Vol. 21 · No. 2 · Issue 67 · Summer 2003

Eric Langenbacher

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Abstract

Are collective memories currently changing in the land where the "past won't go away?" Long dominated by memory of the Holocaust and other Nazi-era crimes, Germany recently witnessed the emergence of another memory based on the same period of history, but emphasizing German suffering. Most commentators stress the novelty and catharsis of these discussions of supposedly long-repressed and unworked-through collective traumas and offer predominantly psychoanalytic explanations regarding why these memories only now have surfaced. However, thanks to "presentist" myopia, ideological blinders, and the theoretical/political effects of Holocaust memory, much of this discourse is misplaced because these German-centered memories are emphatically not new. A reexamination of the evolution of dominant memories over the postwar period in the Federal Republic of Germany is necessary in order to understand and contextualize more fully these current debates and the changes in dominant memories that may be occurring-tasks this article takes up by utilizing the memory regime framework.