Decades after the previously unimaginable horrors of the Nazi extermination camps and the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their memories remain part of our lives. In academic and human terms, preserving awareness of this past is an ethical imperative. This volume concerns narratives about--and allusions to--World War II across contemporary Europe, and explains why contemporary Europeans continue to be drawn to it as a template of comparison, interpretation, even prediction.

This volume adds a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to the trajectories of recent...