Blending history and social science, this book tracks the role of social movements in shaping German public memory and values since 1945. Drawn from extensive original research, it offers a fresh perspective on the evolution of German democracy through civic confrontation with the violence of its past. Told through the stories of memory activists, the study upends some of the conventional wisdom about modern German political history. An analysis of the decades-long struggle over memory and democracy shows how grassroots actors challenged and then took over public institutions of memorialization. In the process, confrontation of the Holocaust has been pushed to the centre of political culture. In unified Germany, memory politics have shifted again, as activists from East Germany have brought attention to the crimes of the East German state. This book delivers a novel and important contribution to scholarship about postwar Germany and the wider study of memory politics.
The conventional understanding of public remembrance has been contained within the boundaries of the nation, the state, or the local community. With the arrival of what Astrid Erll has called the Bthird phase^of memory studies (Erll 2011, 4), commemoration is now analyzed in terms of its Bunbounded^quality and is Bconsidered a fluid and flexible affair^(Bond et al. 2016, 1). Memory straddles established divides, it moves and travels, and it is actively transformed in the process. And yet, a significant part of what continues to fascinate scholars about memory is its groundedness in concrete locations. The possibility of Bvisiting^one's object of research, of interacting with those who experience memory as the intended (or unintended) audience, and witnessing transnationality Bup close^is what draws scholarly inquiry. So how can we best connect the obvious significance of the local to the reality of transnational remembering? This special issue addresses this tension between the production of remembrance through transnational processes and its grounding in concrete locations. Underlining the presence of transnationality in commemoration, this volume examines how historical events and experiences that transcend national boundaries, global norms, experiences of mobility, or awareness of the Bworld out there^are manifested in particular realms of memory. The contributors come from different disciplinary backgrounds (literary studies, sociology, political science, history, peace, and conflict studies) and focus on memory spaces in a diverse set of geographies-including in Australia, Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Norway, the Philippines, South Africa, and the USA. They also investigate sites dedicated to different and complex pasts that are transnationalized through various mechanisms and with different results for local remembrance. 1
Memory activists have recently received more scholarly and public attention, but the concept lacks conceptual clarity. In this article, we articulate an analytical framework for studying memory activists, proposing a relatively narrow definition: “Memory activists” strategically commemorate the past to challenge (or protect) dominant views on the past and the institutions that represent them. Their goal is mnemonic change or to resist change. We locate scholarship on memory activists at the intersection of memory studies and social movement studies. We introduce a typology for comparative analysis of memory activism according to activist roles, temporality, and modes of interaction with other actors in memory politics, and illustrate this with a diverse set of empirical examples. We contend that the analytical utility of the concept of the “memory activist” is premised on its value-neutrality, and in particular, its application to both pro and anti-democratic cases of activism.
This article examines the political uses of memory in the three successor states of the Third Reich. The focus is on how political elites offered stylized histories of the Nazi past in the service of broader political goals, both domestic and international. After reviewing key junctures in the politics of memory, the authors discuss contemporary debates about history, particularly in Germany, the country often viewed as the model for coming to terms with a traumatic past. Despite the massive and growing literature about confronting the Nazi past, the authors note that there are few studies that link ideas about history to broader political outcomes and suggest that this represents a fertile area for future research. The article concludes by considering whether German memory politics will serve as a model for European memory.
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