Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past

by Edited by Jan-Werner Müller

• ISBN13: 9780521806107
• ISBN10: 0521806100
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-10-14
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

How has memory - collective and individual - influenced European politics after the Second World War and after 1989 in particular? How has the past been used in domestic struggles for power, and how have 'historical lessons' been applied in foreign policy? While there is now a burgeoning field of social and cultural memory studies, mostly focused on commemorations and monuments, this volume is the first to examine the connection between memory and politics directly. It investigates how memory is officially recast, personally reworked and often violently re-instilled after wars, and, above all, the ways memory shapes present power constellations. The chapters combine theoretical innovation in their approach to the study of memory with deeply historical, empirically based case studies of major European countries. The volume concludes with reflections on the ethics of memory, and the politics of truth, justice and forgetting after 1945 and 1989.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	ix
Acknowledgements	xii
Introduction: the power of memory, the memory of power and the power over memory	1	(38)
Jan-Werner Muller
Part 1 Myth, memory and analogy in foreign policy
Memory of sovereignty and sovereignty over memory: Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine, 1939-1999	39	(20)
Timothy Snyder
Myth, memory and policy in France since 1945	59	(17)
Robert Gildea
The power of memory and memories of power: the cultural parameters of German foreign policy-making since 1945	76	(24)
Thomas Berger
The past in the present: British imperial memories and the European question	100	(21)
Anne Deighton
Europe's post-Cold War remembrance of Russia: cui bono?	121	(16)
Iver B. Neumann
Memory, the media and NATO: information intervention in Bosnia-Hercegovina	137	(20)
Monroe E. Price
Part 2 Memory and power in domestic affairs
The past is another country: myth and memory in post-war Europe	157	(27)
Tony Judt
The emergence and legacies of divided memory: Germany and the Holocaust after 1945	184	(22)
Jeffrey Herf
Unimagined communities: the power of memory and the conflict in the former Yugoslavia	206	(17)
Ilana R. Bet-El
Translating memories of war and co-belligerency into politics: the Italian post-war experience	223	(21)
Ilaria Poggiolini
Institutionalising the past: shifting memories of nationhood in German education and immigration legislation	244	(21)
Daniel Levy
Julian B. Dierkes
Trials, purges and history lessons: treating a difficult past in post-communist Europe	265	(18)
Timothy Garton Ash
Index	283