Erinnerungskultur in Mittel- und Osteuropa

The appropriate way of remembering the crimes of National Socialism and communism continues to be the subject of controversial political discussions, and in this respect there are considerable differences between Germany and the countries in East-Central Europe. On the one hand, they relate to the question of how these two forms of totalitarianism stand in relation to each other and, on the other, how the memory of the suffering caused by National Socialism and communism plus the memory of the resistance to each of these dictatorships have become constituent parts of each nation’s self-understanding. The contributions to this volume analyse and compare the diverse ways in which these experiences are remembered in East and West Germany, Poland and Hungary, among others. The central question which runs through the book is whether there is a collective memory of the experiences of totalitarianism in the 20th century beyond national cultures of remembrance (and the danger of them being instrumentalised in political processes) that can form the basis of a transnational European culture of remembrance.