Emmanuel Macron is on a six-day tour of France’s first world war battleground sites to commemorate the centenary of the armistice. Anyone who’s spent time in places where the 1914-18 bloodbath unfolded will know this could be an emotional visit. The fields and forests still bear the scars: the long sinuous furrows formed by the remains of trenches; the 90-metre-wide gaping crater left by the explosion of a mine; or the war museum in Péronne, in the Somme, with its collection of photos of gueules cassées (“broken faces”, disfigured soldiers).

Macron is of course also in campaign mode for the European parliament elections next year, but his interest in history is hard to question. He’s also built up the centenary commemorations as an opportunity to showcase France’s special taste for diplomatic summitry. On Sunday he will host dozens of leaders at a “Peace Forum” in Paris. It makes for an ostensibly global – if Francocentric – embrace of the significance of 1918, but one in which eastern European memories hardly feature at all. This blind spot in the commemoration of 1918, rather than fostering European unity, may in fact complicate things.

A hundred years on, how do Europeans relate to 1918? The British and the French approach it in much the same way: it marked the end of a carnage that is still vivid in family stories passed down. Honouring the millions who perished and remembering lessons learned makes obvious sense. By contrast, in German collective memory, the first world war features much less prominently – perhaps because of military defeat and the dire fate of the Weimar Republic, but also because it is largely overshadowed by the second. This isn’t to say that Germans are indifferent to it. Think of that iconic 1984 image of François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl holding hands in Verdun.

Last month in Berlin, on the sidelines of a conference on the first world war, a German diplomat in her 50s told me a moving, personal story. I’d noticed a beautiful necklace she was wearing. She said it had been bequeathed to her by an old French woman who had lost two of her brothers in the 1914-18 war. For decades this French grandmother had refused to speak to or even approach anyone German – even rejecting the young exchange student from Bonn who regularly visited her family. Yet years later she wrote in her will that her favourite necklace should be given to that very German student, as a token of reconciliation. The German diplomat was that young student. As she finished the story she added gently: “When I die, the necklace will be given to that woman’s great-granddaughter, in France.”

Commemorating can be a very personal thing. When I moved to London from France a few years ago, I started wearing the red poppy as Armistice Day approached – not only as a tribute to the fallen but also as a European gesture. Still, all of this remains very focused on “western” Europe. We still fail to acknowledge that in other parts of the continent, 1918 has a different meaning from the one we French or British give to it.

For one thing, 1918 as the date of the end of the conflict only holds true for the western front. In the east of Europe, the crumbling of empires, the Russian revolution, civil war and the struggle to establish the borders of newly established states all meant that armed violence continued, leaving deep scars. In many ways that set the stage for the autocracies of the 1930s and further bloodshed. The Polish-Soviet war lasted until 1921. The conflict between Reds and Whites in former tsarist Russia (which encompassed most of today’s Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the Baltic region) continued until 1923. There was also fighting between Poles and Ukrainians and Poles and Lithuanians, and pogroms perpetrated against Jews. The Greek-Turkish war of 1919-1922 led to terrible massacres, and a forced exchange of populations that uprooted 1.6 million.

The date also meant something entirely different for many easterners. For Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, 1918 represented the advent of statehood, or the restoration of nationhood. (Ukrainians also experienced this, if fleetingly.) Poland reappeared on the map after 120 years of having been carved up by empires. In Warsaw this week, 11 November will mark the centenary of “Independence Day”, and is likely to include demonstrations of ultra-nationalism. For Hungarians, the end of the war is synonymous with the treaty of Trianon by which the country lost two-thirds of its territory and more than half of its population. It is about loss and humiliation – a deeply felt historical hangover that Viktor Orbán cynically plays on when he tries to cast his country as a “victim” of the European Union.

Why does remembering this matter particularly now? For one thing, it seems awkward to commemorate 1918 as if Europe were still cut in two, as it was during the cold war – with some collective memories pushed aside, frozen behind the iron curtain, while others are more easily spoken of and acknowledged. Today, nationalists and populists in Budapest and Warsaw thrive on the notion that easterners aren’t treated as fully equal. To be sure, political leaders can manipulate history. But are western Europeans all that interested and knowledgeable about what easterners have experienced, and how that can weigh on people’s understanding of Europe today?

Markus Meckel, a former East German dissident who speaks publicly about the need to share east-west experiences, put it to me this way: “The memories of the first world war and its consequences are very diverse. Looking back today still raises important challenges.” The point is not that a unified narrative should be imagined, he says. Rather, it is that we would all gain from better awareness of the mosaic of European memories of 1918. The Europe we live in today still has its roots in that past.

• Natalie Nougayrède is a Guardian columnist