Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe

The collapse of the Iron Curtain, the renationalization of eastern Europe, and the simultaneous eastward expansion of the European Union have all impacted the way the past is remembered in today’s eastern Europe. At the same time, in recent years, the Europeanization of Holocaust memory and a growing sense of the need to stage a more “self-critical” memory has significantly changed the way in which western Europe commemorates and memorializes the past. The increasing dissatisfaction among scholars with the blanket, undifferentiated use of the term “collective memory” is evolving in new directions. This volume brings the tension into focus while addressing the state of memory theory itself.

Eric Langenbacher is a Associate Teaching Professor and Director of Honors and Special Programs in the Department of Government, Georgetown University. He is editor of Between Left and Right: The 2009 Bundestag Election and the Transformation of the German Party System (Berghahn, 2010).

Bill Niven is Professor of Contemporary German History at Nottingham Trent University. His recent publications include The Buchenwald Child: Truth, Fiction and Propaganda (Camden House, 2007; German edition, 2009), and Memorialization in Germany since 1945 (edited with Chloe Paver, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Ruth Wittlinger (1961-2020) was a Senior Lecturer in the School of Government and International Affairs at the University of Durham, UK.  She authored German National Identity in the Twenty-First Century: A Different Republic After All? (Basingstoke, 2010).