Jeffrey K. Olick's Books

The Politics of Regret

On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility

By: Jeffrey K. Olick

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The Politics of Regret

On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility

By: Jeffrey K. Olick

In the past decade, Jeffrey Olick has established himself as one of the world’s pre-eminent sociologists of memory (and, related to this, both cultural sociology and social theory). His recent book on memory in postwar Germany, In the House of the Hangman (University of Chicago Press, 2005) has garnered a great deal of acclaim. This book collects his best essays on a range of memory related issues and adds a couple of new ones. It is more conceptually expansive than his other work and will serve as a great introduction to this important theorist. In the past quarter century, the issue of memory has not only become an increasingly important analytical category for historians, sociologists and cultural theorists, it has become pervasive in popular culture as well. Part of this is a function of the enhanced role of both narrative and representation – the building blocks of memory, so to speak – across the social sciences and humanities. Just as importantly, though, there has also been an increasing acceptance of the notion that the past is no longer the province of professional historians alone. Additionally, acknowledging the importance of social memory has not only provided agency to ordinary people when it comes to understanding the past, it has made conflicting interpretations of the meaning of the past more fraught, particularly in light of the terrible events of the twentieth century. Olick looks at how catastrophic, terrible pasts – Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa – are remembered, but he is particularly concerned with the role that memory plays in social structures. Memory can foster any number of things – social solidarity, nostalgia, civil war – but it always depends on both the nature of the past and the cultures doing the remembering. Prior to his studies of individual episodes, he fully develops his theory of memory and society, working through Bergson, Halbwachs, Elias, Bakhtin, and Bourdieu.

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238

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Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1135909814

ISBN 13

9781135909819

The Sins of the Fathers

Germany, Memory, Method

By: Jeffrey K. Olick

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The Sins of the Fathers

Germany, Memory, Method

By: Jeffrey K. Olick

National identity and political legitimacy always involve a delicate balance between remembering and forgetting. All nations have elements in their past that they would prefer to pass over - the catalog of failures, injustices, and horrors committed in the name of nations. Yet denial and forgetting carry costs as well. Nowhere has this precarious balance been more potent, or important, than in the Federal Republic of Germany, where the devastation and atrocities of two world wars have weighed heavily in virtually every moment and aspect of political life. 'The Sins of the Fathers' confronts that difficulty head-on, exploring the variety of ways that Germany's leaders since 1949 have attempted to meet this challenge, with a particular focus on how those approaches have changed over time.

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540

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University of Chicago Press

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ISBN 10

022638649X

ISBN 13

9780226386492

In the House of the Hangman

The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949

By: Jeffrey K. Olick

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In the House of the Hangman

The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949

By: Jeffrey K. Olick

The central question for both the victors and the vanquished of World War II was just how widely the stain of guilt would spread over Germany. Political leaders and intellectuals on both sides of the conflict debated whether support for National Socialism tainted Germany's entire population and thus discredited the nation's history and culture. The tremendous challenge that Allied officials and German thinkers faced as the war closed, then, was how to limn a postwar German identity that accounted for National Socialism without irrevocably damning the idea and character of Germany as a whole. In the House of the Hangman chronicles this delicate process, exploring key debates about the Nazi past and German future during the later years of World War II and its aftermath. What did British and American leaders think had given rise to National Socialism, and how did these beliefs shape their intentions for occupation? What rhetorical and symbolic tools did Germans develop for handling the insidious legacy of Nazism? Considering these and other questions, Jeffrey K. Olick explores the processes of accommodation and rejection that Allied plans for a new German state inspired among the German intelligentsia. He also examines heated struggles over the value of Germany's institutional and political heritage. Along the way, he demonstrates how the moral and political vocabulary for coming to terms with National Socialism in Germany has been of enduring significance—as a crucible not only of German identity but also of contemporary thinking about memory and social justice more generally. Given the current war in Iraq, the issues contested during Germany's abjection and reinvention—how to treat a defeated enemy, how to place episodes within wider historical trajectories, how to distinguish varieties of victimhood—are as urgent today as they were sixty years ago, and In the House of the Hangman offers readers an invaluable historical perspective on these critical questions.

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397

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226626385

ISBN 13

9780226626383

Guilt and Defense

On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany

By: Theodor W. Adorno

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Guilt and Defense

On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany

By: Theodor W. Adorno

In this series of interlocking essays, which had their start as lectures inspired by the presidency of Barack Obama, Robert Burns Stepto sets canonical works of African American literature in conversation with Obama's Dreams from My Father. The elegant readings that result shed surprising light on unexamined angles of works ranging from Frederick Douglass's Narrative to W.E.B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk to Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.

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264

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674036034

ISBN 13

9780674036031

Collective Memory and the Historical Past

By: Jeffrey Andrew Barash

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Collective Memory and the Historical Past

By: Jeffrey Andrew Barash

There is one critical way we honor great tragedies: by never forgetting. Collective remembrance is as old as human society itself, serving as an important source of social cohesion, yet as Jeffrey Andrew Barash shows in this book, it has served novel roles in a modern era otherwise characterized by discontinuity and dislocation. Drawing on recent theoretical explorations of collective memory, he elaborates an important new philosophical basis for it, one that unveils profound limitations to its scope in relation to the historical past. Crucial to Barash’s analysis is a look at the radical transformations that symbolic configurations of collective memory have undergone with the rise of new technologies of mass communication. He provocatively demonstrates how such technologies’ capacity to simulate direct experience—especially via the image—actually makes more palpable collective memory’s limitations and the opacity of the historical past, which always lies beyond the reach of living memory. Thwarting skepticism, however, he eventually looks to literature—specifically writers such as Walter Scott, Marcel Proust, and W. G. Sebald—to uncover subtle nuances of temporality that might offer inconspicuous emblems of a past historical reality.

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279

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University of Chicago Press

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ISBN 10

022675846X

ISBN 13

9780226758466

The Politics of Regret

On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility

By: Jeffrey K. Olick

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The Politics of Regret

On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility

By: Jeffrey K. Olick

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238

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Routledge

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ISBN 10

1135909814

ISBN 13

9781135909819

In the House of the Hangman

The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949

By: Jeffrey K. Olick

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In the House of the Hangman

The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949

By: Jeffrey K. Olick

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397

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University of Chicago Press

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ISBN 10

0226626385

ISBN 13

9780226626383

The Sins of the Fathers

Germany, Memory, Method

By: Jeffrey K. Olick

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The Sins of the Fathers

Germany, Memory, Method

By: Jeffrey K. Olick

National identity and political legitimacy always involve a delicate balance between remembering and forgetting. All nations have elements in their past that they would prefer to pass over—the catalog of failures, injustices, and horrors committed in the name of nations, if fully acknowledged, could create significant problems for a country trying to move on and take action in the present. Yet denial and forgetting carry costs as well. Nowhere has this precarious balance been more potent, or important, than in the Federal Republic of Germany, where the devastation and atrocities of two world wars have weighed heavily in virtually every moment and aspect of political life. The Sins of the Fathers confronts that difficulty head-on, exploring the variety of ways that Germany’s leaders since 1949 have attempted to meet this challenge, with a particular focus on how those approaches have changed over time. Jeffrey K. Olick asserts that other nations are looking to Germany as an example of how a society can confront a dark past—casting Germany as our model of difficult collective memory.

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540

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022638652X

ISBN 13

9780226386522

Book's by Jeffrey K. Olick

The Politics of Regret

The Politics of Regret

The Sins of the Fathers

The Sins of the Fathers

In the House of the Hangman

In the House of the Hangman

Guilt and Defense

Guilt and Defense

Collective Memory and the Historical Past

Collective Memory and the Historical Past

The Politics of Regret

The Politics of Regret

In the House of the Hangman

In the House of the Hangman

The Sins of the Fathers

The Sins of the Fathers

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