This is the first of three volumes based on papers given at the conference 'The Fragile Tradition: The German Cultural Imagination Since 1500' in Cambridge, 2002. Together they provide a conspectus of current research on the cultural, historical and literary imagination of the German-speaking world across the whole of the modern period. This volume highlights the ways in which cultural memory and historical consciousness have been shaped by experiences of discontinuity, focusing particularly on the reception of the Reformation, the literary and ideological heritage of the Enlightenment, and the representation of war, the Holocaust, and the reunification of Germany in contemporary literature and museum culture.

In this collection of essays, a range of scholars from different disciplines look through the prism of technology at the much-debated notion of cultural memory, analysing how the past is shaped or unsettled by cultural texts including visual art, literature, cinema, photographs and souvenirs.

The Normans have long been recognised as one of the most dynamic forces within medieval western Europe. With a reputation for aggression and conquest, they rapidly expanded their powerbase from Normandy, and by the end of the twelfth century had established themselves in positions of strength from England to Sicily, Antioch to Dublin. Yet, despite this success recent scholarship has begun to question the ’Norman Achievement’ and look again at the degree to which a single Norman cultural identity existed across so diverse a territory. To explore this idea further, all the essays in this volume look at questions of Norman traditions in some of the peripheral Norman dominions. In response to recent developments in cultural studies the volume uses the concepts of ’tradition’ and ’heritage’ to question the notion of a stable pan-European Norman culture or identity, and instead reveals the degrees to which Normans adopted and adapted to local conditions, customs and requirements in order to form their own localised cultural heritage. Divided into two sections, the volume begins with eight chapters focusing on Norman Sicily. These essays demonstrate both the degree of cultural intermingling that made this kingdom an extraordinary paradigm in this regard, and how the Normans began to develop their own distinct origin myths that diverged from those of Norman France and England. The second section of the volume provides four essays that explore Norman ethnicity and identity more broadly, including two looking at Norman communities on the opposite side of Europe to the Kingdom of Sicily: Ireland and the Scandinavian settlements in the Kievan Rus. Taken as a whole the volume provides a fascinating assessment of the construction and malleability of Norman identities in transcultural settings. By exploring these issues through the tradition and heritage of the Norman’s ’peripheral’ dominions, a much more sophisticated understanding can be gained, not only of th

The political shocks of the 2014 Ukrainian crisis have been felt in many former Soviet countries, not least Latvia, where over 35 per cent of the population are native Russian speakers. At a time when analysts and commentators are unsure about Russia's future plans to intervene on behalf of their 'compatriots', this study provides a detailed political and cultural analysis of Russian-speaking identity in Latvia. By using Russian-speakers in Latvia as a specific case study, this volume also offers a fresh methodological approach to the study of discourses and discursive strategies. It outlines a coherent methodology to study the evolution of discourses over time, rather than a single de-contextualised and static time period. Drawing on media analysis, elite interviews, focus groups and survey data, this volume situates the identity strategies of Russian speakers within the transformations of the post-Soviet era. By assessing political, cultural and economic links with their home state (Latvia) and their potential kin-state (Russia), it offers important insights into the complex identity positions of Latvia's Russian speakers, and how these positions have evolved in Latvia since the late Soviet period. At a historical moment when many will question the loyalty of Russian speakers to their various 'host states', this book provides a timely, scholarly account of ethnic politics in Latvia. It also offers a methodological framework that allows for the mapping of trends in discursive strategies, exploring how they evolve through time.

Memories are not static or frozen, remaining in particular sites or places, within and belonging to particular groups, cultures or nations; rather, memory travels. Broadly speaking, memory has travelled because of the demographic displacements brought about by modernity’s extremes – slavery, colonialism, ethnic cleansing and genocide – and also because of the trade, travel and migration made possible by globalisation. Whether social movement is violent, exilic, migratory, emancipatory or oppressive, it is accompanied by memory. With the movement of people, memories of modernity’s histories and postmodern legacies meet, correspond and often become mutually constitutive. Even where memories compete with each other for cultural dominance, mutual dialogue and recognition is implicit if not explicit. Memories travel through and across cultures and national boundaries, a process increasingly facilitated by mass media technologies. This collection explores a range of case studies of transcultural memory as well as theorising the mobility of memory as it travels. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal parallax.

This volume features sixteen thought-provoking essays by renowned international experts on German society, culture, and politics that, together, provide a comprehensive study of Germany's postunification process of "normalization." Essays ranging across a variety of disciplines including politics, foreign policy, economics, literature, architecture, and film examine how since 1990 the often contested concept of normalization has become crucial to Germany's self-understanding. Despite the apparent emergence of a "new" Germany, the essays demonstrate that normalization is still in question, and that perennial concerns -- notably the Nazi past and the legacy of the GDR -- remain central to political and cultural discourses and affect the country's efforts to deal with the new challenges of globalization and the instability and polarization it brings. This is the first major study in English or German of the impact of the normalization debate across the range of cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and historical discourses. Contributors: Stephen Brockmann, Jeremy Leaman, Sebastian Harnisch and Kerry Longhurst, Lothar Probst, Simon Ward, Anna Saunders, Annette Seidel Arpaci, Chris Homewood, Andrew Plowman, Helmut Schmitz, Karoline Von Oppen, William Collins, Donahue, Katharine Schödel, Stuart Taberner, Paul Cooke Stuart Taberner is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society and Paul Cooke is Senior Lecturer in German Studies, both at the University of Leeds.

The Eighty Years’ War and the partition of the Low Countries led to the publication of numerous chorographical works on towns and regions in the Northern and Southern Netherlands. This book offers a comparison of these histories reflecting political change and promoting new identities.

This book presents new developments in Scandinavian memory cultures related to World War II and the Holocaust by combining this focus with the perspective of history didactics. The theoretical framework of historical consciousness offers an approach linking individual and collective uses and re-uses of the past to the question how history can and should be taught. It also offers some examples of good practice in this field. The book promotes a teaching practice which, in taking the social constructivist notions of historical consciousness as a starting point, can contribute to self-reflecting and critical thinking - being fundamental for any democratic political culture.

In German Cinema – Terror and Trauma Since 1945, Thomas Elsaesser reevaluates the meaning of the Holocaust for postwar German films and culture, while offering a reconsideration of trauma theory today. Elsaesser argues that Germany's attempts at "mastering the past" can be seen as both a failure and an achievement, making it appropriate to speak of an ongoing 'guilt management' that includes not only Germany, but Europe as a whole. In a series of case studies, which consider the work of Konrad Wolf, Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Herbert Achterbusch and Harun Farocki, as well as films made in the new century, Elsaesser tracks the different ways the Holocaust is present in German cinema from the 1950s onwards, even when it is absent, or referenced in oblique and hyperbolic ways. Its most emphatically "absent presence" might turn out to be the compulsive afterlife of the Red Army Faction, whose acts of terror in the 1970s were a response to—as well as a reminder of—Nazism’s hold on the national imaginary. Since the end of the Cold War and 9/11, the terms of the debate around terror and trauma have shifted also in Germany, where generational memory now distributes the roles of historical agency and accountability differently. Against the background of universalized victimhood, a cinema of commemoration has, if anything, confirmed the violence that the past continues to exert on the present, in the form of missed encounters, retroactive incidents, unintended slippages and uncanny parallels, which Elsaesser—reviving the full meaning of Freud’s Fehlleistung—calls the parapractic performativity of cultural memory.

"The Second World War was a common experience of cultural and historical rupture for many European countries, but studies of this period and its after-images often remain locked in national frameworks. Jones' comparative study of national memory cultures argues for a more nuanced view of responses to shared issues of remembrance. Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, two decades of great change and debate in French and German discourses of memory, it investigates literary representations of the Second World War, and in particular the Holocaust, from France and both Germanies. The study encompasses thirteen works representing a variety of genres and divergent perspectives, and authors include Jorge Semprun, Peter Weiss, Georges Perec and Bernward Vesper. Addressing the underlying theme of travel as a means of exploring the past, it contrasts the journeys made by deportees and post-war visitors to the camps with the use of the journey as a literary device."