In his classic essay Qu’est-ce qu’une nation (1882), Ernst Renan underscored the key contributions of collective memory and collective forgetting to the forging of a national consciousness. Some hundred years later, memory emerged as an object of sustained examination in such fields as history, German studies, and film, and scholarly interest in memory shows no signs of abating. Whereas Alon Confino has explored how Germans tried to remember and forget the Nazi past after 1945, historians, such as Reinhard Koselleck and Rudy Koshar, and literary scholars, such as Ulrich Baer, Marianne Hirsch, and James Young have focused on the media of memory and on public monuments as “artifacts” of German memory, drawing in part on Pierre Nora’s notion of “sites of memory” (lieux de mémoire). Questions over collective memory and its role in framing German responsibility for the Holocaust also loomed large in the West German Historikerstreit of the 1980s, while the recent reiteration of that debate, the so-called Historikerstreit 2.0, has exposed both the fragility and ferocity of contemporary German memory culture. Moreover, amidst the tumult of German reunification, many former GDR citizens promoted the notion of Ostalagie, a certain nostalgia for the East German past, to value positively aspects of this past—its material culture, a sense of community—vis-à-vis the uncertain unified German future, a sentiment also evoked in the film Good-Bye Lenin.

Recent scholarship has focused further attention on how collective memories are “produced”: via literature, films, and television, but also in the organization of museums and the development of memorial cultures, from the erection of statues to the naming of buildings and streets. In addition, events of the past years have made us particularly aware of how memory, or at least memory claims, can be and are politicized, as exemplified by the controversies over the organization of Gdansk’s Museum of the Second World War, the disputes over statues and building projects, such as the demolition of Berlin’s Palast der Republik and the reconstruction of the Stadtschloß, and the heated debates on antisemitism at documenta 15.

For this panel, we invite explorations of memory in the context of Central Europe from a wide range of perspectives. Papers might, for instance, consider how authors and cineastes have used memory as a subject or structural element in their creative projects. Alternatively, they might examine the development and impact of specific memory cultures: from veterans’ war experiences (Wars of Liberation, World War One, World War Two) to memories of exile and expulsion, from economic depression or prosperity to dictatorship and persecution. Another possibility would be to reflect on the practices and politics of public commemoration, such as the creation of museums or even specific expositions and the establishment of public holidays. What narratives are created, how, and with what purposes? Similarly, à la Pierre Nora, papers could consider particular Central European sites of memory, whether in terms of specific sites (e.g., the Wartburg, the Cologne Cathedral, the Viktor-Adler-Hof, Teresienstadt), broader concepts or institutions (the Grundgesetz), spaces (the Sudetenland, the Rhine, Upper Silesia), or even specific folk songs and food customs. Papers might also reflect on recent debates, such as those surrounding the translation into German of Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory; they might also take up methodological concerns, for example, the relationship between history and memory, or the challenges of studying and “representing” memory. Finally, papers could think about memory and its salience for public cultures of emotion, whether in the past or the present.