Opportunities and Challenges in Memory Activism: The Case of the Mittenwald Protest Campaign (2002–2009)

Abstract This article examines how memory activism can contribute to the democratizing of history through the example of a specific protest campaign in which activist historians among other groups and civil society actors attacked the dominant narrative of the “clean Wehrmacht” represented by a veteran association of Mountain Troops. It interrogates the Public History approaches of the activists and their impact on the local level of the Bavarian town of Mittenwald, where the protests took place between 2002 and 2009, in order to find out how participatory their construction of an alternative historical narrative actually was. Although memory activism has obvious benefits especially in dealing with painful pasts, the article also reveals its limits, as such benefits are contingent on the extent to which historian activists share their authority and the way they deal with public, as well as their own, emotions.