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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History Stephan Jaeger Alon Confino. Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006. 306 pp. US $24.95 (Paperback). ISBN 978-0807857229. Historical remembrance, in particular of topics such as World War II, the GDR, or – recently revived – the RAF terrorism in the 1970s, has become a central theme in German public historical culture. In the wake of this development, Alon Confino – indebted to the French historical movement of the Annales – tries to develop historical perspectives on Germany as a remembrance culture using examples from the time period between 1871 and 1990. However, the period immediately following World War II receives the most attention. The book is divided into two parts: “The Local Life of Nationhood: Germany as Heimat, 1871–1990” and “Memory as Historical Narrative and Method.” This organization of the book confuses the reader who expects a layout of the theoretical grounding of the book’s method before its application. Confino’s four chapters on the concept of “Heimat” (the local) are the strengths of his book. He convincingly shows how Heimat developed through the Wilhelmine Empire, the Third Reich, West Germany, and the GDR. On the one hand, the concept is closely related to nationhood, but it also offers interchangeability between local, regional, and national identities. This flexibility provided for rhetorical possibilities for talking about nationhood in postwar West Germany: “it allowed one to link to a selective personal experience of the Third Reich, while sidestepping moral questions” (91). In his chapter on the evolution of the Heimat image in the GDR, Confino demonstrates how traditional meanings of Heimat, such as love of the locality and of the surrounding nature, became more GDR-specific through a shift to class. Even so, this section of the book could have been strengthened in two respects: Except for the analysis of Edgar Reitz’s television series Heimat (chapter two), which Confino reads as an uncritical reproduction of the Heimat myth, no [End Page 93] attention is paid to fictional or artistic sources, whether in literature, film, or the fine arts. Consequently, Confino does not discuss the emergence of the explicit concept of Heimat and its many images that could, for example, be traced back to the romantic reinvention of the Middle Ages and the evolving imaginary concept of the German nation in the early nineteenth century. The second part of the book, which is much less coherent, consists of a chapter on Freud and Moses, a methodological chapter on collective memory and cultural history, a general chapter on telling German history, and chapters on the imagery of tourism after 1945 as well as on traces of National Socialism in the post-World War II Germany. Confino tries to make a case for why memory should be more than a tool for historians; it should serve as a “meaningful metaphor to describe the state, development, and changes of the discipline [of history]” (156). One of the most interesting observations in the second half of the book is that tourism functions as an example of a discourse that allowed for the complex mutual processes of remembering and forgetting. The weaknesses of Confino’s book lie in its structure and style. About two thirds (147 of 224 pages) have been published previously as articles. In addition to a prologue and two brief prefaces, there are only three previously unpublished articles, of which only the one on the East German imagination of Heimat provides new and systematic insights into “Germany as a Culture of Remembrance.” Confino did not really rework his articles for a monograph publication, which leads to infinite repetitions of the same phrases and arguments and an overall tiresome reading experience. Vague theoretical concepts are displayed throughout the book. Confino’s presentation of himself as an overt narrator of history who reflects upon his method and his own biography assists the reader in understanding the author’s thought processes, but does not necessarily contribute to developing the overall argument of his book. For example, Confino jumps from tourism as a social practice to the historicizing of the...