Professor Jennifer Yoder’s talk on German Chancellor Angela Merkel revolved around a central political discourse known as memory politics—that is, integrating imagery from a society’s past into the present in order to facilitate a certain course of movement into the future. In Merkel’s case, this manifested itself in using past discourses about Germany in order to take responsibility for the past and push for a more conscientious future.
Angela Merkel is both the first East German and the first woman to serve as Germany’s Chancellor. In many ways, she acts as a challenger of tradition: someone to shake up norms, whether those be in politics or culture. Germany has long lived with its WWII actions coloring others’ opinions of the country, and one might assume that, like her predecessors, Merkel would attempt to distance today’s Deutschland from its history. Continue reading “Past, Present, and Future in Merkel’s Memory Discourse”