National collective memories and their functions in Japan and the US

Objective - This article is to introduce theoretical motivation for the interaction and links joining national identity, collective memory, cultural heritage, digitization and libraries understood as memory institutions, and substantiate memory institutions and digital collective memory as an essential source for national identity. Research methods - The author claims that the digital resources managed by memory institutions, particularly libraries, are the fundamentals of national identity. Therefore she discusses postmodernism as a theoretical basis for the system of concepts of "national identity – collective memory – cultural heritage – memory institutions – digital resources – users", and presents the structure and individual concepts of this system. The research method used was qualitative research with discourse analysis and a theoretical analysis of information sources such as: J. Baudrillard, I. Hassan, D. Harvey, R. J. Lifton, J. F. Liotard, P. Waugh, A. J. Toynbee, G. E. Veith et al., conventions and resolutions of the European Commission, Committee and Parliament, legal provisions in culture and cultural heritage by the Government of Latvia. Results and conclusions - National identity is seen as a totality of meanings the main manifestations of which are the cultural and national heritage as the basis for the personal system of values and experience. National identity is formed by the totality of conceptions on affiliation with something. Conceptions, ideas are formed in the interaction process of personality and the collective memory based on digital resources. The collective memory, i.e. the resources in libraries, museums and archives, particularly the digital ones, is the main element for the construction of national identity. This construction is delivered by memory institutions through collecting, harvesting, saving, arranging and providing access to resources via the digitization process. Digitization should become the main tool for maintenance, inclusion, communication, and identity in the process of globalization. The author introduces theoretical model, based on the discourse of postmodernism ideas, theoretical conclusions of world researchers and philosophers, official conventions, guidelines and declarations - for justifying memory institutions’ resources as the basis of national identity. Such a theoretical analysis of the "national identity – collective memory – cultural heritage – memory institutions – digital resources – users" is the first experiment in Latvia to place the important role of memory institutions, particularly libraries, in a system of cultural heritage, digitization, new environment and national identity. The main conclusion is that the philosophical discourse of postmodernism accepts the idea of the leading role of memory institutions in the structure of national/digital heritage and national identity.

This study uses the case of Holocaust Day in Israel to examine the premise that national days impact national identity and collective memory. Specifically, the study examines whether a very unique type of national day—Holocaust Day—impacts national identification, nationalism, and collective memory in the form of Israeli Jews' perceptions of the “lessons” of the Holocaust. This study uses panel survey design data on national identity and perceptions of the Holocaust's lessons from the same sample of Israeli Jews (N = 665) collected two months prior to Holocaust Day and again during and after Holocaust Day. During and after Holocaust Day, respondents expressed increased levels of nationalism and more perceptions of both particularistic and universalistic Holocaust lessons. Participation in Holocaust Day practices had a stronger relationship with nationalism and national identification during Holocaust Day than before but a weaker relationship with the perception of a universalistic lesson during Holocaust Day. These findings indicate that Holocaust Day impacts national identity and collective memory and highlights the multifaceted nature of the relationships between national identity, collective memory, and national days. The theoretical implication of the findings as well as the case comparability are discussed in light of the findings.

Colonial Williamsburg, and U.S. history museums generally, claim to transform public history into collective memory. That is, they convey an objective documented history to the public who, absorbing that history, acquires an appropriate collective or national memory. We argue that the emphasis on consumer (visitor) experience at such museums collapses the distance between the reconstructed past (the museum's history lesson) and the visitor's touristic or familial experience at the site. Visitors indeed remember their visits to Colonial Williamsburg, but their specific memories would seem to have little to contribute to any 'collective memory' of a 'national history.'

This study examines imagined interactions (IIs) among young adults in the United States, Thailand, and Japan. A comparison of means across cultures on II characteristics reveals that -the Japanese participants have the widest variety of II partners, whereas the American participants are the most self-dominant in their IIs and demonstrate the most II frequency. As for II functions, Japanese and Thai participants keep conflict alive via their IIs more than the Americans, whereas the Thais utilize the II rehearsal and self-understanding functions the least. The Japanese participants use the II boldness function, which focuses on escaping from societal norms via one's IIs, more than the Thais and Americans.

Introduction: Twenty-first-Century MemoriesEric Langenbacher and Yossi Shain 1. Collective Memory as a Factor in Political Culture and International RelationsEric Langenbacher 2. Germany's National Identity, Collective Memory, and Role AbroadBettina Warburg 3. Collective Memory and German-Polish RelationsEric Langenbacher 4. Building Up a Memory: Austria, Switzerland, and Europe Face the HolocaustAvi Beker 5. Memory, Tradition, and Revival: Who, Then, Speaks for the Jews?Ori Z. Soltes 6. September 11 in the Rearview Mirror: Contemporary Policies and Perceptions of the PastOmer Bartov 7. The Eventful Dates 12/12 and 9/11: Tales of Power and Tales of Experience in Contemporary HistoryMichael Kazin 8. The Use and Abuse of History in Berlin and Washington Since 9/11: A Plea for a New Era of CandorJeffrey Herf 9. Of Shrines and Hooligans: The Structure of the History Problem in East Asia after 9/11Thomas U. Berger 10. Popular Culture and Collective Memory: Remembering and Forgetting in Chinese -- U.S. Relations after 9/11Gerrit W. Gong Conclusion: Collective Memory and the Logic of Appropriate BehaviorYossi Shain Contributors Index

This article discusses the important role of archives in preserving the nation's collective memory at universities, with a focus on archive management as part of national identity. Through a qualitative approach and case studies, this research explores archival practices at universities, including archive management and archive preservation. This research also identifies challenges faced in archival management, such as administrative obstacles and the importance of historical awareness among students and staff. The research results show that effective archive management can increase information accessibility, support research, and strengthen historical awareness. Recommendations for improving archival practices at universities include strengthening archival policies, increasing human resources, digitizing archives, as well as educational activities to increase awareness of historical values. In this way, universities can act as guardians of the nation's collective memory and contribute to sustainable social and educational development

Traditional scholarship in social film history views groups of films from a certain time period as encapsulations of the overriding national mindset of that time. However, film scholarship has challenged this notion of what sociologists term ‘collective memory’, insisting instead that a wider range of films be included and several ‘collective memories’ be formulated in order to broaden the understanding of time-specific societal beliefs. In addition, research in memory studies has challenged the insistence on ‘national memories’, preferring instead the exploration of ‘transnational memories’. Most prominent among transnational memory scholarship is the work being done on the Holocaust. This article examines four films produced in three different national cinemas from the early post-war period (1946–49), all of which deal with the aftermath of the Holocaust in some way. Analysing these four films (The Murderers Are among Us, Rotation, The Stranger and The Third Man) and these three national cinemas (East Germany, America and Great Britain) shows how a specific transnational event such as the Holocaust can produce several aesthetic and narrative signifiers internationally while also being specifically formulated to meet local, national sensibilities.

National Identity Can be Comprised of More Than Pride: Evidence From Collective Memories of Americans and Germans

Alterations in higher-order social cognition are well documented in individuals with severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD). However, the basic mechanisms underpinning them are not well understood. This knowledge gap hampers the development of targeted therapeutic interventions. Here, we investigated whether individuals with SAUD show abnormalities in social episodic memory processes, which may represent relevant candidate mechanisms for alterations in social cognition. Recently detoxified patients with SAUD and matched healthy controls (HCs) completed two experimental tasks. We first used a Social Recognition Task in 40 SAUD patients and 40 HCs to measure the participants' ability to implicitly memorize the facial identity and emotion of novel interpersonal cues (i.e., dynamic facial expressions of anger and happiness). We then used a Social Memory Accessibility Task in 29 SAUD patients and 30 HCs) to measure participants' access to and fluency for already existing social memories by asking them to retrieve as many specific positive and negative interpersonal events as possible within equal time limits. In the Social Recognition Task, we found that, compared to HCs, patients with SAUD had a globally lower recognition performance for the facial identities of novel social stimuli, but a preserved bias toward positive information. Conversely, in the social memory accessibility task, patients showed greater access to and fluency for negative interpersonal memories than controls (no group differences were observed for positive ones), resulting in a negative accessibility bias. This exploration of episodic social memory in individuals with SAUD showed (1) a preserved bias for the encoding of positive versus negative novel social information, and (2) greater access to negative than positive interpersonal memories. These results enhance our understanding of socio-affective processing in individuals with SAUD and identify social memory alterations that may contribute to social cognition and interpersonal difficulties.

This article deals with how remembering the Second World War is conveyed in Bernard Kangro’s last three Tartu novels, The Stone Bridge (1963), The Black Book (1965) and Whirlfire (1969). The Second World War is a memory topos that has, more than anything else, divided the memory politics of European countries. If memory politics in Western Europe is focused predominantly on condemning Nazi crimes, primarily the Holocaust, then Eastern Europe, in addition to the legacy of Nazism, has to deal with the additional criminal legacy of Communism. To bridge the gap between Eastern and Western European nations’ collective memories, discussions started in 1990 about the European memory that should help form the basis for a unified European identity. In the opinion of Jan-Werner Muller, European memory assumes one of two processes. The first is linked to unifying the stances toward memory politics of various European nations; the second with unifying the contents of various collective memories. Although Kangro’s last three Tartu novels are among the peripheral works of Estonian cultural memory, they nevertheless deal with themes that have become relevant in the twenty-first century, on the one hand linking collective memory and national memory politics, and on the other hand, addressing the concept of European memory. Using Kangro’s Tartu novels, I first analyse the problematic aspects of national memory politics as they relate to remembering the Second World War in Estonia. Secondly, I point out the implicit criticism in the Tartu novels of the more inflexible and homogenizing form of European memory. For this I focus more closely on the formative stories of three characters – Benno Maran, Naatan Uirike and Juku Leebram. Benno Maran is one of the narrating voices in these novels, together with an anonymous narrator, an italicized narrator from a different time, and another character, named August September. Quotes from Benno’s diary dating from the days of the Russian and German occupations Russian and German occupations of Estonia are used extensively in the novels’ texts. These quotations overlap considerably with the inscriptions in Kangro's own diary from the period. This circumstance and the italicized narrator’s role as a witness to pivotal events in history enable Kangro’s Tartu novels to deal with moral witness, as explained by Aleida Assmann. According to Assmann, moral witness is the grievance of a forgotten historical injustice as well as an elegy which has no political objectives. What emerges from the italicized narrator’s text is that Kangro’s objective is to deliver a moral witnessing, as well as demonstrate the difficulty in bearing such witness: having participated in the events, he is responsible for the reality he remembers and portrays, and the impression he conveys of the people whose suffering he recounts. The process of bearing witness becomes the theme of these novels through the thoughts, comments and confessions of the italicized narrator; at the same time he distances himself from the narrated tale and characters, thus emphasizing the relative nature of the portrayal. The second characteristic keyword of the Tartu novels is pluralism, demonstrated by both their structure and subject matter. Namely, by using multiple characters, Kangro portrays very different Second World War experiences that are inconsistent with nationalistic memory politics as well as too conflicting for transnational memory politics. One example is theology student Juku Leebram’s life story. Juku collaborates with those in power during the Soviet occupation and takes part in the deportations, then turns traitor by fleeing to the German side, but is captured by the Germans and dies in jail. However, after the war, rumours circulate that Juku escaped and has become a Forest Brother. Thus, in the communicative memory of the Estonians in the homeland, Juku first becomes a martyr and then a resistance fighter and national hero.

The story goes that in the 1980s and 1990s no publisher in Paris was prepared to issue a historical study that did not have the word ‘memory’ in the title. Identity, a congener of memory, was equally popular in the same period. One of the experts in the field, John Gillis, claimed that identity has become no more than a cliché and that memory has lost a lot of its precision, but both terms have remained key concepts. ‘The core meaning of any individual or group identity, namely, a sense of sameness over time and space, is sustained by remembering; and what is remembered is defined by the assumed identity’. Memories and identities are anything but certain facts; they are `representations or constructions of reality, subjective rather than objective phenomena. […] “Memory work” is, like any kind of physical or mental labor, embedded in complex class, gender and power relations that determine what is remembered (or forgotten), by whom, and for what end”.It has been suggested that the demise of the vainglorious future-orientated ideologies in the late 1980s brought about a shift in focus towards the past. However that may be, the wave of interest in memory did receive an enormous impulse from one of the most controversial studies in this field, the seven-volume series Les Lieux de Mémoire (1984–1992), published under the direction of the French historian Pierre Nora. In the last volume he argued that France had gradually disappeared as a ‘memory nation’; the national memory had been supplanted by a series of lieux de mémoire and the conflicting social identities that this entailed. La France, according to Nora, had entered the ‘era of commemoration’ as Les Frances as a result of what he called a ‘democratization of the commemorative spirit’.The relation between national identity and collective memory is highlighted by the many commemorative events organised in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1980, the French, British and Brazilian governments had a Year of National Heritage, while in Israel a ‘memory industry’ specially devoted to the Holocaust got under way.

This study, which focuses on the interrelations between media, memory, and collectives, examines the significant role played by the media in forming the two dimensions of collective mediated recollections: shaping the memory and defining the boundaries of the collective. One of the central arguments raised in recent years in the field of social science maintains that more attention should be shifted to the ‘cosmopolitan turn’ (Beck, 2003; Beck and Sznaider, 2006), the process that involves more openness to the transnational arena and the sensitivity to ‘universal values’ that become part of national societies. Within this context, we argue that although most of the research devoted to collective memory centers on the construction of national memory — in the era of globalization, collective memory and commemoration that exist in a cosmopolitan context (Levy and Sznaider, 2006) — it does not necessarily promote national values. We will contend that, parallel to the ‘cosmopolitan turn’, a reverse process might be identified whereby small communities — the relations among whose members rely on geographical or ideological vicinity, or yet on common areas of interest — succeed in creating regional-communal-local versions of the collective national memory.1

(Re)Constructing the European Past: Christianity and the French Religious Memory Yelena Mazour‐Matusevich If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven;: if you retain the sins of any, they are retained. (John 20:21‐23) Now, when a united Europe has become a political and economic reality, European nations must politely forget that they used to be hereditary enemies and become good neighbors instead. The European Union was, after all, at its beginnings, not only a project about peace, and economic exchanges, it was also about forgiveness and grace. In a sense, constructing a common Europe is an unprecedented Christian experiment in and of itself for it consists of applying the essentially Christian idea of total forgiveness1 to entire nations, compelling millions of people to put their mutual resentments aside, pardoning each other for all eternity. Alas, a simple trip through Europe easily demonstrates to a naïve tourist that love for geographic neighbors is not on the menu. The pioneering experiment of transforming an essentially personal action of forgiveness into a collective effort has proved to be an enormous challenge. Europe’s long history, like any history, was filled with wars, massacres and prejudices, and collective national memories, with their extensive lists of grievances against the historical other, represent mental barriers for the creation of Europe’s new identity. Indeed, this identity cannot be forged without each country confronting its own national past or rather, the way each nation views and evaluates this past, for, in the context of a historical narrative, “subjectivity is truth and truth is subjectivity.”2 Confronting European historical subjectivities is particularly urgent with regard to the question of Europe’s Christian identity. The recent 2004‐2009 polemics over the inscription of Christian references in the preamble to the European Constitution reveal the significance of the present moment, when each European country must face not only its own collective memory and memories of other Christian nations but also formulate the place of religion in the new Europe.3 The present essay will focus on the case of France and the French religious identity and memory. Western man today is characterized by: An innocent mind and a heavy memory. Emile Poulat I imprudently presented the first draft of this paper at a conference in 1998. Never would I have dared to embark on such a perilous venture again if, after duly scrutinizing the current French media and public Internet forums, I had not happened to notice that the situation in France has not changed substantially in twelve years. It turns out that my initial analysis of France’s major tendencies in dealing with its Christian past is still valid. The tendencies in question are not equally represented in terms of frequency or influence, nor are they completely isolated from each other. The first, the most common trend, is that which journalist and famous essayist Jean‐Claude Guillebaud called “modernité appauvrie,”“an impoverished modernity.”4 People holding this attitude feel estranged from their national past, which they perceive as incomprehensible and, most importantly, no longer theirs. This popular opinion might have an intellectual variation whose proponents consider France’s history too national to be used as a common European foundation and propose to see Europe’s future as constructed from a tabula rasa, from now on. Although lacking even the most basic understanding of what religion is (Jean‐Claude Eslin),5 this dismissive tendency views Christianity as a burden, which, together with the rest of the national memory, is too complicated to take on. In a sense, this outlook is neither anti‐Christian nor anti‐religious per se because it expresses the general and growing alienation of French society from its collective memory, a phenomenon Eslin called “the French without France.”6 Here we will call it the “anti‐history” position (not to be confused with anti‐historical). It does not deny history; rather, it wants none. The second attitude is what Guy Coq, author of Démocratie, religion, éducation (1993) and Secularity and Republic (1995), calls “vulgate républicaine.”7 This ideological position dates from the good old days of the “war of two Frances,” when progressive, secular forces opposed the traditional, Catholic...

Holocaust Memory and Restorative JusticeCompetition, Friction, and Convergences Björn Krondorfer (bio) Keywords Holocaust, transitional justice, memory, restorative justice, Jewish and Christian responses, trauma, uniqueness, reconciliation, politics of difference, national entrenchment, dialogical engagement In Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Michael Rothberg argues for the value of overlapping and intersecting Holocaust memory with other collective memories. He traces how the history and memory of the Holocaust have been evoked, adopted, and employed as a way of making sense of political struggles and group identity in various colonial and postcolonial contexts. For Rothberg, the concept of multidirectional memory recognizes that remembrances of cataclysmic events do not cancel each other out but are venues through which meaningful moral and political decisions can be formed in the present. In a time when momentous collective (and often traumatic) memories flow freely and rapidly across national borders, they are often pitted against each other competitively. But, Rothberg argues, the idea of "competitive memory" must be abandoned since it assumes a public sphere that cannot hold "different collective memories"—as if it were "a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources."1 While Rothberg's study largely focuses on how the Holocaust has figured as a political, cultural, and moral trope in negotiating the meaning of the Algerian War (in which Algeria eventually won independence from France), it transcends any specific cultural location. His frame is global in perspective and rests on an ethical foundation that pursues the "notion of transnational, comparative justice."2 Consequently, Rothberg disagrees with claims that view the Holocaust (or any other calamity, for that matter) as a unique and incomparable event. [End Page 373] In this essay, I use Rothberg's critical intervention—multidirectional memory—and its application as a "shared moral and political project"3 to probe the dichotomizing language of uniqueness/universality when applied to memorable events of great harm. By eschewing competition among collective memories, I seek new pathways of justice-oriented, dialogical engagement. I do so by tracing, on the one hand, the rhetorical weight of Holocaust uniqueness claims (particularly in American and occasionally German contexts) and, on the other, the universalist claims of transitional justice as they evolved after 1945. I will read uniqueness claims through and against a transitional justice genealogy, eventually arriving at the concept of restorative justice. I will argue that neither uniqueness nor universality is a helpful mechanism for thwarting the entrenchment of partisan political memory. I propose, instead, to speak of "singularity" with respect to the gravity of each injurious history and collective memory. Creating a framework that averts competition among narratives of suffering will be "inevitably dialogical," as Rothberg suggests.4 It supplants the competitive deployment of political memory with an ethical vision of engaged relationality. UNIVERSAL, UNIQUE, SINGULAR: PRELIMINARY CLARIFICATIONS "The question of the uniqueness and universality of the Holocaust," writes Michael Berenbaum, "is being considered with increasing frequency not only in scholarly quarters with a focus on historiography but also in communities throughout the United States where Holocaust memorials and commemorative services raise a consciousness of the Holocaust."5 Berenbaum wrote those lines before the 1993 opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, at a time when Jewish American and Israeli scholars were debating the place of the Holocaust along the oppositional poles of uniqueness and universality. In his 1981 essay, Berenbaum briefly reviewed the positions of some of the major participants in the debate, including Yehuda Bauer, Lucy Dawidowicz, Emil Fackenheim, Elie Wiesel, Richard Rubenstein, Ismar Schorsch, Eliezer Berkovits, Robert Alter, and Henry Feingold. Berenbaum, who had been a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, sided with a restrained embrace of the uniqueness claim, arguing that neither the perceived threat of a so-called Americanization of the [End Page 374] Holocaust nor the attempt to compare Jewish victims to other victim groups or other genocides would diminish the historical uniqueness for the Jewish community. To Americanize the Holocaust, he suggested, is just a way of telling "the story . . . in such a way that it resonates" with an American audience; to compare the Holocaust to other events, he continued, is no cause for fear since they are "analogous...

Travels in Time is a collection of essays on collective memory. It is grounded in literary, cultural, and media memory studies. Human beings are time travelers. Incessantly, they traverse past, present, and future. This process is called collective memory. Collective memory helps people remember their childhood, know who they are, anticipate danger, commemorate the dead, and hand on knowledge. It is the key to identity and culture. Travels in time are not just mental phenomena, but also sociocultural and medial ones. This collection of essays undertakes forays into various dimensions of collective memory. It discusses in what ways families and generations are shaped by the past; how media such as literature, film, and photography make and remake collective memory; and the cultural dimensions of trauma, flashbulb memories, and implicit memory. A central question concerns collective memory in motion: People travel in time with collective memory; but memory, too, is a traveler. What happens, when versions of the past move across cultural and national boundaries, or over long stretches of time? The cases of traveling memory discussed in this book include memories of colonial warfare in India and Britain; the transnational reach of apartheid memories; transgenerational memories of migration; European memories in film; mediations and remediations of the First World War, the Holocaust, and 9/11; collective memory and the coronavirus pandemic; the Odyssey as a longue durée mnemohistory; and James Joyce’s Ulysses as a critical reflection of such long-term memories.