ABSTRACT
Two editorial offices of Sächsische Zeitung, a Saxon newspaper, referred to a photographic shoot by local photographer Matthias Schumann in January 2018 to inform their readers about recent statistics concerning the wolf population in Saxony. This chapter asks how ‘the wolf’ is discussed in the East German Lusatia region and what role it plays in Lusatian people’s collective memory. The French historian Pierre Nora has introduced the concept of lieux de mémoire to describe historic points of reference “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself”. Cultural memories of different European societies conserve the wolf in its role as an antagonist of humans with mostly negative connotations. The return of wolves to Germany is embedded in an accompanying setting called ‘wolf management’. The culturally inscribed fetish for clarifications and classifications makes it hard to accept ambiguous spaces within the collective memory – despite the fact that this might conjure “hybrids, monsters”, as described by B. Latour.
