European Memory Cultures

The role of memory in European culture and politics is as urgent as ever. European memory cultures are challenged by a number of both new and lasting issues, including questions of post-colonialism, post-totalitarianism as well as recent and ongoing conflicts and questions of how to rebuild countries and regions after wars and large-scale crimes against civilians.

The crucial position of cultural memory and heritage in Europe has become obvious, especially since the early 1990s with the rise of Holocaust remembering as a core element of European Union identity and memory politics. It was aggravated by the memory conflicts that followed the 1990s wars in the Balkans and the enlargement of the EU to the East, which brought the difficult memories of Communism and the East-West memory divide to the fore. Moreover, European memory disputes recently acquired new actuality with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the instrumentalization of the past by both sides of the conflict. Furthermore, Europe’s former colonial powers struggle to build usable memories that fit the new European memory paradigms, and Scandinavian welfare states are engaged in judicial and public struggles over past injustices towards indigenous populations, in many ways comparable to processes surrounding stolen generations in Australia and Canada.

Thus, struggles over European memories and how to interpret Europe’s modern history are very much at the core of contemporary European culture and politics, at regional, national and international levels.