臺大歷史學報第 53 期 BIBLID1012-8514(2014)53p.181-227 2014 年 6 月,頁 181-227 2014.1.13 收稿,2014.5.23 通過刊登 DOI: 10.6253/ntuhistory.2014.53.04 Cosmopolitan Normalisation? The Culture of Remembrance of World War II and the Holocaust in Unified Germany Christoph Thonfeld* Abstract Since the 1990s, Germany has dealt with the difficult integration of collective and individual memories from East and West Germany. Alongside the publicly more prominent remembrances of perpetration has occurred an upsurge in the memories of German suffering. At the same time, Europe has increasingly become a point of reference for national cultures of remembrance. These developments have been influenced by post-national factors such as Europeanisation and transnationalisation along with the emergence of a more multicultural society. However, there have also been strong trends toward renationalisation and normalisation. The last twenty years have witnessed a type of interaction with the ‘other’ as constructively recognised; while at the same time it is also excluded by renationalising trends. Researchers have described the combination of the latter two trends as the cosmopolitanisation of memory. This article adopts the diachronic perspective to assess the preliminary results since 1990 of the actual working of this cosmopolitanisation process within the culture of remembrance of World War II and its aftermath in Germany. Keywords: culture of remembrance, World War II, cosmopolitanisation, Europeanization, renationalization. * Assistant Professor at National ChengChi University, Dept. of European Languages and Cultures. Rm. 407, 4F., No.117, Sec. 2, Zhinan Rd., Wenshan Dist., Taipei City 11605, Taiwan (R.O.C.); E-mail:
[email protected].