Hello.  Good afternoon.  Thank you very much for being here.  I´m sorry I was not sitting up here.  I was in fact in the back of the room, and I didn´t see that there was an empty space for me so I apologize. 
 
I appreciate very much being here.  I´m very grateful to the Polish embassy and also to Maria for organizing this event.  I´ve always liked this connection between Poland and Hungary very much, and thought there is some weird spiritual link between the countries that I´ve always appreciated. 
 
I´m going to do something a little bit different now than what my colleagues have done.  Instead of talking about history I´m going to talk about the history of memory.  In other words, the history of how we have recalled and discussed the Second World War.  I´ll go through some of it briefly, and then of course I might dwell a little bit longer on the present.
 
The popular memory of the war has gone through different stages.  Obviously it was different in different parts of Europe and different parts of the world, but I think that more generally, at least in Europe, there is a pattern.  I´ve picked out four periods that I´ll talk about.
 
The first, very briefly was a kind of black hole.  This is 1945 to 1948.  There was so much destruction, so many cities were destroyed.  People hardly understood or absorbed what had happened.  We all tend now to forget the scale of the destruction that the war wrought here, not only physical, but moral.  People had the sense that all of civilization was gone.  That centuries of accumulated knowledge no longer meant anything. 
 
In recent months I´ve done interviews with very elderly people, both in this country and in Poland and in Germany.  And, I´m struck over and over again how people try to convey to me this sense of loss they had at the time and how difficult it is now to understand it. 
 
The second period I would point to is from more or less 1948 to 1989.  I will talk about it generally.  This is the period in which the cold war divided Europe.  That meant that history was often told in half truths. It was learned in stages.  What Americans knew about about the war,  what Hungarians knew about he war, what Germans knew about the war was different, changed over time, and was very often incomplete.  Of course the story of the war and how it was told was a very important part of post-war state building and reconstruction.  As an example, it is clear that the Americans and the British knew very well and began talking about it immediately, the story of D-Day and the story of the Western move across Europe through France and into Germany, but very few, either in the political class or in the intellectual class, spoke much about the Soviet occupations of Central Europe that took place in the last year and towards the end of the war.  There was very little discussion about what had happened in this part of Europe after 1939.  I´m not sure if this was entirely...partly this was self-serving because everybody likes to feel they´ve done something victorious and heroic at the end of a war.  For Americans it was nice to say ˝We won the war, we left. We fought for democracy then we left.˝  The memory that half of Europe was left under occupation after the war was uncomfortable.  It was also partly the case simply that documents, people, information was not available in the way that they have become more recently, and the war was essentially written in the West from a Western point of view.
 
There are other countries where you can say the same of this. The French, for example, talked a lot about resistance to the Germans and not very much about collaboration. That was part of their attempt at postwar state building. The Germans, at first, spoke very little at all. After the mid-60s about 1968, they began very studiously and genuinely to teach themselves about the war. Even then, though, it was a narrow focus. The Germans really did make an attempt to understand what had happened in the Holocaust, what had happened to the Jews, but even then it was mostly about German Jews and it was mostly focus on the Western camps such as Auschwitz. Even now the Germans have only a vague sense of what happened in the East. They know very little about mass murders that took place in eastern forests, and of course they speak very little about other victims of the wars such as Polls, such as Russian POWs, who also died in very very large numbers. Somebody quoted a figure to me a couple of days ago of 3.1 million Russian POWs who died in German camps during the war. That´s an enormous number of people about whom nobody ever writes or speaks. This is a very large number.
 
The Soviet Union is a kind of special case. At the end of the war they made a great effort to tell the story of the war, but in a very particular way. The war was glorified. This glorification and creation of heroes and hero cities and of a kind of picture of the war as a great triumph for Stalinism and for Soviet communism actually increased with time. Over the period of the 50s and 60s and 70s there was in fact more and more information about the war. I once for example visited the seared city of Brest where there is an enormous war memorial and an enormous monument to the Battle of Brest, which was actually not a very important battle but Brest as a city was important to the Soviet Union because it was a new city acquired after the war so they had to include it in this war mythology.
 
Poland and Hungary, I assume most people in this room will know or remember how the war was described during the Communist period here. It was explained in a very superficial way, who the fascists were and what the fascists had done. Poles and Hungarians never talked much at that time about their own personal experiences of the war, in particular their personal experiences of the Holocaust either as witnesses or as victims. Of course they were not told the true story of what happened at the end. There were very specific lies about the Katyn Massacre, about what happened after 1939, and of course there was a more general lie about what liberation meant. The war was celebrated. The war ended in 1945 with liberation, and that was the end of the story.
 
I would point out, though, that in this period, during the period of Communist occupation in Central Europe and in the Western Cold War there was another factor which was that there were witnesses. There was a phenomenon at that time of the underground history. Again, many people here I think will remember that as well. There were private memories of the war. There were witnesses still alive. People remembered, for example, the disappearance of the Jews and how it had happened. There is, for example, lots of have evidence in Poland that this was the case. There were memories preserved. There were family discussions of it, creating many feelings of ambivalence. But there were also, eventually, in the underground in all of these countries there were whole counter histories of events written. The story of Katyn...I have a Polish friend who says to me that by the time he was age 12, he is now in his 60s, everybody knew what happened at Katyn. Everybody knew the true story. How did they know? They just knew. He doesn´t even remember how they knew. It was an automatic piece of information. You got it from your family, from radio free Europe, from underground publications. Everyone knew. In Hungary there was an equivalent counter narrative. At first involving what happened when the Russians got here. How did they treat civilians? And of course the narrative of 1956 remained. Not even that far underground all through the 1960s and 70s, ´56 being kind of a belated reaction to the Russian occupation.
 
I should also add that in Russia there were also counter narratives. People in Russia also remembered the war. It was a very deep experience for many people.  It was very emotional. But of course it was ambivalent. There were moments of glory, and then there were the stories of the political commissars. What did the Battle of Stalingrad would really look like? The Germans on one side and the Soviet Union on the other, and then behind each line of fighters there were political officers telling you you had to keep fighting. It was very agonizing even for people who didn´t fight themselves.  It was a period of starvation, it was a period of really terrible deprivations, and people remembered and maintained ambivalent feelings about the war and were able, at least in their own families stories, even though there was this official propaganda, to have some distance from it.
 
My third period that I´m describing begins in 1989. I don´t think this is fully appreciated now but ´89 actually marks the new period in our public discussion of the war. Let´s face it, the last two decades have been a really extraordinary period for historiography of the second world war both in eastern and western Europe. There has been a proliferation of Holocaust studies of all kinds. Really extraordinary work done on a wide range of subjects. There has also been an enormous amount of work done using Soviet archives and using Eastern European archives. There is a spectacular and well documented book about Hungarian war prisoners in the USSR which never would have been possible before. There is excellent documentation of Katyn now to the extent that people are now writing secondary books and secondary literature and popular literature describing events that are now completely documented.
 
There are many many books about the Eastern front written by Western historians. Books on the bombing of German cities, looks on all kinds of aspects of the war that were either difficult or impossible to talk about before because of the lack of evidence. I would add for this audience that it is also not true, which maybe it still was 10 years ago, that the story of central Europe at the end of the war is no longer available or unknown in the West. There have been in the last, for example, a best-seller in many Western countries was Anthony Beaver´s book about the fall of Berlin. This is a book which is a very brutal and very graphic description of what happened when the Russians came into eastern Germany and what happened to the population. It´s extremely well documented. People were very moved by it. I think the story of what happened at the end of the war and indeed what happened at the end at the beginning of the war is now far more balanced than it used to be.
That brings me to the fourth period, which I´ll spend a little bit more time on, which is the present. In the present we are in fact in a new situation, I think, because we are now in a period where really there are very very few survivors, and those who have memories of the war were either young children or teenagers at the time. Within a decade or two they won´t be there either. Thus, talking now about the memory of the war we are now moving into a slightly different period. We are not really talking about memory. We are talking about a collection of images, a collection of public debates. We are talking about something a little bit different than what it was. Of course the danger of this period is that this war and because it had such an effect both physical and geographical and political in Europe still evokes great emotions which can be twisted and used and made use of by politicians. There aren´t real memories and real facts to counter them. Real accounts and memories of any war really are always very gray and nuanced. People remember moments of heroes. People remember moments of defeat. They remember being embarrassed. They remember failures.
 
Some of the contemporary accounts have been deliberately simplified so that the nuance is taken away in order to be used by contemporary politicians. Of course the first exhibit of this phenomenon is the Russian use of the war. We didn´t hear that today because we heard something more sophisticated. There has been, in the last five years in Moscow, a very specific rehabilitation of certain aspects of the war.  It´s not exactly a rehabilitation of Stalin. That´s not exactly what has happened. It´s a kind of attempt to bring back that emotion of 1945. The emotion of triumph: ˝When we were the strongest power in Europe. When we won the war.˝ This has been done with an annual ceremony which gets bigger every year on the anniversary of the end of the war in May, with marches on Red Square in which Soviet flags now appear. Every year they add new elements, Soviet anthems, Soviet songs playing. There is a proliferation of books about the war. I found this on a recent trip to Moscow. In bookstores there are now whole shelves of books. I remember one ˝We beat the Germans and we scared the Americans˝ something along these lines. ˝We beat Berlin and terrified to New York˝. There is this kind of attempt to re-evoke that pride. And remember this is to re-evokes it to people who don´t remember it, because none of the people who read these books or are attending these marches could have fought in the war unless they were extremely old.
 
Of course, because of the 20 years of good history and good historiography, this view of the war and this interpretation of 1945 as a moment of liberation and the sort of triumph of the Soviet idea and the Russian idea in central Europe has come up against opposition from Russia´s neighbors. In particular the Russians have trouble with two years. One of them is 1939 and the other one is 1945. The Russians have felt a need to defend themselves against the accusation
of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.  They have felt the need to counter the descriptions of Poland and the Baltic states who remember 1939-40 as a time of dual invasion with a different narrative. I´ll illustrate both of those years.
 
I should say that this narrative, this struggle against the alternate memories of the neighbors has come up and has implications for foreign-policy and has come up in a couple of recent events. The first and most obvious was the recent 1939 celebration in Gdansk. This was, in some ways, a really extraordinary event because you had there, I think for the first time, a Polish Prime Minister, you had a Russian Prime Minister, and you had a German chancellor, plus you had a French Prime Minister and a British Foreign Minister all on this site at the same time making commemorative speeches. The German reaction at this time was very reflective of how the Germans have come to understand the war in the last 20 years. It was very straight. It was a kind of apology. There were no complications, no mixed metaphors, and Angela Merkel did not present any complicated ideas.
 
What Putin did, we heard a little description of before, was more complicated. He, in some ways, made some steps in a new direction. He acknowledged the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and said ˝Yes but the Russians had signed it˝, but he made kind of an equivocation.  There was the Molotov Ribbentrop pact but there were also other deals that people did with Germany in the 1930s.˝ There was very also a very odd game that went on as he was speaking in Gdansk at the same time.  The Russian Foreign Service, the SVR, was giving a press conference in Moscow presenting a new book in which it claimed to have discovered a secret Polish-Nazi pact that they had found evidence of in their archives. This is a very difficult situations for Polls to interpret. How do they understand it?  Do they believe Putin or do they believe the SVR?  My interpretation is that the Russians were playing to two audiences. There was the foreign audience where ˝Okay, the Molotov Ribbentrop pact happened and maybe we´re a little bit sorry˝, and then there´s the domestic audience which is much angrier and much more defensive. ˝Okay there was Molotov Ribbentrop but there was also these other things.˝
 
The second event was one a few years back. This was, in some ways, the very strange argument over the Estonian statue. Many of you will probably remember this. There was a bronze soldier statue of an Estonian soldier that was in in the center of Tallinn. The Estonians after almost 65 years decided they wanted to move this statue from the center of Tallinn to the cemetery. Now this is a statue of a Soviet soldier, and of course it was part of a monument to the liberation of Tallinn. Since the Estonians don´t remember the 1945 as a liberation they decided that it was inappropriate to have this in the center of the city. This decision was used by the Russians in a very strange political way. There was a campaign against Estonia. There were descriptions in the Russian press of the resurgence of Estonian Fascism. Once again it was used particularly internally to gin up emotions and create loyalty to the regime.  Once again we are talking about a nation in which people don´t remember the war. Russian soldiers who had been in Tallinn in 1945 would have had very complicated memories of it.  They would remember, ˝Okay we were liberators˝, they would also remember really terrible scenes of rape and destruction. They would have two feelings about it. Their children however don´t remember. That makes these games very easy to play. 
 
You can see where this is leading. You can see where these Russian attempts to play with history and manipulate history and use it in politics as a way of creating domestic legitimacy carries with it very extreme dangers. There has even been, in recent days, allusions to the invasion of Georgia. How come the Versailles Treaty...that Russia has the right to feel treated unfairly because it lost territory after 1989. Just like the Germans felt they lost territory after 1914 and they´ve attempted to use this as justification for current for activities in the present.
 
I´d like to close, though, with another kind of example. Very different. This is something I see in Poland and Hungary which is not dangerous in the same way, but is perhaps not useful for our two countries, as well.  This is the selective use of war memories and postwar memories to make political points and to celebrate certain aspects of the country´s culture.
 
There´s a particular attachment to stories of martyrdom. Again, these are less damaging in a geopolitical sense. I´m not comparing this kind of use of history to what the Russians are doing, but I still think it´s not good for a nation´s psyche. Particularly, as I say, in a in an era where there are no more real memories of the war.
 
I´ll start with Poland. In Poland there has been, in recent years, a very powerful focus on and a great deal of interest in the Warsaw uprising, which was a very brave, very bloody, and ultimately unsuccessful piece of the war.  Of course the attempts to remember the heroism of people who fought there and the attempt to celebrate and commemorate them is very very important. What worries me, though, is that it could create a kind of myth about how Poland should be rebuilt in the coming decades. What is valued in that kind of commemoration are desperate, brave, and ultimately unsuccessful acts of courage and not the slow, dull, persistent construction of political and civil institutions. What do we have now in this part of the world? We have a need for institution building, for reconstruction of the state, for good economic management, for sound education - including good historical education for children. Celebration of martyrdom won´t get us that. I´d like Polls to talk more about the 1920s, for example, when the Polish state was put together after more than a century of occupation and division.  That, to me, seems more relevant to the present.
 
Again I would like to make this point very carefully, but I could make a similar point about the Hungarian celebrations about 1956. Once again this is very important: to know what happened, to know what really happened, to tell the story, but I don´t want that young people who remember nothing else have the impression that this was the only thing that happened between 1945 and 1989. Focus on 1956 does not explain what happened in the 1970s and ´80s when the regime brought a form of sullen cooperation from millions of Hungarians, nor does it explain the ´50s when the Stalinist state that ´56 took apart was created. So the legacy of the immediate postwar period as well as post-1956 also seems to me worth study with studying today.  In the case of Hungary, when I walk around Budapest, every single time I´m stunned by the number of fabulous buildings built in this very short period of time at the end of the 19th and early 20th century. You can see, physically, this outburst of national energy that happened at this particular time. I always want to know more about it. How did it happen. What were the social conditions that created this a really extraordinary period of creativity. I hope Hungarian schoolchildren are also taught about that, as well as 1956.
 
So I´ll finish by saying that I speak here as a devotee of history and a person who believes that a deep understanding of history is a really central part of being a good citizen in a modern democracy - indeed being a fully developed human being. I would hope that we think hard, in a period in which we don´t have witnesses, which events we choose to celebrate and mark.
 
Thank you very much.