Kriegserfahrung und nationale Identitat in Europa nach 1945

In 2010 Europe commemorates the fact that 65 years ago the Second World War came to an end. Celebrations show that the memory of the war is still a strong influence in defining national identity and citizenship in today's Western World. Owing to the natural limitations to human life, however, the experience of the war is rapidly becoming a transferred one. In most cases it is now discussed by those who do not share it from their own experience. Therefore, the time has come to discuss the importance of the experience and memory of the Second World War in public life. The present volume, edited and introduced by Tübingen historian Kerstin von Lingen, ventures to produce a critical evaluation. It contains nineteen national case-studies (most of them written in German) and five more chapters about general features of transitional politics and the politics of memory. All of the contributions demonstrate how Europeans have struggled in many different ways to come to terms with the disrupting and gruesome experiences of the global conflict. In most cases, peoples and their rulers turned to the effort of the reconstruction of their nation states, after conquest, oppression, partition, and annexation. The post-war political élites consequently set out to stimulate narratives of common suffering, heroism and victory, intended to glorify national identities and unify their nations. This phenomenon might have been illuminated from a different angle by discussing some significant historical cases that followed different trajectories, such as Belgium, the Baltic States or the Ukraine, which are not separately addressed. After all, such cases prove that the miraculous post-war recovery of the nation-state was not in all cases inevitable

Citizenship · Genealogy · National identity · Oppression · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Victory · World War II · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · German History and Society · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Law