This article draws on memory studies and media studies to explore how
memory practices unfold in schools today. It explores history education as a media-
saturated cultural site in which particular social orderings and categorizations
emerge as commonsensical and others are contested. Describing vignettes from
ethnographic fieldwork in German secondary schools, this article identifies different
memory practices as a nexus of pupils, teachers, blackboards, pens, textbooks,
and online videos that enacts what counts as worth remembering today: reproduction;
destabilization without explicit contestation; and interruption. Exploring
mediated memory practices thus highlights an array of (often unintended) ways of
making the past present.
