THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 changed Europe fundamentally and brought a loss of “master ideological narratives” that had previously governed the bipolar world order. This monograph considers Jewish migrant authors from Eastern Europe who are writing in the aftermath of this profound political change. Having migrated from the Soviet Union, Russia, or post- Soviet societies to the German-speaking area, they articulate an Eastern European perspective on Europe's traumatic history that implicitly or explicitly contributes to reordering European memory and intervenes in a political memory contest that arose as a side effect of the political changes. In particular, the ending of the bipolar world order led to uncertainty regarding hitherto binding understandings of the past and of national and transnational identities. The Western European countries struggled with the loss of the East as a fundamental “other” that hitherto had constituted their identity as liberal and democratic nations.

On the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain, the disappearance of the myth of common resistance to the fascist West, especially in the newly constituted post-Soviet states, dissolved definitive political markers. Thus, besides being an economic and political revolution, the dissolution of the Eastern bloc also revolutionized transnational collective memories in East and West. The countries on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain share some political markers that justify the division of the European continent into two mnemonic entities. While 1945 meant liberation from the Nazi regime and invoked the creation of new European cooperation in the “Atlantic” Western part of Europe, for the countries occupied by the Red Army 1945 meant “the beginning of a different oppressive regime.” Despite internal antagonism between the countries, this memory of double victimization “constitutes a common feature” that unites the Eastern nations in “a bond of ‘tragic fate,” setting the entire region apart from Western Europe.

The need of nation-states on both sides of the Iron Curtain to reconfigure their shared memories after 1989 and 1991 can be explained by Jan Assmann's theory of cultural memory, which posits that “Gesellschaften brauchen die Vergangenheit in erster Linie zur Selbstdefinition” (societies primarily need the past to define themselves).