| Abstract | Fritzsche examines how personal and institutional archives in Germany's changing political regimes shaped self and collective identities, and continues with discussions of the narratives of justice, Europe, and empire in the twentieth century, all of which were thoroughly recast by the events of 1989/1990. It was not memory as such, but the specter of oblivion that constituted the German archive and prepared for the reorganization of the German past at the turn of the nineteenth century. The menace of French empire, the initial "German catastrophe" two hundred years ago, serves as the point of origin for the German archive, the purpose of which was to identify a specifically German past, a genealogy called Vaterland.
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