Politics of Collective Memory

The memory is not shared. In a present reconstruction of the past, it rather produces the sharing of the sensible, its cleavages and clashes parallel to the clashes of political sensibilities. To examine the shifting representations of heroes, victims, terror, and oppression of the Great War, Second World War, holocaust and communism in museums, historical monuments, public spaces and buildings, public holidays, and state symbols allows to capture what different countries of Europe are sensible to, to ask whether they share or not a common sensibility, common cultural patterns.