Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Acknowledgments vii
4. Introduction. Reclaiming the Personal: Oral History in Post-Socialist Europe 3
5. Part One: From Subjects to Agents of History: Political Implications of Oral Historical Research
6. 1. Political Changes and Personal Orientations: Germany and the European Remembrance Cultures 19
7. 2. Empowering Files: Secret Police Records and Life Narratives of Former Political Prisoners of the Communist Era in Poland 41
8. 3. Memory Silenced and Contested: Oral History of the Finnish Occupation of Soviet Karelia 58
9. Part Two: Reclaiming the Personal: Beyond the Collective Vision of History
10. 4. Restoring the Meaning: “Biographic Work” in Ostarbeiters’ Life Stories 79
11. 5. “We Are Silent about Ourselves”: Discussing Career and Daily Life with Female Academics in Russia and Belarus 103
12. 6. A Commentator or a Character in a Story? The Problem of the Narrator in Oral History 122
13. Part Three: The Past Differentiated: Revisiting the Second World War and Its Aftermath
14. 7. Experience and Narrative: Anti-Communist Armed Underground in Poland, 1945–1957 147
15. 8. Forced Labour in Nazi Germany in the Interviews of Former Child Ostarbeiters 176
16. Part Four: Locating Other Memories of Late Socialism
17. 9 “Renew the Face of the Land, of This Land!” Catholic Culture and the Crises of Sacralization in People’s Poland 205
18. 10. In Search of History’s Other Agents: Oral History of Decollectivization in Ukraine in the 1990s 231
19. 11 “Where Has Everything Gone?” Remembering Perestroika in Belarusian Provinces 256
20. Bibliography 285
21. Contributors 315
22. Index 319