Collective Memories in the Baltic Sea Region and Beyond: National — Transnational — European? 1

Since the 1980s there has been a steadily increasing interest in issues of remembrance, memory and commemoration amongst the public and in the media, as well as from professional historians and scholars from neighboring fields: the journal History and Memory, founded in 1989, is only one indication of this trend. Dan Diner, director of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig, has even launched ‘memory’ as a new paradigm of historical research which is said to have pushed ‘society’ onto library shelves (Diner 2007). Such a thesis might, of course, be disputed and refuted, but there is no doubt about a boom in memory-related publications.