Germany As a Culture of Remembrance

by Confino, Alon

• ISBN13: 9780807857229
• ISBN10: 080785722X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-09-30
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

An acknowledged authority on German history and memory, Alon Confino presents in this volume an original critique of the relations between nationhood, memory, and history, applied to the specific case of Germany. In ten essays (three never before published and one published only in German), Confino offers a distinct view of German nationhood in particular and of nationhood in general as a product of collective negotiation and exchange between the many memories that exist in the nation. The first group of essays centers on the period from 1871 to 1990 and explores how Germans used conceptions of the local, or Heimat, to identify what it meant to be German in a century of ideological upheavals. The second group of essays comprehensively critiques and analyzes the ways laypersons and scholars use the notion of memory as a tool to understand the past. Arguing that the case of Germany contains particular characteristics with broader implications for the way historians practice their trade, The Historian's Representationsexamines the limits and possibilities of writing history.

Table of Contents

Preface	xiii
Prologue: The Historian's Representations	1	(22)
Part I. The Local Life of Nationhood: Germany as Heimat, 1871-1990	23	(130)
1 The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Heimat, National Memory, and the German Empire, 1871-1918	29	(28)
2 A Century of Local Nationhood: Edgar Reitz's Heimat, Memory, and Understandings of the Past, 1871-1990	57	(24)
3 Heimat and Memories of War in West Germany, 1945-1960	81	(11)
4 Heimat, East German Imagination, and an Excess of Reality	92	(22)
5 A National Lexicon for All Seasons	114	(39)
Part II. Memory as Historical Narrative and Method	153	(102)
6 Freud, Moses, and National Memory	159	(11)
7 Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method	170	(18)
8 Telling about Germany: Narratives of Memory and Culture	188	(26)
9 Dissonance, Normality, and the Historical Method: Why Did Some Germans Think of Tourism after May 8, 1945?	214	(21)
10 Traveling as a Culture of Remembrance: Traces of National Socialism in West Germany, 1945-1960	235	(20)
Notes	255	(46)
Index	301