Restitution and Memory: The Holocaust in European Political Cultures
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Let me begin on an apodictic note with the following thesis: Europe, on the fast track to integration, seems more and more to be finding a common unifying memory in the events of World War II, and what is increasingly emerging a posteriori as its core event the Holocaust. Such a commonly shared European memory is not only assuming the salience of an arsenal of remembrance. No, it is also being transformed into a veritable foundational, a seminal event quite comparable to a certain extend to the Reformation or the French Revolution, an event, to which historical memory, as it thickens into a catalog of narrations and values, seems to lead back. The thesis of World War II as an act of political foundation for a future and united Europe may not be so new after all. Quite immediately after 1945, elderly statesmen such as the French Robert Schuman, the German Konrad Adenauer and the Italian Alicide de Gasperi, whose generational memories reached back far before World War I, propagated in due time the idea of Europe as a project for "neutralizing" so to say the particularistic historical nationalisms on the Continent. Besides the fact, that those three personalities were more or less and because of their age biographically deeply rooted in the 19th century as well in the proper peripheries of their respective nation-states (Schuman was born in Luxembourg and was educated in the 1871 German annexed Alsass; the former mayor of Cologne, Adenauer, made always his distance to the Protestant and Prussian German nation-state felt, and was after 1919 even blamed as a pro-French Rhenish separatist; de Gasperi originated