Performance studies e immaginari sociali: un percorso possibile

Historical events—such as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, World Wars I and II—unavoidably affect the social and cultural sphere of the communities and nations involved. In the past three decades, there have been several attempts to deal with past historical traumas through people’s memories. Memory is a central issue in contemporary understandings of what it means to do history. Recently, the term collective memory (Halbwachs, 1950/1992), written at the beginning of the twentieth century, has been rediscovered and reinterpreted by historians (Santos, 2001). Halbwachs used the term to represent the past within social imagination; in other words, collective memories are understood as collectively shared representations of the past. However, many historians criticized Halbwachs’s structural (Durkheimian) analysis and determined anti-individualism (Kansteiner, 2002).1 Although the alternative terms proposed—such as social memory (Fentress & Wickham, 1992) and collective remembrance (Winter & Sivan, 1999), along with other terms such as national memory, public memory and personal memory (see Bodnar, 1992)—attempt to overcome the dichotomies between past and present, on the one hand, and individual and social, on the other, it is extremely hard to do so. It is not surprising, then, as Santos (2001) asserts, that memory has become a major issue that is deeply associated with social identity, nation building, ideology, and citizenship.

Reviewed by: Debating German Cultural Identity since 1989 ed. by Anne Fuchs, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, and Linda Shortt Elke Segelcke Debating German Cultural Identity since 1989. Edited by Anne Fuchs, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, and Linda Shortt. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011. Pp. 256. Cloth $80.00. ISBN 978-1571134868. Ever since unification, issues of German cultural identity, national history and memory have become especially prevalent. The twelve essays of this well-researched volume emerged from an international conference in Dublin on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. They include contributions by scholars from the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, and Germany who examine the question of German cultural identity in the post-wall era from multiple disciplinary, geographic and ethnic perspectives. While most other anthologies related to the continuing public-political discourse on identity, history, memory, and generational shifts in German culture focus on literary and cinematic representations of the events since 1989, this volume also gives voice to historians, sociologists, art historians, and scholars of urban studies who provide multiple and diverse responses to unification. Tied to the book’s overarching emphasis on the ongoing controversies about contemporary German cultural identity is the central argument that, contrary to the discourse on normalization, German identity remains ethnically and politically fractured and subjected to “memory contests” regarding the recent past (a concept first developed with reference to the controversies about the National Socialist past in an edited volume of 2006 by Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and Georg Grote). The substantive introduction discusses some recent public disputes, including the rebuilding of Berlin’s Schloss, Germany’s integration politics and the legacy of the GDR, thereby providing extensive contextualization for the ensuing essays. The first three chapters, organized under the main heading “Historical and Sociological Reflections: 1989 and the Rehabilitation of German History,” open with Peter Fritzsche’s essay which problematizes the general notion of history, historicity, and chronology with reference to “the internal logic of past systems” in light of the surprising and rapid events of 1989, thereby analyzing the subsequent “competing models of historical explanation.” Pertti Ahonen adds another historical dimension by examining the trials of East German border guards in the context of the disputes on German victimhood and addressing their far-reaching effects on “the transition to a new, united Germany.” From a sociological perspective, Jennifer Jordan reveals [End Page 477] the significance of food (in particular apples) in Germany’s identity-transformations and continuities as “a site of collective memory” in East and West, positing that the construction of a German national identity happened not in opposition to, but rather through, regional identities constitutive for Heimat sentiments. The four chapters of the second part of the volume focus on “Architectural and Filmic Mediations: Germany in Transit and the Urban Condition,” beginning with Andrew Webber’s contribution to the topographical turn in Cultural Studies (in reference to his previous study Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography [2008]) which argues that in Petzold’s film Gespenster urban spaces in the New Berlin are recast as sites of contested personal and national memory, mediating “the haunting hold of historical legacies” in the post-unification capital. In the context of the debates on migration, public memory and Germanness, Deniz Göktürk analyzes earlier stagings of the Berlin Wall in Turkish cinema from a transnational perspective, pointing out “the correlation of migration and national identity” in postwar German history which until now went unacknowledged in commemorations of German unification. The last two authors of this section focus respectively on Berlin’s and Dresden’s architectural reconstruction from an art historian’s point of view. Kathleen James-Chakraborty provides insight into the debates over the construction of a new architectural identity in a reunited Germany and highlights how international star architects with their creation of new landmarks responded to the “palimpsest of Berlin’s many layered political and architectural pasts” (a reference to Andreas Huyssen’s 2003 study) by transforming the city’s architectural legacy of modernism into “an instrument of memory” without, however, a recourse to historicism. In contrast, Jürgen Paul’s investigation of Dresden’s reconstruction of its old center and Frauenkirche (in...

The focus of this paper is not on the person, but on theworkof Carl Schmitt, in particular the significance of Schmitt's concept of the political for an understanding of his legal and constitutional theory. Let me start with a short personal memory. When I was a third year law student, I read Carl Schmitt'sConstitutional Theory. I came across the formulations that the state is the political unity of a people and that the rule of law component in a constitution is an unpolitical component. I was puzzled by these two remarks. I had learned from Georg Jellinek that the state, from a sociological perspective, is a purposeful corporative unit and, from a legal perspective, represents a territorially based corporation. I had also gathered some knowledge about “organic” state theories, especially that of Otto von Gierke who considers the state an organism and a real corporative personality rather than a mere legal fiction. On the basis of these theories, I felt unable to understand Schmitt's point that the state is the political unity of a people, because in those theories the political aspect is largely missing. It was only later that, by reading and studying Carl Schmitt's essayThe Concept of the Political, I gradually learned to make sense of the above remarks. Thus I have discovered that that essay, and the understanding of the political elaborated in it, contains the key to understanding Carl Schmitt's constitutional theory in general. I would now like to explain this.

Memory for behavior is functionally important, yet memory for many details of behavior decays quickly. The authors argue that the eye gaze, unlike some other details, is critical to understanding behavior and thus people should remember eye-gaze direction. The authors thus present the first data on eye-gaze memory. They also expected a self-enhancement memory bias favoring attributions to direct eye-gaze. Consistent with self-enhancement, the authors expected the direct-gaze memory advantage to be diminished for angry faces. Participants viewed faces that varied on eye gaze (direct, averted) and expression (angry, happy, neutral). Memory was tested via a forced-choice recognition test containing two versions of each face (varying in only direct- or averted gaze). Participants accurately remembered eye-gaze direction, although accuracy was higher for direct gaze. As expected, the direct-gaze memory advantage was diminished for angry faces. The authors discuss these results in the context of integrating research on social vision with extant models of person memory.

This study, which started with a well-known photograph of the famous Çukurçarşı, one of the vital spots in the history of Eskişehir, seeks to narrate the change and transformation of the city within the subject-space relationship based on personal and social memory with a historical background. In this study, a particular method is proposed with regards to the perspective of visual sociology toward urban space, and a research based on this method is designed and carried out. This research is designed in three phases that initiate with selecting an old photograph of the city and tracing its path. The first phase consists of experiencing the field through an autoethnographic lens and taking notes. In the second phase, the researcher finds the location where the photo was taken and takes a new photo of it from the exact angle and spot using the rephotography technique. In the last phase, which is designed as 'art within the scope of the research', a photo collage is designed by wandering through the depths of the archive and bringing together the images, newspaper clippings, photos taken by local photographers, maps, catalogs and booklets that depict and describe Eskişehir Köprübaşı and Çukurçarşı. The art technique in this phase is reflected through the artistic skills and competencies of the researcher/photographer.

In considering the complexities of autobiographical memory, the point of view that restricts itself to the study of single individuals at one point in time has definite limitations. Previous chapters have dealt only indirectly with the social interactions between child and parent and between patient and psycho­ therapist, both societally ordained relationships, and the main concern has been the manner in which social contacts help or hinder individual memoric endeavors. This chapter and the next deal with larger societal perspectives. However they are restricted, out of necessity, to only a limited sampling of theoretical ideas about personal memory in extended temporal contexts. Most of the ideas discussed are meant to supplement concepts and theories already presented.

上演北愛衝突：北愛爾蘭戲劇中的記憶、時間與倫理

This paper is concerned with memory and modernity1. Memory as such is not one of Simmel’s proper topics2. However, Simmel’s insights on experiencing modernity may suggest a sociological approach to memory. Not only does Simmel’s work provide a framework that gives legitimacy to a sociological study of the inner life of individuals in modern society (and so of their personal memory, too), but, through his stress on the contrast between subjective and objective culture, it also provides a point of view to develop the dialectic between individual and collective memories. Furthermore, Simmel’s analysis of the rhythm of metropolitan life and of the “intellectualization” of inner life is consistent with the hypothesis that modern individuality is confronted with a particularly problematic relationship with the past.