to remember and forget: archives, memory, and...

378 American Archivist / Vol. 53 / Summer 1990

Research Article

To Remember and Forget:Archives, Memory, and CultureKENNETH E. FOOTE

Abstract: The idea of archives as collective memory is sometimes employed as a metaphorfor discussing the social and cultural role of archives. It is argued here that the idea ismore than a metaphor and is supported by theories that would view collections of docu-ments and material artifacts as means of extending the temporal and spatial range ofcommunication. Archives, along with other communicational resources such as oral andritual tradition, help to transfer information—and thereby sustain memory—from gener-ation to generation. Two examples illustrate the interrelationship of archives and memorywithin this broadened view of communication and culture. The first arises from attemptsto find ways to warn future generations of the location of radioactive waste repositories.The second revolves around pressure to efface from cultural landscapes evidence of tragicevents that people wish to forget.

About the author: Kenneth E. Foote is an associate professor of geography at the University ofTexas at Austin. He presented an earlier version of this article at the forty-ninth annual meeting ofthe Society of American Archivists in Austin, Texas, in October 1985.

To Remember and Forget 379

The Memory Metaphor

ARCHIVISTS HAVE LONG been interested inthe theoretical dimensions of their work aswell as its institutional and social goals.With a view toward improving archivaldocumentation strategies, some writers havedrawn attention to the question of why so-cieties maintain archives.1 In addressing thisbroader question, archives are sometimessaid to be society's collective memory. Fromthis perspective, archives transcend the im-mediate tasks of documentation, education,enrichment, and research to help sustaincultural traditions and values. Although theview of archives as collective memory issometimes employed metaphorically, it isa claim that can be placed on firmer theo-retical foundations. Previous writings inanthropology, sociology, linguistics, andsemiotics argue that material objects, arti-facts, and documents—including thosecontained in archival collections—play aspecial role in human communication.2

'Frank Burke, "The Future Course of ArchivalTheory in the United States," American Archivist 44(1981): 40-46; Lester Cappon, "What, Then, Is Thereto Theorize About?" American Archivist 45 (1982):19-25; F. Gerald Ham, "The Archival Edge," Amer-ican Archivist 38 (1975): 5-13; Andrea Hinding,"Toward Documentation: New Collecting Strategiesin the 1980s," in Options for the Eighties: Proceed-ings of the Second Annual Conference on AmericanCollege and Research Libraries, eds. V. Massmanand M. Kathman (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1982);Michael Lutzker, "Max Weber and the Analysis ofModern Bureaucratic Organization: Notes Toward aTheory of Appraisal," American Archivist 45 (1982):119-30; Society of American Archivists, Task Forceon Goals and Priorities, Planning for the ArchivalProfession (Chicago: Society of American Archivists,1986).

2Kenneth E. Foote, "Object as Memory: The Ma-terial Foundations of Human Semiosis," Semiotica 69(1988): 243-68, and "Space, Territory, and Land-scape: The Borderlands of Geography and Semiot-ics," Recherche Semiotique/Semiotic Inquiry 5 (1985):158-75. The case made in those two articles is basedon a number of sources: Victor Yngve, Linguistics asa Science (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1986); Ferrucio Rossi-Landi, Linguistics and Eco-nomics (The Hague: Mouton, 1977) and Language asWork and Trade: A Semiotic Homologyfor Linguistics

Unlike verbal and nonverbal action, whichis ephemeral and disappears as it occurs,the physical durability of objects, artifacts,and documents allows them to be passedfrom person to person and from place toplace over long periods of time. Their du-rability defines them as communicationalresources that can be used to transmit in-formation beyond the bounds of interper-sonal contact. The first of the two key pointsof this article is, then, that archives can beseen as a valuable means of extending thetemporal and spatial range of human com-munication.

The coevolution of writing systems andearly civilizations provides an example ofthe relationship between the use of docu-ments and communicational range. Al-though many factors were involved in therise of early civilizations, the beginning ofcomplex social organization seemed to re-quire a means of notating the spoken word.3

Writing allowed information to be trans-ferred from place to place and from year toyear, even if the information pertained atfirst only to commonplace business trans-actions and government decrees. In this way,documents and archives facilitated trans-fers of information that were difficult toaccomplish through means such as oral andritual tradition.

Yet, the fact that documents and artifactscan extend the temporal and spatial rangeof human communication does not mean

and Economics (S. Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey,1983); Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The Worldof Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption(New York: Norton, 1979); Jean Baudrillard, Le sys-teme des objets (Paris: Gallimard, 1968); and PierreBourdieu, "Le marche des biens symboliques,"L'Annee sociologique 22 (1973): 49-126.

3Jack Goody, The Interface Between the Writtenand the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1987), 1-56, and The Logic of Writing and the Or-ganization of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1986); Roy Harris, The Origin of Writing(London: Duckworth, 1986), 76-157; GeoffreySampson, Writing Systems (London: Hutchinson,1985), 46-61.

380 American Archivist / Summer 1990

they are the only resource available formeeting this need. Oral and ritual traditioncan serve a similar function and, indeed,memory may even be said to reside in theinstitutional mission of organizations suchas archives, museums, universities, somegovernment agencies, and the like. In thislight, the idea of collective memory as-sumes a double meaning. First, as dis-cussed in sociology and psychology,collective memory refers to beliefs and ideasheld in common by many individuals thattogether produce a sense of social solidarityand community.4 In the second sense—ofinterest here—the term implies that manyindividuals and organizations act collec-tively to maintain records of the past, evenif these records are shaped by the demandsof contemporary life. From this perspec-tive, the activities of, say, archives andmuseums are interwoven. Each particularinstitution may sustain a representation ofthe past quite specific to its institutionalmandate, but these representations can beinterrelated.5

The value of this point is that it guardsagainst assuming that collective memory isinvested in any single type of human insti-tution, such as the archives. Any view ofthe past conserved by the archival recordcan be placed, profitably, in the context ofthe representations maintained by other in-stitutions. The task of assessing this archi-val contribution is made no easier by thevariability in the way different societiescome to sustain important information. Inone society, oral and ritual traditions maypredominate, while in another society theymay be allied with archival records, writtendocumentation, and even elements of ma-

terial culture such as monuments and me-morials.6

This second key point—about the col-lective, interdependent nature of institu-tional memory—implies that the cultural roleof the archives is hard to isolate from thecontributions of other institutions and tra-ditions. Setting archives in such a broadcontext, however, gives us a better under-standing of how social pressures influenceand shape the archival record. No matterhow tempting it is to discount these forces,understanding the force of their influenceis a natural outgrowth of viewing archivesin relation to, rather than as set apart from,the goals of other cultural institutions.

The two key points of this discussion canbe set in bolder relief with examples, thefirst of which arises from recent attemptsto isolate high-level radioactive wastes fromliving ecosystems. Warning future gener-ations about the location of waste sites is aserious public policy issue and raises thepossibility of archives being used to helpcommunicate across spans of time greaterthan any single civilization has ever en-dured. The second example emphasizessome of the forces that shape a society'sview of its past. It derives from study oflandscape history and the selective way inwhich tragedies and acts of violence havebeen marked with monuments and memo-rials in order to outline an almost mythol-ogical representation of the national past.

Sustaining Warnings for Ten Millennia

Since the dawn of the Atomic Age dur-ing World War II, the United States hasproduced large quantities of high-level nu-

"Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans.F. J. and V. Y. Ditter (New York: Harper & Row,1980) and Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phe-nomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-sity Press, 1987).

5Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse:Syracuse University Press, 1986), 69-90.

6Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison:University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). The literatureof oral history is of interest also in this regard, in-cluding David Stricklin and Rebecca Sharpless, eds.,The Past Meets the Present: Essays on Oral History(Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988)and William W. Moss, "Oral History: An Appreci-ation," American Archivist 40 (1970): 429-39.


clear waste. These radioactive byproductsof weapons production and commercialpower generation require up to ten thou-sand years to decay into less dangerous iso-topes. No solution has yet been found tothe problem of this material's safe disposal.Current plans call for its solidification andburial deep in stable geologic formations.However, quite apart from uncertainty aboutnatural processes that might breach thestorage chambers, human violation of thewaste dumps is an important concern. Nomatter how securely the waste is stored, itis virtually impossible to prevent people fromdisturbing the waste—intentionally or un-intentionally—during the next ten millenia.If some of the buried waste becomes ofvalue to future generations, it may even be"mined."

Recognition of the dangers of possiblehuman penetration of waste deposits led tothe formation of a Human Interference TaskForce by the U.S. Department of Energyin 1980.7 The task force included special-ists in semiotics and communication andwas charged with proposing long-termwarning systems for disposal sites.8 It rec-ognized from the start that disturbance ofthe sites by future generations could neverbe completely prevented. Indeed, the taskforce was unwilling to assume responsibil-ity for safeguarding the waste from delib-erate violation. However, it did accept theobligation to reduce the likelihood of in-advertant, ill-informed penetration of thestorage areas.9 Long-term communication

The following discussion summarizes an argu-ment found in Kenneth E. Foote, "Object as Mem-ory: The Material Foundations of Human Semiosis,"Semiotica 69 (1988): 253-59.

"Thomas A. Sebeok, Communication Measures toBridge Ten Millennia (Columbus, Ohio: Battelle Me-morial Institute, Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation,1984) and Percy H. Tannenbaum, CommunicationAcross 300 Generations: Deterring Human Interfer-ence with Waste Deposit Sites (Columbus, Ohio: Bat-telle Memorial Institute, Office of Nuclear WasteIsolation, 1984).

9Battellc Memorial Institute, Office of Nuclear

regarding the location of waste deposits wasseen as crucial to this goal.

The key to understanding the interplayof archives and communication in this in-stance lies in the task force's pursuit of long-lasting means of communication employ-ing a variety of transmission techniques.Durable physical markers at the storage siteswere seen as a long-lasting, but insuffi-cient, technique (figure 1). It would be im-possible to hope that such markers couldretain their meaning for three hundred gen-erations, or that they would even remainphysically intact. After all, some of the mostdurable building materials known are, byvirtue of their durability, prime quarry forscavengers. The task force therefore pro-posed that other techniques be employed tosupplement the warning conveyed by phys-ical markers.

Written documents maintained in on-sitevaults and off-site document collectionswould be the most important of these sup-plements. At the site of the waste deposit,written warnings could be placed in anabove-ground document vault to explain thenature and danger of the radioactive ma-terials. In this way, detailed informationabout the design and layout of the storagearea would be available for careful study.Future generations would be encouraged toperiodically translate the documents fromtheir original languages into languages that

Waste Isolation, Human Interference Task Force, Re-ducing the Likelihood of Future Human Activities ThatCould Affect Geologic High-Level Waste Repositories(Columbus, Ohio: Battelle Memorial Institute, 1984);U.S. Department of Energy, Statement of Position ofthe U.S. Department of Energy in the Matter of Pro-posed U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Rule-making on the Storage and Disposal of Nuclear Waste(Waste Confidence Rulemaking) (Washington, D.C.:Department of Energy, 1980); U.S. EnvironmentalProtection Agency, "Environmental Standards for theManagement and Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel, High-Level and Transuranic Waste," Federal Register 47,29 December 1982, 53196. U.S. Nuclear RegulatoryCommission, "Disposal of High-Level RadioactiveWastes in Geologic Repositories, Technical Crite-ria," Federal Register 48, 21 June 1983, 28194.


Periphery i> Stabilized With

Indigenous Vegetation

Figure 1. A schematic plan of the surface marker for a nuclear waste repository. The plan mirrorsthe shape of the proposed nuclear waste warning symbol. Monoliths are combined with documentvaults in the plan, which includes a geodetic survey coordinate marker. Source: Battelle MemorialInstitute, Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation, Human Interference Task Force, Reducing the Likeli-hood of Future Human Activities that Could Affect Geologic High-Level Waste Repositories (Co-lumbus, Ohio: Battelle Memorial Institute, 1984), 87, with permission.

may emerge over the next ten thousandyears, thereby enhancing the effectivenessof the on-site written documents. The taskforce saw periodic translation of the ma-terials as a means of creating a sort of tem-poral "relay system" of informationtransmission.

In addition to this relay system of trans-lation, the task force proposed distributinginformation about the disposal sites and theirlocation to off-site library and archival col-lections. Printed records produced on acid-free paper were judged the most durablefor distribution, but microfilm, magnetictape, and electronic storage media wereviewed as possible alternatives if periodi-cally copied and replaced.10 Entrusting thecare and updating of these new records to

established libraries and archives wouldserve to extend their longevity. History hasshown that collections gathered by librariesand archives have been maintained with carefor long periods—in some cases for manycenturies—without serious disruption.11

Worldwide distribution of warning mes-sages in this manner would mean that thepotential loss of a record from any one placewould be offset by the conservation of cop-ies in other collections.

The task force also recommended thatinformation about nuclear waste sites beadded to maps and included in the nationalland survey system. Maps were seen as aneffective means of communicating with fu-ture generations because they are used ex-tensively, are produced in great number,and are constantly revised under the super-

10Battelle Memorial Institute, "Reducing the Like-lihood," 67. 'Ibid., 72.


vision of established national, state, and lo-cal government agencies. To encouragemapping of the waste sites long into thefuture, each site would have establishedvertical and horizontal reference pointswithin the national geodetic survey system.These reference points would provide sur-veyors and cartographers with the incentiveto retain information about the location ofthe storage areas. Furthermore, it was rec-ommended that the locations of waste stor-age sites be included in recently createdgeographical information systems. Theseare large computer databases developed bygovernment agencies and private corpora-tions to store plat and tax maps and plansof public utility systems. Geographical in-formation systems are among the largestdatabases ever created in the world of com-puter technology. The high cost of theircreation provides some assurance that in-vestment in their maintenance will continuelong into the future. The task force con-cluded that this plan of distribution wouldextend the longevity of warnings by againentrusting their care to a variety of estab-lished and long-lived organizations.12

Beyond the use of records stored in on-site vaults and off-site document collec-tions, the task force considered the possi-bility of employing oral tradition tocommunicate with future generations.13

Disagreement exists among historians, an-thropologists, and folklorists about the ef-fectiveness of oral traditions in accuratelytransmitting information over long periodsof time.14 Instances can be found in whichfactual information has accurately beenmaintained orally for hundreds of years, but

12Abraham Weitzberg, Building on Existing Insti-tutions to Perpetuate Knowledge of Waste Reposito-ries (Columbus, Ohio: Battelle Memorial Institute,Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation, 1982).

"Sebeok, Communication Measures."Battelle Memorial Institute, "Reducing the Like-

lihood," 74, and W. L. Montell, The Saga of CoeRidge: A Study in Oral History (Knoxville: Universityof Tennessee Press, 1970).

in many other cases oral tradition has fallenfar short of sustaining factual accuracy. Ofall the means of conveying information, oraltradition was judged the most difficult toassess in terms of potential long-term ef-fectiveness. Legend-like tales and storiesmight well arise, or be created, to conveythe dangers of the waste deposits. But thetask force held little confidence that suchstories would transfer enough informationto guarantee safety, unless one or more ofthe other long-term communicational tech-niques succeeded, too.

Finally, as part of its recommendations,the task force suggested creation of a uni-versal biohazard symbol as a two-fold aidto communicational durability. First, thesymbol would depict the deadliness of thewaste in a form that could be marked on awide variety of monuments and writtendocuments. Second, use of a single legiblesymbol would permit its meaning to be as-similated more readily and accurately intooral and social traditions.

Taken together, these efforts reflect thevaried resources societies have at their dis-posal for extending the temporal range ofcommunication. Given the need to com-municate through ten millennia, the HumanInterference Task Force recommended thatboth durable markers and documentary rec-ords be employed as the cornerstones oflong-term warning systems. The task forcedid, however, find value in other commu-nicational resources, such as legend-likestories. The task force also argued that syn-ergistic relationships can be expected toemerge from the interplay of communica-tional resources. For example, the longev-ity of markers and written records could beimproved significantly if their safekeepingcould be made an ongoing concern of ex-isting human institutions, such as libraries,archives, and government mapping agen-cies. The conclusions imply that even thoughdocuments and markers may be the preem-inent means of sustaining memory in hu-man communication, they are not the only


way, and they benefit from interaction withother communicational resources.

The Effacement of Memory

If archives can play a part in extendingthe range of communication, they can justas readily be implicated in any attempt tothwart communication by diminishing itstemporal and spatial range.15 In George Or-well's novel 1984, the Ministry of Truth("Minitrue" in the language of Newspeak)revised records to reflect current dogma.By translating documents from Oldspeakinto Newspeak, Minitrue workers couldmanipulate the past to support "good-think." In real life, people do sometimeschoose to keep secrets, to lie, and to distortinformation to control others. Bureaucra-cies and corporations may seek to controlthe flow of damaging information by de-stroying incriminating records and employ-ing oaths of secrecy.16

Despite the prevalence these days of pa-per shredders in high government offices,professional archivists would not condoneeffacement of records in their care. None-theless, as was earlier made clear, archivesare subject to the same social pressures thatshape the collective memory of other insti-tutions. Perhaps archivists are more suc-cessful in resisting these pressures, buteffacement does sometimes occur with re-spect to representations of the past main-tained by other institutions and by societyat large. Insight into how such forces aid

15Further discussion of the following issues can befound in Kenneth E. Foote, "Object as Memory: TheMaterial Foundations of Human Semiosis," Semi-otica 69 (1988): 259-63 and in "Stigmata of NationalIdentity: Exploring the Cosmography of America'sCivil Religion" in Person, Place, Thing: Essays inHonor of Philip Wagner, ed. S. T. Wong and M. E.E. Hurst, (in press).

I6Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Conceal-ment and Revelation (New York: Vintage, 1984) andLying: Moral Choice in Public Life (New York: Pan-theon, 1978).

forgetting can be gained by turning to thehistory of places that have been stigmatizedby violence and tragedy.

These are cases stemming from land-scape history, an active area of research incontemporary geography. To draw a par-allel with archival theory, this research hasstressed, among other themes, the interre-lationship between cultural landscape andcollective memory. Such studies are basedon observations of the close connection be-tween the places a society values and thatsociety's view—or "myths"—of its past.17

Like archives, cultural landscapes can besaid to maintain a representation of the past.In some early civilizations and primitivesocieties, this representation was legible inthe layout of cities and villages that weredesigned according to sacred cosmologicalprinciples.18 In modern secular societies,the organizational principles that guide theshaping of cities and landscapes are con-siderably more complex and elusive. Yet,as the historian Catherine Albanese hasnoted, Americans are not without a sort of"civil religion," despite claims to the con-trary.19 This civil religion has attained asort of cosmographical representation in theAmerican landscape, in the national parks,battlefields, museums, monuments, and

"Foremost among these works are those of DavidLowenthal, including "Past Time, Present Place:Landscape and Memory," The Geographical Review65 (1975):l-36, and The Past is a Foreign Country(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 185-259. Other related works are: John B. Jackson, TheNecessity for Ruins (Amherst: University of Massa-chusetts Press, 1980); John Gold and Jacquelin Bur-gess, eds., Valued Environments (London: GeorgeAllen & Unwin, 1982); and Yi-Fu Tuan, Landscapesof Fear (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1979).

18Paul Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters:A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Characterof the Ancient Chinese City (Chicago: Aldine Pub-lishing, 1971), 225-476.

"Catherine L. Albanese, Sons of the Fathers: TheCivil Religion of the American Revolution (Philadel-phia: Temple University Press, 1976).


memorials that are maintained at public ex-pense and are the object of pilgrimage bytourists.20

One of the most interesting aspects ofthis landscape cosmography is the selectiv-ity with which sites are commemorated torecall great victories, watershed events,historical turning points, and the womenand men who made sacrifices for the causeof nationhood. Not infrequently, however,darker events—tragedies and massacres—are marked as well. The value of turningto episodes of violence and tragedy lies inthe fact that the memory of such events isso prone to be held in tension. A society'sneed to remember is balanced against itsdesire to forget, to leave the memory be-hind and put the event out of mind. Fewevents produce such strong ambivalentfeelings as acts of violence, and as societiesgrapple with these feelings in public de-bate, the struggle comes to imprint itselfon landscape. If a tragedy seems to illus-trate a lesson of human ethics or social con-duct worth remembering, or if it demandsthat warnings be forwarded to future gen-erations, tension may resolve in favor of apermanent monument or memorial.21 If theviolence fails to exemplify an enduringvalue, there is greater likelihood of the site,artifacts, and documentary record being ef-

20An informal but provocative account of cosmo-graphical representations and "pilgrimage" routes tobe found in the capital cities of Europe is providedby Donald Home, The Great Museum: The Re-Pre-sentation of History (London: Pluto Press, 1984).

21In this context it is useful to recall that the ety-mological root of the word monument is the Latin verbmonere—"to remind, to warn." Monuments may arisefrom other impulses, but their power to remind andto warn often overshadows secondary considerations.Further insight into this issue is offered by Kurt Fors-ter, "Monument/Memory and the Mortality of Ar-chitecture," Oppositions 25 (1982):1-19; Alois Riegl,"Der moderne Denkmalskultus, sein Wesen und seineEntstehung," in Gesammelte Aufsa'tze (Augsburg: Dr.Benno Filser, 1929); and John Ruskin, The SevenLamps of Architecture (London: J. M. Dent, 1907),182.

faced, either actively or passively. As thegeographer David Lowenthal has written,"Features recalled with pride are apt to besafeguarded against erosion and vandalism;those that reflect shame may be ignored orexpunged from the landscape."22

This point about effacement can be il-lustrated with striking, but contrasting, ex-amples from Salem, Massachusetts, andBerlin, Germany. Today in Salem, no oneknows exactly where the town's "witches"were executed.23 Soon after the witchcraftepisode of 1692, witnesses retracted theirtestimony and the trials were discredited.Through the years, the exact location of thesite of the executions was forgotten (figure2). Tourists visiting Salem today can stopat the Witch Museum (the building and siteare unrelated to the events of the seven-teenth century), and visit a house where itis believed accusations were leveled againstsome of the victims. The sense of shameengendered by the trials, combined withSalem's subsequent growth as a prosperousseaport, led to the passive effacement ofthe execution site. All records of the site,both oral and written, were lost. Still, withthe tercentenary of the trials approachingin 1992, the executions remain part of Sal-em's public life. Proposals to raise a me-morial, and thereby publicly accept the eventas a valid part of Salem's past, are count-ered by the desire of many to leave theepisode unmarked and unremarked.

In Berlin, buildings closely associatedwith Nazi power have been destroyed. TheBerlin Wall was originally begun close tothe heart of the former Nazi government

22David Lowenthal, "Past Time, Present Place:Landscape and Memory," The Geographical Review65 (1975): 31.

23Sidney Perley, Where the Salem "Witches" WereHanged (Salem, Mass.: Essex Institute, 1921). Foran account of the witchcraft episode, see Paul Boyerand Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The So-cial Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1974).


Figure 2. View from Gallows Hill toward Salem, Masschusetts. No record was kept of the siteof the executions of 1692; only the general location can be surmised. The witchcraft trials and thereputation they lent the town remain a divisive issue in Salem. This is particularly true now, in lightof the suggestion by some citizens to raise a memorial in 1992 during the tricentennial year of thewitchcraft episode. This and all following photographs by author.

district as an intentional means of breaking

apart this stigmatized area. The site of the

Gestapo headquarters remains vacant more

than forty years after the building's de-

struction. In Berlin, this conscious efface-

ment of buildings was based on

renouncement of this vicious genocidal ep-

isode, as well as on the belief that efface -

ment would waylay attempts to create pro-

Nazi monuments. The destruction of Span-

dau Prison, following the death of Rudolph

Hess, was predicated on the latter motive.

Some Germans go so far as to call for the

razing of all remaining Nazi buildings, such

as the libraries and galleries that still stand

in Berlin and elsewhere.24

24The fate of these sites of Nazi terror is an active

In Germany, of course, this active ef-

facement of buildings has been matched by

topic of debate in Germany and is discussed in Rein-hard Riirup, ed., Topographie des Terrors: Gestapo,SS und Reichssicherheitshauptamt auf dem "Prinz-Albrecht-Gelande" (Berlin: Verlag Willmuth Aren-hovel, 1987); Gottfried Korff and Reinhard Riirup,eds., Berlin, Berlin: Die Ausstellung zur Geschichteder Stadt (Berlin: Nicolai, 1987), 543-60; and Be-nedikt Erenz, "Der Ort, der Stort," Die Zeit, 9 Sep-tember 1988. Debate about the disposition of this"landscape of terror" is closely related to attemptsby Germans to come to terms with the Nazi legacy,a topic discussed by Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The Hol-ocaust and the Historians (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-vard University Press, 1981) and Richard J. Evans,In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and theAttempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (London: I.B.Tauris and Co. Ltd., 1989). This debate is likely toincrease in intensity in the wake of East and WestGerman unification; many sites are likely to be reap-praised in light of this development.


the demand that sites of Nazi atrocities bememorialized for eternity. Without ques-tion, the Holocaust has inspired some ofthe most forceful memorials of modern times(figure 3). The pressure to sustain these sa-cred places is growing ever stronger asmembers of the last generation of Holo-caust survivors seek, in their remainingyears, to leave enduring testimony to theevil of the Holocaust.

These cases bring to mind other eventsof violence and tragedy where calls formonuments divide opinion and provokeheated public debate. Generally, this de-bate is resolved in favor of one of four out-comes for landscape: sanctification,designation, rectification, or effacement. Aswas the case above with respect to concen-tration camps, sanctification entails con-struction of a memorial—perhaps a building,monument, or park—and ritual dedication

of a site to the memory of an event, martyr,great individual, or group of victims. Des-ignation revolves around the marking of anexceptional event without the religiousovertones borne of sanctification. Rectifi-cation occurs, generally, after accidentaltragedy, when a place or building is "putright" and reused. As was noted above forSalem and Berlin, effacement occurs bothactively and passively after particularlyshameful events and involves obliterationof the evidence of violence.

The most striking aspect of all four out-comes is the length of time required fortransformation to occur. Even in cases wheretragedy sites become transfigured intoshrines of national, state, or civic identity,their sanctification frequently involves alengthy struggle. In the first place, as manyhistorians have noted, historical concep-tions of a national past are almost entirely

Figure 3. The rail siding leading to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Memorials to the victimsof the Holocaust are among the most compelling reminders of twentieth-century genocide. In Berlinand elsewhere, symbols of Nazi power were effaced.


Figure 4. The Boston Massacre marker in Boston's State Street. The hub of the memorial isbelieved to lie where the first blood of the Revolutionary War was shed by Crispus Attucks on 5March 1770. This memorial was laid in 1886. A monument commemorating the massacre was builtseveral blocks away on the Boston Common in 1888.

retrospective and take time to evolve.25 The

American Revolutionary and Civil Wars had

to be won, for instance, before people be-

of the most useful sources in this large lit-erature are Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds.,The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1983); George Allan, The Impor-tances of the Past: A Meditation on the Authority ofTradition (Albany: State University of New York Press,1986); Bernard Lewis, History: Remembered, Re-covered, Invented (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1975); Richard Johnson, GregorMcLennan, Bill Schwarz, and David Sutton, eds.,Making Histories: Studies in History- Writing and Pol-itics (London: Hutchinson, 1982); Michael Kammen,Selvages and Biases: The Fabric of History in Amer-ican Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,1987); John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness, or,The Remembered Past (New York: Harper and Row,1968); Patricia N. Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest:The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York:Norton, 1987); and Paul Thompson, The Voice of thePast: Oral History, 2nd Edition (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1988).

came interested in identifying key events

of the struggle. Second, as has been noted

above, tragedies carry intense equivocal

meaning and people may hesitate to sanc-

tify sites of tragedy without first reinter-

preting their meaning. The initial horror of

a tragedy usually must pass before its sig-

nificance can be assessed and its site sanc-

tified. As a consequence, years or decades

may pass before sites achieve the status of

national shrines. Until then, the sites may

lie abandoned and virtually ignored.

Nowadays, the Boston Massacre of 1770

is viewed as the first act of violence of the

Revolutionary War era, but more than one

hundred years passed before it was per-

manently marked (figure 4). Even after this

was accomplished, people argued against

the marker on the grounds that the massa-

cre was little more than a street fight, an

undignified provocation of British troops


Figure 5. A memorial raised outside Goliad, Texas, in 1936 at the gravesite of those men mas-sacred by Mexican troops after surrendering during the Texas Revolution. The battle sites of theTexas Revolution, like those of the American Revolution, went unmarked for many years beforebeing sanctified. It took Texans a century to mark the sites associated with origins of the republicand state. The Goliad site is perhaps less celebrated than the Alamo massacre site in San Antonio,possibly because the Alamo's defenders died fighting whereas the soldiers of Goliad surrenderedbefore being executed.

unfit for commemoration as part of Amer-ica's "glorious" struggle for indepen-dence.26 Similarly, many years passed beforeTexans sanctified the Goliad and Alamobattlefields, both sites of needless massa-cres (figure 5). In fact, the Alamo was al-most lost to urban development before itwas rehabilitated and enshrined to mark analmost mythical view of Texas's origin asa republic and state. The same delay oc-curred in the cases of Chicago's civic tra-gedies: the Fort Dearborn Massacre of 1812,and the Chicago Fire of 1871. Initially thesewere viewed as at least inauspicious, and

26Franklin J. Moses, "Mob or Martyrs? CrispusAttucks and the Boston Massacre," The Bostonian 1(1895): 640-50.

perhaps even shameful, events. Only laterdid they become reinterpreted —andmarked—as episodes demonstrating Chi-cago's civic spirit as a hardworking, en-during, and enterprising city.

In contrast to these landscape "stig-mata" of national, regional, and local iden-tity, places go unmarked and even unnoticedwhen defaced by other types of violence.Accidents, for example, seem to have littleeffect on landscape, unless they claim manyvictims of a single group and induce a feel-ing of community loss. Society seems tofind little redeeming value in accidentaltragedy. Once the immediate causes havebeen deduced and rectified, the site of anaccident is usually forgotten. As a result,the sites of many accidental tragedies haveremained unmarked or have been reused.


Figure 6. Site of the former home of serial murderer John Gacy in Des Plaines, a suburb ofChicago. The house was disassembled during the police search for victims in 1978-79. The remainsof the structure were bulldozed shortly after completion of the investigation. Effacement is onecommon response to particularly shameful acts of violence, although a sense of stigma may stillremain attached to the site itself.

Among these are the sites of many of theworst accidental tragedies in American his-tory, such as the Iroquois Theater fire (1903)and the Our Lady of Angels School fire(1958), both in Chicago, and the CocoanutGrove fire (1942) in Boston. By isolating,cleansing, and returning such sites toeveryday use, people absolve them of guiltin a manner common to other ritualprocesses.27

In the case of accidental tragedy, thepassage of time is a useful means of ab-solution. But when a tragedy is not acci-

27Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure andAnti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969) and ArnoldVan Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1960).

dental, rectification resulting from thehealing action of time is not always ac-ceptable, and this is where social pressureis most outwardly evident. People may beso outraged and shamed by the appearanceof violence in their community, perhapscaused by someone they knew and trustedas a neighbor, that they demand active, notpassive, effacement. In the case of manymass murders, for instance, people havenot hesitated to destroy the site of the mas-sacre—or even the murderer's home—assoon as possible after the violence (figure6).28 Apart from assassinations of promi-

28Perhaps the best known of these demolitions fol-lowed the 1984 mass murder in a fast-food restaurant


nent individuals, which tend to inspire me-morials, the general trend is for murder sitesto be rectified gradually, as are places ofaccidental tragedy.29 But slow decay is un-acceptable in instances of particularly hei-nous crimes. In some cases, the sense ofshame and stigma is so great that a place,once effaced, will remain isolated and un-used indefinitely, never to be reincorpor-ated into the activities of daily life.30 Perhapsthe "silence" of these sites actually does"speak" to the senselessness of the vio-lence as eloquently as any monumentwould.31 In the end, all these cases showhow social pressures shape landscape into

in San Ysidro, California. The restaurant was razedand the land donated to the City of San Diego. Thereare, however, many less well-known cases. Duringthe course of the investigation of a serial murder in asuburb of Chicago in 1978-79, the killer's house andgarage were leveled by public officials (figure 6). Inthe case of a series of murders discovered in 1957 inPlainfield, Wisconsin, the killer's house was de-stroyed by arson. Many sites of mass murder are rec-tified, but about half are effaced.

29For example, see the Martin Luther King, Jr.,Memorial shown in the cover illustration for this is-sue. The memorial is on the balcony of the LorraineMotel in Memphis, Tennessee, where King was as-sassinated; it was created by the motel's owner, Wal-ter Bailey. It took nearly twenty years for supportersof a memorial to gain public funding that would con-vert the motel into a civil rights educational center.Similar tensions have been aroused by attempts tomemorialize victims of American violence of the 1960sat Kent State University, Jackson State University,and the John F. Kennedy assassination site in Dallas,and with respect to the Vietnam Veterans Memorialin Washington, D.C.

30Shame and stigma may have a powerful effect onthe shaping of landscape and the archival record. Fu-ture research in this area is supported by a suggestiveliterature on shame and stigma and their bearing oninterpersonal relationships, including Erving Goff-man, Stigma: Notes on the Management of SpoiledIdentity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963);Agnes Heller, The Power of Shame: A Rational Per-spective (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985);and Edward Jones et al., Social Stigma: The Psy-chology of Marked Relationships (New York: W. H.Freeman, 1984).

31Bernard P. Dauenhauer, Silence: The Phenome-non and Its Ontological Significance (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1980) and Peter Ehrenhaus,"Silence and Symbolic Expression," Communica-tions Monographs 55 (1988): 41-57.

an acceptable representation of the past. Thedisposition of the tragedy sites comes tomirror society's view of its own motivesand aspirations.

Implications for Archival Appraisaland Retention

The issue of sustaining or effacingmemories of tragedy has a direct bearingon debate concerning the collection andappraisal of archival materials. In 1970,historian Howard Zinn faulted archivistsfor neglecting to collect records docu-menting significant social minorities out-side the mainstream of American life.32

In a sense, Zinn was maintaining that ar-chives err in favor of preserving recordsof dominant social groups at the expenseof the less powerful. As the discussion oftragedy shows, the issue of selectivity iseven more involved. The American land-scape, too, is notably silent in regard tothese less powerful groups. Few monu-ments mark the course of American racialand ethnic intolerance. But even with re-spect to the activities of dominant groups,powerful forces may intervene to influ-ence the record of the past, regardless ofwhether it is represented in the landscapeor in an archival collection.

The Dallas County Historical Founda-tion had difficulty raising funds to open anexhibit entitled "The Sixth Floor" in theformer Texas School Book Depository fromwhere Lee Harvey Oswald shot PresidentJohn Kennedy. The foundation's fund-rais-ing efforts were hampered by a division ofpublic opinion concerning the exhibit. Somepeople felt that an exhibit was needed,whereas others believed it would only serveto glorify the assassin, since Dallas had al-ready built a cenotaph honoring PresidentKennedy.33 The Historical Museum of South

32Hinding, "Toward Documentation.""Candace Floyd, "Too Close for Comfort," His-

tory News, September 1985, 9-14.


Florida was severely criticized for collect-ing the motorcycle of a black man whosealleged murder by Miami police in 1980sparked a major riot. Some museum spon-sors withdrew their support in the wake ofrumors that the motorcycle was to be puton display.

Archivists have never come to terms withthe concept of the cultural effacement ofmemory. They have long recognized thenecessity of selective retention, but havedone so to avoid squandering limited ar-chival resources on redundant or relativelyunimportant records. Similarly, they haveaccepted the necessity of restricting accessto certain records, at least temporarily, inorder to balance national security, personalprivacy, or competitive business consider-ations against the value of public availa-bility. But the possibility that a positivepurpose might be served by conspiring toefface the collective memory of a particularevent is alien to prevailing archival values,at least in contemporary Western civiliza-tion. The point here is not to realign thosevalues, but to help understand the conflictsinherent in any society's attempts to re-member and deal with its past. A criticalrole for archives may well be to serve as acountervailing force to effacement as a"source of last resort."

For archivists, the idea of archives as

memory is more than a metaphor. The doc-uments and artifacts they collect are im-portant resources for extending the spatialand temporal range of human communi-cation. This view implies that attitudestoward the past, as well as visions of thefuture, can sometimes condition collectingpolicies. In regard to the long-term storageof nuclear waste, it may be imperative thatarchives be employed to protect future gen-erations from danger. Conversely, the his-tory of tragedies exposes the power of socialpressure to shape society's view of the pastas represented in cultural landscapes and,by extension, archival collections. At thesame time, the examples discussed in thisarticle suggest how much remains to belearned about the dynamics of collectivememory. Theorists must eventually cometo terms with how archives, as communi-cational resources, are to be related to othermeans of memory conservation, and whysome events are so well documented andstir so much interest while others leave sucha small mark on the historical record, tothe point where archives become a memoryof last resort. Pursued in these directions,research can yield insight into the relation-ship of societies to their archives so thatthe concept of memory is not overlooked—or forgotten—in archival theory.

to remember and forget: archives, memory, and...

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