AHR forum: Writing the individual back into collective memory

American Historical Review

Volumn 102, Issue 5, 1997, Pages 1372-1385

  Crane, Susan A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0000058690     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2171068     Document Type: Review

References (96)

1. Mark Strand, "Orpheus Alone," in Strand, The Continuous Life: Poems (New York, 1990), 9.
2. See John R. Gillis's introductory essay to Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, N.J., 1994).
3. For recent discussions of the theory of collective memory by and for historians, see Keith Michael Baker, "Memory and Practice," Representations 11 (Summer 1985): 134-59;
4. Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn, eds., "Memory and Counter Memory," special issue of Representations 26 (Spring 1989);
5. James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992);
6. Amos Funkenstein, "Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness," History and Memory 1 (Spring/Summer 1989): 5-26;
7. Paula Hamilton, "The Knife Edge: Debates about Memory and History,"
8. and Chris Healy, "Histories and Collecting: Museums, Objects and Memories," in Hamilton and Kate Darian-Smith, eds., Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia (Oxford, 1994);
9. Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, N.H., 1993);
10. Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory (New Brunswick, N.J., 1994), is designed to serve as a textbook and includes a useful annotated bibliography.
11. Substantial catalogs of American, French, and British collective memory practices, respectively, include Michael Kammen, The Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991);
12. Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, 7 vols. (Paris, 1984-92);
13. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985);
14. and Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London, 1994).
15. Oral history's peculiar relationship to collective memory and anthropological approaches are presented in Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory;
16. Thomas Butler, ed., Memory: History, Culture and the Mind (Oxford, 1989);
17. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989);
18. and the special issue "Memory and History," History and Anthropology 2, no. 2 (1986).
19. See also David William Cohen, The Combing of History (Chicago, 1994).
20. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (Paris, 1896; English transl., New York, 1911).
21. Bergson's conception of memory as an action occurring in the present, rather than as an element of archival material located in one spot in the brain, emphasized the lived experience of recalling and remembering the past in the living, active present. He foreshadowed current psychological and neurological research that focuses on the multiple functions of memories, the interacting brain components that produce them, and the nature of the experiences in which memories are created and recalled: see Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York, 1994);
22. Daniel L. Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind and the Past (New York, 1996).
23. See also the discussion of the bodily aspects of Bergson's theory in Matt K. Matsuda, The Memory of the Modern (New York, 1996).
24. Funkenstein, "Collective Memory," 19.
25. This is not to argue that historical consciousness did not exist before 1800 but, rather, that it took on significant new forms that deliberately spoke for collective memory. For a summary of the "arts of memory" and memory theaters drawn from Frances Yates's seminal study, see Hutton, History as an Art of Memory.
26. On the antiquarianism and curiosity cabinets, as well as natural historical collecting, see Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine, Allison Brown, trans. (Princeton, N.J., 1995);
27. Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, Calif., 1994);
28. Krzyszt of Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500-1800, Elizabeth Wiles-Portier, trans. (Cambridge, 1990);
29. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London, 1992).
30. See Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge, 1984);
31. Susan Crane, "Collecting and Historical Consciousness: New Forms for Collective Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany" (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1992).
32. Still worth noting for its discussion of both the discipline of history and related collecting practices is G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (1913; rpt. edn., New York, 1959).
33. In the rapidly growing literature on museums, collecting, and preservation in Europe, see also Phillipa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838-1886 (Cambridge, 1986);
34. Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton, N.J., 1996);
35. Daniel J. Sherman, Worthy Monuments: Art Museums and the Politics of Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1989);
36. and Sherman and Irit Rogoff, eds., Museum/Culture (London, 1994).
37. Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, Francis J. Ditter, Jr., and Vida Yazdi Ditter, trans. (New York, 1980),
38. contains the crucial essay, "Historical Memory and Collective Memory" (50-87);
39. see also Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, Lewis A. Coser, ed. (Chicago, 1992), which contains selections from "The Social Frameworks of Memory" and other essays.
40. Compare Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam, "Collective Memory - What Is It?" History and Memory 8 (Spring/Summer 1996): 30-50. Gedi and Elam argue that Halbwachs rejected Durkheim's "fine distinction . . . between individual and collective representations" by completely obliterating individual memory and its representative status (36).
41. They see Halbwachs as presenting the old idea of social "myth" in new clothes. It should be noted, however, that their argument is based on a reading of "The Social Frameworks" essays rather than the later work collected in The Collective Memory, where Halbwachs indeed articulates the potential (and limits) of individual memory in collective memory. Further, in the later essays, Halbwachs stresses the plurality of social frameworks and each individual's multiple memberships, in which a single totalizing "myth" could not function.
42. Halbwachs, "Historical Memory and Collective Memory," 84, 72.
43. Halbwachs, "Historical Memory and Collective Memory," 78.
44. Halbwachs, "Historical Memory and Collective Memory," 64.
45. See Halbwachs, "Historical Memory and Collective Memory," 55.
46. Halbwachs, "Historical Memory and Collective Memory," 80.
47. Halbwachs, "Historical Memory and Collective Memory," 83.
48. See Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1988);
49. Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990);
50. Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (Cambridge, 1991);
51. Peter Reichel, Politik mit der Erinnerung: Gedächtnisorte im Streit um die Nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit (Munich, 1995).
52. On the monumentalization and preservation of conflicted collective memory, see James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, Conn., 1995);
53. Sarah Farmer, "Symbols That Face Two Ways: Commemorating the Victims of Nazism and Stalinism at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen," Representations 49 (Winter 1995);
54. Rudy Koshar, "Building Pasts: Historic Preservation and Identity in Twentieth Century Germany,", Commemorations.
55. and Claudia Koonz, "Between Memory and Oblivion: Concentration Camps in German Memory" both in Gillis, Commemorations.
56. The experiences of trauma and repression are aspects of collective memory that deserve particular attention; see Michael S. Roth's collected essays, The Ironist's Cage: Memory, Trauma and the Construction of History (New York, 1995);
57. and Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore, Md., 1996).
58. See also Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, eds., Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York, 1996).
59. Pierre Nora, "Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire" Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7-25.
60. See also Steven England, "The Ghost of Nation Past," Journal of Modern History 64 (June 1992): 299-320;
61. Hutton, History as an Art, 124-53;
62. Nancy Wood, "Memory's Remains: Les lieux de mémoire," History and Memory 6 (Spring/Summer 1994): 123-49;
63. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Vol. 1: Conflicts and Divisions, under the direction of Pierre Nora, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (New York, 1996- ).
64. Nora, "Between History and Memory," 7.
65. Halbwachs, "Historical Memory and Collective Memory," 52.
66. Nora, "Between History and Memory," 12.
67. Nora, "Between History and Memory," 19.
68. Yosef Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982; rpt. edn., New York, 1989).
69. See Funkenstein, "Historical Consciousness," 12-19;
70. see also Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley, Calif., 1993).
71. See David Meyer, "Remembering Zakhor: A Super-Commentary," History and Memory 4 (Fall/Winter 1992): 129-48;
72. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Jews: History, Memory and the Present, David Ames Curtis, trans. and ed. (New York, 1996), 57-62.
73. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 95.
74. Cited in Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 102.
75. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 197-98.
76. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 116.
77. "Testimony" implies both spiritual and evidentiary discourses, a moral or legal imperative to attest to memory. The potential richness of this vein of analysis for historians can be drawn from literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory: see Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York, 1992);
78. and Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, Conn., 1991).
79. Nora, "Between History and Memory," 18.
80. Nora, "Between History and Memory," 18.
81. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 95.
82. Nora, "Between History and Memory," 18.
83. Daphne Patai, "Sick and Tired of Scholars' Nouveau Solipsism," Chronicle of Higher Education (February 23, 1994): A52;
84. see also the forum "Four Views on the Place of the Personal in Scholarship," Publications of the Modern Language Association 111 (October 1996).
85. The problem of when to use the subjective, self-reflexive voice in historical writing was raised at the "Narrating Histories Workshop" in April 1994 at the California Institute of Technology, where "the debate over the 'I' in the text was, without a doubt, the most heated of the workshop," Robert Rosenstone, et al., "Experiments in Narrating Histories: A Workshop," Perspectives (September 1994): 7-10, see 8.
86. Historians at the meeting were in general more willing to consider experimenting with fictional writing in historical narratives than with using the first-person voice anywhere beyond the introduction or acknowledgments. Philippe Carrard, Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier (Baltimore, Md., 1992), 86-104, includes a discussion of the use of the first person in Annales school historical writing.
87. have also discussed the relationship between autobiography and historical writing in "(Not) Writing History: Rethinking the Intersections of Personal History and Collective Memory with Hans von Aufsess," History and Memory 8 (Spring/Summer 1996): 5-29.
88. Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968, Lisa Erdberg, trans. (Hanover, N.H., 1996).
89. A panel called "Autobiography, Personal Identity, and History" at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, January 3, 1997, discussed only autobiographies written by historians. See the articles previously published by two of the participants: Bonnie G. Smith, "History and Genius: The Narcotic, Erotic, and Baroque Life of Germaine de Stael,"
90. and Jeremy D. Popkin, "'Ego-histoire and Beyond': Contemporary French Historian-Autobiographers," in French Historical Studies 19 (Fall 1996): 1059-83 and 1139-67.
91. Samuel, Theatres of Memory, 17.
92. Le Goff, History and Memory, 99.
93. The role of the archive, particularly in the newly expanded electronic sense, thus becomes one not simply of preservation but of infinite selection. Wolfgang Ernst has developed the most intriguing reconceptualization of the archive, stemming from a Foucauldian analysis; see "Reisen ins Innere des Archivs," in Ulrich Johannes Schneider, et al., eds., Philosophie und Reisen (Leipzig, 1996), 160-77.
94. On the new technologies of memory, see also Healy, "Histories and Collecting," 46-48;
95. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Making Time in a Culture of Amnesia (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), 34-35;
96. Le Goff, History and Memory, 90-94.