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Tag: memory

Krupp fuels far-right narratives in Germany

In the north-eastern German city of Greifswald, the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg’s minimal acknowledgment of its patron's crimes against humanity, committed during the Second World War, indirectly feeds into the political climate that facilitates the meteoric rise of the far-right AfD party. This calculated institutional forgetfulness nurtures extremist revisionism, highlighting the crucial intersection of memory politics and momentous political shifts in contemporary Germany.

December 18, 2025 - Tomasz Kamusella

Goodbye communism

The pace of dealing with the communist past has been uneven across Central and Eastern Europe. While Poland intensely debated de-communization in the 1990s, in Ukraine the mass removals of Lenin monuments – the so-called Leninopad – began only during the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. In the Baltic states, the memory of communism remains strongly negative.

December 8, 2025 - Kinga Gajda Michał Kuryłowicz

From revolution to souvenirs

The selling of communism across Central and Eastern Europe reveals more than the region’s ingenuity in repurposing its past – it exposes how memory itself has become a currency in the post-socialist era. This marketplace of memory is not merely a tourist trend – it is a mirror of broader cultural transformations.

December 8, 2025 - Jovana Janinovic

Sensory memory and creating a community of memory

The feeling of coarse toilet paper bought after hours in a queue, the scent of sweat on a train to a Bulgarian summer camp, the fizz of Soviet shampanskoye igristoye on New Year’s Eve – these are not just fragments of nostalgia. They are traces of a collective past, an embodied memory of life under communism that continues to shape how a generation remembers itself.

December 8, 2025 - Magdalena Banaszkiewicz

The memory of forgetting

After the end of communist rule, many societies sought recognition of their own wartime suffering as part of Europe’s shared memory. Although the Allies are often portrayed as a united front against Nazism, the newer member states of the European Union have pressed for acknowledgement of the oppression they experienced under both Nazism and Stalinism, arguing that these histories should be remembered on equal terms.

December 8, 2025 - Dymitr Romanowski

The gradual “forgetting” of communism in Poland

Featured in communist times as a symbol of abductions, the black Volga has lost its aura now. Today few young Poles even recognize the car or recall the urban legends that once linked it to the KGB or security services. Stripped of these political connotations, it has survived mainly as a retro curiosity – an object of aesthetic nostalgia rather than historical unease.

December 8, 2025 - Aleksander Niepokój Michał Kuryłowicz

Looking for heroes. Experiences in Latvia

Latvia’s understanding of heroism has been rewritten repeatedly over the past century, shaped in turn by Soviet occupation, the struggle for independence and the challenges of democratic renewal. Each era constructed its heroes – some imposed, some rediscovered, others newly recognised. Today, debates over memory, justice and national identity continue to determine which lives are honoured and which stories are told.

December 8, 2025 - Vita Zelče

Thirty years after the Srebrenica genocide, Bosnia and Herzegovina remains a land suspended between memory and oblivion

Education in Bosnia and Herzegovina is a battleground, where nationalism and ethnic divisions are highly visible. Thirty years after the war, more than 50 schools in the country are “schools under one roof”, where students are divided not only by curriculum but also physically. In one of these schools, a history teacher presents her lessons according to two different curricula.

July 8, 2025 - Tatjana Dordevic

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was far from being just “Poland”

A conversation with Tomas Venclova, Lithuanian philosopher and writer. Interviewer: Nikodem Szczyglowski

February 28, 2025 - Nikodem Szczygłowski Tomas Venclova

Oriental or local? Poland’s Tatar community

The Tatars of Poland remain one of the country’s most enduring ethnic minorities. Arriving in the area as early as the 14th century, this group has maintained its own distinctiveness while adapting to many wider Polish customs. This process has involved as much positive as negative developments.

Had you, 30 or 40 years ago, visited Kruszyniany, a village near the Belarusian border that is home to one of the two traditional Tatar settlements in Poland, you would have encountered the tranquil rhythm of community life centred around bayrams (a Turkic word for festivals or celebrations). In Muslim tradition, religious holidays are moments for families to gather in prayer at a mosque or a cemetery (mizar). To join their relatives in these celebrations, descendants of Tatars from all around Poland would flock to Kruszyniany. However, once the festivities were over, only a few Tatar families stayed in the village, enjoying its tranquillity and the slow pace of life.

February 28, 2025 - Michał Łyszczarz

On the traces of Migjen Kelmendi, rock icon and Kosovar intellectual

Kosovo’s identity remains highly contested in spite of its declaration of independence all the way back in 2008. While many still hold on to an ethnic conception of the state, people like the musician and intellectual Migjen Kelmendi want a new country with new values. This aim can be traced back to a cultural milieu that overcame the divisions of Yugoslavia.

I met the journalist and writer Migjen Kelmendi in the Charlie Brown café near Bill Clinton Boulevard in Pristina, Kosovo. Forty years have passed since he founded the band Gjurmët, but the thin smile of the first Kosovar Albanian rock icon is still there. In the 1960s, Yugoslavia welcomed rock-n-roll, organized festivals and promoted Yugoslav artists via the Yugoton label. An unprecedented rock scene emerged during the following decade: Zagreb, Belgrade, Ljubljana and Sarajevo became vibrant centres where punk and new wave flourished. Often mobilized by the state apparatus, the youth used rock to voice new aspirations. 

February 28, 2025 - Erik Da Silva

Depicting natural wonders, the rich cultural heritage and the mentalité of Bulgaria all while baring the bones of taboo topics

It is rare to find books on Bulgarian history in the English language – it is even more uncommon to come across works of fiction with a historical twist which are set in Bulgaria. Ellis Shuman’s Rakiya: Stories of Bulgaria shines a light on the idiosyncrasies of Bulgarian life and rich historical heritage while exposing angles on Bulgarian mentality of which the country’s citizens are often oblivious.

October 21, 2024 - Radosveta Vassileva

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