The memory wave in the humanities has contributed to the impressive revival of cultural history, but the success of memory studies has not been accompanied by significant conceptual and methodological advances in the research of collective memory processes. Most studies on memory focus on the representation of specific events within particular chronological, geographical, and media settings without reflecting on the audiences of the representations in question. As a result, the wealth of new insights into past and present historical cultures cannot (...) be linked conclusively to specific social collectives and their historical consciousness. This methodological problem is even enhanced by the metaphorical use of psychological and neurological terminology, which misrepresents the social dynamics of collective memory as an effect and extension of individual, autobiographical memory. Some of these shortcomings can be addressed through the extensive contextualization of specific strategies of representation, which links facts of representation with facts of reception. As a result, the history of collective memory would be recast as a complex process of cultural production and consumption that acknowledges the persistence of cultural traditions as well as the ingenuity of memory makers and the subversive interests of memory consumers. The negotiations among these three different historical agents create the rules of engagement in the competitive arena of memory politics, and the reconstruction of these negotiations helps us distinguish among the abundance of failed collective memory initiatives on the one hand and the few cases of successful collective memory construction on the other. For this purpose, collective memory studies should adopt the methods of communication and media studies, especially with regard to media reception, and continue to use a wide range of interpretive tools from traditional historiography to poststructural approaches. From the perspective of collective memory studies, these two traditions are closely related and mutually beneficial, rather than mutually exclusive, ways of analyzing historical cultures. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the development of Hayden White's work from Metahistory to the present. It compares his approach to Roland Barthes's study of narrative and historical discourse in order to illustrate the differences between White's structuralist methods and poststructuralist forms of textual analysis. The author puts particular emphasis on the interdependence between the development of White's work and the criticism it has received during the last twenty years. Whereas historians have dismissed White's relativism, literary theorists and intellectual historians have criticized (...) his formalist methods. White's attempts to counter these critiques have gone mostly unnoticed and have been unsuccessful in that they destabilized his original position without proposing a coherent alternative. The question about adequate representations of Nazism, which White has recently addressed, highlights the theoretical problems which have not received enough attention by White or his critics. (shrink)

The former consensus stipulating the singularity and incomprehensibility of Nazism and the "Final Solution" has been challenged in recent years from two perspectives. Microhistorical works and studies of poststructuralist orientation have emphasized the normal and ordinary aspects that link Nazism and the Holocaust to the postwar period. Both approaches differ in their understanding of the concept of historical truth, but together they stress the need for close-range, contextualist methods for studying the emergence of the "Final Solution" and the development of (...) its representation and memorialization since 1945. This paradigmatic change in the perception of Nazism from an exceptional to an exemplary event apparent in recent scholarship in the United States follows similar developments in Germany. In both countries the rejection of the concept of singularity and the use of contextualist methods developed as a result of a more general generational transformation. Younger scholars born after World War II seek to integrate Nazism within its wider historical context and use knowledge about Nazism and the "Final Solution" as a key to better understanding of the modern era and contemporary societies, a project hitherto discouraged by the notion of Nazism's exceptionality. (shrink)

In light of the great interest in interdisciplinary trauma research, this article explores the philosophical-literary concept of cultural trauma from the perspective of psychiatric and psychoanalytical studies of the long-term consequences of the Holocaust. The extensive literature on the psychological after-effects of the Final Solution offers an exceptional opportunity to study the aftermath of extreme violence from different subject positions, including the perspectives of survivors, perpetrators, bystanders, and their descendants. Moving from the epicenter of the historical event of the Holocaust (...) to its psychological periphery, the survey reveals how much the concept of trauma has changed in the course of five decades as a result of political and cultural developments. But the review of the literature also demonstrates that none of the existing concepts of Holocaust trauma is well suited to explain the effects of Holocaust representations on individuals or collectives who encounter the Final Solution only as a media event for educational or entertainment purposes. (shrink)