ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to survey European memory regimes since 1945, in broad brushstrokes and necessarily without any claims to comprehensiveness. It looks at the European and Europeanizing dimensions of the violent and genocidal past of the "dark continent" and of the representations of this past. The chapter argues that, despite attempts at political manipulation, the memory and memorialization of genocide had a Europeanizing dimension. It discusses the concepts involved, namely collective memory, collective identity, and Europeanization. Europe is identified as a space of particularly dense and contested collective memory or memories. In France, the nationalization of camp memory is even clearer than in the case of the official Polish Auschwitz memorial. In Eastern Europe generally, scholars diagnose a sense that the Holocaust paradigm is too narrow to allow for adequate expression of wartime and postwar experiences with Communist as well as Nazi oppression.
