From oblivion to national reconciliation and from there to the reflective processing of the civil war past: through this journey, it could be said that the Civil War was addressed within the Greek public sphere.
Although for approximately forty years (1949-1990) there was no place for it in public discourse, and while it was overshadowed by the narrative of national resistance, the Civil War has remained a present past. In fact, since the 1990s, it has been inscribed in multiple and exponential ways within the wars of memory regarding the 1940s and therefore within the broader question of under what terms does society 'remember' and 'forget' its past.
Since then, protagonists, activists, political parties, governments, intellectuals, artists, journalists, historians, and social scientists have not only brought the Civil War back from obscurity but also argue oppositely about how and why, thus transforming collective and largely intergenerational pain into cultural trauma.
As the dramatic elements of the trauma, in this public reflective process, memory, emotion, and identity interact within the framework of the pervasive crisis experienced by almost the entire Greek society. With fewer illusions now, the different interpretations of the Civil War help us to understand not so much the past but primarily the present and the mechanisms by which the expectation of the future is constructed.
Starting from the theory of cultural trauma, this book covers hidden and forgotten aspects of the Greek Civil War using alternative conceptual tools and posing new questions.
[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]
