History Research

Over the last decade, memory has become a key term for reorientation in the field of cultural studies. It is a subject of research studied by a wide range of different disciplines and it is defined by them in quite different ways.

Neurologists examine the neural bases, "the hardware" of memory; psychologists study cognitive and emotional processes of memory in individuals. Historians research the reliability of human memory in relation to written sources and, like political scientists, have recently increasingly also researched how societies (re)construct their past according to the needs of their present using symbolic forms such as monuments and commemorative events. Literary and art scholars examine the cultural memory, which is built up over a long period of time in texts and pictures to create a cultural heritage.

An attempt is to be made below to survey the wide and complex field of cultural memory research using some basic conceptual differentiations.

Embodied versus externalised memory

First of all, it makes sense to differentiate between embodied and externalised memory. Through the possibility of being able to write something down, people and cultures broaden the range of their ability to remember. The resulting externalised store of records extends and relieves (embodied) human memory.

As a result, however, this also creates a growing discrepancy between embodied memory and externally stored memory. Libraries and archives are enormous data stores which one can tap and from which information may be gleaned but they do not guarantee the survival of living embodied or remembered knowledge, the extent of which is becoming ever smaller in a written culture, and especially in an electronic media culture. Today, we rely on our Google memory. Accessing knowledge quickly is more important to us than possessing knowledge.

Cultural memory

Cultural memory consisting of texts, monuments, museums and days of remembrance, among other things, is now divided into two areas that relate to one another like a foreground and a background: a stored memory and a functional memory. The stored memory collects and keeps sources, objects and data, regardless of whether they are needed in the present. The functional memory contains a small selection of what a society selects from the past in any particular case and what it updates from the contents of its cultural tradition. The process of externalising knowledge in writing is thus not a one-way street, but is coupled with memories and personal reacquisitions. The name we give to this embodied treasure of cultural knowledge is education. Canonised classics are learned by heart or are at least present in quotations. Museums canonise pictures and sculptures in their permanent exhibitions. Monuments keep the past physically present and anniversaries bring historical events back to the present at regular intervals.

Can a nation have a memory?

While no-one has ever doubted the existence of individual memory, there are many who consider the term "collective memory" to be pure mystification. Maurice Halbwachs, who coined this term back in the 1920s, met with criticism and distrust. Critics who understood the term to mean something like a collective national character were justified in their scepticism that one cannot simply transfer individual psychological phenomena to collectives.

However, Halbwachs’ research went in an entirely different direction. He examined forms of a social group memory in which those participating had a common background of experience, such as a family, a school class, a regiment of soldiers or a travel group. He showed that memories are intrinsically social and constitute a group’s communicative and emotional glue. His radical theory was that, strictly speaking, people do not develop an individual memory at all but are always included in memory communities. Memory is formed – like language – in communicative processes, i.e. through narrating, accepting and internalising remembrances. According to Halbwachs, a person who is completely alone cannot develop a memory at all.

Meanwhile, the concept of "collective memory" is not only applied to small social groups in face-to-face situations, but also to large groups, such as ethnic groups, nations and states. One should be aware of the fact here, however, that such units do not have a collective memory, but make themselves one using different memorial media such as texts, pictures, monuments, anniversaries and commemoration rites.

Collective remembrance creates a common identity

With the help of common points of reference in the past and of cultural tradition, such collectives at the same time create a shared identity for themselves which is not a matter of origin and descent, but of participation in the form of learning, identification and other forms of practised belonging. Until recently, the rules of selecting points of reference in the past followed what Nietzsche defined as "monumental history”. It was a matter of constructing a heroic self-image of the group and exaggerating it mythically, using concepts of the enemy. A key turning point has taken place in the politics of history since the 1990s when various countries began to reflect on their historic guilt and to integrate it into their self-image in forms of public commitment.

A special situation: Remembering traumatic events

Trauma refers to an experience that is so painful that the gates of perception close in the face of such force. It is split off from consciousness and encapsulated as something that cannot be narrated or remembered within the context of constructing a person’s identity. What is closed away in the capsule or crypt is not forgotten but conserved at a distance and becomes noticeable after a certain interval of time through a certain set of symptoms. Therapy aims to transform the trauma into conscious remembrance and to communicate it with the person’s identity. While this does not heal it, it does reduce its damaging effect.

The long-term effects for victims of sexual abuse or torture are a specific characteristic of trauma, which is why the period of limitation has been abolished for such crimes. In the case of the collective historical trauma of the Holocaust, the deferred action is equally evident. It took until the 1980s before the victims’ painful and degrading experiences could be told and were listened to. The concept of a moral witness who gives the dead among the victims a voice is to be seen in this context. Meanwhile, other genocides as well as the Holocaust have come to the world’s attention and demand symbolic recognition and material restitution.

Another aspect of deferred action in connection with historical traumata is that in a certain sense they are passed on from one generation to the next. In this way, later generations who identify with these family fates, become members of a “collective of suffering”. A new problem relating to the politics of history has arisen in this connection, with political groups basing their identity on a "selected trauma" (Vamik Volkan) and entering into victim competition with other groups of sufferers.

Remembrance as a resource for legitimation

Memory does not develop in isolation, but has always been related socially to other individuals and, at a political level, to other groups, where it reacts and refers to other memories. The deferred action of remembrance, which is so extreme in the case of trauma, applies to memory generally. Without a story that we can tell about ourselves, there is no identity. That applies to individuals no less than to groups. The history that is taught in school textbooks and is commemorated at anniversaries is something like a nation’s collective biography, which, however, like individual biographies, is retold differently, especially after crises or political transformations. The history that is remembered reinforces an individual’s or a group’s self-image. What we remember therefore, is not based on what actually happened, but on what we later can and wish to tell a story about. What is and is not remembered from the past ultimately depends on who needs the story and for what purpose.

Selected publications by Aleida Assmann Geschichte im Gedächtnis. Von der individuellen Erfahrung zur öffentlichen Inszenierung. Krupp-Vorlesungen zu Politik und Geschichte am Kulturwissenschaftlichen Institut im Wissenschaftszentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen; volume 6, Munich, C.H.Beck 2007 Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik, Munich, C.H.Beck 2006 Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, Munich, C.H. Beck 1999, 3rd edition 2006 Generationsidentitäten und Vorurteilsstrukturen in der neuen deutschen Erinnerungsliteratur, Edited by Hubert Christian Ehalt, Vienna, Picus Verlag 2006 Co-authored by Ute Frevert: Geschichtsvergessenheit - Geschichtsversessenheit. Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart 1999