Schlüsselbegriffe der Public History, literally “keywords of public history,” is a handbook written by a team of German historians, anthropologists, and education and media scholars. The key concepts under discussion are authenticity, emotions, memory, experience, heritage, historical culture, historical imagination, historical thinking, performativity, and reception—each discussed in about twenty pages. One could argue about the choice of the keywords, but the authors rightly claim that such lists are always controversial and never complete (16). Similarly disputable might be some decisions regarding the terminology (the explanation for writing about “emotions” instead of “affects” is not fully convincing, for instance), yet authors of handbooks usually face these kinds of unavoidable difficulties. Interestingly, the authors of Schlüsselbegriffe der Public History also offer an insight behind the scenes of their collaboration by informing the reader that they worked on the explanation of each of the keywords collectively so that there are no authors of...

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