ABSTRACT
This chapter aims at concretizing the potential of sociological memory research to the extent that the relevance of memory regarding the possibilities and limits of social integration are demonstrated, specifically through the perspective of sociology of knowledge. It illustrates the argument with the aid of examples from the context of the German unification. According to Hans-Georg Soeffner and Dariu Zifonun, the social integration of an individual occurs in the 'life world'. The individual life world can be defined in Alfred Schtz's terms as 'the totality of symbolic universes'. In conventional models of social integration usually a distinction is made between material and symbolic factors. The chapter focuses on the change within the 'order of reality'. The concept of order of reality can be traced back to Martin Sabrow and his reflections on the end of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a 'dictatorship of consensus'.
