ABSTRACT
More than seventy years now separate us from the outbreak of World War II. To date, the most important trend in debates about the war’s consequences for Central Europe has been to focus on the interconnections between the social, political and economic changes occurring during the war, on the one hand, and the origins of the communist bloc in that part of Europe on the other. 1 This approach is too narrow: it fails to take account of the importance of the psycho-social consequences of the war, which extended far beyond the political dimension.
