Volver a Stalingrado

The German-Soviet conflict (1941-1945) was the bloodiest scene of the Second World War. On the eastern front, the fate of the conflict in Europe and Asia was decided, two totalitarian projects clashed and millions of combatants were mobilized in the largest land conflict in history. It was the framework of a ruthless war of extermination according to a plan of racial and imperial reorganization, and of a total war that affected the front and the rear. In addition to Germany and the Soviet Union, millions of European soldiers, from Spain to Finland, Hungary, Italy or Slovakia, participated in the war and suffered its lasting consequences. This book reconstructs the various modalities of public and private memory of the Eastern Front in post-war Europe, during the Cold War, after the fall of the Soviet bloc and up to the present time. It covers with a comparative view the evolution of public memory policies in the former contending countries, the cult of the fallen, the heroes and the victims, as well as the forms of social remembrance, the literary, visual, artistic and filmic recreations of the conflict in Germany, the USSR and Russia, the post-Soviet space, Finland, Italy and Spain, detecting parallels and differences between the various cultures of memory. Eighty years later, the shadow of the German-Soviet war is still very present in European memory and politics, as the conflict between Ukraine and Russia unleashed in 2022 shows.