Rien n’est moins sûr que le passé. Les (ré)-écritures de l’histoire de la Shoah en Bulgarie
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In March 2023, Bulgaria celebrated the 80th anniversary of the “rescue of the Bulgarian Jews” – the non-deportation of almost the entire Bulgarian Jewish community in March 1943. To mark the occasion, it rolled out an ambitious commemorative program that relegated the deportation of 11,343 Jews from the Yugoslav and Greek territories under Bulgarian occupation to the background and attributed to the state, supported by society, the merits of a rescue that had previously been attributed to society and a few elected representatives – against the state. Using this sequence as a starting point, the aims of this article are twofold: first, to shed light on the historical work currently underway in Bulgaria and to reconstruct the actors, logics, and vectors of the competing claims to tell the truth about the past. The second aim is to look beyond the documentation and memory of the Holocaust in Bulgaria and examine contemporary developments in the production and accreditation of historical knowledge. At the heart of the discussion will be the growing porosity between knowledge/counter-knowledge/propaganda against the backdrop of the shift of historical debate towards self-contained social networks and the increasing mimicry in the sources, methods, and instances of legitimation used by those actors committed to a critical establishment of the facts and those who support a heroic vision of history. More than ever, it is what is believed that is held to be true.
Source: Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah
Author: Nadège Ragaru
Language: French
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4408958810