Alon Confino's new book, a collection of ten essays, seven previously published, comes in two distinct parts. The first contains variations on the themes of his previous study of Heimat; the second has essays on the idea of collective memory and commemoration. The two parts are loosely connected, as the title suggests, by the concept of a “culture of remembrance.” A book so composed gives the impression of a work in progress, where interesting ideas are proposed but not fully considered. Different emphases in the different parts and even contradictions between them reinforce the unfinished feeling, so that the work's strength lies more in the questions it poses than in the answers it offers.

In the first part, Confino argues that the nineteenth-century development of the idea of Heimat he outlined in his earlier work formed a “cultural tool kit” that could be employed by different regimes and different political and intellectual movements in twentieth-century Germany. In contrast to the concepts of nation or fatherland, Confino argues, whose use linked them to political subjects, governments and borders, war and aggression, Heimat was passive, had emotional and sentimental connotations, and was gendered feminine. Confino offers a number of literary examples of this interpretation, although he does not mention one of the classic instances of this evocation of Heimat, in All Quiet on the Western Front. This may be because Confino conducts his argument primarily through an interpretation of images in posters sponsored by different regimes. This analysis of images (and the press is to be congratulated for its high-resolution reproductions of them, which make the author's argument easy to follow) is a strong point of the book.

Confino suggests that the concept of Heimat was particularly useful for the purposes of the two German states after the Second World War, when other symbols of the national community had become tainted by the Nazi regime. He shows how refugees from the lost eastern territories and the politicians of the Federal Republic who pressed their case used the concept of Heimat to create an image of the refugees as innocent victims, obscuring any mention of the role of the war unleashed by the Third Reich in creating their plight. Most interesting in this section is Confino's chapter on the use of Heimat images in the GDR. He notes the frequency with which the generic Heimat image, the small town with the distinctive church tower set against a background of rolling hills, appears in the regime's political posters. He asserts that the use of this cultural tool kit ultimately proved problematic, since its symbolism of national belonging conflicted with the class-based understanding of political community the communist authorities wished to propagate. Closer examination of the author's sequences of images suggests—although this is not a conclusion Confino himself draws from them—that Heimat themes were least prevalent in the years of high Stalinism during the first half of the 1950s.

The second half of the book veers off in a rather different direction, as the author investigates the notion of a collective memory and considers the relationship of history to memory. These are topics in which historians have shown a good deal of interest in recent years, and much of the section deals with familiar issues, such as the relationship between the memory of the Holocaust and the history of it, or the related question of the distinction between the scholarly study of Nazi genocide and its evocation in commemoration. Perhaps what is most interesting about Confino's discussion of these matters is less the topic itself, but the way he grounds it in a broader evaluation of the idea of collective or historical memory.

He argues that much of what historians call collective or historical memory is really organized commemoration, experienced in museums, monuments, public ceremonies, politicians' speeches, and the like. Confino contrasts this organized commemoration with memory itself, with individuals' recollections of and reflections on past events, and argues that the two need to be distinguished and considered separately. Indeed, one might see this argument as a kind of self-criticism, since Confino's own work on Heimat is very largely based on instances of organized commemoration.

Of course, studying individual recollections and reflections and attempting to elucidate their common features is considerably more difficult than investigating organized events that produce large bodies of sources. In the book's final two chapters (which seem a lot like different versions of the same essay), perhaps part of a work in progress on tourism, Confino suggests that the experience of travel and tourism in the post-1949 Federal Republic was a way that Germans could simultaneously remember and forget their Nazi past. Like his previous discussion of twentieth-century representations of Heimat based on the study of political posters, this one is more evocative than definitive, but it is a stimulating point of departure.

Of all the questions raised by a reading of this book, one deserving of further consideration stems from Confino's distinction between commemoration and recollection, namely the best means for elucidating and then analyzing the common features of individual recollections and reflections. One procedure, found in the brilliant and not fully appreciated works of Lutz Niethammer (briefly discussed by Confino), in particular his study of the experience of the years 1930–60 among the working class of the Ruhr Basin and his work on the experience of the real-socialist society of the GDR, involves large numbers of individual oral history interviews carried out by a team of researchers, which are then reviewed and investigated for common features. Of course, such a method, for organizational and financial reasons, is difficult to emulate. Beyond the question of gathering recollections is that of their analysis. Historians, including Niethammer and certainly Confino as well, have generally relied on Freudian concepts, particularly that of repression. Unfortunately, Freud's ideas have proven to have relatively little to do with the actual workings of human memory. Although works of academic psychology on the nature of memory are often rather arid and their reading is forbidding, I wonder if they might offer an ultimately more profitable guide to historians following Alan Confino on the paths of recollection.