Transformations between History and Memory
Author(s): Aleida Assmann
Source: Social Research , SPRING 2008, Vol. 75, No. 1, Collective Memory and Collective
Identity (SPRING 2008), pp. 49-72
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40972052
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Aleida Assmann
Transformations between
History and Memory
COLLECTIVE MEMORY-A SPURIOUS NOTION?
THERE IS NO NEED TO CONVINCE ANYBODY THAT THERE IS SUCH A THING
as individual memory; memory attaches to persons in th
But does it attach to them in the plural? Although the term
tive memory" has gained currency and a whole new discour
built around it that fills extended library shelves, there are
erate skeptics who tenaciously deny the phrase has any m
is of course easy to create a new term, but how can we b
term corresponds to anything in reality? Susan Sontag, for
is one of those who questioned and denied the meaning of t
"Photographs that everyone recognizes," she wrote in Regardi
of Others, "are now a constituent part of what a society choo
about, or declares that it has chosen to think about. It calls these ideas
'memories,' and that is, over the long run, a fiction. Strictly speaking,
there is no such thing as collective memory." And, she insists,
all memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each
person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering
but a stipulating: that this is important, that this
is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that
lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating
archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate
common ideas of significance and trigger predictable
thoughts, feelings (Sontag, 2003: 85-86).
social research Vol 75 : No 1 : Spring 2008 49
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According to Sontag, a society is able to choose, to think and
to speak, but not to remember. It can choose without a will, it can
think without the capacity of reason, it can speak without a tongue,
but it cannot remember without a memory. With the term "memory,"
her license of figurative speech reaches its limit: memory cannot be
thought of independently from an organ and organism. As part of the
brain and its neurological networks, it is tied to individual lives and
dies with each person. This commonsensical argument has its irrefutable
evidence. The statement is certainly true, but, we may argue, it is
incomplete.
There is little dispute that autobiographical memories are what
existentially distinguishes us from each other. Experiential memories
are embodied and thus they cannot be transferred from one person to
another. In stressing the experiential solipsism of individual memory,
however, we disregard two important dimensions of memory: interaction
with other individuals and interaction with external signs and
symbols. Autobiographical memories cannot be embodied by another
person, but they can be shared with others. Once they are verbalized
in the form of a narrative or represented by a visual image, the individual's
memories become part of an intersubjective symbolic system
and are, strictly speaking, no longer a purely exclusive and unalienable
property. By encoding them in the common medium of language,
they can be exchanged, shared, corroborated, confirmed, corrected,
disputed, and even appropriated. In addition to that, it is sometimes
notoriously difficult to distinguish what one has experienced oneself
from what one has been told and afterward incorporated into one's
own stock of autobiographical memories. Similarly, what we have experienced
ourselves and what we have read about or seen in films can be
equally difficult to disentangle. Oral narratives, texts, and photographs
are important props of autobiographical memory, which explains why
the boundary between individual memory and shared material signs
(such as texts and images) is not always easy to draw.
Sontag would probably concede all these points, provided that
we introduce the distinction between mind and memory. "Mind" refers
to the cognitive part of the brain, in which general concepts are built
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up, where external knowledge, taken in through texts and images, is
assimilated and reconstructed. "There is collective instruction," Sontag
affirms (85). Psychologists offer the distinction between "semantic" and
"episodic" memory, which may help us to further elucidate the problem
(Tulving, 1972: 382-402). Semantic memory is related to the learning
and storing capacity of the mind. It is acquired by collective instruction
and the site of continuous learning, acquisition, and retention of both
general and specialized knowledge that connects us with others and
the surrounding world. Episodic memory, on the other hand, enshrines
purely personal incidents as individually experienced; though it can
be communicated and exchanged, it cannot be transferred from one
individual to another without changing the quality of the experience
through external representation.
When Maurice Halbwachs (who is acknowledged today as one
of the patrons of memory discourse) introduced the term "collective
memory" in 1925, he was already aware of a potential misunderstanding.
To preempt lingering doubts he connected the concept of collective
memory with another term: "social frame." According to Halbwachs,
the term "collective memory" cannot be understood without referring
to the concept of "social frames." He writes: "No memory is possible
outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and
retrieve their recollections" (Halbwachs, 1992: 43). By defining collective
memory in terms of social frames, Halbwachs adopted a constructivist
perspective, which distances him from collective mythmakers and
essentialists (like Herder with his notion of Volksgeist). For Halbwachs,
collective memory is not a "spurious notion" but an innovating and
groundbreaking concept that has the capacity - as has been proved 60
to 70 years later - to open up an entirely new field of research.
In spite of our sound and justified skepticism of collective mystifications
and the political abuse of such notions in racist and nationalist
discourse, we must not forget that human beings do not live in the
first person singular only, but also in various formats of the first person
plural. They become part of different groups whose "we" they adopt
together with the respective social frames. A social frame is an implicit
or explicit structure of shared concerns, values, experiences, narraTransformations
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tives. The family, the neighborhood, the peer group, the generation,
the nation, the culture are such larger groups that individuals incorporate
into their identity by referring to them as "we." Each "we" is
constructed through shared practices and discourses that mark certain
boundaries and define the principles of inclusion and exclusion. To be
part of a collective group such as the nation one has to share and adopt
the group's history, which exceeds the boundaries of one's individual
life span. The individual participates in the group's vision of its past
by means of cognitive learning and emotional acts of identification
and commemoration. This past cannot be "remembered"; it has to be
memorized. The collective memory is a crossover between semantic and
episodic memory: it has to be acquired via learning, but only through
internalization and rites of participation does it create the identity of a
"we." This point was made clearly by Margaret Atwood:
When I lived in the rural Ontario countryside north of
Toronto, a local man said, "There's the barn where we hid
the women and children, that time the Fenians invaded."
An individual barn; individual women and children. The
man who told me about the barn was born some sixty years
after the Fenian attack, but he said we not they; he was
remembering as a personal experience an event at which
he had not been present in the flesh, and I believe we have
all done that. It is at such points that memory, history, and
story all intersect (Atwood, 1997: 7).
What is called collective memory, writes Sontag, is not a remembering
but a stipulating: groups indeed define themselves by agreeing
upon what they hold to be important, to which story they accord
eminence, which anxieties and values they share. According to Sontag,
the term collective memory is just another name for ideology. The
German historian Reinhart Koselleck shared this opinion. He distinguished
between two forms of truth: one subjective, one objective.
Subjective truth can be claimed by the individual who owns his specific
distinctive and authentic memories. The truth of these memories arises
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from the indisputable evidence of unmediated experience. Objective
truth, on the other hand, can be claimed by the professional historian
who reconstructs past experience in an impartial way. The historian
compares sources, weighs arguments and engages in an open-ended
discourse of experts who continuously correct each other to come
closer and closer to the truth. What lies between these poles of subjective
experiential truth and objective scientific truth is referred to by
Koselleck as "ideology."
It is interesting to note that after a period of heavy usage in the
1960s and 1970s, the term "ideology" has dropped from contemporary
discourse. As it declined and disappeared, the term collective memory
rose to take its place. What happened in the discourses of the 1990s was
more than a simple substitution of one term by another. The change of
labels was an index of a deeper theoretical transformation. The term
ideology is derogatory. It denounces a mental frame as false, fake,
manipulated, constructed, insincere and harmful, thereby presupposing
an absolute truth that is as clear as it is indisputable. The use of the
term ideology is grounded on the rock of a self-assured truth. This rock
has been eroded since the 1990s under the influence of multiculturalist
and constructivist thinking. We have come to learn that Koselleck's
concepts of subjective or objective truth indeed share many of the qualities
that we had assigned to ideology. It is in particular the insight into
the irreducible constructedness of both our memories and the work
of the historian that has taught us to discard the term ideology as a
descriptive term and recognize it as a purely polemical tool.
Individual remembering, as psychologists tell us, does not
preserve an original stimulus in a pure and fixed form but is a process of
continuous reinscription and reconstruction in an ever-changing present.
Historiography, as theoreticians explain, involves rhetorical use of
language and, in spite of all claims to impartiality, a specific vantage
point, an unacknowledged agenda, a hidden bias. In addition, we have
come to accept that we live in a world mediated by representations in
the form of texts and images, an acceptance that has had an impact
on both individual remembering and the work of the historian. The
historian of today has lost the monopoly over defining and presentTransformations
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ing the past. This does not mean, however, that he has lost his or her
authority. The voices of professional historians are as important as ever
when it comes to judging and correcting evidence, probing the truth of
representations, discovering new sources and interpreting them in a
new light. They have lost some of their singular luster, though, as they
have to cope with the "memory boom," in which activists, politicians,
citizens, artists, film producers, media magnets, custodians of museums,
and many other experts are engaged in the common enterprise of
reconstructing and shaping the past.
This situation is often described in terms of a postmodern relativism
that is induced by the reign of the media, which restage the
past and exploit it according to current popular taste or the interests
of specific groups. It is argued that feelings are exploited in the media
market at the expense of cognitive functions. To concede memories,
individual and collective, a new status and right in the mediated democratic
society, is to acknowledge the multiple and diverse impact of the
past, and in particular of a traumatic past, on its citizens. The memory
boom reflects a general desire to reclaim the past as an important part
of the present, and to reconsider, to revalue, and to reassess it as part
of individual biographies and the way individuals position themselves
in a wider historical perspective. It also provides a repository for group
affinities, loyalties, and identity in a postindividualist age. While the
term memory has ousted the term ideology, it has reinforced the term
"identity" on an individual and in particular on a collective level. This
change of terminology and orientation cannot mean, however, that
the functions of criticism, discrimination, and ethical evaluation have
become obsolete. On the contrary, it is up to the memory discourse
to develop its own stance of critical vigilance and to develop criteria
for probing the quality of memory constructions, distinguishing more
"malign" from more "benign" memories - that is, memories that
perpetuate resentment, hatred, and violence from those that have a
therapeutic or ethical value.
To counter the criticism of skeptics such as Susan Sontag and
Reinhart Koselleck, it must be emphasized that the step from individ-
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uai to collective memory does not afford an easy analogy. Institutions
and groups do not possess a memory like individuals do; there is, of
course, no equivalent to the neurological system. Institutions and
larger social groups, such as nations, governments, the church, or a
firm do not "have" a memory - they "make" one for themselves with
the aid of memorial signs such as symbols, texts, images, rites, ceremonies,
places, and monuments. Together with such a memory, these
groups and institutions "construct" an identity. (A. Assmann, 2006)
Such a memory is based on selection and exclusion, neatly separating
useful from not useful, and relevant from irrelevant memories. Hence
a collective memory is necessarily a mediated memory. It is backed up
by material media, symbols, and practices which have to be grafted into
the hearts and minds of individuals. The extent to which they take hold
there depends on the efficiency of the political pedagogy on the one
hand and the level of patriotic or ethnic fervor on the other.
The term collective memory, I would argue, is not necessarily a
spurious notion, but it is much too vague to serve as a critical term. It is
an umbrella term for different formats of memory that need to be further
distinguished, such as family memory, interactive group memory, and
social, political, national, and cultural memory. Interactive and social
memory are both formats that are embodied, grounded in lived experience
that vanish with their carriers. The manifestations of political and
cultural memory, on the other hand, are radically different in that they
are grounded on the more durable carriers of external symbols and
representations. In order to transform ephemeral social memory into
long-term collective memory that can be transmitted from generation
to generation, it has to be elaborated and organized in various forms,
including:
► emplotment of events in an affectively charged and mobilizing
narrative;
► visual and verbal signs that serve as aids of memory;
► institutions of learning and the dissemination of mass media;
► sites and monuments that present palpable relics;
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► commemoration rites that periodically reactivate the memory and
enhance collective participation.
Though grounded on external symbols, a collective memory can
be re-embodied and transmitted from one generation to another. The
cultural memory of a society is based on institutions such as libraries,
museums, archives, monuments, institutions of education and the arts
as well as ceremonies and commemorative dates and practices. While
social forms of memory are short-lived because they depend on embodied
and interactive communication, political and cultural formats of
memory are designed for a long-term use to be transmitted across
generations. (Whether they achieve this goal, is of course another
matter, depending on the stability and continuity of the political infrastructure.)
As we pass the shadow line from short-term to long-term
durability or from an embodied intergenerational to a disembodied
and reembodied transgenerational memory, an implicit, heterogeneous,
and fuzzy bottom-up memory is transformed into a much more
explicit, homogeneous, and institutionalized top-down memory.
However overlapping and intertwined the formats of social
and political memory may be, they have become the focus of different
academic disciplines. The bottom-up social memory is studied by social
psychologists who are interested in the ways in which historical events
are perceived and remembered by individuals within their own life
span. The top-down political memory is investigated by political scientists
who discuss the role of memory on the level of ideology formation
and construction of collective identities that are geared toward political
action. Social psychologists look at individuals in specific historical situations
and investigate how memories are established and experience is
communicated and contested; political scientists examine collective units
such as institutions, states and nations and ask how memories are used
and abused for political action and the formation of group identities.
HISTORY AND MEMORY
Until recently there was a widespread conviction that while humans
change over time, the past does not. It was considered to be beyo
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the touch and control of the living and therefore written in granite.
We have witnessed how over the last 20 years or so, this commonsensical
truth has been called into question and even reversed. While until
fairly recently people were convinced that the past was closed and fixed
and the future was open to change, we are now experiencing that the
past is constantly changing and the future proves to be heavily determined
by the past. The past appears to be no longer written in granite
but rather in water; new constructions of it are periodically arising and
changing the course of politics and history. It is not safely locked up in
history books and stowed away in libraries but continually reclaimed
as an important resource for power and identity politics. History is not
only what comes long after politics; it has also become the stuffand fuel
of politics. This paradigmatic change alerts us to the entangled relationship
between history and memory. To better understand this complex
relationship, we need to look at it in a longer historical perspective.
If we do so, we can discover that the relation between "history"1 and
"memory" has itself a history that has evolved over time, passing
through three stages:
1) the identity between history and memory,
2) the polarization between history and memory, and
3) the interaction between history and memoiy.
The first or premodern stage is marked by the identity of history ana
memory. Before the foundations of critical historical scholarship were
laid in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, history and memory
were not clearly distinguished. On the contrary, it was considered the
central function of the writing of history to preserve the memory of a
dynasty, the church, or a state in order to legitimize such institutions
and to ensure their continuity by providing for them an honorable past.
Historiography, in this stage, was fully adapted to the demands of the
present; it served specific functions for the state or community such as
justifying the institutions of the ruling class, legitimizing the authority
of traditions, and controlling the future. History was, to use an expression
of the English historian J. Plumb, the "handmaid of authority." The
Transformations between History and Memory 57
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legitimizing function was intertwined with the memorial function. The
battles of heroes and kings were sung by bards and written down by
chroniclers in order to rescue them from oblivion and to establish fame
and an honorable memory for the noble dead. The memorial function
of historiography was never given up throughout Greek and Roman
antiquity. Cicero still defined historiography as a weapon against oblivion,
a formula that became a topos and was still very popular in the
Renaissance.
The intimate link between memory and history shaped the
accounts of the past in a specific way. It narrowed the criteria for the
selection of people and events to be memorized; only those of highest
rank were singled out for a continuation in memory and only those
feats and achievements were selected that contributed to the honor
and fame of those who were remembered. In addition to this, only such
events were selected that supported the opinions and interests of the
ruling class. In other words: the identity between history and memory
was guaranteed by the reference to a collective identity enforced by
a specific power structure that was itself confirmed, legitimated, and
perpetuated in the process. The identity between history and memory
is grounded in a quadrangular relationship between memory, history,
identity, and power.
The second or modern phase is characterized by a polarization
between memory and history. This dichotomy was the effect of a long
process of intellectual and institutional evolution beginning with Greek
historiography. In early modernity, critical historiography sharpened
its tools in the struggles for power, pitting the truth of authority against
Memory
Identity
History
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the new authority of historical truth. When Renaissance humanists (like
Lorenzo Valla) deployed their scholarship to target certain documents
as forgeries, they exposed as the willful constructions that secure the
establishment and maintenance of power and shook the foundations
of institutions and tradition. A sustained and systematic differentiation
between memory and history arose only when professional historiography
was established as a specialized discipline and independent institution
in universities of the nineteenth century. Historiography became
a discipline by defining its own standards of truth telling, including
specific rules for verification and intersubjective argumentation. By
developing an ideal of disinterested objectivity, the old bond between
history and identity was cut.2 This is why Ernest Renan emphasized in
a famous speech in 1882 that history can become a real problem for the
collective memory constructions of the nation:
The act of forgetting - I might almost say historical error plays
a significant role in the creation of a nation, and therefore
advances in the field of history are often a threat to
the nation. Historical investigation, in fact, often brings to
light those cases of violence which occur at the origin of all
political formations, even if their consequences were most
beneficent. Unity is always effectuated by brutal force; the
unification of northern and southern France was brought
about by continuous extermination and terror which lasted
for almost a century (Renan, 1996: 41-55).
Historians can play contrary roles: they can either support the
play of political power or challenge it; they can act as architects or critics
of national memory constructions.3
The polarization between history and memory became a firm
and long-lasting topos among philosophers, sociologists, and historians
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nietzsche contrasted
"history" and "life," with history standing for an endlessly growing
storehouse of unusable knowledge and life standing for the vital capacTransformations
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ity to forget and thus to restrict the scope of knowledge to the size of a
usable past (Nietzsche, 1872). When Maurice Halbwachs described the
mechanisms of social memory in the 1920s, he introduced history as a
negative foil. He compared historical discourse to an ocean that frames
all the partial narratives and memories (Halbwachs, 1991: 72). For him,
histor(iograph)y is the universal memory of humanity, while collective
memories are embodied by specific groups and therefore always
partial and biased. Before these memories can be integrated into the
total view of history, they must be severed from their carriers and their
social milieus. The transformation of memory into the abstract scheme
of history, however, involves the evaporation of live experience and
meaning. Sixty years after Halbwachs, the French historian Pierre Nora
revived the concept of collective memory and dispelled lingering critical
doubts about its theoretical status. He extended Halbwachs' notion
of an oral memory shared by a social group to the cultural memory of a
nation, which, as a network of symbols, values, rites, and local traditions
provides the cohesive cement of a society. Nora sharply contrasted this
shared collective memory of lieux de mémoire to the scholarly discourse
of historiography:
History, memory are by no means synonymous but, as we
are becoming more and more aware, opposite terms in
every respect. . . . Memory is always a palpable phenomenon,
a tie experienced in eternal presence. History, on
the other hand, is a representation of the past
sacralizes the past, history which is oriented
chantment, desacralizes it. Memory is ow
and it is the cement of this group
hand, belonging to everybody and nobody,
to universality (Nora, 1984-1992: 23-43).
Whereas the pioneers of critical historio
memory as a rival of history, theorists such as
and Nora rehabilitated memory over against th
abstract histor(iograph)y. They rediscovered an
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Memory History
-is an embodied form of memory -is a disembodied form of
memory
-stresses differences and exists in -provides a universal frame and
the plural exists in the singular
-is linked to the identity of an indi- -is disconnected from the idenvidual,
a group, or institution tity of individuals, groups, or
institutions
-bridges the past, present, and -separates the past from present
future and future
-is highly selective, deploys -develops an event and impartial
forgetting attention
-creates values and meaning, and -searches for truth and tries to
provides motivation and orien- suspend values, disconnected
tation for action from action
Table 1
functions of memory as important and indispensable modes of assessing
the past. They all agree, however, in polarizing memory and history
along the following lines (see table 1).
The third (let's call it the postmodern) stage can be characterized
by a new interest in the interactions between memory and history. After the
long period of polarizaiton, they are now considered as complementary,
each one adding something that the other cannot supply. A new
awareness of the interactions between history and memory was triggered
by the profound political changes of the 1980s and 1990s, when
new memories emerged and old ones were seen in a different light.
After 1989, with the thawing of frozen memories and the opening of
archives, both memory and history took on a new force that carried
them into the center of the public arena. Historians were baffled by
the enormous impact of living memories that they had hitherto considered
to be a negligible entity. A historical caesura always introduces
the chance to narrate the past in a different way. Such a moment of
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retrospection can become a moment of revelation; then it suddenly
becomes obvious that what had been presented and passed as objective
history turns out to have been a biased construction of political
memory. The experience of a fundamental change of values exposed
the contingence of earlier accounts of the past. In such situations both
history and memory become self-reflexive; a sense is developed of their
constructedness by discovering that memory has a history and that
history is itself a form of memory.
History is not only the point of view from which strategies of
collective memory are targeted and exploded, but also the realm
from which they are described and explained. This particular area of
research is a new domain within the field of academic history. In addition
to reconstructing events in the past and showing how and why
they "happened," some historians now also reconstruct the symbolic
practices with which events of the past were collectively experienced,
interpreted, remembered. An important new configuration of
memory and history has been developed in a new branch of historiography
that can be termed " mnemohistory." Since the 1980s, historians
have become more and more interested in modes of remembering as
a form of social and cultural practice. They started to investigate and
analyze the symbolic practices of their own contemporary culture,
asking questions such as What is known of the past in the present?
Which events from the past are selected and how are they represented?
Which images have survived? What kind of commemoration acts are
devised? In this way, memory became itself the object of historiography.4
Mnemohistory is interested in the constructive as well as the
distorting effects of memory; it takes into account the ambivalence
of the past both as a conscious choice and as an unconscious burden,
tracking the voluntary and involuntary paths of memory. While the
task of traditional historical scholarship consists in separating memory
(the mythical elements) from history (the factual truth), it is the task
of mnemohistory to analyze the mythical elements in tradition and
discover their hidden agenda (J. Assmann, 1997: 10).
The research of mnemohistory does not exclude a critical stance especially
those studies that focus on current practices of remember-
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ing have critically exposed them in analyzing them. Some historical
studies even have made an impact on the respective national memory.
Henri Rousso's book on the Vichy syndrome, for instance, has immediately
impinged on French memory culture to the effect that collaboration
is acknowledged today to a much larger extent than it used to be
and we now speak of a mythe de résistance (Rousso, 1991). Similarly, the
book by Jan Gross on Jedwabne has instigated a passionate discourse on
memory in Poland (Gross, 2001). In these cases, historians have challenged
collective memory practices.
Charles Maier wrote that "memory motivates historical activity;
historical research utilizes memory" (Maier, 1993: 143) We may add:
memory complements history, history corrects memory. Historical
scholarship depends on memory not only for oral testimony and experience,
but also for criteria of meaning and relevance; on the other hand,
memory depends on historical scholarship for verification, substantiation,
and falsification. For this reason, it is important not to conflate
the two terms but keep them distinct to be able to analyze their varying
forms of mutual interaction.
HISTORY INTO MEMORY
We may think of the interaction between history and memory as
sented on an imaginary scale where memory and history coincid
the one end and are polarized on the other, with many variati
mixtures in between. Where history and memory are polarize
historian assumes an intellectual and ethical function and concentra
on the lacunae of national memory. In focusing on what is forgott
or she creates a countermemory. The critical historical discourse w
challenge and subvert the strategies of political power. Peter Burk
described the critical historian
as the guardian of awkward facts, the skeletons in the
cupboard of the social memory. There used to be an official
called the "Remembrancer." The title was actually a euphemism
for debt-collector; the official's job was to remind
people of what they would have liked to forget. One of
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the most important functions of the historians is to be a
remembrancer (Burke, 1989: 110).
Let us address the other end of the spectrum and look at instances
of a conflation of history and memory. Authoritarian institutions such
as the church and totalitarian states aim at a monopoly over truth and
the past. Whereas in premodern cultures, there were neither media
nor institutions of writing independent of power and authority that
could back up independent accounts of the past, the institution of
censorship served the function to destroy rival media and carriers of
counterhistories that threatened the stability of a uniform view and
an authoritarian voice of history. Totalitarianism can therefore be
described as an attempt to restore the premodern state monopoly over
history under modern circumstances and with modern means. This
situation is presented emblematically in George Orwell's novel 1984,
which describes the meticulous labor invested by the state in suppressing
and changing documents that contradict the unified voice of power
in the present.
We should not forget, however, that there are certain contexts
in which history and memory are also conflated in democratic nationstates.
If we look at the sector of public historical education we can
observe a similar self-enforcing relationship between history, memory,
identity, and power. In this context, history becomes the stuff of which
political memory, identity, and myth is made of. There is a close alliance
between the nation-state and the history textbook. The modern
nation-state is not only built on the general growth of literacy through
mass media and public education. Education is an important factor in
the building of the nation-state because it was by learning their history
that the heterogeneous members of a population were transformed
into a distinct and homogenous collective, conceiving of themselves
as "a people" with a collective "autobiography." In all cultures, history
textbooks are the vehicles of national memory which have been appropriately
termed "weapons of mass-instruction" (the formula comes
from Charles Ingrao, mentioned at a conference on "History Textbooks
in a Global Perspective" at the University of Chicago in April 2007). By
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remembering a shared history, premodern subjects were transformed
into modern citizens. "To some considerable extent a nationalist effort
is premised on the need to construct a desirable loyalty to and insider's
understanding of one's country, tradition, faith." In this political
context, the study of history, "far from being a neutral exercise in facts
and basic truths", is "of course the underpinning of memory, both in
school and university" (Said, 176). In the realm of school curricula and
textbooks, history automatically becomes applied history. It serves as
the backbone for the nation-state and supports its values by constructing
heroic and mobilizing patriotic narratives.
Forms of participation in collective memory differ widely
between informal social memory and the more organized format of
political memory. Participation in social memory is always varied
because it is based on lived experience and linked to autobiographical
memory, which is irreducibly specific in its position, perspective
and experiential quality. The memory of the Holocaust, for instance,
will vary vastly among survivors depending on the fact whether
they endured the torments of the concentration camps, hid in secret
places, or managed to escape into exile. For the second and third
generation of the survivors, however, as well as for the members of
other nations, this memory will become more and more homogeneous
as it is reconstructed by historians and accessed through the
shared representations of public narratives, images, and films. Those
who access collective memory via different channels participate in
cognitive learning (or semantic memory) about the past, in imaginative
and emotive identification with images, roles, values, in narratives,
and various forms of action such as celebrations, processions,
and demonstrations. Abstract and generalized "history" turns into
re-embodied collective "memory" when it is transformed into forms of
shared knowledge and collective participation. In such cases, "history
in general" is reconfigured into a particular and emotionally charged
version of "our history" and absorbed as part of a collective identity.
While collective participation in national memory is enforced in
totalitarian states coercively through indoctrination and propaganda,
in democratic states it is circulated by way of popular media, public
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discourse, and forms of "liberal representation" (Williams 1998).
In both cases, however, it relies on effective symbols and rites that
enhance emotions of empathy and identification.
MEMORY, MYTH, IDEOLOGY
According to Edward Said, "collective memory is not an inert and passive
thing, but a field of activity in which past events are selected, reconstructed,
maintained, modified, and endowed with political meaning."
A similar point was made earlier in an influential book edited by Eric
Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (1983). In this
collection of essays, the authors showed that many traditions of the
nineteenth century that paraded as age-old and stemming from times
immemorial, had in fact been "invented" rather recently. It is today
generally acknowledged that "the invention of traditions" was part of
the nineteenth-century project of nation-building, and a considerable
part of the project consisted in projecting the self-image and cultural
practices of one's own group into the past. These historians, however,
took the argument one step further. By focusing on certain traditions
that they identified as "new" and "invented," they suggested that they
were a "fiction" and therefore "false." The discovery that certain rites
and ceremonies such as the introduction of Bastille Day, for instance,
could be dated back to 1880 was a way to expose and "unmask" them as
instruments of rule by those in power who imposed their will top down
on the masses.
There is a methodological problem inherent in this Marxist reading
of traditions. By showing that some traditions are a fake, such
categories as "true" and "authentic" were affirmed and reinstated ex
negativo. It was the trust of enlightenment shared by these historians
writing on the presuppositions of Marxist and modernization theory
that by the very act of exposure, by merely pointing to the inventedness,
manifacturedness, and hence to the "falseness" of the tradition,
its spell would be broken and automatically dissolved. This recipe of
critical dismantling (or deconstruction) did indeed work in certain
cases where the demonstration that a document was a "fake" (such
as the ancient parchment called "the Constantin donation") caused a
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crisis and triggered the collapse of an institution. The term "fiction" is
misleading in the larger context of memory studies. "Fiction" can has
different meanings: it can refer to a narrative as a pure invention that is
therefore qualified as a lie; it can refer to the lack of a historical or ontological
status in fictional characters; and it can refer to the strategies
and constituents that go into the making of any symbolic construct.
Collective memory, as we have shown, depends on transitions from
history into memory that involve the framing of historical events in
the shape of affectively charged narratives and mobilizing symbols.
If historic dates (such as the storming of the Bastille) are selected to
be collectively and transgenerationally remembered, "fiction" in the
sense of making, shaping, constructing is always implied in their narrative
emplotment or visual encoding. Memory constructs that inform
commemorative practices and traditions are therefore not necessarily
false because they are constructed - of course they are! The questions to
be asked should not only focus on empirical evidence and the substance
of the narrative or tradition alone but ought to take the wider context
into account: Why and how do memory constructs work? Why do they
succeed to mobilize? Why do they find or fail to raise mass support and
resonance? As they are necessarily selective, the question is: By which
norms and bias are they chosen? What is included and what is excluded
from the constructions of collective memory? And what are the political
consequences of such choices in the present and for future?
When Said wrote that "the processes of memory are frequently,
if not always, manipulated and intervened in for sometimes urgent
purposes in the present" (Said, 179), this sentence was intended as a critical
statement. From the point of view of collective memory research,
however, it is a pure description. Collective national memory is always
selective "by manipulating certain bits of the national past, suppressing
others, elevating still others in an entirely functional way" (179).
As a rule, writes Margaret Atwood from the British-Canadian point of
view, "we tend to remember the awful things done to us, and to forget
the awful things we did. The Blitz is still remembered; the fire-bombing
of Dresden - well, not so much, or not by us. To challenge an accepted
version of history - what we've decided it's proper to remember - by
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dredging up things that society has decided are better forgotten, can
cause cries of anguish and outrage" (Atwood, 1997: 8). Given the close
functional relationship between the national narrative and the identity
of the nation, Atwood stresses that collective national memory is
always designed for a purpose and specific use: "the past belongs to
those who claim it, and are willing to explore it, and to infuse it with
meaning for those who are alive today. The past belongs to us, because
we are the ones who need it" (39).
While in the context of historiography the word "myth" is an
index to what is to be exploded and debunked, in memory studies, it
acquires a different meaning. Here it may refer to an idea, an event, a
person, a narrative that has acquired a symbolic value and is engraved
and transmitted in memory. While in the discourse of rational enlightenment,
myth is used to distinguish between truth or lie (or authenticity
and fiction), in the discourse of memory research it is used to
distinguish between the object of historical knowledge on the one
hand and collectively remembered events on the other. The idea behind
this new and nonderogatory meaning of myth is that not only fictive
events create myths but also historical events in their transformation
into collective memory. Myth in this sense of "collectively remembered
history" is meant as a neutral description. This more recent and scholarly
meaning, however, has not yet gained a wider currency. In the politicized
public arena it is easily mistaken as "untruth" and can give rise to
conflict. In May 2007, for instance, a conference in Berlin on the "Batak
Myth" had to be cancelled at the last moment because the Bulgarians
protested against their memory being presented as "myth."5
Hobsbawm's argumentative strategy, which was based on the
distinction between "fabricated" and "constructed," belongs to the
framework of "ideology critique" as practiced in the Marxist tradition
or the Frankfurt School. In these discursive traditions, ideology
was considered as a form of flawed consciousness and wrong values.
Ideology was something to be exploded from the point of view of those
who (like historians or philosophers) were free of the taint of ideology.
Yet already in the 1980s, when Hobsbawm's book appeared, the rigid
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polarization between "us and them" inherent in the term ideology gave
way to a more fuzzy and inclusive notion of "consensus," which no
longer excluded but implicated the point of view of the observer. This
shift signaled an important mental change that can be summed up as
the recognition that there is no viewpoint outside ideology. Ideology is
all-pervasive; in the words of Barbara Godwin: "we can only escape from
one ideology into another" (Flood, 1996). This new inclusive concept of
ideology was step by step divested of its normative baggage. To quote
Sacvan Bercovitch:
I mean by ideology the ground and texture of consensus. In
its narrowest sense, this may be a consensus of a marginal
or maverick group. In the broad sense in which I use the
term . . . , ideology is the system of interlinked ideas,
symbols, and beliefs by which a culture - any culture seeks
to justify and perpetuate itself; the web of rhetorical,
ritual, and assumption through which society coerces,
persuades, and coheres. (Bercovitch, 1986: 635).
In Bercovitch's use, "ideology" has shifted from an exclusive
term (criticizing what "they" do) to an inclusive term (describing what
"we" do). This move has stimulated new questions. The issue is not only
whether a collective memory construct is true or false, but also why it
manages to convince. In asking these new questions, another question
arises: In changing the meaning of such inherently critical terms as
myth and ideology, have memory studies abandoned and betrayed the
critical spirit? The answer is: of course not. Critique is also an objective
of the memory discourse, but it starts on a different level. It does not
start from the premise of authenticity and truth but takes its starting
point from the recognition that we cannot think, communicate, and
act outside of symbolic cultural frames. It is therefore no longer the
constructedness of a collective memory as such but the use to which
it is put that has become the basis for investigation, evaluation, and
critique.
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History can support a "painless exercise in patriotic fervor," but
it can also become "countermemory" (Foucault, 1977). In focusing their
attention on forgotten episodes and shameful moments, historians can
help to create a more honest and complex self-image of the nation.
Over the years, a change in style of history textbooks can be observed,
which may be characterized by the move from monumental to selfcritical
narratives and from isolationist narratives to those that connect
to others in a transnational and global perspectives. Criteria are emerging
for a critical evaluation of national narratives and political memory.
One concerns the question of whether the national narrative is told
more in terms of essentialism (myths of origin) or in those of historicism;
another has to do with the question whether stress is laid more
on identity (sameness) or on change. Textbooks and other representations
of the national narrative can be subjected to an analysis of their
principles of selectivity: it can be put to the test whether they adhere to
exclusive norms or whether they include awkward facts and recognize
the voices and experience of minorities.
NOTES
1. The term "history" is used here in the sense of historiography.
2. Historiography, writes Jacques Le Goff, "must aim at objectivity
must be built on a belief in historical truth" (Le Goff, 1986, pref
In spite of his ideal of impartiality and commitment to objectiv
even the professional historian is of course never completely f
from loyalties and prejudices. But he differs from others in that
is aware of this fact, and instead of indulging his prejudices seek
identify and correct them" (Lewis, 1975: 52).
3. Whether the new tool of "objective" scholarship was actually im
mented or not depended largely on the specific historiogra
discourse. Antiquarian historiography has embraced it, the
enlarging the realm of historical curiosity and eroding the con
of a "normative past." Historians of the national past, on the o
hand, were inspired by specific visions of the future for which
selected and constructed a motivating past.
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4. The pioneers in this form of historiography were often medievalists,
who had already been used to investigating social forms of religious
and secular memorializiation. See for instance O. G. Oexle (1995).
5. In April 2007, the following news blog could be read on the Internet:
"More than a century, time has not washed away the memory of our
ancestors' fate. Therefore, according to President Parvanov, every
attempt to re-write history or artificially to create prerequisites for
tension on delicate historical topics, is not only deeply unacceptable
but will also meet the repudiation of the whole Bulgarian society. . . .
The president's reaction has come after the Mayor of Batak Petar
Paunov announced that the citizens of Batak would not let a conference
on 18 May happen. The reason for their decision is the expected
presentation of a thesis, which claims that the Batak massacre is a
myth, its victims are exaggerated, and Turkish slavery is sham." See
Kostadinov (2007).
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