Izabela Paszko (German Historical Institute Warsaw)
Following the definition of cultural memory, it is formed and shaped by initiatives “from below” in collective response to the need to remember particular events from the past. However, practice proves that the truly causative role mostly belongs to state-driven actants, policymakers, and funding distributions. The interplay between cultural memory and the state authorities in Germany is particularly complex. In her paper, the author argues that German cultural memory of the tragic events of the Second World War and the Holocaust is subjected to regional-level decisions on a wide spectrum, including finance, politics, and local interconnectivity in the heritage landscape, to name a few. Active remembering takes place within legal and administrative frameworks, which are additionally enhanced by actualizations derived from scholarly research, changes in paradigms, and communal responses to current foreign affairs. In this case, debates on memory in Germany are a coupling of the “globalized memory” dependent on regional administration and nation-scale public discussions concerning the actualization of the memory culture for topics like postcolonialism and migrant history. This paper analyses the interplay between stakeholders “from above”, memory institutions (case study), and recent affairs (Middle East conflict, war in Ukraine, ministerial plans for a new memory culture, “Historikerstreit 2.0”) and hopes to entangle multidimensional dependencies.