Aleida Assmann

Das Gestern im Heute. Medien und soziales Gedächtnis

Das Gedachtnis entsteht nicht nur in, sondern vor allem zwischen den Menschen. Es ist nicht nur ein neuronales und psychisches, sondern auch und vor allem ein soziales Phanomen. Es entfaltet sich in Kommunikation und Gedachtnismedien, die solcher Kommunikation ihre Wiedererkennbarkeit und Kontinuitat sichern. Was und wie erinnert wird, daruber entscheiden neben den technischen Moglichkeiten der Aufzeichnung und Speicherung auch die Relevanzrahmen, die in einer Gesellschaft gelten. Aufbauend auf der Gedachtnistheorie des Soziologen Maurice Halbwachs entwickelt der folgende Beitrag eine Theorie des kulturellen Gedachtnisses, die den kulturellen Aspekt der Gedachtnisbildung in den Vordergrund stellt und nach den Medien und Institutionen fragt, die dieses „Zwischen” organisieren. Medien wie Schrift und Buchdruck sowie Institutionen der Kanonisierung und Interpretation von Texten haben in der Vergangenheit die Moglichkeiten des kollektiven oder sozialen Gedachtnisses fundamental erweitert. Entsprechende Wandlungen zeichnen sich mit der Heraufkunft der elektronischen Medien ab. Kultur wird in diesem Sinne verstanden als der historisch veranderliche Zusammenhang von Kommunikation, Gedachtnis und Medien.

Das neue Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur : eine Intervention

The moment is significant: 70 years after the end of World War II, 94-year old Oskar Gröning stands trial in Lüneburg, Germany, for the crimes he committed as a soldier with the SS. Convicted on July 15, 2015 for accessory to 300,000 counts of murder at the former concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, Gröning is one of few remaining witnesses. His memories have historical value, and carry moral and judicial weight.

The Holocaust - a global memory? : Extensions and limits of a new memory community

The Holocaust is the name for a complex of events, actions and experiences that had a global impact historically and an emphatically transnational character. Due to its radical anti-human ideology, geographic scope and bureaucratic ‘perfection’, today it stands out as the paradigmatic genocide in world consciousness. From its very beginning, the social exclusion, contraction and extermination of European Jews was associated with spatial movements. Acts such as expulsion, flight and migration into exile, as well as deportation, the concentration of victims in transit camps and their transfer to sites of exploitation and extinction, implied crossings of many national borders. The Nazi administration was also eager to ‘outsource’ their crimes and to hide them in far-off places. The many languages in the concentration camps, as Primo Levi noted, rendered these places into a ‘perpetual Babel’ (Levi 1996, 38); people from many nations were drawn into the lethal orbit of the Holocaust, which was planned and organized by the Germans and enforced and supported by many other countries. Given the transnational nature of the crime, one that not only pulled together and concentrated millions of victims in the bureaucratic machinery of death, but also unleashed a centrifugal effect of scattering the families of victims across five continents, it is to be expected that this mega-event should find its resonance in transnational memory.

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

During the 1990s, the innovative term ‘culture of remembrance’ was coined, providing a cultural framework within which we automatically assume that remembering is a beneficial obligation that we must fulfil. Remembering thus appears to be a significant social and cultural resource. This picture has been recently thoroughly upset by Christian Meier, whose latest book Das Gebot zu vergessen und die Unabweisbarkeit des Erinnerns (The Imperative to Forget and the Inescapability of Remembering, 2010) posits the theory that it is the ability to forget which should be considered the cultural achievement; remembering is only to be recommended under absolutely exceptional circumstances such as Auschwitz.1 Using Meier’s study on the importance of forgetting after civil wars as its point of departure, this chapter opens up a more general discussion on ways of possibly overcoming a shared history of violence.

Funktionsgedächtnis und Speichergedächtnis — Zwei Modi der Erinnerung

Die Tagung Geschichte und Gedachtnis steht im Zeichen zweier Begriffe mit einem ebenso weiten wie vagen Bedeutungshof. Ich mochte im ersten Teil meines Textes etwas zur Geschichte dieser Begriffskonstellation sagen und im zweiten Teil einen eigenen Vorschlag zur Ausdeutung dieses Begriffspaares zur Diskussion stellen.

Memory and Political Change: Introduction

Over the last 25 years we have been able to witness how countries that maintained brutal dictatorships and bred bloody genocides chose to set an end to oppression, violence or exploitation in order to build up a new relationship between victors and losers, perpetrators and victims, on the way towards an integrated society. The transnational advance of the norm of human rights and the emergence of a watchful global community have provided the larger framing condition for such changes. The new credo is that countries noted for injustice and violence may be transformed, or rather that they may transition from autocratic regimes to democracies. The contemporary political landscape is continuously undergoing decisive changes which are propelled, instigated and reinforced by a whole new set of instruments and institutions that are employed to overcome totalitarian and violent pasts. These changes have been bolstered by a new search for justice, which has been implemented by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), truth commissions and the International Criminal Court. The historical truth about the political crimes of the past — uncovered from archival sources or oral testimonies of victims — is today considered to have great ethical and transformative power. Memory has become a central issue in our discussions about transition, as this truth is directly related to the memory of the victims, and it is the medium of a new shared narrative of the past that integrates formerly divided perspectives. In these cases, as Andreas Huyssen has emphasized, memory forges a new powerful link between past atrocities and a peaceful future: As particular nations struggle to create democratic polities in the wake of histories of mass exterminations, apartheids, military dictatorships, and totalitarianism, they are faced, as Germany has been and still is since World War II, with the unprecedented task of securing the legitimacy and future of their emergent polity by finding ways to commemorate and adjucate past wrongs.1

Neda — the Career of a Global Icon

On 26 December 2009, the London Times chose Neda Agha-Soltan as ‘person of the year’. The article stated: ‘Neda Soltan […], a young beautiful woman who had studied philosophy, was now an aspiring singer, […] found herself abruptly catapulted from the crowds of Tehran to become the face of protest against Iran’s repressive rulers; a symbol of rebellion against the fraudulent election that had just returned Mahmoud Ahmedinejad to power’. Neda is included in a list of recent heroes and victims whose suffering became a beacon of protest against repressive injustice and brutal violations of human rights (Times 1 2009).

Europe’s Divided Memory

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, European politicians developed the idea of a European Museum in Brussels. A group of professional experts was commissioned to plan a site that would tell the transnational citizens of the European Union (EU) who they are, where they come from, and what connects them. A team of experts, with the Polish-French historian Krzysztof Pomian as the head, started to work on the design of a European Museum in the 1990s. The opening of the museum, however, had to be postponed several times. The emblematic date 2005—60 years after the end of the Second World War and 55 years after Robert Schuman’s declaration on May 9, passed without a symbolic event. In 2007, an exhibition with the title “C’est notre histoire” was opened in Brussels, featuring the visitor of the exhibition as a prominent actor. In 2008, a fresh start for the museum was made by appointing a new team and choosing a new name for the project. The central focus is to be the history of European unification after 1945 up to the present. Rather than looking back into divisive national pasts it was now decided to tell the story of new alliances and the shared resolve to look forward to a common future.

History and Memory

The relationship between memory and history is one of continuous reassessment, ranging from identification and polarization to various forms of integration or coexistence. It is evident that empirical modes of observation and witnessing which are transformed into memories with the growing distance to the events are a prior and primary access to the past. This access, however, can never be a pure one. One reason for this is the constructive and distortive power of memory, the other is the transference from individual to collective experience. A collective experience of the past is sustained on a basis of a corporate memory which is fuelled by media of public commemoration such as monuments, memorial days, and rites of remembrance. While remembered history is a subjective and partial mode of relating to the past, commemorated history constructs a uniformous shape that integrates various perspectives and can be shared by following generations. The carriers of commemorated history are communities and states who build their collective and political identity on a specific construction of the past. Because of its ritualized, symbolic, and mnemonic form, some theorists refer to this collectively remembered and commemorated past as ‘myth.’ Myth in this sense is not used as a devaluating term but indicates a dimension of the past which is overlooked and counteracted in professional historiography as it was institutionalized in the academe of nineteenth century. The rise of this form of scholarship was connected with a critique of memory as a ‘handmaid of authority.’ Its aim was to establish a critical and neutral stance from which it becomes possible to describe processes and patterns which escape the awareness of contemporary witnesses and transcend the constructions of corporate memories. The polarization and discrediting of memory by professional historians, however, is not the last word in the issue of the relation between history and memory. Over the last 30 years, we have witnessed a growing sensibility of historians towards the influential constructive and political role of memory. After a long period of remaining blind or averse to the issue of memory, more and more historians have discovered the changing forms and uses of memory and commemoration as an important object of their research. They are interested not only in a factual reconstruction and reinterpretation of the past as it was but also in the past as it was remembered and commemorated. The term ‘mnemohistory’ signals even a new kind of co-operation between the two formerly emphatically separated accesses to the past. This co-operation, however, must not entail a fusion or blurring of the mechanisms of memory with the critical standards of the professional discipline.

Exkurs: Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation

Den Begriff ›Archaologie‹ im etwas umstandlichen Titel dieses Projekts mus man als Antonym von ›Theorie‹ verstehen. Als wir Mitte der siebziger Jahre den Plan zu diesem Unternehmen fasten, hatte die Konjunktur der Theoriebildung in den Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften ihren Hohepunkt erreicht. Die historische Dimension drohte daruber vollkommen aus dem Blick zu geraten. Gegenuber dieser Tendenz zu ahistorischer Systematisierung erschien uns ›Geschichte‹ als Gegenbegriff noch viel zu schwach. Archaologie: das bedeutete nicht nur die zeitliche Abfolge literarischer Diskurse, sondern die Frage nach Anfangen und Ursprungen, Vorstufen und Vorschulen, also uber die Literatur in einem wie immer zu fassenden engeren Sinne hinaus in das, was ihr voraus- und zugrundeliegt, sie hervorbringt und ermoglicht. So wie der Kunsthistoriker Hans Belting eine ›Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst‹ vorgelegt hat (Belting 1991), geht es einer Archaologie der literarischen Kommunikation um eine ›Geschichte des Textes vor dem Zeitalter der Literatur‹ oder doch zumindest darum, solche ›vorliterarischen‹ Zeitalter und Nebenlinien in ihre Betrachtung einzubeziehen. Der neuzeitliche Sonderstatus der Literatur ist eine Errungenschaft der jungsten abendlandischen Entwicklung und kann nicht unbesehen auf altere und ausereuropaische Literaturen ubertragen geschweige denn universalisiert werden.