Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Strategies of remembrance in pre‐unification West Germany

2000; Routledge; Volume: 86; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00335630009384280

1479-5779

M. Lane Bruner,

German History and Society

By examining instances of dramatically rejected speech, critics can identify codes of the unsayable in a culture/situation, and by identifying what cannot be said publicly are better equipped to distinguish between types of national identity. In the years leading to German reunification, West German national identity was based upon various strategies of remembrance that are identified through a comparison of two speeches: Richard von Weizsäcker's celebrated 1985 parliamentary address commemorating the end of the Second World War in Europe and Philipp Jenninger's dramatically rejected parliamentary address in 1988 commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Kristallnacht.