TheCollective Memory Reader

Edited by JEFFREY K. OLICK

VERED VINITZKY-SEROUSSI

DANIEL LEVY

O XFO RDU N I V E R S I T Y PRESS

2011

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Library o f C ongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The collective m em ory reader / edited by Jeffrey K. Olick,Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy,

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-19-533741-9; ISB N 978-0-19-533742-6 (pbk.)1. Collective memory.I. Olick, Jeffrey K., 19 6 4 - II. Vinitzky-Seroussi, Vered i9 6 0 - .III. Levy, Daniel, 19 6 2 - H M 10 33 .C 6 2 2 0 11 30 2 .0 1— d c22 2 0 10 0 14 50 3

9 8 7 6 5 4 3

Printed in the United States o f America on acid-free paper

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments xiIntroduction 3

Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy

Part I. Precursors and Classics 63

E d m u n d B u rk e , fro m Reflections on the Revolution in France 65

A le x is d e T o c q u e v il le , from Democracy in America 68

F r ie d r ic h N ie tz sc h e , from "On the Uses and Disadvantagesof History for Life” 73

E r n e s t R e n a n , from “What Is a Nation?” 80

SIGMUND FREUD, from Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between thePsychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics and Moses and Monotheism 84

K a r l M a r x , from “The Eighteenth Brumaire o f Louis Bonaparte” 8 9

K a r l M an n h eim , from “The Sociological Problem of Generations” 9 2

W a lt e r B en jam in , from “The Storyteller” and “Theses on thePhilosophy of History” 99

E r n s t G o m b ric h , from Aby Warburg: An IntellectualBiography 10 4

T h e o d o r W. A d o r n o , from “Valéry Proust Museum” and “InM em ory o f E ich end orfF ’ n o

Lev V y g o ts k y , fro m Mind in Society 1 13

F r e d e r ic B a r t l e t t , fro m Remembering: A Study in Experimentaland Social Psychology 1 16

Ca r l B e c k e r , from “ Everym an H is O w n H isto rian ” 12 2

G e o r g e H e r b e r t M e a d , from “T h e N ature o f the Past” 12 7

C h a r le s H o r t o n C o o le y , from Social Process 13 1

Peter Burke (contemp.)

British historian. A central issue for h istorians has been the relationship between history

and m em ory as m odes o f apprehending the past. Here Peter Burke offers what has

become a classic statement o f moderation, one that preserves the distinctive contribu­

tion o f historiography but sees it nonetheless as a kind o f social memory. Th is issue is

also taken up in the following selections by Megill and Yerushalmi, am ong others.

From “ History as Social M em ory”

The traditional view o f the relation between history and memory is a relatively simple one. The historian’s function is to be a ‘remembrancer,’ the custodian o f the memory o f public events which are put down in writing for the benefit o f the actors, to give them fame, and also for the benefit o f posterity, to learn from their example. History, as Cicero wrote in a passage which has been quoted ever since, is ‘the life of memory’ (vita memoriae).. . .

This traditional account o f the relation between memory and written history, in which memory reflects what actually happened and history reflects memory, now seems rather too simple. Both history and memory are coming to appear increasingly problematic. Remembering the past and writing about it no longer seem the innocent activities they were once taken to be. Neither memories nor histories seem objective any longer. In both cases we are learning to take account o f conscious or unconscious selection, interpretation and distortion. In both cases this selection, interpretation and distortion is socially condi­tioned. It is not the work o f individuals alone.. . .

Halbwachs made a sharp distinction between collective memory, which was a social construct, and written history, which he considered— in a somewhat old-fashioned positivist way— to be objective. However, current studies of the history o f historical writing treat it much as Halbwachs treated memory, as the product o f social groups such as Roman senators, Chinese mandarins, Benedictine monks, university professors and so on.

It is becoming commonplace to point out that in different places and times, historians have considered different aspects o f the past to be memorable (battles, politics, religion, the economy and so on) and that they have presented the past in very different ways (concentrating on events or structures, on great men or ordinary people, according to their group’s point o f view).

It is because I share this latter, relativist view o f the history o f history that I chose the title ‘history as social memory' for this piece, using the term as a convenient piece o f shorthand which sums up the complex process o f selection and interpretation in a simple formula and stresses the homology between the ways in which the past is recorded and remembered.

The phrase ‘social memory’ and the term ‘relativism’ do raise awkward problems, so I had better try to state my position, as follows. The analogies

PETER BURKE 1 8 9

between individual and group thought are as elusive as they are fascinating. If we use terms like ‘social memory’ we do risk reifying concepts. On the other hand, i f we refuse to use such terms, we are in danger o f failing to notice the different way in which the ideas o f individuals are influenced by the groups to which they belong. As for historical relativism, my argument is not that any account o f the past is just as good (reliable, plausible, perceptive . . .) as any other; some investigators are better-informed or more judicious than others. The point is that we have access to the past (like the present) only via the categories and schemata (or as Durkheim would say, the ‘collective representa­tions’) o f our own culture.. . .

Historians are concerned, or at any rate need to be concerned, with memory from two different points of view. In the first place, they need to study memory as a historical source, to produce a critique o f the reliability o f reminiscence on the lines o f the traditional critique o f historical documents. This enterprise has in fact been under way since the 1960s, when historians of the twentieth cen­tury came to realize the importance o f ‘oral history.’ Even those of us who work on earlier periods have something to learn form the oral history movement, since we need to be aware of the oral testimonies and traditions embedded in many written records.

In the second place, historians are concerned, or should be concerned, with memory as a historical phenomenon, with what might be called the social his­tory o f remembering. Given the fact that the social memory, like the individual memory, is selective, we need to identify the principles o f selection and to note how they vary form place to place or from one group to another and how they change over time. Memories are malleable, and we need to understand how they are shaped and by whom. These are topics which for some reason attracted the attention o f historians only in the late 1970s; but now there seem to be books and articles and conferences about them everywhere.. . .

Memories are affected by the social organization o f transmission and the different media employed. Consider for a moment the sheer variety o f these media, five in particular.

1 . . . . Oral traditions . . . [CJhanges . . . have taken place in the discipline of history in the last generation, notably the decline of positivism and the rise of interest in symbolic aspects of narrative.

2. The traditional province o f the historian, memoirs and other written records (another term related to remembering, ricordare in Italian). We need of course to remind ourselves . . . that these records are not innocent acts o f memory, but rather attempts to persuade, to shape the memory of others. . . . [Moreover] as we read the writings o f memory, it is easy to forget that we do not read memory itself but its transformation through writing.

3. Images, pictorial or photographic, still or moving. . . . [MJaterial images have long been constructed in order to assist the retention and transmission of memories. . . . Historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in partic­ular have been taking an increasing interest in public monuments in the last

1 9 0 HISTORY, MEMORY, AND IDENTITY

few years, precisely because these monuments both expressed and shaped the national memory.

4. Actions transmit memories as they transmit skills, from master to apprentice for example. Many o f them leave no traces for later historians to study but ritual actions in particular are often recorded, including rituals o f ‘commemoration.’ . . . These rituals are reenactments o f the past, acts o f memory, but they are also attempts to impose interpretations of the past, to shape memory. They are in every sense collective re-presentations.

5. One o f the most interesting observations in the study o f the social frame­work o f memory by Maurice Halbwachs concerned the importance o f a fifth medium in the transmission o f memories: space. He made explicit a point implicit in the classical and Renaissance art o f memory; the value o f ‘placing’ images that one wishes to remember in particular locations such as memory palaces or memory theatres.. . .

There is an obvious question for a historian to ask at this point. Why do myths attach themselves to some individuals (living or dead) and not to others? . . . The existence of oral or literary schemata, or more generally of perceptual schemata, does not explain why these schemata become attached to particular individuals, why some people are, shall we say, more ‘mytho- genic’ than others. Nor is it an adequate answer to do what literal-minded positivist historians generally do and describe the actual achievements of the successful rulers or saints, considerable as these may be, since the myth often attributes qualities to them which there is no evidence that they ever possessed. . . .

In my view, the central element in the explanation of this mythogenesis is the perception (conscious or unconscious) o f a ‘fit’ in some respect or respects between a particular individual and a current stereotype o f a hero or villain— ruler, saint, bandit, witch, or whatever. This ‘fit’ strikes people’s imagination and stories about that individual begin to circulate, orally in the first instance. In the course o f this oral circulation, the ordinary mechanisms o f distortion studied by social psychologists, such as ‘levelling’ and ‘sharpening,’ come into play. These mechanisms assist the assimilation o f the life o f the particular individual to a particular stereotype from the repertoire o f stereotypes present in the social memory in a given culture.. . .

But o f course this explanation o f the process o f hero-making in terms o f the media is insufficient. To offer it as a complete explanation would be politically naive. I have still to consider the function o f the social memory. . . .

As a cultural historian, I find it helpful to approach the question o f the uses of social memory by asking why some cultures seem to be more concerned with recalling their past then others. It is commonplace to contrast the tradi­tional Chinese concern for their past with the traditional Indian indifference to theirs. Within Europe, contrasts o f this kind are also apparent.. . .

Why is there such a sharp contrast in attitudes to the past in different cultures? It is often said that history is written by the victors. It might also be

PETER BURKE 1 9 1

said that history is forgotten by the victors. They can afford to forget, while the losers are unable to accept what happened and are condemned to brood over it, relive it, and reflect how different it might have been. Another explanation might be given in terms o f cultural roots. When you have them you can afford to take them for granted but when you lose them you search for them .. . .

The later nineteenth century has been provocatively described as the age o f the ‘invention of tradition.’ It was certainly an age o f a search for national traditions, in which national monuments were constructed, and national rit­uals (like Bastille Day) devised, while national history had a greater place in European schools than ever before or since. The aim o f all this was essentially to justify or ‘legitimate’ the existence o f the nation-state; whether in the case o f new nations like Italy and Germany, or o f older ones like France, in which national loyalty still had to be created, and peasants turned into Frenchmen.

The sociology o f Emile Durkheim, with its emphasis on community, con­sensus and cohesion, itself bears the stamp o f this period. It would be unwise to follow Durkheim and his pupil Halbwachs too closely in this respect, and to discuss the social function o f the social memory as i f conflict and dissent did not ex ist.. . . Given the multiplicity o f social identities, and the coexistence of rival memories, alternative memories (family memories, local memories, class memories, national memories, and so on), it is surely more fruitful to think in pluralistic terms about the uses o f memories to different social groups, who may well have different views about what is significant or ‘worthy o f memory.’

. . . It might be useful to think in terms o f different ‘memory communities’ within a given society. It is important to ask the question, who wants whom to remember what, and why? Whose version o f the past is recorded and preserved?

Disputes between historians presenting rival accounts o f the past some­times reflect wider and deeper social conflicts___ Official and unofficial mem­ories o f the past may differ sharply and the unofficial memories, which have been relatively little studied, are sometimes historical forces in their own right. . . . Without invoking social memories it would be hard to explain the geography o f dissent and protest, the fact that some villages, for example, take part in different protest movements century after century, while others do not.. . .

[T]o understand the workings o f the social memory it may be worth investi­gating the social organization o f forgetting, the rules o f exclusion, suppression or repression, and the question o f who wants whom to forget what, and why. Amnesia is related to ‘amnesty,’ to what used to be called ‘acts o f oblivion,’ official erasure o f memories o f conflict in the interests o f social cohesion.

Official censorship o f the past is all too well known, and there is little need to talk about the various revisions o f the Soviet Encyclopaedia. Many revolu­tionary and counter-revolutionary regimes like to symbolize their break with the past by changing the name o f streets, especially when these names refer to the date o f significant events.. . .

The official censorship o f embarrassing memories is well known. What is in need o f investigation is their unofficial suppression or repression, and this topic raises once more the awkward question o f the analogy between individual and collective memory. Freud’s famous metaphor o f the ‘censor’ inside each individual was o f course derived from the official censorship o f the Habsburg Empire. . . . But between these two censors, public and private, there is space for a third, collective but unofficial. Can groups, like individuals, suppress what it is inconvenient to remember? I f so, how do they do it? . . .

It is often quite easy to show major discrepancies between the image o f the past shared by members o f a particular social group, and the surviving records of that past.. . .

Generally speaking, what happens in the case o f . . . myths is that differences between past and present are elided, and unintended consequences are turned into conscious aims, as i f the main purpose o f these past heroes had been to bring about the present— our present.

Writing and print are not powerful enough to stop the spread o f myths of this kind. What they can do, however, is to preserve records o f the past which are inconsistent with the myths, which undermine them— records o f a past which has become awkward and embarrassing, a past which people for one reason or another do not wish to know about, though it might be better for them if they did. It might, for example, free them from the dangerous illusion that past, present and future may be seen as a simple struggle between heroes and villains, good and evil, right and wrong. Myths are not to be despised, but reading them literally is not to be recommended. Herodotus thought o f histo­rians as the guardians o f memory, the memory o f glorious deeds. I prefer to see historians as the guardians o f awkward facts, the skeletons in the cupboard o f the social memory.

1 9 2 HISTORY, MEMORY, AND IDENTITY