European Memory. A Blessing or a Curse?

edited by: Leonidas Donskis and Ineta Dabašinskienė
published by: A. Longo editore
pp: 296
ISBN: 978-88-8063-622-9
price: € 20.00

To be or to forget?

How do the politics of remembering and the politics of forgetting relate to modernity?

Is European memory the way out of painful dilemmas of modernity or it is just a burden?

The volume offers a strong Central European perspective on the politics of remembering and the politics of forgetting in the twentieth century, and on interpretation of ourselves and the world around us in the twenty-first century.

The promise to remember everything accompanied by the ability to obliterate anything from the face of the earth, or the promise to describe history just like it was, coupled with a modern obsession to forge history or to whitewash and rewrite it, appear as the contradictions of modernity that may be pushed to the limit at any time.

The book offers Italian, French, Hungarian, Slovenian, Lithuanian, and other European academic and cultural perspectives on this multidimensional phenomenon.

The volume contains the following essays:

“To Be or To Forget: Politics of Remembering vs. Politics of Forgetting" (Leonidas Donskis)
"Identity in the Vicissitudes of Globalization" (Rudi Rizman)
"European Identities and Education for Democratic Citizenship in Diverse Societies" (Mitja Žagar)
"Networking Memories: Historical Narratives and the Challenges of European Integration" (Stefano Bianchini)
"Conspiracy Theories in Traumatized Societies: The Lithuanian Case" (Egidijus Aleksandravičius)
"The Spirit of Freedom and Hope: The Meaning and Message of the ’56 Revolution" (Ferenc Miszlivetz)
"The Landscape of the Politics of Remembering in Transitional Hungary" (István Bariska)
"Autobiographical Memory and the Self: Combining Approaches from the Social and Cognitive Sciences" (Maurice Bloch).

The book has just been pubished. Additional information can be found on PECOB, our Portal on Central Eastern and Balkan Europe (www.pecob.eu).

Availability of this book was announced in issue III/2010 of our newsletter. If you haven't subscribed to our newsletter yet, then you may want to register and you'll receive it by default whenever it is issued.