For decades, commemoration policy in Saxony has been marked by a conservative prerogative of interpretation and continuous conflicts. However, to turn those crises into a productive process and in order to come to the right conclusions, a debate on the former ordering principles of the commemoration discourse in Saxony is needed. This essay is meant to both initiate a critical hindsight and to outline challenges the future commemoration work in relation to Nazi crimes might face.

In this text, the meaning of civic remembrance work is clarified and related to trends of the state’s historical policy. An excursus on theorybuilding in the political sciences negotiates the problem of the concept of state and prepares the field for discussing the dwindling of the emotional reference to the history of National Socialism, to which civic remembrance work provides an answer.

The article sketches the unfolding of a civic remembrance landscape, and while doing so it particularly discusses possible contributions by the historical sciences and social education to the establishment of a civic-historical education which deals with National Socialism.

The interview presents the development and the work of the “Geschichte im Treibhaus e. V.” association, a socio-cultural centre in Döbeln. Due to the years-long commitment of young people, the history of National Socialism in Döbeln has been researched and made public by way of a variety of approaches. The working conditions for “AG Geschichte” are often rather precarious and deserve reliable funding.

Services of historical-political civic education on NS crimes are a challenge both for providers and for recipients and are subject to constant change. In the following, three complexes are going to be dealt with in somewhat more detail: firstly, the tension area of school and non-school learning places, and here this refers to memorial sites in particular; secondly, concrete support offers in the Free State of Saxony by the example of Landesservicestelle “Lernorte des Erinnerns und Gedenkens”, and thirdly changes and media possibilities of how to deal with witnesses.

How are memories connected to the topic of being an immigration society dealt with in Germany’s East and West? The idea the article is based on is to do kind of cultural remembrance work among Germany’s immigration society after 1989 which is reflected on by way of the theory and practice of social work. New potentials for democratisation processes by help of migration-sensitive remembrance work are made accessible by extending target groups as well as a profound repertoire of the methods of social work. This approach is enriched by practitioners from (cultural) remembrance work who have their say here.

In the town of Sachsenburg there was located a concentration camp from 1933 to 1937. A memorial site is to be established there soon. The essay investigates the complex tangle of all the players involved in the discussion about an appropriate way and place of commemoration. Starting from the main debate regarding the conservation and the future role of the commander’s villa the text is going to present the players, the controversies, and the different positions.

At Landesanstalt (State Psychiatry) Großschweidnitz, between 1939 and 1945 more than 5,500 mentally ill and mentally disabled people became victims of the National Socialist murders of ill people. Only a few of all the involved doctors and nurses were brought up before court. These NS murders of ill people were never discussed, over decades there was silence about these crimes. The article sketches the first attempts of accounting in the GDR and sheds light on the current work of the association Gedenkstätte Großschweidnitz, which wants Großschweidnitz to become a place of commemoration and education.

In Riebeckstraße 63 in Leipzig, people were ostracised and stigmatised over a period of one hundred years. Founded in 1892, under the name of “Zwangsarbeitsanstalt St. Georg” (St. George Institution of Forced Labour), during the NS period this complex of buildings became a workplace and place of collecting forced labourers, Jews as well as Romani people. In the GDR it was, among others, the location of a venereological station for women (allegedly) suffering from venereal diseases as well as a social home and a long-term care psychiatry. In 2019 there formed an initiative which actively supports the establishment of a site for commemoration, learning and encounter at the location.

The article tells about the work of the German-Polish Society Saxony. Among others, this initiative aims at supporting an understanding between Germans and Poles against the background of an awareness of the changeful history and Germany’s responsibility. Examples are given of how, by way of events, German-Polish encounters and projects or exhibitions and publications, remembrance work is done and solutions for a better future are searched for. Doing so, also some difficulties of joined commemoration are addressed.

The MAZEWA project is presented here as an example of the work of the Netzwerkstatt of Hillersche Villa in Zittau which aims to further develop the remembrance and commemoration work around the local Jewish cemetery. Using Heritage Interpretation as the methodological basis of the project, the cemetery is presented as a focal point to the history of the Jewish community in Zittau.