Paper short abstract:

Alongside the many monuments and memorials to the First and Second World Wars, monuments to victories or defeats, old forms and practices of commemoration are increasingly receding and making space for new discourses and new commemoration and identity practices.

Paper long abstract:

Alongside the many monuments and memorials to the First and Second World Wars, monuments to victories or defeats, and alongside the innumerable names written on them, old forms and practices of commemoration are increasingly receding and making space for new discourses and new commemoration and identity practices.

Until recently, various self-referential discourses were characteristic of these places. At the local level, and somewhat less at the regional level, these are constitutive for local identity: for remembering relatives, which allows integration of the dead into the community of the living. At the ethnic and national levels, they are constitutive for awareness of one's own nation and language, and at the same time are entwined with concepts of victims, victory, territorialization, and so on. New discourses and practices also open a new horizon, a new re-evaluation of perspectives on war and on the heritage of memorials to battles and death.