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Understanding Europe: The Council for European Studies book series, 18

Remembering Difficult PastsMonuments and Public Memory in Europe

Edited by Abigail Lewis, Clemens Sedmak, Mechtild Widrich and Jacob M. Kildoo

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Published 30 April 2027

Open access under CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0

About this book

Monuments and memorials, as symbols built intentionally into the environment, are important frames for understanding how narratives of the past are constructed and reconstructed over time. Europe’s memorial landscape is rife with debate about which pasts to remember, how to remember them, and whose job it is to remember.

This book presents a range of case studies from the UK to Ukraine to better understand how European societies have grappled with their difficult pasts – whether traumatic, controversial, exclusionary, propagandistic or even embarrassing – through the built environment. Looking across national borders, the contributors explore how different countries, at different moments in time, have memorialized complicated histories, including fascism, socialism, the Holocaust, colonialism and other examples of contemporary violence; and also how they have removed monuments, memorials and architecture as a response to attempts to remember, as well as forget the past.

The book considers how memory divides as well as how it unites an increasingly globalized European populace and questions the stakes of memory in Europe, and how European societies remember their diverse and collective histories.

Table of contents

List of Contributors
Preface: The Ethics and Politics of Remembering in Europe
Clemens Sedmak
List of Figures

Introduction: Sites of Memory and the Construction of History
Abigail E. Lewis and Mechtild Widrich

Part I. Holocaust Memory
1. Negative Spaces and the Play of Memory: The Memorial Art of Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz
James E. Young
2. Tilting Austria’s Past
Mechtild Widrich
3. Contested Histories at the Jasenovac Memorial Site
Jelena Subotic
4. Paris as a Site of Holocaust Memory?: Holocaust Memorialization in Postwar Paris
Abigail E. Lewis

Part II. Totalitarianism / Fascism
5. Is There Such a Thing as Fascist Architecture? Architectural Design and Politics in Interwar Rome
Steven Semes
6. Monuments to ‘those fallen for God and Spain’: A Truly Present Legacy
Xurxo Ayán Vila
7. ‘No Monument Found’: Inframemory
Pedro Aguilera-Mellado

Part III. Post-Socialist memory
8. Living Memory and the Politics of History: Holocaust Memory Activism in Orbán’s Hungary
Maya Nadkarni
9. When Monuments Tell What We Don’t Want to Hear: Confronting Contested Monuments in Croatia
Željko Tanjić and Jasna Ćurković Nimac
10. Divided by the Past: The Turbulent Fate of a Monument and the Challenges of Difficult Heritage in Contemporary Poland
Robert Traba and Magdalena Lemańczyk
11. Center to Periphery: Constantin Brancusi’s Monumental Ensemble ‘Heroes’ Boulevard’
Andrei Pop

Part IV. Colonialism and Slavery
12. Contested Monuments in England: Toppling the Colston Statue in Bristol
Tim Cole
13. Doit le Duc d’Orléans tomber? French Colonial Monuments in the Age of Rhodes Must Fall
Jennifer Sessions
14. Monumental Rehabilitation: Hans Pauli Olsen’s The Building Master King Christian IV and Historical Maintenance Activism
Mathias Danbolt

Part V. Warfare and Contemporary Violence
15.Contested Monuments in Ukraine during the Full-Scale Russian Invasion: Between Discourses of Identity and Sustainable Development
Danylo Sudyn
16. Remembering World War I in the Irish ‘Borderlands’
Georgina Laragy and David Murphy
17. Sarajevo Roses – Civilian, Deserter, Soldier
Lejla Džumhur

Concluding Remarks: Remembering (and Teaching) Difficult Heritage
Jacob M. Kildoo

Epilogue: The Stories Monuments Tell – and Are
Clemens Sedmak

About the contributors

Abigail Lewis

Abigail Lewis is a historian of modern French and European history. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her research focuses on photography, visual culture and collective memory during and after the Nazi occupation of France. She serves as the Executive Director of the Council for European Studies at Temple University.

Clemens Sedmak

Clemens Sedmak is Professor of Social Ethics and Director of the Nanovic Institute in the Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame. He also holds concurrent positions with the Department of Theology and the Institute for Social Concerns. He was previously F. D. Maurice Professor of Moral and Social Theology at King’s College London.

Mechtild Widrich

Mechtild Widrich is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her books include Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art (2014), Monumental Cares: Sites of History and Contemporary Art (2023).

Jacob M. Kildoo

Jacob M. Kildoo is a scholar of Qur’anic and Islamic studies. He currently serves as Senior Research Program Manager at the Nanovic Institute for European Studies (University of Notre Dame).

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