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  • German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990
  • Joseph W. Moser
German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990. Edited by Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and Georg Grotte. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006. vii + 344 pages. $75.00.

With the concept of German Memory Contests, Anne Fuchs and Mary Cosgrove identify in their introduction a recent trend in German historical debates since the 1990s, which consists of replacing Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) and thus a normative ethics of memory with the idea of contests representing a pluralism of memory cultures. The fourteen articles in this interesting volume are [End Page 597] the result of a conference held at the Humanities Institute in Dublin in June 2004 on the topic of "Memory Contests: Cultural Memory, Hybridity and Identity in German Discourses since 1990."

This volume examines a variety of texts and films on German and, to some extent, Austrian memory. While some of the articles follow the topic of Memory Contests very well, others are more loosely connected to the book's subtitle. Two essays in particular address the topic of Memory Contests with great insight. Anne Fuchs presents Väterliteratur by Christoph Meckel, Uwe Timm, Ulla Hahn, and Dagmar Leupold, thus analyzing the conflicted memory of descendants of fathers who were more or less involved with the Nazi regime. Dagmar C.G. Lorenz offers a contrast to this article in her contribution about the diversity of narratives by the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors in both Germany and Austria. Because Väterliteratur and literature from survivors of the Shoah represent opposite sides of German memory, these articles complement each other extremely well and point to the idea of contesting memories. Three articles by Stefan Willer, Mary Cosgrove, and Anne Fuchs treat various aspects of W.G. Sebald's writings, from the topic of exile and childhood and the issue of Jewish identity to the concept of "Heimat" in Luftkrieg und Literatur. While Sebald is certainly crucial to this topic and these articles will be of interest to Sebald specialists, the emphasis on Sebald in this volume almost overshadows the significance of other writers and artists. Other articles which round out this volume discuss the Wehrmachtausstellung, German cinema after reunification, and Afro-German women writers' struggle for identity in post-unification Germany.

The strength of this book lies in the fact that the issue of German memory is an important current topic in Germanistik and German Studies and will likely continue to flourish as more primary sources on this topic are published in Germany and Austria. There are two significant weaknesses of this volume. First of all, memory of post-Nazi and post-reunification Germany is not clearly differentiated in this book. While the emphasis of this book is on memory, it is still important to delineate the difference between memory of the Nazi regime and that of the GDR and the period of the Cold War. Another failing is the fact that Austria is acknowledged in some articles and then completely ignored in other articles. Thus the book does not give a comprehensive overview of memory contests in Austria and how these differ from Germany.

Despite the fact that not all of the articles are on the same topic historically, and the subtitle of the book, The Quest for Identity, is somewhat general, as is sometimes the case with conference volumes, the articles in this book are individually very interesting and significant contributions to the field of German memory and will certainly be of great interest to experts in this area.

Joseph W. Moser
Washington and Jefferson College
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