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In Pursuit of Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz

allotted the family a much less important role in postwar reconstruction. Yet because the East German state provided no specific material support for POWs or war victims, East German families actually had to bear even more of the burdens of defeat than their West German counterparts. East German representations of the legacies of World War II resisted any significant changes right up to 1989. Like the style of East German consumer goods, official East German war memories remained “frozen in social time” which meant that the “incongruities between public and private memory” (p. 12) were always much greater in the GDR than in the Federal Republic. West German official memory was more open to change. Confrontation with the pathologies of late returnees (the last returnees came back from Soviet captivity in 1955–56) promoted the acceptance of new diagnoses of the causes of POWs’ psychic problems which eventually transformed compensation law and also encouraged West Germans to acknowledge the trauma of Holocaust survivors. And whereas all of the earlier returnees were exonerated from any complicity in Nazi crimes, regardless of their actual guilt, the West German response to the last returnees was more differentiated—several were prosecuted. Overall, Biess detects the development of a more comprehensive West German confrontation with the Nazi past by the late 1950s, symbolized, for example, by the founding of the Central Agency for the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes at Ludwigsburg in 1958 which opened new possibilities for dealing with German guilt and responsibility. Historians of twentieth-century Germany should certainly read this book. It is an impressively rich synthesis of cultural and social history approaches to the first decade of Germany’s postwar history. But Biess’ study will also be of great interest to scholars in other national fields who are engaged in research on the history of memory, in particular memories of the Second World War. This book shows that in the right hands, “memory” can be a very powerful category of historical analysis.