Travelling Memory

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 For an overview of the history and disciplines of memory studies see Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (London: Macmillan, 2011). 2 Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire I-III (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992). 3 Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, ‘A Looming Crash or a Soft Landing? Forecasting the Future of the Memory “Industry”’, Journal of Modern History, 81:1 (2009), pp.122–158, p.147. 4 Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, ‘A Looming Crash or a Soft Landing?’, pp.122–158, p.147. 5 Cf. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, eds, Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, in coll. with Sara B. Young (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2008). 6 Jan Assmann, ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’, Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2008), pp.109–118. 7 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). 8 See, for example, Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin, eds, Memory Cultures: Memory, Subjectivity, and Recognition [2003] (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006). 9 Cifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 10 Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1944). 11 Harald Welzer, ed., Der Krieg der Erinnerung: Holocaust, Kollaboration und Widerstand im europäischen Gedáchtnis (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2007). 12 Preface to the German edition: Pierre Nora, ‘Vorwort’, in Pierre Nora, Zwischen Geschichte und Gedächtnis (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990), pp.7–10, p.8. 13 Hue-Tam Ho Tai, ‘Remembered Realms: Pierre Nora and French National Memory’, American Historical Review, 106:3 (2001), pp.906–922. 14 Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992); Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 15 See Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p.8: ‘As people move with their meanings and meanings find ways of traveling even when people stay put, territories cannot really contain cultures.’ 16 Wolfgang Welsch, ‘Transculturality – the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today’, in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (London: Sage, 1999), p.194f. 17 Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age [2001] trans. Assenka Oksiloff (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006). 18 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 19 For example, Marie-Aude Baronian, Stephan Besser and Yolande Jansen, eds, Diaspora and Memory: Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Arts and Politics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007); Indra Sengupta Frey, ed., Memory, History, and Colonialism: Engaging with Pierre Nora in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts (London: German Historical Institute, 2009). 20 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins and Anna Reading, eds, Save As – Digital Memories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 21 Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire [1925], ed. Gérard Namer (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994). 22 See the chapter on individual and collective memory in Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective [1950], ed. Gérard Namer (Paris: Albin Michel, 199), pp.51–96. 23 Jeffrey K. Olick, ‘Collective Memory: The Two Cultures’, Sociological Theory, 17:3 (1999), pp.333–348. For the distinction between cognitive (or: individual) and social and medial (or: collective) levels of cultural memory, see also Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture. 24 Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective, pp.97–142. The unfruitful opposition of ‘memory versus history’ is Halbwachs's legacy, which, via Pierre Nora, became part of contemporary memory studies and has hindered research more than it has helped. 25 Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, ed. Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2000). 26 James Clifford, ‘Partial Truths’, in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), pp.1–26, p.10. 27 See James Clifford, ‘Traveling Cultures’, in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paul A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp.96–116. 28 This idea has been aptly expressed by Ann Rigney in the image of a swimmer: ‘[…] collective memory is constantly “in the works” and, like a swimmer, has to keep moving even just to stay afloat.’ Ann Rigney, ‘The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts between Monumentality and Morphing’, in Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2008), pp.345–353, p.345. 29 Although insights about the individual mind cannot be transferred to the social level (except metaphorically, and although both levels penetrate each other in many ways), it is interesting to note, that in the brain, too, it is movement, the continual (re-)activation and modification of neuronal connections (rather than stable patterns) which enables remembering. 30 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p.3f. 31 Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, eds, Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2009). 32 I am using Anne Fuchs's concept here. See Rebecca Braun and Lyn Marven, eds, Cultural Impact in the German Context: Studies in Transmission, Reception, and Influence (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010). 33 Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, p.200. 34 Cognitive psychology studies such memory figures as ‘schemata’ and ‘scripts’, which contain rudimentary plot structures and provide slots to be filled. Their cultural significance has been addressed from many angles, for example, as the ‘metaphors we live by’ (Lakoff/Johnson) or as the ‘protonarratives of possible lives’ (Appadurai). 35 Andreas Huyssen, Urban Palimpsests, p.99. 36 See Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, eds., Mediation, Remediation. 37 The concept was introduced by David Harvey. See Jon May and Nigel J. Thrift, eds, Timespace: Geographies of Temporality (London: Routledge, 2001). 38 Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 39 The term was coined by Wilhelm Pinder. See Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 40 Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, p.9f. (my emphasis). 41 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).