THIS BOOK HAS PRESENTED the argument that both memory politics and literary writings respond to the profound geopolitical revolution that was a consequence of the dissolution of the Eastern bloc. Each in their own way, the political and aesthetic spheres deal with the mnemonic division of the European continent that prevails beyond the creation of the European Union and that, after the Eastern expansion of the EU, stirred memory contests between the “Nazism-and-Stalinism-equally-evil frame” and the “uniqueness-of-the-Holocaust frame.”

The various examples of literature of mnemonic migration discussed here illustrate the capacity of literature to engage in the construction of transcultural memory by making Eastern European memories “travel” to the German-speaking area and thus traverse the mnemonic borderline between Europe's formerly socialist East and the capitalist West. By representing characters who live through the experience of mnemonic migration, understood as the emigration into the Western framework of memory, literature of mnemonic migration tests the version of European history that has been written in accordance with the Auschwitz paradigm, which has dominated memory politics in Germany and the EU since the 1980s. As I showed in part I, up until the EU's eastern expansion in 2004 and 2007, the Holocaust was acknowledged as a “negative benchmark for European identity” and had been anchored in “the institutional setting” by a European-wide Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, and by the Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which was shaped to carry the memory of the Holocaust across the threshold of the new millennium. The Stockholm Declaration, which was adopted in 2000 as the founding document of the IHRA, confirmed the official perception of the Holocaust as a singular event and a pivotal caesura in European civilization.

With the eastern expansion of the EU, new memory entrepreneurs entered the field of the EU's memory policy, demanding acknowledgment of the Communist regime as “equally evil.” The various initiatives launched by the European Commission in order to strengthen common knowledge of Stalin's totalitarian regime in Western Europe eventually failed to shape a more pluralistic perception of European memory, as the proponents of the “uniqueness frame” outnumbered and were also much better organized than those propounding the similarity of the two totalitarian systems.