Research on the Eastern fronts has expanded exponentially over the past fifteen years, with at its centre the German–Soviet war as the single most destructive conflict in history.²⁰ About 45 million soldiers fought on the Eastern front, and 14 million of them perished. While recent research has profoundly altered our understanding of the 1940s, it has nevertheless remained fragmented and often preliminary on many levels and for many regions. The number, intensity, and acrimony of current debate and polemic especially, but not only, between Russia, Ukraine, and Poland, provide a link to this volume’s analyses.

The decimation of the armed forces, be it in combat, in POW camps, via summary executions or other murderous policies such as mass deportation, represents only a small part of the Soviet and the Polish society’s losses.²¹ Even though events at the Eastern front were larger scale than in Southeastern Europe, there are many analogies, and all societies were affected similarly intensely by what they experienced. Overarching all is the Holocaust, and all the consequences of racial policies, mass shootings, the death tolls in the various sorts of camps, death as the consequence of starvation, deportation and forced labour, as well as massacres carried out in the name of antipartisan warfare.²² Conspicuously, the two Axis allies Romania and Bulgaria each occupy a specific position with regard to the Holocaust. Romania ‘ranks’ second only to Germany in the number of individuals it killed, although with regard to the Holocaust Romania’s ‘ethnic dumping ground’ of Transnistria²³ was an exception in Eastern Europe (beyond Poland). Bulgaria has been trying to preserve its image as a ‘rescuer’ of its Jews—a narrative that depends above all on the total amnesia about the more than 11,000 Jews deported from Bulgarian-occupied Macedonia. The protracted food crisis in Greece makes Southeastern Europe integral to the history of regimes of war supply and hunger.²⁴ Establishing a solid narrative of multilevel extreme violence is a challenge even on the most basic premises. How should victims be counted? What territories should be considered? Which borders? In what years? Which victims ‘belong’ to whom?

The experience of extreme violence seems to represent the single common focus of recent research tropes, not least those promoted in German research efforts and perpetuated by historians in the Anglosphere. Snyder’s Bloodlands remains only the work to have reached widest public visibility.²⁵ Violence has been analysed as a protracted, repeated, multiform and all-encompassing experience; as a process, a dynamic, a trauma, a memory—and as a force destroying but also engineering societies. With the changes to the political landscape after 1990, historians have made good use of access to archives in the East, inspired by pioneering works like Omer Bartov’s,²⁶ and by controversies like that generated by the exhibition on the Wehrmacht in Germany shown between 1995 and 1999 and then again in a revised version between 2001 and 2004.²⁷ As in other countries, in Germany too the war’s history has been written mostly within the national or nation-state framework, as a history of German historical agency and institutions, with German readers in mind. It has been centred on the Third Reich’s military, repressive and ideological apparatus, and has drawn from largely German archival materials. Such an approach, valuable as it is, has neglected the effects on the occupied societies and the interactions between occupiers and local actors. Mark Spoerer once aptly observed that the focus on German institutions and actors risks appearing to take an interest in the occupied societies ‘only as long as the Wehrmacht was present there’—an impression that should possibly be avoided, or overcome soon.²⁸

During the Cold War, at the same time as the Soviets were turning it into the central myth of their historical narrative, western historians of the Soviet Union had largely ‘forgotten’ the Second World War, if only for practical purposes. Throughout the 1990s, then, the old narrative was by and large preserved in the post-Soviet societies, with the exception of the Baltic countries. The turning point came with the new millennium, when a new generation of historians of stalinism, heralded by Amir Weiner, rediscovered the World War.²⁹ Weiner was of a new school of Soviet history that gained authority following Stephen Kotkin’s Foucauldian reading of ‘Stalinism as civilization’.³⁰ In terms of temporality, the Second World War was seen as one episode in a continuing violent transformation of society since the First World War and the Revolution of 1917. To this as a second trope were added the entanglements between stalinism and nazism as ‘systems of violence’.³¹ The ‘barbarisation of warfare’ was due to the mutually radicalizing effects in the course of the war.³² Triggered by the German attack, the Soviets reacted with defensive measures on a huge scale, which in turn called forth increased German aggression, to which the Soviets then responded with even tighter measures which engulfed their entire population. The war therefore came to be fought on the domestic front too, in an effort to wipe out all enemies, and that entanglement of the fronts of international and domestic war clearly represents another topical link to the cases in this issue.³³ The German equivalent became fully apparent in 1941-1942, when German warfare was recalibrated into a war of extermination. In the German as in the Soviet case 1941 was just the beginning of the corollary of both escalation and radicalization on a subjective and psychological level, of the process of ‘brutalisation’ that led soldiers on both sides to commit extraordinary atrocities.³⁴

Both regimes had violent prewar histories; both saw extra-legal brutality as the normal state of affairs in a world of class war or the survival of the racially fittest; and both sides were shaped by and shaped themselves in the projection of deadly enmities. Neither dictatorship could rely on the collaboration of all of its subjects, who were neither completely nazified nor thoroughly bolshevized. War therefore radicalized soldiers, and multilevel unfettered violence was as much a prerequisite as it was a consequence of the process, intimately tied into an understanding of the Second World War as a societal conflict. On the Soviet side, the war with its chain of cataclysms was perceived as the ultimate clash that had been dreaded yet expected by the first generation to live in a socialist society. It was framed as the event that would either vindicate the system or bring it down. As a sort of ‘collateral damage’ a great variety of violent conflicts broke out during and after the War, behind the lines of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army along the western and southern borderlands of the European part of the Soviet Union.³⁵

Amir Weiner’s pioneering study Making Sense of War situated the Second World War firmly within the overarching feature of the Soviet enterprise, the revolutionary transformation of society from an antagonistically divided entity into a harmonious body, conflict-free. The war was followed by an acceleration of the continuous ‘purification’ campaign that sought to eliminate divisive and counterproductive elements. Exclusion and violence in that light were neither random nor were they preventive policing measures to delineate the boundaries of the legitimate and the permissible. Instead, they were integral parts of a continuing structuring of the community. The Soviet ‘purification’ drive combined the modern European ethos of social engineering with Bolshevik Marxist eschatology, although Bolshevik Marxism was not alone in its refusal to accept human nature and society as it was. Rather, the premise of the primacy of nurture over nature was encoded within the larger pan-European view of modernity, whereby increasingly intrusive political authorities sought to define and manage virtually all critical public and private spheres. The expanding welfare state and the ‘cleansing’ state stood at opposite ends of the new, transformative modern politics.³⁶

In the words of Mark Edele and Michael Geyer the challenge lies in approaching the war between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia not as a German nor a Soviet affair but as ferocious and brutal antagonism within a wider field of European and global war.³⁷ This in fact makes come full circle the claim that the Balkan ‘third front’ is significant, as considering it more could help to differentiate such too dichotomically constructed approaches. As we have seen, the presence of the Italians adds an additional layer to the topoi of war, occupation, and resistance. In Southeastern Europe as in the Soviet territories societies were both subjects and objects of destructive efforts. There, too, existed peculiar expansive and intensive systems of violence in a war that reached both inwards and outwards in order to exterminate enemies perceived both within and outside, and to obliterate and thereby remake entire populations.³⁸ In Southeastern European societies too, the fusion of interior and exterior war turned people into pawns in the hands of both sides, as much as locals also had an eye to the main chance in aligning with one or the other. Finally, and consequently, the current ‘memory wars’ and the ‘popularization of history’ show many analogies between the formerly Soviet space and wider Southeastern Europe, and Polish-Ukrainian-Soviet history is only one of the more conspicuous examples of controversies about matters such as changes to borders, ethnic ‘cleansing’, and seemingly irreconcilable cultures of remembrance.³⁹

In the whole of Europe the central mnemonic figures of the 20^th century wars were—and more often than not still are—dichotomically intertwined. There are winners and losers, perpetrators and victims, heroes and martyrs.⁴⁰ All are implicit in every nationalist discourse, but not only in those. In order to grasp analytically the entanglements among them, Reinhart Koselleck’s ‘spaces of experience’ that condition ‘horizons of expectation’⁴¹ remain as relevant as his concept of the ‘contemporaneity of the uncontemporaneous’ (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen).⁴² With regard to the Second World War that means that ‘numerous primary experiences […] have been repressed or consolidated in the various spaces of consciousness, or that they have been integrated into new contexts of meaning which can no longer be easily connected with the original, primary experience’.⁴³

‘Nesting orientalisms’,⁴⁴ in the guise of certain forms of othering motivated by ethnocentrism and methodological nationalism, have made it difficult to unveil these Koselleckian layers of consciousness. The narrowing of historiographical agendas to the needs of the nation state, which has had to make up for much of what has been left blank by the disappearance of the state socialist ideological superstructure, has in fact caused difficulties for the evolution of a history-writing that thinks inclusively, relationally, and in terms of process. Such history-writing positively insists on being complex, but simultaneously reflects on its communicative and collective dimensions, on the potentials of public history, which necessarily includes selection and simplification or better, crystallization.⁴⁵

This special issue argues that, while the manifold analyses of ‘collective memory’ that have been part and parcel of the ‘memory boom’ might have correctly assessed how memory is crafted into social knowledge, it is the work of historians—independent, methodologically and empirically sound— that substantially contributes to consolidating democratic societies; providing always that there is space for communication and discussion of their findings. Only if societies can handle multiple and complex perspectives, such as negotiations about core monuments, will they avoid falling easy prey to simplistic ‘truths’. Over recent decades the boundaries between research and advocacy have become too porous, challenging many a historian’s definition of their craft and professional ethics. The growing range of actors who are confident that they hold the truth about the past has confronted professional historians with a conundrum. Are we to acquiesce in this trespass onto the ground of our professional ethics? Is it the price we must pay for perhaps preserving or even gaining the sort of social visibility that other protagonists might claim in our place? Or must we fight for an autonomous field for Historical Studies at the risk of becoming marginalized? To conclude on an optimistic note, the flourishing of public controversies on ‘history’ might be seen as a necessary precondition for the strengthening of public interest in what makes the past divisive; and for creating a generation of scholars who will provide innovative if not integrating pieces of research. If this volume manages to bundle energies pointing towards that goal, it will have accomplished its task.

The enlarged European Union has played a significant role in how European memory of the Second World War has changed over the last quarter of a century. With the demise of state socialism the Council of Europe and other EU institutions saw restoring ‘historical truth’ in Eastern Europe as an urgent matter, and building democracy demanded a departure from the socialist ‘uses’ and ‘misuses’ of the past. Furthermore, the violent collapse of Yugoslavia prompted fears that re-emerging nationalisms might threaten peace in all of Europe. Offering a many-voiced version of divisive events was expected to facilitate national reconciliation and guarantee space for pluralistic memories, albeit they be based on common European core values.⁴⁶

However, attempts to contrive, or ‘engineer’ a common European remembrance have fallen victim to the ‘law of unintended consequences’. One thing that was underestimated was just how deep was the ‘void of making sense’ left by the demise of state socialism, especially when accompanied by war and violence. Identities were now in flux, insecure, and vulnerable, which in turn rendered societies susceptible to the seeming simplicity of politically motivated ‘economies of truth’.⁴⁷ The European Council issued an invitation in 2011 to member states to ‘raise or support initiatives aiming at informing and educating the public about Europe’s totalitarian past, as well as to conduct research projects, including those with an international dimension’. There was also an insistence that there could be ‘no reconciliation without truth and remembrance’,⁴⁸ and the Council’s initiative gave politicians and state actors even more encouragement to advocate that there should be a ‘one and only’ historical truth and that it should be remembered ‘properly’. Indeed, most of the European and international recommendations rest upon the belief that conflicted memories can and should be reconciled, however difficult the task. In fact the real challenge most probably lies elsewhere, in recovering all the voices that were once lost, so that there can be a thorough exploration of the diversity of sources available, and necessary conversations can be carried on without prescribing where they should lead.

Bilateral commissions are certainly able to establish or support dialogue intended to reach a mutual ‘officialized’ understanding of history, but they provide strong evidence of the difficulties involved. As the example of the Italian–Slovenian commission on both countries’ history between 1880 and 1956 shows, the self-imposed goal of establishing an ‘official’ version acceptable to both sides was difficult to reach. While many years of work by the commission did produce a joint document, the wider public in Slovenia was much happier with it than were most Italians, where reactions rather mirrored existing interpretive schisms.⁴⁹ For their part, similar Slovenian-Austrian and Slovenian-Croatian commissions failed to establish anything even nearly as elaborate as the first commission did.⁵⁰

As communism was ‘peeled away’ from national histories across the region, observers began to note how the rehabilitation of anticommunist figures included a tendency to obscure their wartime roles as collaborators sympathetic to the Nazis.⁵¹ More broadly, this was about the persistence of cognitive dissonance between ‘East’ and ‘West’, for when it came to the crimes of the twentieth century the former communist countries were suspected of having in mind only communist crimes. The Holocaust was certainly more visible in western European memory regimes, and as the authors in this issue show, in a number of the multiethnic Southeast European countries ‘hierarchies of victimhood’ have indeed challenged interpretation of the Holocaust as the greatest crime in the history of humankind. The Nazis treated Slavs too as racially inferior. The claim to have suffered just as much as the Jews if not more during and after the war can claim some legitimacy, yet it is also as unproductive and disrespectful as any other sort of exercise in ‘ranking’ suffering. Debates like the one triggered by Jan Gross’ ground-breaking account of the small town of Jedwabne in northeastern Poland can have painful and sobering effects. Jedwabne was where non-Jewish Poles, with a certain amount of incitement but no actual participation by the Germans, brutally massacred their Jewish neighbours.⁵² On publication of Gross’s book bitter arguments followed in Poland over the degree of responsibility borne by Polish society for the Holocaust. The experience of having been almost literally ‘ground to death’ between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union became entangled with debate about Poland’s existing domestic legacy of antisemitic practice as well as about the Polish perpetrators of atrocities. Even if substantial segments of Polish society continue to refuse to acknowledge Gross’ findings, while others, including the Institute for National Remembrance in Warsaw and the newly opened Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk,⁵³ confirm them, a narrative of sole victimhood and total denial of responsibility will no longer be possible. Recent attempts by the Polish government to impose its own ‘truth’ by forbidding by law any expression of Poles’ involvement in the Holocaust and by taking control over how the Gdansk museum should interpret history attests to the fierceness of the whole matter.⁵⁴ In the case of the history of the Jedwabne massacre, it took the efforts of a Polish-American scholar to trigger a debate that reflected the EU’s view that EU enlargement should demand that candidate countries critically rethink their national historiography, and that they should include educational policies to increase awareness of the Holocaust. The other side of the same controversial coin saw certain EU candidate states—now members—deploring what they saw as a similar sort of insensitivity among members of the EU to the effects of years of communist repression.⁵⁵

The recently opened House of European History in Brussels provides for a forceful demonstration of just how much the EU has been captured by that reproach. The museum explicitly puts Hitler and Stalin—and today’s Russia by extension from Stalin—on an equal level. If ‘totalitarianism’ was conceived by scholars like Hannah Arendt in an attempt to come to terms with 20th century history, the success of which Arendt herself doubted towards the end of her life, the term has been reduced today to a mere tool of sweeping and levelling political propaganda. In 2008 the House of History entrepreneurs sketched a concept for the new museum,⁵⁶ which obviously has remained the basis for the museum’s exhibition until today.⁵⁷ It reads like a confused school textbook full of bits and pieces of quite unconnected ‘European’ events. However, any attentive reader may easily deduce the inherent political agenda of the new member states—it amounts to the effective externalization of Russia from Europe. In the document, Europe is frequently divided into ‘West’ and ‘East’ by asserting that the situation in Eastern Europe was ‘completely different’⁵⁸ during the Cold War because of stalinist ‘brutal violence’ and ‘terror’ (19, point 79). It is the ‘pressure exerted by the Soviet Union’ that is given the greatest credit for the union of ‘the nations in the West’ (20, point 80); while early poststalinist history is reduced to the Soviet crushing of uprisings in the GDR, Poland, and Hungary (20, point 83). Also the establishment of the European Economic Community in 1957 is significantly credited to Soviet activity, this time as a reaction to its increasing influence in rapidly decolonizing Africa (21, point 86). The erection of the Berlin Wall remains curiously uncontextualized; it was apparently just ‘built’ to then become ‘the symbol for the division of the continent’ (21, point 87). It is claimed that the structural economic changes in the West of the 1970s left the ‘states of the Soviet power bloc completely untouched’ (22, point 96). Glasnost and perestrojka ‘found a resonance principally in the non-Russian parts of the Soviet Union’ and ‚in the states of the Eastern Bloc’ (23, point 103). However, the 1980s again saw ‘a stark contrast’ between East and West (23, point 104). In 1989, ‚in terms of their national history, the new states returned to the mainstream’ (23, point 105), and ‘reconnected with their long [nation state] history’ (24, point 106). And then the document declares that with the first round of accession of formerly state socialist countries in 2004, ‘the division of the continent had finally been overcome’ (24, point 111).

A few weeks before this concept for a European museum in Brussels was drafted, in the midst of Slovenia’s EU presidency, which it was the first of the new member states to hold, in September 2008 was issued a ‘Declaration of the European Parliament on the Proclamation of 23 August as European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism’.⁵⁹ Since 2009, that Day of Remembrance has been observed on the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop-Pact, and it refers among other things to protests in the 1980s organised by exiles from the Soviet sphere of influence and to the ‘Baltic Way’, for which on 23 August 1989 ‘approximately two million people joined their hands forming a 600 km long human chain through the Baltic countries, thus demonstrating their unity in their efforts towards freedom’.⁶⁰ Even though this European Day of Remembrance is committed to democratic and liberal values it has contributed to cementing cognitive dissonances between ‘East’ and ‘West’, for the memory of stalinist and communist violence in general has stood at the forefront of commemorative events, and with the exception of Sweden only formerly state socialist East European countries have taken it up officially. The fact that Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, and that the Soviet Union suffered the largest number of deaths in the Second World War has lain awkwardly as an obstacle on the path to the levelling of national socialist and stalinist crimes. The very fact that a Day of ‘European’ remembrance so constructed categorically excludes Russia, as does the Brussels House of History, is alarming.⁶¹

In the East European states a myth has been fostered of collective victimhood under several, but equally horrible, dictatorships. With it, not only has remembrance of the victims of stalinism become part of the European memory canon, but the victims of both national socialist and stalinist violence, in another effective ‘ranking’ enterprise, have been placed at an explicitly equal level. The political intention is to excuse domestic populations; their role must be as victims of horrific repression by outsiders; it was all the fault of Stalin or of Hitler. Any participation by domestic society is therefore negated; any responsibility for what happened is likewise externalized. The point is only proved by the acrimony of the debates, like those in Poland about the massacre at Jedwabne, if memory so constructed is challenged.

Further strong evidence of the European dimensions of what is at stake is that Italy had been the first to institute a Day of Remembrance (Giorno del Ricordo), in 2004, which seems in essence to have been the predecessor of the Slovenian-sponsored EU initiative four years later.⁶² Every year since 2005, the anniversary has been commemorated of the peace treaty signed between Italy and Yugoslavia on 10 February 1947, and along with it the victims have been remembered of the foibe and the ‘exodus’ from Istria and Dalmatia. Throughout the war people were killed or their already dead bodies were disposed of by throwing them into the deep pits, called foibe, that perforate the karstic landscape of Trieste’s hinterland, especially on the Istrian peninsula. The practice first reached a peak after the Italian capitulation in September 1943, and then again at the war’s end in May 1945, and several thousand people arrested by the Yugoslav authorities in the region were executed in the same way, or died later in prisons or camps in Yugoslavia. The peace treaty between Italy and Yugoslavia assigned the larger part of the Istrian peninsula to Yugoslavia, triggering a large-scale emigration which in Italian collective memory is known as the ‘exodus from Istria’. That remembrance is decidedly monoethnic, even though many Slovenes and Croats were among the emigrants. The Italian efforts at ‘engineering of memory’ have interpreted history to match political interests, which have favoured leaving fascist violence to oblivion and making communist violence the essence of all evil.⁶³

This Italian self-stylization as victims happens on a level analogous to that in East Central and Southeastern Europe, in spite of its different substance. That is especially true of the country’s eastern border, where the ‘evil forces’ are Tito’s partisans, the ‘communists at Italy’s back door’. The fascist violence that preceded the communist riposte is thereby belittled, and the motif is a regional variant of the myth of the ‘good Italian’ (italiani brava gente) who, unlike the average German, was quite incapable of committing any sort of atrocity. That image, although scholars have dismantled it as thoroughly as they have the myth of the Resistenza, continues to condition much of the Italian public memoryscape. The combination of both explains away much of the amnesia created around the violent Italian regimes in the Balkans during the war,⁶⁴ a forgetfulness which scholars have attributed to a conscious strategy of self-exculpating denial propagated by Italy’s postwar elites.⁶⁵ As Thomas Kühne and Benjamin Ziemann have noted, war experience is often narrated by soldiers as a ‘history of suffering’—one that systematically downplays individual agency and personal responsibility for the unfolding of violence. In Italy such sanitized memory patterns received strong legitimization from above.⁶⁶