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Instrumentalization of the wartime past for political gain is the subject of this study of eleven World War II commemorations. Using a comparative, conceptually original approach, Jennifer Yoder identifies the actors who manipulate memory surrounding wartime anniversaries, such as the bombing of Dresden and ceremonies to honour fallen soldiers and fascist collaborators. The cases of memory contestation span three geographic regions, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Russia, recognizing that each developed distinctive interpretations of the war and different patterns of memory politics.

A decade after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the beginning of democratization and marketization in East Central Europe, a handful of countries introduced territorial and administrative reforms and created regional "self-governments": autonomous subnational-level assemblies elected by universal suffrage. This comparative study of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary explores the reasons for these reforms and their consequences for post-communist democracies. In the context of the long-standing development of regions in Western Europe, Jennifer A. Yoder argues that a new approach is needed to explain recent regional reforms-and their wide variablity-in post-communist Europe. Her study offers a nuanced and authoritative account of a category of reforms that gets to the heart of democratization after communism: how to distribute authority within a new system.

This article examines the ways the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has claimed to supply eastern voters with important elements of political representation that they demand. Rather than seeking "revenge," which would suggest voting purely out of protest against a government or policy, the evidence examined in this article suggests that some voters in the East support the AfD to express something else. The reactions of some of the other political parties in the wake of recent elections suggest that they have begun to pay more attention to their roles in the electorate and to the various dimensions of political representation.

Well before the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine, the bilateral relationship between Germany and Russia began to deteriorate. This article traces German-Russian relations since the end of the Cold War in order to identify the reasons for the deterioration of the bilateral relationship. It examines the key debates inside Germany about its Russia policy, suggesting when and why the terms of the debates changed.