In a presentation delivered at Yale University in 1992, Charles Maier expressed concern that the study of memory was becoming an obsession. Shortly afterwards, he published his reflections on the ‘surfeit of Memory’ in the new journal History and Memory, subsequently authoring a well-received book on the topic of German identity, memory and the Holocaust.Footnote ¹ Other prominent historians, such as Dominick LaCapra and Henry Rousso, likewise have warned against the growing infatuation with memory studies, even though they inspired and contributed to our scholarly addiction to the topic.Footnote ² Like moths to the flame, a growing cadre of historians, literary scholars and, more recently, political scientists has been drawn to the study of memory construction, analysing the interaction between history, identity and the contemporary world. The new journal Memory Studies competes for readership with the well established History and Memory, now in its twentieth year of publication. H-Net has a dedicated discussion forum devoted to memory studies, linking scholars from across various geographical and disciplinary fields.Footnote ³ Articles and review essays of the newest books on memory and history jostle for prominence in journals ranging from Contemporary European History to the Journal of Modern History to the German Studies Review and the New York Review of Books.Footnote ⁴

One might ask whether the point of diminishing returns has been reached. I'd venture to answer, ‘not yet, but soon’. Had Maier's 1993 tongue-in-cheek wish that memory studies fade from the scene been granted, we would be intellectually much poorer.Footnote ⁵ Pierre Nora's Lieux de Mémoire (Realms of Memory) might not have been translated, nor his concept of the juxtaposition and multiplicity of memory popularised.Footnote ⁶ Jeffrey Herf's comparative study of the interaction between popular and state-sponsored memory in East and West Germany might be unavailable and our understanding of the two societies less developed.Footnote ⁷ Robert Moeller's engaging analysis of the construction of West German memory might not have been written, and its findings could not be tapped as we debate whether Jörg Friedrich, Günther Grass and others are overemphasising the image of Germans as victims in their latest works.Footnote ⁸ Tools and insights from the study of memory inform the works of scholars ranging from Alon Confino to Konrad Jarausch, from Aleida Assmann to Omar Bartov.Footnote ⁹ Positivist approaches to history fall short in understanding how the past interacts with the present, with memory providing the key to understanding both grand meta-narratives and personal, individual perspectives on the past.

Yet the warnings of Maier, Rousso and others against a memory-centric frame of reference that entirely displaces historical analysis ring true. Both are needed, particularly when it comes to the topics of genocide and war. How do the latest works on European memories of the Second World War measure up in terms of history and as exemplars of memory studies? This review addresses seven recent books on the topic, which range widely both geographically and thematically. Encompassing studies from the French resistance to the siege of Leningrad, and from high-brow film and literature to pop culture, the seven works are an eclectic mix.

Susan Rubin Suleiman's Crises of Memory and the Second World War consists of eight elegantly written studies that explore ‘how memory is enacted or put to public use’ in specific cases, with a preface and conclusion that bind the collection together. The essays, six of which draw from previously published journal articles, encompass four studies of French memories of the Second World War and four of central European and Holocaust-related memories. The book's overall aim is to craft an awareness of the processes of memory by providing refined, nuanced, and focused examinations of memory construction and reception. Suleiman likens her approach to a week-long hiking vacation she and her sister took in the Swiss Alps; each day they would set out on a different trail that provided a new perspective on the Matterhorn. By the end of the week, they felt they knew the mountain. Likewise, Suleiman's forays in specific instances of memory formation, while loosely linked to one another, provide a delightful, aesthetic panorama of the processes of memory. Suleiman, a professor of comparative literature at Harvard, has written broadly over the years, addressing topics from gender, politics and the avant-garde in France to childhood trauma and Holocaust memories.Footnote ¹⁰

The four cases addressing French memories of the Second World War encompass three studies of literary and intellectual lenses on French memories of the Resistance and one of a cinematographic interpretation of the life and times of Klaus Barbie, the ‘butcher of Lyon’. Suleiman's careful textual analysis of various essays by and on Jean-Paul Sartre during the period immediately preceding and shortly after France's liberation provides a snapshot of the post-war construction of the intellectual as ‘resister’. Her essay on Raymond and Lucie Aubrac, long feted as heroes of the Resistance, grapples with the collision between narrative construction, historical perspectives and personal recollections as the Aubracs sought to defend themselves in the late 1990s against charges that they had betrayed Jean Moulin, leader of the Resistance, fifty-four years earlier. Essays on Jean Moulin and André Malraux, and on Marcel Ophül's film Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, round off Suleiman's exploration of French memory of the Second World War.

The second portion of Crises of Memory grapples with memories of the Holocaust, again focusing on the interplay between individual memories and works of literature and film, and their interaction with the broader collective. Here Suleiman is at her best and worst. Her empathetic, meticulous examination of the omissions, elaborations and changes in vocabulary and tone between Elie Wiesel's Yiddish Un di velt hot geshvign, its 1958 French translation La nuit, the 1960 English translation Night, and Wiesel's 1994 memoir Tous les fleuves vont á la mer, provide the sort of nuance and insight that literary criticism best provides. Yet Suleiman's immersion in a post-modern world of aesthetics and construction proves troubling in her examination of Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments (1996). Fragments, a Holocaust memoir that purported to present ‘shards of memory’ of the camp experience of a young Polish Jew, won numerous book awards after its publication in 1995. Yet evidence emerged that the work was fictional, a product of the imagination of its Swiss author, one Bruno Grosjean. While noting that the line between fiction and non-fiction exists and should be maintained, Suleiman almost wistfully concludes that ‘whatever else it might claim to be, Fragments is an artful work, powerful in its effect’. Her critique that ‘positivist historians’ fail to grasp that memoirs and autobiographies are rife with constructions and that fiction can and does provide perspectives on the truth seems off the mark. Indeed, most historians would concur with her quote from Michael-André Bernstein that no first-person narrative is ‘untouched by figuration and by shaping’ (p. 168). Suleiman's sensitive analysis of memory and narratives provides an exemplar of the strengths and weaknesses of a post-modern aesthetic: one gains a complex, layered sense of how memory is constructed and interpreted, but leaves with a nagging sense that truth and reality – so important when confronting issues of war and genocide – are willow o wisps of the mind.

In Germany as a Culture of Remembrance, Alon Confino tackles the dynamics of memory construction from the perspective of a historian. Confino, who has published extensively on the concept of Heimat and on the problematic of German memory, offers ten essays dealing with Heimat, collective memory and the relationship of history to memory.Footnote ¹¹ As was the case with Suleiman's book, most of Confino's chapters appeared previously as stand-alone articles. The book is divided into two sections, each of five chapters, with the first portion of the book exploring the concept of Heimat and the second examining memory as historical narrative and method.

Confino's main discussion of memories of the Second World War takes place within the framework of the idea of Heimat. Building on the thesis he developed in The Nation as a Local Metaphor – that the concept of Heimat allowed Germans of the nineteenth century to unite regional and local identity with German nationalism – Confino continues his study of Heimat through the Third Reich and into the two post-Second World War Germanies. He draws on an impressive range of sources, from the Heimat films of the 1950s to the Edgar Reitz television series of the 1980s, from literature to travel brochures and from exhibitions in Heimat museums to political posters and postcards. His assessment of West German memories of the Second World War echoes that of Robert Moeller: by the late 1940s, West Germans recalled their wartime experience largely through the prism of suffering, loss and victimhood. Rather than focusing on the Holocaust, German war crimes and the narrative of German guilt, post-occupation West Germans focused on the suffering of East Prussian and Silesian refugees driven from their Heimat in the closing months of the war, on the rape of German women by Russian soldiers and on the longing of expellees (Vertriebene) for home grounds they might never see again. Confino's assessment of West German memory during the Adenauer era will surprise few, but Germany as a Culture of Remembrance contains much more, ranging from an essay on East German memory to an exploration of the interaction between memory, history and methodology to several chapters probing the nexus between tourism and memory.

Dirk Moses analyses the influence of the past in a more systematic, structured manner in German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past. Written as a book rather than a series of articles, German Intellectuals presents a thoughtful, well-developed argument that too much emphasis has been placed on 1968 as the intellectual watershed for German democracy. Instead of crediting sixty-eighters with instrumentalising German democracy, Moses argues that intellectuals from the generation of forty-five proved pivotal in cementing a new German political culture based on tolerance and democracy. Born between 1922 and 1932, youths from the generation of forty-five had been true believers in the Third Reich, actively supporting it as junior officers, soldiers, Flakhelfer or youth group leaders. The defeat of the Reich confronted them with the enormity of Nazi crimes, forcing the most thoughtful to question how and why it had been possible for Germans to support a regime that suppressed free thought, launched a war that spread death and destruction across the face of Europe and murdered millions of Jews, Poles and other ‘undesirables’ in the name of the German Volk.

Moses asserts that forty-fivers such as Karl Dietrich Bracher, Andreas Hillgruber, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Ernst Nolte, Rolf Hochhuth, Joachim Fest, Martin Walser, Siegfried Lenz, Rudolf Augstein and others were the key figures in reshaping German political attitudes during the first decades of the Federal Republic, and that their political views and sense of engagement stemmed from an internalised struggle with the legacy of Germany's Nazi past. He argues that forty-fivers essentially accepted the fundamentals of republican democracy, but differed on how it should be implemented. One group, which he labels the ‘German Germans’, believed that for democratic republicanism to take root, the West German system must integrate former Nazis into the system, punishing the worst offenders but allowing the tens of thousands of functionaries, party members and military officers who had supported the Reich to find a place in German society. These ‘integrationists’ believed that West Germany's constitution, the Grundgesetz (Basic Law), provided the framework for rooting republican democracy in German political culture, rejected the need for revolution and tended to view the Third Reich and Hitler as accidents of history. Another group, whose members Moses dubs the ‘non-German Germans’, was so shocked and sickened by their new awareness of Nazi barbarity that they argued that Germans must undertake a cathartic break with the past. More supportive of the student movement of the 1960s that called for a social revolution, these ‘redemptive republicans’ asserted that Germans needed to make the Holocaust the central lieux de mémoire around which they built a new political culture.

Moses provides two case studies of the ‘integrationist’ and ‘redemptive’ intellectual. He selects Jürgen Habermas, recognised in the West for his contributions to critical theory, as exemplar of the ‘redemptive’ response to the Nazi past, and Wilhelm Hennis, best known for his work on Max Weber, as archetype of the ‘integrationist’ group. The book builds steadily to its high point, Moses's analysis of the interaction between forty-fiver intellectuals and the student movement in the 1960s. Carefully dissecting the issues of the day, from university reform, the ‘Spiegel Affair’ and the emergency laws of the 1960s to terrorism and the German Autumn of 1977, Moses convincingly demonstrates how the Nazi past was used in the intellectual debates of the day. Moses's study of the influences and use of memory in the West German political realm, focusing on the role of the public intellectual, is superb. His treatment of memory during the 1980s and since unification falls flat.

Providing a third disciplinary perspective on how the past intersects the present, the political scientist David Art examines the quandary of why right-wing parties have been much more successful in Austria than in Germany over the last twenty years. Campaigning in nations with roughly similar rates of unemployment and immigration, Germany's Republikaner Party and Austria's Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ) attracted very different proportions of the national vote, with the REPs averaging 1.4 per cent of the national vote over the period 1986–2002 while the FPÖ averaged 18 per cent. In The Politics of the Nazi Past in Germany and Austria, Art argues that the far right has been more successful in Austria than in Germany because of political cultures that have established different boundaries to acceptable dialogue. Protracted public debates about the Nazi past, the Holocaust and German normality created different norms regarding the right, with the political establishments in the two countries adopting alternate strategies towards emerging right-wing movements in the late 1980s. In Germany, the mainstream parties simply refused to work with Republikaner politicians even at the local level, thus marginalising them and creating an impression that a vote for the right was a wasted vote. In Austria, the major parties chose to accommodate and when convenient co-operate with the far right. These different strategies allowed Jörg Haider and the FPÖ to gain national credibility through governance at the provincial and municipal level, while support for Germany's Republikaner Party dwindled.

Art unpacks the way in which Austria and Germany developed different norms regarding the right because of the public debates of the 1980s and 1990s concerning the uniqueness of the Holocaust, the role of the Wehrmacht in the Final Solution and the responsibility of ordinary Germans for the Third Reich. The outcome of these debates – the Bitburg Affair, the historians’ controversy (Historikerstreit) about the relationship between national socialism and Stalinism, and the Goldhagen Debate, the controversy about the Wehrmacht Exhibition, the Walser–Bubis dialogue and the Holocaust Monument controversy – strengthened those actors who advocated a ‘culture of contrition’ when it came to the German past and weakened those who had argued that Germany must move beyond the Holocaust and become a normal state. In Austria, public debates about Kurt Waldheim's past, about reparations and about the Wehrmacht proceeded along a different trajectory, strengthening the refrain of Austrian victimhood and minimising Austrian support of and participation in the Nazi agenda.

True to his discipline, Art provides quantitative evidence of a ‘culture of contrition’ in Germany and a ‘culture of victimhood’ in Austria. He conducted 107 interviews with German politicians and 68 with Austrian politicians, coding their responses along a scale of contrition and victimhood. The results indicate that even conservative German politicians recognise the need to conform to the culture of contrition, with Austrian politicians more apt to view Austria as a victim. Most striking is the different tone that the tabloid press adopted in Germany and Austria. In Germany, the conservative-populist Springer press and the Bild Zeitung, the bête noir of student activists in the 1960s, consistently argued for public acknowledgement of German guilt and responsibility for the Holocaust and the crimes of the Third Reich. Austria's Kronen Zeitung projected a different message, with its editorial writers supporting Waldheim against sinister and undefined ‘outside’ forces. The strength of the works by Suleiman, Confino and Moses rests in their fine-grained analysis of memory patterns in literature, film and among intellectuals. Art provides the link that connects memory regimes and narratives to political action.

Malte Thiessen and Lisa Kirschenbaum approach the topic of Second World War memories from yet another perspective in Eingebrannt ins Gedächnis: Hamburgs Gedenken an Luftkrieg und Kriegsende and The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments. Their studies of memory in Hamburg and Leningrad emphasise those broader rites, rituals and commemorations – from museum exhibits to annual days of remembrance – associated with collective memory. Building on the definitions of collective memory developed by Maurice Halbwachs, James Young, Jan Assmann and Pierre Nora, Thiessen and Kirschenbaum shift their focus from the national level to the municipal level.Footnote ¹² Both studies excel in illustrating how collective memory is constructed, analysing how political leaders, parties, journalists and interest groups sought to define and channel collective memory in Hamburg and Leningrad.

Thiessen's study, published as part of the series ‘Forum Zeitgeschichte’ by the Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte, Hamburg, provides a detailed look at the construction and patterns of memory in Hamburg from 1943 to 2005. The study rests on written sources drawn from over a dozen archives, encompassing memorial speeches, newspaper articles, exhibition guides, serialised historical specials, popular histories, memoirs, newsletters and the scholarly studies emanating from historical institutes, museums and universities. One of the major benefits of Thiessen's city-specific study of memory is its increased granularity: while broader studies of German memory have captured the tension between German memories of themselves as victims, perpetrators, bystanders or resisters, in Hamburg these general narrative frameworks found specific historical expression in the memory of the thousands of innocent German women and children killed in the July 1943 firebombing of the city, in the brutality of the wardens and guards at the Neuengamme concentration camp, in the indifference of Hamburg's citizenry to the vicious treatment and callous execution of prisoners assigned to gather and bury the bodies of air raid victims and in the idealised construction of Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann as a quasi-resistance figure during the final days of the war. This increased granularity and specificity illustrates how memory was ‘constructed’, with Thiessen laying bare the mechanics of narrative construction. Different groups attached competing meaning to the same historical event (the Hamburg firestorm as terrible retribution or as barbarous escalation), disagreed about what dates should be publicly commemorated (3 May – the surrender of Hamburg – 4 May – the liberation of Neuengamme – or 8 May – Germany's unconditional surrender), advanced opposing perspectives (the war's end as defeat or liberation) and mobilised the same historical events to support diametrically opposed contemporary agendas.Footnote ¹³

Lisa Kirschenbaum provides an analogous study of memory formation and development in The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995. Written in an engaging, jargon-free style, the book nonetheless conveys a sophisticated understanding of collective memory as the interaction between common experience, individual memory and municipal and state efforts to mould a shared understanding of the past in accordance with contemporary agendas. Kirschenbaum, unlike Thiessen, at 300 pages eschews analysing each and every anniversary, instead providing a more lively sense of the overall contours of how the 900-day siege of Leningrad has been remembered.

Kirschenbaum situates her analysis of myth, memory and monuments with the broader framework of changing terms of municipal reference and meaning. Built by Peter the Great in the early 1700s on a swamp at the river Neva's delta, St Petersburg provided a window to the West and represented a different, more European Russia than did tsarist Moscow. Renamed Petrograd, the city gave birth to the Russian Revolution and as Leningrad it became a celebrated symbol of Soviet suffering, steadfastness and determination in the Second World War. Once victory had been achieved, Stalin clamped down on expressions of local pride and identity, forcing the closure of a museum dedicated to Leningrad under siege and downgrading plans to build impressive monuments to Leningrad's suffering. Khrushchev reversed course in the 1950s, supporting memory of the Great Patriotic War as affirmation of the Soviet system, with rituals and monuments to the siege proliferating. Yet by the 1980s, disillusionment had replaced the confidence of the 1950s and 1960s, and when put to the vote in 1991, Leningraders voted to rename their city St Petersburg despite the iconic association of Leningrad with the Great Patriotic War. Skilfully weaving her examination of monuments, museums and commemorations associated with the siege of Leningrad into this broader narrative, Kirschenbaum accomplishes far more than the study of collective memory in action at the municipal level. Instead, her book provides a compelling window on popular and state sponsored memory in the Soviet Union and in Yeltsin and Putin's Russia.

The final book under review shifts away from memory of the historical past, and instead addresses the imagined alternate histories of the Second World War. In The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism, Gavriel Rosenfeld analyses 116 novels, short stories, films, television programmes, plays, comic books and analytical alternate histories. He explains that he first turned to alternate history as a form of entertainment, reading Robert Harris's novel Fatherland as a relief from his scholarly work on memory, architecture and the legacies of the past.Footnote ¹⁴ As he gradually immersed himself in the genre, he became convinced that alternate histories – also termed allohistorical narratives – ‘possess a unique ability to illuminate the workings of historical memory’ (p. 12) because of their subjectivity. Rosenfeld contends that alternate histories provide windows into the biases, fears, wishes, evasive desires and longing for confirmation of their writers, and that an analysis of the major trends and themes of ahistorical fiction furnishes a barometer by which to assess the memory of the Second World War itself.

Rosenfeld provides a coherent framework for his analysis of more than one hundred ‘allohistorical’ works. He organises his chapters around the predominant alternative scenarios he detected, which range from the Third Reich victorious to Hitler surviving the war as a fugitive to scenarios where Hitler is never born, dies early, or is assassinated, to alternative scenarios of the Holocaust. His search for alternative histories revealed that they are far more popular in the United States and Britain (which together account for 80 per cent of the accounts Rosenfeld uncovered) than in Germany or continental Europe. His source base is rich and varied, ranging from a 1947 play by Noël Coward entitled Peace in Our Times to Newt Gingrich's unfortunate foray into fiction, 1945, to scholarly alternative histories by historians such as Eberhard Jäckel and John Lukacs, to Twilight Zone episodes and Walter Moers's 1998 comic book Adolf die Nazi-Sau.

For each allohistorical book, play or production, Rosenfeld provides a fairly detailed summary of its plot lines, along with an examination of the creator's background and agenda. The book succeeds in establishing the general trends and patterns of allohistorical works of the Second World War, thoughtfully assessing how national sensibilities and perspectives influence these works. Readers interested in alternate history will surely appreciate the effort that went into finding, reading and summarising so many allohistorical sources dealing with Hitler, the Third Reich and the Second World War. But the connection between trends in alternate history and collective memories of the Second World War is tenuous without information about the consumers of these productions and the meaning that readers and viewers attach to allohistorical books, films and cartoons. Rosenfeld's analysis of Walter Moers's Adolf die Nazi-Sau (Adolf, the Nazi Swine) illustrates the precarious connection between fictional works and collective memory. Moers, a German cartoonist whose creations range from the children's figure Käpt'n Blaubär (Captain Blue Bear) to a bitingly sarcastic cartoon entitled Kleines Arschloch (little asshole), published a cartoon book in 1998 depicting the adventures of a doddering Führer who had emerged from his bunker some forty years after the war. When asked why he selected Hitler as the latest subject of his biting wit, Moers dryly commented that he ‘was in desperate need of money’ and ‘could achieve high sales figures with “this crazy fascist [Hitler]”‘ (p. 262). Connecting the appearance of Moers cartoon to a broader claim of ‘an increasingly normalised view of the Nazi past’ in Germany is problematic, given the strength of Germany's ‘culture of contrition’. Rosenfeld's study of alternate history provides thoughtful insights into British and American patterns of an imagined other world, ‘the world Hitler never made’. It is less useful in understanding German and continental memories of the war that Hitler made.

The intersection of memory, war and history continues to draw scholars like moths to the flame. Yet, reassuringly, the works being generated have not melded into a tired sameness. From Rubin Suleiman's textual analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre to Rosenfeld's engagement with Walter Moers's satirical comics, scholars approach the topic from different perspectives and continue to uncover new insights into the meaning of memories of the Second World War in Europe. What strikes this reviewer is the absence of memories of military service and the experience of combat in any of the books reviewed. Given that tens of millions of young Europeans volunteered or were compelled to join the military, that millions encountered the tedium and terror of frontline service and that many formed enduring friendships and suffered lasting traumas as a result of their experience as combatants, the absence of their memories in these books on memory and the Second World War is striking.