Editorial

Anniversaries are like New Year - an opportunity to look forward as well as back. The coming together of history magazines from Britain, Germany and Russia in this special issue is an expression of hope for the future as well as an accounting for the past.

The calendar celebration of victory in Europe and the political circumstances of the 1990s have come together with extraordinary resonance. We can now see 1945 in its proper perspective - a pivotal point in what the British historian Eric Hobsbawm has called the 'short twentieth century' - begun by the 'end of old Europe at Sarajevo in 1914 and closed in the helter-skelter of events since 1989 symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall.

All our countries have now to come to terms with and go forward from that chapter of world war and totalitarianism. The historians have written here through the prism of 1945 - calmly, clearly, but never coldly. For history is an art - never more so than when recalling the experience of war where, as the great First World War poet Wilfred Owen reminds us, 'the poetry is in the pity'.