Suchergebnisse

As the inestimable Harold Wilson once put it, "a week is a longtime in politics." Certainly, the evolution of collective memory andscholarship devoted to it is much slower than the pace of day-to-daypolitics. Yet, there are periods of rapid change—of paradigm shiftseven—where the landscape shifts rapidly over a relatively shortperiod of time. This special issue, we think, captures one of theseperiods of rapid change. Compared to the last special thematic issueof German Politics and Society from 20051 and even compared tomany books published in the last few years, the state of collectivememory in Germany appears very different today. Most prominently,Holocaust-centered memory is foregrounded to a muchlesser extent than previously.

The collapse of the Iron Curtain, the renationalization of eastern Europe, and the simultaneous eastward expansion of the European Union have all impacted the way the past is remembered in today's eastern Europe. At the same time, in recent years, the Europeanization of Holocaust memory and a growing sense of the need to stage a more "self-critical" memory has significantly changed the way in which western Europe commemorates and memorializes the past. The increasing dissatisfaction among scholars with the blanket, undifferentiated use of the term "collective memory" is evolving in new directions. This volume brings the tension into focus while addressing the state of memory theory itself

The Allied agreement after the Second World War did not only partition Germany, it divided the nation along the fault-lines of a new bipolar world order. This inner border made Germany a unique place to experience the Cold War, and the "German question" in this post-1945 variant remained inextricably entwined with the vicissitudes of the Cold War until its end. This volume explores how social and cultural practices in both German states between 1949 and 1989 were shaped by the existence of this inner border, putting them on opposing sides of the ideological divide between the Western and Eastern blocs, as well as stabilizing relations between them. This volume's interdisciplinary approach addresses important intersections between history, politics, and culture, offering an important new appraisal of the German experiences of the Cold War