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What is collective about collective memory? Two different concepts of collective memory compete-one refers to the aggregation of socially framed individual memories and one refers to collective phenomena sui generis-though the difference is rarely articulated in the literature. This article theorizes the differences and relations between individualist and collectivist understandings of collective memory. The former are open to psychological considerations, including neurological and cognitive factors, but neglect technologies of memory other than the brain and the ways in which cognitive and even neurological patterns are constituted in part by genuinely social processes. The latter emphasize the social and cultural patternings of public and personal memory, but neglect the ways in which those processes are constituted in part by psychological dynamics. This article advocates, through the example of traumatic events, a strategy of multidimensional rapprochement between individualist and collectivist approaches.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Sociological Review.Using a case study of official representations of the Holocaust in the Federal Republic of Germany, we address the ways in which collective memory constrains political claim-making. In contrast to the commonly held views that the past is either durable or malleable, we characterize collective memory in political culture as an ongoing process of negotiation through time. We distinguish between mythic and rational political cultural logics, and delineate mechanisms through which these logics operate as constraints: taboo and prohibition, duty and requirement. With these conceptual distinctions, we describe transformations in the memory of the Holocaust as a constraint in German political culture.

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