Seventy years later, the images of tens of thousands of casualties, of the annihilation of a city to its foundations, of the Armageddon unleashed by the megalomania of two dictators at the head of totalitarian systems, images of which Dante's Inferno seemed like a pale premonition, are shocking. Why remember all that? Perhaps the answer lies in the management of the report, in the rationalization of what happened, in the need not only to understand, but to find some sense in what happened.

Although most historians have considered the retreat from Moscow in the winter of 1941 as the pivot on which the sign of the war began to change. The defeat of Paulus' German 6th Army was the symbolic hinge on which the perception of World War II was transformed. Germanic invincibility suffered a severe setback and the perception of it began to crack, encouraging resistance inside and outside Germany.

After the war, the memory of what happened was articulated in various historical memoirs. In Germany, Stalingrad served to justify the condition of the Germans as victims of a pathological Hitler. The withdrawal of the 6th Army, of the foot soldiers, would show to what extent the dictator and his immediate entourage were to blame. For the Soviets, the Great Patriotic War and Stalingrad in it constituted a legitimizing myth of the regime in its struggle against fascism as the final phase of capitalism. The construction of the great memorial ("The Call of the Fatherland") in a Stalingrad renamed Volgograd after 1953, symbolically captured the Soviet regime's perception of itself under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Moreover, the proliferation of references in culture, from novels (Grossman, Plievier), poetry (Neruda), music (Shostakovich, Prokofiev), plastic art (Vuchetich) or cinema (Stalingrad, Enemy at the Gates), show the popularization of mythical stories set after the great battle.

This construction of historical memories that sought to make sense of what had happened was anchored in multiple references to the past. It was not strange that German officers read General Caulaincourt's account of the Napoleonic campaign of 1812, nor that the Soviets recovered and expanded the patriotic war against the French emperor to name the one they had lived through since 1941. The same resistance of Hitler to order the withdrawal from Stalingrad when it was still feasible, referred to the still recent trauma of Verdun in 1916, and to the withdrawal of some positions -they thought in the winter of 1943-, whose maintenance would have led to the victory.

These references and others that sought to go back to medieval confrontations showed that the relationship between countries and nations of the continent had a solid foundation in confrontation, in war. To a large extent, one of the components of what is European is conflict, and perhaps this may justify why we should remember Stalingrad seventy years later. The confrontation, destruction and barbarism, that savage continent that only a few decades ago was a bloody reality, should make us keep our attention on the risks that hang over a peace so painstakingly achieved, over a European model of which war is a backdrop that we should not lose sight of. The calls for exclusion and the exacerbated nationalism that appear in our days are the warnings so that the memory of Stalingrad does not fall on deaf ears.

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