ABSTRACT
Tony Judt, in his essay ‘The past is another country: myth and memory in post-war Europe’, warned Eastern Europeans to guard against the temptation of misremembering the communist experience. 1 At the same time, Timothy Snyder suggested that not only Eastern Europeans but the whole of Europe would have to revisit narratives about the Second World War in order to eliminate this temptation and, accordingly, he made the case for a common European history which did not ignore the historical experience of Eastern Europeans. 2 This insistence on going back to history probably stemmed from his understanding of the relationship between the actual past, history and memory. Although admitting that history and memory were interdependent, Snyder insisted on being persistently attentive to the fact that they are two separate concepts. He argued that it was only possible to pose coherently questions of collective memory if the accuracy of historical events being remembered could be established in the first place. As he put it: ‘A historian who studies the memory of past events must do so against the background of some picture of these events.’ 3 Even since the collapse of communism, Eastern European national histories have not been incorporated into the larger European history. Snyder suggested that this inability to assimilate the Eastern European historical narrative was the result of the West’s inability to comprehend ‘the scale of resistance to both Nazi and Soviet rule, the scale of the crimes committed by both the Soviets and the Germans, and the obvious comparability of the two systems’. 4 The extent to which Western and Eastern stories of the war still differ has been most evident at times of major European war commemorations. The political and economic EU unity has not yet produced a united position when it comes to remembering the war. As Snyder noted: ‘West European political leaders have no trouble endorsing the Soviet version of the end of the war, as for example at the commemorations in Moscow in May 2005.’ 5
