History textbooks wield significant influence in shaping collective memory and identity, which is why history education is often positioned as both culprit and cure for gaps in collective memory. Yet its own historical development often remains underexamined. This article addresses this gap by examining how perspectives on decolonization have evolved in Indonesian and Dutch history education from 1950 to 2025, underscoring the need to empirically ground and historicize these perspectives across diverse temporal and spatial contexts. Employing a diachronic and transnational framework that engages with geopolitics and processes of instrumental and cultural perpetuation, it discusses history education as both a contested site and a catalyst for critical reflection and reparative action.
This critical reappraisal of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything isIlluminated (2002) shows how postmodernizing the Holocaust in fiction seeks to free the third generation from paralysis of memory but in doing so works against the concept of history as a record of past events, privileging instead history as a series ofviolations in an unending apocalypse and reconfiguring the past as a collection of myths. Such "postmodern holocausts" undermine any attempt to understand history as an objective record of real events or to recover a usable past. They do, however, return us to the question of how the Holocaust can be made real for those who were not there, and they also raise issues of the ethics of representation and of the future of Holocaust memory.
This article investigates activist-initiated modifications to Soviet-era World War II monuments and memorials and the erection of alternative monuments in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland over the past ten years, identifying their main attributes, similarities, and differences, as well as reflecting on their connections to the global movement to decolonize public memory. I argue that in Central Europe activists have been much less willing to remove or destroy these structures, preferring to modify them by correcting or supplementing their reference to World War II, a practice I term rehistoricization. However, the Russian military aggression in Ukraine triggered a new wave of activism which inscribes new references onto monuments that explicitly pertain to the present yet implicitly build on past contestations, a practice I term dehistoricization.
This article examines the Last Address Project, a crowdsourced civic initiative that commemorates individual victims of Soviet political terror by attaching small metal signs to fa & ccedil;ades of victims' last known residences. The analysis develops the notion of resistant memory commons, defined as an aggregate of reclaimed and newly created mnemonic resources, ways of mobilizing them in commemorative practices, and communities formed around shared remembrance. In the neo-totalitarian political climate of contemporary Russia, Last Address not only makes the record of Soviet political violence publicly visible but also fosters a conversation around the traumatic national past and knits a social fabric around resistant practices of commemoration and witnessing.
Engaging microhistorically with the three "diaries" of Clara Licht, a German Jewish refugee from National Socialism who fled to Britain before World War II, this article considers the lives and afterlives of the diaries as both objects of use for Clara and objects of memory for later generations. It argues for the need to view historical items pertaining to migration and persecution within a longer continuum stretching to the present. The article considers how the meaning of the same object alters over generations and how microhistory can elucidate some of the nuances of the experiences of German Jewish refugee families.
