Volume 43, Number 17 · October 31, 1996
The New Germany
By Gordon A. Craig
The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany
by Jane Kramer
Random House, 293 pp., $27.50
In the summer of 1984, at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, after the welcoming speeches had been delivered and the Olympic flame lighted, the floor of the stadium was suddenly filled with hundreds of dancers, who formed a gigantic outline of the United States of America, after which others, dressed as cowboys and farmers, advanced across it in covered wagons and, when they had reached its western limits, proceeded to build a church and a town hall and other buildings representing the coming of civilization to the wilderness and, this work being accomplished, held a shivaree and danced a hoedown. A German guest leaving the the stadium after this extravaganza was heard to murmur, 'Only the Americans could do something like that.' He may have been referring to the combination of kitsch and grandiosity he had just witnessed, but it is possible that he was thinking also of what it told him of the American connection with history and how different it was from that of his own country. This is one of the themes that are suggested in Jane Kramer's collection The Politics of Memory.
Review, 5412 words
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