ABSTRACT
This chapter explores to what extent the German trade unions have used memory as a political resource between their institutionalization in the second half of the nineteenth century and today, and it will ask how successful they have been in justifying themselves and their mission in the present with reference to the past. This is not an easy task, as there is not much research at all so far on the long history of the shaping of the memory of German trade unionism. Hence we shall only here be able to give hints and first hypothesis about the memory history of German trade unionism in the hope that others might be able to fill the vast empty spaces on this particular historical canvas.
