Point/Counterpoint: Anchoring Historical Memory

Wednesday, November 19, 2014 saw citizens and students of Gettysburg crowd into the Majestic Theater for the fifty-third annual Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture. The audience listened attentively as Dr. Nina Silber, a renowned historian of the American Civil War, explored the nuanced application of the memory of Abraham Lincoln during the 1930s and ‘40s, especially as associated with the figure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. [excerpt

Scraping Down the Past: Memory and Amnesia in W. G. Sebald\u27s Anti-narrative

Vanguard anti-narrativist Galen Strawson declares personal memory unimportant for self-constitution. But what if lapses of personal memory are sustained by a morally reprehensible amnesia about historical events, as happens in the work of German author W. G. Sebald? The importance of memory cannot be downplayed in such cases. Nevertheless, contrary to expectations, a concern for memory needn’t ally one with the narrativist view of the self. Recovery of historical and personal memory results in self-dissolution and not self-unity or understanding in Sebald’s characters. In the end, Sebald shows how memory can be significant, even imperative, within a deeply anti-narrativist outlook on the self, memory, and history

Confronting the Past. Trauma, History and Memory in Wajda’s film

Confronting the Past. Trauma, History and Memory in Wajda’s filmHistorical films are important carriers of collective memory, and as a genre historical films can activate both strong feelings and strong debate. Historical fiction films often tell very accurate and almost documentary stories, but fictional films have the freedom to make historical reality in quite another way than factual historical films. This article deals with some of the most important historical film genres and uses a general theory of genres, emotions, memory and history to analyse the historical films of Polish film director Andrzej Wajda, especially those made post 1989. Dealing with both his heritage drama Pan Tadeusz (1999) and critical historical drama Katyń (2007), the article analyses the ways in which Wajda uses historical narratives to comment on both history and contemporary society, and how this strategy is reflected in all his historical films. The article argues that the traumatic and contrast-filled history of Poland makes historical films especially important and interesting as a critical part of public debate and the reframing and reinterpretation of the past

Germany and History in Flux: The Generational Changes in Approaching Germany\u27s Past

Historical memory, how a people remember the past, is in a state of almost eternal flux. By following the development of historical memory in post-war Germany, historians can better understand the generational and contemporary impact on popular history. German history illustrates the importance of this concept, as German history has a great deal of 20th century historical baggage

Politics as usual? The Trials and Tribulations of the Law of Historical Memory in Spain

The aim of this article is to evaluate the Law of Historical Memory from a political perspective where politics is understood as "the art of the possible". It will be argued that the Law of Historical Memory is a product of the compromises which characterise the process of politics as usual in a functioning democracy. An analysis of the Law of Historical Memory, therefore, can illuminate the way in which politics functions in Spain today. Two main issues are focused on: the primacy of electoral considerations and the interaction between state and civil society

Memory In Paintings of Quattrocentro Renaissance Florence: Religious paintings and Secular Portraits

Collective memory studies as a field has always been the interdisciplinary study of how and why memories have been created. The difference between collective or cultural memory studies and that of a strictly historical study is often discussed and debated as people question whether memory or history is more valuable regarding past events. Jan Assmann explains that “in the context of cultural memory, the distinction between myth and history vanishes. Not the past as such, as it is investigated and reconstructed by archaeologists and historians, counts for the cultural memory, but only the past as it is remembered.” Assmann has the perspective that while an historical event took place in a certain way the memory of the event in itself is worthy of recognition and exploration. However, whether or not studying the past as history or as memory is more appropriate is not the concern here. This paper will focus on how the approach of memory studies is able to bring memory into historical perspective as an element of influence and a catalyst for memorialization that took place through painting in Quattrocentro Florence. The use of paintings as objects of immediate memory was practiced by the Florentines as a form of “social memory,” a term coined by art historian Abby Warburg to refer to a cultural level of memory. Interestingly enough despite the use of paintings for immediate memory in fifteenth century Florence, Jan Assmann credits Warburg with being the first art historian to recognize and treat images or “cultural objectivizations” as carriers of memory. This may be a relevant statement for contemporary art history, however a key theorist of the fifteenth century, Battista Alberti noted that in regard to paintings as a form of memory of deceased individuals, “the dead were seen by ‘the living many centuries later,’” referencing a clear recognition of the power of images to act as carriers of memory centuries before any field of memory studies was formalized

Historical Consciousness and Ethnicity: How Signifying the Past Influences the Fluctuations in Ethnic Boundary Maintenance

Theorists tend to limit \u27history\u27s\u27 role in the dynamics of ethnicity to that generally played by collective memory. By bringing the notion of historical consciousness to the fore, new possibilities may, however, emerge for discerning how history, as one cultural mode of remembering among many others, impacts both ethnicity delineations and fluctuations in boundary maintenance. In encapsulating the many forms of commemoration as well as the different dimensions of historical thinking, the contribution of historical consciousness accordingly lies on how group members historicize temporal change for moral orientation in time. By likewise signifying past events for negotiating their ethnicity and agency toward the \u27significant Other\u27, social actors gate-keep group boundaries. And, depending on their capacity and willingness to recognize the \u27significant Other\u27s\u27 moral and historical agency in the flow of time, they can transform group delineations and render ethnic boundaries more porous. Key Words: Historical Consciousness; Ethnicity; Group Boundaries; Boundary Maintenance; Boundary Fluctuations; Collective Memory; Disciplinary History; Moral and Historical Agency

The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the “Memory Boom” in Contemporary Historical Studies

Jay Winter delivered the following in the form of a lecture at the Canadian War Museum on 31 October 2000. A distinguished academic, Winter has been writing about the cultural history of the First World War for nearly three decades. He has taught at the University of Cambridge in England and is presently at Yale University. Since 1988, he has been a director of the Historial de la grande guerre in Peronne, an important war museum in northern France. In this capacity, he has become familiar with a great many institutions of war and military history around the world and he has great knowledge and familiarity with the important historical and intellectual debates that will be fundamental to the creation of a new Canadian War Museum, which is now slated to open in May 2005. Probably Winter’s best-known book is Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History published in 1995. In it, he argues that the rituals of mourning associated with commemoration after the First World War had a history stretching far back in human life and experience. In this he contradicts the thinking of Canadian historian Modris Eksteins who argued that the Great War marked the birth of the modern age. Lately, Daniel Sherman has proposed that commemorative ceremonies and memorials are significantly politicized in the interests of state control. In the following paper Winter warns against the dangers of collective memory being collapsed into “a set of stories formed by or about the state” while also providing a rich overview of the great importance that attention to memory and culture studies has taken on in contemporary thought. These cannot be ignored in any serious attempt to lay the intellectual foundation of any new museum, and perhaps especially may have specific relevance to a new war museum