1.20. Negotiating Difficult Pasts: Memory, Silence, and Public Life: Europe and Brazil

Days after the Parliament approved the Holocaust Law in January 2018, the PM of Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki, touted the controversial bill as a milestone in restoring the nation's pride: “In the past … we fouled our own nest despite having the world’s most wonderful history. Now we have to conduct a wide-scale global information campaign.” The legislation criminalised claims about the complicity of Poles in the Holocaust, introducing a sentence of three years in prison. Crucially, the bill, approved with just five opposing votes, was not an isolated incident but an element of the state’s sustained politics of memory campaign. At the heart of this project is the surprising rise of increasingly censorial Holocaust memory policies in Poland which isolate the state internationally and undermine its image. The Holocaust Law is a particularly striking illustration of this puzzle due to the sheer scale of the critique it brought to Poland. It caused an international outcry and was heavily criticised in Washington, Jerusalem and Brussels. The project relies on multimethod data generation. I.e. an analysis of Poland’s public communication on Holocaust memory policies, in-depth interviews with Polish officials and experts, and field observations of remembrance events. The project addresses a pressing issue. Since it is in Polish “bloodlands” where two-thirds of Europe’s Jews were exterminated, Warsaw is the main battleground for the way how the global community and the EU will memorialise this genocide. Holocaust memory is increasingly used as a key element in Europe’s public diplomacy. With the rise of populist and far-right politics across the continent, the memory of the Holocaust became a central point of contention between liberal and new illiberal politics.

This paper examines the conscious construction of false memory cultures under National Socialism, and argues that the regime’s medieval nostalgia and mythic historicism reveal how distorted collective memory can operate as an instrument of anti-democratic power. By selectively appropriating medieval and folkloric history, from the warriorship of the Teutonic knight to the racist ideal of the 'Urdeutschen' (‘original Germans’), the Nazis constructed an imagined past that legitimized authoritarianism and glorified warfare. Drawing on Hannah Johnson and Nina Caputo’s work on how National Socialist medievalism fuelled its antisemitic agenda, as well as Fabian Link and Mark W. Hornburg’s studies of medievalist construction projects in Nazi Germany, I trace how deliberate national ‘misremembering’ became both the emotional and material foundation of European fascism. This process replaced critical, individual thought with a collective myth that was, by design, anti-democratic. Methodologically, the paper uses examples of Nazism's artistic, architectural and literary engagements with the medieval past from 1933-1945 to show how Nazi cultural production reimagined and weaponized history in service of totalitarian ideology. It also draws on primary source diaries and letters to consider the extent to which actors and bystanders were conscious or ignorant of this act of misremembering. The findings suggest that any regime that cultivates a state-directed false memory culture undermines the very conditions of democratic thought. More broadly, the paper challenges assumptions about agency within authoritarian remembrance cultures and argues that dictatorships not only distort collective memory, but destroy its possibility altogether.

This article examines the construction of national pantheons of heroes in two Eastern European kin states – Romania and the Republic of Moldova – that lack physical mausolea for enshrining their illustrious figures. It advances a dual conceptualization of pantheonization, distinguishing between material and symbolic forms of national commemoration. Drawing on quantitative content analysis of fifty-eight history textbooks, the study introduces an Index of Pantheonic Status (IPS) to measure the prominence of historical figures within didactic narratives. The findings reveal both a transnational convergence of heroic canons between the two countries and a remarkable continuity across Romania’s socialist and postsocialist mnemonic regimes. By linking nation-building to the politics of remembering, the paper contributes a transferable framework for investigating how modern states codify their heroic heritage in the absence of monumental pantheons.

Abstract: This speech addresses the concept of History and the selective criteria of what constitutes national historical and artistic heritage, carried out by the Federal Council of Culture. This governamental organism, created in 1966, brought together renowned intellectuals from various backgrounds, aligned with the authorianism guidelines that came how effect with the civil-military coup of 1964. The source we emphasize here is the major book, published in 1972, which was intended to serve as Brazil's Cultural Atlas. That year also marked the sesquicentennial of Independence, and the historical perspective of society was publicly celebrated. The aim is to map the policies of the time presented in the introduction of the work, the vision of what should constitute national memory, and the expected impact by this group of intellectuals who, without wearing military uniforms, sought to reinforce the nationalist vision promoted by the country's leaders during that period. The concepto f pratical past, created by Hayden White, will be used to carry out this analysis.