Scholarship on Eastern Europe after 1989 often focuses narrowly on the socialist past as authoritarian, dictatorial, or totalitarian. This collection, by contrast, illuminates an additional dimension of post-socialist memory: it traces the survival of hopes and dreams born under socialism and the legacy of the unrealized alternative futures embedded within the socialist past. Looking at contemporary German-language literature, film, theater, and art, the volume analyzes reflections on everyday socialist realities as well as narratives of opposition and dissent. The texts discussed here not only revisit the past, but also challenge the present and help us imagine alternative futures. Rather than framing the unrealized futures envisioned in the pre-1989 era as failures, this collection probes post-socialist memory for its future-oriented potential to rethink issues of community, equity and equality, and late-stage capitalism. Foregrounding the complexities of Eastern European legacies also helps us reimagine the relationship between East and West both in Germany and in Europe as a whole.

Combining cultural studies, literary analysis, and memory theory, I move away from reading these works under the lens of autobiographical trauma, seeking instead to examine the negotiation of post-socialist memory through attending to generic and formal elements of the literary texts. My literary close readings methodologically draw on individual texts, while reflecting how literature is in exchange with other media and also present in the public sphere. Rather than a homogeneous entity, I show, the invoked Europe constitutes a multidirectional network. Through my focus on contexts beyond East Germany and its experience of state socialism, I address the intersections of migration and memory and their relevance for contemporary and future Germany and Europe, while counteracting approaches that traditionally center West Central Europe in discussions of the continent. In dialogue with Michael Rothberg's conceptualization of multidirectional memory, I furthermore contribute to ongoing debates on different histories of violence, such as the current discussion about the relation or interaction between the memories of colonialism and the Holocaust.

A study of the archival turn in contemporary German memory culture, drawing on recent memorials, documentaries, and prose narratives that engage with the material legacy of National Socialism and the Holocaust.

Focusing on the memory of the German Democratic Republic, Towards a Collaborative Memory explores the cross-border collaborations of three German institutions. Using an innovative theoretical and methodological framework, drawing on relational sociology, network analysis and narrative, the study highlights the epistemic coloniality that has underpinned global partnerships across European actors and institutions. Sara Jones reconceptualizes transnational memory towards an approach that is collaborative not only in its practices, but also in its ethics, and shows how these institutions position themselves within dominant relationship cultures reflected between East and West, and North and South.

The concept of the generation in today's German culture and literature, and its role in German identity. In the debates since 1945 on German history and culture, the concept of generations has become ever more prominent. Recent and ongoing shifts in how the various generations are seen -- and see themselves -- in relation to historyand to each other have taken on key importance in contemporary German cultural studies. The seismic events of twentieth-century German history are no longer solely first-generational lived experiences but are also historical moments seen through the eyes of successor generations. The generation, seen as a category of memory, thus holds a key to major shifts in German identity. The changing generational perspectives of German writers and filmmakers not onlyreflect but also influence these trends, exposing both the expected differences between generational views and unexpected continuities. Moreover, as younger artists reframe recent history, older generations like the 1968ers are also contributing to these shifts by reassessing their own experiences and cultural contributions. This volume of new essays applies current discourse on generations in German culture to contemporary works dealing with major sociohistorical events since the Nazi period. Contributors: Svea Bräunert, Laurel Cohen-Pfister, Friederike Eigler, Thomas C. Fox, Katharina Gerstenberger, Erin McGlothlin, Brad Prager, Ilka Rasch, Susanne Rinner, Caroline Schaumann, Maria Stehle, Reinhild Steingröver, Susanne Vees-Gulani. Laurel Cohen-Pfister is Associate Professor of German at Gettysburg College, and Susanne Vees-Gulani is Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Case Western Reserve University.

Beginning with the question of the role of the past in the shaping of a contemporary identity, this volumes spans three generations of German and Austrian writers and explores changes and shifts in the aesthetics of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). The purpose of the book is to assess contemporary German literary representations of National Socialism in a wider context of these current debates. The contributors address questions arising from a shift over the last decade, triggered by a generation change-questions of personal and national identity in Germany and Austria, and the aesthetics of memory. One of the central questions that emerges in relation to the Hitler youth generation is that of biography, as examined through Günter Grass' and Martin Walser's conflicting views on the subject of National Socialism. Other themes explored here are the conflict between the post-war generations and the contributions of that conflict to (West)-German mentality, and the growing historical distance and its influence on the aesthetics of representation.

Coming to terms with a troubled past is the mark of the modern condition. But how does memory operate? This powerful collection of original essays probes this question by focusing on Germany, where historical trauma and political turbulence over the past century have deeply scarred modern memory and identity. Tracing the role of memory in German history between the Reformation and reunification, contributors show how memory has a history and the presence of the past has historical context. With scholarly zeal and keen insight, these essays draw on ghost stories and the postwar fiction of Heinrich Böll, among other memory sites, escorting the reader through the streets of Alt Hildesheim and the grocery aisles of East Germany. By historicizing memory, this volume surpasses the efforts of previous memory scholarship in confronting Germany's National Socialist past. Standard approaches to memory in modern Germany have explored how the past represents social relations and is commemorated in literature, art, and personal narrative. In taking memory "out of the museum" and "beyond the monument," The Work of Memory investigates the ways memory forms social relations and is integral to the construction of identities, communities, and policies. Profound and provocative, The Work of Memory contributes to a much-needed anthropology of memory in modern Germany.