| Zusammenfassung: | The following article investigates the relevance of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) for the ongoing creation of a national identity, based on the assumption that public commemoration is a form of history-making. It demonstrates how the memorial differs from other war memorials, how it generates and supports conflicting reactions and thus resists any definitive statement about the war. Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country joins the multivocal response to the VVM. The novel's young protagonist, Samantha Hughes, tries to find out what the Vietnam War was "really like," a subject everyone in her environment is conspicuously silent about. Her search for her father who was killed in action is on a symbolic level a search for a personal as well as a national identity, culminating in a visit to the VVM in Washington, DC. The article explores the significance of a site of memory in the process of coming to terms with a traumatic past and of generating an historical consciousness. It discusses the functions of memory, the danger of nostalgia in the novel's emphasis on the memorial's healing capacities, and the plausibility of a clear political statement in the text.
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