Chinese Historical Memory of the World War II: Points of Connection and Difference with the Russian View

The paper considers trending matters of the history of World War II based on views of contemporary Russian and foreign representatives of neoliberalism. The present topic is relevant since neoliberalism supporters attempt to reconsider the key events of World War II, which is especially noticeable just before the 75thanniversary of its end. Instead of serious historical research, numerous works of neoliberal authors contain highly ideologically charged representation of the events considered, which usually has anti-Russian trends. The present paper investigates neoliberal judgments and views of Russian and foreign authors on the reasons of World War II, its beginning, the Eastern Front (which in Russia is called the Great Patriotic War) and on the image of the Soviet army. These particular aspects are usually payed special attention and considered from the perspective of the new neoliberal reading.The aimof this paper is to perform the analysis of neoliberal views on some key aspects of World War II. The authors consider the rationale proposed by neoliberals and try to identify the grounds for reconsideration of a number of events of World War II. The keymethodof analysis performed was the dialectical method. Such specific methods as those of analysis, synthesis, comparative-historical and problematic-chronological methods, methods of actualization, of specific and logical analysis and some other ones were applied as well. Asthe resultof the research conducted, the authors ascertained that in both Russia and foreign countries neoliberal views on important matters of World War II stem from ideology and political interests. In fact, there is the aim pursued to substantiate the responsibility and blame of the Soviet Union for starting the war, inhumanity of soviet regime and barbarity of the Soviet army. To attain this, in the context of informational war that is currently taking place all means are used from distortion of facts to fabrications and outright lies. Such methods are obviously unscientific and have nothing to do with historical research. The political objective of the ideological campaign run is to show Russia, which is the legal successor state of the Soviet Union, as the aggressive country that treats the free liberal world. The proceedings of the present paper may be relevant for historians, political analysts and theorists as well as for those who are engaged in World War II and particularly its Eastern Front.

Memory as a battlefield: letters by traumatized German veterans and contested memories of the Great War

This article examines how Second World War memory is circulated, reproduced, and challenged in the transnational space of digital media by Ukrainian and Russian Internet users. Using as a case study one episode of the war on the Eastern Front—the capture of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, by the Red Army in 1943—it investigates how this event is commemorated through YouTube, which is a popular online platform for uploading, viewing, and commenting on audiovisual materials. This article employs content analysis to assess audiovisual tributes to the Battle of Kyiv from two perspectives: that of representation (how the event is presented on YouTube) and that of interaction (how YouTube users interact with memory of the event). This article concludes that although YouTube is frequently used for the propagation of nationalistic interpretations of the past in Ukraine and Russia, it still has the potential to democratize collective remembrance of the Second World War.

Part I. Framing the Issues 1. The politics of war memory and commemoration: contexts, structures and dynamics T.G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Roper Part II. Case Studies 2. Layers of memory: twenty years after in Argentina Elizabeth Jelin and Susana G. Kaufman 3. The South African War/Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902 and political memory in South Africa Bill Nasson 4. National narratives, war commemoration, and racial exclusion in a settler society: the Australian case Ann Curthoys 5. 'This is where they fought': Finnish war landscapes as a national heritage Petri J. Raivo 6. Remembered/Replayed: the nation and male subjectivity in the Second World War films, Ni Liv (Norway) and The Cruel Sea (Britain) Peter Sjolyst-Jackson 7. Postmemory cinema: second-generation Israelis screen the Holocaust in Don't Touch My Holocaust Yosefa Loshitzky 8. Hauntings: memory, fiction, and the Portuguese Colonial Wars Paulo de Medeiros 9. Longing for war: nostalgia and Australian returned soldiers after the First World War Stephen Garton 10. Involuntary commemorations: post-traumatic stress disorder and its relationship to war commemoration Jo Stanley Part III. Debates and Reviews 11. War commemoration in Western Europe: changing meanings, divisive loyalties, unheard voices T.G. Ashplant

Shrine: War Memorials and the Digital Age

War was the central theme of Germany’s twentieth century. The first half of the century saw unprecedented violence and destruction caused successively by the Kaiserreich and the Third Reich. The second half was shaped by the consequences of these wars and the realities of a resulting cold war: total defeat, utter devastation, a divided nation under Allied occupation, and a second dictatorship on German soil. Studying modern German history thus entails dealing with war and its social, political, and cultural consequences along with the narratives and memories it inspired in its aftermath. The two most terrible, closely intertwined crimes committed by Germans during World War II – the Holocaust and the war against the Soviet Union – gave rise to two diametrically opposed official memories of the Nazi past in the two postwar Germanys. Although the mass murder of about 6 million Jews would gain the most prominent position in West German public memory of the war, official memory in East Germany centered around the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union. This fundamental difference derived to a great extent, but not exclusively, from the political realities and ideological antagonism of the Cold War – the West German alliance with the West and the integration of East Germany into the Soviet sphere of influence. A multitude of personal, political, and ideological motives of those postwar politicians who came to dominate the political landscape in divided Germany also gave shape to this fundamental difference. The emergence of the differing – what I call – political memories of the Nazi war against the Soviet Union – henceforth also referred to as the war on the Eastern Front or, simply, the Eastern Front – in divided and reunited Germany is the subject of this book. I present a comparative study that examines when and how the war was discussed in public, with a particular focus on the two social groups that often dominated the collective memory landscape: the political elite and war veterans. I investigate the relationship between public memory and politics by asking how memory formed and informed political culture, and vice versa. I am thus concerned with the “public use of history,” with the recollection, appropriation, and narration of the war against the Soviet Union by politicians, state officials, and war veterans in the context of the most important domestic and foreign policy debates in postwar German history.

In this article we analyzed digital games as a mode of memory production and preservation especially in the genre of World War II games. Using a Japanese-produced PS3 game, Valkyria Chronicles (2008), we demonstrated the ideological aspects of this type of games in (re)shaping the memory of the World War II through what we called “allegorithmic memory” process. Borrowing from Alexander R. Galloway’s conception of “allegorithm,” we argued that the combination of narrative allegory and gameplay algorithm in Valkyria Chronicles has produced a “cute” perspective on the memory of World War II that is closely tied to the historical role of Japan during the War. Set in an alternate 1930s Europe, the game combined the collective memory of Holocaust with an atypical representation of World War II in its allegorithmic structure. We argued that this combination has produced a double screen memory that attempted to invite a shared affection in dealing with Japanese traumatic memory of World War II. In conclusion, our article demonstrated the capacity of digital games as a culturally-specific site of memory production and preservation offering a complex combination of recycled and new perspective of World War II.

This article describes the process of preservation and beautification of military cemeteries and memorials of World War I on the territory of Western Belarus in 1921-1939. Aspects of cooperation between state bodies and public organizations are discussed. The author relies on the legislative acts and periodicals of that period, as well as modern literature and Web-sites of specialized public organizations. The article considers the main legislative acts that manage activities for protection and arrangement of sites of memory of World War I. The questions of the relation of the different people to memory of the victims of Great World are raised; examples of particular actions for its preservation on the territory of the Western Belarus in 1921-1939 are given.
 The author determines the role of World War I in the history of Belarus and its heritage. The article contains information about key battles on Eastern front, and also about features of burial of soldiers of the Imperial Russian Army. The special attention is paid to joint military burials where Russian and German soldiers were buried and which are symbols of posthumous reconciliation of hostile sides. 
 Various ways integration of sites of memory of Great War´s to modern military patriotic routes, which are urged to inform new generations about this grandiose conflict of the XX century, are considered.

This article brings together the fields of Cold War studies and memory studies. In Denmark, a remarkable institutionalisation of Cold War memory has taken place in the midst of a heated ideological battle over the past and whether to remember the Cold War as a “war”. Using Danish Cold War museums and heritage sites as case studies, this article sheds new light on the politics of history involved in Cold War commemoration. It suggests that the Cold War is commemorated as a war, yet this war memory is of a particular kind: it is a war memory without victims.

After World War II, Dutch psychiatrists and other mental health care professionals articulated ideals of democratic citizenship. Framed in terms of self-development, citizenship took on a broad meaning, not just in terms of political rights and obligations, but also in the context of material, social, psychological and moral conditions that individuals should meet in order to develop themselves and be able to act according to those rights and obligations in a responsible way. In the post-war period of reconstruction (1945-65), as well as between 1965 and 1985, the link between mental health and ideals of citizenship was coloured by the public memory of World War II and the German occupation, albeit in completely different, even opposite ways. The memory of the war, and especially the public consideration of its victims, changed drastically in the mid-1960s, and the mental health sector played a crucial role in bringing this change about. The widespread attention to the mental effects of the war that surfaced in the late 1960s after a period of 20 years of public silence should be seen against the backdrop of the combination of democratization and the emancipation of emotions.

Exploring optimal market operations and grid effects in an office building energy community: A case study

War memorials and related exhibition spaces are commonplace in Australian cities and towns. As critically reflected upon in this paper, there is much ‘hidden’ or alternative history that tends to get ignored when it comes to official memorials and conventional places of remembrance. The particular focus of our paper is the exploration of the peace-building and educational potential of site visits to a number of memorial places that differ, in significant ways, from national war memorials, war museums and battlefield tourism. As illustrated by the various case studies in this paper, there may be alternative, dissenting sites of memory/remembering that question selective remembering and militarising historical myths. Each of these ‘sites of conscience’ may offer, as discussed in this paper, significant opportunities for experiential learning and critical reflection on peace-related issues. The authors offer some reflections on these sites, the histories of the sites, and possible peace education implications. Our paper invites follow-up research and reflection on whether there are many other such ‘sites of conscience’ that peace educators may draw upon whether in Australia, Japan or internationally. Key issues include how such site visits and learning trails may excite curiosity cross-culturally among students about nonviolent, life-affirming alternatives to militarised ‘maps’ about the future.

Focusing primarily on the Łużna-Pustki military cemetery constructed by the Austro-Hungarian army on the Eastern Front after the Battle of Gorlice, also known as the ‘Little Verdun’ (2-5 May 1915), the article deals with the memory of World War I and its use in local, national (Polish) and European contexts. The text shows the history of this lieu de mémoire: its creation, cultural and artistic contexts, and ultimate slide into oblivion during the interwar period and after World War II, before a resurrection in interest in Poland at the turn of the 21st century. Taking into consideration Europeanization processes, the author shows how tangible remnants of World War I are brought into the limelight within European frames of reference and discusses the consequences of this discursive reinterpretation of the Łużna-Pustki military cemetery, awarded a European Heritage Label in 2016.

Reviewed by Neil M. Cowan The War Complex: World War II in Our Time. By Marianna Torgovnick. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. 193. $25. Marianna Torgovnick examines our collective memories of World War II and the conflicts that followed. Because questions not easily answered are posed at the beginning, her book is an interesting read. But it has a number of flaws. Torgovnick should have separated the subject of warfare from quite distinct subjects: her personal experiences on September 11, her assessment of various novelists who write about war, Adolph Eichmann and the Holocaust. The War Complex would have been more compelling had she done more than focus on cultural memories of World War II and our "altered state of consciousness produced by large scale war [that] can last beyond the end of hostilities" (p. xxiii). I believe that she could have constructed a stronger narrative had she understood how cultural memories of World War I and how it was fought had a direct impact on World War II and how it was fought. [End Page 834] Torgovnick is correct in saying that our cultural memories of World War II played a major role in shaping our consciousness throughout the cold war. Politicians in democracies and dictatorships captured and distorted that event to suit their own aims, leaving some of their audiences delighted, others in rage. People in Hollywood found out that a carefully crafted story about World War II could make for a fine film while also making them a great deal of money. But such a film can also reinforce a cultural memory of the war that is critically distorted and historically inaccurate. Torgovnick devotes two chapters to Eichmann, the architect of the plan that moved millions to the death camps and the Holocaust, but she should have also considered the man behind the massive bombing of German cities, the Royal Air Force's General Arthur Harris. If she had devoted less attention to Eichmann—simply another German robot—and examined Harris's conscience, her argument could have been taken down some very interesting roads. Harris knew that his bombing campaign killed millions of innocents; it also left a cultural memory of the vast efficiency of air power that carried into the cold war, Korea, Vietnam, and now Iraq, even posing a temptation to use nuclear weapons once again. How we identify with war depends on our cultural background and what we have learned in school and from the media. In shaping the cultural memory of World War II in the United States, the media have deliberately protected Americans from its realities. What sane person wants to see the actual effects of combat and aerial bombing? In her concluding chapter, "Towards an Ethics of Identification," Torgovnick writes that "World War I made polite fictions about death difficult to sustain, World War II made them even more so." Yet if "polite fictions" about death in both world wars are actually the case, why do American politicians so often travel to Normandy to give speeches extolling the sacrifice American soldiers made in June 1944? Why do they continue to ask us for more sacrifices in the name of what they consider to be America's world mission? Neil Cowan is an independent scholar who specializes in oral-history interviewing. Permission to reprint a review published here may be obtained only from the reviewer.

This chapter outlines the German memory of the First World War. It discusses collective memory, political culture and historical scholarship in the period 1918 to 1939, the Second World War, and since 1945. The memory of the war was increasingly a battleground in the final years of the Weimar Republic. The obsessive campaign waged against the ‘war guilt lie’ and reparations payments stood for nationalist Germany’s refusal to accept the consequences of defeat. Hitler and the German army learned the lessons of offensive warfare from the First World War and succeeded in combined, all-arms, mechanized, motorized operations (Poland, the West 1940, Barbarossa) which overcame the stagnation of trench warfare: ‘lightning warfare’ spearheaded by tanks and aircraft to ensure mobility. The memory of 1914 strongly influenced German warfare at the start of the Second World War. Keywords: First World War; German memory; lightning warfare; Weimar Republic