The perception and interpretation of conflicting mnemonic narratives: Post-communist remembrance in East Germany and Poland

Abstract

Every society is marked by memory gaps. Taking Poland and (East) Germany as examples, we use a social constructivist-poststructuralist approach and conduct focus groups and qualitative interviews to investigate how the communist past is remembered in private everyday discourse and its differentiation from the hegemonic public memory discourse. Both countries exhibit striking parallels in their everyday and hegemonic memory practices, but they differ in how the memory gap is interpreted: in Poland along class lines, in Germany according to quasi-ethnic lines. Thus, the study shows that private–public memory gaps may determine the societal (re)production of group-specific identities in mnemonic conflicts.