The difficult heritage of dictatorship in Europe

[Extract] This special section examines how post-authoritarian societies in Europe since 1945 have negotiated the material legacies of dictatorship. By bringing together researchers working on sites, buildings and monuments once, or still, closely associated with Nazism, Fascism or State Socialism, the special section affords a bird’s-eye view of the differing ‘cultures of remembrance’ 1 at play across six European nation-states: Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, Albania and Croatia. It also speaks to the broader global monuments debate over what to do with the physical remains of ‘histories that hurt,’ 2 which flared after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

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