A significant new look at the legacy of the Nazi regime, this book exposes the workings of past beliefs and political interests on how--and how differently--the two Germanys have recalled the crimes of Nazism, from the anti-Nazi emigration of the 1930s through the establishment of a day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism in 1996.

Over the past fifteen years Northeast Asia has witnessed growing intraregional exchanges and interactions, especially in the realms of culture and economy. Still, the region cannot escape from the burden of history. This book examines the formation of historical memory in four Northeast Asian societies (China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) and the United States focusing on the period from the beginning of the Sino-Japanese war in 1931 until the formal conclusion of the Pacific War with the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951. The contributors analyse the recent efforts of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese scholars to write a ‘common history’ of Northeast Asia and question the underlying motivations for their efforts and subsequent achievements. In doing so, they contend that the greatest obstacle to reconciliation in Northeast Asia lies in the existence of divided, and often conflicting, historical memories. The book argues that a more fruitful approach lies in understanding how historical memory has evolved in each country and been incorporated into respective master narratives. Through uncovering the existence of different master narratives, it is hoped, citizens will develop a more self-critical, self-reflective approach to their own history and that such an introspective effort has the potential to lay the foundation for greater self- and mutual understanding and eventual historical reconciliation in the region. This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of Asian history, Asian education and international relations in East Asia.

During the last few decades there has been a growing recognition of the great role that remembering and collective memory play in forming the historical awareness. In addition, the dominant national form of history writing also met some challenges on the side of a transnational approach to the past. In A Nation Divided by History and Memory, a prominent Hungarian historian sheds light on how Hungary’s historical image has become split as a consequence of the differences between the historian’s conceptualisation of national history and its diverse representations in personal and collective memory. The book focuses on the shocking experiences and the intense memorial reactions generated by a few key historical events and the way in which they have been interpreted by the historical scholarship. The argument of A Nation Divided by History and Memory is placed into the context of an international historical discourse. This pioneering work is essential and enlightening reading for all historians, many sociologists, political scientists, social psychologists and university students.

By and large, the histories of East and West Germany have been studied in relative isolation. And yet, for all their differences, the historical trajectories of both nations were interrelated in complex ways, shaped by economic crises, social and cultural changes, protest movements, and other phenomena so diffuse that they could hardly be contained by the Iron Curtain. Accordingly, A History Shared and Divided offers a collective portrait of the two Germanies that is both broad and deep. It brings together comprehensive thematic surveys by specialists in social history, media, education, the environment, and similar topics to assemble a monumental account of both nations from the crises of the 1970s to—and beyond—the reunification era.

How does an extended family, bound by shared history, affection, and duty but divided by generation, gender, status, and personality, memorialize its dead? This fascinating study shows how members of the prominent Yu family passed down their personal and familial memories over five generations, through the traumatic transition from imperial to modern China and amidst the radical change and destruction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their memory writing is unusual and compelling for its quantity, variety, and resonance of themes across generations. It reflects a particular cultural moment and family, yet offers insight into universal practices of writing and remembrance. Ink and Tears begins and ends with the Yu family’s two most famous members: the late Qing writer Yu Yue and his great-great grandson Yu Pingbo, each among the most famous and prolific scholars of their respective generations. Over a span of one and a half centuries, they and their lesser-known female and male kin made use of an impressive diversity of genres—poetry, prefaces, biographies, diaries, correspondence, and strange tales—to preserve their family’s memories. During the times in which they wrote, the technologies of printing and the institutions of publication and book distribution were being transformed, and by the time of the great-grandchildren the language of education and governance, definitions of scholarship and literature, and the map of literary genres had all been remade. The Yus’ memory writing thus reveals not just how different family members remembered and mourned, but the changing tools they had with which to convey their loss. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, Rania Huntington focuses on questions of how memory was crafted, preserved, and transmitted as much as on what was remembered, tracing common tropes and shared strategies. Her beautifully observed study will interest scholars of late imperial and early Republican literature and history, as well as readers more broadly concerned with the family, women’s writing, themes of memory and bereavement, and the personal functions of literature.

Winner of the 2019 Scott Bill Memorial Prize for Outstanding First Book in Peace History Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea: Crossing the Divide explores the history and tells the story of the emotionally charged meetings that took place among family members who, after having lost all contact for over fifty years on opposite sides of the Korean divide, were temporarily reunited in a series of events beginning in 2000. During an unprecedented period of reconciliation between North and South Korea, those nationally televised reunions would prove to be the largest meetings held theretofore among civilians from the two states since the inter-Korean border was sealed following the end of active hostilities in 1953. Drawing on field research during the reunions as they happened, oral histories with family members who participated, interviews among government officials involved in the events’ negotiation and planning, and observations of breakthrough developments at the turn of the millennium, this book narrates a grounded history of these pivotal events. The book further explores the implications of such intimate family encounters for the larger political and cultural processes of moving from a disposition of enmity to one of recognition and engagement through attempts at achieving sustained reconciliation amid the complex legacies of civil war and the global Cold War on the Korean Peninsula.