ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the process by which historical memory came to dominate the field of cultural history. The chapter begins by examining the relationship between psychohistory and cultural history in the 1980s and considers why cultural historians, who drew so much from psychoanalysis, found psychohistory of no use as a historical explanation. The shift to a focus on historical memory, and away from psychohistory, actually increased the parallels with psychoanalysis, which likewise focuses on memory. I discuss how historians treat historical memory and its notions of evidence and storytelling. I conclude by telling two Holocaust memory stories from present-day Germany and Israel, showing just how far some representations of the Holocaust in the two societies could go from the starting point of 1945.
