Nadège RAGARU
Pr. Nadège Ragaru, a historian, is Research Professor at Sciences Po (Paris, CERI), where she teaches the cultural history of socialism and the history, historiography and memory of the Holocaust in Southeast Europe.
Formerly a Visiting Scholar at Oxford (2017) and a Reid Hall Fellow at Columbia University (1999-2000), she holds an Habilitation à diriger des recherches (HDR) from the EHESS, Paris, a PhD, 2 Masters and a Bachelor from Sciences Po Paris.
Her research centers on the Holocaust in Bulgaria, Macedonia and Greece, on identity policies in the post-Ottoman Balkans, as well as on the cultural history of Eastern European socialisms.
In 2019, she obtained a three year grant from Sciences Po's Scientific Advisory board (SAB) to work on a book project titled: "Prosecuting crimes against Jews Before Nuremberg: Holocaust and Justice in Wartime Bulgaria."
Within the international research program “World War II Crimes on Trial, 1943-1991,” coordinated by Vanessa Voisin (University of Bologna) and funded by the French Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR), she is responsible for the research package "Temporalities of postwar justice" (with Emilia Koustova, University of Strasbourg).
Phone: 00.33.6.23.10.50.83
Address: Sciences Po (CERI)
56, rue Jacob
75006 Paris
France
http://www.sciencespo.fr/ceri/cerispire-user/7196/0
Formerly a Visiting Scholar at Oxford (2017) and a Reid Hall Fellow at Columbia University (1999-2000), she holds an Habilitation à diriger des recherches (HDR) from the EHESS, Paris, a PhD, 2 Masters and a Bachelor from Sciences Po Paris.
Her research centers on the Holocaust in Bulgaria, Macedonia and Greece, on identity policies in the post-Ottoman Balkans, as well as on the cultural history of Eastern European socialisms.
In 2019, she obtained a three year grant from Sciences Po's Scientific Advisory board (SAB) to work on a book project titled: "Prosecuting crimes against Jews Before Nuremberg: Holocaust and Justice in Wartime Bulgaria."
Within the international research program “World War II Crimes on Trial, 1943-1991,” coordinated by Vanessa Voisin (University of Bologna) and funded by the French Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR), she is responsible for the research package "Temporalities of postwar justice" (with Emilia Koustova, University of Strasbourg).
Phone: 00.33.6.23.10.50.83
Address: Sciences Po (CERI)
56, rue Jacob
75006 Paris
France
http://www.sciencespo.fr/ceri/cerispire-user/7196/0
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Books, edited volumes and journal issues by Nadège RAGARU
Table of contents
Pages 275 to 296
Introduction
Viewing, reading, and listening to the trials in Eastern Europe
Charting a new historiography
By Nadège Ragaru
Pages 317 to 348
Filmic sources of the Horáková and Slánský trials: From concealment to valorization (1950-2020)
By Françoise Mayer
Pages 349 to 382
An iconic, but phantom, film: Sounds and images of the Industrial party trial (1930-2020)
Valérie Pozner and Anna Shapovalova
Pages 383 to 428
The 1963 Krasnodar Trial
Extraordinary Media Coverage for an Ordinary Soviet Trial of Second World War Perpetrators
By Vanessa Voisin
Pages 429 to 462
Documenting evidence in sounds and images: Soviet staging of justice at the Nuremberg trials (1945-1946)
By Victor Barbat
Pages 463 to 498
Film as inculpatory evidence: Documentaries on war crimes in Soviet Latvia, 1961-1971
By Irina Tcherneva
During World War II, even though Bulgaria was an ally of the Third Reich, it never deported its Jewish community. Until recently, this image of Bulgaria as a European exception has prevailed—but at a cost. For it ignored the roundup of almost all the Jews living in the Yugoslav and Greek territories under Bulgarian occupation between 1941 and 1944, who were in fact deported to Poland, where they were murdered.
In this new English translation of her work originally published in French, Nadège Ragaru presents a riveting, wide-ranging archival investigation encompassing 80 years and six countries (Bulgaria, Germany, the United States, Israel, North Macedonia and Serbia), in doing so exploring the origins and perpetuation of this heroic narrative of Bulgaria's past. Moving between legal and political spheres, from artistic creations to museum exhibits, from the writing of history to transnational public controversies, she shows how the Holocaust north of the Danube became a "rescue" to the river's south. She traces how individual merits were turned into "national" achievements, while blame for the deportations was planted squarely on Nazi Germany. And she illuminates how discussions on the Holocaust in Bulgaria were held hostage to Cold War dynamics before 1989, only to yield to political and memorial struggles afterwards. Ultimately, she restores Jewish voices to the story of their own wartime suffering.
Exception en Europe, un État allié du Reich a refusé de déporter sa communauté juive. Cette image de la Bulgarie pendant la seconde guerre mondiale a prévalu jusque récemment, quitte à omettre que, dans les territoires de la Yougoslavie et de la Grèce occupés par ce pays entre 1941 et 1944, la quasi-totalité des Juifs ont été raflés, convoyés vers la Pologne et exterminés.
Au terme d'une vaste enquête documentaire et archivistique, Nadège Ragaru reconstitue l’origine de ce qui a longtemps été tenu pour un socle de faits vrais parce que largement crus. Elle explique pourquoi une seule facette d’un passé complexe et contradictoire a fait l’objet d’une transmission prioritaire ; comment les déportations, sans être oblitérées, sont devenues secondaires dans les discours publics, les musées, les livres d’histoire et les arts ; comment la mise en écriture des persécutions contre les Juifs en Bulgarie s’est retrouvée l’otage de la guerre froide puis des luttes politiques et mémorielles de l’après-communisme dans les Balkans et le reste du monde.
Profondément originale dans sa conception comme dans son écriture, cette enquête historique est une réflexion exemplaire sur les silences du passé.
Dir. Nadège Ragaru et Antonela Capelle-Pogacean.
Paris: Karthala & CERI
La finalité de ce dossier est de rendre compte de cet espoir, de ce moment singulier dans l'histoire des socialismes est-européens en prenant pour entrée les relations entre sciences et temporalités socialistes.
Dialogues avec le visible : l’historien et le regard
par Nadège Ragaru
Les atlas historiques de ville et l’administration
du passé métropolitain au XIXe siècle
par Stéphane Van Damme
Ganin ya fi ji / Voir est mieux qu’entendre :
lire l’identité sur la peau (Sahel central, XIXe siècle)
par Camille Lefebvre
La voix et le regard : les régimes visuels
des concours d’autobiographies polonais, 1930-1984
par Katherine Lebow
Voir et devoir voir le passé.
Retour sur une exposition historique à visée commémorative
par Sarah Gensburger
Papers by Nadège RAGARU
Table of contents
Pages 275 to 296
Introduction
Viewing, reading, and listening to the trials in Eastern Europe
Charting a new historiography
By Nadège Ragaru
Pages 317 to 348
Filmic sources of the Horáková and Slánský trials: From concealment to valorization (1950-2020)
By Françoise Mayer
Pages 349 to 382
An iconic, but phantom, film: Sounds and images of the Industrial party trial (1930-2020)
Valérie Pozner and Anna Shapovalova
Pages 383 to 428
The 1963 Krasnodar Trial
Extraordinary Media Coverage for an Ordinary Soviet Trial of Second World War Perpetrators
By Vanessa Voisin
Pages 429 to 462
Documenting evidence in sounds and images: Soviet staging of justice at the Nuremberg trials (1945-1946)
By Victor Barbat
Pages 463 to 498
Film as inculpatory evidence: Documentaries on war crimes in Soviet Latvia, 1961-1971
By Irina Tcherneva
During World War II, even though Bulgaria was an ally of the Third Reich, it never deported its Jewish community. Until recently, this image of Bulgaria as a European exception has prevailed—but at a cost. For it ignored the roundup of almost all the Jews living in the Yugoslav and Greek territories under Bulgarian occupation between 1941 and 1944, who were in fact deported to Poland, where they were murdered.
In this new English translation of her work originally published in French, Nadège Ragaru presents a riveting, wide-ranging archival investigation encompassing 80 years and six countries (Bulgaria, Germany, the United States, Israel, North Macedonia and Serbia), in doing so exploring the origins and perpetuation of this heroic narrative of Bulgaria's past. Moving between legal and political spheres, from artistic creations to museum exhibits, from the writing of history to transnational public controversies, she shows how the Holocaust north of the Danube became a "rescue" to the river's south. She traces how individual merits were turned into "national" achievements, while blame for the deportations was planted squarely on Nazi Germany. And she illuminates how discussions on the Holocaust in Bulgaria were held hostage to Cold War dynamics before 1989, only to yield to political and memorial struggles afterwards. Ultimately, she restores Jewish voices to the story of their own wartime suffering.
Exception en Europe, un État allié du Reich a refusé de déporter sa communauté juive. Cette image de la Bulgarie pendant la seconde guerre mondiale a prévalu jusque récemment, quitte à omettre que, dans les territoires de la Yougoslavie et de la Grèce occupés par ce pays entre 1941 et 1944, la quasi-totalité des Juifs ont été raflés, convoyés vers la Pologne et exterminés.
Au terme d'une vaste enquête documentaire et archivistique, Nadège Ragaru reconstitue l’origine de ce qui a longtemps été tenu pour un socle de faits vrais parce que largement crus. Elle explique pourquoi une seule facette d’un passé complexe et contradictoire a fait l’objet d’une transmission prioritaire ; comment les déportations, sans être oblitérées, sont devenues secondaires dans les discours publics, les musées, les livres d’histoire et les arts ; comment la mise en écriture des persécutions contre les Juifs en Bulgarie s’est retrouvée l’otage de la guerre froide puis des luttes politiques et mémorielles de l’après-communisme dans les Balkans et le reste du monde.
Profondément originale dans sa conception comme dans son écriture, cette enquête historique est une réflexion exemplaire sur les silences du passé.
Dir. Nadège Ragaru et Antonela Capelle-Pogacean.
Paris: Karthala & CERI
La finalité de ce dossier est de rendre compte de cet espoir, de ce moment singulier dans l'histoire des socialismes est-européens en prenant pour entrée les relations entre sciences et temporalités socialistes.
Dialogues avec le visible : l’historien et le regard
par Nadège Ragaru
Les atlas historiques de ville et l’administration
du passé métropolitain au XIXe siècle
par Stéphane Van Damme
Ganin ya fi ji / Voir est mieux qu’entendre :
lire l’identité sur la peau (Sahel central, XIXe siècle)
par Camille Lefebvre
La voix et le regard : les régimes visuels
des concours d’autobiographies polonais, 1930-1984
par Katherine Lebow
Voir et devoir voir le passé.
Retour sur une exposition historique à visée commémorative
par Sarah Gensburger
Thereby, the paper also seeks to illuminate some of the backlash effects recording in Southeast Europe countries following integration into the EU.
It argues that anti-Jewish policies and the various local responses to these policies must be set against the history of competing Serb, Bulgaria, Greek and (to a lesser extent) Albanian nation-building ambitions in a multicultural region that had long been part of the Ottoman Empire.
More specifically, focusing on a specific moment - the early months of Bulgarian occupation (April to December 1941) -- it tries to reconstitute the ways in which the Bulgarian occupygin civil servants made sense of anti-Jewish policies. Having been trained to focus of supposed Serb and communist threat, it was in proportion to their supposed pro-Serb loyalties that the Jews were seen as a menace.
Reconnecting the "Macedonian question" and the "Jewish question" is of utmost importance here to understand the street level implementation of anti-Jewish policies. Of equal importance is an understanding of the fashioning of popular indifference towards the Jews that takes into account long-term identity dynamics, mid-term professional routines and short-term opportunism.
The article seeks to target this and other issues relating to the politics and policies of anti corruption: Which affairs are prioritized and why? How do legal proceedings impact the actual behavior of public officials and corporate business? - Building on the examination of a corruption case at Sofia's heating company, the article argues that the reasons behind the low effectiveness of anti-corruption measures need to be traced to the ways in which anti-corruption has become an arena where competing networks of actors (in the police, the judiciary and the political sphere) seek to strengthen their own institutional positions, to promote divergent definitions of the public good or to settle (at times unrelated) disputes.
The selection of cases incriminated as well as the outcome of the legal proceedings are thus likely to tell us more about the balance of power between the various protagonists than about the actual map of corrupt practices in Bulgaria. In addition, although anti-corruption initiatives do have an impact on the anticipations and strategies of public officials and private businessmen - including an increasing recourse to legal expertise -, they do not necessarily result in more transparent political and economic practices.
Logically, investigating forms of compensation offered to human trafficking victims in France marks the end of a journey showing how institutions deal with this category. By analyzing the role of the Crime Victims Compensation Commission (Commission d’indemnisation des victimes d’infractions, CIVI), this article examines debates that emerge over the value assessment of damages—which lie at the crossroads between techniques for evaluating the damages suffered, practices for assigning a fiduciary value to these damages, and the agency of lawyers, judges, doctors as well as victims in asserting their rights. The work of the Commission sheds new light on the trajectory of the victim, who is now considered the beneficiary and recipient of monetary compensation. The analysis also encompasses a wide range of actors involved in the management of victims of human trafficking, while exploring the uses of legal and medical knowledge in the context of civil rather than criminal proceedings.
Les propositions de communication sont à envoyer aux organisatrices avant le 15 octobre :
Milena Jakšić : milenajaksic@gmail.com
Nadège Ragaru: nadege.ragaru@sciencespo.fr
The aim of this chapter is to shed light on this seeming paradoxe by using the 1945 judicial proceedings for anti-semitic crimes in Bulgaria as a lens on the relationships between Jews and non-Jews during the World War II and the Holocaust, as well as in its immediate aftermath.
In exploring the role of personal connections in the daily routine of anti-Jewish policies as well as their legal prosecution, this study makes three arguments. The first argument concerns the social dynamics of violence against the Jews during the war. The court auditions indeed lift a veil on how wartime changes in expectations and ethnocultural hierarchies fostered a commoditization and a brutalization of exchanges of favors. In this context, some relatives turned into predators. The second point relates to antisemitic attitudes in end-of-war Bulgaria. Chamber 7 was presented by its initiators as “the trial of the antisemites.” A closer look at the auditions and the judgment, however, suggests that the court was expected by the ruling coalition of the Fatherland Front and its communist core, the Workers’ Party, to punish a small number of “fascist” bureaucrats so as to make a case for the historically good relations between Jews and gentiles in the country. More strikingly, perhaps, the examination of the speeches of several defense attorneys reveals the existence of antisemitism in a soci- ety presumably devoid of such attitudes.
The third and final argument revolves around Jewish responses to the bringing to justice of members of the anti-Jewish bureaucracy. Elsewhere I have emphasized the part played by intra-Jewish political contention in their reception of the action of Chamber 7. The present chapter complements and nuances the role conferred upon political variables in Jewish court testimonies. Victim statements are set against a broader range of contexts, including the ongoing return of Jewish properties, the continu- ation of wartime power asymmetries in the courtroom, and the retrauma- tizing effect of publicly retelling one’s recent experience. At a time when the definite repeal of anti-Jewish measures was uncertain, the administrative and legal obstacles to the restoration of Jewish lives encouraged the search for connections with individuals close to the former regime. These circumstances minimized the chances that even the leading accused would receive their due sentences.
Drawing on a diversity of sources (ethnography, interviews, in particular) it pintpoints the multiple issues that cristallized around the question of the future orientation of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church at a time when Bulgaria was deeply divided between supporters of the anti-communist coalition SDS and supporters of the socialist successor party.
The purpose is not solely to explore the reasons behind the development of collusions between economic and political circles in post-1989 Bulgaria, nor even the differential treatment of illegalisms.
It rather aims to understand how and when certain social practices came to be understood as a public problem that deserved to be addressed -- while others did not.
This chapter is part and parcel of a longer research project that includes an in-depth investigation into one of Bulgaria's first oligarchs (the now deceased (Ilija Pavlov), as well as an exploration into the workings of a specific public scandals (that of the siphoning off funds from the Sofia heating company).
Some of these papers are also available on Academia.edu
This reflection builds upon a body of literature which has understood legal proceedings in the USSR as social facts amenable to ordinary sociological treatment and has investigated the “spectacle” by which political justice is seen and enacted simultaneously. The originality of the approach resides in the nature of the sources used to illuminate the making of this political turning point, namely the photographic narrative of the trials in Chambers 1 and 2 of the People’s Court as it developed under the aegis of the Bălgarsko delo Foundation—a private legal institution under the Ministry of Propaganda—in combination with the Propaganda and Culture Departments of the National Committee of the Fatherland Front (Otečestven Front, OF, the Communist-dominated coalition that came to power on September 9, 1944), and of the Workers’ Party.
Drawing on a wide range of photographic materials, records from institutional archives (the People’s Court, the Fatherland Front, the Workers’ Party, the Ministry of Propaganda, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of the Interior and Public Health, etc.), private archives (the Minister of Justice, the Attorney General, public prosecutors, court members, photographers, etc.), autobiographical memoirs, and the press, the chapter makes two arguments. First, it shows that the photographic capture of the proceedings offers an original aperture onto the relationships between the protagonists in the legal arena, the process of assessing guilt, the sentencing policies, and the reception of the trials by the publics. Second, the text argues that visual sources provide a unique access to a social process that lay at the core of the decision to resort to justice—an effort at reshaping political and social hierarchies. Indeed, as they captured contrasts in clothing, demeanor, as well as ways of holding the body and using hands to make a point, pictures immortalized the confrontation between political and legal elites whose social trajectories intersected during the trial (downwardly mobile for the supporters of the old regime and upwardly mobile for those who were judging them). They thus unveil the symbolic struggle that took place in court between the old and the new powerholders—a confrontation that did not end with the pronouncement of the verdict.
Thereby, the chapter aims to offer a renewed sense of contingency to the legal event. Rather than considering the proceedings with an eye to later developments (i.e., the four communist decades), the analysis remains sensitive to the indetermination of beginnings, exploring the specific moment of the trial without evading the plurality of temporalities entailed in it. To this end, three frames of focus are adopted. The first, wide-angle frame serves to re-contextualize the creation of the People’s Courts and their strategies for publicizing legal action. The specificity of the Bulgarian case rests in the fact that the People’s Courts were given three partially overlapping tasks: judging war crimes, sanctioning the fallen ruling elites, and boosting revolutionary momentum. In these, the line of demarcation between repression of political opponents and punishment of acts of war is extremely porous. Secondly, a closer focus allows us to illuminate the photographic production of the right to punish in light of the social history of photography in Bulgaria and the role played by the Bălgarsko delo Foundation. Finally, we will zoom in to the images themselves in order to assess the way they sketch the legal scene and its actors, before interrogating how the courtroom images were appropriated. At each one of these analytic angles, we will situate the Bulgarian trajectory within a context that extends, geographically, beyond its relationship to the Soviet Union, and, temporally, beyond the moment of the Second World War.
L'article se propose de mettre en perspective les contextes de production et réception des diverses versions de cet ouvrage, en traductions plurielles.
The interview was conducted and translated into French by Prof. Nadege Ragaru.
It offers a very stimlating insight into how Russia, its leadership and its future perspective were seen in the early 2000s by a renown scholar in the Unitd States.
The interview offers important insight on how Russia's future evolution was perceived at the time of President Putin's ascent to power.