Germany Collective Memory Research Paper

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The Politics of Memory and the Poetics of History The purpose of this final chapter is to draw some comparative conclusions from the national case studies presented in this volume and to show how they contribute to reframing the study of memory. This is not an easy undertaking, especially for historians whose suspicion of generalizing statements has been reinforced by their scholarly focus on a subject—collective forms of remembrance—which is highly contested both theoretically and historiographically.1 Bearing this cautionary premise in mind, we have approached our task somewhat obliquely. First, we offer an overview of the current state of memory studies that highlights the specific theoreticalmethodological issues that our case studies address and clarify. Informed by these preliminary reflections, we then turn to the case studies to illustrate what we believe to be the most generalizable traits which they reveal about the institutionalization of the memory of Nazism and World War II in Europe from 1945 to the present.