Goals
ERA Goals
ERA Memorial Trip, Auschwitz March 2007, Eyewitness Henryk Mandelbaum speaking
The European Resistance Archive (ERA) wants keep the knowledge of the resistance alive und wants to demonstrate by which means people contributed in the liberation of national socialist rule by their decision to fight against fascism, occupation and extermination.
ERA offers a specific knowledge of the diversity of the resistance movements and different outcomes in their national contexts.
Aim of ERA is to create a common understanding of European rights as the result of a historical path characterized by the fight against fascism/Nazism.
The active role of women in the fight against fascism/Nazism should be recognized. People of different political, social and religious motives fought in the resistance and did so because of their conscience. ERA wants to create and spread an European awareness that the resistance against fascism and nazism played a constitutive role in the creation of the new Europe.
ERA will promote a methodology in order to teach younger generations how to interact with historical witnesses and how to grasp the nuances of their testimonies to acknowledge these experiences as a specific knowledge of history.
Interested individuals, school-classes and universities can participate actively in the work of ERA.
In the current historical discourses, especially in the educational systems of schools, still a national perspective dominates in most countries.
We want ERA to become a forum, in which the different national perspectives come together and lead to an understanding of European history, for which the resistance against fascism and Nazism played a constitutional role.
A Europe-wide research of already existing video-materials of eye-witnesses is aimed at to integrate these recordings into the archive.
Of course, this is strongly connected to financial securities. Any future activities depend on funding/other possibilities to keep the work on ERA going.