Erinnerungsorte in Ostmitteleuropa (lieux de mémoire in East Central Europe) is a valuable contribution to recent efforts to shift the center of gravity in memory studies toward Eastern Europe. Written by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, this volume extends the methodological concept of lieux de mémoire into a region, where—unlike the original object of research of Pierre Nora's work—state-formation was characterized by the recent collapse of multiethnic empires, territorial instability, and the consecutive domination of two totalitarian systems. The empirically rich material provides an innovative structure that reflects the fractures of divided memories as sources of collective identities. A first section focuses on place memory, notably three multiethnic cities in the territories of contemporary Slovakia, Ukraine, and Poland. Three chapters examine Pressburg/Bratislava/Pozsony for its Austrian-German, Hungarian, and Slovakian memories. Three chapters deal with Lemberg/Lwow/L'viv, elucidating the complex intertwinement of Polish and Ukrainian master narratives, as well as possibilities of reconciliation in a multiethnic environment. Two chapters on Breslau/Wrocław look at the German and Polish memories of this city. The second section features seven chapters dealing with memory places of victims of totalitarian systems, including Auschwitz, Dachau, the museum of the Warsaw uprising, the House of Terror museum in Budapest, the Ukrainian great famine (Holodomor) in 1932/33, and the place of the execution of tens of thousands of Polish officers in Katyń at the hands of Stalin's secret police in 1940. Furthermore, a chapter on “visible memories” is dedicated to places of commemoration for victims of Stalinism and Communism in East Central Europe and Russia. The third section contains five chapters with historical ruptures associated with a chronological lieux de mémoire, including 1945, 1956, 1968, and two chapters on 1989 as a “Polish” and a “European year of revolution.”

As a distinguished historian whose career embodied border-crossings between East and West, Krzysztof Pomian's programmatic chapter on “Divided Memory” highlights cognitive, emotional, and existential aspects that shape both individual and collective identities in memory conflicts. Identity-formation through memory requires complex and often fragile practices of assembling different elements such as historical research, arts, and literature, as well as tolerance and openness by state authorities toward minority groups. Pomian's chapter ends on the plea to move from Geschichtspolitik (politics of history) toward an ethics of memory.

In accordance with this plea, this volume rejects a prescriptive or normative hegemonic lexicon of memory. The authors are wary of propositions about a common European understanding of history, let alone a European culture of memory (25)—and rightly so. They favor the idea that national memories should align themselves by mutually adding to often biased images of history. Emphasizing the “associative openness” of the concept of lieux de mémoire (17), the primary goal is the “extension of an inventory of memories into a space, which is ethnically and historically torn apart, without clearly identifiable centers” (11).

Refreshingly, the vantage point of analysis is constituted by the interstices, the liminal spaces and time periods, which exemplify the brokenness of political reality, the in-betweenness of meanings, and the interpretive contests about events. Paradoxically, this engagement with hybridity and confusion conveys a great sensitivity regarding conflicting mnemonic practices in East Central Europe. In spite of this achievement, the chapters sometimes remain captive to the power of international, if not globalized forms of memory regimes—which have arguably the origin in (West-) German forms of forms of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. To what extent will the commemoration of Auschwitz and the destruction of European Jews become a central lieux de mémoire in European identity as suggested in the chapter “Who Owns Auschwitz?” The fascinating chapter on the multiple meanings of “1945” nevertheless ends on the (overtly?) optimistic note that there is hope for the emergence of an all-European culture of memory. After all, Eastern Europe might take the turn toward a “European commemorative mainstream” (297). Will East Central Europe remain at the receiving end of lessons in political pedagogy about how to remember? Or, will, as Pomian puts it, the existential dimension of memory deploy pedagogical efforts in a very broad sense—including teachers of all kinds such as politicians, religious leaders, or journalists—for the purpose of the “education of sentiments”? Would this then enable the transition from the “conviction of one's own innocence toward the consciousness of one's own merits and crimes” (38)?

The two lines of reasoning do not contradict each other. They rather illustrate the hinge function of memory. Memory binds and divides, reveals and conceals. Lieux de mémoire in East Central Europe, in this sense, have a unique experiential background, making for a commemorative culture that will learn its lessons but not inevitably Western ones.