Perceptions and images of the Cold War as they appear in textbooks, in the classroom but also in public and in the scientific discourse are topic of this volume "Remembering and Recounting the Cold War - Commonly Shared History?". These perceptions and images are particularly interesting because they are part of the communicative memory and are thus in the process of undergoing change. It is also the task of history didactics, here understood as a science concerned with investigating, theorizing on and staging the way of how people and societies deal with history and memories, to describe, to analyze and to interpret such moldings of teaching cultures, memory cultures and, of course, individual and collective views of this era.

Prof. Dr. Markus Furrer and Prof. Dr. Peter Gautschi, University of Teacher Education Lucerne, Center of History Education and Memory Cultures Lucerne, Switzerland