Stefan Berger

Stefano Musso

Christian Wicke

Exploring two large economies which were heavily affected by deindustrialisation in the late twentieth century, this book provides insights into the social movements that brought about and also challenged industrial reduction in Europe. Both the Ruhr region in Germany and the Northwest of Italy experienced major structural transformation from the 1960s as a result of deindustrialisation. With contributions from experts in the field, this collection provides a comparative overview of each region, examining policy implementation, class relations, the changing political economy and environmental impact. Analysing industrial and post-industrial landscapes, urban developments and labour relations, the authors place their transnational findings within the context of the wider literature on deindustrialisation in the global North. A much-needed contribution to deindustrialisation studies, which have traditionally focused on North America and the UK, this book is a useful read for those researching deindustrialisation and the social history of Europe. Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. He is executive chair at the Foundation History of the Ruhr and an Honorary Professor at Cardiff University in the UK. He co-edits, with Holger Nehring, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, and has published widely on comparative labour history, deindustrialisation studies, industrial heritage, historiography and nationalism. Stefano Musso is Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Turin, Italy. He was general manager of the Institute for the Memory and Culture of Labour, Business, and Social Rights in Turin and President of the Italian Society for the History of Labour. He is a member of the editorial board of several Italian historical journals. Among his many publications on labour and business history is Storia del Lavoro in Italia (2015). Christian Wicke is Assistant Professor in Political History at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He has worked in nationalism studies, deindustrialisation studies, and social movement studies and is particularly interested in the politics of history, memory and heritage, currently focussing on urban movements in the 1970s. With Stefan Berger and Sean Scalmer he recently edited Remembering Social Movements: Activism and Memory (2021).

The Northwest of Italy and the Ruhr Region in Comparison

Deindustrialisation in Twentieth-Century Europe

Sean Scalmer

Remembering Social Movements offers a comparative historical examination of the relations between social movements and collective memory. A detailed historiographical and theoretical review of the field introduces the reader to five key concepts to help guide analysis: repertoires of contention, historical events, generations, collective identities, and emotions. The book examines how social movements act to shape public memory as well as how memory plays an important role within social movements through 15 historical case studies, spanning labour, feminist, peace, anti-nuclear, and urban movements, as well as specific examples of ‘memory activism’ from the 19th century to the 21st century. These include transnational and explicitly comparative case studies, in addition to cases rooted in German, Australian, Indian, and American history, ensuring that the reader gains a real insight into the remembrance of social activism across the globe and in different contexts. The book concludes with an epilogue from a prominent Memory Studies scholar. Bringing together the previously disparate fields of Memory Studies and Social Movement Studies, this book systematically scrutinises the two-way relationship between memory and activism and uses case studies to ground students while offering analytical tools for the reader.

Activism and Memory

Remembering Social Movements

During his political career, Helmut Kohl used his own life story to promote a normalization of German nationalism and to overcome the stigma of the Nazi period. In the context of the cold war and the memory of the fascist past, he was able to exploit the combination of his religious, generational, regional, and educational (he has a PhD in History) experiences by connecting nationalist ideas to particular biographical narratives. Kohl presented himself as the embodiment of “normality”: a de-radicalized German nationalism which was intended to eclipse any anti-Western and post-national peculiarities. This book takes a biographical approach to the study of nationalism by examining its manifestation in Helmut Kohl and the way he historicized Germany’s past.

Christian Wicke

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