Welzer, Harald

Harald Welzer

He was quick to understand that one needs to approach the big questions from several directions if one wants reliable answers. Harald Welzer, whose background is in social psychology, is used to working on an interdisciplinary basis. And he has every reason to do this, since the subject of his research is no minor issue: human memory.

Harald Welzer is the director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Research at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen and Research Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Witten/Herdecke. His main focus is on research into memory, research into the handing on of knowledge, and research into violence. All rather unusual for a social psychologist: three disciplines on the margins of his own subject. His entire academic career is unusual, says the 48-year-old academic, as he has always done research in areas where other people saw few career opportunities. As a result, he says, his findings have been noted more by neighbouring sciences and less by social psychologists. "In my own field," exaggerates Welzer, "I am barely noticed."

From communicative to autobiographical memory

In 2002 Welzer attempted a "theory of memory". He shed light on the interactive and socially generated functioning of memory. In his treatise "Das kommunikative Gedächtnis" (The communicative memory), he emphasises the influence of communication on the human brain. Memory begins back in the womb, and recollections are only formed in community with others.

"The brain is a biosocial organ," he says, "and memory a biosocial phenomenon. This means that neither a purely biological nor a purely social-sciences approach helps."

It therefore comes as no surprise that Welzer teamed up with a colleague from the neurosciences in order to get to grips with the phenomenon of memory. In 2005, the volume "Das autobiographische Gedächtnis" (The autobiographical memory) appeared, the result of a four-year interdisciplinary project called "Memory and recollection" at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen. Magazines like Die Zeit ascribed a "productive unrest" to the book, and enthused about how the concept of the autobiographical memory, as a point of contact between mind and brain, defines the vague concept of consciousness more precisely. "There is nothing out of the ordinary about what we are doing," says Welzer, "we too have yet to work out how thoughts emerge from matter. But we have at least found a theoretical interface." At the purely neuronal level, says Welzer, it is only possible to map a semantic and an episodic memory, the level of pure knowledge and the recollection of events. But only the autobiographical memory makes people human, that level of consciousness at which we become emotionally identifiable for ourselves. And, much more than can actually be demonstrated in neuroscientific terms, this level is fed from a collective treasure trove which humanity has formed in the course of its development. According to Welzer, this is the point of interface at which the autobiographical memory of each individual exists without being mappable in the brain itself. "There is more memory outside the brain than inside," is Welzer's brief summary of the theory.

From a server at mass to a mass murderer

However, Welzer recently achieved the greatest public reaction with a very different subject: the Holocaust. Here, the social psychologist also reached a non-academic audience as well. The question posed by the title of the book, "Täter" (Perpetrators), may sound simple, but it is far from being merely of historical or psychological interest: how do utterly normal people become mass murderers? Welzer seeks what it is that motivates the perpetrators, normal family men and harmless ordinary people, and finds himself in the midst of a core area of research into violence. Previous attempts at explanations which have been restricted to the personalities of the perpetrators are inadequate. Welzer shows that, due to shifts in the social structure at individual and societal level, the crimes are not even perceived as inhuman acts. Within the space of a few weeks, a server at mass in church can turn into a mass murderer if the appropriate social and situational environment pertains. Welzer underpins his arguments with examples from Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Vietnam and shows that the emergence of violence is socially and historically specific. – Insights into the dynamism of modern genocides "which make one shudder," judged the newspaper taz.

Welzer also expects that an interdisciplinary approach will soon be taken to the problem of violence. After all, bodily processes are of key significance for violence. "Here, too, it makes sense to broaden the perspective."

Select bibliography Das soziale Gedächtnis. Geschichte, Erinnerung, Tradierung, Hamburg 2001, ISBN-10: 3930908662 Das kommunikative Gedächtnis. Eine Theorie der Erinnerung, Munich 2002, ISBN-10: 3406528589 Opa war kein Nazi. Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis, Frankfurt a. M. 2002, ISBN-10: 3596155150 Das autobiographische Gedächtnis. Hirnorganische Grundlagen und biosoziale Entwicklung, with Hans J. Markowitsch, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN-10: 3608944060 Täter. Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden, Frankfurt a. M. 2005, ISBN-10: 3100894316 Warum Menschen sich erinnern können. Fortschritte in der interdisziplinären Gedächtnisforschung, with Hans J. Markowitsch, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN-10: 3608944222