2 . Memorial to Victims of Stalinism , Steinplatz
Berlin , 1951 . Picture : Jenny Wüstenberg .
This public memory very much had majority public support in West Germany , as well as support from the democratically elected government . Certainly , there were also efforts , especially by survivors , to commemorate the Holocaust and Germans ’ responsibility for this genocide – but these groups were not well-supported by the state or by majority public opinion . Thus , at this point in time , the dominant forms of public memory were indeed democratic in the representative sense , supported by a high level of civic social capital and legitimized by an at least formally democratic state – though of course the presence of former Nazis at all levels of government in the Federal Republic of Germany should give us pause . However , no observer would define the memory culture in the 1940s and 50s in West Germany as democratic : the societal norms being fostered by dominant public memory in the immediate post-war era were not conducive to democratic values . The same could be said for the state of public memory in the Russian Federation today . Though independent research is currently challenging , it does appear that most Russian citizens wholeheartedly support the state-driven and -endorsed celebration of Soviet ( and by extension Russian ) victory in the Great Patriotic War , whereas a reckoning with Stalinist and Post-Stalinist oppression is side-lined and even persecuted ( Gabowitsch , 2023 ).
EUROPE INSIGHT
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