The Politics of Memorial Representation: The Controversy Over the German Resistance Museum in 1994
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The study of historical memory in its various forms is a burgeoning
area of inquiry among historians. The debate over public, official,
government-supported memory and private individual memories
reveals a complex dynamic among myth, memory, and history,
which as Michel Foucault and others have argued, is simply the dominant
form of memory in a society at a given time.1 Some of the most
revealing instances of the intersection between public and private
memory are commemorations and memorial sites where personal
memories are created and sustained within the context of the official
representation of the event and those involved. The constant need to
locate memories within a larger social frame of reference ensures
that supporters of different memories of the same event will directly
and forcefully link images from the present with their memories of
the past, no matter how incongruous these images may appear.