Memory of World War II has changed dramatically over the past few decades. And an even more dramatic reinterpretation appears to be ongoing at a moment of dramatic uncertainty now.
More than three years after Russia began a full-scale war with Ukraine, the far right achieved some notable successes since the EU. There are multiple sources, but this growing conflict continues to attract diverse interpretations of World War II and, importantly, the outcome and meaning assigned to it.
If Ernst Norte’s apparent equation of crime committed by the Soviet and Nazi regimes is widely rejected “Revisionist” Back in the mid-1980s, in the German Federal Republic, an equal nationalist attitude that helped to obscure the local history of right-wing authoritarianism and extremism, called the prime ministers of independent states, “etc.”, which launched the “political and Soviet states” that began affirming potential and potential states since 1991. Totalitarian dictatorship of the 20th century. These states, which have recently been freed from Moscow’s hegemony, can be said to have been “revisionists from the start.”
Their increasingly hegemonic perspectives clashed with the standard vision of the Great Patriotic War in Russia. Through the already widespread idea of ​​a “twin totalitarian regime,” they have also come to have an impact on the European Union. Especially after expansion, he became an important player in the field of historical politics. Bullock was willing to respond to such nationalist views in the spirit of “principle pragmatism.”
A scene from Central Budapest after the Soviet victory in the Battle of the City from December 1944 to February 1945. Image: Fauphon / Source: Wikimedia Commons
In 2008, the European Parliament declared August 23 as the European Memorial Day for the victims of Stalinism and Nazism. Similarly, the European History House, a parliamentary museum in Brussels that opened in 2017, depicts the interwar period as a battle between totalitarianism and democracy. In adopting a timeline story that referenced the Communist dictatorship and the Stalin cult before discussing Nazism, the museum’s intentions may not have been to alienate Russian visitors. However, such effects were hardly predictable.
The equation of Stalinism and Nazism, and the reinterpretation of the era’s war as a catastrophic conflict between twins between 1941 and 1945, can be seen as a right-wing shift in the mainstream of Europe since 1989-91.
However, the memory changes were more multilayered and ambiguous. As our young century has fully demonstrated, we are in fact faced two Revisionism is being regenerated simultaneously – one anti-attocrat who is comparable rather than comparing. Other anti-fascists could replicate the worst abuses of the Soviet era and in fact be labeled fascists by political enemies.
Central and Eastern Europeans were keen to reinterpret the results of World War II through the concept of sovereignty that unfolds to account for the experience of continued oppression and delayed liberation since 1945.
Meanwhile, Putin’s Russia is increasingly committed to a story from solid nationalist victims to battle, while trying to take away violent revenge for what he understands as a “expanding Western sphere of influence” after the end of the Cold War.
These two expansions of revisionism deserve emphasis, particularly as political agendas threaten to more and more replace professional discourse by European historians and alienate more research-based, nuanced perspectives. Vladimir Putin’s “Essay” The historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians, published in 2021, is just the most notorious example of a wider trend.
A reinterpretation of anti-fireism provided post-Cold War Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Western Europe during the Cold War. I have a strong sense of Deja Vu To provide a protective shield against the Kremlin’s ominous intentions and expansionist policies in today’s conviction that Europe needs NATO, particularly the United States. This same belief is that today causes deep fear among Central and Eastern Europeans, or at least those committed to Western political projects, which may prove to be far less fortunate than their Western European counterparts.
However, if Russia under Putin is the power of radical revisionists who want to cancel the outcome of the Cold War and restore the “power and glory” of the Russian Empire, the end of the Soviet Union should also serve as a warning that the empire’s overstretch can prove fatal. Here, the Sovietization of Poland and Hungary after World War II is important. After all, these were the same states where in 1989 the first exit from communist single-party rule, and the exit had an unexpected domino effect. More importantly, the recent past of the Baltic countries and western Ukraine. There, in 1991, the movement that ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union began.
This brings another dimension to current political fractures. It is fascinating and confusing historians from Central and Eastern Europe. It relates to the differences between the northern (or northeast) and southern (or southwest) parts of this diverse region.
The northern provinces (including Romania) influenced by the Molotov-Liventrop Agreement, which had broader experience with Russian imperialism for centuries, are today at the forefront of Western opposition to Russian resurrectist ambitions. That’s not surprising.
But what’s less obvious is why the southwestern parts of Slovakia, Hungary and Serbia are one of the most vague in Europe regarding Russia’s brutal war of attacks against Ukraine. The fact that they were do not have The targeting of the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement and its secret protocols should be part of the explanation of its ambiguity, but only part of it.
In the current context of neo-imperialism’s aggression, it appears that imperial domination and exposure to massive violence in the recent and less intense past has produced either opposition or hedge. Various actors in Central and Eastern Europe agree that occupation and foreign domination will never happen to us again, but that the strategies adopted for its objective achievement are significantly diverse. The relationship between this fork in Central and Eastern Europe and the two types of experiences collected between 1939 and 41 still needs to be properly explained.
Of course, it is obviously necessary to take a dedication to the invaders. However, serious debates about Western responsibility must consider that supporting Ukraine in resisting the brutal Russian onslaught will secondary contributions to the devastation of Ukrainians and Russian lives. On the one hand, we need to confront the possibility of painful trade-offs between democracy and autonomy, as well as peace and human life. But now, the most urgent and perhaps not entirely unanswered challenge for the West is how to create a true peace strategy that does not conspire at all with Russian interests.
I will write this in late April 2025 under conditions of serious uncertainty. The most direct cause of that uncertainty is, of course, the utterly reckless and disturbing start to Donald Trump’s second term as US president, and the prospect of a reconciliation between two major Cold War superpowers that could potentially come at the expense of Ukrainians and Europeans more generally. Such a fundamentally new future could become a new perspective in the mainstream of the past.
However, there is another important reason for the present uncertainty when it comes to the future of historical politics in Central and Eastern Europe. Germany’s memory culture is at stake. With the diverse efforts of civil society, no country has achieved more success than the federal republic in constructing its (post) national identity based on the memory of “father’s sin.” That self-critical template has been received, repeatedly discussed, and has been rejected very frequently by Central and Eastern Europeans in recent decades.
Standard German memory of World War II has revolved around Germany’s wartime invasion and Nazi genocide policies, particularly celebrating major casualties, of Jews and Soviet citizens. But we now know that, particularly sensitive, and may argue, but above all, subsequent political projects of major groups sacrificed by the Russian Federation and the state of Israel could be in a clear contradiction with their commitment to basic universal norms.
For many, including the author, one of the most painful realizations of recent years is how serious this contradiction is. That’s not a reason to reject the self-critical template that is at the heart of German memory culture. But it certainly calls for less urgent investigation than beneficial political influence. If the “German model” of memory could lead to such a moral and political culmination, what can we hope for from the increasingly nationalist and terrifying people of Central and Eastern Europe?
The answer to that question will depend on future global political dynamics and regional impact. What seems obvious anyway is that World War II remains an important landmark for Central and Eastern Europeans desperately searching for orientation in an increasingly bewildered world.
Source: Eurozine – www.eurozine.com
