ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a new tool to help understand memorialization and commemoration, protest and populism in relation to the performative enacting and official presentation of difficult history. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and museum display analysis in Dresden, it highlights how key actors involved in these processes adopt contrasting narratives of the past when commemorating the city’s firebombing on 13 February 1945. It shows how left-wing groups seek to develop narratives of ‘perpetrators’ and ‘shame and pity’ related to these historical bombings, whereas their right-wing counterparts nurture narratives of ‘victims’ and ‘fear’. Both groups then instrumentalize and apply these narratives (termed here the axis of appropriation) to contemporary political issues, notably migration. The chapter also identifies a second narrative, which focuses on the contrast between practices of commemoration, protest, and representations of the past which appear ‘emotional’ and those which appear to be ‘rational’ (here: the axis of appropriateness). The combination of these two axes has specific relevance for Germany’s continuing process of ‘coming to terms with the past’ but is also more generally applicable to scholars from various disciplines who seek to frame and analyze (mis)uses of the past in relation to contemporary social and cultural phenomena.
