ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses remembrance policies and the related aspects of social policies pursued by East Central European countries, starting from the interwar period up until 1989. The first area subject to analysis is the attitude of the new states to veterans of imperial armies and national armed forces. The second part of the chapter focuses on the treatment of wartime graves and tombs as well as ways of remembering those fallen in the First World War in fights for independence and establishment of borders; it also analyses the circumstances of the emergence and symbolism of tombs of unknown soldiers. The third part concerns rituals and counter-rituals anchored in that heavily symbolic space. The year 1939 (with slight temporal differences in some cases) was a distinct turning point, marking a collapse of existing historical policies. The symbols and narratives that replaced them hardly referred to the First World War at all. Then, often before the political breakthrough of 1989, some aspects of interwar symbolism began to resurface and are still dominant today. The single common motif that persisted without any long breaks from 1918 up until 1989 was the marginalisation of all the aspects of the history of the Great War that do not fit in within the history of fights for independence or expansion of existing borders.
