What Remains from the Second World War?
Remnants, Memories, and Narratives Revised
15th Conference of the ‘Genealogies of Memory’
17–19 September 2025, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, Jägerstraße 22-23, Berlin
Has the Second World War ever truly ended? Eighty years on, its legacies remain inscribed in Europe’s landscapes, memories, and imagination—visible in ruins, cultural representations, and scars carried across generations. As the last eyewitnesses pass away, new questions arise: what still remains of the war, and how does it shape our historical consciousness today?
These issues will be at the heart of the upcoming 15th conference in the ‘Genealogies of Memory’ series, ‘What Remains from the Second World War? Remnants, Memories and Narratives Revised,’ to be held on 17–19 September 2025 at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.
Organized by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS) and the Federal Institute for Culture and History of Eastern Europe (BKGE), the conference will bring together international scholars and practitioners working at the crossroads of history, cultural studies, anthropology, psychology, political science, art history, and related disciplines.
This year’s edition will focus on the material and symbolic afterlives of the Second World War, exploring how ruins, traces, and remnants—both tangible and intangible—continue to mediate the past in today’s cultural and political contexts. Special attention will be given to how current challenges, including Russia’s war against Ukraine and the impact of digital technologies, reshape patterns of remembrance and the narratives of the Second World War across Europe and beyond.
The conference will revolve around three central themes. The first concerns the materiality of memory, inviting theoretical reflections on how the past endures through ruins, artefacts, human bodies, and landscapes. The second focuses on memory cultures in transition, exploring how new geopolitical realities, shifting perceptions of the “other,” and the rapid development of digital technologies and social media reshape practices of commemoration. Finally, the conference will turn to case studies, examining how the symbolic and physical remnants of the Second World War are represented and reinterpreted in literature, art, testimony, oral history, education, and broader collective memory.
The three-day programme will include keynote lectures, roundtable discussions, and numerous thematic panels with over forty international researchers. Keynote speaker Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska (German Historical Institute Warsaw) will open the event with a lecture on ‘Dispersed History and Concentrated Memory. Current Holocaust Remembrance in Poland and Germany.’ A special highlight will be the jubilee evening lecture by Jay Winter, one of the world’s foremost historians of war and memory, titled ‘The Second World War Between History and Memory.’ In addition, there will be a roundtable discussion on the genealogy of war memory through testimonies, and another on saving and curating stolen or endangered cultural heritage.
The conference language is English.
For more details on the ‘Genealogies of Memory 2025’ conference and full programme, visit: Genealogies of Memory 2025: What remains from the Second World War? Remnants, Memories and Narratives Revised | ENRS
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Media contact
Magdalena Żelazowska
magdalena.zelazowska@enrs.eu
+ 48 500 395 489
