Poland wants to revive dialogue with Germany over past

Jan 11, 2008, 14:45 GMT

Warsaw - Poland wants to revive the dialogue between Germany and Central and Eastern European countries over their difficult past, Polish Vice Culture Minister Tomasz Merta said Friday.

'We remember different things. But we should learn to listen to each other as a foundation for understanding and cooperation in the future,' he said in Warsaw at the opening of a three-day conference on places of remembrance in Central and Eastern Europe.

The patrons of the event are Germany's junior minister for culture and media, Bernd Neumann, as well as culture ministers of Poland, Hungary and Slovakia.

According to Matthias Weber of the Institute for Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, the continent was currently searching for ways to remember its shared culture.

It was difficult to pool memories to make one large whole, he said.

However, Merta was sceptical about the possibility of a homogeneous, shared European history, as participants discussed the role of Polish cities such as Lwow and Wroclaw in the memory of different nations on the first day of the conference.

The idea for the conference emerged in 2005, when representatives of Poland, Germany, Hungary and Slovakia initiated the foundation of the network for Memory and Solidarity.

The panel was to coordinate the cooperation of scholarly institutions of the participating countries which deal among other things with the history of totalitarian regimes, displacement and forced migration in the 20th century.

After rising to power in November 2002 the nationalist- conservative Polish government discontinued its participation in the project.

It was afraid its participation in the network would legitimize German efforts to create a documentation centre against displacement in Berlin.