Authors: Wulf Kansteiner
ISBN-13: 9780821416396, ISBN-10: 0821416391
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Date Published: February 2006
Edition: New Edition
The collective memories of Nazism that developed in postwar Germany have helped define a new paradigm of memory politics. From Europe to South Africa and from Latin America to Iraq the German case has been studied to learn how to overcome internal division and regain international recognition. In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz examines three arenas of German memory politics?professional historiography, national politics, and national public television?that have played a key role in the reinvention of the Nazi past in the past sixty years. Wulf Kansteiner shows that the interpretations of the past proposed by historians, politicians, and television makers reflect political and generational divisions and an extraordinary concern for Germany's perception abroad. At the same time, each of these theaters of memory has developed different dynamics and formats of historical reflection. Kansteiner's interrelated essays offer a comparative analysis of the German scene that reveals a complex and contradictory social geography of collective memory. In Pursuit of German Memory underscores the truth that, while all memory may be local, German memories of Nazism are highly mediated and part of a global exchange of images and story fragments. Wulf Kansteiner is an assistant professor of history and director of graduate studies at the State University of New York at Binghampton.
1 | The vagaries of collective symbolic guilt | 3 |
2 | Finding meaning in memory : a methodological critique of collective memory studies | 11 |
3 | The rise and fall of metaphor : German historians and the uniqueness of the Holocaust | 31 |
4 | Between politics and memory : the historians' debate and West German historical culture of the 1980s | 54 |
5 | Narrative invention and historicization : how modern was the Nazi genocide? | 86 |
6 | Entertaining catastrophe : the reinvention of the Holocaust in the television of the Federal Republic of Germany | 109 |
7 | Nazis, viewers, and statistics : television history, television audience research, and collective memory in West Germany | 131 |
8 | The radicalization of German memory in the age of its commercial reproduction : Hitler and the Third Reich in the TV documentaries of Guido Knopp | 154 |
9 | High politics and communicative memory : collective guilt management in the Adenauer era | 183 |
10 | The long good-bye of the war generations and the search for liberal politics of memory : from Adenauer to Schmidt | 214 |
11 | Fighting about the future of the past : the difficult process of cultural memory production in the Kohl era | 248 |
12 | Normalization : the Europeanization of German political memory since the 1990s | 280 |
Conclusion : toward a social geography of collective memory | 316 |