The article reconsiders the relations between past and present in the era of “Erinnerungskultur”, i. e. remembrance culture. It describes the semantic careers of the terms “Zeitgeschichte” (contemporary history) and “Aufarbeitung” (coming to terms with the past) in the representation of the past in Germany after 1989. By discussing the inherent tension between both attitudes of coping with the past and ist historical burdens, the article reflects upon the characteristics of today’s historical discourse: a remarkable alliance between politics and historiography, the dominance of teleological perspectives, and the revival of the belief in the concept of historical lessons (“historia vitae magistra”).

Current research shows that the remembrance boom of the 1980s and 1990s has by no means come to an end but is changing categorically. The article analyses current tendencies in German and European remembrance dynamics and illuminates above all generational but also cultural processes of change in dealing with the dictatorial past. In addition to the general paradigm shift from hero to victim, the focus is on the increasingly normative rhetoric of remembrance, while at the same time experience-oriented forms of historical consumption are becoming considerably more attractive.

This article addresses the question of how contemporary commemoration projects spatialize the memory of Jewish and German presence in Stettin/Szczecin and map Jewishness in the urban space. Analyzing local memorial projects and autobiographical writings that address the Jewish past in Stettin/Szczecin, I investigate the particular conditions of urban nostalgia in the so-called “Regained Lands” where the Jewish legacy is inseparable from the German one and where the rediscovery of Jewish spaces thus entails a process of cultural translation and “overwriting” of contested spaces.

The debate about the past in Russia is characterized by an intensification of politics of history. The government attaches great importance to school curricula and the standardization of textbooks. In this narrative, most of all the military glory serves as a unifying „bracket“ for patriotic education. However, there is partly a „victim turn“ in the Russian remembrance landscape: due to the individual stories of the war generation and the victims of Stalinism, an unheroic kind history is getting more and more important for the medialization of history. History policy under Putin is seeking to integrate new social practices into the official rituals.