In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (review)

Few Holocaust topics have been researched more than German memory of the crime. Unlike other academic literatures that evolve only slowly, the study of working through the legacy of the Holocaust in Germany has experienced continued change, now well into its “third generation.” Wulf Kansteiner’s new study provides an outstanding contribution to the literature.

Kansteiner identifies two lingering problems in memory scholarship: “an unselfconscious return to the central role of human agency in history (now as the maker of representations)”; and “a troubling disregard for proof (who actually shares or identifies with these representations)” (p. 22). He counsels a return to the hermeneutic triangle (examining the makers, consumers, and products of memory), a focus on important differentiating factors such as generation, and (especially) sustained attention to the neglected processes of reception.

The first empirical section, “History,” argues that a discourse of metonymy (i.e., ordinary referential discourse, as opposed to the more subjective strategy of metaphor) dominated postwar scholarship. Early historiographical silence on the Holocaust was followed as early as in the late 1950s with a more sustained focus, albeit a dry, factual, historicist “pathos of sobriety” abjuring emotion or “populism,” but also precluding empathetic treatment of the victims (p. 39). Generational changes by the 1970s produced a “flight into theory” (e.g., functionalists versus intentionalists), and an ensuing “flight into exceptionality,” i.e., the notion of the singularity and incomparability of the Holocaust (p. 41). Further academic controversies ensued, culminating in the Historikerstreit of the mid-1980s, a very important battle that was generational, partisan, and also the last concerning the singularity thesis. Leftists prevailed—albeit ephemerally, given an unstoppable normalization and relativization. The years since the late 1980s have been defined by a “self-confident empiricism” (p. 47) and a return of metonymic equilibrium, as well as a shift to “perpetrator research” and a resurgent focus on the political-economic dimensions of Nazism.

In one of the most innovative sections Kansteiner analyzes the treatment of National Socialism and the Holocaust by German television. He surveys the content of, and the time devoted to, the Nazi period as depicted by the second German public television network, ZDF, over several decades. In the 1960s a pedagogically intended philosemitism and stories of rescue predominated—perpetrators and bystanders were virtually ignored until the 1990s in an “elaborate avoidance and selective confrontation” (p. 129). Instead of a linear development, the book’s analysis of viewer-ship reveals four periods: two of more engagement—1960s to early 1970s, and 1979–1987; and two of relative disengagement—“the 1970s,” and 1987 to 1993 (p. 137). The author discerns a pattern of selective consumption: viewers loved World War II coverage, whereas other Nazi-related subjects foundered. Viewership dipped markedly in the 1970s (for all historical content), reflecting both an increasing unpopularity of older representational forms and “generational replacement.” Nevertheless, Kansteiner notes an overall process of self-reflection via television. An upsurge of interest in historical themes in the late 1990s and early 2000s attended the productions of Guido Knopp, who delivers seemingly politically correct messages that actually contain a seductive vision of Nazism that in many senses violates taboos and norms that evolved in the postwar period; his successful formula for what many critics think is a normalization, or even whitewashing, of Nazism was to use visual effects, editing, and pacing to minimize context, explanation, thematization of perpetrators, and didactic messages (p. 165).

In the final section Kansteiner turns to politics, starting with the postwar political class: the “opportunists of the Third Reich were now enlisted for a particularly important and tricky task: they had to design a system of guilt management acceptable to Allies and Germans alike” (p. 184). Their “anti-totalitarian” framework neutralized Nazism as “a natural catastrophe,” and created a dominant “bystander/German victim memory” (pp. 211–12). The chapter on Helmut Kohl’s politics of memory stresses his conservative project of taming the...