The National Socialist period was the central formative experience for Romanian Germans, and their identity debates were refracted through the legacy of National Socialism and the Second World War. This chapter charts the origins of these debates in the interwar period, places them in their respective contexts of Cold War Romania and West Germany, and explores the reverberations of these debates in post-Communist Europe. The circle around the Romanian German literary magazine Klingsor in the 1920s and 1930s rehearsed many of the arguments that were to occupy the Romanian German émigré public in the 1970s and 1980s. If the Klingsor writers were part of an interwar European right-wing ‘youth’ movement, then the same ‘old men’ of the 1970s and 1980s formed the vanguard to a turbulent revisionist decade over the fascist past. Far from being a parochial debate about a marginal group, the Romanian German memory wars and ‘little historians’ dispute’ of the 1980s reflect a European and transnational process of making sense of European fascism, war, and expulsions.

This chapter examines how the suppression of religious houses undertaken by Henry VIII’s government between 1536 and 1540 was transformed into the event that has come to be known as the ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’. It begins by considering this transformation through the lens of an eye-witness chronicle, compiled by Charles Wriothesley in the 1530s and 1540s. The second part of the chapter then turns to explore how the protracted and uneven process witnessed by Wriothesley acquired the qualities of temporal specificity and cultural significance that are the hallmarks of historical events. It traces evolving perspectives across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with a view to highlighting that the ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’ was an invention of posterity: it emerged only in hindsight and largely in critical perspective. The final part of the chapter asks how early modern processes of naming, commemorating and selectively forgetting the dissolution have shaped modern historical scholarship. In seeking to expose the ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’ as a seventeenth-century construct, this chapter also exposes modern historians’ reliance on a vocabulary and temporal framework that were themselves products of the dissolution and the wider English Reformation.