Hamburg Memories

von: Bammer, Angelika
Veröffentlicht in: The German quarterly (2001)

Hamburg Memories - This essay examines German historical memory of the period 1938-45. Positing that the predominant focus on Berlin highlights the politics of national memory at the expense of local memorial practices, it selects Hamburg as the site of its inquiry. The central argument of "Hamburg Memories" is that the separation of German historical memory into perpetrator and victim memories, as is commonplace in recent literature on the culture of memory, is untrue to the complexity of a community's memory. Drawing on evidence from memorials in the city as well as city cemeteries, the essay demonstrates that the historical memory of the city in the years after 1945 always encompassed both memories of the Holocaust (perpetrated by Germans) and memories of wartime trauma (suffered by Germans). On the basis of a comparison between the immediate post-'45 period and the 1980s, it concludes that what changed, over time, was the relative emphasis.

von: Bammer, Angelika
Veröffentlicht in: The German quarterly (2001)

Displacements:

Veröffentlicht: Bloomington [u.a.] : Indiana University Press, 1994