Aleida Assmann has long been one of the most insightful commentators on the subject of German memory. In studies such as Geschichtsvergessenheit, Geschichtsversessenheit. Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945 (1999), which she cowrote with Ute Frevert, and Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (2006), she has surveyed the ways in which Germans have coped with the legacies of the Nazi and Communist dictatorships and wrestled with their identities as perpetrators and victims. In her new book, she seeks to explain what she describes as a growing “discomfort” with Germany's “memory culture.” Some of the evidence she provides for this trend is convincing. But it ultimately falls short of confirming her concerns. Rather than revealing a burgeoning challenge to Germany's “memory culture,” the book unintentionally confirms its consolidation.

In her introduction, Assmann identifies several factors that explain the incipient sense of discomfort with memory: the accelerating disappearance of the eyewitnesses to the traumatic events of World War II; the fading of the 1968 generation's “interpretive influence” in narrating these events; the rise of a new generation that possesses its own present-day concerns related to globalization, migration, and social diversity; as well as the increasing mediation of the past through cultural (and especially mass media) forms of representation.

Against this backdrop, Assmann devotes most of her attention to discussing the skepticism toward memory that has been visible in the recent writings of various German intellectuals and scholars. She first addresses the critiques of collective memory advanced by the late Reinhart Koselleck, Volkhard Knigge, and Jan Philipp Reemtsma. In response to their claims that remembering is an individual, rather than a group, phenomenon, and that memory is inferior to historiography in providing valid insights into the past, Assmann introduces the concept of “memory culture,” which she defines as an ethically-grounded approach to remembrance that, since its emergence in the 1990s, has been marked by an effort to atone for historical crimes and acknowledge the perspective of the victims who had experienced them. Assmann is right to point to the global emergence of this “memory culture” (or “memory boom,” as other scholars have termed it) as proof that remembrance is, in fact, a group activity; she is equally convincing in refuting the claim of other writers that the Germans' recent obsession with remembrance should be dismissed as insincere or wrongheaded. Assmann takes particular issue with a series of claims advanced by Ulrike Jureit and Christian Schneider in their book, Gefühlte Opfer. Illusionen der Vergangenheitsbewältigung (2012), and Dana Giesecke and Harald Welzer in Das Menschenmögliche. Zur Renovierung der deutschen Erinnernungskultur (2012). In particular, she rejects their contention that Germany's “memory culture” has become an instrumental tool used by the 1968 generation to maintain political influence within German society; that it reflects a bad-faith desire to identify with the Nazis' victims, especially the Jews; that it has become a ritualized expression of official culture and has lost sight of its original countercultural thrust; that it has fallen victim to the trendy moral nostrums of political correctness; that it has become a distraction from more pressing contemporary issues, such as globalization and climate change; and that it needs to shed its national orientation in order to accommodate the requirements of a more multicultural society.

In responding to these charges–in addition to similar ones by older critics, such as Hermann Lübbe and Martin Walser–Assmann spends the rest of her book explaining (and implicitly defending) the emergence of “memory culture” itself. In this discussion, she introduces a variety of concepts relating to remembrance (mostly binary oppositions, such as “historicization” versus “moralism”; Vergangenheitsbewältigung versus Vergangenheitsbewahrung) and explains how Germany's own struggles over memory have mirrored similar ones in Europe and the world at large. In so doing, she highlights the fact that many nations have ceased to focus primarily on their own victimization and have begun to address the suffering of others. She devotes special attention to highlighting the global emergence of a “politics of regret,” and she highlights multiple examples of this important development in the form of various truth commissions and historical apologies. To be sure, Assmann concedes that challenges remain. While she commends European nations for anchoring Holocaust memory within a transnational framework (epitomized by the Stockholm Declaration of 2000), for example, she recognizes that they remain divided about how to balance the memory of Adolf Hitler's crimes with those of Joseph Stalin. She remains confident, however, that a balance can be struck between them, quoting Bernd Faulenbach's observation that neither of these twin traumatic legacies should be permitted to relativize or trivialize the other (“Probleme des Umgangs mit der Vergangenheit im vereinigten Deutschland,” in Deutschland. Eine Nation, doppelte Geschichte. Materialien zum deutschen Selbstverständnis, ed. Werner Weidenfeld [1993], 190). In her conclusion, finally, Assmann typologizes various strategies of remembrance that have emerged over the course of the postwar period, all of which represent sequential phases in the attempt of nations to come to terms with traumatic historical legacies.

The cumulative effect of Assmann's discussion is convincing, but it yields a paradoxical result. In historicizing the rise, and establishing the virtues, of “memory culture” in Germany and beyond, Assmann somewhat undermines her case that it is facing a serious challenge from hostile critics. Viewed against the backdrop of the massive institutionalization of remembrance worldwide, the writings of various German intellectuals (and the appearance of scattered mass media events, such as the apologetic 2013 television documentary, Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter, which Assmann cites on several occasions) do not seem to represent much of a threat to remembrance. This is not to say that Germany's memory culture does not face any challenges at all. In a world that has experienced its share of tumultuous events since the turn of the millennium, the forces that are shaping the present inevitably will influence views of the past. Assmann recognizes this fact, of course, and alludes to some of these forces in her study. But she refrains from tying them together with any larger organizing concept. Oddly enough, she refrains from employing a concept that would be of service in this regard—the idea of “normalization”—even though she has used it in her previous scholarship. This oversight does not mar Assmann's analysis as such, but it prevents it from achieving its full potential. While Das Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur is a timely, engaging, and insightful survey of the rise of memory culture, it could go further in explaining the growing “discomfort” with it.