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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