1. Brandenburg Gate on December 1, 1989. The structure is already freely accessible from the East, however, the crossing to the Western side will not be officially open until December 22nd | SSGT F. Lee Corkran, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.
fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989), the enormous amount of literature on the topic most often refers to localised studies, at national level, essentially focusing on policies of the past, here and there, whose effectiveness is widely taken for granted. Nevertheless, they reveal major differences from one country to another.
These dissimilarities refer the West and the East back to the Second World War – and to the position of the countries concerned, allies or enemies of the Third Reich. But they also relate to the specificities of the history of the Soviet bloc countries during the communist era. Needless to say, the repression of revolts and movements – even attempts at revolution – spring to mind here, such as that of 1953 in the GDR, that of 1956 in Hungary, that of 1968 in Czechoslovakia or those of 1956 and the 1970-80s in Poland. But the types of“ transition” of these very countries also need to be considered, between relative continuities negotiated and assumed as such, as in Poland or Bulgaria, and brutal if not violent breaks( and publicised as such like in Romania). The literature given over to the political-normative reflection on
the desirable contents of a memory common to reunified Europe and its“ painful pasts”, between Nazism and Stalinism or between the Shoah and the crimes of communism, has not however gone away. Very recently, the protests and outrage sparked, mainly in Western Europe and particularly in France, by the European Parliament’ s adoption in September 2019 of a resolution on“ the importance of European memory for the future of Europe”. To sum up a long line of initiatives since 2005, following the European Union’ s first enlargement to include former communist countries, the latter asserted the role of the German-Soviet Pact in the outbreak of the Second World War and associated the communist and Nazi regimes in the same sentence, which“ carried out mass murders, genocide and deportations, and caused an unprecedented loss of life and freedom”. Therefore, the questioning of the memories of communism in Europe arises from an ideal-typical case on the uses and meanings of memory understood as policies of memory, even as the political instrumentalisation of the past born out of the desire to build a shared memory heritage – at various national and European levels. But this does
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