MEMORIES OF COMMUNISM AND POLITICS OF MEMORY IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE AFTER THE END OF COMMUNIST POLITICAL SYSTEMS

Abstract

This article has been structured around a series of variables related to issues such as the collective memory divide between West and East Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet bloc. With that purpose, we analyze the socialist countries’ official memory until 1989 and the repercussions of the end of communist political systems in the field of memory together with past reinterpretations and the impulse to the construction of new collective identities. In this sense, the politics of memory, followed in Eastern Europe after these events and how they affected their society by the construction of mythology and symbology, are exposed.