The Past Under Erasure? History,Memory,and the Contemporary

Abstract

This article seeks to explore some particularities of history writing in the present. It considers in turn the meanings of the contemporary interest in memory, the different ways in which ideas about and images of the past circulate through the mass-mediated public sphere of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the complexities of publicness and the public sphere, and the shifting boundaries between popular ideas of the past and changes in the discipline of history. It then turns to the example of (West) Germany between the 1960s and now. The article concludes with some reflections on changing perceptions of the overall character of the twentieth century.