ABSTRACT
“ 270Do you want total austerity?” asks a graffiti artist in central Vienna, as depicted in the image appearing here in the epilogue. An inter-textual allusion to Goebbels’s infamous “total war speech” in Berlin in February 1943, this encapsulates the crux of our volume, or at least in part: the Second World War in its many facets and dimensions, as viewed and remembered from heterogeneous political positions throughout the second half of the twentieth century and perhaps even more so at the beginning of the twenty-first century, has provided people across Europe with an interpretative prism for contemporary ills, anxieties, and tensions. As our contributors have shown, such discursive connections between the present and a very particular historical context have been made, and are continue to be made, not only across the continent, but also across ideological divides, at different levels of political hierarchies, in order to make sense of a multitude of current issues, fears, and (perceived) injustices. Crucially, as we have seen throughout, any such invocations can only be understood in the various contexts—often predominantly national, but also regional and at times European—of the different political and discursive frames, through which memories of World War II have been articulated, transmitted, or contested since the postwar era.
