According to the German sociologist Mario Rainer Lepsius, the three states that were erected on the ruins of the Third, or Greater, German Reich following the end of World War II, differed in the way they dealt with the National Socialist past. Whereas the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) managed to “internalize” this part of history for the sake of justifying its postwar effort to build an enduring democracy, the Republic of Austria opted for an “externalization” of responsibility by attributing responsibility for National Socialism exclusively to Germany. The German Democratic Republic, for its part, cultivated a “universalization” of the polluted past by linking National Socialism as a specific form of fascism to the universal concept of monopoly capitalism. In a certain sense, the FRG seemed ready to accept that Germany had been a country of perpetrators between 1933 and 1945. Contrary to this self-perception, Austria, for a long time, regarded itself exclusively as a victim of German aggression, while East Germany cultivated the tradition of Communist resistance.

In the published version of her PhD thesis (University of Heidelberg), Katrin Hammerstein does not outright discard Lepsius's classification. With good reason, however, she points to the fact that the differentiation between internalization, externalization, and universalization is in many respects too restrictive an approach. Instead of presenting a typological scheme of politics of memory in the three German-speaking countries succeeding the Greater German Reich, she pays heed to binational or trinational references. Therefore, she does not confine herself to presenting the official and societal discourses used in the three countries. The strength of her book lies in the hermeneutically motivated analysis of interdependencies.

By combining a comparative and a transnational approach, Hammerstein challenges the notion that each country had its own, typologically isolated discourse on the National Socialist past. Assessing an impressive amount of existing scientific literature and historical sources, she unfolds parallels, analogies, commonalities, and several implicit or explicit mutual references among the three countries. Thus, for example, all three of them at times made efforts to present themselves as victims misled by a relatively small elite of the National Socialist regime, thereby ignoring that millions of Germans and Austrians had participated in the establishment and operation of the Greater German Reich. A further commonality between the two German states is that they both (ab)used the National Socialist past to delegitimize their counterpart in the context of the Cold War. For East Germany, the regime in the West was nothing else but a new form of capitalist fascism; in West German opinion, the East had simply moved from one totalitarian system to another.

At the latest from the 1980s onward, “connected memories” gradually became predominant over “divided memories.” Outstanding catalysts were the famous speech that the Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker held in the German Parliament on 8 May 1985, the Austrian Waldheim Affair one year later, and a steady recognition of non-Communist resistance fighters and victims on the part of the East German regime since 1988. Although Hammerstein clarifies that none of these events started from nothing, they enhanced critical discussions on the polluted past within each of these countries, while paving the way for a clearer insight into the common responsibility of Germans and Austrians for the historically unique crimes committed in the name of the people of the erstwhile Greater German Reich. The end of the Cold War and German unification in 1989–90 accelerated this process of rapprochement in the field of memory politics. All in all, it cannot be denied that, among the three countries, the FRG established itself as a role model for most aspects of postwar discourse. Occasionally, however, West Germany was surpassed. Austria, for instance, took the lead in the rehabilitation of deserters or in commemorating the fatal lot of the Jews in form of monuments.

This review on Hammerstein's remarkable study cannot be brought to an end without noting two shortcomings. To facilitate further research, the book definitely should have included an index of names. Furthermore, it would have been illuminating if the author had paid some attention to forms of remembrance specifically honoring henchmen and perpetrators, such as fallen soldiers of the Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS or persons who did not belong to the primary victims of National Socialism: Jews, Slavic peoples, or communists. In Vienna, for example, until 2014 tribute was still being paid in a church dedicated to the Austrian military to the memory of general Alexander Löhr; among others this man had been responsible for the bombing of Warsaw and Belgrade and for massacres among civilians in Greece and on the Balkans during World War II. And up to the 1960s, in numerous places commemorative stones dedicated to German and Austrian prisoners of war detained in Soviet camps (Kriegsheimkehrer) constituted an additional form of collective remembrance. The same can be said about remembrance of Sudeten Germans who had been expelled from Czechoslovakia at the end of the war.

Nevertheless, Hammerstein's book on the relationship between distinct histories and political systems, on the one hand, and points of contact, overlaps, and interdependencies in the field of memory politics, on the other hand, between West Germany, East Germany, and Austria substantially enriches the pertinent field of research. It makes convincingly clear that topics and forms of collective commemoration had more in common among the three German-speaking countries following the collapse of Nazi Germany than has been identified hitherto. These findings do not deny the existence of singularities in each of these countries. However, they disclose a triad or triptych that paralleled national peculiarities. The resulting concept of “moving memory” (40) will have to be taken into account by any future research on postwar policy of memory.