Competing Memories of Fascism in Postwar Europe
Competing Memories of Fascism in Postwar Europe

Summary/Abstract: “Who controls present controls past. Who controls past controls future.” Since 1948, the year George Orwell published his famous novel 1984, few scholars, journalists, and politicians have “dared” ignore this causal relation. Scholars are essentially concerned with the theoretical aspects. Journalists and politicians are interested first and foremost in its applicabilities. For them, the mechanisms that lie behind the intrinsic relation connecting past, present, and future, are important. However, what they are looking for are the final results, which they either promote or aim to prevent. Nowadays scholars constantly operate with the “Orwellian paradigm”. Whenever needed, they apply it to the multitude of existing cases to emphasize “nuances”. In fact, some of them say, it is not only for the totalitarian states and authoritarian regimes to use the past in order to legitimate their current policies and to emit claims over the future. Democratic governments are, in their turn, “culpable” from that perspective. Naturally, in the last case, scholars generally refer to a Felix Culpa.

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