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European Memories of the Second World War. Edited by Helmut Peitsch, Charles Burdett, and Claire Gorrara. New York: Berghahn Books, 1999. ISBN 1-57181-936-3. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xxxi, 333. $59.95.
European Memories of the Second World War is the published version of conference papers originally presented at the University of Wales, Cardiff, in September 1995, to commemorate the half century anniversary of the end of the war. Twenty-eight of the thirty-eight papers presented are offered in the current collection. Almost all the contributors are literature specialists and, accordingly, the papers address the literary world more than they do military history as such. The collection is limited to Italy, Germany, and France, featured to the exclusion of other European countries, notably the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. Most of the discussion of Germany focuses on the postwar West rather than the East.
The primary theme of this collection is the varied and contested ways in...