In the vast literature on how the Second World War has been remembered in Europe, research into what happened in Poland, a country most affected by the war, is surprisingly scarce. This book fills this gap by explaining how the post-war institutionalization of veterans’ and victims’ movements took place in the People’s Republic of Poland.

Joanna Wawrzyniak is Deputy Director of the Institute of Sociology at the University of Warsaw, where she also heads the Social Memory Laboratory. She has published extensively on the relationship between history and memory in Poland, the uses of oral history, and the current state of memory studies in Central-Eastern Europe. Recently she was a visiting fellow at Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and at Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena (Germany).

«Abschließend bleibt festzuhalten, dass Wawrzyniak überzeugend und souverän durch die Wandlungen der Geschichtspolitik in der Volksrepublik Polen führt.» (Maximilian Becker, sehepunkte 16/2016) «An incisive and well-organized case study, it is highly recommended to specialists on Poland’s politics of memory and postwar central and east central Europe more generally.» (Andrew Demshuk, Slavic Review Spring 2017) «[...] the book is well translated and makes for a captivating reading. It is a fine study, which offers rich and detailed insights into Polish memory politics. It is likewise an important addition to the growing body of studies on the role of war veterans in twentieth-century Europe.» (Christian Noack, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 65/2017)

Contents: Communism, Myth and Memory – The Communist Post-war: Organizing Life and Memory – The Myth of Victory (1949–1955) – The Myth of Unity (1956–1959) – The Myth of Innocence (1960–1969) – Epilogue: The Long Shadow of the Communist Politics of Memory.