Representations of World War II in Lithuanian cinema in the 2000s: between national and European narratives

ENAfter years of discussion, testimonies, judgements, and resolutions of international organisations, the Holocaust has become the cornerstone of WWII memory and European identity in Western Europe. For East European nations emerging from decades of communist rule, the cosmopolitan ethics of the Holocaust memory have remained in the background while attention has been focused on national suffering and resistance to the Soviets. Since regaining independence in 1991, and especially since accession to the European Union in 2004, Lithuania has sought to formulate its own mnemonic narratives of WWII asserting Lithuania’s role in the European framework. This article traces influential manifestations of this narrative in popular historical feature films released since 2004. These films have tended to reproduce, rather than transcend, the national ‘fighting and suffering’ paradigm of the early 1990s and have only just begun to tackle the more challenging aspects of the war such as the role of Lithuanian collaborators in the genocide of the Jews or the atrocities against the civil population committed by some Lithuanian anti-Soviet partisans. Keywords: Collective memory, World War II, holocaust, Lithuania, national identity, ontological security.