treptow (1951),
which can be regarded as a victory monument in the land of the defeated/
”liberated” (Aman 1992:23). It honored the fallen, but only those who
fell on the winning side (ibid.), and celebrated the Red Army as a symbol
of freedom and liberation. Occupying a huge amount of space, with
brass flags, marble tombs, and mass graves, the Berlin-Treptow memorial
has as its central the figure that of the liberator – a Soviet soldier with a
child in his hands. 11 Monuments to the Soviet soldier were sometimes
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