Abstract
In the early 1950s, the Vienna-born U.S.–Polish historian Oskar Halecki developed a model of “the limits and divisions of European history” from antiquity to the Cold War. Using cultural and religious criteria, he identified four historical mesoregions: Western Europe, West Central Europe, East Central Europe, and Eastern Europe. Post-1989–1991 cultures of remembrance, too, reveal a Europe of four mesoregions, ones that closely resemble those of Halecki’s historical Europe. In the Western part of the European Union, an “Atlantic,” victory-based remembrance prevails. In West Central Europe (i.e., in partly postfascist, partly postcommunist Germany), 1945 is remembered ambivalently as defeat and liberation. In East Central Europe, which has been part of the EU since 2004, the Yalta syndrome and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Agreement of 1939 shape collective memory. In Eastern Europe, that is, the Russian Federation and some other parts of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), 1945 functions as a new founding myth replacing that of 1917.
An earlier version is published in Pakier and B. Stråth (2010).
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Troebst, S. (2011). Halecki Revisited: Europe’s Conflicting Cultures of Remembrance. In: Meusburger, P., Heffernan, M., Wunder, E. (eds) Cultural Memories. Knowledge and Space, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8945-8_9
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