Epilogue Without an End

Abstract

After the end of World War II and up to the 1989 revolutions in Central- Eastern Europe, the European frontiers and the forms of collective identity associated with them were influenced not only by the model of Europe’s political division drawn up at Yalta and subsequently frozen by the cold war but also by the wish, common to both sides of a divided Europe since 1946–48, to forget the recent past and build a new continental identity. In Western Europe, this impetus manifested itself as the movement for supranational unification linked to economic reconstruction and modernization. In Eastern Europe, there was a movement for unity imposed by the progress of a presumed social revolution, obsessed by the ethic of industrial productivity and the statist creation of society and the new man. On both sides of what Churchill defined as the “Iron Curtain” there were many good reasons for forgetting the experiences of the war and the occupation, totally embracing the rhetoric of the future and material progress. Both the nature of the wartime experience and the ways in which its memory came to be distorted and sublimated served to give the postwar era an identity model that was substantially falsified and based upon an artificial distinction between the present and the public memory of the recent past, which would, at least until 1989, have accumulated a number of insoluble and unresolved contradictions.