Chapter 1 DYNAMICS OF GENERATIONAL MEMORY Understanding the East and West Divide Harald Wydra States have always constructed civic identity by means of unremitting defenses against the memory of their violent origins. If “blessed acts of oblivion” are crucial to ensure collective identities, the political trans- formations of the last two decades in Europe arguably present Europe with a challenge. Across a complex array of repressed memories, denial, victim syndromes, and atonement, Western European societies, such as Germany and France, have come to adhere to the “foundational” memory of the end of Nazism and the singularity of the Shoah. 1 Genocide recognition, official apologies, and the rehabilitation of victims are all arguably a central feature for the reconstitution of democratic identity in Europe. With the end of communism, the singularity of this foundational European memory was relativized. Comparisons between the two totalitarian systems became more systematic and plausible. Western Europe has developed a culture of memorials, museums, and centers of commemoration focused on the cen- trality of the Shoah. 2 The new members who joined the European Union in 2004, however, claim the need for the acknowledgment of differences in historical legacies. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, European memory is characterized by a deep geopolitical asymmetry. A memorandum, drafted by prominent historians from Eastern Europe, argued that the new Europe has brought new historical experience, grievances, and complaints, so far ignored in the West. 3 In their view, the more established Western members have not forgotten their past. Rather, they had the opportunity to reassess it and thus have found more common values to share. Since Eastern Europeans did not participate in the process of “constructing Europe,” their experience of the shared values of Europe is bound to be thinner and so is their understanding of the informal rules and meanings. If Europe wants to