In its totality, the "Long Second World War"-extending from the beginning of the Spanish Civil War to the end of hostilities in 1945-has exerted enormous influence over European culture. Bringing together leading historians, sociologists, and literary and film scholars, this broadly interdisciplinary volume investigates Europeans'' individual and collective memories and the ways in which they have shaped the continent''s cultural heritage. Focusing on the major combatant nations-Spain, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, and Russia-it offers thoroughly contextualized explorations of novels, memoirs, films, and a host of other cultural forms to illuminate European public memory.

In its totality, the “Long Second World War”—extending from the beginning of the Spanish Civil War to the end of hostilities in 1945—has exerted enormous influence over European culture. Bringing together leading historians, sociologists, and literary and film scholars, this broadly interdisciplinary volume investigates Europeans’ individual and collective memories and the ways in which they have shaped the continent’s cultural heritage. Focusing on the major combatant nations—Spain, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, and Russia—it offers thoroughly contextualized explorations of novels, memoirs, films, and a host of other cultural forms to illuminate European public memory.

List of Illustrations    
Acknowledgements

Foreword: Between World Wars: Remembering War in Europe before 1945
Richard Overy

Introduction: The Long Aftermath of the Long Second World War
Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame

PART I: SPAIN

Chapter 1. Violence and the History and Memory of the Spanish Civil War: Beyond the Crisis of Inherited Narrative Frameworks
Pablo Sánchez León

Chapter 2. Poetry and Silence in Post-Civil War Spain: Carmen Conde, Lucía Sánchez Saornil and Pilar de Valderrama
Jean Andrews

Chapter 3. On Civil-War Memory in Spanish Women’s Narratives: The Example of Cristina Fernández Cubas’ Cosas que ya no existen
Alison Ribeiro de Menezes

PART II: THE UNITED KINGDOM

Chapter 4. Narrating Britain’s War: A ‘Four Nations and More’ Approach to the People’s War
Daniel Travers and Paul Ward

Chapter 5. ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans’: the Representation of Germans in British Second World War Films
Robert Murphy

Chapter 6. Memory and Nation in British Narratives of the Second World War after 1945
Mark Rawlinson

PART III: FRANCE

Chapter 7. A Capital Problem: The Town of Vichy, the Second World War, and the Politics of Identity
Kirrily Freeman

Chapter 8. Tracking the Past in the Places and Spaces of Patrick Modiano’s Early Fiction
Peter Tame

Chapter 9. Vercors and the Second World War
Cristina Solé-Castells

PART IV: GERMANY

Chapter 10. Reconstructing D-Day Memory: How Contemporary Politics made Germans Victims of the War
Harold J. Goldberg

Chapter 11. Memories of World War II in German Film after 1945
Christiane Schönfeld

Chapter 12. Ilse Aichinger’s Novel The Greater Hope. Poetic Narrative to Deal with Trauma
Marko Pajević

PART V: ITALY

Chapter 13. Victimhood Asserted: Italian Memories of World War II
Richard J. B. Bosworth

Chapter 14. Re-picturing the Myth: American Characters in Post-War Popular Italian Cinema
Daniela Treveri Gennari

Chapter 15. Italian Resistance Writing in the Years of the ‘Second Republic’
Philip Cooke

PART VI: POLAND

Chapter 16. The Second World War in Present-Day Polish Memory and Politics
Andrzej Paczkowski

Chapter 17. Wounded Memory. Rhetorical Strategies Used in Public Discourse on the Katyń Massacre
Urszula Jarecka

Chapter 18. The Second World War in Recent Polish Counterfactual and Alternative (Hi)stories
Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż

PART VII: USSR / RUSSIA

Chapter 19. History Politics and the Changing Meaning of Victory Day in Contemporary Russia
Markku Kangaspuro

Chapter 20. War and Patriotism: Russian War Films and the Lessons for Today
David Gillespie

Chapter 21. Russian Fiction at War
Greg Carleton

Afterword: Memories of War: From the Sacred to the Secular
Jay Winter

Index