Collective Memory and Nonpublic Opinion: A Historical Note on a Methodological Controversy About a Political Problem

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This article describes a little‐known moment in the history of social research, the so‐called Group Experiment (Gruppenexperiment) conducted in Germany in 1950–51 by members of the reconstituted Frankfurt school. That research, I argue, provides a missing link in the history of the ideas of deliberative democracy and public discourse, areas of political theory in which the substantive legacies of pragmatism and interactionism are particularly significant. Most important, however, the Gruppenexperiment provides a model for rethinking certain methodological and conceptual problems plaguing contemporary research on collective memory, namely, the tendency to reify it.