The “Keys” to unlocking Eastern European (neo)Nazism: the search for narrative refuge

Abstract

Russia’s campaign against Ukraine has illuminated the rise of neo-Nazism across Eastern Europe, highlighting the need to understand the history and memory of Jewish refuge within post-Soviet societies. In order to examine how public memory within the region has reckoned with this complicated history, this essay analyzes a Latvian TV documentary project, Atslēgas, and looks at how three episodes engage with a dual meaning of refuge: (a) the literal-material search for refuge by displaced peoples and (b) the narrative-memorial search for “narrative refuge” from dominant discourses by displaced countermemories, experiences, and traumas, exemplified in the Eastern European displacement of Jews.