Collective Memory: The Two Cultures

What is collective about collective memory? Two different concepts of collective memory compete—one refers to the aggregation of socially framed individual memories and one refers to collective phenomena sui generis—though the difference is rarely articulated in the literature. This article theorizes the differences and relations between individualist and collectivist understandings of collective memory. The former are open to psychological considerations, including neurological and cognitive factors, but neglect technologies of memory other than the brain and the ways in which cognitive and even neurological patterns are constituted in part by genuinely social processes. The latter emphasize the social and cultural patternings of public and personal memory, but neglect the ways in which those processes are constituted in part by psychological dynamics. This article advocates, through the example of traumatic events, a strategy of multidimensional rapprochement between individualist and collectivist approaches.</div

The politics and aesthetics of commemoration: national days in southern Africa

The contributions to the special section in this issue study recent independence celebrations and other national days in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They explore the role of national days in state-making and nation-building, and examine the performativity of nationalism and the role of performances in national festivities. Placing the case studies in a broader, comparative perspective, the introduction first discusses the role of the state in national celebrations, highlighting three themes: firstly, the political power-play and contested politics of memory involved in the creation of a country’s festive calendar; secondly, the relationship between state control of national days and civic or popular participation or contestation; and thirdly, the complex relationship between regional and ethnic loyalties and national identifications. It then turns to the role of performance and aesthetics in the making of nations in general, and in national celebrations in particular. Finally, we look at the different formats and meanings of national days in the region and address the question whether there is anything specific about national days in southern Africa as compared to other parts of the continent or national celebrations world-wide.Web of Scienc

Turning Points and Myths of German Memory

What have been the contributions of social memory studies to the discourse of German history, particularly about the Nazi past? This essay seeks to distinguish between the memory boom in politics and culture and the more durable insights of social theory and historiography about memory, including insights about this memory boom itself. In particular, it explores mythologies of 'turning points' in the discourse of memory, arguing that the attribution of such turning points is often overstated. To be sure, 1989 did mark significant ruptures. But comparing present debates to the Historikerstreit (historians' dispute) of the mid-1980s, and the Historikerstreit to earlier debates shows that as much has stayed the same as has changed. We remember not just the Nazi past, but the previous ways in which we have remembered the Nazi past, and our mnemonic practices are as much comments on earlier practices as on the event itself.Was haben die neuen "Social Memory Studies" zu den Diskursen über die jüngste deutsche Geschichte beigetragen, insbesondere zur Auseinandersetzung mit der NS-Vergangenheit? Dieser Aufsatz versucht zu unterscheiden zwischen dem "memory boom" in der Politik und der Kultur sowie den tieferen Einsichten der Sozialtheorie und der Geschichtswissenschaft, inklusive den Einsichten über den "memory boom" selbst. Untersucht werden insbesondere die Mythologien von "Weichenstellungen" in den Erinnerungsdiskursen, bei denen es sich oft um übertriebene Zuschreibungen handelt. Zweifellos markiert das Jahr 1989 wichtige Veränderungen. Doch vergleicht man gegenwärtige Debatten mit dem "Historikerstreit" und diesen wiederum mit früheren Debatten, so zeigt sich, dass es neben Veränderungen auch etliche Kontinuitäten gibt. Wir gedenken nicht allein der NS-Vergangenheit, sondern beziehen uns im Gedenken ebenso auf frühere Praktiken dieses Gedenkens

In The House Of The Hangman: The Agonies Of German Defeat, 1943-1949

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