Modern Language Review

In the Introduction to her new book, Sara Jones provides an overview of recent memory debates in Germany triggered mainly by the German publication of Michael Rothberg’s seminal book Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) and A. Dirk Moses’ essay ‘The German Catechism’ (Geschichte der Gegenwart, 23 May 2021 <https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/the-german-catechism/> [accessed 21 October 2023]). These debates focused mainly on the perceived lacunae and tendentiousness of German memory of National Socialism, with memory of the Holocaust standing accused of having become a state dogma preventing comparison with other genocides before and since; there was relatively little discussion of whether Germany’s memory of the GDR might not also be subject to similar flaws. [End Page 286] It is particularly welcome, then, that Jones in Towards a Collaborative Memory addresses precisely this issue. She focuses on the work of three of Germany’s major memory institutions dealing with legacies of the GDR: the Federal Commissioner for the Files of the State Security Service of the Former GDR (BStU), the Memorial Berlin-Hohenschönhausen and the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship (Stiftung Aufarbeitung). The question she asks, though, is not so much how these organizations have approached the GDR past in a national context as how they use ideas and expertise developed in the course of dealing with that past in an international context—namely in interactions with memory institutions and a whole array of other organizations working in other countries to come to terms with their national past. Germany’s memory of the GDR, or more precisely the lessons Germany has learnt from it, has become something of an export model in the same way memory of the Holocaust has. But how model, Jones wants to know, is the model?

If studies of memory can sometimes lack empirical scope, this cannot be said of Towards a Collaborative Memory. Jones uses Social Network Analysis (SNA) to investigate with the greatest precision the international networks which have been built up by the BStU, Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, and the Stiftung Aufarbeitung. In six cogently written chapters, the analysis always closely backed up with many helpful and detailed diagrams, Jones sets out the collaborative landscape. She explains that the international collaborations work across what she terms ‘memory zones’ to describe areas of the networks in which ‘there is a dominance of actors from one particular geographical/historical region’ connected with ‘actors from the same geographical/historical region’ (p. 67). The regions she identifies and explores include post-socialist/central and eastern Europe (CEE), western Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and East Asia. The reach of the networks at whose centre the three German institutions stand is, then, truly global. However, Jones also shows that the memory zones within these networks do not necessarily operate independently of one another: they are connected by ‘transzonal brokers’ (p. 141), although, as she further outlines, brokers can at the same time connect parts of the same zone with each other.

What, then, are the book’s conclusions? Jones’s argument is as careful as her balanced deployment of quantitative and qualitative analytical methods. To differing degrees, and depending on context, it seems that Germany’s memorial institutions focused on the ex-GDR indeed regard themselves as the ‘teachers’ from whom other countries, particularly in eastern Europe but also in Africa and Asia, should learn when it comes to dealing with the past—even though it is by no means the case that countries in these regions always want to ‘learn from the Germans’, preferring to take only what they find useful from the German model, while ignoring the rest. There is some but not much evidence, to judge from Jones’s book, of the German institutions...