This paper examines the (historical) narrative in German newspapers that ultimately shapes the Germans' image of the nation. Starting from the assumption that a nation is an "imagined political community" (Anderson, 1991), which is based on shared knowledge of traditions and historic identities, the focus is on the shared memory culture of the Germans.
In Germany, the negotiation of the past is a complicated issue that repeatedly leads to new public discussions and debates. In a lengthy process of negotiation through several debates, the elites agreed in the early 2000s on a civic-pluralistic image of the nation (civic nation model). This refers to a concept of nation that enables ethnic-cultural pluralism while at the same time committing to the basic values of the constitution (Piwoni, 2012, 2013). This model no longer sees the Nazi past and the Holocaust as a blockade to a commitment to national symbols and emotional patriotism. As a result, this past became "latent but not less significant" (Piwoni, 2013), without suggesting with what 'memory content' this now emerging vacuum should be filled. In order to approach the topic as broadly as possible, the research interest of this paper is therefore not focused on a single topic (e.g. the Holocaust, the Nazi past or the fall of the Berlin Wall etc.), but rather on the nature of German remembrance culture in general and the extent to which it reflects the German understanding of nations.
This narrative can be conveyed through a variety of channels: through history lessons, education and socialization by parents or friends, politics and of course the media. The mass media have a special role to play here. They "accompany" us throughout our lives and, in addition, they publish the role of other history mediators, for example by commemorating memorial days. They filter content and set the accents for the past and function as a moral imperative and collective meta-memory. Meta-memory means that media remind us that something must be remembered. For communities they have control functions by promoting "right" memories and repairing "wrong" ones through legal and normative guidelines (Böhme-Dürr, 1999). The research question is therefore: Does the culture of remembrance conveyed by the media reflect the Germans' civic-pluralistic understanding of the nation?
To answer the research question, specific events (anniversaries, political and sporting events and debates) in the German culture of remembrance since German reunification were selected (period of time 1990-2020). Of these events, more than 50 articles from the agenda-setting mainstream media against the background of Foucault's Discourse Theory were qualitatively evaluated. The results show that there are different phases of remembrance in the German culture of remembrance, which also fit the elite discourse mentioned above in its negotiation with German history. Interestingly, there are two major turning points in dealing with and classifying the topic of national identity and the dark side of the German past (Nazi era and Holocaust): the 2006 Football World Cup and the entry of the right-wing party AfD.
