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One of the particular and constitutive features of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as a memory region is its double experience of two totalitarian regimes – Nazism and Communism, with Stalinism as the extreme expression of the latter. The history of these two dictatorships became entangled in the region in a unique way and resulted in a multiplicity of painful and often conflicting memories. In consequence, handling the crimes of Nazism and Communism, epitomized by the concepts of Auschwitz and Gulag, respectively, became, after the fall of Communism in 1989-1991, an immense challenge for memory cultures in Central and Eastern Europe. This lecture will shortly review how the societies in the region have wrestled with these issues. Additionally, it will aim to explain why the remembrance of the Holocaust and the Gulag is an object of ppolitical struggles and still constitutes a dividing line between the memory cultures of the Western and Eastern members of the European Union.
 

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The speaker series is part of the project Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past on the Global Arena, Tallinn University, Estonia that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No 853385). 

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