The Twentieth Century in European Memory investigates contested and divisive memories of conflicts, world wars, dictatorship, genocide and mass killing. Focusing on the questions of transculturality and reception, the book looks at the ways in which such memories are being shared, debated and received by museum workers, artists, politicians and general audiences. Due to amplified mobility and communication as well as Europe’s changing institutional structure, such memories become increasingly transcultural, crossing cultural and political borders. This book brings together in-depth researched case studies of memory transmission and reception in different types of media, including films, literature, museums, political debate printed and digital media, as well as studies of personal and public reactions. Contributors are: Ismar Dedović, Astrid Erll, Rosanna Farbøl, Magdalena Góra, Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir, Anne Heimo, Sara Jones, Wulf Kansteiner, Slawomir Kapralski, Zoé de Kerangat, Zdzisław Mach, Natalija Majsova, Inge Melchior, Daisy Neijmann, Vjeran Pavlaković, Benedikt Perak, Tea Sindbæk Andersen, and Barbara Törnquist-Plewa.

The Twentieth Century in European Memory investigates contested and divisive memories. Focusing on questions of transculturality and reception, the book looks at ways in which such memories are being shared, debated and received by museums, artists, politicians and general audiences

An examination of the role of history and memory is vital in order to better understand why the grand design of a United Europe--with a common foreign policy and market yet enough diversity to allow for cultural and social differences--was overwhelmingly turned down by its citizens. The authors argue that this rejection of the European constitution was to a certain extent a challenge to the current historical grounding used for further integration and further demonstrates the lack of understanding by European bureaucrats of the historical complexity and divisiveness of Europe's past. A critical European history is therefore urgently needed to confront and re-imagine Europe, not as a harmonious continent but as the outcome of violent and bloody conflicts, both within Europe as well as with its Others. As the authors show, these dark shadows of Europe's past must be integrated, and the fact that memories of Europe are contested must be accepted if any new attempts at a United Europe are to be successful.

Whilst Soviet communism and its relationship with modernity has been widely studied to date, the agrarian experiment in Eastern Europe has been relegated to the margins of historical analysis. In this comparative study, Alex Toshkov uncovers the history of agrarianism after the First World War and explores its place as an alternative modernity to liberal democracy and capitalism. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, this book explores the transnational connections between the paradigmatic cases of Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, as well as the International Agrarian Bureau in Prague, teasing out contradictions, hidden records and silenced interpretations of agrarianism. In addition, it uses a microhistorical approach to present an innovative theoretical framework which adds to our understanding of nationalism, political corruption, and alterity and the subaltern. This fascinating study restores interwar agrarianism to its rightful place as one of the most original and significant political currents in 20th-century Europe.

In studies of a common European past, there is a significant lack of scholarship on the former Eastern Bloc countries. While understanding the importance of shifting the focus of European memory eastward, contributors to this volume avoid the trap of Eastern European exceptionalism, an assumption that this region’s experiences are too unique to render them comparable to the rest of Europe. They offer a reflection on memory from an Eastern European historical perspective, one that can be measured against, or applied to, historical experience in other parts of Europe. In this way, the authors situate studies on memory in Eastern Europe within the broader debate on European memory.

It is the aim of this volume to investigate how academic practices of Memory Studies are being applied, adapted, and transformed in the countries of East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. It affords a new, startlingly different perspective for scholars of both Eastern European history and Memory Studies.

Scholarship on Eastern Europe after 1989 often focuses narrowly on the socialist past as authoritarian, dictatorial, or totalitarian. This collection, by contrast, illuminates an additional dimension of post-socialist memory: it traces the survival of hopes and dreams born under socialism and the legacy of the unrealized alternative futures embedded within the socialist past. Looking at contemporary German-language literature, film, theater, and art, the volume analyzes reflections on everyday socialist realities as well as narratives of opposition and dissent. The texts discussed here not only revisit the past, but also challenge the present and help us imagine alternative futures. Rather than framing the unrealized futures envisioned in the pre-1989 era as failures, this collection probes post-socialist memory for its future-oriented potential to rethink issues of community, equity and equality, and late-stage capitalism. Foregrounding the complexities of Eastern European legacies also helps us reimagine the relationship between East and West both in Germany and in Europe as a whole.

An introduction to key issues in the study of war and memory that examines significant conflicts in twentieth-century Europe In order to understand the history of twentieth-century Europe, we must first appreciate and accept how different societies and cultures remember their national conflicts. We must also be aware of the ways that those memories evolve over time. In War and Public Memory: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Europe, Messenger outlines the relevant history of war and its impact on different European nations and assesses how and where the memory of these conflicts emerges in political and public discourse and in the public sphere and public spaces of Europe. The case studies presented emphasize the major wars fought on European soil as well as the violence perpetrated against civilian populations. Each chapter begins with a brief overview of the conflict and then proceeds with a study of how memory of that struggle has entered into public consciousness in different national societies. The focus throughout is on collective social, cultural, and public memory, and in particular how memory has emerged in public spaces throughout Europe, such as parks, museums, and memorial sites. Messenger discusses memories of the First World War for both the victors and the vanquished as well as their successor states. Other events discussed include the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent conflicts in the former Soviet Union, the Armenian genocide, the collapse of Yugoslavia, the legacy of the civil war in Spain, Germanys reckoning with its Nazi past, and the memory of occupation and the Holocaust in France and Poland.

Asking whether a genuinely shared European memory is possible while addressing the dangers of a single, homogenized European memory, Gluhovic examines the contradictions, specificities, continuities and discontinuities in the European shared and unshared pasts as represented in the works of Pinter, Tadeusz Kantor, Heiner Muller and Artur Zmijewski.

How has memory - collective and individual - influenced European politics after the Second World War and after 1989 in particular? How has the past been used in domestic struggles for power, and how have 'historical lessons' been applied in foreign policy? While there is now a burgeoning field of social and cultural memory studies, mostly focused on commemorations and monuments, this volume is the first to examine the connection between memory and politics directly. It investigates how memory is officially recast, personally reworked and often violently re-instilled after wars, and, above all, the ways memory shapes present power constellations. The chapters combine theoretical innovation in their approach to the study of memory with deeply historical, empirically based case studies of major European countries. The volume concludes with reflections on the ethics of memory, and the politics of truth, justice and forgetting after 1945 and 1989.