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Tag: memory

Walking through history: inside the March of the Living

Each year, thousands of students and educators take part in memorial trips to Auschwitz as part of international Holocaust education programmes such as the “March of the Living”. This text is a critical reflection based on a personal experience of one of these trips, examining how remembrance, education, and lived practice intersect and where the structure of such programmes reveals its limitations.

June 16, 2026 - Viktoria Rybicki

Even after the borders were marked, the songs remained

The Balkans is often thought of as an area marred by conflict and its legacy today. Despite this, a great number of cultural practices unite the varied peoples of the region. This is clear regarding many things that are part of everyday life.

June 5, 2026 - Tunacan Tuna

Is the past for sale?

In Poland, cultural heritage has increasingly become a site where memory, market logic and political power intersect. From urban regeneration projects and nostalgia tourism to digitally-branded cultural platforms and AI-generated public figures, the past is often packaged, optimized and sold.

February 22, 2026 - Giorgia Maurovich

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 - Joshua Evangelista 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

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