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Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Part 1. Introduction -- 1. Placing Memory in Germany -- 2. The Sociology of Collective Memory -- 3. Prologues: The Origins of West German Memory -- Part 2. The Reliable Nation -- 4. Bonn Is Not Weimar -- 5. Expiation and Explanation -- 6. Germany in the West -- 7. The Return of the Repressed -- 8. The Reliable Nation -- Part 3. The Moral Nation -- 9. Seeds of Change -- 10. The Grand Coalition and the Wider World -- 11. Social-Liberal Guilt -- 12. The Moral Nation -- Part 4. The Normal Nation -- 13. West Germany's Normal Problems -- 14. The New Conservatism -- 15. The Politics of History -- 16. Beyond Bitburg -- 17. The Normal Nation -- Part 5. Conclusions -- 18. Epilogues: Berlin Is Not Bonn -- 19. History, Memory, and Temporality -- Appendix -- References -- Index.

In the past decade, Jeffrey Olick has established himself as one of the world's pre-eminent sociologists of memory (and, related to this, both cultural sociology and social theory). His recent book on memory in postwar Germany, In the House of the Hangman (University of Chicago Press, 2005) has garnered a great deal of acclaim. This book collects his best essays on a range of memory related issues and adds a couple of new ones. It is more conceptually expansive than his other work and will serve as a great introduction to this important theorist. In the past quarter century, the issue of memor

Abstract: Observing the efflorescence of scholarly and public discourse about memory and commemoration since about the 1970s, historians and others have expressed concerns about "the memory boom" and "the memory industry." Referring instead, and less negatively, to "the mnemonic turn," this article responds to those concerns. It shows that many critiques were based on a Manichean distinction between "history" and "memory"—and between "historiography" and "memory studies"—that led to faulty predictions about the future of scholarly and public interest in memory. It makes a strong case for a robust memory studies that seeks not to displace historical truth-telling but to work alongside it to understand when, where, and how historiography might or might not be an effective response to problematic memory politics and practices.

What have been the contributions of social memory studies to the discourse of German history, particularly about the Nazi past? This essay seeks to distinguish between the memory boom in politics and culture and the more durable insights of social theory and historiography about memory, including insights about this memory boom itself. In particular, it explores mythologies of 'turning points' in the discourse of memory, arguing that the attribution of such turning points is often overstated. To be sure, 1989 did mark significant ruptures. But comparing present debates to the Historikerstreit (historians' dispute) of the mid-1980s, and the Historikerstreit to earlier debates shows that as much has stayed the same as has changed. We remember not just the Nazi past, but the previous ways in which we have remembered the Nazi past, and our mnemonic practices are as much comments on earlier practices as on the event itself. ; Was haben die neuen "Social Memory Studies" zu den Diskursen über die jüngste deutsche Geschichte beigetragen, insbesondere zur Auseinandersetzung mit der NS-Vergangenheit? Dieser Aufsatz versucht zu unterscheiden zwischen dem "memory boom" in der Politik und der Kultur sowie den tieferen Einsichten der Sozialtheorie und der Geschichtswissenschaft, inklusive den Einsichten über den "memory boom" selbst. Untersucht werden insbesondere die Mythologien von "Weichenstellungen" in den Erinnerungsdiskursen, bei denen es sich oft um übertriebene Zuschreibungen handelt. Zweifellos markiert das Jahr 1989 wichtige Veränderungen. Doch vergleicht man gegenwärtige Debatten mit dem "Historikerstreit" und diesen wiederum mit früheren Debatten, so zeigt sich, dass es neben Veränderungen auch etliche Kontinuitäten gibt. Wir gedenken nicht allein der NS-Vergangenheit, sondern beziehen uns im Gedenken ebenso auf frühere Praktiken dieses Gedenkens.

Is (or are) memory studies, social or otherwise, a field? If so, does anything hold it together beyond the mere use of the phrase 'collective memory'? Memory studies is simultaneously still in its charismatic phase, though it no longer has a right to be, as well as highly resistant to efforts to escape from it, though it clearly needs to do so. To be a field, it needs a memory of its own. Adapted from the source document.

What have been the contributions of social memory studies to the discourse of German history, particularly about the Nazi past? This essay seeks to distinguish between the memory boom in politics and culture and the more durable insights of social theory and historiography about memory, including insights about this memory boom itself. In particular, it explores mythologies of 'turning points' in the discourse of memory, arguing that the attribution of such turning points is often overstated. To be sure, 1989 did mark significant ruptures. But comparing present debates to the Historikerstreit (historians' dispute) of the mid-1980s, and the Historikerstreit to earlier debates shows that as much has stayed the same as has changed. We remember not just the Nazi past, but the previous ways in which we have remembered the Nazi past, and our mnemonic practices are as much comments on earlier practices as on the event itself.