Ambiguous Memory ― The Nazi Past and German National Identity

Ambiguous Memory examines the role of memory in the building of a new national identity in reunified Germany. The author maintains that the contentious debates surrounding contemporary monuments to the Nazi past testify to the ambiguity of German memory and the continued link of Nazism with contemporary German national identity. Certain monuments, and the ways Germans have viewed them, contribute to the different ways Germans have dealt with the past, and how they continue to deal with it as one country is discussed. Kattago concludes that West Germans have internalized their Nazi past as a normative orientation for the democratic culture of West Germany, while East Germans have universalized Nazism and the Holocaust, transforming it into an abstraction in which the Jewish question is down played. In order to form a new collective memory, the author argues that unified Germany must contend with these conflicting views of the past, incorporating certain aspects of both views.

SIOBHAN KATTAGO is Adjunct Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study of New York University./e She has published articles on German collective memory and national identity.