Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-wq484 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T17:15:51.982Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What Does It Mean to Normalize the Past?: Official Memory in German Politics since 1989

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Jeffrey K. Olick
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In 1959, Theodor Adorno delivered a lecture whose title and theme played on Immanuel Kant’s famous essay “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” {Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?). Kant’s essay had begun with the statement that enlightenment is humanity’s emergence from self-imposed nonage. Called “What Does It Mean to Come to Terms with the Past?” (Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?), Adorno’s lecture takes issue with tendencies in the Federal Republic of Germany to wish away difficult legacies of the Nazi period. Evoking a parallel between Kant’s “enlightenment” (Aufklärung) and the contemporary expressions “coming to terms” or “working through” (Aufarbeitung), Adorno poses a high critical standard for German political culture. According to his diagnosis, the Federal Republic was more concerned with getting beyond the past, with avoiding difficult memory through what Adorno calls “an unconscious and not-so-unconscious defense against guilt,” than with the genuine working through that would be required to “break its spell.” The latter would demand an act of clear consciousness, a difficult process much like the work of psychoanalysis. According to Adorno, the defensive unwillingness in the Federal Republic to confront the past—at both the personal and official levels—indicated not the persistence of fascist tendencies against democracy (e.g., neo-Nazi groups) but of fascist tendencies within democracy. The latter, he argues, are much more insidious.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 22 , Issue 4: Memory and the nation , Winter 1998 , pp. 547 - 571
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1998 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adorno, Theodor (1986 [1959]) “What does coming to terms with the past mean?,” in Hartman, Geoffrey (ed.) Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 114–29.Google Scholar
Baldwin, Peter, ed. (1990) Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Greiffenhagen, Martin, and Greiffenhagen, Sylvia (1993) Ein schwieriges Vaterland: Zur politischen Kultur im vereinigten Deutschland. Munich: List.Google Scholar
Halbwachs, Maurice (1992) On Collective Memory, ed. Coser, Lewis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hartman, Geoffrey, ed. (1986) Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Herf, Jeffrey (1991) War by Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance, and the Battle of the Euromissiles. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Herf, Jeffrey (1997) Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Herles, Helmut, ed. (1991) Die Hauptstadt Debatte. Bonn: Bouvier.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Ranger, Terence, eds. (1983) The Invention of Tradition. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jarausch, Konrad H. (1994) The Rush to German Unity. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jaspers, Karl (1987 [1946]) Die Schuldfrage: Zur politischen Haftung Deutschlands. Munich: Piper.Google Scholar
Maier, Charles (1988) The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Mohler, Armin (1991) Der Nasenring: Die vergangenheitsbewältigung vor und nach dem Full der Mauer. Munich: Langen Müller.Google Scholar
Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth (1991) Demoskopische Geschichtsstunde: Vom Wartesaal der Geschichte zun Deutshen Einheit. Oshabriick: A. Fromm.Google Scholar
Olick, Jeffrey K. (1993) “The sins of the fathers: The Third Reich and West German legitimation, 1949-1989.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University.Google Scholar
Olick, Jeffrey K.(forthcoming) “Genre memories and memory genres: A sociological poetics of May 8th, 1945 commemoration in the Federal Republic of Germany.” American Sociological Review.Google Scholar
Olick, Jeffrey K., and Levy, Daniel (1997) “Collective memory and cultural constraint: Holocaust myth and rationality in German politics.” American Sociological Review 62: 921–36.Google Scholar
Olick, Jeffrey K., and Robbins, Joyce (1998) “Social memory studies: From ‘collective memory’ to the historical sociology of mnemonic practices.” Annual Review of Sociology 24:105–40.Google Scholar
Rabinbach, Anson (1988) “The Jewish question in the German question.” New German Critique 4:159–92.Google Scholar
Schudson, Michael (1989) “The present in the past and the past in the present.” Communication 11: 105–13.Google Scholar
Schwartz, Barry (1991) “Social change and collective memory: The democratization of George Washington.” American Sociological Review 56: 221–36.Google Scholar
Schwartz, Barry (1996) “Memory as a cultural system: Abraham Lincoln in World War II.” American Sociological Review 61: 908–27.Google Scholar
Schwartz, Barry, Zerubavel, Yael, and Bartlett, Bernice (1986) “The recovery of Masada: A study in collective memory.” Sociological Quarterly 27 (2): 147–64.Google Scholar
Scott, James C. (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Sturmer, Michael (1987) “Geschichte im geschichtslosem Land,” in Historikerstreit. Munich: Piper: 36–8.Google Scholar
Thompson, Paul (1988) The Voice of the Past: Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wolffsohn, Michael (1995) Die Deutschland Akte: Tatsachen und Legenden. Munich: Ferenczy bei Bruckmann.Google Scholar