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Start Over Creator Orság, Petr

2. With Chinese communists against the Czechoslovak ''Normalization'' regime: exile listy group and its search for political allies against Soviet power domination in central Europe

Creator:
Orság, Petr and Medková, Blanka
Format:
bez média and svazek
Type:
model:article and TEXT
Subject:
Communist rule, Soviet expansionism, and Radio Peking
Language:
English
Description:
The article investigates how the Holocaust distorted and exploited in Cold War debates on the example of genesis and reception of the book Ghetto Warschau. Tagebücher aus dem Chaos [Warsaw Ghetto: Diaries from Chaos]. The book is a translation of the essay Stosunki polsko-żydowskie w czasie drugiej wojny światowej [Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War], written by the Jewish historian and creator of the underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto Emanuel Ringelblum while hiding from the German Occupiers in Warsaw in 1944. Ringelblum addressed his essay to the Polish reader discussing the relation of Christian Poles and Polish Jews under German occupation based on his own experience and the material he had collected. It was originally published in several portions in the Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute, an early Holocaust Research Center based in Warsaw. The German translation was based on this publication and published in summer 1967 in a Stuttgart-based publishing house. However, the new title, introduced by its German editors, suggested it was Ringelblum’s diary. Above that the blurb and many footnotes highlighted the role of Poles as perpetrators in the Holocaust, while minimizing that of Germans. As the article shows, the book was prepared by the Göttinger Arbeitskreis ostdeutscher Wissenschaftler [Göttingen Working Group of Eastern German Scholars], a Think Tank with close ties to the German expellee community, campaigning for a revision of the Polish western border. Göttinger Arbeitskries used the book and earlier on excerpts of Ringelblum’s text for a smear-campaign in the West-German expellee press. Through the biased presentation and distorted context of the work these former Ostforschers sought to portrait Poles as eternal anti-Semites and the factual perpetrators of the mass murder of Polish and European Jews following their anti-Polish agenda. Polish nationalist within the ruling Polish United Workers Party in turn exploited the book and the campaign based on it, which coincided with the anti-Semitic campaign in Poland. Though the Institute was not involved in the publication of the German book, the Polish national communists accSome reform Communists who went into exile after the Soviet-led military intervention in Czechoslovakia, in August 1968, began to work in the Listy group led by Jiří Pelikán (1923-1999), a former Director of Czechoslovak Television, the publisher of the Rome-based exile bimonthly Listy, and, later, a Member of the European Parliament. In the search for political allies against Husák’s regime of ''normalization'' (the return to hard-line Communist rule), they tried to establish contact mainly with infl uential representatives of the West European Left. This article, however, examines an area of their involvement in exile, which has previously not received attention - namely, their efforts to develop contacts with Chinese Communists who in the period after August 1968 were vociferously speaking out at international forums and criticizing Soviet expansionism. The author demonstrates how the exiles tried to take advantage of this in order to strengthen their positions as members of the foreign socialist opposition to the normalization regime. When establishing these contacts, they could build particularly upon those that Pelikán had developed in China while working in the International Union of Students. In the second half of the 1970s his erstwhile Chinese colleagues, led by Hu Yaobang (1915-1989), rose to leading positions in the Party, thus creating considerable opportunities for the exiles to work with them. From China, they received continuous funding for their activities, while the Chinese were interested in the Czechoslovak attempt to reform state socialism in the late 1960s. The author acquaints the reader with visits by Listy ‘envoys’ to China, who acquainted their partners there with current developments in central Europe, including information about dissidents and the opposition movement. A special initiative as part of this collaboration was their attempt to get their own representatives involved in the Czech broadcasts of Radio Peking. Though they briefl y succeeded in this, their plan to infl uence the content of transmissions to Czechoslovakia, and thereby make it an information source for listeners which would provide an alternative to state-controlled Czechoslovak mass media, ultimately came to naught: members of the Listy group worked at Radio Peking only as language advisers for the Czech broadcasts. and Překlad: Blanka Medková
Rights:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ and policy:public

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