Cultural Memory Studies

≥
Media and Cultural Memory/
Medien und
kulturelle Erinnerung
Edited by / Herausgegeben von
Astrid Erll · Ansgar Nünning

Editorial Board / Wissenschaftlicher Beirat

Aleida Assmann · Mieke Bal · Marshall Brown · Vita Fortunati
Udo Hebel · Claus Leggewie · Gunilla Lindberg-Wada
Jürgen Reulecke · Jean Marie Schaeffer · Jürgen Schlaeger
Siegfried J. Schmidt · Werner Sollors · Frederic Tygstrup
Harald Welzer

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Cultural Memory Studies
An International
and Interdisciplinary Handbook

Edited by
Astrid Erll · Ansgar Nünning

in collaboration with
Sara B. Young

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

 앪
앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI
to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cultural memory studies : an international and interdisciplinary hand-

book / edited by Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning.
p. cm. ⫺ (Media and cultural memory ; 8 ⫽ Medien und kultu-
relle Erinnerung ; 8)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-11-018860-8 (alk. paper)
1. Culture ⫺ Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Memory ⫺ Cross-cul-
tural studies ⫺ Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Erll, Astrid. II. Nün-
ning, Ansgar.
HM621.C8534 2008
306.01⫺dc22
2008017708

ISSN 1613-8961
ISBN 978-3-11-018860-8

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쑔 Copyright 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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 Preface and Acknowledgements
Cultural memory studies came into being at the beginning of the twentieth
century, with the works of Maurice Halbwachs on mémoire collective. In the
course of the last two decades this area of research has witnessed a verita-
ble boom in various countries and disciplines. As a consequence, the study
of the relations between culture and memory has diversified into a broad
range of approaches. Today, the complex issue of cultural memory is re-
markably interdisciplinary: Concepts of cultural memory circulate in his-
tory, the social and political sciences, philosophy and theology, psychol-
ogy, the neurosciences, and psychoanalysis, as well as in literary and media
studies. Sometimes these concepts converge; at other times they seem to
exclude one another; and all too often, researchers in one discipline seem
to take no notice of the work done in neighboring disciplines.
Moreover, cultural memory studies is a decidedly international field:
Important concepts have been generated in France, Germany, Great Brit-
ain, Italy, Canada, the United States, and the Netherlands. At the same
time, however, we have seen how nationally specific academic traditions
and language barriers have tended to impede the transfer of knowledge
about cultural memory.
The handbook project proceeds from the assumption that, more often
than not, the meaning and operational value of concepts of memory in
general and cultural memory in particular differ between diverse disci-
plines, disparate academic cultures, and different historical periods. With
the move towards greater interdisciplinarity, the exchange of such con-
cepts has considerably intensified. Through constant appropriation,
translation, and reassessment across various fields, concepts of cultural
memory have acquired new meanings, opening up new horizons of re-
search in the humanities as well as in the social and in the natural sciences.
To the extent that their meaning must, therefore, be constantly renegoti-
ated, a sustained enquiry into these concepts and a survey of the latest
research in cultural memory studies can foster a self-reflexive approach to
this burgeoning and increasingly diverse field, providing a theoretical,
conceptual, and methodological backbone for any project concerned with
questions of cultural memory.
The aim of this handbook is to offer the first truly integrated survey
of this interdisciplinary and international field of cultural memory studies.
The concise presentation of the main concepts of cultural memory studies
is intended not only to offer readers a unique overview of current research
in the field; it is also meant to serve as a forum for bringing together ap-
VI

proaches from areas as varied as neurosciences and literary history, thus

adding further contour and depth to this emergent field of study.

***

Our debts are many, and it is a great pleasure to acknowledge them. Our
thanks go, first of all, to the many individual authors who contributed to
our handbook. It was a wonderful experience to collaborate on this proj-
ect with researchers from numerous countries and disciplines. We are
grateful for their willingness to present their research in the admittedly
very concise format of this handbook and also for their great patience
during the production process. Moreover, we would like to thank Heiko
Hartmann and his colleagues at de Gruyter for their encouragement and
assistance in establishing the series Media and Cultural Memory. Four years
after the appearance of its first volume, this handbook represents the at-
tempt to chart the very field––international and interdisciplinary memory
studies––that this series is committed to exploring and further developing.
We are also very grateful to Anna-Lena Flügel, Meike Hölscher, and
Jan Rupp, who helped prepare the manuscript for publication. Many arti-
cles had to be translated into English, and we thank Anna-Lena Flügel for
her translation from French, Stephanie Wodianka for her counsel on all
things Italian, and Sara B. Young for providing all the translations from
German. To Sara go our most cordial thanks: Without her, this volume
would not exist. She did an absolutely excellent job, from the critical
reading and careful editing of the articles to her well-crafted translations
and skilled guidance in the overall language and style of the volume.

Wuppertal and Giessen, April 2008

Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning
 Table of Contents

ASTRID ERLL: Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction ............................. 1

I. Lieux de mémoire–Sites of Memory

PIM DEN BOER: Loci memoriae—Lieux de mémoire ............................................. 19
MARIO ISNENGHI: Italian luoghi della memoria.................................................... 27
JACQUES LE RIDER: Mitteleuropa as a lieu de mémoire.......................................... 37
UDO J. HEBEL: Sites of Memory in U.S.-American Histories
and Cultures ........................................................................................................ 47
JAY WINTER: Sites of Memory and the Shadow of War................................ 61

II. Memory and Cultural History

ALON CONFINO: Memory and the History of Mentalities ............................ 77
DIETRICH HARTH: The Invention of Cultural Memory................................. 85
ALEIDA ASSMANN: Canon and Archive ............................................................ 97
JAN ASSMANN: Communicative and Cultural Memory................................ 109
JÜRGEN REULECKE: Generation/Generationality, Generativity, and
Memory.............................................................................................................. 119
VITA FORTUNATI AND ELENA LAMBERTI: Cultural Memory: A European
Perspective ........................................................................................................ 127

III. Social, Political, and Philosophical Memory Studies

JEAN-CHRISTOPHE MARCEL AND LAURENT MUCCHIELLI: Maurice
Halbwachs’s mémoire collective ........................................................................... 141
JEFFREY K. OLICK: From Collective Memory to the Sociology of
Mnemonic Practices and Products................................................................ 151
ANDREAS LANGENOHL: Memory in Post-Authoritarian Societies ............. 163
ERIK MEYER: Memory and Politics ................................................................ 173
ELENA ESPOSITO: Social Forgetting: A Systems-Theory Approach.......... 181
SIEGFRIED J. SCHMIDT: Memory and Remembrance: A Constructivist
Approach........................................................................................................... 191
MAUREEN JUNKER-KENNY: Memory and Forgetting in Paul Ricœur’s
Theory of the Capable Self............................................................................. 203
VIII Table of Contents

IV. Psychological Memory Studies

JÜRGEN STRAUB: Psychology, Narrative, and Cultural Memory:
Past and Present ............................................................................................... 215
WULF KANSTEINER AND HARALD WEILNBÖCK: Against the Concept of
Cultural Trauma ............................................................................................... 229
DAVID MIDDLETON AND STEVEN D. BROWN: Experience and Memory:
Imaginary Futures in the Past ........................................................................ 241
DAVID MANIER AND WILLIAM HIRST: A Cognitive Taxonomy of
Collective Memories ........................................................................................ 253
GERALD ECHTERHOFF: Language and Memory: Social and Cognitive
Processes ........................................................................................................... 263
HANS J. MARKOWITSCH: Cultural Memory and the Neurosciences............ 275
HARALD WELZER: Communicative Memory................................................. 285

V. Literature and Cultural Memory

RENATE LACHMANN: Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature . 301
HERBERT GRABES: Cultural Memory and the Literary Canon.................... 311
MAX SAUNDERS: Life-Writing, Cultural Memory, and Literary Studies .... 321
BIRGIT NEUMANN: The Literary Representation of Memory ..................... 333
ANN RIGNEY: The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between
Monumentality and Morphing ....................................................................... 345

VI. Media and Cultural Memory

JAMES E. YOUNG: The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in
History ............................................................................................................... 357
JENS RUCHATZ: The Photograph as Externalization and Trace................. 367
BARBIE ZELIZER: Journalism’s Memory Work.............................................. 379
ASTRID ERLL: Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory.... 389
MARTIN ZIEROLD: Memory and Media Cultures .......................................... 399

Index of Names................................................................................................ 409

Index of Terms................................................................................................. 423
Notes on Contributors.................................................................................... 427
 Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction
ASTRID ERLL

1. Towards a Conceptual Foundation for

Cultural Memory Studies
Over the past two decades, the relationship between culture and memory
has emerged in many parts of the world as a key issue of interdisciplinary
research, involving fields as diverse as history, sociology, art, literary and
media studies, philosophy, theology, psychology, and the neurosciences,
and thus bringing together the humanities, social studies, and the natural
sciences in a unique way. The importance of the notion of cultural mem-
ory is not only documented by the rapid growth, since the late 1980s, of
publications on specific national, social, religious, or family memories, but
also by a more recent trend, namely attempts to provide overviews of the
state of the art in this emerging field and to synthesize different research
traditions. Anthologies of theoretical texts, such as The Collective Memory
Reader (Olick et al.), as well as the launch of the new journal Memory Studies
testify to the need to bring focus to this broad discussion and to consider
the theoretical and methodological standards of a promising, but also as
yet incoherent and dispersed field (cf. Olick; Radstone; Erll). The present
handbook represents the shared effort of forty-one authors, all of whom
have contributed over the past years, from a variety of disciplinary per-
spectives, to the development of this nascent field, and it is part of the
effort to consolidate memory studies into a more coherent discipline. It is
a first step on the road towards a conceptual foundation for the kind of
memory studies which assumes a decidedly cultural and social perspective.
“Cultural” (or, if you will, “collective,” “social”) memory is certainly a
multifarious notion, a term often used in an ambiguous and vague way.
Media, practices, and structures as diverse as myth, monuments, historiog-
raphy, ritual, conversational remembering, configurations of cultural
knowledge, and neuronal networks are nowadays subsumed under this
wide umbrella term. Because of its intricacy, cultural memory has been a
highly controversial issue ever since its very conception in Maurice
Halbwachs’s studies on mémoire collective (esp. 1925, 1941, 1950). His con-
temporary Marc Bloch accused Halbwachs of simply transferring concepts
from individual psychology to the level of the collective, and even today
scholars continue to challenge the notion of collective or cultural memory,
claiming, for example, that since we have well-established concepts like
“myth,” “tradition,” and “individual memory,” there is no need for a
2 Astrid Erll

further, and often misleading, addition to the existing repertoire (cf. Gedi
and Elam). What these criticisms overlook, of course, is that it is exactly
the umbrella quality of these relatively new usages of “memory” which
helps us see the (sometimes functional, sometimes analogical, sometimes
metaphorical) relationships between such phenomena as ancient myths
and the personal recollection of recent experience, and which enables
disciplines as varied as psychology, history, sociology, and literary studies
to engage in a stimulating dialogue.
This handbook is based on a broad understanding of cultural memory,
suggesting as a provisional definition “the interplay of present and past in
socio-cultural contexts.” Such an understanding of the term allows for an
inclusion of a broad spectrum of phenomena as possible objects of cul-
tural memory studies––ranging from individual acts of remembering in a
social context to group memory (of family, friends, veterans, etc.) to na-
tional memory with its “invented traditions,” and finally to the host of
transnational lieux de mémoire such as the Holocaust and 9/11. At the same
time, cultural memory studies is not restricted to the study of those ways
of making sense of the past which are intentional and performed through
narrative, and which go hand in hand with the construction of identities––
although this very nexus (intentional remembering, narrative, identity) has
certainly yielded the lion’s share of research in memory studies so far. The
field thus remains open for the exploration of unintentional and implicit
ways of cultural remembering (see Welzer, this volume) or of inherently
non-narrative, for example visual or bodily, forms of memory.
But if the range of themes and objects of memory studies is virtually
limitless (everything is, somehow, related to memory), then what makes
our new field distinct? With Alon Confino, I would argue that it is not the
infinite multitude of possible topics which characterizes cultural memory
studies, but instead its concepts: the specific ways of conceiving of themes
and of approaching objects. However, despite two decades of intensive
research, the design of a conceptual toolbox for cultural memory studies is
still at a fledgling stage, because (to quote Confino in this volume) mem-
ory studies is currently “more practiced than theorized”––and practiced, at
that, within an array of different disciplines and national academic cul-
tures, with their own vocabularies, methods, and traditions. What we need
is to take a survey of the concepts used in memory studies and, in doing
so, cross intellectual and linguistic boundaries.
Even a cursory look at the host of different terminologies which have
emerged from memory studies since Maurice Halbwachs will shed light on
the challenges faced by those who are searching for a conceptual founda-
tion for the field: mémoire collective/collective memory, cadres sociaux/social
frameworks of memory, social memory, mnemosyne, ars memoriae, loci et
 Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction 3

imagines, lieux de mémoire/sites of memory, invented traditions, myth, memo-

ria, heritage, commemoration, kulturelles Gedächtnis, communicative mem-
ory, generationality, postmemory. The list could go on.
What this wealth of existing concepts shows, first of all, is that cultural
memory is not the object of one single discipline, but a transdisciplinary
phenomenon. There is no such thing as a privileged standpoint or ap-
proach for memory research (for the systematic and historic reasons for
this, see sections 2 and 3 of this article). Cultural memory studies is a field
to which many disciplines contribute, using their specific methodologies
and perspectives. This makes for its terminological richness, but also for
its disjointedness. At the same time, it has been clear since its very incep-
tion that the study of cultural memory can only be successful if it is based
on cooperation among different disciplines. Cultural memory studies is
therefore not merely a multidisciplinary field, but fundamentally an inter-
disciplinary project. Many exciting forms of collaboration have already
been fostered. And indeed, the strongest and most striking studies in cul-
tural memory are based on interdisciplinary exchange––between media
studies and cultural history (J. Assmann; A. Assmann), history and sociol-
ogy (Olick), neuroscience and social psychology (Welzer; Markowitsch),
cognitive psychology and history (Manier and Hirst) or social psychology
and linguistics (Echterhoff; all this volume). An even more intensified
dialogue among disciplines will help uncover the manifold intersections of
memory and culture. This, however, requires a very sensitive handling of
terminology and a careful discrimination of the specific disciplinary uses
of certain concepts and of their literal, metaphorical, or metonymical im-
plications (see section 2).

2. Establishing the Framework: Dimensions, Levels, and

Modes of Cultural Memory
If we want to establish a framework for cultural memory studies, working
on concepts is inevitable. In the following I will propose some basic defi-
nitions and conceptual differentiations which may help to prevent misun-
derstanding and resolve some of the controversies which have been
sparked time and again within and about cultural memory studies.
(a) Dimensions of Culture and Memory: Material, Social, and Mental
Arguably the most important and by far most frequently used key concept
of cultural memory studies is the contentious term mémoire collective
(collective memory), which was brought into the discussion by Maurice
Halbwachs in the 1920s. Our choice of “cultural memory” for the title of
4 Astrid Erll

this handbook is due, in the first place, to the highly controversial nature
of Halbwachs’s term and the many wrong associations it seems to trigger
in those who are new to the field. Secondly, according to the definition
given above, the term “cultural memory” accentuates the connection of
memory on the one hand and socio-cultural contexts on the other. How-
ever, the term “cultural” does not designate a specific affinity to Cultural
Studies as conceived and practiced by the Birmingham School (although
this discipline has certainly contributed to cultural memory studies). Our
notion of culture is instead more rooted in the German tradition of the
study of cultures (Kulturwissenschaft) and in anthropology, where culture is
defined as a community’s specific way of life, led within its self-spun webs
of meaning (cf. Geertz).
According to anthropological and semiotic theories, culture can be
seen as a three-dimensional framework, comprising social (people, social
relations, institutions), material (artifacts and media), and mental aspects
(culturally defined ways of thinking, mentalities) (cf. Posner). Understood
in this way, “cultural memory” can serve as an umbrella term which com-
prises “social memory” (the starting point for memory research in the so-
cial sciences), “material or medial memory” (the focus of interest in literary
and media studies), and “mental or cognitive memory” (the field of expertise
in psychology and the neurosciences). This neat distinction is of course
merely a heuristic tool. In reality, all three dimensions are involved in the
making of cultural memories. Cultural memory studies is therefore char-
acterized by the transcending of boundaries. Some scholars look at the
interplay of material and social phenomena (for example, memorials and
the politics of memory; see Meyer); others scrutinize the intersections of
material and mental phenomena (as in the history of mentalities; see Con-
fino); still others study the relation of cognitive and social phenomena (as
in conversational remembering; see Middleton and Brown; all this vol-
ume).
(b) Levels of Memory: Individual and Collective
It is important to realize that the notions of “cultural” or “collective”
memory proceed from an operative metaphor. The concept of “remem-
bering” (a cognitive process which takes place in individual brains) is
metaphorically transferred to the level of culture. In this metaphorical
sense, scholars speak of a “nation’s memory,” a “religious community’s
memory,” or even of “literature’s memory” (which, according to Renate
Lachmann, is its intertextuality). This crucial distinction between two as-
pects of cultural memory studies is what Jeffrey K. Olick draws our atten-
tion to when he maintains that “two radically different concepts of culture
are involved here, one that sees culture as a subjective category of mean-
 Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction 5

ings contained in people’s minds versus one that sees culture as patterns
of publicly available symbols objectified in society” (336). In other words,
we have to differentiate between two levels on which culture and memory
intersect: the individual and the collective or, more precisely, the level of
the cognitive on the one hand, and the levels of the social and the medial
on the other.
The first level of cultural memory is concerned with biological mem-
ory. It draws attention to the fact that no memory is ever purely individ-
ual, but always inherently shaped by collective contexts. From the people
we live with and from the media we use, we acquire schemata which help
us recall the past and encode new experience. Our memories are often
triggered as well as shaped by external factors, ranging from conversation
among friends to books and to places. In short, we remember in socio-
cultural contexts. With regard to this first level, “memory” is used in a
literal sense, whereas the attribute “cultural” is a metonymy, standing for
the “socio-cultural contexts and their influence on memory.” It is espe-
cially within oral history, social psychology, and the neurosciences that
cultural memory is understood according to this first aspect of the term.
The second level of cultural memory refers to the symbolic order, the
media, institutions, and practices by which social groups construct a
shared past. “Memory,” here, is used metaphorically. Societies do not
remember literally; but much of what is done to reconstruct a shared past
bears some resemblance to the processes of individual memory, such as
the selectivity and perspectivity inherent in the creation of versions of the
past according to present knowledge and needs. In cultural history and the
social sciences, much research has been done with regard to this second
aspect of collective memory, the most influential concepts to have
emerged being Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire and Jan and Aleida Ass-
mann’s kulturelles Gedächtnis.
The two forms of cultural memory can be distinguished from each
other on an analytical level; but in practice the cognitive and the so-
cial/medial continuously interact. There is no such thing as pre-cultural
individual memory; but neither is there a Collective or Cultural Memory
(with capital letters) which is detached from individuals and embodied
only in media and institutions. Just as socio-cultural contexts shape indi-
vidual memories, a “memory” which is represented by media and institu-
tions must be actualized by individuals, by members of a community of
remembrance, who may be conceived of as points de vue (Maurice
Halbwachs) on shared notions of the past. Without such actualizations,
monuments, rituals, and books are nothing but dead material, failing to
have any impact in societies.
6 Astrid Erll

As is always the case with metaphors, some features can be transferred

with a gain in insight, others cannot. The notion of cultural memory has
quite successfully directed our attention to the close connection that exists
between, say, a nation’s version of its past and its version of national
identity. That memory and identity are closely linked on the individual
level is a commonplace that goes back at least to John Locke, who main-
tained that there is no such thing as an essential identity, but that identities
have to be constructed and reconstructed by acts of memory, by remem-
bering who one was and by setting this past Self in relation to the present
Self. The concept of cultural memory has opened the way to studying
these processes at a collective level. More problematic is the migration of
concepts between the individual and social levels when it comes to trauma
studies. Wulf Kansteiner and Harald Weilnböck (this volume) show the
(ethical) pitfalls of attempting to conflate processes of the individual psy-
che with the medial and social representation of the past.
To sum up, cultural memory studies is decidedly concerned with so-
cial, medial, and cognitive processes, and their ceaseless interplay. In the
present volume, this fact is mirrored not only by the dedication of differ-
ent sections to (clusters of) different disciplines (history, social sciences,
psychology, literary and media studies) which have an expertise with re-
gard to one specific level of cultural memory, but also by the incorpora-
tion of as many approaches as possible which go beyond those bounda-
ries. Readers will therefore discover numerous cross-connections between
the paths taken in the individual parts of this book.
(c) Modes of Memory: The “How” of Remembering
The last distinction to be made in this introduction––that between differ-
ent modes of remembering––is one which aims to confront another
source of vehement dispute within and about memory studies. One of
Halbwachs’s less felicitous legacies is the opposition between history and
memory. Halbwachs conceives of the former as abstract, totalizing, and
“dead,” and of the latter as particular, meaningful, and “lived.” This po-
larity, itself a legacy of nineteenth-century historicism and its discontents,
was taken up and popularized by Pierre Nora, who also distinguishes po-
lemically between history and memory and positions his lieux de mémoire in
between. Studies on “history vs. memory” are usually loaded with emo-
tionally charged binary oppositions: good vs. bad, organic vs. artificial,
living vs. dead, from below vs. from above. And while the term “cultural
memory” is already a multifarious notion, it is often even less clear what is
meant with the collective singular of “history” (cf. Koselleck): Selective
and meaningful memory vs. the unintelligible totality of historical events?
Methodologically unregulated and identity-related memory vs. scientific,
 Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction 7

seemingly neutral and objective historiography? Authentic memory produced

within small communities vs. ideologically charged, official images of history?
Witnesses of the past vs. academic historians? The whole question of “his-
tory and/or/as memory” is simply not a very fruitful approach to cultural
representations of the past. It is a dead end in memory studies, and also
one of its “Achilles’ heels” (see Olick, this volume).
I would suggest dissolving the useless opposition of history vs. mem-
ory in favor of a notion of different modes of remembering in culture. This
approach proceeds from the basic insight that the past is not given, but
must instead continually be re-constructed and re-presented. Thus, our
memories (individual and collective) of past events can vary to a great
degree. This holds true not only for what is remembered (facts, data), but
also for how it is remembered, that is, for the quality and meaning the past
assumes. As a result, there are different modes of remembering identical
past events. A war, for example, can be remembered as a mythic event
(“the war as apocalypse”), as part of political history (the First World War
as “the great seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century”), as a traumatic
experience (“the horror of the trenches, the shells, the barrage of gunfire,”
etc.), as a part of family history (“the war my great-uncle served in”), as a
focus of bitter contestation (“the war which was waged by the old genera-
tion, by the fascists, by men”). Myth, religious memory, political history,
trauma, family remembrance, or generational memory are different modes
of referring to the past. Seen in this way, history is but yet another mode
of cultural memory, and historiography its specific medium. This is not at
all to lessen its importance or the merits of generations of historians. Since
the early nineteenth century, the historical method has developed into the
best-regulated and most reliable way of reconstructing the past (even
though its specific operations have been justifiably criticized by Foucault
and others, and may be complemented by other modes).

3. Genealogies and Branches of Cultural Memory Studies:

The Design of This Handbook
This handbook has a historic and systematic (or diachronic and syn-
chronic) layout. Although its main focus is on current research and con-
cepts of cultural memory studies, it also provides insights into the differ-
ent roots of the field. Whereas a history of thought about memory and
culture would have to go back to Plato, the beginnings of a modern no-
tion of cultural memory can be retraced to the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries (see Olick; Straub; Marcel and Mucchielli; all this vol-
ume). The present field of research is built on the emergence of a “new
8 Astrid Erll

wave” of cultural memory studies since the 1980s (see Confino; Harth;
Fortunati and Lamberti; all this volume).
Maurice Halbwachs was the first to write explicitly and systematically
about cultural memory. If one reads through the essays of this volume,
there can be little doubt that his studies of mémoire collective have emerged
as the foundational texts of today’s memory studies––unequivocally ac-
cepted as such no matter what discipline or country the respective re-
searchers call home. Halbwachs not only coined the fundamental term
“collective memory”; his legacy to cultural memory studies is at least
threefold. Firstly, with his concept of cadres sociaux de la mémoire (social
frameworks of memory) he articulated the idea that individual memories
are inherently shaped and will often be triggered by socio-cultural con-
texts, or frameworks, thus already pointing to cultural schema theories and
the contextual approaches of psychology. Secondly, his study of family
memory and other private practices of remembering have been an impor-
tant influence for oral history. And thirdly, with his research on the mem-
ory of religious communities (in La topographie légendaire) he accentuated
topographical aspects of cultural memory, thus anticipating the notion of
lieux de mémoire, and he looked at communities whose memory reaches
back thousands of years, thus laying the foundation for Jan and Aleida
Assmann’s kulturelles Gedächtnis.
However, although Halbwachs’s work is rooted in French sociology,
memory studies was an international and transdisciplinary phenomenon
from the very beginning. Around 1900, scholars from different disciplines
and countries became interested in the intersections between culture and
memory: notably Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, Emile Durkheim, Mau-
rice Halbwachs, Aby Warburg, Arnold Zweig, Karl Mannheim, Frederick
Bartlett, and Walter Benjamin (see also Olick, this volume). Sometimes
those scholars critically referred to one another’s work (for example
Halbwachs to Durkheim, or Bloch and Bartlett to Halbwachs), yet more
often this early research remained unconnected. Early memory studies is
thus a typical example of an emergent phenomenon, cropping up at dif-
ferent places at roughly the same time––a process which would be re-
peated in the 1980s, with the “new memory studies.”
If Halbwachs is the best remembered founding father of memory
studies, then Aby Warburg is arguably the most forgotten one. The Ger-
man Jewish art historian was an early and energetic ambassador of the
interdisciplinary study of culture (cf. Gombrich). He famously pointed out
that researchers should stop policing disciplinary boundaries (grenzpo-
lizeiliche Befangenheit) in order to gain insight into processes of cultural
memory. Warburg––whose writings are more a quarry providing inspira-
tion for subsequent scholars than the source of clear-cut theoretical con-
 Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction 9

cepts––drew attention, moreover, to the mediality of memory. In a great

exhibition project called Mnemosyne (1924-28) he demonstrated how cer-
tain “pathos formulae” (Pathosformeln, symbols encoding emotional inten-
sity) migrated through different art works, periods, and countries.
Whereas the sociologist Halbwachs and the psychologist Frederick Bart-
lett (who popularized the notion of cultural schemata) laid the founda-
tions for cultural memory studies with a view to social and cognitive lev-
els, Warburg’s legacy to present-day research is to have given an example
of how cultural memory can be approached via the level of material ob-
jects.
The interest that the works by Halbwachs and others had sparked in a
small community of scholars dwindled away after the Second World War.
It was only in the 1980s (after the “death of history,” the narrative turn,
and the anthropological turn) that “collective memory,” first slowly and
then at breathtaking speed, developed into a buzzword not only in the
academic world, but also in the political arena, the mass media, and the
arts. The “new cultural memory studies” was, again, very much an emer-
gent phenomenon, taking shape more or less concurrently in many disci-
plines and countries. The 1980s saw the work of the French historian
Pierre Nora on national lieux de mémoire (see den Boer) and the publica-
tions of the German group of researchers around Jan and Aleida Ass-
mann, who focused on media and memory in ancient societies (see
Harth). In psychology, meanwhile, behavioral and purely cognitive para-
digms had been superseded by ecological approaches to human memory
and the study of conversational and narrative remembering (see Straub;
Middleton and Brown). Historical and political changes became a catalyst
for the new memory studies. Forty years after the Holocaust the genera-
tion that had witnessed the Shoah began to fade away. This effected a
major change in the forms of cultural remembrance. Without organic,
autobiographic memories, societies are solely dependent on media (such
as monuments; see Young) to transmit experience. Issues of trauma and
witnessing were not only discussed in the context of Holocaust studies,
but more and more also in gender studies and postcolonial studies (see
Kansteiner and Weilnböck). More recently, major transformations in
global politics, such as the breakdown of the communist states and other
authoritarian regimes, have brought new memory phenomena to the fore,
such as the issue of “transitional justice” (see Langenohl). More generally,
the shape of contemporary media societies gives rise to the assumption
that––today perhaps more than ever––cultural memory is dependent on
media technologies and the circulation of media products (see Esposito;
Rigney; Erll; Zelizer; Zierold; all this volume).
*
10 Astrid Erll

In keeping with the double focus of this handbook––on genealogies and

disciplinary branches––each of its six parts is concerned with historic and
systematic aspects of cultural memory studies. Part I is dedicated to the
one concept that has arguably proved most influential within the new,
international and interdisciplinary memory studies: Pierre Nora’s lieux de
mémoire, which he introduced in a multivolume work of the same name,
featuring French “sites of memory” (1984-92). The notion of lieux de mé-
moire quickly crossed national borders and was taken up in books about
sites of memory in Italy, Germany, Canada, Central Europe, and the
United States. The ubiquity of the term cannot belie the fact, however,
that the lieu de mémoire is still one of the most inchoate and undertheorized
concepts of cultural memory studies. On the one hand it lends itself par-
ticularly well to the study of a wide array of phenomena (from “places” in
the literal sense to medial representations, rituals, and shared beliefs), but
it is precisely because of its sheer limitless extension that the term has
remained conceptually amorphous, and it would be well worth initiating
another round of scholarly scrutiny (cf. Rigney). In this volume, Pim den
Boer traces the roots of the lieu metaphor back to the ancient art of mem-
ory, its founding myth about Simonides of Ceos, and the method of loci
and imagines (places and images) as we find it described in the rhetorics of
Cicero and Quintilian. He uncovers the French specificité of Nora’s con-
cept, comments on its translatability, and considers the prospects for a
comparative study of lieux de mémoire. Some elements of such a compara-
tive perspective on sites of memory are provided by the following articles:
Mario Isnenghi gives an insight into Italian luoghi della memoria; Jacques Le
Rider writes about Mitteleuropa (Central Europe) as a site of memory; Udo
J. Hebel distinguishes literary, visual, performative, material, virtual, and
transnational memory sites of the United States; and Jay Winter provides a
comparative view of the sites that commemorate twentieth-century wars.
Part II presents memory research rooted in cultural history. Alon
Confino reveals the intellectual and methodological affiliations between
memory studies and the history of mentalities, reaching back to the fathers
of the Annales school, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, and shows how
Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire emerged from this tradition. He then takes a
critical look at present-day memory studies and the chances and pitfalls it
offers to historians. The next three articles form a unity in many ways, not
surprisingly, as they are written by members of the interdisciplinary, Hei-
delberg-based group of scholars who have been working on cultural
memory since the 1980s. Dietrich Harth reconstructs the “invention of
cultural memory” in this research context; Jan and Aleida Assmann pre-
sent some of their eminently influential concepts, among them, for exam-
ple, the distinction between “cultural” and “communicative” memory and
 Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction 11

between “canon” and “archive.” Jürgen Reulecke delineates recent ap-

proaches to generational memory, which also have their source in the
1920s: Karl Mannheim’s writings belong to the foundational texts of cul-
tural memory studies, since memory within and between generations is a
significant form of collective remembering. With the development of
terms such as “generationality” and “generativity,” his legacy has been
updated. Vita Fortunati and Elena Lamberti complete this second part of
the volume not only by giving a comprehensive overview of the wide
array of concepts, but also by providing an insight into the actual practice
of international and interdisciplinary cultural memory studies as carried
out within the European thematic network ACUME.
Part III directs attention towards the different kinds of memory stud-
ies that have emerged in philosophy and the social sciences. Here, again,
the history of memory studies and its protagonist Maurice Halbwachs get
their due: Jean-Christophe Marcel and Laurent Mucchielli provide an in-
troduction to Maurice Halbwachs’s works on mémoire collective as a “unique
type of phenomenological sociology.” Jeffrey K. Olick then delineates in a
grand sweep the development from Halbwachs’s beginnings to the current
“sociology of mnemonic practices and products.” The articles by Andreas
Langenohl and Erik Meyer address specific social, political, and ethical
questions which have arisen out of contemporary memory politics.
Langenohl provides an overview of forms of remembrance in post-au-
thoritarian societies and elaborates on the issue of transitional justice;
Meyer develops a policy studies perspective on cultural memory. The
articles by Elena Esposito and Siegfried J. Schmidt represent the contri-
butions of systems theory and radical constructivism to cultural memory
studies. Esposito theorizes the powerful other side of cultural memory,
namely social forgetting. This part ends with Maureen Junker-Kenny’s
critical recapitulation of the philosophical and hermeneutical perspective
on memory, forgetting, and forgiving that was introduced by Paul Ricœur.
The inclusion of psychological concepts in part IV provides a bridge
from memory studies in the humanities and the social sciences to the
natural sciences. Representatives of different disciplines (including the
neurosciences; psychotherapy; and narrative, social, and cognitive psy-
chology) provide insights into their work on cultural memory. An histori-
cal perspective is assumed by Jürgen Straub, who traces the genealogy of
psychological memory studies back to the late nineteenth century and
charts the history of narrative psychology, up to and including its current
state. Wulf Kansteiner and Harald Weilnböck take a strong stand “against
the concept of cultural trauma.” From a psychotherapy studies perspective
they reconstruct and criticize the various uses and abuses of the concept
of trauma in cultural memory studies. David Middleton and Steven D.
12 Astrid Erll

Brown introduce their work on conversational remembering and stress

the important connection between experience and memory. David Manier
and William Hirst outline what they call a “cognitive taxonomy of collec-
tive memories,” thus showing how group memories are represented in
individual minds. Gerald Echterhoff presents new interdisciplinary re-
search on the relation of language and memory, which lies at the very
basis of cultural memory. Hans J. Markowitsch provides an introduction
to memory research in the neurosciences and discusses how the social
world shapes the individual brain. Harald Welzer rounds off this part of
the volume by presenting the key concepts of his inherently interdiscipli-
nary research, which spans the field from oral history to social psychology
and to the neurosciences.
Parts V and VI move on to the material and medial dimension of
cultural memory. The articles in part V represent the main concepts of
memory found in literary studies (cf. Erll and Nünning). Renate
Lachmann shows how the ancient method of loci imagines is linked to liter-
ary imagination and describes her influential notion of intertextuality as
the “memory of literature.” With Herbert Grabes’s article on the literary
canon, the perspective on literature and memory moves from relations
between texts to the level of the social systems which select and evaluate
literary works. Max Saunders’s article on “life-writing” is concerned with
those literary works which are most obviously connected to cultural
memory: letters, diaries, biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, etc. How-
ever, he also shows that life-writing extends beyond these genres and that
individual and cultural memory can indeed be found in most literary texts.
Birgit Neumann provides an overview of how memory is represented in
literature, using a narratological approach to describe the forms and func-
tions of a “mimesis of memory.” Ann Rigney stresses the active and vital
role that literature plays as a medium in the production of cultural mem-
ory. She understands memory as a dynamic process (rather than a static
entity), in which fictional narratives can fulfill an array of different func-
tions––as “relay stations,” “stabilizers,” “catalysts,” “objects of recollec-
tion,” or “calibrators.”
With its focus on mediality and memory, Ann Rigney’s article already
points to the last part of the volume, which is concerned with the role of
memory in media cultures. Here more than ever disciplines converge.
Scholars from literary studies, history, media studies, journalism, and
communication studies introduce their views on a set of questions which
has emerged as one of the most basic concerns and greatest challenges of
memory studies: the intersections between media and cultural memory
(which, of course, also give this series its title). Cultural memory hinges on
the notion of the medial, because it is only via medial externalization
 Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction 13

(from oral speech to writing, painting, or using the Internet) that individ-
ual memories, cultural knowledge, and versions of history can be shared.
It is therefore no accident that many articles which have made their ap-
pearance in earlier parts of this volume could just as easily have been in-
cluded in the media section. This certainly holds true for the entire section
on literature, which can be viewed as one medium of cultural memory.
Many other articles of this volume, such as those written by Udo J. Hebel,
Jan Assmann, Aleida Assmann, Siegfried J. Schmidt, Elena Esposito, Ge-
rald Echterhoff, and Harald Welzer, are characterized by their strong me-
dia perspective––ranging from medial sites of memory to the role of
communication technologies for social forgetting and to language as a
basic medium of memory.
Part VI begins with a contribution by James E. Young on what is ar-
guably one of the most important artistic media of cultural memory––and
its most intricate: the Holocaust memorial. Jens Ruchatz scrutinizes the
double role of photography as medial externalization of memory and trace
of the past. Barbie Zelizer writes about the connection between journal-
ism and memory, identifying journalism, despite its strong emphasis on
the present, as a memorial practice. I look at literature and film as media
of cultural memory. Martin Zierold concludes this volume with a more
general perspective on how memory studies might develop its focus on
media cultures.
We hope that in bringing together many different voices from inter-
disciplinary and international memory studies and providing an overview
of its history and key concepts, we will be able to give some definition to
an emerging field. Most importantly, the aim of this volume is to inspire
further sophisticated and exciting research by addressing scholars who are
as fascinated by the possibilities of “thinking memory” as we are.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ann Rigney for her critical reading and constructive
comments on an earlier version of this introduction.

References
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14 Astrid Erll

Bloch, Marc. “Memoire collective, tradition et coutume: a propos d’un

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––., and Ansgar Nünning, eds. Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissen-
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I. Lieux de mémoire–Sites of Memory
 Loci memoriae—Lieux de mémoire
PIM DEN BOER

1. Cicero and Quintilian: Loci memoriae

Centuries ago a Greek poet, Simonides of Ceos, was witness to a terrible
accident. The roof of the dining hall of the house of a wealthy man, Sco-
pas in Crannon in Thessaly, collapsed and caused the death of everybody
present in the hall. Simonides, who had left the hall for a moment, was the
only survivor. It was not possible to identify the completely mutilated
bodies. However, when asked by the mourning relatives, Simonides was
able to identify the dead because he remembered who had been seated
where just before the accident happened. Simonides thus realized the
importance of localization for memory and discovered the importance of
“places” for good memory. This Greek story about the invention of
mnemotechnics circulated widely and was transmitted in Latin treatises on
rhetoric.
Cicero (first century BC) mentioned Simonides’s discovery (or that of
“some other person,” as he cautiously added), in his famous De Oratore:
The best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement […].
[P]ersons desiring to train this faculty select localities [loci] and form mental im-
ages of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities,
with the result that the arrangement of the localities will preserve the order of the
facts, and the images of the facts will designate the facts themselves […].
(2.86.353-54)
Then Cicero makes the oft-quoted comparison that we should “employ
the localities and images respectively as a wax writing tablet and the letters
written on it” (2.86.354). According to Cicero “the keenest of all our
senses is the sense of sight […]” (2.87.357), and consequently what the ear
hears and the intellect conceives is best preserved if the eyes help to keep
it in your head. In this way the invisible takes shape in a concrete
appearance. About the loci memoriae Cicero writes that it is well known that
“one must employ a large number of localities which must be clear and
defined and at moderate intervals apart, and images that are effective and
sharply outlined and distinctive, with the capacity of encountering and
speedily penetrating the mind” (2.87.358).
In the elaborated Rhetorica ad Herennium attributed to Cicero and often
printed together with other works by him, but actually written by an
anonymous, less brilliant author, one finds a more detailed description of
20 Pim den Boer

loci memoriae. A distinction is made between two kinds of memory, one

natural, the other artificial:
The natural memory is that memory which is imbedded in our minds, born si-
multaneously with thought. The artificial memory is that memory which is
strengthened by a kind of training and system of discipline. (16.28) The artificial
memory includes backgrounds [loci] and images. We can grasp […,] for example,
a house, an intercolumnar space, a recess, an arch or the like. (16.29) And that we
may by no chance err in the number of backgrounds, each fifth background
should be marked. For example, [if] in the fifth we should set a golden hand [...],
it will then be easy to station like marks in each successive fifth background.
(18.31)
All this seems to be mnemotechnical common knowledge in an age before
the printing press. The most influential textbook on rhetoric was
composed by Quintilian (first century AD). His Institutio Oratoria is very
didactic:
[I]t is an assistance to the memory if localities are sharply impressed upon the
mind, a view the truth of which everyone may realise by practical experiment. For
when we return to a place after considerable absence, we not merely recognise
the place itself but remember things that we did there, and recall the persons
whom we met and even the unuttered thoughts which passed through our minds
when we were there before. […] Some place is chosen of the largest possible ex-
tent and characterised by the utmost possible variety, such as a spacious house
divided into a number of rooms. (vol. 4, bk. 11, 2.17-18) The first thought is
placed, as it were, in the forecourt; the second, let us say, in the living-room; the
remainder are placed in due order all around the impluvium and entrusted not
merely to bedrooms and parlours, but even to the care of statues and the like.
This done, as soon as the memory of the facts requires to be revived, all these
places are visited in turn […]. (vol. 4, bk. 11, 2.20)
As a good teacher Quintilian warns his audience not to overestimate the
usefulness of the loci memoriae: “Such a practice may perhaps have been of
use to those who, after an auction, have succeeded in stating what object
they have sold to each buyer, their statements being checked by the books
of the money-takers […]” (vol. 4, bk. 11, 2.24). However, loci memoriae are
“of less service in learning […], [f]or thoughts do not call up the same
images as material things” (vol 4, bk. 11, 2.24). Quintilian warns several
times that it is impossible to represent certain things by symbols (vol. 4,
bk. 11, 2.25).

2. Pierre Nora: Lieux de mémoire and National Identity

After the loci memoriae according to Cicero and Quintilian come the lieux de
mémoire according to Nora. Collective memory, although a vague and am-
bivalent concept, is perhaps as fruitful and strategic for the innovation of
 Loci memoriae—Lieux de mémoire 21

historical research as the concept of mentality was thirty years earlier, as

Nora remarked in his contribution to the French encyclopedia of La Nou-
velle Histoire (“La mémoire collective” 401). In the lieux de mémoire project
which started in 1977 with his inaugural seminar at the École des Hautes
Études en Sciences Sociales, Nora has given the concept of lieux de mémoire not
only a new meaning but also a highly successful programmatic signifi-
cance.
For the ancients, the loci memoriae were a necessary mnemotechnics in a
society without modern media (see also J. Assmann, this volume). For
Cicero and Quintilian the loci memoriae were practical mental tools, free of
ideology. Loci memoriae were not determined by social values, by historical
views, or future expectations. Nora’s lieux de mémoire are also mnemotech-
nical devices, but extremely ideological, full of nationalism, and far from
being neutral or free of value judgments. Most lieux de mémoire were cre-
ated, invented, or reworked to serve the nation-state. Lieux de mémoire were
primarily part of the identity politics of the French nation and functioned
to imprint the key notions of national history on the outillage mental (“set of
mental tools”) of the French citizens.
In his 1984 introduction to the first volume, Pierre Nora was very
clear. Convinced by the perspective of a future European integration,
Nora put forward without any ambiguity the necessity of inventorying the
French lieux de mémoire: “The rapid disappearance of our national memory
seemed to me to call for an inventory of the sites where it [the national
memory] was selectively incarnated. Through human willpower and the
work of centuries, these sites have become striking symbols: celebrations,
emblems, monuments, and commemorations, but also speeches, archives,
dictionaries, and museums” (“Présentation” vii).

3. French “specificité”: Republican Universalism

In his conclusion Nora is also very clear about the special position of
France. Nora seems to be convinced that there is a French specificité, a kind
of French Sonderweg compared to the English monarchy and the German
Empire. “The Republic distinguishes itself [from them] through an pro-
found investment in and the systematic construction of memory which is
simultaneously authoritarian, unified, exclusive, universal, and intensely
historical” (“De la République” 652).
However, if one looks more closely, it seems that the French Republic
is only different in one—very important—respect: universalism. The
British and German lieux de mémoire—symbols, handbooks, dictionaries,
monuments, commemorations, and expositions—were also authoritarian,
22 Pim den Boer

unifying, exclusive, and intensely historical. The crucial element that is

lacking in the British and German political regimes is this universalism,
crystallized in the French Revolution and codified in the Declaration of
the Rights of Man and Citizen. This universalism is typical for French
republicanism and also marks the difference between the two French
monarchies and the two French empires in that turbulent nineteenth
century. These non-republican French regimes were as authoritarian, uni-
fied, exclusive, and historically orientated as the British and German Em-
pires were.

4. Translating lieux de mémoire

Nora’s project has been very successful and comparable projects and
studies on national lieux de mémoire were recently published in Germany,
Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands, and other countries will soon follow
(see also Isnenghi; Hebel; and Le Rider; all this volume). Impressed by the
success of this kind of historical approach easily accessible for a large
audience, publishers in different countries are commissioning multi-vol-
ume series of essays on the lieux de mémoire of their respective nations.
The translation of the concept of lieux de mémoire does not pose fun-
damental problems in several European languages, such as Spanish and
Italian, but in less Romanized European languages a fitting translation is
less evident. In the English translation of the ancient rhetorical treatises in
Latin, loci memoriae was translated as “the backgrounds of memory.” The
modern French concept is often translated by the more concrete expres-
sion “sites of memory.” If the concept lieux de mémoire is used on a more
abstract level a different translation in English is necessary.
In German not only the spatial designation in this context but also the
term “memory” is not so easily translatable (see also Harth, this volume).
The successful German series is entitled Erinnerungsorte. In his essay in the
German series, Nora himself wrestles with the proper translation of lieux
and uses Herde (centers), Knoten (knots), Kreuzungen (crossings), and even
Erinnerungsbojen (buoys) (François and Schulze 3: 685). If a marine meta-
phor is chosen, perhaps “anchor” would have been more appropriate than
“buoy.” But even more problematic is the translation of “memory” with
Erinnerung. This forceful modern German word—erinneren, “to internal-
ize,” from an older word inneren—has a didactical connotation and can
even mean “to learn” or “to teach.” Martin Luther, for example, used
erinneren frequently in his Bible translation.
In each language a proper translation will pose different problems of
translation which can be related to conceptual history. For example, in
 Loci memoriae—Lieux de mémoire 23

sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Flemish and Dutch, the German ne-

ologism erinneren was not yet accepted. Although translated in Latin as
revocare in memoriam, it was considered to be dialect from the eastern prov-
inces (Kiliaan 112). In the seventeenth-century authoritative Dutch Bible
translation (h)erinneren was never used. Even in the beginning of the eight-
eenth century it was considered a Germanism (see Sewel 129). In Dutch,
memorie was a common word, as was the old Dutch word geheugen. Due to
the growing influence of the German language on Dutch in the nineteenth
century, the word herinnering became a common Dutch word and lost its
original Germanic flavor. In contemporary Dutch speech, memorie is not
frequently used anymore and has a solemn, old-fashioned connotation.
Thus, the Dutch project of four substantial volumes was appropriately
entitled Plaatsen van herinnering (Wesseling et al.).
Lieux de mémoire is not a transnational term such as, for example, de-
mocracy. The translation problems are not just a matter of definition. In a
comparative historical European perspective the positivistic reification of
the concept of lieux de mémoire has to be avoided and an awareness of lin-
guistic conceptual differences taken into prominent consideration.

5. Comparing lieux de mémoire

The next challenge will be to compare lieux de mémoire in different coun-
tries (den Boer and Frijhoff). Given the general European context of na-
tion-building one may expect that the international structural similarities
will be more evident than the national dissimilarities (see also Fortunati
and Lamberti, this volume).
The comparative approach has two advantages. Firstly, national his-
tory will be enriched by understanding how the history of one’s own na-
tion is embedded in European and global history. A nation is never quar-
antined, but in a large degree determined by transnational context.
Secondly, comparative research will open up transnational perspectives on
the European lieux de mémoire. Christianity, humanism, enlightenment, and
scientific development are crucial elements in European cultural history
and offer a rich number of significant transnational lieux de mémoire such as
the ora et labora of the Regula Benedicti, the Imitatio Christi of Thomas à
Kempis, the dignitas humanum of Pico della Mirandola, the trial of Galileo
Galilei, Spinoza’s Ethics, Newton’s apple, Linnaeus’s taxonomy, Ranke’s
historical seminar, Pasteur’s vaccine, Einstein’s theory of relativity, or
Niels Bohr’s quantum mechanics, to name a few (cf. Nora, “La notion”).
As lieux de mémoire of political European history one cannot pass over
the Congress of Vienna, the peace of Versailles and Saint Germain, or the
24 Pim den Boer

defeat of Hitler’s Third Reich and the creation of an Iron Curtain. At the
heyday of European nationalism, during the first half of the twentieth
century, Verdun and Auschwitz present the most terrible lieux de mémoire.
It is remarkable to observe that even long before the disastrous out-
come of nationalist rivalry and the terrible experiences of two European
wars, Ernest Renan had already traced a transnational perspective. In a
famous lecture about the question of what a nation is, delivered a decade
after the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), which intensified the process
of nation-building considerably, Renan prophesied: “The nations are not
something eternal. They had their beginnings and they will end. A Euro-
pean confederation will very probably replace them. But such is not the
law of the century in which we are living. At the present time, the exis-
tence of nations is a good thing, a necessity even” (53).
European nation-building has developed during successive periods of
violent military confrontations and peaceful episodes of flourishing com-
merce. No European nation ever witnessed splendid isolation or any sort
of quarantine. Nonetheless, to this day history teaching is still, generally
speaking, dominated by the perspective of the nation-state. National his-
tory is often misunderstood and even occasionally disfigured by nine-
teenth-century national prejudice. For the Middle Ages and the early mod-
ern period, the national perspective is an anachronism that makes no
sense. The comparative study of lieux de mémoire can help to analyze the
topography of nineteenth-century national identity politics, an even more
important task in the face of attempts to create “national canons” (see
also the articles by A. Assmann and Grabes, this volume).
Contemporary Europe urgently needs a kind of transnational identity
politics. In order to instruct their young citizens, European countries need
teachers with at least a degree of knowledge, affection, and sympathy for
Europe. After the lieux de mémoire of the nations, the future of Europe
requires a new kind of loci memoriae: not as mnemotechnical tools to iden-
tify the mutilated corpses, not as devices of national identity politics, but
to learn how to understand, to forgive, and to forget (see also Junker-
Kenny, this volume).

References
Cicero. On the Orator, Books I-II. Trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967.
[Cicero.] Ad. C. Herennium Libri IV de Ratione Dicendi (Rhetorica ad Heren-
nium). Trans. Harry Caplan. London: Heinemann, 1954.
 Loci memoriae—Lieux de mémoire 25

den Boer, Pim, and Willem Frijhoff, eds. Lieux de mémoire et identités nation-
ales. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1993.
François, Etienne, and Hagen Schulze, eds. Deutsche Erinnerungsorte. 3 vols.
Munich: Beck, 2001.
Kiliaan, Cornelius. Etymologicum teutonicae linguae: sive dictionarium Teutonico-
Latinum. Antwerp: Plantijn-Moret, 1599.
Nora, Pierre. “Entre mémoire et histoire: La problématique des lieux.” Les
lieux de mémoire I: La République. Ed. Pierre Nora. Paris: Gallimard,
1984. xv-xlii.
––. “La mémoire collective.” La Nouvelle Histoire. Ed. Jacques Le Goff.
Paris: Retz, 1978. 398-401.
––. “La notion de lieu de mémoire est-elle exportable?” Lieux de mémoire et
identités nationales. Eds. Pim den Boer and Willem Frijhoff. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam UP, 1993. 3-10.
––. “Présentation.” Les lieux de mémoire I: La République. Ed. Pierre Nora.
Paris: Gallimard, 1984. vii-xiii.
––. “De la République à la Nation.” Les lieux de mémoire I: La République.
Ed. Pierre Nora. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. 651-59.
Quintilian. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian. Vol. 4. Trans. H. E. Butler.
London: Heinemann, 1961.
Renan, Ernest. “What Is a Nation?” Becoming National: A Reader. Eds.
Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. 41-
55. Trans. of “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” 1882. Oeuvres complètes d’Ernest
Renan. Ed. Henriëtte Psichari. Vol. 1. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1947. 887-
906.
Sewel, Willem. Nederduytsche spraakkonst. Amsterdam: Erven J. Lescailje,
1733.
Wesseling, H. L., et al., eds. Plaatsen van herinnering. 4 vols. Amsterdam:
Bakker, 2005-07.
 Italian luoghi della memoria
MARIO ISNENGHI

Writing on “sites of memory” in a united Italy is set against a background

of disunited factors and developments. Disunity is a constituent element of
events, memory, and narrative.

1. From Country to State

The peninsula’s great past was the original symbolic heritage through
which the dawning Nation Italy took its initial form, developed as both
consciousness and a project of common space, between the end of the
eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. For centuries
already, what other nations had seen and encountered was the past, but
the past of a “land of ruins” peopled by a resigned “population of the
dead.” Establishing the new Nation was a matter of referring to this past
from a different viewpoint. Two thousand years before, the secondary
peoples of the peninsula had been unified by Rome; a few centuries be-
fore unification, between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, there had
been a flowering of arts and culture, yet that Italy of city-states and do-
minions was divided politically and militarily while Europe experienced
the growth of great absolute monarchies. This spelled both pre-eminence
and impediment. The Risorgimento was born from this premise: Italy is—or
rather will be, will return to being—because it was; it was founded on the
memory of having been, and having been great—compared to its present
lowliness. The Nation and the national State were thus conceived, estab-
lishing and legitimating themselves as a great regenerative process founded
on, and made of, memory. The intellectuals and politicians who solicited
this reawakening took on a maieutic role, seeking an eclipsed collective
“us.”
The time invested in laying the foundations spans the first seventy
years of the nineteenth century, ideally framed by two great literary works
expressing the predominant character of the literature and the men of
letters who “invented” Italy: I Sepolcri (“The Sepulchres”) (1807) by Ugo
Foscolo, the first in a series of poet-prophets and heralds of the nation,
and Storia della letteratura italiana (“History of Italian Literature”) (1871) by
Francesco De Sanctis, critic and minister, a major summing up of identity,
completed as Italy’s church towers—for the occasion risen to the status of
civic towers, no longer controlled by mourning priests, but rather by cele-
28 Mario Isnenghi

brating laymen (Sanga)—rang out the conquest of Rome, thereby com-

pleting unification (De Sanctis himself recorded this). Putting the seal on
this cycle we should add that in the very same year, 1871, Foscolo’s re-
mains were moved to Santa Croce, the temple of great Italians that the
poet had postulated in his work in 1807.
“Oh Italians, I urge you to history,” Foscolo proclaimed, opening his
courses at the University of Pavia (1809), courses that undermined the
regulations and mental landscapes, the traditional identity of subjects ral-
lied to citizenship; the foreign governors soon saw the need to censure
him. Foscolo was born of a Venetian father and a Greek mother, on Za-
kynthos, an island in the Ionian Sea, a modern Ithaca for a new Odyssean
quest for a denied fatherland. Thus he had three homelands: Zakynthos,
Venice, and Italy. His birth granted his poetic fantasy both classical and
romantic analogies and empathies with Greece and Italy: the great civili-
zations of the past now fallen low, appealing to history from the nine-
teenth century, recruiting idealists and volunteers in sentiment and action.
The move to Venice exposed the poet-citizen to further losses and depri-
vations, at the hands both of France, head of the “new order,” and Aus-
tria, head of the ancien regime. Foscolo took on the role of exile, exiled
from both his small and large homelands; this separation allowed him to
associate them in memory and nostalgia, as rarely occurs unless fate con-
signs one to some painful, though fertile, “elsewhere.” But living outside
of Italy, and making it real through thought and dream, was normal for
the eighteenth-century Italian patriot. This was the fate of Giuseppe
Mazzini (Ridolfi): protagonist and father of the nation; author of the triple
motto “Unity, Independence, Republic”; a leading force in the first Italian
political party, Giovane Italia (“Young Italy”), in 1831; and an exile in life
and death, even though he died in Italy (1872), spurned by the victorious
monarchy, defeated, but not broken, living under an alias, almost like an
ordinary English Mr. Brown. The Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont of the
centuries-old Savoy dynasty became the guiding state. It achieved domi-
nance over the national movement, either confining the democrats of the
Partito d’Azione (“Action Party”) to opposition or subordinating them to
moderate monarchical initiatives, and became—when it intercepted the
political diaspora from Italy to England, France, and Switzerland—itself
the land of exile for several thousand refugees during the 1850s. In Turin
they re-elaborated their deluded post-1848 revolutionary aspirations and
the memory of their respective homelands (Tobia).
Foscolo’s personal experience—from “Greek” to Venetian and from
Venetian to Italian—is replicated by Ippolito Nievo in Confessioni d’un
Italiano (“Confessions of an Italian”; Eng. trans. The Castle of Fratta), thus
becoming the narrative path of a historical and formative novel and
 Italian luoghi della memoria 29

forming the nation, national consciousness, and citizenship in a broader

than municipal context. Nievo was a great young writer who died prema-
turely at the age of thirty (he was one of the Garibaldi Thousand), just
after having completed narrating and elaborating the entire historical cycle
he had experienced. Here, too, the narrative process, in this case that of an
eighty-year-old man who had experienced and describes the period of the
Risorgimento, represents and politically welcomes a territorial and mental
passage from small to large—in this case from Venetian to Italian. Reality
showed this process of deconstructing and reconstructing old separate
identities within a new unity to be more difficult and time consuming than
in its literary depiction.
Looking towards the past to lay the foundations of Italy as a country
(cf. Romano) involved not only dealing with municipalism as a permanent
factor of disunity, the negative side of civitas and municipal energy, but
also the geographic and mental centrality of the Roman Catholic church,
already identified by Machiavelli in The Prince (1513) as the most powerful
and structured anti-unity barrier. A third great divide was itself the fruit of
the very process of unification, namely the discovery, identification, and
accentuation of two distinct macro areas, both material and symbolic:
North and South.

2. The Rivers of Memory

Recognizing “sites of memory” in a united Italy involves operating on
three planes: Until 1861 the building of the Nation and the State actually
proceeded by means of the selection and renewed streamlining of artifacts
from the past (from an extended period of over two thousand years of
history); after 1861, meaning and distance change under a second inter-
pretative pressure, this time aimed at establishing and broadcasting the
coordinates of collective memory and a public account of yesterday’s
events, in other words the events that led to the birth of the Kingdom of
Italy (in an accelerated period of less than half a century). The third op-
eration carried out on memory has involved historiography; this has been
our task, we who over one hundred and fifty years later have come to
draw the conclusions, in a period when the great tale of our origins has
lost much of its aura.
Our volumes on the Italian sites of memory, written, conceived, and
elaborated during the mid-1990s, did not share the emerging revisionist
and anti-unitary spirit of certain environments (the municipalism, region-
alism and even secessionism expressed by the new movements of the Lega
in Veneto and Lombardy, and the clerical revanchism of a certain power-
30 Mario Isnenghi

ful right-wing Catholic group, Comunione e Liberazione, torchbearers of a

counter-memory and counter-history of ancien-regime imprint). However,
we were encouraged not to remain prisoners of the lofty schemes forged
in post-unity public discourse, which were more a form of hegemonic
pressure exerted on memory, a political operation and public usage of
history, and certainly not a balanced and reliable presentation of events.
As often happens, silence, omission, and oblivion are of no less impor-
tance in their own way than the emphasis placed on other facts. The con-
cern of historians dealing with the Italian nineteenth century is, and has
been, to reintegrate the political targets of oblivion, restoring importance
to republicans such as Mazzini, Cattaneo and Garibaldi who “invented”
the Nation and sustained the idea; but also to the clericalists who, in the
name of legitimist principles and the Pope-King, had thwarted it, and
blighted feelings of citizenship among the faithful ab origine, in other words
a considerable portion of the population (then around twenty million);
and to more than a few southerners who, without necessarily feeling nos-
talgia for the “Neapolitan homeland” and accomplices to bandits, may
have struggled, and continued to struggle for some time, to subscribe to
the mental adjustment necessary to experience and identify with Pied-
montese occupation as national liberation. Above all, it is obviously not
the task of the historian of memory to assign posthumous compensation
or ideological corrections of real processes. When certain memories have
the strength to impose themselves and marginalize, or even cancel oth-
ers—like the post-1861 moderate, monarchical memory—they themselves
become “facts” under which successive generations live, even though
subordinate to forms of false consciousness. The reconstruction we
sought was, therefore, that of a conflict of directions, whether open or
unspoken, with victors and vanquished but without dogmatization: The
waterways of history are, after all, not straight, artificial canals but instead
exhibit bends, meanders, and resurgences. The waters of republican
memory—but also those of anti-unitary, clerical, pro-Bourbon or pro-
Austrian memory—may recede but they continue to flow underground
and sometimes re-emerge.
The liberal monarchy is well represented by monuments in public
squares by the “disciplined revolutionary.” (In 1866, during the third war
of independence, the government ordered Garibaldi to curtail his volun-
teers, who were setting out for Trent, as they were winning “too much”
against the Austrians. The military leader of the left responded with a
laconic telegram: “I obey.”) In Italian imagery a different, rebel Garibaldi
(Isnenghi, “Garibaldi”) persisted as a counter-memory and political re-
source that has never been completely deactivated, lasting through several
generations, made real and reactivated by the left (and during the twenti-
 Italian luoghi della memoria 31

eth century by the right). The Catholics prevailed in the long run: Liberal-
ism and democracy—repudiated in the motto “be neither elector nor
elected” (1861), excommunicated by the Syllabus (1864), adverted by the
scandalous refusal of the early-twentieth-century “Christian Democrats”
and the liquidation of the newly established Partito Popolare Italiano
(“Popular Party of Italy”) by a Vatican attracted to the “Man of Provi-
dence” Benito Mussolini—also prevailed after the Second World War
under the form of a moderate popular party built on denominational
foundations (cf. Tassani; Riccardi; Bravo). And this occurred precisely
when the majority of Italians denied having ever been fascists, during the
several decades when fascism seemed to disappear both as a real fact and
as memory, becoming almost a mere “digression.”

3. History and Memory

The Italian sites of memory project, though it was conceived during a
period when memory appeared to be depreciated and at risk and was thus
approached as a “battle for memory” (Isnenghi, “Conclusione”) has there-
fore endeavored not to put history in a subordinate position in relation to
memory. Were I to edit it today I would redress the balance even more in
favor of history. In a work on memory this means insisting on the mecha-
nisms, the players, the means of construction, the non-innocent character
of memory—subjective and belonging to specific spontaneous and or-
ganized groups—and their conflicts. (We have known this since the time
of Maurice Halbwachs, but today we live in an age of “invalidated memo-
ries” and the “dictatorship of witnesses.”) The Savoy monarchy effectively
prevailed; Turin, a northern city, marginal in relation to the rest of the
peninsula—with a history, moreover, in many ways less significant than
Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples or Milan—managed to take the central
role in the mid-nineteenth century, during the formative phase of a coun-
try in the making, a country which had, historically, a plurality of centers
and capitals. Turin—if Rome was recognized as destined to become capi-
tal—had in any case to accept and suffer the fact that, in the eyes of the
world and most Italians, Rome was firstly the city of the Pope and then
the city of the King.
Plurality, therefore, is a key concept; Italy was multi-centered, a public
arena charged with tensions and retorts, not sufficiently well-represented
by the elevated post-unitary oleography of its four great figures—Vittorio
Emanuele, Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi—to which the most zealous even
added Pius IX, the would-be “liberal pope,” who should have been the
mediator between “good and evil” and instead never tired of dogmatizing
32 Mario Isnenghi

his own primacy and repudiating the Risorgimento. It was an arduous task to
foster citizenship in this country, especially among an illiterate people used
to believing their priests, who were induced by the ecclesiastical hierarchy
during the first forty years of the Kingdom not to acknowledge the “legal
Italy” that had been brought into being by a secular, often Masonic and
not infrequently Jewish revolution; against this the Church offered a “real
Italy,” the only conceivable nation, which was that of the Guelphs. Dual-
ism was therefore perpetuated, exhuming—and yet again exploiting the
sedimentation and language of memory—the most ancient names
(Guelphs and Ghibellines).
It was a decision to capitalize on an effective expression of anti-
mony—“real Italy/legal Italy”—, flaunted for almost half a century by a
considerable part of the Catholic hierarchy under three pontiffs: Pius IX,
Leo XIII, and Pius X. This “real Italy” was the response of a self-referen-
tial Catholic world, resistant to the state (and incidentally not only to the
“illegitimate” State) and the “legal Italy” of a liberal monarchy which had
broadened, though not to any great extent, its social base in the passage
(in 1976) from the governmental legacy of Cavour to the governments of
the historical left, strengthened by ex-republicans and ex-followers of
Garibaldi who had entered the parliamentary arena. This bi-polar image of
late-nineteenth-century, post-unitary Italy, however, suffers from the ab-
sence of some interesting positions of the period such as the revanchist
attitude of the Church and the intransigent clerical movement. It is also
fitting to include a third Italy within this framework of competing identi-
ties that developed within public debate: the broad range of left-wing
movements, the “non-repentant” remains of the Action Party, republicans
and irredentists, and the newly born socialist party, especially in the 1890s
when, under Andrea Costa and Filippo Turati, the socialists disassociated
themselves from anarcho-socialism and entered the electoral competition.
Though denying the Nation, the same Internationalists, under Bakunin,
Cafiero and Merlino, ended up contributing to the definition of the arena:
After several failed attempts one of them managed to assassinate Umberto
I (1900). The Nation was also the Anti-Nation: The Kingdom also in-
cluded its own denial of both “black” and “red.” The “Italies” in conflict
are substantially three. Shifting back in time, the title of a work by the
national-fascist historian Gioacchino Volpe—L’Italia in cammino (“Italy on
the Move”) (1927)—suggests a conceptual framework into which we can
fit the formation and conflict of subjects, identities and memories of what
we can call “three Italies on the move.” This framework ensured several
results: the multiplicity and dialectics of the subjects in question; a division
and conflict which unfolds, moreover, within the same public arena, be-
 Italian luoghi della memoria 33

coming both charged and registered; and the processes of historical dy-
namics.
This was what we needed to underscore the specific elements of the
unity-disunity of “Italy as a country,” not yet finalized but in itinere. Symbols
and Myths, Structures and Events, Personalities and Dates, variants and titles of
the volumes of the Italian Sites of Memory project, take on and give struc-
ture and meaning to the lives of generations of “Italians.” They, too, were
on the move, and “on the move” does not necessarily mean going for-
ward, united in one single direction.
The twentieth century engaged the Italians in two great historical
events which can also be seen as opportunities and incentives to dissolve
the disuniting factors within superior forms of unity. These were the First
World War and fascism, two chapters in the transition from elitist society
to mass society. The Great War—debated for ten months in the press and
by the public at large, much less in Parliament—was chosen, desired but
also imposed by many and on many and represents new antitheses, new
dualisms, and the elaboration of new divided memories (Isnenghi,
“Grande Guerra”). Victory over the “Historical Enemy”—the Habsburg
Empire, Austria—created a unity never seen before and at the same time
new aspects of division in experience, in representation, and in the mass
of private and public accounts. Eighty years after the First World War the
conflict over the pros and cons of the war, and its supporters, have not
yet been appeased or become the mere object of historiographical study.
Neither did the most large-scale project and endeavor towards social,
political, and cultural reunification since the Risorgimento—fascism—man-
age to create unity out of differences. Not only did the dictatorship and
single party allow different lines of thought to persist in a variety of
fields—economy, art, concepts of city and rural life; it also retained sig-
nificant powers such as the monarchy, the armed forces, and the Church,
who were to promote and orchestrate the transition of the regime in 1943;
in fact they primarily nourished the need and desire for another Italy among
the antifascist minorities. Again, therefore, in researching these processes
and mental redistributions the historian must maintain a balanced view of
all the different levels, which at this point also include, diversely: the
memory of republican and imperial Rome; a refocusing on the Risorgi-
mento—excessively liberal and parliamentary in the regime’s policy of
memory and the object of a nostalgic countermelody for both internal and
external exiles; and the memory of the “Italy of Vittorio Veneto,” in other
words the victorious army and D’Annunzio’s “greater Italy” which Mus-
solini (Passerini) claimed to have “brought” to Vittorio Emanuele III
when the March on Rome (Isnenghi, “Marcia”) ended in Palazzo Chigi
instead of in prison. The compact vision of a society reunified within a
34 Mario Isnenghi

“totalitarian” State was, moreover, paradoxically crushed by the regime

itself when it decided, in 1938, to annul the rights of around 40,000 citi-
zens, those Jews who suddenly became “internal foreigners” (di Cori)
though many of them—and their forefathers—had played an active role
in creating the Nation.
In this necessity to contemporaneously grasp unity and disunity as
permanent coordinates of Italian history the summit was reached in the
Second World War. It would be impossible to disentangle the complex
layers of events and memory here. There were several wars within the war,
successive and intertwined, with major points of division defined by two
significant moments in 1943: July 25, the end of the Mussolini govern-
ment; and September 8, the armistice, in other words unconditional sur-
render. The Comitato di Liberazione Nationale (“Committee of National Lib-
eration”), the motor of antifascist resistance and the transition from
Monarchy to Republic, attempted to give a structure to the re-emerging
plurality of positions and parties, yet the pressures and figures involved, in
that devastated Italy between 1943 and 1945 which had ceased to believe
in itself as a Great Power, created a field of tensions which included a last-
minute fascism reborn in republican guise, which competed with the anti-
fascists on the concept of Nation and fatherland, but outdid them in the
name of a “new Europe.” On the issues surrounding the war, in the dif-
ferent phases from 1940 to 1945, there are numerous essays, by witnesses
such as Nuto Revelli on the “retreat from Russia,” and scholars such as
Marco Di Giovanni, Giorgio Rochat, Mimmo Franzinelli, Adriano Bal-
lone, Massimo Legnani and Nicola Galleran. The second post-war period
was organized—institutionally, politically, and mentally—according to two
great dividing factors: the antifascism/fascism antithesis, sanctioned by
the republican constitution which formally took effect in 1948, and the
anticommunist/communist antithesis, which, with the Cold War, became
a material constitution of greater effectiveness than the formal constitu-
tion and was never repealed in the political arena, even after 1989.

References
Bravo, Anna. “La Madonna pelegrina [The Pilgrim Madonna].” Isnenghi,
Simboli 525-36.
Di Cori, Paola. “La leggi razziali [The Racial Laws].” Isnenghi, Simboli 461-
76.
Isnenghi, Mario, ed. Simboli e miti dell’Italia unita [Symbols and Myths].
Rome: Laterza, 1996. Vol 1 of I luoghi della memoria [Sites of Memory].
3 vols. 1996-97.
 Italian luoghi della memoria 35

––, ed. Strutture ed eventi dell’Italia unita [Structures and Events]. Rome:
Laterza, 1997. Vol. 2 of I luoghi della memoria [Sites of Memory]. 3 vols.
1996-97.
––. “Conclusione.” Isnenghi, Strutture 427-74.
––. “Garibaldi.” Isnenghi, Personaggi 25-45.
––. “La Grande Guerra [The Great War].” Isnenghi, Strutture 273-310.
––, ed. L’Italie par elle meme: Lieux de mémoire italiens de 1848 à nos jours. Paris:
Editions Rue d’Ulm, 2006. Trans. of selections from I luoghi della memo-
ria [Sites of Memory]. Rome: Laterza, 1996-97.
––. “La Marcia su Roma [The March on Rome].” Isnenghi, Strutture 311-
30.
––, ed. Personaggi e date dell’Italia unita [Personalities and Dates]. Rome:
Laterza, 1997. Vol. 3 of I luoghi della memoria [Sites of Memory]. 3 vols.
1996-97.
––. “La piazza [The Place].” Isnenghi, Strutture 41-52.
Passerini, Luisa. “Mussolini.” Isnenghi, Personaggi 165-86.
Riccardi, Andrea. “I Papi [The Popes].” Isnenghi, Personaggi 401-25.
Ridolfi, Maurizio. “Mazzini.” Isnenghi, Personaggi 3-23.
Romano, Ruggiero. Paese Italia: Venti secoli di itentità. Rome: Donzelli, 1994.
Sanga, Glauco. “Campane e campanili [Bells and Belltowers].” Isnenghi,
Simboli 29-42.
Tassani, Giovanni. “L’oratorio [The Oration].” Isnenghi, Strutture 135-72.
Tobia, Bruno. “Le Cinque Giornate di Milano [The Five Days of Milan].”
Isnenghi, Strutture 311-30.
 Mitteleuropa as a lieu de mémoire
JACQUES LE RIDER

The formation of Mitteleuropa can be traced back to the Holy Roman Em-
pire of the German Nation and to the first Germanic settlements east of
the empire. In a direct line with Austro-Prussian dualism, entrenched at
the time of Maria Theresa and Frederick II, two empires—the German
Reich proclaimed in 1871 and the Habsburg monarchy—succeeded the
Holy Roman Empire (abolished at the time of Napoleon, partially re-
stored in 1815 in the form of the German Confederation, irrevocably
destroyed by the Austro-Prussian War in 1866). In the twentieth century,
the mental map of German Central Europe is marked by the geopolitical
concept of Mitteleuropa, which is linked to the liberal nationalist ideology of
Friedrich Naumann, which defined the German war aims in 1915.
Naumann’s ideas attenuated the pan-Germanic program by limiting it to
the area of Central Europe. As a result, German-speaking historians and
political scientists today tend to avoid the word Mitteleuropa, preferring the
terms Zentraleuropa (closer to the French “Europe central” and the English
“Central Europe”) or Mittelosteuropa.
Why are Mitteleuropa, Zentraleuropa, and Mittelosteuropa of contemporary
interest for the history of lieux de mémoire? Because from the Enlighten-
ment to the Second World War, this area has, through the individual na-
tional identities, provided the center of the European continent with its
identity. The twentieth century has striven to dismantle and deform Mit-
teleuropa: the First World War, Nazism and the Shoah, the Second World
War, Stalinism and Neo-Stalinism. One can say that since the peace trea-
ties of 1919-1920 and since 1945, Mitteleuropa as a whole has become a lieu
de mémoire, a space of memory (Erinnerungsraum).
The dissemination of German culture formed a space which, from the
end of the eighteenth century on, became the site of confrontation be-
tween, on the one hand, German Kultur and other cultural identities and,
on the other hand, the German-Slavic, German-Jewish, German-Hungar-
ian, German-Rumanian mixture. Cultural Mitteleuropa is thus an ambiva-
lently defined notion. In certain contexts, it evokes the catastrophic path
of Europe’s destiny during the time of nationalisms and imperialisms. In
other contexts, it designates a civilization of cultural mingling at the inter-
section of Northern and Southern Europe, halfway between Occidental
Europe and Oriental Europe.
In the “center” of the European continent, other lieux de mémoire older
than Mitteleuropa retain a subliminal presence, always ready to become
38 Jacques Le Rider

current again. The distinction between Byzantine Europe and Central

Europe, and later between Islam and Christianity, created religious and
cultural borders separating the Orthodox peoples from the small islands
of Islam which still exist in the Balkans, and Catholics from Protestants.
These borders are lieux de mémoire which have often served to justify dis-
courses of rejection (Russophobe or anti-Serbian), or to explain conflicts
in the post-Communist era, particularly in the territory of the former
Yugoslavia. However, the secularization of European culture renders it
impossible to reduce contemporary conflicts to religious wars. These reli-
gious borders are lieux de mémoire manipulated by neo-nationalistic propa-
ganda. Yet forgetting them would also be unfortunate: For example, con-
sidering attempts to define “fundamental values” and Europe’s cultural
identity, Mitteleuropa is a reminder that both Islam and Judaism have left an
indelible mark on Europe, and that Byzantine Christianity is not only to
be found on the Oriental edge of Europe, but instead also in its geocul-
tural center.
Two other borders, present earlier and still existent, belong to the lieux
de mémoire of Mitteleuropa. The first is that separating Russia from Central
Europe. For the Slavophile Russians, the Catholic, Protestant, and non-
religious Slavs of Central Europe were an exception to the rule which
identified the Slavic soul with the Orthodox church. For Russian Occi-
dentalists, Central Europe was merely a connecting passageway one had to
traverse to get to Germany, France, Italy, or England. Poland, lastly, seen
from the Russian perspective, occupied a place apart, as it could, after all,
to a certain degree be seen as an integral part of the Russian empire. Mit-
teleuropa certainly defined itself most often in opposition to Russia, whose
political and cultural regression appeared threatening from the Central
European point of view. This lieu de memoire, namely the border between
Mitteleuropa and Russia, could possibly reemerge, if the question of closer
ties between Russia and the European Union were to be broached.
The other long-standing border which exists as a lieu de mémoire in
Central Europe is that dividing the “Balkans” from the population of
Central Europe. The homo balkanicus is a caricature originally conceived of
by Westerners to denote a primitive European, merely picturesque within
his folklore tradition but barbaric when he takes up arms. European dis-
courses regarding “the Balkans” highlighted an Orientalism without posi-
tive characteristics. They originate from a cultural colonialism which ex-
pects Western civilization to bring a bit of order and rationality to the
fragmented and underdeveloped territories. “The Balkans” were con-
trasted with the Southeast Central Europe of the Habsburgs. Still today,
the expansion of the European Union to include the “Balkans” remains
 Mitteleuropa as a lieu de mémoire 39

incomplete and faces difficulties, of which the symbolic constraints are

not the least important.
The Western borders of Europe are not any simpler to define than its
Eastern borders. Do the German-speaking countries belong to Central or
Western Europe? When the German Reich and the Habsburg monarchy
were in contact with Russia and the Ottoman Empire, they undoubtedly
were a part of Central Europe. Between 1949 and 1990, the Federal Re-
public of Germany belonged to Western Europe, whereas the German
Democratic Republic was a part of “Eastern Europe” and under Soviet
influence.
In 1990, after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., the emancipation of the
Central European republics, and German reunification, Central Europe
seemed to be coming to life again. After the consolidation of the Euro-
pean Community, the center of Europe was no longer the Berlin-Prague-
Vienna-Budapest axis, but rather the axis Rotterdam-Milan. Would the
Eastern enlargement of the European Union allow Europe to recover its
historical center? Or would it become clear that the Central Europe in
question is no longer in the center but rather at the margin of the Europe
of the Treaty of Rome, and that Mitteleuropa now only has the status of a
lieu de mémoire?
This lieu de mémoire had been the talisman of certain intellectual, anti-
Soviet dissident groups. In the 1980s, György Konrád in Budapest and the
Czech Milan Kundera and the Yugoslav Danilo Kis in Paris revived the
discussion about Mitteleuropa. Kundera’s text, first published in Paris in
November 1983, became famous under the title of the American version
from April 1984: “The Tragedy of Central Europe.” Members of the anti-
Soviet resistance of November 1956 in Budapest, Kundera writes, were
fighting for their fatherland and for Europe. It took the repression of the
Prague Spring in 1968 to awaken once again the memory of Central
Europe, the myth of a Golden Age, the end of which was the time around
1900 and the 1920s.
However, the memory of Central Europe also includes fateful epi-
sodes which line the history of the “small nations” that were exposed to
mortal threats. The nations of Central Europe know the experience of
downfall and disappearance. The great Central European novels, namely
those by Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Jaroslav Hasek, and Franz Kafka,
are meditations on the possible end of European humanity. The tragedy
of Central Europe is, in short, the tragedy of Europe. When the Iron
Curtain falls, Kundera concluded in his text of 1983-84, the peoples of
Central Europe will realize that the culture of Europe (scientific, philoso-
phical, literary, artistic, musical, cinematographic, audio-visual, educational
40 Jacques Le Rider

and universitarian, multilingual) has ceased to be of value in the eyes of

Europeans themselves, and constitutes at best only a lieu de mémoire.
Almost at the same time, in June 1984, the Hungarian writer György
Konrád published the German version of his essay, “Der Traum von
Mitteleuropa” (“The Dream of Central Europe”), first presented at a con-
ference in Vienna in May 1984. Mitteleuropa for him evoked the memory of
Austria-Hungary during the Belle Époque. The Central European spirit,
he wrote, is a view of the world, an aesthetic sensibility that allows for
complexity and multilingualism, a strategy that rests on understanding
even one’s deadly enemy. The Central European spirit consists of accept-
ing plurality as a value in and of itself; it represents “another rationality,”
Konrád affirmed, an anti-politics, a defense of civil society against politics.
In Central Europe, the “literary republic” was long near to the heart
of the res publica. The first configuration of the cultural identity of Central
Europe appeared when Renaissance and Baroque were spreading via Vi-
enna, Prague, Krakow, and Buda (in Hungary). This “delayed”
Renaissance fused with the art and zeitgeist of the Baroque period and
significantly influenced the entire Central European region. The primary
factor determining the establishment of a literary republic in Europe was
the reaction to the Ottoman threat, which led to the founding of the
“Sodalitas litteraria Danubiana” by Conrad Celtis around 1500, unifying
German, Hungarian, Slavic, Bohemian, and Wallachian humanists.
At the time of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, a new
cultural system emerged in Northern and Central Germany, which broke
with Latin and Italian Central Europe, and the Reformation called forth
the first stirrings of a consciousness of national cultures, for example
among the Czechs or Slovaks. In contrast, the Counter-Reformation ele-
vated Baroque to the official style and it would be two centuries before
Josephinism at the end of the eighteenth century achieved the first synthe-
sis of German Enlightenment and Baroque, all the while endeavoring to
establish German as the lingua franca in Mitteleuropa, after Latin, Italian,
and French, which incited as a reaction the inexorable protest of the na-
tions against this Germanization.
The production of the national through philology, which exalts the
oral and written literary traditions, and through linguistics, which codifies
the spelling, grammar, and vocabulary, corresponds to a German model
one could call “Herderian.” The diffusion of Herder’s theoretical system
among the peoples of Central Europe constitutes an essential stage in the
formation of the cultural Mitteleuropa. Hungarian, Romanian, Polish,
Czech, Serb, Croatian, Slovenian, etc. intellectuals, through exposure to
Herder’s texts, forged the conviction that love for one’s fatherland is im-
possible without love for one’s mother tongue, and that the poet is the
 Mitteleuropa as a lieu de mémoire 41

true father of the nation, far more than the rulers who scoff at linguistic
borders and only recognize dynastically defined territories.
Mitteleuropa is one of the lieux de mémoire that was of decisive impor-
tance in the way the “literary republic” constituted cultural and national
identities. One could say that Mitteleuropa is the lieu de mémoire par excel-
lence of a model of the production of the national through the cultural,
against the pure reason of the political and military state.
Delayed by their coercion into the collectivity of the German and
Habsburg empires, since the nineteenth century the historical nations of
Central Europe have been demanding their emancipation, and striving to
connect to earlier epochs of independence and greatness. During the
twentieth century, at the time that the central empires disappeared, repre-
sentations of a federal order and a cosmopolitan culture resurfaced, gener-
ally in connection with the Austrian tradition. “Central Europe is just a
term which symbolizes the needs of the present,” Hugo von Hof-
mannsthal wrote in December 1917 in his lecture on “Die österreichische
Idee” (457-58). And in his notes for an article about the idea of Europe
we find this definition of the lieu de mémoire Mitteleuropa: “Millennial strug-
gle for Europe, millennial mission by Europe, millennial belief in Europe.
For us, the Germans and Slavs and Latins who dwell on the soil of two
Roman empires, chosen to bear a common destiny and inheritance—for
us Europe is truly the fundamental color of the planet” (54).
Faced with the shock of the Third Reich, the Habsburg myth and, be-
yond that, the memory of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation
are transformed by Joseph Roth or Stefan Zweig into a retrospective uto-
pia of the coexistence of nations in a cosmopolitan cultural space, into a
literary republic covering a vast Central European territory from Italy to
the coast of the Baltic Sea.
The history of the Habsburg monarchy from this time can be inter-
preted as a political and socio-cultural process of harmonization of the
ethnic, linguistic, and cultural plurality. Thanks to institutions which man-
aged conflict and structured the pluralism in the form of the “Compro-
mise” (Ausgleich) within the framework of each “crownland” (Kronland),
the liberal Empire founded in 1867 on the basis of new principles at-
tempted to improve the relationships among the nations. This is the
meaning of the “Habsburg myth,” which Claudio Magris has spoken of so
masterfully. This ideology of the state, brought to the fore by the Habs-
burgs since the time when Prince Eugene referred to the monarchy as a
totum and particularly emphasized during the time between 1866 and 1871
when Austria, removed from the Holy Roman Empire which it had long
dominated and in competition with the German Empire, newly pro-
claimed in 1871, had to invent a new geo-political identity for itself, based
42 Jacques Le Rider

on that which was left over: the territories in the East and Southeast. The
Habsburg myth of a pluralistic society and a pluralistic state which pro-
vided all peoples the Heimat entitled to them was merely a propagandistic
disguise for the battle between two hegemonic peoples, the German Aus-
trians and the Hungarians, both fighting to defend and expand their
privileges and their advantages, a struggle presented as being of general
interest and “supranational” reasoning.
The comparison (flattering for Austrian Cisleithania) with the policy
of Germanization pursued by the German Reich in its Eastern, Polish re-
gions is an integral part of the “Habsburg myth.” One also has to distin-
guish between the Austrian part of the Danubian Empire and the Hun-
garian Transleithania. The integrative force of the Habsburg model,
characterized by its cultural pluralism, is incontestable in Cisleithania (even
allowing for a confusion of myth and reality), but did not function in
Hungary. The Slavic regions that belonged to the Hungarian part of the
monarchy undoubtedly never had the feeling that they were part of a
Slavic-Hungarian cultural community. The same can be said of the Roma-
nians in Transleithania. It is Cisleithania that has romanticized the “Habs-
burg myth” and made it a lieu de mémoire of a cosmopolitan Mitteleuropa, in
which the cultural plurality was able to form itself into a harmonic plural-
ism.
Since World War II, Mitteleuropa has become the lieu de mémoire of Jew-
ish Central Europe, destroyed by the Shoah. The Jewish culture of the
shtetl, the contemporary renaissance of Yiddish, and the spreading of
Hasidism have drawn new maps of Central Europe. This Jewish culture of
Mitteleuropa was also that of the Jews assimilated into the national cultures.
In Prague during Kafka’s time, assimilated Jews were part of both the
German and the Czech cultures; in Lemberg, intellectual capital of Galicia
and birthplace of Joseph Roth, they were divided between German and
Polish culture; in Czernowitz, metropolis of Bukovina, the territory made
famous by Paul Celan, they hesitated between assimilation into the Ger-
man culture and Rumanization.
The Austrian-Marxist tradition constructed the lieu de mémoire of a
Central Europe of the working class. The Austrian social democracy of
the Habsburg era found it difficult to overcome the contradiction between
“class” and “nationality.” Victor Adler led a supranational, official dis-
course and wanted his party to become a Reichspartei, in opposition to
nationalist currents. But from the 1890s on, even for him the nationalist
arguments prevailed over internationalist class solidarity. In the Cisleitha-
nian parliament, the Social Democratic fraction was divided into five na-
tional clubs. The trade unions tried to unite the nationalities within a fac-
tory, one branch of industry, one organization. In sum, the Austrian social
 Mitteleuropa as a lieu de mémoire 43

democracy was a mirror image of the Habsburg monarchy: supranational

in its “political myth,” but in reality divided along national lines.
Mitteleuropa is a European space of memory which combines two con-
stitutive elements of European identity: first, cultural and linguistic plural-
ity and second, the difficulty to structure this plurality without giving in to
the “holistic” temptation of a homogeneous society, the course usually
followed by nationalism.
Until the 1920s, German, the lingua franca of Mitteleuropa, is added in
some linguistic regions as an international language alongside the “na-
tional” language, occasionally in competition with another international
language such as French. Gradually, with the growing sense of national
consciousness and the affirmation of literary languages, German is re-
duced to the status of a “second language” which allows for international
communication within the Central European region.
The phenomenon of true multilingualism, combining two or three
languages of the Central European region, is generally limited to certain
zones of contact, the children of mixed marriages, and the elites of certain
metropolises (such as Trieste, Prague, Bratislava, Czernovitz, or Lemberg).
It should be mentioned that cases of Polish-Lithuanian, Slovakian-Hun-
garian, or Austrian-Italian-Slovenian multilingualism, to name just a few
possible combinations, are far less numerous than cases of multilingualism
in which a Central European national language is combined with German
or French. An intellectual from Mitteleuropa who chooses a language other
than his native tongue for his literary or scholarly works seldom chooses
another language of the region; only German, English, or French come
into consideration.
As a lieu de mémoire of cultural plurality which allows multilingualism
and “hybrid identities” to flourish, Mitteleuropa is also a lieu de mémoire of
the degradation of nationalism, as analyzed by Gumplowicz, who depicted
Central Europe as the theater of a “struggle of races” (Rassenkampf), a war
between the various social and ethnic groups. The “race” theories of this
professor at the University of Graz are dominated by a pessimism that
would be worthy of Hobbes, and form the other interpretative framework
for the plurality of Central Europe.
In Cisleithania, the Habsburg system had attempted to guarantee the
cultural autonomy of the nationalities through constitutional compromises
which controlled the balance between the ethnic-linguistic groups in each
territory. In Moravia, for example, one could not simultaneously be both
Czech and German, but had to choose one or the other. A majority of the
Jews chose a German linguistic identity. In Cisleithania, this cohabitation
without cohesion did not lead to “supranationality,” but rather to a curi-
ous alloy of Habsburg citizenship and Czech, Polish, Serb, Croatian,
44 Jacques Le Rider

Slovenian, Italian, Romanian, Ruthenian, or German “private nationality.”

Were the Jews of the Habsburg monarchy “supranational” as well, as Jo-
seph Roth suggested? In reality, the Jews of Austria-Hungary were swept
along with everyone else in the movement affirming the individual nations
and took on the language of the dominant nationality in their province.
Regarding the notion of Mitteleuropa from the perspectives of the dif-
ferent societies of the Central European region, profound divergences are
evident. For most Poles, memory of Mitteleuropa is inextricably bound up
with the successive divisions of Poland among three empires. The Poland
that existed between the two world wars refused the restoration of a Cen-
tral European federation and drew inspiration for being a major regional
power from its own national historical references, by challenging the
German enclaves within Poland maintained by the Treaty of Versailles, yet
also nourishing great territorial ambitions in the East.
In Bohemia, did the national independence achieved in Saint-Ger-
main-en-Laye do away with the nostalgia for the old Danubian order, and
did Czech intellectuals in the 1920s forget the “Austroslavism” of
Frantisek Palacky, that liberal Czech who insisted after 1848 that had the
Habsburg monarchy not existed, it would have had to be invented, in the
interest of Europe and of all mankind? In fact, the empire of the Habs-
burg Bohemians, which belonged to the old Holy Roman Empire, offered
the best protection against Russian imperialism. The high degree of eco-
nomic and political modernization achieved in Bohemia before the Sec-
ond World War confirms that the Czech nationality was able to flourish in
the heart of Cisleithania. But the First World War destroyed the faith that
the peoples of Central Europe had in the Habsburg Mitteleuropa. After the
summer of 1914, the Habsburgs, having betrayed their historical mission,
were merely the “shining representatives” of Germany, which reduced the
small nations of Central Europe to the status of oppressed peoples, as
highlighted by Jaroslav Hasek’s novel The Good Soldier Švejk.
In Hungary, a historical nation in Central Europe recaptured from the
Ottomans by the Habsburgs, Mitteleuropa has remained a positively con-
notated lieu de mémoire. Budapest, capital of the dual monarchy after the
Compromise of 1867, experienced in the last third of the nineteenth cen-
tury and up until the First World War one of its most splendid periods,
politically, economically, and culturally. The Treaty of Trianon, for the
Hungarians a traumatic experience, is part of the reason for the idealiza-
tion of the memory of Mitteleuropa.
Mitteleuropa is also a lieu de mémoire of French-German and French-
Austrian tensions and conflicted relations with Italy, which, going by the
“mental map” of German imperialism, was the decisive party in the fate of
Mitteleuropa, based on the Italian territories first belonging to the Holy
 Mitteleuropa as a lieu de mémoire 45

Roman Empire and then the Habsburg monarchy. Since the end of the
nineteenth century, French historical thought, primarily committed to the
cause of the Slavic peoples, has criticized the “prison of the peoples.” One
of the most systematic deconstructions of the term Mitteleuropa comes
from Ernest Denis, an expert in Czech history, friend of Benes and Ma-
saryk, advocate of the idea of Czechoslovakia and also a defender of the
idea of Yugoslavia. These negative interpretations of Mitteleuropa as an
imperialistic German and Habsburg project corresponds to the majority
opinion in France at that time. The geographer Emmanuel de Martonne,
who played an eminent role in the committee that paved the way for the
peace conference of 1919-20 (he suggested the borders of Hungary,
Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland, and the Polish corridor), published in 1930-
31 volume 4 of Geographie universelle, dedicated to L’Europe Centrale. This
French concept of Central Europe, in contrast to the idea of Mitteleuropa,
influenced the peace treaties of 1919-20 and inspired the politics of the
“small entente” in Central Europe.
From the Italian perspective, the term Mitteleuropa evokes a debate car-
ried out in Northeastern Italy in the time leading up to the First World
War, about attempts to bring together Italians, Germans, Austrians, and
Slavs in a regional community, held together by deeper links than the dy-
nastic connections of the Habsburgs. In the 1920s, Trieste remained a hub
for Austrian-Italian-Jewish-Slavic cultural contact. Under fascism, Italy
tried to play a role in the foreground of Central Europe and the Balkans,
but was unable to penetrate Nazi domination (see also Isnenghi, this vol-
ume).
In the years following German unification, the dissolution of the So-
viet system, and the emancipation of the nations of Central Europe, one
could expect Mitteleuropa to reconstitute itself. The French and perhaps the
English might well worry that this negative lieu de mémoire could gain cur-
rency again and a zone of German (and Austrian) influence be re-estab-
lished. In the lands that belonged to the Habsburg monarchy until 1918,
Mitteleuropa remained the Belle Epoque, a fashionable topic re-discovered
in the 1980s.
Paradoxically, at precisely the point that the expansion of the Euro-
pean Union to include Central Europe has been completed, Mitteleuropa
seems to have lost its importance. But does not precisely the forgetting of
this lieu de mémoire of Central Europe show that Europe itself has lost its
memory and the markers of its identity? In the new member states of the
European Union, will the feeling of being European be engulfed by the
return of national emotions, by the appetite for economic and cultural
globalization after decades of being trapped in the Soviet bloc, and by
strategic considerations that would seem to be better guaranteed by
46 Jacques Le Rider

NATO than by Europe? Does not neo-Nazi and xenophobic populism

highlight the fact that the suppression of Mitteleuropa—lieu de mémoire of the
great catastrophes which nationalism and racism led to—does not con-
tribute to a democratic political culture? Indeed, it is instead witness to the
atrophying of historical consciousness, without which it is likely impossi-
ble to strengthen the European Union.

Translated by Anna-Lena Flügel

References
Csáky, Moritz, and Elisabeth Grossegger. Jenseits von Grenzen: Transnatio-
nales, translokales Gedächtnis. Vienna: Praesens, 2007.
Droz, Jacques. L’Europe central: Evolution historique de l’idée de «Mitteleuropa».
Paris: Payot, 1960.
Europe central—Mitteleuropa. Spec. issue of Revue germanique internationale 1
(1994).
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. “Die Idee Europa.” 1917. Reden und Aufsätze II,
1914-1924. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1979. 43-54. Vol. 9 of Gesam-
melte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden. Bernd Schoeller und Rudolf Hirsch,
eds. 10 vols.
––. “Die österreichische Idee.” 1917. Reden und Aufsätze II, 1914-1924.
Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1979. 454-58. Vol. 9 of Gesammelte Werke
in zehn Einzelbänden. Bernd Schoeller und Rudolf Hirsch, eds. 10 vols.
Konrád, György. “Der Traum von Mitteleuropa.” Aufbruch nach Mitteleu-
ropa: Rekonstruktion eines versunkenen Kontinents. Eds. Erhard Busek and
Gerhard Wilfinger. Vienna: Edition Atelier, 1986. 87-97.
Kundera, Milan.“Un Occident kidnappé ou La tragédie de l’Europe cen-
tral.” Le Débat 27 (1983): 1-22. [English: Kundera, Milan. “The Trag-
edy of Central Europe.” New York Review of Books 26 Apr. 1984: 33-
38.]
Le Rider, Jacques. La Mitteleuropa. 1994. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1996. [German: Le Rider, Jacques. Mitteleuropa: Auf den Spuren
eines Begriffes. Trans. Robert Fleck. Vienna: Deuticke, 1994.]
Le Rider, Jacques, Moritz Csáky, and Monika Sommer, eds. Transnationale
Gedächtnisorte in Zentraleuropa. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2002.
Magris, Claudio. Il mito Absburgico nella letteratura austriaca moderna. Turin:
Einaudi, 1963.
Naumann, Friedrich. Mitteleuropa. Berlin: Reimer, 1915.
 Sites of Memory in U.S.-American Histories
and Cultures
UDO J. HEBEL

1. Conceptual Frameworks and American Memory Studies

U.S.-American cultures of memory reverberate with the particular con-
texts and developments of North American histories since the colonial
period. The proverbial newness of the so-called New World, the defini-
tional projection of the U.S.-American republic as an unprecedented
promise of universal redemption, and the manifold conflicts within the
multiethnic societies of the North American continent and the United
States have supported rather than limited the emergence, purposeful con-
struction, and ongoing revision of a multivocal network of sites of mem-
ory. Theoretical approaches to interpret the political, social, and cultural
power of imagined communities and invented traditions in processes of
nation-building and community preservation offer the conceptual frame-
work to assess the significance of cultural memories and collective com-
memorations for the formation and stabilization of a U.S.-American na-
tion that was created rhetorically and in historical acts of political and
cultural opposition. At the same time, archaeological remains of precon-
tact achievements of the indigenous peoples of North America and traces
of pre-Columbian European travelers in the Western Hemisphere serve as
lasting reminders that American cultural memories do not begin in 1492
and should not be reduced to Anglocentric sites. The multidisciplinarity of
American Studies and the discipline’s multicultural agenda and prominent
involvement in recent theoretical turns—visual, performative, spatial,
virtual, transnational—provide American Studies scholars with a compre-
hensive vision to account for the heterogeneity of the discursive and non-
discursive manifestations of American cultures of memory and to explore
the political and economic competition for commemorative participation
and authority in a democratic and pluralistic society. Well-established con-
cepts of U.S.-American cultural history and American Studies scholarship
such as Henry S. Commager’s stress on the specific U.S.-American search
for a usable past and Robert Bellah’s notion of American civil religion, as
well as the New Historicist understanding of U.S.-American culture as a
rhetorical battlefield, connect well with sociocultural and constructivist
approaches in memory studies.
48 Udo J. Hebel

2. The Cultural Work of Literary Sites of

U.S.-American Memories
The beginnings of the literary construction of specifically American cul-
tural memories run parallel to the European colonization of the North
American continent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A wealth
of multilingual texts preserves the wondrous moments of the first inter-
cultural encounters as well as the ensuing conflicts between European
colonists and the indigenous peoples in the northwestern, southern, and
southwestern areas of the future United States. The commemorative im-
pulse in colonial English-language literature reaches a climax of lasting
ideological impact in the historiographical writings of seventeenth-century
Puritan New England. The histories of William Bradford, John Winthrop,
and Cotton Mather prescribe a formula for U.S.-American commemora-
tions of an Anglocentric myth of origin revolving around the narrative of
the Pilgrim Fathers’ arrival at Plymouth Rock in 1620, which is still ob-
served today as the national family holiday of Thanksgiving on the fourth
Thursday in November. The intention of seventeenth-century historiog-
raphers to perpetuate the Puritan “city upon the hill” against the changing
course of worldly history is best verbalized in the “General Introduction”
to Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702): “But whether New
England may Live any where else or no [sic], it must Live in our History!”
The determination to use historiographical scripts to exercise commemo-
rative authority, especially in times of political crises and intercultural con-
flicts, can be recognized in the repeated commissioning of prominent
seventeenth-century ministers and politicians to write officially sanctioned
interpretations of New England history, among them most prominently
Nathaniel Morton’s New Englands Memoriall and William Hubbard’s General
History of New England. In the centuries to follow, and especially after the
foundation of the U.S.-American republic, the impulse to construct histo-
riographical sites of memory for the sake of ideological control and cul-
tural containment continued to remain productive. George Bancroft’s
History of the United States of America, first published in 1837 and continually
revised until the 1880s, still stands as one of the best examples of a long-
dominant historiographic site of U.S.-American memory.
The nineteenth century, and especially the time period between the
British-American War of 1812-15 and the Civil War of 1861-65, saw the
publication of innumerous historical novels which acted as literary sites of
memory (see Rigney, this volume) in the processes of establishing and
maintaining a national U.S.-American culture and identity. Literary critics
such as George Tucker, Walter Channing, Rufus Choate, John Neal, and
William Gilmore Simms called for the intentional creation of a national
 Sites of Memory in U.S.-American Histories and Cultures 49

U.S.-American literature. The historical novels of James Fenimore Coo-

per, James Kirke Paulding, John Neal, Lydia Maria Child, William Gilmore
Simms, John W. DeForest, and Nathaniel Hawthorne responded to the
collective desire for fictional commemorations of earlier stages of colonial
and national U.S.-American history. They also provided historical prece-
dents for contemporary cultural and political issues and conflicts such as
the Indian removal policy or slavery. Regional differences in the percep-
tion of American histories and identities move to the forefront towards
the end of the nineteenth century when so-called plantation literature
serves as a popular, though controversial, platform for the nostalgic, at
times openly apologetic and racist, commemoration of the Old South and
the so-called lost cause of the Southern Confederacy. The fictional recol-
lection of the pre-Civil War South in the context of late-nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century reconciliation politics lives on in twentieth-century
American visual and media culture in Hollywood classics such as Birth of a
Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939), and in the internationally
successful TV series North and South (1985-94), based on a 1980 trilogy of
conventional historical novels by John Jakes. The resurgence of history in
contemporary American literature—see novels by authors such as Tho-
mas Pynchon, E. L. Doctorow, and Charles Frazier—testifies to the un-
broken cultural power of fictional sites of memory.
Autobiographical writings, here read as purposeful acts of individual
remembrance and collective identity construction in specific cultural and
intercultural contexts (see Saunders, this volume), make for a third note-
worthy corpus of literary sites of American memory. The self-dramatizing
impulse of early promoters of European colonization such as John Smith,
the particularly self-scrutinizing urge and exemplary format of Puritan
conversion relations, and the collective self-perception of many eight-
eenth-century American writers fuel the early production of a large body
of religious and secular life writing in British North America. The spiritual
autobiographies of Thomas Shepard and Jonathan Edwards, the Indian
captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson, the travel narratives of Sarah
Kemble Knight and Elizabeth Ashbridge, John Woolman’s Quaker jour-
nal, William Byrd’s account of daily life on a Chesapeake Bay plantation,
Native American Samson Occom’s narrative, and, above all, Benjamin
Franklin’s Autobiography represent the wide spectrum and cultural diversity
of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American autobiographical writ-
ing. The autobiographies of women and ethnic writers as well as the early
autobiographies of representatives of religiously and politically dissenting
groups illustrate the usefulness of acts of individual remembering for op-
positional, if not subversive, expressions of group concerns. Olaudah
Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) is the first of a long list of African
50 Udo J. Hebel

American slave narratives which preserve for the African American com-
munity and expose to white readers the plight of Southern chattel slavery
and the evil of the transatlantic slave trade. Paradigmatic examples of this
literary form are the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriot Jacobs,
whose cultural work and political impact resound in the texts of twentieth-
century African American activists and writers such as Martin Luther
King, Malcolm X, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. In the twentieth
century, the archive of American autobiographical writing encompasses
life writings by a wide range of differently representative Americans, from
Gilded Age business tycoon Andrew Carnegie to New England intellec-
tual and cultural critic Henry Adams, from groundbreaking feminist
Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Jewish American immigrant Mary Antin,
from expatriate writer Gertrude Stein to Sioux chief Black Elk. The fur-
ther pluralization of a once-Anglocentric, English-only U.S.-American
literature in the wake of the ethnic empowerment movements since the
1960s and the canon revisions since the 1980s have given a more promi-
nent voice to the autobiographical fiction and commemorative identity
politics of ethnic writers such as N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich,
Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodriguez, Sandra Cisneros, and bell
hooks.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the ever-growing editorial
project of The Library of America makes for a commemorative compila-
tion of a uniquely comprehensive scope.

3. Visual Sites of Memory in an Increasingly Mediated

U.S.-American History and Culture
Petroglyphs and other forms of visual rock art of precontact indigenous
Pueblo cultures in the American Southwest antedate any other manifesta-
tion of visual memory in what would become U.S.-American territory.
Dating back several centuries before the arrival of European colonists and
continuing into the times of European-Indian contact and conflict after
1492, the pictorial art of the prehistoric Anasazi, Mogollon, Hohokam,
and Fremont cultures and the post-Columbian rock art of the Navajos
and Apaches are abstract, ceremonial, or representational in composition.
They preserve sacred rites, mythic figures, and ancient symbols as well as
specific secular and historic events such as a Spanish massacre of South-
western tribes in the Canyon de Chelly area in Arizona. Today, visual sites
of memory remain part of the ceremonial cultures of Native American
tribes but also serve as an important attraction in the tourist business and
 Sites of Memory in U.S.-American Histories and Cultures 51

commemorative industry of the national parks of the Southwest, a promi-

nent, and probably the best-known, example being Mesa Verde.
Among visual representations of the European colonization of North
America, renditions of so-called landing scenes hold a specific ideological
position as commemorative constructions of pivotal moments of origin,
foundation, and identity formation. The 1493 Basel woodcuts of the arri-
val of Christopher Columbus in the New World express European de-
sires, projections, and cultural schemata rather than actual American reali-
ties. Theodore de Bry’s widely circulated late-sixteenth-century engravings
of Columbus’s imperialist act of taking possession of the Western Hemi-
sphere became the foil for later visualizations of landing scenes with a
seminal impact on U.S. history. Henry Sargent’s “The Landing of the Pil-
grims” (1815), today displayed in Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth, Massachusetts,
and John Vanderlyn’s “The Landing of Christopher Columbus” (1847),
still part of the permanent exhibition in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in
Washington, D.C., are particularly visible examples from a much larger
archive of pictorial recollections of foundational moments in North
American history. The crucial moment of U.S.-American national creation
is enshrined in John Trumbull’s painting “The Signing of the Declaration
of Independence, 4 July 1776” (1820), which remains a remarkable exam-
ple of the young nation’s construction of a usable past by means of com-
missioned icons of memory. That all the works mentioned here served as
points of reference for popular prints distributed by the thousands by
Currier & Ives and Kellog & Kellog, the most successful producers of
lithographs in the nineteenth century, illustrates the connection between
U.S.-American cultures of memory on the one hand and commercial in-
terests on the other, evident already in the nineteenth century. The popu-
lar impact of visualizations of prenational and national American histories
in the nineteenth century was furthermore enhanced by the publication of
widely circulated pictorial histories. Multivolume works such as John
Frost’s The Pictorial History of the United States of America (1844) and Benja-
min J. Lossing’s Pictorial Field-Book of the American Revolution (1850) framed
the commemorative constitution of a U.S.-American national history and
identity with a clearly marked didactic impetus in times of territorial ex-
pansion and increasing demographic pluralization.
The archive of iconic sites of U.S.-American memory includes three
pre-twentieth-century pictures that deserve special attention. Paul Revere’s
engraving of the Boston Massacre of 1770, distributed immediately after
the event in various print and broadside versions and still used today for
history and children’s book illustrations, has framed interpretations of the
American Revolution as the archetypal struggle of liberty-loving, Ameri-
can colonist-citizens and common people against British military and po-
52 Udo J. Hebel

litical tyranny. Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware”

(1851) has become the quintessential representation of George Washing-
ton’s historical role as the larger-than-life epic hero leading the emerging
U.S.-American nation into a bright future of glory and progress. Emanuel
Leutze’s “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (Westward
Ho!)” (1861), commissioned as a mural for the U.S. Capitol in Washing-
ton, D.C., gathered for official recollection and public admiration the full
repertoire of figural and scenic elements to depict the national ideology of
Manifest Destiny on the eve of the Civil War. Among more recent picto-
rial sites of memory, Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom from Want” (1943)
stands out as a painting whose rendition of an (Anglo) American Thanks-
giving family celebration for World War II propaganda purposes testifies
to the unbroken cultural and political power of paintings even in the
twentieth century.
The rise of photography as a new documentary medium in the second
half of the nineteenth century changed the configuration of visual mem-
ory and initiated the conceptualization of sites of memory as part of mod-
ern U.S.-American media culture (see Ruchatz, this volume). The Civil
War photography of Matthew Brady became the first major set of photo-
graphic representations of a major event in U.S.-American history. The
pictures of Brady and his teams replaced to a large extent the previously
classic formats and modes of memory of war, namely literature and
painting, and continue to dominate the collective U.S.-American recollec-
tion of the Civil War even today. In a similar vein, Edward Curtis’s late-
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century photographs of Native Americans
in the West and Southwest have inscribed into U.S.-American and non-
American memories alike the iconic figure of the “vanishing Indian.” The
social photography of Jacob Riis has preserved the promise and plight of
late-nineteenth-century immigrant life in the U.S. Throughout the twenti-
eth century, photographs have increasingly served as commemorative
registers of changes and crises in U.S.-American history and culture, from
Walker Evans’s and Dorothea Lange’s pictures of distressed farmers dur-
ing the Great Depression and Ansel Adams’s photographs of the endan-
gered landscapes of the Southwest to the stills in the Zapruder film of the
assassination of John F. Kennedy, photographs of war atrocities in Viet-
nam, and Magnum photographers’ immediate capturing of the national
trauma of 9/11. Newsreels and TV news coverage, the latter increasingly
live and rivaled by the Internet, have inscribed into twentieth-century
collective U.S.-American memory lasting, at times haunting, images of
historical events and national traumas, including, for example, pictures of
great moments in American sports, decisive developments and acts of
World War II, the funeral of President Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the
 Sites of Memory in U.S.-American Histories and Cultures 53

landing on the moon, the resignation of President Nixon, 9/11, and Hur-
ricane Katrina. How movies have shaped U.S.-American cultural memory
and the popular imagination of U.S.-American histories and identities
since the beginning of the twentieth century can be measured by the con-
tinued appeal and commercial success of seminal filmic sites of memory
such as Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone with the Wind (1939), JFK (1991),
Amistad (1997), or Pearl Harbor (2001). The public television documenta-
ries by Ken Burns have presented a particularly appealing commemorative
panorama of American histories, cultures, and icons, from Thomas Jeffer-
son to the Lewis and Clark expedition, and from the Civil War to Brook-
lyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty.

4. Commemorative Performances and Material Displays of

U.S.-American Memories
The establishment of the United States of America stirred a collective urge
for the celebration of common historical achievements and for the affir-
mation of the newly created collective identity. The Early Republic espe-
cially saw a large variety of local, regional, and national festivities that took
the scripts and repertoires of traditional religious and folk rituals and
adapted them to focus on the events, figures, and documents determining
the new nation. Commemorations of specific occurrences of the Ameri-
can Revolution, celebrations of the birthdays or inaugurations of revolu-
tionary leaders turned presidents, and ceremonies in honor of the ratifica-
tion of the Constitution governed the festive calendar of the young nation.
The commemorative culture of the Early Republic and antebellum Amer-
ica laid the foundation for the development of a specifically U.S.-Ameri-
can civil religion whose politically and culturally cohesive function relies
even today to a considerable extent on the lasting appeal of largely un-
contested sites of national memory and collective veneration. In the nine-
teenth century, the Fourth of July developed into the national holiday
proper, rivaled for some time by the observance of Forefathers’ Day, the
commemoration of the arrival of the so-called Pilgrim Fathers in Ply-
mouth on December 22, 1620. In the decades before the Civil War, sec-
tional strife and territorial expansion supported the divisive functionaliza-
tion of national sites of memory and the emergence of more locally and
regionally significant festivities, such as the commemoration of the foun-
dation of major cities in recently acquired territories and the celebration of
technological achievements such as the opening of the Erie Canal.
Post-Civil War America saw the further pluralization and commer-
cialization of the U.S.-American landscape of performative memory. The
54 Udo J. Hebel

nationwide popularity of anniversary commemorations and reenactments

related to the Civil War and a host of Civil War monuments and memori-
als erected with different political and cultural agendas in the North and
the South reduced the national significance of New England history and
heritage. The battlefield of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania became the
overtowering icon of national rededication and soon developed into a
commercially marketed shrine of pilgrimage and collective worship which
anticipated twentieth-century memory tourism and business. The emer-
gence of African American emancipation celebrations and the formation
of a diversified landscape of ethnic sites of memory, especially in the
Midwest and West in the wake of mass immigration, furthermore plural-
ized U.S.-American festive cultures. In particular, local history pageants
complicated once-monolithic Anglocentric narratives of national and cul-
tural origins by staging the more heterogeneous histories and heritages of
the respective immigrant groups. In another illustration of the fast-
changing parameters of U.S.-American cultural memories, the Wild West
shows of William “Buffalo Bill” Cody staged the conflicted memory of
the American West with white and Indian actors for American and Euro-
pean audiences from the 1880s through the 1900s, while the history of
westward expansion was still under way. In this context, the ceremonious
dedication of the National Monument to the Forefathers near Plymouth,
Massachusetts, in 1889—one year after the erection of a statue in honor
of African American Revolutionary War hero Crispus Attucks in Bos-
ton—and the Plymouth tercentenary festivities of 1920, with George P.
Baker’s pageant The Pilgrim Spirit as a major tourist attraction, appear al-
most like belated attempts to reanimate the binding force of an exclusively
Anglocentric U.S.-American memory. However, a seemingly monolithic
U.S.-American festive culture was to remain politically and culturally pow-
erful, if not dominant, well into the second half of the twentieth century.
In the context of more recent debates over multiculturalism, ethnic em-
powerment, political correctness, and identity politics, time-honored cele-
brations of Columbus Day or the arrival of the Pilgrims on Plymouth
Rock became the very epitome of repressive Eurocentric conceptualiza-
tions of the U.S. to advocates of a more pluralistic understanding of
American histories, cultures, and identities. Monuments such as the Bos-
ton Irish Famine Memorial, unveiled and dedicated near Boston’s famous
Freedom Trail in 1998, document the continued urge of American ethnic
groups to claim their spaces on the map of U.S.-American historical
memories.
The gathering and display of U.S.-American memories in collections,
archives, and museums as publicly accessible sites of memory also goes
back to the early years of the U.S.-American republic. The establishment
 Sites of Memory in U.S.-American Histories and Cultures 55

of the Library of Congress by an act of Congress in 1800 laid the founda-

tion for the largest U.S.-American archive, whose special online section
“American Memory” ([Link] is to date the
most comprehensive collection of U.S.-American cultural memories elec-
tronically available. The early foundation of local and state historical so-
cieties as well as of private archives of national significance such as the
Massachusetts Historical Society (1791), the New York Historical Society
(1804), and the American Antiquarian Society (1812) became the model
for an intricate network of historical societies and heritage institutions in
all states and major cities. Over the course of more than two centuries the
archival politics and cultural work of these societies and archives have
impacted strongly on the particular local, regional, and national memories
which they endorsed and/or contested. In the ideological crisis of the
1930s, when the cultural politics of the New Deal supported the purpose-
ful preservation of endangered historical sources for the sake of collective
identity stabilization, local and state archives often became important plat-
forms for the retrieval of commemorative materials such as African
American slave narratives and work songs, the records of the Salem
witchcraft trials of 1692, and Southern blues and Western cowboy music.
The centerpiece of U.S.-American museum culture is the Smithsonian
Institution ([Link] which was established in 1846 and today
consists of some 20 museums, most of them located on the National Mall
in Washington, D.C. Recurring controversies over particular commemo-
rative exhibits such as the display of World War II B-29 atomic bomber
“Enola Gay” in 1994/95, and the discussions about the location, archi-
tecture, and museum concepts of recently opened museums such as the
National Museum of the American Indian and of still-to-be-built muse-
ums such as the National Museum of African American History and Cul-
ture illustrate the far-reaching political implications of museums as par-
ticularly visible and influential sites of memory in contemporary multieth-
nic U.S.-American culture.
The National Mall in Washington, D.C. is the heart of U.S.-American
civil religion and the central site of national U.S.-American museum and
memory culture. Designed in its basic outline by Washington architect
Pierre L’Enfant in the 1790s, the National Mall today serves as the prime
destination for national(ist) pilgrimages of U.S.-American citizens and as a
tourist attraction for both American and international visitors. In a larger
topographical and symbolic context, the Mall connects the major build-
ings of the three branches of government, the White House, the Capitol,
and the Supreme Court. Besides the museums of the Smithsonian Institu-
tion, important national organizations such as the National Archives, the
famous monuments erected in honor of George Washington, Thomas
56 Udo J. Hebel

Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as well as

major national war memorials such as the World War II Memorial, the
Korean War Memorial, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial are all located
on or close to the Mall. The Rotunda of the National Archives, with its
ceremonial display of the sacred documents of the U.S.-American nation,
and the Great Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, with its commemorative ar-
rangement of paintings of crucial scenes of North American history and
sculptures of important U.S.-American presidents and statesmen, have
become especially venerated sites of national U.S.-American memory cul-
ture and tourism. Since 1965, the “National Mall and Memorial Parks”
have been part of the U.S. National Park Service and are thus linked in-
stitutionally and ideologically to an extended system of some 400 sites
across the nation. Since the establishment of the first national park, Yel-
lowstone National Park, in 1872, the U.S.-American national parks have
been expressly dedicated to the preservation of the natural and historical
heritage of the United States. They range from Independence Hall in
Philadelphia and mythic battlefields of the American Revolution and the
Civil War to landmarks of immigration history such as Ellis Island and the
Statue of Liberty, as well as to New Orleans jazz clubs, birthplaces of
historical figures, churches of the Civil Rights Movement in the South,
and presidential libraries (see [Link] In addition, privately
sponsored and more openly commercial sites of memory have increasingly
become part of U.S.-American memory culture and business. Plimoth
Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg deserve special mention, as their
living history performances of everyday life in Puritan Plymouth in the
1620s and in eighteenth-century Virginia are particularly noteworthy ex-
amples of the fusion of historical didacticism and tourism governing many
sites of U.S.-American memory today. Whether the active involvement of
visitors in historical performances and the increasing accessibility of sites
of memory both in person and via the Internet enhance the democratiza-
tion of U.S.-American national memories remains open to debate.
Visual sites of U.S.-American memory and U.S.-American commemo-
rative displays of different kinds receive additional, material circulation on
coins and stamps. Among the manifold commemorative series and pro-
grams of the United States Mint ([Link] the recent “50
State Quarters Program” and the “Westward Journey Nickel Series” may
serve to illustrate how coins function as agents and sites in the circulation
of historical and cultural memory. The first commemorative postage
stamps were issued by the United States Postal Service ([Link]
[Link]) in 1893 in honor of the World Columbian Exposition in
Chicago and showed well-known paintings of Columbus’s arrival in the
“New World.” Recent examples such as the “United We Stand” and
 Sites of Memory in U.S.-American Histories and Cultures 57

“Heroes of 2001” stamps released in the wake of 9/11 and the Benjamin
Franklin stamps issued in honor of Franklin’s 300th birthday in 2006
demonstrate the continued practice of remembering statesmen, artists,
sports heroes, paintings, landmark buildings, national parks, and many
other historical and cultural landmarks of the U.S. on stamps.

5. Transnationalization and Virtualization of Sites of

U.S.-American Memories
The multiethnic and transnational histories of North America and the
hemispheric, Atlantic, and Pacific contexts of North American cultures
have always given national U.S.-American sites and ceremonies of com-
memoration a multidirectional, pluralistic dimension—notwithstanding all
historical processes and official acts of repression, exclusion, erasure, and
forgetting. The renaming of Custer Battlefield National Monument as
Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in 1991 and the addition of
an Indian Memorial in 2003 to the National Park Service’s previous site of
commemoration of the 1876 battle between General Custer’s 7th U.S.
Cavalry and an alliance of Plains Indians under the leadership of chiefs
Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse document in exemplary fashion how
transcultural and transnational memories are now surfacing more visibly
from beneath the long-monolithic landscape of U.S.-American memory.
The monumental dialogue in the hills of South Dakota between the four
presidents enshrined in stone at Mount Rushmore National Memorial and
the even more colossal figure of Crazy Horse on horseback slowly
emerging since 1948 from the wooded mountain at the construction site
of the Crazy Horse Memorial makes for an equally striking example of the
increasingly multivocal and controversial landscape of American memo-
ries. Pivotal sites of national(ist) U.S.-American history—such as the
Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, or the two major immigration stations on
Ellis Island, New York, and Angel Island, California—have been giving
more multivocal narratives of their transnational histories and implica-
tions. Monuments, memorials, historical markers, and national parks re-
lated to the intercultural histories and identities of specific ethnic groups
such as the National Japanese American Memorial in Washington, D.C.,
the “Go For Broke” Japanese American War Memorial in Los Angeles,
and the Manzanar War Relocation Center National Historic Site in Cali-
fornia now display conflicted memories of U.S.-American history and
immigration. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Wash-
ington, D.C. shows what scholars have termed the Americanization of the
Holocaust and thus a very specific manifestation of a national appropria-
58 Udo J. Hebel

tion of an international memory. The ongoing controversies over ade-

quate memorials at and beyond Ground Zero in New York City dramatize
more than anything else the political and cultural implications of the con-
test for commemorative authority over 9/11 and its sites of memory.
Elaborate websites offer almost unlimited virtual access to these and most
of the other sites of U.S.-American memories mentioned here. Participa-
tory structures and interactive communicative channels turn these web-
sites into platforms of exchange and dialogue, albeit only on a virtual level.
To what extent transnational accessibility and virtual interactivity will fur-
ther enhance the pluralization, democratization, and commercialization of
U.S.-American cultures of memory remains to be seen.

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_____________
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60 Udo J. Hebel

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 Sites of Memory and the Shadow of War
JAY WINTER

Sites of memory are places where groups of people engage in public activ-
ity through which they express “a collective shared knowledge […] of the
past, on which a group’s sense of unity and individuality is based” (Ass-
mann 15). The group that goes to such sites inherits earlier meanings
attached to the event, as well as adding new meanings. Their activity is
crucial to the presentation and preservation of commemorative sites.
When such groups disperse or disappear, sites of memory lose their initial
force, and may fade away entirely.
The term, adumbrated in a seven-volume study edited by Pierre Nora,
has been extended to many different texts, from legends, to stories, to
concepts. In this brief essay, I define the term more narrowly to mean
physical sites where commemorative acts take place. In the twentieth
century, most such sites marked the loss of life in war.
Such sites of memory are topoi with a life history. They have an initial,
creative phase, when they are constructed or adapted to particular com-
memorative purposes. Then follows a period of institutionalization and
routinization of their use. Such markings of the calendar, indicating mo-
ments of remembrance at particular places, can last for decades, or they
can be abruptly halted. In most instances, the significance of sites of
memory fades away with the passing of the social groups which initiated
the practice.
Sites of memory operate on many levels of aggregation and touches
many facets of associative life. While such sites were familiar in the an-
cient and medieval period, they have proliferated in more recent times.
Consequently, the subject has attracted much academic and popular dis-
cussion. We therefore concentrate here on sites of memory in the epoch
of the nation state, primarily in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In the modern period, most sites of memory were imbedded in events
marked distinctively and separately from the religious calendar. There has
been, though, some overlap. Visiting a commemorative site on Armistice
Day, November 11, in countries remembering the end of the 1914-18 war,
is close enough to the Catholic feast of All Saints on November 2; in
some countries with a large Catholic population, the two days occupy a
semi-sacred space of public commemoration. First comes the visit to the
cemetery; then the visit to the war memorial or other site. The day mark-
ing the end of the Second World War in Europe, May 8, is also the Saint’s
day of Joan of Arc. Those engaging in commemorative acts on that day
62 Jay Winter

may be addressing the secular celebration or the Catholic one; some cele-
brate the two together. Usually the site chosen to mark the day differs.
Commemoration at sites of memory is an act arising out of a convic-
tion, shared by a broad community, that the moment recalled is both sig-
nificant and informed by a moral message. Sites of memory materialize
that message. Moments of national humiliation are rarely commemorated
or marked in material form, though here too there are exceptions of a
hortatory kind. “Never again” is the hallmark of public commemoration
on the Israeli Day of Remembrance for victims of the Nazi persecution of
the Jews. The shell of public buildings in Hiroshima remind everyone of
the moment the city was incinerated in the first atomic attack. Where
moral doubts persist about a war or public policy, commemorative sites
are either hard to fix or places of contestation. That is why there is no date
or place for those who want to commemorate the end of the Algerian
War in France, or the end of the Vietnam War in the United States. There
was no moral consensus about the nature of the conflict; hence there was
no moral consensus about what was being remembered in public, and
when and where were the appropriate time and place to remember it
(Prost).
When the Japanese Prime Minister visits a shrine to war dead, he is
honoring war criminals as well as ordinary soldiers. The same was true
when President Ronald Reagan visited the German cemetery at Bitburg,
where lie the remains of SS men alongside the graves of those not impli-
cated in war crimes. And yet both places were sites of memory; contested
memory; embittered memory, but memory nonetheless.
The critical point about sites of memory is that they are there as
points of reference not only for those who survived traumatic events, but
also for those born long after them. The word “memory” becomes a
metaphor for the fashioning of narratives about the past when those with
direct experience of events die off. Sites of memory inevitably become
sites of second-order memory, that is, they are places where people re-
member the memories of others, those who survived the events marked
there.

1. Commemoration and Political Power

Much of the scholarly debate about sites of memory concerns the extent
to which they are instruments of the dominant political elements in a soci-
ety (see Meyer, this volume). One school of opinion emphasizes the use-
fulness to political elites of public events at such sites establishing the
legitimacy of their rule (Nora). Some such events are observed whoever is
 Sites of Memory and the Shadow of War 63

in power—witness Bastille Day in Paris or Independence Day in Philadel-

phia or elsewhere in the United States. But other events are closely tied to
the establishment of a new regime and the overthrow of an older one:
November 7 was the date in the calendar marking the Bolshevik revolu-
tion and establishing the Communist regime in power in Russia. That date
symbolized the new order and its challenge to its world-wide enemies. The
march past of soldiers and weapons deployed by the Soviet army in Mos-
cow was a moment of commemoration as well as of muscular pride, dem-
onstrating outside the Kremlin their place in Russian and world history.
This top-down approach proclaims the significance of sites of mem-
ory as a materialization of national, imperial, or political identity. Anzac
Day, April 25, is celebrated as the moment when the Australian nation
was born. It commemorates the landing of Australian and New Zealand
troops as part of the British-led expeditionary force sent to Turkey in
1915. The fact that the landing was a failure does not diminish the iconic
character of the date to Australians. It is the day, they hold, when their
nation came of age (Inglis). There are many sites of memory where this
day is marked. First people come to war memorials throughout Australia.
Secondly, there is a state event at the Australian War Memorial in Can-
berra, an edifice built in the shape of Hajia Sofia in Istanbul. On the walls
of this building are inscribed the names of all Australian soldiers who died
in the war. Thirdly, there is an annual pilgrimage, still robustly attended in
the twenty-first century, to the shores of Gallipoli itself. There, Australians
mark the Gallipoli landings on the beaches where they took place.
By no means are all commemorative activities or sites of memory as-
sociated with warfare. The birthdates of monarchs or deceased presidents
are marked in similar ways. Queen Victoria’s birthday, May 24, was Em-
pire Day in Britain; now (since 1999) it is celebrated as Commonwealth
Day. The creation of such commemorative dates was part of a wider
movement of what some scholars have termed “the invention of tradi-
tion.” That is, at the end of the nineteenth century, new nation states and
pre-eminent imperial powers deepened the repertoire of their ceremonial
activity. Such flourishes of the majesty of power were then immediately
sanctified by a spurious pedigree. To display ceremonies with a supposed
link to ancient habits or forms located in a foggy and distant past created
an effective cover for political innovation, instability or insecurity
(MacKenzie; Hobsbawm and Ranger). Interestingly for our purposes,
such traditions have only a tenuous attachment to a site, thereby increas-
ing the flexibility of choices available to those who want to invent tradi-
tions.
This functionalist interpretation of commemoration has been chal-
lenged. A second school of scholarship emphasizes the ways that sites of
64 Jay Winter

memory and the public commemorations surrounding them have the

potential for dominated groups to contest their subordinate status in pub-
lic. However much political leaders or their agents try to choreograph
commemorative activity, there is much space for subversion or creative
interpretation of the official commemorative script. Armistice Day on
November 11 was a moment when different groups came to war memori-
als, some for the celebration and others for the denigration of military
values. Pacifists announced their message of “Never again” through their
presence at such sites of memory; military men and their supporters used
these moments and the aura of these sites to glorify the profession of
arms, and to demonstrate the duty of citizens, if necessary, to give their
lives for their country in a future war. The contradictions in these forms
of expression on the same day and in the same places have never been
resolved (Gregory; Winter).
This alternative interpretation of the political meaning of sites of
memory emphasizes the multi-vocal character of remembrance and the
potential for new groups with new causes to appropriate older sites of
memory. From this point of view, there is always a chorus of voices in
commemorations; some are louder than others, but they never sound
alone. De-centering the history of commemoration ensures that we rec-
ognize the regional, local, and idiosyncratic character of such activities and
the way a top-down approach must be supplemented by a bottom-up
approach to the performance of scripts about the past at commemorative
sites in villages, small towns, and provincial cities, as well as in the centers
of political power.
Very occasionally, these dissonant voices come together, and a na-
tional moment of remembrance emerges. However on such occasions,
there is no one single site of memory at which this braiding together of
leaders and led takes place. One example of this diffusion of remem-
brance is the two-minute silence observed in Britain between 1919 and
1938 at 11:00 am on November 11. Telephonists pulled the plugs on all
conversations. Traffic stopped. The normal flow of life was arrested. Then
the Second World War intervened, and such disruption to war production
was not in the national interest. Thereafter the two-minute silence was
moved to the Sunday nearest November 11. But in the two decades be-
tween the wars, it was a moment of national reflection, located every-
where. Mass Observation, a pioneering social survey organization, asked
hundreds of ordinary people in Britain what they thought about during
the silence. The answer was that they thought not of the nation or of vic-
tory or of armies, but of the men who weren’t there. This silence was a
meditation about absence. As such it moved away from political orches-
tration into the realm of family history. To be sure, families commemo-
 Sites of Memory and the Shadow of War 65

rated their own within a wider social and political framework. But the
richest texture of remembrance was always within family life. This inter-
section of the public and the private, the macro-historical and the micro-
historical, is what has given commemoration in the twentieth century its
power and its rich repertoire of forms. But the very complexity of these
processes means that sites of memory are not always the foci of acts of
remembrance.
In addition, some buildings can be converted into sites of memory
unofficially. A cinema where workers organized a strike, a home where
women created a midwifery or child care center, a school where people
made homeless by a natural disaster found shelter can all be turned into
sites of memory by those who lived important moments there (Hayden).
Official certification is not necessary when groups of people act on their
own.

2. The Business of Remembering

Unofficial sites of memory must be preserved through the time and cash
of groups of people. That is a crucial defining feature of sites of memory:
They cost money and time to construct or preserve. They require special-
ists’ services—landscapers, cleaners, masons, carpenters, plumbers, and so
on; they needs funding and over time, re-funding. There are two kinds of
expenditure we can trace in the history of sites of memory. The first is
capital expenditure; the second is recurrent expenditure.
The land for such sites must be purchased; and an appropriate sym-
bolic form must be designed and then constructed to focus remembrance
activities. The first step may require substantial sums of public money.
Private land, especially in urban areas, comes at a premium. Then there are
the costs of architects’ fees, especially when a public competitive tender is
offered, inviting proposals from professionals. Finally, once the symbolic
form is chosen, it must be constructed out of selected materials and fin-
ished according to the architect’s or artist’s designs.
When these projects are national in character, the process of produc-
tion is in the public eye. National art schools and bodies of “experts” have
to have their say. Standards of “taste” and “decorum” are proclaimed.
Professional interests and conflicts come into play. Much of this profes-
sional infighting is confined to national commemorative projects, but the
same complex, step-wise procedure occurs on the local level, too, this
time without the same level of attendant publicity. Local authorities usu-
ally take charge of these projects, and local notables can deflect plans to-
66 Jay Winter

wards their own particular visions, whatever public opinion may think
about the subject.
Most of the time, public funding covers only part of the costs of
commemorative objects. Public subscriptions are critical, especially in
Protestant countries where the concept of utilitarian memorials is domi-
nant. In Catholic countries, the notion of a “useful” memorial is a contra-
diction in terms; symbolic language and utilitarian language are deemed
mutually exclusive. But the Protestant voluntary tradition has it otherwise.
In Protestant countries, commemorative projects took many forms, from
the sacred to the mundane: In Britain there are memorial wards in hospi-
tals, memorial scholarships in schools and universities, alongside memorial
cricket pitches and memorial water troughs for horses. In the United
States and in Australia there are memorial highways. The rule of thumb is
that private citizens pick up most of the tab for these memorial forms.
The state provides subsidies and occasional matching grants, but the
money comes out of the pockets of ordinary people. The same is true in
Britain with respect to a very widely shared form of public commemora-
tion: the purchase of paper poppies, the symbol of the Lost Generation of
the First World War. These poppies are worn on the lapel, and the pro-
ceeds of the sale go to aid disabled veterans and their families.
Recurrent expenditure for sites of memory is almost always paid for
by taxpayers. War cemeteries require masons and gardeners. The Imperial
(now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission looks after hundreds of
such cemeteries all over the world. The cost of their maintenance is a
public charge. Private charities, in particular Christian groups, maintain
German war cemeteries. Once constructed, memorial statues, cemeteries,
or highways also become public property, and require public support to
prevent them from decomposing. They are preserved as sites of com-
memorative activity.
Much of this activity is directed towards inviting the public to remem-
ber in public. This means directing the public towards particular sites of
remembrance. Some of them are nearby their homes. In Britain and
France there are war memorials in every city, in every town, and in every
village; it is there that Armistice Day ceremonies are held annually.
Churches throughout Europe of all denominations have memorial plaques
to those who died in war. Special prayers were added to the Jewish prayer
book to commemorate the victims of the Nazis in the Second World War,
and later, those who died on active service in the Israeli army.
Remembrance in local houses of worship or at war memorials re-
quired that the public travel a short distance from their homes to sites of
remembrance. But given the scale of losses in the two world wars, and the
widely dispersed cemeteries around the world in which lie the remains of
 Sites of Memory and the Shadow of War 67

millions of such men and women, the business of remembrance also en-
tails international travel. Such voyages start as pilgrimage; many are mixed
with tourism (Lloyd). But in either case, there are train and boat journeys
to take; hotel rooms to reserve; guides to hire; flowers to lay at graves;
trinkets and mementos to purchase. In some places, museums have arisen
to tell more of the story the pilgrims have come to hear and to share.
There too money is exchanged along with the narratives and the symbols
of remembrance.
This mixture of the sacred and the profane is hardly an innovation. It
is merely a secular form of the kind of pilgrimage, for example, that made
San Juan de Compostela in Spain the destination of millions of men and
women in the Middle Ages who came to honor the conventionally desig-
nated resting place of the remains of one of the original Apostles. Pilgrim-
age to war cemeteries is public commemoration over long, sometimes
very long, distances. Where does pilgrimage stop and tourism take over? It
is impossible to say, but in all cases, the business of remembrance remains
just that—a business.

3. Aesthetic Redemption
The life history of sites of memory is described by more than political
gestures and material tasks. Frequently a site is also an art form, the art of
creating, arranging, and interpreting signifying practices. This field of ac-
tion can be analyzed on two different levels: The first is aesthetic; the
second is semiotic. The two are intimately related.
Some national commemorative forms are distinctive. Others are
shared by populations in many countries. The figure of Marianne as the
national symbol affixed to thousands of town halls throughout France
could not be used in Germany or Britain. The German Iron Cross, on
commemorative plaques, denotes the location and the tradition in which
commemoration is expressed. Germany’s heroes’ forests or fortresses are
also imbricated in Teutonic history.
At times the repertoire of one country’s symbols overlap with that of
others, even when they were adversaries. After the First World War, the
first industrialized war fought among fully industrialized nations, many
commemorative forms adopted medieval notation. Throughout Europe,
the revolutionary character of warfare was marked by a notation of a
backward-looking kind. Medieval images of heroic and saintly warriors
recaptured a time when combat was between individuals, rather than the
impersonal and unbalanced duel between artillery and human flesh. The
war in the air took on the form and romance of chivalry. On the losing
68 Jay Winter

and the winning sides, medievalism flourished. We can see these traces
clearly in stained glass windows in many churches, where the site of mem-
ory for the two world wars takes on a meaning by virtue of its proximity
to older religious images and objects. Twentieth-century warfare thus
takes on a sacred coloration when its sites of memory are located within a
sacred grammar and a sacred building.
Until very late in the twentieth century, on war memorials the human
form survived. In some instances, classical images of male beauty were
chosen to mark the “lost generation”; others adopted more stoical and
emphatically un-triumphalist poses of men in uniform. In most cases,
victory was either partially or totally eclipsed by a sense of overwhelming
loss. Within this aesthetic landscape, traditional Christian motifs were
commonplace. The form of the grieving mother—Stabat Mater—brought
women into the local and national constellation of grief.
In Protestant countries, the aesthetic debate took on a quasi-religious
character. War memorials with crosses on them offended some Protes-
tants, who believed that the Reformation of the sixteenth century pre-
cluded such “Catholic” notation. Obelisks were preferable, and relatively
inexpensive, too. In France, war memorials were by law restricted to pub-
lic and not church grounds, though many local groups found a way
around this proscription. In schools and universities, the location of such
memorials touched on such issues. Some were placed in sacred space, in
chapels; semi-sacred space, around chapels; or in secular space. Public
thoroughfares and train stations also housed such lists of men who had
died in war. Placement signified meaning.
Twentieth-century warfare democratized bereavement. Previously ar-
mies were composed of mercenaries, volunteers and professionals. After
1914, Everyman went to war. The social incidence of war losses was
thereby transformed. In Britain, France and Germany, virtually every
household had lost someone—a father, a son, a brother, a cousin, a
friend. Given the nature of static warfare on the Western front, many—
perhaps half—of those killed had no known grave. Consequently com-
memorative forms highlighted names above all. The names of the dead
were all that remained of them, and chiseled in stone or etched on
plaques, these names were the foci of public commemoration both on the
local and the national scale.
Sites of memory preserved the names of those who were gone. In
some rare cases—Australia is one of them—war memorials listed the
names of all those who served. This notation was a constant rebuke to
those who passed the site knowing full well that their names were not
inscribed on the memorial. Most of the time, though, the dead were the
names that mattered, so much so that alphabetical order replaced social
 Sites of Memory and the Shadow of War 69

order. The overwhelming majority of war memorials list those who died in
this way. A small minority listed men by rank, and some listed men by the
date or year of death. But sites of memory were built for the survivors, for
the families of those who were not there, and these people needed easy
access to the sole signifier left to them—the name of the dead person.
This essential practice of naming set the pattern for commemorative
forms after the Second World War and beyond. After 1945, names were
simply added to Great War memorials. This was partly in recognition of
the links between the two twentieth-century conflicts; partly it was a mat-
ter of economy. After the Vietnam War, naming still mattered, and First
World War forms inspired memorials, most notably Maya Lin’s Vietnam
Veterans’ Memorial in Washington. Her work clearly drew on Sir Edwin
Lutyens’s memorial to the missing on the River Somme at Thiepval, inau-
gurated in 1932.
By the latter decades of the twentieth century, artistic opinion and
aesthetic tastes had changed sufficiently to make abstraction the key lan-
guage of commemorative expression. Statues and installations thereby
escaped from specific national notation and moved away from the earlier
emphasis upon the human figure. The exception to the rule is Soviet
commemorative art, which resolutely stuck to the path of heroic romanti-
cism in marking out the meaning of what they called the Great Patriotic
War. In many instances in Western Europe, but by no means all, forms
which suggested absence or nothingness replaced classical, religious, or
romantic notions in commemorative art.
This shift was noticeable in Holocaust remembrance. Holocaust sites
of memory—concentration and extermination camps, in particular, but
also places where Jews had lived before the Shoah—could not be treated
in the same way as sites commemorating the dead of the two world wars
(see Young, this volume). The first difficulty was the need to avoid Chris-
tian notation to represent a Jewish catastrophe. The second was the allergy
of observant Jews to representational art, either forbidden or resisted
within Orthodox Jewish tradition. The third was the absence of any sense
of uplift, of meaning, of purpose in the deaths of the victims. Those who
died in the Holocaust may have affirmed their faith thereby, but what is
the meaning in the murder of one million children? To a degree, their
deaths meant nothing, and therefore the Holocaust meant nothing.
Representing nothing became a challenge met in particular ways.
Some artists provided installation art which literally vanished through the
presence of visitors. Others projected photographs of the vanished world
onto the facades of still erect buildings, occupied by non-Jews. Others
adopted post-modern forms to suggest disorientation, void, emptiness.
Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish annex to the Berlin Historical Museum is one
70 Jay Winter

such site. It has been likened to a Jewish star taken apart, or a lightning
bolt in stone and glass. Whatever metaphor one chooses, it is a disturbing,
tilted, non-linear representation of the unrepresentable.
Since the 1970s, commemoration of the Second World War has be-
come braided together with commemoration of the Holocaust. This pre-
sented aesthetic as well as social and political challenges. Great War com-
memorative forms had sought out some meaning, some significance in the
enormous loss of life attending that conflict. There was an implicit warn-
ing in many of these monuments. “Never again” was their ultimate
meaning. But “never” had lasted a bare twenty years. Thus after the Sec-
ond World War, the search for meaning became infinitely more complex.
And the fact that more civilians than soldiers died in the Second World
War made matters even more difficult to configure in art.
Finally, the extreme character of the Second World War challenged
the capacity of art—any art—to express a sense of loss when it is linked to
genocidal murder or thermonuclear destruction. We have mentioned how
Auschwitz defied conventional notations of “meaning,” though some
individuals continue to try to rescue redemptive elements from it. The
same is true for the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sites
of memory are places where people affirm their faith that history has a
meaning. What kind of site is appropriate where the majority of people
see no meaning at all in the events being marked in time and in space?
Ignoring Auschwitz or Hiroshima is impossible, but locating them within
earlier commemorative structures or gestures is either problematic or ab-
surd or both.

4. Ritual
Public commemoration is an activity defined by the gestures and words of
those who come together at sites of memory to recall particular aspects of
the past, their past. Such moments are rarely the simple reflection of a
fixed text, a script rigidly prepared by political leaders determined to for-
tify their position of power. Inevitably, commemoration overlaps with
political conflicts, but it can never be reduced to a direct function of
power relationships.
There are at least three stages in the history of rituals surrounding
public commemoration. The first we have already dealt with: the con-
struction of a commemorative form. But there are two other levels in the
life history of monuments which need attention. The second is the
grounding of ritual action in the calendar, and the routinization of such
 Sites of Memory and the Shadow of War 71

activities; the third is their transformation or their disappearance as active

sites of memory.
One case in point may illustrate this trajectory. The date of July 1,
1916 is not a national holiday in Britain, but it marks the date of the
opening of the British offensive on the river Somme, an offensive which
symbolized the terrible character of industrial warfare. On that day the
British army suffered the highest casualty totals in its history; on that day a
volunteer army, and the society that had created it, were introduced to the
full terrors of twentieth-century warfare. To this day, groups of people
come to the Somme battlefields to mark this day, without national legisla-
tion to enable them to do so. Theirs are locally defined rituals. A party of
Northumberland men and women bring their bagpipes and mark the
moment when the Battle of the Somme began at a gigantic crater they
purchased to ensure it would not be ploughed over and forgotten. Others
from Newfoundland go to the still extant trench system at Beaumont
Hamel where their ancestors were slaughtered on July 1, 1916. There is a
bronze caribou at the site to link this place to the landscape from which
the men of Newfoundland—then a British colony—came as volunteers to
fight for King and country. In France November 11 is a national holiday,
but not in Britain. Legislation codifies activities the origins and force of
which lie on the local level. After 1939, remembrance of the Great War
dead was located on the closest Sunday to November 11. What mattered
most about this is that churches became the sites where remembrance
occurred. The ritual of Protestant churches domesticated war remem-
brance, and blunted its appeal. There is still today (2006) a movement to
return war remembrance to where it belongs, in the midst of life, on
whatever day the eleventh of November happens to fall.
Public commemoration flourishes within the orbit of civil society.
This is not true in countries where dictatorships rule; Stalinist Russia
smashed civil society to a point that it could not sustain commemorative
activity independent of the party and the state (Merridale). But elsewhere,
local associations matter. And so do families. Commemorative ritual sur-
vives when it is inscribed within the rhythms of community and, in par-
ticular, family life. Public commemoration lasts when it draws about
overlaps between national history and family history. Most of those who
take the time to engage in the rituals of remembrance bring with them
memories of family members touched by these vast events. This is what
enables people born long after wars and revolutions to commemorate
them as essential parts of their own lives. For example, children born in
the aftermath of the First World War told the story of their family up-
bringing to grandchildren born sixty or seventy years later. This transmis-
sion of childhood memories over two or sometimes three generations
72 Jay Winter

gives family stories a power which is translated at times into activity—the

activity of remembrance (Winter and Sivan).
There are occasions when the household itself becomes a site of
memory. The great German sculptor and artist Käthe Kollwitz kept the
room of her dead son as a kind of shrine, just as it was when he volun-
teered for war in 1914. In Paris, there is a public housing project in a
working-class neighborhood, where above every apartment door is listed
the name of a soldier who died in the Great War. This is their home too,
the metaphoric residence of those who were denied the chance the rest of
us have of living and dying one at a time.
This framework of family transmission of narratives about the past is
an essential part of public commemoration. It also helps us understand
why some commemorative forms are changed or simply fade away. When
the link between family life and public commemoration is broken, a pow-
erful prop of remembrance is removed. Then, in a short time, remem-
brance atrophies and fades away. Public reinforcements may help keep
alive the ritual and practice of commemoration. But the event becomes
hollow when removed from the myriad small-scale social units that
breathed life into it in the first place.
At that moment, commemorative sites and practices can be revived
and re-appropriated. The same sites used for one purpose can be used for
another. But most of the time, sites of memory live through their life cy-
cle, and like the rest of us, inevitably fade away.
This natural process of dissolution closes the circle on sites of mem-
ory and the public commemoration which occurs around them. And
rightly so, since they arise out of the needs of groups of people to link
their lives with salient events in the past. When that need vanishes, so
does the glue that holds together the social practice of commemoration.
Then collective memories fade away, and sites of memory decompose, or
simply fade into the landscape. Let me offer two instances of this phe-
nomenon. For decades the national war memorial in Dublin, designed by
Sir Edwin Lutyens, was completely overgrown with grass. No one could
tell what it was, and this was no accident. That 100,000 Irishmen died for
Britain’s King and country was not an easy matter to interpolate in Irish
history after 1918. But with the waning of sectarian violence in the latter
decades of the twentieth century, the grass was cut and the monument
reappeared, as if out of thin air. Sites of memory vanish, to be sure, but
they can be conjured up again when people decide once again to mark the
moment they commemorate. At other times, resurrection is more difficult.
For years I asked my students at Cambridge what did they see at the first
intersection into town from the railway station. Most answered nothing at
all. What they did not see was the town war memorial, a victorious soldier
 Sites of Memory and the Shadow of War 73

striding back home, right at the first traffic light into town. They did not
see it because it had no meaning to them. It was simply white noise in
stone. For them to see it, someone had to point it out, and others had to
organize acts of remembrance around it. Without such an effort, sites of
memory vanish into thin air and stay there.
We have reached, therefore, a quixotic conclusion. Public commemo-
ration is both irresistible and unsustainable. Constructing sites of memory
is a universal social act, and yet these very sites are as transitory as are the
groups of people who create and sustain them. Time and again people
have come together at particular places, in front of particular sites of
memory, to seek meaning in vast events in the past and try to relate them
to their own smaller networks of social life. These associations are bound
to dissolve, to be replaced by other forms, with other needs, and other
histories. At that point, the characteristic trajectory of sites of memory,
bounded by their creation, institutionalization, and decomposition, comes
to an end.

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Memory and Cultural Identity.” Trans. John Czaplicka. New German
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Gregory, Adrian. The Silence of Memory. Leamington Spa: Berg, 1994.
Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.
Inglis, Ken. “World War One Memorials in Australia.” Guerres mondiales et
conflits contemporains 167 (1992): 51-58.
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MacKenzie, John, ed. Imperialism and Popular Culture. Manchester: Man-
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Merridale, Catherine. “War, Death and Remembrance in Soviet Russia.”
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Prost, Antoine. “The Algerian War in French Collective Memory.” War

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II. Memory and Cultural History
 Memory and the History of Mentalities
ALON CONFINO

Between memory and the history of mentalities there are intellectual and
methodological affiliations, though not straight connections. These affilia-
tions began within a milieu of French scholars, notably Maurice
Halbwachs and Marc Bloch, that originated at the first half of the twenti-
eth century the modern study of memory and of mentalities. Affiliations
continued to be present in the second half of the century in the work of
Pierre Nora, who was a member of a succeeding French historical genera-
tion. While his magisterial project Les lieux de mémoire signaled the begin-
ning of present-day memory studies, the links between memory and
mentalities have been since mostly overlooked, as memory studies has
been influenced by other trends in the humanities.
Today the link between memory and mentalities may serve as a call
for the scholar to expand the interpretative, explanatory, and narrative
potential of the notion of memory, while at the same time to exercise
methodological rigor. Thinking of memory in association with mentalities
may be useful in order to raise new questions, to make new connections,
and to be aware of the interpretative problems and potentials in exploring
the notion of memory.
The link between memory and the history of mentalities was evident
from the beginning of modern memory studies. The French sociologist
Maurice Halbwachs was the first to have used the concept of collective
memory systematically in a seminal work, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire,
published in 1925. Halbwachs’s fundamental contribution was to establish
the connection between a social group and collective memory, and he
argued that every memory is carried by a specific social group limited in
space and time (see also Marcel and Mucchielli, this volume). After the
First World War he received a Chair of Pedagogy and Sociology at the
University of Strasbourg, where he met the celebrated historians Lucien
Febvre and especially Marc Bloch, the fathers of the Annales school. They
expressed vivid interest in Halbwachs’s ideas, and a close professional
friendship developed. When they founded in 1929 the journal Annales
d’histoire économique et sociales Halbwachs became a member of the editorial
board.
Febvre and Bloch called for a new kind of history that explored, be-
yond the usual political history of states and kings, the social and eco-
nomic structures of a society as well as its “mental tools” (outillage mental),
namely, the system of beliefs and collective emotions with which people
78 Alon Confino

in the past understood and gave meaning to their world. This history of
mentalities (histoire des mentalités) provided a whole new approach to the
study of the past, as it took seriously the history of collective representa-
tions, myths, and images. The history of collective memory—of how so-
cieties remember their past, how they represent it and lie about it—was
viewed as one important part of this endeavor. Bloch published in 1924
his classic Les Rois thaumaturges about the “beliefs and fables” around Me-
dieval royal healing rites, in which he used terms such as “collective ideas”
and “collective representations.” In the mid-1920s he started to use the
term “collective memory.” In 1925 he wrote a favorable review of
Halbwachs’s Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire.
The history of mentalities never possessed a clear and comprehensive
body of theoretical work, and was more practiced than theorized, also by
Bloch and Febvre. It was often justifiably criticized, which is beyond the
scope of this entry. The same is true for the term histoire des sensibilité, or
history of sensibilities, an offshoot of history of mentalities, coined later
by Lucien Febvre to describe the study of collective psychology and re-
constitution of emotions and habits of mind. What links memory and the
history of mentalities therefore was not a set of clear-cut theoretical rules.
Rather, it was the combination of path-breaking work, simultaneously
conceived by scholars who made up an intellectual milieu, to study human
society by exploring collective representations and beliefs of people in the
past by using historical and sociological tools.
Pierre Nora was a member of a later generation of Annalistes, con-
scious of the school’s traditions and also of its new directions. In 1974 he
edited together with Jacques Le Goff Faire de l’histoire, a manifesto about a
new kind of history that nonetheless took as its starting point the Annales.
In a volume of similar intent published in 1978, this time explicitly called
La nouvelle histoire, he wrote the entry on memory. He was explicit about
the association between memory and mentality, and began his entry in the
following words: “To talk today of collective memory raises the same
genre of difficulties and mobilizes basically the same stakes that the word
‘mentalités’ raised thirty years ago” (“Mémoire collective” 398). By that
time, the Annales as a school of historical study lost its cohesiveness and
domination. But Nora’s interest in memory continued in a sense a certain
affiliation between memory and mentality that had always been present
within the Annales and French historical thought: Thus the study of col-
lective representations was transformed by Nora to the study of collective
representations of the past, of memory.
From Halbwachs to Bloch and Febvre and up to Nora, the history of
memory was linked with the history of mentalities within a shared French
scholarly and intellectual milieu. But the new history of memory in the last
 Memory and the History of Mentalities 79

generation, while keeping a seminal place for Nora’s project, has had a
distinctly different character that is not centered in France. Memory stud-
ies have been transnational and international in their scope, interests, ori-
gins, and historiographical foundation. They have been influenced by the
growing interest in the Holocaust; by new approaches to nationhood and
to the ways nations construct their pasts; and by a diffused body of work
called cultural studies, which often centered on issues of identity (includ-
ing, among others, postcolonialism and gender studies).
In this context, the link between memory and history of mentalities
became less important and visible, and was indeed forgotten. The com-
mon way scholars now describe the evolution of memory studies is to
begin with Halbwachs, jump some fifty years straight to Nora, and then,
depending on the interpretative taste and topic, to place their study within
a relevant historiography on, say, national memory or the Holocaust. This
recent historiographical evolution overlooks then an important part in the
history of memory. In the meantime, memory studies itself was at one and
the same time a central topic of scholarly exploration as well as in the
midst of what seemed like a theoretical crisis. In this interpretative context
it was suggested to think of memory anew by associating it with the his-
tory of mentalities (Confino, “Collective Memory”).
By the mid-1990s the notion of “memory” had taken its place as a
leading term, perhaps the leading term, in cultural history. Used with vari-
ous degrees of sophistication, the notion of memory, more practiced than
theorized, has been used to denote very different things which nonethe-
less share a topical common denominator: the ways in which people con-
struct a sense of the past. As such, it has contributed tremendously to our
historical knowledge. Memory studies uncovered new knowledge about
the past, and brought to the fore topics that were simply not known a
generation ago. One example will suffice here. Memory studies demol-
ished the venerated view that Germans after 1945 were silent over the war
and the extermination of the Jews. We know today that this view was a
historians’ invention. Instead, there existed in West Germany (where, in
contrast to East Germany, there was an open public sphere) a lively de-
bate on National Socialism in the local and private spheres, as well as in
public and political life. It is difficult to underestimate the significance of
this finding to the way we now understand postwar West German society.
But the benefit of richness cannot hide a sense that the term “mem-
ory” is depreciated by surplus use, while memory studies lacks a clear
focus and, perhaps, has become predictable. It has a number of critical
articles on method and theory, but not a systematic evaluation of the
field’s problems, approaches, and objects of study. It often follows a fa-
miliar and routine formula, as yet another event, its memory, and appro-
80 Alon Confino

priation is investigated. Memories are described, following the interpreta-

tive zeitgeist of the humanities, as “contested,” “multiple,” and “negoti-
ated.” It is correct, of course, but it also sounds trite by now. The details
of the plot are different in each case, but the formula is the same. We
know that a study of memory undertakes to explore how people imagine
the past, not how the past actually happened, though this in itself is not a
new undertaking. Thus the often-made contention that the past is con-
structed not as fact but as a cultural artifact to serve the interest of a par-
ticular community may still be considered by some a dernier cri, but one
cannot possibly present it anymore pour épater les historiens.
In this context, thinking about the lost connection between memory
and the history of mentalities provides an imaginative way to think of
memory as a notion of historical method and explanation. The study of
memory and the history of mentalities appear to share a common purpose
and agenda, as well as a sense of fashionableness and crisis. Jacques Le
Goff described the history of mentalities as “a novelty and already deval-
ued by excessive use […]. It represents a new area of research, a trail to be
blazed, and yet, at the same time, doubts are raised as to its scientific, con-
ceptual, and epistemological validity. Fashion has seized upon it, and yet it
seems already to have gone out of fashion. Should we revive or bury the
history of mentalities?” (166). It sounds like a description of the current
state of the history of memory. Similar to the study of memory, the his-
tory of mentalities was denounced as an empty rhetoric. Like the history
of mentalities, a great appeal of the history of memory appears to be its
vagueness. And both histories have by themselves no additional explana-
tory value; their value depends on the problems posed and methods used.
But the history of mentality is useful not only in order to outline the
dangers faced by the new history of memory. There is a great advantage in
thinking of the history of memory as the history of collective mentality.
This way of reasoning resists the topical definition of the field and, con-
versely, uses memory to explore broader questions about the role of the
past in society. The history of memory is useful and interesting to show
not only how the past is represented in, say, a single museum but about
the historical mentality of people in the past, about the commingled be-
liefs, practices, and symbolic representations that make people’s percep-
tions of the past. This kind of history of memory is part of the history of
mentalities as described by Robert Mandrou: It aims at “reconstructing
the patterns of behavior, expressive forms and modes of silence into
which worldviews and collective sensibilities are translated. The basic
elements of this research are representations and images, myths and values
recognized or tolerated by groups or the entire society, and which consti-
tute the content of collective psychologies.”
 Memory and the History of Mentalities 81

Memory as a study of collective mentality provides a comprehensive

view of culture and society that is so often missing in the history of mem-
ory whose fragmentary tendency is to focus on distinct memories. The
history of mentality attempted, in theory if not in practice, to outline the
mental horizons of society as a whole, to link elite and popular culture,
state indoctrination and habits of mind, within a single cultural world.
This is a useful corrective for the history of memory, a field that is in-
clined to isolate memories instead of placing them in relations to one an-
other and to society as a whole.
This approach emphasizes that collective memory is an exploration of
a shared identity that unites a social group, be it a family or a nation,
whose members nonetheless have different interests and motivations. And
it emphasizes that the crucial issue in the history of memory is not how a
past is represented, but why it was received or rejected. For every society
sets up images of the past. Yet to make a difference in a society it is not
enough for a certain past to be selected. It must steer emotions, motivate
people to act, be received; in short, it must become a socio-cultural mode
of action. Why is it that some pasts triumph while others fail? Why do
people prefer one image of the past over another? The answers to these
questions lead us to formulate hypotheses and perhaps draw conclusions
about historical mentality.
Thinking of memory in association with the history of mentalities in-
vites the scholar to give memory a certain anarchic quality that will take it
beyond the sphere of ideas, ideology, and state and public representations,
and into the ways people acted, shaped, internalized, and changed images
of the past. An anarchic quality that locates memory not only in monu-
ments and museums, but also in the ways people make it part of how and
why they act in the world. This kind of history sees its task not simply to
explore how people remember the past after the fact, but how memory
structures behavior and thoughts.
Differently put, it means to place memory within a broader history
that takes cognizance of the coexisting diversity of social times. This ar-
gument, in a sense, takes us back to Halbwachs’s classic Les cadres sociaux
de la mémoire, whose fundamental idea was of the “multiplicity of social
times.” The various ways by which memories become linked is a conse-
quence of the various ways in which people are associated to given
groups, be they religious, family, professional, local, or national. Different
registers of memory determine the relative importance of a memory for
the individual and for the group. This approach to memory views it as one
cultural practice put in relations with other practices that together make
up a mental horizon of society.
82 Alon Confino

For close to a century now, the notions of mentality and then memory
have fascinated scholars. What has been the source of this powerful at-
traction for two concepts that were after all so ambiguous, even tricky?
The answer lies in their two shared basic characteristics. The first is to
have dramatically expanded the territory of historical investigation and
imagination in a way that called into question some cherished assumptions
about historical reconstruction of the past. This, more than anything else,
links the two notions. Mentalities had this effect on political history in the
previous century and memory had this effect on social history in the last
generation.
This comes into sharp focus when we consider the recent history of
the notion of memory. When Nora conceived his memory project in the
late 1970s and early 1980s, it reflected a wider disciplinary transformation.
Broadly speaking, we can talk of an interpretative shift from “society” to
“culture” and “memory.” It began in the early 1980s as a gradual yet not
brisk shift. By the 1990s, however, the notion of “society”—as it had been
practiced by social historians along the twentieth century and particularly
after 1945—was swept away by the interpretative onslaught of memory
and cultural studies. The notion of society, broadly speaking, was based on
a linear concept of history developing forward along one temporal time-
line and privileging social and economical topics interpreted in terms of
their function and structure. The notion of “culture,” in contrast, is based
on a multi-temporal concept of history where past and present commingle
and coalesce, capturing simultaneously different and opposing narratives
and privileging topics of representation and memory interpreted in terms
of experience, negotiation, agency, and shifting relationship. This shift put
at the center the historicity of history writing. It became central to the
project of historical understanding to emphasize the historian’s act of
construction and interpretation of the past. And under these circum-
stances, it became inevitable to explore how people (including historians)
construct their collective representations of the past.
The second and closely related characteristic is that mentality and
memory call for interpretation. Of course, every historical topic is inter-
pretable. But economic trends in the nineteenth-century British coal in-
dustry do not call for interpretation in the same way that Holocaust mem-
ory does. Sources and analysis of memory and mentality lay bare the
process of construction of the past and therefore the practice of the histo-
rian. That is one important reason that the notions of memory and men-
tality expanded the investigation of the past, and were paradigmatic to
major interpretative shifts in historical studies. While expanding the terri-
tory of historical investigation, they at the same time made this territory
less defined and the methods of historical analysis less precise. But this is
 Memory and the History of Mentalities 83

not necessarily negative: Well-defined disciplinary borders are important

but can also be limiting. Expanding the historian’s territory resulted in
broadening the tools, subject matters, and questions of historical analysis.
And it also shaped, in the last generation or so, a period when historians
write with less certitude than previous generations, and with more self
reflection and experimentation, about reconstructing the past.
And here—in the unbearable lightness of interpretation—lies the risk
of memory and mentality as methods of inquiry, and also the promise of
their relations. They call for interpretation, which can be facile and super-
ficial. To find a meaningful trend in the serial data of coal production in
nineteenth-century Britain is much more time consuming, and involves an
extended period of research, collection, and analysis of evidence. But a
representation of memory is different. It is as if it does not require an
interpretative effort from the historian, and the sources seem to speak for
themselves. Of course, no such thing exists. The challenge of the historian
is to resist this unbearable lightness of interpretation. It is rather to sift
meaning from memory via methods and theories, via interrogations of the
use of evidence, of narrative, and of sources. Here lies today the potential
of memory and the history of mentalities to set our historical imagination
free, as they have done for a century.

References
Bloch, Marc. “Memoire collective, tradition et coutume: a propos d’un
livre recent.” Revue de Synthése Historique 40 (1925): 73-83.
Confino, Alon. “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of
Method.” American Historical Review 105.2 (1997): 1386-403.
––. Germany As a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing His-
tory. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006.
Febvre, Lucien. “Comment reconstituer la vie affective d’autrefois? La
sensibilité et l’histoire.” Annales d’histoire sociale 3 (1941): 5-20. Rpt. in
A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre. Ed. Peter Burke.
Trans. K. Folca. London: Routledge, 1973. 12-26.
Halbwachs, Maurice. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Alcan, 1925.
––. On Collective Memory. 1925. Ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1992.
Le Goff, Jacques. “Mentalities: A History of Ambiguities.” Constructing the
Past: Essays in Historical Methodology. Eds. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre
Nora. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 166-80. Trans. of “Les Men-
talité: Une Histoire ambiguë.” Faire de l’histoire. Eds. Jacques Le Goff
and Pierre Nora. Vol. 3. Paris: Gallimard, 1974.
84 Alon Confino

Mandrou, Robert. “Histoire/L’histoire des mentalities.” Encyclopaedia Uni-

versalis 1971. Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis France, 1985. 9: 366.
Nora, Pierre. “Mémoire collective.” La nouvelle histoire. Eds. Jacques Le
Goff, Roger Chartier and Jacques Revel. Paris: Retz, 1978. 398-401.
––, ed. La République. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. Vol. 1 of Les lieux de mémoire.
7 vols. 1984-92.
––, ed. La Nation. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Vols. 2-4 of Les lieux de mémoire.
7 vols. 1984-92.
––, ed. Les France. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. Vols. 5-7 of Les lieux de mémoire.
7 vols. 1984-92.
 The Invention of Cultural Memory
DIETRICH HARTH

1. Guiding Metaphors and Concepts

One can often observe that certain words and terms common in daily
usage contain, like trace elements, metaphorically coded clues to a seman-
tic deep structure, the investigative explication of which can shed light on
hidden connections. For example, the lexical field “Erinnerung-Gedächtnis-
Gedenken” (remembering-memory-remembrance) refers not only to a con-
ditioning process of internalization (Innerlich-Machen) but also to the cogni-
tive processing of that which is “internalized.” This suggests a dynamic
relationship between passive as well as active attainments of learning,
knowledge processing, and meaning-making which allows us to use
“Gedächtnis” and “Erinnerung” as interlinked key terms in a wide variety of
multi-dimensional contexts. This possibility of a transdisciplinary termi-
nological freedom is encouraged by the descriptive strategies of neurosci-
entific and recent psychological memory research. In these fields the “net”
metaphor is used in order to illustrate the coordinative and cooperative
activities of memory in the—sit venia verbo—antiphon of inner (neuronal)
and external (social) voices (Markowitsch; Welzer; see also their articles,
this volume). In the terminology of sociological memory studies based on
systems theory, the metaphor of the net, in marked contrast to the expres-
sion “archive,” takes on the function of a cybernetic explanatory model
which promises insights regarding the procedural dynamics of mnemonic
practices in various social systems (Esposito 337ff.).
The metaphor of the net evokes the work of knotting together loose
ends to interlacements and thereby offers an image for the coordinative
and cooperative continuity in the action plan of interdisciplinary research
programs. What this metaphor leaves aside are the hierarchies and other
vertically organized structures of subordination. However, what it encour-
ages is something I would like to call an “epistemology of relations.” By
this I mean a path to knowledge that draws attention to the relations (Be-
ziehungen) between the elements by means of their connections (Verknü-
pfungen) and interactions, in order to use these interrelations to be able to
probe the forces of gravity that operate within a particular socio-cultural
field (Bourdieu).
It is by no means surprising that the epistemology of relations, albeit
only partly discernible, is also tangent to the examples of wordplay which
thematize “kulturelles Gedächtnis” (see the articles by A. and J. Assmann,
86 Dietrich Harth

this volume). The “connective structure” which Jan Assmann discusses in

the introduction to his principal work on cultural theory (Das kulturelle
Gedächtnis 16f.) uses the metaphor of connection, which, in a sort of ho-
mologous reflection, connects the descriptive language to the inner form
of that being described. To put it more simply, Assmann argues that every
culture connects every one of its individual subjects on the basis of shared
norms (rules) and stories (memories; Erinnerungen) to the experience of a
commonly inhabited meaningful world. It is only because of this experi-
ence that individuals are able to frame their personal identity through the
orientating symbols of identity of their social world, symbols which are
embodied in the objectified forms of a commonly shared cultural tradi-
tion. In the term “connectivity” the two types of memory which are deci-
sive for this theory meet: “kommunikatives Gedächtnis,” active on the level of
simultaneity, which connects the present and the most recent past (Ver-
knüpfung); and “kulturelles Gedächtnis,” which, like a large storehouse filled
with traditional “memory figures” (Erinnerungsfiguren), offers various possi-
bilities to link the present to an ancient past (Anknüpfung).
The imagery of the co-nexio at this point should bring us back to the
imagery of knotting nets, to consider again some fundamental aspects.
The denser the net, the more it resembles a fabric. True, the production
techniques are different, but in the end, as in the knotting of rugs, the
results are quite comparable. Precisely this similarity between net and fab-
ric—the latter in the meaning of “texture” and “text”—benefits both the
construction of scholarly conceptualizations and also the construction of
appropriate research objects. And yet: The difference between “net” and
“fabric/texture” becomes relevant when one considers the openness,
flexibility, and extent of the phenomena constituted by these craft meta-
phors. Nets are not only more permeable and thus also more transparent
than fabric; in addition they offer, as seen in the example of the World
Wide Web, possibilities for linking and unlinking within seconds, without
the fear of disturbing or destroying key organizing patterns. If the Heidel-
berg cultural theory prefers as its guiding conceptualization the textuality
and fabric metaphor to the net metaphor (A. Assmann, “Was sind kul-
turelle Texte?”), then primarily because of an appreciation of those dura-
ble “textures” that are protected by ancient gods such as the Egyptian
deity Thoth, who by his own account invented writing as an “elixir of
memory and wisdom” (Plato 7).
 The Invention of Cultural Memory 87

2. Invention, Elaboration, Adjustment

Invention here does not mean creation ex nihilo, but is instead to be un-
derstood in the meaning of the rhetorical inventio, best compared to a “cré-
ation par bricolage” (Bastide 103). Referring to this discipline of ancient
rhetoric (also known as heuristics) connected to the process of producing
written texts intended for oral presentation, Roland Barthes paraphrased
ancient texts when he said it was like an argumentative “net” that one had
to skillfully throw over the material if one wants to catch a successful text
(discours) (197). This refers to the production of written texts, but is also
valid in the larger framework of developing concepts for research pro-
grams, although this does of course call for a careful reconstruction of the
elements that flow into the inventio.
A Brief Remark Regarding Linguistic Differences

The German expression “kulturelles Gedächtnis” is not translated here,

but rather used in the original, out of a consideration of the two
languages involved. Already the words “kulturell/cultural” have
different semantic connotations in German and in English, as a
glance at any common dictionary of standardized language use will
show. Anglo-American usage locates “culture” as a collective term
for ideas, customs, and art in the contexts of society and civilization,
while the lexeme “Kultur” stands for the intellectual, artistic, and
creative achievements of a community and is used to express the
advanced development of humanity. In addition, “Gedächtnis” and
“memory” are not only very different morphologically and
etymologically, but also their standard semantics signal subtle differ-
ences which can only be hinted at here: “Memory,” as force, process,
or repository, primarily refers to the reproducing and recalling of
learned knowledge. “Gedächtnis,” however, stands for the capacity to
store not just what is learned but also sensory impressions and
“mental processes,” which can then at an opportune moment be
allowed to “enter one’s consciousness” again. In both cases, the
standard languages cleave to the scientifically and empirically
questionable storage metaphor in order to give the abstractions an
eidetic meaning. Simultaneously, we recognize already on this level
that language as a register of “mémoire collective” exerts a creative force
which also molds the objects of the Kulturelles Gedächtnis (Linke 75).
The conventional storage metaphor to a certain extent forms the
pre-scientific hinge between the idea of an inner Gedächtnis and a
Gedächtnis which has in the course of its phylogeny become an
88 Dietrich Harth

“exteriorized memory” (Leroi-Gourhan 273-332; J. Assmann, Das

kulturelle Gedächtnis 22, note 5), located in tools, material symbols,
(writing) techniques, and institutions.

As a cultural-theoretical blueprint, the Heidelberg concept, which came to

be known as “Kulturelles Gedächtnis,” has in an astonishingly short time
successfully entered into the circulation process of interdisciplinary struc-
tures (Erll 263-76). This has been the result of various factors, and cer-
tainly not solely the dexterity in knotting argumentative nets mentioned by
Roland Barthes. Flexible forms of self-organization, which promote the
development of informal communicative structures free of strict efficiency
imperatives and cumbersome administrative regulations, are necessary
conditions for the success of scholarly work in temporary academic
groups with changing personnel. The author of this article, at the begin-
ning of the teamwork in Heidelberg, had in mind the French model of the
École des Annales, founded in the late 1920s, a community of scholars
whose name stands for a widely influential reform of historiographical
thinking, and whose interest in the social sciences and methodological
syncretism is also reflected in the work of the Heidelberg initiative.
For a long time, Jan Assmann’s Egyptological Institute in Heidelberg
served as an interdisciplinary “center of gravity” for a similar policy of
open association, discussion, and the initiation of projects. Here work-
shops, guest lectures, conferences, and lecture series were planned which
all revolved around the topic of culture and memory. In response to
growing interest, the cultural-studies groups meeting there were soon
replaced by a transdisciplinary discussion group which for many years met
on a regular basis in the Internationales Wissenschaftsforum of the university (a
center for scholarly exchange in all areas of academic research) and which
dated its unwritten charter to the time before 1933, when a distinguished
generation of scholars well-known outside the university established the
international reputation of the “Ruperto Carola” (University of Heidel-
berg). A crucial step in furthering the versatile application and interdisci-
plinary implementation of the concept of Kulturelles Gedächtnis was the
volume of collected essays published by Suhrkamp in 1988 and edited by
the archaeologists Jan Assmann (Egyptology) and Tonio Hölscher (Classi-
cal Archaeology): Kultur und Gedächtnis. This publication grew out of a
lecture series organized by the discussion group on the occasion of a
mnemonically prominent event, namely the 600th anniversary of the
founding (in 1386) of the University of Heidelberg, with the intention of
proving to the public that cultural studies and the humanities are in fact
ideally suited to reflect and support the endowment of the complexities of
modern life with meaning.
 The Invention of Cultural Memory 89

The group strategies and organizational frameworks indicated here

cannot replace personal dedication, which of course also profits from the
type of informal infrastructures mentioned above. Personal dedication in
the humanities is most clearly reflected in written and printed words, and
the Heidelberg initiative brought forth quite an impressive number of
publications. Worth mentioning are particularly the books that appeared
in the relatively short period from 1990 to 1992 and which had a pro-
found effect on promulgating the key concept and its versatility: Ma’at
(1990), Kultur und Konflikt (1990), Kultur als Lebenswelt und Monument (1991),
Weisheit (1991), Mnemosyne (1991), Die Erfindung des Gedächtnisses (1991), Das
Fest und das Heilige (1991), Revolution und Mythos (1992) and, last but not
least, Jan Assmann’s programmatic study Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift,
Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (1992).
The meaning of “invention” in this context has in the meantime,
along the lines of Barthes’s argumentative networking, gradually been
worked out and intersubjectively tested on both the level of philological-
historical and of comparative cultural studies. Even before the term Kul-
turelles Gedächtnis was found for the new theory, the initiators, Aleida and
Jan Assmann, had launched a continuing series of interdisciplinary collo-
quia, under the title Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation. The emblem-
atic character of the name for this series, later established as a book series
title, aptly indicates the complexity of the undertaking. The label “archae-
ology,” particularly in this context, not only denotes the excavation work
carried out by Jan Assmann and others, it is also directed towards the
connectivity between death and writing characteristic of ancient Egyptian
culture (J. Assmann, “Schrift, Tod und Identität”; cf. also Dupont 281f.).
What is more, “archaeology” alludes to Sigmund Freud’s use of the same
expression as an image for the deep-hermeneutic seeking, bringing to-
gether, and restoring of dispersed fragments of individual memory.
A relation is indicated here which is explicitly discussed in the closing
essay of the first volume of the Archäologie series in 1983 (A. Assmann and
J. Assmann, “Nachwort”) and five years later in “Schrift, Tradition und
Kultur” (A. Assmann and J. Assmann). As in an overture, some of the
main motifs of the concept of Kulturelles Gedächtnis are raised, and then
elaborated, rendered more precise, and adjusted in later writings:

x Differentiation of oral and literal processes of transmission corre-

sponding to the experienced time of everyday life on the one hand,
and to the anamnestic time of events transcending entrenched habits
(“time of solemn reflection”) on the other hand;
x Kultur as an authoritative, symbolically coded “world of meaning”;
90 Dietrich Harth

x (Collective) memory as a repertoire and generator of values which

transcend the span of a lifetime and create identity;
x Standardization of collectively accepted “self-images” (we-identities)
through the “sacralization” (canonization) of religious, historic, legal,
and literary traditions;
x Organization of a “script-based culture” (for example in Greek antiq-
uity) as the origin for the active appropriation and continuation of
canonized traditions, supported by annotation, explanation, and inter-
pretation.

With these points, the new theory contested earlier literacy research that
purported an equation of the alphabetic writing system with an allegedly
advanced “rational” mentality (in comparison to other writing systems). In
fact it is not the formal features of the written characters that are impor-
tant; mental conditioning is instead much more a result of the social or-
ganization of oral and written communication processes, which include
not only the institutionalization of experts and schools, but also the differ-
entiation of such varied activities as reproduction, annotation, critique,
canon creation, censorship, and the writing of literary history (J. Assmann,
Das kulturelle Gedächtnis 87ff.). In short, it is the way the script-based cul-
ture is organized that determines which pragmatic, mnemonic, and for-
mative functions the medium of writing can be accorded in the construc-
tion of a cultural system.
Since Jan Assmann’s reading of Maurice Halbwachs in the summer of
1986 (J. Assmann, “Das kollektive Gedächtnis” 65), the main motifs
sketched out above have remained central elements in the subsequent
elaboration of the concept. One of the results of the Halbwachs reading
was the replacement of the unwieldy composite “Gedächtniskultur” with the
metaphorical construct “Kulturelles Gedächtnis” (A. Assmann and J. Ass-
mann, “Schrift, Tradition und Kultur” 27). This was by no means merely a
superficial shift, as the introduction of the new expression accompanies a
conscious demarcation from Halbwachs’s term “mémoire collective,” a term
the French sociologist was familiar with thanks to his teacher Émile
Durkheim and the writings of Arnold van Gennep (Gierl 161ff.). In his
posthumously published book La mémoire collective, Halbwachs assigned this
term the status of a key concept which mediates between the individual
and the society. He also tried to define it more exactly by distinguishing it
from the historical work of the rational reconstruction of the past, which
his colleague Marc Bloch, one of the founding fathers of the École des An-
nales, had taken as a starting point for his critique of the psychologistic
transference of the term “mémoire” from the individual to the collective.
 The Invention of Cultural Memory 91

Assmann’s use of the term “Kulturelles Gedächtnis” reflected this dis-

tinction and could thus profit from Halbwachs’s theory. It was not suffi-
cient to balance memory (Gedächtnis) against the scholarly reconstructions
of historiography. It is true that the semantics of the term “memory” does
indeed include cognitive intellectual operations, but that does not mean
that the success or failure of remembering (Erinnerungsleistung) can be
measured by the alternative “true or false?” (A. Assmann, “Wie wahr sind
Erinnerungen?”). In contrast, the inherent logic of mnemonic shaping
corresponds to a quasi-poietic force, as already reflected in the ancient
myth of Mnemosyne, and as Halbwachs affirmed anew in the framework
of his social-psychological reflections. This force, not directly visible and
thus best regarded as a virtual entity, evinces a legend- and myth-creating
productivity. The effectively normative, symbolically coded “truth” of a
great memory figure—such as Assmann’s example, the prophet Moses—
is thus not to be found in the past of this religious founder, a past that can
be reconstructed by comparatively rational means, but rather in the per-
spectives from whose vantage point later generations have interpreted and
incorporated into their own self-image his history, passed down in writing,
and the story of the exodus associated with his name (J. Assmann, Herr-
schaft 247-80). The example clarifies once again the twofold function of
the memory metaphor (Gedächtnismetapher): On the one hand it designates
the cognitively simplified visualization of the past, and on the other hand
it provides a symbol for the formation of ideological convictions con-
ceived in analogy to the internalization of concepts of religious belief.
A comparison of mémoire collective and Kulturelles Gedächtnis also brings
important differences to light. Halbwachs was above all attempting to get
to the bottom of the cognitive discrepancy between the scholarly recon-
struction of the past and the experienced, that is, the lived, tradition. Ass-
mann’s concept, on the other hand, looks at the medial conditions and
social structures of organization which groups and societies use to con-
nect themselves to an objectified supply of cultural representations, avail-
able in diverse forms (for example, in writing, image, architecture, liturgy),
in order to construct patterns for self-interpretation legitimized by the
past.
The Heidelberg cultural theory thus does not lay weight on the for-
mations, however created, of a collective consciousness. Rather, it differ-
entiates, along the lines of the aforementioned dual coding of the social
mneme, between the “communicative” group memory (Gruppengedächtnis),
meant to guarantee the organization of “profane” everyday acts, and the
memory of tradition (Traditionsgedächtnis) of the interpreting elites, which is
there to keep at hand the longer-lasting, the “sacralized” world view. No
doubt, with this concept of the Sacred (A. Assmann and J. Assmann,
92 Dietrich Harth

“Schrift, Tradition und Kultur” 27), the theory of Kulturelles Gedächtnis

holds to a schema of collective thought which includes the idea of a quasi-
prophetic appeal to the living to forget neither victims nor past traditions’
broken promises of salvation.
The ethical component of the Heidelberg cultural theory suggested
here has a thanatological background which points to the ancient Egyptian
cult of the dead and the associated forms of a monumental burial archi-
tecture enclosed in and covered with writing. Assmann sees in this cul-
ture-specific feature of the ancient Egyptian commemoration of the dead
the “origin” of Kulturelles Gedächtnis in the symbolically embodied presence
of the absent person (J. Assmann and Rack 96). Here a methodical rela-
tionship between the Heidelberg cultural theory and the fundamentals of
semiotic hermeneutics à la Clifford Geertz becomes evident. That is to
say, only in light of the interpretation of the signs, which can certainly be
allegorizing, do the dead specters step out of the darkness of forgetting
and transform themselves into ambiguous memory figures, on whose side
the interpreter in the role of the Remembrancer (Burke 110) can hold up to
his present time the debts of the past.
Thanks to Jan Assmann’s sovereign mastery of this variety of herme-
neutical necromancy, cultural history has gained a deep understanding not
only of the ancient Egyptian religion and state, but—mediated through its
Otherness—also new insights into the “history of influence” (Wirkungs-
geschichte) of “Occidental” thought. The concept denoted by the formula
“Kulturelles Gedächtnis” is to be understood—as is made clear by Assmann’s
extensive comparative cultural studies—as a hermeneutical category, which
leads the efforts to reconstruct the historically shaped consciousness be-
yond that teleologically constructed realm of memory (Gedächtnisraum), the
historical border of which is demarcated by, to use Karl Jaspers’s term, the
“Axial Age” (J. Assmann, Ma’at 11).

3. Limits of the Concept

The idea of interconnecting “culture” and “memory” is not particularly
new. In 1910, Arnold van Gennep pointed to the tenacious longevity of
the “mémoire des faits d’ordre culturel” (164), which can allow technical know-
how and religious traditions, but also rules and regulations of social and
political organizations, to outlast historical “expiration dates.” Nor may
one forget Maurice Halbwachs, important for the early history of the con-
cept even beyond the aforementioned aspects. For sound reasons, the
editor of the critical edition of La mémoire collective emphasizes the French
sociologist’s tendency to cross the conventional borders of “mémoire psy-
 The Invention of Cultural Memory 93

chologique” in the direction of “mémoire culturelle” (Namer 270f.). One must

also mention Aby Warburg, who in the early twentieth century pondered
the socio-cultural implications of remembering. In his posthumously pub-
lished work he called attention to the dark, even “demonic,” as he called
it, side of the emergence of cultures, and advocated the thesis that the
iconographic memory (Bildgedächtnis) provides the means to endure, and
even to sublimate, the horrors of existence.
It was not until the 1970s that the Moscow-Tartu semiotic school
(Lotman) once again established a loose affiliation between “culture” and
“memory”; the Heidelberg concept drew on this at the beginning (J. Ass-
mann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis 21). A short time later the first volumes of
Pierre Nora’s “lieux de mémoire” appeared, which not only provided an
encyclopedic repertoire of constructions of a nationally significant collec-
tive memory, but also reflected on the changing functions of the French
memorial sites in the framework of post-traditional lifestyles (see den
Boer, this volume). More recently, a group of American philosophers
appealed to the historically saturated, reflective “cultural memory,” in
order to stand up to the vagueness and loss of history and memory dis-
seminated in certain academic communities (Cook).
It would be futile to compare the positions mentioned here with the
Heidelberg cultural theory and ask which one of these should enjoy the
rights of the firstborn. The Heidelberg theory can justifiably claim to be
an argumentatively well-founded theory without fulfilling the rigid de-
mands of an orthodox system. The theory of Kulturelles Gedächtnis instead
offers an open concept that is thus adaptable in other disciplines and
which it is no rebuke to call conservative. After all, with its reconstructive
path through the “great tradition” (Redfield 43ff.), its application con-
vincingly spreads a wealth of guiding ideas before our eyes which, to name
just one, albeit very important, aspect, brings together political and reli-
gious thought. The authors of the Heidelberg cultural theory have ex-
pressly linked their concept with the problems of German historical
memory and have participated in controversial debates regarding appro-
priate forms of commemoration of the Holocaust (J. Assmann, “Das
kollektive Gedächtnis” 67). This relationship of the theory of Kulturelles
Gedächtnis to controversial questions of identity-creating politics of mem-
ory does, though, draw attention to a difficult aspect of the concept which
I would like to, in closing, comment on with a critical remark.
Key elements of the Heidelberg cultural theory include the way the
medium of writing is charged with the task of passing on tradition and its
standardizing function. Kultur, in this view, unfolds as a dense fabric of
writings before the eyes of those who read and are able to interpret what
they read. These are both abilities acquired through learning, and in earlier
94 Dietrich Harth

times were mastered by only a few, very powerful elites, and which even
today are associated with privileged access to the general culture and cor-
responding group loyalties. Illiteracy, inadequate mastery of the written
word, and hermeneutic incompetence would, according to this under-
standing, exclude large majorities and entire social classes from participa-
tion in the Kulturelles Gedächtnis and its rewards of identity creation.
This raises the question as to the effects of a social distinction that is
based on the unequal distribution of symbolic capital and thus offers only
a few groups the possibility to satisfy their need for orientation through an
institutionally anchored Kulturelles Gedächtnis kept alive by the constant care
and regeneration carried out by scholars. The crucial point is that society’s
acceptance of norms and values does not depend on a “sacralized,” writ-
ten, or in any other form symbolically coded canon. The genesis and va-
lidity of values and their translation into effective practical norms is in-
stead based on the processes of negotiation and agreement that are part of
common experience. This refers to communicative practices that would
be overstrained with charges to safeguard memory and create identity, and
yet which nonetheless hold to cultural standards, while not immunizing
themselves against alternative interests through the “sacralization” of a
cultural canon. This sort of defense of cultural standards is transverse to
the distinction between everyday memory (Alltagsgedächtnis) and sacred
memory (Festtagsgedächtnis), and does not require an appeal to identity. In
general, it is sufficient if the members of a group or society can explain
why they keep to their effectively operating self-images and are not inter-
ested in any other, without necessarily needing to denigrate or despise
alternative kinds of cultural experience (Waldron).

Revised article based on a translation by Sara B. Young

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 Canon and Archive
ALEIDA ASSMANN

1. The Dynamics of Cultural Memory between

Remembering and Forgetting
Over the last decade, the conviction has grown that culture is intrinsically
related to memory. Jurij Lotman and Boris Uspenskij have defined culture
as “the memory of a society that is not genetically transmitted” (3) but, we
may add, by external symbols. Through culture, humans create a temporal
framework that transcends the individual life span relating past, present,
and future. Cultures create a contract between the living, the dead, and the
not yet living. In recalling, iterating, reading, commenting, criticizing, dis-
cussing what was deposited in the remote or recent past, humans partici-
pate in extended horizons of meaning-production. They do not have to
start anew in every generation because they are standing on the shoulders
of giants whose knowledge they can reuse and reinterpret. As the Internet
creates a framework for communication across wide distances in space,
cultural memory creates a framework for communication across the abyss
of time.
When thinking about memory, we must start with forgetting. The dy-
namics of individual memory consists in a perpetual interaction between
remembering and forgetting (see also Esposito, this volume). In order to
remember some things, other things must be forgotten. Our memory is
highly selective. Memory capacity is limited by neural and cultural con-
straints such as focus and bias. It is also limited by psychological pres-
sures, with the effect that painful or incongruent memories are hidden,
displaced, overwritten, and possibly effaced. On the level of cultural
memory, there is a similar dynamic at work. The continuous process of
forgetting is part of social normality. As in the head of the individual, also
in the communication of society much must be continuously forgotten to
make place for new information, new challenges, and new ideas to face
the present and future. Not only individual memories are irretrievably lost
with the death of their owners, also a large part of material possessions
and remains are lost after the death of a person when households are dis-
solved and personal belongings dispersed in flea markets, trashed, or recy-
cled.
When looking more closely at these cultural practices, we can distin-
guish between two forms of forgetting, a more active and a more passive
one. Active forgetting is implied in intentional acts such as trashing and
98 Aleida Assmann

destroying. Acts of forgetting are a necessary and constructive part of

internal social transformations; they are, however, violently destructive
when directed at an alien culture or a persecuted minority. Censorship has
been a forceful if not always successful instrument for destroying material
and mental cultural products. The passive form of cultural forgetting is
related to non-intentional acts such as losing, hiding, dispersing, neglect-
ing, abandoning, or leaving something behind. In these cases the objects
are not materially destroyed; they fall out of the frames of attention,
valuation, and use. What is lost but not materially destroyed may be dis-
covered by accident at a later time in attics and other obscure depots, or
eventually be dug up again by more systematic archaeological search. Sir
Thomas Browne, a physician of the seventeenth century with a philoso-
phical mind, was convinced that the unremarkable traces of the past have
a better chance of being preserved than the ostentatious monuments of
emperors. With respect to some antique urns which were unearthed in his
Norfolk neighborhood, he commented: “Time which antiquates Antiqui-
ties, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor
Monuments” (279). The German writer F. G. Jünger has defined this type
of reversible or “halfway” forgetting as “preservative forgetting” (Ver-
wahrensvergessen). Archaeology is an institution of cultural memory that
retrieves lost objects and defunct information from a distant past, forging
an important return path from cultural forgetting to cultural memory.
If we concede that forgetting is the normality of personal and cultural
life, then remembering is the exception, which—especially in the cultural
sphere—requires special and costly precautions. These precautions take
the shape of cultural institutions. As forgetting, remembering also has an
active and a passive side. The institutions of active memory preserve the
past as present while the institutions of passive memory preserve the past as
past. The tension between the pastness of the past and its presence is an
important key to understanding the dynamics of cultural memory. These
two modes of cultural memory may be illustrated by different rooms of
the museum. The museum presents its prestigious objects to the viewers
in representative shows which are arranged to catch attention and make a
lasting impression. The same museum also houses storerooms stuffed
with other paintings and objects in peripheral spaces such as cellars or
attics which are not publicly presented. In the following, I will refer to the
actively circulated memory that keeps the past present as the canon and the
passively stored memory that preserves the past past as the archive.
This important distinction can be further explained by a reference to
the cultural historian Jakob Burckhardt. He divided the remains of former
historical periods into two categories: “messages” and “traces.” By “mes-
sages” he meant texts and monuments that were addressed to posterity,
 Canon and Archive 99

whereas “traces” carry no similar address. Burckhardt mistrusted the mes-

sages, which are usually written and effectively staged by the carriers of
power and state institutions; he considered them tendentious and there-
fore misleading. The unintentional traces, on the other hand, he cherished
as unmediated testimonies of a former era that can tell a counter-history
to the one propagated by the rulers. If we modify Burckhardt’s distinction
somewhat, we can perhaps generalize it. Cultural memory contains a
number of cultural messages that are addressed to posterity and intended
for continuous repetition and re-use. To this active memory belong,
among other things, works of art, which are destined to be repeatedly re-
read, appreciated, staged, performed, and commented. This aspiration, of
course, cannot be realized for all artistic artifacts; only a small percentage
acquire this status through a complex procedure which we call canoniza-
tion. At the other end of the spectrum, there is the storehouse for cultural
relicts. These are not unmediated; they have only lost their immediate
addressees; they are de-contextualized and disconnected from their former
frames which had authorized them or determined their meaning. As part
of the archive, they are open to new contexts and lend themselves to new
interpretations.
Cultural Memory

Remembering Forgetting

active passive passive active

select, accumulate neglect, negate,

collect disregard destroy

working reference material material

memory memory relicts destruction

canon archive

museum store house dispersed taboo,

monument in forgot- censorship
ten depots trash

library
humanities
100 Aleida Assmann

2. Cultural Working Memory: The Canon

The active dimension of cultural memory supports a collective identity
and is defined by a notorious shortage of space. It is built on a small
number of normative and formative texts, places, persons, artifacts, and
myths which are meant to be actively circulated and communicated in
ever-new presentations and performances. The working memory stores
and reproduces the cultural capital of a society that is continuously recy-
cled and re-affirmed. Whatever has made it into the active cultural mem-
ory has passed rigorous processes of selection, which secure for certain
artifacts a lasting place in the cultural working memory of a society. This
process is called canonization. The word means “sanctification”; to endow
texts, persons, artifacts, and monuments with a sanctified status is to set
them off from the rest as charged with the highest meaning and value.
Elements of the canon are marked by three qualities: selection, value, and
duration. Selection presupposes decisions and power struggles; ascription
of value endows these objects with an aura and a sacrosanct status; dura-
tion in cultural memory is the central aim of the procedure. A canon is not
a hit-list; it is instead independent of historical change and immune to the
ups and downs of social taste. The canon is not built up anew by every
generation; on the contrary, it outlives the generations who have to en-
counter and reinterpret it anew according to their time. This constant
interaction with the small selection of artifacts keeps them in active circu-
lation and maintains for this small segment of the past a continuous pres-
ence.
There are three core areas of active cultural memory: religion, art, and
history. The term “canon” belongs to the history of religion; it is used
there to refer to a text or a body of texts that is decreed to be sacred and
must not be changed nor exchanged for any other text. The canonized
text is a stable reference that is used over centuries and millennia in con-
tinuous acts of reverence, interpretation, and liturgical practice. Canoniza-
tion is also a term for the transformation of martyrs of the Christian
church into saints. These saints are remembered not only by stories and
images but also by their names, which are inscribed into the calendar and
reused for the naming of those who are born on these respective days. A
Christian church is an institution of the active cultural memory. With its
stone tablets and commemorative sculptures on the walls, especially old
churches are unique memorial spaces that span several centuries. This
cultural memory is kept alive also by architectural styles, traditions of im-
ages, and continuously and periodically repeated liturgical rites and prac-
tices.
 Canon and Archive 101

When the religious canon was translated into the arts in secular mod-
ernity, it became a canon of classics. This canon is not as fixed and closed
as the religious canon but open to changes and exchanges. Sacrosanct
writers such as Milton and Nobel laureates such as T. S. Eliot have lost
much of their former prestige during the last thirty years. In the postcolo-
nial era, the Western literary canon is hotly contested and undergoing
considerable transformations (see also Grabes, this volume). Although
canons change, they remain indispensable tools for education; without
them academic fields cannot be established, university curricula cannot be
taught. The canon of classical texts is not only taught from generation to
generation but also performed on the stages of theaters and in the concert
halls. A canon of paintings and artifacts is repeatedly presented in muse-
ums and traveling exhibitions, and literary classics are stable elements in
the book market. It is only a tiny segment of the vast history of the arts
that has the privilege of repeated presentation and reception which en-
sures its aura and supports its canonical status.
A third realm of active cultural memory is history. Nation-states pro-
duce narrative versions of their past which are taught, embraced, and re-
ferred to as their collective autobiography. National history is taught via
history textbooks, which have been appropriately termed “weapons of
mass instruction” (Charles Ingrao). National history is also presented in
the public arena in the form of monuments and commemoration dates.
To participate in a national memory is to know the key events of the na-
tion’s history, to embrace its symbols, and connect to its festive dates.
Cultural memory, then, is based on two separate functions: the pres-
entation of a narrow selection of sacred texts, artistic masterpieces, or
historic key events in a timeless framework; and the storing of documents
and artifacts of the past that do not at all meet these standards but are
nevertheless deemed interesting or important enough to not let them
vanish on the highway to total oblivion. While emphatic appreciation,
repeated performance, and continued individual and public attention are
the hallmark of objects in the cultural working memory, professional pres-
ervation and withdrawal from general attention mark the contents of the
reference memory. Emphatic reverence and specialized historical curiosity
are the two poles between which the dynamics of cultural memory is
played out.
The tension that exists between these two poles can be further illus-
trated by two different approaches to literary criticism. In 2003 and 2004,
two books appeared on Shakespeare, one by Harold Bloom with the title
Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, and one by his former Yale student Stephen
Greenblatt with the title Will in the World. Both books became bestsellers,
although they could not have been more contrary in their approaches,
102 Aleida Assmann

methods, aims, and premises. Bloom writes in the spirit of the canon,
developing a praising style, venerating the text and its author with a semi-
religious fervor. Greenblatt, on the other hand, establishes a relation of
distance and estrangement to his object of research. While Bloom de-
contextualizes the text to make it the object of devotion, Greenblatt
places the text back in its historical context, reading it side by side with
other texts of the epoch. One adopts the strategy of the canon, investing
the text with existential meaning and framing it with an aura; the other
adopts the strategy of the archive, aiming at destroying the aura (Green-
blatt and Gallagher 12). The tension acted out between Bloom and
Greenblatt is the tension between the canon and the archive, or, in other
words, between the contraction of cultural memory and its expansion.

3. Cultural Reference Memory: The Archive

The institutions of passive cultural memory are situated halfway between
the canon and forgetting. The archive is its central and paradigmatic in-
stitution; to understand this dimension of cultural memory, it is necessary
to explore the history and function of the archive. In literary studies, the
archive is a concept that, just like trauma, has moved into the center of
poststructuralist and postcolonial discourse: in this career, however, it is
often disconnected from the empirical institution and used in metaphori-
cal ways as a highly suggestive trope. According to a famous statement by
Foucault, the archive is “the law that determines what can be said” (186f.).
To bring this statement closer to the level of empirical institutions, it can
be rephrased in the following way: The archive is the basis of what can be
said in the future about the present when it will have become the past.
As the paradigmatic institution of passive cultural memory, the archive
is the opposite of the memorial space of the church: It is the unhallowed
bureaucratic space of a clean and neatly organized repository. Archives
were developed in ancient cultures together with writing systems and bu-
reaucratic structures of organization. In their primary function, they
served the ruling class with the necessary information to build up provi-
sions for the future through stockpiling. They also served as tools for the
symbolic legitimation of power and to discipline the population. Examples
of such political archives are, for example, the Inquisition files or the files
compiled by the East German State Security (Stasi). Archives always be-
longed to institutions of power: the church, the state, the police, the law,
etc. Without extended archives of data, there is no state bureaucracy, no
strategy to organize the future and no control over the past. Archives of
data provide important tools for political power (Herrschaftswissen).
 Canon and Archive 103

Time, however, quickly outdates these archives. Once they are out-
dated, they lose their political function and relevance, transforming them
into a heap of (possibly compromising) rubbish. If they do not disappear
altogether, they may enter into the new context of the historical archives.
These relicts of the past are not trashed, because they are considered to be
of historical or scholarly interest. The historical archive is a receptacle for
documents that have fallen out of their framing institutions and can be
reframed and interpreted in a new context. We must therefore distinguish
between political archives and historical archives. While political archives func-
tion as an important tool for power, historical archives store information
which is no longer of immediate use. They are a very recent institution,
dating back to the French revolution. The revolution brought about and
sealed a violent break with the past out of which not only a new future but
also a new historical sense was born. Ernst Schulin speaks of “a birth of
historical consciousness out of the violent break with tradition” (24). The
modern idea of progress and a new form of antiquarianism, namely his-
torical scholarship, evolved side by side. Both presuppose a break between
past and present. After having withdrawn from the past its normative
values and claims, it could be subjected to historical scrutiny. If power is
based on the political archive, historical scholarship is based on the his-
torical archive.
The objects in the historical archive have lost their original “place in
life” (Sitz im Leben) and entered a new context which gives them the
chance of a second life that considerably prolongs their existence. What is
stored in historical archives is materially preserved and cataloged; it be-
comes part of an organizational structure, which allows it to be easily
sourced. As part of the passive dimension of cultural memory, however,
the knowledge that is stored in the archive is inert. It is stored and poten-
tially available, but it is not interpreted. This would exceed the compe-
tence of the archivist. It is the task of others such as the academic re-
searcher or the artist to examine the contents of the archive and to reclaim
the information by framing it within a new context. The archive, there-
fore, can be described as a space that is located on the border between
forgetting and remembering; its materials are preserved in a state of la-
tency, in a space of intermediary storage (Zwischenspeicher). Thus, the insti-
tution of the archive is part of cultural memory in the passive dimension
of preservation. It stores materials in the intermediary state of “no longer”
and “not yet,” deprived of their old existence and waiting for a new one.
Although there are many different kinds of material relicts, the past, as
Margaret Atwood has put it, is largely made of paper, and paper must be
taken care of. She calls archivists and librarians “the guardian angels of
paper” to whom we owe thanks, because “without them there would be a
104 Aleida Assmann

lot less of the past than there is” (31-32). These guardian angels are so
inconspicuous that they remain almost as invisible as the angels them-
selves. Other important guardian angels of transmission were the scribes
who copied texts from fragile papyrus scrolls onto the much more durable
carrier of parchment in late antiquity, but also the Irish monks who copied
ancient classical books and stored them in their libraries although they
were not part of their own tradition and they did not make use of them.

4. Embodied and Disembodied Cultural Memory

The selection criteria for what is to be remembered and circulated in the
active cultural memory and what is to be merely stored are neither clear
nor are they uncontested. In the modern print age of libraries, science, and
the growth of encyclopedic knowledge, the storage capacity of the archive
has by far exceeded that which can be translated back into active human
memory. In the age of digital media, the growing rift between the amount
of externalized information and internalizable knowledge becomes ever
more dramatic. As the capacity of computers is doubled every two years,
the external storage capacity of the digital age has expanded even further,
while the human capacity for memory remains the same due to its neural
constraints. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, Georg
Simmel had referred to this uncontrollable process as “the tragedy of cul-
ture.”
According to Plato, the “tragedy of culture” started with the introduc-
tion of (alphabetic) writing, because this technique of notation separated
the knower from the known and made knowledge available to the non-
initiated. Plato argued that writing does not transmit memory but pro-
duces a memory ersatz. Though already inherent in the introduction of
writing itself as a form of externalizing knowledge, the distinction between
a cultural working memory and a cultural reference memory has been
considerably exacerbated with the new institution of the historical archive.
In Western democracies, these two functions of cultural memory have
come to be more and more separated. But they are, contrary to Simmel’s
(or Nietzsche’s) apprehensions, in no way unrelated. The two realms of
cultural memory are not sealed against each other. On the contrary, they
interact in different ways. The reference memory, for instance, provides a
rich background for the working memory, which means that elements of
the canon may be “estranged” and reinterpreted by framing them with
elements of the archive (which is the method of New Historicism). Ele-
ments of the canon can also recede into the archive, while elements of the
archive may be recovered and reclaimed for the canon. It is exactly this
 Canon and Archive 105

interdependence of the different realms and functions that creates the

dynamics of cultural memory and keeps its energy flowing.
Although we cannot imagine a culture without an active cultural
memory, we can well imagine a culture without a passive storing memory.
In oral cultures in which the cultural memory is embodied and transmitted
through performances and practices, material relics do not persist and
accumulate. In such cultures, the range of the cultural memory is coexten-
sive with the embodied repertoires that are performed in festive rites and
repeated practices. Cultures that do not make use of writing do not pro-
duce the type of relicts that are assembled in archives. Nor do they pro-
duce a canon that can be enshrined in museums and monuments. In order
to do justice to cultures based on embodied forms of transmission,
UNESCO has recently created a new category, referring to their cultural
capital as “intangible cultural heritage.” The new law of 2003 revalorized
nonverbal forms of knowledge and protects a heritage that consists of
practices, dances, rituals, and performances. Diana Taylor has written
eloquently on the power of the Western archive over indigenous perform-
ance in the Americas. She has drawn attention to “non-archival systems of
transfer” and “indigenous embodied practice as a form of knowing as well
as a system for storing and transmitting knowledge” (18). Embodied rep-
ertoires and performances cannot be fixated and stored externally; they
are multiplied and continued “in a constant state of againness” (Taylor
21). In an oral culture, cultural memory that is stored in embodied prac-
tices and live performances is kept within human limits and cannot ex-
pand indefinitely.
In totalitarian states, there is also no storing memory, but for very dif-
ferent reasons. In such a state, as Orwell has shown in his novel 1984,
every scrap that is left over from the past has to be changed or eliminated
because an authentic piece of evidence has the power to crush the official
version of the past on which the rulers base their power. Orwell’s pro-
tagonist Winston Smith is a paradoxical archivist who is engaged in the
ongoing project of effacing traces and rewriting the sources to make them
mirror the present concerns. This paranoid effort is deemed necessary for
the protection of the state because an independent reference to the past
can trigger a counter-history that challenges the totalitarian version of the
past and undermines the state.

5. Conclusion

Total recall is only possible in the science fiction movie of Arnold

Schwarzenegger. Memory, including cultural memory, is always permeated
106 Aleida Assmann

and shot through with forgetting. In order to remember anything one has
to forget; but what is forgotten need not necessarily be lost forever. The
canon stands for the active working memory of a society that defines and
supports the cultural identity of a group. It is highly selective and, as Ha-
rold Bloom has put it, built on the principle of exclusion. The function of
the archive, the reference memory of a society, provides a kind of coun-
terbalance against the necessarily reductive and restrictive drive of the
working memory. It creates a meta-memory, a second-order memory that
preserves what has been forgotten. The archive is a kind of “lost-and-
found office” for what is no longer needed or immediately understood.
The historical archive helps us to position ourselves in time; it affords us
the possibility of comparison and reflection for a retrospective historical
consciousness. We must acknowledge, however, that archives are selective
as well. They are in no way all-inclusive but have their own structural
mechanisms of exclusion in terms of class, race, and gender. These
mechanisms, however, have in recent decades become the focus of critical
attention, debate, and investigation, which are themselves powerful agents
of change. Luckily, there is not only intentional but also accidental preser-
vation when hidden deposits are discovered. They are what involuntary
memory is to voluntary memory. But even counting in accidental discov-
eries, the past remains, as Thomas Carlyle once put it, a “miserable, defec-
tive shred.” While historians have to adjust their research and questions to
the extension and range of the archives, literary writers may take the lib-
erty to fill in the gaps. Atwood writes: “[T]he parts left unexplained—the
gaps unfilled—I was free to invent. Since there were a lot of gaps, there is
a lot of invention” (35). Toni Morrison is a writer who deals with the gaps
in historical records and archives in yet another way; the gaps that she
discovers are the wounds in memory itself, the scar of a trauma that re-
sisted representation and can only belatedly, long after the deeply destruc-
tive events, become articulated in the framework of a literary text. In a
novel like Beloved, Morrison’s imaginary literary supplement to historical
memory is not a filling of the gap but a marking of it.
I wanted to show that both the active and the passive realms of cul-
tural memory are anchored in institutions that are not closed against each
other but allow for mutual influx and reshuffling. This accounts for the
dynamics within cultural memory and keeps it open to changes and nego-
tiations. I also wanted to show that the archive is an institution with a
history and specific functions. Like the recognition of human rights, the
archive is an important achievement of civil society and perhaps not the
least by which we may judge its strength.
 Canon and Archive 107

References
Atwood, Margaret. In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical
Fiction. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1997.
Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.
Browne, Thomas. “Hydriotaphia, Urne-Burial, or A Brief Discourse of
the Sepulcrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk.” The Prose of Sir Thomas
Browne. Ed. Norman Endicott. New York: New York UP, 1986. 241-
86.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: U of Chi-
cago P, 1997.
Foucault, Michel. Archäologie des Wissens. 4th ed. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1990.
Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.
Jünger, Friedrich G. Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Frankfurt am Main: Klos-
termann, 1957.
Lotman, Jurij M., and Boris A. Uspenskij. The Semiotics of Russian Culture.
Ed. Ann Shukman. Michigan Slavic Contributions 11. Ann Arbor: U
of Michigan P, 1984.
Schulin, Ernst. “Absage an und Wiederherstellung von Vergangenheit.”
Speicher des Gedächtnisses: Bibliotheken, Museen, Archive. Eds. Moritz Csáky
and Peter Stachel. Vol. 1. Vienna: Passagen, 2000. 23-39.
Simmel, Georg. “Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur.” Das individuelle
Gesetz: Philosophische Exkurse. Ed. Michael Landmann. Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1987: 116-47.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas. Durham: Duke UP, 2005.
Veit, Ulrich, Tobias L. Kienlin, Christoph Kümmel, and Sascha Schmidt,
eds. Spuren und Botschaften: Interpretationen materieller Kultur. New York:
Waxmann, 2003.
 Communicative and Cultural Memory
JAN ASSMANN

1. Memory: Individual, Social, and Cultural

Memory is the faculty that enables us to form an awareness of selfhood
(identity), both on the personal and on the collective level. Identity, in its
turn, is related to time. A human self is a “diachronic identity,” built “of
the stuff of time” (Luckmann). This synthesis of time and identity is ef-
fectuated by memory. For time, identity, and memory we may distinguish
among three levels:

Level Time Identity Memory

inner (neuro- inner, inner self individual
mental) subjective memory
time
social social time social self, communicative
person as memory
carrier of
social roles
cultural historical, cultural cultural
mythical, identity memory
cultural time
Figure 1

On the inner level, memory is a matter of our neuro-mental system. This is

our personal memory, the only form of memory that had been recognized
as such until the 1920s. On the social level, memory is a matter of commu-
nication and social interaction. It was the great achievement of the French
sociologist Maurice Halbwachs to show that our memory depends, like
consciousness in general, on socialization and communication, and that
memory can be analyzed as a function of our social life (Les cadres sociaux;
La mémoire collective). Memory enables us to live in groups and
communities, and living in groups and communities enables us to build a
memory. During these same years, psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud
and Carl Gustav Jung were developing theories of collective memory but
still adhered to the first, the inner and personal level, looking for collective
memory not in the dynamics of social life but in the unconscious depths
of the human psyche (see also Straub, this volume).
110 Jan Assmann

Aby Warburg, however, the art historian, coined the term “social
memory” with regard to the third, the cultural level; he seems to have been
the first one who treated images, that is, cultural objectivations, as carriers
of memory. His main project was to study the “afterlife” (Nachleben) of
classical antiquity in Western culture and he termed this project “Mnemo-
syne,” the ancient Greek term for memory and the mother of the nine
Muses. As an art historian, Warburg specialized in what he called
Bildgedächtnis (iconic memory), but the general approach to reception his-
tory as a form of (cultural) memory could be applied to every other do-
main of symbolic forms as well (Gombrich). This is what Thomas Mann
endeavored to do in his four Joseph novels, which appeared between 1933
and 1943 and which may rank as the most advanced attempt to recon-
struct a specific cultural memory—in this case of people living in Palestine
and Egypt in the Late Bronze Age—and, at the same time, to conjure up
our European cultural memory and its Jewish foundations in times of
anti-Semitism (J. Assmann, Thomas Mann). Neither Warburg nor Thomas
Mann, however, used the term “cultural memory”; this concept has been
explicitly developed only during the last twenty years. It is, therefore, only
since then that the connection between time, identity, and memory in their
three dimensions of the personal, the social, and the cultural has become
more and more evident.
The term “communicative memory” was introduced in order to de-
lineate the difference between Halbwachs’s concept of “collective mem-
ory” and our understanding of “cultural memory” (A. Assmann). Cultural
memory is a form of collective memory, in the sense that it is shared by a
number of people and that it conveys to these people a collective, that is,
cultural, identity. Halbwachs, however, the inventor of the term “collec-
tive memory,” was careful to keep his concept of collective memory apart
from the realm of traditions, transmissions, and transferences which we
propose to subsume under the term “cultural memory.” We preserve
Halbwachs’s distinction by breaking up his concept of collective memory
into “communicative” and “cultural memory,” but we insist on including
the cultural sphere, which he excluded, in the study of memory. We are,
therefore, not arguing for replacing his idea of “collective memory” with
“cultural memory”; rather, we distinguish between both forms as two
different modi memorandi, ways of remembering.

2. Culture as Memory
Cultural memory is a kind of institution. It is exteriorized, objectified, and
stored away in symbolic forms that, unlike the sounds of words or the
 Communicative and Cultural Memory 111

sight of gestures, are stable and situation-transcendent: They may be trans-

ferred from one situation to another and transmitted from one generation
to another. External objects as carriers of memory play a role already on
the level of personal memory. Our memory, which we possess as beings
equipped with a human mind, exists only in constant interaction not only
with other human memories but also with “things,” outward symbols.
With respect to things such as Marcel Proust’s famous madeleine, or arti-
facts, objects, anniversaries, feasts, icons, symbols, or landscapes, the term
“memory” is not a metaphor but a metonym based on material contact be-
tween a remembering mind and a reminding object. Things do not “have”
a memory of their own, but they may remind us, may trigger our memory,
because they carry memories which we have invested into them, things
such as dishes, feasts, rites, images, stories and other texts, landscapes, and
other “lieux de mémoire.” On the social level, with respect to groups and
societies, the role of external symbols becomes even more important,
because groups which, of course, do not “have” a memory tend to
“make” themselves one by means of things meant as reminders such as
monuments, museums, libraries, archives, and other mnemonic institu-
tions. This is what we call cultural memory (A. Assmann). In order to be
able to be reembodied in the sequence of generations, cultural memory,
unlike communicative memory, exists also in disembodied form and re-
quires institutions of preservation and reembodiment.
This institutional character does not apply to what Halbwachs called
collective memory and what we propose to rename communicative mem-
ory. Communicative memory is non-institutional; it is not supported by
any institutions of learning, transmission, and interpretation; it is not culti-
vated by specialists and is not summoned or celebrated on special occa-
sions; it is not formalized and stabilized by any forms of material symboli-
zation; it lives in everyday interaction and communication and, for this
very reason, has only a limited time depth which normally reaches no
farther back than eighty years, the time span of three interacting genera-
tions. Still, there are frames, “communicative genres,” traditions of com-
munication and thematization and, above all, the affective ties that bind
together families, groups, and generations.
A change of frames brings about forgetting; the durability of memo-
ries depends on the durability of social bonds and frames. In his earlier
work, Halbwachs does not seem to be concerned with the social interests
and power structures that are active in shaping and framing individual
memories. In his last work on collective memory, however, he shows a
keen awareness of institution and power. La topographie légendaire des évangiles
en terre sainte, published in 1941 during the German occupation, deals with
the transformation of Palestine into a site of Christian memory by the
112 Jan Assmann

installment of all kinds of memorials, a process which took place after the
adoption of Christianity as the state religion by the Roman empire. In this
work, he crosses the border which he himself had erected between mémoire
and tradition and shows to what degree this kind of official memory is
dependent on theological dogma and formed by the power structure of
the church.

3. Time Frames
Jan Vansina, an anthropologist who worked with oral societies in Africa,
devoted an important study to the form in which they represent the past
and observed a tripartite structure. The recent past, which looms large in
interactive communication, recedes, as time goes by, more and more into
the background. Information becomes scarcer and vaguer the further back
one moves into the past. According to Vansina, this knowledge of affairs
that are told and discussed in everyday communication has a limited depth
in time, reaching not beyond three generations. Concerning a more re-
mote past, there is either a total lack of information or one or two names
are produced with great hesitation. For the most remote past, however,
there is again a profusion of information dealing with traditions about the
origin of the world and the early history of the tribe. This information,
however, is not committed to everyday communication but intensely for-
malized and institutionalized. It exists in the forms of narratives, songs,
dances, rituals, masks, and symbols; specialists such as narrators, bards,
mask-carvers, and others are organized in guilds and have to undergo long
periods of initiation, instruction, and examination. Moreover, it requires
for its actualization certain occasions when the community comes to-
gether for a celebration. This is what we propose calling “cultural mem-
ory.” In oral societies, as Vansina has shown, there is a gap between the
informal generational memory referring to the recent past and the formal
cultural memory which refers to the remote past, the origin of the world,
and the history of the tribe, and since this gap shifts with the succession
of generations, Vansina calls it the “floating gap.” Historical conscious-
ness, Vansina resumes, operates in oral societies on only two levels: the
time of origins and the recent past.
Vansina’s “floating gap” illustrates the difference between social and
cultural frames of memory or communicative and cultural memory. The
communicative memory contains memories referring to Vansina’s “recent
past.” These are the memories that an individual shares with his contem-
poraries. This is what Halbwachs understood by “collective memory” and
what forms the object of oral history, that branch of historical research
 Communicative and Cultural Memory 113

that bases itself not on the usual written sources of historiography, but
exclusively on memories gained in oral interviews. All studies in oral his-
tory confirm that even in literate societies living memory goes no further
back than eighty years after which, separated by the floating gap, come,
instead of myths of origin, the dates from schoolbooks and monuments.
The cultural memory is based on fixed points in the past. Even in the
cultural memory, the past is not preserved as such but is cast in symbols
as they are represented in oral myths or in writings, performed in feasts,
and as they are continually illuminating a changing present. In the context
of cultural memory, the distinction between myth and history vanishes.
Not the past as such, as it is investigated and reconstructed by archaeolo-
gists and historians, counts for the cultural memory, but only the past as it
is remembered. Here, in the context of cultural memory, it is the temporal
horizon of cultural memory which is important. Cultural memory reaches
back into the past only so far as the past can be reclaimed as “ours.” This
is why we refer to this form of historical consciousness as “memory” and
not just as knowledge about the past. Knowledge about the past acquires
the properties and functions of memory if it is related to a concept of
identity. While knowledge has no form and is endlessly progressive, mem-
ory involves forgetting. It is only by forgetting what lies outside the hori-
zon of the relevant that it performs an identity function. Nietzsche (The
Use and Abuse of History) circumscribed this function by notions such as
“plastic power” and “horizon,” obviously intending the same thing for
which now the term “identity” has become generally accepted.
Whereas knowledge has a universalist perspective, a tendency towards
generalization and standardization, memory, even cultural memory, is
local, egocentric, and specific to a group and its values.

4. Identity
The distinction of different forms of memory looks like a structure but it
works more as a dynamic, creating tension and transition between the
various poles. There is also much overlapping. This holds true especially
with respect to the relation between memory and identity. We must cer-
tainly avoid falling victim to what Amartya Sen has described as the
“identity illusion.” Individuals possess various identities according to the
various groups, communities, belief systems, political systems, etc. to
which they belong, and equally multifarious are their communicative and
cultural, in short: collective memories. On all levels, memory is an open
system. Still, it is not totally open and diffuse; there are always frames that
relate memory to specific horizons of time and identity on the individual,
114 Jan Assmann

generational, political, and cultural levels. Where this relation is absent, we

are not dealing with memory but with knowledge. Memory is knowledge
with an identity-index, it is knowledge about oneself, that is, one’s own
diachronic identity, be it as an individual or as a member of a family, a
generation, a community, a nation, or a cultural and religious tradition.
Groups are formed and cohere by the dynamics of association and
dissociation which is always loaded (to varying degrees) with affection.
Halbwachs, therefore, spoke of “communautés affectives.” These “affective
ties” lend memories their special intensity. Remembering is a realization of
belonging, even a social obligation. One has to remember in order to be-
long: This is also one of the most important insights in Nietzsche’s Geneal-
ogy of Morality. Assimilation, the transition of one group into another one,
is usually accompanied by an imperative to forget the memories con-
nected with the original identity. Inversely, this kind of assimilatory for-
getting is precisely what is most feared and prohibited in the book of
Deuteronomy, which deals with such a change of frame between Egypt
and Canaan and the first and second generations of emigrants from
Egypt.

5. Institutions and Carriers

The difference between communicative and cultural memory expresses
itself also in the social dimension, in the structure of participation. The
participation of a group in communicative memory is diffuse. Some, it is
true, know more, some less, and the memories of the old reach farther
back than those of the young. However, there are no specialists of infor-
mal, communicative memory. The knowledge which is communicated in
everyday interaction has been acquired by the participants along with lan-
guage and social competence. The participation of a group in cultural
memory, by contrast, is always highly differentiated. This applies even and
especially to oral and egalitarian societies. The preservation of the cultural
memory of the group was originally the task of the poets. Even today, the
African griots fulfill this function of guardians of cultural memory.
The cultural memory always has its specialists, both in oral and in lit-
erate societies. These include shamans, bards, and griots, as well as priests,
teachers, artists, clerks, scholars, mandarins, rabbis, mullahs, and other
names for specialized carriers of memory. In oral societies, the degree of
specialization of these carriers depends on the magnitude of the demands
that are made of their memory. Those demands that insist on verbatim
transmission are ranked highest. Here, human memory is used as a “data-
base” in a sense approaching the use of writing: A fixed text is verbally
 Communicative and Cultural Memory 115

“written” into the highly specialized and trained memory of these special-
ists. This is typically the case when ritual knowledge is at stake and where
a ritual must strictly follow a “script,” even if this script is not laid down in
writing. The Rgveda constitutes the most prominent example of a codifi-
cation of ritual memory based solely on oral tradition. The magnitude of
this task corresponds to the social rank of the ritual specialists, the Brah-
min, who form the highest caste, higher even than the aristocratic class of
warriors (Kshatriya) to which the rulers belong. In traditional Rwanda, the
scripts for the eighteen royal rituals had to be memorized by specialists
who ranked as the highest notables of the kingdom. Error could be pun-
ished by death. Those three notables who knew by heart the full text of all
eighteen rituals even partook of the divinity of the ruler (Borgeaud).
In the context of rituals, therefore, we observe the rise of the oldest
systems of memorization or mnemotechniques, with or without the help
of systems of notation like knotted chords, tchuringas, and other forms of
pre-writing. With the invention of full-fledged systems of writing, it is
interesting to see how differently various religions have behaved vis à vis
this new cultural technique. In the Indo-European traditions, from the
Indian Brahmins to the Celtic Druids, we observe a general distrust and
shunning of writing. Memory is held to be by far the more trustworthy
medium to hand down the religious (that is, ritual) knowledge to later
generations. The reason normally given is that too many mistakes may
creep into a text by copying. The true reason, however, seems to be that
writing always implies the danger of dissemination, of giving away a secret
tradition to the profane and uninitiated. This distrust in writing is still very
prominent in Plato. In the ancient Near Eastern societies such as Meso-
potamia, Israel, and Egypt, on the other hand, writing is eagerly grasped as
an ideal medium for codifying and transmitting the sacred traditions, es-
pecially ritual scripts and recitations.
But even where the sacred tradition is committed to writing, memori-
zation plays the central role. In ancient Egypt, a typical temple library
contained no more books than may be known by heart by the specialists.
Clement of Alexandria gives a vivid description of such a library. He
speaks of forty-two “indispensable” or “absolutely necessary” (pany
anankaiai) books that formed the stock of an Egyptian temple library and
were all written by Thot-Hermes himself. The priests were not supposed
to read and learn all of the books, but to specialize in certain genres corre-
sponding to their rank and office. In describing a procession of these
priests, Clement shows both the hierarchy of the priesthood and the
structure of their library (Stromateis 6.4.35-37). The highest ranks are held
by the stolistes and the prophetes, corresponding in Egyptian terminology to
the “lector priest” and the “high priest.” It is the books of the stolist that
116 Jan Assmann

serve as a codification of ritual memory proper, complemented by what

Clement calls “education.” The books of the high priest, on the other
hand, are said to contain normative or legal literature concerning the laws,
the gods, and priestly education. The library, thus, is divided into norma-
tive knowledge, which ranks highest; ritual knowledge, which comes a
close second; and general knowledge concerning astronomy, geography,
poetry, biography, and medicine, which occupies the lowest rank among
this canon of highly indispensable literature.
There is, however, still another sense in which the participation in
cultural memory may be structured in a society. This concerns the ques-
tion of restricted knowledge, of secrecy and esotericism. Every traditional
society knows areas of restricted knowledge whose boundaries are not
simply defined by the different capacities of human memory and under-
standing, but also by questions of access and initiation. In Judaism, for
example, general participation is required in the Torah which every (male)
member of the group is supposed to know by heart. Specialized participa-
tion concerns the world of Talmudic and Medieval commentaries, codices,
and midrash, a vast body of literature that only specialists can master.
Secrecy, however, shrouds the esoteric world of kabbala, to which only
select adepts (and only after they have reached the age of forty) are ad-
mitted.
The participation structure of cultural memory has an inherent tendency
to elitism; it is never strictly egalitarian. Some are almost forced into
participation and have to prove their degree of admittance by formal exams
(as in traditional China); or by the mastery of linguistic registers (as in
England); or of the “Citatenschatz des deutschen Volkes” (treasury of German
quotations) as in nineteenth-century Germany. Others remain systematically
excluded from this “distinguished” knowledge, such as women in ancient
Greece, traditional China, and orthodox Judaism, or the lower classes in the
heyday of the German Bildungsbürgertum (educated bourgeoisie).
As to the media of cultural memory, a more or less pronounced ten-
dency can be discerned towards a form of intra-cultural diglossia, corre-
sponding to the distinction between one “great tradition” and several
“little traditions” as proposed by Robert Redfield. Until the creation of
modern Iwrith, the Jews had always lived in a situation of diglossia, since
their “Great Tradition” was written in Hebrew and for their everyday
communication they used vernacular languages such as Yiddish, Ladino,
or the various languages of their host countries. To a similar or lesser
degree, this situation is typical of virtually all traditional societies, be it in
the form of two different languages, such as Hindu and Sanskrit or Italian
and Latin, or two different linguistic varieties, such as Qur’anic and ver-
nacular Arabic or classical and modern Chinese. Modern societies tend to
 Communicative and Cultural Memory 117

diversify this binary structure by introducing more linguistic varieties ac-

cording to the multiplication of cultural media such as film, broadcasting,
and television. The following list with its clear-cut binary structure, there-
fore, does not do full justice to the modern situation:

Communicative Cultural Memory

Memory
Content history in the frame of mythical history,
autobiographical memory, events in absolute
recent past past (“in illo
tempore”)
Forms informal traditions and high degree of
genres of everyday formation,
communication ceremonial
communication;
Media living, embodied memory, i l f in texts,
mediated
communication in icons, dances, rituals,
vernacular language and performances of
various kinds;
“classical” or oth-
erwise formalized
language(s)
Time 80-100 years, a moving absolute past,
Structure horizon of 3-4 interacting mythical primordial
generations time, “3000 years”
Participation diffuse specialized carriers of
Structure memory,
hierarchically
structured
Figure 2

Transitions and transformations account for the dynamics of cultural

memory. Two typical directions have a structural significance and should
at least briefly be mentioned in this context. One concerns the transition
from autobiographical and communicative memory into cultural memory,
and the other concerns, within cultural memory, the move from the rear
stage to the forefront, from the periphery into the center, from latency or
potentiality to manifestation or actualization and vice versa. These shifts
presuppose structural boundaries which are to be crossed: the boundary
between embodied and mediated forms of memory, and the boundary
118 Jan Assmann

between what we propose calling “working” and “reference memories” or

“canon” and “archive” (see also A. Assmann, this volume).

References
Assmann, Aleida. “Memory, Individual and Collective.” The Oxford Hand-
book of Contextual Political Analysis. Eds. Robert E. Goodin und Charles
Tilly. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 210-24.
Assmann, Jan. “Das kulturelle Gedächtnis.” Erwägen, Wissen, Ethik 13
(2002): 239-47.
––. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen
Hochkulturen. Beck: Munich, 1992.
––. Thomas Mann und Ägypten: Mythos und Monotheismus in den Josephsromanen.
Munich: Beck, 2006.
Borgeaud, Philippe. “Pour une approche anthropologique de la mémoire
religieuse.” La mémoire des religions. Eds. Jean-Claude Basset and Phil-
ippe Borgeaud. Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1988. 7-20.
Clemens von Alexandria. Stromateis. Trans. Otto Stählin. 3 vols. Munich:
Kösel & Pustet, 1936-38.
Gombrich, Ernst H. Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1986.
Halbwachs, Maurice. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. 1925. Paris: Albin Mi-
chel, 1994.
––. On Collective Memory. 1925. Ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1992.
––. La mémoire collective. 1950. Paris: Albin Michel, 1997.
––. La topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte. 1941. Paris: Presses
universitaires de France, 1971.
Luckmann, Thomas. “Remarks on Personal Identity: Inner, Social and
Historical Time.” Identity: Personal and Socio-Cultural. Ed. Anita Jacob-
son-Widding. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1983. 67-91.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Trans. Maudemarie Clark
and Alan J. Swensen. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998.
––. The Use and Abuse of History. Trans. Adrian Collins. New York: Mac-
millan, 1957.
Redfield, Robert. Peasant Society and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to
Civilization. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1956.
Sen, Amartya. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. New York:
Norton, 2006.
Vansina, Jan. Oral Tradition as History. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1985.
Welzer, Harald. Das kommunikative Gedächtnis. Munich: Beck, 2002.
 Generation/Generationality, Generativity,
and Memory
JÜRGEN REULECKE

The term “generation” is used in public discussions in an ambiguous

manner, such that several different meanings are often blended one with
another. In everyday language, the term is used to refer to a member in
the natural sequence of grandparents, parents, children, and grandchil-
dren, a progression that traditionally assumes a distance between genera-
tions of about thirty years (the “pulse-rate hypothesis”). In reference to
the population structure of a society, “generation” is used (although “co-
hort” would be the correct term) to statistically group all those born in the
same year or the same five-year period or decade. A new understanding of
the term which originated in the humanities and social sciences has now
become common, however, which defines “generation” as a group within
a society that is characterized by its members having grown up in the same
particularly formative historical era. Often, such a generational identity
exists throughout its members’ lives due to their having experienced times
of radical upheaval and new beginnings (primarily in adolescence) and as a
result sharing a specific habitus (the “imprint hypothesis”).
The term “generationality” gets at the particular features of this iden-
tity and has a twofold meaning. On the one hand, it refers to characteris-
tics resulting from shared experiences that either individuals or larger
“generational units” collectively claim for themselves. On the other hand,
it can also mean the bundle of characteristics resulting from shared ex-
periences that are ascribed to such units from the outside, with which
members of other age groups—and often also public opinion as expressed
in the media—attempt, in the interest of establishing demarcations and
reducing complexity, to identify presumed generations as well as the pro-
gression of generations. This led during the twentieth century in particular
to many blanket labels that caught on in public discourse in Germany,
such as the “superfluous,” “disinherited,” “oppressed,” “skeptical,” or the
“conformist” generations. Thus, generation and generationality are, in the
end, not tangible entities but rather mental, often very zeitgeist-dependent
constructs through which people, as members of a specific age group, are
located or locate themselves historically, and accordingly create a we-feel-
ing.
Linking processes of societal change to generational relations, and
characterizing individual generations as, say, engines of progress or as
initiators of a particular, perhaps avant-garde, style did not start until the
120 Jürgen Reulecke

early nineteenth century, in the wake of the experiences of upheaval dur-

ing that era. As contemporaries from Goethe to Friedrich Schlegel and
Schleiermacher all the way to Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill real-
ized, the various age groups living then perceived the rapid political, so-
cial, and technical-economic changes of their epoch differently and, as a
result, assessed and reacted to them differently. In the time since, there
have been numerous trends in the public discourse on generations,
including arguments which in the twentieth century frequently led to
demagoguery and political actionism, with slogans such as “Make way, you
old men!” (“Macht Platz, ihr Alten!”; Gregor Strasser 1927) and “Trust no
one over 30!” One could almost argue that grave changes generally lead,
first immediately afterwards and then again at a distance of one to two
decades, to society-wide debates about the generational background and
results of these events.
Scholarly attempts at a more thorough analysis of the generation
problem began in earnest in Germany around 1870 with the philosopher
and statistician Gustav von Rümelin, and in particular with Ranke’s stu-
dent Wilhelm Dilthey. The latter strongly favored the imprint hypothesis,
in that the starting point of his theory of generations was the “depend-
ence” of particular groups of individuals on “the same significant facts
and changes which emerged in the period when they were most suscepti-
ble.” Shortly before World War One, Sigmund Freud introduced to the
debate an additional, psychoanalytical interpretation of the role the mental
generational legacy played in determining the course of individuals’ lives in
subsequent generations. At the end of the 1920s, the sociologist Karl
Mannheim then supplied his theory of generations, which remains the
operative approach today, albeit in a modified form. He distinguished
between the “generational location” (Generationslagerung), exposure to the
same historical contexts during youth, which he saw as a disposition that
under certain circumstances could lead to a “generational connection”
(Generationenzusammenhang) and “generational consciousness” (Generationen-
bewußtsein), and the groups these could feed into, the “generational units”
(Generationseinheiten), identifiable and influential groups within a society.
Mannheim compared “generation” with “class” and believed that the
specific location “primarily eliminates a great number of the possible ways
of experiencing, thinking, feeling, and acting and [limits] the scope of the
effect of individuality to certain circumscribed possibilities” (528).
Mannheim’s belief that “generation” was a quasi-objective, existent
entity to which he also ascribed a fixed purpose, a “generational entel-
echy,” has been criticized and rejected, yet to this day his other funda-
mental assumptions provide manifold impulses not only to the social sci-
ences, but also in political science, the history of education, the history of
 Generation/Generationality, Generativity, and Memory 121

mentalities, and the history of experience. In addition, the strengths of the

generational approach in the context of a recent turn to cultural-historical
approaches have only gradually been discovered: Studying historical con-
texts with the generational approach, in combination with the concept of
“generationality,” connects the identification of general structures and
processes, especially those of various social levels, with the subjective
perceptions and experiences of contemporaries, including their interpreta-
tions, spheres of action, and options for action. This achieves an at least
partial dissolution of the far too heavily emphasized pair of opposites
“objective vs. subjective,” in favor of an integrative perspective. This view
places the concrete temporality of humans, including their generational
“baggage,” into the context of general historical change, which the indi-
vidual may face passively as well as actively. In other words: With such an
approach, the individual is left his unmistakable historicity within the
framework of his realm of experience as well as his life story, with a view
not least towards his actions in light of the future open to him. The oft-
voiced criticism of the generational approach is that it creates—through
hindsight and quite arbitrarily—artificial clusters of people, and that it is
oriented solely on birth years and thus reduces the continuous passage of
time to segments of time constructed retrospectively. Yet this is not the
case if one takes seriously as historically influential phenomena the sub-
jective generational positioning—both the self- and the historically spe-
cific external positioning—of people during their lives, including the asso-
ciated creations of meaning, interpretations, and memory, which are ever
changing according to the particular stage of life.
Generational research, in the 1980s and 1990s rather narrowly limited
primarily to the political and social sciences and social and everyday his-
tory, which were increasingly taking up questions of the history of men-
talities, has expanded significantly due to increasing interdisciplinarity.
New ideas include questions that, on the one hand, are derived from the
current interdisciplinary study of culture, which is paying more attention
to historical phenomena of perception, experience, and memory. On the
other hand, there has also been increased collaboration between genera-
tional researchers in the humanities and the social sciences and those in-
terested in generationality in the psychological sciences, including psycho-
analysis, psychotherapy, psychosomatic medicine, and psychogerontology.
In addition to this there are also the challenges that arose from the new
findings of neuroscientific research, especially with respect to the research
area of memory and remembering (see also Markowitsch, this volume):
These motivated further efforts to investigate the complex concurrence of
generationality, memory, and generativity (see below). And there was one
more, rather extra-scientific, impulse: For several years, in the context of a
122 Jürgen Reulecke

“memory boom,” new, catchy generational attributions have constantly

been invented in the media, in politicians’ speeches, in advertising, and in
essays—from the “Generation [VW] Golf,” the “Generation Berlin,” and
the “Generation ’89” in Germany to the “Generations X,” “Y,” and “@”
in the United States and elsewhere. Moreover, there is an age group that
has recently begun, in their self-biographization or retrospective recon-
struction of the course of their own lives, to position themselves genera-
tionally and speak as a generational unit, one that until this point had
drawn little attention to itself: the war babies. Born in the late 1930s and
early 1940s and now reaching retirement age, they are calling to memory
their early childhood experiences—or these are “catching up” with
them—of the bombing war, expulsion, the loss of their fathers, etc. Some
of these memories are extremely traumatic, and can have grave results for
their self-image, creation of aims and meaning for their lives, and mental
stability. Here we see that not only—as assumed up to now throughout
generational research—are the experiences from adolescence able to cre-
ate a long-term generationality, but also that grave experiences in other
phases of life, even in very young years, can lead to a we-feeling of special
generational units.
Only slowly, however, are studies beginning to get under way which
pursue the question of whether national characteristics can be determined
in comparison to other societies (such as in Germany, where this is a cur-
rent topic). For example, can the problem of the generational mental
“baggage” of the children of war, which these then pass on in a specific
manner to their children and grandchildren, be studied in international
comparison and not solely in relation to the Second World War? This
question lends significance to a new concept, namely that of “generativ-
ity,” used to some extent as a synonym for “natality.” It refers primarily to
the—conscious or unconcious—examination, especially within particu-
larly distinctive generationalities, of their ties to the diachronic sequence of
“generations” in the genealogical sense of the word. Sigmund Freud al-
luded to this already in 1912 in his book Totem and Taboo, with his exhor-
tation to consider how a generation transfers its specific mental problems
to the next generation. According to Freud, no generation is capable, in
the end, of hiding meaningful mental processes from the following gen-
erations. The extremes that can result range from passing the problems on
in an individual manner to a massive generation break, leading to some-
times quite considerable consequences for entire societies. Especially after
experiences of major upheaval, the aftershock can be felt “into the third
and fourth generation,” as it is said in the Old Testament. “Generational
rejection,” whether institutionally absorbed or revolutionary, thus belongs,
according to the historian Reinhart Koselleck, to the elementary precon-
 Generation/Generationality, Generativity, and Memory 123

ditions of a generation becoming aware of its historicity. How this hap-

pens in each individual case is a question of the “factual history,” the
potential of which is contained in each individual generativity.
It is clear that individual as well as collective forms of memory and the
maintenance of memory typical of a specific period project into this cen-
tral, downright existential-anthropological complex. A broad debate about
the dissimilarity vs. the insoluble connection between a “communicative”
and a “cultural” memory in distinct cultures of memory, about memory
spaces, sites of memory, and the different “temporal Heimate” of age
groups living together, about the mediality of memory, about competing
memories and the (often generationally definable) “interpreting elites,”
about the changing, reshaping, or even erasure of memory has since been
led in a lively interdisciplinary exchange. Age groups with distinct genera-
tionality are understood in this context as communities of experience and
carriers of memory, who then can also potentially exhibit a “memorial
resistance” towards the more or less official interpretations of history,
since a memory that is subjectively coded as “true” or “correct” can prove
to be resistant to the given images and interpretations of history of a soci-
ety in which one lives.
To sum up: With the triad “generationality-generativity-memory” dis-
cussed here key anthropological facts are thus addressed, as with such
memorable phrases as “ohne Herkunft keine Zukunft” (“without a past no
future”) (Odo Marquard) or “Erfahrungsraum und Erwartungshorizont”
(“‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’”) (Reinhart Kosel-
leck), which—both individually and collectively—refer not only to the
fundamental problem of human historicity, but are also of central impor-
tance for every concrete analysis of contemporary history. Their strongly
formative experiences and the specific ways in which they process their
experiences make each generation unique and unmistakable. These can, it
is true, not be passed on directly, but they do indeed flow, in the form of
memory contents created through later selection, attribution, interpreta-
tion, etc., into the generative succession as well as into the subjective po-
sitioning in one’s own “temporal Heimat.” They can also be a legacy in-
tentionally offered to posterity in the form of narratives, bequeathed
works, institutions, designed places, and more, and also, according to
Freud (see above) engraved in subsequent generations even without an
expressed intention to pass them on, although these later generations
might also (consciously or unconsciously) reject, re-interpret, or erase
them. The latter can happen rather casually, without particular activity or
controversy, in times of upheaval and new beginnings, or with pathos,
with demagogic arrogance, with great pressure and, in the extreme case,
with massive force. All historical processes in concurrence with genera-
124 Jürgen Reulecke

tionality, generativity, and memory can, following Koselleck, be accord-

ingly assessed by asking whether the generational break, which is funda-
mentally always present as a possibility, can be bridged or not. Scholars in
disciplines which work from the premise of humans’ temporality under-
stand that each generation makes its decisions based on the rich experi-
ence it is carrying forward and that which it has accumulated itself, and
against the backdrop of a wide-open horizon of experience. They are thus
called upon to see themselves in their own societies as communication
partners who provoke stimulating as well as critical self-questioning re-
garding the neverending adventure that is history.

Translated by Sara B. Young

References
Assmann, Jan, and Tonio Hölscher, eds. Kultur und Gedächtnis. Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988.
Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen
Gedächtnisses. Munich: Beck, 1999.
Daniel, Ute. “Generationengeschichte.” Kompendium Kulturgeschichte: Theo-
rien, Praxis, Schlüsselwörter. Ed. Ute Daniel. 5th ed. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2007. 330-45.
Erll, Astrid. Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen. Stuttgart: Metzler,
2005.
Fogt, Helmut. Politische Generationen: Empirische Bedeutung und theoretisches
Modell. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1982.
Jaeger, Hans. “Generationen in der Geschichte.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft
3 (1977): 429-52.
Jarausch, Konrad H., and Martin Sabrow, eds. Verletztes Gedächtnis: Erin-
nerungskultur und Zeitgeschichte im Konflikt. Frankfurt: Campus, 2002.
Jureit, Ulrike. Generationenforschung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
2006.
Jureit, Ulrike, and Michael Wildt. Generationen: Zur Relevanz eines wissen-
schaftlichen Grundbegriffs. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005.
Koselleck, Reinhart. Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2000.
Loewy, Hanno, and Bernhard Moltmann, eds. Erlebnis—Gedächtnis—Sinn:
Authentische und konstruierte Erinnerung. Frankfurt am Main: Campus,
1996.
Lüscher, Kurt, and Ludwig Liegle. Generationenbeziehungen in Familie und
Gesellschaft. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2003.
 Generation/Generationality, Generativity, and Memory 125

Mannheim, Karl. “Das Problem der Generationen.” 1928. Rpt. in Wissens-

soziologie. Ed. Kurt H. Wolff. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1970. 509-65.
Platt, Kristin, and Mihran Dabag. Generation und Gedächtnis: Erinnerungen und
kollektive Identitäten. Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1995.
Reulecke, Jürgen, ed. Generationalität und Lebensgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert.
Munich: Oldenbourg, 2003.
Weigel, Sigrid. “Generation, Genealogie, Geschlecht. Zur Geschichte des
Generationskonzepts und seiner wissenschaftlichen Konzeptuali-
sierung seit Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts.” Kulturwissenschaften: For-
schung—Praxis—Positionen. Eds. Lutz Musner and Gotthard Wunberg.
Vienna: WUV, 2002. 161-90.
 Cultural Memory: A European Perspective
VITA FORTUNATI AND ELENA LAMBERTI

1. Cultural Memories: The Making of Europe

In recent years, memory studies has been playing a pivotal role in re-
shaping traditional approaches to sociological, historical, political, and
cultural issues. For instance, Jeffrey Olick has shown how the idea of a
memory related to the formation of the nation-state has been reshaped; as
a consequence, today the old relationship between memory and nation
must be rediscussed and renegotiated. On the other hand, it is the actual
crisis of this value which has led to a complex re-discussion about the very
meaning of memory itself. It is no coincidence that this flourishing of
studies about memory has gone side by side with certain crucial historic
events of the twentieth century: the decline of ideologies and the collapse
of the U.S.S.R., the re-emergence of heavy historical responsibilities, and
the explosion of issues related to post-colonialism, to mention just some
of the key moments of our most recent history.
Hence, memory studies can offer an interesting ground for observing
the making of Europe (or of the new Europe), especially if we assume that
the memory-power nexus is extremely important for understanding how
memory has been, over the centuries, subject to manipulation and exploi-
tation by hegemonic states. As a matter of fact, as Francesco Remotti
points out, in order to understand the processes of identity formations of
a collectivity or of a nation, it is necessary to investigate the relationship
between “what disappears,” “what remains,” and “what re-emerges.” In-
deed, it is only through a careful analysis of the processes which select and
filter the past that we can highlight the dialectics among these three cate-
gories and avoid the dangers of an ideological manipulation of memory.
Also, the aforementioned studies have suggested that to be able to live, it
is true that one must also forget (see Esposito, this volume); and yet, the
relationship and the dialectics between memory and forgetting are never
“given” and never linear. To understand who we are, we need to establish
a certain distance from those who came before us; however, we also need
to establish a certain continuity. The dialectics between continuity and
discontinuity in relation to our past must always be renegotiated.
Halbwachs’s studies on collective memory have been seminal on this
point.
Hence, today what the making of Europe inevitably implies (in order to
try and grasp the meaning of a still foggy idea of “European identity”) is
128 Vita Fortunati and Elena Lamberti

that such a dialectic is to be played not only within single countries, but
also at the macro level of the European Union; a fact that, needless to say,
clearly complicates the process. Today, however, the most interesting
aspect to be stressed is the social interaction which takes place during the
act of remembering: This interactive act prevents fixing and hypostatizing
memory. As a consequence, it is no longer possible to passively accept a
monolithic idea of collective memory, as it must be perceived as a more
fluid concept. Collective memory is not just a substantial entity; we need
to grasp the dynamic aspects of remembering, not the static aspects of
memory, that is, its mnemonic practices.
For an individual, as well as for a nation, cultural memory is a com-
plex and stratified entity strictly connected not only to the history and the
experience of either the individual or the nation, but also to the way in
which that very history and experience are read in time, individually and
collectively. Each time, the past acquires new meanings and the same fact,
even though it stays the same, is nevertheless shaped through remem-
brance; inevitably, it is juxtaposed against new backgrounds, new biogra-
phies, and new recollections. Hence, following the theoretical debate
which has characterized the last decades of the twentieth century and
which has undermined ontological categories and disciplinary statutes, it is
possible to argue that it is no longer possible to offer a final and absolute
vision of the past. The breaking of all canons, the juxtaposition of macro
and micro history, the questioning of the ideas of objectivity and subjec-
tivity in the historiographic rendering, as well as in literature, have taught
us all to be prudent observers and to use the plural instead of the singular:
no longer a unique “memory,” but many “memories,” many traces left by
the same event which in time sediment in the individual consciousness, as
well as in the collective consciousness, and that are often—consciously or
unconsciously—hidden or removed; traces that nevertheless stay and that
suddenly or predictably re-emerge each time the historical, political, or
cultural context changes. It has become evident through memory studies
that no unitary definition of memory exists and that memory is dynamic
(see also Rigney, this volume). It is memory as a process (over the course
of time) which is reshaped according to the present—hence its pivotal
role in interdisciplinary studies of both the notion of historical context
and that of the context of the dialectics of temporality.
Therefore, research on memory in the humanities and in literary stud-
ies has marked the breakdown of disciplinary barriers, thus giving rise to a
comparison between disciplines such as history, philosophy, anthropol-
ogy, social sciences, and the hard sciences. Memory is a complex subject
of research, which, for its investigation, requires an orchestration drawing
on various branches of knowledge.
 Cultural Memory: A European Perspective 129

For instance, memory studies has brought to light the crisis of history
as a discipline, the difficulty of giving an ultimate meaning to the concepts
of “document,” “source,” “truth.” For these reasons, the relationship
between memory and history has received more and more attention in
recent years, since faith in the existence of objective historical truth has
lost its hold and the idea that historical statement is a construction which
draws on fictional paradigms has been put forward (White). On the other
hand, memory studies has underscored how experience in no way
guarantees truth because in evidence—as several studies on oral history
have amply demonstrated (Hodgkin and Radstone)—subjectivity and
emotion determine different viewpoints of the same historic event. It is
decisive to investigate the extent to which the changed historical context
conditions individual memory and how pronounced and intricate the rela-
tionship between public memory and private memory is in order to gain
an understanding of the various patterns of recollection. Rather than go-
ing into the lively debate on history and memory, it will be suggested
along with Raphael Samuel that in comparing the two disciplines it is
more helpful from a methodological viewpoint to underline common
characteristics than the differences and make use of the synergism evident
in the following parallel: “Like history memory is inherently revisionist
and never more chameleon than when it appears to stay the same” (x).
What emerges here is an idea of non-monolithic memory, that is, of a
more fluid memory: The process of memory and recollection is always the
result of an interaction which, at times, is marked by strife juxtaposing the
individual and the group. A metaphor often used in cultural studies to
underline its vitality is that of the “battlefield,” where nothing is neutral
and everything is under constant discussion (Lamberti and Fortunati).
Thus this is a memory which is restored through a critical gaze to-
wards a “contested past,” which becomes the setting in which to investi-
gate truth and above all to achieve an awareness of the present. So it is not
memory as commemoration, and still less a sanctifying one but rather a
memory which wants to bring to light traumatic, repressed, and censored
memories and again questions dangerous stereotypes which have been
lurking over some historical events. Thus in “gender studies” and in post-
colonial studies what becomes pivotal is the concept of “counter-mem-
ory”—where the term “counter” emphasizes the fact that these are other
memories belonging to minority groups and thus marginalized by the
dominant cultures. Memory becomes an “act of survival,” of conscious-
ness and creativity, fundamental to the formation and rewriting of identity
as both an individual and a political act. In such a perspective, memory
and recollection have a critical impact, as Benjamin states, because they
bring out unresolved difficulties of history and represent the most effi-
130 Vita Fortunati and Elena Lamberti

cient protest against suffering and injustice. In this sense some of Walter
Benjamin’s essays are still fundamental. He underlined the dangers of a
memory reaching into the past and thereby fossilizing and falsifying it:
“[…] only a redeemed mankind (which) receives the fullness of its past—
which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable
in all its moments” (254).
This is truer when controversial memories of a traumatic historical
event are at stake, as in the case of memories of the two world wars (see
also Winter, this volume): One has to question the provenance of such
recollections, from whom these recollections come, where they are re-
membered, and in what context. Hence, also the discourse on trauma always
implies a dialogue between memory and oblivion, memories and counter-
memories, the ethics of bearing witness and the difficulty of telling and
representing (see also Kansteiner and Weilnböck, this volume). Media
representations, cinema, television, photography, the visual arts (and more
recently, the Internet) have been, for at least sixty years, the fundamental
vehicle by means of which traumas are transmitted, judged, and remem-
bered. Literature, in its diverse expressions, and theoretical studies have
played an important role in the representation, the transmission, and the
critical (or mystifying) elaboration of traumatic events. Through the analy-
sis of these sources, a re-conceptualization of memory as a discursive con-
struction, as a culture of memory can be inferred. Memory becomes not a
mere instrument for the construction of an identity, both individual and
collective, but also a method of deconstruction of those very processes
leading to the definition and elaboration of individual and collective iden-
tities. In this perspective, the representation and the transmission of trau-
mas is carried out through the deconstruction and the difficult operation
of re-composing controversial, neither homogeneous nor universal
memories in a dialectic relation between the responsibility of remem-
brance and the necessity of oblivion.
The accent placed on the possibility of “re-constructing” and repre-
senting trauma has foregrounded sources such as diaries, autobiographies,
testimonies, and narrations (fictions) not only as individual expressions,
but also as cultural structures exposing narratives of imagination and op-
position. Dominick LaCapra insists on the difference between writing
trauma and writing about trauma. Writing trauma means acting it out in a
performative discourse or in artistic practice. Given these premises, there
is a dynamic and perhaps positive aspect which links memory studies to a
series of political issues which today underpin the molding of a European
scenario, as they can help to sort out new strategies for assessing contro-
versial memories of the same past.
 Cultural Memory: A European Perspective 131

2. Memory Studies in Europe: The Case of the European

Thematic Network Project ACUME
Today, it is the European Commission that encourages transnational
forms of research, such as the European Thematic Network Projects, in
order to encourage communal speculations capable of bringing Europe
together through the sciences and the humanities. The underpinning edu-
cational project is very ambitious and also somehow dangerous: On the
one hand, promoting new forms of research capable of overcoming na-
tional boundaries is certainly a fundamental and a necessary input to work
out new European educational standards at once original and updated.
And yet, on the other hand, pursuing a shared European identity through
new educational patterns risks inducing some sort of homologation and
melting of all differences that are, instead, a precious heritage to be pre-
served while unifying, and not assimilated. For this reason the European
Thematic Network Project ACUME, dedicated to the study of cultural
memory in relation to the making of a European identity, was based on
the idea that the very term “European identity” is to be considered an
“open” and “dynamic” term, capable of re-negotiating itself starting from
a shared set of values that the scientific and the humanistic research can
certainly help to work out. In such a context, the European identity is to
be perceived as a sum of various identities, both those rooted in the vari-
ous national realities, and those nowadays in progress, following the new
understanding of historical processes as well as the new waves of immi-
grations within Europe and from outside Europe. It is this idea of cultural
memory that we have tried to encourage through our ACUME Network.
“Cultural Memory in European Countries: An Interdisciplinary Ap-
proach (ACUME)” was a European Thematic Network which was started
in 2002 and which ended its last year of activities at the end of September
2006 (detailed information is available online at [Link]
it/acume). ACUME was designed with an interdisciplinary approach to
introduce the study of cultural memory to the European university curric-
ula: The trans-European study of cultural memory was seen, in fact, as a
strategic goal in order to preserve and respect local and national identities
while co-operating in the making of a communal European educational
system. Inevitably, such a goal implied also developing a new series of
trans-national research projects fostering memory studies across disci-
plines.
Therefore, the intention was to bring together scholars and experts
from various European countries, as well as from the associated countries,
in order to encourage a deeper understanding of the very idea of cultural
memory and to co-operate in a broader curricular innovation, in the spirit
132 Vita Fortunati and Elena Lamberti

of the guidelines established in Bologna, Prague, Berlin, and in other and

more recent education forums. The importance of focusing on this major
issue is proven by the fact that the ACUME Network included partners
from almost all European countries, who jointly contributed to design,
develop and implement this project: We counted about 80 partner univer-
sities and associated partners (including also non-European partner insti-
tutions in North and South America, that is, in areas in which European
immigrants constitute a conspicuous part of the population).
The working hypothesis of ACUME was that cultural memory has
become a very important issue pervading and affecting the cultural educa-
tion of old and young generations of Europeans; also, it could be con-
ceived as a priority step towards the making of a new European identity,
built upon common and shared values, but fully respecting local identities
and traditions. The need to question European cultural history seems to
be cogent since, in recent times, it has also been the object of ideological
manipulations brought to bear on various nationalist claims in Europe
(such as the Balkans, Spain, Ireland, or Italy). We were therefore aware of
the fact that cultural memory is something closely linked to national iden-
tity; this is why the objective of our broader research was not so much to
embalm memory, but rather to pursue a critical approach to memory. This
means that all the partners involved aimed to investigate how, within the
history of the various countries, there has always been a very close link
between memory and power. Hence, for us, remembering meant also
having a critical perspective on the past. For all these reasons, our the-
matic network questioned the idea of cultural memory and fully investi-
gated all the inevitably related cultural (and historical) oblivions. For each
nation there are, in fact, historical events which have played a fundamental
role in the shaping of national identity and that are collectively remem-
bered and celebrated. On the other hand, for each nation there are histori-
cal events which, due to political and ideological reasons, continue to con-
stitute a sort of national emotional burden, a real trauma which,
consciously or unconsciously, is too often “removed” and “forgotten.”
What constituted a fundamental aspect of this thematic network was
the fact that the partners, while carrying out their various activities and
research, also carried out a survey of local situations and realities (a sort of
field research); this implied a strong co-operation among European gen-
erations who were encouraged to meet and confront, by means of inter-
views, gathering of materials (photographs, films, documents, etc.) and
similar processes of “cultural exchange.” In the long term, the hope was
to contribute to the creation of a possible archive of European Cultural
Memories, and to the establishment of a permanent Centre for Research
on Cultural Memory. This latter idea is currently being pursued by a group
 Cultural Memory: A European Perspective 133

of ACUME partners, to encourage the study of cultural memory in life-

long learning.
The project was characterized by an interdisciplinary methodology and
by a comparative approach. The areas of research and teaching were: his-
tory, history of ideas, philosophy, literature and translation studies, an-
thropology (folklore and ethnographic studies) and social sciences, cultural
studies (cinema, media, pop culture) and gender studies, and visual arts.
While developing both research and teaching activities, partners started to
collaborate also with scholars in the hard sciences, especially in biology,
bioinformatics, and cognitive neuroscience, further proving that memory
studies works well as a catalyzer of joint research. Partners co-operating in
this project encouraged students’ active involvement in the discussion of
new university curricula; assessed curricular innovation and developed
new educational strategies at a European level; designed and tested new
teaching modules, both traditional and in e-learning mode; produced Web
pages on the theme of cultural memory; and produced new teaching and
research materials on cultural memory, both in the form of books and e-
outputs.
The project included five fields (sub-projects) of teaching and re-
search:
1) Cultural Amnesia: This sub-project explored the theme of cultural am-
nesia. Through the analysis of an eclectic variety of documents (from ca-
nonical texts to visual records and interviews with survivors), partners
investigated the double process of remembrance and oblivion that cul-
tures experience when dealing with traumatic aspects of their history (such
as Nazism and the Holocaust in Germany, the Empire politics of coloni-
zation in Great Britain, Fascism in Italy, or the Balkan quest for identity).
In particular, within this sub-project, a group of partners investigated
the textual interweaving of the discourse of European memory carried out
by postcolonial writers. This concern was motivated by the acknowledge-
ment of the increasing critical attention devoted to postcolonial works in
Europe. The result is that the traditional silence imposed on these voices,
as well as the traditional erasure of their memories, are now abolished so
that, today, the assessment of postcolonial fiction triggers a series of inter-
esting (and even uncanny) speculations on the very issue of European
identity itself. This retrieved-narrative scenario raised complex issues such
as the discursive nature of memory, European memory as a performative
cultural practice, and the irreducible identity of postcolonial writers.
2) Bearing Witness: This sub-project investigated written sources, visual
documents, and oral testimonies concerning events, situations, and people
who played an important role in the cultural making of each nation (in-
cluding letters, diaries, autobiographies, novels, photographs, films,
134 Vita Fortunati and Elena Lamberti

documentaries, and museums and archives). The idea was to question the
very act of bearing witness by combining macro and micro history, as well
as the forms and times of testimonies. In particular, partners investigated
traumatic memories of World War One and World War Two as useful
benchmarks to bring to light uneasy questions, such as the idea of con-
tested memories. The research was carried out by a network of scholars
belonging to various areas of study, including literature, history, and visual
arts; it offered an emblematic ground to further investigate the controver-
sial and often painful idea of “reconciliation” within nation-states and
Europe. Moving from the study of cultural memories of the two world
wars in the various European national realities, we have become more and
more convinced that acknowledging the existence of these contested
memories is the first step to take to encourage the negotiation of a truly
shared ethic of memory.
3) Memory and Places: This sub-project investigated the importance of
landscape, urban sites, and various individual places (real but also always
to some extent imaginary, and in some cases wholly so) in the characteri-
zation of communities of various sizes and kinds—and the ways in which
places are tied to memory in its many forms. The interplay of places and
memory (with its inherent components of historical and spatial “produc-
tion”) is a central issue at various communal levels—regional, national,
and global—and can also be a strong indicator for those wanting to
explore the (imagined or real) existence of a communal European identity.
Every so-called “real” space is a mere product of the storage of vari-
ous significances, be they parallel, telescoped, conflicting, overlapping,
exclusive, or complementary. These kinds of mixed symbolic meanings
are specific to every human community. They are mostly representations
of the Self and of the Other. Recollection endows these representations
with various values: ethical, ideological, political, religious, social, eco-
nomic. Within a particular community, these values are shared, having
previously been selected, secured, and sorted through specific ritual pro-
cedures.
4) Oral and Written History: Cultural memories are transmitted, and in
the process shaped, by “languages”; in our context, the word “language”
should be very broadly defined, denoting all manner of practices, visual
signs, linguistic discourses, and other modes of communication. However,
as the title announces, this sub-project focused mainly upon language as
texts; several other relevant communicative modes were, however, consid-
ered within the sub-projects focusing upon the memory of specific events.
The various ways in which the past and cultural practices are
transmitted, and the different roles of orality and writing within the same
community, have proved particularly topical areas of study within the
 Cultural Memory: A European Perspective 135

overall project of ACUME as Western culture is going through multiple

changes that arguably amount to an overall shift in world paradigm. In
this context, Europe may be construed both as representatively Western,
sharing features with, for instance, the U.S.A. and the so-called “global
village,” and as in some ways unique, presenting distinctively European
manifestations of the changes involved (which are further differentiated in
their respective national-historical contexts).
Crucial factors in the overall change are the technological and digital
revolutions: These have challenged the codes of written discourse solidly
entrenched for at least three to four hundred years (the Enlightenment)
and are introducing, even within the written media, quasi-“oral” habits of
thought and utterance (features which may be accommodated within the
hybrid term of “oralcy”). These changes—a new balance between oral and
written, and an increasingly “oral” quality within some written genres—
may usefully be studied not only for their own sake, but also in the light of
the earlier revolution in communication by which orality gave way to liter-
acy as communicative dominant (first in manuscripts, latter, and mas-
sively, though print). Thus, oral and written technologies of memory, both
as phenomena per se and as historically determined, should be studied in
their diachronic as well as synchronic aspects. Therefore, this sub-project
moved along both these axes in an effort to: 1. salvage specific cultural
memories; 2. study the differences as well as problematic and fruitful in-
terrelations between orality and literacy as these appear in the aforemen-
tioned two transitional periods (from the Middle Ages to Modernity, and
our own time); and 3. contemplate the cognitive implications of today’s
digital revolution for our culture.
5) Foundation Texts and Mythologies: The research in this project focused
on three major themes: 1. anachronisms and discontinuities of cultural
memory; 2. the role of myths and foundation texts in establishing “imag-
ined communities,” including rewritings and other manipulations of
European traditions; and 3. the role of specific “universal” canons (mainly
Shakespeare’s work) in the formation of national and European identities
(see also Grabes, this volume). The coordinators and partners developed
their activities along two main lines: researching the anachronisms of cul-
tural memory and the discontinuities of European traditions; and studying
cultural invention, rewriting of myths and histories, and the formation of
imagined communities.
The study of cultural invention, the rewriting of myths and histories,
and the formation of imaginative communities was expanded in the dis-
semination year by the study of the relation between spectrality and cul-
tural memory. Spectrality has been proved to exist as an important tempo-
ral and value paradigm used both in works of literature and art but also in
136 Vita Fortunati and Elena Lamberti

the process of understanding historical monuments, local historical narra-

tives, problems of marginality and liminality in cultural studies and an-
thropology, and in spectacular forms of culture.
In addition to the various seminars and conferences, in its three years
of activities, the European Thematic Network Project ACUME has de-
signed, realized and promoted several outputs, which have been promoted
and disseminated at a European level. These outputs offer new tools for
new research and teaching on the theme of cultural memory and can be
grouped in three main typologies: volumes, teaching modules, and e-mate-
rials. Also, ETNP ACUME encouraged the development of new strategies
of investigation and research also in the humanities, such as networking, a
practice which implies interaction and exchange of mutual synergies
among scholars expert in different fields. The format offered by the
European Network (grouping partners in various geographical realities)
and the object of research (memory) have fruitfully combined, in turn
implementing each other: Memory, which is per se a trans-disciplinary
field of research, has encouraged networking, at the same time fostering
new understandings and knowledge across disciplines. In such a context, it
was possible also to further investigate the ontological status of memory
studies itself, therefore suggesting new potentialities pertaining to this area
of research. For instance, networking on memory studies offered the op-
portunity to open up a new dialogue with the hard sciences and to start to
pursue a renewed idea of “interfacing” between the sciences and the hu-
manities which has led to the establishment of a group of researchers
belonging to six different areas of studies: social sciences, biomedical sci-
ences, visual culture, media, humanities and literary studies, and religious
studies. Scholars investigated the very idea of “memory,” moving from
their own expertise and using some key words which have characterized
memory studies in the last twenty years: the self; emotions; time and evolution;
the tension between memory and oblivion; the context; information; memory as con-
struction. These words represented a sort of fil rouge, a powerful heuristic
tool and an epistemological matrix, and enabled a discussion on the inter-
relations between memory and power, memory and the body, memory
and trauma, memory and religion, memory and images, and memory and
places, as well as the themes of oblivion and of cultural mediators (cin-
ema, TV, advertisement, journalism, etc.). The results of this investigation
are now gathered in a volume (Agazzi and Fortunati), proving the fertile
role which memory studies can play in forging a new idea of Europe.
Europe is an economic and institutional reality; nonetheless, defining
Europe from the cultural point of view is still a major challenge, especially
today when society has to cope with new flows of immigration, both in-
side and towards Europe. By addressing historical and political issues
 Cultural Memory: A European Perspective 137

(such as the controversial past, cultural differences, etc.), memory studies

can contribute to finding common roots while enhancing and acknowl-
edging diversity; it can turn Europe into a dynamic workshop where new
ideas can be discussed and developed and thus trigger hope for new and
much-needed scenarios.

References
Agazzi, Elena, and Vita Fortunati. Memoria e saperi: Percorsi transdisciplinari.
Rome: Meltemi, 2007.
Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen
Gedächtnisses. Munich: Beck, 1999.
Benjamin, Walter. “Thesis on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations.
Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1985.
253-64.
Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.
Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. London: Routledge, 1992.
Halbwachs, Maurice. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. 1925. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1952.
––. La mémoire collective. 1939. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950.
Hodgkin, Katharine, and Susannah Radstone. Contested Past: The Politics of
Memory. London: Routledge, 2003.
LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 2001.
Lamberti, Elena, and Vita Fortunati. Memories and Representation of War in
Europe: The Case of WW1 and WW2. New York: Rodopi, 2007.
Le Goff, Jacques. Histoire et mémoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1988.
Nora, Pierre, ed. Les lieux de mémoire. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1984-92.
Olick, Jeffrey. States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts and Transformations in
National Retrospection. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.
Remotti, Francesco. Luoghi e corpi: Antropologia dello spazio, del tempo e del
potere. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993.
Samuel, Raphael. Theatre of Memory. Vol. 1. London: Verso, 1994.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Crises of Memory and the Second World War. Cam-
bridge: Harvard UP, 2006.
White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.
III. Social, Political, and Philosophical
Memory Studies
 Maurice Halbwachs’s mémoire collective
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE MARCEL AND LAURENT MUCCHIELLI

Halbwachs, born in 1877, graduate of the Paris Ecole Normale Supérieure

(where many of France’s outstanding thinkers have studied and/or
taught), holder of the agrégation in Philosophy (1901), and of doctorates in
Law and the Arts, was influenced by both Henri Bergson and Emile
Durkheim (see also Olick, this volume). The former was his philosophy
teacher at the Lycée Henri IV (secondary school). He later distanced him-
self from Bergson, his first major book on collective psychology (Les cadres
sociaux de la mémoire, 1925) being, in a sense, the formulation of his criti-
cism. Halbwachs discovered the thinking of Emile Durkheim and joined
the group around the Année sociologique periodical in 1904, through Fran-
çois Simiand. From then on he was one of the most faithful and at the
same time one of the least conformist members of the “French school of
sociology.” Named professor of sociology in Strasburg in 1919, he went
on to the Sorbonne in 1937 and was ultimately elected to the Collège de
France in 1944, for a new chair in “Collective Psychology.” The present
text is devoted to a presentation of his collective psychology, focusing on
the theme of memory.
In 1918, in “La doctrine d’Emile Durkheim,” Halbwachs gives his in-
terpretation of Durkheim’s scientific project and suggests ways of making
the most of this legacy. His answer is collective psychology. It is a new
theory, indicated by the idea of the collective consciousness:
Collective consciousness is a spiritual reality. […] Its action and extensions may
indeed be followed into every region of each man’s conscience; its influence on
the soul is measured by the influence exerted on sensitive life by the higher facul-
ties, which are the means of social thought. (410)
There are of course temperamental differences between individuals, which
are the object of individual psychology. But temperaments are of little
help in studying people’s actions, for “their nature is entirely reworked
and transformed by social life” (Halbwachs, Esquisse 209). Only collective
psychology is able to show how motives, aspirations, emotional states, and
reflective sensations are connected to collective representations stored in
the memory, which is the focal point of the higher faculties of the mind
(Halbwachs, “La psychologie collective”).
Having reasserted the cogency of Durkheim’s psychosociological the-
ory, Halbwachs determines the cerebral mechanisms by which the collec-
tive consciousness acts on individual consciences. In 1898, in his famous
article on “Individual and Collective Representations,” Durkheim had
142 Jean-Christophe Marcel and Laurent Mucchielli

attempted to respond with the theory of collective representations, pos-

tulating an unconscious social memory affecting individuals automatically
without their being aware of it, and developing a specific mental life in
them (Mucchielli, La découverte, chap. 5). Halbwachs differs from Durk-
heim here, and turns toward a unique type of phenomenological sociol-
ogy, with three main lines of thought:

1. the social construction of individual memory;

2. the development of collective memory in intermediary groups (family
and social classes);
3. collective memory at the level of entire societies and civilizations.

1. The Social Construction of Individual Memory

There does not seem to have been any essential evolution in the psychol-
ogy of memory since the two seminal books, one by Théodule Ribot (Les
maladies de la mémoire, 1881) for psychophysiology and psychopathology,
the other by Henri Bergson (Matière et mémoire, 1896) for introspective
psychology. Halbwachs is an heir of the latter, for whom there are “domi-
nant memories, on which other memories lean, as on supportive points”
(Matière et mémoire 186). Ribot too thought that locations used “land-
marks,” that is, states of consciousness serving to “measure other dis-
tances” according to their intensity. Halbwachs uses that argument to
claim that those landmarks actually construct us as members of groups
(Les cadres sociaux 125), since we try to locate memories using social frames
built from our present identity. To demonstrate this, Halbwachs used
several detailed examples, including dreams and language.
In Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925), Halbwachs experiments on
himself. For over four years, he analyzes his dreams “to determine
whether they contain complete scenes from our past” (3) and whether
there is such a thing as strictly personal memories. He confronts Freud,
for whom dreams reproduce fragments of the past, and wonders whether
those fragments are authentic bits of recollections. The answer is negative,
since memories are precise and dated, as opposed to the reminiscences
discussed by Freud. Halbwachs contrasts those impressions, mixing past
and present, with precise memories implying reasoning and comparison,
which is to say dialogue with an other, for his point is that the past is not
really preserved in the individual memory. “Fragments” persist there, but
not complete recollections. What makes them true memories are collective
representations. The collective memory is made of those “instruments”
 Maurice Halbwachs’s mémoire collective 143

used by the conscious individual to recompose a coherent image of the

past.
Halbwachs also deals with the problem of aphasia, a speech disorder
characterized by a loss of verbal recollections. Earlier research tended to
identify neurological centers of ideation and to explain aphasia as a mal-
functioning of that center. Now Halbwachs pointed out that physicians all
consistently differentiate various types of aphasia, but are unable to for-
mulate an exact classification. He first shows that aphasia, viewed by an
outside observer, is characteristically the impossibility of communicating
with other members of the social group. Secondly, disorders apparently
similar to those produced by aphasia may be encountered in practically
anyone in specific situations, as in the case of a person taking an examina-
tion who is nervous to the point of momentarily forgetting his words. At
this point, one may postulate that aphasia definitely does not require the
presence of brain damage, but that it is above all “a deep alteration in the
relations between the individual and the group” (Les cadres sociaux 69).
Halbwachs finds proof of this in the writings of Henry Head. Head,
observing young soldiers with head wounds who had developed disorders
of an aphasic type, showed that their inability to reproduce some words
pronounced in their presence was not due to the absence of mental im-
ages or of the memories corresponding to those words, but to the forget-
ting of the words themselves. What aphasics suffer from, then, is defi-
nitely a loss of the conventional social markers:
All of these observations seem to indicate that what the aphasic patient lacks is
not so much memories as the ability to situate them in a framework, the very
frame which is provided by the social environment […]. The loss of words […] is
only one specific manifestation of a more general incapacity: all conventional
symbolism, the necessary basis of social intelligence, has become foreign to him.
(Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux 76-77)
Dreams, aphasia—but also mental illness—are phenomena traditionally
accounted for in purely individual and biological terms. Halbwachs’s work
shows that people act according to the meaning they ascribe to their own
and other people’s behavior. Now the content of those meanings is pro-
vided, originally, by the conventions of the community to which the indi-
vidual belongs. Memory, intelligence, and identity are constructed by a
learning process within a group. Subsequently, it is in an absent or disor-
dered relationship to that group that the causes of any individual mental
disorders should be sought, instead of launching into unverifiable conjec-
tures as to the state of an individual’s brain. As Durkheim had announced,
sociology is “a new view of human nature,” destined to renew psychology
by transcending the traditional neurobiological and psychiatric concep-
tions.
144 Jean-Christophe Marcel and Laurent Mucchielli

2. Collective Memory and Intermediate Groups

Having solved the problem of the fundamental human mechanisms of the
collective memory, Halbwachs devoted his work to the main producers of
that collective memory: the family, social classes, and religious communi-
ties.
A family is not merely a concatenation of individuals with shared
feelings and kinship relations. Those individuals inherit a “broad concep-
tion of the family” (Les cadres sociaux 148), a number of social representa-
tions of what a family should be, and of their roles toward one another and
toward their children. Those conceptions do not depend exclusively on
their personal tastes and on their affectionate feelings:
No doubt, within a given family, feelings are not always in step with kinship rela-
tions. Sometimes one loves one’s grandparents as much or more than one’s fa-
ther or mother […]. But one barely admits this to oneself, and the feelings expressed
are nonetheless regulated by the structure of the family: that is what matters […] for the
conservation of the group’s authority and cohesion. (Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux
149, emphasis added)
To convince oneself of this, generally speaking, it suffices that we com-
pare the different types of family structure. In ancient Roman society, it
was thought normal for each individual to conclude an average of three or
four marriages in a lifetime. The family was much more extended. In our
modern societies, these representations are far less active. Nonetheless,
the family still structures children’s memory through the roles they play in
shared events, and which roles they continue to play in their parents’ eyes,
even when they have become adults. Now this collective life, however
minimal, has a memory, as is illustrated by the choice of first names, for
instance, which are symbols: “[I]f they help differentiate members of a
family, it is because they correspond to the group’s felt need to differenti-
ate them for itself and to agree on that differentiation” (Halbwachs, Les
cadres sociaux 165-66).
The psychology of social classes looks at the whole of the representa-
tions produced by a human group. As soon as a group is integrated in a
social space, it develops a notion of its place in society, of the society itself
and of what is required for its maintenance. For the constituent element
of a group is an interest, an order of ideas and concerns, no doubt re-
flected in personalities, but still sufficiently general and impersonal to
retain their meaning and portent for all (Halbwachs, La mémoire collective,
chap. 3). This is what each person has in mind when deciphering his own
and other people’s behavior.
For example, the collective working class memory is made of recol-
lections that conform to an interpretation of the worker’s condition,
 Maurice Halbwachs’s mémoire collective 145

which may be assumed to revolve around the feeling of not participating

in a dignified manner in collective life, of not participating in the estab-
lishment of its shared ideals (Halbwachs, Esquisse 132). Workers are not
free to set the pace of their work, and are constantly subservient to the
lifeless, often foul and even dangerous substances they fashion. Every-
thing in their social life reminds them of this, including their crude lodg-
ings, which are reminiscent of the workshop.
Nevertheless, those lodgings “harbor the family” viewed as a little so-
ciety providing warm relations and in which the individual is judged ac-
cording to his or her personal qualities, as opposed to the arbitrary deper-
sonalization reigning in the world of the factory. Here originates a second
idea, according to which the collective memory is also composed of what
the group aspires to being or doing (in this case, retrieving some of the
dignity denied it by society). This in turn explains the aspirations and
modes of consumption of workers, translating the search for “increasing
participation in the forms of modern civilization” (Halbwachs, Esquisse
182).
In Morphologie sociale (1938), Halbwachs states that for a group to have
an idea of what it needs in order to persist, it must begin by developing as
clear as possible a representation of itself. On this is based its special rela-
tion with the material forms embodying it: Their relative steadiness pro-
vides the group with tangible proof of its existence and with a basic tenet
of stability. Once constructed, these spatial forms have a dynamic of their
own. They change very gradually, so that while individuals live and die,
society does not disappear with them. Generations go by, but villages and
city neighborhoods persist.
The city neighborhood regulates the way its inhabitants get together,
their movements across space, which influence tastes, needs, and customs.
Similarly, economic activity, the directions in which exchanges flow, the
intensity of business transactions, fluctuations in the prices of goods may
all be viewed as the outcome of many collective aspirations. And, lastly,
those aspirations depend on the location of markets and of places of pro-
duction.
By a sort of to-and-fro movement, the social group comes into being
through stable spatial images representing it. Thus, we may consider that
material forms both reflect and shape the concerns of each individual
inasmuch as he acts and thinks as a member of the group. In this sense,
the material form of the group is the source of the “primordial” psycho-
logical life of its members. It is the spatial images which produce collec-
tively constituted psychological states, and especially the collective repre-
sentations connected with memories and stored in the collective memory.
146 Jean-Christophe Marcel and Laurent Mucchielli

It should be clearly understood that the material forms of society operate […]
through our awareness of them, which we acquire as members of a group who
perceive its volume, physical structure and movements within space. This repre-
sents a sort of collective thought process or perception, that might be called an
immediate given of social consciousness, and which contrasts with every other process.
(Morphologie sociale 182-83; emphasis added)
The importance of social morphology is justified, for behind the material
forms and distribution of the population there is a whole series of psycho-
social factors in operation, tied to collective thoughts and trends. How-
ever, the psychology of intermediate groups comes up against one diffi-
culty: the intertwined motives behind the action of members of a group.
For instance, it is difficult to claim that workers’ desire to consume new
goods is exclusively due to their need to participate more completely in
the forms of modern civilization. That desire also has to do with the har-
ried pace that urban life imposes on people. Collective psychology should
therefore also view the population taken at the broadest level.

3. The Collective Memory of Societies and Civilizations

Halbwachs transposes the reasoning he applies to intermediate groups to
society as a whole. It too develops “an intuitive, profound sense” of its
identity (Morphologie sociale 176), through its hold on its body: the popula-
tion. The broadest spatial structures (such as the entire national territory)
express the spirit of the society and cannot be modified by specific activi-
ties, for the laws shaping the population do not change. This means that
each and every social group is caught up in another current, determining
the forms of the population.
Halbwachs, like Durkheim, views the density of human groups as one
of the most important laws of population. Urban life is thus viewed as the
most remarkable civilizational fact. In cities, collective life is more hectic;
it is channeled into paths forming a circulation network of unparalleled
intensity. This results in a mixture of material and mental representations
causing social groups to tend more to be dissolved there. There are more
occasions for people to experience extreme isolation, but also, at the same
time, a more powerful collective feeling may develop, with the presence of
apparently limitless masses of people. As situations are more complex,
there are greater chances for individuals to be maladjusted (Halbwachs
developed this idea in his work on suicide: Les causes 13-14).
To make the transition from material forms to an overall collective
psychology, Halbwachs borrows the concept of “way of life” (genre de vie)
from geographer Vidal de la Blache and from Simiand, defining it as “a set
 Maurice Halbwachs’s mémoire collective 147

of customs, beliefs and ways of being resulting from men’s usual occupa-
tions and from the way these are established” (Les causes 502). The urban
way of life is opposed to the rural way of life, just as modern life is op-
posed to the old way of life in which collective life was both very strong
and highly simplified, since there was little separation. In urban society,
the spatial fragmentation causes fragmentation of social life. But move-
ments among people are faster paced, and a greater diversity of situations
is concentrated in a given time frame.
The main resulting psychological states tend to limit births. This be-
havior is a sort of instinctive reaction to the shortage of space characteris-
tic of the new urban population structure. For the city demands great
efforts of its residents, whose integration requires that they change many
of their habits and expend their energy to “defend their life” and “prolong
it” (Halbwachs, Morphologie sociale 127).
The lower death rate should be seen as the outcome of the will to per-
sist and to concern oneself with the value of the individual existence, ideas
which are spurred by society in its members. As for the collective memory
of urban society, it is composed of recollections tied to spatial representa-
tions reflecting the way it conceives and preserves itself. For example, a
nation has borders it attempts to maintain a