ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at two major issues: how memories are struggled over in academic work and the politics of memories. It focuses on some ways in which historians construct memories through their institution building, research agendas, and interpretive paradigms. While excluded and marginalized groups are subject to the discursive gaze of Eurocentrism, political correctness protects the assumptions that undergird the Eurocentric modernist project. Like any academic debate, multiple dimensions drive the debates, including the relationship of historians to West German party politics and the internal struggles of leftist historians between the Unabhangig Historiker Verband, historians from the West, and former East German Party historians. Rainer Eckert rationalized that multiple interpretations needed to be adopted but political history should take the lead in order to see how deep the suppression of other Germans by Party members bled into the fabric of East German society and how futile dissidence was. Memory was unreliable, vulnerable to misinterpretation, and subject to politics.
