Abstract

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.

Joanna Wawrzyniak is Head of the Social Memory Laboratory of the Insitute of Sociology, University of Warsaw. Her recent publications are Veterans, Victims, and Memory: The Politics of the Second World War in Communist Poland (2015) and The Enemy on Display: The Second World War in Eastern European Museums (co-authored with Zuzanna Bogumił et al., 2015).

“[This volume] addresses memory and cultural transformations from an eastern point of view… [and] illuminates very different aspects of the problems Eastern European researchers face identifying  national crossroads of diverging memories and the necessity of coming to terms with a surfeit of memories which had not hitherto been publicly articulated or acknowledged.” · European History Quarterly

“The various contributions to this book highlight why the joint enterprise of creating and reconciling memories between Eastern and Western Europe remains a complex undertaking that escapes straightforward answers. Yet the search for answers is valuable and stimulating. The reader is invited to travel to locales which, while not terrae incognitae, reveal themselves in new and fascinating ways.” · Helga Welsh, Wake Forest University

Małgorzata Pakier is Head of the Research Department at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Her publications include The Construction of European Holocaust Memory. German and Polish Cinema after 1989 (2013), and A European Memory?: Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (co-edited with Bo Stråth, 2010).