The Sins of the Fathers: Germany, Memory, Method
Jeffrey K. Olick
Abstract
The Sins of the Fathers deals with the difficulty of confronting the devastation and atrocities committed by Germany in two world wars, and explores the variety of ways in which Germany’s leaders since 1949 have attempted to meet this challenge, with a particular focus on how those approaches have changed over time. The book can be read as a narrative history of German memory as well as a sociology of German memory or a theory of the politics of regret. Olick’s major empirical goal is to provide a thorough descriptive account of the historical record of state-sponsored or “official” memory, an ... More
The Sins of the Fathers deals with the difficulty of confronting the devastation and atrocities committed by Germany in two world wars, and explores the variety of ways in which Germany’s leaders since 1949 have attempted to meet this challenge, with a particular focus on how those approaches have changed over time. The book can be read as a narrative history of German memory as well as a sociology of German memory or a theory of the politics of regret. Olick’s major empirical goal is to provide a thorough descriptive account of the historical record of state-sponsored or “official” memory, and he claims that much of the state-sponsored memory in the Federal Republic of Germany has been organized as an effort to deny collective guilt. Olick asserts that other nations are looking to Germany as an example of how a society can confront a dark past – casting Germany as a model of difficult collective memory.
Keywords:
collective memory,
collective guilt,
Germany,
sociology,
Wold War I,
World War II
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226386492 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: May 2017 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226386522.001.0001 |
