ABSTRACT
Tony Judt concluded his monumental Postwar with a lucid essay on European memoryscapes and the significance of the professional ethics of the historians and engineers of public history who helped craft them:
The new Europe, bound together by the signs and symbols of its terrible past, is a remarkable accomplishment; but it remains forever mortgaged to that past. If Europeans are to maintain this vital link—if Europe’s past is to continue to furnish Europe’s present with admonitory meaning and moral purpose—then it will have to be taught afresh with each passing generation. 1
It is this notion of having “to be taught afresh” that I wish to take up in these epilogical reflections, thereby underlining the significance of the chapters in this volume for developing a renewed research agenda. I am convinced that a truly entangled engagement in re-scaling the narratives of the Second World War on a European and global level can help overcome present mnemonic divides. In making my point, I carve out several analytical levels: the starting point is an overview on how European mnemonic tropes pertaining to the Second World War and the Cold War have remained entangled in today’s Europe; how these legacies have been instrumentalized politically; and how this, over the last three decades, has contributed to the symptoms of political destabilization and crisis of democracy we have been witnessing. Taking a Southeast European perspective, I then argue for a research agenda—and societal debate—that differentiates and complicates its parameters; that fosters a more comprehensive European entanglement in studying and referring to the era between the late 1930s and the 2000s. The Cold War historiographic regimes and politics of history have suppressed and/or molded the primary experiences of the Second World War in ways that remain difficult to decipher, and certainly difficult to de-ideologize. But it is precisely this which is needed.