ABSTRACT
The history of mass killing and the commemoration of that history are two separate subjects.1 I would like to divide this chapter between these two topics, emphasizing that they are different, and, at the very end, I will make some modest suggestions about how they ought to be brought together. So, this is an essay about the last twenty years of my own work, which involved an attempt to bring together German and Soviet policies of mass killing in Eastern Europe in the volume Bloodlands. At the same time, the past two decades was a rich period of commemoration of Soviet and German crimes in a region where I was working. This is something we have all experienced, as we try to work on the history of the twentieth century, while simultaneously around us that history is being commemorated.
