Christoph Nebgen / Veit Straßner: Erinnerungsorte des Christentums. Ein Analysevorschlag

While in recent years social memory has been coming to the fore of cultural studies, much research has focused on better understanding the mechanisms of how communities remember and thereby construct their own past. One interesting focal point of such fruitful research are the Christian “lieux de mémoire” as spatial manifestations of social remembering. Despite this, theology and church history have hitherto dedicated only little attention to this topic. After summarizing the fundamental concepts of social memory this article focuses on the possible contribution of theology and church history to cultural memory studies and proposes an analytical framework to examine Christian “lieux de mémoire”.

Keywords: anamnesis, collective memory, church history, history of memory, lieux de mémoire, Maurice Halbwachs, memory studies, monuments, social memory, sociology of remembrance.