Introduction

History and Memory

Volumn 17, Issue 1-2, 2005, Pages 5-11

  Confino, Alon ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 62749160892     PISSN: 0935560X     EISSN: 15271994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ham.2005.0012     Document Type: Review

References (9)

1. A recent work that interrogates this topic with similar intensity is Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, NJ, 2003).
2. Two attempts to take account of the state of German historiography put in sharp focus the endeavor behind this volume. In 1989 Michael Geyer and Konrad H. Jarausch edited a special issue of Central European History on new directions in German historiography in light of the postmodern challenge. Several years later, Geoff Eley's edited volume Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870-1930 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996), based on a conference that took place in 1990, summed up the Sonderweg controversies of the previous decades and the new research they had generated. Both projects originated in the pre-reunification period, and thus necessarily reflect that period's historiographical insights and concerns. (The Sonderweg, or special path, interpretation is the view that modern German history diverged from the "normal" history of Western democracies.)
3. Alain Corbain, Time, Desire and Horror: Toward a History of the Senses (Cambridge, 1995), 182.
4. Two important reference points are Pierre Nora's seven-volume project Les Lieux de mémoire (Paris, 1984-92)
5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983; revised and extended ed. 1991).
6. Cited in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (New York, 2003), 285.
7. See Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1988)
8. Walser's speech caused a controversy with Ignatz Bubis, at the time the chairman of the Jewish community in Germany. See Frank Schirrmacher, ed., Die Walser-Bubis-Debatte: Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt/Main, 1999).
9. Albert Camus, OEuvres complètes d'Albert Camus, vol. 2 (Paris, 1983), 277 (my translation).