The development of Jewish studies and Holocaust research in academia during the 1970s and 1980s, or fascination with the “Jewish sign” in post-modern philosophy, were other legacies of 1968 in higher education and thought. But another “1968” informed liberal visions of cosmopolitan Europe during the last decade of the Cold War. Established in France since 1975, the Czech émigré novelist Milan Kundera almost single-handedly prompted the nostalgic rediscovery of Mitteleuropa in the West. His influential essay, “The Tragedy of Central Europe” (1983), romanticized Central European Jewish intellectuals as symbols of lost but retrievable supranational Europe. Advocates of the European Union, however, grounded cosmopolitanism on the memory of the Shoah – the birth certificate of a new Europe allegedly triumphant over nationalism, antisemitism, and racism. Competing memories of communist oppression impeded the export of Holocaust remembrance across the former Iron Curtain. Yet post-Communist countries developed their own forms of Shoah memorialization, even if “to control the way in which the Holocaust is remembered, understood, and interpreted.” At the start of the twenty-first century, the commemoration of murdered Jews had become “our contemporary European entry ticket.”