Jeffrey Olick has long been one of the leading lights in the burgeoning field of memory studies.  Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, his books on Germany offer invaluable insights into the long struggle to master the Nazi and Holocaust past.  The Politics of Regret has become a standard reference point for scholars working on the global trend of nations commemorating shameful histories.  From the essential readings in the The Collective Memory Reader to the overarching history of collective memory in the six volume A Cultural History of Memory, his edited works have helped anchor and frame the field of memory studies.  I was fortunate to have the opportunity to speak with Jeff about his start in memory studies, his thoughts on the German memory success story, and his feelings about the current direction of American collective memory.

When Jeff began his graduate studies at Yale University in the late 1980s, he recalled there was no place in sociology for his interest in how narratives and storytelling shape our identities.  At the time, sociology was largely quantitative, the focus was not on the roots or construction of identity, but rather what you do with it.  It was the discovery of the work of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) that helped Jeff find a source of disciplinary legitimacy for his interests.  Often credited today with laying the groundwork for the field of memory studies, Halbwachs pioneered some of the earliest work on collective memory.  A student of Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of the discipline of sociology, Halbwachs helped Jeff anchor his interests in the very beginnings of the study of sociology.  

An American Jew who married a German woman, Jeff’s personal and professional lives drew him to the study of collective memory in Germany.  In particular Jeff became interested in how countries like Germany, with discredited national histories,  harness memories of the past for uses in the present.  In The Sins of the Fathers: Germany, Memory and Method, Jeff looked for answers to this question by studying the speeches of German political leaders from the immediate post-war years to 1989, with some concluding observations stretching up to 2010.  This is essentially a deciphering and framing of the language crafted by Germany’s political elite to master the past.   

Jeff acknowledges that Germany has done far more than most countries to acknowledge and work through its darkest chapters.  From Krastallnacht, the first wide scale assault on Jewish life in Germany, to the start of World War II with the invasion of Poland, the highest officials in the Federal Republic routinely express their remorse for past crimes on dates that fill the official memory calendar.   While the priorities of German leaders over time may have evolved from reintegration into the family of nations to acceptance as a “normal” nation, the language developed to acknowledge the crimes of the past is now at the core of the official memory culture.    

Many of us have had the luxury of ignoring statues and markers commemorating histories that, if we examined them closely, we would find abhorrent. But routinely we walk by them without notice, without stopping to look or read, without doing what monuments or memorials (although the former perhaps less than the latter) ask us to do: stop and think about the past. Jeffrey K. Olick, “Charlottesville and the End of American Exceptionalism,” in Henry L. Roediger III (ed.) and James V. Wertsch (ed.) National Memories: Constructing Identity in Populist Times. 

But Jeff is quick to note that he is far less triumphalist about Germany’s memory achievements than many Germans.  From the very beginning of the Federal Republic of West Germany, the political elite crafted what Jeff labels as a grammar of exculpation that allowed them to recognize while deflecting blame for the crimes of the past.  For example, the passive voice offered a means of framing the past in naturalistic terms as a disaster that befell the nation without clearly defined perpetrators.  When perperpetrators were identified they could be cast as a small fanatical Nazi leadership, exempting most ordinary Germans from responsibility.  While Jeff recognizes that Germany has done far more than most nations to work through a difficult past, the grammar of exculpation became one of the defining features of official German discourse about the National Socialist past. 

Commemoration of the Nazi past became highly ritualized over time.  Significant dates and sites on the official memory calendar called a specific tone and language.  Recognizing the unspoken memory protocol was paramount.  Failure to do so could provoke shock, consternation, even outrage.  Jeff begins and ends The Sins of the Fathers with the example of a speech given in 1988 on the occasion of Kristallnacht by then Christian Democratic President of the Bundestag Philip Jenninger.  Jenninger was forced from office shortly after his speech not because he said anything new but rather for his failure to recognize the proper tone and comportment required for this particular commemorative occasion.  Ritualized memory demands strict adherence to established norms, rather than a sincere expression or remorse or responsibility for the past.   If Germany’s political elite mastered the past, Jeff suggests that it may have been more a question of form than substance.  

If you peruse the scholarship in the field of memory studies you are bound to run across references to The Politics of Regret.  This is Jeff’s highly influential collection of essays where he elaborates on how recognizing and working through shameful histories, rather than just celebrating past triumphs, has become a source of political legitimacy for nations today.  Official apologies, transitional justice, and reparations have become common features of how nations today attempt to establish their moral integrity.  The global culture of regret is anchored in the belief that striving for the truth or a greater understanding past misdeeds is the best ways to move beyond catastrophic histories.  

What has set the United States apart is the extent to which it has not engaged in the kind of critical introspection seen in other parts of the globe. As late as 2016, Jeff remarks, there were as many as 1700 monuments to the Confederacy dotting the national memoryscape.  Lost cause mythology has remained intact and schools have not aggressively confronted the history of slavery.   Efforts to diminish the stature of Christopher Columber have had limited success and Native American mascots and images remain an integral part of the heroic national narrative of pacification and manifest destiny.  While the currency of regret gained wider circulation abroad, the United States seemed firmly anchored in a mythical, celebratory self understanding.  

If the dam of American exceptionalism began to fissure, Jeff identifies 2017 as a key turning point.  In the wake of the 2015 Charleston massacre and the start of the Black Lives Matter movement, in 2017 New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu moved the city’s Civil War monuments under the cover of night.  That same year the Charlottesville, Virginia City Council voted to move the Robert E. Lee monument from Jackson Park and to change the name to Justice Park—a decision that sparked a lethal clash between Neo-Nazi and left-wing protesters.   Following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 efforts to remove monuments to the Confederacy intensified and crossed the Atlantic.  From the toppling of the statue of slaver trader Edward Colston in Bristol, England and the statues of the infamous ruler of the Belgian Congo, King Leopold II, 2020 became known as the reckoning.  

The 2024 reelection of Donald Trump has certainly ushered in a backlash against the politics of regret.  A vocal proponent of a return to a celebratory approach to the American past, Trump has used the levers of the executive branch to pressure the National Park Service to remove references to shameful histories.  Lonnie Bunch, Secretary of the Smithsonian, has come under intense pressure to recast its treatment of American history to accentuate the achievements over the shortcomings of the past.  Despite this pushback, Jeff remains convinced that too much has changed to reverse course.  Long since discredited ways of talking about traditionally stigmatized groups cannot easily be restored.  American exceptionalism may have been given a reprieve but its days still seem numbered.