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Prazan, Michaël
2 articles of this author have been cited in the European Press Review so far.
Michaël Prazan on Ukraine's European identity
Author Michaël Prazan takes a critical view of Ukraine's European identity and the country's attitude to its past. "After Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili's catastrophic adventures and Russia's subsequent show of force, Europeans persist in seeing in Ukraine a 'European country'. ... History is the locus of a complex continuum in Ukraine, one where the legacy of the Second World War and the Soviet era is more alive than anywhere else. ... The history of the genocide of the Jews, in which a large part of the Ukrainian population took part, is constantly rewritten by the highest authorities. We should remember that the graves into which the corpses of a million Jewish victims of National Socialism were thrown are only considered memorial locations by Jewish organisations. ... In such a situation, Europe should think twice about whether it promises [former Soviet] countries that they may be integrated into the European Union. ... Why should Turkey be required to recognise its responsibility in the genocide of the Armenians as a precondition for negotiation while Ukraine falsifies its history and is cleansed in advance of any responsibility in the genocide of the Jews?"
» full article (external link, French)
More from the press review on the subject » EU enlargement, » Security Policy / Crises / War, » Domestic Policy, » Ukraine, » Europe
Littells offers another perspective on the Holocaust
For the journalist Michael Prazan and the historian Adrien Minard, this work of fiction has the merit of "filling an empty space" in an historical sense. "If only for the description of the elimination of the Kiev Jews, of astounding realism, that has never before been rendered like this, neither by Hilberg, nor by Lanzmann, not even by Father Desbois (who has been searching mass graves deep in the Ukraine for so many years), if only for that bit, the book is on the verge of being a masterpiece. ... Littell delivers real insight into extermination that is not reduced to the elimination of a people in an abstract sense of the term. The massive massacres were applied to people of flesh and blood. And on the other hand, civil servants and the SS are not just the pawns of a bureaucracy, they are also executioners whose impulses play a role in the death-dealing operations. ... Only literary writing enables one to get so close to this anthropological dimension of the genocide."
» full article (external link, French)
More from the press review on the subject » Literature, » History, » Europe
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