ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how certain windows of opportunity allowed political actors in Italy and Germany to codify national memory narratives from the earliest post-war months onwards. It shows that political circumstances and changes in the social structure of society nevertheless also frequently constrained wilful memory entrepreneurship. The chapter illustrates how politicians in both countries contributed to the construction of national memory with clear political purposes in mind during the immediate post-war years. It illustrates how a number of political changes and the parallel existence of different age cohorts caused a gradual transformation of the way in which the past was confronted in Italy and Germany between 1960s and 1970s. This chapter describes the transition period that defined the 1980s and which was characterised by the re-positioning of the different political forces on the one hand and a change in the reception by the public of new memory discourses on the other.
