How are past events commemorated today? Commemoration strongly depends on the contemporary views of the past. A conference that took place in 2014, “Europäische Erinnerungskulturen – European Commemoration 2014”, touched upon this topic and gave an overview of initiatives, narratives and commemorations taking place across Europe. It provided an opportunity to analyse and discuss different current perceptions on what World War I still stood for a hundred years later. This topic is also central in European Commemoration: Locating World War I, a new anthology that is now published and freely available online.
This publication reflects on questions like “What are the correlations between national, transnational and European perspectives?”, “Is there a difference between a European perspective and multiperspectivity?” and “What can and what should be the goal of historical education concerning the First World War?” It not only reveals blind spots and presents new approaches and projects to this theme, but also includes a chapter by EuroClio’s founder and special advisor Joke van der Leeuw-Roord, titled “Rethinking Commemorations, Memory and Remembrance in History Education”.
The authors that have contributed to this publication are Aleida Assmann, Geert Buelens, Hayk Demoyan, Frank Drauschke, Michael Dreyer, Vesna Goldsworthy, Maciej Górny, Breda Karun, Thilo Kasper, Alan Kramer, Krsto Lazarevic, Joke van der Leeuw-Roord, Felicitas Macgilchrist, Andrea Molesini, Frank Morawietz, Andrea Mork, Bogdan Murgescu, Herbert Ruland, Ingrid Sharp, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and Guoqi Xu.
The publication can be found here.
