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The author reflects on the paper he presented at a conference in La Plata, Argentina in September 2004, on the topic of "The State and the Politics of Memory: Archives, Museums, and Education." His paper is about discourses and sites of public memory and history in Berlin, Germany. The theoretical dimension of the paper he gave argued for the persistent dialectic of memory and history, specifically for the sharpening of discourses of memory according to the rules of history. He was arguing against the appropriation of history by memory in the tradition of Pierre Nora, and for the infusion of memory qua raw material by historical reasoning in what he takes to be the central Freudian argument.

ABSTRACT '68 has become a powerful cipher for the political renewal of post-war (West) Germany, but references to women and their impact on social (and political) changes are mostly absent from personal and collective memorials. Using the notion of cultural memory work as social constructivism, the paper explores how the politics of memory, femininity and gender reflecting un-negotiated gender issues, especially the lingering myth of traditional femininity, are pivotal in second-wave feminism's low visibility and esteem in spite of the movement's apparent success in promoting women's legal and social equality. Dating back to the contested relationship between '68ers and second-wave feminism, anti-feminist discourse in the media employs strategies of displacing the social arguments of equality feminism into the erotic and personal, presenting feminist gender negotiations as ridiculous, irrational, prudish, anti-democratic, and even dangerous. Equality feminism as a social movement promoted and supported mostly by women does not easily fit into the traditional categories of German paternalistic national history and present memory culture in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role played by the encounter of history and personal memories in the difficult process of coming to terms with the Stasi in present-day eastern Germany. While historians have made substantial progress over the last two decades in accounting for the wide range of ways in which the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is remembered by East Germans, the memorials and museums of the reunified Germany remain unable to integrate memories of dictatorial oppression and happiness in everyday life. Sites commemorating state repression are thus often assumed to lack impact on former GDR citizens whose memories differ from official versions of history. These assumptions are tested for the Bautzen Memorial, formerly known as the ‘celebrities’ prison' of the East German Ministry of State Security. Focusing on the differing receptions of GDR memorial sites, this article draws on interviews with two former political prisoners and with visitors to the Memorial who grew up in socialist East Germany. It argues that the open approach of the Memorial, which leaves visitors to draw their own conclusions from the exhibition, allows different stakeholders to find ways of personal engagement with the past at the site despite the disparities with their own memories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines how the uses of memory in turn-of-the-century Lorraine structured political discourse and presented enduring difficulties for the actions of German administrators and local community leaders. In this border region, memory was always contested and challenged, and thereby unstable. This paper approaches “the politics of French memory” through the examination of various pro-French “memory societies” and networks such as the Souvenir Français. The central question is how did conflicts over memory impact Lorraine's political life and its place in the German Empire in the years leading up to the Great War? Regarding this point, the growth of nationalism is analysed as a phenomenon that reached far beyond French nationalist circles. [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]

This article considers the following questions: how and with the aid of which resources was the memory of forced labour during World War II constructed and recreated in the public space of Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine? How has the perception of the place of forced labourers in the general pantheon of war participants changed? And what kinds of transformations took place in the meaningful emphases and symbolic accretion of images associated with this group of people? The initial focus is on the Soviet version of this memory because some correction must be made to the theory that was formulated in the early 1990s and which gradually acquired normative significance in post-Soviet (including Ukrainian) journalism and scholarly literature: namely, that the history, creativity, and memory of this population group were "forgotten" in the official Soviet version of the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]