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The Sins of the Fathers
Germany, Memory, Method
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Jeffrey K. Olick
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2016
About this book
National identity and political legitimacy always involve a delicate balance between remembering and forgetting. All nations have elements in their past that they would prefer to pass over—the catalog of failures, injustices, and horrors committed in the name of nations, if fully acknowledged, could create significant problems for a country trying to move on and take action in the present. Yet denial and forgetting carry costs as well.
Nowhere has this precarious balance been more potent, or important, than in the Federal Republic of Germany, where the devastation and atrocities of two world wars have weighed heavily in virtually every moment and aspect of political life. The Sins of the Fathers confronts that difficulty head-on, exploring the variety of ways that Germany’s leaders since 1949 have attempted to meet this challenge, with a particular focus on how those approaches have changed over time. Jeffrey K. Olick asserts that other nations are looking to Germany as an example of how a society can confront a dark past—casting Germany as our model of difficult collective memory.
Nowhere has this precarious balance been more potent, or important, than in the Federal Republic of Germany, where the devastation and atrocities of two world wars have weighed heavily in virtually every moment and aspect of political life. The Sins of the Fathers confronts that difficulty head-on, exploring the variety of ways that Germany’s leaders since 1949 have attempted to meet this challenge, with a particular focus on how those approaches have changed over time. Jeffrey K. Olick asserts that other nations are looking to Germany as an example of how a society can confront a dark past—casting Germany as our model of difficult collective memory.
Author / Editor information
Jeffrey K. Olick is professor of sociology and history at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility and In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943–49, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.
Reviews
“The Sins of the Fathers is a tour de force of interdisciplinary scholarship, blending historical erudition and sociological keenness. Highly innovative, it adds important understandings to German official memory, particularly the stability of its exculpatory forms, tenses, and tropes across the last half of the twentieth century. Olick is a master translator of what he calls ‘the language of the past.’ Provocative and informative, this is an overwhelmingly erudite and penetrating analysis that advances the field of collective memory.”
— Barry Schwartz, University of Georgia“Sins of the Fathers is the definitive book on official Nazi era memories in (West) Germany. I have little doubt that it will become a landmark in the discipline, indeed a must read for everyone concerned with memory and politics. This book will undoubtedly cement Olick’s reputation as the preeminent memory scholar in the field of sociology. More, by linking memory, meaning, and history, and by finding new ways of thinking about the amalgamation of past, present, and future, of symbolic orders and everyday exigencies, Olick’s book also makes a significant contribution to cultural sociology that will be widely discussed. A brilliant study.”
— Andreas Glaeser, University of Chicago“For a generation, memory of German crimes during the Second World War has functioned as Europe’s ethical constitution, and nowhere is this status more evident than in Germany. In The Sins of the Fathers, sociologist Olick produces the most empirically extensive and methodologically sophisticated discussion yet written about this society’s tortured wrestling with the question of inherited, collective guilt. It is sure to become a classic.”
— Dirk Moses, University of Sydney“In superimposing sociological nuance onto a well-researched historical narrative of official (usually political) West German memories of the Holocaust, Olick has made a monumental contribution to collective memory studies. The book felt so comfortable to this trained historian that he almost wished for an alternate edition containing Chicago-style footnotes instead of parenthetical citations. Olick employs a refreshingly accessible writing style, but he has no reservations introducing complex theoretical concepts. The book is a must-have for any university library. Essential.”
— Choice"Skillfully combines empirical exploration, historical and political erudition, and theoretical insight."
— European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, Alejandro Baer“Rather than simply, if competently, telling a familiar story, Olick asks how politics made memory and were remade by commemoration in their turn. . . . In its stringency and consequence [The Sins of the Fathers] is rewarding, and scholars of German and other politics of the past will ignore it at their own peril.”
— The American Historical Review“This truly scholarly book breaks significant new ground in connecting memory to genre, event, political context, and generation.”
— American Journal of SociologyTopics
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
November 24, 2016
eBook ISBN:
9780226386522
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
496
Other:
16 halftones, 2 tables
eBook ISBN:
9780226386522
Keywords for this book
collective memory; collective guilt; Germany; sociology; Wold War I; World War II
Audience(s) for this book
Professional and scholarly;
