Conflicted Memories ― Europeanizing Contemporary History

Despite the growing interest in general European history, the European dimension is surprisingly absent from the writing of contemporary history. In most countries, the historiography on the 20th century continues to be dominated by national perspectives. Although there is cross-national work on specific topics such as occupation or resistance, transnational conceptions and narratives of contemporary European history have yet to be worked out. This volume focuses on the development of a shared conception of recent European history that will be required as an underpinning for further economic and political integration so as to make lasting cooperation on the old continent possible. It tries to overcome the traditional national framing that ironically persists just at a time when organized efforts to transform Europe from an object of debate to an actual subject have some chance of succeeding in making it into a polity in its own right.

Konrad H. Jarausch is director of the Zentrum fur Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam and Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. His research interest is currently focused on the German unification in 1989/90, the nature of the East German dictatorship and the problem of interpreting 20th-century German history in general. His publications include The Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories with Michael Geyer (Princeton 2002) and Die Umkehr: Deutsche Wandlungen 1945-1995 (Munchen 2004).

Thomas Lindenberger is Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for European History and Public Spheres in Vienna and teaches at the University of Potsdam. His current research interests center on European societies under communism and their transformation after 1989, on Cold War Cultures and on theoretical questions of Alltagsgeschichte. His publications include Volkspolizei. Herrschaftspraxis und offentliche Ordnung im SED-Staat 1952-1968 (Koln/Weimar/Wien 2003); as well as the edited volumes Herrschaft und Eigen-Sinn in der Diktatur: Studien zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte der DDR (Koln/Weimar/Wien 1999) and (co-edited with Belinda Davis and Michael Wildt) Alltag, Erfahrung, Eigensinn: Historisch-anthropologische Erkundungen (Frankfurt am Main/New York 2008). His latest co-edited book (with Muriel Blaive and Christian Gerbel) is Clashes in European Memory: The Case of Communist Repression and the Holocaust (Innsbruck 2011).