To Remember or to Forget: Which Way Out of a Shared History of Violence?

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

Volumn , Issue , 2012, Pages 53-71

  Assmann, Aleida ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Cultural Framework; Military Dictatorship; Reconciliation Commission; Shared History; Truth Commission

Indexed keywords

EID: 85145227288     PISSN: 26346257     EISSN: 26346265     Source Type: Book Series    
DOI: 10.1057/9780230354241_4     Document Type: Chapter

References (28)

1. Christian Meier (2010), Das Gebot zu vergessen und die Unabweisbarkeit des Erinnerns. Vom öffentlichen Umgang mit schlimmer Vergangenheit (Munich: Siedler). There are other studies that have analysed the political strategies of forgetting in a wider context. Stanley Cohen has looked at ‘modes of forgetting by which a whole society separates itself from its discreditable past record. This might happen at an organized, official and conscious level – the deliberate cover-up, the rewriting of history – or through the type of cultural slippage that occurs when information disappears’. Stanley Cohen (1995), ‘States of Denial. Knowledge, Accountability, and the Policing of the Past’, Law and Social Inquiry, 20 (1), 7–50, here 15. See also Stanley Cohen (2001), States of Denial. Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity Press), p. 138.
2. Nicole Loraux (1997), La Cité divisée. L’oubli dans la Mémoire D’Athènes (Paris: Payot); Hinderk Emrich and Gary Smith (eds) (1996), Vom Nutzen des Vergessens (Berlin: Wiley); Avishai Margalit and Gary Smith (eds) (1997), Amnestie, oder Die Politik der Erinnerung in der Demokratie, translated by Hartmut Kuhlmann and Wilhelm Werthern (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).
3. Avishai Margalit (2003), The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press), pp. viii–ix. Margalit differentiates between two modes of forgetting: covering up, and blotting out. In comparing these practical possibilities, he argues in favour of the first mode.
4. William Shakespeare, Richard II, I, 1, 156 in W.J. Craig (ed.) (1974), The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (London: Oxford University Press), p. 382.
5. Edward Hall (1542), Dedication to the King, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families, quoted in Lily B. Campbell (1964), Shakespeare’s Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (London: Methuen), p. 69.
6. This is the interpretation offered by Zdenek Stribrny: ‘ . . . the whole conflict between France and England is presented as an encounter between the surviving feudal order and the English nation-state as it developed in Shakespeare’s own time’. See Zdenek Stribrney (1964), ‘Henry V and His-tory’, in Arnold Kettle (ed.), Shakespeare in a Changing World: 12 Essays for the 400th Anniversary of his Birth (London: Lawrence and Wishart), pp. 844–901.
7. Hermann Lübbe (1983), ‘Der Nationalsozialismus im politischen Bewusstsein der Gegenwart’, in Martin Broszat, Ulrich Dübber and Walther Hofer (eds), Deutschlands Weg in die Diktatur (Berlin: Siedler), pp. 329–49.
8. Tony Judt (1992), ‘The Past Is Another Country. Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe’, Daedalus, 121 (Fall), 83–119, here 87. See also Tony Judt (2005), Postwar. A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, NY: Penguin Press), p. 160.
9. Judt (1992), pp. 83–9. Ian Buruma described this logic as follows: ‘It was comforting to know that a border separated us from the nation that embodied the evil. They were evil, so consequently we must have been good. The fact that we grew up in a country which had suffered under the German occupation meant, to us, that we were on the side of the angels.’ Ian Buruma (1994), Erbschaft der Schuld. Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Deutschland und Japan, translated by Klaus Binder and Jeremy Gaines (Munich: Hanser), p. 11. Confronted by members of the ‘Committee for Jewish Claims on Austria’, the Austrian government declared: ‘All suffering of the Jews during this period was inflicted upon them by the Germans and not by the Austrians; Austria bears no guilt for all of these evil things, and where there is no guilt, there is no obligation for restitution.’ Quoted from Heidemarie Uhl (2005), ‘Vom Opfermythos zur Mitverantwortungsthese: NS-Herrschaft, Krieg und Holocaust im Österreichischen Gedächtnis’, in Christian Gerbel, Manfred Lechner and Dagmar C. G. Lorenz (eds), Transformationen gesellschaftlicher Erinnerung. Studien zur Gedächtnisgeschichte der Zweiten Republik (Vienna: Turia + Kant) pp. 50–85, here p. 57.
10. Randolph S. Churchill (ed.) (1948), The Sinews of Peace. Post-War Speeches by Winston S. Churchill (London: Cassell), p. 200. I would like to thank Marco Duranti for drawing my attention to this.
11. Rainer Blasius (2009), ‘Der gute Wille muss auch anerkannt werden’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 60, 12 March, p. 21.
12. Journalist Hans Ulrich Kempski recorded the following text: ‘the Nazi era killed as many Germans as Jews . . . we should now let this era fall into oblivion’. See Hans Peter Mensing (ed.) (2009), Adenauer: Die let-zten Lebensjahre 1963–1967. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, Gespräche, Interviews und Reden, Band II, September 1965–April 1967 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schönigh). See also Rainer Blasius (1997), Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1966 (Munich: Oldenbourg).
13. Geoffrey H. Hartman (ed.) (1986), Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington, IN: John Wiley & Sons).
14. It is interesting to note that, with the exception of the Weizsäcker speech, the push for change came from below rather than from above. It was a bottom-up movement of two generations (namely, the so-called 45ers and the 68ers) that were reacting against top-down initiatives which inaugurated the memorial shift towards a civil society.
15. Norbert Frei (1997), Vergangenheitspolitik. Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit (Munich: C.H. Beck); Edgar Wolfrum (1999), Geschichtspolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Der Weg zur bun-desrepublikanischen Erinnerung 1948–1990 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft).
16. Meier (2010), p. 81.
17. For an overview of activities, see Pierre Hazan (2007), ‘Das neue Mantra der Gerechtigkeit’, Überblick, deutsche Zeitschrift für Entwicklungspolitik, 43 (1 and 2), 10–22. The edition of May 2007 is devoted to the theme of justice in the aftermath of conflict.
18. Elizabeth Jelin (2010), ‘The Past in the Present: Memories of State Violence in Contemporary Latin America’, in Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad (eds), Memory in a Global Age. Discourses, Practices, Trajectories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 61–78.
19. The formula ‘die Geburt der Demokratie aus dem Geiste der Diktatur’ (the birth of democracy out of the spirit of dictatorship) comes from Christian Schüle (2003), ‘Die Toten kehren heim’, ZEIT, 22, 22 May.
20. Walther L. Bernecker and Sören Brinkmann (2006), Kampf der Erinnerungen. Der Spanische Bürgerkrieg in Politik und Gesellschaft 1936–2006 (Nettersheim: Graswurzelrevolution).
21. Paul Ingendaay (2009), ‘Einen Nationalsalat, bitte!’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 77, 1 April, p. 33. In this article, the author describes the one-sided symbols of Franco’s memorial policy which continue to exist 70 years after the ‘day of victory’ on 1 April 1939.
22. According to Ingendaay, there is a difference between left and right violence. The victors had persecuted and humiliated the losers for decades with Church support. In Spain, the regime renamed squares and roads for its victims that had fallen for ‘God and Spain’, creating a pompous death cult. See Ingendaay (2009), ‘Siebzig Jahre Scham: Die Totenruhe des Bürgerkriegs’, http://faz-community.faz.net/blogs/ancho/archive/2009/09/02/siebzig-jahre-scham-die-totenruhe-des-buergerkriegs.aspx, accessed 30 September 2010.
23. Schüle (2003).
24. Alexander Etkind (2009), ‘Post-Soviet Hauntology: Cultural Memory of the Soviet Terror’, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, 16 (1), 182–200.
25. Paul Ingendaay (2010), ‘Gerechtigkeit für Baltasar Garzón’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 90, 19 April, p. 29. This article also refers to the foreign press. The International Herald Tribune carried an editorial which explicitly stated that it was not Garzón’s investigation, but the deeds of the Franco regime which constituted the crime to be debated. The process against Garzón was termed a ‘parody of Justice’.
26. Compare the situation in socialist Yugoslavia during the 1990s.
27. Pia Hörstrup (2009), ‘Hass und Rache’, in Die Stimmen des Flusses (von Jaume Cabré), State Exam Dissertation submitted to Konstanz University, p. 76. I gained many insights from this work.
28. The importance of knowledge about family members who died in wars and in civil wars for those involved and the transformation in the significance of that knowledge within American society has been impressively shown by Drew Gilpin Faust, who uses the American Civil War as a case study. See Gilpin Faust (2008), This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, NY: Knopf).