Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History

To understand how memory has made a difference in the lives of ordinary Germans, we need to explore "the private spheres of family, friends, workplace, and neighborhood" (p. 177) as well as the more familiar terrain of public and official ceremonies and monuments. To understand why Germans have embraced certain versions of the German past, yet rejected others, we need to examine the gaps that often emerge between officially-approved public memories and private images of the past, as well as the frictions between "individual memories based on experience and collective memories based on constructing a usable past"(p. 207).