In a business world predominantly oriented toward the future, it has paradoxically become ever more common that companies turn towards their pasts. This book empirically explores the phenomenon of organizational remembrance from a holistic cultural perspective. Based on a twelve-month ethnographic case study conducted at the headquarters of the German automobile company, AUDI AG, this study dissects the relationships between memory, identity, and image in a corporate setting. The greater aim in doing so is twofold: First, this study examines exactly why and how a company officially manages its past in terms of ‘history’ and ‘tradition.’ And second, this study scrutinizes what effect organizational remembrance has on the workforce – how it impacts their collective identification with a corporate community and influences their understanding of their daily working life. By investigating the interplay between different stakeholder groups, as well as their practices, media, mental models, and other vehicles of remembrance, an integrated account is offered which makes sense of the complex cultural forces at work in the corporate handling of the past, the present, and the future.

This book presents the most comprehensive study of the Waffen-SS until this date. Based on archival studies done in more than 20 archives in 13 different countries over a period of 5 years the book covers the entire history of the Waffen-SS and follows the post-war fate of the SS-veterans as well.

An original and compelling new analysis of Hiroshima's place within the global development of Holocaust and World War II memory.

This volume provides an overview of theories of cultural memory that are intensively discussed in cultural studies and humanities disciplines such as history, sociology, literary studies, art history, and media studies. Cultural memory encompasses all rituals, institutions and practices through which communities establish their identity and common origin, which are challenged by the digital turn today. The book presents, on the one hand, basic arguments by the most important memory theorists of the 20th and 21st centuries and, on the other, exemplary descriptions of the most significant forms of cultural memory.

Founded in 2000, the German Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” is one of the largest transitional justice initiatives in history: in cooperation with its international partner organizations, it has to date paid over 4 billion euros to nearly 1.7 million survivors of forced labour during the Nazi Era. This volume provides an unparalleled look at the Foundation’s creation, operations, and prospects after nearly two decades of existence, with valuable insights not just for historians but for a range of scholars, professionals, and others involved in human rights and reconciliation efforts.

Mystic Chords of Memory "Illustrated with hundreds of well-chosen anecdotes and minute observations . . . Kammen is a demon researcher who seems to have mined his nuggets from the entire corpus of American cultural history . . . insightful and sardonic." —Washington Post Book World In this ground-breaking, panoramic work of American cultural history, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Machine That Would Go of Itself examines a central paradox of our national identity How did "the land of the future" acquire a past? And to what extent has our collective memory of that past—as embodied in our traditions—have been distorted, or even manufactured? Ranging from John Adams to Ronald Reagan, from the origins of Independence Day celebrations to the controversies surrounding the Vietnam War Memorial, from the Daughters of the American Revolution to immigrant associations, and filled with incisive analyses of such phenonema as Americana and its collectors, "historic" villages and Disneyland, Mystic Chords of Memory is a brilliant, immensely readable, and enormously important book. "Fascinating . . . a subtle and teeming narrative . . . masterly." —Time "This is a big, ambitious book, and Kammen pulls it off admirably. . . . [He] brings a prodigious mind and much scholarly rigor to his task . . . an importnat book—and a revealing look at how Americans look at themselves." —Milwaukee Journal

We take for granted the survival into the present of artifacts from the past. Indeed the discipline of archaeology would be impossible without the survival of such artifacts. What is the implication of the durability or ephemerality of past material culture for the reproduction of societies in the past? In this book, Andrew Jones argues that the material world offers a vital framework for the formation of collective memory. He uses the topic of memory to critique the treatment of artifacts as symbols by interpretative archaeologists and artifacts as units of information (or memes) by behavioral archaeologists, instead arguing for a treatment of artifacts as forms of mnemonic trace that have an impact on the senses. Using detailed case studies from prehistoric Europe, he further argues that archaeologists can study the relationship between mnemonic traces in the form of networks of reference in artifactual and architectural forms.