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This paper examines WWII forced labour memory politics in Germany and Japan by drawing from Barkan's concept of amending historical injustices. After lengthy negotiations, germany reached in 2000 a milestone agreement compensating victims individually, while in Japan, settlements, consolation payments and apologies have been overshadowed by a revival of revisionist historical narratives and victim denial. It is argued that the official recognition of forced labour as historical injustice made a mutually acceptable outcome possible in Germany and helped to shape a genuine historical memory in victim nations. In Japan, by contrast, an alliance of politicians, bureaucrats and academics has been reconsecrating revisionism as official position. The revisionist inability to recognize victims and admit mistakes has implications for South Korea as the rift between right-wing pro-revisionists and left-wing nationalists divides the country and prevents the formation of a shared collective memory. unintended consequences have dimmed prospects for a settlement. [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]

Commemorative street names belong to the ideological foundations of the socio-political order. The process of renaming streets figures prominently in a stage of regime change. As a measure of historical revision, renaming the past is a twofold procedure that involves both the de-commemoration of the version of history associated with and supportive of the old regime and the commemoration of heroes and events that represent the new regime and its version of history. This paper examines political processes and commemorative priorities and strategies that directed the renaming of streets in post-World War II Berlin during two successive municipal administrations. The first part of the article explores the failed project promoted by the unelected communist administration that ruled Berlin between May 1945 and October 1946 aimed to achieve a comprehensive odonymic reform that went beyond a mere purge of explicit Nazi street names. The second part examines the substantially downscaled purge of Berlin's register of street names accomplished by the SPD-led city government that took office after the October 1946 democratic election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Dealing with the past is an essential part of transitional justice. It combines the four main pillars: the right to know, the right to justice, the right to reparation, and the guarantee of non-recurrence. Dealing with the past indicates that a significant amount of time has passed since the crime and injustice. Therefore, the problem of forgetting and modifying history deliberately or unconsciously forms the core of the instrumentalisation of dealing with the past. On the one hand, unconscious forgetting or modifying is usually the result of a non-responsible educational system (youth and adult education); on the other hand, deliberate modification of the past is driven by the desire to reach an aim which morally cannot be supported by its measures. One can observe governmental desire to modify and therefore instrumentalise history to secure the government's power, divert attention from domestic issues and thus shape national pride/patriotism which is built on a selective historical memory. This article highlights the development of German and Polish relationships in the context of reparations for World War II and a selective history spread by the German movement called 'Prussian Claims Society' that fights, using selective Nazi analogies, to reclaim former German property from Poland represented by the Polish government. The movement also wants to create a selective history to divert attention from the national separation of the population. The aim of the article is to show how Germans and Poles handle the topic of reparations for World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes the Oder region as an example to demonstrate the way in which memories of the Second World War and the postwar years are cultivated by residents of the region, and furthermore, how the place of remembrance of the Oder–Neisse line was encoded by Germans and Poles respectively. The Oder region saw an almost complete population exchange, which was a result of several migration processes. On both sides of the Oder–Neisse line, the memories of these events were manipulated politically and influenced the collective memory of the respective groups. The following text is based on the results of an Oral History project (www.pyrzany-kozaki.eu) carried out under my direction in 2011, as well as on the analysis of memoirs written by Polish new settlers in the 1950s and on reports by German refugees and expellees. These sources were the main focus of my research on the topic of ‘“Poland's Wild West” – forced migration and cultural appropriation of the Oder region 1945–1948’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

The annihilation of the European Jews, the Holocaust, had in ensuing decades occupied a different place in the collective memory of Scandinavian countries than in other parts of former Nazi dominated Europe. This was due to most Scandinavian Jews, and especially Danish Jews, being rescued from deportation and extermination in the Nazi extermination camps. This made the rescue of the Jews central to the collective memory of the German occupation, and it might explain why the Holocaust was long concealed behind this ‘master narrative’. In more recent years, historical research has advanced a more nuanced view of the Danish rescue in October 1943. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using the example of the city of Kassel, this article examines the way in which the historic city centres lived on in the consciousness of the inhabitants after the destruction during World War II. It demonstrates the need to review the generally received opinion that the German people had initially greeted the extensive loss of their built heritage as a ‘welcome disaster’, and began only thirty years later, as modernism gave way to postmodernism, to mourn their former cities. The article traces a genealogy of longing for the old city as it was imagined to have existed prior to the destruction. Nostalgia over the lost city enjoyed a first boom in the decade following the war, and never completely disappeared thereafter. The politics of longing were not straightforward but subject to significant reversals. In the light of this, the article argues that historians of the Federal Republic should no longer discount the nostalgia for an idealized past as being merely a momentary delay in the onward march of history, but should instead take it seriously both as evidence of the long-term consequences of the violence of war and as expressing unease with the costliness of modernization itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Like most aspects of German politics and society after 1945, post-war German foreign policy has traditionally been greatly influenced by the legacy of Germany's National Socialist past and the Second World War. The semi-sovereign and divided nature of the West German state along with the strong argumentative force of collective memory in foreign policy discourse ensured a strong presence of Germany's historical legacy in both institutional and discursive terms resulting in a foreign policy which was characterised by self-limitation, a strong commitment to multilateralism and a civilian foreign policy culture. This article will argue that the interpretation of German collective memory of the Holocaust and the Second World War underwent significant changes under the red-green governments between 1998 and 2005, in particular with regard to the use of force. Although German collective memory continued to be present during this period, it lost its predictability and was used in a variety of crises to justify a range of responses, including military action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

As the most important medium of memory, German television has refracted intellectual debates about the burden of the past and influenced the popular perception of nazism for generations of viewers since the 1960s. However, limited access to archives and intellectual prejudice have so far prevented a full appreciation of television's role in the evolution of German collective memory. This article addresses this gap in the scholarship on contemporary Germany by taking a closer look at the historical coverage broadcast by the West German public television station ZDF between 1963 and 1993. In the course of our analysis the development of the contents of three decades of programming on the history of the Third Reich is linked to the available qualitative and quantitative television reception data for the same period. The evidence suggests that West German viewers were quite interested in the history of nazism and the second world war. With the exception of the mid-1970s there is no indication that the audience systematically avoided the historical coverage of the ZDF. But the data also indicates that this surprising willingness to engage with the burden of the past reflects significant changes in media content and political disposition. In the 1960s, television recycled the apologetic plot structures of West Germany's postwar historical culture. As a result, the programmes all but ignored the Holocaust and provided a very schematic, self-serving image of the past for the benefit of viewers who had themselves experienced the Third Reich. In the 1980s a more complex and self-critical vision of the nazi past appeared on the screen and was appreciated by a more diverse audience, including a majority of viewers who shared no personal responsibility for the crimes of the regime. But even the improved programming of the 1980s for the most part avoided any direct confrontation with the perpetrators and bystanders of the `Final Solution'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts of reports on German politics and society including "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright: SPD-Left Party/PDS Coalitions in the Eastern German Länder," by Jonathan Olsen, "British-German Relations and Collective Memory," by Ruth Wittlinger and "Spying on Terrorists: Germany in Comparative Perspective," by A. James McAdams.