Publications

The Nation’s Memory Institute in Slovakia in cooperation with European Network Remembrance and Solidarity has prepared a series of brochures regarding the history of Slovakia 1939-1990. The brochures can be especially useful for teachers and students and for all those who seek basic knowledge about the totalitarian regimes and their consequences in Slovakia. The authors – historians and researchers from the Nation’s Memory Institute – chose a simple yet attractive form of leaflets with archival photos to describe the reality of limitations of human rights and religious freedoms under the Nazi and Communist regimes in the general and international context of the past century. The brochures were published in English and in Slovak language versions. For the Slovak version, please visit http://www.upn.gov.sk/sk/informacne-letaky-pre-studentov/

En: Dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu 1965-1989. The Genius of the Carpathian Mountains

The overall picture of the Ceaușescu dictatorship in Romania offered by Adam Burakowski presents the brutal machinery of oppression and dictator’s calculated relationships with the West in a broad historical-political framework. The Romanian translation of Dictatura lui Nicolae Ceaușescu 1965–1989. Geniul Carpatilor [Dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu, 1965–1989. The genius of the Carpathian Mountains] was published in 2016 by Polirom, a publishing house, in cooperation with the ENRS. It is the first book published in Romania to use original documents of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Bucharest.

Published by Polirom in cooperation with the ENRS. Year: 2016.

En: Magazines of European Network Remembrance and Solidarity. Volume 8. National Socialism and Regional Awareness in Eastern Europe: Ideology, Power Struggle, and Inertia

The essays in this volume examine the relationship of National Socialist territorial and population policy to regional identities in the countries of Eastern Europe. A focus is placed on the role of “Auslandsdeutschen” (ethnic Germans in foreign countries), including their relationships to their nations of residence and to the Third Reich given their cultural ties and the exigencies of the Second World War.

Published in 2016 by European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, De Gruyter Oldenbourg
Edited by Dr Burkhard Olschowsky, Ingo Loose.

Since there are a number of relevant periodicals dealing with Holocaust research, the ‘Call for Articles’ for this current issue, published in February 2015, requested a focus on issues that are particularly relevant to the work of the ENRS. The objective was to obtain current research contributions from different European countries and to address authors with regional and methodologically different approaches. The response to this call has been overwhelming. The fifteen contributions ultimately selected for publication in this issue were written by an international group of authors either in English or in their native language and then translated into English. They deal with Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Romania, Ukraine, Slovakia and Hungary, or Central and Eastern Europe as a whole. The issue is divided into two main parts: I. Articles, which include academic research, and II. Miscellanea, which present both project reports and professional reflections. The Articles are subdivided into two further sections: ‘History – Studies on the Period’ focuses on the history of oppression and dispossession of Jews as well as the history and course of the murders in different local, regional and national contexts; and ‘Memory – Studies on Remembrance’ centres on post-1945 memory and remembrance, in which a variety of forms of public and private remembrance and memory preservation are considered, including literature, exhibitions, films and memorials. Special emphasis is placed here on the ways in which the subject was handled during the communist era and the question of comparability of the Holocaust / Shoah with the crimes of Stalinism.

The book was published as a result of the first editions of the "Genealogies of Memory" project, organised by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity and coordinated by the editors of the volume, Małgorzata Pakier and Joanna Wawrzyniak.

In studies of a common European past, there is a significant lack of scholarship on the former Eastern Bloc countries. While understanding the importance of shifting the focus of European memory eastward, contributors to this volume avoid the trap of Eastern European exceptionalism, an assumption that this region's experiences are too unique to render them comparable to the rest of Europe. They offer a reflection on memory from an Eastern European historical perspective, one that can be measured against, or applied to, historical experience in other parts of Europe. In this way, the authors situate studies on memory in Eastern Europe within the broader debate on European memory.

Published in 2015 by Berghahn Books.

En: History of Mutual Interactions

The publication, previously known only in German, was published in the Polish language as Historie wzajemnych oddziaływań [Historie der Beziehungsgeschichte]. The collection of texts edited by Professor Robert Traba was written by Polish and German historians, cultural theorists and writers. The texts deal with one of the most important problems of modern historical studies: the interaction phenomena occurring in regions that differ in terms of identity and culture. It is an attempt to analyse how the same historical events, which play a different role in various nations, have often simultaneously affected the history of those nations.

Published in 2015 by ENRS in cooperation with the Centre for Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin.

The publication describes the Freedom Express campaign which was the ENRS's major project of 2014, oganised in order to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the fall of communism in Europe. It started with 20 young Europeans going on a study trip. The aim of the study trip was to make young people aware of the reality of the life behind the Iron Curtain. Time was spent in meetings and workshops, discussing and exchanging opinions, where they had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet the witnesses of history and to experience the atmosphere of late 1980s. The publication also describes the open-air exhibition Roads to 1989. East-Central Europe 1939-1989, which documents the complicated process through which our part of Europe regained its freedom from communist dictatorship.

The 4th issue – entitled “The memory of economic crisis” – focuses on depressions, recessions, shortages, and hyperinflation. These topics are not often a subject of memory studies, however memories of war and revolution often center on the economic experience of these events. Therefore, scholars look among others into Living in Warsaw under Hyperinflation in 1923 (by Izabela Mrzygłód), Parallels of Economic Business Cycles in Slovakia (by Ľudovít Hallon), Public Transportation in Budapest in 1945-46 (by Zsuzsa Frisnyák) and discuss The Possibility of Remembering Economic Crisis (by Łukasz Mańczyk).

Published by Znak and the ENRS.

The Polish translation of the book was published in 2015 in cooperation with Znak, a publishing house. With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows, written by Sandra Kalniete, a Latvian politician and diplomat, is a memoir of the author’s family banishment from Latvia to Siberia. It tells the story of Latvia’s 20th-century history determined by a nation’s struggles with the twin plagues infecting Central and Eastern Europe: communism and Nazism. The book was a best-seller in Latvia and has been translated into several languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Arabic.

The book describes the Soviet bloc’s struggle against Radio Free Europe (RFE). It is the first book in English to use the unique documents of communist foreign intelligence operations and propaganda materials, interviews with RFE staff and collaborators as well as with Polish Communist Party and security functionaries. The English translation reflects further discoveries of documentation since the original publication in Polish in 2007. On 2 February 2015 the book was officially presented by the author and the representatives of the ENRS in the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC.

Published in 2014 by Woodrow Wilson Center Press with Stanford University Press, with ERNS as a partner.

Antology of texts on memory and memory studies.

Published in 2014 by Narodowe Centrum Kultury, in cooperation with ENRS, Zentrum fur Historische Forschung Berlin der Polnischen Akademie der Wissenchaftern.

This issue of Remembrance and Solidarity Studies is entirely dedicated to the European memory of the First World War. The authors, among others Andrzej Chwalba, Christian Wevelsiep, Jenny Wustenberg, and Mark W. Clark, take on new questions concerning the significance and long-term impact of one of the greatest conflicts in 20th-century Europe.

This third issue is devoted to the “second” anniversary being celebrated in this “extraordinary year” of European remembrance, which is the 25th anniversary of the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. The careful observer can see that the anniversary referred to above, at least in Western Europe, has been pushed into the background by the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. However, the year of 1989, while symbolizing events less dramatic, bloody and harrowing as those of 1914, would seem to be of similar significance in terms of periodization of European history. In fact, a number of historians subscribe to the belief articulated by Eric Hobsbawm that 1914 marked the beginning of “the short 20th century”, which symbolically ended in 1989. In light of recent events in the eastern part of Europe, I would like to express my wish that Hobsbawm be proven correct in his belief that “the age of extremes” has come to a close.

Issue 3(183)/2013 of Polish Sociological Review is composed of the articles presented during the first edition of the ‘Genealogies of Memory’ conference organised by the ENRS. Starting from the growing interest in social memory in Central and Eastern Europe, the authors aim at discussing possible theoretical approaches to social remembrance. The texts also pose questions of a possible use of the ‘region’ as a theoretical framework for inquiries about the divergent ways of forgetting and remembering in Central and Eastern European societies.

Published by Polskie Towarzystwo Socjologiczne [Polish Sociological Association]

The book describes phenomenon of illegal trade in PRL occurring many areas of everyday life. The researcher shows how black market activity has become common proceder in post-war social reality.

Year of publication: 2013 (for the German edition).
Publisher: Walstein Verlag.
Financed by: ENRS, Deutches Historisches Institut Warschau and Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur eV Ostmitteleuropas the University of Leipzig (GWZO).