Since the 1970s and 1980s, the politics of history in western Europe has produced a “hot” memory of the Shoah. In eastern Europe after 1989, the memory of Communism became “hot”, while the memory of the Holocaust remained as “cold” as it had been during Communism. Adapting the histoire croisée method of history writing – the focus on crossovers of different cultures, social groups, and historical events – Éva Kovács examines the mémoire croisée of the Shoah in the different political systems of eastern and western Europe.
Éva Kovács
is a sociologist and economist, a researcher at the Teleki Laszlo Institute for Central European Studies in Budapest, and guest professor at the University of Pecs. She was a research fellow at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (IFK) in Vienna in 2005, with the theme “Brauchen Staaten ein Gedächtnis?” [Do states need a memory?].