In 20 March 2004, two Greek political scientists, professors Stathis Kalyvas (Yale University) and Nikos Marantzidis (University of Macedonia, Greece), published an article in the book review supplement of the daily Ta Nea under the title “Νέες τάσεις στη μελέτη του Εμφυλίου Πολέμου” (New trends in the study of the civil war).² The article presented the positions of what its authors described as a new current in the historiography of the 1940s. Kalyvas and Marantzidis labelled a part of the output from a new generation of scholars in the 1990s and 2000s as the “new wave”. The authors’ ten-point summary of the innovative aspects of that output was intended more as a platform for future research in the field than as a review. What followed was an intense and rigorous debate in the supplement that lasted for around eight months. The series of articles, published under the general title “Διάλογος για την Ιστορία” (Dialogue on history), ended with a concluding piece by the two authors of the text that initiated the debate³ and a special issue that was printed but never came out.⁴ The “war”, though, was not restricted to the newspaper’s columns at that time. It was diffused in the press and the internet, as well as in conferences and publications, dominating the discussion on the field, with ups and downs, for more than ten years.⁵ Later, as the economic crisis emerged, it became part of the debate on the transformations and multiple uses of the 1940s in public discourse.

In Greece, debates and public discussions on the history of the 1940s had taken place before, in the media or elsewhere. Looking back, some of the most characteristic cases include the discussion around the destruction of security files on citizens in 1989, the long debate on the official recognition of the leftwing resistance during the Second World War, the first international historical conferences on the field in the 1970s and 1980s, the discussions and the antagonism around the first collective attempts in the 1960s to produce a chronicle of the occupation and resistance period, and the public interventions of veterans and politicians in the 1950s. Those and other relevant debates reflect the close relationship between politics, history, and memory; others, such as the debate around Thanasis Valtinos’ novel Orthokosta (1994), add literature, representations of the past and their role in the formation of historical culture to the picture.⁶

Such conflicts over history are certainly not a Greek or a narrowly national phenomenon, especially when the subject touches on a world war.⁷ As a matter of fact, the new wave debate in Greece has been compared to revisionist attempts and the discussion around them since the 1970s (or in other cases the 1990s) in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Israel, or in Russia and eastern Europe after the collapse of the socialist regimes.⁸

Moreover, as the “Dialogue on history” was also a dialogue on the historiography of the 1940s, the close relationship between history and historiography cannot be ignored: while studying the historical production (professional or not) on the 1940s in Greece, one should take into account the determinant role of each national political, social and cultural environment,⁹ of the present stakes and their significance for the way in which communities deal with their past, and of the practicality of that past.¹⁰ The role of the international environment is also important. There, of course, special attention should be paid to the developments with regard to professional history: the trends and institutions in which history is formed within and beyond national borders. Furthermore, the historical perception of a community is formed by stereotypes and repeating motives that are durable and create common sites, genealogies, “significant others” (enemies or friends) and views on history itself – and especially on national history; making a topos which effects, and often determines, any kind of attempted elaboration and re-elaboration of a historical period.

Regarding the historiography and public history of the field, 1989–1990 is considered as a rupture; however, it can also be seen as a continuity of a process that had started in the early years of the transition to democracy (metapolitefsi)¹¹ after the collapse of the junta in 1974 in Greece, and even earlier by a new generation of scholars abroad. Any attempt to periodise this historical production will be subject to debate; however, periodisation is necessary for studying it over the long term.¹² I shall distinguish three main periods, keeping in mind that different aspects of society move according to different temporalities:

a) 1945–1974. The first period can be defined as running from the end of the Second World War to the fall of the military dictatorship in Greece. Although one can identify various turning points during this rather long period – the short “peaceful” period after the liberation, the civil war and the establishment of the postwar state, the year 1956 and the changes that it brought to the international communist movement, the developments in the first half of the 1960s especially under the Centre Union government (1963-1965), and, of course the dictatorship of 1967–1974 – an important element serves to unify this era: professional historical research was relatively absent.¹³ A discourse, nevertheless, began in and gradually gained pace from the mid-1950s, concentrating mainly on the history of the resistance. The resulting output included press publications, memory accounts, autobiographies, local histories, chronicles, party histories, popular and specialty magazines, literature, and non-textual representations such as music, theatre, cinema, fine arts and monuments. What one can distinguish is the attempt by different memory communities to choose, narrate and give visibility to the facts that form a recent but still largely uncharted past.¹⁴ The actors in that past themselves play an important role in shaping its history; a reflexive attempt to form a memory archive of it and, at the same time, to interpret it.

b) 1974–1989: The fall of the junta and the transition to democracy marked a new era, not only for Greek society but also for Greek historiography.¹⁵ The universities were reformed and new institutions arose (faculties, research centres, archives, journals, museums). New research fields were established and the study of the 1940s was among them. Through the metapolitefsi, the history of the war entered the universities – not without obstacles and setbacks – and became a subject of academic research. In other words, professional historians gradually entered a field that had already been long open to public discussion.¹⁶ At the same time, the legalisation of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) allowed thousands of political refugees to repatriate to Greece.¹⁷ The KKE had already undergone a split into two parties; other changes in the political centre¹⁸ accelerated a paradigmatic shift in the discourse on the 1940s. This was symbolised by the official recognition of the leftwing resistance by law 1285/1982.¹⁹ There followed a memory boom, marked by the publication of many memoirs, autobiographies, and local histories by former members of resistance groups as well as politicians.

c) 1990–2010: The end of the 1980s coincided with the collapse of the communist regimes and the definitive end of the bipolar Cold War world. In relation to this crucial event and the fundamental change that it brought regarding the view of the world from that point on, 1989 was also a fateful year for the Greek political scene and society. Amid an atmosphere of corruption and scandals in which even the name of the prime minister, Andreas Papandreou, was involved, right and left agreed to form a coalition government. One of its most symbolic acts was the law on “lifting the effects of the civil war”, which was accompanied by the destruction of police records on citizens.²⁰ The same period saw a second memory boom, this time concerning the civil war, as reflected in testimonies of participants, their (and not only their) representations and the surrounding public discourse; but also in new directions for historical research. In the 1990s a new generation of historians, who entered the field and broadened it, began to produce rich historical material. The political and diplomatic history of the previous decade gave way to more diverse social, local and oral histories, comparative approaches, gender and memory studies, as well as the combination of disciplines such as history, political science, sociology and social anthropology. Finally, the study of the case of the Greek Jews was an important accession in this constellation. All this led to the “conflict” that started in the first half of the noughties, while there was, also, a significant increase in studies triggered by the 50th anniversary of the end of the civil war.²¹

This article²² attempts to trace the production of histories and memories from the first postwar and post-civil war years by examining relevant debates in and on Greece as part of a broader process: that of the historisation of the Second World War in Europe within and, mostly, across national borders. It intends to see history as “the arena in which the present and future identity of a community is debated”²³ and as a set of practices with different connotations; practices and perceptions determined each time by the present, but also by the lived experience in the past and present.

Thus, the article begins by exploring a part of the first collective effort, undertaken in the initial postwar decades, to create a European history of resistance movements, in an attempt to develop an initial approach to the repertoire of historical practices in the political environment of the time, to the ways in which the experience of the Second World War changed or accelerated the development of new historiographical trends, to the role of historians in that process and to the kind of history that was produced. Then, the focus is transferred to Greece. As a subject, the mapping of a constellation of different memory and history communities, centres and means in the same period has garnered little attention, comparing to the dominant anticommunist ethnikofrosini (nation-mindedness) discourse in Greece or the historiographical efforts of the left in the 1960s. The article, by following the developments in the academy and the politics of history and memory in the final decades of the previous century, returns to the current discussion on the 1940s in an attempt to approach it through the strings that connect it to the past and, at the same time, as a debate of the twenty-first century.

The end of the Second World War marked a new era in the history of the twentieth century. Eric Hobsbawm captured an aspect of that change in the language of western intellectuals in its last quarter: “The keyword,” he wrote, “was the small preposition ‘after’, generally used in its latinate form ‘post’ as a prefix to any of the numerous terms which had, for some generations, been used to mark out the mental territory of twentieth-century life.”²⁴ Indeed, beyond that “mental territory”, after the war much had changed on the European continent: from landscapes to demography, from state borders to new power relations. Perhaps, most importantly, the experience of Nazi atrocities (and not only these) had changed the view on what mankind was capable of and posed questions to the dominant narrative of constant progress, which had already been seriously battered by the experience of the First World War.²⁵ Thus, there emerged a need for the war years to become past or, in the way that Tony Judt described it, for an end and reboot of European history in a way that had to deal with various processes of retribution, remembering and forgetting.²⁶ How was the war made into the past and what was the role of history, memory and experience in that process?

Stefan Berger, among others, has offered a comprehensive image of how Europe, within the different national borders, shaped memories and narratives related to the political, ideological and social realities of the postwar era; the passing, or better the various passings, from a united popular resistance discourse to more self-critical national approaches has also been highlighted, up to a point.²⁷ Resistance – including cases of greater or lesser importance to the outcome of the war – was the most significant and sometimes the only source of collective and national pride; for this reason, it formed the foundation myth of the new European status quo as well as for the questioning of this status quo.²⁸ Here, we will focus on the first postwar period, from the aftermath of the war to the mid-1960s, in an attempt to follow one part of the transnational efforts for the formation of a collective history of resistance, beyond and within the national or bipolar divisions of the time, by examining the activities of international veterans organisations in regard to the history of the recent past. When seen from a certain viewpoint, such cases, even when they are not directly linked to the Greek case, can help us proceed with an examination of the latter.

In that context, the first pole was the International Federation of Resistance Fighters (FIR), which was founded in July 1951, having its origins in the International Federation of Former Political Prisoners (FIAPP), formed in 1946. The FIR was founded and based for many years in Vienna, Austria, the country that had been commonly recognised as “Hitler’s first victim”. The FIR’s first bureau comprised representatives from nine countries, both eastern and western (Austria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Poland and Soviet Union), and managed to bring together more than 41 veterans organisations over the next ten years. Apart from the low-profile, unofficial leadership that was controlled by the Soviets, the representatives from France and Italy, both countries with powerful communist parties, played an important role. The FIR was clearly a communist front organisation, whose establishment was influenced and supported by the Cominform, and thus relatively discredited in a large part of the western world.²⁹ On the other hand, the FIR became a point of affiliation and a memory mediator for thousands of resistance veterans and victims of Nazism for more than 20 years, effecting the way in which the recent past was interpreted.

The FIR’s declared aims were to bring together the national organisations of former resistance fighters or political prisoners and refugees, to promote their interests, their rights and their demands, and to play an active political role in the promotion of aims of the United Nations charter and in the preservation of peaceful relations between the states. Moreover, it sought to honour the memory of the victims, to highlight the atrocities committed in the concentration camps and demand the punishment of those responsible for crimes against humanity. Most importantly, it aimed to keep the spirit and values of the resistance, as well as its historical role, alive.³⁰ Or, to quote the words of its first president, French Colonel Henry Manhès:

The FIR was very active in the first two decades of its existence, as an agent of history and memory.³² These two fields can be distinguished here, as they seemed distinguished in the FIR’s own perception as well: indeed, the FIR’s history committee, created in the second half of the 1950s, seemed to view historical writing as one of its duties – publishing and translating works for national and international audiences, such as the Cahiers internationaux de la résistance. It also involved itself in promoting the integration of resistance history into school curriculums and in organising and participating in historical conferences and meetings. On the other hand, heritage and memory issues – the creation of monuments, sites of memory, events and commemorations – were perceived as broader issues that required collective and, in fact, political work, from other committees or even the FIR’s bureau.³³

A reaction to the FIR’s establishment and activities was the founding of international associations of veteran resistance figures and former prisoners that developed a discourse against totalitarianism, standing in favour of the defence the “free west”, and the integration of “Free Europe” into the latter. The first of these attempts was based in Paris: the Free International Federation of Deportees and Resistance Internees (FILDIR), founded in 1952, had the National Union of Associations of Deportees, Internees and Families of the Missing (UNADIF), headed by Michel Riquet, as its driving force and tried to imitate the FIR’s organisation and activity.³⁴ Others gathered around the Belgian veteran Hubert Halin, and the multiple international groups that he created in the 1950s and 1960s, such as the Committee of Inter-allied Resistance Action (CAR), founded in 1953, and the International Union of Resistance and Deportation (UIRD), set up in 1957.³⁵ Moreover, Halin’s periodical La voix internationale de la résistance engaged in a long debate with the FIR’s Résistance Unie. Pieter Lagrou has shown how these and other international memory communities perceived the resistance within the framework of Cold War discourse and connected it with the vision of a unified Europe.³⁶ The CAR, through Halin, was also one of the organisers of the first of a trilogy of big international meetings of the time: the international conferences on the history of the resistance movements.

The first conference, which took place in Liege, Belgium, in 1958, was embraced by the Belgian state and the national historical community. In fact, many members of the Belgian government served as honorary committee members, while professional historians, mainly from Belgian universities, as well as Halin, were part of the executive committee. In total, historians and veterans from 16 countries, including Germany and Italy, Israel, and also non-European states, such as the US and Australia, took part in the conference. While representatives from the Soviet Union, Poland and Yugoslavia had accepted an invitation to participate, they didn’t attend the event. The main issues discussed by the panels were the resistance in Germany and Italy, the psychological war, the concentration camps and Jewish resistance, the Maquis and guerrillas, and the Allies in relation to the resistance movements.³⁷

Participation at the second conference, which took place in 1961 in Milan, Italy, was broader. After Liege, a liaison committee for the organisation of international conferences was created, headed by the former Italian prime minister and founder of the National Institute for the History of the Liberation Movement in Italy, Ferruccio Parri.³⁸ In Milan, representatives from the Eastern bloc and FIR participated in the organising committee, together with American, British, French, Italian, Dutch and Belgian scholars. In total, 21 countries were represented.³⁹ The opening remarks and the conclusions of the conference were read by three historians: William Deakin, a professor at Oxford; Norman Kogan, a professor at the University of Connecticut; and Evgeni Boltin, a professor at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow.⁴⁰ On the other hand, despite the efforts to keep a balance, Cold War politics, in their rawest form, were not at all absent from the conference. The report by a CIA agent who followed the procedures concluded by pointing out that “one must remember that what the Communists were saying in Milan was just a sample of what they are spewing out in their official histories and papers and books. These are being translated in many languages and are being sent all over the world. They need to be countered. The West cannot leave the history of the war and the Resistance to the Communists. A true historical picture must be drawn, and it must get circulation behind the Iron Curtain and in the uncommitted nations of the world. From the standpoint of the Milan Conference, this is the unfinished business of the West.”⁴¹ In fact, that “business of the West” remained “unfinished”; the third relevant conference, organised by the same committee in Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, two years later (1963), seemed to be dominated by the FIR, reflecting, up to a level, the gradual prevalence of the communists in the field.

However, at these conferences the concepts of representativity and scientific proficiency played an important role. These were considered as major factors for obtaining credibility and wider acceptance. This fact also represents a common ground with the events organised by the FIR: while studying the relevant procedures, a particular persistence on scientific objectivity and historical truth can be noticed. The presence and contribution of professional historians was deemed as precondition and necessity in that process, even if the subject concerned (maybe more than ever) a history of the present. Bearing in mind Hayden White’s working distinction between the practical and historical past, it can be argued that in this case the historical past comes as an agent of credibility to a process

But of equal importance to the presence of professional historians was the necessity for actors in recent events to be part of that process. First, because they were present anyway, alive and active, and many of them were engaged in a new struggle: that for the preservation and promotion of the memory of the resistance. Second, because they represented a main primary source: a living archive for historians to work with. According to a report by the FIR’s history committee in 1961, “historians don’t have archives in order to write the history of the time, so they have to rely on oral memories or witness accounts”.⁴³ On the other hand, André Puttemans, president of the Belgian Federation of History Teachers and general secretary of the International Committee for History Teaching, who headed the organising committees of both conferences, referred to the words of the late Lucien Febvre in his opening address: “Those who participated in the tragic struggle of 1940–44 don’t have just the right, but the obligation, the supreme duty, to transfer their truth to the others, and to offer their version of the facts, a version that includes living evidence and has been signed by thousands of sacrifices.”⁴⁴

From that process – from the need for the recent past to become past – emerged issues that concerned the contemporary nature of history. Gérard Noiriel has argued that the Second World War was a turning point, an event that, along with the development and democratisation of the academy in the postwar years, boosted the formation of a new historical field that is now called contemporary history or histoire du temps présent (history of the present times), following the changes that had taken place after another fundamental international martial and political event, the First World War.⁴⁵ According to Noiriel, this was related to the intense pressure on historians from public authorities and memory communities to contribute to a further understanding of the reasons for the barbarity that the world had faced and to the open issue of accountability. As the editorial of the first issue of the Journal of Contemporary History (1966) states:

Indeed, the publication of the Journal of Contemporary History in 1966 is evidential of this shift and the development of a community of historians dealing with yesterday’s past in the previous years. Examples can also be found in France, with the establishment of the Committee on Second World War History in 1951, which in 1979 was renamed the Historical Institute of Contemporary Conflict (IHCC), or in Germany with the establishment of the Institute of Contemporary History in 1949.

Moreover, beyond the developments in history and the involvement of professional historians in the interpretation of the recent past in this initial period, questions emerged on who had the right, the capability and the cognisance to narrate the resistance. In other words, who was the historian of the resistance? In this context, two main trends can be distinguished: those who were broadly recognised as resistance historians were, on the one hand, the professional historians, the academics, regardless of what their field of research was; on the other hand, there were the veterans (fighters, military officers, politicians or victims) who, after the war and the postwar failure of the resistance to translate into a comprehensive and prevalent political agenda, were engaged in a different project, mentioned above: the promotion of the history of the resistance to the next generation.⁴⁷ Those “historians” of the time were not all eye-witnesses or generally actors in the struggle against Nazism and fascism; but some of them were committed to writing the history of the war beyond their personal experience, claiming to be engaged in a broad interpretation of the historical events, by writing books using historiographical tools of the time, founding institutes, participating in conferences and meetings, debating with historians and each other, representing the resistance in the national parliaments, and taking initiatives that formed the ground on which academic historical research took place, at the same time or in the years that followed.

Lastly, what kind of history was the history of the resistance produced in that initial period? By examining the conference procedures and works by the one or the other side, one could argue that the resistance had two faces. First, it was seen more as a condition than as an action; an environment of resistance that concerned almost everyone – the large majority of the occupied or/and displaced populations. In this context, a typology was formed in which everybody, except the Nazis and their active collaborators, had their place: civil resistance, passive resistance, moral or spiritual resistance, etc.⁴⁸ Second, the resistance fighters, the ones who actually took up arms and fought against the invaders – including the organised national armies in the battlefields – were considered as just one part of that multifaced and multicoloured process. Even if there were different approaches to this pattern, related to political and ideological reasons, there was a common thread that connected the narratives. It involved at least three types of figure: The humble and heroic fighter, guerrilla or soldier; the common people who managed to stand and resist in any way possible; and, most importantly, the anonymous victim, the martyr, who gave his or her blood and to whom the supreme honour and duty in the present was dedicated.

To a large extent, finally, resistance history was a story of occupation, displacement and terror. A large part of almost all narratives was dedicated to extended descriptions of the forms of occupation (the economy, rule, terror) or the inhuman conditions in the concentration camps. Occupation and barbarity was becoming a common experience; lived or not, it was being re-lived in written, oral or visual representations. It seemed a moral obligation for any speech or text to refer to that experience, as it was for the residents of the areas around the concentration camps to visit them after the German defeat or the audience of Alain Resnais’ 1955 film Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) ten years later to watch the screen without turning their eyes away.⁴⁹

Shifting the focus to the Greek case, what matters is not only the study of the formation of the first historical narratives on the recent past, but also the ways in which the personal and collective experience became past and produced history. At this level we shall first focus on the agents, location and time of that process, regardless of the fact that, as many believe, the outcome of the civil war resulted in an “official” silence about the past: a forced silence that included the resistance period, which, for the state, was one of preparation for the communist attack: the first round; it was followed by a second round (the December events); and it culminated in the third round, the civil war, the most serious attempt ever made by the KKE to seize power. On the other hand, the KKE leadership under its general secretary, Nikos Zachariadis (who was imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp from 1941 to 1945), until 1956, in particular, ascribed a number of strategic mistakes to the resistance fighters and the previous leadership, thus deflecting the focus away from his own leadership and responsibility for the defeat in the civil war.⁵⁰

The following mapping of what was produced regarding the history of the Greek 1940s (and also where and by whom) is based on four working hypotheses: first, the study of the historicisation of the Greek 1940s cannot be seen as an isolated, completely autonomous phenomenon. Even though it has its peculiarities that have to do with the civil war that followed liberation from the Axis, it was connected to the formation of the history of the Second World War and the resistance movements in Europe. Second, that process was not linear, neither was it restricted to the Greek left. It was an open and manifold process with different centres, communities, institutions and time regimes, which forms a unity based on the lived experience. Third, for one part of those who took active part in the events of the 1940s, their personal and collective engagement in the war was transformed into an engagement with the history of the war. That was a fact that determined both their own personal stance from that point, and the formation of Greek historical culture regarding the recent past of conflict.⁵¹ Last, even though the war as past and the historical perceptions around it were closely connected to and determined by politics, those perceptions were not necessarily identical to the political and social divisions that the 1940s caused in Greece.

From very early on, there were narratives on the events of the occupation period in Greece. The left, especially but not solely, took particular care in the way in which the period of occupation and resistance would be historicised. The archive of the Unified Panhellenic Youth Organisation (EPON), the youth organisation of the National Liberation Front (EAM), contains long manuscripts with information on the history of the activities of different units around Greece. Those documents are dated 1944 at the latest, or, sometimes, even earlier, and were destined for the purpose of writing the history of the national-liberation struggle, to use the most common term of the time. A series of initiatives in the same direction, such as the efforts to establish liberation day as an official national celebration, and the publication of a periodical dedicated to the resistance years,⁵² are indicative of this concern by the Greek left. Moreover, a number of relevant books came out in the years immediately after the liberation, such as ELAS (1946), written by its military commander Stefanos Sarafis,⁵³ which was also one of the few Greek testimonies of that kind that was translated into English and published abroad (1951).⁵⁴ Arguably, the outbreak of the civil war suspended that first stream.

However, in the 1940s, the imported term Αντίσταση (resistance) or Εθνική Αντίσταση (national resistance) was not commonly used in leftwing writings. On the contrary, it was quite common in the Greek liberal newspapers, such as Eleftheria, and in books by members of the non-communist resistance, such as National Resistance (1947) by Komninos Pyromaglou, the former political leader of the second major resistance group, National Republican Greek League (EDES).⁵⁵ Also, the term appeared in legislation from 1946,⁵⁶ as well as in initiatives, such as the first official historical exhibition on the war years that took place in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, also in 1946.⁵⁷

Pyromaglou’s case of is one of the most eloquent examples of the witness-historian figure of the first postwar decades. A participant in the Asia Minor campaign in the 1920s and a member of the circle around Venizelist General Nikolaos Plastiras in the interwar years, Pyromaglou studied French literature in Paris. He actively opposed the Metaxas dictatorship (1936–1940) as member of anti-dictatorship groups and was exiled. Escaping to Marseille, he returned during the occupation to join EDES, serving as one of its political leaders. After the war, he taught French at the Panteion School and in 1958 he was elected MP on a Unified Democratic Left (EDA) ticket, serving until 1961. But Pyromaglou’s main characteristic in the postwar period was his systematic and constant engagement with the history of the Greek resistance. Beyond writing his two related books, National Resistance (1947) and The Trojan Horse (1956–58),⁵⁸ he was one of the main representatives of a memory community that arose from the non-communist resistance and was officially recognised in 1949. The latter, which was not monolithic and in fact did not consider itself as a community, had access to the public sphere, formed veteran organisations and constantly intervened, mainly through the media, to represent the resistance in a period when the left was being persecuted.⁵⁹

Pyromaglou, though, managed to move one step further than the rest: beyond his collaboration with the EDA and the organisation of the party’s resistance bureau, his participation in the Committee for the Restoration of National Resistance, and the publication of the first periodical dedicated to resistance, which took the title Ιστορικόν Αρχείον Εθνικής Αντιστάσεως [Historical Archive of National Resistance] (1958–62), he was one of the first Greeks to cross the border to take part in international forums in order to contribute to the integration of the Greek case into the historiography of the European resistance movements. His personal archive contains details of his involvement in international meetings, seminars, conferences and publications, as well as correspondence, such as the relevant letters in the early 1960s with University of California professor Peter Novick regarding his participation in a project, which, however, failed to materialise.⁶⁰

A frequent discussant with Pyromaglou in those forums was the veteran of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Greece, the diplomat, politician and historian Christopher Montague Woodhouse, widely known in Greece as “Colonel Chris” and in Britain as “Monty”. Woodhouse belonged to another community of the time, based in Britain, which engaged itself with the history of the war from early on and had access to British universities, the political scene and the special services. British public discussion on the history of the war often referred to the Greek case, interacting simultaneously with the discussion in Greece.⁶¹ By the end of the 1950s, London houses had published more than 30 books written by SOE veterans, politicians and former war correspondents.⁶² Many of these made for big news in Greece, entering public debate through translations of extended extracts in the press, articles and reviews, and even full, Greek-language editions. Among the best-known publications was Greek Entanglement (1955), by the SOE’s first commander in Greece, Brigadier Eddie Myers, in 1955; and, earlier, Apple of Discord (1948), by SOE sub-commander and Myers’ successor from 1943, Woodhouse.⁶³

In this context, it also worth mentioning the first study of the – later significant – American historian William Η. McNeill, The Greek Dilemma (1947).⁶⁴ McNeill was a press attaché at the American embassy in Athens from late 1944 to 1946. In his book, he did not limit himself to his personal experiences, but attempted a historical narration from the Italian invasion in 1940 to the first postwar elections in 1946. A large part of the book was translated into Greek and serialised by the daily Eleftheria in the summer of 1947.

Moreover, some of the few academic studies on the field at that time were conducted overseas. Leften S. Stavrianos, a professor at Northwestern University, was one of the Greek Americans to be assigned by the State Department to analyse the events in Greece, a task that concluded in a number of articles and, finally, a book, Greece: American Dilemma and Opportunity (1952).⁶⁵ Stavrianos, whose analysis was perceived as judgmental towards American (and British) policy in Greece in the 1940s and early 1950s, barely managed to publish his book; in fact, his work almost cost him his position at the university and it placed him in disfavour for around two decades.⁶⁶

Another community comprised the defeated of the civil war who had been forced to leave Greece: the exiled communists in the eastern European peoples’ republics. Although, as has been mentioned, the left had always shown particular care for the preservation of the past, the Greek communists entered, systematically, into that process after the mid-1950s. In fact, the KKE’s history department was founded in 1959. Its relevant activities formed around three axes: a) the organisation of a large project of collecting testimony from veteran fighters and party members, as well as documentation and material from the period, for use in the creation of a “complete” chronicle of the national resistance and other publications; b) playing the role of an “editorial committee” by receiving, evaluating, editing and approving (or rejecting) all the texts under publication, from testimonies to chronicles, and from histories to novels and short stories; c) following the historical production on the war, especially in the Eastern bloc, and trying to coordinate the integration of the “Greek case” into it, either through establishing, for example, the entry on “Greek resistance” in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, or preparing the Greek representations at FIR conferences and meetings.⁶⁷

Back in Greece, a fourth centre, which was closely connected to the Greek communists abroad, gathered around the Greek left, as it was expressed after the civil war by the EDA. This community was formed, or was activated as such, around the concept of national resistance, also in the second half of the 1950s. The party’s resistance bureau was formed in 1959, initially with the participation of Pyromaglou and leading officials such as the veteran military officer and EDA MP Gerasimos Avgeropoulos, who was often referred to as an historian. The activities of the office were, up to a point, similar to those of the KKE: the gathering of relevant data, giving opinions and evaluating manuscripts or published works, coordinating with exiled communists, etc. Its main goals were, however, different and concerned the integration of the left into the historical narrative of national resistance and, thus, the reformation of that narrative, which was still under construction. This was a two-way process, as it transformed, up to a level, both the public and the party’s view and discourse on the subject.⁶⁸ Moreover, through publications, memorial ceremonies, campaigns, the foundation and coordination of veteran and victims’ unions and organisations,⁶⁹ as well as through parliament, the EDA lobbied for the official recognition of the leftwing resistance and the lifting of the penal sanctions imposed during and after the civil war, wounds that remained open, not only as a traumatic past but also as the base of the oppressive postwar state and everyday life in Greece.⁷⁰

The above-mentioned centres were the main bodies engaged in the history of the resistance, but they were not alone. Discourses on the 1940s could be found elsewhere. In Greece, apart from the anticommunist production of ideological and political essays informed by Cold War discourse and to the postwar ethnikofrosini state,⁷¹ the official historiographic perception of the events of the Second World War was, largely, expressed by the military publications of the Greek Army General Staff’s history bureau. The series entitled Ο Ελληνικός Στρατός κατά τον Β΄ Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο [The Greek army in the Second World War] intended to cover the events from 1939 to the liberation of the last parts of Greek territory in the first months of 1945, but in the late 1950s and early 1960s it focused on the Greek-Italian War on the Albanian front in 1940, with the publication of four related volumes. The volumes dedicated to the activities of the Greek army on the Middle East front and the occupation period in Greece, even though they were included in the initial publishing plan, only came out many years later. On the other hand, works were also published abroad, especially in countries that were involved with the Greek case, or by Greek scholars such as the historian Nikos Svoronos, whose Histoire de la Grèce moderne, first published in Paris (1953), included a small part on contemporary Greece and the events of the Second World War.⁷² In Germany, for example, dozens of narratives were published in the postwar years, written by politicians and military officers. Beyond those, Greeks living in West Germany and Austria, such as Polychronis Enepekides⁷³ and Vassos Mathiopoulos,⁷⁴ published works based on German archives.

The ways in which these memory and history production centres were formed, developed and communicated with each other, as well as their practices and their products, are a core subject in a study such as the current one. In order to emphasise aspects of that multilayered process in the initial postwar decades, we will continue by briefly referring to two relevant examples.

On November 1957, Woodhouse, as an historian and general director of the British Royal Institute of Foreign Affairs (Chatham House), gave a lecture in Munich, at the invitation of the Institute of Contemporary History, under the title “Zur Geschichte der Resistance in Griechenland” (On the history of resistance in Greece). The lecture was published the following year in the institute’s journal, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (Contemporary history quarterly).⁷⁵ Subsequently, a five-part Greek-language version of the article, translated by Mathiopoulos, was published in November 1958 in the daily Eleftheria. The newspaper, though it was close to the then-fragmented political centre, included angry headlines and subheadings like “Woodhouse distorts historical truth: A purulent lecture in Munich” and “Systematic anti-Hellenic propaganda”. By the end of the year, Eleftheria had published six additional pieces responding to Woodhouse, and the debate had spread to other Greek newspapers.⁷⁶ Most of the responses to the piece came from veteran officers and members of guerrilla groups who had entered politics and written books about the history of the resistance movement and their experience during the Axis occupation, such as Pyromaglou, Stylianos Houtas, Georgios Petrakogiorgis, Christos Zalokostas and others. Woodhouse responded to the criticisms in an interview with BBC Radio (25 November 1958) and in a second interview with Eleftheria some months later (17 May 1959).

The lecture began by considering British historical production on the guerrilla movements against the Axis in Greece and throughout Europe. Woodhouse favoured re-evaluating this part of the history, with the intention of seeing its “true” dimensions within the war’s larger contexts, and arguing that it had been either overstated or ignored. This would require professional historians to retake the field from the amateurs. They had been absent, in his view, because of the proximity in time and the internal controversies within the British state apparatus. The latter had made it difficult to access a wide range of diplomatic documents and other archives of the period. Woodhouse then cited some data for the study of the Greek case with regard to the main resistance groups, the most important military achievements and the internal conflicts in the Greek resistance. Within this framework, he paid special attention to the deliberations and role of the SOE. Contrary to his initial protestations, his manner of narrating this history had a markedly personal tone; beyond a few abstract references to British diplomatic archives, he barely referred to any sources in justifying his arguments.

One of Woodhouse’s main conclusions was that the contribution of the Greek resistance to the military struggle against the Nazis was very small, a “little more than a pustule”; that was the phrase that generated the most outrage.⁷⁷ Woodhouse argued, however, that the resistance was politically important in forming the postwar situation in Greece, and that this had been underestimated. British activity in Greece during the war, as well as the military intervention in Athens starting in 1944, was crucial, in his view, to blocking the communists from taking power, thus allowing Greece to remain in the “free world”, with all that this entailed for the next phase of European history.

By studying the debate, one can draw useful conclusions that can help us appraise the historicisation of the 1940s as an open historical and political process of the time. In fact, in giving that lecture Woodhouse was participating in a broader discussion that was taking place in Britain at the time regarding the British strategy during the war and its effects on the present. As Richard Clogg has pointed out, “few wartime organisations in Britain can have subsequently been the target of such abuse as the Special Operations Executive”.⁷⁸ Woodhouse, as an advocate of the strategy of supporting guerrilla movements while also seeking to control them, was defending the tactic against military and political analysts, such as the historian Basil Liddell Hart, who argued that the approach had ultimately damaged the British empire by fostering the rise of anticolonial movements. The SOE’s activity as part of the British strategy during the war was criticised both as strategically ineffective and as amoral, giving the new generations false messages and impelling them “to defy authority and break the rules of civic morality”.⁷⁹

Woodhouse named several examples in his lecture, such as Malaysia, Kenya and, most importantly, Cyprus, stretching the differences between the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters (EOKA) and the Greek wartime resistance. The Cyprus issue was also central to the responses. Regardless the different approaches taken by the critics of Woodhouse’s lecture, all those who responded seemed to be united in their common opposition to British policy in Cyprus. Indeed, all related the lecture to the Cypriot situation. Moreover, the responses to Woodhouse also allow us to observe the formation of a new national resistance genealogy: the Cypriot fighters appeared as successors to the fighters of the anti-Axis struggle, and the tradition of resistance was seen to stretch back all the way to the Greek revolutionaries of 1821.

The second issue, which was central to the debate, is related to the status of historians and witnesses, and the key concept of historical truth: who had the right to talk about the history of the war? For Woodhouse, this was the monopoly of professional “historians and serious scholars”, among which he included himself, even though, as he pointed out, he knew very well “that it is really difficult for anyone who has taken part in the historical events to judge with the same objectivity as a historian would judge”.⁸⁰ Woodhouse’s respondents disagreed. His critics did not recognise him as an historian, because he was involved with politics and used history as a means to promote his country’s interests. His reliability as a witness was also questioned: first, because he himself had, implicitly, disclaimed it. Second, some of the responses questioned his reliability as a witness by doubting his bravery in battle. A “cowardly fighter” couldn’t be a credible witness.⁸¹ Thus, historical truth existed in the bravery of heroes and the blood of martyrs. History “has been written by the blood of the Greek fighters and sealed by the emptiness of the destroyed villages”, and not by types like Woodhouse, “with his alchemical numbers and his unacceptable claims”, as one article in Eleftheria claimed.⁸²

The responses to Woodhouse invoked a repeating motif of the blood of the dead, still crying for justice. In this context, history appeared as debt, a moral duty to the dead. The demand that the resistance receive recognition was addressed in two ways. The history of the resistance sought its place in Greek national history, on the one hand, and in the history of the Second World War, on the other. Recognition, as a part of the letters in response to Woodhouse point out, would be an inevitable act of justice, redemption and, even, liberation. In this case, agency was vested in the veterans of the partisan struggle, a varicoloured memory community whose members now belonged to different parts of the political centre and had participated in the non-communist part of the resistance – remaining clean, in a way, from the stigma of the civil war, but maintaining a strong identity as members of the resistance and a commitment to its history.⁸³

The publication of Στ’ Άρματα! Στ’ Άρματα! [To arms! To arms!], in the early 1960s, was one of the first collective attempts to create of a complete chronicle of the Greek resistance; a significant moment within a wider process, that of the formation by the Greek left of a coherent historiography of the recent past. Moreover, the project was also a means to call for the rehabilitation and official recognition of the leftwing resistance, as well as a number of demands towards the state, such as the release of political prisoners and exiles, and the legalisation of the KKE, wounds that remained open after the defeat in the civil war.

After considerable editing by different groups in Bucharest, where the KKE was based, and in Athens, by the EDA’s history bureau, the chronicle was published three times. It was serialised in the leftwing newspaper Avgi, under the title Στ’ Άρματα! Στ’ Άρματα! Το πρώτο ολοκληρωμένο χρονικό της Εθνικής Αντίστασης [To arms! To arms! The first complete chronicle of the national resistance] in 133 instalments, from July 1963 until January 1964. Then it was issued as a four-volume edition entitled Το Χρονικό του Αγώνα: Στ’ Άρματα! Στ’ Άρματα! Ιστορία της Εθνικής Αντίστασης [The chronicle of the struggle: To arms! To arms! History of the national resistance] (1964).⁸⁴ Last, in 1967, it was published in Bucharest by Political and Literary Publications (PLE), the KKE publishing house, in a volume of 617 pages.

The case of the chronicle reflects a long-lasting process in the ranks of the Greek left; a process related to the ways in which the left, inside and outside Greece’s borders, tried to come to terms with its past, but also to the relationship, the communication codes, the different approaches and the balances between these two closely connected poles. Furthermore, it is a process through which we can examine the ways and the practices of history at the time, at least in regard to an engaged historiography, in its different shades and tensions: the reception and circulation of the project, the public (and private) discussion around it, as well as the very practice of chronicling and publishing in the daily press.

The chronicle was presented for the first time on 21 July 1963, written, according to Avgi, by a team of contributors and supervised by Avgeropoulos. In the content of that first publication, which formed the basis for those that followed, there was an obvious effort to establish the leftwing EAM and its armed wing, the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), as the main (if not the only) resistance force, and, at the same time, as the only agent of national unity, in a teleological scheme where national unity – from the very beginning to the end – was constantly and deliberately undermined by foreign “allies” (especially the British) and the national oligarchy. That first publication was, also, accompanied by a few dozen readers’ letters (33 in total), congratulating the initiative and providing additional data regarding events, names and places, but also correcting mistakes and criticising aspects of the chronicle. One of the criticisms came from Mitsos Dimitriou (Nikoforos), a veteran ELAS fighter and writer, who pointed out that

Indeed, Avgi’s chronicle was neither “complete” nor was it the “first” such effort. Some years before, from July 1960 to February 1962, the daily Anexartitos Typos, a newspaper close to the small Greek democratic socialist political space, had presented a series entitled Η αληθινή ιστορία του ανταρτοπολέμου [The real history of the guerrilla war], written by an anonymous group of authors. The series was followed by an edition entitled Ιστορία της Εθνικής Αντιστάσεως, 1941–1944 [History of the national resistance, 1941–1944] (1962).⁸⁶ The book was prefaced by Avgeropoulos and Pyromaglou; as the latter mentioned, it was an opportunity to highlight once more that

Apart from the previous effort, six weeks before the first publication of Avgi’s chronicle, the daily Eleftheria started a series as well, named Το Αντάρτικο. Η πρώτη πλήρης και αντικειμενική εξιστόρησις των πολεμικών γεγονότων της Κατοχής [The guerrilla war: the first complete and objective narration of the military events during the occupation]; the latter was also compiled by an anonymous group of authors and, according to the newspaper, was “based on original documents – Greek, English, Italian, German”. In the introduction, entitled Debt, the editors argued that “all National Resistance fighters – from all the groups, armed or unarmed – made their ultimate duty, with self-sacrifice … Neither the suffering that followed the liberation, nor even the resistance’s black blots can stain and erase it, as it is in danger to be erased … Today, after the passing of 20 years, with cross-checked data from sources ‘from both sides of the fence’ … an effort for a dispassionate and objective narration of the events of a time of heroism and elation is possible; without fear, without passion, without exaggerations, but also without misrepresentations; with one sole interest, the truth.”⁸⁸ The Αντάρτικο was a long series, comprising 296 instalments that ran until 24 May 1964. The publication was also accompanied by a number of readers’ letters, as in the case of Avgi’s chronicle. Likewise, it did not avoid criticism. According to the epilogue, the editors tried “to be objective, as humanly possible, without any preoccupation for any national freedom fighter”. All the criticisms from “fanatics on both sides” managed to achieve was that the authors remained on the right track.⁸⁹

Meanwhile, the first edition of Στ’ Άρματα! Στ’ Άρματα! was published, in 48 weekly issues, which resulted to a four-volume edition of 1,666 pages. Apart from the chronicle’s main body, edited and expanded with additional data that the authors had received since its first publication, the edition included quotes from politicians, artists, and personalities covering the entire political spectrum from Greece and abroad, rich illustrations, a poetry collection, lists of people executed by the Axis, official reports, etc. The last part, which amounted to more than 250 pages, was dedicated to the resistance in different European countries, and included an extended report by the FIR about the Greek resistance. The editions’ inclusiveness and richness is evident of its ambition to become a reference book, the magnum opus regarding the history of the resistance. According to the related advertisement in the press, it was “the book of books”, the “legacy that the generation that lived the Occupation and created the epos of national resistance had left to the Nation”.

That first edition remained on the bookshop shelves for less than three years, as the military coup of April 1967 forced the publishers to suspend the title. However, in the same year, a second edition of the chronicle was published abroad, among the Greek refugee communities in the Eastern bloc. The book included only the main body of the chronicle and a long introduction by a KKE politburo member, Zisis Zografos, consisting of a communist rulebook for the party’s recent history.⁹⁰

The snapshots above offer a small glance into the formation process, practices, means, and products of those different but interconnected poles in the two decades after the war; a lot more, though, would be needed for the creation of a representative album. In the 1960s that process grew and intensified; the changing Greek political environment was one of the reasons. After more than a decade of administration by rightwing governments – represented for eight years by Konstantinos Karamanlis’ National Radical Union (ERE) – and the royal court – the liberal Centre Union (EK) came to power in 1963 and Georgios Papandreou became prime minister. Karamanlis had combined his vision of Greece’s Europeanisation with oppressive police rule, the employment of autocratic methods and a tolerance for the powerful parakratos (shadow state) that ended up in the 1961 elections of “violence and fraud”, and the murder of leftwing MP Grigoris Lambrakis in May 1963 in Thessaloniki. According to one foreign analyst of the time, Karamanlis’ use of “unfair electoral practices” and the “exaggerated bogey of communism as a pretext for intimidation” were among the main reasons for the right’s downfall.⁹¹

Papandreou, on the other hand, who during the Centre Union’s 1961 election campaign introduced the “relentless struggle” discourse, managed to approach leftwing voters, and finally win two back-to-back elections in 1963 and 1964. He formed a government that lasted until the palace coup of 1965, which was followed by a period of political and social turbulence that resulted in the establishment of a military dictatorship two years later. In that context, the Centre Union raised issues of the recent past, such as resistance and collaboration during the occupation, claiming a part of the legacy of the former and accusing the right of the latter. During his administration, Papandreou tried to fulfil his pre-electoral promises. Among others, he moved forward with the release of a large number of communist political prisoners.

Moreover, there was an effort to establish two important anniversaries as official national days: these were the Gorgopotamos operation (25 November 1942) and the liberation of Athens (12 October 1944).⁹² The blowing up of the Gorgopotamos bridge represented a rare moment of unity during the occupation, as it was conducted by both major resistance groups, ELAS and EDES, under the SOE’s command. In 1964, the anniversary of the mission was commemorated under the government’s aegis for the first time. Thousands of people took part, but the detonation of an old landmine converted the celebration into a tragedy, leaving a dozen dead and more than 50 injured, sparking a riot by those present and many arrests. The incident, a bitter reawakening of wartime memories, was officially characterised as an accident, but the left perceived it as a CIA provocation.⁹³ In the trial that followed the riots, among those convicted were Avgeropoulos and General Nikolaos Kosindas, an EDES veteran.

The trials were not the first related to the recent past to grab the public’s attention. From 1957 to 1960, the prosecution of Max Merten, an official of the Nazi occupation force, frequently made the front pages of the newspapers and developed into a major political and international issue.⁹⁴ Moreover, from December 1958, the arrest, trial and conviction for spying of Manolis Glezos, Avgi’s chief editor, triggered a large national and international solidarity campaign. Glezos, who, along with Lakis Santas, had delivered the “first act of resistance” by tearing down the Nazi German flag from the Acropolis on 30 May 1941, was named as “Europe’s first partisan” (a phrase that had been ascribed to Charles de Gaulle) and became an international leftwing public figure in the 1960s.

One part of the campaign for Glezos’ release came from the FIR. The EDA, along with a number of Greek veterans and victims’ associations, started participating systematically in the FIR’s activities from the late 1950s. That was not always a simple task. On the one hand, organising trips abroad to participate in meetings, conferences and exhibitions was frustrated by the state apparatus using a series of bureaucratic obstacles; on the other, the EDA, which was perceived by many friends and enemies as the KKE’s locum tenens in Greece, could not always make and deliver its own decisions. A brief example: the Greek representation at the FIR’s third Conference of Historians of the European Resistance (Prague, 1963) consisted of one official from the exiled KKE (Giorgos Zoidis) and two EDA MPs (Vasilis Efremidis and Yiannis Skouriotis). After an adventurous trip, during which they encountered problems regarding their travel documents, the translation and copies of speeches, and so on, all three brought back reports as well as a large part of the conference’s procedures. By examining this material, one can trace, first, one of the ways in which the directions of that international process affected the relevant Greek case; the Greek participants were obliged to write papers based on the three main themes of the conference: the political system during the occupation, the economy and Nazi terrorism. Second, the communication codes between the two centres and their problems: the three participants had taken to Prague two different papers for each subject (three from Athens and three from the Eastern bloc) and they had to decide which ones would be read at the conference.⁹⁵ Moreover, there is evidence about who was recognised as an historian at the time: according to their report, the EDA representatives believed that they were not capable of participating in a “scientific conference”; on the contrary, according to them, the party should had sent “historians such as Dimitris Fotiadis”⁹⁶ or Pyromaglou. Finally, due to the organisers’ intention to preserve the “scientific character” of the conference, the Greek demand for the inclusion of a phrase, in the final collective statement of the conference, recognising the resistance in Greece was rejected, despite the negotiations of the Greek with the Soviet representation and the organisers.

A closer look at events such as the previous one is necessary for the examination of the narratives that were formed at the time, as well as the repertoire of practices and the material aspect that they contain. With regard to meetings and conferences, this does not only concern leftwing activities. Among others, there was “Greek” participation in the previously mentioned international conferences of the European resistance movements; there were also related events such as the conference “Britain and the European resistance, 1939–45” that took place in St Antony’s College, Oxford, in 1962 with the participation of Woodhouse, Pyromaglou and others.⁹⁷ Furthermore, a Greek delegation attended the conference “Greece since the Second World War”, organised on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Truman doctrine at the University of Wisconsin in 1968; besides, its proceedings were published in Greece by the English-language journal Balkan Studies, an edition of the Balkan Peninsula Foundation (Institute for Balkan Studies), founded in Thessaloniki (1953) as a branch of the conservative Society for Macedonian Studies.⁹⁸

On the other hand, it is always important to return to what was being written: in the 1960s a production of memoirs, narrations, chronicles and histories continued and grew. On the one hand, a number of leftwing testimonies, chronicles and local histories appeared.⁹⁹ On the other, there were memoirs and histories written either by former EAM-ELAS members who were no longer part of the communist movement, or members of other groups.¹⁰⁰ One of the most important editions of the time was the memoir of the rightwing intellectual and politician Panagiotis Kanellopoulos, who during the occupation was a member of the cabinet of the Greek government in exile and played a crucial role in the developments of the time. Kanellopoulos was Karamanlis’ successor as ERE party leader and, thus, head of the opposition, when his book Τα χρόνια του μεγάλου πολέμου, 1939-1944 (The years of the great war, 1939–1944) came out.¹⁰¹ According to the relevant advertisement, the book contained “pages of cold history and extended descriptions of the events, as well as pages of fascinating lyricism and emotional narrations of our people’s sacrifices, misfortunes, victories and triumphs”.¹⁰² The book consisted of two parts: the first was his thoughts around ten events in which he took part and his initiatives during the occupation. The second included a collection of his articles and correspondence from the period. The two great victories of the Greek nation that determined European history were, according to Kanellopoulos, 28 October 1940 and the victory in the civil war, but not particularly the resistance, as “this phenomenon appeared also elsewhere in the European countries. In any case, this phenomenon – although it was morally great – did not have any direct effect on the development of the world events, like the effect that our five-month victorious resistance in Albania or the victory of 1949 had.”¹⁰³

Kanellopoulos’ memoir concluded with a didactic epilogue under the title “Thoughts on history”, addressed to the “Greek youth”. Indeed, what is missing, among many others,¹⁰⁴ from this conclusion is the exploration of a new social subject from the mid-1960s; that of the Greek youth: the first generation, in other words, for whom the 1940s were little more than a childhood memory and who bore no responsibility for its outcome but grew up with its consequences. The formation of that generation’s historical perception is related to those consequences, as well as to the “substructure” described above, and to the environment, developments, social demands and new conditions of their time; facts that give to that youth, along with the age factor, a distinctive and autonomous historical subjectivity. A part of this generation that had studied history mainly abroad (mostly in the United States, Britain and France) would attempt and achieve to make the study of the 1940s a field of professional historical research, during and mostly after the military dictatorship.

What we have attempted to do through the presentation of these cases above is to explore and map the different practices and products by which the first historical narratives on resistance were formed. Many elements pitted these interpretations against each other. But in those contested and even conflicting histories, there are common threads, such as the notion of patriotism and the concept of foreign intervention, and the integration of the recent past into the national narrative of the continuity of Greek history.¹⁰⁵ Moreover, the historisation of the war created a new type of hero, a character described eloquently by the Marxist philosopher Yiannis Imvriotis, in an article entitled “The man of resistance”:

That type of hero included the fighter, the victim and the martyr, but also the common people and Greek society that experienced the hardship of the war. Last, these first narratives on the struggles in the 1940s sought vindication, constantly claiming and expecting their recognition in many ways: ethical and practical, national and international. In this context, history appears as debt, a moral duty to the dead.¹⁰⁷ In order to have a better understanding of those elements that formed more an integrative than a divisive narrative, one should examine them not as a Greek peculiarity but part of the broader framework of history and memory of the Second World War; by thinking about the ways in which the personal and collective engagement in the war of people who played a decisive role in its results and consequences was transformed into an engagement in a struggle for identity, justice, legitimacy and hegemony, through history and the major concept of historical truth.

To return to the current debate on the history of the 1940s, it would be useful to examine the criticism that was (and is) made by the two authors who lead and mainly represent the “new wave”. The ten axes that they highlighted in the article that kicked off the “dialogue” were positions that, as has been mentioned, no historian or social scientist could easily disagree with. They described the need for historical studies to be discharged and detached from a highly ideological discourse, to avoid the heroisation or demonisation of the event’s actors, to overcome simplified Manichaean interpretations, to highlight the multiplicity of the issues concerning the civil war and its integration into broader theoretical and comparative frameworks. Moreover, they argued for the need of research to emphasise local history studies and to explore “taboo issues” such as the leftist violence in relation to the phenomenon of collaboration.¹⁰⁸ Those lines were accompanied by an expansion of the time limits of the civil war – the beginning of which was placed in 1943, during the occupation – and observations such as one claiming that some personalities of the time, like ELAS’ communist commander-in-chief Aris Velouchiotis, were heroised in the existing bibliography.¹⁰⁹ Most importantly, at the forefront of the initiative was a recently published case study by Kalyvas entitled “Red Terror: Leftist Violence during the Occupation”.¹¹⁰ In general, the fact that those positions were delivered within a specific historiographic reality in Greece made it obvious from the very beginning – and it was openly stated later – that the criticism was being directed at the historians and historiography that had developed in Greece during the Metapolitefsi.¹¹¹ That historiography was criticised as highly ideologically and politically engaged with the left, and as subjective and unilateral.¹¹²

The professional historical research that, thus, was gradually developed on the Greek 1940s from the mid-1970s was, certainly, a product of its time. As Antonis Liakos has pointed out,

That ice-breaking process was also not linear. Apart from the Cold War factor, it was related to various developments of the time – from the apperceptions of that generation, the junta and the antidictatorial struggle, the split in the KKE (1968) and regime change in Greece (1974), to the substrate that the production of the previous decades had created, and to the democratisation of the academy, the developments and the new trends in historical studies, as well as the opening of relevant archives and institutions in Europe.¹¹⁴ However, it cannot be seen as a smooth process; it was marked by intense debates and setbacks, and it resulted in various and even contested findings and interpretations. In fact, the only consensus that existed had to do with overcoming the dominant state and institutional postwar anticommunist discourse, and the opening of a discussion that would produce “scientific” and “well-documented” studies on the field.

The discussion, in fact, opened with two international conferences that were organised by the Modern Greek Studies Association (MGSA) and the Society for Greek Studies (ELEMEP) in Washington and London, both in 1978. Looking at the participants, one could say that the past first encountered the future at those conferences. The past was represented by those who had taken part in the events and had written about them, such as Woodhouse, Nicholas Hammond, Andreas Kedros, Elizabeth Barker, Thanasis Hantzis and Myers; the present by already established historians in French, British and US universities, such as Nikos Svoronos, John Iatrides and John Petropoulos; and the future by a new generation of historians and social scientists on modern Greece, such as Richard Clogg, Nikos Alivizatos, George Mavrogordatos, Constantine Tsoukalas and Kostas Vergopoulos, as well as young scholars – the first academically specialised in the field – such as Hagen Fleischer, Prokopis Papastratis, Heinz Richter, John Hondros and Lars Baerentzen. Those conferences focused mainly on the political and diplomatic decisions, the “mistakes” and the relations between the Allies and the resistance movement.¹¹⁵

Although the conference in Washington had addressed issues related to the civil war, the events after 1946 were absent from the title and the programme of the first conference on the 1940s that was held in Greece in 1984, ten years after the regime change and two years after the official recognition of the leftwing resistance. On the contrary, the time period was extended backwards to include the 1936-1940 dictatorship (“Greece, 1936-44: Dictatorship–Occupation–Resistance”, Athens, 1984). Held in the National Hellenic Research Foundation; it was a large international conference with state support, many themes and participations from all over Europe.¹¹⁶

In the same year (1984), the first conference dedicated to the civil war took place, in a particularly neutral place, Denmark, under the title “Conference on the Greek Civil War, 1945–1949”, organised by the newly established Department of Modern Greek and Balkan Studies at the University of Copenhagen.¹¹⁷ The fact that one of the most traumatic events in Greece’s contemporary history overcame repulsion and inhibition and took its place, finally, on the “operating table of historical analysis” was indeed a significant moment and it was perceived as such, too. Papastratis describes the atmosphere there:

Three years later another meeting was organised, again in Copenhagen with more narrow participation, and the intention – declared in the volume that followed – was to “introduce to the non-specialist the results of the research on the Greek civil war”.¹¹⁹ But Greece had to wait for one more decade in order to see a conference that would include the civil war in its title: it took place in Athens in 1995 (“Greece, 1936–1949. Dictatorship–Occupation–Civil War: Continuities and Ruptures”). Its programme shows the development of the field in that period; moreover, in its proceedings, published in 2003, one can find the first comprehensive overviews on the historiography of the 1940s and its institutional construction, in Fleischer’s prologue and Liakos’ introduction.¹²⁰

On the other hand, the relevant book production in Greece until the 1990s was not determined by the developments in academic historiography. Apart from a book by Richter (1975),¹²¹ the procedures of the 1978 conferences, which were published in Greece in the first half of the 1980s, Fleischer’s ground-breaking study Crown and Swastika (1988),¹²² and the procedures of the conference in Athens that came out in 1989, edited by Svoronos and Fleischer, the academic book production remained rather poor. In fact, there were studies, written and published abroad that never came out in Greece¹²³ or were only published decades later.

On the contrary, the same period showed that there was a memory boom, partly reflected in the publication of testimonies and nonacademic histories. Part of this boom came from the past, as books that had been published in earlier decades abroad came out in Greece in the initial period following the regime change.¹²⁴ But the larger part came from the left and had its roots in the split and, later, the legalisation of the KKE as well as in the change of the atmosphere towards the left in Greece.¹²⁵ The initial testimonies were oriented towards the resistance, while the usually brief references to the civil war were made in the context of accounts about their lives. The motive was to claim a discourse on “what had really happened” in the 1940s and, at the same time, to ascribe responsibility for the defeat of the communist movement in Greece. The authors were usually leftist cadres and their books are a combination of memoir and historical essay. The choice to elevate the resistance and not the civil war in the collective memory reflected the recognition of the left as a patriotic force and, also, the rejection of the use of armed violence for the seizure of power and the acceptance of legality and the parliamentary system.

As it is believed, the 1990s was a decade of further development, deepening and broadening of the academic field but also of the related memory production. The dynamic entrance of the civil war showed, at least for the moment, that the period had eventually “passed to history” and that, after such a long time, people could more openly speak and write about it. However, even though some aspects of the 1990s – as well as of the years that followed – have been mentioned, it remains too close to us and, thus, a highly unmapped time in terms of history. Beyond the memory accounts, which are a subject that also require further and deeper study, it would be useful to highlight four major developments regarding historiography and public history of the time.

First, a publishing boom (which continued and peaked in the 2000s) was evident, especially in the academic field, as was a turn to the social history of the period; or better, there was an important addition of the “society” and the “social”, as well as interdisciplinarity, to the political and diplomatic focus of the previous period. The books of Giorgos Margaritis (1993), Mark Mazower (1993, 1994), and Riki Van Boeschoten (1997) are considered the main examples of that production.¹²⁶ Although published abroad, Janet Hart’s study on women and the Greek resistance (1996) could be added, at this level, as well as Polymeris Voglis’ research on the experience of political prisoners of the civil war, some years later (2002, 2004). Both attempted to approach the emergence of new social subjects during the war and its consequences.¹²⁷

Second, beyond the entrance of the civil war to the field, there was another addition: that of the study of the case of the Greek Jews. The silence on this issue was broken with the establishment of the Society for the Study of the Greek Jews and its first conference, held in Thessaloniki in 1991.¹²⁸ The first relevant studies came from scholars, some of whom were of Jewish origin, who turned to the history of the Greek Jews and wrote books, as a secondary subject of their research interests, before the field was established and connected it to the international research as a main trend of Second World War historiography.¹²⁹

Third, the establishment of new institutions and the opening of archives that were classified or had belonged to private collections was also significant.¹³⁰ The Contemporary Social History Archives (1991), the Society for the Preservation of Historical Archives, 1940–1974 (1992), or even the Archive of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (1990) and others, as well as the research institutes of the Greek political parties, and new historical journals that joined the existing ones from the 1980s, formed an environment where scholars could research, write and publish in Greece more easily than before. Moreover, the formation of new networks of historians in the 2000s helped young researchers to overpass existing hierarchies in the academy, create new communities and get publicity for their work. Such groups included the Network for the Study of the Civil War (2000), which later was partly connected to the “new wave”, the Group for the Study of History and Society (2006) and the Social History Forum.

Fourth, there is much to be studied regarding history in the public sphere of the time. How has, for example, the escalation of the public discourse around the German war reparations from the late 1990s affected the way people think about the Second World War, especially after this subject was linked to the Greek debt and the policies of the current German government towards Greece after the crisis emerged? In what ways and to what extent did the gradual homogenisation of political life in the first three decades of the third Greek republic form a consensus on the view the Greek 1940s? And, did this collapse along with the balances and political stability after the crisis erupted? Last, we should examine the role of the media, old and new: the press was, once again, the field where a large part of the discussion took place. It was, also, a main agent of the described process, as the mainstream press groups engaged, in the 1990s and 2000s, in a number of publishing projects, much of which concerned history, and particularly the history of the 1940s.

Even though the “dialogue on history” was seen as an “historians’ debate”, in fact historians were just one part of those who participated in it, both in the Ta Nea series and in the numerous articles, comments and replies in the press or online. Despite the fact that the initiative came from two political scientists, in Ta Nea and the other relevant material one can find historians, sociologists, anthropologists, journalists, architects, novelists, artists and life witnesses – the latter fewer, naturally, compared to previous discussions. This diverse combination matters, not only to confirm what we already know: that history is not just the business of historians. Through that body of participants one can observe the different approaches between “experts” and “amateurs”, on the one hand, as well as the communication codes between various disciplines, on the other; the latter phenomenon highlights the difficulty of interdisciplinary attempts, which are nevertheless necessary for a deeper understanding of an historical period.

The main issues of contention were closely connected to each other: leftwing violence during the occupation, the phenomenon of δωσιλογισμός (collaboration), its extent and its armed units (Security Battalions), the local aspects and the aggregate evaluation of the period, and the starting point of the civil war. Indeed, those subjects are crucial; in some cases, their study has offered ground-breaking results, as, for example, the issue of violence has been explored in its multifaced aspects in fruitful and interdisciplinary ways.¹³¹ However, a large part of the public discussion was monopolised by a well-known and not entirely new question: who was to blame for the civil war? The field may have indeed evolved and developed through the previous 40 years, but blameology and mistakeology remain powerful, both in academic and public history.

Moreover, in the contested contributions there was a constant invocation to science, the scientificity of historiographical practice, and the methodologies that lead to objective findings and pure knowledge. One part of the argument of both sides was based on the above, as well as on more inside professional and academic qualitative judgments, regarding the value of each scholar, their work and their place in the academic community inside and outside national borders. What can become evident from such an approach is the ways in which academics – at least in the humanities – draw prestige and credibility for themselves and their work: from the kinds and the use of documents to the number of publications and their international impact. Also, elements of how the public views the professional historian, the “expert”, can be traced to this period. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, those elements are related to a wider discussion on the historical profession, the academy and the perception of it. Closely connected with the previous point is the discussion on the relationship between politics, ideology and ethics with history, its practices and, finally, the role of historians today.¹³² This is certainly a contemporary discussion; but, as this article has tried to highlight, it also concerns a problematic that passes through the historiography on the 1940s: in the early postwar decades the relevant questions concerned the role of witness-historians or the moral witnesses,¹³³ as well as the métier of historians and their multiple identities at the time. As Roderick Beaton has pointed out regarding members of the British School at Athens, the intervening period of almost a century since the First World War

Indeed, no one would expect today’s historians to combine the multiple identities of a Woodhouse; however, it would be also misleading not to problematise the various influences, interests and engagements of contemporary historiography.

A third remark concerns the media, through which historical discourse is produced and disseminated, and which effects not only the historical culture of a community, but also the historian community as well.¹³⁵ There is, of course, the role that a weekly supplement in a popular newspaper on culture and history can have, the publicity that it brings and its effects; a subject that also connects the current discussion to the past. Besides, it is also important to focus on the role of the internet. Websites, blogs and social media contain dynamics that, to a large extent, remain unmapped.¹³⁶ To what extent does the medium shape its users and is shaped by them? Would the debate on the 1940s be different if it remained restricted to newspaper columns, or academic conferences and publications and, if so, in what ways?

Having highlighted just some of the issues that the study of the debate opens to further discussion, the question set by the title of this article becomes more clear: Was (or is) the dispute on the history of the 1940s a historical debate of the twenty-first century or is it taking us back to questions and interpretations that supposed to belong to the past? Indeed, there are elements that help us think about the present and future of history and historiographical practice: history in the public sphere, the new media and the historical profession today.¹³⁷ On the other hand, the “new wave”, “new current” or “new historiography” venture, as a historiographical and political attempt to penetrate and change the balances in what is considered a leftwing-dominated, in that case, field, can be seen, in the long run, as another episode in the long “war” for the history and memory of the 1940s. Was that decade a long civil war, a revolution that failed, an unyielding people’s resistance against foreign and native enemies, or a small case study in the history of the Second World War? Are all of the above simply a matter of historical perspective?

In conclusion, in terms of a critical approach, the current debate should be placed within its own historical framework, but also, as is attempted above, within the seven-decades-long elaboration of a highly conflicting subject of Greek and European history; a subject that is often not seen and lived as an historical event and, thus, part of the past, but as a constant present, a debt, heritage or “birthright”, and as a means to politically validate contemporary views and choices, as confirmed by the numerous public political commentaries by the two authors of the “new wave” and many others.¹³⁸ Does this represent another attempt at revenge, following the considered “revanche of the defeated” during the Metapolitefsi, or a rightwing revisionist attempt, as it has been characterised, similar to international examples since the 1970s? Those questions may be valid, but another way to proceed, before rushing to conclusions, is to closely examine the social uses of the 1940s, as well as the paths and the historical practices in the past and the present.

In that context, an article like the current one is not enough, as it focuses mainly on some aspects of a multifaceted process: on academic and nonacademic historiography, that is, the textual and non-textual elaborations of the past that claim the concept of historical truth based on documentation and reasonable conclusions, or on the personal and collective experience. In the case of the 1940s, in particular, though, fiction, through its different expressions, has also staked a claim to truth and truthfulness,¹³⁹ replacing or adding to the two aspects of the aforementioned multifaceted process, the ones of sentiment and imagination∙ and conquering, in many cases, a large territory of the “Jurassic park” of historical culture.¹⁴⁰

Lastly, a reverse study of the current one is equally necessary: a historisation of the key concepts and interpretative frames of the history of the 1940s, such as resistance and civil war, and also “foreign intervention” and “violence”, would enable us to think about their past and present uses, the dominant effect of each choice in the interpretation of the whole decade, and their contemporary utility regarding a renewed critical, comparative, and interdisciplinary approach to both the period and its historiography.¹⁴¹