beginning to bear an impact on geopolitics and the state of international relations . Over these years , it is primarily in the realm of nation states that national memorial initiatives abound . In the West , the ongoing construction of Europe called for memory reconciliation among the countries , giving impetus to this construction , France and Germany , increasing historical memory policies with the apotheosis of the 1984 recollection of Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand , hand in hand , in front of the tombs of the soldiers of the two nations involved in the Battle of Verdun . Between East and West , the first embryos of Polish-German reconciliation appeared with the Letter of Reconciliation from the Polish bishops to their German counterparts in 1965 and the beginning of the diplomacy of forgiveness with Willy Brandt dropping to his knees in front of the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw in 1970 . This marked the period when reconciliationism reigned and memory games only served this purpose .
Soviet Russia , on the other hand , was affected from within by memory claims , very briefly during the so-called “ Khrushchev Thaw ” of 1956 , then widely in dissident literature , culminating in the Gulag phenomenon , under the major impact of Solzhenitsyn ’ s Gulag Archipelago . Here , memory helped civil society reveal the historical truth of Soviet crimes .
4 . People ’ s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR V . M . Molotov ( left ) and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop shake hands after the signing of the friendship and border treaty between the USSR and Germany . 28 September 1939 Public Domain ( Wikimedia Commons )
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In the West , as if through the distortion of memory , among the young Germans of the 1968 generation , there was a demand to account for the crimes perpetrated by their forgetful grandparents . This was met by the revival of historical negationism in Western Europe , which focused on challenging the universally accepted narrative of the Holocaust , with the denial of the existence of the gas chambers . In France , the academic world was shaken , notably by the activism of the negationist academic , Robert Faurisson , as well as , in a different order , by the controversy sparked by Hannah Arendt around the trial of Adolf Eichmann . Soon Germany would face the so-called “ historians ’ debate ” ( Historikerstreit ) surrounding the relativisation of the origins of Nazism on the one hand with the work of Ernest Nolte , and on the other , with the call to speak out against the Nazi criminals who found refuge in post-war Germany with the blessing of the Allies . This memory revival movement was symbolised by the slap given by Beate Klarsfeld to Chancellor Kurt Kissinger or by the revelation of the past of Kurt Waldheim , officer of the Wehrmacht , responsible for war crimes in Yugoslavia , but also former UN Secretary-General . In France , the ambiguities of the Gaullist narrative on the French Resistance and , in its wake , on the responsibilities of the Vichy regime , were tentatively put on the public agenda .
The French case is of interest to us here because of the growth of work on the politics of memory . Several facts are shaking the certainties of French memory by destabilising the balance of identity . This will be fertile ground for the birth of Pierre Nora ’ s paradigm of “ lieux de mémoire ” ( sites of memory ). France was still digesting the effects of its 1968 cultural revolution and was experiencing the oil crisis , which revealed to the French that the three decades of abundance and carefree consumption were over . It also marked the end of the empire , with the abandonment of Vietnam by the Americans , followed by the Viet Cong ’ s victory , and the somewhat chaotic withdrawal of colonial powers in North Africa . Pierre Nora and his team noted the need for a reference point in terms of memory identity , a reunion with a glorious past and its roots .
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Observing Memories Issue 6