2014/04/17 by Steffen Werther, Madeleine Hurd · 1 citation
Psychology · Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration #German History and Society #Eastern European Communism and Reforms #Mythology #Narrative #Sociology #Sacrifice #Identity (music) #Hegemony #Work (physics) #Memory work #Gender studies #Media studies #Political science #History #Law #Aesthetics #Classics #Art #Literature #Politics #Epistemology #Philosophy
paper · pdf · doi:10.3384/cu.2000.1525.146327
openalex publication_date 2014/04/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
This article uses social-movement analysis to understand the rituals, memory-work and spatialties of Waffen-SS veterans and their sympathizers. Most social-movement analysis focuses on left-wing protesters; our concern is with the marginalized counter-narratives, rituals and -spaces produced by the self-proclaimed misunderstood “heroes” of World War Two. This counter-hegemonic self-definition is essential to these former world-war soldiers who, despite an internal mythology of idealistic self-sacrifice, are vilified in West-European master narra-tives. We discuss how, during the 1990s, veterans and their sympathizers sought to replace rituals of memory-work in the newly-opened East. We look at how the Waffen-SS’s ritual memory-work is “replaced” in alternative settings, including – perhaps surprisingly – Russia itself. Here, Waffen-SS veterans use new, official, semi-sacred places to anchor both an alternative identity and an alternative definition of the central meanings of modern European history.