Legacies of Stalingrad Remembering the Eastern Front in Germany since 1945

Christina Morina's book examines the history of the Eastern Front war and its impact on German politics and society throughout the postwar period. She argues that the memory of the Eastern Front war was one of the most crucial and contested themes in each part of the divided Germany. Although the Holocaust gained the most prominent position in West German memory, official memory in East Germany centered on the war against the USSR. The book analyzes the ways in which these memories emerged in postwar German political culture during and after the Cold War, and how views of these events played a role in contemporary political debates. The analysis pays close attention to the biographies of the protagonists both during the war and after, drawing distinctions between the accepted, public memory of events and individual encounters with the war.

1. Memory under occupation: the emergence of competing memories of the Eastern Front; 2. Cold War: political memory of the Eastern Front in divided Germany; 3. Lessons of the Eastern Front: the Wehrmacht legacy and the remilitarization of Germany; 4. Peacetime wars: official memory and the integration of individual wartime experiences; 5. The past reinforced: the memory of the Eastern Front from Ulbricht to Honecker; 6. The past revisited: West German memory of the Eastern Front in the era of détente.

Christina Morina is a lecturer at the University of Jena, Germany. She received a PhD in 2007 from the University of Maryland and has published several articles on issues of memory and political culture in Contemporary European History and Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Morina is the co-editor of a forthcoming comprehensive volume on the divided history of the German historical sciences since 1945. In 2009, she co-founded an International Young Scholars' Network on 'The History of Societies and Socialisms'.