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Book review: In Search of Transcultural Memory in Europe

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.