Abstract
Crafting a methodology for the study of a state’s collective memory is a daunting task—one that sociologist Jeffrey Olick embraces in his study of post–World War II German memory. The purpose of the study is twofold: to theorize a dialogical approach to the study of collective memory and use it to analyze West German official representations of World War II and the Holocaust from 1945–1989. At stake is our understanding of the role historical narration plays in creating contemporary state legitimacy. The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) provides an apt example of how official state discourse about World War II and the Holocaust shaped the legitimacy of the state, and in turn, the structures and policies that they implemented. Between the development of a speech-centered sociology of official collective memory and a multi-decade, close textual analysis of official speeches, Olick charts an ambitious but important agenda. Scholars in the fields of rhetorical studies, sociology, and history should take note of what will undoubtedly become a definitive book on post–World War II German memory.
Olick analyzes West German official state discourse (by this he means speeches from the Presidents and Chancellors) from 1949–1989. The aim of his analysis is to discover how speeches operate in the moment, build upon past memory, and develop patterns over time. He warrants his decision to focus on official discourse by arguing that in modern times, states have replaced other institutions in providing people a sense of community, belonging, security, and collective identity. They have done so by pivoting to the past. This pivot has provided states with some ability to “govern memory,” and despite memory’s own internal constraints, to “govern with it” (p. 27). Exploring how the FRG governed the memory of a difficult past is also a way for Olick to investigate the “politics of regret,” or the contemporary shift away from celebrating our shared pasts to regretting them, and the trend in contemporary states’ use of past-focused apologies as a source of legitimation (pp. 18–20).
To understand how historical narration can become a source of legitimation, Olick presents a sociological theory for how official speech governs collective memory. He argues that speeches are given within a dialogical relationship between the past being commemorated, the memory of past commemoration, and the needs of the present. Over time, norms of commemoration form that regulate expectations of what can be said, thus creating genres of commemoration. The development of genre explains for Olick how tropes become solidified within a society and how those tropes take on forms of their own within commemorations—structured by expectations from previous commemorations. Under this theory, official speech becomes a powerful tool (and reflection) of collective memory that enables government action.
Olick’s major historical claim is that official speech concerning World War II and the Holocaust in the FRG revolved around the denial of collective guilt. This effort, he contends, shaped a large part of West Germany’s official rhetoric, and in doing so, became a central component of state legitimacy. He spends much of the book chronicling the evolution of guilt denial, and argues that there are three distinct periods of time in which different interpretations of guilt shaped the FRG. He names these three legitimation profiles “The Reliable Nation” (1949–mid/late 1960s), “The Moral Nation” (mid-1960s–early 1970s), and “The Normal Nation” (early 1970s–1989). Within these three time periods, four key topoi emerge that become solidified into genres. Throughout each period, leaders had to navigate how World War II fit into the larger German tradition, what caused the rise of Nazism and who was implicated within it, German suffering during the war, and who bore responsibility, and therefore guilt, for the war and the Holocaust.
In chapters chronicling “The Reliable Nation,” Olick emphasizes tropes of exculpation, resentment, victimhood, and catastrophe that emerge in the official discourse from the period of occupation directly following the end of World War II and analyzes their development by leaders such as the first Chancellor of the FRG, Konrad Adenauer, and Federal President Theodor Heuss. Olick argues that during this period of emerging West German statehood, leaders such as Adenauer accentuated the German people’s status as victims of a narrow group of criminals who formed the Third Reich, and subsequently emphasized The FRG’s reliability as a nation. This allowed Adenauer, and to an extent Heuss, to depict the genocide of the Jewish people as perpetrated by a criminal Third Reich. This released the German people from collective responsibility for the rise of Nazism, and therefore from collective guilt for perpetrating the Holocaust and for perpetrating the war. Olick characterizes official rhetoric from this period as “defensive, exculpatory, and repressive” (p. 63).
Responding to discontents with previous policy and a growing conviction that Nazism had not just been an aberration in German history, official discourse during “The Moral Nation” emphasized “renewal, reform, and progress” through “a conscious reworking of images of the past” (p. 284). Olick argues that Chancellor Willy Brandt portrayed the Nazi past as an integral part of German society that demanded an assumption of collective guilt, even from a new generation of Germans (p. 282). Yet Olick sees the younger generation’s embrace of collective guilt as embodied by Brandt’s rhetoric as a form of distancing. “By making such an absolute break” with the older generations and the former West German government, Olick argues, individuals within the moral nation “made it clear that responsibility came to them in only the most abstract form” (p. 281). This, and a tendency to not differentiate between the guilt of the Holocaust and the guilt of the war, deemphasized the specificity of the FRG’s crime against the Jews, paving the way for “The Normal Nation.”
Within “The Normal Nation,” leaders responded to myriad domestic problems by pragmatically reworking images of the past to enable advantageous policy. This allowed leaders such as Chancellor Helmut Kohl to pursue an ideological revision of Germany’s past by arguing that Germany was normal. Kohl portrayed the FRG’s problems with its past as “universal problems like those confronting all open societies” (p. 392), rather than as a unique dilemma facing West German legitimacy. This normalization relativized the FRG’s past by making it distant historical fact. It also showed the degree to which commemoration had become normalized within the present and solidified into distinct tropes and genres. In becoming normal, it helped to relieve the FRG of what Olick calls “specific administrative burdens from Nazi history” to include reparations, regard for their relationship with Israel, and peace between the East and West (p. 394), demonstrating the force of discourse in the creation of policy.
Olick’s argument about the solidification of genre is the clearest in “The Normal Nation,” but is less salient in other parts of the book. He faces the challenge of covering a significant amount of time while using a method of close textual analysis. He navigates this through a chronological narrative, pointing out changes in reoccurring themes as they develop. He provides helpful chapter summaries at the end of each legitimation profile and has a knack for answering reader questions as they arise. In choosing a chronological development of tropes, Olick’s argument about genre largely drops out of the narrative until the very end. The absence of the larger structural argument during a significant part of the book was occasionally disorienting and made for a bit of a slow read during the close textual analysis sections. Olick is conscious of this concern, however, and attempts to compensate for it by devoting much of the conclusion to connecting his theory chapter with a retrospective analysis of genre.
It is here that Olick’s argument could be helped by interrogating genre’s relationship to audience. He acknowledges that genres develop in response to the circumstances of the present, but does not distinguish between the context of the moment and the people to whom the speech is presented. Olick folds audience (immediate, secondary, present, future) into context. This seems like a significant deficit to a dialogical analysis. For Olick, dialogical means the present speaks to the past, but dialogical also means that people write speeches with audiences in mind and are shaped by the specificity of their audience. This is implicitly acknowledged by Olick in his recognizing that speeches changed due to location (Israel, concentration camps, the floor of the Bundestag), but it is more than just location and context that shape genre—it is the expectations of the people for whom the speeches are written. Audiences create genres because people are the ones with expectations about what should happen in those spaces and in that moment. The people that the speech is given to, as well as subsequent audiences that receive the speech, dramatically influence the enactment and subsequent creation of generic expectations. Speakers must either embrace these expectations or reject them. Either way, they are constrained by them.
Overall, this book is a remarkable addition to the literature on post–World War II German memory and memory studies more generally. By laying out a systematic analysis of collective memory that is predicated upon speech, Olick outlines a method that scholars in several fields, regardless of their knowledge of German history, will find beneficial.