Europe between memory and forgetting

According to the Czech writer Monika Zgustova, Europe is wavering between memory and forgetting. "For half a century, Westerners and the citizens of the East did not share the same history. As a result, the collective memory of each group differs in the most fundamental fashion, and it is not surprising that the two sides regularly fail to understand one another. Those who live in the East, obliged for decades to put up with the ideological manipulation of the past and the present - a sort of imposed forgetfulness - are now obsessed with remembering. ... Unlike their governments, citizens of the former communist states are anxious about collective or individual remembrance. They feel an urgent need to recover personal memory of this period during which the individual was sacrificed in the name of the absolute collective."

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