Introduction
Cultural critics have noted an obsession with memory in modern Western society. The phenomenon, to which they refer as a ‘memory crisis’, seems to be combined with a fear of forgetting. Archives have grown explosively, an abundant amount of remembrances is being organised, and private life is being documented extensively in pictures, videos, and weblogs. Concisely: a memory culture has emerged. In the earlier decades of the twentieth century, Western society was occupied with apocalyptic myths of radical breakthrough and the emergence of the ‘new man’, based on the Nietzschean ‘Übermensch’ and the Christian doctrines of Paul the Apostle. After that came the murderous phantasms of racial purification in National Socialism and Stalinism, and the post-World War II American paradigm of modernization. These events energized modernist culture, which was characterised by ‘present futures’. This focus on the future, however, seemingly has shifted to ‘present pasts’ during the 1980s.
Approach
Context
It is of importance that the reader of this paper has a good understanding of the notion of collective memory, for although it will not be mentioned in this paper, it is the basis on which it is built, since I have in this paper made the assumption that memory is collective. Collective memory is a concept that was first addressed by Maurice Halbwachs in 1925 . He was the first to develop a view of memory that was not focused on the individual, but on memory as collective. He argued that memory is constituted by the social framework in which a person lives. These frameworks are for example a family, a group of friends, colleagues, team mates, etc. Because people live in a social framework, their memories revolve around living within this framework. Memory therefore depends on the memory of a group, since the process of recollection is most often stimulated by questions from others that live in the same framework as an agent, or enforced and clarified by the recollections of others, that make the memory more complete. Collective memory can be passed on, constructed, shared, both by small and large groups. This memory however, can also be changed, but I will discuss this more elaborately in the core analysis in this paper.
Core analysis
Characteristics
The most significant changes in our occupation with the future took place around the 1980s. Not only did this new orientation on the past stand in stark contrast with the previous orientation on the future, it was also in contradiction with the, then recent, innovative work in the development of maps, space, geography, borders, trade routes, and diasporas in the context of postcolonial and cultural studies. Time and space are always bound up in complex ways, which we can see when looking at the magnitude of border-crossing memory discourses that characterises contemporary culture so much in so many different parts of the world.
After the 1960s a new type of memory discourse first emerged in the West, in the wake of decolonisation and the new social movements and their search for alternative and revisionist theories. Along with the search for other traditions and the traditions of ‘others’, these new social movements made multiple statements about endings: the death of the subject, the end of history, the end of the work of art. They pointed directly to the ongoing recodification of the past after modernism.
In the early 1980s memory discourses accelerated in the United States and Europe, energised by the broadening debate about the Holocaust and by the media attention paid to the fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries of the events in the history of the Third Reich. These ‘German anniversaries’, the historians’ debate of 1986, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and German national unification in 1990, received intense coverage in the international media. The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, inaugurated in 1993, gave rise to the debate about the Americanisation of the Holocaust. But the resonance of the memory of the Holocaust did not end there: in the late 1990s, one started to raise the question of to what extent we can now speak of a globalisation of Holocaust discourse.
We can also see how the globalisation works in two other related senses that illustrate a possible ‘globalisation paradox’. On the one hand, the failures of society in the twentieth century have become a cipher for the twentieth century as a whole and for the failure of the project of enlightenment. On the other hand, the totalizing dimension of these societal failures that is so prevalent in much postmodern though is accompanied by a dimension that particularises and localises. Precisely the emergence of for example the Holocaust as universal trope is what allows Holocaust memory to latch on to specific local situations that are historically distant and politically distinct from the original event. The Holocaust loses its quality as index of the historical event and begins to function as metaphor for other traumatic histories and memories.
The Holocaust and its place in the reassessment
Causes
This particular obsession with memory is often explained as a function of the fin de siècle. As we look back in history, we see that in earlier centuries, similar observations can be made when we look at how people were dealing with memory in previous fin de siècles. This, however, cannot be seen as the one explanation for our society’s current obsession with memory, since, with the emphatic way we are reaching back to the past, we can now even speak of a ‘culture of memory’. Explaining how memory has permeated our society by pointing merely at the condition of time will not suffice.
Another way to observe it is by looking at how events from the past are being used in politics. Part of the reason why memory is so present in our everyday life, is that politicians use events from the past both in positive and negative ways. Memory has many political uses, as noted by Andreas Huyssen: “ranging from a mobilization of mythic pasts to support aggressively chauvinist or fundamentalist politics, […] to fledgling attempts […] to create public spheres of ‘real’ memory that will counter the politics of forgetting” (Huyssen, 2000, p.26).
(historical events are not only used in the spots where they took place, but also in different parts of the world, where the facts are being used as a reference, so that politicians can base their choices on for example interference or non-interference in warzones. mentioned in prior chapter) While memory discourses appear to be global in one register, in their core they remain tied to the histories of specific nations and states. Particular nations still struggle with their past of mass exterminations and wars. The result of these past wrongs, is that these countries have to secure the legitimacy of their emerging polity, by finding ways to commemorate and rectify past wrongs. If they fail to do so, it will make them look negligent. Thus, to a certain extent, particular countries are forced to reach back to the past.
Not only globalization, but also the rise of mass media in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, has had a major influence in the emergence of the memory culture. Although critics accuse our current memory culture of amnesia, an accusation that is couched in a critique of the media, it is these exact media that make ever more data and memory available to us today. This may sound contradictory, but it seems that the relationship between memory and forgetting is changing, due to the cultural pressures in which new information technologies, media politics, and fast-paced consumption are beginning to take their toll.
With modern day techniques, we are able to store ever more data. One would think that, because we can simply keep piling data, this would temper our fear of forgetting about the past. However, a paradox seems to arise: the more we rely on techniques of data-storage for the preservation of our memories, the greater the fear of forgetting. For imagine the consequences for our society if one day our data storage would vanish. In addition to that, the possibility to access all these data at any desirable time and place has an effect on the way we experience time. One could argue that it decreases our feeling of living ‘in the moment’.
We appear to keep trying to counteract our fear of forgetting with survival strategies of public and private memorialization. Already in the early 1980s, German philosopher Hermann Lübbe described that which he called ‘musealization’ as central to the shifting temporal sensibility of our time . He explained how ‘musealization’ of objects and events was no longer bound to the museum as an institution, but that it had infiltrated every aspect of our daily lives. He argues that modernization is inevitably accompanied by the decay of traditions, the loss of rationality, and the disarray of stable and lasting life experiences.
The ever increasing speed of scientific, technological, and cultural innovation only fortifies the extinction of a stability of time and fractures lived space. We can look at our obsession with memory and musealization as a reaction against obsolescence and disappearance of stability. It appears that we try to counteract deep anxieties about the rapid pace of change and the shrinking horizons of time and space.
Our discontent with the present flows from an informational and perceptual overload, combined with a cultural acceleration, to which neither our senses nor our psyche are accommodated. As Raymond Williams put it: “There is both too much and too little present at the same time, a historically novel situation that creates agonizing tensions in our ‘structure of feeling’” (Williams, 1977). We respond to this by trying to slow time down and reaching out to memory for comfort.