Remembering Difficult Pasts : Monuments and Public Memory in Europe

How does memory both divide and unite an increasingly globalized European populace? This book presents a range of case studies across Europe to better understand how countries have grappled with their difficult pasts – whether traumatic, controversial, exclusionary, propagandistic or even embarrassing – through the built environment.

Monuments and memorials, as symbols built intentionally into the environment, are important frames for understanding how narratives of the past are constructed and reconstructed over time. Europe’s memorial landscape is rife with debate about which pasts to remember, how to remember them, and whose job it is to remember. This book presents a range of case studies from the UK to Ukraine to better understand how European societies have grappled with their difficult pasts – whether traumatic, controversial, exclusionary, propagandistic or even embarrassing – through the built environment. Looking across national borders, the contributors explore how different countries, at different moments in time, have memorialized complicated histories, including fascism, socialism, the Holocaust, colonialism and other examples of contemporary violence; and also how they have removed monuments, memorials and architecture as a response to attempts to remember, as well as forget the past. The book considers how memory divides as well as how it unites an increasingly globalized European populace and questions the stakes of memory in Europe, and how European societies remember their diverse and collective histories.