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.

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

Fourteen specialists of Central and Eastern European politics explore memory policies and politics by examining how and why contested memories are constantly reactivated in the former Soviet bloc. The book explores how new social and political actors can challenge the traditional narratives about the past produced by state bodies.

This book examines the role of collective memory in the origins and development of the European Union. It traces Europe's political, economic and financial crisis to the loss of these memories of the rupture of 1945. In order to survive the EU will have to prove that it can act effectively in the face of future challenges.

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.

This book investigates the transnational dimensions of European cultural memory and how it contributes to the construction of new non-, supra, and post-national, but also national, memory narratives. The volume considers how these narratives circulate not only within Europe, but also through global interactions with other locations. The Changing Place of Europe in Global Memory Cultures responds to recent academic calls to break with methodological nationalism in memory studies. Taking European memory as a case study, the book offers new empirical and theoretical insights into the transnational dimensions of cultural memory, without losing sight of the continued relevance of the nation. The articles critically examine the ways in which various individuals, organizations, institutions, and works of art are mobilizing future-oriented memories of Europe to construct new memory narratives. Taking into account the heterogeneity and transnational locations of commemorative groups, the multidirectionality of acts of remembrance, and a variety of commemorative media such as museums, film, photography, and literature, the volume not only investigates how memory discourses circulate within Europe, but also how they are being transferred, translated, or transformed through global interactions beyond the European continent.

For early modern Europeans, the past was a measure of most things, good and bad. For that reason it was also hotly contested, manipulated, and far too important to be left to historians alone. Memory in Early Modern Europe offers a lively and accessible introduction to the many ways in which Europeans engaged with the past and 'practised' memory in the three centuries between 1500 and 1800. From childhood memories and local customs to war traumas and peacekeeping , it analyses how Europeans tried to control, mobilize and reconfigure memories of the past. Challenging the long-standing view that memory cultures transformed around 1800, it argues for the continued relevance of early modern memory practices in modern societies.