What is ERA?

ERA is a space in which individual stories of people having resisted against the terror, humiliation and despair fascism brought over Europe are kept alive and visible for everybody.

The protagonists and eyewitnesses will disappear in the next years. Soon, there will be no other testimonies of the happenings apart from those having been collected, recorded, recounted and written down. The European Resistance Archive will enable the documentation of this precious knowledge. It offers video interviews with women and men having taken part in the antifascist resistance. Six countries are represented in the project: Poland, Slovenia, Austria, France, Italy and Germany.

In the process of creating this platform, young people participated actively in the realization of the project in form of doing the interviews. Historians, memory workers and a professional video-team guided the young participants in their work. We hope that this creates an understanding and coming together of the different generations and makes the understanding of the history of Europe possible.

ERA Goals

The European Resistance Archive 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.

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 a European awareness that the resistance against fascism and Nazism played a constitutive role in the creation of the new Europe.

In the current historical discourses, especially in the educational systems of schools, a national perspective stil 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.

ERA Project Partners

DGB-Youth, Germany

The Youth organization of German trade unions consists of members of the youth working group of lecturers of the DGB. The lecturers regularly perform political youth work. This focuses on antiracist and antifascist subjects.

Youth Antifa Berlin, Germany

The antifa-youth group of Berlin is a group of young people being engaged in the struggle against fascism, racism, nationalism, anti-Semitism and sexism.

Karta, Poland

Eleven high-school students developed the ERA project in Poland. The project coordinator came from the House of Historical Meetings and Karta Center. The three witnesses, who were engaged in various forms of historical resistance movements in Poland in the years between 1939 and 1945 were interviewed by the students.

Istoreco, Italy

The Istoreco working group for the ERA project consists of an historian, a memory worker and a teacher as well as eight high school and university students. The junior team was provided with the necessary materials and tutoring in order to carry out the video interviews with the witnesses who all fought against the German occupation in the partisan movement.

Grünalternative Jugendorganisationen (GAJ), Austria

A mixed team of young people realized the interviews in Carinthia/Koroška. A professor for contemporary history at the University of Klagenfurt tutored them.

Institute of Contemporary History (INZ), Slovenia

The interviews in Slovenia were realized by a team from the Institute for Contemporary History in Slovenia. A group of young people tutored by a team of historians realized the interviews with former members of the Slovenian resistance against the Nazi occupation.

Province of Reggio Emilia, Italy

The Province of Reggio Emilia promotes a well-balanced social and economic development for its community and invests in research, knowledge and vocational training, the valorization of its landscapes, the local territorial and environmental development, the local welfare. It also promotes gender equality in every field and cares about the identity of its community through the memory of its inhabitants.

Forschungsgesellschaft Flucht und Migration, Germany

The Research Society Flight and Migration was founded in 1994. It does research and publishes facts about the situation of refugees and migrants on the periphery of the European Union as well as about the politics of separation and camps on the outer boarders of the European Union.

CEMEA, France

CEMEA was created in 1937 just after the Front Populaire (1936). CEMEA is a pedagogical organization which is historically related to the so called Education Populaire. The aim of CEMEA is to promote citizenship, equality of chances, social awareness and political involvement though education.

Pulse, Italy

PULSE is an Italian private Non-Profit Association founded in 2004 to promote and favor activities in different fields such as research, communication, education and training as well as international cooperation.