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 memory
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 perspectives,
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,
historiography,
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
contemporary
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 cultural
memory studies––ranging from individual acts of remembering in a
social context to group memory (of family, friends, veterans, etc.) to national
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) memory
studies is currently “more practiced than theorized”––and practiced, at
that, within an array of different disciplines and national academic cultures,
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 foundation
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,
memoria,
heritage, commemoration, kulturelles Gedächtnis, communicative memory,
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 approach
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 inception
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
interdisciplinary
project. Many exciting forms of collaboration have already
been fostered. And indeed, the strongest and most striking studies in cultural
memory are based on interdisciplinary exchange––between media
studies and cultural history (J. Assmann; A. Assmann), history and sociology
(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
implications
(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 definitions
and conceptual differentiations which may help to prevent misunderstanding
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. However,
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 comprises
“social memory” (the starting point for memory research in the social
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 characterized
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 Confino);
still others study the relation of cognitive and social phenomena (as
in conversational remembering; see Middleton and Brown; all this volume).
(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 “remembering”
(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 aspects
of cultural memory studies is what Jeffrey K. Olick draws our attention
to when he maintains that “two radically different concepts of culture
are involved here, one that sees culture as a subjective category of
meanCultural
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 memory.
It draws attention to the fact that no memory is ever purely individual,
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 sociocultural
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 especially
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 Assmann’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 social/
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 individual
memories, a “memory” which is represented by media and institutions
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.
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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 maintained
that there is no such thing as an essential identity, but that identities
have to be constructed and reconstructed by acts of memory, by remembering
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 psyche
with the medial and social representation of the past.
To sum up, cultural memory studies is decidedly concerned with social,
medial, and cognitive processes, and their ceaseless interplay. In the
present volume, this fact is mirrored not only by the dedication of different
sections to (clusters of) different disciplines (history, social sciences,
psychology, literary and media studies) which have an expertise with regard
to one specific level of cultural memory, but also by the incorporation
of as many approaches as possible which go beyond those boundaries.
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 different
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 polarity,
itself a legacy of nineteenth-century historicism and its discontents,
was taken up and popularized by Pierre Nora, who also distinguishes
polemically
between history and memory and positions his lieux de mémoire in
between. Studies on “history vs. memory” are usually loaded with emotionally
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 “history
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. memory
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 generation,
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 synchronic)
layout. Although its main focus is on current research and concepts
of cultural memory studies, it also provides insights into the different
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 notion
of cultural memory can be retraced to the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries (see Olick; Straub; Marcel and Mucchielli; all this volume).
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 accepted
as such no matter what discipline or country the respective researchers
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 contexts,
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 important
influence for oral history. And thirdly, with his research on the memory
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, Maurice
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 different
places at roughly the same time––a process which would be repeated
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 German
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 (grenzpolizeiliche
Befangenheit) in order to gain insight into processes of cultural
memory. Warburg––whose writings are more a quarry providing inspiration
for subsequent scholars than the source of clear-cut theoretical conCultural
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 certain
“pathos formulae” (Pathosformeln, symbols encoding emotional intensity)
migrated through different art works, periods, and countries.
Whereas the sociologist Halbwachs and the psychologist Frederick Bartlett
(who popularized the notion of cultural schemata) laid the foundations
for cultural memory studies with a view to social and cognitive levels,
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 objects.
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 emergent
phenomenon, taking shape more or less concurrently in many disciplines
and countries. The 1980s saw the work of the French historian
Pierre Nora on national lieux de mémoire (see den Boer) and the publications
of the German group of researchers around Jan and Aleida Assmann,
who focused on media and memory in ancient societies (see
Harth). In psychology, meanwhile, behavioral and purely cognitive paradigms
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 generation
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 mémoire
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 particularly
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 memory,
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 concept,
comments on its translatability, and considers the prospects for a
comparative study of lieux de mémoire. Some elements of such a comparative
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, Heidelberg-
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 present
some of their eminently influential concepts, among them, for example,
the distinction between “cultural” and “communicative” memory and
Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction 11
between “canon” and “archive.” Jürgen Reulecke delineates recent approaches
to generational memory, which also have their source in the
1920s: Karl Mannheim’s writings belong to the foundational texts of cultural
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 studies
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
introduction
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-authoritarian
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 contributions
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 Ricoeur.
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 psychology)
provide insights into their work on cultural memory. An historical
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 collective
memories,” thus showing how group memories are represented in
individual minds. Gerald Echterhoff presents new interdisciplinary research
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 interdisciplinary
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 literary
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. However,
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 functions
of a “mimesis of memory.” Ann Rigney stresses the active and vital
role that literature plays as a medium in the production of cultural memory.
She understands memory as a dynamic process (rather than a static
entity), in which fictional narratives can fulfill an array of different functions––
as “relay stations,” “stabilizers,” “catalysts,” “objects of recollection,”
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 individual
memories, cultural knowledge, and versions of history can be shared.
It is therefore no accident that many articles which have made their appearance
in earlier parts of this volume could just as easily have been included
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, Gerald
Echterhoff, and Harald Welzer, are characterized by their strong media
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 arguably
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 journalism
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 interdisciplinary
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.
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