In Europe, commemorations of the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War have reiterated the existence of radically different official narratives of the historical event. These narratives can be broadly grouped into four distinct memory discourses based on the significance they attach to the event. Each discourse is dominant in a particular European country or region: Russia and Belarus, post-communist East-Central Europe, Germany, and the Western European countries that fought against Nazi Germany. On 8-9 May 2015, the four narratives found expression in distinct European commemorative locations (lieux de mémoire): Moscow, Gdansk, Berlin and London/Paris. The paper argues that, while the four narratives have existed for several decades, some - most notably the Russian narrative - have recently been reformulated with a more nationalistic rhetoric and used as a conceptual framework to explain and interpret the crisis in Ukraine. This further contributed to the politicization of the memory of the Second World War, leading to dissonance between the Russian and the German and Western European narratives, and to a radical discursive clash between the Russian and the East Central European memory discourse. Rather than providing a deterrent for further conflict, the memory of the Second World War has become a discursive battlefield that exacerbates tensions about current affairs and hinders the construction of a shared European narrative of the twentieth century.
