The First World War was not simply an unprecedented human catastrophe, but the tragic event that would give rise to Nazism and its genocidal policies. In this book, George L. Mosse reveals the myth of the experience of war, which from the time of the French Revolution to the Second World War masked the horrors of war with a glorious, romantic and transcendental mantle. The cult of fallen soldiers, war memorials, the banalization of the massacre and the brutalization of life caused by the experience of the Great War allow us to understand, through a fascinating narrative, the drift of Europe towards mass death in the twentieth century.

Author: George L. Mosse

More than 100 million people lost their lives to war, expulsion and genocide during the course of the 20th century. To mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War on 11 November 2018, the Ruhr Museum in Essen is staging an exhibition entitled “Krieg. Macht. Sinn. War and Violence in European Memory”. This catalogue brings together articles and exhibits to illustrate the subject of war and its accompanying phenomena from a variety of angles.

Authors: Stefan Berger, Heinrich Theodor Grütter and Wulf Kansteiner

For more information

Laws against Holocaust denial are perhaps the best-known manifestation of the present-day politics of historical memory. In Memory Laws, Memory Wars, Nikolay Koposov examines the phenomenon of memory laws in Western and Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and Russia and exposes their very different purposes in the East and West. In Western Europe, he shows how memory laws were designed to create a common European memory centred on the memory of the Holocaust as a means of integrating Europe, combating racism, and averting national and ethnic conflicts. In Russia and Eastern Europe, by contrast, legislation on the issues of the past is often used to give the force of law to narratives which serve the narrower interests of nation states and protect the memory of perpetrators rather than victims. This will be essential reading for all those interested in ongoing conflicts over the legacy of the Second World War, Nazism, and communism.

Author: Nikolay Koposov

For more information

The democratic transitions in the Iberian Peninsula and the Southern Cone during the 1970s and 1980s form a large part of the collective memories on both sides of the Atlantic. However, these memories are not only national, but converge in a transnational memorial space, which invites transatlantic views from Spain and the Southern Cone. This book offers a comparison of these two regions and describes the emergence of a transatlantic memory space, with its artistic and discursive dynamics. As the subject of memory is an intrinsically transdisciplinary field, the studies gather historiographical, political-juridical aspects, literary-artistic and filmic creation, as well as cultural and linguistic-discursive practices.

Editors: Patrick Eser, Angela Schrott and Ulrich Winter

For more information

This interdisciplinary collection of essays examines contemporary public history’s engagement with the Spanish Civil War. The chapters discuss the history and mission of the main institutional archives of the war, contemporary and forensic archaeology of the conflict, burial sites, the affordances of digital culture in the sphere of war memory, the teaching of the conflict in Spanish school curricula, and the place of war memory within human rights initiatives. Adopting a strongly comparative focus, the authors argue for greater public visibility and more nuanced discussion of the Civil War’s legacy, positing a virtual museum as one means to foster dialogue.

Editors: Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez, Adrian Shubert

For more information