ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century, Europe (and here it does not make much sense to distinguish among East, West, South and North) is searching for some shared cultural imagery to provide a cultural backbone for the crisis-ridden currency of the Euro and the project of European unifi cation. What shape could that cultural imagery take? Many intellectuals have repeatedly invoked the seminal role of the memory of the Holocaust as a foundational event for a shared European past, albeit in very different terms. As we have argued in the previous chapters, the study of memory is too often pervaded by a territorial conception that leads to an idea of culture that is rooted and spatially fi xed. One of the consequences in Europe is the by-now-iconic distinction between Western and Eastern Europe, a distinction which follows the lines of the Cold War. But Eastern Europe does not mean simply the geographic east of Europe, nor does it mean speaking about a uniformly Eastern European Civilization (Delanty 2003). In terms of history and memory politics, one of the most distinguishing characteristics of Eastern Europe in contrast to the West is that the east experienced both fascism and communism, and memory activists in this region must take both formations into account.
