ISBN:
9781135909819
Language:
English
Pages:
1 online resource (238 pages)
Parallel Title:
Olick, Jeffrey K., 1964 - The politics of regret
DDC:
303.601
Keywords:
Political atrocities
;
Electronic books
;
Kollektives Gedächtnis
;
Schuld
;
Reue
;
Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit
;
Politische Verantwortung
;
Kollektives Gedächtnis
;
Reue
;
Das Grausige
;
Politische Verantwortung
Abstract:
In the past decade, Jeffrey Olick has established himself as one of the world's pre-eminent sociologists of memory (and, related to this, both cultural sociology and social theory). His recent book on memory in postwar Germany, In the House of the Hangman (University of Chicago Press, 2005) has garnered a great deal of acclaim. This book collects his best essays on a range of memory related issues and adds a couple of new ones. It is more conceptually expansive than his other work and will serve as a great introduction to this important theorist. In the past quarter century, the issue of memory has not only become an increasingly important analytical category for historians, sociologists and cultural theorists, it has become pervasive in popular culture as well. Part of this is a function of the enhanced role of both narrative and representation - the building blocks of memory, so to speak - across the social sciences and humanities. Just as importantly, though, there has also been an increasing acceptance of the notion that the past is no longer the province of professional historians alone. Additionally, acknowledging the importance of social memory has not only provided agency to ordinary people when it comes to understanding the past, it has made conflicting interpretations of the meaning of the past more fraught, particularly in light of the terrible events of the twentieth century. Olick looks at how catastrophic, terrible pasts - Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa - are remembered, but he is particularly concerned with the role that memory plays in social structures. Memory can foster any number of things - social solidarity, nostalgia, civil war - but it always depends on both the nature of the past and the cultures doing the remembering. Prior to his studies of individual episodes, he fully develops his theory of memory and society,
Abstract:
Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Preface -- Part I -- 1. Introduction: From Collective Memory to the Politics of Regret -- The Society of Narratives -- The German Case -- Halbwachs' Legacies -- The Dynamics of Collective Remembering -- Collective Memory and Historical Sociology -- The Sociology of Retrospection -- The Politics of Regret -- Conclusion -- 2. Collective Memory: The Two Cultures -- Origins -- Two Cultures -- Collected versus Collective Memory -- Collected Memory -- Collective Memory -- An Example: Individual and Collective Dimensions of Trauma -- Conclusions -- 3. Collective Memory and Cultural Constraint: Holocaust Myth and Rationality in German Politics -- New Political Culture Analysis and the Interpretive Turn -- Mythic and Rational Logics of Cultural Constraint -- Proscription: Taboos and Prohibitions -- Prescription: Duties and Requirements -- Holocaust Myth and Rationality in German Political Culture -- Strategy and Morality in German Rehabilitation -- The Mytho-Logics of Identity: Perpetration and Denial -- Taboos and Transgression Costs: The Jenninger Affair -- The Historians' Dispute: From Taboo to Prohibition -- Conclusions -- 4. Genre Memories and Memory Genres: A Dialogical Analysis of May 8, 1945, Commemorations in the Federal Republic of Germany -- Genre Memories and Memory Genres -- May 8, 1945, in West German History -- Period 1: Defeat, Liberation, and the German Victim -- Period 2: Liberation and the Pan-European Future -- Period 3: Normalcy and Normalization -- Period 4: Normalization through Relativization -- Period 5: Commemoration in the New Germany -- Conclusion -- 5. Figurations of Memory: A Process-Relational Methodology, Illustrated on the German Case -- Introduction -- The Process-Relational Critique -- Four Process-Relational Counterconcepts -- Field -- Medium.
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