Martin Pollack

Pollack’s book The Age of Shame gathers essays and articles by a passionate campaigner for democracy and an open society. This volume offers a careful selection of texts from recent years, including gripping reports from Eastern European countries such as Ukraine, Belarus and the Republic of Moldova, but also calls for resistance and moving essays against forgetting the Holocaust. In these works, Pollack returns again and again to confront his own family’s difficult history. During his final years, already marked by illness, he wrote very personal works of observation from his beloved garden in the Austrian region of Burgenland: tales of apple trees, seasons and wildlife of all kinds, published here for the first time.

"Topografie der Erinnerung" is a collection of the brilliant essayist's most striking speeches and articles. They deal with topics as diverse as the massacre of Reichnitz in the last weeks of the war; so-called "Reibepartien" (scrub groups) where Jews were humiliated and forced to scrub the street; the myth of Galicia; Poland and Ukraine's postwar history; or Pollack's own family's entanglement with the Nazis. His investigations are always astute and critical, they are always aimed at keeping memory alive and against false claims of innocence. Time and again he asks the key question of memory politics: How can and must we deal with these memories today?

The official victims of the 20th century are commemorated in memorials. But how do we remember the thousands of nameless, secretly buried victims – Jews, Roma, anti-communists or partisans? How do we in Central Europe live in landscapes tainted by innumerable hushed up massacres: from Rechnitz in Burgenland to Kocevski Rog in Slovenia and Kurapaty near Minsk? Martin Pollack relentlessly, yet diligently draws a new, more honest map of our continent. It is a map in which memory and honest location replace shameful secrets and anonymous graves.