History and Memory

Abstract

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.