ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the many entanglements of wildlife conservation and cultural memory. The Halfautomatische Troostmachine commemorates the individual bear Jo and the appalling conditions in which he lived, the equally terrible treatment of animals in zoos, and the extinction of animal species through humans. Cultural memory for Jan and Aleida Assmann plays an important role in the working of the signifying system of a society or culture. Cultural memory, however, is a necessarily selective process of active and passive forgetting and remembering, which raises the question which past is actively remembered and which actively or passively forgotten and why. The conservation of wildlife, therefore, may not only be part of a national cultural memory, but the historiographies of wildlife conservation themselves can be considered a form of identity discourse. Historical narratives of places are often reflected in their toponomies.
