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An introduction to the journal is presented which discusses various papers published within the issue, including one on a change of hegemonic memories on communal violence, one on how historical memories of human rights violations are addressed in Chilean public schools, and another on memory practices in the classroom.

In this paper I examine the use of the concept of "normality" in debates about German foreign policy since unification. In the early 1990s, left-wing intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas tended to criticize the idea of "normality" in favor of a form of German exceptionalism based on responsibility for the Nazi past. A foreign policy based on the idea of "normality" was associated above all with the greater use of military force, which the right advocated and the left opposed. Thus, "normality" became a synonym for Bündnisfähigkeit. Yet, from the mid 1990s onwards, some Social Democrats such as Egon Bahr began to use the concept of "normality" to refer instead to a foreign policy based on sovereignty and the pursuit of national interests. Although a consensus has now emerged in Germany around this realist definition of foreign-policy "normality," it is inadequate to capture the complex shift in the foreign policy of the Federal Republic since unification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scrutiny of the statements of UK politicians about the nature and purposes of teaching history in schools shows a strong desire to return to the 'traditional' form of history education which was dominant in the UK until the 1970s, with its strong emphasis on a positive and heroic rendering of the national past and movement away from the idea of history education to develop intellectual autonomy and provide historical perspectives on contemporary issues and problems. The concluding section of the paper considers the implications of this attempt to 'turn back the clock' and argues that it is intensifying the polarization between policymakers and history education professionals, perhaps ultimately leading to a form of school history which many young people consider to be irrelevant and implausible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to offer a critique of the proposal of 'methodological cosmopolitanism' in theoretical terms and to substantiate this critique by providing an account of the dynamics of collective memory and identity in postunification Germany. In the first part, we look at the arguments about methodological cosmopolitanism and their derivative, the idea of cosmopolitan memory, illustrated by the case of Holocaust memory. In the second part we look at the case of Germany: firstly at its postwar experience of the attempted construction of 'postnational' identity, and then at more recent trends, contemporaneous with the Berlin Republic, towards a 'normalization' of national identity in Germany. The Holocaust plays a crucial, but different, role in each phase, we suggest. In the conclusion we return to more general themes, asking what the German case tells us about the cosmopolitanization thesis more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Angela Merkel came to power at a crucial time in regards to Germany's relationship with its past. Where would she position herself in light of Gerhard Schröder's approach that had offered a new way of accepting responsibility for the past and integrating it into the twenty-first century present by explicitly making it a key element of German national identity, but also in view of her East German biography? Would she continue and maybe even reinforce the institutionalization of Holocaust-centered memory and–given the forceful return of the topic of German victimhood–complement it with the institutionalization of the memory of German suffering, or would she emphasize the latter at the expense of the former? This paper attempts to answer these questions by examining Merkel's politics of the past during her first three years in office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important developments in the incipient Berlin Republic's memory regime has been the return of the memory of German suffering from the end and aftermath of World War II. Elite discourses about the bombing of German cities, the mass rape of German women by members of the Red Army, and, above all, the expulsion of Germans from then-Eastern Germany and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe have gained massive visibility in the last decade. Although many voices have lauded these developments as liberating, many others within Germany and especially in Poland—from where the vast majority of Germans were expelled—have reacted with fear. Yet, do these elite voices resonate with mass publics? Have these arguments had demonstrable effects on public opinion? This paper delves into these questions by looking at survey results from both countries. It finds that there has been a disjuncture between the criticisms of elites and average citizens, but that the barrage of elite criticisms leveled at German expellees and their initiatives now may be affecting mass attitudes in all cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leander Haußmann (Sonnenallee), a theater and film director with East German roots, contributed the documentary Die Durchmacher to the television series Denk ich an Deutschland. In his documentary, Haußmann interviews some of his old friends who in the late 1970s formed a group in East Berlin and presents their stories about the time. This paper explores the image of the German Democratic Republic that is created by the memories of the participants and their presentation through Haußmann. An important element of the memories is the perspective from which they come: out of a subculture that tried to escape East German reality with only limited success. This article also examines how the ambiguity and unreliability of memories are presented in the film. The documentary is put into the context of a debate on the concept of "Ostalgia" (Ostalgie), arguing that this can still be a productive means to communicate East German experiences without idealizing them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the leading public intellectual of postwar West Germany, Jürgen Habermas was a prominent opponent of the unification of the two Germanies after 1989. While his fears regarding the identity, collective memory, Western orientation, and economic power of a united Germany are important, in contrast to the existing literature, I argue that Habermas's objections are primarily procedural, focusing on the normative deficiencies in Chancellor Helmut Kohl's executive-led, administrative approach to reunification. In Habermas's eyes this procedure short-circuited the democratic processes of public opinion- and will-formation necessary to fulfill the normative presuppositions of popular self-determination. Methodologically, I make this point by reading Habermas's "short political writings" alongside his theoretical writings, especially his early postwar readings of the German constitutional theory. In addition to reframing the debate over his opposition to unification, I also oppose realist critiques of his work by showing that Habermas's theoretical writings have direct implications for contemporary politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autobiography and self-reflection on Jewish identity are recurring subjects of the works of Miriam Libicki, a third-generation American-Israeli comic artist. Drawing on a semi-structured interview with Libicki, this article explores how the concept of Jewish identity, both personal and collective, has influenced the artist's creative process throughout her career. Libicki's positionality as a third-generation artist is examined, alongside her oeuvre's place within the current trends of third-generation comics. Libicki's recent work on an SSHRC-funded Holocaust graphic novel project, A Kind of Resistance (2022), led her to undertake a more personal project which examines her grandmother's survival experience, Glasnost Kids (forthcoming). This most recent work on Holocaust narratives has brought Libicki closer to her own Jewish ancestry and has allowed her to further analyse and position her own Jewish identity within both historic and contemporary contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses key changes in public memory in the Netherlands. Its examination of memorials, and their relationships to official memory and creative practices, shows a gradual shift in focus from war heroes to collective and individual victims of the Nazi persecution. The second part of the article focuses on contemporary visual artists, whose works are inspired by their own family histories and by changing attitudes to the memory of the Shoah, which has gained increasing public visibility. In line with the changes observed in some memorials, their artworks demonstrate a key development of Holocaust remembrance since the end of the war, with a shift in emphasis towards remembering individual victims and circumstances. This shows a transition from commemorating the unpronounceable through symbols, towards a detailed memorialising of the Shoah through the names of victims and minute reconstructions via maps, models and portraits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Jewish secOnd generation art & family Museum Amsterdam (JOMA) opened in 2022. It combines the artwork of Maarten van der Heijden with the stories of his Jewish family. This article presents the various stages of van der Heijden's work and elucidates his practice as a second-generation artist, drawing on the notions of postmemory and sublimation. The article concludes by discussing the JOMA as a highly personal as well as a collective memory project and its role in human rights education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a pre-recorded video conversation between artist Lorna Brunstein and 44AD gallery director Katie O'Brien, this written interview discusses Brunstein's experience of growing up as a second-generation survivor and the ways in which she has explored this identity in her creative art practices. The conversation offers insight into Brunstein's family history and discusses the role that inherited trauma, place and embodied memory play in her installations and interactive artwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Denisa Nešťákova, Katja Grosse-Sommer, Borbala Klacsmann, and Jakub Drabik, eds., If This Is a Woman: Studies on Women and Gender in the Holocaust, Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021, 292 pp., $119.00 (hardback), ISBN: 9781644697108. Plachá Pavla, Zpřetrhané životy: Československé ženy v nacistickom koncentračnom tábora Ravensbrück v letech 1939–1945 (Torn lives: Czechoslovak women in the Ravensbrück Nazi concentration camp in 1939–1945), Prague: Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů, Puchra, 2021, 496 pp., €34.00 (hardback), ISBN: 9788075640628. Kata Bohus, Peter Hallama, and Stephan Stach, eds., Growing in the Shadow of Antifascism: Remembering the Holocaust in State-Socialist Eastern Europe, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2022, 340 pp., €71.00 (hardback), ISBN: 9789633864357. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In what way does national history shape the interpretation of international events in that country's media? Germany has always had a particularly sensitive and complex relationship with Israel. The Holocaust left such a scar on German identity that the country cannot consider Israel without confronting its own history. In Israel, Germany sees a 'reflection' of its own historical and symbolic space. In this article, I draw together a close reading of major German newspapers with more interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives in order to illuminate the mechanism of what I call 'mirror reading,' and especially to reveal its workings during what I consider a key shift in the discourse on German identity. The German print media, which I treat as the activating agent in German narration of national identity, plays a central role in this reflection by projecting national symbols onto Israel. In particular, I identify the initial reception of the Israeli wall (2003-2004) as a turning point in the debate on German self-understanding after the Holocaust. I establish that there are two extremes in a continuum of how German national history can frame the Israeli wall, one making Germany an active agent and the other a passive one. Employing national symbols in the media distorts the domestic perception of foreign events. My study casts a first light on this little understood-but nonetheless crucial-phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study understands comedy in relation to the Holocaust as an attempt by Germany's third and fourth generations to create alternative forms of commemoration. Analyzing the country's history of coming to terms with the Shoah, it highlights that recent forms of subversive satire are reacting to a crystallization in official memory politics through counter-discourse to political correctness and the defenders of moralism. The article finds that it is possible to combine comedy and Holocaust memory if Jewish victimhood is not spoofed and the limitations of official memory politics are debunked. Finally, it contends that not every historical assessment based on a local/national context can serve as a global blueprint. The recognition of national historical guilt and the establishment of distinct collective memories are still crucial for understanding specific pasts. Accordingly, German popular culture referring to the Nazi past differs from u.s. comedy dealing with the Holocaust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article starts out from looking at what is missing from environmental history in China today, and then goes on to ask a particular set of questions: How does one interpret environmental history with the public? How does one present environmental history in public space? How does one engage with an environmentally conscious public? And ultimately, is it possible to establish public environmental history as a new mode of knowledge? In answer to these questions, it focuses on relationships, including the relationships between nature and culture, the environment and people, and history and memory. Using the dredging history of West Lake in Hangzhou as an illustrative case, it explores nature as material culture, calls attention to the rhetorical power of nature, and argues that environmental history should be interpreted and presented as public memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role played by the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a German right-wing political party, in the politics of memory in and of Dresden. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among AfD members and observation of the party's organization, the article demonstrates that the performative acts of local AfD members bear crucial significance in explaining the party's attempts to challenge the mainstream memory discourse that is linked to the centrality of the Holocaust. I argue that party members not only draw upon established discursive narratives of Germany's victimhood, but also find ways to skillfully adapt their messages in their efforts to achieve legitimacy. Their performative contestations have enabled the AfD to be both a beneficiary and an instigator of the shifting boundaries of what is considered admissible in Germany's official culture of memorialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including European ethnography, anthropology of art, and heritage and social memory.

The primary motivation behind this study is assessing how successful "inclusive" urban museums really are in representing ethnic/religious minorities. The research site is Bursa City Museum, Turkey, where the Bursa Jewish Community used to be one of the key social and cultural elements of the city. In-depth interviews are the main method of study, since the opinions of this minority on the subject are the main focus. The main aim here is to reveal the ideas of the community (whose collective memories are threatened with extinction) about being represented in the museum, and from this analysis to make constructive suggestions for the institution. It seems that the community cares about being identified as part of the city, but is indifferent to the institution of the museum, partly due to problems in the ways in which they are represented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Ukraine is usually portrayed as a cleft country with a determining internal East–West divide. However, critical researchers in Ukrainian scholarship emphasize that the East–West paradigm fails to adequately reflect the complex reality of the Ukrainian society and its historical, linguistic, economic, and political mixture. This article deconstructs the origins and evolution of the eastern and western Ukrainian identities and argues that the current clash between the two regions should not be explained by linguistic and ethnic differences, geopolitical strategies, economic interests, or political gains but rather by symbolic geographies, historical myths, and political imaginations. As a consequence, Ukraine is unable to make clear choices about its geopolitical future and remains a liminal space of east and west, where the broader EU-centered and Russia-centered regions overlap. Resumen: Ucrania suele ser retratada como un país caracterizado por una división interna determinante entre el este y el oeste. Sin embargo, algunos investigadores critican este paradigma Este-Oeste, que no refleja la compleja realidad de la sociedad ucraniana y su mezcla histórica, lingüística, económica y política. En este artículo se deconstruyen los orígenes y la evolución de las identidades ucranianas orientales y occidentales y se argumenta que el actual choque entre las dos regiones debería explicarse por el nuevo enfoque de geografías simbólicas, mitos históricos e imaginaciones políticas. En caso contrario, Ucrania no puede tomar decisiones claras sobre su futuro geopolítico y sigue siendo un espacio liminal de este y oeste, donde se superponen las regiones más amplias centradas en la UE y en Rusia, respectivamente. Résumé: L'Ukraine est généralement présentée comme un pays avec une division interne Est-Ouest déterminante. Cependant, des chercheurs ukrainiens critiquent ce paradigme Est-Ouest, qui ne reflèterait pas la réalité complexe de la société ukrainienne ni son mélange historique, linguistique, économique et politique. Cet article déconstruit les origines et l'évolution des identités ukrainiennes orientales et occidentales et soutient que le conflit qui les oppose actuellement devrait être expliqué par la nouvelle approche des géographies symboliques, des mythes historiques et des imaginations politiques. A défaut, l'Ukraine est incapable de faire des choix clairs quant à son avenir géopolitique et reste un espace liminaire entre l'Est et l'Ouest, où les régions plus larges centrées sur l'UE et la Russie se chevauchent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During his prolific career, Reinhart Koselleck left his mark on a myriad of topics beyond the history of concepts: iconology, memory, and temporality. The first part of this piece is a never before published English translation of one of Koselleck's numerous public interventions. Second, taking as a starting point his reflection about the end of the war and the impossibility to collectivize certain memories, this article links his considerations about the unsayable with his work on images and political sensuality. Going beyond a simple analysis of Koselleck's writings, the article opens a dialogue between the history of concepts and affective memories, offering news ways to link experiences, emotions, and practices while underlining the limits of communication and collective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The graphic representation of traumatic memory of war disasters constitutes a broad tradition that can be traced back to Francisco Goya. Comics, with the resources provided by their textual-visual narrative, have been part of that tradition especially since the 1950s. However, representing traumatic memory of war disasters is troublesome, in regard to the artists' strategies and public reception - as shown by the conflicts between memory, history and myth posed in these works. This article develops a comparative study of traumatic memories in Spanish comics and presents an analysis of the modes of representation in works such as Carlos Giménez's Paracuellos, Francisco Gallardo Sarmiento and Miguel Gallardo's Un largo silencio, Antonio Altarriba and Kim's El arte de volar and Paco Roca's Los surcos del azar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Devorah Omer's first two historical children's novels, Ben-Yehuda's Eldest Son and Sarah, Heroine of NILI (both published in 1967), as a case study for the ideological role played by historical fiction for children and youth in 1960s Israel. A comparison of the novels with the historical sources on which Omer relied reveals how the selection of the figures of Sarah Aaronsohn and Itamar Ben-Avi allowed her to create a narrative that crossed the political divide while presenting the difficulties experienced by children and women in their encounters with the national myth. Omer's novels thus play a dual role: they preserve the Zionist narrative and shape a collective memory consistent with the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state, while also raising issues that call into question the national narrative's hegemonic status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I detail how archival finds helped me develop questions on World War II martyr heroes and their role in Soviet culture and Russian collective memory. I consider how one might approach silences, read discrepancies in archival holdings, and extrapolate meaning from various kinds of documents. Considering that the Russian State Archive of Sociopolitical History Komsomol archive allows one to study the evolution of gender via the continuous reshaping of feminine and masculine ideals for Soviet youth, I discuss how the archive might open up new research areas and prompt additional questions for gender historians, and lead one to reconsider power and authority in the Soviet past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on memory studies and media studies to explore how memory practices unfold in schools today. It explores history education as a media- saturated cultural site in which particular social orderings and categorizations emerge as commonsensical and others are contested. Describing vignettes from ethnographic fieldwork in German secondary schools, this article identifies different memory practices as a nexus of pupils, teachers, blackboards, pens, textbooks, and online videos that enacts what counts as worth remembering today: reproduction; destabilization without explicit contestation; and interruption. Exploring mediated memory practices thus highlights an array of (often unintended) ways of making the past present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 2012, a small farm in Latvia with a collection of over 200 tomato varieties was charged with the illegal sale of seeds not included in the European Union's Common Catalogue. The farm's collection includes traditional Latvian varieties that have never been officially registered, Western varieties imported illegally during the Soviet years, and Russian varieties that came into use during the Soviet years and are now defended by Latvian gardeners as "traditionally grown" and representing the taste of their childhoods. The debate highlighted the continuing struggle over Latvia's geopolitical positioning between Russia and the European Union and control over seeds as a tactic of empire. I explore the cultural memories embedded in the contested tomato seeds and how they contribute to an intertwined imaginary of the Latvian landscape idyll with a Soviet sociality. I argue that the innovative resolution to this conflict represents a process of transculturation in a contact zone between empires (Pratt 1992). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the best-selling French literary works of the twentieth century, Vercors' novella has enjoyed an exceptionally rich afterlife thanks to numerous print editions as well as several influential stage and screen adaptations: Jean-Pierre Melville's 1947 feature film, Jean Mercure's 1949 play, Vercors' own 1978 theatrical rendering, and a 2004 television movie written by Anne Giafferi and directed by Pierre Boutron. Taking a comparative approach that weighs the aesthetic and ideological priorities of these authors and directors alongside shifts in historiography and French political culture, this article traces the evolution of Le Silence de la mer as a contested site of national memory and a means of negotiating the ethically-charged concepts of collaboration and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1949, Jewish-German critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno, a member of the group of intellectuals now known as the Frankfurt School, returned to West Germany from exile in the USA. This article examines a lesser-known aspect of Adorno's participation in the West German public sphere: namely, his radio broadcasts around the topos of 'eine Erziehung zur Mündigkeit' (a pedagogy fostering political maturity/autonomy). Adorno's critique of the medium of radio as an arm of the reified 'culture industry' is well documented. What, then, are we to make of his sociopolitical contribution to the German public sphere in the form of over one hundred radio broadcasts in the late 1950s and 1960s? This article broaches the question by analyzing his now-canonical 1960 broadcast on Hessischen Rundfunk titled 'Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?' ('What does Coming-to-Terms-with-the-Past Mean?'). Arguing for the centrality of affect for Adorno's postwar work, I demonstrate how he stages a pedagogy emphasizing the necessary relationship between reason and affect (Kant avec Freud) in achieving self-reflective thought and political autonomy. Finally, Adorno's earlier attack on music educational shows as 'pseudo-democratic' (1938-1941 in Paul Lazarsfeld's Princeton Radio Research Project), complicates any straightforward elaboration of a postwar public pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines post 1989 Polish literary production that addresses German-Polish history and border relations in the aftermath of World War II and participates in the German-Polish dialogue of reconciliation. I consider the methodological implications of border space and spatial memory for the analysis of mass displacements in the German-Polish border region with particular attention to spatiocultural interstitiality, deterritorialization, unhomeliness, and border identity. Focusing on two representative novels, Stefan Chwin's Death in Danzig and Olga Tokarczuk's House of Day, House of Night, I argue that these authors' attention to geospatiality, border space, and displacement forms a distinct characteristic of Polish border narratives. Chwin's and Tokarczuk's construction of interstitial border spaces reflects a complex dynamic between place, historical memory, and self-identification while disrupting and challenging the unitary mythologies of the nation. With their fictional re-imagining of wartime and postwar German-Polish border region, these writers participate in the politics of collective memory of the border region and the construction and articulation of the Polish perspective that shapes the discourse of memory east of the border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The architectural and sculptural design of the Karaoğlanoğlu War Memorial (1990-1991), which this article explores, has a unique place in Turkish war memorial architecture built after 1950. Until the end of the 1990s, Turkish war memorials continued to be conceived and constructed in a traditional and conventional manner in spite of the changes that the notion of the war memorial underwent worldwide over the course of the twentieth century. The Karaoğlanoğlu War Memorial embodies certain attributes of a 'living memorial' and 'counter-monument' with regard to its architectural form and its monument characteristics, which distinguish it from other Turkish memorials. Designed in connection with the features of its geographical context, this memorial enables an awareness of the landscape of memory. With its humane dimension and vaguely figurative repre- sentation, the monument evokes a unique personal experience for each visitor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

German political culture has been undergoing gradual but significant changes since unification. Military engagements in combat missions, the introduction of a professional army, and a remarkable loss of recent historical knowledge mostly within the younger generations are hallmarks of the new millennium. Extensive education about the Holocaust is still prevalent and there is a strong continuity of attitudes and orientations toward the Nazi era and the Holocaust reaching back to the 1980s. Nevertheless, a lack of knowledge about history-not only the World War II period, but also about East and West Germany-in the age group of people under thirty is staggering. The fading away of the generation of victims who are the last ones to tell the story of persecution during the Holocaust and a parallel rise of new actors and technologies, present challenges to the educational system and the current political culture of Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the title of "Righteous among the Nations" has been awarded in Israel since 1963, foreign governments did not show any interest in this commemoration until the late 1990s. Since then, however, a growing number of European governments have adopted the term. Of all the countries to which this commemoration has spread, the French government's appropriation of the Israeli terminology may have gone the farthest, forging a new national commemorative expression: the "Justes de France." This essay explores how the French lexical appropriation has taken place, paying particular attention to the role played by Jewish rescuers in this process. In doing so, it seeks to introduce a new perspective into the current debate on the transnationalization of memory: to what extent do the different states interested in the commemoration of the "Righteous," in this case Israel and France, speak the same language and whose language is it? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the intersections between history, memoir, and collective memory. It re ects on my experience of writing, as both historian and former participant, about the 1965 Australian Freedom Ride, which protested racial discrimination against Aboriginal people. It also traces the ways in which memory of and discourse about that event has changed over time: how it was and is remembered and understood, and the di erent uses made of the event by Aboriginal people, educators, and historians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes textbooks and curricula for primary schools in Poland published between 1944 and 1989 to show how the communist regime attempted to influence Polish history education via political change and educational reform. The article focuses on five aspects of this influence: Marxist methodology of history, portrayals of political parties, promotion of a 'scientific' worldview, justification of new boundaries and alliances of the People's Poland, and a new pantheon of national heroes. In conclusion, the article investigates the effectiveness of history education in shaping Polish collective memory under the communist regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the impact of images on reconstructions of the past. In order to analyze the function of images in history textbooks, image-discourse analysis is applied to a case study of Austrian postwar memory. The analysis of recent Austrian history textbooks provides insight into strategies by which notions of Austria as both "victim" and "perpetrator" of the National Socialist regime are held in balance. The article also focuses on the intentional framing of iconic depictions of two central Austrian sites of memory, Heroes' Square (Heldenplatz) and the State Treaty (Staatsvertrag). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how the model of the ideal patriotic woman, established through propaganda activities between two competitive ideologies in Croatia during the Second World War, have been transformed and adapted to accommodate diverse genres of memory culture from 1945 until the present day. In order to indicate the interrelation of media-ideological constructs and self-definition, the authors have compared cultural representation models of 'acceptable' and 'obnoxious' females in war time with ethnographical interviews conducted with women at the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Antifašistički front žena (Women's Anti-Fascist Front, AFŽ) Istrian Conference in 2004. The contrast between recollections and culturally constructed official memory shows how the memories of women, as autonomous historical subjects, resist the imposed collective amnesia on the anti-fascist movement, although these women also leave many 'unsuitable truths' untold about their subordinate role within the anti-fascist movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Federal Republic of Germany—both before and after 1989—has been influenced deeply by collective memories of the Nazi period and the Holocaust, a seemingly "unmasterable past." In a first phase after unification, memory trends, which had their origin in the mid 1980s, continued, but a second period, beginning around the 1999 move of the capital back to Berlin, however, witnessed the erosion of this older trend and the delayed rise of new memory dynamics. Substantively, there have been three vectors of memory concerning Nazi crimes, German suffering, and the period of division, especially regarding the German Democratic Republic. In this article, I outline the major collective memory dynamics and debates, first from a qualitative and then from a more quantitative perspective where I analyze the holdings of the German National Library. I conclude that an intense period of memory work characterized the postunification years, but the peak of concern was reached several years ago and the German future will be much less beholden to the past. Given inevitable normalizing trends and the unintended consequences of the hegemony of Holocaust memory, Germany's difficult historical legacy increasingly appears to be disappearing or even mastered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the analysis of two exemplary sources pertaining to the genre of the Nahua primordial titles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the aim of this essay is to contribute further to our understanding of how this distinct Nahua colonial genre can be used for the study of Nahua social memory during Spanish colonial times. More precisely, what this present essay endeavors to identify the subtextual and supra-textual layers in these two sources. Second, it aims to highlight the replicated memory formulas applied in these specific texts; and third, to analyze the role of Christianity in these memory plots. By way of these three aspects, the task of this present study is to demonstrate that customs of remembrance, deeply rooted in the practice of a collective social memory were still cherished and kept vibrant during the mid colonial period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although history textbooks are highly revealing sources of what is considered worthy of being included in collective memory, they only tell half the story. The study of the non-official 'parallel pantheons' of popular culture also contribute significantly to understanding patterns of perception and self-perception as well as mental representations of 'Europe.' For more than a century, soccer, Europe's most widely shared social practice, has contributed to shaping perceptions of what can be encompassed under the term 'Europe.' This article focuses on the 'popular maps' of Europe that soccer has drawn over the last half-century and hints at the myths of cultural commonality that underpin them. It appears that while soccer represents a somewhat ambiguous metaphor for contemporary Europe, it can also supply interesting insights into the emergence of horizontal bonds between Europeans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's right-wing nationalists have launched three major attacks on school textbooks over the second half of the twentieth century. Centered on the treatment of colonialism and war, the attacks surfaced in 1955, the late 1970s, and the mid-1990s. This article examines three moments in light of Japanese domestic as well as regional and global political contexts to gain insight into the persistent problem of the Pacific War in historical memory and its refraction in textbook treatments. There are striking similarities as well as critical di erences in the ways the attacks on textbooks recurred and in the conditions of political instability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses reports published within the issue on German collective memory and national identity, including one by Ruth Wittlinger on Angela Merkel and the focus of Germany on the memory of the Holocaust, another by Alexandra Kaiser on German remembrance days and the politics of memory, and one by Erick Langenbacher on the shift towards a focus on the memory of German suffering.

During the course of the 2006 Soccer World Cup, Germans started to celebrate a “new patriotism.” As the construction of national identity is inseparable in Germany from the Nazi past, this occurrence can be considered an indicator of an altered relationship to this past. This article examines these changes by focusing on a nationally recognized site of remembrance, the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, where five matches of the World Cup were played. The convergence of site and event evokes contradictions and ambiguities, such as the encounter of the opposed needs of sports and remembrance at the same location. It shows what problems arise at a site of national collective memory today, when the role of the national collective is challenged by developments like European integration, migration within and to Europe, and the on-going effects of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on the assumption that cultural representations of the past contribute to the establishment and regulation of gendered power relations, this article investigates the representations of female participation in the Nazi regime in the German television series Hitlers Frauen. Stuart Hall's concept of decoding is used for a critical media analysis, asking how men and women are positioned as historical agents or passive objects in the series. In fact, the series plays on the gendered symbols and representations associated with the Third Reich. It reproduces traditional ideas regarding the (non)relation between femininity and politics and evokes a sexualized imaginary where women are seduced by a powerful, charismatic leader. Women are represented as dependent–materially, physically, and emotionally. In this way, the television series contributes to the continuation of traditional gender regimes. Even when the series apparently reacts to ongoing debates about women's role within the Nazi system, it disappoints those who hoped to learn about the reasons, interests, and possibilities of women between 1933 and 1945. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 3 October 1990, the National People's Army (NVA) of the German Democratic Republic, in which about 2.5 million East German citizens served their country, was dissolved. Its personnel either was removed from military service, placed into early retirement, or integrated into the Bundeswehr after a two-year selection and examination process. Since then, the NVA has turned into an object of history with no immediate significance for contemporary German society—despite efforts of former NVA officers to change the official interpretation of 1989-1990. This article examines the processes of remembering and forgetting with regard to East Germany's military heritage since 1990, contrasting the Bundeswehr's politics of memory and “army of unity” ethos not only with the former NVA soldiers' vision of the past, but also with the East German population's general attitude towards their former armed forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on topics related to German collective memory, including the politics of the past under Angela Merkel's government, German memory culture in the 21st century, and German national identity and the Nazi past.

British-German relations have undergone a considerable transformation since 1945 with both countries having to adapt to significant changes in their own status, as well as a very different international environment. Germany's status as a morally and militarily defeated and occupied power in 1945 is in stark contrast to the confident role it is playing at the beginning of the new millennium when—sixty years after the end of World War II—the German chancellor for the first time took part in the VE-Day celebrations of the victors. This article analyzes recent dynamics of collective memory in both countries and examine if and to what extent their collective memories play a role in British-German relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role of cinematic texts in upholding cultural memories concerned with World War II and the Jewish Holocaust in Germany. A visual material is created by the documentaries and fictional films that inform about the wartime past and the way in which it is remembered. The directors of these films are guided by postmemory, where the connection to the source is mediated through imagination and creation. The limitations of second generation to access the past make them dependent on stories and metaphors of the Holocaust that are shared across the national boundaries of remembrance. The cinema provides that medium as it can reach large audiences across national borders and cultural contexts.

What do secular, left-wing Israelis living inside the Green Line have in common with religious, right-wing 'settlers'? Despite their conflicting positions, I argue that there is a depth of commonality that fuels the hatred and intolerance between these groups. This article aims to reveal a positional unity that appears as conflict, difference, and disunity. Resituating the apparently incommensurable discourses, I contend that this discord is best understood within the context of a society that is continually struggling with the outcomes of its settler origins and ongoing settlement activity. The focus is on the arguments between the two groups concerning uses of the past, which serves as a reference from which to demonstrate that the desire, particularly among the secular, to differentiate rather than identify is located in a fear of what today's settler activity reveals about the Zionist project in a broader sense and what it therefore stands to potentially undermine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the culture of memory among the people of South Africa as they embrace democracy and put the apartheid regime behind. This article reflects on the culture of memory that influence official remembering and the efforts of individuals, relative to the District Six Museum issue in Cape Town. The museum emerged out of the Hands Off District Six campaign which was formed in the late eighties to defend the area from redevelopment by British Petroleum.