European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology

ISSN: 2325-4823 (Print) 2325-4815 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/recp20

The Sins of the Fathers: Germany, Memory,

Method

Alejandro Baer

To cite this article: Alejandro Baer (2017) The Sins of the Fathers: Germany, Memory,
Method, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 4:4, 494-497, DOI:
10.1080/23254823.2017.1373931

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2017.1373931

Published online: 21 Sep 2017.

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 494 BOOK REVIEWS

The Sins of the Fathers: Germany, Memory, Method, by Jeffrey Olick,

Chicago, The Chicago University Press, 2016, 496 pp., $50, £37.50
(hardback), ISBN 9780226386492

There is no state that has been and continues to be as haunted by the spectres of a
criminal past as is Germany. Jeffrey Olick’s The Sins of the Fathers: Germany,
Memory, Method examines, with an impressive wealth of documentation and
meticulous attention to detail, the process by which the Federal Republic of
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Germany (1949–1990) confronted the burden of the Nazi crimes and dealt
with its political costs, from the immediate post-war period to German
unification.
What happens when State leaders cannot tell a positive story about the nation’s
past? What history and politics unfold in the context of a damaged national iden-
tity? Such a problem is, of course, not unique to Germany – even less so in a
‘guilty age’ dominated by the Politics of Regret, to which Jeffrey Olick has
devoted his previous book. For German leaders, however, the task at hand was,
and continues to be, the mastering of a past that has become the symbol of ulti-
mate evil.
The book’s fundamental contribution is a methodological one. The well-estab-
lished but still amorphous field of memory studies exists disjointedly in disciplin-
ary silos that too often engage in solipsistic and heuristically sterile undertakings.
In this academic scenario, Jeffrey Olick’s ‘historical sociology of mnemonic prac-
tices’ (or, more simply, the historical study of commemorations and images of the
past) has for some time now provided conceptual clarity and very helpful analyti-
cal tools for examining the elusive workings of collective memory. To that end,
Olick has also revisited theoretical traditions in a very fruitful fashion and The
sins of the fathers is possibly the most refined outcome in this line of scholarship.
This is a book about state-sponsored or official memories of the Nazi past. It
examines what national leaders have said about Nazism, and how those state-
ments, which conveyed specific images of this past and its present implications,
showed significant differences synchronically and throughout the period ana-
lysed. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin and the notion of dialogue and on Bourdieu’s
field theory, Olick departs from reified conceptions of collective memory and
places the emphasis on practices and processes. Official representations of the
past are not mere emanations of structural factors – or epiphenomena. While offi-
cial memories are influenced or constrained by broader social trends and govern-
mental agendas, they are also structuring, i.e. affecting what the state does and
conditioning ensuing discursive constellations, implying both speech and
actions. The productive notion of ‘memory of memory’ illustrates the dialogical
approach. Earlier images of the past shape later ones, singular commemorative
events being ‘always but moments in continually unfolding stories’ (p. 4). The
author also adopts a commendable Bourdieusian epistemological vigilance in
the use of concepts that too often fall prey to deterministic approaches in
social memory research. ‘Generations’ is one of them. While differences in gen-
erational experience undoubtedly have a bearing on the ways German leaders
have referred to and situated themselves with regard to the crimes of the
 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 495

Nazism and the Second World War, the study highlights that ‘generations’ are not
only analytical prisms but also categorisations internal to the field of study – emic
or indigenous categories in ethnographic terms – and claims made for particular
purposes by the political actors involved. For instance, the liability-deflecting
‘grace of late birth’, a statement by chancellor Helmut Kohl at the Israeli Parlia-
ment in 1984, is both an empirical fact and a powerful element of discourse.
Germany has gained international reputation and now appears in popular
imagination as the country that has openly acknowledged, atoned for and
expiated the atrocities in question. Olick offers a thorough empirical qualification
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to such broad-brush strokes and argues that Germany’s leaders have actually
deployed a myriad of defence mechanisms in their remembrance of the Nazi
past. ‘Much of the state-sponsored memory in the Federal Republic of
Germany’, he claims, ‘has been organized as an effort to deny collective guilt’
(p. 29). The book is structured around the presentation of three succeeding ‘legit-
imation profiles’ – each confronting the problem of collective guilt in singular
ways. The first one, the ‘reliable nation’, centred on institutional reform, rather
than symbolic gesture, and aimed to prove that the newfound German state
was a trustworthy and responsible member of the international community.
During this time, the country’s leaders draw a clear line separating the criminal
Nazi leadership from the general German population. The Nazis had committed
crimes ‘in the name of the German people’, as chancellor Adenauer put it in the
1950s.
The ‘moral nation’ emerges in the mid-1960s with the coming of age of a
second generation that was not burdened directly by the Nazi period and who
could more easily pose questions regarding individual culpability and collective
responsibility of their elders. This was a progressive era across the West. In
Germany, the political culture of the New Left embraced anti-Fascism (in contrast
to previous anti-totalitarianism theory), and German leaders of the time claimed
that the separation line between the new German democracy and the Nazi past
was rather porous. The duty of remembrance was stressed now and this meant
properly confronting the looming legacies of that past in the present, a past
repressed and not yet ‘worked through’.
In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, the pendulum swung back towards
conservatism, and German leaders sought to become a ‘normal nation’, the third
legitimation profile. Such normalisation implied recovering national identity and
traditional values. Leaders were invested in altering the image of the nation’s past,
where Nazism appeared to be spoiling the nation’s identity for perpetuity. Nor-
malisation meant reframing and relativising: (a) other nations also had trouble
with their pasts and (b) there was more to German history than the crimes of
Hitler. While each epoch has a dominant legitimation profile, Olick stresses
that these are not watertight compartments and there are elements of the three
legitimation profiles in all three epochs.
From the analysis that follows, Olick asserts that when the acknowledgment of
guilt comes to the foreground of German history politics it is, necessarily, at the
expense of national identity. The progressives, argues Olick, seek guilt without
identity, while the conservatives claim an identity without guilt (p. 32). This
 496 BOOK REVIEWS

leaves the reader with the stirring question behind this study: a criminal past,
when acknowledged, poses a legitimation dilemma and thus Germany embodies
the quintessential collective memory problem. The overall political lesson to be
learned from this case is that Germany managed to keep the past alive – even
if such efforts were permanently entangled with attempts to avoid, to reframe,
to silence or to relativise it. This is, we learn in the conclusions, a valuable huma-
nist German legacy to the world.
The epilogue makes a necessary incursion into the post-unification memory
debates. Still, the reader remains somewhat unapprised of how the developments
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in the last 25 years in Germany fit within the overall analytical framework. Have
new legitimation profiles emerged? Is the irreducible tension between guilt and
identity still pertinent in the unified Berlin Republic? Here engagement with
the work of German scholars who sustain alternative hypotheses on the
memory–national identity nexus would have been welcome. I thus permit
myself to bring some of these arguments to the discussion now. The chronic
weakness of identity of the Germans, to the extent that their past cannot be inte-
grated into a stable and positive self-image (a recurrent trope from the Historians’
debate in the 1980s), has given way to rather new formulations. Sociologist
Darious Zifonun (2004) argued that the Holocaust has shifted from a burden
to an opportunity, paradoxically, for a redefined national identity. The thorn in
the side of German identity has not festered in the wound, but rather nurtured
and strengthened the national body. German memory discourses, practices and
fertile memorial landscape (the colossal Memorial to the murdered Jews of
Europe in Berlin being its most conspicuous expression) function like a mirror
for the German citizen, and a theatrical stage for the non-German spectator,
who witnesses Germans confronting their past and verifies their transformation
and national renewal.
This newfound national identity is, however, unescapably exclusionary. The
language around the Berlin Memorial is a case in point. Journalist Leah Rosh,
one of the primary forces lobbying for this project, envisioned that the monument
would fulfil a ‘collectivity building’ (Gemeinschaftsstiftend) role. But which is the
collectivity whose identity is being built through remembrance? Germans here
can only be those who identify as descendants of a perpetrator generation and
accept, as Zifonun argues, the guilt of Germans as representatives of the collectiv-
ity. These are necessarily ethnic Germans. One could also provocatively phrase
this as follows: the Nazis saw themselves as a collectivity (the Germans) that
defined themselves against the (non-German) Jews to be exterminated, whereas
contemporary German identity is defined vis-à-vis the dead Jews of the Holocaust
in a national identity-building space such as the Berlin monument. Several histor-
ians have also pointed to this unfortunate irony. Hanno Loewy (1999) contended
that the Berlin monument embodies the founding act of the Berlin Republic, of
German unity, which is to be realised in the collective penance for the act, i.e.
the genocide of the Jews. Similarly, Holger Kirsch (2003) considers that the
Jews are the ‘great other’, and at the same time fulfil the role as a symbolic
centre of German identity.
 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 497

Summarising, the critical interpretation of these more recent memory dis-

courses and objects poses questions regarding the linkage between remembrance
(of atrocious misdeeds) and identity, which Jeffrey Olick sees as an irreconcilable
legitimation problem. One could argue that this is still a legitimation profile, one
that rhetorically embraces guilt and repentance. But in contrast to the ‘social
liberal-guilt’ of the 1960s and 1970s, this discourse is not deepening a cleavage
with conservative mainstream forces in society but functions transversely as a
productive source of national identity. In this respect, we might think also of
other lessons, or rather warnings, that Germany’s memory problem can teach
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to the world. I am referring here to the limitations and drawbacks of state-spon-

sored (national) remembrance of an ethnic crime (as any genocide is) in a society
where citizenship is no longer defined in ethnic or national terms. How do such
mnemonic practices concern those in Germany (immigrants, refugees, and also
descendants of the persecuted) whose ‘fathers’ were not part of the Holocaust?
I would not like to finish this review by pointing to what could have been
discussed but rather I applaud the book’s significant contributions. The Sins of
the Fathers: Germany, Memory, Method skillfully combines empirical exploration,
historical and political erudition, and theoretical insight. For scholars and stu-
dents in memory studies, this book is an excellent illustration of what rigorous
and creative social memory research can look like.

References
Kirsch, J.-H. (2003). Nationaler Mythos oder historische Trauer? Der Streit um ein zentrales
‘Holocaust-Mahnmal’ für die Berliner Republik. Köln: Böhlau Verlag.
Loewy, H. (1999). Das Denkmal: ein Essay über den gutgemeinten Mißbrauch der Erinnerung.
In W. Köpke, R. Ascheberg, D. Diner, & J. Semprun (Eds.), Zivilisationsbruch Auschwitz
(pp. 67–80). Pax Christi und Aktion Sühnezeichen – Friedensdienste.
Zifonun, D. (2004). Gedenken und Identität. Der Deutsche Erinnerungsdiskurs. Frankfurt:
Campus Verlag.

Alejandro Baer
Department of Sociology & Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies,
University of Minnesota
abaer@umn.edu
© 2017 Alejandro Baer
https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2017.1373931

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