Erinnerung als Ritual

The discrepancy between the organized war-veteran culture and the development of overall German culture since the 1970s at the latest, the closely-defined ideological framework involved, and the static nature of the values, attitudes, and guiding principles upheld within that framework provide ideal conditions for the reconstruction of a form of cultural memory associated with a clearly defined group of language users. The analysis of speeches held on Commemoration Day (Volkstrauertag) and of interviews with the writers of those speeches indicates the almost total uniformity of the communicative patterns employed in them. Those patterns are discussed here from the perspective of research on strategies for coming to terms with wartime experiences.