Mark A. Wolfgram

author of Getting History Right: East and West German Collective Memories of the Holocaust and War

November 4, 2015

Dr.Mark A. Wolfgram is Associate Professor of Political Science (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison 2001). He has received research and writing fellowships from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation, and Carleton University. His current research involves an investigation into the Yugoslav collective memories of World War II, and the various national narratives about the wars of the 1990s, as Yugoslavia fell apart.

How do individuals, societies, and nations deal with their difficult pasts? Getting History Right examines this question in a comparative context by looking at an authoritarian East Germany and a pluralistic, democratic West Germany. Eschewing a narrow focus on elites, this work draws extensively on societal level discussions of the past in popular culture, such as film, television, radio, and newspapers. It examines how societal level discussions of the past shaped individual perceptions and interpretations of the past; and how individual perceptions and struggles over the meaning of the past shaped societal level discussions. These struggles over meaning and "getting history right" are not only shaped by political power, but are also a source of symbolic power.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2011-honorees/mark-wolfgram

Last Updated: 8 December 2015