ABSTRACT
In recent historiographical approaches, remembrance is increasingly assuming an epistemic importance. What is remembered and preserved, by whom and why? These are vital questions for historical anthropology and the cultural sciences in the broadest sense. After all, memory spins narratives that precede any interrogation of the historical material. Those narratives are not arbitrarily selected: via the narrative mold, they channel the imprint of past historical reality into reconstructions crafted by professional historians. Consequently, it is not just a subjective endeavor to try to determine the various modes of seeing intrinsic to differing perspectives; from their intersections, relevant truths can be extracted that are both objective and universal. In this chapter, I attempt to exemplify the approach that assigns memory an epistemic significance, developing this via an often demanded comparison between National Socialism and Soviet Communism. Indeed, such juxtaposing itself can be understood here as the articulation of a specific structure of memory.
