The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war is primarily examined through official narratives, propaganda, and victims’ testimonies. However, the deeper motivations driving Russian men to enlist and fight often remain underexplored. While Western and Ukrainian media frequently attribute this to Russian propaganda, animosity towards Ukrainians, naivety, or financial incentives, these factors only partially capture the issue’s complexity. An additional motive rooted in an enduring ‘behavioral schema’ also plays a significant role. This schema is based on traditional gender roles influencing men’s decisions to engage in combat and women’s decisions to support them. By analyzing Russian social media and combatants’ writings, this research reveals how war discussions are framed by entrenched ‘traditionalist’ behavioral patterns. Utilizing Astrid Erll’s concept of ‘implicit memory’ and James V. Wertsch’s concept of narrative templates, this study elucidates not only the official narratives of the war but also the ‘hidden’ narratives that shape collective feelings and memories.

This article provides a critical analysis of the representations of collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Asia-Pacific theatre of World War II. The discussion of the “subject debate” over the inscription of the Cenotaph for the A-bomb Victims, politics over the construction of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and the preservation of the A-bomb Dome transpired the memory mechanisms at work with regard to the US responsibility for the A-bomb, the Japanese aggressive war leading up to the A-bomb, Japan's colonial rule of Korea, and denationalization and universalization of the A-bomb experience in Japan as a result. The article analyzes the chronology of the “only A-bombed nation” notion in the post-WWII Japanese “peace” discourses and concludes that it was a process to reconstruct Japanese national victimhood as a reaction to the “discovery” of the Korean A-bomb victims and the DPRK nuclear program. The article overall challenges the notion of “peace” and “pacifism” in post-WWII Japan that revolve around the experience of the atomic bombing.

Due to severe shortages of volunteer labor for repairing the damage immediately after World War II, the provisional Austrian federal government decided in September 1945 to make work compulsory, primarily for former National Socialists. As a result, these individuals were forced to perform a wide variety of reconstruction work over a period of two years. These workers subsequently sued the Republic of Austria for compensation payments and received a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court in 1951. The work of these conscripted former National Socialists was increasingly forgotten as the years went on, and, therefore, toward the end of the twentieth century, a form of “Trümmerfrauen” myth emerged in Austria. According to this myth, the immediate repair of war damage was mainly carried out by volunteer women. This article examines for the first time the people that worked in the removal of rubble in 1945 and 1946, how they described their work afterward, and how this compulsory labor gave rise to a positive reconstruction myth of voluntary women’s work.

On January 30, 2022, Northern Ireland observed the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. On that day in 1972, the British Army opened fire on a group of unarmed protesters in Derry, killing 13 and wounding an additional 15. Bloody Sunday was a pivotal moment during the 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles, a day widely considered a ‘watershed in British-Irish history’. And while 50 years have passed since this dark day, Bloody Sunday remains vivid in the collective memory of the small country. Considering the cultural and social significance of Bloody Sunday, I sought to answer a simple yet deceptively complicated question: does this still matter? In pursuing this answer, I aimed to understand how journalists and news outlets chose to mark and remember the anniversary in their January and February 2022 coverage. First, I present an overview of Bloody Sunday and its historical role as a catalyst for the three decades of the Troubles. Then, I review relevant memory studies literature in order to understand the role that commemorative news media play in the process of remembering in conflict and post-conflict environments. I then introduce my three research questions and methods before finally discussing the results of my analysis. I found that Bloody Sunday continues to be invoked against British colonialism, that key details of the day remain contested even now, and that the press presented Bloody Sunday as part of a globalised narrative of war-time atrocities.

Social media challenge several established concepts of memory research. In particular, the day-to-day mundane discourse of social media blur the essential distinction between commemorative and non-commemorative memory. We address these challenges by presenting a methodological framework that explores the dynamics of social memory on various social media. Our method combines top-down data mining with a bottom-up analysis tailored to each platform. We demonstrate the application of our approach by studying how the Holocaust is remembered in different corpora, including a dataset of 5.3 million Facebook posts and comments collected between 2015 and 2017 and a 5 million Tweets and Retweets dataset collected in 2021. We first identify the mnemonic agents initiating the discussion of the memory of the Holocaust and those responding to it. Second, we compare the macro-rhythms of Holocaust discourse on the two platforms, identifying peaks and mundane discussions that extend beyond commemorative occasions. Third, we identify distinctive language and cultural norms specific to the memorialization of the Holocaust on each platform. We conceptualize these dynamics as ‘Mnemonic Markers’ and discuss them as potential pathways for memory researchers who wish to explore the unique memory dynamics afforded by social media.

For many Russians, the Russia–Ukraine war became a starting point for rethinking their identity. And thinking about their personal and national future played a significant role in this process. This article is based on the analysis of the interviews I collected during the first year of the war. It examines how imagining the future activates a variety of defense mechanisms, which can be situated in four unique, yet not mutually exclusive, defensive discourse strategies. The primary focus is the connections among future thinking, agency, defensiveness, and identity. The whole spectrum of different and, in some cases, opposite visions of the future and the fact that the majority of respondents used more than one defensive discourse strategies can be a sign of a significant fragmentation – on individual and collective levels. This fragmentation is almost invisible if we consider the public opinion polling or Putin's approval rating. This paper gives crucial insights into what remains hidden in the statistics and presents a more complex picture of Russian society in a time of war.

In April 2022, journalists at the tech website 9to5Mac discovered that photographs taken at sites related to the Holocaust would no longer appear in the Memories feature of Apple's Photos app. This article examines how news of this decision was received by the public through analysis of the comment section that followed the original 9to5Mac post. The perspectives on display in this public forum provide insight into the evolving public perception of automated memory technologies and the potential consequences of their use. Through this analysis, several interrelated areas of public concern emerge. These include the boundaries of platform intervention for governing access to content, the subjective qualities of personal photographs, and the metrics upon which algorithmic memory systems operate. Though opinions vary, this comment section captures an illustrative range of sentiment towards Apple Memories and this intervention into the memories of its users. This range demonstrates a degree of scepticism, alarm, and dissatisfaction rising among users who are increasingly aware of how algorithms are influencing their memories.

When we study the Jewish-national historiography of the last quarter of the 19th century, there is a tendency to pass directly from Smolenskin’s doctrine to the Zionist-cultural approach of Ahad Ha’am and his students, omitting the works written in between. However, even before the emergence of Ahad Ha’am as a cultural icon in the Jewish national movement, some Hibbat Zion activists engaged in Hebrew cultural activities directed at shaping national Jewish consciousness. The main figures in this trend were Saul Pinchas Rabinowitz and Avraham Shalom Friedberg. Their world view was based on education that advocated proto-nationalism: Jewish solidarity, love of the Hebrew language, promoting Hebrew newspapers, and preserving Jewish tradition. To this they added settlement in Eretz Israel as a solution for the harsh conditions of the Jews in Russia. They edited literary and scientific collections in Hebrew and Jewish historiography and wrote historical monographs and biographies. In this way, they sought to introduce national historical protagonists instead of the Hasskala’s pantheon of historical characters to vividly illuminate periods of historical “golden ages” suited to the national ideology and teach the lesson of historical history—that Hibbat Zion is the solution to the plight of Jews and Judaism.

What qualifies as a political event is a core question for social and historical research. This article argues that the use of temporal structures in narratives of political and social developments contributes significantly to the making and unmaking of events. We show how arguments that draw upon history play a particularly important role in transforming the everyday unfolding of politics into discernable events with a clear time bracket. Through this lens, we investigate the 2016 Brexit referendum as an event that has triggered extensive debates about both Europe’s experiences of the past and political expectations for its future. Conflicting assessments of history are crucial for understanding how and when Brexit became an event of European significance and why it then ceased to be so. This case also enables us to distinguish more clearly between the agent-centered focus on the event itself, and the analytical ex-post assessment as a critical juncture. Methodologically, the article demonstrates the value of a multi-perspective approach for qualitative analyses with a focus on Brexit narratives articulated across several EU countries and the United Kingdom.

In this article, I examine efforts to rewrite school history in Putin's Russia, efforts whose precedents in Russia can be traced back to the nineteenth century. I explore this process from the perspective of recent scholarship on ‘collective future thinking’ and demonstrate how a particular feeling – anxiety – shaped Russian and Soviet efforts to change history textbooks. I describe those created in Russia, focusing on their future component and the emotional message accompanying them. In contrast to some other countries, where narratives may be revised or replaced by new ones in accordance with the development of societies and political regimes, in Russia, there is evidence that previous narrative templates continue to coexist. The state may privilege one or another narrative primary in response to emotional pressures, and in some cases, this pushes people towards aggression and even death. I argue that anxiety about the future has forced the current Russian regime to initiate a school history rewriting in the midst of the Russia-Ukraine war, allowing the state to use collective memory to convince people to engage in a brutal conflict.

This article is dedicated to the absent presence and mnemonic remains of the socialist-era monuments in eastern Europe. Mnemonic remains is a metaphor I employ in this paper to direct our attention to the physical absence of monuments after their removal. But it also speaks of a monument’s role in absentia, its continued existence in and its effects on the collective memory beyond its physical presence. The phenomenon, sporadically acknowledged but rarely subject of investigation in academic literature, is explored and illustrated through the lens of the removed V.I. Lenin monument in Riga. The absent monument, I contend, performs the function of a phantom monument, exerting mnemonic agency beyond its physical presence through its representational value for other memory projects. This is highlighted through the study of the proposed and completed, but never unveiled, monument to Konstantīns Čakste on the site of the former Lenin monument in Riga.