The Memory of Thought reconstructs the philosophy of Adorno and Heidegger in the light of the importance that these thinkers attach to two proper names: Auschwitz and Germanien. In Adorno''s dialectical thinking, Auschwitz is the name of an incommensurable historical event that seems to put a provisional end to history as a negative totality. In Heidegger''s thinking of Being, Germanien is a name inscribed in an historical mission on which the fate of Western civilization seems to depend: it thus becomes the name of a positive totality of history.