Collective memories of Germans and Japanese about the past half-century

We investigate the collective memories of two samples drawn in 1991, one from the former West Germany and one from Yokohama, Japan. In the early 1990s such samples included many members of World War II cohorts and also cohorts born long after that war had ended. We consider the relation of age, conceptualised as birth cohort, to the salience of memories of national and world events that were mentioned as important in response to a quite general open-ended question about the past half-century. The relations are similar across the two countries in so far as external events like World War II might have had similar impacts on each population, while each country is distinctive with regard to events that especially impinged upon it. Hypotheses about the importance of adolescence and early adulthood to the imprinting of memories are generally confirmed, but several types of evidence suggest the need to extend the delimiting ages to earlier than the mid-teens and later than the mid-twenties. Other evidence indicates the desirability of distinguishing between recent events that are the focus of media attention and earlier events that depend more fully on autobiographical memory.