The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture (review)

Current academic studies are fascinated with memory. It is as if a new door has opened through which it is possible to revisit the whole of human history. One place is visited more than any other: Auschwitz. Confino and Fritzsche's contribution to "memory work" spans in contrast several centuries of German history, from the transformation of memory in the German Reformation (when the Lutheran abolition of purgatory removed the link between the worlds of the dead and the living) to disorientation in everyday East German life after the "Wende." It also examines the impact of the French Revolution in Germany, as a result of which, in Johannes von Müller's phrase, "Everything is becoming so different" (66); Jewish memory and citizenship; the "strategic use" of memory by the German nobility; psychic trauma and state policy after the Great War; the everyday normality of "ordinary" citizens in Hildesheim; public relations and corporate history in the postwar period; Heinrich Böll and literary remembering; and the treatment of war widows and "waiting wives" in East and West Germany.

In their introduction, the editors legitimate memory as an approach to the study of history: "The operations of memory in social settings and the subsequent study of memory in academic contexts are justified because, plainly, the past does not speak for itself" (1). Such a statement is pertinent only to modernity, which inserts a caesura between past and present. According to Confino and Fritzsche, "To be modern is to be conscious of one's historicity; to be able to see oneself in historical terms" (10).

Nations are more inclined to reflect on their past in times of social change and political re-orientation. But to be conscious of one's historicity is not enough. There is also the problem of overcoming the past, which becomes particularly difficult when one acknowledges that history has been obscured in the devising of coherent stories about it. Mastery of the past has acquired a German name: "Vergangenheitsbewältigung"; similarly, Germany has been a prime site for the machinations of memory over the past hundred years. Each dramatic shift in government has encouraged the creation of new narratives to explain the preceding era. Revisionism has dominated the historical discourse of twentieth-century Germany.

Of course, memory plays a role in such revisionism. Firstly, memory is invoked to "set the record straight" by revealing silences, denials and repressions, thereby uncovering the truth beneath official narratives. Secondly, memory can be revised or effaced by narratives that make sense of the past in the interests of power or allow individuals to live frictionless lives without guilt or trauma. At issue is memory's effect on social and cultural conditions.

The introduction promotes "polyphony" (15), a chorus of different memories and versions of the past, in which nothing is lost, and scorn has no place. Marcus Funck and Stephan Malinowski write of the merits of aristocratic memoirs, a "uniquely maintained treasure of memory," available as a "valuable optical instrument with which to enlarge our image of the twentieth century to include important new facets, which are not always disagreeable," and which challenge "our increasingly homogenized lifestyles in the present" (98). Another voice in the chorus is that of German business, which tried to exculpate itself after 1945 from complicity with the Nazi regime. In their corporate histories, businesses made excuses or erased events from the record. They evoked the "age of innocence" of German industry and lent "coherence to the devastating and disorienting experience of National Socialism" (208). S. Jonathan Wiesen admits that German business was engaged in mythmaking rather than remembering, but allows myth a place in the making of memory. It would seem that memory does not necessarily correspond to actuality. What then its analytical value?

Other contributions are more incisive...