RUB Europadialog Blog is featuring a special series of essays on the politics of history in contemporary Europe.

These essays have been written by students of the MA in European Studies programme at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, The Netherlands. They are revised versions of papers written within the course Post-War Europe: Political and Societal Transformations.

The essays include:

Linda Weigl, Commemorating Communist Rule in Hungary: The Role of History in Times of Democratic Decline

Dany Levin Prist, Orbán and the Hungarian Holocaust: Historical Distortion for Political Gain?

Florian F. Christ, Katyn 2? How the Tragedy of Smolensk is Used in Polish Politics

Elias Hartmann, Street Fights: White Fragility in the Debate on Colonial Legacies in the Streets of Berlin

Florian Bikard, Vichy – Memories of a Past that is still Present: Re-surging Nationalism and the Limits of the ‘devoir de mémoire’

Careen Becker, The AfD and the Commemoration of the Holocaust: The Power of the Past to Shape the Present

Blog Post Image: Toppling of the statue of Lenin in Kharkiv, 28 September 2014. Photo by Kpamua – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35925624