• DOI:10.1086/244674
• Corpus ID: 144281631

"Coming to Terms with the Past": Illusions of Remembering, Ways of Forgetting Nazism in West Germany

@article{Ldtke1993ComingTT,
  title={"Coming to Terms with the Past": Illusions of Remembering, Ways of Forgetting Nazism in West Germany},
  author={Alf L{\"u}dtke},
  journal={The Journal of Modern History},
  year={1993},
  volume={65},
  pages={542 - 572}
}

• A. Lüdtke
• Published 1 September 1993
• Art
• The Journal of Modern History

Public attention to ways of coping with the Nazi past in Germany tends to focus on gestures or speeches by representatives of the state and society. However, this view "from above" ascribes nothing but a passive role to the audiences of such representational politics. The sentiments, opinions, and practices of "the masses" play no active role in these accounts. Therefore, the range and impact of messages from the seeming centers of the polity are not explored but assumed. More important, this approach ignores the stimuli affecting formal and public politics that originate from society and its classes, milieus, and groups. Practices of remembering and forgetting both allow and preclude the reading of past experiences as history. However, distinct experiences intricately shape memory and, in turn, are shaped by ever-changing hindsight. Remembrance and forgetting cannot be disconnected from momentary feelings of physical pleasure or pain: notions and images inscribe their traces into one's own body. Here, the recollections of two women may illuminate the intricate "bodily" connectedness that links past experiences with actual well-being or misery. They will also show the gulf that separates these experiences of suffering because one of the women was a member of the dominant "German Herrenrasse," albeit in a subordinate position. "At the time of the liberation I was only a skeleton, lousy, with swollen legs and abscesses all over my body. After a while I overcame the physical illnesses. However, because of my experiences in the concentration camp [KZ] I had become another person. I was now a pessimistic, suspicious, and very nervous woman. I still have a lot of headaches and a lot of difficulty in focusing