European Cultural Memory Post-89

This volume is the first comprehensive mapping of how practices of cultural memory in post-communist countries and other late newcomers to the European Union have been affected due to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism. The essays cover Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, the unified Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden as well as Europe’s significant Other, Russia. The practices analysed range from films, novels and theatre to museums and state organizations such as memory institutes and pedagogical campaigns.

Authors in this volume Conny Mithander, John Sundholm and Adrian Velicu: Introduction Julia Creet: The House of Terror and the Holocaust Memorial Centre: Resentment and Melancholia in Post-89 Hungary Egle Rindzeviciute: Institutional Entrepreneurs of a Difficult Past: the Organisation of Knowledge Regimes in Post-Soviet Lithuanian Museums Tomas Sniegon: Implementing Post-Communist National Memory in the Czech Republic and Slovakia Barbara Törnquist-Plewa: Coming to Terms with Anti-Semitism: Jan T. Gross’s Writings and the Construction of Cultural Trauma in Post-Communist Poland Adrian Velicu: The Moral Witness in Post-89 Romania Conny Mithander: From the Holocaust to the Gulag: The Crimes of Nazism and Communism in Swedish Post-89 Memory Politics John Sundholm: Finland at War on Screen since 1989: Affirmative Historiography and Prosthetic Memory Owen Evans: Memory, Melodrama and History: The Return of the Past in Contemporary Popular Film in Germany Veronika Zangl: Austria’s Post-89: Staging Suppressed Memory in Elfriede Jelinek’s and Thomas Bernhard’s Plays Burgtheater and Heldenplatz Bo Petersson: The Eternal Great Power Meets the Recurring Times of Troubles: Twin Political Myths in Contemporary Russian Politics