| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

S. Jonathan Wiesen. West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past 1945–1955. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2001. Pp. xvi, 329. $39.95.

S. Jonathan Wiesen's book is at heart a study of historical memory. In the author's view, the central component to the rehabilitation of West German industry after World War II was its public association with the economic miracle of the 1950s and its dissociation with the disastrous policies of the Nazis. West German industrialists succeeded in doing this through the manipulation of historical memory. 1

Building on the work of sociologist Maurice Halb-wachs, Wiesen posits that the historical memory of West Germans after the war was the product of volitional choices and actions rather than of a subconscious desire to suppress the memory of their willing embrace of Adolf Hitler's dictatorship. Memory, according to Wiesen, is "an active process dependent on collective agency and rational choice" in which "a group sustains itself by manipulating images of the past for present purposes, and individuals within a group express their own personal memory through the lens of broader group narratives" (p. 6). To develop the idea of the collective identity necessary to mold historical memory, Wiesen contends that there existed an "industrial milieu" that was welded together by common language, symbolism, and experiences and that cut across industrial sectors and bridged the gaps among small, medium, and large enterprises. Within this milieu, Allied treatment of Ruhr industrialists and the on-going conflict with German labor over managerial prerogative endowed heavy industry with a symbolism that transcended divisions among the ranks of industrialists. To regain political legitimacy in the 1950s, West German industrialists used public relations to manipulate the popular memory of the Nazi past. . . .

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