From the Editor

This issue opens with Kıvanç Kılınç's "The Hittite Sun Is Rising Once Again," which follows the journey of the Hittite sun disk through Turkish political discourse, from its original display in an archeological museum in the 1930s through its monumental representation on a central square in Ankara in the 1970s to its printed reproduction on T-shirts and its virtual dissemination on the internet in the early 2000s. As Kılınç shows, in the course of seven decades the sun disk has served as a politically laden symbol in controversies on Turkish identity, usually in support of modernist, secular standpoints against Islamic positions.

Like Kılınç, Christian Baier discusses the use of an ancient mnemonic signifier in contemporary Turkey in order to postulate pre-Islamic origins and bring Turkey closer to the West. To this end a mythical Troy was turned into the cradle of European culture and Homer was categorized as an Anatolian poet. As Baier points out, this use of the myth of Troy both orients Turkey toward Europe and undermines the age-old dichotomy Asia v. Europe. However, Turkey figures only as one example from many in "Homer's Cultural Children," where Baier explores the continuing fascination with antiquity in contemporary politics and culture from a broad perspective in order to demonstrate how an ancient myth can be made to signify a multitude of different meanings.

The two analyses of the deployment of signifiers from antiquity in contemporary debates on political identity are followed by two studies of the shaping of the public memory of World War II. Dan Stone examines Alan Burgess's 1950 BBC radio play, "The Greatest Detective Story in History," which tells of the work of the International Tracing Service (ITS), especially its child search branch. The play's title, which Stone adopts for his essay, reflects Burgess's view of the Nazis as a group of evil minds, the likes of which not even Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle could have imagined. Stone shows that Burgess's play accurately informed the British public on the work of the ITS and that it closely mirrored the language used in reports that tell of attempts to help parents find their children who had been abducted by the Nazis to be "Germanized." Stone concludes that by focusing on Britain's involvement with a transnational agency such as the ITS, Burgess's play depicted Britain as a country committed to Western Europe and situated the British memory of the war in a broader, European context.

In "Fighting Russia's History Wars" Mark Edele explores a 2014 Russian memory law that criminalizes "lies" about unspecified Soviet activities in World War II. Edele argues that the vague wording of the law supports Vladimir Putin in his quest to impose an unequivocally positive historical account of the Soviet role in World War II on Russian historical discourse, in schools as well as in scholarship. Putin's aim is both to present his triumphalist narrative as based on incontrovertible fact, which he has done in meetings with historians, and to deter the presentation of different perspectives by invoking the threat of legal prosecution for writing critically about Soviet actions. According to Edele, although it irons out moral and political ambiguities, Putin's narrative of World War II is adroitly crafted and has become popular in Russia. It cannot be dismissed easily.

David Wight's "Henry Kissinger as Contested Historical Icon in Post-9/11 Debates on US Foreign Policy" takes us from Russia to the United States. Wight examines four instances in which memories of Kissinger's policies and actions in the 1970s have been invoked in order to support contradictory positions on US foreign relations in the beginning of the twenty-first century. Centrists and those on the right remember Kissinger as a bold statesman, clever diplomat and brilliant strategist, while those on the left evoke him as an antidemocratic, secretive and dangerous warmonger—but both sides refer to him time and again as a historical icon. Moreover, Wight shows that Kissinger has been actively involved in shaping his role as a historical...