The authors address the needs of academicians in different fields of knowledge investigating collective memory and its discursive practices, its various manifestations in language subsystems, and the principles and mechanisms of social communication. Based on the significant potential of cognitive linguistics in this area due to the links between memory and language, the authors present this study аs to how social and cultural institutions regulate collective memory and apply different strategies, tactics, and linguistic means to create positive, negative, and neutralized images of the past in German mass media discourse. This study reveals the most relevant textproducer policies used to manipulate text-recipients and focuses on the most relevant argumentative and compositional tactics used in German mass media to re-actualize and form images of the collective past. The authors view re-actualization of collective memory in mass media in terms of social communication and media priming theories wherein collective memory is a phenomenon socially constructed in discursive practices, which perform selective, interpretive, and reversible functions. Managing the delivery of transformed images of the past to the addressee is aimed at cognitive and axiological changes in the communicative space of the addressee and forming the value judgment of the past. It is considered be possible due to the agent-object relationship of the addresser and addressee. The tactics applied by the addresser contribute not only to distributing and emphasizing some pieces of information but reducing criticism of the mass recipient perception.