AHR forum. Collective memory and cultural history: Problems of method

American Historical Review

Volumn 102, Issue 5, 1997, Pages 1386-1402

  Confino, Alon ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33750193683     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2171069     Document Type: Review

References (90)

1. Also in cases where the use of memory has been insignificant in terms of method and theory, the memory perspective itself has proved to be thought provoking. Take, for example, the recent debate on post-Zionism in Israel, where a group of scholars, called "the new historians," has questioned Zionist historiography's most cherished assumptions. The scholars have criticized, among others, the myth of the heroic birth of Israel, Zionism's repression of the Palestinian tragedy, and, more generally, the reduction of historical studies in Israel to an ideological and educational tool of Zionism. These and other claims opened a public debate by scholars and laypersons about the historical meaning of Zionism. At the center of the rethinking of Zionist history has been the term "memory." As Anita Shapira, a leading historian of Zionism and a critic of the "new historians" observed, "the debate is less about historiography than it is about collective memory." But the notion of memory has been used either perfunctorily or as a hollow metaphor defining memory as a monolith in expressions like "the collective memory of early statehood" or "Palestinian collective memory." In terms of method, the debate has centered on the actions, ideology, and motivation of institutions and leading figures, while a social and cultural history of memory's construction and reception has not been taken, as well as the interrelations among different memories within and between Israeli and Palestinian societies. These topics still await their historians. For a good introduction to the post-Zionist controversy, see History and Memory 7 (Spring/Summer 1995):
2. "Special Issue on Israeli Historiography Revisited," especially Anita Shapira, "Politics and Collective Memory: The Debate over the 'New Historians' in Israel," 9-34;
3. Ilan Pappe, "Critique and Agenda: The Post-Zionist Scholars in Israel," 66-90.
4. For a collection of essays about the recent historical disputes in Israel, see Robert Wistrich and David Ohana, eds., The Shaping of Israeli Identity: Myth, Memory, and Trauma (London, 1995).
5. The literature is enormous. See, for example, Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, Conn., 1991);
6. Ronald Berger, Constructing a Collective Memory of the Holocaust: A Life History of Two Brothers' Survival (Niwot, 1995).
7. The term "vehicles of memory" is used by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (New York, 1989).
8. Pierre Nora's magisterial seven-volume collection Les lieux de mémoire provides a cornucopia of memory sites: Les lieux de mémoire, Vol. 1:
9. La république, Vols. 2-4:
10. La nation, Vol. 5-7:
11. Les France (Paris, 1984-92).
12. See, for example, Frederick Crews, The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute (New York, 1995);
13. James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, Conn., 1993);
14. Miriam Hansen, "'Schindler's List' Is Not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory," Critical Inquiry 22 (Winter 1996): 292-312;
15. Diane Barthel, Historic Preservation: Collective Memory and Historical Identity (New Brunswick, N.J., 1996);
16. Daniel Sherman, "Objects of Memory: History and Narrative in French War Museums," French Historical Studies 19 (Spring 1995): 49-74;
17. Michael Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (Philadelphia, 1996);
18. Southern Cultures 2 (Fall 1995), special issue on memory and the South;
19. Keith Wilson, ed., Forging the Collective Memory: Government and International Historians through Two World Wars (Providence, R.I., 1996).
20. For recent, current, and instant history of memory, see Barbie Zelizer, Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory (Chicago, 1992);
21. Thomas Johnson, The Rehabilitation of Richard Nixon: The Media's Effect on Collective Memory (New York, 1996);
22. Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (New York, 1992);
23. Edward Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York, 1996).
24. Lynn Hunt warned several years ago against the danger of defining the new cultural history topically: "Just as social history sometimes moved from one group to another (workers, women, children, ethnic groups, the old, the young) without developing much sense of cohesion and interaction between topics, so too a cultural history defined topically could degenerate into an endless search for new cultural practices to describe, whether carnivals, cat massacres, or impotence trials." See Hunt, "Introduction," in The New Cultural History, Lynn Hunt, ed. (Berkeley, Calif., 1989), 9. The history of memory faces a similar danger. I was reminded of memory studies when I recently read Jacques Revel's critical evaluation of social history: "'Classical' social history was mainly conceived as a history of social entities . . . As a result, when one looks through the enormous mass of results accumulated over the past thirty or forty years, one has a certain sense of déjà vu and stagnant categories. From one work to the next, the characters are the same though the cast may vary." Memory studies could also end up being predictable, as yet another memory is subjected to an analysis of its construction, appropriation, contestation.
25. Jacques Revel, "Microanalysis and the Construction of the Social," in Histories: French Constructions of the Past, Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds. (New York, 1995), 498.
26. Jacques Le Goff, "Mentalities: A History of Ambiguities," in Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical Methodology, Le Goff and Pierre Nora, eds. (New York, 1984), 166.
27. It was first published as "Les mentalités: Une histoire ambiguë," in Faire de l'histoire, Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, eds., vol. 3 (Paris, 1974).
28. François Furet, "Beyond the Annales," Journal of Modern History 55 (September 1983): 405.
29. The French history of mentalité was justifiably criticized on grounds that it, first, tended to view every historical problem as a psychological problem and second, reduce categories of mentality to social analysis (of hierarchy, income, occupation), a method that reduced beliefs and values to a social structure established a priori. See Carlo Ginzburg, "A proposito della raccolta dei saggi storici di Marc Bloch," Studi medievali 3 (1965): 335-53;
30. Roger Chartier, "Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories," in Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, Dominick LaCapra and Steven Kaplan, eds. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), 13-46, esp. 22-32.
31. For a critical appraisal, see also Patrick Hutton, "The History of Mentalities: The New Map of Cultural History," History and Theory 20 (1981): 237-59.
32. This has been Furet's argument about the study of mentalities. I found Furet's critique of the history of mentality insightful for my thinking about memory. See Furet, "Beyond the Annales," 404-07.
33. Robert Mandrou, "Histoire/L'histoire des mentalités," in Encyclopaedia universalis (1971; rpt. edn., Paris, 1985), 9: 366.
34. For Warburg's idea of social memory, see Kurt Forster, "Aby Warburg's History of Art: Collective Memory and the Social Mediation of Images," Daedalus (Winter 1976): 169-76;
35. E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, 2d edn. (Chicago, 1986), 239-59. Gombrich presents Warburg's fragmented notion of social memory but does not attempt to provide a comprehensive view.
36. For a critical evaluation of Gombrich's book, see Felix Gilbert, "From Art History to the History of Civilization: Aby Warburg," Journal of Modern History 44 (1972): 381-91.
37. Seventy years after Warburg's death, his writings are still unavailable in English. Fortunately, Kurt Forster is now preparing the English edition of Warburg's collected writings (Gesammelte Schriften [Leipzig-Berlin, 1932]), to be published in the Getty Research Institute's book series Texts and Documents.
38. For a selection of Warburg's essays and several critical appraisals of his work, see Dieter Wuttke, ed., Aby Warburg: Ausgewälte Schriften und Würdigungen (Baden-Baden, 1980).
39. For some evaluations of Warburg's notions of culture and art history, see Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History (New Haven, Conn., 1989);
40. Yoshihiko Maikuma, Der Begriff der Kultur bei Warburg, Nietzsche und Burckhardt (Königstein, 1985);
41. Kurt Forster, "Aby Warburg: His Study of Ritual and Art on Two Continents," October 77 (Summer 1996): 6-24.
42. For an attempted feminist, poststructuralist, and psychoanalytic reading of Warburg, see Margaret Iverson, "Retrieving Warburg's Tradition," Art History 16 (December 1993): 541-53.
43. On the reception of Warburg's writings, see Michael Diers, "Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition of Cultural History," New German Critique 65 (Spring-Summer 1995): 59-74.
44. On his projected picture atlas of memory, which he called Mnemosyne, and which included photographs and reproductions of recurring human figures and gestures, see Dorothee Bauerle, Gespenstergeschichten für ganz Erwachsene: Ein Kommentar zu Aby Warburgs Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (Münster, 1988).
45. Peter Burke, "Aby Warburg as Historical Anthropologist," in Aby Warburg: Akten des internationalen Symposiums Hamburg 1990, Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers, and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, eds. (Weinheim, 1991), 39-44;
46. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York, 1995), 209-14;
47. Ron Chernow, The Warburgs (New York, 1993), 64-66.
48. Forster, "Aby Warburg's History of Art," 172.
49. Carlo Ginzburg, "From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method," in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore, Md., 1992), 21.
50. Maurice Halbwachs, La topographie légendaire des Evangiles en Terre sainte: Etude de mémoire collective (Paris, 1941);
51. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris, 1925).
52. In English, see Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, Lewis Coser, ed. and trans. (Chicago, 1992);
53. The Collective Memory, Francis Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter, trans. (New York, 1980).
54. On Halbwachs' formulation and use of collective memory, see Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, N.H., 1993), chap. 4.
55. Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France (London, 1973), 4.
56. Halbwachs received after World War I a Chair of Pedagogy and Sociology at the University of Strasbourg, where he began a close professional friendship with Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. When Bloch and Febvre founded the Annales d'histoire économique et sociales in 1929, Halbwachs became a member of the editorial board. See Coser, "Introduction," in Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 5-11. About the relation between Warburg and Halbwachs we know very little.
57. See Jan Assmann, "Collective Memory and Cultural Identity," New German Critique 65 (Spring-Summer 1995): 125.
58. Peter Burke poses this question in his discussion of social amnesia. See Burke, "History as Social Memory," in Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, Thomas Butler, ed. (New York, 1989), 108.
59. Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven, Conn., 1994), 9-10, 44.
60. Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
61. Robert Moeller, "War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany," AHR 101 (October 1996): 1008-48. The narrative trajectory of Holocaust and World War II memory as one of repression (1950s-60s), awakening (sometime during the 1960s), obsession (the 1970s and after) has an air of predictability. A common argument about Holocaust remembrance in Israel, for example, is that the Adolf Eichmann trial was the watershed between survivors' repression and state indifference before 1961 and growing interest and instrumentalization of the Holocaust later on. But this argument is correct only insofar as we explore the official state level. In everyday life, the Holocaust was everywhere between 1945 and 1961. The fundamental division in Israeli society between those who came from "there" and those who were "here" was often represented in small gestures, as when a survivor's number on the arm drew hisses and furtive glances or when a survivor's behavior was excused with the explanation, "Well, he was there." So far, this aspect has been captured better by writers than by historians.
62. See the novel by David Grossman, See Under: Love, Betsy Rosenberg, trans. (New York, 1989), and especially the masterful first story, "Momik."
63. My argument is not, in case such a clarification is needed, against every exploration of the political. The study of the political is fundamental because it allows cultural history to link with power and thus avoid being a rendition of the old history of ideas. My critique is of the particular mode of cultural history that reduces power to politics, and the political to top-down, public, and official manifestations.
64. Rousso, Vichy Syndrome, 272.
65. Rousso does not provide in his discussion of transmission any new information that was not already discussed in Part 1 about the evolution of the syndrome. We only get more of the same - more films, more books, more commemorations - though it is unclear what are the criteria according to which a source (say, de Gaulle's memoirs) is used to interpret the construction of the syndrome (Part 1) rather than its reception (Part 2).
66. Rousso, Vichy Syndrome, 219, emphasis added.
67. The danger of looking for evidence in the most visible places is clear when Rousso explains his choice of method in exploring the depth of the syndrome in French society: "Before 1971 . . . polling . . . [about World War II's issues] was practically non-existent. Since polling data are essential for what I want to do here, I have focused in what follows on the 1970s and 1980s" (Rousso, Vichy Syndrome, 272-73). Instead of posing a problem - how French men and women remembered Vichy - and looking for the answer everywhere, Rousso viewed polling data, which as a source should be a vehicle to establish an argument, as the essential factor, and looked for the answer where polling data existed. This is a little bit like looking for a lost coin under the lamppost because there is light there.
68. The status of evidence in the history of memory has been so far ignored, although this is a crucial issue. See the discussion of James Wilkinson, "A Choice of Fictions: Historians, Memory, and Evidence," Publications of the Modern Language Association 111 (January 1996): 80-92, who has a favorable view of Rousso's method.
69. Rousso, Vichy Syndrome, 221.
70. Rousso, Vichy Syndrome, 221. Rousso himself is conscious of this problem when he writes of his method that it "may at times seem rather circular . . . [and] is intended only as a heuristic tool." One can identify with this argument. Still, we must be clear about the consequences of writing a history of memory by separating memory's construction from its reception.
71. Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago, 1995). Among the growing Israeli discussion of memory, Zerubavel's study seems the most comprehensive and illuminating.
72. Zerubavel makes a concerted effort, often very successful, to get to the everyday level of collective memory. Among the sources she uses are jokes, popular songs, public school textbooks, plays, poems, children's stories, and the experience of trips to Masada and Tel Hai.
73. See, for example, Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 18, 30, 31, 96.
74. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, xix.
75. Let me illuminate this argument with an example. In The Vichy Syndrome, the context created in Part 1 (memory from above) conditions the exploration in Part 2 (ignoring popular construction of memories). But why should we assume that people were limited to the memory delineated in Part 1? Instead of exploring how people constructed their own collective memories of Vichy, which at times concurred with and at times opposed the official memory of Vichy, Rousso investigates only how the memory constructed by politicians and intellectuals was received by the public. Thus the Vichy memory from above looks very much like a memory imposed on a public that has no agency.
76. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 3.
77. My thoughts on the relation between text and context owe a debt in some measure to the work of microhistorians who attempted to provide an alternative to the customary use of context as the "background" of the text. See Giovanni Levi, Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist (Chicago, 1988);
78. "I Pericoli del Geertzismo," Quaderni storici (1985): 269-77.
79. see also Revel, "Microanalysis and the Construction of the Social," 492-502, esp. 500-01.
80. Jacques Le Goff discusses Halbwach's "multiplicity of social time" and its influence on Fernand Braudel in History and Memory, Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman, trans. (New York, 1992), 135.
81. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 53, emphasis added. I attempt to break the text/context dichotomy in my analysis of local and national identities in Germany. Instead of understanding local identity as part of national identity, and localness against the background of nationhood, I view local identity as a constituent of national identity and localness as the symbolic representation of the nation. My basic argument is that Germans imagined nationhood as a form of localness.
82. See Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997). The present article is a product of my thoughts on memory following the completion of my empirical study.
83. Gildea, Past in French History, 340.
84. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 235.
85. Of the three myths, only Tel Hai is presented as having a rich history of contestation reaching to the 1930s-1940s. The analysis of the contestation of the Bar Kokhba revolt focuses on the early 1980s, that of Masada on the 1960s and 1970s. Possibly, the paucity of contestation is linked more to the specific cases of Masada and Bar Kokhba than to a general attribute of Zionist's construction of the past. Other myths may reveal a different picture.
86. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J., 1992).
87. Bodnar, Remaking America, 13-14, 245, 20.
88. Bodnar, Remaking America, 14, 247.
89. Bodnar, Remaking America, 253.
90. In fact, Bodnar does use the metaphor of the whole and its parts to explain his views on the relationship of memories. Vernacular culture represents a variety of interests that "are grounded in parts of the whole," namely the nation-state. But for Bodnar, "the component parts of the nation-state [are] its families, classes, ethnic groups, and regions [which] attracts loyalty and devotion." The nation-state thus remains an aggregation of sanctified vernacular memories, while official memory remains extraneous to it, a metaphor of "'unitary conceptual framework.'" Bodnar, Remaking America, 14, 16.