Remembering And Recounting The Cold War

Perceptions and images of the Cold War as they appear in textbooks, in the classroom but also in public and in the scientific discourse are topic of this volume "Remembering and Recounting the Cold War – Commonly Shared History?". These perceptions and images are particularly interesting because they are part of the communicative memory and are thus in the process of undergoing change. It is also the task of history didactics, here understood as a science concerned with investigating, theorizing on and staging the way of how people and societies deal with history and memories, to describe, to analyze and to interpret such moldings of teaching cultures, memory cultures and, of course, individual and collective views of this era.

The traces of the Cold War are still visible in many places all around the world. It is the topic of exhibits and new museums, of memorial days and historic sites, of documentaries and movies, of arts and culture. There are historical and political controversies, both nationally and internationally, about how the history of the Cold War should be told and taught, how it should be represented and remembered. While much has been written about the political history of the Cold War, the analysis of its memory and representation is just beginning. Bringing together a wide range of scholars, this volume describes and analyzes the cultural history and representation of the Cold War from an international perspective. That innovative approach focuses on master narratives of the Cold War, places of memory, public and private memorialization, popular culture, and schoolbooks. Due to its unique status as a center of Cold War confrontation and competition, Cold War memory in Berlin receives a special emphasis. With the friendly support of the Wilson Center.

Remembering the Cold War examines how, more than two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cold War legacies continue to play crucial roles in defining national identities and shaping international relations around the globe. Given the Cold War’s blurred definition – it has neither a widely accepted commencement date nor unanimous conclusion - what is to be remembered? This book illustrates that there is, in fact, a huge body of ‘remembrance,’ and that it is more pertinent to ask: what should be included and what can be overlooked? Over five sections, this richly illustrated volume considers case studies of Cold War remembering from different parts of the world, and engages with growing theorisation in the field of memory studies, specifically in relation to war. David Lowe and Tony Joel afford careful consideration to agencies that identify with being ‘victims’ of the Cold War. In addition, the concept of arenas of articulation, which envelops the myriad spaces in which the remembering, commemorating, memorialising, and even revising of Cold War history takes place, is given prominence.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book explores how the socially disputed period of the Cold War is remembered in today’s history classroom. Applying a diverse set of methodological strategies, the authors map the dividing lines in and between memory cultures across the globe, paying special attention to the impact the crisis-driven age of our present has on images of the past. Authors analysing educational media point to ambivalence, vagueness and contradictions in textbook narratives understood to be echoes of societal and academic controversies. Others focus on teachers and the history classroom, showing how unresolved political issues create tensions in history education. They render visible how teachers struggle to handle these challenges by pretending that what they do is ‘just history’. The contributions to this book unveil how teachers, backgrounding the political inherent in all memory practices, often nourish the illusion that the history in which they are engaged is all about addressing the past with a reflexive and disciplined approach.

This open access edited collection brings together established and new perspectives on Cold War civil defence in Western Europe within a common analytical framework that also facilitates comparative and transnational dimensions. The current interest in creating disaster-resilient societies demands new histories of civil defence. Historical contextualization is essential in order to understand what is at stake in preparing, devising, and implementing forms of preparedness, protection, and security that are specifically targeted at societies and citizens. Applying the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to civil defence history, the chapters of this volume cover a range of new themes, from technology and materiality to media, memory, and everyday experience. The book underlines the social embeddedness of civil defence by detailing how it both prompted new forms of social interaction and reflected norms and visions of the ‘good society’ in an age where nuclear technology seemed to hold the key to both doom and salvation.

This book addresses memory politics and their evolution as an academic discipline, including memory studies. It explores national and international debates about conflicting interpretations of the recent past, including WWII remembering, the annexation of Ukraine, the reformed history teaching in Putin's Russia, Historikerstreit and the holocaust in Germany, and the legacy and role of nuclear weapons in international relations in the USA in the context of the so called New Cold War.

The 2022 issue of JHEC is focused on the topic "Why History Education" addressing the sense of history education in contemporary world where it has to assert itself in the field of tension of power, economy and society, and to engage in the dialogue with the growing field of public history. Perspectives from Austria, Germany, Israel, Poland, South Africa. Ukraine and Zimbabwe are included. The highlight of the Varia section is the article on "Plannungsmatrix" where Alois Ecker presents his innovative tool for designing teaching modules that skillfully combine first and second order historical concepts in the course of dialogical interaction between educator and students.

This volume reflects on the role played by textbooks in the complex relationship between war and education from a historical and multinational perspective, asking how textbook content and production can play a part in these processes. It has long been established that history textbooks play a key role in shaping the next generation’s understanding of both past events and the concept of ‘friend’ and ‘foe’. Considering both current and historical textbooks, often through a bi-national comparative approach, the editors and contributors investigate various important aspects of the relationships between textbooks and war, including the role wars play in the creation of national identities (whether the country is on the winning or losing side), the effacement of international wars to highlight a country’s exceptionalism, or the obscuring of intra-national conflict through the ways in which a civil war is portrayed. This pioneering book will be of interest and value to students and scholars of textbooks, educational media and the relationships between curricula and war.