In January 1945, the German Army in Poland braced itself for an inevitable massive attack. Enjoying overwhelming superiority in numbers and weapons, and with logistics and communications greatly improved by the Lend Lease program, the Red Army had learned how to outperform the Wehrmacht. The Soviets struck across Poland in mid-January. Two weeks later, they were deep inside Germany; East Prussia was cut off from the rest of the country. The top Soviet generals planned to take Berlin by mid-February, but Stalin postponed their march to the Reich’s capital, rerouting their efforts to what he perceived as a flank threat from northern Germany. The elimination of this treat delayed the offensive towards Berlin until mid-April. The Germans exploited this pause to strengthen their fortifications. When the march to the ‘beast’s lair’ finally resumed, bitter fights at the Seelow Heights and then in Berlin’s streets resulted in grave casualties. During the entire war on the Eastern Front, the Red Army lost at least four times as many soldiers as the Wehrmacht. As for Soviet civilians, crimes of both the Nazi and the Soviet regimes made comparable contributions to their death toll.

New kinds of friction between the episcopal and monastic system kept up the demand for papal lubrication.

A great king in the North felt the need for a papal privilege even though the pope had no powers to enforce it.

This chapter situates contemporary Russian war memory in its twentieth-century historical context, exploring how and why the war victory gained such prominence and drawing out certain continuities and discontinuities across the Soviet/post-Soviet divide. Given the immense scale of Soviet wartime losses and the unusually heavy-handed instrumentalization of history under Putin, the Second World War was bound to play a prominent role in Russian memory culture. Yet, as the chapter will show, the precise character of Russian war memory and its utility for the Kremlin derive overwhelmingly from decades of Soviet-era commemorative practices. The chapter does not attempt to rectify distortions of historical truth but rather to elucidate the mechanisms by which states repurpose the past in the service of the present. Soviet war memory, as elsewhere, was the product of internal debate and deliberation as the leadership wrestled with what were often pan-European issues of representation. The chapter therefore approaches the myth and memory of the Great Patriotic War as a particular manifestation of a universal impulse to ‘make sense’ of war in the modern world.

Louis Dumont’s concept of hierarchy can illuminate not only the famous ‘two powers’ passage in Gelasius I’s letter to the emperor Anastasius but also later history of papal Church–State theory.

Collective memory of a historical event does not depend on its contemporary and historiographical significance alone. Germany’s selective memory of the Eastern Front is a case in point. It has been influenced by four developments. The problem of the prisoners of war that had remained in the Soviet Union, the ‘returnees’, and the veterans underlined the importance of the Eastern Front among the West German public. The Stalingrad myth, in particular, had a decisive influence on an image of war (in the East), according to which the Germans considered themselves first and foremost victims of that war. The critical discussion of the war and its nexus with the Holocaust after 1970 led to a turning point wherein the victims of the Germans became the focus of remembrance in West Germany. In the socialist satellite state of East Germany, the heroization of the Red Army was a characteristic feature of public war memories. Commemorations of the Eastern Front changed again in unified Germany after the Cold War – from the early years of Russia’s rapprochement to the dramatic deterioration of the German-Russian relationship.

The Donation of Constantine mattered more in the thirteenth century than in the Carolingian era.