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Sites of remembrance

Sites of remembrance are symbolical spaces where a collective – for example a national community – can remember their shared history and thus, according to the French historian Pierre Nora who coined the concept, can develop a shared group identity. Sites of remembrance can be material places such as monuments, museums, memorials or documentation centres as well as they could be songs, persons or events. In Germany, many memorials and historical sites remember the National Socialist dictatorship and the German partition. Institutional sites of remembrance seek to educate and create a shared culture of remembrance. In regard to migration, however, sites of remembrance are underrepresented.