The case of modern memory

Journal of Modern History

Volumn 73, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 87-117

  Fritzsche, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 2342454531     PISSN: 00222801     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/319880     Document Type: Review

References (135)

1. Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History (New York, 1993).
2. For critical but related responses, see Steven R. Weisman, "Coming to Terms with Kosovo's Old' Hatreds," New York Times (June 12, 1999);
3. and David Remnick, "The Black Page," New Yorker (June 14, 1999).
4. On Janković and Čelik, see Chuck Sudetic, Blood and Vengeance: One Family's Story of the War in Bosnia (New York, 1998), pp. 63, 219.
5. Charles King ties the vignette together in his review, "Shallow Graves," Times Literary Supplement (October 2, 1998), p. 34.
6. Sudetic, p. xxxi.
7. Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth, and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven, Conn., 1997), pp. 15, 65;
8. Roger Cohen, Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo (New York, 1998), p. xvi;
9. Marcus Tanner, Croatia: A Nation Forged in War (New Haven, Conn., 1997);
10. and Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts.
11. Kaplan, p. 8.
12. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972), pp. 142-43;
13. Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (London, 1941; reprint, New York, 1982), pp. 1, 128.
14. The conception of the transparency of history and of the past is effectively analyzed by way of Greek examples in David E. Sutton, Memories Cast in Stone: The Relevance of the Past in Everyday Life (Oxford, 1998). Incidentally, Sutton anticipates me and makes excellent use of sharply differing opinions on Yugoslavia to make sense of one Greek community's historical consciousness.
15. Tanner, p. 153; Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of the Dead: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York, 1999), p. 97.
16. See also Robert M. Hayden, "Recounting the Dead: The Rediscovery and Redefinition of Wartime Massacres in Late- and Post-Communist Yugoslavia," in Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism, ed. Rubie S. Watson (Santa Fe, N.M., 1994), pp. 167-84.
17. Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina, introduction by William H. McNeill (Chicago, 1977), p. 92. See also Sudetic on Višegrad, and Cohen, pp. 8, 173, 176.
18. Cohen, pp. 120-21. See also Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford, Calif., 1998).
19. Cohen, pp. 269, 158.
20. Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (New York, 1998), pp. xxx, 330, 356.
21. Pierre Nora, "General Introduction: Between Memory and History," in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, ed. Pierre Nora, 3 vols. (New York, 1996-98), 1:1-20,
22. and "The Era of CommemorationRealms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, ," in ibid., 3:612-37.
23. Susan A. Crane, "Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory," American Historical Review 102 (1997): 1372-85;
24. Rudy Koshar, Germany's Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), p. 7;
25. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, "Introduction," in War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 2-3.
26. Steven Englund, "The Ghost of Nation Past," Journal of Modern History 64 (1992): 299-320.
27. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 4, 15.
28. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Ibid., pp. 275-76; Koshar, p. 18.
29. On this theme, see Helga Nowotny, Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience, trans. Neville Plaice (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 22-23.
30. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, N.C., 1987), p. 13;
31. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and the Avant-Garde (London, 1995), p. xii.
32. Koselleck's arguments echo those of Klaus Behrens, Friedrich Schlegels Geschichtsphilosophie (1794-1808): Ein Beitrag zur politischen Romantik (Tübingen, 1984);
33. Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt, 1966);
34. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985);
35. Georges Poulet, Studies in Human Time, trans. Elliott Coleman (Baltimore, 1956);
36. and Rudolf Wendorff, Zeit und Kultur: Geschichte des Zeitbewusstseins in Europa (Opladen, 1980).
37. Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), pp. 3-4, 22, 24.
38. James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, 1998), p. 24.
39. James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Ibid., pp. 5, 78, 89, 149-50.
40. Pierre Nora, "Generation," in Nora, ed., 1:515.
41. Terdiman, p. 31.
42. See, e.g., Lowenthal.
43. Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York, 1980),
44. and On Collective Memory (Chicago, 1992).
45. See also Susan Crane, Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000), which was published too late for this review.
46. Richard Handler, "Is 'Identity' a Useful Cross-Cultural Concept?" in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, N.J., 1994), pp. 29-30.
47. Mary Jo Maynes, Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and German Workers' Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995), pp. 11-12;
48. Thomas W. Laqueur, "Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative," in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, Calif., 1989), pp. 177, 195.
49. On the way in which subjects are constituted by changing notions of the admissibility of evidence, see Joan Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 773-97.
50. James Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life Writing (Chicago, 1998), pp. xiv-xv.
51. Alon Confino, "Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method," American Historical Review 102 (1997): 1402.
52. See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London, 1991), pp. 197, 206.
53. Pierre Nora, "Die 'Histoire de France' von Ernest Lavisse. Pietas Erga Patriam," in Zwischen Geschichte und Gedächtnis (Berlin, 1990), p. 60.
54. Nora, "General Introduction" (n. 11 above), 1:3;
55. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, p. 86.
56. Pim den Boer, History as a Profession: The Study of History in France, 1818-1914 (Princeton, N.J., 1998), pp. 341-42.
57. Augustin Thierry, "Autobiographical Preface," in The Historical Essays (Philadelphia, 1845), p. xi,
58. and "First Letter on the History of France," in The Historical Essays (ibid., pp. 96-97.
59. Boer, pp. 346, 364. See also Linda Orr, Headless History: Nineteenth-Century French Historiography of the Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), which appeared after the publication of Boer's original Dutch text.
60. Pierre Nora, "Lavisse, the Nation's Teacher";
61. and Jaccques and Mona Ozouf, "Le tour de la France par deux enfants: The Little Red Book of the Republic," both in Nora, ed. (n. 11 above), vol. 2.
62. In Germany's Transient Pasts (n. 12 above), p. 44, Koshar felicitously refers to the process of "scrutinizing society for its 'nationness.'"
63. Koshar, pp. 8, 259, 331. See also Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, Calif., 1990);
64. and Alon Confino, The Nation as Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997).
65. Koshar, pp. 313, 322; Nora, "The Era of Commemoration" (n. 11 above), 3:618.
66. Sarah Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (Berkeley, Calif., 1999), pp. 55, 58.
67. Sarah Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (Ibid., pp. 178, 113, 193.
68. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, 1996), p. 34.
69. Farmer, pp. 6-7, 185. See also Pierre Birnbaum, "Grégoire, Dreyfus, Drancy, and the Rue Copernic: Jews at the Heart of French History," in Nora, ed., 1:415-17;
70. Antoine Prost, "The Algerian War in French Collective Memory," in Winter and Sivan, eds. (n. 12 above);
71. and Martin Evans, "Rehabilitating the Traumatized War Veteran: The Case of French Conscripts from the Algerian War, 1954-1962," in War and Memory in the Twentieth Century, ed. Martin Evans and Ken Lunn (Oxford, 1997), pp. 73-85.
72. The force with which Gaullist myths have represented the nation is also discussed in Katherine Conley, "The Myth of the 'Dernière poème': Robert Desnos and French Cultural Memory," in Act of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover, N.H., 1999), pp. 134-48;
73. Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, 1991);
74. and Pierre Nora, "Gaullists and Communists," in Nora, ed., vol. 1.
75. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J., 1992).
76. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), pp. 3-5.
77. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 144, 51, 94, 26.
78. Jay Winter, "Forms of Kinship and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Great War," in Winter and Sivan, eds., p. 42.
79. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, p. 44.
80. Winter, "Forms of Kinship and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Great War," p. 41.
81. Bodnar, pp. 13-14; Winter, "Forms of Kinship and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Great War," pp. 24, 33.
82. Winter, "Forms of Kinship and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Great War," pp. 43, 60.
83. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, p. 108. Winter's stress on "timelessness" is not careless: see pp. 53, 108, 113.
84. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, "Setting the Framework," in Winter and Sivan, eds. (n. 12 above), p. 6.
85. On this theme, see Elisabeth Domansky, "Militarization and Reproduction in World War I Germany," in Society, Culture and the State in Germany, 1870-1930, ed. Geoff Eley (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996).
86. Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 1919-1946 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 51, 120-21, 226-27.
87. Antoine Prost, "Monuments to the Dead," in Nora, ed. (n. 11 above), 2:323-24, 329-30;
88. Prost, "Verdun," in Nora, ed., 3:401.
89. See, e.g., Tony Judt, "The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe," Daedalus 121 (1992): 83-118.
90. Catherine Merridale, "War, Death, and Remembrance in Soviet Russia," in Winter and Sivan, eds., pp. 63, 75.
91. See also Jochen Hellbeck, "Laboratories of the Soviet Self: Diaries from the Stalin Era" (Ph.D diss., Columbia University, 1998);
92. and Igal Halfin, "From Darkness to Light: Student Communist Autobiography during NEP," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 45 (1997): 210-36.
93. Merridale, pp. 75-77, 79. On memories under state socialist regimes, see also Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, 1994);
94. Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory (New Brunswick, N.J., 1994); and Watson, ed. (n. 6 above).
95. See, e.g., Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Turning Key: Autobiography and the Subjective Impulse since 1800 (Cambridge, 1984); Laqueur (n. 26 above), pp. 176-204;
96. Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780-1930 (London, 1995),
97. Past Tenses: Essays on Writing, Autobiography; and History (London, 1992);
98. and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modem Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
99. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995), p. 24.
100. Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London, 1986), pp. 16, 29-30;
101. Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London, 1995), pp. 4, 8, 63-65, 82-83.
102. Quoted in Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), p. 48.
103. Kuhn, p. 42.
104. Hirsch, pp. 11, 22-23, 192, 214.
105. Ibid., pp. 266-67.
106. John R. Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (New York, 1996), pp. xvi, 6, 18.
107. John R. Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (Ibid., pp. xvi-xviii.
108. Anne Martin-Fugier, "Bourgeois Rituals," in A History of Private Life: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, ed. Michelle Perrot (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), pp. 263-65.
109. Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998), p. 24. See also Scott (n. 26 above), Trouillot (n. 59 above), and Gillis (n. 65 above).
110. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience (n. 40 above), pp. 3-4.
111. Mieke Bal, "Introduction," in Bal et al., eds. (n. 41 above), pp. x-xi.
112. Shoshana Felman, "Education and Crises, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching," in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, 1995), pp. 16-17.
113. See also Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London, 1991).
114. Cathy Caruth, "Trauma and Experience: Introduction," in Caruth, ed., pp. 10-11.
115. Martin Jay, "Against Consolation: Walter Benjamin and the Refusal to Mourn," in Winter and Sivan, eds. (n. 12 above), pp. 228-29.
116. Kevin Newmaik, "Traumatic Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the Shock of Laughter," in Caruth, ed., p. 238.
117. Susan J. Brison, "Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self," in Bal et al., eds., p. 42.
118. Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), pp. 196, 200.
119. LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, pp. 45-46, 111.
120. See, e.g., Charles Maier, "A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy, and Denial," History and Memory 5 (1993): 136-51; Wachtel (n. 8 above), pp. 237-45;
121. Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley, Calif., 1994);
122. and Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, 1999).
123. LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, p. 196.
124. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, Conn., 1991), pp. 198-203. Italics added.
125. Merridale (n. 56 above), p. 61.
126. Claudia Koonz, "Between Memory and Oblivion: Concentration Camps in German Memory," in Gillis, ed. (n. 25 above), p. 258; Winter (n. 48 above).
127. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996);
128. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, Calif., 1991);
129. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernisierung: Eine Kontroverse (Frankfurt, 1996);
130. and Ulrich Beck, Die Erfindung des Politischen (Frankfurt, 1993).
131. Verdery (n. 6 above), pp. 126-27.
132. Ibid., pp. 29, 127.
133. What I regard as the signature phrase of the modern is Johannes von Mullet's, a noted historian who writes to his brother about his astonishment at the French Revolution. See his letter of May 20, 1797, in Johannes von Müller, Briefe in Auswahl, ed. Edgar Bonjour (Basel, 1954), p. 212.
134. On Hegel, see Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (New York, 1992), p. 293;
135. otherwise, see Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (New York, 1995).