Alon Confino is Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies, Professor of History and Jewish Studies, and Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts. He is author of the award-winning The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Wurttemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory (University of North Carolina Press) and coeditor of The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture.

An acknowledged authority on German history and memory, Alon Confino presents in this volume an original critique of the relations between nationhood, memory, and history, applied to the specific case of Germany. In ten essays (three never before published and one published only in German), Confino offers a distinct view of German nationhood in particular and of nationhood in general as a product of collective negotiation and exchange between the many memories that exist in the nation.
The first group of essays centers on the period from 1871 to 1990 and explores how Germans used conceptions of the local, or Heimat, to identify what it meant to be German in a century of ideological upheavals. The second group of essays comprehensively critiques and analyzes the ways laypersons and scholars use the notion of memory as a tool to understand the past. Arguing that the case of Germany contains particular characteristics with broader implications for the way historians practice their trade, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance examines the limits and possibilities of writing history.