Abstract

The article on Collective Memory and political Theory discusses the crucial relation between culture, history and politics. The essay starts with an analysis of Hans Ulrich Wehler's Gesellschaftsgeschichte and Walter Benjamin's famous article «Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian». It focuses in particular on Wehler's concept of society and his theory of social history and Benjamin's use of «collecting history». In a second part, the article deals with the contemporary German debate on memory and remembrance and the guiding difference between history and cultural studies, society and community. Above all, the author argues that the question of method is a political one. The paper pursues a more ambitious objective, which is to determine the theoretical and therefore political statutes of collective memory in times of contingency.