Vol. 20 · No. 4 · Issue 65 · Winter 2002

Elliot Neaman
History, University of San Francisco

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Abstract

Rudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces; Artifacts of German Memory 1870-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)

Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (New York/Oxford: Berg, 2000)

Since the 1980s, German historians have tried to apply the promising methodological concept of collective memory, pioneered predominantly by French social historians, to the always contentious arena of German history. Predictably, the politics of memory have tended to divert attention away from the larger framework of German history in all its regional, social, and chronological diversity, towards a narrow focus on the history and pre-history of Nazism. In the mid-1980s, for example, conservative-nationalists in the so-called Historians' Dispute implicitly invoked the concept of collective memory by arguing that the legitimacy of the Third Reich derived in part from the geopolitical and psychological threats felt by Germans during the Weimar Republic. Conversely, in the late 1990s, the Goldhagen debate focused on the much contested theory suggesting a causal link between the 2,000-year-old Christian collective memory and the apparent willingness of ordinary German citizens to assist in the Nazi war on the Jews after 1933.