Posted: 12 February 2008
Volume assessing how post-unification Germany confronts its collective memory receives outstanding academic title award
German Memory Contests, a volume of fourteen selected academic articles by scholars from Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and Ireland, which explores current German memory debates, has been selected as an ‘outstanding academic title’ by Choice, the main US academic titles review journal.
“Comprising just over 9% of the titles reviewed by Choice during the past year, and less than 3% of the more than 25,000 titles submitted to Choice during the same period, ‘outstanding academic titles’ are truly the best of the best,” says Irving E Rockwood, Editor and Publisher at Choice.
The volume, co-edited by Anne Fuchs, Professor of Modern German, UCD School of Languages and Literatures, University College Dublin; Dr Mary Cosgrove, Lecturer in German, University of Edinburgh; and Dr Georg Grote, UCD School of Languages and Literatures, University College Dublin, touches on gender, generations, memory and postmemory, trauma theory, ethnicity, historiography, and family narrative.
Taking issue with the concept of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (coming to terms with the National Socialist past) which after 1945 guided nearly all debate on the topic, the contributors to this volume view contemporary German culture through the more dynamic concept of ‘memory contests’. This provides a circumspect view of German debates on the past, departing, as have recent German debates, from the tone of censorship that has so often accompanied these discussions.
The idea of memory contests asserts that all forms of memory, public or private, can be understood as ongoing processes of negotiating identity in the present. Producing a comprehensive picture of current German debates, the volume sheds light on the struggle to construct a German identity mindful of, but not wholly defined by, the horrors of National Socialism and the Holocaust.
The publication of the volume was made possible by the support of the Humanities Institute of Ireland at University College Dublin. It was also assisted by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities which awarded a senior fellowship to Anne Fuchs.
>> 'German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film and Discource since 1990' is published by Camden House
