| Abstract | The article focuses on the complex relationship between historical scholarship and collective memory as exemplified in a concrete instance. The secondary role of professional historians is compared with other agents of collective memory. The limitations of historiography in molding collective memory is highlighted. Academic historiography attempts to determine how and why things occurred. The first task of collective memory is to forge a common national bond. The loss of control over collective memory is interpreted as part of a process of democratization in whose course dominant, agenda-setting elites forfeited their central role in shaping collective memory, supplanted by other forces that were hitherto relatively silent in historical documentation.
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